1. Tracking.
2. Art. England. 10th century.
3. Also England. Car repair.
4. Think, thank, thunk.
5. Prime matters.
6. The Pope speaks from the Holy land.
7. Taking the people out.
8. Parliament has lost its moral authority. Well, heck, those in our government don’t even know what moral authority might even mean.
9. Souter and conservatism considered.
10. Going home and some related reflections.
11. A new book.
12. Pakistan … some thoughts.
13. VE day.
14. Considering a (malign?) stereotype.
15. Ways to strangle that which would strangle us.
16. A long and interesting essay on Dollhouse.

In a fundamental way the church fathers and tradition has rejected the traditional attribute driven ontology. Long ago I read a presentation describing the difference between Platonic and Aristotelian ontological methods by comparing how they attached, manipulated, and viewed attribute attachments to ontological categories. The Nicene fathers and the theological/philosophical aftermath of that 4th century upheaval rejected that and arrived at a new conception. Their notion was that ontological objects and categories are not defined by their attributes but defined instead by the qualities and aspects of their relationships with other objects and categories. Existence of a thing depends crucially not on its substance of qualities (attributes) but on the aspects of its relationships with others things. A chair is not a chair because it has chair-like attributes but because people (or I for example) have a relationship with it that categorizes it as chair.

I’d like to examine a few consequences of how that works especially in a Christian context.

• A primary example of this is that the ontology of God, the Trinity is to be understand relationally. We arrive at our understanding of God not by understanding God as such, or as Father, Son, and Spirit by examing their attributes, but instead by understanding the relationship between the three. Put more radically, God’s existence depends on its relational nature between the hypostasis.
• Consider the radical science fiction notion of transference of person from one body to either a machine or another body. There is difficulty in deciding where and when “transference” is valid especially in the case of information or ability loss. But if existence and identity is defined relationally does that work? It seems to me likely that it does and perhaps avoids some of the ambiguities and difficulties that arise in the attribute model.
• In the context of abortion a lot of the arguments I’ve seen center on attributes of being. Specifically what attributes the fetus must obtain in order to qualify as person. This is often state in terms of intellectual or brain development or an attribute of “independent” living or existence, i.e., viability. However that existence of the fetus might just as well be defined relationally. In the relational model it is a little more difficult to distinguish infanticide from abortion. However, another aspect of relational ontological thinking arises … that of the disordered relationship. Abortion (or miscarriage) can perhaps be viewed as a disorder in the relationship between mother and fetus.
• Consider as well, the marriage/homosexuality discussion in the context of existence and a ontology based on connection and relationships. That is perhaps a fruitful avenue for later discussion. I think it’s clear that both sides of the question can be presented in this methodology and unlike abortion the resolution is not so clearly biased (as in the case of abortion there is a clear bias against abortion in my view with this ontological method). The real question is by framing the question in this way, can some of the heat be abstracted from the discussion? For that might be a very useful thing to do at the very least.

I value gas mileage highly in my choice of automobile. In fact, one of the implicit criteria I had in obtaining new cars lately is that my “new” car should get better mileage than the one it replaces. My current car I drive is a 2000 manual transmission Honda Insight. It gets “officially” 61/71 mpg city/highway. My experience is that in temperate weather on dry pavement I get about 65/80 … but any drop in conditions or the thermometer drops the milage as low as 52/62 respectively.

Anyhow, here’s the question. How many years will I have to wait until a replacement vehicle costing under $25k that gets better mileage will be available. The only other criteria I have is that it at least seat two with some luggage and when I’m alone can fit me with my bike (wheels removed). The Insight can do this handily. 2012? 2015? Or never?

So, what’s your guess? When will there be an alternative out there which meets those criteria?

1. I think it’s the press who has a “thing” about gays. I’d bet dollars to donuts that same Christian college would suspend a student for participation in porn without the ever popular “gay” tag … and the linked article supports that contention.
2. Mr Obama and his Guantanamo bay problem, “what details?”
3. Culture wars continue.
4. Isn’t that supposed to be an egg … or a butterfly?
5. Some inspiration.
6. One poverty myth.
7. Government, worse than you imagine.
8. How will the left defend this?
9. A question on defense spending … when you want to have comparable defense budgets to other countries … do you want to also have comparable attitudes about casualty rates?
10. The foreclosure matter.
11. Of Job and Kansas.
12. The journey there and back again about a former atheist.
13. For when it doesn’t work … war?
14. Abortion and a Obama effect?
15. Spring is sproinging.
16. Zoooom.  Baam.
17. A squeeze.
18. That recent $300k NYC flyover … payback for campaign contributions, a quid pro quo with taxpayer dollars?
19. Econometrics then and now.

First off, Robert Gates says that the extended hand of friendship is being rebuffed by the Iranians.

He said Tuesday that so far, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s response to the US outreach has been "not very encouraging."

"We’re not willing to pull the hand back yet because we think there’s still some opportunity," Gates said. "But I think concerns out there of some kind of a grand bargain developed in secret are completely unrealistic."

He was referring to speculation in the Middle East that the Obama administration was trying to forge a grand Middle East peace settlement with Iran whereby the US would press Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians, perhaps a Palestinian state, in exchange for Teheran rolling back its nuclear program.

"Not encouraging."  Who’d have thought?  (Well, lots of people, actually.)  We attempt to give them what we think they want, and they turn it down.  Perhaps what we think they want isn’t what they really want.  Maybe wiping Israel "off the map" really is part of their foreign policy. 

OK, but we’re trying, aren’t we?  I mean, that must count for something in the Middle East, where Obama is trying to repair our standing among the Arabs, right?

Washington’s efforts to start a dialogue with Iran have sent ripples of alarm through the capitals of America’s closest Arab allies, who accuse Teheran of playing a destabilizing role in the Middle East.

The concerns being raised by Arab leaders sound strikingly like those coming from the mouths of Israeli officials.

"We hope that any dialogue between countries will not come at our expense," said a statement Tuesday by the six oil-rich nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council, who have long relied on US protection in the region.

Oh, well, so much for that.  Extend a hand to an enemy, alarm our allies.  Perhaps they just need to get used to the idea that making Iran a friend is in their best interest.

Or perhaps they know something we don’t know about Iranian foreign policy.

Saturday begins the Giro d’Italia, the first of the years three Grand Tours on the pro cycling calendar. This is a three week, sort of, stage race which begins on a Saturday and ends on a Sunday just over three weeks later with two rest days in the second and third week. Now, given that most of my readership is in the US and most US residents are not up to speed on bike racing as a sport, here’s a little primer (below the fold). Read the rest of this entry

For a very modest definition of the word "trim".  This administration has said it would be more fiscally responsible than the last, and then proceeded to put us into debt in a way never before seen.  Well then, it made a promise about cutting the budget.  So how’s that going?

President Obama has said for weeks that his staff is scouring the federal budget, "line by line," for savings. Today, they will release the results: a plan to trim 121 programs by $17 billion, a tiny fraction of next year’s $3.4 trillion budget.

About 1/2 of 1%.  Well, one might say, that’s probably better than what Bush did.  And one might be wrong.

The plan is less ambitious than the hit list former president George W. Bush produced last year, targeting 151 programs for $34 billion in savings. And like most of the cuts Bush sought, congressional sources and independent budget analysts yesterday predicted that Obama’s, too, would be a tough sell.

With a much smaller budget, Dubya found double the cuts he wanted. 

But just because the President wants a cut, no matter his party, that isn’t the end of the story.

"Even if you got all of those things, it would be saving pennies, not dollars. And you’re not going to begin to get all of them," said Isabel Sawhill, a Brookings Institution economist who waged her own battles with Congress as a senior official in the Clinton White House budget office. "This is a good government exercise without much prospect of putting a significant dent in spending."

The problem is that our federal government is simply too big.  So much responsibility has been given up voluntarily by, or taken by force from, states and the private sector, and once it goes to Washington, it virtually always stays there, where it grows and costs more money while becoming less and less efficient and nimble.  Whatever the good intention, the more Washington does for us, the more it costs and the less anybody wants their piece of the pie slimmed.  Consolidation of this power means lobbyists only have to convince a few Washington Senators and Representatives to keep their money flowing rather than legislatures in 50 states. 

This is the result; a budget where only the most microscopic pieces can ever hope to be trimmed. 

1. Well, here’s Obama’s big “budget balancing” act. Numerically speaking, I think if his recent cut $500m had been $17b and today $17b had been in excess of an order of magnitude larger.
2. The ordinary as more influential.
3. Some images from an interesting photo site, Orthophoto. A few more here.
4. Kreminology as a hermeneutic for predicting Obama’s moves regarding Israel.
5. Gosh, how about wearing little yellow stars?
6. Is the torture narrative winding down?
7. Math and more math.
8. Ask the trees?!?
9. YA reading list.
10. Babies … albeit not of the human variety.
11. So … Mr Obama looks for a white church filled with black people? Is that it?
12. Chesterton.
13. Not exactly chic.
14. Forgiveness.
15. God and Star Trek.
16. Democrats, the party of the intellectually arrogant, proof here. I don’t think he grasps what “free inquiry” actually means.
17. Unions.

Well, that makes it all simple … I guess I can toss that book(Wickedness) by Ms Midgley. Mr Niven offers that:

The problem of evil, for instance, has often been reduced to one and only one issue, that of unanswered prayers (see e.g. here)

Well, one can come up with a few notions, which may not be “new” but it’s unclear on why that is per se problematic.

1. From Scripture, John 9 offers As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.
2. There is a story of a Papal representative referring to Acts 3:6 who when referring to the rich appointments in the Vatican city noted that “no longer can we say, we “have no silver and gold” … the retort as it goes is that no longer either can the representative say, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!”
3. When the disciples failed to cast out an unclean spirit, (Mark 9) Jesus replied, “This kind can come out only by prayer and fasting.”
4. Genesis 1 as discussed by Kass in The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis points out that one of the lessons of this first story is that God’s universe as created is intelligible.
5. Consider the following. A group of people in a room are trying to determine if they can communicate with a person outside of room. Some individuals think they can communicate with that outside individual. One faction in the room devises a well constructed double blind experiment to see if the communication works. The experiment “fails.” That however proves nothing meaningful, in that it assumes that the exterior entity is unaware of the experiment. Or more plainly, what does a double blind experiment mean that must needs “blind” God?
6. Finally, examine the action of a parent. Parents do not fulfill every request of a child. Every stumble, every fall. If a parent was to catch and hand hold every matter a child faced, that child would not grow up. Augustine coined the phrase (I think), that “happy fall”.

What is the point of these items?

1. God’s view is larger in scope than one man’s view. A person may endure hardship to bring out the good in those around him. There may be other reasons.
2. It is often said that works of prayer are rare these days because the work of prayer matches the faith. This is not an age of faith and prayer. Likewise ascetic struggle is not common likewise the fruits of prayer are less clear.
3. Consider a nerfed world in which every prayer is answered and no harm can be done to another. What moral development might we expect in men? What need would a man have to be good.
4. Some offer a “scientific” study (based on unusual assumptions regarding God) proving that prayer doesn’t work. Another has a large number of individuals who witness to the benefit of a lifetime of ascetic struggle which includes numerous personal encounters with God.
5. Finally, this notion of prayer as a mechanism to “fix things in your life which are wrong or are painful” is flawed. Prayer is fundamentally a reach for communion with the Creator, a striving for theosis … not a magical incantation to make your life materially better.

[Update: Missing link to the first quoted excerpt which was missing is now present]

1. Eating habits and the modern world … a graph.
2. Banned, but the real question might be is this newsworthy?
3. Questioning the Trek fanaticism (Star not bike).
4. Spy vs Spy, a book.
5. Pseudonym a narrative.
6. Another book, volume 4 of a Marginal Jew noted.
7. Contra the Shack.
8. From the Desert Fathers a quote. Deer eat reptiles?
9. Reality trumps data? Huh?
10. How long will it take?
11. A price of non-repentance.
12. Revision … which prompted me to consider the non-revisional aspects of blogging.
13. Whom do you follow?
14. Insight on faction in a 100 day reflection.
15. A hidden cost to biofuel.
16. Human rights as a weapon.
17. Some reflections on humility.
18. More dreck for the left to attempt  (vainly?) to spin in a positive light.
19. Tales of a father.
20. From the (real) depression.

Jeremy Pierce at Parableman offers (I think for the Christian Carnival tomorrow) an interesting short essay on the establishment clause regarding education, creationism, and the Establishment Clause and the associated Free Exercise Clause, err, Phrase. I think his argument makes sense, but likely ignores much of the the larger part of Constitutional lore that lawyers depend on, which is the larger body of prior rulings, i.e., stare decisis. Specifically two cases are mentioned, Lemon and Lynch … but I’m willing to bet the cases cited in precedent number in hundreds or perhaps thousands.

However, us lay members (see Pelikan: Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution) of the US with respect to the body of law have little but (note Mr Pierce does refer to several SCOTUS cases) the text of the Constitution from which to judge whether a ruling or act is Constitutional. In some sense that might actually be a good thing.

Creationism is one of the “standard” issues regarding church/state separation that comes up in conversation and in blog essays. However a decidedly more radical one is one I’d offer. I think it can be argued, along similar lines as the argument presented in the linked essay noted above that the following is in fact Constitutional. Would it be Constitutional for a State to establish the death penalty and restrict its application to those who profess faith and believe in an effective soteriology. Or in plainer English, only those who believe in the afterlife might be put to death by the state.

I think the fundamental problem with Supreme Court doctrine on this sort of issue is that none of this has much to do with what the Constitution actually says. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause reads, “”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. Together with the misnamed Free-Exercise Clause (which is a phrase, not a clause, which adds “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” we have the entirety of the Constitution’s pronouncements on religion. The founders were preventing the establishment of a church state, such as Great Britain’s Church of England. Congress is prevented from making a law respecting the establishment of religion.

So. Examine for a moment Mr Pierces discussion about what “respect to” or “giving respect to” might mean.

The term ‘respecting’ could mean either “with respect to” or “giving respect to”. I tend to think it means the former, which is a broader prohibition. Congress can’t make any laws about the setting up of religions. Religions are free to do as they choose in setting themselves up, without laws prohibiting their free expression. But even in the more restricted second reading, Congress is only preventing from making laws that show respect for a religion. In that case, it still doesn’t mean that government employees can’t show respect for a religion (never mind show disrespect). This is about laws prohibiting certain religious conduct or establishing a state religion.

The question that I find no ready answer for, is how is that sense of “respecting” religion betrayed by failing to execute men (and women) who don’t believe they are assured of an afterlife. If you take a persons deeply seated beliefs seriously, a Christian for example, should not fear death, for it has no sting. An atheist on the other hand has plenty of reason to fear the ending of his days, for that is the end of him … there is more there. Basically the statement is saying, the state will only execute people who are in an essential way, OK with being killed. That seems to me ultimately respectful of religions and in a real sense cognizent of the role of religion regarding soteriology.

From CongressDaily:

House Appropriations Chairman David Obey dealt a blow to President Obama Monday by rejecting his request for funding in the FY09 supplemental spending bill to shut down the military’s Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center by early next year.

The White House requested $80 million in the FY09 war supplemental to begin moving 240 detainees out of Cuba, but Obey said Monday he stripped the funding from his bill because the administration has not presented a plan to close the facility.

"I personally favor what the administration’s talking about doing, but so far as we can tell there is yet no concrete program for that," Obey said ahead of his panel’s markup of the $94.2 billion supplemental Thursday. "And while I don’t mind defending a concrete program, I’m not much interested in wasting my energy defending a theoretical program."

For dealing with these terrorists, looks like Obama doesn’t have an exit strategy.  That "close Gitmo in 1 year" promise has only 9 months left on it.

1. Geek chic? (Just say no?)
2. Not what the typical separation of church/state has in mind.
3. Experience and dogma.
4. Moooo(re) fun.
5. A clarification on the one state solution.
6. Progress or not.
7. Running away, not to say that’s a bad thing.
8. Rome and Kirill.
9. Wisdom from Aleksandr on violence.
10. Some words from St. Cyril.
11. Heh.
12. For my gymnastically inclined daughter … and lover of pizza.
13. At least there was no mention of John Galt.
14. Wrightspeak.
15. Bells.
16. Contra High Noon.
17. A Plantinga paper noted.
18. Biking in circles in Estonia.
19. Apparently the liberal orthodoxy doesn’t cotton to Mr Souter in retrospect either.
20. The Gospel and property rights.

Commenter Boonton accuses my position on torture as “not clear.” Five or six years ago, if asked impulse would be along the lines of the film Taken, or other revenge oriented narratives if harm had come to my family or more specifically my daughters … torture and taking law into my own hands included with that package. But then again, my ethical framework has been turned about since I became Christian and my political thinking as well has, well, sharpened as a result of this exercise known as blogging came into my life. Since that time my notions of political ethics vs personal ethics have diverged … but not in the strictly simplistic fashion that one might imagine. Politically speaking I am influence by a number of sources, Bertrand de Jouvenel and Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn influence (in contrast to the more traditional influences along the lines of Hobbes, Locke, and the founders). For what follows I am going to try to establish what I see as the political ethical situation vis a vis torture.

Regarding torture. I find childish and simplistic the ordinary narrative we find so often arising from the left. That torture is well defined and clear cut. That it the consequential argument is all that is required to oppose it. That numbers do not matter, i.e., that the torture of 10 or 100 men (illegal combatants at that) is the same thing for a regime, for a people and ethically speaking as the torture of millions of innocents. That a good man cannot find himself driven to choose it as the lesser of evils (see again the movie noted above). All of these points are repeatedly made by the left and the critics of recent activities of the past (and it seems likely the current) Administration(s). Unfortunately, that these things are all wrong and in error is not the same as taking a position that torture should not be the policy taken by and on behalf of our country.

And it should be repeated that these combatants which are in custody, almost certainly to a man, are guilty of heinous war crimes. They themselves torture, drug, and abuse their enemy. They fight without regard to civilian or military personel as target, in fact more often than not they specifically target civilians. In prior ages, and rightfully so, their combat would be regarded as unspeakable and they would be summarily executed when apprehended. The only argument against doing just that as far as I have understood or heard is that is tactically unwise, i.e., a foe who knows he faces death on capture will fight to the last.

Torture is not well defined. There are large and relevant cultural and personal elements which need to be taken into account when considering what constitutes torture. This cannot be waved away as irrelevant. Seemingly this should be clearer to the “side” of the debate that scoffs at the failure to define pornography but that “one knows it when one sees it.” This is not in and of itself problematic. Torture has been used for two distinct purposes by regimes in the past (and likely in the present). One is to inculcate fear and terror in a populus. Consider again the (excellent) fim Das Leben der Anderen, it is true that the regime was venal and corrupt. It is also true that torture, fear, and terror “worked” in the purely consequential sense. Intimidation with the force of the state … is highly intimidating, especially if you have friends or family. It takes a heroic stance to be able to withstand such force and heroes are rare. Torture to obtain information also can be effective. It also can be not be effective if used poorly. For that matter, modern guns and weaponry and trained soldiers can be not be used effectively. Pointing that in a specific instance that torture was ineffectively used is not proof that it cannot be used effectively. Information gathering and analysis is a difficult task. Heisenberg and the quantum theorists of the early 20th century identified the notion that the observer and the observed are not two independent entities. An analogous thing operates in the gathering of information. One has to be careful that prejudices of the observer do not influence the data being sought, always a problem in high noise to signal environments. But I digress. The point is that any sort of interrogation is a flawed source of information. If a intelligence agency or community finds itself with a extreme dearth of information and feels that information is crucial at a juncture in a conflict … the desire and need to turn to alternate means, knowing that there is a price, i.e., that this is the least worst alternative, makes the turn to methods to extract information that are considered in the drawing room as torture is understandable.

However, torture is not consistent with the American way. We do not systematically speaking condone torture. This authority, to borrow from Jouvenel, has not been granted by the people. Furthermore, this conflict in which we find ourselves is highly asymmetric. We can and should claim that we will in fact not avail ourselves of these methods not because they are not useful, because if used intelligently they can be, but because we don’t need them to beat our enemies. We should make a stern point to highlight the difference between legal and illegal combatants and our treatment of the same. Sticking to our principles may have material and tangible costs. We should acknowledge that up front and accept. Or if we are unwilling to do so, we should be honest about our failing to do so and strive to come to a place were we do not have to sacrifice our principles to acheive those necessary ends.

I haven’t done this in a while, so I have some rather old examples in addition to the rather recent ones.

Signing statements:  Once the bane of the liberal blogosphere, and criticized by Obama himself, they seem to be coming back into vogue.  Perhaps not as much as under Bush, but when a spending bill’s signing statement says the President only considers some of the item "suggestions", that’s precisely what the Left used to decry.

Taxing health care benefits:  During the campaign, Senator Obama criticized McCain’s proposal, but now President Obama is open to the suggestion.

Military tribunals:  Senator Obama said during the campaign, "by any measure, our system of trying detainees has been an enormous failure."  President Obama, however, is open to using that supposedly failed system.  While this would be change a bit, sometimes using federal courts and giving foreign enemies constitutional rights, this is not making us friends in the world (as if that should be the ultimate end of our foreign policy).  Germany’s "Der Spiegel" notes a number of German opinions that are critical of this move.  And Moe Lane, writing at RedState, notes a plausible outcome of all this change; the status quo.

Mind you, other people suggested that the President’s actions back then [announcing the closing of Gitmo] were possibly just an attempt to give him maneuvering room while he came up with a way to keep the status quo going. Which leads to an interesting scenario: let us say that the President decides to run military tribunals for Gitmo detainees. Let us also say that he (with a little help from Congress) steamrollers over current opposition to those tribunals. Once those tribunals are done, and the existing detainees are processed… what’s stopping the President from continuing to keep Gitmo operating? After all, did he not just ‘reform’ it? It’d certainly be cheaper to keep an existing facility going than to shut it down and create a new one. Fiscal responsibility is good, right?

And what would any critics plan to do about it, anyway?

Vote Republican?

Not likely, so what’s the downside for the President?