Jogging in Suburbia: The Outdoor Treadmill
24
March
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This post was composed while listening to Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) by The Arcade Fire.

I went for a comfortable jog around the neighborhood around Garmin today.  I was literally lost in suburbia, unable to tell where I was or where I was going, if anywhere.  These are my reflections from my three miles spent on the great outdoor treadmill of cul-de-sacs and intentionally tangled roads:

  • It’s in the low 50s, wet but only threatening to rain again.  I’m alone on the sidwalk in the gloom.
  • I’m passed by some teenagers in their 90s red BMW.  They park on the street two houses down from another 90s red BMW.  They sit in the car, seeming to wait for someone else.  I eventually jog past them.
  • I pass driveway after driveway of minivans waiting for me to pass at my pedestrian pace before they can back out onto the street and drive by as far on the other side of the road as possible.
  • I shuffle through a four-way stop where a maroon minivan has stopped well in advance of my arrival.  She could have come and gone before I reached the intersection.  I think she’s checking me out. But I can’t tell; the windows are tinted.
  • I jog down a slight hill and around a pine-tree lined corner where houses are made of stone.  They stand out against the wood siding of a brick-layer-union-busting neighborhood.  I grew up in a pine forest.  These houses’ facades  remind me of my childhood home in the Sierra Nevada Mountains like a green tree car freshener hanging from a mirror in a sticky-hot car reminds one of an evergreen forest, which is to say: close, but no cigar odor was masked.
  • I follow the road side into several dead end cul-de-sacs, which is Catalan for “Bottom of the Bag”.  In the bottoms of these bags, with identical houses all facing each other at slightly different angles, I wonder if anyone looks out and wonders why the neighbors would choose such an ugly shade of taupe.  Dogs bark in warning that this is not a through street and non-residents are not welcome.  If we had wanted people jogging by, we’d have bought the house on Sleepy Hollow Drive.  This is Sleepy Hollow Circle.  You must be lost.
  • I look down when I run.  This neighborhood is over 10 years old, which is to say it’s falling apart and the streets have several minor potholes.  I notice some plastic pellets that are evocative of the ammunition from a toy gun I once wanted so badly as a child.  I finally got it one day.  It was my most prized possession.  Until I saw a commercial for something else and wanted it more.  The toy was discarded and the rubber ammo is likely littering a driveway somewhere like plastic land-mines for my brother’s GI-Joes.
  • Another minivan passes.  This one’s windows are not tinted.  She gives a sideways, suspicious glance.  This isn’t a through street.
  • Does this street go though?  I really am lost.  How could I know where I’m going?  The roads are intentionally obfuscated by real estate planners who want to conceal the fact that an actual meadow was destroyed before East Meadow Lane was built.  Transplanted trees keep me from being able to see the next street over.  The landmarks are houses that all look the same.  Wait–that one is powder blue and this one is baby blue and this one is rotated 30-degrees off from the one up the block.
  • More litter:  Soda bottle caps.  Mountain Dew is for snowboarders.  Pepsi is for cool kids with leather jackets.  Coke is for people who want the whole world to get along.  But this cap is useless and the trash can is so far away–except on Tuesday morning, when every trash can is lined up at the end of every drive next to the house numbers and an American flag icon painted on the curb.
  • The cool air has made my nose run into my open mouth.  It’s salty–it’s real and honest.  It’s playing outside in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  It’s climbing a pine tree.  It’s the safety of a road in the woods.  It’s living in a stone house and getting warm by a fireplace that isn’t for show.  It’s desire that isn’t sated by high fructose corn syrup or plastic BBs or a red BMW.  It’s personal, but it isn’t alone like these streets are alone.  I haven’t seen a single person who wasn’t safely hidden behind a curtain of steel and crouching airbags.

If you’ve read this far, you either have a biological imperative to love me (Hi Mom!) or you’re really convinced that Suburbia is an environment built to be discarded.  In the latter case, you will also enjoy watching James Howard Kunstler talk about Suburbia at TED.

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Liz Cheney is UnAmerican
10
March
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwcy_0JWvro]

Liz Cheney wants us to question the values of lawyers who would represent terrorist suspects at trial.  She wants us to question the Department of Justice that employs them and its credibility in the area of Justice if it is in the practice of hiring people who defend the guilty.

This is, aside from being idiotic, thoroughly unAmerican.

What does it mean to be American?  An American is not someone born here.  An American is not someone with a particular religion or one of a specific set of last names.  We are Americans because we subscribe to a particular form of government: A government of laws, not men; based on Freedom, Justice, and Equality; and deriving its just power from the consent of the governed.  This is not possible if anyone is presumed guilty until proven innocent or denied due process.  To assert that some are not entitled to due process is objectively to be unAmerican.

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“Are You?” by Dorothea Tanning
02
March
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If an expatriate is, as I believe, someone
who never forgets for an instant
being one,
then, no.
But, if knowing that you always
tote your country around
with you, your roots,
a lump
like a soul that will never leave you
stranded in alien subsets of
yourself, or your wild
entire;
that being elsewhere packs a vertigo,
a tightrope side you cannot
pass up, another way
to show
how not to break your pretty neck
falling on skylights:
reward-laden
mirages;
then, yes. All homes are home; mirages
everywhere. Aside from
gravity, there are no
limits,
never were, nor will there ever be,
no here and there to foil
your lotus-dreaming
legend.
Stay on the planet, if you can. It isn’t
all that chilly and what’s more,
grows warmer by the
minute.

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On the Steps of St. Thomas, 5th Avenue
22
January
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The Steps of St. Thomas, 5th Avenue

Inside the church, the liturgy is timeless and uniform yet resonant. Voices in perfect pitch reflect from the high ceiling–impossibly held up by stone–and surround everyone in the creaking wooden pews.

We’re just a little late to the service. As we quietly walk down the aisle trying to find seats we can access without disturbing anyone any more than we already have, we pass all manner of people. Urban dwellers from uptown are seated in their regular seats for the evensong service on the eve of the Second day of Advent. Tourists are sitting next to their shopping bags. The curious are leafing through the prayer book and the handout. The awestruck are staring at the vaulted ceilings or the towering reredos, one of the largest in the world.

In this sacred space, countless souls have worshiped, sought refuge, answers, and above all, meaning. The flow of voices raised and voices whispered, the flood of thoughts turned heavenward in this place are near infinite. For a single moment, fleeting in comparison, my thoughts contribute to this nearly perpetual hymn.

As many others here are, I’m swallowed whole by the immense space around me. It reminds me how small and insignificant I am: my body cannot fill but a portion of a seat, my mind cannot fill but a fraction of this collective consciousness. This place is a monument to mankind’s yearning to understand our place in the world. It is for something. It has a purpose. That purpose is to pull the incorporeal into our world, to connect mankind with the infinity that is God, to find order in the chaos of existence.

Everyone who has slid off 5th Avenue all throughout the service has left behind a frenetic world and entered a world of expansive order. But this bubble of order exists fully seated in the vibrant chaos. Beneath our feet, the rumble of the subway can be felt, reminding us that while we pause, the world continues without us.

As the service ends, we all make our way to the exits and move from this stone and wood chamber into Manhattan. But standing on the steps of St. Thomas, between the world of inward contemplation and the shoulder-to-shoulder traffic of the sidewalk, I stand with a foot in both places. I stand in a spot where countless have stood before me and countless will stand after me.

The dim lighting of St. Thomas blends into the street lights and headlamps of 5th Avenue. As the flood of people rushes by with so many varied life experiences, at once completely unlike my own and yet wholly shared, I see my immortality.  Just standing on these steps is an act of immortality.  I cannot stand where I am without the benefit of an unfathomable chain of events, linking me to the stoneworkers who built these steps, to the ironworker who crafted this handrail, to the priests who perpetuate the Church, to my parents and ancestors who bore me, to the bacteria who share my gut and sustain my life, to the plants I eat, to the very DNA that instructs the construction of my hands and brain.

I stand at the edge of this stream of people on Fifth Avenue who are sculpted by all that came before them and changed by all that is around them; by me. Every decision, known and unknown, changes the outcome and ripples its effects across the universe, creating an indelible mark.  The signal may attenuate or find magnifying constructive interference, but it propagates forever.

The spirit of God hovers above the sidewalks, turning chaos into form into chaos.

I am but one participant in an infinite awareness of the world, endowed with the gift of consciousness, of forethought, memory, and imagination. I am able to internalize the very cosmos–to shrink the universe into a space the size of my head, and yet able to conceptualize its infinite and indomitable size. I am the cosmos, made of the same substance as stars and as dung beetles. Yet in this miracle of being, I am utterly common and quotidian, walking down Fifth Avenue to 50th street to see the tree at Rockefeller Plaza.

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Democracy for Sale
22
January
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Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that corporations, which are considered persons under the law, have full first-amendment rights and therefore cannot be restricted in financing political ads.  Thank you Supreme Court Activist Judges for standing up for the disenfranchised corporation, long oppressed by the individual person.

The court has touted the decision as a victory for Freedom of Speech in a disgusting perversion of everything America stands for.  The Court has removed even a hint of an attempt to insulate the political process from the profit motive.  The market has triumphed over the Republic.  Democracy is no longer one-man-one-vote, but rather one-dollar-one-vote.

What’s good for the profit maximizing autocracy that is the modern American corporation is clearly now good for us all.  If you don’t like a multi-national, billion-dollar corporation spewing toxic waste into your back yard, well, I suppose it’s time for you to incorporate a business, raise capital, and buy a political campaign.  It’s now the American way.

What do we gain if we expand the freedom of speech for corporations, handing them megaphones, without similarly augmenting the voice of the individual?  This is not equality of outcome and neither is it equality of opportunity.  It is a shameless erosion of the political process that takes power from the poor and even the well-off individual and hands it to the corporation.

At this point, it seems there is some room for Congress to act by legislating restrictions other than bans on corporate purchase of elections.  A petition is available to sign at Organizing for America.  I’d sign it myself, but the corporate firewall blocks the site–an irony I assure you is not lost on me.

Read more at The New York Times: Editorial – The Court’s Blow to Democracy or Supreme Court Blocks Ban on Corporate Political Spending.

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Another Reason for a “Public Option”
12
October
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I was just listening to this week’s This American Life– part one of a two part series on understanding the current debate over health care.  I had an epiphany about insurance companies and the need for a public option.  Intuitively, I was already aware of this, but the argument only just seemed to crystallize:

Insurance companies stand between health care providers and health care consumers.  We (or our employers) pay an insurance company to pay our doctor’s bills.  We allow them to retain a small amount of our premium as profit earned for serving their function— a function we must find valuable, otherwise we wouldn’t pay them.

One of those functions is to spread risk among policy holders so that at any given time, more money comes in than goes out.  We can’t do that on our own, so we pay someone else to do that for us.  This makes sense.

The other thing we pay insurance companies to do is to keep costs down.  An individual insurance company negotiates service fees with providers.  If one insurance company can secure lower costs of service, they can require lower premiums and therefore attract more customers and make more profit.  They have an incentive, individually, to keep costs down.

However, systemically, insurer profits are generally 3-5% of amount paid out.  If health care costs rise across the country, the amount of payout increase and the amount of profit along with it.  If health care costs fall across the country, the profits fall with them.

So, while one insurance company may have a profit motive to reduce their cost of care compared to another insurance company, there is actually a negative incentive to reduce the cost of care in general.

In this case, the profit motive is working against keeping industry-wide costs down and we see the effects in the out of control rate of increase of health care costs.  It’s projected that by 2009, the average American family will spend half their income on health care.  Insurance companies are clearly not earning their profit in this task.

A public-option health insurance plan with broad access (not just for the currently-uninsured) would have the benefit of changing this balance.  It would be concerned by mandate and national scale with reducing not just the local cost of care, but the global cost of care.  This provides a competition and a profit motive to other insurance companies to work to reduce their cost of care relative to this public option and thereby, inadvertently, work to reduce the global cost of care.

Listen to This American Life: More is Less.

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It’s either Evolution or Gay Marriage… Pick One.
09
April
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The argument goes that marriage is naturally the coupling of one man and one woman, as though there is some inherent quality about men and women or about marriage itself as an autonomous, free standing institution that “naturally” leads to this definition. This definition must be defended from those who wish to destroy society by trying to change who can get married.  Society, they say, depends on this particular definition of marriage.

This is backwards. The definition of marriage depends on society. Marriage is not a natural phenomenon nor a free-standing institution. Marriage is a social contract defined by society. It is completely mutable and has no inherent nature beyond what society defines for it. If not, then what gives inherent meaning to marriage as between one man and one woman? Is it a gene… the monogamous heterosexual marriage gene??

If there is some biological inherency in one-man-one-woman marriage, then it must be in its current form via evolution. Looking back through the historical record (even the one provided by the Bible), we see that marriage has been one-man-many-women, it has been about finance and property, it has been about alliances and power. It has changed, evolved.

So, either marriage as defined by DOMA (one-man-one-woman) is a consequence of some biological configuration that is subject to change via evolution and has arrived at it’s natural present state through natural selection, or marriage as we know it is socially constructed and has changed because society has changed it.

(I suppose there’s the third option of the Intelligent Designer having created marriage in it’s current state and then a pernicious devil-like character has gone back through history and the Bible and planted false evidence of a different notion of marriage in order to trick us.  But some things are just too absurd to believe)

I doubt anyone takes the biological evolution of the nature of marriage seriously. So we as a society are permitted to change the definition of marriage. Your definition is not sacred and neither is mine. It never has been.  It is now and always has been what we define it to be.

A storm is coming. That storm is the dying fit of those who wish to suppress the democratic process by which states are changing the legal definition of marriage to match the social contract already written by our changing culture. The storm is coming, but you do not need to be afraid. A rainbow coalition of people of every creed and color is what comprises society. And that society is increasingly choosing freedom over fear.

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A Great Government is What Makes America Great
25
February
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“My fellow citizens, never forget: We are Americans. And like my dad said years ago, Americans can do anything.” (Jindal, 2/24/09)

What makes America great?  Is it the greatness of Americans?  Is it some special LOST-island-like quality about the land we inhabit?  Or is it our values and their expression in our system of government?  While geography, natural resources, and immigration have most certainly affected our history (often for the better), what makes America great is that we are a nation of laws, not of men, where values are institutionalized in the government; chief among them is freedom.

Freedom is more than just freedom to…  It’s also freedom from…  Freedom from constant fear about personal safety or random acts of violence; freedom from oppressive search and seizure; freedom from crippling exogenous, uncontrollable financial ruin; and freedom of access to lifesaving health care.

“Republicans believe in a simple principle: No American should have to worry about losing their health care coverage, period. We stand for universal access to affordable health care coverage.” (Jindal, 2/24/09)

Really?  Just as long as it doesn’t involve a government guarantee??  I think this depends on what your definition of “universal access” is.  If by “universal access” you mean that anyone who can afford to pay for it can get access, then you do not mean “universal”.  If you mean by “universal access” that you can get lifesaving care, but you’ll end up losing your house in the mountain of resulting debt, then you do not mean “freedom of access”.

“What we oppose is universal government-run health care. Health care decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not by government bureaucrats.” (Jindal, 2/24/09)

Again, what this really means is that health care decisions should be made by doctors, patients, and for-profit insurance companies trying to spend as little on your treatment as possible.  This, again, is a false freedom.  The freedom to have someone make a profit-based decision about your health is far less free than a government bureaucracy being involved.  The freedom of a doctor is limited by the profit motives of an insurance company.

Reject false dichotomies between freedom and government involvement!  Freedoms are guaranteed by the government, empowered by the people.  Your freedom of speech is inalienable but enforced by the government.  The free market is built upon government security, government provided stability, government issued currency, government enforced contracts, etc.  Your freedom to drink tap water without fear is secured by a government agency.

Instead of complaining about ineffective government, work to make government better.  You have the freedom to make and keep America great.

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Reading Notes: The Irrelevance of Equilibrium Economics – Kaldor
11
February
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Reading Notes on: Nicholas Kaldor, The Irrelevance of Equilibrium Economics, in Further Essays on Economic Theory, Holmes & Meier, 1972.

Equilibrium Economics, as embodied by Walras and Debreu (where equilibria of competing forces determine observed economic states), is “barren and irrelevant.”

Assumptions of economics, unlike hard sciences, are not based on observation. For example, some are unverifiable: producers maximize their profits, consumers maximize utility. Some are counter-factual: perfect competition never exists, markets are not impersonal, economic actors never act from perfect knowledge.

Equilibrium economics wasn’t intended to describe reality, but it is often asserted as the description of how individuals act in a decentralized market to maximal outcomes. Neoclassical economics takes this view as the axiomatic starting point for all other theories.

This sort of economic theory started as a first-draft approach that was buttressed by intellectual scaffolding (“assume perfect competition for now… we’ll deal with the real world when we understand the theory better…”), but instead of removing such unrealistic scaffolding, more and more was added, such that now, economics is even more divorced from the real world than ever before-more filled with arbitrary assumptions than previously-in order to satisfy the modern demand for logical cohesion.

“In fact, equilibrium theory has reached the stage where the pure theorist has successfully (though perhaps inadvertently) demonstrated that the main implications of this theory cannot possibly hold in reality, but has not yet managed to pass his message down the line to the textbook writer and to the classroom.”

… To be Continued …

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This Margaret Mead Believes
08
February
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Anthropologist Margaret Mead’s essay for This I Believe praises the intrinsic human oneness that unites us all as well as the culture in which we are raised that separates us.  If we are to be one human race, we must learn about the differences and similarities of the human cultures that so shape us.

She writes:

I believe that human life is given meaning through the relationship which the individual’s conscious goals have to the civilization, period and country within which one lives. At times, the task may be to fence a wilderness, to bridge a river or rear sons to perpetuate a young colony. Today, it means taking upon ourselves the task of creating one world in such a way that we both keep the future safe and leave the future free.

You can read or listen to her whole essay here.

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