Meet the Proles

Public Domain image by Pearson Scott Foreman

One thing that never ceases to shock me is the tendency of the electorate to hold on to oft repeated lies, even resfuse to hear statements to the contrary of them, and with no candidate has this been more true then Sarah Palin. What do people get out of speaking venom and lies against her? What is it about Palin that makes people not only swallow the lies about her hook, line and sniker, but then dismiss any challenge to those lies as unworthy of their hearing?

In "1984", there were some, shall we say, non-characters called the Proles. They are humans who are non-people, are so lost in their hate, anger, fear and willful ignorance that they will simply hate upon without question whoever the small elite decides as a target, not even quoting their own memories against it. They can be controlled by a single broadcast of the radio.

I don't know what brought America to the brink of becoming Oceania, but something did. Something made us so thoroughly lose ourselves in hate, anger and political parties that we will ignore all reasoning thereafter. Something made us that lazy, that cowardly, that inhuman. I'll leave you to figure out what it was, but when was the last time that someone attacking Sarah Palin gave a good reason why?

Any particular lies you would like addressed will be handled in the comment section.

UPDATE 10/5/2011: Sarah Palin will not be seeking the highest office in the land. She announced that family concerns have simply become too great. The only person in the world who can defeat Sarahcuda is her own daughter, and it seems that she has proved this adage once again.

Politics is Comedy

The Clown Chili Peppers. Attb: Rick Dikeman at the English Language Wikipedia, license c.c.a.s.a. 3.0 unported.

Any frequent reader of this blog will know that there are few more enthusiastic supporters of the Tea Party then me, but I must give one mild criticism.

It has often been said that in many ways the Tea Party needs to learn. Being a new "organization" (more like "tribe") this is undoubtedbly true, but what precise due they need to learn? If one says "learn to tax people and give bailouts," then surely we have already seen the fruits of these decisions, the very standing on which the Tea Party was organized against the establishment of the Republican Party. Indeed liberals, your prayers against the hypocrisy of the Bush Administration have been answered.

If one says dealing with racism, while there are certainly racists in the Tea Party (and every other party I might add), I challenge you to give any example where a poilcy that could be considered racist was supported simply because it was racist. You will find none, but rather, a plethora of wasteful, ignorant and dangerous policies that undermined American law and order, or laid waste to our federal budget. It seems once again that the "unwashed masses" are more intelligent then our isolated, and steamed in a lost and perverted academia till no nutrition remained, vegetables of elites.

Rather, there is something far more fundamental, far bigger, and far more important at this moment in time that they must learn. If they do not learn it, they will fragment, and unlike a traditional party the Tea Party has no answer for such a fragmentation, all will be lost, and politics as normal will continue.

To understand what and why, let's step back for a minute and look at a great and foolish debate taking place in the tea party today: whether to increase taxes. It's easy enough to see why this debate would happen, and easy to deride the opposition to doing so. As a Texans put it, and what greater pleasure is there in life then hearing Texans speak, "do you honestly think not going to the mall and not using your credit card will pay off your debt?"It's easy enough to dismiss this crowd as toddlers, infants, those who were born yesterday.

Yet they have a very real intuitive fear, and one that is correct. For every dollar saved from the deficit by "Revenue Increases," there is just a little less pressure on congress to end our dangerous habits. Then there is a little more pressure to expand existing government entities and assets to facilitate new ends, possibly even ends with some merit, bringing us to precisely where we are now 4 years later, with less ability to borrow and, thanks to higher tax rates depreciating our economy, less ability to pay off. This is a very valid fear.

Why is it so hard to believe that one thing can be done at one instant and another at another? If you rearranged the lines in a movie, would they neccesarily make any sense? Or would the very point of the film be lost on its viewers?

Sometimes one must hold a gun to the head, must threaten and coerce, especially when one possesses only one house of congress, and has substantial detractors even among its own adopted party in the other. Sometimes one must also rearrange the scene to rearrange the decision. Politics is not a game for straight-talk or fairplay, especially not when dealing with other politicians, and exceptionally stubborn and heartless ones as we've found.

Politics is an art of timing and discretion. If the claim that increasing tax rates is indeed true, there will come a time for it, but that time is not now, especially since government can also raise revenue by selling government assets, such as public land with substantial mineral and oil reserves or quality soil for farming, and that dilapidating spending not only will help balance the deficit, but can alleviate the burden facing businesses with their excess of regulation and paperwork, a burden that currently equals $10,585 per employee for a small business, and close to $8,000 per employee for larger firms. The cost to our federal budget of regulation is $1.75 trillion, or more then the current budget deficit. This is a figure that comes from the Small Business Administration, a entity that the Obama administration has some ability to control and doctor with spinning.

Not only would selling these lands and relieving these costs to business reduce our deficit through spending cuts, but as Senator Marco Rubio recently pointed out, they would also unleash an economic torrent of growth likely far greater then the "10 day reprieve" the tax increases offer. As one can tell, things are not as they once seemed. The "balanced approach" folks really do not have the sense that the mind would conjure for them. We need to cut spending, and any attempt to raise revenue artificially will only slow such a process and damage the economy. Eventually, revenue will be raised - if we do it right, tax increases may not even be neccesary.

Take your turn, wait your time. It may seem hypocritical, but it's a fight we didn't start and we're in it. Know what to say and when, and realize who it empowers and who it humbles. Control your tongue, and let all the chips fall in place, for "there is a season and place for everything under the sun." (King Solomon, translated from book of Ecclesiastes). Don't let haste make waste, rather realize that politics is comedy, and your power is also a grave responsibility.


WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Guest Post - Roy Sanders is Magic (and other discoveries at the CHoA Autism Conference)

Yet another guest post from our good friend Walt Guthrie on the "social sciences." Enjoy!

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I wasn't expecting much from this year's CHoA Autism Confernce that was held last Saturday.
Boy, was I surprised.
Who knew that Roy Sanders had magical powers?

But I'll get to that.
Let's take the events of the conference in chronological order.

First up was Catherine Rice, a behaviorist from the CDC, who was there to give us the obligatory What-Is-Autism? opening presentation.
The talk actually touched more on issues of classification than anything else I have seen so far in these types of events. In the course of her presentation, she inadvertently raised a couple of interesting points. First, until 1980, the DSM classified autism as a type of schizophrenia.
Now here's a question (one that I didn't actually ask): In 1979, WAS autism actually a type of schizophrenia and in 1981 it WASN'T schizophrenia? The implication from Rice, of course, was that this is an example of how far the understanding of autism has come. But, as my numerous public questions to "experts" make clear, the classification of autism, even today, is divorced completely from empirical evidence. James McPartland, in my questioning of him, admitted that the use of the word "disorder" in the classification of ASDs was purely definitional.
If autism, or any word, is only whatever a designated authority structure says it is, then that's what it is. If autism is defined as schizophrenia, then it's schizophrenia. And if it's defined as a disorder, then it's a disorder. And if it's defined as two parts from this column of symptoms and three parts from that column, then that is what you have.
If you believe that the evidence points to the moon being made of cheese, then upon arriving on it, you may be forced to admit that no, the moon is not made of cheese. If you DEFINE the Moon as being made of cheese, then upon discovering that the orb revolving around our planet is actually composed of a different substance, you may be forced to admit that it is not, in actuality, the Moon.
If autism,as defined, is different from autism as experienced, then it's pragmatic utility as a useful term, even for the "science" of behaviorism, is questionable indeed.
Which was brought more into focus by Rice's second tidbit. She declared that there are those with autistic traits who are not counted as having an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. She compared it as the difference between neuroses and psychoses but then didn't really touch on it again.Yet, given how much of her presentation was related to doing counts of "ASD" cases in the general populace and whether or not the rate of autism is rising, this would seem to be highly pertinent Let's follow this line of reasoning. All autism is a disorder (thus ASD). Some people have autistic traits but, they are not disordered. So now, at least according to Rices' brief explanation, we find out that, a little bit of autism equals no autism at all.
Now, why not the easier explanation of: some people have autism and they're fine with it? Is it because that interpretation would be injurious to the autistic population? Or would the real victim of such an interpretation be the behaviorist money train for whom every diagnosis is a ka-ching?
I asked Rice, what the methodological procedure was for labeling the entire autistic spectrum as disordered (taking into account that she doesn't consider autistic-lites as part of the spectrum). It was at this point that Roy Sanders, the Medical Director of Marcus popped in to shut me off.
Hmm.

Next up was Felissa Goldsmith, a child psychiatrist from Marcus
Dr. Goldsmith treats a PowerPoint presentation like a teleprompter. And that's not a compliment.
There was little new here. However, there was such an underlying contempt for autistic kids in her talk that I had to check with Linda later to confirm that it wasn't just me picking up that vibe.
To give just the most egregious example: Goldsmith suggested more than once that parents should be encouraged to mourn their children's autism like a death. And to do this on special occasions like birthdays and Christmas. This easily was the most sickening thing I've been exposed to all week. ("Daddy will be down in a moment, Timmy. He's mourning the child he wanted that you'll never be.") This is the advice you'd expect to come from a monster and I said as much.
I asked Sanders, if this was the official policy of the Marcus Center. Boos from the audience. He curtly dismissed the question as inappropriate.
Well, it's not like I was the one who brought it up.

Dr. Michael Morrier, from the Emory Autism Center, gave a somewhat uneven presentation on ABA that ended up focusing on how his people do it over there. I want to say some good things somewhere and it might as well be here. As I told Morrier after the presentation, he is the least offensive behaviorist I have ever encountered. When asked about his center's use of aversives, he replied that they don't use any.
Giving Morrier the benefit of the doubt, if I was forced to send a child anywhere for the application of ABA, Morrier would probably be my choice.
Still, even if he seemed more of an actual human being than any other behaviorist that I have ever personally met, he still was, after all, a behaviorist. At one point, talking about instilling eye contact as a habit in children, he observed that one could be TOO successful. If children make eye contact all the time they become creepy staring machines. And Morrier noted that regular run-of-the-mill kids don't make eye contact all the time either. Instead, they do it 63% of the time. (Or something like that number, I neglected to make a note of his actual percentages and all the figures that follow in this paragraph are approximations of his actual numbers.) Morrier was quite explicit that the goal was to get the autistic kids to make eye contact at EXACTLY the same percentage of the time as normal kids. He even talked about making up the gap (as if this were some sort of missile crisis from the 1960s) between the two groups so that children who begin training at age three are 14 percentage points behind in eye contact percentages and those that begin at age 4 are 28% behind.
Morrier never felt the need to explain why a random sampling of non-autistic kid's eye contact percentages (or any other behavior) should serve as the golden mean against which all similar autistic behavior should be measured. There was no suggestion that it might be possible that regular kids might be indulging in too much eye contact and perhaps should receive some therapy to tone it down a bit.
There was no evidence presented that, having trained children to achieve the same percentage of eye contact to non-eye contact, that these children were indeed receiving the same benefits from this activity. Presumably, eye contact is a skill that delivers information to those engaging in it and that the everyday children doing it were themselves benefiting from the activity.
Certainly a question that you might think should be asked is: do autistic children, trained to make eye contact, receive the same benefits as regular children naturally engaged in the same activity? Or are they merely being trained to pretend that they are not autistic? A previous speaker at the AAC made a big deal about how his research has shown that those on the spectrum tend to gain their information about people from studying mouths rather than eyes. Assuming that this is indeed the case, and that all these babies haven't had laser pointers slapped on their heads for nothing, then wouldn't you want to know if forcing a child to shift his primary attention from mouth to eyes will be accompanied by an increasing ability to make use of this information? Or, will the child be left in a worse position, forced to concentrate on areas of the face he is less equipped to easily decipher?

Finally it was Sanders turn.
During his presentation, Sanders literally sat on his hands and continuously kicked out his legs and pointed his feet which might have been adorable if he was a shy, pretty girl in a sundress instead a self-conscious middle-aged introvert seemingly hyper-aware of his own poor public speaking skills.
Sanders attempted to use his own personal situation to illuminate what parents in the audience would face and the things they should do to prepare for raising a child on the autistic spectrum. And, as might be expected, it was the same old, tired checklist, although this time it was wrapped in a droning awkward wallow of self-pity and look-at-me-I'm-a-martyr-for-raising-an-autistic-child self aggrandizement.
At the conclusion of his talk, I asked the question why, in the two years of this particular conference, which seems to be aimed squarely at the parents of autistic children, that they had not chosen to include a single adult or teenager who was actually on the spectrum. Someone who might be able to explain to the parents what their own children were actually experiencing.
Sanders was dismissive of this question as well.
I then asked why, with all the usual suspects that he was recommending parents consult, he had not included actual people on the autistic spectrum who could possibly contribute a valuable understanding as to why their children thought and acted as they did.
His response was that not all people who claim to be on the spectrum actually are.
Well, THAT'S awfully cryptic, Roy.
His meaning became clear soon enough, right after the meeting. And it was at this point that I discovered that Roy Sanders' has magical powers. For he revealed to me, much to my surprise, that I am not on the autistic spectrum.
Wait a minute, I hear some of you saying. Don't you have to take a bunch of intricate expensive tests and pay a bunch of money to get an autistic diagnosis? Well, yeah. That's what I thought. A major part of this whole four hour plus drone-a-thon I had just finished sitting through was about the importance of getting special testing. Nobody said anything about just dropping Roy Sanders into the room and having him magically deduce it.
But his magic didn't end there. He had an even more dazzling trick up his sleeve.
It seems, rather than being on the spectrum I'm a "schizo" something-something-something. I'm afraid I didn't catch the full diagnosis. DSM labels are like your kid's Pokemon monsters. What grown-up with a life really has the time to keep up with them all? But I invite Roy to publicly post his diagnosis to this group so that I might be properly discredited as an autistic advocate in a public forum.
This later part was all relayed to me as he walked briskly to his car, making so little eye contact with me that he practically called out for a session of ABA and Christmas day parental mourning.
I'm sure you can imagine my internal dialogue:
"Huh? What? What are you doing? You can't walk away now after dropping that on me! I'm going to need counseling. YEARS of therapy! Preferably behavioral because that's science! I need to come to terms with this diagnosis! This changes my entire life! I need to know that there's hope for me and that I can live with this schizo-whatever-whatever and still have hope for a happy and productive life!"
Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, was not the magical diagnosis enough, and, in his quick retreat, he sure seemed like he had some place he needed to be. Perhaps, and I'm only speculating here, Saturday is the day of the week he reserves for mourning his own adopted child's autism.
And, of course, declaring me off the spectrum was probably an easy call. After all, if I am on the spectrum, it's not like Sanders or the Marcus Center are in a position to make a buck off of it.

In reality, his is the game pseudo-scientists play all the time, employing the magical intuitive powers that their credentials supposedly convey to conveniently discredit their adversaries.
Sanders was explicit that if I continue to pursue matters as I have that I will soon find myself barred from meetings such as this one. How much easier that will be if he is in a position to use his special magical insight to claim that his critic doesn't have standing.

I have spent years now arguing just how untenable the behaviorists' and their allies position are. I have shown you how they can't answer the simplest of questions.
Sanders, being the stupid man that he is, thinks that if he bars me from the meetings that he will have won. If it happens it will instead be a complete and total vindication for myself. I have, since my early days in Bob Morris' group, argued that you can't do business with these people. Nonetheless, in the time since then, I have treated them as the scientists I know them not to be. I have asked them to justify their uses of simple words they use everyday like "disorder" and those from our community who have attended these meetings have seen their complete inability to do so. What more do I need to do to show their essential fraudulent nature?
When I am barred (and i think it is a matter of when rather than if) I will have demonstrated, once and for all and for everyone here in the autistic community to see, that the behaviorists and their allies are unwilling to engage the autistic community in any form of real dialogue or debate that does not at first begin with a servile acknowledgment of their superior knowledge and authority in all matters pertaining to us.

I was asked, after the meeting, why it was that I couldn't be nicer. Bob Morris was nice. And they repaid his niceness by treating him with contempt and running the clock out on him.
The people charged with fixing us, hate us. Loathe us. Talk about us as tragedy, a collection of deficits and disorders. They encourage parents to MOURN when their children are identified as us. They think the best that we can ever be is a crude approximation of them. They compare us to animals. They compare us to AIDS. They compare us to cancer. They compare us to death.
And in doing all this they enrich themselves.

The time for nice, from me, or anyone, is past.

Way, way past.

Walt Guthrie

The Lemmeys Lay an Egg in the Chagos

Chagos Islanders helping the Seabees, Diego Garcia, 1971

Okay, imagine this, you have a home, a large home on 14 square miles, shared between you and 1100 other people. You are told, mysteriously, by the British government that you will be evicted to build a military base. If you have an extremely long ancestry on the island, you're entitled to some compensation, and only a little bit, several years too late to help you out in any significant manner, but if it's only you or your mother or your grandfather, you're entitled to none. Worse, brutal measure including depravation of supplies, threats of bombing, and the destruction of domesticated animals are used to achieve these ends.

But here's the strange part: the military base isn't even in your chain of islands, but on a larger island 30 miles away.

And thus you have the Chagossians. They've been forced out of a home that wasn't even needed for anything, and at one point, the British did not believe they were entitled to any compensation. They described them as "Tarzans" and "Man Fridays," and dumped them on the nearby island of Mauritus without so much as food and water to fend for themselves in the Port Louis slums. At most, an eviction of Diego Garcia might have been in order, probably to the other islands, and certainly not by these means.

This leads me to wonder, just what are they doing with those islands? There are allegations of black sites by the US Intelligence community on those islands. There are also large areas of solid farmland and excellent mineral resources and fishing completely off limits to any economic development. And then there are the poor souls forced to live in urban slums because some idiot in London, or DC (the story varies), decided this was honestly a good idea.

Mauritus is now seeking control of the islands. While the US millitary has a legitimate claim to the neccessity of Diego Garcia, I see no reason at all that they should so much as whine at some reasonable level of economic development on a bunch of islands that aren't even reasonably near them. If they had been willing to make the people there American or British citizens on the Chagos Islands, and only rearrange the lives of those directly affected by the military base, maybe my feelings would be different, but after 39 years of reckless unethical behavior towards an entire society, methinks that neither London nor DC nor Port Louis, Mauritus, who sold their people out for 3 million pounds, can be trusted at all with the greatest Lemon of Lemmeyland. This is totally irresponsible, and no official associated with these acts should be allowed to keep their job, and no bureau associated with the duties regarding the British Indian Ocean Territory should avoid thorough scourging and discipline.

Those people have a home they have been deprived of. Now, the UK wants to declare a giant nature preserve to keep them out of their home forever. This is not the first time that eco-nazism has hurt the people of the Chagos - another proposed site for the current base at Diego Garcia was an uninhabited atoll rejected because it was the site of a rare breed of turtle. Please, please, please let them come back, and there is no reason at this point why someone else should not control those islands, especially when the British have abused them so thoroughly:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." -The Declaration of Independence

Government comes from the people, and thus the British Government has lost it's right to the British Indian Ocean Territory, pure and simple. Who will it go to instead? I don't know. Not Mauritus, not the UK, and not America, that much has to be certain.

A few thoughts for the day

My friend Marty, of "Out of Context", writes aphorisms. This day has really made me think about my life and who I am, and I just wanted to take a moment to write down a few small thoughts for the day:

Be gracious, and your friends will be many.

Sometimes we wonder why, but when you live with a good heart and a head of honor, you know why you're here.

Hard work improves YOU, every part of you, while sloth rots you inside.

Troubles and trials are man's moment to conquer and exploit, justly.

The beauty of the world is another statement of God's love for us. When you don't see God with you, look out at the moon, and let still peace fill your heart. Or look out at the mountains, and let yourself be strengthened by their strength. For all this has been made for you and others like you.

With questions come answers.

With heroism comes stories.

With favors and decency, come respect and love.

With greed, comes the consumption of the self.

With envy, the person is lost.

With needless violence, relationships are made brittle, and the respect is moved by the blind.

With lies, reality is lost, and the world becomes the most terrifying of abominations, a twisted knot of human machinery tearing slowly to the vilest corruptions and indecencies, with clocks showing wrong times, beauty burned to nothing, free horses chained to the weak, wrong becoming right, and man himself as fine-cut meats for the hungry shadows.

With respect of others, you see the beauty in people, and the world lights up before your eyes.

With respect of the world, everything is sacred and right.

When you revere your parents, you really honor yourself.

Marty could top these any day, and I know this isn't what I normally write about, but these are just a few thoughts of mine that seem to be flowing out of my heart.

Is Sexism Bad?

Male & Female Hansi (Chinese Characters) side by side, with archaic Japanese meaning "Husband & Wife" or married couple. The female character (left) is a nurturer as the artistic aura of the image conveys, while the two characters that symbolize masculinity (right) are a hand holding a hoe and a rice field, the laborer. Courtesy of Wikimedia user AnonMoos.

No one asks this question, but many extremely successful men and women are sexist against the other gender. The reasons that, as far as I can tell, are given for Sexism being bad are mostly flawed. See, we assume that because it has some similarity to Racism (so does the tendency of airlines to charge seniors and kids different prices then adults, and for that matter patriotism) it therefore must be bad, but racism has no basis in the human character and no function in tight knit relationships.

To clarify, by "Sexism" I mean the tendency of people to hold the other gender, or its' perceived attributes, in contempt. I do not mean the tendency to discriminate in the workplace, sexually harass, or worse. These things are acts of Greed, Lust and Violence, are against human rights, law and public safety, and should always be illegal. The Sexism I mean is simply believing that the other (masculinity or feminity, or men or women) is inferior to your own. In other words, Sexism in your mind.

The reason I believe Sexism could be healthy is because it allows you to define yourself and have deep root in your own character, rather then a character imposed from outside. Assuming they practice sexism, masculine women and feminine men tend to look down on man and woman, while masculine men and feminine women tend to look down on the traits, femininity and masculinity, as masculine women and feminine men are criticized for not complying, and must hold their own against society and try to balance themselves, while feminine women and masculine men are defined within those traits and fight those who fight against them. I have no scientific studies on this, but my own personal experience seems to validate what my reason contrives.

It also creates a hierarchy of dominance within the family, preventing fights and working towards the happiness of all. You will have to be careful how you choose your mate, of course, but once you have selected one who is willing to be inferior, and wants to be taken care of, the rest should be easy. Further, as long as you are not trying to force this on someone who is not willing (which never works anyways) there really isn't a moral crime in it, as some people are genuinely weaker in character and want a big strong papa or mama bear who can take care of them. Avoid embarassing them in front of their friends, of course, but otherwise it seems mutually beneficial. I know a lot of strong families have stayed together this way.

Does this actually mean you have legitimate reason to look down on the other gender? No. But then again, can every country in the world really be the greatest?

The Flaw of Small Ambitions - Obama and Afghanistan

"“I’m not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or, in some way—you know, sending a message that America is here for the duration. Until I’m satisfied that we’ve got the right strategy I’m not gonna be sending some young man or woman over there—beyond what we already have.” -President Obama

Sounding reasonable and being reasonable are not the same thing. The problem with this approach to any ambition, but especially a war, is that when your aims are so small and "pragmatic" that they excite no one, you will inspire no loyalty, no commitment, and no resolve. When you can't even give an Afghani the time of day, how can you possibly expect them to support you, possibly to their death? These people have to make life and death decisions; if they side with us, and we ditch on them, they may be killed by the other side. If they don't side with us, and we stay, we may kill them. It's a stark reality, and one that must be remembered and honored. If they cannot trust us to keep our word, Mr. President, and have a little bit of honor, we will be sending many more young men and women to die in many other places because we will find help from no one in Afghanistan. We may even, considering Afghanistan's location, face a world war. Worse, we tarnish our good name, and people remember that. And no, regardless of an "illegitimate war" (whatever that means,) if we stay by the side of those we promised to stay by the side of, yes, people can trust us to keep our word, even if they don't like what we're saying.

Joe Biden made it very clear, according to the Economist, that he favors a "bomb stuff" approach to Afghanistan.

From Dr. Strangelove, redherrings.wordpress.com, Fair Use (Non-profit only)

We will fly around in little drones with rockets smiting whatever we like. In Iraq, we tried a strategy very much like that from 2003 to 2006. We also tried this strategy in Vietnam, a few decades before. Neither time did it turn out any better. In both places, violence got worst, and for every enemy we killed, 2 more were creted to take his place. In Iraq, only the courage and sheer stubborn gall of our president prevented us from ending the war the same way we did in Vietnam, increasing the risk of nuclear holocaust with the Soviets seven fold and wasting every ounce of blood spilled in that jungle.

In Iraq, after 2006, a massive millitary surge took place, but so did something else. A clever, educated, creative young general, General Petreaus, who is as far from the millitary stereotype as could ever be imagined thought up his own method for fighting the insurgents. Before him, a young Colonel with a very softspoken, passive, nonviolent attitude whose name I sadly cannot remember had gathered together a series of Sunni Chiefs in Anbar Province, pointing out to them that Al Qaida was, in fact, a threat to their authority. He won their trust so well that over night, they not only stopped fighting the Coalition, but fought for it. This, among other things, freed up forces and resources for other regions. It also demonstrated an attitude of cooperation that neither the Millitary before the Surge nor Biden after it appear to understand.

See, we are winning in Iraq not because we did such a wonderful job with firepower. We are winning in Iraq because we finally appealed to the people. This is something that both Rumsfeld and Bush spoke of as early as 2003, but did not actually accomplish until after the surge.

General Stanley McChrysthal, photo taken by Scott Davis, Civil Service, public domain

General Stanley McChrystal, commander of Afghanistan, summed it up perfectly on 60 minutes today: "If the people are against us, we cannot be successful. If the people view us as occupiers and the enemy, we can't be successful and our casualties will go up dramatically."No matter how well you do with high-tech gizmos, millitary maneuvering, and plain old riflemanship, if your objective, here the people, won't cooperate, you will lose every time. And here, losing means Afghanistan descending in to chaos and continuing to be a threat to the United States, emboldening Al Qaida and the Taliban, and destabilizing a region with 4, soon 5, nuclear armed nations in it (Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and soon, Iran).

Idealism may be costly, and ambition may be a terrifying dragon when looked at head-on, but if you put none together, and stand for nothing, you will achieve nothing, including the bare basics of what you need. If we destroy our own nations mission, no one is going to care if we live or die. We may not even care, at the individual level. Iraq was won not because we had the best weapons or the best people, but because we actually gave them a way forward, a way out of the darkness as a people. If we refuse to do the same in Afghanistan, then every civilian we kill, every bomb we drop, every life we end and destruction of property that can be accredited to us will inspire yet more hatred, yet more animosity towards truly needless violence. When we give them a way forward, they can accept, they can forgive, and they themselves can make sacrifices for their country, for you can have no law if no sacrifices for your own country can be made.

What good are scientists anyways?

I know it is cliche these days to say such and such has been proved by science. But science doesn't actually prove anything. To prove, you have to avoid all fallacies, all holes in logic, but there is one very critical hole in logic that science cannot ever avoid, the fallacy of induction. If something works in one place and one time, it therefore works in every place and every time.

Now I'm not saying that scientists are actually worthless, but I am saying that we should ask ourselves, what are they for? What do they do? What are they responsible for? How do they know? And we should ask it because we ourselves are losing touch with reality.

Table Manners

Yet another break from my break:

At a dinner table, you are not supposed to let your elbows touch the table. At the bar, on the other hand, it is considered wise and appropriate. This may actually have to do with the now dying or dead custom of bringing your gun in to a saloon, and keeping your elbows on the table implies that you are not carrying such aggressively.

You are not supposed to open your mouth when chewing food, and are only supposed to use your hands when eating finger food. We Americans/Mainline Anglo-Europeans use forks and knives, although in some country's they will actually use tortilla like breads to grasp their food instead, especially Ethiopia. It was never much of a custom in Anglosphere nations to use a flattened bread, whereas fried foods that can be easily picked up (potato chips, chicken fingers...) filled the void of foods by hand, and cooking beef in larger pieces is also more common in English-speaking countries. Metalworking was also more common in these nations.

What conversation is allowable at the dinner table is regulated in the US to varying degrees dependent on region. This is unfortunate, as dinner is one of the main social gatherings of the day and restricted conversation lends easilly to superficiality. It softens people in mind, body, and soul. Makes them at ease as they dissolve in to the chair they are sitting in, slowly disappearing before their own decadence.

Of course, on the flip side, that only happens if you take it too far. Restriction in moderation makes for ease of relationship. And insisting on too much "real" may make new relationships more difficult to attain, crippling and restricting your life.

Maybe the best approach is to start easy and slowly remove the bounds. Build up. Give people their space at first and slowly approach. On the way, it's steady. Once you're there, it's fulfilling and enriching. Really, you can only make so many rules, relationships are an art. One basic rule though: It's about the other person.

Heaven on Earth

Atheists, secularists, moslems, et al, wait for it. This blog post is most certainly religious, but religion is not all I'm talking about here.

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

For I have come to turn " 'a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law-

a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'

"Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;

and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

-Matthew 10: 34-39, New International Version

These words from the Gospel of Matthew make clear exactly what our intentions should be in this world. We, if we our to follow Jesus, are not to make peace, but instead to make a war of words and ideas. It is made clear elsewhere, as when Jesus sows the gaurds ear back on his head, that the sword is not to be our weapon - the war reference is largely metaphor - but we are NOT to be peacemakers. We are here to unleash the fury of heaven in the hearts, minds, and souls of men.

We are to represent what is right, for "all that is required for evil to triumph in the world is for good men to do nothing." (Folk Saying) We are not to represent consensus, we are to create it. For peace, although desirable (he also says "blessed are the peacemakers..."), may be a luxury we cannot afford.

If those who know something say nothing, nothing can be heard. Even if they do say something, it may still not be heard, at least by many, but there is a certain piece of folk-wisdom, given to us by Abraham Lincoln, that goes "You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time," and if we keep on trying, keep on pushing, and we reach them at just the right moment, they WILL listen.

It doesn't matter what you know. It doesn't matter what you believe. It may not even really matter if you're right. Edison, when asked about his 1000 failed attempts to make his lightbulb, said "they're not failures. I now know of 1000 ways not to build a lightbulb." It may just be a phase we, and you, have to go through to find a higher truth and find it the right way at the right time. But keep on pushing. Know you will offend, but don't let that silence you. People will hate you, will be angry, may even attempt to destroy you, but if you have on your heart something that needs to be said, don't you dare keep it to yourself, for such is greater selfishness then the pick-pocket, who only steals money...

Foamy-mouthed taxpayers

Dear AIG, I quit!

Re: Dear AIG, I quit!

Now in the bible, when a rich man does nothing to help the leprosy and starvation suffering beggar Lazarus as he jollily feasts, he loses his name, and all we know about him is "a rich man" and he went to hell. It seems that many taxpayers, seeing VP and AIG in the same sentence, have decided this man is exactly the same, a "rich man" not even worth considering. While I can understand the anger, it seems very misplaced, as a contract is a contract, government legislation is government legislation, and anyways, this VP didn't pick his pay:

Geithner, an Obama crony and public official, did.

He is also helping Lazarus right now with how that pay will be used.

And he didn't partake in the destruction of his company. Those folks are already gone. We are taking away the rights of an innocent man under the excuse of "I have it so hard." We are allowing our morality to be corrupted by the hardship of the world, and are thus ourselves like the seeds that Jesus spreads which fall on vines and are devoured. Reminds me of this old shrapnel of wisdom:

"If you are starving, which will you take first, your vote, or a bag of grain?"

But in a world of "Hope" and "Change" any kind of dilligent study and analysis or even using your common sense is discouraged. See, anger makes you predictable, makes you stupid, makes you like a little cow that can be brought to the stockyard and slaughtered for meat, and by allowing the government to impose penal taxes on a small group of people after the fact, a clever way of getting around the rule of law and the rights of it's citizens, the government has done exactly that. They've served the public hide hot and spiced, with a liberally applied maranade, and a side dish of US constitution.

I'm all for the common man, I know how capable he is and how much he has to offer this world. But that only makes me more angry that 1) our government wants to take away their freedom and thus their abillity, 2) people are allowing themselves to be corrupted and enslaved without even a promise of a better life for themselves. So who are we? Are we the men who built this country, or are we the "Here we are now, entertain us" (Kurt Kobain) crowd?

How a Stimulus Works

Or Honor, Honesty and Confidence:




Keynes (founder of Keynesianism, the economic philosophy of mainstream liberalism) believed that recessions could be evened out by the debt spending of government. He believed that certain "multiplier" effects could be achieved by the way such money was spent. But the basis of the whole argument was confidence.

You see, in a deflationary recession (according to Keynes), demand sags because of a shock to the system or bankruptcies and the resulting loss of business confidence. By allowing government to be the buyer of last resort, you remove such concern and allow them to avoid taking a loss or as large of a loss for a time, preventing their need for new investment (and thus inabillity) later.

They know this will pass, and by way of the multiplier it does, and they will make a profit then.

But what happens when those same businesses see that at this banquet, they are the skeleton on the dinner table?

When they see it is a trap, when they see that they will be paying and subjugated to their "customer," in the here and now, later? What happens when, in the excuse of "a deeper problem," we push a healthcare system that was contrived hastilly, funding for Student Aid that is permaneant and is thus in no way stimulus, bizarre rhetoric about "greed" when business is but a tool, and force the contraction of an industry (healthcare) in the name of "cost" when we are suffering deflation (damage from the reduction of cost, according to Keynes.) What happens when we subject our entire economy to a byzantine carbon cap, instead of a simple carbon tax? What happens when government pulls strange shenanigans with stimulus money and contracts and creates a "scandal"?

And then in "response," they attempt elimination of the right of ex post facto. I don't care how cleverly their little bill is phrased or what kind of strange loopholes they are using to break a legally-binding contract, I have a right not to be prosecuted for something that wasn't illegal at the time I did it. AIG, scoundrels as they are, has that right to. As far as I can tell, we left it in the contract, and if contracts and legal process are not observed, well, why should it end with "scoundrels?"

See, you can debate the ideology all day, but it's the people I'm worried about. And anyways, AIG may be awful, but in their defence, they never agreed to be public servants.