Darwinian Interlude

Meaning of Meaning Pt 3 – Building Soul

Building Soul

Given the context of “some assembly required” and likely contradiction and internal conflict, it is reasonable to hypothesize a system that works to knit together and harmonize the components of human personality.
1. Jung hypothesized this specifically and called it the archetype of Self.
2. Jung’s Self had the power to channel conflicting components towards synthesized whole. His interest in the mandala reflects an interest in systems that put many components into a patterned whole.
Confronting our contradictions, we generally work from the personal ‘down’ into the collective. Unless your culture is in the midst of a open crisis, the demands of our personal biography trump cultural schisms. Once the personal is reconciled, however, the cultural issues come to the fore.
1. The downward movement is what Jung called Building Soul and he defines the Soul as a organ of the psyche that gives depth by connecting the individual to deeper collective currents.
2. The division between personal and collective is, of course, complex and multi-layered…and somewhat arbitrary. The personal is simply an instance of the collective and the collective is the sum of the personal. Conflicts and contradictions do not exist in the abstract no matter how abstractly we work with them. They are always embodied.
When our personal contradictions span emerging or existing cultural divides, the work to heal and harmonize can gain significant additional intensity (often painful intensity) but, also, the work to heal and harmonize can feel powerfully meaningful.
1. Jung and Campbell described this as the Hero’s Journey
2. The first stage is often individual crisis and confusion. The present is in some manner intolerable but the future is clouded and the hero must depart from the known world and seek the vision or tools or guidance that allows him/her to move forward.
3. This is the most individual form of meaning generation: the puzzles are often collective (contradictions in our culture), occasionally individual (warring traits) but the solutions are always sparked by individual blood, sweat, tears, and imagination.
Jung’s Individuation vs Cambell’s Hero’s Journey
1. Jung focuses on the introverted side: internal contradictions (generated by either personal contradictions or the ‘introjection’ of cultural divides) are resolved into awareness. Hero stories are about that process.
2. Campbell focuses on the extroverted side. Some rupture sends the hero out to triumph and return and revitalize the culture.

(to follow – Extrinsic (tribal): [[under construction]])

Meaning of Meaning Pt 4 – Personal Note

My own tale of a life disrupted and rebuilt and the roots of my fascination with meaning, myth and story are told on my story-trading site, OutInUnder:

My Life in Stories: Intro to the ‘Story of Stories’ Conversation

My Life in Stories: Lessons Learned

(Quick links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Privacy Pt 1: Youth Wants To Know

Discussion of privacy on the Internet, and, in particular, in social media, hit a local maxima a short time ago in the nym wars on Google+ against a background of increasing public concern. Pronouncement by pundits and officials, some informed and most ignorant, rocks steadily on. None of that had pushed me to add my 2 cents to the mix.

What finally took me over the edge was hearing yet another 20 year old explain that his generation doesn’t have the same concern for privacy that we old folks so quaintly maintain. The implication is that, because they’re from a younger generation, the young are better adapted to current conditions.

There is another possible explanation, however. It follows.

First, let me get my on geezer persona.

Now there, youngsters, I’m from a generation that routinely showed up naked in public and engaged in such low profile activities as chanting to levitate the Pentagon. This was dropped onto an America barely emerging from the 50’s and massively less receptive to living publicly. Nudity was performance art aimed at letting some sunlight into the cloister.

Allow me to assure you that my concerns are not an attachment to some arbitrary, bygone, meaningless convention like, for example, not ending a sentence with a preposition. They are, instead, the result of years of observation and balanced analysis…primarily of the government. More on that later.

You kids may have a different concept of the value of privacy but that concept is not different from the concept I held as a kid. Experience, one of a few advantages of aging, has made me wiser.

I’d argue that privacy concerns come down, not to how you feel about living in public, but how you feel about powerful institutions– governmental organizations, primarily, but any institution large enough to have significant information gathering resources–being able to have easy access to your life’s details.

I think providing that access is dangerous.

Rather than get into point/counter-point or personal biography, I’d like to perform a thought experiment.

Draw a axis of government benignity. Start in, say, Amsterdam and end in Pyongyang. Route it through 6 or 8 cities you think span the spectrum of openness. (Let’s pick Berlin, Beijing, Lagos, Sao Paulo, Moscow, San Francisco, Tehran, Istanbul, and London for the purposes of this experiment.) Put them on the axis wherever you think they belong. Now, imagine yourself in living a Amsterdam. Assume you and your tribe share thoughts, interesting books and websites, music, purchases, shops and restaurants via a social media or two. Sometimes you flirt; sometimes you trade ideas and opinions; sometimes you blow off steam.

(Exclude for the purposes of this experiment the information streams created by your cell phone and credit card.)

Move the slider along until having all that information public becomes a significant threat to your well-being…until you cross a line where your behavior is now suspect and where simultaneously you have revealed who you associate with and much of your daily routine. If you get comfortably all the way to Pyongyang, you need to get a life. Commonly you’re in danger of loss of income, harassment, discrimination, imprisonment, or disappearance at some point midway along the line for any of multiple reasons.

Of course, you say, you’re not in Pyongyang but near Amsterdam on the line…safe perhaps in San Francisco with me, and these concerns aren’t appropriate. Or are they?

At issue? These media are primarily built here but deployed globally. What seems benign locally becomes a tool for the police state with a slight shift of context. Regardless of local comfort, our systems would better be measured on a global yardstick.

Specifically, as the creators, early adopters, critics and evangelists for these systems, we have responsibility to take predictable consequences quite seriously as we design, create, implement, and sell. We are building history, brick by brick, and broad current flow through us and our shapings.

We need to take that seriously.

At least now and then.

It will be of general benefit if we lay down cover for our brothers and sisters that are under genuinely under siege. Perhaps they want to practice Qi Kung in Beijing or discuss their Armenian heritage in Istanbul…or draw political cartoons in Amsterdam.

The issues aren’t necessarily easy to engineer. We need to wrestle, for example, with the interface between criminality and dissent, and the interplay of persona and authenticity. But it’s up to us to do that rather than ignore complexity and the likely paths into the future. I have some ideas that might help in this discussion. Probably you do, too.

I’m urging us to design and discuss privacy in a wider scope–spatially, temporally, morally–and remove it from a discussion of personal preference.

In Brian Eno’s terms, we need to think in a broader here and a longer now.

Privacy Pt 2: Python Politics: the Economics of Knowledge Accumulation
Privacy Pt 3: Is there an Engineer in the house?

PS – A few notes in passing.

The US is not necessarily a safe haven.

Consider http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/washington/23habeas.html?ref=us in light of the recent National Defense Authorization Act. Or police raids to preemptively undermine protests at the 2008 Republican convention: http://www.salon.com/2008/08/30/police_raids/

You may not be a Judi Bari (they arrest you and search everywhere you hang out after someone bombs your car) or organizing widespread protest in Minneapolis (the show up the week before and take all your stuff) but note: systems integration is changing the game for law enforcement everywhere. It might not be J edGar Hoooover you need to worry about but some local middle-aged portly DA with too tight shoes, a sullen teenager, a nasty mortgage, and a depressed spouse that’s pissed off because some 20 year old is driving a car that costs his yearly salary

Finally, here’s a bit of gratuitous Chuang Tzu – the topic is gathering up treasures for thieves : http://oaks.nvg.org/zhuangzi10-.html

Privacy Pt 2: Python Politics: the Economics of Knowledge Accumulation

clothed man arrested by naked guys
“A constricting snake like a boa or a python kills its prey by suffocation. It uses the momentum of its strike to throw coils around its victim’s body. Then, it squeezes. Every time the prey exhales, the snake squeezes a little more tightly. Soon, the victim can breathe any more.” ref

Essentially, then, constrictors kill not by crushing but by taking in the slack and not giving it back. I view this as relevant to the topic at hand.

History: the Internet Wants to Be Free.

We seem to have generated a cultural lock-in that demands a free Internet. This is the result of a combination of factors: successful initiatives, ideological leanings (sometimes based on the semantic ambiguity between free as unregulated and free as without cost), and significant self-delusion.

There is a component of this freedom that is real. The freedom exist in a commons collectively built and shared. It exists in the group effort to build standards and protocols to connect us and to share and display information. It exists in the collection of individual visions, not always mutually compatible, that maintain and extend this effort. It exists in our ability to design technical hacks to undermine systems of control.

Wikipedia is a good exemplar of this Internet.

Beyond that, it’s not free at all.

Our vision is embodied in components all of which have both capital and maintenance costs.

The initial freedom was built on simple design hacks and the low bandwidth required to move text around. It sat on top of large computing projects in academia and government and survived on crumbs snatched off the table. You might have to pay a bit for your hook to the the infrastructure but content was provided mostly without cost. This was the world of bulletin boards, irc, usenet groups, email, text based MUDs.

This model has been extended with increasing elaborate ‘free’ content and services: Google, youTube, Flickr, facebook, Pandora, Spodify, Twitter and so on. Meanwhile, temporary successes in the paid model, eg AOL, generally seem to erode back to free.

This apparent continuity masks a simple fact: the old model didn’t scale. We benefit from increasing costly products. A new funding source…advertising, of course…by and large pays the bill.

Google is the exemplar, here.

Which brings us to the common wisdom: if the product appears free, then you’re the product.

The true coin of this transaction is information about us individually and collectively.

The economics of targeted advertising is pretty simple conceptually. Information is gathered on you to give you advertising you’re likely to respond to. Or perhaps to provide you a more tailored service that will make you more engaged and hence bring you to the advertising more frequently.

With Google this was an add-on that went from humble beginnings. Now the business plans of start-ups are often designed specifically to elicit information. Products are built around data mining and targeting advertising.

We gain significant benefit from this model and here we, perhaps, become complicit.

This march toward greater public visibility has generated other elements of common wisdom which are more suspect.

You often hear the following: “Privacy is dead. Things are different than in the past. We need to get over it and adjust to new realities. Privacy is already fairly illusory therefore upset is unjustified; just look at the targeted direct mail of the past” And so on.

To my mind, an appeal to the hopelessness of implementing change regardless of that changes desirability somehow lacks punch. We live in a world that’s changing all the time. We live in a world in which an improved technical solution or compelling idea can turn things upside down in considerable less than a decade. And we are inventing that technology every day.

There is a danger that I think it is our responsibility to recognize and attempt to address.

My argument is —

There’s an unremitting economic pressure to create a higher and higher resolution picture of you, what you do, and what you might potentially consume.
We’ll hit a point (and are there already in some locations) where you’ll stand out as suspicious by not being transparent. Given this fine grained picture, not being highly visible will become increasingly suspicious. The blurry individuals then stand out as very likely criminals or revolutionaries.
The most likely to succeed in hiding from scrutiny behind a false front is the deliberate criminal with a carefully constructed public identity. The most likely to fail is the accidental revolutionary…the well meaning public citizen that is compelled to move into some sort of rebellion.
Here’s the NYRB on Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi:

Fang’s path through life observed a pattern that is common to China’s dissidents: a person begins with socialist ideals, feels bitter when the rulers betray the ideals, resorts to outspoken criticism, and ends in prison or exile. Liu Binyan, Wang Ruowang, Su Xiaokang, Hu Ping, Zheng Yi, Liu Xiaobo, and many others have followed this pattern.

Let’s return to a police action in Minnesota cited in the PS to Part 1.

I suspect that these raids proved highly effective in disrupting the protest and that it would have been less so had the naive folks raided been up to actual criminal activity and taken steps to keep backup materials and tools hidden away somewhere. In other words, if they had been the folks that justified a disruptive police action then that action would likely have been ineffective.

Is there an Engineer in the house? How about an ESL Instructor?

We are building, brick by brick, a consolidation of power through an increasingly fine-grained consolidation of data. We live in a world where a major portion of the US security apparatus has disappeared behind a curtain and is accountable, apparently, mostly to themselves. And a world where the idea of individual political rights to speak, meet, and organize are not widely acknowledged. The result of that intersection creates a problem that is not, I think, insignificant. The constraint on oppressive regimes has often been reach and we, in our work on information technologies, are eliminating some significant constraints.

What’s the solution? Is there one?

Privacy Pt 1: Youth Wants To Know
Privacy Pt 3: Is there an Engineer in the house?

Privacy Pt 3: Is there an Engineer in the house?

RegisterIdentityAcrossGroupAndVenue

under construction

Privacy Pt 1: Youth Wants To Know
Privacy Pt 2: Python Politics: the Economics of Knowledge Accumulation

Asabiya Part 1: Introduction

Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War is one of my favorite sort of books: those that dig into my thoughts and continues to influence them by providing a perspective to work with…or sometimes against. I find his analysis of the patterns of history intriguing and I believe he throws a light on our political landscape.

This will take on much of the flavor of a book report. In fact, it will look much like a bad book report in which I substitute long quotations for my own reactions and analysis. So be it. There is a direction. I am building to an open ended point…some questions I find interesting… which does contain the seeds of a thesis but tries not to narrow down to too fine a point. My format will be to add a skeleton of an outline to frame up material from the book and then add some observations that spark off Turchin’s work.

The anchor for Turchin’s analysis is social cohesion.

“Following the fourteenth-century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun, I call this property of groups asabiya. Asabiya refers to the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action. Asabiya is a dynamic quantity; it can increase or decrease with time. Like many theoretical constructs, such as force in Newtonian physics, the capacity for collective action cannot be observed directly, but it can be measured from observable consequences

Social cohesion => successful societies. Essentially, the groups that do the best job of cooperating are the most successful in competing with other groups. Turchin’s interest is in the creation and collapse of historical empires and he proceeds in his analysis by gathering case histories.

“Generally, in a struggle between two groups of people, the group with stronger norms promoting cooperation and the most people following such norms has a greater chance of winning.

Inequality erodes social cohesion. Successful societies have, in the past, built empires which then erode social inequality leading to the eventual collapse of the empire.

“The phase of the secular cycle also determines the trend in social and economic inequality—whether it increases or decreases. This aspect is of particular interest because of the corrosive effect that glaring inequality has on the willingness of people to cooperate, which in turn underlies the capacity of societies for collective action

Turchin uses history as his laboratory and makes the following points about contemporary politics:
- One can’t necessarily generalize his pattern of empire going forward. We may be in a post Imperial world (witness the EU vs historically warring states in Europe.)
- But one can understand the development of historical societies and something about current societies since they are the result of their history.
- Turchin uses Italy as an example because it provides two matching societies:
  “The disparity in economic development between the Italian north and south is striking. Today the south is rural and poor, whereas the north is urban, industrialized, and wealthy. Few people realize just how well off the Italian north is, because when we see economic statistics for Western Europe, they are typically broken down by country, rather than by regions. Italy as a whole is in the middle of the pack, but its northern regions, such as Lombardia and Emilia-Romagna, are at the very top of the list. The overall rank for Italy is pulled down by its poor Mezzogiorno.
  “In 1993, Robert Putnam published Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. “Social capital,” as Putnam explains, “refers to features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions.”
  
  “How can one measure “institutional performance,” that is, how well regions are governed? Asabiya (or social capital) is the key. However, capacity for collective action is a complex, multifaceted property of society, and therefore we cannot expect a single way to measure it perfectly. Putnam and his co-workers, however, came beautifully close. They chose 12 indicators, ranging from measures of operation efficiency such as bureaucratic responsiveness and budget promptness to a quantification of services provided to the public, such as the number of daycare centers and family clinics.
  
  “When Putnam and co-workers finished estimating the institutional performance for each Italian region, they saw a remarkable pattern. There was very strong north-south gradient in how well regions were governed. The regions in the Po Valley such as Emilia-Romagna and Lombardia were consistently at the top of rankings in institutional performance, whereas southern regions, such as Campania (the region around Naples), Calabria (the “toe” of the Italian boot), and Sicily were at the bottom.
  “Well before Putnam, and even before the Italian experiment in devolution of powers to regional governments, anthropologists knew that something was wrong with the society of the Italian south—the Mezzogiorno, as it is known in Italian. A particularly interesting study is that by the American anthropologist Edward Banfield, who spent a number of years in a southern Italian village during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1967, he published a book detailing his findings, The Moral Basis of the Backward Society. Banfield describes the extreme atomization of the southern Italian society, in which all cooperative efforts are limited to the smallest possible societal unit, the family. Relations even to such kin as cousins, and sometimes even grown-up siblings, are rife with distrust and lack of cooperation. Community-level cooperative efforts are virtually impossible. Banfield called this type of society “amoral familism,” and defined its basic philosophy as this: “Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.”
  “Millions of slaves, captured during the wars of conquest, flooded Italy during the second century B.C. Because slaves had no human rights, and legally could hold no property (in practice, some masters allowed them to accumulate funds to buy themselves out of slavery), their presence in massive numbers made the Roman society during the late Republic even more unequal than is usual in pre-industrial states
  
  “The distinction between slaves and freemen is perhaps the most extreme form of social inequality. Thus, widespread slavery must be a very corrosive influence on the society’s asabiya. In fact, empirical evidence shows slavery has a deep, and lasting, negative impact on “social capital.”
  
  “It was, thus, the rise of inequality and especially of its ugliest form, slavery, that began corroding Roman asabiya during the second century B.C.
  
  “…southern Italy—the core region of the defunct Roman Empire—was an asabiya black hole. <> Peninsular Italy, including Sicily, remained an asabiya black hole from the collapse of the Roman Empire to this very day
He does not, of course, believe that southern Italy remained a static society. He believes that it is a damaged and ineffective one. One that has never managed to heal itself from a persistant legacy of poverty, feud, and bad government.
With the issues phrased this way, it’s hard not to draw some parallels to the US. That will be the topic of contemplation next post. For now, here’s something that caught my eye recently and sparked this whole train of thought

You are looking at a map of violence based on an analysis from an NGO, the Institute for Economics and Peace, based in Sydney Australia. Red is bad. Blue is the best. The rest range in between, color coded as you’d expect.

AT&T Tech Support Fixes Our DSL…

AT&T Tech Support Fixes Our DSL…but only after extracting their pound of emotional flesh.

[Here’s an interaction with AT&T. It is copied from the IM window in an on-line chat tech support session. I’ve logged in by giving my name and phone number. I’m using Scott’s name coz the account is in his name. Spacing added for readability. There is some overlap as we both type but one message posts first. That explains some of the disconnect. Some.]

System: Welcome, Mr. jonathan weaver.

System: Connecting to server. Please wait…

System: Connection with server established.

System: Technical Support Topic: undefined

System: Lisa has joined this session

System: Connected with Lisa

You:hello

Lisa:Thank you for choosing AT&T Internet Services. My name is Lisa (am943m).

Lisa: Please let me know the first and last name.

You: We have ATT DSL. Last week we ‘upgraded’ the service to a faster speed. Thur evening our service slowed way down. I think something on your end is tweaked. We have a modem and router that we have been using all along…nothing changed there. I tried calling in but got instructed to setup an account(?) which I did. Can you check and see what’s going on?

You: Oh, I alread filled in the first and last name on the sign in screen but it’s Jonathan Weaver.

Lisa: Hello Jonathan Weaver.

Lisa: I apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Lisa: I will be glad to help you with the relevant information

You: Great

Lisa: Mr. Weaver, Please let me know the 10 digit DSL number to pull up the records.

You: 415.821.xxxx

Lisa: Thank you.

Lisa: I am sorry for the inconvenience you have faced due to this issue. I will do my best to help you in getting this resolved.

Lisa: As I understand you are experiencing the speed issue. Am I correct?

You: Yes, a severe speed issue. Service has shrunk to .12 up and .02 Mbps down. It happened abruptly Thur evening and has not recovered.

Lisa:Thank you for the confirmation.

Lisa: Please let me know the name of the modem/router you are using?

You: The modem is an Alcatel 1000 ADSL that AT&T provided when we first signed up for the DSL service. The router is a NetGear something or other. I’d have to get the step ladder to check the model number.

You: Is that enough information?

Lisa: No problem, thank you for the information.

Lisa: Mr. Weaver, I need to ask you a few questions to reach the root cause of this issue. This will help me to provide an effective resolution. Would that be all right with you?

You: Yes, ask away.

Lisa: Thank you.

Lisa: I appreciate your support.

Lisa: How many computers are connected with the network?

You: Usually 5

Lisa: Thank you.

Lisa: Are you connected with the wired connection or wirelessly?

You: Both

Lisa: I am sorry, I mean to say how are connected with us ,either from the wired or with the wireless connection.

You: Please note, nothing has changed in terms of connections, modem, router, number of computers, or usage pattern between Wednesday when everything worked and Thursday when it slowed to a crawl and stayed there.

You: wired connection to you: DSL phone line to modem.

Lisa: Thank you.

Lisa: Mr. Weaver,Please let me know if you’re using any VPN connection, like your office Network.

You: No.

Lisa:Thank you.

Lisa: Please let me know have you power cycle the modem/router since you started experiencing the slow speed issue?

You: Yes

Lisa: How did you perform the power cycle of modem/router last time?

You: I turned it off and turned it back on. And rebooted the computer I’m monitoring speed on.

Lisa: Fine,

Lisa: Let me provide you all the steps once again how to perform the correct power cycle of modem/router.

Lisa: As correct power cycling mostly resolves the speed connection issues.

You: Can you verify that we do in fact have the service that we are supposed to have and that you are providing appropriate service to our modem?

Lisa: Please let me know a preferred e-mail address where I can send you some useful information for further assistance.

You: Can you verify that we do in fact have the service we are supposed to have and that you are providing appropriate service to our modem?

Lisa:Yes in order to get to that , please lets perform all the steps which are in the email that I am going to sent you.

You: Having rebooted, etc, I am now trying to verify that you all didn’t hose something when you upgraded our service!

You: How do I do that if it is not by contacting AT&T!!!

You: xxxxxxxxx@gmail.com is a good email address but I already went through the checklist you have online!!

Lisa: please let me know the complete email address on which I can sent you some information.

You: I just gave you the address. Please tell me why you will not verify that our service is correct. There are other alternatives for high speed internet. Comcast for example.

Lisa: Thank you, I have sent you a email with all the information related to your slow speed issue. Please perform all the steps and call the Voice technical support at 1877-722-3755 toll free number available 24/7.

You: Are you telling me that you will not verify our service?!

Lisa: We have found that a technician is helpful in solving these problems. Please perform all the steps and call the Voice technical support at 1877-722-3755 toll free number available 24/7.

You: I will do that. I’ll will begin by telling them that you refused to verify our service.

[And with that I hung up the chat window. Oddly enough, 5 minutes later our service was fixed. Note: I copied most all of the above from the chat window but the last two sentences were recreated from memory. I lost them when I hung up.]

Everything I needed to know I learned during freefall

I’m taking the week off to do some writing, work on side projects, and generally try to get organized (an ongoing but quixotic project of mine.) I thought I’d limber up by posting something from the archives.

Here’s something I found last week while digging through old files. High school buddy, Denny, was asked to give the Commencement Address at our old high school. He sent out a call to some of us to send in our advice. Here was mine:

—–

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you get rained out

Everything I needed to know I learned during freefall.

We all graduated in 1970. That might make you think that we were in high school during the 60’s. In actual fact, South Dakota went directly from the 1950’s to the 1970’s and skipped the 60’s almost entirely with the except of a few short months allowed for transition.

Although those months were short, they were intense and we were there.

The main thing about the 60’s was that all the Big Truths about God, America, and Western History were called radically into question. All the stuff we were taking for granted became so suspect that I found it necessary to clear everything off the table and start over. My theory was that I’d examine the Big Truths one by one and let the valid ones back on. Unfortunately, none of them made it back and I’ve been forced to rely on a collection of smaller truths instead. I offer some for your consideration.

1. Life’s too short to live anybody else’s but you own.

2. Never try to psychoanalyze a cop while he’s arresting you.

3. It’s a good idea not to be any stupider than absolutely necessary.

4. Truth itself is an attempt to use limited tools to describe an unlimited reality and therefore all truths are necessarily wrong.

5. Some truths are much more wrong than others.

6. Reality doesn’t sit there waiting to be described like a mackerel on a plate. It’s a tiger that might get up at any given moment and thoroughly kick your ass.

7. Love and affection are more important that sex.

8. Sex is important.

9. The statement “If he’s so smart, why isn’t he rich” is the logical equivalent of “If he’s so smart, why isn’t he fat”. It takes a lot less money to get fat, however.

10. After reading Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Husserl, Tillich, and numerous others in search of a approach to life, the best I’ve been able to figure is that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you get rained out. All three, when they happen, have their attendant problems and it’s wise to be emotionally prepared to deal each of them.

Good luck.

==========

Denny, this may need a quick edit. I didn’t have time to let it sit then read it over again. Also, the order of the above might could use rearranging.

Divine Retribution

21 Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
Matthew 7:21-23 (King James Version)

Having been alerted by Pat Robertson that hurricanes and other natural disasters are communications from God, I couldn’t help but notice that what my parents and grandparents termed the Bible Belt seems to take an inordinate number of hard shots. Katrina, for example, hit Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Louisiana (disasters from which they’ve yet to recover) as have frequent subsequent hurricanes. If you look at the map of the BP oil spill, notice it angled in toward Mississippi and Florida.

My hypothesis is that contemporary Christians have changed the religion into a ‘divine’ justification for their petty hatreds, angers, and judgments (encroaching on God’s explicitly claimed prerogative on that last point.) This combination of spiritual arrogance and conscious or unconscious hypocrisy is starting to make God a little testy.

Here’s some good evidence from last week’s San Francisco Chronicle.

photo credit: Brant Ward / The Chronicle

Pictured are Associate Pastors Chris Nunn and Steve Messick from Imperial County featured in an article “County leads battle against gay weddings.”

Notice the background. They are posing in their church which is under repair…after being damaged….in an earthquake….on Easter!

My theory? God loves these people but hates what they do. He’s trying to give them a wakeup call. Will they get it in time?

Yours in faith,

Rev Al

“Many are called but fewer are called Al”

If you’re so smart why aren’t you rich?

“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

I’m glad you asked that.

I’ve always taken my inspiration from biological systems. One universal here is that inputs are good in a biological system only in a narrow range. Too much water and too little water will kill a plant. Too much food and too little food are both bad. Medicines have a low threshold of ineffectiveness and a high threshold of toxicity. My grandfather took strychnine as a blood pressure medicine. Critical vitamins can kill in both lack and excess.

Money is an input in a biological system. Too much and too little both trend towards toxicity…though in quite different ways.

The statement “if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich” is the precise logical equivalent, in my opinion, of “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you fat!”

I point out in passing that I’m not poor.

Now the counter question. I’ve noticed a tendency among the rich to keep working to get rich. What’s up with that? Lack of imagination? Trapped in the system?

To quote Baba Ram Dass when asked about his switch from LSD, “Well, when you’ve received the answer, hang up the phone.”