Proposing for Use and Future Definition the Terms "Rational Nominalism" and "Selective Rational Nominalism":
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)
A post of defined terms or solidified key concepts would ordinarily be posted to my Miscellaneous BLOG where I have come over the years to categorize key concepts that inform my operative presuppositions.{1} The problem is, I have not come up with precise definitions for these words yet. The concepts have been percolating in my mind as I have considered them and the purpose of this posting is to set some of them down in expository format both for later codification and because it is late in the day and it is a birthday indulgence of ours essentially.{2}
One of the reasons we at Rerum Novarum have often emphasized at sundry times and in diverse manners the importance of definitions{3} is because respect for definitions is at its core a respect for reason and logic. Conversely, those who do not take this matter seriously have a corresponding lack of respect for reason and logic{4} regardless of pretentions they might make to the contrary. Ironically, most of those who fall into the latter camp involve themselves in a kind of rational dualism in that they give every appearance of recognizing the importance of definitions in some contexts but not in others.
I have at times thought of them as rational dualists and on rare occasions have thought of using that term as a way of trying to get through to them their inconsistencies so they would be aware of them. But that is neither here nor there, the intention with this posting to sketch the outline of a couple of terms as a kind of shorthand way to explain a phenomenon I have witnessed for years on end.{5}
As often is the case, one can only stand by and watch the same insanity over and over again before sensing the need to define a key concept when so many others show by example that they do not understand it. That is what I intend to do at some point with the post you are reading an outline of key concepts intended to provide the benefit of those who want a ready point of reference for this phenomenon whenever they see it.{6} But before getting to the terms to be defined, I need to explain the root common to both of them and that is the concept of nominalism.
Nominalism is a subject I have discussed explicitly and implicitly many times over the years in a variety of forums and applicable contexts but in nearly all of them, the context was to some respect philosophical in nature. It is indeed through this medium that the outlook in question first became explicitly manifested. Nominalism in philosophy is a foundational presupposition that denies the existence of universal concepts as well as refusing to admit that the intellect is capable of forming and expressing such concepts and words intended to denote such things have no intrinsic meaning in and of themselves but are merely designations of words which could be made anywhere and everywhere.
For example, in the nominalist weltanschauung the word "dog" could apply to a "dog" or we could apply it to a "cat" or a "house" and "person" could be applied to a "goldfish" and vice versa. The underlying result of this outlook is that reasoning and logic are rendered impotent and we are no better than the animals who are incapable of reasoning and logic. All sources of knowledge available to us are immediately rendered worthless by this irrational outlook and it makes sense why those who respect reason and logic would be so merciless in their attack on those who would devalue this important reflection of the image of God within us as well as all things in known existence.
Having noted at the outset the concept of "nominalism" and the staunch opposition of that outlook that every fiber of my being contains, it hopefully makes clear to the reader what is necessary to combat this intrinsic evil: the requirement that terms used to describe something actually be given a meaning so that there is a point of reference common to all. It is a failure to do this which is at the heart of the terms I will now propose for future codification. Here is what I am toying with at the moment as outlines for the terms in question:
Rational Nominalism: A mindset or foundational presupposition which wholeheartedly embraces the nominalist concept of using words in a variety of ways without concern for any universal or underlying coherency across the continuum of words, phrases, subjects, etc.
Selective Rational Nominalism: A mindset or foundational presupposition which selectively embraces the nominalist concept of using words in a variety of ways without concern for any universal or underlying coherency on certain arbitrarily selected words, phrases, subjects, etc.
And of course the derivative terms from the ones so outlined above are "rational nominalists" and "selective rational nominalists."
To use a term is to have a degree of accountability for it and without a proposed meaning, there is no accountability. This enables the "rational nominalist" or the "selective rational nominalist" to hide behind their chosen terms or use them in broadbrush and at times contradictory ways. The easiest way to notice such people are when they throw out terms they do not bother to explain via definition or other means and then are obstinate when challenged to explain their use of terms.
The reason you will know these kinds of people are either fullblown "rational nominalists" or arbitrary "selective rational nominalists" is by their overall actions and statements as patterns of thought provide what can be called motives of credibility for determining which of the above terms is applicable to the person or group in question.
The "rational nominalists" have a defect in ability to utilize reason and logic and will manifest this across a broad continuum of subjects. The "selective rational nominalists" evince in other situations evidence that they possess the ability to properly utilize reason and logic but have a defect in will to on certain select subjects, persons, etc. which they have a partiality towards or against. Your host for one has an easier time tolerating those who fail to manfest the ability to use reason and logic properly than those who manifest the capablity but are instead (on certain pet issues) are intellectually too lazy or disingenuous to.
Unlike with virtually every term{7} your host has used which he has provided a definition for, there is no past usage of the term in question to provide the reader with examples of how the term was applied in actual situations to facilitate a crystallization of the term into a defined form. That is the reason for this posting where the concepts surrounding these terms are explained and tentative meanings proposed -though I may well after more thought and some usage of these terms in actual situations come up with better ways to eventually define them than the meanings tentatively proposed above.
Notes:
{1} From time to time both as the terms take on a discernable shape in how they are used in a series of circumstances and as I judge it as opportune to give them precise meanings.
{2} Though the bulk of this posting was framed in draft form back on the sixteenth of the month we are posting it at the end of the day at it happens close to the very time that we came into this world many years ago today.
{3} This was recently manifested in a Rerum Novarum weblog posting which can be viewed here. There are numerous others in the archives but we are not inclined to do a search for them at the present time.
{4} This is an example of another core principle required for proper reasoning but I do not have time to go over it at the present time -though I am sure in time I will either out of the mood to or the necessity of a given circumstance in the future.
{5} And the older I get, the less tolerance I generally have for obstinate sorts who repeat this defect in their interactions either with myself or others.
{6} And indeed they will not have to look far in the arena of ideas to see it under many forms of dress and manifestations.
{7} The one exception prior to this is the term "Carter Corollary" which had no actual precedent of usage by your host either in the blogosphere or elsewhere before it was defined and (by its nature) does not readily admit of much in the way of actual usage in normal circumtances.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
On Logic, Faith, and "Free Thought":
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)
What about the Children? — Is Religion Child Abuse?
Just once I would like to see these sorts of atheists admit that it requires faith in order to reason because it does. Seriously.
The ability to reason is either true or false. Logic itself applied as we would say "properly" is either an assemblage of disconnected non-sequiturs which lead us nowhere or else it can lead us to being able to discern if not with certainty what is true than at the very least isolate what is probably and what is most definitely false. The very laws of logic -be they the law of identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, etc.- themselves are presumed to be valid because without them, there is no capacity for logic to be operative; no frames of reference or foundation from which we can then utilize reason and logic itself.
Another way of saying it is that logic is not possible without recognizing as valid some rules that are required in order to utilize logic and reasoning to begin with. And since it is not possible to prove these rules as true or false without assuming they exist to begin with, there is no way we can empirically demonstrate in a manner that is not circuitous (and thus logically specious) in its approach that it is possible to utilize logic and reason at all.
For that reason, all this talk about "freethought" is an intrinsic charade. Think about it: the very sort of empirical evidence that people like Dawkins say they will accept is predicated upon accepting without scientific evidence that the basic laws universally accepted for being able to utilize logic and be able to reason do in fact exist and are themselves operative. It is unavoidable therefore that we require faith that those laws are true to enable us to try and explain reality, solve problems, discern what is false, etc. And as it requires faith to even reason at all, there cannot be anything intrinsically "irrational" about having faith in other non-emperically verifiable phenomena unless it is also "irrational" to be rational.
This is why I have no problem with non-militant atheists and agnostics but find those who are militant like Dawkins to be a bunch of hypocrites. Dawkins claims that theists are "being irrational" and "believing in something that you cannot subject to scientific scrutiny" and this is at the core of his critique. He therefore should heed the principle of "physician, heal thyself."
After all, people such as him believe that it is possible to be rational beings and utilize logic but they do not subject those presuppositions themselves to scientific scrutiny. Oh yes, they cannot do so because scientific scrutiny itself presupposes that the laws of reason and logic are both true and operative to begin with!!! If they are not, then scientific inquiry is not possible anyway and their precious "empericism" evaporates like dew in the morning sun.
If we really take it to brass tacks, whatever arguments people have about God, what God is like, whose conceptions of God are true, etc. they are no more "irrational" than arguments that are based on reason and logic -as in neither case can you definitively prove the existence of what you are presupposing. However, to presuppose the laws of reason and logic makes it possible to bring order out of what would otherwise be non-sequiturial chaos and this itself makes sense. The same is true for postulating the existence of a First Cause or Primary Mover - a "God" if you will Whom is Reason and Logic personified apart from whatever particular construction of "God" you happen to believe is most probable.
One last word on the idea of "child abuse" seems appropriate and it is on the abuse to the intellect that people like Dawkins inflict with their flawed and rationally specious positions. If there is anything that can be construed as "child abuse", certainly any weltanschauung which criticizes others for the same thing it engages in would be a good candidate as far as I am concerned. That would after all be abuse of a child's natural faculties and intrinsically retarding their mature intellectual development. But those who take the Dawkins school of thought to a militant degree inexorably by logical extension do exactly that -however much they try to pretend otherwise- and that my friends is its own form of child abuse.
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)
What about the Children? — Is Religion Child Abuse?
Just once I would like to see these sorts of atheists admit that it requires faith in order to reason because it does. Seriously.
The ability to reason is either true or false. Logic itself applied as we would say "properly" is either an assemblage of disconnected non-sequiturs which lead us nowhere or else it can lead us to being able to discern if not with certainty what is true than at the very least isolate what is probably and what is most definitely false. The very laws of logic -be they the law of identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, etc.- themselves are presumed to be valid because without them, there is no capacity for logic to be operative; no frames of reference or foundation from which we can then utilize reason and logic itself.
Another way of saying it is that logic is not possible without recognizing as valid some rules that are required in order to utilize logic and reasoning to begin with. And since it is not possible to prove these rules as true or false without assuming they exist to begin with, there is no way we can empirically demonstrate in a manner that is not circuitous (and thus logically specious) in its approach that it is possible to utilize logic and reason at all.
For that reason, all this talk about "freethought" is an intrinsic charade. Think about it: the very sort of empirical evidence that people like Dawkins say they will accept is predicated upon accepting without scientific evidence that the basic laws universally accepted for being able to utilize logic and be able to reason do in fact exist and are themselves operative. It is unavoidable therefore that we require faith that those laws are true to enable us to try and explain reality, solve problems, discern what is false, etc. And as it requires faith to even reason at all, there cannot be anything intrinsically "irrational" about having faith in other non-emperically verifiable phenomena unless it is also "irrational" to be rational.
This is why I have no problem with non-militant atheists and agnostics but find those who are militant like Dawkins to be a bunch of hypocrites. Dawkins claims that theists are "being irrational" and "believing in something that you cannot subject to scientific scrutiny" and this is at the core of his critique. He therefore should heed the principle of "physician, heal thyself."
After all, people such as him believe that it is possible to be rational beings and utilize logic but they do not subject those presuppositions themselves to scientific scrutiny. Oh yes, they cannot do so because scientific scrutiny itself presupposes that the laws of reason and logic are both true and operative to begin with!!! If they are not, then scientific inquiry is not possible anyway and their precious "empericism" evaporates like dew in the morning sun.
If we really take it to brass tacks, whatever arguments people have about God, what God is like, whose conceptions of God are true, etc. they are no more "irrational" than arguments that are based on reason and logic -as in neither case can you definitively prove the existence of what you are presupposing. However, to presuppose the laws of reason and logic makes it possible to bring order out of what would otherwise be non-sequiturial chaos and this itself makes sense. The same is true for postulating the existence of a First Cause or Primary Mover - a "God" if you will Whom is Reason and Logic personified apart from whatever particular construction of "God" you happen to believe is most probable.
One last word on the idea of "child abuse" seems appropriate and it is on the abuse to the intellect that people like Dawkins inflict with their flawed and rationally specious positions. If there is anything that can be construed as "child abuse", certainly any weltanschauung which criticizes others for the same thing it engages in would be a good candidate as far as I am concerned. That would after all be abuse of a child's natural faculties and intrinsically retarding their mature intellectual development. But those who take the Dawkins school of thought to a militant degree inexorably by logical extension do exactly that -however much they try to pretend otherwise- and that my friends is its own form of child abuse.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Points to Ponder:
(On the Nobel Peace Prize and Contributions to Knowledge in General)
This posting to some extent coheres well with something I noted in a posting from earlier today and highlights a point I noted earlier that it would when posted. Nonetheless...
Winning the Nobel Prize is generally considered the ultimate achievement in any field, but even a casual look at a list of the people who have won that award should make it obvious that the selection of such winners is based primarily upon political factors rather than upon any actual contributions to knowledge. So-called “peer-review” is an oxymoron: if an idea is actually new, then the existence of peers is obviously impossible, which is why almost all of the truly valuable ideas and inventions have come from people who were totally outside the scientific community, people like Edison, Tesla, the Wright Brothers and a long list of others. [Arthur Jones]
(On the Nobel Peace Prize and Contributions to Knowledge in General)
This posting to some extent coheres well with something I noted in a posting from earlier today and highlights a point I noted earlier that it would when posted. Nonetheless...
Winning the Nobel Prize is generally considered the ultimate achievement in any field, but even a casual look at a list of the people who have won that award should make it obvious that the selection of such winners is based primarily upon political factors rather than upon any actual contributions to knowledge. So-called “peer-review” is an oxymoron: if an idea is actually new, then the existence of peers is obviously impossible, which is why almost all of the truly valuable ideas and inventions have come from people who were totally outside the scientific community, people like Edison, Tesla, the Wright Brothers and a long list of others. [Arthur Jones]
"The Drudgeford Files" Dept.
(A Rerum Novarum Quadruple Subject Thread)
When perusing Drudge back on October 12th (in a coffeeshop while waiting for a repair to the car to be completed), I found through various linkings the following news stories and wrote the following musings on them. Without further ado...
Al Gore and the Mission of the Nobel Prizes (John Berlau)
Though the subject of the Nobel Peace Prize is one that I have generally looked at with some benign "whatever" fashion{1}, there was never a revulsion from me pertaining to the award itself. It stands to reason that any noble intention that the late Alfred Nobel had with this award would not always be realized when there is some secret committee doing the awarding. And whatever problems there are with some of the past recipients of the award, they are to some extent explainable. I will now note my problems with some of the recipients in the 107 year history of this award being given out.
Strangely enough (perhaps), I have no real problem with recipients of the award all the way up to 1987. That is not to say that I would have given the awards as they were given mind you, only that nothing sticks out to me as problematical with the selections up to that point. Beginning in 1988 though, things begin looking dodgy in spots and I will now note the problematical recipients starting at that point in time:
--The United Nations Peacekeeping Forces (1988)
The idea that the UN deserves any awards considering how pathetic their trackrecord of achievement is in this area in recent decades -that explains my reasons for noting the 1988 award as problematical. (This is not the same UN that was around when Dag Hammarsjkold was given the award postumously in 1961.) But I must also confess that I approach this to some extent with the benefit of hindsight; ergo this one could be given less weight than the others I will note which follow it.
--Mikhail Gorbachev (1990)
My only gripe against Mikhail Gorbachev getting the award in 1990 is it is too much like giving the World Series trophy this year to the Chicago Cubs who I remind you all are not currently playing. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II should have gotten the award that year if it was to be given to those who worked for peace. If Gorbachev was to be included in that grouping then that would be fine as he did play a crucial role in the ending of the Cold War. But to give it to just Gorbachev and not include the other three I mentioned was inexcusable and showed an obvious bias on the part of the nominating committee that year.
--Nelson Mandela (1993)
Nelson Mandala was and is a communist and the atrocities that have taken place during his tenure as head of South Africa -and which the ANC sanctioned prior to his tenure as head of South Africa- made him receiving the award rather dubious at best. However, he also was not the head of South Africa in 1993 so I must confess to approaching this one with some degree of anachronism. Objectively, if the award was going to be given to Frederik DeKlerk who headed South Africa at the time{2}, it is hard to see how someone on the other side of the struggle to end apartheid could not also receive the award and there was no greater symbol of the struggle than Nelson Mandela whose imprisonment for thirty years was to some extent a rallying point of reference for those struggling to achieve basic recognition for their fundamental rights in South Africa. For that reason and also diplomatic ones, the awarding to Mandela could be justified.
--Yasser Arafat (1994)
Yasser Arafat was a terrorist who never did one substantial thing in his whole miserable existence to advance the cause of the Palestinian people or seek real peace. This made the 1994 awarding a laugher. However, it would not have been diplomatically wise to have given it to the Israeli Prime Minister and Foreign Minister that year and not to Arafat since all three parties were involved in the project that was the basis for that year's award being given.
--United Nations and Kofi Annan -Joint Recipients (2001)
See my previous comments about 1988's recipients. Add to it (i) further ineptitude and the corruption of the UN which festered under Annan's watch as well as (ii) their lack of cajones in dealing with Saddam Hussein's constant violation of UN sanctions and the terms of the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire and this award can be seen for what it was: an undeserved awarding by any objective standards whatsoever.
--Jimmah Carter (2002)
As strange as it may seem, none of the above awardings (despite the problems noted) gave me reason to loathe the Nobel Peace Prize committee the way the 2002 award did. Even the 2001 award could perhaps be chalked up to not having anyone of note to award it to that year{3} so for that reason some leeway could be granted for the choice made. But not Jimmah Carter in 2002.
Jimmah Carter presided over the explosion of Muslim extremist movements and encouraged them by his ineptitude as president. He made a mess that subsequent presidents had to deal with in a variety of ways and with mixed success thus far. Further still, his negotiating skills with the North Koreans in 1994 could give reasonable people cause to wonder if a trained monkey could not have gotten a better deal than the one he got. And (of course) making a political statement in 2002 with his award was disgraceful and cheapened the award further than anything prior to that time had done.
Having said all of that, Carter did oversee the Camp DavidDiscords in 1978 and both Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat were given the award that year. All things considered, if Carter had been given the award that year, it is hard to say that such a decision could not be justified in the same fashion awarding Arafat in 1994 and Mandela in 1993 could be. But Carter's star had fallen since 1978 -and any deserved reputation enhancement he received from his work with Habitat for Humanity since leaving the White House in 1981- was reduced by his ineptness as a negotiator in 1994 and his unexcuable public statements attempting to undercut the Commander in Chief in the runup to the war in Iraq.
Basically, I have had a serious lessening of respect for the Nobel Peace Prize particularly since it was used as a political football back in 2002 when Jimmah Carter was given the award. Having noted that however, I also could not see a problem with the recipents of the award since that time so it more or less returned to my status quo "benign whatever" attitude up until the present time. John Berlau sums up what the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Albert Gore Jr. this year really means in this succinct paragraph from the link above:
Al Gore has won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. This choice, more than any other Nobel Committee selection, marks the end of a 105-year era. In direct contradiction of Alfred Nobel's last will and testament, the selection of Gore essentially means the Peace Prize can no longer be said to be an award for improving the condition of humankind. Looking at Gore's writing, it's far from clear that Gore even believes that humanity is his most important priority.
Whatever one wants to say about awarding the UN or its "peacekeeping" forces with the award (1988), or the UN and its General Secretary (2001), at the very least one could make the argument that they meant well despite the mixed record overall where seeking to improve the conditions of humanity are concerned.
Similarly, one could view the end of apartheid in South Africa (the basis for the 1993 awards to deKlerk and Mandela) and the most significant attempt at peace between Israel and the Palestinians (the basis of the 1994 award which Arafat partook of) as grounds for meeting the intentions of the award as envisioned by its founder. And while I personally have lost a lot of respect for Jimmah Carter in the past fifteen odd years{4}, even his ineptitude as a negotiator in North Korea and other such endeavours could (maybe) be chalked up to not deliberate but instead accidental sabotage.{5} But none of these could be brought to bear to attempt to excuse this year's co-recipients. They have instead perpetrated one of the biggest hoaxes since Y2K and what they recommend would be such a striking departure from the stated aims and intentions of the late Alfred Nobel that the award is for all intensive purposes useless now. John Berlau adequately deals with this matter in the above article and comes to the same conclusion on the matter as your humble servant does; namely this:
--If the Nobel Committee goes with the "politically correct" winds, it is incumbent on every Nobel laureate who cares about the legacy of Alfred Nobel to denounce this terrible decision.
Precisely.
The Hamiltonian Ground (David Brooks)
The above article to a macro extent summarizes well your host's view of the Republican candidates at the present time. It also deals to some extent with some of the underlying principles I have been working on for another posting to be completed and blogged soon but that is all I will say for now except to exhort you to give the above article a read.
The genocide vote: Now is not the time (Jane Harman)
I have to admit it: when I heard about the proposed "genocide vote", I was storing away fire for the day of wrath and was preparing to really unload on the craven Democrats for this monument to symbolism over substance and trying to put partisan politics above national security, our military troops overseas, our geopolitical relationship with Turkey during a time of war, etc. But then I was alerted to this article by a former co-sponsor of the resolution who woke up to the very realities I was prepared to outline in detail. I thank her for seeing the delicacy of these matters and how sometimes imprudent zeal can not only fail to achieve anything of significance but can actually make matters significantly worse. (A subject I am covering in more detail in a soon-to-be-finished-and-ready-for-blogging post incidentally enough.)
Big Brother is Watching You (Whittaker Chambers)
Fifty years ago, Atlas Shrugged was published and fifty years ago, Whittaker Chambers wrote this biting critique of the work and some of the foundational presuppositions of its author. Despite some of my early intellectual influences being Objectivists, I find problems with some of the inexorable conclusions that one often draws from an Objectivist approach to reality. Chambers covers some of them in this review and also raises a few other ones that while I would not have been aware of them myself{6} would nonetheless not sit well with me including the caricature approach to different views in general. To quote a snippet of his review where this is touched on:
Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.
Whatever problems I have with people of certain outlooks, I do not buy into the notion that anyone on earth is all white or all black; ergo such an outlook is not one that resonates well with me.
Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.
I concur fully with the above assessment. Any system or application of a system which does not take ethics and morality into account -which includes a recognition and support of the fundamental rights of people properly understood{7}- will inexorably become totalitarianist. And while more could be noted on this matter (and in the future may well be), that is all I have time for now.
Notes:
{1} This view started with the 1990 awarding to Mikhail Gorbachev if I recall correctly.
{2} Rationally, I can see giving the award to the head of an apartheid-supporting nation who dismantled the system of apartheid in his nation; ergo my view of DeKlerk receiving the award in 1993 lest anyone wonder.
{3} I am trying to give a charitable interpretation here lest anyone wonder.
{4} His work with Habitat for Humanity had rehabilitated his reputation in my eyes for some time subsequent to his leaving office though (admittedly) my assessment of him and his time in office was not formed until after he had departed for various reasons -including that I was too focused on playing "Star Wars" and other such games around that time chronologically ;-)
{5} See footnote three and multiply by three.
{6} I say this as I have not read Atlas Shrugged in its totality but only select passages from it here and there over the years. Trusting for a moment the veracity of Chambers' review, he notes several elements to this book which I had only noticed faintly in the parts of it I had read. The overall tone he claims the book possesses is one which (if true) would have probably turned me off from finishing the book had I attempted to read it from start to finish.
{7} Emphasis on the words "properly understood" of course -a distinctionwith a difference and one that not many people try to make nowadays.
(A Rerum Novarum Quadruple Subject Thread)
When perusing Drudge back on October 12th (in a coffeeshop while waiting for a repair to the car to be completed), I found through various linkings the following news stories and wrote the following musings on them. Without further ado...
Al Gore and the Mission of the Nobel Prizes (John Berlau)
Though the subject of the Nobel Peace Prize is one that I have generally looked at with some benign "whatever" fashion{1}, there was never a revulsion from me pertaining to the award itself. It stands to reason that any noble intention that the late Alfred Nobel had with this award would not always be realized when there is some secret committee doing the awarding. And whatever problems there are with some of the past recipients of the award, they are to some extent explainable. I will now note my problems with some of the recipients in the 107 year history of this award being given out.
Strangely enough (perhaps), I have no real problem with recipients of the award all the way up to 1987. That is not to say that I would have given the awards as they were given mind you, only that nothing sticks out to me as problematical with the selections up to that point. Beginning in 1988 though, things begin looking dodgy in spots and I will now note the problematical recipients starting at that point in time:
--The United Nations Peacekeeping Forces (1988)
The idea that the UN deserves any awards considering how pathetic their trackrecord of achievement is in this area in recent decades -that explains my reasons for noting the 1988 award as problematical. (This is not the same UN that was around when Dag Hammarsjkold was given the award postumously in 1961.) But I must also confess that I approach this to some extent with the benefit of hindsight; ergo this one could be given less weight than the others I will note which follow it.
--Mikhail Gorbachev (1990)
My only gripe against Mikhail Gorbachev getting the award in 1990 is it is too much like giving the World Series trophy this year to the Chicago Cubs who I remind you all are not currently playing. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II should have gotten the award that year if it was to be given to those who worked for peace. If Gorbachev was to be included in that grouping then that would be fine as he did play a crucial role in the ending of the Cold War. But to give it to just Gorbachev and not include the other three I mentioned was inexcusable and showed an obvious bias on the part of the nominating committee that year.
--Nelson Mandela (1993)
Nelson Mandala was and is a communist and the atrocities that have taken place during his tenure as head of South Africa -and which the ANC sanctioned prior to his tenure as head of South Africa- made him receiving the award rather dubious at best. However, he also was not the head of South Africa in 1993 so I must confess to approaching this one with some degree of anachronism. Objectively, if the award was going to be given to Frederik DeKlerk who headed South Africa at the time{2}, it is hard to see how someone on the other side of the struggle to end apartheid could not also receive the award and there was no greater symbol of the struggle than Nelson Mandela whose imprisonment for thirty years was to some extent a rallying point of reference for those struggling to achieve basic recognition for their fundamental rights in South Africa. For that reason and also diplomatic ones, the awarding to Mandela could be justified.
--Yasser Arafat (1994)
Yasser Arafat was a terrorist who never did one substantial thing in his whole miserable existence to advance the cause of the Palestinian people or seek real peace. This made the 1994 awarding a laugher. However, it would not have been diplomatically wise to have given it to the Israeli Prime Minister and Foreign Minister that year and not to Arafat since all three parties were involved in the project that was the basis for that year's award being given.
--United Nations and Kofi Annan -Joint Recipients (2001)
See my previous comments about 1988's recipients. Add to it (i) further ineptitude and the corruption of the UN which festered under Annan's watch as well as (ii) their lack of cajones in dealing with Saddam Hussein's constant violation of UN sanctions and the terms of the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire and this award can be seen for what it was: an undeserved awarding by any objective standards whatsoever.
--Jimmah Carter (2002)
As strange as it may seem, none of the above awardings (despite the problems noted) gave me reason to loathe the Nobel Peace Prize committee the way the 2002 award did. Even the 2001 award could perhaps be chalked up to not having anyone of note to award it to that year{3} so for that reason some leeway could be granted for the choice made. But not Jimmah Carter in 2002.
Jimmah Carter presided over the explosion of Muslim extremist movements and encouraged them by his ineptitude as president. He made a mess that subsequent presidents had to deal with in a variety of ways and with mixed success thus far. Further still, his negotiating skills with the North Koreans in 1994 could give reasonable people cause to wonder if a trained monkey could not have gotten a better deal than the one he got. And (of course) making a political statement in 2002 with his award was disgraceful and cheapened the award further than anything prior to that time had done.
Having said all of that, Carter did oversee the Camp David
Basically, I have had a serious lessening of respect for the Nobel Peace Prize particularly since it was used as a political football back in 2002 when Jimmah Carter was given the award. Having noted that however, I also could not see a problem with the recipents of the award since that time so it more or less returned to my status quo "benign whatever" attitude up until the present time. John Berlau sums up what the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Albert Gore Jr. this year really means in this succinct paragraph from the link above:
Al Gore has won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. This choice, more than any other Nobel Committee selection, marks the end of a 105-year era. In direct contradiction of Alfred Nobel's last will and testament, the selection of Gore essentially means the Peace Prize can no longer be said to be an award for improving the condition of humankind. Looking at Gore's writing, it's far from clear that Gore even believes that humanity is his most important priority.
Whatever one wants to say about awarding the UN or its "peacekeeping" forces with the award (1988), or the UN and its General Secretary (2001), at the very least one could make the argument that they meant well despite the mixed record overall where seeking to improve the conditions of humanity are concerned.
Similarly, one could view the end of apartheid in South Africa (the basis for the 1993 awards to deKlerk and Mandela) and the most significant attempt at peace between Israel and the Palestinians (the basis of the 1994 award which Arafat partook of) as grounds for meeting the intentions of the award as envisioned by its founder. And while I personally have lost a lot of respect for Jimmah Carter in the past fifteen odd years{4}, even his ineptitude as a negotiator in North Korea and other such endeavours could (maybe) be chalked up to not deliberate but instead accidental sabotage.{5} But none of these could be brought to bear to attempt to excuse this year's co-recipients. They have instead perpetrated one of the biggest hoaxes since Y2K and what they recommend would be such a striking departure from the stated aims and intentions of the late Alfred Nobel that the award is for all intensive purposes useless now. John Berlau adequately deals with this matter in the above article and comes to the same conclusion on the matter as your humble servant does; namely this:
--If the Nobel Committee goes with the "politically correct" winds, it is incumbent on every Nobel laureate who cares about the legacy of Alfred Nobel to denounce this terrible decision.
Precisely.
The Hamiltonian Ground (David Brooks)
The above article to a macro extent summarizes well your host's view of the Republican candidates at the present time. It also deals to some extent with some of the underlying principles I have been working on for another posting to be completed and blogged soon but that is all I will say for now except to exhort you to give the above article a read.
The genocide vote: Now is not the time (Jane Harman)
I have to admit it: when I heard about the proposed "genocide vote", I was storing away fire for the day of wrath and was preparing to really unload on the craven Democrats for this monument to symbolism over substance and trying to put partisan politics above national security, our military troops overseas, our geopolitical relationship with Turkey during a time of war, etc. But then I was alerted to this article by a former co-sponsor of the resolution who woke up to the very realities I was prepared to outline in detail. I thank her for seeing the delicacy of these matters and how sometimes imprudent zeal can not only fail to achieve anything of significance but can actually make matters significantly worse. (A subject I am covering in more detail in a soon-to-be-finished-and-ready-for-blogging post incidentally enough.)
Big Brother is Watching You (Whittaker Chambers)
Fifty years ago, Atlas Shrugged was published and fifty years ago, Whittaker Chambers wrote this biting critique of the work and some of the foundational presuppositions of its author. Despite some of my early intellectual influences being Objectivists, I find problems with some of the inexorable conclusions that one often draws from an Objectivist approach to reality. Chambers covers some of them in this review and also raises a few other ones that while I would not have been aware of them myself{6} would nonetheless not sit well with me including the caricature approach to different views in general. To quote a snippet of his review where this is touched on:
Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.
Whatever problems I have with people of certain outlooks, I do not buy into the notion that anyone on earth is all white or all black; ergo such an outlook is not one that resonates well with me.
Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.
I concur fully with the above assessment. Any system or application of a system which does not take ethics and morality into account -which includes a recognition and support of the fundamental rights of people properly understood{7}- will inexorably become totalitarianist. And while more could be noted on this matter (and in the future may well be), that is all I have time for now.
Notes:
{1} This view started with the 1990 awarding to Mikhail Gorbachev if I recall correctly.
{2} Rationally, I can see giving the award to the head of an apartheid-supporting nation who dismantled the system of apartheid in his nation; ergo my view of DeKlerk receiving the award in 1993 lest anyone wonder.
{3} I am trying to give a charitable interpretation here lest anyone wonder.
{4} His work with Habitat for Humanity had rehabilitated his reputation in my eyes for some time subsequent to his leaving office though (admittedly) my assessment of him and his time in office was not formed until after he had departed for various reasons -including that I was too focused on playing "Star Wars" and other such games around that time chronologically ;-)
{5} See footnote three and multiply by three.
{6} I say this as I have not read Atlas Shrugged in its totality but only select passages from it here and there over the years. Trusting for a moment the veracity of Chambers' review, he notes several elements to this book which I had only noticed faintly in the parts of it I had read. The overall tone he claims the book possesses is one which (if true) would have probably turned me off from finishing the book had I attempted to read it from start to finish.
{7} Emphasis on the words "properly understood" of course -a distinctionwith a difference and one that not many people try to make nowadays.
As I consider one of the threads to be posted to this weblog shortly upon its completion, it is interesting to have discovered through some web surfing a similar view of ours on the subject of the Nobel Prize as enunciated by the late renaissance man Arthur Jones (RIP). He was one of the notable influences of your host at Rerum Novarum as we have noted on occasion at sundry times and divers manners over the years (most recently here). Anyway, that posting (to be blogged soon) can serve as a bit of a foretaste to something we will be blogging on soon as well as an encapsulation of another principle which we have often enunciated over the years at this humble weblog. But that is all I want to say on the matter at the moment as it is late and I need to get some rest.
In light of summer which has faded, before we start getting really bad weather up here in Seattle, and as another birthday for your weblog host is imminent, it seems appropriate to denote in sonnet form the changes in more ways than one. Without further ado...
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
[William Shakespeare: Sonnet XVIII]
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
[William Shakespeare: Sonnet XVIII]
Sunday, October 14, 2007
On Blogging in General, My Approaches To It, Remembering Two Musical Legends and Three Major Influences, Etc:
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)
[This thread was predominantly drafted back in early September but due to time constraints was not able to be finished until now. -ISM]
I would be remiss in not mentioning at the start of these musings that September 3rd was the birthday of blues legend Freddy King. I wrote in some length on him last year and encourage readers to review that thread to learn more{1} about the late great "Texas Cannonball" (may he rest in peace).
On the subject of blogging, there are many ways of going about writing on a blog or in other online mediums. I have gone over this a few times in the past and probably will in the future the approaches I use to draw ideas for blogging. One of them is that I am by nature a bit of a contrarian and always have been. That in and of itself is a departure from most people but frankly if you are not to some extent unique -either in your views, your approach to explaining your views, how you go about discussing the subjects you want to discuss, etc.- then it is difficult to be perceived apart from the general mass of those with similarities in their outlooks as yours.
The blogging medium itself is one that I consciously recognized early on{2} had a number of ways to do it and I did not want to approach the way many others do. Or as was noted in a weblog posting within the first year of blogging and when the weblog was still in an early part of its growth:
[Blogging a bunch of links] is not something that interests me for many reasons - though I do have my days on occasion when I am in the mood to mostly post links without much commentary.
...
I can track stuff down with the best of them but my problem is that I cannot simply post a lot of links and not comment on them. And my reason for this is [due to] the tendencies of the media to try and paint people [of a generally conservative disposition] as either criminal or weird. And if I can do my part to make "a dent in public discourse" then I will do that. But one way I cannot do that is to simply be a vending machine of links.
For if I did do that too regularly, why would I provide any incentive to actually read Rerum Novarum and not Instapundit??? And why read Instapundit and not the two columns on the front page of Investors Business Daily??? I could deconstruct this into near-infinity so I will stop at this time as I am sure you get the idea. My goal is simply to muse on whatever strikes my fancy. In short, there is a reason that you will seldom see breaking stories at this humble weblog.[...]
I tend to prefer to let others bring up breaking issues and then I respond to them. There are tactical reasons for this as well as practical ones. Part of the reason is that I am too critical of journalism in general of rushing to print anything they think can make a story and then if they err on A1 - which happens more frequently than most people would believe, they correct themselves on Q14 where no one sees it.[...]
I find if I let others break the story, I can benefit from their efforts and also circumvent the problems that can come with seeking to "break" a story before anyone else. And of course letting others hash out the main points provides an opportunity to approach the subjects in a way that is to some degree different than anyone else.
...
Criticism is sometimes justified but usually those who make a habit of it are incapable of separating legitimate criticism from childlike rantings. I believe we do a reasonable job of that separation here; however that does not mean there is no room for improvement of course. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa June 11, 2003)]
I should probably note that even early on I was not predisposed to post a lot of links without commentary but I did it to a greater extent early on than I subsequently have. There are a few reasons for this but rather than go into that now, there are many strengths to the approach I take. One is that it makes it easier to focus on the real underlying issues of a subject and not so much of the trivial surface stuff that most people focus on. However, one of the problems with imposing on oneself a degree of contemporary ignorance of media overexposure is that stuff one would be interested in if they heard of it gets lost as well. The strengths I could list for my overall approach to these matters are legion. The weaknesses while few are nonetheless worth noting and I will give three such examples at this time of news stories I did not hear of until weeks after the fact.
The first example is this thread from the New York Times froma couple of weeks two months ago:
Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83
Now the only reason I know of this link is that I saw on the cover of a jazz periodical at the library an article about the late great Max Roach, God rest his soul. That got me to do a google search and the above article was found on him. I am a music connoisseur of many styles but one style I like where my overall knowledge is not that good is jazz. Having said that though, one cannot be even minimally familiar with jazz and not know about Max Roach. He was unquestionably the greatest jazz drummer ever. Indeed, his influence went beyond jazz with some of the greatest rock and roll drummers of the '60s and '70s being unquestionably influenced by Roach either directly (i.e Ginger Baker and Neil Peart) or indirectly (i.e. John Bonham, Keith Moon).
Within the last couple ofdays weeks we saw pass on also the greatest tenor since Enrico Caruso, Luciano Pavarotti. As he is much better known than Max Roach, I will not say much on him that has not been said by others far more competent to discuss that genre of music than myself. I refer of course to fellow musicians including his opera peers and fellow Three Tenors performer Jose Carraras and Placido Domingo who were involved in a musical memorial and who (along with numerous others) spoke fondly of him here. And it seems fitting to include a clip of the great Pavarotti (RIP) so here is one of him singing Nessun Dorma. In three words: he was phenomenal.
Also a missed news story in that time span was the death of Michael Jackson (may he rest in peace). Those familiar with your host's love of beer, wine, and other spirits may well know whom I speak of -suffice to say it is not the same fella who owns Neverland Ranch. Lovers of fine beer will hopefully join me in lifting a glass to his memory -if not for Michael Jackson and the world of fine imports he either exposed me to or encouraged me to seek out and try, my knowledge of beer would be so much less than it is to say nothing of my appreciation for the truly good stuff which is most assuredly not made in America.{3}
Finally, there is the passing of Arthur Jones -founder of Nautilus and a certified renaissance man in many respects. The influence he had on my intellectual formation -both directly and particularly by the influence he had on one of my major intellectual mentors- cannot be emphasized enough. He was one of those who taught me and others who fell under the sway of his influence to not passively accept "conventional wisdom" on anything and indeed that lesson (learned at a young age thankfully) has served me well lo these many years later.
It is my hope that these great men (both the recently as well as not-so-recently deceased) will rest peacefully with the souls of the faithfully departed in the bosom of God for their utilization of the tremendous gifts they gave to others. Perhaps if I had been a little less media ignorant than I had been in the past couple of months{4} I would have caught these events sooner. But even if I had been, the possibility of missing them was still a significant one and considering how much garbage one has to sift through to find the wheat amongst the chaff. (Due to the overstressing nature of 24/7 news cycles.)
Notes:
{1} For those interested in more about Freddy King, here and here are a couple links of him playing live.
{2} After I adjusted to it and the degree of freedom here which as I admitted back in May did not happen automatically or without a degree of "growing pains":
[L]ife itself is a process of growth and development across a broad continuum. This includes weblog writing and interests.
We have no problem admitting that it took a bit of time before this weblog really started to take a discernable shape and some of the features and/or principles which have become standard or typical over time were in the "finding their feet" stage early on. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa May 15, 2007)]
{3} This is not to deprecate some of the microbrews that are made in various locales mind you; only that my operative presupposition with beer is that foreign brews are to be preferred whenever possible except for Japanese beer which has the singular distinction of being the only nation where the mass-produced beers are worse than those made in America.
{4} I have been gradually imposing a greater media ignorance on myself than I normally have and deliberately for reasonsI may touch on at some point later on. I have actually explained recently.
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)
[This thread was predominantly drafted back in early September but due to time constraints was not able to be finished until now. -ISM]
I would be remiss in not mentioning at the start of these musings that September 3rd was the birthday of blues legend Freddy King. I wrote in some length on him last year and encourage readers to review that thread to learn more{1} about the late great "Texas Cannonball" (may he rest in peace).
On the subject of blogging, there are many ways of going about writing on a blog or in other online mediums. I have gone over this a few times in the past and probably will in the future the approaches I use to draw ideas for blogging. One of them is that I am by nature a bit of a contrarian and always have been. That in and of itself is a departure from most people but frankly if you are not to some extent unique -either in your views, your approach to explaining your views, how you go about discussing the subjects you want to discuss, etc.- then it is difficult to be perceived apart from the general mass of those with similarities in their outlooks as yours.
The blogging medium itself is one that I consciously recognized early on{2} had a number of ways to do it and I did not want to approach the way many others do. Or as was noted in a weblog posting within the first year of blogging and when the weblog was still in an early part of its growth:
[Blogging a bunch of links] is not something that interests me for many reasons - though I do have my days on occasion when I am in the mood to mostly post links without much commentary.
...
I can track stuff down with the best of them but my problem is that I cannot simply post a lot of links and not comment on them. And my reason for this is [due to] the tendencies of the media to try and paint people [of a generally conservative disposition] as either criminal or weird. And if I can do my part to make "a dent in public discourse" then I will do that. But one way I cannot do that is to simply be a vending machine of links.
For if I did do that too regularly, why would I provide any incentive to actually read Rerum Novarum and not Instapundit??? And why read Instapundit and not the two columns on the front page of Investors Business Daily??? I could deconstruct this into near-infinity so I will stop at this time as I am sure you get the idea. My goal is simply to muse on whatever strikes my fancy. In short, there is a reason that you will seldom see breaking stories at this humble weblog.[...]
I tend to prefer to let others bring up breaking issues and then I respond to them. There are tactical reasons for this as well as practical ones. Part of the reason is that I am too critical of journalism in general of rushing to print anything they think can make a story and then if they err on A1 - which happens more frequently than most people would believe, they correct themselves on Q14 where no one sees it.[...]
I find if I let others break the story, I can benefit from their efforts and also circumvent the problems that can come with seeking to "break" a story before anyone else. And of course letting others hash out the main points provides an opportunity to approach the subjects in a way that is to some degree different than anyone else.
...
Criticism is sometimes justified but usually those who make a habit of it are incapable of separating legitimate criticism from childlike rantings. I believe we do a reasonable job of that separation here; however that does not mean there is no room for improvement of course. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa June 11, 2003)]
I should probably note that even early on I was not predisposed to post a lot of links without commentary but I did it to a greater extent early on than I subsequently have. There are a few reasons for this but rather than go into that now, there are many strengths to the approach I take. One is that it makes it easier to focus on the real underlying issues of a subject and not so much of the trivial surface stuff that most people focus on. However, one of the problems with imposing on oneself a degree of contemporary ignorance of media overexposure is that stuff one would be interested in if they heard of it gets lost as well. The strengths I could list for my overall approach to these matters are legion. The weaknesses while few are nonetheless worth noting and I will give three such examples at this time of news stories I did not hear of until weeks after the fact.
The first example is this thread from the New York Times from
Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83
Now the only reason I know of this link is that I saw on the cover of a jazz periodical at the library an article about the late great Max Roach, God rest his soul. That got me to do a google search and the above article was found on him. I am a music connoisseur of many styles but one style I like where my overall knowledge is not that good is jazz. Having said that though, one cannot be even minimally familiar with jazz and not know about Max Roach. He was unquestionably the greatest jazz drummer ever. Indeed, his influence went beyond jazz with some of the greatest rock and roll drummers of the '60s and '70s being unquestionably influenced by Roach either directly (i.e Ginger Baker and Neil Peart) or indirectly (i.e. John Bonham, Keith Moon).
Within the last couple of
Also a missed news story in that time span was the death of Michael Jackson (may he rest in peace). Those familiar with your host's love of beer, wine, and other spirits may well know whom I speak of -suffice to say it is not the same fella who owns Neverland Ranch. Lovers of fine beer will hopefully join me in lifting a glass to his memory -if not for Michael Jackson and the world of fine imports he either exposed me to or encouraged me to seek out and try, my knowledge of beer would be so much less than it is to say nothing of my appreciation for the truly good stuff which is most assuredly not made in America.{3}
Finally, there is the passing of Arthur Jones -founder of Nautilus and a certified renaissance man in many respects. The influence he had on my intellectual formation -both directly and particularly by the influence he had on one of my major intellectual mentors- cannot be emphasized enough. He was one of those who taught me and others who fell under the sway of his influence to not passively accept "conventional wisdom" on anything and indeed that lesson (learned at a young age thankfully) has served me well lo these many years later.
It is my hope that these great men (both the recently as well as not-so-recently deceased) will rest peacefully with the souls of the faithfully departed in the bosom of God for their utilization of the tremendous gifts they gave to others. Perhaps if I had been a little less media ignorant than I had been in the past couple of months{4} I would have caught these events sooner. But even if I had been, the possibility of missing them was still a significant one and considering how much garbage one has to sift through to find the wheat amongst the chaff. (Due to the overstressing nature of 24/7 news cycles.)
Notes:
{1} For those interested in more about Freddy King, here and here are a couple links of him playing live.
{2} After I adjusted to it and the degree of freedom here which as I admitted back in May did not happen automatically or without a degree of "growing pains":
[L]ife itself is a process of growth and development across a broad continuum. This includes weblog writing and interests.
We have no problem admitting that it took a bit of time before this weblog really started to take a discernable shape and some of the features and/or principles which have become standard or typical over time were in the "finding their feet" stage early on. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa May 15, 2007)]
{3} This is not to deprecate some of the microbrews that are made in various locales mind you; only that my operative presupposition with beer is that foreign brews are to be preferred whenever possible except for Japanese beer which has the singular distinction of being the only nation where the mass-produced beers are worse than those made in America.
{4} I have been gradually imposing a greater media ignorance on myself than I normally have and deliberately for reasons
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Points to Ponder:
The process of establishing precise definitions is rigorously demanding; which is why the mystics and skeptics (most people, today) turn away from the realm of the intellect. Concepts are the tools of thought; the better your tools, the better, i.e., more precise, the closer to the actual facts of reality, will your thinking be. [Mike Mentzer]
The process of establishing precise definitions is rigorously demanding; which is why the mystics and skeptics (most people, today) turn away from the realm of the intellect. Concepts are the tools of thought; the better your tools, the better, i.e., more precise, the closer to the actual facts of reality, will your thinking be. [Mike Mentzer]
On Vilfredo Pareto and Notes on Applying A Basic Economic Principle to Life In General (Including Blogging):
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)
Sometimes with a weblog such as Rerum Novarum which is not updated daily, the appearance can be given that there is a haitus of sorts when in reality there is not. It bears noting briefly at the start of this posting because in a 24/7 news and media cycle, going days on end without posting anything new is hardly in keeping with the weltanschauung of many who are involved in media endeavours -be they of the msm or alternative media variety. To keep the plate adequately mixed here subjectwise -both for my own interest as well as that of the readers- it requires some degree of pacing. I almost never make a scheduled haitus unless it is absolutely necessary.{1} But I also do not like to rush posts as they are formulated and with more thought out expositions, that can take some time -usually days, sometimes weeks, and in a few cases, months.{2}
Life has a way of not giving enough time to get done everything one wants to do -be that in business, with blogging, whatever- and your host is seeking to reapply a principle he has long believed in but not always observed as faithfully as he should have: namely an old economics principle by the late Italian-French economist Vilfredo Pareto. In all spheres of his life in recent months, your host has been trying to reapply this principle where it had fallen into disuse and that includes with blogging. But before explaining how we intend to apply it, readers should be familiarized with the principle in question first so that they can see where we are going in raising it at the present time.
Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) had come to realize a principle that he first set forth explicitly in 1906{1} pertaining to the issue of economic distribution. He had observed in Italy that 20% of the population owned 80% of the land and resources. Initially he thought that this was due to inequalities of economics but various studies he conducted in nature solidified that hypothesis into a probable theory and it became evident that this is the natural order of things. In other words, whether it is 80-20, 85-15, 90-10, or 95-5 the overwhelming majority of productive results come from a small percentage of outputs.
I discovered this principle years ago with weight training where my training partners and I would through doing a mere fraction of the work that others around us were doing would continue to make progress while they stagnated.{3} And over time I have found that it applies to so many areas but I do not want to get away from the subject in question which is applying Pareto's Principle to all areas of my life -particularly those areas where I have unconsciously let it lapse in recent years.
None of this means I will necessarily blog any more than I do not generally speaking. Well, maybe a bit more if there is more time in the day as a result of getting the other areas of life more thoroughly organized under this principle -a process that is taking a while in lieu of the layers of inefficiency that I had allowed to seep into various aspects of my life.
Oh, I should note before wrapping up this posting that one thing I am considering writing on is the application of this principle to economics and explaining the fallacy behind economic approaches which seek to create equality in outcome as opposed to merely equality in opportunity. But that is a subject for another time.
Notes:
{1} As it was back in July of this year for a couple of weeks.
{2} It seems in the past six months there have been more than the usual number of these kind of endeavours -including about a half dozen which are in various stages of completion as of this posting and the recent posting on baseball milestones. (The bulk of the material of which was composed over two months prior to its posting but required significantly more than the normal rearranging and revising before it was ready to be posted.)
{3} I have since realized through further study and personal experimentation just how little is really required in this area for maximizing results volume-wise. Like everything, it is not how much you do which is the determining factor but doing it precisely right; ergo a ten to fifteen minute weight training routine seven times per month done correctly results in magnified progress far and above ten times the amount of work in the same time period, etc.
Once the tendons in my foot heal enough to allow it (they were severely strained in April of 2006 and only in recent months appear to be close to fully healed) and I shed a few more pounds, it will be time for perfecting these matters further both with my return to training and some friends and associates who have asked for assistance in maximizing their results in minimal time in the coming months and year.
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)
Sometimes with a weblog such as Rerum Novarum which is not updated daily, the appearance can be given that there is a haitus of sorts when in reality there is not. It bears noting briefly at the start of this posting because in a 24/7 news and media cycle, going days on end without posting anything new is hardly in keeping with the weltanschauung of many who are involved in media endeavours -be they of the msm or alternative media variety. To keep the plate adequately mixed here subjectwise -both for my own interest as well as that of the readers- it requires some degree of pacing. I almost never make a scheduled haitus unless it is absolutely necessary.{1} But I also do not like to rush posts as they are formulated and with more thought out expositions, that can take some time -usually days, sometimes weeks, and in a few cases, months.{2}
Life has a way of not giving enough time to get done everything one wants to do -be that in business, with blogging, whatever- and your host is seeking to reapply a principle he has long believed in but not always observed as faithfully as he should have: namely an old economics principle by the late Italian-French economist Vilfredo Pareto. In all spheres of his life in recent months, your host has been trying to reapply this principle where it had fallen into disuse and that includes with blogging. But before explaining how we intend to apply it, readers should be familiarized with the principle in question first so that they can see where we are going in raising it at the present time.
Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) had come to realize a principle that he first set forth explicitly in 1906{1} pertaining to the issue of economic distribution. He had observed in Italy that 20% of the population owned 80% of the land and resources. Initially he thought that this was due to inequalities of economics but various studies he conducted in nature solidified that hypothesis into a probable theory and it became evident that this is the natural order of things. In other words, whether it is 80-20, 85-15, 90-10, or 95-5 the overwhelming majority of productive results come from a small percentage of outputs.
I discovered this principle years ago with weight training where my training partners and I would through doing a mere fraction of the work that others around us were doing would continue to make progress while they stagnated.{3} And over time I have found that it applies to so many areas but I do not want to get away from the subject in question which is applying Pareto's Principle to all areas of my life -particularly those areas where I have unconsciously let it lapse in recent years.
None of this means I will necessarily blog any more than I do not generally speaking. Well, maybe a bit more if there is more time in the day as a result of getting the other areas of life more thoroughly organized under this principle -a process that is taking a while in lieu of the layers of inefficiency that I had allowed to seep into various aspects of my life.
Oh, I should note before wrapping up this posting that one thing I am considering writing on is the application of this principle to economics and explaining the fallacy behind economic approaches which seek to create equality in outcome as opposed to merely equality in opportunity. But that is a subject for another time.
Notes:
{1} As it was back in July of this year for a couple of weeks.
{2} It seems in the past six months there have been more than the usual number of these kind of endeavours -including about a half dozen which are in various stages of completion as of this posting and the recent posting on baseball milestones. (The bulk of the material of which was composed over two months prior to its posting but required significantly more than the normal rearranging and revising before it was ready to be posted.)
{3} I have since realized through further study and personal experimentation just how little is really required in this area for maximizing results volume-wise. Like everything, it is not how much you do which is the determining factor but doing it precisely right; ergo a ten to fifteen minute weight training routine seven times per month done correctly results in magnified progress far and above ten times the amount of work in the same time period, etc.
Once the tendons in my foot heal enough to allow it (they were severely strained in April of 2006 and only in recent months appear to be close to fully healed) and I shed a few more pounds, it will be time for perfecting these matters further both with my return to training and some friends and associates who have asked for assistance in maximizing their results in minimal time in the coming months and year.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Ahmadinejad Cements Ties With Venezuela President Chavez (ABC News)
The irony is, these dictators are beloved by not a few who hate President Bush's guts and whine about "suppression of free speech." Of course the people who whine about President Bush are not about to be thrown in jail or executed anytime soon whereas with Ahmadinejad or Chavez, the same assurance cannot be given. This goes to show just how mentally vacant some people can be -notably the sorts who endorse people such as Chavez.{1} To help those who need pictures to put two and two together, let us consider this "socialist summit of 2007" in pictures:
Now consider this in the context of an earlier "socialist summit" from 1934 pictured below:
For those who think this comparison is unfair, it only shows how ignorant of history they really are. For if it was the 1930's the fans of Chavez and Ahmadinejad would be going gaga over socialist Benito Mussolini and socialist Adolph Hitler forming their "alliance" also.
The irony is, these dictators are beloved by not a few who hate President Bush's guts and whine about "suppression of free speech." Of course the people who whine about President Bush are not about to be thrown in jail or executed anytime soon whereas with Ahmadinejad or Chavez, the same assurance cannot be given. This goes to show just how mentally vacant some people can be -notably the sorts who endorse people such as Chavez.{1} To help those who need pictures to put two and two together, let us consider this "socialist summit of 2007" in pictures:
Now consider this in the context of an earlier "socialist summit" from 1934 pictured below:
For those who think this comparison is unfair, it only shows how ignorant of history they really are. For if it was the 1930's the fans of Chavez and Ahmadinejad would be going gaga over socialist Benito Mussolini and socialist Adolph Hitler forming their "alliance" also.
All we need now to have TIME Magazine nominate Ahmadinejad as "Man of the Year" the way they did with Hitler for 1938 and the parallel will be complete. (That rolling you felt was Spanish historian George Santayana rolling in his grave.)
Note:
{1} Those who are shillers for Ahmadinejad are significantly worse in this area.
On Baseball, Recent Milestones, Etc.
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)
[Note: The bulk of the material in this thread was composed a couple of months ago but remained unfinished until it was reformatted for posting and revised a bit a few days ago. -ISM]
Considering the recent record breaking feat of Barry Bonds, readers of this humble weblog who know of your host's fondness for the "thinking man's game" of baseball may be surprised that we do not view this "feat" as all that impressive. Tom Glavine's 300th win is huge as he will be the last 300 game winner until Randy Johnson and Mike Mussina do it.{1} But we at Rerum Novarum are not too impressed with a juiced up cheater like Bonds and frankly think all players of the past twenty years for whom reasonable certainty can be derived that they used steriods should have their records reduced by 10-20% as punishment for their unethical behaviour. But enough on that point for now, let us focus on what was impressive and did not involve any juicing. I refer of course to the feats of George Herman Ruth aka "Babe Ruth" among other titles given.{2}
Babe Ruth is the greatest player of all time, period this is frankly not even debatable. This is evident in countless ways of which only a few will be touched on here. The title "greatest of all time" has many applications and in Ruth's case it refers both in his prowess as an all-around offensive machine as well as the fact that he was among the most dominant pitchers of his era before becoming a full-time hitter five years into his baseball career. But now that Bonds has the home run "record" and will likely finish in the top three in runs batted in (RBI's), it seems appropriate to remind readers unfamiliar with history some of the feats of the Babe as there has never and will never be another like him.
In a twenty-two year career, Babe Ruth achieved over 90% of his stats for hitting in a sixteen year span from 1919-1934.{3} Consider this for a moment:
2657 of the Babe's 2873 hits (92.4%), 2062 of his 2174 runs scored (94.8%), 458 of his 506 doubles (90.5%), 118 of his 136 triples (86.7%), 688 of his 714 home runs (96.3%), 2085 of his 2213 runs batted in (94.2%),and 1953 of his 2062 walks (94.7%) were in a sixteen year span of his twenty-two year career. In that same span, his batting average was .344, his on base percentage was .477, and his slugging percentage rounded from the nearest thousanth was .700. In that same time period, he led the league in home runs twelve times, in slugging fourteen times, in walks eleven times, in runs batted in six times, and had 100 or more runs batted in thirteen times, and 40 or more home runs eleven times.{4}
One who wants to argue that Bonds achieved more in a four to five year stretch (2000-2004) than anyone else can consider that sustaining the standard of excellence three to four times as long is significantly more remarkable. If the two are compared on the most productive sixteen year stretches of their careers (including the subpar years each had in that span for injuries or other reasons), Ruth edges Bonds even before we get to the question of steroids. In fact, let us consider for a moment how significant Babe Ruth's achievements were when they are compared to Hank Aaron who set the record broken by Bonds this year.
If you compare their stats, you will see that Babe Ruth had nearly 4000 fewer at bats than Hank Aaron. Despite that, Ruth only hit 41 fewer home runs and 80 fewer runs batted in.{5} The only players where one could make an argument for greatest based on the OPS+ statistic (which is arguably the best stat for measuring a player against his contemporaries) and the players closest to Ruth's all time 207 figure (meaning he averaged twice the average player in overall offensive output for his career) was Ted Williams' 190 career mark and Barry Bonds' 182 career mark. (Bonds also has four of the top ten single season OPS+ marks to three for Babe Ruth and two for Ted Williams -three of Barry's four happen to be the first, second, and third most for a single season including 2001 where his single season average was 275.) However, since Bonds had over 700 more at bats and still was behind Ruth in home runs by a small margin (and runs batted in by over 300) and achieved his top three single season marks after 2000 (and when he was obviously on steriods), they are easily dispensible.
And of course Ruth was also cherished for reasons outside of baseball. For this reason, anyone who approached one of his records was going to get grief. Roger Maris was the recipient of it in 1961 when he broke Ruth's record for single season home runs in the first 162 game season.{5} His all-time record for home runs{6} was of course surpassed by Hank Aaron who was among the most disciplined, consistent, and classy players to ever play the game. But the stats themselves{7} do not lie.
Barry Bonds was (and is) talented in his own right -I would say (and did in years past) that he was the best all-around player in the game during the decade of the 1990's before the controversy with steroids. However, he allowed himself to be seduced by the attention being paid to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa when they challenged the single season record in 1998 (both surpassing it that year). Sosa has since been shown to have used a corked bat which calls a number of his homeruns into question (to say nothing about the bulking up he did) and McGwire at the Senate hearings on steriod use in baseball did not come across well and was rejected overwhelmingly on his first bid for the Hall of Fame.
For those who do not know, 500 home runs for hitting was at one time what 300 wins for pitching is: basically a defacto entry for the Hall of Fame.{8} So for McGwire to lose overwhelmingly in his first bid by 87% -falling 54% short for inclusion- is a significant rebuke considering that he had nearly 600 home runs and is the only player in history to homer in fewer average at bats than the Babe. Sosa who has over 600 home runs thus far is not going to fare much better so that leaves Bonds. Will the new so-called "Home Run King" make it into the Hall of Fame??? Seriously, I am not so sure he will even though before he decided to sully his reputation with steroid bulking up he was well on track to do so as one of the most gifted players ever to play the game.
In short, I am very happy for Glavine who achieved a feat that will in the coming years be rare if not practically non-existent. But as for Bonds, I am not similarly well-wishing. Perhaps a little rhyme I threw together recently on the matter can explain this succinctly so I will end with it now:
The Sultan of Swat did it{9} with hot dogs and pizazz
Hammering Hank did it with consistency and class
Barry Bonds did it with a needle in his ass
And that is the bottom line really.
Notes:
{1} We are confident that Randy Johnson will find a way to nurse his perpetually injured back well aged beyond his 44 years and conjure up the 16 wins needed to make 300 before he wraps up his career. Mike Mussina needs about 53 wins and at 37 years of age should see that achieved within the next four years. Beyond that, we are not sure there will be another 300 game winner for about two decades or more (if ever).
{2} He was also given the following nicknames:
The Big Bam", "The Sultan of Swat," "The Bambino," "The Colossus of Clout," "The Wali of Wallop," "The Wazir of Wham," "The Maharajah of Mash," "The Rajah of Rap," "The Caliph of Clout," and "The Behemoth of Bust."
{3} I picked this span of time because it started with the first year where he was a fulltime hitter (instead of a fulltime pitcher) and left off the last year where he was clearly a shadow of his former self. (In the interest of fairness I included the 1934 season which was the first season where he had a noticeable decline in production in all offensive categories.)
{4} In 1922 he missed a fifth of a season and fell 1 RBI short of 100 and five HR's short of 40. Similarly he missed over a third of the 1925 season due to an illness which left him 34 RBI's short of 100 and 15 HR's short of 40. (His batting average in those two years was a shade under .300 too.) Based on the balance of his career stats, there is no reason to conclude otherwise than he would have hit at least 100 RBI's, 40 HR's, and batted over .300 in those years as he did in every season where he played at least close to a full schedule of games.
{5} As of this writing, Aaron and Ruth are first and second all-time in RBI's or "runs batted in."
{6} The seasons were 154 games up to 1960: one reason Maris' record was astrisked. When Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa broke Maris' record in 1998, they both did it in 154 games or less unlike Maris who tied Ruth and broke the latter's record after the 154 game point of the 1961 season.
{7} Another note: when Ruth hit his 700th home run, there was no one else even half way to that number. Heck, his teammate Lou "Iron Horse" Gehrig was at 347 and Philadelphia Athletics slugger Jimmy "the Beast" Foxx was at 266: their total combined was still almost a hundred homers fewer than Ruth's total. (Jimmy Foxx was second in home runs when he finished his career in 1945 and was not supplanted in that spot until 1965 when he was passed by Willie Mays. Futhermore, when Ruth died, "The Beast" was the only other player in history to have over 500 home runs in his career.)
{8} There are a variety of things to consider and players can get in by other criteria (i.e Ty Cobb as a hitter and Catfish Hunter who had nowhere near 500 HR's and 300 wins respectively) but those have long been viewed as automatic benchmarks for entry into the Hall.
{9} Though if modern rules were applied to Ruth's hits, he would have had at least 765 home runs rather than the 714 to which he is credited. To quote Wikipedia on the matter:
As a sidelight to his prominent role in changing the game to the power-game, the frequency and popularity of Ruth's home runs eventually led to a rule change pertaining to those hit in sudden-death mode (bottom of the ninth or later inning). Prior to 1931, as soon as the first necessary run to win the game scored, the play was over, and the batter was credited only with the number of bases needed to drive in the winning run. Thus, if the score was 3-2 with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, and the batter smacked an "over the fence home run", the game would end at 4-3, with the batter only allowed a double, and the runners officially stopped on 2nd and 3rd (since they weren't needed to win the game). The new rule allowed the entire play to complete, justified on the grounds that the ball was dead and that all runners could freely advance, thus granting the full allotment of HR and RBI's to the batter, as we know it today. Several players lost home runs that way, including Ruth, whose career total would have been changed to 715 if historians during the 1960s had been successful in pursuing this matter. Major League Baseball elected not to retrofit the records to the modern rules, and Ruth's total stayed at 714.
Another rules change that affected Ruth was the method used by umpires to judge potential home runs when the batted ball left the field near a foul pole. Before 1931, i.e through most of Ruth's most productive years, the umpire called the play based on the ball's final resting place "when last seen". Thus, if a ball went over the fence fair, and curved behind the foul pole, it was ruled foul. Beginning in 1931 and continuing to the present day, the rule was changed to require the umpire to judge based on the point where the ball cleared the fence. Jenkinson's book (p.374-375) lists 78 foul balls near the foul pole in Ruth's career, and the research indicates at least 50 of them were likely to have been home runs under the modern rule.
(Musings of your humble servant at Rerum Novarum)
[Note: The bulk of the material in this thread was composed a couple of months ago but remained unfinished until it was reformatted for posting and revised a bit a few days ago. -ISM]
Considering the recent record breaking feat of Barry Bonds, readers of this humble weblog who know of your host's fondness for the "thinking man's game" of baseball may be surprised that we do not view this "feat" as all that impressive. Tom Glavine's 300th win is huge as he will be the last 300 game winner until Randy Johnson and Mike Mussina do it.{1} But we at Rerum Novarum are not too impressed with a juiced up cheater like Bonds and frankly think all players of the past twenty years for whom reasonable certainty can be derived that they used steriods should have their records reduced by 10-20% as punishment for their unethical behaviour. But enough on that point for now, let us focus on what was impressive and did not involve any juicing. I refer of course to the feats of George Herman Ruth aka "Babe Ruth" among other titles given.{2}
Babe Ruth is the greatest player of all time, period this is frankly not even debatable. This is evident in countless ways of which only a few will be touched on here. The title "greatest of all time" has many applications and in Ruth's case it refers both in his prowess as an all-around offensive machine as well as the fact that he was among the most dominant pitchers of his era before becoming a full-time hitter five years into his baseball career. But now that Bonds has the home run "record" and will likely finish in the top three in runs batted in (RBI's), it seems appropriate to remind readers unfamiliar with history some of the feats of the Babe as there has never and will never be another like him.
In a twenty-two year career, Babe Ruth achieved over 90% of his stats for hitting in a sixteen year span from 1919-1934.{3} Consider this for a moment:
2657 of the Babe's 2873 hits (92.4%), 2062 of his 2174 runs scored (94.8%), 458 of his 506 doubles (90.5%), 118 of his 136 triples (86.7%), 688 of his 714 home runs (96.3%), 2085 of his 2213 runs batted in (94.2%),and 1953 of his 2062 walks (94.7%) were in a sixteen year span of his twenty-two year career. In that same span, his batting average was .344, his on base percentage was .477, and his slugging percentage rounded from the nearest thousanth was .700. In that same time period, he led the league in home runs twelve times, in slugging fourteen times, in walks eleven times, in runs batted in six times, and had 100 or more runs batted in thirteen times, and 40 or more home runs eleven times.{4}
One who wants to argue that Bonds achieved more in a four to five year stretch (2000-2004) than anyone else can consider that sustaining the standard of excellence three to four times as long is significantly more remarkable. If the two are compared on the most productive sixteen year stretches of their careers (including the subpar years each had in that span for injuries or other reasons), Ruth edges Bonds even before we get to the question of steroids. In fact, let us consider for a moment how significant Babe Ruth's achievements were when they are compared to Hank Aaron who set the record broken by Bonds this year.
If you compare their stats, you will see that Babe Ruth had nearly 4000 fewer at bats than Hank Aaron. Despite that, Ruth only hit 41 fewer home runs and 80 fewer runs batted in.{5} The only players where one could make an argument for greatest based on the OPS+ statistic (which is arguably the best stat for measuring a player against his contemporaries) and the players closest to Ruth's all time 207 figure (meaning he averaged twice the average player in overall offensive output for his career) was Ted Williams' 190 career mark and Barry Bonds' 182 career mark. (Bonds also has four of the top ten single season OPS+ marks to three for Babe Ruth and two for Ted Williams -three of Barry's four happen to be the first, second, and third most for a single season including 2001 where his single season average was 275.) However, since Bonds had over 700 more at bats and still was behind Ruth in home runs by a small margin (and runs batted in by over 300) and achieved his top three single season marks after 2000 (and when he was obviously on steriods), they are easily dispensible.
And of course Ruth was also cherished for reasons outside of baseball. For this reason, anyone who approached one of his records was going to get grief. Roger Maris was the recipient of it in 1961 when he broke Ruth's record for single season home runs in the first 162 game season.{5} His all-time record for home runs{6} was of course surpassed by Hank Aaron who was among the most disciplined, consistent, and classy players to ever play the game. But the stats themselves{7} do not lie.
Barry Bonds was (and is) talented in his own right -I would say (and did in years past) that he was the best all-around player in the game during the decade of the 1990's before the controversy with steroids. However, he allowed himself to be seduced by the attention being paid to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa when they challenged the single season record in 1998 (both surpassing it that year). Sosa has since been shown to have used a corked bat which calls a number of his homeruns into question (to say nothing about the bulking up he did) and McGwire at the Senate hearings on steriod use in baseball did not come across well and was rejected overwhelmingly on his first bid for the Hall of Fame.
For those who do not know, 500 home runs for hitting was at one time what 300 wins for pitching is: basically a defacto entry for the Hall of Fame.{8} So for McGwire to lose overwhelmingly in his first bid by 87% -falling 54% short for inclusion- is a significant rebuke considering that he had nearly 600 home runs and is the only player in history to homer in fewer average at bats than the Babe. Sosa who has over 600 home runs thus far is not going to fare much better so that leaves Bonds. Will the new so-called "Home Run King" make it into the Hall of Fame??? Seriously, I am not so sure he will even though before he decided to sully his reputation with steroid bulking up he was well on track to do so as one of the most gifted players ever to play the game.
In short, I am very happy for Glavine who achieved a feat that will in the coming years be rare if not practically non-existent. But as for Bonds, I am not similarly well-wishing. Perhaps a little rhyme I threw together recently on the matter can explain this succinctly so I will end with it now:
The Sultan of Swat did it{9} with hot dogs and pizazz
Hammering Hank did it with consistency and class
Barry Bonds did it with a needle in his ass
And that is the bottom line really.
Notes:
{1} We are confident that Randy Johnson will find a way to nurse his perpetually injured back well aged beyond his 44 years and conjure up the 16 wins needed to make 300 before he wraps up his career. Mike Mussina needs about 53 wins and at 37 years of age should see that achieved within the next four years. Beyond that, we are not sure there will be another 300 game winner for about two decades or more (if ever).
{2} He was also given the following nicknames:
The Big Bam", "The Sultan of Swat," "The Bambino," "The Colossus of Clout," "The Wali of Wallop," "The Wazir of Wham," "The Maharajah of Mash," "The Rajah of Rap," "The Caliph of Clout," and "The Behemoth of Bust."
{3} I picked this span of time because it started with the first year where he was a fulltime hitter (instead of a fulltime pitcher) and left off the last year where he was clearly a shadow of his former self. (In the interest of fairness I included the 1934 season which was the first season where he had a noticeable decline in production in all offensive categories.)
{4} In 1922 he missed a fifth of a season and fell 1 RBI short of 100 and five HR's short of 40. Similarly he missed over a third of the 1925 season due to an illness which left him 34 RBI's short of 100 and 15 HR's short of 40. (His batting average in those two years was a shade under .300 too.) Based on the balance of his career stats, there is no reason to conclude otherwise than he would have hit at least 100 RBI's, 40 HR's, and batted over .300 in those years as he did in every season where he played at least close to a full schedule of games.
{5} As of this writing, Aaron and Ruth are first and second all-time in RBI's or "runs batted in."
{6} The seasons were 154 games up to 1960: one reason Maris' record was astrisked. When Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa broke Maris' record in 1998, they both did it in 154 games or less unlike Maris who tied Ruth and broke the latter's record after the 154 game point of the 1961 season.
{7} Another note: when Ruth hit his 700th home run, there was no one else even half way to that number. Heck, his teammate Lou "Iron Horse" Gehrig was at 347 and Philadelphia Athletics slugger Jimmy "the Beast" Foxx was at 266: their total combined was still almost a hundred homers fewer than Ruth's total. (Jimmy Foxx was second in home runs when he finished his career in 1945 and was not supplanted in that spot until 1965 when he was passed by Willie Mays. Futhermore, when Ruth died, "The Beast" was the only other player in history to have over 500 home runs in his career.)
{8} There are a variety of things to consider and players can get in by other criteria (i.e Ty Cobb as a hitter and Catfish Hunter who had nowhere near 500 HR's and 300 wins respectively) but those have long been viewed as automatic benchmarks for entry into the Hall.
{9} Though if modern rules were applied to Ruth's hits, he would have had at least 765 home runs rather than the 714 to which he is credited. To quote Wikipedia on the matter:
As a sidelight to his prominent role in changing the game to the power-game, the frequency and popularity of Ruth's home runs eventually led to a rule change pertaining to those hit in sudden-death mode (bottom of the ninth or later inning). Prior to 1931, as soon as the first necessary run to win the game scored, the play was over, and the batter was credited only with the number of bases needed to drive in the winning run. Thus, if the score was 3-2 with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, and the batter smacked an "over the fence home run", the game would end at 4-3, with the batter only allowed a double, and the runners officially stopped on 2nd and 3rd (since they weren't needed to win the game). The new rule allowed the entire play to complete, justified on the grounds that the ball was dead and that all runners could freely advance, thus granting the full allotment of HR and RBI's to the batter, as we know it today. Several players lost home runs that way, including Ruth, whose career total would have been changed to 715 if historians during the 1960s had been successful in pursuing this matter. Major League Baseball elected not to retrofit the records to the modern rules, and Ruth's total stayed at 714.
Another rules change that affected Ruth was the method used by umpires to judge potential home runs when the batted ball left the field near a foul pole. Before 1931, i.e through most of Ruth's most productive years, the umpire called the play based on the ball's final resting place "when last seen". Thus, if a ball went over the fence fair, and curved behind the foul pole, it was ruled foul. Beginning in 1931 and continuing to the present day, the rule was changed to require the umpire to judge based on the point where the ball cleared the fence. Jenkinson's book (p.374-375) lists 78 foul balls near the foul pole in Ruth's career, and the research indicates at least 50 of them were likely to have been home runs under the modern rule.
Friday, October 05, 2007
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
On the Seahawks and the 2007 Season Thus Far:
(With Kevin Tierney)
This thread is a composite of sorts from a few discussions that Kevin and I have had in recent weeks about sports in general with the focus on football. To start with, it seems appropriate to highlight my season prediction for the Hawks as I noted to Kevin back on September 11th:
I am going to say 12-4 and in the Superbowl this year
As for the rest, the following conversation tidbits are from a chat Kevin and I had on September 30th. Without further ado...
Kevin: well i'm sure your happy today, you guys nearly sent alex smith to the morgue :-p
me: no autopsy no foul as Sonics announcer Kevin Calabro used to say
Kevin: did you see that hit or no
me: unfortunately I missed the game today
Kevin: someone hit san frans qb, pancaked him
ripped apart his shoulder
out of the game in the first quarter
me: Julian Peterson possibly?
that guy is a wrecking machine
Kevin: he was blitzing, had a full head of steam, leaped at him, and just pancaked him right into the ground
me: they have ome good hitters on defense
could have been [Lofa] Tatupu
considering how [the Washington Huskies] gave away the game against USC yesterday
I will take that kind of defensive power everytime (I love good defensive in football)
Kevin: Rocky Bernard made the hit
me: next week will be the test
aah yes, Bernard
we have so many beasts on defense
that I did not think of Bernard first should tell yo how stacked we are there
Kevin: he was blitzing, had a full head of steam, leaped at him, and just pancaked him right into the ground
me: they have some good hitters on defense
heck, we got rid of Bryce Fischer earlier this year -a reserve who could start on virtually any other team
Kevin: even though detroit isn't in the playoffs, this should be an interesting october
me: the Hawks have a strong, fast, and youthful offense
me: I mean defense after today's game, I like our [chances] against the Steelers
if we had lost, whoeeee boy that would not be good
it was questionable to me only cause it was a road game
we gave the Cards a win in AZ earlier this year
snatching defeat from the jaws of victory there
so we had not proven we could win a road game yet
and going 0-2 road into Pittsburgh would mean likely slaughter
1-1 is more comfortable but the Steelers still have to be favoured
plus, we proved we could win when Alexander rushed for less than 100 yards
(With Kevin Tierney)
This thread is a composite of sorts from a few discussions that Kevin and I have had in recent weeks about sports in general with the focus on football. To start with, it seems appropriate to highlight my season prediction for the Hawks as I noted to Kevin back on September 11th:
I am going to say 12-4 and in the Superbowl this year
As for the rest, the following conversation tidbits are from a chat Kevin and I had on September 30th. Without further ado...
Kevin: well i'm sure your happy today, you guys nearly sent alex smith to the morgue :-p
me: no autopsy no foul as Sonics announcer Kevin Calabro used to say
Kevin: did you see that hit or no
me: unfortunately I missed the game today
Kevin: someone hit san frans qb, pancaked him
ripped apart his shoulder
out of the game in the first quarter
me: Julian Peterson possibly?
that guy is a wrecking machine
Kevin: he was blitzing, had a full head of steam, leaped at him, and just pancaked him right into the ground
me: they have ome good hitters on defense
could have been [Lofa] Tatupu
considering how [the Washington Huskies] gave away the game against USC yesterday
I will take that kind of defensive power everytime (I love good defensive in football)
Kevin: Rocky Bernard made the hit
me: next week will be the test
aah yes, Bernard
we have so many beasts on defense
that I did not think of Bernard first should tell yo how stacked we are there
Kevin: he was blitzing, had a full head of steam, leaped at him, and just pancaked him right into the ground
me: they have some good hitters on defense
heck, we got rid of Bryce Fischer earlier this year -a reserve who could start on virtually any other team
Kevin: even though detroit isn't in the playoffs, this should be an interesting october
me: the Hawks have a strong, fast, and youthful offense
me: I mean defense after today's game, I like our [chances] against the Steelers
if we had lost, whoeeee boy that would not be good
it was questionable to me only cause it was a road game
we gave the Cards a win in AZ earlier this year
snatching defeat from the jaws of victory there
so we had not proven we could win a road game yet
and going 0-2 road into Pittsburgh would mean likely slaughter
1-1 is more comfortable but the Steelers still have to be favoured
plus, we proved we could win when Alexander rushed for less than 100 yards
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Threads on "Distributivism" From 2007:
(A Rerum Novarum Recapitulation Thread)
As strange as it may appear, I had absolutely no intention of writing on this subject in 2007 when the year started. I saw no reason to considering that I had done a critique of a critique of "distributivism" published by The Acton Institute in late March of 2006, recorded a couple audioposts on it in early April of 2006, put up another posting touching on the subject in July of 2006{1}, and revisited the subject in another audioposting in September of 2006. Basically, I did not see anything more I could say or wanted to say on the matter in the future particularly since the core internal contradiction I highlighted that undermines "distributivist" methodology had not been interacted with anywhere to my knowledge. But a series of circumstances came about which facilitated a change of mind on the matter starting with the closing of audioblogger in late 2006.
I had noticed since November of 2006 that I could sometimes access my old audioblogging posts and sometimes I could not. This was chalked up to a system issue initially by me as it seemed that the problem was one of technology.{2} When the "distributivist" issue came up again around April-May 2007{3}, I decided to throw together a response based heavily on the contents of the previous audioblogger recordings. This was not however possible at the time due to audioblogger not working as they promised; ergo I noted that problem briefly on the weblog{4} after I had put together a weblog posting from scratch to deal with the matter in question.
It is probably for the best that at least temporarily there were audioblogger problems as it resulted in the thread of posts below where the matter is dealt with in a fair degree of detail -both in expository postings as well as responses to some email inquiries on the matter from people with different outlooks on the matter. One party was a passionate advocate of "distributivism", one was opposed to it for the reasons I outlined in the postings below, and a third was if not a fan of the outlook at the very least thought it deserved to be entertained as a viable alternative to current economic realities. Anyway, without further ado, here are the threads posted in sequential order from oldest to newest:
Revisiting "Distributivism" (circa May 25, 2007)
"TheEmpire Distributivist Strikes Back" Dept. (circa May 27, 2007)
On Fundamental Rights, Private Property, and Authentic Dialogue (circa May 31, 2007)
From the Mailbag on the "Phantom Menace" of Distributivism (circa September 8, 2007)
From the Mailbag on Distributivism and Economics Systems in General (circa September 10, 2007)
I will gladly admit that having noticed a rational flaw in the "distributivist" weltanschauung years ago that I dismissed it out of hand without explaining more in detail why this outlook has so many problems to it in the area of application as opposed to merely the abstract where it can sound downright tempting to entertain as a possible solution. The audiopostings recorded in 2006 were basically an amplification of and reiteration of the internal inconsistencies of this view without concern for other factors generally speaking. The lack of ready access to my audioposts made me have to revisit this subject from scratch and thus necessitated taking a different approach to it than I had customarily done up to that point -both in major as well as minor ways.
Should audioblogger's mp3 recordings be accessible again in the future, the readers can get a better idea of the various ways I have approached this subject both in the past as well as in the recent threads above. Until that time though, I hope what is outlined in the above threads provides plenty of food for musing for those who both have a passionate concern for people but also who take reason and logic seriously.
Notes:
{1} The material in this posting touched on the subject only briefly and was originally a private communication that I gave the recipient of permission to use publicly. When the contents were used publicly by that person and someone mentioned in the material contacted me about what I had written, I tracked down the material (after wondering where on earth I had said what was being attributed to me) and posted it to this weblog to clarify the material and retract one assumption made which had not been a correct one.
{2} Some computers I accessed would be able to play them and others could not.
{3} How or where this happened I do not recall offhand but it was probably someone emailing me about it and asking for my opinion on the subject.
{4} I recorded some audios last year which I tried to access for the next weblog posting but they are not available. This is despite Audioblogger's promise last year after they closed that feature to host the audios recorded "indefinitely", apparently "indefinitely" as a measure of time is less than a year now. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa May 25, 2007)]
(A Rerum Novarum Recapitulation Thread)
As strange as it may appear, I had absolutely no intention of writing on this subject in 2007 when the year started. I saw no reason to considering that I had done a critique of a critique of "distributivism" published by The Acton Institute in late March of 2006, recorded a couple audioposts on it in early April of 2006, put up another posting touching on the subject in July of 2006{1}, and revisited the subject in another audioposting in September of 2006. Basically, I did not see anything more I could say or wanted to say on the matter in the future particularly since the core internal contradiction I highlighted that undermines "distributivist" methodology had not been interacted with anywhere to my knowledge. But a series of circumstances came about which facilitated a change of mind on the matter starting with the closing of audioblogger in late 2006.
I had noticed since November of 2006 that I could sometimes access my old audioblogging posts and sometimes I could not. This was chalked up to a system issue initially by me as it seemed that the problem was one of technology.{2} When the "distributivist" issue came up again around April-May 2007{3}, I decided to throw together a response based heavily on the contents of the previous audioblogger recordings. This was not however possible at the time due to audioblogger not working as they promised; ergo I noted that problem briefly on the weblog{4} after I had put together a weblog posting from scratch to deal with the matter in question.
It is probably for the best that at least temporarily there were audioblogger problems as it resulted in the thread of posts below where the matter is dealt with in a fair degree of detail -both in expository postings as well as responses to some email inquiries on the matter from people with different outlooks on the matter. One party was a passionate advocate of "distributivism", one was opposed to it for the reasons I outlined in the postings below, and a third was if not a fan of the outlook at the very least thought it deserved to be entertained as a viable alternative to current economic realities. Anyway, without further ado, here are the threads posted in sequential order from oldest to newest:
Revisiting "Distributivism" (circa May 25, 2007)
"The
On Fundamental Rights, Private Property, and Authentic Dialogue (circa May 31, 2007)
From the Mailbag on the "Phantom Menace" of Distributivism (circa September 8, 2007)
From the Mailbag on Distributivism and Economics Systems in General (circa September 10, 2007)
I will gladly admit that having noticed a rational flaw in the "distributivist" weltanschauung years ago that I dismissed it out of hand without explaining more in detail why this outlook has so many problems to it in the area of application as opposed to merely the abstract where it can sound downright tempting to entertain as a possible solution. The audiopostings recorded in 2006 were basically an amplification of and reiteration of the internal inconsistencies of this view without concern for other factors generally speaking. The lack of ready access to my audioposts made me have to revisit this subject from scratch and thus necessitated taking a different approach to it than I had customarily done up to that point -both in major as well as minor ways.
Should audioblogger's mp3 recordings be accessible again in the future, the readers can get a better idea of the various ways I have approached this subject both in the past as well as in the recent threads above. Until that time though, I hope what is outlined in the above threads provides plenty of food for musing for those who both have a passionate concern for people but also who take reason and logic seriously.
Notes:
{1} The material in this posting touched on the subject only briefly and was originally a private communication that I gave the recipient of permission to use publicly. When the contents were used publicly by that person and someone mentioned in the material contacted me about what I had written, I tracked down the material (after wondering where on earth I had said what was being attributed to me) and posted it to this weblog to clarify the material and retract one assumption made which had not been a correct one.
{2} Some computers I accessed would be able to play them and others could not.
{3} How or where this happened I do not recall offhand but it was probably someone emailing me about it and asking for my opinion on the subject.
{4} I recorded some audios last year which I tried to access for the next weblog posting but they are not available. This is despite Audioblogger's promise last year after they closed that feature to host the audios recorded "indefinitely", apparently "indefinitely" as a measure of time is less than a year now. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa May 25, 2007)]
Friday, September 28, 2007
Points to Ponder:
(From Alexander Hamilton -The Constitution's Greatest Defender)
I have learned to hold popular opinion of no value.
Constitutions of civil government are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages, according to the natural and tried course of human affairs. Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious than to infer the extent of any power, proper to be lodged in the national government, from an estimate of its immediate necessities.
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.
The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right.
In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.
Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
It is one thing to be subordinate to the laws, and another [for the Executive] to be dependent on the legislative body. The first comports with, the last violates, the fundamental principles of good government; and, whatever may be the forms of the Constitution, unites all power in the same hands.
The following article is yet another case study of not only what is wrong with the mainstream media but also why my use for them continues to diminish to the extent that it still can{1}:
Vatican Rejects Charges on John Paul II (New York Post)
The long and short of it is summed up in the first paragraph of the article:
ROME (AP) -- A doctor alleged Wednesday that Pope John Paul II violated Catholic teaching against euthanasia by refusing medical care that would have kept him alive longer - a charge immediately dismissed by Vatican officials.
In other words, someone makes an allegation and that constitutes news!!! If that does not tell you just how downright pathetic thedrive by mainstream media (msm) has become, I do not know what does.
Basically, we have a doctor here who jumped on some news from March 30, 2005 about the late pontiff who proceeded to draw unwarranted conclusions from minimal if any evidences. She in other words made a rash judgment of the sort that does her no credit. I say "rash judgment" because she did so based on press releases and news reports the accuracy of which should always be questioned rathe on the basis of reviewing the late pontiff's medical records. Or at least that is what the Vatican has claimed:
Vatican officials said Wednesday that the tube had actually been inserted well before March 30 but that the procedure was only announced on that date - casting doubt on Pavanelli's core argument. They disclosed the information in response to Pavanelli's charges, which they said weren't serious because she had no access to the medical records and based her accusations only on press releases and news reports.
The subject of of hydration for the terminally ill or near-death "proportional means" pertains to the issue in question and it is a complex one. What you have with it are solid moral and ethical principles which must guide one's dicernment but ultimately the variables admit of differing possible applications.{2} Thus, with the example in question, we have yet another case study of what I have for years referred to as The McElhinney Media Dictum.
Of course before the reader presumes I am uncritically accepting at face value the Vatican's side of the story, the story itself claims that woman in question admitted to the veracity of the Vatican's assertions with regards to her allegations:
At a news conference Wednesday, Pavanelli acknowledged she didn't have access to John Paul's medical records and acknowledged the likelihood that he may have been outfitted sooner than March 30 with a nasal feeding tube.
So she was not possessing of the requisite information to thereby make an accurate assessment of the matter but decided to spout off publicly anyway. Sadly this is all too typical today but I digress.
But she maintained...
Who cares what she "maintained"??? She made an allegation based on supposition and when cornered, she admitted to not having reviewed key evidences that should accompany such an allegation considering the gravity of the issue involved. This whole incident is a bunch of fark in other words, not real news. That would be all that needs to be said about it except for the opportunity to set forth and/or reiterate{3} a principle which I believe bears noting here.
It is no secret that Pope John Paul II (RIP) was in some respects a controversial figure: this goes with the territory of being an original thinker and on many subjects, he was just that. And obviously different people may not have agreed with him on some of his opinions -heck, I know on occasion that I did not. Such a situation of course should not surprise as no one agrees with someone else all the time -indeed if they did then only one of them is doing any thinking.{4} But consider if you will what we have here and what the presence of this article intends to convey.
We have here a man who by every objective standard was a great and good man apart from his stature as a serious and personally pious religious figure in general. Therefore, in the absence of significantly solid evidence to the contrary, it should be presumed that he died in accordance with the beliefs he espoused while he was living. That is what people of a good reputation deserve, not to be made the object of detraction based on incomplete and/or uncharitable speculation either years after they have passed on and are not here to defend themselves or on the basis of contemporary realizations{5} which themselves have no greater claim to infallibility than past "certainties" which with time showed themselves to be anything but certain themselves.
Notes:
{1} The depravity to which the journalistic profession has fallen since the days of Watergate can be to some extent pinned on Woodward and Bernstein...not as much them personally as what they ushered in in the aftermath of the Nixon resignation.[...] The journalistic profession has become one where you "make it" by finding someone whose reputation you can destroy. Ethics are often not a factor, indeed morals and ethics often get the screw from journalists who are trying to "make it" and then (for those who "make it") the same tactics are utilized to try and stay "on top." The same is the case with the legal profession and the political profession: oftentimes those who "make it" do so by screwing other people. So the parallel to prostitution is an apt one. The only difference of course is that prostitutes are somewhat honest about it. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa June 1, 2005)]
{2} A phenomenon which is common to matters of the prudential order.
{3} I am sure I have discussed this somewhere before but cannot recall where and am too busy right now to bother looking for the threads.
{4} Credit for this phrasing goes in part to the late President Lyndon Johnson who once said something to the tune of "if two people agree on everything, only one of them is doing the thinking."
{5} I noted that principle before at sundry times and in divers manners on this weblog -most recently in March of 2007 when I concurred with a defense of someone (Hillaire Belloc) I have vehemently disagreed with on some matters of principle. The reason: attempts by modern persons to tar and feather him unjustly as an antisemite based on writings of his which while over the line by modern standards were hardly so in his own day and certainly on their face are too ambiguous to be given such a label for the reasons so noted in the posting above.
Vatican Rejects Charges on John Paul II (New York Post)
The long and short of it is summed up in the first paragraph of the article:
ROME (AP) -- A doctor alleged Wednesday that Pope John Paul II violated Catholic teaching against euthanasia by refusing medical care that would have kept him alive longer - a charge immediately dismissed by Vatican officials.
In other words, someone makes an allegation and that constitutes news!!! If that does not tell you just how downright pathetic the
Basically, we have a doctor here who jumped on some news from March 30, 2005 about the late pontiff who proceeded to draw unwarranted conclusions from minimal if any evidences. She in other words made a rash judgment of the sort that does her no credit. I say "rash judgment" because she did so based on press releases and news reports the accuracy of which should always be questioned rathe on the basis of reviewing the late pontiff's medical records. Or at least that is what the Vatican has claimed:
Vatican officials said Wednesday that the tube had actually been inserted well before March 30 but that the procedure was only announced on that date - casting doubt on Pavanelli's core argument. They disclosed the information in response to Pavanelli's charges, which they said weren't serious because she had no access to the medical records and based her accusations only on press releases and news reports.
The subject of of hydration for the terminally ill or near-death "proportional means" pertains to the issue in question and it is a complex one. What you have with it are solid moral and ethical principles which must guide one's dicernment but ultimately the variables admit of differing possible applications.{2} Thus, with the example in question, we have yet another case study of what I have for years referred to as The McElhinney Media Dictum.
Of course before the reader presumes I am uncritically accepting at face value the Vatican's side of the story, the story itself claims that woman in question admitted to the veracity of the Vatican's assertions with regards to her allegations:
At a news conference Wednesday, Pavanelli acknowledged she didn't have access to John Paul's medical records and acknowledged the likelihood that he may have been outfitted sooner than March 30 with a nasal feeding tube.
So she was not possessing of the requisite information to thereby make an accurate assessment of the matter but decided to spout off publicly anyway. Sadly this is all too typical today but I digress.
But she maintained...
Who cares what she "maintained"??? She made an allegation based on supposition and when cornered, she admitted to not having reviewed key evidences that should accompany such an allegation considering the gravity of the issue involved. This whole incident is a bunch of fark in other words, not real news. That would be all that needs to be said about it except for the opportunity to set forth and/or reiterate{3} a principle which I believe bears noting here.
It is no secret that Pope John Paul II (RIP) was in some respects a controversial figure: this goes with the territory of being an original thinker and on many subjects, he was just that. And obviously different people may not have agreed with him on some of his opinions -heck, I know on occasion that I did not. Such a situation of course should not surprise as no one agrees with someone else all the time -indeed if they did then only one of them is doing any thinking.{4} But consider if you will what we have here and what the presence of this article intends to convey.
We have here a man who by every objective standard was a great and good man apart from his stature as a serious and personally pious religious figure in general. Therefore, in the absence of significantly solid evidence to the contrary, it should be presumed that he died in accordance with the beliefs he espoused while he was living. That is what people of a good reputation deserve, not to be made the object of detraction based on incomplete and/or uncharitable speculation either years after they have passed on and are not here to defend themselves or on the basis of contemporary realizations{5} which themselves have no greater claim to infallibility than past "certainties" which with time showed themselves to be anything but certain themselves.
Notes:
{1} The depravity to which the journalistic profession has fallen since the days of Watergate can be to some extent pinned on Woodward and Bernstein...not as much them personally as what they ushered in in the aftermath of the Nixon resignation.[...] The journalistic profession has become one where you "make it" by finding someone whose reputation you can destroy. Ethics are often not a factor, indeed morals and ethics often get the screw from journalists who are trying to "make it" and then (for those who "make it") the same tactics are utilized to try and stay "on top." The same is the case with the legal profession and the political profession: oftentimes those who "make it" do so by screwing other people. So the parallel to prostitution is an apt one. The only difference of course is that prostitutes are somewhat honest about it. [Excerpt from Rerum Novarum (circa June 1, 2005)]
{2} A phenomenon which is common to matters of the prudential order.
{3} I am sure I have discussed this somewhere before but cannot recall where and am too busy right now to bother looking for the threads.
{4} Credit for this phrasing goes in part to the late President Lyndon Johnson who once said something to the tune of "if two people agree on everything, only one of them is doing the thinking."
{5} I noted that principle before at sundry times and in divers manners on this weblog -most recently in March of 2007 when I concurred with a defense of someone (Hillaire Belloc) I have vehemently disagreed with on some matters of principle. The reason: attempts by modern persons to tar and feather him unjustly as an antisemite based on writings of his which while over the line by modern standards were hardly so in his own day and certainly on their face are too ambiguous to be given such a label for the reasons so noted in the posting above.
I have not taken one of those online quizzes in a long time but this one was of particular interest to me (and it was not that long) so I took it yesterday during lunch:
Which Civil War General are You?
Robert E Lee: You are the very image of the gentleman warrior with the soul of a river boat gambler. You place a very high price on honor and personal loyalty. Lee is widely regarded as one of the greatest generals in US history. Personally opposed to slavery, he only joined the Confederate army after Virginia seceded from the Union. Some say that he personally prolonged the war at least two years with his tactical brilliance
Take this quiz!
Quizilla |
Join
| Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code
This quiz had one question which could have been answered in multiple ways so I did so and it gave me two answers. One was General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and the other was General Robert E. Lee. Because I do not have the sense of reckless abandon and do not consider myself to be possessing of some special God-given mandate, I went with the Lee test result instead. Either way though, I am shocked by the test result and would have banked on it being General James Longstreet for a variety of reasons.
Which Civil War General are You?
Robert E Lee: You are the very image of the gentleman warrior with the soul of a river boat gambler. You place a very high price on honor and personal loyalty. Lee is widely regarded as one of the greatest generals in US history. Personally opposed to slavery, he only joined the Confederate army after Virginia seceded from the Union. Some say that he personally prolonged the war at least two years with his tactical brilliance
Take this quiz!
Quizilla |
Join
| Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code
This quiz had one question which could have been answered in multiple ways so I did so and it gave me two answers. One was General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and the other was General Robert E. Lee. Because I do not have the sense of reckless abandon and do not consider myself to be possessing of some special God-given mandate, I went with the Lee test result instead. Either way though, I am shocked by the test result and would have banked on it being General James Longstreet for a variety of reasons.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
From the Mailbag;
Hi. I hope you don't mind me e-mailing you. As a Catholic, I thought you might be interested in the abortion issue. I want to tell you about a new pro-life website that I think has some great information on it. It's at http://www.clinicquotes.com and it has articles about abortion, including several about babies born alive after abortions. I also has collections of quotes from abortion providers taken from interviews, books, magazines and newspapers. There is a section of abortionists admitting that abortion takes a life, a section of first hand accounts of abortion procedures, court transcripts where abortionists testified, information about clinics using deceptive practices to sell abortions, and more. I hope that you can use some of this information in your pro-life work and spread the word about the page.
Here is the link for easy click access:
Abortion Quotes
I do not write on this subject very often admittedly.{1} Nonetheless, it is appropriate at times to remind people of what goes on behind closed doors and out of view. That situation makes abortion for many an abstract rather than a concrete issue. No matter how the issue is viewed, I cannot understand how anyone could not rationally conclude that (i) life begins before birth, (ii) life begins a long time before birth, and (iii) where innocent life is deliberately taken with no self-defense or due process, there is murder.
I hope readers of this weblog take a look at the thread above, view the pictures, and share them with others. This needs to be a tangible issue for most people and not merely an intangible one if there is to be any conversion of hearts amongst those who advocate this abominable practice. And that is the bottom line really.
Note:
{1} For those who may have forgotten, here is my last weblog posting on the subject:
On Fundamental Rights, Common Law Principles, and Abortion (circa February 1, 2007)
Hi. I hope you don't mind me e-mailing you. As a Catholic, I thought you might be interested in the abortion issue. I want to tell you about a new pro-life website that I think has some great information on it. It's at http://www.clinicquotes.com and it has articles about abortion, including several about babies born alive after abortions. I also has collections of quotes from abortion providers taken from interviews, books, magazines and newspapers. There is a section of abortionists admitting that abortion takes a life, a section of first hand accounts of abortion procedures, court transcripts where abortionists testified, information about clinics using deceptive practices to sell abortions, and more. I hope that you can use some of this information in your pro-life work and spread the word about the page.
Here is the link for easy click access:
Abortion Quotes
I do not write on this subject very often admittedly.{1} Nonetheless, it is appropriate at times to remind people of what goes on behind closed doors and out of view. That situation makes abortion for many an abstract rather than a concrete issue. No matter how the issue is viewed, I cannot understand how anyone could not rationally conclude that (i) life begins before birth, (ii) life begins a long time before birth, and (iii) where innocent life is deliberately taken with no self-defense or due process, there is murder.
I hope readers of this weblog take a look at the thread above, view the pictures, and share them with others. This needs to be a tangible issue for most people and not merely an intangible one if there is to be any conversion of hearts amongst those who advocate this abominable practice. And that is the bottom line really.
Note:
{1} For those who may have forgotten, here is my last weblog posting on the subject:
On Fundamental Rights, Common Law Principles, and Abortion (circa February 1, 2007)
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Miscellaneous Notes and Notifications:
I want to touch on a few things here in brief subject-wise as well as notify the readers of this humble weblog of some upcoming posts and projects. Without further ado...
--Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is speaking at the United Nations as I put the final touches on this posting. It is nice to see President George Bush getting a bit of support from French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on this one -I forgot when mentioning earlier this year my recent about-face on Sweden and France to mention Angela Merkel and Germany too. Consider that oversight with this mention to be rectified.
--In a posting from last week, I noted how someone should by default approach national security matters. After that thread was posted, I was reviewing a thread reporting that Israel bombed an installation in Syria that may have been a joint Syrian-North Korean nuclear facility As there is speculation on the matter, that is all I will note on it except to point out how former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the sort of approach that the opposition parties in America should learn from.
I do not mean that the opposition party needs to explicitly and uncritically support everything the party in control does mind you, that would be ludicrous and contrary to one of the principles of our underlying weltanschauung here at Rerum Novarum. Uncritical acceptance is the problem here much as uncritical rejection is. If any opposition is taken at all it should be solidly based, principled, and not for the sake of being contrarian but out of a genuine concern for just public order and the common good of society. Few issues impact the latter elements more than that of national security. And as I have noted before on several occasions -including in a recent blog posting revisiting the Able Danger controversy- matters of national security should be free of the sort of partisan bickering that has been all-to-common in recent years on this issue among numerous other ones.
--The Senate of the United States deserves to be given some credit for their condemning of a full page ad against General Petraus issued prior to his testimony before the Congress. The vote was 72-25. Among those of note are Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Christopher Dodd for voting against the condemation -hopefully voters will remember their craven nature when it comes primary time.{1}
If not for the fact that these sorts are so evidently out to undermine the Iraq situation by any means possible, I would not care what they say. Nor would I care if this ad was run after Petraus' testimony was looked atbecause at the very least they would have at least had the testimony to review before running such an ad if they wanted to run it at that point. For all the talk these so-called "progressivists" have about so-called "free speech", they do not realize that with freedome comes responsibility and those not willing to accept the responsibility for their public statements do not deserve the freedom to make them.
Furthermore, in a free society decisions should be made after evidence is heard, not beforehand. The Moveon.org crowd has proven with this stunt{2} that they do not care about dialogue or discussion on issues. They also proved that they have no interest in questioning their own infallibility by dismissing in advance without a hearing information that could possibly give them reason to reassess or even (possibly) change their mind on the matter. This is how kangaroo courts have been (and are0 run in totalitarianist nations -obviously the marxist apple does not fall far from the communist tree methodologically.
I want to touch on a few things here in brief subject-wise as well as notify the readers of this humble weblog of some upcoming posts and projects. Without further ado...
--Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is speaking at the United Nations as I put the final touches on this posting. It is nice to see President George Bush getting a bit of support from French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on this one -I forgot when mentioning earlier this year my recent about-face on Sweden and France to mention Angela Merkel and Germany too. Consider that oversight with this mention to be rectified.
--In a posting from last week, I noted how someone should by default approach national security matters. After that thread was posted, I was reviewing a thread reporting that Israel bombed an installation in Syria that may have been a joint Syrian-North Korean nuclear facility As there is speculation on the matter, that is all I will note on it except to point out how former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the sort of approach that the opposition parties in America should learn from.
I do not mean that the opposition party needs to explicitly and uncritically support everything the party in control does mind you, that would be ludicrous and contrary to one of the principles of our underlying weltanschauung here at Rerum Novarum. Uncritical acceptance is the problem here much as uncritical rejection is. If any opposition is taken at all it should be solidly based, principled, and not for the sake of being contrarian but out of a genuine concern for just public order and the common good of society. Few issues impact the latter elements more than that of national security. And as I have noted before on several occasions -including in a recent blog posting revisiting the Able Danger controversy- matters of national security should be free of the sort of partisan bickering that has been all-to-common in recent years on this issue among numerous other ones.
--The Senate of the United States deserves to be given some credit for their condemning of a full page ad against General Petraus issued prior to his testimony before the Congress. The vote was 72-25. Among those of note are Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Christopher Dodd for voting against the condemation -hopefully voters will remember their craven nature when it comes primary time.{1}
If not for the fact that these sorts are so evidently out to undermine the Iraq situation by any means possible, I would not care what they say. Nor would I care if this ad was run after Petraus' testimony was looked atbecause at the very least they would have at least had the testimony to review before running such an ad if they wanted to run it at that point. For all the talk these so-called "progressivists" have about so-called "free speech", they do not realize that with freedome comes responsibility and those not willing to accept the responsibility for their public statements do not deserve the freedom to make them.
Furthermore, in a free society decisions should be made after evidence is heard, not beforehand. The Moveon.org crowd has proven with this stunt{2} that they do not care about dialogue or discussion on issues. They also proved that they have no interest in questioning their own infallibility by dismissing in advance without a hearing information that could possibly give them reason to reassess or even (possibly) change their mind on the matter. This is how kangaroo courts have been (and are0 run in totalitarianist nations -obviously the marxist apple does not fall far from the communist tree methodologically.
--I am working on a piece in dialogual format responding to some recent statements made by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. I am not sure when it will be finished but probably sometime in October time-willing.
--The talk I have seen in some circles about the Catholics for Ron Paul movement has got me thinking about the draft I started on a necessary third way in politics earlier this year and how I need to find the motivation to finish it.{3} If I continue to read material on the Ron Paul movement, I may well have that motivation because I do not see him as fitting that necessary third way at all. Instead, in his own way it would be more of the same as that posting (when it is finished) will hopefully make reasonably evident.
--The frequently-mentioned dialogue on the atomic bombings of 1945 will commense soon.{4} I still need to format the opening posts and review my dialogue partner's opening statement a few more times to get a sense of how he wants to go about handling the subject. The first posting will be a joint statement of principles that was drafted back in early August and to which my dialogue partner gave his full concurrence to after reviewing it and offering a few small revisions which I gladly accepted. Basically, we should be ready to go on it within the week now -time willing as always but this will be put in priority over and above anything else being blogged once it starts.
--There is also a sports posting I have been working on here and there as well as a posting on my approach to blogging which will touch on the weaknesses of my approach to this medium.{5}
--The "points to ponder" series featuring key Founding Fathers has one more installment to go to wrap it up -that will be tended to soon as well.
More could be noted but that is enough for now to point out what will be worked on in the immediate future at this humble weblog.
Notes:
{1} Senator Barack Obama also should be noted because he abstained from the main vote and voted in some package proposition condemning this ad and specific ads in the past. Nice try Senator Obama but we can take that kind of retroactive approach to condemnations of ads even further back than 2004. This attempt on your part shows not decisiveness but indecisiveness and even cowardice. Any chance you had of getting my vote in 2008 (and you had a decent chance) is practically nill after this stunt. I can vote for someone whose principles are not the same as mine but not someone who puts principles behind politics. Politics should never come before principles. PERIOD.
{2} If there was any doubt whatsoever prior to it and this writer certainly did not have any.
{3} I am not sure when I first mentioned it on the weblog but I believe it was in this posting from April of 2007 which was written as a prelude to it. The idea had been in my mind for quite some time prior to that posting though -the seeds of which were in retrospect planted when I was publicly noting my views on the need for a third party in the United States. (As noted in a pair of postings from 2002, a pair of postings from 2004, and a couple of posts from early 2006 prior to the elections.) Perhaps the time it would take to make the vision as I outlined it occur coupled with the intuition I have had for years that serious fixes are needed and needed now facilitated this approach to the issue in question. Anyway, it has been in the works for some time and hopefully I can put the finished product into the arena of ideas for criticism and/or interaction with soon.
{4} To note the history of this briefly, after watching the usual babbling on this subject last year, I decided in early 2007 to entertain issuing a challenge for 2007 on the matter if things looked no different this year than in the past. In the meantime, I wrote some posts dealing with procedural matters that went so badly askew the last time this was publicly delved into with others and waited to see if history would repeat itself. Well, it always does and this time the subject in question was delved into even earlier this year than last in some places. For that reason, I pondered what would be needed for a potentially fruitful dialogue on the matter and in July issued a challenge for a dialogue on this matter. I did this as I noted before fully expecting no Catholic to measure up to the very basic criteria I outlined -heck I said this in the challenge posting itself!!!
As I predicted, a few people (including one fairly known author/"apologist") contributed to making a prophet out of me on the matter until I received a couple emails from people interested in the idea who were willing to fulfull the criteria I outlined. From that point, I dialogued behind the scenes with them to set it up and in the process have occasionally mentioned here and there that this project was in the process of being done. After several delays due to more pressing issues and also lack of time, it is on the verge of being started now; ergo I mention it here for those who are interested in the topic.
{5} As a way to balance it out since my methodology overall has a lot of strengths to it.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Four Down, Four to Go, and a Bit on "Benedict" John Murtha:
U.S. officer charges dismissed in Haditha killings
Out of the original eight who were accused in early January of 2006 of being "cold blooded murderers" by one of the highest ranking fifth columnists in the United States House of Representatives (referring to one "Benedict" John Murtha), four have been exonerated thus far. The article sums up the problem in a nutshell with this quote from the defense counsel:
You don't want the lance corporal, the 19-year-old kid with the M-16, thinking twice about pulling the trigger for fear that he'll end up being investigated if in fact he reasonably believes there are insurgents involved with the attack upon him.
In a military situation, you have to make split second decisions. Sometimes those decisions however much one may want otherwise will have disasterous results. However, a soldier in a warzone if he reasonably believes that he is being attacked, has the right to self-defense. Furthermore, the presumption should be that the soldier acted correctly unless there is solid preponderant evidence indicating that the contrary proposition is more probable.
It truly disturbs me that there are people in America who want to see failure in Iraq simply to advance their own ideologies. It is my hope that the remaining four are also exonerated and "Benedict" John Murtha is subjected to contempt by the congress for his irresponsiblity. Bryan Preston{1} has the footage of someone in the msm with some actual cajones confronting "Benedict" Murtha on his previous statements and readers can watch him try to weasel his way out of being accountable for his previous statements:
Rep. Jack Murtha confronted about Haditha accusations (HotAir TV)
Truthfully, I would prefer to see him soundly caned{2} but since that is not going to happen, I hold out the hope{3} that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will grow a pair and have this disgrace of a congressman censured. I do not even care if she views throwing Murtha under the bus as a politically calculated move for 2008 -whatever it takes to get it through to politicians and other public figures that condemning people without a trial will not be tolerated. PERIOD.
Notes:
{1} The commentator formerly known as the proprietor of The JunkYard BLOG -one of our favourite reads in years past.
{2} For the record, I volunteer to do the caning if by some stroke of luck that is agreed to as punishment for Murtha.
{3} Not a good hope mind you, just a faint one.
U.S. officer charges dismissed in Haditha killings
Out of the original eight who were accused in early January of 2006 of being "cold blooded murderers" by one of the highest ranking fifth columnists in the United States House of Representatives (referring to one "Benedict" John Murtha), four have been exonerated thus far. The article sums up the problem in a nutshell with this quote from the defense counsel:
You don't want the lance corporal, the 19-year-old kid with the M-16, thinking twice about pulling the trigger for fear that he'll end up being investigated if in fact he reasonably believes there are insurgents involved with the attack upon him.
In a military situation, you have to make split second decisions. Sometimes those decisions however much one may want otherwise will have disasterous results. However, a soldier in a warzone if he reasonably believes that he is being attacked, has the right to self-defense. Furthermore, the presumption should be that the soldier acted correctly unless there is solid preponderant evidence indicating that the contrary proposition is more probable.
It truly disturbs me that there are people in America who want to see failure in Iraq simply to advance their own ideologies. It is my hope that the remaining four are also exonerated and "Benedict" John Murtha is subjected to contempt by the congress for his irresponsiblity. Bryan Preston{1} has the footage of someone in the msm with some actual cajones confronting "Benedict" Murtha on his previous statements and readers can watch him try to weasel his way out of being accountable for his previous statements:
Rep. Jack Murtha confronted about Haditha accusations (HotAir TV)
Truthfully, I would prefer to see him soundly caned{2} but since that is not going to happen, I hold out the hope{3} that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will grow a pair and have this disgrace of a congressman censured. I do not even care if she views throwing Murtha under the bus as a politically calculated move for 2008 -whatever it takes to get it through to politicians and other public figures that condemning people without a trial will not be tolerated. PERIOD.
Notes:
{1} The commentator formerly known as the proprietor of The JunkYard BLOG -one of our favourite reads in years past.
{2} For the record, I volunteer to do the caning if by some stroke of luck that is agreed to as punishment for Murtha.
{3} Not a good hope mind you, just a faint one.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Pope warns Catholic theologians against arrogance
It would be nice to see him issue a similar warning to self-styled "apologist" sorts who can be every bit as dogmatic in their opinions as any Catholic theologian but who have a lot less to be humble about (to put it nicely).
It would be nice to see him issue a similar warning to self-styled "apologist" sorts who can be every bit as dogmatic in their opinions as any Catholic theologian but who have a lot less to be humble about (to put it nicely).
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Points to Ponder:
(From James Madison)
The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended."
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.
As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.
Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.
(From James Madison)
The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended."
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.
As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.
Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.
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