Why Inequality gets so Little Traction

I heard a guest on a recent National Public Radio show wonder why inequality in America is getting so little political traction this election year. Maybe it's because there are so many of us who know we have enough, and can't be bothered to envy those who have more.

To be Surveilled or Colonized?

A few months after the 9/11 attacks, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) began a campaign of undercover anti-terrorism surveillance in mosques, schools, and Muslim neighborhoods, according to NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly in a recent speech given at Fordham University. That surveillance has thwarted 14 terror attacks from that time to the present. On the other hand, one reason the German Catholic and Lutheran churches failed to thwart the rise of Nazism and the deportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps was that Nazi informers infiltrated the churches. It's a question of balance.


Balance against the petrodollars funding the attempts by extremist Jihadi-Takfiris and their mullahs and imams to colonize our American mosques, schools, and Muslim neighborhoods. (As if American Islam were any less genuine or authentic than anyone else's Islam.) The Jihadi-Takfiris use methods of agitation-propaganda and provocation learned from atheistic Communism and thuggish violence learned from idolatrous Nazism in order to intimidate or eliminate their opposition within Islam. They function like an organized criminal gang, except that instead of peddling drugs, they are on a Crusade to peddle their narcissistic ideology, to which they themselves are addicted. Against such moneyed, organized, zealous criminal power, the balance of state power is sometimes needed, even welcomed.


But before we get to blasé about it, think of how you would feel if you went on a camping trip with some of your friends, only to find out, years later, that one of them, whom you trusted, to whom you bared your soul, was actually an undercover cop who was reporting your every word.


Our American Muslims need and deserve our care and respect. Maybe sometimes they also need the help of our law enforcement agencies to resist colonization by the Jihadi-Takfiris. But that help should be used  judiciously and circumspectly. Whenever possible, that help should wait for an invitation. And always, that help must respect and protect the privacy and dignity of Muslims who have given themselves to God, and not to the Jihadi-Takfiri idol of God.

You Do Not Have the Right Never to be Offended

Adapted from the poisonous pen of the notorious Right Wing extremist, David Horowitz:


Last fall, a Muslim, named Talaag Elbayomy, attacked a Pennsylvania man name Ernest Perce who had dressed up like Mohammed for a Halloween parade. The attack was caught on film, witnessed by dozens of parade watchers, and verified by a policeman. 

Elbayomy was charged. But when he was brought before Cumberland County Judge Mark Martin, the judge dismissed the assault charges against the Muslim and dressed down the Pennsylvania man for being insensitive to the Muslim religion. Not only did Martin rule in favor of the Muslim attacker, he lectured Ernest Perce for insulting Islam: "Islam is not just a religion, it's their culture. It's their very essence their very being… And what you've done is, you've complete trashed their essence, their being. They find it very, very, very offensive. I find it offensive."


- End of Adaptation.


I find it offensive, and stupid, too. But in a democracy, being offended does not confer the right to commit violence. Yet Judge Martin unlawfully conceded the right to commit violent crime in the name of religion to Elbayomy, and by extension to all practitioners of the religion of Islam.


I doubt that Judge Martin would concede a right of violent redress to equally devout Catholics seeking revenge against members of the Obama Administration who are forcing Catholic organizations to provide insurance coverage for birth control. In other words, Judge Martin is just another knee-jerk, reactionary, Politically Correct "useful idiot" for Islamofacism, who desperately needs to be impeached from the judiciary, and disbarred from the practice of law. It is the job of the judiciary to defend ordered liberty, not to sell it cheap in a vain attempt to appease its despisers.


You do not have the right never to be offended, because if you do, then everyone else has no rights. The whole world must revolve around your sensitivities. And that's wrong.

Birth Control is Not a Right

So Rush Limbaugh satirized Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law Student, who is advocating in favor of the Obama Administration policy that mandates employers who provide health insurance also provide coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients. I have yet to hear or read Limbaugh's remarks, or Ms. Fluke's for that matter.

What I can say, is that when my wife and I were Ms. Fluke's age, we were also living on graduate student stipends. We took care of our own birth control costs, and never thought to ask the University to help us with them. Because we assumed that birth control was not our right - it was our responsibility. Birth control is considered a right by people whose ideology confuses license with liberty.

On the other hand, the real issue is not graduate students, but the working poor. When you are bringing in such low wages that you have to count pennies, then maybe you do need a little help to make ends meet. Maybe the government should win this one. But Catholic and some other religious institutions have moral objections to birth control. At least let them have a means test, so that they will only be compelled to provide such coverage to those whom they pay wages too low to afford it.

That will at least provide those institutions a way to opt out of providing coverage for birth control by raising the wages of those lowest on the pay scale, and letting them make their own choices as to how to spend their own money.

How Dangerous is Theoretical Physics?

The String Theorists and the Loop Quantum Gravitators are busily chipping away at the problem what space-time actually is. For some time, my concern has been that if people can figure out how space-time is put together, then somebody might be able to figure out how to take it apart. In other words, the next paradigm shift in theoretical physics may have weapons implications, just like the last one, which gave us nuclear weapons. The atomic nucleus is not Nature's last word on explosive energy release.

That last word is actually the First Word - the Big Bang that began the Universe as we know it. The question is whether some yet to be discovered physics can yield intentional explosions between the intensity of a nuclear explosion and the Big Bang.

On the other hand, our astronomers are finding that planets orbiting around stars are commonplace. With all those planets out there, surely some are home to technological civilizations, and surely some of them have already discovered physics that is several paradigms beyond our own. If there were any explosive technology based on such physics, and if any extra-terrestrial civilization had used it, our astronomers would have seen it. So far, all the observable explosions and other energetic phenomena in space look natural. Or so we think.

Maybe theoretical physics isn't such a dangerous pursuit after all. Maybe.

Why Conservatives Suck

Here it is, in their own words, by their own admission.

Lunch Box Inspectors

Well, here's an outrage for you:

http://www.nccivitas.org/2012/state-inspectors-searching-childrens-lunch-boxes-this-isnt-china-is-it/

In an era of constrained budgets, inspectors for the State of North Carolina are searching through children's school lunch boxes and forcing them to eat state/federal-funded, school-provided lunches if what they bring from home fails to measure up to state guidelines.

Now I can see state and or federal guidelines for the nutrition of our nation's precious children. But I object to state or federal employees forcing compliance. Providing proper nutrition is the duty and privilege of the childrens' parents. Unless and until a child shows signs of neglect, or failure to thrive, it is tantamount to illegal search and seizure to snoop into his or her lunchbox. It is wasting scarce tax revenues on needless tyranny.

Or am I wrong? If we are all going to be paying for each other's healthcare, then maybe we all have a legitimate interest in what we may each be eating. Maybe we will all save money in the long run if we pay inspectors to do things like citing and fining me for the donut I ate during a workshop on plasma physics I attended this morning.

Perish the thought!

The Problem of Free Will III: The All-Knowing God

In the previous two posts we established that we are conscious beings who are have Free Will within the constraints of being human in this universe. Indeed, the purely materialistic argument is that Consciousness and Free Will arose in human populations because they enabled us to gain survival benefit from behaviors that are unpredictable and more complex, creative and powerful than pre-determined reflexes. The atheist/materialist is thus forced to argue in favor of Free Will, rather than against it.

But the atheist/materialist points out that Free Will is incompatible with the usual notion of an Omniscient (All-Knowing) God. If God knows the Future, then the Future is pre-determined. If God does not know the Future, then God is not All-Knowing. And the atheist would be right, if the Graeco-Roman categories of Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Omnipresence were categories that circumscribed the Deity.

Here I side with the Muslims, when they say, "Allahu Akbar!" which means, "God is greater!" Greater than anything you can imagine, including your philosophical categories. But before we dismiss the argument with a slogan, let us consider an alternate reality that you alone control.

Let us consider your dreams. You are the Creator of every one of them. You yourself are Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnipotent with respect to your dreams. Part of you must know how each one will turn out, because part of you creates and controls the plot. But you are still surprised at what occurs in your dreams. Except for relatively rare instances of "lucid" dreaming, you feel out of control, swept along by the current of events in the dreams that you dream up.

Elsewhere I have argued that the Universe and everything in it seems like one vast, self-consistent dream in the Mind of God. Given that we are made in the "image" of God, perhaps it is not too outrageous to wonder if God experiences something of the same surprise at God's own dreaming of this Universe?

And why should God be limited to only one dream?

The Problem of Free Will II: Limited Autonomy

Let us return to the first proposition of my friend the skeptic:


"Every human thought is in principle a pre-determined consequence of biochemical processes that are themselves determined by evolution, the course of which is pre-determined by chemistry and physics. Therefore, there is no such thing as free will."

At first, it appears that the question of Free Will is an "either/or" proposition. Either we have Free Will, or we don't. What we actually experience, however is freedom within the constraints of our abilities. For example, you may be free to desire whatever you can imagine, but you are not free to desire what you can't imagine. The limits of your own imagination are the limits of what you can want, or will. I concede that the limits on our Free Will are pre-determined by our genetic makeup combined with our experience and our situation in the world. But within those limits, determinism is dead.


Determinism is based on the notion that if we could know the positions and velocities of every particle in the Universe we could, in principle, calculate the entire future evolution of the Universe. This idea was born from the structure of Newton's equations of motion and held sway for over 200 years, until the 1920's. Then we found out that very small particles begin to exhibit behavior that is masked by the sheer size of large ones. It turns out that the process of precisely measuring a particle's position destroys information about its velocity, and vice versa. That is to say, measuring exactly where a particle is gives it such a whack that we can no longer know where it's going, and measuring exactly where it's going can only be done via interactions that "smear out" where it is. That the position and velocity of a particle cannot simultaneously take on precise values is a statement of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and seems to be a fundamental limitation on the measurability of reality.

If the Uncertainty Principle struck Determinism a mortal blow in the 1920s, nonlinear dynamics delivered the coup de grace in the 1980s. The nonlinear dynamicists finally had the desperation, the courage, and the methods to tackle some of the really hard problems of Classical Mechanics (the branch of physics that deals with the motion of ordinary sized things and is described by Newton's equations). They found that even for relatively simple systems, like three bodies moving under mutual gravitational attraction, the future motion can depend so sensitively on the given conditions at any moment (positions and velocities) that the detailed motion of the system is unpredictable (or chaotic) - not only because classical measurements are only finitely precise, but because of the limitations imposed by the Uncertainty Principle as well. In other words, the Universe is not nearly as well-behaved as a wind-up clock. The Universe is not a machine or a mechanism, as we understand machines and mechanisms. Determinism is dead.


How dead is it? Consider that three bodies moving under their mutual gravitational attraction have 6 degrees of freedom per body (their positions along any three perpendicular directions in space, and their velocities along those directions). These three bodies are a system with 18 degrees of freedom whose motion is unpredictable in principle. Now consider that the human brain has about 100 billion neurons, each with about 10,000 interconnections to other neurons, each of which is a degree of freedom for that neuron. The human brain is a system with at least a quadrillion degrees of freedom. The idea of trying to predict the state of a living human brain is ludicrous. 


And that's just classically. Quantum mechanically, the wave function of each neuron in your brain extends throughout the whole universe. True, the far reaches of that wave function have very low values. But I include it to emphasize the fundamental impossibility of knowing all the influences on the state of the brain. 

Now the three gravitating bodies will under certain circumstances, stay within some enveloping region of space. Within that region, it is impossible to predict where they will be over the long term. But they will be (almost completely) somewhere within that region. They are free within that constraint.

Similarly, you are free to think and to desire whatever you want within the constraints of your being human at a certain time and place. That is to say, you have Free Will within limits. You are free to will anything possible. You are free even to will the impossible. But you are not free to will the unimaginable, because you don't know what it is. This is Limited Freedom, rather than an Absolute Freedom. The limits are set only by human nature and physical reality. At least, until we figure out how to change them.

So the dichotomy between Absolute Freedom and being an automaton is false. There is space for freedom with the constraints of being in this Universe. It puts us in a situation that seems paradoxical to absolutists who insist on Free Will as an all-or-nothing proposition. As Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, "We have to believe in Free Will. We have no choice."

The Problem of Free Will I: Is anybody there?

"Every human thought is in principle a pre-determined consequence of biochemical processes that are themselves determined by evolution, the course of which is pre-determined by chemistry and physics. Therefore, there is no such thing as free will. In fact, there is no such thing as consciousness. What appear to be sentient beings are just automata that give the illusion of consciousness."

I feel frustrated, even enraged when I hear or read statements like this, whether from scientists and non-scientists. Such a statement is equivalent to saying that the Universe and everything in it is dead — even ourselves. It implicitly permits the most outrageous disregard of everything and everyone, even one's one children. After all, what harm is there in neglecting or even killing that which never was, and never could be really alive?

I'm outraged when people make such statements, because it is that easy and that quick to show that such statements would have grossly immoral consequences, were people to take them seriously. I'm frustrated when people make such statements, because they are wrong. For the rest of this thread, I would like to show you why.

Let's start with basic philosophy. To whom do automata give the illusion of consciousness? This is not just a semantic game. An illusion cannot have itself, nor can an automaton have one. The very idea of an illusion pre-supposes the idea of consciousness on the part of someone. That is, you must be conscious in order to have the illusion (the false awareness) that you are conscious. You might be semi-comatose and in a dream-like state, but that is still a state of consciousness. In fact, consciousness is the prime datum of philosophy, both Western (self-awareness as in Descartes' "I think, therefore I am") and Eastern (a generalized oceanic awareness).

Consciousness is also the prime datum of science. The discipline of science is to get ever more precise and accurate data into one's consciousness, so that one can discover and then test relationships among the data. If you reject the datum of your own self-awareness, then you can claim that anything I do to demonstrate the contrary is unreal, an illusion (which you must be conscious to experience, but since I must be wrong, logic must not apply). That is to say, rejecting the datum of your own consciousness is unfalsifiable, and therefore unscientific. Because science accepts only statements that are falsifiable (capable of being proved wrong), in principle, by some sort of observation (a means of getting data into consciousness) or experiment (a controlled means of getting data into consciousness). Science is thus a way to get to know by successive approximations (trial and error) those aspects of reality amenable to its methods.

In short, claiming that we are unconscious is unscientific, unphilosophic and leads to logical contradictions. And that is, as mathematicians say, "what was to be proven," Quod Erat Demonstrandum, QED.

Of course, it is possible that my friend mis-spoke. Perhaps what he really wanted to deny is the reality of the self. Here he might be on firmer ground, because Buddhism claims that an individual's sense of self is illusory. That is to say, that your own little sense of self is an illusion entertained by part of the Universal Self.

I think what the Buddhists are trying to say, however imprecisely, is that you are not your personality. Indeed, you build your personality on the foundation of your temperament in order to have an interface with the people and the world around you. You use your personality to relate to yourself, as well. The Buddhist koan, "Show me the face you had before your parents were born," is a demand to experience and relate to reality directly, without the intermediary of your personality.

But that doesn't mean that your personality is unreal. If you build a bicycle, the bicycle is no less real for your having built it. If you write a piece of software, the software is no less real for your having written it, or for it being the expression of your ideas. Similarly, your personality is your real creation, more intricate and grander than any art or literature ever created. It isn't an illusion. It just isn't all there is to you. And if your personality changes over time in response to your circumstances, so what? You might want to make changes to the bicycle you built as you grow, or as you age. So too, you may change your personality, albeit with some difficulty, and sometimes with the aid of a psychotherapist.

Having dealt with consciousness, we now turn to the thornier problem of free will. What my friend above should have been trying to establish was not the solipsistic ideas that we are unconscious or have no personalities, but rather the idea that although we are conscious, we only have the illusion of free will. We may be self-aware, but all our thoughts and actions are pre-determined reactions to preceding stimuli. We only think that we actually decide anything. This will be the topic of the next post in this thread.

A Taxonomy of World Religions

According to their Hermeneutics of Fecal Occurrence

by Author Identity Requested

This has circulated over the net in many versions. Here's ours, with contributions from Scooper, Andy Busch, MM, RF, and others.

TAOISM	S__t happens.
CONFUCIANISM	Confucius say: "S__t happens."
BUDDHISM	S__t doesn't really happen. It is only called s__t happening.
Zen	What is the sound of one s__t happening?
SIKHISM	Cut that s__t out, or we'll cut it out of you!
HINDUISM	This s__t has happened before.
PLATONISM	This s__t will happen again.
JAINISM	When it happens, s__t gently. Don't hurt the s__t.
SHINTO	If s__t happens, put a flower in it. Make a pretty offering.
HARE KRISHNA	...s__t happens, s__t happens, s__t happens...
MOONIES	Only happy s__t really happens.
WICCA	S__t happens if you will it to happen.
ISLAM	S__t happens because Allah wills it.
SUFISM	Even though s__t happens, Allah wants you to dance.
PROTESTANTISM	Let s__t happen to someone else.
JUDAISM	Why does this s__t always happen to us?
CATHOLICISM	You deserve this s__t.
Vatican II	If s__t happens, blame the clergy.
PRESBYTERIANISM	S__t should happen decently and in good order.
CALVINISM	S__t is predestined to happen because you don't work hard enough.
7TH DAY ADVENTISM	No s__t on Saturdays.
TORONTO BLESSING	Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, s__t happens, ha-ha-ha-ha....
ANGLICANISM	Scripture contains all things necessary to deal with s__t happening.
ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM	We still favor happenings of state-supported s__t.
FUNDAMENTALISM	Unless you're one of us, you're s__t.
Baptist	S__t won't happen for you until you're totally immersed in it.
Pentecostal	S__t happens! Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!
METAPHYSICS	In terms of materialistic ontogeny, we're all s__t.
NEW AGE	When s__t happens, channel it. Visualise s__t happening.
Feminism	S__t happening is an act of the Goddess.
Feminist Separatism	When s__t happens, blame men.
Men's Movement	Drums & fire make s__t happen hot & loud.
RASTAFARIANISM	Let';s smoke this s__t!
Bud Lightism	S__t happens... I love you, man!
EXISTENTIALISM	S__t is, therefore it happens.
JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES	If you just let me in, I'll tell you why s__t happens.
MORMONISM	If s__t happens, make sure you have a 2-year food supply.
RAJNEESH	For $1000, s__t can happen for you, too.
HEDONISM	There's nothing like a good s__t happening!
STOICISM	This s__t is good for me.
ZOROASTRIANISM	Bad s__t happens half the time. The rest of the time, it's good.
Parsi	Don't burn that s__t — fire is sacred!
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE	This s__t is all in your mind.
BAHA'I	S__t happens to everyone alike.
UNITARIANISM	If there is a s__t, let it happen to each in his/her own way.
AGNOSTICISM	Maybe s__t happens, and maybe it doesn't.
Apathy	Who gives a s__t?
ATHEISM	No s__t!
POLITICS AS RELIGION
Republicans	When s__t happens, stare like a deer in the headlights. Or invade a country that had nothing to do with it. Or both.
Democrats	When s__t happens, deny it. Or else weasel your way out of it with double talk, as in, "It depends on what the meaning of 's__t' is."
NRA	S__t will happen when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
NRA-Ted Nugent Style	Before you grill s__t, you gotta kill s__t!

Give Cain a Chance

It appears that someone from the Rick Perry campaign has leaked that someone in the past may have accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment. If any other political office were at stake, I would be interested. But this is the Presidency of the United States of America. Neither Herman Cain nor Rick Perry have done anything that Bill Clinton didn't do. In fact, Bill Clinton was accused of doing worse. But Bill Clinton was a pretty good president. So, I give both Cain and Perry a Clinton pass on this one. I recommend that you do the same.

The nation stands on a precipice regarding its power to influence world events in its favor, while the media focusses on the banal and the trivial. The media are not serving us well. There are other, better reasons to reject or to consider either of these men for the office they seek.

And there are other, more important stories to follow, like crony capitalism on the part of both Democrats and Republicans, the gerrymandering that undermines the foundations of our Republic, and the proliferation of rules and laws that undermine the Rule of Law itself.

Occupy Wall Street: The Real Story

The Occupy Wall Street people seem to have no clear idea of what they want and why they are occupying anything. It turns out, however, that they may have more of a point than they realize. Take a look at this Science News article entitled, "Financial World Dominated by a Few Deep Pockets." Researchers have determined that 40% of all the world's wealth in the financial markets is controlled by 147 corporations. You download a PDF of their original paper, "The Network of Global Corporate Control," at arxiv.org.

These 147 corporations (mostly investment banks and brokerage firms) are highly interconnected. This has a number of policy implications. First, when one goes down, it can take the others with it — this can destabilize the entire global economy. And regulators in any one nation are pretty powerless to do anything about it. Second, those who want to forecast market conditions might do better to scrap their statistical models and just monitor what these 147 are doing.

What they are doing is properly the subject of further study, but I'll take a guess, which brings us to a third policy implication. I think they are concentrating wealth. True, they redistribute some wealth to buy off the forces that would try to take control of them if they concentrated wealth too fast, or too intensively. And if they really mess up, they might redistribute a lot of wealth (or a lot of debt in the case of Lehman). They give us little guys some chance to get our small cut. But over my lifetime, the average net flow has been away from the middle class in places like the US and Europe. I assume that it's been toward the big players. But that's a subject for further study as I said.

The concentration of wealth and the flows of wealth enabled by globalization and high-speed networking are things worth watching, by national policy makers acting together around the world. It is also worth watching by investors. Maybe they should learn more about their investments and actually vote their shares.

Mother Doesn't Live Here Anymore

In 1959, when I was a child, our family house looked like this:

Fifty years later, in 2009, when Mother died and we sold the place, it looked like this:

I guess my parents were inspired by the style of houses in Colonial Williamsburg. The two-story white houses with the green shutters, the old trees, and the hedges. Even their silverware was from Colonial Williamsburg, as was a pewter mug they had bought. Perhaps the look was out of place in our part of Appalachia, but we liked it, and the neighbors grew to like it, too, as they grew to like Mother.

Now it looks like this:

The giant old oak is gone from the front yard, as are the hedges, the eagle over the front door, and the green shutters.  Gone is the stone patio and fireplace that the owner previous to us built with one of his neighbors in back of the house. Gone, too are the stone walkways in the front yard, and the old-fashioned lamp post by the driveway. The rose Mother transplanted from her parents house when they died in the 1960s has been pulled out. No more Colonial Williamsburg. After more than half a century, the property looks more like it belongs to its Appalachian locale.

The neighbors, long-time family friends all, are taking some time to get used to it. Every time they look at it, it screams at them that Mother doesn't live here anymore.

To me, it looks as if we had never lived there. To me, it says that there comes a time for all of us when we can't go home again. And that, if we have the hubris to leave behind any monuments to our past, we had best not look back.

Now new children play in the yard, filling the place with with memories that will seem magical to them in years to come, because it will have been their childhood home.

A Message from Lance Armstrong

Your chance of getting cancer increases roughly as the third power of your age. It doesn't matter who you are, where you live, what you eat or drink. Cancer is rough to live with, and even rougher to die from. Whatever else you can say about Lance, he's serious about his campaign to beat cancer. Maybe you think he's a cheat. But at a time when his accusers say that everyone was cheating, that means the playing field was still level - the competition was still equalized. Whatever he did, it was below the level of detection, which is all any detection system can guarantee. I think he's a little bit crazy for living and training the way you have to live and train to win the Tour de France, year after year. And I think he's a hero, who made the journey from dying to winning. But I think he's a hero especially because of his Livestrong Foundation work. Now... what do I have to wear that's yellow?

The Next Christian Martyr?

The government of Iran is about to execute Youcef Nadarkharni for the crime of being a Christian Pastor in a Muslim country. If the mullahs go through with it, he will not be the first Christian martyr, not even in modern Iran, nor will he be the last. Unlike those jihadi-takfiris who murder themselves and as many others as they can find and pretend to be martyrs, we will witness Iranian clerics making a real martyr of a man for the simple reason that he is called to worship the same God as they, but in a different manner — the manner of a Christian.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide is monitoring the case. You can click here to help.

Update 10/1/2011: The Iranian government is changing their story. Now they claim they are going to execute him for the "security-related" crimes of rape and extortion, rather than the crimes of "turning his back on Islam," and "converting Muslims to Christianity," which were the only crimes mentioned in the court documents from his so-called trial. We note here that Mr. Nadarkhani claimed he was never a Muslim before he became a Christian. Look, the bloody-minded mullahs of Iran just want to kill this guy, never mind the precise charges. Kind of reminds you of the Crucifixion, doesn't it?

Update 10/3/2011: Now the Iranian government has added the charge of being a Zionist, which makes him a traitor to the government, one of the most serious charges that can be made against a person in Iran. They are getting really serious about killing this person, this husband, this father. You can tell by the way they are trying to make themselves feel good about it. Where are the protests about this?

If the Iranian government executes Youcef Nararkhani, then they will be cursed by the Blind Chihuahua even more so than they already are. Feel free to tell them so.

Happy New Year

This coming Thursday is Rosh HaShanah, the beginning of the New Year 5772 of the Hebrew Calendar. Yes, Jews, although never particularly numerous in comparison to many other peoples, have been around as long as civilization. Religious Jews believe themselves chosen by God to live according to God's commandments. Such special election does not imply that Jews think themselves better than anyone else, or entitled to special considerations from anyone else. It implies that Jews believe themselves to exist to keep God's commandments, and that God's promise to them is that as long as they keep God's commandments, they will continue to exist as a distinct people.

Keeping God's commandments can get complicated, because many of them were written down thousands of years ago in circumstances that no longer exist in this world. Therefore, keeping the commandments has become a matter of interpretation and debate, which has lasted for nearly two thousand years. The Talmud records several centuries of detailed discussion and commentary regarding how one can best live in fulfillment of God's commandments in a changing world.

But one of the commandments is to live in accord with God's commandments joyfully. So, Happy New Year, Shana Tova, everyone!

Should the UN recognize a Palestinian State?

How about a quid pro quo? How about requiring that the Palestinians and the other neighbors of Israel recognize Israel as a Jewish state? That is, until the Arab world recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, what is really being proposed is a "one state" solution...

Theodicy Part 3: God is Better than Perfect

In parts 1 and 2 we established that the Universe is such that we are free to live our lives without God, and that the Universe is self-consistent. These two related properties combine to allow us to make our way in the world, and to frustrate us into doing so.

I use the word "frustrate" in a specific sense. The late psychologist Donald Winnicott developed the concept of the "good-enough" mother — the ordinary, devoted mother, who creates a secure enough environment for her child, yet is not "perfect" from her child's point of view, because she can not or will not satisfy the child's every wish. This "frustrates" the child enough to begin trying to do things for itself, and to establish its own identity apart from its mother. In this sense, "good enough" beats "perfect" hands down. A child with a good enough mother becomes a functioning adult. A child with a perfect mother remains dependent all its life.

Perhaps the entire question of theodicy stems from God being imperfect from our point of view. We want God to take care of our every want or need, to guard us from every harm. We might regard that as perfect, but we would be less than human. All we would be capable of is wanting and needing. Under such circumstances, who among us would be capable of doing or creating, and who would want to? Perhaps God is "good enough" to let us have a little space and time to become ourselves, which means that God better than perfect.

Yes, the Universe is a rough place. But within the constraints of freedom from God and self-consistency, could you come up with a better one? To quote Bob Dylan, "The answer, my friend, is blown' in the wind" — as God speaks it from the whirlwind in the Book of Job, chapters 38 and 39, of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible.

Springtime for Cairo

A little ditty to commemorate the pogrom in Cairo, September 9, 2011:
Tune: Springtime for Hitler

The Arab Spring was having trouble, what a sad sad story
Needed some old scapegoats to bring it back to glory
Where, O where were they? And how to make them pay?
We looked around and then we found
The powers we must slay.
And now its ...

Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli,
Tunis is happy and gay
We know now just how we cannot lose
Go out, and burn out those dirty Jews!

Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli,
Winter for Jews and the West
Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli
Come on, Arabs, and give it your best

I was born in old Aswan, my hate for Jews goes on and on
Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Hamas party

Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli
Burn the embassy of Israel today
Tanks rolling on the sands again
Egypt is in good hands again

Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli
Jew-hate is flaring once more
Springtime for Cairo and Tripoli
Means that soon we'll be going
We've got to be going
You know we'll be going to war!

If this offends anyone, all I can say is, "Es tut mir Leid," which is German for, "I'm sorry." I don't mean to criticize Arabs generally. I do mean to recommend that the Arab Spring achieve freedom and dignity for Arabs (both Muslims and non-Muslims) without diminishing the freedom and dignity of anyone else.