Ontological Angst

Falling Leaves

2011-10-24T10:56:00.000-07:00

This Indian Summer has not made me happy. It's closing beautiful day has left me sad and resentful.

I cling to my little one, clutching her closer lest she slip away, and I bark sharply at the teens, even though they are behaving themselves and getting good grades.

I start thinking about heading south where winter is banished. My God, am I getting old?

I never understood old people heading south. What is it about cold weather that is incompatible with being old?

Then I'm reminded of my old drinking buddy from Germany, Horst. I met him at the Stube, the local drinking hole. One evening he confided in me that he was an alcoholic, and then he told me he was in the SS in World War 2. He showed me the tattoo.

I only bring this up because he was old, and after a night of drinking, he went home, slipped on the icy stone steps to the doorway of the house he and his sister lived in, cracked his head and died. His sister found him the next morning, stiff and stuck to the stairs. I drove right past the grim scene dark and early the next morning on my way to work, oblivious to my friend's demise.

Live or Die Trying

2011-09-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

It's sad to see someone go...

We just lost our dear friend who lives across the street. She was 89 years old and tethered to an oxygen tank, but she enjoyed life and took care of herself to the end. Her "kids" (older than the wife and I) and grandkids would travel across the country three to four times a year to visit her and take her camping or to just spend time together. They exchanged letters and called often. One son lives here in town and checked on her frequently, keeping the house in good repair, watching TV with her and taking here places. She went out happy, God bless her, and her family enjoys the blessing of having no regrets.

I was sitting in the living room Saturday morning, laptop on my lap, when my wife went across the street to get her groceries out of her car. She came back running and crying so I sprang up and ran over there, but Mrs K was already gone. I moved her to a flat surface and did CPR until the paramedics arrived.

My poor wife was inconsolable. She had befriended this lady and helped her for more than 10 years. It was very hard for her, but the wife went and took down the Do Not Resuscitate order Mrs K had taped prominently to the wall in the entrance of her home and presented it to the medics. They confirmed it and stopped working on her. Technically, my own efforts had violated her wishes, but somehow I don't think she minds...

All I could tell my sorrowful wife was that Mrs K went out her way, cheerful and independent to the end. Getting her own groceries, driving herself home and entering her own house were her last acts, and I think that's befitting such a fine lady who cherished her independence...

I wrote the following two years ago when we had a couple of deaths in the neighborhood, so I guess this is turning into the death post...

How are you supposed to feel when someone in your neighborhood dies who you weren't particularly close to?

Two Fridays in my neighborhood, two deaths. Directly across the street an elderly woman. The next house over a troubled young man who blew his brains out in front of his best friend. I'm not superstitious, but they say these things come in threes...

I couldn't cry for Mrs H. She scared me. Not in a "boo" way but in that "She can see into the depths of my soul" kind of way. She had a hard life, with a severe Norwegian upbringing on the cold northern plains. I don't know much more. There was an ugly marriage, alcoholism involved, that left her a dry, severe woman with an icy cold stare who nonetheless never lost her firm Lutheran faith in God.

She was a good woman, but she just couldn't contain the bitterness life had filled her up with. She was smart, and would strike like a snake at ignorance when she spied it, then regret her lack of charity afterward. She refused to let her mom go to a nursing home, taking care of her until her death at 101 years old. My wife was there when Mrs' H's mom died. They called me over to move her. She was already stiff.

I always admired Mrs. H for such devotion to her mother. Her stern sense of duty reminded me of my mom. Have you ever known one of those people who will do anything for anyone, always there when you need a hand? Not the cheery ones, but the ones who do it out of a grim determination to fulfill some Kantian, or maybe Christian duty. That was Mrs. H, and that's my mom. Anywhere someone is dying, sad, or suffering, she is there, carrying out her duty. God didn't say anything about having to smile.

Anyway, by the time we moved into the neighborhood, Mrs. H had already run off everyone who tried to befriend her. She was aging and needed help, but repelled all who attempted to come to her aid. My wife was too stubborn to be run off so easy, and that's how they became such great friends.

My wife didn't cry until the funeral. I was at work, but I had warned my kids that it would hit her there. My son, almost a man, held her and comforted her, my neighbors reported to me when I got home that evening. That boy may actually make something of himself someday.

I didn't know the young man who went out sideways last night. I remember last winter when he tore the back bumper off his truck trying to pull a tree stump out. I was in the garage building some shelves when it happened. Made a hell of a crash, followed by a serious string of cuss words.

It was a typical Friday night. I had beer in hand, guitar strapped to my back, the grill going on the back deck, music playing, interrupted occasionally by me playing and singing as the mood struck me. We just replaced the carpet with hardwood, and the acoustics are just awesome. My good friend Tito was over to share some beers and bbq, and my older daughter had one of her friends over.

Then a neighbor called to tell us there were men with machine guns outside our house. I think the cops often overreact in situations like this. A Tactical Assault Unit is a hammer in search of a nail sometimes, especially in a small city that doesn't see a lot of violence. So there were cop cars, ambulances, fire trucks, all because a young man was holding a gun threatening no one but himself. He had a history of depression and substance abuse. He followed through and put all that to rest. The last car to arrive was the coroner's.

Life Goes On

Today we had our annual neighborhood potluck. The Vietnam vets swapped stories, the older folks looked even older. J down the street needed me to help her navigate her electric wheel chair up and over the curbs. She's young but has been stricken by MS.

I used to fight a lot. I loved mixed martial arts, but too many little aches and pains accumulated and I decided to call it quits. I want to ease gracefully into old age. I enjoyed it for the exercise, but many of my fellow fighters had other reasons. More than one mentioned that getting hit in the face made him feel alive. I never understood that. I don't need a bloody nose to know I exist.

So what does it all mean? I couldn't cry for a fellow human being. The night of the suicide, Tito left, and my wife went over to take care of Mrs. H's house and the cat that still lives there. I prowled the living room, doing my best Stone Temple Pilots/Pearl Jam/Neil Young acoustic set. I offered it up for the soul of a young man who had just left this earth. I didn't know what else to do.

You see someone shot dead in a riot in South America, someone is there and now they're not. You ride 500 miles in a C-130 with a flag draped coffin. We live our lives while someone next door may be suffering out theirs. All I know is that my accumulated years had built a wall, a bulwark, against assaults upon my emotions.

Then I watched my kindergardener strip naked to the world on the back deck, put on her bathing suit, and prance gleefully among the sprinklers. Such unbridled joy, unencumbered by the cares of the world. I cried as I scrubbed crayon drawings off the deck railing and pondered the number three.

Progress, and Other Superstitions of the Antheap

2011-09-02T17:40:00.000-07:00

Ants in a heap, carrying food to the queen and biting the heads off of genetic nonconformists, believe in the superstition of progress.

Choose, Grow, Be Free

2011-09-01T17:42:00.000-07:00

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
-- Viktor Frankl

Is this space the same size it was in Frankl's time? Can the space in a ghetto be compared to the space Frankl had in a concentration camp? To believe someone or something can crush that space down to nothing is to surrender your free will. You stop growing, you imprison yourself.

Some cannot bear the weight of responding, growing, and being free. That puts too much in their hands. What causes this refusal to cast away blame, this fear of being responsible for ones own life?

Worry-Driven Life

2011-06-08T09:28:00.000-07:00

I've maintained for years that the true goal of the news media is to make money. Nothing wrong with that. The 24/7 news cycle is their money machine: Create a constant drumbeat of scary news, salacious gossip, snarky he-said she said, and nail-biting cliffhangers. As long as there are gullible people, this model should prove quite lucrative.

James Lewis has written an article in American Thinker entitled, The Great Liberal Pandemonium Machine. My only nitpick is that this is an equal ideology enterprise with plenty of conservative perpetrators as well.

Global Warming? All those confident "scientific" predictions are falling apart around the world, even as greedy politicians still try to squeeze the last little drops of power and money out of them. Human flesh-eating bacteria? SARS? Ozone holes? Mad Cow? The Curse of the Killer Tomatoes? Water torture? CO2? Bee Colony Collapse? It never ends. As long as scare stories sell, as long as millions of indoctrinated suckers fall for them they will never end. They've got you on a rat-running wheel, running scared every day, like rats scrambling to get away from electrical shocks that never actually come.

There is an element of sadistic cruelty in the Leftist Pandemonium Machine. "Pandemonium" is the imaginary Hell of devils, and there is something truly demonic about the torrent of media madness we have to tolerate every day.

But we have to understand it as a psychological trick. Ultimately, each of us has to resist the media storm and learn to laugh at it. Only you can solve the problem of media madness by ignoring them: Turn away from the scare headlines on the daily news, turn off the radio, don't click false-alarming websites. Every time you respond to a screaming scare story you are playing into their hands.

I agree. Am I concerned, even anxious, about the future? Sure, but I'm not going to let FOX or CNN drive me into a TV watching frenzy over it.

I'm going to work hard and be a good dad and husband, play my guitar, cook out on my grill and drink some beer. Life's too short to spend it stuck to the TV anxiously sweating over the latest crisis or outrage.

How to Save a Life

2011-01-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

Sgt 1st Class Greg Stube almost lost his life in the battle of Sperwan Gar, west of Kandahar. His guts were blown out by a rocket and he lost a leg. His life was saved by a man he had refused to let graduate when he was an instructor at the Special Warfare School and Center at Ft Bragg. He gave the man a choice: Go home (back to the regular Army) or go through the course again. The man chose the second option, and ended up saving Sgt Stube's life.

It's not very often a man gets to pick his savior, to shape an outside influence that will one day drag him from death's door. Sgt Stube was not given this opportunity: He made it by his own positive action, by demanding nothing but the best from his teammates. His teammate also embraced his destiny by not giving up on his dream to be an SF troop.

This is what makes the US military the greatest, most successful institution in the United States, perhaps the world. Soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines demand nothing but the best from themselves and their fellow warriors. Special forces even more so. Slack off, and the organization will spit you out on the street.

We can control what goes on around us. To believe otherwise is to surrender to despair

Self: Never stop growing or learning. Give it all or go home.

Family: Demand the best from your children, or you may be supporting them in your old age instead of vice versa.

Vocation: Demand the best from your coworker or your company may end up like GM

Faith: Demand the best from your pastors (and pastors, from your fellow pastors!) or you may end up embarrassed like Ted Haggard's New Life Church or bankrupt like many Catholic Dioceses who had not the courage to face the evil in their own midst.

Government: Demand efficient use of resources and courageous leadership from your politicians or your country will end up, well... where it is now.

We can control our own destinies if we have the courage to perservere regardless of circumstances and demand that those around us do as well.

What Makes A Hero?

Legalize Drunk Driving

2010-08-29T13:24:00.000-07:00

Legalize Drunk Driving. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

If you consider drunk driving laws as one more link in the chain of abuse constructed by the progressive social engineers, and that it punishes someone because they might do harm, it no longer sounds quite so absurd. Look back to where we started from:

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. (Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 62)

Here is Lew Rockwell's take:

The feds have declared that a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 percent and above is criminal and must be severely punished. The National Restaurant Association is exactly right that this is absurdly low. The overwhelming majority of accidents related to drunk driving involve repeat offenders with blood-alcohol levels twice that high. If a standard of 0.1 doesn't deter them, then a lower one won't either.

Probability and Ambiguity
Here is the truly insidious nature of lawmaking the modern American era. The laws are so complex that ordinary people no longer know where the boundaries are. Can you tell the difference between when your blood alcohol level is at .08 and when it is at .10?

Into this gap of ambiguity steps the regulator. Behave yourself and don't make trouble and you'll be OK. Decide to be a rabble rouser, and the regulators will hound you at every tiny infraction.

What have we done by permitting government to criminalize the content of our blood instead of actions themselves? We have given it power to make the application of the law arbitrary, capricious, and contingent on the judgment of cops and cop technicians. Indeed, without the government's "Breathalyzer," there is no way to tell for sure if we are breaking the law.

Now, the immediate response goes this way: drunk driving has to be illegal because the probability of causing an accident rises dramatically when you drink. The answer is just as simple: government in a free society should not deal in probabilities. The law should deal in actions and actions alone, and only insofar as they damage person or property.

Some reasonable people will say I've gone too far. All I can do in response is ask why eating french fries and texting while driving are not punished the same as drunk driving. Why did congress tax tanning salons and not hookah parlors or swimming pools? Why ban smoking in privately-owned business (like here in Colorado) but not flatulence?

Or as Jefferson would say,

"We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of rights; that without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782. ME 2:199

Self Esteem Nation

2010-07-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

"The worst psychological state is a superiority complex coupled with an inferior status."
--Jagdish Bhagwati, economist

Self-esteem is in the news again, sort of. President Obama has cut NASA space projects while charging the organization to "...engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."

Yeah, let's ignore all that stabby, explodie clitorectomy stuff and focus on ancient history...

The Self-Esteem movement has damn near wrecked this country. Maybe this is a secret plan to destroy the Muslim world?

As I sat through another interminable middle school award ceremony that lasted longer than the contest itself, I pondered how the self-esteem movement has wrecked this country. I had plenty of time since well-meaning adults were handing out participation medals to every eager participant, as the parents clapped themselves raw.

Our current financial calamity is the logical result of the self-esteem movement.

Don't get me wrong, I think self-esteem is wonderful when sprung from a healthy self-image and buoyed by real accomplishments. But like diversity, it is worthless when pursued for its own sake.

Defense Failure
Presidents Clinton and Bush were full of self-esteem as terrorists plotted the 9/11 attacks under the noses of our clueless but confident alphabet soup bureaucracies. The attacks themselves dented no one's esteem. Richard Clarke was the only government official to feel any blame and apologize as far as I can remember. President Bush awarded CIA Director George Tenant a medal for crying out loud!

Financial Failure
Politicians of all all stripes are arrogant and proud as interest on the national debt and entitlement spending slowly, blob-like, consume the federal budget. And now the private sector and state governments follow suit with stumblebum mismanagement that has wrecked the nation's economy. Finally, individual citizens soil themselves after gorging on credit, new cars and McMansions. And mommy government will pick them up and clean them off. Don't want them to feel bad...

Like spoiled children in a no-fault world, this endless chain of fools lines up to receive participation prizes.

Congress responds by creating bailouts and rewards for participation based on the advice of the same geniuses who caused the debacle.

This is how unbridled, unwarranted self-esteem destroys a culture that once believed in personal responsibility, thrift and self-reliance.

Self-esteem is turning this country into a colossal failure. Our car manufacturers are going broke while Japanese companies move in and make a profit, on our soil, with American workers. This shows that the average American still knows how to work and achieve, but our leaders and managers are egotistical losers too stupid to leverage it. What has any government agency or public enterprise done right in the last 8, 16, 20 years?

I could give a damn whether our next president is the messiah or the anti-Christ; all I want is competence from my government and our public institutions. If that's too much to ask, could they at least stop rewarding failure?

It's high time that people who screw up got the good old-fashioned ego-destroying, ass-kicking they deserve.

Did you lose a billion dollars today? Then your self-esteem should be crappy, and by the way, you're fired!

Bought more house and more car than you can afford? Looks like you may need to find a cardboard box underneath the interstate off-ramp. Your fellow citizens won't be paying for your stupidity.

You're a failure. Want a self-esteem builder? You can start by cleaning up your own mess. Our nation is out of balance: We have a surplus of self-esteem and a deficit of personal responsibility. Third-world countries are made of this.

Breasts, Bucks, and Bondage

2010-06-13T10:57:00.000-07:00

I caught a bit of Dennis Prager the other day, and he was talking about breastfeeding mothers alleging Facebook discrimination. Jenna Wortham, at her NY Times Blog reports:

Facebook is standing firm on a policy that has led to the removal of some photos posted by women that show breastfeeding. The deletions have spurred Facebook members to stage protests both online and offline.

Facebook maintains it is simply enforcing an existing no nudity policy. I didn't realize how widespread the Indignant Lactivist Movement was until I Googled the subject.

A nice young blogger posted this on her site, along with some pictures of herself proudly alimenting her young child:

Why do people think that baby pigs/cats/dogs/(mammal of your choice here) nursing are super! cute! and put photos of them in baby books and on sappy greeting cards, but a baby human being nourished is offensive?

AHHHHHHHHHHHH! It makes me rip out my hair. Maybe I should start nursing Willow again. In public. TOPLESS.

I've seen dogs and cats lay on their backs, spread their legs quite unashamedly, and vigorously lick their privates, so I don't think animal behavior is a reliable standard for gauging the limits of human decency. And her desire to scandalize us all by publicly nursing TOPLESS reveals the primal, atavistic urge that drives this attitude-fueled exhibitionism.

Jaelithe tells us (and shows us):

Offending the unwashed masses is one of my favorite pastimes. Take that, nursing-haters. I flash my boob at you! In a grainy filtered out-of-focus photo that shows even less flesh than the one on the cover of BabyTalk, which, incidentally, showed a lot less flesh than one ordinarily might expect to see on the cover of Vogue.

Angry women ranting against the puritans who quail at the sight of their breasts... Super moms proudly railing against the ignorant who equate breastfeeding with pornography...

One problem. These woman warriors are assailing straw men. Not wanting to see your breasts does not make me a puritan; and try as I might, I could not find one account of anyone equating breastfeeding with pornography.

Newsflash: Despite the arduous efforts of BET, MTV, and the major networks, large segments of society still cling tenuously to time-honored standards of decency, which include not showing off your hoo-hoos.

Breastfeeding is a beautiful, intimate experience between mother and child, and there is something creepy about the desire to turn it into a notorious display of "look at me" defiance.

Mothers have every right to discreetly breastfeed in public. Anyone who wants to push a mother and her baby into a bathroom so the baby can eat needs to have his head examined. But that's not what this is about. This is an unbalanced group of women with psychological issues actively stirring up outrage against themselves.

This is the kind of self-righteous, in-your-face ranting that does self-inflicted damage to a cause. Why would a woman want to post a picture of herself breastfeeding? What purpose does it serve, besides announcing, "Look at me! I'm Zena the warrior mother! I have a set of mammaries and I know how to use 'em!"

These women are hurting the cause of discreet public breastfeeding just as the creepy, parading "queers" hurt the homosexual agenda. Gay rights supporters insist these weirdos are not representative of the community at large, and most decry the negative publicity these painted and pierced perverts attract. Leather-clad homosexuals leading around their mates in spiked collars on the end of a chain gain no sympathy for gay rights; and angry Astarte wannabes who let it all hang out while defiantly challenging all "puritans" are doing damage to the righteous cause of public breastfeeding.

It is the outrageous exercise of rights that causes so much social friction in societies. Yes, I have a right to flagrantly denounce everybody's religion but mine, loudly damning everyone to hell for not converting to my faith, but why? What purpose would it serve, other than to anger a lot of people? I sure wouldn't gain any converts. This is the behavior that creates social chaos in places like the Indian subcontinent and the Balkans.

Sometimes it's better to just leave it alone
Big game hunting is a big deal in my state, and everyone has to take a hunter's safety class to get a tag. I took the course many years ago, and the instructor asked us to refrain from triumphant post-hunt displays like strapping a bloody buck across the hood of your pickup and parading down mainstreet past the Dairy Queen and the grocery store. Why? Because my state's been invaded by Bambi-loving city slickers who don't realize these animals would starve over the winter if we didn't manage the population. It ain't the wild west no more. Hunting offends the Disneyesque fantasyland these latte liberal transplants live in, and they vote. Push your slain quarry in their faces and these affluent voters could negatively impact big game hunting for a long time to come.

Standing up for what you believe in is important, but we all must realize that the God-given rights our constitution acknowledges are broad and deep, covering a diverse range of activities. Some of them are bound to rub others the wrong way. The easiest way to keep the peace is to enjoy them fully but charitably and mind your own business. This simple formula keeps the peace in small towns all over America.

If we could learn to keep our breasts, bucks, and bondage fetishes to ourselves, we'd all be a lot better off.

Abnormal Psychology

2010-06-08T05:00:00.000-07:00

"If 7-year-old Mozart tried composing his concertos today, he might be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and medicated into barren normality."
-- George Will

They pegged my son as ADHD a few years back. The psychologists ignored the fact that I was deployed to the Middle East for a year and that he may have been worried about his dad getting killed in a war he saw every day on the news. They also failed to realize he was bored.

We addressed it all when I got back. I was angered at the eagerness of these "professionals" to push drugs on a 9 year old. The only good that came of it was a comprehensive "IQ" test we paid for ourselves because it was not covered by insurance. Yes, he scored a little low on short term memory retention (imagine that, a 9 year old not paying attention!). We also found out that although he was no genius, he was advanced for the classes he was taking.

ADHD is Real, But Drugs are not the Answer
We turned down the offer from the drug pushers (my son being the most adamant) and followed the advice of anti-drug heroes Dr David Stein and Thom Hartmann. These two men are essential reading for parents who have been told their kids have ADHD. Hartmann's The Edison Gene will help you understand the ADHD child so you can develop strategies for success. Dr. Stein dispenses practical advice on how to parent an ADHD child, from schoolwork to behavioral issues.

We bought him an electronics kit, a programmable Mindstorm robot, gave him a violin and let him join orchestra, and we had him tested into advanced classes. Add in karate, and a crisis was now a manageable minor issue. He was now a normal, rambunctious inquisitive, annoying 9-year-old boy, who is prone to forgetfulness.

George Will turns his incisive analysis on psychology in America:

The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry's encyclopedia of supposed mental "disorders," is being revised

Today's DSM defines "oppositional defiant disorder" as a pattern of "negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures." Symptoms include "often loses temper," "often deliberately annoys people" or "is often touchy."

DSM omits this symptom: "is a teenager."

Disordered Nation

This DSM defines as "personality disorders" attributes that once were considered character flaws.

"Antisocial personality disorder" is "a pervasive pattern of disregard for ... the rights of others ... callous, cynical ... an inflated and arrogant self-appraisal." "Histrionic personality disorder" is "excessive emotionality and attention-seeking." "Narcissistic personality disorder" involves "grandiosity, need for admiration ... boastful and pretentious." And so on.

You mean sex addiction isn't normal?

The revised DSM reportedly may include "binge eating disorder" and "hypersexual disorder" ("a great deal of time" devoted to "sexual fantasies and urges" and "planning for and engaging in sexual behavior"). Concerning children, there might be "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria."

Why should we care?

If every character blemish or emotional turbulence is a "disorder" akin to a physical disability, legal accommodations are mandatory.

Under federal law, "disabilities" include any "mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities"; "mental impairments" include "emotional or mental illness." So there might be a legal entitlement to be a jerk. (See above, "antisocial personality disorder.")

Bottom Line: We all Pay
All of this must be covered by insurance, causing all of us to pay higher premiums so psychologists can rake in more money, based upon a book they wrote. Talk about a self-licking ice cream cone. Anyone who suffers any of these "disorders" must be given special dispensations at school and at work, creating perverse incentives to be "disordered."

We are paying for our own downfall. That's disordered.

*-There really are some disorders that require medication. I am criticizing abuses of the system, not the treatment of legitimate problems. --Silverfiddle

RCP - George Will
Thom Hartmann

No Respect

2010-06-04T13:35:00.001-07:00

Our problem in this country? No Respect. For anything. We have lampooned and demeaned every last institution in the country, a slow motion French Revolution where even the highest offices of government and church leaders do not escape the rhetorical torches and pitchforks. We've set it all ablaze and we dance with glee as we watch it burn.

Granted, government and church have earned it with their serial malfeasance. Their leaders don't appear to respect the institutions they were supposed to be guarding, so why should we?

We didn't earn it, so we don't respect it
We are ignorant of our history. We only hear the Howard Zinn versions now, being screamed out by blasphemous preachers from their pulpits of anger and resentment.

President Obama was proselytizing his fellow international cosmopolitans when he reduced American exceptionalism to patriotic self-delusion:

"I believe in American exceptionalism," Barack Obama said, "just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

"It's all in your minds, you jingoistic morons! Get over it. Your stinking country is no better than than Greece or West Stinkhole-istan!"

And we believe it, because we don't respect our history, so we've forgotten it.

We respect nothing so we value nothing

The press does not respect the truth. It is more interested in sensational propaganda. William Randolph Hearst and the yellow journalists of yore applaud with admiration from the grave.

We respect nothing but our own overinflated sense of self importance. Getting "dissed" is the only disrespect we get angry about. Back in the day, people had more respect because the culture taught it to them. A person with little or no respect for anything was ostracized to the fringes with other malcontents, but it was a long trip there with plenty of opportunity to repent along the way.

Forgotten Societal Correctives
Punishment and guidance at school, getting fired from jobs, being shut out of polite society, getting punched in the nose for insulting something dear to someone or impugning someone's character. These things taught us lessons and instilled virtues, if nothing else, just knowing when to shut your mouth. A person could learn, or not, by degrees.

Nowadays, there are no stop signs, no guardrails to block a person's free-wheeling descent to hell. Until he dis's the wrong person, and "honor" obliges the offended to shoot the smartass dead.

No, the football coach who used to teach respect has adorned the back window of his pickup with a cartoon character peeing on a Detroit Red Wing logo. How funny! It's in your face 24/7.

We get disrespected, so we shove it back in return, ending up respecting nothing and hating everything.

George Santayana said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Well, those with no respect of their history and their institutions are doomed to trash their culture.

H/T to Camp of The Saints who blogged on a similar issue by Washington Rebel - Closing the Gate

Is this a Protest or a Debate?

2010-03-03T07:32:00.000-08:00

Instead of reporting on conservative protests, the press is debating their ideological enemies in the tea parties

“Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic”
--Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.”
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel”
-- Ivan Turgenev

Reductio Ad Absurdum: Who gets there faster, Big Government Advocates or TEA Partiers?

The press is good at taking something an ordinary American says at a TEA party and deconstructing it down to absurdity, often going after syntactical errors or poorly constructed arguments. "See?" They say, "These people don't even know what they're protesting!"

The cognoscenti say "This lady receives social security and medicare and she's protesting big government! What a hypocrite!" This statement is itself illogical and dishonest: Protesting a system you're coerced to participate in is hardly hypocritical, but anyway... They find one little loose thread and pick at it until they unravel the fabric.

This is a valid line of attack in logical argumentation, but these reporters are still being dishonest. Their role is not to debate newsmakers, but report the news. They attack a logical error or mangled syntax to discredit the messenger and, by implication, her message. All good and fair, but this obscures the larger truth, and I think they do it on purpose.

The Meta-Narrative: You may have discredited this particular example, but the larger truth still remains

The left makes the same cry I am now making when they find recourse in the "meta-narrative." e.g. "Maybe the latest racist attack was a hoax, but racism still exists!"

Or, "OK, so that family Newsweek claimed was driven to bankruptcy by health care costs is not really broke. They own expensive real estate. But medical costs really do bankrupt some families!"

The press eats this propaganda up and spreads it like manure, where a thousand liberal fantasies bloom. No argumentation, no logic examinations, just channeling the emotion.

Things like racism and health care problems are real, but hard to put a quantitative finger on. Bad things happen, and as Dr Sowell points out, in a nation of over a quarter billion people, improbable events are commonplace. The press can be relied upon to point out every obscure event that buttresses the liberal cry that, "something must be done about this crisis!"

We don't need no stinking meta-truths!

The present conservative and libertarian concerns are valid: We really are in debt, our government really has invaded every corner of our lives, and people really don't trust institutions anymore. These are measurable, objective facts. We don't need meta-truths: The real thing is on display!

* Unemployment at 10% and rising, while the "stimulus" removes capital from the marketplace, leaving businesses unable to expand and hire more people.

* Government taking our money from the US Treasury and giving it to politically-connected banks and businesses

* Government apparatchiks telling us how to sneeze, how to wash our hands, and a gaggle of nattering nannies scolding us about compassion and racism

* A government insinuating itself deeper and deeper into our lives with endless tangles of red tape

* Government spending money it does not have, and encouraging citizens to do the same, putting us in hock to China

Politicians, liberal agitators, and their enablers in the press launch a farrago of rhetoric and argumentation to defend it all, but common sense people who know nothing of formal logic and debate do know that our nation cannot survive if this continues.

The jig is up.

Killer Compassion

2009-12-05T07:00:00.000-08:00

By providing an immigration safety valve, the US is doing more harm than good

HBO ran a film awhile ago by investigative director Rebecca Cammisa that documents the dangerous journey illegal immigrants make to get to the US from points south.

"Which Way Home" follows Kevin, Fito and several other children as they make the journey north, risking being robbed, raped, beaten or killed by criminals preying on the vulnerable migrants, or being killed or maimed if they fall off the train.

"For migrants who are trying to get through Mexico to get to the United States the situation is incredibly dehumanizing," Cammisa told Reuters in an interview. "(At a detention center) a young boy came through and just collapsed in front of us."

"He was completely and utterly devastated," she said. "He had been traveling with his brother and his sister. All three of them were trying to get to the United States. His sister was gang-raped and his brother was shot to death in front of him."

Given their track record, we should always be suspicious of liberal victim stories (Tawana Brawley, Rigoberta Menchu, just to name a few). But anyway, taking her at her word, we see that Mexico is where all the cruel abuse happens, not the US.

"I'm hoping that people will see this film and it will maybe deepen their understanding, help create a more compassionate view," Cammisa said. "I'm hoping that this film can be used as a tool pushing positive immigration reform."

"People are coming, people are desperate, they want a better life," Cammisa said. "There has to be a practical sensible approach to understanding that people need to work here, we need workers here, make it legal and humane."

A more compassionate view? I already have one. I first looked Latin American poverty in the eye over 20 years ago, so I'm one step ahead of Cammisa. Besides, she takes a simplistic view.

Say we give amnesty to everyone here, every single illegal alien. OK. Now what about the millions of souls still outside our borders who want in? How do we show compassion for them? Do we let them in too? Now, what do we do about the devastated villages and regions peopled only with those too old or too weak to make the journey. What of these poor souls?

This can't be the answer. The answers are found in places like Panama and Costa Rica, where government corruption is minimal and commerce flourishes. Unemployment is relatively low, as is the cost of living, and people would rather stay where they're at.

True Compassion is Not Emotional
Yes, we should have compassion for our fellow human beings, but it must be true compassion. It is easy to give a bum five dollars and call it compassion, but we're killing him if he uses that fiver to buy hooch or crack.

The wrong kind of help only makes things worse. Are things really so bad in the darkest corners of Guatemala? Is staying in your poor village really worse than getting gang raped in a Mexican boxcar, watching your brother get shot and killed, or dying in the Sonora Desert?

There is dysfunction south of our border, and we contribute to it with our greed for cheap labor and addiction to white powder

From our own craven dysfunction we pay politically correct lip service to these dysfunctional "cultures" in places like Africa and Latin America while enabling the kleptocrats who hold them hostage. This is not compassion, it's an international outrage. We rob these poor countries of their best and brightest, providing a safety valve for the ruling elites.

It's time to stop viewing unbridled immigration as a panacea. The solution is to bring prosperity to these impoverished areas. If stubborn, selfish oligarchy blocks progress, then ship guns and bombs so the people can start their first and most important self-help project.

OK, that's a little tongue-in-cheek, and it's been tried already with little success. Some serious Hispanic thinkers on the left have been calling for a moratorium on immigration, pointing out that the safety valve only benefits the oligarchy, alleviating it of its social responsibilities:

For the last fifty years, the so-called "safety valve" has not alleviated Mexico's growing pains as it transitions into a first world economy; it has merely delayed the development of the institutions that must address the lack of opportunities for the lower classes and the social disparities between ethnic Hispanics and indigenous Indians and dark-skinned mestizos. [...]

To achieve a realistic economic solution for the undocumented population in the United States, the pro-immigration side ought to consider a compromise whereby a moratorium period on immigration should be enacted. (MexiData - Villarreal)

True compassion
True compassion does not create dependency, separate families and hollow out villages. Rather, it gives fellow human beings the wherewithal to care for themselves within their own societies and cultures.

Reuters
MexiData - Villarreal

Peace and Freedom through Anarchy

2009-08-21T17:14:00.000-07:00

What is freedom? What is libertarianism? Can anarchy bring peace?

I find libertarianism attractive in the abstract, but sometimes jarring in the cold glare of reality. It doesn't help that I recently read that it grew out of anarchism, but it does make sense that the logical end of libertarianism is anarchism.

Libertarianism makes striking sense in that simplistic "if everybody minded their own business we'd all get along" kind of way. But what really impresses me about this ideology is its logical coherence.

Stephen Kinsella has written an interesting piece reducing all individual rights down to property rights and then showing how this is the key to peace and happiness.

As Murray Rothbard explained, individual rights are property rights.[2] And justice is just giving someone his due, which depends on what his rights are.[3]

The nonaggression principle is also dependent on property rights, since what aggression is depends on what our (property) rights are. If you hit me, it is aggression because I have a property right in my body. If I take from you the apple you possess, this is trespass — aggression — only because you own the apple. One cannot identify an act of aggression without implicitly assigning a corresponding property right to the victim.

I find this idea intriguing because it bolsters the case against an overweening government as well as against invasions and wars of aggression. I am against the former but have participated in the latter. I love things that rip your mind in two different directions.

If a state pays for you and decides for you, it owns you, and your rights disappear because you become de facto property of the state. That applies to citizens as well as invaded countries. And notice that motivation of the aggressor state does not matter. It could have the best of intentions, but you are still violated.

Anyway, I recommend you go read Mr. Kinsella's article. It's good food for thought.

Mises - Stephan Kinsella

Depression Has Already Started

2009-08-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

Winston Churchill was cursed with depression his whole adult life. He called it the Black Dog. How did he lead such an active, successful life without lithium?

WASHINGTON, Aug 3 (Reuters) - Use of antidepressant drugs in the United States doubled between 1996 and 2005, probably because of a mix of factors, researchers reported on Monday.

The news report goes on to blame increased stress, unemployment, the usual suspects.

Maybe it's a lack of purpose or a sense that life has no meaning. Maybe we're too self-focused; too much belly button examination is not healthy. I notice that the happiest, most well adjusted people are not self-referential. Maybe the depressed think life should be perfect. There's a pill for everything, why not for happiness?

Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live. -- Nicolas de Chamfort

If too much introspection doesn't do you in, your fellow man is waiting to do the deed.

John Sodini was a lonely guy who couldn't get a date, so he shot up a woman's aerobic class. Maybe our sex-sodden society pushed him over the edge.

Once again, Chamfort comes to mind:

There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men.

Facing both at once is too much to bear for some people.

Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.

CBS News - Sodini
Reuters - Antidepressants

Saving Private Hitler

2009-08-05T19:51:00.000-07:00

How would you like to be the medic who saved Hitler's life?

What a burden for a man named Johan Jambor, who was a WW I medic and treated a wounded Private Hitler. He died aged 94 in 1985, but had told his secret to priest Franciszek Pawlar, who kept a note of their conversation. Johan’s friend Blassius Hanczuch confirmed the priest’s account of how the medic saved Hitler’s life. He said:

In 1916 they had their hardest fight in the Battle of the Somme. For several hours, Johan and his friends picked up injured soldiers. He remembers Hitler. They called him the ‘Screamer’. He was very noisy. Hitler was screaming ‘help, help’. His abdomen and legs were all in blood. Hitler was injured in the abdomen and lost one testicle. His first question to the doctor was: ‘Will I be able to have children?’.” Blassius said that when the Nazis swept to power Johan began to suffer nightmares and blame himself for saving Hitler.

You can go read the entire account in The Sun, a British Newspaper. The article focuses on Der Fuhrer's testicular deficiency, but I found the account of the medic who saved a future genocidal madman to be much more interesting. Oh, the cruel twists of history...

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1945960.ece

Brother Al's Unscientific Medicine Show

2009-08-02T08:47:00.000-07:00

Global Warming fanatics strike me as being credulous and naive in their wild stampede to "consensus." They are also very unscientific. Continuing disagreement among respected scientists is prima facie evidence that the science is not "settled."

Yes, conservative blowhards like me can be just as bad in the opposite direction; overly skeptical, poo pooing it all without even examining the scientific evidence. But the global warming skeptics who really matter are the scientists who have studied the subject. After all, how much does the average citizen really know about all of this? We must rely on the words of others who actually measure, study and observe these global phenomena.

Skeptical scientists do not dismiss global warming so easily, and that is what makes them credible. Unlike Al Gore and his followers, the debate is still open for them; they foreclose no option. Consensus is not a scientific concept.

Most will admit that there is evidence of a warming trend, as far as the data goes. So what? The earth's temperature has never been static. There is evidence of wide variances of temperature over the past thousands of years. The earth's atmosphere is a complex and dynamic thing.

WHAT IS THE CORRECT TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH?
The earth doesn't have a temperature--think about it. It has millions of simultaneous temperatures in millions of ecosystems or climates, each with their own weather patterns and internal dynamics. Question: Why is the same latitude warmer on the West Coast of the US than on the east coast?

Even if we thought we could control it, a random volcano or sunspot event could overwhelm our efforts. Mount Pinatubo put more pollution into the earth's atmosphere than man has in his entire history on earth. Think about that: Trillions spent, creating horrible opportunity costs, and its all for naught with one belch of a volcano or a sudden spike in sunspot activity.

MISTAKES HAPPEN
Our ability to accurately measure temperatures in all the meaningful places (all things being equal, cities are hotter than the countryside), at the meaningful times is imperfect and imprecise. Measurement anomalies and statistical errors can ripple throughout entire data sets.

Historical records are spotty and anecdotal (Europe's year without summer, the little ice age, size of tree rings, ice core samples). Even when we think we've got it nailed, there are mistakes:

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies—known as GISS—was forced to admit it committed an egregious error when it publicly claimed October 2008 was the warmest October in history.

It turns out October 2008 was nowhere near a record. Global temperature measurements of the Earth’s lower atmosphere by NASA satellite instruments show it was fairly typical compared to temperatures over the past 30 years and significantly cooler than average temperatures over the past seven years. (Source: Heartland Institute)

In 2007, NASA's GISS website issued a report correcting historical data measurements. This resulted in revising US temperatures downward slightly. Sensitive to the political hay that would be made of this, they attached this note to the end of the report:

Contrary to some statements flying around the internet, there is no effect on the rankings of global temperature. Also our prior analysis had 1934 as the warmest year in the U.S. (see the 2001 paper above), and it continues to be the warmest year, both before and after the correction to post 2000 temperatures. However, as we note in that paper, the 1934 and 1998 temperature are practically the same, the difference being much smaller than the uncertainty.

NASA Astronaut Phil Chapman, who also happens to be a geophysicist and an astronautical engineer, informs us that by the measurements of the four authoritative agencies that measure such things, 2007 was the coolest year since 1930. This is not his conclusion. It is the conclusion of the data provided by these agencies:

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

He goes on to talk about observed variances in solar activity which, surprise!, affect our climate. Imagine that, the sun has something to do with how warm the earth gets. Note he doesn't shove this evidence in our faces, shouting "Aha!" and declaring the debate over. So here we are, with each side invoking their chosen scientists while impugning the character and professional credentials of those on the other side. This fails to satisfy.

SCIENTIFIC "CONSENSUS" IS A BOGUS CONCEPT
Dr.Richard Lindzen, MIT Climatologist, addresses the fact that CO2 levels have increased, and further accedes this may be due to human activity, but it is also possible this could be caused by the climate itself. Regardless, the relevant question to him is, what is the relevance?

The scientific question of relevance is what do we expect such an increase to do? The answer, most assuredly, is not to be arrived at by a poll of scientists--especially of scientists who do not work on this question. The issue of consensus is, in this respect, extremely malign, especially when the consensus is merely claimed though not established. However, the whole idea of consensus is problematic.

With respect to science, the assumption behind consensus is that science is a source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists. Of course, science is not primarily a source of authority. Rather, it is a particularly effective approach to inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science; consensus is foreign. When in 1988 Newsweek announced that all scientists agreed about global warming, this should have been a red flag of warning. Among other things, global warming is such a multifaceted issue that agreement on all or many aspects would be unreasonable.

With respect to science, consensus is often simply a sop to scientific illiteracy. After all, if what you are told is alleged to be supported by all scientists, then why do you have to bother to understand it? You can simply go back to treating it as a matter of religious belief, and you never have to defend this belief except to claim that you are supported by all scientists except for a handful of corrupted heretics.

He goes on to explain that all of these imprecise data points require interpolation and extrapolation to fill in the blanks and predict future trends, and that's where the controversy comes in. It is unfortunate, but science often bends to the will of those providing funding.

Good Science vs. Junk Science

Good science, unlike religion, eschews anathematizing the heterodox. Science is about inquiry, testing of ideas, and sharpening one's ideas upon the whetstone of reality. Consensus short-circuits scientific progress. Look at all of the information that the scientific community accepts as established fact: Size and distances of the planets, all manner of natural phenomena here on earth.

The UN had nothing to do with establishing consensus on these currently accepted facts. Once a preponderance of evidence accrued, they generally became accepted. And any scientist worth anything knows that any of these facts could change based upon new information.

Scientists agree on the laws of thermodynamics, and no international body was called in to mediate agreement and gain consensus. Scientists have not reached similar agreement on the earth's environment. This is prima facie evidence that, all apologies to Al Gore, the science is not settled and the debate is not over. To believe otherwise is to be quite illiberal and most unscientific.

Australian - Phil Chapman
Heartland Institute - NASA Mistake
GISS - NASA 2007 Errors
Heartland Institute - Lindzen

Is America a Christian Nation?

2009-07-27T05:01:00.000-07:00

Matt Rogers has written a thoughtful article on the separation of church and state at his blog, The Observer Podcast. He makes a strong case for secularism, among other things:

One misconception is that secularism is aligned with atheism and agnosticism however this is wrong. It is in fact a processes that allows for freedom of religion or lack there of. It permits an individual to make a decision and be safe in the knowledge that their believe will not be hindered, as long as it is braking no laws and not impeding on another’s rights to their own belief.

He also attacks the idea that this is a Christian nation, citing Richard Dawkins and calling out certain conservative Christians for using bogus founding fathers quotes. He makes a coherent case as far as he goes, and he does it quite dispassionately and intelligently.

However, I think he discounts too quickly the influence Christianity had on the founders, and he doesn't pause to consider that a religion can inform the morals of a polity without actually hijacking its laws. Having said that, I think it is refreshing to see someone I don't completely agree with write on the subject in an intelligent and charitable manner. I am a Christian who believes in keeping church and state separate. I voted for Bush, but I hated his faith based initiative.

I do take issue with Dawkins claiming this is not a Christian nation. That's an easy argument for such a brilliant man to make, almost a straw man argument. This nation was actually founded more upon an Old Testament, Hebrew conception of God. No doubt, most of the founders were Christian, but they assiduously avoided invoking Christ. They wisely abstracted the idea of a National God out to such nebulous concepts as Divine Providence or Natural Law. Anything more would be exclusionary; anything less would be Universalist mush.

Before Christians stone them for being wish-washy, we must remember they were founding a state, not a church or religion. By recognizing a divinity and pointing to His natural law, they alienate almost no one while establishing a bedrock foundation upon which to build a political and legal system.

This begs the question, if not divine law and the natural rights of man, then what is our constitution founded upon?

Health Scare: Put Descartes Before de Horse

2009-07-24T17:29:00.000-07:00

Two Questions:
1) Why must the democrats insist on shoving this giant health care suppository up our hind ends so quickly?

2) Why do they insist on gulping down the entire enchilada all at once as opposed to a piecemeal approach?

The first question is easy to answer. It's now or never. Citizens are getting wise to the Washington game, and they don't like it. Support is going down, not up. They may never get this chance again.

Lefties squealed like stuck pigs when Bush rammed through the Patriot Act and rushed us to war in Iraq. Although I think they were wrong on the issues, I did agree with those on the left who wanted to slow things down, have an honest investigation of the issues, and then debate the issue in light of the material facts.

Rushing things through is never wise. Good ideas get better with time, and bad ideas go rotten.

The second question kind of gets answered by the first. They want it all and they want it now. This is an extremely complex issue. The president doesn't know what's in the bill, congress doesn't know... Who knows? Medicare is going broke, Medicaid is breaking the states, and nothing they do turns out right.

I'm against this solely by virtue of my judgment that anyone so willing to take all of this on, all at once, and right now, is seriously, dangerously deluded. Their delusion therefore renders them incapable of addressing this properly. To paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, these people don't know what they don't know, and they don't know it. Ignorance is a dangerous thing. Letting politicians monkey with something this complex is like giving an arsonist the materials to make firebombs.

DC needs a dose of Descartes
Rene Descartes, the greatest philosopher since the Greeks, wrote an incomplete work, Rules for the Direction of the Mind. In it he tells us how to solve problems. This is the man who invented analytic geometry and then showed it could not be used to solve the three most famous problems of classical geometry, anticipating the calculus of Newton and Leibniz. Rene knew a thing or two about figuring things out.

Rule 5 is most applicable here. Break it down into simpler pieces:
...first reduce complicated and obscure propositions step by step to simpler ones, and then, starting with the intuition of the simplest ones of all, try to ascend through the same steps to a knowledge of all the rest.
We say "health care," but that is a huge, all-encompassing concept. Let's break it down with an eye to balancing humaneness and efficiency:

Delivery: How do we deliver it to those who need it when and where they need it?

Payment: Who pays and how?

Insurance Reform: Slash the rules and let the companies compete for our business? How do we handle catastrophic cases? How do we protect families from going bankrupt?

Decision-making: Who gets to make those decisions about your heath care and that of your loved ones?

What is the proper role of the federal government? Should it encourage certain practices while proscribing others?

Taxation: Should the federal government be monkeying with this at all? Why not turn it all back over to the states, along with the concomitant chunk of money they tax from us every year to pay for it?

These are still very broad categories. Each could be broken down by experts into perhaps hundreds of sub-categories. And that's another thing. Where are the experts? Where's the congressional testimony, the public debate and the jostle of competing ideas?

Regardless of your politics, can't you agree with me that there has been no debate? Can we also agree that something must be done, but we must first understand what we are undertaking?

WikiSource - Descartes' Rules
Professor Kenneth A. Bryson

Che and Churchill: There's a Little Eichmann in All of Us

2009-07-11T11:04:00.001-07:00

How does a Ward Churchill happen?

I was fascinated by indians and the west when I was a young boy living in Illinois. I roamed my uncle's timber in the Dean Hills with my .22, and canoed down The Kaskaskia River, camping under the stars, fishing, and gigging frogs as I went.

But I really wanted to do all that out west, in the Rocky Mountains. Maybe similar childhood fantasies are what drove fellow Illinoisan Ward Churchill to go off the deep end with the whole hippie-radical-Indian thing.

It's easy to call him a charlatan, because the facts bear this out; but that is too simple. I am sure his goals were noble. The West didn't used to have a lot of blacks, so Native Americans had to stand in as the despised minority once the Chinese went mainstream. So a good western hippie took up the cause of the red man.

I only got to see Boulder in the 80's, but I'm sure Ward fit that scene well back in the 60's, with his fiery intellectualism and indian braids. I can see how he could get so into it that he ended up deluding himself and authentically become the fantasy he had created.

What I don't understand is how the CU Board of Regents fell for it.
You can call yourself an indian and declare the 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns," but you'd better have you academic credentials in order.

I hold nothing against hippies. I wanted to be one when I was a kid. But then I grew up. Even then, I could not resist hitching to Boulder when The Dead came to town. I would spend the whole weekend joining throngs of deadheads playing guitars and banging tambourines on Pearl Street. I always found some hippies willing to take me in. They didn't even mind me refusing the dope.

Later on, I made many friends in Latin America who were self-avowed socialist and leftists who idolized Castro and El Che, and who still spoke bitterly about what Pinochet did to Allende. Like my hippie friends, all sincere people.

Bring it all down, man!
But there are many on the left preaching peace and brotherhood who would do great violence to achieve this dream. Che Guevara killed poor campesinos. Is it any wonder the good folks of Higuera dropped a dime on his murdering ass? Leftist hagiography also avoids the documented evidence that Salvador Allende was becoming increaslingly infatuated with violence and accumulating arms before his downfall.

There are people on the right itching to set it all "right" with violence as well. I'm not saying anybody's better than anyone else. It's just that so much of this on the left gets overlooked or romanticized while the right is inevitably tied to Hitler.

Hitler was not a "Right-Winger" anyway. He embodied a Nietzchean overthrow of traditional religion-based morality while indulging himself and his adopted countrymen in Rousseau's back-to-nature romanticism, with Wagner blaring in the background. Hardly conservative...

We are flawed human beings, searching for the truth. When we think we've found it, we have a strong desire to impose it on others.

There's a little Eichmann in all of us, including Ward Churchill.

Arizona, Cut Off Your Indian Braids

2009-06-24T04:54:00.000-07:00

Happiness is a state of mind

A Loss for Words in a Time of Change

2009-06-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

President Obama has ushered in an era of change, but do we really know what we're getting?

Can ordinary citizens even evaluate whether these winds of change blow fair or foul? If so, how? Based upon feelings and pop culture, or upon the lessons of history?

The current political debate started over 100 years ago. Threads of Socialism, Libertarianism, Populism, Fascism, Classical Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, Conservatism, Republicanism, and Jeffersonian Democracy are all interwoven into the the political fabric of our nation. Trouble is, these emotion-laden words have become stumbling blocks to rational discussion, and politics has become a cartoon.

"You're a neocon fascist!"
"Oh yeah? Well you're a socialist"

Alas, this is the state to which we have reduced our political discourse. Any intelligent debate must employ these words, since they are shorthand for important political concepts.

Just how statist do we want this nation to be?

American Progressives in the thrall of Mussolini's Fascist Italy asked that question back in the 1920's. State intervention into the businesses of the nation and the lives of the citizens was seen as the anecdote to poverty and the periodic market crashes that indifferent Conservatives merely shrugged their shoulders at.

Mussolini was a bold leader who made the trains run on time, and that was something to be respected back then. His deep socialist roots also informed his state-sponsored sympathy for the working class poor.

American conservatives pointed to The US Constitution to support their state-sponsored indifference to things outside the purview of The Republic.

George Joyce has written an insightful article detailing Alfred Smith's Democratic party nomination challenge to FDR. Smith shows us how to argue against President Obama's ideas, and he does in from within the Democratic Party.

Fred Siegel, in City Journal, writes about H.G. Wells, Godfather of American Liberalism. In the article, he examines the intellectual wellspring from which grew modern liberalism.

Both pieces taken together show us a time when people vigorously debated fundamental philosophical issues, employing historical precedent, ancient writers, and contemporaneous empirical evidence.

Europeans and South Americans can dispassionately deploy these concepts in discussing what this or that nation should do. Why can't Americans?

American Thinker - George Joyce
City Journal - Fred Siegel

Anything more than Nasty, Brutish and Short is Icing on the Cake

2009-04-08T05:00:00.000-07:00

Blogger Ben Sutherland recently wrote about life being FUBAR. He is so right that life is broken, and to an idealist that realization can be very depressing.

I have a real problem with people who believe in the perfectibility of man. Spending a little time in Ben's world of special education on the wrong side of the tracks would quickly disabuse the naive of this notion.

The world is broken and nobody can fix it. All each person can do is to try to illuminate the little corner they are in. Look at the world: Pinprick sparkles of civilization scattered across a sea of Hobbesean brutality. To not be upset about it is to surrender your humanity. Obsessing over it can cause you to lose your sanity. The trick is to not let it drive you crazy or deter you from keeping your own little corner bright and clean.

Ever read "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Hemingway?

Devils Infest the Postmodern Bubble

2009-04-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

French philosopher Andre Glucksmann boldly declares that the real bubble implicated in the current economic and financial crisis is a post-modern one, and it has not yet burst.

Postmodernism, which places itself “beyond good and evil,” beyond true and false, inhabits a cosmic bubble. It would be a good thing if fear of a universal crisis allowed us to burst the mental bubble of postmodernism—if it washed away the euphoria of our pious wishes and brought us once again to see straight.

When ignorant people build ziggurats in the shifting sands, the project is doomed to failure...

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_snd-postmodern-financial-crisis.html

Michael Vick's Dogged Determinism

2009-04-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

Should Michael Vick be allowed to play football again?

I think so. A man's livelihood is an important part of who he is. What else can Vick do to support himself and his family? Star in a real-life remake of The Longest Yard? He is a gifted athlete. Hanging drywall, while beneficial to society and those professionals who do it, would be grossly unfulfilling for this formerly high-flying falcon. A man of his talents must be free to exercise them.

Allowing him to be an NFL quarterback again would not be condoning his actions. Rather, it would be an acknowledgment that he has paid his debt to society and to the animal kingdom. If a society punishes someone, it should also hold out redemption.

Is he repentant? Who knows. If we take him at his word, he has learned some valuable life lessons. The average ex-con doesn't have the skills or talents to put his life back together; Michael Vick does.

Would I trust him to stay in my house and watch my dog? I don't know... I do know that giving him a chance to prove himself on the gridiron again costs me nothing; that's why I advocate giving him another shot at NFL superstardom. We as a society bear no risk; it's all on Michael Vick and the NFL, so why not?

The NFL is a gansta joint anyway, so bringing Vick back can only increase the multi-billion dollar revenue stream that flows inexorably from the unemployed and working class to the millionaire owners and players. A dog's gotta bark, a quarterback's gotta throw a football, and the fans gotta cheer.

Who are we to stand in the way of destiny?

http://www.nypost.com/seven/04032009/news/nationalnews/michael_vick__prison_gave_me_time_to_thi_162741.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Vick
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hDsEKkbHNcP7laksDZz0oHhhHOwAD97BGRQ00
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

Intellectual Honesty

2009-04-03T16:56:00.000-07:00

I've had more than a few visitors snort derisively at my claim of intellectual honesty because I believe in God yet also cherish logic. These arrogant atheists think they're smarter than Kant, Pascal and Descartes; men who taught us much about logic yet still believed in an Almighty Creator.

My understanding of intellectual honesty is that you don't purposely distort or hide information in the course of communicating with others. Politicians do this all the time.

Their recent manufactured outrage over the AIG bonuses that their stimulus bill authorized is the latest example. Instead of explaining why the bonuses are needed to retain people to defuse this bomb, they fan the flames of voter anger. They know the real story but withhold information for their own political advantage. That is intellectually dishonest, as well as cowardly.

Here is the WikiHow definition of intellectual honesty that my God-scoffing critics cling to:

Keeping one's convictions in proportion to one's valid evidence

By this definition, an intellectually honest person cannot believe in God because there is no concrete proof. But going down the road of Human Logic Uber Alles eventually leads to absurdity. How do you know your wife is not cheating on you when you can't see her? How do you know your truck is still in the garage when you're laying in bed at night? How do you know the Battle of Hastings really happened? How do you know 2 + 2 doesn't conspire to make 5 when no one is looking? See where this leads?

I like the University of California at Irvine's definition much better:

Honesty in the acquisition, analysis, and transmission of ideas.

Jewish World elaborates:

One of the hallmarks of our great Torah scholars throughout the generations has been the uncompromising loyalty to the concept of intellectual honesty in their writings and commentaries. One would almost take this for granted, for the subject that is being dealt with is Torat Emet -- the Torah of Sinai itself, that to Jews represents ultimate and eternal truth and honesty.

Nevertheless, the temptation to falsify, exaggerate, deny, plagiarize and even commit forgery is a well-known affliction in general academic circles. As such, the unswerving path of intellectual honesty that one finds in the writings of the great Torah scholars is exemplary and inspiring.

This is the intellectual honesty I'm after. No matter how much I believe in some cause or idea, I will sincerely evaluate information that contradicts it, and I will never make stuff up or use dubious information to bolster my case. Cold, hard logic is beautiful to me, it is the clockwork of life, but it is not an end unto itself. Just because the human mind is incapable of apprehending something doesn't mean it's not there.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~arvo/honesty.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigour
http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/jewishsociety/Intellectual_Honesty.asp