For the Gentle Reader https://www.evernote.com/shard/s53/sh/f02da4cf-1ec4-4069-91c3-b6b7ab28abb0/ddb6abe51ce6fbf49f0c7eb9644f1836
via The Gentle Reader by Norm Lucas http://nglucas.blogspot.com/2014/12/predictions-for-2015_29.html
Faith
Predictions for 2015
Predictions for 2015
Oscillations in the jet stream will cause more record-setting weather patterns in the US, the arctic and Australia as climate change continues unabated. Radical right-wing American politicians will continue to deny that the global weather fluctuations have anything to do with carbon dioxide (CO2) levels exceeding 400 ppm. Thinning ice sheets at both poles will expose more shipping lanes and change the pH of the Atlantic along with its temperature.
Oil prices around $50 per barrel will persist until a serious shock to production capacity occurs. Low oil prices and geopolitical complications with natural gas supplies will cause worsening CO2 levels during the year. The US Senate won’t ratify any climate treaty due to continued political denial of the greenhouse gas effect. This may cause developing nations to remain uncommitted to a climate treaty.
The US Federal Open Market Committee will raise the discount interest rate in April despite continuing headwinds to the global economy in Asia and Europe. The improving US economy will make the US dollar more attractive as a safe haven for capital preservation. Recession in Russia will precipitate further attempts from Putin at gaining territory in Moldova or the arctic. Danish interests may become threatened if Putin chooses expansion in the arctic. Putin will become more aggressive toward the US and Saudi Arabia if evidence of oil price collusion appears implicating the two producers. Wealth from Russia may find it’s way into US assets, despite Russian central bank measures. This will raise some commodity prices again for wealthy individuals and hedge fund managers seeking capital preservation.
Reduced funding for both the IRS and the EPA will result in more punitive example-making and higher financial penalties for apprehended lawbreakers and increasing numbers of cases destined for settlements. IRS and EPA bureaucracy will appear to become more intransigent and less sensible as the agencies try to impose lawful constraints on businesses with fewer resources. This will lead to greater decrying of the US regulatory scheme and the federal government as a whole among citizens who misunderstand the tendencies of an underfunded bureaucracy.
The Republican control of the US Congress and the dearth of moderate voices will lead to fewer compromises on policy and increased interference in market factors. Corporate and financial interests will more easily, regularly and directly purchase influence in the government as the Supreme Court continues to reduce regulations and laws prohibiting influence-peddling for politicians and corporations. Campaigning for the 2016 elections will begin early and wax negative very quickly.
Violent struggles for political control will continue to disrupt lives in the Central African Republic and in Yemen as most of the world ignores the deaths of innocent victims in those locations. Foreign exchange uncertainty in the European Union will become compounded as political changes arise in Greece and Spain. No one in Malaysia or Indonesia will note the success of South Korean airlines in correcting accident prone cockpit procedures. As a result the two nations won’t request or receive help from any nations with better air transportation safety records and airline disasters will continue in that region.
via The Gentle Reader by Norm Lucas http://nglucas.blogspot.com/2014/12/predictions-for-2015.html
Local Politics in 2014
Local politics usually aren’t pretty, I have enough experience to understand that. Still, the most recent election leaves me disheartened over two politicians for whom I formerly had much respect. A Republican, who had served our county well, lost his dignity by allowing his name to be printed on a smear flyer assailing four local Democrats. His flyer joined him with three inexperienced Republicans in attempting to link local Democrats with national Democrats where no policy or personal association existed. The flyer accused the four Democrats of supporting socialism and the killing of babies in the womb. It was the same junk propaganda we’ve become accustomed to in nasty national politics.
Sadly, the political smear worked. The electorate was robbed of at least one good leader by the falsehoods promulgated in the flyer. Worse, at least one Republican, who had earned a second office by serving well in his first learned to take the low road in an election. He must have lost his confidence in his integrity, or he sold it to some campaign contributor who wanted an experienced politician to list alongside the lesser candidates. Either way, the Republican who had served so well threw away my vote, worsened our local politics and won his office. Now he may become just another right-wing political hack.
The second politician who threw away my respect did so by switching parties immediately after winning her election unopposed as an incumbent Democrat headed back to the state legislature. She had served as the last remaining moderate Democrat in our state legislature. She chose to abdicate that important role to join the majority Republicans without allowing the voters to learn of her plan to switch. I’m unsure whether I am upset more by her desertion of the pivotal role she played in the legislative debates as a moderate Democrat, or by the deceptive way she allowed her constituents to re-elect her to her seat. Both of the affects have diminished the leadership she otherwise could have wielded in her last term.
via The Gentle Reader by Norm Lucas http://ift.tt/1Hbdi2f
Mental Health Funding
I find the situation facing Missouri law enforcement officers very discouraging. They now deal with mental health patients so regularly that the state has begun to offer training for those situations as public safety incidents. Not so long ago those incidents were considered referral incidents. Officers previously summoned an ambulance for mental patients with behaviors which ran amok with disorderly conduct laws. Ambulance personnel knew where to find help for these mental patients and repeated incidents were far more rare.
State and federal care for mental health patients has become so under-funded and inaccessible that law enforcement officers and correctional officers deal with those patients more than mental health providers do. This brings about new demands on law enforcement and poorer outcomes for the mentally ill. Jailers become substitute caregivers in an institution designed for punishment rather than treatment.
The way our society treats the most vulnerable population among us says far more about us than we ever might reveal in our collective rhetoric. The resultant suffering of the mentally ill and their families has completely escaped the notice of conservative politicians who foisted these cuts on the mental health system. Conservatives scream that people kill people, not guns, but the same politicians won’t allow spending to help the mentally ill avoid the most dangerous situations. They prefer to ignore the need and let the problem become a police and correctional system matter.
via The Gentle Reader by Norm Lucas http://ift.tt/1uti87b
Predictions for the remainder of 2014
Increased misapprehension of climate change will grow because of the difficulty most people have differentiating between climate and weather. That and the reports of the sun cycle approaching conditions which might give rise to a little ice age will obfuscate and confuse the issue for many non-scientists. The scandal involving the EPA official who falsified reports on the climate while collecting a huge government salary will also fuel some politicians, pundits and media commentators to further mislead the public about the global temperature trend lines and their meaning.
Al Queida will continue to suffer financial woes making terror attacks fewer and less effective, especially in the west. Grassroots recognition of the misogynist underpinnings of the movement will slowly erode recruitment among nations where women continue to make education gains. Women in the west may largely continue to ignore the plight of their sisters under oppression. This will leave the greatest potential societal weapons against Al Queida underutilized.
European or Chinese financial woes will add uncertainty for world markets just as conditions in the U.S. approach opportunity for employment gains. Momentum in the US economic recovery will lessen from growth rates forecast by some at nearly three percent to growth rates more in line with the previous several years. Employment gains will continue to be deferred as large companies hoard cash positions rather than risking growth in the anemic continuation of the slowest, but longest recovery of any recessionary period in US history.
The widening talent gap in the US will increase a potential to become filled with immigrant labor as Republicans finally realize that an immigration reform bill will benefit their party even more than it will the Democrats. This change will sustain or worsen existing frictional unemployment leading to increased numbers of part-time workers seeking but not finding full-time work. Both these trends will keep downward pressure on wages and subsequently reduce the chances of higher inflation in the US for the shorter term.
Selective enforcement of government regulations will increase as the US congress continues to cut regulatory agency budgets while simultaneously enacting stricter rules in response to further market failures. Lobbyists will succeed in influencing representatives to write more industry loopholes in regulatory schemes and reducing tax revenues available for enforcement. The public will become more exposed to externalities and other market failure affects, but will not accept reforms to tax codes or regulations strong enough to protect them until greater harm to the public has already precipitated obviously selective enforcement on the industries not well-represented through lobbying efforts. Little or no public understanding of these correlations will occur due to under-reporting by the media. The Tea Party will not comprehend this trend and will fail to use it as a new rallying cry against establishment politics.
Payday loan restrictions will arise in more states as consumer advocates, credit unions and others seek to replace the most pernicious predatory lending practices with better lending offerings. Pawn shops will escape the changes in lending regulations, but car title loan and other lenders of last resort will become subject to rate rules and fee restrictions making the business less lucrative and the lending less harmful to economically challenged families. Banks may or may not gain any new business as rules become enforced, credit unions will become the biggest potential beneficiaries of the regulations.
The US postal service will continue to contract due to missing or botching the chance to provide rudimentary banking services to under-served populations. Congress will not help the service as too many representatives have become beholden to lobbyists for FedEx and UPS. Likewise, the fragile and vulnerable email system will not become viewed as a market opportunity by anyone in the postal service leadership. No USPS equivalent of a guaranteed electronic delivery system will arise, and the postal service will have lost two of its last chances to remain viable and essential to the US economy.
via The Gentle Reader by Norm Lucas http://ift.tt/1bZvLwS
Et tu, Peanuts?
In the bestselling book, Wheat Belly, William Davis explores the relationship between hybrid wheat and some modern health problems. His study of the unintended consequences of hybrid wheat consumption causes me some concerns. Just as a certain cohort of the population seems unable to digest and benefit from some nutrients found in hybrid wheat products, I suspect that other recently studied food allergies can be attributed to changes in crops.
My experience as a child included knowledge of only one child with a food intolerance. I consider this rather striking because I was raised peripatetic, with childhood experiences ranging across much of the eastern half of the U.S. I had one friend who was lactose-intolerant. I have no memories of childhood friends with any other food intolerances at all. In adulthood I have one friend who has developed allergies to nuts very late in his life, but I know of many children with food intolerances. Nut allergies have risen in frequency to become a part of the cultural lexicon.
These experiences and other anecdotal observations make me wonder about what has changed over the course of the decades during my lifetime. The study done by Dr. Davis suggests to me that perhaps nut allergies stem not from changes in the human condition, but from alterations in nut proteins brought on through hybrid selection. If this is the case, we may also find evidence that hybrid selection has changed the composition of nuts even beyond the more easily identified man-made commercial groves. Like genetically modified crops, these hybrid trees may have leached changes into areas not purposely exposed to the hybrid traits as the nuts fell further from the tree than our proverbial thinking might presume.
Whatever the model for the dispersion of the hybrid traits, I am willing to wager that research will eventually uncover similarities between the ill-effects of hybrid wheat on a cohort in the population and the ill-effects of nuts on another cohort of the population. They each appear to be unintended consequences of our attempts to change crop production by altering genetic design. By extension, this experience bodes very badly for any attempts at alteration of the human genome, present or to come. Thus I regard such experiments with the same disdain that I hold for the eugenics considered and attempted in the beginning of social Darwinism.
via The Gentle Reader by Norm Lucas http://nglucas.blogspot.com/2013/12/et-tu-peanuts.html
Pseudo-intellectuals
Many Christians have felt the sting of criticism stemming from a common fallacy. Specifically, the criticism that faith has no place alongside scientific or intellectual pursuits. This criticism comes mostly from folks who claim that one cannot prove the existence of God. These are the same people who claim that no physical location can possibly exist to allow for heaven or hell as described in the Bible. Some go as far as to deny the traditional claims of the scripture and therefore the resurrection of Jesus.
While most Christians don’t abandon their faith in the face of these criticisms, some young Christians feel compelled to give up the scholarly disciplines sometimes needed for spiritual growth. Many of them believe that a scholarly pursuit will lead away from faith, rather than reinforcing faith because of the pseudo-intellectual attacks made by misapprehending critics.
I find the work of the best physicists and mathematicians very helpful in dispelling the bases for these pseudo-intellectual attacks. A bit of study shows that the best scientists, ranging from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking acknowledge God’s existence and even attribute various aspects of our existence to God’s providence. Some of the cosmological explanations they derive seem a bit heavy, but even Carl Sagan made reference to the almighty in his understanding of the universe.
Einstein’s favorite mathematician, Kurt Godel, wrote a famous ontological proof of the existence of God using modal logic. His was an improvement on the work of Anselm and later, Leibniz. None have found a better proof of God’s existence since Godel.
Lately, astrophysicists have admitted to understanding the form of less than twenty-five percent of the known universe. This lack of knowledge about the most basic make-up of seventy-five percent of the known universe is accompanied by disagreement as to whether our universe is part of a multi-verse, or not. Surely these gaps in our knowledge leave plenty of room for the existence of both a heaven and a hell.
So I hope my fellow Christians will join me in inviting the pseudo-intellectuals to let faith answer the questions that start with “why”, just as we trust science to answer the questions about “how”. Likewise, we invite all students of the sciences to join Christians in enjoying the wonderment of God’s beautiful creation through the unending scrutiny of its myriad and infinite intricacies.
via The Gentle Reader by Norm Lucas http://nglucas.blogspot.com/2013/11/pseudo-intellectuals.html
Product Placement
You may have seen products placed in television shows and movies to advertise from within the storyline of the show. One particular show features Chevrolet automobiles driven by law enforcement agents. Advertisements from Chevrolet accompany this television show on a regular basis.
Interestingly, one of the plot lines for the show included an alleged perpetrator who drove a Ford vehicle. The plot development brought mention of the Ford vehicle driven by the suspect several times during the show. As in every other episode of the show the protagonists drove the Chevrolet.
Could this be the opposite of the product placement? The producers of the show seemed to subtly vilify a competitor to their sponsor. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive to such things. Still, the repetition seemed to indicate intent.
via The Gentle Reader by Norm Lucas http://nglucas.blogspot.com/2013/08/product-placement.html
Timeshare Scams Enlarged
Timeshare purveyors have a new scam. Not content to take property management fees from people forever, now they want to take vacation management fees from folks in perpetuity! Once upon a time the timeshare sellers held 51% of properties as condominiums used to bribe vacationers into a protracted high-pressure sales pitch. As buyers finally got wise they found fewer willing subjects to lure into the timeshare scam with reduced rate overnight stays.
Now they package those same properties as an alternative to hotel rooms or condominium rentals. Lest they miss out on the chance to hook you for life, they charge an annual vacation management fee. Reminiscent of the timeshare maintenance fee, it lasts more than a lifetime. It can become part of your estate! Your children and grandchildren could end up paying annually for your contractual obligation long after you have found your eternal vacation spot.
The 51% controlling property interest in the timeshare condominiums has been turned into an enticement in a ploy to tie up your airfare arrangements, cruise packaging and overnight accommodations for your entire family forever. If you bought into the timeshare scam, now they can get you coming and going, instead of just staying. Thousands of vacant timeshare units have become the bait for the new takeover ploy to control every dollar you might spend on vacation outside of restaurants and souvenir shops. The chutzpah of the timeshare sales force has been turned loose on the whole vacation marketplace. The $1,300 they want up front will pale when compared to the annual fees which never end. Let the vacationer beware!
via The Gentle Reader by Norm Lucas http://nglucas.blogspot.com/2013/07/timeshare-scams-enlarged.html
Freedom and the Ninth Amendment
The many constitutional amendments proposed by the extreme right have begun to expose a seeming lack of knowledge about the document they claim to hold so dear. In Missouri the right wing has proposed amendments to the state constitution purporting to protect the right to farm, the right to pray in school, the right to raise children and various state laws about the right to do more with guns. These Republicans show so little understanding of the U.S. constitution that I have to wonder if some of them can recall high school civics class. Their fear mongering seems to imply that somehow we can’t enjoy these freedoms now.
If some of them did recall the Ninth Amendment, the mistaken notion that more law somehow preserves freedom might not feature in their misguided rhetoric. Libertarians and Constitutional Party members could inform these right-wing Republicans that in the matter of protected rights, less codification often preserves more freedom. Almost every time a legislature attempts to define or refine rights protected under the Ninth Amendment, those rights inevitably become inadvertently or intentionally more limited. For politicians espousing smaller government, these right-wing Republicans should be ashamed of their seeming inability to grasp the obvious. If one desires less government intrusiveness, one should not write more law.
While these seemingly obvious observations appear not to have occurred to these radical right-wing Republicans, it seems more likely they have conveniently avoided any scholarly study of the constitution because they prefer to perpetuate more jaded interpretations. Maliciously misleading voters in this way would almost seem to require one to disavow the study of political history and the law. The lawyers among these right-wing conservatives must have private paroxysms over these wild incongruities, or perhaps no consciences. While no one expects complete honesty from any politician, the right-wing appears especially egregious in their attempts to deceive voters when they invoke needless fears and propose ways to limit our freedoms while claiming to protect our liberty.
via The Gentle Reader by Norm Lucas http://nglucas.blogspot.com/2013/06/freedom-and-ninth-amendment.html
Norman Lucas, writing for the gentle reader. 