Zephyr Dear

Web hosting is a horrible business.

There’s potential for massive profits: most customers of shared hosting and VPSes never come anywhere near their resource allocations so the machines can be extremely oversold, and most dedicated-server customers keep paying the “new” price of the server every month for years after its value has plummeted through the floor.

But it’s also highly commoditized: hosts can’t differentiate their products very much, there’s effectively no barrier to entry, switching at any time is fairly cheap and easy, and most customers buy primarily on price.

Long-term reliability and reputation are spotty and hard to evaluate. Most customers haven’t tried many hosts, so reviews have little context or credibility. Even credible reviews may not apply to your situation, since customer needs vary so widely — a novice running a small phpBB forum on a managed VPS with cPanel will have a very different experience than a sysadmin running a high-traffic web app from ten unmanaged dedicated servers. And since large hosts have complex infrastructures, different customers of the same company at the same time with the same needs can have very different experiences by being in different datacenters, behind different routers, or served by different virtualization-host servers.

Most hosts are mediocre or overpriced, so when word of a good, reasonably priced host gets around, they usually get a deluge of new customers, leading to frequent changes and growing pains. So even if you pick a “good” hosting company, being their customer today or next year might be significantly worse than it was when their good reputation was built.

The combination of high profitability, heavy competition, lack of differentiation, and volatile reputations leads to frequent mergers and acquisitions.

As just one small example: if you were an EV1 Servers customer ten years ago, a 2007 merger forced you to become a customer of The Planet instead. But in 2010, SoftLayer — which was formed by ex-executives of The Planet — pulled a NeXT and “merged” with The Planet by taking it over, “sunsetting” its infrastructure, and making you a SoftLayer customer… until a few months ago, when IBM bought SoftLayer. Now you’re a customer of a Wikipedia article with “multiple issues”, wondering where your commodity web host fits in “a branded ecosystem of cloud computing products and solutions from IBM” as they assure you nothing will change for the worse.

Web hosting customers are nomads. If your host hasn’t been ruined yet, just wait.¹

Today, news broke that GoDaddy bought Media Temple. GoDaddy is a horrible company run by horrible people selling horrible products. Media Temple made a big name for themselves in the late 2000s with modern design, strong branding with lots of parentheses, and heavy marketing in the Rails and design communities, but I’ve never been a customer of theirs — they always looked overpriced to me, and they’ve had a lot of growing pains.

If you’re a Media Temple customer wondering whether you should prepare for the worst, the short answer is: probably. While GoDaddy claims that Media Temple will be run as a separate business, with the implication that nothing will be changing and Media Temple customers shouldn’t be worried, look at the language they’re using:

As for why [Media Temple] decided to finally exit after all this time, co-founder Demian Sellfors said that this was always the plan.

“We’ve had our eye on an exit since we started 15 years ago,” he told me. “We regard ourselves as entrepreneurs first and we designed it for exit from the start, even if on the way we accidentally built a phenomenal culture and a business that resounded with the marketplace.”

Translation: “I’m outta here.”

Virb was acquired by Media Temple last year, but isn’t included in the GoDaddy acquisition. Virb’s blog post is so clear that you don’t even need to read between the lines: (emphasis theirs)

After early meetings with GoDaddy, it quickly became apparent that we shared different visions for our website builders. So… I’m thrilled to announce, GoDaddy has decided Virb will be sold back to its original founder and investors, Brad Smith (that’s me) as well as Media Temple’s co-founders Demian Sellfors and John Carey.

Translation: “We hate GoDaddy, and we’re all outta here.”

It looks like there are about to be a lot of job openings at Media Temple, even at the highest ranks. (And who will GoDaddy replace them with? Open-minded, outside hires? Sure.) Some turnover after an acquisition is normal, but this looks above average already, and likely to get worse — how many people with enough taste to create and run Media Temple are likely to have a positive opinion of GoDaddy?

Shawn Blanc is more optimistic, hoping that this “new GoDaddy” is improving and becoming less horrible, but I don’t believe that for a second.

If you’re at Media Temple and not running for the exits yet, I suggest that you at least make an escape plan.

This via Nick Budnick, the Oregonian reporter who covers all things health policy:

Though the Oregon's health insurance exchange is not yet up and running, the number of uninsured is already dropping thanks to new fast-track enrollment for the Oregon Health Plan.

The low-income, Medicaid-funded program has already signed up 56,000 new people, cutting the state's number of uninsured by 10 percent, according to Oregon Health Authority officials.

Though the new exchange called Cover Oregon was originally intended to be used for Oregon Health Plan enrollment, the online marketplace doesn't work yet. Instead, new Oregon Health Plan members are being enrolled using a fast-track process that was approved by the federal government in August.

This might come as a surprise to the health wonks who have followed Oregon, and watched the state delay consumers' ability to access the marketplace directly on day one. Officials at the state exchange, Cover Oregon, worried that initial glitches would trip up shoppers.

"When Google launched Gmail, you had to be invited," spokeswoman Amy Fauver told me a while back. "That was their beta launch. That was their way to identify bugs. Our benefit is that our initial users will be community partners who will be trained on the system."

At the same time, the state has a governor who is obsessed with the Medicaid program (you can read more about that here). Oregon is among one of the 26 states planning to expand Medicaid--and it made sure that those eligible knew about the option.

"Since late September, the Oregon Health Authority sent out notices to 260,000 people already enrolled in the state's food stamps program since late October," Budnick writes. "To enroll, all they have to do is make a phone call or send a form consenting to be enrolled. So far, 56,000 people have done that, coming on top of more than 600,000 already enrolled."

It is probably not Oregon's twee advertisements that get credit for the big enrollment spike, but rather a wave of notices targeting the exact people who are supposed to qualify for Obamacare's benefits in the first place.

The shutdown deal includes a new bicameral budget commission that's supposed to figure out a replacement for sequestration before the 2014 cuts kick in on Jan. 15. This will be the eighth major budget commission since 2010. Until now, every single one of them has failed for the same reason: taxes. And if nothing changes, this one will fail too.

But something should change: Democrats should admit the obvious. For the time being, they’ve lost on taxes. And you know what? That’s okay. At least, it could be, if they were willing to admit it and smartly negotiate the terms of their surrender.

For Democrats, the idea behind sequestration -- the across-the-board spending cuts that came about from the 2011 debt-ceiling debate -- was that the defense cuts would be so objectionable to Republicans that it would force them to cut a deal that raised taxes.

Democrats made a mistake. Protecting defense spending isn’t a top priority for today’s Republican Party. There are exceptions among the old guard, of course. Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham hate sequestration. Appropriators like Rep. Hal Rogers desperately want it lifted. But the old guard long ago lost control of the Republican Party. The Obama administration is much more anxious over the defense cuts than your average House Republican.

Most elected Republicans see sequestration as a huge victory for them. So do crucial unelected Republicans. “Sequester is the big win,” Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and the enforcer of the Republican anti-tax pledge, said. “It defines the decade.”

Refusing to raise taxes is what it means to be a Republican

It’s not that Republicans like sequestration’s cuts. They loathe them. The policy takes an ax to the one part of government where Republicans like to spend -- defense -- and exempts Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies and Medicare beneficiaries. That is to say, it exempts pretty much every program that Republicans think is to blame for the debt while slashing away at the one governmental function Republicans actually admire.

But it does one thing Republicans love: It locks in $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction without a dime in new tax revenue. And they intend to hold onto that win for dear life.

To put it plainly, Democrats aren’t going to persuade Republicans to lift sequestration in return for a mix of entitlement cuts and tax increases. It doesn’t matter that those tax increases will come in the form of ending certain tax breaks. It doesn’t matter that Paul Ryan’s budget said these tax expenditures are “similar to government spending.” It doesn’t matter that raising taxes on the rich is popular.

At this point, the Republican opposition to taxes has nothing to do with policy. It has nothing to do with the economy. It’s religion. It’s dogma. It’s identity. Refusing to raise taxes is what it means to be a Republican in this day and age.

The worst mistake Democrats could make would be to become the mirror image of Republicans on the tax issue. Republicans are cannibalizing everything they care about -- defense, deficit reduction, their chances of retaking the Senate -- to keep taxes low. The Republican obsession with taxes is an opportunity for Democrats to exploit, not an example for them to mimic.

The core question for the American economy isn’t taxes. Or spending. It’s growth. That’s true even if all you’re worried about is the deficit. As Larry Summers wrote, the Congressional Budget Office’s numbers suggest that “an increase of just 0.2 percent in annual growth would entirely eliminate the projected long-term budget gap.”

The budget debate, in other words, should be a growth debate. And Democrats’ top priority shouldn’t be higher taxes. It should be growth -- and, to be sure, the distribution of that growth.

Three reasons Democrats should abandon taxes

When the budget commission sits down, Democrats should expand the playing field.

First, they should realize that sequestration is the best opportunity they’ll ever have to cut defense spending, and that a dollar in defense cuts is exactly as effective as a dollar in new revenue at relieving pressure on social services. Why Democrats have decided that cutting the incentives rich people have to donate to charity, buy big homes or live in blue states is so much better than cutting defense spending escapes me.

Second, Democrats should realize the objective need for tax increases is less than it was in 2011. As they note, the deficit has fallen, and fast. Health-care costs are down. The CBO’s budget projections are much sunnier than they were a few years ago. Democrats like to argue that this makes the Republicans’ monomaniacal pursuit of spending cuts a bit ridiculous. But it does the same to their insistence on tax increases.

Third, they should see their leverage clearly: Republicans badly want entitlement cuts, but they don’t want them enough to trade for taxes. They badly want to replace sequestration, but not enough to trade for taxes. And they badly want tax reform -- but, again, not enough to trade for higher taxes.

One answer to that is to keep sequestration in place until something changes. That’s basically the answer Democrats have come up with. But it’s a terrible answer. It’s bad for growth, bad for government, and bad for the people who depend on government programs.

Democrats should use their leverage to get something they actually want. Immigration reform and infrastructure investment are obvious places to start. They mean vastly more to the economy and to people’s lives than slightly higher taxes on rich people. And they’re things that many in the Republican Party want, too.

There’s precedent for these kinds of wide-lens deals: The 1997 Balanced Budget Act was all spending cuts, but part of the bargain was that Republicans agreed to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Today’s Republican Party might simply say no to these kinds of broader deals. If so, then at least Democrats tried every compromise possible, and it’s that much clearer that Republicans simply refuse to make any concessions at all.

But if Democrats don’t try because they refuse to admit that sequestration was a strategic error, and taxes aren’t going to go up for the next few years -- well, that’ll just mean piling one mistake on top of another.

Black Angel is a 25-minute Arthurian film from 1979 directed by Roger Christian, the Oscar-winning set decorator on Star Wars. George Lucas blessed Black Angel as the opening film to play before The Empire Strikes Back in Europe. For years, it's been thought that the original prints were lost. But an archivist at Universal Pictures found a print that has now been restored. It re-premiered this week at the Mill Valley Film Festival. According to the L.A. Times, Christian plans to release it on Netflix and iTunes early next year. Above is a clip! "Short film meant to accompany 'Empire Strikes Back' makes a comeback" (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)

“Even at the bitter end, on the last possible day to defuse the crisis before the debt ceiling was breached, over 60% of House Republicans voted to push the US government into default, with incalculable but almost certainly catastrophic consequences. This is a very important point, with very ominous implications, that shouldn’t be forgotten or obscured.

Is it unfair, one-sided, or exaggerated to suggest that the national Republican Party has become a dangerous menace to the republic, with no clearly visible redeeming features? I don’t think so,” – Jeff Weintraub. Me neither.

The Stanley Parable is strange. The Stanley Parable is smart, calculated. The Stanley Parable is pure chaos. The Stanley Parable is about so very, very many things – at least, until it decides to be not about them at all, often in the same breath. I’ll be straight with you: reviewing this thing in any conventional fashion is more or less impossible. Yes, at heart it’s a first-person adventure born of a highly acclaimed Half-Life 2 mod, but it’s also far, far more. A tangled web of surprises and secrets, a madman’s ransom collage of endings and fresh starts. And so, in the spirit of The Stanley Parable, I have decided to let you choose how you’d like to see the game reviewed. Well, if you’d even call these meaningful choices, let alone important ones. Er, sorry about that. Been playing too much Stanley Parable. You know how it is. 

(more…)

Ross Douthat tries to draw a useful lesson from the pointless standoff that concluded last night:

So for undeluded conservatives of all persuasions, lessons must be learned. If the party’s populists want to shape and redefine and ultimately remake the party, they can’t pull this kind of stunt again. If the party’s leadership wants to actually lead, whether within the G.O.P. or in the country at large, they can’t let this kind of stunt be pulled again. That’s the only way in which this pointless-seeming exercise could turn out to have some sort of point: If it’s long remembered, by its proponents and their enablers alike, as the utter folly that it was.

This is good advice, and I hope that it is heeded, but the reaction from the “proponents and their enablers” so far has been discouraging to say the least. The leading proponents of the failed strategy remain certain that they did the right thing in the right way, and they believe that any failures along the way must have been someone else’s fault. This is of a piece with the attitude on display over the last few weeks. The message has been: what we’re doing is so vitally important that we must use extraordinary measures to achieve it, but nothing bad can happen as a result of what we’re doing, and anything bad that does happen isn’t our responsibility. If the “proponents and their enablers” disowned responsibility for the consequences of their actions beforehand, or pretended that there couldn’t be any negative consequences, is it likely that they will accept responsibility now? So it probably won’t even be acknowledged as a mistake, much less as utter folly, and so can’t be remembered as such. After all, they will tell themselves that they were abandoned by their leaders, and that is a much more flattering story. As Douthat suggests, that makes the pointless standoff truly pointless, because its failure won’t even serve an instructional purpose.

Movement conservatives of various stripes have become very good over the last ten years at rationalizing defeat, evading responsibility, and denying that obvious blunders were anything of the sort. The embarrassing and inconvenient explanations that found fault with their ideas and goals have been routinely ignored, and the ones that offered ready-made excuses were eagerly embraced. Thus the invasion of Iraq was often treated as a good policy on the right, but one that was just poorly executed. According to this view, the Iraq war wasn’t a pointless debacle, but should be seen as a great success. Similarly, many movement conservatives convinced themselves that the 2006 and 2008 elections weren’t lost because of the Iraq war and the other failings of the Bush administration, but because of “spending” or the selection of a weak nominee. As far as Iraq war hawks were concerned, the debacle there didn’t prove that the basic assumptions behind it were completely wrong, and there has always been tremendous reluctance to admit that the war was a political disaster for the Republicans. Even today, there are still Iraq war dead-enders that believe that the war had been “won” until the U.S. withdrew. The lesson from this seems to be that the most ardent supporters of a policy or a political strategy are least willing to admit their folly when the disaster is undeniable.

“[The Obamacare defunders] hurt the conservative movement, they hurt people’s health care, they hurt the country’s economic situation and they hurt the Republican party … These are the people who said, ‘Plan: Step One, Invade Iraq. Step Two, It turns into Kansas,’ Could I ask if there’s anything in between Step One and Step Two? ‘Oh ye of little faith.’” – Grover Norquist.

Ted Cruz’s press conference today was as desperate an exercise in spin as I have seen in many years:

One of the stranger aspects of Cruz’s rhetoric throughout the last few weeks has been his insistence that Washington must “listen to the American people,” when it could not have been clearer that those advocating the shutdown/defunding strategy were doing their best to ignore what the public had to say. Indeed, for some of Cruz’s defenders the fact that his effort was extremely unpopular meant that it was noble rather than indefensibly foolish. He followed this up today with the bizarre claim that “the American people over the last few months have risen up in overwhelming numbers,” which is true only in the sense that an overwhelming majority of the people disapproves of what Cruz and his allies have been doing.

Cruz briefly allowed himself to acknowledge reality when he admitted that “there is nothing to be gained” by holding up the Senate deal. Then again, there was never anything to be gained by the pointless showdown that Cruz urged his party to embrace, which didn’t stop Cruz from deceiving his colleagues and his supporters by claiming that something could be gained. It is only now that the farce has come to an end that Cruz is willing to accept that continuing that showdown is futile, but there was never a time when it was not. Barro sums up what has changed:

Nothing has changed today to make delay and destruction any more futile than it was yesterday, back when Cruz was in favor of delay and destruction.

The only thing that has changed, I think, is that Ted Cruz has more to lose than to gain by continuing to wreak havoc.

So Cruz is capable of recognizing when he has reached a dead end, but he is indifferent to the damage done to anyone but himself. Anyone who wants to follow a leader like that should be prepared to be ill-treated and misled from start to finish.

Should I Get Motivated Or Use Willpower?:

So you want to exercise, but don’t feel like doing it? You have two options: Get motivated (v): increase your desire to take action.  Use willpo

http://deepexistence.com/get-motivated-or-use-willpower-guide/

Sarah Pulliam Bailey does a good job reporting the facts for Religion News Service: “Woman sues InterVarsity after firing over her divorce.” Let me chip in by reading between the lines a bit, because I’m familiar with this ugly little game, having experienced it firsthand.

A Michigan woman has filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit against InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, saying she was fired because of her divorce even as two male colleagues kept their jobs as they went through divorce and remarriage.

Alyce Conlon worked for the evangelical campus ministry as a spiritual director at the Grand Rapids office from 2004 until she was let go in December 2011, according to a suit filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan.

A spokesman for InterVarsity said no one from the organization would be able to comment on the case, but provided the following statement:

“A vital element of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty is the freedom of religious employers to make hiring decisions through the use of faith-based criteria,” the statement said.

“As a Christian organization, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s credibility and witness depends on its ability to hire and retain personnel who share and abide by InterVarsity’s faith commitments. It is deeply regrettable that a former employee has chosen to challenge this key constitutional liberty.”

IVCF’s response is obtuse, at best, but most likely it’s exactly what it appears to be — a transparent bit of ass-covering evasion and dishonesty, mixed with a big dollop of sanctimonious faux-lamentation.*

This case hasn’t had its day in court yet, so we don’t yet know all the facts from both sides, but IVCF comes out of the gate trying to change the subject and that dodginess makes them look guilty. We know and they know that this suit isn’t about “religious liberty” or the First Amendment or a “key constitutional liberty.” It’s about gender discrimination.

IVCF’s religious freedom to fire people for divorce is not being challenged. IVCF’s apparent practice of having different standards for men than for women — standards that privilege men over women — is what is being challenged. Their slippery refusal to defend those differing standards in this statement is a big tell that they recognize such differing standards are indefensible.

My guess is that InterVarsity’s larger problem here is that it may have been unaware that it had different standards for male and female employees until this lawsuit forced them to confront that fact. The group only has one written policy for dealing with employees who get divorced, and the men applying that policy were likely less than wholly conscious of the way they applied it differently for male employees than they did for female employees. That has to do with the fuzzy, elastic, discretionary aspects of such evangelical policies regarding divorce — a subject I’m unfortunately quite familiar with.

Conlon was placed on paid leave early in 2011 after informing supervisors that she and her husband were considering separation or divorce.

“During this leave of absence, plaintiff followed each and every requirement of the Separation and Divorcing Staff Policy including counseling sessions and continuing communication with her supervisors as to her progress,” attorney Katherine Smith Kennedy wrote in the lawsuit.

According to the lawsuit, during the absence, InterVarsity employees contacted Conlon’s husband to discuss the marriage without informing her. Despite following InterVarsity’s requirements for divorce procedures, the ministry let her go because she was not successful in reconciling her marriage, her lawyer alleges.

The lawsuit claims that she was treated differently than two male colleagues, who went through separation, divorce and remarriage and were allowed to stay on staff.

So the question is why was the woman fired for not being “successful in reconciling her marriage” whereas the two men — equally unsuccessful at that — were treated differently?

Divorces are like snowflakes — no two are exactly alike. It’s possible, then, that there are identifiable differences between Conlon’s divorce and those of her two male former colleagues that might explain or justify their different treatment.

“When there are significant marital issues, we encourage employees to seek appropriate help to move towards reconciliation,” InterVarsity says, according to the lawsuit. When dealing with employment issues and divorce, ministry leaders take into consideration who initiated the divorce, the impact on work competency and funding and the effect on colleagues, students, faculty and donors.

In the white evangelical church, there are good divorces and bad divorces. If your spouse skips town, abandoning you for a new lover despite your unwavering commitment and fidelity, then yours will be a good divorce while your spouse’s is a bad divorce. That’s what IVCF’s bit about “who initiated the divorce” is all about. “No fault” divorce may be a legal category, but for the evangelical tribe, someone is always at fault. If that someone is you, then it’s a bad divorce. If that someone is the other spouse, then you’re probably OK.

What that means, in practice, is that you’re expected — and required — to demonize your estranged spouse. This requires a radical pivot, because right up until that moment, you’re also expected and required to be wholeheartedly working for reconciliation. Not everyone has it in them to make that pivot — from pleading for reconciliation to vituperative demonization. No matter how ugly and War-of-the-Roses a divorce may be, every divorce also occurs between two people who once loved each other. For some of us, what remained of that love made it impossible to blame and scapegoat our former spouse with the enthusiasm required to satisfy the evangelical wisemen gathered to judge whether or not ours qualified as a good and acceptable divorce.

My guess — and this is only a guess — is that this was part of Conlon’s problem with InterVarsity. My guess is that she didn’t hate her former husband enough to be able to play the ugly game one has to play when applying for official evangelical accreditation of an acceptable divorce. (Although I hope she handled this more graciously than I did.) My guess is that one big factor in the difference between how IVCF treated her male colleagues and her was that they were more willing and able to play this game.

And if that is true, then not only is IVCF guilty of gender discrimination, but it’s also guilty of doing a real disservice to the students it serves. Because the more willing and able one is to play that ugly game, the less qualified one is to minister to others as a mentor, a leader, a servant, a counselor or a friend.

Consider, also, the countless ways that general male privilege and patriarchal assumptions could have biased IVCF’s judgment in these cases. Could we with ink the ocean fill and were the skies of parchment made, we still couldn’t list all the ways that gender bias could have played a role in IVCF’s differing determination that its two male employees had experienced acceptable divorces while its female employees divorce was unacceptable.

One of the most obvious and least defensible entry points for such gender bias comes from the bit I’ve bolded in the quote from Bailey’s article I’m repeating below:

“When there are significant marital issues, we encourage employees to seek appropriate help to move towards reconciliation,” InterVarsity says, according to the lawsuit. When dealing with employment issues and divorce, ministry leaders take into consideration who initiated the divorce, the impact on work competency and funding and the effect on colleagues, students, faculty and donors.

What does it mean to “take into consideration” how a given employee’s divorce will have an “impact on … funding“? Or it’s “effect on … donors“? The donors providing this funding are mostly dudes. More than that, they’re mostly dudes whose response to the news of a male employee’s divorce will be, “Oh, that poor guy,” while their response to the news of a female employee’s divorce will be, “Oh, her poor husband.”

Evangelicals vary on issues surrounding divorce, including in cases of adultery or desertion, as illustrated in a book published by InterVarsity Press, “Divorce and Remarriage.”

Both the Old and New Testament address divorce. “‘For I hate divorce,’ says the Lord,” states Malachi 2:16. “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery,” Jesus says in Matthew 19:9.

These are, in fact, the key clobber verses that will be used to bludgeon Christians, usually women, like Conlon. And this is piss-poor biblical work.

Malachi 2 is not a treatise on marriage, it’s a prophecy of judgment against Judah for idolatry (one that, by the way, seems to include feminine imagery for God). “‘I hate divorce,’ says the Lord.” Of course God hates divorce, for the same reasons God hates cancer. Is IVCF also firing people for getting cancer?

That passage in Malachi is one of the many places where the prophets say in effect what Jesus would later say, “You have heard it said … but I say.” It’s a critique of the earlier law — a critique that, like Jesus’ own similar statements in Matthew 19 and Matthew 5,** cannot be understood apart from understanding how Moses’ laws on divorce had become a tool for the oppression of women. Neither Malachi nor Matthew wholly forbids divorce. What they forbid is the use of divorce to punish women while privileging men.

The apparent disparate impact of InterVarsity’s policy, in other words, seems to be a flagrant disobedience of the biblical teaching on divorce in both Malachi and Matthew.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* It’s not my main point here, but this “deeply regrettable” garbage needs to stop as a form of corporate/political/religious damage control. This feigned sadness never, ever works. It always reeks of disingenuous pretense. Always. Unless you can afford to hire, say, Cate Blanchett, or some other ridiculously gifted actor to deliver those lines, then please stop trying to pretend you’re just deeply, deeply saddened. No one believes you. It doesn’t help your case — it just makes people want to punch you in the neck.

** I mentioned Matthew 5 there as well as Matthew 19. Bailey’s article, correctly, didn’t mention that passage because most evangelicals have learned not to mention that passage either. Matthew 5:32 seems like just the sort of unambiguous statement, directly from the mouth of Jesus, that Christians opposing divorce would find useful: “Anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

But that’s in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, and the last thing most American Christians want to do is to suggest that unambiguous statements directly from the mouth of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount are in any way binding for Christians today. That way lies madness — love for enemies, turning the other cheek, non-retaliation, lending to all with no expectation of repayment, poverty, pacifism and an end to public prayer.

Much, much safer just to stick to Matthew 19 and to continue keeping as far from the Sermon on the Mount as possible.

Notorious technophobe Luddite Ethan Zuckerman

“I don’t want a Google car,” I tell her. “I want a train.” … There’s something very odd about a world in which it’s easier to imagine a futuristic technology that doesn’t exist outside of lab tests than to envision expansion of a technology that’s in wide use around the world. How did we reach a state in America where highly speculative technologies, backed by private companies, are seen as a plausible future while routine, ordinary technologies backed by governments are seen as unrealistic and impossible?

… My student Rodrigo Davies has been writing about civic crowdfunding, looking at cases where people join together online and raise money for projects we’d expect a government to otherwise provide. On the one hand, this is an exciting development, allowing neighbors to raise money and turn a vacant lot into a community garden quickly and efficiently. But we’re also starting to see cases where civic crowdfunding challenges services we expect governments to provide, like security. Three comparatively wealthy neighborhoods in Oakland have used crowdfunding to raise money for private security patrols to respond to concerns about crime in their communities. …

… On the one hand, I appreciate the innovation of crowdfunding, and think it’s done remarkable things for some artists and designers. On the other hand, looking towards crowdfunding to solve civic problems seems like a woefully unimaginative solution to an interesting set of problems. It’s the sort of solution we’d expect at a moment where we’ve given up on the ability to influence our government and demand creative, large-scale solutions to pressing problems, where we look to new technologies for solutions or pool our funds to hire someone to do the work we once expected our governments to do.

Dishheads know I believe that you cannot understand the current GOP without also grasping how bewildered so many people are by the dizzying onset of modernity. The 21st Century has brought Islamist war to America, the worst recession since the 1930s, a debt-ridden federal government, a majority-minority future, gay marriage, universal healthcare and legal weed. If you were still seething from the eruption of the 1960s, and thought that Reagan had ended all that, then the resilience of a pluralistic, multi-racial, fast-miscegenating, post-gay America, whose president looks like the future, not the past, you would indeed, at this point, be in a world-class meshugganah, cultural panic.

When you add in the fact that the American dream stopped working for most working-class folks at some point in the mid 1970s, and when you see the national debt soaring from the Reagan years onward, made much worse by the Bush-Cheney years, and then exploded by the recession Bush bequeathed, you have a combustible mixture. It’s very easy to lump all this together into a paranoid fantasy of an American apocalypse that must somehow be stopped at all cost. In trying to understand the far-right mindset – which accounts for around a quarter of the country – I think you have to zoom out and see all of this in context.

Many of us found in Barack Obama a very post-ideological president, a pragmatist, a Christian, and a traditional family man, and naively believed that he could both repair the enormous damage done by the Bush-Cheney administration and simultaneously reach out to the red states as well. I refuse to say the failure is his. Because he tried. For years, he was lambasted by the left for being far too accommodating, far too reasonable, aloof, not scrappy enough, weak … you know the drill by now. In fact, he was just trying to bring as much of the country along as he could in tackling the huge recession and massive debt he inherited at one and the same time, and in unwinding the 9/11 emergency, and in ending two wars and the morally and legally crippling legacy of torture (about which the GOP is simply in rigid denial).

Obama got zero votes from House Republicans for a desperately needed stimulus in his first weeks in office. So I cannot believe he could have maintained any sort of detente with the Republican right, dominated by the legacy of Palin, rather than McCain. But the healthcare reform clearly ended any sort of possibility of coexistence – and the cold civil war took off again. The first black president could, perhaps, clean up some of the mess of his predecessor, but as soon as he moved on an actual substantive change that he wanted and campaigned on, he was deemed illegitimate. Even though that change was, by any standards, a moderate one, catering to private interests, such as drug and insurance companies; even though it had no public option; even though its outline was the same as the GOP’s 2012 nominee’s in Massachusetts, this inching toward a more liberal America was the casus belli. It still is – which is why it looms so large for the Republican right in ways that can easily befuddle the rest of us.

But it is emphatically not the real reason for the revolt. It is the symptom, not the cause. My rule of thumb is pretty simple: whenever you hear a quote about Obamacare, it’s more illuminating to remove the “care” part. And Obama is a symbol of change people cannot understand, are frightened by, and seek refuge from.

That desperate need to certainty and security is what I focused on in my book about all this, The Conservative Soul. What the understandably beleaguered citizens of this new modern order want is a pristine variety of America that feels like the one they grew up in. They want truths that ring without any timbre of doubt. They want root-and-branch reform – to the days of the American Revolution. And they want all of this as a pre-packaged ideology, preferably aligned with re-written American history, and reiterated as a theater of comfort and nostalgia. They want their presidents white and their budget balanced now. That balancing it now would tip the whole world into a second depression sounds like elite cant to them; that America is, as a matter of fact, a coffee-colored country – and stronger for it – does not remove their desire for it not to be so; indeed it intensifies their futile effort to stop immigration reform. And given the apocalyptic nature of their view of what is going on, it is only natural that they would seek a totalist, radical, revolutionary halt to all of it, even if it creates economic chaos, even if it destroys millions of jobs, even though it keeps millions in immigration limbo, even if it means an unprecedented default on the debt.

This is a religion – but a particularly modern, extreme and unthinking fundamentalist religion. And such a form of religion is the antithesis of the mainline Protestantism that once dominated the Republican party as well, to a lesser extent, the Democratic party.

It also brooks no distinction between religion and politics, seeing them as fused in the same cultural and religious battle. Much of the GOP hails from that new purist, apocalyptic sect right now – and certainly no one else is attacking that kind of religious organization. But it will do to institutional political parties what entrepreneurial fundamentalism does to mainline churches: its appeal to absolute truth, total rectitude and simplicity of worldview instantly trumps tradition, reason, moderation, compromise.

Francis Wilkinson has studied the scholarship of Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, authors of The Churching of America 1776-1990. He wrote a passage yesterday that resonated with me:

An important thesis of the book is that as religious organizations grow powerful and complacent, and their adherents do likewise, they make themselves vulnerable to challenges from upstart sects that “impose significant costs in terms of sacrifice and even stigma upon their members.” For insurgent groups, fervor and discipline are their own rewards.

Right now, the Republican Party is an object of contempt to many on the far right, whose adamant convictions threaten what they perceive as Republican complacency. The Tea Party is akin to a rowdy evangelical storefront beckoning down the road from the staid Episcopal cathedral. Writing of insurgent congregations, Finke and Stark said that “sectarian members are either in or out; they must follow the demands of the group or withdraw. The ‘seductive middle ground’ is lost.”

In other words, this is not just a cold civil war. It is also a religious war – between fundamentalism and faith, between totalism and tradition, between certainty and reasoned doubt. It may need to burn itself out – with all the social and economic and human damage that entails. Or it can be defeated, as Lincoln reluctantly did to his fanatical enemies, or absorbed and coopted, as Elizabeth I did hers over decades. But it will take time. The question is what will be left of America once it subsides, and how great a cost it will have imposed.

(Photos: from a Tea Party rally, Ken Cucinnelli, far right candidate for governor of Virginia, and Michele Bachmann, apocalyptic prophet, by Getty Images.)

Brian Doherty of Hit & Run: "As I've written before, even law-and-order types should be concerned with reckless and murderous police tactics that lead to innocent citizens' deaths, because they can be expensive for local governments (that is, for local taxpayers) when aggrieved citizens fight back their only legal way: with lawsuits."

On the morning of June 27, detectives raided the couple’s home in unincorporated Littlerock, serving a search warrant granted because the property allegedly smelled of the ingredients used to make methamphetamine, according to sheriff’s department officials.

Police found no meth, nor evidence of a meth operation, inside the house. They did find marijuana — in Pate’s son’s room.

The sheriff’s department insists that the marijuana vindicates the raid.

“There was a drug operation that was certainly going on in this house,” said Whitmore.

All in all, it was a bad week of press for Los Angeles cops. One L.A. police lieutenant was arrested for soliciting a prostitute, and another officer has been temporarily relieved of duty after firing his gun in an effort to scare some kids who were bothering him.

Widow to Sue Over Fatal Shooting of Husband, 80, by Sheriff’s Deputies

As deal is announced, Republicans berate National Parks Director for shutdown. Watch.

“The problem is we have hucksters, shysters, and people ripping off the Republican Party for their own self-aggrandizement, for their own egos, to make money,” – Ann Coulter, appearing on Hannity to hawk her latest book.

(Photo by Evan Agostini/Getty Images)

“Complementarians” do not like Rachel Held Evans — mainly because complementarians do not like other complementarians.

They have to attack Rachel because she listens to all of them, and tries to respond to all of them. And they can’t bear that, because that exposes the one thing they can’t survive acknowledging: the wide diversity of “complementarian” views.

That word refers to the idea that men and women have “complementary” roles, with men divinely ordained as leaders. It’s basically a religious euphemism for “patriarchal.”

What all these various “complementarians” share in common is the claim that their views are based on the decisive, authoritative plain reading of an inerrant Bible. That’s their trump card — “It’s not me saying this, it’s God.” Anyone who disagrees, therefore, is denying “the authority of scripture” by rejecting its plain, clear, obvious meaning.

This is what the idea of biblical “inerrancy” offers its adherents. This is its appeal and its primary function. If we do not recognize the Bible’s authority as the final word, settling all disputes with clear, definitive teaching, then we are adrift.

Inerrancy, in other words, is said to be the only way to avoid a bewildering diversity of opinions and interpretations and the only way of adjudicating decisively between competing views.

That’s an excellent argument and it makes biblical inerrancy seem very appealing. The problem is that, in practice, biblical inerrancy itself produces a bewildering diversity of opinions and interpretations while offering no way of adjudicating decisively between competing views.

If inerrancy worked as advertised — if it were true — then every believer in an inerrant Bible would share identical beliefs with every other believer in an inerrant Bible.

And yet they don’t. Not even close.

That diversity among inerrantists is itself a more sweeping rebuttal of their claims than any external critique of “inerrancy” ever could be.

Thus “complementarians” are upset with Rachel Held Evans not because of her critique of their views, but simply because she had the audacity to try her best to portray the wide diversity of their views as accurately and honestly as possible.

Evans writes:

The problem with accurately portraying what complementarians believe about “biblical womanhood” is that complementarians do not agree on what they believe about “biblical womanhood.”

This is why I never use the word “complementarian” in the book. It appears only once, and in the context of another person’s quote. I did this on purpose because 1) complementarianism is not a word, 2) I recognize that the movement is too diverse to summarize, and 3) I suspect a more general audience will be unfamiliar with the term anyway.

Instead, I identify and cite what specific people (some of whom identify as complementarian) say about “biblical womanhood.”

In the introduction, for example, I quote from the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s pivotal Danver’s Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood to try and capture the ethos of the movement. On page 22, I quote Dorothy Patterson’s statement in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood that “keeping the home is God’s assignment to the wife—even down to changing the sheets, doing the laundry, and scrubbing the floors.” On page 100, I quote Mark Driscoll as saying that “a wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband….is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping either.” On page 178, I quote Walter Chantry who said, “Woman’s hope, the church’s hope, the world’s hope is joined to childbearing…Women, here is a lifelong calling! It’s the highest any woman can enter,” and Dorothy Patterson again who said , “We need mothers who are not only family-oriented, but family-obsessed.” On page 203-204 I examine John Piper’s views on women’s submission from Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and on pages 207-214, I examine Debi Pearl’s. (Note: I never identify Debi Pearl as a complementarian.) On page 254, I quote again from Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood to share what John Piper and Wayne Grudem say there about women teaching and leading in the church.

If most of these people and organizations identify as complementarian, and if I represent their views by quoting directly from their books or sermons, and their fellow complementarians disagree with those views … that seems like something complementarians need to discuss amongst themselves rather than with me.

That’s true. But they can’t have that discussion amongst themselves, because to do so would be to acknowledge the intolerable diversity of views among those claiming that the authority of an inerrant Bible eliminates the possibility of all such diversity.

See earlier:

• The all-or-nothing lie of fundamentalist Christianity (part 1)

• The all-or-nothing lie of fundamentalist Christianity (part 2)

 

Modern software developers have many tools at their disposal to help them feel confident that the code that they produce is high-quality and defect free. Amongst the most valuable of these tools are those that aid in inspecting source code written by another developer, a practice known as code review.

While these tools are becoming more pervasive, their value is difficult to quantify and the motivations of those who use them are not well known. Alberto Bacchelli and Christian Bird of Microsoft Research recently published a paper, Expectations, Outcomes, and Challenges of Modern Code Review which concluded that while most developers feel that code review is meant to find bugs in code, other outcomes are more prevalent.

This chart from the paper illustrates the common outcomes of code review:

The ‘Outcomes’: Ranked categories extracted from a sampling of code review data.

In this blog post I will briefly introduce the authors’ concept of “modern code review,” discuss the techniques and findings of this fascinating study, and discuss the unseen benefits of this process.

What Is “Modern Code Review?”

Code review has its origins in the formal practice known as a code inspection, introduced by Fagan in 1976 and described by Bachhelli and Bird as “cumbersome, time-consuming, and synchronous.” It involved line-by-line break-downs of code, lengthy explanations, people in suits, and other undesirable traits.

In contrast, the authors define modern code review as a form of code inspection which has the qualities of being informal, tool-based, and frequent. The most well-known engineering organizations today typically participate in a whole lot of modern code review: Microsoft, Google, and Facebook not only advocate this practice but have all authored their own tools for the purpose.

How The Study Was Conducted

The study sets out to answer two primary questions:

1. What motivates developers to participate in (or managers to advocate for) code review?
2. How does code review actually benefit those who participate in or advocate for it?

Bachhelli and Bird relied on access to employees, previous work, and data from Microsoft to conduct their study. They dealt with the use of one specific tool: Microsoft CodeFlow, an internal interactive tool that creates a central location where the discussion of code and the subsequent fixes can be discussed either in real-time or asynchronously.

In addition to using data from a previous study, the authors observed and interviewed “17 developers with various degrees of experience and seniority across 16 separate product teams with distinct reviewing cultures and policies.” Additionally they “manually inspected and classified the content of 570 comments” from CodeFlow, and surveyed 165 managers and 873 programmers.

Code Improvements vs. Finding Defects

What the authors found was that while a large portion of developers, managers, and testers are motivated to perform code review because they hope to find bugs, the results of the study show otherwise. After categorizing the discussions in actual code reviews, finding defects ranks fourth, as shown in the chart above. To contrast the outcomes with the motivations, here is a graph that shows the motivations of the developer segment of those interviewed:

The ‘Motivations’ chart: the ranked motivation categories from the developer segment of the interviews.

The top answer for the largest number of developers was “Finding defects,” and it ranked second overall amongst developers. The most prevalent topic discussed in code reviews ostensibly pertains to “code improvements:” comments or changes about code in terms of readability, commenting, consistency, dead code removal, etc.

This mismatch naturally led the researchers to wonder why this delta was so severe. The paper points to the idea that the challenges in finding bugs in other’s code essentially boils down to one idea: understanding.

Being capable of internalizing and understanding code is essential to being able to review code properly and find bugs, yet today’s large codebases and fragmented engineering organization make this difficult. As a result, an impedance mismatch is created that prevents decent overarching defect detection from occurring.

Conclusion

While there is a significant difference across the Microsoft organization between the expectations and outcomes of code review, this is not an entirely negative thing. Although we don’t seem to be getting the exact value from code reviews that we expect, we may be getting quite a bit more.

The paper states that in addition to a modicum of somewhat superficial bug fixes, teams get benefits such as “knowledge transfer, team awareness, and improved solutions to problems” from participating in modern code reviews. Additionally, the idea that code review is good at “educating new developers about code writing” is a compelling point.

So without knowing it, developers, managers, and testers rely on code review for a wide variety of purposes including communicating the design goals of implementations, enforcing style, and more. If we tweak our expectations and prepare for the inevitable outcomes, over time we can improve our code and use our tools to maximum effect.

Works Cited

All quotes and figures are from Alberto Bacchelli and Christian Bird, “Expectations, Outcomes, and Challenges of Modern Code Review”, May 2013, Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering.

They’ve been proven to save lives in countries such as the Netherlands and Canada, so why their absence in the US? Architectural historian Steven Fleming argues that macho bike culture deserves some of the blame:

A sad irony in the history of bicycle transport is that keen cyclists aided and abetted motoring lobbyists, who wanted the whole road for cars.

Bike store owner John Forester was a keen “vehicular cyclist.” He could keep pace with cars, assert his right to a lane, and gracefully somersault onto the grass if ever a driver looked but didn’t see him. He published these tips in his 1976 book Effective Cycling, with some good intentions, but also a hint of male pride. By the way he opposed the Dutch-modeled cycle tracks he feared would spread to the US, you could be forgiven for thinking his secret fear was being made to ride beside women and children.

Authorities throughout the Anglosphere nations where Forester’s book was read most were happy to listen to a male voice of cycling. There was no way though that Forester’s ideas were going to have sway with the Dutch. Too many Dutch mothers were already active in the Stop the Child Murder rallies that began in 1973 after 450 children were killed on their bikes in one year. The Netherlands was developing feminine and juvenile bike infrastructure that did not exclude men. Australia [and] the U.S. did the opposite.

(Photo of a separated bike lane in Vancouver by Paul Krueger)

Putting in overtime is a productivity-killer:

If you still need convincing that long hours destroy wealth, look at 2012 OECD figures. The country with the longest hours was Greece, followed by Hungary and Poland – and they ranked 26th, 33rd, and 34th out of 34 countries in terms of productivity. By contrast, the countries working the fewest hours were the Netherlands, Germany and Norway, which rank fifth, seventh and second, respectively, for productivity. Overall, the more hours worked, the poorer the productivity and wealth creation.

Previous Dish on working hours here, here, and here.

“Apologetics” is the subcultural jargon term for offering dismissive answers to difficult questions.

Among American fundamentalist and white evangelical Christians, “apologetics” is a an internal exercise — it’s not an attempt to answer questions posed by outsiders, but rather a device for reassuring insiders that they need not worry about, or listen to, such questions.

Books on “apologetics” therefore tend to sell very well. They’re widely recommended, but far less widely read. I learned this growing up among the fundamentalists. I would ask some question and, often, the response would be something like, “Gaaah! Questions! Um, I dunno, here’s Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict. Read that.”

So I did. It didn’t help. If anything, McDowell’s evasiveness only left me more insistently asking the same questions. “So I read that book you recommended, and in chapter four …” But it turned out the person who recommended the book hadn’t actually read it and couldn’t offer any further help to me except, perhaps, to recommend that I also read Josh McDowell’s More Evidence That Demands a Verdict.

McDowell’s unsatisfying books were supposed to enable me to obey the much-quoted verse of 1 Peter 3:15: “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you.” That verse, I was taught, charged us to be prepared to win a debate with any doubter. But I’d enthusiastically read all the “apologetics” books in the church library and I still didn’t feel prepared to do that.

It wasn’t until many years later, by the way, that I finally grasped the full context of that verse in 1 Peter — which isn’t about offering a defense of orthodoxy in debate, but about orthopraxy:

Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an account of the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame.

Nothing in there about the question-begging redefinition of terms or the bestiary of straw men or any of the other tactics I’d found discussed by McDowell & Co. The only “answer” or “defense” suggested in that passage is “do what is good.”

I’d lost track of and interest in Josh McDowell over the years until began noticing his worries about the Internet. His concern that the vast amount of unfiltered information and argument on the Web would deceive Christian youth seemed to reveal a lack of confidence in the pat answers he’d previously offered. He seemed worried that “atheists, agnostics, skeptics” on the Internet would present an overwhelming tide of evidence leading to a different verdict from the one he’d taken as his conclusive starting point.

Today I read, via Hemant Mehta, that McDowell is still making this argument about the Internet, and that his lack of confidence in his own answers seems even more pronounced:

“Every pastor, youth pastor, and every parent is in competition with the Internet and the information it is spreading,” said McDowell. “Most young people don’t get their news from CNN or CBS, they get it from bloggers. There are about 181 million bloggers vying for the attention of your children.”

The unlimited amount of online information that people have access to has caused an increase in skepticism that will only continue to become more pervasive, says McDowell.

Hemant’s response to this is exactly right:

The 181,000,000 is a tad high, but McDowell is wrong about something more important: The access to all the online information doesn’t (generally) lead to skepticism about all ideas, only bad ideas. The truth has a better chance of emerging when all the viewpoints are out there, not when you’re sheltered and only hearing what your pastor wants you to hear. If Christianity is losing that battle, it’s not the Internet’s fault.

But none of that is why I think Josh McDowell has jumped the shark. That has to do, instead, with something else McDowell has correctly observed about the Internet: It’s full of porn.

I’ve heard that elsewhere and I’m assured it’s true. But I can’t agree with McDowell’s claim that Internet porn “is the greatest threat to the body of Christ in 2,000 years.” I don’t think less than two decades of one-handed Web-surfing really ranks up there with, say, four centuries of Christian approval of slavery. Or the crusades.

“There’s no difference in and out of the church” McDowell says, when it comes to the consumption of Internet pornogaphy, and he says that “50 percent of fundamental, evangelical pastors watch porn while 80 percent of youth pastors have a problem with porn as well.” (I don’t find those sad claims implausible, but I do find the claim to have authoritatively measured such a thing implausible. I mean, I’ll stipulate that 4-out-of-5 evangelical youth pastors might be watching porn, but I’m intensely skeptical of the idea that 4-out-of-5 evangelical youth pastors would admit to it in any poll or survey.)

I don’t share McDowell’s hyperbolic anguish over this, but I’m sympathetic to his concerns so far. Until he gets to this:

McDowell pointed out that porn provides only a momentary satisfaction and porn addicts often seek other opportunities to satisfy their sexual desires.

“The average person starts with heterosexual sex then after a while, that no longer satisfies, then there’s anal, from anal there’s oral, from oral to homo, from homo to bestiality then to children,” said McDowell.

What in the wide world of sports is he talking about? 

Christian Post reporter Jessica Martinez does not tell us how this statement was received by McDowell’s audience at Southern Evangelical Seminary’s Christian Apologetics conference. Did they quietly exchange puzzled looks of did he really just say what it sounded like he just said? Or were they knocking over chairs in a rush to back out of the room and get away from this strange man as quickly as possible?

I’m aware of Rule 34 and Rule 36 and of the vast cornucopia of human diversity when it comes to sexuality, so I’m very cautious about categorical statements. But I think it’s appropriate to make one here: No actual human being, anywhere, in any time, has ever experienced what McDowell there asserts is the average experience of the average person. Caligula would look at McDowell’s statement and shake his head in perplexed horror.

The only imaginable exception to that is the terrifying possibility that McDowell is speaking from experience — that he was, in effect, saying to his audience, “We all know how it is … you start out with pin-ups and, before you know it, you’re into zebras, amirite guys?” But I really don’t think that’s true. I’m certain he wasn’t speaking autobiographically — that he was describing an imaginary scenario as foreign to his own experience as it is to everyone else’s.

And in a way that’s just as bad. McDowell is not confessing his own sins, he’s asserting that “the average person” is guilty of sins that he himself would never commit.

If “apologetics” is going to be worth anything at all, it’s going to have to start coming up with better answers than the ones Josh McDowell supplies. And it’s going to have to remember, as 1 Peter says, that any such apologetics has to start with “doing what is good.”

That means loving our neighbors. And loving our neighbors means, at a minimum, not assuming that the average person is probably growing bored with bestiality and is therefore about to become a pedophile.

Some classic Lindsey Graham special pleading here:

We won't be the last political party to overplay our hand. It might happen one day on the Democratic side. And if it did, would Republicans, for the good of the country, kinda give a little? We really did go too far. We screwed up. But their response is making things worse, not better.

Without quotation marks. It was bound to happen at some point, when the frenemies or allies or rivals of the US note that the world’s superpower has grotesquely violated the Geneva Conventions and held no one accountable:

In its commentary, Xinhua embellished its call for a new reserve currency with a scathing indictment of the United States’ broader role in the world, saying that the Obama administration claimed “the moral high ground” while covertly “torturing prisoners of war, slaying civilians in drone attacks and spying on world leaders.”

I don’t want an authoritarian police state to be able to use that accusation against the US. But which part of that sentence is untrue?

The program outlined in this Miami Herald story by Alex Leary makes me feel so disheartened about the country:

As the battle over the healthcare law grinds on — Republicans no closer to victory than when they forced the government shutdown — a different fight was rising on a recent Saturday from inside Sharkey’s, a bar near the campus of Virginia Tech, 260 miles away.

Lured by free beer, gift cards and the chance to win an iPad, 100 students heard a pitch from the young staffers of a group named Generation Opportunity: Obamacare is a bad deal, and you should opt out.

Generation Opportunity is funded in part by the Koch brothers. The thinking is that if enough young people don't sign up for healthcare, Obamacare will fail. And what happens when one of these kids gets into a car wreck, or suffers from a catastrophic illness? Will the Koch brothers be there to pick up the hospital tab? No, of course not. That's the job of everyone who pays for health insurance, apparently. This is maybe the evilest thing the Kochs have done in their long, evil careers as kingmakers.

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Think of this as a rule for life: When you see articles in mainstream newspapers about the detailed inner workings of the financial system -- clearing and settlement systems, triparty repo markets and other money market esoterica -- something horrible has probably gone wrong in the economy. And that is why so many economy-watchers are fretting so much about the debt-ceiling negotiations in Washington this week.

Most of the time few pay much attention to the details of the electrical grid or sewer system, and in normal times only the real specialists keep their eyes on these arcane markets through which trillions of dollars flow and which are fundamental to the workings of modern finance.

People care a lot more about the physical plumbing when the sewage overflows -- when something stinks. Similarly, the financial plumbing matters a lot only when something smells horribly wrong.

For example, to understand where the economy was going in the financial crisis of 2008, you had to pay attention to the Libor-OIS spread (rates that the premium banks were charging to lend each other short-term cash relative to the overnight indexed swap rate, which spiked that fall when the solvency of the banking system was in question). It was by watching that rate and similar indicators as they gyrated wildly that September that one could best guess how high unemployment would rise that winter and in the spring of 2009.

That experience is partly why many analysts and executives are sweating the strange movements in money markets over the last week, as the United States draws closer and closer to breaching its legal debt ceiling.

Here's what Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of America's largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, said when asked about what would happen if Congress doesn't raise the debt ceiling: "You don't want to know," he said at a meeting of the Institute of International Finance over the weekend. "It would ripple through the world economy in a way that you couldn't possibly understand . . . the money markets are the most fickle markets in the world; they're like a rabbit."

U.S. Treasury securities are the bedrock of the global financial system. They are used as ultra-secure collateral for trillions of dollars' worth of transactions, and are used by banks, pension funds and all sorts of investors as a safe place to park cash. When the world was at its financially scariest point in 2008, short-term Treasury bills were considered the safest of safe assets -- to the degree that investors actually bought them at a negative interest rate (they were paying, say, $1,002 in exchange for a bill that would pay them $1,000 30 days later).

The truth is, we don’t really know what would happen to the broader financial system if the United States seriously threatened to make its payments late or started failing to meet its obligations. It might not even follow the usual logic of debt defaults. Usually when a creditor looks like it might not make bond payments on time, its borrowing costs skyrocket, whether that creditor is Argentina or Enron. But because Treasuries are viewed as a safe haven, financial chaos could actually cause their yields to fall, which is what happened after Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s credit rating in August 2011.

But though we don’t know exactly what a U.S. default would look like, we do know that chaos in the financial plumbing tends to have a very bad effect on the economy. That’s why the strange movements in Treasury bill markets over the last week -- major investors shedding bills that will be maturing in the coming weeks out of fear they would not be repaid on time — are so worrisome. The interest rates on Treasury bills maturing on Thursday have hovered within a few hundredths of a percent above zero throughout the last six months. That is, until the start of October. The chart above shows their extraordinary volatility in the last five trading sessions.

The prices built into markets right now still suggest that the odds of an actual default on U.S. government obligations are quite low. What makes the debt ceiling standoff scary is not that we know exactly what would happen if we head into next week without an agreement. What makes it scary is that we know how bad things can get when these inner workings of the money markets go awry.

A remarkable morning on Capitol Hill even by recent standards. The quick rundown is this:

Read More →

With their plan dissolving this may become a moot point, but I mentioned earlier how the House GOP leadership plan unveiled this morning included a provision that would bar the Treasury Department from taking extraordinary measures to avert default whenever we approach the debt ceiling again the next time.

Enough of this skating around default -- we want to feel the pain of imminent default quicker next time!

Here's the rationale for that provision, according to the GOP's outline of its plan:

Read More →

Nothing should surprise me with these folks. But apparently House Republicans are considering passing their bill (which is a nonstarter in the Senate and White House) and simply leaving town.

Meanwhile, Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) discusses plan to push House offer as close as possible to default deadline to maximize leverage.

69% of self-identified Tea Party Republicans say the US "can go past the [debt default] deadline ... without major economic problems."