Note to Curt:

Just because the state claims the authority to apprehend and punish rapists doesn’t mean that apprehending and punishing rapists is a form of state coercion. Nor is the notion that rape is bad an example of state coercion. Depending on your perspective, this is either a moral truth derived from God/reason/whatever or a widely-accepted social convention. Similarly, the notion that one can own property is (again, depending on your perspective) either morally necessary or a widely-accepted social convention that seems to work pretty well (here I’m dispensing with Communists and other fools who have nothing intelligent to say on the matter). Either way, the fact that the state claims ultimate authority to adjudicate property disputes does not make private property a form of state coercion. (Further reading)

It’s almost comforting that such invidious fluffy-minded sludge as this is floating around, as it seems, like religion, to keep the middle-brows hypnotized by “beautiful sentiments” which are so vague as to keep them from actually getting together and doing anything. It’s sort of weird to hear this weakly Marxist social-democratic pap which used to be shouted from the rooftops now being whispered in a low monotonous whine. The author avows his fealty to Jeremy Bentham, not Marx, and calls it utilitarianism not Marxism, but there are many illegitimate fathers along this line of thought.

The root of the idea is that, now that neuroscience has supposedly made it possible to actually identify what makes us happy, the idea of happiness has become quantifiable, and hence a program of providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people has become objectively possible. However, the author does not make the slightest effort to apply these wonders of modern science to actually determining what the alleged sources of human happiness are. The neuroscience tack is really just a defensive ploy to ward off the eternal charges that utilitarinism is simply a euphemism for an authoritarian imposition of values. As for espousing his positive program for what constitutes human happiness, it is simply the usual liberal middle-class canards, with not surprisingly a socialist edge: more time to spend with family, a decent wage for everyone, blah blah blah. But he seems to make two pretty criminally unsubstantiated assumptions: one is these sources are essentially the same for everyone, or at least could be under certain conditions, and the other is that they do not inherently conflict with anyone else’s.

I say under certain conditions could be, because in evaluating our current society he seems to privilege envy of other’s material well-being as the principal determinant of happiness. His theory is that above a certain level of material subsistence people are motivated primarily by status-seeking and the desire for a high rank within their social group. Therefore, the increasing wealth of the society will not increase happiness because people measure their well-being relative to the group, not by their absolute prosperity. This is always been a flaw in the concept of the “war against poverty”; I’m not sure it’s much of an argument for socialist economic redistribution. But actually if you read his section on the value of income taxes carefully, he doesn’t even seem to be arguing that they are useful insofar as they can be redirected to the less prosperous, although he does evidently believe that a certain amount of money contributes more to the happiness of a poor person than to a rich one’s. Rather, he seems to think that taking money away from the properous is valuable in and of itself, because it will supposedly make them less focused on the “rat race,” more family-oriented, etc., etc. In short he seems to be advocating a net impoverishment of society.

All of which may be consistent with the program of a good little socialist, but does not necessarily accord marvelously with his own evidence about the supposedly quantified happiness of humanity. The research that he cites non-specifically supposedly indicates that people’s feeling of happiness has not risen in the last half-century, but he does not cite anything which indicates that it has necessarily declined. He cites rising rates of depression and crime as presumably implicit indicators of greater unhappiness, but he does not seem to acknowledge the possibility that in our hyper-medicated and surveillance-based society perhaps people simply report depression and crime more. In any event, if roughly similar numbers of people today as in the ‘50’s report themselves happy (and we believe them), despite the increase in prosperity, that might perhaps indicate that happiness is not fixed to material well-being. Which may be consistent with his general point, but not with his idea of increasing happiness by manipulating income levels.

And even if it did, it seems rather difficult to countenance any social program predicated upon appealing to one of humanity’s most depraved instincts, namely envy. The author acknowledges that his ideal of taxation is mainly motivated by the desire to pander to people’s envy, but he seems to think that their envy will be sated by the loss of prosperity of those around them and that after that point there will be no more. So the envy of the less prosperous will be satisfied by the losses accrued by the more prosperous, which will somehow not be counter-balanced by the chagrin of the more prosperous at the prospect of seeing their status diminished. Very logical.

One of the more egregious presumptions of utilitarians is that non-utilitarian social systems somehow aren’t concerned with seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people. On the contrary, that’s the defining problem of practically every social and political theory I can think of, and they all either seek or claim to have found the answer—whether such a solution exists, I have my doubts, but that’s why I’m a skeptic about politics. This is a handy trick by utilitarians: they say “I believe in the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” Which is practically begging the question: “As opposed to whom?” It’s useful because it tends to conceal the fact that their real agenda is generally somewhat more specific, and tends to consist in the autocratic notion that one or two measures of social living can be authoritatively determined to be the sources of happiness, and then divided up in a centralized fashion. Those that are the most insistent on the idea of liberty are generally those that are the most skeptical about the possibility of the notion of happiness being either quantitatively defined or generalizable. In other words, only indviduals can determine their own sources of happiness.

For the author, on the other hand, the fact that certain stimuli trigger certain areas of the brain at the times when test subjects profess pleasure has solved the problem of determining happiness. Of course, as mentioned, he never really bothers with the results that those studies have yielded. Somehow the fact that he considers envy to be a principal element of human happiness does not place very severe limits on the harmoniousness of individual happiness. Nor does it constitute a tyranny of the majority, because he claims that in an ideal utilitarian society the happiness of the most unhappy would be considered of pre-eminent importance. Of course, at the beginning of the article he cited the equal importance of each individual’s happiness as the fouding tenet of his theory, but I’m sure it all sorts out in the end.

Among social factors responsible for unhappiness, he cites divorce and unemployment as of pre-eminent importance. Of course, rates of both divorce and unemployment in the crassly materialistic and religious United States are much lower than in the much more overtly utilitarian-embracing Europe, but it would be a bit embarassing for him to admit this after avowing that all traditional value-systems outside of utilitarianism and “individualism” are dead.

Personally the question of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people doesn’t exactly compel me constantly, although the issue of personal happiness tends to impose itself intransigently. I would have thought that evolutionary biology would have provided an adequate explanation of this, as well as the recurrence of what we call altruism. But such an idea of course suggests that happiness, whatever that is, is not really the point of our little existences, and that the more imperious competitiveness of life will ultimately subvert all of these little trifles of pleasure and pain. But in the meantime, we have these debased statistical notions of happiness to amuse us in an idle hour.

It seems to me that if one’s “objective” measure of happiness is electrical stimulation in the cerebral cortex, the most efficient utilitarian solution to the problem of human happiness would be strap everyone onto hospital gurneys and stimulate the “happiness” part of their brain all day long. If one does not wish to be this deterministic about it, perhaps one should allow more latitute to individuals to discover their own conception of happiness. Personally, I have found happiness generally to be an idea for the unhappy and something rarely spoken of by the happiness; mention of practically guarantees that it is not present in the environment where it is uttered. I don’t deny that what you might call love is the real bridge between personal happiness and moral obligations, and the only true means by which the desires of oneself and of others are united, but such a sentiment can never be mandated; it is entirely resistant to intellectual compulsion. Utilitarianism, which sometimes does a decent job of faking morality, is nevertheless ultimately predicated on the pleasure principle, and hence is wholly inadequate to uniting the moral and the pleasurable except when love truly pertains. In that case, of course, political theory is entirely superfluous, which is why this is all a waste of time.

p.s. I don’t claim that people’s behavior necessarily reflects what really would make them happy, but presumably it does at least reflect what they consciously value. Hence, if I were the author I would have been a bit skeptical of using the results of “surveys” of what people claim to value when the results don’t correlate with their behavior, i.e. they claim that spending time with family is most important, but they spend a disproportiante amount of time working (at least according to him). So either people are not really being forthright (consciously or unconsciously) in responding to surveys, or there is not actually a problem of priorities. In either case, he’s way over-valuing surveys as a guide to what will make people happy.

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Well, I guess I had to see it to believe it. After reviewing Time-Life's set of Laugh-In's third season, where all 26 episodes were affected by a serious mastering error, I didn't think the problem would have carried over to any of the other sets. In this set of the fourth season with 26 more episodes from the show's 1970-71 season, ONE episode (#22) seems to have come out right but the remaining 25 are still afflicted. I'll talk more about that in the quality section, but first a bit about the show itself:

Dan Rowan and Dick Martin still haven't let up by this point, continuing the show's mostly anarchic format that filled an hour-long slot each week when network TV...Read the entire review

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This second DVD release from Shout Factory Kids celebrating Sesame Street's 50th anniversary consists of a special made this year for prime time on both HBO (where the show has moved for its first run episodes) and PBS (which still presents the show delayed after the HBO showings, and with an annoying "E/I" symbol at the top of the screen to count towards the FCC's required hours of "educational programming" each week- in that regard it's likely for the better that its new primary home is HBO.) Like the 25th anniversary special, which was one of the very first DVD releases back in 1997, this focuses mostly on songs from the show but most of them are new performances, done on the show's set, rather than archival clips. There's a number of celebrity appearances but for some reason Joseph Gordon-Levitt, born after I had already outgrown the show on TV, was chosen to be the main "star". He takes a cab t...Read the entire review

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I think both in fictional movies and documentaries, when airplane trouble happens when a musical act is one of the passengers on the plane, the comedy to diffuse the tension is palpable, whether it is a tribute to "The Night the Music Died" when the Big Bopper, Richie Valens and Buddy Holly passed, or when members of Lynyrd Skynrd died in a 1977 plane crash. Neverthless, I'll Never Forget You attempts to put some emotion into the tragic event.

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'Fasting God's Way' is the subject of our latest Topical Sermon, as we consider the genuine motives behind the type of fasting God looks for in His people. What's the difference in fasting our way, and fasting God's way? What does our fasting achieve if we're not fasting God's way? How does He view it? Join us for the answers to these and other questions! This sermon is available now from https://www.preachtheword.com in MP3 audio and text formats...

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La reciente DANA (Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos) que ha afectado a varias regiones ha evidenciado la necesidad de implementar medidas de protección a largo plazo para mitigar cualquier repercusión futura. Este fenómeno meteorológico ha causado daños considerables, subrayando la urgencia de establecer políticas que no solo respondan a las necesidades inmediatas de los afectados, […]

Artículo publicado en : Visión Innovadora para Proteger Áreas DANA y Preservar el Empleo

En la ciudad de Cuenca, el ambiente está cargado de emoción ante la inminente llegada del Carnaval, uno de los eventos más esperados por la comunidad. El Concejal de Festejos, Alberto Castellano, ha destacado la colaboración entre su departamento y la Asociación Amigos del Carnaval para fortalecer esta celebración anual. «Llevamos ya tiempo trabajando en […]

Artículo publicado en : Álex Simón Designado cartelista del carnaval 2025, que tendrá lugar del 1 al 15 de marzo

The animals sleep as the remaining team of scout birds return and report the findings on their future home. What news will they bring back to Man in the Can and Yellow Bird?

Find out in today's Adventures of the Man in the Can.




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Kate's birthday was on December 22nd! She had a spend the night party on January 3rd which also was Miles' s first birthday. It was a very exciting and fun filled day. I never imagined that I would have a spend the night party because they are not my thing. However, we had a great time.

The best part of the night was the comment we overheard, "Kate's dad is actually funny!" Not surprisingly, Rick is open to have many more spend the night parties. :)

Here are a few pictures from Charlotte's first week. I'm planning to write up the story of her birth in the next few days so I will not forget anything.

Things to know before reading:

1. Charlotte was breech
2. I had a version preformed to flip her
3. She flipped back


When I last left off, I was waiting on our planned c-section. I had a list of things to do and by the Thursday before her Saturday arrival, nearly everything was finished. All of our school work for the semester was complete and all of the laundry in my house was washed, folded, and put away. The only major family thing I had left to do was packing. I never got around to packing.

Thursday afternoon I noticed I was having about 4 contractions an hour. I paid no attention to these because in my previous pregnancies, I had weeks and weeks of contractions prior to actual labor. This pregnancy, I had NO "practice" contractions. I just assumed it was because she was breech and so there was nothing to get ready for. My cervix was also closed at every appointment in the last weeks which is also not normal for me. I normally am between 3-4 cm before I go into labor. So back to the few contractions, I just assumed these where the ones I had been without for the last 6 weeks.

I started cooking dinner on Thursday night and got about halfway through cooking when I felt the first painful and long contraction. It was at 5:15. From that point on, they were coming every 2-3 mins without stopping and lasting over a minute. They went from 0-60 immediately. I couldn't finish making dinner so I really have no idea what the kids ate that night. Rick walked in the door at 6 and I asked him to take Kate to dance and take all of the other kids with him. He asked if it was "time" and I said, "No, I just need to try and make them stop." I had 2 times with Luke where I had similar contractions prior to labor that lasted 2 hours and then stopped. I was assuming that's what was going on here. So from 5:15-9:15, I walked around my house, laid down in my bed, took 2 baths, but nothing was stopping them. It was the same pattern, 2-3 mins apart and lasting from 1-2 mins. I wasn't getting any relief or downtime in between contractions. At some point during this 4 hour period, Rick picked Kate up from dance, printed and folded the bulletins for Sunday, and took them to the church.

I told myself if they were still going at 9:15 that I would call my doctor. My doctor told me to come on in and get checked out and that they would probably keep me overnight to monitor me and decide what to do early Friday morning. I still wasn't sure if I was in labor or not and really didn't want to go and then get sent home so I was relieved that they were going to keep me and that Charlotte would probably be born the next day when my doctor was on call. (He delivered all 7 of our other kids.)

I texted my sister to come stay with the kids and started packing my bags. I always wondered why people packed their hospital bags early. I thought you would have plenty of time in between contractions to get what you needed. Haha! I ended up at the hospital with 6 shirts and 1 pair of shorts. :) I guess I really was in pain.

The ride to the hospital was horrible. Every bump magnified the pain. The contractions didn't slow down and that was when I finally realized that I was actually in labor. It took us about 45 minutes to get to the hospital. I think we arrived around 11:00pm and I was taken to triage to get things checked out. I had never actually been to triage so that was something new. They monitored me for an hour and I had to lay on my back that entire time. That was horrible. I'm pretty sure you are not meant to lay on your back without pain relief during labor. :) They also did an ultrasound to check her position and she was in fact, still breech.

Around 12:20am, Friday morning,  the doctor on call came in said it was time for Charlotte to be born and that we couldn't wait any longer. My contractions were not stopping and my cervix was opening.  From that point on, everything moved quickly and slowly at the same time. The anesthesiologist came in and said I would be getting a spinal because they couldn't wait for an epidural to work. He told me all of the side effects but I'm not really sure what he said. I had to sign about 20 pages of release forms and they I was wheeled off to the operating room while Rick waited in triage to be called back.

I remember the operating room being very, very bright and there were a lot of people in there - I think 10. I'm used to the quiet dark delivery rooms with just one nurse and the doctor so this was a change. I moved from the triage bed to the operating table and was given my spinal. I do remember the anesthesiologist saying that if the spinal didn't take for some reason that they would immediately knock me out and that when I would wake up I'd have a baby. I was hoping that didn't happen. He poked my arm with some kind of sharp object and then would poke on my stomach to make sure I didn't feel anything. The first 2 times he did it I felt it but by the third time, I couldn't feel anything. At that point Rick was let in the room and they began. They had been prepping and draping me during this time as well. Charlotte was born at 12:50 am. She was born toward the beginning of the surgery and it seemed that the bulk of the time was spent getting stitched back together.

She was immediately shown to me over my drape and then taken to get cleaned up a bit. About 2 minutes later she was brought over to me and placed on my chest and I held her for about 5 mins. She was then taken away (in the same room again) to be weighed, etc and Rick went with her. She was then brought back to me all bundled me for a few kisses and then Rick was able to carry her to the recovery room to wait for me. I was in the recovery room for 2 hours and during that time my parents came up to see her. I was able to nurse her which was great. I was also given a pump for my pain medication. The nurse sacred me because she told me to push the button every 8 mins and to stay on top of the pain. She warned me not to fall asleep because if I did and then woke up an hour later, I would not be able to handle the amount of pain I would be in. It was 2:00 in the morning and I was drugged up on morphine and she was telling me not to fall asleep! I guess it worked because I didn't sleep until later that morning, after the pump was turned off. :)

I was in love with her from the moment I saw her. My main concern with having a c-section, prior to having it, was that I would somehow feel like I missed out on the birthing process. I never felt that way. I carried her for 9 months and she arrived in the safest way possible for both of us. It was perfect. The only thing I was sad about was that my doctor missed delivering her by 5 hours. However, that was the Lord's will too. He was on call all weekend so he checked on me everyday while I was in the hospital. C-section recovery is painful. That's all I want to say about that. I just want to remember the hours and minutes before, during, and after her birth. I am thankful for every moment of it.

Depuis une décennie, hiver après hiver, l'histoire bégaye : la France fait mine de découvrir la grave crise du logement à laquelle elle est confrontée. « SDF » qui nous renvoient le miroir de nos propres insuffisances ; « mal-logés » qui se réfugient...