tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99996922024-03-23T11:18:32.490-07:00palosverdesblogObservations on conservatism, politics, education, cosmology, astrobiology, evolution and the environmentBill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.comBlogger654125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-83884428984870832642015-03-16T15:33:00.000-07:002015-03-16T15:33:07.803-07:00<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Hard Science<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The curse attributed
to the Chinese - “May you live in interesting times”- seems to be especially
apt today. Whether it’s the explosion of sexual genders at home -- following
the discovery that male and female are insufficient -- or the resurgence of
barbaric medieval religions abroad, modern times sure are interesting. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Modern
science has also proven to be interesting, and popular. From “The Big Bang
Theory” (a TV sitcom) to “The Theory of Everything” (a tragic love story),
science has become <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hip</i>. Indeed, one
can imagine overhearing millennials at a cocktail party: “I f***ing love
science!!” Here “science” should be in quotes since the old-timers among us
would not recognize what today passes for science. Indeed, what many moderns
love is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">scientism</i>, a secular replacement
for religion, with its scientist-priests surrounded by a cult of personality (See
starman Neil deGrasse Tyson, “</span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the fetish and totem of the
extraordinarily puffed-up <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nerd</i>
culture that has of late started to bloom across the United States.”)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the real
world of the hard sciences, most of the hard work seems to be done. For
example, in physics the theories of Newton, Maxwell, Heisenberg, Einstein,
Dirac, Feynman et al provide the underpinnings of our modern understanding of
the inanimate world and the tools to create new technologies. These scientific
theories are important. Since the 1970’s, however, some physicists have turned
their attention to the extremes, from the real physical world we live in to the
singularities and the multiverse. The results have been disappointing and
mostly unimportant. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Fields of
Dreams<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Let us begin
with the very small. The Standard Model of Particle Physics is the combination
of quantum electrodynamics (QED), theories of the weak and strong forces and
the quark model of the fundamental particles. It has been called the “theory of
almost everything” (from the book of the same title by Robert Oerter). In fact,
the only part of the Standard Model that has been rigorously tested is QED. Theories
of the weak and strong forces were modelled on the exchange of virtual
particles borrowed from QED. (“Because physicists have only been able to think
of the same damn thing, over and over again.” Feynman, “QED” p149). The quark
model was formulated to make some sense of the zoo of fundamental particles being
created in the new atom smashers, the “fields of dreams” built for physicists.
Every collision produced new ephemeral particles that needed to be measured and
categorized. Yet the Standard Model only replaced one zoo-full of particles
with another (something like 40 quarks, anti-quarks and gluons) that have
strange properties never seen before. In fact nobody has ever observed a single
quark, but the theory explains that issue by postulating yet another strange
constraint.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Physicist
John Baez has a</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"> <span lang="EN">rating scale of potentially revolutionary
contributions to physics</span></span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">; he calls it the “crackpot index.”</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The index gives, for example, 5 points</span><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> for a thought experiment that contradicts the results of
an actual experiment, 10 points for each favorable comparison of oneself to
Einstein</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">, and so on. As
in golf a high score is bad. I’d like to suggest 20 points for claiming to have
the “standard model” and 50 points for a “theory of everything.” Yet physicists
from Einstein’s time to the present have been in search of the Holy Grail: a
Grand Unified Theory (GUT: 30 points) or “theory of everything.” (50) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Enter <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">String Theory</span>.</span></span><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">Underlying all the particles, Superstring Theory (It’s
already been upgraded by a second “revolution”) assumes there are more fundamental
entities having some properties of strings. The basic “strings” are mighty
small, with a length equal to the “Planck </span><span lang="EN" style="color: #333333; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">length”
(about 10<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><sup>-33</sup></b> cm). Like a
violin string under tension, the quantum strings support <i>standing waves</i>,
and the fundamental particles of matter are thought to correspond to different <i>vibration
frequencies</i>, with masses given by hν/c<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><sup>2</sup></b>.
The basic idea is pretty simple, but the theory quickly becomes <i>muy complex </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">and unsettling.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="color: #333333; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Superstring Theory
requires </span><span lang="EN" style="color: #333333; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">10 dimensions of space, a major problem
since the 10 dimensions must be “compactified” to the physically realizable 4
dimensions, and there appears to be an infinite number of ways to do that. The
current thinking is that the theory allows an astronomically large number of
physical possibilities (and universes), so it seems impossible to ever test it.
Peter Woit has called the theory “Not Even Wrong,” the title of his recent
book. Dick Feynman said that “String theorists don’t make predictions, they
make excuses.” Normally such criticism would cause one to run for the exits,
but string theorists seem to be a hardier lot, not easily frightened.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="color: #333333; font-size: 16pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Multiverses<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">In the land
of the very large, theories of the universe, while beginning on a firm footing,
have lately gone off the deep end. The cosmological models based on General
Relativity had some successes. To the extent it has been possible to test
General Relativity, its predictions have always been borne out by experiment
(gravitational light shifts, precession of planets, bending of light,
gravitational time dilation effects on GPS, etc, etc.) The existence of Black
Holes is consistent with stellar orbits near galactic centers and with the current
understanding of quasars. The predicted expansion of space, while
non-intuitive, is consistent with the observed cosmological redshifts. The
existence of 3 degree background radiation and the primordial amounts of the
lightest nuclei (but not Lithium) also support the standard model. So far it’s
a reasonable theory.</span><span lang="EN" style="color: #333333; font-size: 16pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The problems
began when theorists tried to explain details of the model relating to the first
femto-atto-wink by invoking new stuff, from “dark matter” and “dark energy” to
“inflation” that have no basis in experimental fact. Today much of experimental
cosmology has devolved into massive searches for the strange stuff and probes
of the horizon. (Astronomer Mike Disney: “Statistical studies of faint objects
can keep a career going for ages without the need for a single original
thought.”) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the theoretical side, the
cosmologists have joined forces with the particle physicists in trying to
invent new ways of explaining the singularity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">It seems
that a more productive enterprise would involve questioning and improving the
theoretical bases of the standard cosmological model. For example, the
assumptions of homogeneity and isotropy that underlie standard cosmology are
gross approximations. General Relativity has only been tested in the weak field
approximation that is nothing like the early universe as it is theorized.
Furthermore, when gravitational forces are strong enough quantum effects must
be taken into account. Thus a quantum theory of gravity would be needed. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">The current
leading contender is Loop Quantum Gravity which</span><span lang="EN" style="color: #333333; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> tries to quantize space itself, </span><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-themecolor: text1;">in other words, treat space like it
comes in small chunks. LQG takes the smooth fabric of space-time in General Relativity
and asks whether, like a normal fabric, </span><span lang="EN" style="color: #333333; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">it might be made up of </span><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-themecolor: text1;">smaller, Planck scale fibers woven </span><span lang="EN" style="color: #333333; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">together into quantized volumes.</span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">LQG theory</span></span><span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">predicts that the speed of light
has a small dependence on energy. Photons of higher energy travel slightly
slower than low-energy photons. The effect is very small, but it amplifies over
long distances. Unfortunately for LQG, the </span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Fermi Gamma-ray
Space Telescope results released in 2009 refute this prediction. (The
prediction was debated on an episode of The Big Bang Theory, where a young
couple on both sides of the LQG-String debate argue about how their children
will be raised: loopy or stringy.)</span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Real Physics</span><span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">An
alternative to all this speculation would be to compactify our hubris. Imagine
that the “initial state” of the universe was not the Big Bang singularity but
rather the photon-dominated stage that we identify in the present model as a
few minutes after the singularity. In our initial state, the fundamental forces
and particles already exist and are moving at non-relativistic speeds. The matter
density is low enough that General Relativity works just fine. A little bit
after our new t = 0 the protons plus neutrons begin to form the lighter nuclei.
Quantum gravity, inflation and exotic particles are not needed. Nor is Superstring
theory. What happened before our new beginning? Who cares; it’s not important.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Thousands of
physicists could give up chasing daydreams and return to doing physics that
mattered. (If they are qualified. Sheldon Glashow wonders whether physicists
whose expertise is limited to string theory will be employable when the “string
snaps.”) And for those of us who are skeptics, we can stop wasting time trying
to discredit the Big Bang and spend our time working on the unsolved problems
in physics. There are so many. Some examples taken from Wikipedia:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">1.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">What mechanism causes certain
materials to exhibit superconductivity at higher temperatures?</span></span><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">2.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">What's the momentum of photons in
optical media?</span></span><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">3.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Are there non-local phenomena in
quantum physics other than entanglement? Are they useful? </span></span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">4.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Why is gravity so much weaker than
electromagnetism?</span></span><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">5.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">How can plasmas be confined long
enough and at a high enough temperature to create fusion power?</span></span><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">6.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">How can turbulence be understood
and its effects calculated?</span></span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">7.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">What is the lifetime of the proton
and how do we understand it?</span></span><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">8.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Are all the measurable dimensionless parameters that
characterize the physical universe calculable in principle?</span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">9.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">How do genes govern our body,
withstanding different external pressures?</span></span><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">10.</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.5pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Is dark matter responsible for the observed
rotational speeds of stars revolving around the center of galaxies, or is
it something else?</span></span><span class="ecxauto-style1"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The last question has been
addressed by Feng and Gallo who show that dark matter is not necessary. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Let’s all get back to doing real
physics.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">A few good books about the crisis
in physics are the following:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><u><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The End of Science</span></u><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> by John Horgan<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><u><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Bankrupting Physics</span></u><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> by Alexander Unzicker and Sheila Jones<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><u><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Not Even Wrong</span></u><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> by Peter Woit<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<u><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Trouble with Physics</span></span></u><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: "Segoe UI"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> by Lee Smolin<br />
<br />
<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</blogitemurl>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-48404125059550855082014-08-04T09:39:00.003-07:002014-08-04T09:39:40.750-07:00Don't know much about history<br />
<blogitemurl>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null"> </a>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%;">Don’t
know much biology. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i><em><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-weight: normal; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-themecolor: text1;">Don't</span></i></em><span class="st1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-themecolor: text1;"> know much about a
science book. </span></i></span><em><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; font-weight: normal; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-themecolor: text1;">Don't</span></i></em><span class="st1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-themecolor: text1;"> know much about the French
I took. But I do know that I love you ... <o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span class="st1"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-themecolor: text1;">So, what do you know
after a public school education? Here is a little quiz.</span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-themecolor: text1;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%;">Consider the following two groups of historical figures and
events:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Comic Sans MS";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%;">Adam Smith, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, American
Revolution<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt 0.5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Comic Sans MS";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%;">Jean Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Woodrow Wilson,
French Revolution<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%;">Compare and Contrast (a favorite Common Core instruction) the
political philosophy of the two groups.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%;">If you think that Locke was a locksmith and Rousseau a French baker,
stop reading and go back to watching “The View.” If you recognize the names but
know little about any of these guys, thank your teacher. Sure, it’s unfair to
the millennials; on Water’s World they don’t recognize the Vice President and they
think that the Cold War was fought in Siberia. Sadly, even the baby boomers
have difficulty with this sort of test, reflecting the steep decline in the
quality of American education over the last 50 years or so. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%;">I chose the two groups to illustrate the difference between (1)
classical liberals and (2) radical liberals (liberalism run amok, which is what
prevails today).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%;">Classical liberals (from the Latin for freedom) stressed the
autonomy of the individual. “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to
prevent harm to others.” (John Stuart Mill, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On
Liberty</i>, 1859) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%;">Classical liberalism gave birth to the “natural rights” of the
individual that exist independent of government. Indeed, limited and
constrained government was seen as a requirement of a free society, as
understood by the American Founders and codified in the Constitution. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">Classical liberals embraced reason as a gift from God,
raising man above the animals. At the same time they understood the limitations
of reason and the wisdom of revelation and traditional knowledge. They believed
in natural law, a universal (God-given) understanding of right and wrong.</span><span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS";">Radical
liberals such as Rousseau and Nietzsche </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">rejected received wisdom and believed that
truth and morality must be constructed from the exercise of reason alone. They
rejected theology and grounded morality on secular criteria alone, especially
the principle of equality. Rousseau believed that culture dictates behavior and
that one could reform behavior by transforming culture. “Social Engineering”
was born in Rousseau’s writings, especially <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Social Contract</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">Rousseau
postulated the “general will” of society as binding on individuals. He
justified coercion to achieve consensus and approved of the “state” as the
authoritarian instrument of coercion. </span><span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">All who know of
Robespierre’s “despotism of liberty” will understand the danger of radical
liberalism that led to the French Revolution and “the Terror.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">President Wilson attacked the very idea of natural
and individual rights. “No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable
rights of the individual” wrote Wilson, taking dead aim at the Declaration of
Independence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Rousseau and his followers also had
a profound impact on education, and not for the better. They believed that man
once lived in a state of peaceful equality – the “noble savage” - but was
corrupted by society and ill-advised innovations such as tool making and
property rights.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;"> It was necessary, therefore, to discredit
those responsible for filling the world with prejudice, superstition (ie.
religion) and bad laws. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">Transformation – reform - of education would be required.
Thus the immediate objective of education was “to erase from one’s mind all the
false principles that parents, teachers and preachers had infected one with.” Rousseau’s
prescription for education reform was laid out in his novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Emile</i> which “acquired a ‘Dewey-eyed’
following in America because of its wondrous impracticality.” (Roger Scruton,
“Rousseau and the Origins of Liberalism.”) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">“Let us begin by laying facts aside” and the books that
contain them. “I hate books,” Rousseau declared. “They only teach one about
what one does not know.” Rousseau also anticipated the modern hostility to
memorization: “Emile will never learn anything by heart.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">For Rousseau the task of the educator was not to tell the
child what others have discovered, but to induce him to discover things for
himself. Thus the labor of discovery would have to be endlessly repeated and
each generation would know less than the last. Child-centered discovery learning
became all the rage in America, encouraged by John Dewey and his disciples.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">And so,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-themecolor: text1;">Don’t
know much about geography. Don’t know much trigonometry. Don’t know much about
algebra. Don’t know what a slide rule is for. But I do know 1 and 1 is 2… <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Comic Sans MS"; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</blogitemurl>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-21944744431369979612014-07-29T13:05:00.000-07:002014-07-29T16:18:29.340-07:00The Scourge of Liberalism<blogitemurl>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I have spent the last year and more fighting against Common Core, the new national education reform that promises to take a bad situation and make it worse. The driving force behind Common Core and all the previous reforms of the past decades has been Liberalism. In fact, over the past 100 years the character of America has been fundamentally changed by Liberalism and irreparable harm has been done to (..............). You can fill in the space with government at all levels, education, religion, the middle class, the poor and the culture, and more.</span></blogitemurl><br />
<blogitemurl><span style="font-size: large;"></span></blogitemurl><br />
<blogitemurl><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span style="font-size: large;">On Facebook at </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/concernedpvparents"><span style="font-size: large;">ConcernedPVParents</span></a></span><span style="font-size: large;">,</span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/concernedpvparents"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></a><span style="font-size: large;"> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I will continue the exposition of the damage Liberalism has done to education. Here I'll discuss the other areas. </span></span></blogitemurl><br />
<blogitemurl><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Stay tuned.</span></span>
</blogitemurl>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-61420975945273105962014-01-14T11:59:00.000-08:002014-01-14T12:01:05.717-08:00I'm Back<blogitemurl>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: large;">I've been so focused on fighting the scourge of Common Core (1) that I've had little time for the many other threats to our American way of life. I do keep up by reading the (free) New York Times while working out at Equinox. It's the best source of what's wrong with America, and it gets my blood up. </span></blogitemurl><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: large;">I've also been away from PalosVerdesBlog. My Education posts focusing on Common Core may be found on Facebook at ConcernedPVParents.</span><br />
<blogitemurl><br /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: large;"> Today there was an opinion piece by Paul Krugman accusing Republicans of being "enemies of the poor." The GOP is "the party that takes from the poor and gives to the rich." Republicans are "doing all they can to hurt the poor"; and "it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the GOP is hurting the poor as much as it can." Got it? <br /><br />On the other hand, Democrats like "Krugtron the Invincible" (2) love poor people. In fact, they love poor people so much they want to keep them poor, and have more of them. Star Parker called it "Uncle Sam's Plantation" in the book of the same name.<br /><br />On the 50th anniversary of President Johnson's "War on Poverty," Robert Rector reported in the Wall Street Journal (1/8/14) that the Federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and social services to poor Americans. The government spends nearly one Trillion dollars a year on those programs for the roughly 100 million Americans who benefit from them. That sums up to roughly 21 Trillion over the past 50 years "to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities."<br /><br />The numbers, while astounding, hide an inconvenient truth. Rector calculates that if just one fifth of the Trillion dollars was divided (progressively, of course) among the poor, poverty would be eliminated in America. That's right, only 20% of what we spend on the war on poverty would raise every poor person above the poverty level. <br /><br />Well, what about the other 80% ($800,000,000,000)? Not all of it is wasted on the Federal bureaucracy that administers the 80 welfare programs. No, most of it goes to the poor in ways that don't count as income, thus raising the poor to levels of prosperity above the working folks who earn just a bit too much to qualify for welfare. Nice trick!<br /><br />So if you were a working person who could receive a handout from the government if only you worked a bit less, you may be tempted to cut back your hours or, even better, to go on disability. Thus begins "generational poverty."<br /><br />As Star Parker put is so well: "The liberal establishment are involved in the slave trade, as surely as if they had put the chains on the people themselves. We work the ghettos instead of the field, dutifully putting 'massa' back in the Senate or House of Representatives."<br /><br /><br />(1) There is a connection to Common Core: Krugman's socialist crap is the sacred text within the academic establishment, especially in the schools of education. Just wait for it in a K-12 school near you.<br /><br />(2) Read about "Krugtron the Invincible" in the hilarious series by Niall Ferguson in the Huffington Post.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span> </blogitemurl>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-85004548593765050612012-06-29T15:30:00.000-07:002012-06-29T15:32:08.813-07:00Creative Destruction<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">Finishing up my physics doctorate in late 1971, I was
considering an offer to join the Xerox Corporate Research Labs in Rochester,
NY. I did a summer internship in 1966 and had been working there part time for
about a year while completing my thesis. Needing a full time job -- with two children
and a stay-at-home wife -- I turned to my Xerox mentors for advice. Bob
Gundlach was the top scientist and inventor at Xerox and a good friend. I was totally
surprised when he advised against my joining Xerox. Bob said that the company
had gotten fat and lazy and was no longer the innovative dynamo he joined two
decades earlier. My part-time boss had similar reservations, and he graciously
offered to continue my part-time employment while I worked full time as a
college physics professor. After more than seventeen years of this arrangement,
I did finally join Xerox as a full time research scientist and manager. What
changed my mind?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large; line-height: 115%;">During the 1970-80s Xerox suffered through some tough times,
“fumbling the future” on personal computers (to Steve Jobs’ immense
satisfaction) and losing copier market share to the Japanese. It took two
decades for the management culture to change course, led first by the adoption
of Japanese style “Leadership Through Quality” techniques. Product quality and
efficiency became pillars of the corporate culture, and by the early 1990’s
Xerox became the first American company to win back lost market share from the
Japanese. Xerox re-branded itself “The Document Company” and transitioned to
the next big things: color printing and software services. Manufacturing became a much smaller part of
its bottom line.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">As David Brooks points out, this
was a common storyline in corporate America. “Forty years ago, corporate America
was bloated, sluggish and losing ground to competitors in Japan and beyond. But
then something astonishing happened. Financiers, private equity firms and
bare-knuckled corporate executives initiated a series of reforms and
transformations. The process was brutal and involved streamlining and layoffs.
But, at the end of it, American businesses emerged leaner, quicker and more
efficient.” (“How Change Happens.” New York Times, 5/21/12) Companies as
diverse as GE, IBM and Apple remade themselves.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The
transition has been astounding. Economic output per person is now 20 to 25%
higher in the U.S. than in Japan and the major European economies, and
America's economy dominates the world in size and prestige. According to The
Wall Street Journal, the revenue per employee at S&P 500 companies
increased from $378,000 in 2007 to $420,000 in 2011. And American exports are
surging, due to smart machines, the shale oil and gas revolution, and the growth
of the global middle class that is dramatically increasing demand for
pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, planes and entertainment, all important
American products.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">But not
all is well. As Tyler Cowen reports in The American Interest (“What
Export-Oriented America Means”), there are actually two American economies. On
the one hand are the companies that have to compete with everybody everywhere.
With the sword of foreign competition hanging over them, these companies have
become relentlessly dynamic and very efficient. On the other hand, there are
large sectors of the economy that do not face this global competition — health
care, education and government, and industries that depend too much on
government (eg. autos). These segments cling to an economic model that no
longer works because the pillars have eroded. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">This
was the issue discussed in my last piece (“America’s Economic Problem”
5/10/12). While America transitioned from a manufacturing economy to a service
economy, the productivity gains achieved by the multinational companies have
displaced many low-medium skilled workers. Those workers will need to find
employment in new enterprises, in fields some of which have not yet been
imagined. After all, ten years ago who dreamed of Facebook or Myspace or
Hootsuite? Who knew we needed personal trainers, personal shoppers or personal
assistants of all types? Who would have imagined the growth of pet services
(canine psychologists, for heaven’s sake)? New skills will be required.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The
future can be very lucrative for America if only we strive for it. Sadly, there
is a sizeable and growing segment of the population that has stopped striving.
A bifurcation of American society is occurring before our eyes. Increasingly,
our country is becoming segregated into high-income groups with a tendency to
pre-1960s social mores, and low-income groups experiencing profound social
breakdown. The double whammy of declining economic opportunity and growing
dysfunction has created a new lower class in America like nothing we have seen
before. That is the subject of my next piece.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<br /></div>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-81725924445261255502012-05-11T15:49:00.002-07:002012-05-11T15:59:06.089-07:00America's Economic Problem<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">In my last article I briefly described the monumental economic and social problems that have been so brilliantly discussed, respectively, by Walter Russell Mead in a series of articles for “The American Interest, and by Charles Murray in his groundbreaking book “Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">Another seminal reference, that predates Mead and Murray by about a year, is the piece called “Keeping America's Edge” by Jim Manzi in “National Affairs” (Winter 2010). “The United States is in a tough spot. As we dig ourselves out from a serious financial crisis and a deep recession, our very efforts to recover are exacerbating much more fundamental problems that our country has let fester for too long.” And what are these festering fundamental problems? On the economic side, there is the creative destruction involved in free-market capitalism and the ever-increasing international competition. And on the social side is “the growing disparity in behavioral norms and social conditions between the upper and lower income strata of American society.” As you see, Manzi raised the very issues that Mead and Murray expound upon. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">In this article I will concentrate on the economic issues although, as we will see, these issues are inter-related. Many say that the economy will be fixed when the housing industry recovers from the bubble; or when consumer confidence returns; or when companies stop sitting on piles of cash and start hiring; or when the Federal government begins to seriously invest in the economy and green technology, as though the “stimulus” was way too small. I will not argue any of these points since, at best, such measures could bring a temporary reprieve. Our problems are structural and much more serious.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">A few statistics will illustrate the problem. Consider, first, our country's transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Quoting from Manzi: In 1800, America was a nation of farmers: About three-quarters of the labor force worked in agriculture. Since then, this share has been in almost continuous decline. By the eve of the Civil War, it was a little over half; by 1900 it was about one-third. Today, agriculture employs less than 3% of the work force. This has been great for ¬consumers: Farming is now incredibly efficient, and food is cheaper and more plentiful in real terms than ever before in human history. American agriculture today is also a successful industry; in 2007, the U.S. exported more than $75 billion in agricultural products, However, the agriculture industry can no longer provide employment for very many people.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">Just imagine the immense upheaval that occurred around the turn off the 20th century, when two thirds of the work force needed to be employed in something other than farming, and industry was not yet able to provide jobs for all the out of work farmers and new immigrants. Eventually American ingenuity prevailed, with Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, George Westinghouse, and many others finding myriad ways to employ millions of eager factory workers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">A lot of pain was endured along the way to this new economic model. “Writing about the onset of the Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith famously said that the end had come but was not yet in sight. The past was crumbling under their feet, but people could not imagine how the future would play out. Their social imagination had hit a wall.” (The previous quote and much of what follows has been copied from the marvelous series of ten articles (77 pages) by Walter Russell Mead, that may be found at his blog site “Via Meadia,” 1/24/12 – present)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">From the era of the first European settlements in North America up through World War I, the family farm was the key social, economic and even political institution in the country. Unlike the oppressed peasants of Europe most Americans owned and worked their own land. The individual family farm was prosperous and independent and the cornerstone of American democracy. Then the family farm died of abundance; it died of the rapidly rising productivity that meant that fewer and fewer people had to work to produce the food on which humanity depended. The industrial and scientific revolutions of the 19th century made agriculture so much more productive, and brought so many of the world’s hitherto remote and inaccessible lands into productive contact with world centers of population, that old and outmoded methods of production could no longer be sustained.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">The same thing is happening today: The 20th century model of the American dream faces the same kind of crisis the 19th century version experienced 100 years ago. International competition and technological advances mean that the American factory worker’s earnings and opportunities are depressed in the way farmers were going to the wall 100 years ago. Our successful manufacturing economy led us to push for free trade; that stimulated other countries to export to U.S. markets and generated the kind of financial flows that undermined the nation-based Keynesian economic model. Just look at the numbers. In 1974, one quarter of the US private sector labor force worked in manufacturing. Today, that share is down to about 11 percent. In parallel with that decline, real hourly wages for private non-supervisory workers have been stagnant for a generation. In 1974, the hourly wage was $4.22; in 2007, before the recession, it was at $4.18 (in 1974 dollars) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">Jobs are disappearing in manufacturing and the learned professions for the same reason they disappeared from agriculture 100 years ago: productivity is rising. Fewer hands were needed back then to produce the food we ate; fewer hands are needed today to make all the cars and cell phones the planet’s consumers care to buy. Fewer humans in green eyeshades are needed to do the world’s accounting; fewer typists, stenographers, clerks and managers are needed to get the world’s clerical work done. Automation and outsourcing will combine to limit employment opportunities and income levels for most accountants, lawyers, architects and even some types of medical specialists. (X rays and CAT scans can be read as easily in India as at the local specialist’s office, and given the exponential improvements in software, many other medical processes will become susceptible to outsourcing and automation.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">A century ago, agriculture was in crisis because fewer people were needed to produce the world’s food supply. Today, the middle class is endangered because fewer people are needed to do the world’s routine factory work and information management. In both cases, the economic dislocation and painful change were the side effects of progress rather than the signs of dissolution. The reality last time around was that with fewer hands needed at grow food, more human energy, talent and skill were available to do other things: to produce the goods and services that a more sophisticated and much richer modern industrial society would want and need. This time the emerging economic model will revolve less around “stuff” and more with arrangement, delivery, intelligence, capability and design. And a lot of our economy won’t be about making things at all; it will be about enjoying the freedom that comes when less and less of life revolves around getting the necessities.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">The real political division in American today is between those who think the old days can come back if only government does the right things (tax rich people; pump enough money into state and local government, health care and the higher education industry; raise tariffs high enough and sprinkle enough subsidies on enough industries to protect and rebuild the manufacturing sector) and those who realize that the past is gone and we must now create a new future. In a very real sense, liberals have become reactionary traditionalists while conservatives have become the new progressives.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">But America is good at change. We absorb immigrants better than most. We like new things and like to try them out. We have an optimistic streak in our nature; we believe that change is basically good and that being open to new things will make us happier and better off. Our religious sensibility is future-oriented and believes that God is working through the chaos and uncertainties of life. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; font-size: large;">Roland Bainton, church historian (1894-1984), used to speak beautifully about the way people learned to open themselves to the changes God had in mind for them, and about the special kind of courage they needed to do that. He would encourage his students to think about something Martin Luther once said: “Christ is my bee. He comes not to sting me; he comes to bring me honey.”</span><br />
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<blogitemurl></blogitemurl>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-3097975753747787052012-03-14T14:15:00.001-07:002012-03-14T14:21:15.980-07:00What is wrong with America?<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Everyone seems to have an opinion, but one thing is agreed: America is in a bad way. The economy is in the dumper. Over 15% of the work force is either unemployed or working part time while searching for a full time job. Housing prices are depressed and home foreclosures continue at historic rates. Strong majorities say that the country is heading in the wrong direction. The approval rating of congress is in the single digits. And, from our political leaders, all we receive is <em>cognitive dissonance</em>. The president says jobs are “job one,” yet he stops construction of the Keystone oil pipeline, thereby killing thousands of good new jobs.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Yet, the expensive restaurants are busy. The stock market is flirting with 13,000. Gold is at an all time high. At the movie theater last week, we saw a woman with three kids at the candy counter; her bill was $65! What’s up with that?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Social issues are becoming more serious. Have you checked out the sorry state of public education? Hint: underfunding is not the cause. Last week the Federal Departments of Education (Arne Duncan) and Justice (Eric Holder) released a report showing that black males at ghetto schools are disciplined at a higher rate than other children. Duncan and Holder use this “fact” of discrimination to explain the poorer performance of blacks at those schools. Is this just ignorance or more cognitive dissonance? Thomas Sowell (a black man) has the answer: “Among the many serious problems of ghetto schools is the legal difficulty of getting rid of disruptive hoodlums, a mere handful of whom can be enough to destroy the education of a far larger number of other black students — and with it destroy their chances for a better life. Make no mistake about it - the black students who go to school to get an education are the main victims of the classroom disrupters whom Duncan and Holder are trying to protect.”</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />On the family front, for the first time ever, the number of children born out-of-wedlock to women of all races in their prime childbearing years exceeds 50%. Think about that – over half of these children have no father in the house. Most will struggle to avoid lives of poverty and ignorance. Yet on the morning TV talk shows (like <em>The View</em>) women make excuses, some even holding up the unwed mothers as positive examples of <em>sexual freedom</em>.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />When asked what’s wrong, my conservative friends generally say it’s obvious: the controlling political Party wants to make Americans more dependent on government -- and less free. I think they get it about half right – recall prescription drug coverage and NCLB. It seems to be just a matter of degree. Furthermore, I believe that these economic and political problems are merely symptoms of more serious underlying issues that threaten the American way of life.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />I think that there are two existential problems for the American experiment, one generally economic and the other social and moral. These problems are sometimes interrelated and sometimes cause and effect. Marxists, Social Darwinists, hard-core secularists -- materialists of every stripe -- would have us think that economics determines everything. If people steal, it is because they are poor. Poverty, to their way of thinking, is the primary cause of social decay. Religious believers, on the other hand, hold that the poor can be just as righteous as the rich; it depends on your beliefs and how well you follow them. Whatever the cause and effect may be, these economic and social issues, taken together, are causing a crisis of confidence in American institutions.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />It is our good fortune that these issues have been studied by two eminent scholars who have recently published their observations. In a penetrating series of articles for “The American Interest,” Walter Russell Mead addresses the economic crisis. Mead believes that the crisis is the natural consequence of the liberal and progressive economic system we enjoy. The root cause of the crisis is a paradigm shift in employment, from factory work to whatever will take its place.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Just over a century ago, there was a similar crisis caused by the decline of the family farm. The second agricultural revolution – the boom in productivity due to new farming technologies – meant that far fewer farm workers were needed. But industry was not yet ready to employ the millions of former farmers who were then unemployed. After some hard years, the factory system grew to employ all of the surplus farmers, and more, including millions of immigrants. The new economic model based on industrialization provided a much better living for ever more Americans.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />That so called “Fordist” economy fostered American prosperity for most of the twentieth century. But American innovation in factory automation, computers and “killer apps” grew productivity to the point where far fewer workers were required to produce the goods we needed and sold. Manufacturing jobs slumped, even while manufacturing output grew. Foreign competition from low wage countries exacerbated the job loss here in the US. Most of those jobs are gone forever. What will we do next?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />The social/moral crisis has been investigated in a remarkable new book by Charles Murray. In “Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010”, Murray addresses the disintegration of the family in the economic bottom third of the white population. Murray chronicles the inexorable breakdown since the 1960s of America’s founding virtues – marriage, industry, honesty and religiosity – within the blue-collar class, and the personal and communal wreckage that has ensued. We’re seeing the “collapse of the central cultural institution in one particular part of America” – meaning the collapse of marriage among the working class.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />It is hard to tie this cultural breakdown to economic conditions. During the Great Depression, the poor were more numerous and far poorer than today, yet economic stress did not undermine the family in those terribly hard times. Moreover, social breakdown began in the 1960s, a time of unprecedented prosperity. So what went wrong?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />One cause was the radicalism of the feminist movement. While demanding equal rights for women, radicals also concluded that the nuclear family was antiquated -- a man in the home was superfluous. Feminine studies programs grew up in the universities preaching the virtues of single motherhood. The Federal government Great Society programs enabled people to avoid work and gave young women an incentive to have children without marrying. Sexual liberation was a great thing, especially for single men.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Fortunately for them, the upper class generally recognized how destructive this behavior was and gradually returned to their more conservative ways. The lower class whites never made the right turn and the statistics tell a sad story. For example, only 48 percent of working class whites aged 30-49 were married in 2010 compared to 83 percent in the white upper class.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />These foundational problems, one economic and one social, have solutions. You may be surprised to find that one is progressive while the other is conservative. I’ll describe these problems and solutions in more detail in the following two posts.</blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-55637755789913023062012-03-05T21:04:00.001-08:002012-03-05T21:07:34.292-08:00The Passion of Miss Sandra Fluke<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Just who is Sandra Fluke and why does she matter? The third year law student at Georgetown, a Jesuit university, testified last week before Nancy Pelosi’s House committee in support of the Obamacare mandate to provide free contraceptive products to one and all. The 30 yr old Miss Fluke was no neophyte to this cause. At Georgetown, she has served as president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice, as vice president of the Women’s Legal Alliance, and as editor of the Journal of Gender and the Law. Today she is the re-born Joan of Arc, having testified, in essence, that “Congress should gut the First Amendment because it economically inconveniences the nation’s elite law students.” (Ben Johnson, Lifesitenews.com)<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The fact that Georgetown Law does not cover contraception for students, Fluke testified, created “untenable burdens that impede our academic success” and proved Georgetown does not “live up to the Jesuit creed.” Contraception, she said, “can cost a woman over $3,000 a year during law school…that’s practically an entire summer’s salary.” She neglects to mention that $3,000 is enough to buy condoms for “protected sex” eight times a day. How’s that for sexual freedom?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />As part of a Democrat effort to change the discussion from defending religious liberty against ObamaCare to one about the “subjugation of women,” Dems will attempt to make Fluke a feminist martyr. She and others who believe that institutions ought to be compelled to fund free birth control are, in effect, demanding a subsidy for having sex. No one is trying to prevent Sandra Fluke or anyone else from doing whatever they want in the privacy of their own bedrooms. “But what Fluke and President Obama are trying to do is to force religious institutions to pay for conduct their faith opposes.” The sovereign “assumes the right to insert himself into every aspect of daily life, including the provisions a Catholic college president makes for his secretary’s IUD.” (Mark Steyn, National Review, 3/5/12)</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Those who care about life – including the life of a baby in the womb or out – within the benevolent embrace of Obamacare, need to remember how abortion became a Constitutional protected “right.” It started with a totally manufactured fight over contraceptives chosen to be a precursor to the abortion rights campaign. In <em>Griswold v. Connecticut</em>, the Supreme Court found a right to contraceptives in the Constitution under the heading of “privacy” which Justice Douglas discovered in the Bill of Rights (that) have “penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” In other words, there is no right to privacy in the Constitution so Bill Douglas invented one. Step one in the abortion campaign accomplished. <em>Roe v. Wade</em> completed the fraud, when Justice Blackmun found that the right to privacy, wherever it comes from, includes the right to abortion.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Now we’ve “progressed” to partial birth abortion and even post birth abortion. Then–State Senator Obama opposed -- in 2001, 2002, and 2003 -- successive versions of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, an Illinois bill that was meant to provide protection for babies born alive after attempted abortions. The bill gave the infants protection as legal persons and required physicians to provide them with care. Infanticide was fine with Sen. Obama, as long as NARAL and NOW approved.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">President Obama and his court want us to be more like the enlightened Europeans. An article recently published in the Oxford Journal of Medical Ethics says that newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life.” The article entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” argued that “To bring up such (Downs) children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Welcome to Obamacare, and the brave new world of sexual freedom.</blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-37856440085908128322012-02-19T17:39:00.000-08:002012-02-19T17:42:25.211-08:00His Majesty, the King<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>“…this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”</em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />How very far we have come since that day long ago when the English king Canute had a throne placed on the seashore, sat in it, ordered the tide to go back, and duly got his feet wet. Canute, being a down-to-earth man, was annoyed by fawning courtiers who tried to tell him that he was all-powerful, and the tide stunt was to demonstrate that he was not.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />When Barack Obama was crowned (I mean inaugurated), there was a widespread sense that the messiah had arrived. One news anchor said he "felt this thrill going up my leg” while Evan Thomas, the Newsweek editor, noted:"In a way Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He's sort of GOD.” President Obama was called the “Son of promise, child of hope, our American prayer” and even the “Platonic philosopher king we’ve been awaiting for the past 2,400 years.” Michelle Obama said she was proud of America for the first time in her life.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Is there any wonder that the new president felt he had a mandate to remake America to his liking? Indeed, he cheerfully proclaimed that he intended to “fundamentally change America.”</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Now progressives had been fundamentally changing American culture for several decades, and the European culture wars (the “Kulturkampf) go back to the time of von Bismark. The origin traces to the anti-Catholic “May laws” that intended to “suppress it (the Church), to destroy it, to crush it with violence,” since it was seen as standing in the way of German nationalism and progress. With the Nazis the anti-Catholic sentiment morphed into opposition to all religion. In 1935 school prayer was abolished and by 1938 Christmas carols and Nativity plays were banned. A Hitler youth song rang out: </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /><em>We are the happy Hitler Youth, We have no need for Christian virtues ,….</em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Meanwhile, Hitler purchased popularity with lavish social welfare programs, national healthcare, environmentalism, and a fixation on organic foods and obesity (“Food is not a private matter.”)</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />The American Kulturkampf began with the 1960’s effort to eliminate prayer in public schools and state aid to parochial schools. Abortion was legalized on the basis that religiously informed morality had no place in public affairs. Roe v Wade merely extended the “right to privacy” found in an “emanation to the penumbra to the Constitution” that had been used to legalize contraception. In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that moments of silence at the beginning of a school day constituted a government endorsement of prayer. How far we have come!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Now we have Obamacare. Charles Krauthammer enumerated its constitutional wreckage. (Daily Breeze 2/19/12)</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Obamacare forces religious institutions to provide medical insurance that guarantees free birth control, tubal ligation and morning-after abortifacients, supposedly free of charge through the generosity of the religious institution's insurance company. On what authority can the president unilaterally order a private company to provide a service at no cost to certain select beneficiaries? This is government by presidential fiat. In Venezuela, that's done all the time.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Obamacare is an assault on the free exercise of religion since church schools, hospitals and charities will be forced into doctrinal violations commanded by the state. It is an assault on free enterprise since the state treats private insurers the way it does government-regulated utilities, determining everything of importance including risk ratios (for age, gender, smoking, etc.) and what is to be included in the basic policy (abortions will be next). It is an assault on individual autonomy since every citizen without insurance is ordered to buy it, again under penalty of law.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Many thought it was merely political hyperbole when Obama promised to stop the seas from rising. Others saw him as “the product of the all-knowing quantum field of intelligence” and “not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh.” I think Obama meant it when he said he would fundamentally change America. The Platonic philosopher king has spoken.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-62279467646754163212011-10-30T17:56:00.000-07:002011-10-30T18:41:57.102-07:00Chadwick Boy Comes Home<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">He walked into the room to the chorus of 300 kazoos playing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Michael Reagan is truly loved in these parts. The Republican Women luncheon was sold out, and we were not disappointed. Michael shared some of his childhood experiences here on the Hill. -- He attended Chadwick School because Ron and Jane did not want their adopted son to be exposed to the temptations of Beverly Hills High (and they wanted him out of the house).</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />He told heartwarming stories about his dad, who was a bit of a cheap skate.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Michael walked into his father’s hospital room --</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Michael: How are you doing dad?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Ronald: <em>Well, you know son, I was shot yesterday.</em> (<em>in that soft, slow Reagan tone</em>) </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Michael: I know that dad; I just wanted to know how you are feeling.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Ronald: <em>Well, Michael, I’m feeling OK. But I have some advice for you.</em><br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Michael: What’s that dad?<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Ronald:<em> If you’re going to get shot, don’t wear your new suit.</em><br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Michael: I see it dad, the blue suit all cut up lying in the corner.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Ronald: <em>Yes, they had to cut it off me. I was hoping they would try to save the suit. After all, I am the President.</em><br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Michael: I know dad.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Ronald: <em>Michael, the boy who shot me; his name is Hinkley. Do you think his parents have money?<br /></em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Michael: They are oil people, dad.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Ronald: <em>Well, do you think they’d buy me a new suit?<br /></em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">And so it went, one endearing story after another, for over an hour, without a single note.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">But there were serious moments as well. Like when he spoke about how we just have to beat Obama before he destroys our country. Michael would vote for any of the Republican candidates (even Ron Paul) and he wishes they would stop taking pot shots at each other and concentrate on Obama. Republicans are sometimes their own worst enemies.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Democrats, being ideologically pure, have no problem with any Democrat candidate (even Barbara Boxer), while Republicans are a more diverse bunch. I thought about what I believe, as a conservative Republican, and contrasted it to mainline Democrat ideology.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Republican vs. <em>Democrat</em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Rights bestowed by God vs. <em>Rights granted by the State</em> </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Individual liberty vs. <em>Government control of our lives</em> </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The Constitution vs. <em>A living constitution</em> </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Individual responsibility vs. <em>Cradle-to-grave welfare</em> </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Life vs. <em>“Choice” (ie a woman’s right to kill) </em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">American is exceptional vs. <em>Just like Greece is exceptional, or China, or.. </em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Right to bear arms vs. <em>Gun control </em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Legal immigration vs. <em>Open borders </em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Right to work vs. <em>Unions</em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Democrats are congenitally wedded to their beliefs, in some cases with a religious fervor (eg. the sacred right of a woman to reproductive freedom). By contrast, Republicans are renegades: Goldwater was pro choice, Reagan granted amnesty to illegal aliens, Bush gave us prescription drugs at government expense, and, did you know, William F. Buckley supported legalizing pot. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Michael told the story about his dad appointing Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in order to keep a promise to his daughter, Maureen, who in return gave up campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Several times Michael reminded us to be more like Democrats – to get into the game. Write letters to the editor, knock on doors, don’t just send money like we always do. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Now we need to nominate a ticket and get behind it. For my money the best would be Mitt Romney as the presidential nominee with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. or New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for VP. It’s a WASP-free ticket -- a Mormon and a Roman Catholic -- How diverse is that!!</blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-4698596566502305062011-10-11T15:13:00.000-07:002011-10-11T15:37:35.405-07:00Car Wars<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Imagine your teenage son and his cheerleader girlfriend hopping into his brand new jazzy sports scar for its maiden spin. OK, I know this merely reinforces the Palos Verdes stereotype of indulgent parents and spoiled kids. But, hey, the kid is an honor student who will be attending Stanford U. in the fall. Anyway, the car enters the 405 freeway and carefully moves across toward the HOV speed lane. Suddenly the unimaginable happens: the throttle opens wide, the engine revs into the red zone, the brakes cease to function and the steering wheel locks tight. A disaster is imminent.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />This is merely the opening scene of Chris Malburg’s new techno-thriller, “Car Wars: A Novel of Industrial Terrorism.” (Get it at </span><a href="http://www.carwarsebook.com/"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">http://www.carwarsebook.com/</span></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"> or at Amazon.com). My friend and PVE neighbor, Chris is a noted business writer who is trying his hand at fiction. And his new book is a fun read, especially on a Kindle at RAT Beach. Without giving away the plot, let me just say that there are plenty of villains in the book, among them Yonggan Zhanshi, ruthless industrialist in control of a devastating weapon of mass destruction, the head of the Chinese National Bank and the honorable President of the PRC.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />In a memorable scene the Chinese President reads the riot act to the American president. Here is an excerpt:<br /><br /><em>...The Chinese President frowned at his American counterpart. “America is bankrupt,” he began. “Morally as well as economically. I can do nothing about the former, but I can do something about your economics. I am your banker. I am now calling in the money I have lent to you. From this moment on, you work for me.” The Chinese President paused for a few seconds to let the shock of what he had just said fully sink in.<br /><br />“America’s Social Security, its Medicare and Medicaid and its unfunded pension liabilities created by the powerful labor unions now comes to 93 percent of your gross domestic product. There is no more money left to pay for anything else. And so you rely on China, Japan and the UK to buy your Treasury debt to fund your cash needs. No more!<br />“Your baby-boom generation is now retired. This large portion of your former workforce no longer pays taxes, but they do suck down your government’s benefits like hogs on a teet. Had you raised taxes to pay for all this years ago and reduced spending, things might have been different--”<br /><br />“I have been in consultation with my fellow holders of US debt. The IMF is calling the temporary line of credit it granted the United States. You have 30 days to repay the $100 billion you borrowed. Additionally, China demands that the US immediately repay $500 billion in Treasury securities coming due in the next 60 days. Not only will China not lend you the $300 billion you have come here to borrow, but my country will no longer be in attendance at your Treasury auctions.”<br /><br />The Chinese President stopped his pacing in front of his counterpart, turned and looked him in the eye. “This financial hiatus China is taking from America does not have to be permanent. If the US puts its financial house in order and affords China one other courtesy, I may elect to resume doing business on a limited scale.”<br /><br />The American President sat very still in his chair. He rejoiced that there might yet be a way out of this financial morass. “Yes, Mr. President? What kinds of house cleaning tasks do you have in mind?”<br /><br />The Chinese President’s knife-edged hand slashed the air, making his first point. “America will limit the coverage of Medicare and Medicaid--no more expensive treatments. Either your people will pay for them on their own or they will do without.” The hand slashed the air a second time, “Next, no health insurance subsidies. You will explain to your greedy, unemployed nation of welfare recipients that healthcare is not a right of citizenship but instead, a personal responsibility.”<br /><br />“Next,” continued the Chinese President, “You will eliminate all nonessential governmental expenses. You will begin with farming subsidies, ethanol production, public broadcasting, energy conservation and trade promotion.” The knife-edged hand slashed the air yet a third time, “You will go to a flat tax system where everyone--every single American citizen--pays taxes equivalent to 18 percent on the income they earn. You will eliminate all deductions and tax credits. You will also increase the gasoline tax to $2 a gallon. You will balance your federal budget.”<br /><br />The US President raised his hand for permission to speak. “That’s a lot to take in. Are you finished, Mr. President?”<br /><br />“I will tell you when I am finished...<br /></em></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Good stuff that. I had no idea that the PRC President was a Republican. In fact some of his action items could be taken straight from Newt Gingrich’s new </span><a href="http://www.newt.org/21st-century-contract-america" target="_blank"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">21st Century Contract with America</span></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">. </blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-82156218355038713892011-10-06T16:44:00.000-07:002011-10-09T15:17:32.304-07:00Faster than Light<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><em>"We don't serve faster than light neutrinos in here" said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.</em></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />The cognoscenti were abuzz -- Einstein was wrong! Relativity was debunked! European scientists at CERN in Switzerland and Gran Sasso in Italy had shown that the speed of light is not really the limit. Physicists, on the other hand, were mildly amused, one, even, </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/23/physicists-speed-light-violated"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">who promised to eat his shorts</span></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"> if the experimental result was correct. The great majority of physicists, a clear consensus, were skeptical of the results, thinking that there must be an experimental error.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Interestingly, no one in the physics establishment mentioned the consensus. No one accused the experimenters of being Relativity-deniers. No one tried to stop publication of the seminal paper in a prestigious journal. And no one claimed that the CERN-Sasso scientists were bigots – after all, Einstein was a Jew. In short, the physics community reacted not at all like the global warming community when confronted with contrary evidence.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />So what was all the excitement about? The experiment, code named OPERA, was built to detect neutrinos, ghostly subatomic particles, which are produced at CERN and aimed towards Gran Sasso, 700kms away. There are several types of neutrinos and two of the species are called mu neutrinos (mu-nu) and tau neutrinos (tau-nu). The primary purpose of the experiment was to determine if any of the mu-nus from CERN had converted into tau-nus along the way. If so, this would help establish the idea that neutrinos have a finite (really tiny) mass that might account for the much-sought-after “Dark Matter” hidden in the universe. A sidelight was to measure the time of flight of the neutrinos and compare it to the time light would take to travel the same distance. Surprise! The neutrinos took less time, 60 nanoseconds less.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">OPERA chief scientist Antonio Ereditato explained that “we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy. And of course the consequences can be very serious.” Indeed, much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light (in vacuum).<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Faster-than-light particles, so-called tachyons, have long been contemplated by theoretical physicists. If they did exist they could be used to send signals into one's own past, a clear paradox of causality -- and an explanation of the backwards joke at the beginning of this note. In fact, the most famous quip about “faster than light” has by now attained a venerable age (Reginald Buller in Punch, 12/19/23):</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /><em>There was a young lady named Bright,</em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>Whose speed was far faster than light;</em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>She started one day</em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>In a relative way,</em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>And returned on the previous night.</em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />The upheaval of known physics resulting from the discovery of tachyons would be momentous. A few astounding effects are discussed briefly in the Appendix.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />In a related development, the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics has been granted for an experimental error! It was 1997 and Adam Riess was sure he'd spotted a blatant error in his results -- measurements of exploding stars implied that the universe was expanding at a faster and faster rate, instead of slowing down, as everyone expected. Indeed, astrophysicists believed that the rate of expansion of the universe -- set in motion by the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago -- would be slowing down due to the influence of gravity. The goal was to figure out how rapid the deceleration was. What the scientists found, instead, was that the expansion of the universe was accelerating -- an observation that could be explained by the existence of a mysterious “Dark Energy” that acts like anti-gravity. Further experiments supported this finding and, even though no one knows what the Dark Energy is, the experimenters were awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />In breaking news (10/5/11): The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Dan Shechtman, an Israeli scientist, for his discovery of quasi-crystals, a form of matter that was not thought to exist. Shechtman faced skepticism, even expulsion from his research team, before his discovery won widespread acceptance as a fundamental breakthrough. “The main lesson that I have learned over time is that a good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks,” Shechtman, 70, told a news conference in Haifa, Israel.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />These cases illustrate the way real science should work. It is not politically motivated, and is not right just because it is believed, no matter the consensus.<br /><br />Appendix</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />In classical physics, mass is independent of speed. In Relativity, however, Einstein showed that the mass of a particle is related to its velocity, v:</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />M = M0/sqrt(1- v2/c2)</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />where M0 is the particle’s rest mass (mass at zero speed), c is the light speed and sqrt(…..) signifies the square root of the quantity in brackets. As one tries to accelerate a particle, and its velocity increases, so does its mass because of the v in the denominator of the equation. That makes it harder to speed up the particle. The result is that for all normal particles (we might call the tardyons) the speed has an upper limit of c, the speed of light.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Note that for tachyons, if they exist, the term v/c exceeds one, and the term in the brackets is negative. Since the square root of a negative number is imaginary, the mass of a tachyon is a strange thing indeed.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Another curious effect is that, unlike ordinary particles, the speed of a tachyon increases as its energy decreases. In particular, energy approaches zero when v approaches infinity. Therefore, just as tardyons are forbidden to break the light-speed barrier, so too are tachyons forbidden from slowing down to below c, because infinite energy is required to reach the barrier from either above or below.</blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-47894644786144329392011-09-22T20:19:00.000-07:002011-09-22T20:24:03.722-07:00Some Scary Numbers<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">You may recall the catchphrase “Billions and Billions” (of stars) that was associated with astronomer Carl Sagan’s popular TV show Cosmos.(1) It seemed like an enormous number, commensurate with the vastness of the universe. Now, however, Billion is passe’, Trillion has become the new Billion –- such as in the US Federal budget deficit for 2011 is more than a Trillion dollars – and we need to recalibrate our mental calculators. So much has changed.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />I remember making $1.80 an hour hauling beef for Wilson & Co, the meat packers. That was 1961 and I was not making much more than the black maids in that new movie “The Help.” And I was paying income tax and FICA.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Today the Government Motors unionized workers make $28 an hour (plus another equal amount in benefits) and yet complain. They just got a signing bonus of $5,000 plus inflation protection to ink their latest contract. Now that $28/hr is a scary number because it is unsustainable. We cannot compete in the global marketplace when nut-turners make $28 an hour. And thus far we have been somewhat lucky since the countries that make good cars –- Germany, Japan, South Korea –- are all expensive places to manufacture them. When the $5 per hour Chinese learns how to make a good car – say in 5 years – it will be all over except the shouting.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />But I digress. What I really want to talk about are the scary large numbers. Take $1 Trillion (that is a million x $million) for example. $1 Trillion is the amount the US Federal Government collects in income taxes from those of us lucky enough to pay income taxes. It is also equal to the amount we claim on our deductions; thus the tax code saves us an equal amount, ie $1 Trillion. For the average Joe the deductions come from mortgage interest, charitable contributions, supporting your mother-in-law, and the like. Note that only about 10% of the $1 Trillion tax savings goes to those evil corporations (which happen to employ our neighbors). So when Obama talks about generating a few hundred billion dollars by closing tax loopholes, it is largely our loopholes he wants to close. And remember, also, that nearly half of US households pay no Federal income tax at all. When the President talks about paying our fair share, I wonder if it is those folks he wants to do more.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />An even scarier number is $14 Trillion. That is roughly the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the total value of all goods and services produced in a year. But $14Trillion is also roughly the value of the Federal government debt, and also the total US household debt. Let’s do some arithmetic. If we divide the GDP by the US population, some 310 million, then the GDP per person is about $45,000, so is the Federal debt per person, and so is the personal debt of each person. For a family of four, that sums up to $180,000 in all three categories. Thus the average family owes $180,000 in government debt (not including State debt) and another $180,000 in family debt. Those are some scary numbers. Could it get much worse?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Oh, yes it can. Have you heard about the UNFUNDED LIABILITIES? Projecting into the future, the revenues from all Federal taxes will not be able to fund the required expenditures. The numbers are actually quite staggering: Social Security - $17T, Medicare - $88T, adding up to more than $100 Trillion dollars. Since the private net worth of all Americans together is estimated at just over $50 Trillion dollars by the Federal Reserve, you can see the problem.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />James Madison foresaw the problem with government excess in Federalist 51:</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /><em>If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.<br /><br /></em>It is pretty clear that the government, at least since FDR, and at all levels, has failed to live up to its obligation of restraint. Then Obama goosed it, but good!<br /><br />(1) The title of Sagan’s last book was “Billions and Billions.” As a humorous tribute to him, a <em>sagan</em> was defined as a unit of measurement equal to at least four billion, since the lower bound of a number conforming to the constraint of billions and billions must be two billion plus two billion. What is the US deficit measured in <em>sagans</em>? Or should we call it an <em>obama</em>?</blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-1246358905170268252011-09-17T14:07:00.000-07:002011-09-17T14:23:57.228-07:00Imagine God and Country<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>Imagine there's no Heaven </em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>It's easy if you try…</em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />It was the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and we were at church. The service was moving and memorable. Then the minister announced that the next song would be John Lennon’s Imagine, and added that he was very glad it was chosen. I wondered why?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />In the book Lennon in America, by Geoffrey Giuliano, Lennon himself explained that Imagine was “anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it's sugar-coated, it's accepted.” Imagine is commonly referred to as the “atheist’s anthem.” So why sing such a song in church? Why, especially, on a day of national sorrow? Have we somehow misplaced our moral compasses?<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The next day I read about a research study by eminent Notre Dame sociology professor Christian Smith. The study asked about the moral lives of young people 18 - 23 years of age, and the results are depressing. (“If it Feels Right,” David Brooks, New York Times, 9/12/11)</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. The default position is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. The study revealed an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism -- of moral relativism and nonjudgmentalism.<br /></span></span><br /><em><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Imagine all the people </span></span><br /></em><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>Living for today<br /></em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">When there is no God or Heaven, living for today seems like a reasonable ethics.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />For decades, thinkers in many disciplines have warned about the erosion of a shared moral framework. Alaisdair MacIntyre argues that the disintegration began during the Enlightenment with the rejection of Aristotle’s teleological idea -- that human life had a proper end, and that human beings could not reach this natural end without preparation. Throughout history, society has served to provide this preparation through the family, the church, school and the state. The group was seen to be the essential moral unit. Religion defined rules and practices, families imposed moral discipline and schools supported the families. Now, however, we are told that it does not matter what we believe as long as we follow our hearts -- the individual as the essential moral unit.<br /></span></span><br /><em><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Imagine there's no countries </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">It isn't hard to do </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Nothing to kill or die for </span></span><br /></em><em><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">And no religion too<br /></span></span><br /></em><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The founders of our great country firmly believed that God was the foundation of virtue and that “respect for His authority, mediated by the authority of parents, was the foundation of godly character.” The public schools were established with the goal of reinforcing this parental obligation to mold moral citizens.<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Somehow, through machinations known only to the intellectual soul, the “Men in Black” decided that religion needed to be banished from the public square. Thus teachers were left toothless in their battle with the child’s instinctive willfulness. Now there are movements afoot to banish the Pledge of Allegiance from the schools as well. Heaven help us if the courts get to decide.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /><em>Imagine no possessions </em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>I wonder if you can </em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>No need for greed or hunger </em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>A brotherhood of man </em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>Imagine all the people </em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><em>Sharing all the world<br /></em></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Imagine, indeed! Every time the <strong>sharing all the world</strong> crowd has taken control of a society or nation the result has been violence and widespread destitution. The forces that are trying to transform this country into a Lennonesque utopia must be resisted, or we will inherit the culture we deserve, and it won’t be pretty.<br /><br />References</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Barzun, Jacques, The Culture We Deserve<br />Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind<br />Bork, Robert, Slouching Toward Gomorrah<br />Himmelfarb, Gertrude, The De-Moralization of Society<br />Hunter, James, The Death of Character<br />Levin, Mark, Men in Black<br />MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue</blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-84025493324453344512011-09-16T15:37:00.001-07:002011-09-16T15:41:17.121-07:00PolyMath or Pretender<a><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">I like to read the New York Times articles by Paul Krugman: though pretentious, they are usually good for a few laughs. You see, Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner in Economics who yet adheres to Keynesianism, an outmoded and generally discredited economic theory. Although it has been clearly shown that Keynesian government “investment” actually prolonged the Great Depression, and that his theory utterly failed to explain Jimmy Carter’s stagflation, Krugman still clings to his childish belief that yet another “stimulus” is just what we need to cure the Obama recession.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Occasionally Krugman goes off the reservation and tries to display his scientific acumen. He is, after all, the guy who wrote an essay on the computation of interest rates on goods in transit near the speed of light. I kid you not. (See “Sixty-seven, and Smarter than Paul Krugman,” palosverdesblog, 5/5/09.) In his recent Times piece, “Republicans Against Science” (8/28/11), Krugman criticized Rick Perry for this “vile” statement: “I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change.” Yep, Krugman called that “vile.” Let us see if Mr. Krugman knows what he is talking about, or is he just a pretender.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">What makes a scientific theory? Let me use an example to illustrate the concept. If I say that things fall down, that is true, but is not a scientific theory. If I add that things fall down because the Earth attracts them that is a hypothesis, still not a theory. If say that all the planets move in orbits because the Sun attracts them, that generalization is still less than a theory. When, however, I say that the force of attraction between the planets and the sun is proportional to the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them, then I am able to calculate the motion of the planets for comparison (and prediction). Now I have a scientific theory.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Thus a scientific theory is more than an idea. It must be descriptive, quantitative, predictive and testable. Thus, it must also be falsifiable. Newton’s gravity meets all these criteria. As an exercise for the reader, ask yourself if evolution does the same. Treat microevolution (Lamarck, c1800, which predates Darwin) and macroevolution (Darwin’s big idea) separately. Here I’ll put global warming “science” to the test.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">The central premise of global warming theory is that man-made carbon dioxide emissions have been trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere and warming the earth. Since the beginning of the industrial age, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing inexorably, from about 280 ppm in 1800 to 390 ppm today, an increase of 39%. Yet during that time the average global temperature has gone up and down. And during the Medieval Warming (900 -1300AD), before the advent of the industrial age, the global temperature was comparable to today.<br />Even overlooking the obvious fact that to base your science on one variable – actually a small proportion of one variable – is not science, the evidence does not even support the idea. Indeed, the global warming “science” - based on computer models - fails the criteria of a scientific theory. In the memorable words of physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it is “not even wrong.”<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">As for pseudo-polymath Paul Krugman, his theme song should be<br />“Yes, I’m the great pretender…”<br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"></span></a>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-57034264213409279822011-08-24T17:09:00.000-07:002011-08-24T17:13:21.240-07:00The Logical Dead End of the Nanny State<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The Western world, as I recently noted (“The Abolition of America,” 7/4/11) is in the process of rejecting the natural tradition of objective right and wrong. One of the sad consequences has been a cultural and moral decay that has infected the greater part of old Europe. Now, only a month or so later, we have witnessed riots in the streets of London and throughout England. Many observers of the British scene have commented on the root causes of the senseless destruction. Three of my favorites - Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, Ann Coulter - plus Prime Minister David Cameron -- contributed their wisdom to the following analysis. </span></span>
<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Lord, please forgive my plagiarizing.
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<br />There are many lessons for us from London in flames, as gangs of feral youths trashed and looted their own neighborhoods. There is a saying in Britain for people who undermine their own living quarters – they call it “shitting on your own doorstep.” And this rioting suggests that the welfare state has given rise to a generation perfectly happy to do that.
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government: they have been marinated in stimulus their entire lives. One-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works – in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One-tenth of the adult population has done not a day's work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997.
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and if it does not receive that high standard, that is a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived, even though each one has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor, quite likely, any member of his family made much of a contribution. Indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognize this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude.
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">And consigning the violence to rage over reduced job opportunities and welfare doesn’t quite wash. A large number of the vandals and looters are teenagers on their school vacations rather than desperate twenty- or thirty-year olds recently out of a job and with a family to support. As written in the Daily Telegraph, the rioters hardly represented a beleaguered minority neglected by the state:
<br />So far, those arrested and charged include an 11-year-old girl, a 31-year-old primary school teacher and the 19-year-old daughter of a company director who is currently at Exeter University. The participation of those from relatively affluent backgrounds, either in full-time education or full-time employment, makes nonsense of the knee-jerk response of blaming cuts to the Education Maintenance Allowance, among other things.
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">A more plausible “root cause” is the parlous state of British inner-city state education, which has turned out a generation of unemployable youth, who are understandably angry at their dim prospects and their miserable state-provided living environments. This introduces a different, and altogether more damning, diagnosis: the failure of the policies of post-war social democratic orthodoxy, and the cumulative growth of the welfare state, to address the problems of urban poverty and the integration of marginalized classes into wider society – indeed, the state’s role in destroying the integrity of families, in discouraging bourgeois aspiration, and in uprooting traditional community values which historically served to harmonize and reconcile society to itself.
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to address the “moral collapse” that led to the widespread looting and violence. He has pledged to “review every aspect of our work to mend our broken society: schools, welfare, families, parenting, addiction,… to the twisting and misrepresenting of human rights that has undermined personal responsibility.
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">“These riots were not about race,” Cameron said. “These riots were not about government cuts ... And these riots were not about poverty.”
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">“No, this was about behavior ... people showing indifference to right and wrong; people with a twisted moral code; people with a complete absence of self-restraint.”
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">He listed irresponsibility, selfishness, fatherless children, reward without effort, crime without punishment and behaving as if one’s choices have no consequences as some of the problems contributing to a “slow-motion moral collapse.”
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">“What last week has shown is that this moral neutrality, this relativism – it’s not going to cut it anymore,” he stressed.
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">And the “social fightback” starts with families. “If we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start.”
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the "abolition of want" to be accomplished by "co-operation between the State and the individual." In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life's vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Today want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. Here is America, the Democrats' real achievement has been in destroying the family, thereby creating an endless supply of potential rioters. When blacks were only four generations out of slavery, their illegitimacy rate was about 23 percent (lower than the white illegitimacy rate is now). Then Democrats decided to help them! </span></span>
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">It is barely two generations since LBJ's Great Society programs began and the rate of black illegitimacy has tripled to 72 percent. Meanwhile, the white illegitimacy rate has exploded from 4 percent to 29 percent. Instead of a “War on Poverty,” it should have been called a “War on the Family.” </span></span>
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The vast and permanent underclass created by the welfare state is a great success story for the Democratic Party, which now has a loyal constituency of deadbeats who automatically vote for the Democrats to keep their “benefits” flowing. </span></span>
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">It's the Democrat Party “heroin dealer” model of government. </blogitemurl></span></span>
<br />Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-68723002983121367482011-08-24T17:05:00.000-07:002011-08-24T17:08:41.536-07:00The Abolition of America July 4. 2011<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">As Americans celebrate our Independence, it behooves us to heed the warning of a man who did not live in freedom. “To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots,” said Alexander Solzhenitzyn. You sever a people’s roots by destroying the memory of their historical past. Today, too many Americans, particularly young people, are ignorant of our past, or believe a distorted version of it.
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<br />Jesus said “I am the Truth,” and without truth there can be no freedom. In the past century, British author C.S. Lewis wrote eloquently on the subjects of truth and identity. Clive Staples Lewis (“Jack” to his friends) wrote everything from children’s fiction to philosophy and theology, from The Chronicles of Narnia to Mere Christianity. The Abolition of Man was his classic defense of truth (the natural law) and his goal was nothing short of an attempt to salvage Western civilization. Lewis believed that the Western world was in the process of rejecting the tradition of objective right and wrong, and he saw this rejection of truth being taught in the school systems of his day. Fifty years later, with the advent of post-modernity, the question of “Truth” is, indeed, the question of our time.
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<br />Lewis would be appalled to find that the “debunking” program he described in The Abolition of Man has done so much damage to the Britain he knew. As Lewis feared, the cultural demolition was deliberate. The self-anointed reformers admitted as much: “We recognize that the British people love the old ways, and that there is no popular clamour for change. Nevertheless, change we must.” Sadly, this change has led to a cultural and moral decline that has infected the greater part of old Europe. The last two Roman Catholic popes have written with passion on the dangers of a “dictatorship of relativism” in Europe. But how did this cultural sea change come about? Was the root cause intellectual or material? And to what degree has America been infected?
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<br />The radical idea that truth is a state constructed by the mind is at the root of a cultural infection. With reason as the sole guide, each reasoning person could (should) construct his own private version of truth (subjectivism). What inevitably follows is relativism -- that each individual’s conception of truth is as valid as any other individual’s. When applied to society, there are no objective truths, only prevailing versions disseminated by ruling social groups. When applied to virtue, moral relativism is the result. Each society creates its own ethics. The ideology of relativism holds that all cultures, ethnic groups, sexual preference or special interest group are equally valid, deserve communal support and mandated representation. This is “multiculturalism” today.
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<br />Radical thought in America has a long history but it entered the mainstream in the 1930’s and marinated through the 60’s. Intellectuals in fields such as education and psychology had been infected by Radical Enlightenment philosophy and Marxism. Scholars taught the tactics of “Critical Theory:” destructive criticism of all the main elements of Western culture, including Christianity, morality, the family, sexual restraint, capitalism, patriotism and conservatism. Their strategy was psychological conditioning: “America’s children could be conditioned at school to reject their parent’s social and moral beliefs as racist, sexist and homophobic, and conditioned to embrace a new morality.”
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<br />Now the radicals of the 1960’s have become professors of philosophy, sociology, literature, black studies, feminine studies, GLBT studies,… and, most ominously, professors at the education schools of nearly all colleges and universities in America. In the Ed. schools they are able to indoctrinate the future teachers of America in all manner of radical thought including relativism, multiculturalism, gender equality and hateful criticism of Western culture, America in particular.
<br />Their first step is the deconstruction and reinvention of history. Lying about our history has now become commonplace. Take, for example, the National History Standards published by UCLA in 1994. This curriculum promoted multiculturalism by minimizing the achievements of Europeans and their descendents in America in order to focus attention on blacks and American Indians. Students were told they need to “Analyze the Declaration of Independence (mentioned only once) from the perspective of men and women, and people of Native American, European, and African descent.” The US Senate denounced the UCLA farce by a vote of 99-1.
<br />But that did not stop the revisionists. </span></span>
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">In 2005 the California State Board of Education approved the eighth-grade history text, Creating America. Produced by Houghton Mifflin, Creating America identifies ten representative American heroes: Abigail Adams, Crispus Attucks, Andrew Jackson, Queen Liluokalanai, Abraham Lincoln, Juan Sequin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, George Washington, Ida B. Wells and Zitkala-Sa. In fact, this highly unrepresentative American history rather vaguely resembles a “Soviet-style history” cobbled together from representative national heroes that conforms to multicultural ideology.
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">One of the most popular American history texts at the high school level is Howard Zinn’s People’s History. Reflecting postmodern revisionist ideology, Zinn declares that “there is no such thing as pure fact.” The theory of history offered by Marx --“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”-- is relied upon by Zinn to explain all of American history, which is portrayed as a continuous chain of immoral colonialism, imperialism and exploitation of minorities and the laboring underclass. Predictably, Zinn draws a moral equivalence between America and the 9/11 terrorists. Yet nowhere in his book will the student learn about Washington's Farewell Address, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate.
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">More recently, the state of CA passed a bill that would require teaching the contributions of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. The textbooks will need to be modified accordingly. Is it actually a fact that GLBT contributions have been systematically excluded from the texts? Of course, facts mean nothing when you are pursuing an agenda, in this case the abolition of the centuries old tradition of heterosexual marriage.
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">So what is left of our culture? Was the redefinition of the words “is” and “sex” by President Clinton an aberration? In one of the founding texts of sociology, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile Durkheim wrote that by defining what is “deviant,” we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards. In 1993, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan authored a now-famous essay, “Defining Deviancy Down.” In it, he argued that social scientists, the courts, politicians, and some in the general public had been busy redefining deviancy down, so much so “as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, (while) also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.” </span></span>
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">How far have we regressed since then? “This is the Brave New World that mindless tolerance, diversity and lawsuits on their behalf have wrought. The decline of American civilization since the 1960s has been so fast and so dramatic that it takes one's breath away,” said my friend Dennis Prager. As Dostoyevsky prophesized many years ago, “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” </span></span>
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<br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">I’m confident that Jack would agree.</blogitemurl></span></span>
<br />Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-28743546592979007842011-03-08T14:43:00.001-08:002011-03-08T14:47:08.658-08:00Ask a Jew<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">One Sunday past I traveled out to Pasadena with good buddy Jersey George to attend a show billed as “Religion on the Line” but promoted by the performers as “Ask a Jew.” Longtime friends and KRLA Radio hosts Dennis Prager and Hugh Hewitt put on quite a show for the 700+ religious conservatives gathered in the Hilton Hotel ballroom.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />Throughout the performance Hugh played the straight man to Dennis’ wise man. At the start Hugh asked the audience how many were Jewish (about one quarter), Roman Catholic (same), Evangelical (half), Muslim (none) and atheist (1). It is interesting that three fourths were Christian and that Mainline Protestant was not polled, perhaps signifying the conservatism of the audience.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />Hugh asked questions of Dennis for two hours, dealing mostly with what it means to be Jewish in America. Prager was ever-ready with insightful and, frequently hysterical, responses, having spoken on the topic hundreds of times and written several best-selling books, including “Nine Questions People Ask about Judaism” with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />Just a sample question dealt with the afterlife. Dennis explained that most Jews do not believe in heaven or hell, in spite of what the Torah says. Judaism preaches an afterlife, including the resurrection of the body, but Jews say -- whatever?</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />In describing the Orthodox, Conservative and Reform branches of Judaism, Dennis mentioned that the Orthodox Jews do not generally accept converts. You may be an Orthodox Jew only if your mother was born a Jew. I thought what a wonderful place America is, where there can be three radically different forms of a single religion, and no one bats an eye. It reminded me of an incident that occurred in England last year that was not so wonderful.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />Europe’s largest Orthodox Jewish school is in London and it has long accepted only Jewish students. Last year, when it denied entry to the son of a Jewish father and convert Jewish mother, the parents sued. In a scary decision, the British court found for the parents and against the school on the grounds that the basis for Orthodox Judaism is “racist.” In his bizarre opinion, the chief justice equated the Jewish doctrine of matrilineal descent with South African apartheid. Britain’s chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, was apoplectic: “An English court has declared the religious definition of Jewish status to be racist,… in effect declaring Judaism racist.” (David Goldman, First Things magazine, Jan. 2010)</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />Just last week the British courts again interjected themselves in religious matters. A black Christian couple was denied the right to continue raising foster children because their views on homosexuality were in conflict with gay rights, which take precedence over their religious beliefs. The grandparents, Owen and Eunice Johns, have already fostered 15 children and were praised by social workers as “kind and hospitable people” who “respond sensitively” to youngsters.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />But social workers raised concerns that their attitudes to homosexuality would conflict with the new Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations. During the case, the Equality and Human Rights Commission argued that the children risk being “infected by Christian moral views.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />Outside court, Mr. and Mrs. Johns, aged 65 and 62, said they were “extremely distressed and had only wanted to offer a loving home to a child in need.” They believe homosexuality is “against God’s law and morals” – but said they are not homophobic and would “accept and love” any child. (</span><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?s=y&authornamef=Tamara+Cohen"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Tamara Cohen</span></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">, UK Mail Online, 1st March 2011)</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />Meanwhile, Islamic religious (sharia) courts have been established in Britain to operate in parallel to British courts. A report entitled “</span><a href="http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/New-Report-Sharia-Law-in-Britain.pdf"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Sharia Law in Britain:</span></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"> A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights” begins with Suhaib Hasan, Secretary General of the Islamic Sharia Council, saying, “If Sharia law is implemented, then you can turn this country into a haven of peace because once a thief's hand is cut off nobody is going to steal.” There are presently over 85 Islamic sharia courts operating in Britain, sanctioned by the British government that has declared their rulings “enforceable with the full power of the judicial system.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />Thus far the Islamic courts deal with civil matters only. Still the “sharia courts threaten the integrity of law in the British democracy, by promoting the unequal treatment of women in the British Islamic community.” For example, “in disputes over child custody, sharia recognizes the absoluteness of a father's ownership if the child is over seven years old.” (Ellen Toplansky, Sharia Law in Canada and Britain.)</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />This unholy trifecta reveals the sad state of religious freedom in Great Britain. Of course, these things could never happen in America. Or could they? (Obama appointee </span><a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/10/spencer-obama-adviser-loves-sharia.html"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Dalia Mogahed</span></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"> is a sharia law advocate.)</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Toward the end of the show Dennis stated that the essence of Judaism is fighting evil. Hugh responded that the essence of Christianity is forgiveness. On the way home after the show, George and I had plenty to gab about over Sicilian pizza and Italian beer at a great place just off Colorado.<br /><br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-49828500608159214902011-02-24T14:12:00.000-08:002011-02-24T14:17:03.205-08:00Unholy Debt<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">With the Federal government debt exceeding the total output of the entire US economy (the GDP), serious minded people are seriously concerned about the economic health of the country. Depending on inflation and interest rates, the interest payments on the debt could, by the end of the decade, exceed the total Federal budget of only a few years ago. The effect of such excessive government spending is to remove money from the private economy, keeping unemployment at unhealthy levels, nearly 10% now, and double that if you include the underemployed.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />The same problem exists in the States where typical yearly deficits are in the billions of dollars, in excess of $20B in California. States are trying all kinds of tricks to balance their budgets, usually including borrowing tons of money if they can get it. Unfunded future liabilities for government retiree’s pensions and health care costs are impossible hurdles in many States. (In California it exceeds $500 Billion.)</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Now church leaders are beginning to speak out about the immorality of massive debt. "America's growing debt is a not just a financial issue, it's a spiritual one," said Jerry Newcombe, of the Coral Ridge Ministries. "The Bible is very clear about the moral dangers of debt." The evangelical ministry has been sounding the alarm about the "monstrous debt burden" to its estimated 500,000 devotees through radio programs, print publications and its website.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Likewise, the Family Research Council has delivered "action alerts" about the debt to its network of 40,000 pastors. The Christian Coalition, Concerned Women for America, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition are also warning members that the deficit is reaching immoral proportions. ("National debt is new hot issue for evangelicals," by Daniel Burke, Religion News Service)</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Generally, people are concerned about the effect on unemployment and the threat to long-term prosperity of historically high levels of spending and debt. Another, perhaps even greater, issue is the harmful effects on the targets of government largess. The sad state of New York welfare is a prime example.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />New York’s Medicaid program covers nearly 5 million people, a quarter of the total population at a cost of $53 billion (combined federal and state money), more than any other state, even California, with twice as many enrollees. Think about that. One quarter of New York residents receive Medicaid, at a cost of over $10,000 per person.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Now Medicaid is supposed to be a last-resort safety net for those who do not receive medical care through their own or employee insurance or Medicare. Yet New York Medicaid covers parents who earn up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level and childless adults up to the poverty level. New York also provides optional benefits including prescription drugs, dental and vision care and even long-term care. (New York Times editorial, 2/19/11.) Quite the nice safety net! In addition to the Medicaid giveaway, this quarter of New York residents likely receive food, rent and energy subsidies, and pay no Federal or State income taxes. These 5 million people are effectively wards of the State.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />So what about these millions of (mostly) able-bodied folks who receive welfare, food stamps, rent and energy subsidies, Medicaid, etc, and pay nothing at all for it? Do they feel good about it? Are they motivated to improve their lot? Daniel Patrick Moynihan, working for Lyndon Johnson in 1965, warned America about the self-destructive consequences of the Welfare State. Star Parker’s Uncle Sam’s Plantation exposed the personal tragedy of a young woman “chewed up and spit out by our country’s ruthless welfare system.” If you look at the many longitudinal studies of welfare recipients from the 1960s until today you find a dismal record of social improvement.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />As Aristotle said 2500 years ago, “If you want to encourage something, reward it.” President Johnson’s war on Poverty has had the unintended consequences of “family breakdown and illegitimacy; cycles of dependency that transfer from one generation to the next; anger, despair and hopelessness. Judged by its results, the war on Poverty was more a War on the Poor.” (Jay Richards, <em>Money, Greed and God</em>)</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />This is the unholy Welfare State. It must be stopped.</blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-8473669200329721242011-02-15T16:07:00.000-08:002011-02-15T16:13:39.735-08:00Oh the Inanity!<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">I sometimes wonder if I can continue reading the New York Times. OK, I only read it at Equinox where it is free, and I use it to get my heart pumping. But the editorial and op-ed writers (excepting David Brooks) are so ideologically tilted as to overshadow the Leaning Tower of Pisa. One could make a career out of debunking the economic “wisdom” of Paul Krugman (whose answer to every question is <em>more government spending</em>) and the socio-political confusion of Bob Herbert. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">On Feb 11, while the throngs celebrated in Cairo, Herbert wrote a piece called “When Democracy Weakens.” In it he mused: “I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.”</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />I wondered what was going on in Bob’s head? Why is he so worried about America?</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Herbert again: “So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands.”</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />There it is. Bob frets that the top tax rate is still “only” 36% and politicians, faced with a $14 trillion federal debt and a $1.6 trillion deficit this year, are looking to cut the budget. “We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.”</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Well, what about that? The dictionary definition of democracy is a “form of government in which all the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives.” It is generally agreed that democracies must guarantee “equality of rights, opportunity and treatment” through the rule of law and that includes the right to hold public office. By that definition there were exactly zero democracies in the world in 1900. Women did not get the vote until somewhat later. Today, however, there are 89 democracies in the world comprising 46% of the world population. That is remarkable progress!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Like all leftists, Herbert thinks of democracy primarily in economic terms. So what about the poor that he thinks are, somehow, disenfranchised? Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a DVD player, and a stereo. In fact, 46% of all poor households actually own their own homes. As a group, America's poor are far from being chronically undernourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle class children and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Not one poor American is denied the right to vote or hold public office or equality under the law. And not one pays a single dollar in Federal income tax. Bob needs to stop the inanity and worry about what is really wrong with American culture.<br />There are two main reasons why American children are poor: Their parents don't work much, and fathers are absent from the home. </span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">The typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year. (16 hours of work per week) If total work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year, the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week, nearly 75% of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two thirds of poor children reside in single parent homes; each year, an additional 1.3 million children are born out of wedlock. If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Look to your community, Bob.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"></blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-14491839173853752822011-01-30T15:50:00.001-08:002011-01-31T14:13:11.653-08:00The Job Myth<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">The fabric of a culture contains both truths and myths -– falsehoods believed by a large number of people. Many times, truths and myths straddle the same objective reality. For example, a truth about America is that it was created as “one nation, under God.” The myth is that it was designed to be a secular nation with a “wall of separation” between church and state. If you saw the SOTU on Tuesday night, one thing you did not see was the words “In God We Trust” chiseled into the granite behind and above the President. As Denis Prager has noted, that was a deliberate choice of the TV stations in service of their secular-America myth. The God-in-America myth has been profoundly damaging to our culture. It will be a primary subject of these blogs. </span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Today, however, I’d like to talk about another type of myth, also harmful, dealing with the economy. </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">This very popular myth involves jobs, or more specifically, job creation. (Isn’t it interesting that job and Job – “an upright man whose faith in God survived the test of repeated calamities” -- are the same word.)</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />Now, Government is able to create jobs, but it involves the force-able transfer of income from one group of people to another. The stimulus package did a lot of that income transfer, but the President has now come to realize that it did not keep the jobless rate below 8%, as he promised, and, with unemployment in the mid 9% range, the people have given up on a government fix. Indeed, “Obama put the business community on notice that they have to deliver on new jobs.” (Timothy Egan, New York Times, 1/26/11)</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />It is unfortunate that this viewpoint reflects an ignorance of basic economics that seems to be mythological. Even the intellectual elites fall for it. The raison d’etre of private companies is to produce goods and services. Jobs are a means to that end. If sufficient demand for goods and services is lacking, jobs will be lost. The law of supply and demand, the most basic in economics, seems to have evaded the Times writers.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />While many believe that the creation of jobs is a universal good, and is the moral responsibility of us all, the Bible puts all such duties below the rights of property. Michael Medved (</span><a href="http://www.michaelmedved.com/"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">http://www.michaelmedved.com/</span></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">) described it thus:</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br /><em>While leaders of the religious left portray the Bible as a neo-socialist document that emphasizes sharing resources with the poor, the stone tablets at the core of our tradition tell a different story. In late January, Jewish congregations around the world read the Exodus passage introducing the Ten Commandments, and two of those ten explicitly stress the sanctity of private property. God commands humanity not to steal—seizing wealth belonging to someone else – and not to covet your neighbor’s house, his animals, or “anything that belongs to your neighbor.” The commandment says material goods belong to the individual, not the state, or even to God. We are obliged to help the poor through acts of personal charity, but nothing suggests that government should seize private property against the will of its owners to achieve some higher good. </em></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><em><br /></em>The history of the past two decades shows that lower government spending as a share of GDP is associated with lower unemployment rates. A much better way to reduce unemployment is to encourage private investment with lower tax rates and reduced regulations. The following graph shows how lower tax rates caused falling unemployment fell when private investment increased as a share of GDP. (John B. Taylor, The Wall Street Journal, 1/29/11)<br /><br /><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"></span><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 175px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 372px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568130879687023570" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7REZzTPr1vxff4c2l8NyTuZ3b6C8aVxwjl3YOQKU2gtMzRiFOOLEzeTsjOKZDfmCA9ZDAbUZfPlTz0f1hisRF5NqX1pFC26R4Oe9-tp7U1DoMacuTU9z4Ad8KZo50c2jFOAGp/s320/private+investment+and+unemployment.jpg" /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Economics is a serious business, not the stuff of myths.</span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-51585544376011390372011-01-22T16:55:00.000-08:002011-01-22T17:02:11.307-08:00Two Culture Wars<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">In the wake of the Tucson tragedy there were accusations that political rhetoric encouraged Jared Loughner on his murderous rampage. Of course, that was mere nonsense. “None of Aristotle's four causes -- not first, not final, not formal, not efficient -- link Loughner's rampage to political chatter.” One of the great things about Americans is that we can and do engage in rhetorical battles about politics, religion, popular mores, MTV (“Skins” – yuck!), without descending into physical violence.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />Two of the most consequential culture wars in America today deal with religion and the source of authority. The “Faith Matters” survey conducted by Robert Putnam and David Campbell (see the book “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us”) found that “Americans are increasingly concentrated at opposite ends of the spectrum – the seriously religious at one pole and the avowedly secular at the other.” The authority war faces off those who wish to conserve the culture handed down from the past and those who would radically change it. </span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">The conservative modus operandi for cultural change is a slow series of tiny tweaks meant to improve an already magnificent tapestry. For the change agent, on the other hand, the campaign must begin with the destruction of the culture as it exists. </span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Usually the change campaign begins with contemptuous dismissal of the past as when Marx declared that “culture is mere training to act as a machine,” or when the deconstructionists denied the validity of all culture as being the corrupt products of “dead white men.” </span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Tectonic cultural shifts generally originate from within a culture, motivated by the cultural elite, intellectuals and political class. The books I reviewed in my last post (by Dalrymple and Hitchens) showed the devastating effects of the cultural revolution in England since the 1960s. “To regret religion is to regret Western civilization,” said Dalrymple, summing up the British loss. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) has written passionately about how Europe’s denial of its religious and moral foundations led to the loss of faith, optimism and courage. Reflecting on the ever declining birth rate, Ratzinger noted that “Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future.” (See for example, “Without Roots” by Ratzinger and Marcello Pera)</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />The culture wars over religion and authority are inter-related in the Putnam and Campbell data. The “Faith Matters” survey shows that religiosity is not correlated to positions on foreign or immigration policies, and the correlation is modest when the issue is the size of government (The religious like smaller). However, the statistical correlations are strong when it comes to abortion and same sex marriage. By large margins, religious people are opposed to both. Abortion and gay marriage are simply steps too far for most religious people.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />Protecting the lives of the weakest humans against a culturally approved slaughter is about the clearest possible moral stand the church could hope for. Standing against gay marriage continues the church’s protection of the innocent after birth.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"> </span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">However, some churches (eg. the Episcopal and the United Church of Christ) have abandoned these traditional stands to their own peril; membership in such progressive churches has plummeted in the last decades. This sad story will be the subject of a future post. </span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-40023720847533426912011-01-06T14:57:00.000-08:002011-01-06T15:04:49.837-08:00Is Britain Civilized?<span/> <span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">When the great British bulldog was laid to rest on 31 January 1965, the crowds (more than 300,000) who queued up to see him lying in state were typically British: loyal, proud, sentimental, yet self controlled. During the darkest days of the war, when England was on the precipice of surrender, Winston Churchill had been the indispensable man. The British people were a proud family honoring their father figure, sure that British institutions were the best in the world. Thus it came as something of a surprise when the newly elected Labour government set about to “reform” British culture.</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />In 1965 the youthful Roy Jenkins was appointed to head the Home Office. Jenkins had made a name for him-self with the publication of a manifesto called “Is Britain Civilized?” in which he attacked Britain's "archaic" laws on abortion, censorship, homosexuality, and divorce, as well as arguing for the abolition of capital punishment. His reform of the criminal justice system was designed to make it as “civilized” to the criminal as possible. Jenkins and his Labour co-conspirators believed that a more permissive society would be a more civilized society.<br /><br />One of the greatest blows was to the stability of family life. In his 1967 Reith lectures, Edmund Leach actually blamed the traditional family for most of society’s problems. In 1965 British society was one of the most stable, decent and law-abiding in the world. By the turn of the century, English society had been radicalized.<br /><br />In his book “Our Culture, What’s left of It” the British ex-pat Theodore Dalrymple documents the destruction of English character: rampant alcoholism and drug use; increasing illegitimacy; children raised without any form of parental supervision or guidance; the destruction of traditional mores and respect for law.<br /><br />And what happened to the family? Labour MP Jon Cruddas, a staunch liberal, said recently that the “biggest calamity facing society is the relentless disintegration of the family and the profoundly dangerous consequential element of a lack of male role models.”<br /><br />Neil Clark summarized the damage in the 2003 Opinion-Telegraph: “The damaging impact of Jenkins's reforms on the society we live in is all too clear to see. One marriage in three now ends in divorce. Almost 40 per cent of children are now born out of wedlock, the highest figure in Europe. Since the 1967 Abortion Act, more than six million unborn children have been aborted. The legalization of homosexuality has not been the end of the chapter, but merely the beginning, with an aggressive ‘gay rights’ lobby demanding more and more concessions. The policy of early release of prisoners has had a catastrophic effect on the safety of the general public: 14 per cent of violent criminals freed early are convicted of fresh violence within two years of their release.”<br /><br />Liberalizing political reforms made a mess of British society turning England into perhaps the “most libertine -- and frankly immoral -- country in Europe.” You may think these judgments are rather harsh, perhaps exaggerated. Well by the late 1970s the damage was already so severe that English novelist Kingsley Amis wrote a withering satire on the decay of the national culture. In “Russian Hide and Seek” Amis suggests that the trashing of English culture could only have been achieved by a ruthless foreign invader.<br /> <br />At the same time the churches in England were undergoing their own reforms and contributing to the destruction of English character. In his scathing critique of British social life --“The Abolition of Britain”-- Peter Hitchens notes that “Hell was abolished around the same time that abortion was legalized and the death penalty was done away with.” Anglican bishops, headed by John Robinson, began to admit that they were “not sure about the existence of God or the truths of their religion’s central beliefs.” The Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins (another Jenkins!) spoke of the resurrection as “conjuring tricks with bones.”<br /><br />Lacking the “faith once given,” English churches decided to become relevant and post-modern. Traditional forms and the most cherished beliefs were jettisoned. Scripture was increasingly replaced by social theology, suited to the new social democracy, in which “Christian charity was expressed through political action rather than in your own conduct.” The churches became booster clubs for the political reforms imposed on the working class people by Roy Jenkins and his crew. And the churches became increasingly empty.<br /><br />Some Anglican pastors described in “The Rise and fall of the Nine o’Clock Service” tried to entice the lost parishioners with pseudo-Christian services: “Druidic white-robed figures around an alter resembling a crescent moon… hundreds of black-clad figures peer out of the darkness, swaying to swirling, strangely ethereal breaths of ambient techno.” Very clearly, it could no longer be said that the Anglican Church was the “Tory party at prayer.” It did not work.<br /><br />Amis describes a church service after the Russians have purified England. A young woman reciting the Creed wonders what it is all about: “The whole catalogue was very odd – remote and fanciful. It made sense to believe in keeping oneself to oneself, in a hot-water bottle on a cold night. But what difference could it make to think the Holy Ghost advisable, to be in favor of the life everlasting.”<br /><br />So what do you think? Is Britain still civilized? Do you see any parallels in America?<br /><br /></span><br /> </blogitemurl><br /></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-4045194374685743382010-12-30T14:00:00.000-08:002010-12-30T14:06:43.929-08:00Onward Christian Soldiers<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><em>Onward then, ye people, join our happy throng <br />blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.<br /></em><br />In this time between Christmas and the New Year it is appropriate to reflect on our blessings. We who live in “this greatest nation on God’s green earth” have a lot to be thankful for. Although there are many who have had to struggle during the economic downturn, we all of us enjoy the most freedom and economic opportunity ever experienced in the history of mankind. Yet we read that many well off people are unsatisfied and unfulfilled. Depression is a growing malady. Perhaps the remedy is to “choose life.”<br /><br />At our church (Neighborhood Church in PVE) my friend, the Rev. George Baum, conducts a monthly Happiness Hour (or two or three). At these gatherings we try to follow the admonition of Dennis Prager that “Happiness is a Serious Problem.” We owe it to others – our family and friends foremost -- to be happy, or at least to pretend to be happy. Of course this instruction did not originate with Dennis. Indeed the Church fathers preached the same message. “The Apostle Paul</span><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"> — who spent an inordinate amount of time in cold, dark Roman prisons — instructed his followers to give thanks in all things. Paul's advice is consistent with research showing that the single biggest ‘happiness variable’ we can control is our attitude.” (Oliver Thomas, “In New Year's trying times, choose life,” USA Today, 12/26/10). My aunt Judy was wrong: We were not “put on the earth to suffer.”<br /><br />That said gratitude and happiness are not cause for Pollyanna. Indeed, there are troubling signs of moral decay in culture and society. Much of the trouble can be traced to a loss of faith associated with growing secularization. In the twentieth century secularism was enforced by totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism cannot tolerate God since the state must be the source of all human rights. The extreme consequence was the mass murder of over one hundred million in Europe, China and the Soviet Union.<br /><br />But secularism does not need to be enforced. In advanced democratic countries God can be chased from the public square in the service of toleration and “the separation of church and state.” Europe provides a sad example of the loss of faith. In his books, “The Abolition of Britain” and “The Rage Against God,” Peter Hitchens, brother of the flagrant atheist Christopher Hitchens (“God is Not Great”) chronicles the parallel decline of religion and culture in the formerly great -- Great Britain. <br /><br />We Christian Soldiers must be diligent. Faith is like a muscle that needs to be exercised to remain strong. In America the protestant mainline churches became flabby and lost millions of members. But the void of belief had to be filled. Some turned to environmentalism, others to post-modern religious movements such as Emerging Christianity that welcome flabby Christians. But that story is for another time.<br /><br />When I was a blogger a few friends found my musings to be of interest. Now I would like to resume the practice with a weekly post on the subject of culture and its most significant artifact -- religion. You may well wonder why I care enough to expend the effort of writing a regular blog on religion. It's simple: If we do not speak up the other side will win. I refer again to St. Paul: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16). </blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9999692.post-28456615132140578832010-04-06T16:26:00.000-07:002010-04-06T16:28:18.458-07:00Sweetheart Government Jobs<span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"> Isn’t it astounding how little most people learn from history? Or, perhaps, it is not so surprising considering the political correctness and downright slander found in many historical treatments used in our underperforming schools. Someone said that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it, much to their chagrin. For example, what can we learn from the Chinese?</span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;"><br />In medieval times the Chinese empire dominated the Eastern world and led the whole world in culture and innovation. By 1300 the Chinese had invented gunpowder, canal locks, movable type, the compass and rockets, among many other notable achievements. Then it stopped. While the Ming dynasty astonished outsiders with their wealth, knowledge and power through the fourteenth century, eventually Chinese technology and innovation withered and the empire waned. What happened to this great culture? What does history tell us? I’ll return to those questions later, after talking a bit about a modern parallel.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">According to a report from the U.S. </span><a title="More news, photos about Bureau of Labor Statistics" href="http://content.usatoday.com/topics/topic/Organizations/Government+Bodies/Bureau+of+Labor+Statistics"><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;font-size:130%;">Bureau of Labor Statistics</span></a><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;">, the typical federal worker is paid 20% more than a private-sector worker in the same occupation. <br />For example, broadcast technicians earn on average $90,000 working for the Federal government vs. only $49,000 in private industry. Some other comparisons (federal/private): graphic designer ($70,800/$46,600), landscape architect ($80,800/$58,400), public relations manager ($132,000/$88,000) and clergy ($70,500/$39,200). Overall federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector while the average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Furthermore these salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Adding it up you get a grand total of $111,476 per year for government work vs. $69,928 for the same work in the private sector. The difference is $41,548 or 59% in favor of government work!</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />Mama, you must send your clile to work for the gubment. Those who labor in the private sector have become an underclass.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />So what does this analysis have to do with the downfall of the Chinese empire? There are several reasons why technology, innovation and progress waned in China. One was Confusion ideology wherein the universe simply is and always was and there is no reason to suppose that it functions according to rational laws. Thus the scientific revolution that awoke the West did not seem possible to Chinese minds. Another reason is the massiveness of the Chinese bureaucracy and its sweetheart government jobs. Eventually the “best and the brightest” in Chinese society entered government service where the pay and benefits far surpassed the “private” sector. History provides a valuable lesson.</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br />And while we labor to reverse the profligacy and malfeasance in Washington, we must not overlook the problems here in California. As the State government goes bankrupt, and brings down the local entities by their egregious spending, it is past time to demand changes. Surely the size of government needs to be reduced by insisting that government does what it must do and no more. At the same time efficiency can be dramatically improved by balancing incomes.<br /><br />In the 3/29 Daily Breeze, the editorial summarized the “political pay gap,” meaning the discrepancy between state government workers and those who labor in the private economy. The magnitude of the problem created by this overspending is understood through a simple fact. States and local governments would save $339 billion a year if they paid their workers the same as private workers. That is enough to more than cover the estimated 2010-2011 deficits of every state in the nation.<br /><br />In California, about half of government expenditures go to support government employees and the State alone has a $20+ billion yearly deficit. The government employee unions control the Democrat party and are rewarded with sweetheart deals in contract negotiations. Somehow we need to find a way to break the cycle of public union - elected official back scratching.<br /><br />A good first step will be to elect Meg Whitman as governor (and John Eastman as attorney general). Then we need to replace as many of the Sacramento Democrats as possible and put the fear of the people into the rest of them.<br /><br />At the local level it is time to demand that city officials, school boards, library trustees and other government entities look at their employees’ total compensation and make appropriate adjustments. It is no longer valid to benchmark government employees’ compensation against other government employees, ie city vs. city, school district vs. school district, library vs. library. The only legitimate comparison is with the private sector, and the ensuing action should lead to fiscal solvency. To do otherwise is an abrogation of our citizen-patriot duties.<br /><br /></blogitemurl></span></span>Bill Lamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02092428206818183253noreply@blogger.com2