buckdata – news and views for an unquiet age

It’s all over the news. The Vatican has been busy naming some new sins to bring that old bunch of seven big ones up to date. This is a wonderful idea, but why should the Vatican have a monopoly on the concept?

I decided to help out the Pope by proposing a few more sins to help the Church modernize. Here they are:

*Carbon Gluttony (CG): This sin involves using more carbon based materials–such as oil–than your planet or your national budget can afford. Employing this new concept, we will be able to characterize drivers of SUVs as sinners and breakers of the Revised Commandment, New Millenium, which states, of course: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s oil.”

*This brings us to the second sin: Absentee Warlordism (AW): Old fashioned warlords used rape, pillage, and private armies to hold onto territory after sovereign governments broke down; however, in a global era, this concept has been outsourced. The commandment should be: “Thou shalt not seize they neighbor’s oil using paid surrogates, puppet leaders, or your own country’s adolescents to conduct the battle, while you sit home.” Better yet, just say “no” to AW, and skip the W, as well.

*Closer to home is a proposed sin which is of particular concern to the buckdata blog: Buck-Passing. Banks and lenders, now that they have completed the task of blaming middle-class consumers and the houseless poor for obtaining home loans on the only terms possible to them, are currently engaged in passing the buck–or rather the lack of it–back onto the same hapless taxpayers by coaxing breaks and liquidity from the federal government. It’s a sin from the 1980s , dressed up in a new outfit, come back to haunt us again: The Sin against Accountability (SA).

*This brings us to proposed sin number four: False Attribution (FA), as in “My predecessor in office got us into this mess.” We will be hearing more of this sin, shortly. One of the correlated commandments could probably be: “Thou shalt not continue thy predecessor’s unjust war.” You can probably think of a few more.

These are just a few of the hot new sins that could be added to the Vatican’s playlist to give the church a whole new sound. I leave it to others to ponder the matter of revising penances. Hey, isn’t it about time?

The day after tomorrow is Super Tuesday–a day in which some 40 percent of delegates for the summer political conventions will be apportioned, grasped, or at least groped or pleaded for. Due to a change in primary dates, we in California are faced with the possibility of having our primary votes count for the first time in a generation. Excitement is consequently higher than usual. So it is interesting to note that although the governor has endorsed John McCain, the governor’s wife, Maria Shriver, has endorsed Barack Obama. Instead of the 19th century’s separate domains for men and women (the world and the household), we are witnessing the further emergence of separate electoral arenas, with powerful women such as Diane Feinstein, Caroline Kennedy, Maxine Waters and Oprah Winfrey weighing in on the Democratic choices. The news is thus not merely that one already-powerful woman is among those seeking the nation’s top office, but that the opinions of so many powerful women are publicly noted and reported. Hey, it’s about time!