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Anything worth doing well is worth overdoing.

Says the guy who wrote a physics paper answering “what would happen if the entire Earth was suddenly made up of only blueberries?”.

Blueberry Earth: Interview with Anders Sandberg.

Equalization is a federal program where they spend more money in regions that are economically depressed. Full stop.

This five minutes 30 seconds is the best description I’ve heard of how equalization payments work in Canada. It’s two Albertan political strategists .

The Strategists: Episode 564

I’ll start you at 31:40 into the episode. Listen at least to the 37:10 mark.

We pay the exact same taxes (federal rate) in Alberta as they pay in Quebec…there’s no “I’m paying more because I’m a rich Albertan — you’re paying more because you’re rich.

Every province does a form of equalization…every city does a form of equalization, because we don’t make the same money and the reason we do a taxation system to begin with is to redistribute funds to those who need them.

Bonus quote, from later in the episode:

Ralph Klein was the one who started to establish this idea that we’re sending a cheque somewhere down East.

Well I’ll tell you something — before the 1970’s, we needed it too.

People have to remember that in Alberta we were a have-not province. Then we got a little bit of oil an gas going our way and things started to work for us. But it didn’t really start to work for us until the late 1960’s and the 1970’s.

Kate Bowler — a professor at Duke Divinity School — has been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer.

But one of my first thoughts was also Oh, God, this is ironic. I recently wrote a book called “Blessed.”

A few years ago she wrote a history of the prosperity gospel, and this article is a sort of mini history, particularly looking at how it shaped the ways in which Christians respond to “bad things” including impending death.

The prosperity gospel has taken a religion based on the contemplation of a dying man and stripped it of its call to surrender all. Perhaps worse, it has replaced Christian faith with the most painful forms of certainty. The movement has perfected a rarefied form of America’s addiction to self-rule, which denies much of our humanity: our fragile bodies, our finitude, our need to stare down our deaths (at least once in a while) and be filled with dread and wonder. At some point, we must say to ourselves, I’m going to need to let go.

Many of her points also permeate the non-prosperity North American church. She deals with the religious, the cultural, and the personal with depth, humour, and frankness.

Cancer requires that I stumble around in the debris of dreams I thought I was entitled to and plans I didn’t realize I had made.

But cancer has also ushered in new ways of being alive.

Read it.

Required listening re: electoral reform options for Canada. Great overview, and interesting points including why we should be wary of calls for a referendum.

It made me rethink some assumptions.

The Strategists – Take Home the Liberals, Wake Up With An STV

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