Uncategorized (A Not Totally Random Blog)

Goat Tuesday: A call for Christians to reassess their values in today’s political environment

Today, as I write this, is Tuesday of Holy Week. It’s not one of the major days—but according to the Gospel of Matthew this was the day Jesus told one of his key stories: the one about the sheep and the goats. And even if you are not religious, it appears to be an extremely potent story for the world we currently inhabit.

It goes like this (paraphrased and condensed). At the time of judgment, everyone will be called before Christ, who will divide them into two groups: sheep and goats. (Spoiler: it’s better to be a sheep.)

He will turn to the sheep and commend them for their behavior: ^“I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

Baffled, the sheep respond: “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?”

The reply: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

He then turns to the goats and says, “I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”

They too are baffled and ask: “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?”

The reply: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”

As I noted above, all of this was on the Tuesday before what we now celebrate as Easter. That alone makes it timely. But it also frightens me about us as a country. We seem to be turning into a nation of goats. (And note that both the sheep and the goats call Jesus “Lord.”)

Not that I feel all that comfortable writing this, because every time I get irritated at a homeless person blocking a drive-through begging for money, or camping in the park two blocks away, beating what used to be flower beds into a sea of trash, I reveal my inner goat. We all have one.

My fear for America is that a lot of Christians seem to be celebrating their inner goat as a virtue.

So, I may be adding to my Holy Week observations. The best known are Easter, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Maundy Thursday. I’m going to add Goat Tuesday to my own list. Not, I should add, as a time for condemning others, but for looking to make sure we’re not overlooking goat-like failings in ourselves. Because, as Jesus said in another of what I see as a core teaching, what it the point in trying to pick a speck out of your neighbor’s eye, if you have a log in your own eye? Instead, remove the log from your own eye, so you can see clearly to remove the speck from your neighbor’s.

And yeah, this means me.

How Trump’s Tariffs are Deliberately Designed to Reduce Imports

I was going to ask on Facebook if anyone here knew how Trump’s tariffs were calculated, but the NYT appears to have back-calculated it, and the Office of the US Trade Representative has posted an explanation that confirms this.

The bottom line is that the tariffs are based solely on the percentage trade deficit with each country (with a minimum of 10 percent). They are NOT done product by product, as would be more normal. Thus, if we import 30 percent more from a country than we export to it, the tariff is 15 percent (because in an apparent effort to somewhat soften the blow, the tariffs are set at 1/2 of the percentage trade deficit).

The posted formula is more complex than that, and is full of Greek letters and opaque terminology, but when you wade through the math, it becomes exactly what the NYT describes. Most confusing are a pair of parameters for import elasticity with respect to price and tariffs that are set at 4 and .25, then multiplied together. The two parameters actually make sense, but it looks like their values aren’t particularly well known and were set to cancel out as a sort of best guess.

The stated goal of these calculations is to find a tariff rate that will bring the trade deficit to zero, based on President Trump’s long-standing belief that trade deficits are stealing from Americans.

That is vastly over-simplified. Yes, there are lots of manufacturing jobs that have migrated overseas, especially in certain industries. Yes, high tariffs would (presumably) bring many of them back, at least eventually. But we would then be paying much higher U.S. wages for these products, and prices would go up.

Furthermore, people in foreign countries would have less money to buy our stuff, so our exports would go down.

Also, money from trade deficits migrates back to the U.S. in the form of overseas investments. These can be controversial, but they are one of the things President Trump claims to want. Shutting off the money that produces them does not seem wise.

The bottom line is that trade deficits have been going on for a long time in the U.S.–five decades, according the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative–and the economy has greatly expanded. Again, yes jobs in certain sectors have migrated, but it President Trump wants to bring some of those back, a more focused approach would seem more appropriate and less disruptive, overall.

Finally, the calculation used by the U.S. Trade Representative’s office appears based on the highly unlikely assumption that other countries won’t retaliate. If they do, our exports would drop, and the calculation would have us raise our tariffs. That’s a formula for everyone’s tariffs spiraling into the stratosphere. That said, President Trump is known for using strong actions as scare tactics, so it’s possible that this will be temporary.

Will ChatGPT Send Writers the way of Buggy Whip Manufacurers?

If you’ve been listening to the news, you’ve probably heard of ChatGPT, the new AI website that generates prose answers to the type of questions previously addressed by Google and other search engines. In fact, its heart seems to be a search engine, with a more interactive, chat-like interface than prior search engines. It’s kind of fun to play with, but also concerning, because it’s about to revolutionize a big part of our world in ways we may not really want.

So far, I’ve heard two groups raising the alarm: English teachers, and science fiction magazines.

What Happens if you “Die” in a Dream?

There is an old canard that if you die in a dream, you die in real life, too. This I can now say with certainty is not true. Because last night I “died” in a dream, and I’m here to write about it.

THE CAT WHO THOUGHT HE WAS SAINT NICK

We called him GM because generally his motor was running. He was a big cat, pun’kin and white (the image above isn’t him, but it’s not super far off), and an outdoor cat because my brother, his nominal master, didn’t clean the litter box as often as our mother’s nose preferred. She gave up asking, discarded the litter box, and decreed that the cat, now an adolescent kitten, be ousted at night and whenever the house was unattended.

Some cats wouldn’t have taken kindly to such treatment. GM thrived on it. Although he ultimately died young, he lived with flair and packed more adventure into a half dozen years than other cats manage in two decades. He became a hunter so self-sufficient that grocery-store cat food nearly followed the litter box into the trash. We kept a dish of dry food in the kitchen, but he seldom touched it.

Much to my relief, he showed little interest in killing birds. Nor was he much of a mouser, preferring bigger game. One morning when he was only six months old, he was waiting beside a partially-eaten squirrel, which he’d placed on the welcome mat beside the newspaper.

Whatever reward he was expecting, he didn’t get, and that was the last time he did that. But we could tell he’d had a successful evening if his belly was distended and he was unusually lazy in the morning.

His favorite prey seemed to be rabbits, which he ate in their entirety except for the big bones of the thigh and the fur-ball of the cottontail. My brother and I would tally the kills when we mowed the lawn: clunk from something hidden in the grass, an explosion of fur, and we’d chalk another up to GM. In the summer, he averaged about four a week.

My mother was delighted. The daughter of a farmer, she had no sympathy for rabbits. And in the years we had GM, she had the best gardens of her life. Long before, she’d given up hope that our dog, a 20-pound poodle named Suzy, would rid the garden of rabbits. Suzy was eager to make the attempt, but her methods, although spectacular, did more damage to the garden than to the rabbits.

Lessons from Patience

For most of my life, horses have played little if any role, so my first experiences with my friend Vera’s 12-year-old gelding, Patience, were a bit intimidating. Patience, you see, was half-Percheron, and he was big. He’d also once been a wild mustang—something that raised thoughts of bucking broncos and undomesticated beasts with a penchant for kicking through walls.

Actually, he was quite gentle—a relief, since he weighed in at a lean 1,300 pounds. Vera acquired him through the federal government’s adopt-a-horse program, training him herself and choosing his name because, she declared, “that horse is going to teach me patience.”

It was a lesson that came to include me one Fourth of July weekend when the three of us—Vera, Patience, and myself—attempted a 50-mile packing trip.

The Race I Never Dreamed I’d Run

Ten years ago, I had knee surgery.

I will never forget what the doctor told me when I woke up. “It’s worse than we thought.” He then added that the drugs from the surgery would mean that I wouldn’t remember those words, but he was wrong. Running as I knew it ended that day.

Seven years later, I had a hip replacement. Arthritis is the family bane. But this time, I wasn’t even thinking about running. Not only had I gained dozens of pounds, but the hip was so bad that the surgeon took one look at the X-ray and said, “That’s a bad hip. Let me check my schedule to see if we can move up your surgery.”

She did, for which I was grateful. I’d reached the point where the 150 meters from the nearest parking spot to the track where I was then coaching had become the longest walk I could manage without a break, and I took it for granted that there would be a time or two each day when the pain would be enough to make me nauseous.

But this is not that kind of story.

Because earlier this month, I rediscovered racing.

Read the rest on Podium Runner…

Masks: the Golden Rule is not a sign of weakness.

I’ve said this before (in fact, I’m using the same photo as last time), but it’s worth repeating. The latest run of the University of Washington’s coronavirus model shows 363,000 deaths by the end of December, with the death rate hitting 2,900 a day by then–a horrible projection for what might happen in January.

But if we can raise the rate of mask-wearing, especially indoors, that number of deaths falls by 86,000. Given that more than 200,000 people have already died, that means the number of new deaths is cut in half. Simply by biting the bullet and wearing masks. (Note, I may not have these figures exactly correct; this was breaking news on TV a few minutes ago, and I didn’t have time to grab a pen. But I’m close enough.)

Mask wearing is not a sign of weakness. It’s not even something you do for yourself. It protects you some, but it works best if the people around you are also doing it.

Mask wearing is something you do primarily for others.

If they reciprocate, THAT protects you. But even if they don’t, it sends a signal of strength. “I care.” Why is that so controversial?

It’s the Golden Rule in action.

It’s that simple.

My 2016 Book…and the London Marathon

Back in 2016, I coauthored a short book (more a novella than a novel) with Phil Maffetone about a hypothetical “Million Dollar Marathon,” in which runners competed on a one-mile track, with the giant prize to anyone who could break 2 hours.

It’s fiction—I thought of it as near-future science fiction, since that is part of what I write—focused on a Tibetan refugee whose background gives him all the tools needed to make this quest possible.

Now, this weekend, the London Marathon—thanks to COVID-19—will be conducted under a protocol amazingly similar to that in our book. The best in the world, male and female will duel on ~20 laps of a 1.34-mile loop. Not a track, but not all that different from Phil’s and my setup.

Quick high-veggie hot dish

With all the political news raging this week, I figured it was time to do something different. Here’s a quick recipe of my mother’s, adapted to my tastes. It makes a very good potluck dish (it always gets raves), a side dish for dinner, or a great lunch. (I used it on my diet.)

Basic ingredients:

1 can corn (or fresh corn, but that takes longer)
mushrooms (1 small can or fresh; fresh is better)
half a large onion
1 ounce mozzarella cheese
Small sweet peppers (red, yellow, orange)
Jalapeño
Roasted cashews
Salt (if desired)
Pepper
Garlic powder (minimal)
Parsley flakes
Paprika
Cumin

Drain canned veggies and put them plus chopped fresh veggies in a microwave-safe casserole dish. Add spices to taste. Place sliced cheese and cashews on top. Heat on high until cheese melts and everything else is sufficiently hot. (If preferred, you can give the chopped onion a head start, but I generally find that unnecessary.)

Serves 4 as side dish; or one as lunch. (Total calories about 450, depending on how many cashews you use.) For heartier version, use more cheese.