harmonicminer

This lady is absolutely right. Abortion IS the civil rights issue of our time, and the most helpless among us are those whose civil rights have been taken away.

During the runup to the health-care jam-down, Obama said repeatedly that, “If you like the coverage you have now, you can keep it.”  He said it loudly, everywhere, to everyone.

We knew it was a lie.  The media is finally starting to admit it.

In an unintentionally humorous reference, AP reporters remind us that women really are different from men, as Fearing rout, Obama, Dems reach to female voters

Women could hold the key for Obama and his party as Democrats look to minimize expected widespread losses at all levels of government in a year when, particularly on the Republican side, female candidates top ballots in statewide races in Connecticut, South Carolina, California, New Hampshire, New Mexico and elsewhere.

Hope for the Democrats: A lot of women are undecided, and more than a third who are likely to vote say they could still change their minds before the election.

If that doesn’t underscore the kinds of women voters that the Democrats court, I’m not sure what would. The election is less than two weeks off… nothing new remains to be learned about any candidate… and over a third of “likely women voters” haven’t made up their minds for sure…. and Democrats see that as a hopeful sign.

Truth, Not Ideological Balance

As the academy grows more stridently left wing, conservatives respond with calls for ideological affirmative action, for schools to hire more right-thinking faculty so students encounter intellectual diversity. This is a seductively alluring scheme, and thanks to wealthy donors, it is proliferating.

It is an ill-advised and ultimately anti-intellectual strategy, even in the unlikely event that it succeeds. The academy can not be, nor should it be, an intellectual version of Noah’s Ark. Sadly, this conservative version of “inclusion” mimics the Left’s subordination of truth to ideology.

The quest should be about insisting that whatever professors teach, content should be truthful, whether this truth is liberal, conservative, reactionary, or Marxist, whether the subject in English or sociology. After all, who wants conservative falsehoods to “balance” radical dishonesty? It is fantasy to insist that if students learn at 9 a.m. that 2+2=3 and at 11 a.m., 2+2=5, they will eat lunch knowing that 2+2=4.

The hunt to hire truth-seekers changes everything. Out with the ideological litmus tests; in with character and temperament. If a Marxist job candidate argues that Africa is poor owing to colonial exploitation, the sharp rejoinder should be, “Can you prove this?” Ditto for the conservative job seeker who insists that only capitalist free markets can solve Africa’s poverty.

Admittedly, abandoning ideological labels complicates life, and may even discourage donors from funding pet projects, but this is what the life of the mind is about.

I admit to having made the argument before that the leftists in higher education (including Christian higher ed) should include conservative, right leaning viewpoints just because they are there, for the sake of balance if nothing else.

But maybe that’s because my sights were set too low.  Of course, if this kind of skeptical search for evidence behind assertion became the norm in higher education of almost any stripe, a great many of the favored programs and initiatives so beloved of administrators and public relations people would have to be reconsidered.    So I’m not holding my breath about some new rebirth in higher education’s ability to be skeptical about itself, and, for now, I’ll settle just for a balance between right and left…  the eventual dialectic may take care of the rest, if that elusive balance is ever achieved.

I suppose the message to us all is this:  be sure you know the difference between what you actually know and what is just your PR.

During WWII, as the Allies were trying to deceive German intelligence about the D-Day invasion location and timing, they used “inflatable military hardware” to make it look to German air-based photo recon as if the Allies were massing in places that the weren’t on the British coast.

This idea seems to have caught on….  here it is employed in Russia, although I’m not sure whom they’re trying to fool these days.

In any case, I do find myself wondering if this isn’t a great metaphor for Obama’s economic policy.

You know:  make it look like you’re doing something, as long as people don’t look too close.  Talk about stimulus a lot, without actually pointing at something that has been stimulated.

Other than the tea parties, of course.

Harry Reid is busy looking for something he can inflate as a successful policy.

But he only has to look in the mirror to see a balloon that’s about to pop.

I so resonate with this post in diversity in higher education that I’m just going to link to it.  More interesting links there.

There is a TV show called Flashpoint.  Each episode purports to be a day in the life of a sort of SWAT team that is called out to deal with unusually difficult circumstances, hostages, major robberies in process, bomb threats, etc.

I’ve watched several episodes of it, spread over several months, and somehow the show seems to have a hard time just telling it like it usually is, namely that there are bad guys and good guys, and the good guys usually are wearing uniforms.  But on Flashpoint, it seems that the usual deal is to try to make the “bad guys” as likable and humanly accessible as possible, almost to make us root for them….  that is, of course, when the show gets around to having actual bad guys, instead of merely the misunderstanding of the week, or the hurt feelings/over-reaction of the week.

I happened to have DVR’d an episode that aired August 13, called “Follow the Leader” and I just got around to watching it.

It featured (gasp) yet another White Aryan Conspiracy, this one involved with plans to blow up several public facilities, targets chosen to kill as many minorities as possible, along with newly sworn in citizens at a citizenship ceremony, etc.  It featured the usual charismatic white middle aged REAL bad guy, along with a couple of “sympathetic” bad guy brothers who are just confused and in over their heads.  It also involved the usual trope, namely that the bad guy leader doesn’t plan to sacrifice himself to bomb civilian targets, but instead plans to take advantage of impressionable young people to do it for him, personally blowing up the bombs on the spot if necessary, at the cost of their own lives.

Well.  There WAS a Timothy McVey.  But as far as anyone can tell, he had only one co-conspirator.  That was in 1995.   Pretty much all the rest of the terrorist actions that have killed Americans since then have been Islamic terrorists.     I honestly can’t remember such a politically motivated, violent event before 1995, unless you count Obama’s friend Bill Ayers and his friends in the Weather Underground bombing this and that, or possibly the Black Panthers, or maybe the Symbionese Liberation Army or something of the sort.  As far as I can remember, there has never been a case since 1995 of home-grown, non-Islamic, White Aryan terrorists planning to bomb some innocent people.  If there has been such a plan, it apparently was not carried out.  Further, the authorities seem not to have arrested anyone planning such a thing…  because it would have been HUGE news in the major media, given how interested they are in equating Christian and Islamic “fundamentalists” as being equally dangerous to society.

I turned on my TV earlier today and was greeted by one of those cops shows with lots of brilliant, earnest investigators trying to figure out who murdered a late term abortionist.  That happens about once every ten years in the USA, but has happened on TV maybe around a hundred times in the last decade….  or more.

Hollywood is clueless.  It hasn’t had an original idea in years.  It doesn’t have one today.

So they make cop shows that feature cops who would be nearly unrecognizable in motivation or perspective to most actual working cops….  who are mostly conservative, have a clear view of right and wrong, good and evil, and who don’t normally hew to the politically correct line of most cops on TV, except when forced to by their city councils.

There is one bright spot.   A new show called “Chase” in its first two episodes has featured irredeemably evil bad guys, and there is no ambiguity about what should be their just deserts.  If they start having the “Chase” federal marshalls chasing down innocent people who accidentally ran afoul of the law, maybe I’ll change my mind.  But it looks promising.

Not that I have much time to watch TV.  I just got around to watching something I DVR’d in August, after all.  But Christmas break is coming, and it would be nice if the villain of the week was actually a villain that we’re likely to run across, instead of one that shows up mostly in the imagination of fevered Hollywood producers.

As the major traditional media continues its usual cover-up for Democrats and attack-ads-pretending to be news against Republicans, this might be a good time to review its malpractice in the last election.

You simply can’t trust ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post or the LA Times.

They won’t report what you need to know.  They’ll make mountains out of molehills.  They’ll tell half the truth and pretend it’s the full story.  Sometimes, they will simply lie.  Sure, they’ll tell the full truth sometimes…  but rarely, and you’ll seldom know when that is.

Best to ignore them.

It would seem that maybe Goldilocks is still a fairy tale.

I am reading Dallas Willard’s book Renovation of the Heart.  It is challenging me.

As usual, Prof. Willard is philosopher and theologian, counselor and therapist mixed with insightful older-brother, all rolled into one.

He has convinced me that I have a LONG way to go (not that I needed much convincing).   Not the most important, but among other things he has convinced me that the memorization of large swaths of scripture is important.  Not just remembering the general content, and knowing where to find the details, but actually being able to recite it.  I think I had always seen that as a kid’s Sunday School sort of thing, a sort of summer vacation Bible school exercise.

So I think I’m going to work some consistent effort at that into my life.  As I said, this is far from the most important thing in the book…  you really have to read it to get the flavor and depth of it.

As a teaser:  if you are a person who finds that your feelings don’t always, or mostly, line up with your thoughts, or what you wish your feelings were, this book is for you.  If you are a person who finds it difficult to wholeheartedly and joyfully live the commitment you have made to Christ, this book is for you.

Prof. Willard does not chide.  He gently leads, and his words penetrate to the heart of the matter.

Highly recommended.