Mark Byron

The Weeble Economy

The first quarter GDP figures came in today; it was up a very modest 0.6% (at an annualized rate, so it was up just 0.15% from the end of last year), the same growth as the fourth quarter of 2007.

It's not great news, but it beats the heck of a negative figure. However, it's sluggish enough to prompt the Fed into another Fed Funds rate cut, 25 basis points down to 2% even.

The economy has taken the hit of $3/gallon gas and $100/barrel oil and only staggered a little; compare that with the stagflation of the 70s when we saw a comparable spike in oil prices. Even the problems of a reeling financial sector hasn't caused a negative quarter of GDP growth.

I was talking about that with my Managerial Econ students last week. The reason that came to mind for our ability to fend off massive inflation is that the long term is a lot shorter than it used to be; businesses have more leases, more temp workers and can get new equipment on-line in days and weeks rather than months and years. An adaptive economy can make changes quicker than they used to, shifting resources to more profitable endeavors quicker than in years past.

It's not as stable as the economy of the 70s, but it's a lot more nimble and resilient. Or, if I can hearken back to an old toy, we have the Weeble economy, which wobbles but doesn't fall down.

Thus, the recession-mongers have another quarter to wait for a downturn and two quarters to wait before a classic recession call of back-to-back bad quarters could be first made. There are micro problems galore, like mortgage issues and high gas prices, but we have a rather resilient Weeble economy with which to work those problems out in. Automation, logistics and a well-run Fed have helped to make this economy nearly recession-proof.

Tuesday Musings

I haven't been my normal blogging self lately. Yes, that's not news. Between a hectic schedule, allergies and a slightly sour spirit, I haven't been in a blogging mood as of late, which has been rare since I started this blog six years ago.

There are a number of things on my mind. Zimbabwe is one of the bigger ones. The macro news isn't bad, as the recount seems to be leaning in the direction of letting the opposition win. However, the powers that be are gooning it up out in the countryside, which isn't good.

I did follow the NFL draft, but don't have too much to say of profundity. I'm happy to see the Pistons doing well, digging out of a 1-2 hole to be up 3-2 on Philly. I'm also happy to see the Tigers dig out of that disaster of a start to be only four games out of first as we go to press.

The other interesting story is the Southern Baptist internal census data that came out last year, showing declining attendance and baptisms, causing much gnashing of teeth in SBC-land; here's Pastor David's take on the issue. I'll have mine later in the week, God willing.

More tomorrow. My home Internet connection is down and I have to close up the office for the night.

Post-PA Musings

Well, Hillary kind of covered the spread Tuesday. If the conventional wisdom required her to get a double-digit lead, she came up a smidge short at 54.7-45.3; it actually rounds to a 9.4% gap.

One of the interesting things about the race is the racial divide. When the race started, Obama was seen to transcend race, but he's struggling to get blue-collar whites to vote for him, at least in the primary. Part of that is race and part of that is his Islamic-sounding name (one poll I saw had 14% of the voters thinking he's Muslim when he's a liberal Protestant; his quickly absentee dad was an atheist raised Muslim). A lot of the bigotry that we see today, especially in blue collar folks, is often more ethnocentrism than pure racism; it's folks who are different and/or foreign that make them nervous.

Jeremiah Wright's sermon portfolio will play poorly with that ethnocentric crowd; North Carolina Republicans are running the Wright "God D--- America" clip (with the "damn" bleeped) in an ad targeting of a couple of local Obama-supporting Democrats. McCain has criticized the Tar Heel heels for their endeavor-"We called and asked them not to run that message. It’s not the message of the Republican Party. It’s not the message of my campaign. I’ve pledged to conduct a respectful campaign[.]"

That's not the last that we'll see of Rev. Wright on the airways; he's too good of a wedge issues for 527s to pass up. It's also too heated of an issue for the McCain campaign to bring up themselves; the modern trend in politics is for the campaign proper to play the good cop and run ads that support themselves, or occasionally make policy comparisons with their foes, while the nasty stuff is left to the 527s.

For instance, in the last Kentucky governor's race, now-Gov. Beshear played the high road with cozy, forward-looking son-of-a-preacher-man ads, while the "independent" Bluegrass Freedom Fund ran ads blasting then-Gov. Fletcher for a patronage scandal that led Fletcher to give the whole administration a blanket pardon to bring the issue to a legal close. The Wright stuff will likely play out the same way this fall, with hardball 527s pulling out passages from the YouTube of Jeremiah while the McCain camp cringes in public while giving low fives in private.

It's more that a bit ironic that Obama started the race as someone who transcended the modern bitterness in race relations is now getting a Chinese YouTube torture of Wright's anti-white-establishment vitriol. Wright's prose came of age when the system earned a big chunk of that vitriol. It seems to be after the system rather than individual honkies, but it's hard to hear your church be declared the Antichrist; now I know what Catholics must feel like when some capital-f Fundamentalist lets it rip at their expense.

That's sad, since I think the senator deserves better. Yes, he's allowed himself to be associated with Wright's church (and with semi-reformed Weather Underground guy Bill Ayers), but he himself doesn't seem to share that bile toward the US establishment. I don't get a feeling of hatred of the establishment when I walk past the new Obama headquarters here in Lexington (we have our primary next month), right next to a Chinese restaurant I frequent in a strip mall near our big Fayette Mall. The flowing Old Glory logo screams Middle America, albeit in a populist John Melloncamp way.

The coarsening of the discourse will help McCain, but I don't think it helps the country. A lot of us were rooting for Obama the concept; even if we didn't want to see him elected, having a more honest and less nasty campaign was appealing. However, Obama the reality was a bit more complex and campaigns that promise to stay on the high road rarely do, even if the principals want them to.

Keystone Musings

We're finally getting the PA primary today; the Conventional Wisdom is that Hillary needs a double-digit win in order to start convincing superdelegates that she's the superior option even if Obama comes in with more elected delegates. Right now, the RCP poll of polls has her up 6, not quite covering that spread.

I haven't chimed in on the Democratic race as of late, since I really don't have a dog in the fight. Obama has not worn that well on the stump, making a number of mini-affes, including his clinging-to-God-and-guns line that he's spend a week living down. However, the Clinton campaign isn't running on all eight cylinders, either. It reminds me a bit of a Larry Holmes-Ken Norton fight in the 70s, where both fighters were so battered, they could have had a joint TKO, but since they were both equally woozy, the fight wasn't stopped.

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Here's a funny story from the other side of the aisle; someone in the McCain camp was plagiarizing the Food Network's website and passing recipes off as Cindy McCain's favorites.

I wonder what Michele Obama's favorites are. Or Bill Clinton, especially; what's his favorite cheesecake recipe? Rumor has it Slick Willy is a Alton Brown fan; "I like using my probe to check the internal temperature."

The Son-'n-Spirit Fly-In?

If you're not a Lakeland, Florida person, you might not get the pun in the title. One of Lakeland's big tourism draws (other than Detroit Tiger spring training) is the Sun-'n-Fun Fly-In, where recreational aviators from around the country show up for a week of flying-related events at the airport south of town.

Lakeland might be on the verge of having another tourist destination, and it won't involve a theme park; a big revival has broken out at Ignited Church on the north side of town, with rising Pentecostal evangelist Todd Bentley (my dad's been taking about him for years after seeing him at a conference about six years ago) being the touchstone of some interesting rashes of conversions and reported healings.

Here's a piece on the revival from the Lakeland Ledger's Cary McMullen, who interviewed me back in 2003 for a Ledger piece on Christian bloggers.

What began as a five-day revival at Ignited Church in Lakeland has become something of a sensation locally and, thanks to the Internet, in Pentecostal circles worldwide.

Canadian evangelist Todd Bentley has been leading "healing meetings" at Ignited since April 2, attended by as many as 20,000 people so far, and the meetings will continue twice daily through April 27, church leaders say. The meetings have drawn attention for what Bentley and Ignited Pastor Stephen Strader say are miraculous instances of people healed of serious medical conditions.

The evening services usually fill Ignited's 700-seat sanctuary, and people have been waiting for hours for the doors to open, Strader said. The crowds have included people from outside Lakeland, outside Polk County and even other states. Ignited's media coordinator, Lynne Breidenbach, said a doctor from England had flown over to attend services after seeing reports on the Internet.

The services have been streamed live via the Web site www.ustream.tv, and as of Wednesday morning, the services had received more than 100,000 views.

Ignited Church has an interesting pedigree, being the half heir to the former Carpenter's Home Church, in more ways than one. Carpenter's Home was an Assembly of God megachurch before the pastor's son did a financial scam that fleeced a good chunk of the church gutted the membership rolls; scamster Daniel Strader got sentenced to 45 years in prison.

Two years ago, Carpenter's Home sold their large, 10,000 sanctuary/auditorium (that would frequently host major Christian acts) to Tampa's Church Without Walls for their Polk County satellite church, giving Carpenter's Home their old facility in neighboring Auburndale and $3.5 million. Part of the church moved to the Auburndale site, with Carpenter's Home patriarch Karl Strader's son in law Shane Simmons as lead pastor of the newly christened Auburndale Life Church, while another group moved to Ignited, where Karl's other son Stephen Strader is the lead pastor.

Ignited Church overhauled an old hardware store about a mile north of the old Carpenter's Home site into a new 700-seat facility. I remember shopping at the Wal Mart across the street on US-98 in the mall quadrant north of town back when I was job-hunting in Lakeland back in 2006 and vaguely remember the Ignited Church signs as they were starting things up.

Carpenter's Home has an interesting place in Pentecostal/charismatic history; they hosted a three-month-long revival by Rodney Howard Brown in 1993 that was noted by uncontrolled laughter "in the Spirit" and other over-the-top manifestations. That meme spread elsewhere, with the "Toronto Blessing" of the mid-late 90s being the largest descendant of that meme (here's a critical piece that gives a decent overview, and here's another).

This Lakeland revival was a topic of conversation at church Sunday (we were at a Vineyard church in Wilmore just south of Lexington); the pastor noted that while the Toronto-style renewals tended to have people looking to absorb more of the Holy Spirit, it didn't translate in most cases to increased evangelism. My thought was that it created a breed of "Holy Spirit junkies" going from healing conference to prophetic conference to "soaking" service looking to get the next fix.

This one's marked, at least in the early going, by a lot of potent evangelism. Conversion numbers in that type of setting can be a bit inflated, as people often give token confessions that don't quite stick for the long haul, but the reports seem impressive. If you're going to have the Spirit move in off-beat ways, it's best to see it followed by people being brought to the Lord rather than just being a bunch of Holy Spirit junkies soaking themselves.

A lot of folks are going to be turned off right away by the TBN-style Pentecostal stuff and happily link to all the heresy-hunter sites. However, I'm interested in seeing if there may be something a bit more mature and worthwhile coming out of this one.

At minimum, we'll get to see the first blogged revival in the early days of "going supernova", if the hype holds up. Also, we may see Carpenter's Home 2.0 become a focal point like it's predecessor.

Salvation and a Fuller Gospel

I think I may have my blogging muse back after a rough patch. Let's put it back on the road with the beginning of a discussion that takes me back to a Michael Spencer post from last week where he rips "Christless preaching."

In fairness, the sermon was on an older testament story, but I am holding the preacher responsible for somehow preaching a Christian sermon, not a motivational talk.

...

Let me suggest that if the sermon I heard represents what we have to look forward to in evangelicalism, then being post-evangelical means that Jesus matters, the Gospel is the Biblical good news and faithfulness to either requires an intentional removal from what is happening in evangelicalism. Post-evangelicalism is a place to stand in the midsts of a tide that has washed everything out and left the flotsam and jetsam of a crumbling, degraded culture on the beaches of a vacillating, deluded church.

When a preacher can stand in the pulpit, hold the Bible, represent a significant church and the training of a major school, claim to expound the meaning of the Bible and never even once mention Jesus or the Christian good news at all, there’s something monumentally wrong at work.

“Houston, we have a problem….Jesus has left the sermon.”

Not entirely. The God of the Old Testament includes Jesus as part of the Godhead. Jesus didn't start existing in Mary's womb, He goes back to Day 1 and before.

However, the incarnate Jesus who died on the cross for us is a no-show in such sermons, and Baptist custom is that every sermon should have some sort of evangelistic content; while Spencer is a bit of a maverick Southern Baptist, he's a Southern Baptist nonetheless. In the Southern Baptist churches I've been in over the years, part of the closing altar call will include a call for people wanting to be publicly come forward and proclaim Jesus as their Lord and Savior. It's awkward to slap that at the end of a sermon that doesn't have much evangelistic content.

Should every sermon be required to have a overtly evangelistic message, just in case unchurched and unsaved Joe Schmoe wanders in that day (and that day only) and has that one shot at hearing the Gospel? If you give him a nice sermon on one of God's attributes out of the Old Testament or a Holy Spirit-centric sermon out of one of the epistiles, he might not hear that Jesus died for his sins.

That's entirely possible, but unlikely in our culture. If Joe caught a Jesus-free sermon at that church, he's likely to be witnessed to in some other fashion along the way at other services or by other people crossing his path.

Salvation is very important, and the focal point of the Gospel, but it isn't the entirety of the Gospel. Discipleship is also important, as is learning about God in His entirety, including the Father and the Holy Spirit.

One interesting footnote on that front comes from Willow Creek, the home of seeker-friendly, moving towards a discipleship of mature believers format; Matthew Lee Anderson has this comment-

Fundamentally, seeker sensitive churches are built on the premise that the mission of the church is to win new converts.  By subordinating all discipleship and church activity to this end, seeker-sensitive churches fail to acknowledge the intrinsic goodness of the fellowship of the people of God.  In other words, they miss out on the eschatological character of the Church–there is no “Church triumphant” in the seeker-sensitive ecclesiology, as the Church exists fundamentally to win converts rather than to encounter and worship the Living God.

The difference is, I think, crucial.  If the ultimate end of the church is saving people, then the only adequate basis for those activities that do not immediately result in salvation–and here I think of the creation and promotion of art–is the salvation of lost souls. However, if the goal of the church is to experience Holy Communion–that is, to dwell in the presence of Jesus Christ, through his Spirit, as His body–then art, music, dance, business, etc. need no further justification for their existence.  The church can engage in them because they are human activities and intrinsically worthwhile.

This is, I think, the chief deficiency of a seeker-sensitive ecclesiology, and many evangelical ecclesiologies.  When non-believers become Christians, what type of life have they been saved to? A life of saving other non-believers is good, but ultimately insufficient, for it is not the sort of life that one can–or will–live in heaven.

That's not to say that Southern Baptists are "seeker-sensitive" but they are salvation-centric. If you don't work on what it means to be a Christian once your saved, you have a lot of loose cannons that are saved but have no clue how to interact with God and their fellow man other than to get folks to recite the same prayer they just went through.

Salvation is important, but it isn't the entirety of the Gospel. My mind goes to the euphemism "Full Gospel" that some Pentecostal types use to describe themselves, insinuating that garden-variety evangelicals avoid the parts of the Gospel that include the Holy Spirit as a hands-on day-to-day player in our lives today.

An overly-salvation-centric Gospel presentation (yes, there can be such) will underplay discipleship and learning about God as a whole. Most folks don't have that problem, since a salvation message isn't PC, requiring folks know both that they are sinners in need of a savior and that a Savior is there at the ready to accept them as-is. It's easy to sugar-coat that issue in a secular setting, but it's also easy to get off on a fire-and-brimestone tangent, where we focus on our sinfulness and our need of a risen Savior.

War is not the Answer: Getting the Bad Guys to Behave is.

I've seen quite a few "War is not the Answer" bumper stickers around Lexington these days; yes, we're in a college town, and even with their crazed Big Blue sport fandom and being in a Southern town, the UK folks do drift a tad left, like just about any non-church-school academics do.

Our local lefties are right on this one. War isn't the answer. If wars go on and on without a conclusion (WWI, for example), they serve little purpose other than making funeral homes and arms merchants rich.

Getting the bad guys to behave is the answer. If responding with military force doesn't move the bad guys towards civilized behavior, then military force isn't the answer.

The bumpers stickers bring out a reflexive response to a boomer of a certain age, who'll fill in the lyrics from What's Going On with "...for only love can conquer hate." However, there are times, as ANC-backer Vusi Mahlasela pointed out, where "armed struggle is an act of love."
Sometimes love needs to pin an intruder to the floor or even pack a rocket launcher or AK-47.

War isn't the answer, but force can be part of the process of reaching an answer. Any violence needs to be done for the right reasons and at the right levels; I would have been within my rights to knock the stuffing out of the poor stoner who threatened me back in February, but I quickly realized that it wouldn't do any good.

Most likely, our peace-loving driver was thinking about Iraq. If our present can help get the Sadrites and the Sunni hard cases to behave, then we're doing our job; the powers that be have been leery of coming down to brass tacks with Sadr until recently, leaving things a war of attrition that hasn't helped anyone.

However, things are heading in a more civilized direction, as the Sadrites are on the ropes; force may well have been the answer in the long run, but it took them way too long to use it decisively.

TGIF Musings

I hope to get back to regular blogging; I've been too exhausted to do much blogging the last couple of weeks, running herd over three traditional classes, two on-line classes and an independent study. Throw tax returns, a graduation ceremony last Saturday (the second trip to Southeast Christian/"Six Flags over Jesus" as a Sullivan prof, and the associate degree silver gowns still look like a Guinan outfit from Ten Forward) and other hassles of modern life into the mix, and I've felt like I'm on a treadmill that doesn't stop and is going a notch too fast for comfort.

However, things are starting to level out. I have a tentative summer term schedule, which is good, since my contract runs out next month (they don't do formal renewals until near the end of the contract); if they were planning on getting rid of me, all the finance classes would be in the TBA bucket. A summer schedule means an all-but-likely renewal, so I can breathe a bit easier.

Spring has arrived in Lexington in earnest; we've had temperatures in the 70s and I can come to class in shirtsleeves if I come later in the day.

I had to pay money on both my Federal and Michigan tax returns this year; I usually wind up getting refunds due to capital loss deductions (my failed computer store of the late 90s is still yielding $3000/year writeoffs) and Eileen's student loan interest. However, this year, we had to write checks to Uncle Sam and Aunt Jennifer; we'll get enough back from Uncle Steve to buy a nice dinner for two, but probably not beverages and tip.

Usually, conservatives are in high disdain of the tax system this week, but I'm actually a bit glad to be paying income taxes. It means we have income to be taxed and excess cash flow such that I can write a mid-three-figure check without doing five layers of creative finance.

My notes are ready through Tuesday, my online classes aren't in mutiny mode, my bosses like me and the weather's nice. Time to enjoy a weekend for a change.

Kentucky Musings

I don't have to describe what's been weighing me down the last few days, just link to this Forbes piece on the worse cities for allergies; Lexington came in at #1. No wonder they do state funerals for basketball equipment managers around here; they're all working off an IQ deficit from the stuffed up sinuses this time of year.

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Well, it wasn't quite a state funeral, but the passing of UK equipment manager Bill Keightley got that kind of response, getting front-page coverage in the local paper for days running. Coaches and players come and go, but Keightley was there for just shy of a half-century, going back to the all-white teams of the 60s through a championship team coached by a black guy. Pastor Dave has a obit for Mr. Bill here.

There are some support staff that get that kind of response, who are with the club for decades while coaches and players change. From my Michigan background, Tiger groundskeeper Herbie Redmond comes to mind, with his signature strut with his broom as he lead the crew to groom the infield after the fifth inning. Or, for a more modern take, Pistons trainer Mike Abdenour, who's been a fixture on the Pistons bench since well before the Bad Boy era (I didn't know  until now that he did a short stint with the Sixers in the early 90s, but I was off at Kent State at the time).

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We've got a bit more history in Kentucky than we do in Michigan, so we often have old sounding names of our roads, like Armstrong Mill, Clays' Mill and Tate's Creek, all of which are roads in southern Lexington. Another road in that southern mix is Crosby Road.

My mind was picturing a successful moonshiner with multiple locations for brewing hooch. The road could then be called Crosby's Stills, and an old black and white shot of him pouring corn meal his distilleries could be labeled Crosby, Stills and Mash.

Columbia and the Big Picture

There's some interesting politics revolving around Columbia, something you probably wouldn't have predicted even a week ago. We have a free trade deal with them that the president has put in the legislative hopper, setting off a 90-business-day window for Congress to act on the treaty in a fast-track, up-or-down manner.

Congressional democratic leaders could stall that by meeting for less than 90 days between now and the election, but that would mean recesses, which means recess appointments for the president.

The other Columbian related story is the reduced role for pollster-campaign strategist Mark Penn for the Clinton campaign; he had been her chief strategist but is stepping aside and merely working as a polling consultant the rest of the way. Penn's day job is as a PR firm executive; his firm had the Columbian government as a client. Penn was working on strategies to get the trade deal through Congress.

That wouldn't be a problem if the Clintons of the mid-90s had been his client. Back then, Bill was a free-trader, getting NAFTA and the WTO through Congress, strong-arming moderate Democrats to go along with the deals. Those were some of the high points of the Clinton years; that coupled with a economic team that had some monetary policy prudence mitigated the sting of his tax increases, allowing for a more vibrant economy that's gone major-recession free up to this day.

However, the intervening decade and a half has seen the Democrats lurch left on trade; even if Columbia is a key ally and fighting off the FARC narco-Marxists who are controlling a good chunk of the country's south, a free trade deal is a free trade deal and free trade is bad for the left. Also, benign Columbian leftists have been targets of counter-revolutionary goon squads/paramilitaries of the right, making the right-of-center Uribe government persona-non-grata on the activist left.

So, Hillary has to lean left, leaning away from where her husband was back in the day, to try and get more-protectionist-than-thou in blue-collar Pennsylvania. An extended primary has made Clinton lean left to pick up primary voters, moves that could cost her or Obama in the general election.

Obama reminds the Democratic faithful of a certain age of Bobby Kennedy. He may remind the non-liberal faithful of a certain age of George McGovern and get a similar spanking from McCain in the election this fall. Normally Democratic states like New Jersey and Pennsylvania are in play for McCain, making it very hard for Obama to see his way clear to an electoral win; that's even before the conservative 527s start bringing out Obama's leftist voting record to the extent that it's yet to be explored by the average voter.

That should mean that we'll see McCain in the White House come January and a loose continuation of current foreign policy. With Iraq improving and Europe becoming a bit less hostile towards the US, things are starting to look better overseas.

Columbia and South America remain the one area where the Anglosphere is on its heels. Hugo Chavez is poised to become the sugar daddy of leftists in Latin America; his moral support (at minimum) of the FARC makes supporting the Columbian government important. If Congress turns its back, the Columbian swing vote can be lured into the Bolivarian camp, making the drug trade that much harder to control at the source, since anything that weakens the US is good news for "Caesar" Chavez.

That why the vote means more than just a free trade deal; it's a vote for bringing Columbia into the American economic sphere and away from the socialist Chavezian-Bolivarian sphere.  There are plenty of folks on the left that wouldn't mind the latter, but there are quite a few Blue Dogs that aren't. It will be interesting to see if Bush can win them over.

An Indivisible God

In mathematics, irrational means a number that can't be expressed as a fraction of two integers, that can't be expressed as a ratio. There are plenty of irrational numbers; square roots are often irrational, and the numbers pi and e are irrational as well.

That doesn't mean that such numbers are irrational in the logical sense of lacking rationality. You just can't boil them down to a fraction.

I likened God to the number e in an earlier post, which brought the comment "How can you say that God is irrational?"

God isn't irrational in the logical sense, but is too complex to boil down to a fraction. God's infinite, so doing anything mathematical on infinity is problematic. e's timeless property of being its own derivative was my poetic device for understanding how to incorporate God into marginal analysis.

However, God does divide in three without losing anything. He's both indivisible and three at the same time; you want irrational, there's irrational.

Yet that irrationally-divided God is the source of all rational thought. Not everything needs to make sense to a math major in order to make sense.

The Freshman Five

That sounds like one of those vocal groups of the pre-rock era, like adding one to the Four Freshmen; however, that's a more scentifically valid statement of college student weight gain.

I spent my freshman year going to my local community college, so I didn't get the "Freshman 15" (extra pounds of weight from all-you-can-eat cafeteria food) until I was a sophmore. They ran a study on Auburn U students and found that it was more like a five pound game.

One difference that a lot of modern dorms do is that they go away from a one-price, all-you-can-eat model for the cafeteria and go to an a-la-carte model where you pay for what you eat and have a quarterly/semester alotment of cafeteria credit as part of the dorm charge.

That's the model that Michigan State's Owen Hall used when I lived there in 1989-90, but that was the grad dorm; the undergrad dorms were still on the eat-utill-you-*&#( model at the time. Kent State had that model in most of it's dorms during my early-90s stay there and made cafeteria credit tradable; you'd often see a bear market on cafeteria credit at the end of a term as students who didn't use the cafeteria much would unload unused credits at 10-20 cents on the dollar.

However, if you give young people (or old people for that matter) unlimited food, they'll have the tendency to eat until stuffed, especially when you have unlimited desert, unlimited favorites and no mom and dad to reign you in. Also, for guys, eating a lot is often seen as a badge of honor, like the various eating contests that spring up; "all you can eat" is taken not as an invitation, but a challange.

Edifier du Jour:Mark 1:9-13(NIV)

⁹At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. ¹¹And a voice came from heaven: "You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."

¹²At once the Spirit sent him out into the desert, ¹³and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.

"You've just been anointed by God as the Messiah. You've just won an all-expense paid trip to Disney World the desert, where you'll sleep under the Galileen sky and eat... absolutely nothing." Or at least the other Gospels have him fasting during this stretch.

I'm reminded of the verse in Hebrews "the Lord disciplines those he loves." During the rough times, I've been prone to say "Lord, you don't have to love me that much."

You think you have it bad? Look what Jesus gets stuck with; a 40 day wonder in the desert. That's after God's stated that He's well pleased with Jesus.

Why 40 days and why the desert? 40 matches the years in the wilderness for Moses and the Hebrews coming out of Egypt; there is some interesting symmetry there.

Also, if Jesus were to launch right into ministry after that dramatic baptism and response, He might have been too eagerly received as a conquistador Messiah; giving things a month to cool off seems to match the low-key style that is often Jesus' MO in the gospels. Jesus tended to do things with a more personal touch and a minimum of fanfare.

 

Kobe Slumps-Only Scores 20 a Game

I was thumbing through the dead-tree Wall Street Journal at the school library before class today and found this interesting headline-"U.S. Slump Takes Toll Across Globe."

So far we haven't been in a recession; we've yet to see a single quarter of negative GDP growth, although all bets are off as to what the first quarter numbers will be. Ben Bernanke made headlines by just acknowledging the possibility of a recession.

The US economy is still growing, despite all the sub-prime mortgage headaches and $3/gallon gas. We're still the most potent economy on the planet.

Let me go back to that headline. If the largest economy on the planet is growing, albeit slowly, how does that equate to a slump? If everyone is expecting more, modest growth is a "slump."

Twenty points a game is a very good average for an NBA player. Only 28 players are at or above that figure as I go to press; Detroit manages to have the #2 record without any of them. Currently, LeBron James leads the league with 30.3 PPG followed by Kobe Bryant with 28.7.

Were Kobe to have his scoring average drop to 20PPG, he'd still likely be an All-Star. He'd still be one of the more feared players in the league. However, since we're used to seeing him in the general vicinity of 30, a 20PPG average would be a slump; he hasn't scored that low in almost a decade, when he was college-aged and just coming into his own.

Likewise, when the US economy merely slows down to a 1% growth rate rather than the 3-4% that is expected, everyone starts to worry. Even a modest downtick in the economy is a modest downtick from a doggone big economy; that's cold comfort to someone getting laid off at a mortgage firm or someone who's out of a house due to an ARM gone sour, but it's something to remember as a citizen and consumer.

Beyond the headlines, we have a very solid economy. Not perfect and not without pockets of inequality and poverty, to be sure, but still very solid. Just like most of the NBA would be happy to "slump" to 20PPG, the rest of the world wouldn't mind slumping to US levels.

Thus, things probably need more tweaking that overhauling.

Evita 2.0 Has Some Bugs

I'm used to seeing taxes on imports, but this ongoing story from Argentina is the first time I recall seeing export tariffs imposed by the country stuff was coming from. Normally, countries bend over backwards in order to get people to buy their stuff, finding ways to subsidize exports. The only exception that comes to mind is that the US is leery of sending computer equipment and other military-useful stuff to unfreindly countries.

However, Argentina has had a system of taxing food exports with the goal of keeping domestic food prices low; if farmers get taxed selling to foreigners, they'll be more likely to sell cheap locally. Those taxes were raised last month by the left-leaning government. Farmers responded by boycotts and blockades, withholding food from the market; the news of the day was that they's put the boycott on hold while they talk to the Christina Fernandez de Kirchner administration.

Not the greatest start to La Hillary del Sur; Ferndandez took over from husband Nestor after serving as a senator, so there are some interesting paralells to our current presidential race. However, in senator Clinton's defence, she isn't a fire-breathing lefty and understands free market economics enough to not do anything quite that dense here.

Got a Little Captian in You, Zimbabwe?

It doesn't seem like it's been six years already since we had the last Zimbabwe elections that Robert Mugabe stole from the opposition; that was one of the first major items I recall blogging about when this blog started in 2002.

Well, we have good news coming out of Zimbabwe for a change; the opposition is leading and will have a majority of seats in the new parliament per the official Electoral Commission. 

In addition, unofficial returns have opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai with a clear lead over Mugabe in the presidential race; the question will be whether Tsvangirai will have a plurality or majority. Tsvangirai's MDC party's figures have him with 50.3%, just avoiding a runoff, but independent figures have him with only 49% and would need a runoff with Mugabe if those numbers hold up.

The results are slow coming in, so there may be some attempts from Mugabe backers to cook the books, like Cook County coming in slowly to figure out how many votes they need to steal to win.

May Mugabe go quietly. Other African Big Men have step aside after clearly losing at the polls, and it's well past Mugabe's freshness date, to put it kindly. He should hand the ship of state over to Captain Morgan.

God on the Margin

I was teaching my Managerial Economics class last night and was working on a profit-maximization problem with my class. In such cases, you find your profit-maximizing point where your marginal profit equals zero, or alternatively, where your marginal revenue equals your marginal costs.

However, I was working with a profit function in the example. To find the marginal profit, you have to take the derivative of the profit function.

A quick Calculus for Dummies: A derivative states what amount of change is happening in a function at a given point in time. For a straight line, the derivative would be the slope, so that the derivative of 4-6x would be -6 and the derivative of  5+3x would be 3.  Quardratics get a bit funkier, so that the derivatives of 3+4X-5X² would be 4-10X and the derivative of  2+6X-0.3X² would be 6-0.6X; the basic rule is that constants drop out, anything times a simple X turns into the leading number and stuff in the form of aXⁿ turns into nax^(n-1). Our profit function "jumps the shark" and hits a maximum point when it hits a slope/derivative of zero.

The punster that I am, I quickly asked whether Muslim economists would be allowed to take the derivative of the profit. The two Arab students in class laughed along with the rest of class; no fatwas are out on me as of yet. It's well known that pictures of the Prophet are off limits to good Muslims, so could you take the derivative of the Prophet?

Bringing the concept into the Christian realm, I wondered what the derivative of God would be. If God is a constant, God drops out of any equation. Thus, God isn't a factor in any marginal decision-making if He's merely a constant.

However, God is always a factor, or at least should always be a factor. God isn't a constant, He's e.

That's not a typo. e is a number, like pi, an irrational number that's 2.71 to two digits. It's what you get if you did (1+1/n)ⁿ as n goes out to infinity. In finance, we use e for continuous compounding; the future value of a dollar at i% per period for n periods is (1+i)ⁿ for conventional compounding, but eⁱⁿ for continuous compounding.

e is thus a timeless number, having some potent applications. In calculus, the derivative of e^x is e^x. It's it's own derivative. If you have e^f(x), it's derivative is the derivative of f(x) times e^f(x). What's inside of e changes, but not e itself.

God's a lot like e. If things are If you and God are in an equation, you may change, but God doesn't; he not only stays constant, but constant in a timeless manner; He refuses to be left out of a marginal equation.

If God is merely a constant, never-changing item, He can be tossed from our decision-making process. That's far too often the view of the world.

However, God needs to be more than just a constant in our lives, but a timeless part of our personal equation that refuses to go away no matter how many derivatives you take.

Pinning the Other Intruder-Anxiety

Well, I'm back from hiatus.

Let's cut to the chase; I had been fighting off some anxiety issues since my home intruder issue in February. As it turns out, it merely heightened some problems I had been dealing with for decades, but managed to previously muddle through with bit of crying and a lot of prayer.

With things ratcheted up a notch, I needed some help from the psychiatric tool kit; I'm on some long-term medication to manage those anxiety attacks that were paralyzing me mentally.

I used to be a skeptic of such medication, buying into the world-view common in evangelical circles that most emotional problems can be prayed through and talked through. However, the operative word in that last sentence is most.

I don't have too many Word-of-Faith visitors here, but this is one issue that has been prayed over for years without any major success. If the shortcoming is with me on the issue, all I can say is that I've done all I can in my power to draw closer to God and have more faith. I can't say that I'm perfect (far from it) but I've seen far weaker faiths be rewarded, so I don't see a perfect correlation between level of faith and answers to prayer.

God can (and does) heal such things directly and supernaturally. However, there are times where He allows nature to take its course and rely upon natural forces (like counseling and medication) to do the healing. Other times, healing just doesn't happen at all.

There are some situations where there are physical issues blocking rational thought and that drugs in the modern tool-kit can help. Some of it is a placebo affect, where people feel better knowing they're on medication, but there also seems to be an additional calming affect that heads off a debilitating cycle before it gets rolling.

We're not shy about using the modern medical system to manage high blood pressure or high cholesterol; despite some of the New Age leanings of modern psychology, we shouldn't be that fearful of using the medical system to manage some emotional/mental issues that have physical solutions.