Pride and Paranoia

It isn't about policy, it's about pride. Or as it's known in the Christian world, the sin of pride, and the self-deceptions, the paranoid fantasies that whole peoples will adopt in order to save face in the face of cultural change.

Cultural change is the inevitable result of globalization bringing cultures into such close contact that they interpenetrate: people from different cultures are trying to live on each other's turf. And the cultures that are dying are the old honor/shame cultures of northern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia that date from the Time of Ignorance before the coming of Islam.

To be respected in a traditional honor/shame culture, you must know more than your children. You must force all your family members to retain the details of your cultural dress and lifestyle, because the source of your honor is adherence to the code of honor that prescribes that dress and lifestyle, and any other choices they might make reflect badly on you. Yet you are surrounded by media which your kids are more savvy at using than you are, and it carries appealing images of alternative dress and lifestyles. You almost begin to feel like a left-behind loser with a rag on your head.

But, wait! There's a quick fix! A paranoid fantasy that makes the surrounding culture evil and you good. The other culture consists of devils who are attacking your religion! You are good and wise, they are depraved. But they are winning, and must be stopped! KILL THEM!!!!!

See? You're feeling better (meaning superior in an honor/shame culture) already. Never mind that Islam is universal and transcends culture, never mind that Islam as a religion is almost nowhere under attack, and that with over a billion adherents, shows no sign of going away.

Now once you've adopted the paranoid fantasy, all you need do is twist any facts you can into supporting your fantasy, and disregard those you can't. This is the dynamic behind the film, "Valley of the Wolves," in Turkey, for example. The film purports to be a documentary and depicts the current Iraq conflict as what yesterday's Wall Street Journal calls, "an organ-harvesting operation run by greedy Jews and fundamentalist Christians."

Unfortunately for us, the paranoid fantasists will think what they want to think and do whatever they can to inflict mega-violence on all their designated enemies, regardless of any of our words or actions. But fortunately for us, their cause is already lost, partly because their culture is simply not competitive, and partly because their ideology is rooted in idolatry and blasphemy. Idolatry because they imagine that God is as wedded to their culture as they are, and blasphemy because they impute their own rage (and evil intent) to God.

So have a good look at the picture above. These are the faces of the defeated, but they are not going down without a fight (even a nuclear one, if they can get the wherewithal). The pity is that the fight is unnecessary: nobody is insulting Islam (because in modern culture it is meaningless to try to insult a revealed religion), nobody is even insulting them, because we're all too politically correct to do that. It's just that they feel insulted (dishonored, shamed), because the surrounding culture does not afford them honor in their traditional ways of getting it. Rather than open their minds and hearts to new ways of being Muslim, they trap themselves into thinking that they must subjugate the rest of us, or live with dishonor.

Finally, contrast their behavior with that of the surrounding culture. People like those in the photo rioted over the "Muhammad" cartoons, because they feel genuinely (culturally) threatened. If the British were as touchy, they would have responded to the above provocation with riots and mass deportations. But they can afford to be less touchy, because their cultural identity and sense of self-worth is not threatened. They know that ultimately, it just doesn't matter what these people think.

The Irrational Part of Atheism

A fine article on the subject is right here. Neither the will to believe nor the will to disbelieve is grounded in rationality. Enjoy.

We are going to win the "War on Terror"

First of all, I hate the term "Global War on Terror" or GWOT because you can't win a war if you can't name your enemy. If we are fighting a war on terrorism, then it is a very old war, beginning with the Jewish Sicari (named for the short swords they used for political assassination) of 1st century Roman-occupied Judea (which the Romans disingenuously called Palestina, or Palestine).

No we are responding to a war brought upon us by Islamofacists - facists who hide themselves in Islamic clothing - which many are calling the Global Salafist Hirabah (GSH). Salafism refers to a desire to return to the simpler, purer times of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions, in itself a laudable thing, provided that would-be salafist realizes that the Prophet and his Companions were innovators who looked forward, rather than fundamentalists who looked backward. Hirabah is a term connoting illegal war, brigandage, banditry, and terrorism. It stands in contrast to Jihad, or Holy War, sanctioned by God, a term with the Islamofacists misappropriate.

The Global Salafist Hirabah had a beginning - the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie on charges that he wrote a book, The Satanic Verses, that Khomeini didn't like. TSV satirized both the West and Islam in general, and Khomeini in particular. I nominate the fatwa as the beginning of the GSH, because a head of state of one government seeking to incite the murder of a citizen of another government simply for exercising his right to free expression is de facto a declaration of war against the civilization that recognizes and upholds the right to free expression. Khomeini had declared war against the West.

The GSH will also have an ending, brought about by social change in just one or two generations. This is because the Islamofacists are fighting to preserve and extend their priveleged status as Muslim men. Their sense of self-worth depends on their subjugation of Muslim women. Continuing this subjugation is ultimately a lost cause. Eventually, Muslim women will decide that they do not want to have their bodies mutilated, that they want to show their faces, that they want to drive, to study subjects both sacred and secular, that they want to work, that they want to choose whom they marry, and they want to vote. After that, this particular war will be over, because there will be nothing to fight about.

"But it's not a war!" one of my colleagues protested. It is a war because our enemies say it is a war. Denying that it is a war is just manipulating the definition of war because one wants to manipulate the conduct of the war. Is is also Eurocentric bigotry. Eurocentrists fight wars wholesale, with massed armies. Their way of war descends from the Greco-Roman way of trying to get the war over with as fast as possible so as to return to normalcy, to farming, to peace. In contrast, the horse peoples of the steppe pursued war as a part time occupation. You could raid the Roman Empire for a goods and glory on any given afternoon. You didn't want the war to come to a swift and decisive conclusion, because then what would you do? The Islamofacist way of war is descended from the tradition of the steppe nomads, but fought with modern weapons, and enabled by the internet.

But all this is not a problem if we realize that the war need not be won militarily. We can switch from fighting war wholesale, to fighting retail - where most of the action is not in shooting but in having tea with the right local leaders. We need only strive not to lose. Muslim women will eventually do the rest.

Of course, it would be nice to help them achieve their Islamic Reformation. If Western Feminists could get over their navel-gazing disregard for the condition of any women but themselves, they could help in ways that governments cannot.

In closing I present the photo above as evidence for my thesis: World War IV, the War of the Islamofacists against Western Liberal Democracy (the Cold War was World War III) will be won, not by the West, not by the Islamofacists, but by Islamic women. It is a picture of Iraqi women lined up to vote.

Their victory, like the victory of the Central European and Russian people over Communism, will be a victory for the whole world, and, in the world of Islam, a victory for God.

Useful Deaths

On the radio I heard Harry Reid (Democrat from Nevada and currently the US Senate Majority Leader) asking for a moment of silence to mark the 3500th US soldier to die in Iraq. The implication is that 3500 is too many, and that we should pull our troops out of Iraq now.

I'm not buying it. In the 4 years it took for those 3500 troops to be killed, 170,000 children, women and men were killed in traffic accidents on US roadways. Senator Reid did not call for a moment of silence for them, because he can't make some political use of their deaths.

Harry Reid is implying that 3500 deaths fighting against Islamofacists are bad, while 170,000 deaths in pursuit of bourgeois mobility are acceptable. And he is counting on you not to see it that way.

The conflict in Iraq is not a war in itself - it is a battle in the larger war against Islamofacism. True, it was not a battleground in that war until the US made it one (and that appears to have been a mistake), but Harry Reid wants the US to lose that battle as quickly as possible, so he can win his larger war against the Republican Party.

See also: Retreat, Defeat, Cowardice and Treason

Globalisation: Tribalism v Liberalism

Melanie Phillips has posted "Liberalism v Islamism" in which she decries the apparent suicide of liberalism. She claims that by abandoning its principles for multiculturalism, liberalism is appeasing and succumbing to the Global Salafist Hirabah (aka the Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders - and if you are not an Islamist, then you're at least a Crusader). She also refers to London as "Londonistan," because of the increasing frequency of honor killings and other cultural baggage brought by immigrants from certain predominately Islamic countries.

She's a bit over the top, but well worth a read, nevertheless. We all need to recognize that the Hirabah is simply another facet of Globalization. Globalization was once thought to be a form of economic and cultural imperialism on the part of the West. Now we see that Globalization is a leveling of the world's playing field, so that not only money, but values - cultural values - can compete for territory, like players in a multi-way game of Go. In this case the counters on the board are not little round stones, but immigrants and less recent immigrants, or "natives."

Back in the old days, when it took months to travel from one country to another, new immigrants found themselves isolated in their new homelands. Messages to and from the old country took those same months to travel. It was almost impossible to keep reinforcing the values of the tribe you had left back home. (I use the word tribe, because the tribe is the fundamental unit of human societies, and has been so for as long as humans have lived on earth. If it seems less true in America, that is because everybody in America is from somewhere else, and has lost their tribal affiliation in the immigration process - except, of course, for the First Americans, who have had their tribal cultures overrun by the immigrants.)

Nowadays, you can migrate across the globe by stepping on an airplane. In a few hours, you are in your new country with your old affiliations and values. If you want to reinforce them, you need only pick up a telephone. Or tune into internet or satellite radio. Thus has Globalization made smooth the path for values from outside the prime Globalizers' (the "developed nations") core.

So, for those of you who want to be nice people, and who think it wrong to impose our Western Liberal values of limited government power, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, equality of women, etc., on other cultures, think again. If we do not live by, trumpet, and enforce those values in our homelands, and sell them abroad, then those other values that we think are "good enough for those people" will be lived by, trumpeted, and sold everywhere, even where you live.

No, pushing Western Liberal values isn't cultural imperialism anymore. In the Global Bazaar of ideas, it is just one voice among many, competing to be heard. Time to stand up and shout, before we are terrorized into silence.

Farewell to Jerry Falwell

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority has died of an apparent heart attack in his office at Liberty University, which he also founded. Guided by his Love for God and his concern for the well-being of his country, the United States of America, he gradually outgrew his early racism and anti-Semitism to focus on anti-feminism, anti-homosexuality, and anti-scientism. While some like Christopher Hitchens have impugned his sincerity, I have always assumed that he truly believed what he preached, even as it changed. That he did not preach violence to achieve his agenda, I find praiseworthy, given the world's recent struggles with clerics who do.

Perhaps one might wish that he had been guided by God's Love for him and for us all, and that he had outgrown his other anti- stances. Yes, he helped form the Christian Right into a more or less cohesive voting block. But the people who make up the Christian Right would still be with us even if he had not done so. Without him, they might have splintered into disenfranchised and bitter groups, some of which might have turned to violence in their increasing frustration. It's better to have them inside our polity than outside of it, and Jerry did his part.

So, thanks, Jerry. You did the best you knew how. I hope that you don't mind sharing Heaven with homosexuals, feminists, liberals and scientists, and I hope that at your eschatological banquet they don't serve you too much crow.

A Christian Kama Sutra

Stimulated by The Deadliest Things, one of our readers has contributed her own parody of a fictitious book to be released by a noted Christian publishing house.

Just click here and enjoy!

Oh. The image at left is from Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Folio 25v - The Garden of Eden in the Musée Condé, Chantilly. It appears here courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Deadliest Things

(Tune: My Favorite Things - from The Sound of Music, Rogers & Hammerstein)

Anthrax in orange juice and toxins in water
Chemical agents as means of mass slaughter
Plumes of chlorine wafting over DC
These are a few of the deadliest things.

Toxic nerve agents unleashed on civilians
Mutating strains of bird flu killing millions
Cattle with blisters transmit FMD*
This is what we have been analyzing

Suicide bombers blow buses to splinters
Slolen devices cause nuclear winter
Railcars torn open by an IED**
These effects we have been calculating

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember what we're modeling
And then I don't feel so bad.

*Foot and Mouth Disease
**Improvised Explosive Device

Jim G-, my colleague who wrote this parody of sorts, wishes to remain anonymous. It's a bit hair-raising, but part of the tasking of our lab is to help the nation and its allies prepare to deal with the consequences of major natural or human-made disasters. We think them through, we model them with as much precision as we know how, and we report our results to our sponsors. We also work on attribution - figuring out where the stuff came from, and whodunit - so others of our sponsors can deal with the guilty parties and those who sponsored them. That's part of the Homeland Security side of the business, anyway.

It's scary stuff. It's only natural that it gives some folks in the government the willies, and induces them to occasional over-zealousness. To counter that, we also model which security measures make the greatest difference for the least amount of effort, money, and social change. The hard part about that is that politicians are used to doing what they want to do. They don't like rational calculation indicating priorities. The priorities are theirs for political posturing. A bunch of scientists trying to calculate priorities is received as stepping on their turf. And when it comes to turf, the politicians are the pros and the scientists are the amateurs. The pros always win. Our priorities are set by our politics, not by our systems analysis.

So we are still knee-jerking our way to greater homeland security, and the press tries to be "neutral," or as Mark Steyn puts in the Chicago Sun-Times:

According to genius New York Times headline writers, "Religion Guided Three Held In Fort Dix Plot." You don't say. Any religion in particular?

In other words, Homeland Security is only part of the solution to the present danger. Another part is making the bad guys feel insecure in their homelands. This is always problematic, and even more so when their homeland is our homeland. There is an essential tension between security and freedom, which can never be finally resolved. We must constantly strive for balance.

Yet another part of the solution is Religion itself. We must recognize that some of the greatest gifts God has planted in us - our capacities for Hope and Faith - can be perverted by the Evil One. As Pascal said, "Men never do evil so completely and so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." And Pascal himself was a devout Catholic.

Well. Got that off my desk. Happy Mother's Day everyone!

Forgiving Google

It's been more than a year since VCBC decided to boycott Google Ads for hypocritically stiffing the US Government hunting for internet child pornographers in order to give the false impression to Westerners that Google was a defender of human rights. At the same time, Google was knuckling under to the Chinese government by deleting all references that might help pro-democracy dissidents. Google could have done worse. Yahoo is being sued on behalf of Chinese citizens for providing information to the Chinese government that led to their illegal (under international law) imprisonment.

But you get the picture. Google's major competitors haven't distinguished themselves either. Instead of fulfilling Tom Friedman's prophecy that the internet would lead to greater freedom on earth, they are enabling it to be used as a tool of oppression as well.

So has our boycott been effective? Our search engine ratings, traffic, and revenues have declined. But the effect on Google has been absolutely nil. We made our point, and took our hit. Now we have decided to forgive Google, renew our advertising, and take our cut.

Our boycott was futile. On the other hand, the lawsuits over contributing to false imprisonment are probably not. They put the calculus of whether to cooperate with despots directly into the profit and loss columns. Web portals may still decide that it is more lucrative to cooperate with tyranny, but it will now cost them something to do it.

Dear Dr. Laura

by J. Kent Ashcraft

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord (Lev. 1:9). The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness (Lev. 15:19-24). The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination (Lev. 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev.24:10-16) Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev.20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted disciple and adoring fan,

J. Kent Ashcraft

Editor's Note: This little gem has been circulating the net. It illustrates the absurdity of a selective and wooden literalism, even if it is not illustrative of Dr. Laura's thinking, other than her dogmatic stand against homosexuals. The copyright, if any, belongs to its author.

Retreat, Defeat, Cowardice and Treason

That's what friend Gator Bob (retired Navy) calls the US Democratic Party position on Iraq, as well as the not-so-well-named Global War on Terror (GWOT) in general. Perhaps he's being uncharitable. Perhaps not.

He points to the death rate among American soldiers and civilians in Iraq. Measured in deaths per hundred thousand, it is comparable to the murder rate in say, Washington, D.C. Perhaps the United States should pull out of Washington, he suggests.

But Right or Left, the emphasis on the death rate in Iraq is misplaced. Compared to previous wars (but not to previous occupations) it is low. What is high is the rate of serious and permanent injuries, the number of our young men and women coming home with pieces of their bodies or brains missing in action. But a national debate centered on that subject would be expensive. We might have to take care of them, so best not to mention them unless we can use them to sack a general.

The dead are already taken care of. They are comparatively cheap, like the talk on the Left and Right that obsesses about them, not for moral reasons, but for political ones. Unlike the wounded, the dead can be trusted not to contradict to whatever claims politicians and activists might make in their names.

Leaving the dead to their graves, and the wounded to their fates, let us move on to the future. Both the Left and the Right seem to be staring at their toes, and thinking that whatever way their toes are pointing is forward. The Right says "Stay the Course," without articulating what that course is and where it will lead. The Left says, "We aren't getting anywhere, so let's get out fast," without hazarding a guess as to what will happen next, either to the Iraqis, the Middle East, Islam, or even us.

That is to say, there is no strategic thinking in evidence from either side. I'm not asking for much, here. I'm thinking of a game of pool, in which a player who's any good tries to hit the cue ball not just to knock another ball into a pocket, but to then position the cue ball so as to be able to make the next shot. What I want to know from both the Democrats and the Republicans is: (1) What position will we (all of us, the entire world) be in if we take your shot, (2) what is your next shot, and (3) how will your first shot line us up to make the next one?

So far, all I've seen and heard is spokespersons for either side looking at their toes and whining. I used to do that, too, when I was three years old.

The House of Misrepresentatives

American politics has become ridiculously polarized, to the point where the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is willing to travel to Syria in order to make her own foreign policy, but not to walk across the aisle of the House floor to talk with the Republicans. Our politics are so polarized that Democrats and Republicans fear and distrust each other more than they do, say al-Qaeda. (Because al-Qaeda may kill a few of them, but it can't really threaten their hold on domestic power.)

So how did this idiotic state of affairs come to be? I give you one word for it: Gerrymandering. Our state legislatures have drawn and re-drawn Congressional voting districts to advantage incumbents to the point that in any given year only a handful of Congressional elections are competitive.

The effect of this is that in order to win, you can't compromise. The voters in your district are dominated either by hard-over Moonbats (left) or Wingnuts (right). By showing any willingness to entertain the ideas of the other party, you merely show weakness to your own voting constituents. And then you lose. Compound this with a media that panders to the public's love of a good political fight, and you get politics that is progressively polarizing itself for no better reason that a positive feedback loop in the re-districting process.

What we need is for each state to have its districts re-drawn by a non-partisan committee of geographers, demographers, mathematicians, and a retired judge or two. People with a sense of justice and fair play with no major stake in the outcome. People who understand population distributions, and convex sets.

That way we could get Congresspersons who would have to demonstrate their willingness and ability to bargain and compromise. That way we could get a government that actually represented the Will of the People, rather than our current tragicomical lurching from left to right and back again. And maybe we could even get a more consistent and thoughtful foreign policy, that might do some good in the world rather than just kicking it one way or the other every four to eight years.

So Americans, unless you are a Moonbat or a Wingnut, your Congressperson does not represent you. Your voice has been Gerrymandered into silence. You don't count. And you won't count unless and until you get an anti-Gerrymandering measure on your state ballot, and vote for it.

How Free is the USA?

The latest "big thing" is how President George W. Bush has sacked some US Attorneys. Maybe he sacked them in order to let the others know that they had better be zealous in investigating and prosecuting possible malfeasance on the part of Democrats. That kind of exercise of arbitrary power makes me suspicious. It reminds me of the time President Bill Clinton sacked all the US Attorneys and replaced them with his own people. Maybe he did it to insure that certain details about that Whitewater thing would never come out.

Both men could exercise arbitrary power within certain bounds. And if they did not exercise it, then they would lose power, because their opponents would chisel away at their power in other areas. In other words, they did what they could because they had to. It's the way our system works.

They were trying to protect themselves from accusations. Had they actually broken any laws, which would validate the claims of those who sought to accuse them? Of course. So have you, if you're an American. We have so many laws, which are so complicated, that you can't know them all. Chances are, you've fallen afoul of one or more of them somehow, somewhere in your life. All it takes for you to find out is to enrage someone who has the resources and desire to have you investigated. We have so many laws that we are no longer a nation of laws, but of people. The only reason you have freedom of speech or action or property rights is that nobody is currently willing to make the effort to take them away from you.

It's the kind of tyranny that creeps over all democracies, one well-intentioned law, regulation, rule, or judicial opinion at a time:

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II, Chapter 4, Section 6, "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear"

The counter-argument is that as our society gets more complex, we need more complicated rules to govern it. On the other hand, it is a well-known result from the science of complex systems that "Simple rules lead to complex behavior - complex rules lead to simple behavior." Too many complex rules freeze the system up. None of its parts can do much of anything.

What to do? When a computer code gets too long and unreadable, the computer scientists "re-factor" it. They look at how it is supposed to work, and, having learned from their past mistakes and new developments, re-design it and re-code it from the ground up.

We need our Congress and our regulatory agencies to re-factor government. Not just to keep making up new stuff to pile on top of the old because nobody remembers what it does anymore. And not to re-factor with laws and regulations that are even more complicated than the originals because they are written by unelected staffers who promote for their own agendas without ever coordinating with each other or even - gasp - reading each other's sections of the documents they produce.

But until that happens (and Hell freezes over, I suppose) I have a word of advice. Once anyone gets elected or appointed to any office of public power, that person must be suspect. It is in the nature of power itself in a society governed by too many small complicated rules. One in power must abuse the system to protect herself or himself from those who are abusing the system to get at them. As the old saying goes, "Politicians are like diapers. They both should be changed frequently, and for the same reason."

Teach the Boobs Economics

Now the poor in Mexico are facing hunger because the price of corn is rising on speculation, because the US is planning to up the percentage of ethanol (made from corn) in auto fuel. But that would require re-directing a substantial fraction of US corn production from food and animal feed to fuel. This in turn would raise corn prices. Moreover the demand for more corn acreage would displace other grains, like rice, and drive up the price of rice as well. And the poor of Mexico can't switch to wheat flour because they need the nutrients in corn flour to complement the rest of their diet. So, we are driving up the price of corn and rice worldwide, and pushing more poor people into malnutrition. Why?

The idea was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. But (duh!) to make ethanol you have to heat the corn mash using - you guessed it - fossil fuels. The net result is that the ethanol will have a bigger "carbon footprint" in the atmosphere than the gasoline it is supposed to replace.

In other words, we are starving people and polluting the air so that our legislators and regulators can make a show of caring for our environment. I'm tired of people who know nothing but politics trying to run our world when they don't understand how it works.

So here's a resolution for you: Let's require all newly elected federal and state officials to take a three week crash course in Economics and Energy before they assume office. Heck, let's make them retake the course every time they are re-elected.

The effort on their part to learn the course material would be an act of loving their neighbors, namely us - the people they presume to govern.

Flying Low

Speaking of technology, have a look at this video of low flying jets.



If you can't see anything, click Flying under the radar.

Name Your Fear

Since the previous post mentioned fear, here is a post from my MySpace page.

The other evening, we got together with friends for a "Bring Your Own Barbecue." We talked about law school, career changes, psychotherapy, religion... And then we talked about the future. We must be in a time of great transition, because the dominant mood was not hope. It was fear.

I talked about how genetic engineering, implants, and other high tech "enhancements" could make the people of the future so different from us that they might not consider "non-enhanced" or "natural" people like us to be fully human. And how, by tinkering with human nature itself, we would undermine the basis of Natural Law.

Our host spoke of Global Warming, and how climate change could wipe out agriculture in some parts of the world, and sink coastal cities.

My wife talked about how the melting of the North Polar Icecap could decrease the salinity gradient in the North Atlantic that drives the Gulf Stream. If the Gulf Stream were to stop, that would almost shut down the transfer of heat from the equatorial to the polar regions. The result could be a rapid re-freezing of the northern latitudes resulting in a new Ice Age. In other words, our climate is metastable, with tipping points beyond which large and sudden changes may occur.

I suppose we could have mentioned asteroid impacts, and global thermonuclear war while we are at it. Or maybe the day some terrorist organization gets hold of a nuclear weapon and detonates where you would least like it.

So I'm just curious. Was it just us, or are other people having anxious thoughts about the future. What sort of thoughts?

God's Balls

The other day LutheranChick wondered why there is so much resistance to inclusive language references to God in the Church. "Inclusive language" means either avoiding the masculine pronoun or using both masculine and femine pronouns for God. She offered her hypothesis that the resistance is grounded in fear, specifically the anxiety that God is out to get us if we don't act the way God wants.

That may indeed be the case for many. For me, it's different. I'm comfortable with someone beginning The Lord's Prayer with, "Father-Mother God," instead of "Our Father." I might even do it myself, if I were praying with people the majority of whom would find the traditional reference off-putting. But generally, I stick with "Our Father." I do it out of respect for those who have gone before me, who made extraordinary sacrifices that Christianity might be a living faith to my generation, who learned to say it that way. I do it out of respect, even awe, for the tradition goes all the way back to a wandering Jewish woodworker, healer, and lay preacher named Yesu (Jesus) who called God, "Abba," which is Aramaic for something like, "Daddy."

Now we could use the original Aramaic and say "Abba," instead of "Our Father." "Abba" doesn't mean anything in English, and therefore is not automatically associated with gender by English speakers. But for English speakers that would come at the cost of losing the emotional and spiritual impact of addressing God in terms of an intimate parental relationship. In the same vein, we could start the Lord's Prayer with the word, "God," but again we would miss the impact of what something like "Our Father," says about God.

I'm not afraid, just respectful. I can let the tradition bend. And yet, I get my back up when someone insists that I must use inclusive language. I know that the idea of God being masculine is God's sop to the patriarchal tribal society of Hebrews in which God first planted ethical monotheism. And I know that many of us no longer need that sop. But must we wrench things the other way, cutting off God's balls, as it were, in order to make God into an icon of gender-equality? Must God be treated like some kind of intellectual property, to be stretched in a tug-of-war between Fundamentalists and Feminists?

Yes, I know. God transcends gender. Balls are not God's problem. But the historical Jesus, recognized by his followers after his glorious Resurrection as the unique Incarnation of God, had them. Let's be honest about that while we are working to include each other, however we are gendered (male, female, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered only begin to describe the possibilities).

Finally, our concern over inclusive language must seem extremely parochial to non-English speakers. What about speakers of German, French, and Italian whose nouns have gender and for whom the word "God" itself is masculine? I think we have it relatively easy.

None so Blind as Richard Dawkins

While driving this weekend, I tuned into NPR and caught a bit of a program about science and religion. It was biologist Richard Dawkins declaring that the question, "What is the meaning of life?" is no more worthy of an answer than, "Why are unicorns orange?"

I was struck by the realization that debating Richard Dawkins on religion would be like debating a congenitally blind skeptic on the reality of color. Dawkins appears unable to have anything resembling a religious experience, and therefore to doubt that anyone else does. Further, he seems to believe that there is in principle a completely naturalistic (or materialistic) explanation of any such experience.

Well, let's get really scientific about it. As a physicist, I can tell you that there is no such thing as color. There are different wavelengths of light, and specific retinal and neural responses to them. But the experience of color is entirely subjective. It's all in your mind.

Dawkins might object to my analogy because there is a neurophysiological explanation for color perception (but not, I hasten to add for its subjective experience). Yet there are also neurophysiological correlates of religious experience - specifically of Western-style experience of mystical union with God, and of Eastern-style experience of oneness with Everything, as documented in Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. The authors take pains to explain that all experience is "all in your mind," and that the absence of an identified sensory organ does not make that experience any less real. Perhaps the brain itself is the sensory organ of religious experience.

Now Dawkins would argue that if there are neurophysiological correlates of religious experience, then religious experience is entirely neurophysiological - no supernatural ingredients required. But just as I cannot prove that there is a supernatural ingredient, neither can he prove that there is not. The only scientifically tenable position is agnosticism - because if your are an agnostic then you can prove that you do not know whether God exists by the methods of unaided reason.

Dawkins' argument that the supernatural cannot exist is equivalent to the argument that everything that exists can be apprehended by the methods of science. But that is something which science itself has known to be false ever since Goedel's Theorem of 1925, in which Goedel proved that within the confines of any finite, non-trivial, non-contradictory set of axioms, it is possible to construct a statement whose validity can be neither proven nor disproven. Therefore, Dawkins' insistence that any question which cannot be answered by science be declared inadmissible is his attempt to turn his erroneous assumption about the universality of science into a kind of Orwellian NewSpeak in order to make all sensibilities become as stunted as his own.

But I have to admire the Religious conviction with which he pursues his mission to make all nations disciples of his atheism.

What is Church, anyway?

I feel moved to say a few words about bricks-and-mortar churches vs cyberchurches. But first, a few words from our Sponsor:

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. - Matt 16:18 KJV

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church:- Eph 5:23,29 KJV

When I was a child, I thought church was a place you went on Sunday, because that's where people were supposed to go. It was the right thing to do, part of the proper way to be a person. I was shocked out of this way of thinking by my church's deafening silence after my father died. But its residue led me after 20 years to join another church, until a conflict among its members drew me in. After it was over, I became a wanderer, visiting many churches, joining none, and not going every Sunday. While I was still a regular churchgoer ("churched," they call it) I became a Stephen Minister. As an extension of my ministry I even started a cyberchurch, the Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua, of which this blog is a part. So again, what is Church? Am I still a part of it, and is cyberchurch really church?

Objectively, Church is the social network of all the believers, the clergy, and God (who, according to Church doctrine makes Himself available to the Church as a person - any and all of three persons to be exact). In the medieval Catholic way of thinking, the Church as social network formed an acyclic graph. Each person is represented as a node (like a Tinker Toy connector for you old folks), and each link represents an association or connection from one person to another (like a Tinker Toy stick). The graph starts with God, with links going from God to the Pope, from the Pope to the Cardinals, from the Cardinals to their Bishops, from the Bishops to their Priests, and finally from the Priests to the congregations of their People. The Protestant innovation was to make the network cyclic by positing a direct connection between every node (person) and the network hub (God). From a Social Network/Graph Theoretic perspective, the old Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants in Europe were over a change in topology.

Being a Protestant, I believe not so much that I keep up my connection to God through prayer, but that God keeps up God's connection to me, without my deserving the favor. This implies that I am still connected to the Church social network through its hub, through God. But there is more to Church than that.

Church has always meant communal worship. Not online, not in front of your TV, but in the physical presence of one another, the entire community of the faithful gathered together. A huge part of the love that Jesus commanded us to have for one another is attachment, a term which refers to the way mammals in close proximity influence each others' metabolic and neural (especially limbic system) rhythms. This occurs through postural cues (body language), gesture (including touch), and lots of other ways, including even the sound of each other breathing. This communal limbic resonance and limbic regulation is probably responsible for the statistic that regular churchgoers are healthier and live longer than the unchurched.

Perhaps the staid nature of worship in the mainline liberal Protestant denominations explains their decline in membership. We mammals crave limbic togetherness, which is mediated by our rhythms. Would it really diminish our neocortical liberalism if we had a little shoutin' and foot stompin' in the pews? But how much more would it revive the church if we took on the task of actually caring for one another?

Church is not only in your rational neocortex, but also in your emotional, soulful limbic body-mind - not only in your head, but in your heart. Cyberchurch cannot replace physical congregation. The Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua is merely an add-on, a sop to those of us who live too much in our heads, and a source of provocative ideas for those of us who don't.

Of course, there is infinitely more to Church than I have mentioned here. I have not even touched on the spiritual dimension, what it means to be a servant of God in community with other servants, the vulnerability of Church to the shadow-side of human organizations, etc. I've written about some of that elsewhere. For the rest, you might try asking your pastor.


References:
[1] For more on social networks see Albert-Laslo Barabasi, Linked.
[2] For more on attachment, limbic resonance, and limbic regulation see Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon, A General Theory of Love.

Search Sucks, Too

While we're at it, search sucks, too. Sure, once you've got the hang of using a computer, it's easy to type search terms into, say, Google. But finding what you're really looking for? That's hit and miss. Partly it's because there is no agreement on standards for making content findable.

But a huge part of it is because search engines don't really understand the language of the documents they are searching. This is about to change. Cognition Technologies has designed and built a search architecture that actually understands language, and that has been initialized for several subject areas in English. Stubs exist to initialize it for a wide variety of languages and subject areas.

But if someday we could put all the pieces together - standards for findability, natural language query and understanding, and learning the intention of the searcher (the shared computer-user state space of yesterday's article) we might actually have a search capability that finds what we're looking for.

Of course, that may doom VCBC. Most people find us by accident. In other words, we have a growing audience because search engines turn up unintended stuff. Oh, well. Nothing we do lasts forever.

Why Personal Computers Still Suck

We have had personal computers for over a quarter century, and they still suck. Yeah, I know, they can play music and video now, and that's cool, but think about all the little steps you have to go through to get a computer to do what you want. Point here, click once there, double click that, drag down this menu which, by the way, is completely different from what it was before you did that other click...

What you are doing is navigating the large, but finite internal space of states that the computer can be in so that you can finally get to that last command that triggers the desired response. You do it using that part of your brain that lets you navigate through familiar and unfamiliar real spaces, like shopping malls, and lets you find your car in the parking lot when you're done shopping. If you have a stroke in your right vertebral artery, which keeps this region alive, you may be able to walk and talk, but you won't be able to use your computer. At least not until after a long period of retraining.

Which makes me wonder: why after all these years are we still navigating the computer's state space? Don't computers now have the processing power to start navigating our state space? After all, there are only a finite number of commands you can give a computer. Therefore, there are only a finite number of commands you can want to give a computer - at least from the computer programmer's point of view.

Why do we have to remember where to find the obscure command that formats the margins the way we what, or go through three click-and-drags to get a Greek letter? Computers now have keyboards, mice, microphones, and cameras. It's time for operating systems programmers to make computers that understand typing, points, clicks, scrolls, and some words and gestures - and that use those inputs to figure out what we want them to do.

It's time for the computational burden of learning and remembering the shared computer-user state space to shift from the user to the computer.

It ain't necessarily jihad!

What is being passed off today as jihad is not jihad. Let me tell you something about jihad.

In about A.D. 627 the first Muslim community al-Madinah faced destruction in what has come to be known as the Battle of the Trench. A champion of the pagan forces trying to wipe out Islam had managed to cross the trench and challenged the Muslims to send their bravest warrior to duel with him. The Prophet's son-in-law Ali took up the challenge, and bested his opponent. Just as Ali was about to strike the final blow, his opponent spat in his face. Ali sheathed his sword and walked away. Only when the man came at him again did Ali finally kill him. When he was asked why he had not finished his opponent at his first opportunity, Ali answered that when the man spat on him, he became angry. Ali did not want to kill the man because of his anger — that would have been contrary to God's will regarding jihad. He was willing to kill only to defend Islam and Muslims. He had recovered his purity of purpose when the man attacked him the second time.

What a contrast to the venom spewed out by the Global Fundamentalist Hirabah! They so deny the anger and hatred in their souls, and so conflate it with God's Will, that they twist centuries of Islamic tradition regarding jihad into justifying hirabah - the killing of innocents and non-combatants to achieve their own satisfaction.

And they do this as a way of achieving salifiyyah, a return to the ways of the Prophet and the Rightly Guided Ones. But what they pass off as salifiyyah is not salifiyyah. They want to yank the world back to the 6th century. But they forget that the Prophet and his Companions did not want to move the world backwards. They wanted to move it forwards. They were not conservatives - they were innovators, who respected certain traditions, but who made all things new. A true salifiyyah does not seek to run time backward, but to move it forward constructively. It asks not how to make the world like the world of the Prophet's time, but what the Prophet and his Companions would do if they were transplanted to our own time. How would they adapt? How would they innovate? What traditions would they let go and what traditions would they re-invigorate in order to make the world new again?

Again, what a contrast to the salifiyyah of the Global Fundamentalist Hirabah! They deny that Right Guidance act through a whole people in the form of Representative Democracy. To them Right Guidance is still the intellectual property of a few (themselves, of course) despite the historical fact that the few have guided Islam away from its position of world prominence since the early fifteenth century.

At least, that's how it looks to this Judeo-Christian outsider. Comments, anyone?

Walking away from North Korea

China seems to delight in letting North Korea make trouble for the US. I have news for China. Your lenience toward North Korea will have consequences that the US cannot prevent and that you will not like.

Consider that Japan is watching the US. She is judging the steadfastness of the US posture in Afghanistan and Iraq. She remembers the way the US ran from Vietnam. She believes that even Israel does not trust the US nuclear umbrella for protection. If Japan sees that she must live with North Korean nuclear-tipped missiles, she will almost certainly decide that the prudent thing would be to have some of her own.

And so, I think that the US should begin walking away from North (and South) Korea. Either China will step up to the plate and bring this bit of proliferation madness to an end, or China will have to live with a nuclear armed Japan. And possibly (in time) even a nuclear armed South Korea.

Let's see. Nuclear India. Nuclear Pakistan. Nuclear North Korea. Nuclear Japan. That will be quite a nuclear neighborhood for nuclear China to handle. We should wish them luck.

Homecoming

She has a perceptual deficit, a hole in her world from an old stroke. She ignores anything lower than her mid-thighs. She has vertigo whenever she gets up from lying down. Her standing and walking balance and coordination are less than ideal. She has osteoporosis. But the staff at the skilled nursing home where she was doing rehab for her hip fracture couldn't assemble these pieces into a coherent picture any more than she could. They told her she could go home, and so that is where I took her, back all those 3000 miles. Once they told her she could go, there was no persuading her to do anything else. She fell again within days, but didn't break any bones this time. I stayed with her there for a week, all I felt I could spare. I arranged for what in-home care I could. And now I've returned to my own home where I wait on pins and needles for her new medical alarm system to inform me of the next fracture.

Watching her decline, it seems to me that getting older means that whatever you do every day becomes the most you can possibly do any day. Which means that if you're middle aged, you are setting your limits right now. If you usually don't walk more than a block each day, then old age will mean that you can't walk more than a block in a day.

So, I exercise. To give myself breaks while I was staying with her, I walked an hour each day that I could. I walked on streets that are cuts in an otherwise uninterrupted forest. When I was young, I could hear my own footsteps on those streets, mingled with the songs of the forest inhabitants: birds, insects, frogs.

I can still hear my footsteps there, but mingled with new sounds. The whoosh and thrum of the new interstate highway that now links her little town so conveniently with the outside world. It sounds like the sighs and groans of a people in a constant and terrible hurry.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But they have promises to keep
And miles to drive before they sleep.

Time itself seems in a terrible hurry when I watch her slow struggle with a bottle of medicine, a pair of shoelaces, or a simple meal heated in a microwave oven. Time is going faster than she can keep up. She is falling behind. Soon, too soon, fracture or no fracture, it will race on without her, and the rest of us with it.

The Passing of the Ages

A family medical emergency brought me 3000 miles back to my old hometown. Back to my boyhood house, that I sometimes visit in my dreams.

In my dreams, the apple tree that I used to climb is still standing. So are the twin maples just outside the window of what we still call "Grandma's Room." The grass grows thick. In my dreams, my old dogs are still alive. And the air is fresh and sweet.

In reality, the house reflects the energy of its owner. The bathrooms need to be remodeled up from the 1950's and the kitchen needs to be redone. The lawn is threadbare, and the daffodils and the lilies-of-the-valley haven't been replanted in years. The roses are wild vines. The back porch is listing badly, as if about to capsize. And I am allergic to something in this region that has now become too humid for me.

I walk the streets of my boyhood, ticking off the houses of the other kids I used to know. Red-haired, freckled Joan and her brother Joe, who had built some kind of radio in his basement. Jim, who at our first swimming lesson tore the water as if he were fighting bees. Bill, who toasted me so badly at our only tennis match that it was embarrassing, and whose sister had a smile that would make my mind go blank.

I wonder if any of their parents still live in these houses. Mostly not. The houses are too well kept up. The door with the knob in the middle has been replaced. The bushes are trimmed neatly, and the luxurious lawns are well mowed. New owners, with new energy to lavish on their new nests. The old folks are gone.

Except Larry, Butch's dad, sitting on his front porch. With a little prompting, he remembers me. He remembers my father, who died back in the '60s. What he doesn't remember is the beginning of our conversation. A few more turns of talk, and I leave as the same anonymous stranger I was when we first said, "Hello."

Even though it's all still there, it's all gone somehow, this land of my childhood and youth. What once was has died to make way for what is. The community we formed as kids and teens has been erased, like Larry's memory.

And then there is old age's inexorable ruin of one's parent. Butch must endure and care for what is left of his father, and I my mother, whom I have come to rescue. Again. My sister and I search the possibilities for in-home care, without sufficient result. We calculate the costs. The cold hard logic yields only one solution. Take her out of her home and even her state for intensive rehab. Do the experiment, and see if she can, with good enough healthcare, work her way back.

I hate to do this. Will she be able to adjust to her new situation? Will she be able to re-adjust if she becomes otherwise able to make it back home? Or will the daily poisons she must take to stay alive take away the last of her strength to adapt to change?

I also hate to do this to her circle of friends. Because her community of elders is being erased more finally than my community of kids. Even if she makes it back, who will have passed, and how many, during her absence?

This is my prayer: Please, Lord, let me do right by her. Please, sweet Jesus, help me see her safely to the shore.

Forget Global Warming

Apparently Global Warming is not yet compelling enough to get the world to start using petroleum products for chemistry instead of fuel. How about guilt?

With the exception of Israel, all the governments of the Middle East, including Iran, are either despotisms or near-despotisms. They are propped up against the will of the majority of their peoples by one thing -- oil money. If we could dry up the supply of oil money, these governments would have to come to terms with their people, or fall. I'm betting on the despots' survival skills that they would manage a more or less orderly transition to something that the people would be more willing to support.

This would do two things. First it would remove domestic political oppression as a major source of grievance from the Muslim world. Second, it would replace the culture of dependency on foreign currency handouts (that's what oil money is, after all) with a culture of self-reliance as Muslim societies develop real economies. This would remove the sense of powerlessness (called humiliation in Islamofacist rhetoric) as a motivation for terrorism. Once these obstacles were removed, Islamic societies would either develop in a healthy manner, or would become impoverished. One way they would be less motivated, and the other way they would be less able to make perpetual war with their neighbors in this world.

In more succinct terms, the burning of petroleum products contributes directly to the oppression of Muslims (by both secular and Islamofacist despots). If President Bush wants to make a positive contribution to the future of all humankind would do better to take back his challenge to return Americans to the moon, and instead resolve to convert Americans to alternative fuels.

I favor hydrogen. We can make it at the pump from water and electricity (from solar, wind, or nuclear power). And it burns to create water-vapor. No more automotive pollution. No more smog. Yes, we have President Bush's Hydrogen Fuel Initiative funding some research. But let's do more than that. Let's make it our primary national priority until we achieve it.

Let's clean up our act, everyone. Burn hydrogen not oil! Free Islam!

Slaughtered in Seattle

Naveed Haq is mentally ill. The experience of mental illness is unique to each individual so afflicted, but the expression of mental illness is often shaped by the culture(s) with which the afflicted individual identifies. So it is that Naveed forced his way past a employee opening a security door and entered the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, carrying a 9-mm semiautomatic pistol.

"I am a Muslim-American, and I am angry at Israel," he announced before he shot 6 women, one of whom was pregnant, and one of whom subsequently died.

Hog on Ice has some choice things to say about the incident. But I think he misses the implications of Naveed being a nut-case who was acting alone without any connection to Hezbollah. This, even though he did his shooting a day after the FBI warned that Hezbollah (actually Hezb' Allah, or Party of God) leaders in Lebanon and al-Qaeda had called for the war in the Middle East to be taken to America.

Part of Naveed's cultural conditioning is his use of the politically correct English he learned growing up in western Washington state. He even used what John Tompkins calls "owned" or "Green Language," by describing his own feelings rather than disparaging the group about whom he has those feelings. It lets one know that political correctness is no bulwark against rage - one's own or another's.

The other part of his cultural conditioning is his apparent participation in the tribal system of managing violence. Under the tribal systems practiced in say, parts of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Chechnya (among others), violence is not rampant, but contained. It is best explained by example.

Tariq murders Hasan. It is now up to Hasan's extended family to avenge his death, preferably by killing Tariq. But not necessarily. If Tariq goes into hiding, then any member of Hasan's family may kill any member of Tariq's family, and claim that vengeance is satisfied. This accomplishes two things. (1) It enables a kind of justice to be done in the absence of formal material and social structures for law enforcement. No elaborate police force, judicial system, or prison system is necessary, which is a big plus for societies that can't afford them because they are either on the edge of subsistence or nomadic. (2) It engages the basic structure of tribal society - the entire extended family - in discouraging the initiation of violence as well as over-reaction when violence is to be redressed. It works well enough for these societies, considering that they have been in existence for thousands of years, while Western Civilization is a relative new-comer.

Naveed's was a mentally-distorted act of tribal indirection. He wanted to redress what he sees as an over-reaction by Israel to Hezbollah's rocket attacks and the kidnapping of its soldiers. Since he couldn't get to Israel to kill some Jews, he did what he could. He shot a group of unarmed women whom he could presume to be either Jews or sympathetic toward Jews.

And so the shrinking of the world brought about by Globalization has not been entirely a "leveling up" as hoped by Thomas Friedman, and by those modernized societies who founded the United Nations. There has also been a "leveling down" of human behavior as tribal societies go global with their notions of how to run the world.

In part this is due to the West losing confidence in itself after the collapse of colonialism, and the collapse of Christianity in Europe and America as an undisputed source of meaning - as a way of knowing one's place in the universe. We no longer seem to know the way forward. Westerners want it to emerge as some kind of consensus between themselves and all the other peoples of the world. This creates a vacuum of leadership that sucks tribalism onto the Global scene.

The West is paying an increasing price for its lack of vision, unity and resolve. The tribalists so far have paid little that they cannot accept. So far.

But there is a price, and it will be exacted once some tipping-point in the West is reached. I remember a visit to the town where I grew up in Appalachia. It was dusk as I approached the front porch of an old friend. He waved his 9-mm semiautomatic pistol at me. It was a friendly wave - you can tell by the way the muzzle of the gun is pointed away from you at all times - and I thought nothing of it. Where I grew up that sort of gesture is normal. It was only when I got back to the West Coast that I realized that where I live now, that would have started a major incident with the law enforcement community. What the world and even the West itself little appreciate is how much of the West (in both Europe and the Americas) is made of people like my old friend.

So far, America has been a great place to be a Muslim, or anything else for that matter (at least since formally instutionalized racism was ended in the 1960s). I would recommend to Hezbollah sympathizers that they keep it that way, and leave their tribalism in their tribal lands. It would be most regrettable if they were to awaken the West's own tribal past.

There is one last point to be made from Naveed's individual act. Although Naveed is a nut-case, unlike most terrorists studied by Marc Sageman, he is nevertheless a volunteer, a wannabe, a free-lancer, if you will, for Muslim Terrorism. Domestic terrorist organizations in the US often operate by stimulating free-lancers to act on their own, without any actual connection to the organization dispensing the stimulating ideology. It's almost the only way they can keep operating in our law-enforcement friendly environment.

So, don't look for too many actions by organized Hezbollah groups in the US (even though they are here). If they get active, look for more "volunteers."

Ten Years Online

On this day 230 years ago, the King of England's subjects in the American colonies declared themselves subjects no longer. Henceforth they would be free citizens of an independent nation that existed only in their imaginations. As yet it had no national laws, but it did have a collection of gentlemen's agreements passed by a Continental Congress, and it had something of an army, led by an inexperienced Virginia planter.

The dream for which the army and the Congress staked their lives - their little rebellion was considered Treason against the Crown and punishable by execution - was an amorphous collection of values from the European Enlightenment, condensed in a little pamphlet called, "Common Sense." From those values they distilled the following lines:

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.

These words provide a postscript to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which set up the modern system of nation-states. It is simply this: Sovereignty does not reside with governments, but with the people governed. And this: Human Rights are not created by governments -- rather, governments are instituted to protect the Human Rights that people are given originally by their Creator.

Democracy is spreading, and has been doing so ever since the first liberal democracy began this day in 1776. The number of liberal democracies on earth is at an all-time high, and almost all countries on earth claim to be democratic whether they are or not. That is to say, the European Enlightenment value that liberal democracy represents is paid almost universal homage, even by its enemies.

And so, we chose this day to launch The Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua 10 years ago to affirm liberal democratic values as the only way we know that can enable people of all faiths to share our planet in peace. And the only way we know to practice our own faith with authenticity and without hindrance. As the Bible says, "Let my people go, that they may serve Me," and as the Qur'an says, "Let there be no compulsion in Religion."

In ten years, we have not been entirely without impact. Some 20 people or so have written to us that they were considering leaving Christianity until they stumbled upon us, and realized (in so many words) that Christianity is not the sole intellectual property of the Fundamentalists. Some vigorous debates have taken place in our Forum concerning sexuality, and war. A woman "came out" to her family and community about her having been abused by a priest when she was a teenager. And numerous clergy and laypersons from around the world have written to say they enjoyed the site. Our essays on nuclear weapons, the Challenger explosion, and some others have been discussed in college courses, and our Abrahamic Prayer (combining Jewish, Christian, and Islamic elements) has been used in interfaith gatherings. All in all, not too bad.

What we would like to see in the next ten years (if we go that long) is more participation by Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists trying to work out a way of affirming their own and each other's faiths.

On a more personal note, I want to mention that my mother-in-law passed from this world yesterday. Let us all be mindful that we are only passing through this world, and that it is our mission to leave it better for our having done so, to the extent we can.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

We are pleased to announce that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, named by Usama bin Laden as the "Prince of al-Qaeda in Iraq," was wedded to the dark-eyed hounds of Hell on June 7, 2006 in the Common Era. He was a high-school dropout, sometime drug dealer, child-molester, and master-mind of numerous killings, bombings, beheadings (for the amusement of his fellow internet pornographers), and the deliberate incitement of sectarian violence in Iraq by killing both Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and destroying their holy places. To his dying day he denied that the Will of God could be made known through the Will of the People. Rather, he acted out the belief that the Will of God could only be made known through the Will of a Single Man, such as himself. By thus projecting his own demonic impulses onto a false god he created of his own stunted and bitter imagination, he joined the idolaters. By calling this idol of his imagination Allah, he joined the blasphemers. By representing this idolatry and blasphemy as the one true Islam, he joined those who insult the Prophet and his followers. For his idolatry, blasphemy, and insult he would have deserved a painful death in this world and an abasing chastisement on the Last Day. However, since he committed so many murders in the name of his perverted beliefs, and encouraged so many others to do likewise, it is impossible to imagine the doom that he must taste.

May those who take up his sword after him follow him to his Judgment swiftly and soon, for the peace of the world and the Glory of God.

Immigration: Don't Fence Me In

Urination upon both Democrats and Republicans concerning illegal immigration from Mexico. Neither party has even tried to come up with a workable and humane solution. I stress these two words because, in the case of US-Mexican relations, workable and humane amount to the same thing.

Consider that, if Mexico exports workers to the US, the US exports money to the families of those workers. We have already been told that the remittances from Mexican workers in the US exceeds the revenues of Mexico's state-owned oil industry. This money empowers those families to do things for themselves instead of waiting for handouts from the corrupt Mexican government. Thus, the flow of money from the US helps build a civil society in Mexico.

That's a good thing and we should encourage it with a guest-worker program that is so easy to enroll in and so helpful to enrollees that people will want to join up rather than to come to the US illegally. The catch? The US gets to collect some biometrics and issue cards so we can know who they are and where they are, and make sure that they leave when they say they will. It should also include a path to US citizenship for those who want it, as well as an option to renew for guest-worker status as long as the worker is working.

But we also need to think about other US exports to Mexico, like the $8 billion to $24 billion in drug money that goes each year to the Mexican cartels. Those cartels are extremely corrupting to the Mexican government: if they can't buy Mexican politicians with US drug money, then they can assassinate them with the US guns they buy with their drug money and smuggle south. In other words, we tend to cancel the good export - money to families - with the bad export - guns and money to the drug cartels.

Instead of doing something stupid, inhumane, unfriendly, and ultimately self-destructive like fencing the border to cut off the flow of Mexicans to the US, maybe we should try doing something to cut off the flow of US drug money and guns to Mexico. Maybe we should change US drug policy.

I have a suggestion. Legalize drugs, but provide only minimal health care to US persons who use those drugs, and stiff penalties for causing accidents or committing crimes while using them. The money we would save on Drug Enforcement and prisons would probably be enough to subsidize drug treatment facilities and medications.

If that doesn't work for you, then lower the penalties on drug sellers and increase them on drug users.

Either way would drive down the price of currently illegal drugs, which would tend to force the cartels to go legit to make money. And that would be a very good thing.

In short, rather than try to fence in Mexico, we should try to help Mexico become a better place to live, so more Mexicans will want to stay there. Rather than building good fences, the US and Mexico should try to be good neighbors.

Sentencing Zack

I'm conflicted over the sentencing of Zacharias Moussaoui. (And if I didn't spell his name right, it is because I refuse to do him the honor of looking it up.) He was the only 9/11 hijacker stupid enough to get caught before he could do his special crime against man and God. The jury sentenced him to life in prison, because he didn't actually do that crime. He merely claimed to have had knowledge of it before it occurred, and that he was supposed to have taken part in it.

In some sense, killing is too good for him. If he had gotten the death sentence, we would have kept him in prison for years while we went through a complex and lengthy automatic appeals process, giving him numerous "days in court" to make a spectacle of himself and us, before finally offing him in the most merciful manner we know how. He deserves the misery of prison terminated only by whatever death God chooses, which might be a good deal less merciful than one of our lethal injections.

On the other hand, we don't need al-Qaeda people in our prisons recruiting other prisoners with shorter sentences and better American acculturation into new al-Qaeda gangs. Since we can't seem to socially isolate prisoners who are gang organizers, even in solitary confinement, maybe it is better just to kill them. You see, I oppose killing anyone who is already in the power of the state. But criminal gang organizers do not submit to the power of the state, even while in prison. They continue to organize, and even to order crimes committed outside prison. The same would be true of al-Qaeda members in our prisons. So, yes, we would be killing them for our shortcomings, our inability to control their anti-social behavior. But then, they could just stop that behavior if they wanted to live.

And yet, Moussaoui is probably not an organizer. He doesn't seem to have the snap to organize anything, not even his own thinking and behavior. In prison, Moussaoui is probably not a serious threat. So the jury let him live, made him live. It boils down to this - he was too stupid to avoid capture, and he is too stupid to kill.

What a Card!

Just a quickie about Orson Scott Card's novels, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. In these novels, Card does many things, and covers many themes. But for tonight, I just want to note that he explores the idea of consciousnesses so alien to ours that communication is rendered extremely difficult. In the first of these novels, misunderstanding leads to war. In the second it leads to multiple murders, which are done by vivisection of the victims.

How appropriate to be reading these as we struggle through World War IV: The Free World vs the Global Salafist Jihad. It has hot spots in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Judea and Samaria (indicating my bias here), Sudan, and a warming one in Iran.

It is clear that we and our Radical Islamist brothers are having a misunderstanding. But part of their schtick is that they cannot afford to try to understand us as we understand ourselves. We, on the other hand, are secure enough in our own identities and religions to try to understand them "from the inside out." Indeed, we must do so if we are ever to win this long war. They cannot risk this kind of love. But we can. Military force and technology are powerful stop gaps. Love in the form of understanding is the winning edge.

Contra Google et alia

In recent months, Google has refused to cooperate with the US government in hunting internet child pornographers, while it has knuckled under to demands from the Chinese government to censor all political references to Tianmen Square from its servers in China. Google wasn't willing to pay the price of China cloning its software and setting up a search service of its own to shut Google out of so big a market. But it is willing to take a stand against the US Government where a centuries old tradition of civil liberties not only prevents it from having to suffer any consequences - it guarantees that Google will get the marketing benefit of "good press" for its courage. In other words, Google has acted like a cynical, hypocritical and avaricious coward. Ordinarily this would be no big deal.

But ours is a time in which we cannot afford to bow to terrorists or tyrants. The Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua has therefore eliminated its Google Adsense advertising. We could also eliminate our Google search box and our Blogger account, but where can we turn?

Yahoo has done even worse than Google by turning over to the Chinese government the identity of a dissident who was subsequently sentenced to 17 years in prison. Microsoft and Cisco have also cooperated with the Chinese government in censorship and law enforcement.

So, shame on you, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco. We will continue to use you to increase our traffic and visibility to get our message out. But we won't take your thirty pieces of silver.

Who's Looking Out for You?

I couldn't resist copping one of Bill O'Reilly's slogans for this post. In answer, I can say that even if you took Mr. O'Reilly, President Bush, all the US military forces and intelligence officers deployed around the world, and all the Homeland Security and law enforcement together, they still wouldn't be enough to watch your back during this Global War on Terror. So who else is looking out for you?

Muslims. I think one big reason there hasn't been another major al-Qaeda like attack in the US, like those in Europe, is that American Muslims are not giving aid or shelter to would-be Jihaddicts. Like everyone else in America, they were caught with their guard down prior to 9/11. But now that they know the threat from these fanatics, I think they are watching out for suspicious characters and alerting the civil authorities.

So, next time you think about or encounter Muslims, show a little gratitude and a little respect.

Better yet, show a little love. Now we could say that it is a kind of love-in-action to pour blood and treasure into Iraq and Afghanistan in order to give the people of Islam a chance at anything other than autocratic government. But even if we win in those places (still in doubt at this writing), we can lose in others. This is because oil-rich Wahabbi-Jihadi fanatics are financing the construction and staffing of mosques all over the Islamic world. They are even funding the infiltration of fanatic clerics into mosques in America to try to take away the protection that American Muslims provide.

I have a counter-proposition. We should fund American Muslims to become missionaries back into the wider Muslim world. We should fund them to build and staff mosques, to run charities, to provide aid, care, and instruction. We should fund them to spread a message counter to that of the Global Salafist Jihad: the message that Islam need not be shackled to the honor-shame cultures in which it was born. The message that Islam does not dictate culture, but transcends it. The message that anyone can be a Muslim and still be themselves. The message of the Prophet, without the baggage the Jihaddicts load onto it.

We can use our technology and military might to keep from losing the struggle against the Global Salafist Jihad. But it will take love to win it.

A Terrible Love of War

James Hillman's book published in 2004 by the above title is an investigation into war by a Jungian analyst. He explores war with his imagination, which well he might, since by his own admission he has never been in combat. This, however, presents no obstacle because of his experience with combat veterans and survivors and their written accounts. Indeed, he has read widely, and refers liberally to the classics, history both ancient and modern, and the literature of psychology, philosophy and social science. Hillman's book speeds over his sources like an insect called a water-strider speeds over a pond - never penetrating the depths, because it is too light-weight to break the surface tension.

His chapters are entitled

War is Normal - meaning that it is ubiquitous in history and geography and that psychologically normal people engage in it

War is Inhuman - meaning that war seems to have a transpersonal dynamic all its own. Hillman imagines it as the Greek/Roman war-god Ares/Mars. Indeed Hillman seems to prefer a multiplicity of simple, one-themed gods, rather than a single, complex, multi-faceted God, like that of Christianity.

War is Sublime - meaning that war calls us to serve and sacrifice for a cause higher than ourselves, that in conflict we can experience a kind of transcendence.

Religion is War - by his own admission an attack on Christianity as being warlike and therefore hypocritical.

I'll give him this. He makes some interesting points. For example, he claims that Clausewitz had it backwards when he asserted that war is a continuation of politics by other means. Having worked for a political campaign I agree: politics is really a continuation of war by other means. He also states the obvious - in order to have a war, you need an enemy. This point was explored more fully by another psychiatrist, Anthony J. Stevens, in his book, The Roots of War: A Jungian Perspective in which discusses enemy-making as pseudospeciation, the portrayal of the enemy group as less than, or at least other than, human. Stevens also delves into the pervasiveness of war-metaphors in our culture, which Hillman merely decries.

With regard to his attack on Christianity, Hillman would do well to read Thomas Cahill's Gifts of the Jews: How a Desert Tribe of Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. That is to say, most of what he identifies with Christianity is what Christianity inherited from Judaism. That he attacks it might tempt me to brand him as an anti-Semite, but there is a better designation. I think he may be an Occidentalist, as described by Buruma and Margalit in their book, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, or perhaps a Bourgeoisophobe, to use David Brook's designation.

All in all, I think much of what Dr. Hillman says in this book is said with more regard for its effect rather than for its accuracy. For example, he quotes a well-known hymn:

Onward Christian soldiers,
Marching off to war,

Sorry, James. It's "Marching as to war," and that makes all the difference. If my impression its statements being made for effect over accuracy is correct, then A Terrible Love of War might fall into the category of discourse studied by Dr. Harry G. Frankfurt in his treatise, On Bullshit.

Corrupting The Nation's Youth

Letter Submitted to The Nation
Re: Princeton Tilts Right

I was delighted to see that my college friend, Robby George, is doing well enough to attract the attention of The Nation. Though Robby and I disagree on abortion and homosexuality, I have always had the impression that Robby's civility was not a tactic to disarm his critics. Rather, I think he believes that civility and civil discourse are more important to preserving our democracy than winning a particular argument.

This point may be lost on Max Blumenthal, who characterizes George's Madison Program as an attack to which Princeton University has capitulated. It is more likely that Princeton is becoming tolerant of yet another form of diversity - that of opinion.

Rather than seeing Robby as Princeton's token conservative, Mr. Blumenthal characterizes him as a corruptor of the nation's youth. If Blumenthal were an ancient city-state, I imagine he would call for Robby George to drink hemlock.

Review: The Battle for Middle Earth
Tolkien's Divine Design in the Lord of the Rings
Fleming Rutledge

No counsel have I to give those that despair. Yet counsel I could give, and words I could speak to you. Will you hear them? They are not for all ears. I bid you come out before your doors and look abroad. Too long have you sat in the shadows and trusted to twisted tales and crooked promptings. — Gandalf to Theoden in The Two Towers

Thus spake the editors of The Nation (a weekly magazine of the American political Left) on their cover of November 28, 2005:

There can no longer be any doubt: The American war in Iraq — an unprovoked, unnecessary, unlawful invasion that has turned into a colonial style occupation — is a moral and political catastrophe. It has also become the single greatest threat to America's national security.... The Nation will not support any candidate for national office who does not make a speedy end to the American war in Iraq a major issue of his or her campaign.

Not long afterward, the The Weekly Standard (a magazine of the American political Right) carried as its December 19, 2005 cover story, "Fighting to Win — With the proper strategy victory in Iraq is far more likely than many think," by Frederick W. Kagan. Both magazines are published in English from Washington, D. C. Other than that, they have nothing in common.

Well, almost nothing. They both get the same news. They just draw opposing conclusions from it. If they were in the world of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, they would each be staring into a palantir, one of the seven seeing stones wrought by the High Elves in the Elder Days, and brought to Middle Earth by the men of Numenor.

The palantiri were "crystal balls" that enabled those looking into them to "converse in thought with one another." They could also show one scenes from across both space and time, if one's will were strong enough to direct them. To us, they are a metaphor for the technical means by which we gather and communicate both news and intelligence. The difference between them being that intelligence agencies try to get the truth and keep it private, while news agencies try to get a story and sell it to the public.

In the Lord of the Rings (henceforth LOTR), palantiri were used by Saruman the Wizard and Denethor the Steward of Gondor. But a third palantir was controlled by Sauron, the Lord of Barad-dur, the personification of Evil, who used the palantiri to drive Saruman to evil and Denethor to suicide, as Gandalf described:

'The Stones of Seeing do not lie, and not even the Lord of Barad-dur can make them do so. He can, maybe, by his will choose what things shall be seen by weaker minds, or cause them to mistake the meaning of what they see.' (The Return of the King: The Last Debate)

And so it is with the news. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world to be a reporter. This means that all the news from Iraq is going to be bad, because nobody in their right mind is going to risk their neck to report the re-opening of a school or the recomissioning of a water treatment plant. That stuff doesn't sell papers, doesn't bring eyeballs to advertisements, so it ends up in the editorial waste bin. But a roadside bomb attack, now that's news. It becomes part of never-ending drip of bad news, and no end in sight. We begin to feel that we can never accomplish anything good there. Thus, Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (aka Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI) uses terror in theater to create despair on the home front.

Now terror and despair are the weapons of Sauron (a stand-in for Satan), which Fleming Rutledge notes in her book, The Battle for Middle Earth: Tolkien's Divine Design in the Lord of the Rings. An Episcopal priest, Rutledge is more concerned to caution her fellow Americans against self-righteous bigotry than she is with the workings of the Enemy. She mentions Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in the context of warning that we cannot allow ourselves the illusion that "they" are all bad and "we" are all good. For our own military and economic power seduces us, in the same way the One Ring — the Ring of Power — seduces its bearers.

How men should conduct themselves in war, and why they should fight are great concerns for both Rutledge and Tolkien, who despite his devout Christianity, never explicitly mentions God in this pre-Christian, yet profoundly Christian epic. Rutledge devotes considerable space to explaining what amounts to Tolkien's action-portrayals of the Catholic tradition of Just War (both in deciding whether one must go to war — ius ad bellum, and how to conduct it — ius in bello).

But her main concern, and indeed her greatest achievement, is to walk the reader through Tolkien's narrative demonstration of how Free Will and Predestination are not opposites. In Christian Doctrine and in LOTR, they are the same thing. Consider that if God has chosen you for His Service, you can refuse. But if you refuse, you turn away from realizing your true self, your rightful destiny. If you accept, you achieve the fulfillment of becoming who you were always meant to be.

Such a short sketch of Predestination (or Election) does little justice to Fleming's exegesis of it in LOTR, and to Tolkien's brilliance. To best enjoy them, I suggest reading a chapter of LOTR first, and then reading Fleming's exegesis of it afterword. This is made easier by Fleming's approach of analyzing LOTR one chapter at a time in sequence as they are printed.

Things that are missing from Fleming's treatment are an interpretation of the palantiri as symbolic of both intelligence and news (as above), and an exegesis of Tolkien's theological interpretation of depression. In LOTR, depression is evoked by Sauron in order to sap his opponents' will to resist him. Sauron induces depression in Theoden through the whisperings of Grima Wormtongue (propaganda), and in Denethor through the palantir. The first is cured only by the intervention of Gandalf (quoted under the title of this essay), while the second is too far gone. Not only does Denethor neglect the defense of his City, his attempted murder of his own son during a successful suicide attempt prevent Gandalf from reaching the battlefield in time to prevent the death of Theoden. For Tolkien, depression is one of the chief tools of the Enemy.

And indeed, in the form of demoralization, depression is one of the chief tools of the terrorist insurgency we have been actively fighting since 9/11. All so-called "fourth generation" warriors use "asymmetrical" means such as terrorism to attack not only the their opponents populace, but more importantly their opponents will to continue the struggle. Their strategy is not to defeat a militarily superior foe outright, but simply to outlast their foe, all the while creating doubt in their foe's mind about the legitimacy and winnability of the conflict. It is even better to create division and conflict within the foe's body politic, as Denethor's subjects fought each other — some trying to carry out Denethor's suicidal orders, and others trying to prevent that suicide.

Then there is the Ring itself. It was made by a craft that none but Sauron possesses, and as such is symbolic of a kind of destructive technological power. Frodo's mission is to take it back into Sauron's own territory and cast it into the lava from which it was forged in the heart of Mount Doom. Rutledge explores the dimensions of this quest as a journey enabled by the Cardinal Virtues and aided by what some might call chance, but is really Divine Providence. But to me (and I think to Tolkien who was a veteran of WW I) it is a covert Special Operation, with the entire War of the Ring as a diversion to keep the op's cover from being blown. As such, it has inspired many re-readings of LOTR by a retired SEAL Commander I know.

On the other hand, imagine an al-Qaeda terrorist reading his story into LOTR. He could see himself as Frodo, bearing the One Ring — an Improvised Nuclear Device — into the heart of our, his Enemy's, territory — to bring to ruin the forces of evil, us. With ever more powerful technologies becoming ever more accessible, the most dangerous weapon is imagination. Although Rutledge neglects some of the more mundane and practical aspects of intelligence and conflict, she is right to draw our attention to how we conduct our side of the conflict. We must make it increasingly difficult for our enemies to portray us as evil and themselves as good.