Pete The Elder: July 2005 Archives

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July 29, 2005

What Anglicans Believe

The other day I saw a copy of Bishop Spongs book Why The Church Must Change or Die. I almost started laughing at the idea of a liberal theologian from a denomination that is still undergoing a rapid decline in numbers from a combination of an aging and dying membership and a general lack of purpose telling the church at large what to do to prevent its death. From a pragmatic point of view alone (although the same could be said from a theological point of view) good advice for a church that wants to grow is this: do the opposite of what Spong says. Spongs attitude is greatly reflected in the following article about the trend of liberal denominations to divest from Israel friendly businesses, a trend which I blogged about many months ago.

Somewhere around Amherst, I asked Lawrence what Anglicans believed. His face took on a deep, pensive look. 'We believe,' he intoned, 'in civil rights for Negroes, the admission of Red China to the United Nations, and friendship with Castro Cuba.' I do not at all want to belittle the bishop. I liked him. He was not pompous. And probably he thought that this clever Jewish boy from New York would not really be asking him a theological question, which is exactly what I was doing.

Posted by Pete at 05:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Fraudulent Judge

Can this be grounds for impeachment? Sound politics linked to a report about a federal judge appointed by Jimmy Carter who provided false information when registering to vote. She has been illegally voting in the wrong district for years and claimed her place of work as a residency. This is a felony in Washintgton.

Here is an excerpt from the story:

The Fletchers claim their residence is the King County Administration Building and that their mailing address is 1010 5th Ave. in Seattle, which is an United States Courthouse Building. Providing false registration application information is a Class C felony.

'This is not a trivial matter,' said Bob Edelman, election reform project manager at EFF who filed the complaints. 'Apparently she registered with a false address for privacy reasons, but that is no excuse for breaking the law. She could have applied for address confidentiality, but she chose to ignore the law instead.

'What this also means is that the Fletchers have been casting illegal votes because their true residence is in a different legislative district,' he said.

Judge Fletcher was appointed to the 9th Circuit by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.

Posted by Pete at 05:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 28, 2005

Video Gamse Make You Smarter Part 2

Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, takes on HIlary Clinton and other video game critics over their often unthoughtful critiques of video games in the LA Times:

Another key question: Of all the games that kids play, which ones require the most mental exertion? Parents can play this at home: Try a few rounds of Monopoly or Go Fish with your kids, and see who wins. I suspect most families will find that it's a relatively even match. Then sit down and try to play "Halo 2" with the kids. You'll be lucky if you survive 10 minutes.
The great secret of today's video games that has been lost in the moral panic over "Grand Theft Auto" is how difficult the games have become. That difficulty is not merely a question of hand-eye coordination; most of today's games force kids to learn complex rule systems, master challenging new interfaces, follow dozens of shifting variables in real time and prioritize between multiple objectives.

In short, precisely the sorts of skills that they're going to need in the digital workplace of tomorrow.

Consider this one fascinating trend among teenagers: They're spending less time watching professional sports and more time simulating those sports on Xbox or PlayStation. Now, which activity challenges the mind more sitting around rooting for the Packers, or managing an entire football franchise through a season of "Madden 2005": calling plays, setting lineups, trading players and negotiating contracts? Which challenges the mind more zoning out to the lives of fictional characters on a televised soap opera, or actively managing the lives of dozens of virtual characters in a game such as "The Sims"?

Previous Video Games post.

Posted by Pete at 10:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 27, 2005

No More John Adams

I finally finished John Adam's biography yesterday and am moving on to a tape series about Hegel. I did not know that one of the reasons Schopenhauer did not like Hegel was that while both were teaching at the University of Berlin Hegel’s classes were more popular.

I also finished No Excuses, which made a very common sense argument that while persuasive is also depressing in a lot of ways. Their basic argument is that for minority students to succeed they need to want to learn and be willing to do the many hours of work required to learn. The same also has to be true of their families and of their teachers and school administrators. But unfortunately as one of teacher quoted in the book said to a hard working colleague “What, are you trying to make us look bad?” I doubt enough students, parents, administrators, and teachers are willing to do the work required to fix the problems of our schools. The top down No Child Left Behind Approach of Bush has apparently helped close the gap at least in reading ability, but this is not the sort of problem that can be solved by massive government intervention. If it could be solved that way, it probably would not exist in the first place because of all the money we have spent on schools the psat forty years. There is an apparent inverse relationship between school spending and student performance in many cases. This may be a problem we have to live with until it solves itself.

Posted by Pete at 10:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Marching Along

I went to see the new movie about my mortal enemies on Monday. March of the Penguins was a pretty good movie, although if you do not want to watch an hour and a half of penguins walking and standing around, then I would not recommend it. It was a fairly typical National Geographic stuff with lots of very well done panoramic shots of hundreds of penguins walking single file atop the ice. I am not sure I would take young kids to see it since several of the penguins die rather painful deaths from exposure, starvation, and seal.

Supposedly this is one of the most profitable films of the summer, which is probably a good thing. Although I am not opposed to sequels if they are well done or remakes if they improve on the quality of the orginal material did we really need remakes of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Bewitched, and the Bad News Bears. There are lots of creative ideas for movies that Hollywood refuses to take risks on and lots of things audiences would like to watch that Hollywood refuses to do. There still has not been a movie about the war on terror, unless you count Farenheit 9/11 or Team America: World Police. There also have not been any more biblical movies since The Passion, even though that movie made something like $350 million. The one movie they are planning about 9/11 is going to be directed by Olive Stone which means it will likely be full of conspiracy crap and may even make the terrorists heros if it does not claim it was all a plot by the Bush administration or the CIA. At least I saw a poster for X-Men 3 (coming next year!) in the theater two weeks ago when I went to a free showing of Wedding Crashers and a preview for the next Harry Potter movie when I saw March of the Penguins. Wedding Crashers at least tried hard to be a funny movie and Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson were both good, although I can not quite recommend going to see it in the theater. Wait for it on DVD.

Posted by Pete at 10:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Climate of Fear Part 25

Its been over a month since my last climate of fear posting, but this one is particularly disturbing. While this may have been a random act of violence and vandalism because of the symoblism involved in the attack it seems likely that it was not a random act. Here is the story from The Cincinnati Enquirer:

American flags, lining the lawn of the mother- and father-in-law of fallen U.S. Army Pfc. Timothy Hines Jr., were heaped in a pile early Saturday and burned under a car parked in front of the home - less than 24 hours after Hines was buried in Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery.

Captain Ed seems pretty sure this was Leftist anti-American violence:

It doesn't take Scotland Yard or Hercule Poirot to figure out that the arsonists had a problem with the American flags. Likely, the arsonist(s) knew nothing about the funeral, but got offended by the sight of so many American flags at one house. They probably presumed that the flags constituted a statement about support for the Iraq War, and America in general, and decided that the appropriate response was to burn the family to death, and failing that, at least get their car. (Maybe it was even an SUV -- making it doubly satisfying for the arsonists.) Fortunately the car alarm went off before the fuel tank exploded and involved the entire house, or else the Wessels could have lost much more than a car and the flags that honored their son-in-law and his sacrifice to this country.

This doesn't constitute protest or political speech; it reflects madness. America-haters have come unhinged. When displaying our country's flag makes a dead soldier's family a target for political violence -- and there seems to be little doubt of the nature of this attack -- something terrible has gone wrong with the Left.

Posted by Pete at 09:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 23, 2005

Minutemen Part 12

The new Border Patrol Chief seems to understand that he is supposed to serve the people of his own country first and that when citizens start to do the job of his employees, then something is wrong. If the Border Patrol was doing its job, we would not have groups like the Minutemen.

Here is the Washington Post Story:

The top U.S. border enforcement official said Wednesday that his agency is exploring ways to involve citizen volunteers in creating "something akin to a Border Patrol auxiliary" _ a significant shift after a high-profile civilian campaign this spring along the Arizona-Mexico border.

Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner told The Associated Press that his agency began looking into citizen involvement after noting how eager volunteers were to stop illegal immigration.

"We value having eyes and ears of citizens, and I think that would be one of the things we are looking at is how you better organize, let's say, a citizen effort," Bonner said.

In related news five more Nueva Laredo police were shot to death in the past few days

Two police officers were gunned down Wednesday while on their way to work, bringing to five the number of authorities that have been slain in this violent border city in four days.

Previous Minutemen post.

Posted by Pete at 05:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Express on Gerrymandering

The San Antonio Express News has a good editorial today about the need to fix gerrymandering. Even though I thought what the Texas Republicans did to the Texas Democrats with the recent mid-decade redistricting was quite funny and a just payback for decades of abuse of the gerrymander by Texas Democrats, I still do not like gerrymandering. House races need to be reasonably competitive for the government to remain accountable to the people. I do not like the idea of congress saying how states should determine districts (as the editorial advocates) because congress could too easily abuse this authority by requiring gerrymandering instead. State legislatures need to be responsible and do this job themselves.

Here is the editorial:

Aside from the partisan acrimony, the current method of redistricting creates a stunningly uncompetitive political environment. Politicians stack and pack voters into safe districts for both Republicans and Democrats.
Outside of Texas, where four incumbent Democrats were targeted in redistricting and defeated, only three of 399 congressional incumbents who ran for re-election lost their seats last November.

There is a better way. A handful of states already have independent commissions that take redistricting out of the hands of partisan, elected officials. State Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio, has been a tireless advocate for this approach in Texas.

Tanner's proposal in Congress would make independent redistricting commissions the law of the land. Among the 36 bipartisan co-sponsors of his measure, astonishingly not one is from Texas.

Posted by Pete at 05:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 20, 2005

Video Games Make You Smarter

There is a good article in the July issue of Discover Magazine (you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing online) about how video games makes people smarter by teaching problem solving skills, patience, and creative thinking along with increasing their perceptiveness and visual acuity. The story talked about studies done by neurologists and other scientists that show how gamers brains function more efficiently and that repeated playing of games ranging from Tetris to Medal of Honor increases everything from reaction time when solving puzzles and increased reading speed to tolerance of distraction under stressful situations. The most interesting tidbit of the article was that arthroscopic surgeons who play at least 3 hours of video games a week have an error rate 37% lower than that of non-gamers. Gamers were also found to be more social and better able to interact with other people than non-gamers. Some of the studies also controlled for the possibility that smart people might be attracted to video games.

The U.S. Army has known about the usefulness of video games for a while and has taken advantage of video games as a way to train soldiers and even uses a video game (Americas Army) to help sort out potential recruits. Unfortunately video games still get a lot of bad press, often from people who have never played the games being criticized or who have little experience or first hand knowledge of games. A good example of this is the recent experience of John Davison who was invited onto the TV show The Big Idea on the pretext of talking about things like gaming communities and the future of games, but instead the show was about how horrible and violent all video games are.

I was introduced as pretty much the bad guy who thinks this doesn't have an effect on kids, and...well...things just deteriorated from there. I tried to discuss the ratings system, I tried to talk about how the majority of games are sold at Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy, and how they all take the ratings system very seriously...but this isn't what the show was supposed to be about. Donny had an agenda. "All games are violent" was his proclamation, and nothing was going to sway him. We weren't here to test a hypothesis. While this was happening, the director kept nagging me through the earpiece to "jump in and talk about what you're here to talk about." I was pissed. "That's not what the show appears to be about, darling."

As we cut to the first break in the live taping, more guests were being lined up including Columbine student Brooks Brown and his parents. This was looking like a full on ambush...so I got up and left. I'd been set up as an apologist for videogames, and with the obvious agenda it was clear that neither I, nor anything I represent was going to come out of it unscathed. Deutsch wasn't interested in discussing the efforts of the ESA or the ESRB, or the fact that the rating system has been commended by numerous organizations, he was simply interested in demonizing an entire segment of entertainment.

Posted by Pete at 10:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

My Elementary School Makes The News

But unfortunately not in a good way. The San Bernardino Unified School District has decided to introduce Ebonics into the curriculum and my former elementary school (which if I understand correctly eventually became the King Middle School mentioned in the story) is one of the schools that will be participating (via dangerous dan). I went to MLK Elementary School for two years in the 1980's and for the most part got a decent education there. I was bussed to MLK from the other side of the city to attend a gifted program, partly to help integrate the school. No word yet if the district will be adding Klingon, Esperanto, or any other made up languages to the curriculum in addition to Ebonics.

Here is the San Bernardino Sun article

"Ebonics is a different language, it's not slang as many believe,' Texeira said. "For many of these students Ebonics is their language, and it should be considered a foreign language. These students should be taught like other students who speak a foreign language.'

To quote Bill Cosby

Its standing on the corner. It cant speak English. It doesnt want to speak English. I cant even talk the way these people talk. Why you aint where you is go, ra, I dont know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk . Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows its important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You cant land a plane with why you aint You cant be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that theyre moving ahead on this. Well, they know theyre not, theyre just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when youre just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out.

Posted by Pete at 10:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 18, 2005

Scientology Stuff

In honor of Dan, who is just back from vacationing in Philadelphia and DC, I am posting these links about one of the most powerful cults in America. First is Slate's story about how messed up L. Ron Hubbard was. I had heard a lot of this stuff before, but did not know that Hubbard had taken part in Satanic rituals to summon the antichrist, that Hubbard's wife and associates went to prison for their part in a massive anti-government conspiracy, or that Hubbard was using anti-psychotic medication when he died. As Tom Cruise could tell you anti-psychotic meds are a big no-no for scientologists.

Speaking of Tom Cruise, tomcruiseisnuts.com tackles the exploits of the current most famous scientologist with a good bit of anti-scientology humor (via the corner). For the best info on scientology I suggest operation clambake. Notice its url is Xenu.net, Xenu being the intergalactic warlord from millions of years ago who flew aliens to earth on DC-10s and then nuked them after chaining them to various volcanos (according to Hubbard).

Posted by Pete at 06:02 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 13, 2005

Ranking Presidents

I finished reading Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the Whitehouse which was edited by James Taranto over the weekend and it was an interesting read. It pursuaded me that Harding and Grant were not as bad as I had been told and made me like them more, but others like Jackson and Ford I like less now. My opinions did not change much on the presidents I knew a lot about already. How some of these presidents like Jackson and JOhn Adams did not make the recent list of greatest Americans is mind boggling. Most of the essays were insightful and the only one I did not really like was the one on Nixon by Ken Starr because it only focused on Watergate and Nixon’s defense of separation of powers, while the other essays tried to cover the whole presidencies. I found the one on Clinton to be very good (did you know Clinton can eat a whole baked potato in two bites? I didn't, but it did not surprise me to read thathe could do that) as were the ones on Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush. Reading this book combined with listening to the biography of John Adams made it interesting to see how George Washington was treated as almost a godlike figure by many of his contemporaries and how it really was a big deal that he retired after only two terms as president. Had he wanted to become dictator for life he probably could have done it.

The other tough thing about rating leaders is do you rate them on what you think they should have done in that situation, how well they achieved their goals, or some combination of the two. With someone like Coolidge this throws people off since he did not do much as president, which was his plan all along and what he thought the president should do. For me the best example of this is FDR who was very successful at getting his goals accomplished, but domestically I do not think he did a very good job and that his policies made the depression worse. Jackson is another good example of this since he was very good at abolishing the Second National Bank, but I do not think that this was a good thing. Another good thing is that in the past seventy years we have had a long string of some decent to pretty good presidents. From FDR to W these presidents have been at least decent except for the terrible trio of Nixon, Ford, and Carter.

Here are my personal rankings (with the books rankings in parentheses, along with category rankings if different from books):

Great
1 Washington (1)
2 Lincoln (2)

Near Great
3 FDR (3 Great)
4. Jefferson (4)
5 Teddy Roosevelt (5)
6 Jackson (6)
7. Reagan (8)
8. Polk (10)
9. Eisenhower (9)
10. Truman (7)

Above average
11. McKinley (14)
12. Monroe (16)
13. Cleveland (12)
14. John Adams (13)
15. Wilson (11 Near Great)
16. Madison (16)
17. Kennedy (18)
18. LBJ (17)
19. Taft (19 Average)
20. Coolidge (25 Average)

Average
21. J. Quincy Adams (20)
22. Hayes (22)
23. HW Bush (21)
24. Van Buren (23)
25. Arthur (26)
26. Clinton (24)

Below Average
37. Grant (32)
28. Harrison (27)
29. Taylor (31)
30. Ford (28)
31. Fillmore (35)
32. Tyler (34)
33. Hoover (29)
34. Harding (37 Failure)
35. Carter (30)

Failures
36. Andrew Johnson (36)
37. Nixon (33 Below Average)
38. Pierce (37)
39. Buchanan (39)

Posted by Pete at 10:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 07, 2005

I Am Starting To Like My Senator Part 5

Over at red state they are wondering if Sen. Jon Cornyn may be one of Bush's nominees to the Supreme Court. Jim Geraghty concurs that

if Cornyn became a Supreme Court Justice, that would leave a Senate seat to which Texas Gov. Rick Perry could appoint Republican Congressman Henry Bonilla.

As much as I like what Cornyn has done in the Senate so far in his very short time there, I think he would be a good choice for the Supreme Court and is obviously qualified. Bonilla had said a while back that he would run for the senate if Kay Bailey Hutchinson had decided to run for governor of Texas against Perry, but Hutchinson decided to stay in the senate instead. This might be Bonilla's best chance at becoming a senator for a long time.

Posted by Pete at 05:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Moving

Posting has been light since I ahve been moving to a bigger and better apartment over the past week. Only one more load from public storage and I should be done.

Posted by Pete at 05:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 01, 2005

Multiple Votes and Vote Buying Part 2

The verdict is in onthe Democrat vote fraud case in St. Louis: All five are guilty!