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| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog October 16, 2009 ASSOCIATED PRESS To rationalists, In the final intellectual battle, religionists are so hateful because their viewpoint will not be controverted by obfuscation in the absence of hard facts. Rationalists have nothing if rationality isn't the tool that conquers all. When, say, the data in some area of endeavor is insufficient for their rationality to attain any but the filmiest traction, they expect people to patiently wait as the rationalists cling to THEIR sole religious belief which is that rationality will ultimately carry the day as it has already in very many pursuits. They will deny that it is a religious belief, saying that they have REASONED it as a logical extrapolation of their study of the history of these sorts of things. But it is a religious belief. There has been many a time in the human "experiment" when a leader |
| and a people have had to navigate with insufficient or imprecise data. The rationalists and their people are always the ones that have failed at this point because the rational thing to do is wait for more data so the FACTS become clear enough to make a clear case as to which way to jump. And then the bears come and eat 'em all up while everybody is waiting. Humans have conquered as much of this universe as they have with both experimental knowledge AND intuition. You can't learn to steer by turning the wheel to and fro in a motionless conveyance; you can't drive very far if you can't look through the windshield but only at the rearview mirrors (except on a planet that is nothing but a road). The human race MAKES its future, or in cultures where rationality is very strictly enforced, ceases to make its future and disappears. I guess this just means that, inherently, humans will worship SOMETHING. There's a choice between worshiping something dead vs. something alive; looking for answers in something material vs. something spiritual; looking for answers from the past vs. creating answers for the future; deciding there's enough wealth in the world so we don't have to try, just redistribute, vs. letting people make it by themselves which raises the general level and makes the future better; living in a culture where every last thing can and must be expressed in terms of money vs. living in a culture where some other rules may apply sometimes. All that glitters is not gold, also does gold always and uniformly glitter? And does that glitter always matter in an absolute sense? |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog Jan 14, 2010 ASSOCIATED PRESS response to: Newsweek Article "The Conservative Case For Gay Marriage" http:// www.newsweek.com/id/229957/page/1 "all men are created equal", not "all groups are created equal" (or must be conceived to be equal, or must be subsidized into equality by the government). Even if the elusive gay gene is someday discovered, at least some component of gay behavior is just that: behavior. While a society may restrict its members and government officials from discriminating against an individual for his physical characteristics, it's absurd to say some behavior is exempt: imagine a lawyer defending a black skinned-individual who was sitting at a lunch counter. OK, now find a lawyer who would invoke the defendant's right to be there if the fellow had held up the joint at gunpoint. It's a society's right and duty to discriminate in favor of behaviors that help ensure its survival now and into the future. So it's a legitimate question whether samesex marriage has anything to contribute, let alone whether it's to be somehow immune to discrimination. As a "good American" I have no truck with those who would have police enter private citizens' domiciles to proscribe consenting adults' behavior, but "Padre turns to groom 'n' says 'Kiss!', he ought to mean a woom-an" is a maxim that shouldn't be excluded on some technical argument. It deserves full and open public debate! Thanks a lot, Hollywood couples, for the damage you've already done to marriage in devaluing it for everyone, including teens who are NOT married but in whose behavior the society must remain very interested, notwithstanding our surfeit of competent psychological professionals and "family planning science". Thanks a lot, samesex couples for insisting on being on the bandwagon. |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog ASSOCIATED PRESS June 10, 2009 I wrote a letter to the LA Times this Sunday in response to an opinion article by Tim Rutten. I frequently agree with his viewpoints, and this article had much to recommend it. However, the question-begging (I decided that the best translation of 'beg the question' is 'ruin the question' [we think it means 'demand the question']) of his automatic use of the term 'marriage equality' indicates he's no longer a disinterested reporter. |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog August 28, 2009 ASSOCIATED PRESS Why are you killing that baby when at other times you have let a bug go? It's because it's going to turn into a human being and (you think) give you trouble. Think how much easier the decision to go full term would be if you could just release it into the wild. So don't go into the tortuous arguments about subjects like 28-week myelin sheathing any more: the reason you give for saying it's OK to kill that fetus is that it's not human-- but the reason FOR killing that fetus is that it IS human. |
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| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog Sept 26, 2010 ASSOCIATED PRESS The human mind has come up with more and more cogent representations of the planets, stars, meteorological phenomena, etc, over the millenia. Will the human mind ever come up with such a working description of the human mind as to enable a desirable result to be reliably reproduced-- like all psychiatric patients go in for one day and live the rest of their lives as productive or at least non-disruptive citizens? There is an area of human endeavor that is all about religion and rightly so. But behaviorial "scientists", far from bringing in scientific method and quantification, have simply managed to usurp the mantle of the shaman, haven't they. OK, but the problem is their materialistic bias against working with anything unquantifiable. Which means their default condition for the human spirit is non-existence. It there is a human spirit, it's got to be a miserable, raggedy-assed one under the "new management." * * * * * * * There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns out of such a trifling investment of fact. --Mark Twain |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog Oct 19, 2011 ASSOCIATED PRESS The average human can drive faster, get fatter and witness more porn than ever before in history. Why, then, is there so much discontent? It's not because the rich are 1000 times as rich as you (instead of 100, which is apparently OK.) Maybe it's because none of the aforementioned, nor any other materialistic superlatives you can think up, address spiritual values. ************************* Recent Books That Hit The Spot: http://www.amazon.com/Overdiagnosed- Making-People-Pursuit-Health/dp/080702 2004 http://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll- Island-Edward-Griffin/dp/091298645X The first one is subtitled: "Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health" The other one is subtitled: "A Second Look at the Federal Reserve," and after reading, I now can remember the three ways the Fed Prints Up Money: a) lending to banks at the 'discount window' at absurd rates b) buying securities through 'open market operations' c) lowering the reserve requirements of the rest of the banks so they can create 'checkbook money'. |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog Nov 12, 2011 ASSOCIATED PRESS Why should we draw the line (in the sand) between alcohol and marijuana rather than between marijuana and (insert more highly intoxicating and/or addictive substance)? Because listen, the people who want to change the position of the line can marshal rational arguments all the doo-dah day for changing the positioning one notch while omitting one fact: they will be there at the next notch with the same arguments. This being the case, why bother with whatever these people's goals are-- just keep it where it is. At least a few individuals will be influenced to stop or refrain from accelerating their dissolution with substances and, it can be hoped, replace this totally worthless (worthless to society-- it may be worth something to some individual although the first example that comes to mind is destroying a competitor by intoxicating him before a critical meeting) with something more productive or at least less harmful. (Yes, like tobaccy!) Rationality aside, the opposite hope-- that a few more intoxicated burdens on civilization would be a small price to pay to stop the drug criminals from causing deaths-- is a red herring. If the profit point is shifted by society, I ask myself, "Is it rational to predict that the criminals will get new jobs at McDonalds !??" Hell, no. (originally from PDA Oct 16,2010) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Recent Books That Hit The Spot: http://www.amazon.com/Overdiagnosed- Making-People-Pursuit-Health/dp/080702 2004 http://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll- Island-Edward-Griffin/dp/091298645X The first one is subtitled: "Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health" The other one is subtitled: "A Second Look at the Federal Reserve," and after reading, I now can remember the three ways the Fed Prints Up Money: a) lending to banks at the 'discount window' at absurd rates b) buying securities through 'open market operations' c) lowering the reserve requirements of the rest of the banks so they can create 'checkbook money'. |
Oct 2010 Sixty-five percent of the surface area of Los Angeles was devoted to cars. Michael Crighton-- STATE OF FEAR (c)2004 |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog May 15, 2012 ASSOCIATED PRESS Baby With The Bathwater File One of the reasons societies have found marriage useful is to put a sort of seal of approval on the flood of new citizens produced by young straight couples, ensuring their involvement beyond just putting another wild young body on the street. One of the ways marriage aids in this is by enlisting the willing cooperation of these couples because they can witness the process as they themselves come up from newborn, a process which is easy to explain because demonstrated and 'lived' by the society. When puberty comes, they have a firmer grip on the facts of life as it affects not only them but their civilization. A segment of a society that wishes to alter this simple agreement because it feels it has good arguments in some other social arena such as egalitarianism, civil rights or 'the sweep of history', has to try to frame the debate so as to ignore this core truth of marriage and in so doing, lend especial poignancy to the phrase 'throwing out the baby with the bathwater.' Societies might have found it convenient to write laws to directly enforce two parents raising a child for 20 years but they didn't, they found them unpopular and unproductive, coming to rely instead on a majority of young couples' developing a proprietary interest in the enterprise simply because it's in keeping with the widely shared agreement. Progressives seem to want to dwell on the impossibilities of getting this unquestionably important societal goal practiced uniformly, favoring theories and practices, e.g. universally available abortion, that solve things by treating people as particles which are more likely to behave according to widely applied low grade incentives like cash and subsidies. This approach abjures any necessity for enlisting the cooperation of masses of actual human beings by such techniques as presenting a long run view of the culture and their and their children's involvement, ownership and deep interest in its success, even as the selfish individuals the current political thinking seems to be fixated on catering to. later: the goal is power and the casualty is the development of the uprightness of the future citizenry, who will receive no better wisdom than that they are stimulus-response mechanisms whose only hope is to wrest a little power back from the powerful rich and transfer it over to the powerful, own-ass-covering intellectual/political elite. (after Hiltzik grousing about Wall Street's bought-and-paid mouthpieces in Washington.) |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog May 20, 2012 ASSOCIATED PRESS Gummint Dispensing Equity File Since the currency of the country is all about agreement (on value), there are government actions concerning money (and money supply) which purport to serve laudable ends-- social justice, evening out the variegated corners of an egalitarian nation, even stimulation of growth for the increased prosperity of all boats-- which do no such thing. Why? Because they slide the ground, as it were, in an opposite direction from the push for the intended good. Taxing the rich, for instance, presumably to offset the fact that the financially acute know how to gradually end up with more money than anybody else, never ends up redistributing wealth as it seemed it might. The rich become less wealthy, ok, fine, that's the first step, isn't it. But then that money disappears into an infinite variety of black holes of inefficiency, cover-your-own-ass-first, makework, etcetera, betwixt the hand of the a-hole wealthy and the hands of the deserving underprivileged. Not to mention plain old corruption. Not to mention that some of the a-hole wealthy were actually providing value and they'll pull in their horns like a snail under a salt shaker, impoverishing everybody just from the slowdown. What went wrong? Gummint forgot that money is a representation of value, it's not the value itself. Since gummint couldn't astrogate its posterior into a successful docking with a porcelain convenience, that attempt to hamfistedly transfer value by shuttling and/or printing dollars was always more likely to result in the disappearance of the wealth in question than its redistribution. Because why? Because the gummint thought it was doing one thing pristinely (creating social justice, righting wrong?), but it didn't factor in the effect of MESSING WITH THE UNDERLYING AGREEMENT OF THE POPULATION THAT IS THE ONLY SOURCE OF A DOLLAR BEING ABLE TO BUY SO MUCH BLUEBERRY MUFFINS ET AL. Even if ends do justify means, you get nowhere if means mutilate ends. The Nazis wanted to define who was human. Statists of all stripes would like to define the dollar and adulterate it at the same time. I believe this is best conveyed by tho old saying "You can't both eat your cake and have it, too." Ultimately, manipulation of wealth by government disappears wealth. If you want to both have and eat a cake, and you have no money and no printing press, the thing to do is bake another cake. Those who have a printing press can't even eat a cake if nobody ever bakes one. To address the printing of money first, I propose that expansions of the money supply be graphically represented by the size of the currency shrinking with each printing (see Milton Friedman for how to calculate) that doesn't result in the destroying of an equal number of old bills. Since this would impose extreme and inequitable hardship on the vending/moneychanging industry, maybe they can just leave the bill size the same and shrink the printed area. I figure if you had started this on the day in 1948 when I was thrust into a world where I could learn that the price of a comic book was not a God-determined 10¢, but could increase to 12¢ (even 15!), that the folding money of today would look roughly like a small stamped postal envelope. Did we want to do this to ourselves? Did we agree to this? Was there a vote I missed hearing about? |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog Sept 30, 2012 ASSOCIATED PRESS Do you deny that that fetus was capable of great accomplishments if it had not been killed? What is the definition of human life? Thesis: the simplest explanation of how a man can bring himself to slit another man's throat in an alley in order to take his wallet is that he doesn't view him as human, but perhaps as a sack of gold that must be slit open to retrieve the valuables. He probably senses that he would, if he asked for corroboration from other humans (ones with whom he was not sharing the 'gold', that is), find little or no agreement on this stance. Thus, we come to the importance of a firm definition, for the purposes of enacting deterrent policies (assuming you're talking about the sort of society that finds this desirable), of whether or not the entity whose life was cut short was or was not human. You can see that the deterrent effect would be rendered less effective by haziness in the concept separating the taking of human life from all other events in the universe, especially among those who are most likely to do the deed. *********************************** My thinking on this definition stems from a thought exercise involving the consequences of one individual ending another's existence as a living organism. Einstein, Caligula, Mother Theresa, the prophet Mohammed, etc, all had to pass through the stage of embryo. Their demise at the hands of an abortionist would have had (to the abortionist, who probably had not a thought in his head beyond collecting his fee and possibly avoiding the gendarmes) an unknown effect on human civilization. To me, this has to play into the quest for a definition, if only to tip the hat to any rationality at all in the notion of justice as an agreed-upon concept among humans: this loop-and-scalpel man is potentially creating a great effect on us all by a killing, in which his only vested interest other than profit is as a generic human who, himself, generally benefits by the agreement that we don't go around killing each other without due process (not knowing whether he was killing an Al Schweitzer or an Al Gore or a Joe the Plumber or a Joe Stalin or someone in between) That's what you do when you cut a human life short, and you can't make me see, in this aspect of the matter, any difference in doing it to a little creature just before, as opposed to, say, a month after it leaves the womb. bJorden |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog Sept. 16, 2012 ASSOCIATED PRESS Cartoon demonstrates the assumptions of "Science-ists" This Doonesbury strip is notable for depicting Trudeau's seemingly total innocence of uncertainty that he, in concert with the collective scientists of the planet have-- along with the 19th Century intellectuals who were sure that no more major scientific discoveries remained-- "nailed it" in terms of knowing exactly what the physical universe represents, now and for the rest of future human endeavor. The framing correction needed here is to downplay "Creationists against Scientists" and make it "People against Science-ists." Science-ists are a politically oriented subset of People who begin with their desired agenda and then back into a supporting narrative selectively cobbled together from a smorgasbord of actual experimental and observational data of actual scientists. The crux of the unfairness here-- which the cartoonist seems blissfully ignorant of-- is the degree of literalness he tests the religionists' statements with as opposed to the degree of literalness the "science-ists" must back up in their assertions. |
| Notable for Garry's total innocence of uncertainty that he in concert with the collective scientists of the planet have, along with the 19th century intellectuals who were sure that no more major scientific discoveries remained, 'nailed it' in terms of knowing what the physical universe represents, now and for the rest of future human endeavor. The framing needed here is to downplay 'creationists against scientists' and make it '___________ against sciencists' (science-ists who make up their agenda first, then their supporting narrative from a smorgasbord of experimental and observational data which scientists provide). The crux of the unfairness that he seems blissfully ignorant of is the degree of literalness he tests the religionists with as opposed to the degree of literalness (figurativeness?) permitted philosophizing science-ists. |
| 'Twit 'Gins 'Blog March 18, 2013 ASSOCIATED PRESS The new Foot/Basketball game The powers that be, responding to a non-equality complaint that basketball players were paid more per injury than football players (or vice-versa), decree the combining of the two sports with the rules mostly combined by a commission appointed by the PTB. The "pointy ovoid" shape of the ball having been selected, the committee now moves on to the definition and scoring of goals, the dispensation and handling of penalties, and-- a particularly sticky point-- the number of steps considered traveling and their relationship to the newly difficult dribbling. The discussion nearly comes to blows when a football-oriented commissioner suggests the total decoupling of the two criteria, except as possibly a loose relationship where you can run ten steps, say, but then are penalized if you don't then perform ten dribbles. to be continued |