All Who Hate Me Love Death

King Solomon, reputedly one of the wisest men of antiquity, was a prolific writer. He was also an astute observer of nature (isn't that a simple definition of what we now call "science"?) For Solomon, the seen and the unseen were not antithetical. If the seen led to the unseen, so be it. To begin with a presumption that only the seen was "real" is not science, it is secular faith. We have an abundance of that kind of faith today.

Today's news featured stories from two courtrooms. One was the U.S. Supreme Court. A ruling was handed down that, in essence, displays of religious symbols are okay as long as they are totally divorced from the religions they symbolize. Confusing? You bet! This, in a courtroom where Moses and the Ten Commandments are displayed above the heads of the justices. I'm not the first to wonder what would happen if something like George Bailey experienced in "It's a Wonderful Life" took place in regard the the Judeo-Christian law. What if every vestige of the Law of God was removed from the public square -- not just the symbols, mind you -- but the content. Not pretty. The Law (God's, that is) defines evil and it defines what is right. It sets up boundaries that restrain evil and promote good. The Law of the Supreme Court seems intent on doing just the opposite. Modern law makes good evil and evil good.

A second scene comes from a courtroom in Wichita. Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, confessed in morbid details to the string of murders he committed. His murders were driven, by his own admission, by sexual fantasies. Here again, modern "law" refuses to connect the dots between moral causes and effects. How many Raders, Gacys, etc. does it take? Evil exists. It is not merely conceptual. King Solomon was not afraid -- no, more than that -- he was compelled to make the moral connections. He was not afraid to go where the facts led. Speaking as Wisdom personified, he wrote, "All those who hate me love death."

Missing the Point - Terri's Legacy

The results of the autopsy performed on Terri Schiavo are now public. As with the pre-death coverage, much of the media is trumpeting the autopsy results as a vindication of Michael Schiavo's (most recent) position. I say "most recent" because for several years after her mysterious fall into the abyss of brain damage, his position was that he did not know what her wishes about end-of-life were. Somewhere along the line, Michael "remembered" that she would have wanted to die if in that condition. His memory conveniently revived after shacking up with a new girlfriend and fathering a couple of children with her.

But that is all old news. The conservative right is not entirely blameless in this issue either. Their rhetoric centered on purported evidence that Terri was not in a persistant vegetative state. The autopsy results "seem" to contradict that. PVS should not be the clincher in this deal.

Consequent fallout from the autopsy shows test-which-way-the-wind-blows politicians shuffling their positions, so as not to be found on the unpopular side of the debate.

The medical examiner said very plainly that Terri's condition was not life-threatening. I even heard a talk radio show caller twisting his logic in a pretzel to avoid calling her death a "killing." What else could you call it? The medical examiner stated that she could have lived on a decade or more if cared for. She had a family willing to do that.

On the other side, you have a legion of "right-to-die" advocates who found an easy mark in Michael Schiavo to get their cause in front of a sympathetic news media. Schiavo's lawyer even wrote a book about the tactics. How much more bald-faced can you get? The "death is so blissful" descriptions of Terri's last hours were enough to make a calloused person wretch.

My wife and I care for her severely and profoundly mentally retarded brother. He has never been "normal." He is non-verbal. He can't tell us "where it hurts." He requires total care. He must be fed, diapered, bed-bathed, moved around in his bed to prevent bed sores -- he is 58 years old. In spite of that, there are crystal clear evidences of "personhood" in him. He never had an opportunity to "decide" if he wanted to live. Who will decide for him? Jesus gave a very compelling standard to us when he said "Whatever you have done to the least of these, my brethren, you have done to me." That is the way we treat him and he returns joy to us.

The upshot of media coverage and popular opinion is this: Michael Schiavo, the justice system, his lawyers all "did the right thing." If so, will our society begin systematically "helping" other non-persons enjoy the bliss of their right-to-die?

Tianamen, Havana and the Decentralizing World

One tenet of the Marxist/Leninist worldview is the need for revolution to bring in the socialist utopia. I am reminded of the Tianamen Square protests. I read an article recently, commenting on the anniversary of the deadly protests. The article was suggesting, rightly, that years later, we know hardly anything about the "true" numbers of the killed, the imprisoned and their fates. Revolution only seems to suit the envious when they are out of power.

Another tight-fisted dictator is Fidel Castro. It baffles me (well... not really) that the champions of freedom -- the American elite -- have such an incongruous love for this despot. Again, revolution suits him when he is the challenger, not the defender. Nat Henthoff comments in the Village Voice about a May 20 meeting in Havana:

You wouldn't know it from The New York Times or nearly all the media in New York (the purported center of communications for this nation), but in Havana onMay 20—for the first time in Fidel Castro's 46 years of brutal rule—there was apublic mass meeting, with subversive shouts of "Freedom! Freedom!"

As Anita Snow reported for the Associated Press, "A little more than half [of the 200] present [for the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba] were delegates from diverse opposition groups around the island. The rest were organizers, international journalists, diplomats and other special guests." The resident dictator was clearly concerned at the refusal by these Cubans to be silenced for fear of being thrown into his gulags. He tried to keep the resistance quiet. As
the Financial Times noted, "Cuba denied visas to dozens of European politicians and Cuban American leaders who sought to attend the meeting, and expelled four European deputies."

And, the AP added, "Cuba on Thursday expelled two European lawmakers who had planned to attend the gathering and refused entry to two others. . . . Six Poles—three journalists, a human rights worker and two students"—were also expelled.

Among the Cubans intending to come who were arrested beforehand were two independent librarians from eastern Cuba, Elio Enrique Chávez and Luis Elio de la Paz. In a quick, secret trial, they were charged and convicted for the crime of "dangerousness" (peligrosidad). They were a danger to his dictatorship. (Read the entire article)

The world is escaping the grasp of its overlords. Many commentators, including Gary North, have commented about the meltdown of the traditional press being faciliated by the decentralized media -- the internet and bloggers primarily. I work in the information technology world. In the last twenty years, there has been a back-and-forth move from centralization to decentralization and back.

Decentralization is great for freeing people to do things that they might not be able to accomplish otherwise. The "killer" for this tectonic shift -- wouldn't you know it -- is the individuals to whom the decentralization flows. Many are unwilling to take the initiative to learn the technologies that come to them in this newfound freedom. They are positively irresponsible in their dabbling with detrimental technologies (loading junkware on their PC and spreading their misery to other users). They fail to recognize the overriding business goals that govern their technological freedom.

I commented several days ago that one necessary ingredient for successful decentralization is self-government. It all comes back to character. The downside of decentralized computing is applicable to decentralized governments. If we don't want despots, we must have overriding agreed-upon principles which glue our individually free lives together. We must take responsibility for progress and shun the detrimental. What a concept!

Will The Real Gulag Please Stand Up?

It would be foolish to assume that the Gitmo facility is being run in a squeaky-clean fashion. Any statements made to that effect should be viewed with some reasonable suspicions. That said, recent statements by Amnesty International accusing the Bush administration of running a "gulag" are laughable. It seems like we can hardly have a bona fide disagreement over political issues nowadays without resorting to polemics.

Guess that's what happens when politics becomes your religion. Governments make bad saviors and politics makes bad religion. Many of the American founders, believed that self-government was essential to good government. NewsMax recently quoted a real (meaning: Soviet style) gulag graduate, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. Speaking about Russian democratization, he made some statements that we could all learn from. Here is an excerpt:

"If they are going to take away our democracy, they can take away only what we have. But if we have nothing, then nothing can be taken away," he said. "We have already taken everything from the people. ... We have nothing that resembles democracy.

"We are trying to build democracy without self-governance," he said, according to a transcript of the interview. "Before anything, we must begin to build a system so that the people can manage their own destinies."

Solzhenitsyn, whose best-known works include "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "Gulag Archipelago," appeared thin, but he spoke energetically and gestured with emotion.

Solzhenitsyn spent a decade in a labor camp and documented life in the camps in his "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970 and was expelled from the Soviet Union four years later. He lived in Vermont until his 1994 return to Russia, three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

His profile as a moral arbiter and a literary star have declined since he returned to Russia, taking a train across the country and criticizing the corruption and poverty of post-Soviet Russia. He has kept a lower profile in recent years, giving few interviews and issuing few public statements.

Watch What We Do, Not What We Say

One of the memorable quotes from the Watergate moment was that of Attorney General John Mitchell, "Watch what we do, not what we say." It could be said that the reality of one's beliefs lies in what they do, not what they say.

I could profess my love for my wife very eloquently, but living in betrayal through infidelity or otherwise would nullify my loudest protestations. Likewise, one's worldview may be accurately determined by what they do, not what they say.

Many years ago, Dr. Paul Ackerman related related how he, as an ardent behavioral psychologist, came to that realization through an unfortunate event in his life. He related how he watched as his young child pedaled down the driveway into the path of an oncoming car. Through that fatal moment, he came to realize that his behaviorism and its attendant naturalistic underpinnings was at odds with the reality of love and loss. To hang everything on stimuli, hormones, genetics -- simply molecular things did not square up with real life.

Similarly, the ACLU is in the spotlight. According to a New York Times article, their internal practices betray their professed statements of purpose. If we were to pull off the covers, what other things might we find at odds with this organization?

Shoulda Seen It Coming

Last night, I was reading an old essay written in 1993 by Gary North. It had something to say about how the Islamic world would cope with the encroachment of Western culture:

The problem is, the likely Islamic defense will be military: terrorism. Islam will have to attack the source of the West’s technological superiority if it is to retain its leadership at home. The West will be challenged. Squads of dedicated terrorists will seek to bomb Western power stations and communications centers, or use biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands of city dwellers. They will seek to create havoc in clandestine ways. Islamic nations cannot defeat the West on the conventional military battlefield, as Iraq learned in Kuwait in 1991. They will have to try to defeat the West on unconventional battlefields inside the West. To escape falling behind the West economically, the Islamic theocracies must bring down the West, even though the West has made them rich in the second half of the 20th century. The envy factor will combine with the Islamic theocracy factor: a highly destructive combination. A war is now in progress. It will almost surely escalate.

Terrorism was nothing new in 1993. I'm sure others could see this trend, as well. It was still an insightful comment, in light of events in the last decade, especially since 9/11/2001.