logos redux

“There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution, and nothing closer to immortality than a government program.”

Russian professor Igor Panarin has a strange mixture of historical/economic credentials and Nostradamus-like date forecasting, but he is an interesting read, if nothing else. Panarin predicts the outbreak of a U.S. civil war in fall 2009, extending into spring 2010, at which point the U.S. will supposedly break apart and be taken over by other world powers, including China, Russia, and Canada.

“[Panarin] predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union.”

Andrew Osborn, “As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough.”

On that last statement, I say: One can only hope.

This morning as I was driving to the seminary for class I heard on the radio that President Obama was coming to St. Louis this morning for a town hall style meeting commemorating his 100th day in office. Then, just as the commentator had moved on to talk about Spector’s identity crisis and the very real possibility that Franken will take Minnesota and give the Dem’s the super-majority I heard sirens. I looked up just in time to see that I was being passed on the left by about 15 solid black sedans and SUV’s with blue and red lights flashing and sirens blaring followed by a similar appearing black truck. In the midst of all this was a black stretch limo surrounded on all sides. It was sort of surreal.

Update: The news stories say he didn’t arrive until 9:30, but if what I saw at 8:30 wasn’t a presidential motorcade I don’t know what it could have been given the number of vehicles, the secret service all black with police lights look and the large black stretch-limo in the middle.

In other news, I’ve finally switched to Firefox. I was talking to a friend the other day and he convinced me. What I like so far: plug-ins, themes, customizable features. What I don’t like: it’s a little to techy for me. I downloaded a theme a few minutes ago, only to find out that to use the sub-themes (i.e. other appearances that I thought were part of the package) I have to modify my chrome files or something. I don’t know what that means and I don’t have time to figure it out right now. More annoying though is that it wasn’t even clear until I spent 10 or 15 minutes digging around after I had downloaded it that this was the case. I assumed if I downloaded the theme I’d get what I saw in the screen shots.

Plug-ins I like: 1 Click Weather gives me up to date weather info that can be moused over for expanded details in the bottom status bar.

Zotero is amazing. It allows me to instantly grab bibliographic information from all sorts of pages (Amazon, Google books, etc.) which can then be dragged and dropped into papers or used in any number of ways. It doesn’t work perfectly, but it gets the majority of it.

Read it Later is a great way to grab and store pages/articles you want to read at some point in a que without clogging up your bookmarks.

Finally, Sage and Twitbin both allow me to quickly and simply open side bars for feed reading and Twittering.

This may be old news for a lot of you but for those Safari die-hards (which I was), I think it’s worth it. Safari seems to have just given up on updating Safari to take advantage of new technology. Also, importing your Safari settings is quick and easy.

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Spector finally came to terms with his identity and switched to the Democrat party. This unfortunately puts the Dems 1 seat away from a fillibuster proof super majority, but it also means that the conservative Pat Toomey, who he was already having difficulty against will likely be his opponent in the general election. How popular can a turn-coat be? Read about it here.

…is the part of the housing crisis that the current administration isn’t telling us.

“Because banks are regulated by various agencies of the federal government, it was easy to pressure them to lend to people that they would not otherwise lend to– namely, people with lower incomes, poorer credit ratings and little or no money for a conventional down payment of 20 percent of the price of a house. Such people were referred to politically as “the underserved population”– as if politicians know who should and who shouldn’t get mortgages better than people who have spent their careers making mortgage-lending decisions. …But, in politics, power trumps knowledge…Who could be against “the American dream” of home ownership or so mean-spirited as to ask how much it would cost the taxpayers or what risks it would create for the whole financial system? Certainly not most Democrats or Republicans in Congress or the White House. The media were also part of this crusade for more home ownership, more widely available. If some segments of the population did not own homes as much as others, that just showed that there was something wrong with the mortgage lending process, as far as editorial office philosophers were concerned. …Riskier mortgage lending practices, imposed by government, were what set the stage for many mortgage payments to stop and thus for the financial disasters that followed. Political rhetoric, echoed in the media, seeks to obscure that painfully plain fact.”

Thomas Sowell, “The Housing Boom and Bust”

“Reason can function properly, in other words, only when reason is informed by the intuitions of the heart as it is nurtured by historically constituted traditions of belief and practice.”

James R. Peters, The Logic of the Heart

“The selling of the green economy involves much economic make-believe. Environmentalists not only maximize the dangers of global warming — from rising sea levels to advancing tropical diseases. They also minimize the costs of dealing with it. Actually, no one involved in this debate really knows what the consequences or costs might be. All are inferred from models of uncertain reliability. Great schemes of economic and social engineering are proposed on shaky foundations of knowledge. Candor and common sense are in scarce supply.”

Robert Samuelson, “Selling the Green Economy.”

“At a briefing for columnists last week to influence the coming 100-day assessments, a senior Obama adviser, struggling to offer a philosophical definition of the 44th president, finally settled on calling him ‘a devout non-ideologue.’ But the mysteries and paradoxes of these 100 days cannot be unraveled without an understanding that the president is more than a ‘whatever works’ guy. Obama would not inspire such loyalty if his supporters did not see (correctly) that he has an agenda to move the country to a very different place. He would not inspire such resistance if his opponents did not sense exactly the same thing.”

E.J. Dionne, realclearpolitics.com, “Obama the Devout ‘Non-Ideologue‘”

Right. See below.

The FDA recently agreed to allow girls 17-years old and up obtain the “morning after” pill, aka “Plan B,” without a prescription. The NY Times had this comment to make in an editorial on the subject:

“In a further break from the Bush administration’s ideologically driven policies on birth control, the Food and Drug Administration has agreed to let 17-year-olds get the morning-after emergency contraceptive pills without a doctor’s prescription. It is a wise move that complies with a recent order by a federal judge, based on voluminous evidence in F.D.A. files that girls that young can use the pills safely.”

April 23, 2009

This is a great follow-up to my previous post (”This explains a lot”) on the unconstrained vision’s lack of scruples re: lying and force as ways to bring about their agenda. Here we have the editor coming out in favor of the FDA’s decision by characterizing the opposing viewpoint as “ideologically driven,” meaning of course that the FDA’s decision was not ideologically driven at all. The editor is lying here. He wants us to believe that one side of the debate (opponents of allowing 17-year olds to use Plan B) are driven by ideology, while the other side (his own and the government’s) is not, but rather not promoting any agenda whatsoever. Nope. Not one.

Nonsense.

As if supporters of Plan B are not motivated by an ideology of their own. The proponents of allowing access to Plan B have their own ideology, which they wish to disguise by claiming to be neutral while their opponents are the ideologues. But proponents of freer access to Plan B are motivated by an ideology of “reproductive freedom” [read: freedom from reproduction], “individual choice,” and, most insidiously, the “right” to kill very small and weak human beings in the name of convenience (or worse, in the name of “equality” for women). If these do not comprise an ideology, then nothing does. The FDA’s decision was a response to an order from a federal judge, who in turn was responding to the “recommendations of health authorities.” But health authorities have an ideology of their own: it involves all the elements above, plus the added incentive of pharmaceutical company profits.

Mark it as a mantra: Nobody makes decisions for no reason; everybody is motivated by something. That “something” is an ideology. Anyone who claims to be ideology-free is lying (or else stupendously ignorant).

Thomas Sowell, in his A Conflict of Visions, explains the two major controlling worldviews (the unconstrained vision and the constrained vision) that drive current political and social debate. While the two visions are multifaceted, for our purposes, the unconstrained vision sees human society as in need of a small, elite, “wise” group of intellectuals to run the affairs of the ignorant masses, overseeing the progress of society and the economy, and directing the course of history. The constrained vision, on the other hand, sees wisdom as the collective experience of generations over the ages, deposited in our human institutions, however imperfectly, and trumping the individual wisdom of any one person.

That being the case, Sowell notes that in the most unconstrained vision, “falsehood and force become not merely rights but duties,” because the ignorant masses, having not yet reached the superior intellectual and moral level of the elite, are not easily convinced by reason and careful explanation; Continue Reading…