Category Archives: Culture views

August 16, 2015 · 7:34 pm

Planned Desolation

“Now there’s a wall between us, somthin’ there’s been lost. I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed.” Shelter from the Storm from the Blood on the Tracks album, Bob Dylan

Josef Mengele, the banality of evil

Josef Mengele, the banality of evil

Documentation for the various studies was meticulous; the results held great potential to help people at risk. How long can a person survive hypothermia in a cold, cold sea? Can we develop new treatments for infection to aid the wounded by testing the new drugs on human subjects? What is the most cost effective method of high volume sterilization to reduce the propagation of lesser races? The good doctors’ tests were conducted in secure facilities with good logistics for rail service. At least for a while until Allied bombing destroyed the trains.

Especially desirable for the testing were young twins: compare the effects of deadly disease when the uninfected control in the experiment possesses the exact same DNA as the tested subject. Once the infected twin died, the doctors would kill them both because the comparative autopsies advanced the research.

“Because they ripped open expectant mothers in Gilead, while extending their territory, I will kindle a fire upon the wall of Rabbah, and it will devour her castles.” Amos 1: 13-14

The benefits of medical research were given this month as justification for collecting human specimens with bonuses paid for highly desirable organs.

The Center for Medical Progress secretly videotaped officials from Planned Parenthood over the last three years, and if you have not viewed them and have a strong stomach, they expose in gruesome detail the practices of America’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood[i]. These are not sociopathic outliers like Kenneth Gosnell, but directors of large districts like the Southern Pacific Region and Texas, as well as Senior Director of Medical Services, Deborah Nucatola, MD.

The undercover team, posing as parts buyers for medical research parts procurers, negotiated for specific fetal organs with bonuses for certain DNA or blood types. Parts included pancreases, lungs, livers, hearts, and eyeballs. Late term abortions were especially desirable. A la carte price schedule. To skirt the law, wholesale firms are on site which take possession of the organs and pay a fee for each. They in turn profit by selling them to research firms. The fees vary according to the rarity of the baby parts, blood and tissue types.

Abortion procedures are sometimes altered and discussed with the middleman, especially for larger fetuses. These procedures add risk of injury to the mothers, but are necessary to harvest intact cadavers. They are actually called cadavers by a Planned Parenthood negotiator; interesting term cadaver – not fetal tissue or protoplasm or medical waste, but a term normally reserved for a dead human being, which, of course, they are. Mothers who are pain tolerant and can endure wider dilation are valued for their ability to birth live, intact babies to provide the most lucrative organs. In many cases, mothers are not informed as to the disposition of their baby’s corpses even though Planned Parenthood tells the public they are.

Late term abortions in some states are illegal. Selling body parts and so called partial birth abortions are illegal in all jurisdictions, but produce the healthiest, most complete harvestable parts. Working around these restrictions is carefully done, but with these damning videos, not carefully enough. Some states have initiated investigations and shut down funding for Planned Parenthood, but not all. The U.S. Senate blocked an attempt to pull federal funding entirely, but this battle is far from over.

When we wrote our local officials asking for an investigation, some stonewalled and others answered back, parroting Planned Parenthood talking points: they make no profit by these practices; fetal research benefits medical science; if funding was pulled, access to women’s health care would be damaged beyond repair; the videos were edited. Policy setters (including President Obama) refuse to watch them; truth, apparently cuts too close to the bone. PP spends millions over the years on lobbying and political donations. Please watch these videos and make your own judgment as to whether statements by senior Planned Parenthood officials could be in any way mitigated by context, and the full videos are made available start to finish. Six of twelve have been released by the Center for Medical Progress. Link to videos.

“Is it not your duty to know what is right, you who hate what is good, and love evil? You who tear their skin from them, and their flesh from the bones!.. They chop them in pieces like flesh in a kettle, and like meat in a cauldron.” Micah 3: 1-3

Cecile Richards at Democrat National Convention 2012

Cecile Richards at Democrat National Convention 2012

Numbers can be revealing, here are a few to gain a sense of the real facts behind the health care scare scam proffered by the Planned Parenthood apologists.

  • Planned Parenthood claims that abortion constitutes only 3% of their services (327,000 out of ten million), but it is necessary to look under the hood. Their method of counting services is weighted. If they see a patient for a PAP smear, a pregnancy check and write a prescription of twelve months of birth control pills, it is counted as 14 services (one each for every month of the prescription). If the count is kept only for pregnant women who come in, 93% of them walk out without their baby still on board. A minor percentage gets other help or adoption services, if they push for it. Abortions are a third of their revenue, and another third comes from public funding. The abortions provide another source of revenue: baby parts for sale.
  • The sale of fetal body parts is not a new practice for Planned Parenthood. The ABC news magazine 20/20 exposed the practice over fifteen years ago, when Chris Wallace ran the story. However, like the current videos, the major news organizations, with the exception of Fox, are spending very little time on this story. It is suppressed by the parent organizations which have alliances with and ideological sympathy for Planned Parenthood and abortion.[ii]
  • While its defenders try to convince us that no public funds pay for abortions directly, taxpayer funds pay the bills, help keep the lights on and help pay the inflated salaries of the administrators, many of whom are non-medical people. One hundred and thirty seven of them make over a hundred thousand dollars a year. Its CEO, the now beleaguered Cecile Richards, made $523,616 in 2013. She looks good in sound bites though; non-profit work for PP pays well.
  • The claims that women’s health care would be negatively affected if public funds are withdrawn from PP are grossly misleading. There are approximately 700 Planned Parenthood clinics (abortion assembly lines) in the U.S, while 9,000 community health care centers provide women’s health care. Planned Parenthood serves 2.7 million patients a year; community health care centers over 21 million.
  • Planned Parenthood warns that breasts would be at risk without their clinics. However, they do only referrals for mammograms and zero actual mammograms a year. Community health care centers do 424,000. Planned Parenthood performs 378,000 PAP smear tests; community health centers 1,758,000. Women’s health care services would be far better served with increased taxpayer funding for community health care centers.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologica, “Properly speaking conscience is not a power, but an act.” When evil is perceived, we are required to respond. We can do that politically. We can show up at our local PP clinic on August 22nd at 9 AM. At the least be prepared by being informed about the facts when the discussion comes up.

One of the videos shows the grotesque picking over of baby parts in a tray looking for prized tissues. The pictures are your worst nightmare of tiny hearts, crushed heads and little hands. The searchers were excited because the tray holds dismembered twins, which like the German World War II researchers in the death camps, were found to be of particular value.

“The most deadly poison of our time is indifference.” St. Maximillian Kolbe [iii]

 

[i] See previous post about the genesis of Planned Parenthood. Maggie Part 2.

[ii] See Crisis Magazine article on this. “Why News Organizations Protect Planned Parenthood.”

[iii][iii] Father Kolbe died in Auschwitz after volunteering to take the place of another prisoner, who was a Jewish father with a family.

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June 22, 2015 · 10:34 pm

Population Bomb Defused

zpg“Sometime in the next fifteen years the end will come. By the end I mean the utter breakdown of the planet’s capacity to support humanity.” Dr. Paul Erlich, 1970

In 1973 before we moved to Maine, we lived in a two bedroom cottage on Mashnee Island where the Cape Cod Canal connected to the bay. One of my contractor customers was a locked down, fit, good looking guy with a locked down, fit, good looking wife and no children. He invited me back to his house to review some upcoming house building plans in his home office one afternoon. When I went in, he offered me some coffee and a half hour of pacing and proselytizing on his zealous organization, Zero Population Growth, for which he was the head of the Cape Cod chapter, one of 600 chapters. ZPG’s ideas rapidly gained ascendency due to Paul Erlich’s best seller, Population Bomb. Dr. Erlich, a Stanford professor of ecology and demographics, developed mathematical models of population growth that foretold of doomsday: the earth is running out of food, mass starvation, riots and complete social breakdown. His solution was population control, voluntary if possible, but government enforced if necessary. His “wisdom,” while radical in the late sixties and early seventies became mainstream and deeply inculcated in our culture. As we have seen again in the climate change debate, elaborate computer models aren’t always predictive. What was neglected in his models was the human capacity to adapt, to learn, and developments like the “green revolution” in India that multiplied our ability to feed and house the growing population. Imperfect solutions, but adjusting constantly to new reality.

My customer thrust on me with messianic fervor a copy of Erlich’s book. At a certain age, we are all convinced that the world is coming to an end, ignorant humans are the cause, and that we and likeminded cognoscenti are privy to its deprivations and must all rally to radical solutions. Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Chairman Mao, Voltaire, Adolph Hitler, even such as Margaret Sanger[i] and Peter Singer—so many similar true believers in that desperate parade—were convinced and convincing that they possessed the truth. The detritus of their error was death. Dr. Erlich delivered his version. Whether his inaccuracies were mistakes, bad computer modeling or lies to bolster an agenda, I’ll leave to others.

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” “Sometimes history needs a push.” Vladimir Lenin

Recent articles reminded me of Erlich’s past. The New York Times published “The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion” about the radical drop in birth rate to below replacement levels in many countries that threatens their culture and sustainability, citing Erlich’s work as an example of science gone wrong. Erlich was the darling of the media in the early seventies; movies like ZPG and Solvent Green were made. A frequent guest of Johnny Carson, he was often hailed as gospel by liberal media giants like Walter Cronkite and Howard K. Smith. He told Johnny to bet big that England wouldn’t exist by the year 2000. The world was headed for catastrophic uncontrolled population growth. Erlich recommended coercive birth control if voluntary good sense didn’t prevail. He advocated doing away with tax deductions for children and punitive luxury taxes on diapers, baby furniture and formula with public shaming of any mother birthing more than two children. India initiated mandatory sterilizations, and eight million women had their tubes tied against their will in hellish assembly line “clinics.” China initiated a one child policy with forced abortions and job loss, eviction from homes or jail time for violators. Much of Western Europe stopped having babies; so did we. ZPG put out scary videos of mobs of people wearing gas masks to enable breathing while immersed in polluted air caused by populations living like rats in a box.

The birth rate plummeted in many nations, including our own. We are now faced with rapidly aging populations, birth rates below the 2.1 minimum necessary to sustain an economy or take care of its own; some are calling what has befallen us a “demographic winter.”

“Children bring life, joy, hope, also trouble, but life is like this…However, it’s better to have a society with these worries and problems than a sad and grey society because it has remained without children.” Pope Francis, General Audience 3/18/15

The same media that parroted Erlich’s earlier errors still shills for him. He acknowledges that his time line was a bit off—England still exists after all, smug smile—but he contends that anthropogenic climate change, the toxins of ocean pollution and escalating species extinction support his earlier theory. After all, he intones in that affected condescension only an academic darling can perfect, “time for an ecologist is different” from that of the uninformed.

While MSNBC is delighted that a pope has finally seen the light as published this week in Pope Francis’s encyclical “Laudato Si’,” they neglect to report some of the document’s other conclusions that solutions to environmental challenges lie as well in our individual and local decisions about overconsumption, compassion in daily practice and sharing, perhaps more than in massive Al Gore like government power interventions that engender more disruption and human misery than they alleviate.

Some lessons for me are these. We do need to consider the impact of our daily life decisions, and while the scientists continue to work out their data, their models and their recommendations, each of us each day can begin right now, where we are to do our part. Erlich’s polemics praising small families and childlessness contributed to the fuel of the so named “sexual revolution,” with all its social ramifications of commitment phobia, single parent families and renegade male irresponsibility; it’s all of a piece. And that the generosity requisite for good child bearing and child rearing, if atrophying in our collective lives, is exactly the generous spirit we need to tamp down our personal avarice, our consumption and our reluctance to share our planet’s resources and in its future.[ii]

“If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.” Wilbur Wright, from “The Wright Brothers,” David McCullough[iii]

[i] See prior two part blog posts on Sanger’s handiwork and life. Maggie

[ii] As quoted by Regis Martin in Crisis Magazine, Ross Douthat wrote in a 2012 NY Times piece, our “’retreat from child rearing, is at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion,’ a condition of ‘decadence,’ he calls it, evoking a ‘spirit that privileges the present over the future.’”

[iii] While not his best book, Mr. McCullough at 81 may have lost some velocity off his fastball, but he still has all his pitches. Well worth your time.

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March 8, 2015 · 8:23 pm

Abert Squirrels, Ponderosa Pine and the Mysteries of the Planet

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” “Essays on Conservation from Round River” Aldo Leopold.

IMG_0333During our recent stay in Flagstaff, Arizona, we were entertained through the window at breakfast by Abert squirrels feeding on the cones of the Ponderosa pines scattered throughout the grounds of the hotel.  Curious creatures, they are quite different from our New England gray squirrel and are primarily found on the Colorado Plateau in the Southwest with tasseled ears and eating pine cones like corn on the cob to get to the seeds. Their obvious attraction for the pines (I’m used to squirrels and oaks, not pine trees) prompted a little research, first to identify them, then to learn a bit about them. From spring to fall, Aberts feed on the tender phloem (inner bark) of the pine twigs; they chew around the bark, exposing the treat.  When they are finished, the twigs fall to the ground, providing fodder for mule deer, normally too high for deer to reach without a squirrel assist.  In the winter, Ponderosa cones are the main source of Abert food, since they don’t store acorns or hibernate, eat they must.

A single squirrel tends to return to one tree year after year and can cause defoliation. Abert squirrels eat almost exclusively Ponderosa pine shoots and cones, but they provide a great benefit to them through a cooperating third party, ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi.  EM fungi strands act as extensions of Ponderosa pine roots; they are a vital component of those forests, helping trees draw water, nitrogen, phosphorous and other nutrients into the roots.  In turn the fungus obtains needed carbohydrates from the tree.  A secondary source of food for Abert squirrels is the fruiting body of EM fungi. Passing through the squirrel, the spores survive, spreading the fungi crucial to other Ponderosa’s existence. So the next time someone tells you that someone else is as useless as squirrel poop, you now have a rebuttal. This three way symbiosis is another of nature’s wonders.  Many examples of inextricably entwined animal to plant or plant to plant cooperatives are indispensable to the varied ecosystems that make up our planet’s living things. Abert squirrels aren’t just cute; they are metaphors for the complexity and dynamic interdependence so essential to the survival of all life here.

“No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.” “Essays on Conservation from Round River” Aldo Leopold.

Beside our main objective, the Grand Canyon, we took some side trips from Flagstaff. One was to Walnut Creek Canyon with its pueblos occupied, then abandoned a thousand years ago by the Sinagua, a pre-Columbian people who flourished from approximately 700 AD to 1500 AD. A Western branch of the Anasazi people, they contributed to the genetic and cultural make up of modern day Hopi.  Their name for themselves is still lost, but anthropologists named them “Sinagua,” Spanish for “without water.”

IMG_0260Walnut Creek Canyon is a National Monument located less than fifteen minutes from downtown Flagstaff.  Approximately 600’ deep, its rim is at around 6,700’ elevation. Ponderosa pines along with our Abert squirrels are abundant along the rim.  A Douglas fir ecosystem is on the northern shaded slopes of the canyon; directly opposite on the sunny southern slopes is a completely different ecosystem typical of the high desert with prickly pear cactus, other cacti and yucca plants.  In its shady depths, near the creek are Arizona black walnut trees, for which the canyon is named.  Over twenty species of edible plants are there besides the yucca, walnut and prickly pear cactus, including wild grape and elderberry. The contrast of the shady and sunny sides of the canyon is startling.

Up on the rim, the Sinagua hunted deer, big horn sheep and smaller animals.  They learned to construct dry farming flood pits in which they grew maize corn, beans and squash, the three sisters of Native American agriculture. The biodiversity of the canyon provided them food, medicine and abundant building materials, with our old friend Ponderosa pine supplying perfect ladder and beam stock.  The Sinagua got by on about a gallon of water per person per day. We modern day Americans use about 150 gallons a day for all our purposes.

We have become remote from our planet, its complexity, its beauty, its wonder, its remarkable life, and with that remoteness given away something precious to our understanding of who we are.  Aldo Leopold wrote, “Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim.”

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.  It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.”  “Essays on Conservation from Round River” Aldo Leopold.

My friend Matthew gave me a transcription of Pope Francis’ general audience on World Environment Day in June, 2013. (Link to whole document).  ”Cultivating and caring for creation is an instruction of God which He gave not only at the beginning of history, but has also given to each one of us.”  He said that “cultivating and caring” for the earth entailed not only the relationship between man and creation, but to human relations as well – a human ecology.  Francis warns that the environment and other persons suffer when we heedlessly acquire in a “culture of waste,” sacrificed to the idols of consumption. His advice is concrete, achievable by all of us at an intimate level.  What do we eat?  What do we consume?  What do we waste?  What are our idols?

Pope Francis advises us to affect what we can in our daily lives and decisions.  Not a counsel of pompous self righteousness which can infect the “environmental” community; not a proud self aggrandizement, counting ourselves as enlightened and condemning others: businesses, governments, the rich, but possessing a calm confidence in doing the right thing each day:  achievable beginning immediately, human and personal. This does not mean we don’t strive to understand, to address and to improve local and even global issues, but that we start with today, with ourselves and with our families.

I’m not suggesting we revert to subsistence hunter gatherers, only that each of us more frequently simply goes for walks, if not in wild places, at least in the forest, along streams and the ocean, grows some things in our gardens so that we don’t come to believe that the only source of our food is at Whole Foods, and in those quiet pursuits, think about our origins, our journey and our purpose.           

“The wilderness will lead you to the place where I will speak.” Hosea (Come Back to Me), Gregory Norbet

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February 1, 2015 · 7:41 pm

Shibboleths

Vulnerability and persistence

Vulnerability and persistence

The origin of the word “”shibboleth” is from the Hebrew meaning the part of the plant containing grain, like the ear of corn.  In a Bible story the Gileadites used the word to identify the Ephraimites, who couldn’t manage the “sh” sound.  Midwesterners today detect us New Englanders by our inability to get our “r”s in the right place, sometimes substituting “h”s, making it difficult to discuss parking the car or wearing shorts without inviting ridicule.  Or upon hearing “irregardless”, we identify those who paid insufficient attention to Miss Flynn in eighth grade grammar classes.

We tag whole groups of people (and situate ourselves in fixed categories) by our choices of words. If a new acquaintance frequents the phrases “global warming” and “we need carbon credit swaps,” we intuit a quick picture and change the subject.  No rational discussion about the record setting ice depth in Antarctica will follow. A polar divide separates us.  If one person in temporary grouping at a party starts in on “gun control” and “banning automatic weapons,” while another stakes out “Second Amendment rights,” it may be time to refresh our glass at the bar. When a condescending scientism true believer comes down on some dinner companions as blind Creationist fools if they question in any way unfettered Darwinism or simply ask ‘how did all this come about ex nihilo with no First Cause?,’ the conversation is not going to get enlightening or productive anytime soon.

“Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”  G.K. Chesterton

Nowhere is the conservative/progressive divide less amenable to be bridged than between the semantics of “reproductive rights” or “death with dignity” and “the right to life of human persons from conception to natural death.”  Last week four old friends gathered for lunch; we had worked together for over twenty years in what for me was now five companies ago.  If the volatile housing market and the credit crisis of the early nineties had not intervened, I would be more than content to be working side by side with all of them still.  Two are running companies in my industry, and the third (and proximate cause of the gathering) is retired and recently recovered from a serious illness.  While enjoying a post lunch coffee, the conversation turned (as it occasionally had in the past) to this unbridgeable pro-abortion rights – prolife gap.  Yet with intelligent companions of good will, a civil, yet spirited conversation ensued among men who really like and respect each other.

Since this is my blog (let them make their own), please bear with the debate from my side of the chasm.  I espoused only secular and scientific argument.  If sacred scripture was allowed in and accepted at face value, there is no debate; those documents are clear and consistent in this regard.  Rather than get sidetracked into Christian apologetics, although ultimately they are more ultimate, we stuck to common, mostly agreed upon ground.

We agreed that at conception this new entity contained within herself all the genetic information necessary to distinguish her from all other human beings, a unique creature, human in nature, who was differentiated from all others and needed only time, nutrition and oxygen to mature.  This is merely science, and no biologist, geneticist or embryologist could disagree.

Then we diverged.

Is one reasonable measuring rod of the humaneness and moral character of a culture its ability to protect the vulnerable, the innocent who cannot protect themselves?  And if so, how are we doing, when we kill over a million of them a year just in our country?  Is that a metric that speaks well of us?  Can we do any better than that?

What about the humanity and rights of the woman, and her ability to choose whether she will bear a child?  I respond that I resent the pro-choice label bestowed only to those who favor abortion.  I am very pro-choice myself, however our choices are narrowed once an innocent and helpless third party is subject to those choices, and the tiny one has no choice.  I think the choice for the mother comes much earlier.  Leaving rape aside as a miniscule percentage of causes of abortion, even the case for saving the lives of women from back alley, illicit abortions pre Roe v. Wade, is weak.  Due to their much higher frequency more women die each year from legal abortion complications than ever died of illegal ones.

Well of course it’s killing, says my most honest friend, but they are not citizens, and therefore not entitled to the protections of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The woman is a citizen and therefore has more rights. Then why have attorneys been appointed by the court to protect the inheritance rights of fetuses, if they are not to enjoy at least some of the rights of other citizens?

“The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion..”  “The Principles of Psychology,” William James, 1890

Clearly the only pertinent and insistent question is this: is the pre born child (or fetus, so we don’t write the conclusion into the premise), a human being? What is the unborn? The answer to this leads inexorably to the immorality or morality of killing it.  What then are those distinguishing characteristics which differentiate the fetus from the citizen, the fully functioning human person with the attendant dignity and worth of a human person, which must be protected by a moral society?  Can we agree on four?[i]

  1. Size. Does Vince Wilfort or Lebron James have more rights and deserve more protection than an adolescent or a 4’11” woman? Or an adolescent more consideration for their lives than an infant?
  2. Level of Development. Does an educated professional have more rights and deserve more protection than an elementary school student or a potty training toddler? Would the torture and murder of a two year old be tolerated by a humane society? If not, why is a less developed pre born fair game?
  3. Environment. (in the womb or out of it). Is the astronaut or submariner, who requires for their every moment the constant protection of a temporarily borrowed and necessary environment outside of themselves, a lower form of human, subject to the choice of her superior whether she lives or dies?
  4. Dependency. Is the person who requires weekly dialysis or the person who requires a respirator or the person under anesthesia and on a heart lung machine during surgery less human than the doctors and nurses providing the care?

The answers to these questions establish the nature and humanity of the unborn.  And the one question that transcends all others in this discussion remains:  What is the unborn?  How we answer that defines our humanity and the humanity of our culture.

The fourth friend, an educated, thoughtful man I have known for over forty years finally joined the conversation.  I was not sure of his position during the debate, but at the end, he answered all the questions, it seems to me.  “I can’t say with certainty when human life begins.  Given the stakes, doesn’t that make it all the more urgent, that we err on the side of caution?”   Just so, my friend, just so.

 “I will give thanks to You for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.. You formed my inward parts. You wove me in my mother’s womb” Psalm 139”

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.  Before you were born, I set you apart.”  Jeremiah 1:5

 

[i] Thanks to Scott Klusendorf and his excellent pamphlet on this topic, which I whole heartedly recommend,  “Pro-Life 101” Stand to Reason Press, 2002

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October 19, 2014 · 7:31 pm

Gentrification and Generosity

brownstonesWhen I was a young inside sales coordinator at the Gerrity Company millwork location in Boston, one of the outside reps we supported, let’s call him Finn to avoid defamation, possessed all the confidence and mostly inoffensive hubris of someone raised to privilege in an exclusive suburb like Sherborn, Dover, Hingham or Manchester by the Sea. Not that Finn had amassed a fortune, yet, just that he expected to, was born to it, was entitled to it.  He was funny, likable, irreverent, and disparaging about his customers when they weren’t in earshot.

Bespectacled and bright, Finn was seen seldom without a coffee cup the size of a beer stein. Well caffeinated, Finn would burn through the office from time to time and light up the phone lines with incessant emergencies because the details, while not beyond him intellectually, were not worth his time or planning until they became a crisis of six carpenters idling a jobsite without the correct materials to do their jobs.  The crisis was predictably visited upon the staff of the lumberyard or door shop to remedy – the fabricators, load pullers, dispatchers and truck drivers.  Finn would assure his customers that the dim lights of his support would get it right next time because he would set them straight.

He once went on vacation and put his home phone on call forwarding for his customers – to a Dial-a-Prayer recording, where the desperate, out of stock customer would be driven into frenzy with a daily pseudo spiritual bromide. They were not amused, and neither was the unfortunate inside sales coordinator who caught the next call the customer made.  Meanwhile Finn could entertain himself and his cocktail guests on the fantail recounting his cleverness.

Finn did eventually make his fortune, hard wired as he was into the realty and construction community. He bought cheap, renovated cheap and sold dearly the old brownstones and triple deckers in neighborhoods like South Boston, hitting the wave of gentrification before it crested and broke over the heads of late comers.  The mechanics, warehouse workers and city maintenance worker children of multi generation Southie families soon found it impossible to buy near the homes of their parents and grandparents.  They wound up renting in places like Mattapan or Dorchester until they too were discovered by developers, house flippers and those enamored of newly fashionable places to live.

Finn retired in his late forties, as was his self assigned due, and sailed off to Tahiti and other exotic climes for a three or four year tour.

“Living in this gentrification environment is much more difficult for residents. Actually, what they’re doing is killing the indigenous culture.” Finn Kwong, The New Chinatown, 1987

Not all gentrification is exploitation and displacement. When the artistic community moves into garret apartments with good light in old warehouses, establishing a beachhead among crack houses, discount prostitution, steel curtained convenience stores with a weekly robbery, boarded up apartments, gang tag graffiti on every vertical surface, and nightly drive by shootings, it’s not all bad.  Celebrity and youthful trendy enterprises follow; attracting fashionable small restaurants with good wine lists, art galleries and six dollar lattes, then like the first class sleepers at the end of the train comes seven figure roof top garden penthouses with views of distant harbors.  The downside is thereafter the artists can’t afford the neighborhood or the ambiance.

The city planners are elated to rid themselves of a crime infested, blighted section generating ugly headlines, raise the property values and collect more taxes to fund the profligacy of their bleeding budgets, which leads somewhat circuitously to the point.

“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation is slow, laborious and dull.”  Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative, 2014 (quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Notable and Quotable)

Standard progressive rhetoric is that they hold the moral high ground, especially regarding the poor and disadvantaged, however the specifics give the lie to the jargon. The progressive is conditioned to the government solving the problems, curing the cultural ills and buffering direct exposure to the unwashed through public funding.  Not all progressives, to be sure, the best work in the trenches, but in my experience, the comfortable, guilt ridden majority would prefer the state to provide the remedies.  Decrying the lack of resources for the poor, the panacea is to hire the well paid experts, pay for them through the “leaky conduit” of government bureaucracy and hike taxes to cover it all.

The majority of conservatives are neither wealthy nor real estate developers; they are hands on, work hard and create economic growth. They are also generous with those upon whom fortune has not shown as brightly.  In a recent study by “The Chronicle of Philanthropy” [i]some clear trends are shown:  progressive state residents give less to charitable organizations as a percentage of their gross income, conservative states give more.  Similarly there is a strong correlation of generosity in states with a high percentage of religious voters.  The truly wealthy give less than they used to (as a percentage), and the middle class and working class have stepped up their much more painful giving.  The middle class gives until it hurts and drives older cars, cuts coupons and shares of their more meager resources.  The rich buy neighborhoods to flip, hobby ranches, million dollar urban pied-à-terres and Ferraris. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and those closest to the poor on the income spectrum are more ready to help.

Of the top seventeen states whose residents give the highest percentage of their income to charity, all voted for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.[ii] Utah, Mississippi and Alabama lead the way; the lowest seven on the list are all Obama blue states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire.  Utah residents give 6.56% on average of their gross income; Connecticut tops the bottom dwellers at 2.34%, and the others range down to a miserly 1.74%.  The progressive will be happy to fund the social state and wax proudly about the social contract, but pulls up lame by the numbers when it comes to hands on giving.

“In every circumstance and in all things I have learned the secret of being well fed and of going hungry, of living in abundance and of being in need. I can do all things in him who strengthens me. Still, it was kind of you to share in my distress.” St. Paul’s letter to the church at Phillipi

[i] See “How America Gives”  http://philanthropy.com/section/How-America-Gives/621/

[ii] See the table from the article:  http://philanthropy.com/article/How-States-CompareHow/149169/

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September 29, 2014 · 7:28 pm

Beyond Singularity

“Jake Spoon is a mighty leaky vessel to put all your hopes in.” – Gus McCrae, “Lonesome Dove”, Larry McMurtry

In the most recent quovadisblog.net post, we explored however briefly the future according to futurist Ray Kurzweil: the era when man and machine will be inextricably fused into one creature, eternal, omniscient and beyond time and space. A blog post can cover barely a brush by analysis of the roots of this prophesy of the goal of human existence. “Singularity,” a beatific vision of the faith of scientism, is a mighty leaky vessel to put all your hopes in.

How we got here is complicated, but some understanding of the journey which discarded nearly two millennia of human wisdom is worth a word or two.

“This (the abandonment of much of Socratic/Aristotelian thought), though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated through the world.” W.T. Stace “Man against Darkness,” The Atlantic (Sept, 1948) as quoted in Leo Sweeney, S.J., “Authentic Metaphysics in an Age of Unreality,” as quoted in “The Last Superstition, A Refutation of the New Atheism,” Edward Feser, 2008

AristotleFor roughly eighteen centuries, the lodestone of Western thought was Aristotle. Before Christianity, before Mohammed, before the Roman Empire, Greek philosophy was true north for all else that was to follow. Until the “Enlightenment,” which wasn’t all light, metaphysics and the search for human wisdom and truth in Western culture relied on principles of natural law and some would say common sense well thought out. What we now deem “science,” and for many the only valid arbiter of truth, was an important, but contracted, aspect of man’s search for truth. All science is based on metaphysical assumptions and precepts. The metaphysical enclosed the hard sciences as a portion, but not the whole.

Aristotle posited that all things have four causes. The first is its material cause: the stuff out of which anything is made (be it wood, iron, chlorophyll, cells, etc.). The formal cause adds the form, structure or pattern which the material assumes and is of a kind that distinguishes it from other things made of the same stuff – be they humans and poodles or countertops and the Pieta. The formal cause exists outside of the thing, separate from it and is congruent with the same form that exists in our minds so that we recognize it. The third attribute is the efficient cause or that which brings a thing into being from exploding stars creating elements to a whittler’s knife carving images – it is what causes a thing to move from potentiality to actuality. Things must have the innate potential to become; and something must act upon them to realize that potential. Finally there is the final cause – that for which something exists, its purpose, its why.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. “Lucky is he who has been able to understand the causes of things,” Virgil, Georgics, Book 2

For Thomas Aquinas, the human person’s formal cause is the soul, which exists beyond space and time; for Aristotle, mankind’s final cause as a “rational animal” is to know the truth, a truth both objective and within our mortal limits, attainable. Beginning slowly with Hume, Locke, Hobbes and the like, modern philosophy disavowed both formal and final causes. We find ourselves on the other side of Neitzsche, Sartre, and now Dawkins and Hitchens and are entangled in webs of relativism, skepticism and purposelessness. [i] Scientism offers us a “leaky vessel” way out, a “hope” rooted in hubris. A mutually exclusive dichotomy now assumed between science and religion was not always so, is erroneous and is not necessary.

Just as the eye was made to see colors, and the ear to hear sounds, so the human mind was made to understand. From “Astronomi Opera Omnia” Johannes Kepler

Science is not scientism; science is an objective search for a limited truth attainable by experimentation and careful observation. Science is agnostic to ultimate purpose or final causes. There is no inherent conflict with faith, but science cannot sound the depths of before time and space. First, science and modern philosophy do not recognize the existence of final causes; secondly they do not possess the means to evaluate them. It is not “faith or reason” that brings us to the fullness of understanding, but “faith and reason” – Fides et Ratio. Scientism is not science; scientism is a faith – a faith not in God, but in “not God.” As in all faiths, there are underlying tenets of that faith that can neither be proven absolutely or refuted absolutely. One can only judge the fruits of it.

Yet the positive results achieved (from pure reason and its handmaid, science) must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them. Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all. It has happened therefore that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned. Fides et Ratio, 1998 encyclical, Saint John Paul.

Here is an example that may help clarify how it works. Many years ago the Jesuits at Boston College tried to teach me logic, epistemology and other arcane subjects that at the time seemed completely irrelevant to the real world. Pearls cast to swine (or sophomores), I suppose. Of course what they were trying to do was teach me to think; they tried with limited success to inculcate into me a disciplined mind. Perhaps these many decades later to their credit, a few lessons stuck. Among the many examples of logical fallacy we learned was circular reasoning, wherein the preordained conclusion of an argument is baked into the premises to deliver stillborn real debate and analysis.

One such banal argument from the atheist goes like this: Since you benighted theists insist that your God is all good and all powerful and all loving, why is there still evil in the world? Hah! Take that! There is no God! Christian theology replies with an eternal Love, a Person, whose “ways are not our ways”, and of the free will inherent to the human person, free even to choose evil, but free will necessary to the nature of the dignity and worth of a free person. It also teaches of the mystery of suffering and redemptive suffering revealed by God as also necessary to the human person in some way not fully fathomable within our mortal coil, but exemplified and made of inestimable value by Jesus. These and other aspects of this most difficult subject require not only a lifetime of study and understanding, but more importantly prayer, reflection and relationship with God through Jesus. [ii]

But if the discussion is shut down with a trite aphorism with the unstated premise that there is not really any God that can shed light on darkness, but if there was, He could not be all powerful and all good and all knowing and permit evil, therefore He doesn’t exist, the argument reveals itself to be, “there is no God, therefore, there is no God.”

When the true believers of scientism draw their conclusions, they mask as scientific, rational and objective that which was preordained in its premises.

Perhaps there is no God; perhaps God is a Divine Watchmaker who set in motion the laws of the universe and left the premises; perhaps the “Irreducible complexity” debate of the Intelligent Design advocates is really another “god of the gaps” syllogism in a new guise. But perhaps, just perhaps, that as the Jesuits taught me our souls are eternal, as is God, and that we exist on this beleaguered planet, which rides within our solar system, our galaxy and our universe with all of them constantly and intimately enfolded within the Mind of God, utterly dependent for each moment on that Loving Mind.

“I assure you, my brothers, that even to this day it is clear to some that the words which Jesus speaks are spirit and life, and for this reason they follow Him. To others these words seem hard, and so they look elsewhere for some pathetic consolation.” St. Bernard, abbot

[i] For a good analysis of the etiology of the current brand of popular atheism and its convoluted path from the Enlightenment to modernity, try “The Last Superstition, A Refutation of the New Atheism,” Edward Feser, 2008 St. Augustine’s Press.

[ii] See C.S. Lewis “The Problem of Pain”

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August 10, 2014 · 10:27 pm

Singularity

“Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence. His intriguing new book envisions a future in which information technologies have advanced so far and fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations – transforming our lives in ways we can’t imagine yet.” Bill Gates

Every week it seems business and culture news emerges about the “internet of things.” Our daily lives produce data, and these metadata are tracked, compiled and used to predict, make more comfortable, market to us and filter what we see, hear and experience on the web. Not just tailoring our internet searches to what the search engine “thinks” we want to know, but analyzing key words in our emails and where we linger on the web to “ascertain” through artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms what interests us. Then putting us in touch with our patterns, selling us stuff and fashioning the right box into which we fit – a Procrustean bed. Software is being generated to enhance the sluggish “key words” analysis and advance to concepts and thoughts, something in which computers have not yet surpassed us in ability. They have long since passed us in sheer computing power, speed and memory. Next generation AI software brings intuition and those types of “thinking without thinking” formerly uniquely human judgments written about in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink.” Computers are learning to learn and replicate on their own. We are evermore typecast and channeled, aided and abetted into what is profitable financially or politically for someone.

Our smart phones, tablets, computers are joined by our medical records, cars, alarm systems, baby monitors, refrigerators, dish washers, furniture and soon our carpets, toothbrushes, and for all we know toilet seats will feed the maw of data about us. The cloud will know all.

Our rugs will inform us (and the cloud) how often we walk across them, whether we have fallen down and can’t get up, if an unknown walker treads softly upon them or perhaps if we get romantic in front of our fireplace and how long we persist at it. We will go from our smart home to our driverless car, and it will take us door to door.

If we thought the NSA was intrusive, we are desperately naïve. And this is just getting started.

“I would say humans are not purely biological. We’ve already expanded humanity with our technology, and the technology is part of humanity; we are the technology.” Ray Kurzweil

Dr. Kurzweil reflects the hopes of many of those whose belief system is exclusively “scientism,” which holds that science, the scientific method and mathematical reasoning is the only true arbiter of truth and in which we will find humankind’s salvation. The irony of this worldview is while such true scientism believers deride metaphysics, the concepts upon which all of science rests are metaphysical in nature. [i] Scientism is an alternate religion.

He envisions nanobots in our brain, hooked up directly into the cloud. No more fingers on keyboards and mouse to search the internet for knowledge. Our thoughts and memories will access the cloud immediately; we will be one with the cloud, and the cloud will be one with us. He coined the term “Singularity” for this, and his eponymous book ten years ago predicted this state of oneness with computers is not three, two or even one hundred years ahead in science fiction. 2045 is his date for “achieving” singularity. [ii]

Our children and grandchildren will see this, according to the futurist, perhaps even ourselves if we stay healthy and achieve the second aspect of his prediction. All human body parts will be repairable or replaceable with genetic manipulation and perfectly cloned parts from our own DNA, so our brains will become part of the cloud, and our bodies will take on immortality. Millions of car recalls, the roll out of the Affordable Care Act, just my recent experience in figuring out how our new dishwasher worked come to mind. Singularity? What could go wrong?

“And what would they be scared of? There’s nothing to fear in a perfect world, is there?” Catherine Fisher (Welsh author and poet)

Much dystopian science fiction has described computers and robots gradually assuming more and more of our daily lives, then assuming everything. From 2001’s nemesis computer HAL killing the astronauts to Isaac Asimov’s super central computer controlling all in “I Robot” it gets worse. The three rules proscribing that a robot may not harm and must protect any human being broke down. In the Terminator movies, Skybot makes the decision that human kind is a virus on the planet and unleashes genocidal warfare upon us.

I have no mouth and I must screamPerhaps the most awful end for us “hairless apes” is found in Harlan Ellison’s short story from the sixties, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” The world’s computers hook up into one all encompassing web, wipe out all humans, but keep four around to torture. “AM” reads their thoughts and intention, controls not only their environment, but their biology – AM can keep them alive for its amusement with freshly minted organs virtually forever. After the protagonist, Ted, carefully avoids actively thinking of his “solution,” in a lightning strike frees his companions by killing them. AM transforms him into a limbless blob with no mouth and no ability for even suicide. The final line of the story is its title.

“Why do you ask how you were created and do not seek to know why you were made?” St. Peter Chrysologus

The modest objective of the self congratulatory and elated “Singularity” variety of science and technology is to supplant completely what was formerly reserved to religion and understood through the study of metaphysics. The technocrats will define and implement our happiness, immortality, omnipotence and fulfillment through becoming one with our machines.

How we got here is a topic which will require more than a few blog posts to begin to explore, and perhaps we shall root around a bit. The history extends back not just into the technology of the late nineteenth century through today, but to late medieval philosophers like William of Ockham, then on through Descartes, Hobbes, Locke and all the rest. To understand even peripherally what ideas have these consequences is not a trivial pursuit.

John Hammond, “All major theme parks have delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked.”

Ian Malcolm, “Yeah, but, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.”  Jurrasic Park

[i] The concepts undergirding science are the stuff of philosophy.  A physical world exists outside our mind; that there are patterns which can be recognized by our senses reliably as sources of information; that we can form concepts and reason from premises to conclusion.  That causation and result are valid methods of understanding.  All of these and more are metaphysical concepts and provable through metaphysics and logic, not the scientific method.

[ii] Curiously, “singularity” is the scientific term for a single point in space-time of no dimensions, but infinite mass, which current hypothesis holds was blown up by a “quantum fluctuation” to trigger the Big Bang resulting in a inflating universe bubble in an infinite cosmos of other universe bubbles that has no beginning and no end.

 

 

 

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April 27, 2014 · 11:57 am

Maternity and Modernity

“Maternity dooms woman to sedentary existence, and so it is natural that she remain at the hearth while man hunts, goes fishing, and makes war.” Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

One of the more pernicious effects of the post modern culture in which we find ourselves is the undermining of motherhood, indeed of parenthood. “Undermining” evolved from ancient times as a siege tactic to bring down the staunchest of walled cities. Medieval aggressors dug a tunnel day and night over many weeks under one stone battlement of the stronghold, propping the tunnel as they went with wooden beams and posts to prevent detection. If undiscovered by the defenders, upon completion, the besiegers would lay in more wood and incendiaries to the tunnel, and set it afire. When the wooden supports burned through and the tunnel collapsed, so, too, would the wall on top of it, exposing the previously impregnable city to conquest, plunder, enslavement and ruin.

“Ideas have consequences.” The tunnel digging of the last century and a half evolved from the supremacy of will and self philosophies of Schopenhauer, Neitzsche and Sartre; the reductionism of human beings to the merely chemical and biological by Darwin, Freud and others; the demeaning of human sexuality by Margaret Mead, Margaret Sanger and Albert Kinsey from lifelong commitment and love to casual pleasure seeking; and the utilitarian ethics of Peter Singer, Jack Kevorkian and their ilk, corroding the dignity of the human person into a subjective quality of life standard, which is defenseless against self serving interpretation. [i]

“All the women were captured and chained

And national suicide was proclaimed

And new America fell to the ground

And all the children lay crippled lame.” When the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Def Leppard

After the tunnel was set afire in the “sexual revolution” of the sixties, “the walls came tumbling down.” We walk in our neighborhood: first time parents are now older with their one or two children; many couples have chosen to keep a couple of dogs in lieu of children; annoyed grown men with plastic baggies in their hands walk sweatered mutts, and plush veterinarian clinics outnumber and architecturally outshine both pediatric and child care centers. Children of single parents and of divorce are the norm. American birthrates have dropped below that which is necessary to sustain our population; the Social Security and Medicare programs are in danger of collapse as too few children grow into contributing workers.

“Mother”, especially a full time mother, has diminished in clever cocktail banter into sniping “new speak” for a failed career woman. Simone de Beauvoir, long time lover of Jean Paul Sartre, and darling of the most extreme faction of the feminist “movement” died alone, chain smoking and embittered. She had this to say about mothers and motherhood: such women “are not so much mothers as fertile organisms, like fowls with high egg-production. And they seek eagerly to sacrifice their liberty of action to the functioning of their flesh.” She becomes a “menstrual slave” victimized by her own biology. Ideas do have consequences and take many years to emerge fully. Once hatched, they metastasize into our concepts, morality and worldview, often without our awareness or consent.

“O, brave new world that has such people in’t!” The Tempest, William Shakespeare

The natural consequence of these ideas was brilliantly foretold over eighty years ago in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel[ii] set six hundred years in the future. Some of his science fiction devices, such as sound waves recorded as digital light, are already commonplace, and perhaps some are in our future. In this future, the words “mother” and “mammary” are obscenities that make citizens blush, while nothing else does; sex is ubiquitous, pneumatic, loveless and fruitless. Recreational sex and multiple partners are mandatory; marriage or even long term relationships are forbidden as sources of angst and discontent. Fatherhood is unheard of.

Babies are fertilized exclusively in hatcheries; they are “decanted” from bottles, not born, and then moved to conditioning floors where they begin their habituation to “happiness” as alphas, betas, gammas, deltas and epsilons. Alphas are decanted to lead; epsilons poisoned while still in their bottles with alcohol to near morons destined only for menial work, but happy in it. The rest are planned and designed to fit into civilization in their predetermined slot. All are molded into acceptance of their lot and conditioned to despise the messy, overemotional and imperfect family. Under constant “hypnopaedic” sleep learning, they are cloned, cut and pasted into their proper place. Any misgiving or dissatisfaction is remedied with nightly “vacations” for all citizens with “soma”, a euphoric mild hallucinogenic with no hangover that wipes away all anxieties, anger, doubts and questions.

Mustapha Mond (Regional World Controller to students)

“’Try to realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother.’

That smutty word again. But none of them dreamed, this time, of smiling.

‘Try to imagine what ‘living with one’s family’ meant.’

They tried; but obviously without the smallest success.

‘And do you know what a ‘home’ was?’

They shook their heads.” Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Gianna flies free

Gianna flies free

Angela the same age as Gianna and little sister Meg

Angela the same age as Gianna and little sister Meg

Our five year old granddaughter, Gianna, hit a milestone last weekend with her family in attendance. Her Mom, our daughter Angela, ran behind her with her guiding hand, aiding her balance, teaching her to look ahead, to peddle steadily, to gain confidence, to advance another step like all her prior and future steps. Then Angela let go as all parents must and ran beside her. I was fortunate to see her on one of her earliest runs. Both were grinning widely, Gianna doing a grown up thing, utterly joyful. I apologize for the limitations of my cell phone camera, but the image is there. Gianna told us later that night she felt like she was ten years old. Angela emailed us that “G” was a ‘big girl’ all night, well behaved, helping with dinner and clean up – the felicitous consequence of maturity.  Angela is doing as Rita did for our kids and what mothers have done for millennia – loving and training her children to fly on their own.

Angela is an accomplished young woman with a post graduate degree and certification as a Creighton practitioner, aiding others with natural family planning and infertility. Recently, she testified to a hostile Rhode Island House of Representatives committee and a packed hearing room about fetal development, in which she is well versed. A full time mother of three young girls, she is the furthest one can imagine from a “menstrual slave.” She and her husband, Peter, choose to live on Peter’s income for the most part. They will have fewer things, toys and accoutrement. They will be less obsessive consumers and more focused parents. She is home schooling their children, Gianna, Elena and Mary. They are not an Ozzie and Harriet fifties family, but Pete and Angela choose to be countercultural to a culture distorted by the now established, dysfunctional “counterculture” of the sixties. She is a heroine. She is a mother.

Link to interviews for the ‘toughest job in the world.’

“This afternoon was definitely one of the best moments of my life. Letting go of that bike, I will never forget it, hard to describe.” Angela Barek (my daughter) about her oldest daughter, Gianna, first time flying solo without training wheels or a net.

[i] See the excellent Architects of the Culture of Death, Donald de Marco and Benjamin Wiker, Ignatius Press, 2004

[ii] I recently reread Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, Chatto & WIndus, London, 1932. Still much worth your time.

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March 2, 2014 · 4:03 pm

This is a Man’s World

“This is a man’s world, a man’s world

But it would be nothing, it wouldn’t be nothing

Nothing without a woman or a girl.”

 It’s a Man’s, Man’s World by James Brown and Betty Jean Newsome[i]

Now that we are thoroughly liberated and bone weary of it, some perspective may prove beneficial.   Betty Jean Newsome never received much recognition for the song; most remember only James Brown, although many covers were successful, notably Grand Funk Railroad, Van Morrison, Christine Aguilera, Celine Dion and the superb Etta James version in 2006. Women often were not acknowledged for their intellectual property contributions. With the exception of Marie Curie, name three women scientists.  Quick.

Sister Miriam Michael Stimson

Sister Miriam Michael Stimson

How many know of Sister Miriam Michael Stimson, a Dominican nun and scientist of the forties and fifties?  Yet her successful experiments to create a thin enough sample to observe DNA and the X ray chemistry work of Rosalind Franklin that illuminated the double helix were critical in the discovery of the ATCG form of DNA.  James Watson and Francis Crick likely would have had no Nobel Prize and worldwide fame without the seminal work of Sister Stimson and Franklin.  Some hold that Watson and Crick borrowed a bit too liberally without attribution to Sister Miriam and Franklin.  Watson and Crick parlayed their “discovery” to beat out other publicity eager academics like Linus Pauling for the science win of the century.  Crick would have had no bully pulpit for his later eccentricities and crusades against religion and for eugenics to genetically engineer a better sort of human being.  He thought it might be possible to program a computer to have a soul.  Perhaps Dr. Crick should have stuck to physics and borrowing ideas from chemists.  Perhaps he could have shared some of the recognition for his Nobel Prize as well.

“People have so many religious beliefs and until we have a more uniform view[ii] of ourselves, I think it would be risky to try and do anything in the way of eugenics.”   “Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.” Francis Crick

Occasionally we venture out to the cutting edge of science and find lawyers.  Rita and I are possessed of a quirky sense of irony and find the class action lawsuits against Androgel, Fortesa and other pharmaceutical pitchmen for testosterone therapy a vein too rich to pass up.  In our headlong rush to remain forever young, men are easy prey to promises of better muscle definition, improved strength, inexhaustible energy and prodigious erections.  Unfortunately users of this snake oil also fall prey to more heart attacks, strokes and a 30% higher death rate than those who don’t rub on the magic gel.  Some say it’s a small price to pay for multiple orgasms, but others call in the attorneys.  The ads are current and frequent to attract more clients to reinforce the lawsuits, especially on sports shows.

What is more ironic is how fast these lawsuits proliferated and how slowly if at all, similar lawsuits have been filed for damages against big pharma for birth control pills.  Invented by men, pushed by men as “liberating” for women (and expedient for men with throbbing testosterone), birth control pills are listed as Group 1 carcinogens for breast cancer by the World Health Organization (see previous post, “Pink Orthodoxy”).  When convenient for men, the drugs get pushed and risks downplayed.  When somewhat inconvenient for men (strokes and heart attacks fall into the category of ‘inconvenient’), then loose the dogs of personal injury partnerships.

Remember how short lived male birth control pills were?  Never heard of them, did you?  Side effects included erectile dysfunction (known in the trade as limp under fire) and shrinkage (similar to skinny dipping in a Maine lake in April).  The side effects defeat the purpose. No lawsuits needed; much better for the women to shut up and take their medicine.

“Men marry women with the hope they will never change.  Women marry men with the hope they will change.  Invariably they are both disappointed.”  Albert Einstein

[i] Years after James Brown dropped Betty Jean as a girlfriend; she sued him for unpaid royalties declaring that she had written the entire song, not just the lyrics.

[ii] Saint Thomas More first used the term “Utopia” in his fictional book of political philosophy of the same name.  It is derived from the Greek: “eu” – “good”, ou, “not” and “topos” meaning “place”.  “no good place” or “no place land.”  When a eugenicist proposes to create a utopia with a “uniform view”, we can be assured that “view” is his own. Peel away a layer of a utopian eugenicist and the coercing fascist soon reveals himself.

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January 19, 2014 · 1:01 pm

Ponderings and Conundrums – musings on a cold winter day

“To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law:  Conservatives think liberals are stupid.  Liberals think conservatives are evil.”  Things That Matter, Charles Krauthammer (reprinted from the Washington Post, July 26, 2002

When we discuss economics, politics or social trends at family gatherings, in the coffee break room or with friends during holiday gatherings, the polarity seems more intense every year, not less.  Talk flows back and forth with hammer blows of conflicting facts and less and less listening from either side.  How do we resolve the seemingly irresolvable?  How do we compromise on issues built on inviolate, but contradictory core values?

The progressive decries the widening gap between the rich and the poor, which is undeniable.  But over nine million formerly well paying industrial blue collar jobs have fled to emerging second and third world countries, and with production goes innovation.  Those nine million jobs have been replaced for the most part by service sector jobs or retail, and rare is the instance that those relatively low skill jobs pay anywhere near as much as a trained machine operator or union car assembler.  The gap grows, but it is facile to make the assumption that the exploitive business owner shoulders all the blame.  We who benefit from lower prices at the cash register vote with our wallets and with the unintended consequence of hurting the highly paid, middle class blue collar worker.

Textile mill of the early twentieth century in New EnglandDemonstrations at Walmart to pay its workers more than the current average $17,500 sound rational on MSNBC.  The underlying economics that drive the decisions by management to set wages are more complicated.  Stocking shelves at Walmart with made in China or Mexico sweaters cannot pay as much as practiced loom operators knitting those sweaters once made in the former textile mills of the Blackstone River Valley in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  Raising the minimum wage reduces hiring and harms the opportunity of those with few skills entering the workforce, where they will learn how to show up on time, to work diligently and improve their proficiency.

If Walmart decided tomorrow to raise the pay and benefits of all their workers $6,000 per year, it would no longer produce a profit for its owners and would not be viable as an ongoing business, having insufficient resources to compete, replace trucks and pay the light bills.  If they raised their prices to accommodate the higher pay, the customers would soon be over at BJ’s or K-Mart buying their Chinese made sweaters and jeans where shelves are stocked and cash registers staffed with lower paid workers.  Or consumers would buy fewer sweaters because they can’t afford the higher prices.

Raising the minimum wage to a “living wage” is terrific as a campaign slogan, but implementation without repercussions is a tricky business.  NAFTA is a two edged sword.

“Cowboys games at AT&T Stadium can consume up to 10 megawatts of energy, more than is used in three hours by the 3.7 million residents of Liberia.” Kevin Kerr, Sports Illustrated 12/30

American “exceptionalism” is a commendable slogan and core belief as well, but can our citizens reasonably expect that having 4.5% of the world’s population and consuming one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper is sustainable in a global economy with the other 95.5% wanting their fair share of resources?  Do we believe it is prudent governance to hinder development of domestic sources of oil through fracking while continuing dependence for oil on those who hate us?  Does it make sense to hinder a pipeline from our closest neighbor and ally, which own of the third largest reservoir of oil reserves in the world?  Do we really believe this will prevent Canada from selling this oil?  The oil will be sold, and likely to those who burn it far less efficiently and cleanly than our more closely regulated industries and vehicles.  Does this truly advance the cause of fewer hydrocarbons poisoning the atmosphere?

“I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Under the flag of “diversity,” the personal freedom in Western culture and in the United States has been under attack for nearly fifty years:  especially the freedom to live out religious beliefs that do no harm.  Jack Phillips, a baker in Colorado, politely declined the business of a same-sex couple who wanted to buy a wedding cake.  The Left espouses diversity of belief and practice except when it comes to anyone who disagrees with the tenets of their own secular faith.  Rather than simply going to another baker (of whom there are many), the couple sued Mr. Phillips and received a court judgment.  He was fined.  If he refuses to pay the fine or bake a cake, he can be sent to jail.   This is not discrimination in the workplace or hiring practices or bullying or any of the other injustices that have been redressed in the courts.  Jack Phillips chose not to participate by baking a cake and was punished by the court.  How soon will churches be forced to perform marriages that violate their core beliefs?  Will those churches have to get out of the civil marriage business, as the Catholic Church was forced out of the adoption business, closing down the largest adoption provider in the country?

The American Civil Liberties Union recently sued a Catholic hospital to force it to perform abortions.  The Left for years had a mantra stating that, “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one.”  Apparently that doesn’t hold true if a hospital chooses not to perform one.

“I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.” Abigail Adams

Mrs. Adams was a superb communicator married to a superb communicator.  Their letters to one another are a priceless legacy.  She was also a lot smarter than most, including most especially me.  I have a difficult time, as do many, trying to “entertain simultaneously conflicting points of view.” – More than ever when those points of view are almost fundamentally irreconcilable.  Compromise may not be possible.  e.g.  How do we reconcile an issue when one group sees only “women’s reproductive rights” (who can oppose someone’s constitutional rights?), and the opposition sees murdered babies who merited protection and nurture?   A Solomonic solution is not possible.

How do we reconcile political viewpoints when the Attorney General lets slide Black Panthers caught on video tape intimidating voters at polling places, and then goes hard after the Little Sisters of the Poor for upholding their rights of personal conscience against the Obamacare monolith mandating abortifacient drug coverage?  How do we find compromise when one side is convinced the opposition is naïve and a little stupid, and the other side sees their opponents as evil incarnate?  How do we reconcile opposing views in which one side perceives exponentially expanding government both in size and scope as a grave danger and the other envisions it as the road to Utopia? There remains little common ground upon which to stand.

This post started with a Charles Krauthammer quote, and it will end in one from a 2012 Washington Post column reprinted in “Things That Matter.”  Read the book.

“(President Obama and progressives are) equating society with government, the collectivity with the state.  Of course we are shaped by our milieu.  But the most important influence on the individual is not government.  It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government:   family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.

Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.”

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