It Just Doesn't Make Good Sense

I honestly believe I learned more as a teacher than my students did from the experience, which is not an admittance of shame or remorse.  To the contrary I think it's as it should be.  Any teacher who doesn't learn more from the experience of teaching than the students do from being taught should find a new job.  Teachers start with a good student's knowledge of their subjects but before they can explain their subjects to their students they must come to an even deeper level of insight.  But that's just the beginning of why teachers learn more.  It's being in charge of people and observing human behavior patterns in a setting where the directions those patterns move directly effect the achievement of goals.

I started out teaching with my feet squarely planted in the behaviorist school of psychology.  I believed that all I needed to do was introduce the right set of rewards and punishments and I would inevitably end up with a well behaved group of students.

By my last teaching day I had been completely converted to what they call the humanist school of psychology.  Human beings, unlike rats and other animals the behaviorists experimented on, cherish their freedom to make decisions so much they are willing to forgo great rewards and actually endure punishment just so they can say to themselves, "I made my own choices and not the ones people pushed me towards".

Another thing I learned as a teacher is that people naturally pick at anomalies.  Big word, "anomaly", I know.  I use it because it's general and it's in the general sense that this is true.  Pass out a bunch of books where one is a little warn for ware and I guarantee you that book will be the most likely to see further abuse.  Slowly walk a thousand students with minimal supervision past two walls.  One wall with no flaws and the other with a tiny hole in its paint and once again I can practically guarantee you the hole in the paint will become a hole in the drywall if not worse, while the wall that started with no flaws will remain that way.  It is human nature to pick at anomalies.  Most of us, I hope, learn to restrain ourselves as we grow up but still far too many of us don't grow up fast enough to keep us from hurting people and things because of it.

This brings me to the subject of issuing marriage licenses to gay couples and what I believe is the key issue behind it.  Why do people wish to redefine a civil institution?  Does the history of marriage and its purpose in civil society lead us to this?  Is marriage no longer tied to natural procreation?  Has artificial means become so common that keeping the definition we've had since the beginning of recorded history no longer seem practical?  I strongly doubt it.  There is something else to it I suspect that has little if anything to do with the family unit and its role in civil society.

The primary argument as I see it for re-defining marriage is that society discriminates against gay people.  Now what does the tendency of human beings to pick at holes in walls have to do with this?  Everything.  Gay people have and still do suffer much in nations all around the world.  It doesn't matter how progressive the nation may be that they live in, they are discriminated against, attacked, beaten up, and sometimes even killed.  This treatment of gay people is reprehensible human behavior, human beings behaving at their basest levels.  People who haven't grown up enough to realize that picking at anomalies only makes things worse.

So does redefining marriage help with this problem?  If every book you pass out to students is badly worn, all of them come back much more badly worn.  If you slightly cut each students' shirt before walking them by the walls, there will be a bunch of completely torn up clothes as well as a hole in the drywall when you're done.  And if you redefine the fundamental civil institutions of marriage and family so as to include a social anomaly, you achieve nothing positive and potentially a great deal negative.  It's the wrong solution to a none the less very real problem.

The "I am Sparticus" approach to injustice can be very moving but only when all involved have volunteered.  And we really should make note of just how well that approach worked in that story.  You can't stop the meanest and lowest examples of human behavior by throwing yourself in its path.  And forcing others to join you there actually makes you almost as bad as the people you're trying to stop.

I personally am a person with many many social and other sorts of anomalies about me.  Thus there are a lot of reasons why a lot of people would want to pick on me, and they have, some times even violently.  Not because they have anything personal against me but because they're human beings who happen not to have matured enough to realize how stupid their reactions are.

So what do I do about it?  Well being a defiant sort I go out of my way at times to advertise some of my anomalies, like not liking sweets or warm climates (so what are you going to do about it?).  But knowing and appreciating human nature as I do, I keep most of them , the most likely to really stand out, between myself and those who may share or appreciate those things about me.  To use the hole in the wall analogy, I keep those things out of sight so as not to tempt the base human natures of others that may thoughtlessly do me harm.

I'm not saying I deny who and what I am.  Anyone who knows me can tell you I'm not normal and have little interest in being so.  Even many people who see me in public would tell you I'm not normal, from the car I drive, to the clothes I wear, I am very much me and not normal.

There is, as the great Greek story teller Homer kept trying to say, a balance that should be reached in most things.  In the case of how to protect ourselves from the natural human tendency to pick on anomalies, we should pick and choose with care what we expose and what we are discrete about.  Walk into your typical college fraternity for example and announce your commitment to not having sex before marriage and you will be attacked, possibly even beaten up and achieve nothing.  Now keep that same passion between yourself and those who you first befriend and you may just work miracles in helping other young men keep themselves out of trouble.

Likewise, as in the cause of celibacy, in the cause of gay rights, an aggressive stance, especially one that redefines an anciently sufficient and fundamental civil institution is a bad tact.  Instead of persuading people to perhaps grow up about the issue, this tact just encourages them to wallow in their own base tendency to pick on anomalies.  And even worse in this case where marriage is becoming less and less common, the next anomaly to be picked on may be marriage itself.

I know this issue seems very complicated to some and overly simple to others, so I'll sum my point up here as succinctly as I can.  Gay marriage doesn't solve the problem it's designed to solve.  In fact it makes it worse.

Checking Back In On The So Called Economic Recovery

I'm not an economist but I've been well educated in the subject.  I even taught an advanced course to high school students.  Ah but I do like to embellish.  Let's be strait with each other.  I'm not an economist but I'm going to offer my best advice on the subject anyway, which will be a lot better than whatever seems to be currently flying around in the White House.

We keep hearing talking heads tell us that either the economy is finally in recovery or that it has a few more rough spots to still get over.  Most of the experts we are told, and expected to blindly believe, are supposedly saying we are in recovery.  Their strongest argument being the recovery of stock values since the crash.

Now it is there that my education in the subject of economics jumps up and starts flashing an alarm at me.  Crashes happen because of an excess of a range of business ventures that are at best weak and at worst foolish.  In the case of our last crash the lion's share of those less than good ventures were primarily in the area of real-estate due to home loans being too easy to obtain and other consequences of attempted government tweaks.  Knowing this, I don't think the current levels of the stock market are a good indicator of a real recovery.

What made this last crash so bad is that the bad business ventures were the product of more than just bad business plans.  They were the product of bad government plans, plans that government on all levels across the United States eagerly participated in.  They were varied only by context but they all shared the same general theme.

"What's good for builders and real-estate values is good for communities in general."  Construction meant jobs and that along with higher real-estate values meant higher government revenues through income and property taxes.  Thus governments on all levels did whatever they could to encourage construction and growth.  Things like forcing insurance companies to charge less then they needed to in order to insure homes built in dangerous places like near beaches or on fragile cliff-sides.  They also took care to tailor taxes to help things along as well.  On the federal level we still have the home mortgage interest deduction and on state levels we have things like Florida legislators trying to weaken homestead exemptions designed to keep people on fixed incomes from being driven out of their homes by rising property taxes.  They want to weaken this protection because it's forcing new home buyers to pay higher property taxes in order to make up for the protected ones, and you guessed it, this makes it more difficult for folks to build new houses and sell them.

The worst government culprit in all of this has been the federal government with the unintended consequences of the Community Reinvestment Act that attempted to assist poor minorities in getting home loans.  This ultimately led to the Federally backed weak mortgages that were the primary weight pulling the world down in the last crash.

Even burdensome government spending owes a great deal to this bad government theme, for much of state and local spending around the country has been driven by the desire to improve real-estate values by improving local amenities like parks, public transportation, public theaters, and local access to colleges.  In deed it could be said that the song "This Land Is Your Land" should be the theme song of what's primarily wrong in the United States today.  Our government at all levels has come to care too much about our land values and not enough about our right to own it.

Now where does that bring me on the question of when it can be safely said we're in recovery?  Well, solid recoveries only happen when money and time start to get heavily invested in solid business ventures.  That means the weak ones whose excess accumulation caused the crash in the first place need to be out of the picture for the most part.  So where is the money in the stock market going?  Is it to solid business ventures like for example, stuff closely related to the oil fields of North America?  That's where a certified economic analyst would come in handy, but just looking at the values of shares in companies like Marathon and Exxon I'm not seeing a clear trend.  I can't say one way or the other there but on the question of whether the bad ventures are mostly out of the picture, that is so clear it doesn't even take my level of training to see it.  Real-estate and new construction are still a major part of the investment picture.  That means that of the newly moving funds, too much of it is chasing weak and possibly even foolish investments.

And governments especially don't seem to have learned their lessons.  They're continuing to try and boost real-estate values and encourage new construction.  Investors need to wise up for a few years and stay as far away from new home construction and real-estate flipping schemes as possible.  They also should develop a general aversion to any potential investment that depends on special favors from governments.  Do New York's tax free business zones come to anyone's mind?  It's not that governments aren't necessarily reliable, it's that whenever a government attempts to manage markets there will always be a piper to pay, and that the piper from the story ultimately ends up taking his payment in children is soberingly appropriate.

So when I stop hearing about "good signs" in real-estate and new home construction and I start hearing about money going to solid business ventures, then I will say we are finally on our way out of the great recession.  Until then, no.

What Messed Up Modern Reasoning

Have you ever wondered why so many of those people with the big academic degrees from the big elite Universities seem to be so out of touch with reality?  I know the first thing I thought of was they spend so much time with books and other intellectuals that they forget what the rest of the world is like, assuming they ever had a clue about it in the first place.  That was my first guess.  Then I went to college.

My guess, though conveniently offered to me by Hollywood, was largely off the mark.  The real reason was something I wouldn't completely discover until I had spent ten years of my own in academia and then a few more in the private sector.  And no, there was no great capitalist guru who took me under his wing to point it all out to me.  I'm not trying to pass off a sub-plot from Atlas Shrugged or an antidote from the writings of Napoleon Hill as part of my life.

I finally found the answer after long years of analyzing studies, papers, and books in various fields. Psychology, historiography, education, geology, and political science just to name a few.  Through my own analysis I gathered a lot of pieces, enough to support my skepticism of modern academia's over-all credibility.  Most striking in my experience was the dominance of Marx's dialectic amongst the world's historians, that in spite of Marx having been a minor scholar at best and his theories badly pocked with logic holes.

Then I found a book that has really seemed to put it all together for me.  Indeed, it has put together more than just what's wrong in modern academic circles, but what's wrong in much of the world's public rationale today.  I cannot recommend this book too much.

It's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker.  In it he discusses not just ten books but fifteen.  It's sub-title is And 5 Others That Didn't Help.  A key base assumption of his book is that ideas matter and make a difference, some bad and some good.  He strongly recommends reading each of the books he discusses for yourself so you can fully appreciate what's wrong with them.  I strongly recommend at least reading his book.  All of the others you may not have time for.

As much as I love writing critiques, I wont critique it for you.  Instead I must insist on asking you to read it for yourself.

But I wont just leave you with that recommendation.  I will actually give you my personal summary of what's wrong with much of modern academia.  Note that reading Wiker's book will give you a much more complete picture, and many of his conclusions are not summed up here.

In as few words as possible and at the risk of over-simplifying, here it goes.  They want power over others and they measure the amount of power they have over others by how much they see the world change to match their own views about how things should be.  Thus they are more motivated by their agendas of "progress" than they are by the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge, or of being accountable to sound logic and reason.

Another way to put it is they have a lust for power.  The way many of them would put it is they want progress.  So beware what others call progress.

Celebrating The Birth Of The Homeless?

And here's another quote used by the acolytes of "social justice".

“Christmas is built upon a beautiful and international paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.”

-G.K. Chetsterson

I have great respect for G. K. Chetsterson and find much I can agree with in another statement of his in particular.

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

The fact that he made this statement about British politics around the turn of the 20th century only shows how very little we have moved from the same general nonsense today.

I wont attempt to argue with the late Chetsterson here.  I want to make that clear before some student of his life and writings chooses to come after me and tell me I don't know near as much about him as they do,

Instead I want to address the intuitive implications of his quote on Christmas.  What I do actually know about Chetsterson is enough to be fairly sure that the intuitive conclusions are the wrong ones to draw, not what Chetsterson meant at all, but unfortunately what many of the acolytes of social justice will think it means.

Jesus Christ was not born homeless.  If being born somewhere other than in your parent's house means you were born homeless then anyone born in a hospital was born homeless.  

He was born in humble circumstances and it is there that we see "a beautiful and international paradox".  The king of the universe and then some was born like someone in lowly circumstances.  He doesn't care about the kind of power and social status that most of us do.  Just as much as this may be seem as a "shout out" to the poor it can with equal validity of thought be seen as a  sort of spitting on our human understanding of power and status.

But for the acolytes of social justice it is another opportunity to feed the flames of class warfare.  Almost assuredly not what Chetsterson was getting at.  Though if it was, I draw the same conclusion with still equal strength.

In order for "social justice" to be anything other than a set of nonsense syllables that happen to make out two recognizable words, groups of people, classes of people must be the focus of Christ's ministry through us.  We must persue political power to achieve this brand of justice since whole classes of people cannot be directed without it.  This therefore means we end up pursuing the very thing the implications of His birth reject, the kind of power and social status most humans cared about before His first coming.

Contrary to many popular teachings, Jesus was never a poor man.  His earthly parents were middle class and even during the travels of His ministry He had enough resources that a treasury was maintained to manage them and the garment He wore was so fine that the soldiers cast lots for it instead of just tearing it up and dividing its materials evenly, as was the more common practice of the time.

The point of this fact is not that Jesus was middle class or rich, but rather and with far more powerful implications, He transcended our fallen class system.  He was one of us but not a part of our pursuit of power and wealth.  He benefited from our resources and our economics but He had no use and still has no use for our politics.

Christianity has influenced many great social transformations without ever laying hold of political power.  And in those cases where Christians have attempted to grow "the kingdom" through political power it has failed.

Social justice is a false concept that encourages us, to quote Chetsterson, "to go on making mistakes".  And these mistakes are costly.  Only heaven can give us a full account of just how costly.

I can now only hope that my conservative Christian friends will bring themselves to see just where and why social justice has gone wrong so we don't just end up opposing social justice in the name of some current status quo that social justice helped create and thus, "prevent the mistakes from being corrected".