Good morning.

1. Markets of sorts.
2. Suspended?
3. Feminism moves backwards, removing a reality on account of a fiction.
4. Making your point.
5. Drones and a shift that is less than it appears.
6. And we just grouse because schoolteachers and priests aren’t fired.
7. Cyprus.
8. Cause and effect?
9. Where the press is less free than here.
10. A sunstone.

Good morning.

1. Early maths.
2. Consistency.
3. Terrify the Kremlin?
4. I’d never even heard of Nowruz. So know you know.
5. Just remember “real utopias” typically have a archipelago of gulags for the millions of kulaks who don’t see your utopia as utopian.
6. Two words, fullness and mystery.
7. Again, I think this is a symptom of an underlying disagreement, on which my homework is to write more tonight. I’d started a post on that topic and changed my mind halfway through. I need to work toward a conclusion again.
8. This is not unrelated.
9. Zooom.
10. Striking down some regulations. Wooo.
11. Babbage in action.
12. More grist for the drone conversation and the difference between killing as a soldier and murder.
13. So, privileges for gays … means you need tests to verify the category.
14. Mr Krugman, sloppy reader, noted in response here.
15. Yikes.

Good morning.

1. Woo Hoo. Mr Cheney back in the news, sort of. Well, actually … not.
2. Grist for the drone discussion.
3. Hmm, no hints at telling us how America will move to becoming an authoritarian state, but interesting nonetheless.
4. Cronyism, fraud? Is that a start? And it’s all about who you know.
5. Nuance.
6. Interesting post on the first day of Spring when it’s  13 degrees out (and global temperatures have been flat for almost 20 years).
7. For the Palin fans … the guy they fail to defend. Just remember, one heartbeat from the Oval office.
8. Simplicity itself. Heh.
9. Last week we had pictures of those bear sized grey wolves in Idaho … this we read from history.
10. All electric not there yet.
11. A budget comparison.
12. Failure to comprehend.
13. Abortion and consequences.
14. Uhm, Patrick was in the 5th century … the concept of “British” had no relation to the modern concept. You’d be better off calling him Roman.

Well, I seem to have lost a day to work and the 1st week of Lent.

1. I think by the term “Wisdom” he means “being sneaky”. Or at least that word substitution makes for an interesting hermeneutic.
2. Why does it help to multiply everything by ten all the time?
3. The other side of the aisle would call that synergy and a good thing. They’re wrong.
4. Mr Timber might recall the non-Democratic defense of the British commander by John Adams prior to the Revolution.
5. Hmm.
6. But bias? Is this bigotry, tribalism? No, not possible. Heh.
7. On fasting.
8. Philosophy meets maths.
9. Seriously? A taster? I’m appalled.
10. The missing articles in the paper about the recent gun debate look like this.
11. I’ve warned about this before, more and more it’s who you know that matters.
12. 20k and growing.
13. Returning to that master race science fiction epic.

My brother, an ordained minister in The Salvation Army, is using YouTube to present a series he calls "The Bible Doubter". He gives answers to common charges made against the Bible that are short (4 – 7 minutes), concise and accessible. He’s starting in Genesis. Really worth a look.

I’ve known Christians who claim to adhere to pacifism, as well as seen protest signs with "Who Would Jesus Bomb?" painted on them. But Bart Gingerich, critiquing Methodist professor and theologian William Abraham’s new book, notes that this supposed "cure" for war may just be as bad, or worse, than the disease. Of the book "Shaking Hands with the Devil: The Intersection of Terrorism and Theology", Gingerich writes.

Abraham admits that pacifism superficially offers moral arguments against terrorism, but its medicine is worse than the disease by disallowing defense of the innocent. He opines: “It requires a very special kind of intellectual malfunction and self-deception to sustain pacifism over time.” And he specifically challenges the particularly fashionable form of “pragmatic pacifism” espoused now by Glen Stassen of Fuller Seminary as “just peacemaking,” which he decries for failing to address terrorism seriously. Its pseudo-scientific claims he calls “bogus and misleading.” Although maybe offering occasionally useful “partisan” policy proposals, just peacemaking ultimately aims to shut down the case for force, can offer “false hope,” and ultimately may only fuel further terrorism.

Hat tip to Don Sensing.

Good day. White smoke, eh?

1. A conservative revolutionary.
2. Some background.
3. More.
4. From down under.

In other news

1. A review in the old style.
2. How many “G’s” in goggle? When the answer is … 2.
3. Well, when your combatants are comfortably at home, micro-managing is not impossible.
4. A category which describes almost all the 2nd generation wealthy individuals.
5. ’cause I don’t have principles, why would I suspect anyone else might?
6. Obama’s North African legacy.
7. This doesn’t quite ring true to me, but it’s close.
8. Suicide statistics, indicator of hope and happiness?
9. A natural consequence of a skewed press, progressives need to explain why this is a good thing.
10. Majorities of both parties watch.

Vibrating oobleck, interesting.

1. A meme. Co-ordinated? What’s the stock Dem answer?
2. Which means …. it isn’t. Pretty clearly in the Gospels the return will be when you don’t expect it. So if you do expect it, guess what logic dictates.
3. Very cool.
4. Applauding Hegel from across the aisle.
5. Well, any thoughts of an upcoming energy shortage just disappeared.
6. I didn’t get the first one, but the rest were funny.
7. Future crystal gazing.
8. Corollary to the Risky Business rule (don’t F with a man’s livelihood) … he gets testy about hobbies too, even if ultra-rich.
9. The man who siphoned about a billion from governments via climate has little leg to stand on. What still bugs me, is the liberal defenders who will jump quickly to “follow the money” never manage to do so with him.
10. So … the President’s recent suggestion. Is he stupid or evil? Do you think he knew or didn’t know that they were already illegal?
11. For the small screen.
12. Actually, the only time they wouldn’t pass on the costs is if they were hit by this cost increase but no other competitors were. This is not the case so … woops.

Good morning.

1. Sovereignty, and after you agree (or not) with the statement, consider the US Civil War.
2. Short answer to “is it racism” … if you are a conservative, yes, it not, then no.
3. Musing on the end.
4. Is this a straw argument is it one even being made?
5. A telling commentary on progressives and their spending, “To proclaim that spending is spending, waste notwithstanding, is remarkably destructive of the public’s trust. It suggests that governments are indeed profligate stewards of the public’s funds.” That bird has long since flown.
6. Proving the opposite point intended.
7. The film you’ll hear about in, or after, Church in the upcoming season.
8. One of the lessons history teaches. Few listen.
9. A stab at a short list.
10. An atheist passes on remarks on celibacy and the Roman church.
11. An election noted.
12. Hypocrisy, in the modern trivial sense, … if you don’t have it, you should.
13. One of the points on the side of faith for the Habermas/Ratzinger debate.
14. Something to read if you have the time.
15. Something our government is doing just as fast as it can. Why do they think that is good? Remember the story of that Biblical villain, Joseph and the Pharaoh (hint: the Patriarch after Israel is Judah, not Joseph)? What did he do, wiped out the independent farmers and centralized the economy. What occurred down the road. Slavery.  A road to serfdom we are on.
16. If the TSA isn’t doing this every week, something is wrong. If we know they are doing it every week, something else is wrong. If you’re serious about security, you have teams working to break in constantly probing for weak points. If it’s theater, then why bother.
17. Why gun control laws won’t/don’t matter one bit to the policy questions at hand. It’s more likely about #15 above … and the modern liberal elites visceral fear of firearms.
18. Have fun with tech.

The President has been treating the cuts from the sequester as some sort of budget Armageddon; blaming Republicans and talking up how much they’ll hurt. Here’s another perspective on these cuts from people who look more closely at our financial situation.

Credit rating agencies are shrugging off sequestration, saying the U.S. government will need to do more to reduce the deficit if it wants to prevent a downgrade of the nation’s credit rating.

While the agencies say the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts represent at least a step towards deficit reduction, they argue much more is needed to prevent the United States from losing its “AAA” rating.

“It’s not the most ideal outcome,” said David Riley, Fitch Rating’s global managing director for sovereign ratings, on CNBC Europe. “You’d rather have intelligent cuts and some revenue measures as well … but we don’t live in an ideal world, and it’s better to have some deficit reduction than none at all.”

The agencies view it as a positive sign that Congress did not simply scrap the unpopular sequester. Erasing the cuts without coming up with an alternative, something pushed by some liberal lawmakers, would have added to the deficit and debt and further pressured agencies to downgrade the nation’s credit rating.

They are glad Congress didn’t scrap it, but the year’s still young. In any event, when you hear Democrats freak out about these cuts, just remember that the credit agencies are yawning.

Good, well, whatever.

1. Mr Stewart notes the filibuster.
2. So does Mr Barnett, in the context of Lochner.
3. A question not answered … but what we got
4. “took a month and a half and a root canal.”
5. Somebody doesn’t understand the phrase “no relation.” You could make a game of that. What relationships can you find. For starters, both are speeches, made of words, both in English, both by people in the Western hemisphere, … apparently “no” has no meaning anymore.
6. So, where would you pick?
7. Freshwater zooloogy.
8. Don’t worry your President has a non-disclosed fantasy (?) of a path to a non-nuclear world. If you believe that is real you believe in the tooth fairy … and are a Democrat. Funny how those go together, no?
9. Government sponsored trafficking. But hey, it’s all illegal, so why talk about it.
10. Little aloof, kinda like when she got a little pregnant.
11. Three books.
12. Poetry by google.
13. Hmm. Adoption by another name … perhaps because adoption and the regulatory burdens round that have priced stranger methods onto the landscape.
14. Of bugs and features.
15. Links abound, 2nd one of particular interest.

Good talk talk talk day, eh?

1. Apparently there is a filibuster going on … approval here.
2. Droney lawers discuss as well.
3. More grist for the drone conversations. Woops.
4. So, why do liberals trust Obama with the power to kill whomever for whatever reason. Trust. Why trust? Beats me. Ask a lib.
5. In a discussion on phone regulations … this was firmly denied. Alas, data seems to indicate otherwise.
6. A book to lead you back to the garden.
7. So, why oh, why did Obama cut what he did for the sequester? He cut aid to babies … and here’s why. His goal is government growth, nothing more, nothing less.
8. Wait wait, what day is it tomorrow? Oh, my.
9. Statistics and bunnies.
10. Talking Turkey, not turkey.
11. Think about this too hard out loud and you’ll be accused of racism.
12. The first word is the most important. Happy is good. Remember that.
13. Snort. Don’t click through with anything in your mouth. You were warned.
14. Grist for talking about evil, ethics, and such. Did Josef think he was acting unethically or not? Or did he follow an ethical code with which you happen to disagree strongly?

And so it goes, another world leader steps off the stage.

1. Not that way however. Yikes.
2. A climate question.
3. A book noted.
4. Liturgy.
5. If you don’t laugh, your having a really really bad week.
6. Someday we’ll find out what the Obamacare supporters were smoking when they supposed longer hours, more uncertainty, less pay would attract more the field.
7. They will, however, insist it wasn’t this.
8. A question is posed. Woops, that was a follow-up. Start here.
9. ‘merica.
10. Won’t be sold here.
11. Matrix and cellular automata have some challenges.
12. Thoughts on nuclear Iran. And … why you really really need to read that last linked post.
13. Our un-serious President. Alas. Don’t look at me, I didn’t vote for him.
14. And to finish off, what hard riding man puts on his shelf. Wow.

Note: I started writing this with the notion that the category error alluded to below was a mistake and a sidelight hiding behind the issues being argued. As I continued in writing I have come to believe that the category error is both the primary reason for the arguments and further is a fundamental problem which is well known.

Much wroth, fury, words, and accusations of ignorance, bigotry, and perversion have crossed from both sides in the recent decades long struggle by various factions in the debates about marriage and who might be married rightly. A few observations

1. Defenders of SSM remark that this sort of marriage is private and affects none outside of the marriage. Yet, if this were so, then why would not civil unions suffice? The logical answers is because this reply is a lie. It does in fact affect others and in this lies a category error to which I alluded in this essay’s title.
2. To read the papers and hear the debates this is an important issue. Yet, why is that? Why is that more important than other issues. As that famous statistician Bjorn Lomberg  pointed out that getting vitamin supplements to the third world would saves tens if not hundreds of millions of lives (and would be cheaper and more effective than most of the aid we send to the third world), world-wide millions are affected by human trafficking indeed the numbers trafficked within the states is comparable to those affected by SSM … and those affected are mostly well educated affluent couples. Yet what debates are heard?

How are these issues a sidelight issue and the other a hot button issue? I suspect my  I offer it is because those entrenched against SSM are also committing that same category error. What is the error of category to which I allude? Simply the following, laws and lawmakers are not our spiritual guides. Note, the use of the term “spiritual” is not the normal one, but one which I will continue in this essay and perhaps in further essays.

So let me digress for a moment. Spiritual? What is that? In the introduction to Dimitru Staniloae’s book (Orthodox Spirituality), it is pointed out that in the Eastern Christian doctrine, your spiritual life and its tending is perhaps better translated as your ethical life and its care. Spiritual health and ethical well being are synonyms.

What is legal or not and what is righteous (in good spirit or a good moral/ethical decision) are independent. This is a founding principle of American jurisprudence. (Or is it?) It certainly is the assumption now. Mr Daschle defended a Senatorial philandering colleague by pointing while he while he was dishonest he didn’t break any laws. The correct reaction to this is that the colleague got his priorities exactly backwards, i.e., it is more important to be ethical than stay on the right side of the law.

Laws are not ethics. Laws and what lawmakers conspire to create has very little to do with ethics and instead its primary purpose is to provide a framework. This framework provides so that peoples may live harmoniously alongside each other in an ordered way.  So that, when conflicts between people arise, there is an orderly way of handling those same conflicts. Personal ethics overrides and sits over the law. For the most part, there is no conflict, most of our choices, our ethical decisions do not lead us toward choices which are illegal. Where they do, it is right, it is correct to choose the ethical over the legal. On the other hand, there are things you may do legally which however are not ethical. Even where there is no conflict, normally ethics binds our actions tighter than the law.

Solzhenitsyn warns that this separation that is part of modern Western democracies (and was part of the former Soviet state) is an error. That itself is an interesting counter point. So it seems likely that this why this debate is important is not what it is about, but sort of the issue is the ground on which it is being made. What is at stake is perhaps not about the particulars of whether certain young dinks (dual income no kids) can have their relationship legalized or not but really what is being debated here and in other forums is whether law should be neutral or be admitted to have spiritual (ethical) content or should it not. Kant (and our founders) explored law devoid of ethics, can a safe lawful republic of demons (not angels) be constructed or not. Perhaps it can. Perhaps it can’t. The question at hand is should it? Recall the Ratzinger/Habermas debate, debating whether a democratic society can be constructed and sustain itself independent of religion, i.e., “does it need things outside itself to sustain itself.” Ratzinger and Solzhenitsyn think not. Bertrand de Jouvenal pointed out in his meta-political science musings about what he termed Babylon (the large multicultural state) envies the unity of the small state. My reading of Solzhenitsyn (and Jouvenal) is that a solution exists. If the larger federal state limit itself to promoting commerce and unity between smaller entities within itself, while foster their ability to form strong local identity, laws and praxis then you could have the best of both worlds. You can find local loyalties and ties and bonds within the framework a larger multicultural state.

Both sides of the cultural debate miss this point. Both sides wish to apply the same laws and sensibilities in artists boroughs of San Francisco, in Amish villages in Ohio, in rural Lutheran Wisconsin, and so on. Why? Why try? It seems wrong to insist that behavioral norms universal.

Locally laws can be tied to spirit. Federally, the are not, but there they run to the Habermas separation of Spirit and law. It seems to me laws about birth, death, marriage are those which the federal level should keep its hands away, to set aside for local regions to coin their own practices, to tie their own view of ethics and spirit what is allowed, to what is righteous in their region.

Instead of insisting that laws be spiritual or devoid of spiritual considerations is wrong. Federal laws laws which bind us all, might be best be light and aim only to promote commerce, unity, and ease frictions. Local laws … let them tangle and wind the ways the local choose. That is, after all, nothing more than freedom.

As I noted, I’m switching to evening links, ’cause I’ve got to hit the road before 5am every morning.

1. Job applications.
2. Applications with merit or not?
3. Doodles applied. Some hit, some miss.
4. Ah, history. If only Western Christians hadn’t put their stock in this guy instead of Augustine (they were contemporaries and left approx the same quantity of writings).
5. The strange fruits of googling oneself.
6. Sequester and our Presidents (most) recent attempts to re-write history.
7. Energy bar, paleo style.
8. Snerk. Jedi mind meld indeed.
9. So, packing for the archipelago yet?
10. Putting Genghis in context. Wow.
11. Holding doors.
12. Science fiction author looks ahead.
13. The tribal left. And yes, you’d likely be able to find evidence o the tribal right, that that’s the assumption isn’t it? That tribalism is all on one side of the aisle.
14. A million mile goober.
15. Still not a fan of cats.
16. We’re watching and waiting.
17. Duck and Cover.