Alabama Tracks

I read this post this weekend and it got me to thinking about the subject of nihilism in politics. Specifically the question raised

I’m advancing a very simple proposition here. Conservatives can be really, really wrong about everything, and centralized solutions could be the only responsible course of action across every policy domain. But is it possible that we conservatives are sincerely wrong, and that we care about more than “power and status”?

I’m trapped in this cycle of thinking that our political leaders, regardless of partisan affiliation, are people, with all the foibles and limitations that this entails. While I do think that a bottomless hunger for power and status exists in the world (we can call this “evil” as a shorthand), I know enough liberals and conservatives to suspect that something else might be at work in our domestic political conflicts.

I don’t think either Salam, nor Sullivan, delve deeply enough into the issue. Sullivan is dismissive and I think Salam is genuinely looking for an answer. It’s not an easy one but it’s important to understand the fundamental difference between Liberals and Conservatives.

Before I go any further, it’s important to note that, in any philosophy, you have two basic groups of people (you can subdivide this a lot more but I’m keeping it simple for the sake of the argument). The largest group is what I call the Believers. These are people who agree with the basic tenets of your argument or movement but only in a visceral sense. They don’t pull the arguments apart or look at it from multiple angles. Instead, they’ve bought into the introductory arguments (which is not to say the arguments are right or wrong, just that they are introductory and often have little substance).  Believers simply take their position for granted. They tend to hang around other Believers and talk in hushed tones about those “other people” who are not Believers. If you ask them why they believe in their philosophy (or worse, questions the introductory arguments) you get a wide range of reactions from silence, to anger, to rationalizations.

In short, Believers generally aren’t sure why they believe, they just know that they believe. They are also the foot soldiers, pawns, hitmen, and evangelists.

Then you have the Core. The Core are your forest people. They not only know why they believe, they can defend it backwards and forwards. If you spot a flaw they might move to straw men or attack you personally. If they’re more rational, they might just agree to disagree but it depends greatly what the forest (the real forest in some cases) is and what they would give up if they were to even admit you might have a point. What determines their reaction depends more on whether or not the Core is based on lies or truth. No matter what the philosophy, the Core is more limited because Believers don’t need to see the forest, they might reject the forest, or because there’s a high cost to getting into the Core that your average Believer doesn’t want to pay.

So what does this have to do with nihilism and politics?

Liberalism and Conservatism are opposite ends of the spectrum. Nihilism is where you see the other end as a force to be stopped at all costs. In politics, this translates into “I can’t stand that you’re in power so I’m going to block you at every turn.” This is a bad policy because it causes serious issues to not be addressed. Each side accuses the other of it all the time. Right now, Liberals (Sullivan) are lobbing it at Conservatives over health care. But it’s important to remember that Liberals have done their own share.

As Salam mentions, in 2005, Pres. Bush wanted to reform Social Security. SS is built on a bad assumption that takes money from current workers to pay current recipients. Bush wanted a change to allow workers to invest some in the stock market. I have no idea how sound the idea was but Liberals proceeded to decry it as a wrecking of the system. They complained that the stock market was risky and that SS will not go bankrupt for many years to come. But the latter argument is weak. Saying it’s not broken now because it won’t fail tomorrow is a poor policy. The system will fail and nobody denies it. A better argument (if less popular) would have been that Liberals didn’t want to deal with the issue. The problem is that it looks very much like the real answer was Nihilism. Specifically the political calculus was that Republicans were weak on the issue (few wanted to take up the cause) and that they would pay no price for doing so.

Sadly, they were right. Few understood the core flaw and Republicans balked at spending the political capital.

So is Conservative opposition to health care Nihilism in kind? Not quite.

First, it’s important to understand that Liberalism’s Core is the philosophy that “The ends justify the means”. What that means is that, if it gets us to where we want to go, we should take it, even if taking it involves poor, wrong or even evil options. With regards to health care, the system really does need reform, but the problem is that the Liberals (like Ted Kennedy) have really meant that their idea of reform is something called Single Payer. Single Payer (proposed by Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1993) is where the government is the only entity that can pay for your health care. It sounds good until you begin to look at the forest. Single Payer means the government is the sole determiner of what care you can and cannot (or will not) get. Worse, the model is simply a tree in a larger forest still, where the government can then determine what you can or cannot consume because, if you make poor consumption choices, the government will, eventually, be on the hook for the consequences. So prepare to pony up punitive sales taxes in the same mold as tobacco products for things you normally eat now because, if you drink too much soda, eat too much red meat or run afoul of anything else lobbyists can get through Congress, the taxpayers will have to pay for it. Worst of all, is that when anything is made “free” by the government, it has to be rationed. In the UK (with single payer), they aim to get you a hospital bed in 18 weeks (4.5 months).

This plan, for obvious reasons, is unpopular with all but the most Liberal (the Core) people. It failed to pass. So we have Round 2 with Pres Obama. This time, we have ideas floated like the “Public Option”, which looks suspiciously like a path to Single Payer. Basically, the government would create its own insurance plan and create a poor mechanism intentionally designed to ensnare more and more people until all people are insured by the government. The Core understands this. Believers are either in denial that it will happen (willful naivete) or they don’t care. But the question is why all the horse trading, deception, and smoke and mirrors for an issue we’re all supposed to be behind? Why the rush to pass one massive bill that does a number of odd things that look like political payoffs when it would be more prudent to make a smaller bill and work with Conservatives?

The answer, sadly, is that the Liberals want their power. If the government gets to decide, sooner or later then it puts them in the drivers seat of your life. You learn what they want you to learn, eat what they want you to eat, and get what treatments they want you to get. They’ll promise to do better on the long waits and let up on the restrictions that people chafe under but now they’ve got you by the nose and they won’t let you go (and we won’t let ourselves go either).

In short, “health care reform” is a bad deal the way it’s written. There are real and salient reasons to oppose it. I don’t see Conservatives as Nihilists on this issue. It’s not the Liberal road or nothing. I do hope that both side will start working together soon to get real reform.

If not, I can see the Liberal forest start losing trees.

I recently took the plunge in the Facebook realm and reconnected with some old school friends. Of all the people I found, David is probably one of my most intriguing friends. He always has interesting questions and today he asked a doozy based on this article

My problem is that while I am convinced that the reasonable accomodations Frankie has come to advocate seem like the proper policies to pursue–I think his analysis on how to get there is flawed. Similarly, while I am still convinced that abortion is murder, I don’t want to become John Brown or Scott Roeder; but I can’t find an intellectually satisfying reason for why I shouldn’t be.

There’s just something about these kinds of questions that draws me to them like a moth to a flame. Sometimes you get burned but it’s sooo pretty… So this may be a practice in self immolation but I think that Frank and David have some points that could stand more discussion than the tiny little box Facebook gives you. So, rather than eat up David’s wall with my ramblings, I turn here where I have room to stretch my legs.

If you’ve not read Frank’s article, it is probably one of the most feckless articles I’ve ever read. Frank used to be a Christian and now, not so much. The article is a mocking mea culpa about how he and “other Christians” are really responsible for the murder of one George Tiller. Tiller was probably one of the most vocal and active abortionists in the country, going so far as to abort up to the moments before birth. He was murdered at his church by a deranged gunman who had dealings with a pro-life group. There’s no indication the group had anything to do with the shooting.

Given Frank’s choice of platform, I knew it wasn’t going to be a friendly article but I was downright stunned at how well postmodernism had grabbed him. His assertions are that the “religious right” is largely a hate filled group, “pro-life” is really another way of saying “kill abortionists”, and that the primary objection to abortion is largely due to late term abortions, which have a nasty way of producing byproducts that resemble human anatomy. David’s question seems to be how to rebut this without turning into a raving lunatic.

The best place to start is with the assertion that the “religious right” (read Christianity) is a group with “hate-filled rhetoric”. If this were true, shootings like this would be common. Furthermore, I don’t think Frank was all that much into the Bible. The biggest hole in Frank’s assertion is that, to be a Christian, you can’t run around spewing hate, much less arbitrarily executing people you don’t like. I mean, Christ himself said that the law was summed up as loving God and loving your neighbor. You can twist the Bible all you want but you can’t wring hate from its pages with an objective reading. Ravi Zacharias put it best when he said that you can’t judge ANY philosophy on its extremes. People will take pretty much anything and twist it to their own bent. Furthermore, how, then, does he explain the massive outpouring of things like charity, or love? Why would people filled with hate condemn this action as just as wrong, if not worse, than the actions of Dr Tiller?

Then there’s the issue of murder. Since murder requires intent, let’s simplify it for the sake of discussion. When is it justifiable to kill another person? The two basic answers (for the sake of this discussion) are in wartime combat and when another life is in eminent danger. To reach the point where you are committing murder like, say, Paul Hill, you have to twist several ideas to reach justification. The most common are that the subjects of abortion, being murdered themselves, make it some form of defense and that it is the “will of God”.

The latter is one that cannot be addressed in any fashion except to say that, when a man has convinced himself he is carrying out God’s will, he is capable of anything. To the former, it is madness to run around executing people doing things you disagree with. In essence, they would become gods unto themselves in the same way that various shooters around the country do. Once you are your own moral authority with a gun, you become an arbiter of death, meting it out as you see fit and ending it only when someone (perhaps yourself) questions (or is about to question) the basis for that authority.

It’s also important to note that, in some ways, the media feeds this. I saw Paul Hill as an attention junkie. People paid a LOT of attention to him after an abortion shooting in the late 80s because he was one of the few kooks who defended  the shooter. It wasn’t too long after the limelight faded that he took up arms himself and got it back and once again  just before he was executed. He fed on the attention and if you look at the interviews you can see it.

The last assertion is that the primary objection to abortion comes from late term abortions.

The Roe v. Wade decision went to far, too fast and was too sweeping.I believe that abortion should be legal. But I also believe that it should be re-regulated according to fetal development. It’s the late term abortions that horrify most people.

Not entirely. He’s right about Roe v Wade, and I think that Liberals will, at some point, have to come to terms with the fact that the judiciary can’t make sweeping reforms that elected officials are too scared to. But abortion is a deeper issue that what trimester we’re talking about. Christians, and the “pro-life” stance, declare that all life is sacred. Period. The “pro-choice” stance is that only some life is precious. What few on the Left like to discuss is what is a plain truth elsewhere: they want to be the people to choose. This sounds far fetched until you read statements like this recent one from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court justice (emphasis mine)

Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way.

That the NY Times saw no problems with such an idea only compounds the horror. It makes perfect sense when you consider that abortion is a fig leaf for things like eugenics. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, held similar views (abortion clinics in black neighborhoods, forced sterilization for mental retardation, etc). Abortion erodes the conscience. It tells us that some people shouldn’t be here, that they are mistakes the universe made and we can fix them with a simple procedure. If we get government funding for it, we can make “them” go away quicker. Given that abortion is largely unregulated (few people, if any, are prosecuted for violating abortion laws), there’s no telling just how far this can go. Tiller was probably just in it for the money. Heaven help us if others are in it to get rid of “you”.

So who is responsible for George Tiller’s murder? The man who pulled the trigger. It’s not Frank, nor is it Christianity, nor a book nor an organization (although that makes for a better story). Frank can sleep better knowing his confession was unnecessary.

* Ruthie sang the ABC song by herself today. She missed 4 letters but didn’t let missing them mess her up. I’m so proud of her. Her song repertoire has increased the last few days. She now has me sing the green lizard song, the Bob song, the cloud song, the tree song……. of course they are all made up, don’t make a lick of sense, but she seems to like them.
* Samuel loves to read these days. He says “book” fairly well (or maybe only mama could really understand the difference between “book” and “bear”) and smiles so big when you agree to get him in your lap with a book.

* Samuel has cut 4 teeth in recent weeks with another 2 in the wings. Its been rough both on him and me.

* I won’t be posting pictures on the site until we find the Photoshop disc to load on my new computer. Hopefully it won’t be too long.

* Ruthie told me today that she was going on a trip, would be back soon, and would send me a postcard.
* I’m beginning to be very anxious to start the work on the house. 2 weeks seems like a long time. New floor, a new microwave, some crown molding, a new window, and half a kitchen. Let’s get this party started already.

* I have been craving a strawberry rhubarb pie.

* We picked up our portion of the cow we purchased last week. It turned out to about 75 lbs of beef. It is fabulously lean and tastes great. An extra plus that it is locally raised, grain, hand fed, and limited vaccinations.

Everywhere. Its been a whirlwind of a few weeks. Here is a short recap with some pictures.

We had Samuel’s birthday party when my parents came to visit. I can’t believe he’s already 1, well really 13 months. He’s walking and teething, and teething, and saying Mama and “Bear”. He’s a mess.

We have been to doctors appts. (well babies), the chiropractor, play dates, the zoo, you name it. I feel like we’ve been everywhere and then there are weeks that I don’t see outside my four walls. I have been working and my computer has been on the fritz. We are waiting on a new one to be delivered any day.

The other day, Ruthie started to revert in her potty training. Thus I have let her run around the house without clothes. One afternoon she decided she didn’t want to put her poopie in the potty while Mommy was on a 5 minute phone call. Samuel got into it, head to toe, smeared it into the carpet and the tile, got some in Sister’s hair. It was a mess. I couldn’t get a picture of them covered because I needed to contain them as fast as I could but I did get one of them after they were clean. In fact, Ruthie put her arm around Brother and TOLD me to take their picture.

While I thought it would be awhile before I had another poopie incident, it was shortlived. We had another one last night. Just not as severe.

On the same note, the other day she was pretending to cook something and was going to serve me. I asked her what she was making. “Stinky Heinie” was her reply as she handed me my plate. I couldn’t stop laughing.

Ruthie is starting to say her ABC’s and sing both that song as well as “This is the Day” and “Jesus Loves Me.” She counts up to 9 accurately most of the time now as well.

Yesterday we had an absolute ton of rain. Just under 10 inches of rain in less than 4 hours in our area of town. Joel was sent home from work for the day and it was debatable whether or not he’d be going in today or not. He did and everything around town seems to be making its way back to normal. There are a few roads still our of commission and they just found a body today of a man that had been swept away in his car. I’ve never been a part of such a flood before. I’m very thankful for the blue skies today and for no damage to our property. I’d post a picture but Joel put them on his computer and quite honestly, I want to go take a nap instead of do the transfers of getting them from his pc to mine. So you just have to use your imagination as to what 10 inches of rain will do.

I have to make this quick. The kids are finally napping - something they didn’t do much if at all for the past two days. Its been eventful around here the past few days. Here a few points to note with pictures to follow:
* We are absolutely sick of the rain.
* When the kids get quiet - go looking. I found both of them playing in the cat litter. Poop and all.
* During the same day of the cat litter, apple sauce was a new decoration in my dining room and on Samuel. Head to toe. Carpet and all.
* Potty accidents abound when one isn’t paying attention. Including the car seat and the couch. Both covers and throw pillows had to be washed.
* When given access to the tupperware drawer while I was cooking, Ruthie found it was about time we had a tupperware party. On her bed…..
* I set Ruthie up this morning with a spot to fish with a magnet. It was a huge hit.
* When watching a violinist on American Idol, Ruthie took her milk cup and tea set spoon and tried to mimic it.
* With birthday money from Gigi, Ruthie got a music in a box set. Equipped with a triangle, tamborine, maracas, cymbals, and some other noise maker. She loves them and is all about making music these days. She says music really cute but I can’t seem to mimic her at all.
* When playing said instruments, she walks around the house saying “thank you very much.” I have no idea where she got this.
* Samuel turned 1 yesterday. Can you believe it?
* He is walking rather well now and has started getting jealous of anything Sister may have.

So here are the pictures….

So the other day, Ruthie took her chickens for a stroll around the house. Did I say stroll? Well, it was more of a mad dash. She ended up “wrecking” and dumping the chicken out of the stroller. When she got up, she said “I’m sorry Chicken.” Threw the chicken back in the stroller and continued to race around the house.

Last night we went in to check on her after hearing a noise in her room. We found her stripped down to her Pull up with her toys out from under her bed. I’m hoping this isn’t the beginning of something new where I have to struggle to keep her clothes on her.

Because he is just so cute….

I bought a book at the consignment sale a few weeks back and we’ve been reading it periodically with Ruthie. 2 weeks after having it, she sat on the couch one day and started reading the “main” words on the page - correctly! I couldn’t believe it. “Moo-Moo, Boom, Boom, Boom.” She does them all. Today, she opened up Snow White and started to read - “one day…” I don’t think I’ve read that book to her but I do know a few others start out that way so maybe she’s copying me. Who knows. I’d like to think she’s brilliant though.

Many years ago I read a book by the late Larry Burkett entitled The Coming Economic Earthquake (out of print so not easy to find). If you’re not familiar with him, it founded Christian Financial Concepts which eventually merged with Crown Ministries. Larry had cancer and knew it was time to step aside. His cancer claimed him in 2004. He was a Dave Ramsey voice long before even Dave was.

I say all of this because I’m glad he never got to see a day his predictions may very well come true. That link was written eight years ago about a book now published some eighteen years ago. Keep that in mind as you read on.

If you’re not familiar with the word trillion, one trillion written out looks like this

1,000,000,000,000

Or, put another way, one trillion is one million squared, or a million sets of one million. Obama has us spending over $3,000,000,000,000 and he’s not only not broken a sweat, he’s not slowing down for trifling questions like “How will we pay for all of this?” Out expenditures may well be beyond $5T by the time this is all done.

Social policy no longer scares me (and that should scare you). Abortion? Can be undone. Fairness Doctrine? Reversible. But this loan (make no mistake about what it is) is not reversible. And what it is going to do to you (yes you) should scare you.

One of Burkett’s major cautions was against the Fiat Standard.  That means that the money in your pocket, bank account, etc, has value because the US Treasury says it does. There is nothing beyond what the Treasury says to back this up. Once upon a time, the US Dollar was backed by gold and silver found in places like Fort Knox. This is what Ron Paul was on about in his presidential bid. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing out of hand but it lets the US tinker with the value of the Dollar by controlling the supply. This is what made Allan Greenspan such a powerful man.

The problem comes when any government gets into monetary trouble. So let’s say the US owes you $1,000. They could, literally, print some up and give it to you. Not a big deal. But let’s say they did that for everyone in the country. Free $1000 to everyone! Sounds good, right? But consider that there’s 350M or so Americans. So that would be $350B in new currency running around. What happens next is called inflation. Inflation happens when the buying power of currency falls. This happens naturally over time. But when the government prints money to pay debts you get hyperinflation. This is a bad thing. A VERY bad thing.

Germany did just that at the end of WWI. They had to repay France and England so their leaders figured they would print some up and hand it over. But France didn’t buy it. They took Germany’s coal mines and all the profits from them. But Germany had all this extra currency laying around. So you got hyperinflation. Imagine a world where a loaf of bread costs $1000. That really happened in Germany. The exchange rate between the US Dollar and the German Doich Mark before Germany’s economy collapsed was 1 trillion to 1.

Unsurprisingly there was a revolt in Germany because the average working guy didn’t get any of the currency and yet had to make do with the same wages that bought less and less until they might as well have been paying him in dirt. People starved and the country ground to a halt. The result of that revolt brought a man named Adolf Hitler to power.

So why type up all of this now? Well, consider for a moment that we’re overextended as a country. Not by a little bit but by well over $1T. Now consider what Burkett wrote eight years ago, after the Clinton era ended (emphasis mine).

I felt that our national debt and annual deficit were out of control and would eventually bring our economy to its knees, creating an economic collapse of historic proportions. Although I did not say that I thought the economy was going to drop in any particular year, I did feel that if we did not change our ways we would experience a huge economic crisis sometime after the turn of the century.

The reality is that neither the Democrats in power, nor Barak Obama, are dealing with the economy. Instead, we’re watching wholesale passage of every liberal spending plan ever dreampt of. What was in the $787B “stimulus” bill? Nobody can really say for sure yet. Certainly almost nobody read it in its entirety before passing it. And we have Bush’s folly of the $700B “bailout” where nobody knows where that went either. In fact, some of its largest recipients have come back for more. Then there the $410B earmark, er, spending bill. And now Obama wants Universal Healthcare and mortgage bailouts to boot. Is there no end to this?

Obama ran on the platform of change and many people voted for just that. No more wars with potential draft. No more “war on terror”. Maybe even no more economic gloom and doom. But we might have just saved our children from fighting in a war that’s pretty much over anyways only to put them on the hook for what may be the largest political fraud ever. Even if we held a new election tomorrow (we’re only 45 days into the Obama presidency), much of this is already law and being done as I write this. Everyone will be paying higher taxes soon in the form of energy taxes and bad energy policy and that’s just the start of this menagerie. If inflation surges (and I suspect it will soon) then all bets are off. If the Chinese (the larget buyers of Treasury Bills, basically a government bond) call in their markers then we’ll be so far up a creek even a paddle factory won’t be able to pull us back.

Pray for our country. Pray this madness ends soon. Pray that someone stands up to this and that we at least make it until 2010, where politicians feel some accountability for this foolishness.  It’s just not social policy at stake anymore, it’s freedom.

The rich rule over the poor,
and the borrower is servant to the lender.
Proverbs 22:7

Running down the length of the house, holding her chickens in the air and flapping their wings, she yells “Fly, fly, fly, fly fly, fly.”

Earlier in the day, the chickens had to nap. She tucked them in her bed and shut the door.

By the end of the day, the Plymouth Rock was missing his wings. They’ve since been reattached.

She told me she loved me for the first time yesterday. It melted my heart.

He’s cutting tooth number 8 and refuses to try walking without holding onto the table.

Just because they are so stinkin cute…

Ruthie colored on the wall again - this time completely on purpose and she knew it was naughty prior to doing it.

Ruthie found Flala taking advantage of a warm dryer while I pulled out the clothes.

And one more, just for Auntie

2 weeks to the day, my Flala came back home. We had several days of trying to trap her on the back porch only to find that the cage had been triggered and no cat inside or the food missing and the cage not triggered. But last night, it all apparently worked. My baby is back in the house. She came out of the cage willingly and immediately into my arms. She is bathed (boy was she nasty) and now she is basking in the warm sun safely on our bed.

I’m so thankful she’s back. I’ve had a weight lifted and a shadow of depression removed. I feel lighter and can feel like I can smile again. Thank you to all who prayed.