Hadley-Ives family update

Dream of Shame

2012-01-21T08:57:00.000-08:00

I had a dream last night, that I can remember quite clearly. I was in the consciousness of someone who stood in the court of some sort of king, and there were several of us there, playing a sort of game. The game was that we had cards, which we turned over to find revealed some word or phrase, and we had to, spontaneously, say something poetic or profound on the theme or word revealed on the card.

When it came my turn, the card revealed to me the word, "Shame" and I decided to keep it short, not wanting to go on and on about it. So, all I said (in the dream) was this:

Shame

What is man that he should feel shame?

Of all the creatures, only humanity can experience shame.

When I concluded, the king said that it was unacceptable, but it seemed he might have been referring to what the person to my left had just said on his theme, and was not objecting to what I said. Nevertheless, I somehow had to go again and say more, so my final statement on the theme of shame was this:

Shame

What is man that he should feel shame?

Of all the creatures, only humanity can experience shame.

The fearsome snake slinks along the surface

And guards treasures of no value to snakes

The beautiful peacock struts with his extravagance

And annoys listeners with his screaming sounds

Darwin said man alone of all the beasts

Can aspire to ideals,

Compare our station to what we desire

And strive to progress

We are created noble, the Hidden Words remind us,

And ask, why have we abased ourselves?

So if we heed the story of the peacock and the snake,

And if Darwin was right about us

And if nobility is our nature

Shame is necessary

To correct our course

And guide us aright.

Sebastian's summer video

2011-08-21T21:22:00.000-07:00

Sebastian made a film with clips from the summer. It's worth watching if you want to know what we did this summer.

Wildlife on the ride to and from school

2011-07-15T09:50:00.000-07:00

As we're in the middle of summer here in Springfield, I'm now riding my bike to school each day, usually four or three days per week. This morning there was a wild turkey just a few feet away from the bike trail, and it didn't flee as I rode past it. About a mile further along my way a small snake slithered across the bike path just in front of me. It wasn't a garter snake, although I have seen garter snakes along the route before. Back in May I was riding into school very early, around 8:00 a.m., and it was a foggy morning, and I found a doe standing in the middle of the road. It looked at me as I appeared out of the mist, and just stared until I was nearly upon it, and then it clattered off the road and casually walked into the meadow on the side of the road.

In the colder winter or the stormy days of spring I drive my car instead of biking, but I enjoy the bike riding, as there are many sights and smells to enjoy. The ride takes about 45 minutes (eight miles each way). It's good exercise I suppose.

Arthur's presentation on John Berryman

2011-05-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

Arthur had to do a presentation on the poet John Berryman. It's up as a web page if you care to see it.

Abbottabad seems like a nice place

2011-05-01T21:25:00.000-07:00

Well, I wonder if anyone I know has recently been in Abbottabad. Seems like a nice place to visit, or just hide out and get away from the world. They have a medical college there for women. Oh, there was a report of a helicopter crash there at night, evidently on May 1st, and the sound of gunfire.

I'm sorry the correspondents on CBS and ABC I was watching tonight listed terrorist attacks and only mentioned ones against American targets (embassies, naval vessels, the 9-11 attacks), and didn't mention attacks in Madrid, London, or the many, many attacks in Iraq, and even attacks in Saudi Arabia, or perhaps they could have mentioned the attack in Mumbai. This creed of terrorism has been a global phenomena. They should have interviewed survivors of attacks whose family members were killed by "al-Qaeda in Iraq" as well as the American survivors of such attacks. The American news media is so hopelessly within a bubble in which only America matters. 'Abdu'l-Baha commented on this when it visited North America.

The legal issues in American involvement with UN action in Libya

2011-04-01T09:02:00.000-07:00

Today I’m writing about the United Nations intervention in Libya. It seems to me that many people are opposed to the participation of the United States in this Libyan action. Evidently there have been opinion polls showing only about half of Americans support the use of American military in attacking Libyan air defenses and military equipment and soldiers. One point of this oppositions seems to hold there is something illegal in an American president ordering the use of American military force in acts of war (not declarations of war) without first getting consent from Congress.

There are a few ways that American military forces can become engaged in acts of war.

The first method, a method that has been used five times in American history, is for Congress to declare war. This is contained in Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution. We know from records of the Constitutional Convention (and various other records illuminating the process of drafting the Constitution) that “declare” was the verb chosen because people (e.g., James Madison and Elbridge Gerry) wanted the president to have the ability (as Commander and Chief of American armed forces) to act suddenly to repel attacks without waiting for Congress to authorize defensive military action. The American Congress has declared war on the United Kingdom (1812), Mexico (1846), Spain (1898), Germany and Austria-Hungary (1917), and Japan, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania (1941 & 1942).

The second method, a method that was modified by various War Powers Resolutions (see chapter 33 of Title 50 of the United States Code), allows the President to engage in hostilities short of war with the approval of Congress. Under the current law, the President must consult with Congress before introducing forces into hostilities, must report to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and President pro tempore of the Senate a report about American armed forces engagement in hostilities, and must get authorization from Congress in order to continue military action beyond 60 days (see Title 50, Chapter 33, Section 1544).

A third method exists under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution (Article VI, paragraph 2), which states that the Constitution and federal laws and treaties have the force of law and have supremacy over state laws. This part of the Constitution effectively means that when the Congress ratifies a treaty signed by the President, the treaty becomes part of American law. For example, the United Nations Charter, which was signed by President Harry Truman and was ratified by the American Congress (Senate) on July 28th of 1945, has the force of law in the United States, just as much as the War Powers Act of 1973 (Title 50, Chapter 33, Sections 1541-1548 of the United States Code). If a treaty (for example, a mutual defense treaty, as the United States has with NATO partners) says that the United States will commit to the military defense of some other country when that country is attacked, and then that country is attacked, the United States is legally obliged to provide for that country’s defense.

It is not entirely clear whether a military act conducted because of legal implications of treaty obligations must also be subjected to the requirements of Chapter 33 of the United States Code (War Powers Act). For instance, if Congress refused to authorize military action, but the military action was required by a treaty obligation, I suppose the Supreme Court would need to decide whether the Supremacy Clause authorized the President to continue the use of military force despite the lack of approval from Congress, as required by the War Powers Act. My sense is that treaties probably take the force of federal law with supremacy over federal law, since Congress or the President can rescind or withdraw from a treaty, and if they haven’t done so, this implies that the particulars of the treaty remain in force and have not been repudiated. Also, in order for a nation to have the ability to even enter into treaties it is a fundamental requirement that governments be able to enforce or hold to treaty obligations. So if American law allowed Congress to cancel treaty obligations by simply passing laws that had supremacy over treaties, without rescinding or withdrawing from the treaties, that would pretty much ruin the American government’s ability to even make treaties, as there would be no credibility in assurances that the American government would hold to their treaty obligations.

Another point here is that a treaty may request or permit military actions without requiring military action. If the United Nations Security Council passes a resolution asking all United Nations member nations to unite in carrying out whatever is necessary to effect the destruction of some military force that threatens civilians, this resolution may not impose on the President the same sort of obligation to act that a mutual defense treaty does. So, if a treaty puts some obligation on a President to do something, but does not specifically require the President to commit armed forces to acts of war or military hostilities, then there arises a question of whether the request can be used to authorize the use of American forces under treaty obligations and the Supremacy clause, or whether the lack of a specific obligation for military action makes American action discretionary, in which case a President would perhaps be more likely need to follow the War Powers Act.

So now, let’s look at some facts here. First of all, the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution has had plenty of history in the Supreme Court, and many state laws have been overturned because they conflicted with Treaty rights. Here are some examples of cases in which treaties were in conflict with state or local laws and ordinances, and the Supreme Court found that the rules in the treaties voided state laws or local ordinances:

Ware v Hylton (1796) and
Hopkirk v. Bell (1807) and
Foster v. Neilson (1829) and
the Head Money Cases (1884) and
Geofroy v Riggs (1890) and
Nielsen v. Johnson (1929) and
Kolovrat v. Oregon (1961)

But what about contradictions between a federal law and a treaty? Or what about when there are two different processes to follow, one described in a federal law and another described in a treaty? I am not aware of any Supreme Court decisions on these questions. I’m confident that a contradiction between a federal law and a treaty would be resolved in favor of the treaty, because while older laws my be nullified or modified by later laws, treaties are nullified or modified by diplomatic actions and the process of withdrawing from a treaty or rescinding it or repudiating it. As to the the situation where a treaty allows one sort of process and a federal law allows a different process, for committing troops to some hostile activities, for example, I’m not sure what the Supreme Court would decide. I think there is a good case that a President ought to follow both a treaty and a federal law when there was no contradiction between the two. I also think that because it’s very important that an American government have credibility in international diplomacy, a good case can be made that processes or conditions given in treaties would have primacy over federal laws.

Let’s consider the source documents. First of all, here is the U.S. Constitution. Article VI, paragraph 2:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

So, Treaties made under the Authority of the United States are the supreme Law of the Land. Yes, but so are Laws of the United States.

Now, let’s consider the United Nations Charter. It was passed by the Senate on July 28, 1945, by a vote of 89-2. President Truman had already signed the Charter, and the UN Charter was signed by 50 nations in San Francisco on June 26 of 1945. By the provisions of the United Nations Charter, it came into force on October 24, 1945 (after the five permanent members had all ratified it). The United States has not withdrawn from the United Nations, and has not repudiated or rescinded its charter.

Next, we should consider United Nations Charter, especially Articles 24 and 42, which bear on the use of force.

Here is Chapter V, Article 24, sections 1 and 2, and also Article 25.

Article 24 (1): In order to ensure prompt and effective action by the United Nations, its Members confer on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and agree that in carrying out its duties under this responsibility the Security Council acts on their behalf.

Article 24 (2): In discharging these duties the Security Council shall act in accordance with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations. The specific powers granted to the Security Council for the discharge of these duties are laid down in Chapters VI, VII, VIII, and XII.

Article 25: The Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.

This seems to me to tell us that, by American law (the Charter has the force of law according to the American Constitution and the fact that we have signed and ratified the U.N. Charter), that America (and about 190 other countries) have given the Security Council primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security, and the Security Council acts on behalf of the United States when it carries out its duties. This implies, to me at least, that if the United Nations Security Council says that such-and-such is required for international security, it’s the same thing as if the American Congress has said that such-and-such is required. That is, the U.N. Security Council can act on behalf of the United States (our Congress and President) in carrying out duties to maintain international peace and security.

Next, let’s examine articles 41 and 42 (in Chapter VII) of the United Nations charter:

Article 41: The Security Council may decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.

Article 42: Should the Security Council consider that measures provided for in Article 41 would be inadequate or have proved to be inadequate, it may take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security. Such action may include demonstrations, blockade, and other operations by air, sea, or land forces of Members of the United Nations.

Following Article 42 are eight more articles (Articles 43-50) related to the use of force. Among these are Article 49:

The Members of the United Nations shall join in affording mutual assistance in carrying out the measures decided upon by the Security Council.

So, the United Nations Charter does allow the Security Council to decide that military action (“other operations by air, sea, or land forces...”) should be taken. It also provides for the United States to join in carrying out such measures. The Charter also makes the Security Council an entity that acts on behalf of the United States. So, it seems clear to me that acts of the Security Council are legitimate and legal means for the United States President to commit American forces to hostilities.

Has the United Nations Security Council authorized the use of force or made some sort of a call that would authorize the U.S. President to commit armed forces to hostile action in Libya? Yes, Resolution 1973 made two demands (complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians... and Libyan authorities comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law, human rights and refugee law...). Security Council Resolution 1973 also made a decision to establish a flight ban over Libya. And then it authorized member states to take all necessary measures to enforce this. Here is point 4 of the resolution:

Authorizes Member States that have notified the Secretary-General, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, and acting in cooperation with the Secretary-General, to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 (2011), to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory, and requests the Member States concerned to inform the Secretary-General immediately of the measures they take pursuant to the authorization conferred by this paragraph which shall be immediately reported to the Security Council;

So, it seems pretty clear to me that the President can send military forces to Libya, but he can’t place an occupation force there. He is authorized to do this by Security Council Resolution 1973 and the United Nations Charter and the second paragraph of Article VI in the U.S. Constitution. It seems likely to me that this authorization is the only authorization he needs, given the language of the United Nations Charter, and that Chapter 33 of Title 50 of the United States Code (the War Powers Act) does not take precedence over the United Nations Charter. However, in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution and Chapter 33 of Title 50, I think the president ought to observe the procedures and obligations of the War Powers Act. The Senate’s ratification of the U.N. Charter back in 1945 already authorizes this particular application of force in Libya, and also addresses the concerns that motivated the authors of our Constitution to give war-declaring powers to Congress (they were concerned with the history of despots and monarchs declaring war and claiming wars were necessary for their nations, when in fact the wars were not necessary, and were actually quite costly and wasteful, and often immoral as well).

My understanding is that the War Powers Act applies to American unilateral military action or joint military action with international allies when that action is not specifically authorized by ratified treaties. The War Powers Act ought not apply in cases of American military action authorized by ratified treaties, as for example in cases where the United Nations Security Council has authorized the use of armed forces, or when one of our NATO allies has been attacked. Still, there is no harm in observing the requirements of the War Powers Act, and there is probably great benefit in doing so, so I think the Obama administration ought to go along with the rules about notification and consultation, and perhaps seek some sort of a Congressional endorsement of any prolonged (more than 60 days) military involvement.

Incidentally, someone was saying that too much effort has gone into inventing and deploying weapons, and not enough effort has gone into figuring out a way to have peace. They were speaking about the conflict in Libya, but making a general observation about the allocation of resources in this world. I agree, but I wanted to point out that there are already some very satisfactory suggestions and institutions for establishing peace. The person asked about a blueprint for peace. Here was my response:

A blueprint for peace? Have you read the charter of the United Nations? Or how about the writings of peace activists, visionaries, and spiritual leaders such as ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Malread Maguire, etc.? Or speeches of various winners of the Nobel Peace Prize? There are many blueprints for peace. It’s up to us to build the structures outlined in these blueprints.

Less Can Be More

2011-03-20T21:16:00.001-07:00

Less can be more

And small can be beautiful

For life isn’t all

Just big and wonderful

‘n’ what do I need when you get right down to it?

All my cares come from greed

And it’s time that I knew it

Things I can’t do without

are the small things that life is all about.

Less can be more

And small can be beautiful

I don’t want it all

Just part of wonderful

For what do I need when you get right down to it?

Just a garden and seed

and the love to pursue it

Things I can’t do without

are the small things that life is all about.

This is the best song from the Rankin and Bass animated movie of the Return of the King. In terms of keeping with the spirit of what Tolkien was getting at in his Lord of the Rings, the Rankin and Bass version may be closer (slightly) to the masterpiece than Peter Jackson's work. Neither version really does justice to the literary and philosophical themes.

Glen Yarbrough came all the way from the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Island to record this song in New York, and then he went right back to his boat.

Here is an mp3 of the song.

Celebration of the resignation

2011-02-11T13:34:00.001-08:00

Arthur and I just went out in the front yard and shot off a pack of bottle rockets in celebration of the resignation of the Egyptian dictator and tyrant, Mubarak. I'm very optimistic for the future of Egypt.

Hadley-Ives channel on YouTube

2011-02-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

I've finally figured out how to use iMovie 2008 (I used to use iMovie 2006), even though there is already an iMovie 2011 available. I have made a few videos of the snow situation here on our street.

And see also a similar film here. And here is one showing the piles of snow on our driveway.

Weather extremes.

2011-02-01T13:43:00.000-08:00

Today and tomorrow we're having a blizzard here in Springfield. I came home from work at about 2:00 p.m. this afternoon, and the driving conditions were awful.

I was reflecting on some winter extremes I've experienced. I think the coldest temperature I've ever experienced was in 1977 (January 16) when I was a child in Indianapolis, and the temperature dropped to -20 F (-28 C). There was a storm with high winds, so the wind chill was -40 F (-40 C). I bundled up and went out in the storm to enjoy the white out conditions. The most snow I've ever seen in a single snowfall must have been in the blizzard of 1978 (January 25-26), when we had 15-16 inches of snow in Indianapolis. That was fun.

This snow we're having today and tomorrow may exceed that record from my childhood, as the forecast is for anything from a total accumulation of 12-20 inches here.

Some other records would be the hottest temperature I've ever experienced, which was 45 C (113 F) while in Tblisi, Georgia, in the old Soviet Union back in 1985. That was hot. The most rain I've ever seen was during Typhoon Mindulle in early January of 2004. It came over Taiwan and then just stalled for a few days and sat on top of the central and southern part of the island (I was in Chiayi), and dumped rain on us as its winds weakened. We experienced about 900 mm (35 inches) in one day, but the rain was also very bad the day before and after that. Up in the mountains there was considerably more rain, and I remember calculating that during the whole storm Ali Shan had received nearly 2000 mm (79 inches) of rain.

Postscript: We had only 9 inches (according to some sources, although our local newspaper reports 13 inches as the total for Springfield), far below the minimum snow amount predicted, but still enough to make impressive drifts. Now we get bitter cold, but the low should only be -7 F (-22 C) tonight.

Climate Change and Weather Disasters

2011-01-13T17:55:00.000-08:00

It turns out that 2010 ties 2005 as the hottest year on record (I think records go back for about 111 years).

And now, in just two weeks of year 2011, look at what we have in terms of rainfall:

Terrible floods in Brazil. Over 400 feared dead (dateline Jan 13, 2011)

Terrible floods in Australia, over 20,000 homes swamped, dozens dead across the country, with floods in Brisbane, the state of Queensland, and Toowoomba. (dateline Jan 12, 2011)

Record flooding in Sri Lanka, with 300,000 people fleeing their homes (dateline Jan 13, 2011)

Bad floods in KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, with evacuations and some drownings. (dateline Jan 5, 2011).

And of course, California has been having the heaviest winter rains on record (highest December rainfalls ever).

In December, parts of Eastern Europe also had the heaviest rains ever in living memory.

Eau Claire, Wisconsin had 22 inches of snow on December 11th, part of that massive snow storm that hit Minnesota and Wisconsin December 9-11th. A few days later the United Kingdom and Europe were hit by one of their worst winter storms ever. More snow storms actually happen in warmer years.

Okay, so the world is a big place, with thousands of regions and areas, and at any given moment, just by statistical chance, there will be a few places having their wettest or driest, coldest or hottest weather on record, right? So, are all these extreme weather events just a statistical blip, a random event, or are we seeing something indicating a change in global climate patterns?

Meanwhile, an anti-science conservative has just taken leadership in the House of Representatives. The Chamber of Commerce, which opposes research into development of renewable energy, has successfully helped elect its friends into office. Meanwhile, China is about to go far ahead of us in investment in renewable energy. The Chinese are building entire new cities with an emphasis on getting power from renewable energy. What is America doing?

Recent Right Wing Violence or Threats

2011-01-12T17:53:00.000-08:00

When you combine serious mental illness, depression, horrible life circumstances, and social isolation with some sort of ideology or rhetoric that blames a group of people for the world's problems (liberals, Jews, Democrats, whatever), you get situations where bad stuff can happen. There is an interesting question, through, whether certain crazed lone gunmen wouldn't just kill randomly anyway. I mean, is it worse for a violent maniac to shoot down a politician or judge or a bunch of people at a political meeting than a group of school children or a group of shoppers, or a group of sports fans? If people didn't have a certain right-wing paranoid narrative to focus their hatred toward police or liberals or federal agencies or politicians, wouldn't they just find some other group to focus their hatred and fear? Perhaps there would be mass shootings on Wall Street, or in banks, or in customer service departments of cable companies or phone companies, instead of attacks on Democrats or abortion doctors or whatever.

But when I think of shooting rampages or violent threats against political figures, I can't think of any in the past 40-50 years that were motivated by Communist or Socialist ideologies, unless possibly the Assassination of JFK had some connection to Marxism. There have been many threats against liberals and Democrats, but do conservatives and Republicans get the same degree of threats and murder attempts? In most of the shooting sprees, I think untreated mental illness plays a role, and the shooters are not politically motivated (think of Charles Whitman, the University of Texas shooter, who was suffering from a brain tumor, or John Hinckley, Jr., Ronald Reagan's would-be killer). Here are some reminders of the sort of attacks Democrats and liberals have experienced in recent years:

On December 10th of 2010, Charles Turner Habermann, of Palm Springs California, called Democrat James McDermott and threatened to kill him. Mr. Habermann threatened to assault and murder a United States official, with the intent to impede, intimidate, and interfere with the official’s performance of official duties (he tried to persuade McDermott to vote in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy). It’s Case MJ11-16. Read the Complaint of Violation, and see how Habermann said, “He [McDermott] advocates stealing people’s money to give it to losers.”

Last April, Charles Alan Wilson made a threat against Patty Murray, another Democrat of Washington State. He opposed the health care bill, and didn’t like the fact that Patty Murray had voted in favor of it.

John Troy Davis, A Colorado man who claimed to be suffering from schizophrenia, also threatened a Democrat, Senator Michael Bennet. Mr. Davis was having difficulties getting his Social Security, and he warned Bennet’s home office staff that he was “going to come down there and shoot you all.”

In July of 2008, Jim Adkisson killed two people in a Unitarian Church. He wanted to kill liberals, and every Democrat in the Senate and House.

In April of 2009, Richard Poplawski shot and killed three police officers. Mr. Poplawski was fearful that the Obama administration was going to ban guns.

In July of 2010, Byron Williams was on his way to kill people at a liberal non-profit in San Francisco when he became involved in a gun battle with police.

In late May of 2009 Scott Roeder assassinated Dr. George Tiller. Mr. Roeder had been a member of the Freemen group.

Would it be possible to think of a similar list of conservative and Republicans who have been threatened or attacked? If not, why not?

FOLLOW UP
The first comment on this post was an excellent observation from an anonymous source, who pointed out that there were indeed many threats made against prominent conservatives. I followed up on some advice from the comment, and found some good links to share here.

Here is one about threats made against President Bush. I'd make a distinction between people who carried signs saying "kill Bush" (awful and illegal and unethical) and those who wanted to see Bush put on trial, found guilty, and executed (awful and legal, and of debatable ethical quality). I personally would find it satisfying to see Bush put on trial, and if he is guilty of crimes, which I suspect he is, I'd like to see him forced to make restitution or receive punishment for it, although I'm open to the possibility that he is innocent, and I certainly don't think putting him or his worst cabinet officials and administration functionaries on trial should be a priority. But at any rate, as the page I've linked to shows, there was very hateful and angry and violent imagery at some anti-Bush rallies, and I think it's clearly in the same category of troublesome rhetoric as what we see aimed at Obama and his administration.

And here are other stories about conservatives being threatened: Ann Coulter; Freedomworks and the Tea Party; and other famous conservatives. Compare those to the cases I've cited and linked to above, or similar threats.

And yet, I see a difference as well. It seems to me that some of the voices using the violent rhetoric and exhibiting hateful paranoia against liberals and the president now (and during the Clinton administration) are relatively famous mainstream people. And while it's now clear people on the left can be just as vicious and divisive, it just seems to me that there aren't so many public figures on the left that are this angry or hostile. I guess two of the harshest anti-conservatives I know of on the left are people like Michael Parenti, Ted Rall, and Jim Hightower, and comparing them to their conservative equivalents (perhaps Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, or Sean Hannity), it just seems to me that the rhetoric from the mainstream far right conservatives is harsher than the rhetoric from mainstream far left liberals. When it comes to name-calling or threats from the mainstream left, I think of Al Franken and his mildly amusing book "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot," but it was not the sort of book that claimed Limbaugh was an enemy of America, at least I don't remember it being so.

And it's clear that there have been death threats against people on the right, and disgraceful violent rhetoric against some people on the right. But, does the left have anyone like Jim Adkisson, who really did kill a bunch of Unitarians because they were liberals, and really did take some of his inspiration from right-wing radio personalities and mainstream far-right authors? Or is there anyone on the left who acted beyond theats, and really shot at people or attempted to kill people, like Byron Williams? The closest thing I can think of is Washington Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad, who was apparently somewhat motivated by class and race (against European-Americans and middle-class or wealthy persons).

I'm not sure I have a point here with this post. I'm just asking some questions, and trying to see if there is a fair cause to distinguish between political sides in assigning blame for the debasement of rhetoric and debate. It is clear there are crazy people on the far left who will threaten violence, just as there are on the far right. Maybe there is a difference in degrees or frequency or style of threats and actions by these partisan extremists and hateful persons.

This past year I listened to the debates between Lincoln and Douglas (acted by Richard Dreyfus (as Stephen Douglas) and David Straithairn (as Lincoln). The debates were heated, and there were personal attacks, but although the debates were aggressive and full of conflict, I thought the tone and style was far more agreeable, and less demagogic than what I've heard or seen in modern media. I wish partisan debates today were as full as substance and eloquence and courtesy as these debates were over 150 years ago.

Update on April 1, 2011: The left now has a person crazed by her anger, who threatened the lives of Republicans. This is Katherine Windels of Wisconsin.

Household consumption in the Hadley-Ives family, 2010

2011-01-09T11:13:00.000-08:00

I keep track of my spending and consumption, and almost every transaction, be it with cash, credit card, or checking account, gets recorded and assigned a category in some spreadsheets I use. Every two weeks I check on these and update them. The spreadsheets keep a running total for our spending in the various categories. I’m interested in my own household as a case study in economic life.

So, let me share how our expenses went into various categories in 2010.

The top two categories are:
Housing: 12%
Travel and Lodging: 12%

The four-way tie for third place in spending are:
Groceries and household expenses: 10%
Taxes: 10%
Vehicle purchase, maintenance, and insurance: 10%
Other: 10% (mostly retirement savings)

In seventh place, we have:
Utilities: 7%

Then, tied for eighth place, we have:
Health: 6%
Education: 6% (mostly college savings)

The remaining categories are:
Giving: 4%
Food out-of-home: 3%
Entertainment: 3%
Clothing: 3%
Gas: 2%
Interest on debt: 2%
Communication: 1%
Money given to our sons: 1%

Explanation of these categories follows:

The housing figure includes both the interest and principle on our mortgage, but not our property taxes. I figure unless one is wealthy or inherits a home, the interest on a mortgage is unavoidable, and is just part of the cost of owning a home, so I keep it as a housing expense rather than looking it as interest.

The travel and lodging category includes both work-related travel for which I was later compensated and personal travel, and also includes all cash withdrawals made while traveling abroad, even though much of the cash spending could more accurately have been assigned to “food out-of-home” or “entertainment” or “groceries”. If we subtract the money I received from faculty development or scholarly grants for the travel, it would drop to 11%, and another 1%-point could be reassigned from travel to entertainment, and probably another 1% reassigned to food out-of-home. Gas costs for travel are kept separate in the “gas” spending category. So, a most realistic estimate for actual travel expenses in 2010 would be 9% of our spending. That is still quite high, but we all went to Asia this summer, and Jeri went back to Taiwan in March and December as well. I had conferences to attend in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Hong Kong, Dallas, and Strasbourg. We also visited Vancouver and Oregon this year (I went to Oregon twice), although most of the expenses on those trips were covered by others, so not many of those expenses are included in this category.

The groceries and household expenses include any charge or spending made at a grocery store, department store, or hardware store. Well, if I remember specifically buying prescription drugs, clothing, or toys I do assign those expenses to their appropriate categories (e.g., health, clothing, entertainment). Mostly though, if we buy something to eat or use in our home, it goes in this category.

Taxes include income taxes and property taxes, and some small portion of our total sales taxes. Actually, if I went through our purchases and shifted all the sales taxes we pay into the tax category, it’s likely our groceries and household category would shrink by nearly half-a-percentage-point, and taxes would go up by half-a-point.

The “Other” category is mainly the retirement savings from my paycheck, life insurance, and a few miscellaneous expenses that are hard to categorize. I do not qualify for any social security (I’m a state worker, and exempt from Social Security taxes, but I won’t get any Social Security benefits when I retire). I also will not receive any pension when I retire (I’m in the self-managed plan for academic workers in the University of Illinois system, which means that when I retire all I get is the money I’ve saved in the self-managed plan, and no pension). As my family has a history of heart disease and I have (treated) high blood pressure, I assume I won’t have many years of life in retirement, if in fact I live long enough to retire, and the self-managed plan has the benefit that my heirs and survivors will get all I’ve saved, whereas if I was enlisted for a pension my survivors would get very little.

The Vehicle purchase, maintenance, and insurance category costs include the costs of repairing my bike and our two cars. It also includes the interest in the loan we used to purchase our minivan, which seemed more appropriate in this category rather than in the “interest” category.

The utilities cost is much higher this year because we had a new heating and cooling system installed this year. That was put in “utilities” rather than “housing” as a spending category.

The education spending category includes the college savings we have put away, and certain purchases of school materials, educational books, subscriptions to news and science magazines and journals, and so forth. My memberships in scholarly associations are also included as “educational” expenses in my system of accounting. Our educational expenses ought to be much less, as we must save a high percentage of our income to pay for college, and college ought to be far more affordable (subsidized by the public).

The health spending category includes medical, dental, and vision care, including services, insurance, and medicine or glasses / contact lenses. At only 6%, it’s a bit low, as a household such as ours ought to be paying much more for health services (to make health care universally accessible to poor, sick, and elderly households). I include Medicare taxes in health spending rather than in the taxes category.

Our giving is about 2.5% charitable giving and 1.5% buying gifts or sending money for family members and friends.

Our “communications” spending includes our internet service, phone service, postage on packages and stamps, and our subscription to the local newspaper.

Politically-Motivated Assassination in Arizona

2011-01-09T06:45:00.000-08:00

It is dangerous to have rhetoric of talking about "taking out" political opponents and having political campaign rallies in which people shoot guns at targets (I find it difficult to believe reports that Gabrielle Giffords' opponent in the 2010 mid-terms actually had supporters shoot at photos of Gabrielle in a campaign rally—that must surely be an exaggeration). The hateful partisan rhetoric, using violent imagery, is most dangerous because in a nation with over 200 million adults, some fraction are unbalanced, and suffer from disorganized thinking, delusions, and perhaps hallucinations, and some fraction of these persons are highly suggestible, and some fraction of those highly suggestible persons with psychotic disorders will pay attention to the hateful rhetoric with violent imagery, and take it seriously and literally.

There is also a danger that persons who are cunning and calculating and not suffering from a diagnosable mental illness will be pulled into conspiracies to assassinate or act violently against our democratic system and political figures with whom they disagree, but it always seems to me that poisonous rhetoric is most likely to poison persons who minds are weak and vulnerable, as Jared Lee Loughner's mind clearly was. Some terrorists, whether claiming Islamic or Christian religious identity or no religious identity, have had loose connections to reality in their minds (think of Michael Enright and Zacharias Moussawi).

Judge Roll, who was assassinated, had been threatened, and local Arizona rhetoric against him was very heated. This was partly because he had presided over a court case in which undocumented immigrants were suing an Arizona rancher. It seems possible that someone older (and less mentally disorganized) person helped Jared Loughner get to the rally.

This reminds me of the reaction to Timothy McVeigh's terrorism, where people talked about how bad the anti-government rhetoric had become, and suggested it be toned down. Really, we ought to instill in Americans a sense of disgust with rhetoric that crosses a certain line, so that hate-mongering demagogues wouldn't be so popular. The quality of public debate and rhetoric ought to be a subject for consideration in middle school and high school, and perhaps even elementary school.

Christina Taylor Green, 9-years-old, wanted to go to college and learn how to help people. Maybe she would have been a social worker, a nurse, or a lawyer. She was recently elected to her student council, and this interest in leadership and being an elected representative might have inspired her to go see her congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Christina was evidently born on September 11, 2001. Her uncle, Greg Segalini described her as, "real special and real sweet."

Another person killed in the assassination was Gabe Zimmerman, a social worker with an MSW, who worked as Gabrielle's community outreach worker. I will certainly mention him and describe his life and work to my future classes of students in social welfare policy or community organizing. "He had a heart for people" said Doug Hart.

Some photographs of Fall and Winter 2010

2010-12-27T13:18:00.001-08:00

I've completed six of nine pages of photographs for my fall and winter photo albums.

Here they are:

A page for the ENTI 2010 Conference in Strasbourg.

And the ENTI Conference culture tour of Haut-Koenigsbourg Castle and Colmar.

And my photographs of Strasbourg, France.

And other parts of Alsace, including Colmar.

I have some photographs from Thanksgiving and December on this page.

And more photographs from the days around Christmas are here.

I've put up some photographs from winter Boy Scout activities.

And I also have a page of general fall photographs, mostly of Boy Scouting events.

Some fun videos from 2010

2010-12-17T07:17:00.000-08:00

This year I enjoyed some amazing videos on the web. I want to mention the interactive "Wilderness Downtown" film you can see with the Chrome web browser application for the Arcade Fire song "We Used to Wait" (www.thewildernessdowntown.com/). Also, check out the OK GO! translation party page (http://blog.universalsubtitles.org/translation-party-ok-go/) for some amazing videos. My sons especially like the "White Knuckles" and "This Too Shall Pass" videos, which I also like, but my favorite is "GPS Parade (Back From Kathmandu)" video, as it seems more inspiring to me. A great year for interactive art.

The semester is nearly over.

2010-12-17T07:04:00.000-08:00

Across my courses and independent studies I've directed this semester, I've had 32 students complete their work for credit, 8 students have received incomplete marks (most of those should be resolved by the end of January), and 4 have received no credit (but I'm open to changing those if the students make extraordinary efforts independently in the next few weeks). I don't like giving so many incomplete grades, but when you teach adult students online, things happen: mental health issues, caregiving issues, family issues, things on the job, legal problems, deployments to the Middle East or Central Asia, and so forth. Most of those incomplete grades were given to people who turned in great assignments and participated well in discussion boards for more than half the semester, but just had big gaps (mostly toward the end of the semester) when they suddenly stopped posting or submitting assignments.

My total teaching load was light (44 students) because I'm the department chair, and have about 10-20 hours of work each week just in administrative duties and service on various committees. I'm chair of a department with about 220 students (mixed graduate and undergraduate, online and on ground), but only three faculty.

During break I will prepare the online lectures for my new course on struggles for liberty and freedom. I'm taking a community organizing and social work perspective on various social movements, revolutions, rebellions, and political causes in which freedom or liberty were expressed motivating factors. We begin with national revolts against imperial rule (from The Maccabee Revolt, Servile Wars, and Provinces rebelling against Roman Imperial Rule down through the American and French Revolutions, the struggles of 1848, and the emancipation, suffrage, and civil rights movements, to modern rhetoric around freedom and liberty in the Tea Party Movement, and various forms of resistance to tyranny political (China, Cuba, Iran, etc.) economic (anti-globalization movement, resistance to corporate power), and social (movements to empower and liberate persons with disabilities, and the resistance to oppressive language and the anti-political-correctness backlash). My goal is to get about 17 lectures down and recorded for iTunes U. I've got to have this done by the first week of June, so I'll be using most of my "vacation" time to get it done.

- Eric

Obama concessions on tax extensions explained.

2010-12-09T14:09:00.000-08:00

Why didn't the Democrats in the Senate and House pass their version of an ideal extension of the Bush-era tax cuts back in September or October? It seems Reid and Pelosi missed a chance to take care of this issue before the election. Because they didn't get the job done, Obama seems to be in a position where he must give concessions to the Republicans, because the Democrats couldn't get their version without concessions through the Senate. Liberals should be putting more blame on the Democrats in congress and less on the White House.

The White House has a fine little presentation by Austan Goolsbee at the White House White Board. It's quite good, and mostly expresses feelings with which I'm in entire agreement. There are two things I would have said differently. First, when he points out that the changes in taxes and programs are only temporary (two year) he suggests this implies they don't have a long-term impact on our federal deficit. I would have said, "they only add to the deficit at this level until we revisit this question in 2012, so if we decide to reduce spending to balance our budget we can decide whether we want to cut these in two years. There's no long-term commitment to these things so we can be flexible about them." I personally would cut defense spending or even Social Security benefits long before I'd cut tax deductions for parents with children going to college or the EITC. But any way, framing the issue as I'm suggesting would have been more honest and more representative of how Obama thinks (he's really into the idea of consultation and negotiation to reach the optimal compromises). The other thing I would have said would be, "Republican intransigence and the inability of Democratic leadership in the House and Senate to push better tax changes through congress months ago have brought us to this situation where we have no time to get a better deal and end the tax breaks for the very wealthy" Of course the White House isn't going to take a swipe at Democratic congressional leadership, but as a non-partisan observer who wants to see the budget balanced as soon a feasible (which seems a long way off, given the current unemployment), I'm angered that Democratic legislative leadership has been so incompetent to get us to this point where fiscally irresponsible policies of the Republicans get shoved down our throats.

If I thought lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans was an efficient way to stimulate the economy I'd be with the Republicans on this, but all the economic research evidence I've seen from non-partisan sources seems to confirm that these particular tax reductions to the wealthy are about the least efficient way to stimulate the economy we have. I personally wouldn't mind if we taxed household income over $150,000 at a flat rate of 55% or 60%. (I think the midpoint of the Laffer curve is somewhere between 50% and 70%, and I think our wealthiest citizens ought to be taxed at such a rate, but I'd have deductions for state taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes, so that after all taxes even the wealthy would keep at least 35% to 45% of their total income).

If you've seen the White House White Board presentation, here is some more I have to say about the presentation:
Some people say the expenditures (whether they are tax cuts or tax expenditures or just spending isn't clear) on the right (Democrat's) side would also be on the left (Republican's) side, but this isn't exactly right (or wrong). Many Republicans have traditionally supported things like the EITC and the Child Tax Credit, but the rhetoric from the Republicans in the election and most recently has been very much about framing the issues with Republicans in favor of shrinking government, cutting spending, balancing the budget, reducing deficits, and opposing "spending we can't afford" like extending unemployment benefits (unless there are cuts elsewhere in the budget to pay for them). But realistically, what tax expenditures or spending would Republicans cut in order to support continuation of generous EITC benefits or the child tax credit? Are they opposing the $80 billion plus tax expenditure of the mortgage interest deduction? Are they proposing reductions in Social Security benefits? Do they want to significantly cut Medicare? Are they talking about reducing the Defense budget? No, they mostly aren't. I think it's fair to say that things like a reduction in the Social Security payroll contribution, the child tax credit, or the EITC are significantly higher priorities for the Democrats, and in general are not protected by the Republicans. So the White House was being fair in showing these in the right (Democrat) column.

Cartoon Story

2010-10-26T15:05:00.001-07:00

Here is a fine little story. It's all in your head. Yes it is.

Pulled Muscle. Ouch.

2010-10-13T21:12:00.001-07:00

Last week on Monday I pulled a calf muscle in my right leg. I had always thought a pulled muscle was something like a sore muscle, but it's much worse. It's actually a tear in muscle tissue, and in serious cases a person may require surgery to repair or help reattach a muscle to a tendon. It seems to me comparable to the pain of a broken bone, although not really quite as bad as that. My muscle tear seems to be not too severe, but not too mild either. Sometimes the pain is excruciating and intense, even now, ten days after the injury. This makes me laugh, as it seems a ridiculous situation. Anyway, it seems the best thing to do is to avoid using my right leg as much as possible, so I won't be going on hikes or riding my bike to work and back. This is disappointing to me. But, by November I suppose I'll be better, and back on the bike and ready to hike.

Remembering September 11, 2001

2010-09-28T15:23:00.000-07:00

In one of my on-line courses we were discussing how major historical events have influenced, and most of the participants in this course mentioned the events of September 11, 2001. I remember in the morning as I cooked my breakfast and listened to NPR, and heard that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. I had no television, and I knew about the plane that flew into the Empire State Building many years ago, so I went off to campus and began my class as if nothing much special was happening, but my students were highly agitated, and one of them asked if we were really going to have class, given what had happened in New York. I was astonished that they would be so worked up about an airplane (I supposed it must have been a small aircraft) crashing into a skyscraper. At noon, when the class ended, there was a message on my office phone from my father, telling me that my sister and brother-in-law were safe (they were investment bankers in New York City, and sometimes went to meetings in the World Trade Center, and in fact one of my brother-in-law's best friends was killed that day). I called to ask my dad what was up, and when he told me the towers had collapsed I responded with something like, "you mean they collapsed from the top down to where the airplane hit them, right? because those towers are made of steel, and I don't think they could just collapse because an airplane hit them." I still hadn't seen any pictures.

The American response to this crime has been very significant in shaping all our lives since then. The wars, the waste, the mismanagement, the fear, and so forth has been very much what I feared we would have. A state of permanent war. But I've been impressed by how good America has been about distinguishing between the cultists and the mainstream. I see Osama bin-Laden and the theologians and strategists around him to be very much the same type as David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Chizuo Matsumoto (Shoko Ashahara), and I think most Americans recognize that our Muslim neighbors have nothing to do with terrorists like Osama bin-Laden (no more than Christians had anything to do with Timothy McVeigh). I must admit I'm glad the Taliban don't rule in Afghanistan, and I'm pleased that Saddam Husayn and his government met the fate that seemed appropriate, but the costs have been overwhelming in treasure and in blood, and the research I've seen suggests our mismanaged campaigns have caused excess deaths in the Middle East and Central Asia at two orders of magnitude over what we suffered nine years ago. I remember in 2002 protesting and holding a sign I'd made saying something like, "When we bomb there will be collateral damage and civilian dead. How is that different from what terrorists do?" My anger at the military and political leadership that has fought these wars badly is like my feelings about Abraham Lincoln's early generals. They're a bad lot, and a disgrace.

Built to Spill

2010-09-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the Built To Spill songs from last night. We have Car, Hindsight, and a cover of the Grateful Dead's No Simple Highway.

Podcasts and iTunes-U

2010-09-20T20:15:00.001-07:00

I listen to podcasts pretty regularly. In fact, podcasts and iTunes-U probably get more of my listening time than radio.

Here are the four podcasts I listen to most often:

Focus 580. This is better than any of the national interview and talk show formats on NPR (I can't stand to listen to those, because the public call-in questions tend to be so annoying). The calls they take on Focus can also be annoying, but they sometimes aren't, and the hosts, David Inge and Celeste Quinn, are extremely good.

Le Show with Harry Shearer.

Planet Money, on NPR.

State Week in Review on WUIS with iTunes-U.

I also listen to these sometimes:

Performance Today.
This American Life.
Sound Opinions.
Fresh Air.
Media Matters.
Faith Matters.
Brookings Audio Events.
Swarthmore College Featured Events.
The UIS ECCE Speakers Series.
Podcasts from the University of Oxford.

Since I have a 40-45 minute commute each way on days when I ride my bike to campus and back home, I can usually get in a couple episodes each day, and then I often go to bed at 11:00 or midnight and listen to a podcast as I fall asleep. When I'm doing work that doesn't require much language thought (like editing photographs or making a photo album) I'll also listen to podcasts when I'm not listening to music.

Reasonable service and scholarship expectations at a teaching-oriented college

2010-09-16T20:33:00.000-07:00

Recently some faculty and administrators in my college were considering what sort of expectations we have for clinical instructors, in terms of their teaching, scholarship, and service. This inspired me to consider how much hours it takes to teach well, and what time this leaves us for committee meetings, service to the college and department and community, advising, research, keeping up-to-date in our fields of expertise, and so forth. I’d like to share my calculations here.

First of all, let’s model an ideal situation, where faculty work a reasonable number of hours per week. I think 44 hours per week is a reasonable workload, and in a 44 hour work week for university faculty, I would suppose about 8 hours of labor are actually spent at lunch, breaks, walking around campus to get to meetings, and various other activities that don’t really contribute to teaching, service, or scholarship. So, a typical faculty in this ideal state would about 36 hours of productive working time per week in a semester in which to do what they are paid to do.

And how long is a semester? Well, faculty probably work on their courses and administrative duties a couple weeks before classes start, and then classes go on for about 15 weeks, and then there is the week of final exams, and the week after final exams when faculty are grading those exams or final papers and so forth, so that’s 19 weeks of work. Usually there is a week of vacation in there somewhere, either spring break or the Thanksgiving break, but in this ideal scenario we’re just ignoring that in the hopes that in this ideal world the faculty get a week of vacation in there. That gives a typical faculty member about 684 hours to labor in a typical semester, at least in this model in which they are working a reasonable work week.

During the 15 weeks of courses, faculty must show up for classes, and that usually involves 2-4 hours of time per class each week (for simplicity’s sake, we’ll say 3 hours). Each week a faculty member teaching three courses must be present with the classes of students for about 9 hours. This time is the same whether a class has four students or 84 students.

Then there is a flexible amount of time a faculty member can devote to preparing for each class session or preparing for their class before the semester begins. They can design and prepare exercises, simulations, lab assignments, lecture notes, and so forth. They can update everything. They can make new tests, new discussion questions, and choose new readings. They must design a syllabus, and they must prepare assignment descriptions or tests. There is a minimum threshold to all this work, and there is probably a maximum number beyond which additional hours of labor get someone no discernible improvements in the quality of instruction.

Another significant variable shaping the need for this sort of labor is the experience of the faculty in teaching the course. If it is the faculty’s first time teaching the course, and the faculty is new, and the course is in an area the faculty knows about, but it’s not the faculty’s specialty, then preparation time can be immense, easily 10 hours per week just to do a reasonable job. If the faculty has taught the course a few times before, and the course is directly related to the faculty’s special interests and expertise, then class preparation times are drastically reduced, and one can probably do an excellent job with just 2-3 hours of preparation per week of classes. Typically there is more time devoted to this class preparation in the two weeks preceding the start of classes, and then a fairly constant amount of time throughout the weeks of classes, and then almost no time devoted to it in the weeks following classes, so all in all, the average over the 19 weeks of work in a semester is probably close to the average spent in a typical week. This is a number of labor hours that is also fairly constant and independent of class sizes. In fact, preparing lectures and group exercises and discussion questions for a class of 55 may require less time than the more detailed preparation one might need to do for a more intimate and personal class of 15.

Then there is the time devoted to evaluating student work and giving students individual attention, mainly through writing comments on their papers or lab work, but also in grading tests, answering questions or e-mails related to class during office hours, and so forth. On one extreme, a faculty member can give almost no feedback and use only multiple-choice tests. On the other extreme, a faculty can give copious feedback on writing style, reasoning, critical thinking, sources, grammar, and so forth. The minimum requirement that leads to almost no feedback aside from submission of grades at the end of the semester probably averages out over 19 weeks to about 5 minutes per student in class per week (slightly over 90 minutes per student per semester). If one gives five assignments and a few tests and gives copious helpful feedback on each assignment, assigns a great amount of writing and actually carefully reads all the writing and comments on a fair portion of it, then one could easily devote 12 hours per student per class per semester, averaging nearly an hour per week per student during the 15 weeks of classes (although not spread evenly across the 15 weeks of classes, but rather concentrated in weeks following submission of assignments).

So, here are my hour estimates for the time required to teach three courses with 18 students in each course over a semester, at a minimal level, a high level, and the highest level that still makes sense, using 1.5, 8, and 13 hours per student per semester as the times faculty would devote to student feedback; 2 hours, 5 hours, and 10 hours as the time faculty would devote to class preparation on average per week; and 3 hours per week for actual in-class time for each course during the 15 weeks of the semester for all three scenarios:

Time in a semester per course:

Average reasonable time for an experienced faculty member giving high quality feedback: 280.

Time for a newer faculty teaching some new courses and giving outstanding help to students in the class: 460 hours.

Time for an experienced faculty member doing a minimal effort with minimal feedback to students: 110 hours.

In actual practice, I think something like 200-250 hours per course is the actual labor time for teaching at a level of excellence with some degree of efficiency after you’ve had two or three years of experience as a professor. However, most faculty teach at a level of high quality (very good work) rather than a level of outstanding excellence, so most faculty get by with some sort of effort around 170-200 hours in a semester per class they teach, assuming the class sizes are around 18-20 students.

What is the amount of time this leaves faculty for their research, their scholarly work, their attending meetings of their department or college, their service to various governance committees and other sorts of clubs or committees on campus? What about their time meeting with their advisees, or the time they spend talking to prospective students or alumni? What if they must travel for a three-day trip to a conference where they present a paper and attend many hours of sessions? What if they are volunteering in the community or in a scholarly association, and helping to serve on an advisory board, or organize a conference, or do accreditation site visits? What about the memos they must write, the schedules and book requests they must submit? What about service on search committees, hosting potential colleagues to campus visits or reviewing scores of files of job applicants? What about training sessions? What about the 40-60 e-mails they receive each day? What about showing support for students by attending student events? Anyway, if a faculty member is spending 200 hours per course per semester, this leaves about 84 hours per semester for all the research and service. If a faculty member is spending 170 hours per course, they will have about the same number of hours per semester (174 hours) to do all their scholarly and service and administrative work.

Now, how many hours are faculty expected to devote to service, and how many hours are required to produce high quality scholarship? Assuming a professor puts 510 hours into teaching three courses with 54 students across the three courses over the semester, and then divides their time with 90 hours in scholarship and 84 hours in service, that gives them about 4 hours and 45 minutes each week for scholarship and 4 hours and 25 minutes each week for service and administration.

Conclusions:

1). If a faculty is expected to teach 4 courses per semester rather than 3 (as clinical instructors may be asked to do), there will be no significant time left for scholarship or service. Faculty teaching 4 courses per semester should have no expectations for service or scholarship.

2). If class sizes increase from 18 to 25, average hours devoted to feedback to each student will decrease (assuming hours allocated to scholarship and service remain constant). If a faculty member devotes 3-4 hours to individualized attention and feedback for each student (in reading and critiquing assignments and so forth) over the course of a whole semester, can this give the student an equally high quality education as when faculty devote 6-8 hours per semester to each student? We are assuming here that class preparation hours from the faculty and actual class time are held constant, and we’re just reducing individualized instruction and feedback. Is that individualized feedback and evaluation so important that a reduction of two or three hours per student in the time faculty give to individualized attention (over the course of a whole semester) going to harm students? I think it will.

3) Taxpayers who help fund universities should insist that public universities organize their spending and administrative structures in such a way that average class sizes remain at or below 20 students per class. A change in average class sizes from the 15-20 range up to the 20-25 range probably diminishes the quality of education in colleges that are not highly selective (students at highly selective schools probably need less individualized time from their instructors). Certainly a rise from the 15-20 class size range to the 25-30 students per class will greatly diminish individualized feedback from faculty. Faculty will need to compensate by training students to give peer feedback and using peer feedback to supplement the greatly reduced faculty feedback.

But still, faculty and the taxpaying public should fight to keep class sizes smaller. Universities ought to spend more than 50% of all revenue gained from tuition payments and allocations from unrestricted state funding to the costs of direct student advising and teaching (and library services). Efficiency gains in the structure of universities and allocation of money toward direct provision of services should be a high priority, and take precedence over attempts to squeeze greater “teaching efficiency” from faculty. Teaching 25 students rather that 15 students per class is not necessarily more efficient in terms of actual learning gained by the students in a classroom. That is, economic efficiency is not the same as pedagogical efficiency. Given the constraints of reasonable workloads and working hours and the need for quality scholarship and service, and given the actual numbers of hours needed for class preparation and individualized feedback, maximum efficiencies in teaching are probably obtained in class sizes of 15-20. Average class sizes of 20 are sustainable if public subsidy of teaching costs are set at close to 50% and average tuition costs actually paid for a year of public university education are set at about 20% of median year-round full-time income and faculty earn incomes at close to the median year-round full-time income for college-educated males, provided that over half of tuition and unrestricted state subsidies go to direct instructional and advising and library costs, and administrative and support costs are kept at less than 50%.

3). If quality scholarship requires more than 4-5 hours of work per week over a semester, and faculty are expected to have a reasonable work week of about 44 hours, then faculty will need to reduce time devoted to courses or to service and administration. Universities should be careful not to lay administrative burdens on faculty that would likely exceed an average of 4-5 hours per week. If university governance requires that some faculty give significantly more than 5 hours per week to departmental service or university service, then a system should be created to allow those faculty to teach fewer courses or smaller courses.

Hawking and Mlodinow say God did not create the universe

2010-09-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Grand Design. The title was “Why God Did Not Create the Universe.”

When a certain type of scientist makes this claim, their position always runs along these lines: science can explain whatever phenomena a religious person uses God to explain, and since science can explain it without requiring God or supernatural powers, it follows that God and supernatural powers don’t exist. Boiled down to its essence, the argument is that if we use parsimony (Occam’s Razor) we won’t have any reason to believe in God, at least not any reason based on our desire to explain or describe what we perceive in the universe.

The Hawking and Mlodinow argument follows this line. They point out that when people didn’t know much about science, they made up stories about gods or supernatural forces to explain their experiences. Even now, some people suppose there must be a God because there is something rather than nothing. We exist in a universe that seems to have just the right settings to allow life to evolve, and our planet seems remarkably well-suited to human evolution. This seems like a remarkable coincidence, so perhaps God designed the universe to be just right for us. Yet, science (as presented in the Hawking and Mlodinow book) has shown that there can be many universes, and universes can emerge from nothing, and if there are a nearly infinite number of universes it follows that there must be some universes such as ours where life as we know it can evolve. And since life has evolved here, this just happens to be a universe where it’s possible for life to emerge and evolve. So, we don’t need God to explain this universe, its creation, or its remarkable suitability for life.

The sort of God this argument dismisses is one who would fashion a creation in such a way that there would be gaps, cracks, holes, and incongruities within the creation so that intelligences within the creation would be able to logically discern the existence of the Creator, and understand that the Creator had intervened within the creation. It also dismisses a God who would set up a universe with two conflicting systems, one a system of physical laws and forces working according to a particular set of rules, and another a system of supernatural forces working according to an entirely different set of rules. In other words, the "God of the gaps" idea that we believe in God because only God can explain certain observed phenomena (like the existence of the universe) is refuted by science which has eliminated all gaps. This is an argument against a God who inspires belief because people need a "god hypothesis" to fill in explanations for things that aren't understood.

But really, there is no point in entering into a debate with such assertions. Occam’s Razor (the rule of parsimony) will always rule out God. Any evidence of God (defined as an all-powerful, all-knowing, Source of creation and Sustainer of reality with attributes analogous to what we experience as will and consciousness and emotion) can be explained parsimoniously as evidence for more advanced civilizations, rather than God. That is, in a universe such as ours it is quite plausible that there could be entities who belong to races or civilizations that evolved and advanced past our current technological state hundreds of thousands of years ago, or even millions or tens of millions of years ago. There could be beings in this universe that passed our present state of evolution and knowledge over a billion years ago. Such entities and their civilizations might be able to manifest all sorts of powers and technologies which would look to us like the work of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator God. But, if we apply the rule of parsimony, we must stick with the hypothesis that all indications of this “God” are in fact the manifestations of natural and scientific technologies far beyond our current understanding. Advanced alien races and technologies, rather than supernatural gods or magical powers of a deity, can always be suggested as an alternative scientific explanation for what appears to be evidence of God. Such explanations, which conform to Occam’s razor, give us questions about any god that science eventually finds. For example, from what race of beings did this god evolve, and how did the god develop powers and attributes, and by what technologies or physical laws does this god manifest seemingly miraculous powers and attributes? This is quite different from the typical religious contention that God was uncreated, and God is above questions related to causes, technologies, and so forth.

Some people come to belief in God through the teachings of Messengers of God. Unlike many other branches of human religion that follow Messengers of God whose lives and revelations are considerably obscured by historical distance and lack of solid evidence, Baha’is follow the Revelation of a Manifestation who lived from 1817-1892. There are plenty of obscuring legends and exaggerations around the life of Baha’u’llah, but we have enough physical and historic evidence, as well as original source materials, to make some factual observations about His life and message.

Yet, even these, which I take as convincing proof and a basis for faith, could never overcome a strong attachment to the rule of parsimony. Baha’u’llah revealed scriptures of high excellence and wisdom, sometimes spontaneously and rapidly. This seems like a possession by the Holy Spirit or a Revelation from God to those who have faith. But, rather than resort of supernatural explanations, one could use the rule of parsimony to point out that many people have revealed poems, stories, and other miraculous material while in trances, or under hypnosis. There have been cases of automatic writing (spirit writing) and so forth, all related to dissociative mental activity, and this isn’t so different from the way Baha’u’llah revealed Baha’i scriptures. Baha’u’llah evidently saw and heard things that others couldn’t hear, and this sort of phenomena is fairly common in people who suffer from schizophrenia, or persons who aren’t mentally ill, but who experience objectively non-real experiences such as alien or fairy abduction or conversations with dead ancestors (at least non-real to mortal observers, but I have no idea about what is going on in the brains of such people). Delusions are also widely known, and Baha’u’llah’s beliefs about His station could be explained as delusions without invoking a supernatural God to explain them. The fact that Baha’u’llah seems to have fit in with prophetic predictions about a Manifestation of God could be dismissed, if we use parsimony, as coincidence, or as stretching the facts to fit vague prophetic traditions. A person could just argue that Baha’u’llah didn’t in fact fulfill prophesies. Likewise the remarkable or miraculous events surrounding Bah’u’llah’s life or his remarkable abilities could be dismissed as untrue stories, or merely remarkable coincidences or luck. It is always more scientific to invoke Occam’s razor and explain away aspects of Baha’u’llah’s life as coincidence, false stories, or something else that doesn’t require a divine supernatural God.

Even if one did accept that something seemingly supernatural was going on in Baha’u’llah’s life and Revelation, it would be more parsimonious to suggest Baha’u’llah was merely using natural forces that science hasn’t yet detected and explored, rather than to accept that God was involved. In fact, in some of Baha’u’llah’s writings (such as the Tablet of Wisdom) it appears that Baha’u’llah was picking up some ideas current in his time and culture about history, rather than picking up direct factual information about history. This fits with an idea that natural technologies or powers were involved, rather than an all-powerful, all-knowing Divine Force.

Baha’i writings about miracles also seem to take this view, that miracles and miraculous events should not be relied upon as evidence, unless one has directly experienced the miracle or event for oneself. The supernatural stories surrounding Baha’u’llah are evidence to those who were present when the miraculous events took place, but for the rest of us, such stories are merely stories, and we should not take them as evidence for Baha’u’llah‘s status as a Messenger of God. After all, there are many people who have sometimes exhibited miraculous powers or encountered supernatural forces, and this sort of experience isn’t really all that unusual.

What frustrates me is that atheistic scientists who present these arguments that Occam’s razor and the rule of parsimony remove God from the question because science can explain everything without God are claiming that the domains of logic and empirical evidence (the sort of evidence that can be reproduced and manipulated through experiment) are sufficient domains to explain the world. In essence, they are claiming that science and logic and rational thought are sufficient for our beliefs and models of the world. This is, I believe, a mistake. There are other domains of life and other models of understanding that work quite well, and are needed, and some of these domains are outside of science. Religion is one of these domains. I think when religion makes propositions about the natural world, it is the duty of the religious person to subject their assertions to scientific investigation. But the scientific method is not an especially useful way to investigate the realms of meaning, value, ethics, theology, and so forth. There are other realms such as arts, economics, human relationships, dreams, and various other aspects of the world that may also lie mostly outside of the scientific method. That is, we use models of understanding and meaning within these realms in a way that makes science and rational thought not really very useful. Scientific methods can be applied in order to try to unify all knowledge under the umbrella of reason and rational thought and the scientific method, but I think the scientific method will not eventually capture a satisfactory understanding of all aspects of human experience and life.

The continuing attempt by certain scientists and atheists to remove superstitious belief in a God who must intervene to make things happen in this universe is usually quite unsatisfactory. They are arguing against a level of theological understanding that seems to only exist in certain fundamentalists or very conservative and traditional theologians. It seems a waste of their intellect. I suppose there are enough literally-minded religious traditionalists and fundamentalists running around in our world to keep the atheists and scientists busy, but rarely do I see anything written in a sensitive way that would really persuade a literalistic believer. Nor do I see a sophistication in the dialogue that would engage with someone who had a more sophisticated critique of scientism or a more post-modern theological belief system. Mostly, these books are intended for an audience that already accepts science and tends to have a simplistic view of religious believers, or a condescending view toward religious faith. It is of course interesting news that cosmologists have answers they find logical and scientific to questions such as why is there something instead of nothing, and how did the universe emerge out of the pre-universe, and why is it that our universe has scientific laws and constants that seem to make it such a nice place for life. But to then take answers to such questions and make a claim that this tells us something new and important about God is not very convincing.

I continue to have faith, but I see my faith as being outside of my scientific approach to the world. My faith is unscientific. That’s not a problem that needs to be resolved.

Centurion

2010-09-06T10:48:00.000-07:00

Last night we watched Centurion. It wasn't a good movie. It was an adventure war film set in early second century Scotland. Lots of action and blood and violence. Very little else.

The Park51 Controversy

2010-08-30T23:54:00.000-07:00

Today as I was walking through the library I picked up one of the mainstream newsweeklies (TIME). The cover was asking if America was anti-Muslim. Inside, I read a poll that claimed about 61% of Americans oppose the Park51 Project. This was a real bummer. I had supposed that the people who were loudly complaining about this were just a fringe. I'm puzzled how so many Americans can take this position. I like what Juan Cole wrote about this issue. I think he has it right. So does Scott Kurashige.

I just don't know what to say. I guess I'll say I'm frightened a bit by it. I happen to believe that Mohammad was a Prophet of God. The Angel Gabriel gave Him the Sacred Verses. It wasn't a standard hallucination or a fabrication. God's Will became manifest in the Qur'an. Islam is a beautiful religion, and a path toward Truth. How on earth can people really believe that the Taliban and the Wahhabi/Salafi represent Islam? It's like my agnostic or atheist friends who think that snake handlers and the Christian Identity Movement represent Christianity, never caring about what people like Reinhold Neibuhr or Hans Kung or Matthew Fox have said.

Happy Ramadan! Eid al-Fitr will be here in a couple weeks (sunset Thursday the 9th of September in North America).

I Just took a short personality test.

2010-08-28T22:11:00.001-07:00

I just took a short personality test. The results were pretty much a confirmation of what I think about myself. Here is a link to the results: I'm a O65-C13-E59-A83-N32 Big Five!! I'm pretty low in one dimension (13th percentile, meaning 87% of the population is likely to score higher than I did), and it's related to how organized I am. The interpretive blurb says, " Low scorers tend to be disorganized, undependable, negligent." I guess my colleagues in my department at work are in for a treat in having me as their department chair now.

Photographs from drive west are up.

2010-08-26T12:36:00.001-07:00

I've finished the last page in the summer photograph series (of nine pages). This one mainly features photographs from the four-day drive I took to reach my sister's new home in Salem Oregon. I was driving her car and bringing along her family's bird and dog and hermit crabs. I didn't really have the ability to stop and do much sight-seeing, but I did take short breaks at several state capitol buildings, and even left the animals in the car for very short (ten minute or so) quick peeks inside a few of the capitol buildings.

I left Saint Louis around 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday the 17th and reached Lincoln, Nebraska at about 8:30 p.m., where I spent the night with my cousin Lesa and her family (Joe, Jake, and Logan). I saw the Nebraska state capitol on the morning of the 18th and headed out of Lincoln around 9:30 a.m., and arrived in Laramie, Wyoming around 6:30 p.m. There I spent the night in the home of my friend Mike Brotherton. On the 19th I left Laramie around 11:00 a.m. and arrived at my motel in Boise, Idaho around 10:30 p.m. Friday the 20th I departed Boise around 11:00 a.m. and arrived in Portland, Oregon around 5:30 p.m. I visited some friends and family before finally arriving at my sister's home in Salem around 10:00 p.m. The total expenses for this trip were about $440.

Cream Soda showdown

2010-08-24T17:42:00.001-07:00

Last night Arthur and I had a taste test between four Cream Sodas. We compared Shasta, IBC, Sioux City, and Jones Cream Sodas. It would have been a blind taste test, but Jones Cream Soda is clear, while the other three had a honey color to them. I closed my eyes as Arthur randomly served me, so I was unable to use my eyes to distinguish the Jones soda from the others.

Both Arthur and I preferred Jones Cream Soda to the other three brands. It wasn't really a close contest. For me, Shasta was the runner-up, with IBC and Sioux City clearly in third and fourth place. Arthur, however, liked Sioux City as his second-best sodas. Arthur liked all four brands, but I clearly preferred Jones and Shasta, and I wasn't too crazy about IBC or Sioux City.

The problem with this taste test is that we were missing two very good brands that I think I would have liked. Sprecher's and A&W Cream Soda weren't in the mix. I think these might be comparable to Jones and Shasta, but I won't know until we've tested them. And of course, I know that how well people like a food or drink in a taste test isn't really an indicator of what they will like if they are sitting and sipping a drink or eating a food over an extended time. Some foods that make a good initial taste impression in a taste test have flavors or other qualities that make them less enjoyable if you're taking your time and consuming them over a longer period.

We actually very rarely drink any soda. In our family we drink water mostly, and milk as well. Our family goes through about a gallon of milk each day. We sometimes have orange juice, grape juice, or apple juice, and on special occasions we'll get some other sort of juice like berry juice or one of the blends that has pineapple or mango in it. I'd estimate we might have an average of two soda cans or bottles per month, if even that much.

Childhood Poverty in the United States

2010-08-17T08:15:00.001-07:00

I recently prepared some materials related to childhood poverty in the United States. I've uploaded a Powerpoint presentation to go along with all that. Go ahead and have a look.

Gross Domestic Income

2010-08-10T16:22:00.001-07:00

I think I'll start using the Gross Domestic Income instead of the Gross Domestic Product from now on, and I'll question the competence of economists or journalists who continue to rely on the GNP rather than the GNI when the GNI is available. But it isn't widely available yet. And, the official figures are all very suspect anyway.

Summer photographs are up.

2010-08-08T15:06:00.000-07:00

I've finished most of pages of photographs from the summer. It was hard to choose just a few to put up on the web. Anyway, the seven pages are up.
First page, Shanghai World Expo.
Second page, Shanghai Museum and more Shanghai.
Third page, more Shanghai, and also photos from Hong Kong.
Fourth page, photos from Taiwan.
Fifth page, photos from Taiwan and summer camp at Camp Bunn
Sixth page, photos from the trip to Ontario.
Seventh page, more photos from Ontario.
Eighth page, more photos from around the Midwest and home.
Ninth page, I haven't done yet.

Updated some web pages

2010-08-06T14:29:00.001-07:00

I've updated my web page about my favorite music. There are four categories with 16 musicians or bands or composers or music-related links for each category. There is a new category for "recent" bands (mostly formed since 2002, and some formed only in the past year. There were many dead links I had to prune and replace. Everything seems to be working now.

And I've finished five of the eventual nine summer vacation web pages. Pages one, two, three, six, and seven are complete.

First of summer photos are up

2010-07-23T23:28:00.000-07:00

I've posted two pages of photographs from our summer adventures. One is a set of photographs from the World Expo in Shanghai, which we visited in June, and the other is a set of photographs from a trip to Ontario. These are the first and sixth pages out of nine pages I plan to put up sharing photographs from our summer.

Books our students thought worth mentioning

2010-05-12T08:08:00.000-07:00

I've had a busy semester. No posts on the blog in March and April. That's pretty bad. Anyway, I'm going through the final end-of-semester papers from seniors in my senior seminar, and I've been noticing the books these students reference. They must write a paper describing all the courses they took and what they learned in their undergraduate education, and some of them have listed books they found memorable or influential. I'll share a list of some of these sources I've pulled from the student reference lists. These are some of the books students in our program have encountered in recent years.

Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology (Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies). (2003). New York, NY: Wiley.

Aslan Reza. No God but God. The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. New York New York: Random House, 2006.

Barnes, Susan. Computer-Mediated Communication. Boston: Pearson Education, 2003.

Bean, Thomas, et al. Content Area Literacy. Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 2008.

Boddice, R. (2009). A History of Attitudes and Behaviours Toward Animals in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Britain: Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of Animals. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press.

Boyer, Ernest L. College, The Undergraduate Experience in America. First ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.

Cherlin, A. J. (2009). Public and Private Families: A Reader (6th Revised edition ed.). New York: Mcgraw Hill Higher Education.

Davis, M., Eshelman, R., and McKay, M. (2000) The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook, (5th Ed.) New York: MJF Books.

Droegkamp, Jan. Liberal Studies Handbook. Springfield, IL: University of Illinois, 2004.

Eiseley, Loren C. The Star Thrower. First ed. New York: Random House, 1978.

Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Feldman, Noah. Divided by God. New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Fisher & Harrsison. Substance Abuse Information for School Counselors, Social Workers, Therapists, and Counselors. 4th Edition. Allyn Ed and Bacon Press.

Fisher, Louis & Adler, David Gray. American Constitutional Law, Seventh Edition. Durham NC: Carlina Academic Press, 2007.

Frye, Marilyn. “Oppression.” From The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Turnsburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983.

Gronlund, N.E. (2004) 7th Edition Writing Instructional Objectives for Teaching and Assessment. Paperback. Pearson.

Holy Bible, New Living Translation. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1996.

Homer. The Odyssey, translated by S.H. Butcher and A. Lang. Vol. XXII. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001.

Hooke, Alexander E. Virtuous Persons, Vicious Deeds. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1999.

Indian Tales and Others by Neihardt, John G.. (1936). New York: Macmillan Company.

Jolly, Alison. Lucy's legacy : sex and intelligence in human evolution. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. : 1999

Kellenberger, James. Introduction to Philosophy of Religion. First ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007.

Kellough, R.D. and Jarolimet, W. (2007) Teaching and Learning in the Elementary School, 9th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall

Kellough, Richard, and Jioanna Carjuzaa. Teaching in the Middle and Secondary Schools. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2006.

Kidd, Thomas S. American Christians and Islam. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

King, T. (2006). Medicine River. Boston: Penguin (Non-Classics).

King, T. (2008). The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Indigenous Americas) (1 ed.). Minnesota: Univ Of Minnesota Press.

Kingston Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

Kolb, David A. The Kolb Learning Style Inventory. Hay Group, 1999.

Komives, Susan R., Nance Lucas, and Timothy R. McMahon. Exploring Leadership. Second ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

Kymlicka, Will. Contemporary Political Philosophy, Second Edition. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Lenski, S.D. and Nierthermer, S.L. (2004) Becoming a Teacher of Reading: A Developmental Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc.

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House."

Macionis, J. J. (2007). Sociology (12th Edition) (MySocLab Series) (12 ed.). Alexandria, VA: Prentice Hall.

Macionis, J. J. (2009). Social Problems (4th Edition) (4 ed.). Alexandria, VA: Prentice Hall.

Marlowe, J.D., and Cummins, S. (2008) Evidence for Paralegals (4th Edition) Aspen.

McGinniss Joe. The $elling of the President. The Classic Account of The Packaging of a Candidate. New York New York: Penguin Books, 1969.

McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege and Male Privilege."

Mcluhan, M. (1997). Essential McLuhan. New York: Routledge.

Millman, Richard, and George Parker. Geometry. New York: Springer, 1991.

Momaday, N. S. (1990). The Way to Rainy Mountain (9th Paperbound Printing ed.). Albuquerque, CA: University Of New Mexico.

Momaday, N. S. (2010). House Made of Dawn (P.S.). New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Moore, B. N. (2010). Philosophy: The Power of Ideas (8 ed.). Boston: Mcgraw-Hill College.

Morgan, Robin. Case Studies in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Myers, Dee Dee. Why Women Should Rule The World. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

Neihardt, J. G. (1991). When the Tree Flowered: The Story of Eagle Voice, a Sioux Indian (New Edition) (New ed.). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Neihardt, J. G. (1998). The Giving Earth: A John G. Neihardt Reader. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Neihardt, J. G. (2002). A Cycle of the West: The Song of Three Friends, The Song of Hugh Glass, The Song of Jed Smith, The Song of the Indian Wars, The Song of the Messiah (50 Anv ed.). Toronto, Canada: Bison Books.

Nerburn, Kent. Letters to My Son. Novato, CA: New World Library, 1999.

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia. Basic Books Inc. 1974.

Pence, G. (2007). Medical Ethics: Accounts of the Cases that Shaped and Define Medical Ethics (5 ed.). New York City: McGraw-Hill.

Platt, R. (2006). Crime Scene: The Ultimate Guide to Forensic Science. New York: DK ADULT.

Platt, R. (2008). Forensics (Kingfisher Knowledge). New York: Kingfisher.

Pojman, Louis P., and Michael Rea. Philosophy of Religion. Fifth ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson & Wadsworth, 2008.

Posner, George. Field Experience - A Guide to Reflective Teaching. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2010.

Possin, Kevin. Critical Thinking. Winona, MN: The Critical Thinking Lab, 2002.

Powell, Sara Davis. Introduction to Middle School. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2005.

Rachels, J. (1991). Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford Paperbacks). New York: Oxford University Press, USA.

Rachels, J., & Rachels, S. (2009). The Elements of Moral Philosophy (6th Revised edition ed.). New York: Mcgraw Hill Higher Education.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, 1999.

Reynard Charles, Valente Judith. Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2006.

Sax, B. (1992). The Parliament of Animals: Anecdotes and Legends from Books of Natural History, 1775-1900. Fairfax: University Publishing Association.

Sax, B. (2002). Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Sax, B. (2004). Crow (Reaktion Books - Animal). New York: Reaktion Books.

Shedletsky, Leonard, and Joan Aitken. Human Communication on the Internet. Boston: Pearson Education, 2004.

Stevenson, L. (1988). Seven Theories of Human Nature (2 ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, USA.

Tannen, Deborah. “Wears Jumpsuit. Sensible Shoes. Uses Husband’s Last Name.” in The Meaning of Difference. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Taulbert, Clifton. Eight Habits of the Heart. First ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Thio, A. (2009). Deviant Behavior (10th Edition) (10 ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Waldman, Steven. Founding Faith. How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty. New York New York: Random House, 2008.

Walzer Michael. Spheres of Justice. A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books Inc. 1983.

Wharton, A. S. (2005). Working in America: Continuity, Conflict, and Change (3 ed.). New York City: McGraw-Hill.

Wren, J. Thomas. The Leader's Companion. First ed. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

Wright, Robert, The moral animal : the new science of evolutionary psychology. Pantheon Books, New York : 1994.

Lincoln's 201st Birthday

2010-02-12T21:00:00.001-08:00

We observed Lincoln's 201st birthday here at the Hadley-Ives household by spending a couple hours sledding. We built a ramp at the bottom of a steep hill on the public golf course here in town (which has one of the very few hills in this area of glacier-flattened central Illinois). I went over it a couple times, and I'm now feeling rather sore.

I spent about an hour this evening reading poetry about Lincoln, and then I decided to make a web page collecting some of my favorite old (copyright-expired) poems.

I spent much of the day reading student papers in my classes, and I'll probably spend most of tomorrow afternoon writing feedback for them and updating web pages for the classes.

Pie chart showing Obama's proposed FY 2011 budget

2010-02-09T07:33:00.000-08:00

I did my federal taxes last night. Once again our contribution to the federal government through income taxes will be around $1,500. That doesn't seem like much. Anywhere, here is where the money goes if Obama's proposed FY 2011 budget is approved.

Snow

2010-02-08T15:16:00.000-08:00

We should get about 8 centimeters of snow tonight, and maybe another 6-8 centimeters on Tuesday and Tuesday night. We already have some snow on the ground, so this should be good. Temperatures won't get above zero (Celsius) for five or six days at least, so the sledding should be great. On Saturday night I took my sons and some of their friends sledding at the local park here in Springfield, and the snow was very hard and slick, with some powdery snow on top, and this made the sleds tear down the hill at incredible speeds. I think we probably exceeded 40 kmh, or even 50 kmh. I'm looking forward to some more sledding this week.

Other than that, I'm mainly working on my classes. I've posted a couple blogs on my policy class blog related to the White House proposed budget and a report on welfare spending.

Primary Elections

2010-02-02T19:12:00.001-08:00

Today I voted in an Illinois primary election. In Illinois you must ask for a particular party's primary ballot. I had a choice of Republican, Democratic, or Green ballots, and it was difficult to make up my mind. I have some opinions about the Democratic candidates for governor and senate, and so I was tempted to vote on the Democratic Party ballot, but then there are several other contested races where I hadn't done any work to investigate the candidates, so I would have left many choices blank. Likewise in the Republican races there were a couple candidates I would have wanted to vote against, but I generally knew very little about most of the Republican candidates, aside from one who is a personal friend (and running uncontested) and another I like who is going to win her primary easily anyway. So, I took a Green Party ballot. I'm very happy about the Green Party's senate candidate LeAlan M. Jones. Also, it was easier and faster to vote on the Green Party ballot, because none of the positions were contested, and there were many offices where no Green Party person was running.

I checked out my county clerk's election results (Sangamon County Election Results). It appears that 92 other persons in this county took Green primary ballots as I did. That is only 0.41% of all the persons who voted in the primary election, the numbers are probably low because the Democratic and Republican parties have interesting contested elections, and on the Green Party Ballot all you could do was confirm that you supported the uncontested candidates (or just not vote for some of them, if you only supported some Green candidates -- the Greens have put some fairly flaky people to stand for elections before).

I'm the only person in my precinct who took a Green primary ballot, and the precinct across the street from me didn't have anyone take a Green ballot. But at least 93 of us in the county did, so that's comforting to know.

Some of my coreligionists (Baha'is) don't vote in Illinois primaries because you must ask for a particular party's ballot or else ask for a nonpartisan ballot (and there was nothing on the nonpartisan ballot today). Baha'is aren't supposed to become involved in partisan political party politics. Well, I'm an independent voter and I've never actually joined a political party. Taking a party's primary ballot doesn't mean one is a member or partisan supporter of that party. I think we all have a duty to be involved in elections and political discussions. We just must do so with our allegiances to basic principles and ethical motives, rather than agendas to help a particular political party gain more power.

White House Proposes FY 2011 Budget

2010-02-01T21:27:00.000-08:00

I've been studying the proposed FY 2011 budget released by the White House today. I created this pie chart to show where the money is going.

The three things I like least about the budget are: 1) there is no projection into the future where the budget ever gets balanced; and 2) security spending is still about 13% of federal spending, which is about twice as high as it needs to be; and 3) meaningful foreign aid to reduce poverty remains a trivial part of the budget.

The things I like about this budget are: 1) it increases spending on education, including a provision for a large increase in Federal Pell Grants; and 2) The National Institutes of Health will get a slight increase (in FY 2010 there is a proposed budget for $31.1 billion, and in FY 2011 the NIH get $32.1 billion). I like the optimism in the projection that unemployment benefits paid out to those getting unemployment insurance will be only $158 billion in FY 2010 and then drop way down to $100 billion in FY 2011. I hope we really do experience that. I wonder about this optimistic picture, because with mandatory outlays for the Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service the FY 2010 projection is $78.4 billion and the FY 2011 projection is $82.4 billion.

Walden and some thoughts.

2009-10-26T19:32:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, probably in 1982 or 1983, my mother gave me a copy of "Walden" and "Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau. I've been re-reading it again this past week for a class I'm teaching, and I'm finding many of the interesting passages I vaguely remembered, and some ideas that were influential on my development as a young person. Here is a collection of passages I found either interesting, thought-provoking, challenging, or useful:

On Luxury:

...Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called
comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to
the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest
have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient
philosophers, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none
has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. ... None can be an
impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we
should call voluntary poverty. ...

On Simple Living (giving up yeast):

...Yet I find it not to be an essential ingredient, and after going without it for a
year am still in the land of the living; and I am glad to escape the
trivialness of carrying a bottleful in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and
discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler and more respectable
to omit it. Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all
climates and circumstances. ...

On Superficial
Changes
(and Occupational Dress Codes):

...I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new
wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made
to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All
men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to
be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty
the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that
we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping
new wine in old bottles. . . .

On Fashion (and why we as individuals
are asked to submit to popular notions):

...When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely,
"They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at all, as if she
quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates [goddesses of destiny], and I
find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that
I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence,
I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately
that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of
consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in
an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her
with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the "they" — "It is true,
they did not make them so recently, but they do now." Of what use this
measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of
my shoulders, as it were a peg to bang the coat on? We worship not the
Graces [goddesses of charm and beauty], nor the Fates, but Fashion. . . .

On the reasons why we do what we do (alienation of labor):

...I cannot believe that our factory system is
the best mode by which men may get clothing.
The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English;
and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed,
the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad,
but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.
In the long run men hit only what they aim at. . . .

Questioning the value of “Improvement”

As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements";
there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance.
The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last
for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them.
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,
which distract our attention from serious things.
They are but improved means to an unimproved end,
an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at;
as railroads lead to Boston or New York.
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas;
but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate....
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic
and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New;
but perchance the first news that will leak
through into the broad, flapping American ear
will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute
does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist,
nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey....

Suggesting that we are servants to our tools (domestic
animals require more work than they are worth):

...I am wont to think that men are not so much the
keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the
freer. Men and oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, the
oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the
larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks of
haying, and it is no boy's play. Certainly no nation that lived simply in all
respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would commit so great a blunder
as to use the labor of animals....

...Though we have many substantial houses of brick or
stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to which
the barn overshadows the house. This town is said to have the largest houses
for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public
buildings; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this
county. . . .

On large buildings (and, by extension, large institutions,
governments, corporations, etcetera)

...The religion and civilization which are barbaric
and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call Christianity
does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It
buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them
so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend
their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have
been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to
the dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no
time for it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much
the same all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the
United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring is vanity,
assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. . . .

On Self Sufficiency:

...There is a certain class of unbelievers who
sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable
food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once — for the
root is faith — I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board
nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have
to say. . . .

On benefits of simple living:

For more than five years I maintained myself thus
solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks
in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as
well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. . . .

...As I preferred some things to others, and
especially valued my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did
not wish to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or
delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just yet. If
there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire these things, and who
know how to use them when acquired, I relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are
"industrious," and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps
because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing
to say. . . .

On Doing Good:

... There are those who have used all their arts to
persuade me to undertake the support of some poor family in the town; and if I
had nothing to do — for the devil finds employment for the idle — I
might try my hand at some such pastime as that. However, when I have thought to
indulge myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an obligation by
maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain
myself, and have even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have one
and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor. . . .

... There is no odor so bad as that which arises
from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a
certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing
me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the
African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and
eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his
good done to me — some of its virus mingled with my blood. No — in
this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man
to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should
be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can
find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love
for one's fellow-man in the broadest sense. . . .

... Be sure that you give the poor the aid they
most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give
money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make
curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he
is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his
misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. . . .

On Benevolence:

...I would not subtract anything from the praise
that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their
lives and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's
uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those
plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a
humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a
man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness
flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act,
but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is
unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. . . .

...I believe that what so saddens the reformer is
not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest
son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to
him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous
companions without apology. My excuse for not lecturing against the use of
tobacco is, that I never chewed it, that is a penalty which reformed
tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed which
I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these
philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, for
it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings. Take
your time, and set about some free labor. . . .

How to Live:

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,
not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does
not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than
the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue,
and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve
and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally
we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every
man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the
contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather
used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform
us how this might be done.

Why Thoreau went into the woods:

I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not
learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had
not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did
I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live
deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like
as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close,
to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it
proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and
publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by
experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Living Slow:

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of
life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a
stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save
nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven't any of any consequence.
We have the Saint Vitus' dance,
and cannot possibly keep our heads still.

On Disengagement and Disinterest in the world:

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news
in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by
accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown
up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one
lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another. One is
enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad
instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is
gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a
few are greedy after this gossip.

Transcendentalism and consciousness:

...With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a
sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions
and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent.
We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the
stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a
theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual
event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human
entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of
a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from
another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and
criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but
spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I
than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the
spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination
only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor
neighbors and friends sometimes. . . .

The wisdom of fools:

Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from the annual visitation which occurs,
methinks, about the first of April, when everybody is on the move;
and I had my share of good luck, though there were some curious specimens
among my visitors. Half-witted men from the almshouse
and elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to make them exercise all the
wit they had, and make their confessions to me; in such cases making wit the
theme of our conversation; and so was compensated. Indeed, I found some of them
to be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the town,
and thought it was time that the tables were turned. With respect to wit,
I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole.
One day, in particular, an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper,
whom with others I had often seen used as fencing stuff,
standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself from
straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told me, with
the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather inferior,
to anything that is called humility, that he was
"deficient in intellect." These were his words. The Lord had made him
so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for another. "I have
always been so," said he, "from my childhood; I never had much mind;
I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It was the Lord's will, I
suppose." And there he was to prove the truth of his words. He was a
metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellowman on such promising ground
— it was so simple and sincere and so true all that he said. And, true
enough, in proportion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did
not know at first but it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from
such a basis of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid,
our intercourse might go forward to something better than the intercourse of
sages.

Values Survey

2009-09-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

I have put up a survey on values, and you're welcome to take it online or download it in Microsoft Word format and score it yourself. This is a survey based on responses students in the LIS and LNT programs have given to questions posed in their learning autobiographies and goals statements. I'm not doing any research on this, but I thought I would share this scale as some people might enjoy taking it to see how they score. If you take it online and leave a legitimate e-mail address for the last item, I'll try to e-mail back your score to you if I have time.

I've made a report that explains this survey and shows some results from the first 100 persons who took the survey.

- Eric

Chinese ideas about what is good.

2009-09-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

I've just finished preparing some overhead slides for a talk I gave on "ideas about what is good in Chinese culture and religion." There are 130 of these slides. On a few of them I might use a slide as a visual aid while I talk for a minute or longer, but for many of these slides I just quickly go through them, spending about 20 seconds on each visual image or idea. So, this represents a talk that might take 45 to 50 minutes. Toward the end I dispense with words and merely go with images to correspond to what I was saying.

Anyway, I'll share the work with this link to the presentation. I was unable to find much else in the way of discussions of "what is good" in Chinese culture. Probably the thing I should have used, but didn't, was the world values survey, which I tend to like because I'm interested in cultural differences related to how people attain happiness. However, I'm not sure what I would say about that, except that in China (the P.R.C.) people have more secular values and fewer traditional values (than, for example, the United States), and also that people tend to be a bit less happy than in the United States. But the P.R.C. has endured many years of Communist government, and this has eroded the influences of traditional Chinese culture and values. Taiwan or South Korea would be the more appropriate comparative culture, The comparative result is the same. Taiwanese and South Koreans are more secular than Americans (rate secular-rational values at levels comparable to the Swiss, the Finns, and the Ukrainians). And, South Koreans and Taiwanese are on the "Survival values" side of the spectrum (near the middle of the range, like Bangladesh and Jordan and Poland), while America is pretty far over on the "Self-Expression Values" side of things.

On the 4-point scale, Japan has been around 3.2 in recent years, South Korea at 3.0, while China has been down at 2.9 (there is still a great deal of extreme poverty in China, remember, and that kind of poverty can bring down national happiness averages). American happiness has been up around 3.4 (bouncing between 3.3 and 3.5 in recent surveys). I'm not sure about Taiwan's happiness, although I heard recently that an international epidemiological survey found the lowest rates of major depressive disorder in Taiwan (Weissman, Bland, Canino, Faravelli, et al. in 1996 reported a lifetime incidence of 1.5% for major depressive disorder in Taiwanese samples). So, if happiness is the absence of depression, the traditional Chinese culture found on Taiwan is at least correlated with happiness, if not a causal factor in making the Taiwanese happy.

I know a fair number of Taiwanese (my in-laws, my friends from living in Taiwan for two years, my colleagues and former classmates from Taiwan), and they don't strike me as being especially happy. I wonder if there is some difference in the way Chinese informants in Taiwan might respond to survey questions, so that if they are asked to verbalize whether they are happy they will rate themselves higher on a life satisfaction scale, or diminish the degree to which they will report feeling emotionally miserable. That is, I wonder if we strapped some sort of devise on people to measure levels of endorphins, amount of laughter or smiling, biophysical manifestations of contentment versus emotional pain, we might find that cross-cultural experiences of mood and happiness do not reflect how people answer surveys about happiness. For example, Taiwanese might report feeling tired or bored rather than reporting feeling sad and depressed, and they might be more willing to report states of balance and equilibrium that are serene and moderate as "happy" while an American would be thinking about more joyful situations of strong emotional pleasure as defining "happy" when they respond to questions about happiness.

That said, I'm basically a survey-research type of scientist, so until we know more, I'm going with the idea that the Taiwanese are especially happy, and the Chinese from the Mainland are less happy than, for example, the Japanese or Americans, in general.

Getting a master's degree. The cost.

2009-09-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

This semester I'm teaching one undergraduate course and one graduate course, and I'm administering an undergraduate program as well. A student was interested in getting into our online graduate program, and he wanted to know the cost, the total cost he would have to pay. I didn't know the answer, and it had been a couple years since I last studied the tuition and fees my university charges my students, so I've taken a close look again at the figures.

For an out-of-state student, like someone from California or New York who wants to get an online degree with our department, the cost per course this year is a little under $1,200, but there are various fees online students must pay, and fees for part-time students, and when you add all these fees, a person who takes just one class per semester ends up paying about $1,384.50. That figure is something I should think of when I'm working on my graduate courses. Students who take courses on campus (assuming they're local and paying in-state rates) pay a few hundred dollars more per semester in fees. Assuming a graduate student starting in August of 2009 needs 42 units of credit in our program to earn their master's degree, and assuming they take one course per semester, including one course in each of two of the upcoming three summers, then that student would probably graduate with their master's degree in May of 2013. If each year tuition increases by 8%, their total cost in tuition and fees will be about $16,500. If each year tuition increases by 16%, the total cost will end up being $18,500.

I'm not really clear on why the cost of online education might go up 8% or 16% per year. Since I've worked in academia (about ten years now) I've never seen only one year when faculty salaries went up by (slightly) more than 2%. I once compared figures on average faculty salaries in 2006 to figures from the mid-1980s, and realized that after adjusting for inflation the purchasing power of average faculty salaries had declined by about 11% over the two decades after I started college. I don't know that the fixed costs associated with delivering online education are going up much either. Computers and software seem not to be costing so much more. Energy costs have gone up, but they are only a tiny fraction of the total cost to my university of delivering online education. There are more support staff now, I suppose, but I believe their salaries have also been stagnant or declining relative to inflation, and the increase in numbers of staff and faculty were, I thought, matched by increases in student enrollment here.

A few of the biggest reasons for tuition to be increasing at our public university are related to public policies. First, state subsidies for education, particularly public higher education, have declined relative to inflation, especially when considered on a per-student basis. So, while students here maybe once paid tuition to cover 35% of the real cost of their education, they may now be paying something like 60% of the real cost of their education, with only 40% or less being covered by Illinois taxpayers. Something along these lines is certainly very true for our residential and commuter students, but I don't know if this applies to online graduate students.

Of course, it's a legitimate question to ponder: how much of a person's education after secondary school is a social good that benefits all of society (and therefore ought to be paid for by the public through taxes and government spending to keep tuition low)? Clearly much of the benefit from an undergraduate degree, and especially a graduate degree, is enjoyed purely by the student who gains the education and increased salary (if education even leads to increases in salaries, which it usually does, but not always). If the benefits of a master's degree are split about 50/50 by the student who personally benefits and the society that benefits by that individual's enhanced productivity and contributions to the common good (including non-economic contributions), then I suppose a 50/50 split on the cost of paying for the graduate degree makes sense.

The State of Illinois has made some other policy decisions that increase tuition specifically in this state. For one thing, the government used to pay tuition for Illinois veterans of the American armed services, but now the government has evidently stopped paying their tuition, but is still requiring public universities to allow veterans to take their graduate courses without paying tuition. Basically, the costs of educating these veterans are now shifted from the general tax-paying public of Illinois to the employees (including faculty) of the state universities (who will now have lower wages and salaries) and the students without military backgrounds (who must pay higher tuition costs to cover the costs of educating their classmates who served the nation in the armed services). I actually think the policy of offering people who serve the nation in military service a form of compensation that includes lifetime access to free higher education is a good policy, but the costs of such a policy ought to be carried by the military, so that people can see that this is a cost of having a large military, and recognize that paying for this higher education is part of our military spending. When states mandate this sort of policy and then don't fund their policies, the costs are shifted to educators and students, and what is really a form of military spending (albeit legitimate and justified military spending, I think) gets covered up in education budgets.

Another way to consider the cost of higher education is to start with an idea of what a reasonable cost should be. It seems to me a two-year graduate degree is probably comparable to a car in terms of value and usefulness, and ought to cost about the same as a new car. It's odd to compare a more intangible benefit like a graduate degree (and the educational experience it represents) to a mundane tool like a car, and I think in the long-term a graduate education is far more valuable to a person than a new car, but still, it seems to me somehow that a master's degree ought to cost significantly less than a house, but significantly more than a three-week vacation to Europe or whatever, and a car fits in the middle ground between these two extremes.

And, as it happens, a master's degree from my department earned by a part-time online student will in fact cost somewhere between $16,500 and $18,500, about the same as a new car. That actually seems like a reasonable cost to me for a master's degree. It works out to be about 1/3 of the median full-time year-round wage. Considering the costs involved in providing such an education and the benefits to the students, that seems to me about right. I'd be happy if a master's degree cost closer to 1/4 or even 1/5 of the median year-round full time wage, but 1/3 doesn't seem to me extraordinarily high, although it is perhaps on the high end of the range of what seems acceptable and reasonable to me.

However, our online master's degree is one of the less expensive ones, I believe. I think other people might pay $40,000 or $50,000 or even more for a master's degree. I wonder how much of that extra cost is justified by the value of the education, and how much is merely a sign of inefficiency or rent-seeking by more schools with more prestige. No institution is perfectly efficient, and I suppose that almost any price asked of a customer or student will include some amount of money commanded by the seller simply because they want to get the highest price they can get without respect to the value of what they are selling. It has sometimes seemed to me that many brands (and some universities as brands) do add to their prices because of brand prestige, although in fact the the prestige of consuming that brand (or attending that university) is worth far less than the addition to the price.

Back to school videos

2009-08-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

Although there is still a week left in the summer, we've started classes at the university, and I'm busy with my new classes and new students and some new ideas for promoting our program. I neglected the blog this summer. I guess it was nice to get away from computer screens and keyboards for several weeks.

Now that I'm back on the computers, and having been impressed by our summer visits to the Acoma, Navajo, and Hopi Nations, I've been listening to some of my American Indian music, and found that I really like Buffy Sainte-Marie. Here is an old video and a newer one to share her music with you.

There are a couple other great versions of that "No no Keshagesh" [No no greedy-guts] here and here. Good art usually does have to exaggerate and simply to make its statement more effectively and with greater beauty. But I think Buffy is fairly honest and accurate in these songs, even for a couple good examples of socially-conscious art.

Hope to see some of you at Critical Mass this Friday afternoon at the Old State Capitol.

Summer Photographs.

2009-06-19T11:32:00.001-07:00

This summer I'm planning to put up about six pages of photographs of the family and our travels or activities. I've already put up the first two photo pages. These are available these sites: page one and page two.

Prime Ministers

2009-05-24T16:46:00.000-07:00

A little over year ago I put a list of my favorite presidents and politicians on this blog.

Today I'll post my five favorite Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom. These are, in ranked order:

Clement Richard Attlee, Lord Attlee (1883-1967)
William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778)
David Lloyd George, Lord of Dwyfor (1863-1945)
William Gladstone (1809-1898)
Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston (1784-1865)
Tony Blair (1953- )

I'll also mention that my favorite Canadian Prime Minister was Wilfrid Laurier (1841-1919).

Yes, I know all the Prime Ministers I've listed had flaws, and some fairly serious flaws, but if you look over all the Prime Ministers, these are the five I like the most. I also like certain aspects of Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli, but politically I would probably have voted against them in elections, and they don't really belong on my favorite British politicians list.

What we boycott in our family.

2009-05-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

What do we boycott in the Hadley-Ives family? There are a few thing we try not to buy, and then there are companies we try to avoid. When I was a kid in middle school I already boycotted certain products, partly for political reasons. I remember certain brands of shoes being popular, but I wouldn’t let my parents buy them for me or wear them because I thought they were made in non-democratic countries where the workers weren’t free. I still make some political decisions when I’m behaving as a consumer. I’ll share those now.

One of the companies I boycott is Exxon-Mobil. I won’t buy gas at one of their stations, and I won’t go to any of the companies that are owned by ExxonMobil. This boycott is mainly motivated by ExxonMobil’s funding for politically-motivated attacks on science around climate change. I believe they have even hired people to attack critics and journalists who have tried to expose how ExxonMobil fought the idea that fossil fuels were contributing to climate change and global warming. I attribute much of the delay in the American political will to make meaningful changes to avoid or diminish global warming to the campaign of ExxonMobil. That’s why I never stop at their gas stations.

Royal Dutch Shell is another company I cannot abide. I hold them partly responsible for the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, an author and businessman who complained about conditions in the oil producing area of the Niger Delta. He believed that not enough of the profits from the oil extraction was getting back to help raise the living standards of the people who lived in the areas where drilling was taking place. He launched a non-violent movement for economic and social development and justice. When the Nigerian government arrested him and decided to kill him I believe Shell could have applied pressure to stop his execution. It also wouldn’t surprise me if Shell was in fact giving indications to the Nigerian government that the Shell corporation wanted Saro-Wiwa silenced. So, I never buy gas at Shell stations, nor do I buy any Shell products.

I don’t shop at the Family Dollar general stores. I find the sweat-shop retail discount chains like this depressing. Walmart and Sam’s Clubs are other stores I scrupulously avoid unless there is an emergency and no alternative. These are part of the trend of corporations delivering shoddy, cheap goods made by workers from unfree countries where workers get killed if they try to organize and environmental and job safety protections are minimal. This provides lower prices, but it also means lower wages for low-skilled American workers and workers in other nations where decent labor laws and political freedoms keep production costs slightly higher. Not only this, but these companies have a tendency to treat employees unfairly (unpaid overtime, stealing time from employees, etc.), which is exacerbated by the way the companies set the goal of maximizing profits so far ahead of the other goals that for-profit firms should have. Finally, these sorts of companies tend to indoctrinate workers to be against unions, and they make contributions to the persons whose political views differ most distinctly from mine, so I have that motive for boycotting or at least avoiding them as much as possible.

I don’t shop at Lowe’s Home Centers. Back in early 2003 before America invaded Iraq many peace demonstrators in Champaign County, Illinois were demonstrating against the possible upcoming war in Iraq. Some of them parked vehicles in distant corners of a local Lowe’s Home Centers parking lot, far from the store, and not in any way taking parking spots from potential customers. The owners or managers of that Lowe’s store had peace demonstrators’ cars towed away, and so I will never shop at Lowe’s.

I almost never buy meat when I shop for groceries. I don’t like the industrial food production system we have in the United States. I think it dehumanizes us because it creates a bad relationship between people and the animals they eat. I will sometimes buy meat at farmers markets when I’m buying directly from a farmer who can tell me about how his animals lived and were slaughtered. I probably eat animal flesh four or five times per month, about once a week, but this is mainly because Jeri often buys or prepares food with meat in it. If I was doing more of the cooking and grocery shopping we would almost never have meat.

It’s not so much a boycott, but I really almost never watch anything on television or listen to anything on radio if commercials will interrupt what I’m watching or hearing. I find commercials ridiculous and intrusive. When I see an advertisement that I find exceptionally insulting, I try to make a note to myself to avoid buying whatever the advertisers are flogging.

I would not buy any Amway products. Amway supports some of the most reactionary political agendas, and I want none of my money going to support the people at the top of the Amway marketing pyramid.

I tend to make a point of never buying anything from companies that send me too many e-mail advertisements, and I certainly boycott all spammers. I also don’t buy things from companies that use annoying pop-up window advertisements on the Internet.

That’s about it for what we boycott.

Family photographs in May

2009-05-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

Here is Sebastian's Spring 2009 8th grade school portrait photograph.

This is Arthur's Spring 2009 4th grade school portrait photograph.

On mother's day we went to the St. Louis Art Museum to see the Ming Dynasty treasures first, and then after we had marveled at that exhibit we went to the Missouri Botanical Gardens to see the iris blooms.

Chun-Chih took this picture of the Hadley-Ives guys in the iris gardens.

Here is Arthur in our backyard among the lilac flowers. The strong odor of these lilac blossoms gives our yard a delicious scent in mid-May.

Spring family photographs.

2009-05-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

I'll share some more family photographs today. Here are some pictures from the past few days.

Here are Arthur and Sebastian at the Missouri Botanical Garden. We went on mother's day to see the iris flowers.

I like this picture of Sebastian and Arthur along with the white iris.

I think this is a good picture of Arthur walking around in the botanical garden.

We have huge lilac bushes in our back yard, and in the second and third weeks of May the air around our home is perfumed by the lilac scent. Here is Arthur back by the lilacs.

Here is Chun-Chih. Arthur took this photograph with his new camera, which was a birthday gift he received in April.

Photographs from late April and early May

2009-05-12T21:01:00.000-07:00

I want to share some photographs of recent events around here.

This is a photograph from the Symbolist Conference held at Allerton Park in Illinois. Rosina Neginsky, my colleague, organized this conference.

This is photograph of Sebastian and myself in the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

This is Jeri with Sebastian and Arthur at the Botanical Gardens on Mother's Day.

This is our home in the morning, with a storm moving in from the west, but the sun shining out of the east on our house and our birch tree. Arthur is coming out of the house on his way to his bus stop.

Videos with Baha'i Themes.

2009-05-08T09:40:00.000-07:00

I've decided to share some Baha'i-themed music videos today. I'll start this one from the Pacific Ocean Islands, featuring a song about gossip.

And then here is one from Merz. I'm not sure if it has a Baha'i theme, but Merz did some great Baha'i songs in the past.

Here is a Baha'i Prayer with a slide show:

Here is some dancing and music, including Kevin Locke playing flute.

April 2009 bike short film.

2009-04-30T21:05:00.000-07:00

April is over. Wow. It went fast. Here's a film of Danny MacAskill riding his bike around Edinburgh, Scotland, and I guess some of it was filmed this past month. I just got a bike like this for my son Arthur this spring, and I imagine he'll be impressed by this. I love bike riding, and this month I've been able to ride back and forth to work two or three times each week. This film shows what is possible with bikes. I wish almost everyone rode bikes to work when the weather isn't cold or stormy. It's sad that so few do.

2009 Lincoln Pilgrimage

2009-04-30T19:02:00.000-07:00

Every year at the end of April boy scouts from all over the United States come to Springfield, Illinois to parade from Lincoln's tomb to the Old State Capitol where Lincoln often worked when he lived here. The day before, many scouts participate in a trek from New Salem to Springfield, a walk of nearly 30 kilometers (almost 20 miles).

Here is Johnny Smith carrying the American flag at the end of the pilgrimage, near the corner of Jefferson and 6th.

Here is a view of the scouts marching through the streets of Springfield on their way between the tomb and the historic center of the city.

Here are the scouts leaving the cemetery where they assembled at Lincoln's tomb. One boy or girl from each troop or pack carries an American flag at the head of the parade.

Here is Sebastian marching in the parade.

This is Sebastian the night before the parade, when he was cleaning up dishes after dinner out at the campground in New Salem.

Here I am, one of the assistant scoutmasters.

Economics

2009-04-30T07:38:00.000-07:00

I think one of my projects for the break I get in May (between the spring and summer semesters) will be to create some web pages that provide links to my favorite blogs and web sites. I've already completed one page, for my favorite economics web resources.

By the way, the oaks broke up in tiny leaves yesterday, and so now even the oaks have turned green. We're getting too much rain, so it's difficult to find a window between the storms to get to my office.

Tonight at 6:30 the MacArthur Street association is having a big event at the South Side Church (where we vote). This street is having some tough economic times (21 vacant or abandoned properties out of 140 in a five-block stretch near our home). There is a three-block stretch of the street that has eight sub-prime lending and check cashing shops quite near our home, and many large vacant commercial addresses. The street is being extended down to a big freeway, where there is a new exit being constructed so traffic can flow directly from the interstate freeway on to our little commercial street. This is disrupting the route of the bike path I ride to school. But oh well, it should help economic progress, I guess.

Taxes

2009-04-20T12:10:00.001-07:00

Last week was tax week, and so I'd like to share some thoughts on the taxes we pay here in the Hadley-Ives household.

First of all, our income is very close to the median income. I work full-time, and my salary is close to the median full-time year-round earnings of all American men, and after you add in the little bit that Jeri earns, that brings our household close to the median household income. We have two children, so we get some deductions and tax breaks related to that.

Here is what we paid in taxes in 2008 as a percent of our adjusted gross income:

FICA - Medicare: 1.85%

Property taxes to the state of Illinois and the city of Springfield: 6.44%

Federal income tax: 2.32%

Illinois state income tax: 2.20%

An estimation for sales taxes and various taxes on gas, electricity, etc.: 1.58%

Total that goes to the government: 14.41%

But, as Americans and as employees in a state education system, we have some private payments that would be part of the tax system in most other industrialized economies. Here is what we paid for these in 2008:

Health insurance and all health care expenses: 6.26%

Actually, since my employer helped pay much of the cost of my health insurance as part of my benefits, and that money could have gone from my employer directly to me in salary if there was a system of public universal medical insurance, the total cost of our household health care and insurance was probably over 10%.

SURS Self Managed retirement fund (instead of Social Security): 10.71%.

Actually, since my employer matched my contributions, and could have instead just paid me as salary what it contributed to my retirement plan, the total money that went into retirement savings was close to 20%. We're one of the very few American household where we don't pay Social Security taxes. And, unless I take some summer jobs or switch to some other job where I do, I'll never get any Social Security when I retire. Also, since I am in a self-managed retirement plan, I get no set pension at retirement. Instead, I get whatever is in my SURs retirement account, and that's it. When it runs out, I have no source of public pensions with the way our national welfare system is set up now. All the risk and responsibility of saving for retirement has, in my case, been shifted to me.

College Savings: 5.17%

In America we must pay for higher education, and it's quite expensive. So, we save over 5% of our income for sending our sons to college, and we have done so for nearly a decade, since our youngest son was a toddler. I'll have to increase this contribution to 8% or 9% of the household income pretty soon if I want to have enough saved to pay for my older son's college tuition.

We also contribute about 2.02% of our income to various charities, including medical research, social services, poverty alleviation, religious work, environmental protection, public television and radio, and the high schools and universities where we were educated. I'd rather we contributed about 5%, but I take a rather large loss of pay by working in the public sector, so I consider my lower salary a form of giving to the public commonweal.

If you sum up all our taxes with all the spending we do on health care, retirement, college costs, and charitable giving, it turns out we are spending about 38.56% of our household income on social welfare and government. But, since my pension and health care expenses are somewhat borne by my employer directly rather than passed on to me, probably our household income could be raised by 15% and we would spend every penny of that raise in covering the retirement and health care benefits we're getting from my employer. So, the Hadley-Ives household and our employer contributions to social welfare and government services combined probably equals about 53.56% of our gross income.

I was trying to figure out what would be a fair policy of taxation and spending that would give us a society where poverty was eliminated, college was nearly free for most students, and everyone had health care insurance as good as what we have. I also considered what it would cost to adjust Social Security benefits and Medicare and Medicaid benefits so they were sustainable (slight increases in taxation and slight decreases in the amount paid out in retirement pensions for some retired persons, I think). This gave me an estimate of how our taxes and social welfare spending ought to be in the society and government system I would prefer to what we have now.

Here are some changes I'd make in taxation.

First, I'd forbid property taxes on a home of primary residence up to 125% of the median home value for a state or region. There could still be property taxes on cars, second homes, boats, or the value of a primary residence that exceeds 125% of median home values in an area, but most property taxes would be abolished. I prefer to transfer taxes to income or consumption.

Second, I'd abolish most sales taxes. I'd keep taxes on gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol, nights spent in hotels or meals eaten in restaurants, and energy generated by burning fossil fuels, but for most items and services I'd abolish sales taxes.

Third, I'd raise income taxes to make up for the lost revenue from the reduction in sales and property taxes. Income taxes should be progressive. Poor people shouldn't pay income tax, working class people ought to pay trivial income taxes (about 1% or 2%), real middle class households (near the median household incomes) ought to pay between 14% and 18% of their income in taxes, upper-middle class households ought to be paying between 20% and 30%, and there ought to be a flat tax ceiling on tax rates set near 45%-50% on the wealthiest 4% of American households.

Here are some changes I'd make in policy.

First, I'd create a national health care system. It would work this way:

There would be a national benefit plan similar to what I get now, or any other standard you want to choose, maybe the medical insurance enjoyed by members of the United States Congress. All health insurance plans would need to have a minimum coverage that matched this national benefit plan or were superior to it. No plan would be allowed that provided less coverage.
There would be a national maximum price for the national benefit price. It would equal the less of two figures: either 13% of a household's income or a rate of 5% of the previous year's median year-round full-time salary for each person covered on the policy. Wealthier families would pay the per-person rate and poorer and middle class families would pay the 13% of household income rate. No insurance plan could charge more than the national maximum price for health insurance.
The federal government would offer the national benefit plan at the national maximum price. Private insurers would be allowed to offer better plans for lower prices if they wanted.
Private insurers would be allowed to sell additional supplementary plans that covered more than the national benefit plan at whatever prices they wanted.
The national maximum price would be charged to everyone, but the government would help pay the premiums. For persons or households with incomes lower than 50% of the poverty level the government would pay 100% of the national maximum price. For every 1%-point of the poverty level over 50%-of-poverty a household earned there would be a 0.20%-point reduction in the amount of the health insurance plan covered by the government up to 100% of the poverty level, and then (at 90% of the premium subsidized for households at 100% of poverty) the subsidy would start decreasing by 1%-point of the subsidy for every 1%-point of the poverty level over poverty a household earned, so that the health care subsidy would decline to 0% of the payment when a household earned 190% of poverty (a 10% subsidy for a family earning 180% of poverty, a 50% subsidy for a household earning 140% of poverty, etc.).
All insurers, whether government or private, would be forced to accept any legal American resident or citizen into their risk pool as beneficiaries. There could be no screening for conditions, no exclusions, and each insurer would need to charge exactly the same to all it's customers.

Second, I'd make states cover the full cost of tuition and fees at their public universities for the top half of students at each public high school within their state, and I'd have a national test for college scholarships, and the American citizens with the top 10% of scores on this national achievement test would earn full tuition and fee scholarships to any university in the world (with perhaps limitations on reasonable tuition and fee levels). I'd also have a national policy to set reasonable tuition and fee levels in higher education. Only universities that charged below the tuition and fee thresholds would be eligible for federal financial aid for their students. Federal research grants would only go to faculty who taught at such schools. The fee and tuition thresholds would be set at reasonable market levels, maybe at 150% of the median tuition and fees charged in some pool of most American 4-year universities.

Third, I'd create two national pension programs similar to what the Canadians have. Every American citizen and legal resident would get a pension equal to 110% of the poverty level for an individual, but this pension would be administered as if it were a negative income tax. For every dollar you earned up to 110% of poverty you would lose a dollar of this pension. This would thus give us a 0% poverty rate for Americans over the retirement age. Persons earning over 110% of poverty from their own private resources would get nothing from this first program, but persons earning nothing would get the full 110% of poverty pension income. This would remove the economic incentive (but not the social incentive) for many elderly persons to work, and they would leave the labor force to make more opportunities available for young people. Then, there would also be some sort of a retirement plan more like Social Security is now, and this plan would require everyone to make a flat 4% contribution out of their payroll, and would return to them a benefit level adjusted so that persons who paid more into it would receive more out of it. Everyone would also be encouraged to put money into income-tax deferred retirement savings accounts. A middle class family might put 4% of its income into the second retirement program with the flat contribution rate, and perhaps 3% into the negative income tax to eliminate poverty among the elderly, and then perhaps 4% into a tax-deferred retirement account, so that your typical median income household was saving or paying in taxes about 11% toward retirement security for themselves and everyone else in society.

With these reforms taxes would increase a bit, but employer and employee contributions toward health insurance would go down for most people. Here is how I think our tax burden would change if these reforms were put in place:

FICA - Medicare: 0% (replaced by the national health care policy).

Property taxes: 0% (replaced by a higher state income tax).

Federal income taxes: 5.95%

They should go up for a middle class family such as ours. Currently the very wealthiest Americans pay between 19% and 23% in the federal income taxes after all their deductions and tax loophole advantages (according to the IRS, and not counting their FICA-Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes). I think the wealthiest families ought to pay more, perhaps 30% or 35% in federal income taxes. After you adjust for the Earned Income Tax and other benefits so that poor Americans pay no income tax and then assume that the wealthy ought to be paying around a third of their income in federal income taxes (and perhaps another eighth in state income taxes), your left with a situation where the median middle class needs to pay somewhere between 5.5% and 8.5% of their income in federal income taxes. Households earning $80,000 or $110,000 aren't median middle-class, and such upper middle-class households ought to be paying a rate somewhere between 10% and 30%.

State income taxes: 8.59%

Increase to match decreases in sales and property taxes. State taxes should be progressive, with the wealthiest families paying perhaps 11% to 12% of their incomes in state taxes. In my state (Illinois) we now have a flat tax of 3% on incomes. That's ridiculous.

Sales taxes: 0.92%

We would still pay taxes on gasoline, and our energy consumption that wasn't using renewable energy sources.

Health insurance and medical costs: 13.28%

We would pay 13% for the national plan and still have co-pays worth about a quarter of one percent of our income. We could go with a public plan and have the 13% taken out of our taxes or use a private health insurance plan and have 13% or less paid to them.

Retirement pensions and old age security: 11.10%

This includes the two universal retirement programs that replace Social Security plus our tax-deferred retirement savings account.

College costs: 0%

Covered by national and state taxes. When our sons are at college we would pay significantly to help with room and board, but those costs would not be so high that we would need to save 5%-10% of our income for each year that our children are under 18.

Charitable giving: same as in the existing system, or about 2.02%.

The total amount paid by our family in social welfare an taxes in the new system would be 41.86%. This is more than the 38.56% our family is now paying directly, but probably less than the 44% I estimate is paid by our family and my employer when I exclude the matching pension contribution from my employer. I think my figures are all reasonable, and the figures for typical 4-person households near the median income distribution would be about the same. That is, if you want a well-functioning government that eliminates poverty among persons over 64 years of age, provides free college educations to most of the country's students who are able to do college work, and provides a national health care system, then middle-class families need to figure they'll be paying somewhere between 36% and 46% of their income on public spending (taxation) or personal savings and health insurance. You can't get what you want and have the middle class paying under 36% (unless you totally soak the rich with something like 65% taxes on them), and you don't need to have the middle class pay and save more than 46%.

Also, I think this exercise points out that state taxes (and state and local policies) are very important for middle-class taxpayers. We actually are paying more to our state and local governments than we pay to the federal government, yet most news media coverage devotes far more attention to national policy and very little attention to local and state policy. This is funny, because at the level of state and local policies it's pretty easy to meet your elected representatives and influence how they make policy, while it's pretty darn difficult to have much of a say in national policies.

The leaves are appearing

2009-04-19T11:48:00.000-07:00

This is a good time of year to ride back and forth to my office on my bike. On Thursday the 16th there were very few leaves out, and then on Saturday the 18th as I was riding home I noticed many trees had tiny leaves beginning to show. The magnolias are starting to lose their blossoms and change over to green leaves instead of white and pink petals. The maples are beginning to have leaves join with the seeds and flowers that have been showing. In two weeks, when we have begun the month of May, most trees will be in full leaf.

I'm also sharing this design for a house I made a few years ago. If I were building a house, it might be something along these lines.

Social Work Logo Ideas

2009-04-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

In January of 2003 my mom took this photograph of Jeri and myself holding our son Arthur's hands as we stood on the beach at Santa Cruz, California, facing the sea and the late afternoon sun. It's a nice image, and my mom uses it as a sort of logo for her counseling service. She let me use it as a sort of logo for my social work classes as well. (the image is copyrighted by Virginia Ives). I like how we are silhouetted so we can be almost any couple with a young child. And of course, the sea and the sun are two powerful images. The sea representing vastness, potential, possibility, and depth. The sun representing life-giving energy, power, glory, warmth, and vision. And the beach is a border, a place where two different realms come together, the land, which is known and understood, and the ocean, a place more mysterious, where we are guests, not residents.

I took the image and used it to play around with ideas for artistic designs to use with our social work club at the University of Illinois. Here is one where I try to place the image in a context of written words. On the left we have a list of social workers and people who did social work and can be claimed as honorary members of the profession, even if they were not actually trained as social workers. I didn't include the comedian Martin Short on the list, although he is a trained social worker and was considering that career before he got into comedy. On the lower level and right the words represent issues, concepts, and tasks that are associated with social work and social workers. I'm not entirely satisfied with this design. I need to arrange the text in a more artistic way according to some design, rather than just using this columns of text.

The green lettering design is in fact one the students in the social work club chose to use for their T-shirts this year. The lettering was a bit tricky to do. I'd really like to just create some fonts and then use Illustrator and Word to position the letters. I actually drew these letters (using iWork 08's Pages application) and arranged them using Adobe Photoshop. Too time consuming. But I did achieve the home-made do-it-yourself look that I was striving for, and the letters are supposed to be friendly and free-spirited, and I think they are.

Photographs of friends

2009-04-09T09:58:00.000-07:00

I was looking for some old documents to photocopy last night, when I discovered my old middle school yearbooks. I scanned some of the pictures from the yearbooks and uploaded the images to my Facebook photo albums. And then, for a while, I reflected on friendship.

Here is one of the images from my 8th grade yearbook. In it I'm in the upper left, holding the French Horn (which I still have). There are a couple students in this photograph who had classes with me all the way from kindergarten through eighth grade, but I moved away from Indianapolis in 1982 and lost contact with most of these people in the 1990s. Now, through the Internet, I've reconnected with several of the old friends in this photograph, including Amy Wharton (Amy Shirk, front row far left), Andy Hamaker (front row on the right), Rob Deppert (front row on the right holding the trumpet), Angela Brown (Angela McCormack, behind Andy Hamaker and Rob Deppert), and John Dishinger (in the third row, on the left, wearing tinted glasses).
I wonder if, thanks to the Internet, my own sons will keep up continuously with their childhood friends all through their lives without the 20-year-gap I've had. That could be a good thing. Keeping in touch, even at a distance, makes it easier to occasionally get together for more supportive or fun activities. I find that what I liked (or even loved) about these old friends when we were children and teenagers still is present in who they are now. Rob Deppert and I are still passionate about politics, usually fairly leftist; Andy Hamaker is still involved in music, etc.

This particular photograph is one of the first ones taken of me without glasses after I started wearing glasses in 1976. I decided to switch to contact lenses partly because I preferred how I looked without glasses, as in this photograph. (There were also issues with active sports, playing in the snow or rain, etc.). These days I wear contacts and glasses almost equally. I have had some trouble with the contact lenses while commuting to work on my bike, so I'm more likely to wear glasses while riding.

The second photograph here shows me with my friends Dave Sutcliffe and Dave Wicker at the Johnston Center Renewal in Redlands California, during this past February President's Day weekend. Dave Wicker and I were roommates in our freshmen year (1986-87) at the Johnston Center. That year there were several Erics and Daves living in Bekins Hall.

The third photograph is a recent one of me with some friends. In this case I'm with a few of my graduate students, although Michael Kim had just finished presenting his master's thesis, so he was celebrating becoming a UIS alumni at this particular outing. Amy, the young woman on the left, is finishing up her master's degree with a focus on cross-cultural communication through the arts, with a special emphasis on documentary film and photography. She teaches at Robert Morris College. The woman next to her in the white shirt is Stephanie, and her master's degree focus is in environmental stewardship, with a focus on writing about environmental issues for Christian audiences. Michael Kim is the Korean-American doctor (he is a surgeon) next to me. His master's degree had a focus in surgical education. I'm the guy on the far right.

Hero of the Ebro

2009-04-09T09:41:00.000-07:00

I'm going to post three art images I want to share with the world through this blog.

The first one is a scan of a diagram given to me by Andrew Irvin. The artists are C.A. and J.W., but I don't know exactly who they are. They must have been students at the Johnston Center in Redlands in the mid-1980s. Anyway, the letter from which I scanned the image has this note: Enclosed is a diagram CA & I made to illustrate "Irvin's Theory of Reciprocity," which he stole from me in the fall of '83 - JW

The next image is a painting by Miguel Viladrich (1887-1956) called Hero of the Ebro (El héroe del Ebro). It shows a handsome young Spanish soldier, naked except for his helmet and a towel across his left leg, rowing a tiny boat, presumably in the Ebro River. In his boat are large artillery shells. The soldier has a pensive and placid expression on his face. I'd like to know more about this painting.

The third image is some commercial art from a signboard advertising a seaside aquarium attraction in Oregon. The sign, which was photographed in 1985, asks readers to:
Visit the
AQUARIUM
LIKE A WALK on the OCEAN FLOOR
Showing the
HIDEOUS OCTOPUS
WOLF FISH
SEA ANEMONES...
"Beautiful Flower-like Animals
From the Ocean Depths"
And MANY MORE OREGON SPECIMENS!
ALL ALIVE
Displayed in 35 Glass Front Tanks
Simulating the natural habitat of marine life!

A model for pricing Sienna LE 8-passenger minivans

2009-04-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

I've spent the better part of two days meeting dealers and private sellers to look at Toyota Sienna LE 8-passenger minivans. As a social scientist and social worker, I'm interested in the variables that go into determining the cost of a car or a used car. I think I have a formula for how to price these cars. Here it is. All figures are in 2009 dollars, so if you find this blog entry in 2010 or later you'll need to adjust using a consumer price index adjustment.

For each year past the current year, deduct $360 from the "new price," which is $23,642. You can think of this as $1 per day in depreciation, as a proxy for wear and tear on the car. If the car is in better shape than you would expect, add a few hundred, or subtract a few hundred if it's in worse condition than you would expect, given its age. For every mile the minivan has been driven deduct 15.272 cents. That's it. The price this yields should be within a couple hundred dollars of your final price. If you're a buyer, don't settle for any price more than a few hundred over this predicted price, unless there is some extra special thing that has been added to the basic configuration of the van. If you can get $100 or $200 under this price you have a great deal. If you're a seller, don't sell for significantly under the model's predicted price.

My "new price" of $23,642 is about $200 under the lowest "new price" (dealer's invoice) I could find for any basic new 2009 Toyota Sienna LE with one power door and the radio/CD system. Typically a dealer can go under the official dealer's invoice by a small amount if they are eager to make a sale, because there are several hundred dollars the dealer has to use as incentives. Also, the dealer can make money on the sale if you finance, so the car can actually be sold to you within a couple hundred of the dealer's cost if the dealer can then make 4% or 5% interest off a loan to you for the better part of the price of the car. Were I a dealer, I would offer my cars to customers at a few hundred dollars over my actual final cost and then finance the buyers with rates about a quarter percent under the lowest reasonable home equity loan rate a buyer might be able to secure (to prevent buyers from getting home equity loans to pay off their car loan debts to me before I have collected all that 4% or 5% interest on their $20,000+ loans).

Various options on the Sienna LE can add $50 to $400 or $800 to the value of a new car, and if you're looking at a car with those extras you just add those numbers to the "new car" price. The only options I was including were one power door, the am/fm radio and cd player, and the 8 passenger configuration.

Incidentally, I should add here that we did significant research on various cars that could carry 6 or more people, and our second choice was a Mazda-V (Mazda 5). In fact, I would have purchased a new Mazda-V except that it wasn't quite big enough and our children felt they didn't have enough leg room in the back. The Mazda-V is more environmentally friendly than the Toyota Sienna, so it's rather a pity that we decided against it. I looked at some older Honda Odysseys and decided against that one. I also don't trust our local Honda dealership in Springfield. We looked at the Kia Sedona and Dodge Grand Caravan as well. Using some formulas to account for discounts or price rises related to quality, we still came down to a choice between the Mazda-V and Toyota Sienna. Keep in mind, I'm a buyer with almost no interest in how a car looks. My main concerns are reliability, safety, fuel efficiency, durability, and comfort.

Springfield, where the wind is always in your face

2009-04-02T21:38:00.000-07:00

What is it with the wind in Springfield? Twice this week I head out to ride to my office in the morning (it's nearly seven miles, going south, then east, then south, then east, then south, then east). Each morning there is strong wind out of the south. Today it was so bad people were telling me they couldn't hardly stand up in it. But I think to myself, "ah, but this afternoon this wind will be at my back and I'll just coast home). Then, twice this week, when it's time for me to ride home, around 6:30 or 5:30, the wind has shifted, and I get wind out of the south or west.

There are two really bad places on the commute between my home and the campus. These are in the area where a bike must cross Sixth street near the new Walmart near Eleventh Street. There is a stretch of about 300 meters with no sidewalk nor bike lane, so you must ride your bike either on the right, in a right-turn only lane, or else on the left, in a "go straight" lane. I usually ride on the white line between the two lanes and then make a choice about which traffic lane to use based on where the cars are going. If a car is coming up behind me in the "turn right" lane I head over into the "go straight" lane so I'm not blocking it. Today cars came up behind me in both lanes, so I moved to the middle of the "go straight" lane. After all, a bike is a vehicle and has a right to the road, and the traffic light ahead was red, so although I was slowing traffic, the cars would need to stop anyway. But the two cars behind me start honking. I assume these are friendly horn blasts from friends or students saying hello to me, but then when we get to the red light (it didn't turn green until about three seconds after I arrived at the intersection and moved out of the way of the cars that were following me to go straight), the cars behind me pull up and the drivers (of two cars) each swear at me, insult me, and honk their horns again in anger. Huh? Where did they want me to go? There was no sidewalk, no bike lane, and for that short 300 meter length of road the whole time they were behind me the light ahead of us was red anyway. I could have saved them some gas mileage by forcing them to drive slowly as they approached the red light so they didn't have to come to a complete stop and then accelerate from a dead stop to continue when the light turned green, except that they tail-gated me to get the honor of stopping for two seconds before the traffic light changed color.

This problem of a section of road with no sidewalk or bike lane is really crazy at Sixth street near the Walmart because once you get to that traffic light I mentioned there is a wide sidewalk for another 300 meters, and then there is a suddenly a bike lane that you can follow all the way to the UIS campus. Also, if you like to ride on the south outer road of the Interstate until you reach the bike trail that connects Chatham to Springfield, and then take the bike trail into Jerome and Springfield, then the only way to get from this bike trail to the campus is to cross 6th street at this point near the Walmart where there is no bike trail or sidewalk. The same problem exists as you return from campus in the other direction. So, the city of Springfield has these two bike trails, one connecting the UIS campus to... a Walmart, and then ending, and the other a nice interurban trail that connects a road with light traffic to an area just a few hundred meters from the Walmart, but for those few hundred meters that could connect the two systems there is nothing but this very dangerous stretch of road where, as I demonstrated today (for the second time, actually) a cyclist can be verbally abused by car drivers for daring to use traffic lanes.

Anyway, betwen having to ride into the wind in both directions on my two days of bike commuting (with rain in my face on the way home today) and having these car drivers shout at me, I'm really upset at the traffic engineers or planners from the city who created this hazardous road situation. I'll talk to someone in city government about this and see what can be done.

- Eric

Philosophy Quiz

2009-03-31T23:06:00.000-07:00

I just took the “which great philosopher are you?” quiz. I have a few comments about the questions.

The first one asks, “Do we have a soul that is separate from our body?

My answer would have been, “the body is the manifestation of the soul in this reality/universe, and the soul is independent of the body, but in this reality/universe the soul is, practically (although not essentially), identical with the body.” So, the question of “separate” doesn’t really work for me. It’s not separate here, but yeah, I guess if we look across all the realities and times of the various levels of creation, the soul is separate, since it is independent of the body, and continues in other realities after the body perishes in this one. So, what answer do I give?
The quiz gives thirteen possible answers, and the four that seemed closest to my understanding were:

b) Not really. The Human body is the best picture of the human soul. Or
c) No the word “soul” makes no sense, there is only “being” or
d) Yes, a “soul” is the form of every living thing.
f) Yes, an immortal one.

I went with the fourth of those, although I didn’t like saying “yes” to the idea that the body and soul are separate.

The second question asked, “Is there ever such a thing as the objectively “right” thing to do?
My answer would be yes, there sometimes is a “right” thing to do. I think there are standards of right and wrong existing outside human values or invention, and I think we “discover” those when we “invent” them in a way that corresponds to the natural or objective “right” thing. I look to the authentic scriptures revealed by Manifestations of God as the standard by which we determine what is “right” action, but that's still an imperfect standard, especially because Manifestations of God tend to use fallible indicators like human language to describe “right” to us. I'm also not clear on how much "noise" gets into the message filtered through the Manifestations of God, based on Their setting in a historical and cultural context, or the human personalities of the Manifestations. So, in figuring out what we believe about what Manifestations of God tell us also depends partly on our rational intuition or our spiritual intuition (our tendency to naturally recognize what is good and bad). That said, for the vast majority of things that we tend to think of as being “right” or “wrong” I think we’re just following social conventions, which tend to be set by the most powerful persons in our cultures. In those cases, “right” is a social construction rooted in intellectual fashions and habits rather than any reflection of a deeper moral reality in the universe.

Okay, so which answers come closest to my thinking on this one? Again, the quiz-makers give us thirteen choices. This time again four of these looked appealing to me:

b) Yes and it is based on rational intuition
e) No, there are no morals beyond those set by the most powerful rulers
l) Yes and we naturally recognize what it is as human beings
m) No, just the product of customs and habit.

I went with the choice that agreed there are “right” actions (at least in some cases), and that those are “naturally recognized” by us (at least some of us).

The third question asked “Can we ever really know what the world is like outside of ourselves?” The key to that question is what is meant by “really know” and here I guess my answer depends on how I understand that phrase.

The answers that intuitively appealed to me were:

a) Yes and we can build a clear picture of it through empirical science
f) Only God knows so our only mission is to know God.
g) No, we have only our inner “ideas” about what the world is like
h) No, we can only know things as they appear not as they are in themselves

I went with “only God knows” since that seemed less open to contradictions than the other answers (a and h, which both seemed correct to me, seemed in contradiction because they depended on a different understanding of “really know” about “the world” whatever those mean.)

Number 4 was easy. The question asked, “what is the most important purpose of our lives?” There were many fine secondary goals in life, but the primary root was almost nailed by the response “to develop faith and get close to God.” I would have said “to improve our knowledge and wisdom, and in particular our spiritual insight, which is akin to “knowing god,” and to transcend our desires and habits to follow the rites, or obey the laws, or submit to the greater good in a way that defeats self-interest and pride, which is akin to “worshiping God.” Every day I say (in prayer) to God (and most importantly, myself), “Thou hast created me to know Thee and to worship Thee,” so I’m pretty clear on what I think my purpose in life is, at least in a general and vague sense.

There were a couple other questions as well. Some of the potential answers were pretty funny.

It turns out the quiz says I’m most like Søren Kierkegaard. That doesn’t surprise me. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure Abū al-Faḍl Gulpāyigānī wasn’t a part of the great philosopher pool from which I could have been identified. I would have liked to know who I was most like after Kierkegaard. I would have liked this quiz better if it had given me a result of 50 great philosophers rank-ordered by how similar my thinking was to each of them. Am I 80% like Kierkegaard, or 90% or 70%? And how close am I to John Stuart Mill, to William James, to Immanuel Kant, to Maimonides, to Paul Tillich, to Reinhold Niebuhr, or to John Rawls? I generally like those guys. And how far am I from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, or David Hume? I'd like to know.

Snow in late March

2009-03-29T12:39:00.000-07:00

We've just had a few inches of sticky wet snow last night, and as always, a snow in the spring is a lovely thing to see. The snow clings to the trees and flowers. I guess I've seen five or six significant snowfalls between March 25 and April 15 over my life so far, and they are always a treat. We tried to go sledding, but the snow was so sticky we just spent more of our time throwing snowballs at each other or rolling balls of snow down the hills so they grew as they rolled.

I took some photographs around our neighborhood, and made a page of images showing them, along with some other pictures I took back in February. The pictures are at this page.

Christians and Poverty

2009-03-26T19:03:00.000-07:00

I've been looking for books that would exhibit some of the attitudes and beliefs of early Christian social work pioneers. Then, while I was doing that, I collected some other books that I thought might interest one of my advisees who will be doing an independent study with me on theology and service to the poor. I used RefWorks, a tool that is like EndNote, to collect the reference information for some sources that were available in Illinois (thank goodness for I-Share and the UIUC library!). I'm trying to encourage students to use RefWorks or Endnote to get their citations right, but now that I see the results here, I'm not so sure this is exactly what I wanted. Anyway, I'll share the list of books here:

Barnett, , & Barnett, H.,. (1972). Practicable socialism; essays on social reform,. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press.

Brace, C. L.,. (1885). Gesta Christ, or, A history of humane progress under Christianity. New York: A.C. Armstrong & Son. (chapters 9, 21, 29, 31, & 32)

Brace, C. L.,. (1967). The dangerous classes of New York and twenty years' work among them. Montclair, N.J.: P. Smith.

Brace, C. L., & Brace, E.,. (1894). The life of Charles Loring Brace chiefly told in his own letters. New York: C. Scribner's Sons.

Chalmers, T.,. (1821). The application of Christianity to the commercial and ordinary affairs of life, in a series of discourses. New York: S. Campbell & Sons.

Chalmers, T.,. (1821). The Christian and civic economy of large towns. Glasgow: Printed by J. Starke for Chalmers & Collins.

Chalmers, T.,. (1911). Dr. Chalmers and the poor laws: A comparison of Scotch and English pauperism and evidence before the committee of the House of Commons,. Edinburgh: D. Douglas.

Chalmers, T., & Masterman, N.,. (1900). Chalmers on charity; a selection of passages and scenes to illustrate the social teaching and practical work of Thomas Chalmers, D.D. Westminster: A. Constable and Co.

Davis, T.,. (2007). Red letters : Living a faith that bleeds. Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook.

Gurteen, S. H. (1882). A handbook of charity organization. Buffalo: The author.

Gurteen, S. H. (1883). How paupers are made; an address on the prevention of pauperism ... Chicago:

Gurteen, S. H., & Charity Organization Society of Buffalo. (1879). Hints and suggestions to the visitors of the poor. Buffalo [N.Y.]: Published by the Charity Organization Society of the City of Buffalo.

Hamlin, C. (2006). William Pulteney Alison, the Scottish philosophy, and the making of a political medicine. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 61(2), 144-186.

Katz, Michael B. (1996). In the shadow of the poorhouse, revised edition. New York: Basic Books.

King, M. L., & Carson, C.,. (1998). The autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Intellectual Properties Management in association with Warner Books.

Niebuhr, R., & Robertson, D. B.,. (1967). Essays in applied Christianity: The Church and the new world;. New York: Meridian Books.

Schweitzer, A., & Campion, C. T.,. (1949). Out of my life and thought: An autobiography. New York: H. Holt.

Schweitzer, A., & Joy, C. R.,. (1967). Albert Schweitzer; an anthology. edited by Charles R. Joy. Boston: Beacon Press.

Sider, R. J., & Gay, C. M. (1997). Rich Christians in an age of hunger - revisited. U.S.: Christians Scholar's Review.

Taylor, G.,. (1913). Religion in social action,. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co.

Taylor, G.,. (1936). Chicago Commons through forty years. Chicago, Ill.: Chicago Commons Association.

Teresa, , & Benenate, B. (1997). In the heart of the world: Thoughts, stories, & prayers. Novato, Calif.: New World Library.

Teresa, , González-Balado, J. L., & Playfoot, J. N. (1985). My life for the poor. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Tillich, P.,. (1966). On the boundary; an autobiographical sketch. New York: Scribner.

Tillich, P.,. (1971). Political expectation. New York: Harper & Row.

Tuckerman, J.,. (1838). The principles and results of the ministry at large: In Boston. Boston: J. Munroe.

Tuckerman, J.,. (1839). Christian service to the poor in cities, unconnected with any religious denomination a series of extracts from "the principles and results of the ministry at large" in Boston, U.S.

Tuckerman, J.,. (1971). On the elevation of the poor; a selection from his reports as minister at large in Boston. New York: Arno Press.

My student will actually be reading about half of these, and I guess I will too. Hopefully I can blog about some of these in the coming months.

Oxford Comma

2009-03-24T23:22:00.001-07:00

I'm always encouraging my students to use the Oxford Comma in their writing. It seems like a losing battle here in America, where people omit that last comma in a list, but I beg my students to do it, at least for me. My friend Amy Wharton may not know this, but she gave me a CD with a catchy song in it that seems to ridicule my concern. The video that goes with this ("Oxford Comma" by Vampire Weekend) is worth watching. It has crude language, and may not be suitable for all audiences.

Animation

2009-03-19T14:38:00.000-07:00

I'm fond of unusual animation, and I'll share a few interesting cartoons here in today's post.

First, here is one of my favorite commercials from my childhood, featuring the voice of Ken Nordine, who gave us Word Jazz and Now Nordine.

Next, here are a couple excellent examples of music videos from Sally Cruikshank, whom I saw at Webster University back in 1986 (I think Julie Mell was with me). Cruikshank has a friendly presence on YouTube. First, enjoy this catchy song:

Then admire this, one of Cruikshank's very early works:

Next, you can admire this patriotic short cartoon from the mid-1970s. Ah, the Bicentennial:

And here, some of my earliest encounters with the music of Phillip Glass were provided by the PBS program Sesame Street:

Spring is here

2009-03-18T22:29:00.000-07:00

Well, this is the week that Primavera (primus ver)—Spring—bursts forth here in Springfield. I rode my bike back from the office on Tuesday with a t-shirt on. Our maple trees came out in flower on Monday and on Saint Patrick's Day (Tuesday) they were pretty much in full bloom, not that maple tree flowers are spectacular or anything. They look like tiny red or yellow fuzzy spikes. Our forsythia will bloom tomorrow, I think, as the buds are yellow and big. The crocus flowers were blooming a week ago, or earlier.

It's Spring Break. I've been working on catching up on giving students feedback on their papers, and I've been reading—some academic stuff for papers I'm writing, and some interesting stuff I just wanted to read. I just listened to a great song on the radio driving home from a friend's home tonight. It's Airborne Toxic Event's Sometime Around Midnight.

I had a nightmare a couple nights ago where I was in the future, and people were watching, for entertainment, people being voluntarily decapitated. It was like a game show where contestants were getting their heads cut off, and trying to maintain a smile as their heads were cut off. I guess it was understood that before irreversible death set in the heads were reattached to the bodies and no permanent harm or scarring would result. I was horrified. The horror was mostly at the empathy I (as a human) was feeling for the "contestants" on the show. I couldn't understand why they were doing it. What leads to such dreams? I am a pessimist about most popular entertainment, and I suppose the dream was a manifestation of my fears about where cultural trends were headed. I think I had been considering something my father mentioned this weekend when he visited, that in some ways the Romans were more barbaric than the "barbarians" who overran the Empire, and of course one of the most famous aspects of Roman evil was their pleasure in watching public executions and gladiatorial combat. The theater of the cruel. And I'd also been reading about Maimonides and his ideas about martyrdom. He thought it was wicked to seek out martyrdom, and one was morally obliged to avoid martyrdom. He was working against the Masada Complex in Jewish culture. All that could have contributed to the dream. Or maybe it was in some way precognitive. Just tonight a friend showed me a film Frank Miller's Sin City. It featured a decapitation, and it was, I thought, presented as a form of theater of the cruel, an exercise in immediacy, savagery, and brutality to elicit strong feelings of horror and disgust at a deep emotional level, forcing the audience to reject what we were witnessing and turn away in panic at our own animal enjoyment of the violence (I didn't feel much enjoyment). But I don't know, maybe it was just an amoral artistic exercise reveling in violence. Bread and circuses. But, like my dream, there were scenes reveling in violence. In my nightmare I was horrified that people would cheerfully submit to a "game" of being decapitated. Here, a day later, I was horrified by an artifact of my culture that "entertained" by showing a hero possessed mainly by the desire to torture evil-doers.

I was reminded of that first Mad Max film where Max finds the gangster who killed his wife and child, and ties him up next to a bomb, and lets him have a saw, and tells him that he has time to saw off his limb and escape before the bomb goes off, and the murderer is begging for mercy, and the film is constructed so we are supposed to feel satisfaction, because Max is getting revenge and the criminal is quailing. And yet, if we stop and reflect, this is extra-judicial killing, itself a form of evil and murder. But evidently satisfying feelings for revenge is like satisfying feelings of hunger or thirst. It's a deep physical need. But one that does not provide long-lasting satisfaction.

Back to that idea of decapitation, I was also thinking of martyrdom. I try to read Baha'i history on almost a daily basis, and there certainly is plenty of shi'ite martyrdom imagery in the Baha'i writings. Most Baha'is know about Baha'u'llah's vision of the Maid of Heaven when he was stuck down in a dungeon, but what about Ali-Muhamad (the Bab) and his vision of the Imam Husayn's bloody head? And I do think of our modern Baha'i martyrs as heros. Many of them were modern, well-educated, materially successful persons who could have renounced their faith to save their lives, left Iran, and then rededicated themselves to the Faith once in safety. That might have been what Maimonides suggested they ought to have done. But they refused to recant, and they died, even as recently as the 1980s. I met the son of one of these martyrs, and he was not really very happy about his parent's choice. I got the impression, although he didn't actually say this, that he would have rather that his parent had followed the advice from Maimonides. And going willingly to one's execution, with a smile on one's face, that is an ideal for religious people who take faith and God's commandments seriously.

Yet, there was my dream, where people were doing this for "fun" to entertain others or prove their own extreme abilities of self control and pain tolerance. Anyway, it's odd what one will dream about. I have disturbing dreams about once or twice a week, and they usually wake me up between 5:30 and 6:30, and I can never get back to sleep after them, so I just get up usually.

Here, I've embedded a video of that song I liked so well.

New Baha'i Pages

2009-02-28T17:22:00.001-08:00

I've added and improved a couple of pages of materials I put up at my Baha'i page.

One of this is a short (about 10-minute to 15-minute) devotional with annotated footnotes to facilitate study. This particular devotional was prepared for Mothers' Day in 2005.

I also improved the study session paper related to the concept of death in the Baha'i Faith.

100 Books (not the BBC list)

2009-02-28T16:21:00.000-08:00

On Facebook people have been counting how many books from a list put out by the BBC they have read. I've read 29 from the BBC list, but I have some friends who have read nearly 60.

I thought I'd create my own list of 100 books I have read or would like to read. There is significant overlap with the BBC list, since I used it as a starting point. I couldn't figure out the order of the BBC list; was it in order of popularity? My list is not in any particular order, although I have clustered books according to some similarities. Anyway, here is my list:

1, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
2, Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
3, The Harry Potter Books (Sorcerer’s Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, Deathly Hallows), J.K. Rowling
4, The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
5, The Once and Future King, T.H. White
6, The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
7, The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
8, Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne
9, The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
10, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
11, A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
12, Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
13, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
14, The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King), J.R.R. Tolkien
15, Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16, War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
17, Dream of the Red Chamber, Tsao Hsueh-Chin
18, In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past), Marcel Proust
19, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
20, Memory of Fire (Genesis, Faces and Masks, Century of the Wind), Eduardo Galeano
21, The Alexandria Quartet (Mountolive, Balthazar, Justine, Clea), Lawrence Durrell
22, The Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street), Naguib Mahfouz
23, The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
24, The Republic, Plato
25, The Inferno, Dante
26, Beowulf, Unknown Anglo-Saxon bard
27, The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
28, The Guide of the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides
29, Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
30, Hamlet, William Shakespeare
31, MacBeth, William Shakespeare
32, Beyond Rationality, Kenneth R. Hammond
33, Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin
34, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, William Manchester
35, Hiroshima, John Hersey
36, The Star Thrower, Loren Eiseley
37, So Human an Animal, René Dubos
38, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
39, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
40, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
41, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
42, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
43, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
44, A Death In The Family, James Agee
45, Moby Dick, Herman Melville
46, Ishmael, Daniel Quinn
47, The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
48, Little Women, Louisa M. Alcott
49, Catch 22, Joseph Heller
50, Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
51, On The Road, Jack Kerouac
52, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
53, Turbulence (Fuzao), Jia Pingwa
54, The Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Analects (The first three of The Four Books), Confucius
55, Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
56, Journey to the West, Wu Cheng-en
57, Sadhana, Rabindranath Tagore
58, God’s Bits of Wood, Sembene Ousmane
59, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
60, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61, Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
62, The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
63, Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama
64, Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
65, In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck
66, Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
67, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
68, Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, Ambrose Bierce
69, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
70, The Trial, Franz Kafka
71, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, Lafcadio Hearn
72, Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
73, It, Stephen King
74, Dracula, Bram Stoker
75, The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
76, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
77, The Iron Heel, Jack London
78, 1984, George Orwell
79, Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
80, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick
81, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
82, Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
83, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.
84, Empire Falls, Richard Russo
85, Watership Down, Richard Adams
86, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
87, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
88, The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
89, Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
90, Freedom from the Known, Jiddu Krishnamurti
91, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
92, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis
93, The Book of Certitude (Kitab-i-Iqan), Husayn-`Ali Nuri (Baha’u’llah)
94, The Hidden Words, Husayn-`Ali Nuri (Baha’u’llah)
95, The Four Gospels and the Acts of the New Testament (of the Bible), Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
96, The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis
97, Why I Am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell
98, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Gandhi’s Autobiography), Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
99, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Luther King Jr., & Clayborne Carson
100, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, Reinhold Neibuhr

Ayyam-i-Ha

2009-02-27T23:26:00.000-08:00

Well, we've reached those magical four days before the fast begins. The boys have two or three present to open each day. I think they are rather disappointed to find clothing and books, and not any DVDs or video games, but I think the books they are getting are good.

This has me thinking about what my sons do with their free time. When I was their age I loved to read, and I read quite a bit more than they are reading now. But, I also liked to play computer games (I think Atari games came out when I was in fifth or sixth grade). Back in 1980-1982 I had a TRS-80 Color Computer, and I pretty much learned how to type by trying to write programs in BASIC to generate characters for Dungeons and Dragons games. I played D&D, Diplomacy, and spent many hours outdoors walking around cornfields and woods and the neighborhood, or went on long (sometimes 20+ mile) bike rides on rural roads through the countryside north of Indianapolis. I was in a soccer league, and then ran in cross-country and track in middle school, and I joined Boy Scouts when I was in sixth grade, around the time my dad moved out when my parents separated. That was my life in late elementary and middle school.

My sons don't have quite the same life. The Internet, Game Cube, X-Box 360, Wii, and GameBoy systems give them a more attractive way to practice their eye-finger coordination than the TRS-80 and Atari did. I think rather than use the "four-hour per week with extra hours allowed if an adult is playing with you" as our limit for computer gaming and playing on the internet, we're going to shift to a system where minutes of screen time are bought by reading. Every page read in an approved book gets a minute of screen time. So, the Ayyam-i-Ha gifts give them some good choices for reading, I hope.

I'm wondering what to do about the fast. Usually I go to bed early, wake up early, and there's nothing much to it. If you wake up at 5:00, finish breakfast by 6:00, and you've gone to sleep at 9:00 or 10:00 the previous evening, the fast is easy to do. But, my habit is to grade papers and participate in online discussions (for my classes) after my sons go to bed (between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m.). The switch in sleeping habits that comes with March can sometimes be difficult at first. Lately I've been up late putting up photographs (180 of them) from my recent college renewal, which you can see here, here, and here.

(I'm a practicing and enrolled Baha'i, and Baha'i adults of a certain age, when in good health and not traveling, refrain from eating or drinking during daylight hours from March 2 to March 20).

The 25 random things

2009-02-21T14:01:00.000-08:00

Lately on Facebook some friends have sent me lists of 25 random things about themselves. These have been very enjoyable to read. I've finally finished my 25 random things. These were indeed the first 25 things that occurred to me. I didn't delete anything I started to write or plan out what I would share. They are pretty darn personal, and they are mostly about my inner life. I guess that's just me. Where the heck did my sense of boundaries ever go?

1) Just about every day I think about death. I think of my son who died when my wife miscarried. What was he? Was he a person? Was he a thing? What about my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my ancestors whose names and stories I know, and my ancestors who are entirely forgotten and unknown? What has happened to them? What is in store for me? What about after the sun destroys planet Earth? What about after the heat death of the universe? What does it mean to cease existing?

2) I always have good intentions, but it seems to me I rarely act on them. I mean well, but there never seems to be time to do well as much as I want to.

3) I always have this tension in my heart and mind between on one hand, my scientific training and my materialist approach to the way I understand the universe and, on the other hand, my faith and belief in a supernatural reality. I really wonder if the fact that when information is arranged in particular forms (matter-energy gets into specific configurations) certain qualities emerge (life, consciousness, etc.) is a “fingerprint of the Divine” or is this merely something that can eventually be explained by mathematics and experimental observation? How is it that matter has mass? What is it about the universe that things like Planck’s Constant, the speed of light, the Natural Log, or pi, etc. happen to exist as they do? How is it that gravity is a property of mass? Are these in any sense spiritual questions?

4) I don’t feel jealous about anything. I remember feeling jealous when I was 12 or 13, but it was a horrible emotion, and I haven’t felt it since. I’ve been in situations where I should have felt jealous, but I just can’t feel a sense of injustice, outrage, or desire for things that I don’t get. I do feel angry that some people are underpaid and others are overpaid, but this is more a violated sense of justice than any personal jealousy.

5) I generally don’t like country music or rap or soul music, but I like Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Lee Hazelwood, Dwight Yoakam, Steve Earl, and Alison Krauss (country musicians). I also like Michael Franti, Public Enemy, KRS-One, and Gil Scott-Heron (Rap and Hip-Hop).

6) I give too many details, explain too much, and repeat myself quite a bit. I’m probably a bit of a bore.

7) I like to keep myself clean, but I don’t care about other aspects of personal grooming like combing hair, shaving, dressing smartly, and so forth. If my wife wasn’t reminding me to brush my hair and insisting I cut it once or twice a year I’d probably look like a wreck.

8) I like to look at pleasing faces, and I find a smiling face to be the most attractive part of the body. I especially like large eyes, and darker complexions, thicker and darker eyebrows, and long hair (in both sexes). Like most people, I find symmetrical faces a bit more attractive than asymmetrical ones, and I like faces that tend toward the average. I think more “feminine” and “youthful” faces are beautiful on women, but more androgynous faces are lovely as well, and I like elderly faces almost as much as youthful ones. A face that laughs often, and has exaggerated animation in its expressions is always attractive.

9) I like to wear unusual clothing. I think mainstream clothing, both the formal suits and the informal t-shirts and jeans are all boring. I like colorful African and and Asian traditional clothing, and I actually wear them fairly regularly. I also like historical clothing, and enjoy wearing 18th and 19th century styles. It’s not so much about cultural appropriation (although I do question the very idea of cultural ownership or barriers), but mainly the fact that I like pretty and unusual or exotic garments, and enjoy wearing them because I wish everyone dressed in unique and lovely ways, drawing on all the diversity of the past and the many cultural styles invented by our species.

10) I love photography. I take lots of photographs. I look at old photographs and keep my photographs organized. Sitting down with an old photo album seems like a good way to spend a half hour on a weekend afternoon.

11) I love to travel. I don’t get to travel very often. So, I love to plan trips. In planning these trips I learn details about all sorts of places I never go. I read travel books and imagine going to the places described. This can sometimes amaze people, when I learn they are from some far-away place I’ve never visited, and I can ask them about restaurants in their town or obscure tourist attractions there because I’ve planned a trip to their town or read about it in a travel book. I've been told that the philosopher Kant had a similar trait, although he evidently never got to travel.

12) I often think about this: do I even exist in the first place? I mean, perhaps I’m just a manifestation of various universal experiences. After all, the feelings and motivational drives I have: the love, the fear, the joy, the empathy, and the frustrations are all biochemically pretty much the same as what any other human feels. In fact, most animals have similar nervous systems and neurotransmitters, and they exhibit behaviors that correspond to the sensations, emotions, and motivational drives I seem to feel. When matter is arranged in particular ways creatures (such as myself) seem to exhibit behaviors I associate with the various emotions and thoughts. So, how are my particular emotions and thoughts really mine? Aren’t they just the emotions and thoughts of the universe temporarily exhibited in the time and space my body happens to occupy? Perhaps I’m just a particular collection of memories, relationships, and experiences, and the sense that there is a “self” that is responsible for all this and owns it is part of that illusion that I stand alone and apart from the whole, the Universe, and the Divine. It seems that way sometimes.

13) I pray. I like to pray alone and silently, and I don’t like praying in a group. I often pray for people, both the living and the dead. Sometimes I’ll read a Baha’i prayer or say a Baha’i prayer I’ve memorized, but most of the time I just talk to God or get into a devotional attitude and a meditative spirit, and pray with my own thoughts and feelings.

14) I still feel enthralled and totally in love with my wife sometimes. I feel this way more about her now than I did in the earlier years of our marriage, and in fact, I was more often dissatisfied and frustrated in our relationship when we were in our twenties than I am now, after over 16 years of marriage. I find it easier to encourage this feeling of being head-over-heels in love with my wife as if we were young and in the first stages of falling in love by spending time apart from her for a few days, like when I go away for a weekend, or when she goes back to Taiwan for a few weeks without me or I take the boys somewhere for a few days without her. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. But only a short absence, please.

15) I waste a lot of time looking up stuff and learning about all sorts of things that cross my consciousness and come to my attention. I’m not so distractible or plagued with a short-attention span that you could say I’m “scattered” or diagnose me with clinical “attention-deficit” problems, but I am spread pretty wide (and, I’m afraid, thinly) over the facts and experiences that come my way or are sought by me.

16) I’m a bit messy with my papers and clothing. I should be neater.

17) I’m a native Californian, and feel proud of that. I love California, and think of it as my true home, but I only lived there for the first six years of my life and for a little over three years when I was an undergraduate student in college.

18) I’m also constantly wondering about Baha’u’llah (Husayn-`Ali Nuri) and His son, ‘Abdu’l-Baha (Abbas Effendi). How accurately were they getting Revelation from God? What is the nature of a Manifestation of God like the Bab (Ali Muhammad Al Shirazi Bab Al Din) or Baha’u’llah? Sometimes the Manifestations of God sound a bit like persons with psychotic disorders, and They don’t seem to be perfect or infallible in the sense that They are “perfect” in Their behavior or always perfectly accurate in everything They say or believe. And yet, I have faith that these Persons are the source of Truth, knowledge of goodness, and so forth. This creates a tension. I try to learn what I can about the historical Jesus, Mohammed, and the founders of other religions. I just can’t stop wondering and thinking about the Manifestations of God. Sometimes I am moved to tears in feelings of awe and devotion, but other times I’m critical of (or baffled by) what people report these Persons did or said.

19) I’m not very engaged with certain aspects of mainstream American culture or life. I don’t know many movie or television stars, and I don’t follow any sports closely. I have no idea what is popular in music, as I rely on friends and disc jockeys on public/community radio to alert me to new music I might like. We don’t have cable television, and I hardly watch any television anyway. No one in our family enjoys shopping. We don’t have a mobile phone of our own, although my mom lets us use a spare one she has, and we only use it when we are traveling. We almost never eat out in restaurants. I drive (seldom) a 21-year-old car when I’m not riding my bike or taking a bus. If I play any trivia games I’m good with the history, geography, and science questions, but the entertainment and sports questions tend to mystify me. So, these are some of the ways I’m de-linked from mainstream culture.

20) I’m quick to anger and my anger passes over me in a quick and intense wave, and then it is gone. Now that I’ve learned to let the anger pass silently without acting on it, this works pretty well for me, as I’m usually over anger within a few minutes, if not seconds. The trick for me is to remain silent and let the feeling pass. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to understand how people can get angry and stay angry for more than a few minutes. I’d rather not get angry at all, and maybe I’m successful in framing reality in a way that I don’t get angry or upset very easily. But still, I think my temperament is such that I am vulnerable to flashes of anger, and it’s taken years to learn to let the waves of rage just pass over and dissipate without using that energy.

21) I’m six feet tall. I was 177 centimeters tall when I graduated from high school, 180 centimeters tall when I graduated from college, and I’m now 182.5 centimeters (just a tiny fraction of an inch shy of 6 feet tall). I didn’t stop growing until I was in my early thirties. That’s supposedly impossible, but my grandmother also continued growing into her thirties.

22) I’m very much concerned with the idea that things are determined, and we don’t really have free will, or anything like responsibility, guilt, honor, or anything else that people would deserve if they had free will. David Hume and others seem to have pretty good arguments against free will. I believe in free will, but take it as a sort of supernatural belief or faith. I wonder about it often.

23) I’m very sentimental. I keep old things, and find it difficult to throw them away. I like to reminisce, and I like cute things and pathetic things.

24) I’ve always thought love should be open and liberating, and not limited and confining. I guess I still believe that, although I gave up on “free love” (at least in terms of sexual relationships) long ago, before I was married. Despite my early interest in open relationships and free love (I never had an exclusive girlfriend until I was a senior in college), I was not a libertine. For example, I remained a virgin until I was 20 years old, and hadn’t had sex (as President Clinton defined the term, narrowly) for the four years preceding my wedding. I guess I’ve been frustrated by the quick association between sexual expression and the emotions and motive drives of love in my culture and time. It seems to me our culture, encouraged by capitalism and its reliance on capturing our immediate attention and selling stuff to us, neglects feelings of philia (friendly love), agape (spiritual love), and storge (familial love), and instead emphasizes something that resembles eros, but is often just base lust mixed with greedy possessiveness, without the beauty of true eros. Well, that’s my take on it anyway, and I guess I’ve felt this way since I was a child. I’m interested in love, openness, community, solidarity, group cohesion, tenderness, kindness, and all the sorts of things you would associate with those terms, rooted in love.

25) I’ve lived in many different places. I lived for years in: central Orange County in California, northwestern Indianapolis in Indiana, central and western Saint Louis County in Missouri, Redlands in California, Chiayi in Taiwan, Urbana in Illinois, and now in Springfield in Illinois. I’ve lived for several weeks or even months in Antioch in California, Nairobi in Kenya, Berlin in Germany, Xi’an in China, Evanston in Illinois, Yamhill County in Oregon, and Taichung in Taiwan. I’ve enjoyed all these places, and would be happy to return to live in any of these places again.

Lincoln turns 200

2009-02-19T23:58:00.001-08:00

Last week marked the completion of the 200th year since baby Abraham Lincoln was born in a cabin in Kentucky. Here in the town where he settled as a young adult and lived most of his life we had a fairly large celebration. Our family went to join in an effort to have thousands of people read the Gettysburg Address all together at the same time. While there, we met our new governor, Pat Quinn. Here are a couple photographs of the event.

New Orleans 2009

2009-02-08T01:32:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I went to New Orleans for the annual meeting of the Society for Social Work and Research. I have finally finished making a couple web pages that show some photographs of people I met and things I saw (especially the Prospect 1 art show). So, if you want to see the photographs, follow this link.

iPod Game

2009-01-30T23:28:00.000-08:00

I played this game with my iPod, where I put it on shuffle and look at the 25 song that come up randomly and use their names to answer these 25 questions. Sometimes you get interesting hits:

RULES:
1. Put Your iTunes, Windows Media Player, MP3 Player, or whatever on Shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. You must write down the name of the song no matter how silly it sounds!
4. Put any comments in brackets after the song name.

Song you wake up to? "Bad Boy" The Beatles [Funny coincidence. One could be a "bad boy" when one wakes up because one is generally in a bad temper when having to get up early.]
If someone says, "Is this okay?" you say "Ave Verum Corpus,” Zephyr, A Choir of Angels [I like this one, as if we would respond to any question seeking approval with the response "Hail, True Body of Christ." There are interesting religious implications.]
How would you describe yourself? "I Menuetto, part 1 and 2 (Allegro Moderato)" Pablo Casals playing Bach Suites for Cello. [That particular piece of music does seem very close to my soul, and perhaps it would be useful to respond with music rather than words to such a question asking the impossible task of self-description.]
What do you like in a guy/girl? "Think for Yourself" The Beatles [Oh, this is so true. A real accurate random hit.]
How do you feel today? "Jebel" Gheorghe Zamfir, Panflute and Organ. [Again, music rather than words to describe an emotion. That makes sense to me. This piece is sort of sad and meditative. That's not actually how I feel today.]
What's your life's purpose? "East of Eden" Big Country
What is your motto? "Mysterious Whisper" They Might Be Giants [This is a funny juxtaposition]
What do your friends think of you? "She’s Like the Swallow" The Quink Vocal Ensemble - Folk Songs of the World. [This would have been funny if I were a woman.]
What do you think of your parents? "Pride (In the Name of Love)" U2 [Nice match]
What do you think of very often? "Four Scottish Dances by Sir Malcolm Arnold" Queensland Symphony.
What is 2 + 2? "Pity" The Tree People - Guilt Regret Embarrassment [The song title doesn't match the question, but the album title is a good association for how many people feel about mathematics.]
What do you think of your best friend? "Fairly Shot of Her" Enya - By Chance It Was
What do you think of the person you like? "The Red Fox" Big Country - The Seer
What is your life story? "Beethoven String Quartet Op. 132 No. 15, in A Minor, second movement (Allegro ma non tanto)" Alban Berg Quartet.
What do you want to be when you grow up? "Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, the first Aria, The Day that Gave Great Anna Birth" Stephen Cleobury - Coronation Anthems [So, does this imply I want to be some sort of monarch?]
What do you think of when you see the person you like? "Voice of Reason" The Hoagland Conspiracy [This is funny, because my wife, whom I like, is something like a voice of reason in our relationship.]
What will you dance to at your wedding? "Ragged Old Flag" Johnny Cash [You can't dance to this song, and we didn't have dancing out our wedding.]
What will they play at your funeral? "Suzanne" Leonard Cohen [This is a great song, and it would go well at a funeral.]
What is your hobby/interest? "All You Need Is Love" The Beatles [Oh, this was a good match.]
What is your biggest fear? "I’m A Little Dinosaur" Jonathan Richman [Funny]
What is your biggest secret? "Crazy Love" Paul Simon [Oh, this is really funny]
What is your best strength? "Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto for 2 Trumpets and Strings RV 537 third part, Allegro" Wynton Marsalis [This is a strong musical piece, full of energy and vigor.]
What do you think of your friends? "Joy To The World" [What is this Christmas song still doing on my iPod in late January?]
What do you think of the world? "Every Time When I Fall Down and My Head Hits the Floor Hard" The Tree People. [An excellent match. This is a good hit.]
What do you think of the government? "One By One" Flipper [A very dark song about things coming to a bad end. It's an apocolyptic song. Suitable for our former governor, who was kicked out of office this week.]
What do you think of religion? "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. Prelude #12 in F Minor, BWV 857" Friedrich Gulda playing this piece by J. S. Bach. [Seems appropriate that a song by Bach would come up in answer to this question. Pity it was one of his secular songs.]
What do you think of school? "New Years Day" U2 [Nothing changes on New Year's Day.]
How was your year so far? "La Chanson de la Rose" Al Gromer Khan - Space Hotel
Perfect way of spending your weekend? "La Fontana di Valle Guilia all’alba" The Fontane di Roma, Sinopoli conducting the New York Philharmonic in this piece by Respighi. [Yeah, I would love to spend a weekend enjoying the fountains of Rome. This is a good match.]
What is the one thing you want to do once in your life? "Pigs On The Wing (Part Two)" Pink Floyd [It's a song about enduring love between friends, and I would like to be reunited with old friends at least once again.]
Most important thing you need to do before you die? "Train" Mission of Burma
What do you think of Myspace? "Shuffering and Shmiling" Fela Kuti [Ha ha, this is a funny match. It's a song about people being duped by false promises from corrupt religious leaders, but it could be taken more abstractly as a critique of the false promises of joy to be found through internet relationships. Although, come to think of it, I sustain many old friendships throught he internet and I've met all sorts of wonderful people by using the internet, so this doens't really work for me in my experience.]
What do you think of Facebook? "Puer Natus In Bethlehem" The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos - Chant [Another Christmas Song?!]
What would your road trip/travel song be? "And God Saw Everything..." The Creation (Haydn) The Academy of Ancient Music. [A perfect match between the song title and the question. God saw everything, and it was good. That's how I feel when I travel.]
How do you want to live your final years? "Deep Blue Dream" Eric Serra - The Big Blue. [This song makes one feel peaceful and meditative, which seems like a good way to spend one's final years I guess.]
What do you think of surveys like this? - "Cuentos de la juventud Recuerdos de la infancia" Alicia De Larrocha playing Granados - Scenes of Childhood. [I guess they are childish?]
What will you post this as? "As If We Never Said Goodbye" Barbara Streisand.

Prospect 1 in New Orleans

2009-01-19T20:22:00.000-08:00

Although I spent most of my time in New Orleans at the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) meeting or hanging out with other social work researchers, I did have a couple hours on Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday to check out some of the Prospect 1 art exhibits, including the ones at the New Orleans Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Center, and the old U.S. Mint.

I want to write about some of what I saw.

Skylar Fein's installation about an arson attack on a bar that killed 32 guys was especially disturbing, mainly because he included huge blown-up photographs of charred corpses from the scene. That was horrific. Another disturbing spectacle was the installation by Stephen G. Rhodes. I somewhat enjoyed certain aspects of the energy and anger and spookiness in his piece, but it was hard to take, and one doctoral student from USC who was with me had to get out of the room quickly; she could only take a few seconds of the experience.
Thought provoking? I think I was especially moved to contemplation and reflection by Yasumasa Morimura's photographic tableaus based on Goya works and his film of himself behaving and acting like Charlie Chaplin's immitation of Adolf Hitler from "The Great Dictator" along and making odd observations ("we are dictators to stones, to tiny animals," etc.). Kalup Linzy's surrealistic soap opera featuring himself as a female character was also hard to believe, but it seemed to cover the basic problems of jealousy, love, and lust with detachment and ridicule.
Inspiring or fun? I liked Candice Breitz's wall of video monitors (Legend) featuring people from Jamaica singing Bob Marley songs. Fred Tomeselli's paintings and Beatriz Milhazes' untitled installation (both at the Mint), Shawne Major's colorful abstract tapestries and Pedro Reyes' Leverage seesaw (both of these last two in the Contemporary Art Center) were among my favorites. I even got to participate in some playing on Leverage, as a bunch of adults balanced one tiny kid for a few minutes up going up and down.

Leaving New Orleans

2009-01-18T21:36:00.001-08:00

I left New Orleans today. I was there for the SSWR conference. I think this was the seventh one I've attended in the past eleven years. Anyway, I was staying on Magazine a few blocks off Canal, in the Country Inn. When it was time to head over to the airport I had considered taking the airport shuttle or a taxi, but it seemed I had time to take the bus, so I walked up to the Walgreens at the corner of Elk Place and Tulane to catch the Tulane bus out to Carrollton to catch the E-2 Airport bus (which doesn't come downtown on weekends). It's strange, but there is no direct bus between the New Orleans airport and the downtown area where the hotels are. Sure, on weekdays the E-2 runs from the airport to downtown, but it stops about six blocks away from where there is a high concentration of hotels, and like I said, it doesn't even run on weekends, so you have to take the Tulane Bus up there to connect with it. I had planned to take the 3:40 Tulane Bus, which would have given me about a thirty minute wait at the corner of Tulane and Carrollton. There wouldn't be anything wrong with that. There is a Nike shoes factory store and a bowling alley there, so I could have bought shoes for my son an perhaps bowled ten frames. But, I was going to catch the 4:10 Tulane bus, which would give me all of three minutes to make the conection to the 4:29 E-2. I overheard someone at the bus stop say that busses "run slow" on Sundays, and I wondered if I would miss the connection to the E-2 and need to wait an hour there.

Anyway, when I got to the Walgreens I started up a conversation with a guy standing there. First off, I just asked him if the Tulane bus, the route 39, would stop there, and he said the bus "would be coming just around the corner in a few minutes to take us all down Tulane," which was a relief to hear. He asked if I had any spare change, and I said, "yeah, I've got to keep some here for the bus fare, but I know I can spare at least a quarter," and rather than scoff at a mere quarter he took it with an expression of delight, smiled at me, nodded, and said, "it adds up, you know." Gee, I thought, giving someone a quarter is like nothing, like sharing a match with someone to help them light up a cigarette or something like that. But I was really glad that he was so happy, and the little symbolic gift seemed to set a happy mood as we were standing there. As I often do when I'm standing with someone, I was friendly and mentioned I was going back up to Springfield, Illinois. We talked together briefly about where we were from. I said my family was from California and I was born there, and my new friend said he'd been there, and he named some towns around Berkeley and Oakland and he knew the names of some streets there. His speech was very slightly disorganized. He spoke vaguely about falling off his bike (somewhere in California?) and said he was embarrassed to admit it (admit what? falling off his bike once?) Anyway, he obviously wanted to connect with me in a friendly way, as he told me, when he heard I was from the West Coast originally, that "yeah, I'm from there too" (although he didn't exactly say where.

Then, suddenly, our conversation took a profound and spiritual turn. All of a sudden he started singing a Sunday School song. He had a sweet African-American voice of a middle-aged man, and it just conveyed joy and devotion and enthusiasm. I was stunned and transported. He sang a Stuart Hamblen medley, starting with the cute little children's song "I love to go to Sunday School" and then moving on to the more inspiring "It Is No Secret (What God Can Do)." There was another song I didn't recognize about loving Jesus, and my new comrad at the bus stop sang it with sincerity and conviction. He was totally into it, and so was I, standing there beaming at him. When I hear songs about The Friend of God I know that the same Spirit was inspiring all the Manifestations, but I don't usually feel any need to discuss theology or my religion with a person so obviously moved by love for God. I just soaked up the devotion to God's Messenger and the feeling of love. Well, about that time the bus arrived to pick us up, just as my new friend had predicted. I guess this guy might have been slightly teched in the head, but I would have liked to get to know him better.

I mean, it's a little beyond normal convention to start singing like that while waiting at the bus stop, but feelings of devotion can come down on a person almost any time. It's hard to stop those feelings, and why should you, anyway? Who cares if you're a little crazy? What's that in comparison of the delight of contemplating God? I know I can feel a sudden rush of trembling awe and joy each afternoon when I say the short obligatory prayer (but heck, I wouldn't sing it out on the street). But still, that sudden quantum leap from the mundane act of standing around waiting for a bus to thinking about God was brilliant. After singing his song he told me he would have a CD out soon. I hope he does.

The Governor has just been impeached.

2009-01-09T08:28:00.000-08:00

They've just voted, and 114 to 1 the Illinois House has just voted to impeach Governor Blagojevich. That's it. He's impeached. It's the first time an Illinois governor has ever been impeached. In a few weeks the Illinois Senate will have a trial (unless Blagojevich resigns).

Most of the lawmakers who spoke this morning before the vote blathered on and on. A few had some reasonable and good comments, but it took them almost 90 minutes to accomplish what should have taken 30 minutes. It's clear that some of these legislators love to hear the sound of their own voices.

Two week Midwest camping trip

2009-01-06T07:46:00.000-08:00

I like to plan vacations and trips. Here is a two-week trip from central Illinois or eastern Missouri to various state parks and historic sites in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. If you start on a Friday driving to Giant City State Park you would get home on a Sunday. I think a family of four could easily do this vacation for under $1,000. It's inexpensive because the plan calls for 12 nights of camping and only 4 nights spent in motels.

Day 1: Drive down to Giant City.

Nights 1 and 2 at: Giant City State Park [CAMPING]

Day 2 at: Giant City State Park

Day 3 at: Ferne Clyffe State Park

Night 3 at: Garden of the Gods Recreation Area [CAMPING]

Day 4 at: Henderson Kentucky John James Audubon State Park

Nights 4 & 5 at: Abraham Lincoln State Park [CAMPING]

Day 5 at: Holiday World at Santa Claus, Indiana

Day 6 at: Abraham Lincoln Boyhood Home

Day 6 at: Abraham Lincoln Birthplace

Day 6 at: Knob Creek, Kentucky (Abraham Lincoln Boyhood)

Night 6 at: Louisville, Kentucky [MOTEL]

Day 7 at: Louisville, Kentucky

Night 7 at: Clifty Falls State Park, Indiana [CAMPING]

Day 8 at: Madison, Indiana (Lanier Mansion)

Day 8 at: Vevay, Indiana

Day 8 at: Cincinnati, Ohio

Night 8 at: Cincinnati, Ohio [MOTEL]

Day 9 at: Serpent Mound State Memorial near Locust Grove, Ohio

Day 9 at: Fort Hill State Memorial near Sinking Spring, Ohio

Day 9 at: Cave Canyon Nature Preserve near Bainbridge, Ohio

Day 9 at: Adena State Memorial in Chillicothe, Ohio

Night 9 at: Chillicothe, Ohio [MOTEL]

Day 10 at: Hopewell Culture National Historic Park in Chillicothe, Ohio

Day 10 at: Rock House near Gibisonville, Ohio

Day 10 at: Cantwell Cliffs near Gibisonville, Ohio

Night 10 & 11 at: Hocking Hills State Park, Ohio [CAMPING]

Day 11 at: Hocking Hills area parks.

Day 12 at: Columbus, Ohio

Night 12 at: John Bryan State Park, Ohio [CAMPING]

Day 13 at: Xenia, Ohio

Day 13 at: Dayton, Ohio

Night 13 at: Toledo, Ohio [MOTEL]

Day 14 at: Toledo, Ohio

Night 14 at: Chain o’Lakes State Park, Indiana [CAMPING]

Day 15 at: South Bend, Indiana

Night 15 at: Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore [CAMPING]

Day 16 at: Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore

Night 16 at: Starved Rock State Park, Illinois [CAMPING]

Day 17: Return home.

Family holiday photographs

2009-01-05T23:27:00.000-08:00

Just like last year, I'm posting some holiday photographs to share what I've been doing with my family. We spent over a week at my parent's home in the St. Louis area (from just before Christmas to just after New Year's Day). My sister Jennell and her family were there during the same time, so the house was lively with six adults and four children. The second photographs shows just the Hadley-Ives family.
The third photograph shows a view of East St. Louis from the Gateway Arch. I've visited East St. Louis pretty regularly over the years, and not much has changed.
The fourth photograph shows my Thanksgiving dinner. I did have a little turkey.
The fifth photograph shows our new little niece, Angie. Jennell and Jason adopted her in 2008. She is a lot of fun.