World Population Pyramid Shows Some Big Declines Coming

This world population pyramid is fantastic.

Want to see something scary? Look at the population of Japan, Russia, and Italy now, vs. 2030.

I think world population is likely to stabilize. But some countries are looking at a demographic shrinkage so large that their societies will be fundamentally changed.

Have the Republicans Run Out of Protestants?

With Rick Perry's withdrawal from the presidential nomination race, the Republican Party is down to Romney the Mormon, Santorum the traditional Catholic, Gingrich the newcomer Catholic, and Ron Paul.

Ron Paul is a libertarian.  Libertarians are mostly unreligious, and a strong segment, like Jesse Ventura, regard religion as a crutch for the weak.

But Ron Paul also attends a Baptist church, is pro-life, and has been on both sides of the gay marriage issue.

I think Paul has not fully worked out the relationship between his religious views and his political views. He is clearly against the federal government being involved in moral and religious matters, as a strict libertarian would be.  But whether he would support or oppose the Christian Right position at the state level is not clear.

In any case, the Republican Party, which has made evangelical Protestants the foundation of its base for a generation, has now run out of any clear socially conservative evangelical candidates for president.

We Should Err on the Side of Internet Freedom

Today many internet sites, my daily tools and haunts, are protesting proposed legislation. The intent of the legislation - to prevent stealing intellectual property - is noble. The proposed method of control, though, seems so burdensome on internet content transmitters that it could really cripple this wonderful tool.

I am not expert enough on the details of the legislation to say more than that about this law or that. And I am confident that our legislative process will work out to a compromise that is not as bad as the proposed law. The political forces are divided and the economic forces are divided. This is the circumstance that makes for compromise.

The internet needs regulation. Every human institution needs rules and regulation. The question is whether our presumption is to err on the side of freedom or on the side of tight control. To take two extreme examples: we need very little regulation of how the rules of children's games work; we need strict regulation of how nuclear power plants operate.

The flow of content on the internet is, I submit, more like the rules of kids' games than it is like nuclear power. Light regulation is appropriate.

School Your Passion Toward a Real Problem, and Thus Find Happiness

Oliver Segovia has a fine piece on the Harvard Business Review blog with the unfortunate headline "To Find Happiness, Forget Passion."

His main point is that if you want a meaningful life, find a big problem to work on. Since it is a big problem, you will probably find a way to make a living at trying to solve it. And working on something worthwhile is likely to make you happy.

Segovia frames this point with a story of a woman who "followed her passion" into something liberal artsy (subject not specified), who ended up unemployed and depressed. This story, no doubt, is what led the headline writer to say "forget passion."

I think Segovia's point, though, is that working on a big problem that you have an initial interest in tends to engage your passion. Thus, his real message is not "forget passion," but try to school your passion toward something the world can use.

That way does lead to happiness, fulfillment, and probably enough income to live on.

The Best Measure of How Far We Have Come On King Day

... is a black president in the White House.

The Vocation to Discern Vocations

In Sunday School we have been talking about the Presbyterian calling to teach.  Everyone in the class is or has been a teacher of some sort. I think this is pretty typical for a Presbyterian Sunday School. I think I would not find the same thing in a random sample of adult Sunday School classes in most denominations.

Being called to teach has also meant that Presbyterians are disproportionately involved in creating schools.  The stewardship of society means that these schools are meant to serve everyone, not just Presbyterians.

One point that came out in the class that I had not fully appreciated before comes from putting the call to teach with the call to create schools.  Having a vocation to teach in institutions that serve everyone means that we also have a vocation to help everyone find his or her vocation - whether that includes teaching or not.

The vocation to help discern vocations vastly multiplies the social effect of the Presbyterian call to teach.

Christian Right Leaders Give Obama a Gift

Leaders of the Christian Right, a once-important bloc within the Republican Party, have endorsed Rick Santorum.

I believe this action will have two consequences.

First, evangelical Christians will not follow these once-powerful leaders, but will split their votes among many candidates, including Mitt Romney.

Second, the split within the Republican Party between the establishment wing, which backs Romney, and the evangelical wing, which does not, will widen.

The Republican Party has been effective in blocking a few of President Obama's policies, but seems to be unable to unite around any effective positive idea for governing, nor do they support an effective candidate to bear such an idea. By further splitting the party, the Christian Right leaders have handed President Obama another gift.

Twins Up Nearly 100% in a Generation Due to Old Mothers

The birth rate for twins has nearly doubled in the past generation in the U.S.

One third of this growth in twinning is due to more older mothers, who tend to have twins at a higher rate naturally than younger mothers do.

Most of the increase in twins - and triplets, quadruplets, etc. on to Octomom - is due to more women waiting so long to have children that they need fertility drugs.

"The King of Bain" is a Very Bad Film

"When Mitt Romney Came to Town," also known as "The King of Bain," the long-form attack ad that Newt Gingrich's supporters are running, is a very bad documentary.  It is the kind of sensationalist fear mongering that the right wing hates when Michael Moore does it. 

The film, which was originally made by Romney employees, was sold to a pro-Gingrich political action committee.

The film shows Romney and his firm, Bain Capital, buying up several companies, firing most of the workforce, making huge profits by getting other people to loan the companies money, and then shutting them down completely.  In one case they started a technology firm, got favorable ratings from Lehman Brothers, made a huge pile from the initial public offering, then sold off all their stock just before the company went bankrupt.

In each case - and the film says there are many more - Bain acts like the vultures that Rick Perry says they are.

What the film does not do is investigate whether the companies could have been run profitably at all.  The film-makers did not even ask whether anyone could have saved these firms.

I do not know the answer to that question.  So far, no commentators on the film have tried to answer it.  It may be that Bain Capital, and Mitt Romney, are indeed "vulture capitalists" or "mafia capitalists," buying profitable companies, suckering investors into giving Bain lots of money in exchange for worthless debt, then destroying the firms. It may also be that Bain Capital bought failing companies, performed necessary creative destruction, and saved the fragment that would otherwise have failed. 

I would really like to know which kind of businessman Mitt Romney is.  But "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" is a very bad way to try to answer the question.

What You Get If You Ask the Web If It's Cool to Be a Virgin

The website "First World Problems" had this intriguing item:

My daughter wants to know if it's cool to be a virgin. I'm not sure, but I know that if I Google the answer, it'll result in firing or divorce.

I am in little danger of being fired or divorced for pursuing such a question, so I did.


The first answer that Google yields is, surprisingly, a Yahoo! Answers Q & A from 2006 (!). The lead answer given then was "it's up to you."


A query from last year is a little scarier: "Is it OK to be 16 and a virgin?"  This, I am happy to report, brought several sensible and well-reasoned "yes" answers.

A similar query brought this response from TheSite.org, a British advice site for young adults:

I'm 78, still a virgin and so cool, I piss ice cubes.

You're doing the right thing.

 

The Pay It Forward Coffee House

I like good news, coffee houses, and Good magazine. This story has all three.

At the Corner Perk, a coffee house in Bluffton, SC, one anonymous customer started leaving money to pay for other people's drinks and food. This custom caught on, and now many people do it.

As psychologist Jonathan Haidt has so interestingly demonstrated, seeing other people do good things fills most people with a desire to do good things, too.

Utopian "Third Party" Movements are the Bane of Centrism

I am grateful to Solomon Kleinsmith to participate in his blog collective, The Rise of the Center.

Recently I got to voice a pet peeve about something that has bedeviled every centrist forum I have been part of: the desire to create a third party between the Democratic and Republican Parties.

I think that in this country third parties are always utopian, sectarian, and do more harm than good.  In particular, they hurt the party that they are more in sympathy with by splitting the vote in an election. Not all third parties are centrist, by any means.  But the effect is the same: third parties are a gift your enemies.

Moreover, like all utopian endeavors, they take up too many evenings with too little to show for it.

The Republicans and the Democrats have nearly all the governmental action.  If you want to actually affect government policy, as I do, then you have to work within the big tent of one or the other major party.

There are many other ways to build up the world besides government policy, of course. Those other sectors allow for many fruitful centrist paths.  But American politics does not.

Most of the other participants in the Rise of the Center discussion, including Kleinsmith, disagree with me on this.

I would be interested in the thoughts of Gruntled Center readers on this topic.

Why President Obama Will Be Re-Elected

This first week of the year is devoted to posts on the big political picture.

The main reasons that I think President Obama will be re-elected is that:

a) he is the incumbent, so the sizable majority that voted for him last time will want to vote for him again;

b) the economy is improving; and

c) the Republicans will be unable to unite around an exciting and unifying candidate.


President Obama has been a very good president.

Conditions in the country and in the world are improving.

Obama is playing the long game of politics very well. When he was first elected, he knew he had about 18 months to pass the main pieces of his positive agenda.  He did, most importantly by passing universal health care. He has also been relentlessly bi-partisan, working with any Republicans who were willing to help, compromising the way any competent politician must, and keeping his eye on the ball.  He has had even greater successes in foreign policy.  And he has waited until the turn into his re-election year to push back harder against the Republican leadership's intransigence.

The Republicans have played into Obama's hands.  They have positioned themselves as against health care for millions, against saving the auto industry, against regulating the investment "banks" that nearly destroyed the world economy, against regulating the payday lenders that batten on the poor and working class, against supporting democratic movements in the Arab world, against reducing payroll taxes for people who live on their earnings, against raising taxes on the hugely rich.  Most importantly, they have positioned themselves against compromising and working together in the way that government absolutely requires.

To take a signal example, I think universal health care will be a pillar of what most Americans appreciate about government, as they do Medicare and Social Security.  Republicans also opposed Medicare and Social Security, but at least some of them voted for it.  Not universal health care, though - the Republican leadership made sure their party was unanimously against it.  And they call it "Obamacare."  This short-sighted intransigence will come back to bite them for years to come.

The Republican Party is also suffering a three-way civil war among its establishment, social conservative, and libertarian wings.  The Tea Party, in particular, is almost as much anti-Republican as it is anti-Democratic. I believe the Tea Party has shot its bolt and will be irrelevant after this election.  But in the mean time, they will exacerbate the intransigence that is undermining the Republican Party as an actual instrument of government.

Obama Is Mostly Doing an Excellent Job

This first week of the year is devoted to posts on the big political picture.

Yesterday I wrote about my main criticism of President Obama. Today I want to say that, on the whole, I think he has done a masterful job under very difficult circumstances.

President Obama first had to clean up the gigantic mess left by the previous administration. He prevented a major depression, ended a misbegotten war, is winding down a more justified war, killed bin Laden, ended torture, restored America's stature in the world, saved the auto industry, resumed regulating the finance industry, and started protecting the environment again.

Obama also came in to office with a positive agenda. His main achievement was to create universal health care, an objective of Democratic administrations since Truman. He started investing more in alternative energy, rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, working with our allies, and shifting our military focus toward Asia.

He also made the most of some unexpected opportunities, most importantly the Arab Spring. President Obama supported indigenous revolutions against Arab dictators, without sending American troops, spending a trillion dollars, alienating our allies, or creating loathing for America among the "liberated" people. The contrast with the Iraq war is striking in this regard. And the chances of successful democracy are greater than in Iraq, though still iffy in both cases.

One great achievement of the Obama administration is something it did not do: it did not make our enemies do worse things by threatening them. The President did not invent an "axis of evil," pushing them to invest in nuclear weapons against an American threat.

And President Obama achieved all of this in the face of a determined foe whose sole objective was to deny the president any achievements: the leadership of the Republican Party. As Senator McConnell said at the outset of the current administration, the main goal of Republicans is to deny President Obama a second term.

Obama has been a very good president. I hope in the coming year he will prove to be an excellent one.

Obama Is Doing Something Wrong in Fighting Terrorists

This first week of the year is devoted to posts on the big political picture.

On his first day in office, President Obama promised to close the Guantanamo prison within a year. He did not.

Last year he ordered the killing of a U.S. citizen, Anwar Awlaki, by a drone attack in Yemen.

Last week he signed the defense bill which allows the indefinite detention without trial of suspected terrorists.

Each of these acts is wrong in itself and dangerous as a precedent.

I normally support President Obama, so I have tried hard to understand why he did these things, and what principle or theory might lie behind them. I have not come up with a good account. National security, especially when dealing with terrorists, necessarily includes facts that can't be revealed to the public. Perhaps there are good reasons for these acts that are now hidden.

Here are my best guesses.

Some of the Guantanamo prisoners were so badly tortured under the previous administration that they cannot effectively be put on trial or released. Since their testimony was acquired by torture, it is worthless. The Obama administration ended the torture, but cannot undue what was done before.

A very small number of American citizens, such as Awlaki, have indeed become enemy combatants. Awlaki himself openly proclaimed this. Since he was in hiding in enemy territory, it was not practical to capture and try him as a citizen has a right to receive. The drone attack was the only practical way to fight that enemy, as we have with many other non-citizen enemy individuals.

When signing the National Defense Authorization Act, the president issued a statement that he objected to the provisions of the act that allowed for indefinite military detention and would not allow them on his watch. His opponents put this poison pill in the law precisely to embarrass the president. Since he had to sign the law in order to pay the troops, he accepted this compromise, while still rejecting this provision of the law.

I think these guesses on my part are the best case for understanding how President Obama could be party to these bad acts. Still, they only mitigate the evil; they do not justify it, nor end it.

I understand that we are fighting terrorists - enemy individuals and loose organizations that really do threaten us. The normal tools that states can use in fighting the armies of other states are not available. We have had to develop new tools to fight these enemies effectively.

I believe the Obama administration has made some effort to make the war against terrorists more legal than it was, and to make it still more legal and ethical as we go forward.

But I believe that President Obama has not done enough to fight these enemy individuals and organizations in a way that is in accord with American constitutional principles. This is my biggest disappointment with the Obama administration.

The Three-Way Fight Among Republicans

I am starting the year with a week of Big Picture posts.

Republicans normally nominate the person whose turn it is to run for president.  They typically pick a candidate who did respectably in their previous primary.  By that logic, it is Mitt Romney's turn.

Some newcomers also run in order to get in line for a future race, or at least to position themselves for a post in the next Republican administration.  I believe Jon Huntsman, my favorite of the Republican candidates this year, ran for this reason.

When I look at the rest of this year's Republican field, I see two things.

First, I think all the other establishment politicians in the party believe that Barack Obama will be re-elected.  Therefore, they decided to sit this one out.

Second, the Tea Party is a wild card. This movement is as much against the Republican establishment as it is against the Democrats. None of those who are running are exactly Tea Partiers.  Tea Partiers are mostly very conservative white Christians, drawn heavily from the petite bourgeoisie, who are the bedrock of any Republican coalition. I think Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann come closest. They are drawn to libertarianism, so they think well of Ron Paul.  But mostly they are not really against government, as true libertarians are.  Rather, Tea Partiers are against government spending money on people they regard as undeserving. All the Not-Romney candidates have been trying to mobilize the Tea Party, but none have a lock.

Herman Cain got into the race, I believe, to raise his speaking fees.  That is his main source of income.  Ironically, if he had not become the front-runner, this strategy might have worked.  Too much exposure, though, destroyed his credibility (if not his marriage).

Newt Gingrich, I think, never expected to be the nominee.  He does, though, wish he still mattered politically, so he ran to raise his profile. He may even get his wish.  I think, though, he has also raised his negatives, reminding a new generation of Republicans why the previous generation of Republican leaders pushed him out of leadership.

Rick Santorum is, I believe, actually the strongest social conservative in the race - which is saying quite a bit. He is a very traditional Catholic - not an evangelical Protestant.  One consequence of this fact, not usually appreciated by secular political commentators, is that traditional Catholics are not beholden to free-market capitalism, large corporations, or big banks.  This is also why Santorum is not the candidate of the Republican establishment.

As I write this, the Iowa caucuses are unfolding. Romney, Santorum, and Paul are leading.  I think the Republican race will continue with these three, or people representing the three Republican camps.

The Tea Party and the social conservatives will try to fend off the gravitational pull of the establishment candidate.

I expect that Romney, the establishment candidate, the my-turn candidate, will be the eventual nominee.

The World Is Better Off Than It Was a Year Ago

I like to start each year with a week of reflections on the big picture.

The worst dictator in the world died.

The worst terrorist in the world was killed.

Three Arab dictatorships were overthrown, which is good; by their own people; which is better; with Western help, but not Western domination, which is best of all.

Three other Arab dictatorships may be overthrown the same way. As well as the military dictatorship of Burma.

The world economy is slowly improving.  Europe has been able to avert economic collapse, and is slowly dealing with their currency and debt crisis.

China is cooperating more with the West in trade and in stabilizing Western debt.  China has also been helpful in containing North Korea.

Conditions are improving for women's education, careers, public lives, and general freedom throughout nearly all nations of the world. 

Conditions are improving for sexual minorities in most nations of the world.

Religious freedom is improving in most nations of the world.

World population seems to be stabilizing.

Let us not take for granted stable democracies in almost every corner of the Western hemisphere, the Northern hemisphere, and most of the Pacific island nations.

The generation-long trend of declining violence continues in nearly all nations.

All the great powers are working together to reduce the threat of war, both among great powers, and among little states.

To be sure, there are a few very bad actors in the world, some of them controlling states. And there are always uncertainties to worry about.  The world economy is recovering, but not recovered. The global warming trend may be getting worse. And bad things happen to individuals every day.

Still, the world as a whole is better off than it was a year ago.

There is a great deal to be thankful for, and hopeful about, in the world today.

Merry Christmas to One and All

The Gruntled Center will take a vacation until the New Year.

I am looking forward to an excellent 2012, and I hope you have the same.

A Dylan Thomas Trip to Shakertown

We had a delightful bit of providential timing last night.

Near Danville is Pleasant Hill, a restored Shaker community now known as Shakertown. It is, in my opinion, the most beautiful human-made place in Kentucky. I took the family there for Christmas Eve-eve dinner.

My mother-in-law brought a recording of Dylan Thomas reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales," a favorite family poem that I used to read to the kids when they were small. We started listening as we pulled out of the driveway. "I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six," and all that follows, carried us through the misty December twilight in the lovely Kentucky countryside.

As we came in sight of the entrance to Shakertown, Dylan Thomas was winding down Christmas day.

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

And he spoke the last word as we pulled up to the stop sign opposite the Pleasant Hill gate.

So now we know: the distance from Danville to Shakertown can be measured in the scientific unit of one Child's Christmas in Wales.

China's Surprising Christian Distribution

The Pew Research Center has taken on the difficult task of estimating the numbers of Christians all over the world.  Yesterday I reported that the country with the third largest number of Protestants is China - many in underground churches. 

I was surprised, though, to see the ratio of Protestant to Catholic Christians in China. 

Using the same methods to estimate both groups, Pew came up with these totals for Chinese Christians:

Protestants: 58 million

Catholics:     9 million

I hope that some day, when China is democratic, these churches will be able to operate openly.  I expect that, when that day comes, there will be an evangelical boom in China - as is already happening covertly.

And, incidentally, sociologists will be able to get more definite numbers.