Negative Railroad

I was a subscriber to the daily Christian Science Monitor. After a couple of trials, I judged their reporting to be from a neutral viewpoint. Religion appeared in every issue, but did not color the news. The coverage, although U.S.-centered was truly global. And the lighter features were usually interesting (they had great, brief film reviews).

My full-time subscription began around the time the world was preparing to invade Iraq in 2003. I let it lapse after a couple of years because I wasn’t finding the time to read all the coverage they packed into a daily paper. I still followed the website regularly (it’s offered in NRR’s news rack).

Minnesota Vikings running back Chester Taylor has signed a four-year deal with the Chicago Bears. Taylor struck me as an ideal all-around back. He may not have any single superstar skill, but he can run, catch and block effectively in any situation. As I’ve said hundreds of times as everyone else seemed obsessed with Adrian Peterson, there’s nothing wrong with Chester Taylor.

I wish him the best, and hope he earns the starting job with the Bears. From the StarTribune story, the Vikings wanted to keep him, but the Bears were willing to pay millions more. There is apparently no ill will on either side.

I was curious how atheists determine right and wrong. Without a command from G-d, isn’t good and evil just a matter of taste?

The google led me to a wealth of argument and testimony. Although they seem to spend far too much time berating non-atheists (mostly Christians), I saw an essential similarity in all the discussion.

Good, or right conduct, works out to be the same as what the faithful subscribe to. By culture and tradition, or for species survival, atheist morality seems to be rooted in the Golden Rule: Do on to others as you would have them do on to you.

The atheists seem very proud that they can reason their way to this shared conception without invoking a deity. They assure the audience that rape and murder are still wrong, and atheism is not (necessarily) just nihilistic hedonism. There are problems in the arguments I saw, but I expect those are issues of logical formality that somebody from Team Atheist has worked out.

As righties and lefties argue about the merits of “drill, baby, drill”, the domestic energy industry has quietly been drilling here, now. For natural gas:

production hit a new record level in 2009, breaking the previous record set in 2008. The 2.2% increase in 2009 follows increases of 4.4% in 2008, 4.8% in 2007, and 0.33% in 2006, bringing last year's production to a level 12.2% above the output in 2006.

This surge in domestic natural gas production over the last three years has enabled the United States to overtake Russia as the world's No. 1 producer of natural gas, and is all due to advanced drilling methods now being used to drill for gas through a type of rock known as shale.

Trains are pretty impressive beasts. But we saw a while back that snow can stop them in their tracks.

What happens when a tornado and a freight train cross paths?

Nature - 2 ; Trains - 0.

I’ve been watching a replay of last Friday’s health care forum. Lefty Senator Jay Rockefeller has been blathering about evil insurers cancelling coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Separate from debating the truth of the characterization, is this really a big problem?

I figure the Failed Obama Administration™’s own website, HealthReform.gov, should provide data well-suited to support a perspective that this practice, called “recission”, is a widespread horror:

A recent Congressional investigation into this practice found nearly 20,000 rescissions from three large insurers over five years, saving them $300 million in medical claims – $300 million that instead had to come out of the pockets of people who thought they were insured, or became bad debt for health care providers.

(please click image—nothing bad will should happen)

A vintage ad from NRR’s left sidebar caught my eye:

From the ad copy, we learn that, in 1956, buying a week’s worth of food at one time and storing it at home was a new trend. It was clearly seen as a convenience to have all the food at hand. In the 50s, the big benefit was reducing the time spent making trips to the grocer. Today we might include saving the energy and pollution those trips generate, too.

This work-saving (and planet-saving) appliance, available in decorator colors, was priced at $229.95. In today’s dollars, that’s $1,852.89.

Mayor Dave Bing deserves some credit for acknowledging economic reality:

The city plans to save some neighborhoods and encourage residents to move from others, he said.

"If we don't do it, you know this whole city is going to go down. I'm hopeful people will understand that," Bing said. "If we can incentivize some of those folks that are in those desolate areas, they can get a better situation."

"If they stay where they are I absolutely cannot give them all the services they require."

Cities exist because the benefits of having people close together outweigh the costs of crowding. In today’s Detroit, there is not so much crowding:

The popular tone seems to be that banks are not lending to small businesses. There are counter-examples, and bankers insist they are making loans to those who can offer both some decent collateral and a reasonable prospect of making payments. I conclude that the problem—if it is a problem—is that banks have tightened their underwriting standards.

Banks have to do this because they can’t afford more bad loans. The Federal Reserve requires bankers to hold some small fraction of real assets against all the promises of payment (loans) they hold.

Maxed Out Mama, who always looks deep into the data, sees cause for optimism:

If one tried, one could make a case that the economy will continue decent growth in 2010, or one could make the case that the economy would subside once more in the later part of 2010. There are indications both ways. Usually, that is an encouraging sign.

I won't try to make any case. In my view this is somewhat fragile and the final trajectory for 2010 depends most on government policy and fuel prices (which will control a lot about spending power).

Income tax withholdings (WIET) are up compared to this period last year. But, last year was horrible. It appears Main Street is no longer collapsing. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Main Street is still in a fragile condition:

Assistant Village Idiot considers himself to have a skeptical nature:

Progressives, freethinkers, 60's liberals, granolas, and alternative medicine adherents think they agree with me on this skeptical approach, seeing themselves as the ones willing to challenge received wisdom. (There is overlap among those groups, but folks usually tend to specialise in one skepticism.)

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 67% (pdf) of owner-occupied American homes have mortgages against them. According the the Mortgage Bankers Association, 15.02% of those mortgages are at least one payment late. That works out to be 10%, a record high.

Since 3.63% of mortgages are only one payment behind, that leaves about 11.4% of mortgage holders (7.6% of all homes) who can’t just be dismissed as having lost a payment slip.

In the third quarter of 2009, 1.2% of mortgages began foreclosure. That’s “only” .8% of all homes, and “just” in one quarter. Multiplying by four quarters puts 3.2% of all owner-occupieds in foreclosure. How many on your block?

With two recent murderous crazies in the news, expect each to be linked to Tea Partiers, conservatives and/or anything lefty culture finds disturbing. It will become part of the informal codespeak of lefties around the country. Never mind the facts, as anyone who opposes the lefty narrative and leftoid agenda is, by definition, exactly the kind of nutjob who would fly an airplane into a building.

Since reason and verifiable fact do not matter much in the Age of Obama, I enter this as counter evidence about who the real criminals in the U.S. voted for:

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