If you've read my previous posts you know that I consider America to be the best place in the world to live in. One thing that separates us from other nations is the ability it gives people to succeed. Let me offer an example. You've probably seen the TV show American Idol, or at least heard of it. People compete on this show for an opportunity to become a pop-music star, with a record contract and all the trimmings. Everyone who auditions does so with dreams of success. Some people back those dreams with considerable talent, others with much less. Still, anyone who shows up can audition. I could audition, and I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. If I were to show up to audition I wouldn't be turned away because my parents weren't singers, or because I didn't study singing at the right school. I'd be sent away because I don't sing well. I'd fail, but the only thing standing between me and success would be my own ability.
Some societies force people to be mediocre, to stay as close as possible to the average. People in such societies are forced into a washed-out pastel existence on a faded great background. There are few failures and just as few successes.
We, on the other hand, reward success and we give people the chance to succeed. That chance to succeed is also the chance to fail, because you can't succeed if you don't risk failure. We give people buckets of vibrant, brightly colored paint and a pure white canvas to paint on. Sometimes the results are beautiful, sometimes terrible, but seldom dull and lifeless.
If you want to understand our typically American attitude toward success you could do worse than to read some things that Thomas A. Edison said on the topic. Edison was, of course, one of the most successful inventors in America (which tends to make him one of the most successful inventors in the entire world). He describes success as one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. He said at one point that he hadn't failed, he merely found ten thousand ways to do something that didn't work. He said he knew five thousand ways NOT to build a light bulb. Perhaps most poigantly, he said that most people fail because they didn't realize how close they were to success when they stopped trying.
Once you've eliminated actual barriers to success (for instance Michael Jordan could NEVER be a great jockey no matter how hard he tried) the rest comes down to ability and hard work. If you want to succeed at something, if you have the basic ability to do it, and if you have the will to work hard enough to make it happen you can do so. If that's not a recommendation for the way we do things I don't know what is.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Friday, March 10, 2006
The Dubai Ports Deal
I don't normally comment too much on current events, especially current political events, but I'll make an exception here.
If you haven't been paying attention, there was a proposal to turn over control of a number of major American shipping ports to a company run by the government of the United Arab Emerites (UAE). This caused concern for a great many people (yours truly included) due to the possibility of a large-scale weapon entering the port in a shipping container. Opposition to this was pretty much bi-partisan, except that the president supported the deal. Now, I thought I had our president pretty-well figured out, whatever else he is or isn't he's tough on terrorism. His support for this deal amazed me, I just couldn't understand it.
I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories. If your only proof for something is that it might have happened and no one can prove it didn't, well frankly that's just not good enough for me. I also think that GWB, whatever his flaws, has a deep love for America and doesn't want to see it harmed. (If you don't believe this, you may as well click to another site now.) So I'm left with the conclusion that the Dubai deal wasn't a bad thing for the nation, but I just couldn't see how that could be. When I read that President Bush had "bowed to the pressure of Republican lawmakers to call off the deal" it hit me. The answer is politics.
No one in the White House is going any further. President Bush can't run again. VP Cheney will probably retire at the end of his term (if not bef0re). They have nothing to lose by taking an unpopular stance, approval ratings for the President and Vice President are completely meaningless. However, the mid-term elections are coming up, a number of Congressmen and Senators are coming up for re-election. If the President takes an unpopular stand that allows those lawmakers coming up for re-election to take a popular stand, and not long before the 2006 elections. I don't think this deal was ever meant to go thru, but the opposition had to come from people who could benefit from it.
So President Bush takes one for the team, it doesn't do him any harm, and it gives his fellow Republican lawmakers the opportunity to look good, to apparently go against the President, and to come out as being tough on terrorism. Democrats, on the other hand, had to take a calculated stand since this is the same party that opposes racial profiling, and opposition to the ports deal looks an awful lot like racial profiling.
If I'm right about this (and I'll probably never find out for sure) this was a politically brilliant move, let people who have nothing to lose be unpopular, let your own folks take a popular stand, and let the other side have to decide which group of constituents to alienate. Like I said, brilliant.
If you haven't been paying attention, there was a proposal to turn over control of a number of major American shipping ports to a company run by the government of the United Arab Emerites (UAE). This caused concern for a great many people (yours truly included) due to the possibility of a large-scale weapon entering the port in a shipping container. Opposition to this was pretty much bi-partisan, except that the president supported the deal. Now, I thought I had our president pretty-well figured out, whatever else he is or isn't he's tough on terrorism. His support for this deal amazed me, I just couldn't understand it.
I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theories. If your only proof for something is that it might have happened and no one can prove it didn't, well frankly that's just not good enough for me. I also think that GWB, whatever his flaws, has a deep love for America and doesn't want to see it harmed. (If you don't believe this, you may as well click to another site now.) So I'm left with the conclusion that the Dubai deal wasn't a bad thing for the nation, but I just couldn't see how that could be. When I read that President Bush had "bowed to the pressure of Republican lawmakers to call off the deal" it hit me. The answer is politics.
No one in the White House is going any further. President Bush can't run again. VP Cheney will probably retire at the end of his term (if not bef0re). They have nothing to lose by taking an unpopular stance, approval ratings for the President and Vice President are completely meaningless. However, the mid-term elections are coming up, a number of Congressmen and Senators are coming up for re-election. If the President takes an unpopular stand that allows those lawmakers coming up for re-election to take a popular stand, and not long before the 2006 elections. I don't think this deal was ever meant to go thru, but the opposition had to come from people who could benefit from it.
So President Bush takes one for the team, it doesn't do him any harm, and it gives his fellow Republican lawmakers the opportunity to look good, to apparently go against the President, and to come out as being tough on terrorism. Democrats, on the other hand, had to take a calculated stand since this is the same party that opposes racial profiling, and opposition to the ports deal looks an awful lot like racial profiling.
If I'm right about this (and I'll probably never find out for sure) this was a politically brilliant move, let people who have nothing to lose be unpopular, let your own folks take a popular stand, and let the other side have to decide which group of constituents to alienate. Like I said, brilliant.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
God and Free Will
This entry grew as a side-issue to part 2 of my Science and Faith entry which I'm still laboring at. If nothing else my labors there have provided ideas for more entries.
If you believe in God you've probably encountered the argument, advanced by someone trying to convince you of the non-existence of God, that belief in God is incompatible with belief in free will. The argument usually goes something like "Does God know everything" to you which you reply "Yes". "So God knows what you're going to do tomorrow?" "Yes" "Therefore you don't have free will, since what you're going to do has already been determined! You either have free will and God doesn't exist, or God exists and controls everything you do!"
In Einstein's view of the universe time is a dimension, just like the three dimensions of space. You understand this in a practical sense too, when you're approaching a road intersection you don't worry about whether a car went thru the intersection ten minutes ago, or whether one will go thru ten minutes from now, you concern yourself with whether another car will be in the intersection at the same time your car is because that's what causes a traffic accident.
Let's assume that you have free will. You carry a chair into a house and, using your free will, you place it someplace in the three-dimensional space within that house. I walk in afterward and observe where you've placed the chair. Does my observation of where you placed the chair mean that you didn't exercise free will in placing it there? People are capable of moving around in three-dimensional space fairly freely, but we can only move thru the fourth dimension of time in one direction, from past to future, and we MUST move thru it, we can't make it stand still.
God, on the other hand, is an Eternal Being. That doesn't just mean He lives for a very long time, or even an infinite time. It means He exists OUTSIDE of time. He can move freely thru the dimension of time as easily as we move thru the three dimensions of space. He can look forward in time as far as He wishes to see what happens. As a matter of fact if He wants to know what I'll do tomorrow He MUST look forward in time to see what I'll do, since because I have free will the only way He can find out is thru observation.
If I may be permitted a digression, this ability of God to move thru time as He wishes has ramifications in our prayer life. Suppose someone I care for is scheduled to have surgery at 2:00 in the afternoon. I decide that at lunch time that day I'll find a quite place to pray for a successful operation, so at noon I leave my office where I'm likely to be distracted and go to my chosen place to pray. When I return I have a voice mail telling the that early that morning the surgery was rescheduled to 9:00 am and was over even before I began to pray. Was my prayer wasted? It was not, because God could move ahead to noontime to hear my prayer, then move back to 9:00 to apply my prayers to the surgery.
Free will is an essential aspect of our relationship with God. The only way we can love someone is to be free not to, that goes for each other, and it goes for us loving God too. There have been plenty of movies made about what happens when someone gives someone else a love potion, it's generally unsatisfying for the person who gave the potion precisely because the other person wasn't free not to fall in love. If you look around you'll see a great many people who have no love for God. That's the price God is willing to pay in order that some people will love Him freely.
If you believe in God you've probably encountered the argument, advanced by someone trying to convince you of the non-existence of God, that belief in God is incompatible with belief in free will. The argument usually goes something like "Does God know everything" to you which you reply "Yes". "So God knows what you're going to do tomorrow?" "Yes" "Therefore you don't have free will, since what you're going to do has already been determined! You either have free will and God doesn't exist, or God exists and controls everything you do!"
In Einstein's view of the universe time is a dimension, just like the three dimensions of space. You understand this in a practical sense too, when you're approaching a road intersection you don't worry about whether a car went thru the intersection ten minutes ago, or whether one will go thru ten minutes from now, you concern yourself with whether another car will be in the intersection at the same time your car is because that's what causes a traffic accident.
Let's assume that you have free will. You carry a chair into a house and, using your free will, you place it someplace in the three-dimensional space within that house. I walk in afterward and observe where you've placed the chair. Does my observation of where you placed the chair mean that you didn't exercise free will in placing it there? People are capable of moving around in three-dimensional space fairly freely, but we can only move thru the fourth dimension of time in one direction, from past to future, and we MUST move thru it, we can't make it stand still.
God, on the other hand, is an Eternal Being. That doesn't just mean He lives for a very long time, or even an infinite time. It means He exists OUTSIDE of time. He can move freely thru the dimension of time as easily as we move thru the three dimensions of space. He can look forward in time as far as He wishes to see what happens. As a matter of fact if He wants to know what I'll do tomorrow He MUST look forward in time to see what I'll do, since because I have free will the only way He can find out is thru observation.
If I may be permitted a digression, this ability of God to move thru time as He wishes has ramifications in our prayer life. Suppose someone I care for is scheduled to have surgery at 2:00 in the afternoon. I decide that at lunch time that day I'll find a quite place to pray for a successful operation, so at noon I leave my office where I'm likely to be distracted and go to my chosen place to pray. When I return I have a voice mail telling the that early that morning the surgery was rescheduled to 9:00 am and was over even before I began to pray. Was my prayer wasted? It was not, because God could move ahead to noontime to hear my prayer, then move back to 9:00 to apply my prayers to the surgery.
Free will is an essential aspect of our relationship with God. The only way we can love someone is to be free not to, that goes for each other, and it goes for us loving God too. There have been plenty of movies made about what happens when someone gives someone else a love potion, it's generally unsatisfying for the person who gave the potion precisely because the other person wasn't free not to fall in love. If you look around you'll see a great many people who have no love for God. That's the price God is willing to pay in order that some people will love Him freely.
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