Good is God

Just a thought for this December.  Here is a corny video but cute.

You may also have seen this article about a New York policeman.

This policeman's actions was great but it's inspirational underpinnings is given here by Mychal Judge.

"With all the commotion over this photo of simple, perfect kindness came an affirmation of a theological precept once proposed by the late Father Mychal Judge, himself widely known as the FDNY chaplain who perished at the World Trade Center. Judge was also an unofficial chaplain to Manhattan’s homeless, able to call many of them by name as he strolled the city in sandaled feet and a friar’s brown habit. “Hello, William!… Hello, Ralph! … Hello, Peter!” he would say.

His smile was always joined by a few buoying words and a dollar, folded lengthwise because he thought that made it seem less of a handout. He one day summarized his particular theology by inverting the old Irish mantra that God is good.

“Good is God,” Judge said.

What he meant was that just as the devil is to be found in evil, God is to be found in goodness. He further believed that in recognizing the good in others, you strengthen that good and therefore God. He also felt that embracing your own goodness is the way to grace."

Judge died as a first responder in the World Trade Centre doing good.

Christopher Hitchens in his 2007 book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" effectively argued the case against organized religion.

Interestingly you can say the same thing about profit for business too. Good practice leads to profits. Profit by itself is greed. It's similar to the idea of looking at stars being best done indirectly with your peripheral vision.  Whenever you seek something directly it becomes counterproductive. The best things are accomplished it seems by just doing the right things, as this New York policeman demonstrated.

News Today is Not Real

News today is not real.  It's like wrestling was in the 70's. You know there's a hint of truth about it.  But it's all entertainment.  Even Colbert in The Colbert Report uses a term "truthiness" that implies there is no real truth just a semblance of it.

With the Colbert Report, Jon Stewart, The Onion and This is That satire, for example, the line between the news and entertainment has never been so indistinct. For those who have watched the recent US election coverage you'll know where this has taken us. Journalist are now politically aligned pundints. You throw in a few anecdotes and you then draw your conclusions. It may be highly entertaining but not informative.  And as we see in the Mitt Romney's campaign in the US, if you tell a big enough lie long enough, people believe it. It's all marketing.

Blame it on the toxic bipartisan polarization that exists now but I think you can also blame it on Halloween in 1938 and the radio drama "War of the Worlds" by Orsen Welles.  Orsen Wells used a news-bulletin format. If you came into this program, after the notice at the beginning that it was fiction, you were scared to death that Martians were invading. This marketing gimmick worked. The entertainment industry took notice. This is when people started purposely confusing news for entertainment by not giving any notice about the distinction. Now we confuse entertainment for news. 

Mind-forged Manacles

Today the Arab countries are ablaze with protests in the streets for a slight to their Islamic god. Yesterday it was the physical assault of the Crusades against the Moors. The pattern repeats itself. Who says history can teach us anything?

Nothing better describes religions than the expression used by William Blake in his famous “London” poem -  “mind-forged manacles”.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

Surely religion is the root cause of much of man’s self-inflicted suffering. Oh if only we could shed those chains, those non-evidence-based claims. Not easy but not impossible. We put them on ourselves. Tradition and authority impose them. An uncritical uneducated population maintains them.

William Blake was aware of the self-inflicted limits placed on thought.  He advocated imagination as a means to overcome the restrictions of tradition and authority. He especially disliked science as he saw it as nature being tooth-and claw and in his London poem quoted above saw the nasty effect of the industrial revolution. But Blake himself had a mind-forged manacle based on the time he lived. For he was limited to what was known at his time. He died in 1827, 32 years before Darwin published his “Origin of Species”.  So when he published his Lamb poem asking, "Little Lamb, who made thee?/Dost thou know who made thee?", he did not realize that Darwin would, for the first time in history, provided an alternative answer to the only one at that time - a religious-based explanation.  Tyger complementing the Lamb poem has the narrator ask: "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" The answer of course is yes. Nature through evolution made both. We know today there is now no need to invoke good or evil or a God for paradoxes seen through the lens of religion. Good, evil, God are anthropomorphic terms that may one day be anachronistic. Unfortunately, as we see in the daily news, they still rule in the southern religious intolerant Taliban-like states of the US and in the eastern Islamic countries.

Why not use our imaginations and slightly rewrite the Grassroot’s song Let’s Live for Today?
I think John Lennon would approve.

"When I think of all the worries people seem to find
And how they're in a hurry to complicate their mind
By chasing after religions and dreams that can't come true
I'm glad that we are different, we've better things to do"

False Economies are Based on Arbitrage - the Sleight of Hand Myth of Hedging.

I was fortunate enough to have obtained a science degree before I got an MBA and learned about arbitrage. Something about arbitrage just didn’t make sense to me. Otherwise I might have bought into this win-lose proposition that business use to hedge their bets and thought it made sense. Basically arbitrage is a form of financial speculation whereby you find a resource that is under priced and then buy it as fast as you can and resell it as fast as you can for the real market price or higher, thus making a quick profit. Business use it to hedge their risky bets; to take risk off the table so they say. But in doing so obviously someone (the someone who had underpriced their resource) loses. But for business, especially Conservative or Republican oriented businesses, where a dog-eat-dog mentality prevails, this sleight of hand is fine. In fact it’s ideal because it minimizes your risk at someone else’s expense. An excuse used for arbitrage is that it determines the real price of a commodity. Again the hidden hand of arbitrage reveals all. Hocus pocus. It’s magic. Let’s not really look too closely at it because it works for this and those in power - the wealthy 1%. In fact arbitrage kills capitalism. 

Conservatives Don’t Know Arithmetic

I have often heard that Conservative times are tough times. But I think Bill Clinton proved that in his nomination speech for Barack Obama at the Democratic Convention last week by providing us some very interesting numbers. He pointed out that Democrats produced twice as many jobs as Republicans in the US.

The Conservatives in Canada are in lockstep with their Republican brethren in the US. Unfortunately Canadians are now suffering under a majority Conservative government. It seems collectively we’re not smart enough to learn from the US experience with Republican governments. It seems we need to find out ourselves how bad the Conservative mind set  really is for our economy. Perhaps we can take a reality check from Bill Clinton.

Clinton pointed out a very interesting but not surprising fact, if you know that Conservative times are tough times. In the US jobs growth with Democrats is much better, double, than with Republicans over the last 50 years.

Overpopulation: The Elephant in the Room

On October 31, 2011, the global population boomed and hit the all-time high of 7 billion people. Some people see this milestone as a great accomplishment of humankind, but I feel it is a step in the wrong direction. Since 1915, the world’s population has quadrupled, increasing by 5.2 billion. The Earth is a closed system. Continued growth of the human population is unsustainable because of this. As our population rises, it grows closer to reaching the earth’s carrying capacity. Increasing populations negatively impact both the human race and the environment it depends upon. Although this affirmation is supported by a vast wealth of scientific evidence, it has serious moral implications. Most notably, it has been argued that limiting population growth infringes upon human rights. A counter argument is presented which demonstrates that not limiting population growth causes greater infringement upon human rights. By adopting an ecocentric viewpoint, I assert that population growth must be limited. I support my argument by providing first evidence that population growth is negatively impacting both the environment and human kind and second refuting the stances against limiting population growth.

The Pirates Among Us - The Offshore Tax Evaders

Please take a few minutes to listen to this episode of The Current on offshore tax evasion.

This documentary applies to the US as well as Canada. It points out how governments target the underground economy instead of the offshore economy. The offshore economy is estimated to contain 10-15% of the world’s wealth. The Cayman Islands and Bahamas have been set up by banks, such as the Royal Bank of Canada to, assist greedy people and corporations to avoid paying taxes. Why should this group be allowed to avoid taxes? Lobbyists, lawyers and accountants working for their rich clients may try to explain why such tax avoidance schemes should be allowed but there really is no “public good” reason that governments should allow offshore tax havens let alone assist in setting them up. The bottom line is that there is absolutely no good reason that offshore tax havens should be allowed. Absolutely nothing justifies the use of tax havens. Period!

The Problem of Entertainment

In the past entertainment must have been a luxury that few could afford. Like everything taken to excess today entertainment is problematic. Today entertainment appears to be much more than a diversion but rather an end in itself. Whole industries, movies, theatre, sports, gaming, gambling have sprung up to support the demand. Like consuming too much food or alcohol, consuming too much entertainment is very problematic.

Are Rich People Mentally Ill? Seriously.

You often hear expressions about stashing money away for hard times. This may be prudent or instinctive like squirrels saving food for the winter. However, when hoarding resources goes on for an extended period of time by humans, sometimes over generations, one has to wonder if those that engage in this activity have become deranged. Are they impaired mentally? Why would anyone want more of a resource than they could possibly use unless they are somewhat mentally challenged. You can’t take it with you so why try? Maybe rich people just don’t get it because of a mental impairment. Of course there are always rich people who eventually want to give back but in many cases they’ve already done damage by hoarding and are making repairs.

Three Under-appreciated Western Cultural Icons

Why did Western Culture develop the industrial revolution and then far surpass other cultures in developing science and applying it to it’s civilization?

I think the answer is from an unlikely and under-appreciated source. Only the Western Culture has cultural icons that develop skeptical thinking in its population. I know education or the school system may want to claim the credit, but I believe that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy (The Holy Trinity) deserve the credit. Indeed, each of these innocent children stories once started, evolved into more elaborate deceptions in their detailing that made them more believable to impressionistic minds.