The Responsibility of Happiness.

Happiness is good.

Take a moment with that, swill it around in your brain and get the full flavor of it.

That's a number of things in one statement, not all of which I will probably get to. Happiness is good, it feels good, is it the essence of feeling good? I don't think so, but what it is happens to be the awareness of feeling good. That's really something wonderful.

Feeling good and happy is great, it is absolutely and completely enough. Just that is enough. What I want is simply more of that, and so when someone feels it, I approve. I also don't think that there are many cases where people feel good and happy at the expense of someone else's misery. It happens sometimes, and then decisions become complicated. More often people think they will be happier if they do stuff that results in others' misery, and are wrong. As a rule of thumb, try to be happy and don't worry about it.

But what I want to talk about today, as a matter of responsibility, is the matter of your own happiness. Your own happiness is probably of some importance for yourself, although you probably don't actually spend enough time and energy on it. Generally people have ambition, or success, or achievement, or fear, or responsibility as equally important goals. What you may not know is how important your happiness is to the happiness of other people. Happiness is something that is transmitted from one person to another. Your happiness directly effects the happiness of other people. If you are committed to your own happiness, and so are your friends, then a feedback loop of happiness is created.

From the all-knowing Wikipedia:

Human relationships are consistently found to be the most important correlation with human happiness.

A widely-publicized study from 2008 in the British Medical Journal reported that happiness in social networks may spread from person to person.^[17] Researchers followed nearly 5000 individuals for 20 years in the long-standing Framingham Heart Study and found clusters of happiness and unhappiness that spread up to 3 degrees of separation on average. Happiness tended to spread through close relationships like friends, siblings, spouses, and next-door neighbors, and the researchers reported that happiness spread more consistently than unhappiness through the network. Moreover, the structure of the social network appeared to have an impact on happiness, as people who were very central (with many friends and friends of friends) were significantly more likely to be happy than those on the periphery of the network. Overall, the results suggest that happiness might spread through a population like a virus.^[18][19]

This means that if you care about those around you, and I think you do, you have a duty and responsibility to try to get yourself happy. If you don't, you are causing misery and happiness to those around you, so cut that out right away.

I would like to thank the Jim and Leslie-Ann for their recent visit, as they took this duty seriously with fine results.

This post was produced while I feel a deep sense of love and humor for my position in the world, surrounded by beauty, and fabulously optimistic about the future. Because of my basic make-up, my bio-chemistry, I have times of dark horror, and times of splendid Wonder. I tend to talk about the dark times more than the Wonder, but that isn't because the times of Wonder aren't as significant, but rather that I'm too busy experiencing them. I truly wish you could feel this, perhaps you do, and that is wonderful. At least one of the Emilys understands.

Near Perfect President?

In the last Presidential election my initial choice was for James Edwards because he ran on a blunt and direct agenda of wealth redistribution. I think the US system is an excellent system, that works well for the vast majority but needs to be tinkered with and adjusted from time to time. The way the US got out of kilter in the last two decades is that while the country continued to get wealthier at the usual fast pace this wealth was concentrated with the wealthy. What was called the Middle Class, and now basically consists of everyone with a career who isn't rich, for the first time in US history got poorer while the country got richer. The long term health of the country depends on an educated, skilled, productive and solvent Middle Class, so I was in favor of the person who had identified this problem and said they were going to fix it.

One of the problems with the US electoral system is that each party picks their candidates through an extended "primary" process that goes state by state. I lived in Oregon, and Oregon has its primary election near the end of the process. By that point James Edwards had dropped out of the running. It turned out that Mr. Edwards had been sleeping with someone who wasn't his wife, and for some reason large portions of the American electorate will not vote for someone who sleeps with people who are not their spouse (although what this has to do with the ability to run a country I do not understand) and so he would have lost anyway.

So what we had was a choice of Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama, and John McCain, and I chose Barak Obama because he seemed to correctly identify problems and said he was hopeful that the US could fix them. This was an emotional choice rather than a reasoned choice, I thought Hilary Clinton would be more skilled at producing useful (if compromised) legislation, but since I know that in a first-past-the-post system your vote only matters if the result is within one vote, I went with my heart so I could feel good about myself.

Obama got elected and I have been enormously impressed with what he has done. What he has done mostly is avert catastrophe, the result being that while the country is not in a good place, everyone knows that it will recover while a year ago many predicted absolute disaster. The USA is respected around the world again, the rule of law has returned, and there are plans to address basic problems such as health care, education, banking and global warming. At the end of Obama's first four year term we can reasonably expect a growing economy and a country at peace when he started off with two wars and an economy on the verge of depression. For me that's good work.

What really has convinced me that Obama is as close to a perfect President as I will ever see is the following transcript in which he answers questions from Republicans in a setting entirely made up of Republicans. It isn't his obvious intelligence, knowledge or communication skills that got me, it is the following unprepared quote, "I am not an ideologue. I'm not. It doesn't make sense if somebody could tell me you could do this cheaper and get increased results that I wouldn't say, great. The problem is, I couldn't find credible economists who would back up the claims that you just made."

This approach is repeated throughout the whole transcript, and I want to summarize it here. Obama identifies goals that Americans can all share, such as reducing the cost of health insurance, creating more jobs, improving education, and so on. Then he asks for ideas on how to achieve those ends and he doesn't care where those ideas come from or what philosophy those ideas derive from. The next stage (the most important bit for me) is that these ideas are then taken to experts in the subject area to find out if they will work. If they work then they are implemented.

This is the exact system of government that I have been wanting all along. A results-based government that uses ideas that will work rather than ideas based on one person's ideology. If socialized medicine produces better results, then use socialized medicine. If pseudo-fascist corporate policies produce the best growth rates for the economy then run the economy like fascists. If free hardcore porn reduces the number of rapes ensure hardcore porn is available for free to all citizens.

Simply within the economic plans of the government you can see this happening because the economy has stabilized and is heading in the right direction and the ideologues at both ends of the spectrum are wildly furious with elements of what has happened. Bail outs for big banks are seen as fascism from the left, and bank take-overs are seen as socialism from the right. The end result has been a stabilized banking system, that is paying back the money it has been lent because of free market incentives, which is then being channeled towards community banks and middle class mortgages. Socialism, fascism, payouts to fat cats, government takeovers, just as long as it works.

Now, the most interesting thing for me is that now there is a President in office with whom I pretty much agree on everything. This then gives me the opportunity to find out whether what I have believed politically is right or not. This so rarely happens that I must view it as a wonderful opportunity to scientifically evaluate my own beliefs. If I was a pure progressive, left-leaning, borderline socialist like my friend Dade I would never get to find out if I was right or not unless I moved to Denmark. If I was a Christian, "moral majority" believer like my friend Dave I would have just endured the evidence that my brand of politics is an absolute failure through the eight years of Bush. So, in about two and a half years I can check to see whether this brand of politics not only appeals to me, but also works, or whether the cynicism of politicians and the ignorance of experts renders this style a failure.

I am hopeful.

Government by Whom?

This post is inspired by a blog post by my friend Dade entitled Plutocracy. The essential point of the post is that government should be run entirely for and by people, rather than special interest groups and corporations. A recent Supreme Court ruling has determined that there are no limits to the spending of corporate and special interest groups in elections in the USA. Clearly this means that corporations and special interest groups will have some influence over elections, and therefore government. Dade puts forward the case for this being a bad move, and my first response to the ruling and the post is one of agreement.

My second response is to think about the various merits of the different people in Government. We generally think that the more pure a democracy we have the better off we will be. People making decisions for people must result in the best circumstances for people, it seems simple. But there is a problem with this, and that problem is that most people are idiots. Most people are astonishingly ignorant of basic things, their focus is personal rather than societal, and the time period over which decisions are made is mind-bogglingly short.

Here are a few examples of how stupid the average person is and an idea of what the consequences of public opinion being directly transferred to government policy would be a nightmare. President George W. Bush was elected with half the votes of the electorate. Within eight months of him being elected he was the least popular president in history with less than 30% approval ratings. A month later he was among the most popular Presidents in history with 80% approval ratings because crazy people had killed lots of Americans. By the end of his second term Bush had essentially understood that all the things he had done had failed and had returned to standard Washington policies, essentially the same basic approach that Obama has used. However, his approval rating had returned to the low 30's. So, within eight months at least one fifth of Americans had changed their mind about what was the right stuff to do, then over half of them completely changed because of something that Bush didn't do, he was most popular when actively failing, and least popular when ineffectual but conventional.

Evolution is a scientifically proven fact. It has been seen to happen. 39% of Americans believe in evolution. So the solid majority of people don't believe something that they were taught in school and is a scientific fact. This is idiocy. As further evidence that this is idiocy, the smarter and more informed you are the more likely you are to believe in evolution. So high school drop outs are the least likely to believe in it while scientists who spend decades studying the subject are the most likely to believe in it. The theory of evolution is the most important explanatory theory in Biology, the area in which the greatest growth in scientific knowledge and technology is expected to happen in the next few decades.

Americans will not elect people if they are not Christians or Jews, and will not let them run a country if they have sex with people they are not married to. This is idiocy, as if Muslims or Atheists cannot make good decisions about how to run a country, or people who sleep around can't make good decisions about government.

So the will of the people is ignorant, reactionary, short sighted and has little connection to what actually works. Having a government that accurately reflected the wishes of the people would be an absolute nightmare. Which is why government in most places is a representative government. People who are less stupid and ignorant are elected to run things for the people. While it is easy to despise politicians, compared with the average person they are educated, articulate, with wider perspective.

Corporations and special interest groups get zero votes. But corporations are the most important institutions in the lives of most Americans. Special interest groups are the organizations of groups o people who are most interested in the actions of the government. In a good system of government shouldn't the most important institution in people's lives have some influence on that system of government? Shouldn't those most interested in the running of the government have some influence in the running of the government? At the moment the only influence these institutions have is in trying to persuade people to do what they want. Now, they have lots of money, and money can be very persuasive.

So, to answer the original question, government by whom? I answer that government should be by people who agree with me, for people in general, but that isn't practical. My weak and rather disappointing compromise position is that government should be by people who represent the various forces in society, in balance, subject to removal if they go too far in any direction. So Congress should just write a law that means corporations and people spend the relative amount of money trying to influence elections that produces the best result for the USA.

The best government is messy, confrontational, slow to act, and removed somewhat from the people because people are stupid and can't be trusted and must be played off against each other in a balance that promotes the welfare of the country.

Oncoming Utopia

As you are no doubt aware the title of this weblog is The Hopeful Muser. The last paragraph of my first entry was this:

So, for the beginnings of this blog, this humble little blog, I want to say that I have picked my label, The Hopeful Muser (which was still available, which I find depressing) because I wish to use this place to think, to express thoughts, to learn and I am hopeful about humans and the future. The way I want to muse is by thinking clearly, trying to avoid the pitfalls of mottoes, slogans and labels, to attempt to glean real meaning from words and thoughts. Hopefully someone will be interested.

I have done lots of musing, but I have done less well on being hopeful. This is because I have spent more time on my personal life and feelings as time has gone on. It has been interesting that there is a definite limit on what I am interested in talking about philosophically, and once having come close to exhausting that then what people discuss is simple the minutiae of their own lives. But I am extremely hopeful for humanity, perhaps the most hopeful person I have talked to about where things are going for humanity.

I believe that before the end of my life I will see at least the beginnings of an Utopian age, a period of unparalleled peace, prosperity, beauty and joy for humanity. Assuming that I live to an age that I think I can reasonably expect (90 or 100 years as a conservative estimate) I believe that I will see a time when war is essentially over, when almost anyone in the world can have a reasonable expectation to travel the world and see the great wonders of ancient civilization, when hunger is almost non-existent, where the norm is enlightened understanding, and where violence is seen largely as a treatable mental health problem.

I wish to take these predictions one at a time, but I feel I must start with three other predictions and some consequences of those predictions. And all of these predictions are linked together, in the manner of modern science which deals mostly with systems and environments rather than isolated concepts. The first prediction is that a new technology of relatively cheap energy production that does not have a net production of greenhouse gases will arise during the next twenty years. The second prediction is that the present trends of a decline in the growth of population and the increase in efficiency of food production will continue. The third prediction is that the present social evolutionary competitive advantage of scientific, secular humanism over other cultural paradigms will continue. By this I mean that when people are exposed to multiple cultures the one that will be chosen most often is scientific, secular humanism.

These three predictions will seem to many to be hugely optimistic. However, I think these are merely predictions that humanity will simply continue to act as humanity has done in the past. The first prediction requires that humanity invent something that they have not invented before, but is done by nature all the time (photosynthesis), has multiple theoretical solutions, and can already be done in a manner that is simply not economically viable. Take the process of going from the discovery of the positive nucleus of the atom in 1909, to a functioning atomic bomb in 1945 as an example of scientific process. Compare that to going from non-competitively functioning fuel cells, solar panels, and alternate fuels, to competitively functioning versions of the same in twenty years, with several times as many scientists in the world working on the problems, and the prediction seems quite reasonable.

The second prediction simply requires that women around the world become more educated, have more access to contraception, and that people don't forget how to farm more efficiently. I simply don't see how these factors won't accelerate. I fail to see how the increased knowledge for women that is happening cannot lead to women educating their children and other women. This does not mean that this isn't the most significant factor (as I believe it is) rather that this needs so little justification.

The third prediction, that scientific, secular humanism will out-compete other cultural aspects, such as religious fundamentalism, is based simply upon the evidence of the last hundred years. In all the places that scientific, secular humanism has been around those places have become more scientific, secular and humanistic. There are large sections of the world now in which this is the dominant culture. These areas are the wealthiest, most educated, most peaceful places. These are the places that people in the world want to live in. People in France don't want to move to Algeria or Chad, or The Ivory Coast, people from those nations want to move to France. The only major religions that are adding adherents at the same level as population growth are doing so because their present adherents are having children faster than the world at large. Even the growing religions lose more adherents than they convert. The vast majority of religious people are religious because they were taught that religion as a child, before they could reason. As the world becomes richer, more educated, more intertwined this process will accelerate. What people think of as the rise of religious fundamentalism is actually the violent response to the reduction in power of religious fundamentalism. The number of religious fundamentalists around the world has undergone a massive reduction in the last few decades. Instead of being the dominant paradigm almost everywhere it is now a paranoid condition fighting against the corrupting influence of the West. Democracy has spread like wildfire, and will continue to spread. Think of how many places are unhappy under theocratic or autocratic rule and will tun to democracy and compare it to the number of democracies under which people are clamoring for theocratic or autocratic rule. The benefits of science are undeniable, even those who mistrust and reject scientists use the results of science all the time.

Upon these three fundamental predictions stand my other predictions, the first being that war will be essentially over in my lifetime. I think with improved prosperity, reduced competition for resources, greater education, deeper exposure to other cultures, and greater inter-connectedness war will inevitably decline. War comes from xenophobia, the de-humanizing of others, or from competition over resources. If people know more about others of different cultures, if they have met someone of different beliefs in a non-violent situation, they are enormously less disposed to bomb them. For nearly two thousand years, up until less than a century ago, the place with the most amount of warfare in the world was Europe. The source of both World Wars, the source of the violence of colonialism, Europe has fought within and without itself almost constantly for centuries. Now the concept of war within Europe is ridiculous. With a common currency, essentially no borders, shared laws and economic policy, mutual inter-dependence, and even a shared military, the concept of France and Germany fighting a war makes as much sense as Kentucky and Tennessee going to war. We see the process that has happened in Europe spreading to Asia and the Americas. At the moment the only wars in the world are in Afghanistan and tribal conflicts in Africa. This is, by an enormous margin, the least amount of warfare there has ever been, and the direction of the arrow is clearly in the direction of less war.

My next prediction is that almost anyone in the world will have the capacity to travel the world before I am dead. This clearly relies on my three basic predictions, cheap energy, increased wealth through population and food resources, and a secular, scientific, humanist world society. The cost of travel is basically linked to the cost of energy. Cheap energy means cheap travel. If science can produce any of the following inventions: a hydrogen fuel cell that can run on sea water, solar panels of similar efficiency to gasoline, bacteria that produce fuel from organic matter economically, then energy will be de-localized, cheap, and sustainable. The pressure to produce these technological inventions is immense and will increase greatly as peak production of oil and global warming will increase cost of oil. When science, the good of humanity, and rewards for the greedy all point in the same direction, humanity produces miracles. A solar powered helium zeppelin would be almost free to operate. A hydrogen fuel cell operated passenger ship would be enormously cheap. A locally produced vat of jet fuel at an airport will reduce costs (as much of the cost of oil comes from transporting it) and actually reduce greenhouse gases. Already essentially everyone in first world countries can travel internationally if they are willing to save money by living like a person in a second world country. Already the middle classes of every country in the world can save to travel internationally. My prediction, with sixty years of proposed progress, to me seems conservative.

I think hunger will become almost non-existent. At the moment the Earth produces more food than is needed to feed everyone on the planet. Malthus was wrong, the efficiency of food production has consistently outstripped population growth. On average people on Earth eat more calories a day than they did fifty years ago, despite a explosion of population. The rate at which population is increasing has dramatically declined. The UN has already made a prediction of when the world population will reach a steady state, and it is within my lifetime. Each time over the last twenty years that the UN makes these predictions the final amount of world population becomes smaller and the time that it will happen becomes closer. There are places in the world that would have declining populations but for immigration. The efficiency of food production is about to undergo an explosion with the increase of genetically engineered food products. While the morality of those producing these crops is almost non-existence, the efficiency of the product cannot be doubted. If energy and transportation becomes cheap, population becomes stable and food production improves then hunger declines. Add in the undoubted increase in global concern for the poor and hungry aroud the world and the massive decline of the hungry seems to me a certainty.

I predict that the norm around the world will be enlightened understanding. This means essentially religious tolerance, tolerance of different cultures, tolerance of homosexuality, a basic scientific world view, and low levels of violence. For much of the world this is already true. In most of western Europe, most of first world Asia, and on both coasts of the Americas this is essentially already true. The basic levels of scientific understanding of the populations in these areas rivals the cusp of scientific knowledge of two hundred years ago. An average high school senior in Taiwan knows more about the Universe than Galileo. The great cities of the World are already places in which tolerance for cultures, beliefs and preferences are the norm. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world for whom hearing the Islamic call to prayer, buying items from a Buddhist, and seeing a transvestite in one day would not even register as things to be noticed. Once again, these are the places where people want to live. As money and education spread around the world, this is what happens. In every part of the world, from the USA, to South Africa, to Iran populations are becoming less religious, more educated, and more socially tolerant. This is particularly true among the younger generations. In Iran, where most of the population is under the age of 25, young people are pro-West, pro-Democracy, pro-tolerance, pro-science. It's just a matter of time before Iran, and the rest of the Persian Gulf, becomes much like Europe. Fifty years ago it was illegal to be gay in Britain, in the last few years the Conservative Party has backed an openly gay member of parliament.

I think violence of all kinds will continue to decline. As it is, this moment in time is the least violent in all of history, not only in terms of war, but also of personal violence. While media reporting of violence in the USA is at an all-time high, actual violence is close to an all-time low. Human beings get better at things. They learn, adjust, innovate, rest and apply to make their lives better. Only in 1879 was the first psychological clinic opened in the World. It's only been fifty years since the very first mental health drugs were devloped, and their effectiveness is improving with gathering speed. Research into the health and happiness of people is at an all-time high, and therapies and approaches are being developed all the time. With increased wealth becomes a reduced need for violence. With increased knowledge of how to treat people who are violent becomes reduced violence. With increased understanding of the causes of violence comes better preventative care. Within fifty years I see no reason not to expect that a persons disposition to violence can be predicted with great accuracy through a combination of genetic, chemical and historical factors, and effective preventative therapies, both drug and counseling/skill-based, will be provided. It isn't nice to be violent, it's much nicer to be loved. Ina society that frowns upon violence, and provides happy alternatives, the vast majority of people will choose not to be violent. The process of this transformation is underway an having substantial success.

My great hope is based on the diligence, intelligence and innovation of the scientific community. While often mocked and derided by the masses, this group of people have done the greatest good for people that any group of people have ever achieved. Motivated by curiosity and a delight in the nature of things, this group of people are overwhelmingly peaceful, cooperative and tolerant. Just turn on your televisions to a documentary series and in a short time you will have an example of groups of people from around the world, working together without suspicion or enmity, with enormous effort and astonishing innovation, for the greater good. These people aren't the best paid, or the most famous, or the most loved, but there are more of them than ever before, they are better at their tasks than ever before, and they are producing miracles at a rate that is itself a miracle. This group of people is my reason for hope.

This has, without doubt, been my longest blog post. I think that's a good thing, because it is a short summary of my reasons for hope. I have written similar posts before in here, and continue to tell people I meet why I am hopeful. I could take any of these points and expound upon them in far greater detail. I am probably actually more optimistic than this post has suggested. But what I find is that many people seem very pessimistic about the future. A sense of doom seems to exist among many people. While my life often has times of utter despair these are because of personal situations, and brain chemistry. The more I learn about the world and the people on it, the greater my optimism about the future of the us on this planet.

Solipsism.

One of my character traits is a tendency towards solipsism, the belief that my own mind is all that exists. I say that I tend towards solipsism rather than I truly believe that solipsism is true. I would say rather that my experience is such that my mind is to me substantially more real than the external world. In the end what matters to me is what goes on in my mind.

A consequence of this is a complete disinterest in what might happen after I am dead. While I don't have the firm belief that the Universe will cease to exist upon my death, the experience will be identical to it ceasing to exist. In practical terms, if you can't tell the difference between two eventualities, they are the same eventuality.

Therefore I have never worried about any legacy, or whether the world will be left as a better place once I've gone. I worry about whether the world is a better place because I'm in it, but not what I will be thinking on my deathbed. I think this is one of the great tragedies of how humanity measures the worth of lives, that is in terms of where that person is at the point of their death. I don't care about my funeral, I think the sensible thing to do would be to find the cheapest disposal mechanism and basically forget that I existed.

One way that this tendency manifests itself is when I have a particularly vivid dream it effects me to the same extent as a "real" event, or memory. I have been having particularly vivid dreams recently, with a couple of particularly strong moments. One is a really heart-wrenching moment, which I won't describe today because I want to be cheerful, and the other is the experience of swimming with dolphins in a tropical sea. As far as I am concerned I have swum with dolphins in a warm sea under beautiful sunlight, and I'm grateful for this wonderful experience.

Christmas Present.

For the past few years Christina and I have donated to charity on behalf of our friends and family at Christmas. This first started through Heifer International when in a moment of interesting cultural zeitgeist various family members bought each other goats, ducks, oxen and such in third world countries. The reasons for this are pretty simple, we haven't lived within a thousand miles of any family members in years, everyone in our family has enough money to buy themselves what they want up to the level that they would get in a present, it feels at least as good to give charitably than to a relative somewhere else, and it takes a lot less effort.

We've taken this seriously over the years, generally increasing what we give (although perhaps not this year, which has been financially very poor for us) and thinking about it more than whether to give a goat or or a water buffalo. It's quite a good way to think about what is the greatest good that can be done, the most efficient use of resources to improve the human condition. Heifer International was very good because animals reproduce, and can be spread around the village, continuously increasing wealth. But this year I wanted to get deeper than that.

It seemed to me that the biggest problems in the world derive largely from two factors, too many people, and wealth not spread around evenly. Now, to reduce the problem of over-population we can either kill large numbers of people off, or stop producing them at the same rate. To spread the wealth around evenly we can either take it from the rich and give it to the poor, or enable the poor to become more wealthy. I know that the greater the educational level of women the lower the birth rate, the more educated the children, and the greater hopes for improved economy as a result. This is a feedback-loop, the best sort of change as it is self-reinforcing. The more women are educated, the more their offspring are educated. Increasing the education level of women in third world countries seems to me to be the most cost-effective method of solving problems because it has a knock-on effect in so many areas. Worried about Global Warming? Reducing the population is a solution requiring zero technological advancement. Worried about poverty? Increased skills for third world people diversifies their methods of getting wealth and improves their chances of competing in the global economy. Worried about war and hatred? Educating people to truly understand heir neighbors is the most effective method of preventing violence between groups.

It turns out that a cousin of Christina's is runs a non-governmental organization (NGO) in India. Named Video Volunteers, its' aim is to provide a voice to the poorest of the poor in India, to provide information, resources, opportunity to the Dalit (which has been known as the "Untouchable caste") and particularly women. We believe that such grass root organizations, directed by the people concerned, working for the goals of those concerned, and self-reinforcing, are the most effective methods for improving the world as a whole. We think through our Christmas present to them, on your behalf, the lives of dozens of people will be dramatically improved, and this improvement will be self-sustaining, a good deed that will live on for generation after generation.

We hope you like your present, and if you don't already give presents like this we hope you will consider doing so in the future.

Sunshine On The Water Looks So Lovely.

The weather in Houston has been unseasonably cold and grey, for winter. We've had about three weeks of grey skies, rain and temperatures in the forties and fifties. According to meterologists the average high in December in these parts is 74 degrees fahrenheit. But today the sun is out, although it is still a bit chilly, and I had the opportunity to see sunshine reflected off the bayou. It really is lovely. While I was happy to see the grey skies and feel the chill, wearing a sweater is quite pleasant, it doesn't take long before sunshine is welcome again.

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I think I post more often when things aren't going so well, thus the gap between posts. We now own a lovely new house, and are extravagantly buying furniture for it, mostly a new bedroom set. It is very nice to see my darling wife be excited by something, it was touch and go last week, but we went for a long bicycle ride and that helped us both. December is the difficult month for her at work, just a case of survival. Just a little stretch until we're sitting by the pool with a cocktail in the warm sunshine.

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The very first post on this blog was about language, about how so much of what people say doesn't make sense. In Houston at the moment you can find many vehicles with a bumper sticker saying, "Keep Christ in Christmas." I find this both amusing and alarming. Amusing because how would you take Christ out of Christmas? If there isn't Christ it's just a festival of lights, giving and celebration, just like there was when the fesival was appropriate by Christians. By definition, Christmas has Christ in it. Alarmed because what they really mean is keeping the omnipresence of their beliefs intact. So that every store, every house on every street, all the music that you hear, on every radio station, on signs on the street, literally everywhere is a reinforcement of Christianity. It is by its very nature, intolerant. The funny thing is that I have never been anywhere that could compare for the amount of Christmas stuff as here.