Thin porridge
February 10, 2006
I find myself recommending another Peggy Noonan column, this one about President Push’s State of the Union speech, among other things.
The president’s State of the Union Address will be little noted and not long remembered. There was a sense that he was talking at, not to, the country. He asserted more than he persuaded, and he chose to redeclare his beliefs rather than argue for them in any depth.
… It went through a reported 30 drafts, was touched by many hands, and seemed it. Not precisely a pudding without a theme, but a thin porridge.
She also talked a bit about the state of the Democratic party, saying that the Republicans are sick, but the Democrats are sicker - sort of a pox on both houses stance.
It was the first State of the Union Mr. Bush has given in which Congress seemed utterly pre-9/11 in terms of battle lines drawn. Exactly half the chamber repeatedly leapt to its feet to applaud this banality or that. The other half remained resolutely glued to its widely cushioned seats. It seemed a metaphor for the Democratic Party: We don’t know where to stand or what to stand for, and in fact we’re not good at standing for anything anyway, but at least we know we can’t stand Republicans.
I’m starting to think that our political system is disintegrating, so I guess it’s time to read about the political battles of past centuries again. Politics has always had its messy and disgusting side. So far, we have been able to muddle through.
Dave, less and less an elephant but not turning into a donkey.
Eurosclerosis
February 9, 2006
The thought of shifting even more economic power from Europe to the U.S. during the next decade leaves me very uneasy. This WSJ article predicts that the GDP per capita of France, Germany, and Italy will continue to fall below the U.S. through 2011.
WSJ.com - The European Disease
The growth trends in the Europe’s three largest economies should put all doubt to rest. GDP per capita in Germany, France and Italy is falling, relative to the U.S., to levels below those recorded in the 1970s.
This relative decline raises uncomfortable questions about the Continent’s ability to finance its welfare state, stay competitive and even sustain its geopolitical alliance with America. “At current trends, with demographics the way they are, the average U.S. citizen will be twice as rich as a Frenchman or a German in 20 years,” Jean-Philippe Cotis, chief economist at the OECD, told us. The divergence between the continents will make it harder to share the mutual defense burden.
Defense aside, it would no doubt be far healthier for the U.S., and for the world, to have the European economies strengthen, rather than the reverse, but at the moment it looks quite the opposite.
“Twice as rich” also sounds like a recipe for hubris and a pratfall.
Dave, who may or may not be around to see what happens.
College and summer camp
February 8, 2006
Why do college graduates earn more than their non-graduate contemporaries? It’s true that they do, but was college education the causation?
EconLog, College and Summer Camp, Arnold Kling: Library of Economics and Liberty
Then perhaps the relationship between earnings and a college education is one of correlation without causation. Perhaps people would prefer to spend age 18-21 on campus, at least if they have sufficient aptitude so that without too much effort they can avoid the unpleasantness of bad grades.
It depends on the major, it seems to me. Looking back on my career as electronic engineer and businessman, it is clear that the math and physics skills I more or less learned in college had a lot to do with my career options, to say nothing of my ability to think rationally and logically.
As an aside, did you know that some of the best computer programmers are also accomplished musicians? Composing music and programming computers require much the same mental and creative skills.
Dave, who really doesn’t have a clue why he survived in engineering and business.
Presbyterian Church USA’s Friends
February 7, 2006
Presbyterians struggle to know their own mind about modern day Palestine and Israel. The Zionists among us are intrigued by the idea that today’s Israel is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy about events preceding the return of Christ. They tend to exalt Israel and demonize the Palestinians. Others, myself included, consider present day Palestinians, especially Palestinian Christians, as largely oppressed by an Israeli occupation of their land. I admit that my views are colored by a study pilgrimage that I made to Israel in 1997, where I met a family of Palestinian Christians and heard from their lips the difficulties of life under the Israeli government.
Israpundit.com portrays the present situation as war between Palestinian terrorists and all of Christiandom.
Israpundit: Presbyterian Church USA’s Friends
Now let’s take a look at what PCUSA’s good friends in Hezbollah are planning to do in Norway and Denmark. Per “The War is On” From the desk of Hjörtur Gudmundsson on Fri, 2006-02-03 01:54
Yesterday (Thursday) Mullah Krekar, the alleged leader of the Islamist group Ansar al-Islam who has been living in Norway as a refugee since 1991, said that the publication of the Muhammad cartoons was a declaration of war. “The war has begun,” he told Norwegian journalists. Mr Krekar said Muslims in Norway are preparing to fight. “It does not matter if the governments of Norway and Denmark apologize, the war is on.”
Islamist organizations all over the world are issuing threats towards Europeans. The Islamist terrorist group Hizbollah announced that it is preparing suicide attacks in Denmark and Norway. A senior imam in Kuwait, Nazem al-Masbah, said that those who have published cartoons of Muhammad should be murdered. He also threatened all citizens of the countries where the twelve Danish cartoons [see them all here, halfway down the page] have been published with death.
Note also that Hezbollah is a Foreign Terrorist Organization as defined by the U.S. State Department and that it is guilty of murdering 241 United States Marines with a truck bomb. The Presbyterian Church USA has consorted with this terrorist organization on more than one occasion.
The Presbyterian Church USA is aiding and abetting Palestinian terrorism by agitating for divestment from Israel.
The position of the PCUSA is not as unambiguous as that last sentence implies. The national leadership of the church has an unsavory anti-U.S. flavor to it in many respects, and that leads them to make naive and uninformed public statements that do not necessarily reflect the majority view of PCUSA membership.
Dave, remembering his Palestinian Christian friends so far away.
The new slavery
February 6, 2006
For those of us who aren’t paying much attention to black history month, this article offers an interesting viewpoint.
Over the last several decades, Liberals and Democrats have been pulling off the greatest scam of all time — rewriting history itself. It’s amazing how, in a free society, they have managed to hijack the past, twisting the truth by subtle manipulation. Somehow the Left has convinced a sizeable portion of Americans that lowered expectations and government coddling are their birthright by reason of their African ancestry. The new slavery is an enslavement of the mind, and its victims willingly embrace their chains.
Multiculturalists (those who preach self-segregation) have convinced many black Americans to believe they even have a different history from the rest of the country. This is a distortion of reality that has already caused much damage to our national identity. What is “black history month” supposed to represent, anyway?
The article goes on to say that we should be thinking of ourselves as Americans, not as black or white or Latino or whatever. Multiculturism may sound good and open-minded, but it may also be dividing us, rather than uniting us in our common citizenship.
Dave, American.
Presbyterian - new category
February 5, 2006
I am an elder and clerk of session in my church, First presbyterian, Quincy, Illinois. I find myself more and more taken up with church affairs and figure it’s time I start talking about it more on the Orlop. I have added the subcategory “Presbyterian” under “Bible and Religion.”
My denomination is the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and like all mainline (some now call us oldline) denominations, PCUSA finds itself caught in many cultural cross-currents and has been declining in membership and influence for a long time. Our church has been active in various renewal groups that are dedicated to helping the PCUSA clean up its act theologically and be more effective in what some are calling the post-denominational age.
Dave, which a little renewal wouldn’t hurt him, either.
Ephesians 1:1-8
February 5, 2006
Salutation
1:1 From Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints [in Ephesus], the faithful in Christ Jesus. 1:2 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!
Spiritual Blessings in Christ
1:3 Blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ. 1:4 For he lovingly chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we may be holy and unblemished in his sight. 1:5 He did this by predestining us to adoption as his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the pleasure of his will– 1:6 to the praise of the glory of his grace that he has freely bestowed on us in his dearly loved Son. 1:7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace 1:8 that he lavished on us in all wisdom and insight.
Ephesians is Paul’s letter to the believers at Ephesus and at the other churches in that area, written while he was under house arrest in Rome. He reminds the early Christians, and us, that it pleased God to choose all who would believe long before their birth. Many who profess Jesus as their savior stumble over this predestinating truth, even though it is clearly taught throughout Scripture.
God’s purpose, we are told, is to create a people “holy and unblemished in his sight,” and this was accomplished through the life, ministry, and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. -sdg-
Bush and medical research
February 4, 2006
Pharyngula is the title of the blog of P.Z. Myers, a biology professor, who says his blog is about “Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal.”
An honest man. I like him and disagree with him. His article about President Bush’s State of the Union statements about medical research makes for interesting reading. Here’s the quote from the SOTU address that my godless liberal friend holds up to ridicule:
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.
Down syndrome is a very common genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. That kind of genetic insult causes a constellation of problems: mild to moderate mental retardation, heart defects, and weakened immune systems, and various superficial abnormalities. It’s also a viable defect, and produces walking, talking, interacting human beings who are loved by their friends and families, who would really like to be able to do something about those lifespan-reducing health problems. We would love to have an animal model of Down syndrome, so that, for example, we could figure out exactly what gene overdose is causing the immune system problems or the heart defects, and develop better treatments for them.
He talks a bit about inserting human genes into mice to produce many of the symptoms of Down Syndrome in the mice. “These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.” Myers then concludes,
George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.
He’s trusting that everyone will think he is banning monstrous crimes against nature, but what he’s really doing is targeting the weak and the ill, blocking useful avenues of research that are specifically designed to help us understand human afflictions. His message isn’t “We aren’t going to let the mad scientists make monsters!”, it’s “We aren’t going to let the doctors help those ‘retards.’”
Once again, the ignorance and the bigotry of the religious right wins out over reason and humanitarianism. I think I know who the real pig-men are.
Do you get the idea that he doesn’t think much of President Bush?
I haven’t much to offer on the subject of medical research, except to make the observation that while the desire “to understand a debilitating human problem” is natural, it needs boundaries. It is an appropriate use of governmental power to protect the people by prohibiting certain types of research. President Bush’s prohibitions deserve respectful debate and study within the scientific community. I hope that with a little reflection, even a godless liberal could agree that at least some limitations on medical research are a good idea.
Dave, a grateful beneficiary of past medical research.
Brain fossilization
February 3, 2006
Is global warming for real? Wanna fight?
WSJ.com - Hurricane Debate Shatters Civility Of Weather Science
Dr. Gray hasn’t been shy about firing back at his critics. After Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, co-wrote a paper linking global warming and hurricane intensity, he said: “Judy Curry just doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
Dr. Curry, in an interview at her Georgia Tech office, said Dr. Gray has “brain fossilization.” She added: “Nobody except a few groupies wants to hear what he has to say.”
Sounds fun, but we may have to wait another couple hundred years or so to find out for sure who is right.
Dave, an old fossil hisself.
Curmurring
February 2, 2006
From my Christmas present Forgotten English Calendar, I offer for your amazement and edification the following, from William Whitney’s Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, 1889.
curmurring: A low rumbling sound; hence, the motion of the bowels, produced by flatulence, attended by such a sound; borborygmus; Scotch.
Or this from Alexander Warrack’s Scots Dialect Dictionary, 1911.
Murmuring, grumbling; sometimes applied to that motion of the intestines which is produced by the slight gripes. This is one of these rhythmical sort of terms for which our ancestors had a peculiar predilection. It is compounded of Suio-Gothic (the ancient language of Sweden) kurr-a, to murmur.
Dave, sometimes curmurring.
