Post 1200 - Weak Eastern Division Update

Have I got this wrong? The Celtic's magic number to make the playoffs is 6. Any combination of Atlanta losses and Boston wins totaling 6 and they're in.

I think I'll go out on a limb here...

Counter-tribalism

To add to my entire Cultural Tribes section the estimable John O'Sullivan made the following observations in the NY Sun recently, apropos of 9-11 and the GWOT.

We heard more and more from the "counter-tribalists" — those Americans who consider themselves more sophisticated and intellectually detached than simple-minded patriots but who take the side against America as reflexively as a hard hat worker or suburban soccer mom salutes the flag. They are an anthropological curiosity — moved by the same instinctive tribal loyalties as a primitive people with the exception that they are loyal to other tribes. And not just any other tribe but the one that happens to be opposed to the United States.

Counter-tribalism explains many oddities such as those feminists who can't bring themselves to welcome the ousting of the women-hating Taliban in Afghanistan because it was accomplished by George W. Bush. It is the ideology of a large lumpen intelligentsia in schools, the courts, universities, the "netroots" Democratic Party, the establishment media, Hollywood, etc., etc. Its slogan runs: "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." And Barbara Kingsolver expressed it perfectly when she wrote: "In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper-shredder."

In a free country like the United States, Kingsolver is entitled to say such things. Shouldn't the rest of us be free to say that this is vicious and unpatriotic drivel and that counter-tribalism is not dissent but hatred of America? And don't we owe the dead that honesty at least?

(HT: Moonbattery)

Michelle Obama

Speaking to the Boston Globe about her husband's upbringing by her mother-in-law

...sometimes dreams don't pay the rent.

Exactly my point, Mrs. Obama. Exactly my point.

"Palming" Is An Anachronism, I Guess.

Beyond The Fringe*

Megan McArdle, guest-blogging over at Instapundit, makes a wise observation about near-fringe candidates, in the context of Nader's announcement that he is running again.

I know, I know--you want to move the party in the direction of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. But this is wishful thinking. The reason that those of us on the fringe--libertarians, Greens, socialist workers, or what have you--do not have more representation in government is not because there is some structural problem with the American political system, like a lack of IRV or minority party candidates. The reason we don't have more representation is that most people just don't agree with us. Oh, I know you can find a poll that says that voters want national health care, a guaranteed income, a carbon tax, or lower government spending. But voters like lots of things in the abstract. When you get down to the specifics of raising their taxes and restricting their choices, they tend to get balky. The Democrats cannot move significantly closer to Nader, nor the Republicans to Ron Paul, without losing more voters in the center than they gain on the fringe. (emphasis mine)

* What's that from?

Ensemble. Assemble. Simple!

Driving down to the wake I saw the word ensemble on a sign in Norwell. Huh - it must be related to assemble...semblance...resemble. What's that "semb" root mean? Together? Meaning? Seem...similar? Hey, those might be from the same root. So might same. Huh. Dissemble...semiotic...simultaneous... Maybe "sem" and "semb" are actually different roots.

And then my usual quote: I'll have to check my OED when I get home. Ah, how I love being able to say that! There is a security in certain reference books that quiets my heart.

But of course once started, I went to my Watkins, my dictionary of Indo-European roots and found that this particular root is completely out of control. It's everywhere. The root is *sem, = "one, together." Thus Greek roots hem, he, homo, homeo. Hamadryad. Homily. Hekaton. Homeopathic. Also half, haploid, hemi, meaning "one of two." Latin roots sin, simul, sem leading to single, singular, assembly, semper fi. Russian sam meaning "self," leading to samovar, samizdata. Plus Sanskrit and Iranian words I didn't recognize.

Seem. Seemly. The suffix -some. Some. Assimilate.
Simple.

There Is A God

There Is A God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew.

If this were a real review, I wouldn't be starting with Appendix B, written by someone other than the author. This is just random commentary.

I thought the "The Self-Revelation of God in Human History: A Dialogue on Jesus with N. T. Wright" was only a few pages long, and I marveled at how Wright had condensed so much into so little space. It is actually nearly 30 pages long, but is so readable that you don't notice. Wright's evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is simply the best essay I have ever read on that subject. I sensed the ghost of C.S. Lewis behind much of what was written, and he quotes Lewis at one point, but Wright's essay is simply better. That is high praise from me.

In brief, the Bishop of Durham confronts the idea that the resurrection is the sort of story people might have made up later to strengthen their claim. He makes the strong case that this particular people would never have made up this story. Palestinian Jews and later, Mediterranean pagans, might not be any more honest than the rest of us and might be tempted to fudge the facts to puff things up. But this is nothing like what they would have done. The behavior of Jesus is both in complete accord with the Old Testament predictions, but different from the 1st C interpretations of same, that it could not have been invented by that group. He did things they never imagined, so they gulped hard and reported it as seen.

I know that evangelicals are supposed to hold Wright at arm's length a bit, especially if you are from a Reformed tradition or are especially worried about the doctrines of the Emerging Church, but I don't care. This is simply the clearest and best exposition out there.

The book by Flew that it attaches to is also quite excellent, though not what I expected. I don't know what, exactly, I did expect, but this wasn't it. Flew is an academic philosopher, and their works always leave me with mixed impressions. I will be reading along blithely, understanding and agreeing with a proposed argument and wondering why it takes a professional philosopher to point out such straightforward things, and then am suddenly at sea. I reread paragraphs or whole sections, wondering if I have accidentally skipped a page in turning. I think: I am not quite sure what is being talked about here. After a few tries I move on, now sailing along nicely until I am again fog-bound, staring into an opacity of words that I know but cannot decipher.

This is not merely a function of whether I agree or not. I found Chapter Nine, "Finding Space For God" invigorating and clear. Then on the last two pages Flew triumphantly nails down his key points, and I am lost. So I don't have the chops to tell you if Flew is the real deal, but I can at least tell you that he nicely refutes several arguments by atheist philosophers, including a few he put forth with energy through much of his career.

Flew is converted to theism, not Christianity, though he makes some acknowledgment that the Christian view looks more likely than other options. This is often the case with those who come at questions of God from philosophic or scientific perspectives. Theism can be apprehended without special revelation, and many who might be generally sympathetic to the idea of a god reject some specific claims of Christians, finding them unnecessary or unsupported. Christians have given these people a lot of grief in the past few centuries; we have become so used to living in a predominantly Christian and Jewish culture, where theism (or deism) was a way station on the way out of the faith, falling somewhere between apathy and agnosticism, that we have forgotten that it is also a way station on the way into the faith. Flew attempts to be rigorously honest to following the argument wherever it goes, and that should not be despised.

In what to me is a humorous irony, the Big Bang Theory and evolution, which evangelicals spend so much pointless energy attacking, are the entry points for Flew to believing that some sort of Superior Mind may be the best explanation for the universe as it is. As Christians, we are often tempted to fall into the practice of defending the Bible (or worse, our interpretation of it) rather than being witnesses for the faith. Luther considered a believer who defends the Bible analogous to a soldier who defends his sword. Testify to what you know and let the Bible be its own defense.

From The Greatest Show In The History Of Television

If you liked that, perhaps some fromage

Check Your Freezer

Following the death of her mother, my wife has intended to make dinners for her father using the food from the freezer on their porch. Tracy's mother went through very lean times when young, and always had great quantities of food stored around the house once she could afford it.

But chicken thighs marked "Sell by 7-18-96" are a bit much.

Note to Doug, who reads this blog: Your grandfather is not going to read the date on anything. Ever. Tracy will be down Monday and throw stuff out, but you might want to examine everything there closely before eating it.

YouTube Diagnostics

A first for me. I often look up patients new to the MH system on the web to see what I can learn about them. The paranoid, angry, psychotic young woman we admitted this morning posted several videos of herself on YouTube two weeks ago. I don't know when the videos were actually made, however. She was friendly and laughing then, except the last two have an eerie edge.

Things like this are going to become more common, and more helpful to us. I hope they are helpful to her as well.

In Every Generation...

Who does this video make you think of, eh? I had not heard of this band, but I like them. Their outfits are very 90's - not surprising, as that was when they were recording - but I like it; I like it.

My Uncle Again

I checked the email after the funeral, and had another interesting note from my Uncle Dave. Wonderful guy. I am very like him, but we disagree on 75% of everything. The link is to an Australian editorial suggesting that democracy might be a problem if people won't do what they should about environmental issues.

A recent survey found that only 22% of Floridians felt that evolution was a proven principle of science. These quotes are from a liberal Florida newspapers editorial:

I came across this tidbit casually I have no idea whether it is true.
and don't really care But assuming for a moment that it is true, it brought meback to this site which you sent a few days ago

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6878
Should people like those described be voting or commenting on global warming
or other scientific matters?

My reply: It's a fascinating topic. I don't know the origin of the statistic, but let's pretend it's true. It doesn't tell us what, exactly, they do think. Those that think that evolution is likely true but unprovable because it is unfalsifiable and unrepeatable might be right. Those who believe in a 10,000 year-old earth are wrong, but I am not sure how much that actually affects things. I don't know enough in any of the sciences - neither data nor theory - to make a case on my own for much of anything. I believe in an ancient earth and in evolution because people who do know things from so many fields - geology, biology, archaeology, linguistics - come to approximately the same conclusions, each in their own fields, and when they explain things to me it seems to make sense. I doubt there is one person in a thousand who can make any of those scientific cases that is anything more than repeating what they read in National Geographic or similar items.

Also, people believe contradictory things because they don't really have much sense of time or numbers. A lot of that 78% are likely proud that their kids know so much about dinosaurs or astronomy, and believe in cavemen. It depends on who's asking and how.

More important, that enlightened bunch who roll their eyes at the creationists are just as ignorant, they just believe a different myth. The National Geographic myth would tell us that human beings first showed up in Africa 2.3 million years ago. True enough as far as it goes, but they don't mention that these creatures they are so anxious to call human didn't have language until about 50,000 years ago, and didn't domesticate animals, plant crops, or build shelters until about 10,000 years ago. That's a helluva lot of that "human beings" time that consists of people we wouldn't think were much like us - far less so than current New Guinea tribesmen or isolated tribes in the Amazon Basin. If you told educated people who don't believe in creationism that human beings started 2.3 million years ago and asked them to guess when they started to talk, very few would guess below 100,000 years. In this way, the National Geographic myth is also complete crap - they leave out the parts that interfere with the picture they want you to have. That's for another issue. Because even their readership doesn't keep the difference between fifty thousand, fifty million, and five billion very clear in their heads. It's all just a long time ago.

The philosopher Anthony Flew, an atheist for most of his 86 years, now believes in a theistic god of Aristotle, which has "considerable overlap with the Judeo-Christian deity" on the basis of recent advances in genetic and cosmology. For him, evolution is more an evidence for god than against him.

There also isn't evidence that this 78% don't understand scientific arguments compared to the 22%. That is automatically assumed, but I doubt it's true. The elites fear people who won't believe what they are told, and this is what is happening in the AGW argument. The belief of the major AGW advocates is that human beings need to live differently, buying less stuff. They want to tell the masses how to live. The problem with this is that their belief long predates discussions of AGW. Bill McKibben set the global warming scare going in the late 80's. We read Mother Earth News in the late 70's and early 80's, and those folks were already pissing and moaning about how unecological everyone was, not so that they would clean up rivers and the air, but with clear advocacy that You Should Live Differently - Maybe You Should Be Made To.

I think AGW unravels more each year. Warming stopped in 1998. That was a warm year, and we haven't dropped off (until 2007) more than a fraction, so people can still rightly claim that the last x years are among the warmest on record. But looking at the record, we now find that some years in the 1930's were warmer. And it got colder this year. And we're going into an Ice Age in 200 years. We are already five years past McKibben's catastrophe and 35 years past Paul Erlich's. AGW is going to turn out like the lefty belief 1960-90 that the US was nearly as bad as the Soviets, and that people listening to their betters was what would solve the Cold War. It's all religion, but only one side admits that.

Funeral

I will be away for the next two days, staying down in Scituate (the Irish Riviera) for my mother-in-law's wake and funeral. For a diabetic and pack-a-day smoker, living to 86 is a pretty good innings, but it is still hard to see her go.

Youngest Son

This will only have meaning to a few of my readers, but those few will appreciate it.

My son Chris has Mike Zylak's judgment and Ben's luck. Y'all pray for that boy.

Basketball Update

ESPN has Detroit and Boston at the top of the rankings, followed by teams from the west in the next nine slots. Only eight of those nine will even go to the playoffs. It has got to be tough to be an 11th-best team and not make it into a 16-team playoff, while watching #19 get in.

Personality Development

Today you built part of the elderly personality you are going to be, when your digestion isn't so good, more joints ache, and other comforts are stripped away.

Lewis Quote Revisited

I have put forward this excellent Lewis quote before

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.” – fictional character Miss Hardcastle, from That Hideous Strength, by C.S.Lewis

I had thought it prescient, in much the same way his Abolition of Man is, detecting a trend and its full flower long before others had even noticed. Today's journalistic bias, noted by many and amply documented, I took as an unfortunate perversion of objectivity which had started about the time Lewis wrote the above (1942), continuing until the present day and hopefully ending soon as the new media replaced the dinosaurs.

But 66 years is a long haul for any aberration, and Lewis was of course commenting from his knowledge of elite journalism over the previous few decades. It occurred to me today that this bias might be present in every age. Not just a bias, but this particular style. I have long remarked that the European intellectual classes were almost infallibly wrong about political issues throughout the 20th C. Fascism, Socialism, and Communism were the fantasies of philosophers, artists, and dreamers, who could skillfully stir up the masses for brief periods - enough to obtain power.

As for journalisms, this J-School site's history of 20th C journalism is risible, almost a satire on itself. 50% straight reporting, 50% parody from The Onion. But that is a retrospective of current media elite values, not the perspective of those then alive and reading. I shall research this to see what biases earlier journalism, magazine and newspaper, showed.

The arts we already know about.

Better In Memory

Like Monty Python and The Princess Bride, some things are funnier when you talk about them after than when you actually watched them. I think this Super Bowl ad will have the same course.

Dirty Politics

John Weidner writes the article I wish I had over at his blog Random Jottings. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, writing at alternet, predicts that as Hillary goes down, the Republicans will turn their dirty tricks on Obama.

Hutchinson goes into detail here. He predicts that Obama's previous votes on issues will be attacked. The nerve of the Right Wing Attack Machine!

That's just the start. His votes and views during his days in the Illinois Senate on taxes, abortion, civil liberties, civil rights, law enforcement and capital punishment have so far drawn little public attention, because of the media and a big chunk of the public's obsession with nailing Hillary. But in a head to head match up with the likely GOP presidential nominee John McCain, Republicans and conservative interest groups will surgically dissect his state Senate votes and they will find much there to pound him on.

But wait, there's more! Hutchinson predicts that Obama will be attacked personally by - well, we'll let Earl explain it himself:

Then there's the personal dirty stuff. They'll hammer him for his dealings with an indicted Chicago financier, for possible conflicts of interest in other financial dealings and legislative votes, and for his fuzzy, oftentimes contradictory, statements and actions on the Iraq War and terrorism.

Weidner tears Hutchinson apart, phrase by phrase. Wish I'd said that.

Progressives Aren't Liberal on Economics

For those who like research papers, Alfred E. Kahn's discussion of recent economic objectives of Democrats might suit.

The assumption of Democratic control of Congress last year and the probability that its majority will be increased by this year's elections portends a growing, deeply troubling ideological split within its ranks, already visible, on matters of economic policy generally and regulatory policy specifically - between the more radical (and at the same time reactionary) populists, who label themselves Progressives, and the 20th century liberals, who have dominated in the formulation of their party's economic programs for the last three-quarters century.