Why Worship?

 

Worship is just singing in church right, a way to pass time at church before the pastor comes out?

I’ve been following this guy Sean Feucht from California who has started setting up his worship team in large cities. He’s from a church in Redding called Bethel. (Yes, I had to look it up).  I’m not sure if he advertises these events or just goes on TV to get the word out. (Most of what I’ve seen are reposts from friends on Facebook). He has some kind of schedule because I know he started in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd. I think it’s time to really support this as followers of Christ. Even if the music isn’t your particular brand or if you’re put off by emotional displays. A friend of mine once called it ‘feeling the music’ as in “That ain’t one them churches where people feel the music is it?”

 Now is not the time to nitpick. I’m not comfortable seeing cities get burned and looted while the media pretends it’s a legitimate civil rights event. I don’t see anyone else confronting the darkness gripping our cities and shining a light of truth. That’s not to dump on organizations helping the homeless and providing shelter. They do great work. But those are defensive measures in the spiritual war, a way of cleaning up the wreckage and providing hope. Few are willing to go on offense, stand on a stage and invite people to acknowledge the Savior.

So why worship? Because it’s an act of humility and on a big scale it’s unifying. Political change must begin with an understanding that we (Americans) need divine inspiration. Without that humility all the brilliant ideas are just bluster. Without surrender there is no improvement. Without a spiritual fight there is no victory.   

Sean’s focus on Portland and Los Angeles for his first couple of events show how committed he is to opening a front in the difficult areas. I read something he posted about not escaping to the suburbs anymore, where the applause is easier (my words not his). It felt like an admission that the hostile climates are where the real war is. It’s a challenge to himself and others to take our faith into unfriendly zones and worship. We’ve ignored cities for too long and now the sewers are backing up and flooding the landscape.

Whatever sins we’ve made as a country this isn’t a time to assign blame. That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to go around, but worship allows us chance to step into something larger than ourselves and surrender.

The lawlessness and cruelty are out of control. We can identify the problems pretty well. They start by removing God and end with societal collapse. The solutions are more problematic. It’s tough to get people to agree in normal political times, much more in a heated political season. But our problems aren’t really political in the sense that we just need to listen to each other. If that was the case Sean Feucht would be doing national dialogues. I think worship is what we’re left with because everything else has failed. Maybe we should have tried it first. Some of our cities and states, whole regions actually, are beyond the discussion phase. Violence and rebellion are the order of the day.  

Worship says “I can’t do this, but I know Who can”. Collectively it says “We can’t do this, but we know Who can”.  

 

 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  Ephesians 6:12

Slow Pace or No Pace

 

I got lazy tonight and decided not to run.

I’ve been working hard and I know…yada yada yada…everyone works hard but sometimes I just want to sit. My regular schedule looks like this for now: Monday, run 3 to 4 miles with mild hills. Thursday, run 3 to 4 miles with hills unless at the gym. Saturday, early group run according to distance set by leader. Right now it’s between 6 and 7 but jumping up to 8 quickly. Cool mornings in August are refreshing rarity, like napping in the shade after a picnic. I consider myself blessed that last week was one such event, mid to high sixties with a little breeze. But summer giveth and summer taketh away; Saturday looks like another sweaty, torturous jaunt through the city. 

I probably complain and also praise the weather more than just about anything else. It’s the single most important external event to any running day. Yes, sometimes my foot gets tight and takes a few laps to loosen up, or my calves won’t stretch out, or my energy is low. Mostly it’s the heat and humidity. Part of my laziness this evening is firmly rooted in that sinking feeling that comes over me when I think about having to lace up the New Balances and hoof it around the park. It’s hot dammit! I have to train after work right now. I’m going in early so morning runs are out of the question.

I suppose I could get up at 5:30 a.m. but It’s not likely it would last beyond a few days.

That leaves afternoons in the heat which is at least a short affair. I barely get 3 miles in before stopping, overheated. But there has to be some benefit to putting in work in the afternoon sun right? Fine, no more complaining. 

I read something interesting about slow pace running that I didn’t know before. It’s actually good for you in a variety of ways. First it improves your endurance and strengthens the muscles to adapt to the rigors of long distance. I noticed how much stronger I was once I passed up older distance milestones. In order to hit the longer runs I had to seriously slow up. Slow running improves the efficiency of your cardiovascular system and improves glycogen stores. I’m not sure what glycogen is but it sounds important. There was a helpful table in a women’s running magazine I found online. Does it still apply to men?

“Slow” is defined as conversational pace or the pace at which you could comfortably carry on a conversation. Keep that pace up whenever doing a middle distance run (90 minutes roughly) and feel the gains!!! I was surprised to read that because I assumed faster was better. Marathon runners are constantly comparing notes on times, improvements, personal records (PRs). Why not run hard every time? The answer seems to be a combination of avoiding injury and burning out. That’s why proper training is so important. Nothing is worse than getting overwhelmed. This is true in other sports too. You build up to game level events through steady, consistent improvements.  

Take it slow and build up a reserve so when the test comes, the body is ready. The races are the test. They’re the event where all the tough slogs in the heat get to matter. You just can’t skip too many out of laziness.

Save Us From the Technocrats

 

I listened to a podcast with John Yoo the other day. 

He’s a legal scholar who knows the Constitution like a favorite passage of scripture. As a result he gets called to these shows to explain judicial decisions and Supreme Court rulings. I like to hear his explanations because he has a way of breaking it down (dumbing it down?) for people like me. Lawyers can get into the weeds pretty quick when talking case law. John was lukewarm on Trump after the election. He's on team Trump now after looking at the last 4 years and probably concluding, 45 isn’t the monster made out in the press.

He talked about technocrats in government and it reminded me of our Tulsa mayor who seems to be one. He pushed for mask mandates and wants to set up a board to review all police incidents. Want a good idea of how technocracy works to undermine official power? Read up on the fraud known as “Trump-Russia Collusion’ for a textbook example. A group of top intelligence officials spied on a campaign to undermine the election and then drummed up some nonsense about Russia being responsible. Then set up a two year false flag operation known as the Mueller Report to ostensibly cover it up.

The Mueller Report was the result of appointed officials deciding they know better than the voters. Forgetting their proper role, which is to evaluate intelligence and make recommendations, they seized the ship and tried to arrest the captain. That’s how it plays out in worst case scenarios. But the thinking that leads to mutiny is rooted in technocratic visions of leadership.

Technocrats like models, data, consensus and lab sourced ideas: while conservatives like to grow the economy and give tax incentives to businesses. Neither vision is easy to pull off but technocrats are more likely to ignore personal freedoms at the expense of broad consensus.  Mostly the left manages cities because the right doesn’t want to. But Republicans shouldn’t give up on cities any more than they should give up on education reform. Large and small cities need reform where technocrats have failed to deliver.

Cameras are everywhere in big cities; downtowns are connected and invasive. What is the point of all the data collection anyway? I’m all for improving efficiency in transportation and garbage collection. I’m for finding out where the heaviest traffic exists and designing better roads. I’m for closing bad schools and replacing bad teachers. I'm for structural improvements and water, sewer and treatment efficiencies.  

I'm against overbearing ordinances and mask mandates. I’m against letting the homeless sleep under bridges and put up tent cities. California’s governor Gavin Newsom mentioned the health threat during his state of the state speech last year (2019). He cited typhus and syphilis, medieval diseases reappearing along with the gathering of large populations of homeless. In San Francisco they are finally getting rid of tent cities a few hundred at a time. But does Newsom, who used to be the mayor there, attribute the meteoric rise over the last few years in bad policy by the city? Since 2014 they dropped mandatory treatment for the mentally ill. Proposition 47 also decriminalized hard drugs and allowed non-violent offenders to get out of jail without any forced treatment. They incentivize homelessness and open drug use by not cracking down on it. 

So why blame the technocrats? Because decisions about decriminalizing get made in groups responsible for making policy. They have agendas based on preconceived notions about homelessness, drug use, mental illness. Most think homelessness is a problem of expensive rents, ridiculous! How many people do you know get prices out of a market and decide to live in a tent? It's not as scientific as they would have us believe. When you start from a faulty premise you get a faulty result. Also these groups (activists, professors, wonks) don't need to get votes or show proof, creating an insidious shadow government. 

What is my problem with technocracy you ask? Not the idea of using expertise to improve life, but in thinking expertise is the ONLY thing needed to solve life’s eternal problems.

 People are messy. We are selfish and mean, arrogant and irresponsible. We drink and drug and gamble and cheat on taxes, we cheat on spouses. Some even refuse to wear masks (monsters!) and disregard speed limits. Adherents to expert rule believe they can change human nature to better fit with the zeitgeist of a modern society. Not all at once, but over the course of decades (millennia?) they believe in shifting opinions enough to replace ‘outdated’ notions like individual liberty. Why? Because what they offer is so much better, just wait and see what we can build!

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (behavioral economists) wrote about changing peoples’ minds so they make the 'right' decisions in the book Nudge. The idea is to suggest slight modifications in behavior to achieve a desired outcome. When Facebook opts you in for some service you didn’t want or ask for, it’s considered a ‘nudge’. You can still opt out of course but it’s not the default. The traditional way to do this is to opt in, like when the cashier asks for your email at Macy and you tell them to get lost. Facebook does it that way because it’s more effective at nudging people to do what FB wants them to.

Governments can also design rate hikes like this too. By say, raising taxes and forcing people to go to the ballot box to vote it down. It’s a sneaky way of saying “Don’t worry you still get to vote on it”. I can’t say if that has happened yet, but I wouldn't put it past a technocrat.  

So what’s the big deal when your ‘nudged’ decision may have been best for you anyway?

 Because why should local officials get to make the call on what is beneficial to a person, a group of people? Even assuming their aims benefit the community, what makes their collective decision the correct one? Especially on issues wearing masks for instance. Naturally you’d say because of the data, but the data is all over the map. Technocrats like to pretend they’re driven by pure science and numbers but when the numbers don’t support them, or aren’t clear, they do what other cities do. Which is just old fashioned peer pressure.  

It’s impossible to understand the needs of thousands of individuals that reside in your city, health or financial. City governments are notorious for overspending and under-budgeting. They have a record in most cities of making bad choices with money. The city of Boston built a very expensive tunnel highway to ease traffic. The project (called the Big Dig) was poorly managed and ran way over budget. At least they got something useful out of it.

Technocrats are people too and come with faulty software like the rest of us. They’re greedy and power mad and use their particular expertise to influence as much as possible. Doctor Fauci is a staple of our news updates now and he’s earned a measure of respect for his years of service. But he’s said conflicting things about masks and the nature of the Covid virus going back to February. He’s entitled to be wrong of course but the shifting in positions should be a warning to anyone that thinks doctors should be the final word in health care.

No one knows all and even with our fancy way of collecting data and monitoring everything from weather patterns to heart arrhythmias, we do the best we can. Decisions from government should be limited and local, mitigating the effects of sweeping changes on millions of lives.

No more shutdowns and no more mask requirements. John Yoo would agree.  

 

 

 

 

The Peanut Butter Falcon: Review

 

If I had to sum up the Peanut Butter Falcon in one word it would be “sweet”. Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn it’s a story about finding friendship and running away on a homemade raft. But where Huck Finn held up a mirror to society and showed flaws about the treatment of blacks, Falcon is concerned with individual growth through redemption. Two men with different lives form a bond by escaping their problems’ through the marshy Outer Banks along the Carolina coast in search of a different life.

Zak (Zack Gottsagen) is a young man with Down’s Syndrome who lives in a nursing home with other elderly patients and tries on multiple occasions to escape. He has no family so the state put him in the facility although he isn’t happy about it. As he says to his case worker Eleanor (Dakota Johnson) in one scene “I’m young, And I’m not old”. His roommate Carl (Bruce Dern) sympathizes with the desire to leave. One night Carl helps Zak escape through the bars of his room and head off into the night. While running around Zak stumbles upon a fishing boat owned by a crabber, Tyler (Shia LaBeouf) with a penchant for stealing from other crabbers. Tyler gets into a fight with the other fisherman and sets their gear on fire, setting of a chase through the tributaries of the Carolina coastline. While hiding he discovers Zak hidden under a tarp.

From this point the movie begins to feel Huck Finnish, both men running away from something and depending on each other in the process. Zak isn’t capable of living along and Tyler is a broken man trying to forget about his dead brother. The film hints that he was responsible for his brother’s death. It’s a burden he carries around like the tattered ruck sack on his back. Zak wears nothing but underwear since his escape, a symbol of his total dependence on others for help. Tyler eventually gives him pants and boots, a sign of manhood and independence. Zak desperately wants to go to a wrestling school run by a former pro named “Saltwater Redneck” and become a “Bad Ass”.  Tyler wants to go to Florida and run a charter service. He agrees to take Zak to the town where the wrestling school is supposedly housed.

Tyler teaches Zak how to fight, how to fire a shotgun and how to fish. Their collective pasts keep catching up with them at various times. The crabbers who Tyler stole from catch him in cabin and set his raft alight before Zak appears with a shotgun to scare them away. Eleanor finds the pair on a beach one morning after a night of drinking homemade liquor. She tries unsuccessfully to bring Zak back to the nursing home but neither Zak nor Tyler is having it. Besides, Tyler is struck by her and convinces her to join the pair on their rafting crusade to find the wrestling school for Zak.

The materials for the raft they eventually build came from a blind preacher that nearly shot them as they drifted onto his property looking for a boat to steal. He agreed to let them built it in exchange for an old style baptism down at the water’s edge. After that scene Tyler seems to let go as the redemptive nature of baptism washes away the guilt for his brother. I may be assuming some of this because it never shows him going under the water. But a lot of his weariness melts away and he becomes a more sympathetic character.

It’s impossible not to root for Zak. He is completely alone in the world. He lacks independence and has little understanding of the world outside the home. He desperately needs a friend, a “Bro Dawg” as he calls it. He has some pain from being called a ‘retard’ by people in his past. He is passionate about wrestling and believes he can become a superstar. The film’s title is taken from a scene where Tyler tells Zak that he needs a wrestling name. It’s a beginning of sorts for him, a new name and a new purpose. They settle on the ‘Peanut Butter Falcon’. I won’t give away the ending but this is a movie for everyone.

 At its core is a story that shows how we all need each other.

I highly recommend. 

A Bridge Too Far: Review

 

Another addition to my old war movie review habit began the other night. I sat down to A Bridge Too Far.

I’ve been a fan of war movies since I was a kid but I always tend to view the same ones instead of looking at different ones. I head right for the old favorites. I’d wanted to see Bridge for some time but kept missing it on the replays. Thankfully Netflix has been buying up a lot of old movies from comedy to war so I caught a glimpse on the scroll. If you have Netflix you know what the scroll is all about. It means spending more time mashing the down button on the remote and hoping some gem catches your eye. It rarely does. Last night though I felt Hitler needed another kick in the teeth.

It was made in 1977 so “old” is kind of a relative term. I expected a 1960s era movie for some reason. The first thing I noticed is the star studded cast: Sean Connery, Michael Cain, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, James Caan, Robert Redford, Ryan O’Neal. The acting is first rate from the start as expected. I’ve mentioned it before in my reviews but I always notice how the older films start with the 20,000 foot view and zoom in from there. Not literally of course but they set the stage for the audience who might be unaware of the historical details of the film. Lot's of maps and overviews of the terrain and mission. Quotable lines about the dangers of hubris on the battlefield.

This one is about the second offensive of the World War II by the Allies called Market Garden. It’s the second offensive since the Normandy beach anyway.

Briefly, Market Garden was an attempt to secure key positions in the Netherlands and hold bridges for the Allies--the ultimate goal being to move on to Berlin. The Nazi were in place too securely and the effort proved a disaster. Paratroopers and gliders landed 8 miles away from their destination and had to walk the rest of way getting slaughtered in the process. A German Panzer division held firm at Arnhem and wiped out the Allied opposition. Radios didn’t work in the heavily wooded area causing supply drops to land in the German area. Fog prevented a battalion of paratroopers up to 3 days, too late to be much help. None of the planners thought they'd face much resistance.

The operation was too aggressive and cost over 18,000 men on the Allied side. The film shows the plan and sets the action in motion. It’s a little easy to get lost on exactly which group is in which part of the country, where is the 101^st Airborne again? Why did it take XXX corps so long to jump? Which group is getting shelled by Panzers? I loved the river crossing scene. Robert Redford leads a company (82nd Airborne) across a river in collapsible boats. They row with their rifle butts until the artillery knocks out about half of them in the water. The rest make an attempt to take and hold the bridge but they have to retreat, unable to take the town. 

War movies have a tendency to make the war, or even all war, about one thing. There is one particular confusing line from Gene Hackman (who Polish General Sosabowski) about ‘when men decide to play war games everyone loses’. It’s meant to sum up the war but ends up sounding like it belongs in a completely different film. It felt like a Ken Burns war documentary for a few minutes at the end, no larger purpose just misery and death.

 World War II was about stopping an evil regime from slaughtering half the world and subjugating the rest. Some conflicts you could make a case that power politics ruined everyone’s life. But the case for defending the world against Hitler in Europe and Hirohito in Asia was self-evident. Besides, the British tried to appease the Fuhrer with give-aways in Austria and Czechoslovakia.  Right after that he invaded Poland.

 I might be reading too much into it, but a quote like that at the end of movie signifying a ‘wrap up’ is grossly misleading. The film drives the history pretty straight but gets drunk at the end and veers into a ditch.

The last shot is of an old man and a women with young children pushing a cart with their belongings away from a burned out shell of home. It’s a poignant reminder of who is left when war has taken the lives of so many fathers and sons. A Bridge Too Far is a thorough retelling of Market Garden through a few key players and their mistakes. Although it’s a little uneven in message it’s worth a watch.

Stumped

Whenever I struggle to write something I go back to what has worked for me in the past. Especially when I hate everything I put down on the page. This isn’t a new thing for me of course. It happens on occasion. I get blocked by either too many ideas or none at all. The ‘too many’ side of the coin usually means I have some germ of a thought that might work for a blog post. The blog website is always in the back of my mind. These ‘germs’ only get started growing before I smother them in the soil like an invasive weed. Last night I started on about corporate morality or some such thing. It’s an idea that just didn’t work. I didn’t stay with it long, an hour or so at most. It’s never a good thing when lose the thrust of the argument in complex jargon.

I eventually had to stop and ask myself in very clear language “What are you trying to say?”  

That’s often the best measure for trying to think my way around a particular problem. Try to summarize it one or two sentences and then work from there to whittle it down like raw basswood. The rest of the time the problem is the point I’m making requires way more information and knowledge than I have time for. It’s too broad for a simple blog post. I haven’t always worked through the thought process anyway. Nothing is wrong with figuring that out in the course of a writing session. Although when pinched for time it just invites more frustration. Not everything can be wrapped up in 55 minutes like an episode of CSI. 

But real blogging is quick posts and angry screeds right? Yes and No.

Nothing is consistent about individual blogs except the inconsistency of them. But what do we expect when we turn the internet lose and tell be people to be creative? There are as many fashion and food blogs as opinions and videos all littering the space like a newsstand after a tornado. One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to information people post about. It’s better to start at a small ‘blade of grass’ view and expand the lens outward capturing the valleys while moving toward the ranges.

One method that works well is a personal anecdote that follows a larger narrative. This is also how I think about the world.

 I’ve noticed a reduced interest in youth football since I started working in sporting goods. Each year the overall numbers of kid sign ups drops by around 10 to 15 percent. Those are purely my figures but after talking with a lot of directors it’s clear that parents are scared of long term effects of concussion on their kids. No one ever complains about concussions from soccer, especially for girls, but it’s also very high. Expand that local view out to other states and the trends are similar, so are the reasons. I did a quick google search on the declining numbers and read a short Forbes article, here. The author doesn’t have a prescription, other than some ‘football needs to change’ line. The reasons for the decline were beyond the scope of the article so I can’t criticize too much.

Writing often works this way for me. I identify a local problem and move toward a larger pattern across the country. I could go a couple of ways with it as well. Either focus why football declines and not other sports with similar head injuries, or why now and not a decade ago? I could also investigate why girls suffer higher rates of concussion than boys, also a Forbes article. No one is sure why this is of course, but I’ll bet parents aren’t nearly as aware of that as they are about football being a concussion laden sport.

Sometimes I think I should have been a journalist. 

Anyway I’ll get back to what I do best and write what I know. Done complaining for now.