Newsflash: Prophecies of Christ Might Shake Christian Faith

In an article which sounds like it could have been written by the parody site: Lost Gospel of Zaccheus, the New York Times writes about a stone tablet from the first century BC, which contains a text which is advertised (like just about anything dating from that period seems to be) as having the potential to shake Christianity to its foundations:

A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time....

“Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology — while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,” Mr. Boyarin said.

Now don't get me wrong, this sounds like a fascinating find. What the stone contains is a fragmentary apocalyptic prophecy from the first century BC, which draws on the model of late Old Testament prophecies such as Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai. Some of the scholars involved have dubbed it "Gabriel's Revelation". The difficulty is, the text is fragmentary in a couple of key places. However, it appears to describe the Angel Gabriel providing a revelation either to or about a messiah who suffers for the people of Israel. One scholar has argued that, based on his interpretation of some hard to discern words, it may hint at this messiah dying and rising after three days:

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says “Sar hasarin,” or prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of “a prince of princes,” Mr. Knohl contends that the stone’s writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David.

“This should shake our basic view of Christianity,” he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. “Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.”

The thing is, I'm not really clear why this is considered big news, unless you start out by ascribing to the theory that all references in the New Testament to Christ's death and resurrection were added in long after their original composition. In other words, unless you figure Christianity is hogwash to start with.

As it stands, Christians interpret a number of passages in the Old Testament as prophesying Christ's suffering, death and resurrection, so it's hardly going to surprise a Christian audience if you find evidence that Jews in the hundred years before Christ believed that a messiah would eventually suffer, die and rise after three days.

Very, very interesting stuff (both religiously and as a matter of history), but I'm not clear why it's supposed to shake anybody.

Man of Three Cultures

Rich Leonardi has started a new blog to celebrate the year of St. Paul: Man of Three Cultures. I'm looking forward to using it as a resource as I spend the year reading slowly through the Pauline epistles.

Just War and Proportionalism

A friend emailed me a question posed to her by a non-Catholic friend:

Her general point was that the Just War theory is an example of proportionalism and, if proportionalism was allowed in this case, why not, to quote her, "allow people to use condoms in Africa"?

She stated that "the Catholic Church was just avoiding calling the Just War theory proportionalist because then they would have to (as I quoted before) allow people to use condoms in Africa", another example of proportionalism. It came from the fact that I had stated that it was an absolute that one may not do evil that good may come. Was I incorrect on that?

The first question, I think, would be to be clear on what we mean by "proportionalism". Following upon that, we should see how both just war theory and "allowing people to use condoms in Africa" are or are not examples of "proportionalism".

I think we might say that proportionalism lies somewhere between an approach to morality based on notions of "objective good" and "objective evil" and a pure utilitarianism. In the former (which I shall take the liberty of calling traditional Catholic morality) the morality of an act is determined by the nature of the act itself, and whether that nature is good or evil. (To be clear, conscience comes into the issue of guilt/culpability, not whether the act itself is good or evil. If I do something evil under the illusion that it is good, I may not be culpable for the evil I have committed, but the act itself was still evil.) In the latter (utilitarianism), the good or evil of an act is measured strictly by it's results.

Proportionalism tries to bring a bit of utilitarianism into a traditional Christian understanding of morality, by saying that certain acts are evil by nature unless their effects are sufficiently good to outweigh the evil of the act. Proportionalism has a long history of being rejected by Christianity -- ever since the gospel writer blamed the pharisees for deciding that "it would be better for one to die for the good of the people".

Alright, so the Church says that it's against proportionalism (John Paul II condemned it in Evangelium Vitae), but how is the just war doctrine not proportionalism? Isn't the case for war basically one of "war is bad, but if it achieves something good enough, it's worth while"?

No.

According to just war doctrine, it is not wrong to use war in order to defend against certain grave injustices. Now, there is an element of proportion that comes into just war doctrine: the injustice being defended against must be sufficiently grave to justify warlike means to resist it -- and the means of war employed must be no greater than is necessary to end the injustice. (Thus, if Country A is invaded by Country B, the citizens of A may well resist by waging war, and even invade B in order to bring the war to a conclusion. But massacring all the military age inhabitants of B is unacceptable, because it is more violence than is required to end the war.)

However, these considerations of proportion are used in order to determine what acts are just within a war context and what acts would involve the defender in turn becoming an unjust aggressor. Just war doctrine is not based on the idea that acts of war are inherently evil, but justified if they result in a good greater than the evil involved.

Perhaps one of the things that would lead people to think that acts of war are necessarily evil is that war is certainly a massive occasion of sin, even for combatants who are involved in a just cause. Another issue is when people take it that killing is always wrong. According to Catholic teaching, it is not. Killing in self defense, just war or just capital punishment is not an evil act. Murder (the unjust killing of another) is an inherently evil act, but murder is a subset of killing, not the whole of it.

Now what of the use of condoms in Africa? The Church holds that using contraception when having intercourse is always wrong -- that it is an inherently wrong act. Because of this, even the apparent good of preventing the spread of AIDS is not seen as making the use of condoms right. (It's also a bit of an odd discussion, since there wouldn't be an issue with the spread of AIDS if people were obeying the Church's teaching that sex is only acceptable inside of marriage anyway.)

The Pros and Cons of having one child

Over at Teeny Manolo, Glinda has put up a list of the pros and cons of having only one child. It's an interesting read for me, since although I could give long and detailed lists of the pros and cons of having two cats as opposed to one, I'm entirely in favor of multiple children. (This is perhaps a natural result of being the oldest of six and the mother of four, counting baby.) Most of the pros don't resonate with me that much, in part because I don't see most of them as being an issue:

1. Having lots of time and energy to give to the one child versus splitting it up between siblings.
Actually, having multiple children who are old enough to play with each other means that I expend less energy because they amuse each other. For example: as I write this post, the three girls are upstairs playing a long involved game with a princess and a dump truck instead of hanging on me. I cannot underestimate the value of having siblings as built-in playmates.

5. One college tuition bill! Wheee!
Nonsense. My parents haven't been stuck with the tuition bills for any of the four of us who've gone through school so far, and neither have we expected them to pay our way. (Now, the Catholic school tuition bills, on the other hand...)

6. Less use of resources. Meaning three do not consume as much water, plastic, etc…
Perhaps, but we're able to live pretty efficiently combining resources here, not to mention that we recycle toys and clothing down and don't have families who inundate us with new plastic junk at every opportunity. (And let me take this opportunity to thank our families for this restraint. You guys are classy.)

10. Not having to buy a minivan.
I don't have a lot to say to that, other than to point out that some families with more than one child drive small cars, while other families buy far more vehicle than their size would warrant, regardless of number of children. Also that I lurve my minivan.

On the other hand, I would tend to push out the cons to the long-term consequences of having only one child. Darwin's father was, in effect, an only child who had the duties of caring for his elderly parents devolve upon him. This became quite difficult especially as the care stretched from months to years. My mother, by contrast, is one of eleven children, so there was a large support network to help her parents in their last days.

(Listen up: before anyone goes over to Teeny Manolo to pontificate about how people should be more generous with family size, please note that she says she would like more but has not been so fortunate.)

Relics of a Fallen World

Last week the US Supreme Court came to the rather unsurprising conclusion that if the second ammendment says that the right of "the people" to bear arms shall not be infringed, by "the people" it means... individual people. Regardless of whether one thinks this is a good idea (in other words, regardless of whether one thinks the 2nd ammendment should be repealed) this would seem like a no brainer. However, Vox Nova writer Mornings Minion took the occasion to write a blistering post in which he informed anyone who would listen that "the Church teaches" that handguns should be banned. (A number of well reasoned responses to MM's post were made on other blogs, and I'm not going to bother fisking it here.)

It seems that back in the 70s, the NCCB and USCCB stated in several documents that due to the large number of crimes that involved handguns, it would be in the interest of society to work for the elimination of handguns. In other statements on social issues and crime since that time, the USCCB has on a few occasions advocated "sensible restrictions" on handguns and stated that one ought to hope for their eventual disappearance. (For the most complete, and earliest, USCCB statement on handgun violence, see the brief 1975 statement "Handgun Violence: A Threat to Life" issued by the USCCB Committee on Social Developmentand World Peace.)

Now clearly, such a policy analysis, even by a committee under the aegis of the USCCB, carries no doctrinal force. However, I think it's appropriate for faithful Catholics to think on these sorts of issues when their shepherds bring them up, and so that's what I proceded to do.

My first reaction is to be pretty dismissive of the wish for handguns to vanish entirely (or, nearly so: exeptions are mentioned for police and military use) since I personally enjoy using handguns very much. I've never shot at or threated another living creature with one, but I go down to a range fairly regularly to assault paper targets either with my own Browning .22 target pistol or with a larger caliber gun belonging to the range or to a friend. Though the .22 is great for target shooting (and is cheep to shoot) there's nothing quite as satisfying as the roar and lift of a large caliber pistol or revolver. The classic Colt .45 has been, since 1911, a sheer pleasure to handle and shoot. And for all it's modern blocky feel, the Glock .45 is a similarly beautiful weapon to handle. 9mm pistols have an angrier bark and jump, but are also fun. And a good .357 or .44 magnum revolver, with a truly smooth action, is a beautiful piece of worksmanship, and provides enough weight in the hand to be a very good long distance shooter.

Sure, I'm conscious of the fact that guns are also powerful tools for self defense -- and should I ever need to use one so I'd have no hesitation to grab one of my rifles and use it thus. But even if I knew that I would never find myself needing to defend myself with a gun, I'd still very much enjoy using them. What, then, should I make of this hope to see handguns eventually vanish entirely?

The difference, it would seem, is that the bishops are concerned entirely with the issue of handgun violence. My interest in handguns, on the other hand, is only minimally related to my desire to have them around for defense. I just like them generally. And indeed, I'd be more happy if one never had to worry about needing one and could simply enjoy using them recreationally. Is that reasonable?

Here's another piece of military machinery which is, to my mind, incredibly beautifully made:

A good claymore is a beatifully balanced thing, which moves like an extension of your arm. In origin, however, it was designed to sever a head from the neck with ease, or slice an arm off at the shoulder with one smooth stroke. So the original reason for all the craftsmanship that surround swordsmithing is steeped in bloodshed. In the Bible itself we find the desire to see swords beaten into plowshares. And yet there is, to my mind, a beauty to a well-made sword that a well made plowshare simply does not possess. (Sadly, swords are not as easy to use for strictly recreational purposes as guns -- though I heartily recommend the modern sport of fencing.)

Perhaps the most direct similarity to the USCCB's comments on handguns can be found in regards to the crossbow, which several Church councils advocated banning in the late Middle Ages.

Crossbows, longbows and their modern cousins the compound bows continue to be used for hunting and recreation in the modern world, but I don't think that any prominant churchmen have called for them to be banned any time recently. The bow has become permanently separated from it's deadly connotations, so far as I can tell.

Yet none of these weapons, in their deadly or recreational forms, would have been developed to the level that they have without the historical human need to slay animals for food and other humans in war. In a sense, these things are products of the fallen nature of our world. And even the sword or bow remails fully capable of killing other human beings with brutal efficiency.

I suppose that if one truly wants not only the violence of our fallen world, but all the products and traces of that violence removed from it, one must wish to see every sword beaten into a plowshare. I'm sure that some would see my affection for weapons of all kind as being a "glorification of violence", and would wish out of existence not only guns but swords and bows and all other products of humanity's history of violence. Yet since the world is and will remain fallen, I can't help seeing the products of our weapon-making history as worthwhile in their own right. And so while wishing that no one felt that he needed a gun in order to protect himself, I can't bring myself to wish them out of existence. They're the product of too much history and human ingenuity. And they're just plain fun.

Dreamy

And courtesy of Julie D., a joke for our anniversary.

After she woke up, a woman told her husband, “I just dreamed that you gave me a pearl necklace for our anniversary. What do you think it means?”

“You’ll know tonight.” he said.

That evening, the man came home with a small package and gave it to his wife.

Delighted, she opened it to find a book entitled The Meaning of Dreams.

Good thing all my dreams lately have involved flooring.

Lucky 7th

I don't know what the traditional gift is for the seventh wedding anniversary, but we gave ourselves wood.


(That on the stairs is our 4 1/2th anniversary present, for which occasion the appropriate gift is "golden fluff and cheeks".)

Prejudices of the Self Made Man

Not long ago, I spent a week or two going the rounds with an adamantly pro-choice philosophy grad student in the comments of another blog. One of the points he kept making was essentially, "If you're really in favor of reducing abortions, you should be in favor of contraception and sex ed programs, because "abstinence based" programs do not, statistically, have good success." (As in, those who have attended public schools with "abstinence only" sex ed programs do not have startlingly lower pregnancy and STD rates than those who haven't.)

That may or may not be true. I haven't familiarized myself with the research. But it's hard for me to take, because since planning (and succeeding) on not having sex before marriage worked for me, my wife, and many of our friends in college -- it's hard for me to understand why it's unreasonable to expect others to do the same. It wasn't exactly easy, and I can certainly understand why one could fail, but it doesn't strike me as an inherently unreasonable expectation. Why? Well, at root, because to say that it's unreasonable to expect others to even be capable of pulling pulling that off would be to say that they simply don't have the abilities that I have. And I have fairly deeply ingrained within me the idea that just about anyone can, with hard work, do the same things that I have done.

This has been striking me a lot over the last couple years as we have finally issued into what I think of as the upper middle class (which I define, in thoroughly relativistic fashion, as doing better financially before 30 than my parents ever did, even right before my father's retirement/death.)

Back when we lived in Los Angeles (one of the most expensive living areas in the country) and we scraped by on a single income which was not much over the poverty line for a family of four, I enjoyed the righteous feeling of insisting, "I may be poor, but I still don't think the government has any business taking money from the rich and giving it to me." It's a fun position to hold, and I milked it for all it was worth while I was qualified to hold it. (Probably much to the annoyance of some of those around me.)

Now I find myself in a less flattering position -- that of the person who has "arrived" in some sense, and now finds himself saying, "If I could get to a stable family income through hard work and dedication -- so can everyone else." This is characterized by those who disagree with the sentiment as "Telling the poor that if they aren't doing well, it's their own fault."

I don't tell the poor that. (Indeed, unless one imagines "the poor" to be an embodied character that wanders about the stage of life, I'm not sure exactly how one could without being insanely rude.) And there are a set of "advantages" that I did have even though I grew up in a lower-middle-class family and never had got a job through "connections": I had two parents who provided me with a stable family environment, an outstanding education, and a strong moral grounding. Those are incredible advantages in life, and ones I do not think I could possibly have got where I have in life without. But they aren't advantages that can be given to you by a government program.

There are, so far as I can tell, to different ways to react to the feeling of being a "self made man". My own, which I would tend to think of as an essentially conservative one, is to conclude that one's success is essentially the result of hard work and a good upbringing, and to seek to help others to receive a similar upbringing, while encouraging them to work hard. The other approach, which I would tend to think of as a "liberal" one (and which has been on my mind of late as it seems to be the approach which is followed by presidential candidate Barack Obama) is to hold that while one somehow achieved success, it was really, really hard and few other people can possibly manage to do the same, and so all sorts of preferences and programs are needed in order to others to achieve what you have.

For instance, I recently ran across this quote from Obama's book, Audacity of Hope. Speaking about meeting with the top campaign donors from his Senate campaign, he says:

But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class; the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured with a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by movements of global capital.

Sure there are lots of social ills that can't be cured by the free market and a good SAT score, but in regards to getting a good education and a good job, the free market and a good SAT score will certainly get you a long way. And Obama should know this, as do I. Because unless he got into college based strictly on racial preferences (and he seems like a smart guy, so I doubt it) it's been his good SAT scores and the free market that have taken him from middle class Hawaii to having a very good chance of being our next president. (And making far, far more money than anyone I know in the mean time.)

Yet Obama's reaction to all this is not to say, "Look, I had a lot of obstacles before me, but with the help of a loving family, and a lot of hard work in school and afterwards, look where I am today. And you could do the same." Rather, his message is essentially that unlike him, none of us poor schmucks stand a chance of getting anywhere in life unless he's elected president so he can start a bunch of new programs that will do everything for us.

The conservative attitude sounds rather heartless, since it boils down to: "Go work hard, and you'll do well." But it stems from an implicit assumption that the person being addressed is of the same abilities as oneself. The progressive attitude, on the other hand, implicitly assumes that others do not have the same abilities as oneself.

In the end, which of these is fair, and which is demeaning?

Fear and loathing in the garden

Some mornings you go outside to take the air and gaze at the garden, and then you glance at the tomato patch and find that once again, birds have gotten inside the netting. Not one, but three birds. And they're still inside. And there happens to be a handy piece of long flooring strip sitting on the grass. And this is what happens.


But you better believe I put the fear of God into those birds!

And I saved the last Cherokee Purple, which was delicious.

Are we done yet?

We are not done yet, but we're getting there.


When you only seal half the living room at a time, you have to lay your boards in an ever-shortening stair step pattern.

This is the corner of the hearth. We took a lot of time to dry lay it and finesse our cutting, but it was worth it -- much easier to lay than the box by the kitchen. Also, it helped that we didn't have to fill it in.

This is the last day of Darwin's time at home, so here's hoping we get a lot completed.

Planned Parenthood as "Lifestyle" Brand

Monday's Wall Street Journal contained an article about Planned Parenthood's efforts to invest it's "surplus" from recent years (being a non-profit, they're not allowed to call the difference between what they spend and what they take in each year a "profit") in expanding their reach into middle and upper class demographics. To this end, they're opening "express centers" in suburban malls which feature birth control, pregnancy tests, counseling, books and branded merchandise.

To encourage the new wave of patients to join the cause, an express center in Parker, Colo., sells political buttons next to the condoms and sets out invitations to activism by the magazine rack.... Officials also aim to rally support with upbeat marketing: TV ads with perky voice-overs about love; a crass-and-sassy Web campaign aimed at teens. Earlier this year, Planned Parenthood began selling a $2 branded condom -- promoted as a "must-have fashion accessory" -- in luxury boutiques and W hotels.

They're also opening regional mega-clinics, as opposed to their more traditional 2,500-5,000 sq. ft. facilities to provide their full range of "services". These mega-centers are targeting at higher income areas, and designed to give the Planned Parenthood brand a brighter, more consumerist appearance.

If all of this chirpy discussion of how to make Planned Parenthood a more attractive brand strikes you as having a certain "Springtime for Hitler" quality, it's because you and I inhabit something like the same culture. Indeed, aside from the obviously appalling elements, one of the weirdest things about reading the article was the implicit assumption that Planned Parenthood was a marketable brand. Between their founding by Margaret Sanger, who ranted about how abortion and contraception (especially for non whites) were needed to protect "the race", and the fact that they are by far the largest provider of abortions -- a service that major portions of the country may be reluctant to totally ban, yet at the same time are far from comfortable with -- I would tend to assume that Planned Parenthood is one of those pariah organizations which we can't seem to get rid of, yet no one seriously considers a positive "brand".

In the immediate culture within which I move, that may be true. But apparently in other cultures that exist within this country, Planned Parenthood is the sort of "brand" from which one would be happy to buy a fashion t-shirt of branded condom, just to show that you're "with it" by having all the right corporate titles on your possessions.

People talk about reducing the "division" in our political and cultural discourse, but this sort of thing serves to underline for me that there really is little chance of these divisions going away any time in the foreseeable future. In a country in which one sub-culture's "lifestyle brand" is another culture's "culture of death", there's simply too fundamental a disagreement to expect it to go away.

Wedded bliss, ca. 1930

Thinking of taking your kids on a trip down memory lane to the Great Depression? First find out how you'd rate as a 1930s spouse, courtesy of the 1930s Marital Scale!

(Darwin got 147 and I got 102, so we're all ready for the time machine.)

h/t Literacy Chic

Tales from the subfloor

Surfacing with an update on flooring, for those fascinated by the subject.

Gluing down hardwood is a nasty, smelly, sticky process. The sealant is noxious and weirdly tacky and porous underfoot, and the adhesive is unpleasant and thick and has to be cleaned with mineral spirits. The mineral spirits start to burn your hands after a time and it doesn't wash off well. Cats and children are fascinated by all these substances, which might explain why my recurring dream last night was of trying and failing to keep small creatures out of stickiness.

That said, here are some pix.

Box inlay in the small hall between the kitchen and living room. This was a bitch to lay. You can see in the lower left corner where, at the end, we wound up with a small gap in the corner despite our best measuring efforts.

After spending five hours yesterday just laying out our box, today we realize that flooring goes a lot faster when you aren't trying to do fancy-schmancy stuff.

If all goes well, we'll finish up a good portion of the kitchen tonight and be able to get the fridge and the table out of the living room.

An Inconvenient Tragedy

Some may recall that La Scala in Milan is preparing an opera of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth for the 2011 opera season. It's not everyone who can turn a pop science phenomenon into an opera, and indeed, I must admit that I rather doubt that La Scala will manage to produce something that people want to see on its own terms -- as opposed to something one wants to see for the righteous slow that it gives one to know that, having donned one's finest clothes and driven over to La Scala in one's Maserati, one may sit back in one's box and gaze at the other worthies around the opera house in the firm belief that one is far above those poor, ignorant "global warming deniers".

Ah, but though he may not live in Milan, there is one out there who can craft a three act opera based on the Al Gore oeuvre, and that man is Bob The Ape. He presents a libretto for An Inconvenient Tragedy in three acts. If you have any doubt whether you should go read all of it, and believe me that you should, merely consult the cast list:

Cast of Characters

.		.
.	Prometheus	.	a Titan
.	Algor	.	an ambitious Spirit
.	Carbona Dioxida	.	an airy Spirit
.	Khi-Oto	.	an Oriental Sorcerer, servant to Algor
.	Skeptica	.	a Seeress
.	Consensus	.	a Judge
.	Helios	.	God of the Sun
.	Oscar	.	a Golem
.	Three Citizens
.	A Troupe of Polar Bears
.	A Figure representing Unnatural Heat

MrsDarwin and I have been going about the house saying "Oscar, a golem" to each other since last night. And so, following upon St. Augustine, I must enjoin you to take and read.

Gracious living

We've been living it up in a small space due to the kitchen being completely torn up. Now, so that we can use the kitchen as a staging ground before we floor in there, we've moved the table into the living room. Usually I have a "no food in the living room" rule for girls, but we're waiving that for the time being.


It wouldn't be so bad to live everyday life in one room if half of it weren't taken up by the prospective floor.


So we're a bit squeezed right now. Just wait until this afternoon, when the couch goes out to the garage and the refrigerator moves into the living room.

Darwin has been doing prep work on the stairs. Yesterday morning the big girls helped him rip off the carpet up to the landing.


We'll be laying floor strips on the stairs and edging them with stair nosings. The cost for the nosings that matched our floor was astronomical, so we opted to buy maple nosings and varish and polyurethane them ourselves.

We stained them deeper than the floor for contrast.

Up today: completely clearing out the kitchen so that we can sand off the vinyl adhesive tomorrow; laying tile around the fireplace and by the back door; moving the fridge, stove, and dishwasher out of the kitchen.

Floor, let's go!

Perhaps you've been wondering, "Did the Darwins chicken out on their reflooring plans?" The answer is, no, but we waited nine weeks for a 4-6 week shipment of wood. Well, now is the time, gentle readers. Darwin is at home for the next week, and the work is under way. The girls and I will be doing our part mostly by staying out of the house.

Pix later, maybe this evening.

Update (from Darwin): After years of keeping my children somewhat insulated from popular culture, one gift of used VHS tapes has my offspring flattering me with the words, "Oh, Dad! You're as smart as Bob the Builder!" Sigh... I tell them that I refuse to wear the hat.

Update (from MrsDarwin) Head over to Jen's to see what the girls and I did while out of the house. It involved lots of screaming.

Engineering Our Way Out of Crisis

The Times of London has an interesting article about efforts to produce crude oil from plant waste such as straw and woodchips using genetically modified micro-organisms which excrete oil as a waste product. Thus far, their efforts have been very small scale, but it's a fascinating effort.

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

Fascinating stuff. I would imagine there are also some folks out there working hard at super-efficient CO2 converting micro-organisms, to be used as "scrubbers" in power plants and perhaps even internal combustion engines.

I know that some fellow science enthusiasts find me overly blasé about the prospect of global warming, peak oil, etc., but given humanity's track record over the last few hundred years, it strikes me as fairly likely we'll manage to engineer our way out of any scenarios in which earth becomes uninhabitable for us. This struck me particularly when I found myself flipping through the environmentally alarmist tome Six Degrees the other day. It discusses what would happen if the earth's average temperature increased six degrees Centigrade (about 11 degrees F), as the most extreme global warming models currently suggest could be possible in the next hundred years or more. Needless to say, it's pretty dire. Author Mark Lynas predicts that a full 6C rise could result in the collapse of civilization, the extinction of most plant and animal species, and a return to the stone age, if humans didn't die out completely.

Now here's the thing I find unconvincing about these kind of scenarios: They're invariably based on global warming skyrocketing while humanity sits down and suffers the consequences, with billions dying, civilisation vanishing, etc. Maybe I've got too much of a Heinlein mentality, but I don't see humanity going quietly into the night (or desert, as the case may be.) If we started to see really massive, destructive effects that were clearly the result of global warming, expect someone (if not in the West, in the developing nations like China and India) to take matters into their own hands and do something massive. For instance, if you created a massive underground explosion along the lines of Krakatoa (think underground nuclear test that makes the USSR's "Tsara Bomba" look small) you could win yourself a couple years of unusually cool world temperatures as a result of suspended dust in the atmosphere. Heck, perhaps there's even an easier way to get that many particulates into the upper atmosphere. Similarly, genetically modified plants and micro-organisms might be used to try to drastically reduce CO2 fast.

Now obviously, we don't think about trying these things right now because they're easy things to get wrong, with the possibility of a run-away GMO wiping out hundreds of existing plant species, or your attempt to get particulates into the atmosphere causing world-wide nuclear fallout. But if countries like China are in danger of collapse, or tens of millions of people world-wide are starving, expect the caution to go to the winds.

This isn't to say that the earth might not end up trashed, but my guess it that it would be trashed by massive (and sometimes poorly thought out) attempt to stem off disaster, rather than by the warming itself. I'm pretty sure we could keep the climate from cooking us out of existence. The question is, can we do that without trashing the environment, or will we do it by large and clumsy means. Either way, I don't see world temperatures going up 6C. There may be environmental disasters in our future, but I don't see that one being it.

(Note: It's also entirely possible that the natural systems of our planet have the ability to adjust to process much more CO2 than we imagine, without going into serious global warming. I consider that fairly possible, but I'm ignoring it for the purposes of this discussion.)

When to do Nothing

Many column inches have been spent in recent months asserting that the Republicans are out of ideas. Reading up about McCain's "cap and trade" global warming proposal, I could almost wish that were the case.

It is one of the facts of human nature that we often feel we must "do something" even if we don't actually know what, if any, action would be helpful. It is painful and difficult to sit still and do nothing when you know that there are things going wrong. Often this is a good urge, but sometimes it gets us into trouble, especially when we don't actually have any idea how to remedy the problem in question.

I encounter this pretty often at work. When the business is behind and not making it's financial forecast, everyone becomes very urgent to "do something". As an analyst, it often falls to me to point out that one or another of the proposals which is suggested to "do something" won't actually help, and may make things worse.

"Let's do fifty percent off on product X." Sorry, the data for the last year shows that product X is not price elastic. All you will do is cut our revenue on that product by 50% while zeroing out our profit on it entirely.

"Let's do buy-one-get-one-free." When we do buy-one-get-one-free on a proprietary product, we just flood ebay with resellers offering out product at below market prices. We'll see depressed demand for the next month or two. I've got the data to prove it.

However, almost invariably, we do these things anyway. Why? Because people always want to be able to say that they're doing something about the crisis. No one wants to tell his boss, "We're missing our number, but we're not doing anything about it, because none of the ideas we've had would help any."

(If the above makes it sound like there's nothing we can do to increase sales, it's because our extant marketing plan generally has all the price elastic products as heavily optimized for volume as possible -- such that only cost concessions from our suppliers could allow us to be more aggressive than we're already being. Those kind of cost negotiations are the responsibility of another group in the company. So when our specific group gets told to "do something", it's often the case that we're already doing basically everything that's likely to work.)

In a "change election" like this one, we effectively have a country-wide demand that "somebody do something". It's not necessarily an unreasonable demand. We're spending money we don't have, health care is definitely a problem for many Americans, we have a set of immigration laws that we lack the ability or will to enforce, etc. Certainly, people would like to see solutions to those problems. But that does not necessarily mean that doing anything is better than doing nothing.

On health care, for instance, the current American system clearly has problems which are causing a lot of people a lot of pain. I'd like to see reform on that. However, I very strongly do not think that single payer health care run by the Federal government would be an improvement. So while I may not be crazy about the status quo, I'll certainly settle for that as compared to the "change" options currently on the table.

The question is not so much whether one has ideas, or is out of ideas, but rather whether the ideas one has are any good.

Pizza Chez Darwin

Pizza is incredible. It's the perfect dinner, and the ultimate comfort food. Everyone loves it: even my two-year-old, asked for her favorite food, chirps, "Pee-ta!" The surest way to be branded as a weirdo and a social malefactor is to announce, "Actually, I don't really like pizza."

Well, we like pizza here (just ask the baby). We've been baking and experimenting with our dough for seven years. When we first were married, we tended to make a very basic bready puffy crust. It was amazingly mediocre -- not very exciting, kind of flavorless, but pretty quick. What first revolutionized our thinking was Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. His excellent overview of the science behind each step of the bread baking process, combined with Pizza Napoletana recipe, instantly transformed our pizza from bland to rustic and tender and delicious.

However, we are tinkerers by nature. Over time we've personalized the recipe through some alterations and additions. We're pretty darn pleased with our crust, so much so that when Reinhart came out with a new book specifically about pizza, American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza, we tried several of his new crust recipes, shrugged, and went back to using our own version. (This is not to disparage the book, which is a delightful read and had an influence on some of our cheese and sauce choices.)

I like recipes that have lots of details about the ingredients and process, so I'll include a both the long chatty form and the "just the facts, ma'am" version.


Pizza Chez Darwin, Long Version

4 1/2 cups unbleached bread flour
Bread flour produces a more elastic dough than all-purpose, but you can use all-purpose and leave out the oil.

1 3/4 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons instant yeast (1 teaspoon yeast if planning to refrigerate dough overnight)
Reinhart calls for instant yeast because you don't have to soak it to activate it, and I quite agree -- you can buy it in bulk packages and it keeps a long time in the back of the fridge. If you only have active dry yeast, one packet ought to do it (2 1/4 tsp.), in which case you probably shouldn't hold it overnight.

2 tablespoons ground flax seed
At some point my mother bought me a package of ground flax seed, saying that it was good for me. I've no doubt that there are plenty of health benefits, but to my mind the real advantage of using flax seed is that it gives even dough that only has an hour or two to rise a deeper, nuttier flavor. You can do without it, of course, but then you wouldn't be making my recipe. Ground flax seed is stored in the fridge -- we stack it with the yeast.

1/4 cup olive oil

2 cups water

Semolina flour for dusting the peel
In terms of pizza prep, semolina is tops for allowing pizza to slide off a peel and giving a bit more flavor to the bottom of the crust. If you can't find semolina, you can use cornmeal, but it's an inferior substitute in every way -- too gritty and chunky.

Prepared pasta sauce
I've tried making my own sauce from canned crushed tomatoes and herbs and spices, but I confess that I don't really find the flavor that much different from using a jarred pasta sauce, which is more convenient. I usually choose the tomato and basil flavor, though a cheese variety also does well.

Mozzarella and parmesan cheese
I buy the big bags of pre-shredded mozzarella. Avoid those "fancy" shredded cheeses that are grated very fine -- the thicker shreds cover better with less, and don't get as greasy. Grating a bit of parmesan over the mozzarella gives a more intense flavor.

Toppings to suit
Some of our favorites: sliced kalamata olives, red onions, bell pepper, garlic, feta cheese or chevre, sun-dried tomatoes, and fresh basil from our garden. We usually eat pizza on Friday nights and don't put any meat on it, but if we make it for company we'll get some prosciutto. The girls don't necessarily eat all the toppings, but they pick them off and then there's more for the adults.

1. Stir together flour, salt, yeast, and flax seed in a big bowl. Add olive oil and water and stir with a spoon until the flour starts absorbing the liquid. Then knead by hand in the bowl for about five minutes.
This is a very wet sticky dough which will stick to your hand, but the wetness is what makes it nice and rustic. It should stick to the bottom of the bowl but not the sides.

2. Pour a bit of olive oil in the bowl and roll the dough around to coat both it and the sides of the bowl. Cover with plastic wrap.
Some recipes call for transferring the dough to a different oiled bowl, but why make more dishes? It doesn't hurt the dough to rise in the same bowl it's been mixed in -- just make sure your bowl is big enough. The dough is sticky enough that you'll need to scrape half of it off the bottom of the bowl and drizzle oil under it, then repeat on the other side. By that point it should move in enough of a mass that you can turn it to coat the top.

3. Allow dough to rise for several hours, or until roughly doubled, or refrigerate overnight. If the dough has been refrigerated, pull it out and let it warm up to room temperature, approximately two hours.
Refrigerating the dough retards fermenation enough to allow the enzymes more time to release more sugars from the starch. Then when the dough is "woken up", the yeast can feed on these otherwise unrealized sugars, making for a bread with a wonderful depth of flavor. It's well worth it -- if you can remember to do it. Frankly, I don't usually think about making pizza more than a few hours in advance. The addition of flax seed is an attempt to approximate the deeper, nuttier flavor of an aged dough without the aging, and I think it works pretty well.

4. Generously flour the counter, and transfer dough from bowl to counter. Sprinkle plenty of flour on top, then divide into four or six pieces. Gently shape each piece into a ball, then flatten into a disk. Flour again, cover, and allow to rest 30 minutes to 2 hours.
This dough is wet enough that I prefer to make six smaller pizzas rather than four larger ones. A longer rest is better, but if you're in a hurry it's not really going to hurt the pizza to rest for thirty minutes, or even less.

5. Place a baking stone on the bottom rack of your oven, and preheat to 500 degrees.
I rarely take my pizza stone out of my oven, except to rinse it once in a while -- I don't really have anywhere to store it anyway. Reinhart recommends 45 minutes of preheating, but I've gotten away with as few as fifteen. Perhaps you're sensing a last-minute theme to my cooking?

Raise the other rack to the top slot to give yourself more room to maneuver later.

6. Generously dust a pizza peel with semolina flour. Shape one ball of dough into an 9-12 inch crust, gently stretching the edges and tossing if you can. If the dough starts to tear, stick it back together, and allow it to rest for a moment before continuing.
Semolina = pizza goodness. This dough is wet enough to stick to the peel if it sits too long, so have all your topping ingredients ready before you start to shape. I can rarely get the dough to stretch more than 12 inches, but sometimes a longer rest will result in a larger pie. If the dough won't stretch for you freehand, you can place it on the peel and tug at it a bit, but you usually won't get much more stretch at that point, and you run the risk of having the dough absorbing the semolina and sticking to the peel when you try to put it in the oven.

7. Spoon some tomato sauce on the pizza and spread it around with the back of the spoon. Sprinkle mozzarella evenly atop sauce, and grate a bit of parmesan on top. Add toppings judiciously.
You don't have to overdo it on any of the toppings. Too much sauce will bubble over; too much mozzarella will run and get greasy; too much parmesan will burn. If you want to top it further, just add one or two other ingredients, but again, don't overdo it.

8. Slide topped pizza onto stone. Bake about 8 minutes.
Hold the peel at a gentle angle to the stone and give it a shake to slide the pizza onto the stone. Once the pizza makes contact with the stone, withdraw the peel smoothly. Sometimes the pizza will stick to the peel as you try to slide it on, and cheese and toppings will spill onto a stone. This is maddening, so I advise any bystanders to stay the hell back. You can generally salvage toppings by scraping them up quickly with a metal spatula and flipping them back onto the pizza. If the pizza refuses to leave the peel, give it up and close the oven door -- don't keep trying in the heat, or the dough will melt onto the peel. Put the peel back on the counter and work some more semolina under the pie. Sometimes a bit of assistance with the spatula will get the pizza onto the stone.

I find that eight minutes is about the right amount of time for the crust to get all golden, the cheese to melt and bubble, and the toppings to bake. Sometimes the first pizza will take a bit longer; sometimes subsequent pizzas will bake quicker. Keep checking, and take it out when it looks done to you.

9. Remove pizza from oven and allow to cool for a few moments before serving.
If you try to cut a pizza right out of the oven, the cheese goes everywhere.

As I'm generally setting up another pizza on the peel at this point, I use a baking rack to remove the pizza. Then it can cool on the rack before being transferred to a cutting board. Stove top burners also make nice cooling racks, though you'll have semolina all over your stove -- a small price to pay for good pizza.

10. Repeat steps 6-9 for remaining dough balls.
When we make pizza for dinner, we put two or three through before sitting down to eat, and then Darwin and I trade off preparing the remaining pizzas throughout dinner. Don't set up a new pizza on the peel more than three minutes before the one baking is scheduled to come out, or your dough will certainly stick. This makes plenty of pizza, but it stores nicely as leftovers.

Pizza Chez Darwin, Short Form

4 1/2 cups unbleached bread flour
1 3/4 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons instant yeast (1 teaspoon yeast if planning to refrigerate dough overnight)
2 tablespoons ground flax seed
1/4 cup olive oil
2 cups water
Semolina flour for dusting the peel
Prepared pasta sauce
Mozzarella and parmesan cheeses
Toppings to suit

1. Stir together flour, salt, yeast, and flax seed in a big bowl. Add olive oil and water and stir with a spoon until the flour starts absorbing the liquid. Then knead by hand in the bowl for about five minutes.


2. Pour a bit of olive oil in the bowl and roll the dough around to coat both it and the sides of the bowl. Cover with plastic wrap.


3. Allow dough to rise for several hours, or until roughly doubled, or refrigerate overnight. If the dough has been refrigerated, pull it out and let it warm up to room temperature, approximately two hours.

4. Generously flour the counter, and transfer dough from bowl to counter. Sprinkle plenty of flour on top, then divide into four or six pieces. Gently shape each piece into a ball, then flatten into a disk. Flour again, cover, and allow to rest 30 minutes to 2 hours.

5. Place a baking stone on the bottom rack of your oven, and preheat to 500 degrees.

6. Generously dust a pizza peel with semolina flour. Shape one ball of dough into an 9-12 inch crust, gently stretching the edges and tossing if you can. If the dough starts to tear, stick it back together, and allow it to rest for a moment before continuing.

7. Spoon some tomato sauce on the pizza and spread it around with the back of the spoon. Sprinkle mozzarella evenly atop sauce, and grate a bit of parmesan on top. Add toppings judiciously.

8. Slide topped pizza onto stone. Bake about 8 minutes.

9. Remove pizza from oven and allow to cool for a few moments before serving.

10. Repeat steps 6-9 for remaining dough balls.

Economics Thought Experiment for the Day

This is slated for a busy day, so my substantial post creation abilities are limited. However, I wanted to throw out for discussion a thought experiment that has been bumping around my head for a few weeks. (And yes, this is probably something of a political/economic Rorschach test.)

Picture, if you will, that in an effort to guarantee a minimum standard of living for all Americans, a law was passed guaranteeing a minimum income to every US citizen aged 18 or over. According to this law, if you are 18 or over, you will always make at least $24,000/yr. Hourly wages and work week are in no way fixed -- in fact, the minimum wage is abolished, but all your wages up to 2k/mo are collected as a payroll tax and sent to the Central Payroll Administration. Every citizen 18 or over, regardless of whether he or she works, receives a check for $1000 on the 1st and 15th of every month (generally conveniently deposited to the bank account of your choice.) If you work at a job that pays more than 24k, you receive the rest of your salary directly from your employer.

This means that single people are guaranteed an income of just over twice the poverty line, and couples have a combined income about twice the poverty line for a family of four.

My theory is, under such a system: unemployment would go up (a lot); mobility between economic classes would decrease; income inequality would increase and the productivity of those who did work would also increase. Why I can go into later if it seems non-obvious.

Thoughts?