VonMorganstone: The home of Morgan-style thinking on the internet

Stephanie's pics

2009-05-14T20:42:00.001-07:00

I have been spending a lot of time at Facebook lately, it's pretty social and fun. But here's a pic you might like.

Gordon Smith's latest radio ad makes me GAG

2008-10-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

Why does Gordon Smith continue to run left of himself? He has absolutely NO REASON to have done this election after election. The last time he ran here he won like 70 to thirty percent.

So it seems to me that after you are pretty safely in office like Smith is, you would start to award the base that put you there time after time. I have voted for Smith three times now and what have I got for it? He continually goes on TV trashing Bush and doing a bunch of anti oil drilling and gay rights stuff when he DOESN'T NEED to.

Soeone needs to tell him and his campaign that his loyal supporters are getting seriously frustrated and are wondering why it is we have supported him for all of this NOTHING.

His latest ad talked about how he and Ron Wyden, the democratic senator here, have budied up to each other and that they virtually vote the same way. I GUARANTEE you that Wyden is NOT running similar ads. The reason? Because liberals will NEVER reward conservatives for acting liberal. They will ALWAYS vote for the more liberal guy anyway.

This is McCain's problem right now. All of these years of sticking it to conservatives are getting him NOTHING. All of those journalists that were do excited about him in the primary are turning around and stabbing him in the back, calling him "Bush OLD" and geriatric and all kinds of things.

Reaching across the aisle to a democrat is for the sole purpose of smacking republicans and conservatives need to learn that they need to SELL conservative ideology and not apologize for it. That works every time it's tried in this country, and why in the world Smith doesn't start running as a conservative now that he's in a position to do so is baffling and totally annoying. I am actually considering sitting his race out for the first time in my life. I have held my nose and voted for a lot of liberal republicans, but in Smith's case it is just gratuitous and inexcuseable.

Elena Uhing finally getting her 'visibility' in Forest Grove.

2008-10-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

This is probably not the kind of visibility Elena Uhing was talking about when she said that adding subdivisions of teeny tiny houses on questionable lots during the heady days of the building boom would bring visibility to Forest Grove. But it is the kind of visibility that needs to happen. Residents of Forest Grove need to pay attention to what this woman has been trying to do to our town.

She has been trying to get in on the action of the euphoric builder boom to add to the money that the city has to spend. After all, they have designed the funding structure of the city as a giant pyramid scheme. The builders will come and get permission to build, give the city money, then the city spends it on CURRENT needs because they are in the hole, and then when the actual residents MOVE IN to those houses and they need utilities and other services and to educate their kids, they need to look around for more building to lure into town. So they have been getting desperate, and are approving projects like Gales Creek Terrace, which is a hundred or so comically small and tall (like Dr. Seuss) houses that NO ONE wants to live in. And now that the non-occupant investor interest is dried up, there is no one who wants them AT ALL.

I said all of this at a city council meeting, but people reacted to it like I was the crazy lady on the bus or something, becaue clearly they didn't want to hear anything that tarnished their greedly little plans. Two years ago Forest Grove city officials met with residents to discuss ammemdments to the city's comprehensive plan, which was among other goals written to protect areas around Gales' Creek from overdevelopment. This meeting was hilarious, because the tone of it was like
"We didn't really MEAN ALL THAT, did we, Forest Grove?"

Particularly, Elena Uhing, a City Councilor expressed the fact that they are decidedly pro-development, and that developers were welcome to come in while the getting was good, giving them permits to build anything they thought they could sell in postage-stamp sized lots. Doing so Uhing said would help Forest Grove become "more visible."

Uhing should have just said what she was thinking, she would have sounded more credible and less politician-y. Obviously officials here feel it is a good thing to grow the population of Forest Grove by turning it into a higher and higher proportion of commuters into Portland who in order to make it worth it to developers to build on steeply sloping land that is known to flood should live in teeny tiny houses with four foot square of back yard. But "more visible?" Do the RESIDENTS want to be more VISIBLE to ANYONE? I know that I don't. I moved to Forest Grove to have a little bit MORE back yard for the price, and less people packed in the radius around my house.

As for who would benefit by being more visible, it is clearly Uhing's own career, which likely lacks anything better to sell it. Because in a overwhelming 80 percent majority, this kind of housing was't the kind that the CURRENT residents of Forest Grove want--hence the meeting to tell us that we really don't want what we think we do. We really want to pack in tiny attached houses around Gales Creek with barely enough room in the street to turn around if you're a CAR much less a fire engine. But perhaps the residents could wait until JANUARY when the 100-yr flood plain is ALWAYS flooded, if need be.

I have also learned a lot about myself through this process. I thought it was interesting speaking my mind when I was quite upset to people I care nothing about like builders from Hillsboro. These guys said things to me that were a bit like the hinted suggestion that I was crazy and thought the sky was falling. Mayor Kidd was plain RUDE and interrupted me with a contemptuous grin saying that what I was talking about had NOTHING to do with ANYTHING.

Well, they beat around the bush but I think that these people would have LIKED to say stuff like calling me Chicken Little. They laughed at my neighbor for bringing in global warming (then again, so did I). But they tried couching it in diplomatic terms. Of course NO ONE likes to hear things from anyone else that they DON'T WANT to hear, that's a tautology. But other than it didn't make pro-growth folks in Forest Grove happy, I can say in my defense that the sky WAS falling, or was it the sky-high building prices? But it all ended up in the long run to be dead on accurate.

Two years ago, I was the only person not only in my social circles but in the town of Forest Grove that was talking about the fact that the real estate market looked a lot like the Holland Tulip Bulb fiasco. During the heady days when people talked about home prices at BBQ's like they talked about stocks ten years ago, it was just NOT COOL to point out that it probably wouldn't last for ever. Saying things like that got you a blank stare and perhaps even pity that you weren't in on the take.

The thing about contrarian investors, (contrarian in the words of the builders who I think would have liked to have come out and called me CRAZY, because I was contrarian or different from what anyone else was saying) is that they end up being right--not always, but at least at the time that it is hardest to be right, when no one else is saying what you're saying.

Contrarian investors are the ones that don't end up doing things like being the last one into a market that doesn't have anyone else to buy what is being sold. At a "soothe the ruffled feathers of the neighbors" meeting with these builders/investors, they ended up describing me better than anyone to this date. They nailed the key to both my strengths in life and my weaknesses, my triumphs and my frustrations. I think this guy would have LIKED to have called me crazy, but instead one of them said "you say things that people DON'T SAY."

Yep, you're right builder dude. I do. In many ways and at many different times and situations. In fact I think the fact that my mind is a free spirit so to speak is why I am able to do things like compose music. Novel trains of thought are interesting to me and I dive right in. I am not ALWAYS right of course, in fact I am wrong A LOT. But it is really remarkable that I am not wrong more often given the fact that one of my goals is to say things in that guys words "that people don't say." I would rather risk saying things that are wrong most of the time than NEVER say anything different or unique or that makes somoene think in a unique way. I seem to nail that goal with a surprising little damage in terms of saying things that are out and out crazy. And that is TOTALLY HARD.

I try to have the goal that if I say something during church that it contains something that hasn't been said before. That is really hard. In fact the only people that do that are the crazy people. But nearly every time I comment in Sunday School someone comes up to me and says wow that's a totally amazing way to look at that. One guy said he had a special page in his planner for stuff I said during Sunday School. When I gave my talk on morality during RS one woman was scribbling every word down and asked me if I could come over and teach a fireside to the youth, which the bishop thought was best to extend to the whole ward. Not that I'm thrilled with that.

But at the time two years ago I managed to say to quite a few people that it wouldn't last. That not only could it stop, it could reverse. People gave me those blank stares like they are going to politely listen and then flush their memories of what I said. The reason that I knew that was not because I am particularly smart or remarkable. Sometimes I think that I offer analysis or thoughts that others don't but in this case all I did was not let things that were happening influence me the way they did everyone else. I also just reflected a bit on history. History indicates that the only time that one should invest in real estate is when you have a LONG LONG LONG LONG time horizon, and that no one should EVER do it to make short term money. The average for someone to simply recover their COSTS in the real estate market is five to seven years. And it was obvious that the said subdivision would be filled with investors rather than owner-occupants.

Now in the post subprime world, it simply wouldn't be possible, and I doubt that the project will go forward. In fact I might have saved my neighborhood by ranting on and on about things that other people don't say. Because especially people that have 20 percent down on 200K don't want to live in a house with two feet of yard all around their property.

But homes during the euphoria weren't just being treated as investments, they were being treated like ATMs. People were being encouraged to refinance again and again with questionable subprime loans because it would never end. Never mind the fact that when people tell you things like that you should run and go the other way. Never mind the fact that "widows and orphans" were entering no actually flooding into the market.

One of the builders during this meeting quoted an article from the Oregonian where it mentioned immigrants and single women being the latest entrants into the housing market. They said that they thought this indicated the market was healthy. Actually, I read between those lines and saw the doom that it spoke.

Did they know what this latest new category of buyers was called? Widows and orphans. The latest to enter the market were the ones that were previously not buyers, and that means that there were obvious signs that the last people to buy into the market had alread done so. For the rest of us, it meant that if all the people that are going to buy houses have already done so, THERE WAS OBVIOUSLY NO ONE LEFT TO SELL TO. This signals a market top.

I guess it is true that I say things that "people don't say." Is this a sign of being nutty? Probably in a way. Because no one likes this in someone else. The overwhelming majority of the time when someone says something that people don't like they attribute either stupidity or craziness. I think most people know they can't say I'm stupid, even the FG city council, most of whom haven't had more than high school education.

But the main reason the council probably HATED me, then and now, was that I would be and am the evidence for the fact that there WAS someone who WARNED them. Elena Uhing can NOT now say that there was no way that she could have seen that her plan to cash in on crazy (YES CRAZY) builder euphoria for political purposes was misguided and a clear plan for ruin, because there was a crazy lady in the audience who spelled it out for her. And I didn't even sound crazy either. I made a very cogent argument with powerpoint that made a lot of sense. That doesn't help when you are telling things people don't want to hear. They just don't listen. The crazy lady in the audience, (who was the only one who was willing to talk about the fact that the party was going to come to an end) ruined things for her and her plans to spend Forest Grove's future to gain something for her own political visibility.

"Being more visible," what Elena Uhing said she wanted for Forest Grove, would have come at a TERRIBLE price if she had been able to glut herself at the trough
completely. Let's look at what she really wanted for Forest Grove in order for it to become more visible (read, get more moeny from building fees so she could have doled it out around town to making people think that she was a miracle-working fairy godmother that in reality is just confiscating one person's money and sprinkling it around where it will get votes). She would have turned Forest Grove into this:

[I don't have a link anymore, basically it calls Gilbert a new ghost town]

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/nov/04/news/admn-ariz4

Here's quotes from it:

Residents of Cooley Station North awoke Monday to 493 signs of more trouble for their half-empty subdivision.

Process servers had blanketed the Trend Homes community in east Gilbert with foreclosure notices, targeting 493 vacant lots owned by a Scottsdale "land bank," which has fallen behind on its loan payments.

The pending foreclosures are among many recent indications that communities on the fringes of suburban sprawl are likely to face more hardship before economic trends shift in their favor. Residents worry about the ghost-town effects of the half-built subdivision on their falling home values and what might happen if a developer were to come in with a new approach.

Cooley Station homeowner Krista Anderson said those empty lots, now scheduled for auction in late August, represent the future of her neighborhood, southeast of Higley and Warner roads.

"We’re living in a subdivision that’s half-full," Anderson said. "My main concern is what’s going to happen to the subdivision."

The land bank that holds the lots is Taro Properties, and they are having difficulties in other developments as well:

Like many other land banks that had contracted with home builders during the real-estate boom, Taro was left with hundreds of vacant parcels.

"They ended up saddled with all these empty lots that nobody wanted," said Mesa real-estate analyst Zach Bowers of Ion Data.

According to the foreclosure notice, also known as a notice of trustee sale, Taro Properties defaulted on a $31.2 million mortgage agreement with Bank of America to finance the land purchase.

Bowers said the land bank faces foreclosure on three separate land holdings, two in Gilbert and the other in Phoenix, totaling 1,251 parcels and $75.3 million in mortgage loans.

This does not bode well for communities like Cooley Station:

The foreclosure notices were the latest reminder that all is not well at Cooley Station, where owners say they are increasingly concerned that Trend Homes has abandoned the development.

Construction activity ceased suddenly early this year, and more than a half-dozen unfinished homes stand in various stages of completion, sun-faded and coated with dust. Weeds have reclaimed many of the graded dirt lots.

"They haven’t done anything in months," Cooley Station resident Adam Hingley said.

Porter said Trend Homes was unable to finish the homes because, when it entered bankruptcy proceedings, its construction lender, Bank of America, stopped funding the projects.

I predicted that a lot of these things would start happening in overbuilt areas. Heck, I am even quoted in the Oregonian and have been on TELEVISION saying it, because I was the only person talking about it that they could find for a while.

I would realy like to know what Elena Uhing could argue would be good about this. Leaving Forest Grove holding the bag when the housing market dried up would leave it with uncompleted subdivisons (that no one really wanted to live in anyway because they were so small as to practically not be habitable) that when they can't sell, along with the rest of the upside down mortgages that foreclosed, paper the neighborhoods with utility shut-off notices that warmly invive meth labs and "coyote drops," where the foreclosure notices are a vacancy notice to illegal immigrants who need a place to stay.

There are people in these news stories who are doing the honorable thing and trying to hold onto properties where they are "upside down" (they owe more than their house is worth) only to see their neighbors' weeds grow into their yards and have the INS raid the house accross the street and bag about thirty or fourty of them living in one house. Must be an erie experience to see studs and building tape on one side of you and the great grandmother of your neighbor on the other side tending a flock of chickens like in the old country.

Not only is Elena Uhing hoping to get as many builders' fees as possible to add to her own political visibility and hand it out to needy schools and government programs she is also a proponent of bringing the Max line out to Forest Grove.

She thinks that this will be good for residents == how?

Well, for one thing, it SOUNDS good, so most people are NOT going to be like the Crazy Lady in the back who actually expects her to defend her positions that sound and feel good.

If the Max Line comes to Forest Grove, is it REALLY going to encourage people to go west with their business? Absolutely NOT. Why would they come out to Grove to patronize the one or two businesses we have down town that haven't gone under because of the over-grown city government that is like a parasite now bigger than its host?

A Max Line out to Forest Grove is going to encourage two things, in addition to being a blight to the parts of town that the line runs through: 1. Forest Grove residents are going to go EAST with their business increasingly often, and people are going to find it easier to go further West with their RESIDENCE, making Forest Grove even more of a bedroom community that has no business infastructure to support people actually living and doing business here. People will spend eight or nine hours in Forest Grove to sleep here and do more and more of their business in town.

Also, it is going to become more and more easy for drugs and homelessness to come further West. Right now Forest Grove is virgin territory to a lot of the Meth Lab/prostitution/heroin/crack dealing etc. because such business tends to follow the Max lines. Yes it's true, the people who do drugs and prostitution are often not to be troubled with getting a bus transfer, meaning that the suburbs beyond the Max line are left alone.

Elena Uhing wants the builders' fees for these teeny tiny houses (the building of which is fueled by real estate speculation, not because people actually want to live in these houses) but Forest Grove residents OVERWHELMINGLY don't want the ACTUAL CONSEQUENCES of building like crazy.

The first subdivisions to go belly up have been these crazy speculation-driven projects where the characteristics like land size are more and more extreme as to not be popular housing choices. The majority of the owners have been investors and speculators and not owner-occupants. It is much easier for those types of owners who are not actually living in their homes to walk away and be foreclosed on than those who actually live in their homes (because they have to live somewhere). It will also fuel the proportion of renters in the community, which is bad for many things including crime and real estate values.

Now don't get me wrong, I think it is a TERRIBLE thing to do for homeowners to walk away from mortgages. In my opinion, if you sign the loan, it means that you intend to make the payments. These homowners and investors wouldn't have shared the profits if they had been on the winning side, so they shouldn't expect to share the downside. But it is certainly much easier, and therefore the bigger risk, for a bunch of builder mutual funds or REITS or whatever to decide to walk away than actual homeowners, making the projects like this, where most of the owners are second and third home owners, most likely to be dumped in this kind of a market.

Am I crazy? Well, I don't know. Crazy in these cases is really being uncouth and willing to be blunt, where I really don't see the reason not to in a city council meeting where you have ten minutes maybe less if the mayor thinks you're off topic. But also, it is very hard for crazy people to actually be RIGHT about stuff like this, and make cogent arguments that the majority of sane people understand they just didn't think of. I was definitely NOT crazy when I was ranting and raving about the consequences of the busted housing bubble for Forest Grove and the blindness of the Forest Grove City Council. I was probably a bit intense about it. But this was a really terrible thing that the city was about to do to my neighborhood. Meth labs and coyote drops a block away are really not something I feel an obligation to be calm about.

I think it was interesting that the only councilor that didn't want to vote for the "Crazy" problem-riddled Gales Creek Terrace, which I nicknamed "Floods, Fires and Crammin'" wasn't even willing to vote "NO." Rather than be a Maverick on the outskirts of opinion, he chose to be absent. Guttless wonder. All of the rest of them, plus Mayor Kidd, put his name on these tiny postage stamp-sized blights to the landscape, except for one who wasn't wanting to so distinguish himself. I really don't know, because if it had become so obvious like it has now that the bubble has burst and there ARE severe consequences in the housing sector, I think that he might have been present.

Who is it that is going to save us from terrible ideas like this when the actual stewards and guardians of our community are the ones who are busy counting the fees they get for selling our town, parcel by parcel up the river to disaster. The only only person willing or able to see the writing on the wall is a crazy lady who no one wants to associate with because apparently it isn't cool to be different even if you are the only one right. In this boom of building euphoria no one was willing to even be the voice of caution.

Socially and politically, being on the right side when it is often MUCH too fun to be wrong (a lot more friends can be made by telling people that their good times will never end and they only need to own a house for six months before they can retire off the profit than warning the town that what they are doing will encourage the Portland meth dealers and coyote droppers to move next door) gets about as many people in your camp as a deserted Phoenix-area ghost town subdivision.

I suppose I could console myself that eventually things came around to being obvious that I was right and Elena Uhing was wrong. I hope she finally gets her "visibility" for it. Because Forest Grove needs to do what it can to cancel any more projects like this whatever stage in development they are in. And we need to have a pretty good memory about who it was that wanted us to head toward the disaster that other communities are facing. Uhing should not be able to escape close association with plans that are coming to fruition in areas around the country and turning them into scary, crime-infested vacant ghost towns.

As for me, I am probably a bit like the subdivisions I warned against. A bit dusty, a few cobwebs here and there, and a bit lonely, because I don't do much with my time or attentions that gets me a lot of popularity. And I am a bit disorganized so my house gets its share of papering of notices to discontinue the garbage service, etc. Because my mind is absolutely CHOC full of different things. So it is true that I am really bad at doing things that make me look normal and makes my life populated with all kinds of supporters. That has a lot of bad consequences for me. It is lonely, because even the people that agree with me aren't willing to stand firm.

My theory on why McCain chose Palin

2008-10-13T13:58:00.000-07:00

McCain couldn't afford to choose a man because of his age. Anyone that he stood next to would have made him look like it was their dad instead of the head of the ticket. Can you imagine him next to Romney in all the campaign stops? Choosing a woman was the only way to make himself look like top dog.

Communism = Genocide, revamped.

2008-10-11T23:19:00.000-07:00

Wrote this up proper. This should get some interesting responses.

http://www.helium.com/knowledge/189833-relationship-between-leftist-politics-and-genocide

Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, and the Existential Crisis

2008-10-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

There are probably a total of three people who will appreciate this, Slade and I being two of them, but here is my analysis of themes common to Ingmar and Allen, and in Bergman's case, Puh LEASE. There are really so many times in a person's life a person should really need to flog themselves because over the inability to continue belief in religion. YES BERGMAN LEFT HIS FAITH, BUT HE COULDN'T LEAVE IT ALONE. Sound familiar?

At least Allen's approach is a bit more light-hearted.

I don't know, I have always thought that the people who get realy excited about Niesche-type nihilism because it sounds OH SO INTELLECTUAL to criticize a large religious or philosophical movement always in the end have to answer the question: if real knowledge is deconstructing other knowledge, then doesn't that apply to YOUR drivel also?

http://www.helium.com/items/1205189-ingmar-bergman-the-seventh-seal-woody-allen-movies-cinema-crimes-and-misdemeanors

Liberalism = Genocide

2008-09-17T16:58:00.000-07:00

I am actually not sure why this JUST occurred to me, but I find it very fascinating that there are a bunch of people that think leftist politics are good in terms of human rights, because the track record is horrifyingly opposite. Absolutely every time that communism or its daughters or sisters have been tried has led to the theory that the common good justifies just about any possible atrocity imaginable.

How is this relevant in terms of the current home for communists (I.E. environmentalists)? Anyone who is actually a non-thinking sheep enough to think that what is really going on here is that these people care about the PLANET. Because the second sentence out of their mouths is always related to some fantasy about how there might be a blessed UTOPIA if HUMAN BEINGS ARE REMOVED FROM THE PLANET. This manifested itself as zero population growth in the sixties, the last instantiation of the attempt at communist genocide, and it is no different now. There are people who are delighted to think that perhaps one day this planet will be free from the traces of human beings, their parts or passions, and THAT EQUALS GENOCIDE OF THE HUMAN RACE.

Why people seem to be STUPID enough to want to give power to central governments to commit the kinds of unspeakable atrocities in the history of communism or its relatives, I will never understand, but it seems to be a lesson that is impossible to teach except with human misery.

Are kids shows realy for kids?

2008-08-26T10:05:00.000-07:00

I argue that paents concentrate what's in adult programing even though ironically most kids don't get it, much less parot it. I think that some makers of kids shows and movies target crude fare for what exactly their audience gets and will repeat.

http://www.helium.com/items/1158450-are-disney-and-nickelodeon-shows-really-appropriate-for-all-ages

Kind of just like my point on Honk that the "a88" lyric is just for a cheap laugh substituting for cleverness to appeal to an age that thinks its great.

The horror of modern parenting

2008-08-22T17:32:00.000-07:00

Helium is starting to get picky about letting people pick their own titles! I am not happy, but didn't want to save this on my computer because it would be instantly lost forever, not that it is treasure or anything.

I honestly don't know whether this is one of those things that we all say is getting worse and wasn't like that when we were young. But a terrible encounter with the product of modern parenting on my recent vacation made me think that it must be that a boundary of some kind was crossed in the way we have all been brought up. And much of the behavior of kids is eerily paralleled in the behavior of adults that don't like to get as good as they give.

On my recent trip through various hotels down the west coast I went to one of those racks of pamphlets and was looking at them. A child, a four year old blonde girl, came up to me and started aggressively bossing me around about what I was doing. At first she said, No, No! Probably she had been told not to touch the pamphlets, but probably not by her own parents.

Helium accepted this eventually, now I have to get all the personal stuff out of it eventually!

http://www.helium.com/items/1160496-parenting-bad-behavior-theory-psychology-nature-nurture

What's the harm in wrongness? This.

2008-08-22T13:45:00.000-07:00

People often get a little defensive when they want to just believe in general theories that are very wrong. Because many of them think that there is no harm in it and they should be able to think and even argue wrong things if they want to do it and should be left alone and not made to even see how wrong they are.

Of course there are many things that serve as good candidates of things that people defend, mainly because they would like to believe them for whatever reason. They think they should be left alone with their theories, even if they are about politics or medicine or whatever that affect the rest of us. The people that point out that things other people say and think don't make sense are to be the real enemy, say they, not the people that thought the things in the first place.

Of course the first set of people, the ones who care about just whether something is right or wrong objectively, isn't making what should be just a logical argument with premeses and evidence and all of that instead about who is an enemy or who is evil and who isn't. The first set merely think that thinking something wrong is not good in and of itself and should be avoided at all costs.

But the latest Casey Anthoney child abduction (a la Susan Smith) case bolsters the others like it, and illustrates very keenly that we have an obligation toward rooting out things that aren't true from our world views no matter whether we see how they are harmfull or not.

Everyone from Scott Petersen to Susan Smith to this new one that said her daughter got abducted by some babysitter did what they did with a cover that they thought would be easily believable: people that are strangers are more likely to abduct your loved ones than you are. No one should believe, unless they believe the stranger abduction theory is stronger than it actually is, that a babysitter would want to take a kid FOREVER and not be able to hand them BACK TO THEIR PARENTS.

Babysitters pretty much are always dying to hand a kid back to their parents and wouldn't run off with it particularly if it meant not being paid for their time. That doesn't happen, except in the world that we have created with our stranger abduction theory. I remember working at CARES, a child assessment center, that there was like NEVER a stranger abduction case EVER the whole three years I worked there. It was one of five main cases but it never got its box checked. It was pretty much always the parent or at the very least the teacher. A stranger never came by the house and put the kid in the trunk. That has happened like once or twice ever in the history in this country, and albeit a horrible thing, it hasn't become a common one. Just because it has ascended to the level of public consciousness like it has doesn't make it more common.

There are some cases in the news. Of course Elizabeth Smart and that girl who had an affair with Gary Condit. Gary Condit is going to go down as the most unlucky guy in the history of the universe. Or the most stupid, or both. He was a nobod congressman from Modesto California and had to go and have an affair with some moon eyed intern, making it seem like it was obviously him because that is what one would call guilty behavior.

He probably was one of the ones that didn't do it. But it is SO RARE that nobody cared, really, he pretty much looked guilty anyway, because in a way he was. But on the whole those things are VERY RARE. Likely if there is an angry mother that lies pathologically and seems motivated to please her boyfriend and nothing else, it is likely that she will be the only one suspected in her daughter's disappearance.

Therefore, like Scott Petersen, if he thought that the stranger abduction theory would provide any cover for a murderous deed, then that theory itself has been an accomplice to murder and other terrible things. We never really know when that is going to happen.

So my thinking is, no matter how much it may seem that something is a good idea to believe, unless it is actually TRUE, it could be very harmful and must be stopped. It sounds a bit harsh and dramatic, but what could be worse than this latest example?

Quesstion about comparing Fiddler on the Roof versions

2008-07-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

The new Broadway version of Fiddler on the Roof made a big deal about not having the actors do the fake Yiddish accents like the classic versions did. And actually that is a more intellectually sound way to go, as these characters are undoubtedly speaking Russian and not English with a New York Jewish nasal tone. But the play bombed. Any opinions as to whether the accent decision was a big factor? I think it was.

And why in the HECK do community theater productions insist on casting Tevye and Golde as plump, when the text specifically mentions them starving over the period of twenty five years, which I would think was enough to slightly emaciate any woman no matter how badly she wanted the lead in a musical. I stuffed myself, but admittedly part of their decision was that I was too thin. I got cast as Grandma Tzeitel, who had been dead for thirty years. Oy vey.

A BURN on Thomas More

2008-07-22T06:42:00.000-07:00

Ok, it has been about five hundred years, and I know ALL of us are thinking the EXACT SAME THING: who in the HELL decided that Thomas More was some kind of great guy? Much less a saint or something?

Not only do I risk the wrath of the world's largest religion here, so I admittedly get some ice water in my veins as I type this, I also risk sounding like the idiot kid who points out the emperor has no clothes. This guy was one of history's most self righteous JERKS and here he has people in the twentieth century eulogizing his memory even in full presence of the terrible things he did?

I feel like this is some kind of 'Behind the Music' version of More but the evidence really speaks for itself. And not only am I doing the equivalent of posting grainy paparazzi photos of this terrible Tudor, it makes me look like some sort of meanie that should be exposing the real story behind Brittany Spears. Brittany Spears hasn't gone down in history, recent or ancient, as being some kind of 'Saint' or something, literally. This is a guy whose terrible cold-hearted grasp was only limited by his reach. In the brief period that Henry VIII decided he was deserving of the office of right hand man, the king gave him a free hand to deal with religious heretics as he saw fit.

So the end result was that this hypocrite was mincing words with the king about whether or not his royal divorce should be sanctioned to save his self righteous NECK while he was BURNING PROTESTANTS like Simon Fish, who normally gets the press of some type of composite protestant martyr (but whose story is still fairly illustrative of the types of terrible things More did).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Fish

Let's see what we might be missing. What is the REAL RAP on why we all think that this cruel bigoted monster is getting an overly sanitized reputation.

I really think that this self righteous hypocrite's actual character is NOT up for debate because among other egregious crimes he goes down in history saying that the only reason that he didn't go into the clergy even though he believed it was the only worthy profession is that he didn't want to look bad for not keeping his hands off the ladies.

This is why, for a lesser sacrifice, Tom More ended up with the movie about all the stupid 'Seasons' and Cardinal Fisher ended up with only obscure but dignified martyrdom. The only thing that I can think of is that Cardinal Fisher, who was actually LESS equivocal about Henry's divorce, didn't get much sympathetic press because he actually WAS a devout Roman Catholic who had never married or fathered children despite his better religious scruples.

And thus because Margaret Roper and his other WHINY, BRATTY descendants have had five hundred years to polish this thug's memory, his reputation looks a bit brighter than poor Cardinal Fisher's whose righteous celibate lifestyle resulted in no one really giving a damn about him at all. Fisher went to the block more valiantly than More, but no kids equals nobody really cared one way or the other.

What I think is a total BURN on Thomas More, though, (HAHA, pun intended) is that he wrote a lot of his legal argument stuff about five years too early. It was right before the Gutenberg printing press (which was really responsible, more than any person could, for successfully ending the hold of Roman Catholicism), standardized English spelling for GOOD!

So even though Thomas More was like the pinnacle of enlightened humanist thinking and education at the time, via historical accident he goes down on record looking like a kindergartner that can barely read or write!

LOL... Burn on Tom More.

Starving people in Ohio and other evidence for liberalism

2008-07-22T00:27:00.000-07:00

This is the intellectual hurdle required for believing that the United States needs a more aggressive social welfare system.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92592545

NPR actualy ran a story that quoted ACTUAL LIVE HUMANS who were willing to go down on record with their opinion that it was the CURRENT "recession" that was responsible for their recent financial troubles as a family, even though NONE OF THEM HAVE WORKED EVER, not five years ago, not ten years ago, and not twenty years ago.

Apparently NPR's fact checkers are getting a bit lazy because it took approximately two alert readers to realize the ridiculousness of this story. Too bad about half of the U.S. population still doesn't see it. It is physically impossible to go without the basic necessities of life in the United States, the heart of cold-hearted, ignorant and unrifined capitalism, as hard as bleeding heart jounalists would try to convince you otherwise.

http://www.red-alerts.com/un-american-activities/npr-claims-lazy-morbidly-obese-cretin-starving-because-of-bad-economy/

All I can say is if you find that neither one of these links work, please GOOGLE 'starving Ohioans.'

Kudos to whoever is hiding the meat from them.

Carol's gazionth car crash, other bummers

2008-06-28T22:40:00.000-07:00

Well I thought I would real quick post about this since news travels pretty fast and you all might hear through other people that you are in contact with.

I just got in a bad car accident again. Drake and Sadie were with me. At least they weren't hurt. I was, at least a bit, my arm has turned black and blue, the soft tissue is stiff and achy and lumpy, meaning that there is tissue damage and bleeding and stuff, My wrists hurt and my fingers don't move well. Not nearly well enough to play the pic tomorrow for BHoftheR. Bummer. I don't know if the other people in the car were hurt that bad. I certainly hope not. WeThere were ambulances swarming all over.

Of course this whole thing has brought out some pretty big frustrations. I have been having a hard time lately because I knew that I was getting to the point where I am not doing that well, just not that bad. This is where other people tend to start loosing patience with me. They do really well in a crisis but they don't really do well just over the marathon portion of it, as it is really a long haul situation I am dealing with with the sleep thing.

I always find it amusing what I think is good. In a way I realized during the veery first behavioral disruption episode when I first started thinkig I was going crazy I was THRILLED because I knew that I had had a lot of behavior in my past that wasn't voluntary and I really wanted a way to explain it to myself and other peopl. Meaning I had done a lot of things that I knew I hadn't done ON PURPOSE that other people had accused me of of course doing on purpose because a lot of people attribute the worst possible motive to your behavior instead of the best as I would expect that they would. That is what I try to do, because I find thinking bad things about people when I don't have to a great burden.

There were a lot of people, well not a lot, maybe one or two, that were previously close to me in my life that had really had a big problem with me for one or two things that I had done according to them that I didn't even remember doing. They probably thought it was evidence that I was a bad person when I knew that I hadn't done the thigs on purpose if at all, in fact I had no memory of doing them. It was some ridiculous thing.

One thing similar to what I am talking about happened on a day that I got in a wreck like today. After my wreck, and before, I was acting funny because going in and out of sleep is very disruptive. Have you ever woken up and you were very emotionally exaggerated and disoriented? That is what I feel like on these days. One day was at a chess tournament. A lady got mad that according to her I had 'stolen' her son's coat - right in front of her! MEaning I walked over to a chair, grabbed a coat from on the back of the chair, and put it on myself and walked away. I was sound asleep when I did this of course. I went in and out of sleep that day. Jacob had to come and rescue us from Salem that day, too.

The mother of the kid whose coat I 'stole' grabbed me by her hands (I have never been physically dragged anywhere by an adult since I was a child, fun fun) and dragged me to the tournament director (um, why the tournament director would care I have no idea) and started screetching at the top of her voice this lady STOLE my kid's coat! Yeah right. I want some ten year old's coat with some superhero logo on it. Mm hmm. It was very obvious that I was having a bad problem that day, but there was no stopping this lady.

Slade said lady, does it really seem to you from looking at this woman that she is doing ANYTHING on purpose, let alone stealing your son's coat right in front of you? It kind of begs a question about stealing. Stealing is behavior that by definition someone does illicitly. If I had no idea that I was putting on a coat that wasn't mine, would it really be stealing? I had no idea what in the world I was doing.

At the time we didn't exactly know what was going on. But that was right after a car crash like I had today. After my car crash today I was acting strange for quite a while afterward, probably because I was in some state of agitaiton about the car wreck, and partially because I was going in and out of sleep. But I was actually happy when I learned that I was definitely doing things that I didn't mean to do and that it was obvious. That way the people like that lady at the chess tournament and one or two other people, one of whom is actually pretty close to me or was, won't be able to accuse me of doing any deliberately dishonest behavior. dishonest behavior is behavior you are trying to hide. I didn't try to hide that. I had no idea what I was doing. When she grabbed me with her hands and dragged me to the tournament director, I said hey can you stop digging your fingernails into me, that kinda hurts? Slade asked her whether I looked like the kind of person that needed her crap. She has no idea what is even going on right now. He was trying to get her to admit that she was trying to get blood from a stone, but she couldn't see it.

He said look lady, what do you want from us. She has no idea what she is doing. If you want to make her pay, here. He took out four twenties from his wallet and dropped them on the ground in front of her and walked away. Classic Slade move that no one else would think of but him. She started screaming again, this time screaming at Slade, because he had done the unforgivable, he had called her on bad behavior.

Bad behavior is emminently forgivable in our culture. All you have to do is say 'I didn't mean it, I was going through a hard time' and you can get out of anything. I don't think that it really should be that way. For example, as my behavior tends to make people feel like they can be really rude and say whatever is on their minds, kind of like people look at each other with that raised eyebrow look when there is a crazy lady on the bus, they tend to reveal themselves to an extent that they don't really feel comfortable with. Behavioral problems tend to make people feel that they can treat you really rudely and it is justified. People with behavioral problems, for example, don't deserve to be treated well according to a lot of people I know, because they have done some pretty rude things in return.

But when this first all started shaking out I thought to myself well at least all of the confusion about whether I am doing things on purpose will be cleared up the more wrecks I get in. Full head on car collisions are not usually just something people do when they have behavior or personality issues. My problem is medical, I think it is very clear. At least I should hope so, I really am done trying to prove it. Hee hee. Nobody has serial car collisions just because they are in a weird mood. Or because they are doing something mean to someone else. There are a lot of emotional and behavioral problems that are secondary to serious sleep disturbances (meaning once you have sleep disruption the other things follow, but the real problem that is primary is the sleep problem). When I have had sleep and am feeling good I don't do any of this. My problems are at least curable, whereas there are problems I don't have that aren't, so I should be grateful I guess.

It is hard to say whether I would without sleep problems because I have always had a sleep disorder my entire life. And in fact, it is a miracle that I act as normal as I do (consistent high performance on my IQ test, relatively high functioning in certain arenas, not all admittedly) considering

1. I get no sleep
2. I have had a lot of secondary distress over the past few years to deal with after the various huge traumatic problems that I have had to go through after these majorish events.

What has made both me AND Slade have actual REAL AND GENUINE depression (oh you guys know slade has problems with depression, right? He has his whole life. It is just now getting to the point where he admitts it but I guessed it as soon as I knew what to look for. I didn't always know what chronic depression looked like until there was all of this other discussion, now it is pretty obvious that he has been dealing with it in some form from way back. Not fun.)

Sorry need to start over over the past few years related to this has been our serious amount of depression that has an actual anteceedent, which has been OTHER PEOPLE'S less than affirming behavior. Of course Jake and Stephanie have been troupers, available at a second's notice like they were tonight. But in terms of the official channels that exist at least through the church (we have many nonmormon neighbors that have been fairly reliable tho) but those who were officially assigned to us through their capacity in the the church to caretake us (VTs and HTs), we haven't been really especially impressed. Most of the people in our lives have fled for the exits.

We haven't been able to keep HTs or VTs because they couldn't even deal with the irony of the whole charade of saying 'if there is anything we can do for you guys' when our entire lives were falling apart in flames around all of us.

I shouldn't say that considering I know nonmormons read this blog and everything. There have been some people that have specifically made the comment about me that I am 'not nice to the church.' I don't know what I would do if I had a sufficiently good attitude about it. Bear my testimony about how impressed I am that my new VTs come once when they are first assigned to me? I am sorry but I think I will conjure a testimony about my VTs if they come back, only. And I am waiting to be able to. I have had VTs assigned to me three times in four years. I had repeat visits ONCE. Yeah that was the extra year. (But anyone reading this blog ready to pat themselves on the back about how right they are that the church isn't true should be aware that we are still hanging in there. There would be a lot more that we would have to go through to scare us away. We are in it for the long haul, baby. No they can't take that away from me.)

I guess the saying goes that the church must be true or X would have destroyed it years ago? X being whichever you can substitute, the members, the missionaries, the whatever. So we in the church have never particularly thought that the reason this operation seems to be going strong year after year was that we were perfect. The gospel is perfect and all that, but we who try to live it are not. In fact I have a few posts here if you wade through my old ones that are designed at trying to unravel some of the mysteries of Mormon culture. Mormon culture is distinct from the gospel because there has been a particular geographic area where members live annd that regional flavor gets associated a bit too strongly with Mormonism. I think that is unfortunate because several things result.

1. There ends up being an in group and an out group for church practice. Meaning if you speak Wasatch English and have Wasatch dialect you are automatically associated with being more righeous even though many of us who have had to go to Wallmart in Orem on Sunday oh and I am sure that no one that WE know would get a email ring going about Slade's going to the store on sunday even though he wasn't brought up that way, etc. We don't have anyone THAT bad that we know of I am pretty sure that most of our family knows that we have probably had kids with fevers on Sunday in Orem or been staying in hotels on sunday here, etc. I think that most of the people in our family aren't like that but

2. When there get to be a comfortable church culture, they tend to forget that Christ narrowed down the ten commandments to two. You can live your religion with all of the specific commandments if you WANT TO, as LONG AS in the process you demonstrate your perfect ability not to offend anyone else. Because the first commandment and the second, to love others, are pretty hard to live while just trying to LOOK righteous. You can't just LOOK LIKE you are trying to love your neigbor. If you can, it is pretty much just the same as doing it. You can't fake being nice to someone! At least you can, and I invite everyone to fake being nice to me as much as you can. That is why insincerity as a character trait shouldn't get as bad a rap as it does. Being nice when you don't really feel like it inside is what people should do. There isn't anything wrong with it. And being not nice when you don't really mean it isn't possible either. If you act not nice, then you act not nice. There should be a venn diagram here somewhere... The only remaining possibility is trying to fake being nice when you don't mean it and really sending the message through other means. That is very bad. It is when you act nice for the benefit of third parties that are paying attention and try to claim nice behavior when you are really trying to be mean to someone through subtler means.

So if you have the being nice to people thing down, then you can live a more complicated moral system if you want. It is easy to engage in complicated religious ritual, though, for reasons other than the first commandment, loving God. That should be the reason that people live religious ritual. The first and only. It shouldn't be to make one's self feel righteous. So people could go to the temple three times a day and if it is to merly live religious ritual for patting one's self on the back, it availeth nothing.

That is why they added the second commandment onto it. Because people can say that they do all kinds of things for the first reason, when they really don't. They can quilt and can and avoid caffinated beverages and all kinds of things. But if its for kudos, then you don't get credit for it. That is why I think it is very significant the culture that Christ lived in. I think he picked a good time to come because the way the people lived when he was on the earth is illuminating. Christ came at a time where there were lots of people living lots of religions with some pretty harrowing requirements. There were a lot of people that we act so smug in saying that they getting themselves to heaven because of how righteous they were being, it was a tower of Babel situaion.

They were operating with the assumtion that by eating or not eating specific foods, and methods of dress, sabath keeping, etc., one can prove righteousness. Obviously Mormons have the tendency to create all of those specifics in our culture, and then judge others by it. Of course the second part is the bad thing. None of us that were raised not drinking caffiene think it is any particular sacrifice to not drink caffiene. Except we occasionally congratulate ourselves about the fact that we are able to avoid caffiene while other people aren't. Things are cultural, and there really isn't any reason to feel superior to someone that wasn't raised to be in this culture. It is easy to be a cultural Mormon once you are one.

Just go to a Walmart on a Sunday in Orem and you will see lots of people who any cultural mormon would feel very superior to. We have yes unfortunately had kids with fevers on sunday in Orem and also been staying in hotels here). Not like I think that anyone is getting ready to get the email rings going, I think that our families are pretty good about not being judgmental. I really doubt that we would have anyone sending alerts when

But adhering to a rigorous list of thou shalt nots doesn't make someone able to be a better person. Of course if all of those shalt nots are done for the first great commandment they are, but many times they are to be like Paul cautioned in his letters. Paul said people listen, you can live your religion if you want. But living a complicated system of religious ritual and shalt nots is only ok if you have the second commandment down pat, too. You can't fake the second commandment. You can't live the second commandment for selfish reasons. Either you love people and show charity toward them and avoid judging them, or you don't. Actually, fake it if you must. Be insincere about it if you must. God doesn't really care if we really mean it, he expects you to be nice anyway. Actually, isn't that what being a 'nice person' is in the first place, doing things that are specifically for the purpose of being kind to others, even if we might not really want to?

I shouldn't say all of this in public. I will get accused of not saying nice things about the church. Of course I am not really sure what I should say. I wish I could make it seem like our official caretakers were doing there jobs. It would be much more lifeaffirming for us if through this thing we had discovered that people were better than we thought they were. We haven't. Not yet. But we are still hanging in there with our testimonies. We have way too strong of testimonies to make bad VT stats discourage us. I think actually the bishop got his radar all alerted to it. I think Slade said something in a joking way about something. It would have to be joking, because Slade doesn't ever even HAVE bad feelings about ANYONE much less ever voice them. Slade is truly without guile. It wouldn't matter what anyone did to him, he wouldn't get upset about it and he wouldn't cease to be charitable. It wouldn't help his depression, because he tends to go inward when someone does something that's not nice.

Well anyway, that is kind of where we are with all of this. I wish it was better than I can with confidence say it is. It isn't good any of it. We are really having a hard time with life at the time being. But one thing that I was telling the kids today, was that we are at least learning some things that are good. We have learned what an amazing guy their dad is, even if he personally is having a hard time. Ever since I have known him he has been prone to bouts of depression and really bad anxiety attacks. He tends to take the world on his shoulders and never cuts himself any slack. But the kids and I have really learned his capacity for kindness and understanding. We have learned the extent to which he can selflessly take care of all of us in a way that if I hadn't been ill, and if we hadn't had logistical and financial problems we wouldn't have learned. If there had been all kinds of people lining up to do their jobs and help us out we might not have ever learned that about him. If I hadn't bee sick we wouldn't have seen the extent to which he is really amazing.

A lady that gave me a ride to the store today, a perfect stranger, told me that her husband suffered similar problems to mine. In fact exactly. And the were suffering really bad because he couldn't keep down a job. We aren't doing that well with money because of how expensive life has been for us, with me crashing cars and not paying bills and getting services shut off and all kinds of things happening there are definitely money problems. But at least he keeps his job and holds things together pretty well for us. All by himself. And even with his own problems with depression and anxiety (again that no one would know about because he doesn't make his problems public, in fact you could torture him with knives and he wouldn't even tell you his problems, much less milk them for sympathy) Slade is all about saying and doing things to make other people feel better, not to have them help him.

Drake and I were both remarking about how much we have learned about their dad through all of this. Unfortunately we will probably learn more before it's over, but at least we are ready to look on the bright side of it.

Communist Cuba as a toilet. Good metaphor.

2008-06-27T15:19:00.000-07:00

There is an article on TED where an African economist George Ayitty describes his native continent as a leaky boat, that as much as well-meaning American academic elite want to fix with "Swiss Bank Socialism" will always continue to leak.

http://blog.ted.com/2007/08/premiere_george.php.

He made a lot of good points, one of them was that these nations in Africa and South America are actually resource rich. The United States when it was collonized was a third world nation WITHOUT these resources. The only resources the United States had was the capitalist model that it was organized based on. When this land started absorbing the globe's poor and oppressed people four hundred or so years ago, it had nothing. It had no gold like was rumored. It had no spices. It had no easy to grow crops. It had no bursting mines. It had no overflowing oil wells. It was a very harsh, unforgiving terrain with nothing much to generate naturally itself except for war, disease, pestilence and hardship. The wealth that later fills the coffers of philanthropists that save TODAY's third world was GENERATED. By CAPITALISM.

This guy picks up a metaphor that was similar to the one Fidel Castro used when he took over Cuba. He knew that even with a heavy dose of oppression and clamp down on opposition, communism does not work as a common man's Utopia. It must be an open system. There must be another system to deal with Cuba's poor. Their mentally ill. Their criminals. The terminally ill. Even with machine guns and socialized medicine no Cuban utopia can handle the suffering that opressed centralized economies will generate.

So this man describes Africa's socialism as a leaky boat. Castro describe's cuba as a toilet that must regularly be flushed. Onto the shores of Florida. Even as heavily flawed as Cuba is and as many millions as have to flee to this country, there are many others that come here on the rafts that Castro himself sends when he flushes the toilet. Very similar to the principle of the Soviet Goulag, the actual infrastructure of communism doesn't even work as well as the very best example may work in theory. The very best example of communism that exists in the twentieth century, which is pretty bad, it only works that well because the United States is on hand (as much as those on the left hate this country for its inequity even if that inequity means that at least SOME people do well, as opposed to pretty much all of them doing terrible like in Cuba).

What would happen if Castro wan't able to flush the toilet anywhere? The United States, which is hated on the left for.... um, really it is hated because it proves them a perpetual failure, is the sewage system that is able to keep Cuba looking as good as it looks. With millitary government, with no freedom of speech, with central planning, the only reason that Cuba is actually able to keep even the base pretense of socialized health care or any of the things that the left holds up as a model of what they want the United States to be like in a limited distorted way is that Castro HAS somewhere to flush his toilet. That is why I find it so amazing that Castro has any fans at all.

What exactly are Castro fans, fans OF? The only ways in which Communist Cuba can be said to not be a dismal failure and oppressor of its people is the extent to which the United States, with a very small percentage of the resources that are generated by the excesses of the miracle of capitalism, saves their rear end. Otherwise the sewer that is communism would continually back up. There would be no where for it to go. So that is why it is so scary that these people would change the United States into a communist system if they could. They know that there would be no place to flush the toilet without the United States being capitalist. They know it, yet they still think there might be something salvagable in this dismal system. Clearly the only thing they think would change is their ability to be in charge. But that is the hubris that scares me even worse. They cling to the dim likelyhood that if communism is tried just one more time it wouldn't be as dismal of a failure with them in charge. They don't have any reason WHY they think that, they just do.

Chaim Potok had the best quote about communism and capitalism that I have heard yet. Capitalism is judged for its deeds; Communism for its dreams. Those on the left really don't have anthing that they want more than ending the resentment they feel toward others that win while they succeed. The deeds of capitalism, while all it does wrong is allow the vices of those who are given their own freedom, are so bad that allowing all of the actuall success to disappear in leu of what will be clear failure, but at least it will be FAIR failure where no one is required to resent another's success. That is clearly what people resent about capitalism. It is not that millions of people are ground up in the gears of a system that has never yet worked and no one has any reason to believe it will.

The reason why people will always be willing to give communism another shot is because nothing is worse to people who resent the United States than allowing it to continue as a testament that principles of freedom (doing nothing for someone but allowing them to take care of themselves) works much better than the best laid plans of those who would take away that freedom. The only way that enemies of freedom can get rid of the testament of their failure is to get rid of the United States. That is why nothing will be good enough until the United States is changed into the system that will need its toilet flushed. Even though they know there will be nowhere to flush it.

Evolution of the stay-at-home mom

2008-06-13T03:16:00.000-07:00

I think that it has been great that I have basically been able to stay home and play with my kids all the time they have been small. Hopefully now that they are in school (at least if there aren't any more at the tail end here) I will be able to help Slade bear the burden of the bills. In fact I am hoping that my writing portfolio continues to accelerate in the income it generates so I can avoid the immense feeling of guilt I have at having caught a free ride off of his hard back breaking labor while I am home playing.

And my ability to do so is so new in the history of the world. Some people think that there is some kind of reference to stay at home mothering in the Bible or other scripture, but it wasn't even heard of at that time. It has come about in less than the last two hundred years.

The new ancient history of working women

Not that mothers didn't take care of their children. Well actually sometimes they didn't. In Tudor England, for example, poor people farmed out their toddlers until they were about three years old to wet nurses. Rich people did too, just different wet nurses. Most of these poor young babies died before their reunions with their parents. It was very sad indeed, for everyone. But people were struggling to even have a roof over their head and food on the table and they did what they had to do.

The origins of the stay at home mother had roots in the Industrial Revolution. That is when men started leaving the house to go to other places of employ in large numbers. There were some types of work that involved this before like seamen, military worker, doctor, courtier, etc. But for everyday income earners to leave in the morning and return home at night was a product of the rise of the factory in the 1800's. The reason that women didn't work in factories at this early time was not that there was any sense that they should stay at home. It was that men got hired first and there were very rarely enough jobs to go around to make women seem like an attractive employee.

But this didn't mean that women weren't busy contributing to the economics of the household. And this didn't just mean cooking cleaning and shopping. I think the example of Lucy Smith is a good one. She did as much farming as anyone else and actually made what was probably a higher hourly wage when she was able to do it when she painted those floor and table cloths for sale. That was clearly a job in every sense of the word for the early 1800's. She didn't leave the house to do it (not always, she did from time to time (leaving the kids at home to go work as a domestic worker on occasion) and to sell her cloths she would have had to take them into market since there wasn't ebay. These two types of work probably meant that she was away from home MORE than her husband, who oversaw the farm at home and would have had the young children doing farm apprenticeship with him).

But she definitely didn't get to stay home more the Jo Senior. Her boys left the house a lot but that was because they were able bodied enough to be day laborers, which neither she nor her husband were able to do. She would have taken domestic work as much as she could have during hard times, however, leaving very young children at home with other children or relatives. This was most likely what every woman at the time did. Extended families living under one roof and very young children left alone or with other children made it so that babysitting was always less of an issue when families were large and housing small.

Changing history of working women in the Industrial Revolution

The sense that women SHOULD stay home and not work was probably unheard until a bit later, at least not just staying at home for the sake of it, which would have seemed absurd. Like 'let them eat cake,' in fact EXACTLY like that. When the factories rose in the large cities men left the house, but when they could so did women and children. Women often sent their children to live with relatives or hired workers for years at a time when they were able to find regular work (in Les Mis Fontine's job was coveted and things turned upside down when she got dismissed. She wasn't rich before this but there was a sense that she had extras. She sent Cozette a rather extravagant wardrobe (that was sold off by her keepers) and she had furniture, candles and stationery, which were considered luxuries).

What really excellerated the concept that women were expected to stay home and not appreciably contribute to family finances were the two world wars in the twentieth century. Women started working in large numbers during this time to man factories, hospitals, storehouses and farms. At the end of the first world war women often didn't keep their jobs in the twenties not because they were expected not to but because they didn't need to. (Remember the relatively independent flapper girl? She often had a job and sometimes even education. My grandmother entered a university in 1918, graduated with a teaching degree and worked as a teacher on and off until she was retirement age, marrying at age 30 and only having three children. Relatively modern sounding.)

Women had relatively few children during the twenties and thirties and the ones that weren't heavily saddled with their families were able to work and kept the available jobs that existed over and above the returning men. So probably there weren't GOOD jobs available enough to tempt womein into the work force, but the economy was good enough that those that wanted to and had opportunities to kept their jobs and no on really said much about it. Poor women probalby continued to make informal contributions to the family income in the 1920s and very few womeon OR men had good jobs during the depression.

WWII changed things rather drastically. The whole pre-war and war era was brutal to the world economy and it took a while for things to get going again. Europe and Asia took ten years before they came back out of third world status, not even having a baby boom like we did, and so the united states didn't really even have a viable trading partner again for a decade. So when the men came back and the government didn't want to pension all of the veterans at 100 percent, the concept of moral obligation of women to stay at home with their children was introduced among the American population.

The notion that women shouldn't work existed before in some sectors of the culture, but in a different form. Mainly in pre world war era, there was still the sense that women who worked in the workplace with men were whores. It wasn't actually just a sense. It was stated openly by everyone from clergy at the pupit to government officials. The whole issue with birth control and Margaret Sanger, etc. was that Sanger thought that women should have the ability to control their reproductive system so they could support themselves and their families in the work place. There was not the argument in response to Sanger that women should stay home with their children the response was that the notion of women working and controling pregnancy to do so was obscene. Discussion of and literature on birth control was ruled by law to constitue obscenity.

Before the 1940s when women entered the workplace because they were needed, there was the sense that only women of loose morals went to work in factories alongside men. People didn't want their children taught by women teachers unless they were clearly spinsters or old women because of this prejudice; people believed that women who worked were loose and they were a bad influence on the youth. There was usually a flood of retired women into the teaching profession because most people accepted old women teaching because there was not a sense that they would be whores at retirement age.

But there was a bit of a problem after world war II because there was a wholesale virtual seduction of women into all maners of jobs because the economy needed them. The economy was much more highly industrialized after cars and telophones becamse prominent, making commuting to work and offices more of a practical necessity for many kinds of employemnt.

There was also the notorious baby boom, too. There were several reaosns for the baby boom and probably it is not that well understood. One of the things that caused the baby boom was the introduction of antibiotics to avoid puperal fever and hence a drastic reduction in death of children and women in child birth. Also the introduction of pain killers during child birth meant that fewer women avoided it than had in previous decades. Birth control became widely practiced for the first time in the twenties and thirties largely because women were able for the first time to successfully limit their families in other ways than death. But the surge in marriage and romance that the war generated (absense making the heart fond) combined with a new optimism that hospitals doctors and medicines could remove tragedy from the equation led to a new enthusiasm for families. This made a very practical situation that one could point to; making the need for women to be at home something that was very easy to point to.

So after telling women they were needed in the work force also involved dispelling the rumors about women in the working world being loose. Wholesome images of Rosie the Riveter assembling cars and tanks were proliferated not just to encourage women to work but also to make the public more accepting that these women were a positive presence in society and not to be feared and loathed like they had been before.

So by the time soliders from the War returned and needed their jobs back, the old prejudices against working women no longer worked. It was rightly viewed as old fashioned superstition to view women that worked in food factories or chemical plants were a step below prostitutes. There was actually some attempt to try it, even, and it had been to thoroughly devistated, thank goodness.

So there was a need for an introduction of a new prejudice to take its place. The women's place is in the home slogan was certainly not something from Adam and Eve, or any place in the bible or old fashioned society. In fact that notion is very modern. It is less than a hundred years old.

One of the easiest ways that you can tell as a historian what people are doing in large numbers are to look through church sermons and politician's platforms for prohibitions. If you read 'don't spit on the sidewalk' in a public ordinance there will be a very good indication there that people WERE spitting on the sidewalk. You won't see that in a society that never spits on the sidewalk.

So that is why the sense that women shouldn't work is a product of the 1950s and afterward, because that is when women first had the option to work outside the home in large numbers and men found them to be unwelcome competition for the types of work that they had before that been unqualified for and society had successfully kept them from being able to by notions that most of us find ridiculously offensive.

The sense of women choosing to not work for moral reasons is newer still. That is probably about as old as the 1980s when ET Benson said it to the church women. And it certainly is good counsel in many ways. I certainly believe that it is a good thing that we are so wealthy as a society that we can finally afford what is most definitely a luxury of the first world in proportions that are new to history. As I said, I feel completely indulged that i am able to enjoy my children's childhood with them. But whether I am doing something that women have always done since Eve is arguably historically inaccurate, whether or not I feel (as I do) that it most definitely SHOULD have been because of how great it is. Unfortunately as in many other ways, women have had too hard of a life to do this. They had to strap their babies to their backs and keep them in pens if they had them at home at all, as they had to get up and start dinner before dawn if they were to have any.

History has been brutal. The good old days in many cases were really never very good. Most of us get the opposite impression, that things are getting worse all the time, but this is clearly a way they are getting better. I am very grateful. The curse of Eve is over in more ways than one. I don't have to bear children in sorrow. Or raise them in sorrow. Just like my husband doesn't really have to much sweat on his brow to earn our bread, child birth and child raising is now quite a pleasant experience. I am grateful for the advances of my country and modern medicine that have contributed to that happy reality.

SUBECTIVITY: (Marriage mistakes many Mormons Make)

2008-06-09T10:05:00.000-07:00

Long and Complicated. Skip. I just couldn't get the fun vids to post, so wait for those. But if any of you are bored and read long rambling stuff on the internet, which I know I do, then this will serve as much as some of it, I guess.

So there is this guy in or SS Gospel D class who used to teach it, and he used to do the same thing every single time someone disagreed with him and he couldn't defend himself. For ex, he said something about the W of W that someone disagreed with and he couldn't defend it without getting flustered trying (which he WOULD try first) he said that he had had a personal witness of what he thought to be true. His beliefs on tithing, a personal witness. (Don't you love that 'at least you can pay tithing 100 percent perfectly?' Ugh, not true! but anyway, not on topic, unless you only want to save yourself from burnin')...

One time he was saying that the Dark Ages was the period from Malachi to the NT when God wasn't speaking to the world. I pointed out that it was possible that other peoples with their own Scriptures could exist and we just don't know about them yet, that in fact according to FARMS, books will come forth from the dust, and people will at first discount those books, much like what has happened with the possible Book of Judas. 'Not Cannon' say others about those books just like they do about the B of M as a reflex. But in any case, that is a long period for God to not talk to people, and was he sure that maybe ther wasn't something else going on in some other culture? To that question, you guessed it, he had had a personal witness.

Later in private I asked him how then the Book of Mormon could have been written in this specific window of time (around O BC-AD the suposed Dark Ages) His feathers were ruffled, save he knew he had had a witness. I am pretty sure he doesn't read this BTW as is the case with most of the people that don't agree with me so it is the perfect way to not talk about things in a contentious way because the people that get offended self select themselves out of the audience, perfect. It is just an exercise, not an attempt at starting a fight with these people. But to me and Slade these things are FASCINATING and are very instructive about a lot of issues that are dead center to various disagreements about gospel and other topics, so it is a perfect way to explore these beauties.

The thing is that I am pretty sure that this one guy didn't spend too much time on his knees asking God about the timeline of the Dark Ages. Which makes it curious how he was lucky enough to get a witness to something that I really don't think he was even INTERESTED in, even though a lot of people with Ph.Ds and spend their lives studying this subject feel that they actually just have to figure it out and make a decision based on evidence. How is it that this guy just gets told and sort of votes? It makes me start to have an idea about how this particular claim functions in M Doctrinal discussions. In fact I am pretty sure many times it is subterfuge to basically declare one's self right via testimony and render any actual disagreement with logic or evidence meaningless.

Whith this person in particular he is very much in the habit of reflexively responding this way to punctuate any possibility that he would ever end a disagreement with someone like me or Slade (the horror to not just DECISIVELY win an argument with US), so he just dismisses us out of hand in this way) in any other way than he's OBVIOUSLY RIGHT even in the cases where it doesn't make sense.

Totally harmless, really, in these cases. I do not think this guy is any kind of threat. He is a curiosity to me and I never really think about any of the particulars of any disagreement with him at all. In fact even though sometimes I accumulate the reputation of being opinionated but most of the time I just state my own opinions out of the blue and people disagree with ME. I sometimes defend myself, to which I get the response that I am opinionated. I would like some day to ask them what they think I should do after people disagree or say something critical of me, but I am not sure it bothers me. I think having opinions is a good thing so if people think I have them I won't really worry too much. But here is what happens with him:

1. I make a comment,
2. he disagrees (and he pretty much always bends over backwards to disagree with ME, I often collect disagreements from people like Mike Tyson collects people who want to fight him in prison. I must wear a sign saying take a shot. But that's fine. Keeps me on my toes.
3. I might if I find it to be worth it and fairly straightforward and demonstrable to illustrate my point without making the person hostile and defensive (often too late) I make a feeble attempt at defending my original position in #1,
4. He very emphatically starts disagreeing with me and perhaps becoming agitated (this will attract attention at this point and look very curious). Like he saves this for me. It is very weird.,
5. I shoot one of the various ducks in the in the barrel like say Um the Book of Mormon was written during the time you claim that no scripture was writte, etc., or what about the part in the word of wisdom about food that you are none too worried about?
6. He claims having a witness of this truth or whatnot and declares himself right.
7. I say, uh, OK THEN. Why did we bother if you had always known bc God told you, sheesh!

Even though he almost tempts using this response to speak for the church with some pretty controversial ways. As a SS teacher claiming P.Marriage is surely destined to be an important part of the next life for all men is a pretty strong statement here, in fact I hate to repeat that here because it is fodder for the Antis. So Slade was curious. He approached him (in private, b/c it is like shooting ducks in a barrel and we don't want to humiliate the guy in front of the ward or anything or ruffle the testimony of the ward members, even though in fairness I should be willing to say that my OWN testimony is shakable with some of this garbage, because I guess it isn't infallible).

So in response to the Plural Question, he NO JOKE started flipping through his SS manual, and then said, you guessed it, "personal witness." One thing that is curious to Slade and me, tho is that if I really thought that I personally had had all of these witnesses from God (perhaps as a teacher it makes sense but at this point he was just a Jo Mormon as they usualy are when they say this, why in the world would I first try to discuss it logically, or for goodness sake why would I flip through a manual written by no one even with their own byline? If I thought I had had a witness I can't imagine how anything else including discussing it in SS would matter. But for some reason this usualy is a LAST RESORT argument with these people, rather than a first resort one like I would have thought it would be if they were really that confident.

This is when it perhaps in my opinion gets to the point where it is less than just totally harmless. Because I think it is important to look at how this reflex response really operates in pseudo-logical exchanges. I don't really think these people are trying to convince other people as much as themselves.

To illustrate, try to think of the last time that you heard someone in say testimony meeting discuss the fact that they were making some random career move or something because they had had some witness from God. People do this all the time. So often is like we were one of those groups that handle snakes or use Ouigai boards or something the amount of times this comes up in Sacrament meeting, even though I have a feeling that most of us suspect that it doesn't actually happen to OTHER people quite that often.

Possibly it happens to us, maybe people say to themselves but if someone claims as they do regularly that they felt that God helped them know they should pull over to a car shop and get their water pump serviced that it really happened that way? Do YOU actually even CONSIDER that it was really the CASE that they had had a this red phone to God? Now I am not saying that you for sure had to vote on whether or not it was true. I assume that it could at least be possible. BUt probably most of us think that it just occurred to them that they should service their car and that is the T Meeting version. Usually most of us just think that it is at best an impression that person has. And in fact I personally think that if we are using that kind of information in a public discussion it becomes much less likely that we have actually had a witness.

Let me explain. We are encouraged to only feel that that level of 'PR' (revelation) is for our own use, and possibly for the family UNDER our stewardship, meaning that we should avoid feeling as though we are privy to information about others or we get guidance for other people not under our stewardship. Meaning that we don't get revelation on whether OTHER people should buy two cars or one or whatever, just our own personal guiance, for our own purposes. So probably we would never use the fact that a guy in our ward had a witness about what was included in the W of W as any sort of evidence we would ever consider using to develop our own opinions, right?

I certainly never say aything in public or even in personal conversations that someone that is not under my own stewardship or responsibility for anything that anyone else would be supposed to consider. So that means that I don't get any vibes of any kind for anyone else or any doctrinal light bulbs going off that I think anyone would benefit from. Except of course by just thinking that something makes sense, and in that case I think that anyone has any idea that could potentially benefit them. But many of these statements are by nature deliberately anti intellectual, meaning they are statements about the truth of various things 'just because someone has a feeling that they are one way or the other. That doesn't reflect an inability to be intellectual it resists the NEED to even use intellectual faculties.

An example, for instance, is something that I probably never would talk about except for this discussion but it happens to apply, so I will assume that no one need take it seriously. And it could be that perhaps I talked about it when I was a young kid and first had my patriarchal blessing because I hadn't developed the sense of appropriateness about sharing that kind of info yet at that time in my life. When I was a teen and young adult I shot off about this as that is when I got my P blessing my mouth but I have tried to stop.

From a combination of my P Blessing and Slade's ongoing P blessings to me which all have a theme to them, and basically from reading the scriptures and prayer and just using what seems to make sense from an overall combination of all of those things taken together that it makes a LOT of SENSE that educating myself and others is how I am supposed to spend a significant focus of my life. This doesn't just consist of some ephemeral thing like a vague urge, like I just have a feeling that it is that way and I don't know why. It actually makes a lot of sense using a general perception that it would be a good way for me to contribute something that I particularly have to offer the world, and it is my talent and desire to do so and it also makes use of these talents without having my weaknesses detract. I can basically stay behind my computer writing and have it benefit in the way I usually do, meaning the 'wow that is fascinating I never thought of that before' that I often get, and don't need to have the fact that I am not good at showing up somewhere at eight in the morning say for a regular job or whatever detract from what I have to offer.

But this is not just a vibe that I might as well just get by crossing my legs and burning insense from who knows what source and following who knows what principles. This makes sense to me and Slade in my mind and my heart. I am actually good at these things, and enjoy them, get good feedback on how I seem to be helping people understand things that they are interested in on a wide scale, wider than if I just went to some mommy and me group and then probaby never really contributed anything. There is need for them that I can fill. So anyway, I know no one cares about that. It is just an example of something that I have always known, and slade as my steward has also known and felt that he was responsible for cultivating.

THe specifics have been vague, meaning I haven't been sure whether I was to continue to get another degree or try to teach school or what, and now I am at least sure that I dont HAVE to do that, which is a relief. Even though it is stll certainly possible all my kids are in school and I wouldn't have to do anything when they are home of course so there is little or no conflict anymore. And iy vould certainly fill a need since there are very few active LDS women with Ph.D.s and it would be a very good way to serve the church and make a difference in the world. In any case the specific phraseology 'spend my life in education of myself and others' is something that I feel VERY STRONGLY about and so does Slade. And we both make our life decisions taking it into consideration.

But I certainly don't expect that personal knowledge that Slade and I have (Slade being in a position of stewardship over me and thus sharing that opinion and encouraging me to work to do the right thing and develop my talents) to influence anyone else in their assessment of me or what I do with my life, because I don't expect them to have any way to assess that because it is for ME PERSONALLY to know, and pretty much to keep to myself except for the purpose of this rhetorical discussion. I still don't expect any of you to believe it because it isn't FOR you.

And if I were constantly going aroud saying things about what my witnesses from God were it would actually make me doubt that these feelings that I have actually came from God for strictly the puspose of directing my own life. If I instead developed these feelings and impressions very much for the benefit of other people and telling them things about what I thought God had told me I might wonder whether these perceptions were to influence other people's perrception of me and how tuned in I was to God. Thereofre I would suspect that these feelings of mine had a secular purpose oriented toward my own personal pride and self image and not anthing that was real and of divine origin.

It would quite literally be me taking the name of God in Vain to constantly burden others publicly with information about what I felt was my own personal direction that no one would possibly think was meaningful or likely even believe. God really doesn't waste his time telling me things so I can justify myself to others I am quite sure so I just am not going to try. I seriously doubt. So if I use what he says that way I would immediately suspect it as having questionable motives.

So why is it that people are so frequently telling others that they have the cosmic stamp of approval on their actions and beliefs if it isn't to make the other people think that their thoughts and beliefs are more credible? If it never actually makes other people believe that they are right or are doing the right thing? Because just as I said there is no chance that any of you are convinced that God really are convinced that I need to be educating people, so if I were to make a big deal out of telling people, why would I want to?

I actually think that it is more of an exercise in the person who says it convincing themselves that the are cosmically justified than anything, and that is where in my opinion (other a SS teacher speaking for the church on shaky doctrine issues but is all related), becomes a bit less than harmless.

The stamp of subjectivity, once it gets dusted off and used frequently enough for people to feel comfortable using it for anythng and everything, becomes very easy to use whenever and whyever people want to use it even when it COULD be harmfull. For one thing it tends to start substituting for what could at least be very good sense. I have heard more people than I would care to think about talk in T Meeting about witnesses as to geographical moves, financial decisions and job changes. It is as if we can't just consult a real estate agent.

Funny, some people seem less than convinced about the witnesses they say they have ironically. Someone was saying in our S meeting recently that they were 'witnessed to' about the need to sell their house so they can move into a different neighborhood that was better for their kids (and there are always lots of these all over the place every T Meeting) but they couldn't sell their house for more than they bought it for so they understandably became frustrated at not being able to do God's will for the sake of their children living in a bad neighborhod (mine, incidentally, yikes sorry kids).

Funny... if God is going to the trouble of telling them to move, wouldn't he expect them to take a loss if necessary? Would he only tell them to move and have them do it if it was a good move financially too? Hmmm....

But the stamp is handy. And versatile. And it tends to be used when there isn't the possibility of just finding out evidence of what the right thing to do. Like if someone is deciding what school to go to it seems like in Mormon circles it really isn't a proper decision making process unless they sit cross legged and burn incense, just thinking in terms of what is the best program or where you get a better scholarship or whatever seems plain out.

That contrasts to certain financial decisions, which Mormons will be very responsible about. For example I know people that if they are going to buy a blender they will scrutinize two years of back issues of consumer reports. But when it comes to decisions involving love or children or where to live or whatnot and there is the possibility of doing something that makes actual sense it just seems more handy to pull out the stamp. We don't use guages like compatibility or social science research or even prudence.

I tend to be the opposite. I don't really care too much about whether I buy a good blender. If I end up wasting my money on a blender it won't be the worst thing in the world because it is only money and I don't care too much about money. I am not a materialistic person, even my own mother says this about me unprompted. I certainly don't want to waste time worrying about money. Time IS valuable to me, though. So I just go into the store and cover my eyes and point to something. But when it came to the decision of who to marry I took a good six years making that decision because I couldn't trade that in as easily if it broke. Luckily I got a model with the best possible features for my needs because I took so long.

I will also credit my mother with good advice on that. I went through a stage where I was very impulsive about the whole marriage issue and thank goodness I went through a period where things didn't work out for me exactly like I WANTED them to with someone I dated. When Slade was on his mission and I was lonely and feeling unable to exercise the discipline over my life's plan like I thought that I should my mom pointed out that I was about to chuck a very good situation just to do the 'I wanna' option. I lucked out seriously that things didn't work the way I wanted them to at that point. I was saved from myself, though, only because if I had had everything work the way I wanted to I would have indeed married someone else. Thank goodness this guy wasn't normal. Then I would just be married to someone normal and not someone exceptional like I am now. But most people have the option of doing the thing that they wanna, and they just do it. Even though in my case I was probably saved from a very unfortunate situation of having a less than superlative spouse. And I am sure that if I had married this guy I would be telling a different story now, because people always think they did the right thing. But, well, phew.

What about people that don't - am I saying that they didn't also get a good model marriage? Certainly not, if they are happy with their marriage than I say fanastic. But that is a bit backwards logic-wise. No one including me is certain what the opportunity cost is in any one decision, meaning it is impossible to compare it to what else we might have done. If we do something risky like run a red light and make it through, did it end up in hind sight being a good idea to run the red light? Nope. We just got lucky. And with most things they end up ok and we make the best of them.

I think it is interesting that Mormons know that they are obviously not when it comes to marriage getting out back issues of Consumer Reports. I am not sure why. It is clearly much more important than with a blender. But for some reason with marriage people seem to be suggesting that the time spent deciding is inversely proportional to how important the consequences. I think perhpas they would argue that with marriage they think that God tells them what to do though. But why is it that they can't just ask God which blender to buy or which car? Why do they do so much homework when it is only money that they are risking? I think that the reason is that in cases where there is an intense flood of emotion about what the person wants to do like in love marriage or children there is the possibility to just think that emotion dictates what they should do. That doesn't happen in a blender situation. Though I think that God would be as likely to tell us which to do either way.

And it isn't like I am telling people that they shouldn't marry who they want. Of course not. They should go for it, as far as I am concerned. Of course I think people should marry who they want, but if it is possible to do that AND do it with a responsible timeline that precludes they are just being impulsive and getting a model of spouse that might involve buyer's remorse, why do they still choose rapid fire relationships? Why does it seem like to them it is always Do I marry this person RIGHT AWAY THIS VERY SECOND or do I NOT MARRY THEM? In my opinion that is not a real choice and they seem to make it seem as though that is what the fuddy duddies that suggest caution are saying.

Most of us if we were to admit what we think about most of the people who we know that get married to people within weeks that they don't know I suspect that we all know other people than us personally are just being impulsive and doing what they want to do, they just don't WANT to exercise caution. Again they think the choices are false. No one is saying don't marry the person if you are destined to be together as you feel you are. But no one is telling them not marry, it is only to not marry that person while it is at least theoretically possible that it is just an impulsive decision. No one looking back would feel that if they waited six more months to make it respectable they would have seriously missed out on something significant having been married for six more months than they ended up being. But what I think these couples are going through is more than just rushing things like most fuddy duddies like me claim they are. I go further than the other fuddy duddies and say that I am convinved having watched all of these couples over the years get married with irresponsible speed it is more than these couples just don't wanna wait, rushing is actually part of the appeal at least for some of them

That is certaily true that they want to get married soon(hence the stamp) but it is more than that. They specifically wanna get married in lightening speed without just taking a normal amount of time even if they had it to burn. Marrying in a responsible weigh the options fashion like choosing a blender is actually less desirable to young people in their twenties who if we compare them to what other people their ages are doing are actualy not averse to risk and thrill seeking, even though these very people end up saying not very much later on that they would counsel their own children to take more time, usually. At least their sons. Women get indulged in making impulsive decisions even though sons get encouraged to be responsible. (Hmmm.... I think I am going to do a paper on that). Bad news tho their sons won't listen to them. It isn't just that it is too hard to wait. I know how hard it is because I actually waited (just like the people that know temptation when they don't succumb, I didn't succumb to the temptation to marry quickly even though certainly I wanted to get married at least as much as other people because I had already waited a long time. I have had people say that maybe I just didn't want to get married as bad as they did. Yeah right. It was excuisite. so I KNOW it is agony. But it isn't NEARLY as much fun to choose a husband practically like choosing a good blender, it isn't exciting and thrilling, we don't feel like something really spectacular is happening to us that we are swept up in beyond our control in the cosmos and we don't get as much attention or buzz around the home ward for doing something boring and responsible and carefully planned. Even if that attention is a bit scandalous.

And of course we can see this in everyone ELSE that does this. I have a feeling that no one really believes that God is speaking to all of the other 95 percent of the Mormon couples getting engaged today that claim GOd is sweeping them away in a firestorm of predestined romance and therefore mandating their getting engaged before they actually get to know each other and married so rapidly that they are registering at Target before they know what if anything they have in common.

With marriage there isn't consumer reports, but there is prudence. Everyone has that first fight about a year or so after they start dating seriously. Slade and I weren't married yet when whe had that fight, so we were able to see how we weathered it so that we could factor it into our decisions. Of course we were teen agers so we could see clearly the reason to be prudent and not to give into what we wanted.

Not that it prevents everyone our age. I have heard some people say and I am not kidding that "some people just have the challenge of meeting the right person early in life," so what could the poor kids do? They wouldn't have CHOSEN to stay home from their mission or not finish school, but it just turned out that they met their dear wife when they were sixteen. Yeah right. Many sixteen year olds including me felt that exact same way about wanting to run off and get married, but I also knew that it was possible to meet the right person for me that young and not just immediately turn insane. I didn't chuck all of the other things I planned in my life just because I met my husband. I didn't need to. Meeting the right person should enhance good decision making not sideline it. It was a good time to develop patience and emotional maturity, and I did that quickly and painfully, but I knew that it was the only option. I didn't expect him to stay home from his mission just to be with me any more than he expected me to not get a graduate degree. With a little sacrifice of emotional indulgence and time delay on getting all of the things we wanted we were able to do all the things we wanted to do and knew we should do.

And I am not saying I did everything perfectly. We were way too young to get married when we did. People keep maturing into their mid twenties, and in my opinion it is always good to know who you are going to be spending eternity with rather than just guess because they aren't that person yet. And it is going to be good to know who you are yourself so you will know who you want. I remember being a young teenage girl that thought I wanted a boy that was totally sappy about me and made me the center of his world. But luckily when I grew up a little more I knew that it would be really annoying to actually be married to a man like that. I needed to marry a man with strong opinions and convictions.

We didn't do everything right, I was too young. I was weak, and we had already waited six years. I would have waited another year. But Slade finally put his foot down. He wouldn't even wait until the end of the summer even though it would have been better in some ways, and looking back it wouldn't be even a noticeable sacrifice. So I understand where people are coming from. I don't hold myself as a model for ANYONE.

But while I am pretty sure no one else really thinks that every 21 year old RM that claims to be stopped dead in their tracks by the cosmic cowboys with the message that they've met THE ONE ACTUALLY really DOES get that message. There is a concept called parsimony, and it is useful in science and many other things: it means that the most likely explanation should be used. Rather than cosmic lightening bolts it is probably true that the RMS get hit with lightening but it is called falling in love, coupled with the excitement of the real possibility of being married soon. This is a very exciting experience. It can really bowl a person over.

And it is my calculation based on the number of people I saw doing exactly the same thing and labeling it in the same way. There is an extremely high percentage of people at BYU who get engaged to a certain person at a certain time in the process. An enormous number of BYU kids get engaged to the first marriageable person they meet after it becomes at least marginally practical for them to get married. THey meet in the fall family home evening group. So basically as soon as they are in a certain position in their lives wham the most obvious candidate possible they are engaged to. Of course there are exceptions. And if you did something very different, great.

For example, if people end up doing something that is counterintuitive and feel inspired that GOd is telling them to do it I would say that made a lot of sense. For instance my brother and his wife decided after he got home from his mission that she should maybe go on hers. I would say that that lightening bolt is not just getting hit with the weaky in the kneesies. That is really something. Because if anything I would believe that God is telling people to do things that are hard and involve sacrifice not something that sounds like the shortest line from A to Being married. But I would say eighty percent of girls at BYU that get engaged there do so their sophomore or junior year after moving out of the dorms and for men it happens in the year or two after they get home. At that time they realize that many of their roommates are getting married and nothing is stopping them either. That is when the lightening strikes. Slade and I of course did things abit differently by necessity. And in that six years if we had been way off about each other we probably could have gotten the message even if we were unwilling to deliberately consider it openly. Slade though hates most women so much that

It is very possible that during this tumultuous and exciting time these new and exciting emotions of falling head over heels combined with intense desire and impatience to become a married person very quickly when we didn't just predict it on a calender like everything else in our lives tempt people to use that "cosmic stamp?" I would like to think that it is always harmless for people to think so. I would guess that it is for most people. About the same percentage as the people that make it through red lights. Most peole make it through ok.

But we all see that stamp used when there is no chance it should be. We see sixteen year old girls run off with questionable characters. We see members of the ward who have families run off with people who aren't their spouse, and they claim that they are certain it is the right thing, because, voila, they feel good about it. They claim this for years later. Certainly, people claim, that they wouldn't know what to do without say the children that are products of these relationships. What would I do without little Timmy? Even though his father left the picture long ago? Certainly it was for the best?

But the thing is, and this is where psychology comes in handy. People always think that the way things happened to them is the way that it should have happened. Obviously people are bonded to the people in their lives, but they also get attached to their own pasts. They see certain consequences that are positive and combined with the devil we know vs. devil we don't comfort level, we guess that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. "All is well in Zion."

I have no doubt that people that are happy with their lives are certainly on the winning side of life's lottery. I have no issue with anyone, much less people that are happy. I wish everyone the best. I am certainly not taking potshots at people's lives. That is the last thing I would want to do. It breaks my heart when people have hard times, and it is when these things are avoidable that they are the most heart breaking. As are most of the people who run red lights, most people that tend to come out ok look to their past as the way they should have traveled. Even i they wouldn't suggest it for their child or someone else. And just as people often look to very trivial upsides to marrying before they know their intended (we wouldn't have goten a grant for that year, etc) perhaps people that run red lights and speed can add up the time they save doing it and decide that they are better off, since nothing bad happened.

Possibly. But what about the people who didn't do so well? And that is about half of us. LDS are just below the national average in divorce statistics. Meaning the worse half. That stat is arrived at at a survey of people that self identify as Mormons, placing us only above born again Christians in terms of other religions but worse than Jews and Atheists. And by state Utah fares pretty badly. Utah is 27th worst on a list of 51 states plus DC.

Many people squawk about this and claim somehow it isn't true: All is well in Zion. People quote some sort of phantom statistic about temple marriage being better than the other Mormons. Pretty much all of them quote some phantom statistic by some BYU person that who knows how he arrived at it. It is possible that is true, and I have heard it recently in my ward - I hear it about once a year from someone in response to something. I really wish it were true, and I am not totally ruling it out. But the problem with that is that there is no one that tracks that statistic other than The Church. And you can't calculate that info if you don't have access to it, it will be a problem of extreme sample bias. And for whatever reason they may have, the church doesn't release that statistic. At all. Why they don't is anyone's guess, but mine is that it isn't too likely if they aren't releasing it that it is much to crow about.

Why do I think that would be? Is it because of any possibility in my mind that the gospel isn't true? Of COURSE NOT! I certainly want to claim many possible benefits to living the gospel, and many particularly for temple marriage. But it doesn't make my belief in the church or the benefits to living the gospel more credible when I claim allegiance to benefits that I can't demonstrate. And I don't have any obligation to say I believe that the state of Utah is true or even that Mormons are true. The only thing that I am going to have a problem with someone saying is bad is the actual gospel meaning the scriptures and a subset of the actual beliefs in circulation among members.

So in my way of thinking, because I really do want to be able to say there are GOOD things about members of the church (particularly about the gospel and T.Marriages), to explain a marriage statistic with a statistic of just worse than average I am going to need to be willing to acknowledge that there might be some bad things about them, too. I have to. I can't claim that a good thing averaged with another good thing can result in a bad number.

Not, mind you, that I need to acknowledge bad things about the gospel. Well I am still hoping not. Again, people have thought I was being mean and picking on Utah for no good reason. I would love it if I had had great experiences personally with Utah, but I haven't. But that I really don't need to explain because it is subjecting. And not that Utah fans can combat negative subjectivity with positive subjectivity because all subjective experience is just that and none of it is more valid or suggestive than any other. Actually that isn't true because even someone that doesn't believe in the church isn't going to have a problem with my theory that there are one or two decent people in the state. It would be pretty ludicrous to suggest that there aren't. My burden as a believing member is always greater to explain the things that DON'T work about the church than it is for other people to explain that some things do. Because I as a believing member am the one that claims that the church is a value added system. A buch of experiences positive and negative end up with everyone just seeing what they want to see.

But the thing is, stats don't lie. Not good ones. A lot of things can get that subjective treatment. THE STAMP. We can give many different things a mental makeover to make them seem like "All is well in Zion." But then we would be left with a statistic of being below average to account for. An important one. Like the most. If we can't even claim a slightly better marriage record than the natural average, um that is a problem.

There are other statistics in Utah that are below average that I don't care for. I don't care for the proliferation of pyramid schemes in Utah County. And that is hard fact. It isn't just my own subjective experience that everything is all nice and fine. Someone can write off my subjective experience that things in my world are nice and fine, but I have a hard time writing away hard statistics. I even have a hard time writing off other people's subjective experiences, but the statistics are harder. One can say that you can prove anything with stats. And certainly that will preclude their using any statistics of their own, or really ever having the perception that they know anything at all or at least that they can communicate to others beyond the very base minimum subjective experience. Subjective experiences can always be combated with equal and opposite subjectivity so for the purposes of seeing anything other than we want to see they are very poor.

So how do I account for these things and not feel that my religion and culture is under attack? Well, first of all, I feel that religion and culture are two different things. I don't have to explain the state of affairs of a particular county in the United States if the problems there could be a regional culture issue and not an issue with IN GENERAL what happens when people that all live my religion get together to live in one place.

Of course, I would prefer that when people of my religion get together in large numbers that the outcome were DEMONSTRABLY positive to objective parties, and not just good because I think or say that they are good, actually good. But since I can't claim that it is, again, with anything other than "Well I like Utah," at best, I can always say that there are possibly problems with the regional culture there that don't necessarily carry over to my religion in general. Of course most of us think it is possible that the Church may have to relocate to MO, so it may be that already within our own predictions of our future as a people there is the idea that the cultural seat has a few problems that we are hoping to get rid of before things get "officially Zion," so to speak.

But even beyond that I think that if it were possible to point out a cultural trait that perhaps one day we will get rid of as a people that were responsible for all of these things (and more) that that would of course be the most ideal of all possible scenareos. That way we can blame something that we don't particularly need or like and that getting rid of it will significantly help some of the things that happen to our detrement as a people at this time.

In my opinion, the stamp of subjectivity, its frequency of use, and the caution and reason that it prevents us from exercising in important decisions is a candidate for something that getting rid of could significantly assist us as a culture in eliminating these red flag characteristics and try to start moving past these dire statistics.

If we get rid of the desire to every time we happen to think something that doesn't match the evidence we have the impulse to think that we just know we are right anyway, every time it seems that something that we prefer something like living a certain place, doing certain work or anything else that is just a PLAIN PREFERENCE n we say to ourselves and others that we 'just feel right about it,' and when we desperately want something very exciting like to get married right away to someone we just met we say that in the face of all reason of our own or others' we know that it is the right thing.

I am not saying that we give up having preferences. We can all want to do things and do them. We can all still like who we like and marry who we want. But the ease at which we all feel that we can stamp the cosmos' approval on actions that are at best personal desires and at worst baser impulses of the natural man is a dangerous thing. They are how we eliminate reason and accountability from the equation in important decisions in our lives. They are the way we do what we want to do and at the same time get to feel like all we have to do is what comes naturally or by preference and we get to tell others in sacrament meeting that we are so in tuned with the cosmos that it orders our every action to the letter.

And certainly there are things where these things are harmless. When people talk in S Meeting about how God told them when to change their water pump, that's certainly nice. But most of us are pretty sure that when it happens to someone else we don't have any actual sense that it is anything more than their own impression. Probably harmless.

But a lot of things enter into this practice that aren't harmless. Of course when we see people switch spouses in the ward and it is easy for them to say that they are just listening to what God wants them to do we know that there might be a problem. I am pretty sure that when I got sealed in the temple it was with the understanding that if I listened to anything telling me to be with someone else that it wouldn't be God. Or he would have tried pretty hard to tell me to perhaps wait and not be so rash in marrying, I have faith.

And also one thing that enters into it is judging others. Perhaps I like to read a lot and someone else likes to sew. That is what's called a preference. But so often I hear it called "What I like is righteous and what someone else likes isn't." I see other preferences such as whether I like someone become easy to want to try to justify through the cosmos. Perhaps someone doesn't like me. That is what's called a preference. But when someone thinks that they dont just want to admit that they randomly don't like me, that there must be some cosmic justification for someone's not liking me, it is an easy step for that person to take to the subjectivity stamp: I don't like someone for a reason. Probably because they're inferior.

I would in general like to, not encourage anyone to live differently than they want to live. I have my preferences, the things I think that I should do with my life, and the things I think make sense. And I encourage everyone else to have theirs.

But there is that little phrase that the scriptures often use about knowing something in our hearts AND in our minds. Perhaps the scriptures are encouraging checks and balances. Perhaps it should also be a warning if it seems as a people we seem to always be making decisions with one or the other. Particularly with our emotions, because there will be no limit to the kinds of things we do that will have the stamp of the right thing if we have no aspiration to anything other than whether it feels good.

The King Kong syndrome

2008-06-05T16:09:00.000-07:00

The story of King Kong, while a cheesy and campy snapshot from pop culture, serves as a nearly perfect moral allegory. The story itself has exquisite dramatic possibilities. The village has a strange and terrible problem with a VERY unfortunate solution: to save themselves and others they must strap a poor helpless sacrifice to a pole where she will meet her terrifying and agonizing death via Kong. And it almost steems like a practical choice to avoid further problems with the ape.

But in a less Machiavellian and calculating view of the world, what the villagers are doing is at the very least acting out the famous quote by Edmund Burke:

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Evil in this allegorical story triumphs actually because of the people who assist Kong certainly, but more generally because of the whole system that is organized around maintaining the monster's minimum victim requirements. There are those that accept the situation and others that actively participate. This is extremely illustrative of what happens in just about every case of accepting and being an accessory to evil that I can think of: within societies, businesses, social groups and families.

Moral instruction only works (and I am sure that is one of the limitations of it) when we are humble enough to consider weaknesses. That is why say the story of the ten virgins is said to be directed at church members and not the culture as a whole because the church members are the ones reading the scriptures in the first place to hopefully see themselves there. And if we are Kong it is probably too much to expect that we would drop our malicious ways. That is why I feel like the most interesting characters in the KK story are the villagers. They have to decide whether to aid and abet it or try and sacrifice doing something about it. There are ten things in my opinion that keep the villagers happily helping the giant monkey boy instead of trying to save the victim:

1. In the face of scary mean victimizers (or evil or whatever the analogy is), most of the time we help Kong get someone else because we are simply so glad that it isn't coming for us.

2. Perhaps in some cases we think that there is something about us that earns us the privilege of not being chosen for lunch.

or

3. Perhaps those who become victims bring it on themselves.

So perhaps that person that is mean to someone else (King Kong) likes us because of how much better we are than the one that is the target of their meanness. But of course there could be no reason why Kong should want to be mean to others so there should be no reason that makes us deserving of escape. So villagers justify themselves being lucky and escaping meanness from mean people based on what they know is faulty logic. Mean people don't have reasons to be mean any more than they have to be nice to the people they aren't mean to.

But that doesn't prevent the beginning of creating a wishful-thinking version of the cosmos as we usually do. As we usually do we assume that things should happen the way we want to us, including having mean people be somehow magically nice to us instead of others without really knowing why we got so lucky because we understand that the fates would just happen to be on our side, and that God or the stars or whatever tolerate misfortunes when they happen others but intervene with Kong to keep him from getting us and ours.

Perhaps we even feel fine benefiting from Kong's increased capacity to be nice to us because they don't have to share their niceness with others, after all...

4. It isn't our fault. Anyway, what could we really DO about it if people are going be that way anyway? Kong will keep coming. We are powerless to stop him from coming at least by ourselves. We might as well at least enjoy the fact that Kong likes us, right?

But even if someone wouldn't be disturbed by the idea of cooperating with Kong even if they can be nice to us even though they are mean to others. Even if Kong is only turning their wrath elsewhere, the cost is certainly prohibitive. The cost is that we have behaved cooperatively with some pretty horrible stuff that we would feel bad if we ourselves or loved ones got the short end of.

That is rare in literature if you think about it. It is rare for antagonists in a story to have their side portrayed so sympathetically in such a way that we think we might under the right circumstances do the same thing. We don't for example view ourselves as the Wicked Queen in Snow Shite or as Thomas Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons.

5. But in this case strangely many of us say, well I would probably do the same thing after all what would be the point of NOT doing it?

And it is not really surprising when you think about it because it is exactly what we actually DO do practically the same non dramatic equivalent on a regular basis. What one of us doesn't for instance feel fine practically about people victimized in other countries without us intervening on the national scale or in our social situations we see no use in weighing in when someone in our work office or families are hurt by someone who is malicious, feeling superior, or even just indifferent? We actually many times help the situation for the perpetrator of these crimes in very real ways.

6. We tell ourselves that our obligation is to not take sides or make object because that would make things even more 'contentious.' As if we have a responsibility to Kong to get along with him by LETTING him be mean without interferng. After all what good would it really do to stand up for the innocent because how much could we ever change anyone's hearts or actions? People don't change, right?

The answer is, in many ways that's really not true, they do change, and particularly they change when they test the social wind and it ever blows against them. If people sense that there is a reduced tolerance of what they are doing they will often stop. Many people gauge their responses and stop their malicious or inappropriate behavior just short of what will get them in trouble with the particular people they care about. Since people have a reduced sensitivity to what happens to others versus what happens to them personally Kong can interact widely in the world with much of his meanness only being perceived by the victims.

Many things continue therefore only because they know that at least a bare minimum of the people around them will accept it. Specifics of this include the level of sexual morality in society that will deteriorate rapidly when the behavior in question is accepted by the larger culture. How many marriages and children then become victims, not just directly to immorality but indirectly because the rest of us stand by and watch? That means that in a very real way we create the evil by accepting it.

7. Well if I take sides it won't be fair even if I side with the victim. I should remain neutral even when it is obvious there is a victim

The thought that the victim might actually defend themselves or that someone ELSE unspecified should defend an innocent victim is often not a good solution. Very likely just as in Kong it probably is not ever a fair fight. She could never defend herself.

It is also very likely the case that those who already find themselves as victims also have no defenders. Bullies in the school yard as we all remember very rarely pick on those in the best position to defend themselves. Kong and human bullies tend to gang up on people who are weak and friendless already. People are rarely eager unfortunately to be friends to the friendless, they more often climb over each other to be friends to the people that already have the most and leave the weak alone to fend for themselves against Kong. In fact many that are the most sensitive to

8. We assist Kong by criticizing victims for defending themselves.

No one punishes bad behavior like they punish the people that point out bad behavior in others. Even if people are saying hey Kong is being mean to me, that person will be blamed for the situation. It is just a sad reality.

9. People don't help because of stander by effect - nothing I do could help and I am sure someone will get involved if someone really needs help (the reason why people are attacked and killed in plain daylight with people watching).

We all know those movies in the classroom where no one will raise their hand until everyone else does and then it does little good. People need the greatest amount of defending when there is no one doing any not when there are many already doing it, and of course that is when no one will.

10. Kong is going to whomp on me himself if I do anything.

True. And this is the most immobilizing one of all for the standby er. Often the consequences to those who would fight evil are dire and there isn't anything that can be done about it. In fact it is probably only a Hollywood ending when ultimately something as powerful as King Kong gets fought and conquered. But considering the examples of some of the actual dramas where this has played out for real, God may be ok with a culture even being nearly destroyed if need be (and there are many precedents of it actually BEING destroyed) rather than wanting that same culture to institutionally justify the most despicable possible behaviors.

How excited is God most likely if when a King Kong syndrome exists (a terrible evil that is in an organized fashion aided and abetted by the rest of the village), and that village in turn thinks they are doing the right thing by playing it easy and not doing something to fight Kong? Not good. In fact it is a true horror story. And it isn't pleasant to think about what this means for us practically, but God might be fine with the fact that many of us will actually suffer trying to fight evil.

You mean God doesn't just want us to do the things that we 'feel really good about?' and the things that make us really happy and content like only being nice to the people that we like and don't need our help much anyway? Probably not, really, I mean what would be the precedent to think so? Not the New Testament anyway, where we clearly don't get credit for giving service to those to whom service comes naturally. Most of the Book of Mormon prophets lost everything doing God's will and I am not sure what is so different about our day that would mean that God's will for us is to order pizza and watch videos with buddies or whatever else we think is our idea of an easy fun time. He clearly expects us to and has used many a sacrifice of innocent people to assist Him in fighting Kong's various manifestations.

And how could it possibly be the case that God would be fine with evil surviving and thriving undisturbed because it would mean that that the rest of us wouldn't just be able to stay as much as possible in our comfort zones? It would certainly be ludicrous to think that. But it is very common for people to calculate that God wants them personally to do what is most comfortable to them: God wants this because it is the best for me. God wants it because I want it and it makes me happy. Therefore we declare what we want God's will and end up with what we want and feeling righteous for doing it. But I think it is very likely that the number of times when it is actually true that God sees things sympathetically to our own way of thinking at least if that way of thinking allows a great level of evil or victimization is not a big number.

So, I have some work to do but this is the germination here for a moral allegory along the lines of Pilgrim's progress wit a modern day pop culture icon, which is helpful for youth and things like that when they are developed usefully, if I get busy and work it through. Of course I have no idea whether the creators of this story or this cultural icon meant any deep significance by it. But this simple image is somehow a fantastic allegory of Edmund Burke's famous assessment. It is in many ways, however, a disturbingly pessimistic one: Evil will probably triumph much of the time because of how powerful it is and how many people it has helping.

But the implication and moral of this story is clear to. Evil can be fought. Certainly not easily, and not without great cost to us personally. We will probably much more of the time make the calculations of the villagers that even when we see evil and its innocent victims that perhaps the cost to the rest of us of fighting evil would be worse than the status quo. But the cost of not fighting it, to all of us, is clearly much worse, not only in real terms but in poetic ones. It is the cost of knowing that evil exists with us all of us as accomplices even when it gets that clear and extreme. What one of us really wants to make sure that the waters are smoothed over in a world like that?

There's a Little African American Spot on the sun today

2008-05-28T12:02:00.000-07:00

I posted about this in my other blog, but since this is the place that I expound safely on my random thoughts I will go into it a bit more because it is interesting to me.

My son was joking when he changed the 'King of Pain' lyrics by Sting (that begins by 'There's a little black spot on the sun today.') Obviously this use of the word 'black' isn't inappropriate and needn't be replaced with anything, but the sense of taboo bleeds from the other use via the word 'black' itself, divorced of the other context in which it is used in a questionable manner.

I think it speaks to what people are doing when they replace so-called insensitive language with euphemism. The language or word itself, and saying it, becomes the performative or taboo act. There is very little thought to actual thoughts of racism, injustice, or just plain bad feelings that people harbor one another.

In church the other day a woman was reading a letter from her son that was on a mission in Africa, and in refering to the black Africans, called them African Americans. Which is absurd, but what else are people going to do when every syllable is scrutinized for ill will?

This extends beyond racism. Many times when people have bad feelings toward each other, the actual behavior or outward signs of it become the focus and the most important thing. I feel this is unfortunate because it actually encourages people to not ever actually consider just addressing and replacing those bad feelings. Most of their focus is checking their outward behavior toward that person, probably for the benefit of third parties and how they themselves are perceived. Real change, real attempts at improving the goodwill expressed one person toward another, are very rare. And because of all the fuss about words or deeds, they aren't what most people address even in the behavior of others.

And those attempts at inward introspection and change are certainly not encouraged by the notion of politically correct speech. In fact in my opinion the accusations of such these days, when clearly made in contexts where there is no actual racism, are in themselves a sign of bad will and hostility from those who level the accusations, and certainly opportunism for political purposes.

This also relates to Obama's slip. The notion of racial or gender insensitivity has been conceived and nurtured as an attack against conservatives, so it is very rarely that anyone will bring it up when a liberal slips, and when they do, they want to get out of it by default. Obama wants very much to say hey, I am the good guy (by definition because I am a liberal). And I think a lot of people want to say that on his behalf, because again, the charge is really only leveled when it can be useful against conservatives. I am quite certain that if there weren't still a primary contest it wouldn't have ever become a story.

But that doesn't work when the words themselves, and not the meaning behind them, become the focus of criticism by opportunistic detractors.

Hey, sweetie.

2008-05-19T18:19:00.000-07:00

LOL!

It is so funy when these people hang themselves in their own nooses.

They come up with these social straightjackets for political purposes and it is so interesting to see them twist painfully when it backfires.

Sadly, though, it changes little on the political landscape.

McCain still looks like a CHEWED PIECE OF SPEARAMINT GUM.

Who would Jesus bomb?

2008-05-12T10:28:00.000-07:00

Who would Jesus bomb?

Uh... well probably similar to who would Jesus flood. Everyone. Except eight people, right?

Just like, who would Jesus burn? Everyone except four people.

But one problem particularly with using the scriptures in this particular debate, other than many of the people that would ask this question aren't fans of them and bumper sticker type questions aren't meant to be actually responded to, is that the scriptures are even worse than conference about containing anything known as 'women's wisdom,' at least if that means having any produced by women.

I am serious when I say that I am actually not sure I would really want to be in the hands of a bunch of women to decide my fate for being a wicked sinner. Probably before I got burned or flooded I would be gossiped about then bombed. Or my clothes hair weight or housekeeping would be criticised and then I would be gossiped about and then bombed. Unless I happened to be inside their little clique.

OF COURSE I am just stereotyping, except for the gossip part. I have heard some pretty creative ways for women to justify gossip. Men don't usually say things like 'well I am not going to keep anything from my WIFE so I have to tell him why I heard so and so went to the store on Sunday!'

Gossip really deserves its own post because it is much like anything else in that the reason behind it (incidentally, just like Sabbath keeping) usually defines the harm in it or lack of harm. And some people would get off the hook here too, because I do think that motivation like so many things determines harm and it is not some blanket statement like saying something about someone not present. So even if women are telling their husbands for the same reason they would spread it around the ward (telling a juicy story about others' faults or misfortunes) to entertain themselves or their husbands) it is the same act. And just like people use the spirit of commandments keeping to get out of trouble, it can get them into trouble just as easily. But more to the point, any of the actual character differences that I could identify between the sexes, I am not sure women come out so great.

But at the very most charitable toward women, men are at least as wise and virtuous, most of the time righteous men could speak for me. I don't share the obsession either with homemaking (as defined by anyone) except for my kids and don't think that if I would want to have any kind of idea that would be distinguishable form a man's.

The truth is, sometimes doing the right thing takes some guts and I think men come out well on that score too, or at least with resolve - little capriciousness or (Frailty thy name is what?). That is why fathers usually do the disciplining. They usually go into the kids' bedroom with a belt (metaphorically speaking of course) intending to do their duty as a father to try to turn their kids into respectable members of society. Because, not in spite of the fact that, they LOVE THEM.

The women (and men like them) all say, OH NOOOOO, I LOVE my kids. I don't want to hurt them. They are sorry. I am sure. They won't do it again, I promise.

And then you get Lot and his daughters.

WISDOM is being able to defend one's position, if it is worth having at all. If it isn't why would we want to have a certain opinion at all much less advocate it widely? And how do we know an opinion is that strong? One of the ways I do that is by floating my ideas out there as far as I can and listening to those who don't agree with me. At the very least I should know for myself how I account for things that people will say. That is how we can become stronger and wiser. I have often ben surprised when it seems that people haven't exposed themselves to an opposing point of view, not before they have an opinion at all because that is understandable, but I always try to do that before I would make an opinion that would involve criticism of others lifestiles or personal morality.

I am often interested to hear the very strong opinions that call themselves antimaterialist to name one (these come from many different sectors). It is sad to me that there sometimes doesn't seem to be much of a desire to let people off of the hook that the proponents let themselves off of for the luxuries they would claim for themselves. It is a very tricky business trying to argue that WE need something but somene ELSE doesn't. One person's necessity is another person's ridiculous extravagance, and it always goes both ways. So of course it would be better to get rid of the need to characterize or make assessments of the way other people spend money at all.

Overall the main theme to many of my religious/morality posts is that I feel much better when I can blame mistaken thinking or cultural myths for being bad instead of the people who think them them. And I apply the golden rule here, and usually try to, because I would personally rather be wrong about something in my head rather than in my heart, and would rather that someone make that judgement about me - that maybe you could think that my ideas are wrong and thus you could perhaps enlighten me but that my actions might not be. That way we can all evaluate our world vies and make adjustments that lets millions of people off the hook instantly instead of having to condemn them with philosophies of men. Of course it depends on one's purpose if it would be a good thing for everyone, there do seem to be a few people that like to think others are in the wrong, but I am hoping that it is a small group and that it could shrink. If it ever does I think there are lots of potential benefits. In a world where it is hard to forgive, it seems like that would be a great thing if eliminating their sins just by a parameter shift is a remarkable opportunity if ever possible.

And I certainly don't want to have opinions about other people being bad without making sure that I am understanding or representing their views as best I can. If I am making casual statements about large groups of people before I ask a representative why they feel the way I do. It might be painful to ask for feedback from people that don't agree with me, but there is little use getting it from those who we know already feel the same. In this case it is clearly no pain no gain. Only with PAIN will we gain wisdom, just like all of those people who suffer and die in this world. Again, I think God knows what he is doing.

After all, there are many people among us preaching religion. Some selling it for money, some wanting the pride. Flattery and telling people they are already good is their theology. Maliciousness is their original sin. Telling people they are better than others is how they win converts, because we are all so wanting and willing to believe it and willing to practice it as a ritual.

I fear that this religion gets MANY converts among Mormon women. It is easy for them to accept a theology of superiority with the equating of housekeeping with homemaking. That is way too easy, after all, one just has to spend their time vacuuming and then poof they are righteous. Or canning, one mustn't forget canning. Then, how convenient, it just happens that the things that MOST Mormon women must qualify as righteous like, because most of them are crafty homebodies. Gee, how convenient for Most Mormon Women. I wonder who thought of that - because oops I didn't see quilting or canning or scrap booking in the scriptures. And I am not knocking these things if other people like it, (of course any more than the things I like if these are considered what RIGHTEOUS women do.)

But if other women they like these things, all they have is doing something they like. They have a hobby. They can congratulate themselves that they have their hobbies just like I have mine but they don't get to call it religion or least of all righteousness and call what I LIKE, NOT righteousness. After all, anyone of us actually just does something in the church because they like it or it makes them happy they should be very careful, because liking something is its own reward. Christianity according to scripture is about being willing to do things that you don't like for people you don't like. And one should be very ware of needing to convince themselves that lucky them, the things that they like are what God wants them to do with their life. Everyone feels that way initially. It is a long process to get educated that it isn't true. It is called conversion.

So would Jesus let suffer and get sick and die? To be lonely and afraid and abandoned?

Everyone.

That is God's wisdom. Not women's wisdom, and not men's wisdom. It is the kind I don't happen to understand the reason for, I admit it. It is the kind that I would change if I could because I am imperfect and weak and don't want to be punished and don't want to see my children or anyone that I love punished. I don't happen to share that wisdom. Not yet. And we shouldn't listen to any man or woman who pretends to. Or question things that they think are unfair about this wisdom.

The title of this post I actually swiped from Slade. He made this point when we gave talks on 'Love' for V-day. I made the point that there are things that love isn't. It isn't always tolerance. It isn't always pacifism. It isn't always indulging. It isn't always affinity (we will probably get credit for loving our enemy according to the scriptures, but very little for loving the people that it comes natural for us to love. Life isn't about seeking our own comfort level or else there wouldn't be any point to it. That is probably why we have our comfort level removed from us so often.

So Slade made a very good point and I thought I would swipe it, because his talk went over surprisingly well. He was also building on one of my points that the 'Men loves your wives even as Christ loved the church' is comparing for men, marriage to the calcification. And I have seen my husband suffer. He used to, before I got sick, think that nothing bad had happened to him. But he didn't say much about it, just dealt with it.

Because HE IS A MAN. I guess most of the time I prefer a man's approach and if I had the choice I would try for it instead of my own, at least when it is different which is as seldom as possible.

---------
This makes reference to some kind of protest statement by feminists around conference time. You can read my brother's JKH3's blog for the family feud. I don't know if I know all that many about the specifics, I was probably just trying to stay awake during conference.

Animal intelligence and other things that don't exist

2008-05-06T00:17:00.000-07:00

Now when it comes to animals as individuals, no one could be a bigger softie than me. I can't even leave the house without my dog in tow anymore, though I am thinking about trying a different strategy due to the dog hair in my car. I used to hand raise my hamsters. I saved a snake from a certain death at my mom's house by promising to escort it personally to the other side of Oracle Rd. I kicked in fourty bucks and cab fare out of the goodness of my own heart.

But seriously animals are total idiots. Horses as case in point. Does anyone know the reason they have to put a horse down if it breaks its leg, even in our day and age. JP3, you are a veteranarian, why don't you tell us?

Just kidding, but sometimes my brother knows so much about things that I wouldn't be surprised.

IT IS BECAUSE HORSES ARE TOO STUPID NOT TO STEP ON THEIR LEG EVEN IF IT IS BROKEN.

You would think they could set the bone and splint it, and in some species including our own (sometimes) that works, but not in horses. They will keep trying to trot around on their broken leg like there's no tommorow. That is probably why we are able to break them into manual servitude so easily.

Even my beloved bulldog doesn't qualify as smart. I won't fool myself at all on that score.

Today as he shows his increasing heat tollerance he showed that as unable as he is to tolerate the heat he is equally unwilling to stay out of the kitchen, so to speak. Ok it is his favorite room, for more reasons than one.

I tried to get him to stay downstairs because it is SO much cooler down there but he dutifully trotted up and down the stairs every time I went up and down with laundry or dishes or whatever in his continuing search to escape the feelings of insecure atachment he attained in his puppyhood (thanks to luvabulldog, as always). It makes me cringe to think that he spent the first summer of his tender little life outside ALL DAY. At least he got sprayed down with a HOSE afterward. I wonder during the summer whether he would like the hose any more than in the winter. He seems to have a problem now even with his warm bubblebath, so I am pretty sure the hose came in a distant second to how much he liked the mud and filth he had to run around in all day before he came in.

So animal lovers, I am with you. I am infinitely tender toward these creatures, particularly those that I am attached to like those in my care. Including the two legged variety.

But in the cases of those animals with less than you would call human-like sentience, it is not a good idea to anthropomorphize.

EVEN PITA PUTS DOWN THREE QUARTERS OF THE ANIMALS THEY RESCUE!

So as I say, I love animals, just like I love the planet and want to save the world, etc. And I suppose horses have even fewer brains than some of the animals that we have no reservations about eating, like pigs.

But they are not people. And just as any cause to be taken up on a banner or on a bumpersticker, there are complicated issues involved in any moral or philosophical issue like whether a dog is smiling.

And the answer is yes MY dog is smiling, because he knows he has hoodwinked about ten years of manual servitude from me.

That blue guy on Oprah again

2008-05-02T18:21:00.001-07:00

In the 'some people never learn' department, I saw that blue guy that was on Oprah (who had turned himself blue by ingesting silver which is obviously not a good idea to ingest and you would think that he would know that now) while I was in the UK doing an interview on one of those shows.

And he still takes silver!

And he doesn't seem to be getting any other benefits from it, really, and I say 'other' if looking like a Smurf can be construed as a benefit.

It bolsters my theory that there really is not with some people anything that could actually happen to them to make them say 'gee, maybe I am wrong about that.'

Yes, it CAN hurt

2008-05-01T21:13:00.000-07:00

I have found that my war against naturopathy is not only fought completely alone, but it makes people very angry, an I am not really sure why. Because pretty much the thing that people say about my articles is that I make really good points that they haven't heard before anywhere else and they really don't know exactly how to counter many of them but that somehow they just in their gut don't agree. This is why I really think people should try to stop thinking with their guts.

Because I have seen the harm that it can do. I had a cousin die

http://www.helium.com/items/1027218-people-argument-pursue-natural

(I can't do links to day so sorry about cutting and pasting if you want to read the rest of this but I am sure that you know how.)

Why some people don't like to discuss how much money they make

2008-05-01T04:45:00.000-07:00

This is really a filler blog because I keep thinking of something new to put on this one and haven't been able to think of much lately. I have been either just doing silly family stuff or Helium lately (it pays much much better) and am neglecting all of my important pointificating.

But I have often wondered in the past why I never seem to get the etiquette right when it comes to the appropriateness of mentioning to the actual number how much money Slade makes. I didn't really see anything wrong with it really, certainly when he only made 3.35 no one else thought it was a problem either. People love to talk about how much they pay for things and save with coupons and such, and in general people like to talk about their talents and accomplishments at certain things. If someone is young or pretty or thin often they like to talk about it. Or if they have run a certain number of miles or made a certain number of quilts. And in this case I wouldn't be even talking about my own accomplishments at all because I am pretty much a freeloader at the moment.

Some people argue that they don't want to know how much people make because it would make them have bad feelings toward that person if the other person made more. I can't say as I sympathize with that, nor does my husband. Slade and I would absolutely never have bad feelings toward anyone else no matter how much more than us they made. But when I slipped one time and miscalculated after Slade started working and mentioned his income and I got a big verbal spanking from a certain relative, it has made me think about why ever since. Especially when I heard that relative saying how proud they were of another person for the good money they made, it made me wonder when it is ok to talk about salary without any such censure.

Then it hit me. People like to not know the specific dollar amount that someone makes nor do they like to reveal how much they themselves make because some people like to speculate about others' incomes, and of course it is much more fun and flexible to do so without conclusive proof to end their fun. And many others and often the same people like to mischaractarise their own incomes. The I'm so poor and can't afford anything game. Particularly things that they don't want to afford.

This is why I haven't liked the whole income taboo, and certainly not because we make a lot of money at all. It is because I hate these kind of games. I really don't want to characterize or mischaracterize my own financial situation at all beyond what it actually is, nor am I interested at all in what anyone else makes particularly if I weren't actually right about what I thought. If I had any actual opinions on someone else's income which I really am not interested in anyway, I wouldn't want it to be based on idle speculation.

I say, if people really feel that it is taboo to discuss incomes, they should extend that to even vague discussion of them including people saying they are poor and can't afford things like everyone else supposedly can. I also hate it when people say oh they or you can obviously afford x when they don't know what they are talking about and interestingly they don't seem to want to know. I feel that if someone doesn't want me to know an actual number, they shouldn't expect me to believe them when they tell me how poor they are. And if someone wants to speculate that someone else is so rich then they should be willing to look at the sad truth of their tax statement, and certainly not be offended that someone is breeching social ettiquette if they simply want to have people talking about how much money they have and not being right. If people think that incomes are so taboo that I would actually vote for them not talking about them at all, but ironically it is the same people that love to speculate and hate to know. It has to be for these reasons, otherwise it doesn't make sense. In fact I am quite sure that this is why the person that I offended was offended, because it ended her ability to speculate that we might be in fat city and that was no fun.

It is all in the numbers folks. I should say it is all in the careful avoidance in order to characterize the numbers. I say total openness or don't use lack of knowledge to help you say something critical of another person. Just my two cents, or however much, I am not saying.

Of course if I am not yet right about this I would like to hear other theories, but I really think this is it. Nothing else makes as much sense or is as consistent with people's behavior.

Magnets for medicine? Pull-ease!

2008-03-09T20:46:00.001-07:00

This is something I wrote for Helium that basically outlines my arguments against naturopathy in a more concise format. Enjoy, or not, depending on what side you come down on.

http://www.helium.com/items/917345-magnets-obviously-lived-human

For those interested in third world poverty in Africa

2008-02-23T13:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/151

Here is a fascinating speech at TED, one of the few that is not part of the liberal freakshow on parade that it usually is.

He offers a lot of support to what I have said arguing that it is liberal hubris to assume that saving the third world and leftist politics need to go hand in hand.

He makes a point that I actually forgot. Most third world countries actually have more natural resources at their disposal than the US. South America and Africa definitely do. Our wealth has been generated symbolically through free trade and capitalism, and theirs has been stifled and kept from the people by communism and other forms of dictatorship.

Audios Castro, Fortunamente

2008-02-22T17:22:00.000-08:00

What could possibly appeal to anyone I know about a communist dictator that all in his own country but his inner circle fear dread and flee with only the shirt on their back I will never know. They flee to this country, and vote republican. Buenvinidos!

And if it seems I am going overboard in my revulsion to such affinity, which I probably have, sorry, but what can I say it was a bit shocking to me to hear someone like this praised by any source, it is in my opinion proportionate to the threat. See the thing is the United States is really the only capitalist country. It is the rising tide that lifts all the boats in the world. United States wealth (generated in very little time since we ourselves were a third world country thanks to the GOD GIVEN MIRACLE of capitalism) is treated hypocritically by this country's detractors as the answer to third world salvation, and I guess that says a lot about whether they want to save the world if they would look this gift horse in the mouth.

And I am very familiar with the kind of response I would get if I said this around any of the people who think this in person. They would get hostile and snippy. But I am not like that. I don't think that supporters of Castro are evil. I don't feel the need to spank them verbally like I was their mom. THEY ARE WRONG. I don't accuse those who dissagree with me of being evil selfish or having no soul. THEY ARE WRONG. And people forget that they don't get to just declare themselves right because they think they are superior.

None of this is personal, so I always get surprised when anyone thinks it is. If you love your ideas so much, argue for them and don't make it about who is evil. It is not about who wants to save the world and who doesn't. We all want to save the world. It is a disagreement about methods. I choose not to think (because I am not racist and have no superiority complex) that I am entitled to enjoy the fruits of capitalism while others suffer because of my militant ideology. If people want what the United States has, they should fight to make their countries more like the United States. To quote a recent blog post I saw, Duh! I would heartilly support that effort in whatever way possible. I would send my sons to die for it.

The ironic thing is that absolutely all of the people that I know who say such things in my personal experience have absolutely no idea what it is like to be poor. They like to spend time around poor people because it makes them feel better about themselves for some reason, but those poor people don't have that opportunity to switch countries for a self-indulgent change of scenery. Slade has paid his own way in life since he was twelve. He didn't get sent all over the world and financed till he was near thirty. When you actually have to struggle and make your way in life you come to understand a bit more about how things work. And you won't have to excorcise your guilt by hostility to others and how they choose to live.

So anyone who interprets what I have said as being hostile to them personally hasn't understood me. I don't feel that people who I disagree with are evil or have 'no soul.' Just because someone may feel that about me and my beliefs doesn't make it mutual. And I also think they discount the immense condecension of their own opinions. Things like hating BYU because its graduates are obsessed with how their education might actually translate into a vocation as if this is a selfishess problem is hostility. Those supposedly selfish BYU students are ironically living their own lives and not returning the insult. That is exactly what I am trying to do. I am not trying to make this about who is evil, and I am not trying to be hostile. But I am sorry communist sympathy is misplaced, and I will argue that to my dying breath whatever the personal cost to me.

All pampered rich Castro fans like all the citizens of this country have the right to live on communes, kibbutzes or flee the evils of this country to any other they choose. I have a feeling that any who support communism or any of its relatives are really not about their own rights. They are about taking away mine. And I am from a pretty proud history of not letting that happen too easy.

Perdon, compadre.

So because this is not personal and I love all my relatives dearly whether or not they agree with me, all I have been doing was running with a ball I was thrown, since very implicit in communist/leftist rhetoric is implied criticism of those who don't agree. It is the hubris that one person knows better than another what is good for them and can enact it by force that is behind all of it.

I did not have Castro on the mind today. I have tried to put him way out of mind, way back to the dated 1960's regime he belongs in. So please delete my posts on the other Castro blog, I would do it myself if you had a Google blog, and I am done now. =) I did cold turkey off some meds recently, for some bizarre reason that I am actually rethinking. Just back to the usual grind of horrible pain and its associated irritability and difficulty coping with life. And the fact that it always makes me feel extremely raw to go back to life au naturalle may feature prominently in why I got so excited. But most likely these are things I believe, just usually don't say, which I admit isn't always a bad thing.

That blue guy on Oprah

2008-02-20T21:53:00.000-08:00

Seriously I don't usually end up seeing Oprah but for some reason I watched it for a few minutes the other day and happened to see that blue guy that took a lot of silver and because it is actually not a good thing to take silver or actual members of the medical communuity might recommend it, he turned blue. QED.

Blessed epidurals: Or, Biting the hand that delivers us?

2008-01-28T15:27:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to update anyone curious on my posting frequency that I am doing some writing for other sites at the moment, but that I will be hoping to return to some of these longer ones.

I am going to work on the anti-artificial post--it is too long, I know. But I actually think that these are important ideas to counter the ubiquitous flipside. Everywhere I look there is someone arguing the opposite of what I am saying, of course without addressing any of the essential arguments.

As to the actual benefit to society angle, anyone curious about the origin of my interest in this topic should be aware of its origins within my ethical system, which believes that whether through human advances or the gift of God we can expect relief from our struggles and pains through modern medicine. Modern medicine is better than its naturopathic competition in my opinion because it uses dispationate science rather than the psychologically powerful pull of placebo and anecdotal evidence that have had customers swearing by every snake oil salesman through town for thousands of years. With medicine, rather than word of mouth and superstition, there is the chance of one generation's knowledge to improve apon another's.

I think that the subject of epidurals is an interesting example of what I am talking about. Individual women who choose to have one or not come to those individual decisions in a very emotionally-invested way, so I am not knocking any one personal decision past or future. And as I have come to learn, surprisingly, most of us come to think what we did in life was the right thing no matter what it resulted in, so that would pretty much not be possible anyway.

But there are other elements in this discussion with motives that I am less thrilled by, however, than just women trying to do the best thing by themselves and their babies (many of them scared by the various propaganda). Having no better name to call them than the 'detractor factor,' this element detracts from anything in the formal medical community but particularly they have success here where they can claim (bravely) that it was better when women birthed their babies on their own. They portray modern obstetrics as some Victorian Patiarical imposition on a better alternative--not the result of the long-time attempt of the whole human race to eliminate suffering of women and the death of unborn children during birth.

It is certainly right to question the actual consequences of encouraging women back from these hard-fought advances, but any reasons offered ought to be good ones, and not just some vague ideology such as the suspicion of anything 'not natural,' like un-natural pain-free childbirth. In my view, though, it sure as heck beats REAL natural child birth a hundred years ago when a half of children and a third of women died afterward. I would sure love it if the obstetrical community, rather than defending itself for the amazing feat of the amount human agony that they have already ended, could be encouraged to do more of the same.

This kind of attack on their usefulness or even safety is making epidurals being tossed out like the baby in the bathwater in Europe, where in managing their health care systems they seem to be forgetting one of the things that they were meant to achieve--elimination of human suffering. This thinking can prevent useful advances in medicine. The doctors that we sent to solve the problem finally return and say hey lookie here, we have reversed the curse of Eve for you with a modern-day miracle! And that miracle is no worse than a flu shot which can look as scary and risky if it is sold as such.

Sometimes I wonder about who gains when women loose--I picture a marketing meeting in some HMO board room where they think up the idea that rather than being forced to cover this wonderful procedure (because it is obviously so wonderful), the better option would be to convince women it would be better if they just writhe in agony for free. Those who welcome national health care can expect this to come to the US. No pain relief for you!

I am all for natural childbirth, or for doing whatever my ancestors did if anyone tells me what it is they did and how it will help me in some way that I don't know. I have a suspicion if they discover that their ancestors lived of of killing one elk and eating it all winter they aren't going to be so excited, but who knows, the writing in agony thing has gone over. But just because the practice was older, has been around a long time, or somehow more 'natural', doesn't make it better, and those that argue these types of alternatives to medical advances should not be allowed to stop at that justification. Most of the actual evidence of archaeological remains of past civilizations, especially Egypt which actually ate very much like the USDA pyramid, the mummies show that they suffered from the same degenerative diseases that we do, along with the chronic ones that we are now getting under control from intervention in 'nature.'

Life of our ancestors was hard and short. So nothing is convincing me that it needs returning to, there, but I will think on it.

The case against nature

2008-01-03T20:11:00.000-08:00

PREFACE--WHY WOULD I MAKE SUCH A CASE?

I am an unorthodox thinker, for good or ill, having the frequent experience that the questions I ask don't seem quite 'normal' to their recipients. One thing that I have asked people about over the years is why they very often express an opinion that 'natural ingredients' are always vastly superior to any 'substitutes.' One such ingredient that attracts negative attention is sweetener. This is a common substitute because sweetness serves a function that doesn't need to be performed by something natural, or at all. You couldn't, for example, have artificial food, because most of us need at least some amount of digestible nutrition. But sweetening can be achieved by something that isn't even really itself a caloric food product--in fact that is the idea.

This topic has been an interest of mine before, because sugar itself obviously has bad health consequences, at least in large quantities. I used to diet before mysteriously loosing my appetite, and I had best results avoiding sugar/starch. It was frustrating how rare good alternatives to sugar are, and even more so because I suspect this rarity is related to just this vilification. No food company would be super eager to manufacture a product that will be scrutinized in every direction for any hint of the danger people feel very strongly must be there, thus there have only been a few main choices, even though a good tasting and versatile one would be a holy grail for dieters and a gang buster seller.

Seeking specifics on reasons for automatic mistrust of something meant to instead be a healthier alternative, I queried a local BB about why some of them had stated this mistrust when the subject came up. Answers were along the lines of 'I figure I might as well avoid artificial ingredients' or 'call me trendy, but that's where I come down.' Not really answers--at most restatements of the original position, with occasional justification that no reason at all is necessary in the case of something so obvious.

'MAKING CASES' VS. 'JUST BECAUSE'

Opinions are everywhere, but it doesn't always follow that their owners have thought them through. I am sure I don't always, but I do value giving some thought before I introduce a habit impacting my life like my diet would, or doing anything that has a consequence for me or anyone else. When I don't get the chance, I prefer to say I have no strong opinion on a topic like say gun control, rather than take one anyway, which in my opinion is a problem. It seems common to come down on one side or another rather than just abstain.

I try to learn about what goes into others' thinking. I might ask about things said in the process of making small talk, online or spoken, even though it isn't a big deal, just curiosity. But sometimes my attempt to just be social, even supportive by showing interest in someone's views, is interpreted as 'pinning them down.' I am not sure why, maybe how much actual homework goes into an opinion always makes people nervous, it does me. Maybe the answers seem plain obvious: everyone knows that is just the way to think, etc. (Slade gets this all the time, too, who even more than I do, commonly leaves people nonplussed).

Bumper-sticker-ready statements, substituting near-universal thinking for individual opinions, are ripe territory. ("Of course it must be good to have natural ingredients--every box of anything touts them!") When something is understood to be good it can practically travel through the air all the way to the status of a passionate mission statement. The whole 'natural is best' reflex I am quite sure otherwise intelligent people buy into because it seems rather harmless at worst, and it could be.

But any 'everyone is doing it' reasoning is surprising in this commercial environment, where some companies can suggest 'apply directly to the forehead' even without bothering to mention WHY ANYONE WOULD EVER WANT TO DO SUCH A THING! Seriously, this particular product launch is so choice; it is unbelievable but obviously in some marketing meeting someone discussed their belief that they never even had to mention pain or make a claim that this product is an actual remedy in any way, but they are probably right and someone is marching out to buy it anyway.

'CULTURAL MYTH'--THE HARM OF 'JUST BECAUSE'

It never IS, BTW, the intellect of someone that I question in any case that I make for something being less than a super idea. There are many reasons why intelligent people can end up wrong. Plato was not a stupid person but it has taken 2500 years to fight back some of the attractive but destructively unhelpful concepts he introduced, such as dualism. Cultural myths, found in all ideologies and levels of education, don't have anything to do with capacity, they result when that capacity is surrendered voluntarily. Rather than analyze an idea a belief held by the larger culture is deliberately substituted. While there are many reasons this is done (efficiency or the pleasure of positive association), in fact it seems to result sometimes from deliberate anti-intellectualism, where someone chooses to for whatever reason reject possibly improving on their views. (This demonstrates that I am distinguishing a choice, rather than claiming some better ability, which I do not.) And this choice can be inconsequential in some cases, but the potential for danger in resisting rigorous analyisis in areas of diet and health seems large to me.

And claiming these are matters of preference, perhaps that it comes down to what we feel like doing, say to even purposefully attempt a placebo effect, is also a bit dangerous. If something can have a good effect it can just as easily have a bad one. This might seem obvious stating it out of context, but there are clearly those who would have us believe that if something is 'natural' it can't harm us . But that ultimately implies that something natural can't do anything physical to us at all, revealing that some proponents and users of say alternative medicine really do believe we are talking about inert substances. But anything that we think does something physiological, or that could, is medicine, however you slice it--little distinction about levels of naturalness can really be made. And if a substance does anything to us, it could just as easily be what ails as what cures, unless the rationale behind it is good. Good reasoning is therefore what I am advocating, not a particular substance or abstinence.

To be clear, I have little opinion one way or the other about food additives other than preferring nothing like say rat poison in my food, because current state of knowledge on what constitutes 'harm' is unfortunately little more helpful than to avoid the obvious. One of my ongoing goals is to avoid questionably-generated or biased opinions, and getting rid of the ones I am sure that I have. The process of submission of my current opinions for evaluation and critique by others, to benefit from perspectives I haven't thought of, is one way to achieve that goal.

OK, FINALLY, THE CASE AGAINST NATURE

My husband all the time at work asks his colleagues (most of them developing the typical pot-bellied engineer physique) why they don't drink diet soda. They say, 'I am not going to put those chemicals in my body!' Somehow in this simplistic response, very intelligent men are able to ignore that that drinking 200+ calories of concentrated sugar in one small serving is not only ingesting a chemical, that particular chemical regularly in those quantities produces in the body the surge of a habit-forming drug--insulin--which has many harmful secondary and tertiary effects on health. Most likely that drug has medicated an extra 30 lbs onto their bodies at least. And unlike the harms of insulin surges, harms of the chemicals that could substitute for concentrated natural sugars are unspecified.

Large numbers of people prefer to ignore the known health hazards of ingesting the artificially sweet--and I make the distinction of artificial sweetener and artificially sweet because very few foods in nature (if any) have such concentrated forms of sugar as soda. Thus any soda, however it is sweetened, is a somewhat 'unnatural' thing. Instead what causes more general alarm are non-specific substances not known to harm anyone in any way, particularly not in any known ways like the ones that their sugary drinks are now.

What is strangest to me is how it is that the term 'natural', even though it provocatively undefined, bears the association of benign health consequences. Here I am, thinking in my typically contrary way, that it is obvious to me that in a large number of cases, natural substances are the ones known to have the greatest capacity of known or unknown harms.

The reason for that is that they are made specifically to have effects on living things, whereas substances foreign to biological systems are often capable of passing through us without even communicating with any of our tissues.

So if I were going to want my toothpaste to taste like mint (something rather unnecessary as opposed to something like nutrients, much the way sweetness itself is), why would I want to insist that the mint taste come from plant chemicals rather than something manufactured for that purpose alone? Anything found in a plant is by design going to have an affect living things--wouldn't I be better off with something not meant to do anything to me at all rather than risk an unwanted interaction which is more likely to exist in the case of the plant chemical?

This argument may be obvious to me, but I don't really have the standard of relying on something's seeming obvious in cases where I profess strong opinions (or reject them, which is more typical of me personally, because I prefer not to have strong opinions whenever it can be avoided). So to evaluate either the the 'natural is best' presumption or its opposite, in addition to the fact that by association it is very often that most examples of actual known harmful substances are natural or semi-natural, I will want an actual argument one way or the other to nail things down.

ARGUMENT AGAINST FEAR OF THE MANMADE SUBSTANCE

And the main argument I see against the likelihood that it is a formerly-unevaluated 'unnatural' chemical which might pose the greater health risk to me than a natural one, is that If a substance is capable of harming me, it must have a mechanism for doing so, or it cannot do so. By definition the natural substances are the ones that most often have mechanisms of doing ANYTHING to a biological system.

Mechanisms for something being harmful to the body include the following:

1. Things can mimic or suppress natural processes of the body.

Like artificial hormones, these can do things that the body recognizes and allows in predictable ways. An enzyme has to be a certain shape or it won't fit, like a key in a lock. Neurotransmitters and minerals have certain channels that they travel, and other foreign substances can't use them. This is why most potent substances, like arsenic, cyanide, heroin are usually things already found in nature, made to be like them or as in natural sugar, are a highly concentrated form of them. The fact that most of the most potent substances we can think of come from living things means that potency often amounts to making use of substances that serve known functions in some or other biological system.

(An aside would be that I am no big fan of synthetic hormones. But the fact that they are synthetic is not exactly what makes them harmful, it is that hormones are so complicated and we don't understand them well enough to be creating versions of them to treat various conditions. Most typically (and this is true even for naturally occurring hormone substitutes such as the one in soy) if we use a substitute of something that our body needs in subtly diverse and complicated ways, there will be unintended consequences, at least for the time being. Some day we may nail it all down and then I say let's go for it.)

With this in mind, theoretical predictions can be made about what effect things might have, particularly on pregnancy. The possibility that DES, a synthetic female hormone that caused problems in developing girls 30-40 years ago, might influence a developing reproductive system is something that careful scientists would probably be able to guess. Paning artificiality probably has much to do with fear the unknown, but there are actual things we can predict theoretically and rule out, and others that we can notice are harmful after only a small amount of good science is applied.

2. Things can be toxic.

Toxicity is a level to which a substance needs to attain in the body to cause a harmful environmental situation for organs and bodily processes. This can happen all at once, such as in poison, or it can happen over time, but it can only happen over time if it is actually stored in the body over that time because it must eventually reach some level at which the harmful condition is potentiated. Something can't harm us over time if it isn't stored, or at least its effect would not be considered toxicity in that case. Buildup in the body's tissues can be measured and detected and usually is. One of the things they test for in FDA approval is I think just this, whether it or its metabolites store in the body, usually in several predicted places like the liver or fat, which tend to do this.

As in #1, no fear of the unknown required, because toxicity is readily determinable.

3. [Few] Things can communicate molecularly.

Viruses are one of the very unique things that can mess directly with molecular structure, primarily functioning to rearrange strands of genetic molecules--but no one would be surprised by the idea that a virus would cause harm or sickness in living things, so again knowns tend to be the bad guys rather than unknowns.

There are very few other ways that substances can directly affect living things at the level of specific particles, but radioactive elements are some that can cause damage to cells that weren't necessarily designed to recognize them. But this feature makes them some of the most dangerous in the world. The fact that these things can aggressively mess with the structure of other molecules is something that accounts for this uniqueness and danger, and other things don't do it.

Developing babies can be particularly vulnerable to both viruses and radioactivity because most of the time in adults a certain number of abnormal cells can be repaired and no harm is done in the mean time. But if a virus infects the mother at the right time, or radiation affects the right cell at the right time, even during a short period of time it can put development off course. And most things that affect developing babies also do so predictably, as do things through these other mechanisms. Something like Tylenol or even heroin for that matter won't do anything to a foetus that it wouldn't do to an adult. Things that affect rate do, because development has a strict time schedule. That is why cigarettes and alcohol are some of the worst things, being respectively stimulants and sedatives. (Heroin does affect the rate of respiration, but since newborn babies don't breathe, they aren't vulnerable to this property).

4. Things can cause physical obstruction, blockage or erosion.

Bacteria deposit plaque (which are really like another aggressive organism like the shark that could eat us I suppose), they wear away our teeth, and acid wears away our stomach and esophagus. The milk that might be fine in someone with my particular makeup (I am the Dairy Queen), in others it can disrupt digestion by failing to break down. Other ill effects of milk are usually attributed to its artificial hormone or antibiotic content, which would be considered #1 and also very predictable, and also because of the way these substances mimic natural substances and not the degree to which they are artificial.

5. Secondary effects: irritations, infections.

Smoking and asbestos are often thought to be somehow directly carcinogenic, based on a flawed and outdated model of cancer. The assumption for the first 50 years or so that lung cancer was understood as a cellular phenomenon was that chemicals within cigarette smoke must have some kind of direct carcinogenic affect on the lung tissue. In actuality smoke (and it is likely that most kinds of smoke blown through the lungs with such intensity and frequency) causes an environment of irritation in the respiratory system. But as there is in most of the cancers that are better understood, there is a secondary mechanism based on an actual way that they have of affecting us that is directly observable. They simply irritate lung cells faster than we can repair them, and eventually a malignant cell is allowed to survive and multiply.

I am sure there are other ways that substances can be harmful than those I just listed, but essentially when there is a possibly harmful substance, to know for sure scientists usually first want to know one major thing:

What would be the mechanism for that thing harming us?

Because something can't just be harmful in general or 'bother' the body in some vague way. The famous study in 1977 that after years of biased attempts to prove a harmful effect, finally established some kind of link between saccharin and some type of health concern (the study was since discredited and removed from labels in 2000), is not applicable to humans because rats have a mechanism that makes saccharine harmful to their bladders. It causes a precipitate in their urine, and this precipitate, not the saccharine itself, is what may possibly lead to more cancers. In humans, the fact that there would not be such a mechanism, means also that there is no such risk.

Cancer as I said about lung cancer and smoking is usually caused by a more predictable way of something harms the body and not some sort of vague direct effect of a chemical on the tissues or cells. This actually eliminates the mechanism that most people use to argue unknown effects of certain chemicals, that they might just 'somehow' result in a malignancy in their bodies. Studies attempting to prove cancer from pesticides were motivated by this assumption, and few of them have any affect on us at all, and the ones that do do so not because they are artificial chemicals but because they are natural chemicals that do something in particular like have an effect on an insect's reproductive system that might also affect humans in a similar way.

And I think the fact that most of the ill effects of substances that people actually have mentioned as being demonstrably harmful, like DES or milk, are only harmful in very in predictable ways proves the point that it really isn't very likely that some synthetic chemical pointedly designed to not be recognized by the body will have some unknown or unpredicted harm. No one in my entire query of why they believed artificial to be worse than any natural equivalent brought up a single established harmful substance that has none of the above known mechanisms for interacting with the body, and most of them are the most harmful because they are the most natural, like estrogen or milk. If it can't do any of the above things, it probably won't do too much. It just hasn't happened, as long as people have been watching for it to happen.

CASE FOR AVOIDING NATURAL HARMS

Essentially this leads me back to my more obvious reaction, that the more natural and central to how the body works something it is, the larger affect it can have, even such an unpredicted effect. That is why I have been so frustrated that artificial sweeteners are maligned more than sugar itself. Sweeteners that are not processed as energy are specifically designed to not cause the harm that sugar causes because our body doesn't recognize them, and thus they also have no mechanism for harming us.

And a substance's harm, even unknown, will be limited by its ability to impact major systems of the body. Salt, long thought to cause health problems, only affects the body's fluid retention and can't do much else. Radioactive iodine can kill off the thyroid, but it can't do anything else, even in large quantities. But things the body itself secretes like estrogen and insulin do hundreds of things, half of which we don't understand, and this means there could be many, and some unknown, consequences to introduce artificially. And this potential effect is proportional to its omnipresence in living things, not its foreignness or artificiality.

SCIENCE--THE TOOL-KIT OF CASE-MAKING, IS OUR FRIEND

The good news for me is that there is also not enough reason for the pessimism that science won't be able to figure out what will hurt us so that we are safer just with our own random irrational fear. In all of the cases of harm I mentioned, most historically harmful things have been, based on this principle, able to be eliminated early either in theoretical science or initial empirical data about how they affect living things. Thalidomide was demonstrably and highly tetratogenic in animals and never should have been used in pregnant women. DES was a reproductive hormone and its effect on the developing reproductive system was not a stretch. Radioactivity has a highly unusual capability of changing cells on a molecular level and more caution should have been taken before it was initially overused in medicine. The fact that these things did eventually cause harm was because good science was for whatever reason not applied, not that it wasn't available. With the scrutiny, even character assassination, that things like artificial sweeteners have received, it really does become highly unlikely that there are looming unknowns, given that these known mechanisms for their harming us have been eliminated.

The result? There probably are, to quote a recent talk by Jane Goodall at TED, probably about fifty chemicals in our bodies that weren't there fifty years ago. Sounds like a wild and crazy coincidence of the number fifty, but I have no problem with that estimate. Unless those substances have a way to harm us, though, they can't. As my sister Donna pointed out, a couple of those chemicals are probably prolonging her life, and her husband's, her mother's...

Interesting facts about the history of English dialects

2007-12-28T20:17:00.000-08:00

Many of the things I go off on are just me messing around with ideas I have no business writing about, but linguistics is one topic on which I actually know my stuff. Too bad it is very boring to most people and does me little good gaining a reading audience!

But a recent book that I read I would suggest to anyone. 'The history of the mother tongue and how it got that way' by Bill Bryson I devoured in the last few days--the closest thing I get to page-turning fluff. (Those sensitive to this kind of thing might avoid the chapter on swearing, even though it is quite fascinating). I have known quite a lot about this topic already (I taught a section of History of English at BYU), and normally I do prefer to get more into the technicalities, but this book is full of fairly interesting and amusing gee-whiz facts about English that most people would probably be interested in and also not know.

A few things I didn't know. Who doesn't love reading things translated into English around the world like this message on an eraser in Japan: 'This product is environmental kind and will self destruct in Mother Earth.

One fairly curious point that I think would surprise most people is that American pronunciation, rather than being 'newer' or more modern, is actually often a preservation of archaic pronunciations because they were isolated geographically during a particular period of change in the Isles themselves.

Most people are aware that in the UK there are some fairly diverse pronunciations, and that in a much bigger area, we over here, on the other hand, kinda sound all just Americans. This is because the colonization process ended up sampling and freezing snapshots of a larger and more rapidly changing set of dialectal varieties because it stashed particular variables across the ocean where they wouldn't change along with the others.

Also probably something I would add to this theory is that of the two Americans are put more on guard about how they say things. UK people have always been considering anything said over here abominable. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the word talented a 'vile and barbarous' coinage of America. It was actually first recorded in Britain in 1422; as most words, it happened there first and actually only gained the horrible notoriety that one would imagine when using the word talented (or customize, etc.) when noticed being said by Americans. Consequently many famous Anglophiles like Franklin and Jefferson are extremely apologetic about anything considered American--resulting in the likelyhood that everything different over here is likely to be older, and not newer, because we have less confidence to innovate.

For instance, most movies if they were portraying Queen Elizabeth I, would certainly have her pronounce vowel in 'plant' more like the 'ah' in 'want,' If anything they usually have historical figures sound even more British than the British today if that is possible. Turns out Bess would have said her /ae/'s just like 'Mericans do today.

The change to the long 'ah' vowel actually happened in the UK in the 1800's, so this would be an example of the US preserving the former pronunciation even though it usually gets characterized as being the upstart of the two speech communities. The UK is the hotseat of linguistic diversity and change in English and always has been, and the US is actually the more uniform, and it turns out, conservative, of the two.

New posting activity in my various blogs

2007-12-28T13:21:00.000-08:00

I had a few comments on my recent posting that were collectively a bit weightier than doing an italics or anything like that, although there is not yet a very good way to do this in my opinion. For now I thought I would try to make a separate note even though it doesn't really work as a time-sensitive post.

I am still less than a month into writing for public consumption. And it seems to me that there is a process involved when I publish something officially that makes the typos all of a sudden start glaring at me. Before I hit 'publish post,' mistakes are unimportant enough that they blend into the background. I think I remember that phenomenon from watching something print out on those old dot matrix printers!

Also, there is another wave a few weeks after I write something and I have totally forgotten what I wrote about that helps me revise further. So it turns out that I also do quite a bit of cleaning up of my longer documents a while after writing them.
Hence any of you who are reading my posts, first congratulations, and second you may want to wait a while. They do get better. I am generally a very good editor of others' writing, and I can even do it to my own after a while. I may have made this comment before but it bears repeating.

Also, a note about my two Huckabee posts. At first I thought I wasn't at all into the sad state of GOP primaries. That is probably the case because the nags they put out each time are so utterly depressing. A few of the issues, however, about Huckabee and Romney have interested me because of the obvious personal connection above just choosing a primary candidate, so I started writing about it. At first I assumed that I didn't have much to say as per usual. Then the length of the short blurb of a post I planned to do surprised me, but at first I hoped to keep it within one post.

Now I have no idea how much I will write about it, but my thoughts have currently evolved into two separate posts which make two fairly different though related statements, which I will state now in case actual them reading fails to communicate my intentions:

1. The GOP has a reason to want to crack down on evangelical hostility to Mormons rather than indulge it for any temporary peace they hope to keep within the party. Letting a group with specific standards for religious ideological uniformity anywhere in politics have their way on this one (Romney being automatically out)is IMO feeding an insatiable monster to which we will have to offer the sacrifice of more and more potential conservative candidates of various religions down the road, and wider public fear of that monster will scare more and more moderate voters away from the party.

2. Why the excuses for not doing #1 (from perspectives of those who don't want it to be done) are all washed up.

I would be interested in whether any of you who read the posts end up getting those general ideas out of them. If not, I have more work to do. If you do get where I am coming from, I would also be interested in what you think also. And if you are only going to read them once you might want to wait a while still!

Elephants at the party and the GOP's Mormon problem

2007-12-28T00:21:00.000-08:00

There is a saying that when elephants start dancing, mice get out of the way.

The GOP's most elaborate and embarrassing dance steps yet are for placating their large evangelical component. My feeling is that party leadership would prefer to condemn any hint of religious bigotry toward otherwise qualified candidates such as Romney. But instead they avoid it, hoping to keep peace with this feisty faction rather than risk its wrath themselves. And wrath is truly the word--this group is famous for it. And often they confuse the wrath of God with their own. They can turn any issue, seemingly as innocent as where people buy their toothpaste, into one of imminent hellfire for any unsuspecting discount shoppers, as they did in a recent documentary.

Most conservative leaders and strategists don't deny that some party constituents have deliberately sabotaged elections of otherwise viable Mormon GOP candidates--handing congressional seats and governorships to democrats by default. Beyond that, it starts getting tricky because, fairly so, people reject being broadly characterized when there is unpopular behavior involved.

To get beyond that tediousness, I will try sound as though I do not wish to speak definitively for all members of these religious groups or even know exactly what to call them. So because I know that ignorance about my religion and who exactly comprises it causes obvious mistakes, I will at least try to admit a certain amount of ignorance about who these groups are or what they call themselves--purposely avoiding overly-specific labels or absolute certainty about why their members do certain things (like picketing my church services, for example, which I know that someone does).

Whoever these exact people are and whatever they are called (evangelicals will suffice here until someone better informs me), the results, when they become politically active in the name of religion, are clear. Many examples could bolster my case but one is sufficiently illustrative: When Matt Salmon was running neck and neck for governor of Arizona in 2002, his Democratic opponent eventually gained the upper hand after a group of concerned citizens put banners on his billboards with the nasty suggestion to 'vote Mormon.'

The GOP's glossing over this problem as an unfortunate but inevitable reality isn't necessary, and the longer they do, the more candidates will be sacrificed to an appetite for religious ideological purity that is not appropriate in politics. If it is instead confronted once and for all, everyone will benefit--everyone except for those with indefensibly bigoted positions, of course. And history is not kind to those who are caught defending such positions in the name of any excuse. Consider how civil rights activists treat past historical figures that even tolerated the status quo about race relations--ultimately, we are held to a higher standard, the right standard.

And why should the GOP continue to risk an unfavorable association with those that they don't even support? It certainly should not be because of something as lame as never getting around to raising the issue. The issue being whether they are willing to hand over the reigns of the party that values a broad religious tent (the only party that does), to the left, whose leadership would ban everyone's sacred practices with Marxist zeal. Would this sacrifice be worth it simply so a privileged few can exorcise a personal religious beef?

Well as unfortunate as it is, the party leaders prefer to avoid this confrontation like they would avoid kicking a bees' nest, leaving them quite free to contaminate the reputation of the larger party with rhetoric about faiths (only including Mormons, but actually encompassing Islam and most bravely even Catholicism) that evangelicals happen to think are 'heretical.' Party leadership claim relative powerlessness in the face of such powerful beliefs, but why evangelicals even get to label heresy, and why placement of that label on candidates during elections is even appropriate at all, is a matter that they can definitively decide if they have the stomach for the unpleasant task.

Out of the context of this particular election (where they can avoid any more conceded larger point by insisting that the problem is actually Mitt himself and perhaps Mormonism itself), if the GOP could possibly drop the kid gloves they would do well to once and for all pose this question: can individual religious beliefs of any party constituents receive larger party sanction in any way under any circumstances?

If asked and answered in the affirmative, the question will simply mean that the party ceases to be a political party and starts to be a religion. Are there those who actually might prefer us to have religious elections every four years? That is something that does get said about the right, so we had better not do anything to confirm it if it doesn't fit. Most believers in the party itself do NOT want to give up the hope of reaching broad ideological consensus among those of different religions, but if they want to substitute that consensus for a future contest between narrow religious sects, they should by all means permit such internal squabbles. But I hope they welcome the party's pejorated reputation resulting from giving the right to religious ideological purification to a group that claims hellfire as the destination of a large number of the electorate.

And I mention that fact not because it is a point of religious contention with me personally (because it is--I don't think those who don't think as I do are going to hell, and I especially wouldn't relish the thought.) But rather I mention their curious focus on doom for the unbeliever because in my opinion when evangelical doctrine is scrutinized like they themselves would scrutinize Mormon doctrine now, is what won't go over particularly well with all of the supposed 'damned' voters (most of them). It turns out, Mormons are only a small number of the 'un-elect.' In fact, some particular brands of evangelical brethren are not even mutually assured salvation it seems, depending on who has irritated whom recently.

And evangelical belief in who may be hellbound goes beyond, in my opinion, their mere objective judgment of it in my opinion; it actually seems quite important to some religious persuasions that their fellow human beings are destined for eternal suffering. And one of the reasons they consider Mormons heretical is they don't share this feeling with them. When my oldest son was four he attended a 'non denominational' preschool. When he questioned, mildly, that those born in India or Africa and who would never hear Jesus Christ's name mentioned should have to suffer like any unbeliever, he was kicked out of the program. I am not making that up. She said she couldn't tolerate heresy in her home. And what was his heresy? My son simply thought that others' suffering seemed unfortunate and unfair in his mind. So the definition of a nonheretical doctrine must be one that also maintains a properly enthusiastic attitude about the damnation of others, and doesn't just acknowledge the fact of it.

In their most comfortable expression these non-heresies, evangelicals often say that Catholicism, just like Mormonism, ‘isn’t really Christian.’ But what evangelicals often say among friends or while teaching preschool children wouldn't ever be as surprising as their liberty to pass such notions for public political ones. Perhaps it is good that the GOP does not scrutinize all done in the name of private expressions of faith--because it is true that politics shouldn't be about such things. But the problem is that they are the only ones that don't currently use smearing someone with any associated religious belief as a strategy in politics. Allowing that kind of scrutiny of Mormons alone, if they allow any at all, will eventually sanction the scrutiny of all religious members of their party by democrats if Huckabee were to get the nomination by running on an anti-Mormon ticket.

So the question about Romney in particular this year shouldn't be whether Southern or Iowan evangelicals will excuse him for what they find problematic about Mormon doctrine. The question the GOP should make sure it asks and answers before sacrificing one more Mormon candidate like him is whether--in a world where any beliefs associated with a candidate's religion are mete to rule out his candidacy--evangelicals will fare any better with their critics than the Mormons do with now with theirs.

They should hope so because refusing to deal with this issue will hasten the day when religious beliefs are held up for approval right along with the candidate's other qualifications. Democrats will eagerly encourage any sense among the electorate that the whole politics thing is actually about what attitudes and prejudices they might have about this or that faction of the right. They would love it if rather than having a debate about conservative principles, which as a party we all think will win every time they are actually tried, the electoral process should instead be about whether the public shares individual religions' positions about Catholicism, or even which principles they think should be basic to Christianity itself. Of course no one will agree about any faith issue in a political election--that forum for discussing them isn't appropriate.

And thus the vote for no religion at all will win the day. Why didn't Marx himself think of anti-Mormonism as a way to have the populace vote against religious expression? It would have been quite effective if it had been tried just this way.

How far does it get the GOP to not deal with where this is all headed, when the reality is that if Huckabee were to win the nomination, someone on the left will waste no time pointing out that his denomination believes that Catholics aren’t Christian, and thus along with Mormons, Jews and Muslims, probably 95 percent of the world’s population is going to hell? Aside from that bleak statistic not being very enthusiastic on the accomplishment of the all-important work of creationism of the evangelicals' God, this opinion just won't be something that wins elections. And so unless GOP leaders actually feel comfortable voicing those types of opinions they better be prepared to at least deal with them, because by association, most people will think they share them.

For now the GOP is trying to bide time, allowing this large, loud and powerful portion of their base to skate by on this one. But the risks of failing to maintain the ideal of religious tolerance that the larger party embraces are dire--and GOP leaders that attempt to save themselves while this group publicly embarrasses the rest of us (elephants really shouldn't dance at all, frankly) will like mice, look cowardly and small.

Branjolina, Schadenfreude, and The Perils of Pygmalion

2007-12-27T21:39:00.000-08:00

This post is proof that I listened first to my mom and later (a little) as an English major for four years. Themes of great literature are truly timeless and can continue to give insight in unexpected places. Even if some of them are kind of snoozers. Just Kidding, Mom.:

After the new focus given by My Fair Lady, everyone seems to have forgotten that George Bernard Shaw’s main theme of Pygmalion is right out of Paradise Lost. Rather than adopt the happily ever after theme of the Greek legend that gives the play its name, Shaw's Pygmalion, Higgins, is given a Miltonic twist: he is the lonely, anguished creator, having worked his masterpiece and then unexpectedly betrayed by it. Pygmalion himself, in designing the perfect woman, has only his hubris to blame in his mistaken hope of the perfect woman; while she seems like a great idea, she would be too good for him. Higgins, the perennial bachelor, blows it with even a real woman. He sours to her because as a common ordinary man, he is unable to cope in a real relationship and is threatened by either fault or perfection in the end.

Rather than a stone Venus that is model for legendary perfection in women, a wife must be a flesh and blood partner. It is quite the dilemma that we are all in. We want perfection in others, their faults of course being obvious obstacles for us in many ways, but we all seem to resent it quite strongly if the ideals we hope for in others are actually approximated.

I was standing in the supermarket line today and was actually drawn to one of the stories on Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and their shocking recent statements about their daughter’s race. Their partnership and resulting daughter is the ultimate product of Hollywood and the supporting culture—youth and beauty are everything, the ultimate hallmarks of success.

But also running strong through our culture is an intense counter-current of resentment of anyone who successfully attains those hallmarks. People are hated simply because they happen to have the bad luck of winning the game we are all playing. Angelina Jolie said openly that she feels that her blonde daughter will be an ‘outcast’ in her world. She didn’t say, but it also may be such resentment or resulting lack of an ability to relate to this child that they haven’t had to rescue from a desperate third world situation, that keeps her daughter home with hired help when the rest of the family are out recreating together. Jolie and Pitt typify physical beauty that our culture craves but they are also as much of a product of its unanalyzed values; they are successful, but in order to be able to handle that success they must attain new extremes of reflexively exorcising their collective guilt for that success rather than simply enjoying it.

Because resentment and jealousy are such fundamental human feelings, the Hollywood compulsion to the third world is only an extreme example (Hollywood is extreme about everything) of everyone’s natural tendencies. We are more comfortable relating to those who we feel have less to resent for or be jealous of. Thus we seem to value cultivating proximity (for comparison's sake) to people who are less rich, less smart, less attractive—we all want to stand next to the person in the picture that makes us look thin and not the one that doesn’t. This is obvious and harmless. But we err when this comfort crosses over into the desire to build important relationships on such a stratification of qualities rather than a real partnership of flesh and blood equals. This is the fallacy that there exists an actual idealization (like Rousseau’s) of a type humanity untouched by the material rewards, such purity creating access to a type of virtue that the rest of us miss, sullied by the aims we know in our hearts to possess. But Rousseau, among many others, probably is less attracted to the virtue of unspoiled humanity as he is repelled by the threat we all feel any time anyone else succeeds in playing the game that we all try to win ourselves.

In the case of their biological child, Jolie and Pitt are coming up empty. Hollywood activism is a natural magnification of extreme idealization of virtue once its possessor is safely judged to be non threatening. And of course no one is knocking Hollywood activism, not even in this blog; the problem is the resulting lack, when there is this simplistic perception of virtue and compassion, of any basis for positive empathy toward anyone others than someone we feel safely superior to. Apparently there is difficulty, in this extreme Hollywood example, (just like in the worlds of Bernard Shaw and Milton in a far flung corner of the world), in trying to have natural familial relations based on anything else. But when you have defined virtue in other people by making sure they are safely ‘have nots’, so you they can’t resent them for any reason, what do they do when your own child is one of the ‘haves’? Jolie elaborated thusly, saying that since her daughter has had everything handed to her, in Jolie's mind her daughter will miss out on something fundamentally important for qualification as a valued human being.

This is relating to others with the mistaken view of a Pygmalion creator figure. In this way the Jolie/Pitts are only an extreme example (again, Hollywood) of the awkwardness that often results when people try to have interpersonal relationships that don’t agitate any of our various conflicting/difficult natures, and our mistaken guesses about what qualities in others we would actually value if we were to choose them AS their creators. Parenting only brings such normal creative instincts to the surface in an obvious fashion, as did the situation in Paradise Lost and Pygmalion. Of course we are taught that we are to give our children every advantage—even the ones we didn’t have ourselves. We are to selflessly slave away time and resources to make sure that they succeed even in ways we ourselves didn’t. But then we are faced with the anguish of the Miltonic hero: if we succeed in our creation, will we be able to relate to them as equals? Will they betray us once they are more powerful? And thus will our fear of such betrayal cause us to preemptively feel threatened by them as we are often threatened by others?

Wouldn't we rather just have our children be like us after all, rather than follow through with that idealistic parenting? Fact is, many parents do just that. They set out to give their children a leg into a better world and then pull back if they cusp it. In an interesting study of parents of older children, parents end up being closer not to the children who have above else lived lives their parents approve of, but those who live lives more closely to their own. We teach our children that nice, unselfish squeaky wheels shouldn't even ask for grease. But of course we grease squeaky wheels just like everyone else, and thus our children who are perceived to be more needed by us have our closer, more involved parenting, while those that dutifully listen to us and go and do as we tell them are probably going to wind up less close, after less need for our parenting interaction.

This manifests itself in a number of common ways, and not just despairing as Jolie has that your child doesn’t blend into your carefully-crafted multi-ethnic hoard. Pretty much every child or younger sibling for that matter gets some type of lecture about how, (when that child has actually benefited from better circumstances that we seem to be all seeking for ourselves and our families), he didn’t really have to attend the much more educational school of hard knocks like we did.

It can quickly get much worse when the resentment of others who have 'had it easy' is unsoftened by any such familial relationships. Those who we are confident are worthless (unschooled by the reality of our real struggles) because of their riches or other success can be objects of open scorn, even violence. Thousands were victims of brutality and murder during the French Revolution simply for having what their murderers wanted for themsselves, so easy is it to translate jealousy into the depersonification necessary for the ultimate injury. And this is one of the tragedies of Pygmalion and each of our lives. When we are faced with a person who might have more than us (in any real or perceived way, and who really can escape our potential for envy) we try to level the playing field against them with our own denial of affection. Thus the rich person in the mansion or whoever might qualify for resentment (really in need of compassion just as anyone) is denied the most fundamental humane treatment of all.

This retaliatory impulse makes us much think we are more comfortable with others whose achievements do not exceed our own, even if they represent no actual detraction to our circumstances. The unfairness is obvious and it creates a situation where unfortunately no one can win this game we have made up. By definition Jolie's daughter lacks worth because she has the advantages we are trying to make sure that everyone has. We establish standards as a society, but rather than celebrate when anyone meets them, we of course express natural resentment and hostility. Resenting others for what they have is actually such a common emotion that our language has no word for it, which is very typical. Our language ironically seems to label those faults and/or good qualities which we perceive as important, but be less comfortable expressing the ones which ones actually are real weaknesses.

Thus we must borrow words from German to describe the very common feeling of delighting in another’s misfortune (or the reverse, which I am talking about here), because it is so common and ordinary that probably we never need to ever talk about it happening. In the Chinese orthography system, an argument is represented by two symbols for the female form. Three women are the word for gossip. Two women, or people to be fair, apparently get together for the purposes of labeling the faults of a third, absent, person. But the characteristic of resenting the success of others probably would not ever be discussed in this way, thus no need to label it. In fact no need to admit it.

Why is it that we feel this automatic resentment for the occupants of the larger house on the hill? They did nothing to us. Their attainment of success does not detract from our own enjoyment of what we have. Yet greed in our language and our culture, is a much bigger problem than the real problems that actually cause us all to suffer. Not one of us has immediate circumstances lessened by the fact that someone else has more. What actually causes pain and anguish are the everyday, small expressions of common resentment and hostility from the actual people in our lives, not nameless, faceless ‘wealthy, greedy, selfish, or materialistic’ villains, though it certainly seems to be easier to think so.

Like Schadenfreude, those qualities which barely have a name, all around us, are our real enemies. Which are the more important virtues: niceness/meanness or benevolence/malice? The answer seems to me to be that the qualities in our culture, or that we think are important in others, are inversely proportional to their actual identification as such. Because we are unwilling to deal with people's real faults, and unable to deal with those without faults, we have a great deal of difficulty being able to take comfort in any of the relations near us, and even worse can indulge openly violent hostility to those far away. Because of this complete surrender to common hostilities and resentments of others, we may have to settle for inventing a wife out of clay or a family out of a third world.

Huckabelievers: Don't find yourself Huckstered--his excuses are weak

2007-12-16T17:46:00.000-08:00

It seems like every time Huckabee opens his mouth about Mitt Romney and the Mormon Church recently, he needs two or three excuses to explain what he said, why he didn't say something else, why he waited so long to say it, etc. It seems like if someone is always needing excuses for it, it might be a bad sign about what he seems to be talking about. And unfortunately one of the things he has talked about lately is that he was concerned about one of Mormonism's doctrines.

And it seems the larger religion of which he is an active part, evangelical Christianity, is also quite often coming up with excuses about why it is that even mentioning a candidate's religion in a political campaign is appropriate, much less their dubious stance toward these other ideologies. They particularly attempt to justify why some of them oppose members of those groups in primaries in their own party, often causing the democrat to win as a result.

These groups as I mentioned sometimes respond to what little scrutiny they receive about the issue with the concern that Mormons, belonging to a church named 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' since its inception in 1830, are not Christian. But would this concern fly about a Jewish candidate? Evangelical attitudes seem the same toward a number of other groups to which the 'not Christian' label wouldn't ever apply, including Judaism and Islam, with slams on new-ageism, paganism and whatever 'ism they can think of on top sounding extremely similar.

If I had to guess it is just an instinctual response to anything that presents ideological competition for these religions to scare their faithful into action. And the use of preaching is a much wider mechanism for interaction with the flock. Billy Graham participated in a documentary alleging that discount stores were threatening the souls of unsuspecting budget shoppers. But the fact is that preaching at the pulpit is an effective way to clarify any threat from any evil, in this case against threatening candidates, and pointedly do so when the collection plate goes around also helps I imagine.

And but it is important to distinguish that using this threat as an excuse is baffling because, unless candidates are really running in a race of religion and there is not actually a wider body of political philosophy that unifies conservatives, Mormon candidates pose no loss of political power as would perhaps a pro-choice candidate.

Thus the fact that they believe there should be some kind of showdown when a candidate is among the less tolerated groups highlights the fact that some factions on the right DO think that it is perhaps not really a political contest but a religious one. The larger party, which does not feel this way, should of course be careful giving any such sanction--after all this is one of the spectres the left waves to attract voters away from our party. We would bring that spectre to life if we indulged such excuses.

Thus holding the religiously intolerant to account to avoid these problems will have wider implications than just this election. But this election itself will make it much harder to turn a blind eye, particularly recent attention to statements made by Mike Huckabee a 'religious conservative' and former preacher himself. If those like Huckabee continue to make ridiculous statements about Mormons, eventually they will attract enough of this negative attention to party infighting that no one will ever forget that crazy cousin party leaders keep trying to hide in the political family.

I think Huckabee was relying on just this practice of turning a blind eye to evangelicals' issues when he made recent statements about Romney's faith. Probably many heard about it; I did, and I don't follow the whole sad saga of GOP primaries closely. But others, and not just Mormons or their friends, found Huckabee's recent claims dubious. He said that he was inclined to be tolerant and fair toward Romney and Mormons personally, but that he was concerned that Mormons held the view that Christ and Lucifer were brothers. Just concerned, that is all.

Right. I am at best skeptical here. Without a better explanation than that, this 'concern' makes much more sense as a deliberate slander on Mormons in general and Romney in particular as his rival. I am sure that Huckabee and his people are somehow aware of how easy it is to stir up this animosity and fear among those who are so inclined toward Mormonism, and rather than to choose a high profile moment to rise above it, he instead jumped in the fray.

So that's the reason just being concerned about Mormonism, doesn't wash. If Huckabee were actually interested (even concerned) about this issue, he wouldn't have had to raise it with Romney himself in the context of a national political election.

Any average, every-day Mormon has some kind of an answer to this question, precisely because it has been asked so long and so often by similar detractors. Any church representative of average learning or expression could give a fairly basic explanation of their thinking that all beings living or otherwise are siblings on the spirit level. Basically anyone that has a name--Lucifer, Jesus, Sally, Arnold, anyone--is the spirit brother or sister of any other, because all of us call God 'Father.' That doesn't speak to whether Sally or Arnold are spiritually identical, even humans have the equivalent of some kind of half siblings, so their is plenty of conceptual room for an understanding that the belief that having a common father can make brother and sister of various spirit entities in a way that even if not consistent with their personal views of God or the human soul, few people would find 'concerning' if explained in this way.

Thus it would be very easy for someone to understand at least how Mormons themselves feel about this issue without the necessity creating some strange association of Jesus Christ with the devil at the national level to besmirch a candidate in a GOP primary. It is very easy for any basically intellectual person to get the whole story on this issue without raising it in this type of debate.

I also doubt the validity of his second excuse, that Huckabee felt compelled to make this statement about Mormon doctrine because he feared silence would imply acceptance. Somehow, though, most high-status members of the GOP, such as Reagan who has spoken warmly of the Mormon church at BYU, and George Bush senior who welcomed Romney to speak on this topic at his library (and both who have met amicably with Mormon church leadership), have been able to avoid coming down on either side of the issue. No one was confused that these presidents might be closet Mormons if they neglected to speak harshly on one of the church's possible doctrines. The last four presidents, actually, have been extremely positive about Mormons in general without feeling obligated to endorse or even mention any specific doctrine or other.

Nothing really makes sense here except Huckabee's eagerness or at least willingness to make some kind of cheap shot to access ambient negativity toward Mormonism among his potential supporters. The GOP continues to allow this, and this is perhaps why they often give excuses of their own that don't wash. There seems to be the belief that in general Mormons are an expendable group and no hardened secular politician will grieve for them if they are out of the party. They are consolidated in western states we don't need, etc.

Even if GOP leaders were to think such states of affairs are unfortunate, they must use the excuse for inaction that doing anything is hopeless, because it is obvious that evangelicals among them tolerate Mormonism less than losing political control. But if the GOP were willing to talk about this problem in the open, the obvious either or fallacy in their thinking would emerge: Mormon conservatives should not just be assumed damaged goods for risk of angering evangelical constituents; in fact, appealing to the reasonable among evangelical groups would clearly benefit all parties. These Mormon candidates (at least the conservative ones) would actually wield that power in a manner more highly favorable to many evangelical political objectives, more so than even the statistical average among their evangelical brothers, and definitely more so than the resulting democrat they may help into office.

In fact it is easy to point to elections that Mormons win, in a wide variety of states. And they are particularly able to win in states when a large contingent of out of state religious conservatives doesn't come around with their usual anti-Mormon tracting. So this would be an easy one: leave your proselyting for your missionaries--the Mormons do. Not one of the members campaigns for any candidate as part of their church affairs, they wouldn't risk their tax exemption among other things.

But there is the state of Mormons and then their direction. As they are, Mormons are an increasingly untapped leadership resource, that if the GOP continues to automatically rule out, will be a big waste. Mormons are the MOST Republican of ALL GROUPS (Yes of course I know that there are exceptions--even one in ten is a very strong conservative trend though that ten percent represent a large number of people). In the 2000 election, for example, about 90% of the voters in Utah cast for Bush. It was the third election in a row in which the democrat came in THIRD (remember Perot?) in that state. I would think that the party faithful would think this tendency made the Mormon component of conservatism to be desired and cultivated rather than thrown to the dogs.

Mormon percentage of the population could even grow and even out among the states. A presence within the party that is enthusiastically supportive of both party candidates and principles you would think that the GOP would cultivate and emulate rather than automatically subject it to capricious abuse to keep them from running or worse voting.

Another GOP excuse might be that they don't really know any very well on the east coast, but surely Mormons are pretty creepy, right? I think we need to go no further than two words: Mitt Romney. In fact, Mormon Republicans are like Romney, among the most user-friendly conservatives around. They don't tend to have quite as many skeletons in the closet that will come out on election eve like that DUI that everyone hoped would just go away. No MAJOR behavioral and character flaws like some of the conservative ideological leaders have been embarrassing the party with. (And though Rush Limbaugh has been making many of these points like a champ, this one he has avoided, for obvious reasons).

I am not saying that Mormons are perfect--they aren't. And in fact a fair criticism of Mormons (that I will even admit to myself) tends to be of their hypocrisy because of their high standards. We do have a pretty long and strict list of behavior and character restrictions, and so of course we will have a hard time living up to all of them. The fact that Mormons are not perfect is fair and I won't argue (even though it really is obvious and thus unhelpful)--but for GOP leaders looking for candidates to prop up, it is at least somewhat handy that Mormons have these high aspirations in the first place. They tend to at least limit the amount of say substance abuse, womanizing, or gambling that any GOP candidate or intellectual will obviously get rubbed into his face.

So what I am saying is that although true, the excuse by anyone that Mormons don't live up to their own standards 100%, having those standards at all allows GOP leadership some amount of comfort that a Mormon candidate, increasingly a higher and higher percentage of the true-believing conservatives out there, won't end up with some horrible failing to sabotage them at the last minute, or the first minute for that matter.

It is so hilarious to watch the likes of Chris Matthews, with obvious tedious frustration that there is little to smear Romney with. ('Moderate' candidate fans, like those for Guiliani and McCain, just wait until after the primary to see the big party the media has pulling them down because of their personal lives, and I hope you will be happy to at least have gotten rid of Romney). But for now, I think assuming that he won't be the candidate and they have to use all their dirt now, Matthews keeps running shows with his own excuse that he has nothing to smear him with: Who IS this Mitt Romney? What do we REALLY know about him? (He tries to sound as if he hasn't actually been trying REALLY HARD to get to know Mitt Romney, at least to dig up some amount of dirt on him).

But more importantly for the party, even if Mormons must remain a necessarily untapped resource for conservatives for whatever excuse that well they just seem oh-so-unsavory, there are those eager to point highlight the situation and say that it represents wider superstitious bigotry on the right, to the detriment of all conservatives and the GOP, even though the left are no great fans of Mormons themselves.

My feeling is that at least one of these people is going to eventually get sick of using tired excuses and someday decide to do something about the tanking Mormon candidates get from those in their own party. When this is addressed we will not only have some increasingly better candidates to run, but we will honestly, without excuses, be able to say that we stand up for freedom of religion, and that we value a candidate's faith but don't evaluate it in the voting booth. What the evangelicals are doing would change that and no one will be happier than the democrats.

Mitt Romney, Mormons and Modern fashion

2007-12-13T14:41:00.001-08:00

A few years ago I saw an obstetrician on one of those Maternity Ward type of shows and I found myself thinking automatically: ‘That man is Mormon.’ Why? I am not sure, because really the only thing that I could tell about him outside of his professional context was his dress: a dark suit, white shirt and tie. But possibly, that combination is getting more and more stereotyped as something that Mormon men do.

It occurred to me that maybe this image of the power suit, really only popularized in the 80’s, just happened to coincide with a period of explosive growth in the church’s worldwide missionary prominence: the widespread image of two youths in white shirts walking down the road happened to become universally recognizable also at a transitional period where boys' serving missions got closely associated with with their level of religious devotion, considered more of a commandment after this period than just an option.

The result of some of these coincidences is that if I had to guess, we have in recent times begun down a fork in the road of dressing in a manner unique to our culture that might actually end up giving this clothing symbolic significance for us like other formalized religious apparel has.

If you think about it, it already has such nearly arbitrary significance. White shirts don’t universally carry the connotation of respect or holiness that would brand a righteous priesthood bearer as such, we have really infused that meaning onto them over time and after associating that combination with men who are missionaries, bishops or GA's--and happen to be displaying particularly high levels of religiosity while wearing them.

And other religious clothing is probably quite similar, the difference is the respective age of the religions. The Mormon church is less than 200 years old, Catholicism, Islam and Hinduism, where religious clothing is more pronounced, have been around 1000+ years. So I think the small changes in psychology of wardrobe can be pretty small and end up adding up down the road.

Now in priesthood bearers the situation is that what was originally a purely cultural result of fashion (Joseph Smith obviously didn’t make up the missionary dress code) ends up being a barometer for the wearer’s level of devotion.

So that obstetrician on t.v. (and turns out he IS a local Stake President here in Beaverton), was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and colored tie—big deal. Right now those are all available in any department store. When the current fashions get very far away from that, though, it will be harder and harder to blend in if we are still outfitting ourselves that way for religious purposes, particularly if it becomes any kind of strict code (like it already is with missionaries). Over time this costume WILL communicate a man’s religion outwardly in this obvious way.

Hypergraphia

2007-12-10T21:42:00.000-08:00

It is quite possible that I have this problem, at least in addition to some of my other ones.

Is 'nice' a compliment?

2007-12-10T10:21:00.000-08:00

Related to my former post is an aside on the word 'nice' and its recent social currency.

I need to look up the history. Probably best if I post this before I don't.

But what makes me ask the question is the recent fact that 'he's such a nice guy' has become a famous insult. I tried to think about whether that is ever the case with women and to my knowledge it isn't.

I think this reveals different cultural expectations about men and women. I think women are expected to just tell people what they want to here all the time and men are given the freedom to actually be themselves--at least with each other, with their wives it may be a different story--by telling people how they really think about things.

Anyone have any thoughts on what you think about that? I know people have differing preferences with whether they want to have people be open with them (when that openness would entail criticism) but I do think it is interesting that 'nice guy' has become a universal pan, and if I am not right about why it doesn't extend to women I think it would be interesting to know why.

(Also, this question was a potential poll question because of similar things I was interested in, but I am not sure the poll venue works for it exactly, esp because I am not able to enter (yet) multi-question polls to do multivariate analysis).

Truly Sincere, or Absence of Malice?

2007-12-10T00:39:00.000-08:00

It is fascinating operating within a culture where the members believe very strongly in ethical rules governing behavior and interaction.

Obviously to those that know, I belong to a religion and so do many of my family and friends. The religion influences our values, obviously, but I think we also borrow many of them from the larger culture. Some evidence of this I saw recently was a survey circulated among some of my family about what character traits we least liked in other people. I was quite shocked that so many of them (and I very honestly can't remember WHO at this point so I am not thinking names) chose dishonesty or insincerity as the thing they most disliked of all the possible things there are to dislike. I think this would be a value borrowed from the larger culture--a Billy Joel song among other things-- because I honestly can't imagine specific prominence in terms of our particular religion.

Although in reality I don't know what good it would do at all, seeing as how any benefits of sincerity would be gleaned from primary reliance on benevolence, or the absence of malice, what I chose.

We are talking BAD character here--so I am not casting any votes for dishonesty or defending it. But this vote threw me me for a loop. In my mind, there is very little to fear from any person who goes around being dishonest or insincere with me UNLESS there is ALSO some kind of other factor to make it harmful to me.

Otherwise, why would it particularly bother me? What would I actually be worried about?

That is why the character trait I picked to most dislike is malice. Malice would be required for anything that someone does, even for things that are dishonest or insincere, to actually be harmful to anyone. So ultimately something like malice or its synonym must exist as the primary bad trait about others, because without it, pretty much anything bad they would do would not be that bad. I am certainly willing to consider various sides of this, and am actually asking for any perspective on the evils of insincerity as a real question and not as a rhetorical one because I haven't heard their reasoning. I know that we hear this mantra beat culturally, that is why I suspect it as another cultural myth of sorts.

But because I have been thinking about this issue so long, though, I have put a twist on the whole subject. One thing I was probably going to post on eventually was our recent discovery that I have a neurological problem where periodically my brain waves slow drastically (they have seen this on an EEG and my husband has pushed a button on a machine that bounds when it starts and stops so it is a fairly clear cut thing). It causes me to start doing bizarre things that I have no previous reason to do, I do not premeditate them, and do not often remember them afterward. These activities can actually be quite complex and seem like normal things that some people would do, at least in some contexts. This neurological state is called chronic sleepwalking, in its extreme form, though my brain waves don't always slow enough to put me all the way to sleep. Sometimes they just slow to make me act funny.

Before we started trying to figure out what I was doing, my way of existing was probably like that of most anonymous people day to day. Probably the things that most of us do from minute to minute are not checked up on by other people to see if we are doing what we think we are doing or what we thought we did. So a lot of the time if people do things that are strange, questionable, out of character, or even something like 'evil' and we really don't have any awareness of what we are doing, we wouldn't even necessarily ever know it.

I have known almost all my life that I have a sleep disorder but only lately did I figure out the rest of it by having my husband start paying attention to all the things I was doing and then checking them out with me afterward. It always seemed kind of like I had poltergeists that moved things from the place I thought I put them, and minor things like that.

Only recently did it seem like there were major gaps in my memory record and major inconsistent accounts between things I thought I had done and the things observed by others. So after a major episode was documented on an EEG machine (it is like Santa Claus, it knows when you are sleeping and knows when you are awake) Slade started checking up on me to see if I had done things intentionally or not. He will ask me if I actually remember things and during strange behavior he has some tests that he will perform. (Apparently if he says 'hey hon, why don't you take off what you are wearing and run down the block?' and I say 'OK' and start to do it (mercifully he doesn't allow me to get too far), rather than rolling my eyes or whatever I would usually do, he knows to start intervening in other things I have planned for the night, too.)

So that gets back to my initial point. Intention renders behavior either it malicious or benevolent. So honesty or sincerity, IMO, in interpreting someone's behavior is only important if we assume that we don't really know their intention and it would make the difference in whether or not what they were doing in some crucial respect.

So why do people think that sincerity is so important? Either they trust the people in their lives or they don't and this IMO has more to do with whether they choose to. They can see benevolence or malice in others' actions pretty much whatever they are.

Ironically because of my neurological disorder I am probably not to be trusted for a true account of my actions on occasion, and I would probably had anyone been watching me for evidence of this, be thought to be dishonest. But even dishonesty itself comes down largely to intention. Obviously if I have no memory of behavior I will not be able to account for it, but I think I am an extreme example of why this can't exactly always be held against people or seen as evidence of a character flaw. If people wanted to think that bad enough they could, but I will refer them to my neurologist.

Probably my ability to account for all my actions and wherabouts is not exactly threatening to anyone, so this is also an extreme example of why malicious intention is always the more basic fear.

And what about whether it comes down to being sincere or being nice? What would we choose in others then? Socially being nice is rewarded instead, for sure. When I am in control of my behavior on my end I choose to hang everything I think out there. Whatever else one thinks about me usually people know where they stand and they don't have to interpret the subtleties of what I do or wait to hear something I said about them. I don't say things behind people's back that I wouldn't say to their face if they asked. But I don't usually experience this trait being rewarded.

'Nice' people often engage in telling people what they want to hear at some point. This would be fine if some of them didn't eventually end up shocking us when we find out it isn't exactly how they feel all the time. But most of us are human, and respond to the humanness of others by acknowledging that occasionally reasonable people disagree. Disagreements are fine with those who trust in others intentions, however, and as I said, that is usually a choice rather than a result of their being inherently trustworthy.

One of the funny things about why insincerity is dangerous is not because people are insincere per se but because they end up communicating their real feelings to us in some other way, probably indirect, and perhaps again, as a suprise if they had first garnered our trust by doing the other. But the real problem was not them being insincerely nice it was them being genuinely not nice. If the reverse were true, that they tell us all the things they think that are critical to us and their behavior is benevolent we have no reason to fear them at all.

People love to talk a good game in terms of what their esteem of others is, but haven't we all had someone articulate how much they like and care about us (probably for the benefit of third parties and how they look) when they can't resist sending different messages under the surface? We all have some sort of feeling about what people feel about us whatever they say to us personally, and we usually don't prioritize directness in this respect.

And in terms of vauing honesty in others in relation being to my religion--it isn't. I think it interesting that the commandment that we have related to honesty specifically mentions bearing false witness of others--again, specifically making the true representation of facts only relevant to what we do to others.

(See my post on witchcraft for how if we have malicious intent toward others, we will see it, regardless of their actual natures.)

All I know is, I am right

2007-12-09T02:52:00.000-08:00

If the title hooked you, obviously I don't defend anything so outrageous. And I swear I wouldn’t believe people have actually said this kind of thing to me if it weren't still ringing in my ears.

I have given up fitting in because of being a heretic to the beliefs of any group, but one indelicate situation is what to do when someone raises a question that I don't know how to answer without awkwardly taking a stand. At a party I was asked "Mormon's don't actually X, do they?" I thought, hm, if I don't answer he will think what he has heard is true but if I do, I know these people will go home thinking that I talked about my religion inappropriately at a party.

In these situations I often just wait for the inevitable declaration of confident belief that inevitable follows the claim to honestly raise an issue of intellectual inquiry. An atheist will eventually tell me, letting me off the hook that all he knows is that he couldn’t possibly believe in such superstitious nonsense as I do, other times religious people who think I don’t quite pass the believer’s litmus test, ends the discussion by declaring they are right by the fact that they have a personal knowledge given to them by God.

Well good heavens. If God was telling you the answers, why do you bother going to other sources afterward? Why would anyone then stoop to talk to lowly ‘ol me?

One night though I felt cornered. It was probably for the first time that I put my toe into the waters of responding to 'the issues' so to speak. At my prof’s office at Stanford, (he had become my close friend and still is), the two of us were alone and he earnestly brought up an issue about what at the time he thought I probably believed. Confidently dismissive, at the beginning of the year he had found out I was from Utah (supposedly) and was a Mormon (correctly) and therefore was politically conservative (wrongly). I actually thought I was liberal then, but I was guilty by association.

He started the ball rolling on how I could possibly believe what I did, etc., and that he was so incredulous to conservatism that he told me he was guilty about his purchase of a teak coffee table. I learned that night that teak is a rain forest wood and not on the list of ethical purchases. I also learned that there is such a list.

Oh dear, I thought. I had no particular views on the rain forest at the time—I swear. I was only 21 years old and was barely holding my head above water in a MA program I was ill prepared for. I hadn’t even ever VOTED before, missing the previous election my freshman year at BYU because I was only 17.

But I thought I would dive in if I could because I was concerned for his guilt, and decided I would do what I could to assuage him. How could I help him perhaps not feel so guilty, I was wondering? So I innocently shared a study that I had just heard. Paleontologists investigating land in South America, convinced that a particular rain forest was the first thing that had ever grown there, thought it would be interesting to look at what was underneath. The reasoning--something that was thought to have always been around would reveal what was before any life forms or some such.

What they found under this primeval forest: corn and charcoal. Basically under the fragile rain forest was evidence of slash and burn agriculture. This particular forest had sprung up rather quickly in human terms after aggressively destructive activity.

My teacher progressed through the various emotional responses to me that I have gotten quite frequently since, but it stuck out that night as a notable first attempt to offer a political opinion.

What baffles me is that I can’t exactly find out why after someone has 1, engaged a young and naive woman on ideas that she swears she is indifferent to, and 2, getting that reluctant and apologetic opinion, 3, that person hostilely rejects the opinion and makes a personal slight. I swear he brought the rain forest up with me pointedly because he heard I felt differently--probably he felt I would be an easy convert.

The irony is that I probably would have been, and but for reactions like that I have not exactly allied with liberalism over the years. For the first time I realized how fragile political views are to being attacked on both sides. I could have easily before that night concluded (like I so often was prone to thinking at BYU) that conservatives were the ones with one-sided opinions or closed minds. That night I learned that on both sides are feelings that hover very low above a person’s personal opinion of their worth as an ethical being—and that it is best to not, even if that person swears what they want is a debate on the issues—to take any of the bait.

I don’t need to leave it at this vague characterization, however, because I actually remember clearly what he said. The sound of it, the sudden emotional outburst, and the look on his face are in my memory forever. All of a sudden, without the kind of warning that would have made me at least TRY to pull back, he asked,“You WANT it to be true that people didn’t destroy the environment, don’t you?”

I was stung, but after a minute, answered with confidence, coming into my stride as a newly-registered voter with the opinions to match: ‘ABSOLUTELY—why would I WANT anything else?’

But the specific argument is beside the point. I am still weak on this issue, and don’t have what I would say is a strong opinion. I have some opinions that are strong, like believing fervently that democracies should respect freedoms and civil rights, but in terms of the environment (or the declared issues about the environment, anyway), I haven’t obsessed on the facts of this or that investigation. If I were to pick what I WANTED to believe and what I DIDN’T, however, it would be easy for me to tell anyone that I intend to pick opinions helped them avoid the guilty burden they carry around on their shoulders.

My teach said that he felt guilty about what he had bought; I was trying to help. Honestly I was offering what at the time as a politically naive girl, I thought that he wanted and that would make him feel better. I certainly didn’t want to say something that would make him shout at me and bring me nearly to tears.

So like Nietzsche observed, once I see something, it is everywhere. I get lulled into thinking that someone wants to have a discussion with me, and without knowing it I cross a boundary into inviting a personally hostile comment about myself and my intentions. I asked him why on earth he had started to yell. He didn’t know. It served as an instructive incident, however, because I am usually very willing to stay on the said subject as long as someone wants without becoming personal. Disagreement is a touchy subject however, even for Stanford prof’s that don’t appear to possibly be threatened by 21 year olds ‘from Utah.’ I didn’t realize that I had without knowing it disturbed his ethical system. He had laughed and toyed with mine—but his was sacred.

December 8—Grandma Hicks Day

2007-12-08T12:37:00.000-08:00

There is probably little I can get for Grandma this year that she might want or be able to use. But I will try this forum of public tribute as one of the only things I could think of.

Probably most of the things I think are good about myself come from my mother. I don’t know where the things that are bad about myself came from, and I though I will probably bring some of those things up, I swear I won't attribute them to anyone, particularly not my parents!

My mom taught me how to write. Public school didn’t really do it for me. I took all the AP English classes that Tucson had to offer and ultimately I learned what I have from mom sitting down at the rounded formica counter and teaching me from square 1.

She taught me at the word level, at the sentence level, and at the idea level.

So I guess more than teaching me to write, she taught me how to think. Most of the time I go to compose my thoughts for a Relief Society lesson it is building on something she once said that I thought was interesting. I based my recent talk on Chastity in my ward on the things that she taught me as a young girl that helped me stay out of danger. The ideas worked then and apparently they seem helpful now--I was asked to give a youth fireside on chastity! Yikes!

I have formed some of the theoretical building blocks of what makes for good character on the things that she has said over the years. One such example is when I learned from her the concept of normalization, and how important it can be when being helpful and compassionate to others.

Her story examples always dovetailed perfectly with her statements. When she spoke about normalizing others' feelings, I remember nearly every word of her story about Sister S in her ward who had just lost her husband, and said: “I get so mad at him for dying that I just want to go up to heaven and strangle him to death again.” There were perhaps a lot of things my mom could could have said to argue against this questionable reasoning or lecture her about how she really should take comfort that she will see him again, etc. But it isn't as if my mom could have explained the concept of eternal marriage to her for the first time, Sister S. knew all those things already, and it isn't what she needed to hear at that moment. The situation called for an extra dose of compassion and support, so mom told Sister Stock: “Of course you do.”

Disagreement is of course possible among family members, and in a lot of cases I argue that people should be allowed leeway to be open about their own opinions without being branded as hostile or contentious. Free exchange of opinions, not needing to all be the same, doesn't automatically mean the desire to be disagreeable, negative, reactionary, to show someone up for sport sport or self-aggrandizement, or to detract from people in particularly vulnerable situations like this. Intention is the key. If people are having the free exchange of ideas without potential for hurt or sensitivity on any side, I think that it is a helpful forum for everyone to express their views to see how far they go. I know that I don't have any use for opinions that aren't much good, and it doesn't help to have family indulge me only to find out from others later where I have gone wrong.

But free ideology need not cross all boundaries in all situations, it is a delicate matter. And support and normalization is sometimes much more called for after careful discernment. When people are expressing their feelings (and specifically not their opinions), it is helpful to have people make us feel more comfortable with them. Mom was pointing out a good example of this. It was not the time or the relationship to discuss theoretical issues or be devil's advocate, and before she worried about whether she agreed with sister S, she made sure to give her general approval.

All this of course is easier said than done, and just because she taught me well doesn't mean I will always get it right. But my mom at least proves that whatever else we do, when we want to, we CAN be well said. And the eloquent expression of ideas can, as hers has for me over the years, been inspiring of further thinking and at least the option of good decision making. There is something to be said for those goals, and part of the legacy she leaves me.

Hater or Hater-Ed

2007-12-07T19:10:00.000-08:00

On youtube someone who disagrees with you is a 'hater.'

Granted, a lot of the people who make comments about vid-blogs are unabashedly hateful. After really putting yourself out there to be communicate with other human beings and someone responds to you with "What's the deal with your complexion-ever considered Clearasil?" or "That of mole of yours is seconds away from taking over the world!" they are intending little other than deliberately hurt or shame.

That's unfortunate. And in the anonymous environment of internet debate (road rage with a keyboard), such behavior is becoming more and more common. But in condemning this type of response it is not fair or helpful to lump anyone offering any type of criticism into the 'hater' category. Online discussion including video blogging is a great opportunity to educate ourselves and revise our opinions and beliefs by responses from people in pockets of the world we don't even know exist much less ever get to visit.

But rather than embracing this opportunity for learning and refinement of our own views, many of those people who post videos (not something for shrinking violets) don't seem to want genuine response. Even though honest criticism may be a response in the spirit with which the conversation was generated, often that response is viewed with the worst possible motive--hate.

Would a poster who equates different views as hatefulness have others believe, in watning only to be stroked and complimented, that only obligation of a listener is to agree 100%? In our personal lives we may have the wish only to be validated, but in the spirit of internet dialogue, honest debate of issues is obviously preferable to just fishing for pats on the back from strangers who really only matter to us for that very potential of objectivity that the forum creates.

But the temptation is strong to distract the issue away any weakness of one's views and rather accuse those who point out those weaknesses as simply being mean. A common debate technique called the 'red herring' but in this new format doing so has developed this new parlance.

An extreme example could illustrate the benefits of divert an argument rather than confronting it head on. Say Hitler posted one of his political speaches online. A coalition nation might then log on to tell him he was sounding anti-Semitic, maybe helpfully suggest he should think about moderating at least his tone in the interest of not being misunderstood, etc. Rather than respond to the serious charge of anti-Semitism (a difficult task in his case) Hitler might accuse that coalition nation of being a 'hater.' One of his axix allies might further encourage neutral nations to not get involved, because even getting involved (especially when there is truth to any critical assertion) could be considered hateful.

Those who would use such red-herring techniques try to paint the bigger obligation of a listener, not to actually respond with their actual opinion, but to avoid at all costs saying anything like:

"Given X (that you have stated), I believe NOT X."

What this does is confuse disagreement with hateful intention, either deliberately or because of the wounded feelings of those who feel criticized.

But the video blogger is rarely the random topic for hatred by those who actually take the time to substantively evaluate their arguments. In fact they are the ones who have introduced often passionate, controversial issues in an an arena that seems to have the purpose of encouraging response in kind. Sometimes their statement is ironically prompted by ways in which they disagree with common views. Thus they seem to wish to tempt others into entering such a discussion with them, and should welcome responses in any form they come.

What is often frustrating, though, is that while many bloggers seem to want to use a form of logic, they deny the power of that logic. Meaning, they claim to have thought through an issue for the purposes of drawing a conclusion about it, but what often intend to do is less a logical statement than a performative. (If you don't know what the difference between arguments vs. persformatives, Google it, because it is a fascinating distinction in betweem linguistic functions.)

Conversations of all types might include statements like "If I won the lottery I would definitely retire from my job and work for a non-profit organization." Such statements give the impression of logical thought and choice among alternatives. But it is likely that offering opinions is what people are doing when they post a video on youtube containing positions like this, even though they often claim that such a purpose. Instead what people mean by what they say in such a position is something like this "I want you all to think I am a good person because I would retire and work for a nonprofit if I won the lottery." Again, their statement is not argumentative, it is performative.

So in turn, if others respond to such an argument in good faith, assuming that someone wouldn't want to remain inadvertently unaware of the other side of an argument like it so very much often seems, offer their opinions in response. But they don't get the benefit of the doubt of the first person thinking they are just responding in good faith to their argument.

They think that the second person is responding to the INTENTION, which was to say in return 'No, I don't think you are a good person.' Even though they are not intending to say that, they are just intending to respond to the argument that was raised. If those who would call everyone with any level of criticism 'haters' cared to, they could try to use intention to determine whether someone is really responding to them in a hateful way.

If you-tube uesers really want no criticism of any stripe, then that is a different matter, but it would seem that posting personal information in such a public place would be a strange way to avoid it.

My subconscious, and my husband, knows me pretty well

2007-12-07T12:31:00.000-08:00

Slade and I have taken to sleeping in separate rooms the past two nights. And before any terrible rumors circulate among the family, the reason is that we have very incompatible ways of talking in our sleep. At least it seems that way. Other times it seems like we are just living out our regular waking hours in some sort of more accurate dream state, kind of like Salvador Dali meant to portray.

Slade's problem is that he continually harasses me in his sleep--his dreams, or whatever they are. One time I woke up with him kneeling beside me and gently sliding his hands under me like he was going to pick me up. (He woke up before he got too far with that, luckily for his back). More typical is that he will all of a sudden reach over and shake me awake, not knowing why, but INSISTING he has a perfectly good reason, until I convince him that he is still asleep and that there is nothing horrible going on at 3 a.m. that needs the attention of an insomniac that just fell asleep two hours ago (and that was a good night).

My nocturnal activities are much more complicated. (I am actually drafting a post on that subject for those who don't know). Basically I have what my neurologist calls 'complex nocturnal behavior' doing things asleep that most people don't. I do things asleep that some people couldn't do awake. I can write things like this for example, sound asleep. A good reason for hiding the password from myself, and I am thinking about it.

It sounds totally bizarre, but I think most people have heard of similar 'sleep eating' and things that people like this do, and I think they are all they same--people like me do a variety of things while their brain is technically sleeping, it is just that in my case, eating isn't really my thing and I am not going to cook hamburger in the middle of the night any more than I am going to do it in the middle of the day. There is actually something in the brain that specifically disconnects our mind and body from acting out our dreams, in in some people's case there isn't a complete disconnect. Go figure that our brains would have this. But they do.

But a few weeks ago was extra funny because I had a series of dreams that caused me to shout about them loudly enough to disturb Slade, who can't exactly afford to get disturbed, considering how he reacts to being agitated in the middle of the night.

One dream was at a public swimming pool where there were obviously huge sharks swimming around under my kids. Everyone but me seemed to be fine with this. (I can draw obvious parallels to how worked up I get about things that everyone else doesn't but that will be a different post.) I kept saying "Slade, do something, you can't just let her stay in there, it's going to get her," etc. This continued for an hour or so. At least I didn't get out of bed, that is always a nice thing.

The next night when I was in supposedly blissful slumber Slade and I had been kidnapped as some part of a criminal plot right out of Reservoir Dogs or something. (I swear the guy with a gun looked just like the owner at my local computer store who has taken nearly a grand from me and not fixed anything, but I am not sure). Anyway, we were in a van without windows along with some other unfortunate souls. The guy with the gun decided to take about four people who had complained away, obviously to me, for the purpose of killing them. My subconscious doesn't mind implied violence any more than I do, but it didn't make me watch, thank heavens.

I spoke out to the guy with a gun, in my handcuffed state, (and also I did so out loud to Slade right next to me, who had started to listen and had become increasingly alarmed about the subject matter of my dream): "Have you EVER killed FOUR PEOPLE before? Do you REALIZE how hard it is going to be to dispose of ALL THOSE CORPSES? And you are going to go ahead and just KILL them ALL just for giving you LIP?"

Slade said next to me in the van in my dream, and also next to me in bed, IN UNISON:

"Shut up, honey."

D'oh! Pearl Harbor Day. No THC for me.

2007-12-07T11:05:00.000-08:00

The History Channel has not been keeping me too satisfied lately, and if it has a chance to make anyone happy it will be me. I tried to evolve a top ten list to describe all the silly programs posing as history they won't stop running these days. I an terrible at this kind of thing even though I love the idea, so if any of you has some ideas, which inevitably more clever and more funny people will (JPH3), send them in as a comment because I would love to work this up:

Top ten History Channel program formulas:

1. You may believe in the Jesus of scripture--but tune in tonight when our very credible, Australian-dialected archaeologists will uncover evidence that instead, you are an idiot. In general.
2. All mysterious events in history were caused by aliens, rendering it meaningless, but making it appeal to a much wider audience.
3. What happened on December 7, of course, can never be discussed without Tom Brokaw.
4. 'Reign of Terror' now refers to all periods of history, too bad you wasted your time on your history homework.
5. WWII seems awfully boring, but tonight the same suff will be dubbed over by people speaking an excellent fake German accent. (We will throw in the sound ‘z’ a lot).
6. "Uncovering the mysteries of King Tut: Turns out he is pretty well wrapped up." (Ending with "despite all efforts of these scholars, he will forever, in the annals of time, remain, to all the ages, even though we dig him up and put him behind glass in every single museum, a mystery, which we wish we could have uncovered like we said.")
7. "Search for the giant squid" (Obviously that ends in failure because it may be we discover tonight that there may be no such thing as a giant squid.)
8. Hey, shouldn’t #7 be on the Discovery Channel?
9. Come to mention it, shouldn't #2 be on the Sci-Fi channel?
10. Any show can be rendered fascinating if narrated by 'that history guy.'

Slade said some of these went over his head but that he liked the giant squid one. Clearly I know nothing about comedy, I thought it was actually my most pandering. I should keep my day job, even with the writers' strike.

Intrusive Communication, or 'stop touching me.'

2007-12-05T10:46:00.000-08:00

It used to be that new forms of communication took a thousand years or so to develop, and so human beings, along with each form, would develop pretty hard-wired corresponding responses, as individuals and certainly as cultures.

I think safely the first form of communicating with each other was probably some sort of direct touch or physical contact, whether wanted or unwanted. Unwanted physical contact has been given the label of violence, and various defenses over the years are levied as culture gets advanced enough to do so.

The next method of communicating was probably SOME sort of symbolic communication. Probably was first talking, then pictorial scratching, then more fluid written symbolic language. Of course no linguist knows whether full language evolved first and then gradually writing or they happened together so I am guessing.

After the first ways of affecting one another (touch) started to take more symbolic form (language), who knows how many thousands of years ago (OK, yes I know exactly: 6 thousand years ago, sorry), I am sure things really took off in terms of options for communicating.

We started being able to communicate across time periods and physical locations, and affecting each other in very nonspecific ways: offending each other's sensibilities and whatnot, whatever that means, it got started after this major change.

The options didn't start changing until Thomas Edison. He invented some version of the telephone which ended up actually being the voice answering machine. Graham Bell passed him up with the telephone technology while Edison's sat there until the patent ran out and eventually it got picked up by the current voice mail technology.

When we picked up Edison's voice recording technology things started heating up. Previous social etiquette rapidly became outdated. For instance, a situation was created where we would leave our message for someone and not know whether or not they got it. This took us back a few centuries to the days that we all had to pay our own private couriers and hope for the best.

When we used to have to let it ring and ring and ring when we called someone or knock and know they hadn't come to the door, we knew that we would need to try back. Now we don't know exactly what to do.

Did they get our message or not?

Maybe we could call them back, but then, but would they get annoyed with us for bugging them?

In my personal opinion 'screening calls' should be accompanied with the social contract that we would return them when we get the chance, but often that is put off indefinitely, and our callers are left with a dilemma: do we make sure we communicate or do we make sure the people we are trying to affect don't get defensive?

As options other than violence evolved to be employed to affect others negatively, they develop other corresponding defenses. Physical armor initially developed to protect our bodies, and other physical defenses like a mote and bailey developed to protect our homes. But we needed new defenses needed for the new communications too, it seemed, and so people started to do somewhat routine and predictable things to hide from each other verbally like they had hidden from potential harm physically. Previous armor or caves became not being accessible by the new technologies.

Did you ever get a bill in the mail where your immediate reaction was 'what and the &*5^ is this and immediately looked for the 1-800 number to call, and it wasn't there, it said 'for comments write...somewhere in Wilmington, DE or Fargo, ND" NO ONE is going to put a stamp on an envelope and send it in the mail when they have an issue with a bill anymore. It is just not an option. I think it is because we associate 'getting on the horn' with what we do to be immediately contentions--to go to war.

And as soon as there are warriors, there are those who want to make sure that they are peace makers. As soon as email came about it seemed to replace calling on the phone as something good to do when calling on the phone seemed too intrusive. Calling had itself replaced physically putting on our hat and lipstick and going over to do our business in person, but now that email is an option, calling itself seems too intrusive, more like something we would do only when we had a seriously personal or emotional issue. Instead, we can now leave people an email and avoid the awkwardness of forcing them to respond in person.

Then in the past LESS THAN A YEAR probably, there have been even more changes. There was the group email thread, the bulletin board, and now the blog. And after how many thousands of years, sorry 6 thousand years, we have a brand new method of basically 'reaching out to touch someone' in some way.

I noticed how much I myself had changed when I felt that actually emailing Amy to ask her for advice on my blog was too much of an imposition, and that maybe she wouldn't mind if I left her a post on Donna's blog instead.

I think even though I don't want to admit it, as much as things change, they probably, as long as we are human, remain the same.

The myth of guilt

2007-12-04T16:25:00.001-08:00

What is guilt?

Does it exist?

It could, but from the way people act, it is more likely that it doesn't. At least it doesn't cause the kind of behavior that people think it does. The myth of 'deathbed repentance' is so rare that is just that--a myth.

Slade probably will never blog, how much the better for the world if he did, but we have between ourselves been talking about cultural myths that are widely believed and perpetuated--perpetuated by thinking that those types of ideas that are the case 'just because'--actually make sense for logical reasons. We use a form of logic, so to speak, but deny the power thereof, by making a logical argument for those things that we really have come to only assume make sense because we always hear them and probably always will.

So because Slade and I love the 'aha moment' we get from popping bubbles of cultural myths in our brains to make room for the other stuff, I will talk about a few of them, even though this is probably not the only way Slade and I are different. But to introduce the concept of cultural myth I need for a mythical concept that really isn't that big of an idea and that nobody really cares too much about believing one way or another. I will gradually move on to bigger stuff as I get some practice not making simple concepts into very very long ones. Which I obviously need more of.

Here goes, myth of guilt:

The fact that people end up feeling bad about and eventually changing their behavior is something that gets the kind of play of a common occurrence with the rarity of a miracle. I actually don't know why, because most people, I assumed it was more common. What happens instead? What do people really do on their deathbeds? I am sure that people can get better explanations of the whole psychological theory of cognitive dissonance than mine, but basically very few people end up thinking that ANYTHING they do, at any time down the road, was wrong. Instead they make final Herculean efforts to justify what they have already thought in the first place. Both in smaller time frames and in lifetimes. So ti anyone spends time fervently repenting in some religious sins or omissions it is likely because they have already done much of that.

Even in situations where people do something that is obviously a 'no brainer' in most respects and bring about the disaster that everyone knows they will, they don't end up sorry. Teenage girls who run off with total creeps, that in five years yell the loudest about how big of a creep it was that they ran off with, are perfect examples of what I am talking about. All of us (but the particular teenage girl in question) know exactly what a creep they are running off with, but admitting 'I told you so' ends up closer to something like a 'well there was no way for me to have known, and it was probably natural given the circumstances.'

In fact most of us think we are exceptions to rules, it is in our nature--even the kinds of rules we would freely expect others to follow. Navigating emotional and personal decisions, such as how to behave in cases of love, marriage, and family, particularly don't mesh well with any kind of statistical calculating on our own part, and certainly not just like advice of we hear from others. That never ends up like anything we are willing to lend credibility to.

Most drivers know that it is obvious that you shouldn't run a red light. But in life when we really want to do something, and then when we have done it already and seek to explain ourselves, it becomes much more persuasive or illustrative to talk about that story we all heard about someone who has run a red light and come out just fine. I ran a red light once when I was a teenager (talk about teenage girls) I remember the night distinctly. Apparently it didn't take long for me to have my license and break one of the worst rules of all, and metaphorically speaking we probably all do that in a lot of contexts.

But in big life decisions, it doesn't seem to make sense, for whatever reason, to actually just make solid, reasoned choices based on what makes sense or what would be safe. 10 times greater likelihood of crashing in driving somehow is strong enough to restrict us but in something much more profoundly dangerous like love, the 90 percent that squeak by doing something reckless seem to compel us to follow their example.

And thus after the fact, are we sorry that we judged a light to be a different color and crashed? Not usually. Isn't really an opinion of mine. There are plenty of boring psych studies--and I promise never to get into those--it ends up for whatever reason not being what people do. People aren't sorry. Mostly if I were to guess why, they end up over their lifetime schooled in the benefits of the road they have travelled. This familiarity is comfortable, and much more so that the path less so, conveniently remains wary enough to justify what we didn't do.

'Can't I at least have my GAZEEBO effect?'

2007-12-04T06:42:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday at 12 years old, Drake was apparently able to discuss with us the fairly sophisticated notion of whether to continue to do something for his health independently of adequate scientific evidence of its benefits. I think the specific thing in question was 'carbo loading' right before a basketball game.

The difference between Drake and many of the adults I have heard make this argument, however, was that he was actually able to see his error even before I was able to well-enough articulate it myself.

Doing something for the mind control factors, PRECLUDING its actual affect on the body, betrays the fact that we actually doubt it does anything significant one way or another to the body.

For instance, about one hundred years ago there were many natural remedies on the market to help calm babies from life's aches and pains. 'Grandma knows best' cough syrup and such things. Many people argued, very similarly to the way they argue them a century later, that such a natural remedy would be better than anything a physician would be able to offer. (Anything a physician would be able to do a hundred years ago might not be worth gambling on, I very much agree, but post-antibiotics I am not so sure...)

The problem about the 'natural' baby syrups is that most of them contained opium. After opium was banned most of them contained cocaine. Then at the very least they left in the whiskey. I suppose those substances ARE at least NATURAL, but whether they are entirely BENIGN in their action is different, and I think unlikely.

So turning to the question of a 'gazeebo' effect: if eating a diet of high carbs before physical exertion was KNOWN to be entirely neutral one way or the other for its practitioners, then I think it could be safely engaged in to only trick the mind that something useful was being done for the body. But the thing is that most people who are trying to in some way do something that changes the state of their body from minute to minute, are in actuality really hoping to do just that.

And the dangerous potential, as in the case of baby opium and maybe some of its modern equivalents, is that they ARE doing that. And the only way to know whether a substance/practice is actually helpful or harmful, is to approach that question in a somewhat traditionally scientific way.

(I just read something about the need to appeal to keyword searches so placebo effect placebo effect placebo erfecter effect placbo effect affect afect plerceeber erfect placeebo affect plaseebo effect placebo effect placebo effect, just kidding, but he really did say 'gazebo' effect, which was cute, and also, in a way, illustrative of something or other)

Christmas Songs from my Genius Brother

2007-12-03T12:30:00.000-08:00

I am swiping some content that my brother posted on a family blog before anyone else, even he, is able to benefit from it first.

He is my closest genetic relative so I will very quickly promote anything he does in this forum, and this probably won't be the last time. In this case he was making up some titles of Christmas songs with a 'Walmart shopping' theme.

'The Walton Family Christmas Album.

Who can resist these festive holiday hymns:
1. Gloria! in Excessive Day o’ Shopping
2. All I Want for Christmas is my Healthcare Plan
3. Grandma Got Run Over by a Government Subsidy
4. It Came Upon a Blue-Light Special
5. Oh Little Town of Bentonville
6. Deck the Halls with Predatory Pricing
7. Rip-off the Red-Nosed Retailer
8. Oh Come All Ye Faithful Bargain Hunters
9. Good King Wencesloss Leader
10. Away in a Mangy Sweatshop
11. Angels We Have Heard on High Cost of Low Prices
12. It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Honduras
13. Have Yourself a Merry Little Union-Free Rally
14. We Three Kings of the Board of Directors Are (Featuring Hillary Clinton!)
15. Jolly Old Saint Nickel-an-dime-us
16. What Child is This (who sews my socks)?
17. Frosty the ShoplifterAnd, as a special non-holiday treat, the Waltons have also included my personal perennial pick: It’s A 3rd World After All. Sweet!

Keep in mind this is a collector’s item and supplies are limited. So rush over (i.e. walk really fast) to your local, independently-owned music shop and get your eco-friendly copy today!'

Slade initially was dubious that he made all that up himself, it being too good an effort for just an off-the-cuff post to a family blog to be read by about half a dozen people. But to be safe I Googled 'what child is this socks' and 'Good King Wencesloss Leader' and because I got nothing I assume it is all legit. It doesn't shock me at all. Keep it coming bro, it is excellent content.

Better off TED?

2007-12-01T23:37:00.000-08:00

I happened to be indulging in TED lately, a somewhat guilty pleasure, admittedly, because I of the ideological agenda that many of the speakers don’t bother to even hide. Obviously the ethical fraternity of these speakers makes them confident enough to betray their long ago passing from objective inquiry into open advocacy, in all of its potential for suppression of Copernican-type revolutions of thought. The prevention of heresy, in any already successful organization, seems more important than the encouragement of enlightenment.

But they don’t seem to be concerned. Magnificent scientists like Jane Goodall, giddy in this feel-good environment, publicly besmirch any credibility from any of their otherwise fair-minded research. Goodall originally gained a name for herself impressive enough to gain an honorary Ph.D. without a baccalaureate by correcting many of the ideologically driven perceptions existing before her about the field of great apes. Previous rain forest thinking saw in these species only vegetarianism and general peaceful and nonviolent interaction that critics of our own species could only pine for.

Yet she has of late been willing to make the current focus of her public speaking, not to augment or for heaven's sake outdo to her past accomplishments, but to risk the everyman ring of the kind of cliché tripe every other lukewarm intellect is sounding these days--exactly the level of the politically motivated nonsense she has so carefully debunked with her empirical observations rather than reliance on authoritarian precedence.

In a meandering mix of stories about chimps, denigrations of our own species, and pleas to save the earth that probably dazzled the audience by being something for everyone, I was particularly struck by some what she said about the native peoples of Ecuador living in the rainforest.

She described the unexpected sight of the village chief using a laptop computer to get her a laugh out of the audience, admitting that they want to use such technology to better their lives by using such innovations of the intruding white man (her words) as running water, a half an hour per home of electricity a day, and combating tropical diseases. But these only in a larger context of how sad it is that such advances are destroying their culture--surely the greater evil for Ms. Goodall than the suffering eradicated by use of the new technology.

Does it ever occur to any of these social scientists that say such things how selfish to their own interests it is to fight such changes for the purpose of preventing ‘the loss of cultural diversity?’ What right does any one of us have to say that other people any place in the world only need a half an hour of electricity per night and one laptop among them? Would anyone suggesting this place herself under such a restriction?

It is obviously fascinating to those who would have their fellow men as museum exhibits to see 'primitive chiefs wearing regal finery’ as some type of time-travelling curiosity. But in the name of preserving such fascinating displays for our own enjoyment, would we allow anyone to have a say in decisions about our own lives?

I don’t know what notion of intellectual superiority blinds people to the unsavoriness of saying that other people are incapable of making important decisions for themselves, other than the obviously very common human tendency to tolerate different rules for ourselves than for others. Most who pan 'materialism, 'consumerism' or the latest 'ism' that refers to human beings having bettered their circumstances do so with the understanding that THEY of course, will be able to choose exactly WHICH comforts and conveniences of modern society they and their own are able to enjoy, while the less fortunate are relegated to whatever is chosen for them.

One person might insist that of course laptops and cell phones are a basic right in the new information age, but large housing square footage is a gross overindulgence, another may believe that of course they have earned the luxury of early retirement, a stay at home wife, or acreage on their farm, but the computers and cell phones of the first person, who of course is in term calling them idle or wasteful, just clutter our lives and can be dispensed with, etc--the obvious problem being that one man's sinful indulgence is another's cherished, hard-earned necessity, and it is extremely problematic to get into the game of pointing fingers and characterizing another's naturally differing values or preferences.

Curiously, Ms. Goodall, in her humdrum, monotone cry of the evils of modern society, doesn’t seem to lack the information that society has produced. She is obviously intelligent and well exposed to the latest scientific evidence along with it does and does not support--she knows what she is doing, and thus like her associates at TED is an advocate rather than a believer. When she makes her unnecessarily Cassandra-like depictions of the current state of the planet, she knows better than to get too specific, to quote any outcome of particular science such as she herself is known for when communicating her alarm that some unspecified children somewhere in the world are eating poisoned food or drinking poisoned water.

And sure, anyone can easily claim that children are being poisoned by the toxic consequences of human technology, as long as they don’t get overly specific about what they mean by that. If one defines poisoning as simply a consequence of man-made chemicals entering our bodies, without any particularly harmful consequence befalling them as a result, one could claim that we all poison our children each time we give them their daily multivitamin.

And it is obvious that this is very close to her actual definition. She mentions some fifty chemicals in our bodies that weren’t there fifty years ago. That somehow seems a strange coincidence of the number fifty but I will bite and assume it’s true. It would still require a willing leap from her audience for them to assume any relationship between these chemicals and any particular consequence.

Indeed, she knows she must say that such toxicity could account for only possibly the ills of maybe asthma or ‘particular types of cancers,’ as surely she is aware of the larger body of information and what it is concluding about manmade chemicals and health. Children everywhere are freer from major diseases than ever, and even all but smoking-related cancer, allowing for population and age of its sufferers, is on the decline. This data despite the file-drawer phenomenon bias that has for a century characterized investigations attempting to pin synthesized chemicals with absolutely any possible health problem.

All this suspicion and potential harm seen around every corner because of the hatred of human progress and shame for its consequences, in her own extreme words. But why, is the real question. She herself has used technology to better the lives of the beloved chimps she studies, giving them running water and video games, and has encouraged its use to spread the word for the causes she advocates. Why doesn’t she feel hope, judging from the faith she seems to place in it on the one hand, about the possibilities technology offers rather than such shame?

Why do such a large number of its beneficiaries honestly refuse to admit that technology, whatever its consequences, has not changed lives for the better? Do they they were living, (as in some of their own ancestors' primitive state) in superstition-laden Medieval Europe, with all of the barbarism and horror provided by human beings and nature alike? I for one am glad I am not desperately consulting witches and astrologists to save my children from the plague, at least the half I didn’t bury when they were born. And for all the quaintness of primitive societies to scientists, these are many of the realities they still endure.

And just like the dire predictions about mass starvation or other consequences of human manipulation of their environment, it turns out that technology can actually be employed to reverse its own negative consequences, rather than only an evil to be mitigated or fought. But fight on they still do. I get so sad when I hear about some story like that poor kid who went across the country to his miserable end freezing and starving on a diet of only marijuana seeds in Alaska, after he was driven to reject the benefit of his privileged upbringing and education because Cumulative guilt is regularly heaped on the young and impressionable if they dare enjoy or appreciate the improved lot in life they have been given through thousands of years of human industry and struggle. I can't imagine what his fore bearers would think if they were told of how much he had obviously appreciated what they had done to pave the way for him.

And worst if all, the guilt isn’t necessary, rather an obvious manipulation by those who know better. Listen to Pinker’s talk on violence. He probably wouldn’t agree with me, but I think that it is interesting that he has gained enough intellectual status to point to one of the elephants in the room. As long as he puts enough obligatory twists on it to seem kosher to his colleagues he can make the obvious point that there has been widespread tweaking and obfuscating of the worldview of any who have been educated recently in the Western world, for the ideological agenda of studied strategy to so indoctrinate.

Another Tedster brought up the notion of ideas as germs, and it makes sense to look at potentially obvious facts this way. They can be everywhere, like the fact that human population is no longer exploding despite the given in most everyone's mind not up on the latest UN projections. This is an ideal case of what can happen when you wait for the information that is given to you rather than seeking it yourself. In fact human population in most countries and inevitably in all of them is on the verge of precipitous decline. Surprising? Look into it. Chances are your government is already scurrying around trying to do something about it because they were just clued in five minutes ago themselves.

Many governments around the world are worried about the complete unknown affect of the inverted population curve because what would you know it, no one is actually worrying about the problems that will actually befall us. Immune to the actual state of things because we have been inoculated against it by those who have convinced us of a completely alternate reality, people get so riled up by doomsayers about the imagined potential evils and problems. Thus the frightened panic about a future that will never come is what will ironically lead to the actual future we will be to deal with without any preparation by those learned and studied forecasters. Fearing what would happen if our planet was busted by overpopulation, people have amazingly felt guilty about reproducing for the past thirty years and now many cultures such as Russia, Japan, Spain and Germany are staring down extinction. The brilliant ideas that government bureaucrats are coming up with unguided by intellectuals reveal the state of their desperation. Singapore is sponsoring government cruises so people will get married and have kids. Does that sound like anything that is going to be what solves any type of crisis whatsoever?

And that poor kid in Alaska that sacrificed himself to an invisible cause.... It makes me so sad. It makes me certain that for whatever reason incomprehensible to me, some human nature makes people somehow desperately eager to not only see the bad in the world and the future, but in their search for superiority and self-satisfaction, to look for the bad in each other wherever they can find it.

Not being a person that so hopes for the worst in the future or in my fellow human beings, I would prefer a world where only ideas were bad. And at all costs, people wouldn't have to be. I feel that we really only have the responsibility to correct each other's views, and not instead criticize or even worse control their behavior or morals. Especially, any time that I can make things better by doing something easy like just choosing to define my terms a bit differently, like not seeing quite so many 'isms' when there don't absolutely need to be, it can be a very easy way of avoiding Ms. Goodall's unfortunate anger shame or resentment about human activities or endeavors. If I can resist the pleasure of feeling better by thinking others are worse, how much the happier for all of us.

Joseph Smith and the role of witness in the restoration

2007-12-01T21:15:00.000-08:00

I thought that this blog format would be ideal for posting some version of my relief society lessons. A few weeks ago I gave a lesson about Joseph Smith. I felt rather pressured to cram in a bunch of ideas that I have had over the years, not realizing that the whole year next year will be devoted to his teachings. Now I will have an opportunity to expand a bit on my thoughts, but I thought first I would get down a rough version of the lesson I just taught so I don't forget it. I have the habit of doing talks and lessons on the fly thinking that I will remember them and increasingly I don't. Sometimes I run across something I wrote in the past and have no recollection of it at all, so it is more and more apparent that I need to start recording things. Blogging may be silly and trendy but if it does that it will do something that nothing else has in terms of my own documentation system.

Testimony is a term indicating a record of what others have experienced or witnessed. The story of Joseph Smith and the latter-day restoration highlights the role of testimony of others when attempting to interpret or understand events that we have little direct knowledge of.

Who we believe on a debatable subject often determines what we believe. What we believe usually also reveals why we believe it. For instance, most people don’t usually ask for advice or any kind of information from those that they are most certain have all the facts they are after. We usually ask advice from people like our parents or others that we want to mirror our lives after--those we want to be like, and want to approve of us.

In many ways the story of Joseph Smith varies with each perspective of who tells that story. That is true with any historical figure, particularly those which inspire debate, mystery, or controversy. In the case of Smith and his achievements, however, I have found it the usual case that secular historians often violate their usual methods of prioritizing historical evidence. Those methods are rather straight forward--who knows best knows most.

Even if a person giving a historical witness is likely biased, their witness is often the best we can come outside of knowing ourselves. For instance, nearly every subject in the court of Henry VIII gave a biased account of him on very peril of death, but their views are not necessarily discounted on that basis because to do so would be to choose ignorance.

So while most objective inquiry into a historical puzzle gives precedence to the testimony of those who had the most contact with that person, in Joseph Smith’s case, it would be his wife, family, friends, and closest advisors. Any biases those people have would be factored in, but it is obvious that those people would be the ones who had the most information to give. These people, however, usually do not figure prominently in most of the secular theories of the first latter-day prophet.

Instead, people who knew him only tangentially or even not at all are employed to provide the kind of evidence that skeptics often feel they need to sketch a likeness of him that would make him look like the charlatan or fraud they assume he was to explain in some secularly correct sense what he achieved.

Similar violation of academic tradition must be committed to arrive at the favorite secular theories of the Book of Mormon. Usually, because certain information about the ancient world is sparse, documents that could possibly give a window into that world are allowed the potential of being genuine in lieu of overwhelming positive evidence to the contrary (difficult to achieve as easy as it might sound to poke holes). Often spurious documents are allowed to circulate even if there actually is such overwhelming proof.

One example is the supposed last letter of Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII. Most Tudor scholars doubt that this letter could have possibly been allowed to survive by Anne's enemies who reigned for decades after her death. But this letter was felt to be so possibly illuminating and interesting that it is often cited even by those who concur it is a fake. In cases like this where curious scholars hunger for answers, it is very rare that the state of no information at all would be preferred to information that is suspect--except of course in the case of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. Most scholars are so certain of the limitations of its origins that it is eagerly dismissed, when there is not the luxury of being choosy about source material on its potential subject matter.

The Book of Mormon is a potential historical account of a place and time that any good information to illuminate is desperately wanting. When it was first discovered, it contradicted the most fundamental aspects of the pre-Columbian Ancient Americas at the time. There are countless aspects of the book that are incongruous with Smith’s own views of the Ancient Americas—assuming that they would have been at least mete with the best going opinions.

Apologetics for the Book’s contents is not my intention and much better efforts are available, but what strikes me is how often Smith would have needed to make himself look utterly ludicrous to the top notch scholars of his day if he had authored the book’s contents himself. And those scholars wasted no time in impugning him for the ways in which he obviously got it wrong. It was absurd, they said, to have claimed such advanced civilizations anywhere in the Americas at the time, for every historian worth his salts knew that native peoples on this hemisphere at that time were simple, superstitious and primitive.

And claiming fantasies such as sacred records on metal in anything as obviously conjured as reformed Egyptian simply compounded his simpleton effort as an author. Until, of course, ruins of such civilizations were found and similar examples of sacred documents became part of anthropological standard. Smith’s absurd unlikelihoods have been used confidently as evidence of the book’s fraudulent origin—until, of course, the moments that the unlikely scenarios he poses quietly transition to being so obvious that anyone would have thought of them.

So any objective critic would have to admit that any genuine historical account of the New World, because scholarly perception of what that history entailed has ranged so widely, would be hard pressed to look respectable in both Smith’s day and our own. Smith would very likely be forced to choose between respectability in his own time and in that of posterity. And if he truly were a charlatan, in what possible scenario would he benefit from deliberately sacrificing his own credibility until vindication over 200 years down the road? If he had possessed the simple ability, as his wife put it, to compose ‘a coherent or well-worded letter, let alone dictate a book like the book of Mormon’ he would have also, it seems, possessed the simple ability to mitigate the scathing reception of the book when it was published.

His own lack of familiarity with the book, originally offered as evidence against his credibility, actually, to those with a longer perspective, is evidence for it. If he had actually suspected that the geographical orientation the book laid out, in his own brief period of acquaintance with the story, really referred to the two entire continents of North and South America, his innocent mistake here would certainly be compounded by inconsistencies and errors in the book’s own internal geographic references—none of those, however, exist. The fact that he was confused about the book’s internal geography reflected the natural limitations of mapping it out after only two or three readings, not a desire to promote the validity of the facts as he saw them as the book's author. He was performing simple apologetics for the book with the very limited knowledge he had both of the book itself and current facts about the Americas. If he had had an author’s intimate familiarity with both, he would have spared himself the effort, one would presume.

The irony is that despite the book’s disastrous critical reception, if it had been taken as literal history in its day it would have greatly improved the contemporary view of the Ancient Americas. The reflex of scholars to discount it was to the detriment and delaying of understanding of the new world. This would perhaps be consistent with the willingness of Tudor historians to accept the unlikely last letter of Anne Boleyn, because the potential explanatory and illuminating potential of a historical document, when no better substitute is available, to a ravenously curious mind, outweighs the risks that it might have flaws or inaccuracies.

So after a lengthy diversion on a topic I am not really qualified to speak of, I am finally able to return to my main point, that the interpretation of Smith and the restoration is intimately connected to the credibility of its witnesses. Critics of Smith have had to rely on witnesses to his character and abilities that were much more remote than those cited by believers. The witnesses of his wife, his family and those who saw first hand what he accomplished are remarkably consistent with one another.

In fact a parallel doesn’t really exist when it comes to piecing together any other major historical mystery. If the main players in Tudor England, for example, had ever left any unified first hand accounts of disputed facts, the facts would cease to be disputed. Most historical mysteries are mysterious because the witnesses to them do not leave accounts, or leave accounts that dispute one another. If Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Catherine of Aragon, Eustache Chapuis, and at least four others were ever on record agreeing about anything, which of course they never are, it would serve as the cornerstone of solid historical evidence around which all other potential disputes are oriented. NEVER so with Smith or the Book of Mormon.

But Smith and his witnesses understood the power of unanimous witness and its credibility over time. It is the reason that in a tumultuous and difficult period they paused to take record of it. And the fact that it is callously overlooked in a way that no other such evidence would be is a fact that, though ultimately unconvincing to the unbeliever as is all scholarly evidence, still troubles him. Historians, in their more frank moments, do admit how unusual it is for none of the central players in the Smith mystery to have slipped and betrayed the ‘real story,’ for many of them ended up with plenty of motive to do so.

And thus is also the role of the current believer or ‘witness’ of the restoration, to whom I am addressing this piece. It is not intended to convince any who don’t believe, for of course such is not possible. It is to speak to fellow believers such as myself and remind them that we even today are witnesses, asked to add our names and credibilities to the reputation of Joseph Smith and the magnitude of his accomplishments.

Ultimately, even as secular scholarship endeavors to chink away at the plausibility of the sacred documents that Smith generated, their ability to stand as genuine history is only one of the many remarkable aspects of their existence. For even if Smith had managed to blunder his way into pulling off something that passed for real ancient history, it is another thing altogether for him to have also succeeded at producing sacred works that are USED as such. For him to have succeeded at producing a book, and a religion, to which so many people are willing to add their witness, is an accomplishment that someday, someone will need to offer a better explanation for than any that currently exist. At least better than the explanation Smith himself gave, the most parsimonious version of all.

Thoughts on treatment of gifted kids/politics in schools

2007-12-01T11:35:00.000-08:00

I thought I would post a copy of an email I wrote to Drake's former principal. It has probably too much info but it has some of my thoughts on his experience the last few years getting properly labled as gifted, and how much better he is doing now that he is. I wasn't aware that there is a faction of teachers very opposed to doing so, and now I know to look out for it,

Hi Principal X,
I hope I have made it clear in the past how highly I regard both both you and your school. I say so whenever I get the chance to whoever will listen. My high esteem of you also has helped me be able to trust your opinion in cases where it differs with mine, something that is very rare for me, and also very useful, because I am sure all too often parents make emotional decisions without the benefit of heeding the advice of professionals.

So my purpose for writing is to give a bit of feedback on the outcome of a circumstance we discussed a few years back. Actually it came about in regard to whether to separate the twins or not. I wasn't sure they were ready, but I deferred to you because of my regard for your experience and my trust that you knew the boys well individually. Overall I am sure that you were right about the twins and the separation was good for Chase and helped him escape his brother's shadow at a crucial time. So my trust in you paid off and I thank you.
One of the peripheral issues that I had at the time was that I was less than thrilled with my oldest son's experience in Ms. X's class and was even more concerned about how his experience would play out with Chase.

I didn't exactly even notice how distinctive certain aspects of her teaching philosophy were until Drake happened to be placed in her sister's class at (another school). It appears that they both have a rather strong preference against labelling children, at least mine, as advanced or gifted, and she seems to be less than laudatory of any prodigial achievement in her students, seeming to for some reason concentrate instead on whatever aspects they do less well at, such as handwriting, and defer any pronouncement on their abilities at a higher level.

The affect of this on my oldest son was quite profound. She was his first teacher that declined to label him as gifted, advanced, or whatever word in current parlance that encompasses those qualities. It happened that it was at a crucial time for him in several ways. One was that my illness made it so that I was less able to focus on what was happening and compensate for it and make any changes. Also the stressful time in our family made it such that he was more likely to respond to the downward shift in his reception at school, and it caused him to disassociate himself with advanced students or higher achievement in general.

Practically, she was the teacher right before his transition to (the new school) causing him to not be recommended for the advanced 'continent' there. He floundered badly his two years there, with one teacher that seemed overbearing to him and thus he was reluctant to do much of anything, and last year with Miss X who was very much the same in philosophy and practice as Ms X. Slade and I had gotten on top of the situation by then and so we fought hard against her decision to not recommend him for advanced placement at (middle school). His test scores were borderline, probably somewhat because of his less than great experience the previous three years, so her opinion had a good deal of weight. Luckily Slade was able to sway the right people and convince them that lowering expectations on a student that was very probably capable of more would result in a reduced performance, and that they should instead do the opposite for the opposite result.

Unfortunately, not being at all times in the best mode of controlling myself, at a P/T conference I expressed to Miss X with frankness that I thought they had mishandled my son and led to his floundering the past three years. She was upset, and very much concentrated on how I had made her feel, rather than at all attempting to evaluate the truth of what I had said, which she never ended up doing. This is very commonly how people respond when they feel aptly criticized, to concentrate on the inappropriateness of the exchange rather than the content. If people feel that they can actually respond and counter what you say to them they more likely choose to do that instead.

My apology for the inappropriateness of what I said was all that she really wanted, and after I gave it to her, she never ended up keeping her end of the bargain to fairly consider what I had said.

But the story has an ending which is mostly happy while still somewhat unfortunate. During Drake's first month at (middle school) we had a constant barrage of notes and such requesting that he be evaluated immediately for placement as TAG, and some teachers expressed open confoundment that he had not been previously labeled, considering how clearly advanced he is in their opinions. Because Slade had basically all but insisted, he was placed in Algebra rather than Pre-Algebra as Miss X had suggested, and though he is doing well (he has the highest grade in the class of mostly classmates that have had Pre-Algebra) and has finally found his voice so to speak to inspire him as an achievement-oriented student, we are all very frustrated that he is now behind. He has to spend hours every night on his homework doing things he should have been learning at (other school), and this is not a good situation for the family at this time when my health is still easilly destabalized with the slightest stress. He clearly should have been in Pre-Algebra last year and now feels, even though he is doing as well as he is, that he is having to play catch up.

Though Ms X and Miss X philosophy about this subject seems quite clear and distinctive, I am not, however, able to explain it. It may be a political thing--some teachers feel it is unfair to distinguish some students above others and thus choose not to. They feel education should focus on a common minimum that all can achieve rather than encouraging each to do the best he can, because the latter would have results that would unfairly stratify society in their opinion.
I have no particular answers to these issues other than how they have affected my children. Drake almost visibly shrank in his interest and estimation of school performance during and after Ms X tenure. As soon as he was again made to feel that he was capable of good things, he blossomed immediately. I so wish that he hadn't wasted the last three years like this. He would have been so much better served if he had been in Africa like the twins now are. They are receiving the treatment and preparation that Drake should have had, for he is in no way less capable than either of them. Archer is going to be sent over to the middle school for Algebra even earlier than many of Drake's classmates, and he is no more capable than Drake was.

So telling you this is not to be understood to be any criticism of you or my belief that you were wrong about even a part of your decision. In fact I assume that part of the reason Chase didn't share Drake's fate was that I had expressed this concern to you and you were monitoring the situation, with clear benefits. And it may be that no one had given you this particular feedback about Ms X and the consequences of her teaching philosophy, and so if that is the case it might benefit students down the road to have this feedback from me if you happen to find it useful.
I bear no ill will toward any of those involved, I just happen to disagree with both their decisions and the philosophies that apparently motivated them. The empirical results as soon as he was treated differently have been obvious to everyone, including to him.

At the P/T conference I mentioned, he was initially very embarrassed that I spoke so frankly (I didn't lose my temper or anything, I just said that I didn't agree with how she and her sister had failed to identify him as TAG unlike any of the rest of his previous or subsequent teachers and said that it seemed to be negatively impacting him). Now, though, looking back, Drake sees exactly what I was saying, he agrees fully, and has thanked me for speaking up for him. He sees the episode as evidence that I understand him and am motivated for his interests. My energy level doesn't always allow such enthusiasm.

So it isn't too late for him even though he has to work harder. It may be that it benefits him to resolve the issue of whether he wants to self identify as an achiever now rather than later when the stakes are higher.

And in a somewhat related aside before I conclude, this has not been the only case where the political views of a teacher are somewhat frustrating to me. We tend to tolerate this type of thing because we feel we can usually make up for it at home (this above issue happened to be one that had a large impact), but I wouldn't be fully honest if I didn't express some frustration at the free hand teachers seem to have in expressing their ethical views.

Ms. X, (another teacher) who I personally love and adore and has been very good for my kids so I would forgive her a world of foibles, a few years ago had a political debate in class on the presidential candidates in which she personally cast a vote. Teachers typically are considered to have the 'right answers' so a vote cast openly for a candidate probably does not leave a remotely neutral connotation to students. She also led the class in a debate, with herself as the leader for the D candidate, and my son Archer as the leader for the R candidate. Archer led the president to a victory in his class by one vote (a somewhat similar margin to the national election), but I think that it was a bit inappropriate for a teacher to express such preferences openly to her students considering the influence they would naturally have as an authority figure so often in a position to tell children right vs wrong. Again, this was not a big deal and I didn't want to say anything at the time, and am now doing so because I have brought up the larger context.

Other issues, such as a classroom with a solitary poster theme year after year of evolution or natural selection all over the walls, of all the principles and facts of the natural world to focus on, could perhaps be seen to be chosen because it counters a worldview the children might be taught at home. It could be a reasonable request in my opinion to focus on a natural science theory less associated with controversy and more generally accepted by all worldviews, and any hesitation by teachers to acquiesce might mean they are indeed interested in the indoctrinating potential it provides them.

Today, in Ms X's class, Sadie was taught about Global Warming. I don't think this is inappropriate per se, except that to teach six year olds a theory which has components (planetary atmosphere, states of matter, etc.) that are individually far beyond the level of the students to understand to me smacks a bit of indoctrination--the hope that the overall ethic can be transmitted wholesale before there is an ability or interest on the students' part to analyze what is being presented to them.

These last issues are not that concerning. Overall, unlike the issue of class placement, we feel that they aren't issues that we can't counteract with our own teaching. It is a bit unfortunate, though, that with all the things on earth and in the heavens, teachers often seem motivated to teach things that are of a controversial nature and not among the basic skills or facts that all parties could agree on as a fundamental part of an education to be built on in all cases. For instance, why couldn't these teachers, instead of making manmade GW theory, evolution, environmental activism their focus, couldn't they choose a component such as teaching them some part of understanding the natural or physical sciences to which no parent, no matter the worldview, would object?

I think again, the answer to my own question is that perhaps education is not their only objective, and they are potentially using their influence to guide the ethical and political choices of their students. I feel this is an unfortunate circumstance, particularly because if the ethical and political beliefs that i happen to have were so openly expressed to children those views would certainly be censored, even though they represent another half of the political spectrum and thus one would think they would be equally respected in the education system.
But rather than ask that anyone show respect for my own views, I would much rather any topics which have a controversial nature be avoided altogether.

It is an unfortunately hostile environment for parents with certain non favored politics, and I think it is what forces many of them out of the public school system. We won't go that route, but still we think that it is unfortunate that our efforts need be spent undoing things done at school when it could instead be augmenting something that no one would have any problem with. I would much rather, for example, spend my time supplementing my son's math background than presenting the other sides to controversies. The one is essential, the latter is only required by circumstance.

And certainly I think while my daughter still needs to learn to read and do basic math, controversial political theories don't belong as a prominent part of her school curriculum. I understand that you have many people to please and will again trust your judgement, but I didn't think that there would be any purpose served by my remaining completely silent on the issue, even though I will continue to be supportive of you and your school in any case.
Best,

Thoughts on what make good pictures--other than containing my very photogenic husband

2007-12-01T09:59:00.000-08:00

I was just browsing through some pics to find one obligatory photo for the first inaugural post and it made me think a bit about what makes a good picture.

It is hard not to make use of the 'line them up and pose' style of photos, otherwise they aren't too representative of everyone in your family. But those kind of pictures tend to have everyone offering very stilted expressions that don't tend to represent anything you really remember about your life and family members.
Some others I found that were interesting. One of them is of Sadie not smiling at all. The ones where she doesn't smile actually better reflect her facial features. When she smiles all the facial chub covers them.

Another pic is of Sadie and me taking a picture of a fireman poster that she made at school. She kept coming to me with this big awkward poster I didn't want to keep of a very generic fireman that she made on safety day. So dad suggested we take a picture of it. Now we have lots of pictures of random things she makes before we pitch them, which is a fairly good system. This one was funny because she was beaming and I was obviously not. I like pictures that capture events and emotions not just what the kids look like.

Also are anything funny to our circumstances, and not always flattering. I have pretty bad hair lately. When my health gets bad my hair gets so frizzy and exactly a random mix of straight and curly, unable to be straightened or done anything about. Slade and I both liked this picture of me for what it captured and what it didn't.

Start of TheVonMorganstones

2007-12-01T09:48:00.000-08:00

So because some of you have lots of energy and motivation, raising the standard for the rest of us, our family is now doing something of a blog. At least it is better than scrapbooking, and there is a risk that all of my scrapbook components will stay in my attic forever collecting guilt.

I really don't exactly know what our blogs will be like or who will read them, but I do end up writing a lot of random things and this might be a good clearing house for them.