Dave Grusin – "Memphis Stomp"

Pandora served up this on my "Rhapsody in Blue" station. Bought it that night.

The Right Image

I have finally come to grips with how hypocritical it is for the husband of a professional photographer to steal images off the internet for his blog posts. Today I am making a commitment to only use images in ways that to the best of my knowledge do not violate their owners' copyright.

I am no lawyer, but reading has lead me to believe it is illegal to use any image without the permission of its creator, either written or in the form of a license (including a public domain license, which applies to all photos taken in the U.S. before 1923). There are exemptions for fair use, but the rules are hazy and I think the ads on my blog preclude me from taking them. Copyright has its issues, but that's no excuse for me not to honor creative people.

Luckily, finding excellent, free-to-use images on the internet is easy. Here are some resources I've found:

• Advanced Google Image Search – Search for images licensed for reuse
• Advanced Flickr Search – Search for Creative Commons licensed images (these usually only require an attribution; check under "License" on the image's Flickr page to find out)
• Wikimedia Commons – A huge archive of freely usable media (great for pictures of famous folks)
• stock.xchng – The leading free stock photo site
• rgbstock.com  – Another free stock photo site
• tineye.com – Reverse image search: a helpful tool for finding the source of an image when you want to ask permission to use it (the artists I have asked have all appreciated the compliment and cheerfully given permission)
• Wikipedia: Public domain image resources – An exhaustive list of public domain image sources
• everystockphoto  – A license-free stock photo search engine (added 9/7/11—thanks, Winn!)

If you use others, please share! Also, I still have some confusion about the copyright implications of using the following. If you happen to know (or know someone who would know) the law regarding the use of these items on a blog with ads, please let me know:

• Image of an album/dvd/book/magazine cover
• Image of a movie poster or playbill
• Image of an advertisement
• Screenshot from a movie or television program

Image: TilarX

Top 5 Things That Recently Blew My Mind

1. North Korea's illegal economy. North Korea needs foreign currency to buy the foreign goods its leaders demand, but it can't even feeds its own people much less produce anything the world wants. So the government resorts to illegal means such as manufacturing drugs, counterfeiting U.S. dollars, and loaning its citizens as cheap labor to South Korea, confiscating their South Korean wages, and paying them in worthless North Korean currency.

2. How software patents are killing technological innovation in the U.S. I had heard of this problem before, but it wasn't until This American Life's recent episode that I appreciated how enormous a problem it is. I am now a more committed abolitionist.

3. The U.S. estimates that 29,000 children under the age of five have starved to death in Somalia in the last three months due to extreme famine and drought. Another 500,000 children are on the brink of starvation. More than 12 million people in East Africa are in need of food aid, with 2.8 million in need of immediate lifesaving assistance. International aid organizations have not been able to provide assistance to the area because of danger from militants such as the Shabab Islamist insurgent group, which has blocked and imprisoned starving people trying to flee the territory, forced Western aid organizations out of the country, and deprived victims of food. Somalia is a failed state which has suffered anarchy since 1992, and the Shabab group controls much of southern Somalia where the drought has taken place. I can't help but feel we are in the middle of another Rwanda which no one is paying attention to.

4. 82% of consumer dollars spent in the U.S. go to China the U.S.

5. Nicholas Kristoff's reflection on the death of John Stott (pictured), which admonished New York Times readers to bridge the "God gulf" and reach out to the many Christians who are on the front lines of humanitarian work around the world. It is not often that a popular columnist in a major news population makes a distinction between evangelical charlatans like Jerry Falwell and humble, brilliant men like Stott who preach service to the poor and the oppressed rather than hate and judgement.

Image: © Langham Partnership International

The Head and the Heart – "Lost in My Mind"

If you haven't seen or heard this yet, you're probably under living under a rock like me. But I finally found it and it took me somewhere I didn't come back from soon.



You can download this song free from Amazon, compliments of the Head and the Heart.

Two Thoughts on Women and the Church

I have written here before about how my faith has been bending since my move to DC two years ago. I grew up in a conservative church tradition which believes in a biblical mandate that women should not fill certain roles in the church. Since then I have been deeply involved with two churches that (at least in their church creeds) have no position on the issue. And I have met many people who, with varying degrees of certainty, believe every office in the church should be open to women. I've also encountered a few people who espouse the tradition I grew up in who I want to avoid aligning myself with (like the plague).

I am trying to see my way through the murkiness of this confusing issue. I have not come to many conclusions, but I have settled on two ideas where I believe the conversation must start:

1. If a community believes certain positions in the church should be closed to women, the implications of being wrong on this are dangerous. If it's true that the Bible makes no claim about whether men or women should fill roles such as pastor or elder, then such communities are denying women the ability to use gifts God has given them. The inevitable result will be confusion, pain, and disillusion for women who cannot understand why God has called them to do things he has denied them the opportunity to do, and why he only values these gifts in men. If we are not absolutely sure we are correct on this issue, and we default to a position that denies women these opportunities, we take an enormous risk.

2. Separate but equal is unequal. The popular view among mainstream traditional churches is that men's and women's roles in the church are complementary. They are not unequal, they are different, and they balance one another. I'm not convinced. When I attempt to look objectively at the traditional churches I've been exposed to, the complementary roles I see go something like "men are pastors, and women are... not pastors." I have tried, but I cannot see how the positions afforded to men (pastor, preacher, elder) and women (...) fit together in a way that maintains equality. It's not tenable. If you take the position that the Bible prevents women but allows men to perform certain church functions, I think you must accept that the Bible affords men a superior position in the church. It is impossible to have authority without subordination.

Here are two articles I found interesting while reading about these ideas:
Sojourners: The Persistence of Patriarchy
Christianity Today: Wounds of a Friend

Image: s13_eisbaer

Stealing from My Friends

As blogging has declined over the last few years, I have been left with a handful of friends who still take to the web to share what's on their mind in more than once sentence. In recent weeks, three of these friends have posted profound pieces of literature that caught my attention. Coincidentally, they all relate to a subject that is constantly in my thoughts: vocation. In what I hope will be interpreted as the sincerest form of flattery, I'm going to go ahead and blatantly steal what they posted and publish it here. If you find these pieces as moving as I did, you should follow the blogs they came from (ok, and maybe Wendell Berry too).

From Michael Costa:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry, "The Real Work"

From Austin Grigg:

Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves, when our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little, when we arrive safely because we have sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess, we have lost our thirst for the waters of life; having fallen in love with life, we have ceased to dream of eternity; and in our efforts to build a new earth, we have allowed our vision of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas where storms will show your mastery; where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars. We ask you to push back the horizons of our hopes; and to push into the future in strength, courage, hope, and love.

Sir Francis Drake, prayer

From Winn Collier:

I go by a field where once
I cultivated a few poor crops.
It is now covered with young trees,
for the forest that belongs here
has come back and reclaimed its own.
And I think of all the effort
I have wasted and all the time,
and of how much joy I took
in that failed work and how much
it taught me. For in so failing
I learned something of my place,
something of myself, and now
I welcome back the trees.

Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2007, no. 9

Image: malweth

How Sweden is Solving Sex Slavery

A short while ago I wrote an exasperated post about Ashton Kutcher's new ad campaign against sex slavery. I still think the campaign is stupid, but after doing a little reading I was surprised how true its underlying premise is: men who hire prostitutes and contribute to human trafficking (known colloquially as "johns") are not just high-profile politicians and hardened criminals deep in the underworld. They are everyday people from all walks of life—cops, schoolteachers, lawyers, doctors, businessmen; most likely one is your neighbor or coworker. I learned a lot I didn't know about prostitutes and the men who hire them from these two excellent pieces of journalism:

The Daily Beast: The John Next Door
Vanity Fair: Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door

The second piece is a harrowing (and I should warn, graphic) account of two young girls who were for all practical purposes sold into sex slavery in America, and how a determined detective named Debora Scates was able to rescue to them. It's an awful and heart-wrenching, but ultimately hopeful story.

One of the many things that surprised me was that both articles came to the same conclusion, and it surrounded Sweden's Sex Purchase Law, enacted in 1999. From the Vanity Fair article:

As of 1999, johns [in Sweden] are punished by up to six months' imprisonment, traffickers are locked up for 2-to-10-year hits, and prostitutes are offered medical care, education, and housing. As a result, prostitution has been reduced by 50 percent in Sweden, and the purchase of sex, which is understood to be a human-rights abuse, has decreased by 75 percent. In contrast, Europol studies show, nations such as Holland and Australia, where prostitution has been legalized, have become lucrative, low-risk magnets for international sex-slave drivers and organized crime. On the subject of Sweden’s demand-side laws—which Finland and Norway have now adopted, and Denmark is currently considering—Sweden’s minister for justice, Beatrice Ask, notes, "If we could get rid of slavery, then I think this type of buying human beings is something that we have to fight too."

The Daily Beast reported that similar legislation has made its way to Iceland and South Korea, and even here in the U.S. attitudes are beginning to shift to an approach that favors prosecuting people who buy sex rather than those who sell it (most often out of desperation or against their will):

Many law-enforcement officials say such longstanding practices are changing and credit the efforts of the antitrafficking movement. "I've seen a huge shift," says Inspector Brian Bray, commander of the Narcotics and Special Investigations Division of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. "When I first started, I didn’t really understand how many of these girls have been trafficked. Now our mindset has changed from assuming the girls are criminals to trying to rescue the victims, provide them the services they need, and get information to lock up their traffickers. Most of our arrests used to be female prostitutes, but now we arrest more johns than we do prostitutes."

It's hard to argue with success when you read about the horrendous, enslaving situations which the vast majority of prostitutes find themselves in (92% of prostitutes in the U.S. say they want to leave the profession but lack the basic human services necessary to do so), and about the progress of legislation which cracks down on those who fund and manage human trafficking rather than those being trafficked. Here is third report which comes to the same conclusions.

Perhaps adopting similar legislation in the U.S. would help put an end to the most dangerous job in America, with a mortality rate forty times the national average. Each year, an estimated nine prostitutes are arrested in the U.S. for every one person who purchases sex. One solution might be to flip that statistic.

Image: camera_rwanda

In Defense of Netflix

"You’ve found market price when buyers complain but still pay." Paul Graham

Last month Netflix announced that on September 1st, customers who want DVDs by mail and streaming video will have to pay $16 per month instead of $10. This resulted in a small explosion of rage on the internet. The comments on the company's blog post announcing the price hike are a waterfall of anger.

...Which I just can't understand. When Netflix added streaming video years ago, the service was offered for free to people who were perfectly happy paying for DVDs by mail. Now Netflix wants to lower their prices for DVDs and charge for streaming, and those same customers want to roast the company alive.

But beyond that (and this is the economic conservative in me talking), price hikes are almost never malicious. Netflix would prefer its prices be low. Streaming is becoming more popular and competitive (Hulu, Amazon, Apple are all in the game), and there is increased pressure on Netflix to feature top-quality content through their streaming service. The entire Mystery Science Theater 3000 library, as good as it is, isn't going to cut it. As I plan to discuss in detail in a later post, the primary way the big movie production companies make money these days is through expensive licensing. People want better content, better content costs money, so Netflix needs more revenue.

I understand that $16 per month will not be worth it for many folks. But those folks should just cancel their service. There's no need to get out the tar and feathers.

As for me, after five years as a Netflix subscriber it still amazes me that I can get almost any movie on the planet delivered to my mailbox whenever I want for $8 a month. Though I'm sure my kids will laugh at the idea of a "video rental store" (and maybe even a "DVD"), I still remember wading through racks of soft porn and 8,000 copies of last week's romantic comedy flop at my local Blockbuster hoping to find something worth watching. I remember gotcha late fees, membership cards, driving back and forth renting and returning movies, and traveling all over town to find some classic film. Heck, I even remember buying DVDs, which I seldom do now because Netflix serves as my infinite movie collection on a one-day delay. Even when Blockbuster was charging lower prices for their by-mail service in an effort to shut down Netflix, I stuck with Netflix because of what I considered their primary selling point: I never had to deal with Blockbuster. Sure these days we have Redbox and Hulu, but if you want to choose from an enormous selection of movies without ever having to get in a car, I still think Netflix is the best thing out there. And I love that it was a created by a guy who decided to think up something better after paying a late fee on his rental of Apollo 13.

Netflix Relief Fund with Jason Alexander from Jason Alexander

The World is Just Awesome

MOVE from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

Quotes: Truth, Innocence, and Hofstadter's Law

"The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off." Gloria Steinem

"It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever." John Adams

"Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

An "Islam-esque" Tragedy

The Colbert Report: Norwegian Muslish Gunman's Islam-esque Atrocity

We all jump to conclusions. It's the news' job not to.