Drink Upstream

You Just Can't Make This Up

John McCain on health care:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking , would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Original article (I haven't read it all yet).

Pardon my language....

but this shit makes my head want to explode.

Look towards Garland, if you see smoke, you can safely assume I've lost my lid.

Boo.

Sermon Crafting (Deux?)

My next "preaching" assignment (though I don't like calling it "preaching") is in a few short weeks, which means it's time for me to start figuring it out.

We're in the middle of a ten-week series we've entitled "Dead Ends and U-Turns."  We're looking at specific stories from throughout the whole Bible where God's people hit what we've been calling a "dead-end moment," and we're looking at the ways God worked in, amongst, and through God's people to cause a U-Turn in their lives, their situations, and their worlds.  And we're asking, "What similar dead ends do we find ourselves at, and what U-Turn might we be called to make?"  Each week has a scripture (or two) and a theme of sorts.

October 12 will find us with Exodus 17:1-2, discussing Obedience.  Go read the passage, then continue reading.

Bruuuuuuce!

I've recently become quite enamored with Bruce Reyes-Chows "Moderator Blog".  For those that aren't aware, Bruce is the most recently elected Moderator of the General Assembly for PCUSA.  For those of you who aren't PCUSA polity wonks, go here for some more info on what a this Moderator thing is all about.

I know that I'm a little late on the Bruce bandwagon (not the only Bruce I'm late to the party for, but that's another post), but summer was hella busy and better late than never.  While I don't agree with the guy all the time, I certainly can't fault his effort to use technology to get out amongst the denomination.  He's active in blogs, podcasts, and Facebook....it's all wonderfully post-modern.

I was checking out his blog this morning, and I really enjoyed his most recent post.  I think you folks will to.

Read. Enjoy. Comment.

Post-sermon Crash

So, here it is... the fruits of the last two weeks of sermon crafting. Arguably my most Marxist sermon. Thanks for to those who were reading along.

Eleventh Hour

Doing the Hard Part

A conversation I just observed:

Project Manager: Have you finished building that new car yet?

Engineer: Yeah.  It's basically done.

Project Manager:  Well, there's no emergency brake.  And the fuel gauge doesn't work.  And you can't replace the air filter - it's super-glued in.  And the duct tape that's sealing the exhaust system isn't going to last long.  And there's nothing here to keep the driver from shifting to reverse while they're going forward at 90mph.

Engineer: Yeah.  But it starts and got me around the test track once.

Making things work is the easy part of my job.  Making them work right and fail gracefully is the hard part.

Don't tell me that the job is basically done when the hard part is still undone.

Sermon Crafting

I still tremble a bit as I climb the steps leading to the pulpit. Just behind the knees, a shake that the robe--thank God--hides from the people of the pews. It is a feeling far beyond the fear of public speaking that others talk about. I'm used to standing in front of a crowd, reading a carefully studied passage or telling a practiced story. I've done it many a time as lector. But preaching is different. When preaching, I'm presenting a shard of my own faith, full of its mistakes and holes and weaknesses. And there they sit, spread out among the pews, the Church Expectant. While I babble, the congregation stares forward with expressions that run the gambit from "Go ahead: impress me" to "Aw, he's trying so hard".

While in the pulpit, my internal editor (we'll call him Ed) chugs along, reviewing the text, evaluating and discarding changes on the spot. Ed, mind you, has been doing this work for the whole week preceding and he has kept me up late Saturday night to make me rewrite a line, a paragraph, a page--ten or fifteen times. The text of the sermon never actually sits on the page, but in my mind, and the page, even a completed manuscript, is really just notes. The internal editor wants the final text, the one that comes out of my mouth, to be perfect, but the internal publisher (Pub?) keeps fighting it, reminding me to lift my head, to speak to the congregation, to explore this latest draft out in the open so everyone can hear it. Theirs is an argument that rages on during the fifteen to twenty minutes of preaching.

Economics Baby....

I'm smart about a lot of things, but economics often escapes me. I find that my economic opinion is pretty easily swayed by the rhetoric and statistics of both sides, and I think the wishy-washiness is largely a product of my lack of hard education in the field.

With that in mind, give this a read. I think it's a really solid, rational response to the conservative economic policies put forth by the Republican party. Give it a read if you've got a few minutes:

A Debate Worthy of a Great Nation in Trouble

Hack it!

Most of you know that I spend the majority of my day working in the realm of computer security.  Round about every four years, the discussion of the security of voting machines comes up again.  This topic is a natural intersection of my political fanboydom and my profession, so I always make it a point to check out what folks are saying. 

I stumbled on this today, and if you've got about 20 minutes to watch both parts, I'd recommend it.  It'll give you a real sense about how genuinely vulnerable voting machines are to tampering. 

Now I understand that no system is perfectly invulnerable, but there is some real cause for concern with most modern voting machines.  In the past, it took a fairly sizable cohort of folks to maliciously influence the outcome of an election.  With current machines it really only takes one malicious user to create fairly serious havoc in a precinct. 

If we are serious about transparency in our electoral process, we've got to open up the software and processes associated with these machines and make them available for public, professional scrutiniy.  Until then, it's really a crap shoot.

I love NPR.

How great is this.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94315732