Well, I’ve been away for a little bit; mostly with training, some with illness. The big news right now is the battle which I hope is shaping up between Congress and the President, as President Obama issues executive order after executive order regarding victim disarmement. Several sheriffs have already posted on Facebook that no such orders will be enforced within their counties, and several States (Missouri, thankfully, among them) have introduced legislation to the same effect.
Government by executive fiat is nothing new to President Obama, of course; he has already authored many times more executive orders than past Presidents, most of which fall entirely outside the scope of Constitutional authority.
Personally, I’m writing my Congressmen daily to encourage action toward the repeal of these orders; I suggest everyone get involved in the effort.
IPCC Fifth Report Leaked
This was actually three weeks ago, but this isn’t really a super-topical blog. Apparently, the trend continues of the real world stubbornly refusing to conform to the IPCC’s predictions of catastrophic super-warming and global disaster. This is much in keeping with what I’m currently reading in Heartland Institute’s new report, as well.
I’m fighting a bit of a bug to get through both of these reports, but the main thing is this: real world observation always, always, ALWAYS trumps computer modeling.
Victim Disarmament Legislation Being Introduced
Senator Feinstein is slated to introduce new victim disarmament legislation today, and we all know that the President is keen to sign as much of it as he can. This would be a great time to start contacting your Congressmen and letting reminding them that their job is to protect your rights. The Congressional Switchboard and Search Directory can be found here.
U.S. Senate Fact-Checking Movies Suddenly?
Senators Feinstein, McCain and others apparently sent a letter to the director of the CIA demanding a fact-check of a Hollywood movie.
While I find the idea of fact-checking a work of fiction a bit ridiculous, I have to wonder why this movie in particulare was called on? Why wasn’t this level of Senatorial diligence/time waste paid to The Valley Elah, The Green Zone, Redacted? Hell, why not any of Michael Moore’s so-called ‘documentaries’?
I’m just saying–either be up front about your agenda, or hide it a lot better, Progressives. That’s just insulting.
The Birth Control Mandate
My opinion on the birth control mandate: if you really feel justified in forcing other people to pay (read: stealing) for your birth control, I am perfectly happy to fund 100% of your abstinence. If you are unhappy with abstinence (100% effective as both a method of birth control and disease prevention), I might be willing to bite the Constitutional bullet and fund a trip to the vet to get you spayed or neutered. Anything else you can pay for on your own.
Fiscal Cliff
Well, the big news of the day is the “fiscal cliff” negotiations. Despite the crushing national debt, the Democrats know that their majority will disappear as soon as they stop buying votes–so the best that has been done is to move the ‘fiscal cliff’ two months forward. In typical Progressivist fashion, CBS is reporting that the current two-month extension our national crisis will “add $600 billion to the national coffers”–by increasing taxes on those earning more than $450,000 per annum. Personally, if I were in that group, I’d emmigrate.
There really is no hope of relief for at least two years. The only hope left for our nation is that the Tea Party Congressmen already elected continue their fight, and take a super-majority in the next Congressional election. If we haven’t been foreclosed on by China by that time.
New Metastudy by Heartland Institute
I’ve just discovered it, and it’s over 130 pages long. So if you are interested you’ll have to wait for commentary until at least Wednesday. Or, read it yourself and discuss below. I’ll be particularly interested in where the information regarding “warmer temperatures” was drawn, since the average global temperature was the same in 2012 as in 1996.
Update: I’ve been ill for the last two days, I’ll post as soon as I can.
Happy New Year!
To be honest, I can think of little to be happy about this evening. Our nation is on the verge of what appears to be a deliberately-caused economic collapse, and our personal freedoms are being chainsawed away by the same administration to a chorus of cheers from the news and entertainment media, and a disturbingly large number of what, for want of a better term, I shall call “citizens of the United States”.
Let us celebrate this, then: a common goal. To achieve through voting and by educating others, the restoration of United States as the bastion of individual freedom, personal responsibility, real education and prosperity in world. It will be a difficult fight, and to be honest, I believe that the weight of history is against us. But we must not forget what it was that made us unique: we are not a nation born of a single geographical demarcation or ethnic grouping. We are one from the many. If any nation could ever break the descent into totalitarianism, it is us.
Let us make a Happy New Year. Godspeed.
Reasonable Faith: Pascal’s Wager
This post is inspired by Dr. William L. Craig’s explaination of Pascal’s Wager on his website. I have only recently discovered Dr. Craig’s writings and, while not usually a fan of Evangelical Churches, Dr. Lane appears to be an excellent logician. I did have a point to make about this argument in particular however. From the question:
“First, how do we know which God to believe in? Thousands of Gods have been claimed to exist and it seems that the probability of picking the right one is minute.”
Dr. Lane’s reply:
“In other words…God does not exist is actually an indefinitely complex disjunction of various deities who might exist if the Christian God does not.”
I often have to explain this error of category to atheists; it is even more unfortunate when I must explain it to fellow Christians. “God” and “god” are not the same word, nor are they the same category of being. “God”, correctly used, refers to the metaphysical cause, the Ultimate Reality; the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle and Aquinas’ Prime Mover. “God” is not a person, existing beyond the subject/object duality. Being perfect,”God” does not want nor act (since any lack or action-in-progress is by definition an incompleteness, and therefore imperfection). “A god”, on the other hand, is an anthropomorphic, supernatural personification of a natural force. Life, death, war, the sky, lightning… all have been called “gods” before. “A god” is a person; whatever supernatural force may be attributed to him, he still has limited perspective and incomplete understanding. Being persons, it is in the nature of gods to act in according to whatever force they personify.
Note that, in this schema, there can be only one “God”. God has been referred to by many names–YHVH, Allah, Ra, Brahman. The difference in mythology surrounding God is a function of different limited humans from different cultures attempting to understand Ultimate Reality, not a function of potentially competing Ultimate Realities. That is, Arabic culture has shaped Islam to be very different from Christianity; however, in both cases the object of the religion is “God”, and not “a god”. Therefore, the question of “which God is real” is actually nonsense. The correct question is, ‘is there an Ultimate Reality or not?’–after which different theologies may, if desired, be examined for applicability.
If I may be referred to as a “believer”, which I would call in inaccurate term, then I believe in God because I believe in a rational, investigable universe. If there is no God, no rational ordering principle of the universe, then there is no reason to assume that scientific investigation will continue to bear any meaningful fruit (nor was there to begin with). For the same reason, I do not believe in “gods.” If there are arbitrary forces which act supernally to the nature of reality,then there is also no reason to believe that science will continue to bear useful fruit.
Moving Targets
In a Twitter conversation last night, I was directed to a pro-victim-disarmament “study by Harvard University”. The link I was to follow never opened, but I did find their most recent study on my own (and I certainly agree with the author’s conclusions).
On the contrary, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center has collected abstracts from several studies, all of which (unsurprisingly) come out in favor of victim-disarmament. How is this possible? In two ways:
The first is by making argumentum ad passiones, the appeal to emotion. One of Harvard’s cited sources reports that, in a survey of Boston 7th-graders who illegally carried firearms, most wished they lived in a society where no one could have firearms. Let me first point out the ridiculousness of the survey group. 12-year-old criminals? I’m certain they were completely honest and forthright. Then there’s the problem of the question asked: do they really wish to live in a society in which 80-year-old women have no way to defend themselves from thieves and murderers? Perhaps they do–but what does that say about their credibility in the survey?
The second way is by moving targets. You see, the second-most-important question in this debate (the first is Constitutionality) is, “does increased availability of firearms to law-abiding citizens increase or decrease crime and fatalities?” However, in study after study by the pro-victim-disarmament groups, the question asked is, “does increased availability of firearms to law-abiding citizens increase or decrease the rate of gun-related homicide?” Note that, almost by definition, increased availability of firearms will increase the rate of any type of firearm-related death. If ten homicides per annum were reported in a society without legal access to firearms, let us say that one of them would have been committed with a firearm. Say firearms were then legalized, and the next year seven homicides are committed, four of them with firearms. The victim-disarmament studies could correctly report that firearm-related homicides had quadrupled, while ignoring the inconvenient fact that they had been reduced by 30% overall. Unfortunately, only the abstracts in these studies were available, so I cannot examine the actual data collected. Nor can I identify the definition of the word “homicide” in these studies, but a category for “justifiable self-defense” is universally lacking in the available information. I can only examine the abstracts in conjunction with other statistics, which demonstrate quite clearly that less access to firearms by law abiding citizens increases crime rates, in with the Constitution, which affirms that the right of American citizens to own firearms shall not be infringed.
There is a final point I would like to make about firearms and crime rates, however. Several years ago, I read Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker (ugh). In it, he describes a model of behavioral equilibrium in a population (I’m sure that there was a specific name for the model, but I can’t recall), wherein different interacting behaviors will be exibited in different proportions of the population depending upon how effective they are. I think that it is entirely possible in the society of the United States that, due to the negative image of firearms portrayed by news and entertainment media, carry of firearms by law-abiding citizens has not reached the saturation point of being as effective a deterrent as they might be. In otherwords, so few people actually carry, out of the total population of possible victims, that criminals may still safely assume that their victims are disarmed. Of course, when they are wrong, they may press the issue to the point of fatality, thus leading to an increase in “firearms-related deaths”. However, if a much more significant portion of the population carried firearms, it would no longer be safe for criminals to assume that someone was an easy victim, leading to an much greater reduction in crime.
Update: Someone agrees with me.
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