What the War Costs

What the War Costs

MIT Admissions

Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, resigned after admitting that she fabricated her academic credentials. In a recent book, Ms. Jones warns stressed-out students competing for admission to elite colleges to calm down and stop trying to be perfect. It is, of course, more than a bit ironic that given her lack of even a baccalurate degree, no academic institution would have considered Jones for her present job.

Yesterday, my youngest son competed in a district-wide math competition for the gifted, in which he placed sixth. My buttons were popping when I saw Our Boy collect his medal and also a third-place trophy for the school's team. But I perceived that he may have been disappointed that he didn't do better, given his strong drive to excel. I asked him about that, and it turns out that he was happy where he was and I was happy where he was in the rankings.

I'm not unsympathetic to the thrust of Jones' desire to reduce student and parental anxiety over academic performance. On the other hand, as her own experience shows, it is false to say that grades, scores, and degrees don't matter. They do matter, as they open doors to future opportunities that would otherwise be closed.

I tell my boys that I ask only one thing: that they do their very best. If their very best is an average grade, that's fine to me. On the other hand, they also realize that in many respects they are not average and thusly they need to make the corrsponding effort. Both of them now get top grades and, more importantly to me, their motivation in getting those grades is inner-driven and reflects a genuine love of learning for its own sake.

Cats and Spirituality

Why is it that cats are associated with spirituality going back to the days of the Egyptian pharoahs?

There is an endearing story of the prophet Mohammed cutting off his sleave to allow his cat to continue to slumber. Throughout southeast Asia, there are temples dedicated to cats. The present pope is well-known for his love of cats as are the wiccans. Great humanitarians who loved cats include Albert Schweitzer, Florence Nightingale, Harriett Beecher Stowe, and Vanna White. (Well, Vanna does like cats and she's probably a nice person.)

I cannot think of any evil people who liked cats.

To generalize, I think it has something to do with their mellowness, independence, fidility, and tranquillity and their capacity to evoke in others mellowness, independence, fidility, and tranquillity while still retaining an air of mystery and divinity.

Someone sent me this post.

I was just in a funky music store the other day and saw a bumper sticker that said:

"I don't need a Higher Power. I have a Cat."

As a fairly spiritual person, it made me chuckle, as cats are natural companions when engaging in spiritual activities, like meditating, praying, reading sacred texts, etc. Maybe they feel a connection... maybe they just like it when their person is quiet and attentive and it's a good opportunity to schmooze some snuggling, or simply enjoy quiet time together. Maybe it's because sometimes they act like Higher Powers patiently trying to teach us lesser beings what life is really all about. :)

Heck, I can't even do yoga without them playing with the drawstrings on my pants or climbing on my back. Although I'm skeptical about there being a spiritual connection there- I believe they just think it's funny!

Help Me

I'm a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display.

I will take whatever model you have in stock, as long as its received certification for being safe on carbon based life forms.In terms of payment: I don't have any Galactic Credits left. Payment can be made in platinum gold or 2003 currency upon safe delivery of unit. Please transport unit in either a brown paper bag or box to below coordinates on Sunday July 27th at (exactly 3:00pm) Eastern Stand Time. If you miss this timeframe please email me.42.4845467 & Longitude -71.1576157 and the ground is 101.3' above sea level.

Although those coordinates are a secure guarded area, these channels through email are never secure. Unfortunately it is the only form of communication I have right now. There is a good chance that sombody will try to redirect the signal. The unit must be teleported directly in a way that nobody will be able to interfere with the transference.After unit has been sent please email me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com with payment instructions. Do not reply directly back to this email.

Thank You,

projectile

Poodle Sheep

Flocks of sheep were imported to Japan and then sold by a company called Poodles as Pets, marketed as fashionable accessories, available at $1,600 each.

The scam was uncovered when Japanese moviestar Maiko Kawamaki went on a talk-show and wondered why her new pet would not bark or eat dog food.

My skeptical apprentice, this story is but an urban legend.

Bush Dancing

Mercy

Means and Ends

We sometimes hear formulations of the Iraq war that go like this: "Although the war has been poorly executed, it is a noble cause. " On Jonestown memorial sites, we see often the same kind of sentiment. While it is true that the experiment ended in disaster, defenders say, the followers of Jones were aspiring to ideals of classlessness and racial harmony.

Do the ends justify the means? Sometimes? Always? Never? Or is this statement meaningless?

My view: There are only means. An end that is defined as an abstraction as it almost always is makes such a cliche worthless.

Take for example civil liberties and national security and the proposition that civil liberties should be constrained to enhance national security-- a means to an end. That may be an applause line for certain audiences. But I would say that the entire sentence not only has no meaning but is dangerous until we know exactly who liberties are on the line and for what compelling reason thay must so be.

A good example of the catastrophic disconnect between means and ends (or what can be called application and principle) is the resolution to go to war in Iraq.
The authorization for the present conflict is section three of the Congressional Resolution on Iraq:

(a) AUTHORIZATION- The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.

These fuzzy statements are the legal basis for our involvement in Iraq that has resulted in so much bloodshed, the draining our of national treasury, and the erosion of US influence and prestige.

A coherent means cannot exist in the absence of a concrete and defined end.

Perhaps the proposition turns on the word justify, meaning in this context, a rational and proportionate relationship between a goal and the means whereby that goal is achieved. We don't spank a crying baby with a hatchet, for example. Of course, questions of national policy derive from this, i.e. Atomizing Hioshima --> defeat of Japan; or liberalizing abortion laws --> reduced juvenile delinquency. The policy question is of course whether these causalities really exist and even if they do exist whether they they are the best or only means to achieve those goals. Evil, it has been said, is the shadow cast by good. Or, to invoke another platitude, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Thus, it often happens that even when the goal and the means is presumed to be good and may even be good, the outcomes are nevertheless tragically evil.

Selling the War

(CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller) To hear Bill Moyers tell it last evening on his PBS program “Buying The War," the White House press corps was a willing participant in its own deception about the President’s case for war in Iraq. He portrays us as easily-manipulated stooges on bended-knee to the President and his top aides. Moyers charges in his opening sentences that the press “largely surrendered its independence and skepticism” and joined with the Bush Administration in marching to war. To portray reporters as mindless conduits of White House policies is unfounded. To charge that the White House press was “compliant” and cheered the President’s arguments for war plainly misrepresents the facts.

Noller is wrong. The White House press specifically and the press in general were compliant, credulous stooges. The orchestration of the mass media was both impressive and duplicitious. There are news reports that the former CIA Directory George Tenet said that his phrase "slam dunk" that many people took as a green light to invade Iraq was actually a reference to effectively propaganderizing the war. Frankly, I don't know which interpretation is worse.

As Moyers showed in his documentary, the process the administration used to sell the Iraq war and arouse public support was as follows:

1. Pass to reporters false "evidence" in leading liberal publications, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
2. Cite that evidence in the Sunday talk shows.
3. Weave that evidence into a dog and pony show for Congressional leaders and the United Nations.
4. Use simple powerful images such as a mushroom cloud in all speeches.
5. Rhetorically associate at every opportunity in every speech Iraq with 9/11.
6. Co-opt the most influential reporters and columnists with private briefings, parties, and requests for advice.
7. Ruthlessly crush dissent in the intelligence services and the military.
8. Demonize or trivialize the skeptical.
9. Make it mainstream by enlisting actors and other famous people to spread the word.
10. Keep the message simple ("Iraq has WMDS") and repeat it continually, making the decision for war a foregone and popular conclusion. (The administration spin today is just as simplistic, but I don't think the public are now buying what the administration is selling: "If we don't stay, there will be genocide." )

In some hellish pit, Joseph Goebbels is smiling.

What is the antidote for simpletons like Noller?

1. Get away from the New York - Washinton, D.C. fishbowl, if not physically, at least mentally. David Halberstam, who died last week, wrote an influential book in 1972 The Best and the Brightest, an ironic reference to the intellectuals that led us into the Viet Nam quagmire. In it he refers to the incestuous relationship between press and power. I think the only way to look at the big questions clearly is to separate yourself from those people. The invitation to Georgetown parties, Lincoln Center concert, and White House briefings erodes the tough-mindedness needed to separate lies from truth.

2. Do your homework. The newsprint as well as the cable and web media are basically trascriptionists and there is nothing that flagship media outlets like more than to transcribe the words of the powerful. But it isn't from the Commander in Chief or the Secretary of Defense where you will get the truth. It's from the mid-level bureaucrats and majors. Propaganda is a bottom down process. The agonizing search for truth is a ground up process.

3. Grow a backbone. This is true for everyone-- the media, the legislature, and voters. In photographs of people the start of war-- it doesn't matter if it's WWI or WWII and it doesn't matter if it's Germany or America-- there is a commonality in expression in the crowds. It's the faces of ignorant glee. But war has a way of teaching us reality-- slowly and painfully. And it is for this reason that courageous questioning is the highest patriotism.

Bill O'Reilly Freaks Out

Here is a partial transcript from Faux News wherein Bill Moyer's got O'Reilly's Irish up for stating in his PBS special Selling the War the obvious-- that O'Reilly is the Joseph Goebbels of the Bush administration.

And that's a memo.

JANE HALL, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: First of all, Bill, you know, I think you could say he should have said where you said I don't want to demonize anybody. But then you proceeded to demonize people. This technique is used by a lot of people on this network and a lot of other places. I think the documentary was excellent. I've reported and written about this. I've interviewed the reporters from Knight-Ridder newspapers who were among the few people who got this right, which is one of the things he says.
He goes after the "New York Times." The "New York Times" didn't even review this.
O'REILLY: Jane, all right, look, so you're telling me as a professor.
HALL: It is a solid piece of journalism.
O'REILLY: Jane, you're telling me as a professor of journalism.
HALL: Let me finish.
O'REILLY: No. I'm not going to let you finish. Are you telling me as professor of journalism that the cut Moyers put on national television of my remarks was fair? Are you telling me that?
HALL: Let me just say.
O'REILLY: Are you telling me that Jane? Yes or no?
HALL: Can I answer the question?
O'REILLY: Because you can bloviate all night and it does us no good. Yes or no, Jane?
HALL: I would have put more of the quote in there. But you are not a huge piece of this. This is more about the print press.
O'REILLY: It doesn't matter what I am. I don't have access to what else he did, as Bernie pointed out.
HALL: Wait. The reporting that I've done, that I know about, that I've independently reported.
O'REILLY: You are justifying the unjustifiable again.
HALL: I don't agree with you about that. He is right about...
O'REILLY: You don't agree before your own eyes, before your own eyes you see how dishonest that cut was and you don't agree. Come on.
HALL: How many times has Fox News taken half of...
O'REILLY: You don't justify bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior. That's not what you do.
HALL: I think you are taking one small thing which obviously affects you. That's different...
O'REILLY: Small to you madam because you weren't made to be a war monger dishonest guy. I was. So it's small to you but isn't small to me.
HALL: I didn't say — I said I wouldn't have made that cut.
O'REILLY: I disagree with you. I have never disagreed with you more than tonight.
HALL: Well OK. You can disagree with me.
O'REILLY: This is a shameful analysis.
HALL: No, I disagree with you.

Rosie Walks

The departure of Rosie from the View was, she claimed, because of a contract disagreement. Maybe. I think it is also true that her public was starting to weary of Rosie's vulgarity. She reminds me of another actress now living in the small town of Oblivion-- Rosanna. Both have a coarseness that they thought played to their supposed regular-folks audience. But what they were both doing was playing to their real audience-- the Hollyweird elite.

Transubstantiation

In a discussion about the cult leader Jim Jones, I had a throw-away thought on the meaning of the sacrement of communion. I got some interestings reponses.

Transubstantiation, or the doctrine of the 'real presence' in the Holy Eucharist, is one of the dividing points between Roman Catholics and Anglicans, who explicitly rejected it in the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith. There is no claim on the part of the Romans that any physical changes in the bread and wine are detectable, in fact, the claim is that they could not possibly be. It is then a doctrine for which there is no evidence, only an interpretation of scripture, which cannot be verified. During the Oxford Movement Hurrell Froude questioned John Keble, who as the author of the immensely popular book of sentimental verse, The Christian Year, had written for the 5th of November (Guy Fawkes Day)

O come to our Communion Feast:
There present in the heart,
Not in the hands, th'eternal Priest
Will His true self impart.

Froude asked how he could be certain of the word "not" at the beginning of the third line, but Keble retained the verse as he wrote it— until he heard it had been quoted by a bishop he disliked. Thirty years after Froude's early demise, on his own death bed, Keble asked that "not" be replaced with "and" in Froude's memory, and it has been printed "and" ever since.

Yes, the particular article in question reads: "Transubstantiation (or the change of the susbtance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lod, cannot be proived by Holy Write; but is repugnant to the lain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrement, and has given occasion to many superstitions."

My objection comes down to my view that truth propositions must be placed into the subjunctive-- if it can be proved, it must be proved; conversely, if it cannot be proved or disproved, it cannot be rejected. Thus, I can accept as an article of faith that angels exist. But, if you say that angels are on my roof, I better hear the flapping of celestial wings before I believe. I will be happy to accept a person's faith but not to the extent that that faith conflicts with normal experiences-- in this case wine being really God's blood.

Few things outside mathematics can be proved or disproved in the sense of absolute certainty. In many legal contexts the preponderance of evidence is enough to settle an issue. So first it would be wise to reduce the requirement to a substantial accumulation of evidence. Still, should we say of propositions for which there can be no possible evidence for or against that they cannot be rejected? Perhaps that makes some logical sense—namely that we cannot declare them true or false—but as a practical matter, it could force consideration of a host of propositions that are meaningless, insignificant, or problematic.

Maybe the word "prove" should be removed from argumentation altogether for the reason that you suggest. It is possible that the question of whether or not the wine is the blood of Christ falls into what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls the silent category: "Whereof on cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent" as it is neither true or false by definition nor emperically verifiable making it to use your statement "meaningless, insignificant, or problematic." The logical positivist premise of this closes down of course entire areas of potential understanding that embrace the realm of values, paradox, contradiction, mysticism, and non-Aristotelian thinking. Because some of life's most delightful experiences fall into this category, I think it's a mistake to embrace the narrow epistimology of the strict empericist, so long as we balance it with rigorous independent thinking and awareness. Otherwise, the alternative may well be the madness of those who sipped from the Jonestown joy juice tub.

Many people misinterpret the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, as it uses terms that have changed in meaning over time. But to dismiss the Sacraments as ineffectual and/or inconsequential is to remove oneself from Christian theology, tradition and practice, IMHO.

"The theory of transubstantiation was never made official in the medieval church, but got weighty backing even before Aquinas’ time when it was used in documents of the Lateran Council of the Church in 1215. It was based on Aristotle’s discussion of the nature of existence. Aristotle divided the being of a particular object into substance and accidents. Take a sheep, for instance: its substance, which is its reality, its participation in the universal quality of being a sheep, is manifested in its gambolling on the hills, munching grass and baaing. Its accidents are things particular to the individual sheep at which we are looking: the statistics of its weight, the curliness of its wool, or the timbre of its baa. When the sheep dies, it ceases to gambol on the hills, munch grass and baa: its substance, its ‘sheepiness’, is instantly extinguished, and only the accidents remain – its corpse, including its weight, curly wool or voice box – and they will gradually decay. They are not significant to its former sheepiness, which has ended with the extinguishing of its substance in death. It is no longer a sheep.
. . .
In the Mass, substance changes, accidents do not – why should they? They are not significant for being. Through the grace of God, the substance of bread is replaced by the substance of the Body of Christ. It is a satisfying and reverent analysis: as long, that is, as one accepts Thomas’ scientific or philosophical premises of the language of substance and accidents, affirming the conception of universal realities which are greater than individual instances, such as the reality of being a sheep or being bread, rather than particular instances of sheep or bread."

MacCulloch, Diarmaid – Reformation [Penguin 2003, pp25-26]

Accepting the division that Aristotle suggested, I still have trouble understanding how the essence of God is somehow the essence of wine-- the non-sheepiness, as it were. Regardless, I'm skeptical about many things including the necessity of the sacraments.

Catholics recognize confirmation, penance, orders, matrimony, and extreme unction as sacraments, in addition to baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Many Protestant churches recognize only baptism and the Lord’s Supper (or what my boy calls “that thing you do at church with the blood and flesh”). Some apostolic churches have a third sacraments—holy sealing-- the passing of the Holy Spirit by the laying on of the hands by church elders. But on what authority are there any ordinances? Doesn’t Jesus command us to do much more than just these acts? Because sacraments are done without exception within the context of the institutional church, I believe that the observance of any sacraments is a form of sacerdotalism—an attempt by the clergy to mediate between me and God by imposing on me requirements that have nothing to do with my faith in God. I think we can affirm our faith with baptism and the Lord’s Supper, but it isn’t and shouldn’t be an obligation.

That there exists no relation of the faithful to/in the communion of the faithful that is the ecclesia is a very unChristian attitude, IMHO. As is the notion that sacraments are ineffectual and uneccessary.

You may be right on both counts. As a practical matter, however, I see many church goers who believe that their sect is the true church and all others are outside of the ecclesia, as someone from the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) once informed me. As an idealistic matter, I think it would be more positive for people to see oneness in the humanity of other rathers than in the dogmas of others.

The Last Season of The Apprentice

An easy prediction: The Apprentice has aired for the last time. Declining ratings has doomed the show, and there was no mention in the final splash of next season's gala. The Hollywood Bowl finale was 34th place with 7.98 million views and the average was a NBC all time low of 6.24 million. These aren't numbers that advertiser will like.

The firing of the ice queen last year and the introduction of the Donald's pompous and untalented kids Larry, Curly, and Mo to the show sealed the fact the Trump's kingdom is no meritocracy. Picking the botoxed Stefani over James who had won more often only makes sense when we understand that the Trump empire is 98 percent sizzle and two percent steak, where working for General Electric entitles the claim that you own General Electric.

For us lesser mortals, the conclusion of this so-called reality show is a respite to be embraced.

The Partial-Birth Abortion Act

I consider the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart to uphold the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act to be correctly decided and trivial. It was correctly decided because I believe legislatures and judges are obliged to draw moral lines in the name of public policy. That line at least to me seems appropriate. Such lines are drawn all the time. The difference between speeding and not speeding is one mile per hour and the difference between misdemeanor theft and felony theft is one dollar. I don't buy the argument that the right to abortion opens the door to infanticide-- the so-called slippery slope fallacy. However, based on what I have read on it, it does seem to be a rather appalling procedure.

Having said that, I consider this decision to be trivial. First, it is exceedingly rare. Secondly, in the hypothetical where the mother's life is in peril, I cannot imagine that any jury would convict if the doctor had to choose between the life of the mother and the child and the mother's life was chosen. Thirdly, if the mother's life was not at risk, it is hard for me to believe that a mother would allow the fetus to incubate into the third trimester so it would even be an issue.

Abortion is far more complex than merely making a simplistic dichotomy between pro-life and pro-choice positions. (Choosing to abort can be pro-life and choosing not to abort is of course a choice, so such labels are meaningless.) Few doctors endorse abortion as a means of birth control and such a grave step should never be taken lightly. Doctors, perhaps for insurance reasons, sometimes scare the daylights out of mother-to-be about the health of their child. But doctors are sometimes wrong, and it’s important to trust ourselves in such matters.

I’ve also met few absolutists on abortion, especially when they have to deal with the issue personally, as in a hypothetical in which a baby is an encephalic-- without a brain-- and the mother’s life in danger. Someone wrote to me saying that this “did happen to my closest friends a couple of years ago, and even more ironically, at the time, I was teaching an eight week course on Biblical ethics when the severity of her condition came to light. In a nutshell, she had four small kids at home, pregnant with her fifth, when she started having problems. Doctors said that: a) The baby essentially had no brain, his limbs were severely deformed, and other internal organs where malformed beyond hope. b) Because of some uterine problems, there was a very high chance that sometime in the ninth month she would suffer some major hemorrhage that could prove fatal to her. They of course, wanted to abort right away. She refused, and moreover, wanted to carry the baby full term and have a natural childbirth. (Initially, she actually wanted to give birth at home). For me, I saw the ethical question in a whole new light, now that it had a face on it. The baby had a zero percentage chance of surviving. For a staunch pro-lifer, it was a dilemma acknowledging that the right-to-life can't always be seen as an absolute. It didn't seem right that the mother should possibly lose her life, and four small children lose their mother, when the baby wasn't going to live no matter what. Fortunately, the mother decided to have a C-section at the earliest possible time. (32 weeks or something like that...don't exactly remember) She got through it okay. The baby lived for three days or so.”

I might also point out that abortion should not even be a moral issue in a society where young men and women have the self-respect, self-control, and a desire for a good future to exclude promiscuity from their life-- not just before marriage but for their entire life. Moral economy consists of supply and demand. If there was no demand for heroin, there would be no supply of heroin. Likewise, if there was no demand for promiscuity, the demand for abortion would I suspect also decline. So, for me, the biggest question is: why is it that promiscuity remains such a lure to cause so many people to shipwreck their lives and the lives of others?

Jonestown's Holy Communion

Last night, I attended a mass at a local Catholic church. I'm not Catholic, but there is much that I admire in their tradition of morals, education, and charity. When it was time to have communion, those from the church-- mainly middle school kids-- lined up to take a wafer and sip from a brass globlet of wine, bowing first and then returning to their seats to kneel.

The priest assured us that the wine was "actually" the blood of Jesus. My background is low Baptist, and so my view of the wine (or grape juice in the case of my church) is that there is nothing mystical about it. The elements are as Luke 17:19 states: a remembrance. It's like the U.S. flag, evoking within us feelings of pride in our heritage, the Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon, our constitution, our diversity and power. But the flag itself is not the United States. It is a piece of cloth that represents the United states. In the same way, the bread and the wine is not God. It is something that represents what God did. But this is a trivial nuance of dogma, and there is no need to dwell on it.

Watching the children line up to take communion reminded me of a documentary that I saw on the History Channel the night before about the Jim Jones cult, in which 913 people, including 276 children, committed "revolutionary suicide" in 1978. It was an incident that impressed me at the time, provoking me to write a letter to TIME that was published in the December 25th edition. "Jones saw the handwriting on the wall, and the words spelled nuclear war," I wrote. "So, choosing to march to a different drumbeat, Jones' disciples followed him into the jungle. Their humanistic dream: to build a better world. But, as it turned out, the handwriting was a forgery, the drummer was mad, the humanism bankrupt, and the dream a nightmare." The documentary showed kids and teenagers lining up to take their cynide-laced Flavor-Aid joy juice. A few resisted Jones' communion of death and were either injected or shot. But the majority were swept into annihilation by a collective death wish.

It is both scary and fascinating to see how organizations can envelope even tough-minded people. In the Jones case, there were a few people who protested, most notably, Christine Miller. The transcript of the final moments of those who died is chilling, as it reveals the power of pathological group thinking. In the back-and-forth between Christine Miller and Jones, the balance could have tipped towards life, but the force of the fanaticism of the true believers was too great. So she, along with Jones and almost a thousand others died.

I'm not suggesting a parallel with the Catholic church and this aberrant death-cult. However, even in religious organizations that are life-affirming, we must remain ever vigilant against losing our soul in the name of a supposed greater good.

Free Will and Virginia Tech

Is there any point in adding to the explanatory mix for the Virginia Tech massacre a collapse in moral responsibility?

I believe that the answer is: yes. Elsewhere on this website, I have written on the question of free will, decisively afirming that it does exist and it is axiomatic to understanding ourselves, ethics, and law. To put it in the negative, I reject as morally suspect and emperically unjustifiable theories that affirm predestination, kismet, fate, astrology, behavorism, and the like.

In the case of Seung-Hui Cho, I'm willing to concede that his actions were the confluence of forces that he and we cannot comprehend. But there is a point where background forces stop and individual choices begin. In the case of this incident, moral responsibility doesn't merely rest with the shooter. From his own admissions, he had self-awareness, enough so as to prevent this tragedy from unfolding. And the same is true with other actors in this drama-- the police and judges, the psychologists and counselors, teachers and students, legislators and citizens. The confluence of countless decisions converged to produce an immoral act.

The Choice

"One has only the choice between God and idolatry. If one denies God...one is worshipping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imaging the attributes of Divinity in them."

Simone Weil

Liberalism

This is what liberalism is according to Newt.

And here is a somewhat more coherent understanding of this term.

The word liberal is used prejoratively in modern discourse. But I think it is only because many of us are reluctant to embrace this word. It's a word that denotes a way of looking at power and liberty that is consistent with the thinking of our founding fathers and our greatest presidents.

Newt finds in the philosophy of modern-day liberalism moral relativism and a contempt for the sanctity of life, which is just a tad hypocritical for an adulteror who supports wars that use weapons of mass destruction.

Gingrich Defends Concealed Weapons

(ABC News) Former Speaker of the House and potential presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., speculated that concealed weapons could have mitigated the Virginia Tech massacre.
"In states where people have been allowed to have concealed weapons, in Mississippi and Kentucky, there have been incidents of this kind of a killer who were stopped, because in fact, people who are law-abiding people, who are rational, and people who are responsible had the ability to stop them," Gingrich told ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

The best way to test an argument is to take it to its extreme. Why not allow people on airplanes, in courtrooms, and in legislatures to pack heat? And on what basis can we assume that rational and responsible people are always rational and responsible? Newt's statement is silly and dangerous.

A Boy Named Sue

Today's New York Times obituaries mention the death of Kelsie Harder, one of the world's leading onomasticians-- an expert in names and their origins. His rumination about why his parents gave him a girl's name sparked his interest in this area of scholarship. Dr. Harder's parents wanted to give him an unsusual name and liked the sound of Elsie, his sister's. They stuck a "K" in front of Elsie.

"We are at the mercy of our name givers," he said. "These things influence us for the rest of our lives, and we have nothing to do with it."

As an author of two books on baby names, he warned that boys name "Jr" ended up on psychoanalyst's couches.

I'm also intrigued by the choices some parents make in naming their children, and I wonder what provokes them to call their kids after brand names ("Mercedes," "Tiffany"), names that are overly religious ("Jesus", "Mohammed"), and names that have a new age cast ("Africa", "Rainbow"). As in the Johnny Cash's song, the unfortunately named can prevail despite or because of their name. However, for some, it may be a psychic wound that festers for their entire life. In Dr. Harder's case, it appears that his name didn't hurt him, and he even gave his first name to his son, but without the "Jr."

Most parents want their children to both stand out-- be individuals in their own right-- and fit in-- be accepted by peers. In the early years of life, conformity has more value than non-conformity as the former is needed to build a base for achieving. If this is so, I suggest that a child's name needs to pass the snicker test. Kids in the early grades spend more brain power than we sometimes appreciate figuring out ways to needle their classmates, and a poorly-chosen name is a hurdle that most kids don't need at that time in their life.

When we chose our two son's names, we considered diminutives, initials, word sounds, syllable counts, and connection to heritage to arrive at what we think are names that they can take pride in for the rest of their lives. We think we chose the right names.

Desert Ridge Marriot

We spent the morning at a time share presentation at the J.W. Marriot Desert Ridge Resort, leaving wiser but not poorer.

F is for Feijoada

a Brazilian dish:
sausages, beef, pork, and beans--
but no fish.

flagrante delicto
felo de se
finalism
fribble
fish gallery
fungible
fey
furbelow
frog's march (as for a prisoner)
FASB 13
fasces
faute de mieux

Memo to John Edwards

"Campaign records now reveal that John Edwards was using his campaign money to get $400 haircuts in Beverly Hills," says Jay Leno. "But Edwards insists this is in keeping with his view that there are two Americas: one that pays $400 for a haircut, and the other America that spends its money on stupid things like rent and food."

In view of Edwards' ribbing for having a $400 haircut, may I suggest Great Clips, where I had my haircut today?

Haircut 12.00
Coupon minus 4.00
Tip 2.00
Total 9.99

Savings for the John ("A Man of the People") Edwards Campaign: $390.01

Interpreting the Bible

(A skeptical interloculor gave me some verses to puzzle over. Here are my responses and also his counterpoint.)

Mark 16:18 says that if a Christian drinks deadly poison, it won't hurt him at all. Are you a Christian? If I gave you some poison, would you drink it? Ready to put your money where your mouth is? Ready to "step out in faith?"

This particular verse (actually verses 9-20) is not found in the two most ancient manuscripts, the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. But, accepting that it is in the canon, I would simply interpret it as an admonition to embrace faith and confidence irrespective of the challenges that life throws. I see nothing in that verse commanding self-harm or foolishness.

Not obvious but not unreasonable either.

I read in Matthew 2:23 that it was spoken by the prophets that "He [Jesus] shall be called a Nazarene." Can you find this prophecy in the Old Testament for me, please, or in any other writing that existed prior to 31 AD?

This is a reference most likely to Isa. 11.1, where the Messiah is spoken as "a rod (netzer) out of the stem of Jesse."

This probably is how Jesus came to be called a Nazarene, but it doesn't get the author of Matthew off the hook for ignorance and/or pious fiction, because (i) netzer is Hebrew and doesn't appear in the Septuagint (the Greek translation that the author of Matthew and his audience were familiar with), and (ii) the author of Matthew doesn't think Nazarene means rod, he thinks it means person from Nazareth.

Ecclesiastes 1:4 says that the earth will last forever; II Peter 3:10 says that it won't. Which do you believe?

The former is a reference to the terrestial world which will someday be consumed by flames in distinction to the celestial world which will last forever.

Did you mean "latter"? Either way, both references are clearly to the terrestrial earth.

Do you believe that anyone has ever seen God? Isaiah said he did (Isaiah 6:1); but John said (twice) that nobody has ever seen God at any time (I John 4:12; John 1:18). Who's lying, John or Isaiah?

They are both telling the truth. If you read the chapter in Isaiah, it is clear that he is not seeing the God that John references but a vision of God. John's God is idenbtified with the God of John 1:1 which is Logos-- roughly, spirit or concept.

No. It was presumably a singular occurence that one might have taken for a dream, but the author goes out of his way to specify, "[...] my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."

II Thessalonians 2:11-12 says that God sends a powerful delusion to certain people, causing them to believe a lie, so that they will be condemned (i.e., spend eternity suffering in hell). Isn't this, frankly, immoral? Isn't this what Christians accuse Satan (the father of lies - John 8:44) of doing? If you were God, would you cause people to believe a lie? Why?

You left out the verse prior in which those that perish have within them "all deceivableness of unrighteousness...because they received not the love of truth." There is no immorality, as those who reject God choose to do so "that they should believe the lie." If I were God, I would give people the capacity for self-deception as this section intimates.

It's a confusing passage and the reading you suggest would be possible in isolation, but it's unlikely in view of all the other verses in Paul where God is depicted as forcing people to do evil things and then judging them for it. In particular, in Romans 9, Paul endorses the plain reading of Exodus where God hardens Pharaoh's heart to force him to disobey and then destroys him for disobeying.

I recently saw the 1960 Spencer Tracy movie Inherit the Wind, basically a re-telling of the Bryan-Scopes "monkey" trial. While I admire the movie for its drama, I consider it to be just as dishonest and as fallacious as these so-called contradictions. The person who authored these "propositions" adopted what s/he clearly thought was the most fundamentalist interpretation possible irrespective of whether such propositions are embraced either in mainstream Christianity of even by minor sects within Christianity. No one can read the Bible without acknowledging that vast portions of it are allegory and ambiguity. At the end of the day, the Scopes trial was not a question of science versus religion, but a simple question of law, of which the defendent was correctly found guilty of violating.

The Bible doesn’t interpret itself. We interpret the Bible, and we all read the same words in different ways. A person who claims that the Bible must be read literally hasn’t read enough of the Bible to justify that statement. Some books such as the Song of Solomon make no sense at all unless read allegorically. We can read Biblical justifications for slavery (such as The Epistle to Philemon), polygamy (the biographies of the kings and patriarchs of the Old Testament), the holocaust (from the Gospel of John and the writings of Martin Luther and others), and the flatness of the earth. The Bible’s doctrine of the flat earth, believed by all the writers of the Bible and Jesus as well as Calvin and Luther, is an example of why we must be cautious in applying broad brush principles of interpretations to such a complex book with so many different styles of writing, authors, and messages.

The problem with Biblical interpretation is that the Bible is like an ink-blot. We see what we want to see in them, which is in turn a projection of our own psychology, life's journey, and ways of processing information. Sometimes, the fundamentalist can be closer to the core truth of things that the skeptic. Earlier, I alluded to the Scopes trial, of which William Jennings Bryan was a spear carrier for the creationists. Among those opposing him was the agnostic journalist H.L. Mencken. His caustic columns laid bear the hypocrisy of the fundamentalism of the 1920s. But it was Bryan was who the progressive-- in fact one of the leading lights of progressivism (or what we call liberalism today) at the turn of the last century, fighting for women's suffrage and direct elections and against business trusts and eugenics, whereas Mencken, who was on the right side of scientific truth and a wonderful writer was also a reactionary of the old school, a bigot, an anti-semite, and an apologist of Hitlerism.

When it comes to each individual's epistomology, nothing and no one is entirely right or wrong, truthful or dishonest.

I cannot say for sure that there is no history in some of the more ancient books of the Old Testament. Genesis, for example, may well be tribal campfire stories that borrowed from the oral traditions of many other tribes. They may contain no fact, nuggets of fact, or be completely factual. We have no way of knowing for sure. But we do know that they were preserved for a reason. And one of those reasons is the power that these stories continue to invoke—moral choice in the Garden of Eden, the illusion of human pride in the , hate and bloodshed in Cain and Abel, and man’s long groping struggle to find moral redemption and God that culminates in the Christmas and Easter stories. It’s these sweeping themes that continue to resonate for me in our Brave New World of gas chambers and gulags, atomic missiles, and human cloning.

Without getting into the specifics of different schools of critical interpetation, I would say that a good rule of thumb for myself is that the more ambiguous a passage is, the less spiritually important or morally significant it is. And, needless to say, there are many passages in the Bible that fall into that category.

Bush Poetry

(Harken Allen Ginsbergh and Jack Kerouac to the president's free verse as delivered in a single speech on April 19th in Ohio. Groovy. )

Everbody wants to be loved . . .not everybody.
If you've got a chicken factory, a chicken-plucking factory, or whatever you call them, you know what I'm talking about.
Death is terrible.
Polls just go poof.
Remember the rug?

E is for Eels

Eels are serpentine, slippery, and thin
but impaled on boards you can peel off their skin.

executory
escent - being
eblis
ecce homo - John xix.5
ecce signum -- behold the proof
ecdysiast - stripteaster
elf-marked
entelechy
ERISA
estival
Eraclius
escritoire
ebullition
escritoire
euratom
euphenics
eidolon
enounce

I'm Thinking of a Number - Part II

The massacre in Virginia provokes wonderment. Where was the Department of Homeland Security? How can someone with a record for mental instability buy a glock with about as much ease as buying tickets to a basketball game? And what can be done to prevent this from happening again?

As to the first question: The answer is that the Department of Homeland Security is indeed impotent. Hurricane Katrina established that. It was only public pressure that caused the department to increase border security and shipping container verification.

As to the second question: I think enough Americans believe that the Second Amendment guarantees them the right to have their kids blow off their heads that I don't think that there will be any new gun restrictions. Not even the Democrats want to play around this third rail of politics. The human mind is still largely terra incognita. and predicitng violence is at best an imperfect science.

What can be done to prevent this from happening again? While Americans value their freedom, their are stronger countervailing trends, such as the trends towards diversity, mobility, computerization, and terrorism. I predict we will see shortly a behavior score, much like the credit scoring neural nets used by credit card issuers, that will be part of an individual's existence from the day they are born or immigrate into this country to the day they die or leave this country. This number will be the focus of interlocking databases consisting of crime and psychological reports and perhaps other kinds of reports that would throw up red flags and at least communciate more information than gun sellers now get. It will be the creation of a true permanent record. From a civil liberties perspective, I don't view this as likely soon, but it is inevitable-- something that society will embrace to by acclamation. Already, we are photographed about twenty times each day, and software now exists to cross-reference and correlate face image and behavior. I don't believe the presumption for civil liberties and privacy will prevail against the demand for increased security. The United States of the future is the People's Republic of China today.

I'm Thinking of A Number - Part I

``If we lose," Karl Rove said "they will follow.''

For the sake of argument, let's accept the Bush administration's premise, that we are in the midst of a global war on terror of uncertain duration and cost, and that the Iraqi war wasn't fabricated from whole cloth to re-elect the president. At this point, there is only one number that would persuade me. That number is: two. Bush has two children, and that neither of them is willing to sacrifice themselves on the alter of liberty at least makes me think that this so-called war is nothing more than a politicized fantasy.

The Bullied

(AP) - Long before he snapped, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in the Washington suburbs, former classmates say. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice.
As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China."

In incidents such as the Virginia Tech slayings, there is no single reason why a man to turns into a madman. But the way Cho's peers treated him is a factor.

Like Cho, I immigrated to America at an early age. Cho was eight, I was ten and we both had accents. In my case, that provoked sadistic glee from a certain percentage at Council Rock, a house of horrors that made the Stephen King movie Carrie look wholesome. Three decades haven't dimmed the misery of that shark pool-- a bovine-faced George Blackwell shaking me down for my milk money, the dwarf James Kilcoyne whose nose I bloodied after one tussel, and yet another greaser who threw me up against the lockers and was killed three days later with a knife in the ribs. Cho's sister graduated from Princeton, and I adopted the same strategy of escaping the bullies by excelling and achieving. The succession of failures and successes also increased my self-confidence and my generally boyant personality also cushioned me from the kind of despair that turned Cho into a psychotic murderer.

I have in my medical files the x-rays of my ten-year old son from 2003. It shows a broken clavicle-- a fracture of the collarbone admnistered by Michael Friedman, an especially vile classroom bully. I suppose it is both a right of passage to navigate the jungle of bullies but also a shock to realize that not everyone acts with decency. Whittaker Chamber's in his fine and frightening autobiography Witness recounts how in first-grade he watched a group of his classmates urinate on a lollypop and then offer it in innocent friendliness to a newcomer. "The watched him with birdlike intentness while he held it in his hand. As he put it to his mouth, they burst into shrieks of derision, doubled up with laughter, slapped their knees and whooped around him like Indians. I think it was at that point that I developed a deep distrust of the human race. It was not only the filthy act that disgusted me. Something else shocked me much more deeply: the thought that inspired the act, its absolutely unmotivated malice, and the complete boyish guileness of the faces watching the victim. From that moment I hated school and everything about it. I was always expecting somebody to offer me a lollypop in one form or another."

The Columbine killers were also victims of bullies. This shouldn't mitigate their crimes or in anyway diminish the human toll the murders exacted. But to prevent such actions from happening again, I think it behooves us to reflect on how we treat the Chos-- the most fragile and the most alienated-- that are among us. Ramping up on gun laws and inducing better living through chemistry doesn't address root causes of these human explosions. Nor do I think the answer is to eradicate mechanisms that differentiate the mediocre from the excellent, such as grades, honor societies, and wealth. But I do believe that people who for whatever reason are given advantages that elevate them in life should reciprocate by treating others-- including and especially the unlovely and the unsmart ---with kindness and efforts at understanding.

Giuliani the Draft Dodger

There are many people that share my skepticism that John McCain is the shining hero of the Hanoi Hilton. There are many questions that need to be asked, such as the precise circumstances that led to his capture and his behavior while in prison. The Republican's Manchurian Candidate may have some explaining to do as well as records to release. Perhaps the only things that prevents McCain from being swift-boated is the presumption that he won't be the Republican candidate.

The conventional wisdom is that Rudy Giuliani will be the Republican candidate. As with his values, credentials, and stand on issues in general, there is less than meets the eye. It appears that Rudy was an especially oily draft dodger during the Viet Nam war. Of course, he is in good company, with Clinton and Cheney among others. And yet if Giuliani is going to make national security the paramont issue in the 2008 election, I don't think it is rude to ask what exactly he did to answer our nation's call to arms at another time of peril.

From a tactical perspective, it's appropriate for the Democrats to hold their fire at present. In many respects, he is the worst possible candidate that the Republicans could want. His liberal stands cancel out the liberal stands by the Democratic candidates, and his character-- his treatment of his many wives and children-- is laughable and despicable.

Miscellenia

1. Dogs are more prone to nervous breakdowns than any other non-human animal.

2. Gustave Le Bob: "Science has promised us truth. It has never promised us peace or happiness."

3. Eggs contain lecithin to emulsify cholesterol and can't do you any harm.

4. The length of Pluto's year is 248 earth-years.

5. A chick hatches in 21 days.

6. An ancient Celtic rhyme puts the age of animals thusly: Thrice the age of a dog is a horse. Thrice the age of a horse is a man. Thrice the age of a man is a deer. Thrice the age of a deer is that of an eagle.

7. The wildcat is a fastidious feline. Sme won't eat meat that they did not kill themselves.

8. Falling stars are said by Mahometans to eb firebrands flung by good angels against evil spirits when they approach too near the gates of heaven.

9. Oceans and inland seas contain 97.2 percent of earth's water.

10. Scientific hypothesis gain confidence not by finding proof but by repeatendly escaping disproof in fair tests.

Memo to John Markell

Enjoy your $570. Brace yourself for a wave of wrongful-death lawsuits.

Markell, owner of Roanoke Firearms, sold Cho Seung-Hui the Glock 9-millimeter and ammunition that took the lives of thirty-two Americans.

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