Sometimes I'm Actually Coherent

Misha, 1994-2011

2011-03-11T21:07:00.000-08:00

So I haven't been posting in a long time. Yeah, yeah... I know.

It's not that there hasn't been anything to write about. Why, the headlines are just full of meaty, maddening, tragic, important stories! Not to mention, there's been plenty going in in my own family too... as the kids are growing up bit by bit, and I've been sneaking on tiptoe back into the Opera world (scroll down to the bottom and click the pic with the guy wearing the kabuki makeup and the Darth Vader helmet. That's me as The Mikado, in Gilbert & Sullivan's show of the same name. And yes, that cute little girl in the kimono--carrying the huge sword--is the Pillowfight Fairy.)

(And if anyone in the Sacramento area wants to see me singing live on stage, here's your chance: this year I'm Private Willis in G&S's show Iolanthe. Details are at the above site; shows are the first two weekends in April.)

But today I merely have some sad personal news that I know my extended family will want to know about. One of our cats, Misha, has gone to kitty heaven.

We've been knowing this was coming, and sooner rather than later; her health has been in steep decline over the last month. The vet had a full ultrasound done on Misha about a week ago and pronounced it Lymphoma, in a fairly advanced stage. She went downhill very quickly; a month ago she was happily jumping up on the furniture, and bugging me to pet her every time I sat down at the computer to goof off. And then, she wasn't...

...

Back in '94 I was living in a townhouse with two college buddies. Sometime during April of that year we discovered that we had an annoying feral cat that kept jumping our fence and trying to sneak through an air vent into our garage. No wonder--April is in the rainy season around these parts, and this cat wanted a nice, dry, secure place... to have her litter. Yup. One day we went to get our cars, and we discovered we had a whole litter of kittens.

And aside from two twins, they all looked completely different.

Well, we decided we'd do the responsible thing. We didn't have permission from the landlord for pets in the townhouse, so we decided to get them spayed/neutered, and get them vaccinated, and socialize them so they'd be able to function around humans, and find homes for them.

And then we made the mistake of naming them. And feeding them. And petting them.

One of the kittens ran off to join the circus before we could get to know him/her, but the other three stuck around. We couldn't find homes for them, but they were completely happy just to stay in the garage most of the time, and sneak in the back door to our townhouse when we opened it up. Yup, we had to catch them and carry them out of the house on numerous, numerous occasions, and they'd be happily purring the whole way.

Misha was the dark one of the lot. Her sister Pasha (who, as a kitten, we used to call Paranoid Gold Kitty for a while) is a tabby, and her other sister Niña is an absolutely gorgeous calico. All three of them were very, very plush longhairs; look at that feather-duster of a tail on the picture above. Tonya and I joked that we should brush them a whole lot, and then spin the fur thus collected into yarn, and use it to knit sweaters. (We could probably still do that just from the fur caught in the carpet in their room...) But Misha looked an awful lot like her mommy, except she had a prettier face.

And the three sisters each had their own personality. Niña was always very suspicious of people. She warmed up to me and my roommates; she eventually warmed up to my aunt, and later my wife; she still hasn't gotten used to all these short, loud people we have running around here. Pasha turned into an absolute lover, who demands to lick any person she takes a fancy to. She's almost dog-like. She's also dumb as a post, and has always had a clumsy side to her. I swear I've seen that cat trip. I also once watched her take a tumble off a balcony. Over the years, she has put on quite a bit of weight, earning the affectionate nickname "Lardbutt." During the time my aunt was taking care of Pasha, she had to laugh at the irony when she remembered Carl Sandburg's poem:

The fog comes
on little cat feet...

"Incoming!!!!!!"

WHUMP

But Misha was the sneaky one of the bunch. I remember one incident back when she was a kitten, and we were having to keep them out of the townhouse. She had this way of sneaking in the back door, then bolting down the hall, around the corner, and into my bedroom--whereupon I had to go find her and extract her from among the heaps of bachelor junk I had piled up around the room. Well, one day she did this trick, and I trooped down the hallway and into my room--and then spent ten minutes tearing it apart trying to find her. Failing and scratching my head, I wandered back to the living room, and saw her happily curled up on the sofa watching TV.

How did she get past me? I wondered to myself.

So the next time she got through the back door, down the hallway and around the corner (it happened a lot don't you know), I listened. Her footsteps halted the moment she went around the corner; she didn't go all the way into my room! I walked to the corner in the hallway, leaned carefully around and looked down... and sure enough, there was Misha, hiding with her dark fur in a dark little shadow. That earlier incident, she had outsmarted me. She got me thinking she'd gone into my room, and I walked right past her without bothering to look down.

If I'd been a pigeon, I would have gotten et.

That was her personality. She loved people-attention, and purred so noisily that veterinarians could never tell how fast her heart was going; but she'd pull one over on you if you weren't careful.

Of course, she'd also occasionally try to jump from lofts onto the tops of ceiling fans, so she clearly got some of the same genetic material as Pasha did....

...

Misha hadn't been in good health this last year. After all, her seventeenth birthday would have been in April; that's getting up there for a cat, even when they are fully spayed indoor female cats. Given that we have three from the same litter, odds are that at least one of them was going to have something bad happen. She'd had to have surgery to remove that gorgeous feather-duster of a tail early last summer, as she'd developed some kind of abscess on it that couldn't be removed any other way. And there were signs at that time that she had other internal conditions starting; we had to put her on a special diet and give her steroids just to get her in shape for that surgery. Still, she recovered from the surgery well, put a good amount of weight back on, and grew enough fur on her little stump of a tail that it looked cute, like the back end of a bunny. Unfortunately, the Lymphoma must have already been in its early stages then. About a month ago she started showing signs of being unable to walk and jump properly, and then her weight started to plummet, and it became obvious the end was near.

I checked on Misha before going to work this morning, and she was weak, nothing but fur and bones, but alert. I checked on her when I got home, and she had passed away sometime during the day, in the same spot where I'd left her in the morning.

So I went out in our little "orchard" (a corner of our garden where we've planted half a dozen fruit trees) before dinner tonight and dug a hole to bury her in. The Adrenaline Junkie and the Happy Boy came out too. I suspect the Happy Boy (age four) just wanted an excuse to help dig a really big hole, but the Junkie (age six) wanted to talk about Misha with her daddy. Kids process these things differently than we do. I was thinking deep thoughts about mortality; she was thinking about how to keep the bugs from getting all over Misha, and what the word "decomposition" means, and does that mean we would eventually get to see all the bones? (not if I can help it) and why the earth never runs out of people or cats or dogs, if everyone eventually dies (not a bad question for a six-year-old, if I do say so myself).

...

So, we're thinking of going to the local plant nursery or home improvement store and getting a life-sized sculpture of a cat--preferably something really longhair looking, if we can find it--and painting it in a charcoal-gray/brown tortoise-shell pattern, and using that to mark the spot we laid her to rest. Yeah, we're hopelessly maudlin that way. (At least the grown-ups are. The kids like to talk about decomposition, even if they can't pronounce it properly.) On the practical side, it might scare off a few of the birds, and might briefly freak out some of the neighborhood cats around here.

None of us here is distraught; we've definitely had worse. Still, even though I was able to pet her and hear her purr not 14 hours ago, I'm already missing my cat.

A Few New Pictures

2010-11-08T21:15:00.000-08:00

I caught myself saying something odd the other day. Tonya's parents had been in town for a few weeks to help us while we had our baby, but they had just left; I was leaving a voicemail for a family member, mentioning that the grandparents were now gone...:

So, we're all alone now. It's just the six of us.

Tonya got a kick out of the irony of that statement.

Anyway, I have a few more pictures of our baby, in case anyone's interested...

...which is something I've always found a little ironic. Yeah, everyone wants to see the picture of the little one, because--after all--it's a big event when another little person comes into the world to mess up everyone's sleep schedules. But babies that are this young aren't generally very photogenic. They're cute, but generally much more so in real life than in still photos. Newborn babies in pictures just kinda... lie there.

So maybe that's why Anne Geddes dresses them like bugs and puts them in flower pots. They're just so much cuter that way.

Ok, since the only pots we have that big have chili pepper plants in them, and chiles and babies don't mix, we decided that the next cutest thing to do would be to put our newborn with a whole bunch of other kids who are still in their pajamas.

Here's one of the Happy Boy, not yet age four, who really likes his baby brother. He occasionally comes up to us and asks to hold him. But just as I took this picture, the Adrenaline Junkie, who couldn't resist, decided to count his toes.

Ok, so here's one with the Adrenaline Junkie in it too.
The Happy Boy looks like he's about to pluck somebody's nose or something. Little babies have lots of cute little body parts after all, that all need to be inspected!

And here's the one with all four of our little ones together. The middle two are just in love with their little brother. The Pillowfight Fairy, on the right, is generally more aloof. She's also been through the drill a time or three before; and after all, the Chunk looks an awful lot like the Happy Boy did at this age.

Except for all that black hair, and the dimpled chin, and the extremely red/ruddy complexion (which isn't just the reflected glow from his orange pajamas)....

Sigh.... :-)

What we've been doing for the last nine months

2010-10-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

All right, it's actually been closer to eleven months since I last posted. However, we've been doing something extra special for the last nine of those eleven months.

Namely, one of us has been waddling around like some kind of penguin/walrus crossbreed.

She was so cute. :)

Anyway, today was the day.

What this picture doesn't capture very well is the fact that he's moving at least as much on the outside as he did on the inside for the last few months. He's big, strong, and active, and kept trying to wiggle in such a way as to get all that unpleasant light off his face.

Now, for the sake of privacy it's been our policy not to reveal the names of our little ones online, so we won't be sharing the rather manly-sounding Irish name we gave this little cub. We need an online pseudonym for him!

The trouble is, we haven't had him around long enough to come up with a good name based on his personality. Even with the Happy Boy, where he got his online pseudonym when still less than a year old, we still had some personality clues--he was usually quite happy and playful, even in unfamiliar settings and around complete strangers.

But we have no such clues about this new little guy, aside from the fact that he was somersaulting like a gymnast inside mommy for the last several months. The only other clues we have are from his vital statistics:

Born at 1:04 am.
Weighing 9 lbs, 10 oz...
21 inches long...
Had a "strong, lusty cry" before even making it all the way out of mommy. His APGAR score was 10 within ten minutes or so after birth, so he's healthy as a horse...
And apparently, mommy tells me he feeds like one too.

So I'm open to pseudonym suggestions in the comments (assuming I have any readers left after 11 months), based on what little we know about him. But to open up the bidding, until I get a better suggestion, I'm referring to him as "The Chunk".

Have at it. :-)

Boom The Cannon!

2009-12-02T23:04:00.001-08:00

It's been a while since I've posted a sample of my eldest daughter's literary attainments online.

(Heck, it's been a while since I've posted anything online.)

But one never quite knows what one is going to get with the Pillowfight Fairy. In years past we've seen diagrams for schemes of airborne sheep rustling, to pictures of dungeons ("Warning: bad people only") to some surprisingly dark bus-stop nocturnes.

One of the fun parts of being a home-school daddy is seeing the progress that your kids make. I look at those earlier efforts, which were done over two years ago, and I marvel at how much progress she's made since then.

But she's still my daughter of course. And naturally, that means her poems involve artillery.

Yup. She was assigned today to write a poem, of her own composition, in cursive. Here's what this little second-grade daddy's girl came up with:
Behold! Ye launch a cannonball! For freedom! And messes!

That. Is. My. Daughter.

A Quartet of Fun Videos

2009-11-27T21:57:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I haven't been blogging much lately--and I haven't been blogging as many of those long, wordy, overly-sincere disquisitions on What's Wrong With the World And How To Solve It.

I suppose you could look at it like this... it is, after all, that time of year when we're supposed to give thanks for the blessings in our life, right? Well then, perhaps my readership should Give Thanks that they don't have to sit through another of my 5000-word manifestos today. :)

And I'm thankful that I don't have to write them just yet.

Instead, I've been collecting some fun videos I've been seeing online lately, and thought I'd pass them on. No doubt you've seen some of them already, but perhaps you haven't seen all four.

So, we'll start with one that's hit the internet lately in a really, really big way. It's shown up on a lot of people's blogs, including that of my sister-in-law (although that's not actually where I first saw it). Behold: the Muppets do Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

And, as usual, Animal steals the show. But Beaker (who, along with the Swedish Chef, is my favorite Muppet) puts in a pretty good showing, too.

(Oh, and my sister-in-law has some wonderful Thanksgiving-day pictures of my three kids, and their two cousins, playing in a pile of leaves. Take a look here.)

Ok, here's the next one, which has been all over the TV lately, so most people have already seen it. But if there be any more Luddites out there like Tonya and me who don't watch TV, then you might not have seen it yet, in which case you are welcome to treat this post as a public service. With a hat tip to The Anchoress (where I first saw it myself), I give you Cop vs. Kitty:

You know, I'm glad that this wasn't my cat Pasha doing that. What's cute with a three-lb kitten would, with my arthitic yet lovable 15-lb lardbutt, be downright tragic.

Ok, here's the shortest video of the bunch. I had been web-surfing a few nights ago, when the Pillowfight Fairy came over to the computer and saw some random link about albatrosses (the seabirds with the 7-foot wingspans). So we clicked it, and watched some video on them.... and then clicked on some more, and some more... and eventually we were watching all kinds of nature videos. (By the way, the ones of albatrosses landing on ground, as opposed to on the water, are good fodder for seven-year-old humor. Apparently, albatross stall-speed is faster than albatross running speed, so their landings tend to involve plenty of unintentional mayhem. Especially when they land on a beach crowded with other albatrosses.) Well, we went from albatrosses to frogs, to insects to...

...to this one that was temptingly captioned, "Frog vs. Dragonfly". What we expected was another of those videos showing nature in all its gory glory, red in tooth and claw (or whatever it is that frogs have). What we got gave everyone an unexpected and surprisingly hearty laugh.

Geez. That's not much better than what Pasha could have done.

Ok, here's the fourth one, which is the longest video of the bunch. I was reading along on the Wired website, on a story entitled Thanks a Lot: Pop Culture's Finest Moments of 2009. Now, I'm never one much to put the phrases "fine" and "pop culture" in the same sentence, unless the sentence is something like, "That's a fine load of pop culture you've managed to land us in this time." Nevertheless, I was bored, and there was a cool picture of Superman next to it, so I thought, "meh..." and clicked. (I was actually more intrigued by the picture of Dr. Horrible next to the story immediately underneath it. Apparently, there's going to be a sequel to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog! Huzzah! I say.)

There's actually some interesting stuff on that list of pop culture. But the one that caught my eye was for an episode of the latest Batman animated TV series, Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Now, the title itself does nothing for me, sounding too much like that of a soap opera. But the Wired write-up of this particular episode made me cock my Spock-brow:

After decades of taking the animated Dark Knight deeper into the shadows, Warner Bros. lightened things up with this bright series, which is resiliently clever. Nowhere is its broad, demographic-crushing appeal more brilliant than in this musical episode, which features the vocal acrobatics of the resurgent Neil Patrick Harris as the Music Meister, a villain who can send humanity into a trance by singing (mostly about himself). Ranging from outright cheese to subversive comedy, “Mayhem of the Music Meister” found Batman hitting the high notes, literally, while beating back a horde of ballet-dancing supervillains and superheroes, all while sampling iconography from Milos Forman’s Amadeus to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Best animated hero worship of the year, hands-down. —Scott Thill

O.M.G. An episode of Batman... done as a musical? All the superheros and supervillains singing and dancing? Subversive cheesiness? I. Am. So. There. So I clicked on it, and had a big dopey grin on my face for the next twenty-three minutes or so.

View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

I especially liked Batman's deadpanned line at the end of the "Death Trap" song about halfway through.

I remember, as a kid, that occasionally the powers-that-be would do something weird like this in one of the cartoons that I watched at the time, and I always found it hokey to the point of being totally embarrassing. Why do they do stuff like this? Don't they know how dorky it is? And then I grew up, and discovered that these were often the only episodes of the cartoons in question with anything like a long-term redeeming quality. By the way, this includes the "Kill the Wabbit" Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd episode, which in hindsight (and a bit more immersion in the lore of Wagner) becomes freakin' brilliant.

Anyway, this is the kind of episode that I once would have totally embarrassed me by its sublime dorkiness. So I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. :)

A Sign That Our Daughter's Moral Training Is Not Complete...

2009-11-16T19:31:00.000-08:00

From the Adrenaline Junkie (Age 4.9):

"Sometimes I feel like... like... like I don't have enough things."

Where the Heck do They Learn These T hings?

2009-11-14T09:00:00.000-08:00

So the Happy Boy, still aged two, just ran up to me.

And, of course, being two, he made absolutely no attempt to stop.

Whump.

"Ow", I explained, somewhat annoyed. "Why did you just do that?"

And my two-year-old boy, who's not yet speaking in complete sentences, looked straight up into my eyes, and sweetly explained:

"Torture Daddy."

Where the heck do they pick these things up? He's two, and he already has a firm grasp of the term torture.

And although he can't pronounce it yet, it appears he also has down the concept of "mortification of the flesh", as we just caught him intentionally (and happily) running headfirst into the cabinets....

A Tale of Time Travel

2009-11-12T21:45:00.000-08:00

Saw something recently that tickled my funny bone, in an intellectual sort of way, and thought I'd share it with y'all.

Background: My wife has somewhat unusual tastes in entertainment fare, when compared with most of female-kind in this country. She's one of those types highly-sought-after by us geeks, who actually enjoys science fiction. She once went to a Star Trek convention, and was mistaken for being in costume. Yup, she had just dressed in what for her was normal street-clothes, which happened to consist of a very 80's-style red jumpsuit with black turtleneck and black boots, and she just happened to be mistaken for one of the women in Khan's posse....

Okay, she enjoys more than just science fiction; she has enough girlyness in her that she occasionally watches the 5-hour BBC Pride & Prejudice miniseries that we have on DVD. Still, she doesn't usually go for the really weepy stuff. She likes explosions.

And big muscles.

(Hmm. Makes me wonder... How'd she wind up with me? Must be the potential for explosions....)

...

Ahem. Anyway, her favorite sci-fi sub-genre is Time Travel. Yup, she loves stories where people go back in time and accidentally cause themselves not to be born. Or they become their own parents or something. Pretty much, the more convoluted the story, the more it makes your mind bend just thinking about how they got themselves into this mess, or how they're going to get out of it by the end of the hour, and she's there. She was a big fan of the time travel stories on Star Trek; she was a big fan of Dr. Who; and she loved Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (a judgment with which I heartily concur).

So of course, I had to share the following news with her when I saw it online the last few days. It gave her a bit of a smile. Hopefully it'll do the same for you.

...

But first, I have to pose a time-travel thought experiment.

Suppose someone builds a time machine, and uses it to go back into the past. What would happen?

Well, there are two schools of thought. One is that the timeline doesn't change, because everything the time traveler does when he gets to the past already happened. If the time traveler loses his wedding ring in the past, his contemporaries from his home year will be able to find it exactly where he lost it. In fact, someone may have found it already, in the intervening years between when the time traveler lost it in the past, and when he started out on that journey in the future. Under this school of thought, the time traveller can't do anything that wasn't already done before.

A good movie that appears to take this approach is Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. ("Trash can... remember a trash can!")

The other school of thought is that the time traveler can in fact change the past, and by doing so will change the future. This is the school of thought on display in the Back to the Future movies. Marty has to fix the past before he goes home to the future; otherwise, since he accidentally broke up his parents, he would cease to exist.

Oops.

Well, just for kicks and giggles, let's assume that the latter of these scenarios is true--that a time traveler from the future can change the past to something different from what happened in the time traveler's history. What then?

Since I'm a geek, allow me to go to the diagram.
Let's say the above diagram represents a time-line. Now, let's say that a time travel experiment is started up that makes changes in the past.

So far, so good. The trouble is, since the past has changed, that means that the timeline diverges; from the moment in the past that the time travel experiment makes something different happen than what went before, the time line has changed--and the remainder of the original timeline, the one on top in these diagrams, never happened.

So really, only the bottom timeline exists anymore. And it is identical to the first timeline, up until the point where the time traveling object appears (seemingly out of nowhere, as observed by people in the past). From that point on, the timelines start to diverge.

Now here's where the fun begins. The timeline is now proceeding differently than it did before. This may in fact cause changes to the circumstances of the time travel experiment itself! What happens then? Well, that experiment will then be run at a slightly different time, and send its payload to a slightly different time in the past, causing yet another timeline to form (and voiding the remainder of the timeline we just constructed, too). And then this timeline will cause changes to the circumstances of the time travel experiment, causing yet more changes in the past....
Now, it seems to me that these alterations to the past timeline would accumulate; they wouldn't necessarily void each other. If the first experiment puts a bowling ball back through time, that changes the timeline; then the next iteration puts a nectarine through instead, what then? Well, since the timelines are identical up until the point in time that the time travel causes them to diverge, it means all the old alterations would still be there as well--including the bowling ball. (Though I'm certainly open to the idea that someone with greater powers of logic than me will come along and contradict this point. If I'm really lucky, maybe he'll come from the future!)
So what's left? Well here's the catch. Ever heard of the "Butterfly Effect"? Any change to a chaotic system, no matter how minor, causes little changes... which cause bigger changes... which eventually cause the system to look completely different than it would otherwise have been. This has long been a bugaboo in the world of weather forecasting. The problem is that weather systems are so sensitive to initial conditions, that missing the tiniest cause--like the flap of a butterfly's wings--will eventually cause the predictive model to yield wildly inaccurate results. The addition of that butterfly's wing flap could result in a hurricane showing up at a different time and place than it otherwise would have, for instance.

But don't we have the same thing in time travel? One minor change sends out eddies and ripples into the timeline, which grow--uncorrected--until the future looks nothing at all like it would otherwise have been. And this huge loop of time-travel changes, with each iteration changing the past, and in turn changing itself, would be dumping an awful lot of unpredictable, disruptive factors into the past.

Eventually, something is going to break. Rather, one of these changes will--through random chance--cause a tornado to hit the time travel research lab. Or will cause the wrong congressman to win the election, who decides to cut the research funding. Or will cause a giant fire-breathing turtle to appear and devour the lead scientist.

After all, this time-travel cycle can happen an arbitrary number of times, and is guaranteed to go on until the cycle is broken--by some sequence of events that stops the experiments. Then, you have a stable timeline, with no more loops.
Now, this timeline will have a lot of seemingly-odd, highly coincidental events in it, that to an objective observer just seem to conspire to shut down the experiment. Like that out of season tornado, followed by that crooked election, followed by that fire-breathing turtle. The observer might be tempted to think that God doesn't actually want us to discover time travel, right?

Either that, or God has an absolutely wicked sense of humor. And He's into slapstick.

...

So what would these "highly coincidental" events look like in real life, that would prevent time travel from happening?

Well, it might look a little like this.

Baguette Dropped From Bird's Beak Shuts Down The Large Hadron Collider (Really)

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, just cannot catch a break. First, a coolant leak destroyed some of the magnets that guide the energy beam. Then LHC officials postponed the restart of the machine to add additional safety features. Now, a bird dropping a piece of bread on a section of the accelerator has, according to the Register, shut down the whole operation.

...

With freak accident after freak accident piling up over at CERN, the idea of time traveling particles returning from the future to prevent their own discovery is beginning to seem less and less far fetched.

Incidentally, I loved the comments on this article. I got a particularly good laugh from this one by HyMinded:

11/05/09 at 11:10 pm
The bird's briefing:

The approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station.

...

But what's really funny to me--partly in a "ha-ha" kind of way, and partly in the Spock-eyebrow-amused kind of way, is just how many serious scientists are taking this kind of reasoning seriously. After all, my little exposition up above seems pretty tongue-in-cheek to me, but apparently no one can find the logical flaw in the thing that can break the whole argument down. Take a look at this article from Time describing the same incident, and tell me if that isn't the case.

While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.

...But ever since the British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of the [Higgs Boson] in 1964, attempts to capture the particle have failed, and often for unexpected, seemingly inexplicable reasons...

In a series of audacious papers, Nielsen and Ninomiya have suggested that setbacks to the LHC occur because of "reverse chronological causation," which is to say, sabotage from the future. The papers suggest that the Higgs boson may be "abhorrent to nature" and the LHC's creation of the Higgs sometime in the future sends ripples backward through time to scupper its own creation. Each time scientists are on the verge of capturing the Higgs, the theory holds, the future intercedes. The theory as to why the universe rejects the creation of Higgs bosons is based on complex mathematics, but, Nielsen tells TIME, "you could explain it [simply] by saying that God, in inverted commas, or nature, hates the Higgs and tries to avoid them."

Yeah. That and the fire-breathing turtles.

What I've Been Doing All Summer

2009-11-05T08:16:00.000-08:00

Don't have a whole lot of time to post now, but I know that there are a whole bunch of people out there who've been wanting to see this. I might update this post a little later with more details about my little girl's Wood Elf outfit...

Behold, the Adrenaline Junkie's Halloween costume:

Assume a Perfectly Spherical Woman

2009-10-02T22:39:00.000-07:00

No, that wouldn't actually be anyone I know. It's a little like that Perfectly Frictionless Ice that they keep asking you about in physics class--it doesn't exist in the real world, but assuming it does actually allows you to solve the math problem.

Well, I'm not sure this counts as an end to my months-long blogging hiatus, but I thought I'd pass along a bit of a Public Service Announcement:

The 2009 Ig Nobel awards have been announced! This is usually the scientific highlight of my year, and this year has some good ones. Perhaps not as good as last years study of how the analysis of archaeology sites--and our reconstruction of ancient history--can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo, but pretty good nonetheless:

PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
REFERENCE: "Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?" Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P. Kneubuehl, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine...

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamonds from liquid — specifically from tequila.
REFERENCE: "Growth of Diamond Films from Tequila," Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M. Castano...

MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years.
REFERENCE: "Does Knuckle Cracking Lead to Arthritis of the Fingers?", Donald L. Unger, Arthritis and Rheumatism...

And here is the one that inspired the title of this post:

PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don't tip over.
REFERENCE: "Fetal Load and the Evolution of Lumbar Lordosis in Bipedal Hominins," Katherine K. Whitcome, Liza J. Shapiro & Daniel E. Lieberman, Nature...

You know, I've always kinda wondered about that myself. I suppose I'd just assumed their physics resembled those of those old Weebles toys from way back when I was a kid.

For obvious reasons, there are some fun pictures at the Ig Nobel site (and elsewhere, all over the 'net) of this last one being demonstrated:

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.
REFERENCE: U.S. patent # 7255627, granted August 14, 2007 for a “Garment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks.”

Well, of course you need two. After all, only half the population is female...

...

As I said, I'm not sure this post heralds the end of my blogging hiatus. I actually like having that extra time in the evenings to do stuff. And I am doing stuff! Some time, of course, is spent doing the chainmaille that will become the Adrenaline Junkie's Halloween costume (which is shaping up to be totally awesome); but I also started up an exercise routine about last May or so, that has knocked about 10% off my weight. And it has just been plain nice to be able to sit around and not worry about whether I needed to get online to feed the beast tonight.

But I'll eventually get around to that post on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems I've been meaning to do for aeons.

Building the Home Armory

2009-06-21T22:04:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I haven't blogged since sometime in May--and even then it was a bunch of odd limericks.

But, things haven't been slow around the house. We have in fact been busy with a bunch of other stuff--everything from lawn work, to new exercise and diet stuff (which I might blog about, if another bout of blog ennui doesn't set in), to dress-making, to...

Yup, my new (and rather expensive) hobby:
Dressing my toddler in maille.

What you see in the above photo is my little kid wearing his hauberk for the first time. It wasn't actually the first time I'd tried to get him in it; this was just the first time he actually cooperated. And let me tell you, you think it's hard getting an uncooperative toddler in his PJs? PJs are a cinch next to that thing. If he doesn't want to wear it, it ain't going on.

Well, I actually got him in it, and took a few pictures, and was feeling very, very happy. So! I pulled down one of the helmets and one of the swords I'd made way back in late 2007, and got them on him. Let me tell you, he was noble, he was gallant, he was cute as a button! So I tried to take another picture, and the camera chose that exact moment to tell me that the battery was dead. Figures. Immediately after that, he pulled off the helmet, dropped the mighty blade Årþørsgrößtetüðpik, and ran off to go do one of those things that toddlers are always running off to go do. The moment was lost. Sigh. I've never since been able to get him back in the whole get-up.

But! Some time after the camera's battery was re-charged, I corralled his four-year-old sister and dressed her up in the whole getup. Behold my midget valkyrie:

With pineapples on her PJs. Very apropos.

Hm... That's very nice and all, but at some point I'm going to have to make a coif with mantle. That neck looks pretty vulnerable.

Ok. Well, one thing about making maille is that you never know in advance how it's going to turn out; and when I tried it on the kids, I discovered that it needed a fair amount of adjustment. The seams under the arms pulled a lot of slack out of the chain pattern, and made the armholes too tight. And the neck was too big. The trouble with toddlers (one trouble with toddlers, actually) is that they have really big heads (proportionately), and really narrow shoulders. Any neckhole that's big enough to go around their heads, is also big enough to slip off their shoulders and make it look as if they're wearing strapless gowns. And let me tell you, strapless gowns would be a big hit on a medieval battlefield.

But one other thing about making maille is that you can always go back and change it after the fact. It's not like cutting cloth, where after the cloth is cut you can never put it back the way it was; with chain, you just add more until you have what you want. So, I started doing ad-hoc modifications until I had it the way I wanted it. I added some width to the arms, I built up the neck, and I added a slit in back (with clasps) so that the head could make it through the newer, tighter neck-hole.
And here the little knight is, doing something a little more studious than his normal dragon-slaying maiden-chasing routine.
And here he is looking for dragons under the dining room table. Nope, no dragons here, but there are some maidens lurking about in the shadows...
And here's the full get-up by itself.
I've actually added a few rows to the torso since this picture was taken, so it's a bit longer now. I'm thinking I'll keep adding a little at a time for now, until it gets to just above the knee, or until I run out of rings. Gotta protect the family jewels, and all.

And in case you're wondering, it's made out of "bright" aluminum--it's an aluminum alloy that contains some magnesium and some other stuff to slow it's tarnish rate. It's very shiny. The shirt weighs something less than four pounds. If it were made of stainless steel instead, it would weigh three times as much, and my little knight would be pinned to the floor.

...

Ok, so that project is pretty much done, aside from the constant after-tweaking that we arteests can never seem to resist doing to our works. Now what?

Well....

That picture of the mighty blade Årþørsgrößtetüðpik? Well... it's not looking like it's in too-good of a shape anymore. After all, blades made of cardboard don't last very long. Årþørsgrößtetüðpik and her sister blade Uncalibur-ated are more than a year-and-a-half old, which for cardboard blades is something like 173 in dog-years. It was time to get some new swords.

But the thing is, you don't want your kids injuring each other, so you need to find something either really lightweight, or really foam-like. Now, there are various piratey-looking swords out there, but they don't actually look right with chainmaille. You want straight swords for that kind of work--nice long ones, so the combatants can swing at each other while yelling taunts from Monty Python ("Tis but a flesh wound!" "What are you going to do, bleed on me?") (Which reminds me of another bit of our cultural corpus I'm going to have to introduce them to someday....) Now, Nerf has a few foam swords out, and they are long, straight ones... but they have neon yellow and blue hilts, and look like they are straight out of some Manga comic (which they probably are).

Nor could I find anything online that looked right.

So?

So I took a trip to the local hardware store, followed by the local fabric store, then came home, and....

Is it just me, or does my wife look more enticing than usual tonight? There's just something about a woman with a big-ol' honkin' sword....

(Now, if I could just get her in maille, well... I'd be in absolute Valhalla.)

Basically, I got a length of half-inch PVC pipe for the core, which I cut down to a decent length for blade-plus-hilt. I also got a length of wood with a square cross-section of 1.25", and cut that into pieces for the hand-guards and pommels. To make the blade, I wrapped the PVC pipe in thick foam padding, then wrapped the padding in duct tape; I inserted the hand guards and bolted them in place; then I wrapped the hilt in duct tape, put the pommel on the bottom, and bolted that on.

The first sword I wrapped a bit too tightly. The foam is a wee bit too compressed, so it hits a bit harder than the other two. Somehow, the Pillowfight Fairy figured this out, and now, of the three swords, she wants to use that one all the time. Go figure. We don't let her.

(Incidentally, that's the one that Tonya is wielding in that picture above, with that smile on her face that says "The Beatings Will Now Begin". No wonder I think it's so sexy....)

Ahem. Anyhoo, these swords are an absolute blast to play with. The two girls and I had them outside earlier today, and they ganged up on me. You know, I may be bigger, stronger, and more coordinated than they are, but there are two of them; and when they figured out that "We can attack him from opposite directions, at the same time!" I really had to do some scrambling.

I also showed them how to do a decent parry. Now, that's a good Fathers' Day activity.

Tonight as I was taking the pictures that follow, the girls were smacking each other silly--including one instance where the girls simultaneously raised their swords high up in the air, and then whapped each other clean on top of each other's heads. It was almost as though they'd choreographed it....
Obviously, they have to treat them as two-handed swords. The swords are a little too heavy for them to use one-handed. I suspect, if they keep playing with them like this, that will change pretty quickly....

It was rather funny. At one point the conversation sounded like this:

Fairy (echoing Daddy from earlier in the day): "You need to learn how to parry."

Whap.

"See?"

Somehow I can't see this last picture without thinking to myself: "Luke... I am your father."

...

Ok, so what's next?

Well, I still have a few (hundred, maybe thousand) rings to add to the torso of the Happy Boy's hauberk. After that, I have a new shipment of rings coming from The Ring Lord with which to make an outfit for the Adrenaline Junkie. I've got this cute little idea planned out for a wood-elf outfit for her, to be made from aluminum rings that have been anodized to look like bronze (but weigh only about three-tenths the amount), and from overlapping metallic scales of green anodized aluminum.

And as I said, this is a very expensive hobby. I need the Junkie's outfit to take a long time to make... so that our finances can recover before I start making the Fairy's outfit. She's actually wanting something in pink.

Did Valkyries ever wear pink?

I think not. (Gag.)

Meine Gesamtkunstwerkpoesie ist Verpfuscht

2009-05-27T21:07:00.000-07:00

Funny how having a hobby like chainmail leads the minds in weird directions.

I had a bit of a slow workday today, and my mind began to wander to about the third maille project I have planned after I finish the one I'm working on now. My daughters have decided they want maille dresses, of course; so I have to think of ways of making maille dresses for them that actually look right. I mean, that's one heck of a novelty item, there; it's not likely they'll be wearing these things to church some bright and cheery Sunday morning. So I don't just think about the maille outfits themselves, I think about the whole ensemble.

Q: Why the heck would a girl be wearing chainmail?
A: Because she's a warrior maiden, darn it!

So, the next question becomes: what kind of warrior maiden?

Well, I have a cute little wood-elf outfit in mind for the Adrenaline Junkie, when I get done with the hauberk I'm making for the Happy Boy. But after that, for the Pillowfight Fairy?

Gotta be a valkyrie. Definitely gotta be a valkyrie.

Well, as I said, it was a slow day at work; and as I was sitting there in front of the glowing box, my mind started to move onto valkyries. And then I started thinking about Wagner's Ring Cycle, and about Brünhilde, and...

See, now, this is the way my only-sometimes-coherent mind works:

...and then I started to think of a limerick about Valkyries.

?!?!?!?!

Yup. Bet you never thought of that one before. A limerick, of all things, for crying out loud? Wagner in his grave has just rolled over.

Well, yes. After all, there's something subtly humorous about the Ring Cycle. It's so big, and so grand, and so darn serious, that it walks very close to the edge of self-mockery. And it only takes a little push before it tips over--like that glorious "Kill the Wabbit" number that Warner Brothers did back in the sixties, that youtube has quite lamentably taken down for copyright reasons. I mean, photographs like this one do tend to lend themselves to parody and ridicule, precisely because the people therein take themselves so seriously.

So--the limerick! Take a good long look at the photo at the link, try to ignore the fact that the bearded guy is Wotan (a bass) and not Siegfried (a heldentenor), and...

...well, it works best when read out loud, very dramatically. Think William Shatner dramatic.

The young heldentenor, he swünz,
At the song of great Hilde von Brün's;
With her spear, shield and armor
So nothing can harm her
Magnificent, iron ballünz.

[insert sound of record scratching...]

...

Ok, so much for my Gesamtkunstwerkpoesie. By this point I was in the rhyming mood. I was also approaching Vogon territory, but I was having fun.

So!

Well, I suppose I should have stopped, but I didn't. So somewhere from the depths of my head (depths of my head?) I coaxed this one out, on a topic near and dear to my wife and me right about now:

A tutor who tuted the flute
Tried to tutor his toddler to pooot.
But the bairn loved the swooshie,
And quite feared the flooshie,
So the toddler pooot tut'ring was moot.

And no, this limerick was not autobiographical. Not even in the slightest.

Y'all are lucky that I decided not to rhyme flusher with gusher. I was tempted to, but that might have been pushing it a little too far. And the whole flusher/gusher thing isn't autobiographical, either. Nope. Not at all.

Once upon a long time ago, I blogged a limerick I had thought up, and my sister-in-law (who had just had a long-distance online haiku contest with a friend) quipped:

This makes me think that a limerick contest with Tim would be inadvisable.

I appreciate the sentiment, of course... but the more I write these things, the more I think that limerick contests are probably inadvisable under any circumstances.

...

Which brings me to the third one. At this point I was almost but not quite rhymed out. And I was definitely in Vogon territory by now. So I thought of one that my mother most likely would approve of, as would my wife. The sentiment here should be well considered by anyone who decides to do limericking on the internet:

Don't advertise smut with a bugle!
With naughtiness one must be frugal.
Though your meaning be mean,
Your words must be clean--
Lest you draw all those perverts with Google.

So that's probably it for one day. I'll try to be more productive at work tomorrow.

P.S. Here's a little fun one I saw somewhere. Do I have any commenters that can interpret this one for me?

Noble, But Doomed?

2009-05-26T21:34:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it's been another two weeks since I dressed Bob and Larry up in maille. And it's been a whole lot longer since I actually wrote something substantial about anything.

Does this mean you'll actually be writing something substantial tonight?

Possibly. Although I'm not so sure it's all that substantial. Well, I think it's substantial, but I have a way of getting worked up over things that seem minor to everyone else around me. So what I think of as substantial, winds up striking everyone else as mildly humorous, in a there he goes again sort of way.

But then, I suppose that the best way to entice me out of my blogging slump is to give me a news story that tickles one of my pet theories.

(Man, Orwell would have hated that sentence. A person is slumping, so you entice him by ticking the theory he keeps as a pet....)

...

All Orwell aside, here's a news story I saw recently. I've actually seen similar things at other sites. But for those who don't want to plow through the article, there's a nascent political movement out there to try to bring back our Constitution's Tenth Amendment.

Tenth Amendment? What's that? And what do you mean, "bring back"? Where has it been hiding?

It's this little inkblot* at the end of the Bill of Rights:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If I recall my political history correctly (and I may not), it was added to the Bill of Rights to assuage a specific fear of the Federalists, thus gaining support for its passage. And this specific fear is actually a very interesting one.

The Federalists opposed the Bill of Rights on two major grounds: first, they believed that it would be unnecessary. Since the national government would be a republic answerable to the people and to the states, the theory went, it would have natural limits on its power to oppress the people. That is, if they attempted to stifle Freedom of the Press, the people and the states would rise up and throw all those bums out, and (presumably) put new bums in who would undo what the previous bums did. I think we can safely say the Federalists got that one wrong.

But their second objection (in my opinion) was a bit more substantive. The constitution granted lists of powers to the various branches of government, with the implicit (unwritten) understanding that these lists represented all the powers that were being granted. That is, if the Constitution said you had the authority to regulate usufructs, salt pork, and left-handed tennis matches, then you only had power to regulate usufructs, salt pork, and left-handed tennis matches; you had no authority over anything else. It was understood at the time the Constitution was written that the national government's jurisdiction was over only those things that were specifically mentioned in the Constitution; everything not mentioned therein was forbidden to the Feds, and either was the province of the states, or (if the states didn't want to regulate it) belonged to the sphere of private life and commerce. This principle was called the Enumeration of Powers, and this principle--originally unwritten--was one of the bedrock principles of limited government.

The Federalists' fear was that, by listing a set of rights in the Constitution, it would make it easier for future tyrants to weaken the principle of Enumerated Powers, and even start treating those listed rights as the only rights the people have. Ok, so let's say the Constitution grants the Grand Pooh-Bah authority over usufructs, salt pork, and left-handed tennis matches; and let's say it explicitly grants the people the rights of Free Speech, Free Love and Free Bacon. Now you have two enumerations. What do you do with things that aren't listed on either list? The Federalist fear was that the very existence of the enumeration of rights creates a gray area that shouldn't be there; people might look at these two lists, and say: "The Right of the People to Sing in Public isn't listed among the rights of the people. And it's just plain annoying. And it's probably an usufruct anyway, since no one around here seems to know what the heck that means. There oughta be a law!"

The net effect of a Bill of Rights, in the Federalist view, was actually to weaken the powers of the states and the rights of the people--since it weakened the principle of Enumerated Powers, which is so important to limited government. And it would tempt those in power to read the Bill of Rights as an enumeration of the Rights of the People--meaning, if a supposed right wasn't on the list, it perhaps didn't exist....

I think the Federalists were a lot closer to the truth with this argument than they were with the other one.

So to placate the Federalists' objections and get them on board, two Amendments were added to the Bill of Rights. The Ninth Amendment was written to preempt the argument that the rights in the Bill constituted some kind of enumeration:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

And the Tenth was written to reaffirm the principle of Enumerated Powers--that the power of the National Government was limited to only those powers explicitly granted it in the Constitution:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

All very well and good.

...

So what the heck happened?

After all, if you take the Ninth and Tenth Amendments literally, then the Federal Government has no legitimate authority over anything not specifically listed. That is, Congress wouldn't have power to legislate anything regarding education, or health care, or funding for the arts, or environmental protection, or pensions (like Social Security). All of these things would be "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people," because none of these things show up in the lists of powers granted to Congress to legislate.

But... one of the powers the Constitution does grant Congress is the power to regulate "interstate commerce."

What does that mean?

Well, here's what many, many successive Supreme court rulings have said: anything, that in any way, shape, or form, affects any transaction that might conceivably cross state lines, counts as interstate commerce. The education you get in Kansas may some day wind up being used when you do business in Mississippi, so education falls under "interstate commerce". The doctor who treats your bunions went to school in North Dakota (because all good things come from North Dakota, I'll have you know), and the medicines he uses were developed in Massachusetts, so medicine falls under "interstate commerce".

In fact, the food you grow on your own family farm, which is grown for your own family's consumption--and is never traded for money, let alone sent across state lines--still affects the market. After all, if you didn't grow that food, you'd have to buy it, so your choice to grow it has economic impact, and thus--ahem--can be regulated under the "interstate commerce" powers. No joke--the Supreme Court case that decided that one is Wickard v. Filburn, 1942.

To make a very long story short, these two amendments--the Tenth, in particular--have for all intents and purposes been nullified by successive Supreme Court cases. Everything affects interstate commerce, if you interpret the term broadly enough; and as a result, Congress can get away with passing just about any law it wants, on any topic. It's been this way since at least the time of FDR--but it was moving that way at least a generation before.

...

So now we're actually seeing a movement to roll back the power of the Fed. The article I linked to above notes a recent attempt by the Feds to force the state of Maine to issue Fed-approved ID cards to the entire population, and Maine said, well... no. And the Feds backed down!

So now we have the State of Montana getting into the act. Being a very outdoorsy kind of State, with a great heaping helping of that Western Libertarian character about it, it's no surprise that the population has a very strong hunting/gun culture. And they don't take too kindly to out-of-towners coming in and telling them what guns they can and cannot purchase, and what hoops they have to jump through to do it. So the governor recently signed a bipartisan bill stating that guns manufactured in Montana, to be purchased by the people of Montana, for the benefit of the people of Montana, do not come under the heading of "interstate commerce"--because there's nothing "interstate" about it. Therefore, such manufacturing and sale need not be registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, since Congress has no authority to regulate in this case.

The Feds, needless to say, are not amused.

The article goes on to mention that 35 states have jumped in the pool with some kind of legislation asserting their 10th Amendment rights to blow off Federal legislation on topics not explicitly granted in the Constitution. It mentions things going on in Georgia, in Texas, in Utah....

...

Believe it or not, I'm only now getting to the part that I find really interesting. I mean, I find all the above interesting, but here's the part where my frustration really starts to kick in.

Sigh.

I'm all for these efforts, and I hope they succeed. They have my support, and I will cheer them when they are occasionally victorious. But in the long term, I doubt there will be many lasting successes.

The underlying problem is that the state governments no longer have an effective check on the power of the Feds.

But first, I have to back up a bit. The guys that wrote the Constitution understood something about power: anyone who has it, wants more of it, and will use what power he has to gain more whenever he has the opportunity. The motives change from one person to the next, of course; some people with power want to wield their power for the Benefit of Humanity. Others just enjoy the thrill of squashing their opponents like bugs. But it's very rare to get people in positions of power who want less power than what they have. After all, given how fierce the competition is as you climb the greasy pole, it's not likely someone gets to the top who doesn't want to wield the power. If they didn't want to wield the power, they wouldn't have been climbing the greasy pole in the first place.

And when you have this kind of situation, with Government run by a class of people who want to Change the World and squash their enemies and retire as comfortably and as young as possible, little obstacles like Constitutional Thou Shalt Nots are easily ignored. After all, if everyone else in government concurs with your overreach, then who's going to stop you? And who's to call it an overreach, anyway?

So when every position in Government is filled by power-grubbers, each of which wants to expand their little empires, how the heck do you keep Government small, under control, and accountable to the electorate?

The Founders' answer: you set it against itself. You design it in such a way that no one's power grows, except at the expense of someone else's; and you give this someone else a veto on whoever it is who's trying to usurp the power. When you've got a government designed like this, it's slow, and inefficient, and rancorous--but when it does pass something it means that whatever it is has some kind of real consensus behind it, and is less likely just to be a power play.

So we have what we glibly call checks and balances: The President can't do something without Congress, and Congress can't do something without the President, and the President must consider the People or risk becoming ex-presidential, and Congress has to defer to the people or risk becoming ex-congressional, and the judges are selected for their positions by the President, with the advice and consent of the legislature. Despite my distaste for the things that come out of Washington these days, the system works pretty well, most of the time; all things considered, our government is still more limited than most developed nations' governments, and I think that's a really good thing.

But...

Back in 1913, I think we made a terrible mistake.

Here's the trouble. Prior to the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, senators were selected in a manner directed by the legislators of the various states. If the legislators of one state wanted the senators to be elected by the people, well and good; but if in another state they wanted the senators picked by the governor and ratified by the legislature (like ambassadors are now), that was legal.

And yes, this produced a bunch of highly corrupt machine politicians. Yes, yes, yes; I know all that.

But it also gave the state governments a seat at the Federal table, and that made a huge difference in what got passed. This goes back to what I said earlier about checks and balances: in order to keep one power player from getting to powerful, you set it against another power player with the power to veto him. Well, prior to the 17th Amendment, the States could effectively veto the Feds. After all, when a state's senators were selected by the governor or legislature, those senators had to do the governor's or legislature's bidding in Washington, or they quickly found themselves ex-senators.

And this meant that, if the Federal government tried to run roughshod over the rights of the states back prior to 1913; if they'd tried to push unfunded mandates on the states; if they'd tried giving orders to the states on how to run their health care or their educational systems; the Senate--answering the desires of the state governments--would have put a big, fat no on whatever plan that was. The Senate was the check against the power of the central government; any attempt to increase Washington power at the expense of the states, pretty much had to get the states' consent first.

But now the Senate, being popularly elected, isn't much more than a somewhat more pompous version of the House, and it provides the states no protection against Fed encroachment. The states have lost their check, and governmental power has become unbalanced.

In such an environment, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the 9th and 10th Amendments have become little more than inkblots--there's no governmental body dedicated to defending them anymore. That used to be the Senate's job; but it's no one's job now. And no matter how much one may like the ideas behind these (or any other) Amendments, if there isn't a governmental body dedicated actively to protecting them, then they might as well be inkblots*.

...

So what of the Federalism movement? Well, I'm for it. And I'm not the only one who thinks the 17th Amendment was a bad idea. Apparently Democratic former senator Zell Miller thought so too, and introduced a bill to repeal it just before he retired from the Senate.

I'm all for states standing up and defending their rights, too. After all, one thing the Constitution definitely does not do is give the Feds the power to give orders to the states. For that matter, the Constitution doesn't give a general police power to the Federal Government, either; nor does it require the states to enforce the federal laws. If a state decided simply to refuse to enforce a law on behalf of the federal government--as California does with medical marijuana--the Feds have a much, much harder time keeping the people in line. In fact, in many cases the only leverage the Feds really have over the states, is the lure of federal funding--that is, if you comply with these laws, we will give you cash for X, Y, and Z. And in most cases up until now, the states have taken the bait. As the article said:

Robert Natelson, a law professor at the University of Montana who was involved in drawing up that state's sovereignty resolution over a decade ago, argues that states up until now have been unwilling to take action of any real consequence in checking federal power.
"Back then they passed the resolution, but they didn't turn down any federal dollars," he said.
"If the states are serious about returning the federal government to its historical origins, they're going to have to do more than pass resolutions. They're going to have to turn down money and litigate."

Very true. And so whenever I hear of some governor turning down Federal money--as Sarah Palin did recently with the Federal economic stimulus money--it really does warm my heart. When a state rejects such money--and the strings that come with it--it often leaves the Feds with no leverage in the matter, no ability to bully the state government back.

Well, I can hope that we'll see more of this eventually. I'm not completely hopeful at this point; it's still a little too much windmill-tilty. But it's fun to see this sort of thing happen, even if it is only a little bit here and there, around the edges.

*Inkblot--I'm referring here to an argument by legal scholar and former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. In his view, the 9th Amendment is so indeterminate in meaning, that if it were blotted out with an inkblot, this wouldn't actually change the practical meaning of the constitution in any way. As such, I think "inkblot" is an appropriate epithet for any clause that is conveniently interpreted away by the courts....

Hey, Arby!

2009-05-11T21:18:00.000-07:00

This one's for you. Ask, and ye shall receive:

Let it never be said that I'm unresponsive to my readers. That is, except for the occasional unannounced two-week hiatus....

Altogether now:

They're coming to take me away, haha....

Time for the Second Monthly Carnival of Tonya!

2009-05-10T21:13:00.000-07:00

Ok, ok, so I haven't been blogging much lately. I've been busy with other stuff.

And what could possibly be more important than blogging? Well, I've been crafting some maille, for one:

I know what you're thinking, because you're thinking it so loud I can hear it all the way over here: He's cracked. He's gone completely mad. Anyone who starts crafting chain eventually goes a little nuts, and starts putting it on their teddy bears, and then on their sofas, and then on their cabbages and eggplants*.... It was bound to happen sooner or later; it just happened a little faster to you than we expected. Tim, it's been nice knowing ya, try not to dribble all over the nice young men in those clean white suits....

Well, you'd think that, and there may in fact be some truth in what you think; but no, I'm not actually crafting a hauberk for the Happy Boy's little friend. Although you have to admit, he's pretty cute, no?

No, we're not planning on loading up this little guy for bear. (ba-DUM-bump!)

We're planning on loading up this little guy for bear:
That would be the little one in the lower right.

Oh, as if that makes it any better! Ok, so you're planning on chaining 15,000 rings so you can put your toddler in a hauberk, for crying out loud. That's only marginally less un-sane than putting it on a teddy bear.

Yup, sounds about right. Though I don't know that we'll actually get to 15,000 rings. I'm about halfway done now, and I'm only at about 6,000.

That settles it. Completely cracked.

So maybe it's for the best that I haven't been blogging. After all, If "Sometimes I'm Actually Coherent", then that leaves all the other times, I'm afraid.

But! Fear not. My intrepid wife has been blogging a lot more than I have. If you haven't been following her blog, she's cooked up a trio of big meaty posts over the last two weeks. Given that I haven't been writing anything, I thought I'd throw my remaining regular readers a bone and send them over her way.

First, there's her post entitled Life Without a Baby, which is very poignant. We've had four babies, spaced roughly two years apart each. That means that since Tonya became pregnant with the Pillowfight Fairy in early 2003, we've constantly either had a baby (or very young toddler) in the house, or we've been expecting a baby. The Power household has been all babies, all the time, since 2003. And with the loss of Baby E three weeks ago, we now find ourselves babyless--none in the house, none on the way, and possibly (given Tonya's and my ages) none left to come. Tonya was feeling a bit melancholy about this fact. Before we got married, and even in that brief time between our marriage and the birth of the Fairy, we never really thought of ourselves as "baby" people--but that changed in a big, big way when our children came along. Now that we're facing the possible end of the "baby" phase in our lives, we're having to look forward, and it's not without some sadness.

(And fear. The Pillowfight Fairy is six-and-a-half now, which means she's halfway to being a teenager.)

Then, there's her next post, entitled End of School evaluation. About a year ago Tonya planned out what she wanted to get done with the Pillowfight Fairy's first grade year, and I posted about that here. It was an ambitious plan, and prompted one of our commenters to remark:

Four to six hours a day of rigorous academics for a SIX-YEAR-OLD?!!! Unless you have a certified genius as a child, you are setting yourself up for misery and failure....

Ahem. We have experienced neither misery nor failure. Draw your own conclusions. :-)

Well, we're proud to say that we made it through, and the Fairy made it through, and we haven't wound up in an institution yet (though I'm getting pretty close, as the pictures attest). We had to make a few changes to our plan, and didn't get everything done that we'd wanted to, but we did get most of it done, and we're very proud of how much the Fairy has learned in the last year. Tonya is also in the process of putting together next year's plan; one of us will probably blog about it a bit more when that's complete. Things are going to be a bit more tricky next year, too, since the Adrenaline Junkie will be doing her Kindergarten year.

Third, Tonya has this endearing way of trying to fill every waking moment with Productivity. (That is, until she gets wiped out by the day and spends her evening hours playing Civilization.) So what will she do during the summer months, until the time to begin the next year's academics? Well, she's decided to make a couple of dresses for the girls. She's already got the fabric, the patterns, and all the materials; she's already measured the girls; and she's starting to cut out the pattern pieces. Oh, and incidentally: our girls are shaped weirdly. I know, I know: as any boy can tell you, all girls are shaped weirdly--but ours are shaped weirdly even when compared to other girls. When Tonya measured them out yesterday, she discovered that the Pillowfight Fairy (age 6) has:

Size 4 chest;
Size 4 waist;
Size 5 hip;
Size 7 back-of-neck to waist;
Size 7 height.

The Adrenaline Junkie, age 4, has:

Size 3 chest;
Size 3 waist;
Size 4 hip;
Size 5 back-of-neck to waist;
Size 5 height.

This has created something of a conundrum for Tonya. Does she:

Pick the biggest sizes for each of the girls (7 for the Fairy, 5 for the Junkie) and just make the dress in that size--recognizing that they might be swimming in them, but hopefully giving them a little room to grow?
Make a dress with hybrid sizes--cutting (for instance) on the size 7 lines for the vertical directions on the Fairy's dresses, and on the size 4 or 5 lines for the horizontal directions? This would take a bit more work and would give a higher chance of making mistakes, but would give a trimmer-fitting dress.

Tonya is leaning toward the first of these two options, but is planning on doing some tailoring after she's had a chance to fit the dresses on the girls. Fact is, they might never grow into the dresses width-wise; thin runs in the females in Tonya's family, at least until motherhood changes the shapes of their bodies. Tonya made herself a skirt when she was in Junior high, when she was 5'2" and had a waist size of 18". And that measurement, dinky as it is, is actually equal to the 18" waist that her mom had on her wedding day! And our girls are likewise feather-weight when compared to their (often much shorter!) age peers.

Anyway, when those dresses are done, either Tonya or I will have pictures up on our blogs.

...

And this blog? Well, I'll try to step up my blogging pace, although since I haven't been spending as much time online lately, I haven't been seeing as much worth writing about. And I still have half a hauberk to finish, of course--after which you'll get to see some pictures of our little knight in shining armor.

After that? Well, I confess that I do have a whole bunch of other chainmaille projects lined up....

*Although if you actually are going to maille your cabbages and eggplants, I recommend you use stainless steel rings. I recommend 16 gauge, 1/4" inner diameter for an aspect ratio of about 4, which seems to work well for the European 4-into-1 weave. And it won't tarnish or leave black rub-off on your vegetables.

Bidding a Fond Welcome Back To a Fellow Blogger

2009-04-27T23:49:00.001-07:00

About six months ago I had the unpleasant task of removing a fellow blogger from my blogroll. Arby's Archives, which had been one of my daily reads (when he posted daily, that was), was no more. For some reason--which I have been coming to sympathize with--Arby just decided to up and delete his blog entirely.

Well, he's back. He may not look like Cary Grant anymore, but his much wrinklier visage hasn't dimmed the sharpness of his pen, or something. Insert your own profound-sounding metaphor if you don't like mine.

Be warned when you visit his new site, though: it appears that he and The Boss (his feminine side) decided to put their kids in public school, and judging from the tone and timber of his first three posts, that turned out to be a disaster. If the state of education is something you get worked up about easily, then Arby's new blog is so far about 75% red meat. They're planning on going back to homeschooling right quick.

(And if you also get worked up about Scouting, or about pubescent boys who haven't discovered how to combat B.O. yet, then the other 25% of the blog is also red meat.)

So without further ado, Arby's new blog is entitled Boarding In Bedlam.

...

P.S. Arby, I'm curious--any particular reason you went with Blogspot this time instead of WordPress? I don't have any particular reason for asking--I'm just curious.

Things To Do With Cupcakes When You're Depressed

2009-04-22T22:18:00.000-07:00

Ok, I cheated. We're not actually depressed. We obviously wish things had gone differently, but Tonya is home and on the mend, and a great deal of future uncertainty has been removed from our lives. What we're feeling is complex, but has a whole dollop of relief thrown in.

And it doesn't hurt that we have a much higher-than-normal quantity of chocolatey baked goods at home. You see, Monday was my 38th birthday, and Tonya had both picked up a devil's food cake to celebrate, and made a huge batch of chocolate cupcakes. She had then decided to decorate the cupcakes by spelling out the words "Happy Birthday Tim" on them in frosting--one letter per cupcake, so it only spells the phrase correctly if the cupcakes are properly arranged.

So the timing of events could be seen at least in part as one of those Mysterious Ways In Which God Moves--he timed things so that we would have the maximum amount of chocolate on hand when we needed it the most.

I know, it's a minor thing... but it's often the minor things that keep us rooted in the real world when all kinds of surreal, unreal events are swirling about us. My younger brother tells of the time he and his wife lost a child three years back, how he was resenting the fact that their eldest son, who was then two, wasn't staying depressed like Daddy was. He wanted to play! He wanted to run! He wanted to splash in the bathtub! --as was appropriate for an energetic then-two-year-old boy. And somewhere along the way something clicked in Daddy's brain--maybe my little boy is the one who has things right--whereupon Daddy climbed in the bathtub right along with his boy, and they started splashing together. Note that Daddy was still wearing most of his clothes at the time. And they splashed, and laughed, and tickled, and Daddy remained sane. To this day, he still refers to his now-five-year-old boy as his hero.

So here's the minor thing that's been going on over here. See, we've had grandparents over who like cupcakes. And we have kids who (obviously) like cupcakes too. So throughout the last few days, the various letters of "Happy Birthday Tim" have been vanishing, one after another. One of the y's went away, then one of the p's..., and--well, it looked like it needed a little cheering up.

So every time I noticed a letter missing, I'd try to rearrange the cupcakes into a complete phrase. And then someone would eat another one, and I'd have to rearrange them again. Or I'd pick the next cupcake to eat, by figuring out an anagram that uses all but one letter that I couldn't get to fit. Or after a while, I'd just start rearranging them every time I went into the kitchen, just because anagrams are that much fun.

Really.

And of course, there were a bunch of cool words that I never got to use because I couldn't figure out what to do with the rest of the letters. Thus, I wasn't able to deliver any wisdom on "Parthia". But for the most part, I think I did rather well.

Ew. Not a good thing to do to your harp.

We got a book of the Arabian Nights for next year's homeschooling, and read through some of it. Some of those stories are really funny.

Don't invite he.

I bet bartenders hear the "bar paid myth" quite a bit, actually....

Ew.

And if anyone does business with the M.I.B., I'll bet it's DARPA.

These are known for tormenting garden gnomes.

Well, I had letters for it...

An' da wife she slap da me.

Good that someone did. Those bartenders have to make a living somehow.

So we've been having fun with this. And I think this newfound hobby of mine has actually been cutting down on our family's cupcake consumption, because everybody has been fearful of taking the wrong cupcakes and leaving me with an unusable collection of letters, like when you have a bunch of stuff on a scrabble letter rack that just doesn't spell anything. Truth be told, I'm afraid that someone will come along and eat all my vowels.

Though it actually got easier when someone came along and ate the y's...

Baby E.

2009-04-21T15:12:00.000-07:00

Well, this was the Big One.

Baby E. entered this world at 3:24 this morning, and left it not much more than two hours later. We did have the chance to hold her, and feel her breathe, and feel her move, before she quieted down and left us.
I apologize that these aren't the prettiest baby pictures you've ever seen; before you can bathe a baby, the baby's temperature must be above some minimum threshold, and Baby E's temperature never got high enough. But there really wasn't time to worry about making them pretty. At the time, we didn't know how much time we had with her, so we did our best to make every moment count.
Aside from being emotionally drained, Tonya is recovering from the delivery well. This baby came about four weeks early (which caught us by surprise), which meant among other things that Baby E. was much smaller than our other kids were at birth--she was only 5 lbs. 9 oz (and 18.5 inches long), as opposed to the Adrenaline Junkie's 8 lbs, 2 oz--let alone the Happy Boy's 9 lbs 7.5 oz. Under normal circumstances, 5 lbs 9 is not a big baby, but still within the normal, healthy range; but Tonya's body was accustomed to much bigger babies, and when the time came, Baby E. arrived much faster than anyone expected. The doctors had just gotten done saying that they'd be back to check on us in an hour, when Tonya involuntarily gave an almighty push and Baby E was there....

So now what?

Well, we're not entirely sure, but the first step is for Tonya to continue recovering. She should be coming home sometime tomorrow, and I'm going to be on Daddy-On-Steroids duty for a while. Thankfully, we have grandparental support to help out. When Tonya is home and has had a chance to catch her breath, then we'll start figuring out what to do. The hospital will keep Baby E. for the next two weeks, so we don't have to make any rushed decisions. That's very nice.

We have a lot of people to thank for the help they've already given. My wonderful brother and sister-in-law, Rick and Wendy, high-tailed it hither at about 9:00 last night to keep an eye on the kids, when we realized that we had to go to the hospital pronto. Then, around 10:30 when the doctors verified that Tonya was in active labor, my Mom and Dad started packing, and hit the road for the two hour drive up here, so they could relieve Rick and Wendy, so they could get some sleep for their workday. Then Tonya's parents came up this morning with the RV so they could stay with us long enough to help us get healthy and back on our feet. And, of course, there are all the people who've been praying for us since we got the Trisomy 13 diagnosis back in December; we owe you all a huge debt of gratitude.

With all the stuff we have to deal with, blogging will be irregular for a while. Not that it was very consistent before....

We're Headed to Labor and Delivery Tonight

2009-04-20T21:05:00.000-07:00

Well, that post on Gödel's incompleteness theorems will have to wait.

Tonya has been having fairly strong contractions every five minutes for the last hour--along with a little bleeding--and we've been instructed to go to Labor and Delivery. We're waiting for our first-line-of-defense child care to show up (thanks, Wendy!), and then we're off.

Be praying for us. We don't know yet if this is the Big One or not. We've had false labors before, on other pregnancies--but not when it was our fourth one, and there are some signs that we're much farther along this time than we were in those instances. We're not sure what will happen.

So as I said, be praying for us. Thanks!

Yet More Amazing News From That Amazing State...

2009-04-18T22:41:00.000-07:00

...which would be North Dakota, of course.

Of Course! Regular readers of this blog know that I've got a soft spot in my heart (head?) for the Land of Flat. I lived there (Minot Air Force Base) for a year and a half while growing up, and it was one of the nicest places I've ever been.

Sure, it gets a bit nippy there in the winter. And every decade or so Grand Forks gets washed away by the Red River. But aside from that, it's what Paradise would look like if Paradise was a vast, featureless plain.

So whenever news from North Dakota pops up, my ears perk up. And news from North Dakota usually puts a smile on my face, because it somehow always seems to run contrary to whatever other doom and gloom stories happen to be running out there. My last post on North Dakota was about how the entire state had a grand total of two murders last year, and neither of them was a shooting. Yup, the per capita murder rate was less than a third of some of the more orderly continental European nations; and the per capita gun murder rate was 0.00.

And then my reader/commenter/co-blogger Roger Z left a comment with some additional North Dakota news that brought a smile to my face: The state has a growing number of millionaire oil tycoons. Turns out that there's a hefty amount of oil under the ground in big swathes of the state; and the ground in question is divided up into family farms that have been in their respective families for generations. A lot of long-time farmers are putting an oil well or two out in their fields, getting wealthy, and staying farmers--continuing to drive around the old beat-up pickups and tractors.

Then, of course, there was the North Dakota story from last December, which alleged that it has the most corrupt state government in the union. Of course, there were so many irregularities in the way they handled their statistics and interpreted the results, that it makes one wish that the reporters had actually spent some time in the North Dakota school system--because then their reasoning skills would likely have been better, and they wouldn't have written the story in the first place.

Well, today I saw a new North Dakota story, that again made me smile. Courtesy of the Instapundit, it appears that the only two areas of the country to have improving employment figures over the last month were the District of Columbia, and North Dakota.

And it's pretty obvious why the District of Columbia had increases in employment, so I'm not so impressed there. Even so their story isn't great; their overall unemployment rate is much higher than the national average.

But North Dakota? It was the only state to have unemployment drop in the last month. There were three others where unemployment stayed even; the other 46 states saw increases of varying magnitudes. My home state of California, I'm ashamed to say, has an unemployment rate of well over 11%--and that's dragging the national average up.

And North Dakota? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In March, Michigan again reported the highest jobless rate, 12.6 percent. The states with the next highest rates were Oregon, 12.1 percent; South Carolina, 11.4 percent; California, 11.2 percent; North Carolina, 10.8 percent; Rhode Island, 10.5 percent; Nevada, 10.4 percent; and Indiana, 10.0 percent. Nine additional states and the District of Columbia recorded unemployment rates of at least 9.0 percent. The California and North Carolina rates were the highest on record for those states. (All state series begin in 1976.) North Dakota registered the lowest unemployment rate, 4.2 percent, in March. Overall, 12 states and the District of Columbia had significantly higher jobless rates than the U.S. figure of 8.5 percent, 25 states reported measurably lower rates, and 13 states had rates little different from that of the nation. (See tables A and 3.)

Emphasis added, of course.

You know, I suspect I need to post about bad news from North Dakota sometime; something looks bad about the state, I post it. But I suspect I'd be waiting a long, long time before coming across such a story, unless the headline was something like "Spring Thaw on Lake Sakakawea Sends Idiot's Car to the Bottom."

But that one happens every year, so it's not exactly news, it's more like a sporting event that people bet on: "What day is the ice going to break, and whose car is going to get dunked?"

Anyway, good to see more news from North Dakota. News from my former home state nearly always makes me proud to be from there, and even a little homesick--unless it's news about the weather.

Bacon--Is There Anything It Can't Do?

2009-04-17T23:42:00.001-07:00

I've been feeling a little guilty about not blogging so much lately. All this cutting and bending metal has been fun (and you should see the little piece of dragonscale maille that I've been putting together lately!), but I've been neglecting my readership. Ah well. I'm thinking that, with the one-year anniversary of that post I did that picked a fight with a herd of Objectivists ("Since I started with good premises, and reasoned without error, my argument will contain no inconsistencies. Therefore since you claim to have found an inconsistency in my argument, it means you must have made an error somewhere, and it's up to you to find it..."), I would go ahead soon and write up something about Godel's Inconsistency Theorems.

But not tonight. Tonight, we play.

It seems that Popular Science's resident mad scientist, Theodore Gray, has built what essentially is a blowtorch, where the oxidizer is pure O₂ gas, and the fuel is--what else?--bacon.

Well, actually--prosciutto. Turns out that plain old American bacon doesn't have the structural integrity, so he had to go with something he considered more "industrial grade". But he then proceeded to turn it into what he refers to as a "bacon lance", which is a bacon-fueled variant of the more mundane (but still awesome as heck) "thermal lances" that are used to cut metal.

Hmm... that means that, at least in theory, bacon is capable of rescuing people from collapsed buildings. Nice.

Of course, as awesome as this is, I still think it's a poor use of perfectly good prosciutto, although I bet his lab smelled absolutely heavenly after he used his bacon lance to cut through that metal pan in the video.

I also love this little note at the end of the piece:
Achtung! Theodore Gray is trained in lab safety. Don't try this at home...
Yeah, and you might run out of bacon.

It's Time for the Carnival of Tonya!

2009-04-16T22:18:00.000-07:00

Well, I haven't been in much of a blogging mood lately, but my lovely bride has been cranking them out.

Blog, posts that is. Although the phrase "cranking them out" somehow seems appropriate to a pregnant mother of 3 kids ages six and under....

Ahem.

On April 7, as she was thinking about Tax Time, she did this post on responsibility. She is coming to the conclusion that personal responsibility is increasingly a counter-cultural virtue; that we tend to "delegate" away our responsibilities, from finances to education to child-rearing.

Then, on April 11 she posted about her sudden urge to get all the loose ends in our life wrapped up now, before the baby comes next month. Now, it's a well-observed phenomenon that expecting mothers get this terrible urge to clean, rearrange furniture, and get everything ready, just a few days (or hours!) before they get this terrible urge to push. Tonya was wondering whether her urge to wrap everything up was a manifestation of this "Nesting Instinct". Have to say, though, I'm skeptical. Tonya gets like this periodically whether or not she's eight months pregnant....

But I really liked her latest post. The Biblical book of Job is my favorite book of the Bible, because of all the hard questions it tackles head-on. What is justice? What is truth? What is wisdom? Why do good people suffer? Why do bad people so often not suffer? What should we do when events occur that run completely contrary to our faith? The book of Job tackles all this very challenging material in an intellectually stimulating way, and with a surprising amount of (often very black) humor.

My favorite line of the book is Job 12:1. After a rather self-righteous and ignorant speech by one of Job's friends deriding Job's wisdom and trying to get him to repent of his (non-existent) sins, Job just rolls his eyes and delivers this sarcastic gem--which for full effect, you have to read out loud:

No doubt, you aaaare the people, and wisdom will diiiiie with you....

Appropriate inflection added by me, but was undoubtedly in the original.... :-)

Tonya expands on a point that I made back in December, but does it from a more theological direction. I mentioned that we were taking the news of our Trisomy 13 baby better than so many of the people around us were. Well, Tonya mentioned that she's been understanding lately something of what Job went through. It's not that we're suffering anything like he did--that's not it. Rather, imagine what Job must have been thinking while listening to his friends' theological babblings--how he must have been thinking, "They have absolutely no idea what they're talking about," and, "how shallow and unthinking their 'wisdom' is!" and, "how in the world do I explain what I know in such a way that they'll actually get it?" and "...it's like I'm talking to a wall here..."

Well, Tonya has been noticing lots of people greeting her at church with well-meaning attempts to bolster her faith, without really understanding Tonya's situation, or how much faith she already has. (Incidentally, that's my assessment.) We meet people who have been praying for us that God would deliver us from this trial--by healing the baby, or otherwise making everything better. Well, we'd certainly be grateful if God decided to do something highly miraculous and give us a perfectly healthy little girl.

Of course, that would take about the same size and kind of miracle as God deciding spontaneously to turn her into a boy.

So we nod our heads and smile, and thank them for their concern; there's no need to get into theological debates with your well-wishers, if you can avoid it. But Tonya's given a whole lot more thought to this than they have, because it's happening to her; and as such, she may well be seeing God's work a bit more clearly. God does not just make life easy for his people. Rather, he gives his people what they need. And sometimes God's people need trials that make them stronger, that bolster their faith, that give them sympathy for the suffering of other people around them. A miraculous healing of our baby would certainly be appreciated; but for us to endure this trial with faith and grace, and to emerge on the other side of this trial with greater strength and experience, may well serve the true needs of the Kingdom of God better.

Anyway, I'm summarizing a wee bit too much of what Tonya was writing, so I'll suggest that you go over there and read the whole thing.

(By the way... It's this kind of thinking that I saw in her, that convinced me that I needed to marry her in the first place....)

Blog? What Blog?

2009-04-04T21:07:00.000-07:00

Well, well. I knew if I went much more than a week without posting something, people would start wondering if we'd dropped off the earth or been eaten by ducks.

Nothing so dramatic, I'm afraid. Starting about two weeks ago, a serious case of ennui set in. Also:

I started making things out of chain--of which I have a few pictures to share a little later. I found that after the kids went to bed each night, I had the choice of sitting down at the computer and typing a whole lot of whatever, or sitting down at the table and bending metal. The latter kept feeling more compelling, somehow.
For that matter, I have been making a conscious effort to spend less time web-surfing. I find that I'm a whole lot more informed about the world when I'm spending more time online, but (relatedly) it makes me a lot more annoyed with the world. I'm generally a happier person when I don't know what's going on. :-) But as a result of my being offline more, I tend not to come up with as many ideas worth sharing....
We were also out of town for a couple days there.
And then I managed to catch one of those generic diseases that's going around lately. We've got a lovely young lady in our office who's had a constantly-mutating virus, or a series of viruses with shifting symptoms (congestion one week, sore throat the next, coughing the week after that), for the last four weeks. It's gotten to the point that my office-mates have named the virus after her. ("Oh, you seem to have caught the 'K' virus...") The trouble is, she just happens to be a veteran chain-maker too, so we've been spending much time shooting the breeze lately and showing off our latest works to each other. So I guess it was inevitable that I would wind up with the 'K' virus. I've been pretty weak and surly this last week.

So that's my excuse. We'd finally get the kids in bed, and I'd hear the little voice on my right shoulder telling me, "They really need to know how you're doing". And then I'd hear the little voice on my left shoulder telling me, "They need to get a life. And so do you."

...

So, what has been going on around here? Well, my lovely wife posted this about two weeks ago, and things haven't changed that much since then.

And then we've been getting over the K virus lately. At one point or another it hit pretty much everyone in the family. For a while there we had both the Pillowfight Fairy and the Happy Boy on antibiotics at the same time.

...Oh, yeah. I nearly poisoned my daughter. I was supposed to give her two teaspoons of amoxicillin, and I gave her a dose of two tablespoons. She took it like a trooper, so I can be proud of that. But shortly after giving her the dose, after some odd things spoken by my wife and daughter, I realized that I'd just given her three times what I should have done. You know that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that you get when you realize that something really, really bad has just happened? Well, I'm not entirely over that sinking feeling yet. I felt absolutely awful as I dialed up the nurse to explain what I'd just done to my kid. And the nurse was very calm and reassuring, explaining that this sort of thing happens all the time. She called up the Poison Control Center just to be safe, and they said just to keep an eye on things and call in again if anything else comes up. As it turned out, the Fairy suffered no side effects or anything; she was absolutely fine. My nerves were shot, but she was just fine.

Now, if it had been Acetaminophen, that would have been really serious....

(P.S. The spell checker doesn't like "amoxicillin". It thinks it's some unholy combination of penicillin and amontillado...)

...

So what of those wires that I mentioned in my last post?

Well, they got here eventually. They took the scenic route, but they got here. After spending the weekend in Winnipeg, they hopped a truck down to Minneapolis, then down to Cedar City, IA; and from there they headed west, west, west--all the way along I-80.

And then it landed on our doorstep a week ago Friday--mere hours after we had left town to visit with Papa and Grandmother for the weekend. Thankfully, my brother and sister-in-law were taking a bit of a fun drive the next day, and were able to swing by our place to snag it before the neighborhood gremlins could. No telling what they'd do with 2 pounds of 16-gauge Nickel Silver wire....

Anyway, after taking off Monday with a bad case of the K virus, I was feeling a little better by the evening, so I started making up some rings and seeing what I could get them to do. By yesterday night, I'd completed this:
And here it is on my very long-suffering wife, who's 7.5 months pregnant, barely mobile, and wiped out after another day full of Toddler Wrestling:
I really like the way it turned out. It's hard to tell from the pictures, but it's actually made of three different kinds of differently-colored metal--bronze, stainless steel, and nickel silver (which, for clarity's sake, contains no actual silver). Up close you can see the colors clearly; but from a distance, the different colors trick the eye into seeing shadows where there are none. As a result, the chain looks like it has more depth and intricacy to it than it actually does. It's a neat visual effect.

It's also a heavy chain. A boxchain pattern with over 400 rings of 16-gauge wire, wrapped around a 1/4 inch mandrel, makes a heavy chain. It's the kind of chain you would expect to find on bikers.

Of course, that's not the only chain I've made so far. As I was impatiently waiting for the Canadians to get their act together, I took a trip to the local craft supply store to see what they had, and found some 20-gauge soft copper wire for beading projects. Close enough, said I! I picked up a small spool of pure copper, and a small spool of silver-plated copper, and got busy making little trinkets for my daughters.

Here's the first one I finished, for the Adrenaline Junkie (dressed in this picture in her Sunday finest. That's why--aside from the smile--she looks like she's about to go to a funeral).
And here it is up close, so you can see a little of the detail...
And here's the one I made for the Pillowfight Fairy:
She likes to wear it long, of course, but it's not always practical that way. So I included a hook on it, so it could be doubled around the neck and hooked in back, like this:
Each of these necklaces took on the order of 400 rings to complete. The different lengths of the necklaces are due to the different patterns, some of which are denser than others. The Adrenaline Junkie's necklace--which is very short, so that Tonya can barely wear it as a choker--takes about 25 rings per inch. The "biker" chain takes about 16 per inch, and the Fairy's spiral chain takes about 12.

...

So now what?

I'm not sure how much I'll be blogging in the immediate future. I figured I needed to write an update to let everyone know that we're still here. But you know, it's actually been a little liberating not trying to blog every day. And bending metal is actually a very fun activity.

I'll try to be a bit more prolific than once every two weeks, though.

Stimulating the Economy in Winnipeg

2009-03-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

Well, this last week has been rather busy, what with kids fighting off the creeping crud, and Grandparents in town, and medical appointments for Tonya's pregnancy, and a whole bunch of other things going on. So I haven't been blogging much lately. If you're one of those rare souls who has come to expect a daily fix, I must offer my sincerest apologies, and humbly offer the suggestion that you take up a hobby or something.

Like maille! Which, after all, is the subject of this post.

Or rather, is the starting point for this post. Last weekend I placed an order for some chain-making supplies from these guys, who are major suppliers in the maille community. Now, they don't just buy from manufacturers and resell it; they make a lot of the stuff themselves. They're not so much like Amazon, which stocks huge numbers of titles in warehouses somewhere waiting for orders, and then re-orders when their stock gets low. Rather, these guys appear to start manufacturing when they get your order, so you get it hot and fresh. Even if all you're doing is ordering wire, they still have to measure the right amount and wind it on a spool for you; but if your order is more complicated (a few hundred hand-cut rings, for instance), it can take some time to get the order ready, because they will go through the whole process of hand-cutting the rings for you.

So I placed my order last Saturday, and waited...

...and waited...

...and visions of ring patterns have been dancing in my head ever since. I've been so impatient.

Who would have thought I would one day go practically nuts because my shipment of wires hasn't come in yet?

("I would", say my wife, mother, and half my readership in unison...)

Well, yesterday afternoon we checked the website to see the status of the order--and it had shipped! Hooray! Now I know that it's out of the hands of the manufacturers, and it's safely in the secure grip of the UPS Ground people. Now all we have to do is wait a little bit more... and wait... and refresh the computer screen to see how much farther...

Now, the thing you have to realize here is that The Ring Lord is located, of all places, in Saskatoon.

(That sounds funny, doesn't it? I never would have guessed that Sauron was a Canadian, or that Mordor was in Saskatchewan.)

Ahem. So now that I've done my part to stimulate the Canadian economy, I'm sitting here in a suburb of Sacramento daily checking my account to see how much closer I am to having my preciousssss. And, as of today, I've discovered that my package is traveling...

East! Toward the Land of Shadow!

No, no, no! Wrong direction! There's a straight line that runs from Saskatoon, to Helena, to Boise, to Sacramento (which is apparently not important enough to show up on this map, unlike, say, Yellowknife).

Ok, ok... I probably shouldn't refer to Winnipeg as the Land of Shadow. I'm sure it's very nice, although perhaps not this time of year. (I lived in Minot, N.Dak. for a year and a half, and I know what it's like there this time of year. And both Saskatoon and Winnipeg are farther north than Minot is. Not that you can tell from this map, which didn't find anything in N.Dak. worth showing.)

But the way my package is headed, it looks like it'll wind up in Chicago or something. And I'm not sure I trust the town that is now going to require you to provide your fingerprints when you sell your home.

Suddenly I'm reminded of an old comic that I used to love called The Tick, which was a glorious spoof of the whole superhero genre. In one episode, the Tick and his sidekick Arthur are trying to drive to New York City, but they keep getting lost. Arthur is getting really annoyed by the fact that he keeps seeing cacti, when "I should not be seeing a cactus on the way to New York!", but the Tick is waxing poetic about all the sights of "America the Beautiful! (And parts of Canada and Mexico too)."

At this rate, by the time my little wires get to me, they will be far better traveled than I am, at least since the kids came along. And they'll probably have Chicago fingerprints all over them.

...

On a completely different topic, my wife has a book about the history of Canadian-American relations that she picked up when she visited Toronto over a decade ago. She finally decided to start reading it a few nights ago got through half of it, and then gave up because everything after 1812 was so boring.

And she's pretty tolerant of boring.

So What Good Is a Mandrel If You Don't Use It?

2009-03-15T23:35:00.001-07:00

Ok, so I had a really, really productive day on Friday, which I described in withering detail to my remaining loyal readership. And the highlight of that day--to me, anyway, was that I got to Build Stuff. In preparation for my foray into maille crafting, I built a mandrel.

And yet, as enjoyable as it was just to be able to build stuff, Friday's activities left me, well... unsatisfied. There was one very important item on my shopping list that I couldn't find, and that was the wire.

Yup. Plain old wire, of the sort that could be made into maille. Here's the trouble, though: to make good maille, you really need better wire than what you can find in most hardware stores. Yeah, you can find 16-gauge galvanized, and a lot of people do make their chainmaille from this material; but it's not the prettiest stuff around, and it does get that old-metal smell after you've been working it for a while, and while it starts out shiny, it doesn't take long to turn dull gray and stain your hands that color too.

So if you want your maille to look pretty, you need some better materials: you need stainless steel wire, or bronze, or brass, or nickel silver, or "bright" aluminum. The trouble is, it's not always easy to find good quantities of this stuff. You might get a little in a craft store, or you might not; you can't always tell in advance.

So I decided to go online and order from a place that specializes in maille-crafting supplies. I am now eagerly awaiting an order for three two-pound spools of 16-gauge wire: stainless steel, bronze, and nickel silver.

And this stuff is going to be delivered in two to three weeks. Weeks, I tell you! Good heavens, I've become impatient in my old age.

(I suspect my mother is reading this and thinking to herself, "What do you mean, become? You've always been like this....")

So earlier today I remembered that we had some wire hanging around from a project I did many moons ago, and I fished that out. Turns out it was 19-gauge galvanized steel. "Close enough", I thought, and I got out my mandrel.

Again, the girls pretty much dropped everything they were doing to come over and watch. I tell you, given how fascinated they are by all this, they're likely to be making maille one of these days.

And without too much trouble, I made over a hundred rings in under half-an-hour or so. Much to my surprise, every step of the process went as smoothly as everything I'd read online said: I wound up a big coil on the mandrel, then I cut off the ends and slipped the rod out, then I took the aviation snips and cut several links at a time off the coil. With the first several that I cut, I closed them into rings immediately after cutting them, to check to see how well they closed (and thus whether I was cutting them well), and everything looked really good--the cuts had a nice, flush surface, and they sealed up fairly tightly with little or no gaps.

So now that I had a small batch of rings, I got my pliers and set to work:
Voila. There you have an honest-to-goodness swatch of European 4-in-1 (meaning that each ring not on an edge goes through four others.

And, of course, I learned a few things. Just as I found with the whole lockwasher experiment from last week that your pattern can be too dense, so this time I found that your pattern can be too sparse. I'm using 19-gauge wire (0.040 inch thickness) on rings with an inner diameter of 0.25 inches, meaning that my Aspect Ratio (inner diameter divided by wire thickness) is 6.25--and that's a pretty high aspect ratio for the European 4-in-1 pattern. That means that the project is going to be too flexible, and thus isn't likely to ward off all those sword blows as well. Thankfully, the wire I ordered is 16-gauge (0.064 inch thickness), so the Aspect Ratio will be closer to 4. That will produce a denser, stiffer weave, but not too dense to work.

And if it doesn't work, I'll just get a thicker shaft for my mandrel. :-)

Anyway, I'll leave you with one more picture of my handiwork. Just for giggles I threw in the little lockwasher-weave that I did last week. I note how clunky and crude it looks next to the piece I did tonight. Interestingly, as different as they look, the rings on the two swatches had the same inner diameter; so had I done the same pattern, the pieces would have wound up about the same size for the same number of rings. (In fact, the new piece would have wound up slightly larger.) As it was, the new piece took 124 rings, compared to the 96 lockwashers in last week's project.
I've also thrown in a penny for scale, and the coil of wire I used. Note how shiny the wire looks on its spool? And note how dark gray the maille looks that was made from it? That's how quick galvanized steel tarnishes when you work it like that, and why I'm going to try to avoid it on my projects.

Anyway, despite the fact that my finished swatch feels to me less like armor and more like fireplace grate/curtain material, this was still a fun little project, and a good learning experience.

Homeschooling: Advice on Getting Started

2009-03-14T21:50:00.000-07:00

One of the other young mothers at our church has been considering homeschooling, and asked Tonya for advice.

It's rather odd to think that we're the experienced ones here. After all, we're only getting near the end of the Pillowfight Fairy's first-grade year; and somehow, we've started finding that other young mothers are coming to us for advice! It's as though they see us as old pros or something.

Of course, we've been doing it for--depending on how you count--two or three years now. We started formally teaching the Pillowfight Fairy her basic reading skills the year before she started kindergarten; then her kindergarten year we expanded the list of academic activities, and this year we've been doing full-time day school. Since our family hasn't self-destructed yet, and the Fairy is now reading her science texts for fun, we have to think we're doing something right.

And if you think about it, you can learn a lot in three years. After all, a college degree only takes four....

(Or six, if you attend San Jose State University. But we won't get into that just now....)

Anyway, Tonya thought about it, and wrote out a very detailed email about how we got started. A lot of what she says is good general advice that could apply to any starting homeschooler, so with her permission, I've decided to reproduce it here--with appropriate redactions to protect the identities of the innocent. I've also added links to the resources she mentions, and to earlier posts on this blog that describe episodes she mentions in more detail.

So if there are any parents of young kids out there who are looking for advice on getting started in homeschooling, and stories of what it was like, here's my wife's take on it:

Hi K,

I finally got around to sending you an email. The book I wanted to suggest to you is: 100 Top Picks for Homeschool Curriculum: Choosing the Right Curriculum and Approach for Your Child's Learning Style, by Cathy Duffy. We found it very helpful. It not only talks about the student's learning style but also the teacher's teaching style. It also has a questionnaire near the beginning to help guide you through figuring out what kind of homeschooling goals and philosophy are important to you. Once you figure out that, it is a lot easier to figure out how to go about homeschooling. The rest of the book gives descriptions of curriculum that is available and rates it according to many criteria such as learning style focus, amount of teacher involvement, amount of writing, preparation time, grade level, ease of teacher use, philosophical lean, and suitability for religious audience. I still refer back to our copy of this book once or twice a year to figure out where we want to go in the future.

We have decided to follow our own path with a "Classical" philosophy. But every homeschool family does their own thing, so don't feel pressured to follow what someone else is doing. Focus on what you think is best for your kids.

When we started our homeschool journey, I started when [the Pillowfight Fairy] was in preschool. She had started reading before I was ready and I didn't want to discourage her. These are some of the things I did.

1. I picked up a few preschool workbooks from Target to see how she would do with them. She was still pretty wiggly so I wasn't sure she would sit still long enough to do workbooks. I found that if I kept her to only one or two pages a day, it worked for both of us. In the process, I got to see how well she was understanding different concepts, so I knew what we needed to work on.

2. Tim found a free phonics program on the internet that would require only a few minutes a day. It taught a different phonics rule in each lesson and provided a list of practice words that I could write on a doodle pad to give her practice sounding out words. It worked well and I'm using the same thing for [the Adrenaline Junkie] right now.

3. We tried teaching [the Fairy] sight words and that was a disaster. I strongly recommend following some phonics method. We were unintentionally teaching her NOT to sound out words but to guess instead.

4. We had her practice sounding out words while we read to her.

5. After she was making good progress on sounding out words, I used McGuffey's Eclectic Primer which was given to us by Tim's parents. This was an old standard that used to be used in schools all the way back to the 19th century. The primer is for starting readers. There are also graded books to use later on, but they use a different numbering system than what we recognize from the current school grades.

6. I got some inexpensive computer games that were intended to supplement school or encourage "school readiness" called JumpStart. The kids like them and it helps them practice skills in a fun way.

7. With [the Adrenaline Junkie], who learns differently than her sister, I bought some Leap Start videos: The Letter Factory, The Talking Words Factory, Code Word Caper, and The Math Circus. Tim hates the videos (he finds them very annoying), but the two younger kids learned their alphabets with the basic phonics sounds using them. The Math Circus helped [the Fairy] with some of her math concepts.

One of the best pieces of advice I think that I got when I was starting out was that Reading, Writing and Math are the foundations for everything else that kids learn. At the very beginning, that is what needs to be focused on. So I have made that the focus of Kindergarten for my kids. And now that [the Fairy] is in first grade, I keep reminding myself to be sure that she gets plenty of practice at those subjects even as we study other subjects. The more fun for her the better, so that she will want to do it more.

We have found the stores nearby that have been useful for us are A Brighter Child located at Greenback and Fair Oaks (for most curriculum needs and a few other things like lesson plan books, or general homeschool books), Lakeshore Learning on Douglas Ave. in Roseville (for teaching supplies like paper, crafts, and toys), and other general stores for office supplies. We have gotten some things off the Internet. For literature, religion, art and music, Tim and I have been making our own curriculum. The more you do yourself, the more work it is. That is where teaching style comes in. I am a planner, but I don't do well thinking on my feet. So, I plan my whole year in advance and print out a complete year lesson plan that gives the details of what we will be studying on each day. Then I check my plan the night before and get everything ready for the next day's work. After the day's homeschooling, I put away the completed work in binders and keep track of what we have gotten accomplished. From what I've heard from others, I am very odd. Most people have a much more relaxed method. Find a method that works for you.

I am aware of two homeschooling groups in the area. S.C.O.P.E. is a group that I think the F's [another local homeschooling family] belong to. It is a Christian group, they have lots of activities, and they usually have a homeschool convention every year at Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church. We have joined C.C.H.E. which is a Christian group following the Classical method like we do. So far the drawback I see to this one is that they don't have much for the younger set. They were advertising a youth choir recently, but it started with age 8. All of my contact with them has been online not person to person. Tim has been following a "Homeschool Carnival" online which is the equivalent of a weekly newsletter or newsmagazine. Each week homeschoolers who maintain a blog online (such as my husband and me) may choose to participate by submitting a post on some homeschool topic. The posts range from how-tos to philosophy to news of the day. The link that I follow to this site is: http://blogcarnival.com/bc/cprof_199.html; This is a great way to locate other homeschoolers online who can give insight into issues that are important to you. Some are just starting out and others are old pros. It can be a very useful resource.

I don't know how much you know about the legal status of homeschooling in California. Basically, there are three ways a person can homeschool in California.

1. Join an umbrella program like a charter school where your children are enrolled but are taught at home. These programs usually have a lot of oversight of your teaching both in curriculum and following your progress. Some people prefer this method, especially if they are not confident in their teaching ability. However, I have heard plenty of complaints that your curriculum is chosen for you and there is a lot of record keeping to follow up on.

2. Register as a private school. This is where you register with the state as a private school where you identify your school to the state by name, identify the administrators and teachers and list number and ages of the students enrolled in your school. There is no other regulation of your schooling methods. You are free to choose what curriculum and teaching methods you wish to follow. You have only the once a year registration to do. All other record keeping is for your own purposes.

3. Hire a credentialed private tutor. This is self explanatory I think and most homeschoolers fall into the other two categories.

We have also joined a legal defense group called HSLDA which gives advice and help to homeschoolers based on the laws of each state. And, the laws do change from state to state.

I hope this is helpful to you. My offer still stands to let you come over and see for yourself what we do and pick my brains. Come to think of it, we should probably have your whole family over some time. After all, homeschooling is a family affair. I'm sure your husband has his own ideas about it and might like to talk to another Dad about homeschooling. I would suggest a time right now, except that [the Happy Boy] is sick right now and I don't know when he will be well again or whether the other kids will come down sick next.

Tonya

Of course, some of the stuff in this letter is only appropriate for people in the Sacramento area. (And some of it is only appropriate for the specific recipient of the letter--I wouldn't like every reader of the Carnival to decide to crash our place all at once, for instance).

Still, I can vouch for all the links and resources she mentioned. Even those LeapStart videos, which are in fact a little annoying, are very good at what they intend to do: even my two-year-old boy knows his letters now and the sounds they make entirely from watching these videos, and he's not even saying all that much yet.

So if there are any parents out there reading this who are debating whether they should homeschool and who are looking for pros and cons; or any parents who have definitely decided to homeschool, and are looking for advice on how to do it, feel free to write a comment and ask.

After all, we're old pros at this. We have three full years of experience. :-)

Daddy's Busy Day

2009-03-13T22:27:00.002-07:00

Well! I had a busy day today. It all started when I didn't go to work. :-)

Ok, there's nothing unusual about that....

(sound of record scratching....)

No, not like that. Turns out my company is on a 9/80 work schedule, which means you cram 80 hours of work into 9 workdays over the course of two weeks, instead of the usual 10. You (theoretically) do the same amount of work, but you get every other Friday off. Now, in reality, most people on my project cram anywhere from 85 to 100 hours over any given two weeks. Nevertheless, pretty much the whole company was shut down today.

And that's good, because today was Friday the 13th. Maybe if no one comes in today, we won't break anything....

(Of course, as anyone who works with computers knows, you don't actually need to do anything for a computer to break. They're like cats; they decide what they're going to do, and when. And they despise you.)

Anyway, today was my day of rest, so of course we packed it full of as much stuff as we could. It was divided about 50-50 between "Honey-do" stuff and Man stuff. (And, as much as we guys hate to admit it, there's a fair deal of overlap between those categories.)

First thing: I had to go shopping this morning. But this wasn't shopping shopping like what women do--this was Man Stuff shopping. First, I headed into Sacramento to pick up a 1/4" by 8' metal dowel, for reasons you'll see a little later. Then it was off to Lowe's, where I picked up some aviation shears, a screen-repair tool (one of those things that looks like a double-ended pizza cutter), a 2x8 board, some patio furniture, a faucet repair kit, new batteries, and some drill bits.

What's all that for?

It's not all for the same project, I'll tell you what. I know; I have this way of reading grocery lists, and imagining that they're describing some kind of diabolical recipe. I assure you, this was several weeks' worth of needs and wants that just rather piled up, so we took care of them all with one trip. My haul may have raised a few eyebrows, but it was entirely legitimate.

So when I got home, the first thing I did was haul all the patio furniture over to that patio thing I finished up just over a year ago. And then I spent a few hours in the afternoon getting it set up. So here's the newest addition to our backyard; isn't she lovely?
I'm referring, of course, to that tall drink on the back table. I tell you, by the time I got it all set up, that tall drink was the most lovely thing out there. But the tables n' stuff look pretty good, too. We like them. The girls have already blessed them by making mud in a bucket on top of them.

If you ever come over to visit, we'll hose them down before we serve you dinner on them.

But while all the work that went into getting those things home and assembled would have been enough to earn me the good night's sleep of a contented worker, I was a bit more ambitious. Now that I'd done some of the Honey-dos, it was time for Man Stuff.

Remember that metal dowel and 2x8 I mentioned earlier? Well, here they are:
That, my friends, is a homemade mandrel. Its purpose is to help me make rings for maille. The general idea is that you get a large quantity of high-quality wire of appropriate thickness, you feed the end through a small hole in the shaft, and you crank with one hand while flattening the wire against the shaft with the other, to make a tight coil. Then when you're done, you cut off the wire at both ends, slide the shaft out, and start cutting the links one by one off the coil.

The observant reader may have been wondering why the heck this semi-coherent blogger just purchased a pair of aviation shears, of all things. Why would he do that? Well, the reason is that--as maillers have found--there are some tools that work better than others for cutting maille links. There are tools that cut wire by pinching it, like wire cutters and bolt cutters; but pinch-cut rings, although they can be used in maille, tend to have pointed ends that don't close flush with each other. There are tools that cut wire by sawing it, like hacksaws, jeweler saws, and cut-off blades on a dremel; and these flush-cut rings tend to be very high quality; but they are much harder to make and take longer. (And trying to cut little tiny rings with a dremel is not very safe. One would need, um... to have a pair of chainmaille gloves first.) And then there are tools that cut wire by shearing it, like how a pair of scissors cuts paper. These shear-cut links tend to be almost as high quality as the flush-cut ones, and almost as easy to do as the pinch-cut method. So I thought I'd give that a try. I'll let you know how it goes....

...when I actually get my hands on some good wire. Alas, I struck out today. The metal supply store where I got the dowel didn't carry wire in stock. And at Lowe's, the only thing I found that was close was some 16-gauge galvanized steel wire. Now, this isn't bad stuff, and a lot of maille shirts these days are made from it; but the zinc coating does tend to oxidize to a dark, dull grey over time, and it eventually gets that "old metal smell"; and when the soft zinc coating gets scratched (as it inevitably will, when a mailler works it with pliers), the steel underneath will eventually start to rust.

Besides, I've decided that I don't want to start with a maille shirt. I'd prefer to start with smaller projects--and that means jewelry-type stuff: necklaces, belts, bracelets, that sort of thing. This will give me some much-needed mailling experience, and offer me a chance to experiment with different weave patterns and ring aspect ratios before I start the big stuff. But to do this, of course, I need better wire than funny-smelling galvanized steel. I'd prefer to start with stainless steel, or bronze, or one of the alloys known as nickel silver (although it doesn't actually contain any silver).

So, I can certainly mail-order the stuff if I have to. But I'm hoping to find a local supplier who has the stuff in stock. So if I have any readers in the Sacramento area who's into chainmaille or into fashioning jewelry, please don't hesitate to jump in and let me know where you get your stuff.

Ok, that's enough Man Stuff; it was time for more Honey-dos. First, I got to assemble and bake a pot pie for dinner--from scratch. Well, it wasn't entirely from scratch. We use store-bought pie-crust dough. And Tonya had actually cooked the chicken meat for the pie while I was putting together my mandrel. But then the Happy Boy came down with some kind of bug, and needed lots of hugs and cuddles, so Mommy did that while I put the rest of the thing together, from sauteeing the onions to crimping the top and bottom crusts together on the assembled pie.

And, for the first time ever, the Pillowfight Fairy asked for seconds on the chicken pie. I must have done something right. :-) Either that, or it's been long enough since they saw Chicken Run that they don't have quite the sympathy for the poultry that they used to....

Then I gave the Pillowfight Fairy a piano lesson. Alas, that didn't go well today. The Fairy is doing well in her homeschooling, and is making tremendous progress; but we still occasionally have days like today, where she fought every little thing we asked her to do. Ah, well; it was Friday, after all. Even homeschoolers look forward to the weekends.

Well, after the kids went to bed, I got to do my last Honey-do of the day: I fixed a leaky faucet in our hall bath. It was a pretty straightforward repair; the faucet is a Delta one-handle bath/shower fixture, and Delta has been making standardized back-ends for these for years, as well as repair kits.

However...

This repair would have been straightforward, except that the replacement part appears to have been assembled slightly, um... wrong. It has an adjustable scald-guard mechanism, that prevents the handle from being turned to the point that it's letting in too much hot water. The trouble is, with the way everything was assembled, the handle could barely turn one quarter of the way around, even with the scald-guard moved to the hottest position allowable; and when the water was run at this hottest position, it was at best lukewarm. So, thinking like the Engineer that I am, I reverse engineered the thing, and figured out how to remove the scald-guard completely, which gives the handle the same range of motion (and same temperature control) that the old faucet had. So yes, I did have parts left over when I reassembled the thing. :-)

Who says that Software Engineers can't do hardware?

Anyway, that was one day in the life of Daddy Power. I'm almost looking forward to going back to work next week so I can relax.

...

(P.S. And my wife did even more than I did. And she's seven months pregnant! Good heavens, how does she keep going!?)

Ah, the Miracle of Life

2009-03-10T21:50:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a more serious post tonight. Really, I was. I still owe my readership Part II of my post about Bristol Palin. And there's always the usual doom and gloom to write about, if we really want to.

But today, I thought I'd write about something more uplifting. That is, about the Miracle of Life, as seen through the eyes of a six-year-old who's just covered the topic in her science lessons, and who is now excitedly telling Daddy all about the wonderful things she learned today.

You see, one of the topics we're covering this year is the anatomy of the human body. And, yup--we've gotten to the section on reproduction. My wife and I have taken the view in our homeschool that leaving out big swathes of your subject matter on account of the fact that it's icky does the student few favors. Fact is, they know when you're leaving out the naughty bits (because they read through the book on their own last week!) and the fact that you're skipping it just makes it that much more exotic, that much more enticing. Besides, many of these topics don't seem quite so icky to them as they do to us.

And Tonya is a pretty left-brained, practical person. Her attitude is a "this is the way it is" bluntness, and so the idea that we should skip this stuff to preserve our little one's wee delicate sensibilities seems just wimpy to her.

So Tonya went ahead and started teaching the Pillowfight Fairy all about the anatomy that is involved in reproduction. Now, this is not The Talk that Tonya was giving her; that will come later, and that will truly be icky. No, this was science she was teaching; it was anatomy.

And the Fairy was absolutely fascinated by it.

...

So when I came home from work the Fairy was still rather excited by her new-found knowledge, and she proceeded to tell me over tonight's meatloaf all about where babies come from.

"It all starts with the eyes," she said.

Eyes? I wondered. I started thinking about how across the crowded dance floor, he looked up and saw her, and for a long moment their eyes locked together; she felt something move in her breast that she had thought would never move again; and as her cheeks flushed, the motion of the dance drew them ever closer, closer...

"Good heavens," I thought, "what has Tonya been teaching that girl?"

But no: "Some people have blue genes, some have green genes, and some have brown genes. You get one from your mother and one from your father, and they set the color of each eye."

Well, that's pretty close, although she made it sound as though you get your right eye from your Mom and your left eye from your Dad. And given that Tonya's eyes are in fact different colors (look really closely at the picture of Tonya in the chainmail post below and you'll see), I suppose this wasn't such an odd thing for the Fairy to say.

She went on to explain to us about the ovum and the sperm, and how the former has an X and the latter has either an X or a Y, and if you get two X's you're a girl, and if you get an X and a Y you're a boy. Pretty good, I thought.

And so then she started to describe how "there's this big race, you see, as all the sperm are rushing really fast to get to the egg first. And the winner gets to fertilize the egg! And all the sperm that lose, die."

The Fairy is big into competitions now. Everything has to be a competition. "I'm the first girl to brush my teeth! I ate more waffles than my sister! I'm the only one wearing purple!" So the fact that there's this big race between the sperm sounded really exciting to her, and the fact that all the losing sperm end up like those Roman gladiators she's also learning about is just really nifty.

"And then the ovums start splitting, always into an even number of cells. And then they turn into embryos, and start growing and growing until they're ready to come out."

Well, as described, that'll get you identical octuplets. But she's close enough, so we'll let it slide.

"And then it grows, and grows, and when it's ready, it slides down the Virginia, and pushes through the Gluteus Maximus, and it's a baby!"

At this point, Tonya and I simultaneously choked and spewed. I choked, she spewed.

Where babies come from?

So, we slowly regained our composure, and corrected her pronunciation (no doubt to the great relief of any readers I may have from the Old Dominion), and explained to her that--although we are very happy that she has remembered the names of the various muscle groups in our bodies--in fact, babies do not come out of our butts. Oh, and when you're eating dinner, it's better to use some of those Orwellian euphemisms I talked about a few weeks back. "Birth canal" spoken at the dinner table is rather less likely to cause people to drop their forks than a suddenly spoken "Virginia".

Especially by a six-year-old.

...

But all that isn't the best of it.

She decided to illustrate the whole process.

And not only that, she decided to give it a story line, with all the various characters acting pretty darn snarky, if you ask me.

When was the last time you ever read a comic strip with an antropomorphized sperm and ovum mouthing off to each other, before getting in a race to see who can be the first to make it out the "Virginia"? And when you did last read something like that, what were the odds it had been written by a six-year-old (as opposed to some college student who thought he was being edgy)?

So without further ado, I present you with, um... I suppose it's the Miracle of Life...

First, here are the full sheets she drew and colored. If you have trouble reading them, I broke them out into panels below.

And here it is broken out into panels. I hope you enjoy....

And there we have the joy of childbirth right at the end. I think those last two are actually supposed to be siblings, but I'm not sure.

...

Oh, and by the way: you remember how in an earlier post, I had told my daughter the Parable of the Lost Caper ("Which of you, upon losing his caper, would not climb under the table to try to find it...")? And then, how the Fairy had stormed up to me full of righteous wrath after that Sunday night's class, to accuse me of leading her astray? ("It's coins, not capers!") Well, my daughter is apparently like this a lot. After having read all about where babies come from today, she passed this withering judgment at the dinner table: "Calvin's dad lied."

Sigh. If you can't trust Calvin's dad, you can't trust anybody, can you?

By All Means, Leave Your Books Out In The Open

2009-03-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

So my wife has been preparing the curriculum for next year. Tonya is one of those (few, I suspect) people who works best when she knows exactly what lesson she will be teaching on any given day, for a year in advance. I was skeptical of this approach at first, but seeing how well it worked out this year, I'm now on board with whatever Tonya wants to do.

Well, as she's been preparing the lessons, she's been getting out big stacks of books and leaving them out. After all, she needs to read through them next to the computer as she's putting together next year's lesson plans. She knows, "Ok, I'm planning 36 weeks, and we're doing History three times a week, so I have to break this book up into 108 roughly-equivalent lessons.

I have no expectation that other homeschoolers do it this way, by the way. If I were the primary parent-teacher, I'd be using a much more, ahem... unstructured approach.

Which means I'd basically be winging it. But then, compared to Tonya, everyone is winging it. :-)

So the Second Grade science books are just sitting out (earth science and astronomy), and the second grade history (Medieval times) and literature (medieval literature) books are just sitting out, and the second grade math books have made an occasional appearance in the stack by the computer.

Now, the Pillowfight Fairy isn't dumb: she knows what these books are for. And she's curious. What kind of stuff are they going to inflict on me next year? So periodically she wanders over here and rifles through the pile, and pulls books out that look interesting to her. Then she drags them over to the sofa, gets comfy, and starts reading.

This is mildly upsetting to Tonya's orderly, clock-like universal worldview. She's reading all the curriculum early! She's already going to know it by the time I teach it to her! Of course, Tonya doesn't discourage this in any way; for one thing, it makes us parents proud as punch to see the Fairy reading about Shakespeare on her own (even if it is just in a comic-book format), or flipping through her new math text to see the amazing things she'll be able to do by the end of next year, or reading through her books about space and earth science.

So how much of this free-reading of hers is actually penetrating? Well, just the other day I caught her making some spontaneous drawings:
As you can see, the Fairy subscribes to the No-Matter-What-They-Say-Pluto-Is-Still-A-Planet school of thought. But she's picked up about both the Asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt, so I'm pretty impressed.

I mean, heck--she even got the colors of the planets more or less right.

Then I got a peek at this beauty, and I asked her to explain it for me:
Here's her answer, somewhat paraphrased: "This is Saturn. First, there was a collision that happened on a moon. Then [pointing at the second picture] the moon broke apart into lots of little pieces. Then [third picture] all the pieces started going around and around Saturn, and then they turned into a ring."

Now, the fun thing about this explanation--aside from being an accurate description of our best understanding of how the rings of Saturn formed--is that we never told her any of that! She picked that up entirely by reading the books that we just left lying around as we were planning her schoolwork for next year. She was curious about all these books with the pretty covers, picked one up at random, started reading through it, and--almost by accident--has educated herself about the structure and origin of the Solar System and the stuff therein.

Anyway, at this point she flipped over the paper and revealed that she'd already diagrammed the formation of the ring around Uranus, which she has informed us is her favorite planet.
I like to think that maybe it's her favorite because it's been knocked completely off its original axis, and so she has some feelings of fond affinity for it. Me, I've always been partial to Neptune. The Fairy asked Mommy what her favorite planet was, and Mommy (ever practical and prosaic) declared, "This one!" The Fairy thought this was somehow an amusing answer.

Of course, we're also facing the questions that we'd been putting off for a while now, which every Christian family must ultimately address: how to square the stuff we read in science books with what we learn about in Church. Now, Tonya and I have pretty well already decided how we were going to answer these questions, but we were hoping to have a little more time before we had to deal with them. Not anymore--the fact that the Fairy is insatiably curious to read and understand this stuff is forcing the issue. She's already familiar with the concept of the Big Bang, having read about it in numerous places--so how this fits in with "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is something that we must face, and soon. We may not even be able to get away with waiting until next year, when we were actually planning on covering the material.

...

But I'm constantly amazed--and very proud--to see the kinds of things that the Fairy gets into, purely from her own curiosity. Charlotte Mason presented the idea that education is like a banquet, and if we fill the table with lots of good food (and keep the unhealthful stuff off of it!), the children will choose what to eat, and will do so with enthusiasm. Our experience with the Fairy tends to point to the truth of this analogy.

(Though it somehow doesn't seem to work with actual food food. It's apparent Charlotte Mason was never actually a mom herself.)

And it also makes me think that the unschoolers among us may be onto something. We're not so radical as to try that approach ourselves--our kids inherited from their Daddy way too much of his lazy streak for us to be confident that they'd prosper if we started unschooling--but I see how much my kids learn even when we aren't making them learn, and it makes me curious to hear more testimony from unschooling parents about their methods, successes, failures, etc....

So by all means, leave your books out where the kids can get at them. Let them know that "this is the stuff we'll be covering next year", and let them read through the stuff if they get curious--even the teachers' manuals (the ones with all the answers). It may even give you ideas about what to cover, and where their interests lie, and which of those ridiculously complicated craft ideas you have to start mentally preparing yourself for now....

When Engineers Have Pets

2009-03-08T21:03:00.001-07:00

Saw this over at the Instapundit, and I thought I'd share it with my loyal readership.

As an avowed fan of homemade siege engines, I just think this is absolutely the bee's knees. That's one happy-looking dog there. (A little later on in the video, that's one happy-looking boy, too.) My three kids were watching this, standing around the monitor laughing uproariously.

Hope you enjoy.

The Mozart playing in the background was a nice touch, as well. So was their choice of dog. There's something about Dachshunds, especially very happy ones, that's just inherently comical.

Oh, Now I've Finally Gone and Done It

2009-03-07T21:33:00.000-08:00

Well, I've been threatening for years that I was eventually going to take up the art of chainmaille*. Of course, I've never actually gotten around to doing it. I mean, when does a Daddy of three have time to sit down for hours on end, bending little metal rings open and closed, open and closed....?

Well, we had to make a run by Lowe's today, so I decided on a lark to take up this new hobby--at least for one experimental project.

I bought a box of 100 lockwashers, and a couple extra sets of pliers.

Now, I suspect that if any maille hobbyists are reading this, they're laughing at me right now. "Lockwashers?" And my response to them would be: Hey, this is just an experiment. I know: if I really wanted to do this right, I would either order some rings from someone, or I'd get (or make) a mandrel so I could wind my own rings from some decent heavy-gauge wire. Yes, yes, I know that. I just wanted to make a quick and dirty project so I could get a feel for how much work it is.

So after I got home, I got out the pliers, broke open the box of lockwashers, and set to work. And I can proudly report that I learned a few things almost immediately:

If you're going to use lockwashers for your rings, pick ones that have a large inner-diameter-to-thickness ratio. The washers I picked were so thick that I could barely get four washers linked onto one. It was also extremely hard to close the links with the pliers, especially when the link was looped through four others--lockwashers are tough to bend even under the best of circumstances, but with that much stuff stuck through them, it became hard to get a good grip on them with the pliers.
And I quickly had to abandon my dreams of making a standard European 4-in-1 pattern. While I could physically get each link through four others, it was such a tight fit that I couldn't lay the work flat enough to get the next set of links through properly. I had to go for a looser pattern, so I went with one that was (apparently) commonly used in feudal Japan. (It doesn't have the stopping power of the European pattern, but it's lighter-weight and has better flexibility).
Given how solid and dense the maille made from lockwashers is, it's pretty apparent that a suit made from the stuff would be ridiculously heavy--even compared to other armor which everyone expects to be heavy.
And it would be expensive, too. Cheap lockwashers sell for about a dime a pop. Given that, according to Wikipedia, a typical hauberk takes anywhere from 15,000 to 45,000 rings (and that's with bigger rings than the ones I was using!) it's pretty obvious that this is not the way to do a big project. I would be spending ridiculous amounts of my family's money to make an obsolete piece of armor that weighs way too much to be practical even when it uses a less protective pattern than the standard one. Mmm-hmm...
I needn't have worried about the kids running off and getting in trouble while I was distracted with all the rings. Turns out the kids were just as distracted by it as I was. The Boy was taking his nap while I was doing this, but both girls were right next to me, wondering "What are you doing, Daddy? Daddy! Daddy! Can I help, Daddy? Can I do it too? What are those things, Daddy? Daddy? Are you listening?" But while I didn't have fears of them running off and getting into trouble, I did have problems with them getting too close. Occasionally those pliers would slip while I was trying to bend a ring, and all that unbalanced force on those pliers could take out an eye, or break a tooth, or gash a hole in one's arm (or chest) if the craftsman isn't careful. Besides, the girls wanted to pick up the rings and play with them, which wasn't actually very helpful.

And when I was done with the project, the girls got in continuous arguments over whose turn to play with it it was. And when I told them that it was my turn to play with it (since I was after all the one who made the durn thing), they were nevertheless inspired again to pull out the various weapons of war we crafted back in late 2007 and beat the tar out of each other.

(And this time they started yelling Shakespearean-sounding taunts and insults at each other as they whacked away. At one point the Fairy yelled out something like, "My brain is sharper than my sword!" which made me completely lose it.)

So I have some conclusions: first, this will be a lot of work. And it might give me repetitive strain injury. But, it's fun. Seriously: I was Making Something. And not only was I Making Something, I was taking ordinary-looking lockwashers and turning them into something absolutely lovely.

Here's what my piece looks like if you pick it up by one corner, and let it drape into a diamond shape:
...and here's what it looks like when you grab it by two adjacent corners and pull it tight:
Believe it or not, that is ninety-six lockwashers in that little piece. And it took me about two hours to complete. No doubt much of that time was wasted through my inexperience and my dubious choice of ring material, but still--it would take a long time to complete a decent-sized suit of armor with this stuff. That piece, which took two hours to craft, is no more than three inches square.

But I have noticed some interesting properties about it. It's very flexible, especially along the bias. The page I linked to above on the Hitoye Gusari pattern had this eyebrow-raising description of its properties:

Hitoye-Gusari is particularly flexible when rotated 45 degrees, so that the grain is like a diamond, instead of a square. On the bias the pattern has an incredible ability to collapse around complex shapes, such as well-endowed chests.

Oh, the possibilities that spring to mind as I turn that nugget of wisdom over in my head**....

...

So, now what?

Well, knowing me, It'll be a while before I get up the gumption to go buy a mandrel to make my own rings. But when I have that thing (and I will let you all know, dear internets, when that great day comes), expect blogging to be light for a year or two until I have linked together 15,000 rings and provided the Happy Boy with the absolutely coolest Halloween Costume Any then-4-year-old boy has ever possessed. Or five, or six, or seven years old; we'll see how long this whole thing takes. ;-)

...

Credit where it's due: I got several good ideas by looking at Dylon Whyte's website. The pages I linked to above, which provide very complete instructions for crafting the ring patterns, were drawn from his site. There's a lot of good stuff there, including some gorgeous maille jewelry (and the patterns thereto!) available for sale, in case anyone in my readership is interested.

*I know--that spelling will look weird to most of my readers, especially within my own family. It turns out that "maille" or "chainmaille" is the preferred spelling of this term among modern hobbyists and armorers. The trouble with the terms "chainmail" or "chain mail" is that they sound too much like those illegal through-the-mail pyramid schemes, so alternate spellings--drawn from legitimate archaic and foreign sources--have been adopted.

**If you haven't been reading this blog since the very beginning, you may not know that I've already sounded off on the issue of armored boobs. Bottom line: I'm for 'em.

Presented Without Comment

2009-03-07T21:31:00.000-08:00

No, seriously. No comment.

I'm Not Sure Why, But I Thought This Was Funny

2009-03-03T22:58:00.000-08:00

Ok, a little background. I'm a software engineer. We're developing a system right now that uses several Linux systems, so we're doing a lot of development in Linux. But, of course, we have Windows boxes on our desks.

So we're always going back and forth. And I can't tell you how many times I've typed Linux commands into my Windows terminals and vice versa. Those of you in similar circumstances are probably nodding your heads at this: I can never remember whether to use "ifconfig" or "ipconfig", so I always wind up typing both and using whichever output looks less like an error.

So anyway, as I walked past my supervisor's cube earlier today, he had a sticky note up to help him keep things straight... and (unintentionally) to give the rest of us Windows/Linux amphibians a bit of a laugh. I mean, despite his proud redneck accent, my supervisor is still plenty smart. And I suspect that's part of what made this so funny to me.

I've reproduced it here for your contemplation:

Yup. Vitally important for a software engineer to keep those little things straightened out. This has been your daily PSA.

(Oh, and pardon the horrible pun--they're supposed to lean like that).

A Confession

2009-03-01T21:19:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make. I'm corrupting the religious and moral development of my children.

You see, I've developed a bad habit--one which I keep doing because it's so, so fun to do. Even my very upright, very conscientious wife thinks its funny. And then, when my eldest daughter finds out the truth, she glowers at me in serious indignation. And if you've never been glowered at in indignation by a six-year old, let me tell you, it's a real hoot.

Thus, the confession.

Here's what I've been doing. You know those retellings of world history, in which they restate, slice up, and remix the stories to humorous effect? You know--"Magellan circumcised the earth in a 100-foot clipper", and "Queen Elizabeth exposed herself to her troops, who all shouted, 'Huzzah'!" and that sort of thing?

(In case you are interested, here is the exemplar of this genre.)

Well, I've found myself doing this with Bible stories. (It makes them much, much more memorable, don't you know.)

Here's one example from today. The girls were talking about some stories they learned in class while we were coming home after morning services. Specifically, they were mentioning things that sounded vaguely like the Parables of the Lost Coin and the Lost Sheep. However, their narration abilities are still only partially formed, and so their description sounded a little like they were hunting for money and food.

Hey, we all can understand that.

So I got this little devious idea into my head, and began relating the Parable of the Lost Caper. Basically, it involved a diner who had ten capers on his dinner plate, and lost one, and so dived under the table looking for it...

I had my wife laughing well before my little story was done. And it became even funnier when we realized that neither of us actually knows what a caper is.

(For the record: it's an edible bud used in Mediterranean cooking, often either salted or pickled. It's also a species of North American snail, but you don't eat those.)

So I changed the story. Truffles! We shall now have the parable of the truffles. Tonya said she could do that, so long as they were chocolate truffles instead of the real thing. Great! I said; after all, if you had ten chocolate truffles, and you lost one, wouldn't you dive under the table to search for it? And when you had found it, wouldn't you wipe the accumulated dust and cat hair off of it, and joyfully call your friends over to celebrate (presumably by sharing your truffles with them)?

(Um, if you don't mind, I'd like to pick one of the other nine, please.)

Somehow, my daughter didn't get the joke. So over lunchtime, she decided that she finally understood the Parable of the Caper, and so she spontaneously narrated it to us. She narrated it quite well, I'm afraid, and had mommy and me practically in stitches:

So here's the parable of the Caper. The kingdom of heaven is like a diner in a restaurant with ten capers on a plate. And then the diner sneezes, and one of the capers rolls off the plate onto the floor under the table. Which of you, upon losing his caper, would not climb under the table to try to find it? And upon finding the caper, the diner jumps up and down in the restaurant, yelling, "Eureka!" The explanation of the parable is this: God is the diner, and we are like the capers; when one of us is lost on the floor, God leaves all the others on his plate and climbs under the table to look for us....

(Sigh...) that's my beloved daughter, in whom I am well pleased.

So that was that... until this evening. After my girl came back from class this evening, she walked right up to me with furrowed brow, darkened countenance and pursed lips; and under her withering, glowering stare, she firmly stated, with righteous indignation:

"It's not capers, it's coins!"

Oh, man, am I going to H-E-double-toothpicks for that one, or what? I suspect it'd be better for me to have an upper millstone tied around my neck....

...

So remind me to tell you sometime about the Plague of Wedgies.

Whaddaya Know, They Can Criminalize Stupidity

2009-03-01T21:09:00.000-08:00

So we saw this headline the other day:

Woman Caught Breast-Feeding While Driving

Of course, we had to look. It was like watching mud-wrestling, or sword-swallowing, or a horrible accident (or all three at once): you just can't look away.

First sentence:

KETTERING, Ohio (AP) - Police in Ohio said a woman has been charged with child endangering after another motorist reported she was both breast-feeding a youngster and talking on a phone while driving.

Darn it, I hate it when people talk on the phone while driving.

Good grief. I mean, seriously: good grief. I'm generally the kind of guy who believes in the wisdom of the common man--at least, in that they're usually able to handle their affairs better than their political superiors.

But then I read a story like this, and it makes me think: If that's the kind of thing the common people do, then I shudder to think what our political superiors are like....

How Times Have Changed

2009-02-27T22:12:00.000-08:00

So my wife looked at the calendar, and decided she'd better start preparing curricula for next year's homeshooling efforts.

(No, really--she's serious, and she has good reason. For one thing, we started the Pillowfight Fairy's first grade year in early July, instead of late August or early September; and if we keep with that schedule, it means the next school year begins in just four months. And besides, with Tonya pregnant--and pregnant with a Trisomy 13 baby with severe developmental abnormalities--it's likely that May, and possibly June, are going to be Really Bad Months. She figured it would be best to get all this planning out of the way now, while life is still fairly normal.)

So she has lots of educational materials scattered around the place. And, on a lark, I picked up McGuffey's Second Eclectic Reader from a pile of stuff yesterday and started flipping through it. And there was one story in there that caught my attention, which I'd like to share with you and comment upon.

...

In case any of my readers aren't familiar with them, the McGuffey Readers were a set of books used as reading texts, which have been around in one form or another since 1836, and later versions were still in regular classroom use into the second half of the Twentieth Century. Even though they aren't used in the Public Schools anymore (as their literary passages have a strong religious/moral component to them), they are still not infrequently used in the homeschooling community. I wrote about them at length here.

Although there's some debate among homeschoolers about the exact reading levels, most estimates I've seen put the Second Eclectic Reader (1879 edition, which was the latest one) at about a third- or fourth-grade level. Since the Fairy is reading a bit above her grade level, we're thinking that it's about right for her.

So, curious as to what kind of moral lessons Mr. McGuffey was going to teach our little girl, I opened it up at random, and read the following.

Lesson XIV

HENRY, THE BOOTBLACK.

1. Henry was a kind, good boy. His father was dead, and his mother was very poor. He had a little sister about two years old.

2. He wanted to help his mother, for she could not always earn enough to buy food for her little family.

3. One day, a man gave him a dollar for finding a pocketbook which he had lost.

4. Henry might have kept all the money, for no one saw him when he found it. But his mother had taught him to be honest, and never to keep what did not belong to him.

5. With the dollar he bought a box, three brushes, and some blacking. He then went to the corner of the street, and said to every one whose boots did not look nice, "Black your boots, sir, please?"

6. He was so polite that gentlemen soon began to notice him, and to let him black their boots. The first day he brought home fifty cents, which he gave to his mother to buy food with.

7. When he gave her the money, she said, as she dropped a tear of joy, "You are a dear, good boy, Henry. I did not know how I could earn enough to buy bread with, but now I think we can manage to get along quite well."

8. Henry worked all the day, and went to school in the evening. He earned almost enough to support his mother and his little sister.

So, what do you think?

Well, by modern sensibilities, this story is something of a heavy-handed morality tale. Not that our modern sensibilities are against heavy-handed morality tales, but they tend to be heavy-handed about different things (ethnic diversity, the environment, healthful diet, acceptance of alternative lifestyles, et cetera).

But the moral lesson of this tale seems, well... simplistic to us. A young boy (by the looks of the picture, a pre-teen), who's lost his father, who spontaneously decides to start working to support his family, while going to school in the evenings? And he actually succeeds at paying most of his family's bills? And we're supposed to believe this stuff? We're supposed to give this really, really contrived story to our children, and expect them to accept such a moral lesson when the world depicted in the pages of the Reader is so different than the one our kids inhabit?

Well, um... yes.

...

As I said above, modern sensibilities also thrust heavy-handed, highly-contrived morality tales on our kids. That hasn't changed; all that's changed is the set of values that's being pushed. And one of the reasons that the above story seems so contrived upon a first reading, is that our values regarding childhood are so different now than they were in the late 19th Century.

What is childhood? What are children supposed to be doing with their time? What are children supposed to have accomplished by the time they turn 12? 16? 18? 22? 29?

I present for your consideration two different schools of thought on this question.

Here's the way people thought of childhood back when America was primarily a rural, agricultural society--back when Mr. McGuffey was writing his books. Childhood was, simply stated, training for adulthood. Kids are born without the survival skills they need--they don't know how to raise (or kill) their own food, they don't know what activities are safe and what are dangerous (and there are plenty of things on a farm that can get you killed), they don't have the moral fiber yet to get up and keep working even when they'd rather stay in bed (behavior which, in subsistence farming, will eventually cause you to starve). If a kid is going to set out on his own at age 18, then that 18-year-old must be fully-formed, fully-adult, fully mature; he can't be lazy, he can't be incompetent. He must know everything about growing and raising food, about caring for animals (and then slaughtering and butchering them), about how to survive winter, about binding up wounds, and so forth. By the time a girl reached adulthood, she needed to know everything there was to know about clothes-making: sheep-shearing or cotton-harvesting, spinning, weaving, dyeing, sewing, and mending. She also had to know all about food gathering, preserving, and preparation--starting with, say, a cow.

(Here's a cow. Now use it to feed your family....)

So from a very early age, these kids were faced with very immediate real-world problems and harsh realities. Farm kids knew the facts of life from a very early age--after all, they often, um... lived with their parents and siblings in small farmhouses without a lot of privacy. And they watched the livestock mating, and knew exactly what was happening. These kids knew about death; most kids in large families lost at least one sibling before they reached adulthood. And people didn't go away to hospitals or nursing homes to die; kids watched their elders grow to senescence and dependence in front of their eyes, and then when the time came, they helped bury them.

In this environment, children had tremendous responsibilities put upon them starting from very young ages: as soon as you were old enough physically to do some task, you had to do it--no shirking. Even very young children had to go fetch water, or fetch wood for the fire, or feed the animals. And as the kids got older, their responsibilities grew, until kids as young as what we would consider Junior-High age were capable of running the farms.

But in this environment, adulthood is a state greatly to be wished. Children have nearly as many responsibilities as the adults do, but they do not have much freedom; because they have not learned fully to control themselves yet, the adults had to maintain discipline. But as the child matured and learned to do the work on his own, he was granted greater freedom and independence. When kids became adults, they still had all the responsibilities, but they had the self-control needed to live up to them without needing a disciplinarian.

So under this paradigm, childhood had many very heavy responsibilities but few freedoms; as the child matured into adulthood, the freedoms increased. Adulthood was thus seen by children as something to be desired, and it came (by our standards) relatively early.

That view of childhood isn't very prevalent today.

What has replaced it is a view of childhood as unspoiled innocence; the idea that childhood should be a time of wonder and exploration, that should be enjoyed as (in many ways) the best part of a person's life. Children's responsibilities in the modern world are often limited to schoolwork and household chores--and the latter of these is often only sporadically enforced. The idea that children need to learn to pull their weight around here is seen not only as outdated, but as downright barbaric.

How dare you, a big, strong parent, demand that your kid do all this work? That's your job, not his! By making your kid do all this stuff, you're stealing his childhood.

In contrast to the other childhood paradigm, this one sees responsibility as something that comes with age. As you enter adulthood, at that time you have responsibility put upon you--the responsibility to earn enough to keep a roof over your head, the responsibility to earn enough to keep yourself fed, the responsibility of caring for children and for elders, the responsibility of finding and pursuing a vocation.

In this paradigm, responsibility is a mark of adulthood. Freedom, on the other hand, comes earlier. Now, even in this paradigm, freedoms tend to grow as the person ages--we don't let young kids drive, for one example. Nevertheless, we do tend to give out the freedoms before we assign the responsibilities; people often learn to drive before they can pay the car insurance.

And, for that matter, it is generally acceptable in our broader society for people to become sexually active long before they feel ready to accept the "adult" responsibilities of marriage and family.

In fact, under this new paradigm, we've developed a rather disparaging term to describe the process of accepting the responsibilities of adulthood: we call it (often with a hint of wistfulness in our voices), "settling down".

So the life trajectory of our kids has changed. Childhood has become a time of play, of wonder, of experimentation, of learning--ideally isolated by loving parents from the harsh realities of life. For a kid to be expected to shoulder real responsibilities, like the children of 1879 were, would be "stealing their childhood", and would be considered child abuse.

(I remember reading a news article once about the Duggars, that Arkansas family that has 18 kids--with no intention of stopping, so long as God keeps giving them more. The story asked them how they managed to take care of all of them; and part of their answer was that the older ones were expected to shoulder some of the responsibility to take care of the younger ones. The reader comments at the end of the article were instructive: they were full of self-righteous anger at how the parents were "stealing the childhoods" of their older kids by giving them this kind of responsibility).

But after childhood, there's a gap before "Settling Down" into adulthood. The teenager, or early twenty-something-ager, has new-found, new-won freedoms, but (understandably!) doesn't exactly want to jump into the world of mortgage payments, income tax, and PTA meetings. He or she wants to sow wild oats! Wants to travel the world, wants to try out different relationships, without committing to any (not yet at any rate), wants to try out different jobs for a while, without necessarily committing to a career.

And this thought leads onto a tangent that isn't exactly where I'm trying to take this essay, but fits in very nicely with my earlier post on Bristol Palin, here.

...

My point is, we have a tendency to judge the moral vision of childhood as presented in the McGuffey Readers, through modern eyes, and we don't necessarily like what we see. After all, how would you respond if you heard about this family:

The father is nowhere to be found.
The mother is unable to find a job that supports the family.
So the pre-teen boy of the family drops out of regular day-school, and
Starts taking whatever odd jobs he can find.
His mother collects the money he earns, to pay off the bills.
The boy continues his education at night school.

Egads! The Child Protective Services would be on this family in an instant. While within the scope of the story, the boy is voluntarily working to support his family, in real life we would sarcastically snark, "A likely story," and blame the mother for putting the boy to work when he should be in school! We would say that if she was really having that hard of a time making ends meet, she should talk to the state or county governments to see what kinds of public assistance are available. If (as in the story) the father was deceased, they would qualify for Social Security benefits, as well. There is no reason that mother should be suffering material deprivation. There is no excuse to be stealing that kid's childhood. And there is absolutely no reason that the kid should be working!

...except that working to take care of one's family is a thoroughly noble thing to do. It is a sign of adult-level maturity. And it is ennobling; far more than any academic work, it gives the person who's doing it a sense that I Matter. Real work is not a curse, or a chore; real work, of the kind that enables a person to meet his needs and those of his family, is a gift. There is no greater builder of confidence in a young man, than for that man to look back on the tasks he has accomplished (real tasks of real benefit to someone--not academic makework), and to be told, "good job".

And I suspect that the converse is true as well. There is nothing so disempowering, so emasculating, as being denied the opportunity or ability to do real work (again, I'm not talking about academic make-work here). Sure, a person may not like doing the work, but there are benefits (like self-esteem and self-confidence) that the work will impart anyway.

...

So yes: I fully concur with my wife's decision to have our daughter read the lessons from the McGuffey Readers, and I fully hope that she takes the moral lessons to heart. Between the two paradigms of childhood, I agree much more heartily with the early-responsibility, early-maturity model than the one more in vogue today. I understand that, yet again, we'll be swimming upstream culturally--but then, we're non-TV watching homeschoolers, so what else is new?

...

A few credits are in order, I think. One of the commenters to my earlier post on Bristol Palin and marriage, Theocentrica, sent me a link to an article entitled In Defense of Marrying Young, and some of the thoughts there--and other articles linked to from there--figured heavily in what wound up in this essay, especially this one by Frederica Matthewes-Green.

I've also written before on the topic of kids and work, here.

Another Example of Music I Like

2009-02-26T21:56:00.000-08:00

Here's another example of the kind of sacred music that I'd like to hear more of. :-)

Now, this music is a setting of the Ave Maria; and being non-Catholic, we're thus not likely to get it in our church anytime soon. Nevertheless, it's absolutely gorgeous. I first learned it when I was in the Choraliers at San Jose State University in the early '90's, and it's been rolling around in my head ever since.

Interestingly enough, although it sounds like really old music on first listening, it's not. The writer, Franz Biebl, lived from 1906 until 2001, and wrote his Ave Maria in the mid-'60's. Originally it was for seven male parts--and in this form was picked up by the Men's chorus Chanticleer; but after it became popular, Biebl himself arranged it for seven-part mixed double chorus. This was the version that I learned with the Choraliers, and it's just as gorgeous. (And you need some serious sopranos to do it right).

The text of the piece combines the Angelus Domini texts, sung as plainsong chant:

Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariæ.
Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto.

Maria dixit: Ecce Ancilla Domini.
Fiat mihi secundum Verbum tuum.

(The angel of the Lord announced unto Mary.
And she conceived by the Holy Spirit.

Mary said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord.
Be it unto me according to your Word.)

with the Ave Maria, presented as a gorgeous seven-part double chorus:

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostræ. Amen.

(Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.)

And while this music--and the liturgy and doctrine it's based upon--isn't part of my faith tradition, I still have to marvel at just how powerful and lovely this music is, and how elevated the sentiments are that led to someone composing such a thing. And from personal experience, I can honestly say that learning and singing it was--despite my not-entirely-compatible religious background--still a powerful worship experience for me. And even though I occasionally become jaded about Christian music--after a while, it all sounds the same for me--something inevitably reminds me of this piece and breaks through my cynicism.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy. This is Angelus Domini, by Franz Biebl, sung by Chanticleer.

Bad People Only

2009-02-25T07:52:00.000-08:00

Ok, so when I came home last night, there were a whole bunch of new pictures taped to the wall. Apparently the Pillowfight Fairy was inspired by those books we've been checking out from the library, about "Life in Roman Times" or "Life in Aztec Times" or the like. So she decided to present a number of pictures about life in the times of some imaginary kingdom of hers.

And among those pictures, there was one that made me laugh out loud when I saw it.

I'm taking a copy of this one to work to post up somewhere.

Another Moment to Make a Daddy Proud

2009-02-23T22:56:00.000-08:00

I've talked at great length on this blog about how I come from a musical family, and how I hope to pass on our family tradition of musicality to my children. Well, today I got some signs that I'm on the right track.

My eldest daughter has been working her way through the John Thompson piano series. She has finished this book and is now working on this one. And she's doing pretty well.

But she tends to learn the same way I do: by rote. She plays something over, and over, and over until it is completely in her muscle memory. It thus takes her a while to learn things (though I have noticed that it's not taking as long as it used to--her ability to learn is advancing, too, and I like that a lot).

And she hadn't been picking up much of the theory. So I decided to add a little something to her homeschooling schedule, and we picked up copies of these three books. Now, these books are intended to be used concurrently with the piano practice, but independently of it; you can choose to read the exercises at the piano to see how they sound, or you can sight-read them at the writing table--whatever works.

So we started off with the first of the three books, the Note Speller. We're not all that far into it yet--but the Pillowfight Fairy has taken to it like it's been missing all her life. So far she has learned how to draw a five-line staff, with bass and treble clef symbols; she has learned the time signatures of 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4, and what they mean; she has learned about quarter notes, half notes, and whole notes, and how many beats each one gets (at least, when the time signature has a "4" on the bottom"); she's learned about bar lines, and how many beats have to exist between the bar lines; and she's started learning how to count out the time by looking at the notes.

On this last one, we put the book out in front of us on the table; and while we count "One, Two, Three, Four, One, Two, Three, Four" evenly, we use a pencil to point at whichever note we're supposed to be on at the moment. The Fairy has started to get pretty good at it, even when the rhythm is a more complicated one, like quarter-half-quarter in a 4/4 time measure.

But after finishing the exercise in the book, I felt we needed a little more practice before going on with the next page. So I got out the staff paper, and started doing a little one-line composition.

The Fairy watched me write it, with a level of interest that bordered on impatience--because she wanted to write some music too. So I finished my four measures of hastily-composed music, and had her draw in the bar lines (which requires her being able to count and add up the note values). Then I had her count it out, pointing at each note as we reached it. She did it well. So, I let her have the pencil--and she started writing a line of music, just like Daddy did.

Then I did another line, this time in 3/4, and then the Fairy wrote one of her own. Then I did one in 2/4, and she did another. By the time we were done, the page looked like this:
I daresay, my girl draws prettier treble clefs than I do.

And I started showing her how to put fingering numbers over the notes, and I had her do one line--the top one--herself.

So after we were done with each pair of lines, we'd go over to the piano, and I would play the line so she could hear what it sounded like. This part absolutely fascinated the Fairy! And I have to admit, when I was learning music theory in college, that was the part of the class I absolutely loved the most: the teacher would collect all our assignments, take them to the piano at the front of the class, announce who wrote each paper in turn, and play them all for us--so we could hear what our work, and those of our classmates, sounded like.Well, it seems the Fairy has gotten the bug too. After our six lines, she wanted to keep on writing, and I would have been more than happy to let her, had bedtime not been fast approaching.

Now, the Fairy doesn't know in advance what her music will sound like. At this point she's just putting semi-random notes on the page. But I started to give her a little advice, which (judging from the noodling she started doing at the piano immediately afterward) she immediately took to heart: If you want happy sounding music and don't want to use any black keys, start and end your music on "C" or "G". I didn't explain to her the reason, but of course this would put the song in either the key of C Major or G Mixolydian. And I told her that if she wanted to make sad-sounding music without using any of the black keys, you should start and end your music on "A" or "D" (again, corresponding to A Natural Minor and D Dorian). After I mentioned this, she started noodling around, trying to start and end her playing on C, G, A, and D, in turn.

So she doesn't understand in advance what the notes sound like together. But she is experimenting, and doing so enthusiastially--and that's what gets people eventually to understand this stuff. So again, I'm very proud of her.

...

One more thing: her selection of notes may be random, but even random selections of notes occasionally do something. If you have a piano handy, take a look at the last line the Fairy wrote--the one in 2/4. She started and stopped it on the high A, and it just happens that the notes in the middle correspond pretty closely to the primary chords of A minor. Play that line out, if you will, perhaps accompanied by an A-E open fifth in the bass hand.

I did this at our piano after the kids all went to bed... and found myself noodling around for a good 20 minutes on that one line: exploring what kinds of counter-melodies would go with it, thinking what kinds of variations would work with it, transposing it into other modes (Major, Dorian, Mixolydian, etc), inverting it, imagining how it would be worked into a larger piece. In the hands of a J.S. Bach (or even a P.D.Q. Bach)--that melody would be turned into an entire cantata, or a symphony, or a tone poem. Those eight notes have some serious potential--and my only advice to her when she was writing them, was to try to get it to end on the same note as it started.

Anyway, I'm rather happy about all this tonight.

My Six-Month Pregnant Bride Muses About Exercise

2009-02-23T22:50:00.000-08:00

As my loyal readers no doubt already know, my wife has decided to start writing up systematically all those ways in which she feels that our broader society has gotten something wrong.

So for the second post in what is sure to be a very long series, I direct my loyal readers this way, to where my wife, who is developing a positively lovely late-term waddle, sounds off on the way we think about exercise.

Profundity From the Four-Year-Old

2009-02-20T07:52:00.000-08:00

So as I was getting ready to go to work this morning, I looked over and saw the Adrenaline Junkie (age 4). She had poured a bunch of water from her cup onto the dining-room table, and was finger-painting in the puddle.

This shall not stand. So I went over to her with a bunch of paper towels, and scolded: Why did you pour your water out?

Her answer was a profound one. In a dreamy, almost mystical voice, she spake: "Because I wanted to know."

Wow. Profound. That's as good a reason as any, when you come to think of it.

Ok, kid, now you know. Now clean it up.

Meet the Pillowfight Zombie

2009-02-20T00:12:00.000-08:00

So just as I was about to leave the house this morning to go to work, I did what I always do--I gave each of my kids a kiss on the forehead. Now, because they're usually at the breakfast table, it's a little awkward--I have to come up behind them, and bend over from above them, and kiss them upside down.

I'm a daddy, after all--we don't do things the normal way. The abnormal way is usually more fun. Mommies do normal--daddies do fun.

And I don't just give them a little peck; no, I want to give them a kiss that will last all day. So it's usually a big ol' noisy smackeroo, that lasts long enough to set them giggling.

Well, this morning the Pillowfight Fairy was running a little sluggishly (do slugs run?), so she was still sitting on the floor of her room, with a pile of the day's clothes (and the nights pajamas) strewn about her. So I came up over her from behind, bent over her, and left a big, sucking, highly-persistent smooch right in the middle of her forehead.

And when I was done, the Fairy said--with no warning to me, and without a hint of pretension:

Braaaaaaaaaaains!

I know, intellectually, that she must have gotten it from either mommy or me, and most likely me. (Mainly because mommy doesn't go around declaring, "Braaaaaaaains!") Nevertheless, it still caught me way off guard, and put a big, wide smile on my face as I went off to work this morning.

I love this girl. Just thought I'd share.

In Which I Sympathize With Bristol Palin, Part 1.

2009-02-18T22:36:00.000-08:00

No, really. Hear me out on this.

If you're not familiar with the story, here it is: shortly after Sarah Palin was selected as McCain's running mate, the news broke that her unmarried daughter Bristol was pregnant. This set off a media feeding frenzy, of course; Sarah was the favorite candidate of the social conservatives in the last election, and Bristol's pregnancy became a mocking front-page story.

Well, recently Bristol was interviewed by Greta van Susteren on Fox News (hat tip to www.hotair.com). And in this interview, Bristol makes a noteworthy comment:

No, I don’t want to get into detail about that. But I think abstinence is like … I don’t know how to put it, like … the main … Everyone should be abstinent, but it’s not realistic at all.

There were a number of other things in that interview that were interesting--like the fact that having and raising a baby is really hard work, and that teens would be better off "wait[ing] ten years" (which would have put Bristol at 28 instead of 18):

I think everyone should just wait ten years. Just because it's so much easier if you're married and if you have a house and a career. It's just so much easier.

Funny thing is that when I look at these comments, I find I agree about 80% with one of them, and I disagree about 65% with the other, and...

...well, they're not the ones you think.

...

For your consideration I'd like to present you with a trilemma.

What the heck is a trilemma? You ask. Good question, because it's a nasty sounding word. But in my defense, I can honestly say that I didn't invent the term. Here's an example of a trilemma that we face in engineering: if you're trying to hire a bunch of engineers to build something, you may be able to get it fast; you may be able to get it cheap, and you may get them to do a good job; but you rarely if ever get all three. At most, you can only expect two: if you want a good product at a low price, it will take a long time. If you want a good product fast, it will cost a lot of money. And if you want something fast and inexpensive, expect it to be poorly designed and built. Fast, Cheap, Good: pick any two.

(And we engineers sometimes snicker when we think of NASA's philosophy of the 1990's: Faster, Cheaper, Better. Wrong answer. It wound up producing a lot of probes quickly and inexpensively that went off course after the software neglected to convert between miles and kilometers....)

Well, when I think of the way our society handles issues of sex, abstinence, marriage, family, and faith, it seems to me that we Christians are up against a pretty major trilemma here.

Pick Any Two:

1. First, as Christians we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, and this includes what it has to say about sexuality. This means that a husband and wife are pretty much free to do what they want with each other, so long as they are acting in love and with due consideration to the other's needs. However, the Bible at various places rules out any sexual act that does not fall within this approved context. Sex between unmarried people is ruled out; sex between same-sex partners is ruled out; sex with a prostitute is condemned; and so forth.

I won't go into the book/chapter/verse at this time (though if pressed on the matter, I will be able to provide them in the comments). Suffice it to say, it's in there, and anyone who's read the Bible has read them.

Now, the Bible doesn't give a really strong closed-form explanation of why sex is to be restricted to within the Marriage relationship, so anyone who attempts to give one is speculating, and their explanations must be accepted as speculation. My own guess--which I concede is just a guess--is that, because sex is the mechanism by which the next generation comes into existence, the sexual mores of a society have a huge impact on the next generation. You talk about who is having sex with whom in a society, and the circumstances under which it is happening--and I can tell you how big the next generation will be, and whether those children are brought into the world in families that can raise them properly and pass on their values. From that, I can pretty well predict whether the society will be stable over time, or whether it is prone to cultural drift and ultimately cultural collapse.

Well, I don't claim that this is the only reason that God gave the rules that He did, or even that this is his primary reason; He may have had totally different reasons for the rules he gave. Still, I suspect that there truly is a natural law regarding the exercise of sexuality in a society. Societies that get it right (or, are at least in compliance with that natural law) survive to future generations; while societies that get it wrong lose the ability to pass on their values and institutions, and thus go into decline.

Nevertheless, while it's not harmful to speculate about why God said what He did, we should never confuse our speculations with His words. The reason we obey God's commands on sexuality are precisely that they are God's commands, and we trust Him.

So, this is the first horn of the trilemma: we need to be abstinent until marriage, and then faithful within marriage.

2. The second point relates to biology. Our bodies were designed to become fully sexually mature, starting sometime during the late teen years.

This point is key: people are entirely capable of falling deeply, passionately in love, well before they reach the age of 20. And this is not necessarily just "puppy love"; these are real, adult-strength emotions. In fact, one of the reasons that the teen years are such a tumultuous time is precisely that the "kids" (who are, biologically, no longer kids) are facing these adult emotions for the first time, full force, without all those years of experience to guide and temper their actions.

And it isn't just their emotions, either. Teen-agers, both male and female, are hard-wired to start competing for mates. In the case of young men, this often involves aggressiveness, risk-taking, and various attention-grabbing stunts. In the case of young women, there is often a strong urge to make oneself as physically attractive as possible, through dress, dieting, make-up, or flirtatious behavior.

And physically, young men and women are reaching their reproductive prime when they hit their late teens and early twenties. This is not merely the age when our bodies hit (note the past tense there) their point of greatest physical attractiveness and athletic prowess: that is also the age when the human body is best able to get pregnant, to handle the pregnancy without complications, to deliver healthy babies, and chase them around when they become toddlers.

In comparison to the late-teen or early-twenties mother, women who put off their pregnancies until later face a host of problems. Consider my wife's history (shared with her permission):

We married in 2000, when Tonya was not quite 33. We wanted at least two (and preferably more) children, so we did the math, and decided we needed not to wait long before trying.
First pregnancy: Tonya got pregnant at 34, after 7 months of trying. Pillowfight Fairy came along when Tonya was 35.
Second pregnancy: Tonya got pregnant at 36, after 8 months of trying. Adrenaline Junkie came along when Tonya was 37.
Third pregnancy: Tonya got pregnant at 38, miscarried shortly thereafter.
Fourth pregnancy: Tonya got pregnant a few months later, and the Happy Boy was born when Tonya was 39.
Fifth pregnancy: we're not so sure about this one. At age 40, Tonya started having all the pregnancy symptoms. But after a few weeks, it stopped, and Tonya's body took several months to get back into a normal routine. Tonya is convinced it was an early-term miscarriage.
Sixth pregnancy: Tonya got pregnant at age 41. The baby has the Trisomy-13 chromosomal abnormality, which is much more likely with older mothers than with younger.

So from six pregnancies, we've gotten three healthy kids, one unhealthy, and two miscarriages. And, Tonya is now having to chase around a very active two-year-old boy while she's six months pregnant. She is absolutely beat when I come home from work.

Now, we wouldn't change the way we've done things; after all, we got married when we did because that's when we were both ready for it. Still, we would hardly describe the above sequence as ideal. And sometimes I wish that we'd been ready for each other sooner, so we could have enjoyed being married while we were both still in our twenties, and so that our pregnancies would have been healthier.

I look at all the stuff I've mentioned here, and I have to conclude that there is a natural law at work here, as well: God designed us to become sexually mature in our late teens and early twenties. The reason that our young men and women have such a hard time remaining celibate, is that they were designed to pair up and start making families at that age. That's what their bodies were designed to do, and that's what their hormones are trying to get them to do, and that's the time of their lives that they are physically best capable of doing it. Sure, they can wait and start families later, but it's not optimal, from a biological standpoint.

So that's the second horn of the trilemma: Humans were designed to find mates, make love, and start raising families--in the late teens and early twenties.

3. The third horn of the trilemma involves social attitudes on age and marriage.

My parents were married at ages 23 and 22, and this was normal--even a touch late--for their generation. My in-laws were born a few years earlier, and when they married at 22 and 20, that was definitely considered late. Of course, my in-laws were married in the 1950s, and that decade was a bit of an outlier in our country's history; even back in the colonial days, it was rare that our average marriage age got down to what we had in the 1950's. But viewed historically, there's nothing really out of the ordinary with the ages at marriage of either set of parents.

But for a couple living today, to get married at 23 and 22--let alone 22 and 20--would be considered downright irresponsible. That is widely seen as too young. Why, they're right out of college! They're barely out of high school! They haven't established their careers, they haven't established their own life paths, they haven't figured out who they are yet. It would be so much better for them to wait to get married until they have the life experience necessary to handle the challenges of marriage responsibly, right?

And it needs to be said, there's a good deal of truth in this argument. The fact is, marriages between people in their late twenties and early thirties tend to be much more successful (measured in terms of lower divorce rates) than marriages between late-teens or early-twenties types.

This fact has worked its way into Christian pre-marital counseling. Tonya and I took a class at our old church entitled "Finding the Love of Your Life", developed by Dr. Neil Clark Warren (founder of eHarmony.com). This class was all about finding a good marriage partner (or, rather, identifying and rejecting those that wouldn't be good marriage partners) and about preparing oneself for marriage. They brought out the statistics I mentioned above; marriages that were started when the bride and groom are in their late twenties or early thirties, tend to be much more successful than those that start when they're younger.

And there are plenty of reasons why this would be the case. Younger people tend to have more financial struggles, they still have issues with immaturity that haven't been worked out yet; they often have unrealistic expectations about themselves and their mates, that haven't been worn down yet by age and experience; they tend to be at earlier (and less stable) phases in their careers; and so forth. Certainly, I've known several people who got married young; and they had more trouble making it work than those who got married later.

So here's the third horn of the trilemma: marriages--at least in our society--work best when the people get married when they're good and mature. That means, say... no earlier than 25. 28 is better. 30 or later is best.

...

To sum up the trilemma:

God expects us to abstain from sex, outside of marriage.
We are physically designed to reach full reproductive maturity in our late teens/early twenties.
In our culture, marriage is increasingly put off until age 28.

Pick any two.

Our secular society has recognized the fact of item 2, and has recognized the wisdom of item 3. And because of that, it has by and large rejected item 1. After all, if:

people were designed to become sexually active in their late teen years
if their late teens and early twenties are the time when they are most attractive to the opposite sex, and most attracted to the opposite sex,
if that's when they reach their physical maturity,

And...

if marriage works best when they get to age 28
if young marriages end in disaster at an alarmingly high rate
if people aren't deemed mature enough to handle the demands of mature relationships until they've had several years of experience they can bring to the marriage

then it follows that sex before marriage is a good thing. It follows that there's something unnatural, even cruel, about our prohibition against sex before marriage. And I think I'm on solid ground when I state that there are many people in this country--including in places of authority, like schools--who think this way.

But, if you wish to have a society that obeys God's commands, and where marriage is put off until age 28, you're going to have to figure out how to put a cork in it from the time our young men and women become sexually mature, for a full decade. And they have to do it while their hormones are raging, while their bodies are screaming at them to pair up (the way they were designed to!), in a culture that has pretty well rejected the first tenet of the trilemma and is encouraging them to explore their feelings (and their bodies). In short, you have to suppress number 2. Bristol Palin just described this option as "not realistic at all"; and I think we should at least consider that there may be some truth in what she says.

So the third option: if you wish to have a society that obeys God's commands, and simultaneously recognizes that we have a strong sex drive and a desire to find a mate, beginning in the late teens, then we have to dispense with the late-marriage paradigm, and figure out how to make the earlier marriages socially acceptable again. And, among other things, this will require that we figure out how to make them work.

...

I have further thoughts on this, which I'll need to expand upon sometime in the future when it's not so late.

("Sometime in the future when it's not so late." Now there's a fun paradox....)

But one last comment to head off some of the remarks I know I'm going to get: I recognize that you will occasionally find people out there who have the strength of character (and the strength of will) to abstain all the way until age 28 or later. I am by no means saying they don't exist. And to those who do, more power to you. I'm not sure, however, that these people form anything like a majority, even of the children of Christian families. And I suspect that if we continue expecting our children all to be like this, we're going to be sorely disappointed. We need to confront the trilemma head-on, because I fear that we Christians are the ones fighting Natural Law here.

More thoughts to come....

Another Brace of Posts From My Lovely Wife

2009-02-15T23:09:00.000-08:00

Well, my recent spate of Windmill-Tilting has appears to have inspired my wife to do a little of her own.

She has decided to start identifying all those little ways in which society's attitudes and values are completely out-of-whack with hers. Then she will start writing up long, detailed theses about how everyone else is messed up.

:-)

So tonight's windmill has to do with her views on Television, and how and why we came not to have one in the household. Now, being a TV-free household puts us in a very, very small minority; but we can definitely say that there are some benefits to this lifestyle choice, and Tonya and I would love it were more people to choose to go this route.

So, her thoughts on this are here.

...

On a not-so-confrontational note, she also had a post a few days ago about planting our vegetable garden. Trouble is, you can never quite tell around here when the last winter frost is going to come; but if you wait until after you're sure you're not going to have another one, your planting is too late for all the cold-weather crops. So you sometimes just have to pick a date, plant, and pray for cabbage. I liked the title of her post: Garden Roulette.

Check it out. And if there are any experienced gardeners/farmers in the Sacramento area reading this, feel free to let us know what you do. Thanks!

Are We Sure We Want To Go There?

2009-02-13T22:35:00.000-08:00

Many of my readers will no doubt be happy to know that this will most likely be my last post on Religion and Economics for a while. Others of you may be thinking, No! Give me more! I must have more! But you probably need to have your heads checked or something. No, I think after this one, my recent line of thoughts on the topic will be played out.

At least until someone else says something at Church that's worthy of a highly-raised eyebrow. Then, my dear Internets, you will be the first to hear about it. Or something.

...

I mentioned in my last post about a couple of comments that were made in class last Sunday. My first reaction to these comments was to think, "I can't believe they said that! Do they even realize what they are saying?"

And then, I started following out the ramifications of what they were saying, following the white rabbit down the hole to see where it led. And, um... it really did lead to Wonderland; and I don't think the original commenter realized it.

Here's the context. We are discussing the concept of Stewardship. Now, when churches usually talk about Stewardship, it's nearly always a euphemism for handling money, and is often presented in the sense of, "You need to hand more of it over to Us." But this class is a little different; it regards stewardship of the other things--our health and our bodies, our families and relationships, the stewardship of the land, stewardship of our time. All these things are of course given to us by God, and we need to use all these things wisely.

(And incidentally, I do appreciate that when our church does talk about stewardship of money, it really does cover the discipline of money management comprehensively--it's not about making people feeling guilty for not giving more to the church.)

As part of our study, we've been going through the Mosaic Law to see how God commanded the ancient Israelites to handle these things. And there's a lot there: laws on cleanliness and hygiene, on public safety, on land use and land ownership, family law, inheritance law, laws on debt, and on and on. Most people find this stuff pretty dry. I do not. After all, God himself gave these laws to help turn a collection of former slaves into a prosperous, stable, secure, healthy nation. Isn't that a fascinating concept? Wouldn't you think the are things we can discover about the mind of God, and about our own human nature and how we fit in society, by looking at how God told the Israelites to order their affairs?

Well, we got to the concept of the Sabbath Year, which you can read about in Leviticus 25. Basically, every seventh year:

All debts were to be forgiven.
All fields were to lie fallow.
No planting or systematic harvesting could be done. You could gather the food you needed from what grew by itself, but only as you needed it. And anyone else could gather it too as they needed.

And then, every fiftieth year--after the seventh Sabbath year, which came on year 49 in the cycle--you would have a Year of Jubilee:

All the rules of the Sabbath year applied--so, basically, you had to go two years in a row with fallow fields. In addition:
Any property (outside walled cities) that had been sold during the last 50 years, would return to its original owner (or his heirs). Thus, the land never permanently left its original family of origin.
All (Israelite) bound servants were to be released as free people.

So anyway, we were looking at all the things in these passages, when someone started talking about what an economic stimulus it would be if we would just accept these laws today. Specifically, "Wouldn't it be nice if all the banks would just forgive all debts? Just drop them, wipe the slate clean? Wouldn't that cause a huge surge in economic activity, if people suddenly didn't have to worry about their mortgage payments, or car payments, or credit card payments? Here our government is preparing to spend trillions of dollars on economic stimulus; just think of the economic stimulus that widespread debt forgiveness would cause...."

Well, the hair on the back of my neck was standing up at hearing this, but there were several nods of assent and mutterings of general approval around the classroom.

Then one of the braver souls in the class raised his hand, and tried to explain briefly what some of the ramifications would be. Such an action would of course ruin the lenders and depositors, and this would itself hurt the economy. But the near-consensus response in the class came back: well, it might, but the economic surge caused by those people who didn't have to pay their debts anymore would more than compensate for the damage to the lenders....

...

My first reaction was one of dumbfoundedness.

The way banks operate--the way they have always operated--is to take their depositors' money, and lend it out at interest. When the loan is paid back with interest, the bank passes some of that extra on to the depositors in the form of payments or banking services, and pockets the difference. The money you put in your bank account isn't currently in the bank; most of it went to some guy who used it to buy a car. In a sense, if you have any money in the bank at all, you are the lender. You have lent it to the bank. When you withdraw it, the bank is, in effect, paying off its debt to you.

So if we were to cancel all debts, that, um...

Includes your bank account.

After all, if the bank has lent out your money to some guy so he can buy his car, and then we declare that all debts are null and void, then the bank can't recover your money. So the bank owes you right? But if the bank owes you, then that's a debt, and it got cancelled with all the other debts.

Now, I suspect that many of us, if we were given that chance, would make the trade. Yeah, I'd give up my bank account, and my Fidelity account, and even my 401(k), if I got to burn my mortgage. After all, my mortgage is bigger than all of those things combined. If I made that trade, I'd be in a better financial state afterward than before. So for me to wish for across-the-board debt cancellation would be a little self-serving.

Now suppose I was instead one of those guys that stayed out of debt, kept my consumption to the bare minimum, and saved every penny I could get so that, say, I could provide something to my heirs. Then what? Well, debt cancellation would hit me hard--and would hit me hard precisely because I was responsible.

My wife was considering this point, and came up with an interesting connection: We get in the habit of thinking of God's Forgiveness as a light, easy thing. God has the power just to wish away our sins, right? But no: When a debt is canceled like this, that's not cheap to the one doing the canceling. Someone always has to eat the loss. For someone to forgive your debt, that someone has to be willing to shoulder the consequences of your responsibility, and eat the cost himself. Tonya's note is that this is exactly what Christ did on our behalf. So while we as Christians have the promise that our sins are forgiven, that knowledge isn't something to accept lightly and easily; we need to remember that in order for my sins to be forgiven, someone else had to eat that cost, and that cost was terrible.

Debt cancellation is a serious business. It represents the trumping of mercy over justice; the one who lent his money loses, and the one who spent the money--often irresponsibly--is permitted to get away without paying it back. This is not something to be taken lightly. And when it does happen, the one who is forgiven the debt should approach the event with an air of gravity and thankfulness; not with a sense of entitlement.

...

Now, thinking on all this raised another difficult thought.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I'm a committed free-marketer. I happen to think that, for the long-term economic health of a nation--and for the long-term maintenance of the liberties of the people--a policy of government non-intervention in the economy is wise. A few exceptions may be made here or there when non-economic concerns (say, national security) are more important than the economic ones; but by and large, we are better off when people are allowed to make decisions among themselves about their economic activities, without third parties putting restrictions on them that they don't want themselves.

And yet, when I look at the Laws that God gave the Israelites, he did not give them a "free market". God's laws include all kinds of prohibitions, all kinds of restrictions, all kinds of mandates, and all kinds of conditions that don't fit a free market-model in any way. Consider:

No land could be sold in perpetuity; it would always eventually revert to the family of the ancestral owners.
All outstanding debts would be forgiven automatically in the Sabbatical year.
They were repeatedly warned against lending to each other at interest (Ex. 22:25, Lev. 25:36-37, Deut. 23:19-20)
There were all kinds of restrictions on what could be used as collateral (Ex. 22:25).
There were restrictions on how efficiently you could harvest your crops; this was so the poor could glean the fields after you were done harvesting. (Lev. 19:9-10).
If family members got in financial trouble and had to sell either their land or themselves to pay their debts, you had obligations to pay the money and do the redemption. (Lev. 25:25-28, Lev. 25:47-55)
If your brother died, leaving his wife childless, you were required to marry her, and father children with her; these children would become the legal heirs of the deceased brother, and would acquire his property.(Deut. 25:6-6).

And so forth. No way you could describe that economy as a "free market".

Now, let's just take a couple of these: the ones having to do with debt. The people of Israel were forbidden to lend to each other at interest. They also couldn't lend for a longer period than the time until the next Sabbatical year. From a purely economic standpoint, what would this do?

Well, it would have a number of impacts. On the plus side, you wouldn't have people going into debt and staying in debt for decades and decades. Every few years, the slate would be wiped clean. But...

A banking establishment like what we have now couldn't exist under these rules. One effect the taking of interest has, is to entice more people actually to lend. If interest rates are pushed lower than what the market will bear, people stop lending money and look for other ways to invest it. And if all debts are automatically going to be canceled when the next Sabbath Year comes around, it means that the payoff term of the debt will be limited to 6 years--or less, if the next sabbath year is sooner than that.

There are no more thirty-year mortgages, that's for sure. If you can't pay off your house in six, you won't be getting a loan to buy your house.

Just gaming out the ramifications of this, it becomes pretty apparent that credit is much easier to come by in our society than it would be if we followed the rules that God gave the Israelites. We can finance much greater sums now. And if we are responsible in paying it back, this allows us a much greater standard of living--I can afford a much more expensive house with a thirty-year mortgage, than I could afford on a five-year mortgage, that's for sure.

What gives? Why didn't God give His people the freedom to make these decisions for themselves, knowing that this freedom--if responsibly handled--would make them more prosperous than they would otherwise have been?

And what does this say about free markets as an economic model? If God didn't give them to the ancient Israelites, is it because there's something inherently immoral about them?

Am I wrong to be a supporter of the free markets?

Tough questions, and I'm not sure I know the answers to them. But here are some further thoughts.

...

First, it should be recognized that any liberty contains within it the potential for abuse. If you permit a large enough population to do some thing, there will almost inevitably be some people in that population who will use their liberty for destructive ends.

And there are plenty of destructive things that can happen in a free market, if the people choose to use their freedoms irresponsibly. I saw this article lately at TCS Daily, which describes Plato's thoughts on the way Republics destroy themselves:

Read along from an excerpt of Plato's Republic (Book VIII, 550d-566), and see if any of it sounds familiar. It's the tragic tale of a declining republic, a tale of war, money, and politics all gone wrong through a combination of bad judgment and disordered cravings. We begin with moneylenders who have a nasty habit of lending money to people they know will use it irresponsibly, especially to youths whom they encourage to fritter it away on useless luxuries. They prefer that their money be wasted on frivolities; the more of it is wasted today, the more they can charge in interest tomorrow.

But their clients are just as bad, if not worse. By spending others' money on frivolities, they fail to take responsibility for themselves. A group of people recklessly spending other people's money soon becomes a leech on society: a class of those who have ruined themselves burning through borrowed money.

The class of bitter, bankrupt borrowers finds it has a friend—or what looks and talks like a friend—in a group of politicians who promises them honey, served in a silver bowl at the expense of the moneylenders who got them into trouble in the first place. Their alliance only lasts until one of the honey-tongued politicians stirs up the bankrupted class, whips them into a frenzied mob, and makes war against the wealthy class, seizing their money by force. This politician emerges as a tyrant, and the old republic has died.

Say what you will about the purely economic wisdom of the Mosaic Law; but if followed, it would absolutely prevent this scenario. Those irresponsible lenders would quickly discover, every seven years, that they've lost their investments. Those irresponsible borrowers would soon thereafter discover that no one wants to lend to them anymore. And those irresponsible politicians would have to find some other issue to demagogue.

God knows human nature. He knows that we humans do dumb things. While wise, moral, upright people may be able to handle the freedom of a free market, it may be that He decided that there weren't enough wise, moral, upright people around among those former slaves from Egypt, to trust them with a free market.

So their society may well have been poorer, due to the economic effects of these laws, but it may also have been more stable.

...

Second, I suspect the very concept of wealth worked very differently back then. After all, we moderns think of wealth in terms of money. But money only has value when you can exchange it for the stuff you want. In a semi-nomadic agrarian society living nearly 3500 years ago, there weren't many stores out there. They used precious metals as currency, but it wasn't yet in the form of coin; they measured it out by weight.

But the stuff of value was, well, the stuff.

You had a piece of land, that was in the family for generations. Even when you sold it, it would still eventually return to your family in the Year of Jubilee. This land would have houses on it, which would be built by one generation and handed down to the next. One generation would plant an orchard; the next would plant a vineyard; the next would dig a well, and so forth. Over time this family would come to be known as wealthy--not necessarily because they had amassed a large quantity of gold and silver, but because they had--through careful management of resources over generations--built up large flocks and herds, built several sturdy houses, planted orchards and vineyards, tilled and fertilized large fields for crops, slowly accumulated tools and machines needed for household work (looms, olive presses, etc.); and so forth. The wealth of these families was built up, over generations, by the work that the people did.

And it seems to me that the laws that God gave are designed to preserve this wealth, to prevent it from being lost through bad financial transactions. You can sell your land, but not forever; it will eventually return to your heirs. You had to redeem it if your relatives lost it somehow. You had to produce heirs for your deceased brother, so that his share would not be lost (and so that his wife/wives would have sons to support them in their old age).

Furthermore, the laws appear to be designed to give people who are destitute a fresh start. After all, if you were an Israelite, even if you were dirt-poor, you were descended from someone who was allotted a share of land back when Joshua divided up the conquered territory; so you had a share, somewhere, that you could lay legal claim to. And once you had that land, you could start over, working it from scratch, in the hope that you could one day pass it on to your children; who would improve it, and pass it on to theirs, and so on, with your descendants one day being wealthy and prosperous.

...

Third, there are some differences between the Old and New Testament worlds. Certain laws that were given by God to the ancient Israelites don't appear to be mandated among the Gentile Christians.

For one example, there are the Kosher laws. When Paul writes to the Corinthians that they should eat whatever was sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience, I think that's pretty conclusive that some of the old laws about cleanliness in diet are not bound on the Gentile Christians. After all, the Jews were required to butcher their food animals very carefully--making sure to deliver the killing blow in a specific way, and making sure to drain the blood from the carcass completely. Meat not butchered in this way was unclean. But in Gentile meat markets, there was no guarantee that any of this meat was properly prepared; much of it had been used in Pagan sacrifices, and had been butchered any which way but how God had told the Israelites. So for Paul to tell them it was OK to eat without any issues of conscience, means that the Kosher laws did not apply directly to them.

Indeed, the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15) dealt with exactly the question of how much of the Law was binding on Gentile Christians, and concluded that very little of it actually was. And following up with the letters of Paul, he treats the Law as a "Pedagogus"--a schoolmaster (close, but not perfect translation), designed to train children. When the child was fully grown and fully trained, though, he no longer needed the Pedagogus; Paul's argument appears to be that the role of the Law has been similarly fulfilled, thus we are not required to bind Gentile Christians to obey all the commands of the law.

And indeed, much of the Law appears to be intended specifically for that group of semi-nomadic agrarian ex-slaves who lived 3500 years ago.

Does this include the economic stuff? I mean, even Jesus made reference to the taking of interest, in a non-disparaging context: in the parable of the Talents, the Master of the three stewards berates the third for not providing him a return on his investment. He says that even if the steward hadn't felt confident investing it, he should at least have left it with the bankers and gotten some interest on it. I'd have a hard time imagining Jesus telling this parable like that, if he didn't consider at least some taking of interest acceptable.

So I think it's at least conceivable that the Mosaic Laws on economics can be counted among those laws that were specifically intended to apply to the ancient Israelites, as opposed to being among those that are intended to apply to all people for all time (like, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength").

...

Where does this leave the Free Market?

Well, I still think it's the system that will produce the most widespread wealth in a society. It tends to be better than most systems at rewarding hard work, innovation, and responsible decision-making; and punishing sloth and irresponsibility. A nation that implements a free market will generally become much wealthier and more economically dynamic.

But like any system made up of humans, it won't be without problems. Given liberties, there will always be people out there who will misuse their liberties, and in the context of a free market, that will bring disaster on them--or on the people around them.

I think the fact that God gave the non-free-market rules he did to the ancient Israelites, should be taken by us as a set of warnings:

The full blessings of a free market only accrue to the society made up of wise and compassionate people. Leave out either of those conditions, and the result can be unpleasant. A society can even destroy itself....
There are other concerns out there than the purely economic. Sometimes we're better off poorer, at least in the short term, so long as we're keeping our culture strong.
God cares about the poor so much, that he was willing to inflict an entire non-free market economy on His people to make sure that they were never left with nothing. So if we wish to enjoy the blessings of the free market, we need to accept some personal responsibility for the well-being of the poor--even if this only involves helping people identify and grab the opportunities that are already around them.

What does my readership think?

Follow Up Thoughts on Public Policy and Pulpits

2009-02-10T22:09:00.000-08:00

Well, it seems that with my earlier post I either touched on a topic that everyone has strong feelings about, or what I wrote made everyone think, "I've got to set this guy straight." Hey, that's what the internet is for, right?

Good comments, all. Going back over my little essay, I'm thinking there are a few points I want to clarify. Also, there was another little interesting exchange in one of our classes at church on Sunday that both illustrates what I was talking about, and provides fodder for more thought.

...

So, as is usual in cases like this, I'd like to go back to first principles. One of the things that the apostles wrote a lot about was the need for unity in the Church. And--as is necessary to secure that unity--Paul warned us to avoid disputes on questionable matters. Where differences of opinion exist, we are to avoid giving offense wherever possible, and--so long as it's not on a matter that could threaten someone's salvation--to let things slide. Examples of this from scripture include Romans 14:1 through 15:6, 1 Corinthians 3 and 6:1-8, pretty much the whole book of 1 John; and there are a bunch of other places besides.

This is absolutely crucial, because the Church is designed to hold people who are radically different from each other, who wouldn't normally associate with each other if it weren't for their religious fellowship. Consider that Jesus himself had, in his own hand-picked group of apostles, one guy known as Simon the Zealot. Now, the Zealots were religious Jewish radicals who were actively working toward rebellion against Roman rule, including through violent means. But Jesus also had as one of his apostles Matthew, the tax collector. The Romans would recruit tax collectors from among their subjugated peoples, including the Jews. Tax collectors would collect money from their countrymen, making their pay by collecting taxes above and beyond the share Rome demanded and pocketing the difference. These guys were, often with justification, widely regarded as parasites and traitors by their countrymen. Zealots hated them.

So you've got Simon the Zealot, and Matthew the tax collector, rubbing elbows within Jesus' inner circle. The Bible doesn't mention any political conversations around the apostles' dinner table, but boy, I bet it got interesting....

But this is precisely the point about unity! The church must be big enough to handle people who, outside of the church, would be diametrically opposed to each other. Christ died for the Army colonel, and the banker in pinstripes, and the university professor, and the hippie chick; and His church must be able to accommodate all of them, at the same time!

And the only way to make the tent that big, is to eliminate any restrictions, any commandments, any expectations beyond what the Lord asks of us. If a church starts to advocate any position beyond the mission that Christ gave it, it will eventually--inevitably--become something that needlessly drives people away. People have a hard enough time just living righteous lives according to what the scriptures define as righteous; when we start expecting more from people than this, it will only serve to drive out someone or another lurking near the edges--precisely the kinds of people we're supposed to be hanging onto the hardest.

This is the main reason that I feel my shields start going up whenever I start to hear politics or economics from the pulpit. Fact is, elections are divisive things. There are a lot of people who were absolutely overjoyed about the latest presidential election, and there are a lot of people who think it's an absolute disaster for our nation. And these people have to share a church. That is, they have to share a church if they hope to obey the will of God.

...

So, all that being said, here's why I dislike the term "Social Justice".

Within the Christian worldview as I understand it, Jesus expects me to take care of the sick, and the orphaned, and the widow, and the impoverished, and the imprisoned. And I see no evidence in scripture that Jesus is willing to let me off the hook by supporting any political program to take care of "the poor" for me. This isn't a task that I can delegate away; I am responsible for the people around me, and will be held accountable. It's a big task, and one that I don't particularly feel up to. Nevertheless, this is all a big part of the Christian mission.

Now, within the Marxist worldview, which has strongly influenced a big chunk of the pop political culture, all these problems that Jesus talked about--poverty, imprisonment, disease--are merely symptoms of underlying socioeconomic factors which are themselves driven by our fundamentally unjust economic and political systems. To the Marxist, the way to solve these problems is a wholesale reordering of our society; the elimination of private property in favor of collective ownership of the means of production; centralized government management of the economy, for the benefit of the people; elimination of gender roles; and the like. The Marxist tends to disdain charities, because they make the current unjust situation tolerable; it keeps the poor content enough to prevent them from rising up to overthrow the system, and it soothes the consciences of the wealthy and lets them think they're good people, when they're really the source of the problem in the first place.

Is there common ground between these two worldviews? Well, yes--a little. They both recognize the fact that there are needy people in the world, and they both demand that we do something about it. And when the Marxist claims that Jesus was in fact an early socialist, he points to these similarities, and says, "See! Jesus was for Social Justice. You Christians, if you really understood what Jesus was about, would be throwing your lot in with us."

The difference is that the action Jesus advocated was in no way a political program. Jesus explicitly said, "My kingdom is not of this world"; he didn't make any attempt to drive out the Romans, or to seize power; he never attempted to validate any other political group. His teachings were all about holy living, and our personal responsibility to one another.

I mentioned George Orwell's famous 1946 essay on politics and language in my post Sunday, and what Orwell was saying about catch-phrases and jargon applies very well here, too. The phrase "Social Justice" is exactly the kind of thing that Orwell was talking about. Fact is, no one knows quite what it means. Or, rather, it means different things to different people, depending on their political indoctrination. To some people, it includes Affirmative Action; to some people, it includes race reparations; to some people, it includes the abolition of private property; to some people, it means appointing judges of a certain activist bent. You might hear this term and think primarily of concern over poverty or lack of health care, and you might say, "Yes, I support Social Justice"; but the person listening to you may well hear something you absolutely did not intend to say.

Did Jesus support "Social Justice"? That depends entirely on what you mean by "Social Justice".

The trouble is that once people accept the term "Social Justice", this language itself tends to push us toward the political program of the Leftist. Once we have accepted that Jesus was all about Social Justice, then the Leftist starts saying things like, "Jesus told people to give money to the poor. Therefore, if you oppose wealth redistribution in our country, you're being un-Christlike," and "Jesus told us to take care of the sick. Therefore, if you oppose Socialized medicine, you're being un-Christlike," and "Jesus told us to take care of the orphans and the widows, so to be Christlike you must support these Welfare programs...." The sleight-of-hand here is of course that Jesus' commandment for us to take personal responsibility for the care of others, is being subverted to a political program. The very fact that we're using the term "Social Justice" to refer to both these things tends to obscure the difference between them in our minds.

As I suggested in Sunday's post, I think this has happened in many Protestant churches, and in many Catholic dioceses, to the point where the political mission has come to dominate all others. They've lost sight of their spiritual mission because they're so busy pursuing the political one.

And, as I said at the beginning of this essay, this is bad for Christian unity--not to mention, it's bad for the long-term health of the congregation. After all, there are people all across the political spectrum, with all kinds of views on economics; and Jesus died for all of them. When you have a church that has bought into the political "Social Justice" view of Jesus' teachings as I described above, it isn't going to be big enough to accomodate those whose political leanings lead them to reject the political advocacy. It will drive such people away--even when such people would be entirely receptive to Jesus actual teachings on personal responsibility for others.

...

Man, I had no idea this column would go this direction. I still haven't gotten to that little exchange from Sunday. Well, on the bright side, I still have fodder for another column. :)

Eureka!!! Um, I Mean, Ewwwww...

2009-02-08T21:50:00.000-08:00

Ok, I'll warn you right here at the beginning: we've been teaching our eldest daughter about the digestive system lately. And, um... teaching about the digestive system to six-year-olds leads to some serious bodily function humor. If you're squeamish about bodily function humor, you probably shouldn't read too much farther.

Of course, if you're squeamish about bodily function humor, you probably shouldn't be raising kids, either.

...

One of my old math teachers had a phrase he used on occasion: When you have been trying to learn a new concept, but you just haven't been getting it; when you've been thinking about it until your brain hurts; when you've been working out problems and examples; sometimes, eventually, it suddenly all makes sense. One second, nothing; the next, the light comes on, the heavens open, the angels sing; and you suddenly understand how to factor polynomials. You get it. My math teacher described this kind of experience as the "Aha" experience. He said it was very like Archimedes' shouting "Eureka!", except that you don't usually jump out of the bathtub and run naked down the street immediately afterward.

Now, when you ask homeschooling parents why they homeschool, you get many answers; but one of the more common ones regards the "Aha" moments. There is tremendous joy in watching one's own kid, who's been struggling with some concept, suddenly get it. Not only is there tremendous joy, but (especially for new homeschooling parents) there's also a sense of affirmation, even a sense of relief: Yes, I'm actually able to do this! I now have evidence!

Well, the Pillowfight Fairy had an "Aha" experience the other day.

As I earlier said, the Fairy has been learning about the human body lately. And we think that a lot of what she's been learning is actually sinking in and staying there: when she saw Grandpa yesterday, she remembered that he was on those crutches because he had broken his tibia, which is a bone in the lower leg. And she's started to use the word esophagus in regular conversation.

Yup, the esophagus. We've lately gotten to the Digestive System. And let me tell you, there's something a little funny about trying to explain the Digestive System to a kid.

Well, kid, first you take a bite of your food, and then you start to chew it, and it looks like this. ("Ewwww!") And then your saliva mixes with it, and starts to break it down, even as it goes around and around and around in your mouth and turns into this mushy stuff. ("Ewwww!") And then you swallow, and it goes past the epiglottis and down into the stomach, where it gets mixed with bile from the liver and it gets broken down further, and sent into the small intestine, where it goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth... Oh, and did you know we use the small intestines of sheep and pigs to make sausage casings? ("Ewwww!") Oh, yeah, and wait till I tell you what they used to do with pigs' bladders....

Actually, the Fairy already knows that one. We just finished reading Little House in the Big Woods.

So Mommy picked up this book from the library, and the Pillowfight Fairy happily read through it last Friday.

The book, entitled What Happens to a Hamburger?, is all about what happens at the various stages in the digestive process. It has lots of diagrams, and even some photographs ("Ewwww!"), and it traces the process of digestion from even before you take that first bite, all the way until, ahem:

Your body cannot use all of the food you eat. The food it cannot use is stored in the large intestine. You get rid of the unused food when you go to the toilet.

And this text is of course on a page that shows the cartoonish hero of the book, the one whose digestion we have been contemplating, happily running to the restroom carrying a roll of TP.

...

Now, all of that is just a set-up for the real point of this essay. I think we adults get squeamish at certain topics, so we tend to bury them in euphemism when we speak of them. I've already written about this phenomenon, regarding the illustrious literary genre of potty time-books. (By the way, ever write something, and then put it aside for a while, and then read it later after you've forgotten all about it? When I re-read this post of mine earlier tonight, I found myself thinking, Man, I wish I could write like that.)

The trouble is that you can't actually teach a topic when you're speaking in euphemisms. In that earlier essay of mine, I noted how we say "letting nature take its course" to refer to certain bodily functions that we don't actually want to talk about. But suppose you speak like that around a kid? The kid doesn't know that you're talking about, um... waste expulsion (there's another euphemism!). What does the kid think?

Oooh! I like nature. Waterfalls are part of nature. Deer and elk and bison are part of nature. Big pine trees are part of nature. I get to let all of this happen! How blissful.

Well, it turns out that even this book, What Happens to a Hamburger?, which is otherwise so well written, turns to euphemism when it comes to describing the, um... end stages of the digestive process. And Mommy developed a suspicion.

"[Fairy], do you know what that 'undigested food' is that the book keeps talking about?"

"Um... Soup?"

Ok, when she starts guessing like this, it's pretty apparent that she isn't getting it. And that was largely because the book didn't actually tell her! It was presumably trying to save the sensibilities of the parents by burying the ugly, stinky truth under an unoffensive euphemism that makes perfect sense to the parents, but means nothing to the kid.

So Tonya pointed out the oddly-shaped brown mass of "undigested food" in the picture, and tried to get the Fairy to guess what it was. No dice. So ultimately Tonya gave up, and just blurted out the answer:

"It's poop!"

Now, most of the time when a kid has an "Aha" experience, it's a joyful event that causes the spirit to soar and the heart to sing. But then, most of the time your "Aha" experiences don't involve learning where poop comes from.

"Eeeeeeeeeeewwwww! Ew! Ew! Ewewewew! Eww! Ewwwwww!" and so forth, et cetera, et cetera, for about the next two minutes.

...

So let's talk about George Orwell.

Good grief! You say. Where in the world did that come from?

Well, given the way my semi-coherent mind works, as my wife was describing to me the aforementioned set of events, and we were laughing ourselves silly, I was actually being reminded of a very important essay that Orwell wrote back in 1946.

You see, Orwell was very, very interested in our tendency to bury unpleasant concepts under impressive-sounding language. His concern was that, by using impressive-sounding official language filled with long, technical words, we hide the true meaning of what we're saying--sometimes even from ourselves.

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

This is an excellent essay, and I strongly recommend that anyone--schoolteacher, or homeschooling parent--attempting to teach writing style to a student of junior-high age or older, should read through it. The essay concludes with a set of simple rules intended to foster clarity and quality in writing. I myself refer to this essay from time to time to evaluate my own writing style--and I usually come away cringing at how wordy and cliched my style actually is, compared to what it should be.

Of course, Orwell himself criticizes his own writing in the essay, so at least I have some good company there.

If you have the opportunity, go ahead and take the time to read the thing. If you take it to heart, it may well help you notice where your own writing is vague and imprecise, and where this vagueness and imprecision comes from obscurity in your own thought processes.

And that's especially important, should you ever decide to start writing potty-time books.

Ok, Now This Takes Some Audacity

2009-02-08T20:20:00.000-08:00

Well, my father-in-law was passing around this video, and I thought I'd share it with all of you.

I had a big dopey grin on my face through the whole thing. It takes some serious audacity to play one's harmonica...

At Carnegie Hall.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Public Policy From the Pulpit

2009-02-07T21:42:00.000-08:00

Ok, I'm going to talk about something here that makes me uncomfortable. In fact, I'm going to talk about it precisely because it makes me uncomfortable, since the the uncomfortability is itself an interesting phenomenon.

My church--which, don't get me wrong, is an excellent one, and is led by some people who take their roles as Shepherds of the Flock very seriously--is having a big push right now along the lines of what could be called "social justice". Now, I hate the term "social justice", because of the way it has been captured and utilized by the political Left to mean all of: A) Redistributive tax and spend policy, B) Lax law enforcement, C) Stigmatization of business and wealth-producing activities, and D) Lack of economic freedoms.

But the point that our preacher has been making, and it is a valid one, is this: when Jesus actually walked the earth, proclaiming the Good News about God's forgiveness and exhorting his followers to live holy lives, many, many of his commands had to do with taking care of the poor, the widows, the orphans, the sick, and the prisoners. The old cliche about Jesus attempting to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" is a true one, and comes through particularly strongly in the book of Luke, which we're now studying. The entire book is filled with teachings like:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh...

But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep...

Throughout the book, poverty is associated with goodness, and wealth is associated with sinfulness. And this association, very explicit in the book of Luke, has become part of the worldview of Christianity ever since. Sure, there have been some very rich and powerful Christians, and the Church has for much of the last two thousand years been a very influential, powerful, and rich institution. (I've seen many of the great Cathedrals of Europe with my own eyes, including the Sistine Chapel with its magnificent ceiling. You don't build any of that stuff unless you have some buku bucks floating around.) And yet the association of poverty and weakness with virtue still remained. Priests, monks, and nuns still took vows of poverty; and even today, there's something unseemly about the very concept of a wealthy evangelist.

As a personal note, this aspect of Christianity shows up in my own name. The surname "Power" is an Irish name of Anglo-Norman origin, originally spelled "Poer" or "Paor", and actually means "poor"--as a mark of virtue, as in "poor in spirit".

And yet, there's still a tension within Christianity. There are many, many scriptures throughout the Bible, both Old Testament (book of Proverbs in particular) and New Testament (book of Luke) that talk about money, and talk about the work--the industriousness--that creates the wealth. If one makes a good-faith attempt to live one's life and manage one's affairs according to what the Bible teaches, one will become industrious, not a sluggard; one will attempt to redeem the time we have been given by God, by not wasting it, but using it for productive purposes; one will avoid debt; one will avoid schemes for dishonest gain; one will be slow to expend money on non-necessities, but generous when it comes to caring for the poor and donating to worthy causes. One will manage his finances with the idea that everything he has is actually God's, with him being a mere steward.

The funny thing about this Biblical view of money management--and the source of the tension I mention above--is that this kind of lifestyle tends to improve the physical well-being of both the person who engages in it, and of everyone else around him. America is a wealthy nation for many reasons, but one big one is the fact that so many of our ancestors--especially the Puritans--brought with them what has been termed the Protestant Work Ethic, which includes the idea that all our labor is done for the Glory of God, and the idea that we must redeem all the time he gives us. An entire society of people who live like that do tend to become materially prosperous. Now, this isn't necessarily the intention of the Biblical concept of money management, and one can point to plenty of counterexamples--cases where acceptance of Christ led otherwise wealthy people into a life of poverty and persecution. I'm certainly no fan of the so-called "health and wealth" Gospel, the idea that God Wants Me To Be Wealthy. God may call me some day to suffer and die for the faith, as Christ did. And Christ was by no means wealthy himself. Still, this doesn't eliminate the fact that when ordinary people order their affairs along Judeo-Christian principles, they tend to start doing the kinds of things that build prosperity....

...Whereupon Christ tells us, "But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry."

So: if you do everything right, if work hard, if you limit your consumption and save what you make for the hard times ahead, if you avoid "get-rich-quick" schemes and invest wisely, as the first two stewards in the Parable of the Talents did, then... you become prosperous, and receive warnings that you have already received your reward, and will someday be hungry. Woe unto you.

Rather harsh, no? Of course, I think there's a reason Christ gives this warning. There are temptations that attack the pride of those of us who do everything right, precisely because we did everything right. Hey, I did everything right! I made the sacrifices, and did the work, and now I'm just enjoying the fruits of my labor. This stuff is mine, I tell you; I earned it.

...

But aside from the fact that I haven't quite squared this circle in my head yet (and if you have, please explain in the comments), there's something else that makes me a little uncomfortable about our church's current focus.

There are many temptations that can affect an entire church. One of these temptations, which seems to be pretty common in the modern Western world, is to start to focus so heavily on "social issues" that the spiritual teachings become neglected. It is certainly true that Christ had a tremendous care for the poor, and he intended us to do something about this.

But Christ--and later, the apostles--gave many other commands to us, as well. We are to be holy in our actions, in our thoughts and deeds. We are to carry ourselves as Children of God, and that involves keeping a close eye on our personal lives, and our personal ethics, and our relationships. We need to work to live upright, ethical, righteous lives.

Additionally, Christ gave us the mission to bring other people to Him. One of the hardest teachings in the Bible is summed in Christ's words, "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me." That puts a tremendous duty on us Christians.

Now, it's pretty obvious that these three aspects of the Christian mission--the concern for social issues and the poor, the concern for our own holiness, and the desire to lead others to Christ, are entirely compatible with each other, and indeed work best together. And yet--here's the source of my discomfort--in modern churches, for more than the last century and a half, there's been an increasing tendency to focus on the first of these missions, and to downplay or even ignore the other two.

Most of the so-called Mainstream Protestant denominations have gone down that road. They are increasingly all about caring for the poor, and cleaning up the neighborhoods, and Building a Better Society; but their focus on the other two missions--especially the outreach to "the lost"--has been waning. There's a sense that the mainstream Protestant denominations--the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and even some of the Quaker congregations--have been moving this direction for some time. I've read on several Catholic blogs that there are tendencies like that in various Roman Catholic dioceses as well--which, generally, the bloggers in question aren't particularly happy about.

What you wind up with when this happens is a Church that has become little more than a social activist organization with a vaguely spiritual focus. And the key word there is "vaguely"; often times the doctrines of these churches start to atrophy; the idea seems to be that if you care for your neighbor enough, God is all right with you. The doctrine of sin, that we were doomed to hell without the salvation Christ provided, often weakens over time as a denomination goes down this road. The doctrine of Christ being The Way similarly weakens. Ethical teachings become watered down; the congregants are no longer taught to be holy because Christ is holy, or that they are to be dead to sin.

The funny thing about this is that churches that go this route eventually have this way of dying out. Once the doctrine is gone, once the teachings on sin and salvation and all that other religious stuff has been shunted aside as not relevant in the modern world, once the church becomes primarily an activist organization, well... its reason for existing has gone away, too. The church by this point has abandoned the only one task that it, and it alone, can do properly. There are plenty of other politically activist organizations out there that don't ask you to sit in the pews every Sunday while they preach at you; if all you're interested in is achieving Social Justice through the political process, then these other non-religious organizations are much more focused on-task.

And the so-called "Mainstream Protestant" denominations today are a fraction of the size that they were just a few decades ago. Meanwhile the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists--which have retained the doctrines of sin and salvation, and the idea that we have a personal duty to live holy lives in accordance with the will of God, have been growing by leaps and bounds.

So with all this said, when the preacher at my church stands up and says, "We need to begin focusing more on issues of Social Justice, like Jesus did..." well, I must confess that the alarm bells start to go off in my head. This is how it all begins, I say in my rather suspicious heart of hearts....

And to make it worse, our preacher--who is a very wise man, I should add, and who is a keen observer of our culture and of human nature--will occasionally say things about economics or politics that just stick in my craw. During this series of lessons on Luke for example, on numerous occasions he has thrown comments into his sermons on how our capitalist system is oppressing the poor, in ways that Jesus would immediately condemn if he were here. (Note, he throws these comments in tangentially--they aren't the core of his lessons, which tend to be very good).

Now, I have no doubt that Jesus would have harsh words for many of us were he to come walk among us again today; and he might even say that we are oppressing the poor through the way we act and the way we handle our money. But I doubt he would condemn the economic system we use; he would condemn what's in our hearts. The thing about the free market, is that--precisely because it is free--it does what we, through our free choice, cause it to do. If we behave wisely and compassionately, this fact will be reflected in market conditions. If we behave in greedy and untrustworthy ways, this fact will be reflected in market conditions as well. So when there are poor people living in a free market system, it is almost always because of the decisions that someone--they, or someone else--has freely made. And it is these decisions, that we freely make based on what's in our hearts, that Jesus would (if necessary) condemn.

And even when the economic system was oppressive--and remember, Jesus and the apostles lived under an empire that had widespread slavery--they didn't actually come out and denounce the system. The apostle Paul told the slaves to obey their masters as though they were obeying God. And he told the slave owners to treat their slaves fairly, not harshly, remembering that they have a heavenly Master to whom they must answer. In fact, one of Paul's letters, which became the New Testament book of Philemon, was a note to a Christian slave owner on how to treat one of his slaves who had run away, converted to Christianity, and then decided to return.

Note that there was no explicit denunciation of the economic system, even though pretty much everyone can agree that it was oppressive by any rational measure. Jesus and the apostles were interested in what went on in our hearts, and in the actions that flowed from them.

But when you declare that "the capitalist system is oppressing the poor", it suggests that the way to fix such a problem is to scrap the "capitalist system" and replace it with some other kind of system. The trouble here is that this does absolutely nothing about what's in our hearts; all it does, is it replaces one set of economic regulations with another, and puts a different set of people in charge. And there's absolutely no guarantee that the new system will be any better at fixing people's hearts and minds than the one you scrapped. That's not what economic systems are designed to do!

At least in a free market, if you want to be successful you have to meet other people's needs in some way, so that they freely decide to give you their business. Under a more socialistic system, all you have to do to be "successful" is to get the right regulator or legislator to like you enough, regardless of whether you're producing anything of value. There is nothing inherently more moral about the latter system than the former. Morality is something that stems from our hearts and our actions, not the kind of "system" we belong to.

...

So, I've been a little uncomfortable lately during sermon and class time at church. Some of this is because we are genuinely covering challenging material, and Jesus' words were intended to "afflict the comfortable". And part of it is that the subject matter is almost inevitably dipping into matters of politics and economics, and I'm not so sure that the political and economic prescriptions I'm hearing are actually good ones. Too many churches have gotten sidetracked by going down that road, to the point where they start debating what industries and countries they can and cannot invest their pension funds in--while their pews become progressively emptier and emptier.

Of course, I need to say outright that I know our preacher and our church leadership well enough to be confident they aren't trying to de-emphasize the other parts of our mission. They are definitely attempting to present the Social Justice part of the Gospel in the context of holy living before God, and in the context of our commission to reach out to those who aren't yet saved.

Still, I rather find myself wishing that our brief, occasional Sunday-morning forays into economics and politics weren't actually happening. With the way politics and the economy have been going lately, I would that our church was actually more of a sanctuary from politics and economics....

If Ye Love Me

2009-02-06T23:35:00.000-08:00

Regular readers of this blog know that I have done a fair amount arranging music in my time. Either through foresight, or through good fortune, I decided when I was studying for my minor in college that I would take the hard-core music theory classes--the Comprehensive Musicianship classes that were required of the music majors. I could have gotten away with easier classes for my minor, but for some reason I decided I wanted a challenge. And I have never, never regretted taking those music theory courses.

Now, most people might think to themselves, "How often do ordinary people, with no career in music, need to be able to arrange stuff?" And the answer is, you'd be really, really surprised. I've arranged music for a couple of weddings now, including my own. I've arranged music for my church's Christmas pageants. And when I started to learn to play Celtic Harp, I started arranging music for that too. After all, when you're dealing with non-standardized folk instruments, you often won't be able to find good, published sheet music for what you want to do with the instrument. So, you have to figure out how to write it yourself.

So I've done a fair amount of arranging. Alas, I haven't done much recently. I took a much-needed pass on last year's Christmas program. This was very good for my family's health and well-being, of course; I don't regret that decision. But it means that I haven't had much cause lately to be writing or arranging stuff.

Enter my little brother, Andy. Andy is a bit of a composer/arranger himself.

(It runs in the family, actually; my dad has done a fair amount; my older brother too; and in fact, we all inherited it from Dad's mom, who was a composer and musician; and she got it from her Dad, who was an accomplished Cornet player and bandmaster (and younger associate of John Philip Sousa). And my mom's side of the family isn't slouchy when it comes to music either. My Granny was, in her day, pretty good with the steel guitar; and Mom played the piano quite a bit while I was growing up).

Well, Andy has been giving some thought to overhauling the music service at his church--training the singers, introducing new (better, and more appropriate) arrangements of the music, unifying the songs with the rest of the service better, that sort of thing. He has been contemplating taking the song "Amazing Grace/My Chains Are Gone", from the soundtrack of the recent movie Amazing Grace--and which is currently fairy popular on Christian radio stations--and creating an A Capella arrangement that would be appropriate for congregational singing.

Now, when you create an arrangement for congregational singing, there are a number of very fine lines to walk. On the one hand, it's too easy for an ambitious hymnwriter or arranger to make an arrangement that's absolutely gorgeous, but is too complicated for the amateur singers of a typical church congregation to be able to handle. I've done this myself on more than one occasion. :-( On the other hand, if you make it simple enough for the congregation to sing, often you've taken the fire out of the song; you've taken out the life; the song winds up sounding boring, stilted, and bland. This is especially true of songs that originally included strong instrumental parts; often these songs are tricky to translate to an A Capella setting, since so much of the energy of the song was carried by the instruments. It can take a great deal of imagination and care, to create a beautiful song, one that inspires, while keeping it simple enough for church singing.

Andy emailed around his arrangement, and my older brother (Rick) and I both took a look at it. He did a really good job. My own opinion was that his first attempt leaned a bit toward the complicated side, but sounded really, really good. And then Rick took Andy's version, tweaked the bass line, and passed it back. Andy (with plenty of input from his wife) then came up with a new version that incorporated all the ideas we'd given him.

The song is sounding pretty good.

But all of this has gotten me itching. What have I been doing with my own music-writing skills lately? Partly this comes from a "parable of the talents" sense, where God expects us to use the abilities he gave us. And partly it comes from me remembering just how much fun it is to write music. Arranging music has the same intellectual stimulation and payoff that you get from solving an interesting physics problem or Sudoku puzzle--if you're into that sort of thing. But in addition, when you've figured out what all the notes should be, and how they should lead into each other to form something just right, you then get to play it. And you get to hear it. And then, if you're lucky, you get to teach it to other people, who then sing it back to you. Talk about satisfying!

...

So I've been in a contemplative mood lately. Part of me has been itching to start writing something that could be done to the Glory of God. But part of me has been holding back. You see, my musical tastes are very, very different from those of most people in our church. My tastes lead toward the polyphonic. I like the works of Bach--the only one of which we ever do in our church is O Sacred Head, and we haven't done that in a while. I like the works of Palestrina--which is entirely in Latin, and is based on Catholic liturgy anyway, so we don't do it. I like Orlando di Lasso and Anton Bruckner and Maurice Duruflé and...

You see where this is going, don't you? After having sung all of these guys in my college days, after having fallen absolutely in love with their music, after having worshipped with this music in concert, even though it was just our secular univerity's Concert Choir concerts; well, perhaps I've become spoiled, but it takes some work for me to get excited about most of the songs we sing. After you've sung the original Beethoven's 9th, final movement, the song "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" seems like such a pale counterfeit in comparison. And much of what plays on Christian music stations seems so saccharine to me.

One solution, of course, is to start writing my own! I have arranged and written a fair amount that has been done by special seasonal programs or (much more rarely) the whole congregation. And typically, people grumble while learning it (because it's so haaaard!) and then they come to like it pretty well when they have it down. It's not the kind of stuff that they would listen to on their own, given their own choices; but they like it enough to appreciate it. (And I generally wouldn't listen to the stuff that's their first choice, either, so we're even).

...

So I was thinking about what kinds of stuff I would write were I (entirely hypothetically!) to start writing church music. And of course, the first thing that happened is I started thinking about that perfectly sublime motet, O Magnum Mysterium, that I posted about last Christmas. (Feel free to click on that link and listen to it right now. Go ahead. I'll still be here when you get back.)

That's the sort of music I like. Even the Alto part is interesting! :-)

Well, as I was thinking about how this kind of music is written, and how polyphony works, I started noticing all the other links at the bottom of the screen when O Magnum Mysterium finished playing. Turns out, I did most of them when I was in college; so I was able to sing along with them--in some cases by memory--when I clicked on them to play them. These songs were like old friends. They brought back some fond memories of hanging out with good people late at night, in one of their garages, with a bottle of red wine and a book of madrigals (which were sung progressively less precise as the night wore on...)

And then, I came upon the song that inspired this whole post. Remember, I've been thinking: how would I write a hymn that would inspire me? Something in four-part A Capella, perhaps based on the words of Jesus...

This was the song I came upon, and I just had to share it with you. I do hope you enjoy it. When I heard it, in the mood I was in, I was thunderstruck.

I'm under no illusions about teaching this to a congregation, but still... That's the way it's done. That's the kind of thing that inspires me.

Wow.

Just, wow. I think I need to brush up on my counterpoint and start writing something soon.

The 162nd Carnival of Homeschooling is Up!

2009-02-03T21:15:00.001-08:00

Yes, it has now reached the noteworthy milestone of 162. That's a seriously important milestone.

What's that, you say? 162? What could possibly be special about that number? It's just a normal number, right? Nothing interesting there.

Ah, but there you're wrong. There's something interesting about every number (at least, every non-negative integer). I can prove it mathematically.

But first, the Carnival, which is almost as interesting as my proof. :-) It's being hosted over at Dewey's Treehouse this week. Alas, I didn't submit anything this week (although I did for the last two carnivals), but there are a number of good posts in there. Here are a few I liked.

Over at Mother by Nature there is a post in which a mother shares a spontaneous conversation she had with her son about money. The kid was doing a math problem (trying to figure out sales tax), and then... started asking the economic equivalent of existential questions. What is money? Where does it come from? Why does it have any value at all? Personally, I think this is good stuff. These are not necessarily easy questions at all. After all, the green stuff in your pocket is little more than ink on paper. Why do we value it so much? And I'm not asking this as some anti-materialist rhetorical question; I mean it. Can you explain where its value comes from? I think the mother in this post did a really good job, and I'm not sure I would have done as well under similar circumstances. Just like when I took Combinatorics in college and discovered that counting is one of the hardest things to do in math, sometimes these seemingly easy questions are the hardest, when you start to pull at all their little threads....

And then there's this fun post from The Reluctant Homeschooler, who happens to be married to a somewhat old-world Ukranian. More power to them! The thing is, though, when their kids get it into their heads that they'd like to raise livestock in their suburban backyard, Daddy agrees quite enthusiatically with them, and Mommy is left to ponder questions like, "but who's going to learn to skin and cook all the rabbits?" Right now, the kids are weighing the pros and cons (mostly the pros) of keeping a pair of goats around. Mommy is, somewhat amusedly, bracing herself....

Then over at the Five J's, we have this post in which the homeschooling mother has gone through all the Dr. Seuss (and similar) books in their personal library, and figured out which ones are good for teaching which first-grade grammar lessons. For example, if you want to learn about prepositions, Green Eggs and Ham is excellent. ("And I would eat them in the rain, and in the house, and on the train....) Likewise, for numbers you could use Bears on Wheels, and for (my favorite) Onomatopoeia, there's Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?

There are plenty of good selections this week, so check it out.

...

And now, for my assertion that there's some interesting fact about every non-negative integer. Yes, this assertion is provable mathematically.

Start by assuming the opposite. There is some non-empty set of uninteresting numbers, U. By construction, no interesting fact exists about any of the elements of U. Well, since these are all non-negative integers, we can say that one such number N, element of set U, has the lowest value of any member of set U. (That is, for all other members M of set U, N is less than M). Note that this is an interesting fact about N! N is the smallest number about which no interesting fact exists. That fact, in and of itself, is interesting.

But! We have just arrived at a contradiction. N, by construction, has no interesting facts about it; but we just gave precisely such an interesting fact.

Therefore, we must conclude that our initial assumption, that the set of uninteresting numbers is non-empty, is false; and the opposite of our initial assumption is true. Every non-negative number therefore has some interesting fact about it. Quod Erat Demonstratum.

Determining what's so interesting about the number 162 is left as an exercise to the reader. ;-)

A Little Bit About Social Conservatism

2009-02-02T21:35:00.000-08:00

Ok, I mentioned a couple weeks back that I was stewing something over in my head about Social Conservatism--specifically what role it plays in our society, and indeed in any society.

Of course, these thoughts were spurred in part by the results of the recent presidential election. Frankly, the self-identified Social Conservatives didn't do so well this time around. Part of the problem, of course, is that this was not a good year for conservatives in general, of any stripe; and part of the problem is that the Republican party, which has been the political home of the SoCons since at least the Reagan administration, has become fractious lately.

This last point is a challenging one. The old Reagan coalition succeeded because it managed to find common political ground between several varieties of "conservative": there were the defense hawks, who were dismayed at the state of American power and influence in the late 1970's; there were the fiscal conservatives and the libertarians, who were dismayed at the levels of taxation, regulation, and spending; and there were the social conservatives, who were dismayed by the erosion of their values in the public square--from open denigration of America and its symbols, to breakdown of the family, to breakdown of public order, to abortion on demand, to marginalization of Judeo-Christian values in academia and intellectual life. Reagan presented a program that appealed to all of these constituencies simultaneously.

But now, it almost seems that these various factions are trying to kick each other out of the party. They don't say that, of course; what they actually say is that if we want to be a big tent, then we have to reach out to people outside the party who don't agree with that faction over there. Of course, this is equivalent to saying that the party shouldn't champion the causes that are dear to the hearts of that faction, which is to say that that faction's values aren't as important as mine....

The trouble that the social conservatives are having, is that there are so few others in society who find common ground with them. Back during the Reagan years it was easy for them to find common cause with, say... the libertarians. To pick one example among many, the libertarians and the fiscal conservatives tend to be opposed to funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, based on the argument that this is not what Congress was designed for, or that the Constitution doesn't authorize this. The social conservatives tend to be opposed to funding it for a different reason: because it supports garbage, and I don't want my tax dollars funding that. There were enough issues around during the Reagan years that were like this: the SoCons and the libertarians, even though they had totally different worldviews, were still on the same side of many political issues. But now the issues are different. Consider the question of whether the schools should support abstinence-based sex education. The SoCons are just about the only ones out there saying Yea, and nearly everyone else says Nay--especially the libertarians, who were allies with the SoCons on so many different issues in the 1980s.

Thus we had something of a spectacle in this last election. There were very, very few people in this country who were unenthused, one way or another, about the V.P. candidacy of Sarah Palin. Among the Social Conservatives, she was a phenomenon. She was much, much more exciting to this big chunk of the Republican base than was the presidential candidate, John McCain--and had McCain picked just about anyone else, I suspect that large numbers of the SoCons would have sat the election out, and Obama would have won in an absolute landslide. And yet, while Palin's support was very deep and intense, it didn't seem to me very wide--it didn't extend much outside the SoCon base. Indeed, many of those in other factions within the Republican party loathed her.

And I say this--full disclosure--as someone who was, in fact, more excited by Palin than I was by McCain. (Actually, in the Republican primaries, my candidate dropped out before I had a chance to vote. Yup, I was a Fredhead. Y'all should have listened to us....) But it seems to me that while Palin gave McCain a fighting chance at covering his base, her appeal outside that base was very limited.

The SoCons are a sizable group, no doubt, but they aren't a majority, and right now they don't seem to have enough fellow travelers so that they can put together a majority voting block. Now, I don't mind so much about the political losses--in any well-designed democracy every side eventually loses, and then eventually wins, and then eventually loses again. But social conservatism as a social (instead of a political) force, on the other hand, is very important, and I'm not so sanguine about the ways things are going on that front.

Why? What's the problem? They're just one more political faction looking to control policy, right? Who (aside from them) cares if they win or lose?

Well, to answer the so what, we have to take about four steps back and look at what exactly social conservatism is.

Here's a little pattern. See if you can trace it out.

...

First item: there was a 14th century North African intellectual named Ibn Khaldun, who believed that there was a natural rhythm to history. It went like this: some nomad tribe, living out on the fringes of civilization, would rise to become a military and social force. The nomad tribe would come upon wealthy yet divided cities, and would beat them militarily and loot them. The tribe could do this because it was unified, and disciplined; the towns were full of soft, weak people who didn't know how to defend themselves and were disinclined to lay down their lives for their hated rulers. So, eventually the nomads would conquer the cities, and would become the rulers. They would continue as rulers for perhaps a few generations, becoming ever wealthier and more comfortable. Eventually science and the arts would flourish under their descendants. But then, they would one day become like their soft, weak predecessors; and then some other nomad tribe would rise up on the periphery of civilization. The now entrenched rulers find they no longer have the social cohesion or the discipline of their ancestors, and eventually they and their society become prey for the new nomads--just as their predecessors became prey for them.

...

Second Item: In his famous work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, historian Edward Gibbon advanced his theory for why Rome fell. As summarized by Wikipedia,

According to Gibbon, the Roman Empire succumbed to barbarian invasions in large part due to the gradual loss of civic virtue among its citizens. They had become weak, outsourcing their duties to defend their Empire to barbarian mercenaries, who then became so numerous and ingrained that they were able to take over the Empire. Romans, he believed, had become effeminate, unwilling to live a tougher, "manly" military lifestyle. He further blames the degeneracy of the Roman army and the Praetorian guards. In addition, Gibbon argued that Christianity created a belief that a better life existed after death, which fostered an indifference to the present among Roman citizens, thus sapping their desire to sacrifice for the Empire. He also believed its comparative pacifism tended to hamper the traditional Roman martial spirit...

...

Third item: In the Biblical book of Judges, you see a rhythm that is repeated numerous times. It goes like this. The people of Israel gain prosperity, victory, and security. Then, they become complacent and decadent, and fall into idol worship. Then, God sends the Philistines, or the Amalekites, or the Midianites, or some other miscellaneous Canaanite foes to subjugate them. They are destroyed and enslaved, until a "judge"--a religious reformer and military leader--turns them back to God, and drives out their foes. Then, they become prosperous and secure for another generation or two, before they become complacent and corrupt....

...

You see the pattern, don't you?

Civilizations, and nations, have a life cycle. While no two stories are exactly the same, there are patterns that appear over and over again. Of course, no two historians agree on what exactly the cycles are. For example, I've seen Malthusian theories about how the driving forces of history are economic and resource-based, with the collapse mechanism having to do with the depletion of resources. Incidentally, I don't buy these theories; they don't, for example, explain the collapse of the Roman empire very well. I suspect that Gibbon and Ibn Khaldun are closer to the truth.

Here's the pattern that both of them (and to a degree, the Book of Judges) outline:
Starting at point 1, you have some tribe, or community, or city-state--one among many--which, for some reason or another, adopts some set of values--some virtues--that sets it apart. This tribe begins to grow in influence and power. It begins to subjugate its neighbors; it begins to take land, and exploit the resources that once belonged to its neighbors to become even more powerful.

Now, it is certainly true that natural resources are very unevenly distributed over the face of the Earth's surface, so some peoples have an advantage right out of the gate. And this has been advanced as a possible reason for why some societies advance and others do not. But while that may be a factor, it is also true that there have been resource-poor nations which have grown into mighty empires and defeated much more resource-rich ones. The classic (no pun intended) example of this, of course, was how resource-poor Greece triumphed over the mighty Persian empire--both when the Persians invaded Greece under Xerxes, and then when Alexander and his (numerically inferior) army destroyed the Persian empire under Darius III.

I think the key here is culture. Not in the sense of music and art, but in the sense of worldview, and social roles, and social values. The fact is, the way you, individually, think about money and about work and about sex and about religion and about power and about responsibility, has a huge impact on where you go in your own life. But if it affects your own life that much, think about how it can affect an entire society! When an entire society thinks that work is a gift from God, to use one example, and when that society teaches the same to its children, you tend to get a productive society--much more so than one in which people are taught that work is a sucker's game, and you should get out of it whenever you can. Likewise, when you have a society where everyone believes that raising the next generation, and instilling our values, is the most important mission in life, that society is going to wind up with children raised completely differently than a society where everyone believes that children are not as important as career and self-actualization.

Well, to go back to the model above, let's say you get a civilization with some set of values that allows them to succeed, thrive, and expand. What does this civilization look like? Well, when you look at most of the great empires and nations throughout history, at the time when they were rising, you see a lot of similar social structures, and a lot of similar traits. These include, in no particular order:

Societal honor of the warrior, and of the martial ethic;
Highly defined gender roles, with Manly Men and Womenly Women;
An austere sense of justice, with antisocial types executed or exiled frequently;
Great reverence to the concepts of duty, honor, loyalty;
Strong social cohesion, to the point that many (even most) would proudly die for their tribes or countries;
Willingness to endure a struggle for the common good;
Strong societal institutions for instilling all these values in the young.

Did Hellenic Greece have these? Check. Rome? Check. India? Check. Pre-1950's Great Britain? Check.

18th-20th Century America? Check.

Ok, continuing: eventually the civilization's influence and power spreads abroad, into a great empire. All enemies are defeated or held at bay; commerce, art, and science flourish; peace and prosperity reign. What then?

Well, we're about at point 2 on the graph--in the middle of what often are referred to as Golden Ages. The trouble with Golden Ages, is that the societies start to slip when it comes to passing the virtues and traits from the above list on to its progeny. After all, when it's been a couple of generations since anyone had to worry about dying in war, when you've got the family business running well, when everyone's fat and happy, it's a whole lot harder to teach the young about "sacrifice" and "duty". As the Wikipedia quote on Gibbon said, describing the later Romans, "They had become weak, outsourcing their duties to defend their Empire to barbarian mercenaries.... Romans, he believed, had become effeminate, unwilling to live a tougher, 'manly' military lifestyle."

One more point here: this period of decadence, which Gibbon and Khaldun and Judges all mentioned, most definitely includes decadence of the sexual variety. I don't want to get too deep into the topic here, but I will briefly touch on it: rising societies tend to have strict, austere gender roles on sexuality, often with severe penalties for those who deviate. Sexuality in the rising societies is primarily for childbearing, and for the strengthening of the marriage, which these societies generally deem crucial for the proper raising and training of children. Societies which enter their Golden Ages tend to become much, much more lax about sexual mores. Sex becomes primarily about pleasure, and only secondarily about procreation. This change is accompanied by the relaxation of societal penalties against "deviant" sex. Not surprisingly, starting during a society's Golden Age, the birthrate starts to plummet. This was true well before the invention in modern times of reliable birth control, I might add; this phenomenon was noticed and commented upon by the Romans, among others.

What happens next? Well, eventually the virtues and values that helped propel the society to its power and prosperity get rejected by the population. Now, this doesn't all happen at once. Interestingly, the decay generally starts at the upper levels in society. The rulers, and those in positions of power, usually become corrupt and decadent before the general population does. And at the beginning the rulers have to hide their behavior for fear of causing a scandal. They become nihilistic and cynical about their society's values first, while the people are still dutifully training their children to grow up to be Real Men (and Real Women). But eventually the cynicism and nihilism of the ruling classes becomes more and more public, and more and more accepted. The old values become a thing of mockery, as they become associated more and more with the lower classes and the non-urban "provincials". Eventually, even the lower classes start to reject them--with the rural farmers often the last to give up.

What do you have then? At that point, you have a society of people who have rejected, and who actively discourage, all the values they held to earlier:

They dishonor the warrior who defends them, and instead celebrate those who keep them entertained;
They obliterate all gender roles, and become what C.S. Lewis termed (in The Abolition of Man) "men without chests".
Justice is thwarted, with the criminal often celebrated, and the law abiding citizen the subject of abuse and mockery;
Open mockery of the concepts of duty, honor, loyalty;
No social cohesion, to the point that many side against their country or empire;
Little or no willingness to endure a struggle for the common good, especially since no one agrees on what the common good is anymore;
Systematic destruction or subversion of those societal institutions that used to instill the former values in the young.

Now, when the society reaches this point (Point 3 on the above graph), it is in decline. Eventually, even its wealth and power and influence will not save it. Its government will increasingly have trouble paying its bills; the people are increasingly unwilling or unable to restrict their appetites or behave in responsible manners; and eventually poverty and oppression close in. Former allies fall away, former enemies (and new enemies) rise up again and threaten the waning empire; but this time, the empire doesn't have the stomach, or the resources, or the military needed for the struggle.

Eventually pieces of the empire start to be lost. Sometimes the final collapse comes suddenly and violently; other times the empire declines into a slow, degraded senescence. But either way, those nations that have had their day in the sun rarely get a second chance. I doubt Italy will have the world trembling under her pointed, heeled boot again, for a very, very long time....

...

So do you start to see what Social Conservatism is, and what role it plays in a society?

Go back and take a look at the graph again. Let's pretend for the moment we're at point 2 on the graph. Now think to yourself: what role are the Social Conservatives trying to play here? What are they trying to do?

The answer: more than anyone else, they're the ones trying to keep those virtues alive that got us here. Take a look at that list again; is it not the Social Conservative, more than anyone else, who champions each one of those virtues?

Societal honor of the warrior, and of the martial ethic;
Highly defined gender roles, rejection of the modern "gender is a social construct" mantra, and pushback against sexual libertinism;
An austere sense of justice, with stiff penalties for lawbreakers;
Great reverence to the concepts of duty, honor, loyalty;
Strong social cohesion, to the point that many, even today, would proudly give their lives for their country (even though they don't like where it appears to be headed);
Willingness to make sacrifices, of time and money for what they believe to be good causes;
Strong support for churches and schools--so long as the schools aren't attempting to undermine their values. If they feel they are, they leave and establish their own schools, or they homeschool--because passing on their values to the next generation is one of the highest priorities of the Social Conservative. It's the mission on which all the values on this list hang.

...

Note that I haven't gone much into a discussion of religion here in this post, even though Faith is very, very important for the American Social Conservative. My point here is that even if one doesn't accept the faith of the SoCon, one should still be able to see that the SoCon is playing a very, very important role here. That role, if I may quote the words of Jesus, is to be the "Salt of the Earth"--in the sense that Jesus most likely originally intended it: SoCons are the preservative that keeps the rest of society from going bad. SoCons are the Inheritors and Guarantors of the traditions, for better or worse, that caused this country to become as wealthy, as strong, and as free as it is.

And the most important thing to understand about SoCons is that they do not primarily operate on a political level. Their Social Conservatism can be a political force, but that's not what it's primarily there to do. The SoCons are much more interested in making the next generation and passing on their values to in, and doing so in a way that the lesson sticks. They're more interested in what goes on in their homes, and in their churches, and on the streets of their towns; and if many of them (Huckabee types excluded) had their way, Washington would get out of the way and mind its own business. Much of their political involvement, in fact, comes about precisely because they fear that the intellectual classes are attempting to use governmental power to undermine and thwart the values they hold so dearly.

...

So when Thomas Frank writes the question, What's the Matter With Kansas? lamenting that somehow the extreme right wing is using cultural wedge issues to distract the working class from their true economic interests, he really, really doesn't understand the phenomenon he's up against. What he calls cultural wedge issues are rightly seen by SoCons as matters--literally--of life and death, both for our next generation, and for our entire society.

A Good Day To Be A Daddy

2009-01-31T23:11:00.001-08:00

Well, maybe the whole day wasn't so good--we had a three-kid meltdown there for a while shortly after dinner, just as haircut time was happening. Yup, all three kids had their hair cut today, in our little kitchen. The Happy Boy most assuredly wasn't happy. But he looks a lot cuter now.

Anyway. Earlier today, the Pillowfight Fairy did something that made her daddy proud: she announced to me that she wanted to get out that pegboard that I'd showed her last week (and blogged about, at great length, a few days ago), and that she was going to make a blanket.

Well, I reasoned with her, blankets are awfully big things to make, and take a long time. You should probably start with something smaller, that can be finished in just a few sessions. Scarves are perfect.

Lo and behold, my reasoning actually worked! With a six-year-old! Will wonders never cease? So, the Fairy picked out an appropriate color ("as white as snow!"), and I helped her get started. I admit, when she started I was thinking to myself, I wonder how long this is going to last. I needn't have worried. She worked on it for a couple of hours straight in the morning. And then she worked on it a couple of hours in the afternoon, while the rest of us were taking naps. And then, after her bath tonight, I suggested that she work on it a while while I read to her.

So here's a picture of the Fairy knitting a white scarf on the pegboard, sporting that do you mind? facial expression:
She currently has her scarf about two feet long, give or take. Of course, she's not as fast at it as I am--yet. But still, I'm very proud of her.

And given that she had something to keep her occupied, I got a little more ambitious with my reading tonight; since we've just finished Little House in the Big Woods, I got to pick something I wanted to read. So I started to inflict The Hobbit on the Pillowfight Fairy. In the past she hasn't had much patience for sitting through that kind of stuff. But having the Fairy work on knitting while I read to her was pretty close to ideal; because she wasn't idle, she didn't get squirmy; she had something to do while I read to her, so she was able to sit through the entire chapter (and Tolkien's chapters are pretty long). The only drawback was that Tolkien's chapters are so long that we went way past her bedtime. But she was able to get some serious length on that scarf of hers, and she enjoyed Chapter 1: An Unexpected Party.

We'll have to get another project lined up for when she finishes the scarf. I want to finish the book with her. :-)

Oh, and by the way: I've been talking a lot about the Fairy lately. The other kids are doing well, too. I liked this picture of the Adrenaline Junkie, freshly scrubbed and looking at a book just before bedtime.

Some Thoughts From The Wife

2009-01-31T23:09:00.000-08:00

My wife has just posted on her blog, a fairly long series of thoughts about how we've been coping with the news that we're expecting a Trisomy 13 baby who most likely won't live long past birth. Tonya's thoughts are here.

A Trio of Miscellaneous Tidbits

2009-01-30T22:24:00.001-08:00

Well, it turns out that I have a couple of short things to share tonight, and instead of making three short posts (as much as I was tempted to), I figured they were short enough that there's only enough material for one decent-sized post. So, here we go.

...

Item: I finished reading the classic book Little House in the Big Woods to the Pillowfight Fairy today.

Now, one of my teachers read it to the class when I was a kid, and I only remembered bits and pieces of the book from that reading. That was a long time ago, and for the most part the book only remained in my memory as an impression; I remembered that "This book is good", but I didn't remember much beyond that.

Well, late last year the Fairy received a copy of the book from her beloved Auntie Wendy. Now, the Fairy is more into the kinds of books that are read in one sitting--children's picture books, that sort of thing. Although she can enjoy chapter books, most of the time she gets bored with them pretty quickly.

But this book was different. I'm not sure if it's because it covered a time in the author's life when she was but five and six years old (same age as the Fairy), or if it was that it was a true (autobiographical) story, or that the lives of the people were so different that it caught her attention, or if it was just written so well; but the Fairy really got into it. And the Fairy especially liked the stories-within-a-story that appeared in many of the chapters, as Pa took Laura and Mary on his knees and told them something that had happened to so-and-so once upon a time.

The Fairy was especially taken by the story in the chapter entitled "Sunday", which talked about how a much younger Grandpa and his two older brothers had been very naughty one Sunday when they should have been studying their catechisms. I won't spoil the story here of course, except to say that it involved a sled and a big black pig--and the story had the Fairy literally rolling on the floor with laughter. (I had a hard time reading it without laughing out loud, myself.)

So the book was a hit, and I'm very pleased about that. In fact, the other night the Fairy insisted on reading one of the chapters all by herself, which she did. The thing was twenty pages long, and the Fairy just read the whole thing! She did get pretty tired about two-thirds of the way through, and I had to give her lots of encouragement to get her to finish (and some correction now and again, as the Fairy has a tendency to misread, add, and delete words when she's reading too quickly), but she managed to read the entire thing by herself. I'm hoping in the next year or two, we can find some decent chapter books that she'll want to read without assistance.

I was particularly struck by the descriptions of how the people living on the frontier way back in the 1870s managed to get by. When we think of people living in the past--especially those living way out on the fringes of civilization--we tend to think of them as backward, and to think that we, today, know so much more than they do. And in some ways, that's right: I can tell you how a nuclear reactor works, and I can tell you how to back up your network, and I can tell you a bunch of other things that wouldn't have meant diddly back then.

But... They were not unlearned, in their own way. They knew how to make cheese--with nothing but fresh milk (straight from the cow), salt, and rennet. (Most people today don't even know what rennet is, and when you tell them, they swear off cheese forever.) They knew how to make hats. They knew how to butcher pigs, and at least four different ways of preserving the meat for the winter. They knew how to grow all their own crops, how to raise livestock for food, and how to hunt--even how to mold their own bullets for their guns. They knew how to make their own socks and underwear! They knew how to carve, and whittle; they knew how to spin, sew, and weave. They knew how to fiddle, and sing, and dance. And they knew how to work. Hard. And they knew how to enjoy their lives!

In short, if you gathered up a half-dozen or so of these people, plunked them down in the middle of the wilderness and left them for a year, by the time you got back you would find them living in cozy little log cabins, with smoked rabbit and venison hanging in the attic, with their little barns all filled with the grain they'd just harvested, and with enough firewood chopped to keep them through the winter. They would look stout and healthy. If you gathered up a half-dozen or so of us moderns and plunked us down in the middle of the wilderness, well... by the time you revisited us three months later, there would only be one left, but he would be very well fed....

Ahem.

Anyway, the Fairy enjoyed listening to the book, and she found it interesting to hear how they did all the things they need to do to survive back then. I'm looking forward to introducing her to the rest of the series.

...

Item: Who was it who said that life is a Tragedy for those who Feel, but a Comedy for those who Think? It was some Brit, I remember, back in the day when the Brits were still primarily a thinking race. (And that explains how their dry comedy came to be, I suspect.) Well, I've found myself enjoying the writing of Theodore Dalrymple lately. He's a British doctor who appears to be something of a throwback to the day when the British were the disciplined, stiff-upper-lip types. And he's a keen observer of British culture. He doesn't like what he sees; starting somewhere in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, the British have been progressively abandoning their orderly, cultured, mannered approach to life and replacing it by something decidedly boorish and vulgar. And Dalrymple is enough of a Thinker that he can find some of the comedy in what he obviously sees as a terrible tragedy.

So here's an article he wrote recently after visiting a town in South Yorkshire. Basically, the local businessmen in the town of Rotherham have been having a problem all-too-common lately: gangs of youths hanging out in front of the stores, intimidating (and robbing) their customers. Of course, this is bad for business; but when the police either can't or won't do anything about them, what's a store manager to do?

Well, for a while they tried "the mosquito", which is a loud, high-frequency noisemaker. Turns out the human ear loses a big chunk of its high-frequency sensitivity shortly after turning 20. It's been discovered that there are sounds that kids can hear that we adults can't. And briefly there was a line of products based on this fact: with "the mosquito", you can create a teen-repellent sound field that grown-ups simply can't hear. But there were problems here--not the least of which, is that those teens can then sue you for damage to their hearing.

So some local businessman in Rotherham tried something different: he started playing music by Bach on the sound system, just outside his storefront.

It had a sudden, immediate effect--like light on cockroaches. Somehow, the music of Bach is completely incompatible with thuggery. If you're in the mood to intimidate people, the music of Bach becomes absolutely repellent to you. It's too square! It's too orderly! It's too civilized! It makes you feel ashamed at the intimidating thoughts you were just thinking. So the thuggish youths wander off, presumably to intimidate someone else who's not so obviously reminding them of their degraded state.

Dalrymple ends his article with some questions about what this episode says about the state of our culture.

...

Item: Speaking of the state of our culture, for the first time tonight I managed to play from beginning to end through Debussy's Clair de Lune.

Note: this video clip is not me. This , for those of you who aren't familiar with the tune, is the piece of music I've been learning.

Also note: I think he misses a few notes. Nowhere near as many as me, but still, I can tell. And I think he takes the middle way too fast. And I think he needs to use more left pedal....

Of course, I don't have the thing anywhere near polished yet. I have the last five (out of six) pages memorized, but I still have to sight-read the first page. And the first half of the piece is rather rocky still, although it goes more smoothly as I approach the end. After all, as I mentioned in a previous post, I've been learning it from the back to the front.

Oh, and by the way: the Pillowfight Fairy has been working her way through John Thompson's Teaching Little Fingers to Play, and is currently learning the last song in the book! I'm very proud of her. Not too long from now, the Power Household will be so full o' culture we'll be fit to bust!

Now if we can only get everyone around here potty trained....

An Sign of Impending Old Age?

2009-01-29T21:41:00.000-08:00

Ok, so somebody explain this to me.

Once upon a time, when I was in college and then in my first job out of college, I and everybody I knew lived for Friday night.

While on most evenings our activities were tempered by the knowledge that the following morning we'd have to pull our half-dead carcasses out of bed and haul ourselves to the office, on Friday night we knew that we had all Saturday morning to sleep in if we so chose, so we could stay up as late as we wanted. If you wanted to hang out with your girlfriend until all hours, so be it! If you wanted to sit up and watch twelve episodes of Dr. Who nonstop, great! If you wanted to get in your car, pick a road at random, and drive for the fun of driving, you could do that.

Now, having a wife and kids does even this out some. No matter how "free" your weekend is, you still have to get up and feed them, or they come in and start jumping on your bed. (The kids, that is; not the wife.) Nevertheless, one would think that Friday night would still be a joyful time.

It's Friday, Let's go do something!

And I work for a company that's on a 9/80 work schedule, meaning we work 80 hours over two weeks, but squeezed into 9 working days instead of 10--so we get every other Friday off, for upwards of 26 three-day weekends per year. Today was what we refer to, tongue-in-cheek, as "virtual Friday", since we get tomorrow off. You'd think that given that I don't have to worry about work tomorrow, I'd be happy to stay up with my wife and do something--even if it was just watching some movie that doesn't involve talking vegetables.

You'd think that. But then, you'd still be young.

For some reason, starting just a couple of years ago, the moment that the kids went to bed on Friday Night (or Virtual Friday night) at 8:30 or so, when the house is finally quiet, when the cats are lying about, and when I finally have time to myself, what do I want to do?

I want to head straight to the bedroom to...

No, not that. Good guess, but remember, I'm getting old here.

I start imagining how good it would feel just to get some sleeeeeep..... Somehow, all the exhaustion of the previous week comes crashing down on me right at the beginning of the weekend. I think to myself, "Wow, if I get started right now, I can catch 10 hours by the time the kids start jumping on my bed! Doesn't that sound heavenly?"

The funny thing is, I don't generally feel this way on all the other nights of the week, when I have to worry about getting up early the next day. On a Tuesday or Wednesday night, I stay up until 11 or 12 with nary a complaint. For some reason, it's always the beginning of the weekend that does it to me.

Anyone else notice this, or am I the only one?

I await your comments. I'll probably get to them late, late tomorrow morning when I'm good and ready. In the meantime, I'm going to bed.