Broadband access at my house is frustratingly slow. We had to cancel Netflix, because we can’t stream. My iPad apps can’t update, and have been permanently hung up for weeks (I’ve rebooted the iPad several times, to no avail). Skyping is very spotty. You can’t watch any online video, even YouTube, without transmission being interrupted. Before you say, “Oh, shut up, you and your First World problems,” I will point out that given the line of work I’m in — media — I have to have reliable broadband access to do my job efficiently. I’m already developing some work-arounds, and I can go to the coffee shop or to my mom and dad’s house (out in the country!) if I need to have fast Internet.

But really, it’s a problem. We’ve called AT&T, which is looking into it. We told them that we were at a friend’s house on the other side of town the other night, and he was able to stream Netflix fine — by which we meant that he had normal high-speed Internet access. We’re in the same town. Is there something wrong with our connection, or what?

They’re looking into it, but the preliminary answer, the man said, is that the phone company’s equipment serving our part of town — the historic downtown — is probably significantly older than that in other parts of the town, and the parish. And that’s not a quick fix. My first thought was, “Well, when my lease is up, I’ll have to move, because I have to have faster Internet to conduct business.” And then I thought about how difficult it would be to attract businesses to town if you cannot offer them reliable high-speed Internet connections. I’m just a one person working from home, but if I were thinking of relocating my small business here — and it would be a great place for that — I couldn’t afford to do so without fast Internet.

This is such a small town that I don’t know that AT&T has any real economic incentive to upgrade its equipment to provide first-class broadband to people here. Is this something the town, or parish government, would have an interest in subsidizing, as an economic development initiative? The Internet really has become a necessity for economic development, just as electrification was a century ago. To be sure, we have broadband here, but it’s pretty slow — again, so slow that the kinds of things most people take for granted are not possible to do here, at least not in my part of town. The San Antonio Express-News wrote last year about what’s happening to small towns without broadband. Excerpt:

The Obama administration has promised $1.26 billion from the Recovery Act for the first phase of a plan to build out the nation’s broadband infrastructure. That money pays for 126 projects in 28 states, including projects in Texas Panhandle and Central Texas.

Not everyone, however, is on board with that initiative.

An August study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found 53 percent of Americans don’t feel that broadband should be a major governmental spending priority. But Staples said it’s vital to public health and education in small communities.

You don’t realize how much our modern way of economic life depends on reliable high-speed Internet service, until you don’t have it. Towns and places that don’t have it are going to get left behind, economically.

UPDATE: Ran into a lawyer at the courthouse today, who heard my tale of woe, and said, “That doesn’t make sense to me. You have fiber optic cable running right in front of your house.” What?! This I must look into.

You’ll recall that the Wall Street Journal columnist wrote the other day smacking Rick Santorum about the special tax-code treatment he wants to give to manufacturing. I, for one, cannot imagine why anybody would think that America would be better off keeping manufacturing jobs here instead of shipping them overseas. Can’t our working class just get a job at Wal-mart selling stuff their parents and grandparents used to manufacture here, but that’s now being made by Chinese people? What’s wrong with that? (I’m being sarcastic, just so you know).

Adam Davidson, writing in the Atlantic, has a big piece about manufacturing as seen through the eyes of South Carolina factory workers. Excerpt:

Yet the success of American manufacturers has come at a cost. Factories have replaced millions of workers with machines. Even if you know the rough outline of this story, looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data is still shocking. A historical chart of U.S. manufacturing employment shows steady growth from the end of the Depression until the early 1980s, when the number of jobs drops a little. Then things stay largely flat until about 1999. After that, the numbers simply collapse. In the 10 years ending in 2009, factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs—about 6 million in total—disappeared. About as many people work in manufacturing now as did at the end of the Depression, even though the American population is more than twice as large today.

I came here to find answers to questions that arise from the data. How, exactly, have some American manufacturers continued to survive, and even thrive, as global competition has intensified? What, if anything, should be done to halt the collapse of manufacturing employment? And what does the disappearance of factory work mean for the rest of us?

Across America, many factory floors look radically different than they did 20 years ago: far fewer people, far more high-tech machines, and entirely different demands on the workers who remain. The still-unfolding story of manufacturing’s transformation is, in many respects, that of our economic age. It’s a story with much good news for the nation as a whole. But it’s also one that is decidedly less inclusive than the story of the 20th century, with a less certain role for people like Maddie Parlier, who struggle or are unlucky early in life.

This is not only a story about free trade, but also about economic modernization — specifically, how technology and mechanization has done away with jobs that used to be performed by people. In fact, one thing I love about Davidson’s piece is the way it brings out how complicated this whole picture is, and how much it defies easy and satisfying (from a partisan perspective) categorization. For example:

To keep the business of the giant auto-parts retailers, Standard has to constantly lower costs while maintaining quality. High quality is impossible without good raw materials, which Standard has to buy at market rates. The massive global conglomerates, like Bosch, might be able to command discounts when buying, say, specially formulated metals; but Standard has to pay the prevailing price, and for years now, that price has been rising. That places an even higher imperative on reducing the cost of labor. If Standard paid unskilled workers like Maddie more or hired more of them, Larry says, the company would have to charge its customers more or accept lower profits. Either way, Standard would collapse fairly soon. (Industrial profit margins are notoriously thin to begin with—typically in the low single digits—and reduced profits or losses would drive down Standard’s stock price, making it a likely target for predatory acquisition.)

Here is the cultural part of this complicated situation:

I went to South Carolina, and spent so much time with Maddie, precisely because these issues are so large and so overwhelming. I wanted to see how this shift affected regular people’s lives. I didn’t come away with a handy list of policies that would solve all the problems of unskilled workers, but I did note some principles that seem important to improving their situation.

It’s hard to imagine what set of circumstances would reverse recent trends and bring large numbers of jobs for unskilled laborers back to the U.S. Our efforts might be more fruitfully focused on getting Maddie the education she needs for a better shot at a decent living in the years to come. Subsidized job-training programs tend to be fairly popular among Democrats and Republicans, and certainly benefit some people. But these programs suffer from all the ills in our education system; opportunities go, disproportionately, to those who already have initiative, intelligence, and—not least—family support.

I never heard Maddie blame others for her situation; she talked, often, about the bad choices she made as a teenager and how those have limited her future. I came to realize, though, that Maddie represents a large population: people who, for whatever reason, are not going to be able to leave the workforce long enough to get the skills they need.

To read Davidson’s story, and to see how extremely little margin for error small manufacturers have — I mean, they have to be extremely vigilant on their prices, or they could see their businesses evaporate — is to see also how little margin for error ordinary workers have. You get the sense that ours is not a country where it’s as easy as it once was to find a second chance, especially if you have a stronger back than you do mind. You can, or you should, see why having a strong, supportive family structure is not just morally desirable, but economically necessary. This fact is something that Rick Santorum, of all the candidates, has an inkling of.

In flood-ravaged Schoharie, NY, people are hanging together around the dinner table. Excerpt:

Floodwaters rose as high as eight feet on Main Street, swamping all the businesses. Of 350 homes, 270 were flooded. Fuel-oil storage tanks the size of brownstones toppled like dominoes, spilling their contents into roaring waters.

“In the first couple of weeks, people said, ‘We’re done, we can’t deal with it, we’re leaving,’ ” said John Borst, Schoharie’s mayor.

Now, more than four months later, the village has hardly returned to normal. Streets are still lined with Dumpsters, backhoes and Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers. But Schoharie (pronounced sko-HAR-ee) is holding on, and many here attribute its resilience to a makeshift cafe that popped up days after the storm to feed villagers and emergency workers.

Week after week, month after month, it has served free hot lunches to residents, volunteers, reconstruction workers and anyone else in search of a simple meal and some company.

Somehow — randomly, unpredictably — food continues to arrive as if from a bottomless pantry, delivering some good fortune to a village that could use it.

Isn’t that great? This sense of covenant the local people have, expressed through food.

This reminds me of a conversation I had the other day with someone in my town. He was complaining about local politics, and what a bunch of knotheads and do-nothings local politicians are. Honestly, I have no idea if he is right or wrong in his assessment, but it was a familiar litany of small-town problems, complications, factionalism, and so forth.

“The thing is,” said this man, “like your family saw with your sister, when you get in trouble, they’ll all be there to help you. Even the assholes.”

The poet Robert Frost famously said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Having stolen the thought from an anonymous citizen, the layabout Rod Dreher adds, “Home is the place where, when you get into trouble, even the assholes will show up to help you out.”

I was talking with my niece about her mother’s death, and the profound spiritual and even metaphysical questions about suffering and ultimate meaning it raises. I remembered being moved by a short WSJ column the theologian David Bentley Hart wrote after the mass deaths from the 2004 tsunami, so I picked up a copy of the book he wrote expanding on that thesis: “The Doors of the Sea.” Finished it last night. It’s a thin book, but a deep one. I’m going to have to read it a second time to make sure I understand the fullness of Hart’s argument.

Two things from the book resonate in my heart this morning. The first is Hart’s contention that Christians have to see the world with double vision:

Rather, the Christian should see two realities at once, one world (as it were) within another: one the world as we all know it, in all tis beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish; and the other the world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply “nature” but “creation,” an endless sea of glory, radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once, to regard the world as a mirror of infinite beauty, but as glimpsed through the veil of death; it is to see creation in chains, but beautiful as in the beginning of days.

This is a very deep mystery, and because a mystery, it defies logical explanation. We can “know” the mystery, though, by embracing it with faith — but this requires that we free ourselves from “the burden of the desire for total explanation.”

The prejudice we live with today is that everything can, in theory, be explained — that is to say, known intellectually. This is why some believe that anything that cannot be explained empirically and logically cannot be said to be true. That is a way of sorrow and self-deception. Hart does not minimize the objections to the idea that a God who would allow innocents to suffer is either not all good, or not all powerful — well, he does minimize some of them — nor does he go easy on Christians who offer glib rationalizations when faced with moral monstrosity. This passage from Hart’s 2005 First Things essay turns up in the book:

I do not believe we Christians are obliged — or even allowed — to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes — and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

The reason I post this here today is that it’s helpful to me to be reminded that “the desire for total explanation” is one that cannot be fulfilled. I can grasp this from a theological perspective. Let me ask you of a more mathematical and philosophical bent: Is this statement of Hart’s (which is entirely consistent with Eastern Orthodox theology) also consistent with Godel’s incompleteness theorems?

UPDATE: There’s more I want to say here. One thing I’m struggling to understand now, and that Hart’s book is helping me with, is the nature of the relationship I had with my sister. I keep going back on this blog to talking about how you will be doomed to frustration if you expect the South to make logical sense — but you will also miss some deep truths about human nature if you insist that the South can be dismissed as merely foolish, hypocritical, and so forth, because it doesn’t make sense. My sister and I loved each other, but we had a relationship that was at times difficult. I’m not going to say much about it here — hey, something’s got to be in the book! — but it would not be truthful to act as if all was always well between us. Nor, I must say, would it be truthful to write as if I were the only one with fault in this regard. Even though ours was, and is, a happy family, that doesn’t mean there weren’t complications.

For years I have puzzled over why I was, as far as I know, the only person on this earth to whom Ruthie didn’t extend boundless patience and understanding. I think I know why, and some things I’ve learned since she died have helped me to understand this better. Ultimately, though, this is a secret she took to her grave. She may not have known herself. The point is, I’ll never know. And yet, my parents yesterday, in conversation, casually made a revelation that hit me with a slow, gathering force, the fullness of which didn’t reach my shore, so to speak, until bedtime last night. It was not an explanation, strictly speaking, but it was a revelation that both startled me and resolved so much painful mystery about the way Ruthie and I were with each other. I’m not going to say what it was here, in part because this needs to be in the book, and in part because it needs to be in the book because it’s going to take me a while to work through the meaning of this. I can say, though, that it has a lot to do with love, loyalty, and the double vision that Hart writes of, one that is necessary if one is going to affirm life as it is, not as our rationalizations would have it be.

When I told Julie what my parents had told me about Ruthie, she said, “God, that is a benediction from beyond the grave.” Indeed it is. It’s hard for me to think about it without tears welling up. How awesomely strange is it that such beauty shines through such brokenness.

I’m sitting here listening to Romney’s New Hampshire victory speech, and thinking it sounds like a Republican Convention address.

“And he apologizes for America,” Romney says, of Obmaa. “I will never apologize for the greatest nation in the history of the earth.”

That cheap lie again. What, there wasn’t a flag factory for him to give this speech in tonight?

That speech makes me very glad that Ron Paul came in second tonight. Rick Santorum is not going to be the anti-Romney. Gingrich is way back in the pack. For all the time Huntsman spent in NH, he had to do better than third. He says he’s going on to South Carolina. Crickets.

“We’re the only ones really in the race with him,” Ron Paul just told CNN, of Romney. I’d say that’s true — which is good news for Romney, because the only real mainstream threats he faced were from Gingrich and Santorum. But it’s bad news for him too, because Paul shows clear and significant strength. Paul also deflected Dana Bash’s question about a third party run — and if so, he’ll bleed away a lot of the passionate conservative vote from the unpopular Romney. Paul looks to be setting himself up to be Ross Perot ’92 — although, I do seem to recall that Clinton took an equal amount of votes away from Clinton, as Paul would no doubt do from Obama.

Ron Paul speaking momentarily…

UPDATE: Ron Paul, the happy warrior, poking fun at people who call him and his supporters “dangerous:

“They’re telling the truth: we are a danger to the status quo in this country.”

I guessed that this economic crisis was going to bring some kind of (relatively) radical figure into presidential politics. I did not imagine it would be Ron Paul. If this were a Democratic primary, and Paul were running, it would be really interesting to see if he would be drawing the same kind of votes. I kind of think he might be.

Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate saying that it’s time for America to stop being the policeman of the world, and denouncing “the military-industrial complex.” Paul’s speech is kind of rambly, but judging by the line graph on the CNN South Carolina Republican focus group, he’s really connecting. None of this is new from Paul, but he seems more fired up tonight than he has. This man does well in South Carolina, and Romney’s got a real race on his hands.

You hear that the LSU Tigers got stuck in New Orleans after the game last night? Some pranksters painted a 50-yard-line in front of the team bus, and the Tigers couldn’t figure out how to cross it.

Heh.

I’ve been out all day doing some journalism, and just got home. “I have news for you,” said my wife. “Our son got a job.”

Matthew, who is 12, landed an unpaid job as a volunteer at a place in town. He told us a couple of weeks ago he’d be interested in volunteering there. Well, said his mother, go talk to the folks who run it and see if they’ll have you. He did, was hired today, and is working there now. He did this all on his own, of his own initiative, with no help from his parents.

The other day, Julie was shopping in a store around town. When they found out that she was Matthew’s mom, the clerks told her how polite he is when he comes in the store — how he looks the adults in the eye when he talks to them, and engages them in actual conversation. Of course parents love to hear that sort of thing about their children. We told Matt how proud we were of him for his good manners and maturity.

I’m bringing this up here not to brag on my kid, but to point out an example of how the whole “they won’t be socialized” argument against homeschooling is such a canard, at least in our experience.

News from the Atlantic:

Chinese researchers have found small pieces of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice. The Nanjing University-based team showed that this genetic material will bind to proteins in human liver cells and influence the uptake of cholesterol from the blood.

The type of RNA in question is called microRNA, due to its small size. MicroRNAs have been studied extensively since their discovery ten years ago, and have been linked to human diseases including cancer, Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. The Chinese research provides the first example of ingested plant microRNA surviving digestion and influencing human cell function.

Should the research survive scientific scrutiny, it could prove a game changer in many fields. It would mean that we’re eating not just vitamins, protein, and fuel, but information as well.

What might this mean? Well:

[It] reveals a pathway by which genetically modified (GM) foods might influence human health.

Monsanto’s website states, “There is no need for, or value in testing the safety of GM foods in humans.” This viewpoint, while good for business, is built on an understanding of genetics circa 1950.

Read the whole thing.  If the Chinese results are upheld, GM agriculture has a huge problem. Joel Salatin penned the December cover story for TAC on GM crops. I hope we can make it available for everybody — but why not subscribe and read it today? If you want a conservative magazine that takes issues like this seriously, and presents a dissenting point of view from the GOP mainstream, we need your support.

Enjoyable profile of the octogenarian lizard, out of federal prison, married to a smokin’ hot babe, and enjoying hisself. Excerpt:

There are no more elections for Edwin Edwards, but there is a final campaign, and he seems to be running for the thing every politician craves: the way a crowd makes you feel, how it can polish achievements and push failures into the shadows. Many get into the game for that feeling, and then they convince themselves — and everyone around them, if they’re good — that there are other reasons to want such power.

That’s what’s wonderful about watching this journey. There’s no artifice, no hollow stump speeches and hot orations about people’s pain. There is only the naked, earnest search for love, and that makes this the most honest campaign ever run in the state of Louisiana.

There was another cartoon in the Times-Picayune recently. It showed Edwin and Trina, and the governor had two fingers raised on his hand.

“V for Victory?” one character asked.

“Viagra,” another replied.

Edwin saw the cartoon and laughed. Trina laughed, too, and Edwin said, “I don’t need Viagra …Viagra needs me. Doesn’t the Times-Picayune know they use my blood to make that stuff?”

He is an 84-year-old felon, a former congressman, and four-time governor of Louisiana. He is a new husband, and he has a book to hawk. He’s done time and managed to put more than a billion dollars in the bank for Louisiana’s children. In this final act, there is joy in the house of Edwards, and he feels it everywhere he goes, from small-town parades to the BCS National Championship Game, where his Tigers will play and where he, no longer inmate 03128-095, will get to see it live.

It’s fun to think about EWE and to enjoy his colorful demeanor now that he’s no longer a threat. It wasn’t so funny when the man ran the state, and, along with his one-time opponent David Duke, was a living symbol of everything that was wrong with our politics.