Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Dona Nobis Pacem

    I find myself unable to sleep. I was temporarily overwhelmed by something simple: the cast of M*A*S*H singing the song “Dona Nobis Pacem.” It’s a little thing, and somebody’s bound to say, “It’s a TV show. It’s fiction,” but last night what got to me was the thought that it has been 25 years since I served in the first gulf war, and our young men and women are still dying over there. I had to leave the room to get control of myself. No use putting all of this on my joyful grandchildren!

    And yes, I thought first of our American young men and women. I should, as a Christian, be equally concerned with all who suffer and die in war, wherever and whoever they are. I did start to think of them in time.

    This is not in any way about sympathy for me, or about any bad experience I had. In fact, I had a rather pleasant war, as wars go, and one I chose. I went out of my way in the two or three years before 1990 to get the qualifications that pretty much guaranteed I’d be headed out to any action in the Middle East, and I was even asked if I wanted to be deployed. I did.

    This is not about being a pacifist. I still hold the beliefs, and have the character (I think) that sent me over “there” (wherever!) in the first place. A democracy, to be viable, needs a military that carries out the order of the elected government. I am proud to have been a small part of that, and to have been there when my country needed me.

    But what is making it hard to sleep is the memories, the knowledge of what dedicated young people right now are giving for their country. There is a duty for those of us who remain, whether we’re veterans of such an experience ourselves, or are those who have  been privilege to live peacefully  while they have been giving.

    I said that a democracy requires a military that will carry out the orders of its civilian masters. The other side of that is that our military needs—and deserves—a culture and government that makes effective use of their service, that makes sure that they do not die—or kill—for nothing.

    Yet many do not want to take the time to think about this. While our men and women  fight and give their lives, we have little time to discuss whether we will make that effort effective. I’m not advocating one strategy or another here. I’m just thinking that how we’re going to go about this endless war on terror needs the application of more wisdom, more long-term strategy, and more weight. We’re mostly concerned about our jobs, our comforts, and our taxes next month. This is an issue of people dying.

    While we’re at it, we need to count the full cost of war. Not just the cost of keeping the troops over there and equipping them well, though that’s important, but also the cost of caring for these people once they’re back, and caring for their families when they pay the ultimate price. We love to watch videos of returning service men and women. We love to see acts of charity that warm our hearts. But taking care of the people who have given this much is not an act of charity; it is  payment of a debt. It should not be left to chance. It should be systematically paid as a moral obligation.

    I had it easy and came back in robust health. I recall a conversation with the son of one of my best friends who was still overseas when I had returned. His question was this: “Why can’t it be my daddy coming home?” His daddy did come home, thank God, but that etched in my mind the fact that somebody’s daddy or mommy is not coming  home, or is coming home injured in body or spirit.

    The people who sent them owe them. We owe them every bit of support. We owe them a willingness to think and learn, to make sure their sacrifice is not in vain.

    How we accomplish that is a good subject of debate. That we owe it is not.

     

  • Perspectives on Paul: The Formation of Paul’s Gospel

    Perspectives on Paul: The Formation of Paul’s Gospel

    Apocalyptic background - flash and lightning in dramatic dark sky

    I’m resuming/continuing my study this evening, looking at Lesson Two from Galatians: A Participatory Study Guide by Dr. Bruce Epperly. I’ll be sticking closely with the lesson itself tonight, discussing how Paul was chosen and learned. I will doubtless discuss a number of these topics from related materials in other epistles.

    Here’s the viewer:

  • Music and the Hebrew Text (Hangout Interview)

    I commend to my readers my interview last night with Bob MacDonald regarding his newly released book The Song in the Night. I make some further remarks on the Energion Discussion Network.

     

     

  • No Bible Study Tonight

    I will not be continuing my Bible study on Perspectives on Paul tonight, but will resume next Thursday night. A variety of things have come together to make it impossible to accomplish.

    Next week we will be starting lesson #2 of Dr. Bruce Epperly’s book Galatians: A Participatory Study Guide, “Chosen by God.” The Scripture is Galatians 1:11-24.

     

  • Robots Threaten Third World Jobs

    According to a UN report, about 2/3 of third world jobs are threatened by robots.

    This is still early days in the way things will change in the world. We keep commenting on how the world has sped up, and it keeps speeding up ever more rapidly.

    To those who wish to go back to some sort of better day that you imagine existed in the past I’d say that not only was the past not nearly as wonderful as it seems, but by trying to get there you will only make the future more painful to yourself and others.

  • Dave Black on the Election

    One of the things that has disturbed me most about this election is justifications of bad behavior by those who claim to be conservative Christians. No, this is not behavior exclusive to them, but in this election it has been particularly clear. It was surprising to me. People I thought were truly about moral and ethical behavior, even if I often disagreed with their positions, have seemed to throw those positions overboard in exchange for the possibility of political power.

    One person who has stood apart from this trend is my friend (and Energion author) David Alan Black. Dave reacted in a blog post today. Always gracious, yet firm, I strongly admire his principled, consistent position. With his [blanket] permission, I’ve extracted the post (his blog doesn’t facilitate linking to a particular entry) onto JesusParadigm.com. I chose a title for it: We Can Be the People Who Tell the Truth.

    A taste:

    … How can we defend a so-called “Christian” America that is hypocritical, homophobic, anti-immigrant, sexist, and bigoted? We can’t. Nor can we invoke a social gospel that ignores the personal gospel of faith in Christ….

    Read the rest.

  • As Everyone Trades Scripts

    I commented on Monday that there was no possibility I’d be happy with the result after election day. (Considering my previous post on probability, perhaps I should have said <0.1%!) I can now tell you that I’m approximately as unhappy as I expected to be. My unhappiness will probably have dissipated to ordinary levels by the time I complete this post.

    One of the things I find very frustrating is the way people change scripts. We saw it happen with who liked and who hated FBI director Comey during the election. (FWIW, I think the man is to be admired.) We’ve seen it as the senate and presidency changes hands with regard to confirming justices. Before Tuesday, it was very bad for the Senate to block judicial appointments according to one party. I’m guessing that it will still be bad to do so, but now that will be according to the other party. Trade scripts.

    Here’s what I would like to ask. I’ve lived through a few presidents, and I have friends of very different political persuasions. During the George W. Bush administration, my more liberal friends disrespected then President Bush. After that, for eight years, my conservative friends disrespected President Obama. In both cases, I have done my best to refer to the office and the person holding it with respect, even when disagreeing vehemently with that officeholder.

    Is there any chance that we could do that with President-Elect Trump, to be President Trump following the inauguration? As I said above, I was unhappy with the choices, and could hardly be anything but unhappy with the result. I will very likely criticize policies espoused by President Trump. I disagree vigorously with him on a wide variety of topics, and will doubtless say so. But I hope to always refer to him respectfully when I do so. I may not be feeling very respectful. I certainly do not respect many of the policies he has proposed during the election.

    There is one president of the United States. Those who say, “Not my president,” are not simply wrong, they are part of the problem. Another script that will be swapped will be which party is the party of “no.” Someone has to be first in trying to work together.

  • Vocabulary Word of the Day: Probability

    Vocabulary Word of the Day: Probability

    Picture Credit: Openclipart.org
    Picture Credit: Openclipart.org

    I know headline writers need their splashy headlines, but as the media is filled with word of a stunning upset, we should remember the number of times that one candidate or the other was “destroyed” or “finished,” or the election was declared “over.”

    A poll takes a snapshot of part of the electorate which is extrapolated to the whole. It will have a margin of error, generally something like 2.5% to 3.5%. (Why that is can be a project for research.) That means that a candidate who is at 50% in that poll might actually be as low as 46.5% and as high as 53.5% if the error margin is 3.5%. If we’re thinking of two candidates, the other, let’s say showing at 45%, could be anywhere from 41.5% to 48.5%, an overlap of 2%. Now that’s using a margin for candidate A of +5%. The average for Clinton was around +3.5% the day before the election. Now not all polls were at that value, and also not all polls have a 3.5% error margin.

    Now there’s an additional percentage involved, which is a probability, variously 90-95%, that the poll itself is within that margin. So in the poll above, if the figure is 95%, for example, 95 out of 100 times the election being polled would reflect a result within that margin for error. Otherwise it might be anywhere. I’m not making any effort here to keep these details realistic — if you read up on the topic you can learn how these numbers relate, but more importantly, if you read the data on a poll, you can find what these numbers are for that particular poll.

    There is no set way to combine polls into an aggregate, and there is no established error margin for polls that are combined. That’s because not all polls are created equal. On the eve of the election, Nate Silver and crew were giving something near a one in four chance that Trump would win the election, i.e., according to their analysis, if you had a good enough sample, one in four elections run where the data looked like this would go to Trump. Three in four would go to Clinton. The election doesn’t make them wrong. That’s a probability.

    Let’s look at that. If I flip a coin, the probability is one in two that it will come up heads an one in two that it will come up tails. So I flip the coin, and it comes up heads. Was my projection wrong? Not at all. Similarly, the FiveThirtyEight people aren’t wrong either. If they had said, “Clinton will be the next president of the United States,” then they would have been wrong. What they said was that there was around a 78% chance it would be Clinton an a 22% chance it would be Trump.

    They were critiqued by Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium, and several people wrote on FiveThirtyEight to defend their methodology. Dr. Wang gave a 99% chance that it would be Clinton. Both Nate Silver (and an unknown number of members of his crew) and Dr. Wang are much more skilled at this than I am (in the same sense that an MLB player is more skilled at baseball than I, considering I have never picked up a baseball bat for a game, is better at baseball than I am). I spent some time with their data and couldn’t really find a way to understand fully how they got their probabilities and why they differed so much. (On your mental flowchart, create a box and label it “Lots of Statistical Figuring.”) But my intuitive feeling was that Nate Silver was getting the better of the argument. It seemed to me that there was insufficient data on which to base that high a level of confidence in the aggregation of these polls. We haven’t been polling presidential elections for that long.

    Why don’t we have neat numbers for the aggregate values? Let me note, first, that any time one uses a phrase like “the polls show,” one is doing some sort of aggregation, however loose. Folks like Sam Wang and Nate Silver do it in a very scientific way. (I’ll let them argue over which is more scientific, and they do so with some vigor.) We all do it when we look at polls and make a generalization. The reason there isn’t a neat x% margin of error an y% probability that the poll will, in fact, fall within that margin is that polls use different methodologies. If you average the number of apples an oranges you have, you don’t get a better value each for apples an oranges. It might be better to say that if I average my Gala apples an my Golden Delicious apples, I don’t get an accurate picture of what type of apples I have available. One set of those apples Jody wants to bake into a crisp, and the other I’m going to slice up and eat. I’m afraid I’ll have to look at the actual apples.

    Again, my inexpert intuition is that aggregation needs more experience and testing to get more accurate, even as I think that Nate Silver’s work is the more promising. In the meantime, what is quite certain is that nobody in the media has a clue about any of this. Alternatively, they don’t care, and just want to write headlines to sell papers, whether they reflect actual data or not. I suppose that’s possible.

     

     

  • I Blame Us

    I Blame Us

    Anger
    Picture Credit: Openclipart.org.

    It’s election day here in the United States, and though I will shortly head to my polling place and cast my vote, I’m not going to say who it is in any of the races. What I would like to call for is moderation, in the sense I define it when talking about religion. I know it’s odd to take such a common word and then define it in perhaps eccentric ways, but I believe both that my definition falls within the semantic range of the word as commonly used and that it is the word closest to what I want to say. In my view, a moderate isn’t always in the center, but rather is one who looks at the entire spectrum as openly as possible (perhaps from a center starting point), and allows solutions that come from a variety of perspectives. I do hold in common with most moderates I know the idea that extreme solutions often create new extreme problems while often failing to solve what they set out to solve.

    With that lengthy note out of the way, why is it that I blame us?

    Simple: Because today.

    We get to vote. Yes, there are technicalities, but they aren’t all that incredibly difficult. If you want to know how the electoral college works (or doesn’t), you can learn. If you want to learn about the candidates for all the various offices, the information is out there. If you want to know how similar solutions have worked in the past, that information is available too.

    It’s easy to blame the media. They fed us all the wrong sort of information. Quite possible, but each voter has a brain. It used to be harder to do, but now you can look up data very quickly. For some reason people think misinformation started with the internet. No, the internet just made it easier to spread misinformation. But it has also made it easier to get good information. The one factor that has remained the same? How willing are you to evaluate?

    I find that quite frequently one can find enough information to debunk a story right within that story. Just look at their source information and how they cite it. Many, many stories actually have no facts cited to first-hand sources at all. Some people read just headlines and early paragraphs, which is a formula for being deceived. Headlines are hard to write. You want to be accurate, yet you don’t want the headline to be too long.

    It’s easy to blame the politicians. But politicians are elected and re-elected by us. It’s interesting how popular many representatives are while congress as a whole is quite unpopular. In a way, we’re saying that we don’t like the people elsewhere in America. We like the idea of electing non-politicians, but despite the claim, you can’t really do that. By the time someone is on the ballot, they’re a politician. The question is, how good of a politician are they?

    It’s easy to blame corporations. But corporations get their money from us when we buy their brands and in turn they influence elections and politicians by spending money, whether it’s a bribe in the legal sense or not. You can find out how much money the politicians you support are taking from corporations. But more importantly, if you watch what the politician does, you can see what the result is. Oh, but that’s too hard. We want it to be simple. Well, it’s not simple. We talk about the responsibility to vote. How about the responsibility to know what you’re voting on?

    I believe it all comes back to us. The tools are available for us to study and to make intelligent choices. We don’t have to be misled. We don’t have to be manipulated.

    Here are some ways you can be manipulated:

    • Fear, and its extreme buddy panic. Decisions made out of fear are often bad. Have you ever noticed how an animal will often run straight ahead in front of a car? I have to watch when entering my driveway because there are a few cats who will sleep right out there and then when they wake up and see the car coming, run directly in front of the wheel. Even when something justifies the fear, that fear is not a good basis for decisions. Motivations? Sure. Reaction? Not so much.
    • Anger. Angry actions are often dangerous actions. Anger spawns those extreme solutions that often create new extreme problems. There is such a thing as righteous anger, but it is much rarer than claimed.
    • Social herding. The fact that all your friends are doing something doesn’t justify it. Your mother probably told you something of the sort. But it’s easy to do.
    • Apathy. Do you know why political campaigns try to manipulate stories to make their chances look better (or in some cases worse)? In either case, it’s to build enthusiasm in their voters. Getting out the vote is a major factor in elections. Why? Because many of us will become apathetic and not get up the energy to cast our vote. Politicians (all of them, even the so-called non-politicians) would like their voters to be enthusiastic and energized and the other side to be discouraged. I have noted this year that those who are leading in the polls talk about polls, and those who are losing in the polls talk about crowd size. I don’t mean that winners talk about polls and losers talk about crowd size. Rather, I mean that a politician will talk about the thing that makes him or her look best.
    • Hate. Give it up, or it will kill you. Disapprove. Reprove. Approve. But give up hate.

    I’m sure someone is thinking they don’t have time for all this. All I can say is that a whole bunch of people had plenty of time to fill my Facebook feed with complete garbage. No, I’m not talking about one side or the other, I’m talking both. Yes, there were thoughtful people and thoughtful posts, but those were a distinct, almost extinct, minority.

    So if you’re angry tonight as the results come in, be angry at us. Make it an inclusive “us.” You (if you’re a U. S. citizen) and I are both part of the people, and the people will be speaking.

  • Tech Fun: Old and New Meet

    Tech Fun: Old and New Meet

    terminal-102516-250x242Some of you may not be aware that I blog a few tech subjects, sometimes related to my IT work and sometimes not, on hneufeld.com. I thought I recent post would be of broader interest. It shows old technology meeting new – Past Meets Present: Command Line Twitter Clients on Linux.

    How many of you remember using a computer that was managed by typed commands at the command line? I’m guessing the number is not large, because people I help with their computer issues generally have no idea what I’m talking about by “terminal” or “command line” or any of a number of other ways to say it.

    Twitter, on the other hand, is very current. Not quite the latest any more, but still today. Enter Twidge. I show you the video of using this from the command line. Showing how old I am, I found it only slightly more cumbersome than a graphical interface, and I could come to like this approach myself.

    Here’s the video: