Minneapolis church makes international news -- for its lefty politics

Economist.com | Churches and politics

THE next time you are in Minneapolis, you may like to visit St Joan of Arc church. Its weekend masses are packed; the congregation has doubled to 4,000 households in the past 12 years; the median age of its members is much lower than that of most other churches. It sends do-gooders to a sister parish in Guatemala, and professional musicians often stop by to jam at mass. This liberal Roman Catholic church hit a bump recently when conservative critics complained to Rome about some of its practices, including an open door for homosexuals. The bishop tried to intervene, but met a wall of protest from parishioners. St Joan's pastor, Father George Wertin, says that he is mindful of the church's teaching, but remains committed to inclusiveness and social justice.

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Wow, Minneapolis makes the international news -- thanks to Joan of Arc church. We've been going primarily for the children's mass; the only place we've been that works for our family. At JofA no-one gives us a second look -- we're quite prosaic there. Now if we can just keep the bishop at bay. I doubt this bit of fame will help ...

Kristof on the 'Left Behind' books

The New York Times > Opinion > Kristof: Apocalypse (Almost) Now

Not Kristof's best column, because he missed the point. Yes, the Left Behind books are nasty and virulent, but it's also true that one can (selectively) read the Bible that way. As religious extremists are fond of pointing out, there are a lot of places in the Bible where "God" is nasty as all get out. That's the God of a some literate barbarians -- the early Israelis.

Things quiet down as the Israelis focus more on spirtuality and less on destroying their enemies. Christ is a real aberration though. I just don't see the continuity between the Old Testament and the teachings of Christ. There's a legacy for sure, but Christ is really a revolutionary. (Paul does yet a third version; a fusion really that provides the right formula for longterm success. Paul is a reactionary zealot -- and a pragmatist.

Bottom line, the Left Behind folks are very much in the spirit of the Old Testament. I'd say they aren't Christian though, more like Yahwhites. Kristof's right when he says they're religious extremists, but wrong to think they're not true to the spirit of a part of the Bible. The Bible is massively inconsistent.

Obesity doesn't compare to smoking

The New York Times > Health > Data on Deaths From Obesity Is Inflated, U.S. Agency Says

They messed up the numbers. Turns out obesity isn't great for you, but it's not in the same league as smoking. Since weight gain is common with smoking cessation this wasn't merely an academic distinction.

In addition to less dangerous than smoking, obesity mortality is concentrated towards the upper end of life, so years-lost are far less than for smoking.

Gmail - has a handle on spam

Gmail - Inbox

Very little spam gets through the gmail spam filters now. The number in my Spam box is falling. I decided not to empty that box, because:

1. Google doesn't provide an easy way to empty it.
2. I've hunch they weight their spam filters based on what's left in the Spam box. It's what I'd do.

So they've got a handle on the problem now. Yay for them!

Update: The spam folder has dropped from about 1500 entries to about 200. Gmail's antispam technology has really kicked in. I get almost no spam.

BBC portrayal of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Hunting 'Satan' in Falluja hell

The BBC are a reasonably neutral source of information. This is a fundamentally sympathetic portrayal of a marine regiment, a regiment that accounted for 20% of the US soldiers lost in the battle for Fallujah. The Colonel of this regiment gaines some infamy for describing the enemy as Satan; this fills out the image in a different direction.

There are stories of very brave men* who died well and with little note. This journalist found very few civilians, but he found a 10 year old fighter.

* I write of "men" here. One of my neighbor's, a man I don't know, has a daughter who's a lieutenant in the marines. The sign he puts by his house tells us she's lost two of her men in Fallujah. So there is at least one woman marine fighting in Fallujah.

Phone Phishing (spam): coming soon to the elderly and the vulnerable

Net phone customers brace for 'VoIP spam' | Tech News on ZDNet

It's not just Net phones. Lately our home phone, which is not VOIP, has been getting phishing calls. Non-native english speakers who want to let me know that the Feds want to give me $10,000.00. (Hush money from GWB? I think not.)

With VOIP to voice linkages it's cost effective to set up a virtual phone bank across south Asia, China, and perhaps sub-saharan africa. If 10,000 callers were to participate in a pyramid-like phone phishing scheme, and each were to make 400 calls a day, that's 4 million calls a day. A call every few months -- assuming no automation. If the initial call is automated (screen out the able minded, avoid recordings, etc) it would be easy to scale to hit ever phone in the US every day.

Laws? You must be joking.

How well does phishing work? I've read that the hit rate is 1/40,000 for email. That's enough to provide a relatively small number of desperate and/or immoral people with a superb income. Who falls for these shemes? Do the math. Far more than 1/40,000 people have early dementia, schizophrenia, pyschosis, and a range of cognitive disabilities. They are frail, vulnerable, soft meat for these scum sucking vultures. (Ok, so I'm mad.)

The email route does limit the population of vulnerable persons. The phone route provides far better pickings; the equivalent of a valley full of fat deer to a hungry tiger.

We will come to miss the days that long distance phone service cost a lot of money.

Armageddon? No, more like stagflation

BostonHerald.com - Business: Economic `Armageddon' predicted

The 'A' word is major hype, on reading the article it's clear Roach has a tendency to hyperbole. What he describes is more like the stagflation of the 1970s, or perhaps something similar to Japan's prolonged slump. He thinks it most likely we'll muddle throught somehow, probably with higher inflation.

The Economist has made much the same warning for a while, as has Krugman and DeLong. DeLong has frequently pointed out that current 30 year Treasury rates are insane, and only make sense for buyers who expect to lose money but figure it's worthwile to keep the US running (eg. China). Bush could have acted to make this less likely, but he chose power. I'd love to know what Warren Buffett thinks of this.

One part rings very true to me -- the debt trap. I've been surprised lately, when speaking to friends of mine with good incomes, how many are in significant debt. Many have run up large debts paying for high tuition private schools for their children -- from preschool to graduate school. Others have spent fortunes on homes, following traditional advice to "live in one's investment" and in response to the NASDAQ crash of the 00s.

If we do hit something like this, it wouldn't be restricted to the US. It would take down the world, and it could plunge China into bloody chaos. Our best hope may be a more sedate stagflation -- and hope China forges ahead and drags us along. I do note some prescient friends of mine started betting on inflation about a year ago. I admit I've been hedging my own bets.

Of course if one believes a true meltdown lies ahead, it would be better to invest in friends, medications, tools, and shelter. I don't give that kind of outcome more than a 5-10% chance in the near term.

Economic `Armageddon' predicted
By Brett Arends/ On State Street
Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation for being bearish.

But you should hear what he's saying in private.

Roach met select groups of fund managers downtown last week, including a group at Fidelity.

His prediction: America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic `armageddon'.

Press were not allowed into the meetings. But the Herald has obtained a copy of Roach's presentation. A stunned source who was at one meeting said, ``it struck me how extreme he was - much more, it seemed to me, than in public.''

Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that "we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual armageddon.''

The chance we'll get through OK: one in 10. Maybe.

In a nutshell, Roach's argument is that America's record trade deficit means the dollar will keep falling. To keep foreigners buying T-bills and prevent a resulting rise in inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan will be forced to raise interest rates further and faster than he wants.

The result: U.S. consumers, who are in debt up to their eyeballs, will get pounded.

Less a case of ``Armageddon,'' maybe, than of a ``Perfect Storm.''

Roach marshalled alarming facts to support his argument.

To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day.

That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world's net savings.

Sustainable? Hardly.

Meanwhile, he notes that household debt is at record levels.

Twenty years ago the total debt of U.S. households was equal to half the size of the economy.

Today the figure is 85 percent.

Nearly half of new mortgage borrowing is at flexible interest rates, leaving borrowers much more vulnerable to rate hikes.

Americans are already spending a record share of disposable income paying their interest bills. And interest rates haven't even risen much yet.

You don't have to ask a Wall Street economist to know this, of course. Watch people wielding their credit cards this Christmas.

Roach's analysis isn't entirely new. But recent events give it extra force.

The dollar is hitting fresh lows against currencies from the yen to the euro.

Its parachute failed to open over the weekend, when a meeting of the world's top finance ministers produced no promise of concerted intervention.

It has farther to fall, especially against Asian currencies, analysts agree.

The Fed chairman was drawn to warn on the dollar, and interest rates, on Friday.

Roach could not be reached for comment yesterday. A source who heard the presentation concluded that a ``spectacular wave of bankruptcies'' is possible.

Smart people downtown agree with much of the analysis. It is undeniable that America is living in a ``debt bubble'' of record proportions.

But they argue there may be an alternative scenario to Roach's. Greenspan might instead deliberately allow the dollar to slump and inflation to rise, whittling away at the value of today's consumer debts in real terms.

Inflation of 7 percent a year halves ``real'' values in a decade.

It may be the only way out of the trap.

Higher interest rates, or higher inflation: Either way, the biggest losers will be long-term lenders at fixed interest rates.

You wouldn't want to hold 30-year Treasuries, which today yield just 4.83 percent.

Toffler: of Future Shock fame

William Gibson

'Today, the technologies of deception are developing more rapidly than the technologies of verification. Which means we can use a television camera, plus special effects, plus computers, etc. to falsify reality so perfectly that nobody can tell the difference. And the consequences of that eventually could be a society in which nobody believes, everybody knows that seeing is not believing, and nobody believes anything. With the exception of a small minority that decides to believe one thing fanatically. And that's a dangerous social/cultural situation.

One of the consequences of living through a period like this, which is in fact a revolutionary period, is that the entire structure of society and the processes of change become nonlinear. And nonlinearity I think is defined almost by the statement that 'small inputs can have large consequences.' While large inputs can sometimes have very small consequences. That also means in a political sense that very small groups can, under a given set of circumstances, achieve power. And that is a very threatening idea for anything remotely resembling what we believe to be democracy. So we're going into a period, I think, of high turbulence and considerable danger, along with enormous possibilities.'

--interview with Alvin Toffler, in Modulations: A History of Electronic Music

Eerie. I'd wondered where Toffler went after the Future Shock books I read as a child. In retrospect the shocks he described were only the merest hints of times to come. As too our shocks shall seem but minor things ...

As goes deception and verification, so goes offensive and defensive weapons.

Body and Soul: Hunger in Iraq

Body and Soul: Hunger:

A woman who'd sworn off blogging post-election is stirred to write again -- by the starvation of Iraqi children. A consequence of our discount-conquest -- an invasion without the forces to provide security, a conquest designed around GWB's electoral calendar and electoral needs.

I left a comment:

Imagine if one were to create a website composed entirely of pictures of these children. Someone in Iraq would have to provide the pictures. A gallery of hundreds or thousands of pictures. Whatever we could get.

Once a week each of us prints out one of the pictures and mails it to the only people with any power:

Tom DeLay
George Bush
Bill Frist

That's all. One picture a week. With or without a comment.

The better species

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Dolphins prevent NZ shark attack

A group of swimmers has told how a pod of dolphins protected them from a great white shark off New Zealand's coast.

The lifeguards were training at a beach near Whangarei on the North Island when they were menaced by a 3-metre shark, before the dolphins raced in to help.

The swimmers were surrounded by the dolphins for 40 minutes before they were able to make it safely back to the beach.

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Supposedly this is not terribly rare. Dolphins seem to have a soft spot for helpless creatures. In other words, they are stupidly sentimental.

Or maybe they're just better than us.

There's a brilliant Onion parody about emergent mutant dolphins with opposable thumbs. The Onion 'interviews" a terrified marine biologist cowering in a shark cage; he anticipates the inevitable and just vengeance of the unstoppable dolphins. Perhaps they'd be more merciful than we imagine.

Too bad they don't seem to be designed to take over ...

Chronic pain and brain injury

BBC NEWS | Health | Pain link to permanent brain loss

They scanned the brains of 26 patients with chronic back pain and 26 healthy people.

The patients with chronic pain caused by damage to the nervous system showed shrinks in the brain by as much as 11% - equivalent to the amount of gray matter that is lost in 10-20 years of normal aging.

The decrease in volume, in the prefrontal cortex and the thalamus of the brain, was related to the duration of pain.

Every year of pain appeared to decrease gray matter by 1.3 cubic centimetres.

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Is the loss related to inactivity, or to pain itself? Is it related to neuronal depletion in the spinal cords (mentioned in article) or to persistent high cortisol levels (known to cause neuron depletion)? Why is the brain so vulnerable to pain or stress anyway? Doesn't seem to make any evolutionary sense. Does the brain injury somehow perpetuate the inactivity/pain cycle -- making the condition untreatable? What can we do to change the dynamic of chronic pain development? Is the pain the primary cause, or have we discovered an unrecognized primary neurologic disorder that has, as one of its correlates, a predisposition to chronic pain syndromes? Does this neuronal loss affect cognition, or is it primarily related to perception, sensation and movement?

And those are just the truly obvious questions.

We know that chronic pain, especially when associated with disability, is very, very hard to treat. The burden on families is staggering. The economic cost is awesome. The suffering of afflicted seems never ending.

We're just beginning to understand what's going on.

America -- a broken democracy?

Spending Bill Held Up by Tax Provision (washingtonpost.com)

Our democracy is broken.

A $388 billion government-wide spending bill, passed by Congress on Saturday, was stranded on Capitol Hill yesterday, its trip to the White House on hold as embarrassed Republicans prepared to repeal a provision that could give the Appropriations committees the right to examine the tax returns of Americans....

... "It's simply representative of the way Congress is now operating," said Allen Schick, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. "It shows on the one hand how easy it is to put something in [an omnibus bill] without anybody else knowing about it." Although this may look particularly egregious, he said, the giant bill also contains hundreds of other provisions that could not be enacted into law if they were offered as single bills requiring full debate and scrutiny in both houses.

Such huge bills, lawmakers acknowledge, represent a breakdown of the normal budget process. For the second time in three years, House and Senate Republicans, bitterly divided over the level of domestic spending, failed to agree on a budget blueprint, as required by law.

The impasse forced delays in drafting many of the spending bills, and when Congress returned last week from its election recess, it had yet to complete nine of the 13 annual appropriations bills. Seven of the spending bills had never been to the Senate floor for debate, one had never been to the House floor, and one funding the nation's nuclear weapons programs and Army Corps of Engineers water projects was still in a Senate subcommittee.

To overcome this problem, GOP leaders crammed all the remaining legislation into a single omnibus package that, under congressional rules, could not be amended.

It contained all the unfinished spending bills, along with three other pieces of major legislation -- the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act, the Snake River Water Rights Act, and the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act.

Along with those measures, lawmakers and staffs added thousands of local projects benefiting home states and districts. Also included in the final bill was a major provision barring states from enforcing laws that require health care providers, hospitals, HMOs or insurers to pay for, provide or give referrals for abortion.

But when the measure was rushed to the floors of the two chambers Saturday, few members had read it. Lawmakers absent from the Capitol for weeks while campaigning for reelection returned for a brief lame-duck session to complete the work of the 108th Congress.

The secretive process, Schick noted, gives GOP leaders enormous power to add provisions that they or special interests might want, and to delete provisions that GOP factions or the White House find objectionable.

Frist, for example, ordered negotiators to accept the abortion provision, even though it had never gone to the Senate floor and was only in the House-passed version of the bill covering health appropriations. Senate opponents agreed not to block its consideration after Frist promised to schedule a vote soon on a bill drafted by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to repeal the provision.

GOP leaders also deleted provisions on overtime regulations and the outsourcing of government jobs despite support in both houses.

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Republicans control the entire government, yet they cannot manage a budget bill.

Oddly enough, the process we now follow gives a few leaders enormous power to punish their enemies and rewards their friends -- and to do so without inconvenient publicity. Imagine that; just by accident we've evolved a budget process that facilitates oligarchic rule and perpetuation of a single party system. This is the way Japanese democracy has worked for the past 40-50 years.

Puzzles in behavior: why would anyone work for Electronic Arts?

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Digital Domain: When a Video Game Stops Being Fun

For around $60,000 a year in an area with a high cost of living, he had been set to work on a six-day-a-week schedule. On weekdays, his team worked from 9 to 10 (that is, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.), and on Saturdays, a half-day (that means 9 to 6). Then Sundays were added - noon to 8 or 10 p.m. The weekly total was 82 to 84 hours.

By tradition, Silicon Valley employers have always offered their bleary-eyed employees lottery tickets in the form of stock options. E.A.'s option grants, however, offer little chance of a Google-like bonanza. An employee who started today with an options package like that of the E.A. worker just described (and who stayed with the company the four years required to fully vest) would get $120,000, for example, if the share price quadrupled - and proportionally less for more modest increases. The odds of a skyrocketing stock grew much longer this month, when the company said competition had forced it to cut prices on core sports titles.

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Surgical residents work those kinds of hours, but typically only for a few years. The pay is less, but there's a clear goal in mind. Not a few of them enjoy that life, which has a certain simplicity to it.

Why do these engineers stay with these jobs? That's the real mystery.

What did Arafat die of?

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Arafat's Death Remains a Mystery, Nephew Says After Seeing Records

And so the rumor mill goes. The most convincing theory I've heard is that he drank himself to death. It's less scandalous and more prosaic than the HIV theory, but it still explains why those in the know would want to keep the cause of his death secret. Alcohol consumption is forbidden to observant muslims.

I suspect the story will leak out over the next few months. If the bottle count was high I'd increase my confidence in the alcoholism therapy with secondary liver, cardiac and marrow failure. It's killed more than a few men Arafat's age.

Planet of the microbes

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Science taps into ocean secrets

'In that regard, I think the big discovery is that 90% of all the carbon that's taken up in life in the oceans is taken up in microbes, and a large number of those may be in the deep-ocean sediments buried beneath the sea floor,' he told BBC News.

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To a reasonable first approximation, earth is a planet of microbes. Macroscopic life is a relative aberration -- perhaps a transient aberration.