Urban Onramps

Man, I think I remember all the things that happened today. Almost. I was on the phone constantly. When I wasn’t on the phone, I was talking to people on the ground. I booked events and confirmed things and added things to the schedule. On one day alone, Tuesday, March 27, they’ve got me doing the following in Fresno:

– speak at the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast
– speak to a gathering of pastors
– speak to No Name Fellowship
– speak to Hispanic pastors

All of this is slated in rapid succession, one after the other. It’s all good.

We are planning for our annual Harambee benefit on Saturday, March 3. Ya’ll come out. That means you, Tyler.

I talked to folks who are organizing a gathering of Black evangelicals. I’m trying to get myself invited…

There is a plan in the works to get me to speak at a sizable venue at one of my old colleges. We’ll see if that materializes.

Other speaking engagements popped up, too. January was silent on that front, up until this week, the last week of the month. Then all of a sudden - BOOM.

We’ve also got a bunch of groups coming on weekends and in the summer. I should say “threatening” to come, cuz the ink is not all the way dry on stuff. I say “threatening” with tongue-in-cheek and much love…

I’ve also moved my primary email and personal calendaring to an online source, Google, so now I’ve got a leg up on Jordon Cooper…

Tomorrow we’ve got a meeting of Hispanic leaders in Pasadena to talk about greeting the incoming Superintendent.

Plus we are organizing a February 21 open forum for District One City Council Candidates. I live/Harambee is in Pasadena’s District One, and the 12-year incumbent (Joyce Streator, God bless her) is not up for re-election.

Ok, now I’m hungry…. Dinner time is soon.

Here’s Micah:

This is what they are talking about at my local indie coffee shop.

An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal says, “The middle class gets hit when Congress targets CEO pay“. This bold prediction made me chuckle:

The Joint Committee on Taxation predicts this provision will bring in $800 million over the next decade. We’ll go out on a limb and predict it brings in an amount closer to $0.

There’s a lot to chew on in this article, including this bit:

Ironically, the targets of the law are probably those least likely to be affected by it. Top executives have the standing to negotiate gross-ups to cover their tax liability or to seek other forms of compensation, such as stock options or restricted stock grants, not covered by the cap. As a result, even the $800 million 10-year revenue estimate for this provision is likely to prove wildly optimistic by the time the compensation consultants and tax lawyers get through devising ways around it — for those who can afford their services.

This is, in fact, precisely what happened in 1993, when the $1 million cap on salary deductibility was imposed. In the mid-1980s, the average CEO had no stock options. Today, they are ubiquitous in the executive suites of large companies, and the tax code deserves much of the credit. Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 on a promise to cap CEO pay by imposing the cap. “Let’s treat everybody fairly again” was his mantra at the time, and Congress took it up with gusto. The result was that the middle class got a tax hike and the executives got stock options.

Here’s the main warning:

The tax code is riddled with provisions, such as the Alternative Minimum Tax, the estate tax and any number of phaseouts and caps, that were sold politically as targeting only the “super-rich” but now capture taxpayers of far more modest means….

…the people who will end up paying will be shareholders and the ordinary Americans who don’t have the luxury of avoiding yet another millionaire’s trap when it gets sprung on them.

UPDATE: FOR DAMIEN: I chuckled at the irony of a well-intentioned effort having zero effect over the long run. Government is full of examples of noble initiatives that produced squat. But I laugh not just at government, but at everyone and everything including myself. I’m always trying new things that I believe will produce significant results, only to get buried by unintended consequences, and then I’m forced to return to the drawing board after (a) producing nothing, or (b) making the problems worse. I also chuckled because Congress is supposed to know better than Rudy, and often times they don’t. Granted, this op-ed is only a projection, just as the examined taxation scheme is a projection, and we won’t know the results for ten years or so. But my bet is on the WSJ analysis.

Over at Anthony Bradley’s blog there’s a discussion about an article by CT’s Ed Gilbreath: “Exit Interviews: Why Blacks are leaving Evangelical ministries“

You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock.

You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured.

You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost.

You have ruled them harshly and brutally.

So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for wild animals.

My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill.

They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them.

From Ezekiel 34:2-6.

Then God gets really mad. Among other things, he says, “…but the sleek and the strong I will destroy.”

Jay Nordlinger:

…Wallis assures the audience that the day of the “Religious Right” is over, and that evangelicals are leaving this Right in droves.

For a while now I’ve been trying to:

– make sure every internet access-capable device that enters my house is filtered
– block Myspace and YouTube

Filtering every device (including smartphones and PSPs) and blocking the above-mentioned sites have been concerns since I noticed that my six-year-old son has become adept at using the net.

I wanted a solution that filtered at the “root” or the router level. Every device in the home network has to connect via the router, so that’s the logical spot. Only it’s impossible to buy a router that allows one to put a proxy filter URL in to the proxy configuration software. It’s crazy. You would think it’s not a pain for the router companies to add a simple line for code, but it’s not there.

Now, the advanced geeks reading this post will note all sorts of solutions, but all of them require using a home server and having extensive knowledge of server maintenance. I don’t want to pay $1,000 bucks for a server and then have to learn how to config and maintain it. I’m a geek myself, but more of a user-level geek, not a “creator” at the hardware or code-writing level.

I just wanted something out of the box that could filter my entire network at the router level. Nothing existed.

Well, nothing until I asked the people at Integrity Online. I’ve used Integrity in the past. I switched to their filtered DSL (Integrity Online-branded DSL) to solve this problem, but when I had installed everything I learned that even this publicized solution did not deal with things at the router level. I asked and asked, and a tech finally said, “Well, for some of our customers we put the Integrity Online proxy onto the router’s firmware.” Very interesting. They get a $75 (after taxes) LinkSys box, take out the firmware hardware, put the proxy url onto the firmware, put the firmware hardware back into the LinkSys box, and ship it. The total price for this router is $150.

Well, I ordered it. Got the router in the mail. Installed it at home…

And it works. My entire home network is filtered, and I don’t have to worry about policing every wireless access-capable device that enters my home.

At Harambee, we have a similar function. But we put out $1,000 bucks for a robust server with bells and whistles, plus we had a superstar volunteer net tech who had weeks of time to set the thing up (and now remotely manages the server from Europe). I don’t have that kind of cash or expertise for a home solution. But now there is this somewhat secret solution.

Hey friends: If you use Wordpress, version 2.1 was just released. I’m not sure where I heard about it, but I was inside my hosting account at BlueHost and it noted that a new version of Wordpress was available for installation. BlueHost has this function where it will automatically update your Wordpress software (well, “automatic” once you push the “update” link). At my other web host, it was moi who had to do the updating in a manual fashion. So that’s some great functionality from BlueHost, and all for the same $99 per year price.

On to the update: There is a short list of new features here. There are some VERY NICE functions that I hope to try out, including:

• AUTOSAVE: while you are drafting your post, it will come along and save it, just like when you are using Gmail
• Set any “page” to be the front page for your site, not just the index.php blog page
• Their sql database is better somehow. I noticed it because my blog seemed to load faster
• Links in the blogroll now have subcategories!!! and add categories on the fly!!!
• More AJAX throughout the comments section

So this is me operating with the new Wordpress 2.1… digging it.

I think there are a lot of people who grew up like Aaron did.

My six-year-old, Samuel, if you don’t already know, is a leukemia patient. He was diagnosed with leukemia in July 2004. He went into remission in August 2004. As far as we can tell, there is no trace of leukemia in his body. But the treatment protocol for childhood leukemia, ALL (which is what Sam has) is about a three and a half year period. We are hoping and praying that he will finish chemotherapy by Thanksgiving 2007. Overall, Sam is doing very well. He’s grown tall, taller than any of his classmates (he’s a first grader at Harambee Prep). But he’s had this persisent pain in his foot. The doc says it may be related to the vincristine he takes every month. These days he slightly favors one foot over another when he walks. In a couple of weeks they will take him for x-rays and see if there has been any damage to the bones in his feet. One of the side effects of all this is that he sits around a lot - on the couch or in bed - and rests his foot. He’s fairly active, but often has to stop and get off his feet. I don’t know why that bothers me, but it does. And I certainly don’t want his foot to be damaged. He doesn’t think about the matter as I do. His foot simply hurts, and so he takes a load off.

But now this a study of gay sheep has turned into a transnational stink (kerfuffle being too weak a word). Here’s a NY Times article with a round-up of the matter. The comments thread for this Ann Althouse post is very insightful as well as fascinating.

You may be surprised, writes Eugene Volokh in the Wall Street Journal. For something completely ludicrous, try this:

And if you’re the professional involved, don’t just worry that these rules will apply to you only if the patient (or the other “key party” involved) complains. No matter how good your relationship with the person you’re seeing, no matter how nonacrimonious any possible breakup, no matter how carefully you make sure that you only date people who won’t want to jeopardize your career, someone else may file the complaint–say, a jealous ex of one of the people involved, which is what happened in this Minnesota case–and you may get disciplined even if the allegedly wronged party is entirely on your side (in fact, is now your loving spouse).

A reader wrote to The New Editor blog and said:

Seriously, I really am shocked at the disconnect I’m seeing. When you pick up a newspaper, turn on the television or radio news you would think by the drumbeat that things are awful: Iraq, Iran, Afgan, Global Warming, America’s loss of status, on and on it goes.

Meanwhile the markets day after day vote on the overwhelming economic resiliency and strength and breadth of the economy. What ever happened to the ‘it’s the economy stupid’ mantra that we were told was the only barometer? Ultra-low unemployment, Ultra-high home ownership, stock markets and investments at all time levels on and on….yet Bush gets ZERO credit.

The New Editor blog here. Direct link here.

“But I’m your woman!”

Heh: It’s still going strong, 41 days later.

Assorted pictures of special children in my life:

Here’s Sam on some sort of Knight ride at Legoland. We went two Saturdays back with Benjamin from Denmark (who I just dropped off at the airport after a two-week visit; what up Simon). This thing wound all the way around a rather sizable patch of grass and foliage. Sam enjoyed it.

THEN I looked up and saw my little tiny Micah strapped to the same Knight ride. I looked for Kafi, so that I could point Child Protective Services in her direction, since Kafi was the one with the idea to put Micah on ride in the first place. If you look closely, you can see that Micah’s tongue is hanging out; she was hanging on! But the ride was very slow, safe, and Micah really enjoyed it.

This is baby Josue with our friend Liz. Liz and Lalo are married and live in Mexico City. Liz spent a year as a Harambee intern in 1997-1998. She’s the “Elizabeth” who leads off this article that I wrote for Youthworker.

…in just a few minutes. FatBurger. You know, FatBurger:

Just thought I’d share.