There are many examples of the failed philosophy of neo (new) conservatism, such as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute , the Project for New American Century, and last but not least, financial ‘innovation’ in the economy. You can argue until you are blue in the face about philosophy and theory, but some evidence is empirical. It just can’t be argued. The outcome, or the results, of particular programs and policies in action speak for themselves, similar to how if you mix water, milk, eggs, and Bisquick just right you get pancakes.
The WPRI was a group that had advocated for school choice vouchers in Milwaukee. After the program was instituted and studied, they issued this report which said, among other things:
“The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find,” George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute, wrote in the paper’s first sentence.
On the same topic of vouchers but not from the same report, I spent a day in Jefferson City speaking with a local Republican State Representative at the time named Jim Lembke. It was a very cordial conversation on education policy in the Missouri. However, the conversation ended quite abruptly after I said to him:
My grandfather was a conservative. (I like to call him an Eisenhower conservative.) And as I understand it, in his day, they believed that public tax dollars should not be used for private purposes. In relation to vouchers, what ever happened to that conservative ideal?
Then there is The Project for a New American Century, a conservative think tank formed during the Clinton Administration and whose membership included the likes of Steve Forbes, Bill Kristol, William J. Bennett, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, Richard L. Armitage, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, “Scooter” Libby, Dan Quayle, and more. They penned a letter that said some of the following (keep in mind, this was before 9/11 and a few years before W. was ever elected POTUS):
“That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”
“Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction”
“Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East.”
“a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard…”
“…removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.”
“…If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.
Of course, we know how all of that worked out. $150 a barrel for oil, $10 billion a month in Iraq Afghanistan, oh, and no Weapons of Mass Destruction. Notice how almost all of the people mentioned in the letter to President Clinton seen here ended up in the Bush Administration.
The phrase that freaks me out the most from the Project for a New American Century is an excerpt from the following paper:
Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions.
And last but not least, the financial market. So far, we have talked about two of the items that the conservatives are traditionally given credit for as their strength. Taxes, Defense, and now Finance. It is clear that their strength in these areas is nothing more than a myth, and a very damaging myth at that. Here is the latest from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke:
“One would be forgiven for concluding that the assumed benefits of financial innovation are not all they were cracked up to be,” the Fed chairman said today in a speech at the central bank’s community affairs conference in Washington. “The damage from this turn in the credit cycle — in terms of lost wealth, lost homes, and blemished credit histories — is likely to be long-lasting.”
It is exactly this type of mentality that we are risking our young men and women’s lives for on the other side of the world. Hopefully this movement is just indicative of the last breathe of an evil murderer in a horror movie, rising for one final scare before he flames out for good. Of course, the best case scenario would be “puppies and bunnies” but it would be naive of me to think that violent and grotesque ignorance does not exist in this world. The latter of which is why good men and women periodically are called to lay their lives on the line for the sake of morality, and the shared purpose of all people in the struggles of life. In this case, let’s just hope that law enforcement is adequate and up to the task before it escalates beyond a manageable level.
(Newser) – Right-wing extremist groups may be taking advantage of volatile economic times and the election of the first black president to drum up membership in the US, the Homeland Security Department says. The nine-page report, sent to police agencies nationwide, says extremism isn’t limited to racist hate groups but “may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration,” the Washington Times reports.
The rising unemployment rate, spate of foreclosures, and debate over issues such as immigration reform and gun control may be creating a “fertile” ground for recruitment, the reports says. The election of President Obama may also play a role, though “most statements by right-wing extremists have been rhetorical, expressing concerns about the election of the first African American president, but stopping short of calls for violent action.” Sources: Washington Times, CNN
I haven’t paid much attention to these Tea Parties; however, I was so embarrassed for these people, I had to post this. There once was a time when we actually wanted intelligent people running this country…I wonder what the Constitution Party guy has to say about African Americans being counted as 3/5’s of a person…
“Let the players play!” is the old adage, and it is a good one. As a matter of fact, I like it. I like it a lot. Especially in baseball. A good game is designed like a well-written novel. The suspense and anticipation of every pitch, nod, wink, and stolen base can keep a true sport fan on the edge of their seat until the climactic final out. And while there is no one way to write a novel, or play a baseball game, there is a general set of rules and regulations that everyone agrees to play by. These rules did not appear in a magical rule book by some invisible hand overnight. The rules of the game evolved over a period of a hundred years, and even longer if you delve in to the history of any sport that involves a ball and a stick. If it was not for these rules that everyone agrees on before the first pitch is thrown, and the umpires to enforce them, the game that we have come to know and love would not exist –- the same applies to my country, the United States of America….
There are few things more sweet than the swing of Ken Griffey Jr.’s bat. In 2008, he started the season seven home runs short of 600, and his last home run, number 599, had been on May 31. The drama and anticipation of that 600th blast was on every baseball fan’s mind until finally, on June 10, 2008, this pure athlete took the Marlin’s Mark Hendrickson over the wall for his place in the history books.
One has to wonder what Griffey’s numbers would look like if he had not spent all of that time on the bench with nagging injuries - but even still, 600 hundred home runs is something that only 6 of over 16,000 former Major League Baseball players had ever managed before. That moment in time was a feat of personal greatness by any athletic standard.
However, Griffey’s greatness did not mystically appear out of nowhere. It was not his inborn natural talents that made him a household name in America with millions of dollars in his bank account and a place in the record books. Instead, he was a man with a passion for the game that thrived in a system that was devised for him and others to succeed within. To better illustrate this point, read what Sir Isaac Newton wrote of the French philosopher Descartes, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Griffey was a giant standing on the shoulders of the giants before him, including a man named Ken Griffey Sr.
Yet, the system that Griffey has thrived in is not perfect, and it has never been perfect. Individual players and sometimes even whole teams have attempted to swipe the legs right from under the giants of Alexander Cartright and his “Knickerbocker Rules,” Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Stan “The Man” Musial, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, and more. The 1919 White Sox, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Hal Chase, and the 1877 Louisville Greys, just to name a few, are black eyes on the history of baseball, and in many cases, almost brought down the game all together.
Philosopher Dan Dennett has some interesting thoughts on what makes things cute, sexy, sweet, and funny. The book on “What is Funny?” is something to look forward too. I have never really thought about it this way before, but it is quite simple, “Things are sweet because we like it, not, ‘We like it because it is sweet.’” Make sense? Just watch…
One thing happens to us all together, all at the same time. Every instant of every day we unfold in to the future. What never existed before becomes empirical, and where we came from no longer exists anywhere but in our minds. Existence and the state of being of every individual on Earth has this one property in common – Presence: We are all in it together – Not just here, but everywhere in the Universe.
1 “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so,” joked Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Scientists aren’t laughing, though. Some speculative new physics theories suggest that time emerges from a more fundamental—and timeless—reality.
4 Green days. The Department of Energy estimates that electricity demand drops by 0.5 percent during Daylight Saving Time, saving the equivalent of nearly 3 million barrels of oil.
9 Weather also changes the day. During El Niño events, strong winds can slow Earth’s rotation by a fraction of a millisecond every 24 hours.
13 Until the 1800s, every village lived in its own little time zone, with clocks synchronized to the local solar noon.
17 Einstein showed that gravity makes time run more slowly. Thus airplane passengers, flying where Earth’s pull is weaker, age a few extra nanoseconds each flight.
19 Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.
20 There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.
President Eisenhower (The Republican Party of my grandpa’s era) warned us of 21st Century Republican Party on his way out of office, with his exit speech. He obviously felt this was going to be the ominous challenge facing America following his Presidency. He just didn’t know the extent of it then. It didn’t just affect America, the M.I.C. spread across the world, arming everyone…thriving off of war. ….if I was just a bit more superstitious, I would almost call him a prophet…
After the results of the latest American Religious Identification Survey, Christian Science Monitor appears to blame evangelical Christianity on the reduction of believers nation-wide.
One interesting tidbit here is that strong proponents of the Separation of Church and State are strong proponents for two reasons. 1. They want the church to stay out of the government business, and 2. They want the government to stay out of church business.
1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.
The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap ofbelieving in a cause more than a faith.
This is interesting information, especially the data about Vermont being the largest non-believer state with 34% “nones,” or no religion. I would be willing to bet that the numbers of non-believers is much higher that this survey shows. I only say that because when I talk to people who doubt their faith, or otherwise claim to be agnostic or atheist, they only do so after they feel comfortable talking about it for awhile. Therefore, I bet that many more people are agnostic than they would ever admit to on a survey, or at the very least, function as deist. The only reason why the number jumped from 8.2 to 14.2 like it did in 2001 is probably just an indication of an increasing population feeling more and more comfortable admitting their agnosticism. However, I don’t have any hard data to prove that, so that is nothing more than a hypothesis waiting to be tested. It seems that most people just don’t know how to categorize their doubts.
In broad terms, ARIS 2008 found a consolidation and strengthening of shifts signaled in the 2001 survey. The percentage of Americans claiming no religion, which jumped from 8.2 in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001, has now increased to 15 percent. Given the estimated growth of the American adult population since the last census from 207 million to 228 million, that reflects an additional 4.7 million “Nones.” Northern New England has now taken over from the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the country, with Vermont, at 34 percent “Nones,” leading all other states by a full 9 points.
“Many people thought our 2001 finding was an anomaly,” Keysar said. We now know it wasn’t. The ‘Nones’ are the only group to have grown in every state of the Union.”
The percentage of Christians in America, which declined in the 1990s from 86.2 percent to 76.7 percent, has now edged down to 76 percent. Ninety percent of the decline comes from the non-Catholic segment of the Christian population, largely from the mainline denominations, including Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians/Anglicans, and the United Church of Christ. These groups, whose proportion of the American population shrank from 18.7 percent in 1990 to 17.2 percent in 2001, all experienced sharp numerical declines this decade and now constitute just 12.9 percent.
On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion, convened by RDFRS and filmed by Josh Timonen.
More than 150,000 people die each year in Missouri and Illinois. The information comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which compiles mortality data for the U.S. from death certificates in each state. Some deaths occur from multiple causes, but an overarching cause is determined for almost all deaths. More than 36,000 people in Missouri and Illinois died of some form of cancer in 2004. In St. Louis City, Jackson County, Mo., and Cook County, Ill., more people died from homicides than motor vehicle accidents in 2004.
…How do you want to go?
Some of the answers are pretty typical, some are decent:
I want to die on my own terms, with dignity and while I still understand what is going on — Geek
with a beer in my hand and a smile on my face. — tigger71
When I pass on I would like for it to be out in the middle of the sea on a boat, the water blue as the sky, on a warm summer day, with a light breeze, enjoying the tranquility and not having a worry in the the world. That could be kind of scary too, because what if no one finds me? and when they do I’ll be wickedly scary corpse!! — Nikki
When I’m 105, riding my Harley and shot by a jealous husband? — mick7
Wanna go with a bottle of viagra in one hand and a blonde in the other. — Jom
I’m sure DaddyHogwash.com readers can come up with some more creative ways to wish to die….
I have been told many times in my life that I am a dork, but I think I have finally proven it. I sat here and watched Mythbusters Co-Host Adam Savage talk for almost sixteen minutes about his obsession with sculpting an exact replica of the Maltese Falcon. I really didn’t even know what it was about or why I was watching, but when it was finished, I was happy I did.
So, hold that thought for a moment and consider this other piece of dork-hood.
The day after Christmas, I read ‘The Giving Tree‘ by Shel Silverstein to my sons, which I was not previously familiar with. In fact, when I bought the book, I thought it was another compilation of poetry. It was a memorable moment in the sense that we really did not sit down to read it. Instead, both of my youngest sons were running about the house playing with their new Christmas toys, and I just stood and spontaneously began to read the story out loud. I became so engrossed in the story and its beautiful simplicity, that either my kids thought I was finally losing my mind, or they were as inspired as I was, stopping in their tracks and giving ‘The Giving Tree’ their full attention.
I could not help but think that this was exactly the type of emotion Silverstein hoped to pull from his readers - and here we were, the anonymous family from St. Louis, nine years after his death, having a memorable moment because of his storytelling genius. My wife, who was apparently listening while putting on her makeup in the bathroom, came out wiping tears from her eyes, and said, “That was sad.” She then turned back around to go and fix the mascara job that Silverstein had just wrecked.
Later that day, we were at my father-in-law’s house and I was telling him the story of our memorable moment from the morning and he said, “I have that book!” Sure enough, within a few seconds, he had pulled it from his library in the den and began to pass it around the room for others to read, and it became a good memory for even more of us.
A little later, my father-in-law grabbed yet another Silverstein book, titled, ‘The Missing Piece.’ Being a big fan of Silverstein’s poetry as a child, and now as a father, I was pleasantly surprised that I was going to read two of his books that only hours before I did not even know existed. He whispered, “Here. This one is just as good, but a little weirder.”
So, I read it and liked it, but I did not really understand it. The story was about an almost complete circle that had a missing piece, which it searches for and later finds. (I hope I didn’t ruin it for you.) But, the story ends without the circle being very happy with its newly found piece, and the two parts eventually go on their own way.
To many, the moral of the story was really pretty obvious, but it was not so for me…at least, not until I saw the following, seemingly unrelated, video lecture from Adam Savage: (If you plan on watching the video, now is the time to do it before reading further.)
The point that Adam Savage makes in the story about his journey to develop an exact replica of the Maltese Falcon was that in the end, it was not about the end product all, but the journey that he would take to get him there. It was the journey that contained all of the fun, as was the case for Silverstein’s circle with a missing piece. It turned out for the circle that it was not finding the missing piece that brought it the most joy. It was simply the journey, or the many experiences it had along the way that brought it the most happiness.
But that is not the end of this story, because it was not until the circle found its missing piece that it realized what really made it happy was playing with the butterflies and rolling in the tall grass. Fortunately, for the circle, it had realized early enough in its ‘existence’ that it still had time to go back out and experience more of what really made it happy before it was too late.
Of course, if the circle did not have the goal of finding its missing piece to begin with, and if Adam Savage did not have the goal of replicating the Maltese Falcon, they would not have had the journey that helped them identify the source of their happiness to begin with. So, perhaps the real moral to the two stories should be that while it is not the attainment of goals that ultimately leads to happiness, the journey would not happen without them. Or, at the very least, knowing that in the end, all that is left of us is our legacy, or our journey, we should spend more time evaluating our goals in life with the an emphasis on the journey that we will take to get there.
And finally, in the case of Shel Silverstein and his gift of ‘The Giving Tree,’ we know that some journeys never end at all. As long as there are new people to read and listen to ‘The Giving Tree’ for the first time, Silverstein’s various adventures, cunning insights, and quest for meaning will continue to stand the test of time.
These are some brave fellows. It brings to mind the old saying that, “There are no atheists in a fox hole.” the monks live in Western Thailand near the River Kwi.
They call it the Tiger Temple, and its story is the stuff of fairy tales. According to Abbot Pra-Acharn Phusit, a tiger cub orphaned by poachers was brought to the temple years ago.
The abbot cared for her and, as word spread, more people brought sickly and orphaned cubs to the temple’s doorstep. Those cubs went on to have their own cubs, and nine years on there are now 34 tigers living here.
I am not sure how I feel about this. Bioethics professor, John Harris, really does make some good points in this synopsis, but I think I am going to have to read the book (Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People) to get a better feel for it. I hope he delves in to the possible consequences of what he is proposing and what societies can do to prevent some of the worst.
If it is right to save life, Harris says, then it should also be right to postpone death by stemming the flow of diseases that carry us to the grave. And we should make any such technology available as soon as we can, even if it means there will be some “haves” and “have-nots”.
“Certainly, sometimes we want competitive advantage – but for the enhancements I talk about, the competitive advantage is not the prime motive. I didn’t give my son (Jacob, to whom the book is dedicated) a good diet in the hope that others eat a bad diet and die prematurely. I’m happy if everyone has a good diet. The moral imperative should be that enhancements are generally available because they are good for everyone.” The only other route to equality, he says, is to level down so that everyone is as uneducated, unhealthy and unenhanced as the lowest in society – which is unethical. Even though we can’t offer a liver transplant to all who need them, he says, we still carry them out for the lucky few. Much better to try to raise the baseline, even if some are left behind.”
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I want to die on my own terms, with dignity and while I still understand what is going on — Geek