The recent Occupy Wall Street protests have aimed their message at the income disparity between the 1% richest Americans and the rest of the country. But what happens when you expand that and look at the 1% richest of the entire world? Some really interesting numbers emerge. If there were a global Occupy Wall Street protest, people as well off as Linda Frakes might actually be the target.

In America, the top 1% earn more than $380,000 per year. We are, however, among the richest nations on Earth. How much do you need to earn to be among the top 1% of the world?

$34,000.

Why stop there? Why not go further?

Every human on the planet is no doubt part of the top 1% of privilege compared to the other 99% of life on our planet. And even pond slime has its privileged position as part of the minuscule proportion of matter manifesting life as compared to inanimate matter on our planet. And perhaps our whole life bearing planet is in turn part of an even smaller proportion of privileged happenstance in a vast beautiful but barren universe.

But where does that get us? Very far from the point.

Probably less than 1% of the occupy movement are actually motivated by base envy.

The point is that with privilege comes responsibility. The old word for it is stewardship.

From those to whom much has been given, much will be required.

If it is very clear that the 1% are fucking it up (and it is!) then it is not wrong – in fact we have a duty – to remind them (us) that they (we) are answerable for what is being done with what has been given. And it is in the nature of things that we are always answerable downwards as well as upwards. If the cry from below is not responded to, then the thunder from above will have to be.

They is we, but let that not be a means of diluting responsibility. There might be a certain nobility in that on the part of those who have less, but it would be utterly despicable cowardice and worse on the part of those who have more. From those to whom most has been given. most IS required.

Tweaking a photo with Instagram does not make it artistic. Selective redefinition of terms like ‘creativity’ and ‘intelligence’ makes for category errors rather than creativity.

So – come to think of it – maybe iPhones DO enable artificial intelligence. (In which case we should stop playing with our digital appendages: even though its makes the logo bigger we really only need that because we’re going blind?) Forgive my grim wit please – but there IS something about AI coming which is self-deluding, profoundly unsatisfying, and a little narcissistic – not just a surplus of cognitive shallowness.

So there is more to us than what we think. Yep. Thank God. We are not men without chests – even though we have tried.

So we can be caught in our own traps. Yep. That has always been true too – thank God.

So the solution to the problem of making our own singular god which we then have to cringe before is to keep it pocket sized? Or eat it before it eats us? Become it before it becomes us?

With apology to Woody Allen and our mother who is the source of the dust from which we and our gadgets are born – ‘Artifice Wrecks’ might be the name of this story.

Which reminds me that we are children – not robots. Men – not mannequins. Children with a father – an artist who creates beyond our wildest imaginings – who gives us a hand in his creating.

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will,–

From an ABC news article:
(http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-10/society-role-in-london-riots/2833168)

But Ms Batmanghelidjh says many British youths have lived with that feeling of fear for their entire lives.

“This happened to the public for a few days. But many of these children are chronically frightened – they get attacked in their own homes, they get attacked on the estates,” she said.

“[To them] it feels like at that point civil society doesn’t step in to, for example, create a robust child protection structure to protect these children, or to protect them from attacks at street level.

What a good idea! It’s called family.

“So from a young people’s perspective, their conditions of fright have been chronically ignored.”

She says the way to counter the problem is to create communities which engage and support disadvantaged youth.

Yup. It’s called family.

“Sort out the civil structures around these young people, provide for them adults who are caring; who can provide a healthy counter culture to the perverse street culture that they are exposed to,” she said.

Yup! It was invented a long time ago. It’s called family.

“Then you have the beginnings of the making of a genuine community that includes these young people. And then you can legitimately hold them accountable.”

Absolutely! It’s called family.

The things that corrode family corrode society. Maggie thatcher was wrong – there IS such a thing as society. But the lefties and libertarians and free-love loonies are also wrong – society starts at home.

Remember all that rhetoric about the fabric of society? We’re all either letting it rip or making a stitch in time – or maybe nine. There isn’t any neutral ground.

It may well be that we get a rise in the stock market before a much bigger drop – (a friend of mine who has a wave theory of market psychology has been predicting that – but he didn’t expect this drop to be as big as it has been) -  but up and down or just down we can still expect much bigger drops to come. The general economy (jobs, houses etc) will start to really feel the heat probably about 6 months after that. I don’t know anything about the ‘physics’ of crowd psychology but we all know about the physics of gravity, and Wiley coyote ran off the cliff quite some time ago.

The bigger question in my mind is what do we do about the social problems that will follow. The ‘arab spring’ has been largely a result of economic problems impacting the middle class. How do we make the best of what happens? I’m asking myself that question as a member of a Christian community / mission order as well as dad / family member / individual. We can’t all shout “We’ll all be rooned!” and head for the hills.

This is not a double-dip recession – it is a continuation of what started in 2007 and has been held off temporarily by making things very much worse by sending governments (tax payers) broke by bailing out banks that deserved to fail. Ordinary savings in those banks could have been safe-guarded for a very much lower cost.

At another level this is a continuation of what first showed itself in 1987 and would / should have been able to run its course back then with less damage than will now occur if the general public hadn’t been encouraged to take on so much debt to keep the bubble growing in the years since then. The things that we have been encouraged to put our hope in – housing and super – will now show themselves to be debt-fueled rather than savings based.

You could say you don’t get something for nothing – but that plays to the lower side of human nature and perversely avoids the core moral issues.

I think a more sensible way to say it is that if you are not actively doing something good then bad things will happen: and if you do good things and bad things still happen – at least you still got to do good. Another way I like to think about is this: Never under-estimate the power and value of being a servant – God is the servant of his entire creation.

(This is a slightly edited version of something I wrote over a couple of posts to a private e-mail list a few days ago.  It is edited just enough for it to make sense outside of the list context – nothing material is changed.)

• While the actual blast can be quite distracting – particularly if well targeted – a bazooka may take a while to reload. I read somewhere that a recent survey showed that at least 98% of magpies don’t actually know what a bazooka looks like. This probably means that during the reload time a magpie is not likely to be distracted by the mere presence of a bazooka.
• There is also a good chance that the recoil from the bazooka blast will knock your bike over. This is probably more distracting for you than it is for the magpie, unless of course you are being closely followed by an inattentive car or truck driver (who may have been distracted by the magpie.) In that case the subsequent sirens and flashing lights and traffic chaos might be quite distracting for the magpie.

I have heard of at least one case of a tennis racket being used as a very effective WMD. I usually don’t have a tennis racket with me when I am riding so I haven’t tried that distraction yet. On a couple of occasions I have picked up a small tree from the roadside and carried that with me for the rest of my ride. That kind of works, but for me it has never had the  impact I imagine a tennis racket would, and small trees don’t make good riding companions.

So lately I’ve settled on the less satisfying but mostly effective distractor of looking just plain silly.

There are of course many many ways of looking silly. If some other nameless cyclist had not come to my rescue I may have had many years of trial and error ahead of me in the search for exactly the right kind of silliness to effectively distract magpies. Fortunately there are many other cyclists doing their best to look silly (that is why lycra bike pants were invented after all) and somewhere along the line some one of them decided to look silly by wearing a hedgehog on his head. Lo and behold he discovered – by chance – that this was an effective magpie distractor. Of course we don’t have hedgehogs in Australia – and the echidna is a protected species – so I’ve had to make do by adding spiky bits to my helmet. So far it seems to be working. There is one magpie about 1km down the road from our place who likes to swoop at least a dozen times each time I ride by him, and I’d say he definitely looks distracted every single time he swoops.

]]> http://bits.8the.net/2009/10/31/wmds/feed/ 1 http://bits.8the.net/2009/07/20/apollo-lunar-surface-journal/ http://bits.8the.net/2009/07/20/apollo-lunar-surface-journal/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:01:57 +0000 mike http://bits.8the.net/?p=103 This time 40 years ago I was nine years old, discovering Jazz at night on the old valve radio my parents had given me (and yet to discover or have any particular interest in popular music) and breakfast cereal boxes had charts and pictures and cards and models of rockets and lunar modules. I remember Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sounds of Silence’ playing on TV so many times during – or in between bits of – broadcasts of moon mission stuff. We all had the day off school. That is my Monday morning recollection of my part in that slice of history.

Much closer to the actual events is this – http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.html – an amazing resource – a real treasure.

From the foreward:

Hour upon hour of the astronauts’ conversations with each other and with Mission Control in Houston, as well as television scenes taken during their lunar expeditions, were recorded as they occurred from July 1969 to December 1972. For all the years since then, these recordings were available but, for the most part, remained “on the shelf” to collect dust. Now, through the dedication and hard work of historian Eric Jones and the lunar astronauts, the aural and visual history of the Apollo lunar expeditions is being taken off the shelf, dusted off, and presented in a way which everyone can understand and enjoy. Besides cleaning up the voice transcripts, Eric is conducting exhaustive interviews with the lunar astronauts and inserting their recollections of the events which took place more than twenty years ago.

(writing this as we drive into Canberra for the weekend.)

It is true of people and it is true on the web. The more you give the more you get. The more you send people away the more they come back. Imagine if google had links only to google. The more facebook points outside of facebook – the more it makes other things useful to me – the more likely I am to use facebook.

love is loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong suffering.
love is not nice pictures of sunsets and flowers.
pretending that everything is OK is not love.
pretending to love is not love.
saying that you love is not love.
not loving is not love.
and everything else is bullshit.
and you know that is true!

I’d been thinking about these things this week – dealing with the consequences of not love (make of that what you will) – feeling the pain of love deal once more with the pain of not love – wondering how far this goes on. Three things remain, and one of them is love.

This then, is a sample from one of our lectures this week.
Lecture snippet “Spirituality of Christian Ministry” Cornerstone Community