Six or seven hundred years ago, society was very different than today. Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, makes this point dramatically when he cites a Middle ages book on etiquette. Unlike today’s such books, it was necessary to point out and make clear that at no point during a dinner, especially with guests, was it good form to defecate in the dining room during dinner. This needed (apparently) to be pointed out. Over the intervening centuries between then and now, the three main leadership roles in our society, the political leaders, the religious leadership and the academic or learned scholars hammered home better comportment and behavior. Much progress, as we can see by comparison has been made. This effort however was not cheap, did not falter (with recent exceptions), and was persistent and warranted.

The same triad, political, religious, artistic, and scholarly leaders for a far longer time, by a factor of five have been hammering at us unwashed another lesson. For a society to continue it must renew itself through the raising of new children to adulthood. In past ages, the ‘replacement rate’ maintaining a society has been higher than the 2.1-2.3 that we enjoy now (this change is largely due to recent medical advances). Now the raising of children is a daunting task. It requires at least two or more decades of diligent, attentive, considered care. This isn’t to say there are not rewards, but the cost is very high. Convincing couples to cleave together, work together to accomplish this task if not done and done well, will doom a society to extinction. No society will last long in which “good parent” is not high praise. If you think this false, name a counterexample.

Each of these factors of the aforementioned “triad” has contributed to an effective array of mechanisms for helping people make the right decision, in which the term “right” here means the same thing as it did in the context of etiquette. Weddings, social acknowledgement, public recognition of lasting marriages, tax breaks, poems and stories, moral teaching all line up to help convince couples to wed, have children and raise them diligently. There has been no one solution as to how to best accomplish the task of convincing people to have children and raise them well. Heterosexual monogamy as practiced and advocated in the Christian influenced West is one of the most common, but it is not exclusive. What is common to all societies however, is that the raising of children is placed very high on the “must be done right is paramount” list for that culture.

Europe and much of the modern world is suffering from a demographic collapse. Some countries and subcultures have been experiencing for decades now replacement rates close to 1, an exponential collapse. Here in the US, religious, cultural and immigration has kept the replacement rate nearer two, but look at the 20-somethings and 30-somethings of your acquaintance, how many of them are married with children? Or more telling, how many of them are not.  But here is a question. That triad of societal leaders, do they have the same force as they once did? Are they still telling us the same message, “get married and raise your children well?” Clearly they are not. In this month our society is deluged with commencement addresses. Read a few … one in a hundred (a thousand) will be telling these kids as they move to independence to get a job, get married, raise kids well.

And no, the conclusion is most definitely not due the European embrace of same sex marriage as being on par with heterosexual ones. That is a symptom not a cause. And this is why I started this where I did. To debate “is calling a same sex union marriage” right or not is to debate in a sandbox, not in the real world. The problem isn’t how/whether we can raise same sex unions on a par with heterosexual ones without “destroying” heterosexual marriage. That frames the debate wrong. The real question at hand is how do we put the task of raising children rightly with the same political, religious, and academic force that it had in past decades back on track. If we fail at that, we will follow Europe into demographic collapse and exponential decline into the past. Parts of Europe already have more 90+ y/olds than those under age 10. We need the vast majority of ordinary individuals to aspire to raise children well in order for society to continue. If we fail at that, whatever we decide on marriage will not matter, for we will be doomed to pass onto the ashes of history as another culture which is remembered in books and by scholars but which has passed away from the world.

What is a fictional narrative, a novel? A novel or fictional narrative at its root is an exercise in world building. With words and story an idealized society is constructed. These stories, setting aside those which are purely meant to entertain, highlight and bring to our attention either what might be wrong with our society and how it functions or perhaps a vision on how it might be improved. Liberals and libertarians supporting same sex marriage in the US are wont to say that there are “no good arguments” against SSM, just bigotry and such. For myself, I have not seen once, anywhere a good narrative account of how you can combine holding same sex marriage in the same regard as heterosexual marriage and at the same time hold the raising of children well as a high cultural imperative in a believable way. Define marriage as a mere mostly temporary contractual alliance between consenting adults … and your raising children well is left where? Show me the novel in which marriage is the thing you think it might be seen in the SSM=HSM world and at the same time raising kids is what children aspire to and then you’ve actually made the argument you think you’ve made outside of that meta-ethical sandbox. Currently from where the right stands, the SSM arguments made by the left sound a lot like more Mr Huxley’s little famous (and alas prophetic) novella. But that, as a reminder, was a dystopia and not a highlighting of problems not construction of where we want to go.

1. Words, authors, and locations.
2. Comin’ at ya.
3. In the wrong black book, recall that one thesis I’m exploring is happiness and individual/wealth based societies vs family/shame based one. Chalk this one up for the family crowd.
4. The budget limit zombie rises again.
5. Let’s see … is it ethical? Is it ethical to drive a model of car that, by comparison, gets better mileage, offers better control, and is substantially cheaper. Is it ethical to not do so?
6. One prediction put down for the record (by a conservative who advocates voting for the sitting President no less).
7. Harvard Law’s minority member.
8. Not a good sign when your model looks quite embarrassed to be there.
9. Will there be an apologetic response from the left?
10. Which one should be coy about admitting belonging?
11. In which little substance is code for full of lies and BS.
12. Food for thought.
13. Bureaucrats, credentialed or not, aren’t the inventors, developers, scientists, and engineers who have (or don’t have) the credentials that actually matter.
14. A glass floor in an unusual setting.
15. On that texting-while-driving crises.

No, me neither. And yet ballot after ballot in Europe is turning out those who pushed for fiscal responsibility. When you’re in a hole, especially a financial one, stop digging. Call Dave Ramsey and cut up your credit card. But experiments with socialism always sound like the Pied Piper, until the bill comes due. By then, everyone is addicted to the "freebies" and there’s no turning back.

Austerity is the answer, but liberal economists always seem to think that government spending is the answer, not the problem, and that austerity leads to all sorts of problems. Except that, when the United States tried it, against the liberal naysayers’ warnings, it worked.

This is what austerity looks like.

After the huge spending during World War II, the US got seriously austere, with regards to government spending. What happened?

Superstar economist and devout Keynesian Paul Samuelson—later to become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics—predicted such shock austerity would cause “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” That dire, disastrous prediction was widely held by his fellow Keynesians, with one even predicting an “epidemic of violence.”

Except the doomsayers were wrong, even though Washington obviously ignored Samuelson’s call for gradual spending reductions. Despite cuts which dwarfed those seen in the EU today—not to mention those Republicans are calling for here at home—the U.S. economy thrived. There was no mass unemployment despite rapid demobilization of the armed forces.

(Yeah, another Keynesian, Nobel-prize-winning economist predicted doom. How much more of a parallel with Paul Krugman do you need?)

Don’t say that austerity won’t work, when you haven’t really tried it, and it’s worked in the past.

1. Same sex marriage and cricket races … or gosh why are the polls always so wrong (and for political science types … apparently “because polls are astoundingly inaccurate instruments” is not the answer. It’s why we call them cricket races after all.).
2. Mr Krugman beats his wife less these days. Oh, wait that was supposed to be this link. I think however the logical fallacy is the same.
3. Domino effects.
4. A Greek popular singer and a change of lifestyle.
5. The atheist worldview and similarities to fatalism.
6. In our money based culture … putting a value on the homemaker.
7. Of guns, control, and revolution.
8. Soteriology.
9. Income inequality.
10. Trade and a book.
11. How to effectively help the third world.
12. Headlines and unintended consequences (predicted).
13. Heh.

Here are some of his reasons:

[Michelle and I] are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated.

"Christ sacrificed Himself. We should treat others the way we want to be treated. Therefore, same-sex marriage is good." With that sort of "deep" theological thought, one could rationalize any number of behaviors that the Bible is rather clear on. But once more for emphasis:

Genesis 2:24 - For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

Pretty clear to me. And again, as I have noted before,

• Every time the Bible mentions homosexuality, it is speaking against it.
• Every time the Bible mentions marriage, it is heterosexual.
• Thousands of years of Christian and Jewish thought understand this.

But for Mr. Obama, personal experience trumps all of that.

“I was sensitive to the fact that for a lot of people, the word ‘marriage’ was something that evokes very powerful traditions, religious beliefs and so forth.

“But I have to tell you that over the course of several years, as I’ve talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in in­cred­ibly committed monogamous same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together. When I think about those soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf, and yet feel constrained even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone because they’re not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

"Some of my best friends are gay. Therefore, same-sex marriage is a good thing." I’m sorry, but quoting the Bible is not the same as following it, especially when it says things in the most definite of terms that are diametrically opposed to what you are suggesting it says.

This may be helping Obama in the short term (he got a surge of donations soon after the pronouncement), but in the long term, this may hurt him with African-American and Latino voters. It’s time to take notice of the actual values of the man you may be voting for.

1. Some of the pictures are very funny.
2. Is it that all government expenditures not created equal?
3. This is interesting … apparently antisemitism is a PR problem for the Jews, nothing at all wrong with those who hold or promote those notions. It’s the Jews fault. Strange, a fellow and his family can go to church for decades and hear not almost nothing about same sex, well, anything. Wonder where these people get those notions? Perhaps its not from inside the church, but external slanders? (Replace “Christian” with “Jew” and “antihomosexual” with, well, whatever antisemites gripe about and see if you think the reaction by Mr Schraub would be place the blame on the Jews).
4. Here is more the sort of thing you actually hear in churches.
5. A spy and his cover. In the Bush admin the left went ballistic over the “outing” of Ms Plame … this undercover operative … do you hear the outrage? Neither do I. Perhaps the outrage was political and not about the loss of cover by leaking data to the press? Odd that.
6. Occupy and their faux outrage against big corporations.
7. Dark shadows, then and now and the missing monsters (or monstrous).
8. Our moral president, always doing right by the people.
9. Boys schools and context for the Romney bully kerfuffle.
10. Social construction and empire.
11. Disabilities and happiness.

Life is wasted without Jesus. That’s a pretty benign Christian aphorism. You can agree or disagree, but is it hate speech? It is in Canada.

The Post Office, supposedly, allegedly privatized, is going to cost the taxpayers $34 billion dollars. It could cut costs, but Congress won’t let it.

A 20+ year study proves conclusively that outlawing abortion does not lead to "coat hanger deaths". Bonus: NARAL co-founder admits they made up numbers to garner sympathy for their cause.

Foiled bomb plots: Occupy Wall Street - 1, Tea Party - 0. The same goes for dozens of incidents (enumerated at the link) that, had they happened at a Tea Party rally, would have headlined national news for day. (I know this because charges of racial epithets with no actual proof did just that.)

VP Joe Biden lauds NBC for moving American towards same-sex marriage. How? “I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.” The next time someone tells you "It’s just a TV show" or "Just change the channel" for complaining about TV show content, ask them to get a new writer. The old script is a lie.

And speaking of same-sex marriage, Nancy Pelosi seems to think that her religion provides the reason why she must act against her religion on the matter.

For what it’s worth, "An official from Iran has refuted claims of plans to execute imprisoned pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who has been imprisoned for almost three years on accusations of apostasy, a crime where one disaffiliates themselves from a religion." This from a country not even holding to its own laws regarding the case.

Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for Julia.

Extremists? I don’t think that word means what you think it means. And here’s an article I wrote in 1996 regarding another right-wing extremist you’re sure to know.

Looks like Mitt Romney’s school days will be vetted by the media more than Obama’s ever was. Too bad their first attempt failed so badly.

And finally, the recent European elections in perspective. (Click for a larger image.)

1. Epistemic insight into that road to serfdom?
2. By your fruit (or not exactly fruit)?
3. Is this on the up and up?
4. Half our electricity … gone? or gone from mind of the left?
5. Hey! I thought Mr Gowers was done with the entertainment. There’s more fun!
6. Saint von Bingen, here and here.
7. Of art, beauty and flaws.
8. Why the horn?
9. Why bother read the fine print … he isn’t an honest speaker in the first place.
10. A language found.
11. A grease, err, Greece fire?
12. An economic indicator?
13. A top ten list.
14. You sir, might be an idiot, I however am a fool.
15. Tombstone.
16. Wind damage.
17. Flexibility and pessimism (or is it realism).

1. Irrespective of the contents of this particular debate, I think Ms Althouse is spot on in noting that any argument that depends/blends on personal anecode is cheapened and weakened. So why is it so often used?
2. Of tea leaves and primaries.
3. And this primary? What of it?
4. A revenue neutral tax? Hows that work? Sounds like no tax at all. Or a linguistic dodge. You can have a revenue neutral tax policy, which entails manipulations of a number of different taxes raising some and lowering others. But you can’t, for example, enact a revenue new tax and have it not be 0. That’s mathematically impossible.
5. A long way of saying pointing out what should be obvious, that the high wage earning management types … work really hard. The pretense is that they don’t work or work very little. That’s amazingly far from the truth.
6. Our state considers its next encroachments on freedom.
7. Reading this, I was wondering if never-had-cable are considered akin to cable cutters?
8. 900k signatures for recall, 1/3 of which didn’t bother even voting in the primary. Odd that.
9. Wrapping up our maths fun for the last week or so.
10. Oh, stop trying to make sense of political rhetoric.
11. Fashion.

Item 2: The Tea Party has been tarred with the charge that they are just Republicans mad at having a black, Democratic President. And yet, in Indiana, the Tea-Party-backed candidate for US Senate challenged and handily beat the white, Republican 36-year veteran in the party’s primary. It is not, and has never been, about race or party. It has always been about policy. If it was about party, running the perennial favorite is what they would have done. But Richard Lugar has lost touch with conservatives in Indiana, and with the Tea Party in full swing, they did something about it.

News/Blog items:

Tea Party Senate Candidate Richard Mourdock Wins; Gay Marriage Loses

Mourdock victory = Tea Party victory

A Terrible, No Good, Awful Night for Barack Obama

Six-term Senate veteran Lugar defeated in Indiana primary

N.C. to add marriage amendment to its constitution

Let’s get rid of all campaign finance restrictions. Campaign contributions will be considered, in my proposal, as a contribution directly to the person who is running. He can use those funds however he might see fit, for vacations in the South Pacific, an extension on his house, or for campaign ads, campaign gewgaws and literature, or other campaign related activities. This will have several benefits.

1. No silly court related cases like the above.
2. People will think twice about contributing to people of low character.
3. Contributions will be taxed as income (likely as aggressively as lottery income), and as a result, will have a positive impact on our deficit far greater than the “tax-the-rich” proposals on the table.

So, there you go. Campaign finance irregularities. Solved. Everybody can go home happy now.

Or not.

1. Starting on a lighter note …
2. Moving to a patriotic one, albeit not for my country but the sentiments translate (literally).
3. Which leads to my question, not exactly about any particular point made by the linked essay, but on the same topic. So many people, and they might be right for all I know, equate political success directly with campaign spending. How does that work? Just about every ad I’ve seen for candidate A (bought by/paid for by candidate A) shifts me more toward the other side. Every call from candidate A makes me more annoyed with him than not. So how then does spending translate into votes?
4. Love your neighbor dude. Try it.
5. Choice.
6. Can you imagine? Government obstruction? Golly.
7. More here, of a different sort.
8. Ho hum? I didn’t see this in any papers. Have you? How about on your other news sources? Why? Why not?
9. Right on the heels of Mr Obama’s speech announcing victory over al-Qaeda.
10. That pay disparity.
11. And some more maths fun.
12. One way to cool your thirst on a long ride. Not the usual way however.
13. A bookend, back to the light with a contrast of sorts.

Genesis 2:24 (NIV) - That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

Proverbs 14:34 (NIV) - Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people.

Righteousness and sinfulness are indeed both personal and corporate. Please consider this.

1. Yep, you need to hold your line, apparently Mr Ferrari has forgotten that elementary point.
2. Tolerance and the much abused “Black Studies”.
3. Mr Krugman (and others) often goes off against EU austerity. Can you spot it? I guess austerity means something besides a cut in spending.
4. A book recommended.
5. A million years of global warming didn’t kill the dinosaurs, why fear a few tens of decades? In fact, this gives support to the climate warm = good hypothesis.
6. Of Parliament and separation.
7. Something, I gather, the pro-choice movement has nothing bad to say about.
8. A tree falls in the forest, see no noise.
9. One view on gay marriage.
10. Checking some results. What do you think the outcome will be?
11. Equine domestication and the Cossack.
12. He “got a few things right” (Mr Obama that is) … starts as damning with faint praise and goes downhill fast when the fact checking begins. Perhaps the article “a”, was unnecessary.

There’s a lesson here for American Republicans.

The fiscal measures that France had been working on are now likely going away.  Hollande is quoted as saying, ""Europe is watching us, austerity can no longer be the only option." Socialism, which exists to "spread the wealth around", needs more and more money and more and more vote buying social spending to keep its promises.

Let’s not forget that, upset at their involvement in Iraq, Spaniards voted in Socialists who promised to get them out of the war. They did, but the jihadists still bombed Madrid. And after seeing what the Socialists did to their finances, the voted them out in a crushing defeat 2 terms later.

There’s a lesson there for the French, and Europe in general.

Is anybody listening? It will be too late for the French if they go the way of Greece. Who will bail them out? Germany, again? Us? This will not go well.

1. I concur … and (clickthrough) a little meta-backstory.
2. Familial ties, social or genetic.
3. Of property values and the entrepreneur.
4. 400!? That’s a lot.
5. Some definitions of racism. I still like mine, “it is racist to use race as a criterion where it isn’t clearly warranted.” And yes, selecting for college admissions based on race is racist.
6. Automation and the legal office.
7. Military training and a sim-city variant.
8. Hayekian road to serfdom in a modern context.
9. Yet another Julia.
10. I found this more humorous than perhaps it warranted.
11. A book noted.

FALSANI:
What is sin?
OBAMA:
Being out of alignment with my values.
FALSANI:
What happens if you have sin in your life?
OBAMA:
I think it’s the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I’m true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward, when I’m not true to it, it’s its own punishment.
(What brand of Christianity does this represent?  Honestly, I have no idea. Read the whole interview.)

“Nice work, occupiers,” tweeted Jeremy Tooker, owner of the popular Four Barrel Coffee. “You made me leave my sick kid at home to go clean paint bombs off my windows. That’ll show Wall Street, fellas.” (More May Day Occupy Wall Street madness at Yourish.com.)

"For activists and Christians opposed to the so-called Israeli occupation, two key votes by the United Methodists will certainly serve as a discouragement. On Wed., May 2, the denomination twice voted to reject resolutions that called for a divestment from companies accused of assisting Israel in the ongoing dispute over Middle Eastern lands." (The UMC cares for both the Jews and the Palestinians, and won’t blame one side for violence from both. Good for them.) (Oh, and on May 1st, "A Qassam rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip and exploded in an open area in Ashkelon Coast Regional Council.")

And finally, Economics 101, from Chuck Asay. (Click for a larger version.)

1. A few comments here on bikes on roads might work. Uhm, I have been stopped by a cop riding a bike, in my case, because he felt “stopping” by doing a track stand (the bike stopped … but I didn’t “put my foot down”, which apparently for the cop means I’ve actually stopped). I’ll add that bike trails along side roads might be nice, but there are two problems, I think when they cross roads they are less, not more safe in that the cars/bikes aren’t really as cognizant of the other’s presence at intersections because they are on separated on the main path and second, lots of roadies are traveling a whole lot further than that short section of bike path. I used to take an 80 mile ride up to my mother-in-laws. Several sections of the path paralleled bike paths for about 2-3 miles of the whole trip. While that path might have made sense for the subdivision along side it, not so much for me.
2. Wheaton stands with the Roman Catholics.
3. Liberals like to point out how much more multiculturally senstive and aware and open they are. It just ain’t so, just observe these two leading liberal public intellectuals.
4. Courage recognized.
5. I think if you back that question up a bit you’ll find the “what constitutes healthy” a thorny enough question in and of itself without qualifying it.
6. While we’re in the business of thorny definitions, how about defining manufacturing.
7. The wonders of Obamacare and that whole “find out what’s in the law after you pass it”.
8. So, go ahead, follow Ms Warren’s example and check the “African American” section any application or employment form. And while your at it, check the “Cheerful” spot in the sexuality section.
9. Admission of guilt a bit?
10. Full assault mode. Attack attack attack!!!
11. Of economic opportunity and height.
12. Well, don’t worry, “reset” didn’t mean anything to anyone not in Russia either.
13. Well, no. I don’t think it is ever correct to hire a less qualified candidate. Who would? Now, I think the left would tell you that aff/action is to have preferences between equally qualified candidates. But, when they tell you that, alas, they are lying.

1. Over four years late … Obama background begins to be investigated.
2. Politics 101: How not to spin.
3. OK. I get it you didn’t like the paper (linked a few days ago). But, geesh, when criticizing a paper isn’t it bad form to use wrong/bad examples, i.e., house construction is not “bloated” because rents are going up … except why might rents go up? Could there be reasons other than a underultilization of construction resources? Perhaps because people aren’t buying because (with good reason) don’t trust property values to be stable yet? I’m no economist but that argument was just plain dumb.
4. Simple analysis of musical forms.
5. My first thought after seeing this is, well, Biden is worse … what ya complain’n about?
6. A political commentator whose never heard of Sarbanes Oxley apparently. Actually, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You don’t have to scratch hard at all to find anti-business in the beltway.
7. Not enough information and cheap puzzles.
8. Transliteration vs translation and maps.
9. Tort and adultery.
10. Hack spit. SAY WHAT? Let’s see, a policy success for the US, China threatens a man’s wife, he leaves the protection of the US embassy … and that somehow somewhere is a policy success?
11. Tripos (whatever that is) entertainment continues.
12. A good question, what does it take to get a higher rating?
13. What they don’t tell you is high reps (20+) to failure is amazingly painful compared to 4-10 rep to failure weights.
14. Atheists, believers and damned lies akin to statistics.

1. Of revenge and justice. Is motive the only difference?
2. Loyalty Day? Where is the liberal outrage? Where? Hmmm? Let’s see, what if Mr Bush had suggested that?
3. A better way to remember May 1. More links here.
4. More grist for the wind farm/climate discussion.
5. A thought experiment on truth telling.
6. Anti-semitism in Norway.
7. Huh? Insanity on the left coast.
8. Rational huh? Evidence to the contrary abounds.
9. Obama’s politicization of his assassination of OBL noted. The left can explain the crucial difference between “not moving heaven and earth” and “if we have a shot we’ll take it”. Seems like they were on the same page.
10. People densities on the planet projected in space.
11. Nuptials of a different sort.
12. Coolness, noted as no biggie by the left. An essential feature of coolness it seems to me is that coolness is a raising of style and aesthetic over substance. If you think that’s not important … perhaps you also believe that.