The Future of Publishing? I'm Hopin'

I'm probably the last on our block to realize this (and I live on a block of hicks), but the paper-and-ink publishing industry is dying.


No no, you say, people love books. They love the feel of books. They like paper and bookmarks and dog-ears. They like to cuddle with them in front of the fire. They share their intimate thoughts with them in highlights and exclamation points and notes in the margin. Heck, they even like that musty, old-book smell.


I know. I'm the same way. I love books.


But they're dying anyway. It's inevitable.


Look at what's happened already in the last year or two. E-reader users didn't like to scroll. They wanted to turn the page, so the e-reader makers listened. Now they flip and you don't even have to lick your fingers. And no one liked the look of the e-readers. It wasn't like real pages. It wasn't book-like. But have you seen a good one lately? They look great, clearer than paper, and you don't need light.


And people are voting with their dollars. Amazon recently announced that ebooks, for the first time ever, have out-sold hardcover books. Paperbacks, no doubt, are next. The market share of ebooks in the overall publishing sector has gone from 1% in 2008 to 3% in 2009 to 10% in 2010. I won't plot that on a chart right here, but if you can picture a graph going up like a skate ramp, you're on the right track.


But maybe the most telling piece of data is this one: people aren't going back. Talk to a Nook, Kobo, Sony, Kindle, or iPad reader--they're utterly, unapologetically sold-out to e-reading. And they're just blazing the trail for you and me. Oh yes, we'll be there too some day. The only way I can read an actual book in the morning is if I wear two pair of glasses at the same time. Seriously. And I look just as stupid as you're picturing me. An e-reader would fix that problem (it will fix it when I finally break down and get one--I was also the last on my block to get a cell phone, but I got one).


Anyway, all of this to say that as a bumbling author, I'm encouraged. Because as the book-printing part of this industry dies, so does the front-office part. The gatekeepers in this new game won't be the old guard. It won't be some intern with an English degree fishing manuscripts from a slush pile. It will be readers who'll decide whether something is or isn't worth reading. It will be the free market at work.


Of course, in another way the author's work will be harder. In the old paradigm, agents and publishers (if you could get them to take a risk on you) took most of the burden of book promotion. But today's author is on his own. For example, he'll have to plug his new e-books (click here for The Cornshuck Memoirs, here for Boy Soldier,  here for A Sword for The King, and here for The Left Foot Says, "GLORY!") all by himself, at every opportunity, and in creative and winsome ways.


But I'll probably be the last on the block to learn those tricks too. Oh well. If it's anything like e-readers and cell phones, I'll eventually see the light.

Freedom Ain't Cheap

Been busy lately, so I haven't posted in a while, but today I'm driven to it.


I've been checking essays--persuasive essays that my juniors are doing to prepare for the ACT--and their positions, their supporting arguments behind them, have me just a little freaked out.


Some background...


I teach an ACT prep course. It's what most juniors take as one half of their 11th grade English requirement. Every couple of weeks we do an ACT-style essay. 30 minutes to take a position on an issue and argue it convincingly. It's not an easy thing to do, so we practice a lot. 


Here's this week's prompt (a short version follows): 
In many of the largest airports around the country, full body scanners (sometimes referred to as “naked scanners”) and enhanced pat-down procedures have been implemented. Some groups are calling for these measures to be removed, claiming that they not only violate the 4th amendment’s protection from unreasonable search and protection of privacy, but are ineffective in catching potential threats. Others claim the new procedures better ensure the safety of the passengers, crew, and those on the ground by acting as a deterrent to terrorist attempts. Should such technology and procedures be the standard rule for all of our nation’s major airports? In your essay, take a position on the issue. You may write about either of the two points of view, or you may propose a different point of view. Use specific reasons and examples to support your position.


Short version: Has TSA gone too far with airport security?


So anyway, I'm grading these essays and coming across a LOT of comments like these: 


"Our safety is the most important thing..."


or "No constitutional amendment is more important than our safety..."


or "If better security means dumping the 4th amendment, then so be it!" 


Some of these are actually coming from kids who, in less than two years' time, will be in the military, risking their lives to secure freedom. They'll be proving by their actions that there are things that are more important than safety and security. But some are coming from kids who just can't see past their own skin.  


As a teacher, I'm torn as to the root cause here. Do they not see the disconnect? Are they still at a place on the learning curve that this example--allowing our gov't to violate a constitutionally protected right to freedom from unreasonable search--just doesn't have the same form that physically fighting an enemy has? 


Or maybe it's that they don't understand that the greatest threat to our freedom is, and always has been, ourselves, and that the constitution is there as a protection between the governed "us" and the governing "us." It is, after all, much easier to see the enemy in that desert over there, or on that continent over there, than it is to see that the enemy is us, and the treason is in our own hearts.


Or maybe it's that they don't see the logical end of such a position, that a compromise here says that all provisions in the Constitution are up for grabs and that the Fed's enumerated powers are more like suggestions. It takes a lot more dot-connecting to see this than it does to see some foreign tyrant who wants to put chains on you. 


But even if they don't get the deeper spiritual stuff, or the logical implications, you'd think they would at least respond to the whole romantic, patriotic notion of freedom having a great cost to it. I don't think any of them would disagree that giving up our lives to defeat Hitler was worth it. 


Again, maybe the example here is just too subtle.


This week, as the kids were writing, I got to thinking about this prompt more than I usually do, and before I even saw what they were doing with it, I decided to write the essay myself. So here it is, my ACT essay on airport security:

            Beware the term “post-9/11 world.” Too often these days it’s used to justify some government measure limiting our civil rights. From illegal wire-taps to an open assassination of a US citizen, such actions are justified by the simple response that we live in a post-9/11 world. Just because the terrorists ignored our Constitution when they struck the twin towers doesn’t mean that our government should ignore it too. But the invasive use of technology and search methods in airports today does just that. Moreover, it hasn’t proven any more effective in deterring terrorism than the methods it replaced. And if the 4^th amendment can be set aside with a simple memo from the President’s desk, what’s next? Our freedom of speech? Freedom of the press? The safety that the TSA promises—even it was effective—is simply not worth the cost of our freedom.

            For 230 years our people have paid the ultimate price to defend our liberties and make it possible that following generations could live in freedom. That’s what we’re celebrating every Fourth of July, Memorial and Veteran’s Day. Even in times of peace we remind ourselves that freedom comes at a cost and that the cost—an absolute cost for some—is worth it. What’s changed? Why do we not demand the same sacrifice today? In fact, our government today makes the opposite demand, telling us that by giving up our rights (freedom from unreasonable search, freedom of privacy) we’ll be securing our safety by deterring terrorism. Our government is saying the exact opposite of what it says when our sacrifice is needed. They’re saying that our freedom is not worth risking our lives over. They’ve flipped things around on us. So which is more valuable? Freedom and the risk of death or tyranny with safety?

            But that’s not even the choice we’re given because the increase in safety is unproven. In fact, given the available data, safety is impossible to improve upon. Since 9/11, there have been exactly zero lives lost to terrorist attacks on airplanes or airports in the US. How do you improve on 100%? Whatever security measures we’ve been using for the last ten years seem to have worked just fine. So why the changes? Why has the TSA embarked on what can only be described as an attack on the Constitution and the people of the United States? Thomas Jefferson said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. He understood, as did all the founding fathers and drafters of the Constitution, that people are power hungry, that at the first opportunity, our leaders will grab for more power over their people. Both the current and previous administrations have proven Jefferson absolutely right in this. We’re being stripped naked and radiated by our government because they saw an opportunity for more power. And they know that if we’re compliant in this, if we don’t refuse it, then the door is open for them to take even more.

            So far, we’re lying down and taking it. The next question must be “What’s next?” For the sake of fighting an enemy that hasn’t touched us in ten years will we give up our freedom of speech? It looks like that’s already in the works. The TV networks and national magazines and newspapers have for a long time now aligned themselves with political parties, so the “free speech” we have there gets sifted and filtered according to their values. That’s nothing new. The latest threat is to our last and best source of free speech and press—the internet. And they’re using the same tactic here that they used in the airports: fear. To avoid the next great terrorist attack—a cyber attack on our computer networks—a senate bill was introduced this year to give the President an internet kill switch. This would give the executive branch of our government another power that directly violates the Constitution. With the push of a button, the President can shut the internet down until he believes the threat is past. But who or what will be the threat? No one knows. We would just wait to see what the President decides. It could be a terrorist. It could be you or me because we disagree with him. Again, what do we value more, a risky freedom or a tyranny that claims to protect us?

            It may not seem like a big deal. Shuffle through the line with the rest of the sheep. Don’t complain or make noise. But ignoring the Constitution is a big deal. No other country in history has gone to such lengths to protect its people from the tyranny of its own government, and that protection lies in the specific provisions of our Constitution. Freedom is not free. It’s not even cheap—it should cost us something that has real value. Isn’t each person who enlists in our military saying exactly that? We may live in a post-9/11 world, but the most important things about us haven’t changed at all. We love our freedom, and we’re willing to sacrifice for it. Let’s do that today in our nation’s airports and show our enemies that we’re still free and we’re still not afraid.

I'll read this to them next week. Maybe it will get some wheels turning and I'll see that my freaking out is premature. 


Maybe.
   

Life-Changing...

The Otter and the Ocean

          One morning, Otter was awakened by the sound of the ocean, so he said to himself for the very first time, "I wonder."

            Later that morning he and his older brother were in the shallows breaking clams open with stones. "Brother," said the younger otter, "have you ever seen the bottom of the ocean?"

         "Of course I have," said his brother. "I know the ocean well."

"What's it like?" asked Otter.

"Oh, it's very deep," said his brother.

"Is it?" asked Otter, and he dropped his clam, half-eaten, in the water.

"Sure. Watch this!" And then Otter's big brother shot out past the sand bar to the middle of the bay. There he lifted himself halfway out of the water, waved, and plunged below. He was gone for less than a minute, but to Otter it seemed much longer. When he finally did break to the surface again, he held up a paw. But Otter could not see that he was holding tiny pebbles and bits of shell until his brother had swum all the way back to the shallow.

"Rocks and shells," said his brother, "as far as you can see."

"Really?" asked Otter.

         "Oh yes, that's what the ocean is like, a floor of sand that goes on and on. But don't worry. You'll see it all some day."

But to Otter's thinking there was nothing mysterious in rocks and shells.   

         That afternoon, he and his father were busy with the work of opening a new den—much higher over the water than their old one—when Otter said, "Father, have you ever seen the bottom of the ocean?"

         "Of course I have," said his father. "I know the ocean well." 

"What's it like?" asked Otter.

"Oh, it's very deep," said his father.

"Is it?" asked Otter, and he stopped his work to listen.

"It is. In fact, it's as deep as a full-grown stalk of kelp, and you know how long those can grow." Then his father took him to the entrance of the den and pointed to the ocean beyond the bay, to where the kelp beds began. "Many times I've had to hunt for clams where the kelp grows from the bottom," his father said with evident pride.  "And it is like swimming through a forest at night." 

"Really?" asked Otter.

"Oh, yes," said his father, "and that's what the ocean is like, a forest of kelp that goes on and on. Some day when you're older you'll find out for yourself."

But again, Otter couldn't help but be disappointed, for he could see nothing more frightening in a stalk of kelp than he could in rocks and shells. 

That evening, Otter was walking alone along a cliff overlooking the bay and the ocean beyond it, thinking of rocks and sand and kelp when he came upon his grandfather. He was sitting on a patch of lichen watching the sun go down. His grandfather was very old, the oldest otter in the colony. The fur around his eyes and mouth was gray, and he let the younger otters gather clams for him now. He was old, but most thought him to be very wise.

Otter sat down next to him. "Grandfather," he said, "have you ever seen the bottom of the ocean?"

His grandfather was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "I'm afraid I know very little about the ocean."

Oliver's shoulders fell at the words, and he rose to his feet to go, but his grandfather kept talking, "When I was young, about your age, I swam to the bottom of the ocean, and it was sandy and flat."

"Really?" said Otter, but if he sounded curious he didn't mean it.

"And when I was older and had cubs of my own," his grandfather continued, "I swam to the bottom of the ocean, and it was like walking through a forest of tall trees at night."

Otter stood quietly and waited for his grandfather to finish.  He was hoping that he might still have time to play in the high tide. 

"But one day, while I floated over the kelp beds preening my fur, a storm came in suddenly and took me far out to sea. I grew hungry, so I dove hoping to find food. I dove so deep that the water grew cold and pressed in on me, but I knew that if I didn't eat, I would die, so I went deeper."

"Deeper?" asked Otter, sitting down again. 

"Finally, I reached bottom."

"And what did you see?" asked Otter.

"I saw the edge of a cliff, like the one we are on now," said his grandfather, and then he peered over the edge, and Otter knew that he was remembering that day.

"And what else?" asked Otter, "What was at the bottom of the cliff?"

His grandfather turned to Otter and shook his head.  "There was no bottom," he said, "just a darkness that went on and on." Then he smiled. "Like I said, I know very little of the ocean."

Otter drew in a deep breath, and then he watched the setting sun until it winked out under a pink and orange sky, for his hopes of playing in the tide had slipped quietly away at the thought of a bottomless ocean.

The left foot says, "Glory!" The right foot, "Amen."

This is how I want life to go: raise my kids in the fear of God...teach them to plod well...have them close when my end comes. That's what this story is about.

The Left Foot Says, "Glory!"

A man walked to the City of the King. His children, a boy and a girl, walked with him. The road was long, and the entire length of it—in this direction at least—slanted upward toward the city, which sat high on a hill.

One day, where the road was particularly steep, the sky went dark, and it began to rain. 

"Can we stop now, Father?" asked the boy.  "This seems like a good place to stay."

The father answered, "It will rain often on this journey, and the city is still miles and miles ahead." Then the father took the boy's hand in his and said, "Say these words with me as we walk, 'The left foot says, Glory! The right foot, Amen!'"

So the little boy said the words with his father as they walked in step, "The left foot says, Glory! The right foot, Amen!"

Glory!

Amen!

Glory!

Amen!

And soon the boy no longer thought about stopping, and he felt fine with the rain on his face.

Another day, in a place where the road was nearly flat for a stretch, the sky cleared, a breeze blew gently, and the sun shone bright.

"Can we stop now, Father?" asked the girl. "This meadow under the blue sky and bright sun would be a wonderful place to stay."

The father answered, "The sun will shine often on this journey, and there will be many meadows, but the city is still miles and miles ahead." Then the father took the girl's hand in his and said, "Say these words with me as we walk, 'The left foot says, Glory! The right foot, Amen!'"

So the little girl said the words with her father as they walked in step, "The left foot says, Glory! The right foot, Amen!"

Glory!

Amen!

Glory!

Amen!

And soon the girl no longer thought about stopping, and she felt fine with the breeze cool in her hair and the sunshine warm on her skin.

The three walked together for many days, passing under every kind of sky and through every kind of weather. The road was very long. Sometimes it wound, sometimes it stretched out. It was rutty in places, and smooth as still water in others. It rose steeply or gently, but always it rose.

One day, as they were climbing the very steepest part of the road, the sun stood directly over their heads and beat down on them with a fierce heat. There was no breeze, and the dust of the road hung round them like fog.

"Children," said the Father. "Let's stop now. This spot of shade by the road is as good a place to stay as any." 

"But it is summer," said the girl. "There will be many hot days like this."

"And our road is a long one," said the boy.

But the father had grown older on the journey, and he sat down heavily under the shade of an apple tree. 

The girl looked up to where the road seemed to crest at a hilltop. "Let's look," she whispered to her brother.   

The father watched as the two walked to the top of the hill. They stood there for a moment, their backs to him, and then turned and raced back down the hill to where he sat.

"Father!" shouted the girl.

"The City!" shouted the boy.

So the father took a deep breath and stood. Then his children both took one of his hands in theirs. 

"The left foot says, Glory!" said the boy.

"The right foot, Amen!" said the girl.

And the three of them began to march in step up the last steep hill before the City of the King. And as they came over the hilltop and on to the gates of the city, the King himself could hear them shouting,

Glory!

Amen!

Glory!

Amen!

And the father no longer thought about stopping, and he felt more than fine with the King smiling down on his old face. 

You've Been Disconnected

Here's one of MSNBC's lead headlines from today: "GOP Race Shaping up as Two-Man Confrontation." It's about the debate last night, the two men being Romney and Perry.


And here are the results of MSNBC's viewers' poll. 
Ron Paul . . . . . . 52.6% of the votes
Mitt Romney . . . 16.3%
Rick Perry . . . . . 13.6%
Huntsman, Gingrich, Cain, Bachmann, and Santorum . . . all below 7%.


MSNBC ran the debate. 
MSNBC ran the poll when it was done.
MSNBC ran the headline the next day. 


See the disconnect here?


But it's not just on the Left. Oh, no.


Today Sean Hannity tells Romney the debate made it clear that "You and Rick Perry are the frontrunners." Finally, the Right and Left can agree on something.


The disconnect is not between the media and some guy running for Pres. It's between the establishment and the people. The mainstream media are just as much a part of the establishment as any smokey backroom in DC. They're thumbing their nose at us and at the same time sinking deeper into irrelevance.

I love it. 

hmmm...The Sun...

[posted August 28, 2011 by James Delingpole]



If Michael Crichton had lived to write a follow-up to State of Fear, the plotline might well have gone like this: at a top secret, state of the art laboratory in Switzerland, scientists finally discover the true cause of “global warming”. It’s the sun, stupid. More specifically – as the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long postulated – it’s the result of cosmic rays which act as a seed for cloud formation. The scientists working on the project are naturally euphoric: this is a major breakthrough which will not only overturn decades of misguided conjecture on so-called Man Made Global Warming but will spare the global economy trillions of dollars which might otherwise have been squandered on utterly pointless efforts to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, these scientists have failed to realise just how many…

Read the rest.

Hilarious...and Scary

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Ron Paul for 2012

I don't stump for politicians. There are no McCain-Palin or Obama '08 stickers on my car. I'm not even registered with a party. But I like Ron Paul enough (and like our Constitution enough, even think we should keep it around) to devote a blog post to him.

A few things about this video:

1. It's dated, produced for his run in 2008, but that says a lot about Ron Paul: His message is exactly the same for 2012. Which is exactly the same message he's had since he got into politics in 1976.

2. He briefly defends the charge that he is an isolationist. Below the video is a more filled out response by Paul. It's great. Read it. You can read up on all of his positions at ronpaul.com.

3. It's corny at times - sorry - but very informative if you don't know much about the guy.



From "Free Trade with All, Entangling Alliances with None" by Ron Paul (Sept. 22, 2009)
Free trade with all and entangling alliances with none has always been the best policy in dealing with other countries on the world stage. This is the policy of friendship, freedom and non-interventionism and yet people wrongly attack this philosophy as isolationist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Isolationism is putting up protectionist trade barriers, starting trade wars imposing provocative sanctions and one day finding out we have no one left to buy our products. Isolationism is arming both sides of a conflict, only to discover that you’ve made two enemies instead of keeping two friends. Isolationism is trying to police the world but creating more resentment than gratitude. Isolationism is not understanding economics, or other cultures, but clumsily intervening anyway and creating major disasters out of minor problems. [emphasis mine]

This is soooooo a sport!

It's called SEPAKTAKRAW. It needs a new name, but otherwise it's a sport (for a reminder of the soon-to-be-universally-accepted 4 criteria for sport, go here).

Grammar vs. Standard Usage

There's a difference between good grammar and standard usage. Anyone who communicates clearly using a native language has good grammar. Standard usage is another matter.

Consider this sentence from my four-year-old: "I bringed you a book, Daddy." Bringed is not standard usage. Bring is an irregular verb so its conjugation doesn't follow the "add an ed to the end to make it past tense" rule of usage. But the grammar template in my daughter's head is just fine. She knew, and without my ever teaching it to her, that the past tense of verbs is formed by adding ed to the end. That's good grammar; the grammar part of her brain is working. But as she hears the construction a few hundred or a few thousand times, she'll add that little exception to the grammar in the form of a standard usage rule.

Her grammar is good, but her usage is not yet standard.

I talk about this with my students all the time.

"I ain't got good grammar," says Billy.

"Billy," I say, "your grammar's just fine. For example, in that sentence you just put a nominative case subject before your verb, you contracted an informal version of an auxiliary verb and added it correctly to a past participle to form the past perfect tense. And I understood you perfectly. Nice grammar, son."

Billy then looks at me sideways and I explain how his brain's grammar was formed and pretty much fixed by the time he was 13 (You can test this yourself: find an adult international who still has an accent, then ask when they arrived here. It was probably after the age of 12. Before that, when the grammar template in the brain is still forming, the new accent--American English--will replace the old one. It's a general rule, so you'll find exceptions.). What Billy's learning in my class now is the standard usage of American English.

So the next time you think to yourself, "My grammar sucks." Take heart. If you can make yourself understood in English then your grammar's just fine. It's your usage that sucks.

Ain't that great?

Psych Refresher - Milgram's 65

There was a story in the news recently of a man who drowned himself in the San Francisco bay. Sadly, there's nothing newsworthy about suicide. It happens all the time. The reason the story went national is that people there knew what was happening before it happened. They called the authorities, who quickly arrived at the scene. And then everyone--bystanders and first-responders alike--stood on the beach and watched him drown. 


It wasn't that the water was too deep or moving too fast or dangerously cold. It was a beach . . . in San Francisco. They watched him die because due to recent budget cuts, going into the water to rescue someone "wasn't policy." So when those in uniform didn't respond, neither did anyone else. They were all deferring to an authority (albeit the wrong ones--official policy, uniforms), so they all did nothing but watch.


We're all under authority, many authorities in fact. As I read the story, I thought of this. I also thought of a Peter Gabriel song and something haunting I learned in Mr. Sparling's high-school psych class...


In 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram was trying to make sense of Nazi Germany and the Jewish Holocaust and human nature and all that, something a lot of people in the social sciences were doing in the years following WWII. One of the questions he was asking himself was whether the people most directly involved in the events shared some dark moral illness or was there something in the authority structure that would explain how such things could happen? So he began a series of experiments testing human subjects' responses to authority.


Here's how his experiment worked: There were two groups of participants--"teachers" and "learners." The "teachers" were the oblivious volunteers, the true subjects of the experiment. The "learners" were actors paid by Milgram to do what actors do--to be convincing. Before they were divided into their two groups, they supposedly drew lots, slips of paper, for those roles. But all the slips said, "teacher," so the volunteers didn't know this was a blinded experiment and that all the "learners" would be acting their parts.


The groups were then paired off and separated so that each teacher and learner worked in different rooms with a wall between them. They couldn't see one another and communicated only through a one-way intercom through which the teacher could speak, and a push-button display through which the learner could respond. 


They were then given a task which involved learning word pairs. The teacher would first read to the learner the entire list of word pairs. The teacher would then read the first word of a pair and four possible answers for the second word. If the learner got the second word wrong, the teacher would be instructed, by someone in a white lab coat holding a clipboard, to remotely administer an electric shock to the learner (before the experiment began, the teacher would be given a real sample from a shock generator--that way he or she knew what was at stake.). The shock administered to the learner was fake, of course, but the teacher didn't know that, and the learner would do the appropriate acting to express pain based on the supposed voltage. 


Milgram designed the experiment so that the "voltage" would increase by 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. And with each wrong answer the learner's performance would rise accordingly--screams of pain, shouts for the experiment to stop, pleadings that their "heart condition" might kill them. The climax of the learner's performance would involve banging on the walls for the teacher to stop, and then silence--no response at all to the shock generator, as though the learner had gone unconscious or even died from the shocks.  


All the while, white-lab-coat guy is standing over the teacher, prodding him to push ahead. And all the while, the teacher really believes that he is shocking the learner in the other room.  


At any time, if the subject (the volunteer "teacher") expressed a desire to stop the experiment, a series of prompts would be given by the authority until the teacher either continued or insisted on stopping. 


The prompts went like this:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If, after all four prompts, the teacher still wanted to stop the experiment, it would be halted. Otherwise, it didn't stop until the teacher had given the learner the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.


But here's where things got scary. Before any of these experiments had been run, Milgram polled 14 Yale senior-year psych majors to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical "teachers." All those polled believed that only a small number of the teachers would inflict the maximum voltage. The poll results were between 0 and 3 out of 100, an average of 1.2. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found similar results. And since then, countless psych teachers in high schools and colleges have introduced these experiments and polled their own kids before revealing Milgram's results. The predictions are consistent. Most people believe that most of the subjects will stop the experiment before it gets out of hand. 


Here's what Milgram actually found: it wasn't 1.2% of the participants who went all the way to the maximum voltage, but 65%! 65% of the teacher participants--the blinded volunteers--reached the final, massive 450-volt shock. Despite the fact that they believed their learners were in great pain, despite believing that their actions might even be causing severe injury to another human being, almost two thirds continued to follow the instructions of the authorities and administer the shocks. And these weren't folks who were employed by the authority or who had pledged themselves somehow to follow the authority or who had guns at pointed at their heads; they were just in the same room with a guy from Yale wearing a white lab coat.


And that was authority enough. 


The experiments have been repeated since then with much the same results. Not surprisingly, the 65% diminishes as intimacy between teacher and learner is increased. Two-way voice communication drops the rate substantially. Removing the physical barrier between the two results in an even more dramatic drop. After all, it's hard to cause pain to someone you're looking at eye-to-eye. But these just illustrate both our pathetic ability to see what is true and our misplaced trust in feelings as our guide to right behavior. The Yale psych majors and Milgram's colleagues got it way wrong, and they were shocked by their own ignorance. But then, faith in humanity--humanism--always disappoints. 


There is one group, though, who shouldn't be shocked, because their teaching predicts exactly what Milgram "discovered." The Christian who looks into God's word, who understands that our depravity is beyond understanding not only can expect results like these but should. Only the Christian faith teaches that we are so hopeless that we must be saved from ourselves by someone outside of ourselves. By that light, Milgram's results aren't a surprise, they're evidence of the depravity of man, and without the Christian worldview, events like the Holocaust must go unexplained and must be repeated.  


All authority belongs to Christ, so all people will (now or at some point in their future) submit to God's word. Under God's word men don't torture others because a man with a clipboard says to, and men don't withhold help from others as they drown. But for the humanist, and for the complicit bystander, "it's policy" is authority enough.




"We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)"
by Peter Gabriel


we do what we're told
we do what we're told
we do what we're told
told to do

we do what we're told
we do what we're told
we do what we're told
told to do

one doubt
one voice
one war
one truth
one dream

Sport - A New Definition

So I'm channel flipping and I come across a hotdog eating contest on ESPN. 


A hotdog eating contest.


That shouldn't have surprised me when I recall that I've recently watched a spelling bee, snowmobile and airplane races (separate, not racing each other, as cool as that would be), poker, billiards, skeet shooting, and fishing all on the same network.


Now, I'll grant this--the E in ESPN does stand for entertainment, and those things are no doubt entertaining to some segment of the viewing public. I love airplane races and did get sucked into a riveting half hour of spelling where I at least once shouted at the TV, "Get the language of origin!" So I'm not suggesting such things aren't entertaining or competitive. They can be. I just can't help but wonder if there shouldn't be clearer lines drawn, lines that would separate things like rugby from kids spelling words-you've-never-heard-before or football from men playing card games. ESPN is the sports network, right? There should be clearer lines around this stuff, right?


I think, yes. So I'm going to help ESPN by proposing some new lines, a change in the definition of the word sport. This should help their programming decisions immensely.


Here it is...


Sport: n. an activity in which two or more participants engage in all of the following: 1) they compete with each other directly; i.e. both competitors are present simultaneously in the area of play; 2) it's athletic: a majority of the body's muscles must be skillfully utilized; 3) there is a ball (or some other object: e.g. puck, shuttlecock) that acts as the central point of contest; and 4) there is a clear method of scoring that does not require a third-party judge (referees and umpires notwithstanding).


That's it. Four simple criteria that anyone can apply to any competitive situation for a quick assessment as to its sportness. No more guessing, doubting, guffawing. It's black and white.


This doesn't mean there aren't athletes in other activities. This isn't about that, it's about semantics. I'm just not going to refer to those activities any longer as sports, and it's my hope that the world will join me. Boxing, biking, skiing, all forms of racing--these are not sports. Are there athletes competing in them? You bet. They're just not athletes competing in sports; they're competing in...well, boxing, biking, skiing, and racing. Competitive activities, but not sports.


It's a realigning of categories, that's all.


So the biggies are still in: football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, tennis, cricket--yes, cricket--rugby (trying to think internationally). These all meet the criteria. They're all sports. Admittedly, the new definition does allow for some questionable entries--ping pong, for example. At the gut level, ping pong (or anything else you can do in your basement) just doesn't seem like a sport. 


But wait! We don't need the gut any longer. The objective criteria will tell us. Two competitors directly and athletically involved in a clearly score-able contest using a ball? Yep, ping pong's a sport. How about skateboarding--is that a sport? Let's see, two or more participants in the same space? Nope. Is it athletic? Yes. A ball? No. Is it self-score-able or do you need a Judge? Judge, so no again. That's one out of four, folks. Skateboarding's not even close to being a sport. Not anymore. We all knew that intuitively, but now we can say it to the punks in front of 7-11 with some confidence. 

So congratulations to ping pong and dodgeball. Apologies to my many golfing friends (you lost sports status on point #1). But guys, you knew all along didn't you? Deep down, I mean, you knew that anything you could do while drinking that much beer could not possibly be a sport. 

ESPN, I look forward to seeing what you do with this. You're Welcome.

God and Pronoun Case Form

Much of grammar involves putting things into categories. Case forms of pronouns are one group of categories, and I spend a lot of my grammar-teaching time talking about case forms of pronouns.


For example, we say "Please take a picture of Abdul and me." Not "Abdul and I." Why? because the pronoun me is in a particular category; it's in the objective case. That is, it's acting as an object. Something is pointing at it--either a verb as in "do you love me?" or a preposition like the of in our example. I, on the other hand, is never an object. At least it's not supposed to be. It does other jobs, the primary one being subject. Then there's the possessive case, as in my, mine, his, her, your, our, their. That one's easy--it's the form a pronoun takes when showing possession.


So I've been thinking about case form lately, not because I teach it but because I find myself conceiving of God in certain ways. There are times when I am unusually aware that everything around me is oriented toward God. Everything is pointing to God. Ontologically, God is in the objective case, not only in a category sense, but in an ultimate sense. He is the object toward which all things point and move. Of course, everything is always oriented toward God in the sense that all things exist in God and are held together by God. But my awareness of this is as variable as wind. I wish I were more constant.


At other times, I have a stronger sense that God is the prime mover behind things, and I conceive of him as being in the nominative case. He is the original subject, actor, force, first cause. He is before all things and "in him all things consist." And yet, all things are still oriented toward him, so he is both subject and object, and there's no category for that. After Jesus calmed the storm, the disciples asked, "What manner of man is this?" In their amazement, they were pointing out a theological truth--that there is no known category to put Christ into, that he is unique.


He is both nominative and objective.


Oh yeah, he also owns everything, so he's possessive too. That would be all three.


Like I said, it's only a sense I have that drives this thinking, so I'm careful with it. The Bible doesn't use grammatical terms (except the Word) to describe God, so I should emphasize that these are only senses that point me to what is already stated as truth: That God is the prime mover behind all things, that all things are oriented to him, that he owns and rules over all things. He is nominative, objective, and possessive.


And that's our grammar lesson for today.


"Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
   to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
   and by your will they existed and were created."

Just Funny

Fathers and Sons and Treasure

I was watching a show about gold miners in Alaska, and one of the guys is complaining about how his dad doesn't trust him to lead the operation. Another responds, "Yeah, seeing eye to eye is impossible. Too many memories." 


For a show that's basically about fixing broken machinery in the woods, that was pretty deep. And it got me thinking.


When I look at my oldest son now I see every age he's ever been. I can picture him at 3 walking around the optometrist store with his new glasses just as clearly as I can the 15-year-old with his learner's permit. So in a way, seeing eye to eye with the older Charlie is impossible because the younger one's there too. For good or for bad, he'll always be a composite, and I'll always have to struggle with seeing him and treating him as the right-now Charlie. Too many memories.


Those miners were wise, sort of.


From my perspective, this has two implications that I see: one, there is a desire on my part to protect my toddler from the mean and nasty world; and two, there is a tension (as in a challenge to me) to see him as the man God is making him to be. I should see both as blessings. The first as a grace to carry me through these awkward, sometimes very awkward teenage years. The tenderness that I feel for my younger children is still there with Charlie, but buried under a lot of other affections. The second as a blessing because as I'm reminded that my son is not mine (and has never been) but God's very own, I'm also prompted to give praise to God for his creation. This is humbling. I have to let go of him--I'm only a steward.


For him, those implications are true, but in reverse. As I get old and my faculties diminish, he won't be able to help himself from seeing the dad that was stronger than anyone and who knew everything (I can't help but see my own that way). In Charlie's eyes the young me will always be there, somewhere, under the wrinkles and frailty. But he will also be very much his own man--a wise and faithful man (if I do my job well) who is also my son. He'll be to me a brother in Christ who sees my need, whatever that might look like. Again, these will be as God's grace to both of us. 


Those miners in Alaska diagnosed the problem well but that's as far as their wisdom could take them. They had no hope in their fathers because--as far as I could tell from the hour-long show--they had no such God as mine to hope in. Their treasure lay elsewhere. 

Sports II

H.G. Wells imagined a world where the globalists could quietly go about their business of world dominance because the masses - that's you and me - would be too busy cheering on their local deities as they competed in gladiator-type games in giant stadiums.


I think of that when I see this commercial: it's the one where the guy's watching NFL on TV, and as he walks out of the room he grabs the TV and folds it up into a laptop, then it becomes a phone, then he arrives wherever he's going and it's a TV again. The point being that you can always be watching the NFL, no matter where, no matter what, no matter the season.


I think about it because that commercial scares me as much as Wells does.


I get the feeling sometimes that sports are hypnotizing us. I watch ESPN and think, "these are really smart people spending their whole lives analyzing boys' games played by adults." (they used to be boys' games, then college sports came along, then pros; and all of that is relatively modern). Have you ever listened to a good sports analyst? It's like listening to a scientist or an economist or any expert on a topic complex enough to be analyzed. It's really quite impressive when the person knows his stuff.


I mean, what are we doing? Aren't there worthier endeavors? Wouldn't studying the stock market bring more happiness and prosperity to humanity? Or what about teaching? If those smart guys on espn had all gotten their degrees in teaching or went on to be college professors teaching other teachers, maybe our educational woes would be less woeful. Maybe. Or what if they all gave up their sports and put their heads together to stop global warming. Is there global warming? Or are we getting colder? Yeah, they could answer those questions first. And what about time travel, or flying cars, or toilet seats that aren't cold in the morning, or pot-hole-proof roads? 

What's the opportunity cost here for humanity by having smart people commit their lives to studying sports? Think about this: just maybe, locked away in some sports analyst's head, is the cure for---sorry, gotta go. Top Ten Plays are on. 


Silly H.G. Wells.

It's All Gonna Burn!

I currently have FIVE active blogs. It's ridiculous. I have a Versitext blog (copy writing stuff), a fiction blog (yep, for my fiction), a blog called GUM (grammar, usage, mechanics), another called Neologistics (it's weird - you don't need to know more than that), and this one--Big Wooden House.


I'll say it again - It's ridiculous.


So as of today, I'm disabling all blogs except BWH. All posts, no matter what their content or intended audience, will go here. I'll be salvaging a few old favorites and re-posting them, but the rest will go the way of all things created--they'll burn (in a digital sense).


This will be cathartic. I'm looking forward to it.

Charlie's 14th

Ok, I'm off by a day, but we're celebrating it tonight. H and I and Charlie at Pizza House. Last year, I had a few guys over to help bring him into his 13th (nothing bizarre, no hazing, just a campfire). This is the letter I wrote and read to him then. It's good for me--and for Charlie, I hope--to think of these things again, a year later:



Dear Charlie,
There's nothing magical about your 13th birthday. You've been baptized into Christ's church, and you've proclaimed publicly your faith in him, so the milestones that matter most are behind you. But some of us have noticed that we're not very good at acknowledging our boys becoming young men, so we thought we'd do something about that. This may not the best way to do it, but it's a start. We've been experimenting on you all along, and we see no reason to stop now.

In 1 Cor 13, Paul writes, "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways." We don't want to read too much into this. Maybe Paul had in mind a specific time when he became a man; his culture certainly gave it more thought than we do. But we can say that Paul saw a time when he was a child and a time when he was a man, when childish things--childish speech, thoughts, and reasoning--had to be put away and grown-up things put on. No, we're not saying that you need to put away all things of childhood. We want you to enjoy the good things God has given you. But we are saying that you need to hold onto these things loosely and with the discernment of a Godly man, to put on more and more the new self, to seek those things that we know make up biblical manhood. To put it simply, we want you to pursue Christ as a man of God does. These are the things that all the men here tonight are striving in God's strength to do.

So I've decided to do this tonight with several purposes in mind: one, to give you a kind of peg to help organize your growing-up memories, that there might be in your thinking, years from now, at time that you can point back to and say, "I became a young man then." We do this to put before you a charge - that Christ calls you, as his man, to obedience to him, to conformity to the Word of God. We do this as a promise to you - that we will help you in this, disciple you in this, and bear with you any burdens or joys God brings you to as you grow into manhood. But mostly, we're doing this to pray, to commend you to our Lord as a brother who's starting a new, wonderful, often confusing period of life.

I love you very much, Charlie. You're my oldest son, and though I can't say I love you more than your siblings, I can say that I've loved you longest. I've also prayed longer for you, that you would grow in grace and in the knowledge of Gd. We want to continue that tonight. So listen carefully, think back often on what you hear these men say--and I'll help you to do that--but most of all cling to Christ, the only one who can show you what being a real man means.

Now, as I've said to you often as you're going to bed, May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you tonight, and always.  

Love, Dad.

Rich Man

I was thinking about the value of motherhood, specifically the value of my wife's work in the home as a mother and home educator, when I said to myself, "No, you can't put a value on something like that." Then my other self said back to my first self, "Yes, you can. In fact, you do it every year she stays home to teach your kids."


What my other self was thinking was something called Opportunity Cost.


Before Heidi started home-schooling full time, she was teaching in one of the area's higher paying districts. She had 11 years in when she quit. She would have had 18 years in by now. By not doing that work and taking on the work of home-schooling instead, she gives up $75k a year in income and another $15k in benefits. That's the cost incurred by me (and her, and the whole family) to have her stay at home. We're "paying" $90,000 a year--more than half a million dollars so far--for Heidi to home school.


But my other self wasn't exactly right because $90k is only the baseline opportunity cost. That's just what she would be making as a public school teacher. The fact is Heidi's a flat-out steal at that price. She works as hard as any corporate CEO and builds a product that will outlast anything any Fortune 500 company can put out. She's also great to the stockholders (I'm the majority holder), and the employees love her. In fact, she doesn't know this but I'd go a lot higher--a million a year, ten million maybe--to keep her at home doing exactly what she's doing. Maybe first self was right, maybe I can't put a value on something like that. But $90k doesn't even come close.

I need to keep that in mind because when things are tight--which is always--I'm tempted to look around and bemoan what we don't have. It's easy for me to forget that I'm surrounded by the very best of things. I have a beautiful, smart, loving wife raising my kids in the fear and admonition of the Lord. That makes me the richest of men.

Perspective

When I first started hunting, I saw deer everywhere. My vision--at the corners of my eyes, especially--was full of motion from deer running, deer jumping, deer fleeing my fearsomeness. Eventually I realized there weren't any deer in the woods around me. In fact, there was nothing moving at all, nothing except me. My eyes were deceiving me.

When you walk through woods, your perspective is continually changing so that every angle, shadow, patch of dark and light, is in constant motion and in constant change with relationship to the things around it. A snowy gap between two trees closes, and from the corner of your eye it looks like movement. The angle of one branch shifts along another as you walk, and it looks like movement. But it's not. It's just shifting perspective.

It's important when hunting that way that you not spend the whole day moving; in fact, most of it should be spent stationary. You only move to get to a new stationary perspective. And there, all the false movement of shadow and light stops. What's left is the real motion of bird and squirrel and falling leaf. And hopefully deer.

But to move constantly without stopping to fix your perspective is confusion. And foolishness.

Life's the same. We move constantly, and so the fixed things around us have the illusion of movement; the things that are really moving get exaggerated. In the woods I can stop, lean up against a tree, and look around me. But what do I do in life? How do I stop the whirl of time, the spinning of earth and stars? How do I see clearly when my vision is filled with the shadows of fear and chaos and calamity? In life, is there a place to simply stand and fix my perspective?

There is. In this life, the things around me appear as they truly are only when my feet are fixed upon the rock of God's word. It's the only constant thing in a world of changing perspective. It's solid ground when light and dark, shadow and substance threaten to confound me. In the woods, in this life, my eyes deceive me, so I have to stop often and just stand there. It's then that I see things as they really are.

"God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging."
~ Psalm 42:2,3

Rob Bell's Missed Opportunity

Maybe you've seen it. Most of the evangelical world has. It's an interview with Rob Bell on msnbc. The interviewer is Martin Bashir. If you haven't seen it, here it is. Be forewarned: the images you're about to see are uncomfortable...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg-qgmJ7nzA


Bashir's first question is one most Christians have heard before: Given the tragedy we're seeing in Japan, which of these is true: Is God all-powerful and not loving? or is he loving but not all-powerful? My reaction as I heard this was "That's an easy one. Ask him something hard!" Not only was it framed as a logical fallacy--either or reasoning--it's also an easy one for any good, thinking Christian to knock down because there's a clear answer, a 3rd option.


So I waited for him to knock it down.


And I waited.


But Bell just talked in circles (the circles would take up the next 7 minutes). Then I realized something--that Rob Bell wasn't going to knock it down because he didn't have an answer, and he didn't have an answer because his theology had eliminated the third option. So in Bell's case the either-or question is not a fallacy at all but a real question that can't be answered because he's removed God's Holiness and Justice as the third - and correct - option.


God is love, and God is all-powerful, but God is also holy. When God intervenes in human tragedies and relieves our temporal suffering, he's showing us mercy--undeserved, as any mercy is. When he leaves us to our suffering, he's showing us his justice--rightly deserved, as all justice is. And he is sovereign over both. That was the right answer, but I think Bell gave up right answers a long time ago when he gave up an orthodox understanding of original sin.


I used to listen to Rob Bell. I went to his church for a summer. He seems like a really nice guy. I sincerely hope that he doesn't have to learn about God's justice the hard way, that God will show him mercy instead. Not the Rob Bell kind of mercy that goes out like halloween candy to everyone, but the sovereign God kind that loves and saves its own.


But either way, God Wins.