Friday, October 31, 2014

Tough Love from St. Paul about Taking Care of One's Family

If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

-1Timothy 5:8, and cited in today's reading in Stott's Through the Bible, Through the Year, at page 91.

I see this ethic applied among all classes of people, notably (at least to me) among the immigrant families here in Miami.

At the recent Annual Dinner hosted by Heartbeat of Miami, we heard a testimony from a young woman who, with the help of her mother at age 16, fled sexual abuse in Nicaragua from a man who threatened to kill her and her parents if she told them and the authorities about the abuse.  She came to the US in the way many of the Central American children come here that we read about:  She made the journey across Mexico, waded the Rio Bravo, was taken into custody by INS, but had an aunt in Miami who would take her in.  Say what you will about the government authorities, they gave the young woman bus fare and she finally arrived here, to be sheltered by her kinswoman and, from there, introduced to the Christian community that works with Heartbeat, her larger family.  Unknown to herself at the time that she fled her country, the man in Nicaragua had impregnated her.

When the INS gave her a physical examination, they discovered her pregnancy and a social worker advised her to get an abortion, telling her "Every time you look at that baby's face, you will see the evil that has been done to you."   The young woman refused.  Heartbeat helped her.  She said at the Heartbeat Dinner that when she looks into the face of her baby, now 2 years old and there with us at the dinner, she sees the face of Jesus.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Exploding Airbags

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration urges owners of certain Toyota, Honda, Mazda, BMW, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Chrysler, Ford and General Motors vehicles to act immediately on recall notices to replace defective Takata airbags. Over seven million vehicles are involved in these recalls, which have occurred as far back as 18 months ago and as recently as Monday. The message comes with urgency, especially for owners of vehicles affected by regional recalls in the following areas: Florida, Puerto Rico, limited areas near the Gulf of Mexico in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana, as well as Guam, Saipan, American Samoa, Virgin Islands and Hawaii.

-from the NHTSA Consumer Advisory of October 22, 2014.

On NPR this morning, a report on this matter indicated that we in South Florida are particularly at risk because of our heat and  humidity.

We are pretty much a Toyota family.  Here are the Toyota models that are on the NHTSA list, at least right now:

Toyota: 877,000 total number of potentially affected vehicles
2002 – 2005 Lexus SC
2002 – 2005 Toyota Corolla
2003 – 2005 Toyota Corolla Matrix
2002 – 2005 Toyota Sequoia
2003 – 2005 Toyota Tundra

For makes other than Toyota, click the link to the article.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Zehaf-Bibeau a Lawbreaker!

Zehaf-Bibeau's long criminal record for a series of crimes, including drug possession, robbery and assault, barred him from owning or possessing a gun.

-from "Police: Canadian terror attack driven by ideology" on the USA Today website today.

I think the author of this quote meant to say that his criminal record made it "against the law for him to own or posses a gun."  Obviously, he wasn't "barred" from anything.  So much for gun laws in Canada.

Buying High and Selling Low

Millions of Americans inadvertently made a classic investment mistake that contributed to today’s widening economic inequality: They bought high and sold low.

Late in the stock-market booms of the 1990s and 2000s, more U.S. families clambered into stocks as indexes surged. Then, once markets tumbled, many households sold and took losses.

Those that held on during the most recent collapses reaped the benefits as stocks nearly tripled between 2009 and today.

The split path is one driver of stark inequality in the U.S. Many workers have seen their wealth and incomes drop despite more than five years of economic expansion in the U.S. Some fear the gap, widening for decades, could fracture society and slow the nation’s potential for economic growth in the long run.

-from "Bad Stock-Market Timing Fueled Wealth Disparity" in today's WSJ.

It was during 2008 and 2009 that I gave up trying to figure out when to buy and when to sell stocks and turned the portfolio over to Investor Solutions, just before the market plummeted.  When the market tanked, Investor Solutions liquidated fixed income securities in our portfolio, took the cash, and bought stocks as bargain prices.  Not that I am now among the rich, but many people were selling stocks at that time, as the article indicates.

Friday, October 24, 2014

Not Running Out of Oil Soon

The piece is probably on the other side of the WSJ pay-wall, and the title is accurate as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Mills is one of those people whose views are similar to those of the retired chairman of the board of Texaco whom I was privileged to know back in the 80's. Mills believes we are not going to run out of energy, and the article bears witness to that belief. Mills, a Manhattan Institute Scholar, has just published a new book whose title tells it all, The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy.

We are having an interesting governor's race in Florida.  One of the attacks being made on the Republican incumbent is that Florida, unlike most of the other Southeastern states, does not subsidize solar energy significantly.  I don't know whether that's true.  (I believe nothing that the attack ads on the gubernatorial candidates are saying.)  If it is true, however, then I think this is a good thing.  It would seem to me that Solar needs to grow up and compete with the big boys for investment dollars and that the State should get-out and keep-out of the marketplace on this one.  (How long has it taken to get NASA out of the outer-space market?  Where would we be if it had gotten out earlier?  Pluto?)

Thursday, October 23, 2014

The Pauline Eschatology

Geerhardus Vos
"With the rise of Rationalism Eschatology was bound to drift into troubled waters.  Eschatology is preeminently historical, and Rationalism is from its cradle devoid of historic sense.  It despises tradition; the past it ignores and the future it barely tolerates with a supercilious conceit of self.  Moreover Rationalism is bent upon and enamored of the inward.  To it the essence and value of all religion lies in purely subjective ethico-religious experiences.  Now in the eschatological process from the nature of the case, the forces of propulsion must come from ab extra.  No nature-force can possibly be conceived as producing them.  All that remains of interest for eschatology in such circles can spring from a "historisizing" curiosity only.  Piety it is no longer capable of kindling.  And yet, there was and may still further appear to be something good from the Lord in this modernistic setback.  Driven by such a storm of denial from the old pastures, not a few of the pious sought refuge out of this chill grown world into anticipations of the world to come.  We cannot help but recoil from much distorted thought and morbid emotion, that makes present-day eschatologizing propaganda unlovable.  But let us be sure not to overlook even the smallest grain of golden piety that may yet linger in it.

"And meanwhile let us learn to reconcile ourselves to this outstanding sign of the times: eschatology has become the large mountain of offense lying across the pathway of modern unbelief.  That part of it which we call Messiahship was already a piece broken from the rock in the days of Jesus.  The double offense was at bottom.  Neither will be tolerated in modern religious thought.  And the results will inevitably be the same.  Paul divorced from his eschatology becomes unfit for his Apostleship; Jesus divested of his Messiahship can no longer serve us as Savior."

-from Vos, Geerhardus, The Pauline Theology (Eerdmans 1972), the preface at vii.

Wikipedia has a helpful article on Geerhardus Vos (March 14, 1862 – August 13, 1949). Vos first published The Pauline Theology in 1930, according to the article.

Plantation Culture at Chapel Hill

In all, about 3,100 students [including about 1,500 athletes  who got "easy A's and B's"] enrolled [at UNC-CH] in classes they didn’t have to show up for in what was deemed a “shadow curriculum” within the former African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) department from 1993 to 2011, the report by former U.S. Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein found. 

-from "UNC academic scandal bigger than previously reported," an AP article that ran in the print edition of the Miami Herald this morning and in other newspapers across the country.


Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2014/10/22/3762543/unc-academic-scandal-bigger-than.html?sp=/99/181/#storylink=cpy

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

An Ad Libitum Diet.

A low-fat, starch-based, vegan diet eaten ad libitum for 7 days results in significant favorable changes in commonly tested biomarkers that are used to predict future risks for cardiovascular disease and metabolic diseases. 

-Conclusions from the abstract of the research report entitled "Effects of 7 days on an ad libitum low-fat vegan diet: the McDougall Program cohort," reported in the Nutrition Journal 2014, 13:99.

Within the limits of a diet very similar to the one described in this report, I do not count calories nor otherwise limit what I eat.  I do not gain weight and I feel good. ("Ad libitum" means "at liberty" and is where we get the phraise "ad lib.")

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Aging in Miami

At UM Med School's Center on Aging
Last night, Carol and I attended a dinner sponsored by our friends at Fiduciary Trust Company where Sara J. Czaja, PhD, of the UM med school's Center on Aging spoke.  Nearly all of us there were 65 or older, except for the staff of Fiduciary Trust.  As articulate as Dr. Czaja was, there were not a lot of new things in her talk for us, although maybe there were for others there.  Here were the things she said about managing aging:
  1. Exercise is definitely necessary to deal positively with both physical and mental aging.  She seemed to say that this was well established in the literature.  Carol and I are banking on this.
  2. One's diet appears to be important, but she did not get into detail on this idea.  She said something like "a heart-healthy diet is a brain-healthy diet."  I can't disagree with that of course, but define "heart-healthy."
  3. She named stress as a negative factor.  Of course, certain types of stress are negative at every age.  I could not tell whether she meant to say that people who are aging are more vulnerable to stress than younger people.  I would guess that they are.
  4. Social interaction is very important.  Well, of course.  At the clinical level, the Center is teaching the use of the Internet to aging people to help them build or bolster their social networks, teaching basic techniques to people who are not computer literate.  The researchers are seeking to quantify the positive affects on a population they recruited that is made up of 75% poor people.
  5. Learn something thing new.  This appealed to me.  I am ready.  Get me out from underneath where I am now!  How about a teaching career?
  6. The pills right now are disappointing.  She discussed this in answer to a question about the medications that are prescribed to address dementia.  She said that they simply don't work in too many cases.  The results seem to be better when there is an early diagnosis, but she made it plain that the drugs are no present solution.  

Monday, October 20, 2014

Another Book List

I like them, and here is one on the AbeBooks website, entitled "50 Classic Books and Why You Should Read Them", by Richard Davies.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

The Jewish Contrarian

Save more. Just save more; if you’re still working, you probably need to save more because you almost certainly aren’t saving enough. If you do the calculations based on having X when you get to retirement, you can begin to understand what X can do for you given all the uncertainties that come with later life. I’ll bet most investors would say, “I wish I had saved more, even though I had to give something up.” I just suspect that’s the case. So my guess is that you can pretty well predict somebody will wish they’d saved more.
 
Maybe when someone is making the saving decision, you can try to help them think more about their future self. Though there are many people who say “I’m not going to live long,” the evidence is that if you’re middle-class you are going to live a long time. You personally may not, but the odds are that you will.

-William "Bill" Sharpe, STANCO 25 Professor of Finance, Emeritus, Stanford University and recipient of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, in an interview entitled "Don't Over-Rely on Historical Data to Forecast Future Returns," in the October 2014 issue of the AAII Journal, published by the American Association of Individual Investors, in answer to the question "What advice you would have for investors given your years of experience?"

19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

 -Jesus of Nazareth, from his "Sermon on the Mount,"  Matthew 6: 19-21Sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Losing Jesus. Losing People.


A friend of mine, lecturing in a theological college in Kenya, introduced his students to “The Quest for the Historical Jesus.” This, he said, was a movement of thought and scholarship that in its earlier forms was carried on largely in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He had not gone far into his lecture explaining this search for Jesus when one of his students interrupted him. “Teacher,” he said (“I knew I was in trouble,” my friend commented, “as soon as he called me ‘teacher’!”), “if the Germans have lost Jesus, that is their problem. We have not lost him. We know him. We love him.” 

-from Wright, N.T., The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (IVP 1999) at p. 13.  (A portion of the first chapter of Wright's book, which includes the introductory paragraph quoted above, may be read here.)

I remember hearing for the first time the phrase "the search for the historical Jesus" when Professor Barney Jones introduced the subject to our NT class at Duke my sophomore year (1965-66).  I had something of the same thought as the student in Kenya, but I didn't express it.  I thought, "I already know Jesus, and of course he lived in history."  Then Dr. Jones said that this was title of a famous book by Albert Schweitzer.  (Not quite.  The title was The Quest of the Historical Jesus, a title that I thought conveyed something a little different.)  Albert Schweitzer, an icon of mine, had problems with Jesus! Such consternation.

The other point made in the quote by the student - that the Germans may have lost Jesus - is just as pertinent.  Look what happened to that great country during the 20th Century.  And America is not far behind.  Last year we celebrated the 40th Anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, and, as of the beginning of this year, America has been the site of 56,662,169 abortions:  enormously more than the Nazis murdered in the death camps.  I can only begin to grasp the implications of that number - how many potential Schweitzers, for example, were among them, how many Beethovens, how many Lincolns, how many MLKs?  Name your heroes.  How many of those were lost? 

Monday, October 13, 2014

Unconventional Discoveries

The impetus for change [from "resource nationalism" by such countries asMexico to a more market oriented "resource maximization"]  is the revival of North American oil-and-gas output. The extra barrels suppress prices, putting pressure on government budgets in large oil-exporting countries. That strain also can be seen in the share prices of national oil companies.

 In the past month, as Brent has fallen by about 10%, shares in Russia’s Rosneft and PetroChina 601857.SH -0.51% have both tumbled by about 13%. In contrast, Exxon Mobil XOM -0.24% is down less than 5%. And many state-backed oil companies, especially those in Russia, Venezuela and Mexico, have high debt levels. In a crunch, that could end up the government’s problem; after all, national oil champions really are too big to fail.

 North America’s shale riches also challenge resource nationalism by competing for investment. Some 38% of incremental spending in upstream oil and gas from 2009 to 2013 went to the region, according to IHS Herold.
 *   *   *
Fraser McKay, a principal analyst at Wood Mackenzie, says that for the biggest four majors—Exxon, Chevron, CVX -0.54% Royal Dutch Shell RDSA.LN -0.23% and BP BP.LN +0.89% —unconventional discoveries have been by far the biggest source of new resource additions over the past five years. He also points out the relatively short time it takes to get oil and gas from such prospects fits with shareholders’ current mantra for cash flow to come out of the ground rather than just go into it for years on end.
-from yesterday's WSJ on-line, "Oil's Decline: Enemy of the People."
 My guess is that this is toning-down Putin's adventurism.

 See my 2012 post, Not Scarcity but Plenty, and Sean's Comment on it.

Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Billable Hours are the Golden Calf of the Legal Profession

The findings and the image itself are from the Robert Haft Blog post, Billable Hours Pressure Tops List of Stress Factors in Legal Profession.

When Jack joined the firm, the firm's billing practice was said to consist of several factors that included: the outcome of the case, the value of the case, the complexity of the legal issues, the number of key partners and of attorneys and support staff committed to the case.  All of these factors were said to have to be evaluated before a final bill was fixed.  The amount charged to the client was virtually always reached after consultations with the client so that the client's expectations were reasonably related to the charge finally made.

While the advent of the billable hour, facilitated greatly by the introduction of the computer to the firm's operation, provided certain benefits to the firm's billing practice, it not only facilitated the quantification of attorney hours invested in the case, it created a new approach to determining the compensation of the firm's associates and the facilitation of determining whether the associate should be retained, dismissed or advanced.

Jack was reasonably certain that these were not the only factors taken into consideration in assessing the value of the associate to the firm, but it was a fairly simple and reasonable way to come to decisions on associates that weren't clearly visible by the partners working on cases in which the associate was assigned.  It was also an important factor in determining the profitability of the firm year-to-year that the firm considered attainable.

As might be expected, this led inexorably to an increase in the target hours that were expected from associates before they were eligible for a bonus at the end of the year.  Inevitably, the target rose to 1900 hours and higher with bonus levels ranging from 2000 to 2400 per year.  In addition, the associate was expected to include his or her pro bono hours, continuing education hours, and his new business-getting efforts.  Although Jack was totally sympathetic to the near impossible task assigned to the associates, especially those who had families and were involved in bar associations developing valuable contacts and identity in the bar, he was very disappointed to observe clear instances of associates padding their hours on some rationale that Jack did not want to find himself discussing with them.


-from Gutierrez, Jr., Max, "The Life and Death of John J. Stevens, Esq. as a member of the Legal Profession," in ACTEC Law Journal, Spring 2013/Fall 2013, at 202, 203.


Thursday, October 02, 2014

Paging Dr. Gawande

The patient first arrived at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas late on Sept. 25, complaining of a fever and abdominal pains, hospital officials said at a news conference. A nurse administered a checklist, on which the patient indicated that he had recently traveled from Liberia. Nevertheless, the hospital sent him home.

-from Time Magazine's "Mistake Led to Ebola Patient's Initial Release" post last evening.

Dr. Mark Lester, Southeast Zone clinical leader for Texas Health Resources, said a checklist for screening for Ebola was in place when the patient entered to [sic] the hospital on September 26, and that he was asked about his recent travels, including to Liberia, where the disease has killed nearly 2,000, according to the CDC. “Regretfully [sic], that information was not fully communicated” to the rest of the patient’s care team, Lester said. Lester described the patient’s condition as “serious but stable.”

-from a Newsweek post on October 1.

This is a nightmare right out of Arul Gawande's, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.  While Dr. Gawande does not write specifically about the virus, it is clear that the Emergency Department at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital lacked the teamwork and discipline that make the simplest of checklists effective, the very things Dr. Gawande emphasizes in his excellent book.

(The New Yorker has just published an article by Dr. Gawande, "The Ebola Epidemic is Stoppable.")

Reading Again McCullough's Biography of John Adams

What a treat!

Ambitious to excel - to make himself known - he had nonetheless recognized at an early stage that happiness came not from fame and fortune, "and all such things, " but from "an habitual contempt of them," as he wrote.

-McCoullough, John Adams (Simon & Schuster 2001), p. 19.