Back of the Envelope

In case you're wondering about the story progress, it's going slowly. I got next to nothing done this weekend for obvious reasons. Call it 41%. I'll try to make it up during the week, but I can't make any promises.

It turns out Dean Esmay is an INTJ according to the Myers-Briggs test. I was rated that way too the last time I took the test, which must have been eight or nine years ago, which means I'm Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, and Judging. Although I'm always a little bit skeptical of tests that ask you questions about yourself and then tell you things about yourself, especially those that are hard to answer objectively and easy to answer in such a way that you'll get the result you expect, I do think Myers-Briggs is more or less accurate. I'd be a little bit hesitant to make major decisions based on it, so I haven't read the books telling you how to choose a career or a spouse based on your Myers-Briggs personality type.

You probably already noticed due to my previous post.

One of the more macabre things I noticed is that a lot of Google searches for information on my friend's death are leading people here. These are probably MIT people, as he was well known on the MIT campus and MIT students certainly know how to use Google. I do mention him in some old posts, but I don't know any more about his death than anyone else yet. I probably won't post it on this blog when I do find out.

Don't expect too much from me right away, but I'm sure I'll be posting something every day, even if I don't feel like jumping back into the long, intensive Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism posts.

There's a nice article on anti-anti-communism in Reason:

More broadly, people like Schrecker can’t or won’t understand that their culture of denial is what created McCarthyism. It was the palpable indifference of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations toward Communist penetration of the American government that finally triggered the backlash led by HUAC [House Unamerican Activities Committee] and McCarthy. McCarthy’s accusation that Roosevelt ushered in "20 years of treason" is an absurd exaggeration. But if Roosevelt didn’t deserve to be executed as a spy, he most certainly ought to have been horsewhipped for his cavalier dismissal of Whittaker Chambers’ accusations. As early as 1939, Chambers warned Roosevelt about Alger Hiss and named at least 12 other U.S. officials who would later be proved Soviet spies. Roosevelt airily told his aides that Chambers could "go fuck himself." The spies kept passing secrets to Moscow for another nine years, until HUAC began making noises about the case. Chambers’ warning was only one of several by regretful spies during that period that first Roosevelt and then Truman ignored. Truman was so lackadaisical that the military code breakers working on the Venona Project kept it secret from him for fear word would leak back to the Soviets.

Fifty years later, the pattern is repeating itself. The character assassinations and lies of the die-hard defenders of American communism have given rise to a movement to rehabilitate McCarthy and other bully-boy anti-communists of the 1940s and ’50s. Some efforts of this movement, such as George Washington University historian Arthur Herman’s Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator, are relatively judicious attempts to correct some of the exaggerations about McCarthy -- for instance, the widely repeated but totally erroneous claim that he never correctly identified a single Communist. Others, such as conservative attack-blonde Ann Coulter’s Treason, attempt a radical makeover. McCarthy (who accused everybody from Harry Truman to George Marshall of secret Soviet sympathies) was actually too charitable, Coulter argues; he was too tenderhearted to say, as she does, that all liberals -- everybody from Lyndon Johnson to Tom Daschle -- are traitors at heart. "Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy," Coulter writes. "This is their essence."

That’s idiotic, to be sure, but no more so than American University historian Anna Kasten Nelson’s argument that Venona isn’t important because there are all kinds of good reasons a perfectly innocent person might be secretly passing microfilm to a KGB agent. (No, she doesn’t list any of them.) "It is time to move on," she wrote recently, instead of "rehashing old debates" (because, you know, historians get bored with old stuff). Then there’s the psychobabble contention of Bard College’s Joel Kovel that J. Edgar Hoover hunted spies not because foreign espionage is against the law but because he had some previously undiscovered Freudian condition in which anti-communism "might be interchangeably a womb or anus." Writing stuff like that amounts to handing the Coulters of the world a loaded gun and daring them to pull the trigger. As somebody once said: Have you no sense of decency, Sir?

Communism killed 93 million people. I have little patience for its apologists.

This is, unsurprisingly, a few days late. I'll move it to the proper point in the archives later.

Sluggy Freelance -- Torg and Riff get a new job--as hitmen?!

Day by Day -- Kerry, Bush, and Bill O'Reilly all get spots in this week's Day by Day.

It's Walky! -- Sarah catches up with Walky and Joyce to warn them about the attack.

College Roomies from Hell! -- The sub sinks, as does the Mad Doc, and Dave meets an angel.

General Protection Fault -- Sharon goes on her trip to France with her good friend, Craig. Unfortunately, there's a spy looking to infiltrate the conference.

Schlock Mercenary -- So they've collected the forensic evidence. Someone needs to tell the cops to keep the lawyer drones away from Schlock.

Update: I've now moved this to its correct place in the archives.

I just received word that a friend of mine from MIT has died. I've just begun trying to process it. I trust you'll understand if I don't post anything for a while.

You've probably noticed my major theme for this past week: I've been talking almost exclusively about the difference between evangelicalism and fundamentalism. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I've been pretty busy at work, so I haven't had that much time for blogging. Second, the evangelicalism and fundamentalism posts take a lot of time to compose, so most of my blogging time has been spent writing those. Finally, since my initial post was linked to by Glenn Reynolds, I figured I should milk it for all it's worth respond to some of the comments that have come up. Doc Rampage's post in particular made me realize that I needed to explain the inerrancy of scripture and being born again in more detail. It looks like I still have two more posts to write: one explaining what it means to be born again, and one which summarizes the blogosphere response and my response to the response. I should be done with this subject by the end of the week, and be back to my normal posting schedule.

Old Post: I promised I would discuss the inerrancy of the Bible in a post below.

The Intervarsity statement of faith I quoted earlier says that one of its founding principles is the belief in

The unique divine inspiration, entire trustworthiness, and authority of the Bible.

This is a very strong statement about the Bible and its authority, but it is very careful not to say that the Bible is inerrant. I remember that this was an important point during the discussion of whether this statement of faith should be adopted by MIT's Graduate Christian Fellowship. The basic fundamentalist understanding of the Bible is that if it is not a word-for-word dictation from God to the human writers, God at the least vouches for every word. Some evangelicals would agree, but many of them would not go that far. They believe the Bible is what it claims to be, and that God's inspiration made sure of that. Some books of the Bible claim to be direct dictation from God: the prophets, Revelation, and parts of the Pentateuch, for example. On these parts, evangelicals and fundamentalists would be in agreement. The Gospels, however, are a different matter. They claim to be eyewitness accounts (or in the case of Luke, a thoroughly researched history) of the life of Jesus. Thus, when there's disagreement between the gospels, such as the differences between the Resurrection accounts, an evangelical can just say that these differences are no greater than any difference in eyewitness accounts of such an eventful and hectic morning (as Lee Strobel argues in The Case for Christ). The fundamentalist must reconcile these differences, because he believes that any difference would be God contradicting himself.

All fundamentalists hold to sola scriptura, and I’d guess that most evangelicals do, but not all. Sola scriptura is the belief that the Bible alone is the supreme authority for Christian believers, and that all other authority derives from it. On the other hand, the Catholic Church places the highest authority not on the Bible, but on apostolic succession, the idea being that Jesus chose his apostles to be leaders in the Church and gave them authority, who then gave authority to their successors, and so on, through today, where the Pope is the direct heir of that succession. Some other churches also believe in Apostolic succession, such as the Orthodox and Anglican churches, although they don't believe the Pope is the direct heir. As I understand it, the authority granted by apostolic succession weakens the further removed the successor is from Jesus: thus Jesus's own words have absolute authority, the writings of Jesus's apostles have the next greatest authority, then the early church fathers, becoming weaker and weaker throughout the years. Those churches view the Bible’s authority as deriving from apostolic succession, as the Old Testament is vetted by Jesus and the apostles (in Jesus's day, there was disagreement about which parts of the Old Testament were truly authoritative: the Christian church has more or less decided which books had authority according to what Jesus and his apostles said about them, although there are some complications), the New Testament is written by those first apostles, and later codified by others in the early apostolic succession. Therefore, even in the tradition of apostolic succession, the Bible has greater authority than any other writing, but the authority of the apostles is its source.

As I said, evangelicals place great emphasis on the authority of the Bible, although not all of them claim it is inerrant. And while most of them believe that the Bible is the source of all Christian authority, the movement also includes those who believe that the authority of the Bible derives from apostolic succession. All evangelicals believe that the Bible directly applies to their lives, and put great emphasis on studying the Bible and putting it into practice.

Update: Jeremy Pierce of Parablemania has a lot of good comments. Some of them are about details I glossed over in this post, read his comments to find out which. Two of the things he said are pretty important:

I wonder if your explanation on gospel accounts is a dodge. Are there errors in some of the accounts? If so, then even evangelicals are hard pressed to agree. This is perhaps one of the places where some people want to call themselves evangelicals when I'm not sure I want to give them the name. Do they deny the infallibility of the Bible? Perhaps not, but if the gospel accounts are merely reports of what some people remembered, and it turns out that their memory was faulty, it's not an attitude toward scripture that I would consider consistent with evangelicalism.

Jeremy makes a good point, and this is the reason I tend to be more on the inerrancy side of things. Those who claim scripture is authoritative but not inerrant have two points in their favor. The first is that even if the differences in the gospels are errors due to faulty memories, the agreement between them is great enough that no essential Christian doctrines are in question, and are all attested to by multiple witnesses. This isn't a reason to believe it to be the case, but rather a reason that believing it doesn't necessarily put you outside of orthodox Christian thought. The second, and I think more convincing point, is that the gospels don't claim to be divine revelations, or more specifically, the divinity they're revealing is Jesus himself and their accounts of him. Again and again in Acts and the Letters, the apostles use their eyewitness status in their preaching, and the gospels are the eyewitness accounts with some commentary, the amount of which varies from gospel to gospel. I believe that the commentary there is (John has the most) is given the same authority as the Letters, written by those with a special relationship with and knowledge of God, granted authority to be His witnesses.

Evangelicals who believe this don't use their uncertainty to argue against doctrine so much as to reconcile the differences in the accounts. Those who do use this belief to question essential doctrine, such as the Jesus seminar ("Jesus never would have taught his disciples the Lord's prayer!") fall outside my definition of evangelical. Of course, it could be that this belief is more on the left edge of evangelicalism than I realized. Remember, I've lived in Boston for the last seven years.

Jeremy also says he's "never heard of this gradual dilution of authority view before." My "as I understand it" disclaimer probably wasn't strong enough. My knowledge of Catholicism comes mainly from my conversations with Catholics, many self-described evangelicals, rather than personal study of Catholic doctrine. They may have been more atypical of Catholics than I thought, or I may not have understood them very well. I'm fairly certain they held the Bible to be a higher authority than the Church fathers, with less authority being granted to more recent writings. The "dilution" may have been more how I viewed that understanding than they did. They probably would deny there was any conflict between the writings, but I think they would view the Bible as more foundational.

Dean Esmay is working on a novel and wants to know whether it's better to seek out an agent or to just send it to a publisher. Having looked into it myself (my magnum opus is at 90,000 words--take that, Dean!), I can tell him that according to every source I've checked, it's much, much, much better to seek out an agent. For practical advice about writing and getting published, I recommend Stephen King's On Writing or Richard Cohen's The Writer's Mind.

Parablemania is hosting the latest Christian Carnival. Check out what Christians around the blogosphere are discussing.

Old Post: This post addresses some of the comments to my previous post.

In case you're curious, I grew up in Southern Baptist churches. Since my family moved around a lot, I went to quite a few of them. Not all Southern Baptists are fundamentalists, but a lot of them are. At one time I would have called myself a fundamentalist, but now I call myself an evangelical. My doctrinal beliefs have changed some, but I still agree with most Southern Baptist doctrine. The main difference is that I no longer think that what makes someone a faithful Christian is the doctrine they believe in. As long as they agree with the minimal evangelical foundational beliefs, I believe that their faithfulness is demonstrated by how they love God and how they love others. It is not for me to judge whether someone is a good Christian or not, although there is a place for correction when someone is clearly going astray, but it is the responsibility of every believer to encourage every other believer to faithfully follow Christ. I no longer think this means trying to convince them to agree with my doctrines.

In my previous post I pointed out that the thing that separated evangelicals from orthodox mainstream Christianity was the emphasis on evangelism: hence the name evangelical. I should probably have pointed out as well that there is a strong emphasis on the Bible as the word of God, an emphasis that is not shared in all orthodox denominations. Evangelicals believe in studying the Bible, both individually and in small group Bible study, believing it to be the way God most directly communicates with his people today. This emphasis is the reason evangelicalism is stronger in Protestant churches than Catholic churches. Catholic doctrine views the Bible differently, and while they aren't opposed to studying the Bible, they don't usually encourage it in the same way Protestants do. That doesn't mean that there are no Catholic evangelicals, but it is a stronger movement in the Protestant church. (And yes, this may get angry responses, but I'm merely explaining it as well as I understand it from my discussions with Catholic evangelicals.)

In the comments, Jim M says:

I guess the most succinct way of saying the whole thing is that Evangelicals consider Fundamentalists as part of their movement, Fundamentalists do not include most Evangelicals in theirs

My personal experience has probably colored my views, but I think this is not entirely accurate. One of the important differences is that evangelicalism is a uniting movement, trying to find the common Christian heritage among various denominations. For that reason, while fundamentalism's doctrine is not too distant from what a lot of evangelicals believe, its reluctance to accept differing beliefs puts them outside of the evangelical movement.

superfly says:

Another difference is in the prohibition of some activities by fundamentalist. Most fundmentalist are opposed to any drinking of alcohol, but most evagelicals are not opposed to all alcohol use. There are also differences within the groups about charasmatic gifting. There may be some surveys to back this up.

There is some of this among fundamentalist churches. From my personal experience, fundamentalists aren't quite so legalistic as non-fundamentalists seem to believe.

I also see that Doc Rampage has commented on my post. I'll discuss some of the blogosphere responses in a later post.

Update: Having had a chance to read Doc Rampage's post, I see why he's upset. In my response, I'll talk a bit about sola scriptura and why I think it's not a common denominator among evangelicals. (For one, quite a few denominations have doctrine that would be incompatible with evangelicalism if it were.) The "born again" reference will require some discussion as well. While I believe that being born again is necessary, describing how we gain a relationship with Christ, I am no longer convinced that being born again has the rather narrow definition that I learned growing up.

In addition, I should clarify some of what I said in this post. Being a Christian requires a relationship with Christ, an adoption into the family of God, being born again. What gaining this looks like is something I plan to discuss later. When I say that doctrine does not matter, I need to be careful, since, obviously, certain doctrines do matter. Clearly you cannot be an evangelical Christian and believe that Jesus is not the Son of God, or believe that the Resurrection never happened. The eight point statement of faith I quoted summarizes what the most important beliefs are, including the importance of the Bible, which informs the remainder of our beliefs. (Certainly, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses do not fit the definition of evangelical Christian.) However, evangelicals look around at the various denominations of Christianity and see faithful Christians in all of them. (They might be rarer in some denominations than others.) Then they look at the differences in doctrines, and wonder whether they're as important as they were thought to be when all these denominations split off from one another because of their doctrinal differences.

New Post: I discuss why evangelicals don't consider the inerrancy of scripture to be central to their faith above.

Thinking about fundamentalism made me think of Jerry Falwell, and thinking about Jerry Falwell made me think of this. Pete Abrams is a brilliant comic artist, but I think he has issues with children's television. That may stem from the fact that he has children. Enjoy!

Glenn Reynolds, aka "The Instapundit," linked to my post on the differences between evangelicalism and fundamentalism, which accounts for the over 2000 visits I've had so far today. The Instalanche is really cool, and it dwarfs my regular traffic (~50 visits). I've been reluctant to post anything new for fear of jinxing it--no, really, Blogger has already tried to mangle the post once, and I figure now would be a bad time to give it another chance. Still, the comments I've received on the post are interesting, and I'd like to try to address some of them in a later post. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow.

Update: Speak of the devil. I'm not sure it was this post that did it, but the archive page for this week wasn't working for a while, leading to problems for anyone who followed Glenn's link. I apologize for that: it should be fixed now.

Old Post: This is a continuation of the discussion I started below.

I'll admit, I'm not an expert on the evangelical and fundamentalist movements, although I have gone to churches of both varieties. This rather long post gives my insider's view, which tends to be narrower than that of someone who's really studied things. I'd appreciate any thoughts or corrections.

Now that I've broached the subject in my previous post, I ought to go more in-depth. Evangelicalism and fundamentalism are both movements, and like most movements they are ill-defined. While there are leaders in these movements, and organizations within them, there is no hierarchy, no one who really says who's right and who's wrong. You can't divide the movements along denominational lines. There are some denominations in which there are few evangelicals, some in which most members are evangelicals, and some which are evenly divided. It is sometimes fair to describe a local church as evangelical or not, as evangelicals do tend to congregate, but not always. Nor is evangelicalism exclusively Protestant, as there are evangelicals in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Broadly speaking, evangelicals believe that there is a God, that Jesus is the Son of God, that the Bible is His Word to us, that human beings are fallen and sinful and need the forgiveness God offers in Jesus (receiving this forgiveness and dedicating yourself to God is often called salvation--being saved from your sins by God), and that it is our mission to introduce people to him. A more specific list of evangelical beliefs can be found in a statement of faith used by one of the evangelical organizations, such as this one used by MIT's Graduate Christian Fellowship, which is affiliated with Intervarsity, the US chapter of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students.

From this list, evangelicals believe in:

• The only true God, the almighty Creator of all things, existing eternally in three persons -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- full of love and glory.
• The unique divine inspiration, entire trustworthiness, and authority of the Bible.
• The value and dignity of all people: created in God's image to live in love and holiness, but alienated from God and each other because of our sin and guilt, and justly subject to God's wrath.
• Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine, who lived as a perfect example, who assumed the judgment due sinners by dying in our place, and who was bodily raised from the dead and ascended as Savior and Lord.
• Justification by God's grace to all who repent and put their faith in Jesus Christ alone for salvation.
• The indwelling presence and transforming power of the Holy Spirit, who gives to all believers a new life and a new calling to obedient service.
• The unity of all believers in Jesus Christ, manifest in worshiping and witnessing churches, making disciples throughout the world.
• The victorious reign and future personal return of Jesus Christ, who will judge all people with justice and mercy, giving over the unrepentant to eternal condemnation but receiving the redeemed into eternal life.

Now all of these beliefs are orthodox Christian beliefs, the same as those stated in the creeds and catechisms used by Christians of various denominations for centuries. The only thing really separating evangelicals from the mainstream of orthodox Christian belief (many of the mainstream churches are no longer very orthodox) is a strong emphasis on evangelism, of telling others about Jesus and inviting them to become Christians. It's not as if there's no precedent for evangelism in the Christian church, but it can be argued that it has atrophied over the years when Western countries were predominantly Christian, and witnessing left to professional ministers and missionaries.

That the foundational beliefs of evangelicals are so few allows there to be a wide array of different beliefs among the members, concerning such hotly debated topics as infant baptism, transubstantiation, pre- vs. post- millenialism, free-will vs. predestination, et cetera. In general, evangelicals accept that faithful Christians can have differing beliefs about these things, and are tolerant of these differences.

Fundamentalism is also a movement, but a much smaller one. Most fundamentalists would agree with the statement of faith above, but they'd want it stronger in some areas, and they would add a few points. Fundamentalist beliefs fall under the broad umbrella of evangelicalism, so that you can find evangelicals who would agree with fundamentalists on their doctrinal beliefs. However, fundamentalists can be intolerant of those evangelicals who disagree with those beliefs, not considering them faithful Christians, if they consider them Christians at all. A few of the doctrines in which fundamentalists believe and about which evangelicals disagree:

1. The inerrancy of Scripture. While evangelicals believe that the Bible is the Word of God, has authority, and should be obeyed, fundamentalists believe that it is also inerrant, without mistake (at least as originally written), and that it should be taken as literally as possible, which leads fundamentalists to reject evolution, which evangelicals may or may not do.
2. Being born again. This is a phrase used by fundamentalists to describe the conversion experience, where someone prays to God to become a Christian and receives salvation. Evangelicals do not deny the legitimacy of the conversion experience, but many of them consider salvation to be more of a process than a one time step. They tend to use the phrase "born again" to describe this process (the phrase is used by Jesus in John 3), although its association with the narrow fundamentalist definition has discouraged its use among evangelicals.
3. Pre-millenialism. Here I usually get bogged down in the technical terms, but pre-millenialism refers to one particular view of the book of Revelation and what the Second Coming of Jesus will look like. Both evangelicals and fundamentalists believe in the Second Coming. Fundamentalists have some rather specific beliefs about what it will be like. Some evangelicals agree with these beliefs, some do not. In general, evangelicals feel less certain about the details than fundamentalists, and tend to put less emphasis on Jesus's return.

So what do these evangelicals and fundamentalists believe politically? That varies. Since they both put strong emphasis on the authority of the Bible, they tend to oppose abortion and the homosexual movement. I should clarify about the homosexual movement, as evangelicals tend to be more tolerant towards homosexuals than fundamentalists. Since the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin, evangelicals cannot accept it as an alternate lifestyle. However, to them, homosexuality is just one sin among many, and we should love homosexuals while encouraging them to repent. What they oppose specifically is the normalization of homosexuality, of saying that there's nothing wrong with it and there must be something wrong with those who say there is. Thus, while they won't be up in arms about gays in government or the military, they will oppose them having leadership positions within the Church (the same as they would oppose an unrepentant adulterer in a Church leadership position) or redefining marriage to include male-male and female-female couples. There is not complete agreement even on these things in the evangelical movement, however. Fundamentalists tend to take a much stronger line on homosexuality, although they too will say you should hate the sin but love the sinner. (There are some who hate both, much to the shame of both movements.)

On other conservative issues, evangelicals have less agreement. There is no evangelical consensus about the welfare state, immigration, affirmative action, gun-control, the war on terror, etc. They may believe one way or the other, and they may use their religious beliefs to inform their politics, but as disagreement over doctrines are allowed, so are disagreements over politics. Their political beliefs on these matters can be more accurately predicted by other demographic factors than their evangelicalism. In the last evangelical conference I went to, in January 2003, most of the speakers were against the upcoming war in Iraq. The conference was for graduate students and academics, and most of the speakers were foreign visitors, which turned out to be a good indicator of their political positions. The church I attended in Boston was rather ambivalent on the Iraq war, and even a bit ambivalent toward the war in Afghanistan. Sometimes I think the reason evangelicalism is associated with conservatism is because it is strongest in the South, which is strongly conservative as well as strongly evangelical. [Addendum: This leads to significant overlap, obviously.]

Evangelicals believe in the separation of church and state, not because they worry about what would happen to the state if the church had too much influence--for the most part, they think the state would be better off--but because they think that the church suffers when it has too much secular power. Power brings pride, opportunism, and indifference to God, all things to be avoided by the church.

Fundamentalists tend to be more conservative. Partly, this comes from their narrower range of doctrinal beliefs, which leads to narrower political beliefs, but partly it's because they don't believe as strongly in the separation of church and state. Oh, they're not looking to forcefully convert people as some liberals seem to believe, but they see the same benefit to the state from a bit of Christian guidance that the evangelicals do, and they don't see it harming the church to provide it. They also tend to view the Republicans with some suspicion, as they aren't as open to compromise as evangelicals, which is what political parties do.

What does all this tell us? For one, if Democrats weren't so strongly in the grip of the abortion and homosexual lobbies, they'd have a pretty good chance at getting more of the evangelical vote. Maybe then they'd stop demonizing evangelicals, which is what is now driving off what they do have of it. Second, evangelicals have diverse political and doctrinal beliefs, and shouldn't be lumped with fundamentalists, whose beliefs are narrower.

Update: I fixed a few typos, and dealt with Blogger’s mangling of this post. A few stylistic changes to clarify, but nothing substantive.

New Post: I respond to a couple of comments above.

This is pretty old, but I've found myself using this quote a lot recently:

You know you're an evangelical if the fundamentalists think you're a liberal and the liberals think you're a fundamentalist.

It's from a pretty good Boston Globe article by Alan Jacobs which Letters from Babylon has commented on. I don't agree with all the author's conclusions, but it's a useful primer for those who think evangelicalism and fundamentalism are the same thing.

New Post: I discuss the difference between evangelicalism and fundamentalism in the post above.

In case you're wondering, I'm now 38% of the way through the second revision of A Phoenix in Darkness. I've started spelling it right too.

I haven't pointed out a Dave Barry column in a while, but this one is pretty good. He has this to say about outsourcing:

The point is that EVERYTHING is being outsourced. In a few years, the only industry left in the United States will be ''reality'' television. A lot of people think this is bad. Congress recently tried to pass a law against outsourcing, only to discover that all federal legislation since 1997 has actually been produced in Taiwan.

So outsourcing is here to stay. Which leads me to my announcement: Starting today, I will no longer personally write my column. It will be produced by foreign humor workers, who, rest assured, are highly trained. You will notice no dropoff in quality as you continue to enjoy the wacky hmogrins of fblsevry lftht hvfrsmnyrs aqdrfltns abtfbls not making this up rltngn alrtrds a good name for a rock band.

Go read the whole thing.

Old Post: My last post on this topic was here.

So what's going on in Fallujah? Many are upset with Bush for giving in to the terrorists. There are a couple of things to keep in mind, however. First, Bush tends to give his subordinates full authority to deal with the situation without micromanagement. In general, he sets the objectives and lets the commanders on the ground decide how to accomplish the mission. Second, all might not be as it seems. For one, the Marines haven't gone anywhere. They're repositioning while the Iraqi forces take over some of the former duties. Belmont Club has some interesting thoughts on this:

It is in this context that the perplexing cycle of ceasefires punctuated by nocturnal assaults can be understood. The Corps, besides incorporating the Chinese word Gung Ho into it's vocabulary, may have finally proved to the Arabs that they can out-hudna anyone who ever stood on a patch of sand. By alternately throttling and releasing the enemy, or in cruder terms, by a process of talking and shooting, the USMC seems to have squeegeed the foe into the 'Golan' without ever precipitating the feared crisis. ("Like a cut flower in a vase, fair to see, yet doomed to die" -- Winston Churchill)

When the Press began trumpeting a humiliating Marine withdrawal and their ignominous replacement by Iraqi Fallujah Protection Army, the Belmont Club, although perplexed by the origins of the Fallujah Protection Army, still guessed that the Marines would not be withdrawn, as per innuendo, from around the 'Golan' cordon and that the Iraqis would be employed in stabilization and police duties simply because it was impossible for a force in contact with the enemy to be replaced by a unit which had yet to be constituted.

A lot of people with a better grasp of military tactics than I think what the Marines are doing makes sense. At the least, I get the impression that the Marine commanders are the ones calling the shots, rather than being called off by the politicians back home. I am concerned with even the appearance of giving in, but I'm not sure that's what's really happening. As I said before, I hope the commanders on the ground know what they are doing.

New Post: A Marine explains the thinking behind the strategy in Fallujah above.

These were my major posts this week. As usual, the timestamp is decided in order to place this post in the correct place in the archives.

John Kerry's long slide into irrelevancy -- Yes, Kerry's sliding in the polls. I'm wondering whether the Democrats are looking for ways to get rid of Kerry and replace him with someone more electable.

Chemical weapons plot in Jordan -- More on the terror plot that the Jordanians foiled.

Why I believe in God: The Trinity -- I talk about the trinity, and what it means for Christians.

Fallujah -- The first in a series of posts about Fallujah.

Rumsfeld's occupation -- Barbara Lerner has some thoughts on what the occupation would have looked like if Rumsfeld had really been in charge.

Spirit of America fundraiser results -- The results are in, and all told, we raised a total of over $50k. Not bad.

Sluggy Freelance -- It's lemonade stand week on Sluggy.

Day by Day -- Less politics, more personal interaction this week.

It's Walky! -- Walky and Joyce enjoy some peace and quiet, but it doesn't look like anyone else will be having the luxury.

College Roomies from Hell! -- Maritza's missed a few days this week due to computer problems, which is unfortunate, because the story's really good right now. The Mad Doc and Dave play off one another well, and April and Marsha are fighting, as usual.

General Protection Fault -- Dexter gets a chance to try his new dating skills, but things don't go so well.

Schlock Mercenary -- Tagon and Schlock are under arrest while investigators try to figure out what happened. I hope they tell us eventually.

Well, the fundraiser is over. The Liberty Alliance, which I was a member of, came in dead last, but it still raised just shy of $10,000. And if we came in last, you know the other two coalitions did even better, for a grand total of $55,401.83. The results are posted here. Since the challenge is over, I've removed the link at the bottom of every post. If you still want to contribute, you can do so here. The fundraiser may be over, but Spirit of America is still doing good work, and they can still use your help.

Barbara Lerner at National Review thinks that Rumsfeld should have been given a freer hand in the occupation:

A Rumsfeld occupation would have been different, and still might be. Rumsfeld wanted to put an Iraqi face on everything at the outset — not just on the occupation of Iraq, but on its liberation too. That would have made a world of difference.

Rumsfeld's plan was to train and equip — and then transport to Iraq — some 10,000 Shia and Sunni freedom fighters led by Shia exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and his cohorts in the INC, the multi-ethnic anti-Saddam coalition he created. There, they would have joined with thousands of experienced Kurdish freedom fighters, ably led, politically and militarily, by Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. Working with our special forces, this trio would have sprung into action at the start of the war, striking from the north, helping to drive Baathist thugs from power, and joining Coalition forces in the liberation of Baghdad. That would have put a proud, victorious, multi-ethnic Iraqi face on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and it would have given enormous prestige to three stubbornly independent and unashamedly pro-American Iraqi freedom fighters: Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani.

Jay Garner, the retired American general Rumsfeld chose to head the civilian administration of the new Iraq, planned to capitalize on that prestige immediately by appointing all three, along with six others, to head up Iraq's new transitional government. He planned to cede power to them in a matter of weeks — not months or years — and was confident that they would work with him, not against him, because two of them already had. General Garner, after all, is the man who headed the successful humanitarian rescue mission that saved the Kurds in the disastrous aftermath of Gulf War I, after the State Department-CIA crowd and like thinkers in the first Bush administration betrayed them. Kurds are not a small minority — and they remember. The hero's welcome they gave General Garner when he returned to Iraq last April made that crystal clear.

Finally, Secretary Rumsfeld wanted to cut way down on the infiltration of Syrian and Iranian agents and their foreign terrorist recruits, not just by trying to catch them at the border — a losing game, given the length of those borders — but by pursuing them across the border into Syria to strike hard at both the terrorists and their Syrian sponsors, a move that would have forced Iran as well as Syria to reconsider the price of trying to sabotage the reconstruction of Iraq.

None of this happened, however, because State and CIA fought against Rumsfeld's plans every step of the way. Instead of bringing a liberating Shia and Sunni force of 10,000 to Iraq, the Pentagon was only allowed to fly in a few hundred INC men. General Garner was unceremoniously dumped after only three weeks on the job, and permission for our military to pursue infiltrators across the border into Syria was denied.

I hadn't heard this before, but it does sound like Rumsfeld's plan may have worked better. In particular, Rumsfeld's method of dealing with Fallujah would have been different than Bremer's, which has Doc Rampage quite upset. While the current solution doesn't look like a good idea to me either, it does conform with my thinking that the idea is to put the Iraqis in charge. The problem is that I don't think they should be put completely in charge yet, at least not until we've taken out the worst of the problem. This may be what is happening, according to the Fox News article, but it does look like we are toning down the offensive, which is a mistake in my opinion.

On Nightline tomorrow, Ted Koppel will take half an hour and read off the names of all the American military personnel who've died in combat in the Iraq war. He's calling it a tribute, but the most telling detail is that he's not reading off the names of any of the people who died in Afghanistan. Given Koppel's previous anti-war activities (saying that the journalist's duty is to show people how awful war is), it's hard to interpret this as anything other than a political statement. I'd probably mind it less if he would just come out and admit it. My prediction is that this won't have the desired result. I think the best way to honor the fallen is to ensure that they have not died in vain, and I think the American people realize that. So while they may watch Koppel's "tribute," they won't be influenced in the way he hopes.

Old Post: The last post on this topic is here.

Everyone's talking about Fallujah these days. Captain Ed thinks we're making a mistake by showing sensitivity while we should be showing strength, as showing sensitivity rather than strength is what brought on 9/11:

For twenty-seven years, going back to Teheran, we have delivered the same message. No one doubts (any more) that we have an overwhelming military advantage in the Middle East and anywhere else, both in personnel and in technology; the three-week fall of Saddam demonstrated that beyond doubt. What we lack is both political will to win a war, and the political will to recognize that we're in a war. Negotiation with terrorists brought us to 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and instead of learning the lessons of the past quarter-century, we seem to be repeating them in Fallujah. This vacillation only communicates a sense of weakness, negating our tactical and strategic superiority, as political weakness always does (see: France, 1939-40).

It's doubly frustrating because Fallujah does not have the tactical disadvantages we face in Najaf, with the Shi'a shrines complicating our ability to attack al-Sadr's militia. Fallujah, in fact, holds the center of the Ba'athist reaction to the Coalition's regime change, and as such makes the case much stronger for direct military action. Instead of acting under a war-time paradigm, the CPA has turned the Marines into a SWAT team with better weaponry, which is a strategy for failure. We cannot be the new police force in Iraq; we must see the war to its conclusion first.

Time to quit fooling around and parleying with terrorists and unreconstructed Ba'athists, and fight the battle of Fallujah from the offense rather than the defense that the past 24 days have brought. The sooner we demonstrate our will to use all of the resources available to us to crush those who would take up arms against us, the sooner other pesky militias and insurgents will recognize that their battle has already been lost. Further delay only gives them hope of outlasting us.

Donald Sensing, as I mentioned in my previous post, thinks that we're pursuing a strategy to isolate the insurgents and we're about to go after them. I hope that Sensing is right, but I'm not sure. This news report from Fox News has me scratching my head:

Coalition officials said they have three or four different negotiation tracks taking place. One of them includes using Iraqi security forces to enter the city under the command of coalition leadership.

Sources said the coalition remains committed to a peaceful resolution to the current standoff in Fallujah.

I don't know why we'd want a peaceful resolution. I tend to think that the enemy in Fallujah are bad guys, whom we want to either capture or kill, not negotiate with, thus leaving them to fight another day and encouraging others to think violence will get them what they want. I think the real key, however, isn't what we want, but what the Iraqis want. I don't think we were pausing out of sensitivity as Captain Ed thinks, or in order to corral them as Donald Sensing believes, although both of those may have been considerations. I think our primary reason for waiting has been to give us a chance to bring in the Iraqis. Remember, the handover is on June 30th. By then, the Iraqis will have to be able to handle their own problems. Oh, we'll still be there, and we'll still be hunting down terrorists and Ba'athists (assuming there's a difference), but the more the Iraqis do for themselves, the better. They'll look less like US puppets, they'll develop their own sense of mission and pride, and in many ways, they can be more effective in this job than we can. By bringing them in now, while the US is still in control, we're teaching them how to handle the problems they'll deal with later. It's like having the training wheels of American support as they learn to ride the bike of self-rule... Okay, I'll stop now before this metaphor becomes like one of Dave Barry's. Of course, there's still a paradox here: can we develop Iraqi strength without showing American weakness? If they want a negotiated settlement, which is the opposite of what we want, should we let them have it? That I don't know, and as I said below, I'll just have to trust that the commanders in the field know what they are doing.

Old Post: My last post on this topic is here.

Well, it hasn't been a month yet, so my prediction isn't necessarily off, but the Fallujah fighting is still ongoing. Things have actually been pretty slow this past month, more like a siege than an assault, but Donald Sensing thinks the end game is approaching:

Over this month American forces have steadily closed the cordon within the city, reducing the terrain available to the enemy slice by slice. President Bush told the media today that in large areas of the city, life has returned pretty much to normal. More and more Fallujan civilians are reported to be escaping from the rebel areas, meaning that the civilians have seen the writing on the wall and no longer wish to hitch to a weak horse, or the insurgents no longer can stop them. Or both.

What we seem to be doing in steadily forcing the enemy to concentrate themselves into a smaller and smaller area. Not only does this liberate more civilians, it makes future targeting and intelligence gathering much simpler.

Some commentati have said that our self-imposed pause allowed the enemy to fortify their chosen redoubt within the city. No doubt. But it won't matter. The patty-cake of Marines getting into street gun battles with insurgents will not continue. The insurgents' modern Alamo will be futile. Imagine if Santa Ana had possessed a few F-15s, Cobra helicopters and Abrams tanks in 1836.

I hope so. My basic sense of things is that they should just go in for the kill already, but I'm nothing like a military expert and I'll just have to believe that the commanders in the field know what they're doing.

New Post: More above.

The three coalitions have set aside their difference in an attempt to raise a combined total of $50,000 for Spirit of America. To do so, the deadline for the fundraiser has been extended for a day. To contribute, click the link below.

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The Christian Carnival has been posted at Fringe Blog, with a Righteousness and Holiness theme. Featured posts are from La Shawn Barber's Corner, Intolerant Elle, Parablemania, and myself.

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...again! If you haven't given to the Spirit of America, please consider doing so. You have until Thursday to contribute. Click the link at the bottom of the post.

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The Trinity is one of the most difficult Christian concepts to understand, and I think many would-be believers give up when they cannot wrap their minds around it. When I was very young, the Trinity bothered me. As a teenager, I simply decided it was one of those things that man couldn't comprehend, so why worry about it? I was having more serious crises of faith anyway. It wasn't until recently, within the last five years, that I've taken a close look at the Trinity again. To say that I've probed its depths would be hubris of the first order, but I've finally seen beyond the surface to begin to comprehend its meaning. Once you get past the surface, so many of the Bible's more esoteric sayings begin to make sense, and the very nature of God becomes clearer. My investigations have reaffirmed my faith by showing me that once again, God is deeper than I thought.

I adapted the following from an article on MIT GCF's Skeptics Anonymous webpage, which I co-authored with Susan Kern and Cynthia Lo:

Christians believe that the three persons of the Trinity are all one God. Deuteronomy 6:4 states, "Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!" He is a super-person, so to speak, His nature being so much more complex than our own that we cannot describe Him as a single "person." The doctrine of the trinity is perhaps the most difficult and perplexing to explain, since we are trying to describe the nature of the infinite God, which finite human beings are incapable of comprehending.

The term trinity describes a relationship not of three gods, but of one God who is three persons. Trinity does not mean tritheism, that is, that there are three beings who together are God, but the word trinity is used in an effort to define the fullness of the Godhead both in terms of His unity and diversity. The term trinity is never used explicitly in Scripture, but the concept is there from the beginning and specific passages such as Matthew 28:19, "baptizing them in the name [singular] of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit", refer explicitly to there being three "persons". All three persons of the trinity make an appearance at Jesus's baptism, as recorded in Mark 1:10-11, "As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: 'You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.'" The "he" who saw this may be either Jesus or John the Baptist, who later testified about this event (John 1:32-34).

The church has rejected from the beginning heresies of modalism and tritheism. Modalism is the denial of the distinction of persons within the Godhead, claiming that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are simply three "modes" of God expressing Himself. Tritheism reaches to the other extreme, that of falsely declaring that there are three beings who together make up God. The term "person" does not mean a distinction in essence, but a difference in subsistence. Jesus is different in subsistence from the Father or the Holy Spirit, but he is the same essence in terms of being. The Christian definition of God asserts that the three persons of the Godhead share the same essence, the same co-eternal existence, and the same will, but not the same mind, the same position, the same role, or the same relationship. All the persons in the Godhead have all the attributes of deity.

The trinity does not refer to "parts" of God and, unfortunately, human analogies fall short. An interesting but imperfect analogy may be found in ourselves, however. Human beings are composite creatures. Physically, we are trillions of cells working together to form the body, billions of neurons firing simultaneously to produce thought, two distinct hemispheres of the brain which "think" in different ways. Psychologically, we are a mess of conflicting emotions and ideas, each vying for primacy in our psyche. Spiritually, we are creatures of both soul and body, an uncomfortable mix filled with the strife between the physical and spiritual parts of our nature. Ultimately, one human person has less internal unity than the three persons of the trinity. And yet we never think of ourselves as more than one being.

The following is a traditional explanation for the roles of the three persons of God, taken from C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity:

God is a Being which contains three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube contains six squares while remaining one body. But as soon as I begin trying to explain how these Persons are connected, I have to use words which make it sound as if one of them was there before the others. The First Person is called the Father and the Second the Son. We say that the First begets or produces the Second; we call it begetting, not making, because what he produces is of the same kind as Himself. In that way the word Father is the only one to use. But unfortunately it suggests that He is there first--just as a human father exists before his son. But that is not so. There is no before and after about it... The Son exists because the Father exists: but there never was a time before the Father produced the Son.

We must think of the Son always, so to speak, streaming forth from the Father, like light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression of the Father--what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it... All these pictures of light or heat are making it sound as if the Father and the Son are two things instead of two Persons. So that, after all, the New Testament picture of a Father and a Son turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to substitute for it... Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him. He knows that Father and Son is more like the relation between the First and Second Persons than anything else we can think of. Much the most important thing to know is that it is a relation of love. The Father delights in His Son; the Son looks up to His Father...

The union between the Father and Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is a Person. I know this is almost inconceivable but look at it thus. You know that among human beings, when they get together in a family, or a club, or a trade union, people talk about the "spirit" of that family, or club, or trade union. They talk about its "spirit" because the individual members, when they are together, do really develop particular ways of talking and behaving, which they would not have if they were apart. It is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence. Of course, it is not a real person: it is only rather like a person. But that is just one of the difference between God and us. What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God.

This third Person is called, in technical language, the Holy Ghost or the "spirit" of God. Do not be worried or surprised if you find it (or Him) rather vaguer or more shadowy in your mind than the other two... Perhaps some people might find it easier to begin with the third Person and work backward. God is love, and that love works through men--especially through the whole community of Christians. But this spirit of love is, from all eternity, a love going on between the Father and the Son.

This explanation helps to illustrate a number of things. For one, the term "Word" applied to the Son in John 1 begins to make sense when we consider the Son as the "self-expression of the Father." Perhaps more importantly, it illustrates what is meant by 1 John 4:8, which declares that "God is love." We tend to minimize this, saying it means that God is loving. But throughout the Bible, the refrain is that God loves us because His very nature is love, and it would be unlike Him not to love us. But before humans and angels, what was there to love? What besides God is eternal? Love requires an object; the word is meaningless otherwise. Love could not be part of His eternal nature if He has not had some eternal object for His love. Instead, it would be something God learned to do once He had created someone to love. Only the trinity offers an explanation of how love can be a facet of the eternal nature of God, since contained in the three persons of the trinity are the subject, object, and expression of love. The three persons of the trinity are defined primarily by the relationship shared among them.

Update: (5/1/2004) I changed the phrasing to make it clear that Susan, Cynthia, and I are responsible for the article on Skeptic's Anonymous, not the whole page. Although... Cynthia as webmaster really is co-author on all of them, and I had a hand in quite a few. Susan may have joined in the debates on some of the other questions, but I don't really remember.

Old Post: To find out what I'm talking about, check here.

I'm 18% of the way through the second revision of "A Pheonix in Darkness." It's slow progress, I know, but the second revision always is.

Old Post: I posted on this over a week ago.

Remember the terrorist plot to attack targets in Jordan with chemical weapons? Well, CNN has finally picked up on it. Most of us knew about it a week ago, but CNN at least has a lot more information about it than we've seen elsewhere:

Officials said there is debate within the CIA and other U.S. agencies over whether the plotters were planning to kill innocent people using toxic chemicals.

At issue is the presence of a large quantity of sulfuric acid among the tons of chemicals seized by Jordanian authorities. Sulfuric acid can be used as a blister agent, but it more commonly can increase the size ofconventional explosions, according to U.S. officials.
...
The plot was within days of being carried out, Jordanian officials said, when security forces broke it up April 20.

In a nighttime raid in Amman, Jordanian security forces moved in on the terrorist cell. After the shooting stopped, four men were dead. Jordanian authorities said. They said at least three others were arrested, including Azmi Jayyousi, the cell's suspected ringleader, whom Jordanian intelligence alleges was responsible for planning and recruiting.

On a confession shown on state-run Jordanian television, Jayyousi said he took orders from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a suspected terrorist leader who has been linked to al Qaeda and whom U.S. officials have said is behind some attacks in Iraq.
...
Jordanian authorities said the attack would have mixed a combination of 71 lethal chemicals,which they said has never been done before, including blistering agents to cause third-degree burns, nerve gas and choking agents.

A Jordanian government scientist said the plot had been carefully worked out, with just the right amount of explosives to spread the deadly cloud without diminishing the effects of the chemicals. The blast would not burn up the poisonous chemicals but instead produce a toxic cloud, the scientist said, possibly spreading for a mile, maybe more.

The Jordanian intelligence buildings are within a mile of a large medical center, a shopping mall and a residential area.

"And there is no one combination of antidote to treat nerve agent, choking agent and blistering agent," the scientist said.

There are some inconsistencies, as the first reports, like this one from Newsmax, indicated that the trucks were captured earlier, and that some of the arrests were as early at April 1st. I'd guess there were ongoing operations to catch all of these guys for the whole month. I can't say whether or not this is the last of it. I'm not even fully convinced that they've managed to foil the operation completely. I'm not qualified to comment on the chemical weapons, but if it was such a diverse mixture of chemicals, I'm surprised that we're still uncertain as to the nature of the attack. Surely with some of the chemicals we'd be able to say, "Yes, that's a chemical weapon all right," even if there were questions about others. Unless, that is, the Jordanians haven't found all the chemicals allegedly involved yet.

Update: Letters from Babylon also noticed the CNN article. CNN's new information came from the confessions of those captured. I'm not really sure whether CNN got the news first, it's just the first place I saw it, but other news organizations have the same information now. I should point out that as Jordan's ideas about the rights of the accused are very different from the US's, the confessions should be taken with a grain of salt.

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I haven't blogged much about politics recently. I don't like beating a dead horse, and by now everyone's noticed Kerry's free-fall in the polls. When the New York Times and ABC News are both questioning the Democratic presidential candidate's honesty, you know he's in trouble. Bush isn't invulnerable, but it sure doesn't look like Kerry's going to be the one beating him. Now if they'd only apply the same standards to him that they did to Bush and provide some real scrutiny into his other actions in the VVAW. Frankly, it might be a smart idea from the Democratic partisan point of view. It's becoming clear that the more people learn about Kerry, the less they like him. The only vote he gets will be the anybody-but-Bush crowd. The best chance the Democrats have is a last-minute substitution, which can only be done, as far as I understand it, by forcing Kerry to resign in disgrace. Then they can replace him with someone electable (Hillary?). Frankly, a relative unknown seems to do best against Bush, although I'm not sure how well that will hold right around the election.

It's not too late to contribute to Spirit of America. Click the link below.

Update: While the fundraiser is now over, you can still contribute to Spirit of America here.

Rosemary, the Queen of All Evil, has just started her blog. Even though it's brand new, I'm sure she's getting ten times the traffic I get (I can see that she's getting ten times the comments). That's not so surprising given that she's married to Dean Esmay of Dean's World. I predict that she'll be Instalanched within a week. Dang, I need to marry a high traffic blogger. Wonkette's single, right?

Here are my major posts from this past week. It's been a little slow, but I haven't been entirely negligent. (The timestamp on this post is 12:01 AM on Sunday, which is half a day off. As this post is not time-critical, I set this timestamp in order to ensure that this post is at the bottom of the page in the archives.

Time to panic -- I wonder why people aren't more worried about al Qaeda's attempt to use chemical weapons in Jordan.

The nail-scarred hands -- A passage from Philip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew which touched me.

First revision done -- A quick report on my progress on the short story.

Quantum Cryptography -- I explain how quantum key distribution works.

The war has begun -- The blogwar to raise money for Spirit of America has started. I'm part of the Liberty Alliance, which is losing badly. To contribute, click on the link at the bottom of this post.

Blogging Gerard Alexander -- I blog Gerard Alexander's talk at tht University of Rochester.

Why I believe in God: His Name -- The name of God has been a powerful influence on my life.

Update: (4/26) I edited the last entry to reflect a change to the title of the post.

Update: While the fundraiser is now over, you can still contribute to Spirit of America here.

And once again, I avoid seriously posting on a Saturday and instead bring you a webcomic review.

Sluggy Freelance -- Zoe's thinks it's time for the others to start paying their way around there. If only they could be paid for fighting vampires, ghosts, demons, and evil corporations. It's not like they don't pull their weight when the going gets tough, they're just not paid for the things they do.

Day by Day -- Air America gets the majority of the mocking this week.

It's Walky! -- Premarital hanky panky for Walky and Joyce?! Time to end the comic and kill everyone off, according to Willis's advertisement.

College Roomies from Hell! -- The guys have been divided, which is unfortunate, since they work better when they combine their superpowers. But now Dave's lost at sea, Mike's under the sea, and Roger's chatting up centaurs and unicorns.

General Protection Fault -- Fred coaches Dexter on the fine art of speed dating.

Schlock Mercenary -- Tagon manages to raise some money by selling off some excess cargo: Jeevee and Xinchub.

Apparently Mike Nelson from Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a devoted Christian. And here I thought Christians weren't allowed to be funny...

Old Post: My last post on my revising progress was here.

The above is the tentative title of my short story in progress, at which I arrived after much brainstorming that produced twenty-five rejected titles (not including the half-a-dozen or so working titles the story has had during its initial writing). Some of them were variations on this theme, some of them variations on other themes, but there were a lot of them before I came up with something that sounded not just good but appropriate. (One of the rejected titles sounded really good to me, an intriguing title that would definitely get me to look at a story. Unfortunately, it just wasn't right for this story. It might work for another story idea with which I've been playing, though, one inspired by a post on this blog, in fact.) I've just about decided that this story is worth the time I've put into it so far, which means I'll have to devote yet more time to it to make it presentable. I haven't yet started on the second revision, both because I've been busy this week, and because I didn't want to rush into it before I gave the first revision time to settle. I should start on it this weekend.

I don't want to talk too much about the story, but I will say that it's in the same world as Fire, and takes place in the time period between the events of "A Stranger in the Library" and of Fire. (Go here for more.) That's all I'll say for now.

New Post: It took a while, but I've made some progress, discussed above.

...to Spirit of America yet?

I'm not going to do the whole Dean Esmay bribe and threaten thing. You should just realize that it's a good cause. The situation in Iraq is about winning the hearts and minds of average Iraqis. There's a lot working against this, including terrorists, the nations who openly support them (Iran and Syria), the nations who may not directly support terrorism but who have an interest in seeing democracy fail in Iraq, propaganda outlets like Al Jazeera (who, even in their English language webpage have a section titled Conspiracy Theories, right up there with Sports and Weather--if they had Sports and Weather sections), etc. However, the single biggest force working for our side is the American military. They are doing not just what they're trained to do (killing the bad guys), but also what they're not trained for, though it comes naturally to them--helping people. They are the best ambassadors America has, and they're doing more to change the attitudes of Iraqis about the US than any propaganda machine the US is capable of running. If you want to see them succeed, if you want to see democracy flourish in the Mideast, then you should contribute to this cause. Click on the link below.

Update: While the fundraiser is now over, you can still contribute to Spirit of America here.

I don't know that this will be a series. To answer the question in full would take a long series of posts, and likely several years, but when I was discussing it with my small group on Monday, I explained how God kept surprising me with his "fittingness" (I checked: it's a real word). As I learn more about God, as I glimpse more and more of His mystery, the better everything fits in place, and the more I can say, "Of course, that's exactly as it should be." In some ways, it's like a scientific theory. A good theory should not only explain what we've observed, it should predict what we haven't observed yet, and new, even unexpected discoveries, should follow the theory, sometimes leading us to say, "Of course. We should have expected that." Here's one example, from my youth (I was probably 12 at the time):

I was pondering the question of why we call God "God." "God" isn't a name--it's not even a title--it's a classification. It's a hazy one, to be sure, having been applied to a wide range of immortal (and semi-immortal) beings with authority and influence over mortal events. Of course, I don't believe in any of those gods: Zeus, Odin, Moloch, or the like. And that, I suppose, is the reason why we simply call God "God." If there are lots of gods, you need names to tell them apart, just like we need names to distinguish us. But if there's only one god, he doesn't need a name, because there's no one to distinguish him from. Oh, that's no reason not to give him descriptive titles, which are peppered all through the Bible, titles such as the Lord of Hosts, the God who sees. All descriptive, none necessary to distinguish him. How cool, I thought. Of course God doesn't need a name.

Imagine my disappointment when I discovered God did have a name. Not a title or an appellation, but a formal name that he's claimed for himself. We know it by it's Latinized form, Jehovah, but the Hebrew, which was by the first century never pronounced aloud, is YHWH, also called the Tetragrammaton. The pronunciation would be something like Yahweh. If you have a King James Version Bible, everyplace you see LORD (in all caps), it's substituted for the Tetragrammaton (similar to what the Jews would do whenever they encountered the name while reading the scripture aloud). That discovery was disheartening to me. I suppose no one else will appreciate this, but in my mind it may God less, closer to the hundreds of national gods worshipped by the peoples appearing in the Old Testament.

That is, until I learned what YHWH meant. The name appears very early in the Bible, and is commonly used for God in Genesis, but it isn't until Moses asks God what he is called that we get an explanation:

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
(Exodus 3:14)

God's name means I AM. And suddenly I found my logic trumped. Not only does God not need a name, he doesn't even need a classification. It is enough that he exists, as he is the only thing which exists independently, self-subsistently. He is the origin of all other existence. God is, and the simple declaration of that fact is name enough for him.

I've found that most people are mightily unimpressed with this story: it doesn't prove anything. There are, in fact, other, less profound interpretations of what YHWH means. For me, though, it was an "Aha!" moment, one that showed me that God was greater than my expectations, greater than my philosophy predicted. But if God is real, if he is what I think he is, then isn't he greater than my imagination can predict? Only when the truth is revealed to me can I recognize its appropriateness. Going back to my scientific theory analogy, it's one more piece of evidence, unexpected but congruent with the theory: God is, and he has spoken to us.

Update: (4/26) I changed the name of this post from "Why I believe in God -- A small part of it, anyway" to "Why I believe in God: His Name." I figured a better name was worthwhile.

Old Post: My last post on this was here.

The Gerard Alexander talk was tonight at 8 pm. I took notes during the talk, of which these are a copy. Since they were taken as I listened, there may be some typos and such:

I can't speak for the audience as a whole, but the people directly in front of me are definitely hostile to the speaker. One guy says: "They’re not racist--they’re homophobic and racist...I’m here for a laugh. Maybe some of the individuals aren’t racist, but the party as a whole..." One girl says she's writing a paper about how the Republican party is inherently racist, and this is part of her research. I wonder if she has a clue what the talk is about. It doesn't sound like any of the people here have read the article.

I do intend to ask Ramesh's question if I get a chance. It's possible someone will beat me to it.

They're running late... it's already ten after and it hasn't started. Of course, I'm pretty sure Ralph Nader started late as well.

Okay, the MC is speaking--Noah, the chairman of CR.

Gerard Alexander is starting. He feels the need to defend himself against racism. He grew up in the US Virgin Islands, which is only 5-10% white. He found the way mainlanders dealt with race to be very different. While in the US, he and his friends from the Virgin Islands did their best to ignore race entirely.

He was surprised to find himself considered racist by association.

There is a strain of thought that the Republicans came to power by winning over the South, and they won it by becoming party of white solidarity, by pandering to white racists. The thinking is that the Republicans are defined by racism.

Many Republicans fear that there is some truth to this belief.

Dr. Alexander thinks the evidence for this is very poor. He thinks it relies on two kinds of evidence: the voting history of the South, and Republican policies on race issues.

The elections in the South. Basic history: South is not the only region with a history of racism, but it does have the strongest history of it, from slavery to segregation. For all of that time, voted solidly Democrat, including for progressive Democrats, who turned a blind eye to the racism of the Southern Democrats. During that time, Republicans most solidly supported civil rights, and had no voice in the South. After WW2, national Democrats broke with segregation, and Southern racists broke with Democrat party, looked for someone else. Voted for Thurmond, Goldwater, and Wallace. Thurmond and Wallace ran on states' rights, a codeword for segregation, and Goldwater did pander to Deep South, using the states' rights codeword. Winning the South is not chump change, and in the story, this is the sort of thing worth selling your soul for.

A couple of problems with that story. If the GOP did sell itself as party of white solidarity, should be able to make four predictions:
1. GOP should have made biggest inroads when and where the racial issue was strongest.
2. GOP should have a different voter profile in the South than its usual profile (educated, upper middle class), instead the Southern GOP profile should be that of the Wallace voters: lower middle class, less educated.
3. GOP should have been more popular among native Southerners than those who moved South.
4. GOP should, over time, have an older voter population, among those who were raised in more racist times.

None of these are true.

1. This is not the case. Republican party grew faster in Outer South rather than Deep South. Republican party started making progress in the South during Eisenhower’s time, when Republicans were the main supporters of civil rights laws. Eisenhower won the Outer South. The story looks much the same with Congressional elections. Goldwater is the exception, not the rule. [It looks like he answered Ramesh's question by conceding it.]
2. The Electoral Demographic of Republican voters in the South during this time are middle class, suburban, educated, the same as elsewhere.
3. Native Southerners vs. Immigrants -- In '60s, '70s, and '80s, the migrants self-identify as Republicans more than the native Southerners.
4. Into the 90s, the younger generations of Southerners identify themselves as Republicans more than the older ones.

Still, didn’t George Wallace's younger voters vote for Ronald Reagan? Does the fact that some of FDR's younger voters later vote for Wallace mean that FDR, and his policies, were racist?

They voted for Wallace in '68, and they didn't get anything. Nixon won without the segregationists in '68, by getting the Outer South--the Republicans demonstrated that they didn't need them. The segregationists had to settle, the same way the Naderites might have to settle for Kerry. Republicans didn't have to offer them much to get it.

The Emerging Republican Majority Kevin Phillips says that Republicans don't need to appeal to segregationists.

What about Republican Party's policies today? Does their policy use codewords? Goldwater used codewords. A policy is only a codeword if there's a legitimate position it also represents. If you think someone's using a code word, you have to discern between the legitimate and illegitimate.

If you don’t think opposing affirmative action is legitimate, then it's not a codeword--it's not hiding anything.

There's a difference between opposing a result (Blacks in good jobs), and between opposing the means (affirmative action). Difference between opposing Jews, and opposing Israel's policies.

Anti-welfare vs. anti-poor. We got welfare reform, didn't we? Many Democrats came around to the conservative view, that welfare was more harmful than not.

Anti-death penalty vs. pro-crime. Have to separate means from results

Questions:
1. Were the whites who moved to the South from the North more racists than those who stayed behind?
No evidence of that.

2. Is there so much accusation of Republicans for being racist?
Read The New York Times.

3. Now the Deep South is more Republican than the Outer South.
Now that it’s less segregationist, they’re more Republican. Why is this a problem?

4. Industrial-prison complex is racist.
Don’t know enough.

5. Republicans may look racist because they tend to go for upper middle class vote, not where Blacks are. So they tend not to be responsive to the Black vote. Need an alternative to affirmative action rather than just getting rid of it.
True enough. [At a later point he says that's what's necessary to improve the lot of Blacks--the alternative of Affirmative Action--is (1) Improving K-12 schools, (2) Making it possible for them to go to college, etc. There was more, but I don't remember the specifics.]

6. Why did Reagan start in South? Why do Republicans still use the codewords, if they’re not racist? Have the segregationists had an influence on Republicans, like they did on FDR in the New Deal?
Had to take the South, from Jimmy Carter. Because they are good words. Yes, racists have had an influence on the Republicans, and on the Democrats.

7. Why did Blacks move toward the Democratic party? Why do southerners locally vote for Democrats and nationally for Republicans?
Democrats spoke better for civil rights, but more than that, spoke better for the economic desires of Blacks. Many Blacks voted for Wallace when he dropped his segregationist platform. Southern Democrats are more conservative than national Democrats, so Southern voters are more promiscuous with their votes.

8. Why is there still racism? How does popular culture foster racism?
Don't think it's indigenous to human beings. Reflect on human history and realize how far we’ve come. Slavery and racism have a really long history. Look after September 11th, and how little violence happened. Popular culture has done more to lessen racism than to increase it.

9. But there’s still racism. Those who don’t grow up around Blacks are more racist, so the Northerners are really more racist than the Southerners.
[This sounds more like an argument that the Democrats are the racists.]

10. Republican policies are not intentionally racist, but are they that way in effect?
Certainly possible, but need to discuss specifics.

11. Why did George Bush speak at Bob Jones University?
He shouldn’t have. Many politicians flirt with people they shouldn’t. Democrats and anti-Semitism [Farrakhan?].

12. Covert racism better than overt. As long as we aren't acting it out, is it really better?
Deal with problems individually. We’re underestimating how far we’ve come, most of it not by state regulation, but by cultural development. Of course there's more to do, but we need to take a hard look at the best way to do it.

13. When Democrats supported civil rights, did segregationists go Republican?
First went for the segregationist party. In '64, went for Goldwater, who was more segregationist than the Republicans as a whole (one of only 2? Republicans to vote against the civil rights act). Threw in the towel by '72, and went for Nixon.

I've added an image at the top of the page, something I think is appropriate to this blog's title. The equation shown, by the way, is the energy of a simple harmonic oscillator, where n is an integer from 0 and infinity, indicating the energy level. I'd also like to add an icon, but I'm having trouble creating it.

Update: The icon should be working now.

Don't forget to contribute to Spirit of America. Click the link below.

Update: While the fundraiser is now over, you can still contribute to Spirit of America here.

Old Post: My post about Gerard Alexander's talk at Rochester is below.

Dean Esmay has picked up on Gerard Alexander's essay. Of course, I've been blogging about it since it was first mentioned on the Corner. I'll be attending a talk given by him at the University of Rochester tomorrow night.

New Post: My blogging of Gerard Alexander's talk is above.

The blogwar, that is. At least three blog alliances have formed in a contest to see who can raise the most money for Spirit of America, an organization which raises money to support charitable projects run by our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. I've joined the Liberty Alliance, run by Dean Esmay of Dean's World. If you'd like to contribute, supporting our troops (and, incidentally, the Liberty Alliance), please click on the link that will be appearing at the bottom of every post for the next ten days.

Update: While the fundraiser is now over (and I've removed the link at the bottom of every post), you can still contribute to Spirit of America here.

I first read about holographic storage around 1990. The idea is that you can store information in three-dimensions in a crystalline material which you can both write to and read from by crossing two laser beams and writing with their interference pattern. The two beams are a reference beam and a data beam, patterned by a 2-D mask, and storing that image in a light sensitive material. The reference beam can then read the data by projecting the data image on a photosensitive array. By changing the frequency or angle of incidence of the reference beam, you can store multiple 2-D data masks in the same block of material, multiplexing the images together and reading them out individually, vastly increasing the amount you can store.

Back in 1990, I was looking forward to when holographic storage was available on every desktop. Of course, that day's still not here, and I was wondering what had happened to it. Well, it hasn't gone away entirely, and there are companies still working on it. Via MIT's Technology Review (not available without a subscription, I'm afraid):

You could store a whole lot of stuff on a one-terabyte computer disc--say a million novels, 250,000 MP3 song files, or hundreds of full-length movies. A Lucent Technologies spin-off is hoping to bring you that kind of capacity using a long-talked-about technology: holographic storage, in which a laser records data in three dimensions on a polymer medium. The technology can store up to 300 times as much data as traditional optical drives of the same physical size, and the startup, Longmont, CO-based InPhase Technologies, says it will start selling the holographic drives next year.

Unfortunately, it's not yet rewritable, although InPhase hopes it will be in a couple of years. And even then commercial availability looks to be four years away, and these estimates tend to be optimistic. InPhase Technology has a website, and the explanation of how holographic storage works is here.

Doc Rampage has this to say about one-time pads:

The problem with one-time pads is that the pad contains as much information as the message and it requires a fully secure channel because if anyone can intercept the pad, he can easily decrypt the message. If you have a fully secure channel with enough bandwidth for the pad, why not use it to send the message? One-time pads are really only useful when you have two channels, one secure and one insecure, and you don't always have the secure channel available. Usually the non-secure channel is a wide-area network and the secure channel is some guy on a plane carrying a CD. In these cases, you can use the secure channel to send the pads whenever you can and you use the non-secure but faster, more reliable, or more widely available channel to send the messages.

This seems like the perfect time to talk about quantum cryptography, or as it's more accurately known, quantum key distribution, which proves once again that there's an exception to every rule, and it's quantum mechanics. The idea is to distribute some amount of data which will be used as the key to encrypt the message you want to send. So this data you exchange, the key, is the equivalent of a one-time pad, distributed securely. Why not just send the message this way? Well, as we'll see, QKD is very inefficient, and only a quarter of the data gets through, which would be pretty useless if you were sending message data. It's also vulnerable to eavesdropping; the trick is that you can tell when it's being eavesdropped.

Let's say you have a public channel, which can be eavesdropped. One party, Alice, wants to send a message to another party, Bob, but is worried that it could be eavesdropped by a third party, Eve. (These are the standard names used in the quantum key distribution literature.) However, this channel is capable of carrying not just regular bits, but also qubits. This is simple enough to imagine, since sending individual photons in essence sends qubits down the channel. Photons also make it easier to explain how the process works, so we'll stick with that. Alice's photons are linearly polarized, in 4 different directions, 0 degrees, 90 degrees, 45 degrees, and 135 degrees. If you use a polarizing filter, then orthogonal light can't get through the filter. If your filter is at 0 degrees, then the photon doesn't get through if it's at 90 degrees. However, due to the magic of quantum mechanics, a photon polarized at 45 or 135 degrees has a fifty percent change of getting through since you can decompose it into a 0 degree and a 90 degree component. Similarly, a 45 degree filter will block 135 degree polarized photons, but pass 50% of the 0 and 90 degree photons. There's no way to tell what the original polarization was. If you have a 0 degree polarizing filter, and a photon gets through to your detector on the other side, then it may have been polarized at 0 degrees, or it could have been polarized at 45 or 135. If the photon is blocked, then it may have been polarized at 90 degrees, or at 45 or 135. So we have two sets of two polarizations which are orthogonal to one another (0-90 and 45-135) but not orthogonal to the other set.

Alice takes a string of random bits, a, and decides on the polarization from a equal-length string of random bits b. For the kth bit in each string, if a(k)b(k) is 00, then she sends a photon polarized at 90 degrees. If a(k)b(k)=10, she sends a photon polarized at 0 degrees. Using a 0 degree polarizing filter with a photodetector on the other side, measuring a photon indicates that a(k) is 1 and measuring no photon indicates that a(k) is 0. If a(k)b(k) is 01, the photon Alice sends is at 135 degrees, and if a(k)b(k) is 11, the photon is at 45 degrees. So if b(k) is 0, the photon should be measured with the 0 degree filter, if b(k) is 1, it should be measured with the 45 degree filter. However, neither Bob nor Eve have any way of knowing this. Instead, Bob randomly chooses the filter with which to measure, using random string b'. The results of the measurement gives a string of a'. If there's an eavesdropper, Eve, she can also try to measure it, but there's no way to measure a photon and then send it to Bob. It's also not possible to copy a photon exactly and measure the copy. Eve could try measuring the photon by guessing at the correct polarization, then send a new photon to Bob based on her guess. If she guessed that the photon would be either 0 or 90 degrees and used a 0 degree filter, she could send Bob a new photon at either 0 or 90 degrees based on her measurement, and if she had guessed correctly, the photon would be at the correct angle. However, if she guessed incorrectly, it would be at the wrong angle. If Bob also measures with the 0 degree filter, it won't make much difference, so if Alice, Bob, and Eve all used the same polarization (a 1 in 4 chance), Eve would have successfully eavesdropped. If Bob measures with a 45 degree filter and the original photon was in the 45-135 set, while Eve measured and resent at 0 degrees, then there's only a 50% chance he'll get the correct value.

Once Bob tells Alice he's gotten the message, the two compare their b and b' strings. This is done publically, so Eve can hear what's being said. They then toss out all the bits where b and b' disagree, where Bob measured at a different polarization than Alice sent, since for each of those bits a(j)=a'(j) only 50% of the time. All the remaining bits should agree. So next they randomly choose about half the remaining bits to compare. There'll probably be some errors just due to the difficulty of sending single photons over long distances, but if the error rate exceeds a certain threshold, then they can know that someone's been eavesdropping on their communication. In that case, they can scratch the attempt and try again. (However, if Eve was smart, she may have eavesdropped only a small number bits, thus settling for a partial key while keeping below the threshold error rate.) If they decide they weren't eavesdropped, they need to correct for errors in the transmission by information reconciliation. Information reconciliation is a form of error correction, doing parity checking on random subsets of the shared string (a and a'), discarding the last bit each time so that Eve gains no new information (a parity check of a set of bits sums all the 1s and determines whether the result is odd or even; any single bit in a set can change its parity, so if you discard a bit without disclosing its value, you reveal no new information by revealing a set's parity). The subsets are chosen to be small enough so that each is unlikely to contain more than one error, and if an error is found, the subset is bissected and the parities checked again until the error is located. This is done repeatedly, with different, randomly chosen subsets, to negate mistakes caused by selecting subsets where an even number of errors may have given a false parity check. Let's say this is done, but Eve still has some information about the key--not a lot, else they would have detected her. Information reconciliation neither increases nor decreases the amount of information Eve has, since if you discard a bit she knew, she then learns what the parity of the remainder of the subset is. Privacy amplification reduces the information available to Eve, even if she's intercepted some information, while reducing the total number of bits in the key. One way of doing this would be to publically select a permutation of the remaining bits in a=a' (without sharing any of the values), then divide it into blocks of a certain size, and using the parity of each block to form the new key. This is a pretty inefficient way of doing it, where the total number of bits in the new key, r, equals the original number of bits divided by the block size. However, it drastically reduces the amount of information that Eve has, since Eve only knows the parity of a block when she has all the bits in it. There are more efficient functions, but the smaller the final key is compared to its original length, the less information available to Eve, even if she managed to get some information from eavesdropping.

The remaining bits form the key, which can then be used to encrypt the message Alice wants to send. Depending on degree of privacy amplification (how much you're willing to reduce the key size) and the error threshold (how many errors you'll accept before concluding that someone's eavesdropping), the distributed key can be made arbitrarily secure.

One thing you'll notice right away is that QKD is very inefficient. Even before information reconciliation and privacy amplification, you're down to about one-fourth the number of bits you started with. However, you can't expect any provably secure communication over a public channel to be efficient. This form of quantum cryptography (there are others, different in details but similar in concept) has been demonstrated in a lab environment, and at distances of up to 100 km. This particular application of quantum information is in the early stages of commercial application.

I didn't write all of this from memory, although I have studied it before. I needed to look up the details, so I used Nielsen and Chuang's Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, and this useful website.

Update: Doc Rampage gives a... uh, simpler explanation. Also, I edited for clarity.