Disinformation, Ion Mihai Pacepa

https://www.amazon.com/Disinformation-Strategies-Undermining-Attacking-Promoting/dp/1522605088

For those that care, the end of the USSR gave us an open window into Communism, the  USSR, and the culture of Russia, which still lives on today. One of the authors, Pacepa, was a 3 star general in Romanian security who was privy to the absolute top of the Soviet KGB. He worked with Kruschev and Soviet leaders after him up until he defected in 1978 ... he was a personal advisor to Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, and accompanied on all his trips abroad.

The book is required reading for CIA personnel, and the title tells us what readers of this blog certainly have known for a long time -- the ability to dupe the west via "disinformation" has been a cornerstone of Soviet and now Russian operations since Stalin. The art of creating fake stories and getting the rest of the world to see them as "facts" is an art form honed to precision and used effectively by the USSR.

As Churchill said about Russia in a 1939 broadcast, it was then and seems will always be "A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma". The idea of the "Potemikin Village" and the "Russian Dolls" of close to infinite regress is core to Russian culture and history. It is no accident that Russian Chess Masters are some of the greatest ever.

Among he "big lies" of Soviet Disinformation are it's numerous framings of Popes and Cardinals as "Hitler's Popes" or other lies involved in their war on religion. Keeping the world view of Jews as "Zionist puppeteers" pulling the strings of any non-communist governments is another of the ongoing Disinformation programs.

The book makes the case that Lee Harvey Oswald provided the KGB with critical espionage on the U-2 that allowed it to be shot down -- there is also more detail on Oswald's connections to the USSR, and the likelihood that we ended up knowing that the USSR was behind killing JFK, however LBJ thought the risk of nuclear war to great to admit what was done. Pulling strings behind the curtain and leaving the West with a bunch of wispy conspiracy theories has always been a Russian favorite.

Surprising to nobody that has read much at all, "Ramparts" magazine and later "Mother Jones" were KGB funded to influence politics in the US -- David Horowitz, was raised as a "Red Diaper Baby" (a child raised in the US whose parents were communists dedicated to overthrow of the US government) and was later editor of "Ramparts" until the Black Panthers (also with KGB connections) killed one of his friends and he became a supporter of the US and conservative principles. I read his book "Radical Son" long before I started blogging.

It is a hard read -- there is a LOT of detail, and a lot of the names are Russian / Eastern European, so it is hard to keep track of it all. I found too much time spent on only marginally successful attempts to claim the Catholic Church supported Hitler ... yes,  there are a number of people on the left that like to make that claim because of the importance of making it seem that "National Socialism" was an ideology of the RIGHT ... I cover this in detail here.

Political Tribes, Group Instinct And the Fall Of Nations

https://www.amazon.com/Political-Tribes-Group-Instinct-Nations/dp/0399562850

Found the subject book by Yale professor Amy Chua to be a quick,  easy, and worthwhile  read. It seems such a perfect book to show up just as I'm closing Moose Tracks.

On page 40-41 she does a good job of quickly covering the basic science that we already know -- "our brains are hardwired to identify, value, and individualize in-group members, while outgroup members are processed as interchangeable members of a general social category".

"Humans aren't just a little tribal. We're VERY tribal and it distorts the way we think and feel".

"The key to ethnic identity is that it is built around the idea of shared blood; ... For most human beings, the family is primal".

Readers of this blog know all that, and they also know why destruction of the family is key to destruction of a culture!

She wisely spends a lot of the early part of the book discussing the US inability to recognize tribalism in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Venezuala. I was completely unaware of the degree to which the Vietnamese had been fighting against a Chinese minority that owned most of the wealth of Vietnam for a thousand years -- and we ignored that fact.

On page 46 she introduces the critical idea of a "market dominant minority" which the Chinese were in Vietnam, and are in Indonesia today: "in Indonesia the Chinese comprise 3% of the population but control 70% of the economy".

At this point it would seem easy to understand where she is headed -- something over 90% of the wealth in the US is controlled by an elite of well less than 10%, with something over half being controlled by a 1% who largely attended ivy league schools, live on one of the coasts in very large cities, and share a set of establishment values at odds with the have-nots of any color -- Asian, Hispanic, Black, White, etc.

Pretty much, she doesn't go there -- she goes to race.

On 166 she says "The Left believes that right-wing tribalism -- bigotry, racism -- is tearing the country apart. The Right believes that left-wing tribalism -- identity politics, political correctness, is tearing the country apart. They are both right."

From 21-33 she asserts that we became a "super-group" in "1965" after the Voting Rights Act, and defines a super-group on page 22 to be "a group in which membership is open to individuals of any background, but at the same time binds it's members together with a strong,  overarching, group transcending collective identity". To the extent she defines that "identity", it is "The American Dream" ... simplified to the idea that everyone can economically surpass their parents.

What she doesn't focus on much is that Christianity as the prototype super-group -- the strong overarching goal is serving Christ and others, and everyone, regardless of background is a "blood brother/sister" in the blood of Christ. Galations 3:28 "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

Obviously, her objective is a SECULAR super-group, which she thought the US had from 1965 to the election of Barack Obama. She notes as I have on previously page 165 that 1965 was also the year when an historically unprecedented wave of immigration, much of it non-white,  started -- this was not an accident. The elites at that point felt that America was too slow to change, so they would just change the population. Brilliantly, they also told us that Americans should avoid having children because world hunger was the "end of the world issue" of that day, similar to "climate change" today.

On page 181, she spots a little problem with identity politics ... "The demand is not for incluson within the fold of universal humankind ... nor is it for respect "in spite of" one's differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different."

So much for "everyone being created equal" -- try each individual being "evolved" different and special, AND demanding to be SPECIALLY respected for being different! Everyone a star! Sacrifice? Tolerance of those who do not share your particular differenc?

Not the values of identity politics!

She spends a good deal of time on things like "The Prosperity Gospel", "Sovereign Citizens", the WWE, NASCAR and a few other things to it is not clear what end -- something like a few on the left doing a "Safari to America" after Trump was elected. Clearly she, being on the left, would like to focus on the tribalism on the right.

 By the most scary estimates the FBI or the Southern Poverty Hate  Center" could come up with were "as many as" 300K members of apparently highly feared "Sovereign Citizens" ... I'd never heard of them, I've never met one even though I'm a denizen of gun clubs and crazy conservative meetings. Apparently no web site exists for this dangerous group ...  sovereigncitizenship.net was expired. There were LOTS of web hits on how much of a threat they are however. It's on the Internet, it must be true.

Would NPR listeners be a "tribe" like "NASCAR"? Since I'm a regular "spy listener", I'd certainly say so -- very much a secular humanist world view with recent movement toward "intersectionality". How about BLM? At a minium, they seem to have a lot more web presence than the fearsome "Sovereign Citizens". Amy is right about tribalism ... even if you DO have a transcendent value beyond your tribe, seeing your OWN tribe is HARD --  we just assume our own tribe is just the normal, reasonable, decent, intelligent people!

So once we had a country that Amy believes was a secular super-group, a goal of at least hers  -- and then came Obama, the proof of the existence of that super-group, and "poof" it was gone. So how do we get it back now that we are no longer going to have any dominant majority group? However, we will apparently continue to have a very elite coastal ivy league "Market Dominant Minority" of the 1% that own all the wealth?

I'd argue that even with lots of minority problems, we were much more of a sectarian (Christian) super-group than she gave us credit for well before 1965  ... that Federick Douglass could rise to the prominance he did as an ex-slave in the mid 1800's shows that much of the country held merit to be a much greater factor than race even at that time. Something about America -- I'd assert it to be our written Constitution, was enough for people to fight and die for even though we remained far from a "perfect super-group". As she points out, nobody else on the planet even sees that as a goal.

The book is a good survey of the prevalence and problems of tribalism -- it does not in my opinion acknowledge how far the generally Christian Western civilization had risen above tribalism by the apogee of America post WWII 1945 - 1965. It does show that our higher level educated "elite" no longer subscribing to the values embodied in our Constitution, and certainly losing Christianity as a common glue, has resulted in what most students of civilization and culture would assert to be a fully expected descent into tribalism ... Darwin's Cathedral is one post/book that goes into more detail here.

She provides a hugely hopeful story on page 205. A young  Mexican American Yale student, "Giovanni" lived in a poor trailer park in rural Texas near "the Joneses", who were extremely kind to his family. In 2016 he thought that due to their social media posts, they must be "racists". He told the author however, that the "Joneses exemplify a critical paradox that progressives often overlook or dismiss, to their own detriment." Despite their racist attitudes (determined by Giovanni based on social media posts), "they treat our family with nothing but love and respect, in fact, they treat my sister and me to be their adoptive grandkids".

She goes on; "I found Giovanni's story to be striking first because he was talking about racism in a way that is completely taboo among progressives (the group he identifies with). Among progressives, once someone is deemed racist, that's it. You can't talk to them, you can't compromise, and you certainly can't suggest they might be decent people just because they are nice to a few minorities.".

Perhaps Giovanni is an Easter Person (Christian)? Somewhere in his heart might he imagine that his judgement is less than ultimate, and that ALL are redeemable? For me, the saddest part of Hillary's deploreables comment was that she judged them (us?)  "irredeemable". As a Christian, it isn't the Joneses works that make them redeemable -- nor mine, nor anyones. If it were, then Christ would not have needed to die because ultimate redemption would be a matter of meeting some standard of works (vs proper social media posts as judged by "progressives"). "Morality" would  be a matter of "keeping up with the Joneses"!

We have exchanged a dominant culture where all people were at a minimum "redeemable", and at least the standard was that as a practicing Christian we were  bound to not only not judge them, but to even LOVE them! For a "progressive" culture where worth can be judged via social media posts, redemption from such posts is not possible, and such posts define your worth even beyond repeated actions! Giovanni is a rare person -- rare enough for his Yale professor to call out his behavior in not cutting off people that have been kind to his family for years on the basis of social media posts to be an "amazing hopeful sign" in this tribal nation of BOistan!

As I wait for the potential of yet another major spring snow storm, I reflect on where our culture has moved over my lifetime. In my youth and even up to middle age, it was considered wise to believe in a set of transcendent values  that included a created world with a loving God showing us how to live happily not only in this life, but eternally, and feeling gratidude to be blessed to be  living in a nation with a written Constitution, exceptional among all nations on the planet, insuring our right to think and live freely in peace with our neighbors.

We traded that for a world where this short life is all we have, the whole of Western culture is nothing but a terrible tale of oppression, and the avowed purpose of our nation is to insure that there will be nothing recognizeable in the future save "accelerating change" toward an unknown, but promised to be "progressive" future. We are required to believe in this, rather than anything we might see with our own eyes -- lest we be judged "irredeemable deplorables" by the elites driving this "progress". Oh, and "nonbelievers" in the "progressive" mantra are to be pitied -- for it is guaranteed by the elites that the "future beyond the future" is CERTAIN to be even more wonderful! What a brave new world!

Have we not been to this movie before? Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

Why The West Was Won, Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Victor-Davis-Hanson/dp/0571216404

A worthy final book review for the end of Moose Tracks. I regularly have blogged on articles by Dr Hanson who writes regularly for National Review, where I find his thinking always of merit and with whom I am typically in agreement with. The depth and scholarship of this work of 455 pages is amazing, even more so when I look at the giant list of books by Dr Hanson -- although an avid reader, I could spend years just catching up with Hanson's writings, let alone a sampling of the classic writers that he often references.

My lack of any training in Greek or Latin makes many of the historical names difficult for me -- Dr Hanson is one more reminder of my lack of historical and classical education.

The book can be summarized fairly simply -- it is a series of battles that bring to light the way of Western warfare. Hanson argues that because of the relative democracy, freedom and private property rights of Western peoples from Greece onward, the west developed the unique character of attacking in mass with a disciplined and cohesive force, and then pressing the attack until the opposition was no longer able to make war. A world of private property and advancement of personal and family fortunes was the way of the West ... and that made WINNING and STOPPING war a priority!

In a recent case that we are familiar with, Japan never imagined that by attacking Pearl Harbor, the US would declare total war on them with no thought of any "negotiations" to come before unconditional surrender. For the Japanese, and other imperial, "god as emperor/king" cultures, wars had elements of symbolism, martial artistry, "honor", and ritual -- they were not simply about getting the bloody task over with as quickly and efficiently as possible. War was an important part of their very culture.

For the West, no matter how great the slaughter on the battlefield, it was seen as "moral" compared with the mutilation of prisoners, women and children. The culture of the west up to recently was in line with the character in this clip from the unforgiven -- if you want to take the west on in battle, you better arm yourself.

In a slight measure, the book is a response to "Guns, Germs and Steel" which Davis finds to not make it's case -- western armies, even with superior weaponry were defeated by native forces on a number of occasions. Cortez was defeated and barely escaped with his life from Tenochtitlan in the summer of 1520, only to amazingly return and win in the summer of 1521! "Germs" affected both sides. What the non-Western adversaries lacked was the ability to form proper formations and successfully fight using them with discipline and resolve, even when leadership was killed.

The story of Western military dominance according to Hanson is one of strong independent individuals at all levels of the force who are drilled and BELIEVE that staying in rank, maintaining the line, and no running are the ultimate best way to stay alive and WIN. Without democracy and private property, it is not possible for a nation to hold this advantage, even if they purchase Western armaments. Western culture could not be bought ... but unfortunately, as with Rome and Britain before it, it has certainly been squandered.

The section on Midway makes that case exceptionally strong. Yorktown returns from the battle of the coral sea to Honolulu heavily damaged with repair estimates of 3-6 months. Admiral Nimitz says he MUST have Yorktown at Midway, and he himself is in hip boots under the hull assessing damage before the dry dock is even drained. Because of the ability of the American workers to operate  without close supervision and know exactly what needed to be done, they worked around the clock and she steamed out of the harbor with the last of the workers still finishing up as she headed into battle 68 hours after she came into port!

The Japanese carriers damaged or losing many planes at Coral Sea -- Shokaku and Zuikaku with FAR less severe damage, sat in their repair port of Kure during Midway battle. Reverse this picture, and the US goes up against SIX Japanese carriers with TWO, rather than the 3 on 4 which resulted in the Japanese losing all 4 carriers and thus the initiative in the war only 6 months after their victory at Pearl.

The tales of the battles are detailed and BLOODY -- on all sides. The book gives some real insight into what battle and life was like for soldiers of Greek and Persian empires, the Romans, the Spanish Conquistadors, the British Empire, etc.

While Vietnam and subsequent anti-war protests have possibly weakened the Western resolve to win, and most of all to do it quickly and efficiently, Hanson maintains that as long as democracy, personal freedom and basic private property continue to exist, so will the Western way of war.

Interestingly, the orginianl Star Trek, right during the Vietnam war had an episode called "A Taste of Armageddon" about two civilizations that had been "at war" for a very long time where "attacks" were carried out by computer simulation, casualty figures totalled up, and people filed into "disintegrators" as war casualities -- very tidy, no loss of costly infrastrucure. When the Enterprise is computer "collateral damage", Kirk decides to give them the option to negotiate or engage in real actual very messy war.

A worthy read if you want to know about western military tradition and some of the key battles of history.

The Power Of Now, Eckhart Tolle

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Now-Guide-Spiritual-Enlightenment/dp/1577314808

I'm guessing that I read this book for the first time in like 02-03. I remembered it, found it interesting, but very very off the wall and impractical at that time.My copy exists somewhere in the manifested universe (as opposed to the unmanifested (spiritual)), but I could not find it, so I manifested a new paperback version from Amazon to lend to someone that I believe it might resonate with.

When I first read it in I found Tolle to be "From a Galaxy Far Far Away". Fast forward past a number of personal and family crisis, meditation, lots of more mystical (and ancient) Christian teachings and DBT (especially Mindfulness), and it seems a good deal less "out there" ... perhaps "Pluto". Who knows, another couple decades and ....

The statement in the book that resonates most with me is on page 190, "I have lived with several Zen masters, all of them cats." While sometimes I find Tolle taking himself a bit too seriously, that line redeems a lot of mileage for me! One of those masters graces our home today (Ferocious Cabadocious)  -- past masters include Tiger and the ineffible Dobson, sometimes fearsome sage of terrible wisdom.

His best philosophic statement is on 15; "The philosopher Descartes believed he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am". he had in fact given expression to the most fundamental error: to equate thinking with Being, and identity the real YOU with your mere thoughts that have far less substance than passing clouds.

If you can learn to sit quietly, observing your breath, and as your mind chatters incessantly, and and you merely OBSERVE IT -- do not judge it (and don't judge the judging which will certainly happen to some degree, at least for a time)!

Treat your chattering mind gently, like a puppy or a toddler -- ACKNOWLEDGE what thoughts are flowing by, and calmly return to focusing on your breath.You will experience Descartes error.

 If you are a "natural", after a "few times", the chatter will slow and you will EXPERIENCE that you are NOT YOUR MIND!!! You HAVE a mind, and a body, and emotions -- but they are not YOU. YOU are spirit ... or consciousness if you prefer.

It is a great way to debunk one of the greatest minds in history in a slightly more metaphysical version of Dr Johnson's "Appeal to the stone".

If you are an UNnatural like me, that experience may take like "100" tries -- the early ones being Panic Attacks, or near so, with LOTS of mind shouting, THIS IS ***NOT*** working! This is stupid!  Satanic!  insane! dangerous! a waste of time!  etc, etc

We Westerners tend to live in and identify with our minds -- it is where our ego resides. My mind was nearly my only residence for my whole IBM career and a few years after. I agree that the EXPERIENCE of being a little "i am' watching your breath, your mind and your emotions is significant, and to a degree "transcendent", possibly even "enlightening" with a very little "e", but I find that Tolle oversells anyway -- much in the same manner as a lot of other marketing.

I'm NOT saying that he is "lying" ... he may well completely believe in all he says. He IS after all Oprah Approved!,  so marketing or truth, it has certainly worked. My advice would be to try DBT first -- it has a lot more research and science behind it, however if Tolle speaks to you, go for it. Scotch, Bourbon, Irish, Canadian ... it's all Whiskey (or Whisky, hard to agree on anything!)

Oh, and getting out of your mind isn't quite enough -- the "real you", the spiritual you, must learn to live in full acceptance of NOW ... this moment and ONLY this moment which is where we ALWAYS exist, AS IT IS! Not as you wish it, believe it "should be", etc, etc. It is here you stand to have the leverage to change the future -- or decide NOT to change the future. The past? Well, the past you are not going to change no matter how much you invest in it. In DBT, we call that Radical Acceptance.

p154, "If you stop investing it with "selfness", the mind loses it's compulsive quality, which is basically the compulsion to judge, and so resist what IS, which creates conflict, drama and new pain." ... a little farther on, "... the greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner [or anyone you deal with] as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way."

The best reason for doing that is because the nearly 100% probability is that you CAN'T change that other person! You might bludgeon them physically or emotionally into "compliance", however unless THEY wanted to change (or they are already less "living in their minds" than you), you will only create pain and damage.

Just as in DBT, many people take this all as "giving up", or "not caring'. Not so -- in fact, you nearly MUST be outside of your mind to actually care, because otherwise, pretty much all you are doing is feeding your own ego. Your mind will continue to have lots of thoughts on lots of things -- you can share them, talk about them, carry signs for them, etc, you will just realize that they are not YOU. You are MUCH more than those things!

YOU are "not of this world" ... you have no reason to invest your ego in this world. In fact, as much as possible, your ego is to be DEAD ... either crucified with Christ, or vanished into Tolle's "unmanifested'. Your ego is your mind talking -- it's your "old address' ... like "666 Gray Matter Parkway", vs "The Now, The Kingdom of Christ -- Infinity Drive'.

While Tolle either believes, or simply wants to maximize his audience, he tries to make this book accessible to any or no religion  -- although on this read, I was surprised by how much semi-New Testament he actually does include.

It's a book worthy enough at least to have someone else buy it and lend it to you!

Boundaries, By Dr Henry Cloud and Dr John Townsend

https://www.amazon.com/boundaries-book/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aboundaries%20book

This book is one of the highest rated books on the topic of boundaries, and it is very Bible based. I DO recommend the book On page 61 they do the definition:

"Functional Boundaries refer to a person's ability to complete a task, project or job."
"Relational Boundaries refer to the ability to speak truth to others with whom we are in relationship"

Simple, huh?

Due to my contrarian nature, ll start with a critical thought: 

I find the term "boundaries" to be misleading. I understand the reason for the term, and the book does a great job of telling the people that REALLY need to develop some boundaries about how important they are, and how they "should" go about establishing them -- usually putting their foot down, standing 100% firm, and often taking the consequences -- loss of relationship, maybe violence or attempted violence, huge angry outburst, etc.

Obviously, if you are worried about a violent response, the person you are setting this boundary with walking out and never speaking with you again, giant anger, etc, then certainly, you REALLY need "boundaries" -- really best called "walls" in the context the book often talks about. To my mind, a WALL is something put up by one party (like the Berlin wall), and enforced with force -- maybe even "deadly force" as in "comply or this relationship is permanently over".

If I do my version, it will be called "loving contracts", or "good fences make good neighbors", or something of the like. My point is that there is a BIG difference between a neighbor going over to his neighbor and saying "I'd like to put up a fence -- dog issues, kid issues, your 16 year old daughter sunbathing naked is distracting my 13 year old boy, etc ... can we talk together about height, styles, etc over a beer" and you suddenly putting up a 20' lime green monstrosity and telling him "it's on the property line, get over it".

I think they wanted to cover this with page 66, "Don't even try to start setting limits until you have entered into deep abiding attachments with people who will love you no matter what".

Page 156 was important to me. "People don't make other people angry. Your anger has to come from something inside of you". Later; "Problems arise when we make someone else responsible for our needs and wants, and when we blame that person for our disappointments".

Bottom line, we all have to own our feelings -- we are ALL selfish, and we ALL seek to get our needs met by others (and for some needs, have to). In close relationships, that means that we deal with conflicting wants, and we need to NEGOTIATE ... which is much better than slapping up a 20' wall without consulting our "partner'.

Chapter 10, "Boundaries and your Children" needs to be made required reading for those seeking a license for having children. Oh, there isn't such a license? Damn.

"Discipline is an external boundary, designed to develop internal boundaries in our children. It provides a structure of safety until children have enough structure in their character to not need it". Later; "Discipline is not payment for a wrong. It is the natural law of God: our actions reap consequences. Discipline is different from punishment because God is finished punishing us. Punishment ended on the Cross for all those who accept Christ as Savior". 

I grew up on a farm. Hard work was as much a part of life as breathing, and I was a VERY lazy kid -- I still drew breath and worked. I also attended church, often with LOTS of bellyaching -- it was just the way it was. Fast forward to today -- unless parents have the intestinal fortitude to work HARD to insure their children learn responsibility and the fear of God, all bets are off. The Ten Commandments have been removed from most public buildings and certainly from the schools. "Honor your father and mother" is pretty much  considered a matter of discredited "mythology" rather than the only commandment with a promise. "Work" can be nigh on inaccessible at home given "convienience", while the Internet, video games, marketing, social media, etc are INTRUSIVE!

In the middle of 174, "The freedom of the Cross allows us to practice without having to pay a terrible price. The only danger is consequences, not isolation and judgment." .. THANKS BE TO GOD! Paul said in Timothy 1:15 "Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst." ... he is right about Christ, he is wrong that he is the worst -- I've won that race in personal failure after personal failure for which I am most grievously at fault,

As I've been able to study more an more theology after retirement, the following becomes more and more clear, and more and more scary -- page 260:

"God gives a choice and allows the people involved to make up their minds. When people say no, he allows it and keeps on loving them. He is a giver. And one of the things he always gives is a choice, and like a real giver, he also gives the consequences of those choices. He respects boundaries." 

We live in a world where many people believe that "someone" or "some thing" can allow radically free choices, yet remove the consequences.  They often believe that their choices OUGHT to be free of consequences. People really "ought" to be able to do whatever they want and never suffer the consequences.

On page 121, the authors provide a ray of hope to those injured by "boundaries" that were really walls or 20' ugly fences with no consultation.

"If you set limits with someone and she responds maturely and lovingly, you can renegotiate the boundary. In addition, you can change the boundary if you are in a safer place". 

It is a worthy book, again, I highly recommend it. Just don't go out and put up a 20' chartreuse fence with your neighbor and expect them to bake you a cake ... and if they do, don't eat it!

The High Conflict Couple, Alan E Fruzzetti, PHD

https://www.amazon.com/High-Conflict-Couple-Dialectical-Behavior-Validation/dp/157224450X

While this book is written to "couples", it will be of nearly equal value to almost anyone that has conflicts in relationships. In today's world, that has to come very close to 100% of us, with the conflicts generally being more nasty and longer lived.

Since the 1960's we have consistently pushed for each of our views, values, wishes, visions, desires, etc to be of ultimate importance, while the old shared values of "God, Country, Family, Church, Community" are now of much less to often even no importance at all to many.

So there are less shared values, more conflict, and one of the ways that many hope to deal with it is to "ignore it and it will go away' ... I find this paragraph from page to 11 to be as true, direct, and scary as pretty much anything I've read in books of this type:

" Unlike the other patterns, in the engage-distance pattern, there is an imbalence between the partners: one moves one way, the other goes in a different direction. That is one person wants to discuss or pursue a topic and be together, but the other person, at least in that moment, does not want to discuss a topic further, or perhaps not even be together, and instead seeks some alone time. What makes this pattern particularly tricky si that the engager or distancer can start out doing so in either an effective or a constructive way or a more destructive, aversive, or avoidant way, but reguardless, the pattern ends up being a disaster." 

Typically, the "avoider" is conflict averse and  REALLY wants it to "just all blow over", or "maybe things will get better on their own" -- they don't. What it leads to is anger in the relationship ... sooner and later. Anger is a valid emotion -- we all have it. The problem with it in relationships is discussed on page 25  " ... there is a very corrosive aspect to anger in close relationships that often overshadows any possible benefits".

"...feeling angry means having increased negative emotional arousal; this in turn churns out judgements. Judgements then increase arousal, which produces more judgements, which leads to inaccurate and ineffective expression of emotion and desires, which then results in misunderstanding and conflict and rarely leads to effective changes. Thus, angry feelings and angry expressions in close relationships almost always create distance, and distance is the enemy of closeness and intimacy ..."  

Page 46 has even worse news:

"In addition, being together passively can be risky: partners may begin to focus a lot of negative attention on each other inside their own heads, running a list of negative past deeds or anticipated future deeds through their minds, privately judging or criticizing the other,  becoming upset and eventually going on "red alert" waiting for the other to do something and then snapping at him or her ..." 

So what are we to do? The big picture  in the book is "DBT" ... of which I have a website here with lots of videos and charts if you are interested.

DBT goes out of it's way to NOT be "Christianity" -- in fact, it is based on Buddhism. However,  the big messages -- "BE STILL!  ... "BE PRESENT" ... "Observe, do not judge", "ACCEPT", "Let go and let God" (or "release your attachments" in the Budhist perspective) are quite similar.

What is important is for both people in any relationship -- "intimate", or other, to follow the principles of DBT as they discuss issues they have -- hopefully as quickly as possible. More "simmering" just tends to insure that everyone gets at least "scorched", if not fully burned.

DBT is like excercise for your mind and emotions. We ALL have BOTH "Emotional Mind" and "Rational Mind" -- if we practice and observe, we get the gift of "Wise Mind". Modern people tend to spend a lot of time trying to talk reason to people in Emotion Mind (totally useless). Here is a link to these pictures. 

"Why we can't communicate" is because we are speaking different languages. For those of us raised in an era where there were more assumptions that emotions are often invalid, and EVERYTHING can be solved by reason, we can be "very good" (in a scientific lawyerly sense) of "making the case" why the emotional position "loses" -- and usually the relationship is what REALLY loses!

Wise mind is a solution to getting on the same page -- at least one party has to "give" and be willing to take the risk of reaching out, AND often accepting some INvalidation, anger, judgement, etc without "giving as good as you get" ... and thus break the cycle and insert hope.

Wise Mind demands being unhurried, being respectful and non-judgemental. It demands Acceptance -- even of things that we really don't like.  We do not have to LIKE or "agree with" things  to accept them ... we can be a parapalegic for life, radically accept it, and not "like" it! Our son can join a cult that worships space aliens, and we can accept it ... and even validate it "I understand how you find the group you joined to be supportive" without AGREEING with him.

Many in our society even encourage denying acceptance of reality in order to not "normalize" some facet of reality. I really like this video of Marsha Linehan, the creator of DBT on that topic ...

I believe that the book is of "use" without the PRACTICE of DBT, however it is going to be FAR more powerful with a daily practice of at least Mindfulness and Radical Acceptance (Interpersonal Effectiveness and Emotional Regulation are good as well).

Everyone that reads this blog knows that I believe that Christ is what we really need to restore our broken world full of increasingly broken, addicted,  and too often, suicidal people, often at each others throats. For those that are not going to go there, DBT can help -- you may not learn to love your neighbor, or even your spouse, however you are much more likely to be able to tolerate them -- and even yourself.

 Needless to say, I HIGHLY recommend the book, and or course DBT -- I've become somewhat of a zealot on that topic. I'll leave you with this last video -- there are many more out on the DBT Site link above.

The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher

Link to The Benedict Option, "A strategy for Christians in a post-christian nation".

About 1/3 of the way through the book I realized that I had read another book by Rod Dreher, "How Dante Saved My Life". I enjoyed that book, and my wife actually enjoyed and made it through it as well, which is RARE for "Moose Books". I hope to blog on that book in the future as well, however this one is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL for anyone who believes that they are a Christian to read.

Rod agrees with me, and I think millions of Christians in the US that we are officially and totally in a post-Christian nation, as well as post Western civilization. This is a new "Dark Age", and as St Benedict, born in 480 decided sometime around 500 as he journeyed to the shadow of once great Rome, now ruled by barbarians, it was time to found a "remnant" to keep the core of the faith, which he did at Norica, and in his "Rule of St Benedict".

As Dreher says; "Professing orthodox biblical Christianity on sexual matters is now thought to be evidence of intolerable bogotry, Conservative Christians have been routed. We are living in a new country" ... one which I label as "BOistan", but the label makes no difference, it is a barbarian nation.

On page 154, Rod quotes from Phillip Reiff: "Barbarians are people without historical memory. Barbarism is the real meaning of contemporaneity. Released from all authoritative pasts, we progress towards barbarism, not away from it.".  I've covered this fact a number of times ... "Closing of the American Mind", "Ideas Have Consequences", and others. Technology is not "advancement", it is just giving monkeys nuclear weapons without theology, philosophy and history. The beginning of wisdom is humility ... and barbarians have none of that!

One of the topics that is explained very well in this book is nominalism, as opposd  to metaphysical realism (see pages 26-29). Metaphysical realism tells us that EVERYTHING that is created has MEANING -- as Charles Taylor would say "It is Enchanted" ... or in philosphical terms "teleological".

This ought not be so hard for us to understand today ... one by one, from phones, to watches, to locks on doors, to thermostats, to labels on products (RFID), more and more of our "objects" have built in "smarts", and are often even "connected". Does it REALLY seem so "magical" that an all powerful God can and does imbdue his creation with sacred meaning ?

Well, everyone thought that was reality up until William of Occam in the 1300s. Strangely, Occam thought he was "letting God off the hook" because being linked with his meaningful universe of laws "limited him" ... so Bill (William) decided that the Christian God was to be like the Muslim "god" ... able to call evil good and good evil at his whim -- an issue covered really well (and a bit ironically) in a great book based on a speech by Pope Benedict, "The Regensburg Lecture".

Occam convinced the west that "matter is just matter" -- it has no meaning except that imposed from outside it, so "parts is parts" ... matter (including life) only means whatever we decide -- and as we became atomized individuals, each supposedly "the measure of all things", we arrived at; "my view is just as good as yours" and of course I think BETTER, so I'll call it whatever I want -- cells, tissue, a baby, etc ... it's ALL UP TO ME!

This book is WAY too rich for me to cover the MANY great points that are well made, so a couple key points ...

• We are in a post-Christian, post-virtue post-civilization age. A "dark age", likely to be FAR worse than the previous one. The World Wars and the Holocaust are likely just "warm ups" -- the ONLY thing our "culture" worships is gratification of the self!, and that has never ended well.
• "To live "after virtue", then is to dwell in a society that not only can no longer agree on what constitutes virtuous belief and conduct, but also doubts that virtue exists. In a post-virtue society, individuals hold maximal freedom of thought and action, and society itself becomes a collection of strangers each pursuing his own interests under minimal constraints". (p16)
• People feel they MUST "do things" ... have an affair, have a same sex relationship, etc because they would not be "true to themselves" if they did not. "It is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes that he affirms his individuality. The body must be the true 'subject' of desire because the individual must be the author of his own desire". (p43) 

In the end, this book also gives us at least the start on a "blueprint" to save Western civilization. We don't need to worry about saving Christianity ... God will do that. It just may well not be in "the west' -- as I increasingly believe from books like "The Divine Conspiracy". 

God REALLY means that we have free will! He is NOT going to be giving this or any other generation any huge "signs" to save us -- he gave us Christ and the Bible, as well as his divine and teleological creation pregnant with meaning. If we seek him, we WILL find him -- because as long as we are not actively turning our back on him as our current civilization is, it is absolutely not his will that ANY should perish -- UNLESS THEY ABSOLUTELY WANT TO! ... and it seems abundantly clear that the bulk of the people in the west DEARLY want to perish on their own terms, and in many cases, as rapidly as possible! 

I'll reluctantly close with this from page 234 ... 

"The mind of technological man cannot resist his heart's desires, because he has been trained by his culture not to question them. .... The Christian must rebel against this. The only impregnable fortress is metaphysical, the conviction that meaning transcends ourselves and is grounded in God. There are boundaries beyond which we cannot go if we want to live." 

We Christians need to build a lot of small communities following something like the Rule of St Benedict. Please read this book, contact me, and let's try to be the leaven ... Dreher gives us many ideas on on existing heroes of God already doing this work. 

Scalia Speaks, Reflections on Law, Faith and Life Well Lived

https://www.amazon.com/Scalia-Speaks-Reflections-Faith-Lived/dp/0525573321/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1515721705&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=scalia+speaks&psc=1

If you care about ever returning to America, just want to understand why America was exceptional, have even a passing interest in the SCOTUS, or simply want to have a glimpse of a truly great man, read this book!

If you are or were a Christian, or simply know some of them, read "The Christian As Cretin" starting on page 107 ... his purpose "It has been my purpose to impart, to those already wise in Christ, the courage to have their wisdom reguarded as stupidity". He succeeded!

He makes the point expertly in a number of places that unless the written Constitution of the old United States is taken as a FIXED DOCUMENT that means what it was meant to mean when it was written, then we may as well have no Constitution at all! As he puts it on page 188; "Originalists believe that the provisions of the Constitution have a fixed meaning, which does not change: they mean today what they meant when they were adopted, nothing more and nothing less".

He makes the obvious point on page 153 that in 1920 when the 19th Amendment was ratified giving women the vote, everyone understood that adding such a new right REQUIRED a Constitutional Amendment, and so it was amended. "The Americans of 1920 understood what the Americans of 1992 seemingly do not, that the vague provisions of the Constituiton, such as the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause, are not invitations to constitutionalize our current desires from age to age, but rather bear a constant meaing that that accords with the meaning of those terms when they were adopted".

 It is that fixed meaning, and the separation of powers architected by it that allowed the enumerated rights to be maintained in the old US until the Warren Court. Scalia shows a number of enumerated "rights" from the Constitution of the old USSR -- not worth the paper they were printed on because the architecture of the government of the USSR did nothing to protect them!

On page 337, he states what I have tried to state a number of times far more eloquently than I could ever hope to do: "The issue is not wether there should be provision for the poor, but rather the degree to which that provision should be made through the coercive power of the state. Christ said after all, that you should give your goods to the poor, not that you should force someone else to give his".

Readers of this blog have heard me harp on all the things that Scalia elucidates with far more skill than I can ever muster ... the critical importance of faith, the fact that our founders (even Jefferson) wanted a government that favored religion over irreligion! As he says on page 71 "What I am saying is that it is contrary to our founding principles to inisist that government be hostile to religion, or even to insist (as my court, alas, has done in word though not in deed) that government cannot favor religion over irreligion. It is not a matter of believing that God exists (though personally I believe that); it is a matter of believing, as our Founders did, that belief is very conducive to a successful republic."

There is no reason for me to keep talking here -- anyone that wants some rememberance of America to be recovered from BOistan -- even if it is just a remnant to teach to future generations, needs to read this book. It is witty, wise, and very important. It is ALSO entertaining, and HOPEFUL ... Scalia's friendship with Justice Ginsburg is a model of how things ought operate in a nation which held many things much more sacred than politics!

Thanks be to God for allowing Judge Scalia to sit on the Supreme Court! Our loss is clearly Heaven's gain!

A Secular Age: Charles W Taylor

https://www.amazon.com/Secular-Age-Charles-Taylor/dp/0674026764/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

As I traversed this massive nearly 900 page work, I sometimes wondered; "Why does one undertake such a thing?". I had previously read "How to Not Be Secular", a "cliff notes summary", so I had the general ideas:

• 500 years ago we lived in an enchanted, embedded, hierarchical world, while today we live in a disenchanted, disembedded, flat world.
• The "standard story" of the secularists is a "subtraction story" -- "science" made it "impossible to believe" in more than matter. Taylor finds the "subtraction story" utterly lacking -- we still believe in love, beauty, justice, consciousness (spirit), and "good" ... none of which can be measured, so therefore do not exist to science. There are lots of other reasons that "subtraction" falls short.
• We live as a "Buffered Self" that is cut off from God, family, other people, the past, having "a place" ... again, a LONG list. However we are "buffeted" or "haunted" by our mortality and a sense of "something more" ... "fullness" that tugs at our hearts / souls ????
• Many are radically unhappy in this world to the point of suicide. They have FAR more "stuff" than even the kings, lords and popes of 500 years ago, yet their lives are arid -- often to the point of not being worth living. "Stuff" does not seem to be enough. 

I'll call those "the biggies" for now. My sense is that the reading of such a book vs "reviews" ... by me or others,  is a bit like the difference between being told of mountains, the ocean, falling in love, having children, grandchildren, etc and of EXPERIENCING those things. Certainly, good wordsmiths, poets, musicians, movie makers, etc can all convey significant parts of those experiences, however I doubt that any person that has experienced one of those or thousands of other things would say "I wish that I never did the real thing, I liked the descriptions of it much better"! 

Late in the millenium prior to Christ, there were a number of "higher religions" that began to replace paganism -- this is sometimes referred to as "The Axial Age" (Karl Jaspers) meaning "pivital age" because the idea of transcendence was so important to changing human thought. "More than mere matter". 

It is tempting for me to head off to read 5-10 referenced works that put even more flesh on the bones of how we have returned to essentially a pre-axial pagan view -- to make the obvious Lennon modification ... "nothing to live or die for, and no religion too ..." 

In the words of Evelyn Waugh quoted in the book ....

I think one has to look deeper before one will find the reason why in England today the Roman Church is recruiting so many men and women who are not notably gullible, dim-witted or eccentric.

It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos… 

Today we can see [the loss of Christian faith]…as the active negation of all that western culture has stood for. Civilization – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe – has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state… It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests… 

That is the first discovery, that Christianity is essential to civilization and that it is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.

Christianity held out in the US for longer than it did in Europe, but we have descended into chaos as well -- pick what date you want, but few deny it today. Yes, the dominant culture still believes that the chaos of Obama was better than the chaos of Trump, however in a world driven only by raw power with no controlling theological, philosophical, constitutional or legal authority, secular life is  just a constant scrum for power by any means possible.

My purpose in reading works like this is to "experience the ocean" of a great mind creating a great work. The experience is one of being made both smaller and larger -- like seeing the ocean or the mountains. It isn't really about snapping a few pictures and putting down a few words. There is some minor similarity of why it is critical for a Christian to daily read their Bible -- cover to cover, then maybe just start again, or give the New Testament a second pass before going back to Genesis -- it becomes the constant EXPERIENCE of the Bible. Not "a text", but a connection to the vastness of God much larger than mere text.

Certainly, "Secular Age" pales in comparison, it is but a "shadow" as compared to the Bible -- like comparing going to Lake Mille Lacs with going to see the Pacific Ocean.

The link to "How to Not Be Secular" above, or another highly rated review of "Secular Age" will give you the "talking points", but in my view, not the "gestalt". Secular Age is clearly a labor of love for Taylor to create -- and at least a labor of "deep like" to read. It was worth it for me, and I hesitate to advise anyone else, other than to say that I would expect that anyone will be changed by the experience.

How To Not Be Secular; Reading Charles Taylor, by James K A Smith

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JJ1RIO2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

I often describe my pilgrimage as from a 1974 tiny rural HS, 1978 no name university BS graduate, culturally flat technical hick; to autodidact idiot savant pseudo-intellectual student of Western civilization, Christianity, Philosophy, Literature and Science hick, as a series of pitches going up a mountain on which I often THINK that I have seen the peak, but realize at various junctures that all I have seen are outcroppings, many of which involve yet another LONG pitch I must traverse to gain a glimpse of the next dizzying (to me) height. I've ceased to imagine it will be the peak -- that will be in the life to come. 

This is a review of  Smith's sort of of extended cliff note narrative summary of Charles Taylor's 874 page mountain of a book, "The Secular Age" which I now have on order (don't expect the review blog anytime soon)! Here is a review of The Secular Age"  if you want a different / more extensive take on the larger work. 

Smith says that Taylor "gives us an account of our cross-pressured situation -- suspended between the malaise of immanence and the memory of transcendence". Immanence meaning "matter and the physical is everything" and transcendence meaning this is not all there is -- there is a higher Platonic /  spiritual / metaphysical reality that is more real than what our imperfect senses can apprehend. 

Taylor perceives and makes plain to us "that transcendence and immanence bleed into one another; that faith is pretty much unthinkable, but abandonment to the abyss is even more so;" ... 

"Employing a kid of intellectual colonialism, new atheist cartographers rename entire regions of our experience and annex them to natural science and empirical explanation, flattening by disenchantment. ("Graveyards of the gods" are always highlights of this tour)."

My favorite diagram from the book is this one -- I apologize for having to resort to taking a picture of it. 

I think a reasonable attempt at tiny summary of the Smith book is that Taylor tells the story, AS A STORY, of how it became possible to exist in a disenchanted immanent world where the most important thing is the Buffered Self -- meaning the self devoid of attachment to culture, history, religion, or even family. A detached self that is never the less haunted by being "pushed by the immanence of disenchantment on one side, but also pushed by a sense of significance and transcendence on another side, even if it might just be an echo of lost transcendence". 

We all live by a narrative -- the pure humanist narrative of "progress" is that we once lacked physical vs metaphysical explanations for what we saw around us, so we imagined "enchantment". Spirits and  gods were all around, but we were only children. The definition of "progress" or "maturity" is NO ILLUSIONS ... we live in a cold meaningless universe that is ONLY matter. Meaning is only about matter ... man is the measuring creature, measurement is meaning. If it can't be measured, it is an illusion, and therefore does not exist! 

"If one were to preserve God's sovereignty, one would have to do away with "essences", and with independent "natures". And the result is a metaphysical picture called "nominalism" where things are ONLY what they are named." 

If you can name it and measure it, it exists. If not, it doesn't. So, with the Nietzschean "demise of God, we are the only authorizing agency left" ... these two paragraphs give the barest thumbnail of the "CWS", Closed World View -- it's matter and us, that is all the material available to try to construct meaning.

And so, the disenchanted immanent "meaning" constructed is the "Modern Moral Order" (MMO) -- it is pure humanism, bootstrapped from matter and human thought and ruthlessly applied to all as a dogmatic religion,  with much more restrictive dogmas, pervasive in all areas of society, especially schools, media, and law ( like gay "marriage", transgender grooming for kids, etc).  

"Because of an inadequate appreciation for moral sources, modernity fixates or moral articulation -- a fixation on more and more scrupulous codes of behavior .... we don't know how to make people moral, but we do know how to specify rules, articulate expectation, lay down the law. This happens in policy, but also informally in cultural codes of political correctness ..."

What is lacking is any sense of inner motivation -- it is all external, we will yell at you if you fail to meet the ever growing MMO -- or maybe worse, we will pass more and more laws, you MUST NOT use plastic grocery bags, you MUST recycle. you MUST drive an electric car"! Thus saith the MMO. 

It becomes clear that the CWS / MMO / Buffered Self, etc ARE a form of metaphysic, and thus effectively a "religion" -- the self is not actually "buffered", unless they can exist as an effective modern hermit of constant distraction, escape, and self-delusion.  The Buffered Self must BELIEVE that all of this is "the good", but part of the CWS itself is that it is a "good" completely made up of whole cloth.

Man STILL cannot live by bread alone, but must have a some sort of "social imaginary" (Taylor term), metaphysical dream, or every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

So what exactly is the advantage of the certified manufactured illusion with ZERO parts transcendent content of the MMO, over thousands of years old moral order that at the minimum leave the thought of transcendence open to the psyche? 

Well, in an immanent sense, of course NOTHING -- since there can't be anything that isn't made up by randomly developed creatures out of nothing except "stuff" (matter). Taylor -- and Smith believe that there actually aren't any honest humans that fail to sense the haunting of the transcendent. Is it real, or is it just side effect of some old caveman brain circuits that would be best excised in our modern world to allow us to be completely "grown up" as a Nietzschean disenchanted, immanent buffered self that deserves to be tamped down and unacknowledged -- even if it means they must lie about it to make it seem that the fiction of pure rational atheism exists (which it doesn't, at least since Quantum Mechanics). 

Unsurprisingly, no answers are given. The task of the book is to make Christian faith POSSIBLE in our flattened, disenchanted meaningless world, essentially by just making it clear that EVERYONE has "faith", it is only a question of "faith in what". The intellectual playing field of the world today is purely secular. Taylor sees us at the possible cusp of faith no longer being "allowable", although he does not predict that will be the actual outcome ... he believes that even the merest ghost of the transcendent cannot be ignored because "this heavy concentration of the atmosphere of immanence will intensify a sense of living in a wasteland for subsequent generations, and young people will begin to explore beyond the boundaries ..." 

Even for the subject Smith book of a mere 139 pages, I have but scratched the surface lightly. Yet again, I find myself regularly running to the Internet to bone up on my definitions in order to begin to understand what I am looking at. I feel as a non-english native speaker, who after a couple semesters of English is thrust into reading Shakespeare and asked to provide commentary. And this AFTER 100's of books over decades of my attempted intellectual improvement.

In the 500 years since the Reformation, science, philosophy and religion have sold us the chimera of "reform / progress" with no concept of "to where"? It seems that in some circles the thought was "to a mature human vision of a morality built on "facts" rather than "superstition" -- however, morality is more than a set of rules, and mature human vision is perpetual change toward an unknown objective rather than a "goal" ... and it likely is merely going in circles chasing its tail.

We remain lost so tragically we often fail to even detect our lostness. Does my quest for knowledge lead me forward, or into the abyss? My prayer is that with Christ holding my hand, there can be no truly uncharted abyss (Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me). I know the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Can this mountain of human knowledge be somehow be translated into a form that allows modern man to see the truth of transcendence in Christ? or is my quest just an old guy attacking the Everest of knowledge alone without oxygen? 

Better to die on a quest than in disenchantment? 

Spaceman, Mike Massimino

https://www.amazon.com/Spaceman-Astronauts-Unlikely-Journey-Universe/dp/1101903546

A book that I suspect only relatively hard core space junkies will enjoy. There are some really interesting sections on the Hubble, spacewalking, the process of getting to be an astronaut, etc **IF** those things are of signficant interest to you.

Of most interest to me were:

• How much flying time riding as a back-seater in T-38s was REQUIRED even if you were a mission specialst that is never going to pilot anything -- psychological training!
• How strong the astronaut sense of community is and how heavily Christian oriented it is. When you you fly on a spacecraft, you are ready to go and ready to GO (permanently).
• How much less "star power" there now is in being an astronaut or ex-astronaut. Massimino is a professor at Columbia now, one of his astronaut buddies is a commercial airline pilot and another flies for FedEx. 
• "Experience vs Knowledge". Mike is orbiting at the Hubble spacewalking, looks around and EXERIENCES the billiant light of the stationary sun as the earth rotates out of darkness ushering in a new 90 min Hubble "day". Mike EXPERIENCED the fact that the sun is stationary (relative to earth) and the day and night are caused by the rotation of the earth. Of course he "knew" that, but experience is much more. Telling someone about being a grandparent is not the same as being a grandparent. 

Mike was a long shot for space -- somewhat weak qualifications considering the competion and very marginal eyesight for an astronaut. Good "never give up" motivational example.

Through a number of twists and turns, personality/connections and certainly some good fortune or "fate", he flew two missions to repair the Hubble that sits at a higher orbit than the ISS, 350 miles vs 250 miles, so the view is better, you see the whole earth "blue marble effect". His first flight was STS-109, which bumped STS-107 so that they had to wait. 107 was the last flight of Columbia, broke up over TX due to insulation damage to the wing on takeoff. Spaceflight is dangerous, and your number can come up, or you can just be "close". 

LOTS and LOTS of detail about spacewalking, Hubble, the difficulties of doing repairs, the expense but huge payoff in exploration of the Hubble. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but unless you are a significant space / engineering junkie, you are not likely to make it through. 

The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard

https://www.amazon.com/Divine-Conspiracy-Rediscovering-Hidden-Life/dp/0060693339

This humbling work, subtitled "Rediscovering our hidden life in God", OUGHT to make a profound change in me -- as is always the case, the reality of that will depend on the DOING not just on the reading.

The book opens with the example of a fighter pilot flying at night who pulled back on the controls for a steep ascent and immediately hit the ground. They were flying upside down and were not aware of it.

The theme of the book is that we moderns are flying upside down and don't know it. As Tolstoy discovered to his dismay, we think that "particles and progress" are reality,  and "spirit" is fantasy, but in fact, the opposite is true.

"The mantle of intellectual meaningless shrouds every aspect of our common life. Events, things and "information" flood over us, overwhelming us, disorienting us with threats and possibilities we for the most part have no idea what to do about". 

Christianity has largely been reduced to a "consumer product".

"... the only thing made essential on the right wing of theology is forgiveness of the individuals sins. On the left it is the removal of social or structural evils."   

"A Christian is either one who is ready to die and face judgement or one who has an identifiable commitment to love and justice in society. That's it. 

The pointing out of problems is always relatively "fun" for we humans -- we love to point out the failings of others, systems, world views, etc -- and this is where the conviction descends on me personally.

"We ought to be spiritual in every aspect of our lives because our world is the spiritual one. It is what we are suited to. Thus Paul, from his profound grasp of human existence counsels us, " To fill your mind with the visible "flesh" is death, but to fill your mind with the spirit is life and peace".  

"To belong is a vital need based in the nature of being human. Contempt spits on this pathetically deep need. And like anger, contempt does not have to be acted out in special ways to be evil. It is inherently poisonous. Just by being what it is is withering to the human soul."

And we know it to be true, as we feel it profoundly. My "excuse" has been that obviously our modern society is contemptuous of Christians, so it is "only fair" that we are contemptuous in return. Only our soul knows that is wrong. We are to be like Christ, who hung on the cross AFTER going through a scourging that few survived, and being jeered and spit upon by the masses. And what did he do? He said "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do".

But we who have tasted of the blood of forgiveness DO know what we do -- if we let the shame of our contempt for those who are contemptuous of us well up within us. It is much like "the dark side" in Star Wars.

So what are we to do?

"Intensive internalization of the Kingdom order through the written word, and learning from the Living Word establishes good epidermal responses of thought, feeling and action. And these in turn integrate us into the flow of Gods eternal reign. We really come to think and believe differently and that changes everything."

The book gives some introduction to the path of becoming a disciple of Christ. It is not an easy path, nor is it a "required" path -- but it IS the goal. Either here or in eternity, if we believe, we WILL be his disciples and reign with him forever.

For those of us who are not premillennialists, eternity is NOW -- the kingdom of God is HERE, and has been since Jesus began his ministry! Christ offers us the way through the gospels and the sermon on the mount to begin that reign in this life -- through meditation on his word and prayer.

As you might guess, this could easily be one of my longer and less reachable blogs if I was to get into the depths of what Willard expertly covers. Instead, I'll just touch on one basic point -- the fact that this IS God's universe, and the fear of God is STILL the beginning of wisdom, even though in the present day, the entire system is intended to declare it foolishness in the extreme.  (p 231)

But if this actually is God's universe, the lords of knowledge have made what is surely the greatest mistake in history. Believing the world is flat or the moon is made of cheese is nothing compared to their mistake. To believe that the lords of knowledge are right on the other hand, is to omit the spiritual God and the spiritual life from the literally real. It is to make them to be illusions; and two or more centuries of "advanced thinking" have been devoted to showing that they are illusions. So the battle to identify our universe as God's and our existence as part of his creation must go on. We cannot stand aside. And in training people to "hear and do", we must take an open, intelligent, and loving stand on these fundamental matters. 

I've covered this topic many times in a number of different ways in this blog -- my base assertion is that "epistemology", a part of philosophy must be understood to even begin the discussion. Another strange twist is to ponder with Elon Musk, the idea we are "simulated".  For extra credit, there is consideration of the odds of us being here if the universe is "godless".  I totally agree with Willard, to be a disciple of Christ, we must have rock solid understanding that God is creator and be able to show that faith to be at least as "reasonable" as any other faith on human origins.

A profound and discerning work. Will my level of condemnation in this blog drop? I pray it does ... there is no question that this book convicted me.

The Fourth Way, Hugh Hewitt

https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Way-Conservative-Playbook-Majority/dp/1501172441

I got sucked in on this one, not a bad book, but VERY wonky. It's objective is to present a clear path as to what Hewitt thinks will allow Trump to avoid losing ground in the midterms and to establish a lasting "Republican" majority. Strangely, it also talks about how likely it is that Trump will be impeached.

He bases that rather odd little chapter largely on a David Brooks column from Nov 11 that brought up impeachment (Brooks is the NY Times "conservative" columnist!), and the fact that "Republicans have done it before". The way Hugh wrote it I suspect that he is essentially threatening Trump to "keep his nose clean, or else". Yes, yes, we Republicans have principles, however in my opinion it is way PAST time to realize those principles are being used against us and become as Matt 10:16 "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." We need to focus a LOT more on the serpent part!

So Hugh's "plan":

• Do a "stimulus" that is 1/10th the BO stimulus, so $85 billion, and have it be "seed money" to get a bunch of low income clinics, basketball courts, swimming pools, etc built around the country in partnership with appointed "boards", majoring in low income areas. (this seems "fine")
  
• Do a bunch of navy ship building in the great lakes states that Trump flipped (fine)
  
• Do teeny tiny tweaky tax reform staying completely away from any sort of "flat tax". It needs to be read, but he makes a good case for not getting rid of home mortgage / chairitable deductions. In my opinion he makes a lot less of a case for continuing to allow state income taxes to be deducted. He asserts that it would "lose WI, IA, MI, PA etc, for what? Winning FL and TX TWICE?".
  
  My thought would be that a lot of the Trump voters, and the most likely potential Trump voters to add don't pay much in state taxes anyway. In any case, I hope someone has a better plan than Hugh.
  
• Appoint good judges (duh) He thanks Harry Reid for making it very likely that Trump can be successful at this. Yes, thanks Harry!
  
• He has a lot of tweaky defense ideas. I HOPE that Trump has some people that have a lot more innovative ones -- like massive containers full of 100's of thousands of tiny drones each with a little "c4" that can hit people, equipment, gang up and hit buildings, etc, etc with the computerized command and control capabilites to use them on subs, planes, and even from satellites. 

And that is about it. Very ho hum. Not recommended.

Making Sense of God, Timothy Keller

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-God-Invitation-Skeptical/dp/0525954155

My love affair with the writings of Timothy Keller continues. I covet his level of intellect and especially his ability to lovingly yet strongly make significant philosophical and theological points with absolutely no regression to snark and put-downs. It is a level of intellectual maturity that I gaze in wonder at, and which puts me to such shame that I cry out for God's help to better emulate Reverend Doctor Keller's example.

For those familiar with how I read, this book now has a forest of tabs sticking out of it, and the inside is extensively marked. I find it to be nothing less than a potential basis for a igniting a new 21st century revival in the west to correlate with the rapid rise of Christianity in China, South America and Africa. The brokenness of North America and Western Europe in spirit, philosophy and community is glaringly obvious. This book provides a strong laymen's case for:
1). Why belief in God is rational as a basis for society
2). What happens when such belief wanes
3). Why the specific God -man Jesus Christ is the only basis for faith that works in our age (or any age)

The book is heavily sourced, so I'll try to give pages for specific quotes that will often have been sourced into the book ... I'll leave it up to the interested to run down the original authors.

p13 "The ideals of freedom ... of conscience, human rights and democracy are the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. ... To this day, there is no alternative to it". 

What we believe is always built on faith in SOMETHING. Morality must be based somewhere or it does not exist. What the west holds to be "self-evident" is only so because of our Judaeo Christian heritage.

Everyone needs to spend some quality thought time on the idea of the "Critique of Doubt" on page 38. Were this understood, everyone's level of smug would have to drop a ton, and that is ALWAYS great for the prospect of community!

"Polanyi agrues that doubt and belief are ultimately "equivalent". Why? "The Doubting of any explicit statement denies one belief in favor of other beliefs which are NOT doubted for the time being." You can't doubt belief A except on the basis of some belief B you are believing instead at the moment. So for example, you CANNOT say, "No one can know enough to be certain about God and religion," without assuming at that moment that YOU know enough about the nature of religious knowledge to be certain of your statement!

Page 74 reaches the following sad summary of current western culture than goes into a few pages of how it is that Christ is the "logos" (meaning) the Greeks intuited ... to which I would add "Man's Search For Meaning" as a worthy sourcebook.

"Western societies are perhaps the worst societies in the history of the world for preparing people for suffering and death, because created meaning is not only less rational and communal, but also less durable." 

Why is this the worst? Because without shared meaning, there is nothing to say to the suffering, dying, and bereaved. There is no shared community meaning of life, but rather the lack of shared meaning kills any sense of even real community. Thus, many suffer completely alone, bereft of even family as they struggle to seek blessing from the faceless government bureaucracy they realize they ended up worshiping by accident.

On page 105, in the midst of discussing why our attempt to make "freedom" the only moral value ... "Today, it is said, the only moral absolute should be freedom and the only sin should be intolerance of bigotry.", Keller points out  ... "Even in our supposedly relativistic culture, value judgements are made constantly, people and groups are daily lifted up in order to shame them, public moral umbrage is taken as much as ever. It is hypocritical to claim that today we grant people so much more freedom when we are actually fighting to press our moral beliefs about harm on everyone."

As Reagan put it, the secular left will "defend your right to AGREE with them to their dying breath". They will however not acquiesce to your right to DISagree with them, and will seek to silence you by any means including violence  -- because your lack of agreement is a threat to them and makes them feel moral umbrage. They have no admonition in their secular religion against judgement -- in fact, their judgement is one of the things they are most certain of.

On page 125, "We need someone we respect to respect us. We need someone we admire to admire us. Even when modern people claim to be validating themselves, the reality is always that they are socializing themselves into a new community of peers, of "cheerleaders", of people whose approval they crave."

Even more sadly, the requirements of conformance in your secular group are always increasing -- maybe you were fine with everything up to gay "marriage", or even transgender", however you were uncomfortable with that next step. Perhaps you are an atheist who finds Islam no more, and possibly less acceptible than Chritianity. You looked at it's tenets and see that as crusade era Chrisianity was, Islam can be violent, and you feel that it is obvious that a "progressives" should point that out.

You will likely run into this situation somewhere and find that compliance is NOT optional -- if you want to continue to be accepted by your group, sworn to the statement that  "individual freedom is all that matters",  you MUST comply with ALL their positions! Typically, you most often will shut up and comply, but at least subconciously you no longer really believe the group practices what they preach. (No Christian church or Christian does either -- that is why we repent and take communion over and over, we accept that perfect human consistency is impossible).

I'm getting long. The SUMMARY of this book is "simply":

1. It is every bit as "reasonable" to believe in God as it is to be an atheist. Increasingly, even MORE reasonable if one is bothered by the "anthropic argument" (we are here because we are here), or the latest physics asserting that there "must" be something like 10**500 UNIVERSES in order to support our existence being "likely".
2. If you want community and morals, there is scant basis for these elements of human existence outside of religion, and in the format we are familiar with in the west, outside of Christianity. Throwing the "baby" of shared values and community out with God/Christianity for the hope of "perfect freedom" is fraught with peril.
3. It's all about Christ. There is a really good reason that history is split into BC and AD. That difference is the divine person of Jesus Christ.

Outside of Christ, the world quickly descends into weeping and gnashing of teeth. It's going on all around us today -- families fall apart, people kill themselves to end meaningless lives, any tiny sense of community is trashed over smaller and smaller issues -- it is the politics that makes me cry when I look away from Christ. The Jim Jones cult of our age is the worship of the secular state. 

Christ is the BEST summary of the book -- keep looking at Christ and the Cross. Pray for your family, friends and community who have fallen into faith of the secular. 

The Soul Of The World, Roger Scruton

https://www.amazon.com/Soul-World-Roger-Scruton/dp/0691169284

After "Face of God" and this fine effort, I'm a confirmed Scrutin fan. In "Soul", Scruton continues his analysis of what it means to be human as opposed to atoms, cells, chemicals and adaptive evolutionary programming.

"I know that I am a single and unified subject of experience. This present thought, this pain, this hope, and this memory are features of one thing, and that thing is what I am. I know this on no basis, without having to carry out any kind of check, and indeed, without the use of criteria of any kind -- this is what is (or ought to be) meant by the term "transcendental". The unity of the self-conscious subject is not the conclusion of any inquiry, but the presupposition of all inquiries. the unity of consciousness "transcends" all argument since it is the premise without which argument makes no sense."

The paragraph is a bit longer than "I think therefore I am", yet I see it as gaining commensurate meaning from that added length.

As humans, "we" have to start somewhere, meaning we have to find some way to postulate that we actually exist from "nowhere". If we sit quietly, focus on only "our" breathing, watching our breaths happen on their own, our thoughts come and be acknowledged/dismissed as "we" return to watching our breath, our emotions pass through us as we acknowledge them and gently return to calm attention on our breath, the question arises as to "what or who" is doing the watching?

We will discover as millions have discovered throughout history (and millions more have not), that "I", is not our physical body, not our thoughts, and not our emotions. We each "have" all those things, but we, ARE something else. Another version of this realization is covered in an Atlantic article that I reviewed not long ago. Reality IS experience.

So if what we experience IS all there is, then how might we think about that?

"There is a culture of long-term thought and abstract conception, represented by Moses; and a culture of short-term pleasure and easy communication represented by Aaron. The first points to the transcendental ground of being; the second reduces beings to idols.:

In this section of the book, Scruton uses music as the example of how to know the difference. I believe however that this quote goes a long way toward the heart of the matter:

"... the difference is between preventing silence, and letting silence speak. Music in the listening culture is a voice that rises out of silence, and which uses silence as a painter uses the canvas ..." 

Scruton is seeking to capture "the ghost in the machine" of physical creation, as many lovers and believers have before him. (and what are true lovers but believers?)  I think we all understand that if we step back and let the silence speak, it DOES speak -- which is why the forces of Aaron work incessantly to make certain we never stop and listen!

"In music as in sex and architecture, the relation between subjects can be uprooted and replaced by an arrangement of objects. And in a hundred ways the result of this is is a culture of idolatry in which freedom and personality are obliterated by intrusive images, clamoring for an addictive response." 

"We are spirits living in the material world" (as "The Police" once put it). Much of modern man's time is spent trying to anesthetize that knowledge via clicks, games, music, drugs, media, work, relationships, ANYTHING!

"The Fall did not occur at a particular moment in time; it is a permanent feature of the human condition. We stand poised between freedom and mechanism, subject and object, end and means, beauty and ugliness, sanctity and desecration. And these distinctions derive from the same ultimate fact, which is that we can live in openness to others, accounting for our actions and demanding an accounting for theirs, or alternatively close ourselves off from others, learn to look on them as objects, so as to retreat from the order of the covenant to the order of nature."

Why is it critical for the left to cover their ears and scream "safe space! Nah, nah, nah, nah"? Because in a fallen world, even a fig leaf is imagined to provide "covering" of the nakedness of corrupted nature denying it's soul. The unbeliever MUST deny their soul, the pain of it's corruption is unspeakable, so they can ONLY "cover", never account for their fallen state until they accept redemption.

For the lover and the believer, the idea of hiding our true face and soul from others, especially those we love, is painful in the extreme. Many of us must do this in order to maintain any relation at all with family, to hold our jobs, or to interact socially.

The question "Why"? is addressed from I to you. It is thrust upon us in those moments in extremis when the order of creation irrupts around us. It is then that we cry out to God -- who will tell us why we suffer, why we live, and why we die. Within the envelope of nature there are only causes. But for the eye of faith the envelope has a telos, a reason for being as it is. And to have faith is to believe that the worlds teleology will account for my afflictions too.

"Irrupts" -- to enter forcibly or suddenly.

In this week before inauguration day 2017, the year of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, I stand in awe of the power of God and of Satan. My sense is that "The Fall" was the "reification" of the spiritual perfection of creation. "Reify" is a dangerous word which I believe holds a paradox within itself. The literal meaning of the word is "to make something abstract more "real" as in "understandable" ".

Since I believe that what we see as "reality" through our fallen senses is what scientists might call a "quantum flux" and God calls "spirit and truth", the act of "reification" is the act of making MORE FALSE -- making something seem to be more physical, or "quantified", "measured", "real".

In my world view, mathematics is closer to "truth" than engineering (applied physics). Reification as  it is commonly used is actually  "making a graven image" from a spiritual perspective.

Scruton has helped me immensely in trying to "un-reify" my world ... as in "sanctify", or "recover the spirit".

HIGHLY recommended to those who seek to recover the spirit.

American Amnesia Phase II, The Authors Die of Alzheimers

Ok, phase I was inane, phase II was insane -- as in the classic leftist claptrap of NPR, NYT, WaPO, Huffpo, CNN, MSNBC regurgitated in a massive flow. Pumping 50 million gallons of hog manure in IA comes to mind. This the link back to phase I if you didn't read that yet. 

We do samples of the pungent fertilizer -- so I will follow suit here.

The next year, Reagan made a U-turn. When a deep recession and his big tax cuts yielded massive budget deficits, the president accepted tax hikes to stanch the red ink.

Reagan was a tax raiser ... which I guess is an attempt to make him "one of theirs". But what he did was try to deal honestly with Democrats.

It happened to my father early in his first term when he sought to close a growing federal deficit caused by the deep economic recession. He believed Democrats in Congress would keep their pledge to make $3 in future spending cuts for every $1 in immediate tax increases. 

In 1982 he signed a compromise tax bill with the horrible name of TEFRA — the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act. And, when those promised spending cuts never materialized in Congress, TEFRA became one of the biggest regrets of my father’s presidency.

We could bore you with a LONG list of these, but the bottom line is that Republicans have been  snookered many times at this game. The authors of the book are mystified why trust has broken down between the parties!

How evil can the Koch brothers be?  Lots of pages of text worth ... they are of course Libertarians and not really Republicans, but "whatever" ... "they are not at war with the Republican establishment". Well, the Republican Establishment certainly was at war with Trump ... so Trump ought to be a good thing for these guys I assume.

For many pundits, American politics seems stuck in its own Groundhog Day: an interminable cycle of partisan warfare and gridlock. The cycle’s beginning can, like Groundhog Day, be dated to 1993. Clinton and congressional Democrats met fierce across-the-board resistance from a Republican Party acting with newfound unity and intensity. The epic battles that followed— budget wars, government shutdowns, impeachment of a president— set the tone for the next twenty-plus years. A new meme in American political discourse, “polarization,” became the new normal in American political life.

Why not 1973? Watergate was getting in full swing -- that had the impeachment of a president involved as well. Certainly the Republicans played Charlie Brown to the Democrats Lucy in the kicking the field goal vignette MANY times.  Reagan played the same roll in the $1 tax increase for $3 of future cuts.

One of the "small" items not really talked about is that Democrats held control of the House of Representatives for nearly 40 years, 1957-1994, but amazingly there was no corruption or cronyism under their rule. Gingrich was a "new breed", not an honorable guy like say ways and means chair Dan Rostenkowski from the mid-80s, who spent some time vacationing at the barbed wire hotel on the SE side of Rochester.

The polarization of the parties has been asymmetric. Republicans have moved much further right than Democrats have moved left.

You would measure that how? By government spending? (steadily up) By government regulation? (steadily up) By social issues? Republican W Bush proposes and passes prescription drug coverage under medicare? Bernie Sanders, a declared Socialist runs as a Democrat and likely would have won had the party not rigged their primaries? Gay "marriage" and men in women's bathrooms isn't a leftward shift?

Have we always had those things and I just realized it? I see leftward as toward more government and less morality and rightward is toward less government and morality. You would think that with their assertion that the "mix" of the "mixed economy" is toward LESS government, while the real world being ever more government spending as a % of GDP, they would at least deign to explain what they mean.

In the current chapter, we explain the parallel rise of two grave threats to the mixed economy: a new economic elite with ideas (and earnings) starkly distinct from the American mainstream and a newly influential economic philosophy that we call “Randianism” (after the radically individualistic thinking of the midcentury novelist Ayn Rand).

I see this development as positive -- Republicans are being accused of reading books other than the Bible ... and possibly Mein Kampf. The normal ding on Republicans is that they lack the intellect to be able to read. The offending text is "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, published in 1957.  Not one, but TWO "grave threats", one of them being a book -- the left always has had problems with books.

GOP presidential candidates have become more conservative, while Democratic candidates have not moved left.

Oh, that is what they mean! Obama was not farther left than Bill Clinton ... no need to even consider it! HW Bush was right of Reagan.  McCain and Mittens were to the "right" of W. Glad that is straightened out!

“Say you had a deal, a real spending cuts deal, ten to one . . . spending cuts to tax increases. . . . Who on this stage would walk away from that deal? Can you raise your hand if you feel so strongly about not raising taxes, you’d walk away on the ten-to-one deal?” All eight candidates raised their hands. The GOP crowd roared approval.

There is one of their "proofs" of the rightward shift of Republicans. How about Republicans have FINALLY figured out that a such a "deal" with the Democrats is letting Lucy hold the football again! Even the very stupid eventually learn!

What is it that makes Republicans so evil? The are racists!

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed that. Within a generation, the GOP represented the nation’s most conservative voters, and the geographic epicenter of loyal Republican voters became the Deep South— a region that is both poorer and more conservative than other Republican bulwarks. When Democratic leaders finally demanded the end of Jim Crow, black voters became overwhelmingly Democratic.

Never mind that the Democrats were the party of slavery and then of Jim Crow, that DEMOCRATS worked to filibuster the voting rights act and as a percentage, more Republicans than Democrats voted for it.  What really takes hutzpah is that the democrat strategy of keeping blacks on the new inner city welfare plantations where they share-crop the votes every couple years has not been much of an aid to the lives of their welfare slaves -- but no matter, I guess they have actually been consistent on their attitude to blacks for the countries entire history! Keep them on the plantation! Just make it look a little different from time to time.

Besides race, the "machinery" that allows Republicans to get voters to "vote against their interests" is:

This machinery has three key elements: Christian conservatism, polarizing right-wing media, and growing efforts by business and the wealthy to backstop and bankroll Republican politics.

Ok, the book was bad before, but by this point there is nothing not covered on NPR, NYT, WaPo, etc every day. It isn't clear what they would do to get Christian conservatives to stop voting against the killing of 60 million and counting babies, gay "marriage", men in women's locker rooms and such -- maybe kill them?

Do we really have to keep hearing about "money in politics" after 2016? Last summer the media was ecstatic that Hillary was cleaning Trump's clock on campaign money, especially from Wall Street. Here is bloomberg waxing poetic about her out raising Trump by 20 to 1 among billionaires. Gee ... let's get the money out of politics! The amount of crap about Citizens United in the book REALLY is a joke after November -- the "read by" date of this book expired Nov 8!

But even the most plausible of them— campaign finance reform, improvements in our electoral process, a concerted push to bring politicians back toward the center—

We need to get back toward "the center" -- which is? In the view of the authors, the country is "moving right" -- reams more regulation, socialized medicine, ever increasing spending, new "rights" ... gay "marriage", sex change, choose your own race? etc.

Moreover, while there’s no single solution, we do believe there’s an overarching and inspiring aim: restoring the capacity of our democracy to express and act upon the interests that large numbers of us share in common.

So how about 60 million Americans? Is that a "large number". I find it tragic and ironic that the numbers on each side in this past election are basically the same as the number of babies murdered since Roe V Wade. How many geniuses that may have cured cancer, solved our energy problems, or maybe written a book that allowed Trump and Hillary supporters to look across the fence and understand why there is so much disagreement, were gassed by Hitler? How many more have been killed since 1973?

Democracies are at constant risk of being overwhelmed by intensely organized minorities who distort, immobilize, or dismantle government to advance their own interests.

Which may be why this was once a Constitutional Republic. If the government was limited in size -- say 10-20% of GDP, then the special interests rent seeking via government, as well as vote buying schemes, would be limited BOTH by the Constitution and there just being 10-20% of the economy to take from, rather than 40%.

To reverse this spiral, we must reestablish a government with the capacity to foster broad prosperity. We need to ensure that ordinary voters and diffuse interests are capable of triumphing over concentrated interests. And we need to rescue the ideal of the mixed economy from the mists of American Amnesia. Many changes have swept the American economy since the 1970s. Yet our biggest problem is not a lack of attractive policy options. Our biggest problem is our politics. The mixed economy is as necessary as ever— indeed, in a world of increased interdependence and complexity, more than ever. And despite all the changes of recent decades, it is still within our grasp. We need better policies to restore its potential. But above all, we need a better politics.

So we have doubled the size of government in % of GDP since those "forgotten" days of the mixed economy. The authors may be certain there are some great "policy positions", but outside of LOTS more government, LOTS more taxes, and LOTS more regulation, the specifics were "thin" ... except for somehow getting the lowest possible barriers to voting, plus allowing felons, and only thinly trying to disguise the desire to allow illegals to vote (no IDs).

Some favor that redistribution; others oppose it. But what is missing is an understanding that most of what government does is not about redistribution at all; it is about addressing a wide range of problems that markets alone are ill equipped to tackle. Our discourse about government has become dangerously lopsided. The hostility of the right is unceasing and mostly unanswered.

I think the BIGGEST of this books many failings is the failure to recognize that BY FAR the biggest dollar amount of effort by the government IS redistribution, 70-80%.  What is far worse is that most of that is that 40% of US households are now getting over 50% of their income from the government ... and all of that (other than what is stolen from our children and grandchildren) is coming out of those who make over the lofty sum of $102K. They harp a lot on how "makers and takers" is nasty ... perhaps cash cows and vote slaves is more accurate?


This has gotten WAY too long ... I'll leave this as their analysis of the wonders of BOcare. It was really wonderful -- here in MN a lot of folks ended up paying $2k+ a couple for their insurance, $24K a year ... STILL with hefty deductibles and co-pays if they had to use it. AFTER the election, even the WaPo had the courage to interviewed Noseworthy from Mayo who pointed out it was time for a do-over.  They find any claims against BOcare to be completely false -- proof of racism, ill will, etc.

They claim millions are losing good insurance despite a historic expansion of coverage. They claim costs are skyrocketing despite a historic slowdown of medical inflation.

 See, the guys that wrote this book know that BOcare was a wonderful thing! Heck, Hacker (one of the authors) was even one of the architects of BOcare -- thanks! BOcare was one of the things that helped Trump beat Hillary!

So by $$$ the government has grown from 20% of the economy when they claim the "mix" was correct to nearly 40% ... but now they think the government is WAY too small. I think what they really mean is that the socialist vote buying programs to date have eaten the whole budget and they don't have enough left for them to buy more votes or pick more winners or losers -- but they don't say that, so the book is completely debunked by looking up a government spending as a % of GDP chart.

But I looked up the regulation volume in the first post as well -- that is also at record levels.

So, what I "learned":

• government is great, government is good, we thank it for our daily bread. When people go into government they are sainted and there is never any corruption or rent seeking (as in build bigger fiefdoms, keep people on forever even if no longer useful, etc) ... no problems in government ... except Republican obstructionism. 
• Republicans and business are in bed together and evil.  (and racist, but I repeat myself)
• Democrats are so amazing! If the Republicans (and at least the high level business people) could be herded into gas chambers, utopia would be at hand! The very fact that they question this utopia is a sign of their evil. 
• Fox News and Talk Radio! Nuff said ... well throw in "conservative think tanks funded by the Koch brothers". Puts the Democrat / government forces of goodness and light at EXTREME disadvantage! NPR, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, WaPo, all the universities, Hollywood, American Bar association, government workers unions, etc just CAN'T COMPETE! Side note ... who has market share on radio? They pointed how how much was conservative, but failed to mention that out of the top 4 with basically same numbers of listeners: "Liberal Things Considered" at top (NPR), then Rush, then "Liberal Edition" (NPR), then Hannity. The book led you to believe it was a conservative rout -- really more of a privately funded / publicly funded draw. 

The big thing that books like this make obvious is that the US electorate is operating under two completely different world views. One actually DOES believe in a truly mixed economy, with the government being 10, 20, or possibly even 30% of that mix. The other (the authors of this book) want a SOCIALIST economy with 50, 60 ??? % being government, and almost certainly eventually effectively 100% -- because anybody that opposes them is always going to be "evil". We know they want MUCH more government because having it jump from 20 - 40% of GDP looks like "backward" from their perspective -- there is indeed "Amnesia", but they need to look between their ears a lot more.