Common Sense with Kenny Kemp

The Biggest Brain Wins

2011-11-06T08:52:00.001-07:00

I SAW MONEYBALL AND ENJOYED IT. Though I don’t follow sports, I’ve nevertheless seen most sports movies because sports are a metaphor for courage in the face of life’s challenges. The sports movie formula is simple: an underdog beats the odds and emerges as a champion. The consistent success of sports films lies in the fact that life doesn’t usually follow this formula, though we wish it would.

In real life, the underdog is usually less talented and driven than his opponent. And if his opponent is the New York Yankees, he also has less money, and this matters. Most sports movies gloss over the fact that our hero’s opponent gets the big bucks because he’s more talented and driven, and the money he gets only widens the gap between them: he has better training, better equipment and facilities, and thus will likely crush our upstart hero.

Sports films usually end with the gladiators meeting on the field of battle, usually with the hero upsetting the order and besting his opponent. But not Moneyball, and that’s risky. In Tin Cup, Kevin Costner blows the U.S. Open in a spectacular orgy of self-destruction so over-the-top that you can’t help but laugh. That’s good, because Tin Cup is a comedy and it is fiction.

Moneyball is neither. Brad Pitt is Billy Beane, former pro baseball player who now GMs the Oakland A’s. Though he was a player, he is filled with regret about the road not taken, in his case a college education, maturity, perhaps of soul as well as athletic ability, and the unrealized promise of a more complete life.

This is especially poignant for Beane because he exhibits something we don’t often see in sports movies: book smarts. Sports movie heroes are always hard-working, talented, and driven. But often—think Rocky here—they are somewhat dim, because when it comes to battling Goliath, a certain amount of dumb on David’s part is essential.

But Billy Beane is not dumb; he’s smart enough to know what he doesn’t know. He discovers that baseball statistics truly do add up to something: a numbingly complex calculus that can accurately predict performance on the diamond. And when Beane and his Yale economics-trained assistant Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) crunch the stats, they discover that baseball pays too much for the wrong abilities. Hitting home runs is not as important as the ability to regularly get on base. Troubled, imperfect players, not sleek superstars, offer the best ROI, and Beane and Brand set out to build a winning team with the talent a limited budget can buy them.

Unlike most sports movies, where the action is on the field, the drama in this movie largely takes place in the windowless offices beneath the bleachers. It sees athletes as commodities that are sold when they do not pay off. So when three superstar free-agents are lured away from the team by the highest bidders, Beane and Brand rebuild with injured, flawed, inexpensive talent and, after a rocky start, manage a 20-game winning streak (one of the longest in baseball history), and win their division.

Oh, and then they squander an 11-run lead to lose to the Minnesota Twins in the league playoffs.

But they made it to the finals with a per player cost only a third of that spent by the Yankees, and at the end of the film Billy is offered an immense sum to bring his management style to the Red Sox.

Here, the film falls back into formula. Billy Beane was never an insider, even though he made it to the Show. He failed there, as he’s failed in his marriage, and, as the final card in the film tells us, he is still failing to build a World Series championship team in Oakland. But Beane’s story is not about championships, it’s about changing baseball, which many insiders believe is already perfect. But strikes, prima donna millionaire superstars, and declining attendance tell the true story: baseball is dying and money may be killing it.

What I liked most about the film was not the inevitable match-up at the end where the hero does/does not succeed. Winning is actually irrelevant to a post-modern sports film anyway; it’s about the journey, so we’re not surprised when the A’s lose to the Twins. What surprises us is that Billy Beane had a vision, kept at it, did the awful, grinding, numbers-crunching work, found a thread, pulled on it, and built a winning team without the most important tool of modern sports: money.

The lack of money in baseball is like Rocky without his southpaw switch, without which he could not have beaten Apollo Creed. And yet Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics competed without a southpaw switch, won a championship, and Boston took note.

But even the title is misleading. This movie is not about money or lack of it in pro sports. It’s about playing your game, not your opponent’s game—playing the cards you’re dealt. In that regard, Billy Beane is a champion because of his response when the Sox asked him to do in Boston what he had done in Oakland, which would mean moving three thousand miles from his daughter.

But Billy Beane is smart, so you know how the movie ends.

Why They Hate Sarah Palin: Do the Math

2011-06-12T08:41:00.001-06:00

ONLY ONCE BEFORE have I seen this level of hatred of a political figure, and that was Richard Nixon, who at least was hated because of something he had done. Sarah Palin is hated for what she is.

And who is Sarah Palin? There are many theories: she’s a rube, she’s uneducated, she’s stupid, et cetera. But as I’ve watched the parade of wild-eyed, spittle-spewing Leftists denouncing her over the last three years, I’ve become convinced these are incomplete reasons. Certainly, her clumsy vernacular and home-spun, folksy approach grate on eastern establishment (both Dem and Rep) sensibilities. But our most successful president was also accused of all these things, yet he won his reelection bid in 1984 by the biggest landslide in American history.

What, then? Like most things, the correct answer is usually the simplest. Though the charges that she’s an unlearned, moronic hick are indeed simple reasons, if there are even simpler reasons, Occam’s Razor requires that we investigate them.

Unfortunately, this involves math, and the Left hates actual numbers, which get in the way of their precious and inarguable feelings. But life is not always an essay question where you can fudge the answer; most often it is unforgivingly arithmetic, requiring binary answers: right or wrong, good or bad, truth or lies.

There are about 300 million Americans, about half of which are female. Of these 150 million women, roughly half would describe themselves as Democrats. Of these 75 million Democrat women, probably one half are of child-bearing age. That leaves us with 37 million Democrat women of child-bearing age.

In the almost forty years since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, there have been over 50 million abortions in America, 95% of which were elective (i.e., used as birth control). Of the women who have had abortions, almost half have had at least two.

These staggering numbers result in a simple statistic: 35 million Democrat women of child-bearing age, 35 million abortions if each of those women had just one abortion, well over 50 million abortions if each Democrat woman of child-bearing age had two abortions.

But surely not every Democrat woman has had an abortion. Republican women also have them. But most abortions are had by Democrat women for two reasons: (1) abortion-on-demand is an integral part of the Democrat party platform and we naturally identify with those who agree with our choices; and (2) blacks vote 95% of the time for Democrat candidates, and half of those black voters are women.

Recent CDC statistics reveal that the abortion rate in 2007 was 16 per 1,000 women nationwide. White women had the lowest abortion rates (8.5 abortions per 1,000 women). In contrast, black women had the highest abortion rates (32 abortions per 1,000 women). Thus it appears that most abortions, quite simply, come on the Democrat side of the aisle.

Therefore, the reason the Democrats (and especially Democrat women) hate Sarah Palin is much simpler than her offensive “Mama Grizzly” persona: huge numbers of these women have had at least one abortion and feel guilty about it. (Remember, less than 5% of abortions are due to the health of the mother, rape, or fetal abnormalities.)

And speaking of fetal abnormalities, here we have the most direct answer to our question: Sarah Palin, when informed by her doctors that the child she was carrying was suffering from Down Syndrome, said she would carry the child to term because he was a “gift from God.”

That’s why the Left (and especially Leftist women) hates Sarah Palin. In the moment of truth, when decency and love and honor and courage were required of them, many of them chose to kill their unborn children, whereas Sarah Palin chose life.

Occam’s Razor states that the simplest answer is the most likely one. And there is nothing simpler than guilt and shame.

This is why I don’t care about Sarah Palin’s diction, her education, and her legendary, disqualifying “stupidity.” What I care about is the content of her character. When faced with one of the hardest choices any woman ever has to make, she chose life and sacrificed her own future to spend what will likely be a lifetime caring for her damaged son, Trig. And she did it with tears of joy because doing what is right is more important to Sarah Palin than doing what is easy. That means she is a grown-up who knows how to make hard decisions. And making hard decisions—based on time-honored values such as the sanctity of all innocent life—is what a real leader does.

Or maybe they just hate her because she’s hot.

Hollywood Shrugs but the Audience Doesn't

2011-04-17T08:08:00.008-06:00

HERE'S WHAT YOU'LL HEAR: critics hate Atlas Shrugged, Part 1; that it’s amateur hour, with wooden acting, unknown, weak actors unable to handle the stilted dialogue, an incomprehensible story, made on a thread of a shoestring budget.

Here are the facts: Atlas Shrugged is one of the most successful books of all time. More than fifty years after its initial release, it is always in the top ten on Amazon. The executive producer tried for almost twenty years to make the film in Hollywood, but no one would finance it. After he made it with his own money, no one would distribute it. So, instead of the 3800 screens the animation film Rio fills, Atlas Shrugged had to settle for just 300. Yet this last weekend, it equaled the per-seat income of the other hit films. And though just 5% of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes like the film, a whopping 85% of the audience does.

So what gives? I thought Hollywood was all about profit, not politics. If there was money to be made in bringing this book to film, why didn’t they jump at it? There may be several reasons, not all of which are damning to the L.A. Lefties.

Atlas Shrugged is an incredibly difficult book to adapt to screen. It’s over 1200 pages of long speeches on economics and government, not exactly the Bourne Identity. Many people have tried to adapt the book and have gotten waylaid by reverence for the source material. Instead of mining a good story out of it, they stayed true to the unwieldy plot. (This may have been a requirement by Rand’s estate.) But the movie is so true to the book that even the bad dialogue remains. The most obvious change should have been to update a key plot point—Rearden Metal, a new alloy that can support trains moving at 200 miles an hour—into mag-lev technology that doesn’t require rails at all. Or use it in aircraft or automotive construction. Whatever. But trains? Obama thinks high-speed rail is the future. Isn’t that reason enough to abandon it as the basis for a key point in the movie?

Another reason: Hollywood has a long history of hating corporate execs, and all the protagonists in the film are corporate execs. According to Hollywood, only union organizers, beleaguered government workers, and renegade journalists are heroic, and those types are relegated to the antagonist class in Atlas Shrugged. Even though Hollywood is such a corporate, union busting town that most films are shot in right-to-work locales now (try to find a depiction of New York that wasn’t shot in Toronto in the last twenty years), Hollywood still has this fictionalized account of itself that Atlas Shrugged exposes.

Another reason: Hollywood has reason to think audiences are brain-dead morons. Adam Sandler has been the most consistent money-maker in Hollywood for twenty years—which really only proves that we like movies and though we’d rather see a great movie, we’ll watch trash if that’s all there is. (Take that, American movie-goers; you go to these movies, after all, don’t you?)

Atlas Shrugged is a serious movie about serious (and timely) issues: the government picking winners and losers, bureaucrats making it impossible to build or run a business, hate-the-wealthy class warfare, a plummeting economy. No pratfalls, penis jokes, or bare breasts—how could the producers imagine that this movie would excite audiences? And yet it is, because we’re starving for films—no matter their production values—that say something important. The programmers at Turner Classic Movies know this: fifty, sixty, and seventy year old movies are still popular because they were made in an era when Hollywood still shared the values of the audience. But those times are long gone, destroyed with the anti-heroes of the 70s, the nihilism of the 80s, and the stupidity of the 90s until the present. (Hangover 2 is coming soon!)

No, Atlas Shrugged is not a great movie; it may not even be a very good one. The critics’ carping about production values, acting, and the screenplay are all valid. But while not being a great movie, Atlas Shrugged is a good movie about great ideas. Great as in important. I think you will be surprised at how many young people will absolutely love the movie and then tackle the book. I’ve no doubt that John Galt’s seventy page diatribe in the book will be severely truncated in the final film installment, perhaps losing most of its power, but if the movie serves to encourage people to read the book, and they have the discipline to wade through it, by the time they reach Galt’s radio rant, they will be, as I was, spellbound by his passion and irrefutable logic. And it very well may change their lives, as it did mine when I first read it thirty years ago.

Not a bad accomplishment for a movie.

eWriter Hocking Scores . . . Against Us

2011-04-11T06:05:00.006-06:00

IT'S BECOMING INCREASINGLY OBVIOUS that wannabe authors can find success by self-publishing their works as e-books. There is perhaps no better example of that than 26-year-old Amanda Hocking, a writer of paranormal romances and thrillers. In 2009, Hocking wrote five 300-page novels targeted at the young adult market. In early 2010, she wrote three more -- one every two to four weeks.

Working from a $250 a month home that was all she could afford to rent, she fueled her writing with Red Bull, Sweet Tarts and cold cans of ravioli and SpaghettiOs. She wrote for twelve hours a day, every day, using the rest of her waking time to chase agents and publishers. She failed to find anyone interested in her work. By April 2010, Hocking had completed eight novels but still had no agent or publisher. She had accumulated "Hundreds. Maybe thousands," of rejections by that time, she said. "All my other friends had either gone to school or they had decent jobs or they were getting married or they were doing something. And I was still just sending off query letters."

Up to this point, she had only published stories on her blog. Now she decided to publish the novels via Amazon’s Kindle store, adding one more title along the line for a total of nine e-books. "I sold 50 books the first month,” she says. It picked up over the summer, then really took off in November (2010)." In February 2011, sales for Hocking, as evidenced by online proprietary accounts, were: Amazon (via its e-book portal, the Kindle): 227,515 units for all nine of her works, including about 60,000 for her best-selling novel Switched. Barnes & Noble (the Nook): 55,135 units. CreateSpace, an online "print on demand" service: 2,948 units.

That’s a total of 285,598 sales for the three platforms in February 2011 alone. Hocking says that total is about 100,000 copies shy of the real sales. That’s because the figures don’t include sales via Apple’s iBook, Kobo (Borders) and Sony’s eReader -- or sales of three other e-books she is selling in a different format through Barnes & Noble.

Hocking is almost certainly now the world's best-selling e-book author. She says that failing to get published by the conventional route worked to her advantage. "It allowed me to put a lot of books on the market quickly, so if people liked them, they could immediately buy another." Her best-selling Switched, the first novel in a trilogy, has already sold nearly a million copies. "I didn't expect it to be anything like this. I was hoping for around ten percent of where I am now," she said.

Hocking is now making millions self-publishing through Kindle and other platforms. Much of her success is based on volume sales. She sells her work for only $0.99 to $2.99 a pop. That means lower revenue, but she has literally no overhead. She just has to forfeit Amazon’s thirty percent cut and keeps the remaining seventy percent on $2.99 sales for herself. Earnings so far: Somewhere between $1.4 million and just shy of $2 million, she says, most of it in the last four months.

In mid-March, the book she believes to be her best, Switched, was the fifth-best-selling book on Kindle, behind mainstream authors John Locke, Lisa Gardner and Laura Hillenbrand. She had seven titles on the USA Today 150 best-sellers list, including Switched, at No. 28 after peaking at No. 16.

And the money doesn’t stop there. In late March, major publishing houses bid for the rights to four more novels by Hocking. Random House, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins all dropped out as the price rose beyond $2 million for the English rights. St. Martin's Press eventually won out and is set to publish her four-book “Watersong” series, with the first book to be released in the fall of 2012. The publishing company, part of Macmillan, has not disclosed how much it paid for the rights. Further, Media Rights Capital, a prominent film financier and production company, has snapped up the rights to the Trylle Trilogy series by Hocking. The company plans to make three novels into two movies, and Terri Tatchell, a co-writer of the hit science-fiction film “District 9,” is already at work on the screenplays.

The three novels -- Switched, Torn and Ascend -- follow an emotionally damaged high school girl, Wendy Everly, who realizes that she may not be human. With the help of a boy, Finn Holmes, she discovers the mysterious world of Trylle, which is populated by beautiful trolls. Media Rights Capital did not disclose terms. The next step is to line up a distributor, which should not be difficult given the company’s close ties to studios like Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures.

Is Hocking now an outspoken advocate for self-publishing e-books? Heck no. She strongly defends the traditional publishing model. While her success was remarkable, it was exhausting. Hocking posted a defense of her pursuit of traditional publishers on her blog. "I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend forty hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation," she writes on the blog. She also cites book availability, increased quality of editing and career stability as factors in her decision. Nonetheless, the prolific writer who has written nineteen books so far promises her fans she hasn't abandoned self-publishing. "I have a few titles lined up this year yet to put out via the self-publishing. And I'll have more in the future."

(sourced from Southern Review of Books)

For my part, I will say just three things:

1) Obviously, ePublishing can work, if you can find a market. The volume sales model clearly works.

2) Hocking is fortunate to have found an audience, which must have something to do with the "young adult" label, which I eschew, because it usually means books in fact aimed at adults but written to a child's level. This is sad, because there is so much great literature out there for adults, but no one reads it anymore. Every adult woman I know read the Harry Potter series (with her kids, so she said), but few of these women have read Poe, who wrote adult thrillers; thrillers that still thrill, if you have the vocabulary and life experience to relate to him. If you don't, you will tell me Stephanie Meyer is a great writer, and that is incorrect and sad, in my view.

3) So, combining the above points: unless you're writing the kind of stories that can be fueled by Pop Tarts and Red Bull (sugar-high caloric brain bombs), and not well-thought-out, well-researched, and powerfully evocative books that cannot be regurgitated in two weeks, you will probably reach for the ePublishing brass ring in vain.

I don't intend to try. I intend, for good or bad, to write books for adults with adult ideas and, yes, even adult language (i.e., polysyllabic words). When I was a kid, as soon as I could read well, I wanted to read grown-up books. Now, it seems adults are retreating en masse from adult writing, which they often (rightly) identify as pornographic. But there are still adult-level books out that are not lascivious, and such books are infinitely more satisfying than YA books, just as the art of Carl Bloch is infinitely more satisfying than that of Andy Warhol. But such art must be sought out and savored, not read or listened to on CD in tandem with millions of others who want the fifth-grade level storytelling of Meyer and Rowling. Great art is often found in distant lands and you have to sacrifice to go there and find it. Bloch's masterworks are esconced in out-of-the-way churches in Sweden and Denmark. Warhol's is found on tee shirts.

You will decide which is inherently more valuable. Unfortunately, right now, you are deciding, at ninety-nine cents a pop, that "beautiful trolls" are great art and you're making books like Switched into bestsellers and blockbuster movies.

Walt Would Die

2011-04-10T07:13:00.006-06:00

IN 2006, ABC/DISNEY SURPRISED THE WORLD by announcing a miniseries called The Path to 9/11 to be broadcast on the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, based on several books, including, prominently, the 9/11 Commission Report. Opposition began immediately.

The project was maligned by the mainstream media and pressure was brought to bear because the miniseries took a hard look at the lack of response between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks. Remember, those years included the Khobar Towers, the U.S.S. Cole, and the African embassy bombings—and that’s just the attacks on American interests. During that time, all over the world, the jihadists were blowing things up, and Bill Clinton was asleep at the switch.

The miniseries, condensing the voluminous matter coming out of the 9/11 Commission, and including other authoritative sources, promised to be a bombshell in itself. But the series almost didn’t broadcast. Bill Clinton himself demanded changes to the completed film and a number of politicians—none of whom had seen the film, mind you—attacked it. And ABC caved, deleting entire scenes, truncating others, and running a disclaimer. The series, designed to run every year on September 11th, ran just once. It never aired again and was never released on DVD.

Blocking the Path to 9/11: An Anatomy of a Smear details what happened in the aftermath of this debacle. The miniseries itself was billed as a docudrama, indicating that certain liberties were taken with presentation. In Blocking, it is clear from interviews with the participants that they were just trying to tell the truth about the lead-up to 9/11, to “connect the dots” as so many accused the Bush administration of failing to do. Unfortunately for the Left, there were only a few new dots to connect during Bush’s few months in office, but a whole mess of them were ignored during Bill Clinton’s tenure.

A growing sense of horror builds as you watch Blocking. The main writer, Iranian-born American Cyrus Nowrasteh, has a formidable pedigree in the film business, as does director David Cunningham. But nevertheless, they soon became marked men for their temerity in trying to tell us what happened prior to the attacks.

Blocking the Path details how craven Disney was in bowing to pressure from the politicians they helped elect. Several scenes are shown with the excised material intact. The one that stands out most is a moment when the Northern Alliance fighters in Afghanistan have Osama bin Laden in their sights, the target painted with lasers, and American fighters above, their thumbs poised to fire missiles, awaiting a kill order that never comes. The national security team, including heads of the FBI and CIA and the president’s own national security advisor, all agree that bin Laden must go, but no one has the courage to give the order. And Bill Clinton? He’s upstairs in the White House residence and won’t come down to take the phone call and make a decision. For two hours they wait and he never arrives. Finally, the operation is cancelled. As the leader of the rebels leaves, he says to the CIA operative, “Are there any men left in America?”

The gainsayers of this episode say things didn’t happen exactly that way. Nowrasteh responds that maybe that is true, but they had thirteen such opportunities to kill bin Laden, and for the purposes of the film, they collapsed them into one. All the elements in the edited scene were factual.

That’s thirteen chances to avoid 9/11, folks. Thirteen. Talk about an unlucky number.

And that’s really the crux of the so far successful attempts to derail The Path to 9/11. Though millions of people saw the two-night series broadcast, they didn’t see the version that was approved by the phalanx of ABC/Disney lawyers and researchers prior to the filming. But when pressure against the film began to be felt, ABC/Disney caved for no other reason than to spare the person most responsible for 9/11—William Jefferson Clinton.

Blocking the Path leaves the viewer stunned. Every fact need not be unassailable for you to realize that those charged with protecting us failed miserably and are still trying to cover up their malfeasance with help from the very people who are supposed to defend free speech.

As stated, The Path to 9/11 is still unavailable on DVD. Imagine spending $40 million and not wanting to recoup your investment. When a group of investors at a Disney shareholder meeting challenged the company to either release the film or sell it to someone who would, the CEO responded that he knew of no one interested in buying it. The investors immediately made an offer, which Disney refused.

Mickey Mouse is indeed a rat.

Note: You can sign a petition to encourage ABC/Disney to make The Path to 9/11 available at www.ipetitions.com/petition/thepathto911.

He who controls the media controls history.

Stubborn Things

2011-04-04T07:57:00.005-06:00

THOMAS SOWELL'S REMARKABLE BOOK Economic Facts and Fallacies is even more remarkable for its brevity. In just over two hundred pages, he tackles and deconstructs fallacies infecting our cities, our relationships, the academy, business, race relations, and the Third World.

John Adams said famously, “Facts are stubborn things.” The Austin Lounge Lizards sang, “Life is hard, but life is hardest when you’re dumb.” Both are true and one of the most difficult things in life is keeping an open mind for facts that contradict received knowledge—our vision of the world which we hold close because it’s simply easier to believe what we already know is true than to investigate contradictory claims. After all, we’re not stupid; we know certain things are true, right?

Well . . . that depends. Here are a few fallacies and the facts that contradict them. How you receive these facts is something to ponder:

Urban Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: Affordable housing requires government intervention.

Fact: It is precisely government intervention in housing which has made housing unaffordable. A hundred years ago people spent a smaller percentage of their income on housing than today. With increasing restrictions on building, due to zoning and environmental regulations, housing prices skyrocketed. “Open space” and “smart growth” policies restrict building and send prices upward. Houston has no zoning laws or like restrictions; a typical middle-class home on a quarter-acre lot that costs $152,000 in Houston costs more than $1 million in San Francisco. As recently as 2001, home prices in Tampa, FL were not much different than Houston, but after restrictive building laws began to take effect, housing prices doubled. And these rates hold true even when adjusted for inflation.

Male-Female Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: The fact that women earn less money than men is proof of discrimination. Where such disparities have lessened, it is because of government intervention.

Fact: While many white collar jobs may be performed equally well by women as men, most jobs are still dependent upon physical strength (construction) and the willingness of the person to engage in dangerous behavior (phone linemen). While men are 54% of the labor force, they are 92% of job-related deaths. In addition, women are often out of the job market for years at a time, bearing and raising children. When they return, their skills are rusty and outmoded. In the sciences, these same years are the peak years of achievement, and thus fewer women are notable scientists because most opt for motherhood instead. The proportion of women engaged in the professions was higher a hundred years ago than it was fifty years ago—long before anti-discrimination laws or the rise of the feminist movement. The reason is that the median age for marriage for women was higher a hundred years ago, thus more women were in the workforce during the formative years prior to their forties. Indeed, most women who staffed women’s colleges during this earlier era were not married at all; they opted out of family life. Finally, the likelihood of future interruptions because of a woman’s prospective role as a mother can make placing her in a senior position more of a risk to the employer than placing a man of similar ability in that same position. Only the never-married women and men are in comparable circumstances, and here women have had comparable or higher incomes than men, years before there were laws or government policies against sex discrimination.

Academic Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: Attendance at a big-name college or university is essential for reaching the top.

Fact: The four institutions with the highest percentage of their undergrads going on to receive Ph.D.s are all small colleges with less than 2000 undergrads each. And of the chief executive officers of the 50 largest American corporations, only four had Ivy League degrees and just over half graduated from state colleges, city colleges, or community colleges. The fact that graduates of Harvard receive prestigious jobs and salaries may be traced more to their wealthy family connections than the education they receive, as well as their income from the earnings of inherited assets.

Income Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: American household income has stagnated, rising just 6% between 1969 and 1996.

Fact: Household size has diminished; average real income per person in the U.S. rose by 51% over that very same period. Studies of what people actually consume—their standard of living—show substantial increases over the years. Alarming statistics about the plight of the poor never take into account the government and charitable resources available to them; indeed, the poor’s actual income from work accounts for only 22% of the actual economic resources at their disposal. As for stagnation, by 2001 most people defined as poor had possessions once considered part of a middle class lifestyle. Three-quarters had air-conditioning, which only a third of all Americans had in 1971. 97% had color television, which less than half of all Americans had in 1971. 73% owned a microwave, which less than 1% of Americans owned in 1971, and 98% of the “poor” had either a VCR or a DVD player, which no one had in 1971. In addition, 72% of the “poor” had a car or truck. Yet the rhetoric of the “haves” and the “have nots” continues, even in a society where it might be more accurate to refer to the “haves” and the “have lots.” In fine, the problem is not a stagnation of the national economy, but particular economic and social problems of particular groups of people.

Racial Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: Governmentally-enforced civil rights laws have reduced racism in America.

Fact: The percentage of black families with incomes below the poverty line fell most sharply between 1940 and 1960, going from 87% to 47% over that span, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and well before the 1970s, when “affirmative action” evolved into numerical quotas. While the downward trend in poverty continued, the pace of that decline did not accelerate after these legal landmarks, but in fact slackened. There was a similar historical trend as regards the rise of blacks into professional, managerial, and other high-level occupations. In short, affirmative action has produced little or no effect on the relative sizes of black and white incomes. The median black household income was 60.9% of the median white household income in 1970—and never rose above that, or as high as that, throughout the decade of the 1970s. As of 1980, median black household income was 57.6 of median white household income.

Fallacy: The current fatherless families so prevalent among contemporary blacks are a “legacy of slavery,” where families were not recognized.

Fact: Most black children were raised in two-parent homes, even under slavery, and for generations thereafter. Freed blacks married, and marriage rates among blacks were slightly higher than among whites in the early twentieth century. Blacks also had slightly higher rates of labor force participation than whites in every census from 1890 to 1950. While 31% of black children were born to unmarried women in the early 1930s, that proportion rose to 77% by the early 1990s. If unwed childbirth was a “legacy of slavery,” why was it so much less common among blacks who were two generations closer to the era of slavery? Oh, and by the way, from 1994 on into the twenty-first century, the poverty rate among black husband-wife families was below 10%. Turns out that “the man” most important to blacks is the man his wife calls her husband.

Third World Facts and Fallacies

Fallacy: Western nation’s imperialism is responsible for poverty in the Third World.

Fact: There are some prosperous countries whose conquests have been minor or non-existent, and countries mired in poverty that were never conquered. Why are those parts of the Third World least touched by contact with prosperous the most destitute of all? Blame is easier to understand than causation, more emotionally satisfying, and more politically convenient. There are many factors that must be considered: geography (mountainous countries persistently lag behind countries with extensive river valleys), isolation (the indigenous people of the Canary Islands were Caucasians living at a stone-age level when the Spaniards discovered them in the fifteenth century), climate (water is not only life-sustaining, but trade-sustaining; most advanced civilizations arose on navigable waterways), history (in the long view, all nations were Third World nations at some point), law and order (property rights, courts of law, uncorrupt officials—all culturally-dependent—create an environment of prosperity; even Rome’s bloody oppression of conquered lands resulted in a higher standard of living because these elements were a by-product of Roman dominance), population (there must be enough people to congregate in cities, where standards of living always increase; over-population is hardly ever the problem, as there are no examples of countries that had a higher standard of living when their population was half of what it is today), culture (Argentina was mired in poverty before German and Italian immigrants brought cattle-ranching and wheat-production to the country), and foreign aid (living standards were lower in sub-Saharan Africa decades after the departure of the colonial rulers, despite both nationalization of industries and foreign aid).

I’ve merely touched upon Dr. Sowell’s brilliant book, just one of the scores of clear-thinking economic tomes he’s written over the years. Yes, life is hard, but I intend to make my own life less difficult by basing it on facts, not fallacies.

The Freedom to Be Unfree

2011-03-06T08:26:00.002-07:00

IT SEEMS CLEAR THAT THE UNREST in a dozen Middle East countries does not bode well for the West. When the images of demonstrators first started appearing in the media, I wanted to believe that the people marching in the streets in Cairo, Tripoli, and Bahrain were marching for political freedom. After all, they all lived under cruel, repressive regimes. Some governments had military rule (Egypt), others maintained power by bribery (Saudi Arabia), and others by sheer anti-Americanism (Libya). Did not all these autocrats deserve to be overthrown?

Perhaps. Having traveled in the Middle East, I have seen first-hand the culture there and, suffice it to say, it is more elementary school than graduate school. Though the union protestors in Madison screamed like spoiled children, violence did not break out, even when anti-protestor-protestors met them face-to-face. In America, for the time being, it appears we still can have confrontations without gunfire.

But in these repressive Middle East regimes, it takes incredible courage to face down soldiers who have no qualms about shooting you. The people in these countries must really want freedom, right?

Yes, but freedom to do what? That’s the important question.

Commentator Mark Steyn mentioned that he’d seen a series of photos of female graduates of Cairo University, taken between 1950 and 2009. In the earliest photo, the women wore poodle skirts and tight sweaters to their graduation exercises, just like their counterparts in America. In the 70s, they likewise sported jeans and peasant blouses. But in the 1990s, there were no bare arms and legs, and by 2009, all the women wore hijabs covering their hair and heads. That fashion detail alone indicated to Steyn that the Arab world is growing ever more religious. His comment made me look for women in the demonstrations. I saw very few and those I did see were completely covered.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a key instigator of the demonstrations in Libya and Egypt, states explicitly that it will work within existing political systems for as long as practicable, but violence is always an option. (You’ll recall that the Brotherhood was a fertile petrie dish for the men who planned 9/11.) That same Brotherhood will have a powerful position in the new government of Egypt, so say all political commentators.

I was dismayed at Obama’s response to the demonstrations. Remember he completely ignored the “Green Revolution” (a true quest for freedom) in Iran in 2009, but quickly decided that Mubarak must go, dismissing our thirty year relationship with Mubarak, who has honored the treaty with Israel made by his predecessor Anwar Sadat and kept the Suez Canal open and functioning for all that time. Mubarak was a tyrannical despot, but I’m reminded of what FDR said in the 1930s when he was chided for supporting the dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza: “Sure, he’s a son of a bitch,” said Roosevelt. “But he’s our son of a bitch,” which is a restatement of the famous Arab proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

We live in a dangerous world. We have no friends; we have temporary allies. To see the world in any other way is foolhardy. And yet when a true enemy of the United States, the madman Muammar Ghadaffi, is challenged by his countrymen, Obama takes almost two weeks to take sides. Ghadaffi was behind the murder of Americans on Pan Am flight 103, which crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland. It seems you can almost set your compass by Obama’s response to any crisis: whatever he does or says is the exact opposite of what should be done and said.

I believe Arabs throughout the world want more freedom, but the freedom they desire is apparently the freedom to live under a theocracy which will institute sharia law, with beheadings for marital infidelities and terror against the West in order to comply with the Koran’s mandate to convert, subjugate, or murder unbelievers. In short, it is reasonable to believe that Iran is the sort of country most of the people in the streets from Algeria to Pakistan desire, and that cannot be good for Western interests.

But as usual, Obama lives in a make-believe world where all people want American-style freedom. Sadly, his world is not the real world, where you and I live.

Imagine a single Muslim caliphate stretching from Morocco to Pakistan. Now imagine it with nuclear weapons and tell me you wouldn’t prefer Mubarak and even Ghadaffi still in power.

Superman's Nemesis Has Tenure

2011-02-21T06:55:00.004-07:00

Waiting for Superman is a heart-breaking and anger-inciting documentary about American public schools. Heart-breaking because of the injustice this system is inflicting upon innocent children and anger-inducing because the perpetrators of this outrage are its self-styled saviors.

The film follows five children, each of whom wants to attend a private charter school that is vastly superior to their local public school. The problem is that there are up to twenty times more applicants than there are open desks.

The decline of American public schools since the 1970s is irrefutable; American children score a fraction of what their non-American counterparts score in reading and math. And even with the No Child Left Behind Act, a nationwide average of less than thirty percent reach the Act’s academic standards.

Billions of dollars have been spent to improve education, but studies reveal an achievement flat line, no matter how much money is spent or how small classes are.

Who is to blame?

The documentary focuses upon those who have achieved success in educating children and those who oppose them. Yes, there are those who oppose education reform, and shockingly, it is the teacher’s unions. The old canard that teachers are overworked and underpaid is graphically exposed as a lie, and contrasted with charter schools like Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Success Academy, which graduates and sends over ninety percent of its students to college.

Yes, you read right: ninety percent.

Canada’s school, with its uniforms, extended hours, mandatory and intensive parent involvement, and results-based teacher pay, is the model for success, but the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the two largest teachers’ unions, vigorously oppose charter schools like his.

In addition, tenure, which takes college professors years to acquire, is granted almost immediately to elementary and secondary teachers across the country, making them nearly impossible to fire for incompetence. This results in New York’s famous “Rubber Room,” where six hundred teachers under suspension are warehoused for years pending outcome of their cases, all the while receiving full pay for literally doing nothing all day.

In 2008, Michelle Rhee, chancellor of Washington, D.C. public schools (the seventh in ten years) presented the unions with a choice: they could either retain tenure and receive a small pay increase (to $80,000 per year) or forego tenure and receive merit pay, which could result in an annual income over $140,000. The unions refused to even allow their members to vote on the proposal.

But teachers are not entirely to blame. A student is not a tabula rasa; they are the beneficiaries or victims of their environments, and their situations both in life and school are a direct result of their social and economic status. Three of the five children in the film are apparently without fathers, supported by single mothers in low-paying jobs who are unable to move elsewhere to provide better educational opportunities for their kids. The charter school lotteries are a salvation long shot.

While I agree with the filmmakers’ that teachers unions are a prime reason students are not being taught, I would add that parents are just as important, if not more so. When I was in elementary school in the early 60s, my teachers were dedicated and competent. But my parents were also an integral part of the equation. My father worked hard to support a family of nine. My mother, freed from income production, was able to act as our teacher as well, and I remember her relentlessly drilling me using vocabulary, spelling and math flashcards. When 8:30 P.M. rolled around, it was bedtime. I would complain that I wasn’t tired, but my frazzled mother would say, “But I am,” and tuck me in. “If you can’t sleep, read,” she would say.

That single fact alone may explain why I’m an author today.

In short, I had good schools growing up, but I also had excellent parents, and, most importantly, a father who worked to free my mother to fulfill her important crucial role as a teacher. Waiting for Superman makes the solid case that schools could be just as good today if the excessive power of the teachers’ unions were scaled back. I would add that a two-parent household is the other indispensable requirement for a child’s education, and that the power to retain fathers in the home lies squarely in the possession of women.

I’ll make that case in my next post.

Wikipedia World

2011-01-07T06:50:00.008-07:00

AS A NOVELIST, RESEARCH IS A NECESSARY—and for me, delightful—part of the job. In order to create (or re-create) a convincing time and place, I need to know what I’m talking about. When I wrote about ancient Judea in The Welcoming Door, I traveled to Israel. When virology became the basis of my book Lightland, I finally got a chemistry education. The Wise Man Returns required that I understand ancient Egyptian religion, and I relished the chance to delve deeply into the subject. The result was, to my mind, a fuller, more dynamic story.

When I write, it is my intent to draw the reader into the story with just the right amount of detail. I always have binders of information that don’t make it into the book because inclusion would result in a narrative speed bump. If the hero is being chased and finds momentary refuge at Abu Simbel, I can’t stop and pontificate on the temple’s history. (Unless I’m James Michener, who isn’t always successful in this gambit.)

This deep digging and conservative parsing out of information subtly lets the reader know that he will get everything he needs for a fulfilling and enjoyable ride. Indeed, Samuel Johnson said, “A man will turn over half a library to make one book.” That’s sounds about right to me.

But that’s not the world we’re living in. Now, things are backwards. From television to books to movies to politics, I see a recurrent thing. As opposed to deep understanding and a light sprinkling of gleaned facts, I see shallow understanding and unbridled passion, and that passion often masks a profound ignorance of the subject.

Economic theory is one case in point. Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics sets forth irrefutable economic truths, but every day I hear someone make an assertion that goes entirely against them. Atheists make the most stunning statements about what believers believe. Politicians regularly reveal an ignorance about human nature so complete that one wonders what planet they live on.

I blame the schools. When I was in junior high, teachers were still teaching, but by the time I was in high school in the early 70s, the bottom had dropped out, at least in California. Instead of reading classics, my sophomore English teacher had us dissect the popular song “American Pie.” We wasted a substantial amount of time learning about the death of the Big Bopper when we should have been reading The Iliad.

College was little better, at least in my liberal arts department. I had a communications class in which the professor spent weeks propounding his pet theory: “If there is no listener, there is no communication,” a tautology that even at the time struck me as axiomatic.

It wasn’t until I got to law school that I learned how to learn a subject. Our study carrels were located among the library stacks, and the old dusty, tan Pacific Reporters were at our fingertips. Legal research is all about precedent—what someone else said about a principle—and citations must be accurate and on point. You can’t shmooze the judge, who has a copy of the case you’re citing in his library.

But electrons conspired against all this. Reducing the libraries of the world into bits and bytes and the invention of key word searching means the seeker need no longer dig his way down to pay dirt. Comprehending the entire branch of anthropology that is ancient Egypt need not be a precursor for someone wanting to know what the “Twelve Hours of the Night” means. Now, you can Google the phrase and get millions of documents that use the term.

The drawback, however, is that there is no hierarchy of merit in the search results. The use might be found in a fringe essay or a scholarly work. And as an acolyte, you won’t know the difference, and your research may skirt Champollion, Carter, and Budge and be based on a high school paper by Stevie from Oak Park, IL. Sure, you may learn some interesting details, but these will collapse under the weight of all that you do not know, which will likely be the real significance of Osiris’s nightly journey.

Welcome to Wikipedia World.

Now, if Wikipedia were the Encyclopedia Britannica, that would be one thing, but it’s not. The Britannica is written, compiled, and edited by professional historians. Wikipedia is written, compiled, and edited by Stevie.

But, you say, historians are biased and cannot be trusted. Perhaps so. Having lived through the Vietnam era, I know first hand how that war has been distorted by historians. But I cannot imagine that Stevie will do any better. Indeed, he will surely do much worse, because his ideas come directly from the very same historians, but are then twisted even more according to Stevie’s own ignorance, and then re-injected into the datastream on Wikipedia, to be edited and argued over by people with no more understanding or education than Stevie himself. And you, as the reader, may never know the difference.

So why doesn’t Wikipedia hire real historians? Because they cost money and Wikipedia would have to be a pay site, like Britannica. And, as any Gen Xer will tell you, “Hey, man, information should be free!”

Funny, education costs money. Books cost money. Cars, food, and clothes cost money. But information, man, should be free. (I think those kids are mixing up information with music. Man.)

Now, on occasion, I use Wikipedia as a resource. It complements my reading, the paid internet research sites I subscribe to, my email exchanges and chat room discussions, and my regular visits to the library. But to rely solely upon one source for information—as it appears the talking heads of our culture do regularly—is to reveal a profound laziness and ignorance to the world.

But does it matter? If everyone says the world is flat, does that not make it so?

Here there be dragons.

Airport Security: Where This Is Going

2010-11-24T07:10:00.003-07:00

LAWYERS TALK ABOUT THE "SLIPPERY SLOPE" in which a proposed action which seems relatively harmless now will eventually devolve into an unacceptable outcome. (See also the Law of Unintended Consequences.)

The argument as applied to airport security is this: the problem is that there are people who wish to kill Americans and since defeating us in a war is impossible, they use guerilla tactics—most recently suicide bombings which do not require troops or missiles—an explosive concealed on the bomber’s person will suffice. All he or she has to do is get on an airliner and press the button.

After 9/11, I said that threatening air passengers with a weapon would never happen again, because the passengers of Flight 93 “rolled” and stopped the barbarians, proving that a box cutter would no longer be a sufficient weapon to turn a plane into a cruise missile. The TSA never needed to confiscate another penknife for that to happen; people would defend themselves once they knew they were being hijacked.

The terrorists knew this as well and began using hidden explosives designed to be detonated without warning. Shoe bomber Richard Reid was the first example. Last Christmas we had the underwear bomber. These plots were foiled as much by the terrorist’s own incompetence as by the alertness of fellow passengers, but the TSA (which has never caught a single terrorist, by the way) was still fighting the last war, examining my toiletries case for nail clippers and confiscating my Leatherman tool.

So the terrorists refined their method again: bombs were re-designed so that airport metal detectors would not discover them. In response, the TSA then spent billions to purchase X-ray machines that would reveal bombs hidden under a person’s clothing. Unfortunately for the TSA’s public relations department, the new scanners also reveal fatty bulges, colostomy bags, and breast implants. The only alternative is for the recalcitrant passenger to receive a police-style pat down that is designed to find those same tell-tale bulges.

The problem is that the public is pushing back. Phone cameras have captured astonishing video of nuns being frisked and three-year old girls being felt-up. The outrage is growing and, if the Tea Party has taught us anything, it is that people are now capable of organized mass outrage. Thus, today is National Opt-Out Day, in which untold tens of thousands across the country will refuse to fly commercial and be subject to these inarguable indignities.

For a moment, let’s accept the view as fact that these “enhanced” security procedures are necessary. All that means is that the terrorists will refine their methods even further. I imagine the next attempt will involve a bomb hidden in the terrorist’s anal cavity. He will choose the grope over the scanner and will breeze through security and waddle somewhat uncomfortably down the jetway. After the explosion (or his capture), we will all be required to go through the scanner and the pat-down/grope, at which point, Katie bar the door: it’s all out insurrection at airport security.

At this point, the terrorists will be somewhat stymied. With everyone facing prison-style searches at the airport, how can he possibly sneak a weapon or bomb on board an airplane?

But he will not give up. His goal is to bring down the Great Satan and ensure himself seventy-odd virgins in Paradise and he doesn’t need airplanes to do it.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the airline industry nearly went bankrupt. Twenty-six men proposed to cripple the U.S. economy and they did just that. The key to their success was violence in the public/economic square. Thus, a mall, a church, or a stadium serve the same purpose as an airliner. The advantage of these venues is that they have no security. He can just strap on a TNT vest under his overcoat and head to the high school basketball game. The effect will be the same: the American economy will be greatly damaged. In short, if everywhere people gather is a potential terror target, then no public venue is safe and people will stay home.

What is the answer, then? It will likely make you cringe: instead of targeting the weapon, we should target the one holding it, and that means a disproportional response to terror attacks. If someone detonates a bomb in a crowded theater and we find that the perpetrator was from Yemen and is unavailable for retributive justice, we should bomb his town to rubble.

My criminal law professor often said that the punishment should always exceed the crime, otherwise criminality was a mere economic exchange. In his experience as a D.A., the key to crime prevention was to inflict punishment that so far outweighed the gravity of the crime that not even the most zealous (or stupid) criminal would risk it.

In our case, it is hard to find a crime more notorious than murder and since the punishment must exceed even that, the only effective and logical response is to inflict retribution upon the terrorist, his family, friends, and nation to such an exponential degree that even a true-believer longing for his afterlife bacchanal will think twice.

I know of no other solution that has any hope of stopping the kind of public square terrorism we now face. When the terrorist understands that not only will he die in tomorrow night’s high school basketball game bombing, but that everyone he knows back home will die shortly thereafter and will arrive in Paradise plenty pissed at him, even a zealot might reconsider his choices.

Otherwise, America, steel yourself for full body cavity searches, which are up next.

A Public Service Announcement

2010-11-21T08:58:00.004-07:00

An animation I've created in which George Washington and Barack Obama discuss leadership, public service, and the president's proper role.

They're Not Here, They're Not Coming

2010-11-19T08:45:00.001-07:00

One of my computer animations, this time about the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors to Earth.

Unbelievable Change

2010-11-18T09:35:00.004-07:00

An animation I created elicidating my views of Obama's hope and change agenda.

We're All Whigs Now

2010-10-15T07:00:00.005-06:00

PROPHECY: IT'S GONNA BE A BLOW-OUT. This November, Republicans will take the House (by historic mid-term numbers) and the Senate (by more than a squeaker). Obamaism will be repudiated, lock, stock, and barrel. Most of this will be due to the insatiable appetite of the ruling class to take our money and not merely spend it, but flush it away on boondoggles that have cost us $1 trillion and resulted in a flat economy.

How is that possible? Because government cannot create long-term job growth. Certainly, it can mobilize people and money to build giant projects like the Hoover Dam or the interstate highway system, but eventually those projects come to a close and the workers are again looking for work. Only private enterprise is on-going, building businesses that will outlive their creators. Taxing one person to pay for another’s job is not job creation; at best it is an even economic exchange. At worst (and most commonly), it results in the impoverishment of both: the taxed worker has less money and thus his standard of living falls; the newly-hired worker has a tenuous job which is dependent upon the quickly-emptying pockets of the taxed worker. When the first loses his job, the second will eventually lose his as well, unless, that is, Congress discovers how to spend the money of those who are not yet born. Which they have.

This economic shell game has birthed the Tea Party, which is nothing more or less than an amalgam of angry people who feel they pay too much in taxes and receive too little benefit. More taxes, less services. More taxes, less security. More taxes, more politicians and bureaucrats, but less money to spend on the kids at Christmas. While most Tea Partiers are white-middle class mortgage payers, the fact is that most mortgage payers in America are white. So the fact that Tea Party conclaves reflect that racial makeup means nothing, only that the brightest anger with the government is focused in groups that pay taxes. But if the USA were France, the welfare class would also be marching. That will come next summer when the Republicans, perhaps properly chastened, begin cutting entitlement programs so our unborn grandchildren will not enter life as serfs.

But will the Republicans actually cut spending and entitlements? The fact that the average civil servant makes double what the private sector worker makes (after factoring in non-cash benefits) is the match that may light the fuse of real change. If a newly-empowered, Tea Party-flavored Republican majority says to America, “We intend to cut everything by X percent,” perhaps this will fly. Equal hardship is easier to bear than the class warfare now being waged by the Left. But if the GOP returns to their spendthrift ways, then this is my prophecy:

It is 1860 and the Whigs are no more.

The Whigs, you remember, were the political descendants of the patriots who formed our nation, and became the strongest opponents of the Democrat party between 1830 and 1950. They elected four presidents: William Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore. The question of the expansion of slavery into the territories divided the Whigs and by 1856 they had crumbled, to be replaced by the fiercely anti-slavery Republican party. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, was a Whig who left the party over the slavery issue.

In short, the Whigs fell behind the times and became irrelevant. They did not listen to the electorate.

If the Republicans, energized by the Tea Party activists, who clearly espouse Constitutional governance and a balanced budget, fail to follow these principles, then the Democratic slaughter of 2010 will be a pale precursor for the complete destruction of the Republican party in 2012, which will be replaced by a new party that more accurately reflects the wishes of the vast middle-American electorate: low taxes, low federal spending, less government intervention in our lives, and the reigning in of entitlements.

In November, the leaders of the Republican party, heretofore complicit in the Democrats’ economic crimes, will receive a clear wake-up call. It remains to be seen, however, if they will hear a bell or a death-knell. On that, my prophetic powers are weak, though my gut sadly reminds me that power corrupts. Therefore, what shall we call the new party? Any ideas?

Whatever it is, sign me up.

Ten Films That Changed My Life

2010-10-03T10:10:00.005-06:00

NOT LONG AGO A FRIEND said we should not expect profundity from movies; they are, after all, mere entertainment. I deeply disagree. From time immemorial, humans gathered around the campfire to tell and hear stories whose design, then as now, is to teach us how to face our fears, overcome obstacles, pursue love, or have integrity—in short, how to live. I will buttress my argument with ten examples of films that have had a powerful impact on me—all for the good. (We’ll leave the negative lessons for another time).

Defending Your Life. This was the movie that prompted me to say, “Hey! I’m supposed to make this movie!” Hapless advertising exec Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) fecklessly cuts short his life and finds himself in the Afterlife, where he has to defend his earthly actions. The standard he must meet is to overcome fear, an ability he lacks as seen in several funny and sad flashbacks. But love in the form of Julia (Meryl Streep) finds him and he finally becomes fearless. In the end, he is allowed to move onward, leaving mortality behind. Though I quibble with the notion that we’re here to overcome fear (I believe we’re here to learn to love), it’s a small quibble. And it’s all done with pitch-perfect comedic writing, such as when Julia approaches Daniel and asks innocently, “Do I know you?” and he responds, stunned by her beauty, “I hope so!” Most of all, the movie postulates an ordered and loving universe where nevertheless there are standards we must achieve. Learning to love each other and acting fearlessly on that love is something I think about every day.
It’s a Wonderful Life. Frank Capra’s tour de force in which George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) discovers what the world would have been like had he not been born. There is an indisputable reason why this is the most viewed movie in history (beyond a glitch in copyright which allows unlicensed broadcast): Our lives are important, and thus wonderful, even if they’re painful. As Clarence the angel says, “Each man’s life touches so many other lives.” What Clarence does not say is equally true: each man can choose how he will touch others’ lives. He can do so positively or negatively; it is his choice. Also, he can do so subtly, as George Bailey does, so quietly that he is absolutely stunned to know that so many people love him. This film prompts me to do good, quietly, and know that those who matter are watching. It is a wonderful life and we have the power to make it so.
Groundhog Day. The other side of the coin from It’s a Wonderful Life. Selfish weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) discovers a world diametrically opposed to that of George Bailey, a world where no one changes except him. Small town Punxsutawney is a perfect foil for Phil’s big-city brashness, but the Universe has a lesson for Phil: see what your life could be if you stopped thinking about yourself. At the beginning of his ordeal, Phil reacts in typically narcissistic ways, indulging himself in sex, entertainment, and gluttony. After a time, bored, he turns to a quicker sort of self-destruction, but each morning he wakes up the same man: physically alive but emotionally dead. Finally, he begins to change the world by changing himself. He catches the kid falling from the tree, performs the Heimlich on a choking diner, changes a flat tire, and feeds an aging derelict, kindly calling him “Father.” Through all these acts, he becomes someone who thinks about others and thus becomes someone others think about. And he wins the lovely Rita (Andie McDowell). “Let’s live here!!” he exults as they step out of the hotel into a bright new day of fresh snowfall and blue skies. “We’ll rent at first!” That’s a happy ending.
A Man for All Seasons. The true story of Sir Thomas More, who, alone of all English nobility, did not sanction Henry VIII’s dissolution of the Catholic Church for the sole purpose of effecting his own divorce. This movie is nothing more or less than a study in integrity. At every turn, More (the unforgettable Paul Scofield) is besieged by friends and enemies alike who wish him to conform to the crowd. Indeed, the most memorable exchange is between More and his friend, the Duke of Norfolk, who begs More to join the aristocracy and sign a pledge supporting Henry’s actions “for fellowship’s sake!” More calmly responds, “And when you go to heaven for doing your conscience, and I go to hell for not doing mine, will you join me . . . for fellowship’s sake?” Eventually, Henry can no longer stand More’s silent opposition, and false witnesses secure More’s conviction. As he scales the gallows, More gives the customary coin to the headsman, and says, “Be not afraid of your office: you send me to God.” Archbishop Cranmer leans forward and says, “You’re so sure of that, Sir Thomas?” More replies, “He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to Him.” This exchange alone completely changed my view of God: There is nothing we can do that will separate us from Him, if being with Him is our desire. God is love; he loves us; we shall one day be with Him. Pretty profound, in my view.
Casablanca. Rick (Humphrey Bogart) is the quintessential weary American: tired of doing the right thing, he tries to find anonymity in Casablanca, Morocco, during the height of World War II. But he cannot escape himself, and a welling joy in the heart is felt at every turn as we watch Rick try again and again to do the wrong thing, and utterly fail. He cannot turn down the young couple who desperately need his help to escape Nazi-occupied French territory, even though the young woman offers him an almost irresistible temptation. He cannot mistreat his employees, even when the bar is shut down. And he cannot not love Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) when she comes to him, even after she broke his heart in Paris. In the end, Rick proves that goodness—true goodness—is the marrow in the bones of an integral man. Many men try to do good but fail because it is an affectation, an act. But Rick, whose goodness was burned into his soul through saccrifice for a virtuous cause (resisting tyranny), can no more leave Casablanca with Ilsa than he can resist the love he feels for her. In the end, he loves her more completely by letting her go than he ever could had he left with her. Nobility? Play it again, Sam.
The Mission. Robert DeNiro’s finest performance as Rodrigo Mendoza, a slave hunter in 18th century South America, who murders his own brother and then, finding no forgiveness in his own heart, finally turns to God. But God has more in mind for Rodrigo, and the challenges only escalate. A newly ordained monk in a jungle-bound monastery, he comes to love the natives and eventually dies defending them from a new crop of slave hunters. The most poignant scene in the film, and filmdom’s greatest treatment of spiritual conversion, occurs when Rodrigo, burdened by his own sins (literally, his armor and weaponry) attempts to scale a steep waterfall-drenched slope as penance. The natives in the company watch, at first uncomprehending, then in dismay, and finally, notwithstanding that they know he enslaved and murdered their own brothers, one of them performs the supreme act of forgiveness and he cuts the rope connecting Rodrigo to his burden, and the armor tumbles down the hill, releasing the broken, penitent man, who collapses into their arms, spent, empty, both spiritually and emotionally, ready now to be filled with love and hope. That scene alone encourages me to believe that there is nothing so terrible that we might do that cannot—and will not—be forgiven.
Chariots of Fire. When British film producer David Puttnam came to Hollywood, they said it couldn’t be done. Popular films about uplifting topics? So passé, so Sound of Music. Yet Puttnam did what he promised (for a time) and his finest result is this extraordinary film about two competing runners, one a prickly Jew, the other a placid Christian, who find friendship and honor at the 1924 Olympic Games. Running, a common Biblical metaphor, is also a metaphor here, for life and the differing yet successful approaches each runner takes in his. The entire mood of the film is sacred and fervent religious belief (as well as bitter agnosticism) are both treated with the utmost respect. I particularly enjoyed Eric Liddell’s (Ian Charleson) wonderful line, “When I run . . . I feel His pleasure.” Same for me watching this film about men with human goals achieved through godly virtue.
Star Wars. Don’t laugh; I’m talking about the first three Star Wars (the final three were made by the Body Snatcher’s pod-version of George Lucas). It was the first film I had seen after two years in South America and had a powerful impact on me, determining not only what I would study in college, but also illuminating my understanding of what cinema (our modern campfire) could be. Everyone knows the story, but what influenced me then (and continues to do so today) is the spiritual arc of each character. Everyone in the story is on a spiritual quest, though they do not know it. Some characters like Obi Wan and Yoda are clearly bodhisattvas, descended masters, acting as spiritual guides for others. Some have turned from the Light (Darth Vader), but are eventually redeemed. Most of the others are young souls just beginning their spiritual journey, as evidenced by the fact that everyone in the films says, in a crucial decision-tree moment, “I have a bad feeling about this,” evidence that they’re on the right track and the Force is working within them. As they grow, the Force grows stronger in each person—even Han Solo!—and in the end, it is sufficient even to redeem Darth Vader himself. In this light, Star Wars is a masterful example of redemption. With light swords.
Forrest Gump. At the time it came out, Forrest Gump was ridiculed as a study of Reagan-era stupidity and fecklessness. Gump was the lovable stooge (like our president) who couldn’t help but come out on top, due to a perversion of natural laws. Nothing could be further from the truth. What Forrest Gump is (the movie version, at least; the book is much darker), is a wonderful example of goodness. Though Forrest often quotes his mother as saying, “Stupid is as stupid does,” what he could have easily said instead was, “Goodness is as goodness does.” Forrest overcomes his disability, throwing off his (spiritual) shackles, literally. He loves Jenny and shares her pain (“Sometimes there just aren’t enough rocks in the world.”). He saves his fellow soldiers, including the reluctant Lieutenant Dan (twice) and manages to mete out justice even at a Black Panther “party.” In the finale, he redeems (that word again) Jenny, and his expansive love accompanies her into the valley of the shadow of death, then continues on to raise their child with humility and bravery. Most of all, he never thinks of himself. Perhaps he is too simple to comprehend selfishness. We should all be so stupid.
Man of La Mancha. I could do an entire top ten list of memorable musicals, but this tops not only that list, but makes it onto this one as well. Peter O’Toole is compelling as Don Quixote, the manic and utterly mad subject of the play within a play that is this fine film. Quixote’s life-saving decision to live in an fantasy world of honor and integrity results in the salvation of those around him, including the desultory barmaid Dulcinea (Sofia Loren), with one of the most powerful love songs ever written, succeeding in showing her who she really is when she sees herself reflected in his eyes. This tender, non-ironic film showcases the last of the 1960’s crop of astonishing musicals, where love was both virtuous and unashamed. What significant, uplifting musical have we had since this gem?

Those are my top ten. Which great films did I miss? Tell me why.

Profile Me . . . Please!

2010-08-29T07:52:00.004-06:00

THE CURRENT IMMIGRATION CONTROVERSY, where the federal government is suing Arizona for enforcing a state immigration law that is less invasive than its federal counterpart, once again raises cries from the left of racial profiling.

As if that were a bad thing. Not just profiling, but racial profiling. Oh, the horror!

Let’s say I’m driving home late one night and I am stopped by a policeman because my car matches the description of a car leaving the scene of a crime. A quick check of my license and registration resolves the issue and soon I’m on my way. I was just car profiled.

But what if the car was seen leaving a bar after a woman had been mugged by a man? I might be delayed for a substantially longer time because I am a man driving a car fitting the witnesses’ description. I might sit in the back of the police cruiser for some time as my alibi is checked out. When it is, I am let go and the police say, “Sorry, sir, but we had to be sure.” In addition to being car profiled, I was gender profiled.

Now, let’s take it one step further. Say the witnesses of the mugging noted that the assailant drove a car like mine, was male, and was white. As I sit handcuffed in the back of the police cruiser, another man driving a car like mine is allowed to pass. Why don’t they stop him?

Because he’s black. I have just been racially profiled.

Now, tell me truthfully, how is racial profiling any different than car or gender profiling? All these profiles help law enforcement find the guilty party. Eventually, the police will discover that I am not the perpetrator and will let me go. I might spend the night in jail, but I will be let go because I am innocent. Indeed, if I am arrested, I will pray that they profile every white man driving a car like mine within a hundred miles of that bar in order to find the criminal and let me go free.

Someone is going to say that the police are not interested in catching criminals, only in making arrests. I will only say that such police should be exposed and punished. But the other 99% are trying to catch criminals, not arrest innocent people.

In this light, the immigration debate becomes quite simple. Since 99% of the illegal aliens in this country are Hispanic (due to our contiguous borders with Mexico), it makes perfect sense to focus on the Hispanic population when seeking illegals. When I travel in South America, I always carry my passport with me. I stick out like a sore thumb because of my race. Soldiers at provincial border checks single me out and ask me for my identification. I am not surprised or offended. The vast majority of the people around me have dark skin; I do not. I am, therefore, by definition, “alien” and thus accorded scrutiny. That’s why I got the visa and passport in the first place, so I could enter their country legally and, notwithstanding the inconvenience of having to produce my documents, can move freely within the country.

Given the tens of millions of illegal aliens now in my country due to the dysfunction of their countries and our porous southern border, it therefore makes perfect sense to ask all Hispanics for identification. Only those who are not citizens have anything to fear; lawfully-admitted foreigners and naturalized American citizens will suffer only minor inconveniences. I doubt anybody with proper identification will find themselves sitting handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. You provide ID when you write a check at the grocery store, don’t you?

The core truth behind the immigration debate is the desire of the democratic party to increase its voter base. Since the vast majority of democrats vote that way because they see the government as a provider of goods and services and not as a thief of wealth, democratic votes are obtained by interest group bribery: affirmative action for the black community, government contracts for the unions, and anchor-baby citizenship for illegal Hispanics, who really should be called “undocumented democrats.”

So all this whining about racial profiling is a mere smoke screen. Every day, I am profiled in a dozen different ways. The credit card offers I receive in the mail are economic profiles. The yard maintenance flyer on my front door is a home-ownership profile. Even the ads that pop up on my Facebook page are tailored to the profile I authored there. Most of these profiling measures are minor inconveniences; some, like a mistaken arrest, can be greatly disturbing. But every day we’re profiled in order to maintain a safe and secure society.

Seems a small price to pay. So, profile me . . . please! I have ID and an alibi.

None of Your Business

2010-05-24T09:21:00.005-06:00

SERIAL ADULTERER JESSE JAMES has now tearfully confessed on television that he has been unfaithful to his movie-star wife Sandra Bullock. Tiger Woods’ famously wooden apology was truly cringe-inducing. Eliot Spitzer, former New York governor, confessed to numerous infidelities as his humiliated wife stood stone-faced behind him on the dais. Every day, it seems, some famous person ruins their life and then apologizes to me.

“Why?” I ask the TV, shaking my head. “I don’t care. It’s none of my business.”

And yet every time I stand in a supermarket line, I’m assaulted with images of human frailty. The rich and famous at risk of losing all they’ve worked for, sacrificing the innocence of their children, not to mention putting in jeopardy their lucrative endorsement deals. I stare in amazement as I watch my fellow shoppers all but drool over this pile of steaming excrement with goggle-eyed intensity.

Schadenfreude is a German word meaning “pleasure at the misfortune of others.” Its symptoms include the reading of People magazine, poring over The New York Post on your morning subway commute, watching E! television, and chatting with others about these peccadilloes while you cluck your tongue and make the “isn’t-that-tragic?” face. Schadenfreude results in a temporary feeling of superiority, but always ends in self-loathing. The cure? Knock it off!

But people seem unable to hole up in the crash pad with only orange juice and chocolate bars and sweat it out until they shake the schadenfreude monkey, so I recommend another cure, where Tiger Woods looks into the camera and says:

I’m a bad person. I know I’m a bad person. I got caught in a lie and now everyone knows I’m a bad person. My personal life is in a shambles because of what I’ve done. But it’s NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. I do not owe you an apology. I do not owe my fans an apology. The only people to whom I owe an apology have already received it, in private. And what I said to them is none of your business.

To my sponsor, I don’t know why my personal life matters when it comes to the merits of Gatorade, but if you think it does, so be it. I suggest you avoid using celebrities to sell your energy drink. If it’s any good, it will sell itself.

To my fans, I say: Get a life. Not me, nor anyone in the public eye should be a role model for your kids. You should be their role model. I’m just someone who’s famous. Obviously, you don’t have to be smart or a good person to be famous. I’m neither. I might be good at what I do on the golf course, but beyond that, you have no claim on me. For the duration of the match, you have a right to expect my best. But the rest of my life is mine. You have no right to it; you have not purchased it, and I refuse to give it to you. I would never wish on my worst enemy the kind of scrutiny my family and I have been subjected to since my world-class screw up. Please leave me alone and please, please, please, leave my family alone. It’s none of your business.

If Tiger made a statement like that, I’d probably take up golf.

God Punishes Haiti?

2010-01-19T09:53:00.005-07:00

IN THE AFTERMATH of the Haiti earthquake, many are asking themselves, "Why does God let such things happen?"

Pat Robertson had a quick answer: In an effort to eject their French colonial masters many years ago, the Haitians made a pact with Satan and are now suffering God's wrath. So there.

Others have said: Bad things just happen. To everyone.

So which is it?

Believers in the Bible (like Robertson) know there are consequences to disobedience. Adam and Eve were ejected from the Garden of Eden for disobeying God. The confusion of languages was the result of man's hubris in constructing the Tower of Babel. And of course, God killed almost all life on the planet in the great flood. From these stories, one can easily believe that God punishes bad behavior, sometimes by cataclysmic means.

On the other hand, earthquakes do indeed occur naturally. The deist "clockmaker" thesis says that God created the universe and, like a clock, it operates largely on its own, not requiring His constant oversight. The Big Bang completely destroyed the random universe as it was moments before in favor of order, and our world was the eventual result. Therefore, everything that happens is part of a plan that God has set in motion. It is only our earth-bound viewpoint that tempts us to believe that suffering and death are abnormal events in an otherwise happy and static world. Bad things happen to people, just as good things do. But this answer seems to leave God out of the equation. As Dennis Miller observed, "If we're quick to give God credit for miracles, why are we slow to blame him for disasters?"

Jesus said that God "causes it to rain on the just and the unjust." So is God up there, blithely flinging thunderbolts toward earth, with no concern for who is hurt? I don't think so. The God I believe in either allowed or sent the earthquake, not as punishment but as a test.

Some of our sufferings are undeserved individually. Exploding gas mains. Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Appendicitis. These unexpected and personally unmerited events, random or not, nevertheless have the effect of quite accurately testing personal mettle. We make a mistake when we believe that death is only random or retributive. In fact, facing death may be an opportunity to prove our character. Only God knows the heroism that thousands of Haitians discovered in the final moments of lives that were literally being shaken apart.

Also, some of our sufferings are deserved. Robertson, again? Not exactly. People do not suffer for the evil their ancestors did. This is an old canard that has justified mistreatment of the children of cursed peoples throughout history. God does not punish anyone for anyone else's mistakes. So the Haitians are not suffering because their forefathers might have offended God. But they might be suffering because the clock God made has built-in tests. They are undergoing this test right now, en masse. And I have no doubt that for every Haitian who is looting and killing, there are a hundred that are helping and loving their neighbor. Most are passing the test, in life or in death.

But more to the point, the moment you and I heard about the earthquake in Haiti, an important test began for us as well. What will we do?

Our answer reveals the confidence we will have when we someday stand before God to give an accounting of our life. Will we be able to say we accepted the test and did our best? Or will we try to explain that we did nothing because "they" deserved what happened to them?

You see, it doesn't really matter why things happen. What matters is what we do about them.

Don't Sub for Santa -- Fire Him!

2009-12-20T05:17:00.006-07:00

FOR YEARS, I PARTICIPATED IN SUB-FOR-SANTA. I was always happy to be a part of this tradition and looked forward to it each year. Until a few years ago.

My church group was given the name of a needy family and a list of suggested gift items. One evening in early December, my group met at Shopko. An hour later we had filled four carts with with food, candy, staples and toys. We returned to the church where we wrapped the items and had an enjoyable evening chatting with other groups doing the same.

A couple of days before Christmas, we parked in front of the family's home. As we unloaded the gifts, I looked around. The neighborhood was humble, but clean. Christmas lights adorned most of the homes. There were two cars parked in the driveway, including a pickup truck. As we trundled our gifts toward the house, I recognized the kind of truck it was from my experience as a contractor: the father of this household was a carpet installer. A niggling question arose in my mind as we congregated at the front door. Carpet layers work hard. Very hard. But they also make a good living: around $300 a day. That's over $70,000 a year. The bag of gifts in my hand suddenly grew heavier.

The door opened and a Hispanic woman greeted us. Several children stood behind her, gawking. She spoke little English, but motioned for us to enter. As we did, I noticed the expensive marble tile on the entry floor and the well-furnished living room, complete with a large Christmas tree, already surrounded by presents. Since I speak Spanish, I told her who we were.

"Ya lo se!" she said. I know! Curious, I asked her how. "We signed up for this," she said brightly.

"Signed up?" I asked. "Where?"

"At the community center. They had a list for people who wanted Christmas and I signed up. I told them what gifts we wanted and now here you are!"

I grimaced a smile. Here was a prosperous immigrant family with their own home and two cars. There was no sign of dysfunction, trouble, or poverty here. Dad made a good living. And we were giving them Christmas because Mom had signed up for it.

I didn't say anything; my friends were not privy to my conversation with the woman. After singing a couple of carols and leaving, we bid each other goodnight. I saw the glow of happiness on the face of my friends and I was glad for them. But in the rearview mirror of my own car, I saw my face. I was angry. Angry because some feckless government bureaucrat, eager to be "of help" during the season, had institutionalized and ruined what should have been a personal, highly private charitable act, where someone sees someone in need and quietly answers that need. Instead, a sign-up sheet and a gift list was given to church groups around Salt Lake and we spent our money and time awarding someone the Christmas lottery.

Now, before you call me Scrooge, hear me out. Historically, Santa Claus did not give gifts. He kept a list of naughty and nice children and rewarded them according to their behavior. Good kids got nice gifts; bad kids got a lump of coal. Both were earned. But Santa now represents the getting of something for nothing. Giving someone a gift doesn't reinforce good behavior (being "nice") and may indeed reward bad behavior (teaching people to expect no-strings charity).

May I offer an alternative? Instead of hand-outs, let's give hand-ups. And I know some folks who do just that: OPPORTUNITY INTERNATIONAL (http://www.opportunity.org/). For over thirty-five years, OI has made small loans to help people start their own businesses. Most loans are just $60 and 98% are repaid. The money is then lent to another worthy entrepreneur. Loan recipients form "trust groups," which bring together 10 to 30 entrepreneurs who elect leaders, receive training and pledge to guarantee each other’s loans. Because the group guarantee replaces the need for collateral, credit becomes available to those previously locked out from formal financial services.When clients build businesses this way, they set monumental changes in motion. Family income rises. Children are fed and go to school. Homes are improved. Lives are changed.

How many times have you wondered when you gave the panhandler a dollar what they were going to spend it on? With OI, you direct your loan to someone who not only values it, but will repay it and that money will then bless the lives of others.

I joined OPPORTUNITY INTERNATIONAL and I urge you to do the same. For as little as $25, you can change someone's life, and then that money, once repaid, will go to work again, changing someone else's life. You can make a one-time donation or choose a regular contribution schedule. And since OI has been at it, scandal-free, for decades, you know your investment -- for that's what it is -- is actually reaching the people who need your help. You're not teaching a man to fish and then taking your tackle home with you. You're loaning him the money to buy his own fishing pole, which he will repay. And then that money will help another man buy a fishing pole for his family. And generations of families will be affected.

Originally, Santa Clause had it right. Good behavior should be rewarded. This Christmas, I urge you to fill someone's stocking with a loan; give them a gift they will in turn give to another. Truly, a gift that keeps giving.

St. Nick will be proud. No coal for you!

I'm Not Anal . . . You're A Slob!

2009-12-14T12:44:00.010-07:00

IN THE WORLD WHERE I'M KING, all my subjects would be allowed to say anything they wished, but they'd have to say it properly. They'd have complete freedom of speech, so long as they used correct grammar and definitions.

So when I hear people call me "anal" when referring to my non-slovenly lifestyle, I want to shout, "Off with their heads!" and send them straight to the dirty, dank, dreary dungeon: their own filthy bedroom.

First of all, there's the matter of definition. "Anal" is short for "anal retentive," which is a Freudian stage of child development when the infant's attention moves from oral to anal stimulation, where it then learns to control excretory functions. Freud theorized that children who experience conflicts during this period may develop the personality traits of orderliness, stubbornness, a compulsion for control, as well as a generalized interest in collecting, possessing, and retaining objects. Although Freud's theories on early childhood have been influential, modern research suggests that parental attitudes have a much more concrete effect on how an infant will grow up.

The key phrase here is "Freud theorized . . ."

In George Orwell's 1984, the totalitarian government pacified the populace by redefining words as their opposite meaning. War fell under the rubric of The Ministry of Peace and so on. In the real world, this tendency for the majority (or a powerful, vocal minority) to redefine previously acceptable behavior as deviant continues apace. Formerly lauded personality traits such as neatness, organization, and cleanliness, falling outside the ability or approval of the powers-that-be, are redefined as wrong and even sick. "Anal" is one such definition.

Now I'm perfectly willing to allow that the woman that lives in her tiny apartment with 35 cats is in trouble by any standard, most notably hygiene. Ditto the co-worker who sharpens all his pencils to the exact same length. No one is going to say these folks do not have issues. But to apply the term "anal" to them is incorrect and doubly so when applied to someone whose organizational and achievement skills are not extreme but merely surpass your own.

You see, we "order-freaks" are on to you slobs. We've been in your home, waiting for half an hour as you scurry around searching for your car keys. Ours we found hanging on the hook by the kitchen door, where we place them each evening as we come in from the garage after work. When you finally find the keys under a couch cushion, we're late for the movie and you wonder why we're, as my mom used to say, "fit to spit!" It's probably just as well that we are seated apart in the crowded theater; you don't want to hear for the thousandth time how your lack of organization (or dare I say consideration?) has once again made a simple evening a never-ending battle with inanimate objects from the car keys to the sitter's number, to where we parked the car, to getting napkins for the popcorn.

If cornered, you toss it off. "I'm too creative to be bothered with such mundane things!" you shout as you sort through the garbage can for your retainer. (Not too bothered, I hope, to make it to the ER for treatment for salmonella poisoning.)

You look around at my house and snort, "Does anybody live here?" as if slovenliness were a prerequisite for happiness. To a shrinking minority of us, order in our physical surroundings happily releases us from worrying whether those undies really need washing, allowing us time to ponder the wonders of nature, plot our next book, or reminisce on the good old days when cleanliness was God's next-door neighbor instead of his arch-enemy living across the street in a Silence of the Lambs basement.

But we fuss-budgets are generous sorts. We know that your life of confusion, memory loss, and disorder effectively punishes far more than we could. We know that when you smirk and label us as "anal," what you're really saying is that you're unwilling to master one of life's most basic talents: the ability to structure your world so you achieve your goals. Not my goals. Your goals.

That's too bad, because I want you to achieve your goals. I want you to experience the joy of getting there early, the self-satisfaction of finishing your homework in time to watch your favorite TV show, the pride of wearing matching socks. All that I want for you. But you've got to want it too. So start by ceasing to label the rest of us. We're not your enemies. We don't have a derogatory psycho-sexual term for your failings; to us, you're just a slob, and being a slob is not a personality disorder. It's merely a refusal to do what's next.

That's all we clean-mongers do. We do what's next. The dishes don't fill the sink because we rinse and stack. The remote doesn't get kicked into the pool because we don't take it out to the backyard in the first place. Our cavity got filled because we made the appointment with the dentist, wrote it down on the calendar taped to the fridge, and looked at it the night before as we raided the freezer for the Rocky Road, which was in there because we bought two containers, knowing that no matter what lies we tell ourselves, we're going to eat a whole half-gallon and so it's a good idea to have another one for the rest of the family.

We do what comes next and guess what: It becomes habit and soon we don't have to think about it anymore and that means we're free to think about everything else. Including what you want for Christmas. (You're paying attention now, aren't you?)

So next time you're tempted to call me "anal," remember: if you do, it will be just another reason you might not find something from me under your tree. The other is that you don't have a tree because you put off buying one until Christmas eve and they were all sold out. But that's your problem. I don't have one.

Okay, maybe one: I'm not king.

My Articles of Faith (part 3)

2009-12-06T07:12:00.005-07:00

IN THIS THIRD POST, I WILL WRAP UP exposition of my core beliefs. In previous posts, I've discussed my view of the nature of God and man and our purpose here on earth. I will now turn to the individual I believe God has chosen who is best fit to guide our sojourn here and help us accomplish the purpose of our mortal existence.

THE NATURE AND MISSION OF JESUS

I believe Jesus was mortal. He was a bodhitsatva, a soul who had mastered love over his lifetimes and was poised to transcend mortality, but instead chose to return to earth one final time, for an important purpose.

I believe Jesus’ purpose was to teach us to love. His Gospel is the shortest, straightest path to mastering love and thereby transcending mortality, which is the goal of all souls incarnated on this planet. When he says, "Come, follow me," he guarantees that if we emulate his example, we will master love and transcend mortality, just as he did.

I believe in error, not sin. Errors require correction; sin requires judgment. Because every mistake we make (willful or not) comes with an automatic, proportional, and negative consequence to our soul, when we are in error, we immediately begin the process of suffering for and learning from that error. Therefore, there is no need for an eventual judgment by God because perfectly proportional consequences are linked to the error and we instantly begin learning the connection between our error and its consequence.

I believe in individual consequences. Because each error has an immediate and proportional consequence, there is no need for a savior to "pay" for my errors. Jesus did not, and could not, die for my errors because (1) they have nothing to do with him—they are inflicted upon myself and upon other mortals, not God. I alone am solely responsible for them; (2) in the precise moment they occur, I begin suffering for them, whether I recognize it or not; and (3) it is contrary to God’s loving nature to ask or permit anyone to interfere with these natural and balanced consequences which I have caused and which accrue to me alone.

I believe Jesus is our example. Because of his transcendent status as a soul who learned all the lessons of mortality, Jesus is the ultimate example of our potential. Those who allow his perfect love to envelop them begin the personal processes of spiritual self-mastery. When that process is complete, any cosmic debt that might exist is, by definition, paid. Only the person in error and the offended person are parties to the process. There is no need or place for the suffering or forgiveness of a third party, including God and/or Jesus.

I believe that though Jesus did not suffer and die for my sins, he nevertheless died for a purpose. This purpose was to show his mastery of love and to stand as a witness of the same. By his death, he left a lasting impression on his disciples, who then took his Gospel to the world, giving all mankind the opportunity to hear, comprehend, and follow his example, if they so choose.

I believe in universal salvation. By "universal" I mean everyone, and by "salvation" I mean unhindered in progress toward godhood. There is no unpardonable sin because God is pure love and nothing, barring our own recalcitrance, can keep us from him. Our errors have profound consequences to our eternal souls, consequences which accrue immediately and proportionally. Yet once the error is comprehended and forsaken, forgiveness occurs immediately because God's love trumps judgment and we once again find ourselves on the path toward him. In this way God's plan is perfectly fair because it allows every soul unlimited progress, thereby demonstrating God’s key attribute: Love.

SUMMARY

The preceding Articles of Faith can be condensed into the following syllogism:

Love transcends all limitations.
I am learning to love.
If I master love, I shall transcend all limitations.

* * *

Thank you for taking the time to read these very personal statements of belief. My intent in sharing them is not to offend or convince, but to encourage you to consider the foundations of your own life and then to live accordingly. For my part, I've found great solace in believing that I am an eternal soul with a potential limited only by my own desires and effort. I am grateful for the miracle of living in a benign universe with loving souls all around me who wish nothing but happiness and joy for me. When I ponder the eternities ahead of me, I sometimes grow faint and weary, but when I remember the eternities behind, I know I can do it. And that is when I know I've just heard the voice of God in my heart.

What a gift!

My Articles of Faith (part 2)

2009-11-29T08:23:00.004-07:00

IN MY LAST POST, I shared some of my core beliefs, which I call "articles of faith," in a tradition going back almost two thousand years. In that post, I discussed my views of the nature of God. I gave only minimal rationale for my beliefs for two reasons: 1) these are statements, not arguments, and 2) this is not an attempt to proselyte. My desire here is merely to encourage the reader to carefully consider what precepts might form the basis of their own belief system.

In this post, I will continue positing my articles of faith, this time focusing on my view of the nature of man and mortality. To me, these beliefs are logical extensions of my beliefs about God.

THE NATURE OF MAN

I believe we are eternal entities who are presently clothed mortal bodies by God. For the same reason I believe in God when I gaze up at the star-strewn night sky, I also believe my origin is from that God and that he has placed me here on this earth.

I believe in eternal progression. Because God is love and agency is eternal, nothing we do on earth can prevent us from progressing, unless we so choose. Consequentially, what we do during our moment of mortality could not possibly change the entire course of our future, given the weight, depth, and breadth of our past experiences and accomplishments, as indicated by our presence here on earth.

I believe man’s destiny is to transcend mortality. Our eternal nature is intelligence, not mortal matter. Intelligence has no gender. Our spiritual and mortal bodies may contain parts and passions, but our souls do not. The body and its experience here on earth are tools designed to teach us specific lessons and when we learn those lessons we will discard those tools and move on to the realm of pure intelligence, perfected by mortality.

I believe there is a plan designed to help us transcend mortality. There are many probations that yet await us, tests and experiences that will help us progress on our eternal path, though I do not know the form these probations will take.

I believe the purpose of our eternal progression is to become gods if we so desire. That is the ultimate definition of God’s love—that we might have all that he has or experiences.

THE NATURE OF MORTALITY

I believe the earth is perfect. Far from being a "fallen" planet, it is the ideal testing place for our mortal probation and was created to aid our eternal progress. When we pass beyond mortality, we will return to the realm of intelligence, unbound by mortal matter. The earth, as all physical things, shall pass away.

I believe God communicates with man on earth. He guides and influences us though inspiration, visitations and dreams, and through mortal guides and exemplars.

I believe in reincarnation. Each of us has lived may lives on this earth, progressing at our own rate. Mortality simply has too many lessons for one life, and God’s loving nature requires that we receive the maximum opportunity mortality can afford us so we will be prepared for the higher realms. This also explains the disparity in the quality of life and abilities across the human spectrum—the only just explanation for this is that each challenge and ability is designed to teach a valuable lesson and each lifetime has its own unique emphases. Wicked people are simply those who have not learned their life’s lessons and must continue returning to earth until they do. In contrast, those who master love will finally leave this world and move on to higher planes of existence.

Next time: THE NATURE AND MISSION OF JESUS

My Articles of Faith (part 1)

2009-11-22T06:54:00.018-07:00

FROM THE TIME OF THE APOSTLES' CREED, people have memorialized their beliefs in written form. In my religious tradition, thirteen "articles of faith" answered a newpaper editor's questions about a new church, and those assertions came to form the belief backbone of that religion. Benjamin Franklin wrote a little handbook entitled "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion" to formulate a method for attaining perfection in his personal life. Every week he focused on one of the thirteen virtues on his list, mastering many, including "industry," "frugality" and "sincerity."

Many people live out their lives unquestioningly performing a script given to them by others or by mindlessly rejecting it. Few people take the difficult step of examining what it is they truly believe and then formulating a system therefrom that guides their actions. In simple terms, writing down our beliefs -- creating our own articles of faith -- ensures that our acts are based on a coherent philosophy.

Over the next few columns, I will share my own "Articles of Faith," not to proselyte, but to encourage you to craft your own. My list of beliefs has given me great solace, peace and direction in my life. I'm certain writing your own Articles of Faith will do the same for you.

THE NATURE OF GOD

I believe in God. I have no evidence, save the stirrings of my heart when I contemplate the immensity of the universe on a starry night. Because it is human nature to anthropomorphize deity, I am not surprised that in a white male-dominated world, our image of God is that of an elder, bearded, white male god. Therefore, I use this imagery to refer to God, not because I believe God is male or even a singular entity, but for the sake of simplicity.

I believe God is progressing. Not just in power, progeny and domain, but in knowledge, experience and wisdom. If he were not, his life would be unutterably boring. Nevertheless, he is so far beyond us as to appear perfect to us.

I believe God’s power is limited. Because God is progressing, he therefore does not have unlimited power. For example, man's free will is self-existent, not granted by God, though it conceivably may be limited or expanded by him. God's own limitations do not diminish his power or authority; rather they serve as an impetus for his continuing progress, which gives his life meaning.

I believe God is perfect in character. Just as it is ignorance to ascribe limited human physical characteristics to God, so is burdening him with human personality disorders such as jealousy, anger, changeability, or a desire for retributive punishment.

I believe God’s prime characteristic is love. Therefore, he is no respecter of persons. There is no "chosen" race, gender, marital status, group identification, church or sexual orientation. It follows, then, that anyone who believes God is a respecter of persons—that he is a bigot—cannot by definition be inspired of God or speak or act in his name.

I believe God’s purpose is to help us become like him. Since, by definition, love wants what is best for the beloved, God desires that we achieve the knowledge and wisdom he has achieved.

Next time: THE NATURE OF MAN

The Great Political Divide: Let's Do Lunch!

2009-11-16T05:43:00.004-07:00

THE GREATEST MORAL AUTHORITY in history, as well as the greatest example of that authority, is undoubtedly Jesus of Nazareth. He was born into a world where "an eye for an eye" was the culturally-mandated response to any offense. His gift to mankind was to supersede that maxim with a far more difficult moral imperative: Love your neighbor as yourself.

For two thousand years Jesus' followers have struggled not only to follow his difficult invitation, but to discern exactly what "loving" your neighbor actually means. Does treating my neighbor as I'd like to be treated include buying him lunch? After all, I'd like someone to buy me lunch, and with the hundreds of people I know and whom I consider "neighbors" (in a lunch-buying kind of way), I might never have to buy my own lunch ever again. Sounds good so far.

But what happens when I have to return the favor? If everyone expected me to buy them lunch, then I'd go broke. Every day, I'd have to pony up the cost of a lunch (and I'll bet most people wouldn't consider a burrito at Taco Bell a sufficient expression of my love for them) and I'd go hungry unless someone else was feeling generous and bought me lunch. (Now Taco Bell sounds downright proletariat -- Red Lobster here we come!)

It's easy to see how "loving" your neighbor and still managing to get lunch yourself requires that your neighbor not be someone who would take advantage of your "love." That aside for the moment, this brings me to my main point: the Great Divide.

We have all heard the phrase, "The world is made up of two kinds of people . . . " and what follows is an example of a dichotomy: those who like dogs and those who don't. Those who like cats and those who cats like, etcetera.

But one of the greatest (and apparently, the most evenly split) divides these days is politics. When President Obama claims a mandate to impose his policies on America, he's really only talking about the five percentage votes by which he won. Five percent is just 1/20th of 100 percent and cannot, by any terms, be called a "mandate." But, as Rahm Emmanuel says, "Never let a crisis go to waste," and that slim five percent has become carte blanche for the Dems to completely reorder life in the good ole U.S.A.

But if the mandate is insufficient, no worries. What really gives Democrats the "right" to make these changes is their wonderful and unassailable self-image. After all, they see themselves as morally and intellectually superior to everyone else. Morally superior because they take Jesus' charge seriously: they love their neighbor so much that they want to do everything for them, not only buying them lunch, but dinner, breakfast, late night snacks, pay for their school, cash in their clunker, give them a mortgage they cannot afford, and now even guarantee inadequate and expensive healthcare. (Remember that kid who asked Obama to get him out of his McDonalds grind? Done and done! Isn't He lovely?)

This manifestation of love is, in a Democrat's mind, proof positive of his moral superiority. His intellectual superiority is assured by the term he now cloaks himself in: "Progressive." Anyone who is not progressive must be . . . well . . . regressive: a troglodyte, a throwback, a BAD person, morally as well as intellectually.

All well and good, if you accept the premise that tossing out thousands of years of history and proven cultural mores is "progressive." Of course progressives (who used to be liberals until that label became tainted by the Law of Unintended Consequences, more below) usually cite examples of their progressivism in racial terms (no matter that Lincoln was a Republican and that many southern Democrat senators voted against the Voting Rights Act of 1964), but ignore what fifty years of their loving special interest politics have done to the black community: 70% out of wedlock birth rates and nearly half of all young black men in America in jail, largely for crimes against other black men.

Nevertheless, a Democrat/former Liberal/now Progressive is unconcerned with outcomes. The Professor in Chief is all about high-minded theory and postulates. All that really matters is intent. The Law of Unintended Consequences has no force in His universe. When someone (usually a throwback Republican) points out how $3 trillion (an all-too familiar number nowadays) thrown at "poverty" over the last few decades has only made the plight of the poor worse, the Annointed One and his minions merely say, with a straight face, that if we'd spent $4 trillion, the problem would have been solved. Nanner nanner.

Of course, this is proof positive of their uncircumscribable love for their fellow man. Except for the fellowman who has to finance their limitless largesse. He's the guy who gets screwed, because Democrats always make someone else buy the world a Coke. Congressional Democrats are currently exempting themselves from their vaunted healthcare plan -- their own healthcare will not be tampered with, because the taxpayers are already footing the bill. If it's not broke, right?

So not only do Democrats believe you're too incompetent to know what you want for lunch, they want to take you out to a tony restaurant, order steak and lobster -- for both of you! -- and then expect you to pull out your wallet and pay for it, as you fawningly thank them for taking you out to lunch. And they will do this every day of your life, if you let them.

I don't think Democrats are morally and intellectually superior to Republicans. But in terms of pure chutzpah, they have no equal!

Feel the love!

Reading the Spiritual Tea Leaves

2009-11-08T05:24:00.007-07:00

I'VE BEEN THINKING about how much things change, and yet how little they really do. In other words, things appear to change because the particulars differ, but the underlying principles at work remain the same.

Case in point: the election of the least-prepared president in the history of the country prompted millions to writhe in an ecstasy prompted by His presence and the promise of change they really, really believed in. We're now seeing that change: an unprecedented restructuring of America toward statism and away from personal responsibility.

But Tuesday's elections proved how short Obama's coattails really are, though he inexplicably remains personally popular. Why? In a previous post I posited that many white Americans voted for Obama primarily because he was black, in order to prove to themselves and others that they were not racists, which of course, proves them to be exactly that, because racism by definition includes taking race into account when judging a person. Yet these same devoted voters stayed away from the polls in droves this last week, showing the true fervency of their love for the Dear Leader.

China and India, the world's two most populous nations, decline to be bound by the sort of legislation now wending its way through the U.S. Congress in the form of "cap and trade" restrictions on CO2 emissions. These two ascendant behemoths are responsible for over one-quarter of the "poisonous" (so says the EPA) carbon dioxide emissions on the planet. English PM Gordon Brown has declared that the world has just thirty days to prevent an environmental catastrophe if the proposed Copenhagen emission standards are not adopted worldwide.

Yet facts are stubborn things. There are more polar bears now than there were fifty years ago. The world has been demonstrably cooling for the last ten years. So, "global warming" has been cynically replaced by "climate change" as the Left's latest mantra. After all, who can dispute that climate changes? A low incidence of sunspots over the last decade is ultimately responsible for the cooling, but this takes mankind out of the equation and makes his attempts to protect Mother Gaia laughably impotent. As a result, only one percent of Americans rate "climate change" at the top of their concerns. (Wages and jobs predictably hold that position.)

Western religion is in decline, while childish, tantrum-throwing Islam rises steadily, due to low birthrates in the West and high Muslim birthrates everywhere. It is only a matter of time until Islam becomes the world's dominant religion. Christianity is on the wane except in the impoverished and uneducated Third World, and then only for the most strident evangelical sects. Church attendance in America is at historically low levels and is practically nonexistent in Europe. More than half of Americans judge themselves "spiritual but not religious."

What all these events and trends have in common is this: the ardent acolytes of politics, religion, and science prove a universal and innate human search for meaning. Historically, meaning was found through the three professions: the church, medicine, and the law. All three are now in decline. Given the reprehensible behavior of so many religious leaders, who can trust someone who claims to speak for God? Doctors until recently enjoyed great respect, but the healthcare debate has revealed that their vote (e.g., the AMA on Obamacare) can be bought as cheaply as anyone else's. And no examples need be given for lawyers, who are barely more popular than Congress.

So what happens when traditional sources of meaning and purpose evaporate before our eyes? The church is passe and uninspiring, with few answers that satisfy modern believers. Politics is a cesspool of needy liars and false messiahs. Its latest incarnation, the nanny state, is insufficiently adult to inspire respect and obedience. A nanny, after all, is not a parent; she's a teenaged babysitter. Can we believe in a government that takes from those who produce and gives to those who do not? Environmentalism is supposed to be based on science, yet supercomputer models of climate change are as wrong as a pocket dog in a tutu. Mother Gaia doesn't even know we exist. What then, can we believe in? What is the next religion?

Man is a spiritual being and religion, no matter how it's clothed, is an innate expression of his spirituality. But in today's world, what religion can truly satisfy our natural need for union with the Ultimate?

When no religion is believable, will we still believe in God?

Or will we see the following headline on the cover of TIME: "We're all Nihilists Now."

The Power of the Love of Music

2009-08-30T07:29:00.007-06:00

LAST WEEKEND I VOLUNTEERED at the Park City Jazz Festival in Deer Valley, Utah. It has become a tradition with me: excellent music, the joy of helping out, the beautiful mountain scenery, not to mention the respite from the August heat of the Salt Lake valley.

In that milieu, I remembered again of the power of music and yet how easy it is to let it slip silently out of our lives. The music that moves me most is jazz, because of its heady improvisation, soaring instrumentality, and ability to envelop the listener in a moment of time that elicits meaning not through lyrics but from the unspoken and often inarticulated feelings inside the listener's heart -- an emotional journey sketched by the musician but colored in by the listener's personal reaction to the song. And when I find myself in that moment, forgotten memories recovered and given voice, I shake my head in wonder that I allow myself to exist outside that moment for so much of my day.

When I was eight years old, I was riding my bike home. They had been clearing a lemon grove for a new park, and had dug many shallow trenches for sprinkler lines. My buddies and I had been playing Army Man all day in those trenches, wearing plastic replicas of GI helmets and hurling hard green lemon hand grenades at each other like the dog faces in "Combat," our favorite TV show.

On that particular evening, tired and dirty from a day of saving the world, I was pedaling home on my red Schwinn. I had my little transistor radio rubber-banded to the gooseneck handlebars and was turning a corner when I heard my first Beatles' song: "Camp By Me Love." The tune and words were so catchy that by the second time the chorus rolled around, I knew it by heart. (Of course I found out later that it wasn't a song about a guy asking his girlfriend to go camping, but something about love being beyond price. But at that time I knew nothing about love but a lot about camping, so that's how I heard it.)

When I got home I picked out the melody on our spinet piano. I knew nothing about chords, so I just tried to find the bass note that went with each change of the melody. But within an hour I had basically figured out the song. I was ecstatic and from then on, I was a musician. I heard something on the radio and reiterated it on piano. It wasn't long before I was rearranging chords to make new songs, often using the same lyrics I'd heard on the radio, often to such tin-eared results as "Camp By Me Love." Nevertheless, by the time I finished high school, I was a fair interpreter of popular music. I formed a band with some friends and 1975 was a glorious year when Zarahemla played church dances, parties, and youth gatherings all over southern California. We even entertained unrealistic fever-dreams of a recording contract.

My best friends have always been musicians, and all of them are more talented than I. I was a sponge, soaking up information that I'd not gotten in my formal training, which ended for the most part when I entered high school and had no time for piano after classes, sports, the beach, and my job. My fellow musicians introduced me to the finer elements of music theory, culminating in the clever "mu" chord popularized by Steely Dan. When I realized that this jazz chord made their music seem at once complex and accessible, I shook my head in wonder. How can adding a second tone to a triad do that? Further, how can a melody evoke emotion?

Music brings me back in time better than any other memory aid. I remember putting Billy Joel's astonishing 52nd Street album on the turntable and dully realizing that this guy was better than Elton; after all, he wrote the lyrics and the music! I could name dozens of songs and albums that literally stand like bright signposts in the landscape of my life, often associated with people, sometimes with places, and always with powerful emotions, sometimes as a result of the song itself, sometimes as a remarkable synchronicity when a song comes on the radio that exactly mirrors what I was feeling at that exact moment. Hall & Oates' "I Can't Go For That" featured a rudimentary computerized drum sound that literally made me exclaim, "It's changing! Right now! Music is changing!" And indeed, from that moment in 1983, drum machines came on board, some would say to sad results. And I would love to argue the point, not to convince you, but to talk with you about music, which is one of the few things in life worth arguing about, because it always results in sharing, in increased appreciation for a song or band or style you didn't previously like, and a full heart. Not many conflicts result so often in large smiles, knowing nods of the head, and hearty handshakes when the argument is over.

So there I stood at the side of the stage, wearing my yellow SECURITY tee shirt, facing the audience on a Sunday evening in Deer Valley, listening to Al Jarreau sing one of his most famous tunes, his face radiant and his happy demeanor contagious. Al et al. helped me find the groove and I was right in the center, swaying slowly from side to side, eyes half open, hands behind my back, chin lifted, rhapsodic. "Mornin' mister radio/mornin' mister Cheerio/mornin' sister oriole/need I tell you everything is fine?"

The sun was setting over the pine-clad canyon wall and the grassy hillside before me was full of people, all in that same groove, heads nodding, smiles on every face. And when he sang the rising melody, "I know I can/like every man/reach out my hand/and touch the face of God!" a chill ran up my spine and tears started in my eyes. I was in it, that evanescent moment when music fulfills its greatest promise: it was drawing me closer to the Infinite.

Did I mention it was also raining at the time?

Democracy Inaction

2009-08-08T07:32:00.011-06:00

AUGUST, NORMALLY A SLEEPY MONTH FOR POLITICS, is sizzling with political heat all across America. Elected representatives are holding town hall meetings and getting an earful from the normally somnambulant populace, which has apparently beginning to awake to Washington's perfidy. It's about time.

As a resident of the most conservative state, I have lamented the lack of political excitement in my own backyard, but then I went to the Board of Education meeting inaugurating a new school district which was carved out of the largest school district in Utah. Salt Lake valley is divided economically east and west. The east side is established; the west is growing. While schools are aging on the east side, new multi-million dollar state-of-the-art schools are springing up on the west side. Thus, property taxes in the Jordan School District have been high and going higher, yet most east side tax money goes to construction on the west side. East side denizens didn't like paying for schools ten miles away from the run-down schools in their own neighborhood, so last November the Canyons School District was born.

My own taxes took a jump, even as my home fell in value by almost 15%. To find out why, I attended the first Canyons school board meeting. It was interesting, and like all government-sponsored programs, expanded from the planned two hours to four. Why? Because scores of my neighbors, who appeared relaxed and agreeable before the meeting, burst into angry outbursts and shouts at the utterly stunned board members sitting before us.

The issue was simple: the Board, repeatedly patting itself on the back for its boldness and creativity, showed us an almost unintelligible PowerPoint presentation designed to inform us as to the mechanics of the new tax scheme, all of which resulted in what they proudly pointed out several times was a zero-increase budget. Oh, what a good boy am I!

Following the presentation, taxpayers each got three minutes to express their opinions. And here's where democracy fell apart. People asked, quite rightly, how the Board could be considering a tax scheme identical to the previous year when everyone in the audience was making do with less this year. The diminishing value of our properties aside, many people used their three minutes to talk of jobs lost, increasing utility expenses, and across-the-board belt tightening. They were often interrupted by applause from the sympathetic and increasingly angry crowd.

During these diatribes, the Board members sat stone-faced and unresponsive. Not a word was uttered in defense of the proposed budget and no question put to them by a taxpayer was answered. Many of them simply worked on their personal computers. Some took notes. But not one of them engaged with the petitioners or responded directly to their concerns.

At the end of more than a hour of public outrage, the time was turned over to the Board. Though they addressed some of our concerns, they spoke among themselves, not to us. It became clear that they had already made up their minds before the meeting ever began; public opinion had not swayed them in the least. At the end of their internal discussion they voted unanimously to approve the tax scheme as proposed.

In disgust, half the audience got up and left.

Then the surreal process was repeated. The CFO spoke in vague terms about budget particulars, this time sparing us his pointless PowerPoint. Public response was again allowed. I got up and asked how is it that the Board refused to respond to questions put to them in real time, by real people? They simply stared at me, saying nothing. Not even the simple, irrefutable logic of "when the pie is smaller, you cannot have the same sized piece as before," seemed to penetrate their closed minds. I closed my remarks by noting that one of the Board members had stated that 85% of their budget was tied to district salaries and benefits. Had they considered the unfortunate but clearly responsive option of reducing salaries and costs across the board or cutting administrative positions? My question was answered with silence.

In the Board discussion that followed public comment, a Board member revealed that salaries and benefits of District employees were set by state law; the Board had no power to change or alter them. So, in a school district with a budget of $200 million, the Board has the power of the purse over just $30 million.

I shook my head. What, then, were we doing there? More to the point: what was the Board doing there? What impact could they possibly have on the District other than rubber-stamping the administration's proposed budget? It seemed like high school all over again: people running for meaningless offices for no other purpose than to advance their own popularity. The budget of the Canyons School District was unanimously approved by the Board.

That's when the rest of us left.

On the way home, I reflected on what democracy has devolved to. All the elements of possible success are there: engaged people with opposing interests striving toward important goals. Yet not a single moment of true dialogue occurred during the entire four hour enterprise. People made presentations, people commented on the presentation, Board members talked among themselves and then voted as they had planned to vote all along.

This new "democracy" is no doubt designed to avoid the messiness of traditional democracy: heated discussions and angry accusations, which can result -- if people's minds are open -- in solutions to problems. So there we sat, two hundred people in the same room, and not a minute of real person-to-person communication in four hours. But from the Board's perspective, the evening had been a success: they got the budget they proposed, they heard from their constituents (though they apparently didn't listen), and the pressure in the boiling tea kettle of public anger was reduced. Success, right?

Not to the almost two hundred tax payers who attended, their taxes raised, their usable income reduced, and their opinions ignored.

One good thing came out of the evening for me: a growing feeling that democracy in America is undergoing a painful rebirth. As more and more of us attend these public gatherings and we see how ridiculous the process became while we were busy living our lives and leaving politics to politicos, we are forming new opinions about what's wrong with our country and how to fix it. We of the silent majority, who routinely solve problems in our own lives and live within our own budgets, are beginning to demand the same from our elected officials. And if the stunned, disbelieving looks on the Canyons School Board's faces are any indication, then a sleeping giant may be awakening.

You may diminish this sort of grass-roots awakening as mere Astroturf and decry it as staged and unimportant. But from what I saw last Tuesday night in Sandy, Utah, you do so at your growing peril.

P.S. The next day, a local television station quoted a District spokesman on the Board's unanimous approval of the proposed budget: "We believe it is responsible fiscal policy for Canyons constituents in a very difficult budget year. We wanted to be responsive to the needs of our public."

I kid you not.

The Forest for the Trees: What's in the Healthcare Bill

2009-08-02T06:23:00.004-06:00

"What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?" -- John Conyers (D-MI)

Fortunately, Congressman Conyers, some people have read House Resolution 3200 and some of them are lawyers and here's what it means, with the page numbers and a layman's translation:

Health benefits will be limited on an annual dollar basis (29). This means rationing.

Instead of you, your doctor, or even your insurance provider, a government committee will decide what treatments or benefits you receive (30). Enjoy standing in line at the DMV? Then you'll love this!

Health services must provided to everyone (50-51). "Everyone" obviously includes illegal aliens, as well as those who simply do not wish insurance coverage.

Government will have access to your financial records to ascertain eligibility (58). The end of financial privacy.

Union retirees and their families will receive special benefits under the plan under Section 164 (65). A sop to the Unions that elected the democrat majority. AARP also benefits, due to an exclusion specifically tailored for it.

A national "healthcare exchange" will be established to bring private plans under government control (72). This will destroy private insurance coverage, for no private company can compete with the federal government.

Under the Exchange, plans which do not meet certain requirements will be excluded (84). And they set the standards, excluding their competitors: private insurers.

The Exchange will set benefit levels and limits (85). More rationing.

"Outreach" activities will be conducted to entice people to participate in the new healthcare plan (95). Here's where ACORN and other approved NGOs come in.

Governmental immunity applies to lawsuits regarding payments or methodology in healthcare (124). Presently, you can sue your insurer. Say goodbye to that right.

Physicians' income will be regulated by the government, regardless of the physician's special training or abilities (127 & 241). This is akin to paying everyone in the NBA the same salary.

Employers must automatically enroll employees into the public option plan (145). No choice of insurers.

Employers must provide healthcare insurance for part-time employees (147). Tens of thousands of small employers will now go out of business.

Employers who have a yearly payroll of over $400,000 who fail to enroll in an Exchange-approved plan will be be fined 8% of payroll (149). That's a small business: just 10 employees at $40,000 a year.

Employers who have a yearly payroll between $250,000 and $400,000 who fail to enroll in an Exchange-approved plan will be fined 2%-6% of payroll (150). That's as few as five employees: Mom & Pop businesses will fold.

Individuals (including the self-employed), who refuse to enroll in an Exchange-approved plan will be taxed 2.5% of their income (167). Zero choice, both in coverage or participation.

Nonresident aliens who refuse to enroll in an Exchange-approved plan will not be taxed (170). But they will nevertheless receive the same healthcare as you do.

Costs for cancer treatment will be leveled among hospitals (272). The Mayo Clinic must charge no more than any other hospital for their superior expertise.

Physicians are limited in ownership of hospitals (317). Thousands of small and rural clinics will fold.

"End of life" consultations are mandated (424-428). A government bureaucrat will advise you that since your healthcare is rationed, here are the ways you can die.

The end of life consultation may result in a court order regarding life-sustaining treatment (429). The government may even order your death.

State "family planning" services will be regulated by the federal government (774). Any hope of state sovereignty over abortion law will be terminated.

That's nowhere near all, but you get the idea. As even the supporters must admit, this law will greatly increase the government's incursion into previously private healthcare decisions, including access to your health records and finances, doctors' decisions, and even the way you die, not to mention the wholesale takeover of more than one-quarter of the U.S. economy.

As a lawyer myself, I instantly recognized the legal-speak of the Bill, which was undoubtedly written by a liberal think-tank intent upon converting America to a socialist state. They know that healthcare "reform" is a sure-fire way to fundamentally change the American economy, making the population dependent upon the government, and thereby ensuring that those dependants will vote democrat for the foreseeable future. When over half the public learns it can vote itself free money (or free benefits), then what is to stop them from doing so? The other 49% must shoulder the cost, for as long as they choose to do so. Will Atlas shrug?

The Troubled Assets Recovery Plan (TARP), a 1500 page bill that spent close to $1 trillion, was considered too important and pressing for our representatives to read it before enacting it. The Democrat leadership in the House waived the traditional 72-hour posting requirement and required members to vote on the bill within 24 hours. Of course no one read the bill and of course it's been a great success, hasn't it?

And now, we have those same leaders in the House insisting that members of Congress not only not bother to read this bill (with many more far-reaching provisions than the TARP bill), but vote on it immediately without discussion or debate before the August recess.

Why? Because of what the Bill contains, plain and simple.

Now you know more than John Conyers. But that didn't surprise you, did it?

Avoiding Doomsday: Atlas Must Shrug

2009-07-26T07:37:00.012-06:00

AYN RAND'S ATLAS SHRUGGED IS NOT SO MUCH A NOVEL as it is a dramatized philosophical treatise, and its redundancy and length is no mistake: Rand is attempting to instill a respect for laissez faire capitalism, no easy task in these days of hate-the-rich anti-corporatism.

Published over fifty years ago, Rand's book was at first received cooly by critics and public alike. Her editor, humorist Bennet Cerf, asked her to trim the 1200 page leviathan. Rand replied, "Would you edit the Bible?"

Arrogant? Perhaps, but arrogance is often just poorly-received competence, and Atlas Shrugged is a perfect example thereof. No, people do not speak like this; Rand's characters do not so much dialogue as speechify. Indeed, John Galt's sixty page radio address near the end of the book may be the longest speech ever written or given, but it wields great power and unimpeachable authority. It is a must read, even if you cannot slog through the entire book.

Atlas Shrugged is an important book and feels especially apropos in the current political climate, where statists wearing liberal sheep's clothing are attempting to fundamentally change the American (and thus, the world) economy. Obama is often compared to FDR, both for his rhetoric and agenda. It can be safely said that the uber-nanny state Obama is attempting to impose upon us got its start as Social Security back in the 1930s, a program originally intended to help the widows and fatherless, but which has expanded (as all federal programs do) into a nationwide retirement program. And it has become the single most expensive item in the budget and is poised to bankrupt the economy, just as cradle-to-grave socialism is threatening western Europe, which is currently turning away from its destructive tenets.

Obama's healthcare "reform" has now morphed into another 1984-style double speak term: "healthcare insurance reform," and will grant the federal government unprecedented control over one third of the U.S. economy. It will be run like all government agencies, with massive bureaucracies, powerful and intractable federal employee unions, unimaginable waste, and a cut-throat competitive edge that will destroy private competition. Who competes with Medicare? No one. Who offers flood insurance in Louisiana apres Katrina? Only FEMA.

Despite its challenging length, Atlas Shrugged is a simple story. Rand's "Objectivist" philosophy divides people into three classes:

Producers: those farsighted individuals who see a need, create a product, sell it on the open market, and reap a reward;
Looters: those who choose not to create, but who seek to take the rewards of creation from the producers, by force, if necessary; and
Moochers: those who use guilt and need as levers to pry profit from producers instead of producing anything themselves.

In Rand's alternate America (this is actually a science fiction novel, due to the presence of futuristic metal alloys and unprecedented energy-producing machines), producers -- tired of the ingratitude of a public that reaps the rewards of the producer's industry and effort -- decide to go on strike. (Indeed, The Strike was the working title of the book.) When the world's economy predictably comes to a grinding halt, it is left to the producers to remake the world in their image: where a man can, through his effort alone, envision, create, and profit from his labors without anyone making demands upon him.

What enrages critics of the book is that it so forcefully rails against what has become a fundamental tenet of modern capitalism: the "duty" of producers to "give back." Bill Gates has used the term; every industrial magnate has. They "give back" because they have been "lucky" and therefore the unspoken implication is that their wealth or prosperity or even their positive self-esteem is unearned. They must "disgorge their profits" for the "benefit of all." Come on, you know you've said this yourself as you write the check to the United Way.

Rand does not condemn charity; she condemns the charitable obligation imposed on producers by looters and moochers. Only producers produce; looters and moochers do not employ producers -- they rob them. The government, whose only Constitutional imperative is to protect us from foreign intervention and maintain a civil society at home, has, in Rand's philosophy, no right whatsoever to steal from producers and give to those who cannot or will not produce. Producers, by the very nature of their life's work, do an immense amount of good for the world: they invent new things, employ people to manufacture them, pay dividends to investors, provide consumers with time-saving and life-improving products, and raise the standard of living of the entire world. Society should be grateful for these people instead of condemning them or taking from them at the point of a gun (the tax code).

What do looters and moochers produce? Nothing, save bureaucracies dedicated to taking from producers and distributing to non-producers. Rand said it well in the book in a conversation between an industrialist (Hank Reardon) and a high-seas pirate (Ragnar Danneskjold):

"I'm after a man whom I want to destroy," [said Danneskjold]. "He died many centuries ago, but until the last of him is wiped out of men's minds, we will not have a decent world to live in."

"What man?"

"Robin Hood."

Reardon looked at him blankly, not understanding.

"He was a man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I'm the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich -- or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich."

"What in blazes do you mean?"

"If you remember the stories you've read about me in the newspaper, before they stopped printing them, you know that I have never robbed a private ship and have never taken any private property. Nor have I ever robbed a military vessel -- because the purpose of a military fleet is to protect from violence the citizens who paid for it, which is the proper function of a government. But I have seized every loot-carrier that came within range of my guns, every government relief ship, subsidy ship, loan ship, gift ship, every vessel with a cargo of goods taken by force from some men for the unpaid, unearned benefit of others. I seized the boats that sailed under the flag of the idea which I am fighting: the idea that need is a sacred idol requiring human sacrifices -- that all of us must live with our work, our hopes, our plans, our efforts at the mercy of the moment when that knife will descend upon us -- and that the extent of our ability is the extent of our danger, so that success will bring our heads down on the block, while failure will give us the right to pull the cord. This is the horror which Robin Hood immortalized as an ideal of righteousness. It is said that he fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don't have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this foulest of creatures -- the double parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich -- whom men have come to regard as a moral ideal. And this has brought us to a world where the more a man produces, the closer he comes to the loss of all his rights, until, if his ability is great enough, he becomes a rightless creature delivered as prey to any claimant -- while in order to be placed above rights, above principles, above morality, placed where anything is permitted to him, even plunder and murder, all a man has to do is to be in need. Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us? That is what I am fighting, Mr. Reardon. Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive."

Incendiary? Yes. Incorrect? No.

Now, lest I be misunderstood as just another greedy rich guy, I will say that I make an average living. I still get out of bed every day and I struggle to pay my bills. But unlike many, I do not blame others for my lack of wealth. I revel in their prosperity and work hard for my own. I do not begrudge the rich their riches. They employ me; no beggar ever gave me a job. And when I engage in charity, it is not only because I see a need, but because I wish to give. I receive a benefit in the transaction, a feeling of goodness, of rightness. The other's need is secondary. But above all, I give because I choose to, not because I am forced to.

Ayn Rand was prescient. One of Obama's campaign promises was to disallow the charitable tax deduction. This in itself is in line with Objectivist philosophy: the government should not reward (or punish) people for charitable giving. Giving should be its own reward. But the consequence of denial of this tax deduction will be that people will give less and the government, seeing increasing need everywhere, will do what it has always done: it will impose upon us a "charitable tax" in order to satisfy the perceived need. So charitable giving will no longer be voluntary but a requirement. After all, we're all in this together, aren't we? Mark my words.

I close with John Galt's famous words:

"I swear -- by my life and my love of it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

If you are shocked by this statement and believe it is heartless and cruel and selfish, then you have not yet read Atlas Shrugged. You should, before it is banned by the State.

Who is John Galt? I am.

Health Insurance: Want Fries With That?

2009-07-14T07:38:00.009-06:00

THE HEALTHCARE DEBATE is everywhere, but it has become increasingly confusing. Trillions of dollars. More taxes on the rich. Increased employer taxes. Health-providers promising cost cutting. The result: health care that is timely, superb, and free.

I'm not buying it. The same guys who run the Post Office now want to run healthcare. Government runs only one thing well -- the military -- and no one on earth believes they do so efficiently. Remember $40 screwdrivers?

So what is the solution? Make the evil rich pay? Okay, let's say we do. But evil rich people know how how to read the bottom line, and when something costs more than it's worth, they will stop paying for it and start living off clipping bond coupons. So there will be fewer evil rich to tax, not to mention the fact that the rest of us will be out of work because the evil rich guy will close his factory. If anything, we should lower his taxes. "If you tax something, you get less of it." Fact: tax revenues exploded under Kennedy and Reagan, when rates were lowered.

What about cost-cutting in the medical industry? Sure, let's do that. In a competitive economy, there is always an incentive to cut costs, but what do you think will happen when the government horns in? Does anyone compete with Medicare? Government-run health care ("single payor") quickly runs everyone else out of the business. So be careful when you pit the government against private enterprise, while hamstringing private enterprise with endless rules, regulations, and taxes. Government will win and private enterprise will lose. And so will you, because choice is the key to competition. No choice, no competition, no half-off Big Macs.

So what is the answer? My suggestion is so simple and so well-proven I cannot believe it is not being shouted from every rooftop in D.C: treat health insurance like car insurance!

To begin with, it must be lifestyle-tested. Your car insurance rates are dependent upon your driving. If you avoid accidents entirely (or pay for fender-benders out of your own pocket), or if the accident is not your fault, your insurance premiums stay low. In healthcare, this means that you must live a healthy life. Maybe twice a year, you go in for a check-up. They look at your triglycerides and lipids, your waist-to-height ratio, check to see if you smoke or drink or do drugs. Based on the results, your health insurance premiums are set. Live well, pay little. Live badly, pay lots.

But what about the unforseeable? If my car's steering goes out suddenly and I get in an accident, I am not held liable -- the car company is. Likewise, if I am born with a congenital defect, my insurance premiums would not be raised. It's just bad luck and would be paid for out of profits. But if I'm a hundred pounds overweight, my premium would go through the roof. Go to the mall these days and see where your health insurance dollar is being spent: at Sbarro pizza by the obscenely obese guy in sweat pants and the "What me worry?" tee shirt. Why shouldn't he pay more for his health insurance? Likewise, why should Lance Armstrong pay for his testicular cancer? Was there anything in his lifestyle that contributed to it? If not, then Lance's health insurance premiums should be the lowest on earth. I'm glad to chip in to help him because he is the textbook example of an innocent victim. But not the Sbarro guy. He deserves to pay for his own heart bypass surgery.

In keeping with personal responsibility, why should an employer pay for your health insurance? He doesn't pay to insure your car, does he? It should be your responsibility and yours alone. That way, you'll be encouraged to shop around (like you do with Geico and Allstate) to find the best deal. Stripped of the obligation to pay for your health costs, your employer might choose to pay you more, hire another worker (end of the recession, kids!), pay higher dividends to shareholders, or pocket the money himself. In any case, more money would be loosed in the economy, more goods and services would be sold, and everyone would benefit. "A rising tide lifts all boats."

Under my proposal, the government doesn't need to get into healthcare at all. Evil corporations, seeking profit, would do so, just like the dozens of evil car companies worldwide who compete to sell me an evil Honda or an evil Hundai. Evil hospitals would be more efficient, more responsive to virtuous consumer demands ("I want seatbelts with my colonoscopy, please!"), and evil investors would reap evil rewards, which they would then reinvest into the evil economy. If my evil healthcare company failed to provide me with virtuous service, I would go elsewhere. And if, by malfeasance, the evil bastards killed me, my estate would have the right to sue the stethoscope off them, just like we can do with the evil auto insurance companies.

Automobile insurance works well in America. The government isn't in it (though I'm sure they'd love to be). Using the same model, our healthcare can only improve. (Indeed, let's go one step further and privatize the post office, divvy it up between FedEx and others, and get a letter back down to a reasonable cost.)

Note the image of the cadeuses, above. Can you make out the dollar sign in the twining serpents? Doctors don't go to medical school solely to be good Samaritans -- they also go to make a good living. The result for me is good health, if I do my part. I have a high-deductible insurance plan, which gives me incentives to live a healthy life and forego skydiving. The result is my health care costs are minimal and my health is . . . well . . . maximal! And it doesn't cost you one red cent!

The only one I worry about is Ronald McDonald. He's going to have to find another line of work.

My TV Cannot Survive the Iranian Uprising

2009-06-21T07:26:00.006-06:00

I WAS SO ANGRY, I ALMOST THREW MY SHOE AT THE TV. An entire nation had been subjugated, a people enslaved, their culture decimated, their vast wealth purloined by a totalitarian regime. The world stood by, the extent of its outrage limited to making angry faces at the aggressor.

I am not talking about Iran. I am talking about Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. When George H.W. Bush finally ordered the liberation of Kuwait, it was over so fast that everyone was stunned. They called it the "100 hour war."

Kuwait secured, our army amassed on the Iraq border. "Go get him!" I shouted at the TV. "Get the maniac who started this whole thing!" But President Bush, himself a creature of diplomacy (he had been U.S. ambassador to China) refused to do the obvious. "That is not our U.N. mandate," he said in measured tones. The Left heaved a sigh of relief ("We are not aggressors!") and the Right chucked their footwear at televisions all across America in exasperation. And so our troops came home and over the next decade, Saddam Hussein murdered more than a million of his own people before we finally removed him, at great loss of American life and treasure.

No history lesson has ever been more indelibly etched on my consciousness: When evil threatens liberty, free men must fight.

History repeats its lessons often, so even the dumbest student will eventually understand. It is doing so in Iran at this moment. A revolution not unlike our own American revolution is struggling to get traction. People are rebelling against an oppressive regime, marching in the street, using social networks to organize (twittering on the Internet instead of placing lanterns in church towers), and risking their lives.

And what does our Blatherer in Chief do? After almost a week of silence, he finally mouths a few lofty sentiments but does nothing. It is left up to individuals, including thousands of American citizens, to create ersatz servers using cell phones, so Iranians can communicate with each other. Facebook users all over the world are changing their network to Tehran, so the government doesn't know they are outside Iran and thus shut their pages down.

Yesterday, I witnessed a small, pro-Iran march in Salt Lake City. Like their Tehran counterparts, most of the marchers were college-age kids. They were clean-cut and conservative in their dress, clearly from the right side of the political spectrum; ordinary kids who came out in support of freedom, not the usual special interest politics of the Left.

And where is the Left? Where are all the people who bombarded me with e-mail about genocide in Darfur? They are silent, because while the Left is full of compassion, it has no interest in actual freedom. It wants to save the starving child but not the angry young adult. The difference is revealing: the starving child cannot survive without the do-gooder's compassion; a true revolutionary wants only the tools to secure his own freedom -- he doesn't want your compassion; he wants a gun. Thus, his needs do not coincide with the true needs of the Left, which are about obtaining feel-good, self-congratulatory mantras to intone at the next faculty mixer.

Twenty years ago, Tianenmen Square in China presented the West with the same dilemma. Should rhetoric be our only weapon against oppression? What did we do to help the protesters in that communist country? Nothing. Many died then; many are dying today in Tehran. A million died in Iraq before we finally did anything.

And this time around it's a no-brainer, because Iran is not only ready for democracy, it is almost ready to explode a nuclear device over Tel Aviv. Nuclear capability is the reason we did nothing to aid the Tianenmen Square demonstrators. North Korea (where two generations of starvation has reduced the average height to just 5'2") continues its self-annihilation because it has nuclear weapons. Why don't my friends on the Left send me e-mails about genocide in North Korea?

History repeats itself. I just wish it would shout, because we are clearly deaf.

My TV's days are numbered . . .

In the Valley of the Death of Perspective

2009-06-17T06:20:00.009-06:00

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH is a well-wrtten, well-acted, well-made, and completely wrong-headed film that speaks volumes about the actors, filmmakers, and Hollywood executives' left-wing and anti-American world view. Out of their own mouths, so to speak.

Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank, a retired military investigator working with small town detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) to first find, then uncover the reason for the death of Hank's son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), a recent returnee from the Iraq war. They ultimately discover that Mike was murdered during a night on the town which included visiting a strip club, fighting in the parking lot, illegal drug use, and having sex with a hooker . . . you know, just a typical Saturday night for our enlisted men. The climactic reveal is that Mike was senselessly killed by one of his buddies, a combat comrade in Iraq, for no apparent reason. Indeed, said the perpetrator: "It could have easily been Mike killing me."

No wonder the $23 million film made less than $7 million in the U.S.

I have no problem with the film strictly as film. It is perfectly acceptable fare: a murder mystery. And I have no trouble with the military setting. People do terrible things everywhere. But why In the Valley of Elah was one of the first (and few) Hollywood films to be made about the Iraq war is inexplicable. Surely, no one on the Left is asserting that more than a minscule proportion of our soldiers are murderous sociopaths. No, what they're really saying is that war, especially war the way America fights it, turns decent young men like Mike into sociopaths; in other words, we're creating a whole generation of brutal murderers.

This is the "Gitmo creates terrorists" argument, for which, statistically, there is absolutely no evidence. But lack of evidence never deters a true believer. In fact, lack of evidence gives rise to a leap of faith, which is the staple of under-informed, emotionally-oriented people. "I care! Isn't that enough?" they seem to shout when contrary facts arise.

No, it isn't enough. Accuracy would also be nice. And lest anyone reject my assertion that this film is anti-American, how else do you explain the final shot, where Hank raises a weathered American flag upside down, a universal sign of distress. With this image, the filmmakers are saying America is in trouble because of the way we fight wars; we are destroying the young men and women in our military. This is also an age-old Leftist canard: soldiers are victims. (Ignore the fact that our military is 100% voluntary.) In one scene (I love how filmmakers reveal their own motivation as well as their characters'), Hank's wife Joan (uber-Leftie Susan Sarandon), chides him for his military background, saying their son Mike joined up because he was raised in Hank's home; he literally had no choice. So not only are soldiers victims, they were brainwashed into being such.

To recap, this is Hollywood's view of the military and America's foreign policy: Evil engagements abroad (always for ultimately nefarious reasons, e.g. "blood for oil!"); CYA coverups by the military (the liaison, Lt. Kirklander (Jason Patric) is an unlikeable, insensitive company man); immoral behavior by our troops (the inciting incident in the film, which drove Mike "crazy" was his hitting a child on an Iraqi street with his Hummer, because there were standing "orders" to never stop a convoy for a pedestrian because that usually set them up for an ambush (sounds like a good policy to me), yet Mike never swerved or hit the horn; he just roared straight ahead, killing the child); illegal drug use, drunken fighting, consorting with hookers and murder being de rigeur behavior of soldiers on leave; yet these same soldiers are credulous children, victims of over-zealous, gung-ho parents and the corrupt militaristic American culture, which put them in the position where they have no choice: they simply must become sociopaths.

If this is the sort of film Hollywood makes to mark the Iraqi war (a war which, by the way, has been, for all intents and purposes, soundly won), then the upside-down flag is indeed apropos. But instead of the local VFW post, it should be flown over the Kodak Theater where they hold the Academy Awards.

The Labels We Wear

2009-06-14T05:42:00.005-06:00

BENETTON. QUIKSILVER. HOLLISTER. NIKE, AMERICAN EAGLE. Signs of the times. I thought the 60s did away with the notion of kids' spending habits being manipulated by the "man" (corporate America), but I was wrong.

When I was growing up in the California surf culture of the 1970s, the label phenomenon was still in its infancy. Labels were small and discrete, like the tiny penguin logo on a polo shirt or the Levis "V" pocket stitching. But when no one complained; indeed, when everyone began proudly wearing these instant status-confirmations, the logos got larger and larger until now, the American Eagle logo fills the entire shirt. Recently, it has become so large they had to shorten "American" to "Am" just to fit it in. And justly so, for how are they going to sell a shirt outside of the USA if it proudly (and loudly) proclaims it's from America?

I watch this walking billboard phenomenon everywhere I go and it makes me sad. Combine it with the multiple piercings (and I mean everywhere!) and tattoos (ditto), and I can only be dismayed at the apparent lack of self-esteem so many people must have. Don't they know that individuality is a function of what's inside them? What they think; what they believe; what they do, is what actually differentiates a person from the crowd, not what they wear, how they cut their hair, pierce their ears, or what corporate logo they plaster across their chest.

Of course, I can understand why children like labels: it makes them feel safe. After all, one of the hallmarks of childhood (especially the teen years) is the need to fit in. I remember the "uniform" I wore as a teen: deep-pocketed corduroy shorts, horizontal-striped long-sleeved t-shirts, zorries (thongs), and long hair cut in the surfer style. I look at pictures of myself from those days and shake my head. Yet the labels I wore were the clothes, not the words on the clothes. But was there a difference, so long as we all wore the same uniform? Not really.

But I was a child then; now I am an adult and I've put away labels as much as possible. I buy most of my generic clothing at Costco. Even my tennis shoes are non-descript; I haven't worn a pair of Nikes in . . . I would have to say . . . forever. To me, no pair of tennis shoes is worth more than $25 unless they can actually make me dunk like Michael Jordan.

But everywhere I look, I see adults emulating their children, though the labels get more expensive as we grow older. My first car was a VW beetle, an icon in its own right. I proudly drove my surf rack-festooned bug to the beach and back for years. For some time in the 1990s, I had a BMW 5 series sedan, which I babied. But at heart, I'm a truck guy and one day when I went into the garage, I noticed my precious Beemer was layered with a coat of dust. I hadn't driven it in a couple of weeks. I promptly sold it. I was done with labels, I guess.

Now I drive a nondescript truck. I removed the dealer logo from the tailgate and chucked the license plate frames. If I could get the Toyota sombrero logo off it, I would, but it's molded into the front grill.

If we must wear labels, wouldn't it be fascinating if we were required to wear labels that described the person we actually are? Imagine walking around the mall wearing a "Grouchy Bigot" T-shirt. (Okay, I've actually seen that one.) But what about "Zero Self-Esteem" tank top revealing all those tattoos? Or "No Time To Work Out, But Plenty of Time To Pierce My Ears" women's tops in XXL sizes?

I would hate to see the shirt I would have to wear.

There's one I hope would apply to me; one I would proudly wear: "The only limitation is your imagination."

Advice to a New Graduate

2009-06-07T16:32:00.007-06:00

YOU'RE A GRADUATE! Congratulations on achieving this important milestone. You've heard it before, but behind every tired cliche is a grounded truth: Education is the key to properly dealing with life's most important opportunities. I remember a television ad campaign from my youth. It said simply, "To get a good job, get a good education." But life is not just about the job; it's about, well . . . life. Living. And living well. Not necessarily accumulating wealth, but more properly health -- physical, spiritual, and mental health. But how do we achieve this kind of wealth? Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let me draw a metaphor for you:

Imagine yourself in the Colisseum, like in the movie Gladiator. You are standing in the middle of the arena. Thousands of people are in the stands, watching to see what will happen next. Will you make the right choice? Or will you fail? Some of the spectators wish you ill; others hope you will make the right choice; but the vast majority are indifferent to your plight. And no one is down on the field of battle with you. You are alone; only you can make these important decisions.

You look around at your options. A tall wall surrounds the circular field upon which you stand. At regular intervals, all along that curving wall encompassing your life, are doorways. When you were born, almost all the doors were open to you, though some were already shut. For example, I was born a man and the "female" doorway was closed to me at birth. But the “male” doorway was open and on the other side of it were -- and are -- many great opportunities. The same is true of all the other doors. Take a minute and think about all the doors that were opened to you when you were born. The choices were almost limitless.

And though there were some doors closed to you at birth, they are not necessarily destined to remain so. Knowing how to drive a car is one example. Through your hard work and diligence, you opened that door yourself. I know it's not lost on you how many opportunities come to us as a result of knowing how to drive.

So consider for a moment how many doors are open to us, or remain closed to us, or that we deliberately shut ourselves, depending upon our choices.

My philosophy has always been to keep as many doors open as possible, and pry others open if I can, thus adding to the options of my life. For that reason I went to law school, though I never really wanted to practice law. I just wanted to know what lawyers know (which is, quite simply, how the world works), and now I do. That door remains open to me and is a great benefit when it comes to understanding current events and politics.

I find it amazing that at people in their twenties are expected to make decisions that will continue to be valid for the rest of their lives. I find this premise sad and untenable. Not that you should put off some of these decisions (career, marriage, etc.), but before making any life-changing decision you should remember the importance of that decision and make it in an informed manner. A proper education will make your decision much easier.

Though you are a graduate today, you have really just began your real education. It does not matter the extent of your formal training, what matters is that you make learning a priority and a habit in your life. That will keep more doors -- and more opportunities -- open to you than anything else I know of.

This is my gift to you on this important occasion. Good luck!

The "Twilight" of Our Culture

2009-03-08T07:02:00.009-06:00

IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY, Cassandra (literally, "she who entangles men") was a woman so beautiful that Apollo granted her the gift of prophecy. But when she did not return his love, he cursed her so that no one would believe her predictions. Thus, the title Cassandra is given to voices in the wilderness that prophesy calamities that no none believes will come to pass. Until they do, of course.

Today, I will do a little prophesying myself. First, my bonafides: I am an internationally-published author whose books deal with spiritual and social themes. I am interested in the state of the heart and soul, and I have spent most of my adult life examining and pondering our culture and times, and then writing about them.

Over the past three months I've been promoting a new book in Costco and Sam's Club stores, where people buy everything from turkeys to televisions. And not a few books. My signing table is usually set up at the end of the book aisle, a great placement, as most shoppers pass me as they head for the food section. Behind me, in recent weeks, are pallets of Stephanie Meyer's four-volume hardbound "Twilight" series, priced at $45, a stiff price to be sure, but a steal when the suggested retail is $75. It's a steal all right, but I fear the theft is of the virtue and judgment of the largely female readership of these popular books.

The author, Stephanie Meyer, is following in J.K. Rowling's footsteps: an instant millionairess, having sold 40 million copies of the books worldwide. But Rowling's appeal was limited largely to young boys, while Meyer's Bella Swan is obviously designed to balance the equation and draw in young girls. Bella is a young, chaste girl who falls in love with a vampire, who acts as not only the object of her romantic yearnings, but as her protector and savior.

Vampirism, from its inception, has always had obvious sexual connotations. The drawing the blood of a docile or sleeping female through a "kiss" on the neck by a powerful male results in her falling under the vampire's thrall, and her own soul is now drawn into the darkness of murder and mayhem that delimits the vampire existence.

But not Twilight. In this artful remaking of the myth, the vampire (Edward Cullen) drinks only animal blood and so he's "safe" for Bella. This, of course, is another sexual euphemism: Ed and Bella don't go "all the way." Bella has no idea what Edward does outside of her presence beyond his assurances that he drinks only animal blood, and, like the young girl she is, she naively believes him. Of course, in the end, their "love" is consummated, as "love" always is. But it's done so cleverly that the readership -- primarily, pubescent girls and their mothers -- see it as "love" and not an act of sexual violence, as vampirism always is.

Perplexed by the books literally flying off the shelf behind me, I asked a woman in her mid-forties what her take was on the phenomenon. She said her two teenaged daughters read the series, and so she read it as well, "to get an idea what was going on." She looked thoughtful for a moment, then smiled: "I think it's a bit of the 'bad boy' thing . . . women are attracted to the bad boy. And since the young vampire doesn't drink human blood, he's not really that bad, is he? Plus, he's nicer to her than the mortal boys her age."

So here was a woman who seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be a good mother who was involved in her daughters' lives to such an extent that she even reads the same books they do. But she saw nothing wrong with vampirism, so long as Edward didn't murder (read: rape) Bella. And since Edward is "nicer" to Bella than the troglodytes on campus, Bella can be excused for succumbing to Edward's charms.

Horrified, I reflected on the state of parenting in the world today. Instead of guiding children toward literature that uplifts and instructs, parents now join their children in reading not only childish and soul-destroying books, but they assuage any resulting guilt by actually believing they are "involved" in their children's lives . . . that they are "sharing" something.

Something like a needle, I think.

But it's been thus for years. The Harry Potter phenomenon was no different. This children's book was also read widely by adults, who, fleeing the increasingly unacceptable violence and language of "adult" fare, retreated into the safe world of a child's story about magic. That itself is not alarming; most people understand that magic is pure fantasy. But the subtextual messages of Harry Potter are what concern me. Unlike the time-honored "hero's journey" of literary tradition going all the way back to Odysseus, Harry Potter was a new kind of hero: he started out a hero and shows little true emotional growth throughout the books. His in-born talents are apparent the first time he stretches out his hand and the broom pops up from the ground. He's a natural! Of course he is, his parents were remarkable wizards themselves -- it's genetic! Throughout the books, people meet Harry and exclaim, "My God! You're Harry Potter!" as if that explains everything about the lad. He simply has to "discover" his talent and use it. No growth (besides puberty) is thrust upon Harry. He is destined to be a great wizard because he already is.

I find this lack of personal development in a protagonist alarming. Our own lives are nothing but challenges that reveal our character; challenges that make us stretch and grow. But Harry is already a great wizard, and, magically, he will show himself to be such. This kind of magical thinking might save Harry's life in the books, but it's death for us in the real world. We mere muggles are doomed to have to learn and grow, to actually mold ourselves into something worthwhile. Our birthright is a mere potential; it's not an exclamation of divine right.

But it doesn't stop there: George Lucas, off to such a stirring start in the first three Star Wars movies, completely destroyed the Force itself when, in the fourth film, Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn informs Anakin's mother that tiny, microscopic organism -- mitoclorians -- are the real source of the Force, and Anakin has a remarkable concentration of them in his blood! No wonder he's going to grow up to be Darth Vader! It's inevitable!

So instead of Luke Skywalker's journey toward adulthood and heroism, where he grows by fits and starts, unable to prevent the remote from zapping him when he has the blast shield on his helmet lowered or failing to see Darth Vader in himself in the Dagobah cave, his father Anakin comes out of the womb fully prepared to be a Jedi Master and later, Darth Vader. Of course, those darned mitoclorians. Too bad I don't have any in my blood.

These shortcuts to power (Harry Potter and Anakin Skywalker) are dangerous lessons to teach our children, for those of us not living in the fantasy world of books and movies know there is nothing more crucial to success in life than achieving -- through our own blood, sweat, and tears -- actual competence, whether it be our ability with a light saber or a magic wand. (And thus far, no one I know on this planet has any talent with either!)

To the mix of incompetent arrested-adolescent adult males spawned by Rowling and Lucas, Stephanie Meyer is now adding young women infected with the dangerous notion that it's okay to date the Edward Cullens of the world, so long as he doesn't drink their blood. What Twilight says about sex is obvious to any girl who has ever been in the backseat with a boy: "It's okay," he coos, "we won't go all the way." What he's really saying is that they won't go all the way tonight. But eventually they will, and it will be she who bears the consequences of his "love": destroyed self-esteem, STDs, and perhaps even pregnancy, while he finds another victim down the road. More and more Bella Swans of the world will be left behind with shattered lives. Good job, Stef.

Congratulations, Mom, on reading Twilight with your daughter. When she turns thirteen, maybe you two can get matching tattoos.

Just call me "Cassandra."

Is America Racist?

2009-02-19T06:46:00.008-07:00

BARACK OBAMA WON THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 53-46. Given the paroxysms of delight experienced by many who voted for him, in explaining his win I'm going to discount his policies in favor of his "presence," especially since he has moved to the center (even center-right on some issues) since the election. Those who hoped he'd start pulling our troops out of Iraq on January 21st must be sorely disappointed, but apparently, most are still in the spine-tingling thrall of his beatific beingness.

I tend to vote issues, not people. Domestically, George W. Bush was far less a conservative than I had hoped. I thus found it easy to distinguish between what I wish he had done and what he actually did. Thinking people can do no less; "feeling" people can do no more.

But the orgiastic Obamaniacs have no such healthy bifurcation of belief. They will blindly believe in the Messiah until the moment they lift him up on the cross. One wonders what it will take for them to turn on him? Not immediately declaring a loss in Iraq? No. Not immediately closing Guantanamo? Nope. Failing to raise taxes on the reviled rich? Escalating the Afghanistan war? Not at all. Nothing he's done seems to sway his bellicose believers. Nothing yet, at least. Perhaps if he goes on Rush Limbaugh's show.

So why are Obama supporters such true believers? Why would the electorate that voted him in not then turn on him (or at least point out his hypocrisy) when he flatly refuses to keep his campaign promises? The answer is simple and devastating: They are racists.

Since his failure to keep his word on the issues is not enough to discourage their support, only one reason remains for their fawning worship: it must be his race. Obama is black (well, half-black anyway) and those who voted for him and who still support him (his popularity as of this writing is a strong 67%) must have voted for him because of his skin color. It certainly could not be his enthusiastic campaign promise-keeping.

Racism, by definition, is allowing skin color to be a rationale for either liking or disliking another person. In our history we've seen ample evidence of "negative" racism. But the gushing, weeping, hallelujah-I-have-seen-the-light sort of "positive" racism has previously been low-key. Certainly, affirmative action is "positive" racism; a racism intended to reward a person for nothing more than the color of their skin. Way back when, Colin Powell had the Republican presidential nomination his for the taking, due to this sort of postitive racism. His behavior since that time proves that he is a RINO, a "Republican In Name Only." The GOP dodged a bullet when it came to Powell.

The election of an unaccomplished, half-term senator with a flimsy resume as a "community organizer" can only be explained in racial terms. He was black (sort of) and thus, the percentage of the electorate that responds to dark skin color (as opposed to his true heritage, which is half black and half white) eagerly voted him in.

Therefore, if one took the percentage of the nation that voted for Obama (53%), one could make the powerful case that America is indeed a racist nation. It remains to be seen, however, how many of his formerly adoring acolytes will continue to applaud his essence when he, by necessity and political instinct, turns from his campaign promises with the fluidity he shows on the court as he rolls off a pick toward the hoop. If they still faint in his sublime presence, the jury must return the only verdict possible:

America is racist.

Belief: The End of Logic?

2009-01-10T06:13:00.004-07:00

I HAD AN INTERESTING CONVERSATION recently with a friend. We were comparing our different belief systems. While cordial, the conversation began to get heated when I pointed out several long-standing, bigoted beliefs inherent to his religion, which he explained as one of those things that could not be answered, because "God's ways are not our ways." The following exchange occurred:

ME: But you believe we are made in God's image, don't you?

MY FRIEND: Yes, but we're a poor reflection of God. We cannot comprehend His methods, much less His mind.

ME: But if God made us, then we are a result of His making, and our flaws and inability to comprehend His ways is a function of that design. In short, it's His fault we cannot grasp His mind, isn't it?

My friend shrugged, but my point was crucial to the rest of our discussion. I went on to say that, leaving aside our poor understanding of God, He certainly would know us well enough to tailor-make our thinking processes so we could understand, as best we are capable, His methodology and intentions.

MY FRIEND: Why is this important?

ME: Because I pointed out a serious flaw in your religion--the bigotry I mentioned earlier--and you blamed it on God. But I wonder: hasn't God himself said He is no respecter of perons? If so, why should we be? Why should we differentiate between black and white, male and female, bond and free, etcetera?

MY FRIEND: Well, that's where logic must give way to faith. I see things that seem wrong, but the Spirit whispers to my soul that there is an underlying reason for it that I cannot understand. Someday, maybe, but for now . . . that's what faith is all about.

ME: So you're saying that when we reach the limits of logic--like when I point out that if God is no respecter of persons and that a religion that purports to worship God is a respecter of persons--that the contradiction between the two can only be explained by the word "faith"?

MY FRIEND: Yes. Faith supercedes logic. Again, we cannot know the mind of God or His reasons.

ME: For the moment, I'll accept your point, which seems to be this: there are things outside or beyond reason that we must simply accept on faith.

MY FRIEND: Yes.

ME: And the reason we can do so is that we receive a "burning" sensation in our hearts when we accept the bigotry, for example, as something we simply cannot understand.

MY FRIEND: "Burning" is one way God's influence--the Holy Spirit--is felt. God has many ways of speaking to us: a still, small voice in our minds, a burning in our bosom, a sense of rightness in our hearts--even in the face of man's logic that might contradict the feeling.

ME: So, at times like this, when you find yourself at the "end" of logic, and these feelings kick in, you are willing to disregard logic because you believe you've "felt" the Holy Spirit "whispering" a greater truth to you?

MY FRIEND: Yes. An extra-logic truth, if you will, that we cannot comprehend with our minds.

ME: Fine, but what is this "burning in your bosom" based on? I know you've said it is a feeling, but why do you think it feels "right" as opposed to feeling "wrong"?

MY FRIEND: I'm not sure I can explain; it may be beyond the limits of language. But I know it comes from God.

ME: But how do you know it?

MY FRIEND: Because it feels right.

ME: So there is a logic at work here, after all: it feels right according to some standard, some rationale. When the Spirit speaks to you, it fills you with peace and light, doesn't it?

MY FRIEND: Yes, it does! It feels, as I said, right.

ME: And whatever fills you with peace and light--knowledge and wisdom, I think you mean--must be of God.

MY FRIEND: Yes, because it prompts me to do good, to do right.

ME: So that is a form of logic. To put a spin on the popular mantra: If it feels right, do it!

MY FRIEND: I suppose. The Spirit of God always encourages us, as Lincoln said, to follow the "better angels of our nature."

ME: So when I use logic to support my belief that bigotry is wrong, isn't that logic really based on a feeling that the Spirit whispered to me? In other words, aren't many of man's ethics a result of the "still, small voice" gently communicating right and wrong to us?

MY FRIEND: I'm sure they are.

ME: So, even though I tend to think of myself as living primarily by logic, and, in cases like this, you live by feelings, aren't we both influenced by the same Spirit which dictates the parameters of our beliefs? Aren't we really using the same Spirit to determine right and wrong?

MY FRIEND: I suppose we are, if we listen to it.

ME: Yes, that is the key. So here's the nut of it: if the Spirit of God has informed both our standards as to what constitutes bigotry, isn't it wrong to believe that those standards are going to change when one leaves logic and enters the realm of faith? If God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, isn't His Spirit also changeless? In short, wouldn't God speak the same, both to our minds (logic) and our hearts (feeling)?

MY FRIEND: I suppose He would.

* * *

I take some liberty here with our conversation. My friend never quite admitted that logic and faith are based on the same thing: an ethic burned into mankind's hearts and minds that have formed the basis of our life on earth for thousands of years. He never admitted that to use the old excuse for our failure to exact from religion the same standards we exact from ourselves is the worst sort of self-dealing; we do ourselves a massive injustice when we allow religion (and, by extension, God) to operate by standards that are less than those we expect from ourselves. In fine, my friend, a good, honorable man, was letting himself and his church off the hook from a great wrong (bigotry) by blaming it on God, who, I'm sure, is neither bigoted nor uncommunicative to us mortals about the wrongfulness of bigotry.

But men do not always listen to their "better angels" and must somehow rationalize their wicked behavior. As any child will do, they blame their parents for their troubles, oftimes for many years after they themselves have grown to adulthood.

So to say that God endorses bigotry is . . . faithless.

Homosexual Marriage: Clear Thinking on a Charged Issue

2008-12-07T06:59:00.005-07:00

HERE'S HOW I DEFEND THE TRADITIONAL DEFINITION OF MARRIAGE:

Me: "From now on, just call me 'doctor'."

You: "But you're not a doctor."

Me: "Yes, I know. But I want to be treated like I actually was a doctor."

You: "You mean, see patients and prescribe medicine?"

Me: "Of course; that's what being a doctor is."

You: "But you aren't a doctor! And acting like one is going to get people . . . well . . . killed!"

Me: "I don't care. I want to be a doctor. I want to be looked up to by the public, get the good parking spaces, and wear that white coat with that black thingy hanging around my neck that hears the heartbeat."

You: "Well, we can't allow you to do that. It would be too dangerous. The State has an obligation to prevent people from pretending to be doctors."

Me: "Why? It's none of the State's business. It's just me and my patients. The State has no right to interfere with our "union."

You: (exasperated) "The State has not only the right to interfere with you, it has an obligation to do so in order to protect society."

Me: "I don't care about society--I just want to be a doctor!"

* * *

You get the idea: The State has an interest in the traditional family, which has been the basic building block of civilization for over ten thousand years. Therefore, traditional families should be encouraged as much as possible because they are inarguably the best place to raise children, which results in a stable, constructive society. To that end, I also think we should outlaw "no fault" divorce; otherwise we're being hypocritical as not fully supporting the traditional, intact family with both a father and a mother present in the home.

All other rights between homosexual couples should accrue--no reasonable voice on the right is advocating anything less--but the traditional notion of marriage should be reserved for traditional unions, as a way of giving the imprimatur of the State to its most cherished and important pillar. Otherwise we're Rome apres Caligula.. . .

But I have nothing against gays being chiropractors!

Changing the Rules in Congress

2008-11-16T05:10:00.011-07:00

CONGRESS, WITH AN APPROVAL RATING AT AN ALL-TIME LOW (9%), is a perennial source of dissatisfaction for Americans of all parties. Though the explanation is usually given as "gridlock," the real complaint is not that the parties are partisan. They are, after all, expressing opposite views that would require capitulation by one side for the other to prevail. Thus, partisanship is as much a part of a representative democracy as is tri-colored bunting at rallies.

The problem is not partisanship; it's ineffectiveness, and the electorate obviously believes the people in Washington are not about the country's business. Not that they aren't doing business back there; it's just not the country's business--it's each individual state's business: they are bringing back the pork (now called 'earmarks,' as if that makes it less offensive) to their constituents, and that makes those who elected them happy. But the other 99% of us are not, unless our own representative slakes our thirst with his dippings from the communal trough. So we complain about the Bridge to Nowhere, but what we're really unhappy about is that it isn't being built in our district, where it would provide (as it did in Alaska) jobs and income for thousands of people.

The popular solution to this conundrum is term limits, as if the answer was in preventing anyone in Washington from being there long enough to unravel the Byzantine rules of power and procedure. But the problem is not how much time a representative spends in Congress; it is what he or she does there.

And what they do is this: they outlast other representatives and in so doing, they get the plum assignments and the committee chairmanships, which are given out according to seniority. That is why Teddy Kennedy continues be elected by the otherwise intelligent voters of Massachusetts. Why serially elect a man guilty at least of negligent homicide and perhaps even murder? Because Kennedy is the senior Democrat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. He also serves on the Judiciary Committee, where he is the senior Democrat on the Immigration Subcommittee, and on the Armed Services Committee, where he is the senior Democrat on the Seapower Subcommittee. That's why.

And he got all those jobs because he's been in the Senate since 1962--forty six years! Indeed, the voters of Massachusetts are not stupid; they are smart. So long as Kennedy is in a position to use his power for their benefit, replacing him with a neophyte would be stupid.

And to be fair, it's also why Utahns re-elect Orrin Hatch every six years. Even by Utah's low requirements, Hatch is a poor public servant, but since he's the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he is a very important man when it comes to Supreme Court nominations. Thus, he is also returned time and time again to the Senate. He's been in office 32 years, and yet he is only the fourth most senior Republican! But has he served anyone, really? And, more importantly, is he the best person to chair the Judiciary Committee when the Republicans are in power? Who can know? So long as Senate seniority rules prevail, he will remain in office, for Utah voters are no less intelligent than their Massachusetts counterparts: without their seniority-rewarded representatives, who can doubt that neither Kennedy nor Hatch would be elected year after year?

So the answer is not term-limits, which punish representatives who have an important expertise they garnered prior to going to Washington and are willing to put in the time to learn how to navigate the halls of power. Seniority rules in both houses should be repealed, and committee members and chairs should be elected by the other members of their respective deliberative bodies. If you are a newly-elected senator who practiced medicine for twenty years, you might be a better choice to serve on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee than Teddy Kennedy. Imagine . . . if your pre-Washington credentials were impressive enough, you might even be elected across party lines. Under such a regime, senators and congressmen would serve where their talents would be best utilized, not suffer as underlings for decades to various fossilized Foghorn Leghorns until their own time for leadership comes, and when they, too, have become a laughable parody of a public servant.

The Law of Unintended Consequences applies. In 1978 California voters passed Prop. 13, which effectively froze property taxes, reducing the money available to a spendthrift legislature. But it didn't stop the spending. The legislature first stopped funding "ancillary" items like city parks, street cleanup, and high school marching bands, then started deficit spending. Which is why today, instead of throwing the bums out thirty years ago, California is begging the federal government for a bailout. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if there were people in the state legislature today who were there in 1978, and are still unchanged by the experience. Freezing property values in 1978 California was not the answer, nor are term limits today. Term limits would simply chase everyone out, no matter their capability or integrity, and no one in congress would know what they were doing. It's hard to imagine the whole shebang working worse than it does now, but just wait until term limits are the rule, not the exception.

No, change must come from within. The alcoholic must want to stop drinking, and the legislature must want to stop spending. So the answer is not term limits, but changes within the legislature to the rules by which committee assignments are given out. The process will begin only when we elect representatives who will pledge to eradicate these archaic seniority rules. Only then will our representatives truly represent us.

NEXT TIME: Solid logic behind the opposition to homosexual marriage.

Primary Madness: The Tyranny of the Few

2008-11-09T06:32:00.016-07:00

THE SIMPLE REASON JOHN McCAIN LOST THE ELECTION is that, even with the nomination of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate, the Republican base was still not sufficiently energized to turn out in sufficient numbers (and to encourage others to do so) to elect the so-called maverick. In short, McCain was just not conservative on enough issues to win us--and the nation--over. His alignment with Democratic senators Feingold, Kennedy, and Lieberman on a series of wrong-headed legislation not only tarnished his claim to conservative credentials, but his claim to good judgment as well. So why did Republicans choose such a poor candidate as their standard-bearer in '08?

Because a few chaff-headed farmers in Iowa and a couple of tree-tapping saps in New Hampshire exerted a disproportional influence on the primary process. There may have been a time when these small state primaries made sense, but I cannot recall it. I cannot even formulate a good argument for its continuance today. So I have what I think is a better idea: A national primary.

Here's how it would work: As we have seen, the presidential election now takes almost two full years from start to finish. I don't like it, but as a believer in the Free Speech clause, I think we should not limit it. Let all the contenders speak, debate, and run ads to their hearts' content, and let them spend all the money, from whatever source, they wish--just require full disclosure of their donors' identities and donations, so the American people can judge who is owned by whom.

Then, we'll hold a national primary for each party in May. Anyone (Rep or Dem) could vote in either primary, but no one could vote in both. That way, in order for miscreants like Rush's ill-advised "Operation Chaos" mind-numbed robots (who effectively elected Obama, thank you) to cast ballots for the "weak horse" (as they thought Obama would be), they would have to sacrifice a vote for their own favorite candidate. I think most people would rather put their own candidate in office than disrupt the other party's nomination process.

This would not disenfranchise voters in Iowa; nor would it disenfrachize voters in California, Alabama, or Utah. Everyone would have a say in narrowing the field, say, to three on a side, who would then go to their respective nominating conventions.

Then, the real campaign would ensue, and it wouldn't be for president, either, but instead for delegates to the national party conventions. Instead of choosing electors based on insider-trading and political payback, each state delegation would be filled with people who run for the office. Their prime qualification would be their reasoning behind which of the three candidates they would support at the summer convention, where their votes would not be secret, but public, because they ran for elector based on their support for a certain candidate.

The nomination convention would then return to its first purpose: to select the best representative of the party in the final contest in the fall. Convention rules could permit a change of vote (after, say, the third tied ballot). In any case, it would be the will of the party overall that would select the best candidate, and not just a few insiders in obscure states.

Looking back at the recent Republican primary, I am certain that the candidate thus chosen would not have been the contrarian John McCain. Rather, if a whole nation of Republicans had an early voice in winnowing down the field of contestants, I believe it most likely that Mitt Romney, Rudy Guiliani, and Mike Huckabee would have entered the convention as final contenders, and people like the guy down my block who cares enough about Republican politics to run for elector and go to the convention on his own dime would then choose the best party representative for November. Thus, in voting for the elector, I would have a say at the national convention.

If both parties had chosen their candidate this way, I have no doubt that today we'd either have a president Guiliani or Clinton, both vast improvements over the faux-conservative McCain or the ultra-liberal Obama.

NEXT: Why Congress Doesn't Represent Us

Top Secret Memorandum from Senator John McCain

2008-09-10T15:55:00.007-06:00

MEMORANDUM -- EYES ONLY

From: Sen. John McCain
To: Republican National Committee
Re: Proposed Arrangement

As per your request, I'm reducing to writing our agreement regarding my nomination as Republican candidate for the presidency. Though I eschew closed door arrangements, I understand your desire that our agreement be reduced to writing to protect the party's interests and insure the future thereof.

First, some straight talk: I'm well aware that I am not the party's first choice for its 2008 nominee. I recognize that my contrariness over the years has reduced much of my stature among the party faithful. In my defense, I've always tried to do what I thought best, though in retrospect it is now obvious that many of my attempts to cross the aisle in the Senate have resulted in bad law and even worse outcomes. McCain-Feingold, our feckless though good-hearted attempt to regulate political speech, was a major disaster, I'll admit. It just goes to show how hard it is to draft legislation; you try to foresee every contingency. Who would have predicted the free-for-all that resulted from the 527 organizations, both left and right?

I know, I know. You predicted it, and I now stand corrected. I think my position on border security was defensible, even now, though I admit I am in a shrinking minority in this. And me from Arizona! Yet, as I've said on the stump, the longest I've lived in any one place is the Hanoi Hilton. I hope I can be excused for not identifying sufficiently with my fellow border-staters. I will do better.

But what finally nearly sealed my changed views has been my stance on environmental issues. I truly believed Kyoto was a good idea; I believe in global warming (or cooling or whatever they're calling it this week). When the nomination was in sight but gas prices were not, I reluctantly signed on to off-shore drilling. I thought that would be enough to satisfy the base, but again, I misunderestimated (to coin a word) my own base. Two decades in Washington, D.C. have apparently done their mischief, even to me.

Now they're clamoring for ANWR drilling, which I still don't want to do. I know, I know, I haven't even been up there (not even to see Sarah), and I know the size of the site is equivalent to a postage stamp on a football field, but I hope you understand how hard it is for me to change from being a maverick to toeing the party line.

Ah, you say, but you co-opted BHO's rhetoric for change, so what's the problem? And you're right, you're right. I've got a few more "fine tunings of my position" left in me, to quote my prompter-dependent opponent, so ANWR is now on the chopping block. And I'll read that Crichton book about global warming that Karl sent over and try to have an open mind.

All this being said, I knew that my pick for Veep was crucial. I thought long and hard about it. My advisers wanted me to go with one of my primary opponents, to show I don't hold as hard a grudge as many allege. But Romney was too Mormon (and too young, tall, and good-looking, to be truthful). Huckabee gave me the creeps with his fundamentalist roots (I know you remember my regretful comments about JF being an "agent of intolerance") and physical transformation (how could a guy be fat for so long and then suddenly lose it all? Did he suddenly acquire self-control?). Rudy would have been good (he can melt ice with his disdainful sneer), but I can't help but feel there are bogeymen in his past he just couldn't let off the leash. Thompson (still my choice for SC, or if he wants it, SecState) apparently just didn't want it bad enough. If he'd had half as much energy in debates as he puts into his Townhall column, he'd have slayed me up there. Plus, people loved him in that Indiana Jones movie.

None of my challengers seemed quite right. So I stopped looking inside the beltway and began looking at my base and what they wanted. And it came to me like a revelation: Sarah Palin, the ultimate feminist/stay-at-home hockey mom who took on the oil companies in Alaska. I liked how she rejected the ultimate earmark, that stupid Bridge to Nowhere. Her selection, I reasoned, would solidify the maverick moniker I've fought so hard for (some say unwisely, but let's let that go), and she'd galvanize the base which was, to put it mildly, rather tepid about me.

And boy, was I pleasantly surprised! She did that and more. You folks at the RNC were tickled with her choice as VP and I saw more than one person nodding, mouthing the word "Reagan."

Well . . . I knew Ronald Reagan. I served with Ronald Reagan. And I know . . . I'm no Ronald Reagan.

So here's my offer: If the RNC will truly get behind my candidacy (I know you were soft-pedaling the entire project prior to my choice of Palin) and get out the vote for November, I'll promise you this:

1. I will continue to manage the war effort just as W has, with additional pressure on Pakistan to either deliver OBL or watch team after team of SEALS violate their border every night until we get him or his corpse.

2. I will continue my popular assault on earmarks. I'll use the presidential veto as never before and will, as I said publicly a few days ago, "make those who sponsor earmarks famous."

3. Just after the House reconvenes in October to vote on whether to maintain the off-shore drilling ban or let it lapse, I will announce that given the state of the economy, overwhelming public opinion, and the high cost of gas, I will fully support drilling in ANWR and let the caribou and polar bears sidle up to the pipeline for some much-needed warmth during the long Alaskan winter. I will also forget I ever heard of Kyoto. And I'll read that book. Hell, I'll even give time in one of my presidential debates for Crichton and Gore to square off. I'd like to emcee for a change; show my Jack Barry chops.

4. Supreme Court: More justices like Alito and Roberts. 'Nuff said.

5. I will bring Palin forward as the most involved VP in history. She'll be in every cabinet meeting, every NatSec meeting, and every Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner (though with size of our combined families, I'm sure we'll all need an extended vacation afterwards!) because I know she represents not only the core of the Republican party, but its noble past and its hopeful future.

6. And after my term(s) (I can hope, can't I?) expire, I promise to shepherd Sarah Palin into the presidency. I know my time as leader of this party will be an aberration from what you folks at the RNC really want, but if I give you the justices you desire, keep America secure and taxes low, then the next generation (Palin, et al) can worry about reversing Roe, taking the culture back from the Hollywood miscreants, and further solidify the Court.

That's the deal. I know I'm not the guy you folks were hoping for. I even saw a "McWhatshisname/Palin" bumper sticker the other day, so I know exactly where I stand. I may have stood last in my class at Annapolis, but I stand behind no one when it comes to keeping my word. If you do your part, I'll do mine. Count on it.

Respectfully,

John McCain

Proposal: Thorazine for the Liberal Mind

2008-08-10T06:51:00.008-06:00

I DON'T KNOW WHEN IT HAPPENS. I don't know why it happens. I only know that it happens, but only to about half of the people. The other half seem immune from the disease. But those who are afflicted, who have apparently forgotten everything they were taught as children (and have even taught their own children), now see the world in a way that is, simply . . . crazy.

I'm talking about, of course, the shift from conservative to liberal. Make no mistake, we all start out conservative. As children, we hoard memories and marbles with equal zeal. We count the peas left on the plate that we must eat before Mom will let us up from the table. We count the minutes until our favorite TV program comes on. We count the pennies, nickels, and dimes in our piggy banks. We keep track of who cuts in front of us in line. We mow the lawn so we can borrow the car Friday night. We work for good grades so we can get into college. We do our best to romance the object of our affection. And when we have children, we teach them the same.

What I've just described is a conservative, someone who conserves time, money, relationships, grades, careers, homes, families, forests, nations, and the planet. A conservative simply applies time-honored principles to his own life. Most people never stray from these principles. They balance their checkbook, knowing that if they don't, they will not be able to buy the things they want and need.

What's amazing is that about half the population, while scrupulously balancing their own checkbooks, believes that government shouldn't have to balance theirs. They insure their own car, but aren't sure if others should be required to do so. They bring an I.D. with them to vote, but think it's racist to require others to do so. They conserve water by running the sprinklers at night; mow the grass to conserve its health; trim the tree branches to conserve the neighbor's roof. In short, they are conservatives . . . when it comes to their own yard.

Yet half of them vote liberal in elections. How can this be, when their own success results directly from conservative principles? If I balance my checkbook, why would I vote for someone who won't balance the federal budget? If I teach my children that they get their allowance after they've done their chores, why would I give money to a panhandler? If I lock my doors at night, why would I vote for anyone who would oppose a border fence? If I'm faithful to my spouse, why would I think anyone who is not faithful to theirs is honest?

In short, everything that works in the private sphere works in the public one. If we go to the gym, eat a good diet, and get enough sleep, we will generally be healthy. Sometimes bad things happen, but a conservative knows that the smoker dying of lung cancer is less worthy of his compassion (and limited resources) than someone born with cerebral palsy. A conservative (and a successful liberal) knows that you pay the mortgage first, put food in the fridge, and if there's money left over, maybe we'll have cable TV.

But liberals are nutty. They disconnect their own experience from the world they live in. While they balance their own checkbook, it's OK to let government spending spin out of control if it's for a "good" cause. Yet they don't give their mortgage money to panhandlers. Instead, they give a dollar and pretend they are both helping the beggar and being generous. They are Scrooges when it comes to their own kids' allowance because they know that teaching a child the value of money is one of the most important things they can do to insure that child's success later in life.

Conservative principles work on the macro level as well. We step in when bullies are beating up a defenseless child, but we also teach that child to defend himself in the future. The U.S. protected the defenseless a generation ago and we rebuilt the economies of our former enemies so that today they are our allies. This decade, we freed 40 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq, freeing them from bullies and are now teaching them how to live as free people. They will learn to balance budgets, govern themselves without corruption, and have peaceful relations with their neighbors. If we are successful, they will, like many of the former Soviet Union satellites, have conservative governments.

So why would anyone believe that the bedrock principles that made their own life successful (thrift, hard work, honesty, and fidelity) be any less indispensable to the success of any other person or country?

There is only one answer: Such a demented person thinks you are stupid and need their help. This is the unspoken, core truth of the looney left. And yet it was conservative principles that placed them in a position to "help" you. Why are they, notwithstanding their "superior" intellect, unable to recall their own conservative roots? Because they are no longer balancing their own checkbook. The checks they are writing, the ones with all the zeros, come from your checkbook.

It's human nature, I guess. Studies have shown that people use much more TP in public restrooms than they do at home. Someone else is paying for the TP, right? At home, we turn off the lights because we're paying for the electricity. But when people get into government, conservative principles often go out the window. Conservatives are not immune. They hear the siren song of "helping" the "helpless" and start throwing good money after bad, but their own moniker eventually reminds them of their folly. Liberals, on the other hand, not only think they are smarter than you, they also believe their compassion trumps your right to manage your own checkbook.

The result is a nation with a bloated, unbalanced budget, out-of-control spending, broken fences with our neighbors, and a populus, nearly half of which apparently doesn't know the difference between giving a child an allowance for helping around the house and tossing a quarter to a bum.

The drafters of the Constitution envisioned "citizen legislators" and a system of checks and balances (an apt economic metaphor) to constrain each branch of government to stay within reasonable bounds. Each branch naturally wants to extend its power. Adherents to the philosophy of a "living" Constitution currently hold sway in the judicial arena, often overriding legislation they deem to be insufficiently progressive. The legislature is too timid to make hard decisions (Roe v. Wade is one classic example of the judiciary stepping in when the legislative branch refused to act), and the President winds up doing the legislature's job via executive orders. And the fourth branch of government--you and me--seems more interested in American Idol than America, so we fail to hold any branch responsible. It's like we left an 8 year-old in charge of the baby while we went out to a movie. In a conservative world, such dereliction of parental duties would result in dire consequences.

Why we do not demand proportional punishment for those who ignore timeless conservative principles in the public square is beyond me. The liberals must be, simply . . . crazy.

May I suggest a Thorazine drip?

The American Dream: Not What You Thought

2008-07-04T06:42:00.004-06:00

SINCE THE ARRIVAL of the Puritans at Plymouth Rock, America has been a dream, a hope, a possibility. It continues to be so today, except for many Americans themselves, who have instead adopted the very beliefs that drove our forebears from Europe to America, where they lived lives of privation, danger, and early death. Why would anyone leave the comfort and safety of Europe for the malaria-infested shores of a distant, uncivilized continent?

One reason alone: freedom. The Puritans were not so much headed for America as they were escaping oppressive European governments, which had limited their religious freedom, their right to assemble, and their right of self-determination--the very rights guaranteed two hundred years later in our own Constitution, but now largely forgotten by most Americans, judging from the polls. Important rights today seem to be the right to not be offended by another's views, the right to cradle-to-the-grave healthcare, and the right to 100+ cable channels and a 2000 calorie Whopper.

I do not make this charge lightly, for it has been my habit over the last twenty years, whenever I talk to someone who is disgusted with American foreign policy, to ask them what exactly does America stands for? What, precisely, is the "American dream"?

What I usually hear is a monetary version: "Home ownership," is the most common response, a kind of updated Depression-era "chicken in every pot" homily. But even 80 years ago the dream started to turn into a nightmare, reducing the core value of political, religious, and personal freedom to mere creature comforts. Back then it was a chicken dinner, in the post-war period it was home ownership, now it's universal health care, none of which satisfy the innate human need for freedom. Creature comforts merely make life more easier, not better. Interstate highways, better cars, 24-7 sports channels, 3-day weekends, safe consumer products--all this seems to be the goal of most Americans, but none of these is why America came into being, and none of them are why it should exist today. In short, America should not stand for the easy life--it should stand for a better one.

Except for tours of French museums and Mexican cruiseship dockings, most Americans have never really been in another country. In Rio, the world's worst slums lie less than a mile from Ipanema Beach, but no tourists go there. Calcutta squalor is seen through the viewfinder of a camera and dismissed just as easily. For two years I lived in Ecuador, one of the poorest countries in South America. I saw first-hand how hard life could be without the creature comforts I grew up with. Even getting water involved walking a mile to the common well. At first I was horrified by the sub-standard living conditions: In the tiny hamlet of Jipijapa there were no paved streets, no running water, very little electricity, and cockroaches as big as your fist. For many days after my arrival, I focused on what these people did not have, until I met a carpenter who dreamed of coming to the USA. "Life is better there, no?" he asked.

"It is," I said. "We have everything."

"Yes. You have freedom," he said simply.

I looked at him. Freedom? Well, sure, we had that. I'd never thought about it before.

"You can live your life as you please," he added. "Any way you choose."

Yes, that was also true. Then he began to tell me how Jipijapa was ruled by a jefe, a strongman owner of a coffee plantation, who paid the workers a pittance, fired them if they complained, and ran off or killed those who opposed him. He was a government that had never built a school or a post office.

"But the liquor is very cheap," said the carpenter, smiling ruefully. "It puts us to sleep."

At that moment I began to see how this simple man--who earned one dollar a day--saw the world, and I realized he was more informed about it than I was. Life was not about cheap liquor (or food or gas or homes or TV or you name it). It was about the freedom to choose one's own life, and this simple Ecuadorian carpenter believed in that dream because of the USA. Nothing in his world even remotely mimicked the freedoms we enjoy; but he'd seen Dallas on TV, and instead of being jealous at the incredible standard of living the characters on that show enjoyed, he saw a weekly morality play: good prevailed, wrongs were righted, and evil people were eventually punished. After all, J.R. was shot.

I returned to home to a different country than I had left. In truth, I was different, and I've never ceased to see the crucial connection between our standard of living and the freedom that underwrites it. But I fear many of my countrymen, who've never lived in another country, do not recognize that the foundation for our life is not capitalism; it is the freedom to choose how we live our lives.

So what does America stand for? Freedom. Freedom to fail, freedom to succeed. Now, with that in mind, where do you come down on the issues of the day? Should the government guarantee that no one ever stubs his toe? Should the government be blamed for every minor inconvenience we experience? Should everyone have the unlimited right to absolute personal safety?

Or should America merely be the level playing field where we get to see what we're made of? Will we win or lose? If I get injured, isn't that part of the game? If the other team scores, should they be required to let me score as well? If they have a star player, shouldn't he be required to play half the game for my team? When I'm tired, shouldn't the coach let me rest? And should I let the attractive cheerleaders divert my attention from the game?

When people say George Bush is the worst president ever, I just smile. Sure, as a conservative, there are many things I dislike about his administration--the unbridled growth of the federal government, to name just one--but for me, he will go down in history as a great president because of just one thing: he gave the freedom to choose to 40 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq. They may choose wrongly. Afghans may return to an opium poppy economy. Iraq may break up into a dozen warring provinces. But President Bush gave them the unprecedented freedom to choose. And that, in my book, not only makes him a great president, but it makes him a great president of a great country, because the freedom is what we stand for. It is our greatest export and the very reason for our existence.

So this Fourth of July I will bow my head and offer a prayer of thanks for those 4,000 Americans who freely gave their lives so that 40 million strangers could experience freedom. And the kind of person who would give his or her own life for another is the natural outgrowth of a nation "conceived in liberty."

God bless America, and may God bless Americans to remember what it means to be an American.

Seek And You Shall Find . . . Unfortunately

2008-04-05T12:34:00.011-06:00

PERHAPS IT'S THE ELECTION YEAR or perhaps it's just the stage of my life, but I'm a little worried about our culture. Everywhere I look, I'm assaulted by images of people frantically searching for someone to follow, or by images of people seeking to lead. One would think that this would create a nice mix: the followers want a leader; the leader wants followers. Voila! A match made in heaven.

But what concerns me is the dynamic itself. There was a moment in my life, one I now recognize as the moment I became an adult, in which I realized there were no real leaders for me anymore. It happened in stages. During the Watergate and Vietnam episodes, like most young Americans I came to distrust the government (in addition to anyone over thirty.) At the end of the 1970s, when popular music basically died, I realized there would be no more Beatles. When Jimmy Stewart passed, I realized there were to be no more movie stars, either. I read one too many books about religion in general and mine in particular to believe in people with a hotline to God or who brunched with Jesus. My parents' foibles became excruciatingly apparent. Even my peers, those who I celebrated for their vision and courage, proved that they, too, had feet of clay.

All that was left was for me to realize that the time for following had ended. There were no experts, no professionals, no prophets, no gurus, no teachers of transcendence. Only people who were facing middle age as I was, as sadly unprepared as I was, and as afraid as I was, truth be told.

So I grew up. I quit listening to the "expert," who, my dad always said, was just "some guy from out of town with a briefcase." I started thinking for myself. Not just criticizing, rebelling, or being contrary, but actually thinking: considering the facts, weighing the arguments, coming to a conclusion, and putting it into practice. In that order.

And guess what? Life went on pretty much as it did before. I had my successes and failures, my ups and downs, and I became aware that I had made my life's decisions pretty much on my own. This is not to say I didn't benefit from the years when I had leaders and teachers and guides and parents, only that I took from them the wisdom and knowledge they had to share and then struck out on my own.

I became aware that the answers I came up with were pretty much as good (and once in a while better) than the generic, one-size-fits-all answers my "leaders" had always given me, answers that seemed, like any policy, to ill-fit almost everyone, even though they were designed for wide application. I came up with a quip: "Policy is what you come up with when you're tired of dealing with individuals."

So my life became a reasoned attempt to weigh the aphorisms and advice I'd received from my "leaders" with my own experience and wisdom. I became less interested in joining . . . anything. I found myself uncomfortable sitting in an audience while some "expert" spoke to me about things I already knew. I still saw the power of unified action, but most of the time when we sit at the feet of "leaders," we are passive and nothing much happens. I found sitting in such environments actually painful, even when the speaker or leader or expert was sincere. In terms of religion, I heard Jesus say, "Love one another." Because of the astonishing difficulty of actually putting this advice into practice, I found I had little time for the further nuances of religious differences, doctrine, or dogma. And since I believe we all have a personal relationship with God, and He knows us better than we know ourselves, how can another human being possibly teach and guide us better than He can? So, to quote a good friend: I "cut out the middle man."

I found that my life took on a wonderful new direction. I still made many mistakes and false starts, but at least they were my mistakes and false starts. As a proactive person, I no longer had the luxury of blaming others for my plight. If I didn't like my job, no one knew me as well as I did and could not possibly advise me better than I could advise myself as to the course of action I should take. If I was uncertain about an idea or philosophy, it was up to me to suss it out and discern a proper course of action. When elections rolled around, I almost reflexively shied away from the candidate who promised me anything. As an adult, I know there's no free lunch, so if this pol wants my vote, it's going to cost me something, usually my freedom. Ben Franklin said, "anyone who would trade freedom for security deserves neither." So I chose freedom.

Spiritual leaders, convinced of their own insider knowledge and wisdom, abound, but I eschew them all, because no one knows me better than God and He and I already have a relationship. I don't need anyone to tell me what God has in mind for me; I'm in the process of learning from Him what that is, though it's often slow going.

I worry about a country and culture where there are so many eager leaders and so many passive followers. What I wish there were more of were adults, those who are reluctant to join not only a rally or a party, but also a mob or a church. So long as we find ourselves in large groups, I do not see how we can discern what our individual purpose in this life is. No one, not even the most prescient prophet, can know that any better than the individual himself.

So the next time anyone tells you how it is (including me, I suppose), your first response should not be, "How many honorary degrees are appended to your name?" or "How big is your constituency?" or "How many books have you written and have you ever been on Oprah?" but perhaps, "I'm sorry, but I'm in a bit of a hurry... I'm busy living my life right now, but when I get done with it, then you can have it."

The Obama Benediction

2008-03-02T07:07:00.009-07:00

BARACK OBAMA, seemingly destined to be the democratic candidate for president, has taken the country by storm and everyone wants to know why. How can this one-term senator with almost no legislative accomplishments or clear plan for the future be prepared for the presidency, and why do tens of thousands of people turn out for his rallies, chanting his name like he was the Messiah?

Because they think he is.

Here is why: As Shelby Steele points out in his book A Bound Man, Obama, the son of a white mother and an absentee black father and essentially raised by prosperous, white mid-westerners, faces the dilemma all blacks in America face: How to deal with the majority that wields power over the minority?

Steele calls the usual racial response, "masking," wherein blacks reinvent themselves through their strategic relations with whites. Masking generally demonstrates itself in one of two ways. The first is the bargaining mask, where blacks say to whites, "I will not use America's horrible history of white racism against you, if you will promise not to use my race against me." In other words, Steele says, bargainers grant whites the innocence and moral authority they need in return for their goodwill and generosity. Bargainers give before they ask, and they trust that reciprocity will prevail -- that goodwill will elicit good will. Bargaining is effective because it begins with magnanimity. Examples of successful bargainers are Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and Barack Obama.

The challenging mask, on the other hand, says, "Whites are incorrigibly racist until they do something to prove otherwise." This high ground as the historic victim of racism gives the challenger great moral power in the white community. In a society where the greatest shame has been white racism, the challenger has the power over the guilt and innocence of whites. This is why Don Imus, in penance for a racial aside on his show, did not seek absolution from Oprah Winfrey; instead, he went to one of the premiere challengers of the day: Al Sharpton. Imus did not go to see Colin Powell because Powell does not wield the racist stigma as his main source of power in American life; Sharpton does. And only a challenger can remove that stigma from whites whith finality, and then only when the challenger gets something in return: a public confession of racism, affirmative action, promises of diversity in hiring, etc.

But while challengers remain forever mired in racial conflict, bargainers can transcend those conflicts when the synergy of innocence given and gratitude received elevates them to an iconic status in the culture. Steele calls this the Iconic Negro, someone who embodies the highest and best longings of both races. Oprah Winfrey has achieved this status, as has Sidney Poitier. In dealing with them, whites can experience themselves shorn of racism, as people capable of complete human identification with a black person.

The drawback for both blacks and whites is that Oprah has obtained her iconic status through masking: she was a bargainer first. This is a tough position to be in: The Iconic Negro lives in that territory between the doubt they feel over the self-suppression they engage in in order to make things happen and the charge from their own group that their success proves them to be sellouts. But while they do not solve the country's race problem, they do nudge the culture in the right direction.

Barack Obama has become an Iconic Negro, which is why white women are swooning at his rallies. He offers racial absolution to a white populace weary of being accused of being racist. The problem for Obama, however, is in his own self-identification as black, rather than white. His bi-racialness makes him suspect to those wearing the challenger mask. Which is why Obama goes out of his way to downplay his privileged, white upbringing. After law school, instead of opting for Wall Street, he worked in the south Chicago projects and joined a black-themed church that essentially excludes whites. Even Obama was paying respects to the challenger mask.

But the real problem for Obama is not his race; it is the fact that he wears a mask at all. Both masks assume a fact not in existence: that no amount of black responsibility will lift the black race into parity with whites. Both masks are designed to deal with the white majority. So only transcendence from mask-wearing will raise the race, as it did a young Obama himself. But if black poverty and suffering are no longer automatically tied to white racism, then black uplift is dependent upon what blacks do. And if blacks are responsible for their fate, then whites no longer need to trade for their innocence with blacks, and mask-wearing blacks no longer have power to bestow racial absolution upon whites. Instead, they must be judged as individuals.

Can Obama achieve this worthy goal? Not so long as he wears a mask. Steele calls black responsibility the third rail of American race relations. If whites mention it, the stigma of racism falls upon them. If blacks mention it, they are Uncle Toms betraying their race by letting whites off the hook.

The only famous black who seems to have transcended race is Bill Cosby, who has recently become a great criticizer of the self-destructive aspects of black culture. He stages "call outs," where he challenges inner-city blacks to take charge of their families and raise their children with values and purpose. He brings on stage mothers of teenagers killed in gang violence, people who lost themselves to drugs, girls who all but destroyed their lives with teenage pregnancies. And, in a moment of great theater, he removed his Iconic Negro mask in public, when he said at the NAACP convention, "I don't care what white people think."

But it cost him. Bill Cosby is now something of a liability even to whites who privately admire his efforts. By refusing to wear any mask whatsoever, he is now a risk to white innocence, rather than a source of it. He no longer sells Jell-O, or anything else, on national television. But he has trancended race.

Cosby knows, and I believe, that only by seeking Martin Luther King's vision of America, where "a man will be judged, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character," can we truly heal the racial divide. And yet, to listen to an Obama speech, for the subtle racial nods in the interstices (the incessant calls for "unification"), or to hear Michelle Obama lament that only with Barack's ascendency has she "been really proud to be an American," one can see that they both continue to wear masks, albeit different ones. Obama is an Iconic Negro, his public face that of the bargainer; Michelle seems to have donned the challenger mask.

But so long as they wear masks at all, the voters will suspect something is amiss. Before reading Steele's book, I, too, suspected something wrong in the candidacy of Barack Obama. I suspected he was not who he said he was. And Steele's book has given definition to my unease. I don't support Obama because he is a nutty liberal, not because he's black. And I can't support him because he wears a mask that hides his true identiy, the one he was raised with: the truthfulness and awkwardness of individuality not tied to race. To get my vote, he would have to promise to defend the country, not parley with the madmen who wish to kill us. And beyond that, he would have to dispense with the expectation that white racism has anything to do with black responsiblity. He would have to take off his mask and cease offering me racial absolution, which I don't want or need and which he cannot truly give.

But can Barack Obama remove his mask? If so, he runs the risk of becoming an individual like Bill Cosby, and will probably lose political and racial capital, both with whites and blacks. He may survive such a move, but the messianic specialness will evaporate. White Americans will no longer see the possibility of their own racial innocence in him.

And white women will stop fainting at his rallies.

Nanny-State Healthcare: Something To Cry About

2008-02-24T08:16:00.009-07:00

MORE THAN ANY ELECTION IN MEMORY, this time around the politicians are trying to impose upon me a relationship I do not want or need. I hear the term "What I'm going to do for you" more and more. But I just want to be left alone.

Remember the "soshes" in high school who ran for student body office? They were budding politicians then, promising the moon and, of course, delivering an empty, dark sky. Nothing has changed. Modern politics -- whether it's on the high school quad or in Washington -- has become someone promising to give me things I do not need and don't want and probably cannot afford. Cradle-to-grave healthcare, for example.

Pols of both stripes often bandy this "fact" around: Over 47 million Americans do not have health insurance! As if no health insurance meant no health care. Yet I am one of those 47 million and I'm just fine with it. The reason? Because health insurance is a scam designed to separate me from my money, and to put my money to work, not on my behalf, but to pay for unnecessary, expensive life-extending procedures, defend doctors and hospitals against frivilous lawsuits, and to pay for the burgeoning healthcare bureaucracy. This may sound troglodytic, but I don't want to live forever. I may not even want to live to be a hundred, as statistics routinely say I will. I live what most would call a risk-averse life: I don't smoke, exercise regularly, watch my weight, and drive the speed limit. The unpredictable and incurable Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) killed my father, and the expensive and painful procedures he went through (including chemotherapy) merely extended a steadily-deteriorating life another eighteen months. And after all was said and done, he still died. It's been eighteen years now; frankly, what does it matter if it were nineteen and one half? He'd still be gone almost two decades.

So I have the minimum health insurance I can responsibly have. It covers only catastrophic illness, like cancer. For everything else, I'm footing the bill. I consider this a benefit, because I take care of myself and avoid risky behavior (I am one of the few boomers who did not bungee jump and now that that trend is over, how was my life impoverished?). I pay as I go. The ER is open to anyone, whether they can pay or not, and I've used it here and there throughout my life. And because I'm the one who pays, I have a financial incentive to stay healthy, so I do.

So, being generally a healthy guy, I've had very few brushes with the health care horror show. But I had one recently, and it was instructive: For a couple of years I've had a condition called a "trigger" finger, where the tendon on my right ring finger occasionally gets momentarily stuck in the pulley under the second knuckle, preventing me from straightening the finger. It can be manually straightened, so it's inconvenient but not life-threatening. More like life-irritating. So I went to a hand specialist who'd sewed me up before (a slip of a utility knife) and he gave me a reasonable bid for his services, if I paid cash. But the hospital surgery center where he worked wanted four times his charges for this simple procedure. "Why?" I asked.

The doctor shrugged. "Liability and staffing issues."

"Staffing issues?" I asked. "Who do we need beyond you, an anesthesiologist, and maybe a nurse to dab the sweat from your forehead?"

He smiled. "Oh, about seven people in all are required."

The lawyer in me sat up straighter. "Required. By law, you mean."

The doctor nodded. "By hospital experience currently being codified into law."

As our conversation continued, I was enlightened about how many people needed to be there when he made a half-inch incision in my palm and perforated the pulley restricting my tendon, just in case I went into cardiac arrest. Then he enlightened me further: "Why don't you shop around?" he said. "I know all the hand specialists in town. I'll give you a few names. Maybe you can find a better price."

"What?" I exclaimed, now sitting fully upright, forgetting my aching finger entirely. "Shop around?"

"Just ask them if they can maybe do it in office -- I'm not allowed to do that here -- and what it will cost. Bargain with them. You know, dicker a little."

I left this good doctor's office, my head spinning. And I did what he advised. I found a doctor who could do the procedure in his office -- using a syringe needle, no less, poking me through the skin and thereby perforating the restricted pulley, allowing the tendon to move freely without getting stuck. No incision, no stitches, no general anesthesia, as my first doctor was required to do.

And here's the kicker: it cost me 1/10th of what it would have cost me at the surgery center at my fave doc's hospital.

And it gets better: After the procedure I sat in the windowless payment office and chatted with the accountant. "If you pay today," she said, "we'll cut the price another twenty-five percent."

I immediately dug out my checkbook, my bandaged finger already feeling better.

Now, what will we get if the politicians, in a transparent attempt not only to curry our favor and votes, but to keep us infants on the government teat, mandate comprehensive health insurance be purchased for all Americans, including me? We'll get procedures that will require me to take the day off work, sign a stack of release forms, undergo general anesthesia, and have to return a week later to remove the stitches. And you, dear reader, will help pay for my little surgery, which won't be done for cash anymore. It will enter the insurance labyrinth, occupy a dozen or more people at least a half-day, and end up costing over $4000.

In short, when politicians treat us like babies, we get procedures we don't need, at costs we cannot afford.

Oh, and did I mention? When the accountant discovered I was a contractor, she asked me if I could come by her house and bid a job for her. Later that week, I went by and got the job, which put many times the amount the procedure cost in my pocket.

So my trigger finger turned out to be a money-maker. I owe no thanks to government or the medical establishment, but effusive gratitude to two great doctors who, despite straight-jacketing laws and procedures, still managed to give me appropriate and inexpensive health care. Just like in the old days, when your mom took you down to the doctor's office for your strep throat and he met you at the door, gently treated you, and gave you a sucker on your way out.

Now, if the nanny trend continues, you'll sit in a waiting room all morning, be treated indifferently by file clerks, see the doctor for two minutes, get a ridiculously-priced medication, and have to schlep to the drug store for your pills, where they will not be allowed to tell you about the generic drug costing half the amount of the name brand advertised all day on TV.

And guess what? You're the sucker.

Lights, Camera... Time Out!

2008-01-01T05:07:00.000-07:00

HOLLYWOOD IS OFTEN ACCUSED of being about just one thing: money. Hollywood says it is just giving the public what it wants, and if that translates into money, so be it. Cultural conservatives fire back that no matter how much money flows into the entertainment barons' coffers, they should stop and consider that the product they make is not only over-priced, it is also dangerous. But Hollywood counters that it's only a movie and has no effect on the viewer; that it is merely reflecting society, not forming it.

These twin pylons framing the gate to the Magic Kingdom have stood a long time: On the left we have entertainment as public service; on the right we have entertainment as nothing more than a mirror with no deleterious effects.

In his book Hollywood Vs. America, film critic Michael Medved sets his sights on the pylon of entertainment as public service. Conservatives blast Hollywood, claiming that they would release tapes of the Manson murders (if there were any), if there was a buck to be made therefrom. While there there is ample evidence of this in Medved's book, he takes the argument a step further, stating that while Hollywood is no doubt about money, it's also about the power to re-make the world in its own image. To quote the Charlie Sheen character in Oliver Stone's Wall Street when he's chiding Michael Douglas for his apparently limitless greed: "How many yachts can you water-ski behind, Gordon?" Clearly, it was not merely money the Gekko character was after, it was power. And the power the left-leaning Hollywood lights desire is acceptance. Anyone who has ever auditioned for a play knows the feelings you get waiting for your turn with the casting director: inadequacy, the fear of losing out to someone not because they are better, but because they are better looking, of partisanship, cronyism, etcetera. Imagine this lowered self-esteem being the bedrock experience of your life and you begin to understand the kind of insecurities that plague most of the people in Hollywood. The hugely successful HBO series The Larry Sanders Show was about this very thing: a television talk-show host (Garry Shandling) who was so entirely cut off from his fellow man that he could only act "normal" when he was on the set.

The money that pours into entertainment coffers is seen by the denizens of tinsel town as a result of not only giving the audience what it wants, but as a vindication of their own insecurities and of the rightness of their views. Remember that most famous actors have minimal education and a narrow spectrum of life experience. Few have gone to college. Even fewer have served in the military or been successful in any business other than show. Almost none have any experience in public service beyond posing for an AIDS poster. This distorted person, however, has oodles of scratch, got it for being attractive or precociously imitative, and without a grownup's sense of perspective, thinks it's because they deserve it! No wonder they all sound like 7-year-olds when Larry King interviews them.

So money = power = a platform to expose your insecurities to the world. And the world, so starved for entertainment, will apparently take what it is given. If it's Saw IX, then so be it. 17-year olds take a Friday-night date to the multiplex, where they pack in to see an orgy of blood-letting, but their minds are really on the bump-and-grind in the back seat of the car after the show.

This tends to lend credence to filmmakers' defense of the other pylon: that what they purvey is merely entertainment, that no one is really watching it, that it's just two hours in the dark and doesn't really mean anything. Before I tackle that dubious defense, let's accept it for a moment: One the one hand, Mr. Producer, you believe your product is important enough to spend your life creating it; on the other hand, what you do is so unimportant that the audience will not remember it more than a couple of minutes after the credits roll. Oops! There goes your self-esteem again!

So what really allows these ego-bloated children to sleep at night is the belief that even though they're overpaid for what they do, what they do doesn't matter after all; they merely provide a non-fattening dessert to the main course of life: they can't be blamed for any weight gain in the body politic.

Conservatives shake their heads at such stupid arguments. Real life is full of the imitation of art. Every time such a connection is made: a Columbine, a Virginia Tech, etcetera, we shout to the Left Coast: "Look! They're "acting out"! They're copying your product! They're making pre-massacre videos, for crying out loud! They're looking for attention in the exact way and for the exact reasons you are! Don't you see it?

But the Alec Baldwins and Danny Glovers of the world just shrug and say there's no connection whatsoever. (Remember, you're talking to a 7-year-old here.) But a recent news headline seems to destroy their argument once and for all: in early December last, in Johnstown, Colorado, two teens were charged with the killing of the 7-year-old sister of one of them by beating her with imitations of moves from the "Mortal Kombat" videogame. Lamar Roberts, 17, and Heather Trujillo, 16, were baby-sitting Trujillo's half-sister, Zoe Garcia, while Zoe's mother was at work. Zoe lost consciousness and stopped beating after the teens hit, kicked, and body-slammed her, initiating moves used in the videogame. The autopsy showed she had a broken wrist, more than twenty bruises, swelling of the brain, and bleeding in her neck muscles and under her spine. Roberts admits to being drunk.

Now, to someone who can actually think, this is a perfect storm of parental abandonment, unsupervised children, alcohol, and the "entertainment" industry. Excise the entertainment portion and these same kids might have just gotten drunk and passed out while mom was at work. But now, turn on the tube, and an uninterrupted stream of anti-social behavior flows into the empty minds, hearts, and family rooms of emotionally and physically abandoned children, filling them with rage, hostility, and aggression. And who can they take it out on? The nearest victim of course: a child even younger than themselves.

When I learned of the story, I went online at CNN to look at the reader comments. All the posts expressed dismay about the murder, but few saw a connection between the videogame and the children's actions. I was dumbfounded: the accused children themselves admitted to trying out the moves in the videogame on little Zoe! How can there be a more direct connection? (Which only shows how effective Hollywood is at teaching values.)

One thing I have learned in life: do not waste your time arguing with a 7-year-old. The only solution is to send them to their room. I submit that Hollywood is just such a child. It denies that setting fire to the tablecloth will do any damage, and so I'm giving Hollywood a Time Out. There are many films I would like to see, and with my grownup sensibilities I can probably discern between the deleterious and the ennobling. But perhaps not. Perhaps we are all 7-year-olds inside; witness the wholesale destruction of our culture. The teenage girl who so blithely gives a grown man the finger from the safety of her car, the children who boldly smoke in front of adults outside convenience stores; the popularity of Brittney Spears... it all says children have taken over, abetted by their childish peers in Hollywood. They are running wild, drunk, destroying their own family room, setting fire to the kitchen, and now they are beating and killing each other.

I wonder if a Time Out is enough?

Mitt Romney's Ethical Dilemma (II)

2007-12-23T06:34:00.000-07:00

IN MY LAST POST, I pointed out that Mitt Romney, as an active, involved member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was a liar. The lie was that he "came to" a belief in the wrongness of homosexuality and rightness of the anti-abortion cause. I asserted that no Mormon could possibly climb to the dizzying heights of Church leadership positions as he had and believe that homosexuality was not sinful and that abortion was anything short of murder. The only answer I could deduce from Romney's Mitt-flopping on these important issues is that when he was asked to choose between his private beliefs and his public actions, Mitt choose to lie, and he did it for the pathetic reason of personal and political gain.

Most men would much rather be found on God's right hand at the last day than be elected president of the United States, if it meant denying their faith. This is as it should be. An oath to God certainly trumps prior agreements made between men. And if a man makes an oath to God, and later makes another, conflicting agreement with man, the previous oath to God should take precedence. In the words of Thomas More, a man who would break a solemn oath "needn't hope to find himself again."

Fortunately, such conflicts are rare. In modern life, oaths exist almost exclusively in the church, the legal system, and politics. Occasionally, there are conflicts between man-made agreements and covenants with God. Some Americans were disturbed by the religion of 1960 presidential candidate John Kennedy, which hinted at a conflict between his duties as a Catholic and his duties as president. He responded that if elected, he would be under no obligation to obey the Pope. And of course that was true, for lay Catholics make no such oath of obedience to the Holy See.

But there is such an oath in Mormonism, and it is undertaken in the LDS temple ceremony, commonly called the "endowment," a term used in the sense of valuable knowledge granted to mortals by God. The knowledge is communicated in an allegorical ritual detailing mankind's journey from a pre-earth life with God himself, to mortality here on earth, where we are to be tested to see if we will be obedient to God's laws, thus enabling us to return to His presence after death. At each stage in the endowment, participants are required to make sacred covenants of obedience to such laws, including the Law of Sacrifice (the Mosaic Law), the Law of the Gospel (Christ's teachings), the Law of Chastity, and finally and ultimately, the Law of Consecration.

While much of the endowment is shrouded in mystery due to a covenant to not discuss it outside the temple itself, the covenants themselves are not mysterious; they are simple, straight-forward agreements made with God designed to hold the participant to high standards of moral and ethical behavior. Temple-going Mormons take these covenants very seriously; indeed until recently the endowment covenants were made under penalty of death should they be revealed to the outside world. Though that penalty was excised from the endowment in 1990, participants are still reminded that breaking or revealing those covenants will bring upon them the wrath of God. Yet there is nothing in the endowment covenants that conflicts with the actions of any patriotic American citizen. Most of the covenants originate in the Bible, encouraging Mormons to be "honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous," and to do "good to all men."

A covenant, by definition, is more than an agreement between men; it is a solemn oath made between man and God. In our secular society, such covenants are reserved for the courts, oaths of citizenship, and certain public offices. When a foreign national becomes a U.S. citizen, he makes a sacred covenent:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

A greater obligation is required, and a higher oath is taken, when a person becomes the president of the United States. The president-elect places his left hand on the Bible and raises his right hand and says:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

The question in this presidential election cycle is whether Mitt Romney can, in good faith, take such an oath. The difficulty arises because Romney has sworn ultimate allegience to something other than the Constitution. In the LDS temple endowment, which Romney undertook over forty years ago, he raised his right arm and covenanted "before God, angels, and these witnesses" to obey the Law of Consecration:

You . . . consecrate yourselves, your time, talents, and everything with which the Lord has blessed you, or with which he may bless you, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for the building up of the Kingdom of God on the earth and for the establishment of Zion.

Romney's oath wasn't made simply to God; it was made specifically to the Mormon church. And it wasn't simply to participate, obey the teachings, or financially support the Church; it was to consecrate ("set apart") everything he has, not to God in general terms, but specifically to the LDS church. The wording of the oath puts it in direct conflict with the presidential oath: his first and last fealty is to the LDS church, not to the Constitution of the United States.

We've already seen the how Mitt Romney lies to protect his personal beliefs. Can there be any doubt that should a real conflict arise, President Romney will choose the Mormon church over the United States of America?

Yet he lied again. In a recent speech, he said, "When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God." (emphasis mine). He continued, "Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin." He concluded by saying, "If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no religion, no one group, no one cause and no one interest."

Yet clearly, to temple-going Mormons, the Oath of Office of the President is not their highest promise to God. And while we do not know yet what kind of influence the LDS church will have on a President Romney, still he has made a solemn covenant to obey them and to place the interests of the LDS church above all else. Finally, it is an outright lie that a believing Mormon will separate the affairs of religion and politics. In the early 1970s, the LDS church entered the political sphere in a very public way to oppose the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. Though in recent years its public advocacy has been more muted, its philosophy has not materially changed since Joseph Smith ran for president in 1844 on a platform of a "theocratic democracy," with the goal of a U.S. government informed and influenced by Biblical and LDS theology.

Again, Mitt has proven that he will say anything to get elected. In the past he has lied about his views on homosexuality and abortion. And, as if that were not enough, he is now lying about the most serious, sacred oath an American can take, the Oath of Office of the President of the United States.

I hope American voters will not force Mitt Romney to choose between his church and our nation.

Mitt Romney's Ethical Dilemma (I)

2007-12-16T05:34:00.000-07:00

"When lying to someone, look him straight in the eye."

-- Mason Cooley

Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for President, is in a pickle. His qualifications to lead are being overlooked due to questions about his religion and his "Mitt-flopping" on key issues, including some very important to the Republican base, namely, gay marriage and abortion. Mike Huckabee's rise to the first tier of candidates has placed the religious differences between evangelical Christianity (40% of the Iowa Republican caucus voters) and Mormonism in sharp contrast. The media, of course, loves a good fight, and has fomented all those differences, up to and including the highlighting of an obscure LDS doctrine that Christ and Satan were brothers in their pre-earth lives.

These distinctions have created concern for many evangelicals, which eschew Mormon notions of Biblical errancy and the eternal nature of the soul. For Christians, humans are objects created by God for His own purposes; for Mormons, humans are the literal children of deity, and, in the words of Joseph Smith, the first Mormon, "co-eternal with God."

Though this makes for an interesting theological discussion, neither Romney nor Huckabee are running for Pastor-in-Chief. I find myself bored discussing the doctrines of Mormonism -- I'm much more interested in knowing whether Mitt Romney believes in anything beyond his own political aspirations.

Mitt Romney was raised a life-long Mormon. As such, he was expected to follow a path of moral rectitude, including the payment of tithing, dealing honestly with others, and living a chaste life. I gather Mr. Romney adhered to all these requirements, because at age nineteen he entered missionary service for the Church in France and later married his high school sweetheart, Ann, in an LDS temple. Only Mormons who abide by the most stringent requirements of their faith are allowed entry into the temples.

If this were all there were to it, Romney, by his faithfulness to the strict Mormon moral code, would be exactly the kind of person qualified to lead: his walk would echo his talk and we could confide that he was a person of integrity. He might be wrong, but at least he would not lie to us.

But the Devil is also in the details, and Romney has fallen well below the standards not only of his own faith, but of trust in general. While governor of Massachusetts, he promoted same sex marriage and ran as a pro-choice candidate. He now maintains that at that time his beliefs were "in flux" about these two controversial subjects, but is that truthful? As an LDS missionary, he was required to teach people that homosexuality was sinful, and that human life was sacred. Later, as an LDS Bishop and Stake President (akin to a Catholic parish priest and an archbishop, respectively), he was required to enforce Church standards of behavior upon erring members, with consequences for misconduct up to and including excommunication. So it is highly unlikely that Romney finally "came to" believe in the wrongfulness of homosexuality and abortion. In his entire life, he'd never been taught differently by anyone in his church, and he had acted as an officiator of the Church to implement those same beliefs and standards upon members over which he had a stewardship.

The truth, then, is one of the following: If Romney is an honest person who did not lie in the Church interviews, then he has always been anti-homosexuality and anti-abortion, or he would not have been allowed to serve as a missionary, bishop, or stake president. But if he lied during those interviews, then he is a man who would lie to God himself. Either way bodes ill for Romney the man and for the United States as a nation, for he is clearly capable of lying either to move ahead in religious circles (publicly subscribing to doctrines with which he did not agree) or to advance in political circles (stating that he was pro-choice and unopposed to gay marriage when he was Massachusetts governor). I tend to believe Romney would rather lie to voters than to God, so I subscribe to the first premise: he has always been in line with Mormon belief: anti-gay and pro-life, but in the past has tempered these views to obtain political power, just as he is "refining" them yet again in his quest for ultimate political power: the presidency of the United States.

Massachusetts is one of the most liberal states in the union, and Romney would have never been elected governor had he not disavowed his core personal beliefs, so he did. After the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that same-sex "marriages" were protected by the Massachusetts constitution, Romney ordered Justices of the Peace to perform same-sex marriages or be fired. He did not have to do this as the Court was simply advising the legislature to codify its opinion on changing the marriage statutes. Romney was not bound to enforce same-sex marriages prior to such legislative action, yet he did.

On abortion, his personal beliefs also likely took a back seat to his political aspirations: In a 1994, he ran for the U.S. Senate against Teddy Kennedy. During a televised debate, Romney declared: "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for twenty years, we should sustain and support it."

If this is the case, then in 1970, just a couple of years after his LDS mission, and mere months after he was married in the Mormon temple, he changed his mind, took views contrary to Mormon belief and practice, and embraced Roe vs. Wade. This strains credibility, given his continued involvement with Mormonism, both as a member and as a leader in the faith.

"Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world."
-- Mitt Romney

NEXT: The real reason Mitt Romney cannot (and should not) be president.

The Looming Tower & The Perfect Storm (III)

2007-12-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

OVER THE LAST TWO POSTS, I've chronicled the remarkable events leading up to 9/11 from Lawrence Wright's work The Looming Tower. In this final post, I'll continue the "highlighter worthy" events of the eve of the terrorist attack. I'm sure many of these events will be a surprise to the reader, as they were to me.

Most men who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared. Alone, alienated, and often far from his family, the exile turned to the mosque where he found companionship and the consolation of religion. Islam was more than a faith--it was an identity. (344)
The Hamburg Cell, the nucleus of what would become the co-conspirators of 9/11, were able to fly below the authorities' radar. The new Germany had enshrined tolerance into its constitution, including the most openhanded political asylum policy in the world. In recoiling from its extremist past, Germany inadvertently became the host of a new totalitarian movement. (345)
Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 masterminds, stated in his will: "No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals." The anger this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Atta's turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations. (347) A fatwa was ordered on the Islamic journalist who dared suggest these young men would not have carried out 9/11 if they'd had a healthy sexual life.
Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khaled al-Mihdhar, both 9/11 conspirators, easily obtained U.S. visas because they were Saudi citizens. (349)
The CIA knew about Hamzi and Mihdhar withheld this information from other governmental agencies, fearing prosecutions resulting from specific intelligence might compromise its relationship with foreign intelligence services, notwithstanding there were safeguards to protect confidential information, and the FBI worked routinely with the agency on similar operations. May in the CIA feared, however, that the FBI was too blundering and indiscriminate to be trusted with sensitive intelligence. (352). Such turf-protection was the key weakness of American foreign intelligence before 9/11. I fear nothing has changed.
Ramzi Yousef, mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was being flown past the towers on his way to stand trial. One of the agents pointed and said, "See, they're still standing." Yousef said, "They wouldn't be if we had more money." (357) This is for those who think President Bush is responsible for all Islamic terrorism against the west. That was back in 1993, when the nation was suffering under the laconic and narcissistic Bill Clinton.
On October 12, 2000, the U.S.S. Cole was bombed by an explosives-laden skiff in the Aden, Yemen, harbor. OBL later said, "The destroyer represented the capital of the West, and the small boat represented Mohammed." (361) For those who do not believe Islamofascism is religious in nature.
OBL was born in Yemen, in an area known as the "Hadramout," which means "death has come." (364)
Yemeni authorities arrested Fahd al-Quso, who was supposed to videotape the Cole bombing, but overslept. Quso admitted that he had delivered money to one of his co-conspirators, Khallad, in Bangkok. Khallad was linked to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The FBI sent Khallad's photo to the CIA, asking about this connection. The CIA withheld information about the Malaysia meeting of Khallad and Quso, which hampered the pursuit of judstice in the death of 17 American sailors. (372). If this information had been given the FBI, they could have found Hamzi and Mihdhar in the U.S., and 9/11 might have been prevented!
Bill Clinton did nothing in response to the Cole bombing, as it came in the midst of his Monica problems and the upcoming presidential election. OBL's belief in American timidity had once again been proven. (374)
In April 2001, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Afghan Northern Alliance commander and enemy of the Taliban, told American officials in Paris that he had learned of al-Qaeda's intent to perform a terrorist act against the U.S. that would be vastly greater than the bombings of the American embassies in Africa. (381)
Bill Clinton's Justice Department reversed intelligence policy in 1995. The new policy regulated the exchange of information between FBI agents and criminal prosecutors, but not among the agents themselves. FBI headquarters misinterpreted the policy, turning it into a straitjacket for its own investigators. (387)
In July, 2001, Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams wrote headquarters, saying, "The purpose of this communication is to advise the bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by OBL to send students to the U.S. to attend civil aviation universities and colleges." His warning was ignored. (395)
In mid-August, a flight school in Minnesota expressed concern to the FBI about a student, Zacarias Moussaoui, who asked about NYC flight patterns and whether the cockpit door could be opened during flight. The INS arrested him, but FBI headquarters would not allow agents to examine Moussaoui's laptop computer because the agents could not show "probable cause" for their search. (396) One wonders what probable cause would have sufficed? A cartoon showing a plane striking the towers?
If the FBI had been allowed access to the laptop, it would have discovered a letter of employment from Infocus Tech, which was signed by Yazid Sufaat, whose name meant nothing to the FBI, but the CIA knew Sufaat was at the conspirator's meeting in Malaysia. The FBI was not guiltless, either. It failed to give terrorism czar Dick Clarke any of the above information. (397)
On September 9, Ahmed Shah Massoud was assassinated by two men posing as Arab TV journalists. His murder was ordered by OBL. (401)
John O'Neill, the former FBI chief of counterterrorism and head of security for the World Trade Center for just three weeks, was killed in the attack when he went back inside the tower to help with the evacuation. (407)
Following the attack, America prepared to invade Afghanistan in pursuit of OBL, who escaped into Pakistan. (420)

9/11 was a devilish conjunction of evil intent, American hubris, and sheer luck. Though I do not believe it will happen again in the same way (airplanes used as bombs), I have no doubt that it will happen again. Most likely, a dirty bomb in a container shipment in a southern California harbor, which when detonated will kill thousands in this densely-populated area. The winds will then carry the radioactivity inland, sickening and killing tens of thousands more. Since at present U.S.Customs physically inspects only 6% of all incoming container cargo, this scenario has a high likelihood of success. God help us if we refuse to help ourselves.

The Looming Tower & The Perfect Storm (II)

2007-11-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

LAST TIME I TRACED THE HISTORY of Islamofascism from its inception to the late 1980s, when al-Qaeda ("the base") was formed by Osama bin Ladin (OBL) and his rival (later co-conspirator) Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, as detailed in Lawrence Wright's masterpiece The Looming Tower. I now continue with more "highlighter worthy" excerpts from this fascinating book up to the eve of 9/11:

OBL is reputed to suffer from kidney failure; there is no evidence of this. Rather, he likely suffers from Addison's disease, a disorder of the endocrine system marked by low blood pressure, weight loss, muscle fatigue, stomach irritability, sharp back pain, dehydration, and an abnormal craving for salt. (159)

Saudi Arabia, only 1% of the world Muslim population, supports 90% of the expenses of the entire fundamentalist and radical Wahhabi faith, overriding other traditions of Islam. (170)

Bin Ladin announced his murderous intentions back in 1982, "When America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon (to stop the shelling of Israeli towns), as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted." (172)

Although al-Qaeda was originally formed to oppose Marxism in Afghanistan, where it had America as an ally, OBL turned the organization into an anti-American terrorist cabal because he is rooted in the 7th century where Christianity (evidenced by his use of the term "Crusaders") was not just a rival, but the archenemy. (194)

Significance of September 11th to Muslims: On September 11, 1683, in Vienna, the king of Poland began the battle that turned back the farthest advance of Muslim armies. This is why that date was chosen for the attack on America. For the next 300 years, Islam would be in retreat. (194)

Al-Qaeda trained the suicide bombers that attacked the Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon in 1983. (197)

Omar Abdul Rahman (the Blind Sheik), despite being listed as a terrorist on the State Dept. watch list, was granted entry into the US, and traveled to mosques nationwide, calling on Muslims to "cut the transportation of their (the West's) countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on sea, air, or land." (201)

Though it is unclear whether OBL sent Ramzi Yousef to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993, Yousef did learn his bomb-craft in an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. (202)

OBL told trainees at al-Qaeda camps: "America appears mighty, but it is actually weak and cowardly. Look at Vietnam. Look at Lebanon. Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags, Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has. For all its wealthy and resources, America lacks conviction. It cannot stand against warriors of faith who do not fear death." (214)

In Somalia, when the bodies of a downed helicopter crew were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Pres. Clinton quickly withdrew all American soldiers from the country. Bin Ladin's analysis of the American character had been proven correct. (215)

At the end of 1993, a Sudanese general had reportedly obtained black market uranium. OBL had been working with the Sudanese government to develop chemical agents that could be used against the Christian rebels in the south. OBL paid for the uranium, but it turned out to be red mercury (cinnabar), a substance used in nuclear scams for more than 25 years. (218)

The first man to betray OBL was Jamal al-Fadl, a Sudanese, who stole more than $100,000 from al-Qaeda. He sold his story to the Americans for $1 million. While in protective custody, he won the New Jersey Lottery! (225)

The Taliban ("students") in Afghanistan arose in 1994, most of them orphans who had been raised in refugee camps and who were outraged by the chaos and depravity of the rule of mujahideen. The liberators in the war against the Soviets had turned out to be more barbaric rulers than their enemies. (255) The Taliban became the largest growers of opium poppies in the world. (259)

August 23, 1996: OBL declares war on America: "Terrorizing you is a legitimate and moral obligation." (266)

Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, uncle of WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef, approached OBL in 1996 with several schemes to attack America, including one that would require pilots to crash airplanes into buildings. (268)

Iranian-backed terrorists Hezbollah were responsible for the 1996 explosion at the Khobar Towers, a military housing complex in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 and injuring 400. (271)

The tortured reasoning of the Islamists which license them to murder non-Muslims: The Islamic nation is in misery because of illegitimate leadership, due to the Christian-Jewish alliance that emerged after the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, in which Britain and France divided the Arab lands between them, and the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which called for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Soon after, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and with it the Muslim caliphate. This is all seen as an ongoing campaign by the Christian-Jewish alliance to suffocate Islam, using such tools as the United Nations, compliant Arab rulers, multinational corporations, satellite channels, and international relief agencies. (294)

An al-Qaeda computer was obtained in 1997 by the CIA. It was owned by Zawahiri's closest political confidant. Called the "Rosetta stone of al-Qaeda," it was nevertheless not made available to the FBI because the Bureau would use the information as evidence at trials, and therefore public, which would ruin its value as intelligence as far as the CIA was concerned. (305) This kind of stand-off, resulting in no intelligence passing between the agencies, would contribute in large part to 9/11.

Another captured al-Qaeda computer in 1998 linked OBL to the killing of American servicemen in Somalia, which resulted in a criminal indictment against him in Federal District Court in New York. ( 302)

August 1998: Al-Qaeda suicide bombers attack American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya (213 dead, 4,500 injured), and Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania (11 dead, 85 wounded). (308) Five embassies had been targeted, but luck and intelligence had saved the other three. FBI investigators were stunned to learn that nearly a year earlier an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda had walked into the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi and told the CIA about the bombing plot. (311)

Shortly after the embassy bombings, Monica Lewinsky testified before a Washington grand jury about her sexual relationship with Bill Clinton. In the minds of Islamists, the relationship between the president and the intern perfectly symbolized Jewish influence in America, and any military response to the bombings was likely to be seen as an excuse to punish Muslims and divert attention from the scandal. (319)

Soil samples at a Sudanese chemical plant purportedly owned by OBL contained traces of EMPTA, an essential chemical in the nerve gas VX. On August 20, Clinton authorized missiles to destroy the plant, which turned out to be a pharmaceuticals plant, which OBL had nothing to do with. Sudan then let the two accomplices in the embassy bombings escape and the FBI lost an invaluable opportunity to capture al-Qaeda insiders. (320)

Though the NSA was able to monitor satellite phone calls, it refused to share the raw data with the FBI, the CIA, or even the White House. (321)

At the same time as the aspirin factory attack, intel indicated OBL was at the Khost al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Several of the 66 Tomahawk missiles that rained down camp failed to detonate. OBL sold them to China for $10 million. (323)

Iraq was an ally in al-Qaeda's war on the west; there had been a series of contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda operatives. Iraqi delegations met with OBL, who asked for weapons and training caps inside Iraq. (335) Nevertheless, FBI director Louis Freeh reportedly stressed in White House meetings that al-Qaeda posed no domestic threat. OBL did not even make the FBI's most wanted list until June 1999.

In December 1999, al-Qaeda-trained Ahmed Ressam was arrested at the Port Angeles, Washington, border crossing. In his trunk were the makings of an Oklahoma City-type bomb, intended for LAX. (337)

January 3, 2000: a plot is accidentally foiled by Yemeni fisherman who encountered a fiberglass skiff containing C-4 explosives destined for the USS The Sullivans, which was refueling in the Aden harbor. (339)

Between ten and twenty thousand trainees passed through Afghanistan al-Qaeda training camps from 1996 until they were destroyed in 2001. (341)

The media helps the terrorists: Zawahiri was keen on the use of biological and chemical warfare, saying, "Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply." (343)

Hollywood helps out, too: Al-Qaeda trainees spent considerable time planning how to pull of terrorist maneuvers. At night they would often watch Hollywood thrillers, looking for tips. The movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger were particular favorites. (343)

NEXT: 9/11 and the aftermath.

The Looming Tower & The Perfect Storm (I)

2007-11-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS, I've read a number of books about 9/11, as well as a few about Islam. I even slogged through the Koran. But after reading Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, I can save you a great deal of time: if you read any book about Islamofascism, let it be this one.

Instead of writing a review, I'd just like to list the "highlighter worthy" sections of the book, followed by the page number in parenthesis, as well as an occasional comment or clarification of my own.

In short, 9/11 was a "perfect storm" of gross incompetence and petty in-fighting among the U.S. "intelligence" agencies, the numbingly self-assured cosmology of the Koran (which has just three responses to everyone on the planet: convert, subjugate, or kill), the repressive, insular Islamic culture, simple luck, and the hubris of the American people, who see themselves as good and so cannot imagine anyone else in the world being evil. Mix into this stew the modern technology of cell-phone-activated detonators, radioactive payloads, satellite phones, and the fluidity of modern bomb-transportation vehicles, and you've got a very combustible combination, to wit:

The beginnings of Islamofascism started in an American college town: Greely, Colorado, in 1949. (23)
The first violent jihadists (the Muslim Brotherhood) made their purpose entirely clear: "It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet." (29)
Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, who tried to kill his predecessor, Gamal Abdul Nasser. (31)
The Koran prohibits the killing of fellow Muslims. Therefore, death-worthy Islamic foes are termed takfir, ("excommunicants") illegitimate Muslims, and therefore infidels to be treated as such. (34)
When Israel won the 6-day war in 1967, Muslims felt God had turned against them. The only way back was to return to the "pure" religion: fundamentalism. (45)
"Salafism" is the most backward of all fundamentalist Muslim dogmas. It does not recognize any Islamic traditions after the time of Mohammed. (49)
Azzam Zawahiri, bin Ladin's second-in-command, fought with him in Afghanistan against the Russians. When asked why they took aid from America, he said, "Sure, we're taking American help to fight the Russians, but they're equally evil." (54) He was also jailed in connection with the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. (59)
The Ayatollah Khomeini, who ousted the Shah of Iran from power in 1979, said, "Islam says: Whatever good there is, exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!" Ponder that statement again. Feel that chill running up your spine? That is the man whose followers want to use the sword on you.
Shia vs. Sunni: After the death of Mohammed in 632 A.D., a quarrel arose over the line of succession. Sunnis supported the election of caliphs (rulers), but the Shia believed the caliphate should pass through the Prophet's descendants alone. (56)
The Sadat plotters were imprisoned in Egypt and tortured by fellow Muslims. Strikingly, this treatment radicalized them against the West, who they saw as responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society. Indeed, the theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is crucial to understanding the Islamist's rage. (61)
The "Blind Sheik," Omar Abdul Rahman, who was convicted in America for his part in a plot to destroy NYC landmarks, was previously charged as a conspirator in the Sadat assassination. (65)
"Wahhabism" (aka "Salafism") has its origin in the teachings of Abdul Wahhab, an 18th century revivalist who believed Muslims had drifted away from the true religion. The Wahhabi sect is located primarily in Saudi Arabia, bin Ladin's adopted homeland. (72)
Osama bin Ladin's father, Mohammed, began his life in Saudi Arabia working for Aramco, the Saudi-American oil cooperative. He became a wealthy man, primarily because of his connection with this company. (74)
Mohammed bin Ladin divorced Osama's mother, Alia, when Osama was just four years old. Mohammed then "awarded" her to one of his employees. (84)
Though OBL has never traveled to America, his favorite TV shows growing up were Fury and Bonanza.
OBL's view of women: "One [wife] is okay, like walking. Two is like riding a bicycle: it's fast but a little unstable. Three is a tricycle, stable but slow. And when we come to four, ah! This is the ideal. Now you can pass everyone!" (94)
Prince Turki (head of Saudi security and charged with bringing bin Ladin to justice), was a classmate of Bill Clinton, who coached him on an ethics test. (98)
Though OBL and other Arabs often brag about how they ran the Soviets out of Afghanistan, there were never more than 3,000 Arabs involved in the war, and most of them never made it out of Pakistan. (121)
"The lure of an illustrious and meaningful death was especially powerful in cases where the pleasures and rewards of life were crushed by government oppression and economic deprivation." (123)
Arab countries are incredibly unproductive. If one subtracts the oil revenue from the Gulf countries, 260 million Arabs export less than the 5 million Finns. (123)
"Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where art is impoverished; where entertainment---movies, theater, music---is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women. Adult illiteracy remain[s] the norm in many Arab countries. Unemployment [is] among the highest in the developing world. Anger, resentment, and humiliation spur young Arabs to search for dramatic remedies. (123) And when you focus that anger on a large target (America), you have thousands of willing martyrs.
Sharia law: "It is only when the rule of man has been eradicated and Sharia imposed that there will be no compulsion in religion, because there is only one choice: Islam. (125) George Orwell would be proud.

NEXT: More highlights from The Looming Tower.

A Simple Solution to Illegal Immigration

2007-11-07T05:29:00.000-07:00

I GUESS I'M OLD ENOUGH, and have seen enough, to state unequivocally that the people who run this country are no smarter than you and I, but they are definitely more self-dealing. A cursory look at illegal immigration makes this abundantly clear. The solutions to this problem are so simple, and the politicians so attuned to ignoring them, that only one explanation is possible: they don't want to solve the problem.

Why? Illegal immigration costs this country millions of dollars in social services, education, health care, and border enforcement each year. Clearly, we could afford to pay a little more for our burgers if these costs were reduced. Again, the only clear answer is that the politicians see a benefit to illegal immigration. The most direct is gaining potential voters; the other is cheap labor for the millionaire industrialists who donate to the politicians. Either way you slice it, politicians' failure to enforce current immigration law benefits primarily themselves. Which is why they have the lowest approval ratings of all.

I have a solution, though I have no illusions it will be adopted by the political class. It is simple, will cost very little, and will result not only in a vast, voluntary reduction in the presence of illegals in this country, but will transform Latin America into a true partner for progress and peace in his hemisphere.

It is this: Latinos are here to work. We all know that. Latino men do not loiter in front of Home Depot pleading for hand-outs---they are pleading for work. And who employs them? Everyone from landscapers to multinational corporations. The solution is to remove the incentive for these people to be here, to deny them employment. And the way to do it is not to round them up, load them in vans, and transport them back to Calexico. It is to enforce current laws which make it illegal to employ undocumented aliens.

But we won't be going after Joe's Landscaping Service. Instead, we should prosecute and imprison a small number (say ten or so) of the CEOs of the largest law-breaking corporations. This will send a message: employ an illegal, go to jail. The word will spread like wildfire. Before long, Joe and his competitors will not dare employ illegals. Yard maintenance costs will go up, but with the reduction in taxes due to lower health care, education, courts, border fence, and ICE costs, we will be able to afford higher landscaping fees when Joe hires a 17-year-old kid to run the leaf blower instead of 42-year-old Juan from Chiapas. All it will take are a few high-profile prosecutions. No ridiculous and ineffective wall, no 24-7 border patrols, no immigration court hearings. Just a few weeks in federal court prosecuting the president of General Mills.

What will happen then is Econ 101: since Latinos are here to work, if there is no work, they will go home. By the millions. If there is no employment, no school enrollment, and no access to health care, they will return to their own countries.

Having spent a substantial amount of time in Latin America, I know the kind of governments they have there: most are dictatorships or are ruled by a small cabal of rich families. What Americans fail to recognize is that most illegal Latinos in the U.S. are the best and brightest in their native lands. They saw the dire state of their home state and looked northward for opportunity and freedom. If I was a campesino in Nicaragua, I would do the same and so would you. To realize this dream, they leave home, family, and culture, travel thousands of miles, and risk their lives crossing the border, all to run a leaf blower for ten bucks an hour. I admire these people, but they are still law-breakers and a tremendous drain on our health, education, security, and court system. And if I were one of them, I would not be surprised that the U.S. is trying to enforce its borders---after all, Mexico's southern border is tighter than James Browns' pants. Ask any Guatemalan.

So what happens when the best and brightest return to their pueblos? They will look around with new eyes, eyes that have seen the possibilities of a free country. As they ran a leaf blower across your driveway in Malibu, they did not fail to notice your million dollar home and the new BMW parked out front. They now know what they only dreamed of before: the possibilities of freedom.

And standing in the muddy calle of their tiny, poor hamlet, they will ask their neighbors, "What is going on here?" And their neighbors will tell them about the malvado down the block who boldly extorts money from them in full daylight; about the corrupt politician who skims local revenues for his own profit; about the greedy factory owner who works their children mercilessly for mere pesos.

And the people who have returned will say, "Well, then, let's put a stop to this now." For they have seen a country of laws, where the police are not uniformly corrupt, where politicians can be thrown out of office if they misbehave, and where most of the rich achieve their wealth through honest industry.

What will follow will be bloody but necessary: the town mafioso will be found dead outside his home; corrupt politician will be ousted in the next election; and factories will be shut down as people organize and make their voices heard.

We should and must support this kind of grassroots revolution through financing, fomenting, and even special ops if necessary. It is time to take the gloves off. Vicente Fox is no less corrupt than his predecessors have been; he just speaks better English. The CIA and other covert agencies must help the Mexican people especially (since they are our closest neighbors) run the half-dozen families that control Mexico out of the country and help the Mexican people take control of their homeland. No Mexican (or Guatemalan or Ecuadorian) wants to live thousands of miles from his family and country. They, like you, want to be near their homes and friends. If their own countries were not so corrupt and the ruling regimes so ruthless, they would not be here raking your leaves. So we must aid and abet revolution in these countries, the kind of revolution that built our country. Remember "No taxation without representation"? That is going on in Chiapas, Guatemala City, and Guayaquil.

If the U.S. wants democracy in Latin America, then we must make it happen. And I'm not talking about propping up petty tin-pot dictators. I'm talking about making it possible for villages to operate under democratic principles: honest and verifiable elections, secure banks, and access to proceeds from the great natural resources of these countries: mining, oil, forests, the ocean. In short, remove dictators and ruling cabals from their positions by helping the very guy who is mowing your lawn to achieve the same kind of life you have. Give him, by the sword if necessary, freedom and security, and you will be astonished at the near over-night transformation of Latin America.

In short order, tens of millions of Latinos will stream across the border---southward this time---and in Mexico, instead of slave-labor farms and factories, we will see the advent of an industrial revolution. The U.S. has graduated from its manufacturing phase; it is a service economy now. Our greatest talent lies in creativity: software, entertainment, business, medicine, innovation. Instead of yard workers, we should be importing automobiles, microwaves, and cellphones from their countries. It is Mexico's (and Latin America's) turn to enter the industrial phase, to follow in our footsteps. As such, it needs steelworkers, automotive assembly line workers, and oil rig wildcatters.

And in the short term, Americans must pay more for a burger and teach their kids how to mow the lawn again.

Warming to Climate Change (II)

2007-11-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

THE EARTH'S AVERAGE TEMPERATURE has risen a little less than a degree Celsius over the past century. Although almost half of this warming occurred before 1940, greenhouse gas emissions (95% water vapor) began to rise substantially only after the 1950s. And one degree isn't much anyway, by any historical standard.

But it matters little, as 40% of all U.S. CO2 emissions are reabsorbed, mostly by vegetation. And CO2 is only one factor in GCC. Other factors are solar irradiance (Mars is warming, too), linear contrails, black carbon on snow, stratospheric water vapor, methane, and ozone. In addition, other factors contribute to global cooling: aerosol cloud albedo (reflectivity) effects, aerosol direct effects, surface albedo land use, and stratospheric ozone. The only factors we know much about are CO2 and methane; the others are largely mysteries.

But let's suppose that the planet is warming and let's also assume that's bad. High Priest Gore and his minions predict dire consequences of this one degree of warming. But how accurate a prophet is Gore?

There is no scientific consensus as to which climate change model should be used. In the last twenty years, no fewer than four major models have been created, with divergence in predictions of cataclysm, ranging from a 1995 prediction of five degrees Celsius rise by 2100, to a 2007 prediction of a 3 degree rise by 2100. And only half of all scientists believe humans are to blame for the present warming. The other half is silenced, frozen out as heretics by the mainstream media that has embraced the church of GCC.

But again, let's pretend Gore is right: the sky is falling. The melting ice caps will drown the polar bears and put NYC under fifty feet of water, right? Wrong. Sea levels have risen since the Earth began to come out of the last ice age, yet since 1961, the rise has been far lower than the historic average. Also, though the arctic ice sheet is melting, Antarctica's glaciers are thicker than ever, due to increased precipitation (remember that pesky greenhouse gas, water vapor? It takes the form of snow in Antarctica). And polar bear numbers have increased from around 5,000 in the 1950s to almost 25,000 today. That's a lot of Coke to share with the penguins.

Gore also predicted yearly hurricane disasters like Katrina. Yet the season that just ended was historically calm. In fact, there has been no change in either the occurrence or strength of hurricanes outside the natural range of variability.

But what about droughts and weather-related deaths? Also a false doctrine: since the 1920s, weather-related deaths have decreased from almost 500 per year to just under 20. And the chart for U.S. lands affected by drought looks like the NYC skyline, with many ups and downs and a gradual decrease since 1935.

Finally, what the prophets of doom fail to reveal are the many benefits from increased CO2: plants grow bigger and faster, which means more available water, greater farm productivity, less food scarcity, and less starvation of polar bears and man alike.

Mankind is the most adaptable creature on earth. If it's cold, we put on a jacket; if it's hot, suntan oil. If the sea rises 2", we build the seawall 2" higher. The real danger of the GCC orthodoxy is how it misplaces the scarce resource of money. If everyone in the U.S. drives a Prius (which costs thousands more than its conventional counterparts), there will be less money spent on real threats: malaria, water purification, nutrition research, starvation, HIV/AIDS, heart disease, and cancer.

On May 1, 1970, on our high school quad we had a speaker for the first "Earth Day" celebration. She warned us of the impending ice age that mankind had brought upon itself by its selfish use of the world's resources. My friends and I, even at that tender age, knew a loon when we saw one: she was wearing a parka in eighty degree heat.

So to Al Gore, I say, "You're a false prophet, your god is a fraud, and I already have a religion."

NEXT: An easy and inexpensive solution to illegal immigration.

Warming to Climate Change (I)

2007-10-28T06:15:00.000-06:00

ANOTHER EVIDENCE of God's existence is the apparently built-in need mankind feels to seek a "higher power." But with the traditional God effectively dismissed by a modern secular society, a vacuum has been created, abhorred by nature. Enter the new god (a dismally ineffective and wholly uninspiring god): the god of Global Climate Change.

The GCC god, however, is still a woefully traditional god who demands unquestioning obedience of its believers. "The debate is over," says the Al Gore, High Priest of GCC, and everyone must bend the knee or be labeled a "denier" and a heretic.

In order to be considered orthodox, one must also know the core doctrines of the Church of GCC (formerly the Church of Global Warming), the chief doctrine of which, the one worshipped in the sanctum sanctorum of the GCC Temple, is that the earth is warming and mankind is to blame.

The genius of many frauds is to link a truth with a falsehood in order to legitimize the latter. The earth is likely warming just now, but is it really mankind's fault or just the cyclical ebb and flow of temperature?

The High Priest, in his gospel Earth in the Balance, asserts that carbon dioxide levels are dangerously high, a large contributor to global warming, and that mankind is the culprit. But before we are baptized into the religion and forced to live in caves and hunt saber-tooth tigers for dinner, let's examine more closely this article of faith.

The truth is, greenhouse gases are a small part of the earth's atmosphere but are critical to making the planet hospitable. Without them, the earth and the moon would be twins. Mankind adds to the level of greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels and deforestation. High Priests in the Church of GCC believe this has caused the present warming trend. But has it?

Greenhouse gases form less than 2% of the earth's atmosphere. The rest is made up of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, etc. And CO2 and other trace gases are only 5% of the greenhouse gases. The other 95% is water vapor. Humans contribute less than 4% of the annual CO2 emissions; the other 96% comes from nature. And so humans add about one-quarter of one percent to the total greenhouse effect. Almost 5% is attributable to oceans, volcanoes, decaying plants, and animal activity. The other 95% is merely water vapor (clouds and rain).

One of the hallmarks of a "true" religion is its permanence. Truth is not usually a flavor of the month. So how have CO2 levels changed over time? Are the levels today higher than in the past? Well, 600 million years ago, during the Cambrian Period, atmospheric CO2 was in excess of 7,000 parts per million. What is it today? .03ppm. Indeed, it has been steadily declining during the entire span of life on earth.

During the age of the dinosaurs, the average temperature was about 18 degrees F warmer than today. As recently as 20 million years ago, the temperature was about the same as during the Cambrian Period, 600 million years ago. It simply tracks up and down within a 20 degree range, even as CO2 levels steadily declined over the same period of time. Therefore, there is no relationship between CO2 levels and temperature.

The earth is a giant analog clock, the hands continually re-tracing their paths across recurrent cycles of heating and cooling. Over the last 400,000 years, there have been five major warming phases, followed by lesser warming and cooling periods. Various ice ages generally last about 100,000 years, interrupted by warming periods lasting about 10,000 years. We are currently at the tail end of a warming period.

What comes next? Why Global Cooling, of course. Get out your parka!

NEXT: Following the second hand into the present... and future.

Iraqi WMDs: The Proof (II)

2007-10-18T07:55:00.000-06:00

WITH THE EXISTENCE of WMDs established beyond controversy, still the question remains: If Saddam had WMDs, why didn't we find any after the invasion of Iraq?

This is where we access the best evidence of all: our own logic circuit. Saddam was a tyrant who ruled his country (quelling the internecine quarrels with which we are all so familiar now) with totalitarian efficiency and cruelty. Dissent was quashed, those speaking against his tyranny disappeared, and neighbors were encouraged to spy on neighbors. In such a world, it would be easy to hide evidence, hide the perpetrators, hide the murders, and hide the mass graves. (Except we've found a few of these, haven't we?)

But even so, it's hard to imagine an entire country being completely emptied out of WMDs by the time we got there. OK, here's where logic kicks in: Suppose you have a 15-year-old son whom you suspect of doing drugs. One day you poke your head into his disheveled room and announce, "All right: in two weeks I'm going to turn this room upside down, and if I find any drugs in here, you're in big trouble, mister!"

Now, do you really think you'll discover anything incriminating in that room two weeks from now? Of course not. Your son might be a druggie, but he is not stupid. Neither was Saddam.

Now imagine your son's room is the size of California, and has doors to his doper-buddies' rooms: Syria, Jordan, Iran. Your son doesn't want to destroy his drugs; he likes them. So he's going to move them elsewhere. So, while you're ticking off the days on the kitchen calendar until your inspection begins, he's quietly moving those drugs into his friends' rooms where he can still get to them when he wants to get high.

This, of course, is precisely what Saddam probably did. His allies received his "drug" cache in return for payment or threats.

"But," you ask, "why hasn't anyone squealed on him? Is there truly honor among thieves?"

During the Egyptian Empire (3100 - 300 B.C.), the pharaohs, obsessed with living as well in the afterlife as they did in mortality, filled their tombs with food, creature comforts, and even facsimilies of chariots and riverboats. Some even had their own servants murdered and buried with them! So why wouldn't Saddam Hussein send a convoy of WMDs out into the seemingly endless Iraqi desert, bury the offending weapons, and then order that everyone involved be shot and quietly buried with them? Is this something you cannot imagine him doing?

The reason we didn't find WMDs in Iraq is because of we gave him ample time to hide the evidence. In addition, the half-hearted and ineffective U.N. inspection regime wasn't designed to find anything anyway. The United Nations has devolved into an anti-American cabal of leftists tinpot dictators, many of whom aspire to the cruelty and barbarism of Saddam Hussein. And the impotent powers of the west, represented by the ineffective and feckless Hans Blix, no more wanted to find WMDs than did his third-world cheer leading squad.

We gave Saddam years to prepare for our invasion, and he did what any drug-addled 15-year-old kid would do: he hid the evidence.

And if you cannot see this logic, I can only say, "You are smoking your own stash, man!"

NEXT: Warming to Climate Change

Iraqi WMDs: The Proof (I)

2007-10-13T05:48:00.000-06:00

JUST LIKE THE 9/11 "truthers," the "There-Were-No-WMDs-In-Iraq!" nutters have taken their shoddy product retail. Up to 30% of the American public now believes that 9/11 was an inside job, and an even greater portion (I'm guessing here, but since the country is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, it's probably nearing 50%) believe there were never any WMDs in Iraq.

Of course the logical conclusion of such a belief is that Iraq was also an "inside job," one designed not to free the Iraqis from the clutches of a murderous madman, but to secure cheap oil for Bush's cronies and work for Cheney's co-conspirators at Halliburton.

Never mind that one has to climb over a mountain of evidence to the contrary to find the tiny stone labeled "We Never Found Any WMDs!" The important thing for all truthers/nutters is to maintain their world view that our government is evil, corrupt, and conspiratorial. Never mind that the U.N. inspections regime was notoriously incomplete, incompetent, and was denied access to any important Iraqi weapons sites. Never mind that politicians of every stripe went on record to say that Saddam had WMDs. Never mind that Saddam used WMDs on his own people when he gassed the Kurds.

Never mind all that. So long as your world view is maintained, facts are irrelevant. And when your world view is that you are a pawn, a tiny part of a terrible, grinding machine, that great forces are arrayed against you, that everyone in power is corrupt and evil, then you maintain your virtue, your wisdom, your innocence. Your nuttiness.

You are, in other words, Chicken Little, the sole possessor of core truths that the other 99% of humanity is either too dumb to realize or too credulous to debunk. Such beliefs are not designed to find and understand truth; they are designed to maintain a glowing self-perception of moral and intellectual superiority at all costs.

But I must add another cost---a stone, if you will---to the mountain of evidence that Saddam Hussein had WMDs in Iraq. In his remarkable book The Demon in the Freezer (Random House, 2002), Richard Preston almost throws away one of the most startling and chilling evidences of WMDs: the manufacturing of the smallpox virus, the most dangerous of all infectious diseases. Since the book was published in 2002, a year before the war began, this can be excused. What cannot be excused is the evidence itself, which bears a complete hearing. I have posted the short two-page section from the book here. Please read it now and then return to the post.

Of course the nutters will maintain, in spite of this evidence, that Preston is a shill for the Bush administration. But the book was written well before the war, and this part of the book is almost a sidebar to his general proposition of the imminent danger of our enemies using Ebola, Marburg, anthrax, and smallpox as bioweapons. And smallpox is the most dangerous weapon ever seen. While it has taken AIDS twenty years to reach 50 million infectees, smallpox could reach that number in just 8 to 10 weeks. "If smallpox were to appear anywhere in the world today," writes Preston on page 103, "the way airplane travel is now, about six weeks would be enough time to see cases around the world. Dropping an atomic bomb would cause casualties in a specific area, but dropping smallpox could engulf the world."

The World Health Organization (WHO) effectively eradicated smallpox from the earth by 1979. Yet into the the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein was still making it in his labs in Iraq. Preston's book also explains (well before the issue ever came up) why France declined to be part of the coalition to free Iraq: they had been effectively building bio-weapon factories for Saddam Hussein for many years.

NEXT: The best WMD evidence of all: inside your own head

One Eternal Round

2007-09-24T05:48:00.001-06:00

A FEW YEARS AGO, I had a radio talk show called "Common Sense with Kenny Kemp" in which I discussed four important areas of life: the mind (science and politics), the heart (relationships and culture), the body (health and medicine), and the soul (spirituality).

I chose the four points because of Da Vinci's perfectly proportioned drawing of the "Vitruvian Man," in which the figure touches the circle (symbolic of eternity in many cultures) at four points.

For material, I drew from my own experiences, books I had read, and on-air interviews with learned and erudite people. Among others, I discussed evolution and intelligent design with microbiologist Dr. Michael Behe, relationships with Greg Godek, flaws in our educational system with Martin Gross, forgiveness with Fred Luskin, child rearing with Hal Urban, and reincarnation with Dr. Michael Newton.

With the advent of the "blogosphere," a term taken from "blog" (a redaction of "web-log") and "sphere" (a less accurate but more sonorous term than "blogiverse," I suppose), anyone can post their ideas, pictures, rants, wild ravings, and even a few educated, well-thought-out ideas and viewpoints.

It is into this last category I hope to fall with this latest permutation of "Common Sense with Kenny Kemp," but of course you will be the judge.

It is my intention to post once a week, when I have the time. I am a working writer, after all, with deadlines. That being said, I do intend to take this blog seriously. I will continue my investigations into new and interesting ideas, books, ponderings on current events, and timeless spiritual concepts. And I'd like very much to share the results with you.

If you bookmark this blog and find yourself coming back, then I will be satisfied that I have achieved my purpose. You may find many of my ideas liberal and others quite conservative. I know I do!

Your comments are welcome, as well as your suggestions for books I should read, websites I should visit, people I should interview, and current events I should discuss. You may e-mail me at kenny@kennykemp.com or post comments here. Either way, I look forward to a spirited and honest exchange, with respect extended to all viewpoints, even if they're not mine!

I'm your host, Kenny Kemp.

The wind is at our backs
The road lies before us
And the journey . . . continues!

NEXT: The case for the existence of WMDs in Iraq

Countdown to a Miracle: The Battle with ALS

2007-09-23T08:00:00.000-06:00

1939: Lou Gehrig, baseball’s “Iron Horse,” was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), cutting short one of the sport’s longest and most remarkable careers. There was (and still is) no cure and no treatment for ALS, which afflicts people of all ages, sex, color, and ethnic background. The diagnosis was (and still is), quite literally, a death sentence.

1990: My father, O.C. Kemp, succumbed to ALS after a courageous three-year battle. He was one of 5,000 people who die each year from ALS.

2005: Fitness entrepreneur Augie Nieto was diagnosed with ALS and decided to fight back. He joined forces with the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) to form a new fund-raising and public awareness foundation called “Augie’s Quest.”

Summer 2007: MDA-funded scientists isolated the genes that code for ALS, bringing us another crucial step closer to the cure.

August 2007: John Ondrasik of the band Five For Fighting dedicated his hit song “100 Years” to the ALS struggle. A video was produced to accompany the music, entitled “Augie’s Quest.”

September 2007: Two families who have been touched by ALS, the Glenn Tullman-Allscripts and Bert and Cindy Silvia, have agreed to together donate $2 to Augie’s Quest every time the video is viewed on John’s site. No phone calls, no e-mails, no fund-raising letters, and no donations. Just a simple click of the mouse and $2 is added to the $11 million already raised to fight ALS through Augie’s Quest. Nothing could be simpler.

Today: You can help make a miracle happen. Take five minutes and help us fight ALS by watching the video here . . . you will save someone’s life! And while you’re there, add your comments to the others who have been touched by this heartfelt video and its message.

I believe in miracles and I hope you do, too -- won’t you please let your friends and family know about this wonderful opportunity?