DC to Raleigh

We have completed the Gettysburg and Washington DC portion of the trip and made it down to Raleigh North Carolina to visit the old friend that introduced my wife and I. We are checked in at a Residence Inn; very nice digs for a couple nights before we sprint for home.

The weather the last few days in DC was in the 70's, sunny, really summer for us folks from MN. Looking at the temperatures back home with below freezing highs makes me realize that it could be a bit of a chill when we get back. We saw "all the sites", for those interested see if you can access some pictures here.

Some Notes:

• I could spend a couple more days at Gettysburg. I'd like to read a couple more battle books as well as review the Burns series. There are an amazing number of monuments and battle scenes. I need to do some full Blogs on the subject, but the Civil War, and thus "The High Water Mark" at Gettysburg bring some fundamental issues to bear. What does "freedom" mean? Was the South free? We have only two political parties that we need to map the sum total of our ideas to at any time. Should we have 3? (potential for House/Senate/Executive to be split). More? What were the main idea mappings prior to the Civil War? After? How many switches between then and today? What are the key ideas today? At the time of the Civil War, MANY people felt those ideas were worth dying for ... to the tune of over 50K men in three days alone, and 600K over the course of the war.
  
• It is very hard to do DC without a TON of walking. Huge space, the Washington Monument is one of those things like the Saturn V that was bigger than I expected.
  
• There is a certain depression about the city. Thousands and thousands of faceless union bureaucrats in 100s of generally fortress like buildings going about their union protected tasks day in and day out with next to no chance for anything creative to happen. There are elements of this in any large organization, certainly including corporations, but the market creates a lot more real diversity in those environments than exists in DC.
• The changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown was way more moving that I expected. It drives home the thought that the universe is designed. The forces of the left and chaos would LOVE to corrupt the transcendent honor present in the military. HOWEVER, no matter how much the left may wish to escape the idea of transcendence and "powers beyond reason", they know that their pursuit of "if it feels good, do it" relies on protection from others that might find their soft outlook to be an invitation to end the chaotic party desired by the left. The soldier will not give his life for meaninglessness, so the military holds to order, command, honor, tradition, duty ... all the thoughts that the left hates. They hate the military, yet they dare not destroy it. Checkmate.
  
• But at the Vietnam Memorial, we see the "High Water Mark" of the left in the World to date (and say a little prayer that we don't return). Just names and dates ... no battles, no locations, no meaning. The personal names, but no divsions, branches of service, etc. War as just a meaningless individual loss, and loss only. Contrast this to WWII, with the theatres of combat, the states and the battles, but NO individual names. The CAUSE was greater than the individual ... the lives were given for something greater than one person. The stars represent the sacrifice and show the magnitude, but they were ALL Americans. That was more important than their name.
  
• I was struck by the paintings, statuary, and inscriptions in the Capitol and the Memorials or how much work needs to be done with chisel or covering to remove "God" from Jefferson, Lincoln and the host of quotations around the city. Worse for the forces of the left, the profiles listed around the chamber in the house would seem to give many of those members pause were they to look at many of their works: Justinian, Moses, Pope Innocent III, Lycurgus, Napoleon, etc. It seems that at least at the time of the construction of the Capitol there was the distinct idea that positioning the nation in the stream of western civilization, including of course Christianity, was a VERY good idea. The American mind had not yet closed, and it was well understood that ideas do indeed have consequences.
  
• I could spend a lot more time at both the Smithsonian Air and Space Museums. I sure enjoyed the time I did get to spend.
  

Enough for now. In general, DC isn't what I would call a "great city" in the NYC, San Francisco, London, or even Chicago sense. It seems to be too "sterile and segregated". Maybe I'm not giving it a fair shake due to only a couple of days there, but I've not even spent that amount of time in London. Scarcely more in Chicago, and only a few days more in NYC and San Fran.

God and Science

An uplifting little gift for the Easter season. I'm always willing to look at both sides, but I'm looking forward to reading his book a lot more than "The God Delusion" and "The End of Faith". I HOPE that he bears a lot less hatred and false certainty than the other two authors. From just the synopsis, it looks like it may be a very worthy work. I never really mind reading "the other side", and often there are some interesting points, but it is often a bit sad to be exposed to the level of hopelessness there.

clipped from www.cnn.com Collins: Why this scientist believes in God POSTED: 6:15 p.m. EDT, April 4, 2007 Editor's note: Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. His most recent book is "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief." ROCKVILLE, Maryland (CNN) -- I am a scientist and a believer, and I find no conflict between those world views. As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the information molecule of all living things, as God's language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God's plan. As the British writer G.K. Chesterton famously remarked, "Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative."

To Gettysburg

We left on the Spring Break journey yesterday and made it to Toledo Ohio by 9 or so without a lot of difficulty. Chicago was slow as we expected it to be, but only actually fully stopped for 10min or so.

Today we started out at 8ish and realized that we were going through Cleavland, and with our 15 year old classic rock fan along, I decided that we would take a look at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. LOTs of guitars, the ZZ Top Eliminator car, a TON of "rock outfits", lots of historical Buddy Holly and Beatles stuff. It would have been a "miss" in my book, but the young rock fan is really into the groups, the history, you name it, so it was a "win" for him and that counts for something. I'm sure he may think we have spent just a tiny bit too much time at the few of the rest of the sites we see on the trip.

We drove the tollway over to US 30, and came through some beautiful mountains via Chambersburg. I've been reading "Gettysburg" by Steven W Sears in my times not driving and in the evenings. An excellent book that is a very readable tale that shows you what is happening on both sides. In many ways of course, the times are quite different, but in others, not so much. One of the big reasons that Lee was on the attack was to help the Democrats gain power by turning public opinion against the war. If he could have been successful at Gettysburg, there is every reason to believe that public opinion would have moved even more against the war, and the Democrats would have been able to make "a political deal" with the South on the issue of slavery. Nothing familiar with today on that front I guess.

The Brutal Facts

Having lived through the Vietnam / Watergate / Carter years, I'm always intrigued with the segment of our population that finds those to be "the best of times". Defeat in Vietnam, discrediting of the Presidency and as a result of both, the US at a low ebb. Millions killed in Cambodia. The USSR on the advance around the globe and finally hostages in Iran while we stood by, so inept that our weak attempt at rescue crashed and burned in the desert with nothing accomplished but more national despair. Turn off the Christmas lights, the best days of America were behind us. Somewhere in those later years of the '70's I made the personal decision that "despair was not an option", and in the intervening years have been blessed with the grace to learn to focus on values and principles vs dollars and feelings.

Unlike what an atheist might assume however, seeking a higher focus actually increases interest in understanding what kind of general mechanisms drive the daily minutia. One example is a connection of a small fact studied about the Korean War and the MSM story today.

In the Korean War, US POWs suffered the highest casualty rate in our history (38%), yet they were not physically tortured, starved or directly abused. The North Koreans used the tactics of:

• Informing
• Self-criticism
• Breaking loyalty to leadership and country
• Withholding all positive emotional support

They did what the MSM and Democrats have since July of '03. Most things have been covered in this Blog already, but a short re-cap:

1. The "Bush lied" ... either in the case of the Niger yellowcake, the Plame affair or the WMD. Hearings and legal proceedings have been held on all of the above showing there to be no "lies", but the constant claiming as to lying has had an affect on all, and has convinced most.
2. Katrina - Local authorities react horribly, leaving 500 buses standing to be flooded rather than using for evacuation. The Governor refuses to allow Federal troops to come in and Bush courageously makes the greatest ACTUAL breech of the Constitution of his Presidency by putting them in there without a request from the Governor. Katrina was the turning point; the MSM realizes that they can successfully create what they want if they act in the proper concert with Democrats.
3. Bush makes the greatest easily avoidable self-inflicted mistake of his Presidency in the Meyers appointment. Democrats have no fixed values or principles, so they still mostly supported Clinton when he did NAFTA and Welfare Reform, even though were they to be principled, they woudl be against them. Conversely, Bush lost a lot of Conservatives when he did Perscription Drug and cost himself a huge amount of political capital with all conservatives. He gained nothing from Democrats since politics count for more than actual help for people that they claim to want help for. Miers was a critical point where Bush lost a huge amount of credibility. It was a political miscalculation that could really not be recovered.
4. The Libby / Wilson / Plame fabrication. The Democrats and MSM manufacture a story that has no content. The tie in of Bob Woodward of Watergate fame makes one wonder about "currents in the force". Repetition is the KEY, and over the long haul, the basic makeup of humanity tends to make 60-80% of people somewhat susceptible.
5. Iraq, the economy, gas prices, surveillance fears, ... etc. NEVER allow positive stories for more than a moment so that it can be said "oh, we reported it". Build a constant view of mistrust of everything possible except Democrats. John Murtha being a spokesman against the war when he is ON TAPE from the early '80s clearly considering taking a $50K bribe, and not ruling it out, while the MSM keeps it completely quiet. It ONLY shows up as the incoming speaker of the House nominates him for Majority Leader, and it is COMPLETELY forgotten the second that he fails to get that role. Fortunately having a guy with a history of interest in bribes and another caught with $90K in bribes in his freezer is NOT a "culture of corruption". (to the MSM, D's don't have that)

The list could go on, it is a daily activity. Our MSM, the Democrats and the North Korean POW camps have remarkably similar methods. Apparently the objective of those methods in at least the case of the MSM and Democrats is a return to the impotent America of the late '70s. I suppose the idea is that if we are all in despair we will vote for them to take care of us. We were fortunate through that valley that in terms of history we paid a relatively low price for losing our way and were blessed with Ronald Reagan to turn us around.

The nasty thing about democracy is that we are assumed to be self-governing. The number of "great leaders" is very limited, and every great leader comes with the potential for danger as well as the potential for blessing. The BEST approach is if we can look beyond the manufactured MSM view and react to reality--where although the facts may be brutal, we can ALWAYS have faith in the ultimate outcome.

Feinstein Resigns

Don't get your hopes up, only from a committee. It will be interesting to see if the MSM picks this up at all. I'm sure that they would treat a well-known Republican Senator exactly the same!

clipped from www.metroactive.com Feinstein Resigns Senator exits MILCON following Metro exposé, vet-care scandal SEN. Dianne Feinstein has resigned from the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee. As previously and extensively reviewed in these pages, Feinstein was chairperson and ranking member of MILCON for six years, during which time she had a conflict of interest due to her husband Richard C. Blum's ownership of two major defense contractors, who were awarded billions of dollars for military construction projects approved by Feinstein.

Good To Great

I read this Jim Collins book a while back, but re-read as part of my recent class at work. It is a book that can apply to personal life, school, church, or any organization as well as to a business.

While one can take this book as a "cookbook", it is clear that just because you do all the things here, there is no guarantee you will build a great company ... just as following a recipe doesn't guarantee a great dining experience. These elements are just things that can increase the odds of making that leap. Following these ideas is like buying a lottery ticket to greatness.

The main ideas are:

1. CREATE Level 5 Leadership from within - A leader that "blends extreme personal humility with intense professional will" for the team/business, not for themselves. Darwin Smith of Kimberly-Clark paper and the decision to "Sell the Mills", a historical profit center of the business, and take on Procter&Gamble in the consumer paper products industry is a great example. Note; level 5 leadership at the team, area, organization, site, division can make a HUGE difference even without having it at the top, although the top can have a huge influence.
   
2. First Who - Then What - If you have the right people, you can do pretty much anything, and if you have the wrong people, you can do very little but manage the wrong people. The phrase "get the right people on the bus" is brought up a lot. Have a "strong and deep team" rather than a "genius with a thousand helpers model". Put your best people on your best opportunities, not your biggest problems. You want people who will argue and debate furiously, but line up once the decision is made regardless of personal interest (level 5 followership?).
   
3. Confront the Brutal Facts, yet never lose faith -This certainly applies to life as well as work.

   The core concept is "The Stockdale Paradox". James Stockwell was the highest ranking US officer imprisoned in North Korea from '65-'73. He said: "I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining even of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade". He was asked who it was that gave up, and he responded "Oh, that's easy, the optimists". The reason was that they always set some deadline like "we will be out by Christmas", and then "we will be out by Easter", and eventually they died of a broken heart.

   "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end--which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever that might be."

   From Collins:"Life is unfair--sometimes to our advantage, sometimes to our disadvantage. We will all experience disappointments and crushing events somewhere along the way, setbacks for which there is no "reason", no one to blame. It might be disease; it might be injury;it might be an accident;it might be losing a loved one;it might be getting swept away in a political shake-up;it might be getting shot down over Vietnam and thrown into a POW camp for eight years. What separates people, Stockdale taught me, is not te presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life."

   There must be a climate in which there is a DRIVE to get and face the truth the key principals for that listed were.
   

   1. Lead with questions, not answers
   2. Engage in dialog and debate, not coercion
   3. Conduct autopsies without blame
   4. Build "red flag mechanisms" to information into information that can't be ignored.
   
   
4. Hedgehog concept - Foxes pursue many ends at the same time and see the world in all it's complexity. Hedgehogs simplify the complex world into a single, simple organizing idea or principle that guides everything.
   
   1. What can we be the best in the world at?
   
   
   2. What drives our economic engine?
   
   
   3. What are we deeply passionate about?
   
   
5. A Culture of Discipline - "Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of the wrong people on the bus". Freedom and Responsibility in a framework -- the example of the air traffic control system and FAA rules, but the ultimate responsibility with the pilot. Start a "stop doing list". "Most of us lead busy but undisciplined lives. We have ever-expanding 'to do' lists, trying to build momentum by doing, doing, doing--and doing more. And it rarely works. Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of "stop doing" lists as "to do" lists."
6. Technology Accelerators - Only technology that fits with the hedgehog concept is used. Technology by itself is never the cause of either greatness or decline.
7. Flywheel and the Doom Loop -- It is the practice that counts, not the big game.
   1. Level 5 leader steps forward with hedgehog concept that organization buys.
   2. right people on the bus, wrong people off
   3. make some key successes ... SUCCEED ... even if it is made up a bit!
   4. more people line up when they see the results
   5. REPEAT - REFINE - REPEAT - REFINE ....
      
   
   

Free Speech for Franken

The Star Tribune is starting their inoculation process for Al Franken. It turns out that "Butt Boy" was a quote in his BOOK, so even more explicit than just an interview. On the other hand, they note that CONSERVATIVES are starting to "wise up" in realizing how bad Ann Coulter is.

Well, Franken has said that he is going to change "Butt-Boy" to "Lap Dog"; something like what a Democrat does when they are caught red-handed with illegal campaign contributions. Give them back! Well, at least they are consistent on this one--as long as you certify you have no character, Democrat or avowed criminal, then no problem. It is only the religious or the Republicans that need to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for whatever kind of charge can be trumped up. Scooter Libby being a great recent example.

The MSM control is certainly set back on"high". Conservatives are so much more quiet when things aren't going their way. Ann maybe has some "comments", but no screaming, yelling, talking about leaving the country, etc. Prayer tends to be quieter than marching, carrying signs and screaming obscenities I suppose. History often repeats with slightly different flavors. It seems that this is maybe "defeat in Vietnam without Watergate" ... maybe a bit of a "'70s motif"; our friends the Iranians that the Dems say will help us out in Iraq even have some hostages again.

Oh, for those that don't understand the inoculation. By doing a number of nice reasoned stories on Franken's slur, it becomes "old news". All "reasonable people" have been over that ... none of the gays were concerned about Franken, so why would anyone else be? Clearly the only kind of people that would bring this kind of thing up during a campaign are complete partisans, not "interested in the issues".

As long as one keeps their "Ds and Rs straight", these things are easy to follow. 35 year old guard papers? HUGE issue if they apply to a "R" ... need a prime time special. Decorated veterans pointing out that it is odd for a soldier to take a BIG movie camera to Vietnam, and that having 3 purple hearts without spending a night in a hospital is unheard of?

Oh, they are accusing a D, CLEARLY a horrible pack of lies, smear tactic, completely reprehensible. No story at all. They made their OWN commercial? My goodness, what is the world coming to? Ought there not be a LAW against that kind of speech! Why even years later, someone who donated money so they could get their message out at all should be disqualified from serving in the government. (this week in fact)

Watch the Ds and Rs, at least that part is easy. "Free speech" is only "free" if you are a D ... otherwise it is quite expensive and there is no statute of limitations if you are caught speaking or aiding speech by an R.

Ideas Have Consequences Again

This book was visited before and it will be visited in the future. I like to highlight my books, but I may as well not highlight this one, or come up with a new standard, because it is almost all highlighted now. I'd love to start just putting in great quotes here, but there are so many that it isn't really worth even starting.

The bottom message that can't be stated too often or too well is that the "ultimate decision" is; "Is this all there is"? Meaning: is the material universe all there is, or is there something more? That something more can be named "perfect forms", "spirit", "God", "intellect" or a number of other names, but at the core, it is the "heroic assertion", "wishful thinking", or "prayerful acceptance" that there is truth beyond particles and bits that is the genesis point of departure for the ultimate cleavage of world view.

While Weaver doesn't directly say this (probably because he would find it beneath him to say), when man continued his rebellion against God and Religion in the enlightenment and set science on the throne, he threw "the baby out with the bathwater". Philosophy went out with Religion, and at least western man was left with no "unifying story".

It would be interesting to see how Weaver would see the current Islamic / Western culture clash. Is a bad transcendent idea better than no transcendent idea? My belief is that Weaver might say "yes", but I'm just putting words in his mouth. The decision is one for Theology and Philosophy, and our culture is so lacking in both that the number of minds available to help us answer such questions of ultimate truth are very small. We have also lost the cultural context to even respect the answer, were it to be presented.

I am again awed, and left in somewhat the same state as a primitive that has wandered in the ruins of a great city by this book and others. Thousands of years of thinking on the state of man in the universe has been cast aside and but a tiny remnant of humanity is even interested in discovering concepts like meaning and truth. The vast majority would rather focus on the firing of 8 attorneys under one political party while having had no concern over the firing of 93 others by the opposite political party 14 years earlier. They are perfectly willing to let "truth" be all in context of time and party.

99% of the population is completely unaware of the consequences of making those decisions as to the loss of meaning, direction, value, and understanding created by such a willingness to flee principle and consistency. Our limited reason can only find purchase in the context of consistency against some standard not fluid in time and application. Science provides no meaning, only data. Correlated data relative to physical perception at times, but no values in any sense. So we continue to drift, hoping that "bigger, better, faster, easier, more comfortable" will provide happiness, or at least comfort.

Why ARE we so fascinated with Anna Nichole? Could it be that she is a bit of a blond "canary in the coal mine"? She seems to be a worthy symbol of the direction of our general culture.

Consistent Whiplash

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com Whiplash Department   [Jonah Goldberg] Me: Edwards is a saint when he drops out. Edwards is a saint when he doesn't. I don't have a major problem with the sentiments of either post taken individually, but taken together, we can now see that the intervals between self-contradictory statements by Sullivan has fallen to a mere 22 minutes. Pretty soon the ends of his sentences will contradict the beginnings.

Butt Boy vs Faggot

I wonder if any astute observers can notice any difference in the MSM treatment of Coulter vs Franken?

clipped from www.startribune.com How does the media punish a U.S. Senate candidate for calling a U.S. Senator a “butt boy”? Consider in particular Franken’s statement in this interview last October with the New Statesman (very near the end) that Sen Norm Coleman is… “one of the [Bush] administration’s leading butt boys.” For a Feb. 15 story about Franken’s announcement of his candidacy, the Star Tribune inquired about the authenticity of this quote, which was trotted out by the state GOP. The Franken campaign did not dispute the quote.

Causes of Death

I'm taking another excellent class this week, although not as absolutely stellar as the last round. For an exercise we were given the list of the top 15 causes of death in the US listed on death certificates and then asked to work in groups to rank them. The issue was how we went about working in groups, not the right answer, but it amazed me that a major discussion in our group was if ACCIDENT was #1! Many groups picked accident as #1, and quite a few in the top 3, when it is really #5 by a fairly wide margin.

The top 5 are Heart Disease, Cancer, Stroke, Lung Disease, and then accident, with heart killing over 600K, cancer 550K and then dropping down to less than 200k, AIDs wasn't even in the top 15.

In a democracy, the populace has to know what is going on if they are to govern themselves. The coverage of accidents shows the "sell papers" bias of a market driven media, reasonably intelligent people can have the capacity to adjust for that if they are aware. The AIDs reporting shows the political bias. It is reported because the measures taken to combat it promote the lifestyle choices the MSM encourages.

Freedom means stepping back from the media control and using the media as a TOOL. It is ONE WAY to carefully and skeptically gather information. When the information choices, priority, and bias of the MSM is followed without those cautions, we are cut off from reality and unable to govern ourselves.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

YouTube has the whole program and it is well worth watching. I have no idea if it is correct or not, but it is certainly very well done, at least rings of truth, and the credentials of the people involved are impressive. The main points are:

• The ice core data shows that carbon dioxide level consistently lags climate change by 800 years or so.
  
• The human input to the total planetary carbon dioxide is less than 1% ... volcanoes, termites and the oceans are HUGELY greater sources, accounting in aggregate for 99% of the "problem"
• At least one excellent potential cause of climate change on the earth is solar activity, and the show goes into that.
• There have been a number of fluctuations in climate in the last few thousand years that are very similar or even "worse" (warmer) than the current one. In general, the times of more warmth have been very positive times for life, and especially human life.

It will be interesting to see if this gets any coverage. Anytime a story only has one side as global warming has become, one has to wonder if it is factual or propaganda. CO2 causing global warming SOUNDS plausible, but one thing that true science shows us is that things that sound plausible are often not.

So why global warming? Basically money and power. Once the USSR lost and in general socialist policies lost with it, then a large number of leftists needed something to do that could get funding and fit into their world view. Capitalism still had to be wrong, so claiming that it was "destroying the world" through global warming rather than just creating too much economic wealth was a decent scam.

Commanding the Heights

I ran into a the documentary out on Netflix, and the book is now on order. It appears to be an excellent discussion of the history of economics in the 20th century, and of all places it was done by PBS! Well, unlike doctrinaire liberals, conservatives enjoy truth where it is found, it doesn't need to be discredited just because of source!

An example of the "breath of fresh air" is that they actually admit the obvious fact that the 70's were an economic disaster caused by Keynesian/liberal/government controlled economics. Part of the travesty of the present time is that every rational American is not as aware of the failure of Keynesian economics and the success of free markets as they are of the failure of the model of a flat earth. While the "two crimes" point is more subtle, it is the same--Democracy can't hope to be successful in even the medium term without the general public understanding reality!

Tale of Two Crimes

Follow the link, all the words are over here.

Aren't We All Terminal?

One has to dig in this story a bit to find that she was first turned down by the Supreme Court TWO YEARS AGO! "Justice" is a government program, so the waiting lines tend to be long. I suspect that the case took a couple of years to get to the high court prior to that as well. Let's be generous and say she has only been "hanging on" three years.

I understand what message the MSM is TRYING to brainwash me with on the heartless(Bush) government here, but they need to think of consistency if they want to reach this particular sheep. They would ALSO like me to hand complete responsibility for my health care over to that same heartless government!

I guess if she died waiting in line for "universal" healthcare she wouldn't have to hang on for years smoking pot! 

clipped from www.cnn.com Court: Dying can be charged for using marijuana POSTED: 2:00 p.m. EDT, March 14, 2007 Story Highlights • Appeals court rules dying not immune from drug charges for marijuana use • Doctor says marijuana is only drug keeping Angel Raich alive • Raich has a brain tumor and chronic nausea, her doctor says • She sobbed when told of the court's decision The Supreme Court ruled against Raich two years ago, saying that medical marijuana users and their suppliers could be prosecuted for breaching federal drug laws even if they lived in a state such as California where medical pot is legal.