But Luther's question was not whether his sins were big or little, but whether they had been confessed. The great difficulty which he encountered was to be sure that everything had been recalled. He learned from experience the cleverness of memory in protecting the ego, and he was frightened when after six hours of confessing he could still go out and think of something else which had eluded his most conscientious scrutiny. Still more disconcerting was the discovery that some of man's misdemeanors are not even recognized, let alone remembered. Sinners often sin without compunction. Adam and Eve, after tasting of the fruit of the forbidden tree, when blithely for a walk in the cool of the day; and Jonah, after fleeing from the Lord's commission, slept soundly in the hold of the ship. Only when each was confronted by an accuser was there any consciousness of guilt. Frequently, too, when man is reproached he will still justify himself like Adam, who replied, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me" – as if to say to God, "She tempted me; you gave her to me; you are to blame."
There is, according to Luther, something much more drastically wrong with man than any particular list of offenses which can be enumerated, confessed, and forgiven. The very nature of man is corrupt. The penitential system fails because it is directed to particular lapses.
-from Bainton's Here I Stand: a Life of Martin Luther, (Abingdon Press 1950, page 55)
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Thursday, September 26, 2013
"For God's Sake, Would You Stop That Coughing!"
On my 10 minute drive to the Metrorail station in the mornings, I'm usually listening to Classical South Florida, 89.7 FM. The radio station is owned by the people who purchased WMCU from the rascals on the board of Trinity International University years ago, to the dismay of a large, South Florida evangelical audience that had supported the old station for many years, including myself. That being said, WKCP Miami has proven itself to be first rate.
As I was listening this morning, John Zech, who is tops as an announcer, presented a recording by Julian Bream, the lutist. It reminded me of a performance of his during my freshman year at Duke. He played in Page Auditorium, the main auditorium.
The large crowd consisted not predominantly of Duke undergraduates but people from the much wider Duke and Durham community. It was cold outside, and people came in bundled up.
Bream began to play beautifully, of course, gently and with great care. A sort of intimacy began to fall over the auditorium. But then someone coughed in the audience. As if that person gave others permission, coughing began to punctuate the performance. It would have been a different thing if the Philadelphia Symphony had been playing Beethoven, and you weren't sitting right by the hacker, but this was Julian Bream and his lute, all alone up there on the stage. It was bad.
Finally, Bream had enough. He stopped playing, looked at the audience, and said "For God's sake, would you stop that coughing!"
Absolute silence. Bream went back to his lute as if nothing had happened. Nobody moved. Nobody coughed. Nobody did anything but listen, and with a bit of apprehension. It was wonderful!
Every time I have attended a concert since then and heard the first cough, I think of Julian Bream and his lute. Until just a few years ago, he was still giving concerts and producing recordings. He certainly taught me something.
As I was listening this morning, John Zech, who is tops as an announcer, presented a recording by Julian Bream, the lutist. It reminded me of a performance of his during my freshman year at Duke. He played in Page Auditorium, the main auditorium.
The large crowd consisted not predominantly of Duke undergraduates but people from the much wider Duke and Durham community. It was cold outside, and people came in bundled up.
Bream began to play beautifully, of course, gently and with great care. A sort of intimacy began to fall over the auditorium. But then someone coughed in the audience. As if that person gave others permission, coughing began to punctuate the performance. It would have been a different thing if the Philadelphia Symphony had been playing Beethoven, and you weren't sitting right by the hacker, but this was Julian Bream and his lute, all alone up there on the stage. It was bad.
Finally, Bream had enough. He stopped playing, looked at the audience, and said "For God's sake, would you stop that coughing!"
Absolute silence. Bream went back to his lute as if nothing had happened. Nobody moved. Nobody coughed. Nobody did anything but listen, and with a bit of apprehension. It was wonderful!
Every time I have attended a concert since then and heard the first cough, I think of Julian Bream and his lute. Until just a few years ago, he was still giving concerts and producing recordings. He certainly taught me something.
Monday, September 16, 2013
The Miami-Dade English Dialect. Sounds like home to me!
"What's noteworthy about Miami English is that we're now in a third, even fourth generation of kids who are using these features of native dialect," said Florida International University sociolinguist Phillip Carter, who studies language in U.S. Latino communities. "So we're not talking — and let me be clear — we're not talking about non-native features. These are native speakers of English who have learned a variety influenced historically by Spanish."
-from Saturday's Miami Herald, an article well worth a read.
Supposuvly, it's not just an accent, it is a true dialect, irregardless of what you might think.
More from the article:
Miami has always been home to Latin American immigrants, but the first sizable wave arrived from Cuba during the 1960s, followed by the Mariel influx of the 1980s and then the balseros of the 1990s. They were joined by political refugees fleeing regimes in Nicaragua and Venezuela and by immigrants from Colombia and Mexico and other countries to the south.
Immigrants overwhelmed the city's population so quickly that before long children growing up in Miami were learning English from people who were not native English speakers themselves. This led to a number of nonnative features like Spanish vowels and "L" sounds being incorporated into the language.
The first sizable wave of Stokes kids arrived in the 70s and early 80s.
On one of the first telephone calls from Macon after his arrival Freshman year at Davidson, he said, "Dad, I feel like a Cuban!" I said, something like "you are a Cuban; you just happen to look like everyone else up there."
-from Saturday's Miami Herald, an article well worth a read.
Supposuvly, it's not just an accent, it is a true dialect, irregardless of what you might think.
More from the article:
Miami has always been home to Latin American immigrants, but the first sizable wave arrived from Cuba during the 1960s, followed by the Mariel influx of the 1980s and then the balseros of the 1990s. They were joined by political refugees fleeing regimes in Nicaragua and Venezuela and by immigrants from Colombia and Mexico and other countries to the south.
Immigrants overwhelmed the city's population so quickly that before long children growing up in Miami were learning English from people who were not native English speakers themselves. This led to a number of nonnative features like Spanish vowels and "L" sounds being incorporated into the language.
The first sizable wave of Stokes kids arrived in the 70s and early 80s.
On one of the first telephone calls from Macon after his arrival Freshman year at Davidson, he said, "Dad, I feel like a Cuban!" I said, something like "you are a Cuban; you just happen to look like everyone else up there."
Sunday, September 08, 2013
Home as a Better School for Character than a Monastery
After [Luther's] marriage his tone shifted and his concern was much less to establish the necessity of marriage [in light of the otherwise "uncontrollable" sexual impulse] than to portray the home as a school for character. In this sense it was for him a substitute for the monastery. All the vexations of domesticity, the tension of the sexes, bawling babies, and of disobedient children led him to say there is no need to go hunting for crosses. At the same time he was often lyrical over the consolations of the married state.
-Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, pages 256 - 258.
-Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, pages 256 - 258.
Friday, September 06, 2013
Let's Not Forget Cranmer's Wife
Henry [VIII] for all his effrontery was not unmoved by the unrest among the populace, and the intransigence among the distinguished. He resolved to hew all the more closely to the line of schism without heresy, and in the latter part of his reign enacted the Six Articles popularly called the "bloody whip with the six strings" whereby a denial of the real presence was visited with death and clerical marriage was forbidden. Archbishop Cranmer, who had married the niece of one of the Continental reformers, was compelled during this period to keep his wife at home or when traveling to conceal her in a chest; when it was turned upside down she was somewhat inconvenienced – and ought to be included among the minor martyrs of the Reformation.
-more from Bainton's The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Enlarged Edition, p. 198.
-more from Bainton's The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Enlarged Edition, p. 198.
Thursday, September 05, 2013
Calvinism and the Scots
Scotland was the name in Europe above all others in which
Calvinism became most firmly entrenched . . . [I]n no other land did Calvinism effect so tremendous a change in the
national character and the national destiny.
Calvinism transformed the Scots.
In the Middle Ages they were a notoriously rough and disorderly people
who preferred to raid rather than to raise cattle . . . The Reformation changed all that. The Scots were to become a different people
and the alteration was effected by the new kirk armed with the Book of
Discipline.
-The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Bainton, Roland H. (Englarged Edition 1985), pages 178 and 179. (Google has the book here, but less pages 183-248.)
I would venture the speculation that Reformed Christianity in China has been working a similar transformation since the 19th Century. Would that God again open the Middle East to the Gospel.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
e-Builder and Estate Planning
The Miami Herald's Business Monday of yesterday features e-Builder, based in Plantation [Broward County, just north of Miami-Dade], a firm that
has developed cloud-based software for construction program management that makes it simpler for builders and developers to efficiently manage the enormous complexity of major construction projects, and helps reduce costs.
The company’s Web-based system allows its clients — mostly builders and developers of multiple projects — to see and manage every detail of a project. It also permits other players, such as subcontractors and engineers, to view their particular section of a project and immediately communicate with each other via desktop computers, tablets or smartphones.
Its a great story in so many ways. Two brothers, Jon and Ron Antevy, from "a family of construction contractors", working together (such a potent sort of partnership) to create a business that serves builders of complex construction projects as far away as California. Their business bio shows fine educations, hard work, creative minds. They wed all that with enterprise software, which, to me, is ideation applied to the marketplace, one reality linked to another in such a productive way. Plato and Aristotle, together at last.
The software is collaborative, involving people at all levels of the management of a complex construction project.
It fascinates me because where the Antevy brothers live is, on a much larger scale, where I live as an estate planning lawyer, dealing with ideas of what the future should look like, preparing a grand document that expresses that idea and marshaling a client's assets so that, when the contingency, no, the certainty, arises, those assets track the idea efficiently and effectively. Where the horizon of e-Builder is relatively near and relatively certain, I have to deal with a horizon that is certainly there, death, but just when it will arise is usually of great uncertainty. Meanwhile, however, we have developed with our client a plan for what should happen when the certainty arises. And we have assets in the here-and-now that must be linked the plan, and there's the rub: making that link and then, once we make those links, tending those idea-asset links into that future, as circumstances will always change over the balance of the client's life.
I collaborate as well, with the client of course, and sometimes with members of his family, with business partners of that client sometimes, with bankers, accountants, financial advisers, insurance agents, people who also serve the client and ought to be involved with the estate plan build.
I have often thought of using enterprise software on the micro-scale of estate planning. There are many, many variables in such planning, not only in terms of the potential collaborators, but crucially at the asset level. It is too expensive for lawyers to do the work at that level. Staff can do that work, however, as long as they are well trained and well-directed. The well-direction, it seems to me, can largely come from the right enterprise software, it seems to me. What lives in my head, after 40+ years as a lawyer, ought to be transferable in significant part. Just as the education and experience of the Antevy brothers, the owners of e-Builder, were transferred to their software, why not something like that being transferred to the loss-leader of all loss-leaders in the trusts and estates world, estate planning. There is huge market for estate planning, that is, there is a huge need for estate planning, if we could only get the price right.
has developed cloud-based software for construction program management that makes it simpler for builders and developers to efficiently manage the enormous complexity of major construction projects, and helps reduce costs.
The company’s Web-based system allows its clients — mostly builders and developers of multiple projects — to see and manage every detail of a project. It also permits other players, such as subcontractors and engineers, to view their particular section of a project and immediately communicate with each other via desktop computers, tablets or smartphones.
Its a great story in so many ways. Two brothers, Jon and Ron Antevy, from "a family of construction contractors", working together (such a potent sort of partnership) to create a business that serves builders of complex construction projects as far away as California. Their business bio shows fine educations, hard work, creative minds. They wed all that with enterprise software, which, to me, is ideation applied to the marketplace, one reality linked to another in such a productive way. Plato and Aristotle, together at last.
The software is collaborative, involving people at all levels of the management of a complex construction project.
It fascinates me because where the Antevy brothers live is, on a much larger scale, where I live as an estate planning lawyer, dealing with ideas of what the future should look like, preparing a grand document that expresses that idea and marshaling a client's assets so that, when the contingency, no, the certainty, arises, those assets track the idea efficiently and effectively. Where the horizon of e-Builder is relatively near and relatively certain, I have to deal with a horizon that is certainly there, death, but just when it will arise is usually of great uncertainty. Meanwhile, however, we have developed with our client a plan for what should happen when the certainty arises. And we have assets in the here-and-now that must be linked the plan, and there's the rub: making that link and then, once we make those links, tending those idea-asset links into that future, as circumstances will always change over the balance of the client's life.
I collaborate as well, with the client of course, and sometimes with members of his family, with business partners of that client sometimes, with bankers, accountants, financial advisers, insurance agents, people who also serve the client and ought to be involved with the estate plan build.
I have often thought of using enterprise software on the micro-scale of estate planning. There are many, many variables in such planning, not only in terms of the potential collaborators, but crucially at the asset level. It is too expensive for lawyers to do the work at that level. Staff can do that work, however, as long as they are well trained and well-directed. The well-direction, it seems to me, can largely come from the right enterprise software, it seems to me. What lives in my head, after 40+ years as a lawyer, ought to be transferable in significant part. Just as the education and experience of the Antevy brothers, the owners of e-Builder, were transferred to their software, why not something like that being transferred to the loss-leader of all loss-leaders in the trusts and estates world, estate planning. There is huge market for estate planning, that is, there is a huge need for estate planning, if we could only get the price right.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Little Boy Humor and a Remarkable Mind
Eight-year old grandson is visiting us with his family: a mom, a dad, and little(r) sister.
Last night, at the supper table no less, but at least after we finished eating and were just talking, the children wandered into the dangerous topic of putting things up one's nose. It was all just cracking the kids up.
Finally mother had to warn the small people that if they put something up their nose and it wouldn't come out, then we would have to go to the emergency room, where they would put instruments up one's nostrils to extract the object.
More laughter!
"And what would instrument that be?!!," Grandson chortled, "A viola or a violin??!!"
Last night, at the supper table no less, but at least after we finished eating and were just talking, the children wandered into the dangerous topic of putting things up one's nose. It was all just cracking the kids up.
Finally mother had to warn the small people that if they put something up their nose and it wouldn't come out, then we would have to go to the emergency room, where they would put instruments up one's nostrils to extract the object.
More laughter!
"And what would instrument that be?!!," Grandson chortled, "A viola or a violin??!!"
Friday, August 09, 2013
The American Middle Class: Seeking Like Gentiles
When we turned the American dream into a dream about materialism, we
disheartened our young, who now are forced to achieve what we've defined as
success in a straitened economy.
-Peggy Noonan in "How Obama Wooed the Middle Class" in today's WSJ.
24 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
25 “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?
28 “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; 29 and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
31 “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
-Jesus in Matthew 6: 24-34 (NKJV).
-Peggy Noonan in "How Obama Wooed the Middle Class" in today's WSJ.
24 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
25 “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?
28 “So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; 29 and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
31 “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
-Jesus in Matthew 6: 24-34 (NKJV).
Thursday, August 08, 2013
Well, I think it's weird.
I'm not sure I could have survived to adulthood had not my dad, granddad, uncles, and various other grown-up men (and a few women) encouraged me to finish my supper with "Eat it! It will put hair on your chest!" The subtext was always this: The amount of hair on one's chest and (by extension) everywhere else on one's body it might grow, has a direct relationship to the amount of manhood. And being a man, by the way, was always a good thing.
Now this: All along, Gillette tells us, women have wanted hairless men. That's what they really want.
Just another reason, I suppose, why people should keep their clothes on until after they marry.
Tuesday, August 06, 2013
Got Fruit Juice? Got Diabetes?
The fruit juice industry has essentially taken the 'apple-a-day' mentality and used it to sell fruit juices as healthy," said Barry Popkin, a professor in the department of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Gillings School of Public Health.
Popkin and other experts would rather see people eating whole fruit. Because most juicing methods remove the produce's fiber, drinking juice omits one of the key benefits of eating fruit, while delivering huge amounts of sugar and calories.
"Every one of the long-term studies of the health effects of fruit juices shows that you increase your risk of diabetes and weight gain" with regular juice consumption, Popkin said.
One 2010 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology followed more than 43,000 adults in Singapore for five years and found that those who consumed two or more servings of fruit juice per week had a 29 percent higher risk of developing diabetes than those who didn't drink juice regularly — not far behind the 42 percent increased risk for weekly soda drinkers.
-from "Fruit Smoothies Dangerous for Your Health?" by Abby Olena of the Chicago Tribune. (In the Miami Herald home delivery edition today.)
The abstract for the study to which the article refers is here.
Popkin and other experts would rather see people eating whole fruit. Because most juicing methods remove the produce's fiber, drinking juice omits one of the key benefits of eating fruit, while delivering huge amounts of sugar and calories.
"Every one of the long-term studies of the health effects of fruit juices shows that you increase your risk of diabetes and weight gain" with regular juice consumption, Popkin said.
One 2010 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology followed more than 43,000 adults in Singapore for five years and found that those who consumed two or more servings of fruit juice per week had a 29 percent higher risk of developing diabetes than those who didn't drink juice regularly — not far behind the 42 percent increased risk for weekly soda drinkers.
-from "Fruit Smoothies Dangerous for Your Health?" by Abby Olena of the Chicago Tribune. (In the Miami Herald home delivery edition today.)
The abstract for the study to which the article refers is here.
Thursday, August 01, 2013
About that Old Hard Drive
Today, the WSJ reports that a federal jury found GoldmanSachs trader Fabrici Tourre "liable for misleading investors in a mortgage-linked deal that collapsed during
the financial crisis, delivering a historic win for a U.S. regulator [the SEC] eager to
prove its mettle inside the courtroom."
According to the WSJ article, smoking guns included emails Tourre sent to his girl friend:
The computer was then passed on to someone else, who noticed that it continued to pull down fresh e-mails -- messages sent to someone with Tourre's name, a name suddenly in the news. The e-mails, correspondence between the trader and his lawyers, discussed how to handle accusations that he and his employer, Goldman Sachs, had played a key role in engineering a near-financial apocalypse.
Dishonest. Dumb. Great combination.
According to the WSJ article, smoking guns included emails Tourre sent to his girl friend:
Several emails from Mr. Tourre to his girlfriend, Marine
Serres, a Goldman saleswoman at the firm's London office, revealed that Mr.
Tourre shared some pessimism about the market.
At his trial, Mr. Tourre translated what he wrote, partly in French, to Ms. Serres: "The entire building is at risk of collapse at any moment. Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab (as Mitch would kindly call me, even though there is nothing fabulous about me…) standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of these monstrosities."
Mr. Tourre called the note a "silly romantic email to my girlfriend, sent as I was very stressed that day," and said it was referencing a newspaper article he had forwarded to Ms. Serres.
How the government got those emails and others are the subject of this post by Bianca Boscar of the Huffington Post:
Fabrice Tourre (a.k.a. the "Fabulous Fab"), the Goldman Sachs mortgage trader who has become synonymous with Wall Street shenanigans, has now become synonymous with something else: the worst possible way to dispose of an old computer.
Among the more titillating passages in a front-page New York Times expose about Tourre's private correspondence with his lawyers is a disclaimer that the newspaper obtained his e-mails via a computer someone found "discarded in a garbage area in a downtown apartment building."
At his trial, Mr. Tourre translated what he wrote, partly in French, to Ms. Serres: "The entire building is at risk of collapse at any moment. Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab (as Mitch would kindly call me, even though there is nothing fabulous about me…) standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of these monstrosities."
Mr. Tourre called the note a "silly romantic email to my girlfriend, sent as I was very stressed that day," and said it was referencing a newspaper article he had forwarded to Ms. Serres.
How the government got those emails and others are the subject of this post by Bianca Boscar of the Huffington Post:
Fabrice Tourre (a.k.a. the "Fabulous Fab"), the Goldman Sachs mortgage trader who has become synonymous with Wall Street shenanigans, has now become synonymous with something else: the worst possible way to dispose of an old computer.
Among the more titillating passages in a front-page New York Times expose about Tourre's private correspondence with his lawyers is a disclaimer that the newspaper obtained his e-mails via a computer someone found "discarded in a garbage area in a downtown apartment building."
The computer was then passed on to someone else, who noticed that it continued to pull down fresh e-mails -- messages sent to someone with Tourre's name, a name suddenly in the news. The e-mails, correspondence between the trader and his lawyers, discussed how to handle accusations that he and his employer, Goldman Sachs, had played a key role in engineering a near-financial apocalypse.
Dishonest. Dumb. Great combination.
The Orange Blossom Special Train Wreck
Florida insurance regulators unveiled for the first time Wednesday the prices proposed by private insurers for individual health plans to be sold on the state’s federally-run exchange, which is scheduled to launch Oct. 1.
But the proposed health plans and prices — and the state’s analysis that federal healthcare reform would cause premiums to rise — were hardly definitive of the actual costs that Floridians are likely to pay for health insurance next year.
That’s because the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has yet to approve the proposed health plans for Florida’s exchange, and those plans, including the prices, may change as they have in other states.
And while Florida insurance regulators said this week that the Affordable Care Act will cause the price of individual health plans sold in 2014 to rise 30 to 40 percent higher than similar plans sold today, and small group plan premiums could rise by 15 to 20 percent, they also conceded that those projections were based on a “hypothetical” health plan that does not exist anywhere in the state.
What’s more, the price projections released by the state do not factor in substantial government subsidies that will be available to many consumers based on household income, which will offset their actual out-of-pocket
-from the front page of today's Miami Herald.
Read carefully the "What's more" paragraph - an editorial gloss by your friendly journalists, who otherwise orchestrate the tone of this article into a "surely it won't be so bad" key. Those "substantial government subsidies" come from the taxpayers and from those insureds paying the increased premiums, persons to whom those subsidies will not be available "based on household income."
But we shall see, won't we? Sometime after the mid-term Congressional elections, of course. One only hopes that the writers of this article (and their editors) will someday bear the full "out-of-pocket" impact of the AFA.
But the proposed health plans and prices — and the state’s analysis that federal healthcare reform would cause premiums to rise — were hardly definitive of the actual costs that Floridians are likely to pay for health insurance next year.
That’s because the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has yet to approve the proposed health plans for Florida’s exchange, and those plans, including the prices, may change as they have in other states.
And while Florida insurance regulators said this week that the Affordable Care Act will cause the price of individual health plans sold in 2014 to rise 30 to 40 percent higher than similar plans sold today, and small group plan premiums could rise by 15 to 20 percent, they also conceded that those projections were based on a “hypothetical” health plan that does not exist anywhere in the state.
What’s more, the price projections released by the state do not factor in substantial government subsidies that will be available to many consumers based on household income, which will offset their actual out-of-pocket
-from the front page of today's Miami Herald.
Read carefully the "What's more" paragraph - an editorial gloss by your friendly journalists, who otherwise orchestrate the tone of this article into a "surely it won't be so bad" key. Those "substantial government subsidies" come from the taxpayers and from those insureds paying the increased premiums, persons to whom those subsidies will not be available "based on household income."
But we shall see, won't we? Sometime after the mid-term Congressional elections, of course. One only hopes that the writers of this article (and their editors) will someday bear the full "out-of-pocket" impact of the AFA.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
"The Biggest Government Bond Bubble in History" [UPDATED]
So Andrew Haldane, a top official at the Bank of England, declared in June of his own institution, as quoted in "The Near-Zero Interest Rate Trap", an opinion piece in today's WSJ, written by Robert I. McKinnon, a professor at Stanford University and
a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Professor McKinnon writes that the bubble is not limited to the Bank of England:
The Federal Reserve, the Bank
of England, the Bank of Japan, and
European Central Bank all have used quantitative easing to force down their
long-term interest rates. The result is that major industrial economies have all
dramatically increased the market value of government and other long-term bonds
held by their banks and other financial institutions. Now each central bank
fears long-term rates rising to normal levels, because their nation's commercial
banks would suffer big capital losses—in short, they would "de-capitalize."
With less capital, we would have banks reducing lending even further, and there we go again: staring at deflation. Meanwhile, the stock market struggles upward, because investors and savers, rejecting those bonds already, have nowhere else to go. What are the investors and savers to do, then, bury their cash in the back yard, buy gold? The market rules, and it will finally make its will effective, whether the politico-bankers are in Washington, D.C. or some other first-world capital.
As to the stock-market, which had a "Great July" this year, one has to view its return in a 15 or 20 year perspective and, then, discount its rise by the inflation that has occurred during that period. Furthermore, with respect to a tax-paying investor, one has to further reduce those returns by the income tax that the taxpayer must pay on that investor's returns.
As to the stock-market, which had a "Great July" this year, one has to view its return in a 15 or 20 year perspective and, then, discount its rise by the inflation that has occurred during that period. Furthermore, with respect to a tax-paying investor, one has to further reduce those returns by the income tax that the taxpayer must pay on that investor's returns.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
China Fouls Its Farm Lands
Estimates from state-affiliated researchers say that anywhere between 8%
and 20% of China's arable land, some 25 to 60 million acres, may now be
contaminated with heavy metals. A loss of even 5% could be disastrous, taking
China below the "red line" of 296 million acres of arable land that
are currently needed, according to the government, to feed the country's 1.35
billion people.
Rural China's toxic turn is largely a consequence of two trends, say environmental researchers: the expansion of polluting industries into remote areas a safe distance from population centers, and heavy use of chemical fertilizers to meet the country's mounting food needs. Both changes have been driven by the rapid pace of urbanization in a country that in 2012, for the first time in its long history, had more people living in cities than outside of them.
-from a story in today's Weekend Edition of the WSJ, entitled "China's Bad Earth".
Among other things, the rice harvest is becoming increasingly toxic and in decline.
Not enough little girls and younger women, the air fouled by pollution, resulting in shorter life-expectancies, and now this. What is to become of China? Believe me, that bell will toll for us.
Lower Suicide Rates for Coffee Drinkers
These results from three large cohorts [of American adults] support an association between caffeine consumption and lower risk of suicide.
-The conclusion from a study published in the World Journal of Biological Psychiatry.
A cup of coffee certainly lifts my spirits. Drinking coffee raises Dr. McDougall's eyebrows, however. The plant-strong people don't like it either.
I have a list of spirit-lifting, physical activities. Coffee drinking is up there, but certainly not at the top.
A cup of coffee certainly lifts my spirits. Drinking coffee raises Dr. McDougall's eyebrows, however. The plant-strong people don't like it either.
I have a list of spirit-lifting, physical activities. Coffee drinking is up there, but certainly not at the top.
It would be helpful to know who funded the linked-to study.
Friday, July 26, 2013
A High Calling
[God] has "told [us] what is good" (Micah 6:8), in the Bible, in the person of his Son, and in the gift of conscience. He has given us faculties to discern the divine order in the world. Law is thus not merely a means of social control to be manipulated by those in power to achieve their ends. Making, interpreting, and executing law consistent with divine ordering is a high calling, not a power-grab or arbitrary assertion.
-from "Evangelicals and Catholics Together on Law: The Lord of Heaven and Earth - a Joint Statement by Evangelical and Catholic Legal Scholars", just published and accessible to read through the Journal of Christian Thought, the Summer 2013 issue, and the Journal of Catholic Social Thought.
This part of the joint statement (and the whole of it) I find to be profoundly encouraging and moving. Practicing law can become so wearisome and such an invitation to cynicism. In the hands of Christians at least, the process is potentially transformed. While we Christian lawyers are liable to lose sight of our calling, non-lawyer Christians seem to fail utterly to see it.
The faith community has generally lost the idea of vocation except as it applies to religious-workers. How many times did I hear, growing up a Southern Baptist, that this person or that is giving himself to "full-time Christian service", as he marches off to seminary or the mission field. No minister I ever heard of ever recognized a young person going off to law school that way!
At best, the church communities tend to view the lawyers among them as leadership resources for the congregation or denomination and sources of financial support, and, at worst, as Christians who are caught in terrible tension between the dark demands of the law and their Christian faith. The question I have been asked over the years, when the subject of being a Christian lawyer comes up, is a variation of the theme "How can you be a lawyer and a Christian." The answer is that God calls Christians into the profession, and he will not call us into something in which he will not also be absolutely involved.
(Speaking of vocation, I would suggest that the next project for a joint statement is Evangelicals and Catholics Together on Business: The Lord of the Marketplace.)
-from "Evangelicals and Catholics Together on Law: The Lord of Heaven and Earth - a Joint Statement by Evangelical and Catholic Legal Scholars", just published and accessible to read through the Journal of Christian Thought, the Summer 2013 issue, and the Journal of Catholic Social Thought.
This part of the joint statement (and the whole of it) I find to be profoundly encouraging and moving. Practicing law can become so wearisome and such an invitation to cynicism. In the hands of Christians at least, the process is potentially transformed. While we Christian lawyers are liable to lose sight of our calling, non-lawyer Christians seem to fail utterly to see it.
The faith community has generally lost the idea of vocation except as it applies to religious-workers. How many times did I hear, growing up a Southern Baptist, that this person or that is giving himself to "full-time Christian service", as he marches off to seminary or the mission field. No minister I ever heard of ever recognized a young person going off to law school that way!
At best, the church communities tend to view the lawyers among them as leadership resources for the congregation or denomination and sources of financial support, and, at worst, as Christians who are caught in terrible tension between the dark demands of the law and their Christian faith. The question I have been asked over the years, when the subject of being a Christian lawyer comes up, is a variation of the theme "How can you be a lawyer and a Christian." The answer is that God calls Christians into the profession, and he will not call us into something in which he will not also be absolutely involved.
(Speaking of vocation, I would suggest that the next project for a joint statement is Evangelicals and Catholics Together on Business: The Lord of the Marketplace.)
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Shirley Jones on the Diane Rhem Show Today
Wow, what a woman, Shirley Jones, a fixture at our house when the kids were growing up, when the main VHS cassette we had was "The Music Man". "Oklahoma!" was the first screened musical I can remember seeing, and a wide-screen one at that at a Miami top of the line theater. It even had an intermission. Mom and I went. (We were real movie-pals.) I had never seen Shirley Jones before in anything, and I found her simply amazing.
She has a new book out, entitled Shirley Jones: a Memoir, and Diane Rhem interviewed her today on NPR. That interview is worth a visit.
UPDATE: I downloaded the book via Kindle and have read the first third or so of it. I think the interview will do for most people. The author startles with details of her sexual history (and in the interview, one is forewarned of it). The story, simply written, provides a window into the entertainment world and that world is as troubled as we bourgeoisie believe it to be. Miss Jones was an extraordinarily gifted young-woman, in the right place and at the right time. She appears not really to have been prepared for the fantastic world she entered. (A Universalist religious upbringing. No reading of the Great Books or equivalent life-apprentice experience, apparently.) Approaching 80 years of age, however, she can write purple (and wear it) if she chooses. She chooses.
And of course I'll finish the book.
SECOND UPDATE: Finished the book. It is an entertainment. Ms. Jones is an entertainer. The book, easy to read, has substance to it, however, as there clearly is substance to Ms. Jones herself. Why did she remain devoted to her first husband for so long? I think the fundamental answer is her devotion to her children, although she writes of him in indearing terms consistently, perhaps too consistently. Dealing with him was obviously a terribly difficult situation for all of them. She got their children, his son, and herself through it all with a sort of iron will, independence, and remarkable gifts.
She has a new book out, entitled Shirley Jones: a Memoir, and Diane Rhem interviewed her today on NPR. That interview is worth a visit.
UPDATE: I downloaded the book via Kindle and have read the first third or so of it. I think the interview will do for most people. The author startles with details of her sexual history (and in the interview, one is forewarned of it). The story, simply written, provides a window into the entertainment world and that world is as troubled as we bourgeoisie believe it to be. Miss Jones was an extraordinarily gifted young-woman, in the right place and at the right time. She appears not really to have been prepared for the fantastic world she entered. (A Universalist religious upbringing. No reading of the Great Books or equivalent life-apprentice experience, apparently.) Approaching 80 years of age, however, she can write purple (and wear it) if she chooses. She chooses.
And of course I'll finish the book.
SECOND UPDATE: Finished the book. It is an entertainment. Ms. Jones is an entertainer. The book, easy to read, has substance to it, however, as there clearly is substance to Ms. Jones herself. Why did she remain devoted to her first husband for so long? I think the fundamental answer is her devotion to her children, although she writes of him in indearing terms consistently, perhaps too consistently. Dealing with him was obviously a terribly difficult situation for all of them. She got their children, his son, and herself through it all with a sort of iron will, independence, and remarkable gifts.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Ol' Dan Tucker died with Plantar Faciitis
Ol' Dan Tucker (or "Old Dan Tucker") is an old song I learned with a number of others as a very little boy. I had a record player that was in a little suit case with a handle. I could lay it down flat, open the top, plug in the cord, set a record on the turntable, turn it on, and place the needle at the edge of the 78 rpm disk. I remember a particular record - it was yellow - that had Oh Susannah, Ol' Dan Tucker, some nursery rhyme songs. I played it all the time.
But I could never figure out the lyric that reports that Ol' Dan Tucker "died with a toothache in his heel." Your teeth are in your head, I carefully reasoned. How can you have a tooth ache in your foot? I laughed. Somebody was making a joke.
Somebody was telling the truth.
I hurt my right foot, specifically my right heel, at CrossFit a couple of months ago. I ignored the pain, and the pain only got worse. I finally limped to a podiatrist. His diagnosis, after an x-ray and an MRI (I do what I can to support the medical profession these days), was plantar faciitis. I had this problem once before, but the pain was centered at my arch. This pain is in my heel. Like a sharp nail is buried in it, point up.
And its killing me. I probably won't die, but I finally understand what happened to Ol' Dan Tucker, poor guy.
But I could never figure out the lyric that reports that Ol' Dan Tucker "died with a toothache in his heel." Your teeth are in your head, I carefully reasoned. How can you have a tooth ache in your foot? I laughed. Somebody was making a joke.
Somebody was telling the truth.
I hurt my right foot, specifically my right heel, at CrossFit a couple of months ago. I ignored the pain, and the pain only got worse. I finally limped to a podiatrist. His diagnosis, after an x-ray and an MRI (I do what I can to support the medical profession these days), was plantar faciitis. I had this problem once before, but the pain was centered at my arch. This pain is in my heel. Like a sharp nail is buried in it, point up.
And its killing me. I probably won't die, but I finally understand what happened to Ol' Dan Tucker, poor guy.
Saturday, July 13, 2013
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