Author: VD

You ain’t seen n-n-nothin’ yet

The Boomers finally begin to become dimly aware that the younger generations do not see them in the same way they have always seen themselves:

Talking about our generation is not going to be as much fun for the Boomers as it was in those long distant days of infinite promise. My generation has some real accomplishments under its belt, especially in the worlds of science and technology. And we made important progress in making American society a more open place for people and groups who were once excluded. In every field of American life, there are Boomers who have made and are making important, selfless contributions: in hospitals, in classrooms, in government, in business, in the military. You name it and we are there.

But at the level of public policy and moral leadership, as a generation we have largely failed. The Boomer Progressive Establishment in particular has been a huge disappointment to itself and to the country. The political class slumbered as the entitlement and pension crisis grew to ominous dimensions. Boomer financial leadership was selfish and shortsighted, by and large. Boomer CEOs accelerated the trend toward unlimited greed among corporate elites, and Boomer members of corporate boards sit by and let it happen. Boomer academics created a profoundly dysfunctional system that systemically shovels resources upward from students and adjuncts to overpaid administrators and professors who by and large have not, to say the least, done an outstanding job of transmitting the cultural heritage of the past to future generations. Boomer Hollywood execs created an amoral morass of sludge — and maybe I’m missing something, but nobody spends a lot of time talking about the towering cultural accomplishments of the world historical art geniuses of the Boomer years….

All of this was done by a generation that never lost its confidence that it was smarter, better educated and more idealistic than its Depression-surviving, World War-winning, segregation-ending, prosperity-building parents. We didn’t need their stinking faith, their stinking morals, or their pathetically conformist codes of moral behavior. We were better than that; after all, we grokked Jefferson Airplane, achieved nirvana on LSD and had a spiritual wealth and sensitivity that our boorish bourgeois forbears could not grasp. They might be doers, builders and achievers — but we Boomers grooved, man, we had sex in the park, we grew our hair long, and we listened to sexy musical lyrics about drugs that those pathetic old losers could not even understand.

What the Boomers as a generation missed (there were, of course and thankfully, many honorable individual exceptions) was the core set of values that every generation must discover to make a successful transition to real adulthood: maturity.

This is precisely the point that I have been making, if in a more contemptuous manner. The Boomers, by and large, continue to exhibit less maturity than their children, and in some cases, their grandchildren. It is not at all uncommon for Generation X children to have far more in their savings accounts and retirement plans than their irresponsible parents, who blithely assume that someone else will always continue to pay for their sheer wonderfulness.

Even their claimed accomplishments are suspect. What the author describes as “important progress in making American society a more open place for people and groups who were once excluded” could be more accurately described as destroying societal cohesion and creating the fault lines upon which society will eventually fragment. Especially if “groups who were once excluded” is intended to include “foreigners who live in foreign countries.”

“What begins in arrogance often ends in shame; there are some ominous signs that the Boomers are headed down that path. Sooner or later, the kids were going to note what a mess we have made of so many things, and now, it seems, the backlash has begun.”

The generational backlash hasn’t begun yet. And it won’t get into full swing, or have any material consequences, until more Boomers retire and the cost of maintaining them breaks the federal budget. But one thing that is already mathematically certain is that Generation X, the Millenials, and the Hispanic immigrants will not pay to support the Baby Boomers in old age. Because they cannot. The Boomers ate too much of the societal seed corn instead of sowing it.

Mailvox: the search for science-based faith

I’m not sure AD can find what he is looking for, mostly because I don’t believe it exists or even can exist:

Thank you for your blog. I started reading it through WND then over the last several months have learned a lot about being a beta. I was raised in Christian churches and accepted Christ at an early age but looking back I was playing church. After [many] years of a rocky marriage my wife filed for divorce. We hadn’t attended church in about 14 years and I decided to go to a local congregation.

For the first time I’m actually going because I want to learn about having a better Christian walk. The trouble I’m having is I want to know what I’m talking about when I talk to someone, (e.g., ex-wife) about Christ and the Bible. I am no Bible scholar and I only have basic answers to her talking about discrepancies in the gospels and the story of a virgin birth savior being included in other religions.

I believe God’s word should stand up to legitimate scientific scrutiny but I can’t say, “well, it is a fact that this or that original text confirms what the modern Bible translations say.” I really want to know what I’m talking about.

Are you able to direct me to sources so I can start to really know I’m basing my faith on a sound foundation? Maybe I’m not showing faith by asking this question but I think I need to know for me.

This is somewhat outside my area of knowledge, as common misconceptions about TIA to the contrary, I don’t get into apologetics, particularly science-flavored ones. So, it might behoove me to step back and allow the scientists here, particularly Stickwick and the other physicists, to provide any recommended reading. I’ve never paid much attention to the present state of the scientific consensus or considered it to be any sort of truth metric because I am old enough to recall it having been the precise opposite of what it is today in many different areas. No one who recalls the butter-margarine consensuses, the global ice age-global warming consensuses, the steady state-Big Bang consensuses, or the low fat-low carbs consensuses is likely to be overly concerned about what scientists happen to be asserting is absolute truth today. Give them a few years and there is a reasonable chance they’ll be saying something very different, if not the exact opposite. Never forget that scientists do not study history and very few of them even know anything about the history of science.

That being said, Patrick Glynn’s God: The Evidence: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Postsecular World, wouldn’t be a bad start. It’s nothing I would consider conclusive, but it will disabuse you of the notion that you cannot balance your faith in science with your faith in God.

But a word of warning. It is not so much indicative of a lack of faith to seek a sound scientific foundation for one’s religious faith as it is evidence of flawed reason. As I have demonstrated on numerous occasions in the past, science is not a reliable basis for one’s faith in anything, religious or otherwise, due to its dynamic nature and its intrinsic reliance on human honesty. It is engineering that is truly reliable by virtue of its much more stringent system of material verification of truth claims; only when science has been transformed into engineering can it be considered more or less reliable, and even then, it can be less than perfectly accurate.

Note that at the moment, after decades of “scientific certainty”, science is attempting to ascertain if supra-luminal speeds are possible. The idea science is capable of being used as any position at all on the supernatural beyond the purely philosophical not only defies reason, but history and scientific history as well.

And if religion got things as reliably wrong as science does, no one would believe in it. When science fetishists complain that religion claims absolute truth, they are projecting. It is religion’s room for and acceptance of doubt that accounts for its persistence; it is science’s false pretensions to being the final word on truth that explain why the world has become increasingly skeptical of science and scientists.

Theft by bureaucrat

Keep this in mind the next time a bond issue comes up for a vote:

Cities and states across the country are using money designated for specific purposes—such as fixing roads or sewers—in order to fill financial holes elsewhere, according to public officials and records. The moves are exposing municipalities to controversy, as federal regulators and local auditors are more heavily scrutinizing their finances to protect bond buyers and taxpayers.

This isn’t exactly new. When voters pass a school bond, they usually do so under the impression that the school will hire more teachers or buy computers. But, as has increasingly been the case over the last three decades, the school districts are hiring employees with no teaching function, to such an extent that half of all public school employees now are not teachers.

The corruption in America is both endemic and structural. This was probably the most shocking thing I realized after moving to Europe, where the corruption is more readily recognized and apparent. It wasn’t that there was more corruption, but that it was only a different form of it.

The amusing thing is the notion, popular among bureaucrats, that it isn’t stealing if you put it back after you get caught. “The city is cooperating fully with the investigation,” said Ivan Harris, an attorney at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP who is representing Miami in the SEC matter. He said the city “stands by the accounting for the transfers” because some of the funds had been unused for their designated purposes and other funds were replaced.

I’m surprised more bank robbers don’t give that excuse a whirl.

The epic cometh

I’m pleased to let those who are interested know that Marcher Lord and I have agreed upon terms for the publication of the first book in the forthcoming Arts of Dark and Light series. I won’t say much about it now except to mention that it is set in the world of Summa Elvetica, Marcus Valerius is one of the protagonists, and it is going to be one big fat fantasy novel of more than 700 pages. It will be available in print and ebook format, and I think I can just about guarantee that the cover art will be even more spectacular than SE’s. We anticipate its release in October next year.

We’re also looking at a re-release of Summa Elvetica with the inclusion of an additional novella which concerns Lodi and one of the protagonists of the aforementioned novel.

WND column

Democracy and Europe

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the end of Europe’s great experiment with democracy. Not only have countries across the continent been forced into a one-vote, one-time arrangement which bears a striking similarity to the National Socialist plebiscite approach, but now the unelected European Commission is utilizing the financial muscle of the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank to remove duly elected officials and install unelected heads of government.

In Greece, Lucas Papademos was sworn in as prime minister last week. He is not a member of Parliament, has never been elected to office and is a former Federal Reserve economist. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi resigned under pressure and is being replaced by Mario Monti, a former European commissioner and Goldman Sachs adviser. Like Papademos, Monti is an economist who has spent his career in the employment of the international banks and has never been elected to office. He has, however, been appointed to the rather ominous sounding position of senator-for-life. Fortunately, he has yet to make any statements concerning the reliability of the railway schedules.

VPFL Week 9

87 Moundsview Meerkats (6-3-0)
48 Macau Marauders (3-5-1)

66 Greenfield Grizzlies (6-3-0)
53 GroverBeach Quixotes (4-5-0)

56 Green Reverends (5-3-1)
47 MS Swamp Spartans (4-5-0)

85 Bailout Banksters (5-3-1)
75 Bane Sidhe (4-5-0)

67 RR Redbeards (3-5-1)
55 Cranberry Rhyneauxs (3-6-0)

It is the clash of the Old School Titans! The Piranha of the Serengeti are going up against the Big Walleye and his Grizzlies for pole position heading into the home stretch.

This is your weekly NFL open thread.

Introverted and Extroverted blogs

I hadn’t previously read Jonathan Rauch’s popular article on introversion in The Atlantic. It’s simple, but pretty good, although I shudder to think that many people actually regarded this as containing much in the way of new information.

Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say “Hell is other people at breakfast.” Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially “on,” we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn’t antisocial. It isn’t a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: “I’m okay, you’re okay—in small doses.”

One thing I’ve noticed is that this blog appears to be a stronghold of introversion, which may help explain why it has such a hard core, but relatively small readership. For example, I actively dissuade what could be considered extrovert-style commenting – generally described in these parts as comment diarrhea – in which the commenter leaves many multiple one-line comments as they occur to him. And I’ve also noted that many of the blogs with bigger traffic tend to have more and shorter posts.

It has never bothered me that more people might prefer other blogs to this one, nor did I ever wish to imitate them, but I did find it puzzling that so many people like to regularly read blogs that essentially say nothing, and say nothing so succinctly. I’m not talking about aggregators like Drudge and Instapundit, you understand, but the sort of blogs where the commentary on the Republican debate is four lines or the contents of their meals is a frequent topic of conversation. I’ve tried reading several very popular blogs on occasion, and to be honest, I not only could not read them regularly, I couldn’t even figure out why anyone was reading them. Ever.

It couldn’t be described as an intelligence thing either. Some of these bloggers were quite smart and very successful, others perhaps not quite so much, but the one thing they had in common is that a) their average post length is very short, both in terms of the selections from the links provided and their own writing, and b) their readers’ average time on site is measured in single-digit seconds. That latter fact has always puzzled me too. Who reads anything except Twitter or market prices in less than 10 seconds? How is that even possible? I understand that those who are checking back to see if there is a new post or not will tend to drive down the average, but why would there be so many multiples of post-checking in comparison with incidence of readers actually reading the posts?

If it is true that extroversion and introversion have fundamentally different styles of communication, then these differences should translate to blog writing, blog commenting, and even blog readerships as well. This may also explain why most of the early big bloggers completely failed as book authors… authors tend to be introverts, for obvious reasons, whereas the more visible bloggers who attracted mainstream media attention are more likely to be extroverts and extroverts are seldom able to focus long enough to complete a coherent thoughtcomplete book. SFWA President-For-Life John Scalzi of Whatever is an interesting case; is he an extroverted geek who is able to focus himself long enough to complete his books or an introvert who enjoys performing in public on occasion? Since I find tend to find his approach to both his blog and his books rather scattershot, I suspect the former, but I wouldn’t bet much on it. The Prince of Wängst strikes me as extremely introverted, as does Roissy. Ann Althouse’s blog, on the other hand, appears to be of the extroverted variety.

To what extent the blog matches the blogger, or the readership, for that matter, I don’t know. It’s more of an impression than an observation and I’d be interested in hearing your opinions about what blogs fit which category. As should be obvious, like most of the readership, I am rather strongly introverted myself, which is why I always find it both bizarre and amusing when I am accused of writing things solely in order to attract attention. That is the classic extrovert’s projection at work; they simply cannot imagine that anyone would not want to be on stage or appear on TV.

As for Rauch’s article, the best part of it is where he describes the concept of social fatigue. At every social gathering, there is the inevitable moment when the mundane chatter surrounding me like an aural miasma appears to crescendo, grow ever more incoherent and frenetic, until it finally all fades away into the blessed silence inside my mind.

Occasionally someone will notice that I am paying absolutely no attention to the conversation and ask me what I am thinking. This is a mistake. But because I am sufficiently civilized, I never answer truthfully. There is no benefit to sharing the dark thoughts inspired by an overdose of social exposure, and anyway, it’s nothing that a little time alone won’t cure.

The week in Alpha

Science has spoken and demonstrated that ALPHAS are merely selfless men bringing health and wellness benefits to the opposite sex.

We already know the answer to why a 10 percent shortfall in the number of female physical science and math degrees is a problem but an eight percent shortfall in the number of male biology degrees is not.

Athol adeptly translates a song into Spielsprache and Vox suggests that being able to do what you want all the time is not necessarily the worst fate in the world.

Vox does his best Pat Moynihan impression and deduces that black statistical canaries are suggesting 50 percent of white college women today will not marry by the age of 40.

Game in Libya suggests that women help choose what sort of society they will live in by influencing young men to pursue careers as builders or destroyers.

Paterno is still a decent man

One of his biographers, Joe Posnanski, defends Joe Paterno:

I’m not saying I know Joe Paterno. I’m saying I know a whole lot about him. And what I know is complicated. But, beyond complications — and I really believe this with all my heart — there’s this, and this is exclusively my opinion: Joe Paterno has lived a profoundly decent life.

Nobody has really wanted to say this lately, and I grasp that. The last week has obviously shed a new light on him and his program — a horrible new light — and if you have any questions about how I feel about all that, please scroll back up to my two points at the top.

But I have seen some things in the last few days that have felt rotten, utterly wrong — a piling on that goes even beyond excessive, a dancing on the grave that makes me ill. Joe Paterno has lived a whole life. He has improved the lives of countless people. I know — I’ve talked to hundreds of them. Almost every day I walk by the library that he and his wife, Sue, built. I walk by the religious center that tries to bring people together, and his name is on the list of major donors. I hear the stories, the countless stories, of the kindnesses that came naturally to him, of the way he stuck with people in their worst moments, of the belief he had that everybody could do a little bit better — as a football player, as a student, as a human being. I’m not going to tell you these stories now, because you can’t hear them. Nobody can hear them in the howling.

But I will say that I am sickened, absolutely sickened, that some of those people whose lives were fundamentally inspired and galvanized by Joe Paterno have not stepped forward to stand up for him this week, have stood back and allowed him to be painted as an inhuman monster who was only interested in his legacy, even at the cost of the most heinous crimes against children imaginable.

Shame on them.

And why? I’ll tell you my opinion: Because they were afraid. And I understand that. A kind word for Joe Paterno in this storm is taken by many as a pro vote for a child molester. A quick, “Wait a minute, Joe Paterno is a good man. Let’s see what happened here” is translated as an attempt to minimize the horror of what Jerry Sandusky is charged with doing. It takes courage to stand behind someone you believe in when it’s this bad outside. It takes courage to stand up for a man in peril, even if he stood up for you.

And that’s shameful.

I don’t know Joe Paterno at all. I don’t know Joe Posnanski either. But I very much agree with what he is saying here, which is that one act of omission, one moment of cowardice, one moral failing, is not definitive of any man. And I also agree wholeheartedly that is shameful for people to pile on Paterno in an attempt to morally preen. Posnanski isn’t saying that Paterno did the right thing or that he shouldn’t have lost his job. Failure has consequences, after all. But the loss of a man’s halo doesn’t render him a devil, merely another fallen man.

The situation reminds me somewhat of when my father was being tried in federal court. Virtually none of his peers, including a number of his friends, were willing to step forward and testify on behalf of his character. No one was being asked to lie or spin anything, merely to recount their personal experience of a man who had paid their salaries, given to their charities, hosted them in his home, or eaten at their table over the course of thirty years. They didn’t have any substantive reason not to do so, but were simply afraid of the social consequences of stepping forward and saying “this man may be guilty of what he is accused, but because that is not the entirety of who he is, let me tell you what I know about him.” I was extremely proud of my friends, several of whom volunteered to testify on my father’s behalf without even being asked to do so.

I wasn’t angry, only disappointed with those who hid behind the rationale of “not wanting to get involved”. What a lame excuse that is, as if anyone would ever seek to get involved in such unpleasantries. But even though I was disappointed, at no point did I lose any affection or respect for people I had known nearly all my life. It would have been outrageous for me to judge them on the sole basis of a single moment where their moral courage failed them.

The irony is that some of those posturing so dramatically about Paterno are exhibiting a failure of moral courage similar to the one that gave them grounds for criticizing the man in the first place. The man merits criticism , to be sure, and I think he deserved to lose his job, but it is simply ludicrous to claim, as some have done, that his behavior was on par with Sandusky’s or even the university administration’s. There is an important difference between a fundamentally decent man whose moral courage failed him at a vital moment and a fundamentally indecent man, and it is not only foolish, but downright societally destructive to equate the two.