Back when Mr Bush was nominating people for President, I made what I felt was a strong argument that the Senate should have readily nominated his appointees. I stand by this argument now that the other party is now in the White House. I based this argument on Mr Hamilton’s Federalist Paper #76. Mr Hamilton notes:

To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.

He also notes just prior, mentioning consequences of what might occur if the Senate took too active a role in vetting and selecting nominees.

Hence, in every exercise of the power of appointing to offices, by an assembly of men, we must expect to see a full display of all the private and party likings and dislikes, partialities and antipathies, attachments and animosities, which are felt by those who compose the assembly. The choice which may at any time happen to be made under such circumstances, will of course be the result either of a victory gained by one party over the other, or of a compromise between the parties. In either case, the intrinsic merit of the candidate will be too often out of sight. In the first, the qualifications best adapted to uniting the suffrages of the party, will be more considered than those which fit the person for the station. […] And it will rarely happen that the advancement of the public service will be the primary object either of party victories or of party negotiations. [emphasis mine]

In view of the last two decades of despicable SCOTUS and other similar interviews, Mr Biden and his parties behavior during the Thomas hearings comes to mind, a rejoinder to Mr Hamilton might be, “D’ya think? They might put considerations of party before who might be fit for the station.”

Mr Hamilton suggests the Senatorial advise/consent be exercised to insure the nominee free from “unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.” If Ms Sotomayor is free from these issues, my view would be to approve her to the position.

Should a court be where "policy is made"?  I thought that’s what we had elected representatives for.  But Obama’s pick for the highest court in the land, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, seem to think so.  (Well, until she realizes she’s being recorded, and then she gives a wink and a nod to the audience.)  Another liberal judge who thinks it’s his or her job to form the law rather than interpret it.

And from this article about the pick comes this wonderful line:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” said Judge Sotomayor, who is now considered to be near the top of President Obama’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

If she were a Republican, that would have been labeled "racist".  But she doesn’t stop there.

“Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences,” she said, for jurists who are women and nonwhite, “our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.”

Her remarks came in the context of reflecting her own life experiences as a Hispanic female judge and on how the increasing diversity on the federal bench “will have an effect on the development of the law and on judging.”

Blind justice will now be peeking, if Sotomayor is confirmed.  I continue to think that these kinds of judges still don’t recall that Brown v. Board of Education was decided by nine white guys.  Unanimously. 

And I’d like to note that my objections to this court pick have absolutely nothing to do with her gender or national origin.  It is the Left that is overly hung up on this, as I noted in this post during the confirmation of John Roberts.  And Sotomayor, in bringing this up, is not only overly emphasizing this irrelevant point, but setting up opponents to be tarred as "racists". 

The whole idea that one’s race or gender, in and of itself, should alter one’s view of the law in this day and age, is saddening, frankly.  The fact that we have an African-American President is not the beginning of racial reconciliation and equality, it is one of the culminating events of it.  It shows we have a majority in this country that doesn’t care much your color as long as they approve of your character.  That’s "The Dream".  No, we are have not been perfected in this, but we are not perfect in anything.  There are always problems.  There are always improvements to be made.  But as a nation, I think we can hold our heads up high on this matter. 

However, Judge Sotomayor thinks white guys, over half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, still can’t judge fairly.  Thanks for your vote of confidence.

Laplace, some years ago, came up with a notion. This idea was that if one could determine the position and momenta of all the particles in the universe at a given time, then the time evolution of the universe would fix all future events of the universe. This notion is one which persists as some level today. The notion that the all kinds of experience can be understood in terms of atomic data. This is an impossible scenario, yet it persists.

Polanyi writes (pg 141) in his book Personal Knowledge:

Yet the spell of the Laplacian delusion remains unbroken to this day. The ideal of strictly objective knowledge, paradigmatically formulated by Laplace, continues to sustain a universal tendency to enhance the observational accuracy and systematic precision of science, at the expense of its bearing on its subject matter. […] I mention it here only as an intermediate stage in a wider intellectual disorder: namely the menace to all cultural values including those of science, by an acceptance of a conception of man derived from a Laplacian ideal of knowledge and by the conduct of human affairs in the light of such a conception.

There are two threats Polanyi envision to such a notion. One would be a systematic sweeping cultural rejection of science as a perversion of truth. Polanyi wrote this in the 50s, today these currents are becoming perhaps more relevant. The root cause of the modern rejections of science are due to the corruption of science itself by the errant (and dominant) Laplacian error. The second threat is the peril to science from the very acceptance of a scientific outlook based on Laplacian fallacy being used to guide human affairs.

I’d planned to get further on this today … but it’s after ten and I have to turn the pedals some more today. I’ll get back to this.

1. Original sin on offer from a left leaning Christian blogger.
2. The beginning of an interesting discussion on condoms, AIDS, and being human.
3. A parable, in “spite of your books”.
4. Memorial day, remembered.
5. A book published.
6. Pakistan.
7. Is this the real colors of the Administration on abortion.
8. A non-catholic reviews Angels and Demons.
9. Liturgy and the blue roads.
10. Christian ghost stories.
11. The essential problem with Mr Obama’s notion of a “reset” in Russia-American relations.
12. Freedom, and the left and the right.
13. Art and the left.
14. Inconsistencies in Sri Lanka.
15. That connection between credit and massive US borrowing.
16. Of journalism and method.
17. Christians in Egypt.
18. A movie suggested.
19. Maths and Physics.

From Michael Ramirez:

(Click on the cartoon for a larger version.)

Until Hamas is willing to alter their charter, calling for the destruction of Israel, is there any reason to think they’re negotiating in good faith?

Following similar action in the House, the Senate voted (rather overwhelmingly; 90-6) to reject the shutdown of the Guantanamo Bay detention center.  The Left has made this a drumbeat for years, but now that they’re in a position to actually do something about it, they suddenly get all NIMBY on the issue.

Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said that none of Guantánamo’s detainees should be transferred to the US to stand trial or serve time in prison. “We don’t want them around,” he said. “I can’t make it any more clear … We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”

“Terrorists”?  I thought they were a bunch of wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time, dragnet detainees that the ACLU is just waiting to spring.  But now Harry Reid is calling them “terrorists”.  Well yeah, that does rather change the calculus on the whole situation, doesn’t it?  If we’d only known then what we know now, right?

And it seems most of the countries where Obama thought he could pawn off these “victims cum terrorists” are closing their doors, after saying that they would be open lo these many years.  Apparently, they were “just words”.  So now, Congressional Democrats find themselves between Barack and a hard place, a situation of their own making as their candidate campaigned on, apparently, “just words”, but no real exit strategy from Gitmo.

But Scott Ott, news satirist at his own site and now columnist at the Washington Examiner, “reports” that Obama has announced a new tactic; simply declare the detainees as “fetuses”.

While accused terrorists have access to attorneys, and nearly-limitless legal appeals, a fetus has no legal standing, cannot speak for itself, and is subject to the death penalty without regard to guilt or innocence.

Civil rights advocates have pressured Obama to follow through on campaign promises to shutter Gitmo, but even Democrats in Congress have resisted bringing the inmates to U.S. soil for trials and incarceration.

“We can debate whether enemy combatants have access to protections under the U.S. Constitution,” said Obama. “However, no serious person would grant such protection to an embryo or fetus. The loss of 240 fetuses wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in a nation where more than 3,000 of them hit the Dumpster daily.”

The president noted that America’s global reputation has been devastated by U.S. treatment of terror suspects, but that “our treatment of a million fetuses each year earns us nothing but admiration, and requests for clinic-funding from those who aspire to be like us.”

Sources acknowledged continuing White House debate about whether a terrorist who escapes from Gitmo alive can still be treated as a fetus.

Nobody, save for some right-wing extremists, could possibly object to that, eh?

From Chuck Asay:

(Click on the cartoon for a larger version.)

He’s just going to introduce efficiencies into the system, that’s all.  No, really.

1. A review of a book about Hilter and his religious belief.
2. Mr Beckwith responds to Mr Leiter.
3. School, Sisyphus or the Circles?
4. Rome and the mongol.
5. Considering the news and reporters.
6. The passage of man.
7. Discourse.
8. V.
9. Forgetting the Gospel.
10. Some inconvenient items regarding Mr Obama’s speech.
11. That economic disaster, old news?
12. Those two speeches, Mr Cheney and Mr Obama.
13. Plans needed for chucking things.

1. Carnival time, Bahstahn style.
2. Links from Mr Challies.
3. Pirates avenging wrong … likely not.
4. A ratio.
5. Quiet the noise.
6. Debunking some global warming overreach.
7. A Stadium.
8. Hmm.
9. On Orthodox evangelism.
10. Some thoughts on Mr Vick.
11. A prayer request.
12. Hubris.
13. On childhood myth.
14. Obama as lizard.
15. Pseudogamy.
16. Check the pants.
17. The exposition problem.
18. Looking at women’s “progress”.

The pseudonymous Larry Niven blogging as the <a target=”_blank” href=”http://rustbeltphilosophy.blogspot.com/”>Rust Belt Philosopher</a> often attacks various defenses of the theodicy problem. I haven’t been reading his blog for much more than a month but it seems possibly he locates the best and most potent objections to Christian belief in the failure, in his view, to solve the theodicy problem adequately. On one former post I had commenting his comments on theodicy he remarked that I’d “offered nothing new.” Well here is something, perhaps, new.
&nbsp;
Theodicy centers on the question of why does the Christian God who has been declared to have significant power in the universe and who is claimed to be Good then allow evil and unearned suffering to be subjected to the innocent. I will now attempt to present what might be considered a narrative defense of this question.

Why is Dicken’s Tiny Tim allowed to suffer, Dickens is writing stories and we will, for now, assume that the story has in mind the furtherance of good and furthermore as author commands complete control over his story. Why does any number of good characters in narratives by any number of authors allow minor characters to suffer undeserved evil? Dickens is not unique. Any number of minor (and major) characters undeserved suffering in novels in which the end of the author was to expose and explore truth and beauty. The crux of the narrative theodicy response that the suffering of the underserved is justified by the demands of the larger narrative. Yet at the same time, unlike in a writers narrative, the protagonists have free will. They can make moral choices and as a result can fail to rise to fulfill the role to which they were fit.

In the book about the life of <i><a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881411809?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=pseudopolym05-20&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0881411809″ id=”static_txt_preview”>Father Arseny, 1893-1973</a></i> toward the end of the book (which contains fragmented stories from people whose lives where touched by Fr Arseny) there is a report of a particular saintly woman, Mother Maria of whom Fr Arseny hears her final confession. The person recounting this story fragment is confused as to why Fr Arseny was so affected by her confession and life’s story for to him here story seemed mundane and ordinary. Fr Arseny explains that at this point in his life, as his own mortality was near, he was so very thankful that God gave to him the chance to hear her story and her example, which was a continual narrative of her putting her own concerns and desires aside for the sake others linked at the same time with a continual turning towards God. My suggestion here is that the suffering of those around her (whom she helped) provided grist for her life’s story <i>for the benefit</i> of Fr Arseny and his story, which being shared helps the rest of us.

Modern materialism rejects the notion that there is purpose in the unfolding of our lives and in history. Dame fortuna for the materialist reigns supreme. So the question of a narrative theodicy requires some justification for rejecting dumb luck as the only meaning for our lives. The question is not to test the narrative model against the materialist model per se (at least to begin) but first to examine if the narrative model is internally consistent.

Judeo-Christian tenents from Genesis and other writings offer that we are both made in God’s image <i>and </i>suggest that narrative is a key feature of both God’s plan and our nature. The notion of God’s unfolding narrative with Israel is not foreign to the text or the interpretative tradition. In the narrative of the man born blind in the Gospel of John the answer to why he might have suffered for decades as a blind man was answered in effect that it was so because he was to take part in <i>this narrative </i>unfolding today, i.e., so that Jesus might heal him. The justification for his being blind was his role in the narrative of Jesus life. Charles Taylor in <i>the Secular Age</i> recounts many of the reasons and mechanisms that arose through the previous four or five centuries that meaning has been leached from our view of history and the world around us.

This is all I have time for tonight, so at this point discussion may be fruitful. Hopefully there may be enough here to chew on.

I’ve been light on the blogging this week (mostly copying and pasting) because my eldest is graduating from high school this evening.  We’re turning a corner as a family; the first one to leave the nest on her way to college, and the changes in both her life and the lives of those, well, left behind. 

It’s one of those events that is very happy and yet in a way sad.  My mother-in-law said that she felt a sadness recently and didn’t know why.  Today she realized it; she’s grieving.  Our daughter is taking the first step to leaving our home, after having spent almost her whole life with us, and the absence will be definitely felt.  Our in-laws live about 15 minutes away, and they see us quite regularly, once a week at church if not more often, so they’ll feel the same sense as well. 

Yes, it is sad, but the joy in this time will overshadow it.  The pride in watching our daughter graduate with honors (something her old man could never do) will push that aside.  Having family and friends come together and celebrate this time will overcome any sorrow that the day brings.

I’ll miss my little girl as she hits the road and turns a corner to discover the next era of her life, in college.  Yes, it is sad, but I’m excited for her.  I remember this time in my own life, and it was thrilling. 

Tonight, we all turn the corner, and we can’t wait to see what’s there.

1. Mr Roubini.
2. One man’s torture, another man’s mere discomfort.
3. Parliament.
4. Termites? in Church?
5. Liberalism and Conservatism … and abandoning ideology.
6. Fiction with an agenda defined.
7. A book noted.
8. Considering the flu.
9. Unwarranted conclusions noted.
10. A danger on not riding quite enough.
11. Silliness in surgery.
12. In other words, no free lunch.
13. Actually centrism might be correct.

The Galileo/Copernican and the Ptolemaic views of the solar system lay in dispute for the 150 years between Galileo and Newton (specifically between the dates of the publication of Copernicus De Revolutionibus and Newton’s Principia). In the period of time between these events, with the possible admission of Kepler’s third law) there were no facts to distinguish these theories. In fact, glancing far to the future, the negative results of the Michelson-Morley experiment demonstrating that the Earth was at rest would have been a point to the Ptolemaic not Copernican view. The scientific (heuristic) passions of the proponents of the Copernican view is what drove the outlook of astronomers to the point where at the publishing of the Principia the Copernican viewpoint was dominant. Attached to the prologue of Galileo’s thesis was a forward by Osiander expressing the point that this view was not necessarily “true” but instead was a “fruitful” way of approaching astronomy. This is a red herring. Ptolemaic astronomy was a fruitful source of inquiry for thousands of years. Astrology has been fruitful employment for 2500 years, Marixism was (and remains alas)
a fruitful mechanism for obtaining political power. Fruitful by itself is not sufficient. Theories are fruitful in that they are believed to be fruitful mechanisms for getting to the truth of reality.

In 1914 TW Richards was awarded the Nobel prize for an extremely accurate measurement of atomic weights. Fifteen years this result was completely scorned as useless, for as that measurement made no allowance for isotopic ratios those painstaking measurements were rendered useless. This was a measurement, of high accuracy, of a value that was discovered to have no correspondence to any features of nature. Accuracy qua accuracy is of no value. One misconception about science is that it is experiment that drives progress. Yet it is theory that is required before experiments to provide the basis for how experimental data is interpreted and in fact for what experimental data is deemed to have any value at all.

New visions and insights drive theoretical breakthroughs. Yet the history of science is littered with far more failures than success. This is not limited to “lesser scientists”. Einstein’s vision following Mach imagined Relativity and against Mach solved Brownian motion. Yet Einstein same said vision rejected quantum randomness. Major theoretical breakthroughs in science require a major reworking of our view of nature, a replacing of an older view with a newer one. Proponents of the new, driven by their heuristic passionate belief in the correctness of their vision, must pursuade on the basis of future intimations of fruitfulness in the search for truth of their vision. In doing so, they also must invalidate the older vision. This process of invalidation is often rancorous and ugly. This “feature” is common and perhaps not easily escapable.

This then suggests some striking things about the scientific process. Theory preceded and both validates and interprets experiment. Major theoretical breakthroughs require persuasion. The passion of scientific discovery must be transformed and moved to the passion of persuasion that the new vision of the truth has intimations that it might be fruitful for further deepening of our understanding of nature. Yet a problem remains. Is there anything left? What differentiates the project of chasing the structure of matter at CERN and Fermilab from astrology? Why was it right for the Copernican view to supplant the Ptolmaic in the period between Copernicus and Galileo and before Newton? There are good answers to these questions but that will have to wait until a later essay.

The first parts of this essay draw heavily on Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge which is an epistemological inquiry looking toward a “post-critical reality” epistemic framework. It might also be noted, this book predated Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Critical reality is the idea that our physical theories accurately represent reality. This is in contrast to the Positivist (which is not as far as I can tell the same as Logical Positivism). This view espoused for example by Stephen Hawking suggests that the question of whether the underlying matches the theory is irrelevant and that physics (or theory in general) merely is a mechanism for predicting experimental results.

Just ask California and New York.  Attempts to balance the budget by taxing the rich even more has resulted in states in crisis.  Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, writing in the Wall St. Journal, have the details.

Here’s the problem for states that want to pry more money out of the wallets of rich people. It never works because people, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states.

And the evidence that we discovered in our new study for the American Legislative Exchange Council, "Rich States, Poor States," published in March, shows that Americans are more sensitive to high taxes than ever before. The tax differential between low-tax and high-tax states is widening, meaning that a relocation from high-tax California or Ohio, to no-income tax Texas or Tennessee, is all the more financially profitable both in terms of lower tax bills and more job opportunities.

Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

Did the greater prosperity in low-tax states happen by chance? Is it coincidence that the two highest tax-rate states in the nation, California and New York, have the biggest fiscal holes to repair? No. Dozens of academic studies — old and new — have found clear and irrefutable statistical evidence that high state and local taxes repel jobs and businesses.

And yet, as the article notes, some governors still listen to the siren’s song sung "by recent studies by left-wing groups like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities that suggest that ‘tax increases, particularly tax increases on higher-income families, may be the best available option.’"  Siphoning off existing economic activity is less useful than increasing overall economic activity. 

The rich are able to move away because, well, they’re rich.  They can afford it. 

What does this mean for those states with low or no income taxes?  Do they have to cut services, such as police and education?  Some say they do, but…

They’re wrong, and New Hampshire is our favorite illustration. The Live Free or Die State has no income or sales tax, yet it has high-quality schools and excellent public services. Students in New Hampshire public schools achieve the fourth-highest test scores in the nation — even though the state spends about $1,000 a year less per resident on state and local government than the average state and, incredibly, $5,000 less per person than New York. And on the other side of the ledger, California in 2007 had the highest-paid classroom teachers in the nation, and yet the Golden State had the second-lowest test scores.

Or consider the fiasco of New Jersey. In the early 1960s, the state had no state income tax and no state sales tax. It was a rapidly growing state attracting people from everywhere and running budget surpluses. Today its income and sales taxes are among the highest in the nation yet it suffers from perpetual deficits and its schools rank among the worst in the nation — much worse than those in New Hampshire. Most of the massive infusion of tax dollars over the past 40 years has simply enriched the public-employee unions in the Garden State. People are fleeing the state in droves.

It only seems counterintuitive if you don’t understand that taxation changes behaviors.  People avoid pain, and over time higher taxes are a pain.  This will modify behavior.  Penalize something more, you get less of it.  It’s a human truism that the Left needs to learn.

1. Some thoughts on spaces and communities in the modern world.
2. Trying to parse Mr Obama’s notions on the Israel, Iran, and Hamas.
3. Austrian econ.
4. Angels &* Demons and a “worst novel” noted.
5. An absurd op-ed noticed.
6. Getting away with it. It occurred to me that we outside the beltway and the business of politics are always confused why politicians assume they can “get away” with blatant lies and flat denials of the obvious. I think one suggestion is that they do it because from their point of view it usually works.
7. On marriage, the plastic mask, and the lack of good role models.
8. On the demand driven economy.
9. A health update from David.
10. Spending some money, suggestions sought.
11. A paper (linked from here).
12. An interesting post, but it kicks off with a quote which is flatly wrong as a generalization.
13. Heh.
14. A criticism of “thinking globally” as an excuse.
15. Gossip and history.
16. Mr Greenwald excuses Ms Dowd somewhat lamely, claiming “And anyone who spends any time writing a blog, or anything else for that matters, should consider it a good thing when their work is used, with or without credit.  Nobody would engage in that activity in the absence of a belief that they have something worthwhile to say and a desire that it have some impact on political discussions.” Bloggers link what they quote. And to assume that there is any one generic reason common to the millions who blog is errant foolishness.