A fair test

Note: This blog entry was actually written on January 30, 2009. I am going through some unpublished blogs and publishing the ones I think are good. When reading this, imagine Obama was just inaugurated, and Christmas has passed a month ago. The prior blog I referred to is here

– Start entry –
I’ve been reading a Christmas present from my mom. The title of the book is “Honor’s Reward” by John Bevere. Reading this book has led me to think of a pretty good filter I ought to start applying. Probably from here on.

I was kind of inspired by a certain friend who said in her 25 things “I am a movie leaver”. She explained in that note that she often stands up and leaves in the middle of movies if she feels that the movie is heading in a direction that would teach her the wrong thing or otherwise be disturbing to her spiritual walk.

Putting the two together, I’m starting to think that perhaps I should become a post, or blog leaver. I rarely ever go to the movies, but there are tons of posts and blogs out there that in their very writing does not speak out of the right spirit. In this instance, the criteria I’m thinking is this:

If it becomes clear that something I’m reading is speaking out against authority, insubordinate, or is outright disrespectful of any other human being, I’ll stop reading right there. If it becomes a clear pattern in a blog or feed that I’m reading, then I’ll stop reading or following that source henceforth.

My goal with this policy is NOT to be judgemental of others. Quite the contrary, my goal is to avoid unnecessary judgemental attitude from entering my own life, and taking root. Note that it does not matter if the point is 100% dead on — if the attitude stinks then I’m leaving. I’ll probably have more tolerance for secular sources than for Christian sources in applying this criteria. I never uphold others who don’t follow Christ to the same standards as I would those who do. I believe that is a biblical way of dealing with it — hear the word of Paul in 1 Corinthians 5:12-13:
“For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God judges. Removed the wicked man from among yourselves”

There are two ways that verse can be applied. On an individual level, we can disassociate from fellow Christians if they are living in a sinful way and unwilling to repent in order to protect ourselves from falling into the same hole. On a church-wide level, the leader has the authority to boot those who refuse to repent of their sin.

To close, I support Obama, the last post I made to call out to conservatives is no joke. I hope others will heed the call. Shortly, I’m thinking of reading the different things Obama has laid out in whitehouse.gov to see where I could fit in in helping out with the new administration’s agenda. We will stand firm on issues in which we believe Obama is going against God’s will, but we will support our president in everything else.

I hope others will join me in this next stage in my journey with Christ, and refuse to succumb to attitudes that is disrespectful of others, especially authority.
– End entry –

Aaah…nice to be reminded

Those “out of nowhere” moments…

You know those moment where you are reading something about a certain topic. Your mind is thinking about that subject, then out of the blue, out of nowhere, in the midst of that page is something that seems to be a totally different subject. Yet it is so on topic. While reading the wishlist for gnucash (the financial program I tend to use), I was reading through different things that people wanted the financial program to do for business, personal finances and other purposes. Then I hit this wishlist item:

—–
Islamic Financial Calculations – support fort Zakah/Khums. – You know Muslims are supposed to pay a portion of their excess money every year to poor people. If this suggestion is approved we may need to start writing the formula needed to calculate the money someone should pay each year.
—–
Source: http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/WishList

Kinda struck me as pretty cool concept, if you think about it. Got excess money — portion of that should be used to help the poor. But I guess it makes me curious as to what they define as “excess money”.

That said — Christians have their tithe, and I’m a strong advocate of always paying at least 10% of the gross income for that. I guess we have some of the same dilemma here — if I sell a stock for a profit — does 10% of that profit go to the church or not? What about interest incomes? Dividend income when stocks payout? What about 401K? What if you earn so much money that it would be insane to give 10% of it to a single church? Well, my thoughts are that God doesn’t really need anybody’s money, and God doesn’t really want the money. What God really wants is our heart, and I think that if somebody doesn’t tithe, I’d question what is really the Lord of their life.

That said — just because somebody tithes does NOT by itself mean that they have their priorities right anyways, we all have our strengths and weaknesses. Some might be great at tithing, but terrible when it comes to managing their time well. Sometimes time can be worth more than money, and that is a topic I’ve been thinking about from time to time — how to help people with my time.

-Tim

Ohio Issue 2

Wow…Cheeseslave really does a LOT of research on Ohio’s issue 2 here:
No on 2

So I had to do some of my own research. It looks like…issue 2 is proposing the creation of something similar to a FDA, only for the state of Ohio, and dealing with animals. Basically, Livestock Care Standard Board will become an agency that factory farmers will be able to hide behind.

But at the same time, I get it. I understand why they want to create such an agency — because there are animal rights activists that have taken some stuff a bit too far. Just look at California.

The thing is that like the FDA, the proposed LCSB only works IF the following holds true:

1. All government personnels are completely ethical and honest in all of their dealings.
2. Government officials in the agency has no beneficial interests whatsoever in the industry in which they are regulating.

Problem is that those two issues are highly unlikely to be true today. This is one thing that Ron Paul’s book “End the Fed” has made me think hard about.

In one passage in that book (I think near the end), he was talking about how when he ran for office, after he won the campaign, a supporter came up to him and say “ok, what is the balance?” As if he had campaign debt to pay off, that is. Ron Paul looked at this business guy as if “what are you talking about?!?” because to him, having a campaign debt and depending on others to pay it off is a liability that can easily create conflict of interests. Anyways, after bringing up that story, he went on to say that that business person had a philosophy in that the government ought to work in partnership with the business.

Now, this is something I didn’t get when I read the book. I mean, for so long I’ve always thought it was a good idea to work with the government in improving things in our life. I mean, what is wrong with businesses doing things to help our society? Or charitable organizations, or churches — for that matter. This phenomenon is quite pervasive in our society that few even bother to think about how this could present an ethical dilemma. I mean, even my own church gets grant from the government for some programs that have proven to be successful. It is a fact that private, non-governmental assistance tend to be far more effective than government assistance. Cities have been known to turn to churches to help improve the streets.

Plus, when you think about it, if the government is to work independently of all else, it becomes a question of exactly what they ought to do. That much is incredibly unclear to me. I mean, if I was to give up my job and run for a political office, I have a hard time even beginning to think about how to avoid conflict of interests. Especially when you consider all the money pouring into your campaign from left to right.

Anyways, back to the issue at hand. Suppose we launch the LCSB, what is likely to happen? That is a very hard question to answer, but one of my favorite way of answering questions like that is to look into the recent past and try to find a pattern in similar agencies behavior and extrapolate this into the new LCSB. Are you ready?

What has happened in Ohio recently — here is one story:
Swat team raided an Ohio coop

That is actions of the Ohio Department of Agriculture less than a year ago. The point here is that when you create agencies like this, you also give them power. Power to do good also entails power to do evil. So it is kind of like a catch-22 — you want a benevolent agency that really does look out for the good of the customers. But that very same agency could be used against the very interests you are trying to pursue. With LCSB, I think that the people who are most likely to gain control over the LCSB decision-making process are NOT the small farmers, not the customers, but the big farmers who only have interest in making as much food as they can as cheaply as possible.

How do they wind up on the top of our food chain — because they get lot of money, and then contribute it to get their people in boards like LCSB, the FDA, and so forth. Now, this echoes exactly what Ron Paul is after: the questionable ethical dilemma when you have businesses “partnering” with the government. What tends to happen is businesses have the money and often connections to put their people on those boards to protect their interests or to legitimize their poor choices. They don’t do it because they want to do something good for everybody. Let’s get it straight — anyone partnering with the government would be all fine and dandy if they are good people, ethical people who are capable of truly looking out for the good of others. But often they are people just like Cheeseslave describes — people who are more concerned about making a living and their pocketbook than about the customers.

If you are from Ohio, and you are voting — think for yourself. I’m not gonna tell you how to vote.

-Tim

11th Hour Political Surprises

So…Dede Scozzafava in the NY 23rd Congressional District, noticing that she cannot win, decided to effectively withdraw from the race and release all her supporters from supporting her. Wow…I’m amazed at her courage to do that. That is the kind of politician I like to see. Although I disagree with her position on the issues, I think that it is wonderful that she was able to see that it was not in the best interest for many of those in her district to support her. The reason why I think that is the kind of politician I like to see is because I believe that if it becomes clear to you that a certain voter does NOT agree with your position, then it is prudent to direct him to vote for another candidate who does while at the same time explaining why you believe the way you do. Nobody should be bending their principles simply to garner votes.

Less of a surprise is, GOP actually has a new health care proposal:
GOP Health Plan

Well, I agree that every 1 of the 4 points they bring up would, if changed, help reduce cost, and make health insurance MUCH more competitive. Seriously: allowing competition across state line could do a whole lot. It might not be that great for my job working for an insurer, but when it comes to politics, my job is secondary to our country’s interest.

But…I think the GOP plan still isn’t enough. Look: if obesity continues to be on the rise, then we will continue to have problems with escalating health care cost NO MATTER WHAT THE SOLUTION.

Second problem with their solution is…I wonder what GOP has to say about how to increase the number of doctors we have? Problem here is: we cannot insure more people unless we have more doctors, especially primary care physicians who are often considered to be inferior to specialists in medical schools. So most people are motivated to become specialist, nobody gets excited about being a primary care physician. Granted, I’d guess they figure that a free market would find a way to provide more doctors. But the problem is that medical education in our country is probably heavily regulated, and I remember reading from a Democrat (yes…) that American Medical association often reject people otherwise qualified people who want to become doctor from entering medical schools.

Why aren’t we discussing how to make healthy food more accessible and what mechanism would increase the supply of health care providers? We cannot cover all the uninsured until we have a system that could encourage both the reduction in demand (by making the population more healthy — Jesus said “it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick”), and increase in supply.

Sorry, Sarah Palin (who called this plan a game changer), Boehner, and the rest of the GOP: I don’t think this is it. It doesn’t look like a game changer at all. Yes, it is better than what we have right now — but it still maintains the status quo both in the Big AG (where to start — go watch “Food, Inc.”), and the medical establishment (where drug companies control almost all of the medical industry). It is that status quo that is wrecking our health and our health care system along with it — FIX THAT, please!

Here’s my proposal — in addition to the 4 you outlined, how about these:
5. End subsidy for corn crops or ANY big agricultural operations. Especially those mass producers who do not follow sustainable, organic practices. Allow food that was previously subsidized to return to market price.
6. Rein in the power of the FDA so they cannot sue companies over “false advertising” without providing a victim that was hurt by the advertisement. I’m all for cracking down on fraudulent actions or claims — but you need a victim first or you have no case. BTW, competitor’s sales being hurt does NOT qualify as victim — a victim is a customer who bought the product and were hurt because it does not do what the advertisement says it does. Competitors are, however, welcome to help find victims of false advertisement and bring a lawsuit on their behalf.
7. End immunity to lawsuits for drug companies and, yes, food companies. FDA approved or not, nobody should be immune to lawsuits if their product really does hurt somebody.

Maybe it sounds like those items do not belong in a health care reform. You might be right about that, but you don’t remove spider webs and expect webs to stop popping up. No, you get rid of the spider too!

My 3 items (and maybe there are others) are designed to shoot down what is really at the root of this travesty. What is at the root is that we are subsidizing cheap, nutrient-deplete food with one hand, and with the other hand the result of the nutrient-deplete food becomes patients for the medical industry. Furthermore, on both sides (food and medicine), if it is “FDA Approved’, then it is protected from lawsuits.

I’ll illustrate how this protection works with a kind of hypocritical story. I once read a story that when evidence came out that BPA in lot of plastic really was bad for our brain, someone tried to find out if plastic containers from various organic companies were affected. Almost all, except Eden Foods (who uses glass container for almost everything) were affected at the time that article was written. You know what the companies response was “but, look, it is FDA approved” — and they started to turn to the FDA to defend their choice of using plastic containers rather than listen to the customers. Look: those companies SHOULD know better than using the FDA as a shield.

Think about it, if FDA didn’t exist, then guess how quick companies would switch to using glass or other more safe containers if customers demanded it? They might even give customers choice of packaging, and they won’t be waiting on the government to make decisions, or wasting time trying to defend their right to use plastic even when customer wants glass in court. How silly is that, what happened to “customers are always right” motto of good business acumen?

Now, this is dealing with companies that make otherwise healthy, ORGANIC products! Those are generally better companies and have higher quality standards than conventional. If they use the FDA to defend themselves, just think how companies with lower ethical standards would use the FDA to defend absurdly poor practices or otherwise entice customers to consume their products? Oh yeah, they do, and the stuff they do is much worse. Trust me, I have some examples in mind as I write this.

-Tim
Some of my ideas came from Michael Pollan

Interesting cooking tip…

I guess they teach people this in cooking school?
http://rouxbe.com/tips-techniques/363-how-to-properly-heat-a-pan

Basically: how do you cook with a stainless steel pan without having food sticking to it.

-Tim

Another blog to my blogroll!

Just Making Joyful Noise: From a Deaf Mama

Let’s see how it goes — she is a Christian (actually, she and her husband are missionaries to Costa Rico), and into Nourishing Tradition.

A while ago, I also added this blog to my blogroll:
Faith Center

I really love a number of things I’ve read at faith center. The latest blog entry with youtube about a church getting jewelry rained upon them, I’m not so sure about, though.

I guess you can say in my heart, I’m kinda crying out “more love, more power, more of You in my life”. Some of you might recognize that line…yep. I think the first and the last one is my main focus those days.

-Tim

There is no better time to learn about finances than…

When they are a kid!

How one mother teaches her kid about money…

Enjoy,

-Tim

Interesting report…

New York, 23rd Congressional District Republican Nomination Process

So…Scozzafava was nominated because her friend Duprey, serving as chairman for Clinton County breached the trust of the Clinton County Republicans.

We’ll see what happens. What I really like seeing, though, is there are lot of people willing to vote what they really believe, even if it might not necessarily win. See this for latest polling:
Wikipedia entry on the election

This will be a very interesting November 3rd!

-Tim

Homeopathy…

I have to say this is quite amazing… I’m reading a review of this book The Homeopathic Treatment of Influenza…

Here’s the amazing statistics in that book that was brought up in the review — in the 1918 Spanish Flu:

Dr. T.A. McCann (a Homeopath) of Dayton Ohio collected data on patients that were treated with conventional means and found that in 24,000 cases of the flu he collected, 28.2% of them died.

However…

Out of 26,000 cases treated with homeopathy (and 40% of the doctors back then were homeopaths)…wait for it…

Only 1.05% died! They used no drugs, no aspirin, and no vaccines, yet nearly 99% of their patients lived while 72% of the allopathic treated patients died.

At the 77th convention of American Institute of Homeopathy in Washington DC, circa 1921, Dr. Frank Wieland of Chicago noted that in his plant…with 8,000 workers…”We had only one death. We used no aspirin and no vaccines. Gelsemium was practically the only remedy used.” I’ll let you judge for yourself, but I don’t see why Wieland would have the incentive to make such an outrageous claim in front of a convention if it wasn’t true. Someone back then could have looked at the data to rebut it if it wasn’t true.

Interesting tidbit of fact: they surveyed many different homeopaths today (which is a somewhat disconnected industry) to ask them what they top recommendation for someone who come down with the flu…

Gelsemium is #1 — in fact, it was remarkable how homeopaths from many different backgrounds were all recommending Gelsemium. Perhaps it is no coincidence, and one nice thing about natural remedies is that pathogen never develop immunity to it (unlike antibiotics) since natural remedies work by helping the immune system do its work naturally.

Oh man, this is so sick. Anyhow, I’ll tell you something: if I get the flu, I’m probably not going to get Gelsemium anyways. It is one of those things that I kind of feel I need to have a trained homeopath or something to guide me. But it does make me wonder because if Gelsemium isn’t the reason why they got better, then conventional medicine failed because it interfered with the normal immune functionality, leaving people open to further complication.

Let me explain — in homeopathy, Gelsemium is used because in a healthy person, Gelsemium would cause flu-like symptoms. So contrary to suppressing the symptoms of the flu (which conventional medicine is prone to do), homeopaths actually encourages the symptoms — sort of. Often the symptoms are our immune system’s natural defense against whatever is attacking us. So…here, while conventional medicine often does their best to suppress or block the symptoms, homeopath does not do that. It is basically a different approach towards attacking the problem.

My instinct tells me that suppressing the symptoms is a bad thing unless the symptoms really is life-threatening (high fever, for example). I’d like to see more evidences that encouraging it is a good thing, but I do believe that nourishing the body in order to assist it in fighting the disease is a good thing.

-Tim

Ah those “extra miles” and lame excuses.

Purple blog about Sorenson

Sorenson was sued by SnapVRS, Purple, and CSDVRS because they don’t show caller id. I just discovered this today because I called my cell phone with my VP-200, and my cell phone got a 866 number, and no it wasn’t my DirectVP number. I get a different 866 number every time I call my cell phone with Sorenson.

Anyways, the fallout is…that means I cannot call my credit card activation number because I have no “home phone”. Unless there is some secret way to change the VP-200 config so Sorenson broadcasts the caller id when calling. But if there was a way: why isn’t this setting the default?

From a programmer’s perspective, this is so classic! I’ve been a software developer for over 5 years now, and I know that there are often situations where it is kinda tempting at times to not follow the “standard” way of doing things. It is kind of called the NIH syndrome. “Not invented here” syndrome in which someone considers their solution as better than anybody else’s solution. Microsoft does this all the time — a bunch of like-minded, oftentimes brilliant folks work many, many hours to come up with a standard for, say, HTML 4. Then Microsoft takes it, twists it, and then all webmasters have to adapt their site to follow an non-standardized approach since Internet Explorer is oh so popular. Their excuse: they felt they could do better. Sometimes it might be better, but all too often I wonder (speculation alert) if it is an cover-up for the fact that it was more convenient to implement it the way they implemented it.

Let me provide a somewhat humorous explanation of how the progression seems to look (I’m speculating on what is going on here):
1. A standard is published.
2. During development, a developer Earl Ego decides that he doesn’t like the standard. It happened to be more convenient for Earl to develop the code differently.
3. Earl’s implementation comes out, and now, some people might notice it is a bit off the mark from what is requested.
4. Instead of going back and implementing it the way it REALLY ought to be, however inconvenient it is — Earl spends all of the time and energy trying to convince everybody else that his idea is really better, more efficient, and so forth.

On step #4 — it is amazing what the human brain is capable of conjuring up for excuses here. It kinda reminds me of one comment a certain person told me — no matter what went wrong, her husband always found a way to blame her for it! AFAIK, the couple concerned have a great marriage, but the point is we can be quite brilliant like that — it is a practical impossibility for somebody to always be the one at fault for every problem. Yet in our eyes, we tend to be both the angel, and the villian (overly critical of yourself). Back to Earl — sadly, he probably believes his own excuses. The best way to rout it is to put the excuse aside and take a hard look to see if you are simply trying to avoid a minor inconvenience. If so, that could be a red flag, especially if the so-called “inconvenience” is simply admitting that you have lost (politically, that is). Many times the “inconvenience” only takes a brief time to overcome, yet we spend hundred fold more time and energy arguing against doing it!

Oh man, there are so many character and integrity lessons in this. I’ve gone through times like that at work as a programmer. After arguing that some bug the tester found was a pre-existing condition, guess what, just hours after deployment, in my research, I found out that my change *DID* cause that defect the tester found. Now what do you think lot of programmers are gonna do? It is quite tempting to just say “I found a fix”, and go ahead, implement the fix, and deploy it next week. Nobody else would have known. But…I couldn’t do that. I dug in, figured out the full extent of the problem, and disclosed everything — including the admission that my change caused the problem. The word got through all the way to the VP of IT (yes, that is a BIG thing), and they had to make a call as to whether they should pull out the change on Saturday morning (involving a bunch of other people who would have to work really early on Saturday morning).

One of the best integrity exercise that I think gave me the strength to do things like this started in grade school. Let’s see, growing up, my parents were always one to bring it up when the waitress forgets to add a drink to the receipt when they eat out. They also refused to lie about my age when paying my way to Disney World even when the parents who were next in line were calling them stupid for not lying. Mom and dad even told me that if the teacher missed a mistake on a test, I am to bring it up to the teacher. This meant…suppose I got 95% on a test, but as we go over the answer, I notice that I got question #5 wrong, and the teacher marked it as if it was 100% correct, I have to go to the teacher to tell them about it. Oftentimes, they will just let me get away with it (which is fine with me), but sometimes it meant lower grades. This is the kind of radical honesty I want to see more of, and I really do believe it would make the world a better place. I *HATE* it that today, instead of seeking honest education and evaluation thereof — lot of parents and students actually try to pressure teachers to give them higher grades than they deserve.

The thing here is that all too often the areas we are dishonest in, we tend to rationalize it away. Oftentimes, the misconduct comes first, then the rationalization comes afterwards. Sin of one man is prone to look as “insignificant” in their eyes, so it is worthless to look at it from our own eyes. Ask yourself, instead how God would see it — or if you don’t believe in God, what would your mom think? The latter is actually a common advice that people who study ethics might have heard.

You know what…I realized something, now that I’ve written about this: I’m sure that I’ll be tested on this quite soon Anyhow, for the rest of you: here’s my challenge — think about how to apply that to YOUR life! I don’t expect anybody to be perfect, none of us are. At the very least — endeavor to be more honest tomorrow than you are today, and may God help you!