In 1987 an unprecedented fight over the legal philosophy of the Judiciary of the United States led to the rejection by the Senate of the Reagan administration nomination of Robert Bork http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork . Judge Bork was a “constitutional originalist”, a jurist whose interpretations of the law, and particularly the Constitution turned on his knowledge of the legal intent of the people who wrote it. This philosophy can be seen fundamentally expressed by Alexander Hamilton in the "Federalist Papers", #78. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed78.htm A key philosophical foundation, taken from this paper is that there is no-
"superiority (supposed) of the judicial to the legislative power. It only supposes that the power of the people is superior to both; and that where the will of the legislature, declared in its statutes, stands in opposition to that of the people, declared in the Constitution, the judges ought to be governed by the latter rather than the former. They ought to regulate their decisions by the fundamental laws, rather than by those which are not fundamental."
In liberal philosophy the power of the Judiciary to effectively amend the Constitution to do what leaders deem “right” without resorting to the arduous task of ascertaining and engaging the “will of the people” has become the last resort of those who could not obtain the people’s legislative blessing, so a tremendous marshalling of liberal organizations in opposition to Bork’s nomination was organized.
In public discussion and news reports Bork’s judicial philosophy was characterized as being a path back to back-alley abortions, Jim Crow laws, and the dissolution of the social progress of the 20th century. There was virtually no discussion of the foundations in political philosophy on which originalism rests. At the time of these attacks, not merely on his philosophies but even his character, Judge Bork had little concerted public defense to raise the legitimate issues for which he spoke. In electronic media constrained by the chilling effects of the “Fairness Doctrine” his critics were heard by all, his defenders were accorded virtual silence.
Thawing the Soapbox
At the same time as these events were occurring a transformation was overtaking the public airways. A series of court cases, focusing on both the areas of technical issues relating to greater carrying capacity within given radio spectrum ranges and the advent of new tele-texting technologies and on the growing concern within the Supreme Court that the Fairness Doctrine was chilling political speech had led, during the ‘70s and early ‘80s, to a whittling away of the underlying assurance that the limitations of the doctrine were, in fact, fair. Cases of particular note are FCC v. LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS OF CALIFORNIA, 468 U.S. 364 (1984) http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=468&invol=364, In which current Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito argued for the plaintiffs, and Telecommunications Research & Action Ctr. v. F.C.C., 801 F.2d 501, 517-18 (D.C. Cir. 1986) In which the D.C. Circuit court held that the Fairness Doctrine was not <em>mandated by statute</em>. This trajectory culminated in August of 1987 with a 4-0 vote of the FCC board rescinding the doctrine.
The Doctrine itself, furthermore, had something of a checkered past. In a paper entitled “The Fairness Doctrine: A solution in search of a problem” http://www.law.indiana.edu/fclj/pubs/v47/no1/cronauer.html Adrian Cronauer addresses uses of the powers of the Fairness Doctrine to actively squelch public comment-
"Bill Ruder, an Assistant Secretary of Commerce under President Kennedy, told how Kennedy's administration used the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters, in the hope the challenges would be so costly that these broadcasters would find it too expensive to continue their broadcasts” (see footnote 14 of that paper)
Cronauer also notes similar behavior by Spiro Agnew as well as threats as early as 1933 (before the advent of the formal “Fairness Doctrine” in 1947) by a member of the Federal Radio Commission against radio stations criticizing Roosevelt administration policies.
Much has been made in public debate of the Supreme Court having upheld the Fairness doctrine. (Red Lion Brdcst. Co. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367, 389-90 [1969]) Interestingly, the rationale behind that decision seems to have turned on the scarcity of the government– owned resource- the radio spectrum- employed in the communication of ideas, whereas later decisions of the court dealing with technological expansions encroaching on the use of the same limited resource exempted other technologies from the same restrictions. This seeming inconsistency prompted the D.C. Circuit court to chide the senior court, as noted in footnote 94 of Cronauer’s paper-
The D.C. Circuit also invited the Supreme Court to revisit Red Lion, observing how such analysis "inevitably leads to strained reasoning" and concluding "the line drawn between the print media and the broadcast media, resting as it does on the physical scarcity of the latter, is a distinction without a difference.”
Numerous attempts have been made to revive the doctrine, starting with the Senate’s refusal for three years to approve Reagan and Bush administration nominees to the F.C.C. (Cronauer), but in light of the Doctrine’s increasingly questionable legal footing these efforts have failed.
Another item of interest is how the doctrine began to unravel. In the FCC v. LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS OF CALIFORNIA, 468 U.S. 364 (1984) case noted above the original plaintiff was Pacifica Foundation http://www.pacifica.org, the nationwide, largely liberal leaning, educational radio network. Fairness Doctrine regulations prevented educational stations operating within frequencies set aside for educational purposes from expressing editorial opinions. One may note with some humor that the 1984 opinion struck down that provision of the doctrine.
The Present Debate
It cannot be argued that there is less access to opinions or news as a result of the demise of the Fairness Doctrine. Whereas in 1980 there were 75 radio stations in America dedicated to political controversy or news and talk, by 2004 there were more than 1400. This, according to Why is Talk Radio Conservative?” By William G. Mayer (findarticles.com). http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_156/ai_n6156821/pg_1 That number, according to Mayer, does not include not-for-profit radio stations such as the previously mentioned Pacifica stations or National Public Radio where conservatives, at least, believe liberal views are well represented. It is, in fact, the end of the Fairness Doctrine that permitted these stations to have overt political content at all!
It appears, instead, that liberals are intent on making an issue of the differential in content time on commercial radio stations, where liberal views are more often presented as counterpoints to be obliterated than as serious beliefs. This is an indication to many liberals that there is a pervasive conservative bias in the management of the radio industry. Mayer addresses this notion with two sets of survey results. The first of these, referenced on the first paragraph of page seven of his article, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_156/ai_n6156821/pg_7 addresses the matter of sheer numbers of self-identified conservatives vs. self-identified liberals in a compilation of more than 130 surveys by ten different polling organizations recorded on the Public Opinion Location Library, or POLL, an on-line database maintained by the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut. In that information Mayer found that self-described conservatives outnumbered self-described liberals about 1.8 to 1.
The second key piece of information, referenced on the fourth paragraph of the same page, speaks to a far more important reason for the difference in audience. Mayer describes it thus-
"Of all the reasons that allow conservative shows to dominate the talk radio market, probably the most important is that conservatives think they have a greater need for these shows--that talk radio provides them with information and viewpoints that they simply cannot get from the 'mainstream media.' American liberals are, on the whole, much less aggrieved about the way the news gets reported on the three major television networks and in most major newspapers."
Mayer follows this with some pages of statistics showing, essentially, that whatever bias or lack thereof the nation’s media believe they may hold conservatives trust them far less than liberals do. Conservatives very frankly fear misinformation, disinformation, and a simple lack of information much more than their political opposition. In the face of this siege mentality they will go farther out of their way to get information than their liberal counterparts will.
With these things in mind an analysis of the current ferment among liberal media-oriented groups such as the George Soros funded Move-on.org and Media Matters would seem to indicate that the effort is primarily intended to generate an atmosphere of media distrust in the liberal audience consonant with that which is native to the conservative population.
If the strategy is to eventually force a return to the courts, as would inevitably happen if liberals in power managed to restore a Fairness Doctrine, it would be incumbent on liberals to show the end of the policy had, in fact, materially harmed access to information for the liberal population. With the current construction of the court, particularly with the presence of Samuel Alito, (though there might be calls to have him recused) it seems very unlikely this challenge would stand. The failure of the appeal to the courts, then, would be used as a reason to urge a “return” to liberal activist philosophies in replacements for retiring members of the court and for election of the Democrats who would appoint and approve them.
Resulting, more liberal, courts could be counted upon to approve a reinstatement of “Fairness”.
Calumny in the Open Air
With the retirement of Thurgood Marshall in 1991 the first Bush administration put itself to the first real test of the new atmosphere resulting from the end of the Fairness Doctrine. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas http://www.supremecourthistory.org/myweb/justice/thomas.htm, a young appellate judge with only a slight paper trail of past decisions but a record of support for a Bork-like originalist judicial philosophy. The liberal establishment rounded up virtually the same coalition of ardent voices to thwart the nomination as had been arrayed against Bork. This time, however, they faced, in addition to the narrowly drawn sound-byte media of four years prior, a concerted effort by conservative talk radio to give context to the otherwise arcane vituperations over political philosophies. Many people heard for the first time the protective agency inherent in Constitutional constructivism.
As the vote of the full Senate loomed it was clear liberals had lost the fight against Thomas on philosophical grounds. An anonymous leak to NPR political correspondent Nina Totenberg http://www.npr.org/about/press/050309.totenberg.html alerted the media to a charge by a former assistant to Judge Thomas named Anita Hill, http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2002/april3/anitahill-43.html that he had sexually harassed her. What followed was pure political food fight played out in the lurid light of day.
Remarkable primarily for their triviality and the “she said/he said” equivocation they forced into the debate over one of the nation’s highest offices, the actual charges were clearly, at least to conservative sensibilities, intended to play against conservative’s perceived prejudices against black men. They simultaneously were intended to play against a presumption that a woman would not bring such charges frivolously. In the resulting extention of the confirmation hearings Judge Thomas characterized the charges in this way-
"This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace, It is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."
On the airways the debate concentrated on how any firm ground for due consideration of fairness or verifiability had been cast away over the importance of "the seriousness of the charges” http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1904827/posts
In the end the “Hail Mary” of the left failed and Thomas was confirmed by a 52- 48 vote of the full Senate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas In the aftermath of the events of his confirmation hearings this is often cited as the closest approval of a justice in more than a century, but, given the forces arrayed against Thomas’s confirmation it can also be seen for what it was- a shift of ten “no” votes to “yes” in the four years since the previous nomination of an originalist jurist, in spite of the most vicious media campaign ever organized against a Supreme Court nominee.
No less effort has gone into the opposition to George W. Bush’s most recent originalist Supreme Court nominees, but the left has not been able to overcome the philosophical clarity forced onto the debate by conservative media. The nominations, though hotly opposed by liberals, have advanced fairly quietly. Open debate in a brightly lit public square made this possible.
Conclusions
The Fairness Doctrine, always a highly questionable and easily abused governmental policy in its best days, died a natural death in the 1980s. Attempts to revive it have failed largely because of the combination of questionable legal footings for government restrictions on the content of electronic media and the openness of the new public forums made possible by its demise. In the wake of the change the dramatic difference in public debate has had a material effect on the attitudes of much of the politically interested population. The slow sea change in the Supreme Court is just one indication of this at work.
It is possible for the tide to change and for liberals to prevail, and reassert both a “Fairness Doctrine” and the governmental changes such a chilling policy would permit, particularly if a more and more rancorous political debate frightens people into indifference, but it at least seems possible that the changes wrought in the electorate who now so strongly support our electronic public forum are permanent. It will probably be a very difficult fight for the left to win.
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I saw in the Huntsville Item this morning that your were in town discussing health care issues. Because I am self-employed with pre-existing conditions I have found it extremely difficult to find affordable health insurance. The policy I did have until this week started out expensive, only to become onerously so in their most recent price increase. The policy for myself and four healthy children had increased from about $450 per month to over $720 per month in less than two years- creating the impression that the insurer (World) simply finds strapped families and offers them moderately affordable premiums and then, knowing they have no place to go, profits by abusive increases till the policy holders on that particular class of policy have been driven out.
Then they can offer a different class of policy and repeat the procedure with a not-yet-jaded new batch of customers.
I was stuck in this cycle by a recent diagnosis of bi-polar disorder, making it virtually impossible to do the responsible thing and provide my own insurance affordably with a new insurer. My wife, by the way, is already covered under the Texas Health Insurance Risk Pool. By the time I had to drop my coverage this week our expense in insurance costs alone was more than $1260.00 per month. Several hundred additional dollars of regular medical expenses went on top of this total. That, sir, is a hefty nut to crack each month.
All that said I am not in favor of single-provider solutions (government-run health care) or the single payer variants we see bandied about. I would rather see the issues attacked in terms of the number of people covering doctor's tusches on the one hand (as a result of fear of tort conditions prevalent today) and the complexity of the medical payer marketplace on the other.
In the first instance medicine is a bloated industry. My wife, working for what was then Woodlands (TX) Pediatrics, used to spend virtually all her time just trying to make her way through a maze of blatantly intentional dodges on the part of insurers (Unicare was the worst) in which billing statements were "lost" or "misfiled" or otherwise avoided until she had cornered the company. That means, of course that the money of insured patients is going to pay people to avoid paying at the insurance company and to get payment at the doctor's office, none of which does a damn thing toward the delivery of medical care. Furthermore, in the event of a lawsuit (and each doctor in the practice at which my wife worked could expect to be sued an average of once a year, though most suits amounted to nothing) records can be seized and much of the staff would become bogged down in that useless jumping-through-hoops. This does not even mention that quite a few lawyers also live off the money we pay for medical care and their service to good medicine is questionable in the extreme.
As to the complexity of the market- Would we not benefit as a marketplace if insurance markets had to function the same way computer markets had to through the early years of the development of that industry? Computers became accessible and, ultimately, remarkably cheap because there was a sort of enforced interchangeability that permitted independent vendors to find the best providers for components that accomplished given functions. This forced major providers like Dell and H.P. to compete on price because they really could not compete on function tailored to the individual consumer.
What I am suggesting is that certain functions be forced to standardize and that there be strict parameters set to exclusions. Force an a la carte marketplace on the health insurance industry. Also, create a uniform class structure for rating different conditions, such as my bi-polar disorder. We don't choose to be bi-polar, (though lifestyle choices do affect some diseases like type 2 diabetes) why should the government condone a system that uses us to subsidize the rest of the marketplace until we look like too great a risk and then shunt us off simply to make the industry more profitable while making access to health care more difficult for those who really need sensible, systematic access. Is that not a form of taxation for the genetically unlucky?
That rating structure should take things into account that can improve public health, encouraging us to exercise and reduce the intake of empty calories, for example. Things over which human beings have no control, genetic disorders, age, and the like should not be avoidable for the insurance industry. No one should be fired because their age made their insurance expensive! If they would not have a rating system imposed on them from above (as computer manufacturers' standards have not been government imposed) require that the industry set standards that themselves meet strict requirements.
This has rambled a bit, but to summarize- 1. We need to make the process of delivering medicine and getting paid for doing so simpler. As many people as possible in the medical industry should deliver medical care. 2. Lawyers and courts should not regulate medical care ad hoc. Regulation should be done by governmental entities that can take away a doctor's (nurse's, organization's, etc.) right to practice nationwide and those entities should not be dominated by doctors. 3. Health insurance should become a far more uniform marketplace with instruments performing specific functions widely available and competeing clearly with each other. 4. Those things the industry can reject individuals from the marketplace for should be only things for which the individual can be held personally responsible.
To these I would also add- 5. The "group" structure used to provide low cost to big employers must become available in some form to small businesses and to individuals. Failure to do so represents an unfair tax on individuals and the small businesses that really grow the nation's economy.
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To say I was exasperated with the world over the summer is putting it pretty mildly. In these posts it should have been obvious I usually vote Republican, but I am a Republican of convenience. That is to say the GOP is my party only so long as they stand with me and the values I recognize as a valid means of putting a society together and keeping it that way. Most of those who vote with me feel the same way. That means that, apparently unbeknownst to the so-called "leaders" of the party, Republicans are a fundamentally different kind of constituency than Democrats are.
The difference means that what, in the hands of Democratic candidates, is simple and nominal disrespect for a constituency they can reasonably expect to allow them to do their thinking for them is, in the hands of Republican candidates, fraud. I and my Republican bretheren are tired of fraud.
]]> The Democratic Party is designed around two very distinct constituencies. Their upper class is a well educated, prosperous elite that thrives on large organizations with inherent institutional inertia and deep, incestuous, governmental connections. This, in the popular misconception, implies governmental entities and unions. In fact it also encompasses large corporations and international institutions both large and small. These lumbering organizations use their govenmental connections to gain protection from the inherently more nimble and aggressive small companies with which they could not compete on a level playing field.The Democrats' lower class is a vast cadre of undereducated and compromised peasantry who are maintained in perpetual economic and electoral servitude by assurances that, once they have been politically empowered, their lot will be made right. Without this vast body of serfs the party would disappear politically. Actually doing what the party promises would, of course, devastate their upper class. The lesson of history, though, is that one may keep a people who are assured they have not the means to lift themselves from poverty enslaved by the mere HOPE that someone will do that lifting for them. Since the inception of the Democratic Party this has been their method- promise a backward people they will be made whole, lifted up from above, while keeping them poor and backward so that hope is always meaningful to them.
When Democrats run for office, then, they expect to offer promises they have no intention of fulfilling. They know their voters expect them to do their thinking for them and they promise no different. When they can't do what they promise they stand on nearly two centuries of political precedent. There was no fraud in what they did. This is, at least in Democratic politics, an honest bargain.
Modern Republican politics is altogether different. There are, of course, rich Republicans. But there is not a distinct break in the class structure of the party as there is in the Democratic Party. Poor members of the Republican Party, for example, are distinctly better educated, on average, than poor Democrats. They read more and are more politically aware than their Democratic counterparts. Rich members of the party are far more likely to have achieved their wealth through small businesses or entrepreneurial enterprises than would be the case with Democrats.
These are people who see government sapping opportunity away from them, who equate taxes with punishments, and who see every paper-pushing bureaucrat and the paper-pushers in private practice (tax accountants, tort lawyers, and clerical support staff) bureaucrats force on them as freeloaders, people who produce nothing but live handsomely for what they have not accomplished.
These hard working folk are people who DO NOT expect their representatives to do their thinking for them. They are also people who listen carefully to what their would-be representatives promise them before they choose to vote for them. For these voters when their office holders make them promises and then run away from those promises in an effort to broaden their electoral appeal what has happened is not a wink and a nod to history. It is a lie.
Republican office holders of late grew up in a world in which a subject called "Political Science" was the supposed key to understanding the electorate and the acquisition of power. What they didn't understand was that political science was the product of decades of Democratic dominance of politics. Look at it with a jaundiced eye and what you will see is a form of political guerilla warfare the goal of which is not empowering the people, but CONQUERING the people. It is no accident that "The Art of War" is a book title one will see on the desk of Karl Rove. Nor is it to be wondered at that his revolution is faltering.
Many of the current crop of Republican office holders gained their offices under false pretenses, believing we needed to be led in feudal chains as Democrats have long led their unwitting constituencies. Republican's recent reverses are the result of the fact we are aware of the world in which we live, unlike the vast Democrat underclass we know what we want that world to look like tomorrow and, we are paying attention.
Here's some advice for the next set of Republican office holders, then. You're not smart enough to lift us up. We can handle that ourselves. Don't even quietly make war on us. We hold the spears. When we are talking to you, SHUT UP AND LISTEN. We pay you to keep the shop, watch the money, and keep the place safe and clean.
And at every opportunity get government, and yourselves, out of our way.
]]>You may recall I stated that marriage should not be considered a social environment for sexual relationships. Well, this is news to a lot of people.
]]> Technology has revolutionized sex.Woooh, let that soak in for a minute. A lot of what has passed for social revolutions in the last forty-five years has really been the product of technological methods of birth contol. Sexuality has been freed of one of its major consequences, at least for the well organized, by these technologies. This has placed a highly intoxicating, deeply coercive, even disabling, human interaction very much in the forefront of the social structure of our times, particularly for the very people least able to comprehend and prepare themselves for the emotional consequences of sexuality - the young.
Such seeming freedom has made sex society's drug of choice, the thing like Coca-Cola's cocaine of the 1890s, that could tickle our fancies and give us a thrill and still keep us coming back for more-and more-and more... A good deal of this is predicated on the fact that the changes of which I speak happened much more swiftly than the social structures that dealt with the old, consequential, paradigm of sexuality could adapt to the new reality. When sex meant babies as one and one equaled two social logic could deal with sex-the-drug and sex-the-procreation function in the same societal device; marriage.
Marriage was, in the old paradigm, society's way of putting a burden of social expectation on the decision to engage in sexual activity. Sex made babies. Fatherless babies were a huge burden on any society so society instituted marriage as the legitimate environment for sexual activity. Both the problem of sex as a drug and babies as a consequence were dealt with. The trouble is that only for the organized is the connection between sex and babies broken. So the freedom modern society claims to freely flout inconsequential sexuality for its coercive and intoxicating qualities is creating an intense burden on the poorest and least organized portions of society (and their unexpected/unwanted children)- exactly the parts of society marriage did the most to help.
The trouble today is that society is slow to come to grips with the power of sex-the-drug and accept that some new paradigm must be found for dealing with the fact this drug is being peddled to our children as harmless while they are yet too young to make rational decisions about how they will use the drug. Sex is not inconsequential, not even when one eliminates the baby issue. Study after study shows it has consequences for personality and for emotional development. It is particularly disabling to young women, often coercing them into relationships that expose them to abuse. Furthermore, the specter of "inconsequential" sex entices young men into viewing women and girls as little more than masterbation fantasy toys, fit to be tossed away when they are no longer novel enough to be interesting.
Marriage is what it always was: the proper environment for consequential sexual activity and the raising of the children resulting from that activity. It exists to ensure children the stability they must have to learn trust, a crucial social skill in a survivable society. If we allow marriage to crumble the society must eventually collapse as well for the lack of that capacity to forge trusting relationships.
But if we continue to insist that sex without offspring is a legitmate recreation society must come to grips with how that recreation affects us all. Like deer hunting with high-powered weapons or organized team sports it is not without dangers. We need to accept that those dangers and their very real consequences place a burden on the whole fabric of the culture and start to create a legal environment for and train our young people in this new, consequential, "socially acceptable" recreation.
]]>This is the very essence of why we have culture. The dirty secret of culture is that it is not about what we are being told it is about. We are being sold a culture that is about entertaining adults and empowering elites. That is, by definition, an unsustainable development.
]]> When we speak of "culture" in our society we are likely to think of a symphony orchestra or art museum. Such a conception is an error. Culture is really the accumulated stored wisdom of a society. I have described it as the program that runs on the human machine. That program, the product of vast human experience imparted to people over the course of an entire lifetime and (hopefully) expanded generation by generation, provides us with a vocabulary of behaviors and a capacity for apprehension of experience to make us better able to deal with the complexities of the world we must face.The depth and reach of culture can be staggering. In virtually every culture in the northern hemisphere that feature of the sky we now call the Big Dipper was once known as the Great Bear. In nearly all of these cultures the three stars on the handle of the dipper were understood to be hunters pursuing the bear. This is a fact that simply can't be explained away as a bunch of separate people converging on the same idea. These conceptions of the Big Dipper, spread among cultures that had been separated from one another for more than 11,000 years, had been carried down by word of mouth through all those millennia and more. The same is true of the flood stories common to so many cultures, particularly in the Middle East. They were the cultural memory of real events that happened with the four hundred to six hundred-foot rise in sea levels at the end of the last ice age. Nowadays our elites look askance at this ancient programming, thinking it too archaic to be valid for the modern world, and they seek, blithely, to overthrow it.
The same is true of those forces who seek to flood the United States with a naive and ignorant workforce and then empower them politically. Through the 1960s a great effort was made to educate an electorate for the difficult and perilous process of self-government. For thirty years now that process has been reversed. Where my generation was once hailed as the most sophisticated in the history of the world hardly any fool would not be embarrassed to make such a claim today- even for young people born legitimately to the rights and privileges of American citizenship.
Even marriage is being presented to us in a way that is a bald obfuscation. The contention over so-called "same sex" marriage is an attempt to sell us civil unions as a sexual environment. That is simply not what marriage is for. Marriage is a union designed for protecting and nurturing children and sustaining generational ties for the nurture of successive generations. It has no other purpose.
The point of these illustrations? Any ten-year-old child brought up in a culture that needed to know the time to plant crops knew more about the sky, from a depth of experience stretching back farther than our most ancient written history, than our kids today. American kids were once raised steeped in the foundations of what makes us one nation, though we are from many lands. Knowledge like this tied generations together-even across cultural divides like race and geography. Now, though, all vestiges of "old" culture are seen with suspicion. Nothing is "venerable". Today's so-called culture is about distraction. It is dismissive of wisdom. It is intended to separate young from old.
In short its purpose is to disable us, to make us dependent.
Culture is an evolutionary environmental adaptation for raising successful human beings. In other words it is not 'for' adults. Culture is for children and for the support of people who raise kids and teach them. All our other appendages on culture are forms of corruption.
When culture becomes preoccupied with entertaining adults it starts to look at children as objects to be used for the entertainment of adults. It is no longer important to these people whether these children will be able to make their way in a difficult world. Society becomes inherently unsustainable.
That is the worst possible form of unsustainable development.
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That's the ticket. Let the rating points show the way. Info-tainment as not even the Romans could do it.
]]> At Virginia Tech this week the world was witness to the cost of media hype. Nine years ago the worldwide media made stars out of a couple of misfit high school boys after they had killed a dozen of their peers. Their faces became familiar to everyone. Their maladjusted pain became everyone's judgement-free pain. Their victims were made into nobodies, pawns, unfeeling props in a national morality play.Predictably this was both hailed and derided as an attack on Roe v. Wade. Should it turn out to be so so much the better but, in point of fact, it simply accepts human revulsion at the torture killing of any animal, human or not.
]]> In numerous reports published during the day yesterday it was noted that Ruth Bader Ginsberg took the extraordinary step, during the announcement of the decision, of reading exerpts of her dissent. She claimed this was an extraordinary step away from Roe, and from four decades of supporting decisions, a notion echoed by numerous others on both sides of this contentious debate.Is this true? If so, what does it say about Roe and about the people who support it.
In the procedure the child is partially removed from the womb, feet first, its head is then punctured, and the brain is suctioned to kill the child and cause the skull to collapse. In the State of Texas were an individual to perform a similar procedure on an animal they would be subject to a prison term. No one in the debate can reasonably claim the procedure, which is performed almost exclusively on viable infants, is not painful. It certainly is. We allow protection under the law for animals from needlessly painful death, though animals have no prospect what-so-ever of gaining full human rights. Yet, were the head of the child in such an abortion to exit the birth canal that child would have the full protection of all laws granting human rights and the procedure would instantly become full-fledged murder. Indeed, in Texas again, the act of preparing the skull for suctioning could be interpreted as a separate felony assault, which would make the murder a capital crime.
What Justice Ginsburg railed in support of was not merely a form of birth control or a means of providing greater health access for women. It was the capacity under the law to find an inconvenient class of people not merely not to be people, but to be not worthy even of those protections from the most grotesque brutalities we provide to animals. It is perfectly acceptable to her and those who believe as she does that the difference between legal humanity and legal oblivion has nothing to do with the capacity to feel, to suffer, to travel four inches further and become part of this world's chosen species. There is no humility in her stance at all.
The difference between human and non-entity is what we deign it to be.
This is a comfortable stance for the Left in America. For the time being they feel secure as the definers of things. They feel presently unthreatened by legal precedent that fails to accord any status at all to a class of human being. They know they are not members of that class. Where the law can define away the humanity of one human class for the sake of convenience, however, it can define away that of any other. All we need is a curtain like that of the womb to draw over the events that follow and give legal cover. Perhaps it will be the nursing home door some day. Perhaps it will be the asylum wall, the prison bar, or the plate-glass window.
With her defense of unabridged abortion rights Ruth Bader Ginsberg reveals this issue for what it really is- a fight to wrench law from any controlling authority whatsoever, and set on the pedestal as morality itself. And if you become inconvenient after that day?
So long as you're not me, I'm supposed to believe, since it's legal, it's OK.
]]>Albert Einstein was famous for his use of mind experiments, little mental models and scenarios set up to explore ideas. Let's try one here.
Imagine that you are a benign sentient microbe. You and a social network of your friends live in a human brain, each of you able to observe the actions of at most fifteen or twenty neurons. As individuals you would be able to observe the firing of these neurons. As a group you might be able to ascertain that there is an order to the "universe" of the vast organism comprised of your, and their, neurons. Would you, or all of you together, be able to detect the intelligence of the larger organism?
No. Undoubtedly you would not.
]]> The debate between the religious and atheists has, of late, become rancorous. We are seeing a genuinely remarkable phenomenon in that atheism is being expressed evangelically. Let us examine why this is happening.By all accounts the current spur for evangelical atheism is the rise of radical Islam and the threat implied by the essential intolerance of Islamic faith and its propensity for expressing itself in law. But atheism is, by definition, the absence of a god of any sort. That means that, though Islam seems to be the proximate trigger for atheistic radicalism, all forms of religious faith, especially Christianity, have become the movement's targets. The reasoning appears pretty simple. 1. There is no god. 2. All assertions of god are superstition. 3. Islamic superstition constitutes a danger to civilization. 4. All superstitions represent intellectual weakness and are, therefore, subject to becoming the same sort of danger Islam represents. 5. All superstitions are a danger and should be eliminated.
What no one says, because it strikes at the logical heart of atheism itself, is that there is also another logical point. 6. All superstition is heresy. In other words, once one has established an acceptable order for the world the things that fall outside that order become unacceptable. Any religion presents itself as an attack on radical atheism if radical atheism has become the acceptable rational underpinning of society.
In as much as atheism has not yet become the rational foundation of our world (thank God) now is a good time to examine the surprisingly questionable logic atheists apply to their arguments and why these arguments seem to hold so much sway today.
In my introduction to this article one can see a kernel of my approach. Atheism can't say there is no order to the world. Nor can it say there is no overarching reality not beholden to our perspective. Nor even can atheism claim that design processes of enormous power are not at work in the universe. All of these statements are logical fallacies easily debunked in simple debate. What atheists do, rather, is attack, on the small end of the logical scale, specific presentations or images of God, and on the large end of the scale, a sentient or self-aware overarching intelligence.
The vast majority of atheist attacks on religion take the first of these approaches. The reason is simple. Virtually all organized religions organize themselves around a fairly specific image of God. The more specific the image is the easier it is to debunk the image. I'm actually very much in favor of this sort of challenge to religion. If we have a false image standing in for God in our common conception we commit idolatry. Atheists do all religion a great service when they point out what we should already know - idolatry is bad.
The second approach is usually taken up with ipso facto statements not dissimilar to saying "All of the images of God I've debunked are wrong therefore there is no god." This is something like saying all the pictures of the Baron de Bastrop from Texas history are wrong, (there being no contemporary images on which to base them) ergo he was a fictional character. Here, of course, there is another logical fallacy. Our inability to create an accurate image of God does not mean there is no God any more than our inability to define an accurate unified field theory for physics means there is no uniform reality for the universe in which we live.
Winnowing all this detail away, the single key point in the atheist's view of the world is that whatever provides order to the universe is not self-aware. The order we see is without purpose. That is the cornerstone of their faith. Break or erode that stone and any moral authority they claim becomes null and void.
Thus am I delivered to my thought experiment. The workings of individual neurons in a human brain are not driven by self awareness. As a matter of fact an enormous amount of the activity in a brain could be said to be random to an extent we would be be apalled to know, given our sometimes defensive insistence on our own self-awareness. Meanwhile, brain studies steadily reveal processes which look for all the world very like the random processes of evolution itself. The haphazardness of the lowest levels of brain activity is channelled through pathways shaped by environment (memory) each of which shows a variety of specializations (speciation, or programming) for the accomplishment of some task (survival). The signal cascades initiated by random neural firings less well adapted to the issue (environment) at hand are supressed while those better adapted tend to survive.
I would make the argument that any argument that can effectively define away the intelligence of the larger creation as we experience it in the world of genetic studies could also be used to define away our own assurance of self-awareness. For that reason they are suspect in dealing with the difficulty of detecting a self-awareness we could recognize in the larger universe.
I will continue to add to these thoughts as days go by
]]>To say I'm mad at the Republican party is like saying I may find a use for air today. Recently I sent them an e-mail in response to one of their shill-o-grams telling the party as much.
Suprise!, Suprise!, I got a response.
It's not much, but I share it with you below, along with the e-mail that prompted it.
]]> Thank you for contacting the Republican National Committee. YourYou may remember the old story about the farmer, his new bride, and the ass. As you will recall after two warnings the farmer kills the ass with a beam across the forehead. Our trouble is that when a natural ass puts on an elephant suit it seems we have to hit him more than once just to get his attention. Keep after it. The hide may be thick but once we have gotten down to the donkey inside we may yet be able to get him to act like an elephant.
(By the way, I do draw a distinction between Democrat office-holders, as criticized above, and well-meaning ordinary people who vote Democrat.)
]]>Upon some reflection there is good reason why we should not want philosophers deciding how judges umpire the game of life.
]]>The argument crystallized around two instances where an umpire's call went to the heart of how the game of baseball is played. The first dealt with a call from the 1880s. In this instance a batter got a hit with men on base. As the first of these runners crossed the plate he began to interfere with the catcher, who was thus unable to tag a succeeding runner out. By the letter of the law of those early days of the sport this unsportsmanlike behavior was not expressly forbidden because the definition of "runner" applied only to those on the base paths. When the runner crossed home plate he technically was no longer a runner, so the rule in effect at the time preventing a "runner" from interfering with the fielders of the other team appeared not to apply to him. The umpire called him out anyway, sent the other runners back to the base paths, and killed what had appeared to be a legal, if not moral, rally. The next week the rules of baseball were changed both to ratify the umpire's extraordinary decision and to make clear that the intent of the game did not include former runners being free to interfere with the action on the field.
The second incident was from more recent memory. In the late 1970s, in a game played in the American League, an apparent home run was hit with two outs in the top of the 9th inning. The team in the field protested the hit on the grounds that the bat with which the home run was hit was covered with pine tar farther up the bat than the rules allowed. On those grounds, the argument went, the bat was illegal. Since the rules required that a batter who uses an illegal bat to be called out the home run was nullified with a game-ending out call.
American League president Lee McPhail reviewed the call the next day and reversed it, reinstating the home run. The game was finished that afternoon from the point of the call and the former losing team won. McPhail's explanation of the reversal stated that the call, while correct to the letter of the law, violated the spirit of the game in that it substituted a narrow legalism for the embrace of the athletic "excellences" baseball is intended to celebrate.
Now, from what I stated earlier one might think I had a problem with these decisions. Not so within their contexts. The spirit of sporting excellence implied in both decisions is how sport ought to be done. Should that spirit of excellence also apply to our conduct of the law? Isn't the spirit of the law a concept that rises above the petty importance of the letter of the law? In point of fact the answer to both questions is no.
An exclusivity founded in excellence is the point of the rules of baseball. The fifty people in a stadium who do baseball best are all supposed to be on the teams- not in the stands. That excellence keeps the other fifty thousand people interested enough to stay. Otherwise, though, the spectators are irrelevant. The conduct of the game would be the same if they were not there. The (rare) liberties umpires may take are designed to keep mere mortals out of the game.
The point of the law, particularly in America, is different. Yes we all desire and benefit from excellence. We are better off when the law promotes this high goal, but unlike baseball, where a committee of (incredibly) wealthy owners makes the rules and their employees both enforce and play by the rules, in law the common spectators are intimate participants. We are supposed to take part in the process that produces law. Then we are required to live under the rules we have made.
Permitting liberties like those mentioned above is just as exclusionary in law as it is in sport, but when the people are shut out of the process the perceived legitimacy of the law we must live by suffers. In a free society the legitimacy of the law is more important than its perfection.
When laws are enforced as written we feel the effects of what we have fought for and won. When the law thus made is good that helps the spectators to feel empowered. When the law is ill conceived or just plain bad (Prohibition comes to mind) the results are chastening. The spectators will continue to participate to get the excellence they desire because they have felt the unanticipated and unwanted effects of their own power.
When interventions, even well meaning ones, interfere with this process and negate the spectators' work we might get a higher level of excellence. We might also be forced out of our homes or businesses for the profit of others, or be made to pay for or participate in things we find abominable. In any event the umpires will have declared us incompetent to decide for ourselves.
Law is not a spectator sport. If all we can do is watch as the best players do the law on the field all of us in the stands are in deep trouble. We are the owners. We appoint the rules committee. We'd best not become irrelevant. In this game it is far better to suffer, and then correct, our own occasional bad rule than it is to allow the umpires to decide for themselves how they will enforce the spirit of the game.
Lee Jamison may be reached for comment at lee@leejamison.com.
Freedom. What does that word mean to you? Is it just doing what you please, or is there something deeper to it? I think it means having a grasp of both what I must respect in others and what others must respect in me. One can't be free if one has no regard for the needs and concerns of others. Why? Because that disregard will lead to the harm of others. Then their self defense will close off even one's otherwise harmless options. One also can't be free if the larger society, particularly the government, can disregard one's own needs and concerns. The need side of that equation is obvious. Fail to fill true needs and a person sickens and/or dies. But governments do not exist over needs. Tribes fill those just fine. Governments exist because of concerns, the reduction of anxiety, the desire to know one's place in the world, to be assured that there will be order in society, and the sense that one's efforts will be to one's own credit. In large societies failure to meet the challenge of these concerns results in a cultural paralysis. That is, by definition, a loss of freedom.
]]> To meet the challenge of establishing a free society our culture, from its ancient roots in the Middle East and Persia, set out laws binding (at least nominally) even on the elite of society. A people who know well what they must not do may feel freer to do those things society permits. Thus we became, and by halting steps have improved on being, nations of written and comprehensible laws and not just the stuttering pawns of powerful men.A crucial part of making a modern nation of laws and not of men is having laws that reflect the wishes of the people. We addressed this idea and how to reinforce this fading national trait in yesterday's post. Of as much importance, though, is the notion that those who carry out the commands contained in the laws thus made do so faithfully. They must be restrained by the law themselves or the effort that went into civilizing a whole people into taking part in governing themselves becomes mute.
Failing at this ideal is not merely the first step into tyrrany. We see in the struggles of newly freed peoples such as those in Russia who have never had the responsibility of participating in self-government such civic power requires a level of skill in cooperation they have never developed. When the authorities who execute laws and the courts that adjudicate them show disdain for the people's choices they push the populus down a path that leads eventually to an irrevocable cynicism. A truly cynical people, because they are incapable of seeing the needs and concerns of their neighbors in the same light as their own, can never be free.
We must never permit government in America to do this to us.
As was noted in yesterday's post the courts in America began to take a high-handed approach with the law during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. In the crisis of the Great Depression it seemed expedient to free the courts from the constraints of the Consititution so that the government might take measures to reestablish the economy. What we now know, though, is that the extraconsititutional measures of those days did not end the Depression, which was, in fact as bad or worse in the early days of 1941 as it had been in 1932. Perverse deflationary monetary policies, which rewarded the hoarding of cash with an effective artificial 'interest' rate, depressed economic activity in a way only the real crisis of W.W.II could overcome.
The economic legacy of the Great Depression we will discuss later. Suffice it for now to say that the society that invests in money starves. The judicial legacy haunts us even now. Freed of its moorings in the Constitution the court system has become the only branch of government with the remarkable lattitude to decide for itself what its own powers are. This presents us with a more and ever more politicized judicial process as a vicious cycle has emerged from each new and more bizarre court decision. The courts negate the wishes of the people arbitrarily with some fiat from on high. The people try to respond with elected office holders who will rewrite law to accomplish their goals. The people then feel disempowered as the courts negate even this effort. The makeup of the courts themselves then become a major issue in elections for political offices. Finally, "wise" people decry the politization of the courts!
All of this happens because it seemed wise at some point to bypass the difficult and, frankly, often flawed process of making law by the Constitution's prescription.
This necessitates a third step in the process of reestablishing rule of law in America. (The first two were discussed yesterday.) We must reestablish the primacy of the literal written words, as understood by those who wrote them, in the interpretation of Constitutional law. The constitutional amendment that makes this move would, by its nature, negate nearly three fourths of the Federal government as we know it today. To do so "cold turkey" would be not merely disruptive, but devastating. For that reason this amendment must provide a sunset period during which government powers not yet explicitly authorized by the Consitution may remain in force, but setting a date-certain at which such extraconstitutional powers will expire. This should probably be a ten-year period to allow the people to understand the power they have gained and the responsibilities they will then bear.
The people themselves will then be required to decide whether abortion will be an explicitly protected right established in the Constitution, whether public payments may be made for charitable causes, whether religious expression may be supressed in public venues, what restrictions the federal government may place on the public policies of the states, whether the federal government has any role to play in education, and whether goverments have the right to seize private property for the ostensible "greater good" through a profitable use by other private property owners.
At the end of the ten years, as the tenth amendment now states, those powers not explicitly granted to the federal government will be reserved to the states or to the people. That is to say, what is not specifically written into the government's powers the government may not do.
That's all pretty frightening, is it not? Not nearly so much so as what government will morph into if we fail to take command of it. Over the last seventy years we have opted to get a sense of well-being from allowing a "bad dog" to hold the things we fear at bay. We have begun to pay a price as that bad dog cared less and less what we wanted and how we felt. Bad dog government now thinks more about its own needs and concerns than it thinks of ours.
For now you will only hear of suggestions such as this one in private venues like this one. Why is that? Once the bad dog no longer fears you he is free to choose whom he serves. Will he serve you who can offer him little or those you first empowered him to protect you from, those who can offer him much?
There is the crux of the issue. The government that is not beholden to you will serve the most powerful, the people you have the most reason to fear. They are the ones who have the power to control the information you get, the ones who can lull you to sleep, or distract you with anxieties.
Let government, through the fiat powers of the courts, decide for itself how powerful it will be and the people you will eventually serve will be the people you feared the most to begin with.
While we still can through our legitimate powers we must take back what is ours. These three steps will go a long way toward doing that.
]]>It is popular for politicians running for national office to run against Washington. Remember Jimmy Carter? Yeah, like that.
We prove over and over that the American people, at best, dislike Washington. At worst we would push it into the Atlantic and start over. Well, while you ponder how someone like Barak Obama can run against the power structure on which he stands, why not think seriously about how to reduce the influence of a city the inhabitants of which have a serious claim to owning the country.
]]> How would you go about changing the way America is run so that the pawl on the ratchet of power favors ordinary people once again?The first thing I would do is recognize one simple fact. At present we are no longer a nation of laws. During the crisis of the Great Depression Franklin Roosevelt was in office long enough to install a Supreme Court that allowed him to enact flagrantly unconstitutional measures. That was a serious time and one may speak highly of Roosevelt's leadership in the midst of necessity, but the lingering effect of what he did empowered an elite to make choices directly contravening the will of the people. We became a nation of men, not of laws. Three fourths of the money we spend at the federal level in this country is unconstitutional by a common sense reading of the Constitution. Only by having case law supersede the words of the Constitution (in the eyes of a few dark-robed visiers) can one reconcile our founding law with our current behavior.
Second, we must re-orient the pawl on government's ratchet in our favor. That means we, as a people, must insist that our leaders install those changes in the Constitution that will both reign in the courts and reinforce our influence over those who represent us.
First and most importantly we must change the balance of power in Washington to favor us. There are two steps to this.
1. We must limit the time people can serve in any and all elective offices authorized by law. Yes, that means term limits. More than that, it means lifetime limits on how long any person can serve in public office. My formula is pretty simple. Limit total service in the House of representatives to eight years and eliminate pensions. Limit service in the Senate to twelve years. In both houses outlaw seniority as a consideration in assigning positions of power. The term of the president would remain as it is. The total length of time any one person would be permitted to hold any elective office or all offices authorized under the Constitution cumulatively, including the Supreme Court, would be twenty-four years. Even in the Supreme Court continuation after twelve years would be contingent upon the jurist getting at least forty percent of the vote in a nation-wide reauthorization election.
This measure, which would require a Constitutional amendment, would force a greater turnover of leadership in Washington and would make it much harder for people in Congress to cloak themselves in bureaucracy to insulate themselves from us. Furthermore, because the constantly incoming freshmen would fine the maze of bureaucracy to be an irritation they would be less inclined to extend it and, may even be inclined to reduce it. In any event they would be highly unlikely to permit the bureaucracy to be condescending to us as is the case today.
2. We must bring our Congressional delegations home. There is no need to have our representatives resident in Washington, D.C. They need only be in Washington for certain ceremonial occasions. Electronic communications obviate the need for members of Congress to be there, where people with deep pockets can concentrate a few lobbyists to overwhelm our personal influence. Representatives should be officed in their districts. Senators should be officed in the largest and second largest metropolitan areas in their respective states (again, not by seniority but by the order of second election of their particular senatorial seat as established originally in the Constitution and in the statutes by which each state was admitted to the union).
This Constitutional amendment would disperse the Congress and make it more difficult for a few influential people to make government act like their playground. Their primary relationships should be with their constituents. Washington is a seductive place full of very intelligent people. As a matter of fact they are smarter, on average, than we are. That is beside the point. If government by the smartest people worked better than government of the people oligarchies would rule the world. Such is obviously not the case.
American government overwhelmed the world because the society it engendered had distinct EVOLUTIONARY advantages over the governments of the rest of the world. A society ruled by the smartest members of that society can't help but limit its evolutionary vocabulary in crippling ways. Such a society makes social decisons it sees as imperatives though they are, in fact, forms of corruption. If we want America to continue to thrive we must reinforce the evolutionary advantages of dispersed power and minimize the rule of even our brightest and best.
We must become, once again, a nation of laws. These are steps one and two.
I'll discuss step three tomorrow, I hope...
]]>Webster's II New Riverside Desk Dictionary defines economics as "The science dealing with the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities". The worst thing that can happen to a course of study is that it be ill-defined. This fairly accurate description of the courses I took reveals why economics stands with Twain's assessment of statistics as a means of obscuring truth.
It is fun to watch magicians fool our eyes, even when we know they are doing so. They use the psychology of physical emphasis to hide what is really happening until the result is revealed. We then draw the wrong conclusion. A dollar bill is healed, a coin is pulled from our ear. Wow!
By entraining two things we think we understand in the discussion of the economy, namely stuff and money, the dismal science plays a sleight-of-hand with what we really should be seeing; how much of our labor really does something useful.
Imagine that on some island there are three people. Two produce food and clothing and the other is a thief who manages to steal half of the fruits of the others' labor. One of the laborers could reasonably conclude that one could live better by being a thief. Were he to change job descriptions would the standard of living on the island go up or down? Modern economics is deeply confused on this issue. Thievery is, in this example, a high-income job. The statistics would indicate a trending upward. (Wink, wink.)
Our conflicted producer decides he is an "honorable" man and can't abide the idea of becoming a thief. Instead he becomes a chief, which permits him to possess the island's gun, seize half of what the still productive producer makes for himself, and apportion only a third of what remains to the former thief, who has now been relabeled an invalid. That seems fair, does it not? The producer is a "rich" man. He needs to "give back" to the community that made him that way...
This is a cartoon version of the modern world. Those who honorably accomplish nothing live well without working in the dirt. They permit those who labor the privilege of keeping a portion of what they create, claiming all the while to be protecting their effort, while insisting the producer is cruel to expect one who has not worked not to eat. Modern economics sleight-of-hand! Those with a little foresight might be seen to raise a hand in the back of the class and ask a foolish question. "Why produce?"
The political reality of our island example is, of course, that the status quo has two of the three votes. Were the producer to convince the invalid to become a producer the island might live much better, but the chief would be out of a job, and might be forced to- oh, our hearts are all a-flutter- WORK. Naturally he finds very clever ways to vilify the producer in the eyes of the invalid. If the invalid occasionally snatches something out of frustration that the producer has so much more than he has all the better! Why have a chief if bad things don't happen? The invalid's poverty and frustration both serve to provide a rationale for the stability of the status quo.
In this illustration one can see why economics as defined by Webster's Dictionary and my professors is defined improperly. Most of the economic activity, that is to say, most of the activity for which people are provided the work product of the producer, revolves around jockeying for an advantage in a contest over who gets the work product of the producer! Economics should be "The science of the distribution of purposeful human activity". Some will quibble about how to shoehorn productivity, value, or consumption into the definition but I stand by my wording.
The fact of the matter is hard work is hard work. Clever people will find ways to put a patina of glory on a lack of accomplishment and convince society to provide well for them for what they have not done. The I.R.S. does not produce anything. Neither do the people who protect us from the I.R.S. Lawyers argue. The lawyers who protect us from the other lawyers also argue, and we feed them both for the priviledge of having them do that to, and for, us. Bureaucrats pile us over with paperwork, and we feed them for what they make us do.
Interesting island we're on.
The chiefs and kings of the ancient world loved to keep wizards and magicians in their courts. Mark Twain, in his assessment of statistics, was merely taking note of how the tools of the crafts of obfuscation and misdirection had changed by the late 19th century. Little could he have imagined how, in the increased majesty of our modern world, something could have exceeded even statistics for a grandeur of misdirection.
And, gee whiz, that's only the DISMAL science!
Lee Jamison may be reached for comment at lee@leejamison.com
]]>Go to: http://aimath.org/E8/
Here is described in the sort of unrevealing lay terms we can at least begin to grasp difficult ideas in the results of a pioneering study of very abstract multidimensional spaces in mathematics.
This is important because one must have an idea what one is looking at before one can really SEE it.
With more modern instruments in the last century we have, in fact, been able to detect the parallax of more than fifty stars. Gallileo, though, had long since shown that the Earth orbited the sun. In so doing he obliterated the dome of the sky.
That dome drew a fence around what it was possible for us to know. The solidity of the concept prevented us from seeing stars as suns. The dome had to be conceptually destroyed before we could comprehend suns like our own sun in numbers beyond comprehension.
That is how concepts work. We muddle along with vague interpretations of phenomena so that our conceptual space is not dominated by the blank spaces of vertiginous perception, but those interpretations are just placeholders for real comprehension. Then an idea comes along that makes sense of what we see, that allows us to know something in more than one dimension. Replacing the dome of the sky with myriad suns literally expanded the scope of human consciousness.
The description of the E8 structure is a step forward in the description of mathematical spaces. We live in a mathematical space. The better science understands the logic of such spaces the better chance we have of comprehending the space in which we live. The concept must exist before we can truly see what we see.
]]>Do these people have a leg to stand on?
No.
]]> President Clinton, over the course of his administration, fired over one hundred and twenty federal prosecutors. Ninety-three of them were fired at one time for no cause at all, an unprecedented political toll in recent presidential politics. This, interestingly, raised no hackles in the press who scream so loudly today.Were these Bush administration firings illegal? No one is saying they were. They are merely being used as a pretext for congressional hearings, jeering, and saber-rattling. The coverage, though is accomplished with the same breathless tone that would accompany a terrorist bombing in Washington, D.C.
Why?
Simple. The Press know that most of us DON'T know what the president's powers are. They are willing to keep us ignorant of such things and use that ignorance as a nose-ring to lead us to the conclusion that the administration has been following a corrupt course. Were we to make such a conclusion and then compare history with the Clinton administration it would be clear that they were vastly more corrupt, but the press will not volunteer that information for us, will they?
This is actually the fault of the president. He should be up front and come out in as many venues as possible to say he fired these people for political purposes, period. They serve at his pleasure. If he doesn't like the cut of their collars he can fire them for fashion insensitivity if he so desires. President Bush must not allow the congress to intimidate him into running the administration by their proxy.
Keep Karl Rove. Keep Alberto Gonzales. Stick it in the press's eye. Tell the American people what powers the president has over the offices he runs. An educated public is not the Democrats' friend. They will shut up to eliminate the controversy that threatens to educate us.
]]>