Mark Byron

Edifier du Jour-Proverbs 18:24 (NASB)

²⁴ A man of many companions may come to ruin,

    but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Sorry for the blog silence, but God was in the process of teaching me a lesson. The phone setup in our hotel Wednesday night wasn't conducive to hooking up the laptop, and when we got into our extended-stay place in Lakeland last night, the laptop proceeded to not want to display anything, just showing gray gloop.

I tried it again this morning without any luck; that was hard, because with the close quarters of our digs, working on the computer is one of the few things I can do in the "dark" while Eileen's still sleeping. Without the computer, I was left to playing a pocket video Yahtzee game in the bathroom after I got up about 7 and Eileen needed a couple hour more sleep.

With an unresponsive computer, I was left without access to the Internet and my blog buddies. I even seriously looked at getting a new laptop, only to have the $700 HP that Best Buy was showing be sold out; I was ready to put a $1000 on my credit card to get back on-line ($950 plus tax before $250 rebate).To be blunt, I was going through the blogosphere DTs. My fears about not finding a job or not finding an apartment in a tight rental market were being compounded by a lack of connection to my on-line friends.

Yes, friends they are. That might seem trite, but there is a real community here in cyberspace. The contacts I've made of bloggers in 'meatspace' are real and show that there are real, caring people behind those blogs.

However, the lack of contact with my blog buddies pointed out the lack of meatspace friends that I have. Eileen's just about the one soul-to-soul friend that I have who I can confide in whole-heartedly. The blog DTs were God's way to get me to strive to make more real-world friends; call that an early New Year's resolution if you will. After a real good cry over the issue, I decided to give the computer one more try, thinking that instead of Ol' Sloughfoot being behind the outage, that it was God using my DTs to get the message of friendship through.

Well, the computer booted up in safe mode, but it booted up. A restart later, I'm back to blogging.

I've got a lot of friendly acquaintances at church but few good friends; however, as the verse points out, it's the friends that really make things work. I need to remedy that in 2005. Pray that it be so.

 

Edifier du Jour-Job 42:1-6 (ESV)

¹Then Job answered the LORD and said:

   
   ²"I know that you can do all things,
   and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. 
³'Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?'
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
   things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. 
⁴'Hear, and I will speak;
   I will question you, and you make it known to me.' 
⁵I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
   but now my eye sees you; 
⁶therefore I despise myself,
   and repent^[a] in dust and ashes."

Check out the second have of verse three. How much of the Gospel is too wonderful for us? Quite a bit.

Just step back and reflect on how great and how good God is. We often will dwell on His love, grace and mercy, but we don't do a good job of expressing his grandeur, especially when we focus on a personal relationship with him. That will tend to make God too small; not that we don't have a one-on-one relationship, but that by dwelling on the buddy-buddy Abba Daddy aspect, we lose the how-great-thou-art part.

That great old hymn used the intimate thou rather than the formal you (we lost that when we dropped the second person intimate), yet still got a glimpse of God's bigness.

London Calling

London, Kentucky, that is. We're almost halfway to Florida; we would have been a good 100 miles further south if accident problems didn't eat up two hours of time this afternoon.  It took us four hours to do 110 miles of I-75 with two major slowdowns in Lima and Dayton; the Dayton one alone took us an hour and a half to work around.

However, there's good news. If you look at the entry below, my old boss at Warner Southern might have some part-time on-line teaching assignments he wants to send my way.

Edifier du Jour-Matthew 23:13-15 (ESV)

   

¹³

"But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.^[d]

 

¹⁵

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell^[e] as yourselves.

My morning devotional guide only has 25 days in a month and I felt like "googling" the Bible for "travel," since we're starting back down to Florida in a bit once Eileen wakes up and we have breakfast and throw the remaining items in the car.

Not too many of us would fit this description here in this passage, but when we do disciple people, we have a tendency to confuse the Gospel with church culture and our native culture.

In our own countries, we can slap on layers of church culture and tradition to the Gospel, often limiting the freedom of the new convert to the point where they can't be themselves. On some points, not being themselves is getting rid of bad habits from our fleshy nature, but in others it is trying to fit a square peg into a [insert denominational] round hole.

When we do missions work, we need to be careful not to confuse our culture for the Gospel, for many parts of [insert home country adjective] culture aren't all that edifying and shouldn't be exported. Cross-cultural ministry is always hard, since we need to try to see what's universal about the Gospel and what is an Anglospherian thing that we might be inadvertently (or deliberately) trying to bring along with it.

 

Mother Nature is a She-Dog

Here's a quick thought before I go to bed. The tsunamis of Sunday have killed 23,000 people at last report. The Iraq conflict has killed about 16,000 non-military (to take a mid-point of IBC's figures¹) and over 1,000 military. "Mother Nature" was more damaging in one day than the combined nastiness of the Iraqi armed opposition and the US government combined.

Yes, this isn't your everyday earthquake, but we don't have civil wars (or whatever you want to call what we've got cooking there) in Iraq all the time, either. The damage to the economies of the Asian and African (Somalia got schmucked, too) countries affected may be as great as the Iraqi mess, but the people who survived the waves know that it wasn't their own people that were mostly to blame for the damage. Yes, if they powers that be put in an Indian Ocean warning system like we already have in the Pacific, the damage would have been less, but this one caught people by surprise.

Will there be as much rhetoric from the "warbloggers" against tsunamis than there are against jihadis? Will the left think tsunamis are more destructive than the Bush administration? Probably not in both cases.

We live in a fallen world. War is one of the side effects. Natural disasters are another. Neither are easily preventable prior to Jesus' return.

¹-No, the Iraq Body Count site doesn't agree with my view of the propriety of the cause. If you've got a better number, bring it on.

Get Yer Bloggers While You Can, Ladies

Congratulations are an order to Jeffrey Collins, who is now engaged to Miss Nicki; June 11th is the big day, well after tax season. Quite a few blog freinds have gotten hitched since I started this blog nearly three years ago; Ben and Ganns come to mind, Ganns even has brought a baby boy and baby magizine into the world since then.

Morning Musings

It looks like Yushchenko is in as Ukrainian president barring some legal shenanigans. He's got a 52-44 edge with 97% in, large enough where problems with the lack of absentee ballots won't be a deciding factor.

The Sumatra tsunami death toll is over 20K. Over 10K in Sri Lanka, 6K in India, 4K in Indonesia and almost a thousand in Malaysia. The quake's been upgraded to 9.0 even from yesterday's early reports of 8.9. One interesting side note is that Ache was the worst hit area in Indonesia; there's a big seperatist movement there and that might play a factor in how the central governement deals with this.

The Pacific Ocean has a tsunami warning system, but the Indian Ocean doesn't. That might have added to the death toll, but the underdeveloped and poor nature of the area did as well; poor areas tend to get hit harder than better off ones when natural disasters hit.

Here's a quick reminder that it can happen here. A slightly smaller earthquake in Alaska in 1964 killed 16 people in Oregon and California via tsunamis.

Will the next big documentary be Pharma and Me?

The Checkout Lane

What's more fun that Jonah eviscarating the French from toe to toncil? Well, possibly Hugh Hewitt doing a vivisection of evolutionists. It's more satisfying, but lacks Hewitt having anyone administering a wedgie, thus less fun. One of Hugh's faves, Joe Carter, joins the anti-anti-creationist pile-on indirectly.

This is a bit dated, but Bryan Preston's take on the top 10 Christan news items of '04 is worth looking at, especially the paragraph of The Porpoise Driven Life :-)

Rick Warren's effort is, I think, the single largest trend underway in Protestant Christianity. It's either a fad that will pass as quickly as it arose, or it is a major and fundamental shift in the Protestant ways of worship and service. Either way, in 2004 it was huge.

That's food for a post, but I need time to digest it; even a week after Preston wrote that, I'm still digesting.

The Yankeecrat Gambit-Part I

One of the things that could come out of the next Congress is the marginalization of the moderate Republicans in the Senate, especially if the Senate Republican leadership decides to "go nuclear" and get rid of the current filibuster rules that require 60 votes to stop debate. The Republicans have 55 votes, but the scarcity of truly centrist Democrats in the Senate makes getting to 60 on binary¹ votes like judicial conformations difficult.

The nuclear option might prompt centrist Republicans, especially in the Northeast, to look to jump ship. Jim Jeffords already has, and a few others, like Lincoln Chaffee, are on the guard-rail leaning away from the conservative wing of the party. In some areas of the Northeast, theocons are so rare that the "RINOs" would lose little by declaring their independence from the theocentric modern GOP. What they would lose in a right-wing protest vote might well be made up by prying loose moderate Democrats who are ticked off by the increasing Democratic drift to the hard left.

Edifier du Jour-Isaiah 27:1-6 (ESV)

¹In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.

   
   ²In that day,
"A pleasant vineyard,^[a] sing of it! 
   ³I, the LORD, am its keeper;
   every moment I water it.
   Lest anyone punish it,
I keep it night and day; 
   ⁴I have no wrath.
Would that I had thorns and briers to battle!
   I would march against them,
   I would burn them up together. 
⁵Or let them lay hold of my protection,
   let them make peace with me,
   let them make peace with me."

   
   ⁶In days to come^[b] Jacob shall take root,
   Israel shall blossom and put forth shoots
   and fill the whole world with fruit.

My conversation at lunch yesterday had me doing a Leviathan search, and I found an even more interesting topic here, a vision of a millennial state of peace, where the Lord is tending a peaceful, thorn-free vineyard.

If the vineyard is a metaphor for the church per John 15 (belonging to a pair [right now, we're between Midland and Lakeland] of Vineyard churches, I'm partial to that metaphor), how can we work towards making a thorn-free church? We'll never quite get there on our own pre-Second-Coming, for we're all flawed critters. However, if we strive for seeking God's agenda and not our own, we'll go a long way towards dethorning our churches, for it's our individual pride and lack of understanding of God that creates the lion share of those thorns.

We're usually smarter collectively than we are individually; that's why we need to be in community. Left to our own devices, we're prone to heterodoxy. When we bring those competing visions of God into the church, friction and strife results until the heterodox views are sanded off with love and teaching.

That does leave the problem of what to do when a majority of a church decides to go heterodox, leaving the faithful remnant in the minority, but in a solid church, that shouldn't be a problem. Instead of dethorning themselves, the heterodox church dethrones God; thank the spellchecker for that turn of the phrase. The proper maintenance of a spiritual vineyard means taking out the thorns, not taking out God.

If it Isn't Close, They Can't Cheat

This Boxing Day runoff seems to be going Yushchenko's way. I don't know what regions are reporting, but Yushchenko's up 57-40 with 40% in. That'll make it hard for PM Yanukovych to jigger the results in his direction. However, the lack of absentee ballots might give the PM's forces a cause to call for a re-re-vote. The oldsters might rightly be friendly to Yanukovych, since they might legitamately prefer a stable but corrupt system to a thriving but unstable system; many Russia oldsters lean towards more nationalistic or communist parties. The revised laws for the re-runoff did away with absentee ballots that Yanukovych's backeds abused in the origional runoff, but the Supreme Court said that that disenfranchised the enfeeebled. However, if the 15%-or-so margin holds up, the Ukranian Supremes might be loathe to have a third runoff.

Evening Musings

We had what may well be our last service at our Midland church as regulars this morning; we'll most likely be back to visit my folks every so often, so it isn't a capital G goodbye. We had a nice lunch with a couple from our old young adult group, including a good conversation on some of the developments in creation science that are bloggable once I get the linkage to back them up.

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The Minister of Defense has gone to meet the ultimate Prime Minister-Reggie White died this weekend. He was one of the better defensive linemen in league history and an outgoing evangelical Christian to boot; a pro-family-values/anti-homosexuality speech before the Wisconsin legislature in 1998 got him in hot water in PC quarters. Complications from sleep apnea seems to have done him in.

That's more dangerous than it seems; both Sully and I are on C-PAP machines that use a bit of air up the nose to "prop" the windpipe open during sleep. In some cases, surgery is needed, but others can be treated without surgery. Simple cases can cause people to lose sleep and have high blood pressure; extreme cases can be lethal. Given that White was the same age I am, it's a bit scarry.

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No damage reports yet, but a 7.3 earthquake hit Bangladesh today. That's a different one from the 8.9 monster off of Sumatra that created tsunamis that have a 11,500 death count per this BBC report. The tab's over 4000 in both Sri Lanka and Indonesia and over 2000 in India. The low-lying Maldives southwest of Sri Lanka were also hit, but with only double-digit casualties.

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Tsunami Damage

Prayers are needed for folks along the eastern Indian Ocean who got schmucked by a series of tsunamis earlier today. The worst earthquake in 50 years, a 8.9, hit off of Sumatra, spreading destruction to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and India. As usual, the poorest areas have the hardest time handling the damage. We've got a Sri Lankan ex-pat at our church in Midland, where the damage seems to be the worst, so we're praying for her friends and family.

[Update 4:30PM- Our Sri Lankan friend's folks are well inland, so they're OK. Bene is on this story like white on rice.]

Edifier du Jour-John 21:24-25 (ESV)

²⁴This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true.

 

   ²⁵Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

Verse 25 is an interesting statement. If you look at Jesus' temporal live of about 33 years, once could see a multi-volumn encyclopedia-sized thing of a daily play-by-play of His life.

However, that's not all of Jesus. Not only did He most likely do a truckload of additional healing, signs and wonders and teaching during His third-of-a-century as a human that the four Gospels didn't get down, He also was co-creator of the universe. That series of god-logs even Google couldn't digitize.

For most of us, our spiritual lives return to ordinary time once Christmas is over; for the more old-school among us, Epiphany, the day the Wise Men were said to arrive to pay their respects to the Christ Child, marks the end of the Christmas season and the return to ordinary time. However, Jesus keeps Himself busy during ordinary time as well.

Evening Musings

Christmas went well here in Midland. "Santa" was good to Eileen and I, getting a lot of clothes that I can use, a number of good new CDs and a 128MB memory stick, as well as some nice new bed sheets and two meals-for-two worth of Olive Garden gift certificates. Now, the focus changes to getting Eileen past the bad cold/upper respiritory virus she's picked up and figuring out what we want to pack in Eileen's car for our pre-apartment stretch in Lakeland.

Parts of Texas got their first white Christmas in a century. My in-laws in metro Houston got a dusting, but places a bit south of Houston got nearly a foot of snow.

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A number of other bloggers (here's Bene's take) have mentioned Steven Den Beste's packing it in; turns out he was/is fighting through a painful genetic malady and got tired of all the nit-picking e-mails. He's got an anime web-site up, but that's not my cup of tea. What was my cup of tea was his lenghty takes on geopolitics and politics, even if his honorable atheistic background occasionally rubbed the wrong way.

Hokie Pundit has a memorial of sorts for Den Beste, Louder Fenn and other blog compatriots who are now longer with us.

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Joe Carter has an interesting piece on Mary. He mentions a Protestant over-reaction to Catholic Mariology, where some Catholics seem to come this close to turning the Trinity into a Quadity (no, they don't worship a Father, Mother, Son and Holy Ghost, it only seems that way).  We can respect Mary's role without worshiping her. For instance, Mary's role in The Passion of the Christ is bigger than I'd give her, but Gibson's take managed to be faithfully Catholic without being un-Christian.

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Pray for the Ukrainian election, which will be going down tomorrow. A minor setback for the Yushchenko team is that absentee ballot will be allowed; the Yanukovych crew were channelling the ghost of Richard J. Daley in the first election with absentee tricks.

¡Viva los blogs!

One of the things I found interesting while clerking last weekend was listening to spanglish in action. Polk County has a lot of Hispanic residents (much more Mexican than Cuban; that's down Miami way) and quite a few made their way to Eagle Ridge Mall. I remember "the babysitter" getting thrown into one conversation. Not even "la babysitter" but "the babysitter." For folks who use Spanish as their primary language and English as their secondary, they might naturally throw an English word in if there isn't a straight-forward altenative to it. To folks who don't care much for the US, it could be seen as cultural imperalism, if such blending makes its way south of the border.

While I was thinking of things en Español, I wondered what the gender of "blog" is. Male, as it turns out. A quick Google gets 90,800 hits for "los blogs" and 253 for "las blogs." Trying it in the singular (screened for Spanish only this time, so Los Angeles blogs don't mess things up), there's 520 for "la blog" and 304,000 for "el blog."

The stereotype is that blogs are a male thing seems to have seeped into Spanish.

Edifier du Jour-Isaiah 11:1-5 (ESV)

¹There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
   and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. 
²And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him,
   the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
   the Spirit of counsel and might,
   the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. 
³And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
   or decide disputes by what his ears hear, 
⁴but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
   and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
   and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. 
⁵Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,
   and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

He may show up in today's celebrations as a little baby who wouldn't hurt a fly, but He is the conquistador Messiah that Isaiah speaks of here. Some of that nature has yet to be seen, for it's for His second trip, but this is what the day's all about; God finally decided a bit over 2000 years ago that the time for the Messiah's first trip had come.

The time of year (Jesus was more likely to have been born in the fall, not in late December) or the date (sometime around 3-6BC or so) may be in question, but the significance of God sending part of Himself in human form to die for our sins still remains. So, let's try to get past the gifts and the goodies and the basketball and football on the tube to remember that we're commemorating Emmanuel, God with us.

White Christmas Eve

I'm back in Michigan; I had a 5:45AM alarm this morning to catch a 9AM flight out of Tampa. The trip went smoothly, except that I had more problems than usual dealing with my 6'5" legs in coach. However, once I got home to Midland, my body kinda collapsed after a week of job and apartment hunting and napped most of the afternoon.

Regular blogging will most likely resume tomorrow.

Midday Musings

Kentucky beat William and Mary yesterday, 92-47. Think what game they could have given the Wildcats if they weren't playing 5-on-2.

I'm not quite sure what to make of the AP pulling its poll out of the BCS formula. That puts a lot of weight to the coaches poll, which might make the move to some other model.

The Washington governor's race is starting to get real messy, making Florida 2000 look like a picnic; the Democrat, Christine Gregoire, has nudged ahead.

Edifier du Jour:Revelation 19:6-10 (ESV)

⁶Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,

 

   "Hallelujah!

For the Lord our God

   the Almighty reigns. 

⁷Let us rejoice and exult

   and give him the glory,

for the marriage of the Lamb has come,

   and his Bride has made herself ready; 

⁸it was granted her to clothe herself

   with fine linen, bright and pure"--

   for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

⁹And the angel said^[b] to me, "Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb." And he said to me, "These are the true words of God." ¹⁰Then I fell down at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, "You must not do that! I am a fellow servant^[c] with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God." For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

How grungy are your clothes going to be at that shindig? I know mine could use an upgrade. Even if my attire isn't as grand as it could be, just being there to celebrate that feast will be awesome.

Mo' Evening Musings

It started to get a bit nippy in Munn Park, so I've relocated to the motel room after grabbing a late dinner (hanging out for a bit with the young bohemians at Taco Bell; at 8:30, the crowd skews >~22), and getting some late Christmas shopping done. My mom doesn't read my blog (my dad does, but he can keep a secret), so I feel safe sharing about the small portable rug cleaner, sort of a modified electric toothbrush designed to clean small spots on a carpet. Mom asked for it via Eileen, it's small enough to pack in my carry-on (and shouldn't freak out security), so I got it.

The WaPo snatched up Slate from Microsoft. One of Byron's Rules of Blogging is that if you wait 24 hours, someone will usually write your post for you, and Patrick Ruffini did just that. However, I think this might make sense from a business standpoint even if Slate and the Post are kissing cousins ideologically; it will bring some Net-savvy Slate readers over to the Post when they have a number of good MSM on-line outlets to choose from.

Had, as Patrick suggested, the Post bought NRO, the resultant culture clash would have been difficult to manage and conservatives wouldn't flock to the rest of the Post. Now, if the Wall Street Journal bought the Corner....

Now that the Dolphins had the obligatory minority interviewee (Art Shell wouldn't be a bad pick for another team, so he's not quite a token) they're about to offer Nick Saban the job. People seem to like Belicheck products (Notre Dame's snagging Charlie Weis, for example), and Saban both had that pedigree and a national title at LSU.

I've still got a bit of a grudge that he ditched MSU for a lateral move to LSU; he did make the move pay off, however, for he went to a school where he wasn't second banana in the state. At the time he left MSU in 1999, the program was on the verge of hanging with the Big Ten big boys, and with the good basketball teams, MSU could have broken out of the second-class status with an equally good football team.

Let's Do The Ahnold Again

With apologies to rice and toast-tossers worldwide, I present the new political dance craze, The Ahnold.

It's just a jump to the left
and then a step to the right;
pump your abs and your pecs
and draw your knees in tight;
then do a centrist thrust
that'll drive 'em insay-a-a-a-ane
Let's do the Ahnold again!
Let's do the Ahnold again!

So, the Governator wants to reposition the GOP towards the center-

"I would like the Republican Party to cross this line, move a little further left and place more weight on the center," he was quoted as saying. "This would immediately give the party 5 percent more votes without its losing anything elsewhere."

OK, how do exactly do that? Foreign policy? Be more Europhile? I don't think that's what Schwarzenegger's after. The two areas where he's clearly on the centrist side is on economics and "values." If they tried doing both at once, the party would split in two, so they'd have to pick one or the other.

First of all, the easy question to ask is whether it's worth compromising in order to lock in power. If you don't stand for anything in particular, you're merely looking for power for power's sake. However, if you can make adjustments on secondary issues in order to assure changing things on the primary ones, you could make a case.

Let's try looking at what a more libertarian (going left on things like abortion and gay marriage and embryonic stem cells) GOP would look like. You'd pick up some voters who like Republican economics but can't stand the theocons; call them Ideopolisites. However, you'd lose two set of voters; the hard core theocons (who'd either stay at home or vote Constitution in protest) and the Goodies, blue collar moralists who would return to the Democrats if you take away the moral draw.

The Ideopolisites are very prominent in the Blogosphere, while the Goodies are almost non-existent. Thus, you'll have more press coverage and blog coverage of folks who would vote Republican if they veered left on moral issues than their numbers would warrant.

I'd guess that such a move would be a wash. You'd tick off the core of the party while only picking up a couple of percent at best. The reduction of turnout on the right coupled with losing a lot of Goodies will roughly offset the number of Ideopolisites picked  up.

OK, let's try moving towards the center on economics. We could start by scrapping the FICA payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare and raise income taxes to offset the revenue loss. Some corporate welfare trimming wouldn't hurt. That would help job creation and make the Goodies firmly in the Republican camp, even bringing quite a few peace-and-justice Catholics and evangelicals who are old-school on morals but so pro-little-guy that they couldn't stand pulling the lever for the corporate GOP.

Would that lead some hard-core dynamists to vote Libertarian or Constitution? Yep. Would it further tick off the Ideopolisites for raising the cost of capital while we lower the cost of labor? Yep. However, that strategy would stand a better chance of bringing in swing voters without ticking off too much of the core.

So, if we're going to do the Ahnold, we need to do it with some populist economics, not with ditching the theocons.

Evening Musings

Bad news for the Pacers; the NBA arbiter upheld three of the four suspensions, reducing O'Neal's from 25 to 15 games. The NBA will take the reduction to court, as their view is that such arbitration doesn't extend to gametime-related punishments.

I'm not sure what to make of yesterday's Mosul bombing. I do know that trying to make comparisons to the Beirut bombing of the 80s that drove us out, as CNN was doing this afternoon, isn't valid. The body count in this incident is only a tenth of Beirut (IIRC) and the stakes in Iraq are a lot higher. However, folks who don't like the US being there (and there are likely quite a few of those at CNN and elsewhere) would like to use this big-number event to try and make the occupation look too costly.

I'm not sure, but this is the first time I can remember that we've had a double-digit US body count in one incident in Iraq. If a thousand soldiers doesn't get the administration to pull the plug, a score more isn't going to do it. However, it's a big enough number for folks to go to town with.

My 403(B)'s liking this; the Dow Jone's above 9/11 levels for the first time. One of the big new items that led to the rally was the end of the reign of Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae. Raines was Clinton's OMB chief before moving over to Fannie Mae in 1999, although he struck me as a technocrat rather than a race-baiter, so any Clinton-era digs might not be fair.

Eat Your Heart Out

This is how to blog. I'm in Munn Park in downtown Lakeland, where it's 77 degrees and a light breeze. The park's lit up with a holiday light display and I'm WiFi blogging via SurfLakeland. For those of you having to fight off the latest snowstorm, my heart goes out to you.

Oy Vey in a Manger

This story of jovial civil disobedience has been in the front page of the Lakeland paper for a week. The story started when Baptists put a manger on the Polk County building lawn in the middle of the night after being turned down by a 2-2 vote. Then, a Festivus display joined it. The county commission is taking its own sweet time in getting the signs down, essentially allowing the displays to stay up through Christmas.

There isn't a whole lot of harm in allowing it to stay, except that the spirit of Roy Moore is all over this, where you're allowed to tell authority to shove it if you're following a Higher Authority. I'm not sure if I can quantify it, but there seems to be a lot of anti-anti-Christmas rhetoric flying through the media and the blogosphere this year, of getting more hot and bothered over the secular Scrooges. Given that attitude, such disobedience might well become more common, with conservative-leaning localities looking the other way.

By the way, Polk County's not one of those very Jewish areas on the Atlantic coast; it's more redneck than cosmopolitan. It just seemed to be a good title for a exasperating creche issue.

Florida Musings

Thanks for the prayers. The finances are not a problem at the moment; for the moment, we're in good shape in the bank account. However, it's been May since I had a full time job and September since I had any employment, save the weekend clerking stint that Bene had compassion for. At this point, I need something more for my spirit than for my pocketbook, although the bank account could use the help.

I've hit five placement agencies since getting down here, and medium-term prospects look good. In four of the five agencies, there was a particular position or positions that they were forwarding my resume to. It might take until after Christmas to nail something securely down, but I've got a ton of leads.

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The summer hurricanes, especially Charlie, has devastated the area. A lot of trailers got destroyed, making the rental market tighter than normal. Roofers and sign-makers are working overtime; my friend Fred is a repairman/contractor, and has no shortage of work.

One of the funny sights is the CVS drug stores; they bought out Eckard just before Charlie hit. You'll see temporary orangey-red CVS signs along side the blue Eckard "Pharmacy, Food, One-hour photo" type sub signs. With all the signs out, it's sometimes hard to pick something out. The hotel I'm staying at had to put its name on their changeable letter sign, since the main sign got destroyed.

The other interesting effect is FEMA and insurance money flowing into the area. When I was working at Penney's this weekend, I would walk past the temporary FEMA office in Lake Wales' Eagle Ridge Mall on my way to the food court. Even four months after Charlie, rebuilding is still a hot issue.

However, we still have 70 degree afternoons while Eileen struggles through highs in the teens; she will not miss it one bit, and neither will I, even when we have to put up with the "Air you can wear" in the summer. You don't have to shovel humidity, it only feels like it.

Edifier du Jour-Revelation 20:7-10 (ESV)

⁷And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison  ⁸and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea. ⁹And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven^[b] and consumed them,  ¹⁰and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

No deep escatology today; just remember that at the end of the book, the good guys win and the bad guys get theirs. I'm reminded of an old Carman line-when the devil reminds you of your past, remind him of his future.

Edifier du Jour-Job 40:1-2 (ESV)

¹And the LORD said to Job:

   
   ²"Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?
   He who argues with God, let him answer it."

Time to borrow from the old retail rules.

(1) God is always right.
(2) When God seems to be wrong, remember rule 1.

You might try to second-guess Tom Brady but trying to play Monday-morning QB with God isn't a good career move.

 

S'More Gramm-Rudman?

The deficit is in the news this week, as the administration is moving into deficit hawk mode; today's news conference had the President pledging to cut the deficit in half in five years. Five year plans for a lame-duck president isn't something you can put a whole lot of faith in.

My mind turned to the Reagan years; this was about the time two decades ago that Congress started to get into budget hawk mode. 1985 saw Gramm-Rudman ...

"I say, ahem, I say, sir! Didn't you forget someone?"
"Yes, Senator Leghorn, er, Hollings"

OK, 1985 saw Gramm-Rudman-Hollings became law, putting mandatory spending caps on. If the budget went over the caps, the budget was cut across the board to make up for it. Ol' Foghorn is the last of the Three Deficiteers to retire, as Jim DeMint will take over for Fritz next month, just in time to possibly see a Son of Gramm-Rudman come into play.

The parallels between 1984 and 2004 aren't perfect but worth trying on for size. Both XXX4 economies had recovered from recessions at the beginning of their decades, partly due to sound monetary policy and partly due to a tax cut. Both eras had in increase in military spending designed to contain a foe that had been underappreciated by the previous administration. Both first terms focused on tax cutting and didn't work too hard to contain government spending.

If we follow the pattern, 2005 would be Deficit Reduction Year and 2006 will be Tax Reform Year. 1986 saw a radical reform of the tax code, where many "loopholes" were deep-sixed in returned for lower tax rates. The biggest losers in 1986 were long-term investors (who got capital gains breaks taken away) and real estate investors (who got generous depreciation rules and passive loss write-offs yanked along with the loss of capital gains breaks) but wage-earners benefited.

What might the radical bombshell of 2006 be? How about a scrapping of the payroll tax in favor of funding Social Security via the income tax? It would increase employment, since the cost of hiring a new worker went down. By decreasing the cost of labor and increasing the cost of capital (via higher taxes on profits), you'll see a slight shift towards more labor and less capital. It would be a populist thing to do, but might be the price tag for moderate Democratic support for a Social Security overhaul; the idea of payroll tax reform has been kicking around for a while in neoliberal circles, but this might be the time to do something about it.

Another possibility is a look at various "corporate welfare" loopholes. That might be a way to keep tax rates low and avoid cutting too deeply into the budget.

However, we might need to see Gramm-Rudman 2.0 first. McConnell-McCain-Bayh, anyone? Once they get some sort of cap with teeth, then they'll be forced to take a harder look at pork and/or projects that have outlived their usefulness.

Don't look too far for 1984-2004 parallels. I don't see an Iran-Contra 2 floating out of this administration, and the nature of the war on radical Islam means that we won't see it collapsing by the end of the decade a la the Cold War.

Scenes From a Mall at Christmas

I spent the weekend in the "Nickled and Dimed" world of a retail store clerk. While the people I worked with were nice, it wasn't a redo.

Being on your feet for an eight-hour shift (even with a half-hour for lunch and two 15-minutes breaks) was more than my body could take for three straight days; by mid-shift of the third day, my legs started to cramp and I wound up knocking over a display pole when I leaned into it while checking a rack of clothes for order. At that point, I decided that it was safest for all concerned to call it a clerking career, and the store management agreed. I was doing a good job until my body decided it had enough.

A few not-so-random thoughts about my stint.

• Nobody wears smalls. In the vast majority of items, things start at medium and work up to XXL, and the XL's outnumber the mediums. That's a combination of obesity, buying a size bigger for comfort and baggy style being in fashion in some quarters.
• With thirty different types of sweatshirts, thirty different types of flannel shirts and about 100 different T-shirts, the work resembled the old game of Concentration. Adding to the mix were multiple variations of a theme, like two "My monkey made me do it" shirts or three on the "Got no money, no job and no car; I'm in a band" theme or three mullet-themed shirts.
• Speaking of XXL, check out the gym wear with the "Property of [fill in team]-XXL" shirts in medium.
• Jean waists sizes sometimes come in odd numbers, but the inseams always are in even numbers. Some poor soul was looking for 30-31s and didn't understand the futility of her quest.
• What's with mullets? More than one T-shirt had that as an topic; is that one of those pop-culture things that I'm out of the loop for?
• Also, does "my/your monkey" mean what I think it means, as in a certain part of the male anatomy? If so, there were a few T-shirts that were more PG then some parents might think.
• Another point of enlightenment was a big Orange County Choppers line of shirts and sweats; I'd never heard of the thing, but it's got a big following on TV. The stuff was moving faster than anything else this weekend.
• Do jean companies have to make six types of nearly identical-looking jeans? Not only to you have to sort by waist and inseam, but also by Loose fit or Relaxed fit or Normal fit or Baggy fit.
• Where's the "Husband Fit Jeans?" I translated it to Relaxed fit for an exasperated lady.
• A few winning T-shirt logos from the weekend
• "I've got the body of a god-unfortunately, it's Buddha."
• "5 out of 4 people have a problem with fractions"
• "Hooked on Foniks werked fer me." (Can't vouch for the exact typos)
• The Brad Johnson 14 Bucs T-shirts weren't going well, but they were going better than the Ricky Williams 34 Dolphin shirts; there was a whole rack of 34s.
• Some gal with a British accent was looking for Ozzy Osborne T-shirts; we did have a vintage rock section with AC/DC, Pink Floyd and the Stones, but no Oz-man.

One of my fellow temps had a lousy attitude about sloppy customers; "I guess I have to treat them like my kids." No, you have to treat them better than your kids, because your kids can't pick up and find competing parents.

Store clerks moved a peg up in my respect after this weekend stint. They have a harder job than it looks, so go easy on them the next time your at the mall.