"...cleanse them by water in the name of Allah, his Messiah and his Holy Spirit.” - Matthew 28:19, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Arabic version.
Philosophy
Regrets, I’ve Had a Few—Countering a Contemporary Cliché
To live life without regret. Never to look back, always moving forward. To insert additional cliches about seizing the day and so on.
This seems to be a pretty common theme among the people I meet. There is a sentiment that regretting your decisions is not just a waste of time but an actual detriment to your development, that to look back on your past with a heavy heart will keep you from moving forward.
I regret nothing!
I say that's a lie, and a dangerous one.
Rediscovering Economics as a Social Science
There may be an inverse relationship between the health of the economy and the quality of books published about economics. In the 1980s, for example, the US economy was booming yet bestseller lists brimmed with gloomy and embarrassing tracts predicting America’s decline. Today, the country struggles through the worst recession in decades, but a significant number of serious, thoughtful books on economic issues have reached a wide audience. This could be an example of necessity being the mother of invention. Sustained economic crises should prompt new thinking, particularly when they were generally unforeseen and have failed to respond to textbook solutions. The current financial crisis has generated several excellent books examining the causes and long-term implications of our current economic environment. More fortuitously, at least two recent books have looked deeper into economic methods and explore questions that economists have largely ignored for more than a century. One of these is Bourgeois Dignity, the second in a series of six volumes by Deidre McCloskey examining the causes of the Industrial Revolution. This topic may seem quaint and of limited relevance, but it’s easy to forget how significant this epoch was. Before the Industrial Revolution, living standards for most of humanity
In Praise of… “Functional” Technology
Writer Thomas Hayden has made quite a stir in the blogosphere recently with his provocatively titled post “In Praise of Crap Technology” on the site The Last Word On Nothing. Acting as a sort of modern day Martin Luther going up against the seemingly unassailable papal fortress of the Steve Jobs legacy, Hayden eschews high-end toys like the iPhone in favor of cheap, sturdy stuff that actually works. He cites his $20 Coby MP3 player, his Roadace 404 bike, his durable-but-unlovely pair of eyeglasses, and his son’s hand-assembled wooden garbage truck as examples of the “crap” technology he so loves. “I’ve stepped off the escalators of feature creep and planned obsolescence, and all the expense and toxic e-waste that come with them,” he says. “Crap technology, it turns out, is green technology.” Hear-hear, I say. I too am interested in a phone that functions primarily as a device for making and receiving calls. I refuse to buy a Kindle because I think the centuries-old invention of the book works just fine. My go-to guitar is a $100 ($75 on sale) Rogue acoustic that may have been thrown together in China but plays really damn well. Additionally, I have to confess
Prisoners of an Unnecessary Paradox — Left-Right Political Bipolarity As a “Device of Ambidextrous Politics”
The religious impulse seems to be ineradicable in humankind, which explains why so many new "faiths" are always bubbling up.
‘Hope and Change’ Is in the Grand Tradition of . . . John Stuart Mill?
John Stuart Mill might have given ammunition to those who would overturn tradition and "fundamentally transform" society.
Kinsey Covers for Deviant Sex
Kinsey believed that humans should not be defined by what they ought to do, but only what they actually do. Therefore, to Kinsey sexual deviation is a myth; any sexuality is acceptable, regardless of how morally depraved, because since it exists in somebody's mind it must be part of the natural spectrum and therefore cannot be illicit, abnormal or unnatural.
Just in Time for Trick-or-Treat — Bogus Alarmism Over World Population
Seven billion people. So what? A human being is more than just a mouth to feed; there's a mind attached which is often capable of solving even the most difficult of problems.
The tunnel vision that is characteristic of environmental alarmists is exemplified by a British group calling itself Population Matters (PM), which thinks it knows how to deal with this non-crisis crisis.
By positing a false dilemma (we must choose between having babies and protecting the environment), Population Matters — as with so many of these groups — stacks the deck in favor of the notion that environmental "protection" is of vastly greater importance than continuing the race itself.
Professional Politicians: For the Founders, A Contradiction in Terms
In his essay, “The Animating Contest of Freedom”, Dr. Marshall Foster reminds us: In 1782, Benjamin Franklin spoke of the differences between America and the statist bureaucracies of Europe. Unlike Europe, there were few political offices in America. None of them was profitable enough to be attractive to men of greed. In fact, all politicians were expected to earn their own living in the private sector. Political office was to be chosen not for profit but for the purpose of sacrificial service. Franklin asserted, in his own very un-PC way: “Industry and constant employment are great preservatives of the morals and virtue of a nation. Hence bad examples to youth are more rare in America, which must be a comfortable consideration to parents.” According to Dr. Foster, however, Franklin’s “industry and constant employment” have been misdirected by a professional political class that systematically ignores the limitations imposed upon them by God and the Constitution: Most Americans do not know that their “public servants” actually live in a different world and under different laws than they do. Federal and state public employees have their own pension plans and health care that guarantees each person hundreds of thousands of dollars in their
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