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The Reformation: A History

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I finished it. It took me ten months, but I finished it. Last night I completed The Reformation: A History by
Diarmaid MacCulloch. Part of the reason it took me so long is because after reading so much of the history of the 16th century, I was inspired to go and re-read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, a work of fiction heavily dependent on the history of the 17th century in the aftermath of the Reformation.

Coincidentally last night I was provided with a reminder that some of these battles of Christianity are recurrent or never settled — for example the discomfort of more established Christianity with more mystic strains of Christianity. I was tuned into “Family Talk,” the Christian talk station on my XM radio, and the host was Al Mohler. He was criticizing the work of an individual whose name escapes me, but the person had apparently posted a modern 95 theses. (Martin Luther is credited with kicking off the Reformation when he posted his 95 Theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.) 

On the Family Talk program Mohler had specific criticisms for the modern writer but his critique seemed to apply generally to more individualized forms of worship, unbound by more organized teaching. In particular, he was critical of forms of worship that focused on a “feel good” positive view of humanity and its relationship with God and didn’t start with original sin and end with salvation through Jesus. Mystics crop up again and again through Christian history and, again and again, they are attacked and put down by more established, organized forms of Christianity. (This is a bit of an aside, neither Reformation Protestants or Counter Reformation Catholics had much use for mystics.)

The idea of making original sin the linchpin of Christianity (and resistance to that idea) crops up again and again. St. Paul and St. Augustine focus on the irredeemable sinfulness of humans more so than did Jesus or the medieval Catholic Church. Luther and John Calvin also made human sinfulness the starting point for Christianity. As I read these folks, humans are such depraved worms in the eyes of God that no actions we take in life could possibly make us worthwhile and so, only by God’s infinite grace can humans be worthy of salvation. (I’m a bit troubled as to why an omniscient, omnipotent, infinitely good God would craft us to be such worms, but that’s beyond the scope of this entry.) Still today we have ideological struggles between people who think that humans are powerless to make themselves worthy through actions and those who think that good works are the measure of one’s worth.

The clashes between Reformation Protestants and Counter Reformation Catholics was one of the things that led indirectly to the Enlightenment and our more secular Western culture. In part this is because it is difficult not to be a bit skeptical when you have decades of people torturing and killing each other because each side believes it is an adherent of the one true religion and is compelled to force the other side into the fold. And, if your skepticism reveals to you that these people are torturing and killing each other over the question of whether, during mass, bread and wine turn into the blood and flesh of Jesus or are merely symbolic of the blood and flesh of Jesus, you might start looking for answers elsewhere.

In any case, if you are interested in this period in history, this is the book to read.

Advance America on Brian Bosma

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Advance Indiana offers very thoughtful commentary on Brian Bosma and his guest column in the Star. It praises Bosma and the House Republicans for a progressive economic agenda and an austere state government budget but takes them to task for a radical and divisive social agenda.

I tend to disagree with some of the praise  because I believe a lot of the budget balancing was done by passing the buck to local government and believe that the economic measures are more regressive than progressive (toll roads and unregulated utilities being more prominent in the 19th and early 20th century than the late 20th century.) My difference of opinion notwithstanding, the post is definitely worth checking out.

More on the War on Science

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Last week when linking to the website of Fourth Congressional District candidate David Sanders, I digressed into a discussion of the Bush administration’s War on Science. Dr. Sanders was kind enough to copy me on a letter to the editor he recently submitted to the Indianapolis Star with respect to a column they ran today representing George Will’s attempts to cast doubt on global warming.

George Will in “Journalism Takes the Heat” continues to be a willing foot soldier in the Bush administration War on Science. His assault on the scientific consensus on the effects of human activities on climate change is filled with irrelevancies and half-truths. The quotation from Science magazine (which Will has been using for years) stating that scientists in 1976 warned of “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” is a distortion; the full statement concerns “the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years” and explicitly does not include “effects as those due to the burning of fossil fuels.”

Meanwhile, I came across a Scripps Howard editorial in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette on the Bush administration’s anti-science efforts. I had forgotten to mention the one about the 24 year old Bush administration flack who instructed NASA to make sure that “theory” appeared everywhere NASA talked about the Big Bang on the grounds that this widely accepted explanation of the origins of the universe was a religious issue. In addition, NASA’s public relations department had been instructed to restrict James Hansen’s access to the press, sit in on any interviews and monitor his lectures and writings lest he express views on global warming that didn’t square with those of the Bush administration.

I’m not a huge fan of the philosophy of Ayn Rand, but I’m reminded of John Galt’s big speech in Atlas Shrugged where he talks about “A” equals “A.” I took that part of the speech to mean that there are objective facts which have to be dealt with and one fails to acknowledge those facts at one’s own peril. Burning fossil fuels either does or does not contribute to global warming. The scientific method is probably the best tool we have to determine the reality of the situation. If we deliberately ignore the information obtained through our observations, then we’ll pay the consequences. Reality will not change simply because we ignore it.

Yglesias on DST

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Matthew Yglesias has a post on Daylight Saving Time.

John J. Miller observes that “The person who invented the abomination that is Daylight Saving Time obviously was not responsible for getting children out of bed and off to school.” Indeed, DST is a huge pain in the ass for everyone.

. . .

For one thing, as far as energy conservation measures go, altering the structure of time is a little extreme. More to the point, there’s no evidence that this actually works. Even if it did work, the amount of possible savings is minimal since all it targets is electric lights which are a very minor component of overall energy usage.

The National Geographic article linked above is from July 2005 and is entitled “More Daylight Savings (sic): Energy Boon or Scheduling Snafu.” It notes that the energy saving data is sketchy and old. The federal government passed an expansion of DST which is to go into effect in March 2007 (3 weeks earlier than it began this year) based on studies conducted in 1974 and 1975. New studies are to be completed before the 2007 effective date. The federal government’s cut first, measure later approach to legislation reminds me of the Daniels administration.

My DST problem story

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Here is my Daylight Saving Time tale of woe. I use my cell phone as an alarm clock. It gets its time from the cell tower. As of last night, it had not yet switched over to Eastern Daylight Time. So, I left alone alarm #1 — a recurring alarm set for 5:10 a.m. and set alarm #2 for 4:10 a.m. (which is the equivalent of 5:10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time). Sure enough, the cell tower caught up over night and so my 4:10 alarm went off an hour earlier than I wanted to get up. I was cognizant of the possibility, so when that alarm went off, I checked another clock, verified that it was only 4:10, and went back to sleep.

But, it took me awhile to get back to sleep, so when my 5:10 alarm went off, I was too tired to get up and decided to skip the gym. This is surely what my pro-DST nemesis — a shadowy, lurking figure with no fixed address — had in mind. Having messed with my workout routine, when our climatic battle comes in the final scene, I will be weak as a kitten. Crafty bastard.

Oh, wait. That’s not real life. Hmmm, lack of sleep must be getting to me. Did I mention that, were we still under Eastern Standard Time, I could have been in bed an extra hour? Grumble.

Prisoner’s Dilemma

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I was reading the comments over at Taking Down Words and noticed  RiShawn Biddle’s observations on the state of political discourse in the state and in the country. I’m paraphrasing, so my apologies if I miss some nuance, but essentially he is troubled by the fact that Republicans and Democrats are constantly at each others throats. Each side exaggerates the faults of others out of all proportion and rarely, if ever, credits the other side for a good idea.

I think that’s a fairly accurate statement for national politics. I’m not certain whether it’s entirely accurate at the state level as a whole,  but, certainly there is enough of it generally, and in the blogosphere
the knives are always drawn.

It seems to me that we have something of a prisoner’s dilemma, particularly at the federal level and, to the extent the same things are happening in Indiana, at the state level as well. I’m sure mathematicians and game theorists will howl in agony at my inadequate explanation — and go to the linked site for a fuller explanation — but essentially it is this. In the prisoner’s dilemma, two prisoners both have an opportunity to squeal to the warden. If both stay silent, both benefit a little bit. If one squeals and the other stays silent, the squealer wins big and the silent one loses big. If both squeal then both lose quite a bit, but not quite as much as the loser when one is silent and the other is a squealer. Overall, the best thing for everyone is if both keep silent.

Something similar is going on with Republicans and Democrats. Overall, society wins if they both play nice. But, the rewards are pretty big for the bad actor if one side decides to be bad while the other is playing nice. And, the downside is pretty significant if you try to play nice and the other side screws you.

I tend to think the current iteration stems from the ’94 Gingrich/Republican revolution where the Republicans upped the negativity in sliming their opponents while the Democrats were playing by the older (comparatively nicer) rules. But, I’m sure others perceive some older transgression by the Democrats as having “started it.” For this post, I’m not all that interested in that point.

I think our current political climate is such that one party cannot unilaterally disarm and become polite and give credit where credit is due. The other side would steamroll them into political irrelevance.

Take this as a thought experiment. Nationally, what do you think the public perception would be of the Democrats if they let up on the Republicans and tried being nice? It would be like HANNITY & colmes on Capitol Hill. It would be as if every Democrat was Tom Daschle or Joe Lieberman. In short, the Democrats would come off even wimpier and rudderless than they do now.

What’s the solution? Beats me. In the prisoner’s dilemma, the best response tends to be “tit for tat with forgiveness”. In other words, you do to the other guy what he just did to you, but about 1 – 5% of the time, even when he did bad to you, you go ahead and respond with good anyway. So maybe the parties should try being nice to each other just once in a great while, and if the other party responds in kind, you escalate the niceness.

(Just a footnote — I’m hesitant to attribute a completely poisoned atmosphere to the General Assembly and the parties at the state level because if you look through the bills, there are a significant number that did not split on a party line vote. So there is cooperation to be had even if the parties and the campaigns don’t necessarily trumpet the collaborative effort and the collaboration doesn’t make the front page.)

IN-08: Hostettler (or Faraci) is high tech

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I’ve got to give him credit, John Hostettler — or at least his aide, Matthew Faraci — is high tech. I ran a search on “Indiana Politics” over at YouTube.com and a couple of John Hostettler videos were the only things that popped up. They were uploaded by Mr. Faraci. I don’t have the time or inclination to watch them, but credit where credit is due — they’re attempting to keep up on the latest Internet developments.

Adiós Hoosier Standard Time

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The newspapers are littered with “Gee Whiz, We’re Going to be on Daylight Saving Time” coverage. When I read those articles, for some reason they remind me of a Special Olympics pep talk. “Come on champ, you can do it! Move that clock ahead one hour. You can do it the night before, or the morning after! Isn’t that wild? Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. There you go, that’s super!”

It’s as if the writers believe that the reason Hoosiers remained on Hoosier Standard Time (HST) for more than a generation was because we considered ourselves too stupid to work a clock.

That sort of cloying enthusiasm notwithstanding, the time switch happens tomorrow. 5 a.m. will become 6 a.m. and we will have an “extra” hour of darkness in the morning as we jump off the DST bridge with the rest of the country.

I don’t expect we’ll change back any time soon, and I expect I’ll get used to getting up in the dark mornings pretty much year round and to putting my kids to bed in the full glare of daylight. I do hope the lemmings in the General Assembly who helped their leader Mitch pass the legislation pay the price when voters head to the polls this November.

Executive Branch Review

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Mary Beth Schneider, writing for the Indy Star, has an article on a performance review of the executive branch. The Governor says that, even though his department’s didn’t reach the benchmarks he set for them, it’s o.k., because they’re making progress. He says they started in a deep hole and the goals were set very, very high.  One area where he wants to see improvement is the BMV which has an average transaction time for motorists of 42 minutes, far from the 20-minute target. Apparently the BMV backslid in February with a decline in both customer service and waiting times. (Apparently BMV bad-boy, Joel Silverman, needs to come up with something beyond  removing clocks from the branches, aligning chairs so they face each other, instituting uniforms and putting real-time spy cameras on employees.)

Daniels claims to have saved the state $250 million (or maybe that was one of the benchmarks that wasn’t quite met — I had trouble parsing that paragraph.) But some of the savings has come from privatizing government services using foreign contractors. Even the so-called Indiana companies are only Hoosiers by virtue of funny definitions.

The report states that at the end of 2005, Indiana purchased 74 percent of its goods and services from “Hoosier companies.”
But one of the companies it calls an Indiana firm is Aramark, which is headquartered in Philadelphia. That firm won the $112 million contract to provide food services for the Department of Correction. Several Indiana companies, including the not-for-profit Bosma Industries for the Blind, have said they lost state business as a result.

The report says Aramark is an Indiana firm “based on its employment of over 3,500 Hoosiers” and the Indiana taxes it pays.
The
report also calls General Revenue Corp., which won the $7.5 million
contract to run the Department of Revenue’s tax amnesty program, an Indiana firm. The company, however, is headquartered in Cincinnati.

 So, the company may pay taxes in Indiana (or it may not, depending how good its accountants are) and it may pay its employees subpar wages with no benefits and, if it does, then it’s defined as an “Indiana company” even if all of its profits are sucked out of Indiana and invested elsewhere or put in the pockets of non-resident executives (until a portion of the profits make their way back to the Mitch Daniels campaign fund).

To everyone’s surprise, Democrats were critical of the Daniels administration.

They questioned the mostly good marks given the Indiana Economic Development Corp., a public-private partnership which, according to the report, secured commitments in 2005 “to create more than 18,000 new jobs and retain over 47,000 jobs.”
House Minority Leader B. Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend, pointed to different statistics that show Indiana has fallen in job growth and personal income compared to other states.

Daniels is “ignoring the needs of the people of Indiana,” Bauer said, criticizing the governor for closing license branches, enacting daylight-saving time and leasing the Indiana Toll Road.

Lost Highway: The foolish plan to sell American toll roads to foreign companies

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Daniel Gross has an article in Slate about the Indiana Toll Road sale.

If a governor told you there were a way to spread pork, raise funds for infrastructure investment, promote jobs, avoid raising taxes, and put a dent in the trade deficit—all in one fell swoop—you might think he had a bridge to sell you. And you’d be right. Only in this case, it’s a toll road. And instead of a sale, how about a long-term lease?

Mr. Gross goes on to explain the benefits of toll road privatization. He then goes on to discuss the opposition:

I got the sense that the toll lease made Hoosiers uneasy for reasons they couldn’t quite articulate. It’s not like the buyers could uproot the concrete and move it to Queensland, Australia, or Seville, Spain.

. . .

I think the uneasiness has more to do with what it says about the peculiar fiscal climate in the United States. How is it that in the richest nation on the earth, localities simply don’t have the cash to do necessary maintenance on basic infrastructure, the political will to raise such funds, or the competence to run such easily profitable operations? Why are they being forced to sell off long-term cash cows for short-term cash?

Leasing or selling a public asset is a classic one-shot—a short-term measure that bolsters the balance sheet today but that can’t be repeated. While politicians like Daniels focus on getting through the next few fiscal years with minimum pain, foreign companies are thinking about how to get rich off of tolls for the next three-quarters of a century. From Gov. Daniels to his former boss, President Bush, there’s a troubling unwillingness to align governmental resources with the express goals and responsibilities of government. At the federal level, we rely on China’s central bank to buy our bonds and fund basic operations. As a result, our tax revenues wind up in Beijing—as interest payments. At the state level, Indiana is relying on foreign companies to lease public infrastructure like toll roads. And under these arrangements, tolls—taxes people pay for driving—are being paid to foreign shareholders of foreign companies.

The entire article is worth a read.