In response to our post about President Obama titled Who Is He? in which I suggested that it would help us to know who he is at his core if we knew who the people are whom he most admires, a reader wrote to ask who I would place on my own list.
Knowing that I risk omitting someone I shouldn't, and limiting the list to ten people from the last 100 years, and excluding anyone who is still alive (and my father), I came up with the following ten men and women:
Thomas A. Edison
Winston Churchill
Raoul Wallenberg
Oscar Schindler
Irene Sendler
Richard Wurmbrand
William F. Buckley
Ronald Reagan
Mother Teresa
Richard J. Neuhaus
I'm sure there are many others who deserve to be on such a list. Indeed, I would include many of those who died or suffered for their faith or in defense of our country. However, these ten come immediately to mind. I welcome suggestions from readers as to who else might be included in such company.
UPDATE: How could I have forgotten Mohandas Ghandi and Martin Luther King?
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Where Has All the Money Gone?
I applaud Alan Grayson for his pursuit of the Auditor General of the Federal Reserve in this video (which must have been made before last November's election when he was defeated). The subject matter is perhaps a bit arcane but the take home message is that the Obama administration is spending trillions of dollars that we don't have, and nobody seems to know where the money is going:
After spending almost a trillion dollars in stimulus money last year Mr. Obama is asking for more in his current budget. Yet no one can say where the bulk of the last stack of money went. This has to strike anyone who watches it, even a left-wing progressive like Grayson, as insane.
What Do They Hope to Accomplish?
I really hope this guy isn't a teacher. I'm not referring to the one with the microphone, but the other one, the guy in the crowd who seems to be some sort of lobotomized wind-up toy:
Anyway, I was wondering as I read the news about the Wisconsin teachers calling in sick for a third straight day in order to attend the protest in Madison, how many sick days their contract allows them and whether there will be any repercussions for taking sick days, for which they're paid by the same taxpayers from whom they're demanding benefits that few of those same taxpayers enjoy, in order to tend to personal business. I don't see how this could possibly do their cause any good or help them to rise in the esteem of the citizens of Wisconsin.
Nor do I see how hiding in a motel somewhere at taxpayer expense in order to block the state senate from doing its work will help the electoral prospects of Wisconsin's remaining Democratic senators, but who knows?
How long do these guys think they can remain squirreled away? A month? Two months? Will they insist that the citizens of Wisconsin pay them the whole time they're in absentia? What's the point of this stunt, anyway, other than to show their constituents in the unions that they're willing to make complete fools of themselves in order to stand foursquare for the right of public employees to drive the state into bankruptcy?
Good old Ed Schultz. He can always be counted on to be a voice of calm reason amidst a sea of turmoil and strife.
Anyway, I was wondering as I read the news about the Wisconsin teachers calling in sick for a third straight day in order to attend the protest in Madison, how many sick days their contract allows them and whether there will be any repercussions for taking sick days, for which they're paid by the same taxpayers from whom they're demanding benefits that few of those same taxpayers enjoy, in order to tend to personal business. I don't see how this could possibly do their cause any good or help them to rise in the esteem of the citizens of Wisconsin.
Nor do I see how hiding in a motel somewhere at taxpayer expense in order to block the state senate from doing its work will help the electoral prospects of Wisconsin's remaining Democratic senators, but who knows?
How long do these guys think they can remain squirreled away? A month? Two months? Will they insist that the citizens of Wisconsin pay them the whole time they're in absentia? What's the point of this stunt, anyway, other than to show their constituents in the unions that they're willing to make complete fools of themselves in order to stand foursquare for the right of public employees to drive the state into bankruptcy?
Friday, February 18, 2011
Popperazi
Famous science writer John Horgan takes a whack at another famous science writer, Brian Greene, for his speculations on the multiverse. There are different multiverse theories, but essentially they share in common the idea that reality consists of an uncountable number of universes, or worlds in our own universe, each one different from the next.
There's no way to observe any world but our own, of course, but the theories have gained a measure of popularity, especially among atheistic scientists, because if there really are a near infinite number of worlds then the probability of a world like ours existing goes from almost nil to inevitable. Otherwise, if ours is the only world there is, its extraordinary fine-tuning makes it exceedingly unlikely to have happened apart from the intervention of an intelligent agent. This is an unacceptable state of affairs for an atheist, thus the concept of the multiverse is seen as something of an intellectual lifesaver.
Horgan writes:
I think it's nonsense for Horgan, who is himself an atheist, to be making moral judgments, but I do agree with what he says in the quoted passage. Speculation about multiverses is not science, its metaphysics. There's no way such universes could be empirically observed or tested for which is the sine qua non for science.
The irony is that although many scientists agree that such "theologies" aren't genuine science no one, as far as I know, complains much about anybody talking about them in a physics class. Yet let someone introduce intelligent design into a biology class, and the screeching and howling from the defenders of scientific purity is ear-piercing. ID is not testable, they protest, it's not falsifiable, it's not science, it's theology, etc. All of these asseverations are dubious, but let's grant them. Why then is ID verboten but multiverse speculations are not?
For that matter, why is the Darwinian claim that natural processes are sufficient to produce life in all its variety admissable, but the basic ID claim that natural processes are not adequate to produce complex, specified information is not?
Of course, we know the answer. Multiverses and Darwinism both provide intellectual cover for atheistic naturalism and are thus welcome. Intelligent Design, however, is compatible with theism and is thus to be banned, proscribed, censored, and exiled at all costs.
The debate, in other words, is not about science, it's about which metaphysical beliefs our children will be suffered to hear in their classrooms. Count me among the "Popperazi", but also count me among those who think that all such speculations should be permitted in the science classroom as long as the teacher wants to present them and as long as there's time for the rest of the curriculum to be taught.
There's no way to observe any world but our own, of course, but the theories have gained a measure of popularity, especially among atheistic scientists, because if there really are a near infinite number of worlds then the probability of a world like ours existing goes from almost nil to inevitable. Otherwise, if ours is the only world there is, its extraordinary fine-tuning makes it exceedingly unlikely to have happened apart from the intervention of an intelligent agent. This is an unacceptable state of affairs for an atheist, thus the concept of the multiverse is seen as something of an intellectual lifesaver.
Horgan writes:
These multiverse theories all share the same fundamental defect: They can be neither confirmed nor falsified. Hence, they don't deserve to be called scientific, according to the well-known criterion proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper. Some defenders of multiverses and strings mock skeptics who raise the issue of falsification as "Popperazi" - which is cute but not a counterargument. Multiverse theories aren't theories - they're science fictions, theologies, works of the imagination unconstrained by evidence.Horgan goes so far as to call such speculations immoral because they divert scientists from the crucial task of saving the world from serious threats.
I think it's nonsense for Horgan, who is himself an atheist, to be making moral judgments, but I do agree with what he says in the quoted passage. Speculation about multiverses is not science, its metaphysics. There's no way such universes could be empirically observed or tested for which is the sine qua non for science.
The irony is that although many scientists agree that such "theologies" aren't genuine science no one, as far as I know, complains much about anybody talking about them in a physics class. Yet let someone introduce intelligent design into a biology class, and the screeching and howling from the defenders of scientific purity is ear-piercing. ID is not testable, they protest, it's not falsifiable, it's not science, it's theology, etc. All of these asseverations are dubious, but let's grant them. Why then is ID verboten but multiverse speculations are not?
For that matter, why is the Darwinian claim that natural processes are sufficient to produce life in all its variety admissable, but the basic ID claim that natural processes are not adequate to produce complex, specified information is not?
Of course, we know the answer. Multiverses and Darwinism both provide intellectual cover for atheistic naturalism and are thus welcome. Intelligent Design, however, is compatible with theism and is thus to be banned, proscribed, censored, and exiled at all costs.
The debate, in other words, is not about science, it's about which metaphysical beliefs our children will be suffered to hear in their classrooms. Count me among the "Popperazi", but also count me among those who think that all such speculations should be permitted in the science classroom as long as the teacher wants to present them and as long as there's time for the rest of the curriculum to be taught.
Presidential Prevarications
The New York Times has an interactive graphic breakdown of President Obama's 2011 budget. You can see the whole thing at a glance, and by moving the cursor over a particular spending area you can get a comparison of this year's budget to last year's spending.
It's a useful way to illustrate the magnitude of the problem and where the cuts have to be made.
Mr. Obama's recent defense of his budget was, by all accounts, disingenuous. Most egregiously, he claimed the budget would be in balance by 2015, but there is clearly no year in the next ten when the deficit would be anywhere near closed. By that time the debt will be so high that we will have long since hurtled over the cliff of national default.
He justified his prevarication by not counting payment of interest on the debt incurred by the previous administration as spending. This is a dissimulation. Federal spending is still spending no matter whether we're spending to pay the interest on the debt or spending to build a bridge. And federal spending is still spending no matter which administration incurred the obligation.
With every public appearance Mr. Obama makes it harder to believe anything he tells us. I resist the conclusion that he is fundamentally dishonest, but it becomes less resistable almost every day.
It's a useful way to illustrate the magnitude of the problem and where the cuts have to be made.
Mr. Obama's recent defense of his budget was, by all accounts, disingenuous. Most egregiously, he claimed the budget would be in balance by 2015, but there is clearly no year in the next ten when the deficit would be anywhere near closed. By that time the debt will be so high that we will have long since hurtled over the cliff of national default.
He justified his prevarication by not counting payment of interest on the debt incurred by the previous administration as spending. This is a dissimulation. Federal spending is still spending no matter whether we're spending to pay the interest on the debt or spending to build a bridge. And federal spending is still spending no matter which administration incurred the obligation.
With every public appearance Mr. Obama makes it harder to believe anything he tells us. I resist the conclusion that he is fundamentally dishonest, but it becomes less resistable almost every day.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
What Lessons Are They Teaching?
Teachers and other union members in Wisconsin are outraged by the attempt led by Republican Governor Scott Walker to return fiscal sanity and solvency to the state. Here's a summary of what the Governor proposes:
Anyway, the Governor wants to make it more difficult for public employees to extort the taxpayers which has roused a thousand or more Wisconsin teachers to call in sick (a violation of professional ethics) to march on Madison in an ugly protest. Left-wing protests, as we've come to learn over the years, are often ugly. The video below is pretty funny, though, juxtaposing as it does the buffoonish allegations by liberals about the source of hate-filled rhetoric in this country with video of the signs carried by some of the Madison protestors: And just think, these are the people who are teaching our children. If it weren't for the fact that I knew so many wonderful, selfless, dedicated teachers in my 35 year career in public education this demonstration would make me ashamed to be numbered among them.
Walker proposed reducing spending by $30 million in the 2010-2011 fiscal year by making changes to public employee benefits programs. The changes include making state, school district and municipal employees pay half of the annual contributions to their pension programs through the Wisconsin Retirement Systems. He also proposed increasing employee health insurance premium payments from 6 percent to 12.6 percent.He has also pledged not to lay anyone off if the bill passes, but if it doesn't he'll have to lay off up to 6000 state employees. There are not enough Democrats in the Wisconsin senate to stop passage so they took a bus to Illinois where they're staying (at taxpayer expense?) at a Best Western. This prevents the GOP-dominated senate from reaching the quorum needed to conduct business. It strikes me as a little futile, and a waste of taxpayer money. After all, they aren't being paid by the taxpayers to hole up in a hotel in Illinois. Nor are they being paid to run from the state's budget crisis.
Walker also recommended tighter controls on collective bargaining with unions representing state employees. He wants to require a voter referendum for any new contract that would increase wages at a faster pace than the consumer price index inflation rate. He recommended limiting terms of state worker contracts to one year and to require annual votes by state employees over whether to remain part of a union. The bargaining limits would not affect state troopers, building inspectors and local law-enforcement and fire employees.
University of Wisconsin employees, on the other hand, would be prevented from participating in collective bargaining.
The state could save $165 million in the current fiscal year by deferring payments on existing debt to future years, according to Walker’s budget.
Walker’s proposal also would order the Department of Health Services to revise state Medicaid programs to help reduce a $153 million gap between fiscal year 2011 costs and money earmarked to pay for the program. Walker also plans to increase the amount of state money dedicated to pay for Medicaid.
Anyway, the Governor wants to make it more difficult for public employees to extort the taxpayers which has roused a thousand or more Wisconsin teachers to call in sick (a violation of professional ethics) to march on Madison in an ugly protest. Left-wing protests, as we've come to learn over the years, are often ugly. The video below is pretty funny, though, juxtaposing as it does the buffoonish allegations by liberals about the source of hate-filled rhetoric in this country with video of the signs carried by some of the Madison protestors: And just think, these are the people who are teaching our children. If it weren't for the fact that I knew so many wonderful, selfless, dedicated teachers in my 35 year career in public education this demonstration would make me ashamed to be numbered among them.
Re: Nobody Gets Married Anymore, Mister
The post titled Nobody Gets Married Anymore, Mister got a lot of attention from readers. Some of the responses were captivating reading, and I'd like to share a few of them, all written by young women, with you. Names have been changed to protect anonymity. Dashed lines separate the replies:
Compare this unfortunate child to another child born to a mother who waited until she was out of school and who's married to the biological father of her child. Both parents have at least some job skills and both share in providing for the child. The child, if a boy, has a positive male role model to teach him by example what it means to be committed to a woman. If the child is a girl she feels loved and valued by her father and will thus be less inclined to seek male acceptance in the back seat of a car when she's a teenager. Moreover, that child also benefits in many cases from having two sets of grandparents who have worked and saved all their lives for the sole purpose of being able to shower their accumulated wealth on their children and grandchildren whom they adore.
What happens when the first child needs a loan to go to college, to buy a car or a home? What happens when grandmother is sick and can't care for the child, but mom has to work? Compare the predicament of the child of a single mom to what happens in the case of the child with both parents and two sets of grandparents when it needs a financial boost. The second child has a tremendous head start in life simply by virtue of the fact that his or her parents got married and stayed married.
If people want to know why there's generational poverty in this country all they need do is look at the generational cycle of fatherlessness and single motherhood. As long as that continues we'll never end poverty no matter how much money we spend on it.
Garibaldi's article, sadly, didn't shock me at all. In today's sexually driven society, it's no surprise that teen pregnancy has become such a major issue. The thing I appreciate most is that Garibaldi raises the issue of marriage having become a burden among these girls. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I hear adults complain about the show "16 and Pregnant" on MTV. The problem these days, though, is that they complain about the show glorifying teen pregnancy, but when MTV ran a similarly made show called "Engaged and Under-aged" it received the same criticisms.There's a lot of wisdom, some of it learned the hard way, in these letters. Unwed motherhood is a calamity for most people who find themselves in that situation. Consider the prospects of both mother and child in that circumstance. The young mom, who usually has no marketable skills, has to struggle to provide the minimum for her child who is often raised by the child's grandmother who's often herself single and poor. What resources does such a child have to draw upon?
I graduated with 75 students in my high school class. Three of those girls were pregnant at some point in their high school career (one in ninth grade, the other two were senior year). One dropped out. Teen pregnancy is not a huge "issue" for my school district because it has become a norm. Last year a good friend of mine broke that norm in a practically unheard of way, and she fell under scrutiny of many an angry parent.
My friend was 17 when she realized that she was pregnant. Her boyfriend was 20. Soon after she broke the news, they started wedding plans. I went to their wedding last May, they lived in the basement of my home (they were previously sleeping in their car) for several weeks last summer, and I was there with her in the hospital when she was having complications with her pregnancy. Their baby boy was born, healthy, in September of last year. Getting married was the right thing to do, wasn't it? Well, apparently what was right in the fifties and what is right today are two completely different things.
My dear sweet friend, who was not your stereo-typical pregnant teen, was ridiculed not for her pregnancy, but for her marriage. She went through four high school friends as matron of honor, because mothers refused to allow their daughters to participate in such an event, before a friend with a sister in a similar situation stepped up. My friend's own mother almost didn't go to the wedding and would not even hug her daughter afterward. What saddens me the most is that no one was upset about the pregnancy. All of the problems were with the marriage. It should be noted that this couple had been engaged for two months before her pregnancy and had planned on marrying as soon as she graduated high school.
When did we become a society in which teen pregnancy is okay as long as the mother intends to remain single and finish high school? When did our views switch? Never have I met a guy so loving of the mother of his child, yet they do what once would have been thought of as right and have their faces spit on. I guess I'm still just an old-fashioned thinker, but I believe we need to reevaluate our ways of thinking as a society.
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I am not going to lie. When I read the title to this article, it intrigued me. I thought it could go so many different ways. Before I met my fiancé, I was so against getting married and swore I never would. Too many people get married and within a year divorce. What was the point? You can love someone without a ring and a different last name. When I started reading the article written by Gerry Garibaldi and realized it was about unwed mothers, I immediately began to get defensive. I am an unwed mother of a beautiful 2 year old (going on 13) boy. Yes, my fiancé is my son’s father. We did not get engaged until Valentine’s Day of 2010.
We met and shortly after I realized he was different from other men I have dated. We exchanged the “L” word, and shortly began talking about children. He is 5 years older than I am and did not want to be 30 when he had his first child. We made the decision for me to come off birth control after reading many reports that it takes almost a year to conceive when you have been on birth control regularly for a while.
Oops! Two months later and we had a positive pregnancy test. We were shocked, to say the least, that it happened so quickly. But we both made an adult decision to try to have a child. My situation is different than the girls in this article. My pregnancy was planned (maybe not so soon), but it was discussed and not the result of not taking the proper precautions.
My heart began to go out to these girls. I have the utmost respect for single mothers. Although I carry the title “single mother”, I do not feel that I am a single mother. It is a difficult job learning the ins and outs of how to be a good parent. I am sorry these girls grew up learning that being a single mother is practically the "norm" for urban residents. I am so thankful I have someone to share the responsibility with. If I didn't, I am certain I would have managed, but it would have been much more difficult. I currently work a full-time job, take 9 credits/semester, and my fiance works a 12 pm - 8:30 pm shift with lots of overtime. Again, if I didn't have our families to help, I would not be able to do any of this.
As far as welfare goes, they make it seem like it will all be just dandy with all the perks of having a baby and being on welfare. Welfare starts the day you find out you a pregnant and get a WIC appointment. You get food stamps, WIC checks, cash assistance, help with daycare, help with housing, assistance from numerous agencies, sometimes Social Security Income if you can no longer work because you need to take care of a child. It sickens me all the benefits they give children who have children. I don't know how the sex-ed programs are in schools anymore, but I know what I learned wouldn't have been enough to stop me from getting pregnant sooner. I think they need to show the gruesome labor and delivery videos, videos of everything that can wrong if you don't take care of yourself. I think there need to be more programs on adoption awareness.
These young girls think they can raise a child on their own, but most of them end up dropping out of high school. Why not allow someone who is having trouble conceiving raise your child in an environment that would be better suited for the baby than what you can give them? Give someone the gift of a baby.
I work in York City and I also see young girls pushing babies in strollers. Better yet, I work in the mental health field. We have a few consumers who are pregnant and/or have children. It is difficult to work with these people because I (and everyone around) know this person should never have had a child, but they're stubborn and think they can make it. Then they're always dropping their children off at the Lehman Center, which is a center for people who feel they're at their wit's end. You can drop your child off there for a few days until you cool down. It is great there is a place like this, but if you feel you are reaching that point a lot, don't you think you should consider adoption?
I worry so much about the welfare of these babies. I think a lot of these mothers are being greedy. Allow your child to have a good life, not be raised in a house with 15 other people. Or by a boyfriend who will beat your child to death with a playstation remote, which is my other concern.
Abuse rates in single-parent households are way too high. Mothers allow their boyfriends to come in and help raise their children but also lose their minds. Most recently in York, there was a story about 2 year old Darisabel Baez where the boyfriend beat her to death with a playstation control.
The documentaries from the York City police, detectives, hospital personnel was heart-breaking. That little girl never stood a chance. There is a program in MD called Justice for Justice where the father shook his baby to death. He is on trial. There was 5 year old Dominick Calhoun in Michigan where again the mother's boyfriend tortured and beat the little boy until he died. This story is also on trial right now. It breaks my heart to read these stories which is why I have become an advocate for child abuse prevention. These are the stories they need to show the 14, 15 year old girls who want to get pregnant, or already are pregnant and not sure what to do.
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This article caught my interest and relates to me personally. First I will start by saying that I personally know many, many young women (many my own friends) who have had children out of wedlock. Not only that, but many of them have multiple children to multiple fathers. And many were born when the mother was very young. My friend Ashley, for example, is 29 years old. She had her first son (which was an "accident") at age 20.
I remember going with her to tell the father. He was at the time, seeing someone else. She never even asked him to be in the child's life. She just said to him, "I just want you to know I am pregnant, It is your baby, and you do not need to be in its life, my parents will help me support it." And that was it. She never did make him help, never made him see the little boy, and her parents helped her raise him. I personally don't know why anyone would do that. Especially with their first child. All the emotions and hormones and decisions to make.... How can anyone do that alone?
Anyway, long story short, she wound up pregnant again a few years later, and the scenario was much the same. This time she did take the father for child support, but he lived in another state, so he was never in the child's life. Finally, she did meet someone, who by the grace of God was a very respectable man, who took in her two illegitimate children as his own, and they were married a few years later. Things did wind up OK in the end for her, but I still don't know how she could have made it through those years before she found him.
Supportive parents or not, I feel it is ultimately YOUR responsibility to raise your own children, but I do find that many young mothers depend on their parents to help them raise, if not raise entirely, their children.
I myself was raised by my grandmother, my mother was hardly ever around, and I was the product of a what you call a "one night stand", so, needless to say, my parents were never married. I actually never met my real father until I was 20 years old. And like the article said, I grew up thinking that that was normal. Children who had "real" families seemed to me to be the abnormal way of life. I didn't have the easiest childhood, but I made the best of it, and of myself. I made the choice to never have a child before I am married, and to wait until I know for sure that the person I marry will be the one I will stay with my entire life. Life is ultimately what YOU make it to be.
Another issue that came to mind when I read this article, is the fact that so many people see marriage as a not so serious commitment any more. Divorce is so common, that I feel like many people feel they should be "allowed" to make a sudden and rushed decision to marry, because they know that they can easily just say, "OK, I meant what I said in my vows a year ago, but now I have changed my mind", and move on to the next one.
Marriage is a serious commitment. And a serious promise. I really don't understand how people today don't see that. Again, I have a friend, Nadia, who is 29, has been married 3 times, and has 3 children, each with one of her husbands. I think that that is ridiculous! I cant even imagine how her children feel when it comes time to go see daddy. I bet they wonder which one?
Bottom line, I feel that people should be held to take on the responsibility of their own actions. In this case, a father taking care of his children, and people in general just being more careful about unwanted pregnancies, and not rushing into the decision to get married right away. Because even if two people find out they are pregnant, getting married isn't always the answer. Many times, because the pregnancy was a result of a lack of judgment in the first place, the marriage will just end in a divorce. And the only person really suffering from all of this is the children, who had nothing to do with any of it in the first place.
All of this really comes down to the image of children and marriage that our society deems as acceptable. And from what is seen in the movies and on the news daily, this way of life is acceptable. I feel that if we as a people began to portray this way of life as it really is (single mothers who wind up living on welfare because they can't support themselves or their children, pregnant teenagers dropping out of high school, ultimately ruining their future because they can no longer continue their education, deadbeat fathers who never learn responsibility because they are never made to, and the children growing up in these families thinking that this is "normal", to name a few...), instead of how the media portrays it (because realistically, those single moms can afford to raise their children alone on their million dollar salaries), then maybe the youth of America will start to be more cautious and really think about the decisions they are making, and how it will affect them, as well as others, in the future.
Compare this unfortunate child to another child born to a mother who waited until she was out of school and who's married to the biological father of her child. Both parents have at least some job skills and both share in providing for the child. The child, if a boy, has a positive male role model to teach him by example what it means to be committed to a woman. If the child is a girl she feels loved and valued by her father and will thus be less inclined to seek male acceptance in the back seat of a car when she's a teenager. Moreover, that child also benefits in many cases from having two sets of grandparents who have worked and saved all their lives for the sole purpose of being able to shower their accumulated wealth on their children and grandchildren whom they adore.
What happens when the first child needs a loan to go to college, to buy a car or a home? What happens when grandmother is sick and can't care for the child, but mom has to work? Compare the predicament of the child of a single mom to what happens in the case of the child with both parents and two sets of grandparents when it needs a financial boost. The second child has a tremendous head start in life simply by virtue of the fact that his or her parents got married and stayed married.
If people want to know why there's generational poverty in this country all they need do is look at the generational cycle of fatherlessness and single motherhood. As long as that continues we'll never end poverty no matter how much money we spend on it.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Deep Desire
The writings of "New Atheists" Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al. are replete with suggestions, implicit and explicit, that people who believe in God are irrational, delusional, superstitious and guilty of sundry other crimes against reason. Believers, to borrow from Ludwig Feuerbach, are simply projecting their deepest longings onto reality and reifying a Being which actually exists only in their hopes and dreams. As Freud puts it, theistic believers are indulging in "wish fulfillment" - wanting something to be true so fervently that they convince themselves that it is.
These are odd objections, though, coming as they do from atheists, none of whom have ever been able to offer a compelling argument against the existence of God, or even, for that matter, a convincing reason for rejecting the belief that God's existence is more plausible than His non-existence. Moreover, many of these skeptics openly acknowledge that their own unbelief is a consequence of little more than their profound desire that God not exist.
I was reminded of this while reading a piece by philosopher Jim Spiegel in an article on Christianity Today's website in which he quotes two famous admissions from two well-known contemporary philosophers.
In his book The Last Word Thomas Nagel wrote: "I want atheism to be true .... It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I'm right about my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."
Spiegel also recounts the words of atheist turned Catholic the late Mortimer Adler. Adler was a philosopher who converted late in life and who gave this explanation for his life-long atheism:
At any rate, the criticism that theism is somehow disreputable because it stems from a deep desire that there be a God strikes me as perverse. Why, given all the evidence that a God exists, is it disreputable to desire it be so and to take the further step of believing it is so? Why is it intellectually disreputable to want there to be a ground for meaning, morality, justice, hope, human rights, human dignity and human worth, none of which can be grounded in anything more substantial than our own whim if atheism is true? If there were very good reasons to disbelieve then perhaps it might be wrong to believe, but there aren't.
On the other hand, it does strike me as intellectually disreputable to fail to believe simply because one has a deep desire that there be no God. One should have more of a reason than that to deprive oneself, and others, of a belief that those things I just mentioned have a ground more substantial than our own tastes.
These are odd objections, though, coming as they do from atheists, none of whom have ever been able to offer a compelling argument against the existence of God, or even, for that matter, a convincing reason for rejecting the belief that God's existence is more plausible than His non-existence. Moreover, many of these skeptics openly acknowledge that their own unbelief is a consequence of little more than their profound desire that God not exist.
I was reminded of this while reading a piece by philosopher Jim Spiegel in an article on Christianity Today's website in which he quotes two famous admissions from two well-known contemporary philosophers.
In his book The Last Word Thomas Nagel wrote: "I want atheism to be true .... It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I'm right about my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."
Spiegel also recounts the words of atheist turned Catholic the late Mortimer Adler. Adler was a philosopher who converted late in life and who gave this explanation for his life-long atheism:
Adler (who was baptized quietly at age 81) confessed to rejecting religious commitment for most of his life because it "would require a radical change in my way of life, a basic alteration in the direction of my day-to-day choices as well as in the ultimate objectives to be sought or hoped for …. The simple truth of the matter is that I did not wish to live up to being a genuinely religious person."I think one could, had one pressed them hard enough, elicited similar admissions from many of the famous atheists of the last two centuries, particularly Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Russell, Sartre and Camus. All of these men were atheists, but none of them ever gave much of a reason for their unbelief other than that they found theism unattractive. Their atheism, I suspect, was due largely to a desire not to have to "live up to being a genuinely religious person".
At any rate, the criticism that theism is somehow disreputable because it stems from a deep desire that there be a God strikes me as perverse. Why, given all the evidence that a God exists, is it disreputable to desire it be so and to take the further step of believing it is so? Why is it intellectually disreputable to want there to be a ground for meaning, morality, justice, hope, human rights, human dignity and human worth, none of which can be grounded in anything more substantial than our own whim if atheism is true? If there were very good reasons to disbelieve then perhaps it might be wrong to believe, but there aren't.
On the other hand, it does strike me as intellectually disreputable to fail to believe simply because one has a deep desire that there be no God. One should have more of a reason than that to deprive oneself, and others, of a belief that those things I just mentioned have a ground more substantial than our own tastes.
The Bloom Is Off the Rose
Andrew Sullivan, perhaps President Obama's most prominent groupie at The Atlantic, has had enough. The President, by presenting a budget that does nothing substantive to trim the deficit or our debt, has shown himself, in Sullivan's view, to be unserious about averting the fiscal disaster that looms in our nation's near to mid-future.
As you read this understand that it was written by one of the more starry-eyed of Mr. Obama's media adorers in the last election:
As you read this understand that it was written by one of the more starry-eyed of Mr. Obama's media adorers in the last election:
[T]his president is too weak, too cautious, too beholden to politics over policy to lead. In this budget, in his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short term political interests. Like his State of the Union, this budget is good short term politics but such a massive pile of fiscal bull.... it makes it perfectly clear that Obama is kicking this vital issue down the road.If Andrew Sullivan is talking like this how many of Mr. Obama's less infatuated admirers are beginning to think that they'd allowed themselves to be seduced by a smooth-talking empty suit?
To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: he just screwed you over. He thinks you're fools. Either the US will go into default because of Obama's cowardice, or you will be paying far far more for far far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down. On the critical issue of America's fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
The Singularity
Ray Kurzweil is a brilliant man who has been writing for decades about artificial intelligence (AI) and the extraordinary growth of computing power. The development of microchips and the increasing quantities of data that can be stored on a microchip has risen exponentially since the 19th century and Kurzweil sees no reason to think the growth won't continue.
This means that at some point computing power will skyrocket and when it does computers will be able to do everything, Kurzweil believes, that our brains can do. People will be able to scan their brains' contents, including their ability to produce states of consciousness, onto a computer and leave the physical body behind. It will be the end of humanity as we know it.
Kurzweil thinks that, at present rates of increase in the power of our computers, this point, what he calls The Singularity, will be reached by 2045.
Lev Grossman at Time has a fascinating essay on Kurzweil and his ideas. Here are a few excerpts:
Anyway, what is just as interesting about Grossman's article is his discussion of how telomerase is being used to slow or reverse the aging process. You'll have to read the article to see what that's all about.
This means that at some point computing power will skyrocket and when it does computers will be able to do everything, Kurzweil believes, that our brains can do. People will be able to scan their brains' contents, including their ability to produce states of consciousness, onto a computer and leave the physical body behind. It will be the end of humanity as we know it.
Kurzweil thinks that, at present rates of increase in the power of our computers, this point, what he calls The Singularity, will be reached by 2045.
Lev Grossman at Time has a fascinating essay on Kurzweil and his ideas. Here are a few excerpts:
Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.Grossman also discusses some of the objections to Kurzweil's vision, but one which he doesn't mention and which would seem to be a strong possibility is that when growth of anything - population, global temperature, speed - goes "hockey stick" (i.e. the graph looks like a hockey stick laying on its spine with the blade pointed up), some constraining factor always gets activated which causes the growth to stop or collapse. I don't know what the constraints might be on exponentially increasing computing power, or at what point they would kick in, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't turn out that there are such limits on how powerful a computer can get.
So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.
The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity.
We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. Kurzweil puts the date of the Singularity — never say he's not conservative — at 2045. In that year, he estimates, given the vast increases in computing power and the vast reductions in the cost of same, the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all the human intelligence that exists today.
Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they'll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans. Alternatively, by then we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots. He and many other Singularitarians take seriously the proposition that many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal.
Anyway, what is just as interesting about Grossman's article is his discussion of how telomerase is being used to slow or reverse the aging process. You'll have to read the article to see what that's all about.
More Questions about Egypt
A few more miscellaneous thoughts about the situation in Egypt:
1. During the Iraq war many in the media were saying that the Iraqi people were unaccustomed and ill-suited for democracy. During the Egyptian upheaval no one was saying that the Egyptian people were unaccustomed and ill-suited for democracy. What's the difference?
2. What effect did our willingness to throw Mubarak under the bus have on other despots in the region who have cooperated with the United States because they trusted us to stand by them in a crisis? I don't say that we should have propped Mubarak up, but I don't think either that we will know the ramifications of our willingness to see him go for a long time. Meanwhile, leaders looking for a more reliable ally might be looking eastward toward Tehran or Beijing for friends less punctilious than we are about authoritarianism. Debkafile reports that Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah is outraged at the Obama administration and has already moved to strengthen ties to Iran.
3. Has there ever before been a military coup that the Left was excited about? What makes the coup in Egypt different from others for the Left?
4. The other day the people on MSNBC's Morning Joe interviewed Harvard historian Niall Ferguson who has a cover story in this week's Newsweek titled How Obama Blew it. The MSNBC folks are all supporters of the President so their guest's thesis wrankled, but by the end of his interview they seemed to have little to say. ?
One thing to notice as you watch the video - which really is worth watching even if you don't think the Obama administration actually "blew it" - is how the hosts simply assume that since things appear to have gone well in Egypt, at least so far, that therefore it must be a result of the President's policies. It never occurs to them that the Egyptians may have been completely oblivious, indifferent, or even angry with the President's actions during this crisis.
1. During the Iraq war many in the media were saying that the Iraqi people were unaccustomed and ill-suited for democracy. During the Egyptian upheaval no one was saying that the Egyptian people were unaccustomed and ill-suited for democracy. What's the difference?
2. What effect did our willingness to throw Mubarak under the bus have on other despots in the region who have cooperated with the United States because they trusted us to stand by them in a crisis? I don't say that we should have propped Mubarak up, but I don't think either that we will know the ramifications of our willingness to see him go for a long time. Meanwhile, leaders looking for a more reliable ally might be looking eastward toward Tehran or Beijing for friends less punctilious than we are about authoritarianism. Debkafile reports that Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah is outraged at the Obama administration and has already moved to strengthen ties to Iran.
3. Has there ever before been a military coup that the Left was excited about? What makes the coup in Egypt different from others for the Left?
4. The other day the people on MSNBC's Morning Joe interviewed Harvard historian Niall Ferguson who has a cover story in this week's Newsweek titled How Obama Blew it. The MSNBC folks are all supporters of the President so their guest's thesis wrankled, but by the end of his interview they seemed to have little to say. ?
One thing to notice as you watch the video - which really is worth watching even if you don't think the Obama administration actually "blew it" - is how the hosts simply assume that since things appear to have gone well in Egypt, at least so far, that therefore it must be a result of the President's policies. It never occurs to them that the Egyptians may have been completely oblivious, indifferent, or even angry with the President's actions during this crisis.
Aren't those Brits enviably adroit thinkers and speakers? They always amaze me.Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Monday, February 14, 2011
Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Egyptian Revolution
Throughout the eighteen days of drama in Cairo a number of thoughts about what was going on both there and here kept recurring. Here are a few of them:
1. Why were the thousands of protestors some of whom were seen throwing stones and heard expressing hate for Israel treated by our media as heroes when thousands of tea party demonstrators in the U.S. who threw no rocks and displayed no bigotry were immediately and persistently said to be nothing more than racist, red-necked, rabble?
2. When the young people demonstrated in Iran and were subsequently arrested and some even executed our government said almost nothing. In Egypt, however, our government quickly took the side of the demonstrators. How do they decide which side to take? Is it that the Iranian government is hostile to the U.S. and the Egyptian government was friendly? Is it our policy to appease those who hate us and throw away those who help us?
3. What is the essential difference between what the tea party folk were demanding in Washington and what the Egyptian protestors were demanding in Cairo? The tea party wanted to end the hegemony of the Democrat party which was doing little to create jobs while piece by piece taking away our freedoms. The Egyptian protestors wanted to end the hegemony of a party that was doing little to create jobs and which had deprived the people of many of their freedoms. Yet President Obama ignored the tea party, which was calling for the defeat of Obamacare and of his party in November, but demanded that the Mubarak government heed the will of the people and begin immediately to hand over power.
4. Our Director of National Intelligence told Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood was a secular Muslim organization. Isn't the term "secular Muslim" an oxymoron? Any Muslim will tell you that if one is secular one is not a Muslim, and if one is Muslim one is not secular. Could the DNI actually be that ignorant of the nature of one of the most powerful Islamic organizations in the world? Shouldn't his ignorance fill us all with a certain trepidation that a man so uninformed about Islam is heading a major intelligence agency?
5. Why are so many people jubilant that Mubarak resigned? I don't mean the Egyptian protestors who are understandably euphoric, but rather I refer to our own media and government personnel. Does no one among these celebrants remember the Iranian revolution? The Cuban revolution? The Russian revolution? In each of these one tyrant was overthrown to the great joy of the people only to have him replaced by a worse tyrant. Do any of those in the media and elsewhere know how the Egyptian imbroglio is going to play out? Our lack of insight into how all this is going to wind up should be sobering rather than thrilling.
1. Why were the thousands of protestors some of whom were seen throwing stones and heard expressing hate for Israel treated by our media as heroes when thousands of tea party demonstrators in the U.S. who threw no rocks and displayed no bigotry were immediately and persistently said to be nothing more than racist, red-necked, rabble?
2. When the young people demonstrated in Iran and were subsequently arrested and some even executed our government said almost nothing. In Egypt, however, our government quickly took the side of the demonstrators. How do they decide which side to take? Is it that the Iranian government is hostile to the U.S. and the Egyptian government was friendly? Is it our policy to appease those who hate us and throw away those who help us?
3. What is the essential difference between what the tea party folk were demanding in Washington and what the Egyptian protestors were demanding in Cairo? The tea party wanted to end the hegemony of the Democrat party which was doing little to create jobs while piece by piece taking away our freedoms. The Egyptian protestors wanted to end the hegemony of a party that was doing little to create jobs and which had deprived the people of many of their freedoms. Yet President Obama ignored the tea party, which was calling for the defeat of Obamacare and of his party in November, but demanded that the Mubarak government heed the will of the people and begin immediately to hand over power.
4. Our Director of National Intelligence told Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood was a secular Muslim organization. Isn't the term "secular Muslim" an oxymoron? Any Muslim will tell you that if one is secular one is not a Muslim, and if one is Muslim one is not secular. Could the DNI actually be that ignorant of the nature of one of the most powerful Islamic organizations in the world? Shouldn't his ignorance fill us all with a certain trepidation that a man so uninformed about Islam is heading a major intelligence agency?
5. Why are so many people jubilant that Mubarak resigned? I don't mean the Egyptian protestors who are understandably euphoric, but rather I refer to our own media and government personnel. Does no one among these celebrants remember the Iranian revolution? The Cuban revolution? The Russian revolution? In each of these one tyrant was overthrown to the great joy of the people only to have him replaced by a worse tyrant. Do any of those in the media and elsewhere know how the Egyptian imbroglio is going to play out? Our lack of insight into how all this is going to wind up should be sobering rather than thrilling.
OK Go Meets Thomas Aquinas
Watch this OK Go video and then there'll be a test. Pay special attention to the beginning and the end:
OK Go probably had no idea they were doing it, but their video serves as a fine illustration of two of medieval philosopher/theologian Thomas Aquinas' famous Five Ways of demonstrating the existence of God. Here are two questions that might help clarify the relationship between Aquinas' argument and the video.
First question: What do you think are the chances of an entire system like this one coming into existence apart from the very intelligent engineers standing on the platform at the end of the video? What would have happened, do you suppose, if one of those dominos was missing? Do you think it reasonable to believe that the system could have resulted from the chance arrangement of its parts?
The atheistic materialist has to believe something very like this about our universe which is far more complex than the Rube Goldberg device designed by these engineering students. The materialist, though, doesn't hesitate to tell those who believe that the Rube Goldberg device required the input of intelligent engineers that they're being irrational. Just read Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett or their epigones.
Second question: If the series of causes and effects that comprise our universe had a beginning, like the sequence of events in the video, then it must have had a cause that triggered it. What was that cause?
The skeptic could buck the consensus of modern cosmologists and try positing an infinitely old universe that had no beginning, but that means the sequence of dominos would be infinitely long with no first falling domino. If there is no first falling domino then it's hard to imagine how the series of falling dominos would ever get started.
The skeptic might retreat to the safety of granting the reasonableness of believing that there was an initial cause of the universe, but then ask why anyone should think the cause is the God of theism. Consider, though, what's entailed by the acknowledgement that the universe had a cause: An adequate cause or explanation of the universe must, it's reasonable to assume, be very powerful and very intelligent. It must also be outside the universe and outside time, and it must be a personal being since what it causes or explains contains personality (human beings). This may not be precisely the God of traditional theism, but it's certainly something very much like Him.
The skeptic, in full flight now, might just say, as many have, that the universe is just there, a brute fact. It has no cause and no explanation. It just is. But, of course, not only is this a waving of the white flag of surrender and fleeing the field, it's also a science-stopper. It's also more than a little ironic because it's a favorite retort of the opponents of intelligent design to allege that ID is the science-stopper. The charge is false in the case of ID, but it's certainly not false to identify the view that the universe has no explanation a science-stopper.
First question: What do you think are the chances of an entire system like this one coming into existence apart from the very intelligent engineers standing on the platform at the end of the video? What would have happened, do you suppose, if one of those dominos was missing? Do you think it reasonable to believe that the system could have resulted from the chance arrangement of its parts?
The atheistic materialist has to believe something very like this about our universe which is far more complex than the Rube Goldberg device designed by these engineering students. The materialist, though, doesn't hesitate to tell those who believe that the Rube Goldberg device required the input of intelligent engineers that they're being irrational. Just read Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett or their epigones.
Second question: If the series of causes and effects that comprise our universe had a beginning, like the sequence of events in the video, then it must have had a cause that triggered it. What was that cause?
The skeptic could buck the consensus of modern cosmologists and try positing an infinitely old universe that had no beginning, but that means the sequence of dominos would be infinitely long with no first falling domino. If there is no first falling domino then it's hard to imagine how the series of falling dominos would ever get started.
The skeptic might retreat to the safety of granting the reasonableness of believing that there was an initial cause of the universe, but then ask why anyone should think the cause is the God of theism. Consider, though, what's entailed by the acknowledgement that the universe had a cause: An adequate cause or explanation of the universe must, it's reasonable to assume, be very powerful and very intelligent. It must also be outside the universe and outside time, and it must be a personal being since what it causes or explains contains personality (human beings). This may not be precisely the God of traditional theism, but it's certainly something very much like Him.
The skeptic, in full flight now, might just say, as many have, that the universe is just there, a brute fact. It has no cause and no explanation. It just is. But, of course, not only is this a waving of the white flag of surrender and fleeing the field, it's also a science-stopper. It's also more than a little ironic because it's a favorite retort of the opponents of intelligent design to allege that ID is the science-stopper. The charge is false in the case of ID, but it's certainly not false to identify the view that the universe has no explanation a science-stopper.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Who Is He?
Who is Barack Obama? What does he really believe? What is his vision for the nation? Despite having written two books telling us about his life, most people still see him as an enigma and many are skeptical that he really is the moderate pragmatist he has sought to portray himself as since the November elections.
Perhaps he could do much to allay Americans' concerns about him by answering these two questions:
1. What ten books that you've read in the last ten years have been most influential in your personal and political life, and what is it about them that you found most significant to you?
2. What five persons alive or dead do you admire most and why?
We can learn much about a man by knowing the books which have influenced him and the people he admires. It would be very helpful in understanding Mr. Obama if we could see those two lists.
Perhaps he could do much to allay Americans' concerns about him by answering these two questions:
1. What ten books that you've read in the last ten years have been most influential in your personal and political life, and what is it about them that you found most significant to you?
2. What five persons alive or dead do you admire most and why?
We can learn much about a man by knowing the books which have influenced him and the people he admires. It would be very helpful in understanding Mr. Obama if we could see those two lists.
Oil and Water
France's President Nicolas Sarkozy is the latest in an expanding list of world leaders who are clearly disenchanted with the European multicultural experiment. British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Australia's ex-prime minister John Howard and Spanish ex-premier Jose Maria Aznar have also recently acknowledged that attempts to accommodate and integrate large numbers of immigrants have been unsuccessful:
A group which rejects the founding principles of a nation and refuses to submit to them, demanding their own laws instead, laws which are often completely contrary to the existing law, is on a collision course with the very people who have taken them in. It is as if you were to accept a guest into your home who then proceeded to impose his own ideas on how to manage your household upon you and gets truculent if you don't go along. This is what's happening in many European nations which have welcomed large numbers of Muslim immigrants to their shores. These and their descendents often refuse to assimilate into the larger culture, and wish rather to establish a state within a state in their host country.
Many Muslims and Westerners alike see Islam and Western culture as fundamentally incompatible, like oil and water, and throwing them together and pretending that the result is a beautiful, harmonious mosaic is an act of self-deception. It's more likely to wind up like Sarajevo. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, but that's the way it's turning out in Europe.
If a potential immigrant to this country is unwilling to submit to the United States Constitution, particularly the freedoms contained in the Bill of Rights, he really should look elsewhere to make his residence. If he finds those freedoms and the emphasis on equality and toleration to be in conflict with his religious beliefs why would he want to come here anyway?
"My answer is clearly yes, it is a failure," Sarkozy admitted in a television interview when asked about the policy which advocates that host societies welcome and foster distinct cultural and religious immigrant groups.It has been clear for some time that the left's vision of a nation consisting of a mosaic of identities rather than a melting pot in which all people are loyal citizens of the state to which they emigrant was going to lead to balkanization, resentment and tension between factions. Ethnic groups which wish to maintain their cultural identity by living in their own neighborhoods should certainly be free to do so, but this only works if the members of the group respect and share most of the principles upon which the larger society is founded and are willing to acknowledge the authority of the laws of the state.
"Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want... a society where communities coexist side by side.
"If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France," the president added.
"The French national community cannot accept a change in its lifestyle, equality between men and women... freedom for little girls to go to school," he said. "We have been too concerned about the identity of the person who was arriving and not enough about the identity of the country that was receiving him."
A group which rejects the founding principles of a nation and refuses to submit to them, demanding their own laws instead, laws which are often completely contrary to the existing law, is on a collision course with the very people who have taken them in. It is as if you were to accept a guest into your home who then proceeded to impose his own ideas on how to manage your household upon you and gets truculent if you don't go along. This is what's happening in many European nations which have welcomed large numbers of Muslim immigrants to their shores. These and their descendents often refuse to assimilate into the larger culture, and wish rather to establish a state within a state in their host country.
Many Muslims and Westerners alike see Islam and Western culture as fundamentally incompatible, like oil and water, and throwing them together and pretending that the result is a beautiful, harmonious mosaic is an act of self-deception. It's more likely to wind up like Sarajevo. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, but that's the way it's turning out in Europe.
If a potential immigrant to this country is unwilling to submit to the United States Constitution, particularly the freedoms contained in the Bill of Rights, he really should look elsewhere to make his residence. If he finds those freedoms and the emphasis on equality and toleration to be in conflict with his religious beliefs why would he want to come here anyway?
Friday, February 11, 2011
Conceding Good Faith
Justin Paulette is a lawyer who has written a delightful piece on dialoguing with one's political opposites. The essay is titled Conceding Good Faith and is posted at First Things. Elsewhere he quotes Charles Krauthammer's observation that the problem with our political discourse is that conservatives come to the table convinced that liberals are stupid and liberals come believing conservatives are evil. Given that trenchant insight it's little wonder that our conversations so often quickly deteriorate into angry name-calling.
Paulette, though, recounts some instances where he turns those assumptions to rhetorical advantage, and in the process sets a fine example of how we should engage our friends and acquaintances with whom we find ourselves in disagreement.
Here's how he opens:
If you read it you should also read the comments.
Paulette, though, recounts some instances where he turns those assumptions to rhetorical advantage, and in the process sets a fine example of how we should engage our friends and acquaintances with whom we find ourselves in disagreement.
Here's how he opens:
Meeting friends and family is part of the universally recognized progression of any relationship, and so it was for me while dating a fellow law student in Washington, D.C. Beyond our common career path, we shared very little—I was a conservative, Republican Catholic from the Midwest and she a liberal, atheist Democrat from Massachusetts.The rest of the essay is a very enjoyable, and informative, read although one nagging question never got answered: How did his relationship with a girl with whom he had almost nothing in common turn out?
My girlfriend also happened to be a former Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, so every few months I tagged along for dinners, birthday parties and social events of the informal “El Sal. Peace Corps Crowd.” They were a well-educated, professional and civic-minded group of white, middle-class young adults. They pursued master’s degrees in international relations with third-world (or, as they corrected me, “developing world”) countries, worked in eco-conscious government agencies such as NOAA, or joined NGOs devoted to global female empowerment.
They were the vanguard foot soldiers of progressive liberalism.
I’d only met one friend-of-the-girlfriend prior to my first evening with the entire crew. She was charming, and found her calling in protecting women’s health by sending glass cooking pots to poor Central American villages in order to reduce open-fire food preparation. We pondered whether her desire for government-mandated price-capping, wage-setting and capital-regulation amounted to communism, and amicably agreed that she was not a militant “brown-shirt” communist, or even a full-blown “red” communist, but rather a befittingly “soft-pink” communist.
The first group dinner was predictably located in an ethnic restaurant in one of the more fashionably hip, socially dynamic quarters of the city. The atmosphere was jovial and the conversation freely swayed between friendly catch-up and political banter. It was early 2003, and I thought it wise to remain politely detached as they excoriated conservative policies, Republican rhetoric, and absolutely everything about George W. Bush. I’d struck up a nice conversation on nothing of significance with a quiet, reserved chap across the table.
If you read it you should also read the comments.
Nobody Gets Married Anymore, Mister
In a sobering article in City Journal Gerry Garibaldi puts his finger directly on a major problem with our modern public schools. It's not that they're underfunded, it's not that teachers are not dedicated to teaching, it's that so many of our kids come from dysfunctional homes. To make the problem worse many of them consider the dysfunctionality to be utterly normal.
The specific manifestation of this problem that Garibaldi addresses is the phenomenon of unwed teenage motherhood. As one young girl told him, "Nobody gets married anymore, mister." If our politicians were serious about improving our educational performance and giving urban kids a shot at a decent life they would forget about all their flowery talk about "races to the top" and laptops on every lap and focus their attention on the problem of the disintegrating family. Until the families they come from are healed and healthy, expending money on a child's education will in many cases be a waste of resources.
Garibaldi, a former Hollywood screenwriter turned journalism teacher, sets the stage for his essay, which is hard to stop reading once you've started, with this:
Read the rest of Garibaldi's poignant story at the link, and as you do ponder what a wonderful blessing the sexual revolution has been for so many of our kids.
The specific manifestation of this problem that Garibaldi addresses is the phenomenon of unwed teenage motherhood. As one young girl told him, "Nobody gets married anymore, mister." If our politicians were serious about improving our educational performance and giving urban kids a shot at a decent life they would forget about all their flowery talk about "races to the top" and laptops on every lap and focus their attention on the problem of the disintegrating family. Until the families they come from are healed and healthy, expending money on a child's education will in many cases be a waste of resources.
Garibaldi, a former Hollywood screenwriter turned journalism teacher, sets the stage for his essay, which is hard to stop reading once you've started, with this:
Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children — all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.When unwed motherhood confers status on both mother and father, when young parents see no need to marry in order to raise their children, when our pop culture continually reinforces these attitudes in our children, we have a much more fundamental problem than whether our students all have access to smart boards in their classrooms.
My first encounter with teen pregnancy was a girl named Nicole, a pretty 15-year-old who had rings on every finger and great looped earrings and a red pen with fluffy pink feathers and a heart that lit up when she wrote with it. Hearts seemed to be on everything—in her signature, on her binder; there was often a little plastic heart barrette in her hair, which she had dyed in bright hues recalling a Siamese fighting fish. She was enrolled in two of my classes: English and journalism.
My main gripe with Nicole was that she fell asleep in class. Each morning—bang!—her head hit the desk. Waking her was like waking a badger. Nicole’s unmarried mother, it turned out, worked nights, so Nicole would slip out with friends every evening, sometimes staying out until 3 am, and then show up in class exhausted, surly, and hungry.
After a dozen calls home, her mother finally got back to me. Your daughter is staying out late, I reported. The voice at the other end of the phone sounded abashed and bone-weary. “I know, I know, I’m sorry,” she repeated over and over. “I’ll talk to her. I’m sorry.”
For a short time, things got better. Nicole’s grades started to improve. Encouraged, I hectored and cajoled and praised her every small effort. She was an innately bright girl who might, if I dragged her by the heels, eventually survive the rigors of a community college.
Then one morning, her head dropped again. I rapped my knuckles on her desk. “Leave me alone, mister,” she said. “I feel sick.”
There was a sly exchange of looks among the other girls in class, a giggle or two, and then one of them said: “She’s pregnant, Mr. Garibaldi.”
She lifted her face and smiled at her friends, then dropped her head back down. I picked up my grimy metal garbage can and set it beside her desk, just in case. A moment later she vomited, and I dispatched her to the nurse. In the years since, I’ve escorted girls whose water has just broken, their legs trembling and wobbly, to the principal’s office, where their condition barely raises an eyebrow.
Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness. In our society, perversely, we celebrate the unwed mother as a heroic figure, like a fireman or a police officer. During the last presidential election, much was made of Obama’s mother, who was a single parent. Movie stars and pop singers flaunt their daddy-less babies like fishing trophies.
None of this is lost on my students.
Read the rest of Garibaldi's poignant story at the link, and as you do ponder what a wonderful blessing the sexual revolution has been for so many of our kids.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Poverty in America: Another Story
We've posted a couple of very personal accounts lately concerning our welfare system. One was written by a young woman who has witnessed welfare abuse in her family and at her job and was rightly repelled by it. Another was submitted by a young single mother who's struggling to support a child and make it through college. I'd like to post one more from yet another young woman whose life situation differs from both of the previous writers. What we get from these three stories taken together, I think, is a pretty good look at the problems with, and the need for, a government safety net:
Everyone wants to help the first group. Many want to help the second, and no one wants to help the third. Unfortunately, it's very difficult for a government bureaucracy to distinguish between them.
I know there are people out there that try to cheat the system (I live next door to the neighborhood drug dealer; trust me, I know), but there are also a lot of people who genuinely need government help. My family is in that category. I know from experience that people who form this view tend to become judgmental of everyone getting government help. Some people never get a chance to defend themselves, and being presented with a chance to do so, I can't help but explain my family's situation from the beginning. Here's my story:There are some in our society who do everything in their power to get by, but because of the vicissitudes of life still need someone to help. There are others who are in difficult straits because of bad choices they've made in their lives, but who are trying to climb out of their predicament. And there are still others who are perfectly content to game the system in any way they can and exploit it for as long as they can.
I come from a long line of hard workers. My parents were married the fall after my mother graduated high school in 1988. She was 18 and my father was 20. They started college but both dropped out when I was born in 1990. My father went to work full-time for RESCAR and my mother worked full-time at a department store. My town is small (pop. of 405 as of 2009) and most people who grow up there marry young and don't go to college. My parents were average. They soon became prominent members of the community. Both served on the borough Council, and my father became fire chief.
When I was two years old my little brother was born, and shortly after my health became a problem. My mother quit her job in order to take of my brother while carting me back in forth to Danville, PA for surgery and doctor appointments. My father worked overtime in order to make up for the lost income from my mother. In 1994, my sister joined the family, making us a family of five on one income with a mass amount of bills to pay. My parents had horrible health insurance and the bills from my doctors began to pile up. My mother took up babysitting jobs (nine children in addition to us at once....I'm sure that wouldn't be allowed today) so that we could keep the house heated. We were on food stamps for a while, but my father hated it. Soon he refused to use them.
In 1998 my family's whole world was turned upside down. My father was climbing out of a train car when he slipped off a chemical-soaked ladder and fell to the bottom. For a year his employers sent him to chiropractors. Then, one night in early '99, my father was rushed to the hospital in excruciating pain. It turns out that the fall had broken his back and the chiropractic therapy had made it worse. He went into surgery in Pittsburgh to get rods placed in his spine. After many complications and 6 surgeries later, my father was left with severe pain and limitations for the rest of his life.
My mother picked up a full-time job and a part-time job on top of that. At nine years old I was left to take care of a father confined to a hospital bed for 6 months, a seven year old brother, and a five year old sister. My grandmother would stop by when we were at school to make sure my father ate and sometimes left meals for us. My father received workers compensation for two years while he healed from his surgeries.
Then came the lawsuits. Worker's comp. began sending people out to snoop around my neighborhood and interview neighbors. My grandparents had helped my mother in buying a hot tub for my father's physical therapy so that he wouldn't have to endure the long rides to Pittsburgh every week. They also bought a pool table for him for his birthday to try to bring him out of his depression (he loves playing). The people in my neighborhood began to ridicule my family. RESCAR tried to fire my father so they would no longer have to support my family. He hired a lawyer and finally settled, getting little money. We began to receive government benefits that year.
I knew people were still talking, but I didn't feel the full brunt of it until last year. I was home from college and my dog got loose. I yelled to a woman up the street to grab his collar, and she grabbed her arm and screamed, "He bit me!" When I laughed and explained he didn't bite; she snapped at me, "I know, I'm just faking it like your father." The doctors still refuse to release my father for work. He can't sit or stand for more than 30 minutes. He is in constant pain. For years he suffered from depression. Often I hear him mutter to himself about being worthless. He is no longer the "bread winner" and feels as if he has let everyone down. Their words cut deeper than they themselves will ever know.
To wrap up this long, long story, I have an access card. It's for medical purposes only. I go to college for free. My FAFSA placed my EFC at $0.00, so I receive thousands in grants, but make no mistake, it's not entirely government. I am the recipient of the national Spina Bifida Association $20,000 scholarship awarded for my involvement in advocacy for my own disability. I also hold a vast amount of academic scholarships, and even a Junior Borough Council Members of PA scholarship. I worked hard for that money. It was no hand out, and I am very blessed.
My mother has held the same full-time job since my father was injured. Because of that, my family now has health insurance, although we still have to use our access cards to get by. My brother graduated high school and works as a full-time auto mechanic, so there is now a second income once again in my household. I'll never forget the times my parents had to sell the hot tub or vehicles for coal to heat the house. My family still struggles sometimes to make ends meet, but we have each other. Right now, that's all that matters. So, not everyone [who receives assistance] is looking for a free handout.
Everyone wants to help the first group. Many want to help the second, and no one wants to help the third. Unfortunately, it's very difficult for a government bureaucracy to distinguish between them.
The War in Waziristan
The war against Islamist terrorists goes on largely out of sight. One aspect of it that does now and then seep into media reports is the war on Taliban forces in northwestern Pakistan. This conflict is waged using UAVs armed with satellite guided munitions and according to this report at Strategy Page, is taking a fearsome toll on the Taliban.
One of the troubling aspects of these attacks, however, has been the deaths of civilians. The article discusses why this is and what measures the military is using to minimize civilian casualties:
One of the troubling aspects of these attacks, however, has been the deaths of civilians. The article discusses why this is and what measures the military is using to minimize civilian casualties:
While there are more attacks, fewer civilians have been killed. It's difficult to tell who is an innocent civilian in these circumstances, but since the Taliban have rarely claimed, and identified civilian deaths from these attacks, there are apparently very few civilians killed.There's much else of interest in the Strategy Page report. Check it out.
There are several reasons for this. One is better intel, but there's a new weapon in use. The CIA controlled UAVs are now using a smaller missile; the Griffin. This enables targets to be destroyed with less risk to nearby civilians.
In the last three years, the UAV campaign in Pakistan has killed about a thousand people. Some 30 percent of the dead were civilians, largely because the terrorists use human shields, and try to surround themselves with women and children. Many of these civilians were wives and children of the Islamic radicals.
As the CIA intelligence got better, and the locals more insistent on not being human shields, more and more of the civilians were close kin of the terrorists, and at least aware of the danger they were in because of their husband's line of work.
Civilian deaths are minimized by trying to catch the terrorists while traveling, or otherwise away from civilians. Journalists visiting the sites of these attacks later, find few locals claiming lots of civilian casualties.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Basic Economics
Perhaps you've heard media folks talking about debt, deficit, big government, etc. and not being particularly well-versed in economics you didn't really understand what they were saying or why you should care. Well, below, by way of Hot Air, is a video which in five minutes will answer a lot of your questions about the perils of big government.
It's a basic guide to why many people are dismayed by what our government has done over the last two or three years. I hope you'll take the time to watch it. It's important that every American understand the ideas this student presents:
It's a basic guide to why many people are dismayed by what our government has done over the last two or three years. I hope you'll take the time to watch it. It's important that every American understand the ideas this student presents:
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