Celebrating My Mother's Life, 26 Years After Her Death

26 years ago on a Friday the 13th, I was at a rehearsal for a Christmas play at Jimmy Swaggart Bible College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana when the Dean of Male Students interrupted us to escort me back to his office. Nothing could have prepared me for that call from my sister, informing me that our mother, Norma Jean "Stormy" Falor, had died.

She was a fighter. She was a crier, She waited tables to put herself through secretary school after dropping out of high school to elope with her sweetheart in the Air Force and then facing the disappointment of divorce It was as a waitress that she met my father. After getting a break to join the steno pool at Toledo Edison, she worked her way up all the way to Executive Secretary to the President. (All while helping my dad produce his Masters thesis.) When John Williamson would fret and fume over corporate difficulties, she would take him by the arm and lead him to the glass walls of his 15th-story office, point to the streets of downtown Toledo below, and say, "Look at all those people walking around down there, Mr. Williamson, just as if the world weren't coming to an end!"

When I was born, the doctor had to inform her of my heart defect, warning her that I might not make it to infancy when surgery would be possible. She looked him in the eye and said, "Bet me!" She made many mistakes, some of which (drinking and smoking) drove me from her home and put her in an early grave. But none of that can ever blot out my admiration of her, my gratitude for all she was and did for me, or the sweet sorrow I feel that she did not live to see me come into my own and lead an extraordinary life.

I've lived more years, now, without her in this world than with her. Yet the memories and the love remain strong. I know she would be proud of me. The occasion of today's anniversary gives me the opportunity to express publicly, "I'm proud of you, Mom and I celebrate the brief, dazzling spark that was your life."

On Obamacare and the Free Market

Many of my contemporaries are posting and blogging about the PPACA, also known as "Obamacare", which rolled out its public health insurance marketplace in October. The most consistent complaint I read about the program is that it sets a new precedent of governmental intrusion on private citizens by requiring us all to purchase a product, namely: a health insurance policy. The law is set up this way so that the economics of heath insurance underwriting will work -- healthy individuals' premiums today cover sick individuals' costs today and provided a reserve for the costs of tomorrow.

It is worth considering how we as a county find ourselves crossing this precedent of intrusion. You would think (wouldn't you?) that industries operating in a free market would police themselves from a standpoint of enlightened self-interest so as to not require regulatory intervention. But in case after case, industries have failed to do so.

Take the revelations about the US meat-packing industry in 1905 that led to the founding of the (precursor to) the FDA. Or the 1910 phosphorus match industry study that produced high taxes, forcing the industry to innovate a safer technology for their workers. When the harm done by an industry flying the free market banner outweighs the benefits of waiting for the unseen hand to remedy the situation, governments have acted and always will act.

You may not be of the opinion that there was a crisis in healthcare access (via premium inflation or underwriting restrictions). However, a sober survey of business articles from 2003 until the housing crisis shows that US health care costs were consistently cited as one of the top problems threatening the US economy.

When you consider the trend of US demographics going forward toward the next 30+ years, it becomes less surprising that the PPACA is the new FDA or SEC of our time.

Fall 2013 US Economic Prediction

I am beginning to convince myself that the US economy is headed for a 3-5 year window of high sustained growth. Here are a few reasons why:

Recall that 2008 was the last year that people with terrible credit could obtain easy housing credit. 2008 + 5 is 2013, which means that this is the last year that banks have to deal with uncertainty about large numbers of borrowers with cheaper 5-year Adjustable Rate mortgages going through foreclosure. The orderly winding down of these toxic assets will enable local and national banks to open up their reserves for legitimate business lending more freely.

Also, competition for high-tech workers is really heating up in the job market. I'm getting the kinds of unsolicited phone calls and emails I got back in 1998 and 2005. Yes, this portends a future bubble-burst, but one that is several years out, with the actual, you know, bubble, in the meantime.

Finally, the stock market has shown uncanny resilience in the face of multiple fiscal crises from Washington over the past 10 months. The right kind of stocks are heading in the right direction: temporary worker companies like Manpower and for-profit education companies like DeVry.

(disclaimer: I don't have any financial interest in either of the stocks mentioned except perhaps accidentally via my employer's 401(k) benefit)

Wrapping Your Head Around the National Debt, Deficits, Surpluses, and the Debt Ceiling

The following is not a perfect explanation of the concepts of our national debt, deficits, surpluses, and the debt ceiling. But hopefully my readers will find it helpful in understanding what these terms mean and how they differ from one another.

Lets say we start a country and we have zero debt. In the first year, we collect $10,000 in taxes and spend $10,000. So we had no deficit, because all the bills were covered. We had nothing left over, so no surplus either. And we did not borrow any money, so no debt.

Year 2, we still collect $10,000 in taxes on $10,000 in expenses but we also decide to light a new national Christmas tree. This will cost $300 extra for tree, lights and electricity. We print 10 pieces of paper with the words "IOU $30.00" printed on them and tell people we will pay back $30 plus some interest on them in 5 years. 10 people buy our bonds, so we now have the $300 to cover the Christmas tree. Result: no deficit, no surplus, but now we have a $330 debt (including a flat 10% interest rate on the $300).

In year 3, we will need to set aside a little more than $10,000 (around $66 more) to make sure we will have the $330 ready to pay back the people who bought our bonds when they come due. However, if we still only bring in $10,000 in taxes, we will incur a $66 deficit for the year. The way we cover that is to print more IOUs and sell them so the money is set aside and our creditors believe we are taking our responsibilities seriously. So we see that the deficit incurred this year causes the debt to grow.

Skip ahead 230 years... We now have a military, a department of social services, tons of federal employees in each, etc, etc. All of these programs were approved over time by the people's representatives -- including the financing schemes to pay for them over time with future tax receipts. The amount of all the bonds we've permitted ourselves to print and sell (to cover our past and future spending commitments above the taxes that have come in) is our "debt ceiling".

Let's say the total amount we've agreed to pay above all of the combined tax income so far is now $17 Trillion. That's the debt. If, in this year, we incur more expenses (including payments on the debt) than we bring in from taxes, we have a deficit for the year. If we had a deficit last year and we have a deficit this year, but the amount we went "over" this year is half of what we went over last year, we have cut our deficit in half. If we bring in more tax revenues this year than this year's expenses, it is a surplus - but that doesn't help us pay down the debt unless we agree to apply some or all of this year's surplus toward paying off the total debt.

Meeting Princess And Her Family

I recently had a mind-expanding experience. A boy invited me into his father's gem shop in nearby Bastrop, Texas. There was a cabinet with an aquarium by the door that had a piece of notebook paper on the front with the word "Princess" written on it in magic marker.

The boy explained that princess was their pet tarantula and that she guarded the shop. While the father told me about his business, the boy took the screen off the top of the aquarium and took Princess out, holding her in his hands. I had never before been that near such a large spider. I turned to the boy and acknowledged the creature. She reared back, waving her two front legs in warning. The boy asked if I wanted to hold her. I said, "sure".

I held my hands open together near his and Princess hesitatingly approached. Then she decided to walk over onto my hands. When she did, I could feel the most unusual, marvelous adhesive sensation as the tips of each of her legs moved about on my palms. The father explained that a tarantula has its sense of smell in its feet and that if you raise one from infancy, it will bond to you through that sense like any other pet.

When my visit was over, I thanked the boy for letting me hold Princess. He thanked me for holding her. I had just made friends with a new family in a very old-fashioned way - by socializing with them about their pet.

On American Exceptionalism

Once again, this time during a civil war in Syria, atrocities perpetrated by some group or other have roused sentiments that "America had ought to do something" about the situation. It has taken the surprise wisdom of an an internationally acknowledged tyrant and thug, published in a US newspaper, to give us all pause from our rush to near-unilateral military intervention. A major point of the published thesis is that America's exceptionalist self-image poses a threat to lasting world peace.

Oh for the days when we were not a so-called "Superpower". The decades -- well over a century if they were gathered up and packed together -- when we meddled with and aggressed only the unlucky other governments that happened to inhabit the land now known as the Continental United States. Even when our aggressiveness began spilling beyond those borders, our invasions involved only our nearest neighbors and our false flag operations were conducted within 90 miles of the Florida Keys. The Presidents in office during the years at the start of both world wars won their elections by promising to keep America out of them. We used to go to war for old-fashioned, unexceptional reasons: the gaining of territory and the weakening of other expansionist nations operating near our borders.

Supposing America were found to be exceptional, would that be a good thing? This is an important question, worth pondering and debating. Perhaps the Roman Empire did not fall because of greed or invasion by barbarians or due to the neurological effects of drinking from heavy metal goblets. Perhaps the Roman Empire fell the way every great society does in which an exceptional class of its citizens comes to control its policies. (always in the name of the "good" of the unexceptional) Under every such regime, only a generation or two passes before the old guard, consumed with defending its power and privileges grows increasingly blind and irrelevant to the concerns and aspirations of the very people it imagines it is serving. As an example, the architects of America's Cold War policies in the 1970s and 80s had about as relevant a contribution to make to the question of Iraq's danger to the world in 2002 as a horse might offer to an octopus regarding the question of sea-floor territory.

The same holds true for movements and institutions. Were Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement exceptional? Without a doubt, they were. Simply witness the situations in American society before and after the movement to judge the question correctly. Yet, only Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton remain muted voices in American politics today. And, this is as just as it should be. Today's societal struggles are not -- cannot -- be led by the heroes of yesterday's movements. Without a doubt, past heroes can inspire and advise new movements and help society understand the broader context in which the struggle continues. Yet, the fire that refines us in every generation is kindled with the tinder of today's hearts, not borrowed from the cooling embers of yesterday's. I assert this to be true also of heroic nations within epochs of international crisis.

So what is the conclusion? Are we Americans "exceptional"? To silently suspect one's own exceptionalism can be a source of great inner strength that motivates one to attempt acts of virtue or valor corresponding with a blossoming greatness sensed within. This is a mature, inner fountain of self-motivation, healthy to cultivate in children and in the unassertive. But to claim rights or privileges due to exceptionalism or -- worse still -- to defend one's claims to exceptionalism seems to me to be a sign of immaturity and weakness rather than of strength. It conjures up the image of a former ballerina Prima Donna, having lost her youthful beauty, grace, and flexibility, clumsily crashing the stage of a new production in a tattered, ill-fitting costume to demand fresh applause.

Did the world, once upon a time, give America a "pass" for using atomic weapons in war or for participating in the choosing of other nations' borders or their forms of government? What of it? We must have, at the time, so earned those privileges and so conducted ourselves in the immediate redemption of them as to invite the awe and respect of the greater mass of humanity rather than their outrage and vows of vengeance. Exceptionalism, then, like any other accolade or privilege, is best observed in ourselves silently or conferred upon us by peers worthy of our respect. As with any other virtue, it has a shelf life and begins to spoil and stink when hoarded too long. Only the insecure claim it as a right or use it as a justification.

10 Meals For Under $10

In my ongoing quest to eat meals with good nutrition at a reasonable cost, I have experimented with cooking in bulk and freezing the results as individual meal portions.  The recipe/process I'll detail below yields me 10 meals at (or under) $10.  I'll store most of the meal portions in the freezer with around 3 of them in the fridge.  When I'm ready to eat, I pull one meal out of the fridge and transfer one of the others stored in the freezer down to the fridge so that I always have a supply there ready to heat up.  When I'm left with only 2 meals in the fridge - it's time to go shopping to set up the meal rotation again!

This whole procedure only takes me an hour - from pre-heating the oven to storing the meals and cleaning the pans.

The equipment you'll need to follow this plan is as follows: An oven, a stove top, a large baking tray (with a lip around the edge) that fits in the oven, a large stove top steamer, and a utensil you can use to stir what's in the steamer - I use a large serving spoon.  An oven mitt or thick pot holder.  Finally, you'll need 10 plasticware sealable containers to store the meals in individual portions. (see image below)  Having a timer (even your smartphone) helps.

Also, it will be best to arrange for room in your freezer for seven of your plastic containers - not stacked, so the portions freeze more quickly.

Here are the groceries to buy:

1 pack of 10 chicken thighs (or 20 drumsticks) - around $5.50
1 large 64 oz bag of broccoli florets - around $2.50
1 large 80 oz bag of mixed vegetables - around $2.50
Note: the large bags of veggies will last for several rounds of this recipe, so the cost is lower per run.

Optional:
Several varieties of sprinkle-on spices (for the chicken)
1 large can of Old Bay seasoning (for the veggies)




Procedure

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit
• Place all of the chicken, skin up, on the baking tray.  (Optional: sprinkle bottled spice mix on each chicken piece)  Put the chicken into the oven and set a timer for 30 minutes
• When the timer goes off, leave the oven alone.  Put an inch of water in the bottom pan of the steamer and set it on a stove burner that you crank to "High".  Place the top basket of the steamer into the bottom part on the stove.
• Set a timer for 15 minutes.  Fill the steamer basket, half-way with frozen broccoli florets, half-way with frozen mixed vegetables.  (Optional: sprinkle Old Bay seasoning over the frozen veggies, but do not stir)  Cover the steamer.  Turn the burner down to Medium once it begins steaming vigorously.
• When the timer goes off the second time, turn the oven off with the chicken still inside.  Turn off the stove burner.  Lift the lid of the steamer and press down on the veggies so they expel extra water down - out of the upper basket into the bottom part. Stir the veggies well.
• Take the baking tray with the chicken out of the oven and set it on a level surface.  If the drippings from the chicken have burned onto the bottom of the tray, your oven temperature was too high.  Try a lower setting (by 25 degrees) next time.  Use your utensil to gently push each piece of chicken so it un-sticks from the bottom of the cooking tray.
•  Set out your 10 plasticware containers and put one baked chicken thigh in each.  If you cooked drumsticks, place two in each.  Pour some of the drippings form the baking tray into each container.
• Spoon portions of the steamed veggies into each container.  Let them sit out, uncovered for 10 - 15 minutes so they cool somewhat closer to room temperature.
• Cover each of the containers.  Put seven of the 10 into the freezer - not stacked at first, so they freeze more quickly.  Put the remaining three containers into the fridge.

If you're in a rush, you can just eat a portion cold - like leftovers.  To heat one, however, I've found it best to pop it in a microwave for 2 mins 30 secs on 70 percent power.  One minute at 100% works a little less well.  Be sure to open the lid on the container before you microwave it.!

My '10 Commandments' To A New Humanity

A friend on Facebook, Jerry Schirmer, suggested the following parlor game.  Below the quote are my 10 Commandments to a new humanity.

There is going to be an atomic war. All of humanity is going to be wiped out. The only survivors will be a group of 1,000 babies that will be raised by robots and given only knowledge of the English language, basic survival skills, and a firm belief in a vague monotheism.

On their 13th birthday, they will be brought above ground, and their first sight will be a giant stone tablet on which will be inscribed ten statements of some reasonable number of words apiece (something like ten, lets say). These statements will be said to be the absolute word of God. You are entrusted with writing these statements.

What do you put on them in an effort to create/preserve/restore the best society possible?

    I. These laws never expire.
   II. Debts and all other laws expire within 7 years.
  III. Patents, copyrights, and leadership roles all expire within 7 years.
  IV. War may be waged only with weapons powered by hand.
   V. Adults may ingest, copulate, and cohabitate as they see fit.
  VI. The best paid teachers and scientists must have equal pay.
 VII. No salary may exceed that of the best paid teachers.
VIII. You may each worship God, or not, as you see fit.
  IX.Anyone attempting to overrule these laws must die painfully.
   X. The maximum penalty for other offenses: 7 years humane imprisonment.

Coming Out

In 2007, I happened to flip through a Nietzsche book at a bookstore. I couldn't put it down. He was bat-shit crazy about a number of things (for one, he was a huge bigot), but he was incredibly clear about many other things. One idea that struck me like lightning was his assertion that Christianity (and - any religion that promises an after-life) teaches people to disregard this life (which we know we do have) for the hope of another, future life (which we cannot know will occur). He did not mince words - stating that Christianity was "life-denying" etc.

I had already been cured (in my 20s) from my decade-long foray into Fundamentalism. But I carried (and to a lesser extent, still do carry) a sense of nostalgia, in a warm place in my heart for that "old-time religion". However, this Nietzsche philosophy hinted at a side of life one did not know and could never know if he or she held onto a hope of "heaven". He listed as virtues the things religion count as vices: ambition, the will to power, a healthy embrace of conflict, and an acceptance that when the world changes (example: Industrial Revolution), it is okay to throw away all of the former customs and ethics in order to embrace new, more suitable ones.

I just couldn't believe what I was reading. As in, I wondered how the censors of the world had somehow let this stuff slip through, unscathed. But it was clear, powerful, and had the ring of truth to it - "face the facts" kind of truth. There have been many other influences in my life for what I am about to say, it's just that he crystallized the important points most clearly.

Today, for the first time in my life, I say publicly and proudly, that I am an Atheist. I affirm that this life I have is the only life (that I know of) that I will ever have. When my heart stops beating and my brain stops firing the synapses that create the social persona of myself, there will be no more me. The foundation for my morals and ethics is the positive benefit I see to the world when I behave in certain ways and the positive feelings I experience when I follow that guide. I will probably still also claim the moniker of "Taoist" among people who have a hard time with my Atheism since the Tao Te Ching is non-theistic and its observations resonate with how I see the world. But even that is an inside joke with myself - since the very first verse of that book states: "The Tao that can be spoken of, is not the true Tao."