Bill's Comments

One of the young adults that my wife and I occasionally have over for dinner is a Dayton, Ohio, police officer. While he was pursuing his criminology degree, we had some interesting discussions. Out of these discussions came my take on the penal system we have today.

I consider our penal system to be ineffective as a deterent to repeated criminal behavior and failing in any rehabilitation goals with few exceptions. I think this is because we are combining two functions into one environment. We expect to punish and to rehabilitate in the same environment. It can't happen.

What I propose is a two-tier system, a hard-time punishment system and a rehabilitation system. Sentencing for crimes would have three components instead of the current two, incarceration and parole. The three would be hard-time, rehab, parole. A convicted felon would be sent to hard time and after a period of time would be eligible for rehab. After time in rehab he/she would be eligible for parole. Any, and that means any, slip from the program leads to full-sentence in hard time.

The key is to make hard-time genuine hardtime, and rehab genuine rehab. Hard-time would be solitary confinement except when under close supervision, and when unconfined, prisoners would eat and work. Work times would be genuine hard labor, as hard as was possible for the felon to accomplish--digging ditches by hand, breaking rocks with sledge hammers, etc., any form of hard, physical labor. It is not meant to be physically harmful, but to be definitely unpleasant. I would expect sentencing to hard time to be a portion of the entire sentence, say 20% or so. [experience on recidivism would fine-tune this.] Once the punishment has been accomplished, then rehab would start. Rehab needs to be genuine skills and knowledge training. It needs to be whatever education is necessary to provide the equivalent of a GED, and skills to enter a trade.

With the consequence of returning to hard-time for not following the program, and true hard-time the reward for criminal behavior, I think the desired results would be obtained. Repeat criminals would get pure hard-time sentences. Hard-time jails should be run to prevent prisoners' organizing into gangs or bullying each other. That is the purpose of solitary.

This satisfies both those who wish to punish felons and those who wish to rehabilitate them. The key to successful rehabilitation is the desire to be rehabilitated. Having to earn rehab via hard-time can be a powerful motivator. I do not consider hard physical labor to be cruel and unusual punishment. Beatings and torture would be, but not working up a sweat.

This idea is not necessarily workable as described, but I think some means of separating the two aspects of prison is necessary for there to be true justice.

Here is a link to a (gasp!) liberal, Marc Cooper. He is quiet and reasoned in his statements. I have just perused his blog, and find it worth reading. Thanks to Michael Totten for the link.

Douglas Kern has published a very interesting and provocative article on the necessity of culture for people to be free.

I have posted a new link to the right, to Norm Weatherby's Quantum Thought. Norm has a very eclectic site, with strong, conservative commentary on many of the items he posts.

About the same time I posted my note on the press getting it wrong, Peg at What If? posted this link to an editorial castigating the press for its behavior over the Iraq war.

I had shut down my posting for the night again, then read this in the Land of the Pharaohs blog. This is a blog I consider important to follow. It is not posted everyday, but the posts are quite revealing of a different mindset in the Middle East than what the media generally quote, but not sycophantic with the US military position. The common man wants us to succeed in Iraq.

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem to lightly: it is dearness only that give every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its good; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated........

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them.......

...And what is a Tory[you are encouraged to substitute Liberal]? Good God! what is he? I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand Tories, were they to attempt to get into arms. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.

But, before the line of irrecoverable separation be drawn between us, let us reason the matter together: Your conduct is an invitation to the enemy, yet not one in a thousand of you has heart enough to join him. Howe[you may substitute any militant Islamic here] is as much deceived by you as the American cause is injured by you. He expects you will take up arms, and flock to his standard, with muskets on your shoulders. Your opinions are of no use to him, unless you support him personally, for 'tis soldiers, and not Tories, that he wants.

.....

There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both. Howe's first object is, partly by threats and partly by promises, to terrify or seduce the people to deliver up their arms and receive mercy. ..... this is what the Tories call making their peace, "a peace which passeth all understanding" indeed! A peace which would be the immediate forerunner of a worse ruin than any we have yet thought of. "

Thomas Paine wrote these words December 23, 1776, when the Continental Army was encamped at Valley Forge in one of the most horrible winters of our history. They are still valid and applicable today. It is not odds and polls and fear-mongering that makes history and wins wars, it is steadfastness and perseverance despite the preceding.

One of the advantages and disadvantages of traveling as much as I do, is that USA Today is delivered outside my room every morning. It is an advantage in that I am more aware of what is occurring in the world than I would be otherwise, and it is a disadvantage because it gives me more to be upset over. (I have been banned for the last 20 years from watching TV news at home. I get too worked up, more at the delivery than the information itself). This article is one of the ones that I got upset over.

On Tuesday, April 27, 2004, in USA Today, on page 13A, the article, "Special interests corrupt what is and isn't news," by Susan E. Tifft appeared. (Incorrect title capitalization in the original). Ms Tifft teaches journalism and public policy at Duke University. I underlined almost half the article, but I will try to extract the salient lines that troubled me so much.

"Luckily, Big Tobacco never acquired Big Media, and the nation was saved from the prospect of newspapers run by the Marlboro Man."

What is wrong with newspapers run by the Marlboro Man? Would they be inferior to those run by Rupert Murdoch? Is not this society based on everyone being able to state their point of view, including cigarette manufacturers? (Oh, yeah, I forgot...they're bad...don't let them talk or advertise or ....)

The NRA launched its own news company, and she states "NRA President Wayne LaPierre was candid about the goal: to give the NRA's media arm the same legal recognition as a mainstream news organization, so that it can push pro-gun views and candidates without the pesky constraints of the campaign-finance law's ban on certain donations." (emphasis mine)

First of all, since she didn't put Mr. LaPierre's statement in quotes, I am suspicious that he actually said what she claims he said. The sneer in the phrase "pesky constraints" which I believe is hers, is a good example of the poor journalism she expects from the NRA, and a not too subtle ad hominum attack. It should be obvious they would push pro-gun views and candidates, just as the NYT and other major newspapers push liberal causes and candidates. As for the new campaign finance laws, the Democrats have already been accused of major violations of them, and George Soros is doing his best to get around them. Why shouldn't the NRA?

"What's legally possible, though, isn't necessarily desirable. In a nation already bitterly divided along partisan lines, we don't need more media bias. An overtly political press is a clear step backward - - to the 19th century, to be precise, when parties openly subsidized newspapers."

We already have an overtly political press. Actually what we need is honest media bias. We as citizens are perfectly capable of determining what we believe.

"The NRA is one of the biggest magazine publishers in the country"...What it doesn't do -- and shouldn't do -- is pretend it is providing "news."

Excuse me, but when does the source define news and not-news? The NRA is not pretending to provide news, it is actually providing news, just not the news Ms Tifft wants. I would ask her, "Is the Journal of the Atomic Scientists publishing news?" I subscribed to it for several years. It is politically biased in the direction opposite of mine, but I could depend on it for more accurate and greater in-depth articles than any standard media source.

"The NRA's recent action corrupts the conventional definition of "news" ...

No, just hers.

"It demeans the journalistic craft and mocks the democratic principle that for self-governance to work, citizens must have access to accurate information."

I think very few people believe that the press is objective, unbiased, or neutrally fact oriented. At one time most large towns and all cities had at least two newspapers, one conservative and one liberal in outlook. Now most cities have one, and though there is lip service to presenting both sides, they tend to be overwhelmingly liberal in viewpoint. I used to tell my students in nuclear energy classes, try to read articles on both sides of the issue. Where both sides agreed, you could probably take it as fairly reliable fact.

Ms Tifft's op-ed piece provides a good example of what is wrong with journalism today. It wants only its answers to appear. Contradiction is intolerable. The First Amendment applies only to some speech. We deserve better than that.

This was passed on to me by one of my colleagues today.

Companies Finding Some Computer Jobs Best Done in U.S.

Even as the prospect of high-skilled American jobs moving to low-wage countries
like India ignites hot political debate, some entrepreneurs are finding that
India's vaunted high-technology work force is not always as effective as
advertised. Full story

John Ray at Dissecting Leftism linked to this article, in which one of the reasons for turning off the TV for a week was...."a recently released study th[at] purports to show a link between watching TV and developing attention deficit disorder. Even though the authors of the study flatly state, 'We have not in fact studied or found an association between television viewing and clinically diagnosed ADHD,...'"

Actually there is a hidden agenda here. TV is blamed for a diminished capacity of students to pay attention. They supposedly want the constant over-stimulation. I think it is a coverup for the teachers' inability to engage the minds of the students in any meaningful way. As a consequence they misbehave and in general are much poorer at educational tasks. If they are diagnosed ADHD they can be drugged into placidity. [I have had direct experience both with ADHD children and with teachers wanting to drug non-ADHD children that were behavior problems.] Never mind that they probably won't learn anything. They just want orderly class rooms. To get this they are now trying to claim that an inborn neurological disorder is acquired, an attempt to impose that nurture as opposed to nature is all important.

I have taught in a military school where a significant portion of the student body was actually ADHD and was on medication. These were so-called problem students. I found that because I respected their questions, was able to take their questions and make a learning experience from them, and taught things that were of value for them to know and that they wanted to know, these problem students were a joy to teach. The very few times I had a hint of a possible discipline problem, I made an issue of it immediately, and it stopped with no hard feelings on either side.

The general problem in schools today is that too few parents care, too few teachers care, the politicians rape and pillage to obtain tax money to throw at the problem., and the kids are left high and dry. Why should they behave, pay attention, or even attend. Its boring and degrading. The really tragic thing is that when they get out of school, they will suddenly be hit with reality, and it is harsh for the unprepared.

I thought I was done for tonight, but then I read Peggy Kaplan at What if?. Her piece on Stereotypes and More is an excellent report on a very contentious issue.

I got this from Fox News after 9/11. I think that I may repost it then as a tribute, but it is well worth reading now, and remembering.

FOXNews.com

Giving Thanks for Those in Uniform

Wednesday, November 21, 2001
By Kenneth Adelman


This will be an extraordinary Thanksgiving, as this has been
an extraordinary fall. So tomorrow let's express our deepest
appreciation for those extraordinary uniformed men and women
who enrich our nation.
How can we express enough thanks for those firefighters on
Sept. 11? As one commentator reflected, the most unusual
aspect of firefighters is their odd sense of direction: as
throngs were pouring down and out of the World Trade Center,
they were rushing in and up to save people. Nearly 350 of the
brethren did not lose their lives on Sept. 11. They gave them.

And they continue to toil at the still-incendiary Ground Zero.
One firefighter said the other day that the only time off he's
taken off is to attend funerals of his fallen comrades.
Heroes, all.

Next, we must remember the athletes who happened to board
United Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco on the 11th.
As Sports Illustrated described in an emotional story in the
Sept. 24 issue: "The huge rugby player, the former high school
football star and the onetime college baseball player were in
first class, the former national judo champ was in coach. On
the morning of Sept. 11, at 32,000 feet, those four men teamed
up to sacrifice their lives for those of perhaps thousands of
others." They didn't board the flight expecting to be heroes.
Ordinary fellows, each one, until they proved so
extraordinary.

Their widows graciously understand this. "A peace grew inside
Liz Glick. 'I think God had this larger purpose for him,' she
said. 'He was supposed to fly out the night before, but
couldn't. I had [our daughter] Emmy one month early, so Jeremy
got to see her. You can't tell me God isn't at work there.'"
And Sports Illustrated described how: "In Cranbury, N.J., a
baby grew in Lisa Beamer, Todd's wife, their third child.
Hearing the report last Friday of her husband's heroics, Lisa
said, 'made my life worth living again.' It was Todd Beamer,
after all, who told his wife he loved her and the children,
before telling his flight-mates, 'Let's roll.'"

That they probably saved the Capitol building, or the White
House, is an incomparable gift to the American people.
We are thankful, too, to the police and other rescue workers
and to the mayor of New York. On Sept. 10, Rudolph Giuliani
was an oft-mocked figure who was considered, at best, a
controversial politician. He transformed himself into an
extraordinary leader on Sept. 11 and every single day since.
He's my candidate for Time magazine's "Man of the Year" for
2001.

And last, but surely not least, are those proudly wearing the
uniform of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast
Guard. These men and women have, in the last several weeks,
performed honorably and with dignity in defense of their
fellow countrymen.

Americans gathering around their dining room tables tomorrow
should give thanks for the continuing sacrifice and dedication
of these men and women. These soldiers are fulfilling the
traditional role that the greatest living military historian,
John Keegan, celebrates in the closing paragraphs of his book,
Fields of Battle: the Wars for North America:

Americans are proficient at war in the same way that they are
proficient with work. It is a task, sometimes a duty.
Americans have worked at war since the seventeenth century, to
protect themselves from Indians, to win their independence
from George III, to make themselves one country, to win the
whole of their continent, to extinguish autocracy and
dictatorship in the world outside.

It is not their favored form of work. Left to themselves,
Americans build, cultivate, bridge, dam, canalize, invent,
teach, manufacture, think, write, lock themselves in struggle
with eternal challenges that man has chosen to confront, and
with an intensity not known elsewhere on the globe.

Bidden to make war their work, Americans shoulder the burden
with intimidating purpose. There is, I have said, an American
mystery, the nature of which I only begin to perceive. If I
were obliged to define it, I would say it is the ethos —
masculine, pervasive, unrelenting — of work as an end in
itself.

War is a form of work, and America makes war, however
reluctantly, however unwillingly, in a particularly
workmanlike way.

I do not love war, but I love America.

Kenneth Adelman is a frequent guest commentator on Fox News,
was assistant to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from
1975 to 1977 and, under President Ronald Reagan, U.N.
ambassador and arms-control director. Mr. Adelman is now
co-host of TechCentralStation.com.

Belief in God

Belief in God is an emotional, not a rational, thing. There are no proofs either for or against the existence of God. Belief seems to arise when things are so bleak that one feels totally incapable of dealing with them, when one's self-image is so poor that one feels they have no innate value, or when extremely unlikely events occur and one cannot believe they occurred without help. There have been many times when a belief in God (as a directly acting and personal agent) would have made my emotional life easier, but that never seemed to be a reason to believe. What happens if later the belief made life harder? Do I drop it for convenience?

However, if I accept an interfering God, where and where not does he interfere? Does he only set up the general situations and leave me to work out the details? Does he actually deal in a lot of trivia? How do we rationalize "free-will" which is supposed to give meaning to our choices to live a godly life, when God makes the options loaded in one direction or another? Where do I fit God into the overall scenario of the Universe? A God-of-the-gaps approach is invalid; He gets pushed further away each time a gap is filled. To relegate him to starting everything and then sitting back and watching all but invalidates the need for Him.

God doesn't violate his own rules of nature.

This idea occurred to me about four or five months ago. I took the approach that if there were God, what must his nature be, and what could be reasonably said about it. First of all it seemed that it would lead to a horribly contradictory mess if God willy-nilly chose which laws of nature he observed and which he didn't. In addition it makes him out to be an arbitrary and capricious Being, similar to Gods of ancient myths. This is assuming that he wrote the laws in the first place. It would also undermine any and all attempts at studying nature, if the rules under study could be altered at any time. Once the assumption is made that God follows his own rules of nature, then a number of things fall into place. Nature being generally deterministic with random elements and events (There is a whole world of discourse tied up in that phrase), both good and bad events will occur without a relationship to any one person or any group of people and their moral status. Hurricanes, tornados, flood, etc. strike good and bad alike, just as a wonderful growing season profits all farmers, not just the morally good ones. Another consequence is that reports of miracles that appear to violate laws of nature would fall into made up events, misconstrued events, mis-reported events, or the use of a law of nature undiscovered to date. Another consequence is that the physical world can be left to science, and religion can focus on what it is best suited for, dealing with the relationships between people and between people and God. The tools of Science are not generally suited to dealing with morality, and the tools of religion are not suited to dealing with science. Religion is concerned with what is inside the person, NOT what is out there. Out there is the province of science.

I was asked once by a good friend who is a lay minister, "If God doesn't violate the laws of nature, is it because He won't, or because He can't?" At the time I passed on an answer because I had not thought it out that far. However, like others before me, I conclude that God does not because He cannot. I do not ascribe to an omnipotent (infinitely powerful) God. I tie my concept of God in with my concept of souls. God may be the totality of all the good souls acting in concert yet individually. In other words, as people have evolved and evolved souls, so has God evolved. In this case, God could be relatively omniscient (all knowing) compared to any individual or group of individuals, even though not absolutely omniscient.

If God does not violate the laws of nature, then the only way left to act is through people. This assumes the existence of free will and choice, i.e., a non-deterministic universe. (I'm still working on that. Daniel Dennett has published a book in 1984, called Elbow Room on exactly this topic. I have read it once, but it deserves much further study.)

This concept of a not omnipotent God also turns a common thought around. People say that God lays no more on us than we can handle. It would be more accurate to say God often provides us with what we need to handle what has been laid on us.

Glorifying God:
We treat God like He can be bribed with flattery. Sincere gratitude is what is required. Basically we approach God in our own image, despite the attempts of prophets and evangelists to teach us otherwise. We act as if he can be manipulated, bargained with, bribed, flattered. The Christian concept of grace negates any requirement on us beyond acceptance and thanksgiving. The rest of it may make us feel good, but neither helps nor diminishes God.

Attending Church:
We go to church for our benefit, not God's benefit. Considering the good to be gotten, God is glad to see us in church, but I don't think he requires it. If God is really as we make him out to be, worshipping him in the sense of abject surrender, excessive praise and flattery, as primitives do their gods, is not pleasing. Gratitude is; joy is; requests for help are; joining together to accomplish good is; joining together to reinforce commitment to doing good things and improving ourselves are. God doesn't care what we wear to church unless it is deliberately disrespectful. He does care about our sincerity.

Church fulfills a need in us, what Karen Armstrong calls the desire for religion. Church can provide comfort and safety. It can provide others to care and assist.

Faith
For Christians, or people of any other faith, to claim to have the one true answer is arrogance beyond belief. To imply or state that only Christians go to heaven, and everyone else is damned to Hell is to turn God from the benevolent, powerful Father into the petty, self-seeking despot, who wants sycophants for worshippers. Motivation is all the difference in evangelism. To "convert the heathen" so they won't go to Hell is much different from sharing the benefits of a belief in God as the Father of Jesus, the Christ. For that matter, We have a huge pool of non-Christians on this earth, are they all damned to Hell? What happens if we find planets of civilized people? Especially if they have their own religious systems that have essentially the same behavior codes, but a totally different justification for their existence.

As a code of living as humans, much of Christianity is extremely good. With the emphasis on forgiving, sharing, caring, loving one-another, it goes a long way towards making for smooth day-to-day interactions.

My own assessment overall is that God doesn't really give a damn whether we believe in Him or not--He cares how we live our lives and treat each other. The Pharisees killed Jesus but believed they were going to Heaven. Al Qaida believes that killing non-believers, infidels, will gain them heaven. During the Crusades Christians believed that killing Arabs and Jews would gain them heaven, and the Jews as a people have a history of conquest and bloodshed in the name of God. I find it impossible to believe that a belief in God and the practice of the rituals of religion would reverse the condemnation of such people to Hell.

Heaven and Hell
My concept of the afterlife is not conventional. First of all I am too grounded in science to believe in literal physical resurrection of the dead. I do however believe our souls survive us. So what happens to good souls? I think they continue an existence in the company of other good souls that is analogous to our life on earth. I think they interact as individuals with each other, and also with those of us in this world that they can. To the degree they can, I think their actions have led to the concept of guardian angels. To the extent that they can interact with people, they will try to protect us from unwitting harm. They don't always succeed, nor should they be expected to.

Then what happens to the bad souls? I think they are totally isolated with only themselves for company. They do not go to a collective Hell, but a personal, private, one-member Hell, where they have only the contemplation of their wrong-doing to occupy them. I think that once they are forgiven on Earth and become adequately remorseful and truly see their evil, they can become members of the heavenly group. The visions of Dante are really not as bad as total isolation. To us the living they seem awful, but that is because they predicate a physical body for their effectiveness. All a soul has is interaction with other souls, and if that is denied, it would be truly Hell.

Prayer
In my earlier posting on Life after Death, I mentioned the problem of energy to maintain souls. Where does would the energy come from? Since the amounts of energy I see as required are small, I think that they may come from our minds when we pray in a particular frame of mind. The frame of mind has to be similar to or identical with a meditative state. In some cases, it is not important what we pray for, as much as that we are praying. There may be some direction however, similar to ear-marking a check to the United Way for certain causes. I believe in the power of prayer for reasons more personal than to be shared in a blog, but not all prayer is effective nor can all prayers be answered. From the earlier discussions, only those prayers that can be accomplished through people have a chance of being answered. Of those, only prayers that can be accomplished through people with minds open to the "still, small voice" will be accomplished. The human brain acts as a very powerful amplifier, converting the minute signals of the cerebral cortex into physical action. Thus it would be possible for the minute interaction of souls with the brains of the living to be amplified into human action.

This post fills out the first paragraph of my first post in this area, An Overview of My Religious Beliefs. I am not suggesting that this is an answer to my questions for anyone but myself. However, I wish to share it as a possible stimulus to others' thinking on these subjects.

In response to my post on the space program, Ed at Ed's Rants and Musings sent me this link to a post he made in January about the Columbia disaster. Ed is a space enthusiast as I am and his link is appreciated. I have put a link to his blog at the right.

Gentlemen,

the problem with a Republic is that we will get what we deserve.

--Benjamin Franklin

I can still remember the night when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. I was tracing a schematic on a fraction-collector (a piece of lab equipment [for the non-chemists]). It was about 2:30 or so in the morning when I heard, "Houston, this is Tranquility Base. The Eagle has landed." I still can't repeat it aloud without choking up. I still consider it one of the greatest triumphs of humanity AS HUMANS. Using our brains, we created a means to leave the planet upon which every living creature up to that time was bound.

Since that time our space program has fallen into grave disrepair. The clear goals of the lunar program gave way to vague goals of space stations, big projects ruled by bureaucracy, and the two shuttle disasters. The most exciting space programs since then have been the Mars landers, and the Voyager programs. People care about exploration and going somewhere new. Humans must dislike absolute boundarie--they do everything possible to get around them. Now that most of the Earth has been explored (Oceanic abysses are the main exception) our sanity as a species needs a frontier to actually go to or to vicariously go to via surrogate explorers.

I once gave a speech in Toastmasters that started, "Last night at 3:00 AM I was in jail." I went on to describe the circumstances by which I arrived there, and then gave the punch line--it was a Dungeon and Dragons game and my character had crossed the local authorities. The point that I wanted to make then and still firmly believe in is, that I was playing D & D at the age of 35 because of the sense of adventure it engendered, and that most people have that same need for a sense of adventure. I think exploring space fulfills that need and for that reason, if no other the exploration should go on.

I read a lot of science fiction from the age of 12 until almost 40. I still occasionally read it, but like more realistic fiction now. The science fiction I grew up with was pretty scientific. It was not the fantasy based on medieval romanticism of current science fiction/fantasy. Through the imagination of the authors, I came to believe that man belonged anywhere he could go. I still believe it and want to see a strong space program. However, the current approach is not the way to go.

Just as the first sea voyages were sponsored by European rulers, but the real exploitation of the oceans was carried out by merchants, fishermen, and explorers after riches, so to should space programs now be given over to private enterprise. The government should keep the military uses of space, as these are focused and purposeful. The remainder is drifting with no clear goal or mission. There are many private individuals trying to find a way to get to space cheaply, quite analogous to the Wright brothers, who pursued and succeeded, despite a big government program to produce powered flight. The program failed ignominiously. The individuals, if left to do so, will succeed. Not without failures and death along the way. But in those cases the choices will have been made by individuals not by committees. The responsibility and consequences, both good and bad, will be readily attributable.

I consider the current space station to be a massive boondoggle. It has no clear, focused purpose, and the sharing with Russia may seem politically nice, but it actually is a liability since the standards of production are not comparable. I think the Russians gain much more than we do from it. Our Mars program appears better, but again, being government sponsored, it has had a number of major reversals. If there had been a private race to Mars, we would have been there years ago and at no cost to the taxpayers.

With space exploration paid for with tax dollars, there is a constant warfare over the goals and which resources will be used. There are constant arguments that instrumented missions are more cost effective than manned missions. For a set of the scientific community this is true. But they are not the ones paying the bills. For the rest of us, manned spaceflight is what connects emotionally and makes us want to support a space program. I think most of us that want a space program want a man-in-space program. Gene Rodenberry was right, "Space, the final frontier..." What's best of all it is an infinite frontier.

The AnalPhilosopher in his disguise as the philosopher, Keith Burgess-Jackson, has published a column in Tech Central Station today on why liberals are so angry. He said in his blog that it resulted in a massive email response, much laudatory and some...angry. I would expect the anger, after all, how dare Keith defect from liberalism, and in the process reveal it to be less than it sees itself?

One of the problems with liberalism is that it somehow produces a Dr. Jeckyl/Mr. Hyde tranformation in its adherents. In many ways the vocal, rabid portion of the liberal world reminds me of a homegrown extremist movement that resembles Islamic extremism in its pronouncements and methods. I had dinner tonight with professional friends that are liberals. They are quiet about it, but when political questions come up have the same knee-jerk reactions that most liberals do, with about the same justifications. I would characterize these associates as caring people, until it comes to politics. Suddenly they expess hate for President Bush and even more so John Ashcroft. They are against the war in Iraq, but yet when asked about John Kerry or Ralph Nader, are luke-warm and derisive, respectively.

In one of his most eloquent columns Keith described his journey from liberalism to conservatism. I have known young people who are liberals because they care about others. They simply do not understand that the things they desire must be paid for, and that people tend not to appreciate that which is free. What transforms some of these young, caring people into the shrill, virulent type of liberal, instead of following the path that Keith and I have followed? The most likely answer I come up with is denial--denial that the world is not as nice as they would like it to be, denial that their wish is not someone else's command, denial that the Universe operates by law not whim, denial that they are simply just another person trying to make it. And the harder their denial butts up against reality, the more stridently they try to maintain it. In the end, they are left with a very unreal world view, and they never understand why it doesn't work. In my better moments, I feel sorry for them. I think they miss a lot along the way. In my worse moments, I really wish they could be in an alternate universe where they get exactly what they wish for, in full consequence (They always are somewhat protected by the rest of us). Most of the time they remind me of gnats, more a bother than a real problem.

Land of the Pharohs is back from a camping trip with more observations on the general Arab outlook and specifically on the lying by Al Jazeera.

I think this quote makes a good post script to the preceding one.

"I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism."

--P D James

P D James is a British author who writes excellent mystery novels. One of her none mystery novels, The Children of Men, is an very interesting tale of the future with an excellent "Lady and the Tiger" ending.

I want to write more extensively on this at a later date as part of a planned series. However, the mention in this article of the church and state issue incouraged me to make a few preliminary comments.

The entire issue of prayer in schools and government sponsorship or promotion stems from the Establishment clause which states that "Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion." As a strict constructionist, I read that clause as specifically preventing Congress from establishing a state religion, such as the Church of England (C of E). The C of E owns Westminster Cathedral, where Diana was mourned and the rulers of England are crowned. It is because of the religious intolerance created by the existence of the C of E, that the Puritans, as well as many other faiths, came to this country. This is the evil addressed by the Establishment Clause.

Over the years this clause has been increasingly more loosely interpreted to provide the basis whereby religion is, in effect, persecuted. Generally, there is a bias in the application of the intolerance, Christianity is more constrained than are other faiths. Granted it is the prodominant faith in this country, but where rights are concerned, one is the same as many. Any governmental organization is now being accused of encouraging or sponsoring religion merely by tolerating displays of religious ideas. Note that there has been a generalization from establishing A religion to encouraging religion in general.

This country was founded on tolerance for all religions as well as for atheists and agnostics. It is becoming intolerant of religion, and in some cases vehemently so. In other cases it is a strangulation by bureaucratic fiat, bit by bit. E.g., children no longer have a Christmas break; it is a winter holiday. These attempts at secular purity make a mockery of the actual motives and history of this country and erode bit by bit our heritage. Without a knowledge of the role religion played in the lives of our forebearers, how can we understand why they did what they did?

I am a railroad buff. I love trains; I actually enjoy being stopped by them. I can almost have a wreck when driving by a railroad yard. I like them as well or better than construction. So it is natural that I would have picked up on this item in todays (April 26, 2004) USA Today. On Page 3A is an article on "silent zones" where trains do not have to blow their horns as a grade crossing warning.

I want to focus on two paragraphs in the article.

"The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) says removing the quiet zones will reduce accidents and deaths at crossings because trains will be able to sound their horns as a warning. In 2002, the last available statistics, 357 motorists died at railroad crossings, FRA says; it's not known how many were at silent crossings."

"Kulm [Steven Kulm, FRA spokesman] estimates that the new rule will prevent 13 deaths, 60 injuries and 123 accidents over a 20 year period."

Let's look at this a bit. The new rules apply to 154,000 crossings, and require certain enhancements to avoid the blast of horns, to the tune of $100,000 or more per crossing. For this we will get a reduction of .65 deaths, 3 injuries and 6 accidents a year. Pleas to reconsider are falling on deaf ears. The number of crossings that are currently exempt is 2400, so we are talking about an expenditure of $250,000,000 or so to have an effect that is probably lost in statistical noise if it is real. What is worse, how did Kulm come up with his numbers when he has no idea of the number of accidents at exempt crossings in the first place?

There is a clause in the Constitution that says the states are responsible for the health, welfare, and safety of its citizens. The Constitution also says that only powers specifically enumerated can be exercised by the Federal Government, that all other powers devolve to the states. I realize that this has been abrogated long ago, primarily by improper reading of the 14th Amendment. But here is a clear case of what happens when Congress takes away power from the states and then abdicates it to the Executive branch bureaucracy to implement.

I resurrected this from my list-serve files. It appeared a little over a year ago on a computer list-serve. It provides such a constrast to our current risk-adversive society. I was a child in the 40's, and 50's. The 40's were even more primitive, especially during and after the war.

If you lived as a child in the 50's, 60's or 70's, looking back, it's
hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have... As children,
we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Our cots were
covered with bright coloured lead-based paint. We had no childproof
lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cupboards, and when we rode our
bikes we had no helmets. We drank water from the garden hose and not
from a bottle. Horrors. We would spend hours building go-carts out of
scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the
brakes. After running into the bushes a few times we learned to solve
the problem. We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as
long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able
to reach us all day. No mobile phones. Unthinkable.
We got cut and broke bones and broke teeth, and there were no law suits
from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame, but us.
Remember accidents?
We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned
to get over it.
We ate sugary sweets, bread and butter, and drank cordial, but we were
never overweight...we were always outside playing. We shared one drink
with four friends, from one bottle and no one died from this.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, video games, 250
satellite channels on TV, DVD movies, surround sound, personal mobile
phones, Personal Computers, Internet chat rooms ... we had friends. We
went outside and found them. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home
and knocked on the door, or rung the bell, or just walked in and talked
to them.
Imagine such a thing. Without asking a parent! By ourselves! Out there
in the cold cruel world! Without a guardian - how did we do it?
We made up games with sticks and tennis balls, and ate worms, and
although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many
eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever.
Footy and netball had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who
didn't, had to learn to deal with disappointment.....
Some students weren't as smart as others and failed exams so they were
held back a year. Tests were not adjusted for any reason.
Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected. No one to hide
behind.
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of.
They actually sided with the law - imagine that!
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem
solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years has been an explosion of
innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and
responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

My friend Keith Burgess-Jackson aka AnalPhilosopher in this post stated that we should leave Iraq by the end of 2004. He published one reaction supporting his contention, but from different grounds. When I think about what he has said, it crosses my mind that, yes, he is correct, we should not be nation-building. But then I consider the overall environment and I am not so sure. Keith points out that if they botch it [building their own nation] that they didn't deserve liberty. In the sense that they were unable to live up to it, I would agree.

However, looking at the realities of that environment, I have two concerns. 1) With a history of nothing but theocracies and autocrats, democracy cannot be learned in one year, and 2) if we pull out too soon, it will not appear as a reasoned exit but a defeat to all our enemies there, and Iran, Syria, Lebanon (yes, I know Syria's stooge), aided an abetted by the French, Russians and Germans will destroy anything we have started. And the repercussions to Israel will be severe as well.

Keith has argued well that our entry to the war was justified. The question becomes, "In what way has the situation changed that we can no longer justify our presence?" The sense I get from Keith's post is that it will be a prolonged effort. There are historical precedents for that, e.g., Japan and Germany after WWII, and the expenditure then relatively and absolutely speaking was far greater than now. Keith expresses indifference at the risk of another Saddam and states that we would deal with that if it occurs. Then the argument, at least for this part, becomes an exercise in risk assessment. Is it less expensive to remain and suppress the possibility of another Saddam to some small value, or do we take the risk that it will not occur, but if it does, the costs saved will be greater than those to either deal with it when it occurs or those expended remaining as a preventative.

I am sympathetic of the costs involved, in particular human, and the death of Pat Tillman, was one of the more visible manifestations. But this is one of those situations that the obvious right answer at the first level leads to a whole host of options, none of which are particularly desirable and most of which "suck." Creating deadlines helps in setting priorities and getting things to happen. The date of June 30 for an interim Iraqi government is such a desirable deadline. However, a deadline to leave Iraq would provide aid and comfort to our enemies there--they would just have to hunker-down until we left then let all hell break loose.

In this case, Keith, I respectfully disagree.

I just followed the link posted in here by Keith Burgess-Jackson aka AnalPhilosopher.. Yes, the left is evil, and utterly without any redeeming virtues. I don't recommend reading the item and comments unless you have a very strong stomach and level head. They deserve the same treatment as a rabid animal. I would take a shower, but it won't clean out the slime I let into my mind while reading. The irony is without the Pat Tillmans of the world, they wouldn't survive to spew their hatreds. I do wonder what they would do if they really had to live by what they say.

One of the biggest obstacles to the implementation of more nuclear power generation is fear. Fear of radioactivity, fear of an accident, fear of a nuclear explosion. From my teaching experiences, I know people have the fear of a nuclear explosion, and from conversations, they have a totally unreasoned fear of anything nuclear having an accident or failure. The press’s handling of Three Mile Island (TMI) and Chernobyl contributes greatly to this. First because TMI was not a major disaster though one would have thought so from the press, and two because Chernobyl was, but not for the causes everyone saw in the news. Also contributing to the fear myths are movies like The China Syndrome which is believable only to someone willing to suspend all judgment concerning nuclear safety and corporate governance.

Let’s start with Three Mile Island. What happened, was that due to a combination of operator error and possible instrumentation issues, the water level in the core of the reactor dropped too low and the reactor overheated. This started a runaway process that created high steam pressure in the reactor chamber and caused a release of radioactive steam. The core then melted down. The release of radioactivity was primarily in the form of tritium (a Hydrogen isotope) which has a very weak emission, and a relatively short half-life. The actual highest exposure to anyone in the vicinity could not have been greater than that from having an x-ray, and tritium is not sequestered in the body. The meltdown was contained in the reaction chamber and left to cool—for a long time. This was the biggest nuclear “disaster” in this country that has been reported.

To read the press at the time one would have thought that half the population of the Harrisburg, PA, vicinity would have mutated children as a result. This was due to the combination of sensationalism and ignorance. I talked to someone that lived in the area at the time, and he claimed that he could taste the radioactivity when he went outside! Sorry, but we are constantly being bombarded by radioactivity and it is tasteless. This person claimed it tasted like a copper penny. I know that taste—it is the taste of fear. This man was terrified of the possibility of being exposed to radioactivity. Yet he would think nothing of an x-ray which is related to radioactivity. It is not his fault—he has never been taught by schools or media. In my experience, they are equally ignorant.

In the press and activist literature there is an equating of Chernobyl with TMI, or a misuse of the Chernobyl disaster (a true, horrible disaster) as an argument against nuclear power. So let’s look at Chernobyl and see what happened. First we have to discuss construction of nuclear reactors a bit. Take a deep breath, relax, this will not be technical. American reactors for power generation are built entirely differently from Chernobyl’s reactor. First the purpose is different, power reactors expend fuel, and eventually have to be refueled. As a consequence, the control of the neutrons from the nuclear reaction is more stringent. Only enough neutrons are allowed to remain to continue the reaction. (For those interested, but do not understand the nuclear basics here, I will post something to Bill’s Big Stuff in the future.) In addition, the reactor itself is contained in reinforced concrete shell called the reactor vessel which has been designed to hold the core in place regardless of what happens, including a meltdown. TMI is proof that it does so. Chernobyl was a Soviet Army breeder reactor. Therefore, it was built, not to eliminate excess neutrons, but to slow them down so that they could be trapped by another uranium and convert to plutonium, the main material in atomic weapons. To slow the neutrons, they used graphite. Yep, the same stuff that pencil “lead” is made from. Also they had no reactor vessel, and the instrumentation was such that there could be positive feedback loops. (There are two kinds of feedback, positive which is essentially an amplifier, and negative which dampens the original cause.)

The scenario was essentially that the operators made a major mistake in controlling a surge of power. (Graphite breeder reactors are notoriously unstable). Their actions initiated a positive feedback loop that caused the reactor to overheat. At that point there was an uncontained STEAM explosion. (Emphasis because it is not possible for there to be an atomic explosion in a nuclear reactor—why is a future Bill’s Big Stuff item) With the water gone, the reactor heated further until the graphite caught fire. This fire was the cause of the disaster. The burning of the graphite (hundreds of tons) created a radioactive smoke that contained the radioactive materials from the reactor core. Once the fire started, the core would have melted and many of the metals burned, and if not burned volatilized. The smoke was carried all over Europe leading to reports of contaminated milk in Scandinavia for example. It turned the entire area around Chernobyl into a wasteland. AnalPhilosopher, has linked to a site with pictures and descriptions of the area.

A third nuclear accident of a different type occurred in Japan. During the processing of plutonium for power plant use, enough plutonium came together to create a critical mass and an uncontrolled chain reaction occurred. Note, there was not an explosion. It takes a critical mass of material to create an explosion, but it has to be in a certain configuration. In this case there was enough in liquid form. What occurred was a sudden intense burst of neutrons that irradiated a number of workers. I do not remember if any died, but certainly some were very ill.

In all three incidents, there was no nuclear explosion, and the meltdown did not create a ball of molten material that bored into the earth without stopping (the premise of The China Syndrome). The release of radioactivity in Chernobyl was due to the design of the reactor, a design which would never be used in the US or Western Europe for that matter. The release of radioactivity in the TMI incident was very small and amounted to no health threat. The release of radioactivity in the Japanese incident was local, and was due to not following procedure and a number of workers and supervisors were punished.

My ultimate goal in all of my posts on nuclear energy, the previous one, this one, and the ones to come, is to lead to an understanding of nuclear energy. Such understanding is not taught in schools and is certainly not conveyed in media articles. From this understanding I want the realization to occur that our energy needs will only be solved in the long run with nuclear power. With the emphasis on clean air, the only output from nuclear plants directly to the environment is heat. The issues of waste disposal are the subject of other posts. For now it suffices to say they are technically solvable, but currently, not politically.

The so-called alternative sources of power are not sufficient to provide significant amounts of power, and they have much larger impacts on the environment than originally anticipated. Many of the problems with alternative power sources are that no one does the real engineering calculations on their effectiveness until after the policy to implement them is created. None of them, with the possible exception of hydroelectric power or geothermal power are commercially viable without government subsidy. Now some of the hydroelectric sources are being taken down because of other impacts, river ecology and salmon reproduction being two examples.

I have often thought fairy stories were lost on kids. They often have much more wit and wisdom than is commonly supposed. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are two examples. The following quote is one of my favorites:

"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master – that's all.'"
– Lewis Carroll
"Through The Looking Glass"

From this quote I have coined two phrases, one, "Humpty-Dumpty word", and two, "rubberband word". The first is a word which, a la Humpty Dumpty, has had its meaning altered beyond all recognition. The second is a word that has had its meaning stretched beyond a reasonable assignment. The second is often used in debate to make an opponent's argument more severe or incorrect than it is. The first is used to totally baffle and obfuscate.

Events are catching up with me faster than I can keep ahead. I may not be able to post for the next couple of days anything of significance.

Robots have both fascinated and horrified people for tens, possibly over a hundred years. I can remember the robots-are-good stories, the greatest being Asimov’s “I Robot”. There were others such as QUR (Quimby’s Usiform Robots, very light-hearted). There were also the apocalyptic ones, such as “With Folded Hands” where robots did everything and there was nothing left for people to do. One of the most different (sorry I can’t remember the title or author) was a setting where there were nothing but robots and the robots were trying to recreate a human from DNA records. They kept failing until they revived an ancient robot that had actually been a medical robot for humans. They finally succeeded in creating a couple of teenage humans through time acceleration after creating the basic stuff, and when the human male asked for something the robots found out what portions of their brain were for—their answer was the equivalent of , “Yes, Master.”

The science fiction picture is certainly fun, entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking, but it is quite inaccurate and probably will be for as long as I care to forecast. The reason is economic. Today’s robots are essential to the productivity of most manufacturing operations, but as humanoids, I can’t see it.

Robots currently find their greatest use in highly repetitive jobs that require absolute consistency. Welding autobodies, painting automobiles, building up the many layers of sand and clay for a lost-wax mold for jet engine turbine blades, creating automotive engine mounts, and many other uses I am not aware of. All of them have the quality of repetitive precision. Something humans aren’t really good at, nor, in my opinion, should they be. The economics of building such devices require a very high productivity as measured in value for their operation because of their cost. Automobiles are produced at one a minute or so, on an assembly line. One robot would contribute to about 1000 automobiles a day. Multiply that by the number of production days, and the years a robot is good for, and it becomes good economics to use them. Especially since retooling a robot is mainly reworking the programs that drive its actions, not replacing huge chunks of machinery.

There are examples of free-moving robots, vacuum cleaners, lawn-mowers, Mars rovers, but these, with the possible exception of the Mars rovers, use very simplistic programs and have a very limited range of activities. Mars rovers may be the most flexible of the bunch, but even they have to have orders from home in order to do anything really useful. They and all robots are not capable of setting goals or making what we might consider value judgments. They cannot be adapted to more than rudimentary image analysis. The things robots cannot do are things humans do with ease, and what robots currently do, humans find extremely difficult over time.

To produce a flexible, decision-making robot that might do our housework or some other free-ranging activity is beyond any of our current technology. The main problem is in the computer programming and in creating sufficient feed-back and range of effort. Humans can control the exertion of energy over several orders of magnitude. Mechanical devices, in general, only work well over a factor of 10 to 100 at the very best. There are some new materials that may have promise, but still not to the degree of biological materials. It is currently a major engineering problem just to get a robot to walk like an insect, much less a bipedal creature. The amount of self-sensing in humans is mind-boggling (pun intended) and in some people leads literally to not being able to walk and chew gum (It’s not really a joke. I can’t walk straight and turn to the person beside me to talk.).

Add to that all the unsolved problems of artificial intelligence and an open-ended programming that would allow flexible decision-making is not within reach. I almost would say that unless a robotic brain were structured like a human brain, it will not be able to do the things humans take for granted. And if it did have a brain structured like a human brain, it wouldn’t be able to do what robots do. Two brains? I suppose, but that adds a huge order of complexity to the interactions. I think dinosaurs tried that (remember Stegosaurus?). OK, cheap shot.

All in all, I think robots will be a quiet part of our productive ability, but do not expect science fiction to be an accurate prophet here.

I mentioned in an earlier post that John Ray's Greenie Watch does a great job of pointing out so many of the flaws in the environmentalist agenda. From a higher level it strikes me that environmentalists forget an essential point--It is OUR world too. Their entire agenda adds up to an apology for the existence of humans on earth. Actually, to put a finer point on it, they apologize for being modern, western man on the face of the earth. Their image of humans is primitive tribes or at best Emerson, Thoreau, and Rousseau. There is a total ignorance of the evolution of the earth and the brutality of unrestrained nature. They can rave on about natural beauty, but don't look under the covers at the constant warfare between the species--a warfare far more deadly than what humans wage.

They can wax rhapsodic over animals taking care of young, but give no credit to the fact that humans have to take care of their young longer than any other animal, and do so. At the risk of being labeled, I firmly believe that humans are at the top of the biological heap. If for no other reason than that humans live in more ecological niches than any other single species. One can find different species of other genera, orders, families, etc. in almost all those niches, but not a single species in all of them except humans. We have done it by mentally adapting and then physically changing slowly, but primarily by creating a local environment (shelter, food, clothing) that allows us to live. Until modern society, humans were little more than adaptable animals. They were subject to the same forces as other predators and scavangers, when the food ran out, they starved and died. Now, we have the ability to feed everyone, whether there are famines or not.

I am not advocating ignoring nature. A biology professor who was a good acquaintance considered conservation the "wise use of resources". We can argue over what constitutes wise, but in order to survive we have to use resources. Modern man reuses and conserves far better than any primitive idea the environmentalists espouse. Modern man lives a longer, healthier life than any primitive. The only conclusion I can come to is that to the extreme environmentalists life doesn't really matter--not even their own. We could find out quickly enough, put them in the environment they say they want and see how well they survive.

When I was growing up as a Boy Scout, environmental concerns were built into our activities, but they were along the lines of careful use of the environment--always clean up behind oneself, use only dead wood for fires, stay on trails, etc. What is the point to preserving nature if no one is allowed to enjoy it, save a small elite of extreme campers, or no one is around to enjoy it because they are spending all their energy to survive in a primitive world.

To paraphrase a Frenchman (I think it was Balzac, but I'll not argue with Voltaire as a choice), I apologize that this is not as coherent as I would like; I had not the time to make it better.

Though I am primarily a dog person, I also like cats. I have had several, and one in particular broke my heart when he died of infectious feline anemia. He was the essence of cat--predator writ small. (Though as cats go he was pretty good sized.) The following item was taken from a list-serv that bore no relation to the topic of pets. I acquired it years ago. Enjoy!


1. INTRODUCTION: Why Do We Need Humans?

So you've decided to get yourself a human being. In doing so, you've joined the millions of other cats who have acquired these strange and often frustrating creatures. There will be any number of times, during the course of your association with humans, when you will wonder why you have bothered to grace them with your presence. What's so great about humans, anyway? Why not just hang around with other cats? Our greatest philosophers have struggled with this question for centuries, but the answer is actually rather simple: HUMANS HAVE OPPOSABLE THUMBS. Which makes them the perfect tools for such tasks as opening doors, getting the lids off of cat food cans, changing television stations and other activities that we, despite our other obvious advantages, find difficult to do ourselves. True, chimps, orangutans and lemurs also have opposable thumbs, but they are nowhere as easy to train.

2. HOW & WHEN TO GET YOUR HUMAN'S ATTENTION

Humans often erroneously assume that there are other, more important activities than taking care of your immediate needs, such as conducting business, spending time with their families or even sleeping. Though this is dreadfully inconvenient, you can make this work to your advantage by pestering your human at the moment it is the busiest. It is usually so flustered that it will do whatever you want it to do, just to get you out of its hair. Not coincidentally, human teenagers follow this same practice. Here are some tried and true methods of getting your human to do what you want:
1) Sitting on paper:
An oldie but a goodie. If a human has paper in front of it, chances are
good it's something they assume is more important than you. They will
often offer you a snack to lure you away. Establish your supremacy over
this wood pulp product at every opportunity. This practice also works well
with computer keyboards, remote controls, car keys and small children.
2) Waking your human at odd hours:
A cat's "golden time" is between 3:30 and 4:30 in the morning. If you
paw at your human's sleeping face during this time, you have a better
than even chance that it will get up and, in an incoherent haze, do exactly
what you want. You may actually have to scratch deep sleepers to get their
attention; remember to vary the scratch site to keep the human from getting
suspicious.

3. DISCIPLINING YOUR HUMAN BEING

Sometimes, despite your best training efforts, your human will stubbornly resist bending to your whim. In these extreme circumstances, you may have to punish your human. Obvious punishments, such as scratching furniture or eating household plants, are likely to backfire; the unsophisticated humans are likely to misinterpret the activities and then try to discipline YOU. Instead, we offer these subtle but nonetheless effective alternatives:
1) Use the cat box during an important formal dinner.
2) Stare impassively at your human while it is attempting a romantic
interlude.
3) Stand over an important piece of electronic equipment and feign
a hairball attack.
4) After your human has watched a particularly disturbing horror film,
stand by the hall closet and then slowly back away, hissing and yowling.
5) While your human is sleeping, lie on its face.

4. REWARDING YOUR HUMAN: Should Your Gift Still Be Alive?

The cat world is divided over the etiquette of presenting humans with the thoughtful gift of a recently disembowelled animal. Some believe that humans prefer these gifts already dead, while others maintain that humans enjoy a slowly expiring cricket or rodent just as much as we do, given their jumpy and playful movements in picking the creatures up after they've been presented. After much consideration of the human psyche, we recommend the following: cold blooded animals (large insects, frogs, lizards, garden snakes and the occasional earthworm) should be presented dead, while warm blooded animals (birds, rodents, your neighbour's Pomeranian) are better still living. When you see the expression on your human's face, you'll know it's worth it.

5. HOW LONG SHOULD YOU KEEP YOUR HUMAN?

You are only obligated to your human for one of your lives. The other eight are up to you. We recommend mixing and matching, though in the end, most humans (at least the ones that are worth living with) are pretty much the same. But what do you expect? They're humans, after all. Opposable thumbs will only take you so far. But remember, until cats have opposable thumbs, be kind to your human!

Karen Armstrong is one of the best writers of history I have read. She is a nun who left her order, took a B.Litt. at Oxford, taught modern literature a the University of London, and became a free-lance writer and broadcaster. Her area of speciality is religious history. She is able to combine extensive scholarship with a very lucid writing style. In her hands, the facts tell stories,not simply chronicle events. In addition, she provides significance not just a story. I have read four of her books, and all provided me with large amounts of new information and new approaches to my thinking. Here is a list of her books. I apologize that do not have complete bibliographical references for them.

1981 Through the Narrow Gate
???? Beginning the World
???? The First Christian: St. Paul's Impact on Christianity
???? Tongues of Fire: An Anthology of Religious and Poetic Experience
1987 The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity's Creation of the Sex War in the West
1991 Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World
I have read this one--get it!
1991 The English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century
1992 Muhammad: A Biograhy of the Prophet
1993 A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
The first of her books I read--get it also!
1996 In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis
1996 Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths
I am just finishing this one. It really changes the way I look at the Israeli/Palestine situation
2000 Islam: A short History
2001 Buddha
???? A Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism
I have read this one, it deals with Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Fundamentalism--very good!

Her writing is the most even-handed of any in the religious area that I have read. She calls herself a monotheist, ascribing to no one particular religion. For anyone like myself with a serious interest in religious history and philosophy, I consider these (at least the ones I have read so far) to be essential reading.

While traveling yesterday, I had a wonderful discussion with my seatmate. Among the things he told me about was a novel Stone Kiss, by Faye Kellerman, that takes its theme from a Jewish tradition. When Jacob and Esau were reunited after all the years, Esau was to give Jacob a fraternal kiss, ostensibly to declare his love (despite having been cheated of his patrimony). When he gave the kiss he did not kiss the cheek but kissed the neck, his purpose was to bite the jugular vein and thus kill his brother. According to the tradition, at that moment, Jacob’s neck became stone and Esau broke his teeth—He was not to have vengeance.

This tale inspired me to post this essay that I wrote about two years ago for my own clarification.

Vengeance, Retribution, Justice and Mercy:

These four words form a continuum of consequences for wrong action. Starting from left to right, they go from the harshest to the most gentle. They also go from the most personal to the most impersonal with justice, then back to personal with mercy.

Because of its length, the remainder of the essay is at Bills Big Stuff.

Just like Willie Nelson, I'm "On the road again," and will be for the next two weeks. I will be able to continue to post, but it will be at night.

John Ray posted a link on his Dissecting Leftism site to this first part of a two part analysis of the 9/11 Commission. The paragraphs I want to expand upon argue for representation of other political parties than Republican and Democrat.

“What about the other so-called “third parties”? (Even that term rankles; we have the two “important” parties, and the dozens of other parties are dismissively lumped together as the “third parties”. Sounds sort of like “third world”, doesn’t it?) … I found thirty US Political Parties listed on Yahoo.”

I consider the two party system in our country to be one of the main sources of the erosion of our rights and the increase in government intrusion into our lives. When Clinton was President, the Republicans in Congress lived by their stated principles and fought to restrain spending, and the various increases in government power. Now that Bush has a tame Congress, we see increases in the very programs that the Democrats were pilloried over in the past—elder prescription benefits, increases in Federal dollars for education, amnesty for immigrants. I am of the opinion that we, as citizens, are far safer when one of three bodies, the Presidency, the Senate, or the House of Representatives is in the hands of the opposing party. Then someone fights to stop or diminish various spending programs.

I would really prefer a multiparty system in this country where no one party ever has a majority in both houses and can elect a President as well. When there is a clear and present need or danger or for action from Congress, party lines have never been important. The declarations of war on Japan and the other Axis powers, and the declaration of war on Afghanistan and Iraq are examples. Yet, with no majority in Congress the work to pass legislation will increase tremendously—every bill will have to have a carefully crafted coalition to pass. I think it will immediately reduce the number of bills that can be passed and decrease their complexity. If there are enough differences in priorities and beliefs, it would not be possible to buy enough votes with log-rolling. There would always be someone on the outside ready to expose what is going on.

I can imagine most of my civics teachers in the past and most liberals and conservatives throwing up their hands at this point and screaming about how impractical this is and how it would destroy a strength of our system, and reduce stability in Congress. Sorry folks, but part of the problem in this country’s politics is that Congress is TOO stable. Where are the citizen legislators that were to populate the House of Representatives? When battles in state legislatures get vicious every ten years over redistricting and the end result is to create as many “safe” districts as possible, we don’t get good legislation except by luck. What we get is legislators that work to buy the votes that keep them in power. If Congress reflected the views of the nation, we wouldn’t have this idea of the “beltway mentality.”

With enough difference in political parties and enough parties, they would all have to adhere to their principles in order to survive; their existence would be predicated in their stated principles. However, I will be the first to admit that almost all of this is wishful thinking. I have some hope in that non-Republican-non-Democrat people are getting elected. I am glad to see Ralph Nader run. I have seen ballots with seven names for President in Indiana. I just wish there were more of it. Congress tries to prevent such things. My assessment on the campaign finance reform agrees with those who consider it an attempt to stifle opposition to the status quo.

I am afraid that we have gone well along the path described by Lord McCaulay in 1857:

“A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can last only until its citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority (who vote) will vote for the candidates promising the greatest benefits from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith.
From faith to great courage.
From courage to liberty.
From liberty to abundance.
From abundance to complacency.
From complacency to selfishness.
From selfishness to apathy.
From apathy to dependency.
And from dependency back again into bondage.
Can we escape this fate?"

--Lord Thomas B. Macaulay, 1857

When looking at some of our current legislation I fear we are on the last line of McCaulay’s description. My hope is that we will rediscover that we created this country to be free, and fought for it Perhaps we can again rekindle the spirit of the Boston Tea Party.

Scrapple is a Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch) item composed of parts of the hog you would rather not know, and cornmeal. It is shaped in a loaf and fried. I have eaten it, and, if you don't know what is in it, it tastes a bit like sausage. Which has nothing to do with the newest link I am adding--Scrappleface. It can be hilarious! As long as you realize that everything in Scrappleface is a parody you will be OK. Some of the postings are so good it is easy to take them seriously! This is a case where ad hominum-type thinking is actually correct. Try it, you'll like it.

I subscribe to the Federalist, a free conservative service that provides, via email, quotes and other related material from the Founders of the US as well as current commentary. Since today is Patriot's day, they published this classic poem. It still can move me.

Concord Hymn
Ralph Waldo Emerson

By the rude bridge that arched the flood.
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, are sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heros dare
To die and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

I have added a new link to the right, The Right Scale. It is a forceful conservative commentary on the war in Iraq, with quite a bit of material from the military point of view.

I have a new link in my list to the right (or will in a minute). It is to an Egyptian blog. He has just started, and I find his insights very interesting. Texas Conservative has a lot of posts from Iraq, but this is from one of the Middle East countries that don't support our efforts. The blogger is in favor of our actions, but his descriptions of his environment are valuable in understanding what is going on.

Thanks to Michael Totten for the link.

I just read the paragraph below in Radly Balko's blog, The Agitator.

"Longtime residents can be jailed and deported for crimes they committed long ago, even decades before Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996 and changed the rules."

It was a strongly emphasized lesson when I was in high school civics that ex post facto laws (criminal law being applied to actions that occurred prior to the passing of the law) were unconstitutional...period. There is an absolute prohibition against them. To me, this is a perfectly clear case of such a law, or at least the application of it. In this particular case it is being applied under immigration law to a non-citizen. I do not consider this an excuse, and I am now seeing the error of some of my own thinking in the past which excused non-constitutional behavior because it was applied against non-citizens.

We cannot compromise principles. They must stand regardless of circumstances, or eventually there will be no principles. The first implication of the preceding statement is that the Bill of Rights applies to non-citizens legally residing in this country. Taking the idea further than this is beyond my knowledge of legal matters. This particular example does reinforce the end of my posting on Friday. This is a most egregious example of the deprivation of rights in the name of security.

In the Sunday postings of Greenie Watch, John Ray kindly quoted a letter I had sent him in response to his post “An Anti-Nuclear Fruitcake.” In thanking him, I realized I was about to launch into a blog post rather than an email response! So here is the first of what should become an ongoing, sporadic series on nuclear matters (because nuclear matters)[OK, I'm not very good at puns.].

Nothing, in my experience (save, maybe, the Presidency of George W Bush! :-)) ), has been so demonized in the popular press reporting and by activists, as atomic energy. When my younger son was in Eighth grade, I had a opportunity to see what could be done to provide a different input. I talked to his science teacher about the material that was in the text on nuclear science, and we both agreed it did not make good sense. It was nuclear chemistry—combining nuclei or splitting them and balancing the mass of the pieces. This is total nonsense in the context of junior high school science. These students did not even have a grasp of the fundamentals of atomic structure much less simple radioactivity.

I proceeded to develop a one-hour talk on radioactivity, starting with a small quiz to assess their ideas on the subject. Needless to say, few or none chose scientifically correct answers, but almost all chose answers reflecting the distortions of the popular press. Actually in one hour, I was able to alter some of those ideas by simple explanations of how the phenomena actually worked. From that start, I then went to my older son’s school, and presented the “same” lecture twice. I put “same” in quotes, because this was a very eye-opening experience. I started with the same set of notes, but ended up teaching two very different classes.

This was because there was a major difference in the two schools. My younger son attended a Roman Catholic junior school, and my older son a military academy. The junior high school students sat like “good” students and listened. The cadets had their hands in the air in the first five minutes and due to the different nature of the questions, I taught two different classes from the same notes, and both of those were different from the first time I taught the material. (BTW I learned something very important in this experience, so-called bad students probably just react more directly to bad teaching. I had a ball that day! The questions they asked were good and in the process of answering them, I learned some new approaches to the subject. They also revealed that the mis-conceptions about radioactivity and atomic energy were far worse than I had imagined.)

From that beginning, I created a whole series of talks, targeting the various science classes at the military school. To do that I went back and studied over forty years of Scientific American, American Scientist, National Geographic, and some other college texts I had. The reason I stuck with tertiary sources such as the periodicals was two-fold, I had them in my personal library, and that was as sophisticated an answer as my audience would handle. The level of science in all of them was second or third-year college conceptually. In the process, like any other teacher, I learned far more than I would ever teach my students. Probably the single biggest idea that came out of my study was that the issue of radioactive waste disposal has been solvable for thirty years or more, it has been prevented by political maneuvering prompted by fear prompted by ignorance. The second lesson was that no one presents the health risks of radioactivity correctly. Third, no one has reported Chernobyl and Three Mile Island accurately much less compared the two accurately. Fourth, all the preceding three items add up to a potential major radioactive disaster in the making in the US, but not related to nuclear power production. The former government site in Hanover, Washington, and the currently active site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, have huge amounts of liquid waste in containers that are failing. It could potentially be as bad as a terrorist’s “dirty bomb” currently being talked about were there to be a massive escape of this material.

One last comment here—because the approach of the environmentalists is “any risk is too much,” we have done nothing to fix many correctible problems, because the perceived immediate risk to them outweighs the much larger, but unperceived long-term risk from doing nothing. Like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, I would create a clock, but not a doomsday clock. It would be a major disaster clock, and thanks to all the anti-nuclear activists and their unaware stooges, it is ticking.

AnalPhilosopher published a short quote today on the possibility of the “continued existence of human personality after death.” After my son was killed, I put a lot of thought into this issue. Part of it was the scientific side at war with the emotional. I had no scientific information to support the concept of “soul,” yet emotionally something, supported by religious teaching, wanted to believe in souls and some sort of afterlife. The paragraphs below are the result of that thought.

From the time Adam died until we buried him, I was very much aware that it [our behavior around his death and funeral] was a continuation of a human behavior pattern that has extended for at least tens of thousands of years. In fact, without a written statement by Adam that he wanted to be cremated, we would not do it. Ostensibly it was because of Jennifer’s family and their feelings, but in truth it was also because of our, or at least my, own feelings. There is almost an instinctive desire to provide a continuation of the life and its trappings, even though the person is obviously dead and in the ground. Where primitive man adorned corpses with special clothes, or pigments, or processes, and buried them with various possessions, we embalm them and put them in special clothes, and provide them with the necessities, at least in Adam’s case, those things considered necessary by his friends [cigarettes, lighter, deck of cards, basketball].

Such persistent behavior must have a cause, and I think it is more than some simple emotional denial of the reality of death. I have been struck over the years at the differences between living and dead animals and human beings. The lower on the phylogenetic totem pole an animal is, the less the perceived difference between living and dead. When a person dies, it is like some wonderful spark or essence disappears. Hence the concept of a soul. Unlike many scientists, I believe there is room in the universe for the concept of a soul. There are too many anecdotes, and I have had my own experiences that are not explainable by “standard” reasons. I think people have something that can best be referred to as a soul. However, I think it begins with the person’s life sometime during the embryonic stage and continues through life. Good people grow beautiful or nice souls and bad people grow ugly or awful souls. When people die, their souls continue. These souls can sometimes appear or make themselves known to others, but it is totally unpredictable. It has provided the basis for a lot of charlatans. Jennifer [my wife] is currently reading a book on this subject called “Hello from Heaven.” Though not “scientific” in the reproducible, objective experimental sense, it contains enough anecdotal evidence that is not hysteric or disconnected ramblings, that I am willing to say there may be something there—though exactly what I cannot say. I think that Jesus’ appearances after the crucifixion were much more powerful versions of appearances of dead loved ones to family members. And the vividness of these appearances were due to the greatness of his soul.

About a year or two later I wrote this:

I think that souls are the sum of the electrical activity of our nervous systems. It forms structures in other dimensions that can retain stability after the body dies. Souls are not given to a person at conception or birth, they grow there as the body grows. The soul is the sum of our thoughts, beliefs and feelings. When we are alive, it merely reflects what we are. It is when we die that it becomes independent.

For at least some time, souls retain much of their old configuration. When we perceive a soul, strength of the perception depends on the similarities of the soul and our souls. The more similar, the stronger the perception. Sometimes the soul is barely perceived. Sometimes it is not perceived at all. I don't think it is just a matter of emotional attraction when alive, though that helps. The perception of the soul of a deceased person by a living human may vary due to similarities and differences between the neural structure of the living person and the structure of the soul’s original body. The reason Jesus was so vivid to those left behind is because there was a similar neural pool in all those persons. Genetically there was less diversity in the Jewish sub-population of Jerusalem, and they had all experienced similar things in the last several years, at least with respect to Jesus.

Sidebars:

Romantic love may have a soul-soul interaction as its basis.

Reincarnation is not possible. There are not enough souls to go around. In addition, any evolutionist would immediately ask how man could advance when a prior more primitive soul was reincarnated. However, I have just dismissed the idea with my hypothesis of the nature of souls.

Interesting open questions:
Energetics of the soul where does the energy come from to sustain them. If they interact with this physical world, then there must be the expenditure of energy.

What do souls do in the next life?

I have thought some further on this since its writing, and my thinking ties in with my concepts of God. That latter topic will be the subject of other posts.

For the non-theists, note that nowhere in the above have I depended on the concept of God to explain or describe what I am thinking. To use God in that way would, in effect, beg the question. I think souls of people remain much the same as when they were a physical reality. I also think that the energetics issue, though valid, may be lost in the noise of our normal existence. The amount of energy for souls to be sustained or “do” anything is probably miniscule, matching the actual capabilities to interact.

This is an open-ended topic, and I have no clean conclusion to state, simply a report on work in progress.

This quote probably most effectively addresses what our attitudes should be towards do-good government.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis, dissenting,
Olmstead v. US

Keith Burgess-Jackson aka AnalPhilosopher wrote an excellent column on ideology in Tech Central Station some time ago. Here are my responses to what he wrote. I strongly recommend reading the original article before reading my comments.

I would like to respond to Stevenson's and Halberman's speculations on motivations of ideologues. I am thinking about the underlying mechanisms that would lead to their stated reasons. Much of the motivation for my thinking comes from Daniel Dennett's "Elbow Room." He notes that for any being to not be locked in "analysis paralysis" it is necessary to have what are heuristics rather than constant thorough analysis. What ideology does is provide a very high-level, easy-to-apply-to-everything heuristic. Granted it implies intellectual laziness, but may also imply intellectual inability. If we include some types of thought that I have seen in everyday use, ideological thinking is very common and may provide most people with a quick way to decide and still feel comfortable with the decision. This latter point indicates the other major force for ideological thinking--personal insecurity in one's own thought processes and decisions. My own belief is that ideological thinking is actually becoming more common, mainly because we no longer teach thinking or evaluating in schools. S & H are correct in stating it takes courage to resist the pressure to think the same as everyone else, but those who do generally are enabled by a belief in the correctness of their own thought processes (10 million Frenchmen [or any other group] CAN be wrong).

Ideology is emotionally seductive. It can be very soothing by providing "absolute" answers to difficult or even unanswerable questions. It has done the hard work of building a world view for the believer--a place to belong in the universe. However, intellectual integrity can eventually show what was wrong with any ideology. I became immersed in Randian Objectivism for a while, until I realized that it ignored and failed to account for much that makes us human. The ultimate Objectivist would have made Spock look emotional and inconsistent. I was once in a position that I had to completely rebuild my world view and my understanding of my place in the world. I can still remember making the decision that the world was objective not subjective. I would not wish the resulting intellectual struggle on anyone. It (my struggle) still goes on. I can understand how people would rather have a ready-made ideology available. What is sad is that when faced with the contradictions, they will deny them more and more stridently until they have become totally detached from reality, at least with respect to their ideology.

Having just completed the preceding post, I received a link to this in my inbox. It is a review by The Federalist of the Patriot Act 2001. I have not read it in detail, but it would appear to be a major expansion along the lines of my one paragraph.

This post was triggered by the desire to expand on something I said yesterday in my post on airline security. The particular statement was "However, additionally, I do not think efforts to give a pass to groups that currently are not a known risk are correct." What I was specifically thinking of was the current discussion to provide a list of no-check passengers based on personal and public information. I have three problems with the idea, 1) given the performance of the no-fly list, there is significant risk for someone qualifying that shouldn't, 2) the security hole it creates, that I discussed yesterday, and 3) the necessary investigation that would ensue.

What I think needs to be discussed is 3). How exhaustive will be the investigation that puts people on the don't-check list? Is it to be a computer scan and correlation of all the data available on a person? Is it to be a scan of selected data on a person? I see either of those two alternatives as flawed both on the privacy intrusion aspects and on the dubious reliability of computer algorithms to do the work. What this will have to amount to is a computer-assisted security background check. Such checks include credit checks, banking history checks, tax returns, any public mention of a person's activities, as well as all travel history. In the case of airline safety, a health check would be necessary, because conceivably a person that was terminally ill would be a good candidate to create a terrorist act out of either ideological considerations or financial considerations for their survivors. All of these records would then be archived in government databases.

I had to obtain a security clearance for my work in the past. In that case the FBI conducted the investigation, and called on all my friends and relatives, in addition to the checks for financial stability. I had two safeguards here, one I explicitly applied for the clearance, and two, the records were kept at the FBI. In addition, somewhere along the way a human had to evaluate the information and decide if I was a risk or not. A don't-check list for air travel would be impossibly labor intensive if carried out in this way, but anything less creates a security hole. The other problem I see is, "What will safeguard all the information on people?" I am not particularly sanguine about reassurances of the security or confidentiality of government data. There have been too many stories in the news of hackers getting into government computers. It would not take too much imagination to understand the risk, that, by trading privacy and freedom for security, a few years in the future the data would become a mine of information for those on a witch hunt for an imagined threat.

I also want to make a couple of comments on the Patriot Act and discussions of it. Liberals and libertarians generally condemn the act as a reduction of freedom, and conservatives justify its necessity to combat terrorism. I think the problem is that both are right, but neither side will admit the correctness of the other. The freer flow of information between intelligence and law enforcement, at least on the surface, does not appear to me as a loss of freedom or encroachment of rights. Despite its farcical elements, the 9/11 commission did clearly reveal that there were major barriers established that directly affected our ability to assess threat. However, I think the lowering of warrant requirements for search and surveillance does indeed represent an encroachment on our protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

As long as we consider ourselves a free nation, and as long as our theory of justice contains the idea that it is better to let a guilty person go free than to condemn an innocent person, then we should not be reluctant to create reasonable constraints on police power and the ability of the government to collect information. What's more, we should be even less inclined to change them just when we are most desirous of doing so. The results are never what we really wanted once the crisis is past.

This is a quote from Ben Franklin:

"They [the House of Representatives] are of the People.... Such an Assembly cannot easily become dangerous to Liberty. They are the Servants of the People, sent together to do the People's Business, and promote the public Welfare; their Powers must be sufficient, or their Duties cannot be performed. They have no profitable Appointments, but a mere Payment of daily Wages, such as are scarcely equivalent to their Expences; so that, having no Chance for great Places, and enormous Salaries or Pensions, as in some Countries, there is no triguing or bribing for Elections." --Benjamin Franklin

I'm sure Ben is spinning in his grave (and has been for years) over our current Congress.

This link is to a picture of a non-scot playing bagpipes in Iraq. I must admit, I get all choked up over bagpipe music. Maybe its my Scots ancestry, maybe it is something else. It doesn't matter. In the accompanying article the marines are quoted as liking to hear it. My father found it reassuring when he was in India during WWII to hear a bagpiper. To me it is a symbol of toughness and resoluteness. I once was able to see the Black Watch perform. In the concert program, they pointed out that when on active duty, these musicians were machine gunners. That's tough! A machine gunner has to carry his weapon and tens of pounds of ammunition for it as well as his own personal gear. So when the pipes are near, so is a fighter.

Thanks to Naked Villainy for the link.

If you haven't already, please read this letter from Abraham Lincoln, posted by Keith Burgess-Jackson, aka AnalPhilosopher.

Yesterday was the date of Lincoln's death. This letter like everything else I have read by him has a phenomenally simple eloquence that is always moving.

I have just added a new link to the right to the Independent Philosopher, aka Bill Villacella. He posts in fifteen day groups, and there is much wit and humor. I recommend it highly.

I was reading reader responses to an article in Reason magazine (a libertarian oriented publication) on airline security. It prompted me again to think about the security arrangements at airports. I see two issues here, 1) who should administer security, and 2) what constitutes effective security?

Despite my lack of love for any government bureaucracy, I think the Federal Government backed by local police, such as Sheriff's deputies, is the correct placement of authority to monitor and enforce security standards. I say this as a frequent flier who has seen good and bad examples of such administration.

After 9/11 I was very concerned with the use of National Guard troops as security forces, because few of them were trained in security, and it implied a risk of militarizing the country. I noticed that fairly quickly they became replaced with Sheriff?s deputies or formal airport police. This is as it should be.

I think the biggest reason the government and not private agencies should be doing airport security is that there is a major difference in the securing of persons vs. the securing of property, and means of redress should that security fail. When the security of property is breached, the loss is generally measured in dollars and the application of money is generally sufficient to repair the damage. The security firm may be held liable for the damages and may also be replaced with a different firm. Since it is a private company that is being secured, they can make their own judgments as to proper security measures to implement.

When airline security is breached, people die. This raises the stakes tremendously. Air travelers are a very diverse group, some able to make judgments concerning adequate security and others not. Most will opt for convenience over security, as witness, the griping when security tightens up. One might advance an argument that market forces should be able to create security, and though I can create my own versions of such arguments, market-force oriented security resulted in 9/11. Despite all the arguments of how bad security was at Boston Logan, the fact is that commercial models for security are oriented around cost/benefit considerations. Why should an extremely low probability event (a hijacking) warrant major investments of time, personnel, and money that could be better spent elsewhere from a business perspective. Businesses have to make some very cold calculations on dollars spent vs dollars lost in law suits if the dollars are not spent now. Add to this the desire of customers not to be inconvenienced, and the result is the least security that can be still legally called security.

I am not condemning businesses for this approach, because this whole area is not a business matter. Public safety has always been the province of government and in the case of airlines should be also. The safety of human lives is expensive and not subject to cost/benefit analysis for aggregates of people. Individuals may engage in personal cost/benefit analyses, which is appropriate. But for groups of people that are defined simply by being in a certain area at a certain time, it is not. Since one of the charters of government is to protect its citizens, and all persons should be protected equally, police organizations are created to promote and protect public safety.

Airline security falls into a very difficult category of preventative law enforcement. Most laws are written to be enforced after the fact, with the punishments to be a deterrent. In the case of 9/11 the direct perpetrators were dead, and we went to war to get their sponsors. In this type of case deterrent law is not effective. We must create a preventative environment. Also the environment must be run consistently and as even-handedly as possible, not subject to local decisions on what is and is not effective. In addition, the cost must the least of the considerations in execution. All decisions must err on the side of risk reduction. To me, this very well describes the type of constraints that governments generally use on their operations.
Add to this the necessity for the use of force implied and actual to implement the security regulations, and government is the correct choice to do the job since they have a legal mandate to use force.

I have separated the justification from the effectiveness issues. Most arguments against government monitoring of security include some degree of the expected or actual lack of effectiveness of government to do the job, or raise the issues of individual liberty and privacy (I see these as part of the effectiveness issue). By separating the justification issue from the effectiveness issue, we can better address effectiveness. By defining the environment in which it is to work, the means for being effective are more clearly arrived at without the distraction of "It should be done by private organizations."

It is in the issues of effectiveness that I see the biggest problems. Here is where traveler convenience, political correctness, personal rights, politics in general, technology, enforcement personnel, and schedules all come together.

The politically correct are horrified at profiling. I think they are right for the wrong reasons. If fat, grey-haired, white men such as myself are found to be a greater risk to airline safety than others, then people like me should be subject to greater scrutiny. However, additionally, I do not think efforts to give a pass to groups that currently are not a known risk are correct. This presents a security hole immediately?all that has to happen is find out what group is being passed easily and imitate a member of that group. The so-called random checks are not a deterrent here. Suppose that in addition to the members of the high risk groups 1 in 10 people are checked randomly, then a terrorist or other group intent on death and destruction only has to put two people on the plane to have a 1 in 100 risk of no-one making the plane. If every second person is checked thoroughly, then it would take seven people to guarantee one on the plane. We saw that Al Qaida put five people each on four airplanes (one exception, 4) easily. To me this is where El Al has the answer--EVERYONE is thoroughly checked.

This answer of course hits traveler convenience heavily. I want to emphasize the word "convenience." I do not see airline travel as either a right or an entitlement. We have the right to travel without restriction in this country, but the means by which we travel are our choices. After 9/11 many people chose their cars rather than airlines for fairly lengthy trips. Others chose busses or trains. There was certainly a flight (I?ll keep the pun) from air travel that is only slowly being restored.

Some people have considered that security checks are violation of our protection from unreasonable search and seizure. I think that an analogy to traffic enforcement is appropriate here. If a police officer has grounds to stop your car, and he sees something that indicates a crime has been committed, about to be committed or an illegal situation, he has the right to search without a warrant. This has been enforced in courts. The initial pass through the x-ray by carry-on luggage and the metal detector should be considered akin to being zapped by a radar gun on the highway. I have been thoroughly checked more than once. A couple of times was due to the random check policy, but once was fully deserved. I inadvertently left a cheap corkscrew in my carry-on (it normally went in checked baggage) and it was found by x-ray. Then they wondered about my blood-pressure cuff, not having seen one go through x-ray before. All my carry-on luggage and my person was thoroughly gone over. My solution was to co-operate cheerfully and let them have the corkscrew. Actually, I was pleased that they were seeing such things.

There is a legitimate concern here, in that TSA has the power to not only inspect, but to judge and punish. There have been reports in the news that people have made mistakes similar to mine, and received notices of fines of hundreds or thousands of dollars. In effect they are guilty merely by possession without regard to intent. Our system of justice does indeed make notice of intent. That is why we have the various degrees of homicide and manslaughter. The inadvertent carrying of proscribed material should have something analogous to a warning ticket in traffic violations. Though appealing to a segment of the population, draconian measures for minor infractions usually backfire rather than creating the desired effect, just as over-punishing a child gains fear and resentment rather than later co-operation. I think that once illegal items are found, TSA should turn it over to the law enforcement personnel to handle, and allow the police or sheriff to determine the situation and follow-up.

The use of technology is improving. The x-ray machines color code the objects in carry-on luggage depending on (degree of absorbancy of x-rays?, object recognition software?, ??). There are new personal x-ray devices being tested that would be true x-ray vision a la Superman. There are concerns that these violate personal privacy. Actually, they do, and are sufficiently revealing that I don't think the idea of an implied search warrant is sufficient here. The difficulty is that there are weapons, e.g., ceramic knives that do not set off metal detectors. (The so-called plastic guns are a combination of urban myth and enough metal to register on metal detectors.) Other measures in place are more to be recommended?sealed cockpits, trained (a whole other discussion) air marshals, and passenger vigilance (Flight 93 was the role model that empowered private citizens again. Richard Reed comes to mind as well as several others subdued by passengers).

Politics comes into play forcefully, as witness the farce called the 9/11 Commission. This is where the charges of not doing enough vs. violation of civil rights meet head-on, where political correctness meets risk aversiveness. Like all things political, it is messy, but generally in the long run, the issue reaches some solution that most are not willing to challenge further.

Finally, let us return to convenience and schedules. Yes, security requires extra time. There is no more trying to make a last-minute plane. I notice the frequent travelers, such as myself, plan accordingly, and use the waiting time after getting through security to do their work. Airline clubs are filled with people using their laptops and cell phones to continue to conduct business while in the airport waiting. From my perspective this is a normal way of doing business now.

I have not addressed the issues of what goes on outside the passenger areas--I have no knowledge of that. Hopefully there are people paying serious attention to this also.

I will continue to travel by air and put up with the security measures. The potential risk seems worth it. I can still get riled at a "pig" personality in a TSA member, however. Unfortunately that is one thing I cannot complain about without risking further problems. That perception does need to change, and removing the enforcement from TSA to police would go a long way to helping it.

Today's Tech Central Station had two particularly interesting articles.

The first was by Glenn Harlan Reynolds entitled Private Space: Blazing a Trail?. It is one of the most encouraging articles about humans in space I have seen in a while. (I am a great proponent of human's going to space--I don't think NASA is the way to do it in the long run).

The second is by Arnold Klinger entitled Hating the Solution and has a very new and different insight into the debate over the war in Iraq.

I strongly encourage anyone not reading TCS to try it today

John Ray at Dissecting Leftism has posted this exerpt from City Journal (link) indicating that the problems with Islam now are built into the religion, starting with Islam's not separating church and state.

I have two thoughts on this, first that yes, Christianity has the tradition built in, from the quote from Jesus that one should "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's." (The quote may not be perfect but it is accurate in meaning). However, that was in response to a Pharisee trying to trap him. Actually, there are strong traditions in Judaism of the establishment of a religious state.

What I observe, however, is that 1) Israel is a secular government in a state whose creation had religious motivation, and 2) Turkey has a secular government in a predominately muslim population. I don't think it is built into the religion, despite the various scriptural justifications. I think it is a phase in the history of a large cultural movement. Europe during the so-called Dark Ages was essentially theocratic, and, in fact, this was part of the motivation of the Crusades. Islam as an organized religion is seven hundred years younger than Christianity, which puts them at the same age religiously as Christianity was in the Middle Ages.

I would propose that theocracy is a necessary stage in the development of society and government. It is through the fear of retribution by God for wrongs, that men will live and work together and voluntarily give up the might-makes-right approach to life. Once they see that the state works and that mutual benefits accrue, they slowly relinquish dependence on theocracy, and willingly give up power to the state. The process may speed up in today's times with the examples of the US and Europe (As messed up as it is, it is better than theocracy.) to see and follow.

I have created a second blog for very large posts, Bill's Big Stuff. Its purpose is to provide space for the very large posts, such as those concerning LS Carrier and the war in Iraq, and other items I will publish in the future. I will publish the opening paragraphs in this blog (Ektopos uses the same technique, that's where I got the idea) with a link to the main text. This will hopefully make it easier to navigate my blog.

Bill

Following a link from Texas Conservative, I found a new (to me) blog, Captain's Quarters. I find it very good for conservative commentary on current news. I have included it in the links to the right.

Dr. Carrier has replied to my last post with two lengthy letters. My reading of them indicates that we have come full-circle in the discussion. He is saying what he has said either to me or to others in AnalPhilosopher's blog. I would start repeating myself to answer further. What I see is a case where in general neither of us accepts most of the facts or interpretations of fact that the other is using, and in the cases where we agree on a fact, our interpretation of it is totally different. If we were to look at this as an attempt to convince either of us as to the correctness of our position, the analogy I would draw is this: We are two people on opposite sides of a chasm, yelling to each other to come over, with no means by which to build any sort of bridge.

I appreciate Dr. Carrier's efforts and time to have engaged in this discussion. I have found it personally valuable in that it has helped me develop my ability to read and write critically. I think it is generally valuable because it has laid out clearly, the differences between the conservative and liberal positions on the issue of the Iraqi war. With all that said, like Bill O'Reilly (whom I no longer watch, because I rarely, if ever, watch TV), I will let Dr. Carrier have the last word.

The text of the letters has been moved to my new blog, Bill's Big Stuff.

AnalPhilosopher has started his series on fallacies in animal ethics. I have no argument with his first fallacy that religion sanctions or even requires eating animals, in general. However, in specific, Judaism requires the sacrifice of a yearling lamb at Passover and eating all of its flesh before dawn. Any left over flesh is to be burned. The remaining dietary rules apply if one is eating flesh but do not require the eating of flesh.

But my main focus here is to look at his emphasis on pain and suffering. What I would like to ask are some questions that fall under the category in science of thought experiments and in law as hypothetical questions.

1) If we had the ability to genetically engineer a food animal that would live a normal (for the species) life, and when it was of an age to slaughter, it went to sleep and died peacefully, and we had the means to monitor it so that it was collected immediately or close after and processed for food, would that be an immoral use of animals for food?

2) Suppose we allowed food animals to live a normal life, and when they were of a size and age to sacrifice, we shot them with a drug, while in their natural environment, that knocked them out and then killed them and processed them?

3) Suppose we did not allow a completely normal life, but did not overcrowd animals, and fed them well and kept them healthy, and then put them to sleep before sacrificing them?

4) Suppose we were able to create a version of a feed animal that was alive in a fairly normal sense, but had no brain to feel pain, and we fed it, housed it, and when it was ready processed it for food?

5) If an animal is suddenly accidentally killed, e.g., a deer by a car, and the meat can be harvested in time to remain fresh, is it immoral to eat that meat?

6) If a hunter kills an animal with one shot and the animal dies instantly, is that immoral?

7) Let us suppose that science finds a way to grow steaks in tissue culture--no animal, just the muscle fiber. Is that meat immoral to eat?

I am not being flip in these questions. I am trying to understand where the pain and suffering accrue, in the way the animals are raised, collected, killed, or processed. I am trying to understand if the act of eating an animal is wrong, or the means whereby we come to eat it. It would be easy to find examples of either deliberate or indifferent cruelty in the world of food production from animals, but the question is, "Is it at all possible to obtain meat humanely? It there any way in which the eating of other animals is not immoral?"

Keith Burgess-Jackson aka AnalPhilosopher published a link to this story, discussing the connection between watching realistic violence and violent behavior in children. It triggered several ideas.

1) Boys were more affected than girls and preferred video games with a lot of action to the types of games girls preferred--board and card games. Here is one of the major differences between the sexes. Boys who grow to men, are generally more active and aggressive in their behaviors. It makes evolutionary sense, since primate males are the primary protectors of the group. (I can't resist the cheap-shot--take that militant feminists!)

2) With that aggressive tendency to start with, would also be a lower threshold on anger. Given this, it makes perfect sense that Hamas and Hezbollah would find some of their most successful recruiting in the pre-teen and teen-age groups of males. And remember these males have grown up with real violence a constant companion.

3) This research also explains the heavy imbalance in sports participation between women and men despite the desires of Title IX. Left to their own devices, men and boys will compete more frequently and more intensely than women and girls. This is not to say that women and girls don't compete, they can and do, but it cannot be mandated.

4) There may be one problem with the research, it does not distinguish between violence for its own sake and violence with a moral message. Though not as prevelant in my day, TV and movies had a lot of violence. When I was growing up, bad guys killed people and were killed by good guys, and World War II themed movies were very common. Granted the violence was not as graphic as in many video games, but I think it was important that the initiation of violence was portrayed as wrong, and that once it occurred, it was a good thing to stop it, even if it required the use of violence in return. Generally, if the good guy used violence, it was done in a controlled way to minimize the equivalents of collateral damage, and its use ceased as soon as the objective was reached.

Peg Kaplan over at What If? has posted a link to a truly funny, satarical website. Go see her blog and follow the link as well.

Today's Tech Central Station had an excellent article by John Kekes (link is to Keith Burgess-Jackson aka AnalPhilosopher who posted a bibliography on Kekes) on Egalitarianism. I highly recommend it as a follow-on to my earlier post on Equality

For those of you who are Christian, Happy Easter! For those of you who are not, regardless of belief, welcome to Spring! This time of year is invigorating! I wrote about construction last week, but I also enjoy the entire Spring process. The warmer weather, the unfolding of plant life, the migration of birds. Being the religious sceptic that I am, I have strong suspicions that Easter is a co-opted pagan holiday. The definition is a bit too non-traditional, the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The whole essence is joy at a resurrection, in the Christian case, Jesus from the tomb, in other cases, life from the ground after Winter.

I do not belittle Christian worship of Easter--I am a participant. I went to church this morning and sang in the choir and was Liturgist (sort of a cantor and communion assistant). I find emotional satisfaction in the forms of worship though I have considerable intellectual conflict with their literal expressions. But I also can see the desire simply to celebrate that life has returned again.

Enjoy this time of year (and all times) to the fullest. This time for me is like a half-time break in the year. My favorite time is Fall, and the best part of Summer is that Fall is coming. Early spring is a drag of mud and clouds, but this time of year is nice. Because of the heat, I think it goes downhill from here, but I enjoy now. There has been only one time I enjoyed the heat of summer, and that was after a Winter in central Indiana that had two solid weeks of temperatures where the high was below zero. It took until July to get warm again.

For all of us, I hope for a feeling of refreshment and renewal at this time.

I copied this from the IBM-MAIN listserv.

When promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable philosophical and psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your verbal evaporations have lucidity, intelligibility and veracious vivacity without rodomontade or thespian bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous propensity and sophomoric vacuity.

Whilst I'd [the original poster on IBM-MAIN--bk] love to claim credit for it, it's quite old. Urban legend says it's a rework of something from Homer. Used a lot in the early days of Usenet to upbraid the longwinded.

If you haven't already, please go to Texas Conservative here to find out what is going on during the insurgence in Iraq from two Iraqis. The link is to the latest post and just below it (earlier in time) is another post. Both paint a different picture from the media.

As I published my reply to Dr. Carrier, I saw that my site counter had reached 200! This in three days, compared to the six days that it took to get to 100. Thank you to everyone that has visited my site, and again thanks to AnalPhilosopher, Texas Conservative, and Dissecting Leftism for their support. Their links are at the right. Make sure you are visiting them also.

Bill

Here is the promised reply to Dr. Carrier's long email to me. WARNING, this ran to eight (8) pages in word in 10-point typeface. I apologize for the length, but unless Blogger (TM) does not let me publish it in one piece, after some consideration, I felt that timeliness was more important than reading convenience. It is long because Dr Carrier spent considerable time composing his reply, and I felt it incumbent on me to properly and completely answer it.

The full text has been moved to my new blog for large posts, Bill's Big Stuff.

AnalPhilosopher posted this essay on the morality of procreation at the beginning of this year. Keith has kindly encouraged me to publish some of my letters to him. This is one of those. Before reading my comments on this issue, I strongly recommend you read his essay first.

Over the years (about 45 of them, since I actively started thinking and questioning), I have come to think that, in the realm of procreation, we have to take into account our biological heritage. This is not to say we are or should be instinct-driven beasts. From years of study of biology, biochemistry, and evolutionary chemistry and biological evolution, I have arrived at the position that the fundamental purpose of life is to reproduce. Everything is directed to that purpose. Even at the level of the amoeba, the acquisition of food and the avoidance of deleterious environments leads to the fissioning into two new amoebas (amoebae?), which then continue the cycle. When we arrive at the higher organisms which use sexual reproduction, greater efficiencies result in exploiting the environment, because sexual reproduction allows for greater variation in the offspring and therefore more chances to succeed in a changing environment. There is nothing teleological about this. Nature is a harsh filter and extremely small advantages over thousands of generations become multiplied into dominance. Nature has also lead to the spawning of large litters in a lot of species, where there is great infant mortality. I once had a tom cat that almost killed himself engaging in reproduction until he was neutered. If we look at humans, sex (and by implication, reproduction) is probably the most powerful force in a human. Humans will attempt to reproduce even when there is little or no chance of the offspring reaching maturity.

I think much of the problem stems from an approach in our society (the USA in particular, I think the causes in Europe are somewhat different), that tries to maintain the very fundamental Judeo-Christian attitude that sex should only be allowed in marriage, and that discussing and trying to deal with the possibility of sex outside of marriage is considered "condoning" it. This leads to a head-in-the-sand approach that is horrified at the idea of discussing contraception with teen-agers and at the same time a horror that they have children out of wedlock. Many of these people appear to have the grotesque idea that a child out of wedlock is punishment for having had sex outside of marriage, and then condemn the mother, force unwanted marriages, and then out of "concern" for the child go along with child welfare programs.

From a utilitarian aspect, it places a burden on the responsible to provide for the care of the children of irresponsible parents, it also harms the innocent child not to give them care. The question then becomes one of, "What is the best means to minimize the overall damage?" I grew up during the time when the last of the orphanages were still in existence, and the foster care programs were not large. I went to school with several teenagers from the local orphanage. I wonder if that may be the proper answer. Payments to the mothers simply encourage having more uncared-for children. Foster homes become a way for unscrupulous adults to profit from uncared-for children. (I realize many foster homes are very good and loving. I am concerned with minimizing the chance for harm.) In addition, foster homes are not stable--many children have many foster homes in their lives. Properly run orphanages, would be much akin to boarding schools. In addition, by centralizing the care of these children, monitoring for harmful environments would be easier. One model that might be followed is that of the Hershey school and home, which houses disadvantaged children and educates them. Rather than the old-fashioned style of orphanage with one huge building housing all ages, it has cottages with counselors that hold 10 to 20 children each. I think the overall cost to those who act responsibly would be less than current programs, and the children would grow in a reasonably safe environment.

I still have to consider how to encourage responsible behavior on the part of the potential parents. Words don't do it. Unfortunately, it would appear that when hormones are coming on strong, teenagers can be semi-sentient. Our culture tends to encourage this with the extension of childhood far beyond puberty. When this country was essentially agrarian and there was still land to be subdued, boys and girls often married around age 14, started a home and a family. In those days the necessary training to survive, build a home, and provide food for a family could be taught by the age of 12 or so. Now, more knowledge is required to succeed, (Though it need not take as long as we currently seem to use. The amount of "fluff" in the schools now is atrocious.) and so the consequence of not surviving does not face sexually active people. They are kept until they have the appropriate pieces of paper and jobs, or are felt sorry for if they cannot or chose not to try. Suppose we don't feel sorry anymore. Make it very clear--have a child, and it will not be yours to raise if you cannot care for it. There will most certainly not be any money given to the parent to raise the child. In addition, the parent will also be in the position of being required to perform public service or obtain employment to pay for part of the costs of the child's upbringing. If they can pay all the costs of bringing up the child, then they are responsible and can raise it. If grandparents chose to raise the child, fine. It is by choice. What they should or might do about their child who had the grandchild is outside this discussion.

One side note, for the most part children do reflect their upbringing. However, I have come to the conclusion from watching both my own and many other persons' children, that children are about 50% inborn personality traits and 50% imposed behavior through training by adults. Occasionally one sees a child that obviously does not reflect the environment they were raised in (in both directions, a good child from a bad environment, and a bad child from a good environment). The nature vs. nurture controversy should have never occurred. It takes both to make a person. The relative impact of each is never fixed.

One of AnalPhilosopher's early posts was this comment on Epicurus. With Keith's kind permission I am publishing portions of the email I sent him in reply.

At first glance this analysis of desires appeals immediately and the partitioning has merit--necessities, preferences, all the rest. However, desires for wealth and power (or perhaps fame) are not necessarily inimical to happiness. They may be for those who don't care about them, or for those who become irrationally driven to pursue such ends as ends of themselves. But I am convinced that the pursuit of something beyond the immediate physical and emotional needs is essential to the health and happiness of individuals, and thus we have the pursuit of ideas, the creation of material objects, etc. In the process wealth, power, and fame may accrue. The acquisition of these things may certainly be pleasurable even to the extent that they rather than the pursuit of the original goal become the motivators. But is this necessarily inimical or harmful? If the expansion of my material wealth becomes a motivator for improvements in what I do or how I do it, by what standard have I harmed myself or others? In the pathological case where wealth, power, or fame are sought as substitutes for other needs, e.g., love, self-respect, peer-respect, etc., I can see the argument applying.

I think this also relates to your comments on the two types of libertarians [here]. I consider myself closer to libertarians than any other political group, though I actually like to consider myself unlabeled. Though the ideal is for us to value liberty for its own sake, most arguments for it end up being pragmatic by looking at the consequences--liberty permits us to do those things which we value doing with a minimum of restriction. Among those can be the accumulation of wealth, power, and/or fame. [Note that I have little or no desire for such things, I make enough money to have a comfortable life; I have sufficient control over my environment that I feel in control of my life, and I don't worry about my reputation beyond my peer group. This said to prevent an ad hominum attack that I am defending my own desires.] The nature of liberty is such that I can pursue such goals and the very principles that I am using also prevent my abuse of others in the process. Thus, though I don't personally care or trust completely those for whom liberty is a means to an end rather than an end, because they will be looking for ways to subvert liberty to their advantage, I would still consider including them in the group, libertarians, since to outward effects they are part of that group.

Dr Carrier has pointed out an error that I made in this post. I had attributed his application of the idea that opinion is intellectual theft as applied to Matthew. He applied it to Jan's post. I apologize for this error, and will read more carefully in the future. As to the comment itself I wiil discuss at a later time.

Equality

For years, (about 45 to be a bit more precise) I have wondered at the uses of equality in the political sphere. Equality with respect to rights has been attached by law to both government and private activities, and rights have proliferated almost like rabbits. In the process other rights have been severely constrained or even possibly abrogated. Since I think that true rights are non-conflicting with each other, this situation warrants some discussion.

The place to start is, "What constitutes a right." Just recently I had an email discussion with John Ray (Dissecting Leftism) over this subject. As it turned out I was discussing rights as a philosophical abstract and John was discussing them as something granted by government. I have come to the conclusion that we are both right. I believe that we can philosophically define certain rights as inherent to our humanity. They are essential for us to exist as humans. Freedom of action and the right to own property are two of the most basic. The Founding Fathers of this country expressed them as "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." (It is always important to remember that it is the pursuit and not the happiness that is the right.)

Where government granted rights come to play is in the spelling out of the ways in which these rights may be expressed in the company of other persons. If we consider the philosophical definitions as the principles and/or goals, then there must be a means by which these are achieved, and in groups of humans, governments are the mechanism. As the Founders realized, governments will acquire power at any cost to the members of the political body, and they spelled out the rights of people vis-a-vis the government in the Bill of Rights. It is important to realize that these rights are constraints on government not individual action. Until the beginning of this century, these rights remained pretty well in place.

Before the New Deal, the only two times we made a major attack on our rights were Prohibition and the Income Tax, both of which required amendments to the constitution to impose. Other earlier constitutional amendments expanded the rights of individuals, with perhaps the exception of the 14th which has been used to provide major encroachments on Federalism. In our Constitutional system, rights are not granted by law but by the constitution. What is granted by law is entitlement and privilege, and these generally diminish or abrogate the rights of all in general or some in particular(I need to say more on entitlements and privilege, but later).

Here is where it is important to distinguish a particular form of equality--Equality under law. This is the type of human equality that is meant to be established by the Constitution. This means in every area that is touched by the government ALL persons must be treated the same, as equals. Exceptions have to be made for those who are not competent to be full citizens, but their rights must be respected to the greatest degree possible. Equality under law does not mean that individuals must treat each other as equals. The principle only applies to government action. When it is attempted to be applied to individuals or private groups, forcing them to treat all persons alike, it abrogates our rights.

I became aware of this conflict when in high school. This was during the start of the civil rights movement. I remember Rosa Parks and the attempts to put her to the back of the bus. I remember the National Guard having to escort black children to a white school in Selma, Alabama. In looking back at it, this was the Federal government performing its proper function. It was enforcing the law equally for all persons, black or white, despite the state laws which institutionalized bigotry and segregation. I also remember Lester Maddox standing outside his restaurant with an axe handle determined not to let blacks into his restaurant.

Lester Maddox is a complicated symbol of the situation. This is one of the cases where we have to separate motivation from justification as AnalPhilosopher has pointed out. Lester Maddox was a bigoted, mean-spirited racist from what I remember. He wanted to keep blacks from his restaurant because they were black and he apparently sincerely believed they were inferior. I have no sympathy for this motivation, and consider it a totally immoral stance. However, the restaurant was HIS. He owned it; he had taken the risks to start it and continue it; it was his living. It was his property by right. It may well be that part of his motivation was to protect his property because it was his. That part was drowned out in the clamor over his racism.

Maddox found himself in that position, because Congress, acting under its interpretation of the Interstate Commerce clause, considered Mr. Maddox's restaurant to be involved in interstate commerce and therefore subject to Federal regulation. (I will leave it to legal scholars to sort this out, but I consider it a major over-reach of the definition of interstate commerce to class a local restaurant, that was not advertising outside of the state nor trying to obtain customers by doing business across state lines, as engaged in interstate commerce simply because someone from out of state might eat there. I also consider this over-reach had as its purpose what occurred, the intrusion of the Federal government into state and personal affairs.) In effect, Congress created a bogus and over-riding right, that anyone had the right to eat at any establishment they chose regardless of the owner's desires or property rights.

Though this is probably not the first time this had occurred, it is the first in my memory, and from that time I have watched a continual process of creating so-called rights and then overriding other rights with them. Some examples are the Equal Housing laws, Equal Employment Opportunity Act, Affirmative Action, Roe vs. Wade, and the two worst of all--hate crime and deprivation of civil rights (It is becoming a way to get around the double jeopardy clause). One of the ways that this is occurring, is that the rights of some person seen as generally undesirable or marginal in some way are encroached. Examples are racists, militia members, so-called cracked-pots of various types, persons dealing in sexual materials. All of these may be undesirable to us as individuals, but they have the same rights as we do, and if we do not defend their rights, we will someday find we are the outcasts having our rights abrogated.

Just as a side note, the framers of the Constitution created one right for government, the Right of Eminent Domain. Though appearing reasonable at the time, it is rapidly becoming a major source of government abuse, destroying private property of one person to allow its acquisition by another.

In closing this over-long-for-a-blog comment, I will state that I do not believe in discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender, body-size, or any of the other so-called grounds for civil and criminal action concerning the new, so-called rights. I firmly believe that organizations that are as diverse as possible are stronger than ones that are restricted in membership by considerations not related to the function of the organization. In saying that, I also condemn those who do discriminate in such ways. But my condemnation does not mean that it is proper to abrogate their rights in order to correct a real or imagined wrong done to someone else. In the long run, no one will have enforceable rights, and the winners will be those with the best presentation of their victimhood.

In response to this post and I would assume this post, Dr Carrier has written a lengthy email to me. A proper discussion is beyond a quick answer, so for those of you who have interest in this thread, I will publish the entire letter and my thoughts on it in a future post. Due to the length, I may post it in sections. Stay tuned......

This essay made me realize I am guilty also of thinking in stereotypes. I do have my disagreements with PETA, but I will have to confine them to substantive discussion. This clear-headed and thoughtful lady certainly does not fit the usual image presented. Read this essay and see if you recognize yourself as I did. (Thanks to Keith Burgess-Jackson at Animal Ethics for the link).

I have a lot of strong opinions on ecological matters, but John Ray does such a good job of dealing with most of them at his Greenie Watch that I have little new to add. However, I will comment that few, if any, so-called environmentalist really understand the environment or ecology. (Ever notice that all they really want to save are the charismatic animals?) As John points out so well, their main goal is power.

My son is graduating from the Ohio Institute of Photography and Technology this Friday with a degree in multimedia. There are several things that makes this an empressive event.

John hated school--until he got to OIP&T. Suddenly he was motivated. He attended school year-round, and he never chose anything over school when there was a conflict, and he always strove for straight A's. He never made that, but it never stopped him. He ended with a 3.3 accumulative average--from a student that did the bare minimum through grade school, high school and a year of college.

John was not computer literate nor had he had any formal art training when he reached the school. Yet he completed on the first attempt the major challenge in the school--portfolio. This challenge is so hard, it is the only thing that a student takes their last quarter. They must have 15 pieces that pass a committee of five faculty members. I would compare it to the oral defense of a thesis or dissertation.

I am tremendously proud of my son. I think he will do well in the world.

The following quote was seen in a Fox News story.

"There are times you make principled choices, heart choices," said Jay Ward, conservation director for the Oregon Natural Resources Council, who voted for Nader for president in 1996 and 2000. "It's time to be rational. This time the stakes are just too high to vote for Ralph Nader."

It looks to me like his principle is--Win, right or wrong." (Actually I think it translates to "Anyone but Bush.")

Why is it that pragmatism is always presented as "being rational?" I find it the least rational of motivations.

Thanks everyone, I just received my 101st hit in under 6 days! Past 100 going for 200. My thanks to AnalPhilosopher, Dissecting Leftism, and Texas Conservative for their links.

Bill

The temperatures are rising; the birds are singing; flowers are starting to pop up; buds are swelling on trees, concrete barriers and orange barrels are being put up, and black vinyl fences are springing from the ground. It is..CONSTRUCTION SEASON!

I am a construction junkie. I cannot pass anything being built without wanting to stop and watch..for hours. I have always been this way. I love seeing carpenters build houses, masons laying brick, backhoes digging foundations. I always want to know where a concrete truck is going. When I worked at LEXIS-NEXIS, they put in a new extension to the data center. I was able to get a hard hat so I could get closer and watch on my lunch hour.

My wife always says I will wreck the car when we go by highway construction. I just have to see what they are doing. It doesn't matter if it is only laying and rolling blacktop. The building of a major interchange is a great treat! My favorite sight is large-scale earthmoving using scrapers. (Large four-wheeled machines that work on dirt just like a plane works on wood. They are self-propelled, but sometimes require assistance from bulldozers when the cut is heavy.)

The attraction is three-fold. 1) I love the sheer power being displayed. 2) I like seeing how engineering problems are solved. 3) I love guessing at what they are doing and what the result will be like. That makes it much more interesting when I come back to see if I am right or wrong. I seem to be able to remember every on-going construction project and its techniques and can see exactly what changes have occurred.

I have watched the foundations of the TransAmerica Tower in San Francisco being built. I have seen a number of major interchanges be built or rebuilt. The current one is the rebuilding of the intersection between I-70 and I-75 in Dayton, OH. I have watched uncounted numbers of buildings being erected. And underneath all of this is the realization that without this country and the system of government and economics it espouses, none of it could happen.

Don't cuss orange barrels and detours--celebrate them. They are a sign of wealth.

Keith Burgess-Jackson just published a post on the apparent difficulty of many people to see the difference between quantitative and absolute comparisons. This is a very common phenomenon in my experience. I think it relates to the issue of ideology. If we look at ideology as a shortcut to decision-making, the desire to make issues pure black and white rather than gray also serves that purpose. It avoids the mental effort, which can be considerable, of doing the precise comparisons that are necessary.

Dr Carrier posted a short reply in AnalPhilosoper here to Matthew@ektopos. At this point I would suggest Dr Carrier retire from the exchange, having admitted defeat by resorting to name calling (calling Matthew a thief). This simply reconfirms my earlier assessment that Dr. Carrier is an intellectual bully. Dr. Carrier should be especially careful about his charge since I consider everything he wrote in this several weeks' exchange to be unsupported opinion.

Michael Totten has some beautiful pictures of Oregon posted today. here

Keith Burgess-Jackson, aka AnalPhilosopher asks a very important question here. How would you answer it? My answer is, first I realized I didn't want to be a manager, which got rid of a lot of corporate striving and pain. Then I realized that being near family and friends was more important than having a big salary or living in a beautiful location. Long ago I realized that I am doing what I was born to do--analyze problems and solve them. So I can answer in the affirmative.

Texas Conservative just posted a link to this blog. Thanks. His link is in the list to the right. Please visit him if you do not yet. His comments are refreshingly direct and on target.

I was trained in physical science, as a chemist, and I have always thought of my self as a scientist. But from working with my sons and neighbor kids as they went through jr high school and high school I realize that in today's educational systems, science is being taken as a body of knowledge rather than a method of acquiring knowledge.

Science is a method, a means for acquiring information that is assured of being as correct as possible. No reputable scientist simply puts information out without supporting data and procedures sufficient for another laboratory to reproduce the same result. In the case of mathematics or theoretical physics, the entire derivation of a result is published for all to see and check. Science involves testing and retesting. In fact all of us start our lives as natural scientists. Watch a child learn something on their own. They will try it one way, then another, and another and so forth, until they have found what the answer for the situation is. In a very primative way they are formulating a hypothesis ( I can get what I want, if I do this), testing the hypothesis (actually doing "this"), and then reaching a conclusion (that did or did not work). A yell to mom or dad may serve as publishing the results.

One of the greatest concerns I have had when tutoring or helping my sons, was that they were taught a set of facts to regurgitate on a test, and not anything in the way of principals or an explanation of the scientific method. When my younger son was in eighth grade, I looked at what was being taught for nuclear science at that level. It was totally inappropriate for eighth-graders. What was being taught was nuclear chemistry by example--combine two nuclei of such weights and get some result with a balancing of the weights. Nothing of the basics of nuclear structure, history of nuclear physics, or other fundamental information that would enable them to learn and understand more later. (What I chose to do about this will make another entry in the future.)

Based on what I have seen being taught as science in the schools leads me to understand the poor reporting on science and the ability of activitist groups to promote specious agendas. The constant biases towards certain viewpoints when reporting science is not based solely on political sympathies or the desire to sell news. It is also due to the inability of reporters or the public to do the most simple reasonability tests of what is being reported. Since people tend to err on the side of least risk, and because they don't have the information or the knowledge to evaluate some risks at any level, they take alarmist and activist statements at face value. Reporters are in the same position, and they must sell newspapers or TV news shows, etc. They will therefore play to the perceived risk rather than challenge the statements being uttered.

Given this kind of approach to science, it is no wonder there is a group that considers science a "social phenomenon." That one view is no better than the rest. They have come to totally ignore the issue of testability or reproducibility. Two astounding announcements that failed to pass such tests were polywater and cold fusion. For six months in the early 70's for polywater, and the 80's or early 90's for cold fusion, these were great science news topics. It turned out that polywater was contamination and cold fusion can't be reproduced.

These same kind of problems are occurring today with global warming, nanotechnology, nuclear power, and many others. In general alarmists make unsupportable statements that are not challenged early on, and come to have a life of their own through being repeated in many uncritical outlets. No one, save some of the older more sceptical scientists, ever question the statements nor do the reporting media or the persons hearing the results. They don't understand the nature of science.

Ultimately good science is like the kid that says, "Oh, yeah? Prove it."

I spent most of 40 years as a hard-core agnostic/atheist. I decided that proofs of no-God were as invalid as proofs of God, and decided I was actually agnostic. Rather than say there is no God, I simply said it made no difference either way in my thinking. However, for whatever reasons, I found myself at war internally, seeing the basic moral good in Jesus' teachings (and seeing the great asthetic accomplishments in the name of religion) and realizing that one did not have to have a supernatural base to justify them. Mine was essentially utilitarian--they work. I have spent a lot of time over the last several years thinking on these things, with results that work for me but I don't consider particularly profound. My resolution of my internal conflict was to posit God in the same form as a working hypothesis. Basically if something is found that contradicts or invalidates the hypothesis, then it is discarded. Of course there are only subjective events or thoughts to validate it. (I am also aware that at any point I can take Occam's razor to the whole thing.)

Be that as it may, I have tired of abstract thinking on it per se, and have embarked on a major study of the gospels, not to validate religion, but to try to find what may have been underneath the stories--what the "reality" of Jesus life and teachings is. I have nine different translations of the Bible that follow three or four major traditions. I am tediously comparing them to create a "synthetic" translation that is my best estimate of what was written or said originally. From that I then do an analysis based only upon the material in the gospels, both within a gospel and across the gospels. Finally, I then bring in material from four major commentaries, the purpose of which is to provide background scholarship. So far I have completed the story of the crucifixion from the seizure in the olive grove to the start of the walk to Golgotha. There is still a strong elemental power in the story when all the embellishments are stripped away. I consider the seizure in the olive grove to be the defining moment of Christianity, exactly at the point at which Jesus said, "Enough" (in the Luke version, equivalents in the others). I also do not believe in Jesus being divine, and in fact, it makes him a better example if he is not divine, and avoids what I call the "divine cop-out" when people are expected to follow his example.

I will have a lot more to write in this area in the future. I simply thought it would be a good time to set some groundwork.

I have added to my links lists at the right. I try to visit each of them daily. They provide a broad variety of viewpoints.

I just read a transcript of Ralph Nader's interview on the new liberal radio network. here. The link is to Peg Kaplan's WHAT IF? blog, the link to which I will post tomorrow. I do not agree with Ralph Nader's ideas for the most part. However, I strongly support the idea that he should be a presidential candidate. Not because I want Bush to win and Nader will suck more votes from the Democrats. Actually, Ralph Nader will probably pull from everywhere. I believe in the maximum of political choice. I actually would love to see a multiparty USA [more on that another time]. Though I don't agree with many of the principles Ralph Nader holds, I do agree that he is a highly principled man, and has not betrayed them within my knowledge. In this day and age that says a lot. So, GO RALPH! I won't vote for you, but I really am glad you are running!

For the philosophers and logicians in my readership, no, I have not forgotten Aristotle’s Law of Non-contradiction. The sole purpose was to attract attention. The proper statement is, Economics in the short term is a zero-sum game, and in the long term not a zero-sum game. What prompted this observation is the ongoing political debate over overseas outsourcing. Liberals and Democrats (sometimes the two are not synonymous) see only the first part, and Conservative and Republicans (again not mutually inclusive categories) see only the second part. Let’s look at some effects, short-term and long-term of overseas outsourcing.

If I am a consumer and I am buying software from the Jiffy Software Company, and Jiffy decides to do its development overseas, I will benefit very quickly, because my next upgrade, or new product from Jiffy will either be cheaper than otherwise, have more feature-function than otherwise, or both. It is definitely to my benefit to support overseas outsourcing.

If I am the Board of Directors of Jiffy, I will see a better bottom line from having lowered my costs, and hopefully see a better price for the stock, etc. These are short-term and long-term gains respectively.

If I am an investment banker, I will be able to spread more capital, because companies like Jiffy will not need as much financing with better bottom lines and cash flow. I will also see short- and long-term gains.

If I am Joe Developer, American citizen, working for Jiffy, I see my job disappear. I now struggle to pay my bills; I have to find a new job; my wife and kids can’t buy the things they are used to having. The car I was just about to trade in will have to be kept for a while longer (This can lead to some difficult short-term increases in cost of ownership, if the car was due for tires, brakes, etc.). I may even have to walk away from my home leaving the mortgage in default and repossession. I have definitely lost to the gain in some overseas company. For me this is a zero-sum game, until I can re-establish my employment. Granted, overall I may even improve my situation in the long-run, but that will not completely negate the emotional pain I experienced in the past.

Just to provide a more complete perspective, if I am Raneesh Patel, a software developer in India, and I am now working for Jiffy, I have just improved my life in what is sometimes called a quantum leap [I will discuss this someday]. I am being paid far more than I was paid before. I can now buy all the things I have dreamed of. Truth to tell, I am winning the game and could care less whether it is zero-sum or not. [Nor should he/she (Please accept my apology if I am not clear on gender here). His/her position in the Indian economy is much like the workers that went to work for Henry Ford when he invented the assembly line. Their value is much higher than their peers, and their paycheck, though small by US standards is big.]

The banker, the grocer, the car dealer, and everyone else who Joe Developer deals with will also see this as a zero-sum game. These are the people that the Liberals and Democrats play to. Generally, the consumers will fall more into the group of this paragraph than then Board of Directors or the investment bankers. That is because emotionally they can empathize with Joe Developer. Long term benefit is not emotionally motivating and is generally abstract. [Look at mega-awards from juries. They don’t realize they are killing the very thing they penalize with excessive damages.]

The Board of Directors and the investment bankers, of necessity, have a longer term perspective and will buy into the non-zero-sum aspects of the outsourcing. Generally speaking these are the people who support conservatives and Republicans.

Having said all this, what might be done?

In theory, a lot. In reality, probably very little. Businesses are so involved in the short-term bottom line, and regulatory oversight, plus politically correct restrictions on personnel handling, that they do not see the value of the employees they are outsourcing. In some cases they will provide counseling and re-employment assistance. I would guess these are the exceptions rather than the rule. Joe Developer has always believed that he was valuable to the company. After all, software development is the latest big opportunity. In addition, Joe has not been trained in school to learn anything other than what he needs to pass a class or to obtain a job. [Based on my experiences as a father and tutor, I will have a lot to say about that in some future post.] Joe really is lost, bewildered, and resentful. And, unfortunately, quite unequipped mentally or emotionally to make a major change without lots of help.

Any specific recommendation I have thought of sounds like pie-in-the-sky. Yet, I though I have had a number of careers, and even more jobs, I have a lot of sympathy for Joe Developer and those like him. I would like to see programs to help such people, but not through the government or at the taxpayers’ expense. I ascribe to the idea that employers owe more to there employees than a paycheck. Mainly because without the employee and his/her willingness to do more than the minimum, no business could survive. That does not mean that businesses cannot expect a high level of output. The two ideas are not antithetical—witness Southwest Airlines or SAS Institute.

The best I can do at this point is to suggest that the employer who sees the advantages of overseas outsourcing needs to recognize the value of the displaced employee and do something to help.

If any one is reading this blog and has not read the AnalPhilosopher for today, RUN, do not walk to here, now. One of the best and most pointed statements on todays presidential politics I have read.

Starting Here There has been an ongoing exchange in the AnalPhilosopher between several readers, most notably Ally Eskin and Matthew@ektopos, with Dr. LS Carrier, concerning the war in Iraq. I became extremely aware of it when Dr. Carrier wrote this response to AnalPhilosopher's comment concerning the lack of depth and quality of pundits' comments on the War here.

I was appalled at Dr. Carrier's letter. What I noticed is that he considered a set of four assertions, without any evidence to sustain plausibility, much less any sort of proof, as sufficient. Then he considered the burden of proof to be on anyone in disagreement. This is not a refutation or even a defense, philosophical or otherwise. I would think that in any disputed philosophical or political issue, the burden of proof lies with BOTH parties.

I would like to make my own response to his four points.

1) What consequences is he referring to? What are the plausible alternatives, and how are the consequences worse?
2) In what way are the means not proportional to the effect? Is he referring to the small number of troops compared to a comparable result in previous wars? (I seriously doubt it) Does he propose that current theory of war is wrong, and overwhelming force is not a proper means to assure victory?
3) By what standard is he measuring safety? There was a news announcement recently that prompt US action after 9/11 forestalled attacks on the Sears tower in Chicago and another tower in LA. Demonstrable proof that we are indeed safer. I also am sufficiently convinced by reported linkages between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida that taking out Saddm removed another state sponsor of terrorism, which would add to our safety.
4) By categorically stating it is unjust to wage war, (by using the argument that innocents will be killed, he is stating all war is unjust, since it is impossible for innocents not to be killed in a war), he is in essence saying that his freedom is not worth preserving since there is a risk that someone innocent might be killed in the process. Is he saying that by not waging war loss of life to Saddam would be prevented in some other way? That is demonstrably false--all non-war alternatives had been exhausted long ago, and Saddam and his sons continued to butcher their own people daily.

I think that Matthew@ektopos provided the most eloquent answers to Dr. Carrier here.

I have reviewed this entire thread, and I remain unconvinced by Dr. Carrier's positions, mainly because they contain the same thing we have been hearing for 13 years since the first Gulf War. I consider placing faith in things that haven't worked in the past 10 or more years is not paying attention in class (indirect pun deliberate, since Dr. Carrier is a retired professor). Unfortunately, I feel a bit of relief that Dr. Carrier is not teaching. I would fear that the students in his classes would not be allowed to properly discuss any topic, but only agree with Dr. Carrier's viewpoint. Granted, I have only his letters as evidence, but they are quite persuasive in this regard.

Thank you to Keith Burgess-Jackson aka AnalPhilosopher HERE for providing an introduction for my entrance to the blogosphere.

I am a software consultant for SAS Institute, and travel extensively in the US installing and customizing a product that collects, warehouses, and reports on computer system performance data. However, that is not really definitive of me. I consider myself a scientist, primarily, and bring that approach to everything I do. I have a PhD in chemistry. Though I have not worked as a chemist for thirty-some years, I have tried to keep myself current in the main outlines of science, especially in cosmology, theoretical physics, and evolutionary chemistry and biology. I have been in data processing for 23 years and it appears to suit my analytical penchant.

I have been married to the same woman for over 20 years and have two sons , one 25, about to graduate with a multimedia degree from a private graphics arts school, and one who would have been 23 on March 9, that was killed in a dune buggy accident about 3 1/2 years ago. I also have two dogs, Dalmatian littermates. The male, Chester, weighs 110+ lbs and looks more like a rotweiller with a spotted coat than a Dalmatian, and the female, Annie, who weighs about 50 lbs and looks like a classic Dalmatian but is too small. The male is the most laid-back dog I have ever had, and the female makes up for it. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway) I love all five of the above.

I enjoy golf, downhill skiing, and ice skating. Lest you think I am athletic, I am 61 years old, 5' 7", and weigh 260 lbs right now, but am doing something about it. I am a fairly accomplished woodworker and musician (At one time playing French horn, now singing tenor). Using my research discipline, am in the midst of a major study of my own in the Gospels. I am a theist, but not of any traditional version. I do try to deal with a number of philosophical, theistic and political issues, and have spent a lot of time considering such things over the past several years. I enjoy civilized discussion and am perfectly willing to see an idea of mine refuted, if I learn in the process. I suspect this blog will give me plenty of opportunity! :-))

Now that I have started, I realize that this is exciting to be able to offer my ideas to whomever finds them interesting. The internet is great! This is the next best thing to a large whiteboard and a group of people.

Hi. Welcome to my blog. I will comment mostly on science, religion, and politics from a philosophical perspective. I cannot promise to publish daily (I travel a lot and don't always have time to even browse my favorites), but will try. Politically I am somewhere in the conservative to libertarian region. Scientifically, I was trained as a chemist, but have read widely in all the physical and biological sciences. With respect to religion, I could be called a theist, but not in any traditional sense of the word.

I would strongly urge you, if you don't already, to visit daily the three links to the right. AnalPhilosopher and Animal Ethics are published by Keith Burgess-Jackson a philosopher, and DissectLeft is published by a psychologist. Both sites have lively, varied, and thought-provoking content, and both men have been very encouraging towards my establishing my own blog. I owe them a great deal of thanks.

I would love to steal Keith Burgess-Jackson's disclaimer and make it mine, but it is copywrited! Suffice to say, that if I write it--it is my opinion or idea. If not, it will be clearly delineated. However, I may not always post things that I agree with.

I will post biographical information later.

You are welcome to write. I will not answer all email, but will read it, even if it is a week later.

Welcome aboard. I hope we all have a good ride.

Bill