A few weeks ago I posted several versions of an essay on Faith and Science, this is the start of another (which unlike the first has no “target” for publication). I may return and extend and refine it, but I have no definite plans to do so. In part that depends on whether this attempt engenders any response. In the spirituality class I am taking we read a number of St. Ephrem’s hymns “On Virginity” from the CWS collection. A few of these in the series concentrate not on virginity but St. Ephrem uses oil (olive) to indicate a “type” of Christ. In Syriac apparently oil, Messiah, and Anointing all come from the same root word, which is not the case with English (or Greek apparently). St. Ephrem also then lists a number of properties of oil, used in cooking, healing, for light and so on and illustrates how, because Christ does the same, that oil is a “type” reflecting and illuminating our understanding of Christ. This hymn thereby becomes a way in which common practice (contact with oil) in daily life can be uses to remind oneself, a trigger for reflections, and in general a way of connecting one’s daily life with one’s theological practice and belief. It can be noted that the common features and uses of oil come from the science and practices of the day.

So it might be an interesting project to do the same with modern science. Light was a common type of Christ in the days of St. Ephrem and the theological writers of late antiquity. Today, in late modernity, we can add to thse typological constructions. Today we might add things like the following:

1. Light is simultaneously without confusing both particle and wave. Likewise, Christ was man and God.
2. Light illuminating an atom can stimulates it to a higher state. Again Christ’s actions in a man’s heart can stimulate it to seek (and attain) for higher things.
3. This same light, further illuminating a population of exited (previously stimulated) atoms can cause the creation of more light, i.e., lasers. Atoms acting in concert, a type of “communion” through Christ (the light) and by Christ in communion a type of Christ and the Eucharist.
4. Light exists in a sort of timeless fashion, particles travelling on null or light cones in Minkowski spacetimes interact with things “in time” yet for the massless particle no time passes.
5. Light through photosynthesis is the source from which oxygen and sugars comes into our world, that which we derive our very life depends. We similarly depend on Christ to “trample death by death” unlocking the gates of Hades.

That was the product of a just a few minutes reflection on light and modern scientific discoveries in a typological exercise. One could likely do similar exercises with our understanding of astrophysics, matter, the standard model and so on. So, here’s the question: Is science education so poor these days that these sorts of typological reflections are useless to the lay Christian? That is, in St. Ephrem’s day oil (of the olive) was in many ways akin to petroleum today, it was a linchpin of their economy. Olive oil then was used for light, food, health, lubrication and a myriad of other applications. It took no real specialized knowledge to understand this. People today have likely all heard of quantum mechanics (things have a wave/particle duality), that light excites atoms to higher states, that lasers exist, and even have heard via special relativity that time slows for fast moving objects and that via extrapolation coupled with remembering that nothing travels faster than light that perhaps time might essentially stop for objects travelling at the speed of light. So, there are two questions here. Is this sort of reflection (a) useful in helping people connect theological abstractions with things with which they are familiar and (b) perhaps have the further use of reducing what friction now exists between religion and science.

1. New non-lethal military tech.
2. Nazi accusations in the news. Pelosi and Rush.
3. On disgruntlement in town hall meetings from TMV.
4. Krugman and pesky facts.
5. Neo-nomenklatura.
6. For the transfiguration, words from St. Ephrem. A church too. One more.
7. A book on ID noted.
8. Mr Harris (on Collins) gets a good going over.
9. Bully for her.
10. Ghastly science fiction.
11. The administration changes some words, here are two suggestions it’s a bad idea, here and here.
12. Noting Mr Hughes passing.
13. Putin viewed from St. Petersburg.
14. Obama and Mr Stewart.
15. Well that didn’t work out like planned.
16. Cash for clunkers, one more way in which Mr Huxley proved prescient.
17. In which I link a Bill Maher quote.
18. Finally, go girl go.

Mr Swartz is on the (far) left, which he thinks should be a larger plurality. In this post expressing that sentiment he writes:

It quickly became clear that I was the only person even remotely on the left. And it wasn’t simply that the others disagreed with me; they couldn’t even understand me. I remember us discussing a scene in Invisible Man where a factory worker brags he’s so indispensable that when he was out sick the boss drove to his house and begged him to come back, agreeing to put him in charge. When I suggested Ellison might be implying that labor, not management, ought to run workplaces, the other students (and the teacher) didn’t just disagree—they found the idea incomprehensible. How could you run a factory without managers?

And thereby it becomes clear why the left which Mr Swartz envisions is so small … it’s because the ideas he holds are so, well, wrong in a very obvious way.

Imagine as Mr Swartz suggests a “factory without managers.” How might that proceed. Well, consider that factory entirely consisting of managers. Somebody of course has to procure raw materials … and a good price would be nice. So one or more of the workers, depending on the size of the plant, isn’t on the plant floor, he’s making calls and finding suppliers. Somebody (or more people again depending on the plant size) has to manage the cash-flow: ingoing, outgoing, and arranging for lines of credit. People will have to locate buyers, find markets, locate new ways of the products produced at the factory to be used. Some people will need to tool up for new product, decide “build or buy” on new property for expansion and arrange for the, uhm, capital as is necessary.  Additionally some of those workers will need to arrange for the hiring of new workers, assist during health emergencies, and could even help plan retirement plans. Others will need to do engineering or basic science work to figure out new and better ways to manufacture whatever it is this factory produces. These roles, oddly enough, are indispensable. They all  in fact take quite a bit of hard work. Additionally many of these roles take more expertise and background training than an unskilled labourer requires, which cost that person time and money in order to acquire. A plant manufacturing “stuff” if it is real actually depends on these sorts of services. We have a name for those people in those roles, that name for people watching the supply chain, doing sales, managing capital and doing HR services are what we call management. Oddly enough the idea is in fact incomprehensible. It is in fact impossible to run a factory without managers in a actual real world situation.

So it seems this is the sort of leftist who finds it sad that factories which don’t actually sell their product, acquire raw materials, and so on … are not seen as realistic. Or to put it another way, I find it completely incomprehensible that Mr Swartz figures on running a factory without people performing the jobs and roles noted above. Who will do this? How and why? There must be a standard answer in his repertoire. What might that be?

My commenter JA scoffs at my idea that those the communist sympathizers and the sympathies held by the left in the mid to late 80s didn’t suddenly have an epiphany and decide that everything they believed was wrong. That they instead have softened their rhetoric and acquired camouflage. Part of his difficulty with that sort of notion is that Mr Obama is of this generation and himself being somewhat younger and one of the “non left lefties” that Mr Swartz complains realize that the socialist/communist dreams of the 80s left has not been inherited by the younger left.

1. Well, that setup ain’t for racing, but one can certainly see the appeal, the other could probably climb a tree … and break your legs going downhill.
2. 2nd quarter shows no support for stimulus benefits.
3. The sun and climate change, oh my.
4. Hey, it’s not a ponzi scheme if you’re soaking the taxpayers, just ask Tweed and Tammany.
5. Some thoughts on income inequality.
6. Accusations that that opposition to Obamacare is “an insurance company plot” is demonstration that this Administration remains out of touch with reality. So say the cricket races.
7. Very cute.
8. A modal argument for the existence of God.
9. Well, I for one have little but good things to offer from my switch to Linux on my laptop.
10. 800 died, did you notice? I hadn’t.
11. The 100 + 1000 + 23 million Mr Clinton missed.
12. Alexandr.
13. Some unfunded government insurance liabilities … so says the liberal, “Please, sir may I have another?”
14. 3 down, 62 to go.
15. Memory and tribute.
16. Memory eternal.
17. I occurred to me while reading this, in the arguments discussed on “harm give birth” I wonder how those arguments transpose to the benefits to suicide? Larry?

Pseudonymous Larry Niven at Rust Belt Philosophy has a short post in which the “right to avoid life” movement arises. Chantal Delsol points that this and similar movements are consequens of the rejection of taking the as axiomatic the ontological nature of human dignity in The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century. I should note that a person “CM” is the author of these arguments and that in my reading of Mr Niven’s piece it is unclear what his stance is on this matter.

A relatively famous document begins:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Here we find the founders noting that some truths are not ones for which a foundational argument needs to be waged, they are self-evident. That the continuance of the human species is both good and a salutatory (if not to say necessary) attitude for humans to take seems to be another such self-evident statement. If you are a shark or a mosquito one must necessarily as such argue that continued existence of the shark and the mosquito is also good.

Mr Niven for CM offers two arguments against human reproduction, a harm based and a rights based argument. The harm based argument is easily countered. He offers that:

Choosing to reproduce, CM says, is tantamount to “imposing a lifetime’s worth of negative experiences on someone else.” And while one might agree that “everybody has negative experiences,” everybody capable of having negative experiences also has positive experiences: are these, too, “imposed”?

The abortion rights individuals hate the counter to this argument. Merely quiz the living, “Would you have never been born?” and oddly enough nobody whom we would term sane answers in the affirmative to that question. This particular argument is not uncommonly seen in the pro-abortion rhetorical quiver. The “his/her life would be too filled with hardship” and therefore termination is required. Yet oddly enough people with hard lives rarely venture that their lot would have been better in non-existence or death, but that sort of notion only resides with those people whose life has been in the main very soft and full of ease. Furthermore virtually everyone in the pre-industrial age had, by today’s standards, a life far harder than the hard life imagined for the incipient child.

The second argument is as follows:

For CM, no person has “interests prior to existing. Hence, biological children are always used as means to an end,” which, together with “the fact that people are brought into existence without their consent,” consists of a violation of the rights

This has two problems. One is a common rhetorical ploy found in philosophical circles the “if P then Q” where there is no logical connection between the premise and the conclusion. All things are a interest or a means to an end is not true. There are “ends”, which are neither. For a child can be see as in intrinsic good in and of itself. A child is good in an of itself, therefore creation of a new child is abstractly a good which is not a means (but an end). The second problem is in his notion of rights. CM suggests that the lack of consent implies a violation of rights. This might be OK if human beings were created ex nihilo with full faculties at creation, but that is not how it works. We have, well, these constructions known as “children” who are in developmental stages for at least a decade and a half. Consent is not a right children possess naturally because they are not equipped to handle those responsibilities at that time.

1. Post tour flurry, and not even the traditional criterium circuits. Too much?
2. Climate and flawed science?
3. Somebody thinks that academia leans right? Hmm.
4. An unelected official.
5. Inflation and the debt.
6. Roaches and riddance.
7. The long wrong arm of the law.
8. On Ms Robinson’s commendation and implications of how the White House views the world.
9. All the news that’s fit to print, fits the agenda at least.
10. More “for the children” arguments noted.
11. Replying, it seems to me quite adequately, to Krugman.
12. Where nature roams (and is written as Nature).
13. Remember that “open” promise, fuhgetaboutit.
14. Some quotes.
15. Left and right, from my view (on the right) I have no clue as to what this is trying to say or imply or what it even means.
16. Oh, it won’t happen here. Right.
17. Right to healthcare. Right to jobs. Right to food. Someday someone will point to an exposition from the left what the heck they think rights are.
18. Well, here’s the healthcare quote which the WH says is out of context but … refuses to provide the larger context to defend it.
19. About that F-22.
20. And on the oeuvre of Mr Kolakowski.

1. For a light-hearted start.
2. A cyclist unimpressed by the cash-for-clunkers program.
3. Mr Sensing parses some numbers related to the above program and is unimpressed.
4. A little zooom.
5. An example of some of the better climate discussions to be found. Oh, and some Arctic sea ice data.
6. Some truth hidden in that satire.
7. Yahoo bites it.
8. Jefferson on national debt.
9. Mr Obama disagrees with himself.
10. A TV series recommended. Perhaps a good choice for winter basement riding?
11. Dragons and witches, oh my!
12. Birther stuff keeps coming up, examples here, here (heh), and here.
13. Reflections on marriage.
14. Doping control and the (dehydrated) cyclist.
15. How about they pass a law and exile any politician who utters the phrase (and variations), “It’s for the children.”
16. Of theology (specifically Calvin’s) and politics in the US.
17. Well, that’s exactly what our robust economy needs, a new tax. Duh.

1. A film noted.
2. Obama … the first six months, inexperienced? Hmm.
3. Russian-US relations and trying to parse what Obama means by “a reset”.
4. Cash for clunkers.
5. Of skill and games.
6. Life and the administration.
7. Consequences of Mr Obama’s Israeli rhetoric? Different airplane sales noise here.
8. A race report.
9. Gates, Sotomayor and race.
10. I think the whole “solving things” is the main reason that Keynesian interventionist economic theory is predominant in politically connected circles.
11. A death noted.
12. Ms Pelosi makes it clear, whatever the Democrats rhetoric on private medical insurance … they want it dead.
13. On death.
14. Heh.
15. An interesting question for the liberal comic book reader.

Foreign policy in some measure is a game of judgement of the intentions of a foreign power. It does not do to assume that the other power is working toward similar goals as yours, even with the goalposts reversed. There is an additional problem, judging the other power takes time, attention, and care.

Coal miners in past centuries (and perhaps still) kept canaries in mines in cages. The reason for this is that during the mining process if the air supply was fouled or contaminated the canaries, being smaller and weaker than the miners would collapse or even die before the miners might notice. This would serve as a early warning.

There is in fact a similar situation in foreign policy. Russia, China, and other Middle Eastern countries are culturally very different from American and much of the West. It might be reasonably said that nobody outside of those countries really understand the day to day policy decisions, personalities, and events in those countries and the implications for foreign nations. Few pay attention to even the broad events and those actions must then be interpreted through the distortion of cultural division. We in the US for example have a hard enough time understanding the decisions and actions of those on the other side of a much smaller political divide between right and left not to speak of the far wider gulf of seeing events in their correct context where language, history and culture divide us.

Yet, canaries exist. Take Russia for example. The intentions and seriousness of Russian actions and motives might be best judged by reading commentary small states on her border such as the Baltic states&nbsp;&nbsp; … the smaller the state the better. Reading commentary and essays from those places is a better place to look than discussions or remarks about the same from any expert Western sources. Find a weak neighbor, a neighbor with the most to lose and there you fill find the most attentive watchers. And of course, like the Sudentdland of Hitler’s pre-WWII aggression, if the canary <i>dies</i> … then protestations of innocence on the part of the foreign power might be judged to be fallacious.

And yes, this is something that undoubtedly experts do right now. Yet, trusting the experts here is again a problem. They are themselves biased and have their own agendas. Canary watching however is something that ordinary people can do in this information age we live in. I blog. So, as an experiment I’m going to see if that particular medium is approachable to this sort of exercise. To whit, as an exercise, I’m going to try following through. In this exercise, the assumption is that reading and reviewing foreign blogs or smaller news sources with the canary model in mind is a better way of judging foreign intentions than by reading local expert opinion. In addition,&nbsp; the canary in the mineshaft model might also be an interesting way to judge one’s own country and how it is perceived&nbsp; from the other side. So … the next week’s I’m going to try adding a lot more foreign blogs to my reader list … which will likely ultimately be reflected in my weekday links posts.

1. Well, if I had big bags of money lying around this would be very very tempting.
2. Watching the tyrants … who try the delay gambit.
3. Action and consequence, well admittedly consequence in this case is just a cricket race.
4. 100 killed, good bad or indifferent?
5. Training goes on in Iraq.
6. What passes for hospitality.
7. By that theory, Luke killed Paul.
8. Canada where the liberals have sway … and what passes for judgement (HT: First Things).
9. Life is not about ….
10. Reflections on creation.
11. On technology and church Mr Anderson asks, “Fundamentally, there is no reason why any local church should continue to listen to Pastor Bob drone on and on when they can get the video of John Piper instead.  What’s more, why simply have John Piper when you can alternate with Mark Driscoll?” Why not throw in Athanasius, Chrysostom, Augustine, et al.?
12. Well, at least it isn’t on the right side of the aisle. The other side has a more complicated relationship with that notion.
13. Tactics on the left.
14. Very cool artwork.

1. Nerfing life … a long time project of the progressives alas runs aground when incentive is considered, here’s another example.
2. Is it climate or weather?
3. Some responses noted in the SI reporter kerfuffle.
4. Angels, pins, dancing, and why it matters.
5. Via Cafe Hayek, a book review by Easterly of Rationality in Economics. And for that matter I didn’t know Mr Easterly had a blog … which is now in my RSS feed list.
6. Consequences of heresy discussed.
7. A search engine to bookmark, lyricrat.
8. Power and congress.
9. The rising price of oil … a book.
10. Patriarch Kirill goes to the Ukraine.
11. A debate on prostitution.
12. An ethical RFC. RFCs (Request for Comment) are how most of the early Internet was documented and specified. How does FTP work? Answer: read the RFC.
13. Graphing anti-abortion violence.
14. End of life in Obamacareland.

1. The Polymath project moves on.
2. Climate hysteria.
3. Some thoughts on women’s ministry.
4. From the other side of the pond, a view of Obama.
5. Remarking on the birther movement. Heh.
6. The Gates kerfuffle as political smokescreen.
7. Why Ms McArdle is against national health care.
8. More reasons here.
9. Who was St. Nicodemus?
10. St. Athanasius on the Psalter.
12. Heh.
13. This will be discussed … ad nauseam.
14. Against the ecumenical movement.
15. What candidates need to say, said.
16. e-Church.

1. What passes for civilized in the wild (very liberal) corners of Western Europe.
2. The democrats, making excuses already. It’s odd that the regulatory burdens, largely pushed by the Democrats, are likely far more the blame than and limited GOP stonewalling … but that wouldn’t work to shift blame, now would it?
3. A collection of the best tour photos, although it seemed to me too many of them were taken “in doping control” and not on the bike.
4. Dr Who and some real history.
5. Simplification for pedagogic purposes is not lying. Duh. And btw, for me the problem is topic not headlines.
6. Misty memories of my first real job (documenting software for an industrial controls group) while in High School and the whole group taking the afternoon off to watch Tron.
7. $1.4k per person. So … what regulations and new legally binding proscriptions will come about if the public healthcare affects the national budget? (If you say … none you are a bald-faced liar or a fool)
8. I didn’t know that … or even imagine it.
9. While many think that the human influences on climate change are settled, science moves on.
10. Mr Obama’s contribution is noted for its absence in the collection of “useful” dialogue on the Gates kerfuffle. I thought James Taranto of WSJ had some trenchant remarks as well on his column.
11. Speaking of “that man”, consider Israel.
12. Some words concerning a former Democratic President.
13. A post on marriage noted.

Mr DeLong points to a plot that the anthropogenic global warming proponents are pushing. He’s also pointed to a big “inflection point” of industrialization and its economic effects in his pdf on “slouching toward utopia”. One wonders if he can put two and two together and get four … and connect the two. It seems if you believe anthropogenic global warming began at the same time as industrialization … the obvious conclusion is that to “restore” the climate the industrial revolution has to be renounced. All the factories, power plants, cars and all have to be forgone. A return to the pre-industrial age is a necessity. One wonder if he really wants to do that. My guess is … no. But if you believe the first and the second is clearly in that chain of logic causally connected then the conclusion seems inescapable. To paraphrase Mr DeLong, “How can any person who believes in anthropogenic global warming participate in a non-agrarian non-carbon neutral non-self-sustaining lifestyle?” It seems clear if you are blogging about global warming you are a hypocrite and a willing contributor to the problem. Since the conclusion that pre-industrial population levels is inescapable for the true anthropogenic global warming believer for us to have a reasonable chance of returning to pre-1850/1870 carbon output. Killing off 6 billion or so people, now that will truly take a real far thinking progressive mentality.

Of course this leads to the same problem as the one facing Mr Obama and his nuclear weapon-free world pipe dream. How do you disarm if there are bad men in the world. The same is true for industrial capacity. How can you disarm your factories and your multi-trillion dollar economy if the other guy doesn’t do it as well? Oh, wait … you can’t.

And because you cannot, there is of course only one way out of this problem … and it is that we need an alternative source of power, of which right now there is only one. Nuclear (fission) power is the only viable alternative to coal and oil based power generation with our current levels of power consumption. And … oddly enough nobody on the left is talking about that. Oddly enough as well, Gen-IV reactor designs are almost have nothing in common with those of the Rickover water cooled variety.

1. Of big nuclei.
2. Obama as a gnostic … although the connection to actual gnosticism is perhaps tenuous … is solipsism a better term?
3. As the left pushes for universal health care … their arguments weaken their argumentation on abortion.
4. Things are looking up on the health care battlefront.
5. Africa gets high speed.
6. Paulson … lies?
7. A high tech disease discussed.
8. West and East on the Holy Mountain.
9. The Constitution vs empathy?
10. Biden remains as dumb as ever. Has this man ever done anything commendable?
11. A bargain at $33/gallon? You can get better but you can’t pay more?
12. On being human.