Author: bill

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Summer Vegetable Gratin, Crash Hot Potatoes, and Chicken

Summer Vegetable Gratin The Cook’s Illustrated recipe for Summer Vegetable Gratin inspired me. I saw the recipe in the magazine and it looked like it had a cornucopia of flavors at a time when the summer vegetables are looking very appealing. The idea of caramelizing the onions, drying out the vegetables, and adding a savory topping of bread crumbs, shallots, and parmesan looked like it was going to overcome my traditional pet peeves with baked vegetable dishes. Most of the dishes I had tasted were bland, watery messes. This dish promised something else entirely.

Adding the Crash Hot Potatoes was an easy decision, too. This is a twice baked potato that looked easy to fix. The Summer Vegetable Gratin took me about two hours to prepare and will probably restrict this dish to the weekends. The Crash Hot Potato recipe was very simple and could easily be used on the weekdays. I just had to try it.

The final item was a pan seared chicken breast and I had a dinner that overcame even my most reluctant eater, my son.

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Cory Doctorow: Our dangerous statistical ignorance

Terrorism is a lot less common than one in a million and automated “tests” for terrorism ”“ data-mined conclusions drawn from transactions, Oyster cards, bank transfers, travel schedules, etc ”“ are a lot less accurate than 99%. That means practically every person who is branded a terrorist by our data-mining efforts is innocent.

Cory appears to be complaining about the statistical ignorance of “others” at same he is displaying his own statistical ignorance. His primary complaint is that the security agencies are branding people as terrorists with inadequate information gleaned from “statistics”. He goes on to voice his fear that the security agencies are rushing to judgement based solely on these statistics and yet that is exactly what Cory is doing to the security agencies with his choice of statistical gleanings. He is using his own selection of statistics to condemn the entire investigative process used by the security agencies. Cory’s condemnations without corroborating evidence are exactly what he does not want the security agencies to do with data about us. Oops! Sorry Cory! You are probably not their role model! My guess is that statistics is just of one of many tools the security agencies are using to identify terrorist suspects.

Cory Doctorow: Our dangerous statistical ignorance | Technology | guardian.co.uk

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A Seminarian’s Prayer

I ran across this prayer a couple of days ago and my immediate thought was that it if I was asked to give the closing prayer at our Habitat board meeting I would use it. This prayer expresses a lot of the battles we confront as board members of a faith based ministry and shows that we have similar hopes as seminarians. Late on Tuesday I received a call late in the afternoon that the meeting location had changed and the President asked if I would give the closing prayer. I never cease to be amazed. Thanks Trevin!

Savior and King,
I find it so easy to revel in knowledge for knowledge’s sake,
avoiding the goal of instruction: to learn love.
A puffed-up mind may be able to hide an impure heart,
an aching conscience
or insincere motives from others,
but before you, all is laid bare.
The purpose of my training is to grow in love and faithfulness,
purity and authenticity.
Help me, O Lord, to keep in mind your purposes
for the instruction I receive.
I pray that when I leave here,
my love will have grown,
many sinful habits will have been left behind,
and any insincere motivations or spiritual facade will have been shattered.
May you work in my heart to draw me closer to yourself.
Help me to love, O Lord.
Give me a heart that breaks
for those held in the chains of sin.
Clear my conscience
and authenticate my faith. 
May the knowledge I obtain be for your glory
and for the growth of your love in my all-too-hardened heart.
And help conform me to the image of Christ, in whose name I pray. Amen.

– Trevin Wax

A Seminarian’s Prayer

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A Prayer before Blogging

 

O Creator of the universe,
who has set the stars in the heavens
and causes the sun to rise and set,
shed the light of your wisdom into the darkness of my mind.
Fill my thoughts with the loving knowledge of you,
that I may bring your light to others.
Just as you can make even babies speak your truth,
instruct my tongue and guide my pen
to convey the wonderful glory of the gospel.
Make my intellect sharp,
my memory clear,
and my words eloquent,
so that I may faithfully interpret the mysteries which you have revealed.

– Thomas Aquinas, (1225-1274)

A Prayer before Blogging
trevinwax
Sun, 27 Apr 2008 08:21:17 GMT

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"Wisconsin is in many ways a liberal state… but its electorate showed this week that it favors judicial restraint over activism."

Just after I had finished reading a FactCheck.org article called Winning Ugly in Wisconsin, I see this post on Ann Althouse’s blog. The premise of the FactCheck article is:

In Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race the winner was on the side that threw the most mud.

Ann points out  that John Fund at the Wall Street Journal highlights a different interpretation of the defeat of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler.

[T]he liberal majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court [has] made so many suspect calls [beginning] immediately after Justice Diane Sykes stepped down to join a federal appeals court. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle replaced her with Mr. Butler, a former Milwaukee judge and public defender who had lost to Ms. Sykes by a 2-1 margin in a nonpartisan race in 2000. Justice Butler soon wrote the infamous decision in Thomas v. Mallet, which created a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach to product liability. Wisconsin became the only state to adopt a "collective liability" theory in lead paint cases: Whether a company actually produced the lead paint that harmed a claimant was irrelevant to its guilt or innocence….
… Louis Butler’s bid this year for a full 10-year term was bound to be contentious. Teacher unions, trial lawyers and Indian tribes (which had benefited from the court’s controversial expansion of casino gambling) poured money into third-party ads attacking [his opponent] Judge Gableman. They were matched by business groups such as Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, which ran ads noting that Justice Butler had earned the nickname "Loophole Louie" from fellow public defenders for winning reversals of his clients’ criminal convictions. Justice Butler made the mistake of embracing the nickname, claiming it was "affectionate." Voters weren’t amused.

Fund’s bottom line is in favor of judicial elections as "a check on the judiciary."

If judges are umpires [as Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts once said], the best way to ensure that they make the right calls is to bounce those who abuse their power from the game.

Politics is a necessary evil but this is far more than I ever wanted to know about Wisconsin politics and judiciary. What I found truly interesting was that the completely different views of John Fund and FactCheck on the same issue. FactCheck appears to have completely dismissed the complexity of Wisconsin politics in favor of a single issue, the effectiveness of attack politics. As a resident of Ohio I think I can feel Wisconsin’s pain.

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Of Markets and Mortgages/My recommendation

Lenders loaned too much money on too easy terms to borrowers who did not have the capacity to make their payments. No alchemy by even the brightest minds on Wall Street could turn bad loans into good assets.

I have to agree with what Ethan Penner says above in the Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Of Markets and Mortgages – WSJ.com. I disagree with him on several other points. The process of bundling mortgages into securities was way out of control and a major contributing factor to this debacle. As the treasurer for a local Habitat for Humanity affiliate I can say that I am familiar with subprime mortgages. All of our mortgages are subprime mortgages. That is just one of the tools we use to get low income families out of substandard housing. We are a charity and that is part of our mission. In a way similar to the commercial market Habitat for Humanity International offers its affiliates the opportunity to borrow money from HFHI based on a bundle of up to 25% of our mortgage portfolio. Despite the obvious differences between commercial lenders and Habitat, it is interesting to note that the foreclosure rate at Habitat affiliates is remarkably similar to those of commercial lenders until recently. Their foreclosure rates skyrocketed and ours stayed the same. If the commercial lenders were following HFHI’s standards they would hold about 75% of their mortgages. This would have allowed the lenders ample room to find good mortgages in their portfolio to replace the mortgages in default. This was the part of the process that failed. Commercial lenders looked at historical foreclosure rates and assumed they were safe.  By the time they realized the extend of their problem, they had already run out of good mortgages. They were experiencing another one of those difficult to predict Black Swan scenarios.

Ethan outlines several proposals for mitigating the credit crisis and reducing the backlog of foreclosed houses. The big question is how to avoid repeating this crisis. One idea that I did not see mentioned is a regulatory tool modeled after the margin call. I think we would have had a smaller problem if we let the Federal Reserve set the collateral limits for bundled mortgages.  The Federal Reserve could move the limits up and down based on the health of the mortgage market. This would have allowed the Federal Reserve to knock some of the irrational exuberance out of the housing market. Several analysts noticed that the housing market in California and Florida has been crazier than normal since 2000 and were openly wondering when the bubble was finally going to burst. We could have done better!