Stones Cry Out

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.

Two different headlines from the same day illustrate the fundamental issues of the healthcare reform debate:

Blue Dog Democrats Announce Deal on Healthcare Reform

Key Senate Aide: Healthcare Reform Deal Not Imminent

The real reason that there is no quick solution coming is threefold: no one can agree on what exactly needs to be reformed, no one can agree on a solution, and the government is trying to provide the solution.

First, what needs to be reformed? It all depends on who you ask. Talk to a liberal Democrat and they will tell you that we need to have universal health insurance. Or that we need to do something about the uninsured. Or that we need to reduce the influence that insurance companies have over medical decisions.

Talk to a conservative Republican and they’ll tell you we need to get the government out of the business of providing health insurance (or at least streamline the current programs). They’ll tell you that we need to eliminate waste in Medicare. They’ll also talk about reducing overall costs.

Who’s right? There’s an element of truth in both sides of the argument. But there is no consensus on exactly what issue(s) need to be reformed thus the wide disagreement on how to solve the problems.

This brings us to the second point which is that without agreement on the problems you can’t find consensus on solutions.

To make matters worse, President Obama is running around pitching a plan without specifics. No one really knows what his proposed solution might be or what he thinks the extent of the problem really is because he doesn’t come right out and tell anyone. He’s been acting as if people will just do what he wishes because he asks them to. Perhaps he would be better served to slow down, listen to all sides in this debate, and figure out what the right steps are to take rather than trying to cram his agenda down the throats of voters. If polls are any indication, voters do not like what they are hearing from the President.

Finally, there is the issue of government involvement in the delivery of health care. Despite the fact that it has been proven repeatedly that government cannot fix every problem, Democrats still want to have government take over health care. Voters do not like that idea and understand what a disaster such a system would be. Most of the proposals so far make the government bureau overseeing health care look like the Office of Circumlocution from Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit:

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving–HOW NOT TO DO IT.

While the news channels may drone on about how healthcare reform is about to be passed it doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon. The longer the debate drags on the better as it is far better to stick with the current system we have no matter how flawed it may be rather than to rush through a package that will only make the situation far, far worse.

What kind of advisors is Obama surrounding himself with?  Radicals.

President Obama’s top science adviser said in a book he co-authored in 1973 that a newborn child “will ultimately develop into a human being” if he or she is properly fed and socialized.

“The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being,” John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.”

Emphasis mine, and which is noting why abortion is underemphasized by this administration; they’re not even considered human when they’re born.  There’s much more at the link. 

Scott Ott, of ScrappleFace blog fame and occasional CNN guest, is running for Executive of Lehigh county in Pennsylvania.  Tuesday night, he went strolling around Allentown, looking to strike up conversations, maybe hand out a few campaign bookmarks; no real agenda in mind.

Turns out that when he enters a store and starts talking to the guys there, a chance to really discuss the issues crops up and he has what he called "an intensely practical, intelligent discussion about political ideology and freedom".  The conversation begins:

"What will you do for me if I vote for you?" the shop owner said. "Will you get me a grant for my store?"

I’m a bad politician.

I said (paraphrasing from memory), "The first thing I’ll do for you is put an end to the idea that public servants should hand out special favors to people who support them."

I told him that the next thing I could "do for him" was to abolish the idea that government is going to save you from your troubles, and to exchange that for the idea that you are responsible and free, and that no one cares more about your children, your business, your home and your neighborhood than you do. In addition, no one is better equipped to deal with the challenges of your neighborhood than you and your neighbors. But it won’t happen until you stop thinking that someone else is to blame, or that some outside agency is going to intervene to fix things.

He looked at me and said, "You’re a Republican."

I was delighted that he associates freedom and responsibility with my party.

His thoughts on that discussion, what the aims are (or should be) of the Republican party, and a sense of community that’s been lost elsewhere can be found here.

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.

That was then:

BARACK OBAMA: …When you rush these budgets that are a foot high and nobody has any idea what’s in them and nobody has read them.

RANDI RHODES: 14 pounds it was!

BARACK OBAMA:  Yeah. And it gets rushed through without any clear deliberation or debate then these kinds of things happen.  And I think that this is in some ways what happened to the Patriot Act. I mean you remember that there was no real debate about that. It was so quick after 9/11 that it was introduced that people felt very intimidated by the administration.

This is now.

Facing criticism from both sides of the aisle that he’s pushing too hard and fast on health care reform, President Obama on Wednesday defended his "rush" to get it done and said Congress must take advantage of this rare opportunity.

"The stars are aligned," Obama said in prime-time news conference, and the American people are depending on Congress to reach a compromise promptly. He wants a deal by Congress’ August recess.

"If you don’t set deadlines in this town, things don’t happen. The default position is inertia," the president said, singling out his critics for playing political "games" with health care reform.

Versus, say, playing political "games" with national defense (without which, health care soon becomes moot). 

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.

From a post at Redstate comes word that a liberal go-to guy for examples of a utopian society is now backing away from, what turned out not to be, the perfect world.  Quoting the Redstate writer "Skanderbeg":

Having run the “progressive experiment” for a few decades, the Swedes have figured out that it’s a dead end that does not work – and they want out.

What are they doing?  Cutting taxes, capping spending and privatizing health care.  What are we doing?  Raising taxes (or coming up with new ones), uncorking spending, and "publicizing" health care.  We’re meeting Sweden on the road going the opposite direction, and they’re telling us to turn back.  Will we listen?

I guess the first question is will they listen.  My underlying issue with public health care is that people will believe, at some point, that they are entitled to it, hence the term used for so many welfare programs; "entitlements".  But a poor choice of terms it is, because it engenders a sort of "right" that doesn’t really exist; your right to my money.  Living in that culture for 30 years, will Swedes let go of class warfare and "soaking the rich" to embrace financial independence?  We can only hope.

I linked only to the Redstate article, because it covers another topic as well, worth reading.  The link to the original article is in there, though.

A new peer-reviewed study claims that "[v]irtually all changes in global atmospheric temperatures in the late 20th century were the result of nature rather than human activity". 

Yeah, that "settled" science continues to get unsettled.

“It goes against the orthodoxy,” said climate scientist Chris de Freitas of New Zealand’s Auckland University. The new findings called into question the politically-correct, politically-motivated assumptions driving the climate change debate, he said.

De Freitas and Australian scientists John McLean and Bob Carter reported that at least 80 percent of climate variability tracked over the past half a century could be attributed to internal climate-system factors including the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Pacific warming phenomenon and its cooling twin, La Nina.

This left little room for human-caused factors like emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other so-called greenhouse gases. Intermittent volcanic activity, producing significant cooling, was found to have been a factor.

The paper was published Thursday, following a six-month peer review process, in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research.

All of our efforts trying to stem this may be for naught.

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.

From class. It seems there is a general statement might make about the usage of two terms. Compare the usage of the the terms synthesis versus harmonization. When two ideas are seen as far apart, a writer or idea which brings them together is achieving synthesis. If on the other hand these ideas were not very disparate then synthesis is not the correct term, the two ideas are being harmonized instead. It seems that the choice of synthesis versus harmonize tells as much (or more) about the place of the observer than the observed.

The West looking East at theological and monastic trends sees three different strands. St. Basil’s monasticism is compared to the rule based Benedictine monastic tradition. The Evagrian/Origenist tradition is seem to be akin to an intellectual tradition akin to the Dominican monastic tradition in the West. Finally the Syriac monastic tradition is seen as (perhaps) a Carmelite or affective tradition. This tendency is exaggerated by the natural tendency to seek comparisons to things closer to home. However the East does not perceive their traditions the same way. They see the similarities and instead the shared parts not the differences.

An example, St. Diadochos of Photiki whose writings are found in the Philokalia is seen by the West as providing a synthesis of Evagrian and (pseudo-)Makarian or affective theological strands. Yet the East sees this as a harmonization. That Evagrius writings and the Makarian homilies share a common tradition. St. Diadochos is not synthesizing their separate threads but in a harmonious way is drawing from each to express his ideas.

I don’t normally post about it here, but I contribute to the Shire Network News podcast, and wanted to post the text of my segment this week.  SNN is a satirical look at the news, but a fierce defender of Western civilization, culture and religion.  I’m what you might call the "token" Christian on the team.  The rest of the regulars are Jews, most of whom started their adult life as liberals.  Then came reality.  We all get along extremely well, even when we disagree.

SNN (virtually) always has a feature interview.  This episode’s is with Charles Winecoff, a contributor to the Big Hollywood blog for conservatives working in the creative arts. Click here for the show notes, links, and ways to listen to the show; directly from the web site, by downloading the mp3 file, or by subscribing with your podcatcher of choice.

Below is the text of my commentary.

Hi, this is Doug Payton for Shire Network News asking you to "Consider This!".

Candidate Barack Obama said that we needed health care reform in the US, but blasted fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton for proposing a mandatory insurance requirement.  President Obama now thinks this is a feature, not a bug; a benefit that we just need to get on board with.  But there’s more, much more!  If you act now…  (Oh, sorry, I was channeling Billy Mays for a second there.) 

Anyway, while there are many positives to the proposal, here are the Top 9 Benefits of ObamaCare(tm):

9 – No more pesky Canadians crossing the border to avoid their long waiting lines.  Ours will be just as long.

8 – We’ll be the envy of the third world.

7 – Health insurance will be just like car insurance; you have to have it, it’ll cover less as you get older, and your children can trade you in during our Cash for Clunkers program.

6 – Getting rid of of Grandma & Grandpa sooner means cost savings to you, not including the Christmas & birthday presents you don’t have to buy anymore.

5 – Electronic records means that your medical history will soon have its own Facebook page.

4- Medicine will no longer be prescribed subject to, as Scott Ott has called it, "diagnosis discrimination"; simply based on a doctor’s opinion.  Government bureaucrats will now be on a level playing field.

3 – It’ll make David Letterman forget all about Sarah Palin.

2 – Cost-cutting measure: close rural hospitals.  It’s OK that farmers will be travelling farther for health care, because we’ll mandate they buy an electric car.

And the #1 benefit of ObamaCare(tm):

If we had already had it, Michael Jackson would still be alive.

Yes, and Christopher Reeve, too, I imagine.  Consider this.

The old phrase goes, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"  Well, here’s another:  What if they gave a universal health care support rally…

Local MoveOn.org members had penciled in on today’s schedule a protest in front of Senator John Cornyn’s Spring Valley Road office, during which they had hoped to pressure the senator to support President Barack Obama’s public health care legislation.

…and a tax protest broke out?  (I know, not as catchy.)

But when Paula Anderson, a MoveOn.org member and spokeswoman, showed up at 11:30 a.m., she found another contingent had beat her to the proverbial punch: A large number of Dallas Tea Party members were already set up, voicing their opposition to the proposal.

Anderson was stunned: "We really did not expect them to show up." She estimated the crowd at about 130. "From our perspective we took names of everyone there, and we had about 30 people," she told Unfair Park. "And I would assume they maybe had 100."

The Tea Party movement ain’t going away so easily.

If good intentions were dollars, TennCare would be turning a profit instead of failing in its financial and moral responsibilities to the people of Tennessee.

And so begins an article dealing with the financial problems of a universal health care insurance program that has failed, and of a government that hid the fact that it was failing.

Now I’m sure that there are plenty of folks who would come forth and say that this time, with ObamaCare, it would be done right. 

The article lists a number of people and groups to blame for the failure, but I find this to be the foundation of it all, and why a little government intervention inevitably leads to a lot.

Then blame the entitlement industry that has grown up around TennCare like weeds choking a garden. These strident advocates believe they have the right to reach into our pockets and take as much money as they need to turn TennCare into what they want it to be — universal insurance — instead of what it is supposed to be — a safety net.

That is precisely what happens when a new entitlement comes into play, and why Ronald Reagan said that the closest thing to eternal life this side of heaven was a government program.  Promoting this entitlement to the federal government will, make no mistake about it, get larger than even its proponents dare to believe.  And ultimately it won’t be as good as what we have now.

Just ask all the Canadians that come over the border.