This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://bizmarts.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://bizmarts.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Arthur Clarke's Four Laws of Prediction

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following four "laws" of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
4. For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.

Science & Technology: Students - America vs The World
(via James Fallows Article in The Atlantic) - Mar. 2010

"..The other major issue is our failure to attract the best students into science and technology in North America. At my university, the best students in biology almost invariably want to go to medical school (or in our case vet school). Very few are attracted to the rigors of starting a research career- the long hours, the low pay for many years and the uncertainty of getting a good job in the end. It is hard to blame them- my own son is an example as he is medical school after always thinking that he would go into research. I won't go into all of the issues here, but as noted earlier when most of the best students come from elsewhere and they either do not come any more or don't stay after training- well then you have a problem."

Public Capacity and Public Trust

Can we reverse the vicious circle of frustrated citizens denying state government adequate resources -- and then resenting the lack of state services?

From: The American Prospect - Dianne Stewart and Michael Lipsky | February 1, 2010

"For 30 years we have witnessed a downward spiral of eroding public trust in government. While the federal government deals with the most momentous issues -- national security, health reform, global climate change -- state government has borne the brunt of a self-deepening tax revolt.

The fiscal noose imposed by tax and spending caps, now exacerbated by the recession, undermines states' ability to raise necessary revenues. The process erodes state governments' basic capacity to operate effectively -- which further destroys public trust. This vicious circle diminishes the willingness of Americans to entrust government at any level with tackling challenges that call for decisive action or for planning and investment in the future.

As revenue collections decline due to the recession, states raise taxes or cut services to balance budgets. In hard times, reductions in public services are not only cruel but counterproductive -- in a recession the economy requires not less but more public spending.

In the current crisis, government agencies cope by reducing staff, cutting hours of operation, closing local offices, increasing hurdles for service eligibility, and raising standards for what constitutes emergencies worthy of intervention. As they decimate university systems, health-care programs, public-education funding, and other essential services, the agencies reinforce the belief that states are incompetent.

The federal stimulus program enacted last year helped the states but made up only 30 percent to 40 percent of their budget shortfalls. A second round of federal support is far from certain. As this special report demonstrates, without further federal assistance, the prospect for the states is grim.

***

For the most part, states are where policies become visible and people experience public programs directly. Frontline public services forge popular expectations of government. For example, state actions will determine the success of national health-care reform and will influence public opinion on the legitimacy of federal efforts to restore economic prosperity.

Yet few Americans grasp what state governments do, how they contribute to our country's well-being, and how our federal system actually works. For instance, we educate our children through local governments required to meet state standards and aided with state and federal funds. If they attend college, most Americans receive higher education through state colleges and universities, which are financed with state funds; these costs are often supplemented through federal grants and student aid. Many of the critical programs that provide for people in need, particularly in hard times -- Medicaid for low-income and disabled people, unemployment insurance, and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program -- are state partnerships with the federal government.

Many might be surprised that the work force of state and local governments exceeds federal employment. At the last census (2002), 12.1 million people worked for the federal government, including military personnel and post-office workers, but 15.6 million worked for state and local governments.

As our research at De¯mos reveals, too many people now see government only as polarized politics or as an undifferentiated, ineffective bureaucracy. The public has lost touch with the ways the quality of life of communities depends on government. People have lost track of government's role in long-term planning and as steward of schools, roads, police services, and other essential public facilities. Constructive responses to the fiscal crisis, if they are to emerge, will require reconstituting an understanding of the critical role of government and support for the public purposes it embodies.

The fiscal troubles of the states are unfolding in the context of a deeply embedded public distrust of government that has been engendered over decades by individuals actively hostile to government and by organizations that promote a small government, low-tax ideology. This past year the backlash against the bailout of financial institutions, the rejection of a public option in health-care reform, and the emergence of passionate "tea party" protests all bore witness to this distrust. At the state level, the manifestations were rampant. In the midst of the worst state fiscal crisis in decades, some state governors even found it politically expedient to refuse emergency federal-assistance funds in perverse appeals to anti-government sentiment.

Public-opinion polling confirms that trust in state government is related to its ongoing capacity to manage state affairs. According to the Gallup organization, in the 1990s, about two-thirds of Americans had at least a fair degree of confidence in their state's ability to handle state problems. By the downturn of 2003, the last time states cut services drastically, this figure dipped to barely half. In 2009, public trust fell again, as all but two states experienced significant budget shortfalls

***

This cycle of public distrust and government contraction can be broken. At stake is the viability of all levels of government in a time when effective and adequately resourced public structures are as crucial as ever. Over the last five years, De¯mos has sponsored research and engaged with state partners in extensive field work across the country to develop strategies to break this cycle. This work suggests several steps that can begin to create a more constructive climate.

First, elected and appointed officials, as well as prominent civic and nonprofit leaders, need to promote a positive view of the mission and purpose of the public sector and offer a vision of the government to which we should aspire. For example, in his speech to Congress on health-insurance reform, President Barack Obama modeled a balanced approach that recognized government's necessary role: "Our predecessors understood ... that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited." At every opportunity, we must make visible the essential roles that government is uniquely positioned to fulfill and which cannot be adequately undertaken by individuals or by private institutions.

Second, leaders can help citizens understand public systems and structures and the taxes that support them as necessary means to achieve the common good. Years of conservative rhetoric have ingrained in our national psyche the idea that the public good is best served by the dogged pursuit of private interest and that taxes merely deprive individuals and companies of their own money. While campaigning successfully to be governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick turned an opponent's demand to "give back" taxpayers' money into an appeal to people's innate sense of community. "It is their money," he declared during a debate, "but it's also their broken road. And it's their overcrowded school. It's their broken neighborhood and broken neighbor. ... It's not this idea that people earn what they earn and have no responsibility for the Commonwealth. We have a responsibility, in addition to personal responsibility, to take charge of shared responsibility."

Third, in seeking public support for government initiatives, we can rekindle Americans' sense of citizenship and community. As a practical matter, this approach broadens the constituency for the initiative. In Wisconsin, advocates canvassing for a local tax measure realized in the midst of their campaign that they were not making headway and switched tactics to talk with voters about quality of life and the need to come together for the good of their community. In winning a surprising victory, they attributed success to the increased receptivity of voters to this new approach. Similar stories are told by leaders in other states, including those in Massachusetts and North Carolina.

Finally, it's possible to cultivate public confidence that government can be a mechanism for pragmatic problem-solving to achieve a secure and prosperous future. Our research indicates that when this image is evoked, Americans are much more likely to have a constructive view of government and are more inclined to support specific progressive policies. Candidates and organizations whose policy goals require state revenues and depend upon effective government action should offer an aspirational picture of how adequately funded and competently managed public systems can serve people's needs.

The state fiscal crisis is the front line of this struggle. State governments, no less than the banking system, are too important to fail. States' ability to weather the fiscal storms, while also cultivating support for their public missions and the revenues necessary to fund them, will either help redeem the case for the role of government -- or further undermine support for the public sector.

The paranoid style in American politics

Excerpts from Harper's Magazine Article - Nov. 1964 - By Richard Hofstadter

"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing.

I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country–that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life.

But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective.

Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (”Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated–if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman–sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons–later, Negroes and Jews–have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

Renegades and Pedants

A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. In some part, the special authority accorded the renegade derives from the obsession with secrecy so characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the man or woman who has been in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid’s archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.

A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent–in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies.

The Double Sufferer

The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering–a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies… systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture–it is no more than that–that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties.

In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest–perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands–are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed.

They see only the consequences of power–and this through distorting lenses–and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him–and in any case he resists enlightenment.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged
(by Frank Rich - N.Y. Times Op-Ed: Feb. 27th, 2010)

...the gradually coalescing Tea Party dogma had its Washington coming out party at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), across town from Capitol Hill. The most rapturously received speaker was Glen Beck, who likened the G.O.P. to an alcoholic in need of a 12-step program to recover from its “progressive-lite” collusion with federal government. Beck vilified an unnamed Republican whose favorite president was the progressive Theodore Roosevelt — that would be McCain — and ominously labeled progressivism a cancer that “must be cut out of the system.”

A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views, which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an “idiotic” and “irrational” threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the conference’s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as “conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.”

William Kristol dismissed the straw poll results as the youthful folly of Paul’s jejune college fans. William Bennett gingerly pooh-poohed Beck’s anti-G.O.P. diatribe. But in truth, most of the CPAC speakers, including presidential aspirants, were so eager to ingratiate themselves with this claque that they endorsed the Beck-Paul vision rather than, say, defend Bush, McCain or the party’s Congressional leadership. (It surely didn’t help Romney’s straw poll showing that he was the rare Bush defender.) And so — just one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office — the heretofore milquetoast Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the audience to emulate Tiger Woods’s wife and “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country.”

Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh’s mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.

In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck’s 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that “another civil war” may be in the offing. “I don’t see us being the ones to start it,” she told Barstow, “but I would give up my life for my country.”

Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin’s memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: “I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help.”

Note: All this blather from the WingNuts makes me want to ask them: "You say you are willing to die for your country...but you never served in the U.S. Military where that is both a possibility and a traditional basis for citizenship...why did you not serve?"

Cyber War = Space War

By Kevin Coleman

Defense Tech: Feb. 2010

In a recent government survey of more than 100,000 people across the U.S., 40 percent reported no broadband or high-​​speed access to the Internet, while 30 percent said they have no Internet access at all. Satellite broadband delivery is seen to be a quick and economical solution to this problem.

While the satellite broadband market slowed in 2009 because of the poor economy, it still increased. The market continues to expand after U.S. regulators outlined the national broadband plan that allows satellite operators to use their radio spectrum for Internet traffic. That is why cyber security professionals are so concerned about the convergence of cyber space and space.

Its becoming increasingly evident that any future war between modern militaries would be both a space war and a cyber war, in fact, they would be one and the same. Russia, China, and the U.S. have all stated they don’t want a space war, but are all preparing for one if one occurs.

That sounds so familiar – oh wait a minute, didn’t Russia, China and the U.S. say the same thing about cyber war? Yes, they did. Satellites in geostationary orbits provide broadband connectivity to businesses and customers. Those satellites and their computer control ground stations present a viable target for offensive cyber actions. A hacker could disrupt or interfere with satellite control communications and could disrupt the delivery of broadband services. In the absence of such command signals, a satellite would malfunction.

Worldwide attention focused on China’s successful anti-​​satellite missile test. While military officials question the scale and progress of the Chinese anti-​​satellite program, one has to wonder if China has already tested their anti-​​satellite cyber weapon. Military leaders are all too aware of the convergence of space and cyber space. An increasing percentage of military operations occur in cyber space and are integrated with and dependent on communication satellite systems in outer space.

It's really, really simple...

via Huffington Post.com - Feb. 28th, 2010

Arianna Huffington: Sunday Roundup

Thursday's health care summit could have been dubbed Talking Points-Palooza. The GOP stayed ferociously on message, with speaker after speaker calling on the president to "start over" with a "clean sheet of paper" and take a "step-by-step approach." For their part, Democrats were committed to sending the message that, as Max Baucus put it, "We're really not that far apart."

That might be the case -- if Republicans were actually interested in coming to an agreement. But they're not -- as the last 14 months have made abundantly clear. No matter how many conciliatory steps Democrats take in their direction, Republicans just keep backing away. President Obama will announce his plan for moving forward this week. Let's hope he scraps his delusions of bipartisan agreement, and pushes Congressional Democrats to beef up the bill and pass it through reconciliation.

------------------------------------->

Note: If the voting public overwhelmingly approves of the "Public Option" segment of Health Care Reform, can so easily be lead to ignore science in favor of commentary, is still suffering from the Bush Administration's Economic Depression, sees the pending calamity of Global Climate Change, and the continuing obscene financial machinations of the Mega-Banks, yet seems to approve of the obstructionistic tactics of Congressional Republicans and even to opt for a further tilt toward autocratic capitalism, then my friends it's past time to just pull the wool over our collective heads and take a seat for the downhill ride to global insignificance.

We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change
By Al Gore - Feb. 2010 - via N.Y. Times

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the IPCC climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing — much less reduce them.

And in spite of President Obama’s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to “take note” of an intention to act.

Because the world still relies on leadership from the United States, the failure by the Senate to pass legislation intended to cap American emissions before the Copenhagen meeting guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of even the minimum needed to build momentum toward a meaningful solution.

The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.

This comes with painful costs. China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed.

Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give up.

Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach. The lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

It’s important to point out that the United States is not alone in its inaction. Global political paralysis has thus far stymied work not only on climate, but on trade and other pressing issues that require coordinated international action.

The reasons for this are primarily economic. The globalization of the economy, coupled with the outsourcing of jobs from industrial countries, has simultaneously heightened fears of further job losses in the industrial world and encouraged rising expectations in emerging economies. The result? Heightened opposition, in both the industrial and developing worlds, to any constraints on the use of carbon-based fuels, which remain our principal source of energy.

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.

The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation, with some Republican support, to take the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions.

Later this week, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are expected to present for consideration similar cap-and-trade legislation.

I hope that it will place a true cap on carbon emissions and stimulate the rapid development of low-carbon sources of energy.

We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.

UN warns of e-waste spike in developing nations

(via Escrap News: Feb 2010)

Over the next decade, rapidly growing sales of consumer electronics in developing countries, such as China and India, will lead to "the spectre of hazardous e-waste mountains with serious consequences for the environment and public health," according to a report released this week by The United Nations Environment Programme. The 120-page report, Recycling — From E-Waste To Resources, was compiled using data from 11 developing countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

The report finds that, in the coming decade, the volumes of e-waste created by, and sent to, developing countries is going to rise sharply, finding that, by 2020, "e-waste from old computers" will rise by 500 percent in India, while a 200-percent to-400 percent hike is expected in South Africa and China.

Additionally, scrap cell phones will rise by a factor of seven in China, by 2020, and by 18 times in India, by the same year. All told, the report's authors estimate that "global e-waste generation" will grow by about 40 million tons a year.

The report also focuses on the resources that are to be found by this growing volume of e-scrap. "One person's waste can be another's raw material," says Konrad Osterwalder, U.N. under-secretary general and rector of United Nations University (UNU). "The challenge of dealing with e-waste represents an important step in the transition to a green economy. This report outlines smart new technologies and mechanisms that, when combined with national and international policies, can transform waste into assets, creating new businesses with decent green jobs."

The study was issued at a meeting of the Basel Convention and other world chemical authorities prior to UNEP's Governing Council meeting in Bali, Indonesia. The report, co-authored by the EMPA (the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research), Umicore and UNU's StEP (Solving the E-waste Problem), uses data from the following countries and regions: In Asia: China and India; in Africa: Kenya, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda; and, in the Americas: Brazil, Columbia, Mexico and Peru.

A snapshot of income disparity

(via LA Times Commentary - Feb. 2010)

Carnival Rio - 2010 (cont)
http://www.rioholidays.com/rio/bilder/allgemein/carnaval3.jpg

Carnival Rio 2010

Long Distance Dedication

From the Earth to the Moon= 240K miles; From the Earth to the Sun=92M miles; from the Earth to Jupiter=555M miles; from the Earth to Alpha Centauri=26T miles; from Earth to the edge of the Universe=46.5 billion light-years, or in miles it would be:
439,923,966,975,007,200,000,000,000 = (201168 x)/125
(thanks Wolfram Alpha)


From small, to really, really small.
On Earth a gram of hydrogen contains approximately 6.02x10^23 atoms; but in outer space there is about one atom of hydrogen per cubic centimeter.

Rachel Maddow at CPAC 2010
...psst...wanna see life from the wingnut side?

Applied Sociology ...in Afghanistan
(via Miller-McCune - Feb. 2010)

"...the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System is in the process of either transforming the U.S. military or being rejected by it."

“What you’re trying to do is understand the people’s interests, because whoever is more effective at meeting the interests of the population will be able to influence it,” McFate told Wired magazine three years later."

“We could kill [the] enemy from now on for a hundred years and wouldn’t be one step closer to winning this war,” Kwast said, turning his eyes to a distant mountain range, cast pink by the setting sun. “But if the people of Afghanistan trust us more than they trust the Taliban, we will win overnight. … If someone is shooting at us from a village, let’s leave and return at a later time to win the hearts and minds of the village.”

Big Island e-scrap program shuts down

E-scrap collection centers on the big island of Hawaii have stopped accepting unwanted electronics equipment due to a lack of funding for the Hawaii County program. The county had a contract with a local contractor, Recycle Hawaii through the end of last year. Hawaii County paid $320,000 to keep the program running through 2009.

According to area reports, Recycle Hawaii ended collection operations because it no longer has adequate storage space and no monies to ship excess equipment to the mainland. Until the county can find funding to restart operations, it is asking big island residents to hold onto their unwanted equipment.

Carnival 2010 - Rio

Members of Salgueiro samba school perform during carnival celebrations at the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro, early Monday, Feb. 15, 2010.

(See more)

Political Awareness Quiz - 2010

<------------------------------------->

1. Question: Did more than a majority of all Republican members of the Senate vote against the Social Security Act of 1935, against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and against a Federal Holiday for M.L.King Jr. in 1983?

1a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( X ) No -(I'll help you out with this one.)

2. Question: Did at least three former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff give testimony before Congress that evidence as of July 2008 shows that Saddam and the Iraq Government were not involved in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in Sept. 2001?

2a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

3. Question: During 2009, were the "Birther Movement", "Town Hall Outcry", and "Tea Parties" discussed on Fox News more often than on all the other broadcast networks combined?

3a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

4. Question: Has Fox News won more than one national excellence in journalism award from the Peabody Awards, DuPont Awards, National Press Club, or Pulitzer Prize in the past ten years?

4a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

5. Question: Was Orly Taitz fined $20,000 by a Federal Judge for filing a federal lawsuit challenging Pres. Obama's election on the grounds he wasn't born in the United States, stating that the suit: "was using the legal system to pursue political rhetoric and insults"?

5a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

6. Question: Did elements within the National Republican Party questioned the patriotism of all Democratic Presidential Candidates except Sen. Kerry during the 2008 elections?

6a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

7. Question: Is it true that the 2004 Presidential election in Ohio is considered by many experts "the dirtiest election America has ever seen."; and that voting discrepancies in Ohio that year overwhelming favored G.W. Bush over J.Kerry, and if all discrepancies, favoring either man, were removed, Kerry would have won Ohio by over 300,000 votes.

7a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

8. Question: As of Jan. 2010, US Government scientists agree that by 2025, without significant changes in policies, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions per capita will be four times those of China, and fourteen times those of India on that date?

8a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

9. Question: Has the global glacial mass, and its average thickness exhibited an exponential decline during the past fifty years, and exceeded 150cm/yr in 2000?

9a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

10. Question: Have the primary Antarctic ice fields decreased in size by an average of 50% during the past twenty years?

10a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

11. Question: Did the Larsen Ice Shelf lose 970 square miles of its area during the period 1995 to 2001; and is currently 40% of its previous minimum stable extant?

11a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

12. Question: As of FY2009 the United States spent over $1 trillion dollars on "National Defense", and has regularly spent more than 10% of GDP on this segment of the Federal budget since the end of WWII?

12a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

13. Question: In the past twenty years more Americans have identified themselves as Democrats as opposed to Republicans, except in 1995; and that a recent poll of affiliation by Gallup indicate a 45(R)/46(D) split in stated affiliation.

13a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

14. Question: All Nations, including America, should abide by internationally agreed upon rules and laws pertaining to their conduct in war.

14a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

15. Question: Can America abridge any international law, invade and occupy any country without international authorization, and hold anyone labeled an "enemy combatant" incommunicado indefinitely without recourse to civilian courts, or all other provisions of the US Constitution.

15a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

16. Question: None of the past five Republican Presidents, nor Candidates for that office, held an advanced degree from a major university, or graduated in the top ten percent of their class as an undergraduate.

16a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

17. Question: The same is true for Democrats.

17a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

18. Question: In 2009, the five richest Americans all said: "repealing the Estate Tax would be a bad idea".

18a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

19. Question: Over 66% of American Corporations paid no Federal Income Taxes in the period 1998-2005; and an additional 68% of foreign corporations also did not pay any Federal Income Tax..

19a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

20. Question: A recent study by several professional polling organizations finds that the political affiliation of American scientists and tenured Professors is heavily Democratic, with the scientific community the most skewed with less than 6% identifying as Republicans.

20a: Answer: ( ) Yes - ( ) No

Tangled up in knots...

Politician - Hypocrite
(via Rachel Maddow on Meet The Press - Feb. 2010)

"If you vote against the omnibus bill," she said at the end of the exchange, "if you complain about the omnibus bill, if you tout your vote against the omnibus bill, it is hypocrisy to then go to your district and go to a ribbon cutting ceremony for something that is funded by the omnibus bill that you voted against."

(via Washinton Times News Report)
"...stimulus foes see value in seeking cash for their districts)

Rogues List - 2010

A: On the right:
Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Coulter, Bachmann, Beck, Dobbs, Hannity, Malkin, Miller, Noonan, Ingraham, Novak, Savage, Buchanan, Cavuto, Schlafly, Crouse, Kudlow, Krauthammer, Lowry, Steele, DeLay, Morris, Gingrich, Hewitt, Kristol, Drudge, Elders, Bozell, Ailes, Boulet, Sadow, York, Medved, Horowitz, Reagan, etc, etc.

B: On the left:
Woopie Goldberg, Keith Olberman, Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, ah...hmm...

The future of clergy (cont.)
via Ecunet/UCChristNet
Note #43904 from Robert Campbell to UCCHRIST CHATTER:

Here are some statistics. They are a bit old, and so I am not surprised that there has been some work to reverse these trends.

According to a study by the Wisconsin Conference for their Forward in Faith Campaign:

• Fewer than 125 clergy in the entire UCC are currently under the age of 35 years.

• An average of 107 ordained UCC pastors will reach retirement age annually in the next ten years.

•  The average number of ordinations annually over the past ten years in the UCC has been 95, a number of whom have entered "specialized" (non-parish) ministries.

•  The median age of UCC clergy today is 52 years.

•  The wonderful pastors who have been ordained in the UCC in the past 20 years and more, have largely been "second career" pastors.
  

•  The average age of graduation from seminary during these years has been 43 years.

• By 2020, more than 80% of Mass. Conference clergy will have reached retirement age.

Part of the problem is the debt that students come out of school with.  Even with an average $28,072 debt, in order to pay such a student debt safely _ without jeopardizing quality of life and care of self and family _ the banking industry recommends a minimum annual salary of $41,700. But, the compensation guidelines for 2001 passed by Annual Meeting recommend starting pay for clergy at between $24,000 and $44,000 annually, with only clergy at the largest churches on the high end of that scale.

> > The Bishops and the Clergy Killers
> by Kristin D. Anderson
> This article appeared in July / August 1998 — Volume 14, Number 4
> In Wisconsin and Minnesota "63 percent of pastors know of a colleague who has been seriously abused by a congregation, colleague, or denominational executive. Approximately 25 percent of pastors have suffered such abuse themselves," according to G. Lloyd Rediger, in Clergy Killers.

> Rediger also notes, "The results of Leadership magazine's national survey of Protestant clergy indicated that 43 percent said a faction (typically less than 10 people) forced them out."

> "Lost in these statistics are good pastors who have been destroyed by their congregations, by parishioners that are selfish, want their own way, and are determined to get it at any cost to the congregation or the pastor. They leap over pastors, support committees, and lay leaders to put their complaint directly to the top.

> These complainers are not easy challenges and certainly circumstances vary. But how the bishop (or Conference Minister) responds to the "bad seed" or even the disenchanted member or colleague can destroy the health of a pastor and the viability of his/her ministry.
 

 > A personal handwritten note in my friend's upbeat yearly form letter concluded with, "The 'honeymoon' is over here and there is a small group wanting John to leave. Do you know why things are going like this? Just about all of the pastors in the area are really going through some rough stuff."

> She commented on a clergy spouse gathering that she had attended; "We figured out that 17 out of 18 of us were on anti-depressants."

> > Condition: Critical  Exploring the causes of poor clergy health
> By Janet Maykus
> Physical health of clergy? The phrase is oxymoronic.
> Today, the health and well being of clergy is awful. This was not always the case. The Pulpit and Pew research project at Duke Divinity School points to studies conducted with Protestant clergy in the 1950’s. At that time, Protestant clergy had the lowest rates of disease for every major diagnosis and lived longer and healthier lives than people in any other profession.

By 1983, another study found that Protestant clergy had the highest overall work-related stress of various religious professionals and the next to the lowest amount of personal resources to cope with the strain. A third study conducted in 1999 found that clergy have one of the highest death rates due to heart disease of any occupation.

> The statistics get grimmer and stranger. A 2003 Pulpit & Pew survey of 2, 500 pastors found that 76 percent rated their health as excellent or very good. About this same percentage said that neither their physical health nor emotional health had caused them to miss work. But, 10 percent reported feelings of depression all or most of the time and more than 40 percent reported feeling worn out or depressed most of the time.

> At the same time, 76 percent of the clergy surveyed were either overweight (46 percent) or obese (30 percent), a significantly higher percentage than the population as whole (61 percent). Weight was a bigger problem for men than for women in the Pulpit & Pew survey, with 79 percent of men being either overweight or obese, compared to 52 percent of women.

>  A judicatory official of one annual conference said that he had an extremely difficult time finding a carrier who would even talk about insuring his pastors because the risk is too high for Protestant clergy

> > So what happened? How did clergy go from a place of health and well being to this new place near the edge of an abyss? The emotional and physical ill health of today’s clergy is not the disease; they are symptoms of a much bigger issue.

> The church has changed dramatically in the past 50 years. Society has changed. A pastor who was interviewed in a focus group at Austin Seminary, for example, described his church as more of a train station than a fixed community. He said his congregation’s membership has a 33 percent turn-over rate every three years.

> The decision to affiliate with a religious community is deeply influenced by a culture of choice. John Mulder noted at the Symposium on the Future of Mainstream Protestant Churches that, “...a culture of choice contributes to the church shopping that bedevils pastors and congregations, and undermines a deep sense of belonging to a particular theological tradition. Pastors ask: ‘How can we win the allegiance of people in a competitive marketplace of ideas, beliefs, and values?’

‘How can we speak with integrity the claims of the gospel when ‘beliefs’ are reduced to the level of ‘personal opinion’ and ‘faith’ is equated with ‘ideology’?”

> Within this culture of choice comes a lack of shared values and commitment to purpose. This leaves many pastors to do all the work all the time all alone.

> Another cause of clergy health is conflict, a persistent problem in today’s congregations. David Roozen and Carl Dudley in a 2001 study entitled, Faith Communities Today: A Report on Religion in the United States Today reported, “Congregations suffer more when they experience conflict than (advanced) age or (poor) location. Lingering conflict is strongly associated with declining vitality and declining membership.”

In focus groups conducted at Austin Seminary, pastors say they are called in to mediate conflicts large and small in congregations. These pastors said that they did not want just more training in conflict management skills, but a breather from conflict, a place where they could vent, and people who understood what it is they talk about.

> Next is loneliness and isolation. Ministers are different. We are not business people, although we need some business skills. We need to know how to read a spread sheet, negotiate, persuade, and delegate. Pastors are not lawyers, although we need to be firmly rooted in our theological convictions; we must understand the polity of our own denominations. Following polity is one of the methods by which we can weather the conflict in our congregations.

> Ministry is a calling. Ministry is a craft. Ministry involves loving the church, its members (who often act in unlovable ways), all the while wrestling with one’s own doubts and inner conflicts.

> > 1991 Survey of Pastors (Fuller Institute of Church Growth)
>     90% work more than 46 hours a week
>     80% believed pastoral ministry affected their families negatively
>     33% believed ministry was a hazard to their family
>     75% reported a significant stress related crisis at least once in their ministry
>     50% felt themselves unable to meet the needs of the job
>     90% felt inadequately trained to cope with ministry demands
>     70% say they have a lower self esteem now compared to when they started in ministry
>     40% reported serious conflict with a parishioner at least once a month
>     70% do not have someone they consider a close friend
 

 I am not making things up.  Maybe everything has been reversed in the last 7 to 10 years, but talking with ministers that are not afraid of talking, the problems are not magically going away.  And, yes, we can dismiss them because some of this research is old.  I would be interested in seeing some new ones when the research has been done.  Sure, some of the programs developed to address these issues may have helped.  I am looking forward to new numbers when those programs produce them.  But it won't be for another 5 years before we will really see the effects.  And, by the way, the problems are not just within the UCC.  The problems exist within every denomination.  Blessings, Ed aka:John of Patmos   

$14 Million vs Over $1 Billion
Note: According to the Forbes List, there are over one hundred Americans with a net worth over $1 billion dollars.
<------------------------------------->

CEO Compensation
Via Forbes Magazine - Edited by Scott DeCarlo and Brian Zajac, 04.22.09, 06:00 PM EDT

The chief executives of America's 500 biggest companies took a collective 11% pay cut last year, earning total compensation of $5.7 billion, {or an average of $11.4 million for the year}.

The future for clergy
(via Ecunet - UCChristnet) - Feb 2010

Note #43899 from Robert Campbell to UCCHRIST CHATTER:

"I am sorry to inform you Marge, that there are not many 20 and 30 [year old] clergy out there.  I am one of the youngest clergy, and I am 46.  The vast majority of clergy will retire by 2021.  There are {few} young clergy graduating in seminary, and the one's that are, are going into specialized ministry.  I remember one Chicago seminary class of 107.  Only 4 were going into pastoral ministry.  The vast majority of clergy now are second career and over 55.  We have to realize that pastoral ministry is dying. 

Clergy shortage is due to debt to pay problems.  According to the Banker's Association, the average Student Loan debt is about $8,500.  They estimate that it takes a cash salary of $44,000 a year to pay the debt off safely without negatively affecting the other parts of the pastor's life.  The biggest churches (about 4%) pay about $40,000 a year.

According to a spouse who went to a spousal retreat, she said that 17 of the 18 spouses were on anti-depressants. 

When pastoral ministry was the healthiest profession in 1950, it is now the most at risk professions of stress related heart disease and illness. 

We have the highest rate of divorce.

And consider that pastors are isolated, cannot trust anyone (even other pastors), and that 75% report that they have at least one conflict every day...

Then you have Conferences that shoot their own wounded, churches that will beat up the pastor emotionally, psychologically, financially, and socially...

The list goes on and on.   We may talk about how churches will survive, but we have to consider that the church will have to survive without clergy.  Sure, we have lay training programs, and I am not putting them down.  I have helped at least one person go though one and seen him go on to serve a church.  I know one licensed minister who is very, very good.  But let's not kid ourselves.  Ordained ministry is dying.

Walmart Baseball !!

Sebelius Calls on Anthem Blue Cross to Publicly Justify 39 Percent Premium Increase

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today (Feb. 11th, 2010), sent a letter to Anthem Blue Cross and called on the company to publicly justify its decision to raise premiums for its California customers by as much as 39 percent. In her letter, Sebelius notes that the parent company of Anthem Blue Cross, WellPoint Incorporated earned $2.7 billion in the last quarter of 2009.

QOTD Candidates

"I can't decipher what your comments are about, and just listening to them sapped ten points off my IQ." --Anon.

"I can't really pronounce that word so I refuse to solve for those."

"He's a bloodsucking leftist...I mean, you gotta put a stake through his heart to stop this guy." --Lou Dobbs

"The average is a 37 out of 90, which is a little low."

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media." --Sarah Palin

"Apparently there were lots of women who would marry a millionaire sight-unseen but would not appear on national TV in a swimsuit." .

"The white Christian heterosexual married male is the epitome of everything right with America"---Michael Savage

"If you're unhappy about it, don't ask me, just be unhappy."

"John McCain and I, we love you and thank you for spending a few minutes to talk to me." --Sarah Palin

"I would get rid of this variable Va that I don't give a rat's ass about."

"Teen Sex: The New “Midnight Basketball”?" --Anon

"Only dead fish go with the flow." --Sarah Palin

''Life's tough.....it's even tougher if you're stupid.'' -- John Wayne

"Clergy types are just insurance salesmen in funny clothes." --Anon

“I don’t want to hear all this talk about dying for your country. You’re supposed to make the sons of bitches on the other side die for their country!” --Gen. George Patton

"I check my email about forty-seven thousand times a day."

"This has been a country built, basically, by white folks"---Pat Buchanan

"About 10 of you have asked me via email about it and I have sort of randomly replied to about 5 of you."

"But ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy." --Sarah Palin

"Zero plus zero is pretty close to zero."

"Since you shoot your mouth off so often, I know there's room in there for your foot." --inactive.

"America has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery." --Sally Kern

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term". --Dana Perino

"On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong." -- Barack Obama

"Exercise freaks ... are the ones putting stress on the health care system." —Rush Limbaugh

"Anything I can't solve for myself in five minutes becomes student research."

"One of the good things about being a professor is that every time you're confused it becomes someone else's research project."

"I am not going to give you a number for it because it's not my business to do intelligent work." --Donald Rumsfeld

"I think on a national level your Department of Law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out." --Sarah Palin

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." --George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

"You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." --President Bush, to a divorced mother of three in Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005

“I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter.” --Michele Bachmann

"If there was evolution, why are there still apes?"

"We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles ... because his father was black"---Rush Limbaugh

"I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is." --Sarah Palin

"I like keeping all those degenerates in one location so we can keep an eye on them." --Bill Cunningham

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

""People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."

"You have three people in the White House that are in love with eugenics or whatever it is you would call it today." --Glenn Beck

"Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner." —Betsy McCaughey

"The White House is perfectly timed, perfectly programmed, perfectly educated to destrop capitalism...and they're in the process of doing it." --Rush Limbaugh

"We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma." —Sen. Chuck Grassley

"Left Unalakleet warmth for rain in Juneau tonite. No drought threat down here, ever but consistent rain reminds us: 'No rain? No rainbow!'" --one of many Tweets by Sarah Palin that William Shatner recited as poetry on "The Tonight Show"

Fox is/was home to:

Married with children, Tracey Ullman Show, Jump Street, Duet, Werewolf, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Second Chance, Women in Prison, The Simpsons, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, Party of Five, The X-Files, MadTV, King of the Hill, Futurama, The Critic, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, When Animals Attack, World's Wildest Police Videos, Bones, American Idol, The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity & Colmes, Glen Beck, Special Report with Brit Hume, etc, etc.

Note: Many of which won ...ah, er...well, they were popular...so...

Clueless by Paul Krugman

I’m with Simon Johnson here: how is it possible, at this late date, for Obama to be this clueless?

------------------------------------->

Note: Sorry Paul, but you have it wrong on this one.

Pres. Obama said: that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

You, Paul, are viewing Pres. Obama's statements as an indication that he doesn't understand the animus Americans hold toward the bonuses and other considerations paid to principals at the very Banks that were implicated as active members in the current Depression. And that he, Obama, doesn't have a problem with the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

On the contrary, Obama appears to be saying, to an unspecified audience, that all huge payments to ballplayers or CEO's are part and parcel of the American way. That someone, again unspecified, considers their services to their sponsors worth that level of payment, and that is not automatically a "bad thing".

It would be more valid if the two companies mentioned did not repay their TARP funds, ignored their current fiduciary responsibilities to their stockholders, or otherwise did not alter their operational methods to address their respective responsibility for the global Depression. Ten to twenty million a year to a CEO is not, by itself, a sign of malfeasance, corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. One need only review the Forbes List to see the number of CEOs, or ball-players for that matter, who received what Main Street would consider outlandish payments; regardless of their performance at their respective positions.

Risk factors for Downs Syndrome
(info via the Mayo Clinic )

Some parents have a greater risk of having a baby with Down syndrome. Risk factors include:

• Advancing maternal age. A woman's chances of giving birth to a child with Down syndrome increase with age because older eggs have a greater risk of improper chromosome division. By age 35, a woman's risk of conceiving a child with Down syndrome is 1 in 400. By age 45, the risk is 1 in 35.
  

Note: Not to labor the point; but Gov. Palin was 44 years old when Trig Paxson Van was born.

"What if George Bush?"

[note - all mistakes below are original to text of email]

From: XXXXXX@YYYYY.ZZZ
To: XXXXXX@YYYY.ZZZ
Sent: Feb. 7th, 2010 10:00 AM
Subject: Fw: What if George Bush?

Some questions for my liberal friends!

If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, after Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?

If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the non-existent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?

If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisors with people who cannot seem to keep current on their income taxes, would you have approved? How about convicted felons, self- proclaimed communist, or eugenicists?

If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to "Cinco de Cuatro" in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the fourth of May (Cuatro de Mayo)-and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?

If George W. Bush had misspelled the word "advice" would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and potatoe as "proof" of what a dunce he is?

If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on "Earth Day," would you have concluded he's a hypocrite?

If George W. Bush's administration had okayed Air Force One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether they actually "get" what happened on 9-11?

If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a teleprompter installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?

If George W. Bush had failed to send aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in New Orleans, would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?

If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national debt-which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate-in one year, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan's holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved?

So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive? Can't think of anything? Don't worry. He's done all this in 6 months-so you'll have three years and six months to come up with an answer!
------------------------------------->

Response

Thanks for forwarding this to me. President Obama has made a few blunders during his first few months in office, but I understand that for a person who makes as many statements as he does, it is not surprising that he sometimes stumbles. I'd rather not respond to you in a tit for tat manner, but I think it is important to note that President Bush's 8 years in office were replete with mistakes and bad policies, all of which plunged our nation deeper into debt, turned allies away and laid the ground work for one of the most severe financial crises in history. That is why Americans overwhelmingly voted for change.

Conservatives have derided the President of allegedly bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia. The White House says that it was not a bow, but whether it was or was not, how did you react when George Bush actually kissed the Saudi King? Check this out: http://tinyurl.com/pmc98x Were you upset? Did you protest?

You note that President Obama made a mistake when speaking Spanish. It appears that he was making a joke. Nevertheless, how did you react when President Bush addressed Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Spanish. You will note that Italians do not speak Spanish. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1O9txBU9FE

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/science/earth/10notebook.html?ref=world

President Obama has made a few gaffes but during his 8 years in office, President Bush misspoke hundreds of time.

Here is a compilation: http://www.slate.com/id/76886/

For example: "John Thune has got a common-sense vision for good forest policy. I look forward to working with him in the United Nations Senate to preserve these national heritages."

Did you send out emails to your friends every time President Bush said something silly?

You note that President Obama uses a teleprompter. I am sure you know that George Bush used a teleprompter. Oh yeah, Ronald Reagan also used a teleprompter. Check out the links: http://tinyurl.com/mlqz7h and http://tinyurl.com/r43fxj

Your email notes that more people were killed by floods in the Midwest than died as a result of Hurricane Katrina. I looked it up and it just is not true. Of the many storms in the Midwest in 2009, the highest death toll thus far is 36 confirmed deaths. http://prod.newsday.com/flash-flood-warning-issued-for-louisville-area-1.1347443

In comparison, there were 1,836 confirmed deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina.
http://www.dhh.louisiana.gov/offices/page.asp?ID=192&Detail=5248

President Obama inherited an economy in disarray and since taking office, has aimed to drastically revamp our nation's health care system and our crumbling infrastructure. I was curious to see how the national debt changed during the Bush years and according to PolitiFact.com, "When Bush took office; the national debt was $5.73 trillion. When he left, it was $10.7 trillion." http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jan/22/rahm-emanuel/5-trillion-added-national-debt-under-bush/

Did you know that billions of dollars were wasted during the Bush administration, particularly in massive contracts given out to private contractors that operate in Iraq and Afghanistan: According to one commission set up to investigate the use of private contractors, "billions of dollars of that amount ended up wasted due to poorly defined work orders, inadequate oversight and contractor inefficiencies. In one example, defense auditors challenged KBR after it billed the government for $100 million in costs for private security even though the contract prohibited the use of for-hire guards." http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2009-06-08-report-dod-spending_N.htm

I hope that we are always critical of those we elect, but I see that you are not being consistent in your criticism. Your complaints about President Obama are ironic, given the fact that President Bush did in fact make so many of the same mistakes and made them much more often. Have you heard that expression? People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Anyhow, I hope this email receives you in good health and I look forward to talking to you soon. –MMAN