Quantum Theology

Congress, McCain, and Obama seem to think that the rise of oil is the result of speculation. When oil first started taking off, I had an open mind regarding the topic because I know nothing about how oil is traded and what speculation looks like. I now have my opinion, and my opinion is that the same geniuses that couldn’t spot a historic housing bubble as being speculative are the same geniuses that can’t tell supply and demand related price increases. In other words, our leaders are horrible incompetent, or evil. I prefer to think they are just monkeys as it makes me smile.

Before I knew nothing about the oil market, and now I know next to nothing. So, take what’s coming with a grain of salt. Normally when you speculate, you buy and hold a widget expecting the price of the widget to increase in the future, at which point you may sell it. The key point is that you have to buy and hold the widget which increases demand for the widget. If you get enough speculators in the market, then this can provide the appearance of demand in excess of what is really there. This is what happend in the housing bubble markets when people purchased who normally would have rented, and people who purchased multiple investment properties.

Is this what’s happening to oil? Well, apparently there are two markets for oil, the spot market and the futures market. In the futures market, contracts are written in which the holder agrees to buy oil at a certain price at a particular time in the future. People speculate by buying and selling these contracts. The spot market is where oil is traded in the present. If you need oil today, you go to the spot market. If you know you need oil next month, you go to the futures market.

Traders can make or loose money by betting on the future price of the oil through these futures contracts. Traders can’t take delivery of the actual oil because they have no place to store it, so they must sell any contracts before the expiration date, to someone who actually needs the oil. So, how do you make money? Well, if you have a contract for 60 dollar oil come December, and when December comes around the price of oil on the spot market is 80 dollars, then your contract is worth more money than what you paid. If, on the other hand, the price of oil is only 40 dollars, then your contract is cost you more than someone is willing to pay for it and you just lost money.

So, in the oil market, speculators don’t actually hold the physical widget. But, what about people that buy the actual oil? Could they be hoarding it and speculating themselves? Apparently oil inventory is tracked, and people who know where to find this information are saying that there is no oil inventory buildup that would indicate that this is happening. Oil that is purchased seems to be used.

In order for speculators to be driving up the price of oil, there must either be phantom entity hoarding lots of oil and hiding the fact, or some phantom relationship between the futures market and the spot market. I’m not putting money on either of those possiblities. I don’t think speculators are driving the price of oil.

I search long and hard on the internet for someone who could explain the oil markets in layman terms, and explain them in a way where the bullshit meter didn’t go off in my head. I found Paul Krugman.

Here are some of his thoughts on oil speculation:

Speculative nonsense once again Various notes on speculation Confusions about speculation

Apparently Denmark is the happiest country on earth. Why? According to a recent study it’s because they are very negative people. Well, that was my take-away

In all seriousness (is this a pun?), Denmark might be a success story for liberal policies due to the free college education and health care, and a 50% tax rate. Just because it works there doesn’t mean it would work here, but it does show that such policies can in fact work and work well. Something to keep in mind when the conservatives make their typical ‘appeal to fear and insecurities’ argument against such things.

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/14/60minutes/main3833797.shtml

An Ohio teacher got fired for burning a cross on some kids arm in a science class. The teacher is a Christian and taught creationism and intelligent design as well as evolution.

According to the news article:

The school’s administrators voted to get rid of the teacher because he refused to keep his religious beliefs out of the classroom.

Either the school administrators are insane, or the reporter is trying to hype a story with controvertial material and twisting the facts. I just don’t understand how a school board could overlook the fact that a teacher BURNED a mark on a kids arm and instead tie the firing to religious beliefs. Are you telling me that if the teacher was not religious and burned a leaf on the students arm he could have kept his job?

I’d put money on shady reporting.

I used to test as an ISTJ, but I now test as an INTP. Wow, a 2 letter change. In other words, how I deal with the outside world and how I process information has been flip flopped. This was the famous Myers Briggs test.

… see the movie, and avoid the Smart car. The movie was fabulous, utterly delicious. Go see it.

Now for my rant on the smart car. My 1996 Dodge Neon, a normal sized compact car, got 28/38 MPG with a 131hp engine and a 2500 pound curb weight. The Smart car, something tiny, gets 40/45 with a 70hp engine and a 1800 pound curb weight.

The MPG numbers are very disappointing due to the small size of the car, small engine, and poor performance. I view this as an engineering failure. I was thinking about getting one of these little cars, but the gas numbers don’t make up for all the other compromises. I need to see something in the 50+MPG range before I would call it ’smart.’ Get a used Civic or Neon and the savings will more than cover the small fuel differential.

There seems to be a difference of opinion in America today with regard to the role of foreign policy, the manner in which it is executed. Closely related is the role of the Constitution, and the powers given to the three branches of government.

The Bush administration, which I opposed ever since the decision was made to invade Iraq, is of the neo-conservative side of the house, which espouses strong involvement in global affairs with the aim of preserving United States interests above all else, preemptive attacks on perceived enemies, a pragmatic ‘end justifies the means’ philosophy,  a strong executive branch, and largely views the constitution as an outdated document and makes attempts to undermine it in search of a stronger central government, and is fiscally irresponsible.

There is another branch of conservative thought which I still hold, has diametrically opposed views to the ones I mentioned above.

In my attempt to engage the larger Christian culture more directly and to crawl out of my isolationist shell, I have observed a disturbing number of Christian which hold to the neo-conservative philosophy of the Bush administration.  I find such views to be not only morally suspect in light of the life and teachings of Christ, but shortsighted for a Christian or any other religious group. Neo-conservatism is only a short step away from outright fascism, and in a fascist state nobody is safe except for those who conform to the party line. The party line of a government is usually driven by power, wealth, and prestige, and I fail to see how a follower of Christ can live in peace in such an environment. In a fascist state, this puts Christians in a difficult situation where you either bastardize your faith in order to survive, or you take a stand and suffer for it. A good study in this matter is the conduct of the Church with regard to Nazi Germany, but a more recent study is the raid of the FLDS compound in Texas by the CPS.

The rather poor showing by Ron Paul in the republican primaries shows me that the majority of republicans are in the neo-conservative camp, and support a continuation of the policies of the Bush administration by nominating John McCain.  While I am still a registered republican, I can no longer consider myself one so long as such views hold dominance. I will most likely vote for the Libertarian candidate in the upcoming election. I won’t consider Obama simply because he was a member of the do-nothing senate that didn’t find it politically expedient to check the abuses of power of the Bush administration. The opposition to the neo-conservative bent is the only thing that would overcome the fact that I oppose much of the democratic political platform.

I called my old spiritual mentor from San Diego last night. His church is in the center of a known homosexual district, and so the recent decision by the California Supreme Court regarding homosexual marriage is causing some serious conflict in his church. He used words like ‘lines being drawn in the sand.’

I always seem to be ahead of the curve on these sorts of problems. I saw this coming back in 05 and I did some research. At the end of that research I came to some conclusions.

1. The Bible appears to be clear on the matter of homosexuality
2. There is research that appears to debunk the seeming clarity of the Bible through a study of the greek words and the historical context.
3. There is nothing I could find from the mainstream church that would debunk the debunking.

I still don’t have a solid position on the matter because of point 3. If a rebuttal is not made sometime soon, then I’ll have to take point 2 to heart and give homosexuality a green light. I’m not an expert on the greek language or the customs of the ancient world, so I have no choice but to depend on the best scholarly evidence and ignore platitudes and surface level observations which are heavily compromised by prejudice.

What is marriage? From the standpoint of the state, it is a series of legal rights and a legal contract between two people. From the standpoint of Christianity, it is the entering of a husband, wife, and god into a binding union. In Christianity, no legal rights are implied or presumed, and the union is supposed to be binding for life with very minimal ways it can be broken, namely death and unfaithfulness.

This conflict between Christians and the homosexual community revolves around the semantic meaning of marriage. The Christians see the homosexual community as defaming something presumed to be pure, and thus the opposition to homosexual marriage. The homosexual community takes the opposition to marriage by the Christian community as bigotry and hatred. This is a complex subject which I don’t know I want to spend the energy getting into in depth on a blog. It’s a better topic for a full on research paper.

Short of delving into the intricacies  of the issue, I think everyone can be served by having the Christian community separate the Christian concept of marriage from the states concept of marriage by coming up with a new name for the biblical ideal. My problem with the greater Christian church is that our marriages don’t look much different from the greater society because we don’t really follow the biblical ideal of marriage. It seems to me that the church needs to clean it’s marriage house before it can make any claims to know better. In my mind it has forfeited it’s leadership role.

If the Christian church could get together and standardize the biblical concept of marriage and name it something else, they could appease those who worry about the purity of marriage, expose those who are using purity of marriage as a cover for a deeper opposition to anything homosexual, clean the house of Christian marriage by giving people a clear standard of what to live for, and foster some peace between the Christian and homosexual communities.

As I said, this whole issues is horribly complex and pivots on the central questions of:

1. Is homosexuality a sin
2. if it is a sin, then how important is it in relationship to other sins. The relative ranking is important because it doesn’t make sense to spend your efforts on minor things while ignoring typical things like lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. In other words, what is the big picture perspective on the matter.

Point one is probably easier to determine, and point 2 just seems like a matter of endless debate. Yuck. Just for an idea of how yucky this whole matter is, presuming that homosexuality is in fact a sin, then the view of the homosexuality community that Christians are just hateful would be quite wrong. A Christian would be the most loving by showing someone the error of his/her way, and most hateful by letting them continue in a wrong path. In fact, homosexuality SHOULD be opposed because it wouldn’t do for others to fall into the same sin.

Given the gravity on the matter, the lack of underpinning for the basic question of if the homosexual lifestyle is a sin or not, is quite disturbing. For what it’s worth, I call for a renewed study into the question of homosexuality, and a call to a high standard of marriage by disambiguating it from the states definition.

One final disclaimer. I intentionally didn’t get into the issue that the Christian and homosexual communities are not disjoint subsets. There are homosexual Christians and things are especially complicated and difficult for them and the churches they attend. This is the situation which confronts my mentor.

PGL over at Angry Bear hit the nail on the head about tax cuts.

George W. Bush also pretended to cut taxes but we all know government spending has increased as a share of GDP. So we did not have tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 – only tax deferrals. And yes – national savings and investment are lower than they were in those allegedly high tax Clinton years. I guess Kudlow is not aware that real GDP grew by 3.7% per year under Clinton while it grew by only 3.0% during the Reagan-Bush41 years. But even 3% would seem high compared to the anemic growth of GDP under George W. Bush. And Kudlow is stupid enough to think that a continuation of Bush43’s fiscal irresponsibility is the path to more investment and growth? No wonder he writes for the National Review!

We all like tax cuts as we get to keep more of our money. However, unless you reduce spending to match the reduction in revenue, then you simply get tax deferral. You simply make someone else down the line pay for what you get now. It’s like you parents running up a large amount of credit card debt, and having the kids pay it down for them. Unless you reduce spending, tax cuts could be thought of as screwing your kids. Personally, I could care less about maintaining an empire so I wouldn’t mind a withdrawal from Iraq and slashing the defense budget in half. Oh yeah, putting some limits on medicare coverage would be a good thing to. People are going to die, so why should the state pay out the nose to keep the almost dead almost dead for a little longer?

I suppose one of these days I should put the link to my OTHER blog here so that perhaps Google might index it one day. Perhaps one day I’ll put a permanent link, but that would require web work, which I really don’t like.