Culture
The 10 Most Bizarre People on Earth. (HT: Kottke)
Context-Less Quote of the Week: "They defecate on you, on purpose, hoping to make you reconsider what you're doing. It's not pleasant."
What does it mean to live on a dollar a day?
1. "The average person living at under $1 a day does not seem to put every available penny into buying more calories...Food typically represents from 56 to 78% [of household spending]."
2. "The poor generally do not complain about their health - but then they do not complain about life in general. While the poor certainly feel poor, their levels of self-reported happiness or health are not particularly low."
3. Spending on festivals - religious ceremonies, funerals and weddings - is high. In Udaipur, median spending on these by people living on $1 a day was 10% of income.
4. In several countries, the extremely poor spend about 5% of income on alcohol and tobacco.
5. In the Ivory Coast, 14% of people on $1 a day have a TV - and 45% of those on $2 a day have one.
(HT: Marginal Revolution)
Politics
In keeping with their national objective to surrender to every nation on earth, the French are pulling out of Afghanistan. (HT: SmartChristian)
While other pundits are blinded by the gleaming charisma of Barack Obama, Peggy Noonan offers some clear-eyed perspective:
He is uncompromised by a past, it is true. He is also unburdened by a record, unworn by achievement, unwearied by long labors.
What does he believe? What does he stand for? This is, after all, the central question. When it is pointed out that he has had almost--almost--two years in the U.S. Senate, and before that was an obscure state legislator in Illinois, his supporters compare him to Lincoln. But Lincoln had become a national voice on the great issue of the day, slavery. He rose with a reason. Sen. Obama's rise is not about a stand or an issue or a question; it is about Sen. Obama. People project their hopes on him, he says.
He's exactly right. Just so we all know it's projection.
It's a projection that won't last long. Obama is not running for president, he's running for vice-president. And since the Democratic nominee will be Hillary Clinton, he's out of luck. Hillary stood in the charismatic shadow of Bill for far too long. There's no way that she's going to share the spotlight with another junior Senator with an even weaker resume than her own.
"Don Rumsfeld is the finest Secretary of Defense this nation has ever had." High praise from a former SECDEF. (HT: OTB)
Evan Bayh has decided not to run for President in 2008. A stunned electorate asks, "Who in the world is Evan Bayh?"
Religion
Tim Challies has a superb post on one of my biggest pet peeves:
I consider what pastors are doing when they preach another person's sermon to be plagiarism. An article on Desiring God's site attempts to define plagiarism and does quite a good job of it. "The essence of plagiarism is to give the impression that the ideas or words of another person are actually your own. This can be done intentionally (in which case it is outright theft) or unintentionally-but either way it is wrong." It is important to note the words "give the impression." A pastor who preaches a sermon that is not his own is typically attempting to give the impression that he wrote the sermon--that he did the research, studied the Bible, thought of appropriate stories or analogies, and assembled a convicting message. And yet, when the sermon is taken from another person, none of this is true. The pastor may have modified elements on the sermon, but he has not invested the time or effort in serving his congregation by doing the long and hard work of sermon preparation.
"Everyone does it" and "nobody cares if we do it" have become the two most repeated excuses for engaging in plagiarism. That might be fine if you are a Federal judge but Christians are expected to be held to a higher standard. If you didn't do it, don't take credit for it.
Right Reason has an intriguing argument on the controversial moral teachings of religions:
I will argue ...it is not rational to reject a religion on the grounds that it includes controversial moral prohibitions of the sort involved in these cases, and it is not rational to reject these moral prohibitions while accepting the religion. These claims hold, I shall argue, regardless of whether the authoritative sources that prohibit the actions are held to be infallible or fallible.
Dan Edelen makes an uncomfortably valid point:
In America, success equates to money. Sadly, the American Church has bought this lie. As a result, our standard for spiritual success and maturity automatically means passing the wealth test.
Too accusatory? Well, consider this. Your church is looking for new elders. Which of these two 40-year old men has a better chance of becoming an elder, the self-made man who runs his own company OR the fellow who works the night shift as a convenience store clerk? In the split second (Blink!) you thought about that pair, did class distinction enter into your assessment? Has anything been said about the spiritual maturity of those men? Don't we assume that one is more spiritually mature simply because he runs a successful business, while the other only makes $8/hr.?
Although I'm ashamed to admit it, my first reaction was to wonder whether the convenience store clerk in this example is an immigrant. If so, then I wouldn't necessarily assume the entrepreneur is more spiritually mature. I've started a business before; it's difficult but not wisdom-inducing difficult. Immigrating to another country and working your way up the ladder is much harder. But if the two men are native-born Americans? Then, yeah, my initial reaction would be to judge on a class-based distinction, though I'd base it more on assumptions about education than money.
1
Joe,
Thanks, as always, for linking to Cerulean Sanctum. Have a blessed Christmas!
posted on 12.19.2006 12:25 AM2
I don't know if anyone else followed your advice to read a good book (from the Good Book) for twenty days straight, but I did--sorta.
posted on 12.19.2006 1:02 AM3
Joe: I am reminded in your plagarism comments of a saying which is not original to me, but which is a factor in the plagarism debate. "The essence of originality is having a longer memory than anyone else."
I fear there is more truth in that statement than any of us would care to admit. Nevertheless, I agree entirely with your point. Both on sermons and on court findings.
posted on 12.19.2006 10:43 AM4
*sigh* I'm so tired of the 'Oh my goodness, some people live on only $(insert low # here) a day' hysteria. $1 a day in some countries is like $100 a day here. The money is not 1 for 1 folks. Get it through your heads.
posted on 12.19.2006 6:06 PM5
Restricting myself to just a couple of observations:
(1) Many of the "bizarre" people are really just very unlucky, ill, or otherwise downtrodden. It seems cruel to hold them up as objects of amusement, or to call them "bizarre" for things that happened to them beyond their control. As for the actually bizarre ones on the list, I can't help noting that all but one of them are (quasi-)religious nutters whose behavior wouldn't be regarded as bizarre if they merely happened to belong to a mainstream church. Possibly this tells us something about mainstream churches.
(2) This post ought to put paid to the popular Republican meme to the effect that "X% of the poor own color televisions!" As exercises in right-wing lunkheadedness go, that one is particularly annoying, but now that we've been told that TVs exist even in desperately poor regions, maybe we can stop hearing that the existence of a TV is proof that there is no such thing as poverty. (Hint: think about the meaning of "hand-me-down".) I submit that, if most people living on $1 can scrounge up a TV - third-hand, discarded, partly working, or whatever - then the possession of a third-hand, discarded, partly working TV constitutes neither liquid equity nor evidence of disposable income. So perhaps we can now discuss poverty using metrics that actually matter.
(Regarding the other poster's point that currencies trade at different values, I think most people know that. But they trade in a global market in which capital moves without compunction out of countries where it is devalued, meaning that someone with an extremely low income in hard currency is going to have trouble making a living no matter what the exchange rate is. I would bet more than $1 on the proposition that there is currently no country in the world where working televisions can be had for US$1 or any small multiple of that.)
posted on 12.19.2006 7:14 PM6
""The poor generally do not complain about their health - but then they do not complain about life in general. While the poor certainly feel poor, their levels of self-reported happiness or health are not particularly low."
Good grief. Does that really say their levels of self-reported health are not particularly low? Is this a joke? "Um, I have HIV but I'm not self-reporting as having particularly low health". 200 million people a year suffer from malaria.
Generally do not complain? Complain to who? Who is there to hear if they have a complaint in many of these places? Or is it that we who have the luxury of self-indulgent whining down to an art can't possibly take anyone's need seriously if they aren't continually whinging about it.
7
To continue a little more...
A paper by Banarjeet and Duflo. I didn't see anything about it being published anywhere, and thus being subject to peer review of any kind.
Of the 13 countries listed, the data for 8 of them is from before 2000. 7 of the countries listed are discussed using data from 1991-1997.
The data for Cote d'Ivoire is from 1988 - 18 years old!
The data for Pakistan is from 1991 - 15 years old.
The data for South Africa and Tanzania is from 1993 - 13 years old.
Absolutely astounding lack of accomodation for the spread of HIV and TB in SA in the ensuing years to the current day.
Quite incredibly, Africa is severely under-represented, and when it is the data is too old.
While the paper acknowledges huge variations between countries on different aspects, it then goes on to make broad assumptions based on "the average". This is nonsense.
The paper begins by purporting to discuss those who live on less than &1 a day, but then decides to add in $2 per day. To what purpose? Solely because of the pauciry of current and relevant data in the first place - in other words it's padding.
posted on 12.20.2006 7:57 AM8
"I submit that, if most people living on $1 can scrounge up a TV - third-hand,"
Based on that paper we have no idea that most people living on less than $1 a day can scrounge up a tv. Firstly, the paper notes that some in some places tv is virtually non-existent among the "extremely poor" while in others some have them.
Secondly - the information is, as I've already said, too old.
I appreciate your point about hand downs though - I didn't see anything in the paper about new vs. used goods actually.
9
Your last line leaves me wondering, do you believe that a higher education level equals, or is a measure of, spiritual maturity?
posted on 01.01.2007 3:48 AM