Bill's Comments

Today in USA Today, was an article on the lobbyists use of houses near the Capitol to host cocktail parties and fundraisers for politicians. What is more, they are generally unreportable under current law. So much for the lobby reform legislation. Oh, you really believed it would work? And you still believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

We have allowed our politicians to peddle votes and influence for so long we don't even pay attention to it. The real cause is not the lobbyists--they are just responding in a rational way to the opportunities. Actually it is only partly the fault of the politicians, who want to stay in power so do whatever is necessary to do so. The real fault is with the American people, who agree to have the government take their tax money and redistribute it in ways that were never intended by the Founding Fathers.

As long as enough people think they get back more from the government than they put into it, this situation will prevail. The money comes from a group that is trading favors with the politicians and passing the costs on to us in the form of higher prices--the American businesses. We make a lot of pious noise about the corruption in the Middle East and Asia, bribes and payoffs being the normal mode of business, without ever admitting we are just as corrupt. It simply flows through different channels.

The solution is to get the government out of all the activities that deal with regulation and giveaways, and non-military contracts. Get the Federal government out of all the social welfare crap and hand it back to the states.

Of course it will never happen--it would be financial suicide for politicians. Graft in the form of lobbyists favors is their major payoff. Tom Clancy was right, the entire government would have to be destroyed for it to be fixed.

.....unachievable.

Our troops in the Middle East, risk their lives to keep us from having to risk our own. They do this voluntarily because they believe in what they do and in the United States. They also deserve to be paid fairly and according to the rules under which they enlisted. One of those rules is that money received overseas is tax-free. This is not just a rule for the military, it is also a rule for business men and women who make far more than our troops. But when Congress fails to pass the necessary bills to pay our troops, the troops suffer while the business man or woman continues on with "business as usual."

One of the ways the military rewards re-enlistment, which avoids retraining raw recruits, is to pay a bonus. The amount of the bonus, though significant to an individual is far less than what it costs to replace a trained soldier. Because Congress felt it necessary to play their political games with the war, and not pass the military appropriations bill(s) troops cannot receive their re-enlistment bonus while overseas, and as a result an individual soldier will lose thousands of dollars by having to pay taxes on their enlistment bonus.

Put yourself in their situation. They perform critical work and were made promises on what it would be worth in pay, only to find out that when Congress wants to play political games, the promises are worthless. Such is the republic they defend. There are two ways we can help, write our Congressional representatives in the short run, and vote them out of office and vote in someone who genuinely cares for the troops. Our priorities need to be security first, welfare second. Let us hold our representatives accountable for this, and make sure the troops, our first line of defense are properly paid and cared for.

.....unless you can give the President a stick in the eye.

The Power of God

This Saturday, the verses for discussion at the Men's Breakfast were the 29th Psalm.

Ascribe to the Lord, O sons of the mighty,
Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the glory due to his name;
Worship the Lord in holy array
The voice of the Lord is upon the waters;
The God of glory thunders,
The Lord is over many waters.
The voice of the Lord is powerful.
The voice of the Lord is majestic.
The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars;
Yes, the voice of the lord breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon skip like a calf,
And Sirion like a young wild ox.
The voice of the Lord hews out flames of fire.
The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;
The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the Lord makes the deer to calve
And strips the forest bare;
And in His temple everything says, "Glory!"
The Lord sat as King at the flood;
Yes, the Lord sits as King forever.
The Lord will give strength to his people;
The Lord will bless His people with peace.
--- New American Standard Bible

After I read the passage I said that the psalmist obviously lived in the outdoors and saw God in everything around him. I then asked, "Where do we see God today?" I got one response of "In our families," and another "In creation." The second speaker then made the analogy that since a building has a designer so creation had a designer. After that there was silence. So the discussion went to another topic.

What troubles me is that here was a collection of devout men, who attend church regularly, who have no sense of the presence of God. What is it they believe in? How can they pray to God and yet never sense Him? I don't mean that one must always feel his presence, and it may be only indirectly, but how can someone claim to believe in something never experienced? Alternatively, it could be that the experience is so personal and subjective that they are either embarassed or afraid of ridicule if they express it. In a group of two dozen men, who have been having breakfast together twice a month for years, this seems a bit far-fetched, especially in light of many of the discussions that have occurred both at breakfasts and retreats.

But perhaps I have stumbled onto a problem with mainline Protestantism and an explanation for its slow demise, to be replaced by churches based on emotional experiences and appeals. When I was much younger, during my college years, I would visit friends that owned a farm on weekends and long vacations other than Christmas. Their church services were simple and the preacher was very good at weaving an almost hypnotic spell. One also had the feeling that they never questioned their faith, and that most could point to some time or place where they felt God's presence.

Intellectual pursuit has been extremely successful in the past several hundreds of years in improving the day to day lot of mankind, especially in Western civilization. We are now starting to make it almost a religion in its own right in our obsession to remove all traces of Christian and Jewish belief from our public culture. Any idea is automatically suspect if it has a religious background to it. Where once religious-based principles were the touchstone of moral codes and general judgment of behavior, now intellectuality is attempting to rule, and the mainline Protestant churches are beginning to go along with it. The most recent notable example being the Archbishop of Canterbury stating that the Christmas story was a myth. [Sure it is, but the way it was done, and the timing served as an attempt to undermine anyone believing in the story in any way.]

The problem is that few of us are intellectual elites that can live on rationality alone (or rather pretend to do so). The myths and legends are necessary to provide us with a touchstone to our natures. Having lived thirty years as a wannabe intellectual elitist, I can say it was hard work, and created a subtly impoverished life. Actually, the elitists have their own set of myths and legends, though they would passionately deny that is what they are. The two main ones are The Big Bang, and Evolution. This is not to say that those two concepts are in error, it is to say they provide for the same needs as the Genesis and other biblical legends do for many Judeo-Christian believers.

With the control of public discourse becoming more and more absolutely secular, our experience of life no longer is allowed to consider God as part of it. We are too busy with cell-phones, TVs, iPods, and constant activity to have any time for contemplation. Life has become a constant rush and a constant interruption of our thoughts. Bedtime after all the family is asleep, airplanes, and waiting on my wife are the only times I find for my own thoughts. I make those times to think, so what about others that are given no time to think, and don't realize they need it? It was during one of those times--an airplane at 32,000 feet on a normal day, that I had my most notable experience of God, and it was very subtle, and very real.

There is an old expression, if you are up to your waist in alligators, it is hard to drain the swamp. Today's society creates alligators as fast or faster than we can deal with them--if we let it. Currently it is all the pundit-babble on the upcoming elections, both primary and general. Or if you wish, all the sordid details of our celebrity sub-culture. One can easily continually distract oneself with You-tube, blogs, and a myriad of on-line entertainments, as well as traditional TV enhanced by hundreds of channels with any choice one could wish for. This kind of superficiality is reinforced with the lack of substance of our education system.

So perhaps it is no wonder that the mainline Protestant faiths are declining. It isn't about their message, it is about their lack of engagement, their inability to reach the feelings of the parishioners in a religiously meaningful way. They have become too smart for their own good, to quote another old expression. Or perhaps we should say they have lost their common sense.

It crosses my mind that the reason we see so little desire to pursue the war or to really be tough is because too few of us have had to struggle for anything. We have grown up thinking life is easy. In the US life is easy, even the poor have it better than most of the rest of the world. In fact, welfare has taken even the strife from being poor. It isn't easy, but survival is almost guaranteed.

As a consequence the reality of the rest of the world is viewed either with disbelief, detachment, or denial. Life is so benign they cannot conceive of a whole society of murderous, paranoid, wannabe conquerors, so they deny their existance. For a short period of time, 9/11 changed their view of reality, but because we were successful in preventing a re-occurrence, the old view has re-asserted itself.

Because little, if anything, requires sustained effort covering years, we want everything over in a short period of time. Post Vietnam, every military action until the current war, has been relatively brief. This has done us no favors. All it does is reinforce the attitude that wars are like movies, over in a short period of time.

Then there is the issue of casualties. Comparisons to the casualties of WW II or Korea are meaningless. Only people 60 or older remember either of these. Quoting the casualties in Vietnam simply brings up the reflexive attitudes of the 60's in anybody that remembers them. What is striking is that so many young people, who weren't even born during or shortly after Vietnam have such animosity and even quote old sayings and songs from the period.

I think it is because we have allowed them to be taught, not by us, but by the teachers that were part of the Vietnam protest movements. They got away with it in 1968-72, and feel entitled to claim correctness and righteousness. This is passed on to our children. The soldiers that came back from WW II and Korea were more interested in getting on with their lives than in dealing with issues and abstracts, leaving the field wide-open for a takeover of academia by the left/liberal axis. The professors the returning GIs had were from the old school, but the professors their children had were not.

Nothing in the experience of most of our population can relate to what is actually going on in the Middle East or to the cultural chasm that separates Islam from Judeo-Christianity. Having been raised on faux tolerance (any challenge to the status quo is tolerated, any endorsement is not) they think they can simply talk their way through the issues. Unfortunately guns, knives, and explosives don't reason.

This is just a short note on something that occurred to me yesterday.

We generally use ad hominum to point out that someone is using the opponents character to defeat an argument. This is of course considered incorrect as the character of the arguer generally has little to do with the validity of the argument, at least in a truly logical discussion.

However, it is the same fallacy if we use a person's character to support an argument. "It must be true, look what a good person he/she is." Or even, "She/he must know, they are experts." This latter error is often overlooked, because it usually supports what we want to see. For an example of the fallacy of experts, just look at the global warming controversies.

There is one area that referring to the character of the arguer may be valid--when the argument is not complete in its logic and information. This is a form of fuzzy logic where one is dealing in trends, and missing facts, though there may be enough information to at least put constraints on the issue. The downside is in evaluating the character of the "expert" or authority. We often chose our authorities not so much for their true capabilities, but for how well we get along with them, or how much we like what they say.