The Best of LIFE

Google recently began hosting all the photos ever used for LIFE Magazine. Some of these are amongst the most famous American photos ever taken, and most are fantastic.

A blog has begun documenting some of the best of these LIFE photos. Of those posted recently, the below is amongst my favorites. Head on over and find yours.

Madrid scenes de rue

(ht: Kottke)

The Wisdom and Sublety of Kids

Discussing Obama

So last night, as has been usual for the last month, some friends and us were discussing Obama. A couple interesting references emerged, and so I thought I'd pass them on. Some of the most interesting articles about Obama are actually interviews with him. It's much better to hear precisely what somebody thinks straight from their mouth as opposed to being rehashed by a journalist. Thus, here are a couple very interesting interviews that highlight some interesting statements by Obama.

First, just before the election, Rolling Stone interviewed the now president-elect. Some highlights include:

At your campaign stop this morning at a high school in Pennsylvania, you made what you called a "solemn vow to the young people of America" that you will make sure they can afford to go to college — "no ifs, ands or buts." How will you do that in a way that doesn't simply add to the crushing debt that students and their families already take on in the form of student loans?
We're going to give a $4,000 tuition credit to every student, every year, in exchange for a minimum of 100 hours of community service a year. That's above and beyond the additional scholarships we're offering for people who are willing to teach, nurses — there are certain categories and occupations where we have a shortage, so there will be targeted scholarships there.

If you're in the White House and could install any one play toy — bowling alley, water polo — what would it be?
Basketball court. If we can get an indoor basketball court, I'd be happy.

Indoor?
Yeah, just because the weather's kind of fickle in Washington.

In what way will people underestimate you as president?
[Long pause] Because I tend to be a pretty courteous person and I don't lose my temper, I think people underestimate my willingness to mix it up. I don't know if they'll continue to underestimate that after this campaign, but I think you'll still get columns saying, "He's too cool, he's too soft." [Laughs] That's OK, actually.

You like being underestimated in that way.
Yeah. No point in having them see you coming.

Second, a few years ago when Obama was running for Senate, he gave an interview on religion to Chicago Sun Times columnist Cathleen Falsani. Now, it's finally been republished in entirety. Some interesting lines:

FALSANI:
What do you believe?

OBAMA:
I am a Christian.

So, I have a deep faith. So I draw from the Christian faith.

FALSANI:
So you got yourself born again?

OBAMA:
Yeah, although I don't, I retain from my childhood and my experiences growing up a suspicion of dogma. And I'm not somebody who is always comfortable with language that implies I've got a monopoly on the truth, or that my faith is automatically transferable to others.

I'm a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it's best comes with a big dose of doubt. I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

FALSANI:
The conversation stopper, when you say you're a Christian and leave it at that.

OBAMA:
Where do you move forward with that?

This is something that I'm sure I'd have serious debates with my fellow Christians about. I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and prostelytize. There's the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven't embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they're going to hell.

FALSANI:
You don't believe that?

OBAMA:
I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell.

I can't imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity.

That's just not part of my religious makeup.

Thoughts?

Woolly Mammoths

Okay, this would be awesome!

Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million.

Not only could woolly mammoths be brought back, but,

The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly...

Jurassic Park anyone?

Politics

So now that the election's over (yep, Obama won), we can all settle down and get back to all the other things we discuss. What? You want to keep talking about politics? Well, here you go then.

In this season of evaluation of where each party is at (or in the Republicans' case, where they're not at), I think it's useful to look at the errors in worldview members of wings in both parties tend to make.

J. Budziszewski is a professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. About ten years ago, he wrote a couple articles for First Things. The first is entitled The Problem With Conservatism. In it he sets forth eight moral errors of political conservatism. He then contrasts the political conservative trajectory with the biblical worldview. Here are the errors:

1. Civil Religionism: America is a chosen nation, and its projects are a proper focus of religious aspiration. Christianity: America is but one nation among many, no less loved by God, but no more.
2. Instrumentalism: Faith should be used for the ends of the state. Christianity: Believers should be good citizens, but faith is not a tool.
3. Moralism: God's grace needs the help of the state. Christianity: Merely asks that the state get out of the way.
4. Caesarism: The laws of man are higher than the laws of God. Christianity: The laws of God are higher than the laws of man.
5. Traditionalism: What has been done is what should be done. Christianity: Any merely human custom may have to be repented.
6. Neutralism: Everyone ought to mind his own business, therefore moral and religious judgments should be avoided. Christianity: While one ought to mind his own business, moral and religious judgments can never be avoided.
7. Mammonism: Wealth is the object of commonwealth, and its continual increase even better. Christianity: Wealth is a snare, and its continual increase even worse.
8. Meritism: I should do unto others as they deserve. Christianity: I should do unto others not as they deserve, but as they need.

So they wouldn't feel left out, he also wrote an article entitled The Problem With Liberalism. Its points:

1. Propitiationism: I should do unto others as they want. Christianity: I should do unto others as they need.
2. Expropiationism: I may take from others to help the needy, giving nothing of my own. Christianity: I should give of my own to help the needy, taking from no one.
3. Solipsism: Human beings make themselves, belong to themselves, and have value in and of themselves. Christianity: Human beings are made by God, belong to Him, and have value because they are loved by Him and made in His image.
4. Absolutism: We cannot be blamed when we violate the moral law, either because we cannot help it, because we have no choice, or because it is our choice. Christianity: We must be blamed, because we are morally responsible beings.
5. Perfectionism: Human effort is adequate to cure human evil. Christianity: Our sin, like our guilt, can be erased only by the grace of God through faith in Christ.
6. Universalism: The human race forms a harmony whose divisions are ultimately either unreal or unimportant. Christianity: Human harmony has been shattered by sin and cannot be fully healed by any means short of conversion.
7. Neutralism: The virtue of tolerance requires suspending judgments about good and evil. Christianity: The virtue of tolerance requires making judgments about good and evil.
8. Collectivism: The state is more important to the child than the family. Christianity: The family is more important to the child than the state.
9. The Fallacy of Desperate Gestures: "The perfectionist acts, at least in the beginning, from a desire to relieve someone else's pain. The desperationist acts to relieve his own: the pain of pity, the pain of impotence, the pain of indignation. He is like a man who beats on a foggy television screen with a pipe wrench, not because the wrench will fix the picture but because it is handy and feels good to use."

Thoughts? Do these points resonate with you?

(ht: JT)

One week from now...

Next Wednesday, approximately half the country will be celebrating their candidate's victory. Who will emerge victorious?

Christian Hip Hop

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of being introduced to the music of Grits. They're a southern Christian rap group, and I loved their sound.

Shortly thereafter, I began hearing about Lecrae, another Christian hip hop artist. At the time, I think he may have been new on the scene, but I again loved the music.

Thus, I definitely enjoyed this interview of Lecrae by Mark Driscoll. If you've ever wondered if there's any good Christian hip hop out there, look no further.

Link of the Day -- Time's Top 25 Blogs

So if you're sitting here wondering what other blogs out there you should be adding to your reader, look no further than this list of the current Top 25 blogs by Time Magazine. Enjoy.

Go Cubs Go

I enjoyed this synopsis on the My Baseball Fantasy blog of the origins of the Cubs' postgame victory tune, "Go Cubs Go."

If you don't know the full story, definitely check it out. It's almost playoff time...

Golden Parachutes

Last week in the financial sector was crazy. Stocks, of which I own several just for fun, were nuts.

Huge companies have failed, and the major investment banks have quickly shrunk in number. I have been struck, though, by the fact that CEOs of these failed companies are still walking away with wealth. Even if stockholders and the average employee are not, the leaders seem to be doing alright.

In an article called How the Masters of the Universe ran amok and cost us the earth, explaining the Lehman Brothers failure, The Scotsman details the walkaway pay many of these CEOs garnered:

Fuld [Lehman's CEO] joined the bulge bracket. He was paid $34.5 million in 2005, comprising a base salary of $750,000, a $13.8 million cash bonus, and stock and options worth $19.94 million.

So how does his demise compare with the other fallen idols who have now fled the crashing debris in Wall Street? They may have driven their banks – and their shareholders – into enormous losses. But the former Masters of the Universe will never know what it's like to live in a subprime home.

By the end, 62-year-old Fuld was Lehman's biggest individual stockholder. Despite the crash, he stands to leave with about $65 million, based on Lehman's Friday morning stock price of $3.73. This tally includes 8.6 million unrestricted shares worth some $32.1 million as of Friday morning – though they had been worth $582 million last November before the credit crunch hurricane struck.

Chuck ("I'm still dancing") Prince left Citigroup with a package said to be worth $40 million. He also received a pension of $1.74 million and another one million stock options – worthless at the time of his departure. Merrill Lynch's Stan O'Neal spent much of last summer perfecting his golf swing, confident that his trusty lieutenants at Merrill could avoid those subprime bunkers. It turned out to be a bad call.

HE WAS ousted last October as the first waves of the credit crunch struck, with a retirement package reckoned at more than $160 million.

Jimmy Cayne, 15 years at the top of Bear Stearns, was said to be on the golf course in June 2006 just as the bank dropped the first of many clangers, with a 10 per cent dive in profits. Worse followed, with the bank having to put up $3.2 billion to try to rescue its imploding hedge fund.

By mid-March last year, when the bank collapsed, Cayne, who would rush from Wall Street by chopper to the private Hollywood Golf Club in New Jersey to play 18 holes before dark, had already relinquished the reins, handing over the chief executive's role to Alan Schwartz.

When Schwartz went cap in hand to the New York Fed for a $30 billion bail-out, Cayne was said to be competing in the North American Bridge Championship in Detroit.

Cayne and his wife, Patricia, sold all their 5.6 million shares in Bear Stearns – worth as much as $1.2 billion in January 2007 – for $61.3 million at the end of March this year. The couple recently bought two adjacent apartments in New York's plush Plaza building for $28.2 million.

He left with a $30 million "golden goodbye" – enough to do up his Park Avenue property and a mock Tudor mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. But it emerged that the mansion, set in 2.3 acres of land, was surplus to requirements. "It no longer meets his needs,'' said the local estate agent, trying to sell it for $6.15 million. He was forced to cut the asking price.

That's how tough it gets at the top in Wall Street.

Hmm, something about this doesn't seem right. So here we have a bunch of companies failing miserably. The person who was paid to make sure exactly that was not the case is still being rewarded handsomely. Sure, they've lost money, but they've still gained much. I think Mark Cuban nailed it when he said,

There is one major problem on Wall Street, that until solved, will result in meltown after meltdown in future years. I can’t say if the meltdown monkey will hit every 2,3, 5 or 10 years. But I can say with certainty that it will happen again. Why ?

Because Risk and Reward have been decoupled for CEOs on Wall Street.

If you are the CEO of a major public company, once you qualify for your golden parachute there is absolutely no reason not to throw the Hail Mary pass, and do high risk deals every chance you get.

The excuse for such high levels of pay is that these are jobs high in risk, and so there needs to be a high reward so people can accept the risk. But if the risk is still worth millions of dollars, I think it's fair to say that the risk is gone. And thus, the incentive not to fail is greatly removed.

I was glad to see Newseek this week analyze the levels of pay of more of these CEOs and give a fantastic rundown. They asked what the CEOs heavily involved in the events of the past week went away with financially.

So what can we do? Is this a problem? I personally would not be opposed to legislation requiring publicly traded companies to cap CEO pay at something like 100 times the average worker at their company's salary. Thoughts?

The Art of Flopping

Well worth passing on:



(ht: TrueHoop)

Urban Jesus

This is pretty neat. My church is currently doing a series called Urban Jesus. We're talking about how,

The city changes you. In many ways the city becomes you and you become the city. The church at Corinth allowed the city to change them, even their view of God.

Paul writes the first few chapters of I Corinthians focused on the person of Christ and how Jesus should change even how we live in the city. Urban Jesus is a study on how city dwellers should be transformed by the Gospel of Jesus even more than their city.

I think the graphic for the series is pretty cool too.

Being a part of a church that is continuing the discussion begun by Tim Keller, Ray Bakke, and Bob Lupton, among many others, is pretty fun.

Happy Birthday Baby!

One year old.

What's the best show on TV ever?

Jason Kottke wants to know.

And if you know us, you know we're happy about the results so far.

The Suburban Dream

So, after basically taking two months off, I'm back. Or at least I hope to be.
What better subject to kick things off with than a spiel on the collapsing suburban dream.

So a couple months ago, CNN ran an interesting article asking whether, "America's suburban dream [is] collapsing into a nightmare?" They noted,

This change can be witnessed in places like Atlanta, Georgia, Detroit, Michigan, and Dallas, Texas, said Christopher Leinberger, an urban planning professor at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, where once rundown downtowns are being revitalized by well-educated, young professionals who have no desire to live in a detached single family home typical of a suburbia where life is often centered around long commutes and cars.

Instead, they are looking for what Leinberger calls "walkable urbanism" -- both small communities and big cities characterized by efficient mass transit systems and high density developments enabling residents to walk virtually everywhere for everything -- from home to work to restaurants to movie theaters.

The so-called New Urbanism movement emerged in the mid-90s and has been steadily gaining momentum, especially with rising energy costs, environmental concerns and health problems associated with what Leinberger calls "drivable suburbanism" -- a low-density built environment plan that emerged around the end of the World War II and has been the dominant design in the U.S. ever since.

Thirty-five percent of the nation's wealth, according to Leinberger, has been invested in constructing this drivable suburban landscape.

But now, Leinberger told CNN, it appears the pendulum is beginning to swing back in favor of the type of walkable community that existed long before the advent of the once fashionable suburbs in the 1940s. He says it is being driven by generations molded by television shows like "Seinfeld" and "Friends," where city life is shown as being cool again -- a thing to flock to, rather than flee.

"The image of the city was once something to be left behind,"

Continuing on that theme, the Freakonomics blog ran a quorum on the subject. They asked, "What is the Future of Suburbia?" Answers ran the gamut from 'apocalyptic utopianism' to 'brutal reality.

I then read a great article which talked about this trend featuring, of all places, Chicago. In The New Republic, in an article called Trading Places, Alan Ehrenhalt wrote about the demographic inversion of the American city. He notes,

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.

I'm not necessarily sure what to think of this trend. While part of me doesn't want to be part of a trend, I'm completely on board with the benefits of 'New Urbanism'. One of the things we love about the city is the walkability and the option of accessible public transit. Being part of a densely populated area seems to lend itself to a dynamic level of life in a neighborhood that is very appealing to us.

At the same time, there is no doubt that choices are being made. As noted, cost of living is higher. And certain amenities are being chosen over others. And I suppose it does come down to what you matter most. But I guess what most matters to me is that people make that choice not based on false reasons, like schools, but on what they actually are choosing between.
We must ask ourselves, do we want a big yard or a walkable community?

Problems

So I've been a bit busy lately. You may have noticed my post count dropping. Sorry about that. Don't worry, it's not an indication that I will be leaving this blogging world, just a reflection of all that's going on for the fam right now. If you're curious, my wife has documented much of it over at WCW's.

Additionally, my home computer has crashed and I've been without it for over a month now. It's got all kinds of problems (hopefully not as bad as those caused by this guy, but still, yikes.) That's the first time this has been the case (no computer) since the beginning of my freshman year of college. Not sure if it's a good thing or not. Hopefully I'll be getting it fixed soon, but until then, I'm limited.

Hopefully you'll bear with me, and when I'm able to get back up and running and a bit more time becomes available, I'll be back with a vengeance. And until then, I'll still try to post when I'm able.

Life in Google Street View

On a quiet afternoon at 6436 S. Oakley here in Chicago, two boys didn't notice the camera recording their every move...


Unsurprisingly, it appears that this particular picture has been pulled from online.

Play Budget Hero

Have you ever thought you could do a better job than our current politicians in Washington? Well, here's your chance. In a highly engaging online game, this site has given you the ability to play federal budget czar.

It's up to you, balance our federal budget...

Play Budget Hero.

Poor People With Checks

I apologize that I haven't been posting as frequently. Obviously there's been a lot going on. And then this past week my computer crashed. (still working on that)
That said, I will be continuing to try to throw fun insightful items up when I get the chance. So I hope you enjoy.

So I just got done watching this video featured on Freakonomics. To quote them,

What kind of people use check-cashing places? How do they work? Do such places contribute to inequality?

And most important — why are people paying for their own money?

Wonder no more.

Office Stress

So one of my co-workers got a little stressed last month. Unfortunately for him, it was all captured on the security cameras...


Office Worker Goes Absolutely Insane - Watch more free videos