What is your spiritual DNA?

I subscribe to Max Lucado's weekly devotional series, UpWords. The other week, his message was titled "Take Up Your Cross".

In that message, he introduced me to the concept of spiritual DNA. To determine your spiritual DNA, you need to answer three questions:

In what directions has God taken you?

What needs has God revealed to you?

What abilities has God given to you?

The answers to these questions define Direction, Needs, and Abilities, your spiritual DNA.

What is God calling you to do today? Are you listening? What do you need to change?

Tough questions, and the answers can be tougher.

Day 2

Day 2 of work crew volunteering. Did 3 jobs yesterday, and started a 4th. Going back to the 4th site today to finish it up, and they have a 5th already lined up. Some of the devastation I've seen is just mind-boggling. You look down in a hollow, and you see trees snapped like toothpicks 30 feet of the ground. Trunks splintered as if explosives went off in the middle. Debris is scattered everywhere. One house had the roof shifted almost completely off to one side. I saw piles of rubble that used to be barns and out-buildings. Probably the worst were the empty slabs or open basements. The houses were just GONE!

One praise is the area that was hit. This is a rural area, where most everyone is on acreage. Most of the property damage is trees, barns and outbuildings. Not as many houses as if it had hit a suburban development. The other big praise is the number of friends, families, and volunteers you see out there helping. A friend said he drove by a house Saturday that had lost its roof. There were 30 or 40 cars in the driveway, and by 2:00PM the roof was already back on.

The biggest blessing for me personally happened with one car. We were taking a break, having just finished up site #3, and getting ready to head to site #4. Some random car stops across the street from us, the driver rolls down his window, and he says "Thank you guys. Thank you for everything you're doing for this family, and for our community." Must have gotten some sawdust or something in my eye right about then.

Being a good neighbor

A community about 20 miles south of us got whacked pretty hard by the tornadoes last Friday. National Guardsmen were deployed, and a number of the roads are still closed to all but residents and work crews.

Our church, in conjunction with the local Baptist Association, is having a work day today, to help the town clean up from the wrack and ruin. I just finished lacing up my boots, and I'm about to head out the door to meet up with everyone.

Prayers for safety are much appreciated today!

Bio-batteries?

Peter over at Bayou Renaissance Man alerts us to experiments harvesting electricity from cockroaches.

His initial reactions are slightly different than mine:

I've already seen that movie, thank you very much
(picture source)

Seriously though, the tech looks pretty interesting. I don't have the background to determine the efficiencies of the process, but I wonder if that reaction chain could be replicated, instead of having to rely on the cockroaches themselves.

Bad news, good news, bad news

Bad news: tornado warnings in the area
Good news: they closed the office early
Bad news: my bus doesn't come for 10 more minutes

Problems With The National Popular Vote Act

I really wasn't planning on getting into the National Popular Vote Act. My intent yesterday was merely to highlight similarities in though processes in very different political arenas. However, a comment was left defending it yesterday, and I wanted to highlight some of the misapprehensions.

Before starting, though, I do want to reiterate that the Constitution grants states the power to determine how they will choose their electors. So, there are no direct Constitutional concerns with the NPVA. That being said, our system of electing the President is not one of direct election. We have the electoral college. When a citizen casts a vote, it is only nominally for the candidate. In reality, it is for an elector pledged to that candidate. The NPVA is trying to do an end-run on the electoral college system. If you want direct elections of the president, then amend the Constitution. But keep in mind that the United States was intended to be an amalgamation of states with loose federal control. The House of Representatives provides proportional membership, to keep the more populous states from running roughshod over everyone else, and the Electoral College provided the same protections for the electorate.

Now, let's start taking a look at the comment that was left.

Under National Popular Vote, every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in every presidential election. Every vote would be included in the state counts and national count. No voter is disenfranchised. The candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC would get the 270+ electoral votes from the enacting states. That majority of electoral votes guarantees the candidate with the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC wins the presidency.

Every vote, everywhere today is politically relevant. Again, each STATE is electing a slate of electors that then vote for the President. We do not have direct elections. If you feel that voters are being disenfranchised under the current system, then propose that states adopt a proportional allocation of electors instead of using a "first past the post" all-or-nothing allocation. Further, from what I can see, the NPVA does not require a majority the popular vote, merely a plurality. So even if a candidate only receives 40% of the popular vote, with two other candidates each receiving 30%, the NPVA guarantees that he will win a majority of the electoral votes. Talk about the ultimate in disenfranchisement.

National Popular Vote would give a voice to the minority party voters in each state. Now their votes are counted only for the candidate they did not vote for. Now they don't matter to their candidate. Talk about disenfranchisement.

NPVA merely stands this argument on its head, potentially taking the voice away from the majority party voters in a state, by allocating their votes to the "national winner", even if he was different than the state winner. That's the travesty of NPVA. Again, the better way to fix this is to encourage states to adopt a proportional elector allocation. This would most likely achieve the goals of the NPVA (to guarantee that the electoral college winner and the national popular vote winner are the same) while still retaining the veracity of local votes.

In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided).

This does not mean that the NPVA is the answer. Again, not to flagellate a deceased equine or anything, but it seems the problem is more with a first past the post, winner takes all allocation of electoral votes. Fix that instead of telling me that my vote vote for a slate of electors (see, I'm not voting for the candidate, I'm voting for electors) could be rendered meaningless by a high-population state.

I will have more to say about some of their numbers-based arguments once I have a chance to pull together some statistics. But, work calls and I have to pay the bills first.

Whither Democracy?

According to Wikipedia, 8 states and the District of Columbia have signed on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The gist of this compact is that ALL of the electoral votes for participating states will be given to the candidate that receives the most popular votes nationally. Granted, states are free to allocate their electoral votes as they see fit, under Article II, Section I of the United States Constitution.

I have no issue with the legality of this Compact.  What bothers me is that it has the potential to invalidate the decision of that state's electorate. Your state voted for the Vesuvian candidate, but the Martian candidate won the most popular votes? Too bad, so sad. The State is going to stand for the Martian. Talk about the ultimate in voter disenfranchisement. Yet all the Right Thinking People hold this up as the ultimate in direct democracy.

Over in California, an experiment in direct democracy resulted in the passage of Proposition 8, which reserved the use of the term "married" for the union of 1 man and 1 woman. Setting aside any personal feelings about who should or should not be allowed to marry (or use the adjective 'married'), the people spoke, with 52% supporting amending the state constitution.

Yet Right Thinking People everywhere decried the result as a miscarriage of justice, and it was overturned in the courts.

Once again, we see that the will of the people is only to be respected when it aligns with the Correct Results®.