I came across this list in a flyer from a group called Because It Matters (http://www.becauseitmatters.net) which is a project of the Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice (http://www.gulfcoastcf.org). If you like what you see below, check the site. It has a lot of good information, and doesn't appear to be too partisan, if partisan at all.
10 Keys to Civility
Why 10 Keys to Civility? Because It Matters is our mantra, our expression of belief in the importance of civility. But, we needed more. We needed some simple guiding principles to raise awareness and impact behavior. The Because It Matters volunteers turned to the literature on civility, including Robert Putnam's breakthrough book on social capital, "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community," as well as "Social Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman, but the most impactful book was P. M Forni's, "Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct."
Respect Others. The ability to see the actual individual is part of acknowledging each other, and the first step to positive regard. Respect for the whole person entails listening to others’ opinions, their feelings, their time, even their physical space. At the core of “respect others” is the “golden rule,” do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Think Positively. Wouldn’t life be more joyful if we all viewed it through a glass “half-full” rather than “half-empty”? Countless studies have demonstrated that those who think positively live longer and happier lives. In the context of Because It Matters, a positive attitude is an emotional contagion we want to spread.
Pay Attention. How often do we go through our daily routines as human robots with little awareness of others surrounding us? The root of “attention” is “to attend to.” That means that every act of acknowledgement or kindness begins with “attending to” the other person. In other words, to be at our best in our human encounters, get off of auto pilot and pay attention.
Make A Difference. Here’s an expression that has become such a part of our cultural lexicon that it has almost lost meaning. Almost is the key word, for the concept of making a difference has never been more valid. Our culture makes self-gratification a must-do, reducing the moral energy we have for others. Self-centered behaviors can put altruism in the back seat. It doesn’t have to be that way. There are opportunities to make a difference in every encounter.
Speak Kindly. The flip side of speak kindly is, Why be rude? Words of kindness can inspire others, lift their spirits, and even, as Forni writes, “reconcile them with life.” And isn’t that a great way to make a difference?
Say Thank You. Such a simple deed, the acknowledging of an act of service or kindness by saying “thank you.”
Accept Others. George Bernard Shaw, in his play “Pygmalion,” speaks of “having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in heaven…where one soul is as good as another.” That is the crux of accepting others: welcoming all with the same enthusiasm as we experience in the feeling of belonging.
Rediscover Silence. In an age when background noises are constant, some fear we are becoming accustomed to noise. Is that a problem? Noise can take us away from ourselves; silence can be the bridge to our innermost thoughts and tranquility. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Let us be silent—so we may hear the whisper of the gods.”
Listen. The act of listening takes work. Instead of focusing on what we want to say and our own needs, good listening requires that our attention go to others. How refreshing to demonstrate that we value others before ourselves. How non-competitive. How civil.
Keep Your Cool. Medical science tells us that nonassertive behavior is a health risk. On the other hand, being a bully is just as unhealthy as being a doormat. The key is to find that happy medium where you express your needs without intruding on others’ needs and do it in a calm and kindly way.
19 October 2008
The Rules for Being Human
I was cleaning out some things and came across the following. I have had it for decades and can' recall where I first got it. I did a google search and found that it had been included in the book "If Life is a Game, These are the Rules" by Cherie Carter-Scott. The copy that I had held onto all these years is a little different. The below rendition is a merger of the copy I had and the copy I found online.
The Rules for Being Human
When you were born, you didn't come with an owner's manual; these guidelines make life work better.
1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it's the only thing you are sure to keep for the rest of your life.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called "Life on Planet Earth". Every person or incident is a potential teacher. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant or stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error - experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately "succeeds."
4. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. It is presented to you in various forms until you learn it -- then you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
6. "There" is no better than "here." When your "there" becomes a "here" you will simply obtain another "there" that again looks better than "here."
7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another unless it reflects something you love or hate in yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need; what you do with them is up to you. Life provides the canvas; you do the painting. Take charge of your life -- or someone else will. The choice is yours.
9. The answers lie inside you. The answers to life's questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. There is no right or wrong, but there are consequences. Moralizing doesn't help. Judgments only hold the patterns in place. Just do your best.
The Rules for Being Human
When you were born, you didn't come with an owner's manual; these guidelines make life work better.
1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it's the only thing you are sure to keep for the rest of your life.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called "Life on Planet Earth". Every person or incident is a potential teacher. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant or stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error - experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately "succeeds."
4. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. It is presented to you in various forms until you learn it -- then you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
6. "There" is no better than "here." When your "there" becomes a "here" you will simply obtain another "there" that again looks better than "here."
7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another unless it reflects something you love or hate in yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need; what you do with them is up to you. Life provides the canvas; you do the painting. Take charge of your life -- or someone else will. The choice is yours.
9. The answers lie inside you. The answers to life's questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. There is no right or wrong, but there are consequences. Moralizing doesn't help. Judgments only hold the patterns in place. Just do your best.
12 October 2008
When Atheists Attack
One of my favorite atheist commentators, Sam Harris, recently wrote a poignant article addressing the selection of Sarah Palin by John McCain as his running mate. I must confess that I had a great deal of respect for Senator McCain, that is until his partisan selection of Governor Palin, which appears to have been made to attract two classes of voters - evangelical christians and women. The assumption that women would change their vote from one candidate to the other, merely because of the gender of the understudy of the ticket is an insult at best. Anyway, take a look at the article if you are so inclined...
When Atheists Attack
A noted provocateur rips Sarah Palin—and defends elitism.
Sam Harris
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Sep 29, 2008
Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.
Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortune—and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.
The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.
The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.
We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.
Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to know—or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain's advisers. What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.
I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americans—but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.
In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing—as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?
You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?
It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends" to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?
Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning—or, indeed, of the 21st century.
We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.
What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:
"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"
"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."
"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."
"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."
The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.
I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.
Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New York Times best sellers “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” His Web site is samharris.org.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/160080
When Atheists Attack
A noted provocateur rips Sarah Palin—and defends elitism.
Sam Harris
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Sep 29, 2008
Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.
Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortune—and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.
The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.
The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.
We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.
Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to know—or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain's advisers. What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.
I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americans—but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.
In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing—as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?
You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?
It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends" to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?
Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning—or, indeed, of the 21st century.
We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.
What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:
"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"
"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."
"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."
"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."
The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.
I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.
Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New York Times best sellers “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” His Web site is samharris.org.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/160080
06 October 2008
Maybe We Should Blame God for the Subprime Mess
Maybe We Should Blame God for the Subprime Mess
By David Van Biema Friday, Oct. 03, 2008
Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current financial crisis? That's what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of Pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity's central promise — that God will "make a way" for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe "God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house." The results, he says, "were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers."
Others think he may be right. Says Anthea Butler, an expert in Pentecostalism at the University of Rochester in New York: "The pastor's not gonna say, 'Go down to Wachovia and get a loan,' but I have heard, 'Even if you have a poor credit rating, God can still bless you — if you put some faith out there [that is, make a big donation to the church], you'll get that house or that car or that apartment.' " Adds J. Lee Grady, editor of the magazine Charisma: "It definitely goes on, that a preacher might say, 'If you give this offering, God will give you a house.' And if they did get the house, people did think that it was an answer to prayer, when in fact it was really bad banking policy." If so, the situation offers a look at how a native-born faith built partially on American economic optimism entered into a toxic symbiosis with a pathological market.
Although a type of Pentecostalism, Prosperity theology adds a distinctive layer of supernatural positive thinking. Adherents will reap rewards if they prove their faith to God by contributing heavily to their churches, remaining mentally and verbally upbeat and concentrating on divine promises of worldly bounty supposedly strewn throughout the Bible. Critics call it a thinly disguised pastor-enrichment scam. Other experts, like Walton, note that for all its faults, the theology can empower people who have been taught to see themselves as financially or even culturally useless to feel they are "worthy of having more and doing more and being more." In some cases the philosophy has matured with its practitioners, encouraging good financial habits and entrepreneurship.
But Walton suggests that a decade's worth of ever easier credit acted like a drug in Prosperity's bloodstream. "The economic boom '90s and financial overextensions of the new millennium contributed to the success of the Prosperity message," he wrote recently on his personal blog as well as on the website Religion Dispatches. And not positively. "Narratives of how 'God blessed me with my first house despite my credit' were common. Sermons declaring 'It's your season to overflow' supplanted messages of economic sobriety," and "little attention was paid to ... the dangers of using one's home equity as an ATM to subsidize cars, clothes and vacations."
With the bubble burst, Walton and Butler assume that Prosperity congregants have taken a disproportionate hit, and they are curious as to how their churches will respond. Butler thinks some of the flashier ministries will shrink along with their congregants' fortunes. Says Walton: "You would think that the current economic conditions would undercut their theology." But he predicts they will persevere, since God's earthly largesse is just as attractive when one is behind the economic eight ball.
A recent publicly posted testimony by a congregant at the Brownsville Assembly of God, near Pensacola, Fla., seems to confirm his intuition. Brownsville is not even a classic Prosperity congregation — it relies more on the anointing of its pastors than on Scriptural promises of God. But the believer's note to his minister illustrates how magical thinking can prevail even after the mortgage blade has dropped. "Last Sunday," it read, "You said if anyone needed a miracle to come up. So I did. I was receiving foreclosure papers, so I asked you to anoint a picture of my home and you did and your wife joined with you in prayer as I cried. I went home feeling something good was going to happen. On Friday the 5th of September I got a phone call from my mortgage company and they came up with a new payment for the next 3 months of only $200. My mortgage is usually $1,020. Praise God for his Mercy & Grace."
And pray that the credit market doesn't tighten any further.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1847053,00.html?xid=newsletter-weekly
By David Van Biema Friday, Oct. 03, 2008
Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current financial crisis? That's what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of Pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity's central promise — that God will "make a way" for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe "God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house." The results, he says, "were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers."
Others think he may be right. Says Anthea Butler, an expert in Pentecostalism at the University of Rochester in New York: "The pastor's not gonna say, 'Go down to Wachovia and get a loan,' but I have heard, 'Even if you have a poor credit rating, God can still bless you — if you put some faith out there [that is, make a big donation to the church], you'll get that house or that car or that apartment.' " Adds J. Lee Grady, editor of the magazine Charisma: "It definitely goes on, that a preacher might say, 'If you give this offering, God will give you a house.' And if they did get the house, people did think that it was an answer to prayer, when in fact it was really bad banking policy." If so, the situation offers a look at how a native-born faith built partially on American economic optimism entered into a toxic symbiosis with a pathological market.
Although a type of Pentecostalism, Prosperity theology adds a distinctive layer of supernatural positive thinking. Adherents will reap rewards if they prove their faith to God by contributing heavily to their churches, remaining mentally and verbally upbeat and concentrating on divine promises of worldly bounty supposedly strewn throughout the Bible. Critics call it a thinly disguised pastor-enrichment scam. Other experts, like Walton, note that for all its faults, the theology can empower people who have been taught to see themselves as financially or even culturally useless to feel they are "worthy of having more and doing more and being more." In some cases the philosophy has matured with its practitioners, encouraging good financial habits and entrepreneurship.
But Walton suggests that a decade's worth of ever easier credit acted like a drug in Prosperity's bloodstream. "The economic boom '90s and financial overextensions of the new millennium contributed to the success of the Prosperity message," he wrote recently on his personal blog as well as on the website Religion Dispatches. And not positively. "Narratives of how 'God blessed me with my first house despite my credit' were common. Sermons declaring 'It's your season to overflow' supplanted messages of economic sobriety," and "little attention was paid to ... the dangers of using one's home equity as an ATM to subsidize cars, clothes and vacations."
With the bubble burst, Walton and Butler assume that Prosperity congregants have taken a disproportionate hit, and they are curious as to how their churches will respond. Butler thinks some of the flashier ministries will shrink along with their congregants' fortunes. Says Walton: "You would think that the current economic conditions would undercut their theology." But he predicts they will persevere, since God's earthly largesse is just as attractive when one is behind the economic eight ball.
A recent publicly posted testimony by a congregant at the Brownsville Assembly of God, near Pensacola, Fla., seems to confirm his intuition. Brownsville is not even a classic Prosperity congregation — it relies more on the anointing of its pastors than on Scriptural promises of God. But the believer's note to his minister illustrates how magical thinking can prevail even after the mortgage blade has dropped. "Last Sunday," it read, "You said if anyone needed a miracle to come up. So I did. I was receiving foreclosure papers, so I asked you to anoint a picture of my home and you did and your wife joined with you in prayer as I cried. I went home feeling something good was going to happen. On Friday the 5th of September I got a phone call from my mortgage company and they came up with a new payment for the next 3 months of only $200. My mortgage is usually $1,020. Praise God for his Mercy & Grace."
And pray that the credit market doesn't tighten any further.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1847053,00.html?xid=newsletter-weekly
05 October 2008
One problem with how this war was dealt
One of the problems with how this war was dealt with at home, is the fact that the general population hasn't had to sacrifice. During the "big one", i.e. World War II, the general population all contributed through things such as rationing.
During WWII, many commodities were rationed due to either shortages or because the components were needed to support the war effort. Tires, passenger automobiles, typewriters, sugar, gasoline, bicycles, footwear, fuel oil, coffee, stoves, shoes, meat, lard, shortening and oils, cheese, butter, margarine, processed foods (canned, bottled and frozen), dried fruits, canned milk, firewood and coal, jams, jellies and fruit butter were all rationed.
Unemployment disappeared during WWII, and in fact, women who had previously not worked became productive in jobs which might ordinarily have been filled by males, but for the fact that a significant portion of the male population was engaged in the war effort.
Nearly every employed person was paying taxes in 1944, whereas only about ten percent were in 1940. Roosevelt had tried to get a 100 percent tax on incomes, but failed to get it through Congress. Compare that with the deficits run up by the Bush administration during the Iraq war, and the fact that they wouldn't even include the funding for the war in the general budget, but instead insisted on a separate funding provision which only added to the debt.
The Iraq war caused no hardship for the general American. Most folks didn't feel it, except those who had loved ones directly involved. Oh sure, there were drives to send care packages and cards at holiday time, but it was such a different experience. I mean, we went about our every day lives, and get an opportunity to buy an extra pound of coffee at Starbuck's to send to the troops. Now that's suffering, eh?
United States home front during World War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_home_front_during_World_War_II
Rationing during World War II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing#United_States
During WWII, many commodities were rationed due to either shortages or because the components were needed to support the war effort. Tires, passenger automobiles, typewriters, sugar, gasoline, bicycles, footwear, fuel oil, coffee, stoves, shoes, meat, lard, shortening and oils, cheese, butter, margarine, processed foods (canned, bottled and frozen), dried fruits, canned milk, firewood and coal, jams, jellies and fruit butter were all rationed.
Unemployment disappeared during WWII, and in fact, women who had previously not worked became productive in jobs which might ordinarily have been filled by males, but for the fact that a significant portion of the male population was engaged in the war effort.
Nearly every employed person was paying taxes in 1944, whereas only about ten percent were in 1940. Roosevelt had tried to get a 100 percent tax on incomes, but failed to get it through Congress. Compare that with the deficits run up by the Bush administration during the Iraq war, and the fact that they wouldn't even include the funding for the war in the general budget, but instead insisted on a separate funding provision which only added to the debt.
The Iraq war caused no hardship for the general American. Most folks didn't feel it, except those who had loved ones directly involved. Oh sure, there were drives to send care packages and cards at holiday time, but it was such a different experience. I mean, we went about our every day lives, and get an opportunity to buy an extra pound of coffee at Starbuck's to send to the troops. Now that's suffering, eh?
United States home front during World War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_home_front_during_World_War_II
Rationing during World War II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing#United_States
30 September 2008
Grid power: Sysadmin discovers 13-million-digit prime number
Here is an interesting article from Computerworld. I will be the first to admit I am quite a geek, but I must say that I have no idea what I would do with a large prime number. Seems to me though that the sys admin in this article found a good way to utilize all of those underutilized PCs.
September 29, 2008 (Computerworld) A systems administrator -- not a mathematician -- used a grid of computers supplied by volunteers at the University of California, Los Angeles, to find the world's largest known prime number. The immense number is made up of nearly 13 million digits.
The discovery is part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a 12-year-old project that uses the computers of volunteers to find larger and larger prime numbers. The volunteer project has been focused on finding the first prime number with more than 10 million digits.
As a prize, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is handing out $100,000, with half going to the winner and half going to charity.
A prime number is a whole number that can be divided only by one and itself. Mersenne prime numbers are a class of primes named after Marin Mersenne, a 17th century French monk who studied the rare numbers 300 years ago. Edson Smith, the systems administrator at UCLA who found the largest Mersenne prime, explained that primes and even Mersenne primes are easy to find in the lower numbers, like 3 and 5, but become much more difficult to find when the numbers become long and intricate.
The prime that Smith and his team at UCLA found was 12,978,189 digits long. It's such a large number that if you printed it out, it would run 30 miles long, according to Smith, who said he believes that if you tried to read it out loud, you couldn't finish it during your lifetime.
"It's really cool for everybody involved," Smith told Computerworld. "This is an excellent demonstration of the power of the grid."
Smith explained that the GIMPS project leaders hand out potential prime numbers to teams of volunteers, such as that at UCLA, whose computers run software designed to test the number.
The UCLA team used 75 Dell desktop computers running Microsoft Windows XP. Smith noted that if they had had only one computer running the program, the job would likely have taken longer than his lifetime.
"There are so few of this-large prime numbers," said smith. "They're very rare and can only be discovered through computing power. It's really about the power of the grid. In a certain sense, I'm a lottery winner. There are thousands [of people] looking with tens of thousands of computers and it just happened to be us."
This isn't the first prime number to be discovered at UCLA; it's the eighth, according to the university. In 1952, UCLA professor Raphael Robinson discovered five different Mersenne primes -- reportedly the first ones to be found using computers.
GIMPS founder George Woltman said in a press release that the organization next will offer up a $150,000 award for the first person or group to find the first 100-million-digit prime number.
September 29, 2008 (Computerworld) A systems administrator -- not a mathematician -- used a grid of computers supplied by volunteers at the University of California, Los Angeles, to find the world's largest known prime number. The immense number is made up of nearly 13 million digits.
The discovery is part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a 12-year-old project that uses the computers of volunteers to find larger and larger prime numbers. The volunteer project has been focused on finding the first prime number with more than 10 million digits.
As a prize, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is handing out $100,000, with half going to the winner and half going to charity.
A prime number is a whole number that can be divided only by one and itself. Mersenne prime numbers are a class of primes named after Marin Mersenne, a 17th century French monk who studied the rare numbers 300 years ago. Edson Smith, the systems administrator at UCLA who found the largest Mersenne prime, explained that primes and even Mersenne primes are easy to find in the lower numbers, like 3 and 5, but become much more difficult to find when the numbers become long and intricate.
The prime that Smith and his team at UCLA found was 12,978,189 digits long. It's such a large number that if you printed it out, it would run 30 miles long, according to Smith, who said he believes that if you tried to read it out loud, you couldn't finish it during your lifetime.
"It's really cool for everybody involved," Smith told Computerworld. "This is an excellent demonstration of the power of the grid."
Smith explained that the GIMPS project leaders hand out potential prime numbers to teams of volunteers, such as that at UCLA, whose computers run software designed to test the number.
The UCLA team used 75 Dell desktop computers running Microsoft Windows XP. Smith noted that if they had had only one computer running the program, the job would likely have taken longer than his lifetime.
"There are so few of this-large prime numbers," said smith. "They're very rare and can only be discovered through computing power. It's really about the power of the grid. In a certain sense, I'm a lottery winner. There are thousands [of people] looking with tens of thousands of computers and it just happened to be us."
This isn't the first prime number to be discovered at UCLA; it's the eighth, according to the university. In 1952, UCLA professor Raphael Robinson discovered five different Mersenne primes -- reportedly the first ones to be found using computers.
GIMPS founder George Woltman said in a press release that the organization next will offer up a $150,000 award for the first person or group to find the first 100-million-digit prime number.
29 September 2008
Too much debt?
Generally speaking, I consider myself to be a fiscal conservative. Perhaps a more correct term would be fiscally responsible. It makes more sense to pay for things as you go. Of course there are certain exceptions, like using a mortgage (responsibly) to purchase a house. Likewise an economic depression or war sometimes may necessitate the government overextending itself.
That is what I expect of myself - and my government. Tax cuts are great, but if you give a tax cut, you need to reduce spending. The present administration assumed a budget that was running a significant surplus, yet even taking out the cost of the war (almost $600 billion at this point), the national debt has still increased by 60% in eight years - and that is prior to the impact of any debt incurred as a result of the apparent impending Wall Street bailout. The economics in play during the Bush administration did not justify unnecessary tax cuts which essentially decimated the hard earned fiscal positioning of the Clinton years.
I could write a lengthy post about the deficit, debt, etc. I could include numerous links from non-partisan sources, but I won't (well, maybe I can put up some links in a separate post). There are many theories that will argue one way or the other, whether the amount of debt we have is at an acceptable level, and so on. I think folks are able to do their own research if they care about the issues. Suffice to say, that for about 30 years (1950 - 1980) the total national debt remained fairly constant - around $2 trillion. It currently stands at over $9 Trillion without taking into account the impending bailout. The republican administrations since 1980 added roughly $6 Trillion.
How much is a trillion? In the U.S., a trillion is one, followed by twelve zeros. I did a little internet research and found a really great site buried in the NASA family of web sites that gave me a nice way to look at it. The analogy was constructed to help people understand how long a light year is. As you probably know, a light year is the distance light travels in one year or approximately six trillion miles. How can we comprehend such large numbers (thus the term astronomical numbers)? Without going through the details of the lengthy mathematical calculations, what it comes down to is that one trillion seconds is the equivalent of 31,546 years! In one could find a way to spend the current value of the debt at one dollar per second - over $31 million dollars a year - it would take nearly 300,000 years!
Seems to me we have too much debt! And this is just the tip of the iceberg!
That is what I expect of myself - and my government. Tax cuts are great, but if you give a tax cut, you need to reduce spending. The present administration assumed a budget that was running a significant surplus, yet even taking out the cost of the war (almost $600 billion at this point), the national debt has still increased by 60% in eight years - and that is prior to the impact of any debt incurred as a result of the apparent impending Wall Street bailout. The economics in play during the Bush administration did not justify unnecessary tax cuts which essentially decimated the hard earned fiscal positioning of the Clinton years.
I could write a lengthy post about the deficit, debt, etc. I could include numerous links from non-partisan sources, but I won't (well, maybe I can put up some links in a separate post). There are many theories that will argue one way or the other, whether the amount of debt we have is at an acceptable level, and so on. I think folks are able to do their own research if they care about the issues. Suffice to say, that for about 30 years (1950 - 1980) the total national debt remained fairly constant - around $2 trillion. It currently stands at over $9 Trillion without taking into account the impending bailout. The republican administrations since 1980 added roughly $6 Trillion.
How much is a trillion? In the U.S., a trillion is one, followed by twelve zeros. I did a little internet research and found a really great site buried in the NASA family of web sites that gave me a nice way to look at it. The analogy was constructed to help people understand how long a light year is. As you probably know, a light year is the distance light travels in one year or approximately six trillion miles. How can we comprehend such large numbers (thus the term astronomical numbers)? Without going through the details of the lengthy mathematical calculations, what it comes down to is that one trillion seconds is the equivalent of 31,546 years! In one could find a way to spend the current value of the debt at one dollar per second - over $31 million dollars a year - it would take nearly 300,000 years!
Seems to me we have too much debt! And this is just the tip of the iceberg!
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