Religious "nones" and crazy people

So a new study indicates (summary here) that if the current trend in the fastest-growing sector of American religion -- "none" or "not affiliated" -- continues, about 25% of Americans will belong to that group withing twenty years.

That's not surprising to me at all, and I actually think it may be a little low. The reason is that, as the authors report, a large chunk of the "none" crowd, or non-religious sector, as I think we ought to be referred, is young and 1st-generational. 30% of us are under 30 and only 5% over 70 (see Fig. 1.2). This means that our impact on our children will be felt in twenty years even as the current trend among our generation (Gen Y) continues.

See more atheism stats here.

I've said before (actually, quoted before) that the Religious Right is getting dumber with time. Want to see recent evidence? Check out a woman speaker suggesting that we have public abortions at the "Values Voters Summit" and this weeks' "How to Take Back America" conference co-chair elaborate on conspiracy theories. These people are complete nutjobs.

Obama Effect Redux

I played racquetball last night at a city park. Like many city parks located around large black populations, the basketball gym inside was almost entirely filled with young black males playing basketball, having fun, goofing off. What I noticed, and the reason for the title of this post, was a poster over the water fountain that I've never seen before:


It's apparently the creation of an Atlanta-based designer, King Photography and Graphics. I found it and two other posters like it on www.nomoresagging.com. It dovetails nicely with a question I raised a few months back about Obama's impact on black culture. Although he's personally weighed in against the sort of laws against sagging that Atlanta and other places have considered, he did clearly state that he thought wearing them like that was disrespectful of others.

I don't know how much of an impact things like this have now or will have later, but it is an interesting thing to keep an eye on.

Thanks, Beck

I really do lay the blame for stuff like this at the feet of the crazy wingnuts that get paid millions of dollars to terrify impressionable people about their government. Two of my favorites from MediaMatters are:

• On July 23, 2009, Glenn Beck tells radio listeners that people going “door to door collecting information” would be helping to create a “modern day slave state”.
• During a June 25 interview with Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) on his Fox News show, Glenn Beck stated that "there's a lot of people that are concerned" with the census "because they don't want to fill it out. They're not comfortable with ACORN members coming to find out all this information. They don't want to give the government all this kind of information."

Conservatives in the media are inflaming the right-wing crazies in a way that no left-wingers ever did or could.

PS: Salon has a fantastic detailed report on Beck's history and rise as a media figure. The most disturbing thing I read was when he called a station rival's wife after she had a miscarriage live on the air and asked her about it, then said that the man (rival) couldn't do anything right. I don't believe in karma, but one has to wonder when a short while later Beck's daughter Mary suffers strokes as she is born and gets cerebal palsy as a result:

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

"It was low class," says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. "There are certain places you just don't go."

"Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station," says Kelly. "It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us 'Jackass.'" Among those who were appalled by Beck's prank call was Beck's own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly's wife since the two worked together at WPGC.
...
Toward the end of his time in Phoenix, Beck's wife, Claire, gave birth to a daughter. As with the rest of his life, Beck had incorporated his wife's pregnancy into his radio show. He asked listeners to guess when his wife would go into labor and the sex of the child. When Beck came back on the air after the birth, he announced that the delivery had been problematic and that there would be no more games around the subject. The baby girl had suffered from a series of strokes at birth resulting in cerebral palsy. Beck named her Mary, after his mother.

"After the public buildup about the baby, it was all very awkward and sad," remembers Hattrick. "I thought it was a good lesson in being careful about personal issues on the air."

Counter-protest

I found a fantastic new website that shows pictures of idiot protesters and others in the mix with them making fun of them. It seems inspired by the Westboro "God hates fags" people. I loved this one because I thought I'd hold up a sign beside the "Fag Church" sign with an arrow asking, "Where can I join this church?"

PS: On a similar note, see this.

Protect Health Insurance Executives!

Hilarious! And it's by MoveOn.

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Wingnuts

Watch this Tea Bagger 9/12 video and tell me that these people aren't almost entirely Southern (listen to the accents and the religious stupidity).

I almost cried at 8:37 when a man said that, "Glenn Beck is such a logical thinker."

Read this and this for more on 9/12 and Tea Baggers.

Mindset

Comment on MJ's Hall of Fame speech:

Yes, there was some wink-wink teasing with his beloved Dean Smith, but make no mistake: Jordan revealed himself to be strangely bitter. You won, Michael. You won it all. Yet he keeps chasing something that he’ll never catch, and sometimes, well, it all seems so hollow for him.

I read a chunk of Dweck's Mindset this summer and was thinking about that as I read about how MJ rolled off grievances and pointed out when coaches and teammates underestimated him in the past. Dweck's major thesis is that people's growth-oriented mindsets are what set them apart from those who see talent as a fixed finite quality that we either have or don't. She points to athletes who find fault with everyone but themselves versus those who continually see ways to improve themselves.

You have to wonder if the drive to improve himself would've been there at all if not for this obvious resent he held for those he felt hadn't given him a fair shot. Maybe anger is a better motivator for improvement than idealism. Could he have spent hours upon hours perfecting his game without all the wrongs he suffered? We'll never know.

SC Republican Joe Wilson is an idiot and a liar

For shouting, "You lie!" during the President's speech after Obama's claim that the bills will specifically exclude coverage for illegals, Wilson proves himself both an idiot and a liar:

• CNN Fact Check
• Factcheck.org
• AP Factcheck
• Denver Post
• Newsweek
  
• ...&c.

Let's kick the loser out on his can in 2010. Elect Rob Miller.

Colbert on religion

No, the real Stephen Colbert, not in character:

Does faith still play a big part in your life?
Very much. I am highly variable in my devotion. From a doctrinal point of view or a dogmatic point of view or a strictly Catholic adherent point of view, I'm first to say that I talk a good game, but I don't know how good I am about it in practice. I saw how my mother's faith was very valuable to her and valuable to my brothers and sisters, and I'm moved by the words of Christ, and I'll leave it at that.

But you do teach Sunday school?
I teach the seven year olds. I'm the catechist for their first communion.

It's almost disappointing. He's no Brad Pitt. But, if you read it carefully, I find reason to think he may be skeptical.

Where all the stuff went

As we read about the economic collapse of '08 and hear mentioned the way consumer spending far outpaced earnings (leading to years of negative savings) one question seems to never get raised: what did Americans do with all the old stuff when they went out and bought new stuff? Did we just trash our old TV's when we went out and bought new plasmas on credit?

It appears the answer may be self-storage.

“A lot of it just comes down to the great American propensity toward accumulating stuff,” Litton explained. Between 1970 and 2008, real disposable personal income per capita doubled, and by 2008 we were spending nearly all of it — all but 2.7 percent — each year. Meanwhile, the price of much of what we were buying plunged. Even by the early ’90s, American families had, on average, twice as many possessions as they did 25 years earlier. By 2005, according to the Boston College sociologist Juliet B. Schor, the average consumer purchased one new piece of clothing every five and a half days.

Schor has been hacking intrepidly through the jumble of available data quantifying the last decade’s consumption spree. Between 1998 and 2005, she found, the number of vacuum cleaners coming into the country every year more than doubled. The number of toasters, ovens and coffeemakers tripled. A 2006 U.C.L.A. study found middle-class families in Los Angeles “battling a nearly universal overaccumulation of goods.” Garages were clogged. Toys and outdoor furniture collected in the corners of backyards. “The home-goods storage crisis has reached almost epic proportions,” the authors of the study wrote. A new kind of customer was being propelled, hands full, into self-storage.

“A lot of the expansion we experienced as an industry was people choosing to store,” Litton told me. A Self Storage Association study showed that, by 2007, the once-quintessential client — the family in the middle of a move, using storage to solve a short-term, logistical problem — had lost its majority. Fifty percent of renters were now simply storing what wouldn’t fit in their homes — even though the size of the average American house had almost doubled in the previous 50 years, to 2,300 square feet.

Consider our national furniture habit. In an unpublished paper, Schor writes that “anecdotal evidence suggests an ‘Ikea effect.’ ” We’ve spent more on furniture even as prices have dropped, thereby amassing more of it. The amount entering the United States from overseas doubled between 1998 and 2005, reaching some 650 million pieces a year. Comparing Schor’s data with E.P.A. data on municipal solid waste shows that the rate at which we threw out old furniture rose about one-thirteenth as fast during roughly the same period. In other words, most of that new stuff — and any older furniture it displaced — is presumably still knocking around somewhere. In fact, some seven million American households now have at least one piece of furniture in their storage units. Furniture is the most commonly stored thing in America.

The marketing consultant Derek Naylor told me that people stockpile furniture while saving for bigger or second homes but then, in some cases, “they don’t want to clutter up their new home with all the things they have in storage.” So they buy new, nicer things and keep paying to store the old ones anyway. Clem Tang, a spokesman for Public Storage, explains: “You say, ‘I paid $1,000 for this table a couple of years ago. I’m not getting rid of it, or selling it for 10 bucks at a garage sale. That’s like throwing away $1,000.’ ” It’s not a surprising response in a society replacing things at such an accelerated rate — this inability to see our last table as suddenly worthless, even though we’ve just been out shopping for a new one as though it were.

Exactly. We knew we were spending a ton of money on the new stuff, but that the old stuff was still valuable. Why this didn't make us realize that perhaps the old stuff didn't need replacing is a key psychological question. I have a feeling that the psychology of American consumerism has been altered for a while. For how long is anyone's guess.

Ego, or something like it

As I mentioned before, I once decided to weed out my facebook friends list. I decided the other day that it was that time again.

It's almost hard to believe that at one point in 2007, I had 350 friends. What's funny about that is that they were almost entirely people I knew from college. I cut the list down to about 80-some, but it crept back up to 155 (today's count) mostly from adding random people I knew from my home town, but people I didn't really care to keep up with. As of a few hours ago, I now have 53 friends, including 3 family members.

I suppose I've grown more antisocial with age and having a child. Although some basic human social drive makes us want to be liked and feel important in the eyes of our peers, I can honestly say that I think I've "outgrown" this impulse almost entirely, with the exception of colleagues at work and some people I respect. Perhaps that's why I don't have even a tinge of desire to go to my class reunion. I won't go, in fact, even if I get invited -- which is somewhat nebulous, given that I have no idea who is "in charge" of sending out such invitations or how they get to be deemed the authority.

Maybe it's a consequence of being a sort of social pariah from my recent history of atheist activism. Maybe it's my unfailing sense of moral and intellectual superiority. It's got to be ego, or something like it, that drives us first to accumulate markers of social importance and then to discard them in the belief that they are like 99.99% of the other shit that constitutes daily life: absurd.

Krugman in the NYT Magazine

If you have 30min - 1hr for economics reading, go here.