The Future has Arrived...

... and it's directed by Terry Gilliam!

It's Not the Size of your Footnotes, It's What You Do With Them

Am I the only person who thinks a 800 page book on miracles that is loaded with another 400 pages of appendices, footnotes, bibliographies etc is trying a little too hard to appear rigorous? In other apologetic books, footnotes and bibliographies have been stocked with references to the author's own works and books that had nothing to do with the topic at hand or were referenced out-of-context.

The hype surrounding Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts by Craig Keener is already touting its authoritativeness based on its size. I just know that no christian is going to verify the contents of the bibliography and I can't shake the feeling that Keener's enterprise relies on that fact.

[edit: I had 400 pages of text and 800 of references when it should have been the other way around]

King or Kingdom?

This Story of Israel meme is kicking up a lot of discussion about how interpretations of Kingdom of Heaven/God affect Christian practice and outlook. Reading various blogs , especially Scot McKnight's discussion of his gospel of Jesus, a question has introduced itself in my mind.

Is the gospel about Jesus primarily or about the Kingdom itself? Jesus spends a lot of time discussing the nature of the Kingdom and what is expected of his followers behavior - supposedly in relation to their role in the Kingdom. In fact, compared to the Kingdom discussion, Jesus' kingship hardly comes up in the Gospels. In the synoptics, rumor equates Jesus' activity with that of the Baptist, implying a messenger role for Jesus. Even in John's Gospel, Jesus casts himself as a servant doing the will of the Father, not his own.

I am increasingly thinking that McKnight is off on a tangent that, while intellectually interesting, will prove a theological dead end.

What's good for GM is good for GM

Check out the graph: US manufacturers are making one thing - profits. The high priests of Free Markets have told us that what is good for GM is good for America. Don't worry about jobs. If the corporations are doing well, then they will be providing jobs to the masses.

Guess what. They were wrong. Predictably wrong. Capitalism is based on the power of self-interest (read: greed). Supposedly competing interests balance out and create the mysterious Invisible Hand. Nowhere in market theory does it say that companies are duty bound or even inclined in provide jobs to as many people as possible. In fact, the very principle of self-interest would demand that jobs are not a priority but rather a cost to avoided.

They care about money, not you. What's good for GM is good for GM. Any benefit the country reaps is accidental or part of a marketing scheme designed to line the pockets of - you guessed it - GM. And that is what we are seeing today. As soon as corporations find a way to make more profits while shedding expensive workers, it's sayonara muchachos!

QOD - More Proof Conservatives Are Bad At Economics

Rich people don't create jobs when we hand them big windfalls. They create jobs when the economy is growing and they have customers for their businesses.

"Rich People Create Jobs! And five other myths that must die for our economy to live"
Kevin Drum - Mother Jones

The idea that corporations hire people just because they have some spare cash lying around is ludicrous - and common. Personally, I would never hire anyone for whom I didn't have work for, i.e. demand to be filled.

Just Plain Too Clever

... smart people are often those who say the stupidest things. They, like everyone else, have blind spots but, being rather intellectually resourceful, they are even more apt at covering them up and rationalising them to themselves. They construct obtuse abstractions that even they themselves find hard to grasp in order to cover up their blinds spots. Add to this some ill-defined (or, conversely, too precisely defined) jargon, and they’ll set the heads of everyone in the room spinning so fast that everyone forgets what outlandish things they are in fact saying.

Philip Pilkington - Confessions of a Non-Utilitarian Shopper

Although this quote is referring to the economics profession, this expresses my frustration when people like N T Wright and Scot McKnight say things like:

The question is not about whether Jesus preached justification; the question is about whether he preached the Story of Israel coming to its completion in the story of himself as a saving story. - Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel, p 106 (ht JRKirk)

What the heck does this even mean? How does Jesus' descent and rise say anything about Israel's story that continues for 40 more years and, arguably, until the present day? More importantly, what possible light can "Israel's Story" cast on the state of the world today and God's apparent absence of action over the last 2000 years? N T Wright tries the same line in an online Theodicy debate with Bart Ehrman and reviewers are left saying, "What does that have to do with real people suffering in the world?" Personally I think the so-called "soterians" have a better claim - the whole Kingdom of God thing must be about internal salvation because the outside world is still f***ed up.

It is bewildering when a scholar like Rev. Wright, Bishop Willimon or Dr. McKnight say these things that are so out of touch with reality. The above observation that the smarter you are the more skilled you become in rationalizing away your errors is spot on.

I So Sympathize

My whole intellectual life has been one of throwing passionate subfield interests overboard as they as they exploded beyond my ability to follow them...

Fred Brooks, The Design of Design

Where is November?

Designers are mostly right-brained people, visually and spatially oriented. Indeed, one of my curbstone tests for potential design talent is to ask, "Where is November?" When my listener is puzzled, I elaborate, "Do you have a spatial mental model of the calendar? Many folks do. If you do, would you describe it to me?" The strong candidates almost always have one, the models themselves vary wildly.

The Design of Design, Fred Brooks

OMG! I have one of those but I never thought too much about it before. My calendar starts to my left with March, proceeds down through April and May. Then it turns to the right and runs horizontally through November, passing in front of me around August. Then December starts to droop and January and February make a turn downward.

Does anyone else have a secret mental image of the calendar? If designers typically do, what unexpected mental traits do theologians, musicians or literary critics share?

More Parents and Education

As I related here, California has a law that allows a majority of parents at a school to sign a petition that fires the school staff or turns the school over to charter organization.

Well now this report of the actual goings on in the only case where this has been tried so far:

When Parent Revolution sent paid organizers to gather signatures from parents at McKinley Elementary School in Compton, Calif., the campaign was conducted secretively. The organizers collected signatures from 60 percent of the parents. When the petition was submitted to the school district in December 2010, it designated the charter operator—the Celerity Educational Group—that would take over the school, although it is not clear who chose it.

Further more, the group spearheading the new law, Parent Revolution is astroturf:

... Parent Revolution, which is funded by charter school operators (it has some affiliation with Green Dot, whose chief executive officer sits on the board of Parent Revolution) and by venture philanthropists (including the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation)

America had better wake up to the fact that the people who brought us the Blue Screen of Death, Wal Mart and the Financial Crisis of 2008 want to bring their special brand of not-so-free markets to our children's education and our country's future.

QOD: Small Businesses, Small Payrolls?

“Eighty percent of U.S. small companies that remained in business from 2000 to 2003 ... didn’t add a single employee.”

Rethinking the Boosterism About Small Business, Charles Kenny (Bloomberg BusinessWeek)