I’m convinced one relatively simple thing you and I can do to help make the world a more just and compassionate place is to register to vote and then vote in local, state, and national elections. It’s a chance to take our power and give it away, ideally. So if you haven’t registered, I would encourage you to do so ASAP. I in no way mean for this post to be heard as against those who choose not to register or vote for well thought out reasons. I’m rather saying I’m kinda of thinking a lot of Americans don’t register and don’t vote from mere apathy, and hoping to throw my little voice out there against such apathy =).
A quick count from this page reveals 34 U.S. states have voter registration deadlines between October 4th and October 15th.
Rock the vote will email you a copy of your voter registration form. If for some reason that doesn’t work for you, here’s Obama’s voter registration site (which will work just fine for you to register even if you don’t support Obama) and here’s McCain’s voter registration site (ditto)
I tried out both of the latter sites, and the Obama one seems a bit more user friendly, but both of them work reasonably well. The Obama site will actually check for you to see if you are already registered.
And for our Canadian friends to the North, who are also holding federal elections on October 14th, I found this voting information website =)
By the way, can anyone help me out with why this question and answer are on the FAQ of Canada Elections online? I’m terribly terribly curious:
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »* Is someone allowed to eat a ballot?
Eating a ballot, not returning it or otherwise destroying or defacing it constitutes a serious breach of the Canada Elections Act.
I ask this in response to my own question on another recent thread, where Janice, who has several great insights and questions, says:
As for the other part - I think it remains a valid point that there will always be poor among us. As noted in my previous message, there really isn’t any way around it. … From what I can see its a complex issue. Not as easy as being openhanded. I don’t think being openhanded will eradicate poverty.
I’m thinking ending poverty isn’t so much about what we do as what we *stop* doing.
I kind of agree that eradicating poverty isn’t simple.
But … I think if we draw a distinction between poverty and *extreme* poverty–it seems a lot simpler to me to eradicate extreme poverty.
It doesn’t make sense to me that anyone on the planet should go without readily available clean drinking water, 2000 calories a day, and basic health care.
I’m not saying it’s *easy* to fix. But there’s a difference between simple and easy.
What would it look like to turn half of the planet’s U.S.$1.2 trillion dollars+ in annual military expenditures toward ending extreme poverty? This is a simple question with a simple but very difficult answer. We would end extreme poverty in 2009 if we did that. That’s my simple opinion =)
It’s worse than you think. For us Americans, we could pretty much unilaterally accomplish this, since our government accounts for very nearly half of the world’s military expenditure.
Here’s a depressing chart
Annual World Military Expenditures by Nation
Meanwhile, world development aid is under U.S.$120 Billion dollars a year, or less than 1/10 of world military expenditures (See page 44 of this report). Another way of looking at that, for those of us in the U.S., is that were we to take half of our annual military expenditure and put in into development aid, we would more than double worldwide development aid dollars per year.
So *must* there be poor? Ultimately I think if we’re talking about extreme poverty, I think there is a strong argument to be made that the answer is a resounding NO. What do you think?
Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments »Today I went with my dad to visit my mother’s grave site for the first time. I found myself feeling disturbed and furious. I don’t know whether my emotions were right or wrong, nor whether they were normal or abnormal (and I use these terms in the way my psychology training has taught me–in the sense of where they fall on the distribution)
My mom died very nearly three months ago, June 27, 2008. Her body was burned, and the ashes, which my father tells me were heavier than one might expect (one of the many and ongoing surprises, mostly painful, which my father keeps butting up against in the aftermath of my mom’s death), were placed in one of these vaults at Tahoma national cemetery. She was 57 years old, and had been healthy all her life before being diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2004.
I found the burial method very very disturbing. My mothers ashes are somehow forever separated from … nature–from the sun, the wind, the dirt, the natural cycle of things. Separated by cement and steel. I decided I must take steps to make sure this doesn’t happen to my mortal remains.
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Bob said something really fascinating in this thread. It really feels like he nailed something about the nature of human society. It brought up all sorts of questions for me, and I thought I’d just throw them out there.
Someone’s got to be wealthy, but it’s up to them what they do with it.
By “wealthy” do we mean “relatively quite a bit richer than everyone else”?
If so, then *why* does someone have to be wealthy? Or … to what extent *does* someone have to be wealthy? Do you think there’s a sort of minimum … dichotomy between the rich and the poor built into the basic nature of the universe/humanity? What’s the minimum such dichotomy? I mean … is it a good idea to minimize such dichotomy? and if so, is there some sort of target mimimum we should shoot for? Say … 1000 to 1–where the wealthiest person on the planet is never in control of more than 1000 times as many resources as the poorest person on the planet? Whereas I guess right now the spread is something like … well …
Let’s see here. I guess Warren Buffett is currently in control of something like U.S.$62 Billion (although this might have *quite* recently changed somewhat downward). I suppose even very conservatively that creates an income of something like U.S.$3.65 Billion Dollars per year, or … U.S. $10 million dollars per day.
Meanwhile the 3 billion poorest people on the planet earn, according to many estimates, approximately U.S. $2/day or less.
So that’s a dichotomy of 5 million, which is to say Buffett controls about 5 million times the wealth of the poorest.
Is trying to minimize this dichotomy even a good idea? Is that part of what Jesus is addressing when he speaks to the rich young ruler? Is he saying that the dichotomy is bad for both the rich and the poor–that it’s just a bad idea for some to be so much wealthier than others, and that … the rich have *some* power to get rid of this evil?
Thoughts?
Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments »Continuing my theme of interesting visuals which carry an unusual message, I’d like to introduce you to Running the Numbers by the Seattle artist chris jordan.
chris describes his work as an American Self-Portrait:
Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.
This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
I am not going to put an image here, please go and look at chris’ work and then come back and tell me what you think!
I am indebted again to a publication from the Royal Statistical Society, which belongs to my wife and is actually really interesting. Honestly.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »Lily Hamourtziadou has recently restarted her weekly reports on the situation in Iraq over at Iraq Body Count, which she has been doing off and on since 2006. Lily edits the “recent events” section of Iraq Body Count, which leads me to imagine that she is seeing a lot of media reports from many different media sources every single day about violent death, maimings, and so forth in Iraq under U.S. occupation.
From this week’s article Above the Law:
So no one is above the law in Iraq. Those foreign soldiers who bombed a whole neighbourhood in Sadr City on April 29, killing 30 civilians, 12 of them children, are not above the law. The killers of 2-year-old Ali Hussein, and 2-year-old Moqtada Raed, 4-year-old Sajad and 2-year-old Ayat are not above the law. That same army that has killed some 500 Iraqi civilians so far this year is not above the law. Or so we are told, by their allies, the government that exists on the strength of this army that occupies their country and kills its civilians nearly on a daily basis. An army that arrests and detains whoever they decide, for months, even years, without charge. An army that remains unpunished. And still welcome.
I find Lily’s writing totally refreshing, in the midst of the current ongoing presidential election circus here in the U.S.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »Robert Parry wrote for alJazeera yesterday:
–During the “surge,” U.S. forces expanded a policy of rounding up so-called “military age males” and locking up tens of thousands in prison.
–Awesome U.S. firepower, concentrated on insurgents and civilian bystanders for more than five years, has slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and has intimidated many others to look simply to their own survival.
–With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.
Violent repression ultimately working reminds me of Martin Seligman’s learned helplessness. I think Mr. Porter may have a point.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »Today people all over the United States are remembering the attacks of 9-11-2001. Again this year, and perhaps more than ever before, I feel very much on the outside of the community being created around this anniversary. This is reflective of my makeup as a person–it’s a very familiar feeling for me.
What about you? Are you doing anything to remember those who died in the attacks, or the hundreds of thousands who have died since as a result of those attacks?
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »The Alpha Course is a short course in Christian theology which began in the Charismatic tradition and spread across many churches and many countries. I have friends who have been profoundly influenced by attending these courses.
Anyway, I don’t really want to discuss the theology or practice of these courses, which I find a largely tedious conversation. What interests me is the range of publicity and posters that are currently being used in the UK, especially outside and inside churches.
Like these:
I remember seeing a church in Coventry, where we live, which was being renovated. The sign outside said something like ‘Dangerous building, do not enter’. Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera with me at the time.
To me, they seem to express rather the opposite of what is intended. Has anyone else seen this kind of thing?
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »My favorite person in the world recently asked me “What are you looking forward to?”
My immediate answer was “There’s nothing I’m looking forward to.”
Which, in one sense, is a rather disheartening answer. And in another sense is a rather dishonest one. Looking forward seems to be a bit of a human thing to do. I, for instance, am actually looking forward to many things that a lot of people can’t look forward to. I’m looking forward to having plenty of food to eat, each and every day for the rest of my life. I’m looking forward to having health care provided for me when, not if, I find myself in need of it. I’m looking forward to sleeping in a warm house this winter, out of the rain. I’m looking forward to engaging in relationship with my current friends as well as new ones I hope to meet. I’m looking forward to doing all these thing for probably another 40 years. Not to mention education, reading, writing, movies, bicycling, motorcycling, sailing, fishing, singing, guitaring, surfing the net, changing the world (that last one I’m not super sure about anymore, truthfully).
What are *you* looking forward to?
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