Peggy Noonan's Got Some 'Splainin' To Do

This afternoon I read Ms. Peggy Noonan's essay touting the Republican line about Mr. McCain's Vice-Presidential selection of Mrs. Sarah Palin. However, her off-mike conversation with Mike Murphy and some MSNBC talking-head includes her uttering these words:

“It’s over… They went for this, excuse me, political bull**** about narratives. Every time Republicans do that… they blow it.”

With this in mind, consider what she wrote:

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.

She could become a transformative political presence.

So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.

And it's going to be brutal. It's already getting there.

I'm not too sure how to interpret Ms. Noonan's written opinions in light of her presumably candid remarks. Did she knowingly write something her audience would like to hear to provide some boob bait for the bubbas? Or should I instead take pains to recall that Ms. Noonan included herself in the class of people she describes here:

Let me say of myself and almost everyone I know in the press, all the chattering classes and political strategists and inside dopesters of the Amtrak Acela Line: We live in a bubble and have around us bubble people. We are Bubbleheads.


Bubbleheads. Yes. I think that best harmonizes the oral and written record.

Update: Ms. Noonan attempts to harmonize her written and spoken words here. Make of it what you will.

Democrats Without Chests

The Catholic journal "First Things" has news of recent statements by Democrat activists that give pause. Now, I would not think the remarks so significant had I not been on vacation this last weekend whereupon I had occasion to reread my copy of the C.S. Lewis novel, That Hideous Strength.

Civil discourse requires the interlocutors to put their partisan aims under something larger than themselves. The ancient Greeks of Plato's Dialogs thought that Reason, qua, Reason must be ultimate. Theists in general must put the will of God over their own will to power. Historically, American political conflicts have taken place within the framework of the Constitution. When that framework proved inadequate Civil War took a half-million lives on its battlefields.

We have recently seen low-life's who would have a hard time knowing which end the round comes out of a gun proclaiming their willingness to perpetrate any crime to bring about the "greater good" as they see it. Happily, all of the NRA members are on the other side of this debate. The First Things essay speaks of bloodshed. I don't think we've come to that.

I think that if someone publicly says that he believes the ends justify any means necessary, remember that this includes violating the Constitution, the Bible, the Koran, the laws of the land, and the rules of civil discourse. You should believe his every utterance to be a lie until someone you know to believe in absolutes confirms it and you ought to attach the maximum skepticism to it when you hear it repeated. The "big lie" theory depends upon it being repeated so widely that people lose track of its source.

That Hideous Strength is a story of how men without chests find themselves completely unprepared to handle evil. The antagonists start with things that seem good, but take this same "ends justify the means" approach. The result are a few lies to "cut the red tape" and those lies are doubled and tripled until all correspondence between words and reality is lost. What meaning is communicated grows more and more vague. In the climactic confrontation between N.I.C.E. and Merlin all meaning is lost.

There are no policy goals so valuable that lying about them is justified. There are no policy goals that destroying innocent people is justified. If you think otherwise, I will not trust you and we cannot have a civil discussion.

An Answer and A Question

This afternoon a colleague was attempting to add an image to his WPF application. What made this unusual was that he wanted to get the image from a resource cooked into an assembly. This was not particularly straightforward to do.

The image itself was in c:\dev\project\framework\IntranetFramework\Content\Images\CSiLogo.png. And we were putting into the IntranetFramework assembly. That seemed to go straightforwardly, but there arose a problem when we went to use it.

Ultimately we added to the xaml file the following:

Source="/IntranetFramework;component/Content/Images/CSiLogo.png">



What's interesting is the syntax that we had difficulty getting right. Don't forget the initial "slash" followed by the assembly name delimited by semi-colon followed by "component" followed by the path within the project's directory tree to the image in question.

It took a fair amount of googling to add the "/" and the "component/" to the image source attribute.

You might keep that in mind if you're struggling with something like this.

It was my friend who did all the work, but I just sat watching. When I thought I understood what he did, I did likewise with a different image file I added to the project and then added to another xaml. Everything the same except the different filename.

It didn't work. Then my friend told me what he'd done before I dropped by. He added the image file to the project as a Resource, then immediately deleted it again. Whereupon my version started working. I don't exactly know why; I figure it's a bug in Visual Studio 2008's WPF code generator. If anybody figures it out, please add a comment explaining it.

Whereupon Stoicism Ensued

Last night I walked out of a writers' group that I attend and was surprised. I'm quite anxious about a party I'm throwing tonight and so I've been watching the weather all week. I watch weather more closely nowadays because I ride my scooter to and fro. It's a great way to go. You're outside with the wind in your hair. When I scooter into work you can tell because I'm grinning all day.

This week it rained Monday morning so I drove and grumbled to work, but the weather said it'd be iffy Tuesday and Thursday, but sunny Wednesday. I scootered to work in wonderful weather and then rode to my writers' group, but I noted a bit of cloud cover. When the group broke up last night, I stepped outside and felt a couple drops sprinkling on me. Instead of loitering and chatting, I bid my farewells and scooted.

My writers' group meets in downtown Grand Rapids and I live in the northeast suburbs. It's about a five mile ride to get home. I started out and after a block the rain was pouring down.

You can tell when I go past on my scooter because I've got a grin on my face. Last night the grin became a grimace. I got as far as Fuller avenue and noticed my scooter lacks the power to climb the hill on Fuller faster than about 15 mph. I was soaked to the skin with almost the entire ride ahead of me. And there was a traffic snag at Fuller and Lake. It is a very low feeling to sit in a downpour waiting for traffic when you've got most of your ride ahead of you.

After a few cycles of the streetlight, I got moving again and the rain was now a full downpour. Hard to see. I was driven to distraction by the fear of an unseen pothole opening before me, and also the fear that my tires would lose traction. Thus I proceeded more slowly as some light hail joined the downpour. Thus I proceeded until I was 2/3rds of the way home.

On Plymouth avenue there is an overpass. I sheltered there and tried unsuccessfully to dry my goggles. You can't dry goggles when everything you have is soaked. After a few minutes of laboring in vain, I proceeded home.

Upon turning onto my street, I noticed the road beneath the trees was dry and that the rain was letting up. The rain ended as I drove into my garage.

My wife met me with great sympathy and she helped me strip. My shirt and undershirt and backpack came off to begin their process of making puddles on the hallway floor. I got in the shower, but before I did I tried to wring water out of my underwear: the item of clothing I thought would be the last to be soaked. I got a fair amount of water out.

The shower was hot and I enjoyed the sensation. I was safe and warm. A few minutes later I had changed into dry clothes and this ordeal was past tense. I tease my Prius-driving friend about how I use less gas and have a lot more fun than he does. I figure that when he reads this he'll feel some measure of vindication.

Weber Gas Grill Pizza

I have an aging Weber Silver gas grill. It's a nice day today, but a bit hot and humid. On a couple occasions when my wife has been busy, I've wanted to get Papa Murphy's pizza, but I didn't want to heat up the house with pizza baking.

What to do?

I got my pizza stone out and placed it in the center of my cold gas grill. Then I put the spurs to it, getting my grill as hot as it would go. It topped out around 500 degrees, less when the breeze kicked up. When I guessed the pizza stone was at thermal equilibriuum, I put the first pizza on. Gave it 10 minutes, then opened the grill a crack to see if it looked OK. It did. Gave it five more minutes. Should have given it one or two more. The top was nicely browned, but I was anxious about the crust in the center. Another minute would have addressed that.

I almost lost the pizza taking it off the grill/pizza stone. I used a half-sheet pan instead of a peel. Note to self, buy a peel.

Second pizza was a thinner gourmet pizza. The pizza stone was at temperature by that time and I gave it more time. I was rewarded with more GBD (gold, brown, delicious) on the top and the crust was a perfect shade of brown.

And all that heat of pizza baking is outside on my deck.

Check Your Premises

I'm told that Ayn Rand was wont to tell people to check their premises. With this in mind, I recently read this essay. The essayist angrily accuses a large group of people of being irrational in their response to the mishandling of a cracker. I agree that it is irrational for people to get upset about a cracker.

However, there's more to this story than just a cracker. I do not believe in the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. But I do understand the doctrine. In short, it claims that the elements of the Lord's Supper, bread and whine, are transformed by the priest's recitation of the rite into the body and blood of Christ.

It is one thing to mishandle a cracker. It is another thing to mishandle the body of Christ. Whereas the essayist signifies the flap as concerning a cracker, millions of Catholics and Orthodox Christians would claim what was once a cracker is no longer a cracker. To them, the flap is over desecration of the body of Christ. If you desecrate a cracker it is one thing, but if you desecrate the body of Christ that is another thing entirely.

Catholic ire is premised upon the mishandling of the body of Christ. The essayist chooses not to recognize the significance of Christ in the elements of the Lord's Supper.

A Catholic friend who pointed this essay out to me is greatly exercised at the essayist's insensitivity. And I sympathize with him. He also made dark hints that violence might be directed against the desecration.

I don't believe in transubstantiation. But if I did, I would not be as ired as the Catholics seem to be. Christ is either living or dead; either capable of taking care of himself or powerless beyond the activism of his Church. I happen to believe in the former.

In Old Testament times, the prophets of Ba'al contested with the prophet Elijah on Mount Carmel. The contest was simple: Here's an altar with a sacrifice upon it, let the deity that really exists set it afire. As you may recall, the prophets of Ba'al got themselves into a lather to no effect, whereas Elijah poured water on the altar and made sure that only God could get the credit. And then fire came from heaven and burnt everything up. In this we see contrasted the religion of dead idols and the religion of a living God.

Thus, I see Christ as more than capable of protecting himself from, or responding forcefully to, any desecration. I think members of the Roman church are responsible to take every reasonable measure to maintain the integrity of their rites and relics. But this stops short of unethical measures. Islam is the religion of riots and murders over a rumored desecration.

This reminds me of another situation where people attach different significances objects. Consider a cluster of a few thousand cells. I've a pro-abortion friend who considers this cluster of a few thousand cells "a bit of goo." Conversely, when this cluster of cells is a fetus I regard it as constituting a human being with rights. I was pro-choice until I signified the fertilized ovum as a distinct human life whereupon I became pro-life.

I think that people who think that fetuses are humans with rights are obligated to take every reasonable measure to secure the rights of such powerless individuals. But this stops short of bombing abortion clinics or shooting abortionists. Such actions are not pro-life.

Partisan arguments about the cracker and the bit of goo are so bitter because each side starts with different premises and reasons from there to conclusions that the other side is populated by demons or madmen. For this reason, we each have to acknowledge our own premises and those of our interlocutors. Humans are by-and-large reasonable creatures. We have the ability to reason from the other fellow's premises. I think we should do so periodically to remind ourselves that the fellows on the other side are not demons.

Hubris is not Triumph

While I was vacationing last week, the junior Senator from Illinois, a fellow with less than two hundred days' worth of experience in that post, went on a tour of some foreign countries. I'm told that a lot of crowds full of people who do not vote in American elections showed enthusiastic support.

This fellow, whose press coverage is generally characterized as messianic, went to Jerusalem and the wailing wall. Though I didn't see any pictures (being on vacation) I suppose his campaign staffers plastered it with campaign posters.

One of Bill & Hillary's press tricks was to stage some phony photo op and then feign outrage. I did hear that the Lord Messiah's prayer left at the wailing wall was pilfered and published. I've every confidence it was as sincere as it was focus-group tested.

I read the New York Times claim of this trip that "even Republicans have described as politically triumphant." Though I missed the pictures of the Lord Obama riding into Jerusalem on the foal of an ass with adoring palm frond waving crowds crying Hosanna, I won't deny the New York Times its Palm Sunday.

Though I once called myself a Republican and have no reason to vote for the senior Senator from Arizona, I would characterize the junior Senator from Illinois' trip as manifesting as much hubris as anything.

Kooks And Nukes

One of the side effects of paying $4.00/gal for gas is the reminder of what politicians said about domestic energy policy a generation ago. We heard all sorts of things about energy independence that was empty rhetoric. Meanwhile, the Saudis paid for a nice park downtown next to the Gerald Ford museum. I figure oil producers have spread around a lot of petrodollars in a bipartisan fashion to get us where we are today. And what do we do about it? Mr. Bush goes to the Middle East and asks the Sheiks nice to increase production. And Mr. Obama tells us our thermostats are set too high.

I've believed a lot of lies spread by malthusans. For one thing, there was an argument about nuclear power plant safety where Navy said they could guarantee nuclear power plant safety and the non-navy guys said that there was a chance of a cascade of rare events that would lead to a nuclear accident. As a believer in the Murphy, I believed the latter. This belief was vindicated by Three Mile Island and Chernobl.

The biggest disaster of TMI was that it gave credibility to Jane Fonda when "The China Syndrome" movie came out at the same time. Nobody died and nobody got cancer from any radiation released by that event.

Chernobl is another story. People died. But think about it. There was a core meltdown and for ten days the Chernobl reactor was out of control. There was no containment of radiation or radioactive fallout.

And the world did not end.

Last spring a friend and I flew over two electrical power plants, a coal-fired and a nuke. The first thing I noticed about the coal-fired plant was the huge amount of space allocated to storing coal with trains bringing more coal in all the time. Coal is not 100% pure carbon. It's a mix of whatever else is in the ground nearby. And when it burns what do you suppose comes out with the smoke, but fly ash. I was surprised to learn recently that there are trace amounts of radioactive materials in that fly ash. If you live downwind of a power plant, you'll get less radiation from it if it's a nuke.

Safe and clean natural gas can also contain trace amounts of radon gas. Radon gas is radioactive and the biggest cause of cancer after cigarette smoking.

But nuclear fission produces nuclear waste that remains deadly for thousands of years, right? Yes. But it doesn't have to. If your president isn't an idiot peanut farmer, you can reprocess nuclear fuel rods to remove unburnt fissionables, greatly reducing the volume of nuclear waste.

Or you can use a different nuclear fuel cycle. Nuclear fission seems to be all about neutrons. And when you burn enriched uranium, the fission products like to soak up neutrons poisoning the reaction. But there are other fission fuel cycles that do not depend upon enriched uranium, and manage neutron flux differently. These reactions produce much less nuclear waste and what they produce has a half-life of a few centuries, not several millenia. Moreover, there's a lot more thorium than uranium on this planet.

And a thorium fuel cycle generates no bomb-grade isotopes, eliminating the risk of proliferation.

And when you're talking about radioactive waste, you should consider the uranium mine in Oklo where a fission reaction burned up all the U235 leaving its fission products safely encapsulated in situ.


So, why is it that we haven't built a new nuclear power plant in this country for a generation? For one thing, it's plain ignorance and gullibility of the public and the media in the face of propaganda by anti-nuclear activists. For another thing, it costs a lot of time and money to license a new nuclear plant. Look at the billions that were lost by Consumers' Power when they dropped the Midland plant. The only way they could have been stupider would have been to buy energy futures from Enron. Putting a lot of money in a decades-long project that's subject to the whims of politicians, bureaucrats and judges is as risky as it gets.

The people who own and operate nuclear power plants know this. They have a license to print money and more nukes would just mean more competitors. They can uprate their reactors, and make incremental improvements, but they'll do nothing revolutionary.

And that's why we're paying so much for energy.

Who Owns This World?

A while back a politician said this:

"We can't drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times, whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the tundra, and then just expect every other country is going to say OK, you know, you guys go ahead keep on using 25 percent of the world's energy, even though you only account for 3 percent of the population..."

This reminds me of the environmentalists of my youth. Back then the line was that the US had 6 percent of the world's population and we consumed a third of the world's resources. This pattern of rhetoric has an unstated premise that the world should be divided into equal parts and distributed in equal shares to each person in the world today.

This sounds reasonable until you think about it. Who owns this world? If you think this planet is owned by its 6.7 billion inhabitants in equal shares, then how is this ownership reallocated when the population of the world increases? For instance, if I were to kill my fellow-man, my shares increase. Or if I have a dozen kids, my family will have an inordinately larger share.

The people who think this way generally think having a dozen kids is a bad idea. Same goes for killing one's fellow-man.

Property and ownership doesn't work this way in a capitalist society. I happen to own the house I'm typing this from and the land it sits on. None of the world's 6.7 billion people have helped me pay the taxes, improve the property, or maintain it. If someone gets hurt on my property, none of those 6.7 billion people will accept legal liability.

There is only way to consistently understand "using 25 percent of the world's energy, even though you only account for 3 percent of the population" in 2008, and say "The U.S. has 6 percent of the world's population but consumes a third of the world's resources" in the 1970s, is to have a continuous redistribution of wealth with the ebb and flow of demographics.

This notion of property is a form of collectivism. The criteria isn't necessarily Marxist because we're not talking about a Robin Hood redistribution from rich to poor, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," but it is redistribution nonetheless.

This rhetoric has been part and parcel of the environmentalist movement for my entire life. I'm not in favor of polluted air or water, but I believe in private property. When someone owns something they take care of it. When nobody really owns something, they don't.

There's more to this world than consumption. There's production and wealth creation. People work with varying degrees of effectiveness. With capital equipment and technology, one can increase one's productivity by orders of magnitude. One of those 6.7 billion people scratching at dirt with a stick will produce much less grain than a farmer with a tractor and hybrid seeds. Few environmentalists bother to point out that Americans produce a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth.

This collectivist notion of property does not correspond to economic reality. Governments throughout the 20th century demonstrated that they could repeal the laws of economics. However that does not mean politicians can't promise this to attract voters.

The Load Just Got Heavier

This story starts in June of 1978 when I graduated from college. There was a bunch of us who hung together, Mike, Clyde, Cindy, and Deb. Mike and I were graduating, and Cindy's folks came to see Mike graduate. They brought along some folks from Cindy's church, Grace Baptist Church of Laurel, MD--including the new pastor there, Colin Smith. He was just a couple years older than us.

The guy was a walking party waiting to happen.

After graduation, I went to MSU, got a Masters' degree and after that got a job with the gubmint. The job was near Laurel, and six weeks after my wife and I were married, we moved there. It was an adventure, living away from home, getting settled in a strange place, and making friends in a new church, Grace Baptist Church where Colin Smith was pastoring.

We lived out there for three years and it wasn't unusual for Mary and me to spend a Friday evening with Colin and Anita watching Kurosawa movies in Japanese with subtitles. Sunday nights after church we'd go to the parsonage and play Rook and eat pizza. I played the best Rook of my life back then.

One Sunday night instead of Rook at the parsonage, we went for ice cream sundaes. We'd gotten nicely settled in and Anita started counting kids. They had five kids all five-years-old or younger. She came up one short. The youngest, little Colin, had been forgotten at church!

Another time Colin took a community-ed class in Chinese. He told the story that at the end of the class the teacher took the class to an authentic Chinese Restaurant. But when they tried to order in Chinese, the waitress gave them a dumb look and said, "I don't understand you. I'm Korean." He'd tell stories with such obvious glee that it was impossible to be around him without having a good time and feeling the lightness of his spirit.

All this happened over 25 years ago. These pleasant memories are a treasure.

But the year 2002 was generally an unhappy one. I had been diagnosed with cancer and spent the previous year in chemo. My father, whose surviving cancer made me think I could beat it too, had his cancer come back. And he wasn't doing well. I'd been sick in January, been CT-scanned, and biopsied to see if the cancer had returned. The results were due the next Monday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Colin Smith had gotten his PhD in ancient languages at Cornell and was teaching Old Testament Hebrew at Baptist Bible College of Clarks Summit, PA. And the Dead Sea Scrolls were on display at the Grand Rapids Public Museum. Colin and a dozen of his BBC students therefore came to Grand Rapids to look at them.

This entailed finding housing for Colin and Anita as well as the students. Colin's daughter-in-law just happens to be a Grand Rapids native and the daughter of some friends from Trinity Baptist Church. The bulk of the students ended up bunking at their house and we got a call asking if we had an extra bedroom for Colin and Anita. OF COURSE WE DID.

Thus, they stayed with us. It was the first time we'd seen Colin and Anita since we'd left Maryland over twenty years before. He was a lot grayer than I remembered and I suppose I was, too. But the humor and quick wit and merry spirit were just as I remembered. We spent Saturday night sitting around the kitchen table and had a wonderful time. It felt like no time had lapsed before. We just picked up our friendship where we'd left it back in 1983.

That Monday we took off work and went to see the Dead Sea Scrolls with Colin and his students. It's a lot more fun to go through an exhibit like that with a PhD expert in such things who can read hieroglyphics and who summons a bright student, points to a 2000-year-old scroll of Psalms, and commands the kid, "Read that." It was a thoroughly wonderful, carefree afternoon.

Did I mention that I was waiting for cancer test results? We got home and there was a message on the machine. I called back, the test was positive, the cancer was back. Dad had died of cancer the October before. I went into a funk.

But that weekend, having seen the Dead Sea Scrolls that are thousands of years old, having seen Colin and Anita, having been blessed by their fellowship. It contextualized the bad news and made it bearable. And we bore up under it.

That weekend my kids, Jane and Dan, got a chance to meet Colin and see his BBC students. They were impressed, Jane almost went to BBC. (She's saving the world another way.) Nevertheless, when Colin Smith and some other guys went to Lake Ann Baptist Camp to hold a week-long seminar for teenagers, Jane and her friend Lindsay went to learn from him. They were less impressed by the other preachers there.

Just this last Friday, Jane's friend Laura got married. Laura's sister is that same daughter-in-law of Colin Smith, and her husband Colin's son, Ben, was there. Looking at Ben wrangling his son, Bond, I thought of how Ben has the best of Colin and Anita. We spoke at the reception and he has that same quick wit and sense of humor. I was reminded that I missed my friend, Colin Smith.

This long rambling discourse started in 1978 and it comes back there. My friend Cindy, who introduced me to Colin Smith way back there in Ohio, called this afternoon. She said she had been speaking to her parents. They told her Colin Smith died today. Oddly, this weekend I reflected, for no reason, upon the demise of other friends. My mom and dad and other family members. None struck me as hard as news of Colin's passing.

When my Dad died, my step-sister's husband said that he was quite a guy. That's true. I told him then that Dad set an example, now its up to us to set example. I look at my college professors, my pastors, my parents, and I see that I stand on their shoulders and they are giants. When giants like Colin Smith leave this world, they leave a gap for others to fill.

What is the Colin-Smith-shaped void in this world tonight?
Here's a better description than I can write.

Was That You On The Couch With Nancy Pelosi?

I am reputed to be a Conservative and Republican.

Thus I get a lot of spam from the right side of the beg-o-sphere (the spectrum of people sending out pleas for cash lest the republic will fall). The way to understand politics in America is simple. You've got Republicans and Democrats who each have their heroes and antichrists. The heroes of the Republicans tend to be the antichrists of the Democrats and vice versa. For instance, Neutron Newt Gingrich was instrumental in taking control of Congress away from Democrats for the first time in my lifetime. This made him a hero or an antichrist depending upon whether you pull the D or the R lever on election day.

It's an effective system, you write ad copy that says, "send us money, or else (insert name and picture here) will take over Washington and corrupt our precious bodily fluids." Then do a mass mailing to everyone who thinks (insert name and picture here) is the antichrist, and wait for the money to come rolling in.

So, imagine my surprise when I get an email talking about high gasoline prices (about which I am furious), from good ole Newt Gingrich saying, "Drill Here, Drill Now." I found it a compelling pitch. Until I remembered the picture of him and Nancy Pelosi sitting on the "global warming" couch. Oh, that's right, Mr. Gingrich believes that the burning of fossil fuels will cause global warming and said something should be done.

What should be done about global warming? We can solve it. We should burn less fossil fuels. How? By making gas so expensive that most people can't afford to buy it. So, whenever I complain about the price of gasoline, I remember that global warming couch and the people who've made ads sitting thereon.

So, Mr. Gingrich, which is it? Do I believe your spam in my in-box saying we should "Drill Here, Drill Now" or do I believe what you said on the couch next to Nancy Pelosi? Or maybe I'll choose to believe nothing coming out of Washington.

The Fellowship of the Two-Cycle Fumes

This story starts 30 years ago. While I was away at grad school my dad and brother, Mark, went to Muskegon and bought Mark's first moped. Over the years my little brother has accumulated quite a stash of mopeds. The total number of mopeds he owns is classified.

And a couple years ago he ran into the Ghost Riders.

Then Mark turned me onto my Honda Metro II scooter a couple of months ago. I figure he didn't think I was ready for a moped. Between then and now, every Monday has either been cold or rainy or busy. Tonight was busy, too, but a meeting got canceled. So, I called my brother.

"Where you at?" I asked. Not much for phone etiquette, I know.

"In my garage," Mark answered. He's cool with the lack of phone etiquette.

"I can be there in the time it takes to get my scooter from my house to yours. You going to Founders?"

"Sure. Come on over."

I got to Mark's house on the other side of town then the two of us drove to Founders microbrewery downtown. I got there and saw about 30 mopeds parked, but only about three scooters. And my 2nd-cousin Lee was there who I hadn't seen in 25 years. He was riding the orange Motobecaine Mark helped him find last year. I looked over the various mopeds parked there. It was a cool sight.

I figure that although I like my scoot, I'll probably be riding my wife's "pink Puch" to subsequent Ghost Riders meetings. I'm buying the pink Puch as soon as Mark gets it running. It's not pink, really, sort of a champaign color. The people have about a half-dozen old guys like me and Mark, but mostly a bunch of kids in their 20s.

After a few minutes of introductions to Mark's friends in the Ghost Riders, we all took off on a ride. My little Honda has this gentle, purring, 4-cycle engine that would never disturb anyone's sleep and its exhaust emissions have a bouquet not dissimilar to rose-water, in my unbiased opinion. This is in contrast to the sound and fury of over two dozen 2-cycle engines. These brethren of the chain-saw engine were belching so much smoke that I could sense Rachel Carlson spinning in her grave. Spotted Owls, no doubt, quaked in their nests this night.

I was unfamiliar with the protocol. The first stop on our ride was to the gas station, where we all bragged about our mileage. A fitting start as we extended a two-wheeled, two-cycle, 100mpg middle finger to the foreign despots who've doubled the price of gasoline of late.

My brother brought his dog in the bike trailer he's modified for canine transport. It's a chick magnet (which would work better if he was more than two years younger than me), but it means he tends to stay near the back of the pack. Since I was the new guy, I kept with him.

However, since I was running flat-out most of the time and sometimes felt a need for more power on hills or catching up, I figure I'll be doing some performance mods on my scooter.

Other guys have some very fast rides. Oddly, these guys would stay near the back then zoom to the front whenever we came upon a red light, where they'd stay in the middle of the intersection until everyone had gotten through. They would act as sheep dogs keeping the herd together. I wonder if the police would approve.

It was great fun to course through the streets of Grand Rapids in a roaring horde of mopeds. A mobile cloud of two-cycle exhaust fumes. After the ride, Mark and I went back to his house and we hung out for a while before I scootered home well after 11:00pm.

I've heard that scooters and mopeds are a fad. Maybe so, but I had a great time with my brother tonight.

Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Stupid Tax

Imagine the following scenario: soldiers of an enemy nation invade this country, kill several US servicemen, seize control of a government base, kidnap a college professor and coerce him to help them steal government property.

Further, after this college professor escapes imagine foreign agents of this same enemy nation threaten and attempt to kidnap him at gunpoint in broad dailight in a crowded restaurant.

If such things were to occur, wouldn't the citizens and government of the US be justified to feel some anxiety, almost paranoia in response?

The opening scenes of the latest Indiana Jones movie show those very crimes being perpetrated against Professor Jones and his young side-kick Mutt. And though I thought it unbelievable that the Soviets could mount such attacks on US soil, I was willing to go along for the sake of the story.

My complaint is that after this narrative setup, Messrs. Lucas and Spielberg feel obligated to pay the Hollywood stupid tax and invoke the dread scourge of McCarthyism. So be it, but I find it then altogether incongruous that Indiana Jones should then express the customary Hollywood sentiment that the Communists are really no big worry.

Either the Commies were credible antagonists OR the Red Scare was justified. You can't have it both ways.

The problem is that Stalinists make effective antagonists. Lucas and Spielberg know this and I think they did a good job of making them appear suitably evil. It's a pity they could not be true to their art.

Lindsey Graham for Veep

Given the current state of the Republican party, Mr. McCain is challenged to find a running-mate who clearly understands his vision and where he wants to take the party. Afterall, Mr. McCain is no young man, so he needs to make it clear that the future course of the party will be consistent with his vision. Mindful of this, I suggest Senator Lindsey Graham as his running mate.

Over the course of the last several years, Mr. Graham has been the Senator more likely to articulate policies most congruent with Mr. McCain's. Moreover, no less a Republican than Rush Limbaugh has taken to calling Mr. Graham "vice president" over the course of the last several years. So, come on Republicans, our party has nominated the Maverick, give us more.

Evolution In A Bucket

When I was a tender lad, the origins argument consisted of two competing narratives roughly equivalent to the partisans in conflict in the old Spencer Tracy movie, "Inherit The Wind." You either believe the dates printed in your Schofield Reference Bible, or you think you're a monkey's nephew.

Later, when in college, I learned that Creationists distinguish between Evolution in the small and Evolution in the large. Specifically, Creationists assert that we have verified proof with things like fruit flies, domesticated animals, or antibiotic-resistant bacteria that selective breeding and mutation can change the morphology of animals. But the evolution we see in the lab, and that we see in nature, is only evolution WITHIN species, not BETWEEN species.

Quite frankly, this distinction between micro and macro evolution seems to have the fossil record going for it. Though we see a lot of different fossils, we don't find a lot of "missing links." If Darwinian evolution explains the presence of millions of distinct species on this planet, then Darwinian evolution posits the existence of many millions more transitional forms between those species. When this complaint was first raised, well over a century ago, the reply was that "we haven't dug them up yet." Time has gone by and the transitional forms remain missing and the reply is twofold: not everything gets fossilized and missing links don't last many generations. The theory is called "punctuated equilibrium." Still it bothers me that there are so many species and so few (any?) transitional fossils. I'm no geologist, I may be wrong, so if there are lots of fossilized missing links out there, I'd like to hear of it.

I am more familiar with mathematical optimization and computer algorithms. Over the last couple decades I've heard of "genetic algorithms" or "evolutionary algorithms" that have been applied in some contexts, but when I'd read more, the details would get fuzzy and I'd lose the thread of what was being described.

However, in a completely different context, I heard a scientist describe an algorithm he called a "simulated anneal" that I could understand quite handily. Let's suppose you have a problem of connecting various things much like the atoms of a metal. Each connection contributes positively or negatively to some objective function. You want to come up with the "global minima" of the objective function. There are too many connections to exhaustively try them all. What to do? One approach is to look at every pair of atoms and make the link that's "best" then connect those pairs of atoms to the pair that's "best" and so on until everything's connected.

This is called a "greedy algorithm" and it often produces a poor result, getting caught in what's called a "local minima" of the objective function. This process is like dropping a marble in a bucket and letting it roll to the lowest point it finds. The trouble is that if the floor of the bucket is shaped inconveniently, say like a mountain range, you may find the marble trapped in a mountain valley whereas had it been dropped elsewhere it would have rolled to the lowland plains.

If this isn't good enough, if you need to get the marble to the bottom of the bucket, you need to dislodge it from its local minima. How do you do this? By shaking the bucket.

In the algorithm I described above, this is analogous to replacing the deterministic rule that I'll make the "best connections" with another rule. I'll add a random variable, analogous to temperature of an annealing vat of metal, to all pair-wise scores and decide whether to link or not on the basis of score+temperature. This biases the solution in the right way, but it doesn't lock it into local minima.

The idea is that over time if you repeatedly perform the process above, the solution (or marble in the bucket) will probabilistically spend more time in better local minimas. By slowly reducing the temperature, you get a solution that's much more likely to be better than you'd get from the greedy algorithm. This process is analogous to the formation of crystal domains in an annealed vat of metal.

Now, there's nothing biological in the last five paragraphs. It's just math and considerations of systems behaving not unlike what you see in soap bubbles or heat-treated metal. I was surprised when someone told me THAT algorithm I just described is also termed an evolutionary algorithm.

Does this mean that any algorithm that includes a random element and an objective function (i.e. fitness) can be termed Evolutionary? This furrows my brow because it makes the notion very expansive. I don't think of soap bubbles settling into minimum energy configurations in this way. I can't think of any Creationist who can have a problem with this sort of mathematics.

Now, could we by selective breeding do the same sort of optimization on successive generations of an animal? Isn't this what the fruit fly experiments demonstrate?

The Bible was written before Carl Linnaeus devised his system of classification. Thus the Creationist must tread lightly. My college Bible classes used the "baramin" which combines two Hebrew words, "bara" and "min." The Hebrew word "min" is translated "kind" but I think this word does NOT mean species in a Linnaeus sense. The phenomena in the Bible is procreation. Those parts of the Bible which speak of animals bringing forth "after their own kind" are places where this Hebrew is employed. Could the word "kind" merely reflect an animal's genotype? That is, does the Bible intend to convey only that the animals delivered their own DNA (with mutations perhaps) to the next generation?

Suppose, for sake of argument that we engage in a program of selective breeding among dogs. So much so that we come up with one breed of dog that cannot successfully mate with another breed. If this occurred, could we claim that speciation had occurred? Would this PROVE the Bible is wrong? I rather doubt it.

I don't know what the Creationist or the Evolutionist would say to this. However, when I've thought in these terms, the lines have tended to blur. No doubt both sides will want to burn me as a heretic.

Where Is The Archimedean Point?

I've been a bit troubled with thoughts of Descartes and his "cogito ergo sum" and trying to figure out exactly what it is that's bothering me.

Tonight, listening to The White Horse Inn I heard the term Archimedean Point. The immediate context was not Cartesian solipsism, but a sort of gnostic quietism. They were talking about "Barnes & Nobel Christianity" and all the self-help gospel types who provide spiritual "secrets" of looking inward in a sort of post-verbal, certainly post-rational, way.

The White Horse guys are masters of snark. And they laid into these people they termed gnostics with delicious sarcasm. Of course, they were unfair in their criticism, but they have a valid point and they miss a valid point that they oughtn't.

First, let me agree with the White Horse guys. It is wrong to tell people to "look inside yourself" for the divine. Luther was right when he said, "simul justus et peccator." If you tell a sinner to look within, you should also warn that person to expect to see sin when he does so. This is where the White Horse guys hit it out of the park. Calvin called the human heart "an idol factory." The Bible calls the human heart "desperately wicked" and "deceitful." Its greatest deceit is excusing and rationalizing away sin. Shame on any putative Christian preacher who blows off this point.

Second, let me disagree with the White Horse guys. My Bible tells me that as a believer in Christ, I have an indwelling Holy Spirit. And my bible also states that, despite the fall, I'm made in the image of God. Thus, when I "look within" I shouldn't be surprised to find God indwelling and God imaged in the architecture of my psyche. The White Horse guys need to be a little more charitable.

Putting these together, what do we get? If you look into my psyche, you'll find a mix of the sinful and the divine. Alexander Solzenitzen says the battle line between good and evil runs through the center of every man's heart. Thus, I'll have to test what I find within myself to see if it really is the divine or whether it is sinful self-deception.

How am I going to do that? That's where I heard Archimedean Point and thought it important. Archimedes said, "give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world." Upon what does Descartes stand when he says, "cogito ergo sum?" Nothing outside himself. As the guy on Mythbusters says, "there's your problem."

If you fail to establish an Archimedean Point outside yourself, that relativizes yourself and everything in your world, you've nothing to push against. You're like the astronaut in zero-gee pushing on a lever and flying backwards in reaction.

This is where God comes in. Three decades ago I gave my presentation in Epistemology class and the critique I heard was that it wasn't Cristocentric enough. You need a Christocentric Archimedean point.

Now, let's suppose you believe in orthodox protestant Christianity. Then you understand that God has disclosed himself in verbal propositional terms in Scripture. Thus, when you "seek God within yourself" you should not be surprised when a lot of Bible verses come to mind. Those are Bible verses that are made out of WORDS and those words hang together RATIONALLY. At least, that's how it is with me. When God speaks to me, when he delivers a "word of knowledge" it is through a Bible verse popping into my head unbidden.

That's what you do. If your heart says something ridiculous about having an adulterous affair, take a delivery from the clue train Exodus 20:14, you're hearing the deceitful part. If your heart says you're doing something wrong and it can provide chapter-and-verse, you're hearing the divine.

A Reason To Vote Against Mr. Obama

Heretofore, I've enumerated at least one specific reason why someone would vote for Mr. Obama. In the last week, Mr. Obama has provided a specific reason to vote against him.

When Mr. Obama was in San Francisco chatting informally with the rich power elite, he referred to rural Pennsylvania with these words:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

When I first read Mr. Obama's remarks I didn't think them particularly nasty or elitist. Perhaps this reflects poorly on my own tendencies toward arrogance.
Update: I forgot to stress that Mr. Obama's remarks are not so much troubling because they are elitist, but for the values they reflect.

But upon closer reflection, I started thinking about what this reflects about Mr. Obama's underlying worldview. What's primary in his thinking is the economic determinism latent in his remarks. What drives and defines the people of rural america are economic factors like jobs or government handouts. I don't believe any of this, but it appears Mr. Obama does. Karl Marx also believed in economic determinism and I don't agree with him, either. Am I saying Mr. Obama is a marxist? No, but sharing the same ecoomic worldview as Karl Marx makes it harder to not be a marxist.

Moreover, look at Mr. Obama's view of human suffering. Mankind, at least in rural Pennsylvania, suffers because of inadequate government compassion and activism. This kind of thinking is statist at best. Contrast this with Mr. Reagan's claim that government wasn't the solution, but that government was the problem. I don't think the government is my momma at whose breast I must be fed. But this is not the reason I have in mind to vote against Mr. Obama.

My reason to vote against Mr. Obama has to do with the opiate of the masses. Another idea of Karl Marx's.

Mr. Obama painted a picture of human pain, and then described how poor people self-medicate to dull that pain. One of those painkillers is religion. Religion, qua religion, as Mr. Obama has posed it, has nothing to do with events of 2000 years ago when our Saviour was crucified and rose again.

I think this explains why Mr. Obama was a member for 20 years of Trinity Church in Chicago. You'll recall that Mr. Obama has claimed he's not a racist, that he doesn't think God should damn America, etc. But he joined and stayed in that church where such things issue from the pulpit. Why? I think it's because he wasn't listening.

There is another explanation for why people in small towns in Pennsylvania go to church. This reason doesn't carry much weight with the power elites. There might just be something to religion. People might go to church because they find truth there.

If you don't believe that way, that's up to you and I'll respect you for it.

But if you believe there's only political expediency or economic painkillers in religion, and then you make any claim of faith, be it Islam, Christianity, or anything, you're a phony.

Because Mr. Obama's remark leads me to believe he's a religious phony, that's a reason to vote against him.

Uncertain? Who's Fault Is That?

It occurred to me this morning, that Truth and Certainty have something to do with communication. I think Truth is What God Knows. And if I'm to have any truth, God has to tell me. Now, this is a rather odd formulation if you aren't a theist. But if there is a God it doesn't matter that you're not a theist.

Now, communication is a process where ideas in my mind become ideas in your mind. Since communication isn't a perfect thing, there may be some change of the ideas during this process. I think in terms of language and I express ideas in my native language in either spoken or written words. My skill with language and my clarity of thought will bear upon the effectiveness with which thoughts get into your head. If your language differs from mine, or your cultural idioms differ, we should expect some translation will be necessary.

Christianity teaches that God discloses truth to mankind in General and Special revelation. Special revelation includes the Bible. And the communication model I've described above fits the process of reading and interpreting the Bible.

In dialog with an apostate years back I was confronted with a number of "contradictions" in the Bible. I used scare quotes around contradiction because I claimed then that there are no contradictions in the Bible. Now, we can easily interpret the Bible in a malicious fashion so as to contrive contradictions. e.g. Jesus said he was a vine, and John said he was a lamb, and a lamb is not a vine. (In this sense of "malicious interpretation" I'll concede that contradictions can be construed by the skeptic.) The matter is not that a contradictory interpretation can be contrived, but that no harmonious interpretation exists.

I was plowing through the list of contradictions my interlocutor had given me and I formulated harmonious explanations for all but one. And that one had me flummoxed. It was a crisis of faith. And I prayed about it.

Prayer changes things most frequently by changing the person doing the praying. And in the prayer I acknowledged a fair degree of pride in my ability to solve such problems. And pride is not one of the cardinal virtues of the Christian. In fact, it's on the vice side of the tally sheet.

And I realized two questions were in play: 1) is the Bible contradictory? and 2) am I skilled enough at hermeneutics to resolve this apparent cotradiction? If *I* fail to interpret a text correctly is it the text's fault or is it mine? Once the thought occurred to me that my failure to solve this hermenutical puzzle might be MY fault, the solution presented itself and all was well. Contradiction and Crisis of faith resolved. If curious, I've written up the "contradictions" here and here. (I apologize for the woodenness of my prose.)

In the truth and certainty debate, it is important to consider where blame for one's uncertainty should be placed. I think consideration of blame can help bring together the parties in an intramural debate between those asserting "philosophical uncertainty" and those who do not. Placing blame helps us distinguish "philosophical uncertainty" borne of creaturely humility from pagan, post-modern skepticism.

My atheist and agnostic friends blame uncertainty about the existence of God and his speaking in Scripture upon God and Scripture itself. And if there is no God, then uncertainty about his existence, indeed certainty of his non-existence is perfectly reasonable. However, if you are a Christian Theist, then there is a God who has spoken.

But did God mumble? If God mumbles, then he is to blame for any uncertainty about what he's said. I don't think anyone in the Emergent Church movement would grasp this thistle. I think it is slanderous to suggest they do.

If God speaks clearly, any uncertainty could be the fault of our ears. Christianity asserts that all men are fallen, and Reformed Christianity asserts that the fall touches man's every capability. (This is TULIP'S T.) I think this explains my atheist and agnostic friends' uncertainty about the existence of God. They were born deaf and have subsequently stuffed cotton in their ears. (Rom 1:20)

Catholicism seems to munge moral and metaphysical categories. The Catholic notion of grace has a metaphysical component that serves to bridge the gap between created and uncreated beings. (By means of metaphysical grace infused within the bones of a saint, Catholicism has claimed that a relic can perform miracles.) The goal of redemption in Catholic terms is the visio Dei that not only consists of the complete cleansing of the sinner of his sins, but a bridging of the impedance mismatch between the non-being of creatureliness and ultimate beingness of the Uncreated One. (Apologies if I've misrepresented Scholastic thinking. I'm only a Baptist after all.)

This metaphysical impedance mismatch between creature and uncreated might be to blame why God might speak clearly, but (incompletely) redeemed man not hear clearly enough to be certain.

I think we want to ask our brothers who claim "philosophical uncertainty" if they blame this uncertainty upon their creaturely finitude. This seems to be what R.C. Sproul is thinking about when he says he'd have to be omniscient to possess "philosophical certainty." And I'm cool with this. I think it's wrong, but this isn't a test-of-fellowship disagreement. If you blame your philosophical uncertainty upon your creaturely finitude, that is an expression of creaturely humility.

Indeed, creaturely humility is one of the cardinal virtues of Christianity.

RC Sproul Is Mistaken

I just heard a quote where RC Sproul speaks of "absolute certainty about anything" and that this requires omniscience. I disagree. But first, let's make clear that I think he's right about everything else a Presbyterian can get right. (I'm a Baptist and Presbyterians sprinkle and I don't hold that against him.) Moreover, we must recall that Dr. Sproul is not a mathematician, but a theologian. And he's betrayed his ignorance of mathematics in the past.

Let's consider the claim that one must have omniscience to have absolute certainty about anything through the contrapositive. Consider the set of propositions known to omniscience. Every proposition therein will be absolutely certain, by the definition of omniscience. Now consider any finite subset of propositions drawn from the omniscience set. Each element of this finite subset will not be made less certain by this process.

For Dr. Sproul to claim that no one can have absolute certainty about anything is equivalent to positing the impossibility of the last paragraph's finite subset OR the impossibility of anyone ever possessing any such set. If these things are simultaneously possible, then Dr. Sproul's premise is mistaken. Q.E.D.

This assertion that you need omniscience to know anything with absolute certainty implies that nobody can ever know ANYTHING God knows, because it would serve as a counter-example.

Now, for purposes of illustration consider this example. Omniscience knows all the digits of PI. Let's suppose I possess this proposition: "PI is approximated by 3.14159." This is a remarkably ignorant statement. There is a countably infinite number of digits of PI that are left out of this proposition. HOWEVER, no matter how many digits you add to your knowledge, they cannot conspire to overthrow this proposition.

Consider Pope Benedict XVI's lecture at the University of Regensburg. He asserted that reason must be the basis of talk about God. Islam holds a contradictory notion about God's nature, claiming God's transcendence makes his will beyond our categories. To Islam there's no problem with God giving irrational or evil commands. Conversely, Christianity asserts an image relationship between God and man and that the transcendent deity discloses himself in a fashion comprehensible to mankind.

One might even go so far as to call that disclosure a finite subset of propositions drawn from the omniscience set.

What Exactly Do I Owe This Black Man?

Mr. Obama's pastor, Jeremiah T. Wright has made some statements that his defenders rationalize as expressions of black rage. He's gone so far as to say, "God damn America." And Mr. Obama has asked for a more frank and open discussion about race.

This is true. Blacks and whites seldom speak frankly about race. Thus, I have often reacted to black rage with a shrug and the remark, "I don't owe you anything." Yet that's the message of Mr. Wright and his ilk: "We're owed." The rationale is that blacks are disadvantaged by America's legacy of slavery.

I can understand that a child afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome and born to a crack-whore mother and raised in a ghetto and sent to an inner city school will face an almost insurmountable nexus of disadvantages. Are any of these things necessarily a black thing? I think it's racist to think so. Did I sell the booze, etc.? I think the weight of that culpability is on someone else's shoulders.

Why is Mr. Wright so angry that he says, "God damn America?" What were the disadvantages of his family? According to this biography his father was a pastor and his mother was a doctor--I presume a PhD. Compared to my own parent's 6th and 8th grade education, I maintain that Mr. Wright had a relatively privileged family background.

Perhaps Mr. Wright who was born in 1941 was denied educational or vocational opportunities in his youth? The Brown vs Board of Education ruling occurred when he was 12 years old. The Civil Rights Act was passed when he was in his early 20s. His biography does not show any insurmountable difficulties. Update:I just checked the fine print of the Wiki article on apartheid. Apartheid ended in 1995. That was 13 years ago and on another continent! But to listen to fellows like Mr. Wright, it's still ongoing. Why didn't he say "God damn South Africa?"

I do not find any justification for Mr. Obama's pastor's outrage. In fact, today I came upon this picture of Mr. Wright's house. Perhaps in a less racist America, Mr. Wright could afford this house instead.

America's legacy of slavery is that politicians like Mr. Obama attach themselves to men like Mr. Wright for the power he has accumulated to himself. Mr. Wright accumulates that power by pandering to the grievances of blacks with legitimate complaints of disadvantage. His message of "we're owed" is clearly false in Mr. Wright's life. How does "we're owed" help any disadvantaged person of any color overcome his disadvantaged station in life?

If you think "we're owed" you'll have an excuse for all of your own failings. if you think "we're owed" you'll think someone else needs to do something for your benefit and this encourages passivity on your part. This does make the slaves on the liberal plantation easier to control after all.

I think I owe this to the black man: You're my equal. Act like it. Man up. Take control of your life and overcome whatever disadvantages. If you fail, open your eyes and learn why you failed. It wasn't for lack of 40 acres and a mule a century before you were born.

Real and Phony Martyrs

On Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI baptized a Christian convert named Magdi Allam. This placed Mr. Allam and the Pope at risk of retribution from Islamic extremists. You may recall a year ago the Pope merely suggested that REASON should be the operant basis for interfaith dialog, whereupon adherents to "the religion of peace" started rioting, burning things, and killing people.

With this in mind I wondered what in the world had gotten into the Pope's head. Though some Moslems think that leaving Islam is a sin to be punished by Allah, a significant number start sharpening their knives.

I now think that this is exactly what the Pope is thinking. The reality of Christianity is never so obvious as when the martyr stands in the coliseum indifferent to the lions. Ours is a faith predicated upon the Resurrection and to people looking forward to Resurrection martyrdom is no loss. Thus, I won't be terribly surprised, though horribly grieved, to note that Mr. Allam, or even the Pope has been murdered by some swine.

Contrast this with phony martyrs: Feckless losers who have no significance to their lives except killing as many people as flagrantly as possible then saving the last bullet for themselves. I'm thinking of the fellows who shot up Columbine High School some years ago. These men did the devil's work and traded their souls for a few weeks' worth of posthumous headlines.

John Lennon failed to consider these swine pigs when he sang, in "Imagine" no hell below us and above us only sky. Society cannot work without justice and how can there be justice for the murder-suicide without hell? Or call it what you will a just repayment after this life for crimes personally committed during this life.

Nowadays, when you hear of "martyrs" on the news, they are more often than not murder-suicides essentially the same as the swine of Columbine. They strap on a bomb vest and kill Israeli or Iraqi civilians. If there's a deity that rewards such behavior with Paradise, he's the devil. I want to go to where that deity isn't.

The man who bravely stands for his God and for his faith when dogs would murder him for no other reason than that he stands for it--he is a man. He is no phony martyr.

Let's Not Be Frank

At this moment in my DVD player is a film series from the 1970s. When I was an undergrad I worked in the library and one of my more enjoyable duties entailed showing films for various assemblies. What I enjoyed most was on Sunday evenings setting up and showing a series of films starring Francis Schaeffer entitled, "How Shall We Then Live." I bought the DVDs last year and this week on a lark my wife started watching them again.

Francis Schaeffer was one of my heroes. I recall emerging from my agnosticism negotiating exactly how much of a thinker I could be while remaining true to Christianity. Francis Schaeffer and C.S. Lewis were significant influences in my defining the relationship between Christian Theism and philosophical thought.

Toward the end of "How Shall We Then Live" Schaeffer tends to get dark in his warnings of where we're going as a society. Secular humanism was the great Satan of those days, but at least it was humanistic. Contrast that with what Pope John Paul II called our culture of sex and death.

This darkness of tone, this warning of impending statist anti-humanism became much more apparent in Schaeffer's follow-on movie series, "What Ever Happened To The Human Race."

I caught a vibe back then that something wasn't quite right, but I couldn't put my finger on anything. I was and continue to be committed to pro-life. I had to admit the truth of Schaeffer's thesis in that film series. There really is no difference between one government that declares Jews to be non-persons, and another that declares the same about Blacks as the US did prior to the Civil War. And who's to prevent the Supreme Court from declaring that the unborn are non-persons, too? And thereby Francis Schaeffer violated Godwin's Law in his anti-abortion rhetoric, and taught a generation of pro-lifers to do likewise.

This was something I enthusiastically supported. But I think that was a mistake. Today I spoke with a friend about adoption and abortion. I've always said that I think every pro-lifer has a moral obligation to be willing to adopt and to do so if that will prevent an abortion. I heard long ago that the number of couples wanting to adopt is roughly equal to the number of abortions. Why has the pro-life movement done nothing about this? What have we done except vote for corrupt idiots who'll promise to nominate strict constructionist judges in the empty hope that Roe v Wade will be overturned?

Why is it easier to fly across the world to China or Korea to adopt than it is to adopt a child right here? Why haven't we asked this of our pro-life legislators?

It is too easy to say that Francis Schaeffer blinded us with Godwin's law. But I doubt that. It's more natural to oppose force with force. Godless feminazis get one Supreme Court to overturn abortion laws. We'll get our own Supreme Court to reinstate them. Let's face it, pro-life politics is a great way to keep Christians voting for Republicans who mumble incoherencies about "the sanctity of life" without having to actually DO ANYTHING about it.

So, now, I read that Francis Schaeffer's son, Frank, has come out condemning his father's political activism. I have never had much respect for junior. He always seemed to be something of a parasite on his father's ministry. Like Yoko Ono's baleful influence seen in "Let It Be." I think he saw this and tried unsuccessfully to attain a measure of independent achievement.

The complete extent of his failure has been seen in his recent denunciation of his father. Mr. Schaeffer has taken his place in that long line of ghoulish children who dine on a dead parent's reputation. He has thus made his stock and trade deconstructing and discrediting his father's work. Let's not be Frank.

It may be so, my lord.
Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility!
Dry up in her the organs of increase;
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honour her! If she must teem,
Create her child of spleen; that it may live,
And be a thwart disnatured torment to her!
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth;
With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;
Turn all her mother's pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt; that she may feel
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child! Away, away!
-- William Shakespeare in King Lear

Reducing My Carbon Footprint

A couple weeks ago my brother called me. He wanted me to get on eBay and find out what a Honda Metropolitan II sold for. I told him. He said he had one for sale. Well, not his, it belonged to his boss. The price was right.

Now, sometime in the mid '70s, my brother got a moped, a Puch. And between then and now he's bought a few dozen more. He says he doesn't collect them, he hoards them. I thought it would be fun to tool around with him sometime. So, I asked him to keep an eye out for one if it came on sale.

It's a 50cc Honda scooter that's classified as a moped. It's top speed is about 25mph IFF you're going downhill with a tailwind. This afternoon I saw the temps were in the 50s for the first time ever. I gave him a call, brought him the money, got the license and registration, and went to his house to pick it up.

He lives on the west side of GR and Mary rode along to drive back the van. She asked if I wanted to wear long underwear and I scoffed at her. Nevertheless, I took my hose hat and gloves and put on a flannel shirt beneath my leather jacket.

I set off to bring it home. When your vehicle has a top speed that's 25mph with a nominal speed well below that, you have to plan your route carefully. At the secretary of state's office, they had a moped safety brochure and I'd read it this afternoon. Setting off, I was filled with paranoia. Potholes are particularly bad this year and I could easily see myself falling in never to be found, just paved over by an inattentive road crew. Traffic whizzed past and I felt more kinship with the pedestrians on the sidewalk who invariably looked and smiled.

When I got home, I turned off the moped (or is it a scooter?) and just whooped. It was a blast, but I should have worn long underwear.

My brother brags that he gets 100 miles to a gallon. With gas at $3.40, that's a consideration. I've plotted a side-road route between here and work. If it ever warms up I intend to see what the commute is like. I'm looking forward to it.

A Specific Reason To Vote For Obama

I've been listening to the latest spin about Mr. Obama's run for president and how his supporters are being grilled by right-wing talk radio. The problem question: name one specific reason why you support Mr. Obama. And the right-wing meme is that there's no specific reason, just a velvet fog of good intentions.

Well, let me provide a specific reason to vote for Mr. Obama. He's a Liberal and will pursue a Liberal program of governance. This isn't in any way news to anyone. He's stated any number of expansive government initiatives he'd like to see enacted. This is the antithesis of Mr. Reagan's thesis that "government is the problem."

I think that the Democrats and Republicans have done the country a disservice in turning the word "Liberal" into a demon term. Most voters simply do not know what the words Conservative and Liberal mean. For instance, when Mr. Huckabee advances a pro-life position while also advancing an agenda of activist solve-all-your-problems government, people think that means he's Conservative. Same goes for Mr. Bush who creates a new Medicare drug entitlement initiating a major new spending program to pay for it. This isn't Conservatism. It got so bad that Mr. Bush's Wilsonian approach to foreign policy and his huge domestic spending increases were fleetingly called "Big Government Conservatism." No, Big Government Conservatism, just like Compassionate Conservatism are simply code-words for the "Liberalism that dares not speak its name."

Given the Republicans who are running for President, it looks like the Republicans will be trying to expand the tent to fit more populists and liberals. And given Mr. Bush's failure to control the Federal Bureaucracy, we've seen a federal government that is not recognizably Conservative. Need a fresh example: the Department of Justice has filed briefs to support the Washington DC handgun ban. Hint: defending gun control is not conservatism.

Why vote for a faux-Conservative who'll say nice things about Mr. Reagan and rule as a Liberal? Wouldn't voting for Mr. Obama be mere truth in advertising? He's clearly a Liberal and he'll rule as a Liberal if he's elected. Better than what we have now.

Who'd Vote For A Black Man?

I just read the news that Mr. Obama's vote counts in the recent New York primary election were disappointing. Particularly, those precincts of New York where he has received zero, count them, zero votes.

I understand that the Democrat party is not as enlightened as the party of Lincoln in its handling of race relations. The party of slavery, after all, numbers among its Senators the former klansman Mr. Robert Byrd. Thus, when a black gets all uppity and runs for President, I can understand that Democrat voters might prefer someone a little "whiter," like Mrs. Clifton.

Of particular interest in this primary election's results was Mr. Obama's performance in New York's 94th District where right-thinking Democrats understand a black man's place in society. I suspect the baleful influence of the Dutch, who created Apartheid, and settled that part of New York, and who named that district where Mr. Obama got ZERO VOTES, Harlem.

Or maybe not and there is a poll tax in Harlem?

That Was An Invalid Response

Freezing rain canceled church, so I was sitting at the kitchen table relaxing on a Sunday morning. The phone rang.

I answered as I always so, "Steve Poling speaking." It is something all my friends expect and well within the guidelines I learned in grade school about how to use the telephone.

This approach has the advantage of immediately putting telemarketers on the defensive as they will invariably ask, "May I speak with Steve Poling?" When I'm feeling unkind, I answer them with, "What did I just say?" In any event, I won't buy anything from anyone who asks to speak with Steve Poling after I tell them that I am speaking.

In recent years this alternative telephone protocol has brought unexpected benefits. Nowadays computers can do rudimentary speech recognition. Thus some telemarketers' computers will wait until someone says, "Hello," before launching into their pitch. "Steve Poling speaking," is insufficiently close to "Hello" for the computer to cope. The result is usually a few seconds of dead air sufficient to convince me to blow off this robocall.

However, this morning the telemarketing call only paused briefly before replying, "That is an invalid response." Telemarketing computers are offering telephone etiquette advice? I hung up.

Sucky Pro-Life Rhetoric

I just read the following exchange:


MR. RUSSERT: But you said you would ban all abortions.

GOV. HUCKABEE: Well, that's not just because I'm a Christian, that's because I'm an American. Our founding fathers said that we're all created equal. I think every person has intrinsic worth and value...


Now, I'm pleased that Mr. Huckabee is pro-life. And I'm not ragging on him, I'm ragging on every Republican politician within living memory.

Let's make one thing very clear: I am not pro-life because I am a Christian. Christianity is a religion that places ethical demands upon Christians. Pro-life politicians are NOT running for Preacher, Priest, or Pope. Politicians, particularly Republican presidential candidates are not and shall not be in a position to extend any ethical demands of Christianity to the general populace. CHRISTIANITY SHOULD NOT EVEN BE MENTIONED IN THIS CONTEXT.

Several Republican presidential candidates say that they are pro-life. Mr. Bush says he is pro-life. This is good. WHY are these people pro-life? Simply stated, abortion is a procedure for terminating a pregnancy without producing a live birth. This procedure is legal by judicial fiat. Pro-life politicians say they want to change this. Why? Tell us why you think so.

I am pro-life and I'm pro-life for reasons I'll not rehearse here. I'm sick of fellows like Mr. Bush talking about "the sanctity of life" which is code for something, but it isn't a straight reason.

The trouble with talking in code is that all the pro-lifers will recognize the code as will the pro-choicers. Great, we can choose up sides and throw rocks at each other. That's all. Nobody needs think at all, just just have to follow.

Let's suppose Mr. Huckabee has some absolutely killer reasons for being pro-life, trot them out, tell them to Mr. Russert. And let's suppose Mrs. Clinton trots out her reasons for being pro-choice. With the reasons available for everyone to examine, we'll know who's a "true" pro-lifer or pro-choicer and who's just mouthing codewords to get votes.

And if we have the arguments out there duking it out, people will be thinking about these things. I believe in this thing called Democracy and that demands an informed electorate. I believe in reason and the ability of people of good will to discuss disagreements and come to whatever compromises are possible. Generally, we think no compromise is possible in the pro-life vs pro-choice argument. Yes, abortion or not is either killing the unborn or not. But perhaps some accommodation can be made for the unwilling mother? Can nothing be done to avoid unwanted pregnancies altogether?

I don't think pro-life voters are idiots, and I wish Republican politicians would quit treating us like it.

Southern Baptists and Liberalism

I've said before that I'm a Fundamentalist. Sometimes I'll say I'm an Evangelical and blur that distinction that I want to draw into tight focus now. Fundamentalist, like Puritan is a demon-term that is applied to behaviors and attitudes no self-respecting Puritan or Fundamentalist would identify with. So, when I say Fundamentalist, I mean to say that there are certain key ideas that are "fundamental" to Christianity. Did Adam have a navel? I don't care. It's not a "fundamental" of the Christian faith. Did Christ rise from the dead? I do care. You have a right to deny this. But if your religion denies it, it isn't Christianity. If you agree that similar non-negotiables exist in the Christian faith, you are to that extent a Fundamentalist, too.

Over a century ago German rationalism re-examined Christian dogma and rejected certain supernatural elements of the religion, while retaining certain moralistic teachings and rites and forms of Christianity. This redefinition of Christianity is either a rearrangement of trivialities OR constitutes a heretical poseur that's no more Christianity than Islam or Judaism is. Fundamentalism claimed the latter and Theological Liberalism claimed the former. The institutional machinery of a number of Protestant denominations embraced Theological Liberalism and in response the Fundamentalists dropped out. I am a member of a Baptist association that dropped out of the Northern Baptist Convention very early and has historically been somewhat militant and defensive about its Fundamentalism.

The Southern Baptist Convention also saw inroads of Theological Liberalism and many Baptists dropped out, too. Jerry Falwell and the Bible Baptists of the south came out and were separate from a Southern Baptist Convention that was "going liberal." However, something significant happened in the 1970s: The Southern Baptist Convention reversed this trend. Theological Conservatives were able to wrest control of the Southern Baptist Convention from the Theological Liberals. This did not happen without a fight and many Southern Baptists lined up on opposite sides of this conflict. The educational institutions of the Southern Baptist Convention remained solidly within the Liberal camp so that my alma mater, Cedarville University, was asked by the Southern Baptist Convention to serve as a conservative alternative.

Southern Baptists have been active and prominent in Democrat politics for a long time. Mr. Jimmy Carter was a Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher. Mr. Bill Clinton sang in a Southern Baptist choir. Mr. Albert Gore attended a Southern Baptist seminary. Nevertheless, these men have not participated in the resurgence of orthodoxy within the Southern Baptist convention.

So then, it was with interest that I learned that Mr. Paul Pressler claimed that Mr. Huckabee had been a slacker in the war against secularists within the Baptist church. Very interesting. Is Mr. Huckabee one of those Southern Baptists?

Mr. Huckabee has been playing a game of "identity politics" that I strongly dislike. I'd prefer a politician who articulates political positions congruent with my own to a politician who goes to my church. However, if Mr. Huckabee is going to play the game of identity politics, he'd better be the RIGHT KIND OF BAPTIST. Because if he isn't, Republican Primary voters may say "Die Heretic!" and push him off the bridge.

McCain’s starting to look better to than this guy

I am an Evangelical Christian. I have identified with the Religious Right from the late 1970s. I have consistently voted and supported candidates congruent with the aims of the Religious Right AND the Religious Right has heretofore been identified as Conservative in its orientation. I am a Fundamentalist Baptist.

Last year I declared that John McCain is a media hoax and I've thought Mr. McCain's only strength in Republican primary elections came from Democrat crossovers. We saw that in 2000 and we're going to see that again next month, bringing us to Mike Huckabee. I predict Mr. Huckabee will draw a lot of CROSSOVER Democrat votes in the Michigan primary election to throw sand in the works of the Republican presidential selection machinery.

I don't like the Arkansas school of Politics. Today my wife got a push-poll robocall from what seems to be the Huckabee campaign misrepresenting Mr. Thompson's position on abortion. (My phone number is well known to Conservative/Republican databases, and I wasn't surprised by such.) I think it is OK for a politician to truthfully say, "I'm against X and my opponent is for X." This is just truth in advertising, not negative campaigning. You might like X and this information will help you vote for the other guy. It's a completely different thing to apply Arkansas spin: "I'm against abortion and my opponent once helped abortionists!" It's sleazy politics to distort an opponent's record in this fashion. If Mr. Thompson is for abortion, show me his votes, quote his words endorsing the practice. Don't repeat agitprop of the pro-abortion activists who dug this up during opposition research. For heaven's sake, don't lie (or say Clintonian half-truths) about the other guy.

Update: I am told that an independent group supporting Mr. Huckabee is responsible for similar calls in other states (NH, SC) and that Mr. Huckabee's campaign has asked them to stop. I am unaware of Mr. Huckabee doing anything to repair this group's damage to the body politic. Political lies damage more than any one candidate, they sew cynicism through the entire electorate. Mr. Huckabee owes it to the Republican party to denounce Common Sense Issues of Colorado, aka Trust Huckabee.

(All candidates who are pro-life should demonstrate how strongly they support this position by stating their reasons for it. Saying, "I was pro-life before he was," is useless.)

Mr. Huckabee has a record as governor that, though pro-life, does not demonstrate much adherence to Conservative principles. It is good to be pro-life, but pro-life politics is painless when you can say Washington won't let you DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. The politician can mouth pro-life platitudes to keep the Republican base on board while ruling like a Liberal. If I'm tired of Arkansas politics, I'm dead-tired of the Bush school of politics. Mr. Huckabee seems to capture that infuriate-the-Left plus dishearten-the-Right combination of religious platitudes plus free spending that made me hate Mr. Bush.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has expressed his disbelief in the Virgin Birth of Christ and other miraculous claims of Christianity. He has every right to to hold and express this opinion. But he has no right to call it Christianity. Similarly, no Republican candidate has any right to redefine Conservatism in his own image. Mr. Huckabee has every right to be a pro-life liberal. If that is who he is, he should embrace that identification.

Several prominent Conservative voices have pointed out that Mr. Huckabee is no Conservative and has less than impressive foreign policy positions. Mr. Huckabee's campaign has interpreted this as a personal attack. Then his campaign gone on to counter-attack with falsehoods. (Did he learn this tactic in the from another Arkansas governor?) When Mr. Huckabee's operatives say that Mr. Rush Limbaugh just repeats the New York-Washington elite's talking-points, they misrepresent Mr. Limbaugh's record in a fashion that no one who listens to Mr. Limbaugh can believe. Did he learn this tactic from Nevada Senator, Harry Reid? Even if you think Mr. Limbaugh is the anti-christ (he's not) this is stupid politics.

Mike Huckabee is to Evangelical Republicans as Jesse Jackson is to Black Democrats. He has played a divisive game of identify politics. Vote for me because you share the color of my skin or my religion is sucky politics. When Mr. Bush nominated Ms. Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, the White House used identity politics to hide her lack of judicial gravitas and liberal background. Written large between the lines was the message, "You Evangelical rubes should get on board because she's an Evangelical, too." I didn't buy it and the Republican base didn't buy it, either.

I will not get behind the Mike Huckabee campaign for these reasons.

Update: I have recently learned some more things that I don't like about Mr. Huckabee.

A Modest Proposal

This week at a time when nobody was watching, the Republican Presidential candidates had a debate. I did not see this debate. I've been following this debate season second-hand. We've had talking snowmen and sappy crooning posing questions that Democrats might like to hear of the Republicans, and that the newsies running the debates find interesting. Indeed, in the debate prior to that, questions of no interest to the Republican primary voter, were posed by operatives of the Clinton campaign.

The problem is that the news media does not share the interests of the Republican primary voter. It's my opinion that the Republican primary candidates should route around damage. There's no reason why the respective state Republican Parties should conduct the debates themselves. The video can be distributed via YouTube or some other internet mechanism. If the candidates want to make snarky comments dissing their competitors, they can post them to Scrappleface.

If the drive-by media wants to attend , let them sit in the back and after everyone's discussed the substance of interest to Republican voters, they can ask the respective candidates to repeat their Scrappleface snarks.

Christmas Music

I like to listen to Jazz Brunch on the local radio station. It's a Sunday morning thing to return from church and listen to tunes that I don't generally hear. Sadly, this ritual works only 11 months of the year. After Thanksgiving, the DJ picks non-stop Christmas Jazz tunes. And it's a lot better to hear Larry Carlton do "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" than someone else.

My problem is that today's date is December 2nd. Christmas is 23 days from now. Even if I love a genre of music, being force-fed it for three weeks suffices to turn me into a Grinch or a Scrooge or whatever term signifies "zeitgeist non-participant." I remarked to my beloved wife moments ago that I appreciate Christmas songs on the weekend-of Christmas. Then they make sense and I rather enjoy them. But by that time, all the radio stations are utterly burned out on the subject and can only play zombie-like the most shopworn of the standards.

My thought, unspoken, was "Why can't they wait until the weekend of?" And the answer came to mind with the wings of Mercury, shocking in its immediacy. All the Christmas shopping has been completed by that point. There's the rub.

Consider the Peanuts TV special with its "Christmas ought not be commercial" message, but it mere presence reminds us to go shopping. Anti-commercial "meaning of Christmas" message is all good and fine, but that should not get in the way of our shopping. If radio stations were serious about the "meaning of Christmas" message, they wouldn't run Christmas carols non-stop until everyone's sick of them and, coincidentally, all opportunities for shopping are exhausted.

End The War

Driving to XP West Michigan tonight I passed through the trendy parts of East Grand Rapids, where I saw these yard signs that say, "End The War." When I see the words, "End The War" I have often thought that that means "Give up and cut our losses."

Here's another way of looking at it. We ended World War II in 1945 and I have every confidence that Mr. Churchill and Mr. Stalin and Mr. Roosevelt each did their level best to end that war as quickly as possible.

From now on when someone says to me, "End The War," I intend to reply, "Yes, we should win it as quickly as possible."

The Hollywood Stupid Tax

I've said elsewhere that I believe the death of the Star Trek franchise was due to the Hollywood Stupid Tax, a fact I realized when I saw the Enterprise from the evil-parallel Spock-with-a-goatee universe and noted that those were the only episodes that didn't suck of the entire Enterprise series.

The Hollywood Stupid Tax came to mind again yesterday when I turned on the old-movie-channel and saw the last 5 minutes of "The Dirty Dozen." That movie rocks in a way that only someone who thinks "300" was homoerotic cannot understand. There's a writers' strike on in Hollywood. So, there's an EXCUSE for the plots of all the stories being tired, derivative and repetitive. And what could the American viewing public go to see over Veterans day weekend? Anti-war sermons consisting of 87 minutes of famous-name actors giving speeches to one another. How's the box-office on your latest flick, Mr. Redford?

There's more to it than just further alienating people who already think Hollywood types suck. There's "opportunity cost." Opportunity stands rapping on the door with huge boat-loads of cash in a valise saying, "open up and this money is yours."

Just imagine what a remake of "The Dirty Dozen" would bring in in terms of box-office. Set the thing in Afghanistan and select a dozen guys in federal prison for a suicide mission to someplace in the Afghan mountains. Make them heterosexual, white, male Christians who don't sort their recyclables. Use lots of CGI and roll out an accompanying videogame that plays a lot like Halo. It's a license to make tons of money.

Now, i don't own any stock in any of the big movie companies. But if I did, I'd seriously question the financial stewardship of current management.

Solving Problems With Unsent Email Messages

I've found that an effective problem-solving strategy is to write an email message describing the problem. This happened in the last 48 hours to me.

First, I have a legacy program that does not have any formal unit tests. It was my first OO project and my inexperience really shows. Happily, I drank the Test-Driven Development (TDD) kool-aid a couple years back so my current code doesn't suck so bad. But living in a TDD mode makes maintenance of legacy code devilish. You get used to "TDD has your back" and when you approach your legacy code with that same fearlessness about refactoring its a high-wire act without a net. Ergo, I resolved to write unit tests for the new work that's required of it and also for any refactoring I choose to do.

More easily said than done. I have some experience with CPPUNIT and have applied it on some of my C++ work with some success. However, everything I have using CPPUNIT works in 32-bit Windows on the Microsoft C++ compiler. And this legacy system is a BORLAND 16-bit Windows application with a 3rd-party GUI library nobody uses anymore called zApp that I don't want to port to 32-bit Windows and the Microsoft compiler. How to add a unit testing framework to that? Pondering this question has kept me up some evenings. But the GLSEC conference this week thrust upon me the urgency to add unit tests and the guys at Atomic who use mock objects to abstract HARDWARE got me thinking.

I saw a way to start, but there were a lot of details that I didn't understand and I wanted some help. So, I started work on an email to a colleague describing what I was trying to do and what I had a hard time understanding.

The mere act of articulating a problem is a magical thing.

I jotted down the first steps I'd taken and where, exactly I was having difficulty. And then an idea occurred. I followed up on that idea to clarify my question and in so doing I found that the idea had solved that difficulty but had raised a couple others a little further along the path to solution. So, I edited my email restating the question as a backgrounder for the current difficulty nettling me. As you can probably guess, I was mid-description when another solution came to mind. And follow-up proved itself, and I edited the email to summarize the current state of my ignorance and so on iteratively until done.

I had a working program, but an email that was a mess of half-finished edits reflecting how much I didn't know at various points in the last few hours. I deleted the unfinished message, declared victory, and went to bed.

This pattern works with more than just emails. If you have a supportive wife, or cubicle-mate, or if you're pair-programming, just describing what you don't know suffices to organize your thinking enough to suggest a solution.

How to Break Borland C/C++ 4.52

Now, you're probably wondering why I'm posting about a C++ compiler that was pretty cool 12 years ago, but is now painfully obsolete. Well, believe it or not, some companies make money on software that depends upon this compiler.

Here's the deal. Normal, sane people don't rename their printers to something incredibly verbose. But if you were normal and sane you wouldn't be using Borland C/C++ v4.52. Under Windows XP, click Start | Printers and Faxes and you'll see a list of the printers installed on your machine. Pick one you like, click on its properties, and rename the printer to something like this: "HP LaserJet 4 (but I've added a very verbose description of many long and boring details to blow out memory in a zApp buffer)" Now you're all set.

Suppose you make this oddly-named printer your default printer. Then launch the Borland 4.52 IDE. You should see the Borland copyright splash screen overshadowed by a dialog box that says this:

Fatal error in IDECRTL at 0001:4758 (addr = 0x143f4758)
Borland C++ will terminate
Save editors before exit?

It doesn't matter what you do, Borland will immediately exit. And all you'll have is the unenlightening error message above to guide you. That and a bunch of 8-year-old Usenet posts that will misdirect you to version mismatched DLLs, to reinstall. Reinstalling won't help. Rebooting won't help. You'll have to change the printer name and/or the default printer to something less verbose.

Hopefully, if you see the error message above, the Google godz will wisely steer you to this note. Good luck my friend.