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  • The Old Prohibition Against Movies Makes a Comeback

    Just about anyone raised in a Pentecostal or Holiness church in the last century will recall the prohibition of going to movies.  The traditional argument against this was that, if one went to the movies and paid the admission price one was supporting the sinful Hollywood people and companies who made them.

    That argument just about went by the wayside, but conservative gay blogger Kevin Dujan has brought it back with a new twist:

    I don’t like giving movie studios my money, though…because I feel like when I do that I help fund the people who inflict so much damage on this country by way of hammering the Left’s talking points into impressionable Americans.  Let’s face it, the way that Democrats maintain power is by way of the Ministry of Truth that is our “news media”, the Ministry of Entertainment that is “Hollywood”, and the Ministry of Persuasion that’s comprised of all federal agencies such as the IRS that are controlled by Democrats and abuse their authority or otherwise persecute and intimidate Americans. I know that movie theaters actually don’t make any money off the ticket sales to first-run films…and instead depend on concession sales to stay in business; all ticket sales go to the movie distributors, so buying a movie ticket sends that cash to Hollywood and then gets redistributed back to the Democrat party and its Leftist masters.  I enjoy limiting the amount of cash I contribute to that revenue stream.

    One friend of mine from Texas, who later went on to become a Church of God minister and state overseer, found a way to beat the system.  Raised in a rough environment, his mother was saved when he was a teenager.  She told him the usual Holiness reason why people shouldn’t go to movies.  His response? He had fixed the cash flow problem by his deft ability to sneak in without paying!

  • Going Around and Coming Around on Paedophilia

    George Conger defends the relevance of 1960’s paedophilia advocate Daniel Cohn-Bendit in a religion blog:

    What makes this a Get Religion story is the context of the European press environment. I am not defending or excusing the Catholic Church. I am however pointing out inconsistencies and double standards in media coverage.

    The attack, of course, is the beliefs of one European politician don’t compare to the paedophilia epidemic in the Roman Catholic Church.  But that rebuttal won’t wash either.

    To start with, it isn’t just one politician; it’s a whole movement from the era, as I observed in this 2010 post re the French.  Conger only adds grist to the mill by bringing up the German Green Party’s advocacy of man-boy love in the 1980’s.  The left has been busy burying their past on this (and other issues) since, but that doesn’t mean it never happened.

    Some would like to think that stuff from so long ago is irrelevant, but it’s not.  Sexual freedom was the leitmotif of the 1960’s and 1970’s left and has remained this way ever since.  That’s why abortion is so sacramental to the left, as we were recently reminded with the media’s attempt to ignore Kermit Gosnell’s trial.  That’s why liberals are apoplectic over abstinence advocacy.

    The result has been the ever-expanding sexualisation of our society.  One of the effects of this is to push down the age at which sexual awareness is recognised, a process which both cultural and biological changes have facilitated.  Leftists in the 1960’s were consistent enough to understand that across the board sexual liberation ultimately included paedophilia, but later developments shoved that, to use a phrase, back into the closet.

    And that brings us to the Roman Catholic Church.  It’s entirely correct to attack the Church both on the paedophilia scandal and the way they’ve attempted to cover it up and not to weed the offenders out.  What has always bothered me is that the same left-wing people who have pushed this campaign so hard will eventually rediscover their intellectual antecedents, turn around and, once they’ve damaged the Church over this, argue for its sanction in society.

    In a sense its like the business of marijuana legalisation: belief in that was the fashionable thing to do in the day, but there was a reaction.  We turned around and filled our prisons to try to stop the habit we unleashed on the world, and only now are we getting around to legalising it by fits and starts.  The biggest obstacle in this country to “finishing the job” is that the Occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, himself the leader of the “Choom Gang” in his own day, won’t let his inner pothead out.

    Discounting the relevance of 1960’s and 1970’s radicalism, given the enormous effect it’s had on subsequent events and the fact that many of the players from the era are prominent in ours, is a mistake.  As Andreas Killen sagely pointed out at the end of his book 1973 Nervous Breakdown:

    Yet the crises of the 1970’s are not so easily buried; indeed they have reemerged with new intensity in our own time.

    Indeed they have.

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  • IRS Investigations Politically Motivated? Better Than I Expected!

    One of the strangest responses I ever got to an “ordinary” question took place in Target one night, where my wife and I ran into the daughter of a friend who is an official in our church.  She was with her new husband; like us she had taken a long time to marry.  So we asked her the obvious dumb question “How is married life?”

    Her response: “Better than I expected.”  That left us speechless.

    These days the discover that the Internal Revenue Service had conducted politically motivated investigations and audits has left a few others speechless:

    On Friday a second-tier IRS official told a gathering of tax lawyers the IRS had engaged in discriminatory audits against conservative groups. The initial story from the AP wire reported that the IRS admitted its mistake, but the mistake was an innocent one…

    As a few have pointed out, this is no different from what got Richard Nixon impeached.  All of this is true, but did you guys really think that we were electing a bunch of Boy Scouts to the White House in 2008? (Their soon to be jettisoned policy over gay scouts should have given you a clue…)

    I did not, as I opined right after Obama’s big victory speech in Chicago after that fateful vote:

    Finally, as I have said before, Barack Obama’s first task is to consolidate his power and that of his party, through such moves as:

    • Reinstitution of the “Fairness Doctrine”
    • Packing the judiciary with élite judges who look at the world through his idea
    • Hate crimes legislation, designed to silence opponents
    • Changes in voter registration requirements (although the expansion of the electorate wasn’t as big of a factor in Obama’s victory as many anticipated)
    • Show trials and congressional hearings of political opponents (Bush, Cheney, etc.)
    • Gerrymandering of House districts in the 2010 reapportionment
    • Patronage through social entitlements

    Some of this list was (especially the gerrymandering, as Obama’s mandate hasn’t filtered down to the states the way it looked like it would) above Obama’s pay grade, to use his famous phrase.  But, knowing Obama’s intellectual pedigree, it made sense to me that the quickest way to consolidate his rule and make sure Republicans didn’t happen in the White House any more was to use the arsenal of laws at his disposal to diminish his opposition.  Instead he wasted his political capital on Obamacare.

    Nevertheless he did engage in some administrative heavy-handedness.  We should not be surprised.  Whether the circled wagons of our élite media will protect him on this one–or whether they will abandon him–remains to be seen.  The only reason the latter would take place is because he had the bad taste to target Jewish groups, and that’s never a good idea.

  • Advice to Graduates: Every Wing has a Leading Edge and a Trailing Edge

    One of the diciest spectacles we have in education these days is the rush to apply technology to the process.  Our school systems are spending enormous amounts of money to equip students with the latest gadget (these days, it’s a tablet) and make sure they know how to run these things.  Textbook publishers are rushing to put students into e-textbooks, which are great until:

    1. Your open book tests do not allow internet capable devices (mine don’t);
    2. You realise the digital rights management (DRM) doesn’t let you resell the book, which means that you’ve just spent more on the e-textbook then you would have if you had bought and resold the paper one; or
    3. Someone steals the tablet you’ve been issued, DRM following.

    A lot of this push comes from Boomer administrators and educators who are a) mercifully retiring and b) in a complete panic over technology in general.  For them, the on/off switch on desktops was a complete mystery, to say nothing about the little dimple at the bottom of their iPhone/iPad.  Much of their push re technology is done without a clear understanding of how it works, which is one reason why it’s an uphill battle to get students to learn how to code (which, in turn, would enhance everyone’s understanding of how computers really work).

    Boomers come up with all kinds of buzzwords to hide their ignorance on many points.  One of them is their insistence upon things, people and organisations being “leading edge”.  Once again, this is the mantra of a generation who is scared to brown pants about being left behind.  This has also oozed into the church world.

    My first job was in the aerospace industry, designing what you see above, and that the year Star Wars came out.  I had never had much exposure to aircraft outside of flying around in them, although I learned later that my grandfather (right) was a different story altogether.  One of the first revelations was that a) the term “leading edge” refers to the “front” edge of a wing and b) wings have both leading and trailing edges, both of which are important to the flight of the aircraft or missile or whatever.  (I’m still tangentially involved with aerospace people, and you can see how they show leading and trailing edges of wings work here).

    Today we’re obsessed with being “leading edge” or “cutting edge”.  But the trailing edge has its place too.  Technology has transformed just about every aspect of productive work (and unproductive work too) but one can have a career in some stuff that would be classified as “trailing edge”.  My family business was decidedly in that group, but we were in the middle of an industry which was (and still is) very advanced in its technology and vital in its product, if not politically correct.  It took me a long time to grasp that it was really OK and, of course, I doubt most manufactured products have examples that are still in their original use after a century or more.  My teaching field (geotechnical engineering) always seems to lag the rest of civil engineering in the application of new techniques, but rare is the structure that does not rest on the foundation.  And the reason for the lag is simple: with the many uncertainties of any earth science, the price of failure (especially in our legal environment) is very high.

    For success, we must have a place on the wing, so to speak.  Sometimes that means moving from one edge to another (that’s not uncommon with computer people) but having that place takes more than following the latest trend or parroting the latest buzzword.  It takes planning, long-term planning, and in the short-term emotionalism that characterises American thinking, that’s not easy to break away from the crowd and do.

    The current decline of the personal computer is well-known.  One ministry friend noted that content generators prefer the PC while content consumers go for the tablets.  That’s true, so the question is this: will you be a generator, or simply a consumer?  Long-term success will be difficult if all you do is find yourself in the latter mode.  But unfortunately the “gee-whiz” approach we take to science and technology encourages that, and it’s a recipe for failure.

    We can be on the leading edge, we can be on the trailing edge, or somewhere between, but the key is that we take flight.  As was noted at the beginning of the greatest adventure in history:

    No sooner had Jesus said this than he was caught up before their eyes, and a cloud received him from their sight. While they were still gazing up into the heavens, as he went, suddenly two men, clothed in white, stood beside them, And said: “Men of Galilee, why are you standing here looking up* into the heavens? This very Jesus, who has been taken from you into the heavens, will come in the very way in which you have seen him go into the heavens.” Then the Apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called Olivet, which is about three-quarters of a mile from the city. (Acts 1:9-12)

    *I would have said “looking stupid” but the men (really angels) were more charitable than I would have been.

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  • They're Still Called Illegal Immigrants in Palm Beach

    And they don’t stand much of a chance, either:

    Palm Beach police picked up five illegal immigrants shortly after 5 a.m. Thursday at the corner of Hammon Avenue and South Ocean Boulevard, police spokesman Fred Hess said.

    Evidently the politically correct terminology has not quite penetrated this enclave.

    I think it should be noted, however, that one of the standing aims of the place is to keep riff-raff of all kinds off of the island, whether they have legal status in this country or not.  It just happens to be easier when they don’t.  Just wait until we get internal passports…

  • Determining the Characteristic Polynomial of the Companion Matrix by Use of a Large Matrix

    Most proofs of the characteristic polynomial of the companion matrix–an important specific case–proceed by induction, and start with a 2\times2 matrix.  It strikes me that an inductive proof has more force (or at least makes more sense) if a larger matrix is used.  In this case we will use a “large” (numerical analysts will laugh at this characterisation) 10\times10 matrix.

    Let us begin by making a notation change. Consider the general polynomial

    For this to be monic (one of the requirements for the polynomial in question) we should divide by the last coefficient, thus

    Our object is thus to prove that this (or a variation of this, as we will see) is the characteristic polynomial of

    The characteristic polynomial of this is the determinant of the following:

    (For another application of the characteristic polynomial and the companion matrix, click here.)

    To find the determinant, we expand along the first row. But then we discover that only two minors that matter: the one in the upper left corner and the one in the upper right. Breaking this up into minors and cofactors yields the following:

    The second matrix, however, is an upper triangular matrix with ones for all of its diagonal entries. Its determinant, therefore, is unity. Also rewriting the coefficient of the second term, we have

    or

    Repeating this process for the next set of minors and cofactors yields

    Note carefully the inclusion of -\lambda in the second term. We can also write this as

    Repeating this process until the end, it is easy to see that

    or more generally

    where n is the degree of the polynomial (and the size of the companion matrix.) If we drop the terms we used to make the polynomial monic, we have at last

  • Advice to Graduates: The Importance of an Objective

    It’s that time of the year again, when some students turn into wage-earners, others just move on to another curriculum, and still others just tank.  Once the mediaeval outfits return to the closet while some who just came out of the closet try to push others they don’t like into the closet, college faculty are generally saddled with the task of documenting their work for accreditation agencies.

    Thinking about that turns me back to my last degree pursuit, and the course in Statically Indeterminate Structures.  It was my first structural course past the very basics (my first degree was in Mechanical Engineering, where I specialised in machine design).  But it was indeterminate in more ways that structurally; the professor’s MO struck me as bizarre.  After years of textbook/problems/tests, there was none of that here.  His treatment of topics reminded me of a 1960’s art movie; no plot, and no clear connection between one scene and the next. He had no textbook, just notes which appeared on the overhead projector.  Homework consisted in substantial projects whose due dates were flexible; you worked and worked until the incomplete disappeared.

    I despaired of learning anything (my father dying in the middle of course didn’t help) but I really did.  There was method in his madness; I am a better engineer for the effort.  As the department head, he made two more decisions which went against the grain.  When his only other full-time professor retired, he brought in one full-time professor (now department head) and me as an adjunct.  Both of us had our primary experience in the offshore oil industry, and this in a landlocked state!

    Getting back to the accreditation progress, one of the requirements of our discipline specific accreditation organisation (in our case ABET) was that we develop an objective for our college.  True to form, my professor said that we could develop any objective, down to and including becoming the worst engineering school in the country.  Once again that struck me as bizarre, but after reflection I realised he was right, because if we had an objective to be the worst engineering school in the country, we wouldn’t be that worst school!  The programs with no goals would do that!

    The point of this strange diatribe is that having an objective, a goal, is essential to success in life, no matter how you define success.  To start with you can’t succeed at anything if you have no criteria for success, and an objective gives you that criterion.  Beyond that, as with ABET, having a goal–any goal–will put you ahead of everyone else that doesn’t have a goal, and that’s a large set of people these days.

    There’s a lot of debate these days about why people raised in the upper stratum of society have the best shot of ending up there themselves.  We speak of more stable family structure, better educational opportunities, better mental stimulus, etc.  But my experience teaches me that underlying all that is that people raised in expensive zip codes are given goals in life and then pushed to make them reality.  Sometimes it doesn’t work; the goals given are unrealistic, unsuited for the subject, or just plain worthless.  But the combination of being raised at the top and having a purposeless life almost never happens, especially these days.

    Down the ladder things are different.  It’s easier to get into a pattern of drifting through life, bouncing from job to job, dole to dole and lover to lover without much thought about where one wants to end up.  It’s especially easy in this country, and one of the unstated goals of the welfare state is to make that drifting the norm.  It’s why immigrants at all levels do so well; they come from places where those without a goal get wiped out.

    A few years ago Rick Warren had his tremendously successful The Purpose Driven Life.  At the time churches marvelled at the idea, but for me it was a given.  Is there any other way to live it?  But unfortunately for many it is, even in churches where a purpose is an underlying assumption.

    For the Christian, the ultimate goal is eternal life in Jesus Christ.  That idea, oddly, has come under attack from some Christians who believe that an emphasis of the heavenly goal is the road to earthly irrelevancy.  But I disagree; the eternal goal not only moulds your actions here leading up to it, but also puts you beyond the ultimate hold of the “god of this age” (cf. 2 Cor 4:4) and his agents and assigns, which is why same agents and assigns dislike Christianity so much.

    But that dislike shouldn’t dissuade us from the pursuit of those eternal goals:

    But all the things which I once held to be gains I have now, for the Christ’s sake, come to count as loss. More than that, I count everything as loss, for the sake of the exceeding value of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. And for his sake I have lost everything, and count it as refuse, if I may but gain Christ and be found in union with him; Any righteousness that I have being, not the righteousness that results from Law, but the righteousness which comes through faith in Christ–the righteousness which is derived from God and is founded on faith. Then indeed I shall know Christ, and the power of his resurrection, and all that it means to share his sufferings, In the hope that, if I become like him in death, I may possibly attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:7-11)

    It’s time to not only have an objective–which is better than none–but the objective.

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  • Internal Passports: The Bad Idea of Regional Visas

    Some people think otherwise:

    State and local governments, the authorities best positioned to understand their own needs and capacities, should have a greater say in directing the flow of immigration.

    To that end, Washington could let states sponsor regional visas. Like H-1B employment visas, regional visas would last three years and could be extended to six years.

    Generally speaking, City Journal is one of the most advanced sources of conservative news and ideas out there.  This time, however, they’ve laid an egg, probably not intentionally.

    The problem with this is simple: in a country where the ruling mandarins are obsessed with micromanaging the population, sooner or later restrictions on immigrants to travel and live will be applied to the locals.  This, of course, smacks of the internal passports that the Soviet Union used to use on its people to keep them in a restricted geographical area.  The Chinese also used a version of this to prevent the countryside from emptying itself out on the cities (they also used to ship people out to the countryside for “re-education” reasons, especially during the Cultural Revolution).

    It may seem like a stretch, but once you extend the concept of travel and residence restriction to such a large group on a legal basis, you invite the same kind of regulation on a broader base of the population.

    Back when 9/11 took place, I said that, if Al Gore had won the election, he would have used the resulting airport security to cull people from flying, which in a country as large as ours would have been a de facto internal passport.  Today of course we have “no-fly lists” whose main claim to fame comes when people who can’t figure out why they’re there sue the government.  I’m surprised that this regime hasn’t used them to ground its opponents, but it’s wasted too much political capital on Obamacare.

    As long as we are the “United” States–and that, IMHO, is not an immutable given–the policies for the granting of citizenship should rest with the Federal government, and the rights therefrom–including going from state to state–should also be universal within the country.  Some states, finding the Federal government’s approach lacking in this regard, have tried to take the job unto themselves.  But in this case we need to make our Federal government work the way it’s supposed to and not passing to the states something they really don’t have any business getting into.

  • In South Florida, Taming the People Won't Be Easy

    But Palm Beach County sheriff Ric Bradshaw’s going to try:

    Florida House and Senate budget leaders have awarded Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw $1 million for a new violence prevention unit aimed at preventing tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., from occurring on his turf.

    Bradshaw plans to use the extra $1 million to launch “prevention intervention” units featuring specially trained deputies, mental health professionals and caseworkers. The teams will respond to citizen phone calls to a 24-hour hotline with a knock on the door and a referral to services, if needed.

    The idea that we can and should keep people from committing crimes before they get around to it is part of 9/11’s legacy, and the Boston Marathon bombings are a reminder that we haven’t got the hang of it.  And of course there are those sticky civil liberties issues:

    “We want people to call us if the guy down the street says he hates the government, hates the mayor and he’s gonna shoot him,” Bradshaw said. “What does it hurt to have somebody knock on a door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’…

    “How are they possibly going to watch everybody who makes a comment like that? It’s subjective,” said Liz Downey, executive director of the Palm Beach County branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “We don’t want to take away people’s civil liberties just because people aren’t behaving the way we think they should be.”

    Good question, especially in a place like South Florida, where people are as a rule not notably friendly, polite, or what not.  (There are exceptions.)  How can you tell whether someone is approaching criminal activity or just being their usual mouthy self?  And what about people who don’t give advance notice?

    Bradshaw’s basic problem is that he’s in a region with little or no sense of community, and trying to throw money at the problem using the mental health community/industry isn’t going to fix that any time soon.

  • Christians in the Military: They Really Don't Want Us Anymore

    Looks that way:

    The Pentagon has released a statement confirming that soldiers could be prosecuted for promoting their faith: “Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense…Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis…”.

    As I noted last year in my piece Go Where the Future Is:

    That last point brings me to focus on a subset of you: Christians.  You should face the facts: your country doesn’t want you any more.  They don’t want your values, they don’t want your lifestyle, and most of all they don’t want anyone who believes that there’s anything or anyone beyond them.  Your country?  That probably betrays a very Palm Beachy view that a country is defined by its people at the top.  Sad to say I’ve lived long enough to see that reality cross Lake Worth and become the driving force in society, a by-product (or the intention?) of a society where the money and the power is increasingly centralised.  You can dredge up anything you want from our history, but it doesn’t change the simple fact that the reality on the ground (or in the air between New York and Los Angeles) is not the same.

    What is going on here in the military is twofold.  The first is that the conservative nature of the military has always bothered the left from a power challenger standpoint, i.e., the possibility of the military participating in a coup to end a left-wing regime (and we certainly have that now).  This may seem like Latin American or French (as in post-Dreyfus or the Algerian war) thinking, but liberals do think this way.  The second is that, until now, the formula has always been “God and country”.  Given the left’s stratospheric view of the state, for them it is “God or country” and they want to make sure everyone worships at the latter’s altar rather than the former.  (Ironic for people who, in years past, trashed the military in the wake of Vietnam…)

    Given this, the time has come for Christians in this country to eschew the military, at least until the attitude of the state changes.  In the short run, that’s probably the best, given the human toll of PTSD and other blowbacks from combat and our decidedly slummy foreign policy these days (do you really want to go to Syria?)  Who knows, perhaps we can lose all the military-style stuff at men’s ministry meetings…

    In the long run liberals will find out what Joseph Stalin did: that propagating same-sex civil marriage and the myriads of other causes they dream up won’t motivate people to fight and die for the country.  Stalin was forced to bring back the church (which he had nearly exterminated in the 1930’s) to help him win the “Great Patriotic War”, which was the beginning of Christianity’s resurrection in Russia.  Hopefully we won’t get to the same dire straits he did (for him the Germans were besieging Moscow and Leningrad/St. Petersburg) before they wake up to the folly of their policies.

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