Occam's Razor

Attention graduates! Here is why you really went to college and what you should have gotten out of it. Did you absorb the lesson?

The point of education is not just to give you a leg up so you can survive and have a higher standard of living, but so you can see beyond the surface and to think independently and originally and discern cause and effect independently in a complex and increasingly confusing world.

Welcome to adulthood.

You can only dodge the bullet for so long. Somehow I dodged it for sixteen years.

That’s how long I’ve been attending my local Unitarian Universalist church. And that’s how long I’ve not been on its board of directors. Not that I never did anything more than put money into the collection plate. Over the years I’ve taught religious education, helped with a youth group, took kids on field trips, spent a night in a lockdown so youth could play all night and even went to our denomination’s general assembly. I’ve ushered, helped put together lunches for annual meetings, cleaned up the church kitchen after services, put away lots of chairs and hymnals after services and drank copious amounts of coffee after services too. I’ve attended church auctions, church dinners, facilitated rummage sales, painted walls, cleaned out closets and showed youth how to pray toward Mecca.

That was then. This weekend I find myself on our board of directors, although my three-year term does not start officially until July. I tried to talk them out of it. I said usually directors were chosen from an elite inner circle, not from the next circle in, which is where I saw myself. That’s probably where they saw me too except after sixteen years they could no longer not call me. They had run through the usual suspects too many times. So I am on the board of directors, somewhat unwillingly, but mainly because I could not think of a good enough excuse to get out of it.

In truth I have plenty of other commitments already. This would be one more and anecdotally it was likely to evolve into one of these unappreciated, time consuming and open-ended commitments. The sad truth about non-profit operations like churches is they don’t run themselves. They are complex organisms of relationships. Bill Gates once famously said that trying to manage programmers was like trying to herd cats. Managing churches is like trying to nail Jello to the wall.

There are all sorts of challenges in our church, none of which are likely to get solved no matter how much we flagellate ourselves or how much time I give it. Membership is declining. Our minister of just three years is leaving, for reasons she will not explicitly state, which of course pumps the rumor mill. As I once noted, churches are human institutions, and ours certainly is. We have a long and storied history of settled ministers leaving us for greener pastures or in strange circumstances, and this latest episode is just one more that feeds the fear, is there something intrinsically wrong with us?

Supposedly we have institutionalized trust issues but it seems that we really have ministerial issues. Our first minister was later revealed to be philandering with the congregants he was supposed to be counseling. His replacement left abruptly after less than a year. One of our interim ministers wrote a letter purporting to be from our board of directors endorsing himself for a permanent ministry elsewhere. He was, of course, quickly sacked. The last interim minister complained that we were a surreal congregation, happy enough to listen to sermons but reticent to challenge him on them, something he saw routinely in other congregations. Not that all of our ministers have been bad. Most recently we had a husband/wife pair that spent nine happy years with us.

The Catholics at least have a pragmatic solution to these organizational problems: the priest gets to decide. His decisions may be imperfect, but at least they tend to be final. In a covenantal church like ours everything is done democratically, which means that consensus is usually needed and usually hard to achieve, even though we are quite similar to each other in categories like race, income levels and politics. A building expansion consumed ten years, all but two of which involved in coming to consensus on whether then what to build. Curiously, once we finally broke ground it all went swimmingly: delivered on time and on budget but for a lot more money than had we done it in year one instead of year eight.

All these details and institutional detritus were on display this weekend as I and eight other members of the board huddled at the church for our annual retreat. It’s an opportunity to talk about big picture things, and for new members like me to get acquainted and subsumed in the church issues of the day. You would think that after forty years we’d have a refined governance structure, but we haggled through issues like whether we should micromanage or empower committees, and how to oversee the myriad committees that we have. Some things are clearer: slowly declining membership is probably due to some cliquishness in the congregation but mostly due to the pressure on members to do church work, and then do more church work. If you aren’t on a couple of committees already, you are a considered some sort of slacker. Being a member is more about taking a second, unpaid job than getting spiritually enlightened. It’s not surprising then that many who come through the door don’t want to stay.

So maybe we need to do less as a church, but no one seems to want to give up any programs. They are all vital. No hypothermia project? How can we let homeless people freeze on cold winter nights? No social action committee? Fighting for issues like gay marriage is in our DNA. And yet it is clearly too much and everyone is exhausted, including me, their newest board member, from just listening to it all. The sandwiches for our retreat from PotBelly were at least tasty, but except for sleep spending twenty-four hours on church business was exhausting, as is the stack of action items I received as I am now the board member overseeing education. I will no doubt be petitioned to attend all these related committee meetings, and the monthly board meetings plus follow up on an ever changing list of action items.

I get to do this and a full time job and nurture my wife back to health after her accident and help my daughter transition from degree to productive employee somewhere and monitor a declining cat who needs regular doses of drugs and special cat foods and all the other stuff in life like finishing painting downstairs. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.

So what’s the point? The point is to change the world for the better, one small step at a time. It takes a lot of energy to heal a broken society, which is the whole purpose of our church. It is made harder when our own church is rife with purely predictable human dramas and institutional malaise. It seems so pointless somehow, until you see the success of the Alternative Gift Market and that realize families in third world countries are getting cows, which means they have a path toward a better life. It seems pointless except a church brings people together who volunteer to help out at the homeless shelter. It seems pointless except for the youth group bonding for life at a weekend at Chincoteague, or the passing out of sandwiches to the homeless on alternate Friday nights. Then you realize there is a point to all of it, exhausting and inefficient though it may be. And you realize that while being on the board of directors is a hassle and our means are far from perfect, there is some value from all these committees, although it is hard to see while you wallow in organizational mess bordering on chaos.

And so you keep pulling at the institutional oars, though you don’t know if you are going in the right direction, though the efforts seem microscopic in comparison to the size of the problems to be addressed. You hope that your unreasonable faith in what you cherish most highly through your church results in outcomes you will mostly not see that matter and that will leave the world a better place.

So you pick up the phone and dial that member and ask them if they are interested in being in the next ministerial search committee. And you find yourself in your off hours looking at the church’s web logs to see what could be done to bring in new members. And you get in email threads with other directors on the minutia of this stuff. And you keep going, despite frequent deficiencies in both interest and energy. You don’t really know why you do it, but you do it. It is both an expression of your faith and absurdity, but you keep going.

Washington Wizards center Jason Collins came out today. It was a top story on Yahoo News and on many other news sites. The reason why Jason’s proclamation was news was because he is the first major athlete of a U.S. team to do so. Apparently our professional sports teams are assumed to be full of homophobes because Jason was somehow the first to do so. Most likely this “news” will soon become as newsworthy as the fact that there are gays in the military. I know I read the headline and simply shrugged and moved onto the next article.

Gays are all around us. They always have been around us. Most of us heterosexuals just preferred to ignore or discount the evidence. The difference between 2013 and, say, 1963 is in 1963 this was not obvious to us. Few even knew that homosexuals existed, but assumed that if they existed, they were some tiny fraction of the population, like twins conjoined at birth. Now even in deeply red states people know that gays are out there by the tens of millions. While there are still some prejudiced anti-gay bigots, if anything, they constitute a smaller percent of the population than gays and lesbians do. Some of us may still have some moral qualms about gays marrying or think that gay sex is disgusting. But all but a handful of us now understand that there is nothing we can really do about it. If there is anything newsworthy about Jason Collins’s admission, it should be why it took so long.

I really doubt there is anyone on the Washington Wizards or anyone in playing in the NBA who really gives a crap about Collins’s sexual orientation. I doubt any of the fans care either, although they will care if his performance starts to suffer. Ten years ago maybe a player or two might have felt awkward being in the shower with someone openly gay and their sex. Maybe they wondered if they would be sexually assaulted if they reached over to pick up that bar of soap they dropped. Or that they might be secretly gay, as evidenced by the boner they might get when in the shower with the gay guy. Maybe. Not anymore. I certainly never give these things a thought when I am in a public shower. Heck, I doubt I would even register shock if a team of women basketball players joined us in the shower. Unless you are sexually inexperienced or never saw any porn, it’s not like the human body is a mystery. If anything, seeing people naked makes us appreciate that all but about five percent of us look better with clothes on than without them.

Being homophobic is not a natural state of affairs; it is a learned behavior. I grew up in a lily-white community. I don’t recall even seeing a black or oriental person until I was more than ten years old. It sure was strange and uncomfortable for me when we moved south and suddenly I was surrounded by all sorts of blacks. But I got over it. It became normal. After a while I simply gave it no thought. In fact, now I find I like living in multiethnic communities. It’s like moving from a black and white world into a Technicolor world. A multiethnic, multiracial community is far more interesting a place to live in. If nothing else, the choice of dining tends to improve greatly. It would be a real challenge to go back to living in one of these virtually all white communities. It would seem so unnatural now; I’d feel like I had hives.

Sexual orientation is not obvious. Of course some gays choose to flaunt their sexual orientation, but even among gays there is incredible diversity on how they choose to express their sexuality. But that’s true of all of us. We all have our kinks and peculiarities. Most transvestites are happily heterosexual men. The sorts of weird behavior that make me queasy are those that I would never do. Sadomasochism is something I would never do, but some people are into it. As long as it is consensual and I am not participating, it’s perfectly fine by me. I am old fashioned enough to request some civility. I ask that it please be done indoors, preferably with the curtains drawn and not with kids in the house. I cannot be offended by something I cannot see.

You certainly cannot see someone’s sexual orientation. Try as you might you will never see it. You might see behavior that is often associated with gays or lesbians, but I’ve been proven wrong leaping to these assumptions. The only way someone’s sexual orientation matters to me is that it takes her out of my potential dating pool, and since I am married that’s not something to worry about.

I’m sorry that Jason Collins felt the need to come out at all. Granted, it is tougher to be gay and black than gay and white, so perhaps there is some bravery coming out while being both of these. Sexual orientation simply does not matter anymore than it matters whether someone has blue eyes or brown, is short rather than tall, or has size 14 feet instead of size 4. The qualities about someone that truly matter are intangibles like their character. All the rest, including sexual orientations, are simply tests on our character.

I’d like to find out some of that character stuff about Jason. That might be newsworthy.

I was born upon the fathoms
Never harbor or port have I known
The wide universe is the ocean I travel
And the Earth is my blue boat home

Peter Mayer, Blue Boat Home

Are you paranoid? Good! I might not have swampland to sell you, but I am sure I could be unethical enough to try to sell you some gold, albeit at hugely inflated prices. Owning gold suggests you own something with eternal value. Our currency may get suddenly devalued by ninety percent tomorrow but the thinking goes that as long as you got your gold coins locked up somewhere you still have wealth. You can maintain that standard of living because you own something no one can take away, and whose value none can diminish. You own gold! You are a survivor, you shrewd investor you!

I will grant you that gold will probably maintain its value much better than, say, the Zimbabwean dollar. Gold is pretty to look at, quite malleable, won’t tarnish and it must be worth something or it would not make up the majority of wedding rings. Mine is made of gold too, albeit white gold. It seemed better at the time than a ring from a Cracker Jack box. And since I have gold on me at all times should a financial apocalypse arrive, my wedding ring might buy us some food, a tank or two of gas, and maybe a couple of days in a hotel in our post deflated dollar world. Beyond that my gold wedding ring has far more sentimental value than monetary value. It turns out that its real financial value would be if I sold it for, say, American dollars. Dollars are convenient in pre-apocalypse America in that I can use it for an even exchange of value. Gold: well, not so much. Exactly how do you get change for your gold coin or ring in something that will retain value? It might help if everyone else kept a stash of gold coins too, but of course most of us don’t own gold and if we do it probably won’t be gold coins.

How good will gold be in a post Apocalyptic world? Well, it will be better than nothing but in a post Apocalyptic world when push comes to shove you will gladly exchange a large value of gold for basic foodstuffs and medical supplies. See, it’s that stuff you really need to survive the Apocalypse. Gold has no caloric or nutritional value.

Most people who own gold coins don’t keep them at home because they are worried they will get stolen. Gold coins are worth quite a lot, obviously, with an ounce of gold worth roughly $1600 at the moment. A one ounce gold coin though is probably going to cost you more than $1600. Someone has to make the coin and distribute it, and that’s a profitable business. Curiously no one buys gold with gold, but they do buy it with money, which gold dealers are eager to accept. Money, unlike gold, is fully fungible. Which makes money in general far more valuable than gold, which is why people prefer money to gold.

Some people with enough means pay a banker or a company to store their gold in a vault somewhere. It’s nice to know it is somewhere safe, but it’s unclear if everything goes to hell whether you will actually be able to withdraw your gold. I’m pretty sure most vaults are not safe from nuclear weapons. Even if they are, it’s likely that your banker won’t be around to open the vault. How would you make a withdrawal even if you could get to the bank? Hopefully there would be enough infrastructure in place and you will have an armored car to make the trip safely, providing the bridges have not collapsed and the roads are serviceable. Of course, once you have your bullion you would then feel the need to protect it from theft, not an easy thing unless you own a Brinks truck.

So maybe you need a more fungible form of gold. You could invest in gold stocks. Get a piece of paper that says you own twenty pounds of gold instead. Maybe in a post apocalyptic world showing your gold certificate will let the local black market distributor advance you some credit. Or maybe not. Maybe there just won’t be anyone around to barter for goods with anyhow. In a real Apocalypse, gold will be the least of your problems, because you probably will be dead. We’re pretty sure you cannot take it with you.

Are there reasons to invest in gold? As a hedge against inflation its record is pretty spotty, and people often tend to buy it when it is overpriced, i.e. when they are feeling scared. Perhaps having some part of your total assets in gold makes a certain amount of sense for the same reason some part of your assets should be in cash. In the real world though it won’t be gold that you will use to buy goods and services. It will be good old-fashioned money. You will want to convert your gold into money and use that. And unless gold appreciates in value over time, it’s probably not going to be a great investment.

Gold simply offers the illusion that your worth can maintain value regardless of the uncertainties in life. Rest assured this is an illusion, but perhaps it has some value because you won’t need to regularly pop Valium. Real worth is predicated on people thinking something has value. Moreover, real worth is the consequence of the way society is ordered and your place within in. Worth rests on a complex web of relationships, which must be there for your worth to have value. Worth depends not just on your job and your assets, but in the investment that society makes in civilization. It depends on the networks that make ATM machines possible and people’s willingness to work for a living wage, yes even at Walmart. It depends on roads being there so you can get to where you want to go. It depends on a justice system so the criminals aren’t preying on you and your neighbors. Without these and much more gold is worthless. Which means that chasing gold in the hope that it will keep you safe from calamity is foolish. It is fool’s gold.

As Peter Mayer put it, we are born upon the fathoms. Our home and our standard of living is an illusion. In reality we are living on a boat adrift in the sea, a giant Noah’s ark that we all share. There is no permanence; we are just around for the ride, but it’s a ride that we are all in together, so it behooves us to play nice and share our toys. So if you want to maintain your wealth and standard of living, stop looking at gold and try investing in society instead. Let’s make our world a place where we all have the likelihood to achieve our potential. Let’s keep investing in roads, good schools, new drugs and technological inventions. All these things though depend on a healthy and sustainable natural environment. Which means that our real treasure is not our personal wealth, but our shared natural world.

Now there’s a solid investment.

I won’t claim to be an economist or financial wizard. I don’t bother to try to time the stock market. I buy in mutual funds in good times and bad times, hoping that general growth in mostly proven funds will mean I won’t eat dog food in retirement. So I was buying in March 2009 when stock indices reached their Great Recession bottom and I am still buying funds today, albeit steadily and incrementally.

That’s one way to make money in the stock market: keep buying in good times and bad and count on general growth for appreciation. That’s the boring and safe way to make money from the market, as long as you do it in the long term and keep plugging away. Hopefully you are not buying crappy stocks, funds and bonds, but ones with decent track records for beating the market.

The other way to make money is to follow the maxim: buy low and sell high. The smart people with capital were doing just this in March 2009. They were fearlessly investing while others were willing to part with their stocks for just about any screwy lowball price others were willing to bid. Oh my God, the world is going to hell. Gotta turn this stock into cash right now and maybe survive the next Great Depression. That was the wisdom of those times, just four years ago. People were chasing their fears and their fears told them to horde cash. As I noted in June 2009, stock in the bluest of blue chips, General Electric, briefly fell below $6 a share that month. GE, like many stocks, was crazily undervalued. Those with cash and nerve should have been telling their brokers to buy GE in bulk. If they had, and I wish I had enough spare cash to buy it, they would be sitting pretty right now. On March 5, 2009 you could buy GE common stock for $5.88 a share. Today four years later it closed at $23.67 a share. That’s an appreciation of 403% in just four years, or 100% appreciation per year, on average. It was, as I said then, a crazily great investment. Granted this is not as high as GE stock has ever gotten. On June 22, 2001 right before the tech sector collapsed GE traded at $51.86 a share. It was crazily overvalued then.

Most likely GE stock and the market in general are suffering now from irrational exuberance as well. Stock prices are inflated, largely because the Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates artificially low. While the Fed has no immediate plans to change this policy, you know it cannot last forever. In fact, some are speculating that even if the Fed continues to keep interest rates low, the market will correct this artificial imbalance through inflation. Inflation happens when too many dollars are chasing too few tangible assets. With nowhere else to put money in hopes that it will grow, people are buying stocks. This tells me that stock prices are inflated. But also I can sense they are inflated. I can tell from the anemic growth in our GDP, the 7.7 percent unemployment rate and median wages that continue to fall. While increasing stock and home prices will help stimulate growth, if it comes it will come much later, and it is likely to only help stocks reach their current valuation, not actually meet their current valuation.

March 2009 was, in retrospect, the time to buy and hold. Arguably, March 2013 is the time to sell and profit. Convert that valuation into cash, while other irrationally exuberant buyers are willing to buy your stock at inflated prices.

Of course if you followed the crowd and sold stocks and funds in 2009 and are buying them now again in 2013, you are guilty of two things. First, you are guilty of being like most everyone else: following the herd. There is some comfort perhaps in that you were not alone because your neighbors were doing the same thing, which is one reason their net worth (and likely yours too) fell. Second, you are being stupid a second time. You are the bottom fish that the bigger fish are about to consume. They are picking your pocket, not the one you have now, but the one you think you will retire on. You are buying what is likely to be overvalued stock in the long term. Why are you doing this? You are probably doing this because you cannot make a decent return for your cash by having them in savings and money market accounts. You are frustrated and you see the stock market surging up 26% in one year and you are thinking, “I deserve a piece of that action”.

And you do, but you are probably chasing an illusion. There is a stock market correction coming. I cannot tell you if it will be this month, this year or five years from now. But it’s not too hard to see that it is coming. Economic growth is anemic and profit depends on growth. Growth also depends on people having more money to spend. While the rich do, they are a tiny part of the populace. People like you and me are probably watching expenses like a hawk.

What do you do if you have been following the herd? My suggestion is to stop buying stock, most of which is dramatically overvalued at the moment, and put that money in a cash account for future investing. You are unlikely to get much appreciation for your investment, but you are likely to lose money buying stocks. Wait for the next market correction, when the stock indexes have lost a third or more of its value. Then steel your nerves and buy, probably in blue chip stocks. Then hold and sell many years later when the signs are clear the market is overvalued again. That’s when you lock in the profit.

If you did buy GE stock in bulk in March 2009, you are probably smart enough to do what you are already doing: selling it and converting it into cash for future buying opportunities. In general, if you have genuine appreciation for your stocks and bonds as a result of buying them low, now is the time to lock in your profit. Profit may also be found in selling your house. In most markets it is a seller’s market and prices have fully recovered from the Great Recession. If this is true in your area, your house is mostly equity, and you want to lock in that wealth, selling your house may make sense. (Of course there may be capital gains and other tax implications from doing this. Consult a financial adviser before doing this.)

Will I be doing any of this? No. As I mentioned, I don’t time the market. I invest regularly and I invest long term. If you are not this kind of investor though, look at your portfolio carefully and note those funds that now are valued significantly more than what you paid for them. Unless there are some special circumstances for these particular stocks and funds for future growth, now is the time to sell them and convert them to cash. Most likely you will find this to be a very profitable experience.

Many of us ex-Catholics tend to share a guilty secret: we still keep up on Vatican news. This is because if you are born a Catholic, whether you like it or not it leaves a big imprint on you. You try to tune out Catholic news and pretend the church’s actions don’t matter, or at least doesn’t affect you. But you can’t help yourself and tune into Vatican news stories, such as the first papal tweet. Being such an enormous institution with about a billion members across the planet, what happens in Rome is bound to make news. So it certainly was newsworthy when recently Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation, the first pope to do so since 1415. The pope sites his declining health as a reason to resign. Naturally some Vatican watchers expect there are ulterior motives to this resignation, and coincidentally shortly thereafter an Italian newspaper published a lurid article on alleged gay sex scandals within the Vatican.

And so in mid March the College of Cardinals, 57% of who were appointed by Pope Benedict, will meet in Rome to decide who the next pontiff will be. Upon abdication, Benedict promises to disappear and devote himself wholly to prayer. It’s unclear what he has to pray so much about, and some of us would like to know. From recent statements he suggests shenanigans within the Vatican is much on his mind. Maybe its incestuous nature and intrigues became too much for him. Apparently he could not even trust his own butler, who ratted confidential papers to the press.

It’s hard for us on the outside to get a sense of what is going on inside the Vatican.  Depending on whose rumors you give credence to, it’s either nothing at all and business as usual or the Opus Dei clerics are duking it out the modernists. So far Opus Dei has been winning all the papal elections. That may change but Benedict has hardly proven himself to be a moderate. Betters would be wise to bet on more of the same. In an insular institution like the Catholic Church where those who can vote for pontiff have to be appointed by the pope suggest that creeping modernism will have no home in the Vatican, although gay sex within the Vatican may be as old as Opus Dei.

I ask myself increasingly if any of this really matters. In some ways it certainly does matter. The Catholic Church is a Jekyll and Hyde institution, capable of great Christ-worthy deeds while being guilty of unspeakable atrocities. I have witnessed the power of Catholic charities. Specifically back in the 1980s when we had a foster child, she was being managed through Catholic Charities. They did good work and arguably work that no one else would take on. So many religions talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. One cannot say that about the Catholic Church, through affiliates like Catholic Charities and the many Catholic hospitals out there.

Then there is the Edward Hyde part of the Catholic Church, proof positive that absolute power corrupts absolutely: children sexually, emotionally and physically abused, sometimes with the cooperation of the state, such as occurred for decades in Ireland at church run laundries. There wayward or suspected wayward women worked as slaves in cloistered workhouses. The reaction to these decades if not centuries of scandals seems to be a watered down set of apologies, but little in the way of actual recompense. The church seemed much more concerned about covering up these abuses so the institution is not sullied than addressing them and preventing them from recurring. Actual restitution if it comes at all comes from civilian courts, and not from the church. And actual prevention might involve empowering the laity to oversee the clerics, something the church is loath to do.

There are lots of reasons for declining church attendance, at least here in the United States. Surely any parent reading about what the Catholic clergy have inflicted on innocent youth should be reticent to place too much trust in their local priest, particularly where accountability mechanisms are so weak. That should explain some of the drop. But much of it can also be explained as the institution has less to offer people that they find of value. It’s hard to put a premium on genuine salvation, but that does not seem to be on the mind as much of Catholics these days, who seem more concerned about getting through this life than some nebulous promise in the next life.

Increasingly Catholics are simply exercising selective deafness, tuning out those edicts they think are silly (such as on premarital sex, birth control and gay marriage) and tuning in those that feel less ephemeral, such as the church’s charitable institutions like Catholic Charities. The church, like most denominations, preaches a one stop shopping method for living and salvation. For the most part these days the laity seems to want their Catholicism a la carte instead. They figure if it works when they go shopping, why can’t it work with religion as well?

Of course there are plenty of traditional Catholics who like the prepackaged solution that the Catholic Church offers. That is the essence of a faith: to accept aspects of beliefs that a rational person might say are ludicrous. As a percent of total Catholics, these traditional Catholics are a declining share of the whole. This suggests, at least for the foreseeable future, that Catholics are likely to decline as a percent of the religious overall. Over a period of decades, particularly here in the United States, more Catholic churches may close due to lack of adherents. Those who remain are more likely to be orthodox but like Hassidic Jews, appear more bizarre to the rest of society.

One of the selling points of Catholicism is its claim to know eternal truths. It offers moral certainty in an uncertain world. And yet real life keeps crashing down on the Catholic Church, as it is an institution managed by flawed people, made worse in its case in that these flawed people are also highly and haughtily insular. While I am convinced that after two millenniums the Catholic Church will likely be around for another millennium, I am convinced its power is waning. It wanes not so much in the size of its congregants, but in its ability to control the behavior of its congregants. On some level it must change so it becomes more relevant to those it preaches to, or it is doomed to drift toward being a sect instead of a denomination.

I will guiltily watch the color of smoke rising from Vatican chimneys next month, but I am wondering when the next papal election comes around after this whether it simply won’t matter to me anymore. It is already mattering to me less than it did when Pope Benedict was elected.

When I cast around looking for beliefs on which to anchor my life, I see the certainty that Catholicism sells as simply false, and worse, dangerously false. There is no certainty about anything in our universe, with the exception of the laws of nature. I think the Buddhists are the only ones who got it right: everything in impermanent. To the extent that we can live a truly happy life, we first have to accept that.

This just in: former TV conservative crybaby Glenn Beck is going Galt, John Galt, that is. Galt is the central character in Ayn Rand’s seminal novel “Atlas Shrugged”. Through Galt, Rand fully articulated her philosophy of Objectivism, which emphasizes the virtue of compete, unfettered Laissez-faire capitalism. It is capitalism freed from the burdens of tariffs, subsidies, monopolies and annoying government agencies like the Federal Trade Commission. Beck wants to build “Independence, USA” where its citizens can go completely Galt all the time. No taxes ever. Anyhow, it’s not necessarily cheap to Go Galt. Beck estimates he needs about two billion dollars to create Independence, USA. Presumably to construct his capitalist utopia he won’t invite a bunch of capitalists to create the machinery he will need on site. But anyhow when it’s all done, the citizens of Independence, USA will be a completely self-enclosed market. People will make stuff that other citizens will buy. Perhaps they will have their own currency. It’s unclear what governmental mechanisms they will have, if any. Laissez-faire capitalism is not exactly the same thing as no government, but presumably it would be a very austere government, far more austere than the State of Florida after several years of Rick Scott as Governor. That’s pretty damned austere.

Also presumably the city will operate more like its own country, since it won’t want anything to do with state and federal laws. There will be no annoying consumer protection laws and no warranties expressed or implied on anything sold. If your next door neighbor wants to turn his house into a smelter and spew out dangerous carcinogens in your general direction, well, more power to him. You are, of course, free to buy your own anti-pollution devices (presumably made only in Independence) to encase your house so you don’t have to breathe the pollution coming from next door. I don’t know if they will have a sheriff in Independence, but maybe not. So perhaps you can express your displeasure the old fashioned way, and load up your semiautomatic assault rifle and empty it into your neighbor’s house. He, of course, is free to wear only bulletproof clothing and encase his house in steel to deter assaults. You, of course, are free to up the ante, buy yourself a bazooka and wreak your unhappiness that way. Presumably since all residents share the same values about capitalism, there will be only brotherly love and no onerous taxes.

My guess is Independence, USA will never get built, but who knows? Beck can use more income to finance his vision, but the Koch brothers have plenty of it and might put up the two billion dollars. If it gets built, Independence, USA will doubtless become the center of capitalism worldwide. It will become the ultimate enterprise zone.

A friend of mine commutes regularly to China for her small business. She reports that contrary to reports that China is a communist country, it is already a lot like Independence, USA only they have gone nationwide. The truth is that China has pretty much ditched communism and is now a capitalist utopia. The state and the Communist Party pretty much exist to ensure capitalism remains free and unfettered. Freed of archaic concepts like religion, China has become a money-grubbing entrepreneurial heaven. She reports that the acquisition of wealth is pretty much the only thing on the mind of the Chinese. They get together to compare how fancy their Rolex watches are.

One thing she has noticed in particular is that the Chinese (or at least the Chinese businessmen she works with) don’t understand ethics. You might as well try to explain nuclear physics to them. They just don’t get why anyone would want to do anything ethical. They will happily do everything possible, legal or illegal, to allow a competitor to fail and for themselves to prosper without even a tiny qualm. This is hardly news. Even we self-absorbed Americans have read press reports about how copyright law is meaningless within China. DVDs and software are pirated, copied and sold for whatever they can get for them. Famous brand names are cheaply imitated and passed off as branded items. The idea of sales territories seems to not exist. Her company supposedly has sales territories within China where only one distributor is supposed to distribute her product, but of course these territories are widely ignored by their various sales agents.

While lots of people are getting richer in China, there have been a few undesirable effects. For example, there is the rampant air pollution in major cities. Lately it’s been so bad that no one in Beijing goes outdoors without wearing a facemask. So I am betting if Independence, USA ever gets built it will devolve quickly into a place that looks a lot like Beijing. It’s not a hard inference to make since this is pretty much how it has gone everywhere since the start of the Industrial Revolution, at least until government said “Enough!” Capitalism is all about making money and increasing your personal standard of living. The cost is borne by those not skilled, agile or moneyed enough to make the transition. Capitalism without regulation also ensures the land will get raped. This should not be news but just in case you don’t get it, maybe it’s time to reread Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax”. I’m guessing Brother Beck hasn’t.

While there are undeniable virtues to capitalism, there are many ugly sides as well. Perhaps its ugliest side is that it strips us of our humanity and appreciation of the connections between each other. In China, dog-eat-dog capitalism means you cannot expect a consistent set of rules because the government will be largely hands off. There is also no religion to speak of, so there is nothing to ground you, and no set of moral standards to use to measure your behavior. There is no reason to care at all about your neighbor, or your community, or your neighbor’s future, unless you can profit from them. It’s all about me, not about we.

Capitalism is simply an amoral system to help facilitate the acquisition of wealth that has the benefit of allowing for the broad distribution of goods and services at reasonably low prices. If there is one thing it is not, it is not a philosophy of living. Here is where Ayn Rand, John Galt and Glenn Beck fall off their moral railings. They don’t get this. Ayn Rand constructed a whole philosophy of life around capitalism, as if it were the shiny city on the hill that Ronald Reagan envisioned. (Independence, USA is literally that city, in Beck’s eyes.) In their eyes, capitalism has become a church, and its cathedral is the inside of a bank vault. They assume that capitalism had a meaning greater than what it is: a meta-meaning. It does not. The consequences of unchecked capitalism though are easy enough to see: the collapse of our moral fiber, the heightening of self-interest over shared interest and the natural tendency to rape the land of resources and the people of their connectedness. It destroys trust and integrity and makes ethics obsolete. It dehumanizes us and turns us from people into profit centers.

There was a time in my living memory where you went to work for a company for life. A company was an extended family. You were a valued worker and were nurtured. You were cared for and your earned loyalty was given back in the form of intimate concern about the company and meeting its goals. Money was put aside into a pension fund so that you could live comfortably in old age. It was paternalistic. Companies reflected the values of the society in which they thrived. Over time, companies changed their values from human-centered to profit-centered. Pensions died. You became a worker, not a strategic asset. Your pension became a 401(k). You became mere a cog in a bigger wheel. You became disposable, something to be used and thrown out when no longer needed.

Sorry Brothers Beck, Galt and Sister Rand. Capitalism is not a utopia. It has its virtues and it has its weaknesses, but unrestrained it will suck the soul out of the society it exists within. It will either use you up as cheap labor or it will crush you spiritually as you acquire wealth. You will have become a slave to profit, loss and wealth and bereft of the values that connect us and enrich us.

Sigh. Today was another day when the world was supposed to end, but here I am still alive and frankly feeling rather disappointed. Granted that most end of the world scenarios are bleak. Fire, brimstone, wailing and gnashing of teeth are all usually assumed at the end of the world. In some scenarios the elect (usually those who accept Jesus Christ as their Personal Lord and Savior ™) at least get raptured. In general, it’s not the end of the world unless huge numbers of people suffer violently and in blistering pain, then die noisily, painfully and traumatically. It all over in a few hours.

So why was I rooting for the end of the world? Well, at least it would be different. Instead, it’s same old, same old.

There was no brimstone falling this morning when I walked to my car. 7:30 AM found me at the chiropractor for another round of traction to make sure my painful sciatica does not come back. At 10 AM, I was getting my haircut by Basma, who had to reschedule for doomsday because she is flying home to Jerusalem on Monday, three days after the end of the world! Thence I tootled to Wells Fargo Bank, not because I am a customer, but because a check from my money market account won’t process electronically. Finally around 11 AM I made it into the office and I realized the day was a huge disappointment. Another day parking in the same parking lot. Another morning flashing my badge to the security guard as I entered the building. Another trip up the same quiet elevators to my fifth floor office. On my desk was the same peace plant in need of water. Lunch was the same too: salad with chicken pieces dropped on top, with the only variant being the soup de jour (vegetable beef).

It was all the same stuff on the news too. Fiscal cliff. Dysfunctional congress. A snowstorm was moving across the Midwest. The NRA was making the same tired noises, this time in response to the Newtown massacre a week ago. (Their “solution” is to put an armed guard in every school.) And of course there was the usual slow moving climate crisis: melting polar icecaps, loss of biodiversity and most Americans living happily in denial.

Sharon at least found her own exit. Sharon was a lady in our office who died of complications from heart surgery a week ago, at the premature age of 51. She was a sweet lady, a huge Redskins fan, always the first to help others and good at herding us cats: people like me who put our time into our payroll system. It was part of her job to manage us cats so we could actually get paid on time. She did a great job of it because our payroll system is a crappy web-based system seemingly put together by trolls. Her funeral was yesterday and most of us in her herd went to it. We pondered our appreciation for having her in our lives and offered sincere condolences to her grieving family. But during the service we also learned of a blessing from her premature passing: she was spending Christmas with Jesus this year.

That sounds pretty awesome. Rapid climate change and fiscal cliff diving are no longer issues she has to worry about, although I don’t recall her being worried in particular about any of these things. And Jesus sounds like a pretty neat dude. I can think of worse things than hanging around him for eternity, like, say, hanging around this world and watching with daily horror as we slowly kill it.

Ask a Mayan (as we did in January when we went to see Mayan ruins on the Yucatan Peninsula) and you learn that they never said the world was going to end today. Rather, their calendar starts afresh. Today is like January 1, 2000 was to the rest of us. It’s a day for celebration, and the Mayans have plenty to celebrate. They may have been about four feet tall when their calendar was invented (their height was limited due to limestone water they drank) but they were amazing in many ways: astronomers and mathematicians arguably more advanced than the ancient Egyptians were at the same time. No, as our Mayan tour guide told us, it’s us Westerners who chose to hear what we wanted to hear. So today became yet another day to proclaim the end of the world and sell a few more newspapers. I won’t hold the Mayans to blame, just shoddy journalists who can’t be bothered to do basic research.

If you were to pick a day when Armageddon actually started, today would probably do, although any day would meet the criteria. Here’s the thing: barring some sort of large asteroid hitting earth (something we would know about) Armageddon is not something that happens quickly. Rather, it happens very slowly. It’s like boiling a frog by putting it in a pan of water on the stove and slowly increasing the heat. Feeling a bit sweaty? I know I am. The end of a world with us humans in it it strikes me as an inevitable consequence of global climate change and our dogged determination to largely ignore it. It’s coming at us way faster than we can adapt to it. While it’s impossible to say any one particularly extreme event is a direct result of climate change, Hurricane Sandy sure felt like Mother Nature was giving us a wakeup call. So for me Armageddon began officially on October 30, 2012, the day when Sandy made landfall on the Eastern Seaboard.

The earth will survive, of course, but humans won’t. There are far too many of us to keep the Earth in something resembling a natural balance. We make it worse on ourselves by craving a first world lifestyle. It’s not hard at all to see how this ends, and it won’t be with a joint Kumbaya. Sandy should have been our wakeup call but we will rebuild along our coasts anyhow, only to see these areas get soon wacked again by the next Sandy. Eventually we will figure out we need to move further inland and build on higher elevations, but that of course doesn’t solve the problem, it just lessens our pain.

Our whole ecosystem is rapidly changing, and not for the better. Lowlands are surrendering to the sea. Storms are becoming larger and more destructive. Farmlands are becoming deserts. Crop yields are lessening because it is simply too hot or too parched during the summers for food to grow to maturity. In good years the Obamas of the world will try to inspire and lead us. We may cheer them a bit but mostly we will prefer to wallow in our own issues rather than wrestle with the macroscopic ones. In bad years the John Boehners of the world will tell us to plug cotton into our ears and pray about your concerns at church.

We already know what causes this real Armageddon that is unfolding: reliance on fossil fuels, cravings for first world lifestyles, humans breeding like bunnies and succumbing to greed. These actions make the world hotter and it makes people meaner. Climate change is killing us and the species we rely on to survive.

The fiscal cliff diving of the moment inadvertently reveals the real end of the world underway. There are too many of us and the world cannot increase in size just because we keep having too many babies. So we enter a resource competitive era and that means someone has to take it on the chin. No one will volunteer to be the first to reduce their standard of living, so we will duke it out instead, and most likely this means the poor will get more wretched and the rich will get richer. The last bloodied man standing can keep his SUV and iPhone but there will be no place to go and no one to call. Eventually he will die, Armageddon will end, but because we won’t be around to tip the balance perhaps the Earth will finally have a chance to restore a natural balance.

I am starting to realize that one of the reasons labor costs are so low is because so much of the labor I use cannot speak English. In theory, English is the common language in the United States, but in practice it often is not. English works fine for me on the job and usually works in stores, but its use becomes problematical with most of the service industry.

At the Wendy’s, the lady behind the counter speaks English as does the manager, but everyone actually preparing the food appears to speak only Spanish. At least that’s how I hear them communicate among themselves. In fact, I have yet to go to a Wendy’s within fifty miles of my house and not find all the workers Hispanic and speaking Spanish to each other. I assume that most whites won’t consider working at Wendy’s. Maybe it’s too low class or something. Or maybe it is because they would have no idea of what their colleagues are saying, unless they studied Spanish in high school. It’s intimidating to work a job when you can barely communicate with your coworkers. I suspect to the extent that anyone wants a low wage job, Hispanics are preferred at Wendy’s.

I don’t interact much with the people who cut my lawn but when I listen to them, it’s clear that they too are Hispanic. The same seems to be true with the trash crew. I hear the guy hauling the trash whistling and talking with the driver, usually in Spanish. I have no particular reason to complain about this. I don’t normally need to speak to someone who is cutting my lawn, but if I did it would be best to relearn Spanish, because I don’t think they understand much English.

It’s those home services where it is easy to get meaning lost in translation. Recently, we removed the dated vinyl countertop and installed a new granite countertop. The business we bought from is family owned and run by a Chinese man. It’s hard to know if the installers were family, cousins or just part of the local Chinese American network, but they were all Chinese. When they came to install their English was obviously marginal. One of the two clearly did not understand a word of English, and the other often had confused looks on his face and spoke in short sentences when he spoke. Communicating mostly involved a lot of pointing and repetition. To make it more confusing, while our countertop installation was done by a Chinese crew the plumber arrived to attach the new garbage disposal. He was Hispanic. It all got done, sort of, but it was often confusing.

I am learning that when I have a contractor in the house I must closely monitor them because chances are they will goof up on some important detail. It’s not their competency which is usually the problem, just clear communications. Something usually gets mistranslated between talking to the salesman in the showroom and the installer trying to do the work.

If you can afford a maid service, you will likely discover that maids are particularly challenging to communicate with because few of them can speak more than a handful of English words. They are usually dropped off and picked up when they are done. Explaining how you like your bathrooms cleaned or how to dust properly can consume a lot of your time because mostly you get blank or confused looks. It helps to have the same maids every week, but there is often large turnover among maids. Eventually we decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.

This system is less than optimal, but presumably is quite cost effective. Arguably it does sort of work somehow. It must be intimidating to the non-English speaking or marginally English-speaking workers around us, and there are many. It is no wonder that they choose to cloister in similar communities. Some businesses have decided that being multi-lingual is good for business. The local Lowe’s has signs in both English and Spanish, and some of the cashiers identify themselves as multi-lingual. While Hispanics form the major minority in the area, they are hardly alone. There are also Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Russians, Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, Egyptians, Turks, Filipinos, Cambodians, Thais, Indonesians, and people from various places in the Caribbean. They seem to have their specialties. The Koreans are running the dry cleaners and convenience stores. The Indians are in the carpet and tile business. The Pakistanis are also in the carpet and tile business. The Chinese are mostly doing high tech stuff or are in a highly entrepreneurial business and at least here in Northern Virginia are mostly businesses of one or two, usually related, subcontracting to some major Beltway Bandit. Mostly the Hispanics are mowing and landscaping our lawns and running the trash trucks. So far the roofers still seem to be principally blue collar whites, but that is doubtlessly changing.

It is clear to me that I pay extra in time and attention for having so many people providing services who cannot speak English or who can speak it only marginally. In fact, English is not really our common language, as so many residents simply cannot speak it with reasonable proficiency. Maybe we need some other common language. Spanglish, perhaps. Maybe it is time to resurrect Esperanto. Its time may have finally arrived.

Truly, I have lost all surprise when I hear that another prominent politician has been caught in infidelity’s web. Not that I haven’t found incidents like this latest one involving former general and CIA Director David Petraeus not to be blog worthy. The steady stream of these infidelities gives me plenty to discuss, and they conveniently happen when I am running out of ideas. I have blogged about dalliances by Rep. Anthony Weiner, Rep. Chris Lee, former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (which was really more about his wife Jenny’s reaction to the affair), New York Governor Elliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, astronaut Lisa Nowak and Bill Clinton. There are likely others I have blogged about that don’t come up with a quick search of my site.

Once I learned the details Petraeus’s affair, shocking to many, it did not surprise me at all. Paula Broadwell had spent years working on his biography, had access to inside information and apparently classified material, met with him frequently including in Afghanistan and they had a lot in common. He is physically fit and has zero body fat. She runs Iron Man marathons and is about twenty years younger than he is. This affair was a matter of spontaneous combustion: all the raw material was there once he bought her sales pitch for the biography. It would have only been a surprise had it not occurred.

Was it poor personal judgment? Certainly. Was it surprising in the least? Not at all. And yet predictably the pundit class was largely deploring the whole thing, acting more than a little like Captain Renault in Casablanca and declared our shock that there was infidelity going on with our CIA Director. For me, Monty Python came to mind instead:

“Eh? Know what I mean? Know what I mean? Nudge, nudge! Know what I mean? Say no more! A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat, say no more, say no more!”

Should people be upset? If I were Holly Petraeus or his immediate family I would be quite upset. Promises likely were broken, balloons burst, feelings of betrayal must be rampant and probably divorce proceedings will be forthcoming. As for the rest of us, it’s always a bit disheartening when our heroes prove as human as we are, particularly the ones we put on special pedestals like David Petraeus. He was a superstar, instrumental in turning things around in our disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and apparently a pretty good CIA director as well. He wasn’t quite so good at covering his tracks but goodness he must have had plenty of suppressed feelings to share, since apparently there were the equivalent of tens of thousands of pages of feelings to share in his GMail drafts folder. That’s a lot of feelings in a short period of time. I am impressed because in nearly ten years of blogging, I don’t think I’ve come anywhere near that. It must have made it hard to do any work. Gosh, it would be hard to actually meet and drop your pants for Paula. Who would have the time?

As a country, while we seem to loathe the French, there are times when I think we should admire them instead. At least on the subject of infidelity, the French have evolved. Basically, they just don’t care. They expect their leaders to have affairs. If they don’t appear to be having an affair, they assume they are probably having one anyhow. They are deeply suspicious of any politician who is not actually having one. There is something very peculiar about them, they probably think.

Americans are slowly adjusting. Bill Clinton’s tawdry oral affair with an intern only raised the wood of Republicans, who seem to have a Puritan streak in them while, secretly of course, they are busy engaging in the same philandering. I have observed from the many prominent infidelities that I have chronicled that professed beliefs have nothing to do with whether you will have an affair or not. Sinning is equal opportunity and party affiliation has no affect one way or the other.

Infidelity is all around us, we are just mostly not aware of it. Infidelity is not something that most of us will choose to acknowledge, and will only do so reluctantly when caught, and sometimes not even then. Somewhere between thirty and fifty percent of marriages have at least once incidence of infidelity in them. I was ruminating on this yesterday when I was walking the neighborhood for exercise. There were all the happy kids jumping in piles of leaves, dads doing woodwork in their garages and families coming home from their local house of worship in minivans. All this ordinariness and virtue and likely in at least one out of three of the houses I passed there was one or more cheaters, just like David Petraeus, just not as newsworthy.

And yet I live in a very safe neighborhood. All the infidelity doesn’t seem to be attracting crime or lowering property values. It may lead to an occasional For Sale sign or a neighbor mysteriously moving out of the neighborhood on no notice. Whatever this infidelity thing is, it is not the equivalent of robbery, or murder, or assault with a deadly weapon. (The frying pan thrown by your wife when you disclose your affair might result in a charge of assault with a deadly weapon.) It is likely personally devastating to the innocent spouse (who I suspect is not so innocent) but it is not generally a sign that the unfaithful one is a complete loser, never again to be trusted with anything more important than an expired lottery ticket.

The French figured it out. Affairs do not speak to our better nature, but they happen, so let’s stop pretending that they mean more than they mean. So should we. In this case though there might actually need to be legislation. Let’s call it the “Infidelity Forgiveness Act”. If you are a politician caught being unfaithful, you are allowed to retain your job and your benefits providing of course that no ethical or criminal barriers were transgressed. And any such investigation shall remain confidential, certainly to the potentially aggrieved spouse, unless there are resulting charges.

Given that Broadwell apparently had classified information on her computer’s hard drive, there are legitimate questions about whether Petraeus provided them. Assuming the investigation shows no wrongdoing by him and his job performance is satisfactory, he should be allowed to remain in office and keep competently doing his job until such time as your chain of command decides he should not.

Know what I mean? Say no more!