Macwriter

Mac kills PC in so many areas. I find that my workflow crashes to a halt when I have to go into the office and use their Windows systems. I hesitated in downloading any Microsoft programs onto my Mac because I don’t like anything about them, how they are organized. Even using Excel, which is still far more substantial than Apple’s Numbers program, I am quick to get in and get out. The one shining Microsoft program out there is Livewriter. It is great. I does everything that a blogger needs and wants. It has two-way communication with accounts and one can write, post, and draw from with ease.

So I am trying out MacJournal. I am hoping that the latest update will address some of the workflow problems that I had. We’ll see. A big problem for me was the lack of tag support. Not that the program doesn’t use tags, it does. But that it doesn’t draw from the list of tags one has already started on an external server. Livewriter does this well. But other programs, not so much. Instead of a seamless work environment I am forced to print out a list of tags and hang it on the wall. This. is. stupid. Either that or I am stupid and I cannot figure out a workaround.

What hedge fund would Jesus buy?

Hedge fund managers:

• David Tepper, Appaloosa Management: $4 billion
• George Soros, Soros Fund Management: $3.3 billion
• James Simons, Renaissance Technologies: $2.5 billion
• John Paulson, Paulson & Company: $2.3 billion
• Steve Cohen, SAC Capital Advisors: $1.3 billion

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/04/big_numbers_how_much_ceos_hedg.ht

I heard the tail end of this story today and I wondered is there a legitimacy to an ethical code that allows, accepts, and encourages one single man can make $4 BILLION dollars in one year and allow others to barely scrape by.

When I say something to this effect the pro-big business people will immediately start screaming that I am trying to get a redistribution of wealth.  They argue that the work of one’s own sweat ought to be one’s own.  There is a noble idea about being self sufficient, of supporting one’s own, of being a capable individual.  Such individuals, capable of performing well and heroically (to borrow the sentiment from Ayn Rand’s books) is a cornerstone of our capitalist-leaning society.  It is hard to get rid of because what are commonly referred to by some as protestant work ethic is a social norm.  That is we appreciate those who work their asses off.  And it is a common belief by some that to be for socialism is to be lazy and not willing to carry one’s own load.

Put it this way.  Many people work as waiters and a majority if their income comes from tips.  Some restaurants do not allow individuals to collect their tips but instead instigate a tip pool where everyone puts their tips into the pool and it is divided out among the workers.  Many waiters that I know are greatly against this idea and prefer individual tips.  I have protested it as well.  The problem?  Incompetent workers.  It isn’t rocket science to be a minimal waiter and the number of terrible waiters are legion (and bartenders).  It takes someone with actual skills and cognitive abilities in memory and sorting to be a good one (much less the emotional stability to handle customers who might harass them).

I doubt seriously that the hedge fund manager works as hard as many people I know who now have broken bodies from a lifetime of hard labor.  Don’t tell me that pay is equal to sweat and effort.

So the argument, accepted by a lot of people in our country, is that to be for a redistribution of wealth is a means of rewarding the slackers in our society because the only people who would really ever want this would be those who could not make more money anyway.   Going back to the restaurant example, you would expect the only waiters to favor a tip-pool approach would be your lousy waiters as your better ones would realize they are losing money and go elsewhere to work.

Another reason why a redistribution of wealth is believed an evil by some is that or individualism is a central component to who we are as Americans.  The notion that I am captain of my own ship (meaning I am in charge of my own life) is a strong fantasy that we hold on to.  To somehow acknowledge the idea that this does not hold true for a lot of people in this country seems to equate, in some people’s minds, the same as denying the principle of self sufficiency and autonomy.

I’ll put it another way.  Children are precious and slavery is a moral wrong (for the sake of space I’ll not defend these two assertions here).  Yet as I’ve just found out there are many sex shops where underage girls are forced to work (slavery) in Portland, Oregon (and other cities as well).  Acknowledging this exists does not mean I accept their validity or right to do so, but that they do and hence something can be done to stop it.

But what does it mean to be a free individual?  That question is quite a complicated question if you tease it out.  But for simplicity’s sake lets say that to be a free individual is to be free of undue influence from outside sources.  I may not like my job and so I choose to quit.  I am free to do so.  I am an autonomous individual.

When the question of working conditions comes up many will say ‘well just quit your job and go find another one’.  I wonder how many of those people that have given me this argument over the years have found themselves downsized during the past year and have had great difficulty in finding another job?  I wonder how many have lost their homes due to high mortgages and low income?  I wonder how many have had their kids pull out of college?

But I did work for a company that I did not like.  I wanted to quit many times.  The company was the worse company I’ve ever worked for and I’ve compromised my principles to continue working there.  Had I been truly a free individual I would have told the owner what a terrible person ze is.  Yet I had rent to pay, truck payments to make, food to buy, and more.  I had responsibilities and constraints acting upon me.  I was not completely free.

For those interested in the difference between free will and free choice they should read Spinoza.  To truly have free will is to be without any influence upon behavior, and according to Spinoza this is God, for nothing makes God do anything.  We, however, do not have free will as we are always under influences and a long line of causality.  I am sitting here now because gravity forces me downward (I cannot float in the air should I choose) and as much as I’d love to I cannot stay up for weeks at a time as I must get sleep.  I can choose to do certain things within constraints.  I can choose to run or walk, to sit or dance, to eat or sleep. But these choices, again, are limited, influenced, and shaped by many factors.  I cannot do without sleep, I cannot run 100 mph, I cannot eat 100 hamburgers at once, and so on.

The notion of free will, misunderstood as it is, is connected to our system of ethics.  We tend to think that an action is only a moral action if it is done with free will.  There are those who disagree with this, and there might be exceptions to the statement as well.  But generally speaking free will is important to us if we are to assign praise or blame.  The Judeo-Christian religions must have some notion of free will.  Otherwise an eternal damnation in Hell is utterly without excuse or merit.  However I would argue that there exists nothing so heinous that warrants an ETERNITY of a Hell.  Nope, not even Hitler.  Think how long eternity is and add one, as the joke goes.  I cannot follow a system of ethics based upon this simplistic formula.

And people that do good out of fear of punishment are no more deserving than those who do not do good out of fear of being caught.  The only praiseworthy person is the one who does good for good’s sake without any reward.  In other words the notions of Heaven and Hell are contradictory to a true system of morality of good.  If you do an action for a future reward, or do not do an action to avoid a future punishment, you are a hypocrite.

Back to our $4 Billion dollar hedge fund manager.  If ze paid 0.01% tax that would be $40 Million.

There are many types of conservatism out there.  I’d warrant to say that should Edmund Burke be alive and view Sarah Palin on the news he’d fall out of his chair.  There is nothing to connect the neoconservative policies to the conservative values of Barry Goldwater.  There really is no ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ but in our current state where we cannot be bothered with reading more than a few sentences, we get our news from highly biased sources that share air time with the emotional plights of superstars, it is no wonder that great many of us have given ourselves labels as ‘left’ or ‘right’, ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ and we view politics as a one or the other game of winners and losers.  Our society is largely unsophisticated in its citenzry.

An example.  Some people have the notion that because you can fertilize an egg and produce a child then you are endowed with parenting knowledge and rights.  A person will say “I have the right to raise my kid the way I see fit” and this gets nods of approval from many.  Okay… fine.  Let us take this as truth.  I am going to go have a kid with some (un)lucky woman.  I’m going to take that kid and raise that kid to behave like a hunting dog.  I’ll keep it on a lease outside, feed it raw meat, and so on. I figure that too much emotion will make the kid ‘soft’ and that I want someone who is tough.  I have the right to do this, I am the parent!

NO! You might say (I hope you say this).  This isn’t exactly what we mean by ‘having rights as a parent’.  And here is a problem that we find in our society.  We say a lot of bullshit but don’t understand the grand things we say.  What we really might say is that, as a parent I have a primacy in responsibilities in raising my children, that this includes managing the well-being of the child’s physical, mental states and I have great leeway, as the parent in what those might mean and how to accomplish it though the final judgment is up to society at large as to my efforts.

If the last sentence bothers you, then ask yourself how you feel about the following scenario.  A church in Oregon teaches its congregation that modern medicine is wrong, that God ought to be trusted, and should He want the child to be healthy, then so be it.  The premise is that it is all in God’s hands and all one can do is pray.  To take medicine is to lose faith.  Parents from this congregation have a child that gets sicks and dies.  The State of Oregon takes them to trial and finds them guilty of negligence.  Is this wrong?  There is another question here about the freedom of religion.  However, as I often do, freedom OF religion also means a freedom FROM religion… a point I sincerely wished the religious right in this country would remember when they try to put their religion in our laws.  The child had a right of freedom from the religion of mer parents and to receive medicine and possibly live.

What’s more important?  The parent keeping faith in some religion… or a human life?

Those who are against socialism will argue that they shouldn’t have to pay more taxes to some dope smoking hippy can get by doing nothing all day.  To be honest I don’t want to work my ass off and let someone sit around and do nothing either.  Yet what is the greater evil?  That a small percentage of people would sit on their asses smoking dope and playing hacky sack, or that a great many people live in poverty, that we close schools, that programs for the needy are cut? Gods forbid we have universal health care because that means (gasp) a move toward socialism!  It is better by far that people go bankrupt to pay for their medical bills than it is that the burden is shouldered by all.

If the average school teacher makes $32,000 a year (I’m not sure of the figures), then one year’s earnings by the hedge fund manager above would pay for 125,000 teachers.  I wonder what states these managers live in and what budget cuts the governments have made in their schools.  Of course I doubt their kids feel the cuts.

So here it is that 2010 and Jesus Christ comes back in secret, like a ‘thief in the night’.  Jesus walks around and sees people working two, three, four jobs to try and make ends meet.  Bob had to take out a pay-day loan to pay an emergency room bill for mer kid’s broken arm.  The interest on that is out of control and when it is all said and done Bob will bay 400% interest.  The Republicans, the party of morality, consistently blocks attempts to regulate the pay-day loan industry because it is against free enterprise (for to Republicans, and Democrats too it seems, business trumps humanity always).  And besides, Bob had a choice not to go to the loan office (while the kid was crying with a broken arm… yeah… nice choice).  Jesus walks around and sees our laws, the homeless on the streets, and decides to pay a visit to some big supporters of ‘morality’ and ‘free will’ and ‘less government’ and asks them how they can sit on their asses while people starve?  Think that Jesus would be a capitalist?  I hardly doubt it.  He was, if anything, a socialist.  Recall the parable of the workers in the field.

So there is this notion among Christians that in order to get into Heaven you must accept Jesus and confess your sins.  I am assuming that in this confession the person must be actually repentant, that is, actually sorry.  Now here is the thing.  Suppose a person lived a life of wickedness and, at the end of the life saw the wickedness in mer life and decides to repent and shortly dies thereafter.  That person would go, it is commonly believed, to Heaven.  Now I ask you, what God, who can supposedly look into your heart and see your true motives, would look at the selfishness of many today and be fooled?  Think that you are really that slick?

But I don’t believe in such a scenario.  I maintain that a system of ethics must be grounded in this life, not the hereafter.  Religious people ask all the time, ‘if you don’t believe in heaven then there can be no morals today’.  Again, if you must rely on heaven and hell for your system of morals then it isn’t a very good system.  Look at the behaviors of people today who say they believe in Heaven and Hell?  Doesn’t appear to be doing such a great job in shaping morality.

Not with someone making $4 Billion in one year and all the misery that is around that individual.

rough draft of a letter about the U.S. Stump Service

A rough draft of a letter I am writing for the paper, for elected officials, and whoever else I can think of.  I’ve got some work to do to this and will try to cite sources as well.

My name is Eddie Black and I have served my country in two wars, Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom.  I come from a hard-working family in Arkansas that is employed by the local timber mill.  I say this, not that it will validate my claim, but to detract from those who would attack them with fallacious arguments of my being a hippy. 

 Again the Tongass National Forest is being attacked by special interests.  There is a proposal on the table now that would increase clearcutting of this national treasure six-fold.  Just who is proposing this plan to attack the few remaining Ancient Forest ecosystems left, you wonder?  The U.S. Forest Service.

 According to economist Randall O’Toole the U.S. Forest Service cost U.S. taxpayers $250-$500 million dollars a year in money losing timber sales per year.   He also maintains that major institutional defects stem from the fact that the U.S. Forest Service does not operate according to economic laws that would guide private, for profit companies doing business in a ‘free market’.  The U.S. Forest Service, situated within the Department of Agriculture, is a cash cow to be milked by timber companies. 

 How does the U.S. Forest Service evaluate its success?  It is a government agency and like all government agencies it ultimately comes down to yearly budget reports and the question ‘did this year’s budget shrink, stay the same, or grow compared to last years?’  The budget of the U.S. Forest Service is tied directly to income from timber harvests.  There are many examples of timber harvests where the timber company’s own studies did not warrant harvest yet were forced to do so, however, by the U.S. Forest Service by the threat of stiff fines and penalties; penalties, it can be said, that are far heavier than those afforded against timber companies that log in threatened habitat, watersheds, or that cross wilderness area boundaries.

 Individuals in charge of not only the U.S. Forest Service at all levels, but other government environmental regulatory agencies, are not individuals with ecological, scientific, or biological training.  Instead they are the former heads of special interest groups for the energy industry, lawyers for petroleum companies, and affiliates with big timber.  Their gross negligence in ‘managing’ our nation’s forests are either gross incompetence on the grandest of scales, biased actions in favor of big business interests, or honest mistakes.  In all three cases there is warranted change not only in the individuals that head these positions, but also the policies that place them there and configuration of their budget forces.

 “The very idea of ‘managing’ a forest in the first place seems oxymoronic, because a forest is an ecosystem that is, by definition self-managing.  Calling the growing of wood plantations ‘forest management’ is the same as defining the farming of corn in Iowa as ‘prairie management’.  – Biologist Bernd Heinrich “The Trees in my Forest”.  Forests are not stands of Douglas-Fir, they are incredibly diverse ecological communities of many types of plant and animal life.  Taken biocentrically this system deserves protection for it’s own right, taken as ‘wise use’ (a misnomer given by pro-logging interests in the continuation of logging over conservation) there are yet to be discovered ‘uses’ for things that are being wiped out as we speak.  At one time the Pacific Yew was found throughout Oregon forests and slashed and burned as a ‘junk tree’ and not replanted after clearcuts.  This tree contains Paclitaxel (Taxol), a compound with exciting possibilities in combating cancer.  While logging companies readily exclaim that they replant, they do not tell that in cutting down stands of diverse trees such as the incense cedar, hemlock, hawthorne, yew, sugar maple, oak, fir, birch, and many more that they replant with the one type of tree desired most by Big Timber; Douglas-fir.

 When the Forest Service is forced to conduct a study investigating impact on wildlife, watershed, ecological diversity, or a host of other concerns other than logging interest, they do so with a blind eye and do not look at the white elephant in the room, clearcutting.  Instead of listening to the people or experts in the field of biology the U.S. Forest Service caters to the whims of big timber whenever it can.  When public opinion is dictated to be collected it is done so with short windows of response and in times that are inconvenient.  The public does not have a fraction of the ear of the directors that the CEOs of big timber does. 

 During the 80’s when many local mills closed down and hard-working families lost their jobs, they were told by the CEOs of Big Timber that it was because of the environmentalists and their love for owls over humans that did it.  They were told that the environmentalists would rather see an owl live than a father provide a home for his family and send his children to school.  There arose a dichotomy between logger and tree-hugger that is a false dichotomy.  I know of few people who love the forest more than my own family, a family that lives and makes their livelihood from the forests around them and not merely to hike through on a weekend.  Of all people that feel the consequences of poor forest management on water, animal populations, habitat, and quality of life, my family of traditional hunters in Southern Arkansas felt it long before coffee sipping hipsters in urban cafes did.  There is no dichotomy between logger and environmentalist, as the CEOs of Big Timber wish you to believe for if blue collar and Green alike joined forces we’d surely change policy, a change that would affect their bottom lines and ability to live in posh estates.  It wasn’t the environmentalists that caused the loss of timber jobs in Northwest in the 80’s, for profits were high and production was up.  It was because production efficiency rose at least 15% during the 80s.  Simply put, fewer workers were needed to do the same job as machinery took over on a larger scale. 

 Simply put, special interests are making big profits while destroying the diverse ecosystems around us.  How much waste, greed, and incompetence is enough before we finally wake up and put a stop to it?   How long before we look upon the actions by polluting and devastating companies, from irresponsible petroleum, coal, and timber companies with the same moral lens that so many of us are ready to impart upon those of different religious convictions.  These enemies, the special interest that rape and plunder our national treasures for their private gains, lie to us and tell us they are Americans, that they are the people too, that they have our interests in mind.  They do not.  They are not the America that I defend… they are lying to the America that I do love and defend.

 

Eddie Black

 

 

Thoughts on politics and economy

I was commenting in a recent comment that I lamented that I did not have John Herberg around with me.  We both used to live in Eugene and would go to a coffee shop and debate politics and philosophy.  He is a good one to debate with because he is intelligent and doesn’t argue the hairs of the horse, but the horse itself, without getting bent out of shape.  I’ve tested out lots of other folks by challenging them here and there, in person and through Internet, and found that most people will get really bent out of shape about a political stance.  Not the people I want to debate with, for I debate to learn and grow and not to prove you wrong.  There are times when I seek out the dumbasses of the world and try to put them in their place, but by far most of the time I am simply trying to learn about myself. 

Remember, I am a guy who has been Democrat, Green Party, and Republican.  I have no loyalty to any party when it all comes down to it, but loyalty to my principles and ideals. 

freedom or generic

It is my day off and it is raining.  A die-hard fisherman would still go out and fish, but I don’t want to stand in the rain… had enough of that in the last year.  So it is surfing the net time and I came across this statement on a socialist blog.

Is it possible that you could produce some argumentation — some factual argumentation — that Capitalism has more merits than Socialism?

Merits? Economics aside…

The gist of my argument against socialism isn’t that it doesn’t contain merit, nor that capitalism is free of ills, it is that people are selfish beings.  Capitalism pits self interest against self interest and socialism requires ever tightening control to ensure that individuals act accordingly.

Is it possible to have as much variety in goods under a socialist economy as it is under a capitalist?  It is a valid point that we have too much crap for sale, too much junk, too much sensless wastes.  Yet isn’t it a by-product of freedom to have waste?  If you are free in your time, you can waste it or  use it, but it is up to you.  What if I wanted a different sort of product, a product unlike anything else on the market, what if I wanted to produce it.  Would socialism allow me to do so? 

Is this important?