Considering that I was brought up in Holiness denominations, and I currently attend a non-denominational church with a Free-Methodist pastor, I take a lot of theology for granted. Much of that theology originated with John Wesley.
Here are some things that I learned.
In Wesley’s day, the Church of England believed in salvation by works.
As a child and young adult, Wesley followed strict rules to attain a level of personal holiness, much like Johnathan Edwards and others of his day.
Wesley learned about salvation by grace from Moravian missionaries on his way to America.
Wesley published a journal of his life in yearly installments, and he was inclined to embellish.
Wesley drew lots prodigiously to determine God’s will.
Wesley and his brother practically invented hymn singing, and it was somewhat scandalous at the time.
Wesley was among the first to preach out-of-doors and evangelize.
Wesley would regularly attract crowds in the 10’s of thousands.
Wesley always spent the money he had, so that he could die with less than 10lbs sterling to his name.
Methodists put emphasis on works. You did your best to be holy. Eventually, God might reward you with assurance of salvation. Then, if you pressed on, you might attain Christian perfection in this life. But, even those who attained perfection sometimes fell away, and were twice damned.
Wesley was against predestination. He felt that there were the elect who were predestined, but also everyone else could still repent and be saved.
Wesley allowed women to preach, which was also scandalous.
Wesley saw his movement as a spiritual revival within the Church of England. He refused to allow meetings that conflicted with the Church of England.
Wesley’s converts were often leaving the ministry over doctrinal disputes. One such dispute was stillness (brought by a Moravian), which is the idea that you could not be saved by your own efforts, so you should just be still until God gave you the grace to be saved.
Wesley was often violently attacked as he preached. He was frequently mobbed, seriously assaulted, and assailed by rioters. He always survived, often by converting to the leaders.
Wesley originated the phrase “Cleanliness is next to Godliness”.
Wesley’s Methodist church meetings were sometimes very charismatic, on par with any modern day charismatic church.
Wesley lived to be 87, even though he spent his life riding around England, preaching, and organizing the Methodist society.
Wesley was amazingly blunt, harsh, critical, and uncharitable to nearly everyone. When his sister’s child died, he wrote her a note along the lines of “You always said your children kept you from doing more for Jesus…” Indeed, he was amazingly unloving at times.
Wesley had a terrible relationship with his wife, whom he married at age 50.
Wesley once wrote to his brother that he never actually loved God. The biography made quite a bit out of this revelation, but I completely relate with Wesley. I don’t think this was any sort of wavering on Wesley’s part. I think it is more an acknowledgment that we are so far short of the most important commandment… “Love the Lord your God with All your Mind, Soul, and Strength” (Luke 10:27, Dut. 6:5). Perhaps Wesley was closer to this level of love for God than almost anybody else.
Wesley was an amazing man, and seems a far better man than I. It seems disrespectful to read him dissected by a condescending modern biographer; but I am glad to know that he was far from perfect, often very inconsistent, prone to embellish, and uncompromisingly blunt. As a result, I better understand the source of doctrines like universalism and perfection, so I am very skeptical of both.
Without revealing too much, I think it is safe to say that some of my favorite albums from the agnostic days include “Saddle Tramp” by The Charlie Daniels Band, “Greatest Hits” by Firefall, and just about anything by the Atlanta Rhythm Section. Something about early 70’s folk rock takes me back to the sunny October evenings of my earliest memory, where the air is comfortably chilly, days are noticeably shorter, and brilliant green grass is covered by floating stacks of freshly fallen leaves.
On HisChannel, I just happened to catch Chuck Smith on tour with “Love Song”, broadcast Live! They are doing a kind of a reunion tour this summer along the California coast at various Calvary Chapels.
“Love Song” is the original band on Marinatha! records. From what I gather, their story is pretty funny. A couple hippies just dropped into Chuck’s church one morning and wondered if they could play a Jesus gig at his church. They said they were new Christians, and Chuck asked to hear the song. Chuck really liked the song (“Welcome Back”), so he invited them to play that very night for the youth group. Apparently, they had to wait for one of the band members to get out of jail sometime after noon, but everything worked out well after that.
As they say, the rest is history. Chuck is 82 or 83 years old now. And, I just missed the tour when it passed through Oceanside, where they performed last Wednesday (aw!).
I’m really enthused, because it turns out that “Love Song” plays authentic folk rock of the early 70’s, when musicianship and talent still mattered.
So I’ve been listening to the “Welcome Back” album this evening off of Napster, and it is really encouraging me, on a day when I really need it.
I’m a Luddite. Michigan has many Menonites. But have you ever heard of the Hutterites?
This post isn’t about riding Amtrak (braindump coming later), but I would like to point out a nice feature of train travel. Unlike any other mode of transportation, you can meet and mingle with people from all over the world during your journey. Consider that a long distance train Amtrak train will have up to 400 passengers and can take more than two entire days to complete its run. During this time, you walk up and down the train to the lounge car, where people generally are bored and like to talk. And, the train is stopping every hour or two, so you can get off and on the train, talk in the stations, etc. There is also the dining car, which I couldn’t afford…
I was sitting in the station in Everett, WA and a woman with with native American features struck up a conversation by commenting about how glad she was to be going back to flat land. She was from sparsely populated Montana and ready to go home. I found out, she has a Master’s degree in Technology. She used to work as a teacher on the Indian reservation, but now she teaches at the Hutterite Colony. I couldn’t understand what she was saying because “hutterite colony” isn’t a syllable combination I recognized at all. She then told me that she didn’t use her technology degree anymore, assuming that I would understand.
Now I understand.
The Hutterites are absolutely fascinating. They actually practice Biblical communism, and it works! As pacifists, they are also very persecuted, from their point of view, therefore they have migrated all over the world in turn. There is a lot of good information in the Wikipeida article…
I am still 3 days away from my great trans-continental train journey, and I’ve already met the first hiccup.
I received an automated call from Amtrak telling me that the train I had reserved from Los Angeles to San Diego is canceled.
I expected this segment to be the easiest part of my trip. Amtrak runs several trains down that corridor each day, and so does Metrolink. If you get close enough to San Diego, you can even use North County Transit. So I think, no problem… I will just use Metrolink for $16 cheaper. It turns out, the tracks are being repaired next weekend, so Metrolink cannot take me to San Diego either. All passenger trains from LA end at Irvine on my weekend of travel.
So, I called Amtrak, and they gave me a new reservation. I just have to get on a bus at Ivine to go the rest of the way.
Meanwhile, since my last post , I have been monitoring the news to see how frequently Amtrak has problems. In less than a week, in Michigan alone…
If Amtrak runs about 300 trains per day, and if you take 8 Amtrak trips, then what is the probablity of an incident on at least one of the trips? Let us assume that each train has equal probability of an incident, because short distance trains operate in areas of greater population density than long distance trains.
7*300=2100 trains per week
Pr[incident]=2/2100= .000952
This is a Poisson process with \lambda=.000952 and t=8.
So, the probability of an incident is .00759.
The complete PDF is…
# of incidents
probablity
0
0.99241
1
0.007561
2
2.88E-05
3
7.32E-08
4
1.39E-10
5
2.12E-13
6
2.7E-16
7
2.93E-19
8
2.79E-22
Granted, these assumption are pretty rough, but at least I can assert that collision delays aren’t a real concern. Even so, improbable things often occur.
Thanks to the internet, I mainly listen to WHWL when I’m at home or working at the computer. The station has several transmitters scattered through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Northern Michigan, so I’ve been getting all the news and weather reports from that region. Then, I happened to be looking at a rail map of Michigan, and I noticed the LSI splits the CN tracks that run from Baraga down to Escanaba. This, combined with my current awareness of the UP, piqued my interest in the LS&I, leading to this post.
Minnesota produces about 80% of the nation’s iron. Michigan produces the other 20%. Without this iron ore production, there is no steel production. This is one reason why Great Lakes shipping is so important, justifying infrastructure such as the Soo Locks and Coast Guard ice cutters. I was a bit surprised to learn how much iron Michigan produces, because there are practically no jobs in the Upper Penninsula. The towns up there are like ghost towns. The once booming mining towns are shabby relics that serve tourists and hunters. But, I would expect that it requires a lot of miners to keep the nation supplied in steel. Where are the people? Well, to satisfy my curiosity, I’ve assembled these links and videos that walk through the production and shipping of taconite (iron ore pellets) to the steel mill.
First, here is is some historical background information. The high quality iron ore (more than 60% iron) was mined out during WWII and the Korean War.
c) The taconite plant grinds up the rock fragments into marbles. The marbles are then milled into a fine dust. The iron in the taconite dust is separated from other minerals using large electromagnets. The non-iron dust is used as fill. The iron dust is combined with limestone and clay in very hot ovens to form taconite pellets that are about 60% iron, according to tight quality control specifications.
e) At the ore dock, gravity moves the taconite pellets directly from the hoppers into the holds of the lake freighters. The major ore dock in Michgian is in Marquette. The major ore port in Minnesota is in Deluth.
f) The ore is transported by lake freighter to stell mills (or rail heads) along the Great Lakes. Primary destinations used to be Gary, Cleveland, and Erie (with rail link to Pittsburgh). Today, Steel Mills operate in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Gary, Ecorse, Granite City, Portage, and and Lorain.
g) Historically steel was unloaded from lake freighters using wheelbarrows. A major advance in great lakes shipping was the Hulett unloader. These days, self-unloading augers allow an ore boat to empty its holds in a few hours at almost any dock. Unloading facilities are no longer required on land, because the self unloading equipment can deposit cargo anywhere.
So, if Michigan is producing a lot of great products, like iron ore, steel, shipping, and autos, then where are all the jobs? Why aren’t the ghost towns booming again? In the past decade, Michgian experienced a net job loss of 20%. How can this be? Well, we are not producing that much iron, proportionally, because it is cheaper to import steel in many cases. The price of iron is very low historically. Other countries have purer ore deposits, cheaper labor, and less government regulation, which makes it much harder for us to compete. So, the only way we can compete is by being more productive, which means heavy automation at just a few modern facilities. We just don’t need that many people to produce iron products as we did 100 years ago.
To put the issue into proportion… 100 years ago, U.S. Steel was the largest corporation in the world. Today, you could buy it for a little more than $6 billion cash. In other words, you could buy U.S. Steel for the price of 3 days of the Iraq war. Or, you could say that the U.S. Government borrows a U.S. Steel from China every 1.5 days just to keep the bailouts flowing. Obviously, the economy isn’t being driven by real corporations that produce things. These days, people with jobs are usually getting money from Washington through one form of a Federal welfare grant or another (speaking for myself here in academia). Meanwhile, we are losing generations worth of industrial and manufacturing output and know-how. How can we possibly recover?
I believe that Ms. Kegan has been selected for the Supreme Court for one same reason that Obama was selected president. Very little is know about Kegan, so it is very hard for conservatives to reduce her down to a few indiscreet, negative sound bytes that the public will understand. She has very skillfully hid most of her views and ideology from the lay public, and I think she will be confirmed on that basis.
Therefore, I propose ending this blog, because in this age of online data aggregation and mining, these blog posts could be very damaging to my future Supreme Court prospect (and even a run for township clerk). But I digress.
Kegan shares an important selection attribute with the good governor of Michigan and Obama (two peas in a pod politically). They all have Harvard pedigrees. Leading the public around by the nose has everything to do with branding. We are being conditioned to think… people from Harvard are smarter than you. Again, I digress.
The critical factor that selected Kegan was also an important factor that helped Obama. Kegan is NOT a WASP!
Today, I chuckled to myself as I read an article from the Wall Street Journal entitled, That Bright, Dying Start, the American WASP, which is a top e-mailed story today. This humorous lament posits the Kegan nomination is a milestone leading to the eventual end of WASP power, and ostensibly the end of the United States of American that everybody once loved (or at least a simple majority of us). Personally, I think Obama is the epitome of a WASP president (LBJ? or Carter?) whose absentee father just happened to be Kenyan, but can I say that? As for Kegan, since she went to Harvard, I strongly doubt that her view on any important topic deviates a crumb from the average white Episcopalian or Methodist who also went to Harvard, but how can I know that? Nobody has any dirt on her. Yes, I digress.
All that was just to introduce the real reason for my post. I was just trying to guess what I should wear to my cousin’s evening wedding in SoCal. The answer seems to be, wear a suit. I have a favorite camel hair jacket (black) that somebody gave me. Is it appropriate to wear this with navy slacks at a summer wedding in California? Googling for answers, I landed on:
WASP 101, an online fashion guide tailored to meet the needs of yours truly
I think the answer is yes, as a WASP, I am entitled to wear a camel hair jacket to a wedding. But I must also wear an argyle sweater and patent loafers. Err… I don’t think I have enough money to be considered a WASP.
Now, I’m traveling about 150 hours by train to the wedding. Should I wear the suit on the train, or should I ship it and wear jeans? Solution! I will buy a suit at the Salvation Army Store or Goodwill once I arrive at my destination. Before I depart, I can donate it again!
