my good name

Minor spoiler alert regarding The Dark Knight. In one of the closing scenes of the movie Batman has to decide whether or not to allow the inhabitants of Gotham believe that he committed murders that someone else committed. He has to make this decision because he believes that if the citizenry of Gotham found out who actually committed the murders they will be disillusioned and unable to stand up to corruption in the city. This concept has stuck with me.

I mentioned in my last post that it is a little rough sitting through sermons on the same passages every year. That is probably not entirely fair because there are always new things to discover in worn passages. They just don't jump out at you. This year I spent some extra time contemplating the following passage from Luke 1.

"'How will this be,' Mary asked the angel, 'since I am a virgin?' The angel answered, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.'

"'I am the Lord's servant,' Mary answered. 'May it be to me as you have said.' Then the angel left her."- Luke 1:34-38

While I have heard sermons and lessons allude to the fact that infidelity was a serious matter in Palestine at this time and that Mary could have been stoned to death, I don't think the sacrifice that Mary made is fully appreciated. Even though she was a virgin, everyone she knew would believe that she was loose or weak-willed at best, or an adulteress if Joseph decided to keep his name clean at her expense. For a woman in a culture where family honor is so tied to the woman's sexual purity that it is considered acceptable to kill her to restore that honor, Mary had to understand the gravity of telling the angel that she was God's servant. Even if she were not stoned to death she in all likelihood was accepting the life of a social outcast over something that she did not even do.

It sounds trite or even sacrilegious to compare Batman to the mother of Christ, but both situations illustrate a concept that has been on my mind. I care about my good name enough that it would drive me absolutely insane if everyone mistakenly thought that I had committed some misdeed. I would spare no energy in defending my name and this fact illustrates one of my spiritual weaknesses. This is just one more thing that can and will stand between Christ and me unless I let Him change that aspect of me. Having a good reputation is fine, but if I'm not willing to sacrifice that reputation I have not given God everything I am.

thoughts on the holiday

As it is now Christmas season I have been enjoying the downtime, but also contemplating a few things about the holiday.

First, I really do not like most Christmas movies. I have known this for a while, but I have only recently taken the time to figure out why. It's because there are only two or three potential plots to a true Christmas movie and they almost always attempt to compensate for a lack of quality with saccharine-sweet sentimentality.

Second, I wonder if the appeal of the holiday to some people is that Christ is depicted as a baby. We went through a major lights display a few nights ago and I was struck by the number of baby-laying-in-a-manger scenes, even in situations where there were no Mary and Joseph depicted. Kind of like Ricky-Bobby, do a lot of people prefer not to think of Christ the adult if presented with the opportunity to think of him as a baby? If so, this cannot be healthy. There's a reason that the Gospels focus on the adult Jesus far more than the child Jesus.

Third, I think that Easter should be more important than Christmas to Christians. From a practical perspective the resurrection is the fulfillment of the Old Covenant and the initiation of the New Covenant. Easter represents the most important event that ever occurred, and Christmas represents an event that was necessary for the resurrection to occur. That said, Christmas is the more important in our culture because of the consumer aspect and because it conveniently splits the school year in two. I don't really see this as a soapbox issue for me, so I'll drop that specific issue here.

Fourth, while I'm on the topic, Christmas and Easter sermons are generally the worst sermons of the year. You do not have to have attended church at all to know the stories of Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. These are the foundation of the Christian faith, but they are also milk rather than meat. A sermon should teach the congregation something that they do not know or do not know well. It is frankly hard to do that when your source text is Matthew 1-2 or Luke 1-2, which everyone in the congregation has heard taught one month out of every year for their entire lives.

Fifth, the above points made, the idea behind the virgin birth and Jesus' very existence on this earth is pretty spectacular. The unpredictability of everything Jesus did and how he fulfilled the Law, even when so much of how this would go down was prophesied, should give pause to people who read prophesies into modern-day events. The methods that God uses to do what He is going to do are unpredictable even when God has provided prophesy about what is going to happen, because God operates more spectacularly than we can imagine.

Sixth, buying and wrapping gifts for the holidays is the most inefficient means of giving someone else something ever dreamed up by mankind. I know that is part of the value of giving and receiving gifts to many people, the knowledge that it requires some effort. In an already busy season, though, is it wrong to long for some efficiency?

One very good thing about the holiday is that I usually take quite a bit of vacation time. I do enjoy taking multiple weeks off from work. It provides a nice way to de-stress. No doubt about that.

the placebo effect

Something that has been rolling around in my brain for a few months is the concept of a placebo and how ethical it is to use or not to use. There is deception involved, but it could be argued that the placebo effect is positive. Is the risk to damaged trust worth it, though?

The placebo effect is known to be real in medicine. It goes beyond that, though. An expensive placebo is more effective than an inexpensive one. If you pay a dime for a sugar pill you think is going to cure what ails you it will work, but not as well as if you pay a couple of dollars for it. Placebo surgery has even been found to be effective.

The question I have is, how ethical would it be for a doctor to prescribe medicine for a patient that he or she knows only has value as a placebo? What if there is no good medicine and the placebo really is the best option? Would requiring the patient to pay a lot for it, since that will make the placebo more effective, be acceptable? How do you measure the rightness or wrongness of the deception in that case? What about surgery? Is going under the knife as part of a mental game wrong if it is done for the right reasons?

What makes this scenario so perplexing is that it contradicts the freedom to choose that is so ingrained in American culture. In this situation, once you have the information necessary to decide whether you want the placebo it is going to be worthless to you. You know that the medicine has no specific physical benefit, so the placebo effect disappears. So, by its nature, placebo medicine has to be forced on those who have not given consent.

What do you think? Does the benefit of a placebo outweigh the risk? How does the potential loss of trust if the patient finds out about the placebo factor in? Are the patients being taken advantage of here, or is ignorance bliss?

two sentences

I have been using Facebook less than three years, but already it is a significant part of my life. I generally think that Facebook, and social networking in general, has more positives than negatives. If there is one thing that I seriously dislike about the site, though, it is that it is causing me to lose some respect for some people because of their political comments.

This isn't about agreeing with me. This is about the nuance that is lost or ignored in a two sentence status update. Real, controversial political issues usually have multiple, intricate facets that require in-depth understanding in order to have an informed opinion. What I am used to seeing on Facebook is one or two sentences that amount to little more than an ad homonym attack on whoever might disagree with the commenter with zero appreciation for those aspects of the issue that conflict with his or her position. Let me provide a fictional example of what I am talking about.

The hot political issue as of late has been whether the Bush tax cuts should be extended in full. On the one end you'll have people who boil it down to, "The rich already pay more taxes and taxes damage job growth." On the other end you'll have people who rebut, "The income gap is extraordinarily high and the Bush tax cuts are far more expensive as a whole than the Obama healthcare plan." Of course, they'll say it more condescendingly, frequently make erroneous claims along the way, and make appeals to concepts like liberty or equity, but that's the gist of it.

The tax issue is actually far more complex than this, though. Whether the individuals making the most money should see their tax cuts extended is part of a much larger philosophical question where each side has enormous pitfalls and some advantages as well. A very scant few of the comments that you see on Facebook relating to a political topic like this will even allude to how complex this is.

On the pro-tax-cut side, if you are being consistent the only way you can justify keeping all of the tax cuts is to take a hatchet to all government programs, including the military. You have to be willing that some people who rely on the current system (welfare, health, education, etc) will suffer extraordinarily and many will die for the greater good of the economy as a whole. Finally, you have to acknowledge that an increasing gap between the most wealthy and least wealthy individuals in a society frequently leads to instability in that society (think France in the late 1700s or Russia in the early 1900s) and that we as a nation might be headed that direction.

On the anti-tax-cut side, if you are being consistent you have to acknowledge that you are expecting a very small portion of the populace to bear almost all of the financial burden of the government system. You have to acknowledge that a percentage (no one really agrees on what the percentage is) of small employers are taxed as high earners and that the taxes will diminish new hiring to some degree as a result. Finally, you have to acknowledge that you are sacrificing a level of economic performance for the economy as a whole and incentive to work and innovate in order to assure that the bottom earners have an increased quality of life.

This is even forgetting the fact that this is part of a larger question of what a proper overhaul of the tax system should look like, and who should bear the brunt of those changes. Arguing about the tax cuts is sort of a way to sidestep the more complicated structural questions.

In conclusion, I wouldn't want to live in a Libertarian, Conservative, Socialist, or Liberal paradise with the serious drawbacks that they all bring, but that is exactly what two-sentence statuses ultimately advocate. That is why I do not like most political comments on Facebook.

the amazing disgrace

I have watched The Amazing Race every season since it started. One thing that I have been noticing more lately is how much some people take from their significant others. I am probably noticing this more because I am paying attention for it rather than because there are more verbally abusive relationships on the show. Indeed, the most verbally abusive of them all was Jonathan Baker in 2005, so verbal abuse has been a constant for years on the show. In the past, though, in my mind it seemed like the relationships with excessive shouting were in the minority on the race. In this season there have been several couples where I have wanted to strangle the guy for what he said to his wife or girlfriend.

How typical are these types of relationships? I am not talking about Mr. Baker abusive, but rather blame-her-for-everything-that-goes-wrong abusive. It's not far enough that most people would consider it abuse, but the result is similar to abuse. I have a sister and I have a daughter, and I do not want either of them learning to tolerate that treatment from a man. Even more than that, I don't want to inadvertently be that man to Golden. The guys who were doing that appeared to be clueless about it, so it can be too deceptively easy to think that I am beyond that poor behavior.

While the show sounds like it would be fun to be on, I will never apply to be on the show with Golden. The main reason is that I am a competitive person and she is not, which would ensure friction throughout the race. One thing that has bounced around in the back of my mind, though, is that I wonder how I would react in some of the stressful situations I see in the show. It can be all too easy and convenient to blame your partner when the right reaction is to encourage or support your partner. I really don't think that I would be that person who shouted insults, but I have to acknowledge that I still have some things to learn about properly handling stressful situations. This might be something about myself that I simply do not want to discover.

the turkey butcher

In honor of the Thanksgiving holiday I present a poem my sister and I wrote for a creative writing assignment when she was in junior high and I was in in high school. It is a parody of the poem "The Village Blacksmith" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I'd encourage you to read the original before reading the parody because it makes more sense that way.

The Turkey Butcher

Under a spreading chestnut tree
The turkey butcher stands;
The butcher, a bloody man is he,
With red and calloused hands;
And the muscles of his scrawny arms
Are strong as rubber bands.

His nails are crisp, and black, and long,
His eyes are like the tan;
His hands are wet at the turkey’s debt,
He years to clean his hands;
The whole world looks him in the face,
He is a mental case, you understand.

Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his mallet blow,
You can hear him swing his heavy hand,
As he screams, “Yowwwwwwwww!:
Like an Angus ringing his old cow bell,
When the evening sun is low.

And children coming home from school
Looking at the open door;
They love to see the fatal hand,
And hear the turkeys roar,
And catch the feathers that fly,
Like the snow of the blizzard of 1624.

He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among the boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears an angel turkey’s voice,
Singing with the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.

It sounds to him like dinner’s voice,
Singing from Paradise!
He needs not think of it once more,
How in the pot it lies;
And with a hard rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.

Toiling, hungry, sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning he sees the turkeys come in,
By evening on a plate it goes;
Something attempted, something done,
Will this poem never close?

Thanks, thanks to thee my sort of worthy friend,
For listening when thou needed not!
Thus at the flaming oven of life
Our turkeys must be brought;
Thus on the butcher table shaped
Each cutting deed and thought.

national pride

Last week I watched the movie Ip Man, which is a Chinese film about the person who would eventually be Bruce Lee's martial arts trainer While it is a well-made film, liberties were obviously taken to make the protagonist into a national hero. It is further obvious that the movie is meant to inspire patriotism in Chinese viewers in the same way that The Patriot was meant to inspire patriotism in American viewers. Most of the film takes place during World War II in occupied China after Japan has ravaged the country, so while it is not a war movie it is a movie that depicts a well-known war.

Something that stuck out to me was that in the closing credits the film notes that China eventually defeated Japan and won its freedom. That stuck out to me more as an American viewer than it would to a Chinese viewer. Regarding the war with Japan, I am more likely to think that Japan's losses across the Pacific and the nuclear warheads dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the reason Japan lost the war. This got me to thinking about how people from different countries view wars that their country has participated in, and World War II in particular.

I don't know this for a fact, but I would bet most British people view their nation's role in World War II as the most important because they offered the last staunch resistance to Germany in Western Europe. I would bet most Russian people (and perhaps Ukranians) view their nation's role in World War II as the most important because Germany's failed invasion of Russia marked the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. Most Chinese people probably view their nation was instrumental in defeating Japan because the conflict between Japan and China predated World War II. For my own part, I am pretty certain that most Americans believe that the United States is almost single-handedly responsible for Germany's and Japan's defeat. In such a large conflict people from every nation involved on the Allied side can point to something that their countrymen did that was pivotal to the outcome of the war.

This nationalistic pride is intriguing in part because most people alive today did not have any role in the things that happened during World War II. I can be proud of the people I know and have known who went through the war and contributed to the effort, and I can be thankful that an earlier generation sacrificed to make the geopolitical situation better today. Do I have any right to feel more personal pride in regard to World War II because I was born in the United States than I would if I had been born in one of the countries that did not fare as well in the war, though? I don't believe I do.

privacy or safety

Possibly the biggest fuss that I have seen in the news and on Facebook posts in the last couple of weeks has been regarding the new TSA screening that is happening in a lot of airports. Travelers have the choice of being screened with backscatter scanners that reveal a lot of what is under your clothes or being patted down in a very personal way. As always, I have some thoughts about this whole situation.

First, while I understand why people would not like these two choices, few of the outraged appreciate that this is an issue of trade-offs. People reacted with outrage that the government did not offer protection against the underwear bomber last Christmas, but frankly most of the steps the government can take to provide against terrorism require sacrifices to personal privacy. Some people have pointed out that the underwear bomber might not have even been caught using the current scanners. This is possible, but it completely side-steps the real issue that the rights to safety and to privacy are usually at odds with each other and must be balanced. I am not saying that using the scanners is right or wrong, but rather I am saying that by taking the position that using the scanners is wrong you are implicitly saying that you are willing to sacrifice some rights to safety for this right to privacy.

Second, I don't personally like the options much, but since I accept that this is a trade-off, whatever we decide as a society is the proper trade-off is what I am going to accept. Since my threshold for what I consider unreasonable is apparently not as high as many others, I suspect that I will have more to worry about regarding my rights to safety than my rights to privacy. I don't suspect that I'm going to worry much about either, though.

Third, I have heard that a lot of people are going to request pat-downs this holiday season to make a point. Isn't that just ruining things for everyone, though, if it causes congestion in the system. I think it's a selfish way to make a point and I would be irritated if I was flying anywhere this holiday.

Fourth, I am sure this is different for men and women, but I am far less bothered about going through the scanner than through a pat-down. I'm not really scared of the radiation level since I don't travel much and the picture does not feel like it invades my privacy as much as the pat-down would.

Fifth, I heard someone make a point that it was not Christian-like to allow yourself to be exposed like that. I didn't want get into argument about that, but it would be a difficult point to establish through Scripture. It's actually far easier to argue against that point than for it using Scripture. If someone has a scruple about that, though, then it is something I have to respect.

Sixth, Despair.com has a couple of hilarious shirts relating to the issue. I know there have been a lot of jokes about the issue, but those two shirts are my favorite so far.

Finally, and probably most importantly, remember that the TSA employees who are implementing these policies have little to no say in the process, so don't take things out on them when you are being scanned or patted down. If I were a TSA agent, I would not like having to pat people down any more than they would want to be patted down, so I know I wouldn't appreciate people being jerks through the process because they thought the attitude was justified. Take your complaints to the people who actually do something if you really don't like the policy.

the end of privacy

This is the post where I sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist. I generally deride the claims that the government is watching every move we make; and I am not either pro- or anti-government, but rather believe we are placed under the systems that God has ordained. I am hoping that these facts provide a little validity to some of my anti-government-sounding, paranoid views below.

I read 1984 one time and that time was about fifteen years ago. While a lot of people view the society described in that book as a likely danger I thought the ideas proposed were ridiculously paranoid when I read them, and I largely still do think that way. I do think that there is one thing about that book that is an eventual inevitability in every society because of advances in technology, though. We will be monitored and that monitoring will be functionally similar the thought police described in the book.

One of the main focuses of 1984 is that people are constantly monitored and that potentially subversive elements of society are detected and spied on by thought police. While I do not like the government conspiracy aspect of the idea, the fact is that technology is going to get to the point in the not-too-distant future where every government (and corporation, and many individuals) will be able to almost accidentally monitor almost everyone in the world effortlessly. It will just take a different form than the book described.

One example is through social media. There is a lot you can tell about people from what they write even when they are purposely trying to hide it. The types of reactions that people post to things they read online, what they say about their preferences or who they admire, when they are active online, what aspects of themselves they decide to share or not to share, et al. I know there is already enough information available on this blog to provide a rather comprehensive personality and psychological profile on me if you know what to look for. Some day automated profiles will be created for everyone who has ever done anything public online simply because the software will be available to collect, parse, and categorize the relevant, freely-available data. Eventually, it will be easy to know everyone who is a threat to commit a certain crime in the future, or who poses a likely threat to a government, or who is the most prone to overpay for the things they buy. Not only that, but the profiles will provide information on everyone's weaknesses and drives, and so will detail how to keep them from doing those things the government does not want them to do. There will not be people who are thought police, but the function will exist through the stuff that we willingly share because that will be the price we pay for a convenient life.

Another example is through old-fashioned monitoring, but in a far less centralized way than was foreseen in 1984. In the book the government did all of the monitoring and no one else really got to know anything meaningful about their neighbors, but in reality we will do the monitoring and our connection with those around use will be what also provides information about us to everyone else who wants to know. People already geo-tag images and video that they upload to cheap or free. Eventually, there will be little point to not be recording and uploading your own video constantly, and some service will exist to collect all of that live video to get monitoring of everything happening everywhere where someone happens to have their device-with-a-camera-in-it (cellphones now, but who knows in the future) running. This is only one source of video. A lot of household products will eventually use video as a source of input (sort of like how the XBox 360 Kinect works), so a lot of inadvertent household audio/video will be made more public than people realize. This sounds bad, but it gets even creepier.

While most people will have video on them most of the time they are in public, simple images are not going to be the only thing that will be collected. Again, since it will be so easy to do, most of that video will eventually be hooked up to software that measures microexpressions. These are small and involuntary expressions that exist on people's faces for short enough periods of time that betray how they are feeling, and they are generally too short for most people to notice. A microexpression would not give away what specifically the person was thinking, but rather that he or she was unintentionally expressing boredom, distraction, contempt, physical attraction, stress, or any number of other feelings. With constant video and software to detect our feelings, the necessary facades of civilized society will disappear. To some people this may sound like a positive thing, but it truly will be more a curse than it will be a blessing. There are a lot of things that we really should not know about each other, and much of it has to do with how we feel about each other in specific situations. On top of that, the video that is collected containing peoples' reactions to different situations will be used to build personality and psychological profiles for every person alive who ever ventures into public or interacts with anyone else.

So, my prediction here is simply this. I think the people who are paranoid about online privacy are right that almost no one appreciates what they are giving up by using social media services, such as this blog for example. I also think, however, that resistance is futile simply because it will be impossible to hide from all of the possible ways to collect data, and even if you found a way to successfully do so that would only make you look suspicious to those you are trying to hide from. Frankly, it will say something about you that you are trying to avoid detection in the first place. Our experiences, our emotions, and our very existences will be naked and on display for the world to see. So, rather than being scared about what is going to happen anyway, enjoy your privacy while you still have it. Fear and paranoia won't look good on a personality profile anyway.

fat, lazy, orange, and offensive

One of the news stories that made the rounds today was that Garfield creator Jim Davis apologized for the offensive timing of one of his strips. The punchline of the strip, which is possibly his funniest for the year, refers to "National Stupid Day." It was unfortunately released on Veterans' Day.

While Davis probably needed to issue the apology to clear things up, the question I have is who in their right mind actually thinks that Davis would intentionally insult the military. Is there a humorist of any form anywhere who actively avoids insulting anyone as much as Davis does? If anything, one of the first things that most people think of when they think of the strip Garfield is that it is inoffensive to a fault.

If there really is a significant group of people who believe that Davis was intentionally disrespectful to the military that says a lot more about society than Davis. Are people really that easily manipulated into manufactured anger? I sincerely hope not.

to dye for

I almost posted this on Facebook, but it seemed more appropriate here. The following conversation occurred last week in our house.

Golden: "Should I look for hair dye for you, or do you think it's already too late and it will look too obvious?"

Me: *Loud Laughter*

From certain angles and in the right light it looks like I am going salt-and-pepper. I still have a few years to go before I will truly be salt-and-pepper, but I'll be there at a younger age than the average.

I'm actually not all that bothered about the idea of having some gray hairs. I've had random ones for years, and I don't think it harms a man's image much to be graying. Going very gray in my early thirties probably is not ideal, though.

So, the question is should I dye my hair at some point in the near future? Is it one of those things that once I start I have to keep up? Am I actually at the point where I need to be taking steps to make myself look younger rather than older? What's next? Eating right and exercising? The horrors.

election results

I have been watching the election returns tonight with some interest. What I have been rooting for is not a landslide, but a close split. It is my opinion that government operates the best when no one party holds control, either symbolically or in reality. This is because there is not enough motivation to come up with compromise except in situations where the government is evenly split.

If the government is truly controlled by one party, then that party has little motivation to work with the minority party or parties because they don't appear needed. If the government is not controlled by one party but one has the appearance of much more control than the other, then the minority party has little motivation to work with the party in the most power because more political points can be scored by disruption. We saw examples of the Democrats refusing to work with the Republicans in 2009 as an example of the first problem and with the Republicans refusing to work with the Democrats in 2010 as an example of the second problem. Watching both major parties play those games was disturbing.

Even though many of the newly elected lawmakers are being brought in on combative platforms, it is my hope that compromises will finally be struck as enough people realize it is in their best interest to find solutions that pluralities of both major parties can accept. If they cannot do that, then a lot more politicians will be getting the boot in 2012.

what is masculinity?

This is more a post to collect thoughts than to push them.

Something that I have touched on and that I will come back to in the future is that I believe that the modern Church (or most any generation of the Church) knows what to do with masculinity. This is more of an issue today because there are few masculine exploits left that are not somehow related to a vice. To be associated with the Church today is to take on some level of femininity in the name of virtue.

I have been giving this more thought than usual in the last few weeks and am stumped. Being a man who has grown up in a church culture and never really rebelled I have to admit that at this stage I am not sure what Scriptural masculinity should look like. Ministries that target men always seem to focus on the familial responsibilities that come with being a man, but if that is the complete definition of Scriptural masculinity it is a disappointing one. While not fulfilling those responsibilities could damage my sense of masculinity, fulfilling the roles involved does not make me feel masculine.

Since this has been on my mind, I want to ask what you think the definition of Scriptural masculinity is. I do so with some caution, however. Some trends that I have noticed is that men tend to think masculinity is the ability to do the things they want to do or aspire to do, and women tend to think the definition of masculinity is what they are attracted to in a mate. So, what would Scriptural masculinity look like in today's world and why?

how not to review

I spent a couple of hours this weekend doing something I truly enjoy—reorganizing and cleaning up my Netflix queue. When I do that I typically glance through user reviews of some of the movies that I am on the fence about to see if I can get an indication if I would like the movie. Very frequently there is a review that provides very good details about why I personally would or would not like a movie. There are a few things that show up quite a bit that are less than helpful to me, though.

No Reasoning

Why do people think a review that basically says, "This is the greatest film ever," or, "They should have shot everyone involved in this film," but says little more is worth publishing? Tell me why you loved or hated the movie so I know if I am likely to agree or disagree.

Arrogance with Vagueness

A few reviews are kind of preachy regarding the type of movie the reviewer seems to think I should want to watch. The following is not copied from any specific review, but it could be.

"This is an intelligent film that takes its time to develop the plot and the characters, unlike a lot of the more popular mass market films that are nothing more than special effects. If you need an explosion every five minutes, then this movie is not for you."

Aside from the reviewer sounding arrogant, all I get from the review is that the pacing is slow and it may or may not be due to something that I care about. I want characters to be developed, but I don't want two hours of poorly-paced back story for a 135-minute movie. The following would be a better review.

"This movie is not for everyone because it is paced a bit more slowly than the average. While most of the slow pacing was necessary, there were two or three scenes that were unnecessary to the storyline. This did not bother me because I appreciated that they erred on providing too much detail about the main character rather than not enough. It was the right decision because the story is character-driven rather than effects-driven."

The above review is better because it tells me what I need to know. If the movie description sounds interesting I can get through the three pointless scenes without irritation. If it doesn't, I will probably be put off by having to watch meaningless scenes.

Not Scary

I like a lot of movies in the horror genre, but it splits about 50/50. I am interested in movies that have twisting or intelligent plot lines, and about half of horror movies fit into this mold. I do not really care one way or the other whether a movie is scary or gory, so when people use that as their only criteria it is not useful for me. I know I shouldn't complain about this for horror movies, but people do this for other genres such as thrillers as well.

Political, Religious, or Philosophical Reasoning

This does not happen too much, but sometimes people review a movie based on whether they agree with the message or not. This is not typically helpful, except in very narrow genres like Christian documentary.

Have not Watched the Movie

This is the most surprising. I hate when I see a review that says something to the effect of, "I am so excited that I am going to see this movie next week." No one cares about that.

Attractiveness of Actors/Actresses

That I can recall, I have never watched a movie because I thought someone in the movie was attractive. I would rather watch a movie with a plot I liked but with ugly stars than with a lousy plot and attractive stars.

Disc Was Damaged

I understand why someone would be irritated that they got a cracked or scratched disc and want to take it out on someone. It really only hurts other users who are looking for valid reviews to post a review that simply whines about getting a bad copy of the movie, though.

I am sure there are more, but those are the pet peeves I have had tonight.

penguins and polar bears

Several years ago some of my coworkers and their spouses played Cranium at a casual get together. One of the guys I worked with at the time, and someone who was generally very intelligent, had to answer a true/false question that asked roughly, "Do polar bears eat penguins?" He said they did not and provided an elaborate explanation. If I remember correctly, his reasoning was that penguins are protective of their young and travel in groups, so that they would be dangerous to hunt. While he was correct that polar bears do not hunt penguins his reasoning was faulty. The real reason is that polar bears live in the Northern Hemisphere and penguins live in the Southern Hemisphere. The phrase, "Penguins and polar bears," immediately became metaphor in my office for being right despite faulty logic, and I have come to love the concept.

One application of the concept is intellectual. Is a person who has a lot of the right answers, but who makes a lot of logical mistakes intelligent? What if that person is right only because he or she learns the right people to listen to even if he or she does not properly understand those intelligent peoples' logic? Is this person intelligent or not?

One application of the concept is ethical. For example, can a person with seemingly random ethical code be considered ethical for rightly considering murder wrong if he or she has no solid rationale for that belief? To further illustrate this, if a person decided that shooting people at close range was wrong because there is a chance that a splatter of blood will stain his or her clothes, is this person thinking ethically in that he or she believes that shooting someone at close range is wrong? Is the entire value of an ethical code the actual rules or is there significant value in the rationales behind the rules?

One application of the concept that I have posted on before is spiritual. If someone has faith in what is true for all of the wrong reasons is it true faith? As an extension of this question, is it inevitable that the person's false reasoning will undo his or her faith?

There are other applications as well, but they all boil down to the value of the work to get the answer versus the accuracy of the answer. I value the work more, but maybe that is so I can justify being wrong on occasion.

800

This is my 800th post. My tradition when hitting a round number is to write something that indirectly relates to the number. Since was the first area code used for toll-free numbers in the United States (and Canada), today's post is on the concept of free.

My trust issues flare up when I see something that is free. Economically speaking, I am a strong believer that there is no such thing as a free lunch, so I always expect an angle when I see something for free. I think most people are like me to an extent on this, but maybe not to the same degree.

One example was a minor-league baseball game that Golden and I attended with a large group of people. We had "seats" on a grassy berm and a local bank was handing out free seat pads to anyone who would apply for a credit card. Most of the people sitting on the berm took the offer. I could not on principle and because I did not know what that would do to my credit score. I would have purchased the pads even at an inflated price had I had the option, but I would not have taken the "free" pads.

I have another problem with taking free things that I am certain qualifies as a psychological issue, and I am also fairly certain that it is an almost exclusively male issue. I have a very hard time accepting something for free because I do not feel that I have earned it, so I feel mildly indebted. For example, I hate taking free samples of food at the grocery store. I would rather pay the nickle or dime that the sample cost. I know that it does not make much sense, but the ability to pay even on something so small would ease my mind.

In short, I probably don't believe in such a thing as a free lunch because I don't want to.

intelligence and religion

"I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure." - Jesus Christ (Matt 11:25-26)

"Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him." - Paul (1 Cor 1:26-29)

A recent study established a correlation between higher intelligence as measured by IQ and the belief that there is no God. As someone who believes very strongly in God and who cares probably too deeply about intelligence, this was definitely something that I had to give some thought. Things that I think about have a strange tendency to show up on this site, so here it is.

There is one thing that I believe should be noted before I go much further. One of the sacrifices that God expects is the willingness to be considered a fool. I know of no place in Scripture where having a reputation for intelligence is portrayed as Godly. There are places where we are instructed to be wise and intelligent. The difference is that wisdom as detailed by Scripture may not have an actual correlative relationship with intelligence as it is popularly measured. This is part of why I included the Scripture passages above in this post.

There are actually two things that I should note now that I think about it. Statistically speaking, using a mean score is often a great way to skew results. For example, at the time of this writing Wolphram Alpha has the mean income for an individual in the U.S. at $43,460, but the median as $33,190. What accounts for the difference? In this case, the mean is skewed by all of the income made by billionaires and multi-millionaires, but the fact that there are relatively few of them keeps them from strongly impacting the median, so the median is more representative of the population as a whole. Likewise, I expect that the ultimate explanation for the IQ difference is simply that only a minuscule percentage of the very low IQ people are atheists and the rest of the very low IQ people drag down the mean IQ score for those who believe in a god. I would bet that a difference would exist in the median scores, but that it would be notably lower than the difference in the mean scores.

While I am sure there are more, I can think of two potential reasons that atheists and agnostics would score higher on IQ tests. The first potential reason is that the tests are imperfect and incomplete measures of intelligence and the second potential reason is that people who believe in God tend to skew less logical.

Argument #1: IQ Tests Are Imperfect

While IQ tests have correlation to intelligence, I do believe that they are imperfect gauges of intelligence. For one, there are too many types of intelligence for any one test to properly capture. One person I spoke to over the summer while Golden and I were on vacation talked about working at Sandia National Laboratories. He joked about how some of the people there with PhDs could understand Quantum Physics but lacked the practical knowledge to tie their shoes. How do you measure those different types of intelligence? Is the PhD really smarter on the important measures, whatever they may be? Just because the PhD understands abstract concepts better, does that make him or her more qualified to know whether there is a god than the average Joe or Jane?

Also, the results of all tests are colored by any number of factors. For example, I would suspect that visual learners would do better on an IQ test than an auditory learner would. If there are multiple people in the room where the test is given people who have anxiety issues or who have ADHD may score lower than they should for their intelligence level. People who prepare for the test and have a strategy would probably score higher than those who do not, even though those factors may not be strong indicators of relevant intelligence.

Finally, I do not know my own IQ, but I am sure that my score would benefit from the fact that I have always been a good test-taker. If someone is not a good test-taker, he or she will not get the score boost that I would get. This is a natural weakness for any test in properly grading someone's intelligence.

Probably the strongest argument that IQ tests are imperfect are is that there are statistical differences between how people in different ethnic groups perform on the tests. At the least, it should give us pause that a statistically significant number of people of certain ethnicities score higher than people of other ethnicities. If it is bigoted to use IQ tests to assert that one race is less intelligent than people of another (which I believe it is), then it is bigoted to use the IQ tests to assert that people of one religious persuasion are less intelligent than people of another religious persuasion (or lack thereof).

Argument #2: People Who Believe in God Skew Less Logical

Remember that I am a Christian as you read this.

There are a few reasons why people who refuse to believe in God would skew more logical. For one, more people today grew up with parents who believed in a god of some sort than grew up with parents who did not. It takes a certain baseline of logic to reject the foundational religious beliefs that you grew up with, so that means that the people at the very lowest end of the IQ spectrum are most likely to believe what their parents believed. They in turn will drag down the average IQ score for people who believe in God (remember, mean versus median).

Second, a huge reason that someone would become atheist or agnostic is because they cannot find enough empirical evidence that God exists. Scientific types, who would be expected to have higher IQs on average, want to have extensive proof for what they believe in, and the evidence for God is not empirical evidence. God is discovered spiritually or relationally rather than empirically.

Third, in many religious circles an inquisitive mind is a liability rather than an asset. High IQ people are most often inquisitive types who want to challenge things to determine truth. The natural questioning that an inquisitive person will do is rarely encouraged in religious settings unless very specific bounds are placed on the questioning. Many inquisitive people eventually determine that they don't fit in with people who believe in God as they seem more interested in maintaining the status quo than in understanding truth, and so they leave to prop up the IQs of those who do not believe.

Conclusion

In the end, I think there are a lot of little reasons for the IQ difference, but I think the biggest is an issue of self-selection. People tend to congregate with and share the beliefs of those who are like them.

While I do think this study is an indictment of the anti-intellectualism that pervades a lot of elements of the church, our wisdom is supposed to be the kind that comes from God, which often will not show up on an IQ test. God's wisdom is about trusting Him and a high IQ is about which object is the next in the sequence. They just don't always relate to each other.

Update (10/5/2010): There is one further point that I cannot believe that I missed, but could have a strong effect on the average IQ scores for those who believe in a god or the God. Religions, and Christianity in particular, actively target groups of people who are likely to have low average IQs. This is partly because those are the people most likely to be in need. This is also partly because it is easier to create a tract that targets the lowest common denominator than it is to truly tackle difficult issues.

pluto demoted

Pluto Demoted

ORLANDO, FL, September 23, 2010 (OTB) — Executives at Disney today announced that Pluto will no longer be officially considered a Disney character, or at least a major Disney character. The media empire is weighing its options, but it might consider giving Pluto "dwarf character" status much like Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, or Doc, from an earlier Disney work. Whether this specific option is the one that will be taken is not final, however.

Pluto had a long run as a major Disney character. Created in the 1930s near the same time that the former planet with the same name was discovered, Pluto was an instantly popular character. Through the years Pluto appeared in numerous stories as a lovable dog. This fact never properly addressed the differences between Pluto and most of the other major Disney characters. Specifically, the other characters can talk and otherwise behave as a normal human would.

"Think about Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, or Donald Duck," noted cartoon enthusiast Greg Quimby, "Most of what makes them them is in how they talk and walk on two feet. Mostly how they talk, though. While Pluto is a fine character he should never have been considered a major character if he did not have the ability to speak in an iconic voice. Even Goofy, who is also a 'dog' character, can talk with voice characteristics that are instantly identifiable."

While most Disney fans agree, a very vocal minority believe that Pluto has not been given a fair shake. "When I heard the announcement it was like one of my children had died," said former Pluto animator and founder of the organization Respect Pluto Now John Haverly. "We are still weighing our legal and PR options. I can assure you that we are not giving up hope yet."

There was a time when it would have been unthinkable for Pluto to not be considered a major character, but that changed with the advent of Pixar and the slew of new characters brought onto the scene. Specifically, with the release of the Toy Story series it was obvious that some characters should be considered major characters and some should not. Many of the minor characters in the first movie did not survive to the third movie largely due to their lack of an instantly recognizable voice. "When we put the hockey puck and the Lite Brite in the first movie," explained former Pixar head Steve Jobs, "we knew that they probably would not be in subsequent movies because they did not interact with the audience anthropomorphically. This caused them to be received as simply minor characters."

This standard that was set in the Toy Story series has now seeped into the rest of Disney culture. If you cannot speak you cannot be considered a major character. Mickey had better hope he doesn't contract laryngitis or he could be next.

preschool

This past week NJ went to preschool for the first time, and I should probably make a note of it here. Unlike what one might expect, I am not overly concerned with the academics that the preschool offers or really that the elementary schools that NJ and CD will attend offer. I have just always assumed that academic strengths are determined more at home than in the classroom, so as long as the basics are covered in school we can assure that the kids are where they should be academically.

I figure that NJ will benefit most from the social interaction that preschool offers. Also, I am interested in insight as to whether we should hold NJ back a year in school since his birthday is in July. Again, I am not thinking in terms of academics because he will do fine academically, but there social advantages for boys to being held back largely tied to physical size.

When CD gets to be preschool age we will probably put her in for her own enjoyment more than anything else. She is easily the most social person in our family and she is not even two yet. I know that girls bring with them their own set of issues, but I have confidence that she will do fine socially.

When I was a kid I did not go to preschool, but my sister did. She has always been more social than I have been, so perhaps preschool played a role in how that played out. If so, maybe NJ and CD will be able to teach their dad a thing or two once they get through preschool.

opportunities past

Last night I watched I Know What You Did Last Summer. By now, most people who care about the movie will have seen it, so I really don't have anything to post about the movie itself. It being a film from 1997, which was the same year I started college, made me think a bit, though.

Any time I see a movie from when I was a teenager, and especially a movie where the actors play roles near to what my age was at the time, I get a weird feeling like it represents opportunities that I did not take in life. I get the same feeling from home movies around the same time period. I do not know why that is because I don't know what sort of opportunities I could have taken. I did everything as I felt I should, and that period of my life offered a lot of challenges I wouldn't want to face again. It's not like I want to be an eighteen-year-old freshman in college one more time with the prospect of having to relearn the life lessons of the next three or four years.

I think my issue is that, even though there weren't any specific opportunities that I wanted to take at that point in my life, my path was not set. Everything represented opportunity. Every decision could dramatically alter the rest of my life for good or for bad. I think most of the choices I made in that time and since have been the right ones, but they transitioned from opportunity to responsibility, as is the way that life goes for pretty much everyone, and lost their excitement.

What is weird about this all is that I am actually young enough to realize that dreaming about opportunities missed is ridiculous because I still remember what that time period was really like. I think I understand the people who are older who want to reclaim their youth, but their youth was so long ago that they do not realize they are remembering an idealized version of their youth rather than the reality. If they were actually transported back to their real previous selves it would be torture, but in their idealized mind it sounds heavenly.

What I need to do right now is structure the rest of my life so that I feel I took every opportunity that I should have taken. The drawback is that that may require I do things that I usually avoid, like making resolutions. We'll have to see where this goes.

permissive legalism

Legalistic people suck
Legalism makes me sick
I wonder what makes them tick?
I wanna go puke on it
Ephesians verse 2:8 states
God has saved us not by works but by grace
So what's it gonna take?
There's no getting through to you- MxPx ("I'm the Bad Guy")

I have never liked the lyrics above because being accusatory doesn't solve anything, but the words fit too well into my topic today not to post them.

Probably the biggest sticking point for whether the typical American accepts Christianity is their perception of sin. I struggled for a long time reconciling what I saw as legalistic and permissive passages in Scripture, as a lot of people do. I still do struggle with it a bit and I probably always will. I now believe I have a better understanding of why the dichotomy should not be between legalism and permissiveness, though. The dichotomy should be between legalism and commitment.

I have always believed, as I do now, that legalism is the process of setting up exacting rules for what is right and wrong. I used to take it a step further, though, and believe that it was only the people who followed those exacting rules or who forced others to follow those rules who were being legalistic. Until recently, it did not sink in with me that the permissive person who assumes that God is fine with the things that he or she is doing is often legalistic as well.

The foundational tenet of Christianity is that humans are hopelessly fallen and need a savior, and that salvation is impossible without Christ because of our fallen nature. We can't be good enough on our own. This is where trying to live by a set of rules, or legalism, is pointless. My epiphany was that most people who rationalize why some thing that they want to do is not sin use the same legalistic mental framework to determine whether it is sin. "Did the Bible explicitly forbid it? Were there any apparent loopholes? In that case, it's not really a sin." They may have fewer rules that they follow, but they are slaves to legalism nonetheless. The whole process of labeling the activity as sin or not is legalism even if the person ultimately determines that the activity in question is not sin.

This fact that both the pious and the permissive can be legalistic illuminates a passage for me that has long confused me, though it is one of my favorites. Paul opens Galatians 5 by condemning those who were telling new converts that they had to be circumcised to be saved. We're free from the Law, Paul notes, so circumcision holds zero value toward salvation. The first twelve verses in the chapter seem to be pretty straightforward, as they state that we aren't bound to follow the Law. Verse thirteen gets a little sticky, though.

"You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature rather, serve one another in love."

So, I'm free but I'm not supposed to indulge the sinful nature? Doesn't that mean I am still under a legalistic system? Verses 19 through 21 go further and even detail a list of things we're not supposed to do, almost like a set of rules.

"The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God."

So, how can we reconcile this? Even with what I am about to say I still have trouble reading the acts of the sinful nature from any perspective other than a legalistic perspective. I think the key is in the verses prior to the description of the sinful nature. The following are verses 16 through 18.

"So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law."

If we focus solely on whether we take a strict or a permissive view of the rules rather than focusing on living by the Spirit we have missed the point. Unfortunately, the passage above is a vague statement that both the strict and the permissive can twist for their own purposes fairly easily. To get around this I turned to another passage that has similarly confused me in the past. In Romans 7 Paul talks about his sinning even though he did not want to, but in Romans 8 he says that those who are controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God. The bridge between the two passages that addresses the apparent contradiction is Romans 7:25.

"Thanks be to God--through Jesus Christ our LORD! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin."

Our natures are slaves to the law of sin on this world no matter what we do, but we can give our mind to God's law. Legalism asks whether some action is a sin and worthy of punishment or not. This is not the system that God intended. The mind that is truly given over to God is concerned with loving God and neighbor, and through that love knows the right actions without a rule book. It is important to note that the mind will not win every battle with the nature. Paul's didn't. Legalism is not nearly so forgiving. Even with the mistakes, the mind that is truly committed to God is ultimately saved and receives no condemnation.

So legalism and permissiveness, if they both rely on establishing black and white rules, are two futile sides of the same coin. The real question is whether you are willing to make your mind and heart a slave to God. I have discussed in a separate post that this commitment will be painful if it is legitimate, but the pain does lead to a reward.

As I work through this myself I hope to hit more on the topic of what specifically making your mind and heart a slave to God entails. I don't know when I will post this, but I expect that it will reflect on the apparent sinfulness of almost everyone listed in Hebrews 11. Look forward to it.

the more i seek you

The more I seek you
The more I find you
The more I find you
The more I love you

I want to sit at your feet
Drink from the cup in your hand
Lay back against you and breathe
Feel your heart beat

This love is so deep
It's more than I can stand
I melt in your peace
It's overwhelming- Zach Neese ("The More I Seek You")

I have only twice heard the song with the lyrics above. The first time was in a church service several months back, and when I got home I had to email a few friends to ask them if they were as uncomfortable with the lyrics as I am. The second time was this past Sunday, again in a church service. Simply put, I can't sing the song. If I sing it it sounds like I'm singing to my boyfriend. Since I am a straight man that is a problem. One could argue that if I were a straight woman and felt the same way that would be a problem as well.

I discussed this with a few other friends tonight, and one important point that came up in the discussion is that without knowing that this is supposed to be a worship song most people would conclude that this was a slightly erotic love song. Giving the song context might make it a little better, but my mind simply cannot properly go from the physical relationship that the words imply to true worship.

The point of this post is not really to whine about the song, however, but to pose a few questions to the men and to the women who read this blog. Please note that I am asking because I am trying to understand how a song like this could get past the censors, as it were.

To the women, if you sang these lyrics in a worship service would it be worshipful as to God as God, or would it be worshipful to God as a significant other, or perhaps something else? Do you have any problems with seeing God as a significant other (like a boyfriend or a husband)? Do you find the lyrics above imply a physical or romantic relationship? If you were in a church service and heard that song would it occur to you that a man would be uncomfortable with the song?

To the men, do you agree with me or do you feel like this is not structured to be a romantic song? Could you sing it as a worshipful rather than a romantic song? Are there other songs that make you uncomfortable for the same reason I am uncomfortable with this song?

I am also open to input beyond these questions. Golden made an excellent point that she could sing the song from the perspective of a child/parent relationship with God. I really can see that, though I still can't shake the romantic relationship idea strong enough to sing it in that way. If anyone else has any other insights I would love to hear them.

workspace

I recently moved from my old office in the interior of the building to an office with an outside view. I have not really stopped to look outside during the day, but I wonder if just having the natural without paying much attention to it makes a health and mood difference. My moods are affected by the weather, so I suspect there's something to that.

For a while I actually wanted to keep my interior office largely due to familiarity and inertia, but on one specific day a few days before I found out that I would be moving I noticed that I felt very out of sorts for most of the day. I could not put my finger on it. I was a bit tired, but no more than typical and I did not feel sick. I suspected at least one factor was the lack of natural light. I have been in the office three years now without a day quite Ike that until now, though, so it could just have been some weird bug.

I would be interested in finding out if a study has been done on people who spend more time in the sun versus people who do not, and whether one group is more healthy than the rest or more happy than the rest when things like level of exercise is controlled. There has got to be something behind that.

feminism

I have been thinking about a post on a perspective on Feminism for a while but haven't really known which way to take a topic with such a wide scope and that is so potentially explosive. Since my interest in Feminism has to do with the ways that it has impacted my thinking I decided to focus on that. Unfortunately, since I am looking for oddities in my thinking, this may look like an attack on Feminism. This is not intentional, though, as I personally believe Feminism exists out of necessity. If I were a woman having to deal with some of the men that I have met in my life, I would probably see a very strong need for nearly all Feminist ideals as well.

I have especially thought a lot about different approaches to the genders in the past few months as I recently completed the book Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know by Meg Meeker. I initially decided this would be a good book for me to read since I do not have experience raising a girl. Many of the book's theses challenged my opinions which I believe originated in Feminist thought. One point in particular was that most girls on some level associate a strong father figure who sets and keeps strict rules as a dad who is "being there" for her. A constant emphasis in the book is that girls are frequently given so much space that they are not entirely convinced that they are worth being protected. Since I grew up in a relatively strict home this does enlighten some things for me, but it also creates a conflict in my brain.

I know from what my own needs were as a kid that boys operate a bit differently from this and that their need for respect often (not always) contradicts the strict approach. Strictness, especially with older boys, needs to be offset with something that they can use to feel respected. What that something is probably varies and is something that I need to investigate further for NJ's sake. The fact remains that what I am reading about what girls need differs from what I know that boys need. The problem I have is that I now almost feel forced into a double standard for how boys and girls ought to be raised. While I am thankful for the new perspective on double standards, I am uncomfortable with the fact that I have now been forced to reconsider whether some are better in place than abolished.

This talk of explicitly supporting some double standards is not meant to sound sexist. I am not only referring to double standards that appear to negatively impact women. Something that I don't think gets acknowledged is that many double standards disproportionately impact men, and that they do not only target women. Reactions to cross-dressing and the expectation on men that they will bring home the bacon are examples of double standards that impact men more than women, but accepting them does not make a person sexist.

Another reason I have been thinking about Feminism a bit is due to a news story that ran a couple of years ago. A study was performed that established that men who believe in traditional gender roles made more money. The headline from multiple news sources read something to the effect of "Sexist Men Earn More Money." The article titles left little doubt that only a sleazeball sexist would believe that it was ideal for his wife to watch the kids during the day.

Aside from the abortion issue (I'm not going into that today), if there is one position that traditional Feminism takes that does really irritate me it is the assumption that traditionalists are sexist toward women but not toward men. I know far more women who are vocal about wanting to be stay-at-home moms than men who are vocal about wanting their wives to stay home, but it seems the only person who can be sexist in this equation is the man. An enlightened opinion is one that either says it is the wife's choice or one that says the wife has to work outside the house. My perspective put bluntly is that if it is sexist for a husband to expect that his wife should stay at home, then it is sexist for a wife to expect that her husband should work so that she can stay home. I don't believe either positions are inherently sexist, but it is hypocritical to hold one view and not the other. The simple reason that men who believe in traditional gender roles make more is that they believe they are fully responsible for their family's income so they take more steps to make more money by working longer hours at the office, taking second jobs, getting more education, etc. If a man is less traditional and believes that he should not be fully responsible for the family's income, then he will be less likely to make serious sacrifices to bring in more money.

In our situation, Golden had to work for a year because our finances necessitated it. Both of us preferred that she be able to take care of NJ and CD (it was only NJ at the time), but she felt more strongly about it than I did. Am I a sexist for preferring that Golden be able to stay home with NJ? Is Golden a sexist for strongly pushing for that option? What about with our decision for Golden to work a year while our finances improved? Would I have been sexist if I insisted on Golden working so that I could stay home with the kids? I probably make more money than I would if I was significantly less traditional because I would not have sought work positions with the sole intent of being able to provide for my family. I would have probably gotten a degree in a less practical field if I had bothered with a degree at all.

While my actual view leans more traditional, it is more that each family has to decide what is the best way for things to be run. There are situations where both parents working outside the home makes the most sense. There are situations where it is ideal if one parent stays home and watches the kids. There are a million other combinations of part time work, or friends and family watching the kids, or baby-sitting co-ops, etc. The point is that believing that one of the options above is ideal for your family or is ideal in a typical situation does not automatically make you a sexist.

There are other points that I could make about feminist thought that are both good and bad, but these are the ones that have been on my mind. As always, I am more than willing to discuss in the comments, but I always prefer that things stay civil and don't get too political.

making time

It has been a while since I have posted an update. As might be assumed, this has been due to everything going on in my life. This is a bit odd, though, because it is not like I have more happening now that I did a few months ago. I am out of school now and few of my regular TV shows have been on. We did take a large vacation earlier this month and I have played on our new Wii some this summer, but that cannot account for the general lack of time. Somehow we're nearly into August and I feel like it should still be early June.

I have spent some effort recently trying to determine what really is a priority for my time. There are so many things that I want to fill my time with that I am having trouble dropping things. So, I decided to open this up to reader input. How do you prioritize the time that you do have? What sorts of things do you drop from your schedule when there is not room for everything?

healthcare

Don't feel bad about not reading this post if you don't want to. It's really only for policy wonks who care about minutia of this specific political issue, and there's nothing wrong with not being a wonk.

Over the last year-and-a-half I have been intrigued with the healthcare debate that has taken place in the country. I am about as close to middle-of-the-road as a person can get on the topic, which mostly means that I don't think any of the available options are ideal. Given the reading and rationalization I have done, I think I could blow holes in almost any plan anyone could conceive of (including the one that is currently in place) as not having enough of the desired effect, having horrific unintended results, or simply not being realistically feasible to implement.

I have also wanted to comment on the state of healthcare for a while but because it is an inherently complicated issue I have not known a real way to do it without making one of two mistakes. First, I could speak in ill-informed platitudes. That is what most of the dialogue I have heard regarding healthcare from both sides has involved. Second, and more likely for me, I could go into such detail about certain aspects of the issue that few would be able to make it to the end of the post, and it would take hours to write properly. Given how long this post is you may believe that I took this exhaustive option, but I truly didn't. Rather than taking either of those two approaches, I decided to talk about two things that pretty much every informed person from any side of the issue agrees are causes for the extraordinarily high cost of medical care in the U.S. I also have some closing thoughts.

1. The seller has far more information about the product than the consumer

First, unlike almost any other industry, consumers of this product are almost completely shut out of the price negotiation process and have almost no information on what good cost or quality is. How do you know whether the doctor you go to charges a reasonable price or does not. How do you know whether your doctor is actually right about the tests he or she recommends are the best ones under the circumstances. How do you know what the differences are between the name brand and generic drugs? How do you know which issues should be addressed and which ones are best left alone? Finally, and most important to my point, how do you know what addressing a specific issue should cost and what addressing your issue did cost?

Imagine for a moment that you wanted to buy a car and all of the information you had was recommendations from friends talking about how nice this or that car salesperson was and the fact that any car you bought would cost you the same amount of money. In this scenario you would have a "car purchase" insurance where some third party would have to pick up the tab for the difference between the price you pay and the actual cost of the car. You just have to pay a monthly fee. What I would do in this situation is find the friendliest salesperson (since I have no way of knowing who is the most knowledgeable salesperson) and buy the nicest car he had. The logical end result of this system would be that the car purchase insurance would be ridiculously expensive just like health insurance is today. The only car purchase insurance companies who would survive would be those who either found some way to encourage customers to price shop (very, very difficult) or who found loopholes in the insurance policies that kept them from having to pay on specific purchases (unpalatable, but much easier). A lot of people see insurance companies as evil, but frankly they are a product of the system within which they exist. They have to tell people that the price of a Bentley isn't worth the quality-of-life improvement that they will see. The insurance companies that do not do this die.

There are a few ways get people to make wiser purchasing decisions, but in the current system they almost all have to come from the government or some entrepreneur who can do something no one has been successful at on a large scale yet. The most effective solution is to require high deductibles, but that only works well for upper-middle class and upper class consumers. Lower class consumers would decide that they could not afford to visit the doctor and would just not go, or they would go and would not pay (that touches on my second reason healthcare costs are so high, but I'll get to that in a bit).

Another way to control costs is something that the state of Maryland does. The prices for certain procedures are standardized so that doctors and surgeons cannot charge more or less than a certain price for a given procedure. That sort of government control may be prone to manipulation, though, and goes against the free-market nature of the country as a whole.

Another solution that eventually got added to the healthcare bill in a very watered-down form that McCain first supported then didn't and that Obama first opposed then didn't is taxing healthcare plans from employers. Since the government does not tax employer-provided health plans but does tax income used to purchase insurance on the open market there is a significant incentive to go with whatever the best employer-provided insurance plan is regardless of cost. Then, since you are paying for a good insurance plan, there is an incentive to over-use that insurance. On the flip side, there is an incentive for the self-insured to under-use their insurance. This specific change is not politically popular because it has an immediate negative affect on almost everyone who is employed and the positive effects are mostly in the long-term. As an example, my healthcare plan almost certainly would deteriorate in quality due to extra taxes involved, so I would have to make a higher salary to compensate for that. I know what the benefits of such a tax would be and I still don't like the idea. Imagine the person who does not understand the benefits. He or she would be livid at any politician who supported it. That is why in the final version of the healthcare bill the actual healthcare plan tax was set to only apply to the most extremely expensive plans conceivable and only goes into effect in 2018 when a new president will be coming into office.

The only non-government options are to hope that someone can use technology to help consumers make wise decisions. One argument could be that websites like WebMD.com, MedicineNet.com, and MayoClinic.com answer questions so that people do not have to go to a doctor to get the same answers. I personally think that they cause people to get nervous that they have some condition and make them more likely to visit a doctor. Other possibilities are technologies that collect price and quality information regarding doctors and procedures and use that to make recommendations. Up to this point, that data has been near impossible to accurately collect. Also, this is something that whoever buys their insurance has to be encouraged to use and so far that has not happened on a large scale.

2. Healthcare choices involve tough decisions where involving cost is unpalatable

I am not officially taking a position on any side in these scenarios, but they have to be considered by anyone who wants to be serious about taking a position in the healthcare debate. President Obama had many opportunities to directly address this, but the problem he had was that doing so would have killed the whole legislative process for his bill. He really could only say that many of the decisions are already being made based on quality of health insurance, but that really did not address the issue in whole. His argument was for the devil you don't know rather than the one you do. One specific doctor asked him in an early televised discussion who would make the decisions about what procedures were acceptable to save someone's life, if they were exorbitantly expensive, and unfortunately the president deflected (again, because I think he felt he had to). Reading the scenarios below, hopefully you will see how difficult this is.

For those who unequivocally disapprove of expanding government-sponsored healthcare, I would like to pose a question that I have not been able to address myself. If a person who is too poor to afford health insurance (high-deductible or not) goes to the ER, should they be treated? If so, who should pay? The current system requires that ERs provide service, inefficiently so. You could say that they should only be required to treat someone if their injury is life-threatening, but who gets to decide what is life-threatening. If an uninsured poor someone comes in with a shallow stab wound that doesn't appear likely to bleed out, should the ER just send that person home until he or she develops something that is more life-threatening like and infection or until the bleeding worsens? There is no doubt that the uninsured using ER services they cannot or will not pay for costs the system at large billions and billions of dollars. The government current subsidizes some of these costs, but who really wants that? Most of the rational solutions to this problem result in a system like what we have now with government subsidization of people using the ER for questionable issues, a system where the extremely poor are automatically insured, or a system where people die on the front steps of the ER because the hospital cannot afford to treat everyone who visits the ER and who cannot pay.

The ER is just one problem where discussing cost is unpalatable. A huge percentage of medical spending is done near the end of life. Let's say you are 60 and you have a terminal type of cancer that responds positively to chemotherapy 2% of the time (not an unreal figure from what I've read). Are the thousands of dollars it is going to cost (Let's say $50K or $100K), if insurance is going to cover most of it, even going to enter into the conversation? Would cost enter the conversation if, as a result of choosing chemotherapy, your kids and grandkids had to pay a few extra thousand dollars every year for their insurance? Without thinking about the impact on others, and frankly who is when they've been told their best chance at survival is an unpleasant procedure that has a one in fifty shot at working, money is not going to be a factor at all in the decision. That fact is a major cause of high health insurance costs.

Almost all of the solutions to bring down the cost of end-of-life medical care are unpalatable. You could just allow insurance companies to refuse to pay for the procedure. You could try to encourage the person to decide that a one-in-fifty chance is not worth the fight and live out the rest of their life in hospice, but that introduces many moral (and political) dilemmas. You could require that doctors/hospitals explain the costs to patients, but that would be largely ineffective and very politically unpopular. You could have the government decide what is an acceptable end-of-life procedure for specific situations like the system that exists in the United Kingdom, but that is uncomfortably close to the concept of death panels.

Finally, what is going to drive research that will find cures? People demonize pharmaceutical companies, and sometimes rightly so, but it is fair to allow them some profit if they have spent billions (or at least hundreds of millions) researching a particular drug and getting it through the FDA approval process. If the market is removed or reduced from the process who decides where finite medical research dollars should go? If you have a disease that only occurs in one out of a million people are you out of luck because the process requires that pharmaceuticals sell medicine for a price less than the research would cost? Would dollars be divvied out by what disease happens to be more in the popular eye (would colon cancer dollars go to breast cancer research)?

Final thoughts about tort reform and personal care

Unfortunately, for too long tort reform was the capstone and main substance of the Republican plan. It is fine as a side item, but tort reform alone is not even a partial solution and would eventually be repealed if the end result were too draconian. Most of the proposals seemed to just say, "There is a monetary limit to what you can sue your doctor for and that limit is X." That seems a bit simplistic in my view. Tort reform should happen, but it should be precisely targeted. If it were it could have a beneficial secondary effect. Standard medical processes should be set for specific symptoms and scenarios (I actually think they are, but I can't remember what it is called), and if the lawsuit is filed complaining that the doctor decided to follow those processes rather than what the patient wanted, that lawsuit should be invalidated. This would encourage standard operating procedures such that the recommendations you get at one doctor for treatment would match what you would get at another doctor. This would hopefully also reduce doctors ordering procedures to cover their butts (which is probably more expensive to the system as a whole than the payouts on lawsuits). Regarding lawsuits where a doctor is truly negligent, I am more on the fence regarding how that could or should be reformed.

Beyond tort reform, Republicans needed to focus on streamlining inefficiencies inherent in the system. There were later proposals that did this to an extent, but they did not properly address most of the issues that I have mentioned above. It's hard to say if the Democrat's bill properly addressed any of the issues I have raised, because they left most of the difficult decisions to the Department of Health and Human Services rather than spelling out distasteful details.

Finally, I think we as a nation need to be realistic about what kind of personal care we can receive. There are a lot of things we need to visit an actual doctor for, however there are some things that we should be able to address with less educated and less experienced people. As an example, when H1N1 testing and vaccination was popular a lot of people went to doctor's offices for that. Isn't that something that a nurse, a nurse practitioner, or a pharmacist should be able to handle? If we care about efficiency in the system (and we should if we want to lower health costs) we should consider reserving doctors for the issues that require the education and knowledge that a doctor would have over someone with a lesser medical degree (forgive me being a pharmacist requires the same level degree as being a doctor, for I do not know).

If you have views on this you can share them if you want, but I am not really looking for a healthcare debate. I would request that any posted opinions be deeply thought out. Simply taking the step to consider the unintended consequences of implementing the system you think should be in place (and there are unintended consequences in almost every system) is really all I am asking for.

multitasking

I have never claimed to be a good multitasker. In fact, I am a horrible multitasker. I can generally manage two truly simultaneous tasks if I am only weakly committed to one of them, but that is the limit. The more I learn about multitasking, though, the more I determine that there is no such thing as a good multitasker.

I started thinking about this when I came across a Wall Street Journal article that questioned whether the Internet was making humans more shallow thinkers. The premise is that Internet activity is inherently full of distractions and interruptions, and this does not allow for deep, contemplative thinking. The article then goes into an explanation that people who appear in life to multitask are merely people drawn to constant distraction, and that doing this too much damages the brain's ability to focus.

What's strange is that I, even with the discomfort I have regarding multitasking, frequently find myself attempting to do multiple things at the same time. This happens more now than it used to, and it id definitely enabled through technology that was not available to me earlier in life. I actually find myself rationalizing that I am saving time and reducing stress, though I may be doing the opposite. There are some times when multitasking is useful, but if I am honest with myself I will admit that those instances usually occur when one of the tasks I am performing is truly meaningless. So, if I get more accomplished because I types some emails while dialed into a meeting, that is only because my attention was never really needed in the meeting in the first place.

While many people believe that multitasking improves efficiency because you are accomplishing multiple things at once, multiple studies indicate that multitasking has a negative rather than positive effect on work. As an example, researchers at Stanford found that multitaskers were no better at doing things than anyone else, but they were simply more easily distracted than the rest of the population. They may appear to be doing five things at once, but this is just because those are tasks that are started rather than those that are completed. One of the study's authors went so far as to say, "We kept looking for what [multitaskers] are better at, and we didn't find it."

This all is reinforced by what I was taught in a project management class I took last year. The person teaching that class emphasized that one of a project manager's responsibilities is to help structure project workers' responsibilities in a way that reduces multitasking because of the negative effect that multitasking has on work quality and speed. Expecting constant updates on five concurrent tasks typically results in less productivity than structuring the work to be done sequentially to allow the project member time to focus.

Something that was addressed in a class I took on managing people was that people whose personality makes them want to flit from project to project have been shown to perform better when they are forced into a structure that reduces that behavior. In short, forcing multitaskers to not multitask as much makes them accomplish more. This was noteworthy because the person who taught the class and made that assertion admitted to being one of those people who liked to move from task to task to task.

So, if you happen to be wandering by a Starbucks and see someone sipping a coffee, talking on the phone, typing an instant message, reading a book, tapping a foot to some music, and shopping online at the same time, rest assured that he or she is not doing any of it well. If you are that person, you probably haven't gotten this far down in the post to notice anyway.