Emperical Evidence

Paul Krugman posted these on his blog.

There is something obviously wrong when a Senator gets applauded for calling the climate change which in the next twenty to fifty years will kill millions of people and cause who knows what havoc a hoax. Is the money being paid to him by corporations afraid of losing profits should we take sensible steps to halt this process really worth all this?

Double Whammy

I take off yesterday for my regular round of golf with the gaggle, come home, get on the 'puter to check e-mail and find out Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett-Majors-O'Neil have died.
The media circus for both of them won't subside for some time.
I came of age in the 70's and Farah was bigger in that decade than Marilyn Monroe was in the 50's. For the record. I did not own her poster. Grinnygranny wouldn't let me buy one. We did enjoy watching Charlie's Angels.
I was never a fan of Michael Jackson's music. His video of Thriller came out the second year of teaching and my 7th grade girls that year hounded me into showing the class the video (with administrative approval).
Everyone who lived in that decade and remembers it has felt a part of their lives die with the loss of these two celebrities, and as such all the media circus is justified, even with all the problems facing the world today. With Farah the media, her fans and everyone in general were prepared for the news. Micheal was a shock. It came out of the blue and he was so young.

Death has been a companion in my family for two years. Yesterday's news mirrored in a peculiar way all we've endured. When we learned Dad had cancer and was given a month to live he'd suffered from dementia for a number of years. We were sad and when the time came deeply grieved, but comforted knowing the pain was over and he'd lived a long and prosprous life. Penni's struggle with cancer lasted four years, but when her days came to an end last December the grief was magnified by knowing her life was so tragically short.
Tomorrow we meet to place a plaque on a bench by the gazebo in the prayer gardens at Glorieta in her memory and spread her ashes.

Vans

Grinnygranny and the kids on our trip to San Antonio.

My late father-in-law fell and hurt himself. They called and I went down. I couldn't talk my MIL into calling for an ambulance and all I had to take him to the hospital was the Ranger extended cab. The kids were also getting too big for them to ride in the drop seats. So we bought our first mini-van. It was a used '92 Ford Aerostar. A crazy thing happened. The dealership had a promotion that for buying a vehicle you got a free vacation. There were a few cities to choose from and we chose San Antonio. What started off as a nice family vacation over spring break turned into a family extravaganza. Mom and Dad decided they'd like to go with us in their RV. Penni and her family joined in. Bruce was living in Houston at the time and so was Penni's brother-in-law and his family. When everyone showed up we had seventeen trying to find a table at the Hard Rock Cafe on the River Walk.

The day we left it snowed and we dodged zero visibility all the way down to Ft. Stanton. From there we went to Fredricksburg. We stayed at KOA's on the drive. The so-called free vacation included a room at the Mariott River Walk, which was nice. Everyone else stayed at the KOA. For three days and two nights we toured the River Walk, a really great attraction, went to Sea World, walked through the Alamo. went up the space needle and over all had a fantastic time. Upon checking out having to pay for parking, the lodging tax and a couple of other expenses not covered by the company responsible for our "free vacation", it was just a little bit more than staying at the KOA. San Antonio has a really nice KOA, if you're into those kinds of accomodations. It had a movie room at night a barbeque pit for diiner, and a nice swimming pool. This was the first trip outside of NM we took as a family. We've been traveling fairly regularly ever since. If your traveling cross-country vans are the best way to go.

At White Sands National Monument. The kids are on the sands not the van.

The Aerostar had one major problem. A lousy transmission. Ford has an overdrive on their automatic transmissions. If your going up a steep hill or pulling something you use the drive otherwise you use O on the shift. Between 35 and 40 it would shift and down shift back and forth. Intown driving is pretty constant at that speed. We had the transmission completely rebuilt and it didn't fix the problem. Still with both our parents aging and the kids getting bigger we needed a van. Our next one was a green '96 Windstar. The passenger seats in the Windstar are a lot more comfortable than they were in the Aerostar. We would still be driving this one if not for one big problem. It had bad brakes. They had to be replaced at 24,000 miles and adjusted every time you did an oil change. Ford went on the cheap for an ABS system. They purposely had too little brake fluid, which kept the brakes from locking in a panic stop.

I was turned off by Ford. The last make of van I wanted was another Windstar and we were looking at a Chevy to replace it, but when we compared it with the newer version of the Windstar we chose a silver '99 version. Ford fixed the braking and transmission problems. We still have it and have put on over a hundred thousand miles on it. It's been down to San Antonio a couple of times while E was in basic training and tech school with the Air Force. We've taken it up to Nebraska to visit BIL and his family. Numerous trips to Oklahoma to vist E when he was stationed in Altus and up to see Bruce. The miles were really put on it when Autypesty took it to Canton as she was helping out Mom with Dad and Penni. It has the sweetest ride on the highway. Mom thinks of it as hers and has treatened us with death and destruction if we get rid of it.

We did look at replacing it with a Freestar, but Ford went brain dead by adding two thousand pounds making it way too sluggish and reduced gas mileage. Ford killed the Freestar and doesn't make a mini-van anymore.

Rangers

Over the last twenty years, I've had four Ford Ranger pickups. The first was a Canyon Red 1985 plain Jane. We bought a white camper shell. This was before seat belt laws. We found four real thick cushions, placed them in the bed and E would ride back there. He loved it.

The next one was a 1990 light blue with silver trim (Dallas Cowboys colors) Six cylinder extended cab. It had standard transmission, but was so much easier to drive with air conditioning and power steering. The kids sat in the back drop seats. We bought a silver camper shell that made it look fantastic.

Grinnygranny drove them more than I did. She went through a phase where she liked trucks. While she was driving them I got stuck with a Honda Aero .125 motor scooter. I worked one mile from the school where I was teaching so I really didn't need much of a ride. I went through a series of clunkers until the kids got too big for the drop seats in the blue Ranger. We traded it in on our first van (which will be the subject of my next post).

I finally got to pick out my own Ranger. I didn't choose wisely. The clunker I was driving lost it's heating so I found a 1996 white plain Jane. It wasn't until I'd driven it for a week I finally figured out there wasn't enough leg room. Which I couldn't figure out. The first Ranger had plenty of leg room, why didn't this one? It was a long bed, which cut off about four inches in the cab. I couldn't wait until I had enough equity in it to trade it in on my last Ranger. I picked out a 1999 Jalepeno Green regular cab with air conditioning, power steering, but it still had a standard transmission. The only problem was that I bought it in June and in August transferred schools from across town to two blocks from home. I was back to not needing a vehicle.

I've Joined The Gaggle

A week ago I went to a private golf course as I was getting bored with the muni's. I'd called to see if they could fit me in (courses don't set tee times for single golfers) I was told they could so I drove the ten miles to get there (it's ten miles from my house to just about anywhere I want to go) and they couldn't fit me in before a scheduled group was set to leave. Then they told me I could play with them. They call themselves "the gaggle" and are bunch of senior golfers that meet every Thursday and Monday at 9:30. This is my first year being considered a senior golfer. I like paying the lower rate, but am still sure if I like falling into this catagory.
About fifteen minutes before their scheduled time they pull numbers out of a hat to form teams. I joined it and the group had 22 golfers.
Scores are kept with handicaps. When everyone gets in each team puts six bucks into the kitty and they divide it up to the team who had the best score on the front nine, back nine and total. Everyone kicks in a quarter for all birdies. Out of 22 players there were three birdies that day. So it cost me (above paying for the round which because it's during the week wasn't too bad) a buck and a half for the kitty and seventy five cents for the birdies. My team didn't have any birdies or win any of the kitty, but it was good fun. I played with some interesting people and have the rest of the summer's golf pretty well set.
I played again last Tuesday (the course had a tournament on Monday so the gaggle was delayed a day). Only nine guys showed making three groups of three, didn't win anything that day. Today twenty seven showed up and my team won the back nine and total so I won seven dollars and fifty cents.
It's penny ante and seems like over the long haul everything evens out. It has made me be serious about my handicap, which has been humbling. Most of the guys are five to ten years older than me and have handicaps ten or more strokes lower than me.

My Car

The Colt was actually Grinnygranny's car. I was riding around on a Honda Motorized bicycle, what they called at the time a Moped. It's top speed was 25 mph, but got around a hundred miles to the gallon. It got me to the university and back with the advantage of not having to find a parking space (scarce and espensive).

I was able to get around most of town using residential streets and only having to cross major ones and did my student teaching puttering around on the little machine. I'd chain it up on the metal ramp of the portable. The students nicknamed me Mr. Moped. The worst thing that happened to me on it was after a short rain storm I got drenched when a car passed me hitting a puddle.

In the fall of that year I substituted until November, and the little Moped got me around without too much trouble. I was hired on a short term contract to replace a teacher whose husband was tranferred out of country. At this point I needed a car.

I went to the credit union, found out how much I could afford, found a nice station wagon, signed the contract, filled it up on the way home on a Friday night. I got up Saturday morning and it was half empty when I turned it on. Getting under it I saw gasoline dripping from a hole in the tank. I drove it back to the dealer. They offered to pay half of the repair. I gave them their keys back. Monday I went to the credit union and canceled the sale.

I then found a much better car. A white 1980 Fiat Brava. It had plush vinyl seats a 2.0 ohc 4 cylinder engine that felt like a V8. I really liked this car. A week after I bought it the radiator blew. I took it back to the dealer, and they repaired it without charge. Finding a good dealer is soooo important.

The only problem with it was the fool who had it before me put spoke wheels on it. It drove fine until around 60 mph then the front end started vibrating. Which meant you couldn't take it out on the road, and this was a car that would have been sweet on the highway.

I did find a picture with E sitting on it when he was about two.

The next year I had my first full year of teaching at a middle school, and was hired as asst track coach at a high school. The first day I went down to coach I was sitting across from my car in the head coaches car in the faculty parking lot discussing my duties and watched a student turn too sharply and bashed in the driver side rear door. Naturally she didn't have insurance and the repair was under the deductable on my policy.

I didn't have the money to put regular wheels on it or fix the door, but all in all it was a fine car.

First New Car

When Grinnygranny had been working a year where she still works 29 years later, and I'd just finished student teaching we felt it was time to trade in the Comet for a new car. I looked at a Chevy economy car and wasn't all that impressed. Then we found a 1982 Dodge Colt hatchback. It was built better and cost less than the Chevy. It had a peppy 4 cylinder engine with an automatic transmission and is the only car I've ever seen that had a lever next to the gear shifter. The lever had an E position and a P position. E for economy and P for power. Normally it was in the E position, but if you needed a little boost you could put it in the P position for more oomph. Living in an area with mountains it came in handy a time or two going up a steep grade, other than that it did fine in E.

One of the great pleasures, that with gas becoming so expensive may be dying, is the Sunday afternoon drive into the mountains. We have various routes we take for these drives. One of them is to go out Tijeras Canyon, turn at the (Sandia) Crest turn off, go through Cedar Crest, but instead of heading to the top of Sandia mountain continue on to Madrid and Golden. (Madrid is where John Travolta, Ray Liotta and others filmed the movie Wild Hogs). This picture was taken when E was around a year old. Grinnygranny grimaced when I showed it to her. It was her first curly perm.

Sweet Ride

I was driving the '69 Plymouth when Grinnygranny and I were married, she had a blue '76 Ford Maverick. A nice enough driving car, it had a V6 engine that was good on gas with plenty stop and go power. She'd had a '68 Mustang in high school, traded it in on a Vega (she still thinks that was the worst decision of her life and traded it in on the Maverick) and wanted to get a sports car again. We both liked the Camaro and started looking around for one.

I gave the Plymouth to Penni we traded in the Maverick for a red with white top, '77 Camaro. It was the first car with my name on the title. When we bought it gas was selling for fifty cents a gallon. Within three months it jumped to a buck a gallon so trading in an economy car for a gas guzzler didn't seem so wise in hind sight. Even so this was the sweetest driving car I've ever owned. It had a 350 four barrel V8 that was pure power, and with it's wide stance it had the smoothest ride. You felt like you were floating down the highway. You did have to be careful on speed bumps and dirt roads as it didn't have much clearance.

The Pontiac Trans Am was much more popular because of the Smokey And The Bandit movie, but driving around like Jim Rockford wasn't that bad.

This was the one car I really hated parting with. When E was born we couldn't afford to make the payments on it and the hospital bill.

My father-in-law gave us his spare car, a '71 Mercury Comet. It had four doors and a fairly good sized trunk which was much more useful for putting all the stuff that you need to haul around small children.

My friend Russ at Private Buffoon, one of the old local blogging geezers that have been getting together to drink a  beer or two the last couple of months, posted this song on his blog and I just can't resist posting it here. It's really fun. Take a listen.

Summer fun

I've been hitting the golf courses quite often the last two weeks. It's fun getting into shape.

I book most of my tee times through GolfNow. The costs are lower and they have a few perks. One of the perks is that if you book 5 tee times you get a free round of golf. I went online to set up my free round only to be told they ran out of them and to check back later. I know sooner or later I'll get my free round, but this does speak about how popular the site has become.

Sonic is giving out free Rootbeer floats today. Oh does that bring back memories from working at an A&W Rootbeer stand. (Added later) Grinnygranny and Auntypesty wanted to take them up on their offer. You couldn't get close to the place! Sitting there for thirty minutes or more to just get in an order would cost more in gasoline than the floats. I wonder if the oil industry is subsidizing the giveaway?

I've also been going through boxes of pictures looking for some of the cars I've owned over the years. You won't believe how many pictures we have of all the animals over the years. It'll take some time to put the kids and grand kids pictures in chronological order. For some reason I can't find many pictures of our vehicles, unless they were used as a backdrop, but only a portion of the cars, trucks and vans are visible.

A Hearty Congratulations

Truly great news, Irina at the Ignoble experiment blog graduated from Law School and is currently getting ready to take her bar exam. Well done and good luck.

The Battleship

My senior year Dad bought a '69 Fury III, It was yellow with a green fabric top, had a 318 V8, and one problem. It had extensive hail damage on the hood and trunk, but it drove like a dream. When everyone was telling Dad not to buy a car with that much body damage he decided to buy it (low mileage and low price) by saying that the hail damage didn't help or hurt it go down the road any better or worse.

When I graduated and had a scholarship to Wayland I naturally wanted to take my Rambler Classic with me. Mom wouldn't let me. Mainly, though on a full ride, I didn't have any money to put gas in it, make repairs, or pay insurance. Needless to say I wasn't a happy camper. My room mate was from church and we drove off to college in his '69 Sport Fury (only difference was that it had a 353 V8). The 318 had good power from a stop, but topped out at around 80 mph, the 353 was a little sluggish from 0 to 40, but could cruise all day long at a 100 mph.

Mom took in a boarder that fall. A Vietnamese college student and sold the Rambler to her. Mom's regretted selling that car ever since. The girl wrecked it not too long after buying it.

When I was attending Seminary in Fort Worth and needed a car Dad gave me the Plymouth. They'd driven it for five years and I drove it for four. It took a beating and kept on ticking.

When I met Grinnygranny and we started dating I was a little embarrassed. The fabric top had split and looked real raggedy, there were a number of dints and scratches, the paint had faded, so I had the dints fixed and repainted it. I didn't have enough to fix the hail damage, but I'd gotten rather used to them.

When Penni married the first time and needed a car we were in a position to let her have it. She drove it for about a year. By that time they stopped selling gas with lead, and the engine wasn't designed for unleaded.

This car was a real work horse and about the best car all of us ever owned.

If Chrysler still made cars this good, they wouldn't have gone bankrupt.

Cadillac of the drive-in

The third car I learned to drive was a 1963 Rambler American 330 station wagon. The way it worked was that Mom drove the Pontiac to work and back, Dad drove the Rambler, Bruce and I fought over who would drive the Olds, he usually won that argument since he was a Senior and I was a Sophomore.

The Rambler was a standard shift and Dad picked me up the summer between 9th and 10th grade at driving school. He took me out on a dirt road (this was before Albuquerque exploded in population growth) and I got my first lesson in how to use the clutch. It took me ten minutes to strip all the gears and Dad had to drive home in reverse.

It had a cast iron flathead 6 cylinder engine that was about as easy to work on as any engine ever designed. It got 100 horse power which was plenty of pep, but not drag racing fast.

Bruce bought his first car. Mom and Dad traded in the Olds and Pontiac on other cars and I inherited the Rambler Spring of my junior year. This was the best car in the world for dating, especially going to a drive-in movie. Keep in mind this was before head rests. AMC introduced the split seat that had adjustable backs. In fact they would go all the way back to level with the back seat. At the drive in you could drop the front seats and that created a nice comfortable space to enjoy your date. Mom really hated this feature.

The summer between my junior year and senior year I worked as a bus boy at Sears in their coffee shop (yes they used to have such things). Almost every penny I made went into fixing this car. I replaced the shocks, the water pump, tuned it up, new tires and was ready to go. School started, I quit my job to run cross-country and track, which as everyone knows is a bad place to be -- all systems go.

Saturday, Sept 4 1971 I was on my way to pick up my girl friend to see a movie. A car ran through a red light hit me on the back left tire, spun me around like a top. He spun one way I spun off the other. I had to get out the passenger door as the drive door was jammed and the bastard that hit me took off.

He snapped the axle and if the grill of his car had not caught between the car and the tire he'd have flipped me over. (No seat belts I wouldn't have walked out in one piece). My only injury was a bruised knee cap that hit the emergency brake handle.

Bruce was a Police Aide at that time and by sheer coincidence was OJT in the "hit-and-run" department. He saw that my case wound up on top of the pile. They found the car that hit me a couple of miles away, but the driver was long gone. They traced the car to a man who had taken a .45 and blew his brains out in the car two weeks before I got hit. The car was given to his ex-wife who left it on the street, in summer, without cleaning it out, and someone stole the car. The gal's brother had a two page arrest record and if you connect the dots most likely was the guy who totaled my car, but since I couldn't make a positive ID that's as far as it went.

On record I got hit by a dead man.

The insurance company paid off on the blue book value, which wasn't much. Mom gave that money to Bruce to buy his car so he could buy another one.

My Rambler station wagon was replaced by a '62 Rambler Classic sedan (it also had the front seat levels with the back seat feature), but it needed lots of work that I didn't have money to fix it up with.

Old Clunkers

In a previous post I mentioned I learned to drive in a '58 Olds, actually I learned in three cars, that was just one of them.

The second car was a 1963 Pontiac LeMans. I can't find a picture of the car in question. Pontiac upsized the LeMans and that's all I can find. Pontiac also had a Tempest that was their version of the Chevy Corvair, and it's not the same car either. This car looked a lot like the '66 Dodge Dart.

The Olds had a huge powerful engine, the Pontiac was a gutless wonder. It had a slant 4 cylinder engine (looked like a V8 cut in half) and though the car looked fast it took forever to build up speed. The transmission never worked properly and it had a stupid little knob on the dash to put it into gear instead of a column shift or floor shift.

This was the car Mom preferred I drive, it was the last car I'd try to drag race in. The real reason I took the driving test in the Olds was that when I got home from school that day the Pontiac had a flat tire. The dome light only worked for one night.

It was the first night I wore my letter jacket (lettered first semester in high school in cross-country). After a basketball game I drove to the A & W Rootbeer stand where I'd worked over the summer (I still prefer A & W Rootbeer to all others). I was starting to get out of the car to go inside and say hi to everyone I still knew that worked there when a car of about five guys pulled up from the rival high school and ran at me. I barely had time to lock my door when they started banging on the hood and roof. I started it up, backed up and drove away. The dome light came on that one time as a result of their banging on the roof.

Bruce tried driving it with four friends in it up a steep hill and threw a rod. The one car we were not sorry to get rid of. I think the reason Pontiac doesn't have picture of this car anywhere on the WWW is because they are ashamed to have ever produced it.

Summer Starts

• There's three good reasons to be a teacher: June, July and August.
  
• Schools out for now and I'm on my long (unpaid) vacation. 
  
• Grinnygranny and I went to see the Star Trek movie. A wife who enjoys all the incarnations of Star Trek means I married well. We enjoyed it. There's a number of other movies out or coming out we'd like to see at the theater, but not sure we'll get to all of them. All you have to do is wait six months and they show up on DVD, PPV or premium channels. When we got home we watched Marley and Me on PPV. I didn't expect it to have such a sad ending.
  
• Mom came over to get a bud off my rose bush, it reminds her of a rosebush Dad used to have at another house.
  
• Had a nice round of golf with my golfing buddies this morning and am now taking it easy.
  
• Grinnygranny and I have a tee time tomorrow morning.
  
• Summer is getting off to a good start.
  

Roses

I

I have this rose bush in my front yard. It's always been a real scrawny thing. The other bush is an American Beauty and is huge, putting out hundreds of flowers from May to November. This bush has never been very big and usually only puts out one or two flowers a year.

I've babied it using rose food and fertilizer for fifteen years and that's all it's ever done. About two weeks ago as the other bushes were starting to bloom this one looked dead.

I was contemplating digging it up so I found a couple of rose bushes at Big Lots and I bought a big bag of potting soil. I planted the two new bushes in the potting soil in a planter to get them going and thought I'd move the one that survived (a real nasty wind storm happened a couple of days after I put them out) in the place of the poor dead bush. 

E dumped what was left of the potting soil on top of the bush I intended to dig up and in just two days it came to life. I've taken six roses off of it and there are five already in full bloom with six more ready to open. I must have scared it, or it just needed potting soil instead of miracle grow.

 It's bloomed more in the last week than in over ten years. The reason I've worked with the bush is that it has gorgeous flowers. A light yellow with red tint and around three inches in diameter.

Glad They're Over

Dancing and Idol are f-i-n-a-l-y over.

Let the screaming and yelling begin.

Come on people neither one is about talent, they're about popularity. If they were about talent Gille and Adam would have won hands down.

Can either show come up with more pure garbage to drag out announcing the winner?

Oh the things men do to please their women, like suffering through shows like these. Unfortunately America's Got Talent is waiting in the wings.

Past Cars

When I was fifteen we were eating at a restaurant across the street from a used car dealership. After dinner we walked across the street to look at the cars and came across a pink '58 Oldsmobile Super 88. When Dad asked how much the guy said $100. Taking it out for a test drive the first thing we noticed was that it had a really powerful engine. The only real problem was that the odometer was stuck. Dad bought it. About a month later we took a trip down to El Paso. When we got to the motel and Dad added up how long it took to get there, he figured we averaged over a hundred miles an hour. The one thing about this car was that at a hundred mph you didn't know you were going any faster than 40. It only got ten miles per gallon, but when gas only cost forty cents a gallon it wasn't too bad.

This was the car I learned to drive in. It had a 398 four barrel V8 engine and that car could move. When I did the driving test to get my licensee I thought I was doing a great job, then as we were on a residential street the inspector asked me how fast I was going. 40 in a 25 zone. He asked me why I was driving so fast, what you would call an oops moment. Getting in he told me that speeding on a driving test was an automatic failure. Ever have that sinking feeling? He was  nice enough to pass me so I got my license.

The car did have a few problems. It would kill a battery every six months and it always seemed to die as I was getting ready to go out on a date. I'd be all after shaved, and dressed up, go out and the damn thing would not start. The heater got stuck and you could not turn it off, the only good thing about that was that the heater finally died in March before it got too hot outside to drive it with the heater on. I did race a bit with it making everyone driving those mustangs and camaros wonder how I could keep up with them. One time I had the whole cross-country team in it driving up I-40 and to show off I ran it up to 120. I didn't go faster than that because at that point it would hydroplane. When Dad got home late that night he walked into my room and asked me when I was going to put tires on it. I said I didn't know it needed tires (I was seventeen, give me a break here) he took me out to look at the tires. They weren't bald, they had cord showing through. To this day I wonder why I'm alive.

Viva Sha Yexin

Today I'm doing a duplicate post. This is also at Captain's Log.

Scott Horton has an interview with Sha Yexin a Chinese author and dissident. It is an absolute must read for the entire interview, but the most clearly articulated and informative answer I had to copy here. He is answering in the context of China's totalitarian state, but it so perfectly applies to the eight year reign of Der Decider aided and abetted  by the mains stream media who only reported the talking points given to them by the government, when they should have been holding them accountable.

Why shouldn’t one write for power? Here are my reasons:

First, power corrupts. The British historian Lord Acton said: “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This famous quotation has now become political common sense. Its correctness has been borne out by the intensifying corruption in China, where power is exercised without oversight or restraint. When corruption and power exist in co-prosperity, how can people fight corruption? In present-day China, anti-corruption is kept at a certain level to ensure that people will not revolt while power will not get out of control. In some districts, corrupt elements have become leaders of the anti-corruption effort. Undiscovered corrupt officials are fighting those already exposed.

Second, power makes people stupid. By using mathematical theories, the American scholar Jonathan Bendor proves the great value of independent thinking and the limitations of decision makers. When leaders are too busily occupied with myriad state affairs, institutional methods can be used to ease their cognitive constraints, by seeking wise solutions from among the people and encouraging independent thinking in government officials. But in a totalitarian country, such institutional methods do not and cannot exist.

Most power-holders in such countries are fond of dictatorship. Each of them puts forward his “ideas” and “theories” when it is his turn to rule the country, hoping to see his thought adopted as the “guideline” to unify the thinking of the whole nation. Acting in this way, they deprive themselves of the kind of wisdom and talent that are needed to solve the thorny problems facing the country. As a bunch of dumbbells, they can not help becoming an object of ridicule among the people.

Third, power brings flip-flops and hence suffering to the people. Since power has reduced the wisdom and intelligence of the power-holders and their think tanks, setbacks caused by repeated policy changes including the adoption of reactionary measures are bound to occur. Frequent ideological reversals and repeated changes in ideas and policy bring about great social instability. It becomes very difficult to attain a truly harmonious society and avoid more flip-flops in the future.

Fourth, power produces cruelty. Those who hold power can be overwhelmed by the glare of the spotlight that accompanies power. They may experience a peak period in which they feel accomplishment, happiness, or pleasure. But according to Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist, this peak period does not last long. The powerful had problems coping with the end of this period. Once they reject oversight, checks and balances that come from outside, they immediately become completely irrational and inhuman. If someone wants to share power with them or seeks to replace them with new power-holders, they become mad and cruel, and have no scruples in resort to guns, cannons, and tanks, producing huge social disasters.

If you are a writer who writes for power, objectively you are working, directly or indirectly, for corruption and stupidity, for more suffering and cruelty for the people. You may have some excuses if you are forced to write for power. If you write for power out of your own will, how can you evade your responsibility as an accomplice?

As may be easily understood, what I am speaking about is power in a totalitarian state. It is power without oversight and constraints, as compared with power born from democratic elections. Refusing to write for power also means refusing to write according to the will of those in power, or to promote their ideology in one’s writings.

One may choose to write for any other purpose: to write for art, for life, for oneself or others. But he or she must not write for power.

Denial

In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged she says: "If two men disagree on an issue they discuss it and let reality decide. One may be right, the other wrong, but they both profit."

The one constant in our economic disaster is that all the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street and the neo-cons treat Atlas Shrugged as if it was their economic bible. The last three leaders of the Fed were devoted disciples of Ms Rand and Objectivism, the philosophy she spawned.

There's only one problem with that little quote. It doesn't take into account the human capacity for denial. Some call it skepticism, but skepticism entails the willingness to change one's mind once that which is being doubted has been empirically proven. (Doubting Thomas saying he'd have to see Christ's wounds and place his hands in them.)

I've said all this in preamble to what Michael Prescott posted on his blog today. Michael writes a lot about para psychology and the para normal and he posted a list of all the reasons given for not believing those who practice, accept and believe in them.

The experimenter was lying.

The experimenter was drunk.

The experimenter was insane.

The experimenter was hallucinating.

The experimenter was tricked by some specific (but unproven) ruse.

The experimenter was tricked by some unknown ruse that may be determined in the future.

The experimental protocol was flawed in some specific (but unproven) way.

The experimental protocol was flawed in some unknown way that may be determined in the future.

The equipment malfunctioned.

The photos (or videotape, etc.) were faked.

The witnesses were in cahoots with the experimenter.

The experimenter was in cahoots with the test subject.

The results were a meaningless fluke.

What struck me by this list is that just about the same reasons those objectivists who worship Ayn Rand use for rejecting Evolution, global warming, etc. They have their minds made up don't confuse it with facts.

I'm not much into psychic healing, communicating with the dead, premonitions, and other kinds of mysticism, but this list is about denial not skepticism. 

This Caught My Eye

Damian Whitworth has an article entitled, Is History So Horrible? The website is from England so the arguments deal with a different educational system, but some of his arguments make sense here too. 1. History needs to be taken more seriously, that the emphasis on math, science, basket weaving, feeling good about yourself, etc has shoved history out of the elementary and middle schools, by the time students encounter history classes they don't have a solid basis for understanding. 2. It needs to be presented in an interesting manner 3. There needs to be hands on, field trip, real world instruction.

My only complaint with the article is that those talking about improving education think the panacea for improving education is more technology. Makes you wonder how Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Confucius, and all the other great teachers over the centuries educated without smart boards, DVD players, and Sesame Street. The problem with technology is that it gets old very fast. In the 1950's there was a movie called Black Board Jungle. A teacher who had trouble getting his students to pay attention shows a cartoon with a 16mm projector, and miracle of miracles the kids are interested. By the 1960's all schools had 16mm projectors and many teachers only function was to turn them on and fix the film when it broke. By the 1980's all those old reel to reel films were transferred to video. In the 1990's it was computers. Today we have DVD players for movies and documentaries, computers to surf the web, power point presentations provided by the book publisher so you don't have to come up with your own lecture, and many other new gadgets. And for each of the new technologies ( all of which I gladly use) the students were interested in for about one or two years, and then it becomes routine and they shut down. Isn't it time we stopped treating students like a baby in the crib that has to be pacified with rattling car keys?

 By the way I'd like to have a copy of the DVD on the battle of Hastings and a link to the video game.