Leon Binkovitz on the Importance of Understanding the 'Reference Neighborhood' →

January 04, 2019 by Miles Kimball

2018's Most Popular Posts

January 03, 2019 by Miles Kimball

The "Key Posts" link at the top of my blog lists all important posts through the end of 2016. Along with "2017's Most Popular Posts," this is intended as a complement to that list. (Also, my most popular storified Twitter discussions are here, and you can see other recent posts by clicking on the Archive link at the top of my blog.) I put links to the most popular posts from 2018 below into four groups: popular new posts in 2018 on diet and health, popular new posts in 2018 on other topics, and popular older posts in those two categories.

I am no stranger to bragging; however, I give statistics not to brag, but because I am a data hound. I would love to see corresponding statistics from other blogs that I follow! The numbers shown are pageviews in 2018 according to Google Analytics. In that period, I had 313,231 pageviews total, of which 42,241 were pageviews for my blog homepage.

New Posts in 2018 on Diet and Health

New Posts in 2018 on Other Topics

Older Posts with Continuing Popularity on Diet and Health

Older Posts with Continuing Popularity on Other Topics

Nouriel Roubini: Why Central Bank Digital Currencies Will Destroy Cryptocurrencies →

January 02, 2019 by Miles Kimball

Christmas Dinner 2018 with the Kimballs in Colorado

January 01, 2019 by Miles Kimball

*Photography in this blog post by Jordan Matthew Kimball*

Our son Jordan’s long-time girlfriend, Caroline, is a fabulous cook. She cooked Christmas dinner for Jordan, Gail, me and herself this year. What is even more remarkable, Caroline was good enough and talented enough to dream up and create dishes consistent with the way Gail and I are trying to eat—in accordance with principles I write about here on this blog in my weekly diet and health posts. Caroline graciously wrote up the recipes below.

Slow Roasted Prime Rib with Horseradish Cream and Balsamic Reduction

8 lb Standing or Bone-In Prime Rib
2-3 tbs Grated Horseradish
cup Sour Cream
½ cup Avocado Oil Mayo
½ tsp White Wine Vinegar
1 cup Balsamic Vinegar
Salt & pepper

● The balsamic reduction can be made up to a week before. I recommend making it at least a day before to keep your kitchen from reeking of vinegar. Heat the balsamic vinegar in an uncovered pot on medium until just boiling. Reduce heat to medium-low and allow it to simmer until it has been reduced by half. If you make this beforehand, let the reduction cool a little before storing in a heat-proof container. Once the reduction cools, it will be harder to pour.

● A day before serving the prime rib, coat the outside of the prime rib with salt & freshly cracked black pepper. Optionally loosen the fat cap from the bottom so that it hangs downward like a flap. This allows air flow when it roasts and helps crisp the fat. Leave uncovered in the fridge to allow to air dry.

● Also on the day before, mix the horseradish, sour cream, mayo and white wine vinegar together and refrigerate so the flavors have time to meld. Adjust the amount of horseradish to taste.

● Preheat the oven to 250 F. Place the roast on a deep roasting pan with a wire rack inside. Roast for 3 hours or until an instant meat thermometer shows an internal temperature of 135 F for a rosy pink prime rib. Remove the prime rib from the oven and allow to rest between 30 minutes to 1 hour. Just before serving, heat the oven to 450 F and blast the rib for 10 minutes to brown the outsides.

● Serve with horseradish cream and balsamic reduction.

Baked Brussel Sprouts with Pancetta, Chevre, Pine Nuts & Dried Cranberries

1 lb Brussel Sprouts
12 oz cubed Pancetta or Bacon
8 oz chopped Chevre or Creamy Goat Cheese
½ cup Pine Nuts
(optional) ¼ cup Dried Cranberries
Salt & pepper

● Preheat the oven to 450 F.

● Steam the brussel sprouts until a fork can just slide into the center. You can do this over a traditional steamer or by covering with a wet paper towel and microwaving for 5-7 minutes depending on the wattage of your microwave.

● Place steamed brussel sprouts in a flat roasting pan & cover with cubed pancetta. Roast until sprouts are crisp and browned on the outside and the pancetta or bacon is crisp. Turn off the heat and allow the pine nuts to gently toast in the residual heat for another minute.

● Once removed from the oven, season with salt & pepper to taste. Add goat cheese and dried cranberries if using and serve immediately.

Creamed Pearl Onions

1 lb frozen Pearl Onions
1 cup Chicken Stock
1 cup Heavy Whipping Cream
1 Bay Leaf
Salt & pepper

● Heat chicken stock, pearl onions, and bay leaf over medium-high heat. When chicken broth comes to a boil, reduce heat to medium and add the cream.

● Simmer the pearl onions for 15-20 minutes until onions are translucent and tender. Strain the creamy broth and save all but ½ cup for the Cream of Mushroom Soup.

● Add the reserved broth back to the onions and simmer until reduced. Season with salt & pepper to taste.

Cream of Mushroom Soup

1 cup Dried Mixed Mushrooms (I used oyster mushrooms, black trumpets, portobello & porcini.)
1 cup chopped fresh Button Mushrooms
1 diced Onion
2 tbs Butter
3 tbs Soy Sauce
½ cup Heavy Whipping Cream
1 tsp Dried Thyme
Reserved liquid from the Creamed Pearl Onions
Salt & pepper

● Wash the dried mushrooms to remove any remaining grit. Then soak the mushrooms in hot water for 15 minutes. Once the mushrooms have been reconstituted, reserve 1 cup of the liquid for the soup.

● Heat butter in soup pot over medium-high heat. Add the onions and cook until tender. Then add the fresh and dried mushrooms. Saute for 1 minute. Add the soy sauce and stir to distribute evenly.

● Add the reserved mushroom liquid and thyme. Cover and bring to a boil. The mushroom liquid may be a little bitter depending on your mix. Sweeten with the reserved pearl onion broth and add the cream. Season with salt & pepper. Keep covered over low heat to keep warm until ready to serve.

***Blueberries, raspberries, blackberries and Camembert cheese***

Don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

IV. Eating Tips

V. Calories In/Calories Out

VI. Wonkish

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

IX. Gary Taubes

X. Twitter Discussions

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

See the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see “Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities” and my post "A Barycentric Autobiography.

The Great Nara Money Experiment

December 31, 2018 by Miles Kimball

Link to this video on YouTube

Hat tip to Joseph Kimball

John Locke: No One is Above the Law, which Must Be Established and Promulgated and Designed for the Good of the People; Taxes and Governmental Succession Require Approval of Elected Representatives

December 30, 2018 by Miles Kimball

John Locke’s views are important because so many of the framers of the US Constitution had read his works. In Sections 141-142 of his 2d Treatise on Government: Of Civil Government, he completes and summarizes his Chapter XI (“Of the Extent of the Legislative Power”) delineation of what powers rulers have and what they don’t have. In reading these sections, it is important to remember that John Locke uses the word “legislative” to refer to the ruler or rulers of a commonwealth.

As with taxation, John Locke views the transfer of power from one ruler to another as something that requires authorization by elected representatives—though his lack of insistence that a monarchy must be elective suggests that this authorization by elected representatives could be long prior to the existing ruler dying or stepping down:

§. 141. Fourthly, The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands: for it being but a delegated power from the people, they who have it cannot pass it over to others. The people alone can appoint the form of the commonwealth, which is by constituting the legislative, and appointing in whose hands that shall be. And when the people have said, We will submit to rules, and be governed by laws made by such men, and in such forms, nobody else can say other men shall make laws for them; nor can the people be bound by any laws, but such as are enacted by those whom they have chosen, and authorized to make laws for them. The power of the legislative, being derived from the people by a positive voluntary grant and institution, can be no other than what that positive grant conveyed, which being only to make laws, and not to make legislators, the legislative can have no power to transfer their authority of making laws, and place it in other hands.

In addition to succession within a commonwealth of a given geographical extent, this seems to imply that annexation of lands that were outside the commonwealth—or cession of lands that were in the commonwealth to the control of some ruler outside the commonwealth—requires approval by elected representatives of the people in those lands. However, John Locke does not directly address that issue in this passage.

In Section 142, John Lock gives a good summary of the limits to the power of rulers, I have boiled down this summary still further into the title of this post.

§. 142. These are the bounds, which the trust, that is put in them by the society, and the law of God and nature, have set to the legislative power of every commonwealth, in all forms of government.

First, They are to govern by promulgated established laws, not to be varied in particular cases, but to have one rule for rich and poor, for the favourite at court, and the country man at plough.

Secondly, These laws also ought to be designed for no other end ultimately, but the good of the people.

Thirdly, They must not raise Taxes on the property of the people, without the consent of the people, given by themselves, or their deputies. And this properly concerns only such governments, where the legislative is always in being, or at least where the people have not reserved any part of the legislative to deputies, to be from time to time chosen by themselves.

Fourthly, The legislative neither must nor can transfer the power of making laws to any body else, or place it any where, but where the people have.

For links to other John Locke posts, see these John Locke aggregator posts:

Keynes's Contractionary Recipe for Counterbalancing the Stimulus of War and Its Disastrous Results in Bengal →

December 29, 2018 by Miles Kimball

Henry Grabar: Minneapolis Confronts Its History of Housing Segregation →

December 28, 2018 by Miles Kimball

Bloomberg #2—>False Advertising for College is Pretty Much the Norm

December 27, 2018 by Miles Kimball

*Link to the column shown above. Originally published in Bloomberg Opinion August 7, 2018. Reprinted with permission.*

“False Advertising for College is Pretty Much the Norm” is my second piece as a Bloomberg columnist. I am grateful to Bloomberg Opinion for permission to reprint the full text of my column here. They retain all rights. You can see links to all my other columns in the popular press here.

For those who want a deeper dive into one of the points I mentioned, here is an ungated link to Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger's paper "Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables."

The administration of President Donald Trump just made it easier for for-profit colleges to get away with making fake promises about things like graduation rates and job placements. That's regrettable. But let's not let prestigious institutions off the hook. They aren't exactly rigorous when they tout the benefits of higher education, either.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has proposed new rules to make it harder for students to get loan forgiveness from schools that lured them with false advertising. Notably, the government wants to make aggrieved students show that the schools actually intended to defraud them, a high burden of proof.

The problem is that the prestige schools have undermined the case for making it easy to go after the bad ones, which just pretend to provide an education without really delivering. Though most colleges and universities mean well, they are also responsible for false advertising and don't always deliver the education they promised. If all institutions of higher education were held to higher standards, it would be easier legally to penalize the worst.

Colleges and universities claim to do two things for their students: help them learn and help them get jobs. It's hard to find even one college or university that provides solid data to back up these claims.

On job placement, the biggest deception by prestigious colleges and universities is to claim credit for the brainpower and work habits that students already had when they arrived. Another important deception is to obscure the difference between the job-placement accomplishments of students who graduate from technical fields such as economics, business, engineering or the life sciences, and the lesser success of students in the humanities, fields like communications or in most social sciences.

Solid data to back up a claim that a school helps students find jobs should include the following:

Graduation rates for different types of students,
The current jobs of graduates, separated out by major and year of graduation.
Data on the other schools a student was admitted to. That’s to identify the consensus view of admissions departments at many schools about the brainpower and work habits a student already had before entering college.

It's no wonder that schools don’t want to provide such data, given what the facts would probably show. Many students incur large educational loans going to a prestigious school but still can’t get a good job. And the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger, former head of the Council of Economic Advisers, used data on which other schools a student was admitted to in a 2002 paper that casts doubt on the benefit from going to a more prestigious school instead of a less prestigious school.

To demonstrate that a school helps students learn, schools should have every student who takes a follow-up course take a test at the beginning of each semester on what they were supposed to have learned in the introductory course. The school can get students to take it seriously enough to get decent data — but not seriously enough to cram for it — by saying they have to pass it to graduate, but that they can always retake it in the unlikely event they don’t pass the first time. To me, it is a telling sign of how little most colleges and universities care as institutions about learning that so few have a systematic policy to measure long-run learning by low-stakes, follow-up tests at some distance in time after a course is over.

When I hear people talk about “fly-by-night” schools, the image I get is one of a “no-name” school with bad intentions. But for a school to meet its implied warranty, it is not enough for it to have a famous name and good intentions. We need to be able to distinguish between good and bad actors.

It's unlikely that colleges and universities will be held to high standards anytime in the next few years given the Trump administration’s strong push toward deregulation. But the next administration could go a long way toward turning the world of higher education right-side-up if it were to require all colleges and universities receiving federal funds to publicly post data on graduation rates and jobs of graduates by major, and provide systematic data to researchers on the other schools a student was admitted to and on long-run student learning.

Cass Sunstein: Change ‘Default’ Option to Ease Student Loan Debt Crisis →

December 26, 2018 by Miles Kimball

Update: I like Robert Flood’s suggestion of calling it a “preset option” instead of a “default option” in this context.

Black Bean Brownies

December 25, 2018 by Miles Kimball

Christmas is a day for treats. But it doesn’t have to be a day of sugar. Our massage therapist Shannaw Martin pointed us to a recipe for black bean brownies that my wife Gail then modified. These brownies cannot match the addictive quality of sugary brownies, but for those who have gone off sugar and flour, the recipe below produces brownies that are surprisingly good.

Black Bean Brownies

Ingredients:

2/3 cup dried black beans that have been soaked overnight in 3 cups water—ideally with some baking soda added—which is then drained and replaced with another 3 cups water, then cooked in a pressure cooker. Follow the instructions of your pressure cooker when cooking the beans. (The presoaking and pressure cooking is to help destroy the lectins that I worry about in my post “What Steven Gundry's Book 'The Plant Paradox' Adds to the Principles of a Low-Insulin-Index Diet.”)

3 organic eggs

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 C cocoa powder (100% cocoa)

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 C Chocolate bar chipped

2/3 C Swerve (play with less—it's supposed to be sugar, so bear that in mind)

1 tsp organic vanilla

3 TBS coconut oil (warmed in the oven or on the stovetop to a liquid form)

1/2 tsp coffee

Preheat oven to 350.

The secret is in the order...

Wet -- pressure-cooked black beans, eggs, little extra vanilla, a little extra coffee in mixer, (mix good)

Dry — Swerve, baking powder, kosher salt, heaping cup of 100% special dark cocoa powder.

Add wet to dry and mix together. Add the heaping spoons of coconut oil that you warmed in the oven into mix.

Before adding 72% or higher organic chocolate chunks grease the pan with lots of coconut oil.

Mix all together and pour into pan. Bake 35-40 minutes at 350 degrees. The above recipe is for 10 brownies. I always double it! Enjoy!!

Grease pan with coconut oil

References:

Don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

IV. Eating Tips

V. Calories In/Calories Out

VI. Wonkish

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

IX. Gary Taubes

X. Twitter Discussions

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

Caitlin Hu: Why Monsters Haunt Christmas in Europe but not America →

December 24, 2018 by Miles Kimball

Kenneth W. Phifer: My Sermon

December 23, 2018 by Miles Kimball

Ferenc Dávid holding his speech at the Diet of Torda in 1568, (today Turda, Romania) when the Unitarian Church was recognized legally by the Transylvanian Diet. By Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch (1896)Link to the Wikipedia article “Unitarianism.” Link to t… — Ferenc Dávid holding his speech at the Diet of Torda in 1568, (today Turda, Romania) when the Unitarian Church was recognized legally by the Transylvanian Diet. By Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch (1896)
*Link to the Wikipedia article “Unitarianism.”* *Link to the Wikipedia article “Universalism.”*

When I left Mormonism for the Unitarian Universalism in 2000, Ken Phifer was the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He gave beautiful sermons. I am grateful for his permission to reprint one of them here.

Ken’s sermon The Faith of a Humanist also appears on supplysideliberal.com. And you will find links to some of my own UU sermons here.

Below are Ken’s words.

It is a truism among those of us who have chosen homiletics, that is, preaching, as our field of expertise that we each have only one sermon in us. Since our work requires that we deliver far more than just one sermon, and preaching the same sermon every week would likely clear the pews/chairs very quickly, we have to learn how to ring the changes on our one message so that we can continue to “mount the pulpit” week by week and remain at least minimally interesting.

In that regard, all of us who preach do well to remember the biting words of Anthony Trollope in his novel Barchester Towers: “There is, perhaps, no greater hardship on mankind in civilized and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent and be tormented.”

I, of course, have no power to compel you to do anything, much less to force you “to sit silent and be tormented.” Indeed, it is one of the great strengths of our Unitarian Universalist religion that people participate according to their free will and not some notion of eternal suffering if they fail to attend.

UU’s don’t sit in torment. They leave, as during a section of one of my sermons that dealt with money some 15-20 people did. Only later did I learn that they were all headed for their children’s RE class for a special presentation. I learned only at the coffee hour why they had gone: because they were good parents, not because they did not like what I said.

I think.

Some stay physically but leave mentally, preparing grocery lists, ruminating on a problem at work, or admiring some fine specimen across the way. Albert Shanker once noted that people generally listen to the first ten

minutes of any talk and doze through the next ten minutes. After that, he remarked, people begin to have sexual fantasies.

This is the reason that I always talk for more than 20 minutes, so that every one can come away with at least something of interest.

Whatever congregants may do, preachers, unless they are genuinely unselfaware, preach their one sermon but in different ways, using different words with different emphases, expanding, contracting, amending, finding better phrases to express their one message.

Like a jazz musician who has played a tune hundreds of times but never the same way—Coleman Hawkins playing his classic Body and Soul, for example, or Art Tatum playing anything in his virtuoso piano style—preachers try to keep the message fresh and interesting, comforting and inspiring, challenging and caring, seeking always better ways to state the message.

The work of the preacher is not unlike that of the singer in a story told by Saul Bellow. She was young and making her debut at La Scala. After a particularly beautiful but difficult aria, the applause was thunderous. There were cries for her to do it again. After the fourth such encore, worn out from the challenging music sung again and yet again, she asked her audience how many more times she must sing it. A voice cried out, “Until you get it right!!”

Each week we preachers hope that we will get it right, or at least get closer to right than before. We know that we will likely fail, but we do not share the philosophy of the man who said, “If at first you don’t succeed, quit!”

Let me try this morning to get it a little bit right, placing before you three themes that are at the heart of my faith and, I believe, at the heart of the Unitarian Universalist faith. They form the core of my one sermon.

The first theme is history.

I majored in history in college because I saw history as an academic discipline within which I could study virtually anything. My doctoral work in Christian anti-Semitism continued this interest in the historical as the human arena within which all subjects could be studied.

As I began the process of moving into Unitarian Universalism, one of the most attractive features of the movement was its attitude towards history. In UU understanding, history, human experience, is where we find authority for our theologies and our moral values.

UU’s see past, present, and future linked together without thinking that one part of history is more important than another. All three matter. All are intertwined. Each affects the other two.

What we know and think about the past helps us to live in the present and plan for the future.

How we live in the present helps us to redeem the past and shape the future.

How we dream of and work for the future helps us to live meaningfully today and to accept the past.

This is in contrast to the orthodox understanding of history where some person, event, or revelation in the past is determinative. The orthodox believer says that all the truth that matters is in the past.

This rigid commitment to the past is why it was only twenty or so years ago that the Roman Catholic Church agreed that evolution was a sound theory, amounting to a fact, a position that creationists, now using the alias of intelligent design advocates, are still unable to accept.

Or consider the power of the violent right-wing Islamic believers, who are able to justify murder in their own minds because they think that the critical truths of life took place in the seventh century.

The radical says that the most important moment is yet to be. Despise the wicked past, loath the evil present, and look only to the glorious future is the message of the radical. The 20th century saw the coming to power of various totalitarian communist governments who blithely murdered millions in order to usher in that glorious future, ignoring present day evils and their own wickedness in the process.

Christopher Buice, a UU minister in Knoxville, Tennessee, captures the spirit of the UU approach to history, when he writes of bowling as a spiritual discipline. Bowl a ball too far to the right and you end up in the gutter of orthodoxy, trapped in the past. Bowl too far to the left and you end up in the gutter of radicalism, postponing a good life to a never-to-arrive future. To knock down the pins, you must strive to roll the ball in the lane between the gutters.

The Buddha taught the same wisdom: seek the Middle Way between the extremes that seem so tempting. Aristotle called it the Golden Mean.

UU’s respect the past, knowing in what measure it affects our lives. Our genetic inheritance, the social history of our species as well as the history of our family, and the environmental developments of the ages that have produced our present earth all have significance for us.

Historian Donald Kagan says that writers of history have “the responsibility of preserving the great, important, and instructive actions of human beings.” By knowing what has happened, we can see what good and evil are, what actions help human beings and what actions harm us.

History shows us clearly the wickedness of slavery and the oppression of women, the folly of war and of designing societies that are unjust so a few get rich and the many live in misery. Hitler and Stalin were evil and did monstrously evil things. Clara Barton and Sophia Lyon Fahs were good and did wonderfully good things.

Our moral values emerge out of seeing what actions and systems do good and which ones hurt people.

Then we create a vision of what might be and begin working to realize it. We understand the truth of Reinhold Niebuhr’s words that “nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime.”

Worthy goals are not easily accomplished. The time to start working on them is now. We must do what we can, even if we do not see the completion of the task, and trust that others will carry on the work to make real the vision of a peaceable and just community.

History is about two things: remembering and dreaming.

We remember so that we can overcome the mistakes of the past and carry forward the noblest aspirations of humanity.

We dream so that we never become complacent about who and what we are, always striving to be better and help the world to be better.

The importance of history is the first theme of my sermon.

Humility is the second.

Humility is an impossible virtue. How on earth can we ever know if we are properly humble?

If I go on a diet, I have something to measure how well I am doing—the scales, how many times I succumb to the delicious pecan pie that I love or have that gorgeous Reuben sandwich, how many days I do not exercise. I can keep a chart of how I am doing and give myself pep talks about doing better.

How can I tell if I am improving in humility? How do I know if my humble demeanor—or yours—is not really a mask for vanity and arrogance?

I have never thought of myself as a particularly humble person. I am not sure if that means that I am or that I am not humble! I just do not know.

Despite the difficulties, I am persuaded that humility is a great virtue. I like what Max Ehrmann said about humility in “Desiderata,” though he did not use the word: “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”

That is excellent advice for staying on course—the middle way!—but hard as the dickens to do. Most of us at one time or another do compare ourselves with others and find ourselves either desperately wanting or wallowing in self-admiration. Ehrmann was right to caution against it.

The trick is to appreciate ourselves, respect others, and enjoy life. Several things can be helpful in doing this.

First, who is not humbled by an awareness of the sheer vastness of the universe: hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy which is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. In the microscopic world, we seem to keep discovering teeny, tiny, miniscule little things that count as fundamental pieces of the make-up of physical reality. The last count I saw was 64 such elemental pieces.

There is vastness in time also, billions and billions of years of time that the earth has been around, billions and billions of years since the universe started, and no one knows what came before that point of singularity.

My goodness! How could anyone be uppity in the face of that knowledge?

The earth and its various life forms are also amazing. Beetles seem to be the most prolific life form with 400,000 species. Cockroaches seem to be the most durable form of life, said to be capable of surviving and prospering even in a nuclear war. Giraffes! Hippopotamuses! Duck-billed platypuses! Monkey pod trees! Roses and thorns! Mountains! Water! The human being!

Life is strange and beautiful and full of mystery and it long predates our brief interlude as part of it.

One last element of humility is the limits that constrain us.

The first and most painful of these limits is our mortality. Religions may propose faith commitments about living beyond this life, but there is not one scrap of evidence that we do. Even if we survive for another go-round—and I would welcome that, as most people would—that does not make this life any easier.

Here’s the truth about our mortality, told in two statements a quipster thought up in the heyday of the God Is Dead movement of the 1960’s. First came these words: “God is dead—Nietzsche.” Then came these words: “Nietzsche is dead—God.”

Whatever we consider the ultimate force of the universe to be, whatever our God is, it will long outlast our very short existence.

There are limits as well in what we can do. Like it or not, no matter how hard I might apply myself, I will never be able to play the piano as well as Fats Waller or Van Cliburn. For that matter, I can’t play as well as Fats Cliburn or Van Waller!

Very few are those gifted in all aspects of life. Some of us can cook and some of us cannot. Some of us are comfortable and capable with technology and others of us are not. Some of us are good with numbers and others of us are not. Some of us can hit a curve ball and others cannot.

Nobody does everything well.

Humility is an attitude firmly rooted in the reality of our situation, an infinitesimal part of life in a vast space-time universe in which our mortal days are few and our talents limited.

Accepting our real condition frees us to enjoy life, to appreciate what we have and what we can do rather than long for what we do not have or cannot do, to respect others and take delight in their accomplishments.

In the UU movement, humility is part of the reason why we have no binding dogma, no required creeds to believe, no rituals one must perform on pain of eternal loss. Humility teaches us that no one of us has the truth, no individual, no religion. At best, we may each have a little bit of the truth. Sharing humbly we can enlarge our understanding.

Humility is the reason we celebrate diversity.

Humility is the second theme of my sermon.

The third is learning how to distinguish between that which is of enduring value and that which is of only passing worth.

One of the watershed moments in UU history was the occasion of the installation of the Rev. Charles C. Shackford on May 19, 1841. At that ceremony, Theodore Parker preached a sermon called “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity.”

Parker made the point that the authority of Christianity or of any religion rests on the truth of its words, not on who said the words, not on any doctrines of the faith. Doctrines are transient. So are rituals. So are people.

The permanent is found in love and morality and divine living, acting on the goodness that is part of every one of us. Parker said that what is demanded of us is “a divine life; doing the best thing, in the best way, from the highest motives.”

He went on to note that living in this way does not “demand that all men...(and women) think alike, but to think uprightly, and get as near as possible to truth; not all men…(and women) to live alike, but to live holy, and get as near as possible to a life perfectly divine.”

There are many ways of speaking the wisdom in Parker’s words. That wisdom is found in the words of the prophet Micah, when he declared that what is required of us is not rituals or sacrifices properly performed or doctrines correctly stated and believed, but that we “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.”

Jesus taught us to love not just family and friends and those who agree with us, but also to love our enemies.

The Koran instructs us in the many ways that Allah’s voice can be heard, different voices in different places to different people.

The permanent is about love and morality, not transient things like wealth or power or fame or comfort.

We live in an age that celebrates the transient. A cartoon in a recent New Yorker showed a man being held up on the street and the robber saying, “Hand over your most recently acquired technology.”

Not even the thieves can keep up with the rapidly changing array of technological gimcrackery that crowds our lives and demands our attention. It’s all very exciting and all very lucrative for the inventors and sellers and all very temporary.

What religions are supposed to do is to remind us of what we need, remind us of the things that endure, the things that really matter: love and morality, justice and compassion, laughter and learning, sharing and hope, respect and thoughtfulness.

What the UU religion says is that these things can be found everywhere in life, not just in the teachings of one religion.

At the 2005 commencement exercises of my alma mater, the actor John Lithgow, a member of the class of 1967, spoke of what he had learned from some of the recipients of the Harvard Arts medal, awarded each year at the springtime Arts First Festival that Lithgow founded. “I began to see,” he said, “that many of the qualities that made them great artists were the same qualities that made them good people.” He then referred to folksinger Pete Seeger, who spearheaded efforts to clean up the Hudson River, to blues guitarist and singer Bonnie Raitt, who donated funds for guitar lessons for inner-city kids, and filmmaker Mira Nair, who started a film school in Uganda.

He briefly suggested four qualities these and others who have contributed to the welfare of humanity have. He urged his audience--he urged us all—to “be creative, to be useful, to be practical, and to be generous.”

That is wisdom that fits any age, truth that endures.

So is the kind of celebration of life that the poet Mary Oliver expresses in her poems, like this one:

Some things, say the wise ones who know everything,
are not living. I say,
you live your life your way and leave me alone.

I have talked with the faint clouds in the sky when they
are afraid of being left behind; I have said, Hurry, hurry!
and they have said: thank you, we are hurrying.

About cows, and starfish, and roses, there is no
argument. They die, after all.

But water is a question, so many living things in it,
but what is it, itself, living or not? Oh, gleaming

generosity, how can they write you out?

As I think this I am sitting on the sand beside
the harbor. I am holding in my hand
small pieces of granite, pyrite, schist.
Each one, just now, so thoroughly asleep.

—Mary Oliver, “Some Things Say the Wise Ones,” in Why I Wake Early (2004)

To see the sacredness in every part of life, to really live the truth of being part of the “interdependent web of all existence,” is to be in tune with the universe, with that which goes on, with that which endures.

Hold fast to love, morality, life, to that which endures.

We live best when we live consciously in history, when we live with humility, and when we live with permanent values not transient ones.

That is the central message of our Unitarian Universalist faith. When we live it, we make the world a better place and we make ourselves better people.

That is my faith.

That is My Sermon.

Nolan Gray's Interview of Urban Planner Alain Bertaud about His New Book, 'Order Without Design' →

December 22, 2018 by Miles Kimball

Kriston Capps on Emily Gallagher's Research: For the Poor, Obamacare Can Reduce Late Rent Payments →

December 21, 2018 by Miles Kimball

Bloomberg #1—>Fight the Backlash Against Retirement Saving Nudges: Everyone Benefits When People Save More for Old Age

December 20, 2018 by Miles Kimball

*Link to the article shown above. Originally published in Bloomberg Opinion June 29, 2018. Reprinted with permission.*

"Fight the Backlash Against Retirement Planning Nudge" is my first piece as a Bloomberg columnist. Thanks to Noah Smith for recommending me to my new Bloomberg editor, Jonathan Landman. I am grateful to Bloomberg Opinion for permission to reprint the full text of my column here. They retain all rights. You can see links to all my other columns in the popular press here.

A Wall Street Journal analysis recently concluded that “more than 40 percent of households headed by people aged 55 through 70 lack sufficient resources to maintain their living standard in retirement.”

It isn’t easy to solve the problem for those already at retirement age, but behavioral economists, working at the border of economics and psychology, have a magic bullet for getting younger people to save more: make enrollment in retirement savings plans automatic. In 2006, Congress blessed this approach by shielding companies from legal complaints if they automatically enrolled workers in life-cycle funds that use a formula to choose a mix of stocks, bonds and other assets appropriate to a worker’s age.

A key aspect of automatic enrollment is that workers are allowed to opt out. So it isn’t forcing anyone to do anything, just nudging them in the right direction. This idea of nudging people to do the right thing without forcing them has been called “libertarian paternalism.” It's a politically attractive approach to improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness, and is the core idea of the book "Nudge" by the Nobel-prize-winning behavioral economist Richard Thaler and the Harvard University law professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist Cass Sunstein, who was head of White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in former President Barack Obama’s first term. The conservative opinion writer George Will wrote in favor of libertarian paternalism in a 2008 essay, “Nudge Against the Fudge.”

Many states, with Oregon leading the way, have begun to roll out automatic enrollment in individual retirement accounts for workers not covered by company retirement savings plans.

Automatic enrollment has now gained so much traction that it has generated a backlash. Some of it targets extra paperwork for small companies. But the stronger critique is coming from analysts who unearthed evidence that workers may run up debt to make up for the reduced take-home pay (when money is deducted to feed the retirement account).

Andrew G. Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute, a top conservative think tank, is one of those leading the charge against automatic enrollment. He is on target in saying that the low-income workers for whom automatic enrollment has the biggest effect are also the ones who may not need to save much for retirement because their Social Security checks will be almost as big as their paychecks. And many people at the bottom of the heap economically would be better served by encouragement to pay off credit card debts than encouragement to save in a retirement account.

Biggs also finds some support for the idea that automatic enrollment can cause people to run up debt in research by many of the key players who got the idea of automatic enrollment off the ground. In a Jan. 29 essay posted on aei.com, “Can retirement saving increase your debt,” he wrote:

If we push low-income workers who don’t need to save more for retirement to do so, one reaction might be to borrow more elsewhere. Sure, state auto-IRA plans would let you withdraw if you chose, but inertia is strong. Many households might remain in the IRA plan and have contributions automatically deducted from their paycheck, but then borrow in order to make up for the lost take-home pay.

But the story is complex. Though it is true that the U.S. Army’s 2010 introduction of automatic enrollment in its Thrift Savings Plan caused employees to run up more debt, this was because it helped people save up for down payments for houses and cars.

Rather than failing to get people to save, the Thrift Savings Plan had an intentional loophole that let people "borrow" their own savings for near-term purchases of cars and houses rather than requiring them to use it in retirement. That's probably a good thing, since Biggs has made the point that low-income people don't need much retirement saving.

Crucially, comparing employees in the years just before and the years just after automatic enrollment was introduced, there wasn’t any evidence that those automatically enrolled in the Thrift Savings Plan took on more credit-card debt. What they did do was to take out larger mortgages and larger auto loans. It is possible that they took out larger mortgages and auto loans because they made smaller down payments as a result of having less take-home pay. But given the ease of borrowing from their Thrift Savings Plan account, it seems more likely that they borrowed more because they were able to put down bigger down payments for better houses and cars than they would have been able to swing otherwise.

It's important to get the facts straight about automatic enrollment because there's more at stake than making sure people have enough resources for retirement.

When people save more, the whole economy benefits. A higher saving rate has the potential to reduce the trade deficit without protectionism. If accompanied by appropriate monetary policy, and not canceled out by bigger government budget deficits, a higher saving rate would also make more funds available for research and development. It should raise wages and reduce inequality. Advocates of automatic enrollment have been underplaying their hand by focusing only on the benefits for financial security in retirement.

Update December 21, 2018: Robert Flood writes on the Facebook page for this post:

Nudge is "rules vs discretion" dressed up and wearing a mustache.

Matthew Goodwin and Eric Kaufmann: Is It OK to Debate Racists? →

December 19, 2018 by Miles Kimball

Evidence that Gut Bacteria Affect the Brain

December 18, 2018 by Miles Kimball

Some of the most important unknowns about diet and health center around the effect of different foods on one’s gut bacteria—also called the gut microbiome. Different types of gut bacteria like different kinds of food, so what we eat affects which types of gut bacteria flourish and which types of gut bacteria wither away.

The best types of gut bacteria do part of the processing of food and can serve as a buffer between problematic aspects of food and the intestinal wall. And the worst types of gut bacteria can themselves produce unpleasant chemicals. And even if a type of gut bacteria is neutral in and of itself, if it crowds out the worst types, that is a big service. So it matters which types of gut bacteria are flourishing.

So far, the one set of recommendations I have discussed that are heavily informed by thinking about gut bacteria are those I discuss in “What Steven Gundry's Book 'The Plant Paradox' Adds to the Principles of a Low-Insulin-Index Diet.” And I talk about evidence that eating sugar causes bad gut bacteria to thrive in “Anthony Komaroff: The Microbiome and Risk for Obesity and Diabetes.”

Possible mechanisms involving gut bacteria should keep you from being complacent about the effects of diet on your health. David Kohn’s Atlantic piece, “When Gut Bacteria Change Brain Function,” points to likely effects of gut bacteria on the brain. Here are some key passages from that article, shown by indentation, with my characterizations interleaved without indentation:

By now, the idea that gut bacteria affect a person’s health is not revolutionary. Many people know that these microbes influence digestion, allergies, and metabolism.

Putting B. fragilis bacteria into a mouse model for autism reduces repetitive behavior and symptoms that look like anxiety and being noncommunicative:

In a paper published two years ago in the journal Cell, Mazmanian and several colleagues fed B. fragilis from humans to mice with symptoms similar to autism. The treatment altered the makeup of the animals’ microbiome, and more importantly, improved their behavior: They became less anxious, communicated more with other mice, and showed less repetitive behavior.

Exactly how the microbes interact with the illness—whether as a trigger or as a shield—remains mostly a mystery. But Mazmanian and his colleagues have identified one possible link: a chemical called 4-ethylphenylsulphate, or 4EPS, which seems to be produced by gut bacteria. They’ve found that mice with symptoms of autism have blood levels of 4EPS more than 40 times higher than other mice. The link between 4EPS levels and the brain isn’t clear, but when the animals were injected with the compound, they developed autism-like symptoms.

Lactobacillus and bifidobacterium reduce anxiety-like symptoms in mice, while gut bacteria from anxious humans increases anxiety-like symptoms in mice:

Stephen Collins, a gastroenterology researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, has found that strains of two bacteria, lactobacillus and bifidobacterium, reduce anxiety-like behavior in mice (scientists don’t call it “anxiety” because you can’t ask a mouse how it’s feeling). Humans also carry strains of these bacteria in their guts.

Collins transferred gut bacteria from anxious humans into “germ-free” mice—animals that had been raised (very carefully) so their guts contained no bacteria at all. After the transplant, these animals also behaved more anxiously.

Humans who were fed the a favorite food of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria—galactooligosaccharide (GOS)—ended up with lower levels of cortisol and were drawn more to positive words:

Some subjects were fed 5.5 grams of a powdered carbohydrate known as galactooligosaccharide, or GOS, while others were given a placebo. Previous studies in mice by the same scientists had shown that this carb fostered growth of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria; the mice with more of these microbes also had increased levels of several neurotransmitters that affect anxiety, including one called brain-derived neurotrophic factor.

In this experiment, subjects who ingested GOS showed lower levels of a key stress hormone, cortisol, and in a test involving a series of words flashed quickly on a screen, the GOS group also focused more on positive information and less on negative.

Gut bacteria produce many chemicals that could potentially affect the brain:

It’s not yet clear how the microbiome alters the brain. Most researchers agree that microbes probably influence the brain via multiple mechanisms. Scientists have found that gut bacteria produce neurotransmitters such as serotonin, dopamine and GABA, all of which play a key role in mood (many antidepressants increase levels of these same compounds). Certain organisms also affect how people metabolize these compounds, effectively regulating the amount that circulates in the blood and brain. Gut bacteria may also generate other neuroactive chemicals, including one called butyrate, that have been linked to reduced anxiety and depression. Cryan and others have also shown that some microbes can activate the vagus nerve, the main line of communication between the gut and the brain. In addition, the microbiome is intertwined with the immune system, which itself influences mood and behavior.

Two types of effect not clearly stated in this extensive just above are the possibilities that (a) certain gut bacteria could intercept and neutralize chemicals from food that might otherwise affect the brain and (b) certain gut bacteria could intercept and neutralize chemicals that might otherwise damage the intestinal wall, which in turn would let other nasty chemicals into the bloodstream.

Why would certain types of gut bacteria do helpful things? One possibility is that it might help aid the spread of that type of gut bacteria:

Cryan suggests that over time, at least a few microbes have developed ways to shape their hosts’ behavior for their own ends. Modifying mood is a plausible microbial survival strategy, he argues that “happy people tend to be more social. And the more social we are, the more chances the microbes have to exchange and spread.”

The other possibility is that, other things equal, killing off one’s host is bad for the spread of one’s type of bacteria. But it takes many humans dying over a long period of time for this to create significant cumulative evolutionary pressure towards nice bacteria, and any change in dietary habits can put in motion a much quicker process of nasty bacteria flourishing.

Conclusion

There are many things about gut bacteria that we still don’t understand. For a simple example, to what extent do gut bacteria themselves burn calories so that get absorbed through the intestinal wall are less than the calories that are eaten?

In terms of guesswork, an argument I alluded to above is that it takes many generations of humans, with those infested with bad gut bacteria being more likely to die, in order to cumulate a significant evolutionary advantage to nice gut bacteria. That is, coevolution of gut bacteria with humans requires many human generations, since it is differential survival of the human hosts that gives an advantage to the nice bacteria. Other than evolutionary pressures from the deaths or degradation of human hosts, evolutionary pressures on bacteria are all for the benefit of the bacteria, not for the benefit of humans.

Evolutionary pressures on bacteria for the benefit of the bacteria, without regard to their effects on their human hosts, can act very fast. It is likely to be quite delicate to maintain a short-run equilibrium that keeps a nice type of bacteria ahead of the nasty type of bacteria for long enough to gain the long-run benefit from human hosts not dying as much. Dietary changes could easily disrupt that short-run equilibrium so things shift toward a nasty type of bacteria that persist for a long time before the long-run disadvantage of killing of human hosts takes its toll on that type of bacteria.

So the bottom line is that it is wise to eat in a way that is close to how our ancestors ate over the period of time when gut bacteria coevolved to be nice to humans. Eating in a newfangled way that changes the competitive environment for bacteria is likely to hurt the competitive strength of some of the old friends we have among gut bacteria. “True paleo” (as distinct from what is called “paleo”) is what I talk about in ““What Steven Gundry's Book 'The Plant Paradox' Adds to the Principles of a Low-Insulin-Index Diet.”

In principle, we should be able to figure out the details of which bacteria we need to take care of to stay healthy and what we need to do for them. In the meanwhile, before we have figured everything out about the gut microbiome, eating in a fairly traditional “true paleo” way is a good precautionary strategy.

Don’t miss my other posts on diet and health:

I. The Basics

II. Sugar as a Slow Poison

III. Anti-Cancer Eating

IV. Eating Tips

V. Calories In/Calories Out

VI. Wonkish

VIII. Debates about Particular Foods and about Exercise

IX. Gary Taubes

X. Twitter Discussions

XI. On My Interest in Diet and Health

Juleanna Glover: Biden Should Run on a Unity Ticket With Romney →

December 17, 2018 by Miles Kimball

I am not unbiased here, since Mitt Romney is my Dad’s second cousin.

John Locke: Legitimate Taxation and other Appropriation of Property by the Government is Limited as to Quantity, Procedure and Purpose

December 16, 2018 by Miles Kimball

John Locke takes for granted the necessity of taxes, but stipulates three conditions for taxes and other government appropriations of property to be legitimate.

The taxes cannot be so high that some individuals would be better off in the state of nature than as taxpayers within the nation.
The taxes must be approved by some kind of majority vote of the populace representatives of the populace who still have the interests of the populace at heart.
The taxes must be for the good of the nation as a whole—or at least include among their beneficiaries many who are not themselves politically powerful.

These views are laid out in John Locke’s 2d Treatise on Government: Of Civil Government, Chapter XI (“Of the Extent of the Legislative Power”), Sections 138-140.

The first point—that taxes cannot be so high that some individuals would be better off in the state of nature instead, I infer from the beginning of Section 138:

§. 138. Thirdly, The supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent: for the preservation of property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society, it necessarily supposes and requires, that the people should have property, without which they must be supposed to lose that, by entering into society, which was the end for which they entered into it: too gross an absurdity for any man to own.

The remainder of Section 138 sets forth the need for representatives to approve taxes who still have the populace’s interests at heart:

Men therefore in society having property, they have such a right to the goods, which by the law of the community are theirs, that nobody hath a right to take their substance or any part of it from them, without their own consent: without this they have no property at all; for I have truly no property in that, which another can by right take from me, when he pleases, against my consent. Hence it is a mistake to think, that the supreme or legislative power of any commonwealth can do what it will, and dispose of the estates of the subject arbitrarily, or take any part of them at pleasure. This is not much to be feared in governments where the legislative consists, wholly or in part, in assemblies which are variable, whose members, upon the dissolution of the assembly, are subjects under the common laws of their country, equally with the rest. But in governments, where the legislative is in one lasting assembly always in being, or in one man, as in absolute monarchies, there is danger still, that they will think themselves to have a distinct interest from the rest of the community; and so will be apt to increase their own riches and power, by taking what they think fit from the people: for a man’s property is not at all secure, though there be good and equitable laws to set the bounds of it between him and his fellow subjects, if he who commands those subjects have power to take from any private man, what part he pleases of his property, and use and dispose of it as he thinks good.

The beginning of Section 139 then speaks of “consent”:

§. 139. But government, into whatsoever hands it is put, being, as I have before shewed, intrusted with this condition, and for this end, that men might have and secure their properties; the prince, or senate, however it may have power to make laws, for the regulating of property between the subjects one amongst another, yet can never have a power to take to themselves the whole, or any part of the subjects’ property, without their own consent: for this would be in effect to leave them no property at all.

Consent is then defined in Section 140 as majority approval:

§. 140. It is true, governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit every one who enjoys his share of the protection should pay out of his estate his proportion for the maintenance of it. But still it must be with his own consent, i. e. the consent of the majority, giving it either by themselves, or their representatives chosen by them: for if any one shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people, by his own authority, and without such consent of the people, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government: for what property have I in that, which another may by right take, when he pleases, to himself?

For current debates, John Locke’s most important stipulation is about the legitimate purposes of taxation. In the latter part of Section 139, he is not explicit about exactly what purposes are appropriate, but has a very revealing parable: a general can order a soldier to almost certain for a public purpose—the preservation of the nation from destruction by its enemies in war—but cannot legitimately steal a penny from the soldier for the general’s personal enrichment:

§. 139. … And to let us see, that even absolute power, where it is necessary, is not arbitrary by being absolute, but is still limited by that reason, and confined to those ends, which required it in some cases to be absolute, we need look no farther than the common practice of martial discipline: for the preservation of the army, and in it of the whole commonwealth, requires an absolute obedience to the command of every superior officer, and it is justly death to disobey or dispute the most dangerous or unreasonable of them; but yet we see, that neither the serjeant, that could command a soldier to march up to the mouth of a cannon, or stand in a breach, where he is almost sure to perish, can command that soldier to give him one penny of his money; nor the general, that can condemn him to death for deserting his post, or for not obeying the most desperate orders, can yet, with all his absolute power of life and death, dispose of one farthing of that soldier’s estate, or seize one jot of his goods; whom yet he can command any thing, and hang for the least disobedience; because such a blind obedience is necessary to that end, for which the commander has his power, viz. the preservation of the rest; but the disposing of his goods has nothing to do with it.

Debates about quantity and procedure for taxes are frequent and obvious in the news. Debates about purpose of taxes are even more frequent, but come in a slightly different guise: they show up as debates about whether particular government expenditures are appropriate or not. In many countries, the battle for what John Locke argues for in these three sections has been won. We are fortunate to have democratic governance of taxes and government spending.

For links to other John Locke posts, see these John Locke aggregator posts: