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Friday, June 06, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Fundamentals of Finance
- POINT 1: $20,000 = the average annual income of a high school grad
- POINT 2: $50,000 = the annual combined household income necessary for a family of four, buying their house. Used car(s). Spartan lifestyle.
- IMPLICATION 1: At some point, you're gonna need more than the $20,000 a high school diploma offers.
- CONCLUSION: Here's the "more" that you will need, choose one or more: College degree, Specialty School, Longevity, become a student of finance, start your own business.
- IMPLICATION 3: We must choose contentment; we must choose to live with less. This is the message of every sage from every culture throughout human history. Addendum to this implication: poverty is not inherently bad.
- PRINCIPLE 1: Your monthly mortgage payment should = 2% of your annual income. Your monthly car payment should = .2% of your annual income. Example: $50,000/year = $1,000 monthly mortgage payment and $100 monthly car payment.
- RATIONALE: Anything greater than those percentages is only to feed your ego, and, more importantly, it keeps you from living, meaning: it keeps you from making good financial decision (investing, paying with cash, etc); it keeps you from doing things that matter (vacations, travel, hobbies, giving, family)
Labels: money
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Michael Clayton
Here's my review:
Michael Clayton
Boom. Just. Like. That. Boom. That's how you do it. Everything. Story, characters, visual storytelling, music, acting. Take notes, kids.
The title works with this movie... because they made the movie about Michael Clayton, regardless of what the other characters were doing. Naming a movie after the lead character is tricky. It worked for Forrest Gump and... um... Juno. But it rarely works for blockbusters. Which is fine for this movie; it is not a blockbuster; the structure of the storytelling is too confusing for a blockbuster.
Michael Clayton
Boom. Just. Like. That. Boom. That's how you do it. Everything. Story, characters, visual storytelling, music, acting. Take notes, kids.
The title works with this movie... because they made the movie about Michael Clayton, regardless of what the other characters were doing. Naming a movie after the lead character is tricky. It worked for Forrest Gump and... um... Juno. But it rarely works for blockbusters. Which is fine for this movie; it is not a blockbuster; the structure of the storytelling is too confusing for a blockbuster.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Thoughts from Today
Add these earlier posts:
...the problem with arguing with Richard Dawkins is that he is right. More on that later.
The problem with Richard Dawkins' arguments, as I see it, are two problems and one imaginary: first, it is risky to declare current knowledge as final proof and absolute and as explaining(whatever I said earlier). Second, Reason must, as Emmanuel Kant explained, acknowledge that it cannot prove (or disprove) the metaphysical. The imaginary problem is (what I said earlier).
...he is blatantly, self-servingly (?) wrong about Einstein's beliefs. / He presumes to speak for Einstein. / He offers his own brand of revisionist history to suit his needs / to assist his cause. Yes, he does have a cause and has so as much himself (insert quote about combating/erraticating religion / making converts to atheism... which is to be expected and even appreciated. He must have a cause, as any passionate person must. Darwin himself said, "(insert quote re: must have an argument)
...after confessing it's limits, Reason must confess that a Supreme Being is somewhat reasonable.
-------------------------------
...the more knowledge I gain / information I learn, the more I value understanding. I am not impressed with game show contestants. And, if it were possible, am less impressed the more I understand.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Richard Dawkins, You're Going Down!
Sometimes you secretly want Richard Dawkins to be wrong, just because he's so smug. And arrogant. And insultory. Much like a lot of fundamentalists. Religious fundamentalists, that is. One might argue that Mr. Dawkins is a fundamentalist.
The problem with challenging Dawkins is that he is right. About science and reason.
It is possible--knowing human behavior, likely--that some people who follow Dawkins do so because Dawkins is right. Humans have an inexplicable need to be right... which also means for someone else to be wrong.
(see footnote on page 101 of In the Lake of the Woods)
The problem with Dawkins is that it is always risky to state any current discoveries as truth. We have no idea how the world will look in five years. We cannot even guess at what we will discover in 60 years.
Me: "I want to be the man that re-marries the physical and spiritual worlds."
Richard: "But there is no spiritual world."
M: "Belief in anything takes faith. And it doesn't take much faith to believe in the spiritual."
If you cannot believe in something produced by reconstruction, you may have nothing left to believe in.
If you start with the Biblical viewpoint, it makes as much sense as any other viewpoint. There are as many answers, and as many questions.
For example: if the world is as "young" as the Bible suggests, how do we explain stars that are so far away that they must have burned out millions of years ago? Unless such stars are purely hypothetical.
Re-marrying the spiritual and the physical is (arguably) a more human endeavor than "killing" God or spiritual things.
The Spiritual is more than the release of emotion in a church service.
My idea that we cannot prove God or it would greatly limit free will. It would make free will not as free. Yes, you would still be able to chose to disbelieve (or believe if disproved), but not really.
Dawkins has a palpable dislike, or disgust, for people who have not joined his beliefs. And for those who partially join. There is room for only one belief in Dawkins' beliefs. He would argue that what he believes is not based on belief, and for much of it, he'd be correct. But until everything is known, belief is necessary.
His animosity toward the religious is not unique to him, nor is it new, nor is it a position held only by the learned. There are several explanations for such animosity: it can be an understandable frustration with unreasonable, bull-headed
zealots. Plato said that those still in the cave would resist learning. But it is often a defiance toward God or the idea of God.--a deep (spiritual) rebellion. Which also aligns with Plato's claims, and which the Bible, conveniently, predicted.
However, Dawkins does not sound like a Philosopher-King. This perspective could be the bias of my beliefs, but Dawkins comes across as someone supremely knowledgable about science and someone whose thinking is most logical, but not as someone enlightened. He is missing a human-ness. A compassion. Which, of course, does nothing to his arguments; thankfully. If personality deficiencies affected the validity of our arguments, we all would be in trouble. All that it means, perhaps, is that Dawkins is unfit (or not yet fit), by Plato's definition to be a Philosopher-King.
--------------------
I'm not sure why science insists that their can be no other / that nothing else dare exist. Science allows nothing else. But why? Kant's Critique of Pure Reason applies here.
Here's a simple example: sin. Some human behaviors can be explained no other way. Throughout history and throughout the world, there are dark places and terrifying deeds
The problem with challenging Dawkins is that he is right. About science and reason.
It is possible--knowing human behavior, likely--that some people who follow Dawkins do so because Dawkins is right. Humans have an inexplicable need to be right... which also means for someone else to be wrong.
(see footnote on page 101 of In the Lake of the Woods)
The problem with Dawkins is that it is always risky to state any current discoveries as truth. We have no idea how the world will look in five years. We cannot even guess at what we will discover in 60 years.
Me: "I want to be the man that re-marries the physical and spiritual worlds."
Richard: "But there is no spiritual world."
M: "Belief in anything takes faith. And it doesn't take much faith to believe in the spiritual."
If you cannot believe in something produced by reconstruction, you may have nothing left to believe in.
If you start with the Biblical viewpoint, it makes as much sense as any other viewpoint. There are as many answers, and as many questions.
For example: if the world is as "young" as the Bible suggests, how do we explain stars that are so far away that they must have burned out millions of years ago? Unless such stars are purely hypothetical.
Re-marrying the spiritual and the physical is (arguably) a more human endeavor than "killing" God or spiritual things.
The Spiritual is more than the release of emotion in a church service.
My idea that we cannot prove God or it would greatly limit free will. It would make free will not as free. Yes, you would still be able to chose to disbelieve (or believe if disproved), but not really.
Dawkins has a palpable dislike, or disgust, for people who have not joined his beliefs. And for those who partially join. There is room for only one belief in Dawkins' beliefs. He would argue that what he believes is not based on belief, and for much of it, he'd be correct. But until everything is known, belief is necessary.
His animosity toward the religious is not unique to him, nor is it new, nor is it a position held only by the learned. There are several explanations for such animosity: it can be an understandable frustration with unreasonable, bull-headed
zealots. Plato said that those still in the cave would resist learning. But it is often a defiance toward God or the idea of God.--a deep (spiritual) rebellion. Which also aligns with Plato's claims, and which the Bible, conveniently, predicted.
However, Dawkins does not sound like a Philosopher-King. This perspective could be the bias of my beliefs, but Dawkins comes across as someone supremely knowledgable about science and someone whose thinking is most logical, but not as someone enlightened. He is missing a human-ness. A compassion. Which, of course, does nothing to his arguments; thankfully. If personality deficiencies affected the validity of our arguments, we all would be in trouble. All that it means, perhaps, is that Dawkins is unfit (or not yet fit), by Plato's definition to be a Philosopher-King.
--------------------
I'm not sure why science insists that their can be no other / that nothing else dare exist. Science allows nothing else. But why? Kant's Critique of Pure Reason applies here.
Here's a simple example: sin. Some human behaviors can be explained no other way. Throughout history and throughout the world, there are dark places and terrifying deeds
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
My Journey With Evolution
That all natural processes have scientific explanations does in no way disprove the spiritual.
...
I disbelieved strongly. I spoke out against it, the way religious people do: full of fervor but no fact.
I looked into it. Read: (insert online readings)
I had a crisis of faith. Both the Bible and Evolution cannot be true. Because the Bible makes quite a to-do about the creation of things.
I stated that Evolution was true to a couple who are friends. The wife seemed genuinely baffled. "So we really came from monkeys"
And then I had the crisis of the undoing of my crisis. Wait. Then, as before, the more I thought about Evolution the less it seemed reasonable. It seemed to explain natural processes and most behaviors. But it failed completely to explain some behaviors and origins, and, failing to explain origins, it is difficult to use it to explain much of what it claims to explain, such as: diversity of species.
One difficulty of evolution is the age it claims for the solar system. Maybe it is simply difficult for unlearned minds to believe. Or maybe it is so difficult that it is impossible.
The fossil problem: fossils are incontrovertable.
(from Time mag. letter to editor)
Humans are developed far beyond our function.
Another problem with evolution is that we don't see it... uh, kinda like that other theory.
The question is: where did life come from? We don't know. We may find the answer in fact-based, naturalistic discovery.
Evolution is not a stand-in for science. Science is not a step-by-step process to truth.
If an explanation of origin is necessary to understand evolution, then you will never understand it.
...
One of the first things you have to believe about the God of the Bible--if you believe--is that he would build a world (or universe) that is capable of continuing without constant supernatural intervention.
Starting from that point, everything in the universe fits: of course, this is just the kind of universe that kind of being could and would create. The processes, the interconnectedness and interdependancy between species... all that we have discovered called science--that we will always be discovering, all of it fits. All of the things that evolution explains can be as logically explained with Creation. Everything but the Creator.
We don't see God; we don't see evolution. We can't see the motivating force. We don't know the origin.
I'm not sure why we insist that everything must have come from something else. Why do we insist on that being the only explanation? We see similarities, but does that mean one came from another? For our world, similarities always mean created... by a creator. No one would ever, observing two differently-sized pieces of paper, think that one came from the other.
????
So, adaptation makes sense and is provable. But doesn't that point to an all-knowing creator as readily as it points to evolution?
...
There is as much hard evidence for God beginning things as there is for any other theory of beginnings.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Let Go and Fall
I'm waiting, waiting for you to let go and fall.
But you never have and you never do.
And it's what you need most
But you never have and you never do.
And it's what you need most
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