HerbEly

Patsy Cline, Martha Stewart, & Phylacteries

Some mornings there are seemingly disparate pieces of popular culture running through my mind and connecting with the gospel. This morning it was a connection between Patsy Cline’s song The Wayward Wind, the TV special on Martha Stewart in Jail, and yesterday’s gospel reading (Mt. 23:1-12). Here is the connection. Patsy sings

Oh, the wayward wind is a restless wind
A restless wind that yearns to wander
And he was born the next of kin
The next of kin to the wayward wind

Why Blog? Scott Adams' Answer

Remember, Scott Adams writes satire.

When I see news stories about people all over the world who are experiencing hardships, I worry about them, and I rack my brain wondering how I can make a difference. So I decided to start my own blog. That way I won't have time to think about other people.

People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a thought process much like this:
The world sure needs more of ME.
Maybe I'll shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing my thoughts.
No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.
I know - I'll write down my daily thoughts and badger people to read them.
If only there was a description for this process that doesn't involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.
What? It's called a blog? I'm there!
The blogger's philosophy goes something like this:
Everything that I think about is more fascinating than the crap in your head.
The beauty of blogging, as compared to writing a book, is that no editor will be interfering with my random spelling and grammar, my complete disregard for the facts, and my wandering sentences that seem to go on and on and never end so that you feel like you need to take a breath and clear your head before you can even consider making it to the end of the sentence that probably didn't need to be written anyhoo.

If that doesn't inspire you to read my blog, I don't know what will. You can find the Dilbert Blog at

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/

None of these reasons could apply to me.

Sibling Rivalry: Senior's Version

This is from Scott Adams' Dilbert Newsletter

It's only natural to feel competitive with your siblings. I recall all of those Christmas mornings, as my brother and sister and I compared gifts to figure out which one of us was the least beloved. This was important information because we adjusted our levels of misbehavior to match the rewards. There's no point in being extra good if the presents are just okay.

Mealtime was competitive too. The winner was the one who moved the greatest percentage of my father's income through his or her digestive system. I was in my thirties before someone told me that eating is not a speed sport.

Now my siblings and I live in different parts of the country. Our competition hasn't diminished. It just changed to a new category: health calamities.

Ask Miers about the War Powers Resolution

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) is close to asking the right questions of Harriet Miers. In this morning’s WaPo, reporter Amy Goldstein writes:

Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) dispatched a letter to Miers, the White House's top lawyer, saying that she must also convince the Senate that as a justice she would be independent of President Bush and would not give him "any special deference" on cases before the court.

In particular, Specter said, he will press her to disclose her personal views of three recent Supreme Court rulings that detainees in the terrorism fight have somewhat greater rights than the administration has wanted to give them.

.

The President has plans for preemptive nuclear strikes on terrorists and expanding the role of the military in case of a flu epidemic or other domestic disasters.

On October 7 and August 22 this blog was suggesting that administration plans might fail the just war questions of last resort and legitimate authority. Administration plans for preemptive use of the military should raise constitutional questions concerning separation of powers as well.

Sen. Specter could, for example, ask Harriet Miers about her view of each of the 23 incidents in which the President reported to congress under the War Powers Resolution. (Scroll down to appendix 1 for the list.) If she declines to answer based on executive privilege, she should not be confirmed.

It seems to me that James Madison was correct in denying the President the power to send troops into combat without the approval of our elected representatives. He sought to restrict the power of the executive by a constitutional requirement for a declaration of war. This worked poorly, even in the 18th century. The War Powers Resolution was an attempt to find a balance between the need for prompt action by the executive and citizen concerns about sending our sons and daughters into harms way. The Senate should acknowledge that it hasn't worked very well and investigate the constitutional issues involved.

If, as Charles Krauthammer has suggested, Harriet Miers must remain mute on these questions, she should not be confirmed. Human life and pro-choice advocates should be at least as concerned with the President’s war making powers as with abortion or capital punishment.

P.S. It won't happen. No Senator wants to challenge the President on this issue and look weak on terrorism.

News Flash Numbers 3 & 4

Occasionally the academic world and the news media rediscover some truths that were obvious to middle America all along. For example, See my previous posts:
• News Flash: Good for Children, and
• New Flash: Eating Dinner with Your Teens Helps

Here are two more:

• Family meals, stories boost child confidence. “Research by two Emory University psychology professors(Robyn Fivush and Marshall Duke) shows that families who regularly share meals together have children who know more about their family history and tend to have higher self-esteem, interact better with their peers and show higher resilience in the face of adversity. In addition, families who openly discuss emotions associated with negative events, such as the death of a relative or a pet, have children with higher self-esteem and sense of control.”
• MIT economist Jonathan Gruber asks Is Religion Good for You? "Doubling the rate of religious attendance raises household income by 9.1 percent, decreases welfare participation by 16 percent from baseline rates, decreases the odds of being divorced by 4 percent , and increases the odds of being married by 4.4 percent."

Maybe somebody will do some research demonstrating that there is a high correlation between health, happiness and income for families that go to church regularly, pray at dinner, and talk with each other about the day’s activities. Maybe the mainstream media will report it as a new discovery by modern psychology. Maybe some popular psych guru will write a best seller titled The Family that Prays Together Stays Together

Watch this space. You might read it here first.

Katrina: Pork Addiction VII - Withdrawal Symptoms

Starting on September 22, I've been making the case that it the broken levees were a result of addiction to federal pork. Now we read that Senator Tom Coburn tried, and failed to break the addiction by shifting funds from a bridge in Alaska in order to rebuild a bridge destroyed by Katrina. The senate found this withdrawal of funds too painful. For an account of the story, see Outside the Beltway

Census Figures in Error by 11 Percent

According to this morning’s Charlottesville Daily Progress

In April, the U.S. Census Bureau released its 2004 population estimates, reporting that Charlottesville had lost 3,494 residents since 2000 for a total population of 36,605. This month, though, the bureau accepted the city’s challenge to the figures, agreeing the estimate should have been 40,745.
…
Charlottesville and Albemarle have had this problem before.
In 1999, the bureau estimated the city’s population to be 36,815 people. In 2000, it estimated 40,099. In 2001, it found 45,049. The differences were a result of miscounting UVa students, either incorrectly assigning students living in the county to the city, or not counting them at all.
The 2001 estimate was eventually adjusted to 39,300.

(registration required)

Zoning inspector Ryan Mickles spearheaded The City’s appeal.

The basic issue, of course, is that an incorrect – and low – census figure means that the City of Charlottesville will obtain less federal funding for education and other programs. (As a city resident, I’m sure that none of these funds can be characterized as pork.)

This may be a national, rather than a local, story. Census figures are used to plan education, public health, poverty, and transportation programs.

If the census can’t correctly count University of Virginia students in Charlottesville can it do any better counting students attending:
• James Madison in Harrisonburg
• William and Mary students in Williamsburg, or
• Virginia Tech students in Blacksburg?

If the census figures are incorrect here, are they incorrect all over the nation?

I hope that state and federal officials ask the right questions of the U.S. Census Bureau.

this post linked to Beltway Traffic Jam for 10/21/05

Decline of War III

The Human Security Centre reports the decline of warfare world wide.

From the Overview (pdf file)

Over the past dozen years, the global security climate has changed in dramatic, positive, but largely unheralded ways. Civil wars, genocides and international crises have all declined sharply. International wars, now only a small minority of all conflicts, have been in steady decline for a much longer period, as have military coups and the average number of people killed per conflict per year.1 The number of genocides and politicides plummeted by 80% between 1988 and 2001.

The wars that dominated the headlines of the 1990s were real—and brutal—enough. But the global media have The extent of the change in global security following the end of the Cold War has been remarkable:

Hell May Not Be Freezing Over but ...II

Two months ago I suggested that, even if hell were not freezing over, NYT readers were putting on their (artificial) fur mittens. Now we read in second bastion of journalistic liberalism that Roe v. Wade was a bad decision. WaPo columnist Richard Cohen writes:

Whatever the case, the very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision -- the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution -- strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy.

Cohen goes on to suggest a political tactic for prochoice forces:

For liberals, the trick is to untether abortion rights from Roe . The former can stand even if the latter falls. The difficulty of doing this is obvious. Roe has become so encrusted with precedent that not even the White House will say how Harriet Miers would vote on it, even though she is rigorously antiabortion and politically conservative. Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument -- but a bit of our soul as well.

I can only imagine how some loyal WaPo readers are feeling a chill as they read Cohen.

h/t Amy Welborn

Workplace Spirituality in the Army Corps of Engineers

Bunny Greenhouse was once the perfect bureaucrat, an insider, the top procurement official at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Then the 61-year-old Greenhouse lost her $137,000-a-year post after questioning the plump contracts awarded to Halliburton in the run-up to the war in Iraq. It has made her easy to love for some, easy to loathe for others, but it has not made her easy to know.
In late August, she was demoted, her pay cut and her authority stripped. Her former bosses say it's because of a years-long bout of poor work habits; she and her lawyer say it's payback for her revelations about a politically connected company.

This story by Washington Post writer Neely Tucker has a “ghost” hidden it it. Terry Mattingly, at GetReligion, calls those facts and religious images hiding in the story holy ghosts. Tucker describes Greenhouse as “broad-shouldered, elegant, devoutly Christian.” Highly professional, the sister of NBA star Elvin Hayes, Greenhouse learned integrity and toughness early in life.

Here is the ghost, as I see it. Author Gregory Pierce, describes ten disciplines for workplace spirituality. The ninth discipline involves making the system work. In her dedication to insuring that corps of engineer funds were spent properly, Greenhouse was working to seeing that funds would be available for other purposes – such as flood control. From the story, it appears that Mrs. Greenhouse saw her job as a mission to help others. It was informed by her Christian faith. I may be wrong, but it seems to me to be a “ghost” – a religious dimension of the story unexplored by the writer.

This is unfortunate. Very few church leaders – or religion blogs – see the religious dimension in the lives of courageous working people like Mrs. Greenhouse.

It seems that journalists are blind to the religious dimension of work. Church leaders, in contrast, are blind to the workplace dimensions of religion.