A Schoolhouse Rock Style Civics Lesson

Senator Ben Sasse gave the country a nice civics lesson last week, as his opening statement at the Judge Kavanaugh confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice.

Senator Ben Sasse, opening remarks
at the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings
screen shot from C-SPAN3

First, he made it clear that the hysteria surrounding a well-qualified judge with bipartisan support among his colleagues has nothing to do with Brett Kavanaugh. It has to do with a misunderstanding of—and a corruption of—the balance of power laid out in our Constitution.

This is not something new. He says,

These confirmation hearings haven’t worked for 31 years in America. People are going to pretend that Americans have no historical memory, and supposedly there haven’t been screaming protestors saying women are going to die at every hearing for decades. But this has been happening since Robert Bork. This is a 31-year tradition. There’s nothing new the last 18 months.

It's ideological, and it’s political. And unfortunately it's treated like team sports:

Our political commentary talks about the Supreme Court like they’re people wearing red and blue jerseys. That’s a really dangerous thing.

He suggests that a better use of these hearings would be to do some Schoolhouse Rock civics lessons for our kids, to give them the opportunity to understand our government better:

We should be talking about how a bill becomes a law, and what the job of Article II is, and what the job of Article III is. So let’s try just a little bit. How did we get here? And how do we fix it?

And then he spends a little time going over some constitutional basics.

The Constitution’s drafters began with the legislature. These are equal branches, but Article I comes first for a reason. And that’s because policymaking is supposed to be done in the body that makes laws. That means that this is supposed to be the institution dedicated to political fights.

If we see lots and lots of protests in front of the Supreme Court, that’s a pretty good litmus test barometer that our republic isn’t healthy. Because people shouldn’t be thinking of protesting in front of the Supreme Court; they should be protesting in front of this body.

The problem is that Congress (he refers to the legislative body using the general term Congress, comprised of the House and the Senate) has abdicated its responsibilities. The founders believed that the desire for power—generally a bad human trait, but nevertheless part of human nature—could be harnessed to have three separate but equal branches of government all jealously maintaining their power from overreach by the other branches. The founders would be surprised to see what has actually happened.

Here’s his description:

How did we get to a place where the legislature decided to give away its power? We’ve been doing it for a long time, over the course of the last century, but especially since the 1930s, and then ramping up since the 1960s—a whole lot of the responsibility in this body has been kicked to a bunch of alphabet soup bureaucracies. All the acronyms that people know about their government, or don’t know about their government, are the places where most actual policymaking—kind of in a way, lawmaking—is happening right now.

This is not what Schoolhouse Rock says. There’s no verse of Schoolhouse Rock that says “give a whole bunch of power to the alphabet soup agencies, and let them decide what the governance decisions should be for the people”—because the people don’t have any way to fire the bureaucrats.

And so, what we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly do is decide to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y, or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home, and we pretend that we make laws. No, we don’t. We make giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined. And we say, the secretary of such and such shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs.

from Schoolhouse Rock video
Three Ring Government

That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch, and about the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work.

He admits there’s a rationale, flawed though it may be, for the regulatory system:

The Congress can’t manage all the nitty gritty details of everything about modern government. And this system tries to give power and control to experts in their fields, while most of us in Congress don’t know much of anything, or, about technical matters, for sure, but you could also impugn our wisdom if you want. But when you’re talking about technical, complicated matters, it’s true that the Congress would have a hard time sorting out every final dot and tittle about every detail.

But the real reason is more self-serving. Legislators don’t want to take responsibility for difficult or unpopular decisions.

If people want to get reelected over and over again, and that’s their highest goal—if your biggest long-term thought around here is about your own incumbency, then actually giving away your power is a pretty good strategy. It’s not a very good life, but it’s a pretty good strategy for incumbency.

In the abstract, maybe it doesn’t seem so awful. But it has real life consequences to the people. Sasse offers an example of his fellow Nebraskans:

When Congress neuters itself and gives power to an unaccountable fourth branch of government, it means the people are cut out of the process. There’s nobody in Nebraska, there’s nobody in Minnesota or Delaware who elected the Deputy Assistant Administrator of Plant Quarantine at the USDA. And yet, if the Deputy Assistant Administrator of Plant Quarantine does something to make Nebraskans’ lives really difficult—which happens to farmers and ranchers in Nebraska—who do they protest to?

As the senator points out,

Almost all the power right now happens offstage. And that leaves a lot of people wondering, “Who’s looking out for me?”

He does offer a solution. It’s one of those simple but not easy things, but it beats what we’ve been doing:

The solution here is not to try to find judges who will be policy makers. The solution is not to try to turn the Supreme Court into an election battle for TV. The solution is to restore a proper Constitutional order, with a balance of powers. We need Schoolhouse Rock back.

We need a Congress that writes laws and then stands before the people and suffers the consequences and gets to go back to our own Mount Vernon, if that’s what the electors decide. We need an executive branch that has a humble view of its job, as enforcing the law, not trying to write laws in the Congress’s absence. And we need a judiciary to trust to apply written law to facts and cases that are actually before it.

This is the elegant and the fair process that the founders created. It’s the process where the people who are elected—two and six years in this institution, four years in the executive branch—can be fired. Because the justices, and the judges, the men and women who serve America’s people by wearing black robes, they’re insulated from politics.

So, we need to stop playing the decades-long game of politics surrounding the Supreme Court. Maybe we can get that if Congress will take back its power. There are hints that that could happen. The rolling back of regulations is a start. Making sure any new legislation is simple, straightforward, and necessary, based on the proper role or the federal government would help.

And—as it appears is a possibility at last—we can have a majority on the Court that know the limits of their power and abide by the law, instead of making it up as they go.

If you’ve got a young person around who isn’t getting taught this kind of civics in school, share Senator Sasse’s lesson with them. The whole 15 minutes is below. And for younger kids, maybe you should look up some of those old Schoolhouse Rock videos online. It’s amazing how the tunes—and the messages they carried—can come back decades later.

L-Shaped Recovery and the Trampoline Effect

Some years ago, I talked about government interference affecting the economy. There’s a pair of posts: Parabolas and The Trampoline Effect. When there are downturns in the economy, there’s usually a natural rebound, forming a parabola, like a U. The bounce back usually reaches and exceeds the start of the fall pretty quickly. But if government steps in to “help,” or interfere, then you get something more like “help” on a trampoline, when someone steps in purportedly make the bounce higher. That help disturbs the natural up and down, and takes the energy out of the bottom of the bounce, so you don’t go back up. You just sort of stumble, and the trampoline flattens. And then you have to get going again from scratch.

In economist terms, this is an L-shaped recession recovery, instead of the usual U-shaped recovery.

Here’s the definition: 

L shaped recession—refers to a period of stagnant recovery after initial fall in GDP. Even though technically the economy may have positive growth (e.g. 0.5%) it still feels like a recession because growth is very slow and unemployment high.

You know the phrase, about the scariest words: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Government’s role isn’t to interfere, or intervene. It’s to set up the background for free enterprise to take place. 

Government isn't the only interference that can cause an L-shaped recession, but it's the usual suspect. When we look at the past decade, we see an L-shaped recession/recovery, and it wasn't just bad luck; it was government caused. 

There are a number of measures of how well the economy is doing. Growth in GDP is one. In fact, a recession has a specific definition related to GDP: "a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters."

The converse is that two successive quarters of growth, however minimal, signify the end of the recession. But in an L-shaped recession, getting to technical recovery likely takes longer, probably over a year, rather than merely months. But getting back to starting position can take much longer, multiple years.

The L-shaped recession recovery looks like this:

Such a "recovery" can take so long that various opinions may start calling it a square root-shaped recovery, meaning that, instead of ever getting back up, we should expect a new, permanent, lower growth reality. Obama and George Soros agreed on this "just the new reality" description of the 2008-2009 Great Recession. The malaise economy of Jimmy Carter was also described as a new normal that turned out not to be normal, after a bit of a Reagan tax cut.

And the Great Recession wasn’t a square root-shaped “recovery,” we now know, because the malaise of extremely low growth wasn’t permanent. It went away as soon as we had a government regime change that made necessary changes. They haven’t been extraordinary changes: lower taxes across the board, and concerted attempts to get rid of burdensome regulations.

We didn’t have to get all the way to the ideal lowest possible tax rate, just better. And we didn’t have to get rid of all burdensome regulation, just go in that direction, and stop the threat of ever more regulations that could be placed at any time, causing businesses to be wary about investing and growing. When people are free to make use of their own money, and can plan without government-induced uncertainty, that's the energy we need to get the economy moving back upward.

We can see some examples of the L-shape in various charts. A typical chart for showing recessions is GDP growth. This one, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP)[i]

Because growth, by definition, rises, in order to see the parabolas and other shapes of recessions and recoveries, you need to turn the chart somewhat sideways, so the rise line is horizontal. The green is to show the L-shape.

Besides GDP growth, there are some other measures. One is unemployment. Here’s a comparison of recent recessions and up to five years out.  In this chart the U-shape, or parabola, is upside down, because we want unemployment to be low. It goes up during the recession and down afterward. You can see that the unemployment spike was a bit higher in 1982, but by one year out had reached its starting point, and then continued dropping. The 2009 recession went higher half a year out, had some downs and ups for a year and a half, and afterward only slowly began dropping back down, taking seven years or more to reach pre-recession rates.

It’s possible for unemployment to go down even though there are more people not employed. Unemployment is measured by taking some combination of people applying for unemployment benefits and polling. That misses people who would be looking for work in a less hopeless economy. People who can’t find work could try to get more education, or could be just staying home. They don’t get counted. So another way to look at economic vitality is the employment-to-population ratio.

This one gives us a really clear picture of the L-shaped recession/recovery. I’ve highlighted the Great Recession in green, and in yellow are a few other more typical recessions with a quick rebound. On this chart, it looks like there might be another L-shaped recession just after 1960.

Another chart that shows the L-shape is average private sector hourly earnings. The housing and banking bubbles burst in the last quarter of 2008, which precipitated the drop. They didn’t start to rise again until 2015, and we’re still quite a distance from the starting point. The source for this chart seemed certain, later in the article, that things would have been much worse without the government interference. It’s hard to show an alternative version to use for comparison, but it is my assertion that government interference caused the intensity of the problem as well as the continuation.

The 1929 market crash was similar. It was beginning to right itself within months, but then government stepped in with one intervention after another, intensifying and continuing the pain for more than a decade. It wasn’t the war that ended the depression, because there was so much to produce for the war; it was that FDR focused on the war instead of the economy, and he largely quit experimenting with ever more interventions.

There was some good news from The Heritage Foundation's 2018 Index of Economic Freedom. We used to be ranked “mostly free,” but had been less free since the beginning of the Obama administration—or maybe since the legislative takeover by Democrats two years before that. Now we’re moving back toward freedom.

The United States, ranked “mostly free,” had not been performing well in the index over the last decade. That precipitous slide has now fortunately come to a halt, with signs of renewed economic growth reinforced by major regulatory and tax reforms that elevate business confidence and investment. It is notable that the U.S. economy grew at a rate of about 3 percent in the last three quarters, something that economists said was very unlikely just a year ago. For the first time in a while, the United States isn’t just economically stronger. It has a real chance to become economically freer in the coming years.

We’ve had two additional quarters of higher growth since that assessment last February. So the news is even better.

When somebody interferes with your jump back up on a trampoline, it takes some regathering your balance and re-energizing your jump. And that gets harder when the “friend” keeps their hand on the trampoline. But once they get out of the way, the energy you put into the jump gets you rising again.

It’s good that happens in the economy too. When we move closer to a free market, not only do we become more prosperous, we become more free.

_______________________________
[i] CBPP is the source for the remaining graphs in this piece, although some have my marks on them.

Good Is Real

In the last post, “Evil Is Real,” I linked to a video about Operation Underground Railroad, the organization founded by Tim Ballard that rescues children from human trafficking. If you followed that link, you found that there are several additional connected documentaries. In the second one, "Finding Light in the Darkness," Ballard recounts the story of finding two young children in Haiti, a brother and sister, and his story of adopting them.

Tim Ballard, of Operation Underground Railroad
screen shot from "Finding Light in the Darkness"

I heard him tell this story in person a couple of years ago, in a setting where he was fully able to express his religious beliefs, and how that is key to the story. Much of that also comes through in this documentary.

He met the two children, and they were on his mind the following night, when he was coming down from the adrenaline rush, after the arrests of the perpetrators were made and the children were safe. Usually when he would feel these strong emotions, he would pray to have relief from them, so that he would be able to carry on with the work. If you get too emotionally attached to every child in every raid, you can’t move on and focus on the job that needs to be done. This time, however, the prayers didn’t bring relief. The feelings intensified. He ended up calling his wife in the middle of the night, and telling her what he was going through.

She said, “You want to adopt those children!” which was beyond any thought he had formed. They had six kids of their own already. Adopting children was a crazy idea. No, he just wanted relief, but he couldn’t get it. Would she come and help him? She said, no, she didn’t need to come. She also felt like they should adopt the children, and he just needed to start the paperwork.

It took four years to accomplish that task. Most of the first year was spent trying to locate them. Because he was a foreigner, not from Haiti, he was not allowed to know where they had been sent; he was just assured that they were safe.

There were many trips back to Haiti, preparing for and performing other missions. Each time he continued his search for these children, but he couldn’t find them. There was one person in the government who could override the rule preventing him from getting the information he needed, and he had tried unsuccessfully several times to meet with her. There was one last day. He asked his wife to gather the children to be on their knees praying for him at an exact hour, when he would enter the government building hoping to get the information he needed.

The part of the Ballard family that went to Haiti to pick up
the adopted brother and sister are about to introduce them
to the rest of the family.
screen shot from "Finding Light in Darkness"

He and a friend arrived slightly early. Tim waited before entering, because he wanted to be sure his timing coincided with the family’s prayer. Then he went through the gate and bumped into a woman on her way out. Because of the timing, he said, “Who are you?” It turned out she was one of the rare English speakers he could have bumped into. When he told her what he was trying to do, she asked the name of the children. He told her, and she started jumping up and down and saying, “Praise Jesus!” over and over. So he joined her in that. And then he asked what she was praising Jesus for.

She ran an orphanage; it was one of several that the children from the raid so many months before had been sent to. The brother and sister had been sent to her orphanage; she had them. It was well across town. She was only in this government building to handle some paperwork that day. And if he had come in a minute earlier or later, they would not have run into each other.

To Tim Ballard, this was a direct and obvious answer to prayer. That’s a much more reasonable explanation than that it was just an odd coincidence.

I’m telling this story, because I’ve been listening to the debate between Jordan Peterson and atheist Sam Harris, from this past June. Jordan Peterson’s view of religion comes at it from an evolutionary psychologist’s point of view. It’s interesting, but it’s cerebral in its approach to what is transcendent of the intellect and reason. Sam Harris’s view is that religion is actually harmful, and the better approach to finding the best way to live a life would be to use pure reason.

Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris debate, Bret Weinstein moderates
screen shot from here

Peterson is often reticent to give a direct answer to whether he believes in God, because he doesn’t like all the attachments to the answer that other people make. But he does say he lives his life as though there is a God, and that he has evidences that lead him to believe that is the right way. But as a scientist, more so in this discussion than in some others I’ve heard, he talks about religion as the metaphorical stories making up religion that lead us to lead better lives.

What Harris takes from that is that metaphors, or stories, are just fiction, even if sometimes they are useful; you can’t trust a fiction for guidance to truth, because you know it's fiction. Also, he believes the dogma that surround religions are harmful and evil.

Harris’s view negates the religious point of view because of an a priori premise that religion is about belief in something pretend, an invisible being who doesn’t exist.

But he fails utterly to grasp the experiential evidence such as Tim Ballard’s story. Ballard’s story is dramatic, and clearly shows God’s hand. And he has a number of other stories—many involving his wife and her uncanny ability to follow promptings that she knows are from God, and that lead to important good outcomes for the children and the family and others. My personal stories may be less dramatic or convincing for others, but they are no less real for me.

I’m also not satisfied with Peterson’s explanation. It starts with an assumption about evolutionary science that I don’t totally buy into. In fact, I start with my belief in God, which is a truth that I believe I have received enough evidence for. And while I do not know how God went about creating us as the fully formed intelligent, self-aware beings that we are, I use the evolutionary science more as a metaphor to describe that some things, and some creatures, are simple and others complex—rather than as a map of how one thing progressed from another, which we don’t actually know.

I do think there’s something to the idea that archetypal stories are metaphors we use to understand things that are true. But my religious experience leads me to believe that God often uses metaphor and symbolism in stories that are also factually true. It would have been a stronger response to Harris’s arguments to say that God is not only metaphorically factual, but actually factual, and Harris' personal lack of evidence does not negate the personal evidence of billions of other humans.

Harris uses the most heinous elements of some religions to claim that religions in general are bad: human sacrifice, genocide of infidels, execution of apostates. My hypothesis is that these are corruptions of religion. They do not honor a God who created us and loves and cares for us. Nor do they honor life, family, truth, or property. Such religions lack the necessities of civilization.

So what Harris is referring to isn’t religious truth; it’s a distortion, a corruption—which implies that there was something whole that they are distortions and corruptions from.

Moreover, he looks at reason as the source for truth and goodness. This fails to notice a couple of things. For one thing, reasoning, or logic, only works if you start with the right assumption. One example provided in the PragerU video "Where Do Good and Evil Come From?" (included below) is that criminals plan a heist using reason. Reason helps them carry out a successful theft without it causing them to realize the wrongness of the theft. So, in order for reason to lead to moral truth, it needs to start with a moral assumption.

From the PragerU video
"Where Do Good and Evil Come From?"
presented by Peter Kreet,
Professor of Philosophy at Boston College

Where can reason get that? It gets it from a milieu of morality. It’s logical to see that dealing honestly and truthfully with others is morally good, if you live in a society where that is normal. If you live in a society where master have their slaves serve them, and that is all you’ve known, it is logically reasonable to see that as the right way, and perfectly moral—which most of the societies on earth have done. That reasoning doesn’t make it morally true. But true religion—which tells us humans are created by God and have a divine nature—tells us that enslaving a human being is morally wrong.

In other words, Harris believes he gets to moral truth through reason, when he’s really benefiting from living in a civilization with a religious moral legacy.

Peter Kreet lists and refutes the various sources for
moral truth proposed by atheists,

There’s a hypothetical question Peterson and Harris consider: If you were to do an experiment in which you take a religious people to settle one isolated frontier, and reasoning atheists to settle another completely separate isolated frontier, which society would more likely become a thriving civilization? Harris believes it’s obvious the reasoning one will do better.

But it isn’t obvious. And history tells us that atheistic societies (which all the socialist/communist ones are) are much more likely to savagely massacre huge portions of the population. What he’s assuming is that he’ll take the reasoning of people who already benefit from the experience of living in civilized societies—which are based on moral principles—and carry on with everyone being moral simply because the good outcomes are rational.

Good doesn’t come from nothing. In fact, good itself is a moral judgment. If that judgment is based on current reasoning, it can change, depending on how individuals or groups think at a given time. There’s no moral absolute there, because there’s no source of absolute moral good, or moral truth.

You only get that if there is a transcendent source. As Professor Kreet says in the video:

Just as a design suggests a designer, moral commands suggest a moral commander. Moral Laws must come from a moral lawgiver.

Well, that sounds pretty much like what we know as God.

The consequence of this argument is that whenever you appeal to morality you are appealing to God whether you know it or not; you’re talking about something religious, even if you think you’re an atheist.

That’s similar to what I’ve heard Jordan Peterson say elsewhere, in a Q&A after a lecture:

Everything you act out is predicated on your implicit axioms. The system of implicit axioms that you hold as primary is your religious belief system. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an atheist or not. That’s just surface noise….

It doesn’t necessarily have to do with your voluntarily articulated statements about whether or not you believe in something like a transcendent deity. So, what you act out is much more what you are than what you say about yourself. And what the hell do you know about what you believe, anyways?

We know that evil is real, because we experience it. We also know that good exists, because we experience it. We know these things and act on them, even before we know how to identify and articulate our beliefs.

So good is real. And that means God is real—the source and definer of ultimate good. If that is so, then we are better off living our lives in search of God’s truth, gaining experience with Him, and from Him. You don’t get that by experimenting with living a life that excludes God; you get that by seeking Him, through study, faith, and practice at choosing good even when bad is easier and possibly appears more rational.

God has a better view. And civilizations thrive when enough people within them live God’s guiding principles, as articulated in the Ten Commandments: honor God, life, family, truth, and property.

Evil Is Real

I was planning a different post for today, about belief in God, and good and evil. But a couple of stories have come to my attention that seem to be asking me to write about them. So I will be talking about evil, but except for the good of combating evil, I’ll have to save talking about the good for another day.

The first thing is a news story from here in Houston. Governor Greg Abbott had posted the story, which I had missed elsewhere in the Houston Chronicle. The headline is “69 suspects arrested on sex trade charges by the Houston Police Department Vice Division.” The suspects, according to the news story, were arrested between the first of June and the end of July, charged with either compelling prostitution or soliciting prostitution. The photos are shown, in an effort to both raise awareness and shame the suspects, perhaps making another perpetrator think before getting involved in such an act.

Among the suspects were a community college professor and a former Baptist church director.

There’s a link to an additional story from last Friday, from even closer to home: “12 charged in north Harris County prostitution sting.” Eleven were arrested and one was still at large but expected to be arrested, following a two-day sting, timed for the beginning of the school year, near area schools and the Willowbrook mall.

Again, the photos are included to both raise awareness and warn off any potential future criminals. The officer giving the press conference said it’s an honor to serve the community in this way, getting these criminals off the streets.

Besides these local stories, I saw a video interview between Tony Robbins and Tim Ballard. Ballard is the founder of Operation Underground Railroad, which rescues children from human trafficking. He has a new book out, Slave Stealers, telling his story, and the story of the organization. I’ve written about him before. I’ve heard him speak in person. I know someone, a young man who was my daughter’s prom date about a decade ago, who has gone with Ballard on a rescue mission. Ballard’s work and his goodness are very real.

This video is about 36 minutes. But it’s worth it. It may be the most inspiring thing you see today.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s a documentary about O.U.R. worth seeing. At the end of the first part (Operation Toussaint, about an hour and a half long) Tim Ballard will let you know what you can do to help. 

It’s hard for me to grasp that this evil could exist among us. Raising awareness is a small step toward wiping out this evil. I thank God that good people have the ability and feel the calling to fight this savage evil.

Tribalism vs. Truth

Last Friday, August 24th, the editorial board opinion piece in the Houston Chronicle said some things that I would normally just ignore, because I know the editorial board is biased in a way that doesn’t align with my beliefs. But sometimes it’s worth taking a look at how the other side thinks—and try to figure out why they think that way.

Here’s a section of the piece; I’ve highlighted a portion I want to talk about:

Yes, President Obama lied when he continued to say you could keep your health plan. He was wrong, but he did it to help millions of Americans get heath insurance.

But Trumps lies are wrong, the piece goes on to say, because they are for his own purposes. I don’t know if the editorial writer recognizes it, but he/she just said, “Lying is OK if your purpose aligns with what we on our side want. Lying is not OK if your purpose doesn’t align with what we on our side want.”

I would like to note that, while Trump’s lies are supposedly so plentiful, the editorial doesn’t list a single one in the entire piece. I’m sure there are some, especially if you’re someone who reads his every stylistic superlative as a literal lie, and yet the only actual lie listed is Obama’s, for comparison. And the lies the editorial writer is telling. Such as this one:

The presidential candidate who chanted “lock her up!” about an opponent who stored sensitive email on a home server has now been implicated in an actual crime.

In actual truth, Hillary Clinton committed a felony when she purposely put classified material on her private, unsecure server. The basic facts tell us that.[i] Those who have held security clearances all know this. Intent is not required, even though that is what Comey used as the excuse for not indicting her. And even though intent in this case was very likely provable.

But there is no indictment, or pending indictment, of President Trump for campaign fraud. Even if his former lawyer ends up facing charges, the incident is much less egregious than the John Edwards case, which ended in a hung jury. Not everything that tangentially could affect public opinion is necessarily part of a campaign. Nor is there any evidence of colluding with Russia to commit voter fraud, which was supposedly the reason for the special counsel investigation in the first place.

I don’t want to be put in the position of defending a person who is covering up for sex with a porn star so his wife doesn’t find out. Even though she probably knows. And even though the “billionaire playboy” image was well known to voters before the election. That behavior is disgusting and anathema to civilized men. Almost as savage as diddling an intern in the oval office, one might say—although actually doing it while president still strikes me as more egregious.

Further, a campaign finance violation committed by an employee is probably part and parcel of every major political campaign—because the laws are convoluted and unevenly applied. But when they are applied, the usual remedy is a fine, probably taken out of campaign funds, not removal from office. Unlike the usual remedy for leaving classified materials in unsecured locations: “Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”[ii]

So there seems to be a disconnect regarding truth and facts.

The Wednesday, August 22^nd, opinion page of the Houston Chronicle featured a piece by Paul Krugman, who is also worthy of being dismissed, based on his past commentary. But I’ll use this one as a sample today. His piece is titled, “The Orwellification of the GOP didn’t start with Trump.” He’s referring to George Orwell’s book 1984. He does give some examples of Trump lies:

Donald Trump operates on the principle that truth—whether it involves inauguration crowd sizes, immigrant crime or economic performance—is what he says It is. And that truth can change at a moment’s notice.

Again, I don’t want to be put in the position of apologetic for Trump. But I do somewhat understand language and language style. Trump is not the person to go to for details, or data, or exact facts. He uses words for effect, and for big picture messaging. So some translating needs to be done. Like, crowd size. What other president would the news media go to for crowd size measures? But they claimed erroneously that the crowd was very small, not because it was particularly small, but because saying so would denigrate the president. And then other people showed the crowd on social media, revealing that the media had used a particular angle to hide the crowd.

So Trump was responding to a media lie, and, as he does because it’s his personality to do so, he made sure we all knew the crowd was big. Really big. He might have even thrown in a number for effect.

Trump wasn’t lying about the crowd size; the media outlets who tried to denigrate the president by claiming the crowd was less than it was did the lying.

Trump also hasn’t been lying about illegal immigrant crime; but leftist media have made erroneous and now refuted claims that illegals are more law-abiding than other immigrants or other Americans—and they’ve repeated that lie in the very moments following the revelation that Mollie Tibbetts was murdered by an illegal alien.

And the economy? Let’s just say, if you’re an American who lived through the Great Recession that lasted, coincidentally, all eight years of the Obama presidency, and you’re a young person, or a black person, or one of the other demographics now facing the lowest unemployment rates in decades, maybe you know the one not in touch with facts might be so-called economist Paul Krugman.

Krugman asks,

Why did the party’s belief in objective reality collapse so suddenly and completely?

Let me do some more language and style translation: he means, “No one in their right mind could possibly disagree with me, so the whole Republican party is demented.” And there’s no self-reflection, no inkling of recognition that he’s unaware of actual objective reality.

Since I’m a truth seeker, I’m also the kind of person who frequently asks, “Could I be wrong?” So I do the exploration for facts, which is why I can fairly clearly see both good things and bad things Trump has done. (I’m not the only one. Ben Shapiro often has a segment on his show called “Good Trump/Bad Trump,” where he shows evidence in both directions.)

But this particular president seems to bring out irrational hatred toward both Trump and anyone who disagrees with them—along with an absolute certainty of rightness. As Mark Twain put it, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Jane Clark Scharl, in a piece for Intercollegiate Review, asks the question “How Dangerous Is Jordan Peterson?” She concludes that he and his ideas are indeed dangerous, but not at all in the way his detractors believe. He’s dangerous because he’s revealing the lies being inculcated by various interrelated political tribes. As Scharl puts it:

In universities, high schools, and increasingly as early as elementary and preschools, children and young people are being taught not to think critically about topics like gender, sex, race, privilege, culture, liberty, wealth and success, and religion; instead, they are being presented with a series of platitudes and told to accept them or be punished.

Having someone who can get people to question the platitudes is dangerous to the tribes.

Jordan Peterson
image from here

I think there’s at least a partial explanation for the sense of danger Jordan Peterson stirs up, in the introduction to his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. He spent many years looking into the atrocities of the past century, and asking how people could believe what they believed to such an extent:

I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one another—and that the systems weren’t just about belief.

People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another. They act in keeping with each other’s expectations and desires. They can cooperate. They can even compete peacefully, because everyone knows what to expect from everyone else. A shared belief system, partly psychological, partly acted out, simplifies everyone—in their own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Shared beliefs simplify the world, as well, because people who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world. There is perhaps nothing more important than the maintenance of this organization—the simplification. If it’s threatened, the great ship of state rocks.

It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire. They will fight to maintain the match between what they expect and how everyone is acting. It is precisely the maintenance of that match that enables everyone to live together peacefully, predictably and productively. It reduces uncertainty and the chaotic mix of intolerable emotions that uncertainty inevitably produces [p. xxx].

So, people tribalize to fend off chaos. They have a vested interest in maintaining the tribe—along with its beliefs, values, and traditions—regardless of whether the beliefs are accurate or not. But disagreeing tribes clash.

That’s a problem. How do I know I’m the one who’s got the truth, when Krugman and the Chronicle editorial writer are so sure they’re the ones with the facts?

I have a number of clues. One is data from trusted sources, and probably multiple trusted sources. I would say the objective measures provided by nonpartisan government sources, at least for economic data, are probably accurate. And there are a few other sources I think have held up reliably well. Then it’s a matter of interpreting the data, to make sure you draw accurate conclusions. You need some tried and true principles for that.

Those of us on the conservative side—or, as we would put it in Spherical Model language, those of us in the northern hemisphere, where we find freedom, prosperity, and civilization—have an advantage over those in the southern hemisphere, who seize or cling to statist tyranny in order to fend off the tyranny of chaos. Up here, we encounter opposing viewpoints every day, from nearly any mainstream news source. So we question everything. If it doesn’t coincide with our experience and those around us, maybe there’s more to the story, so we start seeking it.

Those in a southern hemisphere bubble, those who admit to never encountering an actual conservative in their day-to-day lives, might not have a very clear or complete picture.

The Daily Wire did an interview with Brandon Straka, the guy who started the #WalkAway movement a few months ago. He talked about the bubble he used to be in. He would hang out with Ivy League educated smart people, who all saw things the same way. At first, when he thought what they said didn't make sense, he assumed he must be wrong, because they were so smart.

Brandon Straka
image from The Daily Wire

But then, when he started speaking up and voicing his questions, friends either abandoned or persecuted him for not staying on script. When he left that side, because they were, in his words, "intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, narrow-minded, and even blatantly fascistic," he still didn’t consider becoming a Republican. He told himself, "Well, I’m not a liberal, but I’m sure as hell not going to become a Republican because those people are crazy and racist, etc." Because that’s what he’d always been told to believe.

At first he didn’t really listen to the other side—our side. But after being abandoned by so many now hostile friends, he started really listening to Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin. Now he gladly calls himself a conservative and is a registered Republican.

There’s this interesting part of the interview:

DW: Do you see any of the behavior that you witnessed on the Left mirrored in the Republican Party? For example—the identity politics, the pitting of groups against one another, the tribalism, the cruel rhetoric or violence.

STRAKA: No, I’m not seeing or experiencing anything like that, which is why I think I’ve come to embrace the conservative philosophy as much as I have. It’s all about the individual, personal empowerment, encouraging people to try hard, and work hard. You can have the life you want if you’re willing to work for it, be a decent person, and contribute to society.

One thing that opened him up to new information was a personal change, from alcoholic drug addict. As he says,

My life was all about self-pity and what the world owed me. After I got sober, I really started to learn about accountability, taking responsibility for your actions, and making amends to people when you've made mistakes. I started seeing the rewards of that.

So what he saw as true, when he was in that downward spiral, wasn’t true at all. Once he got free of the brain fog of addiction, he also got free of some untrue beliefs and found some better-serving true beliefs.

There’s an interview with Jordan Peterson—and I’ve heard him say this in several interviews—about learning to tell the truth. It relates to Rule 10 in his book: “Be precise in your speech.” He tries to never say anything that makes him feel weak. The interviewer thought that was an odd thing to base something on, just whether he personally felt more powerful or not. But he didn’t say more powerful over others; he said less weak personally. It’s a signal. You can pay attention and feel it, and that’s a way to find truth.

I would word it differently, based on my religious understanding. But there is a feeling you can have associated with finding truth. It’s a still, small voice, but if you practice and pay attention, you can use it as a built-in truth detector.

I tend to be overly trusting, and assume others tell the truth, because I do. And sometimes that ends up kicking me where it hurts. But many times, an uneasiness, something confusing or unsettling, or physically weakening is what I feel around untruth. I don’t like that feeling. I feel a wholeness, and a wholesomeness, around truth, even unpleasant truth when it needs to be faced.

If you want truth, you have to ask for it. Question tribalism. Question pitting one group of people against another. Question your prejudices. And learn what truth looks like and feels like. Civilization depends upon each of us doing just that.

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[i] 18 U.S. Code § 798 - Disclosure of classified information,  https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798 . And 46 CFR 503.59 - Safeguarding classified information, https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/46/503.59

[ii] 18 U.S. Code § 798 - Disclosure of classified information (see link above).

It's Been a Year

We’re having something of a commemoration this weekend. It has been a year since Houston and beyond was hit with Hurricane Harvey and 50+ inches of rain in about three days. We're still Houston Strong.

During this recovery year, we've learned a lot about goodness, and caring, and sacrifice under those difficult circumstances. As I said back then, there were stages. First, there’s saving lives, and then assessing the situation. Then comes mucking out, which had to be done fairly quickly. A week of standing water in a house can ruin not only everything the water touches, but anything the growing mold reaches. The mucking out includes removing all the flooring, drywall, and furniture out to the curb, and then power washing anything that needs it.

All this time, people are doing this while living without their belongings, in a shelter or a hotel, or with friends, or maybe in a rental if they can get one. And a lot of people going through this with their own homes also went to work to help their neighbors. And many many people who found themselves safe went to work to get the mucking out done for their neighbors.

The next stage was the debris pickup. Places were left looking kind of bleak and blank, with large dead patches on the lawn.

Then came the rebuilding. This is the long stage. Some things had to wait for insurance procedures. Some had to wait for government help. Some had to wait to save up resources. Some, even with ready resources, had to wait for available help. There are only so many remodelers, drywall experts, and cabinet builders in a city. And while we did have some workers move here for the temporary work, there was still a shortage.

The result is that a few people got back into their homes, finished or not, within a couple of months. Many—I’d say an average—took six months. Some longer. And of those moved back in, some are still living with bare walls and floors, waiting their turn for the workers.

A couple of months ago we ran into an older scout troop, age 14+, from several states away. They had come to Houston for their high adventure camp—and spent the week putting up drywall for people in need.

Earlier, during spring break season, a church where I play music one night a week had housed youth groups from several states, spending their week away from school coming to Houston to help with rebuilding.

So that has been quietly going on, during these many months since the media outside Houston stopped talking about our event.

I drove around today, in my neighborhood and nearby, to see the changes. I took a few photos in the same places I did last year, to make the comparison. Most places, on the outside, if you didn’t know about the flood, you wouldn’t know anything had happened. Most trees and plants survived. Grass has grown back.

The entrance to our neighborhood was flooded
for about a week.

The south side of our neighborhood got hit while on the
north we remained dry. This street corner was used
as a rescue boat launch. It's back to normal today.

Anyone who hadn't gotten out before the streets flooded
had to be rescued by boats or large military vehicles.
It was surreal then. It looks totally normal again, at least
on the outside of most houses.

The debris was out one week after the storm. After one month
much of the debris had been scooped up and hauled away.
Today it looks mostly normal. A few houses still have
markings left on them by rescuers.

Here and there you still see a large dumpster parked out front, clearly with work still going on inside. In my neighborhood there were only a couple of those that I saw. In one of the older and harder hit areas, Villages of Bear Creek, those dumpsters were more common. But still, probably 90% of the homes looked OK from the outside.

South end of Villages of Bear Creek,
one of the worst hit areas, looked a lot better today.

I drove through Bear Creek Park, which is essentially part of Addicks Reservoir that is used for picnics, camping, soccer, baseball, and other park amenities whenever there’s no flooding. But when the heavy rains come, the park is intended to fill up with water. We’re used to it. It happens for a portion of most years. This time it was closed for several months. Today it looks mostly unscathed.

Bear Creek Park, near the entrance from Eldridge Parkway,
looking toward the baseball diamonds

The bayou (drainage canal) just down the road from us, which is what overflowed during Harvey, has been undergoing dredging all summer. I think there’s a plan to do that to parts of the park and reservoir as well, since floods have brought in enough debris and silt to lower capacity. And while Harvey was something like a 1000-year flood (not likely to happen again for a millennia), there had been a 500-year flood—the Tax Day Flood—just a year and a few months earlier.

Horsepen Bayou, after dredging

There’s a bond election taking place this Saturday, with nothing on the ballot but the bond. It’s likely to pass. And I believe the county have been good stewards of our resources. They had presentations and took feedback from the community about 20 times over the summer in preparation to know how best to use the resources.

The best case scenario, according to County Commissioner “Cactus” Jack Cagle, would be for the state to use the Rainy Day Fund—and really, if that wasn’t a rainy day, when could we ever use that money?—to pay infrastructure, such as dam improvements and possibly a third reservoir; and then have the county handle the building, because the county is most aware of the needs and priorities; and then have the US Army Corps of Engineers to do maintenance. That way the full burden isn’t on the country, but is shared by the state and by the federal government in ways those entities can be useful.

So, a year out, Houston is still strong. But still in recovery.

One of our church buildings, in the Villages of Bear Creek area, got flooded, along with the post office across the street. The post office is back in business—as is the library, not far away. But that church is still being worked on. When I drove past today, it still had two large dumpsters out back. We have two congregations from that building that have been sharing space with us for a year. We’re told work should be completed this fall, but I haven’t heard word yet on when.

The Cairnway chapel. flooded photo by Melissa Willis
I took the updated photo today.

Meanwhile, the beautiful temple up in the Champions area of Spring, northwest of Houston, flooded and had to be closed for eight months. But we’re happy to be back in there.

The two right photos, from the flood were from media stories.
That's us on the right, late April 2018

My friend Elaine, whose apartment complex was flooded, trapping them upstairs for a week, said this a couple of days ago:

I walked into the lobby of my apartment complex, and we have *flooring*! We haven’t had flooring since Harvey. Then I checked the mail and this was the weekly Kroger circular. Now I’m all emotional. We made it, ya’ll.

Here’s the circular, picturing Kroger workers helping out after the flood.

There were so many who helped. I don’t know if the nation and world is aware of the treasure we have in a furniture salesman we call Mattress Mack, Jim McIngvale. He turned his store—new mattresses and all—into a shelter after the storm, and invited restaurants to bring in food. He was an inspiration to all.

A few months ago, he honored members of my church, the Mormon Helping Hands, for the many hours of service. We appreciate being recognized by someone who has been tireless in his service.

One friend of mine, Derrick Campos, was flooded out of his house until around May, and is still living among the incomplete rebuild. He does a video blog called The Better Way, and this week he did a one-year anniversary of the flood. I love the cheerful way he talks about it. What you don’t see is that this was their third flood—in this house they built several years after we built ours. It’s just north of Villages of Bear Creek, and it’s near a bend in Langham Creek on its way to the reservoir. But it’s a nice, newer neighborhood that wasn’t expected to flood. And what do you do now that it does? Hope you don’t have to face it—yet again—for another thousand years. Anyway, here’s Derrick’s video about having an attitude of gratitude:

One thing you don’t know about yourself until tragedy hits is how much you can handle. And when it happens, you learn what it feels like to be lifted up by other caring people, and by God, whom you can feel with you, keeping you from despair. All Houston appreciated the help and prayers from our neighbors around the country and around the world.

I have a friend, from high school English class, who makes his living as photographer G. Brad Lewis of Volcanoman.com. He has spent decades documenting the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, which has been active and wiping out neighborhoods of his friends the past couple of months. This photo is from yesterday.

Kilauea Volcano eruption
G. Brad Lewis, August 22, 2018

Yesterday and this morning he sent out a couple of photos of Hurricane Lane, which is about to hit them: he took the photo of the wave; I’m assuming he did not “use his new drone” to get the satellite image.

Anyway, it looks like people continue to be in need of our prayers. But one thing we know, after this year, is that love is felt over distances, and prayers work—both to inspire good people to do caring things, but also just to lift heavy hearts.