"The dirty little secret ... is that every Republican in this country wants Obama to fail, but none of them have the guts to say so; I am willing to say it," - Rush Limbaugh.
Here's David Frum's take on Limbaugh:
"And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.
But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership? Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s."
David Frum is a conservative writer and former special assistant to George W. Bush.
I need some help understanding Ludwig Wittgenstein. What is he trying to say?
Wittgenstein is one of the break-through philosophers of the 20th century. By putting moral issues on a linguistic plane, he seemed to eliminate entire classes of questions as undefinable and thus unsolvable.
He had a Nietsche-like aphoristic style of writing. From his 1914-1916 notebooks.
"Eine der schwersten Aufgaben des Philosophen ist zu finden, wo ihn der Schuh druckt. Man versucht oft, zu grosse Gedankenlufte zu uberspringen und fallt dann mitten hinen.
"One of the most difficult of the philosospher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches. One often tries to jump over too wide chasms of thought and then falls in."
Perhaps his most famous aphorism is: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" where "speaking" is the formulation of a moral claim and "silence" is the inability to intelligibly resolve that claim. Wittgenstein forced a precision with the use of language that heretofore didn't exist, for example, in the consideration of these two sentences: "What is time" and "What is the time?" It is an over-simplification that he demolished logical positivism. To the contrary, he complimented Russell's work, for example, in Russell's "Theory of Definitions" and in his application of modal logic.
Videos of discussions of Wittgenstein, his work, and his ideas.
Many years ago, we got Dr. Dobson's book Dare to Discipline. Dobson began to throw hiself into right-wing politics. I became so disgusted at his uncritical support of the serial lies of George Bush, I came to the conclusion that I can no longer trust the doctor on anything, including questions on faith, parenting, or child care. I tossed his book, and I will no longer listen to or read anything that he publishes.
Credability and character is everything. And I have concluded that Dobson has no credability and character on anything. Thus, his decision to resign as chairman seems like a good career move.
While I'll never darken the door of the Supreme Court, it's pure oxygen to try to puzzle through a constitutional issue.
On the face of it, the answer might be: why not? The people in DC pay federal taxes and are subject to federal laws. However, "no taxation without representation" isn't in the constitution.
The constitution puts up a few barriers, most particularly the district clause in Article 1, Section 8. "[The Congress shall have Power] To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States. "
The District is not a state, as stipulated under Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3. "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. " This was subsequently subseded by paragraph 2, article 14. "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed."
However, that objection can be overcome by annexing the district into a surrounding state, such as Maryland or Virginia, or by making the district a state in its own right, with one representative and two sentators. The later alternative is unlikely, as it would shift the balance of power towards the democrats, despite the awarding of an additional electoral vote to Utah.
Other solutions would be to give back to Maryland all of the District except the small area where the main government buildings are located, or count the residents of the District as Maryland residents in determining the number of representatives in the House.
So says psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi to mobster Tony Soprano in the HBO series "The Sopranos."
Good advice? Of course. But there are complications that come to light when we start asking a few questions.
What is the object of forgiveness? If it is someone else, do they need to in some manner recognize the basis the existence of the offense that requires forgiveness? My answer: It helps, but it isn't necessary. Even if it is someone else, do we need to at the same time forgive ourselves for nursing and rehursing those resentments? My answer: Yes, while at the same time not losing sight of the depth of real pain that we may be suffering. While the ethics of forgiveness is found in all religions, Buddhism offers an interesting insight into the dynamic of forgiveness. " In contemplating the law of karma, we realize that it is not a matter of seeking revenge but of practicing metta and forgiveness, for the victimizer is, truly, the most unfortunate of all." Buddhists also encourage the development of disciplines that prevent the need for forgiveness is the first place, with emphasis of metta (loving kindness), karuna (compassion), and upokkha (equanimity).
How do you forgive? My answer: In some cases, as in those who are victims to horrific crimes, forgiveness comes only with time and struggle-- or not at all. At the end of the day, it must be an act of the will-- a desire to arise above the phantoms of hate and history. The medical and spiritual benefits of forgiveness are beyond dispute. So perhaps the question needs to be asked: Why do we have difficulty forgiving? My answer: For some people, be they victim or victimizer, forgiveness is a trivial act-- mere words.
Forgiveness, by itself, is of little use, especially if forgiveness in some way reinforces the original evil, especially if that evil is a function of some kind of authoriterian structure-- a disfunctional parent or a tyrannical ruler. Some people also feel better when they will not forgive. I believe that forgiveness can only occur in the context of justice and the development of personal character that is sometimes needed to ward off future insults to the soul I console myself that there is always a balancing out in life, and Emerson's essay on compensation has much influenced my view on this.
Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself, in a twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature; and secondly, in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing, and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the circumstance is seen by the understanding; it is inseparable from the thing, but is often spread over a long time, and so does not become distinct until after many years. The specific stripes may follow late after the offence, but they follow because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
It is good to forgive. "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ, God forgave you." But it is also hard to forgive. The imperative to forgive is the great challenge of our life.
I used to think that I was a very forgiving person, until I read a book about forgiveness - unfortunately I forget the name of the book - and realized that my forgiving someone was conditional on that person realizing that they had annoyed or upset or wronged me in some way and apologizing. Now I try to forgive unconditionally.
The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley Jr. wrote: “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
Buckley’s position, then, is not really populist. The ism of populism is the idea that the people are inherently more sound and virtuous than the elites. Buckley is saying, less categorically, that we live in an age when the people happen to possess better judgment than the professors. If the reverse were true, if the professors had more respect than the people for God’s laws and tradition’s wisdom, Buckley’s argument would have favored entrusting government pari passu (as he would have said) to scholars instead of citizens.
Professors are firstly people always and citizens generally. They are as qualified to serve on a jury as a plumber. Buckley wasn't deriding the ivory tower elites. To the contrary, his career was dedicated to the proposition that elites of which he was one have a significant and leading place in society. His conservatism stood in stark contrast to the know-nothing conservatism of the John Birch Society, for example. And Buckley influenced the creation of conservative thought tanks, journals, publishing houses, and university organizations. He wasn't claiming that Joe the Plumber had the same depth of wisdom as Justice Antonin Scalia. But he was affirming the core principle of democracy-- that decisions of American policy must represent the broadest range of the values of its citizens, and that without this kind of representation mistakes are more likely than not.
In the first year of Bush's second term, Bush went on a fifty city tour to press his Social Security plan. I noticed that without exception he excluded from these meetings dissenters. He did the same when he was deciding to invade Iraq. This kind of decision-making is a pervsion of what Buckley was suggesting and leads as sure as night follows day to bad decisions.
Barack Obama's degrees from Columbia and Harvard law school may be proof of intellectual agility, but they do not guarantee good sense.
True.
For this, as William Buckley suggested 45 years ago, we are better advised to rely on graduates of the University of Idaho, or even the opinions of stewardesses. But that doesn't follow at all. If this is what you believe, then you haven't read enough Buckley. No one was more democratic in his liking for the broadest range of people while subjecting himself to the highest levels of intellectual rigor from the best universities in the nation. The idea that Buckley would prefer to rely on a stewardess from Idaho than a professor from Yale on policy questions is strange, funny, and false.
I watched President Obama's address to a joint session of Congress. I thought the speech, while light on substance and filled with factual errors, was a consequential speech, promising bold action and a clear vision while trying to articulate the anxieties of the times. His best line: "Education is not a pathway to success - it is a prerequisite."
Governor Bobby Jindal's banal, childish speech was another matter. At first, I thought it was a SNL skit-- Daddy Oliver Warbucks fetches the bus-boy to step-and-fetch his thoughts. It was the difference between Will Smith and Steve Urkel, Mozart and Salieri. Jindal is supposed to be a rising star of the Republican Party. But, like another governor from the Great State of Alaska, he offers nothing new or good. If that is the best that the Republican Party can offer, then they will be with good reason in the wilderness for years to come.
Governor Bobby Jindel Strikes a Pose
Despite Jindal's Rhodes Scholar-tempered mind, I heard only shallowness, refined by the echo chamber that is Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Here are a few examples.
During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office, I'd never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: "Well, I'm the Sheriff and if you don't like it you can come and arrest me!" I asked him: "Sheriff, what's got you so mad?" He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go, when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn't go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, "Sheriff, that's ridiculous." And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: "Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!" Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and go start rescuing people.
But Democratic leaders in Congress -- they rejected this approach. Instead of trusting us to make wise decisions with our own money, they passed the largest government spending bill in history, with a price tag of more than $1 trillion with interest. While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a "magnetic levitation" line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called "volcano monitoring." Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.
And here is the truth. And here is more wingnut silliness galore.
Especially rich is the comment about volcano monitoring-- and this from someone from a state that suffered from Katrina. Why not go one step further and get rid of the entire National Weather Service?
Slash taxes? Let's see how towns and cities pay for their policemen, schools, and hospitals. Actually, raising corporate taxes will have the effect of forcing firms to retain earnings for re-investment in their companies, thus expanding employment and prosperity.
Welfare reform? I'm all for it, so long as we start first with the sprawling red-state agribusinesses that have suckled on the teat of farming price supports for the last half century as well as those firms that have sent tens of thousands of jobs overseas.
The intellectual bankruptcy of this speech is to be expected, for it is the natural consequence of the Republican's mantra that goverment is the problem, not the solution. And, if the government is the problem, why should the Republicans want to be part of the problem, unless their goal is to spear the beast from inside-- bring our government to its knees by their naysaying incompetence?
It is perhaps fitting that Jindal is the hope du jour for conservatives. After all, what can be more conservative than a man who changed his country, changed his name, and changed his religion? All that remains for him to change now is his speech writer.
I've never read anything more clueless about economics and investing. Nobody will want to buy the stock of those companies if that occurs, causing them to have trouble finding investors. A freshman college accounting student would know better than what you said there in that part I quoted above. No one wants to buy the stock of companies that are re-investing their profits and are expanding? I think it was you who was asleep in freshman economics. There are Japanese and Scandinanivan corporation have have thriving investors bases despite high corporate tax rates because of this. Growth stocks by definition have little or no earnings or dividends. Their stocks grow because investors make the distinction between the potential for earnings with present earnings, which is powered by retained earnings and increasing market share. The only question is to what extent will the government be a partner in facilitating the retention of those earnings through tax and fiscal policy. Your implied theory beloved by conservative ideologues-- that reducing corporate rates will increase tax revenues-- has been throughly debunked by your econ 101 professors.
I don't see any reason in principle why subjective morals should be less binding than objective morals.
Correct. We bind ourselves to our own ethical system without regard to whether we can see if it has an objective foundation.
But Kant's meta-ethics derives from the premise that the categorical imperative is objective. That is to say, moral questions are determined without regard to the person asking them or the cultural or temporal context in which those questions are asked. I take this position as well, as I place all such questions as axiomatically derived from what humans demonstrably are-- rational, autonomous, sentient, self-conscious, intentional, with blood and bones, with parents and life spans, and as members of families and tribes. This is the objective foundation of Kant's principle in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law" and "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end" and finally "Therefore, every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends."
These principles are of course the basis of the universalism that we see in the Declaration of Independence, the United Nations Charter and in genocide tribunals-- that right is not might and that right has an independent and transcending reality from any given individual but not from humanity generally.
The human brain is a muscle of sorts, so my question to inquiring minds would be; can the strength of the brain be increase through stressful situations. By applying pressure or stress on any other muscle in the body it would resolute in more strength, so why not the brain? I've been intrigued on the concepts of the brain and it's true power. So with that I will be conducting an experiment on myself and you are welcomed to join. The experiment involves one taking a basic test but one will undergo stressful situations while studying; for instances, their in a room with loud music and movement. I believe after the test is finsihed the person will pass with flying colors because the brain is stressed, so it will concentrate, focus harder, and become more alert. I can add the resolutes will be amazing. Can the brain grow? If one is not a believer I like to add that by reading more complex text, don't they become more mentally capable to read below their level.
Your post reminds me of the quote from Dr. Samuel Johnson: "The prospects of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully." While the brain isn't a muscle, it does benefits from active use and challenges. There are studies that suggest that keeping your mind stimulated can diminish the chance that you can become a victim to dementia or Alzheimers. Of course, the kind of stress that can make one person florish can make another person wilt.
I recently encountered a YouTube video of Chefoo School, the boarding school I attended between 1962 and 1964. I've included this in my account of my time at Chefoo. Read some more recollections here as well.
The next three grades were at Chefoo, a boarding school primarily for missionary kids in Cameroon Highlands, the central hills of Malaysia, about four hours drive from where Mom and Dad lived.
(Chefoo was named after a city of 100,000 on the coast of China where the boarding school was first established about 120 years ago. Dad accompanied 55 cows and other relief to China’s Chefoo in north Shantung in 1947 and reported that “it has an excellent harbor and the city nestles down along the sea coast. On the other side, there are hills that rise up to about 1,000 feet above sea level.”) Diesel yellow-roofed Mercedes Benz taxis would take us to the school but not before negotiating countless fantastic hairpin curves. The verse “I shall lift up my eyes until the hills” had a special poignancy to me, as Mom and Dad would give me a final hug and then leave around the playing field under the ridge to vanish. There was loneliness and homesickness. But the friendships would come and the adventures and the lasting memories. There were about 50 children at the school, between the ages of five and ten. Chefoo, patterned on the English boarding school system with its emphasis on reading, mathematics, and memorization, gave us strong academic skills. We liked being around kids our own age and background. My brother Tim’s favorite memory of Chefoo was Sports Day, where he jumped four feet on the high jump. “I jumped seven feet on the long jump,” Tim writes in 1967. “I rand in a race and won it.” Chefoo also left me with a life-long accent that can only be described as a hybrid of English, Australian, and South African. (The accent of mother and my relatives in Brisbane is more British than the classic Australian cockney accent that was derived from the early settlers, who were mostly convicts from London east-side.) On Sundays, we walked about a mile to All Souls, of the Church of England, where I came to appreciate a tradition that was different from my Low Baptist heritage. Slims, a nearby school for middle and high-school children of British military personnel, also provided worshipers to All Souls. (That school is today a training center for a Malaysian commando unit.) At an elevation of about 5,000 feet, the average temperature was a salubrious 70 degrees. Sometimes, misty clouds would sweep through the school. We felt none of the heat and humidity of the plains where my parents toiled.
Four-fifth of Malaysia, about the size of Florida, is covered by tropical forest covering mountains up to 7,000 feet high. This jungle is inhabited by tigers, elephants, bison, monkeys, gibbons, deer and bear, and is alive with all manner of insects, including malaria-bearing mosquitoes (we would always sleep under nets), bloodsucking leeches, pythons, and multi-colored birds, where orchids and rhododendron flourish. As a boy, I liked nothing better than to “jungle bash”—hike through these sometimes treacherous, always beautiful jungles. The hazards of jungle living was starkly demonstrated when a fellow student Peter Cox almost lost his life to a viper bite. Once, I threw a rock at a hornet’s nest. As I raced over the playing field followed by an angry swarm, I thought that might not have been the best idea. I went to bed that night with a throbbing head and new wisdom. While visiting my parents in Malaysia with sister Anne in the summer of 1972, I described the mountain jungle to Grandmother White. “What I enjoyed most about the Highlands is the landscape and the atmosphere,” I wrote. “Thick, indolent sunshine, a heavy gold light balancing the green and black jungle shadows—great lazy black butterflies and the scent of unseen flowers and a sweet afternoon languor.”
Chefoo exists now only in fond memories: our little gardens where we cultivated mainly mud; our go-cart, the Silver Streak; King, the Alsatian, who was eaten by a tiger (“Does anybody remember the tiger at the padang in Tanah Rata that a park ranger had shot?” Bill Hanna writes. “Its head was propped up on a chair, and all us kids were admiring it. Suddenly it rolled off the chair but looked like it was rolling over the get up. Scare the wits out of us!”) ; the bamboo strands and the Rajah Brooke butterflies; the jungle jim and sandpit; allowance day; marmite sandwiches and milk at “tea” time; building dams in the stream that wended through the property; sports day on the ridge (Leo forever!); looking for bullets in the Gurka military base near by (I once found a revolver that the teachers inexplicably confiscated).
And so the memories that bless and burn keep tumbling out.
I wrote to a Chefoo newsgroup that “my memories of Chefoo are positive, and I feel that I’ve lived a childhood of incredible adventure and privilege. But in these sunlit gardens of youth, there were snakes and shadows and sadness.” There was in my view an excess of collective punishment and sometimes cruel teachers. One such incident occurred perhaps around 1963. David Houliston, who is several grades ahead of me, picks up the story. “About that time, we visited the ridge with a lady teacher. We asked if we could go and explore—which we did. Only problem was that we got lost! I suggested we follow the sun and strike out due east—as that would bring us back down to the school. Which it did. Once back, there was a big hoo-hah. The smaller kids were queued up outside the headmaster’s door and whacked with a sneaker. We older boys were not beaten—this is where the psychological stuff comes in. We had to wait to be called to go to Fred Collard’s office. The first victim reported back that we would be reduced to tears—there was no possibility of holding out. Sure enough, we were shown in the Bible about how much God hates sin and that we should repent. We were then ordered to write “confessions” that would be sent to our parents (they never were)—which we did in our now blubbery state.” I was one of the little boys in that party, and so I was duly thrashed. With my over-active imagination, I wondered who would get us first—the tigers or the head hunters. I was also spanked for not eating rhubarb—and to this day I will not eat rhubarb. The punishment generally for talking after lights out was to stand outside the dorm memorizing a time tables. Needless to say, I had mastered the entire times table by fourth grade.
In April 2001, Dave and Fred again met in England, and this reunion perhaps is a fitting coda to our Chefoo experience. “The reason for our meeting is that I had written him a letter telling him about the hurt I felt he had caused me by wrongly punishing me at Chefoo School when I was 12 years old. I received a Zooty cartoon postcard from him saying that he apologized if he had misjudged me in the past and suggested we meet. He drives me to his house and after a cup of tea Fred and I set off for the pub for a lunch and a chat. Over the superb meal, we talk about Chefoo, about our families, and every now and then we touch on the more emotional issues that I had brought up in my letter. It is obviously not that easy for either of us—we both feel a bit nervous about it but at the same time don’t want to avoid it. He doesn’t remember the particular incident I was referring to although he does remember some of the incidents that happened around the same time. He say’s he’s glad I was open enough to write to him and was only sorry it had taken so long for us to come to talk about it. I begin to feel as if it was I who had misjudged. I also realize that he had not been at Chefoo very long when this happened. So what really happened to me emotionally when I was 12 years old? Time shifts things and makes a mystery of things.
“Strangely, I’m not surprised that Fred is so open to hearing the way I feel. That’s why I felt OK about writing to him. This is the intuition that I remember I had back in 1963. So the 12 year old me was right in that respect.
“Well, three cheers for Uncle Fred! Who else would have been so gracious? And three cheers for the 12 year old me! You did just great, kid!”
As a former lifelong Republican, son of a co-founder of the Religious Right; my late evangelical leader father, Francis Schaeffer, I'm in a unique position to tell you a few things about the Republicans from inside perspective. (As you know I left that movement in the mid 1980s.)
The lack of cooperation you're getting from the Republican Party will continue. You were right to indulge in a little bit of tokenism when you had to Pastor Rick Warren pray at your inauguration. But if you think that the Republicans in Congress and the Senate are going to do more than their utmost to obstruct everything you are and what you stand for you're dreaming.
As someone who appeared numerous times on the 700 Club with Pat Robertson, as someone for whom Jerry Falwell used to send his private jet to bring me to speak at his college, as an author who had James Dobson giveaway 150,000 copies of my one of my fundamentalist "books" allow me to explain something: the Republican Party is controlled by two ideological groups. First, is the Religious Right. Second, are the neoconservatives. Both groups share one thing in common: they are driven by fear and paranoia. Between them there is no Republican "center" for you to appeal to, just two versions of hate-filled extremes.
The Religious Right supply the kind of people who at McCain and Palin rallies were yelling things such as "kill him" about you. That's the constituency to which your hand was extended when looking for compromise on your financial bailout bill.
There's only one thing that makes sense for you now. Mr. President, you need to forget a bipartisan approach and get on with the business of governing by winning each battle. You will never be able to work with the Republicans because they hate you. Believe me, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are the norm not the exception. James Dobson and the rest are praying for you to fail. The neoconservatives are gnashing their teeth and waiting for you to "sell out Israel" or "show weakness" in Afghanistan, whatever, so they can declare you a traitor.
The problem is that when you deal with the Republican Party you're talking to the polished characters in Washington. I wish you could see the hate e-mail's that I have received over the last two years because I supported you, letters calling for God to kill me, telling me that I hate God because I supported you and that I am "an abortionist" and worse a "fag lover" because I've written that I believe that you will be a great president.
What those senators and congressmen are telling you is not what their rabid core constituents are telling them. Their loyalty is to a fundamentalist Christian ideology on the one hand and American exceptionalism of perpetual warfare and hatred and fear of the "other" on the other hand. Between the neoconservatives and evangelical Religious Right Republicans you have no friends.
The good news is that most Americans support you. And if you will just get in the face of the Republican Party and call their bluff you'll be surprised how many individual ordinary Republicans will support you, not to mention the rest of us. America is sick of the Republicans. The Democratic Party won for a reason: the Republicans failed and have taken us all down with them! You're doing your presidency and America no favor by extending an open hand to the perpetually knotted fist of what has become the embittered lunatic fringe of our country. They would rather go down in flames than "compromise" their ideology.
As you showed us again at your press conference of Feb 9, you are a brilliant, articulate and decent man. Your Republican opponents are not decent people but ideologues bent on destroying you. To quote the biblical adage sir, don't cast your pearls before swine.
Frank Schaeffer is the author of /CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.
"During the Senate debate, 36 of the Senate Republicans voted for an alternative that would have cut taxes over the next decade by $2.5 trillion, [and] reduced the top marginal race to 25 percent," said the Atlantic's Ron Brownstein on "Meet the Press." "For John McCain -- who voted for that alternative of a $2.5 trillion tax cut over the next decade -- to talk about generational theft, I mean, pot meet kettle."
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Here's a tongue-in-cheek heads-up on how this plan will work.
Three contractors are bidding to fix a broken fence at the White House. One is from Chicago, another is from Tennessee, and the third is from Minnesota.
All three go with a White House official to examine the fence. The Minnesota contractor takes out a tape measure and does some measuring, then works some figures with a pencil. "Well," he says, "I figure the job will run about $900: $400 for materials, $400 for my crew and $100 profit for me."
The Tennessee contractor also does some measuring and figuring, then says, "I can do this job for $700: $300 for materials, $300 for my crew and $100 profit for me."
The Chicago contractor doesn't measure or figure, but leans over to the White House official and whispers, "$2,700." The official, incredulous, says, "You didn't even measure like the other guys! How did you come up with such a high figure?"
The Chicago contractor whispers back, "$1000 for me, $1000 for you, and we hire the guy from Tennessee to fix the fence." "Done!" replies the government official. And that, my friends, is how the new stimulus plan will work.
While there is some truth to that, a few things need to be noted. The best deterrent to boondoggles is public embarassment. "If a federal agency proposes a project that will waste that money I will not hesitate to call them out on it and put a stop to it," Obama told mayors yesterday. The Fifth Estate-- the media-- also have it call out the Democratic administration if they waste our money.
Getting power is not the same as keeping power, and good governance and the delivery of results will determine to no small degree whether or not there is a second Obama administration or whether Democratic congressional seats are held or lost in 2010. Also, I don't think it is rude to note that this crisis has its roots in the incompetence the Republic administration-- money that was spent like a drunken sailor not just on the war but also on expanded entitlement programs. This recession (depresison, if you're unemployed!) is not because of fate or the alignment of the stars but because of specific decisions that men and women took in past years. And msot of these men and women who mad such catastrophic decisions were Republicans.
I've to realize that much of this world-wide crisis has its roots in a discredited economic ideology that was most forcefully trumpted by President Bush and his acolytes in the last eight years. The ideology in a nutshell is that you could throw away the rule book and the players in the game of business would act responsibily, ethically, in their best interest, in the best interest of their shareholders, and in the interest of America. On all counts, this turned out to be false, and there is no need to recount the mountain of evidence to support this conclusion.
While it is an overstatement to just blame George Bush on the recession, unemployment, the deficit,the stock market, gas prices, and home prices, his economic theory ignited this crisis and fanned its flames. Perhaps thsi self-knowledge that he is a historic failure is such that it wouldn't surprise me if the man who sat in the chair once occupied by George Washington and Abraham Lincolon is still in a fetal position surrounded by whisky bottles.
The stimulus bill passed, and it will be a test of Republican integrity as to whether they will accept the stimulus money. Of course they will. When it comes to towering hypocrisy, I can always count on the Republcians to deliver. During the Senate debate, 36 of the Senate Republicans voted for an alternative that would have cut taxes over the next decade by $2.5 trillion, [and] reduced the top marginal race to 25 percent," said the Atlantic's Ron Brownstein on "Meet the Press." "For John McCain -- who voted for that alternative of a $2.5 trillion tax cut over the next decade -- to talk about generational theft, I mean, pot meet kettle."
Folks, wake up. The Republcians were the problem. The Democrats are now trying to find a solution.
There are good arguments that this bill will fail to deliver as advertised. But I don't see how it can make things any worse, with the world having lost in the last six months thirty trillion dollars in wealth.
I think this economic pump priming will have a measurable psychological effect, although the effect won't be immediate. It appears so far the market palce has turned a thumbs down on it, so much more work needs to be done.
Politically, the plan will either be the Republican's Waterloo or the Democrat's Waterloo. It's a gamble, but I think the Republicans have hurt themselves more by almost without exception voting for the status quo as behooves the party of Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush. The situation we are currently in is, after all, largely the result of the discredited free market dogma espoused by the Republicans and many of the institutions that have failed were run by Republicans. They are, however, right to raise concerns about whether or not some of the spending can be justified. But the more important questions is whether or not massive spending will work.
When I was a child, I had a shoe-box of million mark notes from the Weimer Republic with face values in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. German's printing presses printed so much money, the value of the money eroded causing the middle-class to vanish. This was fertile ground for the rise of fascism. Today's Zimbabwe is also facing similar pressures, as its money has become almost worthless. On the other hand, spending that began under FDR's New Deal and reached its climax during World War II created the foundations for the prosperity of the 1950s and 60s. And that might indeed happen. But the journey might be intolerable for most Americans. The economy of World War II was one of regimentation, scarcity, and the subordination of individuality to the presumed greater good of the state.
What we have today is a pool filled with toxic sludge. The mechanisms that animates our economic system have shut down. Banks resist extending credit-- the water in the professor's analogy. They don't want to extend credit because they themselves don't want to take the risk that the credit they extend -- the water-- will intermingle with the sludge and turn to sludge further harming or killing their institution and companies that depdnd on that institutions.
This is the same kind of rational decision that we as individuals and families are doing now by belt-tightening. We are deferring the purchase of high-end consumer products on the assumption that prices will continue to fall or that we will lose our jobs. But collectively our decision not to buy this stuff is triggering layoffs and factory closures, which in turn puts a downward pressure on prices and hiring decisions. Increased savings-- normerly a good thing-- is actually a bad thing for our economy. The result is unemployment for large numbers of people, including perhaps ourselves.
So what is the answer? No one really knows for sure, but perhaps the best pattern is what happened between 1929 and 1945, between the start of the Great Depression and the end of WWII. In the absence of individual and corporate spending, the government spent massively-- four trillion dollars in today's terms. (To put that into perspective, world wide equities in the last six months have lost more than $30 trillion dollars!) Of course, there was boondoggles, corruption, inflation, and so on. But the state was doing that which free enterprise was not doing-- circulating capital. It wasn't relevant that factories were building tanks or that anyone would actually use those tanks. From the standpoint of the economy, those tanks could have been dropped into the middle of the Atlantic. The productivity wasn't the building of tanks-- it was the circulation of capital to build those tanks.
There is productivity so long as their is monetary velocity. Spending combined with rationing that brought pent-up demand for consumer goods I think was responsible for the prosperity of the 1950s and 60s, as eventually free market institutions such as banks regained their footing and credability.
The problem for America is whether or not we as a country are willing to tolerate this kind of collectivized economic decision-making that presupposes the subordination of the individual to the state. We have ample cause to be skeptical about the stimulus, but I'm not sure there are many workable alternatives to get money flowing again through the veins of our national economy.
Here is a solution to a minor programming problem I was working through last week.
The problem was to split up a large file consisting of many files of different lengths but with fixed columns and separate them by transaction code. There are a number of ways to do this with the magic of UNIX.
The UNIX utility csplit sometimes worked, but not always.
It is as hard to prove consciousness exists as it is to prove God exists.
The ongoing problem is not that we can image our non-existence- in the past or future. The problems is our trying to imagine our consciousness exists as or within being. We think of this before we say it relates to questions of fear of death for example that explain religion. The daemon of Descartes is not deceiving as to if Descartes is dreaming or awake, that he reacts to even illusive experiences but deceives him that he thinks he exists as something capable of experience.
We can imagine our bodies, and thus matter itself to be vaporous non-existence ultimately and we can imagine if matter in a sense is space as vacuum or its flux- then why not such structure imagined for our consciousness?
By doubting we exist- paradoxes aside encountered in the reasoning or other fallacies of thought, we give grounds for a view of the enduring reality of one side or the other of the dualism. Thus the method of modernity and science is balanced on the existence or not of the universe itself as a vital illusion.
Descartes made the assumption by appeal to mathematics as simplicity, that there was a non-mathematical and rational knowledge. One might therefore conclude a perfect God by ontology and Descartes goes back to the drawing board or square one with revolutionary appeal in his day and the centering of things for the philosophical or subject part as his questions centered in epistemology.
I question your premise, viz. "it is as hard to prove consciounsess exists as to prove that God exists."
I think it is a categorical error to conflate the metaphysical, unanswerable questions of theism with natural phenomena, namely, the fact of consciousness. God or gods is a conceptual bucket. We pour into that bucket whatever we want to, but and the end of the day any kind of proof amounts to talking in circles or appeals to faith including the faith that my definition of God must be the one and only true definition of God. Consciousness is a different matter as it is a label of a reality that provably exists.
"Consciousness may involve thoughts, sensations, perceptions, moods, emotions, dreams, and self-awareness. It has been defined from a biological and causal perspective as the act of autonomously modulating attentional and computational effort, usually with the goal of obtaining, retaining, or maximizing specific parameters, such as food, a safe environment, family, or mates."
We might ask, what constitutes sufficient proof? If you were walking past a boulder and there on the rock was "Jack Sprat could eat no fat/His wife could eat no lean" you would without much thought identify some kind predicating consciousness behind those symbols. And they don't even need to be symbols as in the Easter Island monoliths. As I walk home, I kick an ant nest, and the ants scatter. Do the ants have consciousness? Perhaps not, reacting as they are to instincts of self-preservation and nothing more. My cat ecsatically greets me knowing that I'm going to give Kitty kibble. Consciousness? Probably at a rudimentary interspecies level. I put cassarole in the microwave, and, lo, it cooks it just right. Consciousness? No, as there is no self-referral awareness-- no cogniito ergo sum. The same would be true with my computer or any computer or robot to date. I see no evidence of that changing any time soon. Later that evening I monkey with my ham radio, whereupon I get the following beeps from Alpha Centuri- 1 beep, 1 beep, 2 beeps, 3 beeps, 5 beeps, 8 beeps, 13 beeps-- the Finonacci Sequence. Predicating consciousness? Doubtful, as that is a pattern that is inertly replicated in nature. We would need much more than a mere pattern to demonstrate consciounsess from beyond. From a number of reasons that are off topic, I don't believe that can happen, SETI to the contrary.
Consciousness and cognition is not a particularly easy construct to define or model, but that is true with other scientific theories as well, such as time, viruses, evolution, and gravity. But the underlying reality is beyond dispute.
It may be helpful to state what consciousness is not. It is not a synonym for intelligence or meaning. I think these cloud the issue by letting us for example anthrmophize the computational power of IBM's Big Blue. It seems to me a model of higher or human-level consciousness must include that which in not on the face of it is neither meaningful nor intelligent, for example, feelings of dread, guilt, affection, greed, altruism, religious mysticism, and superstition.
I think you are right in that consciousness is a fact for me and there does not need to be much polemic. Now when you ask for objective proof it’s like asking a silly question because our notion of the veracity of an objective world is based on us all experiencing the world “consciously” and in close to the same “categories” of understanding. The public objective world can never be a superior truth to the truth of our individual conscious experiences. The objectivity of our “phenomenal” world is an assertion that assumes the commonality of our subjective conscious experience. Although we have to be careful here in that we are not saying we are all conscious of the same things at the same time but just that our different perspectives can be reconciled with a rationally constructed model of the world. There is no way for us to sit at a table and have the same content of consciousness and I think we can’t successfully divorce “content” from consciousness, even if consciousness itself is its content. You stated that "Consciousness... is a reality that provabl] exists.". I did not just arbitrarily request proof that consciousness exists, he stated that he knew of such proof. It is hardly unreasonable to ask what it is, is it?
As I said in earlier, a rock with a sentence would be proof of consciousness, but not necesserily meaning or intelligence. The a priori that we are in an existence of reality and not in a matrix reality or a dream reality doesn't negate that ther is some kind of consciousness. Is consciounsess an a priori or a fact? It is a fact in so far as it can be demonstrated external to our own feelings or impressions that is indeed a rock with a sentence on it. It is similar to the question: Is grass green? We have instruments that can show you and me that the color of my lawn (I live in Arizona!) is objectively between 430 and 540 nanometers on the visible spectrum. That I am color blind or that the instrument of measuring the color of grass is broken, say, is irrelevant. We have third party means of measuring this piece of reality.
The public objective world can never be a superior truth to the truth of our individual conscious experiences.
Are you sure about that? Is there only "your truth" and "my truth" but no "the truth"? If so, then I would suggest that communication and science has no meaning.
Well I would say that because we have a soul, we can most assuredly believe that we are conscious. The soul is proof of consciousness and a gorgeous credence to believe you are alive in the most eminent way.
Why do we have a soul?
It seems to me that you are on the brink of a whirlpool of circularity-- We have a soul because we have consciousness. We have consciousness because we have a soul.
A rock with intelligible symbols is evidence of another's consciouness. As long as you were sure that the symbols were outside of nature, that would be evidence (I don't use the word proof) of consciouness from another person. It seems to me you are struggling to make the case that this the rock with the sentence that both of us apprehend is something that neither of us can apprehend at all, a position that aligns with radical idealists who would deny the existence of that rock outisde of our minds that apprehends that rock.
When you are asleep, hypnotized or drunk, it is said that you are not conscious of certain stimuli. However, this presupposes the existence of mental occurences that we can or cannot recall. In the case of the rock with the sentnce on it, our consciousness is a relationship to an object-- a perception of a real thing. When we see a rock, it seems to me incorrect to assert we are really processing a motion in our brain. Thus, the object-- the rock-- is just as "mental" as the perceiving. William James in his 1904 essay "Does consciousness exist" made this very point-- that consciousness was a function rather than an entity, laying the foundations of what is called neutral monism.
Now, how can you be certain that these mental images are "real"? How do you know that you are knowing? And do we know our own thoughts better than anything else? The answer is: dialectically, through exposure to intentional actions and experiements outside of your own actions and experiments.
President Obama wants to cap salaries of senior executives at institutions getting significant government aid at a half-mil. And now comes the whine and cheese.
"That is pretty draconian -- $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus," said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. "And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend."
I think Mr. Reda and his fellow fat cats are going to lose this one. First, there is a crisis of confidence in just about everyone in those who have been running Wall Street. Most people including those who have seen their investment vanish and their houses foreclose cannot comprehend how firms that have lost billions of dollars deserve to be run by people getting millions of dollars. Secondly, I challenge the assumption that talent at the top of any pyramid is non-fugible. To the contrary, those who rise to the top of the bureaucracies manifestly do not do so because they have the interest of the shareholders or the public in mind but because they are trying to promote their interest through gamesmanship and risk taking. Perhaps these companies need to return to the ethic of the organization man-- not the financial rodeo clown.
During World War II, the top business leaders swung into action managing vast organizations, sometimes for a token one dollar a year. Perhaps it is that shift of incentive from greed to patriotism that may help restore confidence in our economy.
In my younger days, I preached from many a soap box that capitalism is the hope of the world. That has turned out to be a false faith. That doesn't mean that I embrace socialism or any other kind of economic faith. But no longer will I assume that the invisible hand is the most moral or even the most productive hand.
Mark Thompson has in two paragraphs articulated what I've been struggling to say for some time.
"Religion is not science, and in attempting to gain acceptance as a science, it allows itself to be treated on the same terms as science. In other words, it begs to be treated as if it were falsifiable, when the entire point in faith is that it is something that is unfalsifiable. Worse, it forces religion to get tied up in arguments that have precious little to do with the elements of faith that are so very important: things like morality, conscience, meaning, etc. And so it loses the forest for the trees, to use a cliche.
But similarly, science demeans itself when it used as a proof of the non-existence of god. Science is not meant to provide unfalsifiable answers, nor is it intended to answer questions that can only admit of unfalsifiable answers. To do so is to turn the scientific method on its head. And in so doing, science demeans itself because it loses part of its very essence."
Morality is subjective. Or at least most of us here think it is.
As for laws, laws at least in the western world do not have a basis on any sort of objective morality.
As for their application, when it comes to judgment, it's arbitrary.
blah, I'm speaking gibberish again.
I appreciate your admission that you're speaking gibberish.
You state as a principle that "morality is subjective". But it therefore follows that the principle you stated that is subjective must itself be subjective. That is enough to at least introduce a glimmer of skepticism in your assertion.
May I suggest an objective foundation to morality-- your existence and the existence of other humans. To quote Shakespere's Shylock: "I am a person, too. Hath I not eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as you are? If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you tickle me, do I not laugh? If you poison me, do I not die?" Thus, our reality as sentient beings gives us a commonality from which to derive ethics, and these ethics are consistent through time and in every culture. Through time and in every culture, there are applications that are different-- the tolerence of slavery and the subordination of women, for example. But foundational concepts of "right" and wrong" or "truth" and "falsehood" are not arbitrary at all, deriving as they do from objective concepts of pleasure, pain, individual, family, tribe, life, and death.
And nor do I accept your claim that law is arbitrary. Whether it is the law of Micronesia or the Supreme Court of the United States, it is anything but arbitrary as it flows out of precedence (or tradition) and competing arguments. No judge or tribal chief rolls a dice, for the moment they did that, they would cease to be a judge or a tribal chief. Jurisprudence is inherently rational and thusly a non-arbitrary and an objective process. We may not care for the rulings or the laws, but we are merely expressing our opinion in contrast to the weight of law that jurists have formulated over time.
Encourage your children to shun drinks such as Red Bull or Monster Energy, These highly-caffinated drinks are dangerous and addictive. Medical professionals now regard them as gateway drugs to more potent drinks-- and a gateway to a shorter lifespan.
Don't be fooled by their promotional tie-ins with sports or music events or endorsements from celebrites. It is similar to what cigarette companies did a generation ago. The physical destruction will be much the same-- not to your child's lungs but to her heart and liver. These drinks have all kinds of side effects ranging from decreased intellectual focus to death.
Former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card says that Obama's is disrespecting the office of the presidency by having casual Friday's.
Several decades ago when I started out as a programmer in a Chicago bank, I had to wear a three-piece suit to work. Now everyone from the president down wears dockers or levis. That's the way it should be. Mr. Card's wish is that America would continue to be suckers for style and personality. If so, the administration he presided over might have a shot at redemption, but that's not going to happen. As in almost all lines of work, competence and skill can be wrapped up in some strange wrappers. Thus, sometimes the most brilliant and productive people are sweaty slobs-- and perhaps they are brilliant and productive because they are sweaty slobs. As far as respcting the Oval Office is concerned, I think that has more to do with upholding the constitution than color-cordinating your tie. It is hard for me to feel respectful to President Bush when all I saw was a feckless clown.
Hal Lindsey said that Jesus would return to earth one generation or 40 years after the founding fo the State of Israel in 1949. 1989 came and gone so far as I remember.
Nadya Suleman, the single mother who gave birth to octuplets last week , said she wants to go back to school to get a degree in counseling. Her couseling will no doubt boil down to the usual pro-life certitudes-- breed like a bunny without regard to consequences-- either to yourself, your finances, the finances of tax payers in the state, and the lives of her children. In the meantime, if she can cash in on her story, so much the better.
To make some sense out of this pro-life heroine, I turn to the insights of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). He acknowledged that love was the great mainspring of human existence: "One ought rather to be surprised that a thing [love] which plays throughout so important a part in human life has hitherto practically been disregarded by philosophers altogether, and lies before us as raw and untreated material." He anticipated the sociobiologists of the modern era by claiming that this force not only had precedence over reason but it was the apoetheosis of reason for all creatures-- to stay alive and reproduce at all costs. "The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation." Perhaps the problem Schopenhauer would see in Miss Suleman's bliss for procreation is that it circumvented the usual process of forming a new person, but I don't think he would be judgmental as the desire to compose that next generation stems from unconscious, unspoken yearnings. In this case, person-formation took place in a laboratory with a doctor, not in a candle-lit restaurant or a church social with a boyfriend. Just as we are unsettled by Victor Frankenstein's laboratory-created monster, so too are we unsettled by this astonishing manifestion of Wille zum Leben, the will to love, trumping prudence and common sense. But that is true with all romance. It is a temporary madness that seizes our mental processes so as to ensure "the composition of the next generation."
While the births appear to be irrational, selfish, and foolish and while it must be true that a uterus is not a clown car, I'm not sure it is right to demonize Miss Suleman, as she may not have had much choice in the matter. Her 14 children might be the inevitable consequence of the conditions that created her essence, the result of forces that neither she nor we can begin to comprehend. I am reminded of Melville's Captain Ahab. "But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand - a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders." Could it be that Miss Suleman is the Fate's lieutenant and that she is acting under orders?
During World War II, my father was a conscientious objector. He later served in China and then later in Malay as a missionary under the China Inland Mission. He was present at the creation of two nations-- the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and Malaysia in 1952. My parents finished their missionary service helping the Vietnamese “boat people” in 1982. My father refused to accept either combatant or non-combatant service in the military. Social ostracism was intense, universal, and unrelenting. “I had the opportunity to do some visiting with some army boys going back to the service,” Dad wrote to my aunt Elsie Wik Johnson 1941 from Dennison, Iowa. “They had been drinking and were feeling good and talkative. They wanted to know who I was and where I was going. When they found that I was a CO, we got into a little discussion that warmed up a bit. One of the boys led me to the back seat and gave me a lecture. We parted company without regrets.” And COs were not exempt from physical hazard. Among Dad’s letters is a 1943 publication by the National Service Board for Religious Objectors that mentions guinea pig experiments with COs, including the effects of starvation and malaria inoculations. In Dennison, Iowa, my father worked for four months at a Civilian Public Service Camp under Mennonite Central Committee direction. He then spent a year at a Wisconsin diary farm. The Mennonites accepted him for overseas relief work, but Congress passed legislation barring conscientious objectors from serving overseas. Dad was reassigned to camps in Indiana and also did fire prevention work in Santa Barbara, California. His next assignment was to work as a hospital attendant from three to eleven p.m. at the Philadelphia State Mental Hospital (Byberry), in the male incontinent building. The building was completely staffed by COs. On May 6, 1946, Life published an article by Albert Maisel titled, “Bedlam 1946: Most U.S. Mental Hospitals are a Shame and a Disgrace” that referenced some of what my father witnessed.
Dr. Steven J. Taylor, Director of the Center on Human Policy at Syracuse University, is publishing Acts of Conscience this Spring touches on my father’s experiences during World War II. this Spring that will touch on my father’s experiences during World War II. Here is a description from the Spring 2009 catalog
In the mid- to late 1940s, a group of young men rattled the psychiatric establishment by beaming a public spotlight on the squalid conditions and brutality in our nation’s mental hospitals and training schools for people with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities.
In the mid- to late 1940s, a group of young men rattled the psychiatric establishment by beaming a public spotlight on the squalid conditions and brutality in our nation’s mental hospitals and training schools for people with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities. Bringing the abuses to the attention of newspapers and magazines across the country, they led a reform effort to change public attitudes and to improve the training and status of institutional staff. Prominent Americans, including Eleanor Roosevelt, ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, author Pearl S. Buck, actress Helen Hayes, and African-American activist Mary McLeod Bethune, supported the efforts of the young men.
These young men were among the 12,000 World War II conscientious objectors who chose to perform civilian public service as an alternative to fighting in what is widely regarded as America’s "good war." Three thousand of these men volunteered to work at state institutions, where they found conditions appalling. Acting on conscience a second time, they challenged America’s treatment of its citizens with severe disabilities. Acts of Conscience brings to light the extraordinary efforts of these courageous men, drawing upon extensive archival research, interviews, and personal correspondence.
The World War II conscientious objectors were not the first to expose public institutions, and they would not be the last. What distinguishes them from reformers of other eras is that their activities have faded from professional and popular memory. Steven J. Taylor’s moving account is an indispensable contribution to the historical record.
I think part of being a parent is being sensitive and observant of your child's gifts and limitations. It's not necessary that your child excels in all areas-- only that she finds her niche. For many people, such as me and dad, it took well into our second decade of life.
I have come to realize that the theory that if you put your child into a presumably wholesome cohort of children, they will be shielded from negative influences. For example, if you encourage them to go to Sunday school or if they are in the band, they will be surrounded by high aspiring other children and parents. This is dangerous nonsense. These are exactly the kind of kids that, for example, deal in and use drugs. That isn't the answer. Nor is religious indoctrination the answer-- lots of church, nightly family prayers, Bible memorization and the like-- and that can in fact contribute to a child's despair and bitterness if it isn't coupled with positive parenting that leads to a bright vision for the child's future. I think much of how happy, secure, and successful a child is comes out of that child's family dynamics, and I've observed that such children come out of poor families and rich families, religious families and irreligious families. But they all have the same thing in common-- parents who are committed to go to bat for their kids through thick and thin.
I think about how I was when I was a early teenager-- kind of a lost soul-- and academically mediocre to say the least. It helped however to find adults that took an interest in me and inspired me to transcend myself. It also helped that I came to the realization that I could do much better than I had done-- I made a choice to act smart until I became smart. In a hat trick of personal psychology, the act became the essence! It also helped to experience a few failures that allowed me to pick myself up. This realization that I could fail and then succeed-- if necessary a dozen times-- gave me great confidence to navigate through life no matter what life threw at me.
I think the most important thing you can do for a child is to be a parent. Listen to her, talk with (not to!) her, and spend quality time with her (more movie nights!). Try to find out what her vision is for her life beyond high school. Ask open ended questions. Let her talk, not just about facts but about feelings. Be empathetic.
As far as the tactics of doing well in school, it took me into my college years before I came to realize that doing well in tests and catching the eye of the teacher is a learned skill, like any other skill, such as playing the clarinet. I believe "intelligence" doesn't exist-- it has as much reality to me as the tooth fairy. What does exist are actions and words, and we have a lot of control over both our actions and words.
I reject the notion that nurturing is the role of the mother. A plane cannot fly with one wing. A son or daughter cannot be the person they are destined to be with one parent engaged and the other parent AWOL. It's hard, thankless work, but that's the way it is.
Friends are the spice of life, but they come and they go. Uncle Reyn wrote about the influence of his mother of her eleven children-- she saw them all go to college during the Great Depression. She was adament that they do so, saying that "a good education is one thing no one can ever take from you."
Ben, my seventh grader, wrote this poem for his writing class. It nicely captures some of his inner world. He is also large of heart.
I Am…
I am small in size, yet large in mind. I wonder about the mysteries of life. I hear endless question, and I want answers. I see all of the world’s problems that need to be solved. I want solutions to these dilemmas. I am small in size, yet large in mind.
I pretend to know when I am actually clueless. I feel a need to learn more. I touch the hearts of those who need help the most. I worry about important problems that go unsolved. I cry when I feel underestimated. I am small in size, yet large in mind.
I understand that not all questions can be answered. I say that we should try to answer as many of them as possible. I dream about a perfect world. I try to make a perfect world. I hope to make a perfect world. I am small in size, yet large in mind.
Another more enigmatic part of Ben's world.
Hi there Someone!
I'm just emailing to say that I had a great time in the NeoLodge, and now its time for me to check out and go back to Neopia!. Thanks for being the best owner ever, and I hope all the other Neopets are jealous :)
Just thought you should know. A very good friend was just broken into last week on San Felipe. They just crowbarred their way in and took quite a bit I believe. Making it look like they were yard people, a brown van was seen outside. No one heard anything!
So, bit close to home and according to the police this kind of crime is definately going up in view of the economic situation.
I sent the following email to my representative as the Arizona legislature is contemplating education cuts.
Here are the cuts that will impact the Scottsdale Unified School District.
* First and Second year teachers will be RIF * Blue Cross/Blue Shield will be the health insurance company. It will cost employees more money. * SIP will be decreased by 18% * Career Ladder will be phased out over 8 years * Copy machines may not be in schools * Assistant principals in elementary schools will become .5 FTE * Elementary Schools will start first with different start times to help with school bus schedules * Pay for sports * Library aides will be reduced. * Teachers will be locked out of schools during weekends and holidays. * Class sizes will be increased by 4 students. * The district will lose: 286 FTE administrators, 221 FTE certified teachers, 40 FTE classified * Flex accounts will go from $2000 to $1000 * Principals will decide which specials will be offered at schools. The school can only have 3 specials (PE. music, library, for example)
Co-Interim Superintendents Katy Cavanagh and Dr. David Peterson are seeking ideas and input from the greater SUSD community as the District faces budget cuts imposed by the State Legislature in the amount of $21 million dollars. The Scottsdale Unified School District Governing Board will discuss its final budget decisions at the March 3, 2009 Governing Board meeting.
Carolyn S. Allen, District 8 Representative
Dear Ms. Allen:
We are writing to you as constituents and as a parents of two children that are in the Scottsdale Unified School District. More than eleven years ago, we moved from Chicago to Scottsdale, largely because we were so impressed with the record of excellence from the schools in this area.
It is true that Arizona is experiencing hard times. Because of this, there is ample temptation to slash funding for public education. However, we suggest that this may be the wrong thing to do. Well-funded schools are fundamental to restoring the value of our homes. Good schools foster increasing home property values. A good education with quality programs and competitive salaries for superior, caring teachers can help Arizona recover from this bad economy and position Arizona to be competitive. Finally, for our children, such an education reduces opportunities for more expensive social programs to combat juvenile delinquency and premarital pregnancies.
It is for these reasons that we ask you to consider supporting vibrant public education funding in Arizona.
Representative Allen's terse but wise response to us.
I voted NO on the education cuts in this "slop-dash" budget thrown together without enough careful drilling down into the potential damages. At the same time that information came out, we got another e-mail from teachers at one of the schools that has done so much to educate our children. This is just a quick note to let you know how well Ben is doing on our team this year. We conferred as a group, and we all agree that Ben excels both academically and personally in each of our classes. He is a joy in class and is a wonderful young man. We are proud of him and know you are too.
Thank you for all you do to support our efforts at school.
