Model of Perfection

It seems that politics has taken a vacation for awhile, which is just as well. The Shuttle is in space, docked with the Space Station, and summer is being enjoyed in MN. Some discussions this week and happenings in my personal life have brought me to reflect on my “basic model” for liberals and conservatives.

One of the key features of liberals is that “consistency is not an issue”. They will allow a Ruth Bader Ginsberg to answer very few direct questions in hearings, but are very likely to turn around and demand that John Roberts answer all direct questions. Like all humans, conservatives are not consistent either, BUT, the difference is that for a liberal any such discussion will bring a blank stare. They simply can’t understand that there would be an issue with being “inconsistent” … Ginsberg is good, Roberts is evil. Why would you treat them the same?

While a liberal may be unable to discern “evil” in terrorists flying planes into buildings, pedophiles raping and killing children, or a Doctor partially delivering a baby and then sucking it’s brains out to both insure death and an easy remaining delivery, there are certain areas that they make exceptions. If one faces a liberal and tries to get them to admit to evil in such things, they will quickly point out “different points of view”, or “everyone’s right to see things as they want”, or “you don’t know what kind of background / thought process / brain chemistry, etc drove this person to do that which you judgmentally call “evil”.

One of my theories on why this is so is what I would call “the deity of the liberal mind”. Liberals tend to believe in no God, or in a God that is “unknowable”, “unrelated to us”, or “universal” in that sense that whatever you do would be OK with “*IT*”. Once one believes this, then what one person believes is no more valid than what another believes … but in the human equation, that quickly resolves to “my ideas are better” and ultimately "might makes right". 

When one is god, it is reasonable to expect that your model of the universe is correct and OUGHT to come to pass. It seems that most liberals have a rather abstract and rigid model of what the world ought to be. Since they don’t really believe in any concept of “original sin” and nearly always believe in the perfectibility of man, then the force of “evil” in the universe must be that which is preventing their abstract model from coming true.

This evil typically turns out to be “conservatives” or “Republicans” in some form. The “evil forces” will have names like “religious right”, “big business”, “the oil companies” and “the rich”. The abstract model in the liberal’s mind of a society that is “just”, “free”, “fair”, “peaceful”, “environmentally sound”, and “less filling” is something that would happen NATURALLY if it were not for those forces that are blocking it. Anyone blocking “heaven on earth” must be doing it for an evil purpose.

Once a liberal arrives at their “perfect mental model”, it is very hard to have allegiance to anything in this world and likely least of all the USA. It is a classic case of the “good being the enemy of the perfect” … and of course once it is identified as “the enemy”, it is hard to see it as “good”. Many may see the USA as the best of the best on the planet for governments, but since it falls far short from the abstract perfection inside a given liberals god-like brain, it is worthy of only scorn and derision. Americans being willing to “settle for” what the liberal sees as a sorry state of affairs earns them the derision of a Michael Moore to say about his fellow Americans; “They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet... in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug pricks.”

While it might be easier to just respond to the left in kind, my guess is that they are actually thinking SOMETHING. Michael thinks Americans are dumb because many believe in odd things like God, Family, individual responsibility, morals, hard work, and a reasonable level of personal hygiene. Meanwhile, Michael neither believes in, nor practices any of these and makes millions of dollars while calling himself a “common man”.

I doubt that there is one iota of difference in the “hardware” (IQ) between the right and the left, but there is a significant difference in the “software” (mental models) that many of the people on either side are running. I’d rather accuse the left of “incorrect mental models” than being “stupid”. But I suppose that is only because I’m less sophisticated than the typical lefty.

Seven

Lance Armstrong wins his 7^th Tour, what an incredible achievement. I’ve enjoyed watching him the past few years on OLN, and I really enjoyed reading his books … “It’s Not About the Bike” is a great one. There are so many moments in that book that make a chill run up the spine.

 My favorite is after he has recovered, done a decent job at a comeback placing 14^th in a big race in Spain, given up cycling and hung around Austin playing golf, eating at Chuy’s and drinking Shiner Bock (BTW, having traveled to Austin a good deal on business, I can say his taste is pretty good on the Chuy’s and Shiner ;-) )

He has decided that biking is just too tough, and he wants to “enjoy life”. At one point, he makes the statement “… the old saying, that you should treat each day as if it might be your last, was no help at all. The truth is, it’s a nice sentiment, but in practice it doesn’t work. If I lived only for the moment, I’d be a very amiable no-account with a perpetual thre-day growth on my chin. Trust me, I tried it.” He was locked in the “what do I want to be when I grow up” black hole and going nowhere.

His wife, manager, and friends convinced him that he needed to race in a local Austin race called “Ride for the Roses” that he had set up for Cancer survivors, and if he didn’t train “a little”, he would embarrass himself. Chris Carmichael talked him into going to Boone North Carolina where he had won a couple of races and train. There is a peak there called Beech Mountain, and on the last day of the training he would climb that with Bob Roll, his training partner for that trip. For those of you who watch OLN during the Tour, Bob Roll is one of the commentators.

He buried Bob early on the ascent, and he started to get better and faster as he went up. “That ascent triggered something in me. As I rode upward, I reflected on my life, back to all points, my childhood, my early races, my illness, and how it changed me. Maybe it was the primitive act of climbing that made me confront the issues I’d been evading for weeks. It was time to quit stalling, I realized. Move, I told myself, if you can still move, you aren’t sick!

… As I continued upward, I saw my life as a whole, I saw the pattern and the privilege of it, and the purpose of it too. It was simply this: I was meant for the long hard climb.”

He certainly was, and he has certainly accomplished it. “The privilege of it”. There is something in that line that separates the real “winners” in their hearts from the “losers” of this world. If you are reading this, you are drawing breath, so the privilege is yours. You are one of the privileged. 

One of the top surgeons from Mayo ran a stop sign on a country road that I know pretty well Friday AM and his privilege came to an end. A friend that used to live a across the street from my Grandmother was hit head-on by a drunk driver at 24, and her privilege came to an end.

There will be a ton of people, causes and even political parties that will try to tell you that you don’t have a chance in life and that the deck is all stacked against you. They may be your parents, they may be your “friends”, they may be the group you have always associated with and believe that there is no way you can ever think any differently. They will tell you that some other group will prevent you, that you don’t have “enough” … intelligence, connections, emotional stability, family background, money, etc. 

They will give you the message that you are “lacking”. The reasons they present it to you may vary a lot. They may just believe it, and misery does love company. They may feel that they would be invalidated by your success … that if you had success it would somehow mean that the powerlessness they peddle was somehow more of their own doing than that of some “other”. They may want to convince you to “join their cause”, because adding you to their roster will somehow improve the power of the powerlessness lobby.

Don’t buy it. 

Lance Armstrong was in the bottom 3% of the cancer patients that a noted oncologist had ever treated for SURVIVAL … not for winning the Tour de France 7 times, but for continuing to draw breath. As he says, “success” isn’t about winning the Tour 7 times. That was part of what it was about for HIM, but there are all sorts of success that are possible as long as you realize that as long as you have that privilege of drawing breath.

Thanks Lance, it has been a privilege.

100 People Screwing Up America

I couldn’t resist Bernard Goldberg’s “100 People Who are Screwing up America”. Fun and easy read, and no, all the people in the book are not from the left … Ann Coulter, the Enron, World Com, and other Corporate excess types get roasted as well. It is however mostly predictable … the bias of the press (his first very good, and very successful book was called “Bias”), the extremes of the left, and the excess of sports and the media all get their turn.

His number two pick was Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, and he included a revealing editorial that does a good job of showing the lunacy of press bias. 

On January 1, ’95, the Times provided this editorial:

“In the last session of Congress, the Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from IA, that he is now willing to forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him. Once a rarely used tactic reserved for issues on which Senators held passionate views, the filibuster has become the tool of the sore loser, … an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose.”

On March 6, 2005, they provided the following:

“The Republicans are claiming that 51 votes should be enough to win confirmation of the White House’s judicial nominees. This flies in the face of Senate history, … To block nominees, the Democrats’ weapon of choice has been the filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare majority of senators from running roughshod. … The Bush administration likes to call itself “conservative”, but there is nothing conservative about endangering one of the great institutions of American democracy, the United States Senate, for the sake of an ideological crusade.”

Notice any difference? I suppose the true lefties will find some fig leave to cover the nakedness of that bias, but those that are that far gone won’t be coming back to reality anytime soon in any case.

Teddy, secretarial swimming coach, Kennedy was only #3. I really liked Bernie’s analysis of a famous Teddy bloviation on the Iraq war: 

 “a fraud made up in Texas to give Republicans a political boost”.  (Teddy) 

“This is pretty serious stuff-charging that the president of the United States went to war to win reelection. And exactly how would that work? Let’s see, President Bush takes a nation to war, an enormously risky political proposition, says the reason that we’re going to war is that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, even though the president KNOWS the weapons don’t really exist, and that sooner or later, certainly before the election, EVERYONE will know they don’t exist … and he does this to “give Republicans a political boost”? Am I missing something?”

Very well put I think, and the kind of logic that fortunately 51% of Americans had no trouble parsing. The idea that Americans are going to re-elect a President because we are war is of course also absurd. We only need to go back to LBJ, which is likely a major reason that the Democrats and the media spent so much time in ’04 trying to tie Iraq to Vietnam. Other than just not having anything else to run on after a wasted 20 years in the Senate, I’m pretty sure that is another reason that Kerry wanted to talk so much about Vietnam, and to make a connection to Iraq in every way he possibly could.

The book was entertaining, and I like his writing style. Michael Moore was #1, and as it says on the cover Al Franken was #37. High in entertainment, low in significant content, perfect for a nice summer read.

Vegas Prosecutes Gamblers

CBS News putting a prime time hour long show on during an election year that trashed a sitting President with no counterpoint was a milestone in press bias even if all the “important evidence” had been irrefutable. When the evidence turned out to be bogus, the fact of media bias was made clear enough that even very moderate people realized that the mainline press can’t be believed.

The press working day after day to try to get Karl Rove fired is a sign that they continue their move away from journalism and into extreme partisanship with no remorse. While it isn’t likely that most Americans will care enough to even notice the current adventure in press partisanship since the story is idiotic and it isn’t an election year, nobody should be surprised to see more news outlets of the Fox and further to the right gain success as the future rolls on

The press pushing to see a leaker punished is like Vegas trying to punish gambling. The press LIVES on “off the record sources”. “Deep Throat” was a secret source leaker that broke the law every time he talked to the press. In his position he was sworn to not go to the press or anyone else with inside FBI information, BUT, when he recently was identified the press treated him as a hero, which is exactly what would be expected. If the press wasn’t left biased, they would treat a leak from a Republican the same. Leakers are critical to the press, when they bite the hand that feeds them, one can see their true stripes.

If the DEMOCRATS were working to get Karl Rove out of office … hearings, interviews, talking to the media, etc, then we would have plain old garden variety press bias as the press did all it could do to help them. It is important to contrast however what happens when the Republicans see blood in the water and go after a Democrat, as in the case of Clinton. In that case we get a bunch of press navel gazing about “oh, is this really important?”, “how can anyone be in office if we expect “perfection””, etc.

This is different though. Much as in the CBS memo story, the press is driving this thing. It is Joe Wilson that shows up on the news shows, it is the press that finds some memo and tries to make it news even though there is no evidence that Rove even saw it. This is the press telling the Democrats to just get out of the way, THEY can get this job done!

The story itself is completely uninteresting to anyone but the most political partisan on either side. Even if Rove would be fired, it would be a “ho-hum” for all but the most partisan on the Republican side. On the left, it seems hard to imagine that anyone but a rabid Democrat would care about Rove for anything but “revenge”, and everyone knows they care nothing about CIA people, even REAL covert ones. When Phillip Agee, published “Inside the Company”, and covert agents WERE in fact killed, the left and the mainline media loved it. They hate the CIA, they just hate Bush more.

The meta-story here is “how biased can they be”? They have proved they can be biased enough to run a smear job on a sitting President during an election based on fake memos. They can be biased enough to use false information to claim that US soliders are desecrating the Koran, causing riots in which people are killed. Some interest remains, how biased can they be this time?

Responsiveness

Having not had many posts from readers to deal with up to now, I’ve not thought much of what I would do relative to responding to such posts. Like a lot of things, it will likely vary depending on workload, the weather, my mood, and a host of other topics, but this entry is my “general thinking”. I think the general policy will be to ignore the fray at the post level, and provide feedback from a blog entry if I think there are things posted that I feel like commenting on.

One poster seems to put a lot more meaning in “Republican vs Democrat” than I think was warranted prior to the 60’s, or maybe even that ‘70s. The election of Ronald Reagan ushered in a new Republican era in which Republicans were that party of less Government, free market capitalism, strong defense, and a set of values that prior to the ‘60s would have been “American” rather than have any chance of being “owned” by one party or another … pro-life, pro-family, pro-religion, pro-sexual morality, pro-individual responsibility, pro-hard work, etc. As Reagan said, he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left him. It left a lot of Americans.

Some attempted list of “this is all the good things that Democrats have done” is meaningless to me, especially prior to Reagan. I wasn’t old enough to know anything directly about JFK, but from what I understand … cutting taxes, anti-communist, let’s put a man on the moon, etc, he would have made a good post-Reagan Republican. Reagan himself was an FDR Democrat, and nearly everyone supported the President in wartime in those days. There were a lot more issues that were “American” rather than owned by one party or the other. In the “big picture models”, my sense is there used to be a lot more agreement between Americans because they were Christians, Americans, members of a community, a profession or type of work (farmer, labor, shopkeeper, etc) and loyal to family and friends before they were members of some political party. Perhaps I believe in a time that never was, but those are my impressions … many core values of being an American were pretty much shared by both parties.

From 1865-1930, the “Party of Lincoln” Republican party held general sway. The party of Slavery, the Democrats turned the corner with the Depression and the election of FDR. The question of whether FDRs programs would have ever gotten us out of the depression without WWII can never be answered scientifically without some sort of an alternate universe time machine, but the fact is, he got credit for winning WWII and for the policies that ended the depression. There isn’t anything wrong with that for me. America ended up better, and if Democrats get credit for that, that is just fine with me. Americafirst, party loyalty should always contingent on what is better for the country. I've never cheered for America to do bad in Bosnia, or have a poor economy when Democrats are in control. I will live my life out as an American no matter what party is in charge.

It took the sixties and the “youth revolution” before one could concive that a US Political Party could be anti-family, anti-military, anti-religious, anti-life, anti-business, and in general “anti” and still have any viability at all. The Democrats, the party of slavery and the party of Jim Crow, with KKK members like Robert Byrd finally allowed the civil rights act of ’64 to pass 73-27, with 21 Democrats, and only 6 Republicans against. Modern Democrats (and thankfully for them, the media) don’t seem to like to point out that one of the great historical uses of the Filibuster was the Democrat party preventing anti-lynching and voting rights legislation).

The conversion of the party of slavery and Jim Crow into the party of Black Americans is one of the great government vote buying stories of history. By maintaining the idea that Blacks could not be successful on their own, breaking their families by having the Government replace their fathers as “the welfare father”, Democrats were able to enslave the same people that they had held in actual slavery, the slavery of Jim Crow, and finally the slavery of welfare. I find it to be one of the most amazing stories in American politics, and one of the saddest.

The idea that Republicans are “the party of the rich” is a pre-60’s idea that the media and many Democrats seem to remain fond of. Take a look at the very liberal book “What’s The Matter with Kansas” to see a long lament of how the “stupid poor” have hooked up with the evil Republicans and voted against their own pocketbooks”. I guess I’ll accept that Republicans are “the party of the rich” if rich in spiritual life, rich in work ethic, and rich in devotion to America (the real one, not some “hoped for America”) is included in “rich”. If Republicans must be the party of the rich though, then Democrats remain the party of slavery … slavery to old dead socialist and communist ideas that centralized government can provide, slavery to the belief that the economic pie is only so big so we must all beg the Government to cut the pieces so we benefit at the expense of someone else, and slavery as in the mold of enslaving special interest groups like Blacks, NEA, Government workers, and others through the purchase of their votes.

The term “liberal” used to refer to those that wanted less government of all types, as in “libertarian”, but when the “Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics” and the “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party” (Nazi) ended up making the name look less than stellar, the left decided that the term “liberal” sounded better than “Socialist or Communist” and made the switch. The Government staying away from your property … be it your house or your paycheck is one of those “basic liberties” that the modern “liberal” isn’t very interested in protecting. Rather than fight the standard terminology, I go ahead and tend to use “liberal” for the left and “conservative” for the right, since that is what people expect to see.

Oh yes, and on the old “am I better off” question. It is a Henny Youngman world. When asked how his wife was, he would answer “compared to what”. The stock market crashed in March of 2K when Clinton was still the President, the recession hit in 1Q ’01 when there wasn’t a Bush policy to be had, and of course we know about 9-11 (well, I guess conservatives do, most liberals seem to have forgotten it). Bush only needed to do better than the imagination of Al Gore’s potential to pass the “are you better off” question. It seems pretty clear that not even the DEMOCRATS never gave a second thought to putting Al up against Bush again to say “see America, you made a bad decision, you could have had **AL** !!!”. I rest my case.

All a Schorr

I was able to hear a Daniel Schorr piece today on NPR, the thought that it brought to my mind was “The Hopeful Gospel Choir” from Prairie Home Companion. The subject was the evil Karl Rove. Whenever I hear the media talk of him I’m reminded of the movie “Spaceballs”, where the character “Dark Helmet” is a spoof of Darth Vader played by Rick Morainis. Rick is short and doesn’t look very evil, and his helmet is ridiculously large … one just can’t buy him as the nexus of evil, which is exactly the problem the media has with Carl Rove.

 It is clear they hate him, and why not? He was at least partially responsible for the election and re-election of the hated George Bush. The hatred drips a little too thickly though to try to retain any fig leaf of “we are unbiased”. When a picture of him is shown the thought of a cross between a cherub and Porky Pig comes to mind … not flattering of Karl, but not easy to picture as the nexus of evil.

I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the reasons that the media hates W so much is because they THINK that he does exactly what they do. It doesn’t dawn on them that he may believe, have evidence, or in a lot of cases be “right”, they assume that he is making it up and just saying it over and over like they usually do. A few examples:

1. “Clarence Thomas sexually harassed Anita Hill yet …”. Actually no, he made a couple of comments that nearly nobody would define as sexual harassment, even if the comments were made to their wife or daughter. 10 years before the accusation and she moved to two different jobs with him AFTER the supposed “incidents”.
2. “Bill Clinton was never guilty of anything but an affair between two consenting adults yet …” No in many and varied ways. The Paula Jones accusation, finally agreed to and apologized for and paid off by Bill was a case of a male governor dropping his trousers in front of a female employee and asking her to “kiss it”.  Even many liberals would find THAT to be sexual harassment if it was their wife or daughter. Not to mention perjury about the incident and others, forcibly fondling Kathleen Wille in a hallway at the White House and a host of other stuff. The media keeps repeating though … “meaningless waste of time”. 
3. “The Soviet Union is pretty much like the US and will be around as long (or longer as we are). We need to work with them rather than have some fantasy that they are an “Evil Empire” or “Are going away” … nuff said.
4. “There has never been any connection between Iraq and Al Quaeda” … “Iraq was never a threat to the US” … They may or may not believe some of these things, but repeating them over and over is no different than Bush using the opposite in a speech. There is certainly ample evidence to believe that there were and are connections, there may also be enough evidence for some to believe that there were and are none.

What the Schorr commentary does is postulate that:

1). There was never any evidence that Saddam was buying yellowcake in Niger (of course the British investigation, and in fact Joe Wilson himself reached the opposite conclusion until he started lying about it).

2). When Wilson made the claim that there was no evidence (even though it was later proven that he knew and reported that there WAS evidence), the Bush administration decided to “retaliate”.

Based on those two ludicrous assertions, stated as facts, it is “obvious” that the Bush administration would want to retaliate by “outing” a CIA agent that was not undercover and in fact drove into CIA headquarters every day ( I guess that would be DEEP cover) … if you are actually going in to work at a government agency, it is OBVIOUS that you don’t work there … government workers don’t actually go to work, they call in sick and goldbrick. The fact that she was driving into CIA headquarters would PROVE to anyone observing her that she was NOT a CIA agent … therefore the perfect cover for an actual undercover CIA agent. SIMPLE ! 

This is likely one of those things that those "inside the beltway" are aware of that those of us outside just don't understand.

The power of the media is great, but one would hope that this fantasy is a bridge too far. The idea that they are reduced to trying to take down Rove AFTER the re-election does a lot more to expose bias of an extreme nature than it does to shed any interesting light on anything else.

Listening Left

It is deep summer here in MN, temps in the 90s, no rain, lots of outdoors work and play, so I have been “listening like an average American” to the standard left media and have some thoughts.

If one even just watches the mainline media (closely), a veritable barrage of good news is streaming by, but since it only shows up for a second, and there is never any commentary on it (at least the good news), it is very easy to miss.

· 8 straight quarters of growth above 3%, first time since mid-80s. If there was a Democrat in the WH, this alone would be enough for media happy snoopy dance. As it is, buried on page 4-5 one day, and then the funeral dirge plays on.

· The CBO deficit projection for fiscal year ’04-’05 is down to well under $350 billion and may be under $325 http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/07/08/budget.deficit.ap/index.html

Contrast this with a Washington Post headline of January
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35029-2005Jan25.html that stated it would be $427 Billion. There has been a lot of media and democrat hand wringing about how unrealistic the Bush campaign promise to cut the deficit in half was without the all-purpose media solution on massive tax increases. Expect the story of a lower deficit to see minimal coverage with many caveats about “the numbers being bad”. Next time you see a negative number; see if they tell you about the potential that “the number is bad”. Wonder why that is?

· Unemployment hit 5.0% in June, the lowest since 2001. http://money.cnn.com/2005/07/08/news/economy/jobs_june/

One of the reasons that it truly is sad to have a Republican in the White House is that we never get to enjoy any good news. If we had a Democrat in there, it would be wonderful happy times.

The good news of free market capitalism isn’t just for the USA though. Thomas Freidman had an Op-Ed last week where he pointed out that Ireland, the perennial land of famine and poverty is now the 2^nd highest GDP per capita in Europe. Why? In the early ‘90s they looked at what was working and created a business friendly environment … cut corporate taxes, high individual rates, and reduces socialist kinds of rules that prevented business flexibility, on the “liberal side”, they made even secondary education essentially free to those that were willing to maintain grades. Now Dell, IBM, Motorola, and a host of other business has come to Ireland, while Germany, France, and those in Europe that maintain a socialist bent, slip ever lower. 

As a side effect, it is a lot harder to recruit bombers in a growing economy … people are more interested in living a better life than in blowing it up. The media generally likes to ignore these sorts of facts … the right kinds of decisions might be reached, more people would move up the income ladder and vote Republican … oops, I guess that has already happened. Well, they can try to slow it down at least!

Here in MN the media is intent on blaming Pawlenty for the State shutdown, which was the Democrat strategy from the beginning. One article that you will never read in the local media is that the Governor is part of the EXECUTIVE BRANCH … interestingly, they don’t write legislation, they sign it, and Pawlenty never vetoed a bill during the special session. Which means … drum roll please … that the legislation never got out of the legislature! Let’s see, there are two branches in the legislature, the House (Republican), and the Senate (Democrat). For some odd reason though, this startling fact never made the media, and all we heard about was “Pawlenty’s No New Taxes Pledge”.

There are few things that the media hates more than some limit on taxation, even when a God forsaken Midwestern state with a horrible climate, no mountains, and a bad business climate. However, we do a great job of taxation and always manage to make the top 5. From a liberal POV, high taxes on their own mean a great quality of life … as long as someone else is paying them.

The MN Democrats prevented any bonding bill from passing in ’04, and they were rewarded by picking up 13 seats in the House. Nationally they are obstructing well enough so that a UN Ambassador can’t even be approved. It remains to see if they will be rewarded at the ballot box for their efforts, but if they are one can only guess that even the dense Republicans will learn that obstruction pays and at least give it a ham handed try. Oh how the media will yell at that tactic, but I may be just wishful thinking, look at the Supreme Court.

The Democrats successfully Borked Robert Bork and prevented his confirmation, they carried out their high tech lynching on Clarence Thomas and he squeaked out a confirmation. 

We now hear the opening whine salvos of “Bush didn’t get enough of a majority to appoint anyone conservative”. Clinton NEVER got any majority at all (43% in ’93, 49% in ’96), and yet Ruth Bader Ginsberg sailed through 96-3. What would someone that is as far right as Ginsberg is left believe? I don’t think we can find anyone anywhere in the judicial system that comes close … an equivalent conservative judge would have to believe that Roe should be overturned ASAP, affirmative action / Gay Marriage / restrictions on the Ten Commandments and a host of other things would be constitutional abominations that would need to be fixed immediately. I’m not sure such a candidate exists, but if they did the media and the left would go to filibuster and manufacturing personal charges against the person for certain. 

Yet, the foolish Republicans let Ginsberg sail through AFTER Bork and Thomas. Did they think that the Democrats and the media would give them credit for civility? Of course not, it is the Republicans that have “destroyed the tone” in Washington, and Bush ought to appoint a liberal to “prevent a fight”.

I got a chance to listen to a little of “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross on MPR this evening as I journeyed home from a Church board meeting, and was rewarded with some great humor for my efforts. She was interviewing a Marine reserve Doctor that is head of some University Medical school as well as having served in Iraq. She did her best to try to get him to say something bad about the politics, the efforts, ANYTHING to do with the war, but he remained dedicated to the service, dedicated to the soldiers, and not willing to take any political bait.

She finally got down to a question like “Well, the war in Iraq is a very unpopular war, do you feel that has reflected badly on you as you have returned?”. He had served at the time of (not in) Vietnam, and responded that his experience to the contrary was that they had a lot of support, people sending them letters, treats, helping their families, and telling them how much they appreciated their efforts when they got home. That was the end of the interview, her disappointment was palpable.

It is a great country. He goes to war to fight for the freedom of a tax subsidized woman whose high moments are if someone with Tourettes syndrome comes on and says something inappropriate or she can giggle about gay sex with a guest. If the Muslims that she respects and loves to talk positively about (as opposed to disgusting closed-minded Christians) ever were in charge, they would take her out and cut her head off,  with some unfriendly treatment on the way to getting to see her headless body from a "unique perspective" for her 2-7 seconds of remaining consciousness that science postulates a severed head "enjoys" (providing her head falls in a "lucky" perspective).

How out of touch with reality can a reporter be to think she will get the better of a 30+ year military veteran, Medical Doctor, and head of a University Medical center? She was completely out of her league, but apparently her obliviousness knows no bounds as seems to be the case for most of the mass media.

Terror in London

We awoke this AM to news of terrorist attacks on the transportation system in London. The media breathlessly waiting and anxiously searching for blood, gore and body counts, the stuff of which headlines are made. Over the next few days we will no doubt be treated to statements of; “See, the price of taking on terrorists is too high, we should get out of Iraq, we should retreat and they will leave us alone”.

Such thoughts make the naiveté of Neville Chamberlain signing an agreement with Hitler and talking about “peace in our time” seem like the height of sophistication. Hitler may have been a bloodthirsty monster, but he at least had the PR sense to try to hide it. Al Qaeda has been very clear of their objectives, and even if they hadn’t, their actions have been more than clear. We certainly weren’t in Iraq on 9-11, nor when the Cole was bombed, nor when Kovar Towers were bombed, nor when the WTC was truck bombed in ’93. Bali had no troops anywhere, let alone Iraq in October 2002 when a nightclub was bombed by Al Qaeda, killing 180 people. One doesn’t even have to be looking at them to have them shoot you in the back. They are very capable of being outraged just by our very existence.

The facts may be 100% against them, but we know the liberal mind, and the facts will yet again be ignored and the cries will go out; “If only we are compliant and do as they say they will leave us alone”.

I often wonder if liberals exist on the same planet. They will wail this cry at the same time as the press discloses the details of a sex offender from MN, captured in Idaho with an 8-year old girl he had been molesting for months, along with apparently tying up and killing her family, along with kidnapping, molesting, and killing her 9-year old brother. Do liberals assume that these kids and this family threatened this man? By what odd view of the universe do they believe that terrorists are going to make some rational choice about what they find “threatening” or they “dislike”, and only attack those targets? Do they find that the men that fly planes loaded with people into buildings full of people, or plant bombs on busses and trains loaded with innocent people are somehow less evil than this child molester murderer? Evil has many faces, and for those that are awake, it is quite easy to spot.

To the extent that they are rational, I can only assume that liberals fail to see the existence of evil in any of the above. They see all people (with the likely exception of Republicans) as basically “good”. At times they “do bad things”, but there is always some justification … the crusades, too many oil profits, Bush is arrogant, I had a bad childhood, I was drunk/on drugs/crazy/ etc. The bottom line is always the same … there may be some “bad actions” out there, but there is nothing we can do to prevent any of them, and if we would just throw our arms into the sea, wear tie dyed clothes and listen to folk music, the people that might need anger management, counseling, or better drugs would likely get some and the world would be a sunny place.

Unfortunately, the universe that liberals live in is not the real one, and so we have to go on in spite of them. Prayers for the victims and the people of England, and prayers for the police and military forces of the world as they continue to hunt the evil that is Al Qaeda in whatever hole it chooses to hide in. All that is required for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing. No doubt we will hear a strong round of support for doing nothing from the left in the next few weeks.

Find the Leaks, But Don't Ask Us

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The Sadness of the Liberals

Our local paper graced it’s Op Ed page with an editorial from Ellen Goodman and one from Paul Krugman this evening. Nothing like having some balance! Neither editorial was really worth the waste of good trees and ink. Ellen was lamenting that Bush has “co-opted symbols”, and her special ire was directed at the yellow ribbons on the backs of vehicles, and of course ESPECAILLY those on the backs of SUVs. I don’t have one at this point, but if they bother Ellen that much, they might we worth sticking on.

She sees “support the troops” as a proxy for “support their commander in chief”. She wants to be clear that she supports the troops, is very patriotic, she just doesn’t support what they are doing … and of course even though we live in a democracy where we have elections and Bush won, she doesn’t support him either. He keeps talking about “War on Terror”, and “911”, and he should just stop, it is awful and disgraceful, and it just bothers Ellen SO much!

I think can understand. It would be like if I had a “Support the NEA” sticker on my vehicle, but my real position was that public schools are a disaster, the only thing they are good at is teaching kids gay sex, rap music, and crime, and any student wasting their time going there was doomed to failure. Oh, and I hate the Democrats saying “it’s all about the children”. BUT, I’m really pro-public school, and VERY pro-teacher. All my criticism is based on “support for teachers and public education”. I support them, I just don’t support what they are doing. Not that many teachers die in the line of duty though, so I guess the analogy isn’t quite exact.

Krugman was in his usual “all is lost mode” relative to Iraq. It is wrong, it was always wrong, there isn’t anything right about it, it can’t get better, it can only get worse, Bush is stupid, Bush is a liar, we should get out ASAP, we have lost, lost big, the sky has fallen, might as well just kill ourselves as wait for the terrorists that we are creating to come and do it for us. There just isn’t any doom and gloom dark enough for Paul. I’ve always been against assisted suicide, but if only we could elect Bush to a 3^rd term I’d say that would have to be the best idea for Paul.

I think holidays bring out the worst in liberals. Thanksgiving and Christmas are always hard on them … things like God and family involved. They don’t believe in the God part, don’t like the fact that some people that celebrate the holiday DO believe. Usually don’t like the family thing … lots of imperfection, probably some idiot relative that watches Fox and listens to talk radio, nobody should have to be exposed to that. People aren’t genuine, how can anyone be happy when Bush is President? Holidays make no sense.

July 4^th is a really tough one. Patriotism and liberals is always a touchy subject. They are absolutely sure that they are really the only TRUE patriotic Americans. They just don’t like flags (too showy), or fireworks (pollution and noise), or grilling (pollution, People Eating Tasty Animals (PETA)), marching bands (too military, too regimented, too “Red State”) and most of all, that whole “rockets red glare” thing. The idea that America was born in war and war is often required to preserve their freedom to constantly find the worst in the country. That is a tough concept for them. They have a hard time really coming to grips with what they like the least, but the whole experience is very uncomfortable, and doesn’t feel like a holiday to them.

Liberals like MLK day. They can march in the streets and talk about how bad it still is in America, it is a celebration of badness and struggle. It is a celebration of the flaws of America, and those they love to celebrate. They love Earth Day. Again, they can point to pollution and all that isn’t right. We haven’t signed Kyoto. Labor Day is probably the most major holiday that liberals love. It celebrates labor, how hard labor has it, and how much we all need unions. More unions, more union dues, more money for Democrats. They like Halloween; witches worship nature, and trying to scare the weak is the favorite liberal strategy of all.

The plight of liberals is tragic. All those holidays celebrating God, home and hearth … Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and those celebrating country in a positive light … Memorial Day and July 4^th tend to get much more attention than the liberal holidays. Yet another part of an unfair world in which liberals are forced to make their sad way.

Congratulations Canada and Bush

Public Radio is often the source of news that they really don’t even realize is news. For years we have been hearing how backward and conservative the US is for not recognizing gay marriage. Republicans want to “turn back the clock” to the bad old days before liberals around the world made marriage for gays a standard right.

Driving to work this AM I hear that Canada! That bastion of socialism and amorality north of the border has JUST voted to officially recognize gay marriage as a nation. Today! Not in the 19^th century, but TODAY, 6-29-2005! What is more, this makes them the THIRD (3^rd) nation on the planet to recognize this important union. The other two are the Netherlands and Belgium. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany? They are all as “backward” and “19^th Century” as the poor old stodgy USA? Even if every other country on the planet had recognized marriage between gays, bi-sexuals, random mammals, and space aliens, it would really make no difference in the morality of the issue, but the media has once again managed to hoodwink even those of us that don’t generally believe in it to believing that the US was really “behind the times”.

Next topic, the economy. It is always amazing how negative the media can be on the economy with a Republican in the White House. The Economy grew at 3.8% for the first quarter of this year, matching the rate for the final quarter of ’04. Remember Kerry and most of the media talking about how the economy is “abysmal”, and “Bush is lying about the economy”? Apparently he was lying in exactly the same way he was lying that elections would be held in Iraq in January 2005. What is more, the Growth now has exceeded 3 percent for eight straight quarters, the longest stretch in almost two decades. Hmm, almost two decades … that would put it back in the times of ??? wait, RONALD REAGAN.

Now there is an odd thought, I could swear there was another president in between there? Some guy that had trouble keeping his mind on work at the office? Oh yea, President Bubba, he was supposed to have a GREAT economy … but strangely the growth rate over a lot of his presidency was quite anemic. He DID preside over a marvelous stock market bubble and super things like Enron, but somehow he was never able to achieve 8 straight quarters of over 3% growth. Somehow, I would expect that this story will not be one of the “biggies” that the media chooses to focus on.

A lot of understanding the news today in America seems to rely on getting “the rest of the story”.

Lost Property, Kelo

Today’s Supreme Court decision in “Kelo vs The City of New London” isn’t really getting a lot of media play, but is a giant step for the left down the road of removal of property rights. The decision allows government to use the power of “Eminent Domain” to take property from private individuals and groups for “public good”. “Public good” is not now limited to roads, bridges, or civic buildings, but the property taken can be given to another individual for development simply because the government deems the new use to be for “greater good”. Higher property tax revenue was one of the “greater goods” listed.

While this ruling is horribly serious, and this site is serious as well, there is a little humor involved. http://www.freestarmedia.com/index.html has a pointer to a press release where guy named Logan Clements is moving to petition the town of Weare NH to allow him to build a hotel on the current site of Judge Souter’s home. The Hotel would have more tax revenue, and bring people into the community as tourists, which would be better for the community than the Judge’s home. Identical justification to that the city of New London used in it’s successful argument that the homes of Susette Kelo and others should be taken to make way for a Hotel and Office complex. The Hotel would be known as the “Lost Liberty Hotel”, and would contain the “Just Desserts” dining room. Rather than a Bible in each room, there would be a copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”. Clements says it is “no hoax”, they really want to build a hotel.

The justices that voted for this one were Souter, Ginsberg, Stevens, Breyer, and Kennedy. Kennedy was the “swing vote”. The fact that the left of the court went for this one shows that removal of property rights remains a part of their agenda. “Unlimited Government” is their consistent cry, and this decision provides them a huge lever. In many cases it will be the poor that suffer because tracts of housing where they live can be gobbled up by developers that will provide new uses that will be more lucrative for the city. One of the constant lies of the left about “caring for the poor” is exposed by this ruling. The left “cares” in the fact that they want to maintain a significant, and if possible, increasing number of poor, to vote democrat. Their real allegiance is however to unlimited government. If some poor folks are damaged and some rich folks benefited on the way to the removal of property rights and ever greater government control, then they accept that as part of the bargain.

Kelo allows local governments to take private property for what they deem to be “better use”. The potentials for abuse on MANY fronts are many, but here are two from opposite sides of the spectrum. There is a little town to the south here that has an adult book, movie, etc store that snuck in under zoning restrictions. What stops the local village from going in and taking the property and getting a developer to put a gas station or truckstop there? Nothing now. However, while I might applaud that action, what about a church (such as the one that I attend) that sits on prime real estate next to a park with great views and close to downtown? The church provides zero taxes to the community, a set of luxury condos could be a nice tax base. A whole other set of folks would applaud that action. Our founding fathers abhorred government having that kind of power because it encourages abuse. It took the 5^th amendment for there to be eminent domain at all, now we have the power released for whatever whim local governments may have.

The leftward legislative action of the court continues unabated, and sadly, Souter a Bush Sr appointee is consistently on the left. O’Connor and Kennedy regularly provide the swing votes. The media constantly calls THIS a “conservative court”, but rulings like Kelo show that to simply be a lie. Remember 2000? All the claims that O’Connor “elected Bush because she was going to retire”? Bush was going to be able to “stack the court” in even his first term? No vacancies, O’Connor is still there. Even if a very conservative judge is able to be confirmed and replace Rehnquist, we are no better off than today. It will take at least one, and likely two appointments beyond Rehnquist to simply stem the tide of new legislation from the bench, let alone have any sort of a chance to overturn some of this trash.

Miles Gone By

Not even slow savoring could prevent getting to the end of “Miles Gone By” by William F Buckley. Very hard to imagine a life more blessed than his, and hard to picture someone making better use of that blessing than WFB. Intelligence, faith, fearlessness, great family, wealth, super education, exciting and rewarding work, great experiences in life, and the list just goes on and on.

Born to privilege, his youth was spent in Mexico, Paris, England, and much at a mansion in Connecticut called “Great Elm”. By virtue of time spent in his youth, he always spoke fluent Spanish and French as well as English, with a good deal of Latin and German thrown in from his education. Lots of horseback riding, including being in events at Rhinebeck, NY, just north of Hyde Park, where the box alongside his fathers, was that of FDR. Much sailing as a young man, a passion that he never gave up.

He did prep school at St Johns, Beaumont, in Windsor England … the very same Windsor where the name “Windsor Castle” comes from. His father took him to the airport to watch the plane of Neville Chamberlain land when he returned from negotiations with Hitler to announce “peace in our time”.

He was in the military service stateside towards the end of the War, and then on to Yale, graduating in 1950, as the class orator, I suspect with some level of honor.

 He wasn’t all business, he learned to fly in college and had a number of misadventures in airplanes, including deciding after only a couple of flights with the instructor that he would let a friend that had been a pilot in the war fly himself to Logan airport in Boston, and WFB would just fly the plane back, his first solo! The trip in was uneventful, but Buckley didn’t know how to use the radio, so took off without telling the tower, had navigational difficulties, and night was falling too fast, so he luckily found an airport, made his first solo landing and hitchhiked back to Yale. The kind of foolish and fearless personality that would perform a stunt like that often ends up dead, but sometimes they end up famous.

His first book at age 26 was “God and Man At Yale”, and it caused a huge stir. It was the first book to explicitly make that charge that higher education in the US had become anti-Christian, anti-Capitalist, and in many cases Anti-American. Leading edge thought in those days. The formulation; “I believe that the duel between Christianity and Atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle produced on another level.” is a brilliant summary of a lot of what has happened in America and the world since the 50’s.

His list of friends, associates, acquaintances is utterly amazing. Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Whittaker Chambers, Roger Moore, John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman (nice pair of economists there), Claire Booth Luce, Alstair Cooke, Princess Grace, Vladimir Horowitz, Tom Wolfe, Barry Goldwater, Walter Cronkite, and on and on.

More than any other conservative of the era 1960-1980+, he was THE intellectual powerhouse of the movement, National Review was the publication of record, and “Firing Line” was the ONLY place where one could learn that there were at least one other side to most things presented in the media on TV. Liberals often loved to hate him, but they could not ignore the force of his intellect. He points out in one place, relative to his being in debates when running for Mayor of NYC; “It was widely speculated that I had an advantage, having in pursuit of unpopular ideas been frequently been required to face the opposition. I suspect-and admission against personal interest-that those points I have scored are primarily on account of their own cogency, rather than on account of any personal adeptness at formulating them.”

While he isn’t known as a modest man, in this case he is being a bit too modest, but he has a point as well. Since liberalism remains the dominate thinking in the mass media, not very many liberals have a solid understanding of how to defend their points. Their ideas are presented as the "universal"  ideas, why do they need to be defended? What WFB understood, and was able to articulate well is that the conservative position attempts very strongly to be CONSISTENT. Consistency means that there is a lot less to learn. 

Liberals need to recall that an unborn child has no right to any sort of life, but a Snail Darter in a stream somewhere has nearly unlimited rights to stop all manner of development. Kosovo is a great place to go to war without UN backing, Iraq, a few miles down the road is a TERRIBLE place to go to war without UN backing … oh, and by the way, genocide is an excellent justification in Kosovo, but it is a “who cares” in Iraq. It could go on for pages, but the point is when most of your positions are made up out of feelings, the phase of the moon, and political considerations on a given day, keeping it all straight can get very difficult. The best strategy is to curl your lip and look like you are going to cry like Bill Clinton. 

From the right though, one can lean back in their chair and pounce on the liberals like the intellectual tiger that was Buckley, and is not likely to be soon duplicated.

While he had a huge positive impact on history, the point that strikes me the most from the book is the intellect, the wit, the faith, and the pure joy of his life. His short essay on a pilgrimage to Lourdes is alone worth the price of admission. His experiences at sea, his love of sailing, boats, navigation, skiing, wines, racing at sea, and his trip to the Titanic aboard the Nautile are all captivating and so well written. He recounts how he had been told that; “Offshore yacht racing is like standing in an ice cold shower tearing up thousand dollar bills”.

I write this on a day when one of the Walton heirs, number seven richest in the world, died in an ultra light aircraft near Jackson Wyoming. Many of the wealthy realize that challenge, risk, and loss of physical comfort are an unavoidable part of living a worthwhile life. You can’t really buy the skill to compete in an off shore yacht race, and you certainly can’t buy the weather.

I’m very glad I bought a high quality hardcover of this one. I hope to pull it down off the shelves and give it a read once every decade or so as long as I’m around!

The End of Faith, Sam Harris

https://www.amazon.com/End-Faith-Religion-Terror-Future/dp/0393327655

Since the last post reminded me of the book, I dug it out for some comment. For those that are interested, the author has a Web Page. http://www.samharris.org/index.php/samharris/about/

My title for the book would be “the end of tolerance”, because that is really what it is a about. Some quotes:

Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal” or they will unmake our world.” (The assertion being that it is too dangerous to have religion and WMD on the planet at the same time … although apparently Communism and Nazism were relatively harmless by comparison -- no need to wipe those out).

One of the central themes of this book, however, is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma; they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned the right to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very idea of religious tolerance – born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God – is one of the principle forces driving us towards the abyss.

While religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.

The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.

Religious unreason should acquire an even greater stigma in our discourse, given that it remains among the principle causes of armed conflict in our world.

I could go on, and on, and … well, you get the picture. Let’s just say that he doesn’t like religion, and thinks his ideas are a lot better. He doesn’t like to get very direct about his “final solution”, although one doesn’t have to read between his lines very much to realize that he sees religious faith as a “clear an present danger”. One could easily argue that killing the faithful would be justified for those enlightened by the FACTS given the severity of their “madness”, but of course he doesn’t want to say that directly. 

He does say; “People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in the halls of power.” He makes it clear that we need to learn to discriminate against those of faith. That thought is of course not particularly new. It goes back to throwing Christians to the lions in Rome, gassing Jews in Germany, or sending the faithful to the Gulag or worse in the joyous and completely secular paradise of the USSR.

The man has a PHD from Stanford that he is pretty proud of, yet he seems to have missed some of the more basic aspects of history. Godlessness has certainly been tried before, very frequently in fact. Strangely, when “freed” from the “shackles” of faith, men seem to beat a rather rapid path to mass killing of those that they don’t enjoy for some reason or another. Religious faith, color of skin, potential to be a threat, using more resources than thought to be returned by their “value”, questioning the superiority of those in power, or quite commonly just for that little “thrill” that those who have thrown off all concerns of potential future judgment by some “higher power” seem to find "enticing'. 

After all, once one starts down the path of breaking as many of those backward mythological commandments as they can, that admonition to “not kill” always seems to hit the Saddam, Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin types as being way too restrictive. For some reason, once that little line has been crossed, it seems a thirst that is very hard to slake even when the numbers of victims rise into the millions. 

I’m sure that a PHD from Stanford has a perfect explanation as to why this really isn’t a concern, or maybe even some idea of “what unusual thing happened to those fine atheist men”, but it is enough to make us poor foolish Christian types wonder if there might not be such a thing as “evil”, or even a “force of evil” out there in the world . Somehow he fails to touch on such an explanation in the book.

Other than not tolerating religious thought, his other key message (not always stated directly) is that all religion is equal, and pretty much equally bad. For some reason, there is no reason to differentiate between religions and consider if some have more merit than others. It is a bit strange really since he is of the opinion that religion is just a “made up idea” … which of course so is everything else in his book, including the words, punctuation, and all the ideas that he presents as “better”. If there is no God, than EVERTHING that is the stuff of thought is "made up" ... language, love, beauty, compassion -- pure imagination. 

If some ideas turn out to be “religion” might that make all ideas just too dangerous to mess around with? Couldn’t virtually any old idea suddenly become “dangerous”? What if some folks thought there was a spacecraft behind a comet and committed suicide to get a ride? (it happened, Heaven’s gate cult).

 How about if some folks decided that we were created by space aliens? (see Raelians, they were in the news for trying to clone humans a couple years ago). Maybe these groups are too small. How about a whole country that worships their leader as God? They meet that rationality of worshiping something that exists, so we should focus on the danger of religion, and not on such rational people? As quoted from a North Korean site:

Some people worship God or money or great men or heroes. But our worship of great Marshal Kim Jong Il is quite different from that of religion, material or any individual. It is an absolute reverence and worship for the savior of the fate of the nation and humankind and the only extraordinary leader.

One can easily see how we should blanch in fear at the thought of Lutheran ladies in Lake Woebegon attending Sunday services, but be exceedingly thankful that the rational folks in N Korea have not only seek to acquire nuclear weapons, but have managed to leave the myths of the past behind and worship their leader, Kim Jong Il. Nobody can possibly be worried about THAT, right? Better hunt down the Church Basement Ladies before they do something dangerous. 

Harris falls into the same pit as Druyan. He has immense faith in his ideas and his religion of atheism. Ultimate and eternal faith in fact. He fails to see that the problem is with man, not with God, nor even ideas about God. There are many ideas manifestly created by man that are dangerous in the extreme, and for which millions have died for. Harris is unconcerned about these. 

From reading the book, it is clear that he is quite concerned about the idea that religion might set limits on human pleasure. One such quote: “Anyone who believes that God is watching us from beyond the stars will feel that punishing peaceful men and women for their private pleasure is perfectly reasonable.”

While the generalization is of course absurd, it shows that he finds religion to be restrictive, and potentially, if such people are in charge of a country, such restrictions could be imposed on him. If there is no God, then there is no reason that Sam or Ann could not be “god”. In the liberal utopia each person is god, but for some reason there always seems to be a disagreement over which one is the “top god”, and then the killing begins.

Druyan, The Evils of Religion

I was forwarded a link http://www.csicop.org/si/2003-11/ann-druyan.html to an article by Ann Druyan, Karl Sagan’s second wife, on the evils of religion. It reminded me of a book that I read before Christmas; “The End of Faith”, by Sam Harris. A few quotes from Ann;

“I think we still have an acute case of post-Copernican-stress syndrome. We have not resolved the trauma of losing our infantile sense of centrality in the universe. And so as a society we lie to our children. We tell them a palliative story, almost to ensure that they will be infantile for all of their lives. Why? Is the notion that we die so unacceptable? Is the notion that we are tiny and the universe is vast too much of a blow to our shaky self-esteem?”

“The Bible says that the Earth is flat. The Bible says that we were created separately from the rest of life. If you look at it honestly, you have to give up these basic ideas, you have to admit that the Bible is not infallible, it's not the gospel truth of the creator of the universe. So what did we do? We made a corrupt treaty that resulted in a troubled peace: We built a wall inside ourselves. It made us sick. In our souls we cherished a myth that was rootless in nature. What we actually knew of nature we compartmentalized into a place that could not touch our souls. The churches agreed to stop torturing and murdering scientists. The scientists pretended that knowledge of the universe has no spiritual implications.”

“What I find disappointing about most religious beliefs is that they are a kind of statement of contempt for nature and reality. It's absurdly hubristic. It holds the myths of a few thousand years above nature's many billion-yeared journey. It says reality is inferior and less satisfying than the stories we make up.”

I won’t quote from Harris at this point, only point out that he is generally more militant. So what does an “infantile Christian” have to say about this?

First of all Gödel's first incompleteness theorem says that:

For any formal theory in which basic arithmetical facts are provable, it's possible to construct an arithmetical statement which, if the theory is consistent, is true but not provable or refutable in the theory

In other words, “no complete formal theory of the universe from within the universe”. We are in a box, a box which seems to us to be a very big box, but there will never be any formal system (science) that completely describes the box, let alone describes the meaning of the box.

Second, Ann (and Harris) seem to want to have “souls”. They somehow “believe there is more”, they are just certain that they know what that “more” ISN’T. It ISN’T “God” in any of the senses of any of the existing Religions (well maybe Buddhism for Harris), but it clearly isn’t the Christian / Biblical description. They may claim to not have faith, but they actually have quite a lot of faith:

1. They have a strong faith that there isn’t an afterlife that would have a penalty for unbelief. Pascal’s wager essentially says that if you want to “withhold judgment”, what you really need to do is all you can to be a believer. If you are wrong, you potentially forgo some questionable earthy pleasures of sin, but if right, you obtain eternal bliss. If you take the other choice, one had better be VERY sure (which you can’t be, scientifically), because failure to believe will earn eternal punishment.
   
2. They have faith that what they think they observe is what they are actually observing. Movies like The Matrix or items from science fiction like the holodeck on Star Trek give clues that reality may or may not be what we think it is. Quantum mechanics tells us that “we can’t know what it is”. Is it energy (wave) or matter (particle) … apparently “both”, but potentially neither. A lot of the smugness of science comes from its success at making predictions of how things operate in “human scale”. At very small sizes, and very high speeds, the smugness becomes “uncertainty”. There is a lot of difference between being happy with the information science provides where it can provide, and making the jump to it being “ultimate knowledge”.
   
3. They have faith that in their intellect and experience as superior to thousands of years of Judaic-Christian and other religious teaching, and their individual reality is superior to the experience of billions. They see their experience and knowledge as valid and one supposes “adult”, while the experience and knowledge of billions is “infantile”. It is the billions over thousands of years who are guilty of “hubris”? Could there be any emotion involved in that sort of judgement? 

Humans can live without faith about as well as they live without oxygen. We may not know a lot, but we ought to be aware that we are very limited finite beings living in either an infinite, or effectively infinite from our perspective, universe. The “bridge” is faith … in our senses, in our minds, in the physics we think we see, and basically in “order”.

Science believers and religious believers have that core belief in “order” in common. If there is no order in the universe then there are no principals for science to discover. A core matter of faith is where that order came from. The complete materialist scientists like Druyan choose to believe that order was created by random accident, people with religious beliefs believe that order was created by purposeful intelligence (God).

Either position is in the final analysis a “leap of faith”, but much as Ann talks about what religious people “have to admit”, she may not quite be facing what she would “have to admit”. If all that we see springs from randomness. 

Then what would a “value”, or “right and wrong” be? Nothing but a “myth”, or a “story we make up”. The only “moral principle” in that universe is the fittest survive, or might makes right. We have the freedom to pick which universe we live in, but don’t expect those that believe in a universe with no morals to advertise what the wages of picking their approach really are.