Gus Van Horn

... Massachusetts

This weekend, Mrs. Van Horn's folks are visiting with us and helping out with some of the preparations for our moves to the Land of the Puritans.

As many of you know, she's getting ready to start her residency, which is the next stage of her medical career. The assignment to Boston was random within the set of medical schools that interviewed her. She starts on July 1, so we're moving her up there in mid-June. I move up there once I find a job up there and tie up some loose ends down here.

Perhaps the most striking thing about our move so far has been something I've alluded to before: the cost of living difference between Houston and Boston. As I noted earlier, "[If] the median cost of living in the United States [is] 100, it is 83 in Houston and 126 in Boston." That's somewhat abstract. Here's a concrete example: My wife is temporarily renting a studio apartment smaller than our bedroom for about $400 a month more than the three-bedroom house we presently call home. (Gulp!)

Part of this reflects location as she does need to be relatively close to her hospital, but not much. Our old commute was only ten to fifteen minutes in Houston. By car, not public transit, and without much walking.

Depending on what I end up doing, we could end up renting a two-bedroom apartment or buying a house a little farther out, but even if we swing the latter, we will still have roughly a year of not having room for our things. (I see the job hunt as taking months, and I don't want to buy anywhere until I've been there awhile.) We will have to get rid of some of our things and store others.

We're both feeling a little sentimental. But at the same time she's excited about finally moving forward with her medical career, I face massive uncertainty. I want to keep writing, and think I finally know how to move beyond blogging. But writing at that level takes time.

And that is the main thing I am worried about in this move. The higher cost of living is partially compensated by higher pay -- if I leave academia, which remains my current plan. But it is only partially compensated with higher pay, and moving away from the center of town could cost me in terms of (commuting) time. Beyond that, I don't really feel free to discuss my possible career moves any further here....

Instead, I'll move back to what originally got me to this post, the huge "spring cleaning" type of opportunity this represents. We're pack rats (and ended up with things from her family after Katrina hit), but even at our most sentimental, we both see this as a chance to drop down to a more sane level of material accumulation. After this weekend, we should have a much better idea of what we'll move, what we'll get rid of, and what we'll store.

If it were all up to me, we'd get down to a two-bedroom apartment level pretty easily, but some of the Katrina stuff has real significance to my wife. We have a baby grand piano among other things. I want to sell it, but I may have to settle for storage on that one. Whatever the outcome, as I see it, there will be that much less uncertainty after this weekend, and that will be my big payoff.

The randomness of the move, and learning about it when I did have left me flat-footed and facing a huge blob of uncertainty about many aspects of my future life. And these ramblings have helped me identify the uncertainty as what I really hate about this move.

The first step of knowing how to deal with a problem is always defining parameters. Sometimes, you find that you have a smaller problem than you thought, and sometimes you don't. But you always end up with a better idea of what to do. And that, gentle reader, is what I am really looking forward to this weekend.

And it will be my strategy beyond that. Thank you for your indulgence.


Even though it doesn't really fit in with the rest of what has turned out to be a rumination about uncertainty, I'll end with a top ten list, which I'd promised myself I'd do, and which is what I'd intended to do here in the first place.

Although uncertainty is the worst of the move, I regard Houston as my second home town, and I am really going to miss it. But I won't miss all of it! In the vein of easing myself out of here, I will compose a list of ten things -- in no particular order -- I will miss about Houston which I shall balance with things I either won't miss, or will get to enjoy instead in Boston.

I'll miss ...

1. ... grilling in my back yard, but I won't miss mowing it.
2. ... good Mexican food and especially Ninfa's, but I'll get to enjoy some really good seafood.
3. ... the freedom of driving my own car most of the time, but I do like to walk, and (Wow!) perhaps Boston really is cheaper in a category!
4. ... the flexibility of the schedule of my old job, but I will not miss its unpredictability.
5. ... the independent sense of life of Texans and the dynamism of Houston, but I'll get to drink in lots of American history. (My thanks to the correspondent who reminded me of this.)
   
6. ... the lack of pervasive influence of leftists in Texas, but I'll enjoy the fact that Boston offers more opportunities to participate in intellectual pursuits.
7. ... my friends in Houston, but I'll get to make new ones in Boston and ... oh yeah, about half of my old friends in Houston have already moved up there!
   
8. ... the fact that I basically get to skip winter every year, but I won't miss the high humidity at all.
9. ... the subtropical springtime, which teems with life, but I'll enjoy seeing what the season known as "fall" that I keep hearing about looks like.
10. ... the ability to travel cheaply and easily to visit relatives in Mississippi and Louisiana, but now, they all want to see Boston, so maybe I won't have to travel so much! And we're closer to some of my wife's relatives now.
    

I'm glad I did that. I feel better already.

-- CAV

Posted at 7:40 AM. Permalink | Comments (7) Backlinks

I know, it's a Madrassa like Islam is "peaceful"....

The following video clip should provide an interesting follow-up to my April post about allegations by a substitute school teacher that Minnesota is financing the teaching of Islam with public funds.


Several things are worth noting about this video and the circumstances that led to my finding it.

As Ayn Rand once said (at second occurrence of search term "faith and force" -- why don't they have hypertext anchors for individual quotes?):

[F]aith and force are corollaries, and ... mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind -- a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. [bold added]

Thanks for the demonstration, there, Mo!

But what's really striking is how I found this -- from a blog hosted at the online version of the late theocrat William F. Buckley's National Review. Thank God the people who want Christian prayer in the public schools again are on the lookout for separation of (the wrong) church from state! And thank God the infidels -- I once heard a Catholic priest say, "That was our word!" -- set themselves up so well as foils to Christian "tolerance"!

For its objective merits in showing faith in action, this video also, conveniently for Christian theocrats, allows them to smear non-Christians in general, by sloppy comparison.

The sloppiness lies in ignoring the essential similarity between Islam and Christianity -- reliance on faith as a means to knowledge -- while focusing on superficial differences -- like how thoroughly integrated into one's life an individual's rejection of reason actually is.

As Greg Perkins so astutely pointed out yesterday when noting how one prominent Christian apologist likes to lay the blame for Communist atrocities on atheism:

[S]uch a comparison is fundamentally confused. Recall that atheism is not itself an ideology and therefore doesn't lead people to do anything in particular -- good or bad. So again we need to approach the issue in terms that will actually shed some light. The illuminating question to consider is: What does reason offer humanity over faith?

...

[L]ong-standing Christianity only accommodated the relatively recent changes that unleashed minds brought while its overwhelming authority eroded. We were delivered from the Christian Dark Ages despite Christianity, not because of it.

Does the author of the Phi Beta Cons post at NRO himself want Christian prayer back in public schools? I must admit that I don't know. But he is working for a publication animated by the malevolent spirit of William F. Buckley. At best, the author is making a theocrat's legacy look better than it should.

-- CAV

Posted at 7:16 AM. Permalink | Comments (6) Backlinks

Meditation on a Japanese Parrot

Q. What did he know, and when did he know it?

A. A sequence of sounds, and all along.

A Japanese family has been reunited with its pet, thanks to having taught it a sequence of noises that they knew other human beings would interpret as a name and an address.

"I'm Mr. Yosuke Nakamura," the bird told the veterinarian, according to Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs.

"We checked the address, and what do you know, a Nakamura family really lived there. So we told them we've found Yosuke," Uemura said. [bold added]

This episode reminds me of a discussion of the epistemological status of the arbitrary, in which Leonard Peikoff likens arbitrary pronouncements to the squawkings of a bird:

The arbitrary ... has no relation to evidence, facts, or context. It is the human equivalent of [noises produced by] a parrot . . . sounds without any tie to reality, without content or significance.

Note that the police didn't just take the parrot at his "word".

This parrot didn't know its address as an address any more than a mailing label does. For all we know, it had finally escaped its tormentors only to be foiled by its instinct for mimicry.

Remember this the next time you hear someone citing this as an example of animal intelligence. (And you will.) Some birds do display remarkably sophisticated behavior, but this isn't even an example of that.

Sue the Bastards!

This reads like a story straight out of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.

The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

Let me count the things that are wrong with this bill!

First, it passes the (highly inflated) buck on the real source of rising prices. (It's not just oil, and for oil, it's not just that we're printing money.) Second, short of the United States taking military action well in excess of what it should have done decades ago when foreign tyrants started stealing the property of American citizens, this bill will have only symbolic import. Third, and what will this bill symbolize? American spinelessness. Fourth, ....

That's enough for now. Only obscenities could adequately describe this defiant shaking of the fist from behind the robes of the judiciary, which Congress seems to be confusing with a mother's skirt.

I wish this were merely pathetic.

Sue Noel Keenlyside!

Perhaps while Congress is feeling litigious, Heidi "Lysenko" Cullen can persuade it to sue for the removal of European climatologist Noel Keenlyside's scientific credentials. After all, he is flirting with a sin on a par with Holocaust denial:

Climate scientist Noel Keenlyside, leading a team from Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, for the first time entered verifiable data on ocean circulation cycles into one of the U. N.'s climate supercomputers, and the machine spit out a projection that there will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.

And Tom Knutson....

Global warming isn't to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject.

Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, research meteorologist Tom Knutson reported in a study released Sunday. [bold added]

So "the science" isn't settled that we will have global warming or, that if we do, it will be all bad.

And the fact remains that whatever the scientific conclusion might be, it still doesn't justify the leftist agenda being pushed on account of "climate change".

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected name of Noel Keenlyside. Where on earth did I get "Neely"?

Posted at 6:44 AM. Permalink | Comments (4) Backlinks

There is an interesting article posted over at Slate that touches on John McCain's role in forcing television manufacturers to plunge into digital technology before the market warranted and how this might lead to his own political undoing.

For all I know, McCain is in fine physical condition. If he appears older than his chronological age, that probably has something to do with the torture he endured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam; nine years ago the Arizona Republic reported that he continued to experience "orthopedic limitations" related to his imprisonment, including pain in his shoulders and right knee. But TV is unfair, as Richard Nixon learned when his perspiration and five o'clock shadow helped give John F. Kennedy the edge in the first-ever televised presidential debates. Had HDTV been available eight years later, I'm not sure Nixon could have won the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency.

...

The prevailing cliche about 2008 is that it's the first YouTube election. But it may turn out to be, more saliently, the first high-definition election. If that's the case, then McCain -- more precisely, McCain's political ambition -- may play the unfortunate role of Dr. Frankenstein, whose lifeless body at the end of Mary Shelley's novel is wept over by the demon he created. ... But doesn't Obama look fabulous? [links dropped]

Only Hillary Clinton prevailing over Obama might keep us from the cold comfort of seeing, perhaps, McCain being killed by the monster he helped create. The man who so despises freedom of speech as to hinder it during elections would lose in part on appearances (not that his ideas have any merit or substantive difference from Obama's). The man who could not leave the world's most innovative and productive economy alone would succumb due to the very results of his meddling. The man who so likes giving out orders would be foiled by an army of too-obedient machines.

This would be mere poetic justice -- the only kind available in this year's elections. This result cannot head off tyranny, for these candidates are fundamentally the same despite appearances. But in terms of America's long-term future, perhaps technology and McCain's inopportune power lust might be the kind of break we can take advantage of.

It will only be by using every break we get to make the case for individual rights -- and yet not depending on dumb luck -- that we who value freedom can stop the advance of tyranny.

-- CAV

Posted at 8:44 AM. Permalink | Comments (6) Backlinks

Obama's Altruism

If he gets elected, no one can say he didn't warn us:

Pitching his message to Oregon's environmentally-conscious voters, Obama called on the United States to "lead by example" on global warming, and develop new technologies at home which could be exported to developing countries.

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

"That's not leadership. That's not going to happen," he added. [bold added]

Political candidates have long expressed sentiments that mean, "You have no right to use your own property for your own enjoyment," but I do not recall anyone ever putting such demands for human self-sacrifice so explicitly in terms of their consequences.

And speaking of SUVs, ...

... I do appreciate their value as annoyances to the global warming alarmist crowd, and I fully support the right of anyone who wants one to own one, but I have never really liked them myself.


So I was glad to see that my favorite "High Life Man" commercial has finally made it to YouTube! The whole series of these commercials, directed by Errol Morris, is indexed here. Which is your favorite?

Military Field Research Finds Use for Korans

This news story shows that the American sense of life is alive and well, but that even in the military, our leaders are succumbing to leftism:

An American soldier used a Quran, the Islamic holy book, for target practice in a predominantly Sunni area west of Baghdad, prompting an apology from the U.S. military, a spokesman said Sunday.

Were it not for the incitements contained in that book, our boys would have no need to be over there (although they would be done by now were they properly unleashed). We owe no apology to anyone who takes those rantings seriously.

Roundups Galore

Rational Jenn posted the latest Objectivist Roundup last week, and Bo has posted a huge roundup of posts from submariner bloggers.

Also, it's not in roundup form, but Rational Jenn found three neat quizzes. My answers? 10/10, Rubik's Cube ("You are engaging and popular. People are drawn to your colorful personality.As much as they try, people can't stay away from you. And while you seem easy to understand, people can't figure out what direction you're coming from."), and Ham Sandwich:

You are quiet, understated, and a great comfort to all of your friends.
Over time, you have proven yourself as loyal and steadfast.
And you are by no means boring. You do well in any situation - from fancy to laid back.

Your best friend: The Turkey Sandwich

Your mortal enemy: The Grilled Cheese Sandwich

No time to fiddle with HTML today....

Diana Hsieh on Marriage

I found this short post on the right to marry very insightful since it rather efficiently touched on many of the aspects of that question that I have seen make discussions on the topic difficult.

Joe Kellard's Writings

Fans of Joe Kellard, who blogs at The American Individualist, will be happy to know that he now also has a blog devoted to his professional writings.

-- CAV

Posted at 7:18 AM. Permalink | Comments (4) Backlinks

New York Times columnist David Brooks comments on a trend that hardly surprises me, given today's near-universal intellectual sloppiness and confusion: The embrace of mysticism by scientists. Indeed, although he fails to integrate the progression correctly (or particularly well), he does outline it in the way it unfolded.

Let's follow his outline, but in the vein of understanding how this progression follows from some of the philosophical errors common among today's intellectuals.

In the following, Brooks' comments are in plain text, and mine are in bold.

• To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. So far, so good.

• Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are "hard-wired" to do this or that. Religion is an accident. Most scientists are determinists and, to my knowledge, regard the idea of free will as inherently mystical. Determinism flies in the face of the evidence that man has volition, but to my knowledge, only Objectivists have entertained the idea of volition as being a form of causation inherent to intelligent beings, and arising from their material nature. On top of that, few understand that it is philosophy that sets the terms of the debate about epistemology, the nature of the mind, and indeed, what constitutes science. So they study the mind philosophically half-cocked and end up attempting to make pronouncements of a philosophic nature based on their evidence, when what they desperately need is a correct understanding of the nature of the mind in order to interpret this evidence properly.

• In this materialist view, people perceive God's existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. That does follow from materialism, if you mistake the widespread existence of religious belief for evidence that it confers an evolutionary advantage.

• If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God. Religion is a tangled knot of horrible philosophical premises and legitimate aspirations -- and the emotions that go with them. Imagine the insights we could have if scientists better understood what religion and emotions were when they were studying them! Instead, we have determinists ignorant about both looking at this. Brooks' hero, Tom Wolfe saw where this would go.

• The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it. The scientists are wasting their time here. Like I said, science does not set the terms of philosophical debates. It can eliminate some of the "gaps" in "god of the gaps" types of arguments, but this just proves my point.

• And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible. This follows from the nature of faith and the beginning of that slippery slope was the original concession: to "debate" the faithful at all.

• Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development. The false reason-emotion dichotomy pays off in spades for the religionists as scientists, disarmed in the face of (1) evidence that emotions might (gasp!) have a survival role for human beings, (2) their own ignorance of the nature of emotions, and (3) their own implicit acceptance of the reason-emotion dichotomy, find "evidence" of the supernatural.

• Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment. If altruism is everywhere, and a material being cannot have free will, widespread philosophical errors and their consequences must be instinctual!

• Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real. What did I say a while ago about having a grasp of the nature of emotions and of religion before attempting to study what goes on in the brain during religious-types of experiences?

• This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism. See Sam Harris.

• If you survey the literature (and I'd recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion. Yeah. The beliefs that already saturate our culture like a sponge left to soak in a sewer.
  

• The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It's going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

• In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. Unexpected -- only to the philosophical victims of Immanuel Kant....
  

Many of these scientists see philosophy as impotent, and themselves as coming to the rescue of humanity by offering hard facts and evidence on the "big questions". And yet it is their own ignorance of philosophy that is causing them to bolster the very enemies of reason who might ultimately undo the scientific revolution.

This scientist disagrees.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a typo from a quote. Evidently, I managed to change "hard-wired" to "hard-wire" after a cut-and-paste without realizing it. You can't sic 'em for being right!

Posted at 8:02 AM. Permalink | Comments (6) Backlinks

A Must-Read on "Islamist Lawfare"

Via HBL, I learned of this interview in FrontPage Magazine, in which attorney Brooke Goldstein discusses "Islamist Lawfare", a tactic used by more and more Islamic totalitarians to implement sharia through the abuse of Western legal systems.

Islamists with financial means have launched a "legal jihad", filing a series of malicious lawsuits, in American courts and abroad, and against anyone who speaks out against or writes about radical Islam and its sources of financing and support.

This type of lawfare is often predatory, filed without a serious expectation of winning, and undertaken as a means to intimidate, demoralize and bankrupt defendants. The lawsuits are often based on frivolous claims ranging from defamation to workplace harassment to plain Islamophobia, and have resulted in books being banned and pulped, in thousands of dollars worth of fines and in publishing houses and newspapers rejecting important works on counter-terrorism out of fear of being the next target.

...

Though American courts have proven less friendly to Islamist lawfare and have for the most part ruled to protect the exercise of free speech within this country, notwithstanding that fact, defendants who have been victimized by legal jihad in US courts, even if they end up winning their case, in the end they lose in time and money spent protecting their rights when they could have been doing and accomplishing much more productive things. [bold added]

Read the whole thing, and recall that although this tactic is all but the official government policy of some Moslem states, our own government has failed to make a principled stand against it.

Taking the Long View

In a comment to a post at Myrhaf, Kyle Haight puts forth very succinctly how one should weigh McCain vs. the Democratic candidate in the impending presidential election:

I too will probably pick the lesser of two evils. Where I differ from Mr. Conlon is in my assessment of which outcome is less evil. My political values are already defeated in this political cycle. All choices will launch massive assaults on freedom across a wide spectrum. But a McCain victory has broader ramifications. It isn't a choice between a totally socialist government and a slightly less socialist government. It's a choice between two parties whose orthodoxy is totally statist versus two parties one of which is totally statist and one of which is mixed. [bold added]

This is because McCain, as he said earlier, would "redefine the political landscape" -- in exactly the opposite way we need.

Interesting Historical Note

Last year, I marked the 40th anniversary of the landmark Loving v. Virginia case, in which the Supreme Court overturned laws that forbade interracial marriages. Yesterday, the New York Times published some interesting historical background on the case, noting that, "By the time that Richard and Mildred had begun to date in the 1950s, they had lived their whole lives in a community that had made an art form of evading Jim Crow restrictions on relationships."

Dignity

I've only read about two-thirds of it, but I have found this essay about the concept of dignity very thought-provoking, and not just because of how conservatives want to misuse it in their quest to impose religious restraints on medical technology.

Call me ... erm ... punctual!

I found a quiz over at Dithyramb this morning, and I took it. Did everything ... come out okay? Let's see....


Call me what you want, the description is mostly correct -- but let me explain why you should welcome my being right all the time....

-- CAV

Posted at 6:35 AM. Permalink | Comments (16) Backlinks