Life

“If you truly believe in the value of life, you care about all of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.”  -Joni Eareckson Tada[1]

Does life have value? If so, who sets that value? I’ve been wondering about this for a while now, and I’m afraid I’ve come to the conclusion our global society seems to place more value on the lives of animals than it does on the lives of humans.

Human life seems to hold no fixed value to those who believe women have the singular ability to destroy it before birth. They may claim it is not life, but science tells us otherwise. Brain development begins 2 weeks after conception[2], embryo viability outside the womb is around 24 weeks[3] after conception, although there are cases of survival younger than this.[4] Those who support abortion now want that decision to rest with the woman carrying the child until the child is actually delivered.  The funny thing about this debate is all the people who are making all the decisions actually were born and I’m pretty sure they see a lot of value in THEIR life, just not the lives of those who can’t defend themselves.

Along those same lines do black lives have value? It seems they must, but what is that value? Is it different than that of any other race? If so, why? Last year the nation went through a summer of riots as supporters who say Black Lives Matter fought with police, destroyed urban centers, and looted stores that were conveniently located in those areas the city officials and police abandoned to their rage. Does this destruction prove their point that those lives have value, or does it simply leave the question unanswered as those lives are used as a political chip to install some into power and wealth?

We have a whole litany of organizations who call to us for our dollars to support their causes saying the lives they support are important. Can we determine the value of a human or an animal from those organizations, or are they just a means to enrich some or push a political agenda?  While tugging on our hearts the appeals show the good, they can do with our dollars, but are their appeals valid in placing a value on life?  I tend to think not.  A quick internet search shows for as little as $100 you can sponsor a child in Africa, and for that paltry sum you get a picture of a smiling child and a well written little letter thanking you for your gift, but at the same time for $100 you can sponsor a wild animal from Africa, and like with the children you get a nice picture, an information packet and a certificate (suitable for framing) of sponsorship of that animal.

Is the life of a child living in poverty in Africa worth the same as an animal living with the fear of death from poachers really worth the same thing?  I don’t know?  Of those $100 I would send; how much does either the child or the animal actually receive?

As I seek the answer to my questions, I’ve done many searches of the world wide web of all things and all I can find are opinions on the value of life.  Most of them place increasing value on the lives of those who help others, who show empathy, and who strive to make life better, or speak to how to increase your opinion of self-worth.  Not too many speculate about the potential value of life, or the diminished value of a life wracked by addiction, or trained as a criminal to prey on others.

Christine M. Korsgaard[5], writing in her 1996 paper on ethics for Harvard, compares and contrasts two great Philosophers, Aristotle and Kant in a work entitled “Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value.”  It is clear in that paper these great men understood value as a transient idea and a person’s worth can only be determined by the individuals themself.

My bottom line:  I’ve purposely avoided a discussion of religion in this paper for the topic I write on is universal to mankind, but at the end of the day I find my own value in an understanding of faith and the life I live.  For me, that value is not fixed, nor is the value of all the lives around me, but I place more on the potential values of the lives destroyed before life than I do on the lives wasted on selfish desire or outrage over their own choices. 

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[1] Joni Eareckson Tada (born October 15, 1949) is an evangelical Christian author, radio host, and founder of Joni and Friends, an organization "accelerating Christian ministry in the disability community."

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3722610/

[3] https://www.verywellfamily.com/premature-birth-and-viability-2371529

[4]https://www.nysun.com/national/youngest-premature-babys-survival-called-a-miracle/49036/  

[5] https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3164347

Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs

I’ve written in the past on this theory of society, its villains, and its protectors.  I was introduced to it when I listened to a presentation by LTC Dave Grossman[1], USA (Ret), author of “On Killing” who related this story from an old Colonel[2].

“‘Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident.’ This is true. Remember, the murder rate is six per 100,000 per year, and the aggravated assault rate is four per 1,000 per year. What this means is that the vast majority of Americans are not inclined to hurt one another. Some estimates say that two million Americans are victims of violent crimes every year, a tragic, staggering number, perhaps an all-time record rate of violent crime. But there are almost 300 million Americans, which means that the odds of being a victim of violent crime is considerably less than one in a hundred on any given year. Furthermore, since many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders, the actual number of violent citizens is considerably less than two million.

‘Then there are the wolves,’ the old war veteran said, ‘and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy.’ Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial.

‘Then there are sheepdogs,’ he went on, ‘and I'm a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.’”

I was reminded today of that analogy when I listened to a speech by Victor David Hanson to Hillsdale College on George S. Patton[3] and the tragic reality of how we as a society view our sheepdogs.  Those people who view the dark side of humanity and choose to engage it.  Examples he gave in leading up to the discussion were Generals William Tecumseh Sherman, Matthew Ridgeway, and Curtis LeMay who all had made the mistake of having views in opposition to the popular (i.e., therapeutic we are nice and shouldn’t kill those who are responsible for this mess we are in) view of most of society.

Remember when President Trump ordered the drone strike on the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and how outraged the political opposition was and how this was going to cause a massive Iranian response?  Soleimani was the mastermind behind attacks that had killed hundreds and was responsible for Iran’s involvement in the Syrian civil war.  Just because he was responsible, they said, it was just not right to actually target him as an individual. What was the result?  After his death there was a lot of Iranian chest-beating, a lot of leftist noise about how a war was inevitable, but really not much more.  At the end of the day was Trump’s decision to execute this Soleimani any different than Obama’s to execute Bin Laden, or all the drone strikes he approved against nameless terrorists in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula?

Islamic apologists and supporters of Hamas like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush like to talk about how most of the followers of Mohammed are peaceful, but it is just pure deflection.  As Brigitte Gabriel[4] explains in this video on Benghazi accountability[5] most people are irrelevant to the issue of confronting terrorism, whether done in the name of Allah, the Third Reich, White Supremacy, Black Lives, or simply anarchy. 

As we look at the tenor of American politics today it seems, at least to me, our young and the most highly educated among us have been trained to be sheep and to fear the sheepdogs. They believe the right government will protect them from the evils of the world. But at the end of the day is the government any different than a simple fence or pen, intended to keep the herd all in one place and make it easier to gather them all up when it comes time to be sheered? To keep up the illusion the pen is there for their protection and that the masters are to protect the weakest in the herd they are taught from the earliest time the government will care for the weakest, and must always be on guard of the sheepdogs. (e.g., Defund the Police will lead to safer, more tolerant communities.) 

The DNC has leveraged this with great success, suggesting they are the bravest of the sheep and those mean sheepdogs are just out to destroy the herd.  That works, at least until a real wolf appears.  So, to avoid having to confront a real wolf, they create problems that seem solvable but really don’t seek rational solutions as long as those problems keep the herd moving in its endless circle around the field and inside the fence.

For example, poverty.  Since the beginning of recorded history, there have been those who’ve been doomed to live in poverty.  Today, in America, that is equally true, although what is classified as poverty today would almost certainly be well above the survival standards of yesteryear.  With the crash of an overleveraged stock market in 1929, the government has taken increasingly expensive steps to help the poor us.  In the 1960s while expanding our role in an unwinnable war, and racing the Soviet Union to the Moon, President Johnson and Congress created the “Great Society.” 

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson and the Congress (2/3 majority Democrat) got to work overcoming the resistance of the Southern Democrats to significantly expand America’s support for the disadvantaged and underprivileged. They created Medicare and Medicaid, training programs for the unskilled and illiterate, and priority placements for the underprivileged to provide them a helping hand up, educational assistance, and welfare programs for the poorest of the inner cities.  Of course, to administer all these programs and the redistribution of America's tax dollars they established sizeable new bureaucracies, which have continued to grow and flourish over these past five decades, as have the criminal abuses of these programs.  Human greed being what it is, whenever free money is available there will be those who attempt to gain that wealth for themselves.

But let’s stop for just a minute and ask ourselves one simple question.  Have all these programs and all the redistribution of wealth or the expansion of Government debt served the needs of the poor and the quality of life in the United States to achieve their stated purpose, or have they simply been a tool to increase our individual dependence on the government as it moves to eliminate our faith in God, or our faith in family and our faith in each other as a vital aspect of life in America?  Have these programs, and all the other programs like the “War on Drugs” or the ebb and flow of criminal incarceration helped the poorest of the nation, or eliminated the racism of those who believe they are superior to others based on the color of their skin?  By the way, it doesn’t seem to matter what the color of someone’s skin is for those feelings to exist.  

As we devolve from a nation-state with a unified vision of ourselves and the world, into an amalgamation of tribes at some point there will be too many sheep for the sheepdogs to protect and the wolves of the world will fall upon those flocks and gobble them up.

 

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[1] David Allen Grossman is an American author and trainer who conducts seminars on the psychology of lethal force. He is a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army.

[2] https://www.mwkworks.com/onsheepwolvesandsheepdogs.html

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsC-buIkSE

[4] Brigitte Gabriel is a Lebanese-American conservative author, anti-Islam activist, and founder of the anti-Muslim group ACT! for America.

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-vvoRwJSPc

Intelligence in the Modern World

 This post was inspired by a recent comment on Facebook.

In our modern world we’ve come to define intelligence through a series of measurement, or tests, established by those who believe they know what makes up intelligence and what doesn’t.  There are a whole variety of tests we may be subject to beginning with standardized testing now in public schools, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (then Scholastic Assessment Test, now just SAT), and the American College Testing (now just ACT) find their origins in the early American Army Intelligence tests.  Now one or the other is required for admission to almost every college in America.

Of course, there are a series of other intelligence tests that fall into and out of favor with those credentialled masters who seek to know who has the right intelligence to achieve something.  It should not be missed that every test from the SAT on has been called into question for basing their assessment on a racial bias set of answers.  Minority communities where there are far wider cultural differences often score lower on these standardized tests than the majority populations.  

To keep the appearance of fairness, if not really the actuality of the same, elite institutions have developed quota systems where performance on these “intelligence” tests are overridden by minority admission policies, which only seem to apply to minorities from the right social group.  Take, for example, Asian-Americans have an ongoing lawsuit against Harvard University for its discrimination.  So far Harvard has prevailed but the group “Students for Fair Admissions” has filed a petition for writ of certiorari in an attempt to overturn “Grutter v. Bollinger” which ruled it was constitutional for universities to use race in admissions to promote student diversity.[1]  The issue seems to me to be purely cultural. Let’s accept the fact, as so many on the left would have us believe, there is a longstanding racial bias in this nation.  Asian-Americans outperform all other ethnic groups when it comes to these standardized tests.[2] These studies all talk about how much better the AA do but none of these social analysts seem to want to address the elephant in the room.  Nobody wants to talk about the family and how the destruction of the family unit perhaps destroys an individual’s motivation to prepare, study, practice, and succeed on these measures of intelligence.

Over the past couple of decades, the average scores on the SAT and ACT have markedly declined, yet the Asian-American segment continues to excel.[3] Does that mean Asian-Americans or Asians, in general, are inherently smarter than all the rest? Who is willing to compare the statistics of Asian-American families to say the African-American or European-American family unit to see what role a forceful set of parents can play?  It doesn’t appear to be of much interest to most of the liberal-progressive crowd, especially when you can rationalize away failure as systemic racism.

Back in the mid-20^th century, I had an old Sociology professor who attempted to explain things like intelligence and physical ability as naturally occurring sets of attributes.  As he explained, the Negros came from Africa and as a result of their genetic selection, they could run longer, jump higher, sprint faster, and were gifted in these attributes because of natural selection.  They were, he went on to explain not as gifted as the whites from Europe in their intellect because living on the savanna didn’t require the same mental development as the whites.  When I was listening to this I wondered what Darwin would say, but as you look at professional sports today it does make you wonder.  Of course, within the modern construct, this Professor was clearly and overtly a racist.

For the record, as a social science major, I buy into the idea society fits into a bell-shaped curve.  The range of measurable intelligence supposedly falls between 0 and 175, with 100 being a median score and 85 to 115 being one standard deviation[4], which means 68% of a population will fall somewhere within that range.  Let’s call that range average.  Anything higher than 115 is smart, anything less than 85 is not smart.  

As you take all those intelligence tests on Facebook, keep these numbers in mind, as well as the fact you are feeding into Google’s database so they know what products to sell you, or even if you are able to understand their marketing approach.

Of course, in today’s woke world we are redefining how intelligence is measured.  For the woke generation it’s all about understanding and complying with the social outrages they have been indoctrinated to abhor.  If, for example, you choose to pursue a military career, you clearly have to fall on the not smart scale of intelligence.  Or, if you think less government is better than more government or are a conservative/Trump supporter you have to fall on the not smart side of intelligence.  On the other hand, if you have a Ph.D. in one of the social sciences, or perhaps one of the genders/sexual orientation fields you clearly must fall well above the average and rank significantly higher in the smart category.

Watch this YouTube video to see the results of a social experiment.

I find it interesting to see the rationalization of those who think themselves superior when actually confronted with an IQ test.  Now suddenly emotional intelligence EQ is a critical factor. 

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[1] https://www.thecollegefix.com/supreme-court-may-finally-intervene-in-asian-discrimination-suit-against-harvard/

[2] https://www.studyinternational.com/news/asian-americans-test-scores-sat-act/

[3] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sat-scores-and-asian-amer_b_3902725

[4] https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-average-iq-2795284