Everyday Freethought

It is time for the April, 2013 dividend income report.

The total income for April, 2013 was $179.23. The income for 2013 through the end of April was $898.59.

The income for April, 2012 was $218.56, and the income for 2012 through the end of April was $1010.82.

I sold a few stocks that I thought were not growing their dividend quickly enough, or had gone up in price a lot. (Granted, in the past few months a lot of stocks have gone up in price.) So I have few stocks, but the income from the stocks I have kept has increased.

There was an interesting milestone: I got $43.01 from Kimberly-Clark. That is the most I have gotten for a regular dividend.

Here are the stocks:

• Automatic Data Processing: $24.18
• Coca-Cola Co: $29.22
• MDU Resources Group Inc: $9.25
• Chubb Corp: $9.36
• Kimberly-Clark: $43.01
• Illinois Tool Works: $19.73
• Piedmont Natural Gas Inc: $17.50
• Sysco Corp: $14.89
• RPM International Inc: $12.09

Image from Wikimedia

Here are a few more good quotes from around the web.

This is from The Immoral Minority: A convenient thing about their religion is that it always seems to give them someone to blame if their god has abandoned them – the gays, the atheists, etc. They don’t believe in that science stuff, that would raise too many questions about what they believe. Nah! Blame the homosexuals and unbelievers instead. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It is amazing to think about how much of the dogma of these religions is devoted to keeping the gravy train going for those in charge of them.

Here is one from the Economix blog on the New York Times: It seems as if the only people that matter in this country are corporations. They get to break the laws on environmental and workplace safety, treat employees like widgets, and pay virtually no taxes. And then they complain about the poor state of education, bad infrastructure, disloyal and lazy employees as if they had nothing to with these things. It must be nice to live in Wonderland all the time.

Ever since the Cold War ended, I have tried to keep an open mind about Russia and Russian people.

Heck, even during the Cold War, I tried to keep an open mind about the Russians. I was taught that “Russian” does not equal “Soviet”. But it was a messed up country before Communism, and it is a messed up country afterwards.

A lot of the Russians I have met here in the USA struck me as snakes. They are thieves who do not trust each other. There are a lot of countries that are dragged down a rathole by another country. The Russians have dragged themselves down a rathole again and again, and brought other countries with them to boot.

And then the Boston Marathon Bombing happened. Yes, those guys are Chechen, not Russian.

But there has been a lot written and said about Russia in the past week. Russian intelligence. Russian counter-terrorism. Russian this. Russian that.

And now Vladimir Putin is trying to say “We told you so.”

I generally avoid vulgarity, both on this blog and in general. This will be an exception.

Vlad: You and every Russian on this planet can go fuck yourselves.

You people are the cause of Chechen terrorism.

The Chechens were not radicalized until after they fought a war against Russia. They were radicalized even more after the second.

I am not clear why the second war happened. Some say that it may have been partially instigated by some Russian politicians to win elections. (Think of when the USA invaded Iraq: not too long after an election.)

The first war was a war for Chechen independence. Perhaps Russia should have just let Chechnya go. Russia did not fight a war to stop Ukraine from becoming independent.

Or Georgia. (They were already independent by the time the 2008 conflict happened.)

Or Estonia.

Or Lithuania.

Or Latvia.

Or Belarus.

Or Armenia.

Or Azerbaijan.

Or Moldova.

Or Khazakstan.

Or Kyrghizstan.

Or Tajikistan.

Or Turkmenistan.

Or Uzbekistan.

That’s 14, in case you weren’t counting.

I did some Googling. Some have speculated that Russia doesn’t want to let Chechnya go since they don’t want Russia to break up any further, or they want a buffer against Turkey.

Why should either of those be Chechnya’s problems?

First off, Russia is a large country, and Chechnya is a small country. Sometimes small countries next to large countries are not completely independent. The small country is usually influenced (if not controlled) by the larger country.

On the other hand, Russia might be wrong if they think that the Chechens would make allies with the Turks. It seems to me Chechens want to be independent of everyone. Plus, Turkey is part of NATO. I don’t think they would unnecessarily drag the rest of NATO into a conflict.

So it looks like Russia traded a bad problem for a worse problem. Not too smart.

And if they are sticking with Chechnya because of pride or to look strong, I say perhaps the world would be a better place if people tried to act intelligently instead of trying to look tough. Why should other people have to die so Vlad can think he’s a tough guy?

On top of that, one of the events of the past few decades that has done more to radicalize Islamists is the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. If that had not happened, perhaps 9/11 would not have happened. Perhaps the 2003 invasion of Iraq would not have happened. But the Russian invasion did give the world al-Queda.

Some people are now saying Putin has gone from being a “menacing autocrat” to a “far-sighted ally.” I think he is a “menacing autocrat” who is not only short-sighted, but is now gloating over the fact that other countries are dealing with his bad decisions.

I can see why GW Bush liked him.

Image from Wikipedia

The big news tonight is the explosions (probably bombs) that went off at the Boston Marathon this afternoon. I saw it on TV at work. There were a lot of responders running around, bystanders all over, it looked pretty chaotic.

Ever since 9/11/2001, there has been a lot of talk about disaster preparedness. I think that fitness is a big part of this. If something bad happens, you need to get away from it. I know this sounds obvious, but I think a lot of people forget about it.

In the 2000s, I was working for a large corporation in downtown Chicago. We were on the 18th floor. There were a few large people who complained about potential drills (which I don’t remember ever doing; guess who was in charge of coordinating the drills). They whined about having to go down 18 flights of stairs. Not whining about going up stairs against gravity. But whining about going down.

Going down is the easy way. If you cannot go down stairs without hurting yourself, you are in serious trouble.

In December, 2004 there was a fire in the LaSalle Bank Building in the Loop. I was still at work in the next building when that happened. It was all over the news. I thought one person died, but according to articles I found on the web, there were no deaths. But there could have been. A disaster can happen any time. I heard a lot of stories of people who were out of shape in the World Trade Center in NYC who thought they would not be able to make it.

Granted, if you are right in front of a bomb that goes off then you are hosed, even if you are a world-class decathlete. But being fit will help you recover from injury, and also help you stay calm while you get to safety. It could lessen your chance of injury so the responders could spend time on people who are more seriously injured. It will not make you invulnerable, but it will reduce your risk.

I know this is a bit rambling and incoherent. I have been planning for some time to write about this, but I felt that perhaps it was time to state this idea now. I may revisit it later.

So austerity has been in the news a lot lately. A lot of gold bugs, glibertarians and conservatives push it as a solution to a sluggish economy. I think that they push it because they are either jerks, pay little attention to reality or cause and effect, or some combination of the two. Sometimes these people are called “Austerians”, since they push austerity and subscribe to Austrian economics.

It sounds like a good idea: There is a lot of debt, so governments should cut back on spending. The problem is that nobody else is spending. Keynesians, like Paul Krugman, say that governments should spend more. Austerians think that Keynesians think that governments should always spend through roof, when in fact if you ask the Keynsians themselves they will tell you that they only favor deficits when nobody else spends money. I think Krugman portrays his side more accurately than the other side portrays him. Plus, like many, I am amazed at all the conservatives who only seem concerned about government spending when we have a Democratic president.

The Austerians have been predicting that we will have an economic disaster (hyperinflation, much higher unemployment, contracting GDP) for quite a while. Yet even though their predictions never seem to come true, they never change their predictions. As Krugman said of Rep Paul Ryan, his “complete lack of self-reflection is nonetheless something wondrous to behold.” Maybe things will get really bad. But a lot of people seem to predict disaster no matter what happens.

Then there is Zero Hedge, who think that always predicting the ever-imminent collapse is itself proof of knowledge. In one of their articles, they write “we are generally of the opinion that it is in any case impossible to decide or prove points of economic theory with the help of economic history”. That sounds like a fancy way of saying: We just make this stuff up.

A critic of Austrian economics is that it is “economics without math or models”. The Wikipedia page states that “Critics generally argue that Austrian economics lacks scientific rigor and rejects scientific methods and the use of empirical data in modelling economic behavior”
It seems to be true for whoever wrote that article. If you don’t use history to prove your economic theory, then how can you know if your theory is correct? Then he says that austerity can work because it is working in the Baltic nations. So maybe the just look at the present and ignore the past. But that still doesn’t seem too bright. You should base your predictions on as much data and knowledge as possible. And if you’re just going to make stuff up, why can’t other people do the same thing?

Maybe it’s working in the Baltics (which may be due to the fact that in some of those countries about 15% of the population has emigrated), but it’s not working in the UK. In fact, there is now talk of a triple-dip depression in the UK. Why is the austerity crowd taken seriously? How many times are they going to say, “Just wait! My predictions will come true any day now! Really!”

Austerity not working:

http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/01/26/britain-faring-worse-in-great-recession-than-they-did-during-great-depression/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/the-greater-depression/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/destructive-austerity-usa/

http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/martin-bashir-exposes-great-republican-hoax

http://www.americablog.com/2012/02/austerity-dragging-down-portugal-as.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/scott-walker-jobs-record-2012-5

http://www.americablog.com/2012/05/wsj-expresses-doubts-about-austerity.html

http://www.americablog.com/2012/05/austerity-hampered-uk-economy-shrunk.html

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/27/1094768/-The-Republicans-are-unfit-to-govern

http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/austerity-creates-highest-unemployment-

http://egbertowillies.com/2013/02/01/job-report-proves-austerity-failsgops-path-to-depression/

http://www.businessinsider.com/to-save-the-british-economy-david-cameron-will-have-to-do-the-hardest-thing-for-any-politician-to-do-2013-2

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/03/why-does-anyone-listen-to-paul-ryan.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/martin-wolf-on-david-cameron-2013-3

http://www.businessinsider.com/george-osbornes-comments-about-cyprus-2013-3

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-fast-the-economy-is-deteriorating-in-britain-2013-3

http://www.businessinsider.com/2013-uk-budget-2013-3

Another government falls due to austerity

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/02/20/uk-bulgaria-government-idUKBRE91J09H20130220

http://firedoglake.com/2013/03/22/howd-that-work-out-for-you/

http://www.businessinsider.com/uk-economic-protests-outside-prime-ministers-house-2013-3

Image generated by Memgenerator. And, yes, I now realize it should be “Y U No..” instead of “Y U Not..” Y U No give me brake?

Here is the dividend income report for March, 2013.

The dividend income for March, 2013 was $360.85. The income for 2013 through the end of March was $719.36.

The income for March, 2012 was $294.68, and the income for 2012 through the end of March was $792.26.

A lot of companies brought January and in some cases February dividends foward in December, so I think that the yearly comparisons will not be too good for a while. I also sold some stocks. Most of the stocks I sold pay out in April, so the April totals will be lower than last year.

Here are the stocks:

• AFLAC Inc: $18.01
• American States Water Co: $18.60
• Black Hills Corp: $12.64
• Bemis Co Inc: $16.21
• ConocoPhillips: $33.78
• Intel: $10.84
• Vectren Corp: $18.90
• Sonoco Products Co: $18.99
• Chevron: $19.41
• Emerson Electric Co: $21.11
• Questar Corp: $8.87
• Exxon Mobil Corp: $32.36
• Johnson & Johnson: $19.83
• 3M Co: $8.07
• Walgreen Co: $15.08
• Archer-Daniels-Midland Co: $11.82
• Dover Corp: $7.70
• Consolidated Edison Inc: $17.03
• Valspar Corp: $13.07
• RLI Corp: $17.04
• Eaton Corporation: $21.49

Image from Wikimedia

So I went to a meetup tonight. Another Celtic meetup.

It was hosted by a guy who is learning to speak Welsh. There was a woman there from Scotland who is learning Gaelic.

They talked about the myths and what historical knowledge was preserved in them. They also talked about how languages contain ways of thinking within them. In Gaelic, you are not hungry, nor do you have feelings. They are upon you. You are not simply from somewhere. You are of somewhere. The place is not a part of you. You are a part of the place.

In some languages. many words sound like other words. These homophones give clues to worldviews. I think they mentioned that many words, including the words for “knowledge” in Gaelic and Welsh, sound very close to the word for tree. For centuries trees was where communities gathered to make important decisions, and many druids, bards and keepers of knowledge lived near trees. Sometimes a line of poetry can have many layers of meaning.

When a land is conquered, the conquerors ban the language to remove people’s identity. Many times the place names remain, but people forget what they mean. It is a dark pool of knowledge. But I do not live in the land of my ancestors. I do not even live where I was born. All I can do is speak of these things clearly and plainly.

He also seemed to believe in reincarnation. And homeopathy. There seemed to be some woo.

But I realized that in a way a lot of the New Age stuff can be somewhat compatible with skepticism. The myths contain the views of people from previous times. Sometimes the words and stories are all that is left of entire worldviews. Perhaps the people preserving some of this knowledge are misinterpreting it, or taking viewpoints literally that have been superceded by scientific knowledge. But I do think there is knowledge there. And it is historical knowledge that should be preserved.

Perhaps if you don’t have a non-mechanistic worldview it can be hard to study some of this stuff. I don’t know how to resolve that contradiction.

Image from Wikimedia

A few days ago some GOP nutcase in Texas tweeted about oil and gas (see articles here  and here).

In addition to saying a few wacky things, it seems like a good time to write up some of the notes I have been accumulating.

The main tweet that got attention was “The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas come out.”

Unless you happen to be George W Bush, who poked a lot of holes in West Texas and managed to not find any oil.

He also made a few cracks about liberals and environmentalists being against science and technology. And human progress.

Let’s start with human progress. A lot of conservatives think that atheists should have fewer rights than Christians. And that other races should have less rights than white people. And that woman should have less rights than men. And that homosexuals should have less rights than straight people. And of course that actual people (human beings) should have less rights than paper people (corporations). Liberals think that the powerless should have the same rights as the powerful. That all people should have the right to vote. That everyone should have a say in their lives and their community. I like all the things that oil allows us to do, but “finding more places to drill more oil” is a pretty narrow definition of human progress.

But then again, conservatives seem to love narrow definitions.

He thinks that liberals and environmentalists hate technology? What about solar panels? They may not be much good at night, but they have come a long way in the past decade. And who has been for them? Liberals and environmentalists. And a lot of liberals are for nuclear power. Listen to “The Atomic Show” with Rod Adams. He has had quite a few pro-nuclear liberals on his show. I would say if you are pro-nuclear, you are pro-science. He’s a Navy man from the southeast, but he sounds pretty liberal to me sometimes. He thinks that we should build more nuclear power plants because he has been to poor countries and seen how people live without electricity. He also thinks it is the best solution for climate change.

Yes, climate change. That thing that a lot of conservatives say is not happening. (I love the fact that a scientist funded by the Koch Brothers to refute climate change came to the conclusion that it is happening. Recently, Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House requested hearings on climate change, but were denied by the Renutlican leadership. If conservatives love science, what’s the problem?

Conservatives have been wrong/lying about evolution for a long long long time. And let’s not forget about all the comments about sexual assault and pregnancy that were spoken by Republicans in the 2012 election. (I am thinking of the original comments, and the douibling down by many others in the conservative community.)

The only science and technology that conservatives seem to love is science and technology that helps the fossil fuel industries.

A lot of conservatives seem to think that oil, gas and coal are the only worthwhile forms of energy. I also see this in the media. A lot of people are still part of the “Drill, baby, drill” crowd. That is fine, as long as there is something left to drill. But for how long will that be the case? Yes, the earth is still producing oil,but we are using it faster than the earth is making it.

The DBD crowd says it makes no sense to drill out in the middle of the ocean when we have plenty of oil on federal land. I say: Go ahead, drill on that federal land. You will wind up back in the middle of the ocean in a few decades. If the DBD crowd isn’t thinking about non-fossil fuel energy sources now, why would they starting thinking about it in their Alternative Yellowstone Derrick Future?

Even with all the advances in shale oil and fracking, I still only see predictions about our oil and gas supply for about 150 years. The nuclear industry says we have enough uranium for 6,500 years. Apparently there is a lot of uranium in sea water. I am not a math genius, but 6,500 is a lot more than 150. Plus, I don’t think we should use oil and gas for cars or electricity. Let’s save them for fertilizer and plastic. I guess on a finite planet, eventually everything goes to zero. But some things are much closer to zero than others.

I don’t think we should put too much faith in fracking. People say that thanks to fracking, the peak oil debate is over. That might be a hasty conclusion. The depletion rates for these wells are pretty high. And they have high environmental costs. A lot of pro-oil people say that we will never hit peak oil because “technology and the market will find new ways to get more oil.”

I have two responses to that. First off, we cannot be so sure that there will always be new ways of extracting oil which get discovered when we need them to. A lot of the people raving about fracking did not see it coming ten years ago. If fracking and horizontal drilling were not around today, all that oil would still be in the ground, and our oil supplies would be in decline. Where would we be then? We may reach a point where the market does not find a way. This is related to a post by Tom Murphy, an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. He has a post on his blog “Do The Math” detailing a conversation he had with an economics professor about the fact that there are real physical limits to the amount of energy this planet can produce.

Secondly, there may very well be limits oil extraction. There may be technological limits, and there may be societal limits. Fracking and the Canadian tar sands are pretty controversial. Even if the petroleum industry finds more ways to extract oil, we may be reaching the limit of society’s tolerance for the environmental costs of oil extraction.

Image from Disney movie John Carter. Copyright owned by Disney, assumed allowed under fair use. John Carter is the name of my representative.

I went to the Austin Celtic Meetup on Saturday night, and a bunch of people sang and played some songs. I made the mistake of singing along to one, and the woman sitting next to me heard me. Over the course of the rest of the evening the word spread that I have a wonderful singing voice (which I doubt since I cannot remember the last time I sang). Now there is pressure for me to come to the next “ballad night” and sing.

Such is the way of it.

Here are a few thoughts inspired by the selection of a new pope. Who is probably not all that different than the last one.

Why is he elected by cardinals? This is another example of a thought that has occurred to me a few times lately: Why does god need people to do his work? Why can’t god put the name of the new pope into peoples’s heads? Why can’t every Catholic (or even every human being) just all simultaneously think, “I think the new pope should be so-and-so.” That would be pretty miraculous. I am guessing that most Catholics had never heard of this guy a week ago.

I saw an image on twitter recently of a woman holding a handwritten sign: “If I could I would end suffering. That’s the difference between me and god. I’m proud to be an atheist and ex-Muslim”. (If you are the woman who held this sign, you see this post and need a green card, contact me.)

To a certain degree, my idea and the sign are expressing the same idea as the question “Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?“  Why aren’t there more true miracles? Why doesn’t god do something that can’t be explained any other way? (Sunrises and smiling babies aren’t miracles. They are natural phenomena that happen all the time.) Billions of people thinking that someone they have never heard of before should be pope. I am sure a lot of people would become believers then.

One objection to this is that we would be “forced” to believe in god, that god wants us to have free will.

Let me trot out the usual objections: That this “free will” is extortion. It’s Mafia free will: If you make the choice god does not want you to make, then you are punished.

Another problem I have with the “free will” objection is that a lot of christians think the ideal state for them is to do whatever god wants them to, to do his will and not their own. To be a slave. To be an automaton. I have not heard (or read) them using those exact words, but that’s the general idea. It sounds Orwellian: “Freedom is obedience.”

If it is good for people to choose to be mindless robots, why is it bad for god to make people as robots from the beginning? Why didn’t god just create a small number of people to be true believers, and spare everybody else a lot of suffering?

If we had this worldwide telepathic event, I don’t think that we would be “forced” to believe. I hope that I would at least reconsider things if it happened. But I think a lot of people would still come up with alternative explanations or just deny any evidence. We have people who still deny evolution (even though they use medicine) and climate change (even though over 99% of the articles say it is happening). I bet that a lot of people would think that papal telepathy would just be satan trying to deceive people. There are a lot of evangelicals who think that the catholic church is an arm of satan.

According to the bibles I have read, Jesus did a lot of miracles. But not everyone was convinced that he was the son of god. If people were not “forced” to believe while the son of man supposedly walked amongst the living, why wouldn’t people choose to accept or deny god in the face of miracles today?