Comments and Observations

Steps to Eliminate Complacency in Our Lives

1.Accept trials and adversity as opportunities, not as curses

2.Look for and accept challenges

 3.Serve and serve some more

4.Magnify your callings

 5.Keep an eternal perspective

6.Ensure that your eternal perspective drives your life

Overcoming Complacency

Complacency: Self satisfaction accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies.

2 Nephi 28:21

“It is better to wear out than to rust out!”  President Spencer W. Kimball

“All of us will need His help to avoid the tragedy of procrastinating what we must do here and now to have eternal life.”

            Elder Henry B. Eyring

Alma 34:33-34

“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.”

            Quintus Horatius Flaccus

“He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another harder and better one.”

            Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of those that matter least.”

            Goethe

Fact Checkers Spinning the Facts

Fact checkers are supposed to check facts in an unbiased way. Unfortunately, this almost never happens. The fact checkers don’t often tell outright lies of their own, but they present data in a way that highlights a detail that allows them to call a comment by someone that they disagree with to be “partially false”. This allows them to lead people to believe that the statement is false when it is mostly true. Here is a recent example:

PolitiFact recently fact checked a comment by Senator Mitt Romney as “mostly false”. The comment by Senator Romney was, “People are 7% poorer now because of Biden inflation.” Although inflation did increase by 7% or more in the past year, their reasoning was that average salaries last year increased by 4.7% so people were poorer by less than 7%. On the surface this sounds logical but think about it a bit – what do increasing average salaries have to do with the fact that inflation was at 7% or more? It is a fact that this inflation rate is the highest since the times of Jimmy Carter. Even if average salaries are indeed higher, there is no evidence that they would not have been the higher without the inflation. In addition, around 70 million people take social security benefits, most of them retirees. That income is essentially fixed, so those people feel almost the entire negative impact of the inflation. Apparently, this large segment of the population was not considered in this discussion. While Senator Romney’s comment did not include all the factors that might be considered in the numbers, his statement can logically be considered as “mostly true” rather than “mostly false”.

A totally true statement could have been made that the average family is poorer due to inflation now than they were a year ago. But the situation is much more complex than either Senator Romney or PolitiFact indicated. We know that inflation by the definition used by the US government was 7% or more last year (the December annual rate was almost 10%), but the factors that influence it can not all be attributed to action (or lack of action) by President Biden. In addition, the idea that average salaries are up 4.7% is questionable since we also know that more people quit their jobs in the last couple of months than ever in history. Were those that don’t work and those that choose not to work included in the statistics??

It is interesting to note that PolitiFact did not choose to question the assertion that President Biden is responsible for the inflation, just that it is not as serious as Senator Romney indicated. This is a pretty clear effort by PolitiFact to steer the conversation away from the actual topic (i.e. the contention that President Biden doing a poor job) and onto a detail in the data.

Become as a Child

With all the issues that we see concerning race, religion, culture and a thousand other things that tend to divide us, I think that we should all remember back to when we were 4 or 5 years old. At least for me, back then, none of these issues came into consideration at all when deciding who would be a friend and who I was going to play with. A person being kind to you was all that was needed. Even when a little bit older, the football games and baseball games that we played on the sandlot were the ultimate in equality; it didn’t matter who you were or what you looked like. If you were there, you were in the game. Christ taught us that to make ourselves fit for heaven, we must “become as a little child”. It turns out that bias, prejudice, and exclusiveness are learned behaviors, not genetic dispositions. Here is my hope that everyone might return a bit to the attitude and thought processes that we had as young children.

Preparing for a Rainy Day

The very wise among us are always prepared for emergencies. Financial planners tell us that we should have the equivalent of three months of pay saved so that we can deal with sudden or emergency expenses. However, there are things more important than money that we should save to deal with realistic potential events.

Those of us that live on the Gulf Coast know that when a hurricane is spotted in the Gulf of Mexico, we can go to the store within a couple of hours of the forecast and find that certain items are not available on the grocery store shelves. Water, non-perishable foods (canned tuna for example) and even toilet paper can be unavailable and cannot be bought at any price.

Incidents like a potential incoming hurricane give us a snapshot of what might happen if there was a serious disaster. Most people simply don’t realize that if the trucks stop delivering to the stores, the shelves will be empty in a matter of hours or days at the most, and if they don’t start coming again, no food or other necessities will be available.

A year ago, in Texas an unusual freeze knocked out power and many people were literally freezing within their own homes. Every gasoline powered electrical generator in every store was sold overnight and it was months before the home stores were restocked.

At the height of the Covid 19 pandemic, toilet paper became a very hot commodity. Although this was a bit of an over-reaction by many people, it was not unusual to see a sign in the supermarket saying that you could only buy one or two packages of toilet paper in any given day!

The incidents that I mention above were minor incidents. It is easy to see how a more serious pandemic, a more powerful and widespread hurricane or other disaster could put the unprepared at risk.

Considering all this, I believe that the most important thing that we should have on hand is not money. It is food and water and fuel that will be of the most value in a significant disaster.

There are many companies that sell food that can be stored for many years. Dehydrated foods, beans, rice, and similar products can last in sealed cans for decades. There are many companies out there that sell these types of products. You just need a desire to store the food, an idea of what you should store, and an idea of how much you should store.

The desire to store food is up to you. Just be aware that when the time comes that you need that food, it is likely already to late to store it. Now is the best time to begin.

There are many good resources that can help you know what you can and should store and how much you should store. A good resource is www.ChurchofJesusChrist.org. Just go to the website and search for “food storage”. There will be an abundance of information there about this issue.

One problem that some people have that are starting food storage is keeping track of the food and monitoring if the amounts stored are adequate and what the shelf life of the stored food is (you don’t want to have cans of stored food that when you need it you find to be spoiled). There is a good app that can help you with this. It is called “StockUp – food storage tracker” and you can get it from the Google Play store. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chibby.stockup)

In addition to food, my family has found it very useful to have a small generator handy. Some people install a whole house generator which is fine but is very expensive. In my opinion, the best strategy for food and fuel storage is to store enough to maintain life, not necessarily to be perfectly comfortable. This strategy allows you to do what is necessary for a very reasonable cost. The generator we have, for example, is enough to run the refrigerator and a couple of space heaters or a small AC unit in addition to some lamps and other small items. During the Texas freeze a year ago, this allowed my family to stay warm and to have fresh food throughout the crisis. Note that having a generator is not enough, you must store fuel also. In many disaster scenarios, gasoline will be hard to get, so you must have some on hand. We usually store about 7 gallons of gasoline in containers. That with the gasoline in the tanks of our two cars (be sure to have a siphon device!) give us enough gasoline to power the generator for over a week.

Hopefully, you will never have to deal with a disaster. However, being ready for one is still very logical. The results of not being prepared can be very severe – even deadly.

I hope that this article gives you some desire to act and some ideas to act on.

Concerning Russia and the Ukraine

The events of the past week with Russia invading Ukraine are troubling for all of us. The buildup of Russian troops had been going on for weeks, but somehow our government officials seemed surprised when the invasion finally occurred. Many of us in the United States had simply not been paying attention to that part of the world. After the exciting days when the iron curtain fell 30 years ago many of us simply ignored what was happening in that part of the world.

There are a few people that have roots in that part of the world or that have interest in that part of the world that have been paying attention. And to those people, this invasion was not a surprise. The question was not “if”, only “when”.

I was recently listening to a recording of a book by Orson Scott Card entitled “Hidden Empire.” The book is fiction, but like many authors Card is a master at using facts to increase the realism of his novels. Early in this book, there is a conversation between a special operations officer of the United States military and an operative of the military of Ukraine. In this conversation, the situation in Ukraine and the other countries in the area is outlined with amazing accuracy. Here is part of that conversation:

“Colonel Bohdanovich, you have to look at this rationally. Why is Russia pushing things with all their neighbors?”

“To restore the empire,” said Bohdanovich. “The democracies are prospering, and Russia is the sick man of Europe, even with all their oil. The Russian people are angry, population is shrinking, life expectancy is going down, Russia is a mess. So their fearless leader bullies the little countries, the ones that used to be part of the empire, and the Russian people fell proud again, they remember the big soviet empire. Nobody riots or goes on strike, nobody kills the fearless leader and takes over the government.”

“And if they can get Ukraine and the Baltic states back into the empire,” said Cole, “they think it might jump-start their economy.”

This book was written about 15 years ago. If an author of science fiction and fantasy understood the situation in the Ukraine and Russia at that time with no particular access to detailed intelligence, why didn’t the US government know about it and do something?

The answer is simple. The government was aware of the situation but chose to do nothing to ensure that the invasion of the Ukraine and other countries did not happen. It is logical to assume that effective action could have been taken 15 years ago that was much less radical than military action.

Why the disinterest and the inaction? I don’t know for sure (although I have my ideas), but one thing that I do know is that it cannot be blamed on one political party. The Obama administration, the Trump administration the Biden administration and possibly the Bush administration did not take action when they could have. It is a shame to note that this lack of long-term thinking is a characteristic of modern politics. Doing what is necessary to get elected in the next election is as far as the forward thinking of most politicians goes. As one of Card’s protagonists states in another part of this same book:

But we’re a democracy. That means that it is extremely hard for our government to take…actions whose benefits do not come before the next election.

Even domestically we see that the actions of the government are based on the short term. An immediate monetary handout is preferable to solving basic economic issues. Stopping immigration (or alternately, allowing unrestricted immigration) is preferred by politicians rather than the more difficult but longer lasting action of meaningful immigration reform.

I pray for the people of both the Ukraine and Russia. Many of them will be maimed or killed to satisfy the ambitions of their leaders. But we should also pray that the leaders in the United States will look ahead beyond the next election and take actions to benefit our country and the world long term. We can make this happen by supporting individuals for office that will act according to their knowledge and their conscience and not ignore important issues that do not have immediate impact. Also, we can get rid of those leaders who consistently demonstrate short-term thinking and hypocrisy in their actions and decisions.

Smokescreens, Diversion Techniques and Spin

One thing that is obvious if you observe politics and the news cycle in our day is that it is difficult to get a subjective analysis of any occurrence. Especially, if something negative occurs, there is a scramble to divert the attention of people away from the subject and the issue, put up a smokescreen to hide the facts and spin the event that shows your favored politician or political viewpoint in a positive light.

A good example of this is the current discussion over gasoline prices. Those that do not like the Biden administration love to point out the increase of gasoline prices that have occurred throughout the time that President Biden has been in office but particularly in the recent month as prices have increased dramatically. There has even been a program by these folks to put stickers on gasoline pumps with a picture of President Biden pointing to the gasoline price on the pump and saying, “I did this!”

President Biden and those that support him have been active in utilizing diversion tactics, smokescreens, and spin in an effort to fight against this effort. The administration blames the war between Russia and the Ukraine for the increase (at least partially true), but there has also been an effort to shift the blame to US corporations. Cries of “corporate greed” and “obscene profits” are currently being promoted, recycling arguments that come up whenever blame needs to be shifted and a new bad guy identified.

As is often the case when there are two diametrically opposing opinions, neither side is totally correct nor is totally incorrect. Let’s examine this case and what the real data shows.

First, the price of gasoline has gone up consistently since January of 2021 when President Biden took office. You can check out the data in the US government website to verify this fact: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epm0_pte_nus_dpg&f=w

There are lots of reasons for this including increasing demand as business began to pick up after the pandemic. However, it can not be denied that administration policies did play a part. Cancelling the Keystone pipeline is an example. While some argue that the oil that would have gone into the Keystone pipeline was shipped via truck or train, the fact is that either method is more expensive than a pipeline. There are marginal barrels that are not shipped via truck or train that could be shipped economically by pipeline. However, the more significant impact of this action was the message sent to the crude oil buyers worldwide that the United States no longer supported the development of the oil and gas boom in the US that had been occurring over the previous decade. Even the expectation of less support and lower supplies will raise the price now.

However, looking at the data, we see that there is a large uptick in the price over the last month. This is clearly due to the fear of oil shortage due to the war between Russia and the Ukraine. Oil is traded on the international market. Buyers determine the price that they will pay. If there is even a fear of a shortage, buyers can bid up the price to buy more oil now and hopefully profit when the prices go up more later. Oil companies do NOT set the price of the crude oil (more on this later). In most places, the rate at which oil is produced is not very flexible. Significant increases take time if they can be done at all. The exception to this is a few countries in OPEC, (middle east producers for the most part) and especially Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia can increase production significantly in the short term because they have a lot of excess capacity. That is why President Biden began begging the Saudis to increase oil production. They are the ones that could do it over the short haul. But why would they do it? They are benefiting handsomely from the higher prices.

One question that can be asked about the Russian/Ukranian war is, could the current administration have done something to keep the war from happening and this limit the increase in oil prices? Honestly, we will never know the answer to that question. However, there are enough weird happenings between Russia, the Ukraine and the United States over the last two administrations to conclude that the country could have done a better job diplomatically.

With these facts in mind, the clear conclusion is that 1) yes, the Biden administration has contributed to increasing oil and hence gasoline prices but 2) the recent uptick is more the result of the impact of the war on the international oil market than it is on anything the Biden administration has done.

Now let’s look at another diversion tactic – the one of blaming gasoline prices on corporate greed. Specifically, when the pundits talk about that they are talking about the major US oil corporations such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and so on. One fact that some people may not be aware of is this: no US corporation produces enough oil to have any significant impact on the price of oil. In fact, US oil corporations tend to be some of the biggest purchasers of oil in the world. Here is the data: ExxonMobil, the largest US oil company produces an average of 2.3Kbd of oil. The world daily production of oil is almost 100kbd. A company that produces only 2% of the total of a thing does not have control over the price of that thing. ExxonMobil has a refinery throughput of around 3.7Kbd. This means that ExxonMobil is buying 1.4kbd of oil on the open market. This is over 60% of what they produce. When the oil price increases, a company like ExxonMobil makes a lot more money on the oil that they produce, but they do not make any additional money on the oil that they buy.

The oil companies will make more money when the oil prices are high. But do the oil companies make the “obscene profits” that their detractors talk about. The data would indicate that the answer is a clear “no”. Over time, the average profitability of integrated oil and gas companies is about the average of all industries. Check the data at this link: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/margin.html

A quick example will further support this. ExxonMobil in 2021 made $23 billion. That’s a lot of money (to everyone except the government). However, if considered in relationship to how big the business is it is not so impressive. The revenue for the same period was over $285 billion dollars – so profitability was less than 10% of revenues. Hardly excessive. Further consider that ExxonMobil LOST $22 billion in 2020. ExxonMobil will have really good years combined with some bad ones. Over the past century the company has been able to return a decent (but not excessive) return to its stockholders as corporations are supposed to do. No one year should be taken in a vacuum and the magnitude of the business and the risks it takes to earn its profits need to be considered.

One current meme that is popular about corporate greed points out that the oil prices dropped one day, and the gasoline prices did not drop immediately. Besides the fact that no reasonable person would expect the change to be immediate, gasoline prices over the short term did not react quickly. But here is the inescapable fact: over the long haul, gasoline prices follow oil prices very well. Here is the evidence:

https://www.macrotrends.net/2501/crude-oil-vs-gasoline-prices-chart

The main factors in the cost of gasoline are supply and demand and competition. Competition is a critical factor in ensuring that people don’t get “gouged”. This is why we have laws against monopolies. Corporations are by law prohibited from setting the price of a product in concert with a different corporation. It is possible that retailers will gouge people over the short term when there are severe shortages in an area caused by a natural disaster or some other reason, but this has nothing to do with corporations.

The whole idea of corporate greed is clearly a smokescreen to divert people’s attention from other things that are going on. I am not saying that there is not greed in corporations. There are certainly individuals within organizations that are greedy. Certainly, there are CEO’s that earn more than they are worth. But those few represent a very small piece of the corporate pie even if they are overpaid. But where does all that money that a corporation like ExxonMobil makes go? Most of it goes to stockholders. In 2021, ExxonMobil, for example, paid $15 billion to stockholders. The stockholders are people like you and me, either through direct ownership of stock or through institutional investing that we benefit from. The rest of the money goes to things like capital investment (building stuff so the company can continue to return money to the stockholders in the future).

The data is clear. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that those that are making the claims noted above will pay any attention to the data. Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” hit the nail on the head when he said:

"The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The Psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. Your political preference determines the arguments you find compelling."

I experienced this effect personally when I tried to share data with an individual to make the above points. They refused to look at the data. Their response was, “That’s too much, I don’t have time for that.” In today’s society, many apparently have time to spread information that is not correct but don’t have time to look at the actual data…

"E pur, si muove" is a phrase reputed to have been uttered by Galileo when the Church forced him to recant his scientific discovery that the planets revolved around the sun rather than everything in the universe revolving around the earth.  After agreeing to recant (if he hadn't he would likely have been burned at the stake) he supposedly uttered these words under his breath.  The words mean, "And yet it moves" referring to the movement of the Earth.   In the face of the recognized authority of the day (The Catholic Church) and the general agreement of the masses, he could not deny what he had been able to observe, that the planets move, their moons rotate about the planets and the planets rotate around the sun.

Today we laugh about how silly and how wrong the "authorities" of the day were.  They were secure in their belief that everything rotated around the earth due to their observation that the sun and the stars rose and fell each day on a regular pattern.  However, they were blind to the fact that there was another explanation that fit the facts and that explanation was the correct one.  Galileo had tried to add to the store of human knowledge  with the discovery of a fact that was contrary to the knowledge of the day.  He had observed with his newly invented telescope that there were four moons that he could see that were near to Jupiter.  As he observed them over time, he became aware that they were rotating around Jupiter, not the Earth, repudiating the common belief in the day that everything had to rotate around the earth.  This knowledge, once it escaped from the clutches of those who wanted to suppress it,  led to the model of the heavens as we now know it.

Although we laugh at the shortsightedness of the people of Galileo's time, we don't have to look far in our time to find people that are  willing to close their eyes to truth to forward their own (false) agenda.   The denial of the existence of human male and female gender, the denial of the fetus as a living entity and many other examples common in our society illustrate this fact.

Part of the problem is that our society has become a slave to social media which has blurred and sometimes removed the seperation between truth and error.  Many people in our society are unwilling or unable to think for themselves. Hopefully, our society will grow out of these phase before truth becomes impossible to find.