Birmingham Football Deserves Its Own Wikipedia Page

I took my two oldest boys to the USFL semi-final playoff games in Canton, OH, this past weekend. It was pretty close to us and pretty cheap. While we were there, we got to wondering about just how long long-suffering football fans in Birmingham have been suffering.

It turns out this is their TENTH football team. They had the Birmingham Americans (1974) and the Birmingham Vulcans (1975) in something called the World Football League, the Alabama Vulcans (1979) and the Alabama Magic (1982) of a minor league called the AFA, the Birmingham Stallions of the Original-Recipe USFL (1983-1985), the Birmingham Fire of the World League (1991-1992), the Birmingham Barracudas of the Canadian league (1995), the Birmingham Thunderbolts of the Original-Recipe XFL (2001), the Birmingham Iron of the AAF (2019), and now the back-from-the-dead Stallions, who will be in the championship game this coming weekend. In the past 50 years there has been professional football in Birmingham for 13 of them, more than 25% of the time. That's just somewhat better than Los Angeles, Saint Louis, or Nashville.

My sons enjoyed the games and I think they want to go back for the championship game. We'll be rooting for Birmingham--they're due.

If You REALLY Cared About the Planet You'd Have Two Desserts

What is the connection between obesity and climate change? Well, here's how I got there.

A few years ago I heard two scientist colleagues discussing the fact that when a person loses weight the mass actually exits the body as carbon dioxide. To go along with that, I live in the modern world where our combination of diet and lifestyle has created a prevalence of obesity. And the current state of public affairs has me not necessarily convinced of the imminence of the collapse of complex society but at least not surprised if it happened over the course of an upcoming weekend.

To bring it all together I walked past a moderately overweight person on my walk to work this morning. (That's not a subtle boast that I walk to work--I was walking from the parking garage to the building and it often is the worst part of my commute.)

Then my brain went like this: "When society collapses this person and millions of others will be dumped out of the modern obesity-producing lifestyle, resulting in widespread weight loss which will release a massive carbon sink thereby exacerbating climate change."

I think climate activists would find a lot more sympathy among climate-change skeptics if they presented their plan as an all-dessert diet. I know I'd become a freaking eco-terrorist, bombing vegetable processing facilities like nobody's business. Anything for Mother Earth.

Preliminary Reading List

A few years ago I found some websites with advice on starting an intellectual project like a think tank. One suggested a place to start is to read all pertinent material and take notes and write reviews. In reflecting on what counts as "pertinent information," I figured I should start with the reading I've already done. That will constitute my initial to-read list.

• Arrington, Leonard J. Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900.
• Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.
• Lucas, James W. and Warner P. Woodworth. Working Toward Zion: Principles of the United Order for the Modern World.
• Maxwell, Neal A. Of One Heart: The Glory of the City of Enoch.
• Nibley, Hugh. Enoch the Prophet: The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 2.
• Nibley, Hugh. Approaching Zion: The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 9.
• Nibley, Hugh. Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints: The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 13.
• Spencer, Joseph M. For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope.
• Tolstoy, Leo. The Kingdom of God Is Within You.
• Turner, John G. Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet.

I also have another book that I haven't read yet but I should have:

• Arrington, Leonard J., Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May. Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation Among the Mormons.

I will look through the bibliographies of these works to see where I should go next. But this is my jumping-off point.

No Right Term

Here are the possible descriptions of the economic system that members of the restored Church of Jesus Christ call "Zion," and why each one doesn't quite work.

• Communism: usually seen as involving common ownership of property, including the means of production. Zion, though, still has private property, which is received as a stewardship according to our needs AND wants.
• Socialism: again with the social ownership. In smaller groups it can be managed as an anarcho-syndicalist commune like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail but in larger groups it ends up meaning control is exercised by a group of elites in the name of "the people." And again Zion still has individual decision-makers operating independently.
• Collectivism: this captures some of Zion but by no means all of it. Collectivism is a prioritization of group goals, which a Zion people would exhibit, but that says nothing of the nature of ownership and decision-making.
• Communalism: this has more to do with the governing structure than with the economic structure. Smaller communities with democratic decision-making might be a component of Zion, and given what we know about human nature, it is the most-likely political structure from which Zion can emerge (since affection requires habitual sympathy and the social limitations imposed by our finite brains limit the group to which I can feel affection), but the Kingdom of God will be all-encompassing.
• Communitarianism: like collectivism, communitarianism is probably a feature of Zion but not a perfect description of it. Individuals will be intimately connected to the community when they are "of one heart and one mind," but that alone doesn't define how economic decisions are made.
• Egalitarianism: it's actually interesting to think about whether or not egalitarianism is a facet of Zion. After all, if stewards receive differing stewardships, egalitarianism is limited. Like many people miss about John Rawls's concept of inequality, some inequality is preferable if it increases the welfare of the least-well-off, which it very well could. I'm better off landless with all the farmland in the hands of competent farmers than I am with my "fair share" of farm land being unproductive in my incapable hands. Some in Zion will have more, but they won't have a higher status because of it.
• Chartism: democracy-increasing political reforms that were often seen as socialism-adjacent, but that wasn't a given. We're seeing that most of these definitions can't get past the political system controlling the economy, but Zion isn't a political system.
• Utopian Socialism: this might actually be the closest to Zion if only because it naively ignored the politics of the system and figured it would just work out. A group of people that wants the best for all the members of the group don't need to worry about the political structure, theoretically. It never really worked out that way, though, because of honest disagreements about what constitutes "the best for all the members of the group." Without an omniscient referee to adjudicate disagreements, politics is necessary.
• Cooperativism: this has a lot of the qualities we probably end up seeing in Zion--an associated group voluntarily working together. In fact, the Zion economic reforms of the 1860s and -70s was the basis of ZCMI (Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution). But it's only the large-scale nature of the modern economy that gives impetus to cooperativism in Zion; we could have independent enterprises that merely pooled the products after production was completed.
• Intentional Community: groups of Zion people are definitely intentional communities (groups with a common purpose and philosophical outlook), but it is not true that every intentional community lives like a Zion community.
• Real Utopian Sociology: this is a school of thought pioneered by Erik Olin Wright that focused on "the study of feasible utopian models of society and pathways to achieve them," says its Wikipedia page. This field of study would be interested in how Zion operated but also in how any other utopian scheme operated.
• Associationalism: another political system, focused on voluntary associations of democratic groups. A plausible political structure adopted by a Zion people, but not at all a requirement.
• Zionism: strangely, the one with the closest name is the one that most misses the mark. To everyone outside of the Church, "Zionism" means exclusively the concern over a homeland for the Jewish people. Since the founding of Israel, "Zionist" has also come to refer to supporters of that specific Jewish homeland. Obviously this is unrelated to the economic principles I seek to investigate (although the kibbutz system in modern Israel is probably a pretty close approximation of what Zion probably looks like).

This is why, even though there are about a billion terms that might come to mind when you think of group-driven economic systems, none actually captures what I mean when I talk about Restored Christian Social Thought.

Mississippi River Discharge Volume

Last week I was sitting with two of my sons in a car in a parking lot in a rainstorm in the Mississippi River catchment area. Watching the paved surface gather the water into a drain, I thought that 250 years ago the natural lot would have absorbed some of what was becoming stream volume. Therefore, a similar rainstorm back then would have raised river levels less than what was happening today.

However, comma, there were just a few thousand people in my state back then whereas now there are 11 million. We all take water out of the system to keep ourselves alive and perform our daily functions.

So which is it? Is the volume of output at the mouth of the Mississippi River higher now than it was in 1772? My gut tells me it's higher now because of paved surfaces. But that's just a guess. I have no idea.

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

The first problem of trying to write about the socioeconomic conditions known to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as "Zion" is that there's no linguistic framework from which to begin.

To everyone outside the Church "Zion" and especially "Zionism" have a completely different meaning. Zion refers to a peaceful, utopian place but has no connotations related to economic conditions. The main forums for discussions of Zion are Judaism and Rastafari, and neither is referring explicitly to the economic system described in Acts 2:44-45. One could argue it is implicit that a heavenly society would have a radically-different economy, but just about nobody outside of the Church would make the connection without a lot of thinking.

And Zionism usually means even more specifically the creation of a physical gathering place for Jews. Since the establishment of Israel the term is even MORE narrowed to basically refer only to the existence of Israel: Zionists support the Israeli state and antizionists oppose it.

It would be great if I could just take a cue from Catholic Social Thought (CST) and create the term "Mormon Social Thought," but in October, 2018, Church president Russell M. Nelson encouraged members to retire the term "Mormon," as it has little to do with Church doctrine and merely happens to be the name of an ancient adherent to the religion. Okay, then: Latter-day Saint Social Thought (LDSST)? No dice. "LDS" is on the outs, too. Restoration Social Thought? Restored Christian Social Thought? I don't know.

Even if I had a name for it, there's no succinct way of stating what it is. There are a TON of terms for things LIKE it, but none actually fits. I'll write later this weekend about the variety of terms and their distinct meanings. And I'll try to determine which collection of them does the best job describing what I mean. But for now, I guess I'll call this socioeconomic system Restored Christian Social Thought (RCST).

Will No One Rid Me of This Meddlesome Priest?

I was born in Pittsburgh and have remained a Pittsburgh sports fan all my life, even though I moved away when I was four years old. So this week I am frustrated that yet another hockey team defeated the Penguins in a playoff series after their coach used coded language to ask his team to injury a Penguins player.

In the past it has been Barry Trotz with the Washington Capitals. This year it was Gerard Gallant with the New York Rangers. But it's the same story: a coach down in a series against the Penguins gives public comments about "getting tough" or something and in the next game one of his players concusses a Penguin.

Funny how they never take "getting tough" to mean winning more faceoffs or playing more shifts late in the game. It's almost like "getting tough" doesn't mean getting tough, it means "injure someone."