right left whatever

2003-06-11T23:03:00.000-04:00

The contents of this blog have now been exported, and after some maintenance and cleanup, everything you used to view here will be on the new site. There is content there now, you can now look. There's still more to do, with adding a blogroll and everything, but I can't work on it all night, gotta sleep.

2003-06-10T21:45:00.000-04:00

There will be no more entries to this blog. The new site is now operational, even though there isn't much there yet. Until I export content from this blog, I'll let it sit here, for anyone who wants to find content in the archives.

The new site is right left whatever.

2003-06-10T12:44:00.000-04:00

Can we fly yet, Mom? can we? please? Two weeks to go, argh! it's getting too crowded in here!!

2003-06-10T12:05:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to the New Jersey Devils for winning the Stanley Cup - again!!! I knew they would do it, but the Ducks were a great opponent. Jean-Sebastien Giguere was very deserving of the Con Smythe trophy. There was no booing for him at my house last night (indeed, unlike many other fans, I do not boo at all, even when I am at the games - some would say I'm not into the game, or no fun; I disagree, I love the game just as much as anyone else, I just have some standards).

So - Why didn't I post my congratulatory message last night? Blogger was down! arghh!

Moving to Movable Type soon, the new address will be: www.joelfuhrmann.com/blog. It's actually up now, but no content other than a test message. I'll tell you when you can look.

2003-06-04T22:18:00.000-04:00

Today was banding day for the falcons on top of Kodak headquarters in Rochester NY. Five eyasses, named

Isaura (f)-- Named by Matt Bernius-- Black Band
Chayton (m)-- Named by Aafke-- Blue Band
Edge (m)-- Named by Siobhan Ruck-- Red Band
Destiny (m)-- Named by Sue Long's Fifth Grade Class-- White Band
Tlohtli (m)-- Named by Kenn Martinez-- Yellow Band

Here comes trouble!!
(link from the Kodak discussion board)

2003-06-03T22:55:00.000-04:00

From the columns today

Writing at National Review Online, Byron York, on The Truth About Bush's Lies.

Link via Opinion Journal's Best of the Web, a link to a New York Times column by Paul Krugman, Standard Operating Procedure. Donald Luskin fisks another column by Mr. Krugman at National Review Online, A Not-So-Beautiful Mind.

So what do I think about the concept of truth?

It's been in my thinking lately, because I've been dealing with the statement, "All politicians are liars, so whatever they say or do isn't important". The implication is that if a politician represents your ideology, or policies you like, then their words and actions aren't important.

I've got some real problems with this point-of-view. For starters it sets up a huge double-standard for how laws are enforced in this country. Imagine this: What if laws were passed with the understanding that they would only be enforced against people who were members of the Republican party? Sound far-fetched? Were laws passed forbidding sexual harrassment? Two names: Clarence Thomas - Republican, Bill Clinton - Democrat. I know people who believe that Clarence Thomas should be banned from government service for life because of what he was accused of doing by Anita Hill. Invariably these same people think that Bill Clinton was a great President who was the victim of a right-wing conspiracy. What was different between these two? The allegations against Justice Thomas were never proven. The allegations against President Clinton were proven. Justice Thomas is conservative and is pro-life, President Clinton is a Democrat and pro-abortion.

Another reason I have trouble with this is that it is a cop-out for intelligent discussion of public issues. If you can't believe anything politicians say, then there is no need for paying attention to news or opinion, and our elections fall prey to candidates who promise the most with no regard for preserving the constitutional rule of law that is supposed to serve as a foundation for our republic. There is a need to be careful in choosing what to believe, because there is a lot of stretching the truth, to say the least, both on the left and right. I'd say most of it falls short of outright lying however, except in the view of one's political opponents. One weakness of our election system is that it encourages voting numbers without encouraging voting intelligence. Looking back at the election of 2000, seeing how get-out-the-vote workers bribed homeless people to vote, just screams to me that one party was dedicated to getting a higher number of less-intelligent, ill-informed people out to vote.

So, risking repeating what has already been said by Byron York (National Review) and James Taranto (OpinionJournal), here's what I've come up with concerning how I view the statement, "They all lie, get over it":

In the view of my opponents, of course I lie. They disagree with me, they think they're right, so therefore they think I'm wrong, therefore I'm lying. Accusations of lying of this sort dominate every political campaign. It's just someone's opinion, not a hard and fast fact.

There are lies of fact that people disagree on, citing various misquotes and press statements out of context, such as all the accusations flying about Al Gore's inventing the Internet, Vice President's continuing profit-making with government contracts at Halliburton, President Bush's intelligence, and so on. A lot of this is ideological fluff, designed to discredit one's ideological opponents, creating sympathy for one's own point-of-view, or favorite candidate. These lies can be more or less proven to be true or false, but people rarely believe the other side, so it usually takes a lot of evidence to move people to change their mind. Not that it's impossible: I'm a former Democrat who now votes mainly Republican, and a lot of the evidence that moved me came in the late 90's.

There are hard and fast lies however, ones that can be proven for instance in a court of law beyond a reasonable doubt. We saw instances of that in the late 1990's, confirmed with a contempt of court settlement and articles of impeachment. People don't deny that President Clinton lied, they just don't agree on the proper punishment for it. People who commit lies like this are likely to commit lies of the next category as well.

The most egregious lie of all, the one that takes advantage of peoples ignorance: deliberate misrepresentation of truth. And here's where I beg to differ with those who think that all politicians lie, for there is a big difference between having a different point of view or interpreting numbers differently, and deliberately lying. And those who deliberately lie regarding issue 'A' will invariably have no motivation to be honest with issue 'B', so such people cannot ultimately be trusted with anything, and deserve to be unelected as soon as possible.

So who is not telling the truth? Well two examples, on the issue of judicial nominations (a pet peeve of mine): Senator Daschle is not telling the truth when he says Miguel Estrada doesn't have the experience required to be a federal judge (many judges have been confirmed with less experience). Senator Schumer is not telling the truth when he says we need the memorandums Mr. Estrada wrote when he was Solicitor General (no other Solicitor General who has been nominated has been asked for them). These are not innocent lies, created out of a misunderstanding of our political process. They are deliberate lies presented to a public which is not expected to know or understand the truth.

There's a lot more I can say on this subject, but I'm going to close this post now. Maybe I'll add more later, and if anyone wants to email me a thought or two, I'll post those too.

2003-06-03T21:42:00.000-04:00

I just can't stay away....

Been slowly setting up a new site, looking at Movable Type, and finding out the installers there are very busy, and the backlog is now about a week to make a new installation. I'm also pretty new to web publishing (kindof strange for someone who works in a computer department, though my specialty is installations of the OS - but I do need to know this, and setting up my own website has been registered as one of my 'educational' objectives at my job).

2003-05-29T20:48:00.000-04:00

Blogging after all, working late tonight, listening to the Devils/Ducks game on NHL Radio, and putting in a quick post while I wait for a server to rebuild....

Just caught two stories, the first one being an excellent piece by Rod Dreher on The Godless Party. I think his analysis is spot-on, but I've seen another phenomenon, the Religious Left, those who elevate issues such as abortion to a religious fervor, and equate it with good, and religious conservatism as evil.

The other article is from The Register, The Internet is Dying, By Andrew Orlowski, where law professor Lawrence Lessig claims that the Internet is dying, due to FCC relaxation of media regulation. "Lessig argues that the relaxation of media controls for the latter-day robber barons bodes ill for open computer communications." But reading on in the article, he also says "Google has its own spam problems: a tiny number of webloggers and list-makers whose mindless hyperlinks degrade the value of its search results, and create the Web equivalent of TV static." So, in effect, he criticizes the Internet for two opposing forces, the concentration of control in the hands of a few, and the huge number of webloggers expressing diverse opinions. It seems to me that he's just disappointed that people don't seem to be interested in his point of view, and he's decided to blame the Internet. The Internet is extremely diverse, and I don't see anything changing that.

2003-05-28T21:47:00.000-04:00

I'm going to take a vacation from the blog for the duration of the Stanley Cup Finals. Not that I'm really doing nothing--I'm setting up a new domain and website. Next post will be there.

2003-05-28T21:43:00.000-04:00

Methodist Women's Magazine Chides Religious Conservatives. I saw this issue of Response magazine, and was disappointed that it was so critical of Christian conservatives. Not that it is wrong to disagree, but I didn't see any mention of the name of Jesus in the magazine. The UMW is apparently advocating a pro-abortion and anti-family liberal 'gospel', aligning itself with the leftist feminist agenda, much like the YWCA has done (as evidenced by the hiring of Patricia Ireland as their president). There is a different vision of what Christianity is among political groups of the left, a vision of social salvation through political transformation, a social gospel that has no need for Jesus or His Resurrection.

2003-05-28T21:32:00.000-04:00

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Rachel DiCarlo criticizes the political activism of the National Council of Churches. The NCC is an excellent example of what I, and apparently many other people, find distasteful about religion being used as a stalking-horse to promote social justice, which in the context of the NCC looks like socialism. Trouble is, that when you take God out of consideration, as socialist governments seem to do, socialism becomes an oppressive system which sacrifices broad classes of individuals for the sake of the common good.

2003-05-28T21:08:00.001-04:00

Look for the blog to move soon, I've got a domain and I am going to move my site there and stop using Blogger. I've said this before, and procrastinated, but now that Blogger unreliability is widely recognized, and it isn't even recognizing my latest posts for RSS syndication (what good is a RSS feed if it never updates?), I've decided there is no future here.

2003-05-28T21:08:00.000-04:00

Haven't posted anything in a few days; I was in Oklahoma last weekend to attend a memorial service for family. My mom grew up in a small town in western Oklahoma, and that's where I was. Small town America is really special; my pro-abortion state (New Jersey) is a lot different than Oklahoma, where I saw a picture of Jesus holding a new-born baby painted on the side of a downtown building in Elk City.

2003-05-22T12:32:00.000-04:00

Diane Knippers, the president of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, addressing the October 2002 Confessing the Faith Conference, on the subject of Renewing the Church.

2003-05-21T11:59:00.000-04:00

ok, I've added an RSS feed, and a Bloginfo button, so why is the last post recognized by the RSS feed 5/19, instead of this one?

2003-05-20T22:18:00.000-04:00

This post is a personal sort of Rubicon for me. A bunch of my former UU colleagues are going to strike me off their Christmas lists after they read this (heh!)

I left my former Unitarian Universalist congregation in 2000, largely due to political, not religious, concerns (I wasn't even a believer then, but I was moving there real fast). The next year they decided to adopt a Welcoming Congregation resolution, meaning they were going to actively adopt a pro-gay program. My leaving was not solely due to this policy, but I was bothered by witnessing a child dedication by two gay men who had adopted a baby daughter. My thought then was "how are they going to teach this daughter how to be a woman when she goes through adolescence? She isn't going to have a clue." I don't care what studies the gay-rights advocates put forth, I do not think that children of gay parents will grow up with the necessary education to interrelate with people of both sexes as they grow up. I think they will have problems caused by imcomplete parenting and exposure to homosexual activity. They will be miss an important element of what families with moms and dads will provide, namely the little things that only a mom or dad can each uniquely provide. I have no doubts that I will be labeled as a "homophobe" by UUs, including those from my former congregation. That's a cheap shot, designed to deflect attention from the ill effects that normalization of homosexuality will bring.

Here's what some ministers in the UUA are doing to further their extremist gay-rights agenda: Some UU Clergy will not sign marriage licenses, and are encouraging gay-activist-ministers in other faiths to do likewise. This is real sad, discriminating against what is right to accomodate what is wrong. One thing my former congregation did before I left was to put up a "family wall" in one of their meeting rooms, where people were invited to bring in pictures of their family and put them on a wall celebrating families. They were in the middle of a big push to remind everybody that there lots of different kinds of families, including couples who weren't even married, and gay couples. One thing I remember them saying was something like "pictures of families headed by gay couples are especially welcome". My reaction to that was that my wife and I, as a heterosexual couple, were not especially welcome.

What Senator Santorum said recently was point-blank true, and extends to the concept of marriage as well. If the procreative nature of marriage is denied, and gay marriage becomes legally recognized, what reason would there be for not extending the legality of marriage to marrying one's own sister? or brother? or indeed, any number of people of either sex? Marriage will have no social meaning or value whatsoever.

2003-05-20T21:45:00.000-04:00

Rod Dreher comments on two kinds of segregation, one acceptable and the other not. It has everything to do with the inconsistencies inherent to political correctness.

2003-05-20T21:41:00.000-04:00

From yesterday's National Review Online, Nelson Lund comments on the Senate's refusal to act on judicial nominations. Lund is correct in saying, "This idea — that the validity of judicial decisions depends on the merits of the policy outcomes to which they lead — is already the mainstream view in American law schools. Senate Democrats appear determined to ensure that it becomes the mainstream view among American judges as well. If they prevail, our judicial institutions will stop being courts in anything but name." For all effective purposes, our Constitution is a dead letter. Judges are chosen not to enforce the Constitution, but to implement activist ideals, especially since 1973, when Roe vs. Wade effectively created a new right, ex nihilo. It's time to change this outlook.

2003-05-20T12:46:00.000-04:00

Also on IRD's website, United Methodist Bishop Sprague Assails “Christo-Centric Exclusivism”.

From Paul's epistle to the Corinthians, on why the Resurrection is so important:

Now if Christ is preached that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up if in fact the dead do not rise. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.1 Corinthians 15:12-19 NKJV

Paul says that if you don't believe in the Resurrection, then there's no point in even calling yourself a Christian, as the Resurrection is the foundation of our faith. Indeed, if the Resurrection never occured then Christianity is just a false religion offering no hope and no value to the world.

2003-05-20T12:31:00.000-04:00

Diane Knippers, president of Institute on Religion and Democracy, has written an open letter to the Reverend Franklin Graham supporting his ministry, Samaritan's Purse.

2003-05-20T12:26:00.000-04:00

Charles Colson presents another viewpoint on the New York Times truth scandal.

I don't recall hearing it presented this way before, and it bears repeating, as it points out a flaw that reaches way beyond the New York Times and indeed beyond journalism itself. The recent scandal is usually presented as an affirmative action issue, or the fault of one person. Colson blames it on postmodernism, which denies the existence of capital-T Truth, saying, "If we say there is no truth, we shouldn’t be surprised when people make up stories and pass them off as if they actually happened."

Good point!

2003-05-18T16:34:00.000-04:00

I haven't talked about the New York Times scandal. Everyone else has spoken so well on it. I appreciate Raines admitting this,

"Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?" he added, a moment later. "Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes."

I think it's safe to say that on issues on which it can be perceived that the NY Times is presenting only one side, such as global warming, gay issues, affirmative action, (basically anything having to do with religion or politics), the NY Times has lost its authority to tell us how things ought to be (not that it ever had that authority to begin with, but to some people it seemed to). I hear a lot of liberals use the phrase "According to the New York Times..." to justify their latest liberal point of view. I'm hoping to hear it less often now. Probably just wishful thinking on my part, however, as I saw it in an op-ed today. At least we can legitimately tell those who use it that you can't believe anything you read in the Times anymore. Deroy Murdock says it is also important to consider what the Times doesn't say.

2003-05-18T16:00:00.000-04:00

Mark Byron discusses those who quote Scripture inaccurately.

Additional examples of Scripture being quoted inaccurately come from people who attempt to justify immoral behaviour by saying that Jesus hung out with tax collectors and sinners. They forget to include the second part of Jesus' response to the adulterous woman, however: And Jesus said to her, "Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more." John 8:11 NKJV

2003-05-18T00:14:00.000-04:00

A Wonderful Day

Amy and I went to a Marriage Encounters reunion today, and got to see many special people. Clay, Georianna, Brent, Carol, who presented at our weekend. P___ and S___, who along with us are confronting health issues with their parents (mine are over for now, theirs are ongoing, they are in our prayers, and yours too, I ask), and several people who are associated with this fine program and continue to contribute with ongoing support at events like those held today. Thank you, and God bless you all. We were down in Delaware today, and I saw something very special on the wall of a church library I've never set foot in before today: 1 Cross + 3 Nails = 4given

Sports!
Congratulations to the Anaheim Mighty Ducks for a fabulous performance in winning the NHL Western Conference Finals! Spectacular goaltending from Jean-Sebastien Giguere, who constantly amazes but always gives credit to his teammates. Great talent and great attitude, wonderful to watch.

Congratulations too, to the Devils, who won today for a 3-1 lead, which I only got to watch on my VCR when I got back from Delaware about 8pm tonight, and thanks to all the people who didn't tell me the final outcome before I got to watch it!

2003-05-16T19:11:00.000-04:00

Jeff Jacoby writes about Israel's unshakable allies.

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."Genesis 12:3 ESV