Although I love debating and discussing politics, I have tried to avoid talking about it during the end of this past election cycle (which technically isn't over until the Electoral College meets, but I digress). The reasons I avoided it, especially here in such a public forum, were dejection and fear. Dejection because I was so tired of being treated by the media and politicians either as an ignorant child, who had to be protected from the scary intricacies of government that only "insiders" could understand or handle, or as a narrow-minded, selfish child who could be bought-off with false promises and hollow sweet talk. I just became plain weary of it. Fear because I didn't want my blog to become a virtual version of this, this, or this. (What happened to the good ol' days of stolen yard signs and snarky bumper stickers?) I still hear echoes of these hateful absurdities, but hopefully they are fading.
I am going to try to be optimistic and trust that once Mr. Obama is inaugurated, these types of things will stop. That we have learned. I don't want to end the intelligent, sincere questioning and debate that is necessary to maintain an informed public and a supervised government. That must continue. But the ignorant, hateful, disrespectful vitriol of late needs to end. My soul and the soul of our country and her people cannot, and should not, take it. I'm trying to be optimistic, but it's hard.
When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his now famous I Have a Dreamspeech, he was speaking specifically of the horrors and divisiveness of racism. I hope that Dr. King would not mind if I say that his words and intentions can, and should, be applied to all forms of irrational hatred, including politicism.
... But there is something I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone...
... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Okay, well, we didn't really get close enough to rub elbows and we weren't actually at the debate (just the pre-debate events on campus), but it was kinda cool seeing national politicians, newscasters, and performers in our (relatively) small and out-of-the way town on Friday.
We watched a broadcast of Hardball with Chris Matthews. After his interview, former Mississippi Senator Trent Lott (Ole Miss grad and former cheerleader; the university is the home of the Lott Leadership Institute) boarded a golf cart next to where the kids and I were standing. I forgot to change my camera to video mode, but did snap the above picture during this minor exchange:
Me: [to the kids] Ready? 1, 2, 3...
Kids: Hi, Mr. Lott!
Mr. Lott: Hey there, guys!
We thought it was pretty cool!
Josh Kelley (Ole Miss grad who attended on a golf scholarship... he's got an interesting story you can read here) was one of the performers at the all-day-long Rock the Debate concert. Before the debate started, the kids and I decided to head home (we'd been at Rock the Debate for about 4 hours, and the kids were getting tired, and I could just as well listen to the debate at home). While waiting for the shuttle back to our car (which took 45 minutes... ugh), Howard Dean arrived for his MSNBC interview. I could not for the life of me remember his name until it was too late to say hi and ask him to stop for a picture, and he was busy juggling two different cell phone conversations, so he probably wouldn't have appreciated a crazy stranger saying hi to him at that moment anyway.
I'll post some other shots from events surrounding the debate in a few days.
Adam Kokesh, former Marine who served in Iraq, speaking as a representative of Ron Paul's Campaign For Liberty at Rock The Debate on the Ole Miss campus prior to the first presidential debate of 2008.
The video is a bit shaky during the first minute or so as I moved to a better vantage point, but I didn't want to miss the audio.
Not sure whether to laugh or cry. Maybe we can take comfort in the fact that at least we're not alone... nope, still leaning towards crying... or at least fist-pounding. (And I'm definitely laughing. This is great stuff. Gotta love British sitcoms.)
If you've never seen the British television series Yes, MinisterandYes, Prime Minister, I highly recommend them. You are missing quite a treat.
The kiddos are trying to fit in as much TV as possible before we cancel the satellite service at the end of the month. Primo's favorite channel is the Bomerang Network. They show classic cartoons from the 60's and 70's with a few earlier ones thrown in for good measure. I think Primo is just amazed that they had cartoons when Frodo and I were kids... heck, she's amazed that television existed when Frodo and I were kids! Anyway, tonight she was absorbed in an episode of Scooby Doo. When I walked into the room, she turned to me and said, "Mom, that's Cast Elliott," indicating a character in the show. "Dad knows who she is. Do you know her? Cast Elliott?"
"Do you mean Cass Elliott? Yeah, that's Mama Cass."
"Yeah, that's it! Cass Elliott. Who's Mama Cass?"
"Mama Cass. She's a singer. From The Mamas & The Papas."
"Yeah, she's a singer on here, too. Who are The Mamas & The Papas?"
"You don't know who The Mamas & The Papas are?! Are you sure you're my child?"
At this point, I open up YouTube. (What would I do without YouTube and Google? I mean, seriously?)
"This is The Mamas & The Papas..."
"And this..."
"And this is Mama Cass. Cass Elliott."
"Oh."
Oh?
Sigh. I can see we have to have a more formal study of "American Folk Music of the 50's, 60's and 70's", aka "stuff Mom listened to when she was a kid" and these kids better learn it if they are going to have a good grounding in American Culture Studies (and be able to get half of the jokes in The Simpsons... when they are old enough to watch The Simpsons, that is). They obviously aren't picking it up properly through casual exposure and are seriously lacking in appreciation of the classics of American music.
Johnny Cash does seem to be sticking with Secondo. She has recently declared him her favorite. So, here is a little Johnny Cash to help diversify your own folk music studies. Here is Secondo's favorite:
And here is mine:
(Hey, I'm impressed I was able to hold myself to two.)
In order to become members of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA), as we are, you must affirm five vows:
1. Do you acknowledge yourself to be a sinner in the sight of God, justly deserving his displeasure, and without hope, except through his sovereign mercy?
2. Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and savior of sinners, and do you receive and trust him alone for salvation as he is offered in the gospel? 3. Do you now resolve and promise, in humble reliance upon the grace of the Holy Spirit, that you will endeavor to live as becomes a follower of Christ?
4. Do you promise to support the church in it's worship and work to the best of your ability?
5. Do you submit yourself to the government and discipline of the church, and promise to strive for its purity and peace?
Primo and Secondo took these vows at our church's Maundy Thursday service. They are the girls in the hats. The pastor with the dark hair is our head pastor. The pastor who looks like Santa Claus is our youth pastor. We love them. The other gentlemen are church elders. (We love them, too.) I think it's funny that when each man hugs Secondo, they act as if they are afraid to break her. *grin*
I apologize in advance for the incompleteness of the videos. This was my second attempt to use the video feature on our camera. (You can imagine how sad the first attempt came out.)
After the service, we enjoyed a delicious ham dinner. The kids loved eating at the Passover Seder table. You can see the girls in their hats in the background. Terzo is the one in the black coat in the foreground. (The coat was new, and he refused to take it off.)
Here are Terzo and Quarto enjoying their supper.
This church really knows how to host a supper!
This is the Seder Plate containing chazeret (bitter herbs representing the bitterness of slavery), charoset (sweet, brown, grainy mixture representing the mortar used by the Hebrew slaves in Egypt), karpas (a simple food dipped into salt water, representing tears, to remind us of the plain foods the Hebrews ate while in captivity), z'roa (roasted lamb shank bone representing the Pesach sacrifice now fulfilled by Christ, the Lamb of God), and beitzah (representing the festival sacrifice, or chagigah, and symbolizing mourning).
Milton Friedman, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economic Science, senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, recipient of the 1988 Presidential Medal of Freedom, a hero of Frodo's, one of the strongest influences on my own political and economic philospohies, and arguably the staunchest modern advocate of Freedom (both economic and personal), died this morning at the age of 94.
A couple years ago, Frodo worked at the Libertarian booth at our town's annual street fair. The night before the fair, Frodo and I stayed up late making t-shirts for each of us and our kids to wear to the fair. My shirt bore a quote from Dr. Friedman:
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
Tax Freedom Day, the date on which we stop working for the government and begin working for ourselves, is said to have its origins with Dr. Friedman. He wrote in one of his 1974 Newsweek columns that the United States should have a national holiday called "Personal Independence Day" to celebrate:
...that day in the year when we stop working to pay the expenses of the government, and start working to pay for the items we severally and individually choose in light of our own needs and desires. In 1929, that holiday would have come on Feb 12; today it would come about May 30; if present trends were to continue it would coincide with July 4.
Sadly, according to Americans for Tax Reform, Dr. Friedman's prediction was all too accurate. In 2005, the group determined that "cost of government day" occurred in the second week of July.
In his bestselling bookFree To Choose, co-written with his wife, economist Rose Director Friedman, Dr. Friedman cements the connection between economic freedom and personal freedom:
Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised. In addition, by dispersing power, the free market provides an offset to whatever concentration of political power may arise. The combination of economic and politcal power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
Dr. Friedman did not limit his defense of personal freedom to those areas obviously affected by economics, however. In the 1990 version of his PBS series Free to Choose, he makes clear his view on America's government school system and who should be in charge of children's education:
In regard to education, Dr. Friedman and his wife put their money where their consciences were and started the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice which supports parental choice in education through educational choice in the form of school vouchers... a concept Dr. Friedman originally introduced in his book Economics and Public Interest in 1955.
The rights that Dr. Friedman worked so hard to defend were not just those that benefited
the individual. He purported that total freedom includes not only the right to work to make one's self successful, but also to harm one's self. Man has the right to be stupid as well as to be wise.
"The reign of tears is over. The slums will be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."
That is how Billy Sunday, noted evangelist and leading crusader aginst Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in 1920, enacted in a burst of moral righteousness at the end of the First World War. That episode is a stark reminder of where drives to protect us from ourselves can lead.
Prohibition was imposed for our own good. Alcohol is a dangerous substance. More lives are lost each year from alcohol than from all the dangerous substances the FDA controls put together. But where did Prohibtion lead? New prisons and jails had to be built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against the state. Al Capone, Bugs Moran became notorious for their exploits - murder, extortion, hijacking, bootlegging.Who were their customers? Respectable citizens who would never themselves have approved or engaged in, the activites that Al Capone and his fellow gangsters made infamous. They simply wanted a drink. In order to have a drink, they had to break the law. Prohbition didn't stop drinking. It did convert a lot of otherwise law-obedient citizens into lawbreakers. It did suppress many of the disciplinary forces of the market that ordinarily protect the consumer from shoddy, adulterated, and dangerous products. It did corrupt the minions of the law and create a decadent moral climate. It did not stop the consumption of alcohol.
If the government is to try and ban private consumption of alcohol and tobacco, it must surely ban such activities as hang-gliding, skiing, rock-climbing and so on. Where should it stop? Rugby? American Football? Ice Hockey?
Insofar as the government has information not generally available about the merits or demerits of the items we ingest or the activities we engage in, let it give us the information. But let it leave us free to choose what chances we want to take with our own lives.
- from Free to Choose
Edward H. Crane, president of the CATO Institute, summarized Dr. Friedman's contributions better than I ever could:
Here's a guy who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in monetary theory and he was a great Chicagoan, a great empiricist and theoretician of economics. But ultimately, what Milton believed in was human liberty and he took great joy in trying to promote that concept....Milton would say, "Maybe I did well and maybe I led the battle but nobody ever said we were going to win this thing at any point in time. Eternal vigilance is required and there have to be people who step up to the plate, who believe in liberty, and who are willing to fight for it." ...In my view he was the greatest champion of human liberty in my lifetime, certainly in the 20th century. And he didn’t slack off in the 21st century.
This is the name of a short film that I discovered on YouTube this evening (a web site I am now totally addicted to, by the way). The film is exactly what it's title says it is. It is a series of photos that Noah Kalina took of himself everyday from January 11, 2000 to July 31, 2006 set to original music by Carly Comando (very reminiscent of Phillip Glass... so much so that Frodo thought I had started watching Truman Show without him... a cardinal sin in our house).
This film fascinated me. I felt compelled to watch it once it began and wanted to watch it over and over once it was finished. We may notice changes is our appearance year-to-year, but it was surprizing to see how much Noah changed day-by-day. I would watch the changes in his hair length, wardrobe, background and people who provided his 'supporting cast' and find myself thinking:
"Wow, he likes that plaid shirt."
"I wonder where he was going." (He had on a tuxedo shirt and bow tie twice... on non-consecutive days but within a week of each other.)
"Did he move?"
"Is that his girlfriend?"
"What is that picture on the wall?"
"Did he take his picture at the same time every day?"
"Why is there a seemingly long period of time when he took his photo in front of the alcove with the computer then another long period of time when he didn't?"
"What was his purpose in doing this?"
The film is 5.5 minutes long, so if you have a few minutes and you want to rest your feet while exercising your brain's areas of abstract (or not so abstract) thought, check out the film and let me know what you think.
If you want to learn about a topic, the best person to learn from is an expert - preferably one who is world-renown in his subject. Who wouldn't want to take art classes from Leonard DaVinchi, learn astronomy from Galileo, or receive golf lessons from Tiger Woods? Unfortunately, for many of us, learning any craft from such an expert, living or dead, is equally impossible. Fortunately, this is not the case in economics. Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, has made his "Free To Choose" lectures (originally aired on PBS in the 1980's) free for the viewing. Don't miss this rare opportunity to sit under the tutelage of a master.
Note: I had some trouble with the audio, so you may need to fiddle with it a bit. Trust me, it is worth some fiddling!
Frodo recently introduced me to the artist Feist. Her album Let It Die has quickly become a favorite... especially for road trips or as a gloomy day pick-me-up. I find myself drawn to the song Mushaboom, in particular. It has a wonderful, dreamy quality to it that I find easy to get lost in. I just may adopt this as my new theme song... it fits me so well. To listen, click the link below. The song's lyrics follow.
Helping the kids out of their coats But wait the babies haven't been born oh oh oh
Unpacking the bags and settin' up And planting lilacs and buttercups oh oh oh
But in the meantime I've got it hard Second floor living without a yard It may be years until the day My dreams will match up with my pay
Old dirt road (mushaboom, mushaboom) Knee deep snow (mushaboom, mushaboom) Watchin' the fire as we grow... old (mushaboom, mushaboom)
I got a man to stick it out And make a home from a rented house oh oh oh And we'll collect the moments one by one I guess that's how the future's done oh oh oh
How many acres how much light Tucked in the woods and out of sight Talk to the neighbours and tip my cap On a little road barely on the map
Old dirt road (mushaboom, mushaboom) Knee deep snow (mushaboom, mushaboom) Watchin' the fire as we grow... old (mushaboom, mushaboom)
Old dirt road Ramblin' rose (mushaboom, mushaboom) Watchin' the fire as we grow (mushaboom, mushaboom) Well I'm sold ... Oh oh oh oh oh oh ... Oh oh oh oh oh oh ...
Fox reporters, Steve Centanni (American) and Olaf Wiig (New Zealander), were released by their 'Holy Jihad Brigades' captors this week after a week in captivity. Although no one will ever know the minds of their captors, it is commonly accepted that the videotape made of the two men reading prepared statements in which they denounce Christ, America, and Western society were key to thier release. (To view the videotape, click here.) After their release, Cantanni said, "It was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns and we didn't know what the hell was going on."
What would you do? Would you agree to read the prepared statement with the hopes of being released?
I honestly don't know what I would do. It's easy to say that I would refuse to read the statement, but then who really knows what one would do at gunpoint?
"But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?"
Simon Peter answered, "You are the Christ,the Son of the living God."
Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven."-Matthew 16: 15-19
Then Jesus told them, "This very night you will all fall away on account of me, for it is written: " 'I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.' But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee."
Peter replied, "Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will."
"I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times."
But Peter declared, "Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you." And all the other disciples said the same.- Matthew 26:31-35
Now Peter was sitting out in the courtyard, and a servant girl came to him. "You also were with Jesus of Galilee," she said. But he denied it before them all. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said.
Then he went out to the gateway, where another girl saw him and said to the people there, "This fellow was with Jesus of Nazareth." He denied it again, with an oath: "I don't know the man!"
After a little while, those standing there went up to Peter and said, "Surely you are one of them, for your accent gives you away." Then he began to call down curses on himself and he swore to them, "I don't know the man!"
Immediately a rooster crowed.
Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken: "Before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times." And he went outside and wept bitterly.- Matthew 26:69-75
