Tragedy at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church

I was shocked to hear about the senseless shooting at the Tennessee Valley UU. There are sad stories in the article. There is an account of how someone in the congregation died protecting children.

The title of the article focuses on the shooter’s political motivations for the crime. Supposedly he did it because hated “liberals”. I suspect, however, that his motivations were 99% violent insanity and only 1% political.

My congregation, FUS of Madison, is having a vigil. It awful to think that this tragedy could have happened here, or anywhere. I can’t imagine how hard it is for people who directly affected.

The Tennessee Valley UU congregation is in our thoughts.

1990s "Mindset of Global Convergence" Was Absolutely Right

I heard this quote on a Meet the Press interview with Obama from this past Sunday. It's from an article critical of Obama.

The great illusion of the 1990s was that we were entering an era of global convergence in which politics and power didn't matter. What Obama offered in Berlin flowed right out of this mind-set. This was the end of history on acid.

Since then, autocracies have arisen, the competition for resources has grown fiercer, Russia has clamped down, Iran is on the march. It will take politics and power to address these challenges, the two factors that dare not speak their name in Obama's lofty peroration. --David Brooks

I completely believed in this global convergence, and I'm sad it hasn't come true yet. Technology was going to obviate the concept of spoils of war. The nation state would decline. War would end. We engineers would all be deka-milionaires. It's not going the way I had hoped, but I don't want to go back to the bad old days. If we fight competition for resources with power politics, i.e. more fierce struggle for scarce resources, we all lose. Some people will win one more generation of an unsustainable lifestyle, but that's not worth fighting for.

In the absence of a better plan, what Brooks dismissively calls the 1990s mindset of "global convergence" is the correct mindset with which to approach foreign policy. The Bush policy has been to argue it's a completely new world now because the world has never seen a massacre of innocent civilians prior to the Sept 11 attacks.

That's the old world. The new world is still a work in progress. The 1990s mindset of global convergence is a good place to start. Obama seems to understand how human history has operated and to understand that maybe another world is possible within our lifetime.

Obama and the Economy on Meet the Press

On Meet the Press this Sunday, Obama said he is concerned about the "the failures of the economy, despite the fact that we grew for seven years, to provide rising levels of income and wages for the American people, I think, indicates the degree to which we've got to fundamentally shift how we approach economic policy."

I wish Brokaw had grilled him on specific policy shifts. Getting lower incomes to rise in parity with GDP is a great goal. How do we achieve it?

Obama:

It is true that there may be some folks who didn't make the best decision that will still benefit from the home foreclosure plans that have been put forward. But keep in mind that many of these folks were not so much speculators as they were probably in over their heads. They tried to get more house than they could afford because they were told by these mortgage brokers that they could afford it.

In other words he doesn't want to bail out investors, only the foolish. I hope the next foolish thing people do doesn't cost so much.

He goes on about doing this will help keep houses expensive, which is totally false. Prices are determined by supply and demand. Price supports would work by restricting new construction and paying people to leave their houses vacant and unrented. That would create a real shortage to justify the speculative prices we have now.

All of this is just talk, nothing real. The Fed will continue to pursue a loose monetary policy, allowing inflation to be higher than it was for the past ten years. Real estate prices will fall to historic norms, and the pain will be masked by the inflation. Let's just hope the fed doesn't stay too loose, or will end up with another speculative bubble and another bailout for the foolish in about ten years.

Existing Home Sales Blamed for Stock Market Decrease

Lower existing home sales numbers may have played a role in causing the stock market to decrease two percent yesterday. That's funny to think about. Our economy is partially dependent on people trading existing houses with one another. The houses are durable. They're going to be around for a long time, regardless of who owns them. What the economy needs, though, is for people to trade them with one another frequently. We can't have the same people just continuing to own the same house for a long period of time.

I am not knowledgeable about exactly why some observers see people trading houses as a positive thing. Maybe this is just an idea that the real estate and finance (FIRE) industries have promoted because they get a cut of most residential real estate transactions. If people are voluntarily giving Realtors and banks their money, maybe this bit of GDP is as legitimate as if people were voluntarily giving their money to buy a new toys.

It's more likely related concerns about keeping real estate liquid, which is important for people who own/owe debt collateralized by real estate.

Whatever the reasons, it would be good for our economy not to be dependent on people moving house frequently.

Obama Should Stick to the Message of Hope

You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession. We may have a recession; we haven't had one yet. We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.

--Phil Gramm

Phil Gramm is right. There is no recession. The economy is growing.

He didn't say this but I guess what he meant was that it's a figment of your imagination, these high gas prices. When people are out there losing their homes and property values are declining, that's not a figment of your imagination and it isn't whining to ask government to step in and give families some relief.

--Barack Obama

If you think GDP has declined over the past few quarters, it is absolutely a figment of your imagination.

What do "these high gas prices" have to do with it? I thought Democrats understood that oil is a non-renewable resource and therefore things made from it must get more expensive as time goes forward until we find alternatives.

What does more affordable property values have to do with it? Prices go up and down. Government stepping in to give relief won't change that.

A hopeful, optimistic candidate would view these developments as opportunities. The spike in gas prices is a reminder that we need to get alternatives in place soon. The lower real estate prices make homes affordable.

If he were explicitly talking about the impact of these things on the poor, I would have a different take. Everyday ups-and-downs of markets are difficult for the poor. That's part of why they call it poor: it means you don't have the money to handle everyday things that come up. I still have hope Obama will become president and institute many difficult-to-dismantle programs that drastically reduce the rate of poverty for generations. But that's not what he's talking about.

Instead his talking about short-term blips the economy: "Why do things have to change? Why can't we have cheap energy? Why can't prices of everything stay the same so we don't have to adapt?"

We are not a nation of whiners; Obama's comments are whining. I can imagine McCain countering with an optimistic response of hope and being adaptive to economic change, and thereby beating Obama at his own game.

Did Greedy Executives Cause the Mortgage Crisis?

From The New York Times article, The Fannie and Freddie Fallout

IT’S dispiriting indeed to watch the United States financial system, supposedly the envy of the world, being taken to its knees. But that’s the show we’re watching, brought to you by somnambulant regulators, greedy bank executives and incompetent corporate directors.
This wasn’t the way the “ownership society” was supposed to work.

Is this true? They're saying our system is based on having responsible bank executives and corporate directors, and their lapse in judgment led to the mortgage problems. If that’s true, we should know that sooner or later a system based on the responsibility of human beings will eventually have problems.

While a system with a small group of individuals charged with doing the right thing would be flawed, our economic system does not even have such a protection. The owners are so divorced from decision making that they end up accidentally encouraging risky and unethical behavior. (Click on the chart to enlarge it.)


It’s a circular org chart with no one in charge. We haven’t appointed one group along the chain to be the guardians of long term stability or even guardians of what’s morally right.

I am not at all against corporate ownership of the means of production. On the contrary, it provides a means for productive ideas to be funded. Although our system of ownership needs improvement, I do not have a plan to improve it. All I’m saying is throwing all the blame on “greedy executives” is empty calories.

CSAs: Sustainable Food

The New York Times ran an article about community supported agriculture (CSA). My wife and I are on our second year as members of Vermont Valley CSA. We have had a very positive experience with it.

• We get organic food for a reasonable price.
• The food is grown locally, so less fuel is needed for transportation. Fuel is cheap, even with today's higher oil prices, but the price doesn't include environmental and political costs. It's better to conserve if you can.
• It helps keep farmland from being paved over by suburban sprawl. Wisconsin has some of the best farmland in the world. Once it's paved over, it's gone forever.
  
• We get whatever they grow. This encourages us to try new foods.
• Weather events such as floods, early/late frosts, and droughts affect how much food we get and remind us how connected we are to nature.
  
• There are events for adults to pick some extra food for their own use and for kids to learn about how a farm works.
  

The freezer fills up in the fall and empties by spring. The season started late this year, but the freezer is starting to fill.

The only downside is that storing and cooking the food takes much more time compared to heating the factory-made food I ate before I got married. I am fortunate my wife enjoys cooking so much.

I just checked her blog about saving money looking for something on frugality and cooking, and I discovered she had almost exactly the same comments. I didn't even know she had seen the same NYT article as I did, but evidently she read it and beat me to it. For pracitcal ideas on saving money using a CSA, check out her article "Get Your Own Farmer".

A Lame Excuse for a Lack of an Energy Policy

“[Measures to conserve energy] will work if you coerce the entire system and if you pretend the American people are Japanese and Europeans,” Mr. Gingrich says. “Our culture favors driving long distances in powerful vehicles and the car as a social expression.”

That’s like saying I will always be 15 pounds overweight because I favor eating good portions of high-fat foods as a form of personal expression. It couldn’t be the simple explanation that I don’t want to go on a diet. It must be a form of social expression. (See the picture of me participating in the social expression going on at Madison's Bratfest this year.)

I thought Republicans were supposed to be for taking personal responsibility for your actions. The social expression excuse is pretty lame. The only way this could get any lamer is if he convinced me that driving long distances truly was his attempt at expressing himself.