While the media continues to drone on and on about next November’s presidential election, the actual civic life of the country is focused elsewhere today. Here in Virginia, we are voting for who will represent us in the Virginia General Assembly and in our local city and county governments. Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Jersey will also be holding state legislative elections and the people of Kentucky and Mississippi will be choosing their governors and other state offices. The people of Mississippi will also be voting on a very important state constitutional amendment that would legally recognize that human life begins when science, faith, and logic all say it does: at conception.
As I have told many friends and family members over the last several weeks, we do ourselves a disservice if we ignore these elections and focus instead on a national election that is still a year away. The national elections are important, no doubt, but our state and local governments have more real impact in our day-to-day lives. Your roads, fire departments, schools, police, libraries, and public utilities are the business of your state and local governments. Federal policy has comparatively small impact in these areas. The founders envisioned a system where the bulk of government would be at the state and local levels, while the federal government would stay focused on its comparatively narrow areas of responsibility—foreign policy, interstate commerce, printing money, etc.
So it is important that you pay as much attention to your local elections as you do to your national ones. It is important that you go out and vote today, assuming you live in a jurisdiction holding elections and are legally eligible. I did (and I even got to shake hands with a couple of local candidates). The polls in Virginia don’t close until 7pm, so you still have plenty of time to research your candidates and ballot issues and get out there.
Back in June I took a three-day Apex Cycle Education Basic RiderCourse to learn to ride a motorcycle. I figured that it would be a fun and interesting way to spend a weekend, if nothing else. It most-certainly was.
The course was an evening classroom session, followed by two afternoons on ~250cc trainer bikes (a Honda Rebel in my case) learning progressively difficult rider techniques. Assuming you pass the written exam and on-bike skills test, you finish the class with a certificate that serves as a temporary 30-day motorcycle license. This certificate, after a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), becomes a permanent license. I passed, and my license now has a “Class M” indication on it. In fact, I passed with the highest score in my class of twelve students (one-hundred percent on the written exam, and -2 [up to -20 is ‘passing’] on the skills test).
I didn’t realize until today that I had never mentioned this on Off on a Tangent. As Facebook has become more and more of an outlet for ‘personal’ blatherings, this site has become more and more of a (dare I say it?) ‘journalistic’ outlet. There’s been less and less about my day-to-day life here. In some ways that’s a good thing, and I’m really proud of how this site has developed and grown over the years. But I probably need to do a better job of striking a balance. My lengthy diatribes on politics and religion aren’t going anywhere any time soon, but maybe I should be spending a bit more time on the other random esoterica of my life.
Anyway, I’ve been a licensed motorcyclist for nearly five months now . . . but I don’t yet have a bike. Hopefully that will be changing some time soon. Slowly-but-surely I have been putting some money aside. Melissa has been helping by enlisting my technical assistance with some of her freelance web design work, and putting my portion of those revenues into a motorcycle fund. I’ve also been setting aside the bulk of monetary gifts I’ve received (for birthdays and other holidays) for this purpose. As of right now, the bike fund is floating somewhere around $1,500—which is probably enough for a serious down payment on one of the $7,000 or $8,000 bikes I’m looking at (e.g., the Yamaha V-Star 650 Custom or the Honda Shadow Spirit 750). By next spring—based on our expected tax refunds, annual bonuses, and additional freelance work—I expect this fund to have doubled.
Of course, as a new motorcyclist I would have to worry about a lot of additional expenses beyond the bike itself. Helmets, jackets, gloves, and boots are necessary safety equipment, and they don’t always come cheap. There is also the recurring expense of motorcycle insurance, though I expect this to be quite affordable (and I expect it to be largely offset by fuel cost savings, as bikes get ~50mpg compared to my Subaru’s average of ~23mpg). All-in-all, we’re not quite in a position to buy just yet . . . but it is definitely on the horizon. In fact, I’m told that the best time to buy is in the dead of winter . . . because nobody wants to buy a motorcycle when it’s freezing cold, and the dealers are desperate to sell. It’s starting to get cold, so stay tuned ;-).
Icon of the Second Coming (courtesy WikiMedia Commons)
I’m having no luck with timely posts over the last couple weeks. So in the interest of consistency, here are my belated thoughts on Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day.
I observed with some incredulity this year as some ‘evangelical’ Christian groups tried to replace Halloween with the unfortunately-named “Jesus Ween.” Intended to be a ‘Godly’ alternative to Halloween, the idea is that instead of focusing on demons and death we should focus on Jesus Christ. I have no doubt that the proponents of this alternate celebration are well-intentioned, but they have forgotten something very important: Halloween is already a Christian holiday.
Oh yes, some of my more skeptical friends have already launched into a tirade about how Halloween was a Pagan festival that was usurped and corrupted by us heathen Catholics. There is a little bit of truth in this, but not so much as you might think. It is true that the various cultures across European Christendom are an amalgamation of Christian tradition with the traditions that had been there before, but this is nothing to condemn the Church for. On the contrary, one of the most wonderful things about the Christian Church is that, when you become a Christian, you do not have to abandon what came before except where there is a direct conflict. The very oldest traditions of our faith incorporate elements of Jewish, Greek, and Roman culture combined with newer, uniquely-Christian traditions. There is no such thing as a ‘pure’ Christianity separate from the cultures in-which it developed and grew. No, Christianity is a beautifully-diverse combination of the best elements of tens and hundreds of cultures and faiths it has come in contact with over the centuries—all merged together and conformed to the universal truth.
You see, as Christians we recognize that there are elements of truth in the practices and traditions of other world religions, and even in many non-religious cultural traditions. Until the sad separations of the Church later in her history, nobody thought it was a good idea to ‘purify’ the Church of these influences on her practice. On the contrary, we can and should embrace the elements of truth in other faiths when we find them. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “The Catholic Church recognizes in other religions that search, among shadows and images, for the God who is unknown yet near since he gives life and breath and all things and wants all men to be saved. Thus, the Church considers all goodness and truth found in these religions as ‘a preparation for the Gospel and given by him who enlightens all men that they may at length have life'” (CCC 843).
Greek Debt vs. Eurozone Avg. (courtesy WikiMedia Commons)
Let’s review some basic reasoning: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”
Greece, the cradle of democracy and western civilization, is in national default. It is unable to pay its debtors. Standard & Poor’s (S&P) has rated Greece’s sovereign debt as junk since April 2010, and the Greek government had to be bailed-out by a €110 billion European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan package in May 2010. Despite the loans and some broad ‘austerity’ cuts, the situation did not improve. By June of this year, S&P had downgraded Greece’s debt to the lowest rating in the world.
Last week, leaders of the ‘Eurozone’ monetary alliance and the IMF reached a new agreement to try and alleviate Greece’s sovereign debt crisis. As part of this agreement, many of Greece’s debtors will accept a fifty percent write-off—another one-hundred billion euro gift to Greece. But consider what this means; many banks that bought Greek bonds will get only fifty percent of their investment back. Greece is not able to pay what it owes. We can perform rhetorical back-flips all we want, and fluff it up with as many euphemisms we can come up with (‘Haircut?’ Really?) . . . but when a country can’t pay its debtors the correct word to describe it is default.
In 2011, Greece’s public debt is expected to rise to over 160 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP). In other words, the Greek government will owe its debtors more than the entire economic production of the country over more than one and a half years. This ratio is expected to rise to something over 175 percent in 2012. It is unclear what impact the default will have on this projection, but it’s stated goal is to reduce Greece’s sovereign debt to 120 percent of GDP by 2020. For the record, a debt-to-GDP ratio of anything approaching one-hundred percent is generally considered to be a crisis. So the most optimistic target for Greece over the rest of this decade is that their crisis will diminish to a slightly smaller crisis. Nobody has yet proposed actually fixing the core problems facing Greece. Like Congress dealing with our own debt crisis, the strategy seems to make a few small tweaks around the edges and call it a day.
The fundamental problem for most of western Europe—and for the United States—is that we have bought bigger governments than we have the means to pay for. The Europeans have gone much further down this road than we have, which is why Greece is already in default and why Ireland, Portugal, and Spain are much closer to it than we are. But in the end, the only way to really solve these sovereign debt crises is for all of us to get our government expenditures in-line with government revenue. Greece did not implement any kind of austerity plan until it was too late, and the plan they finally implemented fell far short of what was really needed.
Nobody seems willing to state the obvious. Nobody seems willing to use some basic reasoning. We simply can’t keep spending more than we make and expect it to magically work out in the end. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.
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