Month: August 2011

What I find admirable about Glenn Beck is that he has performed a very simple, and invaluable role: he has seen work that needed to be done, and gone after it. Is he THE man for the job? Of course not. No one is. George Washington was not the man for the job, and he unquestionably spent many nights in deep despair.

The people who make a difference in this world are those who see work that needs to be done, look to see if it is getting done, and if not, step in and start. You will never be good enough. You will never be smart enough. But if you are there and start, miracles can happen.

As Teddy Roosevelt put it (and I do disagree with Glenn in his analysis of TR, although I will grant that his large ego, which put Wilson in the White House, was enormously damaging in 1912): “Do what you can, with what you have, and do it now.”

Those are words to live by. That is all this blog, and my other website, are: efforts to create at least one place on the internet dedicated to dealing seriously with questions of moral relativism, and in thinking through all important aspects of our current cultural and political life. Better thinking always leads to better doing.

I don’t get out much on the internet–I tend to go to the same places–but I don’t know of any blogs or websites quite like what I have created. This is what I did, with what I had, and what I will continue doing, with whatever I have in the future.

Ann, I’m single. Just sayin’.

Few stats: legs long enough to reach the floor.

Have both hair and eyes.

Have a nice bass boat. It’s out for repair, but Junior says he’ll have it back any day now, in time for the competition.

Rent my very own residence.

No tattoos visible when I’m wearing my suit. I looked quite gentlemanly last week down at the courthouse. I really think it helped.

They tell me my road will get paved next year.

Well, if that doesn’t do it, nothing will. Drop me a line. I’m sexy: trust me.

P.S. Oh, and if you could spot me a C note until next Friday, I’d love you forever.

As I view the matter, IQ measures processing capacity, your ability to manipulate spatial, numerical or verbal data accurately and quickly. The person with the high IQ finishes the math test first. They are the first to assemble the something that needed assembling. They know facts and figures about the world, and they tend to use grammar correctly.

All of these things are important. In general, given equal characters, the smarter person will always accomplish more than a dumber person.

At the same time, IQ does not imply a capacity for imagination. Einstein himself said that imagination is more important than intelligence, and the reason he said this, in my view, is that the most useful thinking operates not on existing information, but potential information, paradigmatic information.

IQ enables you to easily navigate existing trails. You can go farther, faster, with less trouble. But it does not necessarily allow you to go traipsing miles back into the bush, just to see what is there. That is a personality trait, one which implies courage, curiosity, and the capacity to imagine LACK, to realize that all the things we “know” may pale dramatically in comparison to the things we SHOULD know, and have been too arrogant, too paradigmatically fixated, to even pursue, much less find.

Let me put it this way: our Defense Dept. network was hacked some years back by a person in Russia using the most basic computer imaginable. It was not the processing speed which did it, but the creativity and persistence of the person operating it.

Tools matter, and intelligence is a tool, but the spirit operating that machine–and I do conceive of the brain as a machine, but one which I in a spiritual form operate–is what matters most.

Is declaring a given law “unConstitutional” anything other than a veto? Prior to Roe v. Wade, many laws existed limiting access to, or prohibiting outright, the murder/destruction of unborn fetuses.

All of those laws were vetoed, after they had been passed by duly elected representatives of the people, and signed into law by their Executives.

Again, I think a two thirds vote in Congress should be able to wipe any ruling from the books, and the President should have no say in it. As the most diffuse, heterogeneous body in our system of government, the bulk of the power was always intended to rest with Congress, particularly in domestic affairs.

I think a few words on “Evolution” are in order. First, the parentheses: they are there because few dispute that change over time happens. There is no reason not to assume some sort of familial relation at some point in the distant past between Homo Sapiens and, say, the Neanderthals. Just look at a chart of dog breeds and will readily understand that selection, per se, has long been practiced and understood the world over.

What is at issue is the hypothesis that life came into being through Natural Selections, Darwin’s actual big idea, and that the diversity of form plainly evident on Earth was likewise the result of what might be termed “Change plus retention”.

We hear the argument about the monkeys and Shakespeare. This is not a good argument, because what the Natural Selectionists will argue is that once a monkey types To Be, that phrase is retained. When they type “or not to be”, that, too is retained. Given enough time, this retentive/memory mechanism will not only produce Shakespeare, but be CERTAIN to produce Shakespeare.

In the wild, this amounts to what a later theorist called “survival of the fittest”, where fitness is always context dependent. Woolly Mammoths did great in the cold, not so much when things warmed up (at least as I understand it).

Intelligence, on this analysis, is a positive adaptation, one with clear survival value, hence me typing letters on a globally networked electronic tool.

The problem they have, and it is in my view an insoluble one within their paradigm, meaning necessarily that some necessary component is missing, is that of complexity. Darwin himself saw and understood the problem that a system like the eye creates.

The eye operates as a finely tuned machine, but one which only has ANY value when the parts are taken in aggregate. The same can be said of the cell itself, the basic unit of life. The same can be said for MANY biological systems.

Necessarily, Natural Selection is linear. The example given is of a countless series of digits on a large lock. The first digit is 7. After you try the other 9 digits, you hit it, and the change is retained. Then you go to lock number 2. That number is 3. You get it, then go to lock 3, which is a 2 also, etc.

Aesthetically, this is a very pleasing conception for some. It conveys an “intelligence”–an order–to Nature, without the need to posit anything like a God.

Yet, if we look at the actual fossil record, and life as it exists today, what has happened both in the past and now is that digits are getting dialed in simultaneously, such that 72257 suddenly appears, without warning. The piece is of a whole, with no antecedants. That is all that an eye or a cell is: an unexplainable statistical aberration whose regular occurence cannot be explained with a linear model.

In my view, field theories of life will need to be reincorporated into the so-called “life sciences” in order to resolve this conundrum. In my own view, “evolution” plainly happened, but that there is sticky property to the universe such that information, once developed, is maintained in a sort of record depository in the sky.

One book that I thought dealt well with this topic was “Science and the Akashic Record”. I cannot support the authors politics, but this book was in my view useful, even though I did not share all his conclusions. I have read many books on the topic. That one comes to mind first. Michael Behe, of course, is perhaps the best known. I have not read his books, since I already accept his premise, and have seen no intelligent counterarguments. As with all important topics–at least to me–I have done this debate many times in many places, and am confident in my views.

Rick Perry, in short, is on solid ground noting gaps in the Darwinian account of the genesis of life. Personally, I would support the right of Texans to teach Creationism as an alternative viewpoint, after discussing the Darwinian view, but what I most want to see is, first, the scientific gaps noted; and longer term what is really needed is actual SCIENTISTS chasing what I believe will be a culture altering paradigmatic shift, one that will attened actually figuring out how life works.

Oi. Should I take it as a compliment that some of my posts disappear, even though they have no profanity and stay on topic? I don’t know. Be that as it may, I have learned to always copy my text before hitting post, so that I can do what I am doing right here. If I took the time to write it, it may as well wind up in cyberspace somewhere.

This is my response to this article/hit piece/journalistic low road: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/08/23/rejecting_man-made_global_warming_disqualifies_perry-comments.html

I trust people who know what they know, and know what they don’t know. I don’t trust people like you who don’t know what they don’t know, and infer from that they are really, really smart.

I HAVE studied the data and the arguments used to support the Anthropogenic Global Warming conjecture, and have found it not just wanting, but farcical to any serious mind capable of the most elementary pattern recognition.

Here is a summary I wrote 3 years or so ago: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2008/01/global-warming.html

My case has only strengthened since then. As an example, in this piece I talk about the criticisms of the Mann Hockey Stick hypothesis, noting that serious statisticians found serious flaws in it, and noting that the data appears to have been cherry picked to generate a specific result, one which conflicted with all the analysis that preceded it, and which was Exhibit A for Algore and his Payattentiontome Parade.

Well, we now have email correspondance from the person, Phil Jones, who had responsibility for the primary data set, saying he would destroy the data rather than give it to the people who had been asking for it. The criticism was plainly valid. All serious “researchers” have to remove the Hockey Stick from their arsenal.

I think you are misguided in thinking that the bulk of Americans still buy into this hooey. Educated elitists like you, who think things are true because they happen in classrooms somewhere, are out of touch with the common sense of people who well understand that money corrupts, and that there is a LOT of money in supporting the AGW conjecture.

According to this li

As of 2011, the Chief Justice of the United States receives an annual salary of $223,500, and the Associate Justices receive annual salaries of $213,900.

Think about our current situation. Obamacare is going to cost the American taxpayers trillions of dollars. It is costing us, in all likelihood, hundreds of billions of dollars now. Bureaucracies are being set up, people hired, standards set, regulations written by unelected partisan hacks. Something on the order of the Social Security Administration is being created.

A number of Appellate courts have already found that the insurance mandate is both intrinsic, and unConstitutional. What the fuck are these dumbasses doing? (You will note I don’t swear often, viewing it as superfluous if the verbiage is otherwise accurate; but I have no moral objections to it).

They make the same money that CEO’s of mid-size companies make, and have jobs for life. Why can’t they stop their cribbage game or whatever it is they do all day, and take this up?

I have argued before and will continue to argue that our Constitution became flawed after Marbury v. Madison, an outcome that Jefferson among others anticipated. Specifically, in a system built on checks and balances, there is no remedy to the abuse of the power of the courts.

Abortion, for example, cannot be made illegal anywhere by any legislature, because the Supreme Court determined that hidden somewhere in a secret code only the priests could decipher, the right to abortion was enshrined in a document written in an age when the very concept was not something people mentioned in public.

Patently, they decreased the freedom of Americans to make our own laws. No one can protest. This is the nature of the beast.

Logically, there needs to be a legislative remedy to this situation, and the most sensible one is the ability of Congress to override Supreme Court decisions. The Supreme Court was intended to be the court of last refuge for nationally important cases. It was not intended to create laws that could not be altered by the Will of the People. Such an idea would have been abhorrent to ALL of our Founding Fathers.

As I see it, a two thirds vote in both houses of Congress should be sufficient to strike any specific Supreme Court decision from the record, resetting the case law to its condition prior to that ruling. I am no lawyer, and there may be some smarter way to do this, but something like that is needed.

We also need to create a mechanism by which these retards can be forced to do their jobs over some reasonable time horizon. In issues of profound importance, Congress should be able to order them to hear specific cases, and render decisions within some reasonable amount of time, say 6 months. There is very little which needs to be said that cannot be said in 6 months.

It is said that the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow because they grind exceedingly fine. This may be true, but if the grist is in the other building because the grinder is taking a really long nap, it is not out of order for the more percipient to be angry and wake him the hell up.

I am not particularly grumpy today, but in my more lucid moments I see the extent of the gap between what is possible and what is happening, and it sucks the wind right out of your gut. It makes you dizzy, like standing onthe edge of a very tall cliff.

Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why do we live this way, and not intelligently? Oh, I wish I knew. That is my daily preoccupation.

I sense at times that we exist in boxes within boxes, prisons within prisons. This is the fundamental Hindu intuition, that there are levels of consciousness, which is to say there are also levels of ignorance. To be ignorant is to be confined in your behavior and awareness. This is, functionally, a prison, since the only purpose of a prison is to limit your physical motion.

Some years ago, I read with interest what was effectively a long essay by Doris Lessing, titled “Prisons we choose to live within”, and found it both instructive and entertaining. You may as well.

An old man once sought out a teacher known for his wisdom. He said him: “I am old and will soon die, and I need to ask your forgiveness for a great crime I committed in my youth. I loved a girl, but she did not love me, so in a fit of rage I raped and killed her. No one ever knew who did it but me. Please forgive me.”

The teacher said: “No man can ever redeem any other. I cannot forgive you, because I do not hate you, and my own feelings in any event mean nothing. What you have to do is live with the picture of that crime until you can stand across from that woman in peace. There is no time for that now, in this lifetime. You have sought me out only because you are hoping to continue to avoid paying for that crime. When you die, her image will be all you see. It will torture you. You will not only feel her pain, but the much greater pain of separation from all living souls which is necessary to commit such a crime. You will be covered in the darkness that existed in you when you did this, and you will be alone. The memories of living comforts, and the intuition of God will torture you. These are the true flames of hell, and you will wish that hell consisted in actual flames, as these will burn you from the inside out. Time will cease, and you will be conscious only of pain for a very long time.

Flames die down after a time, however, and when they do, you will be someone else, someone capable of empathy, someone capable of doing good.”

One advantage I can’t remember if I’ve pointed out is that I deal with the Third Rail of American politics, which is to say all those reallocations of capital via the government which people think are due them because they “put in their time”, or because they were born in the wrong place and time, and deserve to catch up, or something like that. Social Security and Medicare are the two most important ones.

They get funded. Money for nothing: it’s the mantra of the age, so why shouldn’t I add my rhyme and rhythym on that theme? You have to riff on the melodies you have.

(editorial note, I’m listening to Arrow, hence the insertion of musical symbolism. The song, appropriately enough, is “Bills”.)

Democrats: you can sell this to your base. Republicans: so can you.

Both of you need to wake the fuck up, though. Get those cobwebs out of your head.