The Millennium Shrimp

Commenting on Wally-world’s recent endorsement of employee mandates in healthcare coverage, Professor Bainbridge points out the underlying fallacy (on both the left and the right) of assuming that Walmart is the paragon of laissez-faire Capitalism.

Wal-Mart is heavily dependent on government subsidies. Wal-Mart routinely gets sales and property tax abatements when it opens a new store, to cite but one example. According to a 2004 study (albeit one funded by a union) the subsidies can amount to as much as 12 million dollars per store. Additional de facto subsidies come when uninsured or under-insured Wal-Mart employees get health care at government expense. Supporting government-run health care looks like a sop to the politicians who control the subsidy tap.

Personally, I’ve always been rather apathetic when it comes to hating Wal-mart. Maybe it’s time for that to change.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, a company released the first personal music player. Of course, the concept of a personal music/media player didn’t exist then, it was simply called a portable tape player. Or a Walkman.
The BBC recently gave such a prehistoric fossil to a thirteen-year-old to try out for a week.

I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly - effective, if a little laboured.

I’m sure those of us a certain age cringed on reading that. Indeed our precocious protagonist reports that his father informed him that Walkman players were famous for “eating” tapes, which - horror of horrors - could have left him without music for the rest of the day!

I’m relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born, as I can’t imagine having to use such basic equipment every day.

Having said all that, portable music is better than no music.

Truly, life before the iPod was Nasty and Brutish, but it must have seemed interminably long without 30,000 songs on your play list.

“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?” he said.
“Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?”
“Absol–well, okay.”
“Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?”
“All right, I’ll grant you that, but–”
“Saving civilization from a horde of–”
“It doesn’t do any good in the long run is what I’m saying, Nobby, if you’d listen for five seconds together,” said Fred Colon sharply.
“Yeah, but in the long run, what does Sarge?”

Thud

I’ve spent the better part of the last year trying to figure out exactly what Twitter is good for. I think I might be getting an inkling.

Saving civilization from a horde of black-robed Mullahs?

We’ll see.

Twitter seems to be what newsgathering will look like in a post-Journalism world. CNN was 24 hours behind twitter in picking up on the brewing crisis after the election. And Twitter re-scheduled maintenance on their server farm to not interfere with Iranians using it. As wired put it recently, when commenting on the MySpace loosing ground to Facebook:

When your server farm’s service schedule has an impact on Middle East Peace you are onto something big — much bigger than which garden-variety walled garden has more members.

Unfortunately, at the same time, I’m disappointed to realize that Administration of Hope and Change is morally retarded. A President who’s afraid of speaking out plainly and strongly against the type of tactics used by a regime that is willing to send the Basij to shoot their own people seems like a disappointing successor to the people who marched in the 1960s. President Obama is right to worry that he’s on the wrong side of history when France and Canada can make stronger statements against the current regime.

This isn’t about invading and occupying a country. It’s about not giving a repressive regime a moral pass for crushing dissent.

So, our new phone salesman started today. Older guy, very personable. Got him set up on the domain and email. He had an HTC Touch from Sprint that he wanted set up to access email. Tried downloading the Mobile Gmail application, but it didn’t seem to work. It installed fine, but said something about not being able to connect securely. Around the internets, there were a number of people blogging about this issue, and this posting by Sherif Mansour back in October seemed to be the go-to blog post on getting it to work.

I found that Sprint’s “mobile email” application seemed to support gmail natively, however, without needing to install the gmail mobile application. I was able to send a test message, we’ll see how well it continues to work for him.

Rushkoff calls it Facebook’s Fatal Error, opening itself to the Internet.

Hope he’s right.

I’m being hyperbolic (at least slightly), but it does seem like a pertinent question when you juxtapose the new release of the “Patriot’s Bible” from Thomas Nelson with comments made by some prominent Republican politicians at the “Rediscovering God in America” event that was broadcast over the web on God.tv

Some select quotes from Gingerich and Huckabee re-posted on Hamptonroads.com

Huckabee told the audience he was disturbed to hear President Barack Obama say during his speech in Cairo, Egypt, on Thursday that one nation shouldn’t be exalted over another.

“The notion that we are just one of many among equals is nonsense,” Huckabee said. The United States is a “blessed” nation, he said, calling American revolutionaries’ defeat of the British empire “a miracle from God’s hand.”

The same kind of miracle, he said, led California voters to approve Proposition 8, which overturned a state law legalizing same-sex marriages…

“I am not a citizen of the world,” said Gingrich, who was first elected to the U.S. House from Georgia in 1978 and served as speaker from 1995 to 1999. “I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator.”

(emphasis mine)

I’m not horribly surprised to hear this type of blather coming from Huckabee, but it’s hard to believe that Gingerich is engaged in anything other than pandering to the religious right. The belief in American Exceptionalism is an old one in the United States, but it seems like Americans are more interested in worshiping at the altar of Nationalism. Are we being led down the same road as the Church was in Germany, where the voice of the Church will be so bound to the State that it will compromise our ability to preach the Gospel? Or do the evangelical churches in America even have a message besides coddling the sensitivities of middle-class American suburbanites?

Heard an interview with the President of a local Union chapter up in Michigan on WKSU this morning. I can’t find a link to it, but it was in the story on the Pontiac stamping plant being closed. Obviously, this is a sad situation for a lot of GM employees, but one of his comments struck me. He blamed GM’s bankruptcy on corporate management (of course), but also laid the blame on his neighbors (I’m assuming he means the whole town here), many of whom were GM pensioners. He said that it was their fault for buying foreign cars instead of GM.

To me, his comment reflected how deep the problems at GM actually run. Buying a car still is a significant purchase for most Americans. Real wages in this country have largely stagnated since the 1970s, and cars certainly haven’t gotten cheaper. (On the other hand, they do last longer.) GM’s labor contracts with the Unions added $1,500 in production costs to every GM vehicle. The only cars the GM could build and still turn a profit were the huge gas-guzzling SUVs. His neighbors were quite willing to buy them when gas was $1.50 a gallon, but not now. The simple fact is that the labor unions have been a boat anchor waiting to rip the bottom out of the boat as soon as the company hit shallow waters. GM’s problems are not so much the result of upper management making bad decisions as it is the result of the economic realities of running a corporate dinosaur where bad decisions were the only economically viable ones.

The Unions were the product of the conflict between management and labor in the early twentieth century, a conflict that was often quite bloody. Larry Page gave the commencement speech at the University of Michigan this year, his alma mater and the school where his father earned his PhD, and one of the artifacts he brought on stage with him was the “Alley Oop” hammer that his grandfather had carried on strikes back in the 1930s. It was a home-made hammer, a lump of lead welded onto an iron pipe, that the auto workers carried to protect themselves on strike.

The unions fought for something important back in the day - basic rights and economic stability for the working class. But the president of this local seemed to think that the point of the Union was to preserve privileged economic sinecures to pass on to their children.

So, the other night on Faceblah, Darin was getting rather apoplectic about “the Patriot’s Bible” recently released by Thomas Nelson publishers. Greg Boyd, author of “Myth of a Christian Nation” gives a highlight tour of some of the more egregious sections here. And this is the advertising video posted on youtube:

Boyd, of course, is rather upset by wrapping the Bible up in a flag. Now, I have to agree that this stuff is, to put it very mildly, a bit of a stretch. At the end Boyd makes the comment;

I’ll end by simply noting that the very fact that there’s a sizable market for this Bible (why else would Thomas Nelson Publisher’s publish it?) is a sad commentary on the state of the church in America.

So, is there a “sizeable” market for this type of Bible? Quite simply, yes, there is. Mashing up the Biblical text with a commentary pushing a certain, perhaps questionable, theology is a hallowed tradition in American Evangelicalism (see the Scofield Reference Bible for instance), but is early twenty-first century America reaching an even newer low? To quote from the introduction to Stephen Prothero’s “Religious Literacy”:

Pop psychology has elbowed biblical exegesis out of many born-again pulpits (including some of the most successful megachurches), self-help books outsell theological works in most Christian bookstores and loving Jesus has replaced affirming the Westminster Confession as the soul of evangelical piety. Despite their conviction that the Bible is the Word of God, evangelicals show scant interest in learning what scripture has to say or wrestling with what it might mean. “I have watched with growing disbelief as the evangelical church has cheerfully plunged into astounding theological illiteracy,” writes evangelical theologian David E Wells. Even in the Bible Belt, the Good Book is fast becoming as another evangelical puts it, “The Greatest Story Never Read.”

In an effort to get evangelical youth to read that unread story, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson initiated in 2000 a series of ‘Biblezines,” which reprint the entire New Testament in a format guaranteed to attract American teens. The glossy magazine Revolve (for teen girls) looks like a Christian Seventeen complete with beauty secrets, a feature called “Are You Dating a Godly Guy” and fashion tips (”Just make sure you look like a child of God”). Refuel (for guys) has the frenetic feel of ESPN: The Magazine and offers tips on such “practical” matters as wrestling an alligator and handling a jalapeno. (”Man, it’s like dealing with the burning problem of sin. You need to grab the right solution. Get Jesus.”) Real— for hip-hoppers—offers “Dope Christian Rhymes” and a series of articles by ex-cons called “Jail Ain’t No joke” The concept here is simple: young people don’t read the Bible because it’s too imposing, too hard to understand, too square; but if you put it in a friendly format they’ll eat it up. This concept has been a huge commercial success. Thomas Nelson claims that Revolve “became America’s #1 selling Bible in less than 3 months after it was originally released” in July 2003, It is doubtful, however, that these godly glossies arc doing much to wipe our biblical ignorance among American youth. When I assigned Refuel one week to students in a seminar on the Bible in American culture, many admitted that they skipped entirely over the New Testament text, reading instead the “extreme” side- bars, which gyrated around the edges of each page, demanding attention like a hyperactive child. One student was convinced that Refuel was an Onion-style parody. In either case the biblical message was literally lost in translation.

The simple fact is that Americans, especially Evangelicals, have stopped reading the Bible. Thomas Nelson has hit on the fact that to sell bibles to a market that is completely saturated with, and largely uninterested in reading, the Bible, you have to wrap it up in something else - a “Biblezine” targeting a segment of youth culture or a themed package like the Patriot’s Bible. Thomas Nelson would probably make the argument that they are simply giving the consumer what they want. The problem, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is that the medium is the message. It started out rather innocuously with “African” and “Womens study” Bibles, that offered commentary highlighting the role of marginalized groups within the biblical text, but we seem to be moving towards Bibles that are more human opinion about the Word of God than the actual Word of God.

From the Financial Times:

The federal debt was equivalent to 41 per cent of GDP at the end of 2008; the Congressional Budget Office projects it will increase to 82 per cent of GDP in 10 years. With no change in policy, it could hit 100 per cent of GDP in just another five years.

Democrats blame it on the cost of the war in Iraq, but the debt was decreasing for most of Bush’s second term (see the bar graph here at Instapundit.) Not that Bush was all that thrifty, but we’ve seen a sharp decrease in tax revenues because of the economic downturn. The Obama team is predicting that the economic stimulus ( a big chunk of the deficit increase) will increase tax revenues in 2011, but that remains to be seen. Can you really spend your way out of a recession? Or are we going to see higher levels of inflation? Inflation that will sharply decrease the real earning power of wages that have largely stagnated in the past 30 years.

Wait, why are we doing this again?

Geeks are antithetical to the herd mentality.