The Olympics

I ended up watching much more of the Olympics than I ever expected (part of it might be because I got an HDTV in the middle of the Games) I can't remember the last time I ever watched consecutive days of the Olympics, much less several hours a night.

That said, I come away quite ambivalent about the event. James Fallows, a journalist for The Atlantic Monthly that I highly respect who in the midst of a several years long stint in China, said on The News Hour that they were good for China and the world because they made China feel good. He believes that a confident China is a good neighbor and world citizen, and the times when China has caused the most problems for the rest of the world has been when they feel they have lost face.

One of the sports columnist from The Washington Post, Thomas Boswell, has a less historical perspective that still resonates with me. His wrap-up column on the Olympics ends this way.

In decades at The Post, this is the first event I've covered at which I was certain that the main point of the exercise was to co-opt the Western media, including NBC, with a splendidly pretty, sparsely attended, completely controlled sports event inside a quasi-military compound. We had little alternative but to be a conduit for happy-Olympics, progressive-China propaganda. I suspect it worked.

Everything that met my eye at every venue was perfect. Everybody smiled. Everybody pretended to speak English. Until you got past "hello." Everyone was helpful until you went one inch past where you were supposed to go. Then, arms sprang out to stop you. Everywhere you went, even alone at 2 a.m., you felt completely safe. Because every hundred feet there were a pair of guards -- at attention in the middle of the night.

As sports spectacles go, I've never seen one more efficiently or soullessly executed than this one. I have no idea where they put the real people for 17 days, but I felt like Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show." Where's Ed Harris saying: "Truman is going to turn left on Main Street: Cue the smiling girl and the hearty hot dog vendor."

The family that's always perfect in public is the one you worry about. What's going on under the surface? The complete lack of dissent here -- not one person could get a permit to use the designated Olympic "protest area," though some were detained for trying -- has an eloquence of its own.

As for the Chinese people, I like them a lot. But they've been through so many purges and plagues, cultural revolutions and great leaps forward, followed by the whipsaw from socialism to "rich is good," that I think they're happy to toe the societal line. This decade, it's entrepreneurial capitalism -- hyper-boom phase. We'll see how they like the bust part. It's probably coming.

China has, by every account, made incredible material progress in the last 25 years. This city, merely one of several in China that now rivals New York and Los Angeles for size and wealth, isn't going to do anything but continue to grow. The 21st century will, no doubt, be a vast improvement on the last few awful ones here.

Nonetheless, I'll leave here more concerned about China's future, and its impact on those around it, than the future of the United States. Part of that is probably xenophobia, though I've spent a lifetime repeating, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Some of it, however, is my suspicion that the cycles of capitalism and the inflexibility of authoritarian regimes make for a spectacularly happy marriage in the virtuous-cycle good times, but perhaps an ugly partnership in the inevitable bad periods.

China got aboard the free-market love train at roughly the time -- in the early 1980s -- that worldwide capitalism hit one of its long secular hot streaks that frequently last 15 to 20 years. Money couldn't wait to invest itself here. Let's see how the Party enjoys its first secular bear market.

Politics

With the political conventions beginning this week, the Presidential campaign is entering the phase when the general public starts to pay attention. I have not written about politics nearly as much as I've been thinking about it, but I image as we get closer to November I'll be writing more of those thoughts here.

The New York Times Magazine published a great article about Obama's economic policy today. It's long, but worth reading. My short summary will do no justice to Obama's approach, but here it goes anyway.

“The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production,” Obama told me. “And I also think that there is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally.” But, he continued, “there are certain things the market doesn’t automatically do.”

When an Obama presidency would interfere in the market, the above quote will provide guidance. Where does he think the market fails? The fact that over the past couple of decades workers have not benefited from the great gains in efficiency and wealth. The fact that the market is fundamentally incapable to dealing with a non-commodity like health care. The fact that the big business, like the oil industry or banking or big pharma, rely on huge government susbsidies and knowledge that the government will bail them out if they screw up. The fact that the market does not reflect the true costs, both economic and environmental, of a carbon-based energy policy.

This article mention that Tax Policy Center's analysis and comparison of Obama's and McCain's tax plans. I don't know why Obama has not been focused on this, but I hope it is a major part of his campaign following the convention for purely political reasons. Much of the country believes that McCain is a tax cutter and Obama is a tax raiser. They think that their tax bill will be smaller under McCain than under Obama. This only true for the top 20% of the country. For the vast majority of us, McCain's proposal will leave up with a higher tax burden than Obama. For 80% of the country, Obama is the tax cutter.

Be Okay

At the kitchen where I work, we listen to satellite radio. There is AAA station that we all like, and it actually plays many of the artists that are in my iTunes playlists, but they so make some weird choices. They play Bruce Cockburn, but most of the time the Cockburn song they play is from 1984, "If I Had A Rocket Launcher." Either they are trying to make a political statement or they never listened to his 9 more recent albums. And even though one of the benefits from satellite radio is suppose to be their much broader playlist than traditional radio, this station occasionally gets stuck in a rut.

A couple of weeks ago it was a John Mellencamp rut. They played two straight weeks of Melloncamp. That's right, 14 days, from the John Cougar days, then the John Cougar Mellencamp days, and finally the John Mellencamp days. They did a Sheryl Crow week earlier in the year, but at least that week was largely Crow acting as the DJ and choosing other artist's music to play. I could tolerate Crow the DJ, but two weeks of Mellencamp is two weeks too many.

This past week, the rut they fell into was with one song. I heard the same song, "Be Okay," three times in the same day. It was catchy and I could not get the chorus ("I just want to be okay, be okay, be okay, I just want to be okay...) out of my head. That night I tried to find out more about the song and discovered that it was recorded by Ingrid Michaelson.

Michaelson is one of those indie artist who is experimenting with new ways to make a living in the music world. Early on, she relied on her myspace page as well as lots of performance in coffeeshops. Her first big break was when three of her songs were used on "Grey's Anatomy" (a guilty pleasure of mine) The producers of "Grey's Anatomy" asked her to write a song specifically for the show, and it was prominently played during closing moments of the 2007 season finale. Last fall, Old Navy used one of her songs ("The Way I Am") in a commercial.

It used to be that music fans worries about their favorite arists, like Bob Dylan or The Who, "selling out." Today, in part to avoid the artistic compromises that come from signing with a music label, even indie artists are using TV shows and commercials as a way to spread their music. It has worked for Michaelson.

All of this post is mostly an excuse to post this video of Michaelson displaying her knowledge of pop culture from the year 1990. I bet her concerts are fun.

Polls

From now until election day in November, we will be inundated with polling data. The unfortunate thing is that much of that data tells us very little of significance. One of the reasons for this is that the media rarely reports the intensity of the opinion being expressed by those being polled. Remember how prior to the Iraqi invasion, there were media reports that a majority of Americans were in favor of going to war. David Moore, a former Vice President of the Gallup Organization and Managing Editor of the Gallup Poll, explains why it is not that simple while he is guest blogging at The Washington Monthly.

In a February 2003 poll, Gallup asked a standard version of the question that all the other pollsters asked, and like the other polls, found a substantial majority in favor of the war — 59 percent to 38 percent, a 21-point margin. Only 3 percent said they did not have an opinion. However, as part of a special experiment which I helped design (as a senior editor of the Gallup Poll), the standard question was followed up with another, which essentially asked if people really cared that their opinions might prevail. And the results here revealed a very different public from the one that has come to dominate conventional wisdom.

To people who said they favored the war, we asked if they would be upset if the government did not send troops to Iraq. And to people who opposed the war, we asked if they would be upset if the government did send troops. Just over half of the supposed supporters and a fifth of the opponents said they would not be upset if their opinions were ignored.

The net result: Only 29 percent of Americans supported the war and said they would be upset if it didn't come about, while 30 percent were opposed to the war and said they would be upset if it did occur. Another 38 percent, who had just expressed an opinion either for or against the proposed invasion, said they would not be upset if the government did the opposite of what they had just opined. Add to this number the 3 percent who initially expressed no opinion, and that makes 41 percent who didn't care one way or the other.

What this experiment revealed was that instead of a war-hungry public, Americans were evenly divided over whether to go to war — three in ten in favor, three in ten opposed, with a plurality willing to do whatever the political leaders thought best.

There is a similar phenomenon is the polls that are so widely reported about the election. Moore explains that almost every poll about the 2008 presidential election asks who the respondent would vote for if the election were held today. Of course, the election is not going to be held today. Many people know today who they will vote for in November, but many simply have not thought about the election very closely. They answer the pollster's question, but they don't considered themselves committed to any particular candidate. Moore talks about what the latest CBS News Poll tells us about the size of this group of voters.

The CBS poll also asks the standard polling industry's forced-choice question, who would you vote for it the election were held today, and it found 13 percent undecided. But the poll followed up the standard question by asking whether voters who had selected a candidate had made up their minds, "or is it still too early to say for sure?" The results of that question show 39 percent of voters still uncommitted, three times the original number CBS found, and almost eight times what the Gallup tracking poll reports.

If 39% of voters are still undecided, it sheds a different light on the fact that Obama has maintained about a 5% lead over McCain ever since Clinton conceded the primary.

Running Update

My running update is that I have not been running much. I did not exercise much while Monte was in town, and since then I have been riding my bike. Last week I rode with Greg and Peggie one night, by myself another (after which I figured out how to patch an inner tube) and then yesterday Greg and I went on a long ride. This afternoon I rode for about 2 hours.

I do want to keep up with the running. I think that doing a couple of runs and a couple of bike rides a week would be a nice balance.

Tattoo

As I mentioned a few days ago, I was recently looking for pictures of food related tattoos. I have thought about getting a tattoo for years, but last summer decided that it was time. I was in the midst of some major life changes and thought that a tattoo might be one way to mark, literally, both what was new in my life and what was consistent.

I wanted an image that would tie my previous church-based career with the new food-based direction I was taking. The connection is closer than it might appear at first glance. Food images are all over the Bible. Focusing just on the New Testament, there is Jesus' first miracle of turning water into wine at a wedding feast, feeding the crowds with the fish and the loaves, the Last Supper, and Jesus' post-resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus when the disciples don't recognize him until he breaks bread. One of the most consistent images of heaven throughout the Bible is that of a great feast.

These images pop up so often for a reason. Eating with another person is incredibly important. It is hard to imagine the most important occasions in life, like weddings and funerals, without food being present. Kids whose families eat dinner together on a regular basis are socially and emotionally healthier than kids whose families do not eat together. In my time doing youth ministry, I experienced how important eating together is for teenagers to form a sense of community. Eating together, somehow, opens us up to what God wants to happen in our relationships.

For me, the move to feeding people physically is not far removed from putting them into a position to be fed spiritually. But coming up with the right image to capture all that was tough. I was going to have this tattoo for the rest of my life, so I wanted to be sure about it.

I played around with images of bread and wine, but was never really happy with what I came up with. Something about that just did not seem right. At the Easter Vigil this spring, the stating of the cultural mandate (for more about what this "cultural mandate" is all about, check this out) from the Genesis reading jumped out to me. "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it..." The idea that part of the reason for our existence on earth is to be fruitful (obviously this is not limited to having lots of children) has long been an important part of what it means to me to be a Christian.

There are all kinds of things that we encounter in our lives that are full of potential (artistic talent, tomato seeds, ideas about how to build a house) but need to be cultivated by our active involvement. One of the things I love about cooking is finding an incredible ingredient, like a Copper River Salmon, and figuring out how to bring forth every bit of its potential to be an amazing meal. That's one way to put the cultural mandate into action.

So back to the tattoo. The command to "be fruitful" got me thinking about images again. I couldn't exactly figure how a tattoo of a seed would look any different from a freckle, and when I searched for images of a tattoo of an apple, most of what I found was people who had tattooed themselves with the Apple Computer logo. I'm writing this on my MacBook and I own 2 iPods, but there was no way I was going to put something that looks like the logo of a company, even one that I like as much as Apple, on my body.

Then I returned to the idea of bread and wine, the most significant food images in Christendom. The processes of turning wheat into bread and grapes into wine are both incredibly simple, yet in the hands of great artists they end up with incredibly complex flavors and textures. Master bakers and winemakers reflect God's creativity when they are fruitful with their talent and with the fruit of the fields.

I knew I had my image after discussing this with my sister and brother-in-law. Monte pointed out that the grain of wheat must be cracked and the grape must be crushed for them to reach their potential. Cracked and crushed are not bad descriptions of the past two years of my life. One image that refers to my old life, my new life, and hints at the journey from the old to the new. Perfect.

I found some pictures online, took them to several tattoo parlors until I found an artist that felt "right," had him combine the pictures into one unified image, and walked away with this on my left calf.

91% Male

All the cool blogs today have been linking to this nifty tool that uses your web browsing history and makes a prediction as to your gender. Since I want to be one of the cool blogs, too, I just had to join in. According to my history (I have Firefox set to keep 90 days of history), there is a 91% likelihood that I am male.

What the author of this little javascript script did was have your browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10,000 sites you have visited and examined the male to female ratio of the users of those sites. Basically, the websites I visit are mostly read by men (news, politics, sports were the one with the highest ratio) The places I visited that are mostly read by women were shopping sites (amazon, various airline sites, etc)

Food Blog

I've been reading Chef Matt's blog, Deglazed, since the end of last year. I stumbled across it when I was looking for pictures of food related tattoos (this is what I found at his blog). Matt had always been an amateur cook with a career as a web designer when he decided to take the plunge of attending cooking school and working towards becoming a professional chef. He also happens to be a good writer.

The reason for this post is that Chef Matt commented on my Dr. Horrible post (if you didn't watch Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, you can still download it on iTunes) I wanted to thank him publicly for my new favorite Margarita Recipe. His margarita is definitely hardcore - I don't think I've ever had a drink that was as tart as this one. I sometimes make some modification; instead of TripleSec, I've substituted a few drops of orange oil and a shot of my limoncello. Next time you are in the mood for a margarita, give Chef Matt's recipe a try. If you don't think you will like an extremely tart margarita, just add a bit of a simple syrup.

It's Been a Long Time

Once you stop posting to your blog on a daily basis, it's tough to start up again. I hope to get back to posting on a regular basis.


It was great to have Monte, Matt, and Finn in town for about a week. We unloaded a moving truck's worth of their stuff into my parent's basement, ate a lot of good food, watched the Finn channel, and hung out. Of course, we needed to take some family pictures before they started their great adventure.

They landed in Hong Kong over the weekend, and apparently Finn quite content on the flight. We talked over Skype after they got to their hotel. The Skype connection was amazing, even better than when I've used Skype to talk to friends in the US. The video and audio were totally in sync. The only problem we had was when Matt's computer went to sleep.