Links and Weekend Update

1. Here, in a guest post by Jim Fedako on the Statistician to the Stars blog, is some information on the philosophical stylings of John Dewey, a crucial facilitator of modern schooling in America:

Into the fray—the internecine war between Stalinism and Trotskyism—entered John Dewey. Now Dewey had previously ventured into the Marxist morality play when his “Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trial” allowed Trotsky to defend his good name after being tried and sentenced to death in absentia by the Stalinists at the Moscow Show Trials in 1936. That the commission provided Trotsky with a western pulpit to justify his beliefs and actions goes a long way in explaining Dewey’s critique of Trotsky’s defense of Bolshevik morality.

In his response, Dewey agrees with Trotsky in the rejection of moral truths and absolutist ethics:

“Since Mr. Trotsky also indicates that the only alternative position to the idea that the end justifies the means is some form of absolutistic ethics based on the alleged deliverances of conscience, or a moral sense, or some brand of eternal truths, I wish to say that I write from a standpoint that rejects all such doctrines as definitely as does Mr. Trotsky himself, and that I hold that the end in the sense of consequences provides the only basis for moral ideas and action, and therefore provides the only justification that can be found for means employed.”

Yet, he also claims, “The liberation of mankind is an end to be striven for. In any legitimate sense of ‘moral,’ it is a moral end.” That Dewey claims the existence of a self-justifying, absolute truth—the liberation of man—while rejecting the existence of such a truth shows a serious misstep in logic. But such is life in progressive academia.

Read the whole thing.

2. Click the link to Dewey’s full essay – now, there’s some thinking for ya:

But for my present purpose, it is important to note that the word “end” is here used to cover two things – the final justifying end and ends that are themselves means to this final end. For while it is not said in so many words that some ends are but means, that proposition is certainly implied in the statement that some ends “lead to increasing the power of man over nature, etc.” Mr. Trotsky goes on to explain that the principle that the end justifies the means does not mean that every means is permissible. “That is permissible, we answer, which really leads to the liberation of mankind.”

Were the latter statement consistently adhered to and followed through it would be consistent with the sound principle of interdependence of means and end. Being in accord with it, it would lead to scrupulous examination of the means that are used, to ascertain what their actual objective consequences will be as far as it is humanly possible to tell – to show that they do “really” lead to the liberation of mankind. It is at this point that the double significance of end becomes important. As far as it means consequences actually reached, it is clearly dependent upon means used, while measures in their capacity of means are dependent upon the end in the sense that they have to be viewed and judged on the ground of their actual objective results. On this basis, an end-in-view represents or is an idea of the final consequences, in case the idea is formed on the ground of the means that are judged to be most likely to produce the end. The end in view is thus itself a means for directing action – just as a man’s idea of health to be attained or a house to be built is not identical with end in the sense of actual outcome but is a means for directing action to achieve that end.

In this one hears the clear echo of Pierce’s Pragmatic Maxim:

Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.

Pierce and perhaps Dewey would have been appalled by the mass murder and mayhem that became the means to achieve the effects that the objects of Stalin’s conceptions had – but that would be quibbling over matters of taste and style, as there is no objective measure of horror and evil – it’s just however much you can stomach. Stalin could stomach plenty, and there’s nothing much else to say about it. Not that Dewey and other apologists don’t say it. The rest of the essay that follows that quoted above is exactly that sort of claptrap – Dewey objects that, no, not everything is permissible – only those things that really work. Or something. Thus, we have our second logical full fail: the first is claiming absolutely that there are no absolutes; the next is basing justification of means on whether they actually achieve the ends – which cannot be known until the ends are achieved. This logical dog is chasing its tail.

Dewey, in a thoroughly modern way, fears only absolutism. If only he had feared illogic and unreason half so much. On the current schedule, I’ll get around to reading Dewey around September, 2019. Ish. So far, just sampled some of his less coherent stuff – this here is frightfully coherent. Not sure I don’t like the opaque and obfuscatory stuff better.

This guy doesn’t look crazy or anything at all.

3. Yet more Briggs. I just had a wonderful fantasy, in which the efforts of modern Lysenkos to arrest and imprison (and kill, of course – history wouldn’t have it any other way) “climate deniers” leads to an “I am Spartacus” moment among all honest men.

Hey, a man’s gotta dream.

4. You want to know what makes me tired? No? Tough: People who don’t seem to get that having herds of deer in suburbia makes them, you know, an invasive species, to be controlled or even rooted out like so many Asian carp. They are not Bambi. They are only as cute as someone who dies in a car crash after hitting one, or trying not to hit one.

See, in their natural environment, there would not be so many deer that we’d be hitting them with our cars and chasing them out of our gardens daily. Because – follow this closely – in their natural environment, predators would kill and eat them. Their natural predators include wolves, bears, cougars – and people. Soooo, in the Great Circle of Life, we are supposed to kill and eat them. That’s what the Lion King would do, to put it in terms even goofballs can understand. We do not try to feed them birth control bills, or shoot them with birth control  shots.  We do not have them fixed. We eat them. If we don’t, we’re inviting the wolves and bears and cougars to come do it for us – and those predators are plenty smart enough to figure out that a human is a lot less work to kill and eat than a deer.  So, like, we want to be the ones doing the predation, not the ones being preyed upon. Trust me on this.

Sheesh.

Darwin Catholic understands.

5. So, as y’all (all three of you) can tell, got a few hours to write over the last few days, so finished up a few drafts. Now, it’s back to the schedule that will pretty much prevent me from writing except on weekends. Try to soldier on.

The Nature of Our Addiction

Let us assume for a moment that we agree on a few basic points, points frequently made on this blog:

1. That the education system as it exists now is the product of the efforts of a relatively small group of people who created it to further the goals of Johann Gottlieb Fichte: a docile population incapable of thinking anything their betters don’t want them to think, who have been successfully divorced from the loyalty and honor naturally accorded to their families, native cultures, religions and physical places the better to serve their masters;
2. That this project has been a smashing success in America and Europe, among other places: that the mindless stupidity and mule-headed stubbornness with which we cling to conventional nonsense, the imperviousness to any real thought or ideas, the slavish sycophancy of the courtier classes in the media and elsewhere – these are the intended results of this project;
3. That a key and insidious part of this project is to inoculate us against thought: despite all evidence, we are convinced that we are the brightest, most open-minded people ever, and thus must conclusively dismiss any ideas or evidence that suggests otherwise;
4. That all basic skills that might, if applied to conventional beliefs, cause us to rebel against these controls are to be ruthlessly suppressed or channeled into the service of our betters: it is no accident that history, philosophy, science, math and logic have not only not been systematically taught in our schools, but instead have been rendered so boring and meaningless as to drive off all but a few eccentrics. The claim that ‘I hate math’ for example, is the sign that things are working as planned;
5. Finally, that to escape from this morass, we need to reject the system of controls that create and enforce it – the compulsory, centrally controlled graded classroom model: drop into culture by loving what the system hates – Great Books, logic, history, science (real science, not Cosmos-level gee-whiz pablum, which merely serves the cause), family, religion and each other.

The progress of this effort across American history is clear. As one wag put it, we’ve gone in 100 years from teaching Greek and Latin in high school to teaching remedial English in college.

For the sake of the following argument, let us assume we agree on these propositions. I contend that this puts virtually all of in the position of an addict, someone whose life has become completely structured around feeding our addiction. Further, when we have those stray moments of epiphany, when the veil begins to lift and we begin to suspect things are not as they seem – that is exactly the point at which all those years of training, all those carefully ingrained habits of mind, kick in to prevent us from having any real thoughts.

 

The kimono, I mean raincoat, parts.

Note that I’m speaking here of the products of our schools, which includes here any school that follows the graded classroom model, whether public public, private or religious, with one important caveat: it has only been since the 1930s that a majority of people have been educated this way, and only since the 1940s that almost everyone was, and only since the 1970s that the entire mechanism was universally in place. So, it’s possible, if one is old enough and happened to get schooled in some barbarous hinterland or other, that you got some real education. I, at age 56, managed, in retrospect, to straddle the conversion of Catholic grade school education in Southern California from something essentially subversive to a merely kinder, gentler and more selective version of the state schools. I suspect, in my case at least, that a little education snuck past the schooling. But, fundamentally, I’m as much a product of this system as anyone.  People older than me, especially if they were educated away from the great population centers, stand a better chance of having gotten some real education.

Math is Remorseless, Redux

To expand a little more on the notion of identified beneficiaries and hidden losers:

The model of government action is, perhaps, building a bridge: while the benefits of a bridge might be obvious to the people on both sides of the river, the cost and organization needed to get it built may be beyond any private party’s capabilities. So, money is appropriated by a government from a wide range of taxpayers, an entity is set up to build the bridge. Once completed, the bridge makes travel – and commerce – easier, and the amount spent to build it is eventually recovered by the private sector through the increased economic activity the bridge makes happen. Everybody wins.

Well, not everybody. It is almost certain that some people or businesses got taxed beyond any benefit they personally received from the bridge – they live far away, they’re retired and don’t care, or their activities were otherwise not aided by the bridge. But hey, nothing is perfect in this world, and it’s easy to conclude that the benefits far outweigh the costs, and that the bridge remains a success and a good idea.

But consider cash transfers. A large percentage of government activity is moving money from one set of people – taxpayers – to another set of people. The premise is that the payers have more than they need, and the payees need the money. We are encouraged to think fat cat bankers as the payers, and orphans and widows as the recipients (and to ignore the bureaucratic mechanisms required to effect the transfer, which consumes much, sometimes even most, of the money the payers have paid).

In practice, what happens is often almost exactly the opposite: money collected from middle-class tax payers is transferred to the fat cats, sometimes rather baldly, as in the case where Goldman Sachs paid bonuses out of the money it got as a result of the government bailouts it engineered for its creditors. More often, the tax money gets to the fat cats through a more circuitous route, such as how the makers of name-brand contraceptives, which cost much more than the generics, will now get government funding as part of the contraceptive mandate – a little pork to grease the wheels.

But let’s stick to the cases that are more appealing to Christian sensibilities and less criminally outrageous. We tend to think that the benefits of transfer payments to the needy are clearly greater than the cost. The taxes paid by the middle class is often an average of a few dollars per tax payer for any particular program, an amount we’d hardly miss, yet the program really makes a difference to real people in need.

Now I go to a place that is easily vilified. Please keep in mind that nothing I say here is meant n any way to relieve our Christian duty to care for the poor, nor does it make camels any smaller or needles eye’s any bigger. It’s just math.

Any money you take away from people does not get spent by those people as they might otherwise spend it. Say a worthy program, one that feeds moms and their babies, costs the typical taxpayer $5 a year, and there are 1 million people paying taxes in this theoretical example. OK, so that’s $5 million dollars, of which – we’re being very generous here – the government manages to get $4M to the moms. While a mom is going to spent my $4 ($5 minus the $1 for government administration) on groceries,  as a tax payer, I might have spent that $5 I no longer have on a latte at a local espresso bar – a comparatively frivolous purchase, to be sure.

Now for the repercussions: a local grocery store gets $4 more dollars than it might otherwise have gotten. Ultimately, it and other grocery stores in the area get the whole $4M, since, let us assume, groceries are the only items the moms can buy with the money. The margins on groceries (what the store gets paid for carrots and hamburger minus what it costs the store to put the carrots and hamburgers on sale) is very slim – along the lines of 2-3%. So, with the $120K (3% of $4M) gross margin, maybe the local grocery stores hire the equivalent of an extra checker and a bagger or 3 – at least, this program has made it economically possible for them to do so.

The other $1M goes to pay for the bureaucracy someplace – some office space, a few salaries, paperclips, and so on. If is just so happens to happen locally – that the government agents are located where the dollars would have gotten spent anyway – then the money is not lost, just redirected. Instead of me getting a latte, some government office next door is stocked with paperclips.

That’s if the money is redistributed: the moms and kids get fed a little better, and the grocery stores and the sellers of paperclip make a little more money. And a handful of jobs – something like a few nice government jobs, and a descent checker job and a couple of entry-level bagger jobs – get created.

(At this point, if you’re still awake, you know painfully well why economics is called the Dismal Science.)

If that was all that happened – and remember, we’re using a fairly rosy case here – and if there were only a few such carefully targeted and efficiently run programs, then I don’t think any sane person would object.

But this isn’t all that happens.

Now, let’s look at our frivolous purchase of a latte. Make mine a large Peet’s, 2%. The margin on lattes is pretty darn good – not sure about Peet’s in particular, but I’d bet over 50% gross, and maybe 15% net. (Starbucks had a 13% net profit on all its operations – I’m guessing lattes are among the better margin products.) So, using these numbers, and assuming everybody spends the $5 on lattes that they didn’t pay in taxes to feed mothers and babies, the espresso joint in the area take in an additional $5M, which, at 15% margins, gives them a profit – there’s that dirty word – of  $750,000. If they wanted to, they could hire about 3o employees at $10/hr. Some of those employees might even be single moms with babies, who knows? All we do know is that those potential 30 jobs are not economically feasible if we tax that $5 away. Jobs don’t just happen – somebody’s got to pay for them. Businesses generally want to see the money coming in before they hire people.

Not saying those jobs would actually happen – most likely, some lesser number of jobs would get created, or maybe none at all, if the latte-making capacity of the current shops is underused (meaning, that they have workers ready to make lattes at a higher rate than they have customers to buy them, most of the time).  And the grocery stores might not hire anyone, either. The only near sure bet, job wise, are the government workers.

This is just an example. It’s possible to pick ones that go the other way – where the money being redistributed tends to make jobs more jobs at the task toward which it is being redirected than it would if left in taxpayers hands. The whole point here is that there’s a trade-off, every time: whatever good deed we think we’re doing is always offset by things that didn’t happen – things that might have even helped more.

And that’s all I’m trying to illustrate here: shuffling money around through taxes and programs is never without its costs. Sometimes, those costs might even be more than any benefits. One does not have to be a cold-hearted meanie to wonder about these costs, and wonder if there might not be a better way.

And none of this fulfills our Christian duty toward our fellow man. And that works both ways: No one fulfill any Christian duty* of mercy by paying taxes, or voting for programs, or voting for people who promise programs. Nope. You have to do it yourself, nobody, including the government, can do it for you. And  if don’t pay the tax or vote for the program, you still need to do your duty.  You may vote for or against anything, based on your prudential judgement (hey, another dirty word!), but that in no way removes or mitigates the duty of  each one of us to love our neighbor.

*One does fulfill ones Christian duty to honor and obey the legitimate government when one pays taxes – but that’s a different duty altogether than our duty to love our neighbors.

Math is Remorseless.

There’s a little thing I won’t even link to, wherein a poster is made out of a bunch of economic information to make the case for an increase in the minimum wage.

Now, of course I see the need for those blessed with money to be generous with their money and time toward those in need. Of course. But good intentions don’t change the math. Really really good intentions really really don’t change the math.

So, economic tidbit # 1: the average CEO compensation for the top 11 employers* of  minimum wage earners in America was $9.4M.

Math tidbit #1: that’s $4,517 per hour. That’s somewhat more than I make.

Now, 11 times $9.4M is$103.4m – the total compensation of all the CEOs of these 11 companies. I’m here going to make a rough guess, and say that these 11 companies employ, oh, 500,000 minimum wage earners in total. Full time work is about 2,000 hours a year.

So, if all the CEO salary was redistributed to the minimum wage earners, they would now see their wages jump by – 10 cents an hour. I might be wrong – maybe there’s only 250,000 minimum wage workers. OK, so it’s 20 cents an hour. You get the picture.

In most companies, the next 10 top paid executives together don’t make more than the CEO – fire them all, reallocate to the minimum wage earners, and – maybe 20 cents and hour.

The next tier of white collar workers are the people who put in years of hard work, got that business degree, and climbed to ladder – they might make $200K a year, if they’re lucky. So, do we want to fire all of them, and add another dime an hour?

But wait – what about profits? Sure, there are those, and you could pay some more to your workers and reduce profits some – and, unless you show a comparable increase in worker productivity**, the market will be less likely to invest in your company, making it more difficult and expensive for you to borrow money for stuff like inventory, which tends to make your company even less attractive to investors – and so on, and so forth, in what could become a death spiral – except that the leveraged buy-out crowd will, assuming it’s a viable business otherwise, swoop in, buy the company – and fire enough people and cut wages enough to return to profitability.

See, investors – that’s you and me and anyone with a 401k or a savings account or a CD that pays interest- most likely put our money in investments that pay the best returns – the mutual fund or CD that pays the highest rate. I know this is too confusing for many people to follow, but all those rates – returns on mutual funds, interest on CD and savings accounts, and so one – are all tied together. Ever wonder why stock prices rise when bond interest rates fall? Books have been written on this, but for now just know: if you have any investments at all, and choose them because they give the best return, then YOU are the one putting market pressure on companies to keep wages down.  No, really.

Few of us put our money only in instruments violate none of moral positions – we just don’t think that hard. If we did, we’d probably be reduced to stuffing our mattresses.

Also, shop at Walmart for the low, low prices? YOU are the one motivating them to pay the lowest possible price for the labor they buy, and to keep labor costs down any way they can. (And buy stuff made by Chinese slave labor or near slave labor).

In conclusion: OF COURSE people are greedy and nasty and sin; OF COURSE this means other people suffer. OF COURSE.  But trying to fix this problem by raising the minimum wage is just, frankly, idiotic. Often, appeal is made to some elaborate feedback mechanism, where it is assumed that minimum wage increases will prime the economic pump somehow – while it’s conceivable in theory that this might work, in practice it is almost always a demagogue trying to fire up class warfare for his own ends, or some innumerate rube with a good heart and a soft head whop proposes it.  Bottom line: raising the minimum wage does not magically make more money appear with which to pay workers. It comes from somewhere – usually, from other workers.

Nope, we must look for other ways to be just, rather than choosing feel-good methods that do nothing real, but at best help some workers we can see out of the hides other workers or would-be workers we can’t see. Life’s like that, a lot of the times.

* Of course, the CEOs are not really, in many cases, the ultimate boss of these minimum wage workers, who work for franchisees. But that looks like a quibble.

** Sometimes, companies like Costco and In and Out Burger pay their workers comparatively well, and do get more productive and loyal workers with less turnover. These are great companies and we should applaud and support them. One of the ways this works, however, is that their loyal, hard-working employees allow them to – hire fewer workers. There is no free lunch.

In Today’s News, etc.

First up: a hypothetical:

Imagine that omnipotent space aliens from the planet Zyrglax land on Earth and take control of the United States. But these aliens are somewhat bizarre, and they change only one thing: they teleport all public school buildings into the sun, and prohibit the government from any action or law providing for public education, even ruling out school vouchers and the like. All school budgets are rebated back to the taxpayer. Failure to comply will result in America being blasted to dust from orbit.

What would happen?

My response: You mean, after America is blasted to dust? School embodies all that is dearest to certain right-thinking people, who, if everyone else in the country has to die so that they can stand up for their principles (and principals), that’s a sacrifice they’re willing to make – right after they all retire to Oslo for the duration.

The comments section is mostly depressing – we have so bought the idea that education means just exactly the kind of schools/daycare/interment camps pu pu platter now the only thing on the menu, it doesn’t even register that nobody anywhere here ever did it this way until about 150 years ago, and nowhere on earth until about 200 years ago.

Next up, the crass and wonderful Fred on Everything writes about education. Using the example currently in the news featuring the literary stylings of the students of Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS for Business Careers as a benchmark for the level of ‘education’ in America, he tells his story of education back in the 50s and early 60s.  I don’t stack up – I’m less than a decade younger, and went to Catholic schools in Southern California, but we were not as well educated as Fred seems to have been. Math and English studies were much less demanding, for one thing.

My pet theory, which fits all the evidence but lacks any real backbone (sigh. If only I could spend all my time reading up on all this education history stuff) is that, once the one room schools had been extincted,  which happened mostly over the 30s and was effectively complete by 1940, there ceased to be a limit on just exactly how stupid public school could be in the service of their ideology: while the one room schools were still cranking out literate and numerate graduates, the public schools had to at least pretend to care about these things.  But then, they were killed off, and now all that was left was for their practices and successes to pass from living memory. Until then, the Freds of the world could still get a bit of a real education in a public school.

By the 1960s, that passing from living memory had effectively happened in most places, and by the 70s in almost all places – anyone questioning the idiocies of modern schooling – whole word, new math, no history, science or literature to speak of – was clearly an old fuddy-duddy. The curmudgeon’s accusations were no longer backed up by anyone else except a few other curmudgeons. (This is similar to how the reemergence of eugenics had to wait for the WWII generation to die off). And, anyway, the new factory education had produced virtually all the parents and ‘educators’ now in the schools – they would be accusing themselves of being stupid were they to point out the imperial nakedness of school’s claims.

Next, I suppose this qualifies as a local human interest story:

State Sen. Leland Yee indicted on arms trafficking, corruption charges

Even if 10% of this is true, it looks like a key figure in state Democratic circles has been caught being, not just a criminal, but a hypocritical criminal at that – championing gun control while gun running; calling for more open government while being the shadiest operator possible. But, as in the ‘honest corruption’ of Tammany Hall, does he get a pass because, apart from his intentions to criminally enrich himself, plunder public money, and break any law that is in his way while simultaneously positioning himself for future higher state office – I mean, other than that, his intentions were good: further the Democratic political agenda in California.

Hey, how about a trade? Thinking outside the box, taking a cue from Phillip Jose Farmer’s Venus on the Half Shell: every vice is a virtue somewhere in the universe – how about California trade Yee to Chicago? Maybe for a non-liberal judge they’re not using? Sorry, this is pure fantasy – there aren’t any non-liberal judges in Chicago! Silly me.  How about a straight up swap: Yee for a rookie Chicago Machine pol who is merely better at covering his tracks? It would lower their average level of corruption.

Finally, a thought that won’t go away: you don’t suppose that Congress’s inexplicable passivity to the Administration’s unprecedented assumption of congressional power – e.g., extending deadlines by presidential fiat that had been created as law in a piece of legislation passed by Congress – has anything to do with the NSA spying on Congress, do you? I mean, J. Edgar Hoover was rumored to have the goods on the Congressdroids of his day, such that the FBI skated unmolested until his death. That idea of having dirt on your political opponents (and nominal friends too, of course, just to play it safe) in order to intimidate them into going along with your wishes  – that wouldn’t occur to anyone nowadays, in these enlightened times?

That sort of thing just could never happen again, right?

Right?

The Week That Was

That certainly flew by.

1. For the next month, or perhaps longer, I shall be working in San Jose – 50 miles from here. This translates into about 3 – 3.5 hours/day in a car. Historically, I’ve moved to be closer to work when the one-way commute exceeded 20 minutes. Now, however, since this will run a limited time, and I’ve got this wife and kids, I’m going to just do it.

The scenery is usually nice, especially for next the month before everything dries up and turns brown until next November.

Fallout: very little posting. Boo, and, I might add, hoo. But it also provides ample time for prayer, meditation, listening to EWTN and TRYING NOT TO GET KILLED BY MANIACS ON THE FREEWAY!!!! Now, how much and what quality of prayer I’ll get in is open, but hey, can’t say I’m not getting plenty of opportunity.

2. I got a year older – at this point, I’m aging digitally. I made dinner, we had sorbet for dessert, and watched Princess Bride with the kids – it was good.  I’m named Joseph after St. Joseph, being born on St. Joseph’s day and all. I’m grateful I didn’t come a couple days early – I’d have made a lousy Patrick.

3. Do you ever want to do something, then think: OK, but I’d better do this other things first, then remember that you have to do that thing before you do this thing and – well, what appeared to be a simple task results in major, multi-stage work that takes forever? A year ago, when I began studying Greek, I wanted to have a desk to spread out materials where I didn’t need to pack them up and put them away every evening, as I needed to do when I used our dining room table. I have such a desk in the music room, long abandoned to being a repository for stray junk – and the music room is really just a sheet-rocked area in the garage, I wanted more comfort than that. The plan: move the desk to the bedroom. Easy-peasy, right?

By a doom fell and certain, logic inescapable established that I must first get a new TV – don’t even ask, but it works.  I’d never purchased a TV in my life, since its only use for me is watching videos and now Netflix – on commercial channels, by the second ad, I’m thinking, in the words of an all-pro defensive back, of tackling “three feet past” the TV – which would damage the walls. PBS – let’s not go there. Anyway, our third free  hand-me-down TV that we’d had for 15 years  was starting to flicker a bit (after about 30 years of total use), and those flat screens had come down in price so much – well, it was time.  But: the letterbox shape of the new TV was not going to work in the roughly square area vacated by the old TV. So:

This is a media case I just built. It holds almost all our DVDs, old video cassettes and CDs – freeing up space for the new TV! And adding a month or two further delay in getting the desk moved into the bedroom. See, in order to have room for this new case, a nice bookcase had to be moved – where? Why, the bedroom, of course! That meant rearranging things so that I could add both the desk and the bookcase. And so on and so forth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I’m getting close, I can feel it! Just need to find permanent homes for the junk squatting on my desk (including an old Mac tower circa 1999, and a rack of computer music geegaws and a giant old CRT monitor and…) THEN clean the spare rug that’s going under the desk and – I got to stop thinking about this.

4. My beautiful and charming 16 year old daughter is the kind of odd duck that, were she not beautiful and charming, people would say: there goes one odd duck! But no one does, for reasons mentioned. For example: of all my kids, she would have been the last one I’d have suspected was memorizing pi out to 40 digits. She also took a look at the DVD, VCR and CD mess, and promptly alphabetized the whole thing. She also the one who reads massive numbers of books and wants a Great Books education. Of course, I’ve incorporated these data points into my understanding of this now lovely young woman, as a layer on top of my mental image of her as a tiny blond 3 year old with an inscrutably content expression standing in the bathtub covered from head to foot in unnaturally red popsicle drippings. It is going to be very odd to hand her over to some guy to marry.

5. In the Drafts folder: part 2 of Economics for Catholics, in which we discuss what it means to be poor in the modern world; The Nature of Our Addiction, in which is discussed how it is that we have been wounded by the current education model, such that it is folly to believe that we all the sudden see everything clearly and reason rightly just because we’ve managed to pick up on the schooling game; as well as more stuff on Science! I’ll get right on them in the couple hours I’ll have to write on Saturday mornings for the next month – when I should be moving the desk.

6. This Crimea thing is such a complete shock. Where would anyone ever get the idea that a totalitarian nation ruled by a tyrant would use the excuse of protecting its nationals that just happen to be in what some historical accident or meddling do-gooders have determined to be another country entirely to seize territory? As someone of Czech heritage, I find the whole idea flabbergasting! My sympathy goes out to our administration, which must have been completely caught off guard by this.

7. This just cracks me up:

A beverage company proud enough of its hot water to present it with a flourish.

Jen Fulwiler does this thing. Check it out.

Another Crazy Catholic Gets Schooling, and Its Implications for Catechesis

Deschooling Religious Ed, written by Sam Rocha, makes me want to shout: See? It’s not just me – anyone who looks at the history, the practices and the outcomes of modern schooling can see it:

Society itself can at times seems like nothing other than a school. The world has become a school, with discipline and pedagogy everywhere. We are taught how to shop and how to live and where to go to have a good time on billboards and flashing textbooks. Our cars and our glasses and our toilet paper are all included. The world as a school is a place where no person can be trusted — everyone must be trained and formed and protected from themselves.

Algorithms predict our desires. Oracles. Someday, we too will become programmable computers.

The generic idea of school is harmless and old. The modern version, beginning with the Prussian research university, followed by the Prussian compulsory schooling system, the first of its kind and a blueprint for the United States and now the rest of the world, is an extension of the now-failed political project of protestantism, modernity, colonialism, and (neo)liberalism.

You can see school in the prison, the hospital, the buildings and programs that divide and herd and apply newfangled technologies of disciplinary cafeterias.

And:

Salvation today is given in degrees and diplomas and credentials. God is dead because we sent him to school, too.

In our parishes and churches, the sacraments have been thoroughly schooled. We treat them as we would a high school diploma. A religious credential. A passing grade.

Catechesis, then, has become the required schooling for the credentialing of the sacraments. This is the logic of most religious education nowadays, even the ones that seem to be thoughtful and alternative thinking. Even the nice people who give up their time. Volunteers.

Go read the whole thing right now!

Real Science Takes on Cosmos! WooHoo!

Just stretch out and bask in the warm glow of somebody who knows what he’s talking about. Among other things:

But how accurate is the science? Does it matter? Isn’t science, like pizza, still pretty good even if it’s bad, in a way that companies feel all publicity is good publicity?

No, flawed science is flawed science and Sagan wanted to hear valid criticism, just as Tyson does now.

While he takes a much appreciated pot-shot at Sagan’s Nuclear Winter overreach, he gives both Carl and Neil a huuuuugely generous amount of credit for honesty that I have never seen made evident in Sagan’s actual work, at least – don’t know much about Neil except what I’ve read about this program, and that ain’t lookin’ good.

Anyway, a brief sample:

3. There Is No Sound In Space

To go on this journey, we need to be “free from the shackles of space and time”, Tyson tells us. And apparently all of the other laws of physics. Why can we hear his spaceship when he is exploring the cosmos? Yes, it is a “spaceship of the imagination,” but I would hope Tyson’s imagination is more scientifically accurate than that of a teenager playing “Mass Effect.”

And he gets around to Bruno, too, with information available to anyone willing to spend 5 minutes Googling:

The church and science did not agree with Bruno that pygmies came from a “second Adam” or that native Americans had no souls, but they were also not going to kill him over it. There is no evidence his “science” came up at any time. He was imprisoned for a decade because the church wanted him to just recant his claims that Hermetism was the one true religion and then they could send him on his way. When he spent a decade insisting it was fact, he was convicted of Arianism and occult practices, not advocating science. It was discovered shortly after his execution that the “ancient texts” he believed had predicted, among other things, the birth of Jesus Christ, had only been created a century earlier, not at the time of Moses.

After the cartoon about Bruno, Tyson immediately concedes that Bruno was not a scientist.

This leads to an obvious question: Why would a science program devote 25 percent of its first episode to the persecution of someone who was not a scientist, was not accepted by scientists, and published no science, but was instead a martyr for magic?

Schoolin’

That is a poser, that is.

And so on.  The best thing I’ve read one this topic was by Thomas L. McDonald, but I feared he might be considered a tainted source, since he openly believes in mystical woo-woo with no basis in the physical world, like math and logic. Oh, and God.

h/t to the Statistician to the Stars, and his tweet tooth.

 

On the Battle Field: Who and What We’re Fighting

Our wonderful bishop, who I love and am deeply grateful for, recently made a couple moves that, in the opinion of many practicing Catholics, were long overdue. He addressed situations where certain people who had for decades been in open defiance of the Church were removed or are being removed from their positions of authority.

I won’t go into any more detail. There is more than enough gossip. What I am writing about today is the various reactions in the comboxes of the sites where I read this news. I’ll admit to thinking ‘it’s about time!’ and being happy to see these situation, one of which I knew about personally and the other by reputation, finally dealt with.

St. Michael

Yet many people who seemed likewise to approve wrote in the comboxes about their disappointment – why did this bishop take 9 whole months (!) to clean house? Why did his two predecessors, both with reputations for holiness and orthodoxy, let it go on under their watch? In short, why doesn’t the Church clean house of all these Modernists and Marxists and just muddle-headed goofballs who got ordained or took vows in the 60s and 70s and drank deep of the Spirit of Vatican II insofar as it justified them doing whatever it is they wanted to do? Why has this gone on for 50+ years, even when every pope since Paul VI (no, really) saw it and recognized the damage being done to the faithful and sort of faithful?

And they have a point. When you hear a priest badmouth the Magesterium week after week, or teachers claim that there is no one Catholic teaching on their pet heresy, or parishes indulging in activities specifically condemned by the Church – well, how can it not drive a person trying to live the faith crazy? How can I hope to follow spiritual and moral disciplines when those disciplines are disparaged from the pulpit? More important still, what about the now going on 3 generations of Catholics who are both completely ignorant of what the Church teaches and the claims she makes on them and completely convinced that they are Catholics in good standing as they skip Mass, engage in sex outside of marriage, divorce and remarry, support pro abortion candidates and on and on? How can a bishop or a pope tolerate this for one minute?

New Study Reveals Vegans Feel Pain

(Hot off the Web, only *slightly* revised. For clarity, and all that.)

Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast are studying whether vegans like Ozzy Osbourne and Mike Tyson are able to feel pain and so far results are paving the way to entitle the critters with more rights to protect them.

The study began when its lead researcher, Robert Elmwood, was asked the simple question of “do these people feel pain?” by curiously compassionate chef, Rick Stein. Stumped, Elmwood set out to discover the answer.

Today, the assumption is that they don’t, which is why vegans have no special rights when it comes to their protection against cruelty, unlike dogs, farm animals, or anarchists, for example. It is thought by the scientific community in general that these creatures, who make up .0000003% of the animal kingdom, have only reflexes. Clearly, what vegans say gives no evidence of any higher level sentience. In order to find out whether they feel pain and don’t just react involuntarily to stimuli like people enjoying a nice juicy steak dinner, Elmwood had to study not just immediate reaction but more complex behaviors.

Unfortunately to do that, a lot of prodding, shocking and essentially torturing was necessary. Vegans were brought to a local McDonald’s where they were told to drink their grass and almond milk shakes sitting right next to normal people having typical meals of hamburgers. While fundamentally a lot of fun, he also found that vegans continuously whine about having to eat at the same table with bloodthirsty, unenlightened meat eaters. They also rapidly learn from that painful experience, altering their behavior to avoid that pain, or at least to make sure anyone within earshot also had the quiet enjoyment of their meals destroyed.

Across the Atlantic, Robyn Crook, an evolutionary neurobiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, is doing similar research with neo-pagans and found they also show sensitivity to an area where a idiotic, ahistorical idea was crushed or a shock applied.

There are still some naysayers in the scientific field but Elmwood and Crooks are paving the way for these creatures to have more rights, because, as we all know, scientists just mix up fresh rights in big Erlenmeyer flasks as needed. Following the results of their study, both researchers are using as less vegans and neo-pagans as possible and keeping the amount of pain inflicted to a minimum and, most importantly, urging their fellow scientists to do the same. The painful effect of grammar-school level English usage errors on sensitive readers has evidently not been considered to date.

It’s terrible these creatures had to endure such awful procedures but it looks like their kind is on the way to better times — backed by scientific proof to protect them. Next up: scientific proof that saying anything that contradicts anything anyone chooses to identify with is just really mean.