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Some random things I'm learning:
Just some random thoughts.
The Kid's girlfriend (it's pretty serious) is our other adopted college student. They pretty much come as a pair. But something's out of balance in her right now. She spent the summer working with AIDS orphans in southern Africa through the Missouri Synod. That had its effect, and amplified her existing disillusionment with the Christian community at her university.
I reckon that she's out looking for The Real Deal.
I know I was back then, when I was 20 and trying desperately to find someone who would understand me. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, along with more than a fair share of debris. Back then, I couldn't see The Real Deal. I thought that the world was filled with nothing but hypocrites, myself first among. But that was then and maybe I know more now. Anyway, I reckon it's a good time to look back, at Thanksgiving in America, to the Christians that I have known whom I believe are The Real Deal.
There's more than I would have ever had thought.
So. A friend of ours probably has multiple sclerosis, which will have to be under control before the docs can operate on the anuerism in her brain which will cause extensive memory loss. I suppose that's a pretty serious event. She has a fair chance of dying in the operation, and about the same of the thing before they can get to it. MS will kill her given enough time. And the operation will probably destroy her memories of her children, if not the memory of how to walk.
We had a rough weekend (meaningless jumping out on us again; 'tis an existential life for us). L has it worse than I do now, which I reckon says more about it than I should. But even she had to respond when J called and asked her to come with them to the Community Thanksgiving service that another pal was playing at.
Besides, she threatened to bring the kids over afterwards and TP our house if L didn't come.
Radio Shack, a large American electronics manufacturer (they've spun off Uniden and others over the years) and reseller and currently my employer, has not paid me on time since I started. For the last three pay periods, I have not received my check in the store on time.
Last pay period, they lost all of the checks going to Indiana employees. All of them. Employees in our district got their checks (due on Friday) on Wednesday.
I have no idea what their excuse is for the other times.
Corporate sends them regular mail for pickup in the stores. They don't mail them to employee's homes but are supposed to be in our place of work on Fridays.
Employees in Indiana regularly do not receive their paychecks on time. One might speculate that the corporation believes that it can keep hold of its money longer that way. That, of course, is embittered speculation.
The good news is that some of the employees from other stores have expressed interest in legal action should it continue. Which means I might make a heap by barristry!
Paying your employees, of course, is one of the few responsibilities that employers have to their employees any longer.
I'm probably the only person who cares, but is Ole Anthony a heretic? Or is he a prophet (in some sense)? Most folks probably don't have any idea who Ole Anthony is. Nor do they care. I have no idea why I do unless it's apparent in the except below.
The following is a pretty decent example of Ole's teaching. In it, I'm breaking all my own rules about following copyright by transcribing a recording, from the Trinity Foundation website, of a bible study that Ole Anthony led on 2003 Dec 09 in Dallas. The contents should be Copyright Ole Anthony or Copyright Trinity Foundation, 2003. It is from my own "Tracks 4-6" — I split these talks into 5:00 tracks so that I can get back to them.
[ Continue reading "Is Ole Anthony a Heretic? You Make The Call!" ]We are fed[?] in the New Jerusalem. But we bear his reproach outside the camp. And you must bear his reproach to the fullest so that you can taste, once and for all, the incredible, total freedom of 100 percent reliance on him alone and never leaning on your own arm of understanding or never going any place but him for your corn, your bread, your wine, your oil, or for your sustenance.
Now you affirm that, you do that, every single time you take communion. You affirm you're going nowhere else but him himself for that which gives you sustenance and satisfaction. And you're going nowhere else but him himself for your worth.
Think about it. Think about how much your worth is tied up in what you do. Think how much your satisfaction is tied up in what you observed or what ... you understand what I'm saying? Can you risk trusting in him for all of your sustenance, for all of your worth, for all of your satisfaction? Now I'm telling you it took hundreds of years, I mean, before the flood, that's why these people had to live for hundreds and hundreds of years.
From Ole Anthony (again), this time from the 2005 Nov 01 bible study at the Trinity Foundation:
Ole: I've not been bored since the day I became a believer. You want to get rid of boredom? You always say whatever's there....
Member: There was that one time when you said I was boring.
[laughter]
Ole: I didn't say I was bored, you were boring me.
[incomprehensible crosstalk]
No, as soon as I said it I became unbored.
Frank Miller, director, wrote some dialogue on what hell is back in the day. He wrote it for the comic book anthology, Dark Horse Presents, in a serial titled "Sin City". He later made it into a movie, which I missed. The hero has run afoul of the lawless law of Basin City again, and has come to get his medication from his parole officer in the middle of the night.
She tells him that "prison was hell for you" and that this time he's unlikely to ever leave it once they catch him.
From Goffman, Erving (1971). Relations In Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.
Goffman is the guy who sent graduate students into a mental institution as patients. It took one guy six months to get himself certified sane, so the story goes. (I never read the book.) He's also the social psychologist obsessed with the idea that "all the world's a stage and I'm stuck in some stupid clock".
In Relations, he deals with the problem of offense in the Appendix. He talks about what happens when someone commits the social offense, how others respond.
When the offense occurs, the offended parties may resolve the situation simply by withdrawing from relevant dealings with the offender, placing their social business with someone else. The threat of this sort of withdrawal is, of course, a means of informal social control, and actual withdrawal may certainly communicate a negative evaluation, sometimes unintended. But the process just as certainly constitutes something more than merely a negative sanction; it is a form of managemet in its own right. As we shall see, it is just such a withdrawal which allows those in a social contact to convey glaringly incompatible definitions and yet get by each other wihtout actual discord....
And even when withdrawal from the offender or submission to him does not occur, social control need not result. The negative moral sanctions and the material costs of deviation may further alienate the deviator, causing him to exacerbate the deviation, committing him further and further to offense. And as will later be seen, there may be no resolution to the discord that results thereby. The foreign body is netierh extruded nor encysted, and the host does not die. Offended and offender can remain locked together screaming, their fury and discomfort socially impacted, a case of organized disorganization. [348-9]
Goffman is always interesting. His examination of offense is interesting in light of Jaques's ideas. His ideas of offense, often in a context that might not seem to have much appeal, come out more in Lemert's examinations of paranoia ("Paranoia and the Dynamics of Exclusion") which Goffman summarizes and revisits.
Reading Lewin, Kurt (1948 [1942]), "Time Perspective and Morale" in Resolving Social Conflicts (New York: Harper & Brothers), pp. 103-124.
Studies in unemployment show how a long-drawn-out idleness affects all parts of a person's life. Thrown out of a job, the individual tries to keep hoping. When he finally gives up, he frequently restricts his action much more than he has to. Even though he hasplenty of time, he begins to neglect his home duties. He may cease to leave his immediate neighborhood; even his thinking and his wishes become too narrow. This atmosphere spreads to his children, and they, too, become narrow-minded even in their ambitions and dreams. In other words, the individual and family as a whole present a complete picture of low morale.
An analysis of this behavior shows the importance of that psychological factor which commonly is called "hope". Only when the person gives up hope does he stop "actively reaching out"; he loses his energy, he ceases planning, and, finally, he even stops wishing for a better future. Only then does he shrink to a primitive and passive life. [p. 103]
David Copperrider, of Appreciative Inquiry fame, reported during a talk in Chicago in 2003 that a study of those with possibly terminal diseases showed marked differences in survival rates of those who had a particular kind of hope. He reported that those who had the best survival rates were those whose rosy pictures of the future outnumbered their bleak ones 2 to 1. Those who had even numbers fell into despair. Those who had only rosy pictures also died, at similar rates. Hope is not being pollyanna-ish, or even even-keeled, but more hopeful than bleak in one's imagination of the future.
Lewin discusses M.L. Farber's work with prisoners, measuring their felt sufferring against how bad their actual lot was. He found that the correlation between the "objective" advantage of their prison work and their felt suffering was .01 (none, in other words). However, whether you felt that your lot was going to improve, that you would leave prison early or that your sentence was just, had a strong correlation with your level of suffering.
The actual length of the sentence and the length of time served do not correlate strongly with the ammount of suffering; however, a marked relationship does exist between the suffering and a man's feeling that he has served longer than he justly should have served (r=.66). [pp 107]
He moves on to the use of success to breed success:
Experimental data show that although past successes are most effective if they have been won in the same field of activity, nevertheless "substitute successes" and, to a lesser degree, mere praise and encouragement still bolster persistency. An individual may likewise be taught to be more persistent and to react less emotionally to obstacles if encouraging past experiences are built up. [108]
Of course, Lewin was writing in 1941. Recent research (which I've cited here before) on motivation shows that praise can be self-defeating. You have to be careful what you praise someone for. If you praise them for being something ("You are so smart!") you actually undermine their potential persistency. If you praise them for working hard, you increase their persistency.
We're evaluating F-Prot on our linux desktops. I'm not sure exactly what the point is but I'll send out a report.
We keep some known virus files around for testing and thus far it's found the Win32 ones. For the price (free for non-commercial use) it's great. It even tried to get to a couple of old partitions that I'd forgotten about on some attached externals. Apparently I'm automatically mounting them, which can't be good. Still, nice to know that they're clean. And that F-Prot will search mounted drives. (I'm mounting my fat drives under a non-standard directory for purposes I now don't quite recall; it may have had something to do with when I ran RH6 on my old Alpha.)
There's the development going on over at OpenAntivirus.org but I can't say where it is. I don't pay that much attention any longer. Right now, things look OK with F-Prot.
We're not commercial here on these machines. I wouldn't mind being able to do all my antivirus from Linux and then just VMware my Windows sessions. I'd try Wine (they say it runs Visio 2000, my latest version and one of the few reasons I need Windows other than my huge investment in Framemaker) but I'm a bit frightened of it. Maybe it's because I can't lose the book in Frame. Maybe I should just write it in emacs like everyone else. [Shudder] I'm a writer not an administrator! even if I did admin the Americas for that UK law firm....
Live and learn. I should have completed the move to RH back at 6, but the Alpha distributions gave me fits and I just got tired. I also had a bad Alpha workstation: lots of non-standard parts. I recall having to roll my own X11 which was absolutely outside my league. And I had to create my own non-standard PS2 connector. Never did get the mouse to work. Or X for that matter.
But it was a lovely learning experience. The Alpha has gone on to a better place, having been lovingly recycled by the Chicago trash mavens.
Ole Anthony, the president of the Trinity Foundation in Dallas, Texas, makes US$55 a week plus room and board in a crime-infested neighborhood. Ole helped put Robert Tilton in jail for fraud. I can't decide how I feel about Ole. Part of me recognizes that he spouts off more garbage per hour than most people do in a week. Part of me realizes that Ole's trash is closer to Truth than my hard-fought deep thoughts.
People flee before Ole. Ole is intimidating and intimidates. He has more than a little streak of intellectual bully in him. He also demands that you know what you're talking about. And when it comes to Bible issues, most of us just aren't in his league.
Ole says that God doesn't love you. Why would we suffer so much if God loved us? He says that God only loves the part of you that is joined to him in mystical union, like a man only loves those sperm of his that are joined with the egg creating a child.
Ole believes "conflict and sorrow were God's conduits to the real, and the Gospels were just commentary."
Ole personally witnessed a hydrogen bomb vaporize an entire island.
Ole has a bible study where fist-fights occassionally break out.
It's interesting to hear from the Administration's underlings on the same issue that Jimmy Carter spoke out on. Matthews heard from Dan Bartlett, a counselor to President Bush on the same day.
What Bartlett says is very telling. As one would expect from counsel, he's very careful with what he says.
MATTHEWS: That's a sound argument. We have a tape we're going to show later of an interview I just did with former President Carter where he challenged the advantages of using any kind of torture on prisoners. Now, his argument is moral, of course, but he also says you can't trust any information you get from someone under torture.
Is that a valid argument or is that just idealistic talking?
BARTLETT: No, absolutely, and that's why we don't torture. We do not torture in the United States of America. Our government is very clear about that. The laws that we follow are very clear about that.
And if there is ever evidence to suggest that we do, they will be aggressively investigated, Chris.
So there is not a disagreement in this regard, but what we do is follow the law and we make sure that we are consistent with our legal obligations, both of the Constitution as well as our treaty obligations.
But Jimmy Carter makes a very good point -- we shouldn't torture, and we don't.
Some points:
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has had my respect since I left my Reaganism to join the Libertarians back in the 80s. He has recently talked to Chris Matthews of Hardball about the dangerous erosion of America's values, especially where it concerns torture.
Full Story at MSNBC:
Nisbet, Robert. Social Change and History.
Under the heading "Change proceeds from uniform causes", Nisbet discusses how the idea of uniformity came to dominate the thinking of the Victorian social theorists, just as it dominated their peers in natural history. Uniformitarism says that the changes we see in the world are the result of uniform or common causes "working through infinitesimally small, gradual, and continuous variations, also to be seen now working in the world." [184] The idea is, of course, not correct; but Christians helped keep it in the forefront by attacking it so effectively.
[ Continue reading "How Christians Kept Evolution Alive" ]I mean by this [uniformity], not any uniformity of evolutionary change from area to area, but rather the uniformity of fundamental causes of change involved in evolution. This is the meaning of the word that reigned in the late eighteenth century and throughout most of the nineteenth century. [182]
...................................
Even [the great natual historian Charles] Lyell saw fundamental difficulties iwth the theory of uniformitarianism; the evidences of catastrophic events in teh geological past were too pressing to disregarded by a mind as fine as his. It is entirely possible that thoroughgoing uniformitarianism would have lost its monopolistic position in the physical sciences before it did in fact had it not been for two conditions. The first was the great attack that nineteenth-century agnosticism mounted against Christian fundamentalism; the second was the publication of Darwin's The Origin of the Species. Christian creationism was, in a manner of speaking, a "catastrophic" theory of the terrestrial past; and the principles of uniformitarianism laid down by [Scottish philosopher of natural history James] Hutton and Playfair were admirably designed to cast doubt on castatrophism not merely of the Cuvier variety but also of the fundamentalist variety and, with it, the whole edifice of Christian dogma. Once the war on Christian fundamentalism began in earnest, and once the fundamentalists began to counter-attack the theory of uniformitarianism, it was inevitable no doubt that rationalists and secularists would rally for polemical reasons alone to advancement of a theory that, as Lyell realized, presented great difficulties. [183]
Michael Bates has written a short article in Urban Tulsa weekly on the connection between faith and political courage. It comes as a response to criticism he received when he noted that certain councilmembers in Tulsa who have resisted pressure to cave on reforms "are all men of devout Christian faith.? People reacted negatively to the comment, so Bates decided to write a short response on why faith matters.
He's right, too, that we often confuse faith and religiousity, as we confuse faith lived out in community with faith lived out alone. It's an interesting piece that I commend to you.
But is it true? Do men and women of belief make better leaders?