In the early 80s the hottest book to read, discuss, and ponder in the circles I traveled was the (then) recently published Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. One of the topics this popularized was the famous zen koan:

Has a dog, Buddha nature or not?

A Western perhaps mistranslation of “Buddha” nature might be “a soul”. The answer is not, “yes” or “no” but the retort by the master was “mu”? Mr Hofstadter’s intellectual answer to that puzzle is that “mu” is in essence, unasking that question. That is, a way of emphatically insisting that the very asking of the question implies horrible structural defects in your conceptual framework that leads to this question being askable at all.

This leads us to the question:

Has a fetus a soul or not?

One proposal to consider is not, the emphatic “no” by the pro-abortion rights crowd (or to be fair, the insistent “yes/maybe” by the pro-life crowd) but instead to assume that we’ve made a critical mistake in our structural worldview and conception of reality for which this question is being relevant is a sign of error, not a point to ponder. Read the rest of this entry

• La Shawn on the Black vote, civil rights and the GOP.
• Cool tech, especially for the industrial controls crowd, which I’m sure is a big plurality in my readership … not (but it’s not unrelated to my day job). 🙂
• On oil prices and speculation.
• On Julian Schwinger, and his body of work.
• Hijinks between plants and animals.
• On moral order and nature.
• Immutable. Mutable. Hmm.
• A weekend suggestion.
• God and the slugger.
• A neat gadget.
• Every car should install one.
• An interesting take on the Myers kerfuffle.
• East and West.
• Africa. A map. I suppose it would be less impressive to drop Russia + Antartica in there, which also equal Africa in square footage.
• Two speeches. Two takes. Left. Right.

I’m short on time today, so y’all get the whole kaboodle cross posted from my blogs “Morning Highlights” feature. Question. Should I make that my normal practice? or not?

• Looking closer, critically, at Mr Obama’s choices for foreign policy advice. I wonder what their take is on this.
• The Tina Turner song, “What’s Love Got to Do With It”, answered in that it’s all about the love.
• Someone pumped to see an Aussie in yellow … and might I mention a fellow from the town in which I live in 3rd. Some analysis of the tactics of the last stage here. Plus, an interesting take on the French and the king-of-the-mountain.
• 10 points-to-ponder on marriage from Kim Fabricus. Family life and the joys therein.
• If I were a proponent of the anthropogenic origins of global warming … I’d be embarrassed.
• The actual withdrawal plan.

What does it mean, “He’s smart” or “He’s very intelligent?” Largely on the left, we see citations of “that candidate” is very smart or the other one is not so much (typically oddly enough the “smart” ones lean left in the view of the left leaning commentators. Whether that is an attempt at validating their own left leaning predilections or explaining reasons why they admire that particular candidate I will not guess.) What I fail to understand is how they come up with their estimation that a given candidate is smart. I know how I figure that a programmer, physicist, or mathmetician is smart. By looking at their work and asking is it clean? Is it beautiful?

If one was to ask whether an artist was talented. One would ask another performer (or artist in the same field) or perhaps a critic (to be distinguished from a “reviewer”).  However, talent at art is not exactly the same as smart.

Currently, Mr Obama is the politician most often touted as “smart” by the left. Some months ago, blog neighbor David Schraub declaimed that both Mr Obama and Ms Clinton were both “very smart.” What I fail to understand is on what basis he might make such a claim. For the two examples above, one has to look at some sort of body of work to estimate whether a person is smart. There is, of course, another time honored means of deciding if a person is smart, which is to interact personally with that person for an extended period of time. That method of determination by the average citizen with respect to a national candidate is unlikely or impossible so as to be discounted. That pretty much leaves, their corpus of work, which in the case of lawyers like Mr Obama and Ms Clinton would be their body of written opinions.

Rhetoric is of course another key people use to decide whether a person is intelligent. However, in this age of the teleprompter and speechwriters the facility at oration is a actors skill.  However, it is a stretch to thing that those claiming these people are intelligent is based on facility at reading from a teleprompter and calling it oration.

Yet strangely it seems such offerings are absent in the case of these individuals. There are no publicly available opinions written by either of these candidates. Odd that, no? Mr Obama was, for a time, an academic lawyer. To be an academic in the publish or perish environment, yet not to publish seems more than a little strange. If this is a case of lawyers who have read his and her work, deciding that it is good, but that it is to “technical” or abstract or otherwise unfit for general consumption … that seems elitest and very likely to be concealing of a lie.

I would guess that the likeliest reason that these people think, in this case, that Mr Obama is highly intelligent is because they’ve heard it second hand. It is a “meme” if you will, spread by his supporters (and the press) that Mr Obama is very bright. But the question is, why is this to be given credence?
So, if you think, the candidate of the hour, Mr Obama is smart. Why do you think that? On what do you base your appraisal? How does that compare with how you decide or would decide if a candidate is smart?
(disclaimer: I should note, I have no opinion at all on the matter of whether Mr Obama is “smart” or not. I feel I’m not qualified (I’ve read nothing he’s written (or had ghost written)) nor do I have the contact with him. Furthermore, I’m a little disinclined to think “smartness” is a qualification for President. Of our the 19th century Presidents the smartest arguably was John Quincy Adams. Was he the “best” President? Obviously not. Woodrow Wilson was alleged to be very bright … consider the League of Nations and the stellar treaty of Versailles. Clearly intelligence is not what it is cracked up to be in the political arena)

• I wonder if this ecumenical statement could be transferred to other (political or social) division as well? The phrase “distinctions stiffened into contradictions” is one to remember.
• Attempting to be charitable on the theological statements of Mr Obama.
• Odierno and Petraeus … or cream rises.
• Music and the evangelical?
• On Mr Obama’s plan to withdraw 2 brigades each month from Iraq for 16 months after taking office.
• Parental rights.

• One view of Christianity, and CS Lews “acid wit”.
• Hooky stories.
• Agora links.
• Personal Jesus (not the song).
• On Theocracy.
• Laptops in the near future. Cool.
• I can’t guess what gas prices will make such vending machines will be a common sight. Can you? And why I’m a road biker.

• Our current preference for the tarnished anti-hero … in film.
• A valiant attempt to explain Sola Scriptura.
• Contra the language/thought police.
• Calling prayer a good habit … is not right. Is breathing a good habit?
• Animation or real?

In conversations about ethnic or sub-community and varying access to education, I suggested a while back that the necessity of a “good” education for everyone is over-rated. The minimal education needed to get by in our culture and civilization is literacy, some arithmetic competency, and an understanding of how to manipulate or survive the attentions of various bureaucracies. In a good schooling environment this is achievable by about the 2nd grade, in the less good likely the 4th or 6th. It might be said that the only other purpose that public schools get us for the dollar spent is to provide relatively poor moral and public ethics education and to act as baby-sitting service for our kids for 6-7 hours a day on the weekdays of about 2/3rds of the year.

There is as well a public interest in locating and identifying few those in our midst who are touched by genius. The Mozarts or Ramanujans hiding in the weeds, who if found and nurtured can likely blossom and refine their talents to greater levels than they otherwise could if left undiscovered. Our country (and the world) would benefits greatly from the another Fermi or Kelly Johnson. It doesn’t need 5,000 more mediocre literature majors in selling cars.  Read the rest of this entry

Brevity.

• Hoax.
• Boom.
• Swelter (Hoax)?
• Soon.
• Cinema.
• Cricket (races) and Intuition.
• Blue, Obama, and the fetus. Obama and change?
• #51.

In response to last nights essay, which was intended to be satirical,  the following question arose to my remark:

The only serious question [raised in the prior post] is whether mingling of groups is desired or not.

Commenter Mr Boonton asked:

… what do you think about mingling of groups? I think they are on a whole to be encouraged with single-group states being the solution of last resort.

This is a serious question, which begs answer. The conventional wisdom in Jouvenel’s Babylon [Babylon: the multi-cultural/multi-ethnic mix of modern society] that by mixing with “other” we learn tolerance and to appreciate those around us. However there are a few points to consider, and to do so, I’ll resort to the dread bullet list (and more below the fold): Read the rest of this entry

• Mugabe and carbon offset nonsense.
• More great links … Siris(ly).
• Fulfillment and the homemaker.
• Mr Obama and abortion.
• I don’t even know the symptoms. Such a sheltered life the monagomous lead.
• A very strange game.

• Rehab in Saudi Arabia?
• Income, tax, and graph.
• Something thoughtful to chew on for the morning, Louth on Augustine.
• Beauty in nature.
• Poverty.
• Of bio-fuel and consequence.

Here’s my thought for the fourth, I’ve written such on my blog in previous years, but there are new readers here so … From the book of Ruth chapter 1 we have:

And she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.” And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more.

The poetic plea of Ruth’s, “For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.” seems to me not far from the patriotic declamation of Captain Hale, “I regret I have but one life to give for my country.”

When one transposes the sentiment Ruth expresses for Naomi and love of one’s country I think there are strong parallels here. Patriotism is about roots, about earth, about home and hearth at it’s core. It is also at it’s heart, a parochial plea. It is exclusive. I love my country (and not yours). This is my land where I and my family will dwell.

I’m curious, does that jibe with you’re notion of patriotism?

It seems these two holidays make the Left nervous. Of the half dozen left-leaning blogs I read none seem to manage to actually unabashedly come out and say they love their country. Instead we are greeted by various apologetic nuanced finely crafted arguments how we can be (highly) critical of our country and still love it. Or even how the absence of criticism is a sign of a lack of love, if the left leaning author is feeling testy.

It seems to me, if I had a friend, who on every Valentines day and anniversary for his wife announced (quite spontaneously) to his friends and other around who don’t even really know him that his constant criticism, backbiting, and quarreling with his wife and her ideas, her looks, and her acquaintences was a sign of his affection. Well, after a while, not noticing any real displays of affection, one might wonder if where his true feelings lay.

Just saying. It seems to me if you can’t craft a love letter to your wife on her birthday or anniversary sans critique or correction … then I’d wonder about your relationship.

I’m not a great student of recent politics, that is the politics of my lifetime, instead more of a casual observer or johnny come lately, in that my interest in politics is quite young. When I was in college and until just a few years ago, Politics was much like the weather, people talk about it, have opinions and all, but it really didn’t touch me (actually did far less than the weather) and the “little guy” of which I number have about as much effect on the weather as we do on federal politics. I am not well aware of the history of Mr Helms, nor have I walked a mile in his shoes nor understand how he thinks and sees the world. I don’t hate him, I don’t love him (any more than I would another stranger).

Mr Jessie Helms has died. Every single one of the liberal blogs I read have failed to say anything gracious (and some are definitely ungracious) at the passing of a man from this mortal coil. On reflection over their attitude on his passing, I find it a good thing that I hold no American and very few foreigners in a similar regard as the beheld Mr Helms. To reiterarate:

There is no American and very few foreign nationals whose death I would celebrate.

As they did today.  I don’t hate as they hate, it seems. I can think of very few men on whose deminse I would react in a similar fashion. I think I had little good to say about the deceased when Mr Hussein and Mr Arafat died.  It seems to me, if you are trying to rid the world of hatred and bigotry, one must start with oneself. In our liturgy, we repeat and strive to uphold each week, these words before the anaphora (Eucharist):

I believe and confess, Lord, that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first….

The confession/statement goes on, but the important phrase (for this discussion) is emphasized. This does not mean I am a worse sinner than Mr Hussein, Josef Stailn, or perhaps Mr Helms. It does mean however, I am the first person whose sins are my concern. It is not for me to address the “other’s” sins while mine are lying plain before me. And … if you (on the left) hate Mr Helms, Mr Bush, or Mr Cheney then that sin is far more important to you to address than anything that those men have done or do that you find unrighteous. And no, I don’t think that to others your sin of hatred is being compared or worse then perception of the sins of those men whom you hate. What I am suggesting is that it is more important for you to address than the other.