The Federal Budget 2011: Two Pie Charts

Source: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/pdf/budget.pdf

Keeping me awake

I woke up last night to hear Bill O'Rilley indignantly berating the president for appointing Jeff Immelt to head up his Council on Job Creation and Competitiveness. Since Jeff Immelt is a businessman (the CEO of GE) one would have thought Fox would be pretty happy. But it turns out the reason for O'Rilley's outrage was that GE's US tax bill was effectively zero. What to me seems rather strange is that Fox News consistently calls for a lowering of the corporate tax rate as a means of creating jobs - yet when one corporation reaches what logically would be Fox's nirvana of zero corporate income tax, they profess displeasure. The scale and scope of Fox News' hypocrisy continues to astound me.

The first shot

The first shot fired in a revolution by those seeking to change the existing regime likely changes the course of history. In revolutions that are achieved by peaceful protest and the force of popular opinion (such as the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia or recent events in Egypt) those leading the movement are committed but not violent. When peaceful protest is insufficient (as for example in Lybia) and protest turns to the taking up of arms, those leading the uprising are likely to be those most comfortable with the use of violence and lethal force. They may often be fanatical. If the revolution succeeds, those in charge after an armed insurrection are likely to be quite different in character from those who might have been in power had violence not been necessary. One foreign policy implication is that if one wants a moderate government be the outcome of a popular uprising, pressure must be brought to bear before the struggle turns violent.

More on faith

Tony Blair (yes, him again) was asked if his faith guided him in difficult decisions. He answered that his faith in god in the values He stood for was always in his mind but he didn't ask God in prayer what the minimum wage should be. In interesting contrast to those leaders who ask God for answer to specific problems and claim that He tells them what to do...

It got me thinking if I had this kind of faith. And I realized that I have (or had) two: one was in the usefulness and importance of data and reason in advancing knowledge; the other was in the inherent goodness in human nature, that at some level everyone wants to do the right thing. Oddly the realization that I had always had this kind of faith in human beings' acting (broadly) in line with Judeo-Christian values, the kind of faith that Tony Blair talked about, came at exactly the same time that I understood that my faith was misplaced. I no longer believe that people are inherently good.

I do believe Gerry Cory's notion that we as a species have evolved with two competing sets of impulses; ego and empathy. But I'm less convinced than Gerry that the we are driven to maintain a balance between the two. My fear is that under threat, society, supported as it is by empathy, might collapse as the world degenerates into Hobbsian ego-dominated chaos. 

Faith is everything

In a speech given at De Anza yesterday, Tony Blair said that faith will play an increasingly important role in world political affairs. He was talking about the rise of radical Islam, the tension between Arabs and Jews framed as a religious struggle for holy lands, of the many religious groups in China and reflecting also on the Troubles in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants. 

But faith is not just about which god one believes in; faith is about believing in things that cannot be proven. Faith may, for example, be about the power of markets to cure all ills, or the ability of government to improve society; neither is definitively demonstrable. My faith is in the role of science as the best means we have of approaching true knowledge. "My religious faith is better than yours" is an unresolvable and therefore pointless statement; but that also makes it impossible to talk about issues when positions are based in faiths, whether it be the power of science vs religion in general, or in the power of the market s the role of government. Ideology in politics is as divisive and dangerous as it is in religion.

Speaker building postings have moved

I have moved my postings on my speaker building project to phase-n.blogspot.com. It was getting too dull for anyone not interested in such trivial pursuits.