Friday, May 16, 2008
It will get worse before it gets better
There is an extremely important essay in today's Jewish World Review by Caroline B. Glick. It is back to back with one by Diana West. What distills from it is the essence of the problems with the Bush Presidency and our refusal as a nation to see the nature of Jihad.
Also today WSJ Opinion Journal carried an essay by Peggy Noonan that is very discouraging to conservatives like me, but unfortunately very true. We may very well arrive at a nightmare of a Democratically controlled Congress and a Democratic President. Considering what the Democratically controlled Congress has done despite President Bush (or rather in the absence of any real resistance from either the remaining Republicans or the President) it is not hard to see that the nation will take a really hard hit politically for at least two if not four years. In addition, there will be at least three if not more Supreme Court justices appointed as well as all the open District and Circuit Court appointments that the Democrats have managed to save until Obama gets elected.
We will see a major blowout of taxes, spending, feel-good foreign policy, inflation, and then a decades-long hangover in the judiciary. We may also, as a consequence, experience another 9/11-type event, only far more severe. But we will have to go through all that for us to finally see the error in both "Compassionate Conservatism" and modern liberalism.
Currently we are justifiably angry with the Republicans. They have done far worse than Bush I and his "read my lips". They have completely betrayed all the principles the Republicans supposedly stand for. As a consequence we will throw out all the Republicans that we can. In fact, I will do so as well, voting against Senators DeWine and Voinivich at any opportunity.
The only downside is that they will be replaced by Democrats who are unabashedly tax and spend, government power types. However, when none of their policies correct what is wrong with the country and are perceived as making things worse, they in turn will be thrown out. That is the point at which things could become better. Just like a boil which has to come to head to be lanced and healed, so the festering of 60's activism must finally come to a head and be removed from the political stage.
The process of doing this will be very painful. We will see joblessness increase greatly, major gains by Jihad, erosion of savings' value, cost of living sky-rocket, mostly over fuel costs, and retirements being postponed for lack of means to support them. We will see morality and principle come under severe attack under the guise of political correctness. In the name of freedom from being offended, our freedom of speech will be curtailed. To see what is coming, simply look at Canada or Great Britain.
However, we have survived terrible Presidents and terrible Congresses. Other than the courts, we can reverse most of the damage in a few years by throwing the next set of rascals out. It will take both attrition and even possibly impeachment before some of the judiciary will be fixed. The latter is very difficult, because the final arbiter is the Supreme Court, and once they are in office, only major malfeasance can remove them. There may be moves to pass more amendments to force some issues.
The majority of Americans know and understand what makes for good government, despite the crap they are taught in schools these days. They are too busy creating lives for themselves and then being seduced by television to stay in tune with events and their implications. But they also are capable of learning from experience. We will survive, it will just be very hard for a while.
Also today WSJ Opinion Journal carried an essay by Peggy Noonan that is very discouraging to conservatives like me, but unfortunately very true. We may very well arrive at a nightmare of a Democratically controlled Congress and a Democratic President. Considering what the Democratically controlled Congress has done despite President Bush (or rather in the absence of any real resistance from either the remaining Republicans or the President) it is not hard to see that the nation will take a really hard hit politically for at least two if not four years. In addition, there will be at least three if not more Supreme Court justices appointed as well as all the open District and Circuit Court appointments that the Democrats have managed to save until Obama gets elected.
We will see a major blowout of taxes, spending, feel-good foreign policy, inflation, and then a decades-long hangover in the judiciary. We may also, as a consequence, experience another 9/11-type event, only far more severe. But we will have to go through all that for us to finally see the error in both "Compassionate Conservatism" and modern liberalism.
Currently we are justifiably angry with the Republicans. They have done far worse than Bush I and his "read my lips". They have completely betrayed all the principles the Republicans supposedly stand for. As a consequence we will throw out all the Republicans that we can. In fact, I will do so as well, voting against Senators DeWine and Voinivich at any opportunity.
The only downside is that they will be replaced by Democrats who are unabashedly tax and spend, government power types. However, when none of their policies correct what is wrong with the country and are perceived as making things worse, they in turn will be thrown out. That is the point at which things could become better. Just like a boil which has to come to head to be lanced and healed, so the festering of 60's activism must finally come to a head and be removed from the political stage.
The process of doing this will be very painful. We will see joblessness increase greatly, major gains by Jihad, erosion of savings' value, cost of living sky-rocket, mostly over fuel costs, and retirements being postponed for lack of means to support them. We will see morality and principle come under severe attack under the guise of political correctness. In the name of freedom from being offended, our freedom of speech will be curtailed. To see what is coming, simply look at Canada or Great Britain.
However, we have survived terrible Presidents and terrible Congresses. Other than the courts, we can reverse most of the damage in a few years by throwing the next set of rascals out. It will take both attrition and even possibly impeachment before some of the judiciary will be fixed. The latter is very difficult, because the final arbiter is the Supreme Court, and once they are in office, only major malfeasance can remove them. There may be moves to pass more amendments to force some issues.
The majority of Americans know and understand what makes for good government, despite the crap they are taught in schools these days. They are too busy creating lives for themselves and then being seduced by television to stay in tune with events and their implications. But they also are capable of learning from experience. We will survive, it will just be very hard for a while.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Read this book—it is important
These last three weeks I have the fortune to read two excellent books. The first is “Eichmann in Jerusalem” by Hannah Arendt. It has the subtitle “A Report on the Banality of Evil”, but I do not think that is an accurate description, and apparently neither did she, later. What this is a report on is how an entire culture could knowingly and deliberately kill millions of people, men, women, and children, and confiscate their property merely because they did not believe as the dominant culture did.
To me, one of the more chilling aspects is how easy it is to draw parallels between the early days of Nazism and today’s secular, left/liberal culture with its political correctness and educational indoctrination. It is even more disturbing, since we have a very charismatic candidate running for President, who has too many easily drawn analogs to the leader of the Nazis, in the emptiness of his rhetoric, and the emotional responses he receives. We may think that our system will protect us from excesses similar to those that created the horrors of the Third Reich. But we already have many similar behaviors in place, and Congress and Presidency in league with each other, and the ability to appoint up to three or four Supreme Court Justices could lead us way along the road to a socialist state with both Christians and Jews persecuted.
“Eichmann in Jerusalem” is a very complex book, though a fairly straightforward read. Hannah Arendt had several threads to develop. One of them was to show that the trail kept getting derailed from the true justice aspects and became a showpiece on the history of the persecution of Judaism. The trial was as much political as it was an attempt at justice.
There was also the attempt to depict Eichmann as some sort of demon. Nothing could be further from the truth, and Hannah Arendt was vilified for pointing this out. What many failed to note was that she made it very clear that she considered the sentence of death fitting for the crimes that Eichmann did commit, namely arranging that millions of Jews would be transported to the death chambers. It was not necessary for him to have actually killed anyone personally. Rather than a demon or a mastermind at creating death, Eichmann was the quintessential bureaucrat. He did what he did because he desired to be effective at executing the rules. His mind was a hodge-podge of slogans, rules, and a desire to feel good about himself.
In the epilog to the report, Arendt answers with her own discussion the objections to the trial that surfaced, and also where it failed to do what it should. In essence she says that they did the right thing in hanging Eichmann for the wrong reasons. But as important, she points out
The final two and a half pages of the epilogue contain a new view as to the validity of the death penalty and why it was right that Eichmann was hanged. In her words:
One of the best quotes in the book came from this section:
Her final paragraph states the underlying truth:
To me, one of the more chilling aspects is how easy it is to draw parallels between the early days of Nazism and today’s secular, left/liberal culture with its political correctness and educational indoctrination. It is even more disturbing, since we have a very charismatic candidate running for President, who has too many easily drawn analogs to the leader of the Nazis, in the emptiness of his rhetoric, and the emotional responses he receives. We may think that our system will protect us from excesses similar to those that created the horrors of the Third Reich. But we already have many similar behaviors in place, and Congress and Presidency in league with each other, and the ability to appoint up to three or four Supreme Court Justices could lead us way along the road to a socialist state with both Christians and Jews persecuted.
“Eichmann in Jerusalem” is a very complex book, though a fairly straightforward read. Hannah Arendt had several threads to develop. One of them was to show that the trail kept getting derailed from the true justice aspects and became a showpiece on the history of the persecution of Judaism. The trial was as much political as it was an attempt at justice.
There was also the attempt to depict Eichmann as some sort of demon. Nothing could be further from the truth, and Hannah Arendt was vilified for pointing this out. What many failed to note was that she made it very clear that she considered the sentence of death fitting for the crimes that Eichmann did commit, namely arranging that millions of Jews would be transported to the death chambers. It was not necessary for him to have actually killed anyone personally. Rather than a demon or a mastermind at creating death, Eichmann was the quintessential bureaucrat. He did what he did because he desired to be effective at executing the rules. His mind was a hodge-podge of slogans, rules, and a desire to feel good about himself.
In the epilog to the report, Arendt answers with her own discussion the objections to the trial that surfaced, and also where it failed to do what it should. In essence she says that they did the right thing in hanging Eichmann for the wrong reasons. But as important, she points out
…how little Israel, like the Jewish people in general, was prepared to recognize, in the crimes that Eichmann was accused of, an unprecedented crime, and precisely how difficult such a recognition must have been for the Jewish people. In the eyes of the Jews, thinking exclusively in terms of their own history, the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler, in which a third of the people perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered. This misunderstanding, almost inevitable if we consider not only the facts of Jewish history but also, and more important, the current Jewish historical self-understanding, is actually at the root of all the failings and shortcomings of the Jerusalem trial. None of the participants ever arrived at a clear understanding of the actual horror of Auschwitz, which is of a different nature from all the atrocities of the past, because it appeared to prosecution and judges alike as not much more than the most horrible pogrom in Jewish history. They therefore believed that a direct line existed from the early anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party to the Nuremberg Laws and finally, to the gas chambers. Politically and legally, however, there were “crimes” different not only in degree of seriousness but in essence.She then discussed the issues of an international tribunal vs. the Israeli court. Among the issues were the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Law of 1950 under which Eichmann was tried, and the court’s being careful not to legislate or do anything contrary to the law under which they were operating. She also discusses the practicality of trying to convene an effective international tribunal. She points out that this trial in many ways was a continuation of the Nuremberg trials and the Successor trials in the formerly occupied territories. She did say that the Israeli trial was more successful than the Nuremberg trials on at least one issue—the definition of a crime against humanity. On the last issue, recognizing the nature of the new criminal that commits a crime against humanity, she considers the judges helpless.
[…]
Legalized discrimination had been practiced by all Balkan countries, and expulsion on a mass scale had occurred after many revolutions. It was when the Nazi regime declared that the German people not only were unwilling to have any Jews in Germany bu wished to make the entire Jewish people disappear from the face of the earth that the new crime, the crime against humanity—in the sense of a crime “against the human status,” or gainst the very nature of mankind—appeared. Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the “human status” without which the very words “mankind” or “humanity” would be devoid of meaning.
[…]
…only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism. Insofar as the victims were Jews, it was right and proper that a Jewish court should sit in judgment; but insofar as the crime was a crime against humanity, it needed an international tribunal to do justice to it.
…The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied—as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendents and their counsels—that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, [hostile to mankind in general, bk] commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. …. Would they have suffered from a guilty conscience if they had won?
The final two and a half pages of the epilogue contain a new view as to the validity of the death penalty and why it was right that Eichmann was hanged. In her words:
Foremost among the larger issues at stake in the Eichmann trial was the assumption current in all modern legal systems that intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime. On nothing, perhaps, has civilized jurisprudence prided itself more than on this taking into account of the subjective factor. Where this intent is absent, where, for whatever reasons, even reasons of moral insanity, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is impaired, we feel no crime has been committed. We refuse, and consider as barbaric, the propositions “that a great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore; that a wronged collectivity ows a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal” (Yosal Rogat). And yet I think it is undeniable that is was precisely on the ground of these long-forgotten propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification for the death penalty. Because he had been implicated and had played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain “races” from the surface of the earth, he had to be eliminated. And if it is true that “justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done,” then the justice of what was done in Jerusalem would have emerged to e seen by all if the judges had dared to address the defendant in something like the following terms:Ms Arendt also wrote a postscript for the second edition, because of the controversy her book created. The postscript further discussed the philosophical and moral issues and also attempted to answer her critics. One of her points was that the attacks on the book were on an image that bore little resemblance to the real thing, but were the basis of extremely vitriolic criticisms.
“You admitted that the crime committed against the Jewish people during the war was the greatest crime in recorded history, and you admitted your role in it. But you said you had never acted from base motives, that you had never had any inclination to kill anybody, that you had never hated Jews, and still that you could have not acted otherwise and that you did not feel guilty. We find this difficult, though not altogether impossible, to believe; there is some, though not very much, evidence against you in this matter of motivation and conscience that could be proved beyond reasonable doubt. You also said that your role in the Final Solution was an accident and that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially almost all Germans are equally guilty. What you meant to say was that where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is. This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you. And if you don’t understand our objection, we would recommend to your attention the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two neighboring cities in the Bible, which were destroyed by fire from Heaven because all the people in them had become equally guilty. This, incidentally has nothing to do with the newfangled notion of ‘collective guilt,’ according to which people are supposedly are guilty of, or feel guilty about, things done in their name but not by them—thing in which they did not participate and from which they did not profit. In other words, guilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have been and excuse for you.
“Luckily, we don’t have to go that far. You yourself claimed not the actuality but only the potentiality of equal guilt on the part of all who lived in a state whose main political purpose had become the commission of unheard-of crimes. And no matter through what accidents of exterior or interior circumstances you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal, there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done. We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible noncriminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the criminal potentialities of those around you. You told your story in terms of a hard-luck story, and knowing the circumstances, we are, up to a point, willing to grant you that under more favorable circumstances it is highly unlikely that you would ever have come before us or before any other criminal court. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried it out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”
One of the best quotes in the book came from this section:
As is frequently the case in discussions that are conducted with a great show of emotion, the down-to-earth interests of certain groups, whose excitement is entirely concerned with factual matters and who therefore try to distort the facts, become quickly and inextricably involved with the untrammeled inspirations of intellectuals who, on the contrary, are not in the least interested in facts but treat them merely as a springboard for “ideas.”The postscript is an extremely rich and complex discussion of trials, their reasons, and the various theories of exculpation, which she is able to show as invalid.
Her final paragraph states the underlying truth:
And the question of individual guilt or innocence, the act of meting out justice to both the defendant and the victim, are the only things at stake in a criminal court. The Eichmann trial was no exception, even though the court here was confronted with acrime it could not find in the lawbooks and with a criminal whose like was unknown in any court, at least prior to the Nuremberg Trials. The present report deals with nothing but the extent to which the court in Jerusalem succeeded in fulfilling the demands of justice.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
New Blog Role Member
I have added a new member to the blog role, Muslims Against Sharia. I learned of this site from a comment left on my latest post. I have looked at the owner profile and visited the site. I think it is worth the support.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
It won't get through, but I really wish it would
Rep. Sue Myrick, North Carolina Republican, is really doing things right. First, she calls for Jimmy “Hamas” Carter’s passport to be revoked; now, she has unveiled the “Wake Up America” Agenda, the first bold and coherent plan to use means at our disposal to begin to investigate, isolate and take appropriate measures against the jihadist threat inside the US.
Below is her agenda, which:
1. Will call for a government investigation of all US military chaplains who were approved by Abdurahman Alamoudi.
2. Will call for a government investigation of all US prison chaplains who were approved by Abdurahman Alamoudi.
3. Will call for the Government Accounting Office (GAO) to investigate the selection process of Arabic translators in the FBI and DoD.
4. Will call for the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) 501(c)(3) non-profit status which restricts “lobbying on behalf of a foreign government”.
5. Introduce a bill to make the preaching, publication, or distribution of materials that call for the death of American citizens, attacks on the United States Government or Armed Forces, or the financing of the means and/or operations to accomplish these acts, acts of sedition and/or solicitation of treason.
6. Will call on the Government Accountability Office to conduct an audit to verify the total sovereign wealth fund investment in the United States.
7. Will attempt to cancel scholarship student visa program with Saudi Arabia until they reform their textbooks.
8. Will introduce a bill to restrict R-1/R-2 religious visas for imams who come from countries that do not allow reciprocal visits by non-Muslim clergy.
9. Will introduce a bill to cancel contracts to train Saudi police and other security forces in US Counterterrorism tactics until the Saudi’s certify the prosecution of Al Qaeda financiers, like Yasin al-Kadi, and the detention of repatriated Guantanamo terrorists that keep being released into the general population after being “rehabilitated”.
10. Will introduce or sponsor a bill to block the sale of sensitive military munitions, especially Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), to Saudi Arabia.
For more information, see here:
Thanks to Political Maven Diana West for the original which I copied intact.
Also thanks to the Jewish World Review for the link to Diana West.
Below is her agenda, which:
1. Will call for a government investigation of all US military chaplains who were approved by Abdurahman Alamoudi.
2. Will call for a government investigation of all US prison chaplains who were approved by Abdurahman Alamoudi.
3. Will call for the Government Accounting Office (GAO) to investigate the selection process of Arabic translators in the FBI and DoD.
4. Will call for the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) 501(c)(3) non-profit status which restricts “lobbying on behalf of a foreign government”.
5. Introduce a bill to make the preaching, publication, or distribution of materials that call for the death of American citizens, attacks on the United States Government or Armed Forces, or the financing of the means and/or operations to accomplish these acts, acts of sedition and/or solicitation of treason.
6. Will call on the Government Accountability Office to conduct an audit to verify the total sovereign wealth fund investment in the United States.
7. Will attempt to cancel scholarship student visa program with Saudi Arabia until they reform their textbooks.
8. Will introduce a bill to restrict R-1/R-2 religious visas for imams who come from countries that do not allow reciprocal visits by non-Muslim clergy.
9. Will introduce a bill to cancel contracts to train Saudi police and other security forces in US Counterterrorism tactics until the Saudi’s certify the prosecution of Al Qaeda financiers, like Yasin al-Kadi, and the detention of repatriated Guantanamo terrorists that keep being released into the general population after being “rehabilitated”.
10. Will introduce or sponsor a bill to block the sale of sensitive military munitions, especially Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), to Saudi Arabia.
For more information, see here:
Thanks to Political Maven Diana West for the original which I copied intact.
Also thanks to the Jewish World Review for the link to Diana West.
Monday, April 07, 2008
Too Perfect to Pass Up....
The Patriot Post
Founders' Quote Daily
"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, & talk by the hour? That 150 lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected."
-- Thomas Jefferson (Autobiography, 1821)
Reference: Jefferson: Writings, Peterson ed., Library of America(53)
.....Only now it is 535 lawyers. The only business that gets done is more business for lawyers and vote-buying.
Founders' Quote Daily
"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, & talk by the hour? That 150 lawyers should do business together ought not to be expected."
-- Thomas Jefferson (Autobiography, 1821)
Reference: Jefferson: Writings, Peterson ed., Library of America(53)
.....Only now it is 535 lawyers. The only business that gets done is more business for lawyers and vote-buying.
Friday, April 04, 2008
Bienvenu á France, et avez vous un bon jour….peut être
I am sitting in the airport in Toulouse, France, waiting to board the plane for the first leg of my trip home. I have been in France for a few hours short of 10 days. It has been an interesting experience. I came over on business, but had to stay over the Easter weekend so got a three-day weekend out of it. So I have spent a lot of time in Toulouse, and two days sight-seeing, one to the South to Montpellier, and the other to Paris.
The day I arrived, the weather was beautiful. Sunny, and for me, shirtsleeves weather (about 50 degrees, Fahrenheit, or 10 Celsius). On the flight over, I had a window seat, and we hit the coast of France at sunrise. It is hard to describe the feeling of looking down at Brest from 30,000 feet and seeing it just like a map. What’s more to feel the absolute certainty that this was someplace I had never been before, and someplace totally different from any other I had ever been to.
We landed at Charles de Gaulle, which reminds me in layout of Dallas-Fort Worth. However, it is a long walk between the two halves of the terminal to get from my arrival gate to the gate for my flight to Toulouse was a 15 minute walk. I don’t remember anything much of the flight to Toulouse. I was on Ohio time and it was 5 AM by my clock. There is a five-hour time difference between France and the Eastern US and I have only partly adjusted in the 10 days.
On the ride from the airport in Toulouse, I thought Spring had arrived. Everything was starting to turn green, there were the beginnings of leaves on the trees and some trees were blossoming. Once I got to my hotel room, I went out into Toulouse just to orient myself a bit and get some lunch. It had been 40 years since I had spoken French, but I was determined, and I managed even on the first day to eat without using English. My French did improve during the stay, though it is still atrocious. The biggest challenge is hearing it correctly. Most of my French was reading and writing with very little conversational French. Add the fact that I am slowly losing the ability to discriminate sounds, and it becomes a real challenge. The problem is that everyone wants to be helpful, so they change to English, if they know it, instead of speaking more slowly when I don’t understand.
The French seem big on infra-structure services. There is plenty of municipal transportation. There are lots of street cleaners and public trash bins and recycling stations. The French have a very busy railroad service, and it is more expensive than the equivalent in the US. Actually, if the US passenger railroads could charge the equivalent of the French railroads, their profit picture would be much better. Rather than cars, if people don’t use busses or trains, they use motor scooters, bicycles, or walk. I probably walked two to three miles every day just to get to work and meals.
Everything is expensive in France. Food is about twice as expensive in restaurants as it is in the US. Clothing, books, and chocolate are also very expensive, though the chocolate is the best I have ever eaten. The hotel was extremely clean, and cheerful in décor, but also quite expensive for what I received. Hotels are rated by the French Tourist Bureau, and can receive a rating of one to five stars. The hotel I was in had a three-star rating. The price was equivalent to an upper division hotel such as Embassy Suites, or Marriott. The room was very small, no phone, no clock, and no radio. It did have a TV with 13 channels, and private bath. It is my suspicion that the last was what I was really paying for. Breakfast at the hotel was 10 Euros or about $17 for a continental breakfast. The staff was very nice, putting up with my horrible French and encouraging me to continue to use it.
Since I had a three day weekend coming, I planned to ride the rails as much as I could to see as much of France as possible. I was under orders from my wife and her sister to see Paris, which I originally planned to do on Saturday. I would ride up on Friday night in a sleeper car, then walk around Paris and return that evening. I planned to go to Montpellier on the Mediterranean on Sunday and Bordeaux on Monday.
So far, so good. Because of time and work constraints, I ended up making my reservations online for the Paris trip—BIG mistake. Online tickets must be printed. Theoretically it can be done at a kiosk at the station. However, it turns out the kiosks don’t accept international credit cards. So I couldn’t print my tickets. I asked the gate agent for help, and they told me they would accept cash and I could get a refund for the tickets I purchased later. That’s when I found out traveler’s checks are of no value except at currency exchanges. So I didn’t get to Paris on Saturday. Most of Saturday was spent trying to get refunds for the tickets—no dice—they were a special deal from online and non-refundable. So now I have a charge for 225 EU on my card, and no tickets because they don’t accept international credit cards. This is where I found out that there is nothing colder than a petty French official interpreting the rules absolutely and refusing to consider that they created a problem.
So the next thing was to get to the airport and exchange some traveler’s checks for Euros. That’s where I found out that traveler’s checks are not accepted without a passport. So back to the hotel for the passport, then to the airport again. Finally, I had Euros and went to the station to buy some tickets. I now decided that I would try to get to Montpellier on that day, stay in Toulouse on Sunday and go to Paris on Sunday night. Now my luck changed a bit. The agent at the station spoke English but honored my preference to try to do things in French. We started creating an itinerary, and he asked if I was over 60. I was, so for 55 EU I could purchase a one-year senior discount which saved me 110 EU on my first ticket and about 30 EU on the second. Essentially, I got the trip to Montpellier for free. Even though I was not a French citizen they gave me the discount.
I rode to Montpellier and saw the Mediterranean, and had dinner at a superb restaurant. It was one of the finest meals I have ever eaten. The restaurant was in a 700 year-old building, the Tower of Babot. South France is a combination of pastures and vineyards. French vineyards have these stumpy things every 10 feet or so. Those are the vines which have been growing for up to hundreds of years and get pruned back. It is strange to think that produces some of the fine wines of the world. There are also many extremely old buildings. Medieval buildings are really quite common in France. And the number of cathedrals is astounding. Most were created as a means for some nobleman to create a monument to buy his way into Heaven. [At this point it would be easy to get up on a soap-box and rant on about the roots of socialism being the aristocracy of Medieval times. Now they build political monuments at the citizens’ expense.]
I got back from Montpellier late that evening, and then went to Mass at the Basilica of St. Sernin in Toulouse. The basilica was built in the 12th Century at the location of a church originally built inn in the 4th Century. It was Roman architecture not the Gothic of Notre Dame and much more simple and massive. The wood carving was unbelievably ornate especially over the sepulchre of St Saturnus (St Sernin). I had dressed up in my best for church, and found out that just like the US, nobody dresses for church in France, either. Not only that, it was cold and rainy outside and the church is not heated. I didn’t get warm until I had been back in my room for several hours.
Actually, that is one of the more memorable things—nine straight days of rain, wind, and cold. Other than the day I arrived, it was never nice weather. In fact, when I was at the top of Montmartre the next day, there was a brief heavy sleet storm. I had prepared for early spring, and instead got late winter.
I took a nap and worked a bit on Sunday afternoon and evening, and then after supper left for the train station. I ended up being the only passenger in my sleeping compartment, which was designed for up to four people. That was nice, as I could sleep and so forth on my own schedule.
French railroads are heavily used, and are very good overall. The ride is extremely smooth, and the trains travel at over 100 mph routinely. They take switch points at full speed and except for a slight change in the sound one wouldn’t know it. The rails and the stations are apparently owned by SNCF [which I think stands for Société Nationale de Companies des Ferro-carriolle.]. SNCF also will provide electric locomotives for some of the trains. The entire system is electrified, and the largest part of French electricity comes from nuclear power and at some places wind power [I saw two wind power farms on my way to Montpellier.]. The cars themselves, and in the case of the high-speed trains also the motive power, are provided by the railroad companies. I know of three, TER, Corail, and TGV. I rode the second and third. Corail has two subsidiaries, TEOZ and Lunéa. Lunéa provides the sleeper trains, which are special cars configured only as sleepers. TEOZ is a chair car configuration, with 1st and 2nd class versions. First class has the seats in small room configurations, 1, 2, 4, 6, and a one larger grouping. Second class more resembles what we are used to as a chair-car. TGV 1st class is also more conventional, but TGV trains have a cocktail/snack car between the two classes. When it has it, TEOZ has a cart come through the train selling refreshments. I did not ride TER. There is also a commuter double-deck configuration for TGV trains, and TGV operates the high-speed trains.
I arrived in Paris around 7:30 AM on Monday morning. I grabbed a small quiche and coffee for breakfast, oriented myself and went outside. The train station was on the South side of the Seine in the Eastern part of Paris. I called my friend from SAS France, and he said he could meet me at 10:00 at Notre Dame. That was fine with me, so I walked from the trains station to Notre Dame, about a mile or so along the Seine. Fortunately there was no rain, but it was cold. I had prepared this time, I had on a turtle-neck, a long-sleeved shirt, a sweat-shirt, and a pull-over jacket. Notre Dame was awesome. I approached from the back so got a first-hand view of the famous flying buttresses of gothic architecture. I walked along the North wall, and was amazed by the amount of stone carving. Every junction, top of column door frame member was covered in stone carvings. Every pillar had gargoyles at the top and coming out from lower down. The front of Notre Dame was statue after statue of kings and saints. I went inside and found that the church encourages visitors, and but carefully makes them go around the outside. You can be in the middle of the church unless you are participating in a Mass. I decided to attend the 9:00 Mass that morning. Sunday was high mass, this was low mass. My French was still not up to understanding most of what was said, but the clergy have the most clear enunciation of the language I heard the entire time.
After Mass, I met my friend at a restaurant across the street and then we walked to l’Hotel de Ville where he had parked his car. I left my bag there and we walked the mile or so to the Louvre. We hit some of the high spots in the Louve during the two hours we were there, then walked back to his car. (By this time I figured I had walked over five miles.) We then went to the Sorbonne. I wanted to see it, because it is one of the most famous universities in the world. We ate lunch across the street from the Sorbonne then drove to the Champs Élysée, the l’Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower. I didn’t go up in the tower because it was so cold, and then we went to Montmartre. My friend wanted to show me Montmartre because it was where so many artists got their start. There is a basilica at the top of the hill, and to get to it, there are steep streets, a funicular (cable car), or many, many steps. We took the many, many steps. But the view from the top was worth it. Even with the rain, one could see all of Paris from Montmartre. There are some little shops along a side street North of the basilica, and we went there to look around. While we were waiting for the rain to stop under an awning, I took a picture that I can imagine being painted in the style of Van Gogh, and entitled “Montmartre avec parapluies’ or “Montmartre with umbrellas.”
After Montmartre we headed back to the train station, and I grabbed a bit of dinner then caught the train to Toulouse. I slept most of the way back, even though it was a chair car in the club 6 configuration. I had fellow passengers, but didn’t visit with them. The rest of the week I worked, and on my lunch-hours shopped for souvenirs. My flight from Toulouse to Paris, Charles de Gaulle, was billed as a breakfast flight. That was a bit over the top. Breakfast was a cup of coffee and a single, plain, small croissant. I had two and a half hours to make my connection, and it took over two hours of that to do so. I finally bought some breakfast outside the waiting area for my flight. If you can, avoid Charles de Gaulle. They failed to transfer one of my bags for the flight home (something I was told is common) and we boarded 20 minutes late. The flight home was uneventful. I don’t recommend nine hours in coach. There is a trade-off. If you sit by a window there is no leg room. However, if you give up the window and sit in the middle of the airplane, there is lots of leg room—comfort vs. view.
Overall, it was a good trip. If you accept the French as they are, and try to fit in, they are quite friendly. I don’t think the French people are the source of the apparent dislike of the US, as are the French intellectuals, who are decidedly socialist in outlook. Also, anyone in a position of petty authority in France, with a few notable exceptions, seems to let it go to their head, and they can be quite officious and cold. Their god is the rule book. Everyone accept one waitress, some of the airline people, and the night clerk at the hotel seemed more than willing to put up with my horrible French. The only thing was rather than repeating more slowly or using different words, there was a tendency to switch to English immediately, if they knew it. I was able to eat and buy all my souvenirs, none of which came from a tourist shop, without using English. That was a personal success. The other personal success was that I lost 4 lbs. Most likely due to the smaller portions served in France as well as the miles I walked. ----Now if I can just keep that up.
The day I arrived, the weather was beautiful. Sunny, and for me, shirtsleeves weather (about 50 degrees, Fahrenheit, or 10 Celsius). On the flight over, I had a window seat, and we hit the coast of France at sunrise. It is hard to describe the feeling of looking down at Brest from 30,000 feet and seeing it just like a map. What’s more to feel the absolute certainty that this was someplace I had never been before, and someplace totally different from any other I had ever been to.
We landed at Charles de Gaulle, which reminds me in layout of Dallas-Fort Worth. However, it is a long walk between the two halves of the terminal to get from my arrival gate to the gate for my flight to Toulouse was a 15 minute walk. I don’t remember anything much of the flight to Toulouse. I was on Ohio time and it was 5 AM by my clock. There is a five-hour time difference between France and the Eastern US and I have only partly adjusted in the 10 days.
On the ride from the airport in Toulouse, I thought Spring had arrived. Everything was starting to turn green, there were the beginnings of leaves on the trees and some trees were blossoming. Once I got to my hotel room, I went out into Toulouse just to orient myself a bit and get some lunch. It had been 40 years since I had spoken French, but I was determined, and I managed even on the first day to eat without using English. My French did improve during the stay, though it is still atrocious. The biggest challenge is hearing it correctly. Most of my French was reading and writing with very little conversational French. Add the fact that I am slowly losing the ability to discriminate sounds, and it becomes a real challenge. The problem is that everyone wants to be helpful, so they change to English, if they know it, instead of speaking more slowly when I don’t understand.
The French seem big on infra-structure services. There is plenty of municipal transportation. There are lots of street cleaners and public trash bins and recycling stations. The French have a very busy railroad service, and it is more expensive than the equivalent in the US. Actually, if the US passenger railroads could charge the equivalent of the French railroads, their profit picture would be much better. Rather than cars, if people don’t use busses or trains, they use motor scooters, bicycles, or walk. I probably walked two to three miles every day just to get to work and meals.
Everything is expensive in France. Food is about twice as expensive in restaurants as it is in the US. Clothing, books, and chocolate are also very expensive, though the chocolate is the best I have ever eaten. The hotel was extremely clean, and cheerful in décor, but also quite expensive for what I received. Hotels are rated by the French Tourist Bureau, and can receive a rating of one to five stars. The hotel I was in had a three-star rating. The price was equivalent to an upper division hotel such as Embassy Suites, or Marriott. The room was very small, no phone, no clock, and no radio. It did have a TV with 13 channels, and private bath. It is my suspicion that the last was what I was really paying for. Breakfast at the hotel was 10 Euros or about $17 for a continental breakfast. The staff was very nice, putting up with my horrible French and encouraging me to continue to use it.
Since I had a three day weekend coming, I planned to ride the rails as much as I could to see as much of France as possible. I was under orders from my wife and her sister to see Paris, which I originally planned to do on Saturday. I would ride up on Friday night in a sleeper car, then walk around Paris and return that evening. I planned to go to Montpellier on the Mediterranean on Sunday and Bordeaux on Monday.
So far, so good. Because of time and work constraints, I ended up making my reservations online for the Paris trip—BIG mistake. Online tickets must be printed. Theoretically it can be done at a kiosk at the station. However, it turns out the kiosks don’t accept international credit cards. So I couldn’t print my tickets. I asked the gate agent for help, and they told me they would accept cash and I could get a refund for the tickets I purchased later. That’s when I found out traveler’s checks are of no value except at currency exchanges. So I didn’t get to Paris on Saturday. Most of Saturday was spent trying to get refunds for the tickets—no dice—they were a special deal from online and non-refundable. So now I have a charge for 225 EU on my card, and no tickets because they don’t accept international credit cards. This is where I found out that there is nothing colder than a petty French official interpreting the rules absolutely and refusing to consider that they created a problem.
So the next thing was to get to the airport and exchange some traveler’s checks for Euros. That’s where I found out that traveler’s checks are not accepted without a passport. So back to the hotel for the passport, then to the airport again. Finally, I had Euros and went to the station to buy some tickets. I now decided that I would try to get to Montpellier on that day, stay in Toulouse on Sunday and go to Paris on Sunday night. Now my luck changed a bit. The agent at the station spoke English but honored my preference to try to do things in French. We started creating an itinerary, and he asked if I was over 60. I was, so for 55 EU I could purchase a one-year senior discount which saved me 110 EU on my first ticket and about 30 EU on the second. Essentially, I got the trip to Montpellier for free. Even though I was not a French citizen they gave me the discount.
I rode to Montpellier and saw the Mediterranean, and had dinner at a superb restaurant. It was one of the finest meals I have ever eaten. The restaurant was in a 700 year-old building, the Tower of Babot. South France is a combination of pastures and vineyards. French vineyards have these stumpy things every 10 feet or so. Those are the vines which have been growing for up to hundreds of years and get pruned back. It is strange to think that produces some of the fine wines of the world. There are also many extremely old buildings. Medieval buildings are really quite common in France. And the number of cathedrals is astounding. Most were created as a means for some nobleman to create a monument to buy his way into Heaven. [At this point it would be easy to get up on a soap-box and rant on about the roots of socialism being the aristocracy of Medieval times. Now they build political monuments at the citizens’ expense.]
I got back from Montpellier late that evening, and then went to Mass at the Basilica of St. Sernin in Toulouse. The basilica was built in the 12th Century at the location of a church originally built inn in the 4th Century. It was Roman architecture not the Gothic of Notre Dame and much more simple and massive. The wood carving was unbelievably ornate especially over the sepulchre of St Saturnus (St Sernin). I had dressed up in my best for church, and found out that just like the US, nobody dresses for church in France, either. Not only that, it was cold and rainy outside and the church is not heated. I didn’t get warm until I had been back in my room for several hours.
Actually, that is one of the more memorable things—nine straight days of rain, wind, and cold. Other than the day I arrived, it was never nice weather. In fact, when I was at the top of Montmartre the next day, there was a brief heavy sleet storm. I had prepared for early spring, and instead got late winter.
I took a nap and worked a bit on Sunday afternoon and evening, and then after supper left for the train station. I ended up being the only passenger in my sleeping compartment, which was designed for up to four people. That was nice, as I could sleep and so forth on my own schedule.
French railroads are heavily used, and are very good overall. The ride is extremely smooth, and the trains travel at over 100 mph routinely. They take switch points at full speed and except for a slight change in the sound one wouldn’t know it. The rails and the stations are apparently owned by SNCF [which I think stands for Société Nationale de Companies des Ferro-carriolle.]. SNCF also will provide electric locomotives for some of the trains. The entire system is electrified, and the largest part of French electricity comes from nuclear power and at some places wind power [I saw two wind power farms on my way to Montpellier.]. The cars themselves, and in the case of the high-speed trains also the motive power, are provided by the railroad companies. I know of three, TER, Corail, and TGV. I rode the second and third. Corail has two subsidiaries, TEOZ and Lunéa. Lunéa provides the sleeper trains, which are special cars configured only as sleepers. TEOZ is a chair car configuration, with 1st and 2nd class versions. First class has the seats in small room configurations, 1, 2, 4, 6, and a one larger grouping. Second class more resembles what we are used to as a chair-car. TGV 1st class is also more conventional, but TGV trains have a cocktail/snack car between the two classes. When it has it, TEOZ has a cart come through the train selling refreshments. I did not ride TER. There is also a commuter double-deck configuration for TGV trains, and TGV operates the high-speed trains.
I arrived in Paris around 7:30 AM on Monday morning. I grabbed a small quiche and coffee for breakfast, oriented myself and went outside. The train station was on the South side of the Seine in the Eastern part of Paris. I called my friend from SAS France, and he said he could meet me at 10:00 at Notre Dame. That was fine with me, so I walked from the trains station to Notre Dame, about a mile or so along the Seine. Fortunately there was no rain, but it was cold. I had prepared this time, I had on a turtle-neck, a long-sleeved shirt, a sweat-shirt, and a pull-over jacket. Notre Dame was awesome. I approached from the back so got a first-hand view of the famous flying buttresses of gothic architecture. I walked along the North wall, and was amazed by the amount of stone carving. Every junction, top of column door frame member was covered in stone carvings. Every pillar had gargoyles at the top and coming out from lower down. The front of Notre Dame was statue after statue of kings and saints. I went inside and found that the church encourages visitors, and but carefully makes them go around the outside. You can be in the middle of the church unless you are participating in a Mass. I decided to attend the 9:00 Mass that morning. Sunday was high mass, this was low mass. My French was still not up to understanding most of what was said, but the clergy have the most clear enunciation of the language I heard the entire time.
After Mass, I met my friend at a restaurant across the street and then we walked to l’Hotel de Ville where he had parked his car. I left my bag there and we walked the mile or so to the Louvre. We hit some of the high spots in the Louve during the two hours we were there, then walked back to his car. (By this time I figured I had walked over five miles.) We then went to the Sorbonne. I wanted to see it, because it is one of the most famous universities in the world. We ate lunch across the street from the Sorbonne then drove to the Champs Élysée, the l’Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower. I didn’t go up in the tower because it was so cold, and then we went to Montmartre. My friend wanted to show me Montmartre because it was where so many artists got their start. There is a basilica at the top of the hill, and to get to it, there are steep streets, a funicular (cable car), or many, many steps. We took the many, many steps. But the view from the top was worth it. Even with the rain, one could see all of Paris from Montmartre. There are some little shops along a side street North of the basilica, and we went there to look around. While we were waiting for the rain to stop under an awning, I took a picture that I can imagine being painted in the style of Van Gogh, and entitled “Montmartre avec parapluies’ or “Montmartre with umbrellas.”
After Montmartre we headed back to the train station, and I grabbed a bit of dinner then caught the train to Toulouse. I slept most of the way back, even though it was a chair car in the club 6 configuration. I had fellow passengers, but didn’t visit with them. The rest of the week I worked, and on my lunch-hours shopped for souvenirs. My flight from Toulouse to Paris, Charles de Gaulle, was billed as a breakfast flight. That was a bit over the top. Breakfast was a cup of coffee and a single, plain, small croissant. I had two and a half hours to make my connection, and it took over two hours of that to do so. I finally bought some breakfast outside the waiting area for my flight. If you can, avoid Charles de Gaulle. They failed to transfer one of my bags for the flight home (something I was told is common) and we boarded 20 minutes late. The flight home was uneventful. I don’t recommend nine hours in coach. There is a trade-off. If you sit by a window there is no leg room. However, if you give up the window and sit in the middle of the airplane, there is lots of leg room—comfort vs. view.
Overall, it was a good trip. If you accept the French as they are, and try to fit in, they are quite friendly. I don’t think the French people are the source of the apparent dislike of the US, as are the French intellectuals, who are decidedly socialist in outlook. Also, anyone in a position of petty authority in France, with a few notable exceptions, seems to let it go to their head, and they can be quite officious and cold. Their god is the rule book. Everyone accept one waitress, some of the airline people, and the night clerk at the hotel seemed more than willing to put up with my horrible French. The only thing was rather than repeating more slowly or using different words, there was a tendency to switch to English immediately, if they knew it. I was able to eat and buy all my souvenirs, none of which came from a tourist shop, without using English. That was a personal success. The other personal success was that I lost 4 lbs. Most likely due to the smaller portions served in France as well as the miles I walked. ----Now if I can just keep that up.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
This was a surprise
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Which Great US President Are You Most Like? created with QuizFarm.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| You scored as Dwight Eisenhower 34th President, in office from 1953-1961
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Thanks to the Big Hominid for the link
Thursday, January 31, 2008
The answer is....
Today in USA Today, was an article on the lobbyists use of houses near the Capitol to host cocktail parties and fundraisers for politicians. What is more, they are generally unreportable under current law. So much for the lobby reform legislation. Oh, you really believed it would work? And you still believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.
We have allowed our politicians to peddle votes and influence for so long we don't even pay attention to it. The real cause is not the lobbyists--they are just responding in a rational way to the opportunities. Actually it is only partly the fault of the politicians, who want to stay in power so do whatever is necessary to do so. The real fault is with the American people, who agree to have the government take their tax money and redistribute it in ways that were never intended by the Founding Fathers.
As long as enough people think they get back more from the government than they put into it, this situation will prevail. The money comes from a group that is trading favors with the politicians and passing the costs on to us in the form of higher prices--the American businesses. We make a lot of pious noise about the corruption in the Middle East and Asia, bribes and payoffs being the normal mode of business, without ever admitting we are just as corrupt. It simply flows through different channels.
The solution is to get the government out of all the activities that deal with regulation and giveaways, and non-military contracts. Get the Federal government out of all the social welfare crap and hand it back to the states.
Of course it will never happen--it would be financial suicide for politicians. Graft in the form of lobbyists favors is their major payoff. Tom Clancy was right, the entire government would have to be destroyed for it to be fixed.
.....unachievable.
We have allowed our politicians to peddle votes and influence for so long we don't even pay attention to it. The real cause is not the lobbyists--they are just responding in a rational way to the opportunities. Actually it is only partly the fault of the politicians, who want to stay in power so do whatever is necessary to do so. The real fault is with the American people, who agree to have the government take their tax money and redistribute it in ways that were never intended by the Founding Fathers.
As long as enough people think they get back more from the government than they put into it, this situation will prevail. The money comes from a group that is trading favors with the politicians and passing the costs on to us in the form of higher prices--the American businesses. We make a lot of pious noise about the corruption in the Middle East and Asia, bribes and payoffs being the normal mode of business, without ever admitting we are just as corrupt. It simply flows through different channels.
The solution is to get the government out of all the activities that deal with regulation and giveaways, and non-military contracts. Get the Federal government out of all the social welfare crap and hand it back to the states.
Of course it will never happen--it would be financial suicide for politicians. Graft in the form of lobbyists favors is their major payoff. Tom Clancy was right, the entire government would have to be destroyed for it to be fixed.
.....unachievable.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Support the troops.......
Our troops in the Middle East, risk their lives to keep us from having to risk our own. They do this voluntarily because they believe in what they do and in the United States. They also deserve to be paid fairly and according to the rules under which they enlisted. One of those rules is that money received overseas is tax-free. This is not just a rule for the military, it is also a rule for business men and women who make far more than our troops. But when Congress fails to pass the necessary bills to pay our troops, the troops suffer while the business man or woman continues on with "business as usual."
One of the ways the military rewards re-enlistment, which avoids retraining raw recruits, is to pay a bonus. The amount of the bonus, though significant to an individual is far less than what it costs to replace a trained soldier. Because Congress felt it necessary to play their political games with the war, and not pass the military appropriations bill(s) troops cannot receive their re-enlistment bonus while overseas, and as a result an individual soldier will lose thousands of dollars by having to pay taxes on their enlistment bonus.
Put yourself in their situation. They perform critical work and were made promises on what it would be worth in pay, only to find out that when Congress wants to play political games, the promises are worthless. Such is the republic they defend. There are two ways we can help, write our Congressional representatives in the short run, and vote them out of office and vote in someone who genuinely cares for the troops. Our priorities need to be security first, welfare second. Let us hold our representatives accountable for this, and make sure the troops, our first line of defense are properly paid and cared for.
.....unless you can give the President a stick in the eye.
One of the ways the military rewards re-enlistment, which avoids retraining raw recruits, is to pay a bonus. The amount of the bonus, though significant to an individual is far less than what it costs to replace a trained soldier. Because Congress felt it necessary to play their political games with the war, and not pass the military appropriations bill(s) troops cannot receive their re-enlistment bonus while overseas, and as a result an individual soldier will lose thousands of dollars by having to pay taxes on their enlistment bonus.
Put yourself in their situation. They perform critical work and were made promises on what it would be worth in pay, only to find out that when Congress wants to play political games, the promises are worthless. Such is the republic they defend. There are two ways we can help, write our Congressional representatives in the short run, and vote them out of office and vote in someone who genuinely cares for the troops. Our priorities need to be security first, welfare second. Let us hold our representatives accountable for this, and make sure the troops, our first line of defense are properly paid and cared for.
.....unless you can give the President a stick in the eye.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Sunday Notes--01/13/2008
The Power of God
This Saturday, the verses for discussion at the Men's Breakfast were the 29th Psalm.
What troubles me is that here was a collection of devout men, who attend church regularly, who have no sense of the presence of God. What is it they believe in? How can they pray to God and yet never sense Him? I don't mean that one must always feel his presence, and it may be only indirectly, but how can someone claim to believe in something never experienced? Alternatively, it could be that the experience is so personal and subjective that they are either embarassed or afraid of ridicule if they express it. In a group of two dozen men, who have been having breakfast together twice a month for years, this seems a bit far-fetched, especially in light of many of the discussions that have occurred both at breakfasts and retreats.
But perhaps I have stumbled onto a problem with mainline Protestantism and an explanation for its slow demise, to be replaced by churches based on emotional experiences and appeals. When I was much younger, during my college years, I would visit friends that owned a farm on weekends and long vacations other than Christmas. Their church services were simple and the preacher was very good at weaving an almost hypnotic spell. One also had the feeling that they never questioned their faith, and that most could point to some time or place where they felt God's presence.
Intellectual pursuit has been extremely successful in the past several hundreds of years in improving the day to day lot of mankind, especially in Western civilization. We are now starting to make it almost a religion in its own right in our obsession to remove all traces of Christian and Jewish belief from our public culture. Any idea is automatically suspect if it has a religious background to it. Where once religious-based principles were the touchstone of moral codes and general judgment of behavior, now intellectuality is attempting to rule, and the mainline Protestant churches are beginning to go along with it. The most recent notable example being the Archbishop of Canterbury stating that the Christmas story was a myth. [Sure it is, but the way it was done, and the timing served as an attempt to undermine anyone believing in the story in any way.]
The problem is that few of us are intellectual elites that can live on rationality alone (or rather pretend to do so). The myths and legends are necessary to provide us with a touchstone to our natures. Having lived thirty years as a wannabe intellectual elitist, I can say it was hard work, and created a subtly impoverished life. Actually, the elitists have their own set of myths and legends, though they would passionately deny that is what they are. The two main ones are The Big Bang, and Evolution. This is not to say that those two concepts are in error, it is to say they provide for the same needs as the Genesis and other biblical legends do for many Judeo-Christian believers.
With the control of public discourse becoming more and more absolutely secular, our experience of life no longer is allowed to consider God as part of it. We are too busy with cell-phones, TVs, iPods, and constant activity to have any time for contemplation. Life has become a constant rush and a constant interruption of our thoughts. Bedtime after all the family is asleep, airplanes, and waiting on my wife are the only times I find for my own thoughts. I make those times to think, so what about others that are given no time to think, and don't realize they need it? It was during one of those times--an airplane at 32,000 feet on a normal day, that I had my most notable experience of God, and it was very subtle, and very real.
There is an old expression, if you are up to your waist in alligators, it is hard to drain the swamp. Today's society creates alligators as fast or faster than we can deal with them--if we let it. Currently it is all the pundit-babble on the upcoming elections, both primary and general. Or if you wish, all the sordid details of our celebrity sub-culture. One can easily continually distract oneself with You-tube, blogs, and a myriad of on-line entertainments, as well as traditional TV enhanced by hundreds of channels with any choice one could wish for. This kind of superficiality is reinforced with the lack of substance of our education system.
So perhaps it is no wonder that the mainline Protestant faiths are declining. It isn't about their message, it is about their lack of engagement, their inability to reach the feelings of the parishioners in a religiously meaningful way. They have become too smart for their own good, to quote another old expression. Or perhaps we should say they have lost their common sense.
This Saturday, the verses for discussion at the Men's Breakfast were the 29th Psalm.
Ascribe to the Lord, O sons of the mighty,After I read the passage I said that the psalmist obviously lived in the outdoors and saw God in everything around him. I then asked, "Where do we see God today?" I got one response of "In our families," and another "In creation." The second speaker then made the analogy that since a building has a designer so creation had a designer. After that there was silence. So the discussion went to another topic.
Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the glory due to his name;
Worship the Lord in holy array
The voice of the Lord is upon the waters;
The God of glory thunders,
The Lord is over many waters.
The voice of the Lord is powerful.
The voice of the Lord is majestic.
The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars;
Yes, the voice of the lord breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon skip like a calf,
And Sirion like a young wild ox.
The voice of the Lord hews out flames of fire.
The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;
The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the Lord makes the deer to calve
And strips the forest bare;
And in His temple everything says, "Glory!"
The Lord sat as King at the flood;
Yes, the Lord sits as King forever.
The Lord will give strength to his people;
The Lord will bless His people with peace.
--- New American Standard Bible
What troubles me is that here was a collection of devout men, who attend church regularly, who have no sense of the presence of God. What is it they believe in? How can they pray to God and yet never sense Him? I don't mean that one must always feel his presence, and it may be only indirectly, but how can someone claim to believe in something never experienced? Alternatively, it could be that the experience is so personal and subjective that they are either embarassed or afraid of ridicule if they express it. In a group of two dozen men, who have been having breakfast together twice a month for years, this seems a bit far-fetched, especially in light of many of the discussions that have occurred both at breakfasts and retreats.
But perhaps I have stumbled onto a problem with mainline Protestantism and an explanation for its slow demise, to be replaced by churches based on emotional experiences and appeals. When I was much younger, during my college years, I would visit friends that owned a farm on weekends and long vacations other than Christmas. Their church services were simple and the preacher was very good at weaving an almost hypnotic spell. One also had the feeling that they never questioned their faith, and that most could point to some time or place where they felt God's presence.
Intellectual pursuit has been extremely successful in the past several hundreds of years in improving the day to day lot of mankind, especially in Western civilization. We are now starting to make it almost a religion in its own right in our obsession to remove all traces of Christian and Jewish belief from our public culture. Any idea is automatically suspect if it has a religious background to it. Where once religious-based principles were the touchstone of moral codes and general judgment of behavior, now intellectuality is attempting to rule, and the mainline Protestant churches are beginning to go along with it. The most recent notable example being the Archbishop of Canterbury stating that the Christmas story was a myth. [Sure it is, but the way it was done, and the timing served as an attempt to undermine anyone believing in the story in any way.]
The problem is that few of us are intellectual elites that can live on rationality alone (or rather pretend to do so). The myths and legends are necessary to provide us with a touchstone to our natures. Having lived thirty years as a wannabe intellectual elitist, I can say it was hard work, and created a subtly impoverished life. Actually, the elitists have their own set of myths and legends, though they would passionately deny that is what they are. The two main ones are The Big Bang, and Evolution. This is not to say that those two concepts are in error, it is to say they provide for the same needs as the Genesis and other biblical legends do for many Judeo-Christian believers.
With the control of public discourse becoming more and more absolutely secular, our experience of life no longer is allowed to consider God as part of it. We are too busy with cell-phones, TVs, iPods, and constant activity to have any time for contemplation. Life has become a constant rush and a constant interruption of our thoughts. Bedtime after all the family is asleep, airplanes, and waiting on my wife are the only times I find for my own thoughts. I make those times to think, so what about others that are given no time to think, and don't realize they need it? It was during one of those times--an airplane at 32,000 feet on a normal day, that I had my most notable experience of God, and it was very subtle, and very real.
There is an old expression, if you are up to your waist in alligators, it is hard to drain the swamp. Today's society creates alligators as fast or faster than we can deal with them--if we let it. Currently it is all the pundit-babble on the upcoming elections, both primary and general. Or if you wish, all the sordid details of our celebrity sub-culture. One can easily continually distract oneself with You-tube, blogs, and a myriad of on-line entertainments, as well as traditional TV enhanced by hundreds of channels with any choice one could wish for. This kind of superficiality is reinforced with the lack of substance of our education system.
So perhaps it is no wonder that the mainline Protestant faiths are declining. It isn't about their message, it is about their lack of engagement, their inability to reach the feelings of the parishioners in a religiously meaningful way. They have become too smart for their own good, to quote another old expression. Or perhaps we should say they have lost their common sense.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Too Easy
It crosses my mind that the reason we see so little desire to pursue the war or to really be tough is because too few of us have had to struggle for anything. We have grown up thinking life is easy. In the US life is easy, even the poor have it better than most of the rest of the world. In fact, welfare has taken even the strife from being poor. It isn't easy, but survival is almost guaranteed.
As a consequence the reality of the rest of the world is viewed either with disbelief, detachment, or denial. Life is so benign they cannot conceive of a whole society of murderous, paranoid, wannabe conquerors, so they deny their existance. For a short period of time, 9/11 changed their view of reality, but because we were successful in preventing a re-occurrence, the old view has re-asserted itself.
Because little, if anything, requires sustained effort covering years, we want everything over in a short period of time. Post Vietnam, every military action until the current war, has been relatively brief. This has done us no favors. All it does is reinforce the attitude that wars are like movies, over in a short period of time.
Then there is the issue of casualties. Comparisons to the casualties of WW II or Korea are meaningless. Only people 60 or older remember either of these. Quoting the casualties in Vietnam simply brings up the reflexive attitudes of the 60's in anybody that remembers them. What is striking is that so many young people, who weren't even born during or shortly after Vietnam have such animosity and even quote old sayings and songs from the period.
I think it is because we have allowed them to be taught, not by us, but by the teachers that were part of the Vietnam protest movements. They got away with it in 1968-72, and feel entitled to claim correctness and righteousness. This is passed on to our children. The soldiers that came back from WW II and Korea were more interested in getting on with their lives than in dealing with issues and abstracts, leaving the field wide-open for a takeover of academia by the left/liberal axis. The professors the returning GIs had were from the old school, but the professors their children had were not.
Nothing in the experience of most of our population can relate to what is actually going on in the Middle East or to the cultural chasm that separates Islam from Judeo-Christianity. Having been raised on faux tolerance (any challenge to the status quo is tolerated, any endorsement is not) they think they can simply talk their way through the issues. Unfortunately guns, knives, and explosives don't reason.
As a consequence the reality of the rest of the world is viewed either with disbelief, detachment, or denial. Life is so benign they cannot conceive of a whole society of murderous, paranoid, wannabe conquerors, so they deny their existance. For a short period of time, 9/11 changed their view of reality, but because we were successful in preventing a re-occurrence, the old view has re-asserted itself.
Because little, if anything, requires sustained effort covering years, we want everything over in a short period of time. Post Vietnam, every military action until the current war, has been relatively brief. This has done us no favors. All it does is reinforce the attitude that wars are like movies, over in a short period of time.
Then there is the issue of casualties. Comparisons to the casualties of WW II or Korea are meaningless. Only people 60 or older remember either of these. Quoting the casualties in Vietnam simply brings up the reflexive attitudes of the 60's in anybody that remembers them. What is striking is that so many young people, who weren't even born during or shortly after Vietnam have such animosity and even quote old sayings and songs from the period.
I think it is because we have allowed them to be taught, not by us, but by the teachers that were part of the Vietnam protest movements. They got away with it in 1968-72, and feel entitled to claim correctness and righteousness. This is passed on to our children. The soldiers that came back from WW II and Korea were more interested in getting on with their lives than in dealing with issues and abstracts, leaving the field wide-open for a takeover of academia by the left/liberal axis. The professors the returning GIs had were from the old school, but the professors their children had were not.
Nothing in the experience of most of our population can relate to what is actually going on in the Middle East or to the cultural chasm that separates Islam from Judeo-Christianity. Having been raised on faux tolerance (any challenge to the status quo is tolerated, any endorsement is not) they think they can simply talk their way through the issues. Unfortunately guns, knives, and explosives don't reason.
Ad Hominum
This is just a short note on something that occurred to me yesterday.
We generally use ad hominum to point out that someone is using the opponents character to defeat an argument. This is of course considered incorrect as the character of the arguer generally has little to do with the validity of the argument, at least in a truly logical discussion.
However, it is the same fallacy if we use a person's character to support an argument. "It must be true, look what a good person he/she is." Or even, "She/he must know, they are experts." This latter error is often overlooked, because it usually supports what we want to see. For an example of the fallacy of experts, just look at the global warming controversies.
There is one area that referring to the character of the arguer may be valid--when the argument is not complete in its logic and information. This is a form of fuzzy logic where one is dealing in trends, and missing facts, though there may be enough information to at least put constraints on the issue. The downside is in evaluating the character of the "expert" or authority. We often chose our authorities not so much for their true capabilities, but for how well we get along with them, or how much we like what they say.
We generally use ad hominum to point out that someone is using the opponents character to defeat an argument. This is of course considered incorrect as the character of the arguer generally has little to do with the validity of the argument, at least in a truly logical discussion.
However, it is the same fallacy if we use a person's character to support an argument. "It must be true, look what a good person he/she is." Or even, "She/he must know, they are experts." This latter error is often overlooked, because it usually supports what we want to see. For an example of the fallacy of experts, just look at the global warming controversies.
There is one area that referring to the character of the arguer may be valid--when the argument is not complete in its logic and information. This is a form of fuzzy logic where one is dealing in trends, and missing facts, though there may be enough information to at least put constraints on the issue. The downside is in evaluating the character of the "expert" or authority. We often chose our authorities not so much for their true capabilities, but for how well we get along with them, or how much we like what they say.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
My Grandfather's Son
I received "My Grandfather's Son: a Memoir" by Clarence Thomas as a Christmas present. As far as I am concerned every critic is wrong, liberal, conservative, or other. This is a book to be read not as a political story and not as a typical autobiography. This is a book about what it takes to live a proper life.
Clarence Thomas places no blame on anyone except himself. He presents his successes and his failures in the same even tone that neither apologizes or brags. He simply says, "This is the way it was." Reviewers seem to focus on his version of his confirmation hearings for his appointment to the Supreme Court. I think that is less important than the life he lead and what it can show. To me the high point was marrying his second wife--it showed that it is still possible to have redemption.
Anyone who has never had it hard or never had to struggle will not like this book. They will find it dull, boring, and with little merit. Their politics will color what they read of his life, and they will dislike what they see. Justice Thomas makes it very clear that regardless of political persuasion, politics harms, not helps, its supposed beneficiaries. For those who have had to struggle, this book is a validation that to strive and never give up is not in vain.
Don't take my word for it. Read it yourself.
Clarence Thomas places no blame on anyone except himself. He presents his successes and his failures in the same even tone that neither apologizes or brags. He simply says, "This is the way it was." Reviewers seem to focus on his version of his confirmation hearings for his appointment to the Supreme Court. I think that is less important than the life he lead and what it can show. To me the high point was marrying his second wife--it showed that it is still possible to have redemption.
Anyone who has never had it hard or never had to struggle will not like this book. They will find it dull, boring, and with little merit. Their politics will color what they read of his life, and they will dislike what they see. Justice Thomas makes it very clear that regardless of political persuasion, politics harms, not helps, its supposed beneficiaries. For those who have had to struggle, this book is a validation that to strive and never give up is not in vain.
Don't take my word for it. Read it yourself.
Collateral Damage
"...but he'll take it out on his wife."
"...innocent civilians will be killed."
"...if you do that, he will lose his job, and his family will suffer."
"...try to stop me, and I will kill the hostage."
Every day we see or hear versions of the above--an innocent or innocents will suffer if evil is dealt with. The examples can be as trivial as a person's rude behavior being stopped, where the person is a coward and a bully (the first example above) or as deadly as a hostage situation. In every case, there is a hidden sub-text--"and it will be your fault"--an invalid attempt to transfer guilt.
These situations are often presented as moral dilemmas--doing something wrong to correct another wrong. Taken out of the above contexts, it is wrong for the wife to be harmed, children to suffer, people to be killed. And in all these situations our emotions rise strongly in sympathy for the victims. In today's feel-good society, emotions are taken as validation of any position--"If it feels good, do it", on steroids. If we use emotion as a guide, we are lost. Emotion reacts only to the current situation and to limited input.
What all the above versions of the hostage scenario present is not a moral dilemma but an emotional dilemma. The moral issues arise from the actions of the perpetrator not from someone attempting to set the situation right. The boor that bullies his wife, the terrorist that hides among civilians, the deadbeat that will not feed his children, the grafter that cheats his employer, the fugitive with a hostage, all are committing evil acts at the time and their stated consequences, if stopped, are also their responsibility. They created the situation.
Stopping evil requires action. It is not possible to talk nice and expect a result. This is what any evil person counts on--the fear of creating collateral damage. I submit it is equally as immoral to fail to stop or attempt to stop evil as the evil itself. Those who refuse to act out of the fear of creating collateral damage become accomplices in the continuation of the evil. It makes no difference what the motive of the observer is, good intentions towards the victim are cancelled by the continuation of the current harmful situation.
If action is necessary, it is incumbent on the agent of justice to attempt to minimize the collateral damage to that which is necessary to accomplish the purpose, but it is an absolute necessity to act. If circumstances allow a choice of options to fix the situation, the most controlled is to be used, provided it can do the job. E.g. if a terrorist is in a crowd of people and effective choices are a sniper or a rocket attack--pick the sniper. BUT, if the sniper misses use the rocket. Yes, innocents will be harmed and killed, but the terrorist must be stopped. He or she will do far more damage in the long run if allowed to go free.
Failure to act in a hostage situation simply validates it as an effective survival strategy for the evil-doer. Conversely, if a potential hostage-taker (in any of the above scenarios) knows that it is not effective as a survival strategy, then its use will be discouraged and diminished.
Evil-doers count on the victims being more important then stopping their acts. This mindset has to be changed, and only relentless action will change it . A concomittant requirement is that half-measures will not do. Though minimal collateral damage is desired, the force used to act must be sufficient to achieve the result THE FIRST TIME. If not, there will simply be a series of escalations and/or defeats until the price is far higher than would have been paid earlier.
Any tolerance of evil is wrong. Evil not stopped at the outset grows. The problem seems to be a failure to recognize evil for what it is, and then ambivalence as to what to do about it, if recognized.
The first requirement is to have a clear moral code. In today's society that is generally lacking. Decades of public schools' teaching ersatz tolerance and indoctrination with relative and situational ethics and multiculturalism have left many, if not most with no clear guides as to right and wrong. Churches provide moral codes, but often they have a distinct us vs. them flavors as opposed to a generally agreed set of secular standards. Politics does not lead or create moral standards. It simply reflects them. What we see today is certainly conflicting. Take any contentious issue and the morality is nowhere to be seen--laws are created and then either not enforced or selectively enforced.
Ambivalence in action is also a result of no clear moral code. Concern over what other think or appearances weight as heavily or more heavily as the need to correct the evil. "I want to do something but what will [blank] think?" The blank can be filled in by family, neighbors, Mother, the rest of the world. The error is compounded by our refusal to weigh the value of the opinion of concern. Any and all opinions are equally valid, or, in many cases, traditional ones don't count. For believers, God's opinion should weigh more heavily than the neighbors', but we act as of the neighbors' are more important. The prevention of hypothetical harm outweighs the stopping of actual harm. It actually goes so far as to think that not acting will somehow convince an evil-doer to cease acting on their part. Evil-doers count on that to provide time and space to continue their activities.
Evil counts on using our emotions against us. It has no concern for collateral damage, but is aware of our concerns and does everything to maximize collateral damage if attempts are made to stop it. That is the fault of evil, not the fault of justice. The risk of collateral damage is not a cause for inaction, but for greater concern in acting.
"...innocent civilians will be killed."
"...if you do that, he will lose his job, and his family will suffer."
"...try to stop me, and I will kill the hostage."
Every day we see or hear versions of the above--an innocent or innocents will suffer if evil is dealt with. The examples can be as trivial as a person's rude behavior being stopped, where the person is a coward and a bully (the first example above) or as deadly as a hostage situation. In every case, there is a hidden sub-text--"and it will be your fault"--an invalid attempt to transfer guilt.
These situations are often presented as moral dilemmas--doing something wrong to correct another wrong. Taken out of the above contexts, it is wrong for the wife to be harmed, children to suffer, people to be killed. And in all these situations our emotions rise strongly in sympathy for the victims. In today's feel-good society, emotions are taken as validation of any position--"If it feels good, do it", on steroids. If we use emotion as a guide, we are lost. Emotion reacts only to the current situation and to limited input.
What all the above versions of the hostage scenario present is not a moral dilemma but an emotional dilemma. The moral issues arise from the actions of the perpetrator not from someone attempting to set the situation right. The boor that bullies his wife, the terrorist that hides among civilians, the deadbeat that will not feed his children, the grafter that cheats his employer, the fugitive with a hostage, all are committing evil acts at the time and their stated consequences, if stopped, are also their responsibility. They created the situation.
Stopping evil requires action. It is not possible to talk nice and expect a result. This is what any evil person counts on--the fear of creating collateral damage. I submit it is equally as immoral to fail to stop or attempt to stop evil as the evil itself. Those who refuse to act out of the fear of creating collateral damage become accomplices in the continuation of the evil. It makes no difference what the motive of the observer is, good intentions towards the victim are cancelled by the continuation of the current harmful situation.
If action is necessary, it is incumbent on the agent of justice to attempt to minimize the collateral damage to that which is necessary to accomplish the purpose, but it is an absolute necessity to act. If circumstances allow a choice of options to fix the situation, the most controlled is to be used, provided it can do the job. E.g. if a terrorist is in a crowd of people and effective choices are a sniper or a rocket attack--pick the sniper. BUT, if the sniper misses use the rocket. Yes, innocents will be harmed and killed, but the terrorist must be stopped. He or she will do far more damage in the long run if allowed to go free.
Failure to act in a hostage situation simply validates it as an effective survival strategy for the evil-doer. Conversely, if a potential hostage-taker (in any of the above scenarios) knows that it is not effective as a survival strategy, then its use will be discouraged and diminished.
Evil-doers count on the victims being more important then stopping their acts. This mindset has to be changed, and only relentless action will change it . A concomittant requirement is that half-measures will not do. Though minimal collateral damage is desired, the force used to act must be sufficient to achieve the result THE FIRST TIME. If not, there will simply be a series of escalations and/or defeats until the price is far higher than would have been paid earlier.
Any tolerance of evil is wrong. Evil not stopped at the outset grows. The problem seems to be a failure to recognize evil for what it is, and then ambivalence as to what to do about it, if recognized.
The first requirement is to have a clear moral code. In today's society that is generally lacking. Decades of public schools' teaching ersatz tolerance and indoctrination with relative and situational ethics and multiculturalism have left many, if not most with no clear guides as to right and wrong. Churches provide moral codes, but often they have a distinct us vs. them flavors as opposed to a generally agreed set of secular standards. Politics does not lead or create moral standards. It simply reflects them. What we see today is certainly conflicting. Take any contentious issue and the morality is nowhere to be seen--laws are created and then either not enforced or selectively enforced.
Ambivalence in action is also a result of no clear moral code. Concern over what other think or appearances weight as heavily or more heavily as the need to correct the evil. "I want to do something but what will [blank] think?" The blank can be filled in by family, neighbors, Mother, the rest of the world. The error is compounded by our refusal to weigh the value of the opinion of concern. Any and all opinions are equally valid, or, in many cases, traditional ones don't count. For believers, God's opinion should weigh more heavily than the neighbors', but we act as of the neighbors' are more important. The prevention of hypothetical harm outweighs the stopping of actual harm. It actually goes so far as to think that not acting will somehow convince an evil-doer to cease acting on their part. Evil-doers count on that to provide time and space to continue their activities.
Evil counts on using our emotions against us. It has no concern for collateral damage, but is aware of our concerns and does everything to maximize collateral damage if attempts are made to stop it. That is the fault of evil, not the fault of justice. The risk of collateral damage is not a cause for inaction, but for greater concern in acting.
Yet another discussion of Determinism and Free will
This topic is one that I am constantly revisiting. This is the latest effort to deal with these questions. It is a three part series, and the other two parts will be posted over the next few months. I have created links to related posts from the past that were published in Bill's Big Stuff.
PART 1: SCIENCE AND REALITY
Introduction
This will be a three-part set of essays discussing determinism, non-determinism, and free-will. Science, in particular theoretical physics, is often used to justify stating the universe is or is not deterministic and that free-will does or does not exist, based on whether the universe is deterministic or not. The first part of this discussion will show that such claims are beyond the boundaries of science. Science is epistemological, not metaphysical.
The second part will discuss determinism as a metaphysical concept. It will also put some constraints on the issue of whether the universe is or is not deterministic. In doing so, we will use two ideas that were developed in the first section, continuity and reversibility.
Finally we will turn to the question of free-will. As I shall try to show, free-will is actually not contingent on the determinism or non-determinism of the physical universe, and also that non-determinism is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for free-will. [This, in a sense, was the thrust of Daniel Dennett’s, Elbow Room] To do so, we will look at the nature of the brain and touch on the mind/body problem.
This post is quite long and of limited interest to most readers of this blog, so will be posted to Bill's Big Stuff in its entirety.
PART 1: SCIENCE AND REALITY
Introduction
This will be a three-part set of essays discussing determinism, non-determinism, and free-will. Science, in particular theoretical physics, is often used to justify stating the universe is or is not deterministic and that free-will does or does not exist, based on whether the universe is deterministic or not. The first part of this discussion will show that such claims are beyond the boundaries of science. Science is epistemological, not metaphysical.
The second part will discuss determinism as a metaphysical concept. It will also put some constraints on the issue of whether the universe is or is not deterministic. In doing so, we will use two ideas that were developed in the first section, continuity and reversibility.
Finally we will turn to the question of free-will. As I shall try to show, free-will is actually not contingent on the determinism or non-determinism of the physical universe, and also that non-determinism is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for free-will. [This, in a sense, was the thrust of Daniel Dennett’s, Elbow Room] To do so, we will look at the nature of the brain and touch on the mind/body problem.
This post is quite long and of limited interest to most readers of this blog, so will be posted to Bill's Big Stuff in its entirety.
Labels: determinism, free will, philosophy
Monday, December 17, 2007
Peace on Earth
This is the season for songs of peace and goodwill.
I think maybe it is time to unpack some of the meaning in the messages. Let's start with Isaiah, because I have talked about this before. The Jewish prophets wanted a warrior king that would give peace through strength, subjugation, and intimidation. "His name shall be called...The Mighty Lord." Isaiah wasn't talking about some soft-spoken, dewy-eyed, all-forgiving pacifist, he was talking about a kick-butt and take names soldier, leader. Peace was to come from power. Leave me alone or I will make you wish you hadn't. This is the kind of peace that resulted from the Civil War. The South was so beaten they had no possibility of rising up again. This was the peace of WW II. Germany and Japan were so beaten they could not rise up. Finally all three were rehabilitated because they had no choice.
Let's look at the Christmas carol. Since this is most likely a 19th century carol, the background would be the teachings of Jesus that are often used to somehow justify pacifism and inaction. This is re-enforced by the phrase "mercy mild." This is a common thread in Christian history, institutionalized in this country by the Quackers. A Hindu version would be Gandhi's leadership in India. "And look, they worked," some would say. Sure, against people who were civilized and sensitive to suffering to start with. All the pacifism in the world will not change the mind of a hungry tiger, or a bear, or for that matter a Jihadist. None of these three entities are open to reason, and that is the only weapon a pacifist has.
Now let's address the first of the examples, the pop tune. This is the most insidious and the most detached from reality. It sounds so simple and reasonable. It also shows no comprehension of what constitutes peace. It also is an appeal to an entity unnamed and undefined and somehow thought to have the power to grant wishes. Look at the syntax: LET there be..., LET me walk..., so who or what is so powerful as to grant such things? The biggest error here is the thought that the singer has any power in any of this. Walk with my brother? What if the brother wants to kill you? Would it make a difference to martyr oneself in a worthless attempt?
There are two forms of peace--slavery and impregnability. People in North Korea have peace--they have no strife, and they have no choices. Until 9/11 the US had peace--everybody was afraid to do anything to them--until we played wusses in Korea, S. Vietnam and multiple small-scale aggressions on our troops and property--the USS Cole, the Kobar Towers, Mogodeshu. We weren't asked into Korea or Vietnam; we went and without a game plan and got our chops busted.
There is nothing magical about being powerful, it is a matter of determination, freedom, and hard work. We squandered our power after WW II, and now are paying the price. The peaceniks and retreatists of the sixties and seventies are in power now, and we are slowly waking up to the fact that what they want is the peace of slavery. That is not what this country was about, and it is a long, hard road ahead to get back where we belong, assuming we still want to and can.
If we truly want peace on earth, we will get serious, kick some serious butt of those who don't and then make sure it doesn't happen again. If we put proportionately half of the effort into our military that we did in WW II, we could clean it all up in about the same time as we did before. The problem is, we are unaccustomed to the least hardship or deprivation, and are unwilling to sacrifice anything now to a better future. I learned a long time ago a bully listens to only one thing--superior strength. Talking is so much wasted effort. When we realize that most of the world is a bully and/or a con man, we will do much better at dealing with it.
Let's just hope we don't learn the hard way.
Let there be peace on earthor
and let it begin with me...
Let me walk with my brother
in perfect harmony.
(pop tune)
For unto us a son is given...or
The Prince of Peace
(Isaiah and The Messiah)
Hark the herald angels sing...It all sounds so wonderful. Enough good will and there will be no problems, no strife, no animosity, no hatred, no war...everybody will be happy.
peace on earth and mercy mild
(Christmas carol)
I think maybe it is time to unpack some of the meaning in the messages. Let's start with Isaiah, because I have talked about this before. The Jewish prophets wanted a warrior king that would give peace through strength, subjugation, and intimidation. "His name shall be called...The Mighty Lord." Isaiah wasn't talking about some soft-spoken, dewy-eyed, all-forgiving pacifist, he was talking about a kick-butt and take names soldier, leader. Peace was to come from power. Leave me alone or I will make you wish you hadn't. This is the kind of peace that resulted from the Civil War. The South was so beaten they had no possibility of rising up again. This was the peace of WW II. Germany and Japan were so beaten they could not rise up. Finally all three were rehabilitated because they had no choice.
Let's look at the Christmas carol. Since this is most likely a 19th century carol, the background would be the teachings of Jesus that are often used to somehow justify pacifism and inaction. This is re-enforced by the phrase "mercy mild." This is a common thread in Christian history, institutionalized in this country by the Quackers. A Hindu version would be Gandhi's leadership in India. "And look, they worked," some would say. Sure, against people who were civilized and sensitive to suffering to start with. All the pacifism in the world will not change the mind of a hungry tiger, or a bear, or for that matter a Jihadist. None of these three entities are open to reason, and that is the only weapon a pacifist has.
Now let's address the first of the examples, the pop tune. This is the most insidious and the most detached from reality. It sounds so simple and reasonable. It also shows no comprehension of what constitutes peace. It also is an appeal to an entity unnamed and undefined and somehow thought to have the power to grant wishes. Look at the syntax: LET there be..., LET me walk..., so who or what is so powerful as to grant such things? The biggest error here is the thought that the singer has any power in any of this. Walk with my brother? What if the brother wants to kill you? Would it make a difference to martyr oneself in a worthless attempt?
There are two forms of peace--slavery and impregnability. People in North Korea have peace--they have no strife, and they have no choices. Until 9/11 the US had peace--everybody was afraid to do anything to them--until we played wusses in Korea, S. Vietnam and multiple small-scale aggressions on our troops and property--the USS Cole, the Kobar Towers, Mogodeshu. We weren't asked into Korea or Vietnam; we went and without a game plan and got our chops busted.
There is nothing magical about being powerful, it is a matter of determination, freedom, and hard work. We squandered our power after WW II, and now are paying the price. The peaceniks and retreatists of the sixties and seventies are in power now, and we are slowly waking up to the fact that what they want is the peace of slavery. That is not what this country was about, and it is a long, hard road ahead to get back where we belong, assuming we still want to and can.
If we truly want peace on earth, we will get serious, kick some serious butt of those who don't and then make sure it doesn't happen again. If we put proportionately half of the effort into our military that we did in WW II, we could clean it all up in about the same time as we did before. The problem is, we are unaccustomed to the least hardship or deprivation, and are unwilling to sacrifice anything now to a better future. I learned a long time ago a bully listens to only one thing--superior strength. Talking is so much wasted effort. When we realize that most of the world is a bully and/or a con man, we will do much better at dealing with it.
Let's just hope we don't learn the hard way.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
A Christmas song to listen to
Put down whatever else you are doing for the next four minutes. Turn on your speakers if they are off or put on your headphones. Turn up the sound to reasonable levels--this is soft. Now link to this and play the video.
This is my Christmas card to you, as apparently it was Gerard's to his blog readers. This particular song moved me like few do.
This is my Christmas card to you, as apparently it was Gerard's to his blog readers. This particular song moved me like few do.
