The Bible Week 3
Here is week 3 of the 16 week course on the Bible.
httpv://youtu.be/YHgRQCYYSxE
ObamaCare Fallout
When discussing the fallout from the ongoing disaster called ObamaCare, a friend recently stated that he did not really care about the problems; this was a first step and they would get the problems fixed. He was just glad that they were doing something, and assumed the details would be worked out eventually. In fact, his only complaint was for the Republicans and especially the Tea Party, because they just wanted to repeal the bill with no alternative and this would leave us at the mercy of the insurance companies. As he saw it, we are the richest country in the world and thus we should be able to afford this.
While there is a lot wrong with this view, such views are very common and reveal some of the big divides that are splitting the country. The first is between those who trust governments more than they trust the market place when it comes to solving problems. Thus here, despite all the problems and chaos with the roll out of Obama Care, the hundreds of millions of dollars spend on a web site that doesn’t work, the millions losing their health insurance or paying high premiums for less coverage despite promises and guarantees to the contrary, there is just an assumption that government will eventually get all the problems worked out.
But is this really true? While it is likely that eventually they may get some version of the web site up, not even that is certain, and least not any time soon. As Jon Coupal points out, government has a dismal record in this area. Using California as an example he points to a $62 million software upgrade that, “triggered a backlog of 100,000 jobless claims and thousands of unemployed were still waiting for their benefits more than a month later.” Then there was the overhaul of the state payroll system that was cancelled after spending $250 million. A review concluded that “canceled projects, cost overruns and delays have cost taxpayers more than $2 billion.” Nor is it just IT project as the article goes on to document the “gross mismanagement of transportation and highway construction projects.”
One might argue that these are large projects that any business would have problems with. Perhaps, but Coupal presents an interesting contrast. When a section of the 10 Freeway collapsed during the Northridge earthquake the state estimated that it would take two years to repair, assuming there were no overruns that experience shows are very common. Since this was unacceptable the job was turned over to a private contractor, who was given 5 month to complete the job. He finished in 73 days.
Why the difference? Are private sector employees just better than government employees? No. The difference is not in the people; it is in the environment in which they work. While those who look to government often deride the private sector as being driven by the profit motive, it is the profit motive that makes the private sector so much better. While the profit motive is frequently denigrated as little more than greed, what it actually does is force the private sector to be responsive to their customers.
The big difference between the private sector and government sector is not that those in the private sector are greedy while those in government are somehow nobler. People are people. Those in the private sector are forced to address the needs and desires of their customers. If they do not, their customers can go elsewhere and they will go out of business. As a result the marketplace, when it is allowed to function, delivers a wide range of selections and prices and people are free to pick the options that best suits them.
In the private sector costs are watched closely and there is an ongoing drive to innovate so as to deliver a better product at a lower cost and thus beat the competition. These pressures to meet people’s needs are greatly reduced if not absent from government. In government, budgets normally get automatic increases regardless of performance. In fact poor performance frequently results greater increases to budgets as money is thrown at problems. When business needs money they can try to cut cost or raise prices. If people can’t or won’t pay, the company goes out of business. When government needs more money, rarely if ever do they cut costs but instead raise taxes. If people can’t or won’t pay? Well that really does not matter. Taxes are not voluntary.
Often the appeal is, as it was for my friend that we are a rich country. We, or at least the rich, can afford it. But that ignores our current situation. True, the numbers are so vast it is very difficult to really comprehend. So to make things a bit more understandable, let’s divide all the number by $100,000,000 such that our $3 trillion federal budget is only $30,000, the size of a family income.
So putting our current situation in terms of this family; it makes $30,000 per year, but is spending $38,000 per year and currently has a credit card debt of $170,000 (debt), and another $700,000 (unfunded liabilities) in other debts, for a total debt of $870,000. Recently one spouse, against the wishes of the other, bought a Yugo (ObamaCare) for $10,000. The dealer recently called and said that some of the features were not going to be delivered with the car, and that the price had risen to $30,000 and is likely to go even higher. Thus a fight ensues over whether or not to accept the car (the shutdown). In the middle of the fight, the new Yugo was delivered, but predictably does not work.
At the same time the credit cards max out (debt limit). The spouse who complained about the Yugo wants to talk about ways to get their budget under control. The spouse who wanted the Yugo refuses to even talk about it until they get some more credit cards (increase the debt limit). So the one spouse concedes and allows the Yugo to stay and also agrees to take out more credit cards without any conditions, at least until the issue comes up again in a few months.
Is this family financially ok? Of course not. They have not addressed the problem, but instead are only making the problem worse. That is pretty much the position we now find ourselves. Again, take these amounts and multiple them by $100,000,000 and you have the situation for the country. It also describes the division in the country.
The Bible Week 2
After some delay, here is the second week of the 16 week course on the Bible.
httpv://youtu.be/iPnJLuBxc9k
Evolution
At a recent lunch with some co-workers a friend shared a picture he thought was funny. The picture was of the sign for a Christadelphian Meeting Room, which in addition to the name and meeting time also had an area for a short message that could be changed. The message in the picture was “Evolution is a Lie.” What he found humorous was that taped to the sign was a paper that said, “If you have evidence to disprove evolution… then write it down, get it peer reviewed & collect your Nobel prize.”
Regardless of any possible humorous value, this picture does highlight a number problems with this entire issue. The first point is that it is always easy to poke fun at the fringe and the Christadelphian Church is clearly on the fringe. Not only do they reject evolution, they reject most of teachings that have defined Christianity for 2000 years.
Their claim that evolution is a lie is at best hyperbole, and more likely simply absurd. Regardless of what you think about evolution, it is not a lie. A lie is something said with the intent to deceive. The core of a lie is deception not truthfulness. In fact, it is possible to lie while only saying things that are true, if they are said in such a way as to mislead.
Few if any supporting evolution do so because they know that evolution is false, and they are just trying to deceive people into thinking it was true. They believe evolution to be true and that is why they defend it. Evolution can be true or false, but it is not a lie.
The paper taped to the sign is not much better, has it has several problems. Let me take them in reverse order. Let’s assume for a second that someone did have such evidence. Would it really be as simple as getting it peered reviewed and collecting a Nobel Prize? The history of science says no. Science, regardless of its benefits as a method to learn about the natural world, is governed by people. As a community, scientists have beliefs and agendas that get in the way of pure objectivity.
In my book, I cite the example of Alfred Wegener, who had a theory of Continental Displacement, what we would now call Plate Tectonics. When he published his results rather than winning a Nobel Price he was shunned and ridiculed to the point that he could not even get a job teaching in his own country. This was because his theory would have overturned the then current thinking on Geology. It was only 20 years after his death that his theory ceased to be considered pseudoscience and finally came to be accepted. Overturning evolution would be a far more massive change than that proposed by Wegener.
That brings us to the issue of what this “supposed evidence to disprove evolution” might be. Just how would one go about trying to disprove the theory? Evolution is not a repeatable event that can be verified by experiments. If one wanted to “disprove” Gravity one would need to construct an experiment which showed that the mathematical formulas that describe it break down.
But evolution was an historical process. It attempts to describe what happened. So how would one “disprove” it? Find a difference between the theory and the evidence? That already exists. Darwin’s theory involved small changes over long periods of time, but the fossil records shows long periods of stability marked by short periods of change, which has led to the version of evolution called punctuated equilibrium.
This leads to the second problem, which goes to the heart of what is evolution. I have seen a very wide variety of definitions. In short it means many things to many people. I have seen evolutionists define it so broadly as to account for all dogs, or even all canines, evolving from a single type, something even devout 7-day creationists would accept; to a godless and undirected natural process that accounts for the origin of all life.
This later definition is probably the most accurate for the most ardent supporters. It is not tied directly to any evidence, as evidence really does not matter. The theory of evolution will simply adjust itself to include whatever the evidence is found. Given the human ability to rationalize almost anything, it is hard to conceive of anything that could not be fitted in somehow.
After all the core of Darwin’s original theory was small changes over long periods of time. When that was not supported by the evidence, the evidence was simply incorporated into to the theory. In short, Evolution can accommodate large changes or small changes; long periods of change or short periods of change. It is whatever it needs to be. In short, it is a tautology and thus is something that cannot be disproven.
Finally, there is an even deeper issue at play, and it is one that involves the nature of science, particularly when it comes to historical issues such as evolution that do not lend themselves to repeated testing and experimentation. When dealing with such issues, is it the purpose of science to discover what happened, or is science limited only providing a natural explanation? This question is at the core of the debate over the possibility of discovering intelligent design.
The short history of research into intelligent design also shows the absurdity of the claim taped to the church’s sign. Even scientists who accept evolution have found themselves in trouble for even considering the possibility of Intelligent Design. This is because for many, science can only consider natural explanations, and as such, any consideration of Intelligent Design is a priori unscientific. This would be fine if it was then acknowledged that science was correspondingly biased, but strangely few skeptics will acknowledge that point.
The real irony in all this is that within the Christian community, evolution is a matter of open debate. There are Christians who accept evolution, Christians who do not, and some in the middle. One is free to look at the evidence and reach their own conclusion. Within the scientific community, evolution is a belief that can only be questioned at serious risk to one’s career, where even the research into the possibility of Intelligent Design is strongly opposed and condemned. Yet somehow it is the Christians who are closed minded because they consider more than one option.
A Constitutional Crisis
Major disputes, be they family disputes, disputes at work, political fights, or conflicts between nations often operate at several levels. The classic example of this is World War I, seemingly started by the assassination of an obscure archduke by a Serbian terrorist, but in reality the causes ran much deeper to the point that the assassination of archduke Ferdinand of Austria was little more than a pretext.
It is becoming increasingly clear that such is the case with the current government shutdown. Going into the shutdown the apparent cause, the dispute over the funding of ObamaCare, seemed pretty straightforward. But even before the actual shutdown began it was becoming clear that there was something deeper at work.
If nothing else, this was clear because, while Republicans did pass a Continuing Resolution (CR) that defunded ObamaCare, once it failed to pass the Senate they quickly abandoned that demand. Instead they sent up a stream of bills, each bill asking for less than the previous one. Eventually they got to a bill simply asked that individuals be given the same exemption that the President had already granted to corporations, and that Congress follow the provisions of the bill. When even this was rejected, the final bill simply asked that they do what the House and Senate has historically done when they could not reach an agreement, they go to conference to work out their differences, but this too was rejected by the Democrats in the Senate
Thus while ObamaCare is the pretext, there is something else going on here, something much deeper. It can be seen in Senate Majority Leader Reid’s response to a question when he rhetorically asked “What right do they have to pick and choose what part of government is going to be funded?” This is the crux of the matter.
What makes it somewhat surreal is that Obama continues to say things such as, “But we’re not going to accomplish those things if one party to this conversation says that the only way that they come to the table is if they get 100 percent of what they want and if they don’t, they threaten to burn down the house,” yet then he refused to come to the table and negotiate and instead demands that he get 100% of what he wants, a clean CR! All the while the Republicans have sent up a series of increasingly weaker proposals and are now asking to go to conference.
So whatever your view on ObamaCare, it is clear that Obama and Reid are refusing to compromise, while the Republicans are so willing to compromise that they have effectively been negotiating with themselves.
But the real looming crisis is not the current shutdown, or even the looming debt ceiling, it is the Constitutional crisis which is emerging, and which is embodied in Obama’s hard line refusal to negotiate and can be seen in Reid’s question.
What right do Republican have? While it is true that President Obama did win re-election, and that the Democrats held on to the Senate, it is also true that the Republican in the house won their elections and held on to the House. So Democrats hold the Presidency and the Senate, and Republicans hold the House. We have divided government.
In addition Article 1 Section 7 of the Constitution says that all revenue bills must start in the House. Thus while they do not have 100% say in spending, they have the Constitutional edge, and cannot be dictated to by the Senate and President.
Given the divided nature of Government, the demands of Obama and Reid that their wishes be followed, without any negotiation is not only unprecedented, it is extremely dangerous.
Obama is President, not dictator. The house is not his servant, but a co-equal branch of Government, and one that according to the Constitution holds the purse. And yet the President is refusing to even negotiate and is trying to dictate that the House follow his demands. This is much bigger than Obamacare; this strikes at the very core of our government based on checks and balances.
What is even more troubling is Obama’s actions in the shutdown, which seem based on inflicting as much pain on the American people as possible in order to put pressure on the Republicans to cave to his demands. During any shutdown the president has complete authority to determine what is and is not “essential” so if kids with cancer are blocked from Clinical Trails, it is only because the President has deemed this to be non-essential.
While it is reasonable to say, for example, that the Smithsonian is not essential and therefore the people who work there will not come to work to open the museums up, how is it in any way reasonable to say that we are going have people go to work so as to block access to open air locations such as the WWII memorial, that we are going to pay people to put up barricades and pay people to keep people away? This is just being mean spirited and vindictive; trying to inflict needless pain on WWII vets in order to score a few political points out of their suffering.
Where this gets really troubling is the upcoming debt ceiling. The history of negotiation and compromise when increasing the debt limit is clear and well established. But as with the CR, Obama is just demanding an increase without any compromise or negotiation. He is demanding that the House just rubber-stamp his wishes without any say in the matter.
Despite all the dire predictions, a failure to raise the debt ceiling does not automatically mean that the government defaults. It just means that the government cannot borrow any more money. It would still have all the money it normally gets from taxes, which, while not enough to cover all government spending, is more than enough to keep us from defaulting and in fact to keep funding the majority of government. It would, in effect, just be another type of partial government shutdown.
But just as the President gets to define what is essential and non-essential in a shutdown, he also gets to decide which bills to pay if we cannot borrow more money. The Republicans have repeatedly attempted to pass a law that would mandate the federal government not default on its debt as that would have dire consequences, but the Democrats have repeated blocked all such efforts. In short if the debt limit is not increased, Obama could choose to have the country default, in hopes of blaming it on the Republicans. Given his current actions and rhetoric, he might actually do this.
Thus we are rapidly approaching a Constitutional crisis. The best and constitutional way to settle this is to have both sides sit down and work out a compromise. But Obama and Reid are blocking this, explicitly refusing to negotiate, much less compromise. Instead they are demanding that the House abandon its Constitutional role and simply rubber stamp their demands.
Neither option the President is offering is a good one. It effectively comes down to either trashing the Constitution, or trashing the economy, take your pick.
