The Tax-Gap.

"The National Taxayer Advocate's 2003 Annual Report to Congress estimates that, in the year 2001, the amount of tax voluntarily and timely paid by taxpayers was approximately $311 billion less than the actual tax liability of taxpayers. The Report attributes the tax gap to underreporting ($249 billion), underpayment ($32 billion) and nonfiling ($30 billion). The Report indicates that the tax gap is growing and, as a consequence, law-abiding taxpayers are being asked to pay more than their fair share of taxes to make up for the resulting revenue shortfall. In addition, the Federal Budget deficit is projected to be $477 billion for fiscal year 2004."

- from the February 26, 2004, letter to Mr. George K. Yin, Chief of Staff, Joint Committee on Taxation, from Senators Baucus and Grassly, Ranking Member and Chairman, respectively, of the Joint Committee. In the letter, the Senators ask the staff to come up with proposals to reduce the size of the "tax gap". That report was given by the staff recently.

The report, IMHO, will not collect appreciably more taxes but make it even less fair on citizens who pay their taxes, by increasing and making more complex reporting requirements, making penalties more severe, and taking away deductions and exclusions that serve one social tax policy or another. The problem is that (a) people think government does a poor job of handling its money and are justified in cheating, and (b) their sense of duty is, in any event, eroded by their upbringing.

I refer the reader to Jesus' parable of the Widow's mite. He praises her for her faithfulness to an institution, the Temple, which was largely unfaithful.

Colo-blogging
Not to be confused with "colon-blogging"

After a week in Chapel Hill interviewing prospective InterVarsity staff, I'm on vacation for 4 days in Colorado. I've joined the party already in progress, as Doug, Sue, Justin, Kristin, Noah, Caleb, Walter, Morgan, Kellsey, and Aidan were already here.
Aidan, as you can see, was well prepared for the cold weather.


I've been catching up on my blogosphere favorites, and came across this piece in the Chicago Sun-Times via Instapundit.

Most administration officials subscribe to one of two views: a) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater; or b) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater where the whole powder keg's about to go up.

For what it's worth, I incline to the latter position. Europe's problems -- its unaffordable social programs, its deathbed demographics, its dependence on immigration numbers that no stable nation (not even America in the Ellis Island era) has ever successfully absorbed -- are all of Europe's making. . . .

Until the shape of the new Europe begins to emerge, there's no point picking fights with the terminally ill. The old Europe is dying, and Mr. Bush did the diplomatic equivalent of the Oscar night lifetime-achievement tribute at which the current stars salute a once glamorous old-timer whose fading aura is no threat to them. The 21st century is being built elsewhere.

I wonder: What does Sean Meade, my favorite Tom Barnett interpreter (of The Pentagon's New Map, fame) think of this article? And, WWTBS? (What Would Tom Barnett Say?) (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for Sean's major Tom Barnett posts during the past 3 months. And while I'm not quite yet a convert, it's still good reading!)

Dave Seivright and Redeemer PC.

Dave Seivright is a London trained lawyer, born and raised in Jamaica, who came to Christ as a young man and went into "full time Christian service", as folks used to say at Central Baptist Church where I was raised. He has an M.Div., ordained in the PCA, planted a PCA church here Miami-Dade, and for many years under the Campus Crusade umbrella has evangelized and discipled professionals in South Florida and, over the last few years, in Munich to which he commutes from time to time from Miami.

I am on his email list-serve (is that the right terminology?). Here is what he wrote recently.

"Recently in describing our ministry I used the words "genuine relationships, honesty and authenticity" to characterize what God is doing through our ministry both here in Miami and also in Europe. Now I see an article using some of these very same words to describe a new movement of the Holy Spirit in some of the churches.

"My visit to Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC in December has proven to be life-changing for me. It was not the old traditional church with forms and structures which seem irrelevant to the young people I hang out with, nor was it the modern entertainment slick seeker-sensitive manipulative program-driven model, but it was something very different which had no frills and seemed to have more emphasis on Worship and the Word ... not being shouted at anyone but being taught in a conversational style which obviously valued relationships and the questioning intellect of the hearers.

"This article captures what God seems to be doing."

Oops

From the WSJ 2/17/2005:

"A week after Hewlett-Packard Co. directors ousted former Chief Executive Carly Fiorina, the computer and printer maker posted better-than-expected revenue for its fiscal first quarter and offered a relatively strong sales outlook."

Regulating Away the Opportunity for Good.

I meet with a group of Christian lawyers (oxymoron?) every Friday for breakfast and informal Bible study.

In the group is Frank Valladares, who has a busy trial practice but also, with his wife, has a ministry work going in the Dominican Republic. The ministry takes care of orphaned children with birth defects. Its a great work. Frank and his group are doing lots of good. There are set backs from time to time, but everyone is energized. The environment in the Dominican Republic is completely unregulated.

Now switch to Miami.

I had lunch with a financial advisor whose wife works with disabled children in the public school system. She is three years away from retirement and can't wait. She comes home every day, completely worn out. The financial advisor says that most of the time she is dealing with paper work and bureaucracy. The children get whatever time is left-over, which is not much.

We are so regulated around here, we can't even do good, much less do business (which is a good). We are teaching the rest of the world about "free enterprise" and regulating ourselves into paralysis.

George Inhaled. We always knew that W smoked marijuana. He never denied it. He just wouldn't talk about it. He thought it was irrelevant to his political gifts and objectives. The tapes confirm what we already knew. Big deal. What concerns me about W these days is (a) why he pushed through the Medicare drug benefit; (b) why he wants to raise the cap on Social Security; and (c) how he goes about deciding who his friends are.

Now we have two Presidents who smoked marijuana during their lifetimes. (I prefer W's approach to dealing with his drug history to Bill's. Come on, Bill. You didn't inhale? Is that like not having sexual relations with that woman? Please.) (And, for that matter, Bill, why didn't you inhale? Why didn't you have sexual relations with that woman? Are you a weenie or what?)

Maybe we should lighten up on pot. I know all sorts of aging Yuppies who are successful people, good family men, who smoked pot at one time or another. If you want to tax something, let's get pot in a position to tax it.

Quoted in The Challenge of Command by Roger H. Nye

The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.
-- Sir William Francis Butler, Charles George Gordon (London: 1907, 85).

But I Never Inhaled.

The DVD of the movie "Super Size Me" has a "bonus" feature, an interview with Eric Schlossser, who wrote "Fast Food Nation". He more recently wrote Reefer Madness, which I am reading right now. Reefer Madness addresses marijuana use, illegal immigrant labor, and the pornography industry. I just finished the section on marijuana.

From the conclusion of that section:

"According to Michael D. Newcomb, a substance abuse expert at the University of Southern California, "Tobacco and alcohol are the most widely used, abused, and deadly druges ingested by teenagers." American children aged eleven to thirteen now drink alcohol almost four times as often as they smoke marijuana. Drug education programs should respect the intelligence of young people by promoting healthy lives without scare tactics, lies, and hyporcrisy. And drug abuse should be treated like alchoholism or nicotine addiction. These are health problems suffered by Americans of every race, creed, and political affiliation, not grounds for imprisonment or the denial of property rights."

Aidan Update
New hair: Check.
4 more immunization shots: Check.
Baby Babble: Check.
Head Control: Check.
Arm, Leg & Torso Control: See for yourself.

Thanks to: U2 for their music, and Scott for the inspiration.

Fun with Macs
I found a neato program that allows Mac users to broadcast (for lack of a better term) their own screensavers. So, if you're interested, and are using at least Mac OS 10.2 you can subscribe to my screensaver of (what else) the latest Aidan photos.

To subscribe to my slideshow: (you do not have to have a .mac account)

1. Make sure you have Mac OS X version 10.2 or later installed, and you're connected to the Internet.
2. Open System Preferences and click Screen Effects.
3. Select .Mac in the list of available screen savers.
4. Click the Configure (or "Options") button and enter "citostokes" (that's my .mac username) in the Member Name box. Then click OK.

The slideshow will appear the next time your screen saver is activated. The coolest thing: When you are connected to the Internet, you'll automatically receive any updates I've made to the slideshow. I'll keep the slideshow current to the photos taken of him in the latest 5 weeks.

Oh, and in case you think this is me slacking off in producing a new Aidan video: We're in pre-production right now, and are scheduled to begin principal photography tomorrow. (I learned all kinds of video-words watching LOTR Extended Editions.)

"Fall Slow Tears" Revisited. I posted earlier about this beautiful choral piece that I heard at Westlake Hills PC last month. I emailed the composer, and she told me where to find a complete mp3 of a choir performing the number. Listen to it here.

Photoblogging Davidson
This afternoon I attended a Career Services Seminar called "Major Decisions" in which Career Services invites alumni in a particular major to sit on a panel and talk about why they chose that major and how it helps them in their life after college. I was interested to see if any students would show up for such a thing, especially for a major as sexy as Philosophy. As it turned out, there were about nine interested students.

It was a pleasure to talk about the Philosophy Major as it was something I really enjoyed about Davidson. I'm periodically invited to Davidson events: "Local" alumni gatherings in Charlotte, "young" alumni gatherings, ongoing career-development seminars, Lilly Endowment "what-is-vocation" retreats. None of these hold any interest for me. (In fact, it would be difficult for me to care less about them than I currently do.) But here I was driving up to Davidson to sit on a panel in front of nine students to talk about the Philosophy Major. And I was excited about it. Geeky. I know.

Of course, no visit to Fair Davidson is complete without sipping a tasty hot beverage at Summit Coffee. I had an excellent double espresso and shared a table with Mary's friend, Beth, who is wonderful company and engaged to Tim, the proprietor. Among other things we talked about her upcoming wedding, her shiny new iBook, and the glory of picking up the unencrypted WiFi network being broadcast by the Davdison Town Hall down the street. Which, I might add, changes everything. (Incidentally, Beth & Tim raved about AWS Cribs!.)

I took some pictures on my walk over so you could see the campus on a beautiful February day.


To save loading time, I didn't put them all inline. Here are two more:
Old Classrooms
Chambers

Go 'Canes! Check this out, sports fans.

A love poem by George Herbert.

Love (I)

Immortal Love, author of this great frame,
    Sprung from that beauty which can never fade,
    How hath man parcel'd out Thy glorious name,
And thrown it on that dust which Thou hast made,
While mortal love doth all the title gain!
    Which siding with Invention, they together
    Bear all the sway, possessing heart and brain,
(Thy workmanship) and give Thee share in neither.
Wit fancies beauty, beauty raiseth wit;
    The world is theirs, they two play out the game,
    Thou standing by: and though Thy glorious name
Wrought our deliverance from th' infernal pit,
Who sings Thy praise? Only a scarf or glove
Doth warm our hands, and make them write of love.

After a brief hiatus I'm posting again at Coast & Crown. (Thanks for the encouragement to do so, Walt.)

If you click through, you'll read about our latest Cornerstone Conference. The speaker, Jeff Keegan, has a son, David, who attends SCAD. David wowed the admissions folks there with his self-taught knowledge of Maya and the number of scripts that he wrote himself for that program. You can check out his creativity on his website. I've looked over Jef Sewell's shoulder has he's worked on Maya and I know what kind of cool things you can make with it. Perhaps Amplifier Creative needs to keep an eye on this guy?

Edited by Macon: to indicate I meant Jef Sewell, not to be confused with Jeff Keegan.

GTD: Organizing III

Before GTD, I had an file organizer holding folders of "Current Projects" on my desk. At first it was populated by a few folders, but as the weeks went by, more and more folders were added to the organizer. I realize now that this was because I have a large number of projects that are "current"! The folders in the organizer held everything that I needed to do the project, and for some projects, this meant having 4+ folders jammed into the organizer. Plus, after a while, I avoided looking at the growing mess that represented my current projects. It was no longer helpful to me, but I didn't dare remove it from my desk, as I'd put those folders on my desk because they were supposed to remind me of the work I needed to do in each project. I was afraid that if I re-filed them into my filing system, they'd be out of my sight and I'd completely forget that I needed to do anything with them. This is the problem that comes when you don't separate your Next Actions from your Support and Reference materials.

Now I have Project Support Materials and General Reference Material labeled, sorted, filed, and put out of the way until needed. I also now have two file organizers on my desk, this time one is filled with my 43 Tickle folders, the other with my ASAP folders (enumerated in a previous GTD post). So I'm all set to Get Things Done, and I realize: I have alot of work to do. Before GTD, I suspected that I had this much work to do, but now I can see it all in one place, and I'm daunted. (This is not the first time I'm daunted in the GTD process!)

Internally I experienced resistance to starting to work. One by-product of reading David's book is that he spends alot of time talking about why we do or don't do work. So, he's gotten me to start thinking along those lines as well: Why don't I want to start working through my ASAP Next Action Items? Well, for one thing, I can't see how I'm going to have time to do it all, so maybe I shouldn't even start. That is, if I'm going to (apparently) fail to get it all done, I'd rather not start, that way, I won't fail. Heh.

Another thing I find in myself is a strong aversion to just looking through the ASAP Next Action Items. Now, this is an essential discipline in GTD. In fact, it's the whole point in getting all the action reminders together: so you can see them all at once. I realize that I'd rather deny that I have all this work to do. Previously, I enabled this behavior in myself by being so disorganized that I couldn't possibly have looked at everything at once if I'd even wanted to! But now I realize that I'm physically chickening out of looking through it, which galvanizes me to action. I look through everything.

That didn't take as long as I thought! And I feel better about knowing all that I have to do. I even now know what I ought to be doing at this very moment, and I pick out some Next Action Items. But now a new temptation arises: sit down to work and don't stop until everything is done - eat at my desk, take only bathroom breaks, go to bed late, come right to the desk as soon as I brush my teeth in the morning. That is, become a workaholic. The thing that breaks me out of this reverie is the fact that I have a beautiful wife, a spectacular son, wonderful friends, and one or two hobbies, and I'd miss all that if I never left my desk.

So, if my first two responses (denial & workaholism) to having more work than time in which to do it are wrong, what's the right response? I think David would say something like, "Oh, you'll get it done eventually, that's why I created my system. Trust me!" And, you know, I think he's right at a certain level. I'm beginning to see the usefulness of his approach, and as I use it, I do see that I'm going to be more efficient at my work and do things faster & better. But at the end of the day, it makes me uncomfortable to trust the system, because I know that I'm at the center of it and I'm remarkably flawed. (I know this to be true. I've heard people remarking about my flaws.) So it seems to me that the alternative to denial & workaholism is actually Faith. Faith in the Heavenly Father who brought me to this work and gave me the blessings of my family, friends and even my hobbies. I come into my office in the morning and look at the pile of Next Actions and think, "Well, I can't do it all today, and probably not even in a month, but I'll do what I can and trust the rest to God." And since this god I follow is a Good one, I can mentally rest about the stuff that isn't going to get done.

Not that Faith is ever a static place (for me, at least). I usually ping-pong between denial, workaholism, and faith.

Previous GTD post | Next GTD post

"Super Size Me.". Last night was date night, so Carol and I went to Chevy's, a Tex-Mex, jeans, and family sort of restaurant that is on our top five dining establishments. (What does that say about us? At least it wasn't Publix this tiime.)

We came home and watched a video, Super Size Me, which, having seen it, I would name as the Upton Sinclair work of our generation. It had good "bonus" material on it, particularly the interview with Eric Schlosser.

Christianity Today reviews the movie. And there are many more reviews on the net,

Here are some nice pictures to consider as we reflect on the fast-food issue.

"Fall Slow Tears". I enjoy a contemporary worship service, and I like the praise songs that go with it. But I also like "traditional", and it was a blessing to attend the "traditional" service at Westlake Hills Presbyterian Church in Austin on January 30 with Walter and Morgan.

Recognizable in the order of service was a Reformed liturgy, including a Prayer of Confession. Immediately after the Prayer of Confession, an actual choir sang: they sang in four parts, they wore robes, they were well rehearsed, they had fine voices - and those were the voices of believers singing. To me it was a bit of Heaven.

The choir sang a choral piece I had not heard before. "Fall Slow Tears" by Ruth Elaine Schram. It is based on Psalm 51. Here are the lyrics:

Fall slow tears and drown all my doubts and fears
And wash away my sin and shame in the flood of forgiveness and mercy.
Weep, sad eyes; my soul in repentence cries.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit withiin me.
Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.
Take all my iniquities upon You.
Have mercy on me, have mercy on me.

I found a place on the 'net where you can hear an excerpt of this anthem if you have RealPlayer. Find it
here.

Lenny Kravitz and "Baptism".

On NPR this AM I heard an interview of Lenny Kravitz that was interesting. Kravitz, who had a culturally Jewish father and similarly Christian mother, has a new album that has some "spiritual" content. Called "Baptism".

On the NPR site you listen to a couple of the cuts off the album. I also listened to some excerpts on the Wal-Mart down load site. The ones not on the NPR site has cuts that are profane in parts. (What is it about the word "f**king" that fascinates these guys so?)

But it appears to me that the Hound of Heaven must be after young Lenny. Good. I hope he catches him soon.

I am thinking about searching the new Album to see if there was something I could risk singing at church.

Davidson College Moves Away from the Church. This article on Davidson in Christianity Today indicates a change that I am sorry to see. Or maybe it is simply conforming the form to a reality that is already there.