Paschal's Courses, Updates

The Dell Story: lesson for HRM 400

2008-05-20T11:14:00.003-04:00

What You Don't Know About Dell
A look at the management secrets
of the best-run company in technology
A Business Week article

When Dell CEO Michael S. Dell and President Kevin B. Rollins met privately in the fall of 2001, they felt confident that the company was recovering from the global crash in PC sales. Their own personal performance, however, was another matter. Internal interviews revealed that subordinates thought Dell, 38, was impersonal and emotionally detached, while Rollins, 50, was seen as autocratic and antagonistic. Few felt strong loyalty to the company's leaders. Worse, the discontent was spreading: A survey taken over the summer, following the company's first-ever mass layoffs, found that half of Dell Inc.'s (DELL ) employees would leave if they got the chance.

What happened next says much about why Dell is the best-managed company in technology. At other industry giants, the CEO and his chief sidekick might have shrugged off the criticism or let the issue slide. Not at Dell. Fearing an exodus of talent, the two execs focused on the gripes. Within a week, Dell faced his top 20 managers and offered a frank self-critique, acknowledging that he is hugely shy and that it sometimes made him seem aloof and unapproachable. He vowed to forge tighter bonds with his team. Some in the room were shocked. They knew personality tests given to key execs had repeatedly shown Dell to be an "off-the-charts introvert," and such an admission from him had to have been painful. "It was powerful stuff," says Brian Wood, the head of public-sector sales for the Americas. "You could tell it wasn't easy for him."

Michael Dell didn't stop there. Days later, they began showing a videotape of his talk to every manager in the company -- several thousand people. Then Dell and Rollins adopted desktop props to help them do what didn't come naturally. A plastic bulldozer cautioned Dell not to ram through ideas without including others, and a Curious George doll encouraged Rollins to listen to his team before making up his mind.

WALKING DATABASES
To some, the way Michael Dell handled sagging morale might seem like another tale of feel-good management. But to those inside the company, it epitomizes how this Round Rock (Tex.) computer maker has transformed itself from a no-name PC player into a powerhouse brand. Sure, Dell is the master at selling direct, bypassing middlemen to deliver PCs cheaper than any of its rivals. And few would quarrel that it's the model of efficiency, with a far-flung supply chain knitted together so tightly that it's like one electrical wire, humming 24/7. Yet all this has been true for more than a decade. And although the entire computer industry has tried to replicate Dell's tactics, none can hold a candle to the company's results. Today, Dell's stock is valued at a price-earnings multiple of 40, loftier than IBM, Microsoft, Wal-Mart Stores, or General Electric.

As it turns out, it's how Michael Dell manages the company that has elevated it far above its sell-direct business model. What's Dell's secret? At its heart is his belief that the status quo is never good enough, even if it means painful changes for the man with his name on the door. When success is achieved, it's greeted with five seconds of praise followed by five hours of postmortem on what could have been done better. Says Michael Dell: "Celebrate for a nanosecond. Then move on." After the outfit opened its first Asian factory, in Malaysia, the CEO sent the manager heading the job one of his old running shoes to congratulate him. The message: This is only the first step in a marathon.

Just as crucial is Michael Dell's belief that once a problem is uncovered, it should be dealt with quickly and directly, without excuses. "There's no 'The dog ate my homework' here," says Dell. No, indeedy. After Randall D. Groves, then head of the server business, delivered 16% higher sales last year, he was demoted. Never mind that none of its rivals came close to that. It could have been better, say two former Dell executives. Groves referred calls to a Dell spokesman, who says Groves's job change was part of a broader reorganization.

Above all, Michael Dell expects everyone to watch each dime -- and turn it into at least a quarter. Unlike most tech bosses, Dell believes every product should be profitable from Day One. To ensure that, he expects his managers to be walking databases, able to cough up information on everything from top-line growth to the average number of times a part has to be replaced in the first 30 days after a computer is sold.

But there's one number he cares about most: operating margin. To Dell, it's not enough to rack up profits or grow fast. Execs must do both to maximize long-term profitability. That means products need to be priced low enough to induce shoppers to buy, but not so low that they cut unnecessarily into profits. When Dell's top managers in Europe lost out on profits in 1999 because they hadn't cut costs far enough, they were replaced. "There are some organizations where people think they're a hero if they invent a new thing," says Rollins. "Being a hero at Dell means saving money."

It's this combination -- reaching for the heights of perfection while burrowing down into every last data point -- that no rival has been able to imitate. "It's like watching Michael Jordan stuff the basketball," says Merrill Lynch & Co. technology strategist Steven Milunovich. "I see it. I understand it. But I can't do it."

How did this Mike come by his management philosophy? It started 19 years ago, when he was ditching classes to sell homemade PCs out of his University of Texas dorm room. Dell was the scrappy underdog, fighting for his company's life against the likes of IBM and Compaq Computer Corp. (HPQ ) with a direct-sales model that people thought was plain nuts. Now, Michael Dell is worth $17 billion, while his 40,000-employee company is about to top $40 billion in sales. Yet he continues to manage Dell with the urgency and determination of a college kid with his back to the wall. "I still think of us as a challenger," he says. "I still think of us attacking."

It's not that Michael Dell leads by force of personality. He's blessed with neither the tough-guy charisma of Jack Welch nor the folksy charm of the late Sam Walton. Once, after hearing about the exploits of flamboyant Oracle Corp. (ORCL ) CEO Lawrence J. Ellison, he held up a piece of paper and deadpanned to an aide: "See this? It's vanilla and square, and so am I." This egoless demeanor permeates the company. Everyone is expected to sacrifice their own interests for the good of the business, and no one gets to be a star. If Michael Dell is willing to modify the personality traits he was born with, other top execs are expected to be just as self-sacrificing. Frequently, Dell pairs execs to run an important business, an approach called "two-in-a-box." That way, they work together, checking each others' weaknesses and sharing the blame when something goes wrong. One such executive calls Dell's senior leadership "the no-name management team."

All this has kept Dell on track as rivals have gone off the rails. Since 2000, the company has been adding market share at a faster pace than at any time in its history -- nearly three percentage points in 2002. A renewed effort to control costs sliced overhead expenses to just 9.6% of revenue in the most recent quarter and boosted productivity to nearly $1 million in revenue per employee. That's three times the revenue per employee at IBM and almost twice Hewlett-Packard Co.'s rate.

Still, for the restless Michael Dell, that's not nearly enough. He wants to make sure the company he has spent half his life building can endure after he's gone. So he and Rollins have sketched out an ambitious financial target: $60 billion in revenues by 2006. That's twice what the company did in 2001 and enough to put it in league with the largest, most powerful companies in the world. Getting there will require the same kind of success that the company achieved in PCs -- but in altogether new markets. Already, Michael Dell is moving the company into printers, networking, handheld computers, and tech services. His latest foray: Dell is entering the cutthroat $95 billion consumer-electronics market with a portable digital-music player, an online music store, and a flat-panel television set slated to go on sale Oct. 28.

Can Dell graduate from PC prodigy to corporate icon? Driving for nonstop growth will require grooming a new generation of leaders, which Rollins concedes is a major challenge given the company's pressure-cooker atmosphere. In the 1990s, after seasoned execs recruited from titans such as Intel and IBM quickly jumped ship, Dell learned that outsiders don't adapt easily to its demanding culture. And unlike in the past, Dell won't be able to count on stock options to make up for the discomfort. Some 32% of its outstanding options are priced above the current share price of $35, and the company has sliced grants to about 40 million shares this year, one-third the 2001 level. Little wonder that so far, Dell has achieved only a modest improvement in morale, according to its internal surveys. "They need to work a lot on appreciating people," says Kate Ludeman, an executive coach who has worked with Dell since 1995.

"ONE-TRICK PONY"
Dell also faces an innovation dilemma. Its penny-pinching ways leave little room for investments in product development and future technologies, especially compared with rivals. Even in the midst of the recession, IBM spent $4.75 billion, or 5.9% of its revenues, on research and development in 2002, while HP ponied up $3.3 billion, or 5.8% of revenues. And Dell? Just a paltry $455 million, or 1.3%. Rivals say that handicaps Dell's ability to move much beyond PCs, particularly in such promising markets as digital imaging and utility computing. "Dell is a great company, but they are a one-trick pony," says HP CEO Carleton S. Fiorina. What's more, Dell has shown little patience for the costs of entering new markets, killing off products -- like its high-end server -- when they didn't produce quick profits, rather than staying committed to a long-term investment. "They're the best in the world at what they do," says IBM server chief William M. Zeitler. "The question is, will they be best at the Next Big Thing?"

For Michael Dell, inventing the Next Big Thing is not the goal. His mission is to build the Current Big Thing better than anyone else. He doesn't plan on becoming IBM or HP. Rather, he wants to focus on his strength as a superefficient manufacturer and distributor. That's why Dell continues to hone the efficiency of its operations. The company has won 550 business-process patents, for everything from a method of using wireless networks in factories to a configuration of manufacturing stations that's four times as productive as a standard assembly line. "They're inventing business processes. It's an asset that Dell has that its competitors don't," says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for eBusiness at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.

Dell's expansion strategy is carefully calibrated to capitalize on that asset. The game plan is to move into commodity markets -- with standardized technology that's widely available -- where Dell can apply its skills in discipline, speed, and efficiency. Then Dell can drop prices faster than any other company and prompt demand to soar. In markets that Dell thinks are becoming commoditized but still require R&D, the company is taking on partners to get in the door. In the printer market, for example, Dell is slapping its own brand on products from Lexmark International Inc. (LXK ) And in storage, Dell has paired up with EMC Corp. (EMC ) to sell co-branded storage machines. Dell plans to take over manufacturing in segments of those markets as they become commoditized. It recently took on low-end storage production from EMC, cutting its cost of goods 25%.

Dell's track record suggests the CEO will meet his $60 billion revenue goal by 2006. Already, Dell has grabbed large chunks of the markets for inexpensive servers and data-storage gear. After just two quarters, its first handheld computer has captured 37% of the U.S. market for such devices. And Rollins says initial sales of Dell printers are double its internal targets. With the potential growth in PCs and new markets, few analysts doubt that Dell can generate the 15% annual growth needed to reach the mark. The company has averaged better than 19% growth over the past four quarters, and on Oct. 8 Rollins assured investors that everything was on track. "It's almost machine-like," says Goldman, Sachs & Co. analyst Laura Conigliaro. For the year, analysts expect Dell to boost revenues 16%, to $41 billion, and profits 24%, to $2.6 billion, according to a survey of Wall Street estimates by First Call.

What should help Dell as it plunges into so many new markets is the founder's level-headed realism. A student of business history, he has paid close attention to how some of tech's legendary figures lost their way by refusing to admit mistakes. He cites Digital Equipment Corp.'s Ken Olsen as one who stuck with his strategy until the market passed him by and hints that Sun Microsystems Inc.'s (SUNW ) Scott G. McNealy could be next.

Dell, on the other hand, has reversed course so fast he's lucky he didn't get whiplash. In 2001, he scrapped a plan to enter the mobile-phone market six months after hiring a top exec from Motorola Inc. to head it up. He decided the prospects weren't bright enough to offset the costs of entry. The next year, Dell wrote off its only major acquisition, a storage-technology company bought in 1999 for $340 million. Dell backed out of the high-end storage business because it decided its technology wasn't ready for market. "It's amazing how a guy who was so young when he founded the company could evolve as he has," says Edward J. Zander, former president of Sun Microsystems. "Guys that have been in the saddle for 15 and 20 years tend to get too religious. He's the exception to the rule."

Michael Dell, in fact, has one of the longest tenures of any founder who remains CEO. At 19 years and counting, he's second in the tech industry only to Oracle's Ellison. "This sounds strange coming from me," says William H. Gates III, who was CEO of Microsoft Corp. for 25 years before giving it up to be chairman and chief software architect, "but very few business leaders go from the early stage of extremely hands-on stuff to have a leadership style and management process that works for a company that's an absolutely huge and superimportant company."

One way Dell has done it is through his power-sharing arrangement with Rollins, à la his "two-in-a-box" philosophy. Brought on as a consultant in 1993 to help plot the company's first long-range plan, Rollins helped it recover from a series of miscues, including the bungled launch of its notebook business and a disastrous go at trading currencies. Three years later, Dell hired Rollins away from Bain & Co. to run North American sales.

Now, Rollins is the day-to-day general. He and Dell sit in adjoining offices separated by only a glass wall. During a pivotal meeting in the fall of 2001, Dell proposed they agree not to make a major move without the other's approval. Working in tandem helps avoid mistakes that the more entrepreneurial Dell or the more rigid Rollins might make alone. Says Dell: "This company is much stronger when the two of us are doing it together." And there's no question that Rollins is the successor. "If I get hit by a truck, he's the CEO. Everyone knows that."

THE GAUNTLET
Not that the current CEO is letting up. He maintains pinpoint control over the company's vast operations by constantly monitoring sales information, production data, and his competitors' activities. He keeps a BlackBerry strapped to his hip at all times. In the office, he reserves an hour in the morning and one each afternoon to do nothing but read and respond to e-mail, according to one former executive. "Michael can be a visionary, and he can tell you how many units were shipped from Singapore yesterday," says General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt, a top Dell customer.

Dell's penchant for tracking every last detail can land him in hot water. On Oct. 10, during the trial of former Credit Suisse First Boston (CSR ) tech banker Frank P. Quattrone for allegedly obstructing an investigation into the bank's handling of hot initial public offerings, prosecutors revealed e-mails between Dell and Quattrone. In one July, 2000, exchange, Dell requested 250,000 shares in Corvis Corp. (CORV ), a promising networking company that was preparing to go public, for his corporate venture-capital fund. Dell suggested the allocation "would certainly help" the relationship between his company and CSFB. Dell declined to comment. But his spokesperson says he was merely trying to assist the fund and noted that the company did not do any investment-banking business with CSFB before or after the exchange. In a separate e-mail on which Michael Dell was copied, the manager of Dell's personal venture fund requested Corvis shares for the fund. A spokesperson for that fund says it had invested in Corvis in 1999 and there was nothing improper about the request.

Rollins has the same attention to detail as Michael Dell. He is overseeing a Six Sigma transformation of everything from manufacturing to marketing that is expected to help cut expenses $1.5 billion this year. The emphasis is on small surgical strikes on defects and waste, not massive restructurings. Consider a Six Sigma meeting one balmy July afternoon. Rollins listened to John Holland, a technician in Dell's server factory, describe how his team replaced the colored paper it used to print out parts lists with plain white paper, saving $23,000. "Where else do you get a supervisor making $40,000 a year presenting to the president of a $40 billion company?" says Americas Operations Vice-President Dick Hunter, Holland's boss.

The discipline in Michael Dell's management style is most apparent in how the company approaches new markets. Take Dell's plunge into the $50 billion printer business. Beginning in 2001, a team of Dell strategists spent more than a year researching the market. Dell only started serious planning after finding that nearly two-thirds of its customers said they would buy a Dell printer if they could get the same kind of service they got when they bought a PC or server. In the summer of 2002, Vice-President Tim Peters, a veteran of Dell's handheld launch, was tapped to lead the effort. But like any exec planning to put out a new product, he had to face the gauntlet of Dell and Rollins. After thinking up a strategy, he had to sit by while it was picked apart.

Nothing was left to chance. Dell prodded Peters to think about product features and the buying experience, while Rollins pushed him to keep costs low without sacrificing quality. Both bosses wanted to make sure the timing was right. That required intense discussions about how standardized printer technologies were and the state of the supply chain that Dell would use. One key challenge: ink. Customers typically buy replacement cartridges at a nearby retailer. It didn't seem likely that they would wait for days for an Internet order from Dell to arrive.

The toughest task in any product launch is the math. At Dell, a new line of PCs, which is good for $2 billion to $3 billion in annual revenue, costs roughly $10 million to launch. Any new idea must have a comparable return says G. Carl Everett, a Dell senior vice-president who retired in 2001, and turn a profit from the get-go. That's what Peters had to promise in printers. The rare exceptions occur only when Dell senses an opportunity that's critical to the company's future. Dell's server business, for instance, took 18 months to reach profitability, says former Vice-President Michael D. Lambert.

In the printer business, it took seven months for Peters to work everything out. The products debuted in March and were profitable immediately. Peters' proposed solution to the ink riddle: Every Dell printer comes loaded with software directing users to Dell.com, where they can order a new cartridge and have it delivered the next day. Still, Michael Dell never let up: The night before the launch, he sat up until 2 a.m. to watch the printers debut online and then zipped e-mails to Peters with suggestions for improvement. When initial sales came in at double the internal target, Peters' team got a very Dell-like reward: a quick trip to see Terminator 3.

That flick may turn out to have more than therapeutic value, considering that rival HP is determined to wipe out Dell's printer ambi- tions. HP's strategy is to leave Dell in the dust with a burst of innovation. It spends $1 billion a year on printer research -- more than twice Dell's entire R&D budget. HP is using that money to develop products like high-end photo ink, which will last 73 years, nearly 10 times as long as what Dell offers. "Dell is going to hit a wall," says Jeff Clarke, HP's executive vice-president for global operations. "We view them as low-tech and low-cost. They're the Kmart of the industry." And some experts say Dell won't threaten HP's 60% market share anytime soon. Gartner Inc. estimates that Dell claimed less than 1% of the printer market in the second quarter, mostly at the low end of the business.

ATTACKING FROM BELOW
If past experience is any guide, Dell may struggle as it tries to move upmarket. With its bare-bones R&D budget, it had to kill off high-end servers that go head-to-head with fancy gear from Sun, saying the soft demand didn't merit its attention. And after two and a half years selling networking gear, Dell has failed to deliver products powerful enough to threaten Cisco Systems Inc.'s (CSCO ) dominant market share. Yet Dell is betting that as technology improves, the low-end products it sells so deftly will become more than good enough for most customers, leaving rivals scrambling to find their next high-end innovation. "The history of the industry is [that] the attack from below works," says Merrill Lynch's Milunovich.

Indeed, Dell has had no trouble gobbling up sales as markets mature. In storage, its sales now account for 10% of EMC's revenue, some $600 million annually. In the low-margin home-PC market, which Dell long avoided, unit sales have grown an average of 46% in the past four quarters.

Michael Dell certainly would take exception to HP's jabs about his company being the Kmart of tech. But there are some striking similarities between Dell and another giant retailer: Wal-Mart. Like the behemoth from Bentonville, Ark., Dell has built a business as a superefficient distributor, with the tightly run operations and thrifty management to enter any number of new markets quickly and easily. "We've always toyed with the idea that we could distribute anything," says Morton L. Topfer, a former Dell vice-chairman who now sits on the company's board. Maybe not anything. But Dell is striving to greatly expand his reach in the tech world. With his management philosophy of constant improvement, he seems well on his way.

By Andrew Park in Round Rock, Tex., with Peter Burrows in San Mateo, Calif., and bureau reports
___
Email Dr.Baute, your Alignment graph for Dell, justify your estimate of Strategy, Process, Customer and People.

Above article was dated November 2003. You can tell current status of Dell by visiting
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Dell_(DELL)
that is, go to wikinvest.com and googling DELL for s summary of Dell's current market status.

U S. Management in face of Globalism: Decline: pleaee note your future challenges in HRM>

2008-03-18T18:55:00.002-04:00

Mismanagement 101

The dollar's woes reflect the world's collective verdict on the ability of the U.S. to manage the global financial system.

Daniel Gross

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 11:46 AM ET Mar 15, 2008

Last November, president George W. Bush, in an interview with Fox Business Network, summoned his inner high-school cheerleader. "We have a strong dollar policy, and it's important for the world to know that," he said. "And if people would look at the strength of our economy, they'd realize why I believe that the dollar will be stronger." Since then, the greenback, which had been slumping against foreign currencies for years, has wilted like spinach in a sauté pan at the Olive Garden. Given that the typical audience for Fox Business Network could comfortably fit into Rupert Murdoch's downtown Manhattan loft, it's no surprise the world failed to get the message. The greenback last week hit new lows against foreign currencies. The dollar is so sad, we should consider renaming it the dolor.

At some level, the dollar's woes reflect the world's collective verdict on the ability of the United States—businesses, individuals, the government, the Federal Reserve—to manage the global financial system and the world's largest economy. Lately the verdict has been two thumbs down. Countries that outsourced their monetary policy by pegging domestic currencies to the dollar are having second thoughts. Kuwait last year detached the dinar from the dollar, and Qatar government officials last week said they were considering doing the same. International financiers are unnerved by the toxic combination of "misplaced assumptions about housing, a lack of necessary regulation and irresponsible use of debt with sophisticated financial instruments," said Ashraf Laidi, currency strategist at CMC Markets.

Dissing American financial management is an affront to national pride tantamount to standing in Rome and asking, loudly, if Italians are able to make pasta. For the United States invented the concept and practice of running large, complex systems. Along with baseball and deep-frying, management is one of our great national pastimes. The world's first M.B.A.s were awarded by pioneering yuppie factories like the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. (Wharton's founding in 1881 was quickly followed by the first time-share summer houses in the Hamptons.) Henry Ford's revolutionary assembly line was the gold standard in global manufacturing for decades. Contemporary American institutions stand for excellence in managing everything from supply chains (Wal-Mart) to delivery services (Federal Express and UPS).

Americans' ability to manage complex systems has been the ultimate competitive advantage. It has allowed the United States to enjoy high growth and low inflation—a record we haven't hesitated to lord over our foreign friends. The shelves in the business section of a bookstore in a mall in Johannesburg are stocked with the same volumes you'll find in a Barnes & Noble in Pittsburgh: memoirs by cornfed paragons of capitalism like Jack Welch, wealth-building advice from American money managers, large tomes on how Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller built global businesses from scratch.

But today? Not so much. Thanks to widespread incompetence, American management is on its way to becoming an international laughingstock. Faith in American financial sobriety has been widely undermined by the subprime mess. The very mention of the strong-dollar policy now elicits raucous bouts of knee-slapping in even the most sober Swiss banks. (How do you say "schadenfreude" in German?) Earlier this month, as oil hovered near $100 a barrel, President Bush complained to OPEC about high oil prices. OPEC president Chakib Khelil responded acidly that the crude's remarkable run had nothing to do with the reluctance of Persian Gulf nations to pump oil, and everything to do with the "mismanagement of the U.S. economy." Since Bush's plea, oil has gushed to $110 per barrel. (How do you say "schadenfreude" in Arabic?)

Americans abroad are constantly taunted by perceived failings of American management. America's aviation system is now the butt of jokes because 9-year-olds have become accustomed to removing their Heelys before boarding a plane. As my family and I passed through the snaking security line in Cancún's airport last month, we were harangued by a security guard who encouraged tourists to sing along with him: "Please. Do not. Remove. Your shoes."

The concern extends beyond airlines to America's industrial complex at large. Leery of the ability of provincial American executives, with their limited language skills, to negotiate today's global business environment, the boards of massive U.S. firms like Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Alcoa, and insurer AIG have hired foreign-born CEOs. Carl Icahn, the 1980s corporate raider, has reinvented himself as a borscht-belt comedian/activist investor, who delights conferences and reporters with jokes at CEOs' expense. On a recent "60 Minutes," Icahn complained to Lesley Stahl about the incompetence of American management. "I see our country going off a cliff, and I feel bad about it."

Icahn is moping all the way to the bank. The market's recognition of management failures gives him the opportunities to acquire companies on the cheap. But those of us who aren't billionaire corporate raiders—which is to say pretty much all of us—must manage through this management crisis on our own.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/123469

The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, "rational individualism" . Paschal's comment.

2008-03-13T07:06:00.003-04:00

Paschal’s comment on the talk by Dave Peck to my HRM 304 class, 3/4/08

Dr. Peck used part of his time Tuesday evening to quote from Rand’s novel. I was sure that he would ask you to critique her views after briefly explaining “false premise” in logic, but he did not. When one proposes a specific point of view to any group without criticism or inviting criticism we can suppose the support for that view. Knowing his shaman background, I chose to ask him to talk about it, as I knew you would probably never ever meet another “shaman in training” type of person.

In the dialogue from Rand that Dr. Peck read, Rand is critiquing the point of view that “money, or the use of money is bad, wrong or evil.” The problem with that argument is that she begins with an erroneous premise assigned to her protagonist. setting this point of view up as a Straw Man, easily defeated. It is simply not true that Money, or the use of money is bad. Money is simply a thing, a method of exchange. The use of any thing cannot be wrong in itself,

Because her premise is erroneous, therefore her entire arguement is false. Further comments below taken from "Critique of Objectivism." googled.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy is fairly summarized as "rational individualism.". Altho widely read via her two novels, Fountainhead and Atlast Shrugged, she is easily dismissed by most philosophers as simplistic, shallow, self-contradictory and mean-spirited tripe, a kind of barnyard ethics.

In her glorification of rugged individuals, she proposes no conflict of interest between rational persons, an obvious oversight. The paen to Self interest can take no account of social issues such as racism and feminism. Greed is good is the logical outcome. The frequency of self-justification is not recognised. Rand's ethics are subjectivist, not objectivist, in reality. She endorses atheism and has no concept of the common good.

By glorifying human existence and reason, she has no way to move from IS to OUGHT, to morality. Rand's view of human nature does not correspond with that of scientists, builders, scholars or anyone inreality. It is certainly opposed to Christianity, as it is a form of atheistic materialism, recognising no truth from any of the Wisdom traditions.

We can summarize Rand’s ethics as "Go For it, because this one life is all you got." She cannot and does not propose a moral code based on the absolute value of human life. Her followers have been accused of endorsing the Holocaust, war against terrorists and other such. You can find pages of many critiques of the inadquacey of her philosophy.

Rand is the deluded rational ego, alienated from mystic insight into ego's distortions
from Ego strengthening vs. ego transcendence by Michael Hoffman http://www.egodeath.com/rushrand.htm#xtocid26513

Rand is a philosophical hack. How can you critique someone who is so rabid as to refuse reading other people? In response to an interviewer who asked her at one point: "Have you read 'X' author?", she said: "No, because X is trash, and what's more, I will NEVER read X because of this".

Rand is dogmatically closed-minded about religion, and mysticism. Just because she has seen mysticism (views of the transcendent, or of faith) used in ways she politically disagrees with, she dismisses all of mysticism and any possibility that there might be any truth in it. Peart is very aware of this crucial ignorance in Rand's attitude toward the ego, which is a major factor in his interest about Rand. She is so absolutely, blindly in love with the ego, and so untainted by any degree of awareness of mystic transcendence of the ego, that she, and not the enlightenment philosophers, is the most appropriate representative of the development of the ego to the extreme height of delusion. She so absolutely rejects all forms of religion and even mysticism, that she becomes a symbol of confident delusion and gullibility in the semi-illusion of the ego. She, not the enlightenment philosophers, becomes the absolute ego -- to whom Peart issues a grave warning of impending doom in "Bastille Day", "No One at the Bridge", "The Body Electric", "The Enemy Within", and many other songs.

Can you now be more alert to word, theory of practice arising from this philosophy? In a few words, how?

MEDIA BIAS: A HARDER LOOK AT OBAMA AFTER SNL SKIT

2008-03-05T05:03:00.005-05:00

NEW YORK — Life imitating art or just a coincidence? A study of campaign coverage found the media took a sharper look at Barack Obama the week after "Saturday Night Live" spoofed journalists enthralled by his candidacy.

The NBC comedy show on Feb. 23 opened with a mock debate where journalists were rough on Hillary Clinton while being starry-eyed about Obama. It matched complaints the Clinton campaign had made _ and she even referenced the comedy skit during a real debate last week.

During the week, Obama was the dominant person in 69 percent of presidential campaign stories, according to a study by Project for Excellence in Journalism. That's the biggest percentage one candidate had received in any week this year.

Many of the stories took a tough look at Obama, such as a Feb. 25 ABC "World News" study on his Illinois legislative record and a "CBS Evening News" report on his career three nights later.

It's hard to say whether "SNL" acted as a de-facto assignment editor, since some of the stories were probably being prepared before the NBC show aired, but it did seem to crystallize a thought that had been percolating, said Mark Jurkowitz, the project's associate director.

"There were a lot of factors at play," Jurkowitz said. "But there's no question the skit, if nothing else, was perfectly timed."

With no primaries last week, news outlets had the time to look at other stories, as well as the time to look at their own performance. The Washington Post, New York Times and ABC's "Good Morning America" all ran stories addressing whether the media has been fairly covering the Obama-Clinton contest.

"Saturday Night Live" this past weekend opened its show with another fake debate where journalists played easy for Obama. This time, the skit ended with an appearance by Clinton herself.

The project studies 48 different media outlets, including newspapers, Web sites and television networks, as part of its examination of campaign coverage.

HRM 304 CLASS: After our brief discussion last night, do we ordinary citizens trying to make decisions about who will lead us the next four years, do we need to become aware of this example of bias in what is presented to us? COMMENT?

The End Justifies the MEAN. Gillispie's coaching style.

2008-02-22T08:26:00.001-05:00

The end justifies the mean

Some players love him, some leave him, but Gillispie's aim is to make them better

By Jerry Tipton
February 22, 2008
JTIPTON@HERALD-LEADER.COM

After making the team as a walk-on in September, Dusty Mills waited for an opportune moment to introduce himself to Kentucky Coach Billy Gillispie. The time seemed right two days into his short-lived UK career.

Mills approached Gillispie, who sat at the scorer's table in the Joe Craft Center gym as the other players headed for the locker room.

"Hi, Coach Gillispie," Mills remembered saying. "I know I never introduced myself. My name is Dusty ..."

Gillispie cut off the freshman.

"I know your name," the UK coach said. "Your name is Ollie."

His new teammates had nicknamed Mills for the player/team manager in the movie Hoosiers.

"If I need to know anything else, I'll look you up in the phone book," Gillispie added. "Have a nice day."

End of conversation.

Mills walked away disappointed.

This week, Mills became the third player to leave Gillispie's first Kentucky team. He cited the new coach's style as why he stopped his teammates from seeking his reinstatement. Alex Legion gave the same reason to explain why he left. The departures call into question Gillispie's demanding style, which he says benefits individual players and the team in the long term.

Mills had hoped to develop a relationship with Gillispie like the open-door access he enjoyed with his high school coach.

"But immediately, off the bat, I realized he was really unapproachable," said Mills, who acknowledged this week he had been dismissed from the team. "He has more basketball knowledge than any person I've ever met in my life. But I just feel like he has -- I don't know if it's no people skills or bad socially or however the heck you want to word it. But he doesn't seem to be very good with people."

Earlier this season, Gillispie's approach drove away Legion, a heralded freshman who transferred to Illinois after one semester.

"I just don't really work well in his style of coaching," Legion said in picking his words carefully. "His overall way of doing things. He's obviously had some success. But it isn't for everyone. I'll just leave it at that."

Gillispie declined to speak specifically about the players who've left UK's team either voluntarily (Legion, walk-on Kerry Benson) or otherwise (Mills). The UK coach acknowledged his demanding style. He said the long-range benefits outweigh any hurt feelings. More than once, he noted his personal attachment and affection for the players.

"You don't have the relationships like we have -- the love relationships that last forever -- without being approachable," Gillispie said.

The UK coach's methods, which prompt words such as "demeaning" and "negativity" from detractors, cause others to sing his praise. Josh Johnston found the experience as a walk-on for Gillispie's last UTEP team so rewarding he followed the coach to Texas A&M and walked on there. He described a Billy G. who bore little resemblance to the man who dismissed Mills from UK's team with a terse "You're done" shortly after Kentucky's flight from Vanderbilt touched down at 2 a.m. last week.

"I just felt he was sincere and genuine," said Johnston, now an assistant coach at the College of Eastern Utah. "He was not a guy to just talk to you on the court. He was a guy who actually cared about you. ... Nobody cares more about kids on a Billy Gillispie team than Billy Gillispie."

Supporters and critics agree that Gillispie can be difficult.

Acie Law IV wanted to transfer from Texas A&M more than once, even during his award-winning senior year of 2006-07. He stayed because his parents wouldn't let him quit.

"He's continually riding you to do more," Law said. "After a while, you say, 'I've had enough of this.'

"Once I matured a little bit and got used to it, I look at coach as a father figure. I love him to death. If I have a problem with anything, not just dealing with basketball, I wouldn't hesitate to pick up the phone and ask him about it."

The two speak regularly and usually end the conversations by expressing their love for each other, Law said.

That wasn't the Gillispie encountered by Legion, Mills and, perhaps, Benson, who left the UK team during the first semester. Mills said Gillispie's coaching style led Benson to quit. Benson could not be reached for comment. His coach at Pleasure Ridge Park High School, Dale Mabrey, said Benson did not have a problem with Gillispie, but was tired of basketball.

"He just said he didn't know if he wanted to continue to play basketball," Mabrey said. "He had nothing bad or negative to say about the coaches. He liked them, and they liked him. Maybe it was a case where I didn't prepare him right so that he would've realized that when you get to that level, it's basketball 24 hours a day.

"The day he quit, he was supposed to be in the starting lineup in practice, and supposed to start the next game. Go figure."

Mills declined teammate Ramel Bradley's offer to lead a team-wide appeal to Gillispie for the walk-on's reinstatement.

"I told my teammate, 'Don't make a distraction out of me; don't try to pull me back,' " said Mills, who added that he didn't want to be part of a program headed by a man who "tries to make you feel smaller than him."

UK Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart saw nothing in Mills' dismissal or Legion's transfer to warrant his attention into "personnel decisions." He said he was "very comfortable" with how Gillispie is instilling toughness, discipline and competitiveness into Kentucky basketball. UK needs those qualities to win championships in all sports, he said.

"He's no more demanding than many of the successful coaches I've been around," said Barnhart, who noted football's Rich Brooks and baseball's John Cohen as examples at UK. "The great ones demand greatness because he knows where we want to go.

"Some young people can handle that and some people can't handle that."

When Kentucky played Florida International in late December, FIU Coach Sergio Rouco voluntarily defended Gillispie, his friend and former boss, by saying the UK players had to adjust from a "mild-mannered man" (Tubby Smith) to "Baby Saddam." The intended compliment drew laughter from reporters at the post-game news conference. For what it's worth, none of the holdover players from last season have left. Also none speak ill of Gillispie.

Legion cited Gillispie's personality and style as reasons he left. Neither playing time nor his mother influenced his decision, he said.

"I just felt I couldn't develop as a player," said Legion, who averaged 17.5 minutes in six games.

Legion acknowledged how Law ultimately benefited by staying with the program. But it wasn't enough for the Parade All-American to stay.

"Like I said, Coach Gillispie has his way," Legion said. "As a freshman, I just don't see that. I can't see going four years doing that."

Legion refused to speak specifically about his experiences at Kentucky. The player's mother spoke of a negative environment that her son kept from her until Thanksgiving.

"Three or four hours, nothing but negativity," Annette Legion said. "Just told you're nothing. ...

"My son kept a secret I didn't know. He said, for two months Billy talked about him, demeaned him and privately told him to go home and take your mother with you."

Many fans blamed Annette Legion for her son's transfer. But she said the decision was her son's.

"I had nothing to do with it," Legion's mother said. "My son tried to handle it as a young man, but it was over-bearing. He felt he was bullied long enough."

Gillispie did not want to talk about Legion or Mills. But he acknowledged his demanding style is intended to make players uncomfortable. He's trying to push players to greater levels of achievement, the UK coach said.

"My responsibility as a coach to each individual is to motivate them," Gillispie said. "If Joe Crawford is not an NBA Draft choice, I'll take that personal. If a guy such as Patrick (Patterson) comes to you as a sure first-round draft choice, if after one year, he's not a lottery pick, if he stays two years and he's not top-five, I take it personally.

"I'm going to help these guys to understand. Sometimes it may not be really comfortable to achieve at the very highest level. But I can see what exactly the top level of each player is and what the top level of the team is. Sometimes people want to get in a comfort zone and we have to motivate them to get out of it."

Gillispie likened himself to the character played by Sean Connery in the movie The Untouchables. When Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) tries to add the tough Chicago cop to fight organized crime, Connery has a question:

What are you prepared to do?

"He kept asking that question," Gillispie said. "I really believe that's relevant to what we do as basketball players. What are you prepared to do? ... Everybody wants to be an NBA player. But what are you prepared to do to make yourself become one of those guys.

"That's just my whole philosophy, basically."

When asked whether the cliche "tough love" described his coaching philosophy, Gillispie said, "There's a ton of love, I know that much."

Legion acknowledged that the coach patted players on the back. It was usually to point out areas of improvement, he said.

"He's going to tell you you've done a good job sometimes," the former UK player said. "But he's not going to baby you."

Gillispie compliments players. "But," Legion added, "it wasn't one of his strong points."

Johnston admitted that he initially had doubt. As a walk-on at UTEP, he assumed this was the way Division I players and coaches interacted. When the season began and the games became much easier than the practices, he embraced Gillispie's tough love.

"If you want to get better and you want a coach who cares about you, Billy Gillispie is the guy," Johnston said. "It's not an easy road. It's ultimately for the better of you."

That Gillispie's way turned off Legion, that Mills said he "agreed 100 percent" with the word "demeaning" as an accurate description of the style did not surprise Johnston.

"It's not that he's trying to belittle you or hurt you," Johnston said. "He's trying to help you. Some people can't look past the criticism to see it's constructive."

Without any prompting, Mills likened Gillispie's style to another no-nonsense, this-will-be-good-for-you coach who draws admirers and detractors.

"I love Bobby Knight, but it's like Bobby Knight tactics that you read about," the now former walk-on said. "It's all about holding power and stuff like that."

Unlike Knight, Gillispie doesn't physically abuse a player. "No, no, no, no, no," Mills said. "I truly believe Billy Gillispie would never physically touch a player. I've seen him very, very (ticked) off, but he never made any motion toward physically touching a player.

"Put it this way, if he was ever in my face, I'd have 100 percent confidence that he would not lay a hand on me."

Gillispie, an unabashed Knight admirer, recoiled from any comparison to Knight. "Any time you're compared to a guy who won 902 games and graduated his players, that's not fair to Coach Knight," he quipped.

Observers have said Knight acted like a drill sergeant, tearing down buck privates and then building them back into soldiers. "He believes that destroying you motivates you to prove him wrong," Mills said.

Since Southeastern Conference play began, Gillispie has been noticeably freer with praise for players. Good numbers by Crawford in November and December drew a shrug. In the last week, Gillispie has used the word "fantastic" when asked about Crawford and Patterson, and noted how Bradley's turnovers in the clutch are a bargain when weighed against his ability to score.

"I don't have a strategy," Gillispie said of the recent encouragement. "What I do is I tell the truth 100 percent of the time."

Sometimes the truth hurts.

Gillispie noted his demanding nature extends to the classroom and social settings as well as basketball.

"I think we're teaching life through basketball," he said. "Life isn't always easy either. The people most prepared to be successful are the people who've probably gone through some trials and tribulations."

© 2008 Kentucky.

Women and Power, part 1, Newsweek, Oct 15, 07

2007-10-08T01:46:00.001-04:00

My Journey to the Top
These 11 women came from many different backgrounds, but they all had big dreams. The path to power meant facing obstacles and their biggest fears.
Peter Yang for Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21162321/site/newsweek/

Women & Power

Do Women Lead Differently Than Men?
My Journey to the Top
Now This Is Woman's Work
An Authentic Life
'You Do What You Have to Do'

What I Learned
Live Talk: Gov. Janet Napolitano on Leadership
Women Leaders' Paths to Power
Arianna Huffington
Julie Greenwald
Andrea Wong
Rachel Roy
Kyra Sedgwick
Lucy Jones
Shirley Franklin
Lorena Ochoa
Rachael Ray
Shonda Rhimes
Elaine Pagels
Women Leaders on Overcoming Obstacles
Amy Gutmann
Janet Murguia
Donna Orender
Ethel Person
Liz Cheney
Betsy Myers
Mich Mathews
Mara Brock Akil
Agnes Gund
Swanee Hunt
Sherry Lansing

Newsweek

Oct. 15, 2007 issue - Arianna Huffington
Cofounder and editor in chief, The Huffington Post

Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident—all those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.

In my case, I think I may have had an easier time dealing with this fear because my first taste of leadership came in a situation in which I was a blissfully ignorant outsider. It was in college, when I became president of the Cambridge Union debating society. Since I had grown up in Greece, I had never heard of the Cambridge Union or the Oxford Union and didn't know about their place in English culture, so I wasn't weighed down with the kinds of overwhelming notions that may have stopped British girls from even thinking about trying for such a position.

The same thing happened when my first book, "The Female Woman," came out. I was 23 and my U.S. publisher, Random House, flew me from London to New York. They handed me my schedule, and my first interview was with Barbara Walters on the "Today" show. This didn't faze me since I had no idea who Barbara Walters was, and had never heard of the "Today" show. So I was less nervous than if I had been on a local show in Athens that my family and classmates could have watched.

In this way, it was a blessing that I started my career outside my home environment. It had its own problems in that I was ridiculed for my accent and was demeaned as someone who spoke in a funny way. But it also taught me that it is easier to overcome people's judgments than to overcome our own self-judgment, the fear we internalize.

From one perspective, it might look like I've had a number of careers. But the heart of it has always been communicating, whether it's communicating through books, through columns, and now through the Huffington Post. A big part of my personal evolution has come from responding to the spirit of our times, responding to the way our world is changing. So when I first fell in love with what was happening online it was when I recognized its power to empower people who might otherwise be locked out of the national conversation. I was struck by how often, when I asked women to blog for the Huffington Post, they had a hard time trusting that what they had to say was worthwhile, even established writers.

I don't think that anything I've done in my life would have been possible without my mother. She gave me what I am hoping to be able to give my daughters, which is a sense that I could aim for the stars combined with the knowledge that if I didn't reach them, she wouldn't love me any less. She helped me understand that failure was part of any life. So often, I think, we as women stop ourselves from trying because we don't want to risk failing. We put such a premium on being approved of, we become reluctant to take risks.

My mother gave me that safe place, that sense that she would be there no matter what happened, whether I succeeded or failed. When I saw a picture of Cambridge in a magazine and I said I wanted to go there, everybody else in my life, including my father, said it was ridiculous. But my mother found out that I could apply for a scholarship and she even found some cheap tickets so we could go to England and see Cambridge in person. It was a perfect example of what we now call visualization. Visualize that you are going to Cambridge! It was a long flight to London and it rained the whole time we were in Cambridge. We didn't see any school officials or anything. We just walked and imagined me being there. Three years later, I got in and got a scholarship.

My greatest wish is for my daughters to discover their passion, whatever it is. It could be cooking or politics or art or anything. My oldest daughter just finished an internship with Sen. Harry Reid. Last summer, she did an internship at Vanity Fair. I won't pretend that it's not exciting to see your daughter being excited by the same things that excite you. But, at the same time, it's very important for them to feel the freedom to be excited by things that are not exciting to me. I will share that excitement.

Women are at the next stage of our evolution. In the early '70 s, in many circles, a woman was thought not to have value unless her life included a big career. Thankfully this has evolved to the point where we are now respecting a wider range of choices women can make.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, "If you want to change the world, who do you begin with, yourself or others?" I believe if we begin with ourselves and do the things that we need to do and become the best person we can be, we have a much better chance of changing the world for the better.

What to do when you feel surrounded by Jerks, Opinion for Training and Development, HRM 302, SCD Midway College.

2007-01-18T13:52:00.000-05:00

Help, I’m Surrounded by Jerks
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

CERTAIN mortals have the power to sink hearts and sour moods with lightning speed. The hysterical colleague. The meddlesome neighbor. The crazy in-law. The explosive boss. A mélange of cantankerous individuals, they are united by a single achievement: They make life miserable.

You call them jerks, dolts and nitwits. Psychologists call them “difficult people.” In fact they are difficult in so many ways that they have been classified into species like the Complainer, the Whiner and the Sniper, to name but three.

But in an age when no problem goes unacknowledged or unaddressed, living with such people is no longer the only choice. Instead, an industry of books and seminars has sprung up, not to help the difficult change their maddening ways, but to help the rest of us cope with them.

Two decades ago there were only a handful of books offering advice on how to defang the dears. Today there are scores of seminars, workbooks and multimedia tools to help people co-exist with those they wish did not exist.

In the spring, Career Press is to publish “151 Quick Ideas to Deal With Difficult People” by Carrie Mason-Draffen. But numerous resources are already on the market, including the succinctly titled “Since Strangling Isn’t an Option” by Sandra A. Crowe.

Next month the Career and Professional Development Center at Duke Law School will for the first time offer a workshop called Dealing With Conflict and Difficult People. In September the negotiation program in Harvard Law School’s executive education series will present a seminar called Dealing With Difficult People and Difficult Situations. And the Graduate School, United States Department of Agriculture, which offers continuing education classes, has scheduled more than half a dozen seminars entitled Positive Approaches to Difficult People for this year.

The lessons include common sense (talk it out and put yourself in their shoes), character by character tactical road maps and something that the victims of the difficult don’t want to hear: they might be the problem.

Nan Harrison, the vice president of training resources and publication sales for CareerTrack, which every month presents more than 50 public “difficult people” seminars across the country, attributes the increased popularity of such workshops to a desire to improve workplace skills in a time of corporate downsizing and a more competitive job market. “I think the stakes have gotten higher for everyone,” she said.

Other conflict-resolution specialists suggested an unexpected reason for the increasing interest: A post-9/11 desire to make peace, even if it is merely with the wet blanket in the adjoining cubicle.

Whatever the reason, “difficult people” gurus are in demand. That is perhaps because everyone knows at least one person who can set the blood boiling. They can be found in corporate offices, on co-op boards, in church choirs and on university faculties. They are the office Cassandra who predicts doom for every project her team initiates, the intimidating boss for whom nothing is ever good enough and the unreasonable receptionist at the motor vehicles office.

“They’re very disruptive, these people,” said Brook Zelcer, a tennis pro and an English teacher in Westwood, N.J.

On the tennis court, Mr. Zelcer has been served up his share of overbearing and impatient parents. One stood out as truly difficult: The father who gave his wife play-by-plays of his daughter’s matches on his cellphone, disrupted games by shouting from the stand, encouraged his daughter to cheat during matches and drove her to tears.

Mr. Zelcer tried to control the father, but all he got was a phone call from the man insisting he loved his child. “That’s one of the reasons I quit coaching,” Mr. Zelcer said. “I couldn’t deal with these people.”

For Ann Rothman, a Manhattan real estate agent, her difficult person is a know-it-all friend who simply cannot be pleased.

“She’s a superior human being, and she comes from a superior area — Berkeley, Calif.,” Ms. Rothman said. “She has told me many times that there are only two places to get good food. One of them is Berkeley, and one of them is France. And France is only second to Berkeley.”

Difficult people are not harmless. The impact of slowing productivity or creating unhappy customers and vendors is immeasurable, unknowable and often a company’s biggest cost, said Ms. Harrison of CareerTrack, paraphrasing W. Edwards Deming, a management consultant.

Yet, some scholars say, the problem is not the difficult people themselves. It is you.

“There’s a good quote from the Talmud,” said Bruce Elvin, an associate dean and the director of the Career and Professional Development Center at Duke Law School. “ ‘We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.’ That really in my view sums this topic up.”

He and others say that rather than seeing the office curmudgeon or the post office nitpicker as the sum of their most wretched behavior, it is better to think of them as full people, even to empathize with them, if only to maintain some sense of control.

Easier said than done. But psychologists say people exhibit difficult behavior because they have a need that is not being met. Understanding that need — a colleague may be snappish, for instance, because his personal life is in turmoil — helps take the sting out of his or her actions, they say.

“Some people really are bad people,” said Mark I. Rosen, a social scientist at Brandeis and the author of “Thank You for Being Such a Pain: Spiritual Guidance for Dealing With Difficult People,” “but I don’t think the percentage is as high as people think it is.” Instead, he said, “most people fall into the category of incompetent or oblivious.”

Several authors think it is useful to characterize infuriating people into types and prescribe ways to deal with them, as Robert M. Bramson did in 1981 in “Coping With Difficult People,” one of the first popular books on the topic. Its overarching lesson is to find a way to communicate with these people because they are not going away. Dr. Bramson lists seven difficult behavior types: Hostile-Aggressives, Complainers, Silent and Unresponsives, Super-Agreeables, Know-It-All Experts, Negativists and Indecisives.

These authors say that after categorizing the difficult behavior, you can take steps to rein it in. For example, Dr. Rick Brinkman, a seminar leader and an author of “Dealing With People You Can’t Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst,” calls one category Whiners. These people rattle off an endless loop of complaints and must be coaxed into problem solving.

He suggests listening to them and letting them vent. Chances are, he said, their complaints will be vague and exaggerated. When they begin to repeat their gripes, summarize for them what they have said. Then begin asking specific questions.

“You have to keep asking them what they think they should do,” Dr. Brinkman said, to press for resolutions. You might finally say something outrageous, like “What if we were to kill everyone in the other department?”

The literature on difficult people often focuses on the workplace, but business scholars say that neither your department nor “the other department” has a corner on the difficult people market. Rather, as Richard Freedman, the distinguished service professor of management at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business of New York University, put it, “Difficult people are distributed evenly throughout society.”

“How many mother-in-law stories have you heard?” he asked. “It’s not disproportionate in the workplace, but often what it is, is that the stakes are so big for people. Career is at the center of people’s lives.”

Workplaces are competitive environments comprising individuals with disparate styles of working and communicating. With so many temperaments thrown together, every office is a powder keg.

For instance, there are those who think they are powerless, that their ideas go unheard or are dismissed and who believe they are not valued, feelings that can turn into chronically difficult behavior.

In the end, the specialists say, we cannot control other people, only our response to them. Then again, we can always let nature take its course.

“Having somebody who is really difficult can actually be good for the workplace,” said Jo-Ellen Pozner, a researcher in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. “If everyone really hates this one person, it becomes the basis of social bonding for the rest of the group.”

Philosophy 301 Ethics Class, just completed, Midway SCD.

2006-03-02T21:38:00.000-05:00

Philosophy 301 Ethics, Midway SCD class, Jan 10 to Feb. 28, 2006.

Jesus tells us a parable about the laborers who were hired at different times during the day, but at the end were all paid the same amount, regardless of how long they had worked. What is fascinating to contemplate is how this parable is a metaphor for the Kingdom of God. Can anyone earn entry, or is it an undeserved gift of grace and mercy?

Some of you worked harder than the others, a few a lot harder, both in debates and final papers. Some did really excellent work (and should consider going on to graduate school, I hope). Others did passing work but I also know that you work a full time job, and sometimes more than a 40 hour work week plus family obligations.

But none of you will likely encounter a teacher who challenges you as much personally as I did. Also I know that I am not an easy teacher as I crave your minds and hearts becoming engaged in a different way. So, for surviving me and my Out-of-the-Envelope style of teaching, you all receive an A in this course.

Did you deserve an A equally? Hardly. So I will be a metaphor of the Kingdom for you. At the end I choose mercy rather than justice. Why? Simply because at the end, I know this very imperfect man shall need mercy more than justice. ;-)

So, Smile and be happy today. ;-))
You are each a Divine Amazement.
Truly.
Dr. Paschal Baute
Coordinator, HRM program at SCD, Midway.
Chaplain, Amazing Grace Wedding Chapel
www.paschalbaute.com/wedding.
Facilitator, Fierce Landscape for the Spiritual Warrior, a spiritual growth group at the Fayette County Detention Center, Lexington, always looking for men and women who will give one hour per week to this interfaith personal growth groups for inmates of both genders.
Facilitator, Spiritual Growth Network of Kentucky.
Board member, Kentucky Storytelling Association, telling stories of Amazement.
http://www.kystory.org.
The Kentucky Storytelling Association is a non-profit membership organization whose mission is to develop on-going support and appreciation for the art of storytelling in the Commonwealth.

More information can be obtained on these projects from Paschal’s blogs at his web site.

Crime and punishement, drugs and Crime, post #1, 301 Ethics course

2006-02-08T10:34:00.000-05:00

April 28, 2005
Dear Editor:
Herald - Leader Editorial page

"Kentucky is 'Best' in something else."
Did the Herald - Leader reader notice that Kentucky's growth rate among Ohio Valley states clearly beats all the surrounding seven states in at least one area: Growth in prison population?
Headline: "1 in 138 Americans is in Prison" Monday, April 25, page. A9. In the number of prisoners in state and federal corrections, Kentucky's rate of growth, compared with the average of the seven surrounding states, is not twice, not three times, but almost four times the average rate of all seven surrounding states, a percent change of +8.5 percent from 2003 to 2004.
Is this because we simply have that many more criminals in Kentucky? or possibly because our sentencing policies are now the harshest in the region? Who are these and how is this happening? The vast majority are there for drugs, using or selling.
Our local jails and prisons are overcrowded, sometimes so many in county jails that inmates are living in Third World conditions. Even when volunteer programs are offered, some county jail staff is too busy with the overcrowded warehousing of inmates to accept the offer.
We are paying so much for warehousing ($300 million per year in Kentucky) there is nothing left for rehabilitation. If we take time to examine the situation, we shall find that we are simply punishing addictive behavior by incarceration--mostly without rehabilitation, so 2/3 are back in jail within three years.
Are our current sentencing policies creating a new underclass of those trapped in addiction, joblessness and resentment?
Is this a system of justice? ? Are these policies protecting our communities, or in fact undermining our safety and security? Who will examine and speak to these issues
Paschal Baute
4080 LOfgren Ct.
Lexington, Ky 40509
tel 293-5302
email pbbaute@paschalbaute.com

Welcome, January Midway SCD 301 class, January 11, 2006

2006-01-11T08:05:00.000-05:00

We are going to have a lot of fun, and this class may be one of the most different class you have ever had in college. You will also learn a lot and how to become a reflecive practitioner.

In the meantime, before I email each of you, there is one more small piece of homework detailed in the syllabus that we did not highlight last night. I overlooked calling it to your attention.

Within 48 hours (aim) please register your reaction to each class in a small memo to yourself, say of about 100 words of so. What stood out, what were particular learnings or insights for you, for your own journey? Were you challenged to think outside your box any? Impressions?
Title your entry: "My Thoughts about our Last Class, Jan 10."

Thank you. I am glad we have only 12 in this class. Smaller is better.

Dr. B.

We are a sick country and, increasingly a mad society.

2005-11-15T00:51:00.000-05:00

The Sun's Not Yellow, It's Chicken: Why Torture Makes Perfect Sense to the Commander-in-Chief
by Steven Laffoley.

While listening to the President denying its use, I find myself thinking about American torture. And I ask myself, "At what point does a tortured man 'break'? Is it the moment when he hears his twisted arm snap behind his back? Or is it, perhaps, the moment when he sees the frayed electrical cord draw blood from his beaten skin? Or maybe it's when he feels the creeping dread of pain promised after hours without sleep, squatting on a cold cement floor, hearing the sound of footfalls moving menacingly down the hall?"

These questions are not born of morbid curiosity. Rather, these are practical questions, the banal stuff of present day American politics and policies. Because, despite the President's pale claims to the contrary, the American government does, in fact, condone the use of torture. The President himself makes this clear when he promises to veto any bill that "makes it illegal to practice the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment" of people. And certainly his Vice President makes no apologies for the American use of torture, when he bluntly says, " Sometimes you gotta play rough."

So, why does the American government use torture? When I consider the question, two possible answers occur to me: 'dark logic' and 'madness.'

In the 'dark logic' answer, torture is not so much a means to an end as it is, in fact, the end itself. Consider, no one in the Bush administration truly believes that torture yields timely or even useful information - nor would they care if it did. The only true value of torture - a value well understood by thugs like Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and now George W. Bush and Dick Cheney - is that torture terrifies people. Lots of people. It creates a deep, lasting, irrational fear of national authority: a fear felt both by the enemy abroad and by citizens at home. And, historically speaking, it is disturbingly effective.

But the 'dark logic' theory suggests that the Bush administration is rational - albeit darkly rational. And, frankly - and let's be honest here - there's not enough evidence of 'rational behavior' in the Bush Administration to support this. The other, more plausible, reason for the existence of American torture is this: 'madness.'

However, the more I consider 'madness' as the reason behind American torture, the more I am disturbed by what this 'madness' has to say, not only about George W. Bush and his administration, but also about the American people since September 11, 2001.

When I think of America's new embrace of torture, I am reminded of Bob Dylan's Tombstone Blues. Listen as Dylan sings: "John the Baptist, after torturing a thief, looks up to his hero, the commander-in-chief, saying, 'Tell me great hero, but please make it brief. Is there a hole for me to get sick in?'"

Americans in the post 9/11 Age of Unreason are Dylan's metaphoric John the Baptist after their mass conversion to President Bush's absolutist religion: 'You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists.'

Lest we be deemed 'with the terrorists,' we marched blindly behind the Commander-in-Chief, a would-be messiah who promised us deliverance from our perceived enemies and fears. Under his leadership, we willingly destroyed nations and murdered people - by the thousands, and then by the tens of thousands - in the hopes that our enemies would be vanquished and our fears finally dispelled.

But instead, over time, the Commander-in-Chief only dredged up more enemies and more fears from our collective imagination. And consequently, over time, the dead bodies only continued mounting. And consequently, over time, we descended into an immoral black hole, with no way out.

It was then, with blind rage and near religious righteousness, that we started torturing others. It was then, in the darkest of ironies, that we become the enemy we feared.

Searching for the hole to get sick in, Dylan's John the Baptist looks up. "The Commander-in-Chief answers him, while chasing a fly, 'Death to all those who would whimper and cry.' And dropping a barbell, he points to the sky, saying, 'The sun's not yellow; it's chicken.'"

As with Dylan's John the Baptist, we also look up after torturing the enemy, and stare into vacuum of the Commander-in-Chief's eyes. And as he looks back at us, we suddenly understand the President madness: he thrives on our fears.

And our gorge rises.

We look back into the hole and find ourselves getting sick, left alone with our innocence and ethics gone, left alone with only Macbeth's lament to speak: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?"

And we weep when we realize - no, it won't.

Published on Monday, November 14, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

Steven Laffoley is an American writer living in Halifax, He is the author of Mr. Bush, Angus and Me: Notes of an American-Canadian in the Age of Unreason. E-mail: stevenlaffoley@yahoo.ca or steven_laffoley@yahoo.com.

A veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom speaks on torture

2005-11-10T00:00:00.000-05:00

"I am a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and an increasingly liberal defector from the GOP, and like you I have been confused by the GOP's simultaneous promotion of a 'culture of life' and of torture.
I was in Iraq in 03-04 and was really disheartened when Abu Ghraib broke in the media; I didn’t think the war was justified, ex ante, and the revelations of what was happening at the prison really made me feel like a Nazi. I employed a number of Iraqi laborers, and after the Arab media showed the photographs it was very difficult to look those guys in the eye.
As to balancing the seeming contradiction between torture and life, the only conclusion I can reach is that the pro-torture lobby has taken the rhetorical construction of 'The Terrorists' that was the centerpiece of administration pronouncements from 2001-2003 to its logical extreme – 'They' (that is, 'The Terrorists') are unworthy of life because 'They' don’t respect life. 'They' behead people, while all we do is beat them to death. 'They' hate us for 'what we are,' while we hate them for – well, I guess because of 'what They are.' But because we are a Benign Force, it's different.
In class, I compared the construction of The Terrorists to the construction of Japanese identity during World War II, assigning the John Dower book, "War Without Mercy." The enemy is so alien that he has abandoned any consideration as a human being. Consequently, exterminating him is appropriate."

Or torturing him for that matter. Wars are dangerous things. They corrupt us unless we remain vigilant. And one real worry is that because the president sincerely believes that his motives are good, he can find ways to dismiss or ignore or even condone things that are objectively wrong. This is especially a danger for those who believe their actions are sanctioned by their own God. If their motives are pure, they can do no wrong ...

from WWW.andrewsullivan.com, on November 9, 2005

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US. On Torture, practice and policy.

2005-11-08T19:41:00.000-05:00

One of the mysteries of American public morality is why there is so little public outcry about the Bush Administration's support for torture. It's not as if this is a big secret. Each week brings a fresh revelation about U.S. treatment of prisoners in violation of the Geneva conventions. On November 2nd, the Washington Post reported that alleged members of Al Qaeda are being held in "black sites," a CIA prison system in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Thailand, and Eastern European countries.
These facilities are kept secret so that they won't come under the scrutiny of Congress, the Red Cross, or other international agencies; an arrangement that permits the CIA to hold suspects for as long as they want, "off the books," and use whatever techniques they feel are necessary.

Apparently, Americans ignore the irony that we overthrew Saddam Hussein to free Iraqis from his brutality and, now, are substituting our own.

George W. Bush made the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions the night of September 11th; Richard Clarke quoted him, "We are at war--any barriers in your way, they're gone…I don't care what the international lawyers say." The President signed a memo on February 7, 2002, declaring that the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war did not apply to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. (It is incongruous that America's leader in the war on terror is "Christian" George Bush. The ethics of Jesus of Nazareth do not condone abuse such as torture. His Golden Rule is, "Treat people in ways that you want them to treat you.")

Immediately, misconduct began in Afghanistan. On October 10, 2001, the U.S. began dropping cluster bombs on civilian targets, followed by the use of "bunker-busters", which had a similar, savage impact. When the Taliban fell, U.S. forces and their Northern Alliance allies, mostly mercenaries, took about 8000 prisoners; of these, 5000 "disappeared." A BBC documentary (http://www.democracynow.org/afghanfilm.shtml) reported that the majority suffocated during transportation in freight containers and were buried near Sheberghan prison. Thousands of Afghani suspects have been detained, without legal recourse, and, in most cases, tortured.

Three forms of abuse take place in Iraq. Military assaults often feature weapons designed to inflict casualties on civilians, including cluster bombs, napalm, and ordinance encased in depleted uranium (http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203). Despite the negative publicity surrounding Abu Gharaib, suspects continue to be routinely tortured in military prisons. Iraqi prisoners are referred to as "Persons Under Control" (PUCs). The November 3rd edition of the New York Review contains an article, "Torture in Iraq," from Human Rights Watch (http://hrw.org/reports/2005/us0905), which graphically detailed this abuse.

"Everyone in camp knew that if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent…One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the [expletive] cook."

A January 4, 2005, Newsweek article reported that the U.S. was considering death squads as a strategy to combat the insurgency. Recent evidence suggests that this policy has been put into effect (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/FUL506A.html). Since the "transitional" government took over in April, more than 500 Iraqi corpses bearing evidence of torture have been counted. (The November edition of "Mother Jones" has an article about Steven Vincent who was killed investigating Basra death squads.)

While a properly conducted war on terror is a vital component of American security, such an effort does not justify abuse by U.S. forces: Torture is illegal under our law and under international treaties that we signed. Furthermore, torture is not a reliable method of obtaining information; many intelligence officers argue that torture produces unreliable results, as victims will say anything to alleviate their pain. Torture punishes the innocent as well as the guilty; U.S. authorities acknowledge that the majority of tortured prisoners, whether in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, or Iraq will eventually be released, charged with no crime. Finally, torture is immoral; it takes the philosophy of "the ends justify the means" to an extreme with no limits – more than 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody. Torture is an aggressive, moral cancer.

When the Iraq war began on March 20, 2003, there were many arguments against the invasion. None of the opponents anticipated that the eventual, compelling argument would be the loss of America’s soul: that by occupying Iraq we would take on the attributes of Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime; that 30 months later Americans would be emulating the evil dictator, torturing Iraqis in the same facilities once used by Baathist thugs; that U.S. soldiers would be as feared by Iraqi civilians as were Hussein’s henchman.

Near the end of the Vietnam-era, the comic-strip character, Pogo, spoke words as applicable now, as they were then, “We have met the enemy and he is us.

Opinion by Bob Burnett, Huffington Post, Nov 8, 2005

Media Silence on Torture?

2005-11-05T01:19:00.000-05:00

REGARDING MEDIA
Pervasive silence about torture issue
Tim Rutten
LA Times
November 5, 2005

OF all the ways in which the American news media have failed since Sept. 11, none may be more consequential than the mild and deferential eye it has cast on the Bush administration's adoption of torture as state policy.

Who can forget the giddy months through the fall of 2001 when U.S. cable networks and newspaper op-ed pages actually staged debates — in some cases in front of live audiences —over how far we should go to "extract information" from any Al Qaeda members who fell into our hands?

Ostensibly responsible Americans — officials and commentators alike — unashamedly sat and publicly discussed not only whether torture was licit, but also how and when it should be applied.

The whole sorry spectacle reached its nadir when a purported civil libertarian, Harvard Law professor Allen Dershowitz, proposed procedures for obtaining "torture warrants." (The relevance of due process to a moral universe that sanctions the torment of other human beings is apparently an irony against which a Harvard professorship armors the mind.)

All of this was abetted by a news media that somehow found it natural to adopt the verbal evasions of our budding Torquemadas. Phrases such as "coercive interrogation" and "harsh measures" began to turn up with regularity. Nobody even bothered to wink.

One of the best is "rendition," which occurs when U.S. forces or intelligence agencies capture suspected terrorists and secretly turn them over to another country — Egypt, Jordan and Morocco apparently are favorites — where people aren't squeamish about a little coercion.

We remain an ingenious people. Who but Americans would think of outsourcing torture?

None of this is surprising. If recent history has taught us anything, it's that the road that brings hell to Earth is paved with euphemism.

This week we passed another milestone on that path, when the Washington Post's Dana Priest reported that "the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement."

In her front page account, Priest wrote, "The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries....The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as 'black sites' in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officials in each host country."

According to the Post's story, "The CIA and the White House ... have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long."

Now, why do we suppose our government wants to hold people secretly in foreign countries? Maybe it's because they want to do things to them that would be illegal inside the United States ... like, say, torture them?

That would explain why Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss have so stubbornly resisted language written into the defense spending bill by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a one-time Vietnam POW, that would prohibit the cruel or inhumane treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody, including those held by the CIA. Cheney and Goss aren't concerned, as their surrogates have argued, about tying the intelligence agencies' hands in some future, theoretical moment of national emergency. They're worried that they'll have to close down the clandestine torture chambers that are in operation now.

And the American press continues to abet their sinister evasions with an indifference to consequence and diffidence to power that only can be called what it is: moral cowardice.

Even the Post, which deserves full credit for exposing the existence of the White House's petite gulag, stepped back from the full disclosure it owed the American people. "The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials," Priest wrote. "They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation."

You can bet those officials argue that — and you can bet just as strongly that acceding to their demands shields the Post from being called unpatriotic, one of the favorite epithets this administration uses to bludgeon the press.

But at least the Post was willing to take the risk of exposing most of this story. What should have been a torrent of follow-up reporting and commentary by other news organizations was barely a trickle by week's end.

In fact, when a Washington-based human rights organization came forward to say it believes the CIA's secret prisons are in Poland and Romania, the only newspaper willing to print the allegations was Britain's Financial Times.

The grotesqueries presented by this sordid story are almost too numerous to list. But one likely to be overlooked deserves to be noted.

There is something particularly perverse about the United States inducing the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe to become its accomplices in all this.

For decades, the iron curtain, captive nations and Soviet tyranny were staples of American political rhetoric — and of the U.S. news media's editorial pages. Seas of reportorial ink were spilled charting the murky reaches of the Gulag and the interlocking network of secret police agencies that maintained the cold grip of an ossified communism throughout the Eastern Bloc year after gray, numbing year.

To make these points in this connection is not to mock. We were right, and the Soviet Union and its client governments were wrong.

Now, we have to wonder whether the Bush administration fixed on Poland and Romania — or some other Eastern European democracy — precisely because it suspected that the long night of Soviet oppression had conditioned them to accept our "black sites" on their soil?

Or did we think that societies desperate for a slice of the West's prosperity wouldn't mind selling just one more little piece of their collective souls to obtain Washington recommendation to the European Union?

There was a time when American officials could stand up in public and — without blushing — describe the United States as "the leader of the free world."

Could any of them do that now that this administration has adopted torture as an instrument of state policy?

Sadly, the answer probably is yes. They lost the ability to blush when shame became a casualty of the war on terror. +++

Torture, post #3, background, Phil 301

2005-11-02T22:01:00.000-05:00

Truth about Torture
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek

07 November 2005 Issue

A courageous soldier and a determined senator demand clear standards.

Army Capt. Ian Fishback is plainly a very brave man. Crazy brave, even. Not only has the 26-year-old West Pointer done a tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, he has had the guts to suggest publicly that his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, lied to Congress. After making headlines a month ago for alleging that systematic interrogation abuses occurred in Iraq-and that the Pentagon was not forthright about it-the plain-spoken Fishback went back to Fort Bragg, N.C. He is now practicing small-unit tactics in the woods for a month as part of Special Forces training. After that, he hopes to fight for his country once again overseas.

Fishback's courage in taking a lonely stand may be paying off. Inspired by his example, "a growing critical mass of soldiers is coming forward with allegations of abuse," says Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch, the New York-based activist group that first revealed Fishback's story. One of them is Anthony Lagouranis, a Chicago-based Army specialist who recently left the military. He supports Fishback's contention that abuses in Iraq were systematic-and were authorized by officers in an effort to pressure detainees into talking. "I think our policies required abuse," says Lagouranis. "There were freaking horrible things people were doing. I saw [detainees] who had feet smashed with hammers. One detainee told me he had been forced by Marines to sit on an exhaust pipe, and he had a softball-sized blister to prove it. The stuff I did was mainly torture lite: sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions, hypothermia. We used dogs."

Fishback has also won a devoted and powerful ally in Sen. John McCain, who says that the captain's tale "is what I view as the tip of the iceberg in the military today." Fishback's account has proved to be a prime exhibit in McCain's long-running feud with Rumsfeld over conduct of the Iraq war. In a long letter to Congress obtained by NEWSWEEK, Fishback told McCain and others in Congress that when the Defense secretary testified before Congress in the aftermath of the 2004 Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, Rumsfeld did not accurately represent what was occurring in Iraq.

Fishback said that many of the brutal practices shown in the Abu Ghraib photos-which the Pentagon called the work of a few rogue soldiers "on the night shift"-were actually "in accordance with what I perceived as U.S. policy." After he heard Rumsfeld testify in May 2004 that the U.S. forces were following the Geneva Conventions in Iraq, Fishback wrote: "I was immediately concerned that the Army was taking part in a lie to the Congress, which would have been a clear violation of the Constitution." Based on what he saw, Geneva rules for prisoner treatment were not being followed, he says. And for 17 months, a frustrated Fishback tried to get a clear answer about what standards were being used- consulting his superior officers, Army lawyers, even a professor of philosophy at West Point, Col. Daniel Zupan. He says he never got an answer. A devout Christian, Fishback held soul-searching discussions with fellow officers in Bible class about what he should do. In the end he went to Human Rights Watch for guidance.

Like Fishback, McCain has grown keenly frustrated by the lack of clarity in the Bush administration's interrogation policies. The Arizona senator, a former POW who was tortured in Vietnam, is now battling the administration over an amendment he has attached to the new defense appropriations bill. It would set down, once and for all, what is allowed in interrogation rooms. In simple, clear language, the two-and-a-half-page amendment forbids cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment "regardless of nationality or physical location"-and defines such treatment as the same as that which is prohibited under the U.S. Constitution. In a rebuke to President George W. Bush last month, the GOP-controlled Senate voted 90-9 to approve the McCain amendment.

The Bush administration has consistently maintained that it is not U.S. policy to abuse prisoners. But Bush has threatened to veto the entire appropriations bill if it contains McCain's language-all in an effort to preserve the right to treat prisoners in whatever way the president decides is necessary. Last week Vice President Dick Cheney, with CIA Director Porter Goss in tow, met with McCain to try to persuade him to exclude the CIA from any restrictions. The administration also sought to cut out the term "regardless of physical location," McCain said in an interview. The Washington Post, in a harsh editorial, later branded Cheney "the vice president for torture." Cheney's spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said she had no comment on the McCain meeting. CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Dyck also declined to talk about it. But John Yoo, a former Justice Department official who drafted an August 2002 memo that justified rough methods, said last week that the administration should continue to treat terrorists differently overseas because they "do not operate according to the Geneva Conventions."

Critics, many of them inside the military, say Yoo and other administration hawks have never understood that U.S. observance of Geneva rules is not dependent on what the enemy does. As McCain puts it: "This isn't about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies." He says the administration could make things worse than they already are by putting a law on the books that will, in effect, authorize abusive practices at overseas facilities. "We aren't going to allow any weakening of language," McCain told NEWSWEEK. If the present bill is vetoed or watered down, he adds, "we will certainly put it on another piece of legislation. I think we could get 90 votes tomorrow." Even at senior levels of the Pentagon, some officials are uneasy about the administration's opposition to the McCain amendment. "The uniformed military is appalled by Cheney's stand," says a Pentagon official who would talk only if he were not identified.

For a year and a half now, the administration has sought to make the Abu Ghraib scandal go away. When questioned about abuses, the Pentagon regularly cites the sheer numbers of punishments it has administered to U.S. personnel-230 cases in all, including jail sentences, demotions and other nonjudicial discipline.

But Defense officials rarely point out that no senior officers or civilian officials have been charged since Abu Ghraib. Other officers say they too are seething over the lack of accountability at senior levels. Colonel Zupan, the West Point philosophy teacher, says he himself should have acted when he was deployed in Afghanistan and heard of similar abuses. "I didn't raise my eyebrows about it," he said. "I think it was wrong of me. And if I didn't, as a field officer, then how are we going to be too harsh on an enlisted soldier?"

The Army has sought to paint Fishback as a lone malcontent. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, says the Army Criminal Investigation Division was investigating the captain's allegations. He calls Fishback's long letter "verbiage" and says he had no comment on the questions raised about Rumsfeld's veracity. But NEWSWEEK has obtained corroboration for Fishback's central point in the Army's own files. According to papers released by the Defense Department in September in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, supporting documents for an inspector-general probe in July 2004 show that abuses were much more widespread than the Army acknowledged. In one IG document, an Army sergeant testifies that putting detainees in stressful positions and pouring water on them "seemed to be something all interrogators" in the Fourth Infantry Division were doing.

Before heading into the Fort Bragg woods this week, Fishback told NEWSWEEK that he doesn't want to talk to the media now. "I will just say: I support clear standards in accordance with American values," he said. Judging from the firestorm he started, he may someday get them.

More background (#2) on Torture, Phil 301, Midway

2005-11-02T21:54:00.000-05:00

Vice President for Torture
The Washington Post | Editorial

Wednesday 26 October 2005

Vice President Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.

His position is not just some abstract defense of presidential power. The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have "disappeared," like the victims of some dictatorships. The Justice Department and the White House are known to have approved harsh interrogation techniques for some of these people, including "waterboarding," or simulated drowning; mock execution; and the deliberate withholding of pain medication. CIA personnel have been implicated in the deaths during interrogation of at least four Afghan and Iraqi detainees. Official investigations have indicated that some aberrant practices by Army personnel in Iraq originated with the CIA. Yet no CIA personnel have been held accountable for this record, and there has never been a public report on the agency's performance.

It's not surprising that Mr. Cheney would be at the forefront of an attempt to ratify and legalize this shameful record. The vice president has been a prime mover behind the Bush administration's decision to violate the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and to break with decades of past practice by the U.S. military. These decisions at the top have led to hundreds of documented cases of abuse, torture and homicide in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington, was reportedly one of the principal authors of a legal memo justifying the torture of suspects. This summer Mr. Cheney told several Republican senators that President Bush would veto the annual defense spending bill if it contained language prohibiting the use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by any U.S. personnel.

The senators ignored Mr. Cheney's threats, and the amendment, sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), passed this month by a vote of 90 to 9. So now Mr. Cheney is trying to persuade members of a House-Senate conference committee to adopt language that would not just nullify the McCain amendment but would formally adopt cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as a legal instrument of U.S. policy. The Senate's earlier vote suggests that it will not allow such a betrayal of American values. As for Mr. Cheney: He will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture.

On torture, debate background for Phil 301, November, 05

2005-11-01T18:54:00.000-05:00

On our official USA endorsement of torture

Tomgram: David Cole on John Yoo and the Imperial Presidency

Here is the key passage in Senator John McCain's anti-torture amendment to the 2006 Defense Appropriations Bill (which the Bush administration has threatened to veto if it arrives so amended): "No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment."

Here are the August 2002 words of John Yoo, then-deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice (now a law professor at Berkeley and the author of a new book reviewed below) in his infamous "torture memo" to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. After hauling out many dictionaries, Yoo managed to redefine torture in the following pretzled fashion: "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Thus, did a junior member of the Bush administration open the legal way for waterboarding in the White House. This is the man who, only two weeks after September 11, wrote a memo to Gonzales' deputy entitled The President's Constitutional Authority to Conduct Military Operations against Terrorists and Nations Supporting Them, which is certainly in the running for the most sweeping claim of unfettered executive power in our nation's history and which laid the (il)legal groundwork for an Iraq war of choice to come. "In the exercise of his plenary power to use military force," Yoo insisted, "the President's decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable."

Over four years later, lobbying for torture is no longer restricted to secret, high-level White House meetings, insider memos from Justice Department lawyers, or little privately scrawled notes from Donald Rumsfeld -- like the one on a November 27, 2002 memo on acceptable interrogation methods: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing [as a counter-resistance technique] limited to 4 hours?" Last week, on the torture side of the ledger, Vice President Cheney descended from the imperial heavens to lobby Senator McCain, a man who knows something about torture first-hand, to exempt the CIA (and possibly other secret agencies) from his amendment. According to the New York Times, here is the (tortured) wording of the exemption the Vice President was pushing:

"[The measure] shall not apply with respect to clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States, that are carried out by an element of the United States government other than the Department of Defense and are consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States and treaties to which the United States is a party, if the president determines that such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack."

"As for Mr. Cheney," the Washington Post editorial page commented astringently, "[h]e will be remembered as the vice president who campaigned for torture."

Last week, by the way, the ACLU released "an analysis of new and previously released autopsy and death reports of detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom died while being interrogated. The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions… The documents show that detainees died during or after interrogations by Navy Seals, Military Intelligence and ‘OGA' (Other Governmental Agency) -- a term, according to the ACLU, that is commonly used to refer to the CIA." Evidently, this is just everyday life in the world created by Dick Cheney and John Yoo.

As it happened, Cheney was going for the torture trifecta. The Monday after the indictment and resignation of I. Lewis Libby, he announced the appointment of a new vice-presidential chief of staff, his counsel David Addington, a man the Washington Post has identified as "a principal author of the White House memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects. He was a prime advocate of arguments supporting the holding of terrorism suspects without access to courts." These days, it seems, this is nothing short of a qualification for holding high office. After all, the three men who head our new Homeland Security State -- Alberto Gonzales, Michael Chertoff, and Donald Rumsfeld (Justice, Homeland Security, and Defense) -- were all intimately involved in creating and/or parsing pretzled definitions of torture meant to free our "commander-in-chief" to order more or less anything he wanted done to anyone at all out there in the imperium.

Read more at www.tomdispatch.com
Other web sources:
truthout
Huffington Post
Media Matters
Project Censored
Tompaine.com

Darwin's evolution vs faith in creation: an ongoing dialogue

2005-08-22T12:26:00.000-04:00

New York Times
August 22, 2005
In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash
By KENNETH CHANG

At the heart of the debate over intelligent design is this question: Can a scientific explanation of the history of life include the actions of an unseen higher being?

The proponents of intelligent design, a school of thought that some have argued should be taught alongside evolution in the nation's schools, say that the complexity and diversity of life go beyond what evolution can explain.

Biological marvels like the optical precision of an eye, the little spinning motors that propel bacteria and the cascade of proteins that cause blood to clot, they say, point to the hand of a higher being at work in the world.

In one often-cited argument, Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and a leading design theorist, compares complex biological phenomena like blood clotting to a mousetrap: Take away any one piece - the spring, the baseboard, the metal piece that snags the mouse - and the mousetrap stops being able to catch mice.

Similarly, Dr. Behe argues, if any one of the more than 20 proteins involved in blood clotting is missing or deficient, as happens in hemophilia, for instance, clots will not form properly.

Such all-or-none systems, Dr. Behe and other design proponents say, could not have arisen through the incremental changes that evolution says allowed life to progress to the big brains and the sophisticated abilities of humans from primitive bacteria.

These complex systems are "always associated with design," Dr. Behe, the author of the 1996 book "Darwin's Black Box," said in an interview. "We find such systems in biology, and since we know of no other way that these things can be produced, Darwinian claims notwithstanding, then we are rational to conclude they were indeed designed."

It is an argument that appeals to many Americans of faith.

But mainstream scientists say that the claims of intelligent design run counter to a century of research supporting the explanatory and predictive power of Darwinian evolution, and that the design approach suffers from fundamental problems that place it outside the realm of science. For one thing, these scientists say, invoking a higher being as an explanation is unscientific.

"One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas H. Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do."

That does not mean that scientists do not believe in God. Many do. But they see science as an effort to find out how the material world works, with nothing to say about why we are here or how we should live.

And in that quest, they say, there is no need to resort to otherworldly explanations. So much evidence has been provided by evolutionary studies that biologists are able to explain even the most complex natural phenomena and to fill in whatever blanks remain with solid theories.

This is possible, in large part, because evolution leaves tracks like the fossil remains of early animals or the chemical footprints in DNA that have been revealed by genetic research.

For example, while Dr. Behe and other leading design proponents see the blood clotting system as a product of design, mainstream scientists see it as a result of a coherent sequence of evolutionary events.

Early vertebrates like jawless fish had a simple clotting system, scientists believe, involving a few proteins that made blood stick together, said Russell F. Doolittle, a professor of molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego.

Scientists hypothesize that at some point, a mistake during the copying of DNA resulted in the duplication of a gene, increasing the amount of protein produced by cells.

Most often, such a change would be useless. But in this case the extra protein helped blood clot, and animals with the extra protein were more likely to survive and reproduce. Over time, as higher-order species evolved, other proteins joined the clotting system. For instance, several proteins involved in the clotting of blood appear to have started as digestive enzymes.

By studying the evolutionary tree and the genetics and biochemistry of living organisms, Dr. Doolittle said, scientists have largely been able to determine the order in which different proteins became involved in helping blood clot, eventually producing the sophisticated clotting mechanisms of humans and other higher animals. The sequencing of animal genomes has provided evidence to support this view.

For example, scientists had predicted that more primitive animals such as fish would be missing certain blood-clotting proteins. In fact, the recent sequencing of the fish genome has shown just this.

"The evidence is rock solid," Dr. Doolittle said.

Intelligent design proponents have advanced their views in books for popular audiences and in a few scientific articles. Some have developed mathematical formulas intended to tell whether something was designed or formed by natural processes.

Mainstream scientists say that intelligent design represents a more sophisticated - and thus more seductive - attack on evolution. Unlike creationists, design proponents accept many of the conclusions of modern science. They agree with cosmologists that the age of the universe is 13.6 billion years, not fewer than 10,000 years, as a literal reading of the Bible would suggest. They accept that mutation and natural selection, the central mechanisms of evolution, have acted on the natural world in small ways, for example, leading to the decay of eyes in certain salamanders that live underground.

Some intelligent design advocates even accept common descent, the notion that all species came from a common ancestor, a central tenet of evolution.

Although a vast majority of scientists accept evolution, the Discovery Institute, a research group in Seattle that has emerged as a clearinghouse for the intelligent design movement, says that 404 scientists, including 70 biologists, have signed a petition saying they are skeptical of Darwinism.

Nonetheless, many scientists regard intelligent design as little more than creationism dressed up in pseudoscientific clothing. Despite its use of scientific language and the fact that some design advocates are scientists, they say, the design approach has so far offered only philosophical objections to evolution, not any positive evidence for the intervention of a designer.

'Truncated View of Reality'

If Dr. Behe's mousetrap is one of the most familiar arguments for design, another is the idea that intelligence is obvious in what it creates. Read a novel by Hemingway, gaze at the pyramids, and a designer's hand is manifest, design proponents say.

But mainstream scientists, design proponents say, are unwilling to look beyond the material world when it comes to explaining things like the construction of an eye or the spinning motors that propel bacteria. What is wrong, they ask, with entertaining the idea that what looks like it was designed was actually designed?

"If we've defined science such that it cannot get to the true answer, we've got a pretty lame definition of science," said Douglas D. Axe, a molecular biologist and the director of research at the Biologic Institute, a new research center in Seattle that looks at the organization of biological systems, including intelligent design issues. Dr. Axe said he had received "significant" financing from the Discovery Institute, but he declined to give any other details about the institute or its financing.

Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, compares the design approach to the work of archaeologists investigating an ancient civilization.

"Imagine you're an archaeologist and you're looking at an inscription, and you say, 'Well, sorry, that looks like it's intelligent but we can't invoke an intelligent cause because, as a matter of method, we have to limit ourselves to materialistic processes,' " Dr. Meyer said. "That would be nuts."

He added, "Call it miracle, call it some other pejorative term, but the fact remains that the materialistic view is a truncated view of reality."

William Paley, an Anglican priest, made a similar argument in the early 19th century. Someone who finds a rock can easily imagine how wind and rain shaped it, he reasoned. But someone who finds a pocket watch lying on the ground instantly knows that it was not formed by natural processes.

With living organisms so much more complicated than watches, he wrote, "The marks of design are too strong to be got over."

Mainstream scientists say that the scientific method is indeed restricted to the material world, because it is trying to find out how it works. Simply saying, "it must have been designed," they say, is simply a way of not tackling the hardest problems.

They say they have no disagreement with studying phenomena for which there are, as yet, no explanations.

It is the presumption of a designer that mainstream scientists dispute, because there are no artifacts or biological signs - no scientific evidence, in other words - to suggest a designer's presence.

Darwin's theory, in contrast, has over the last century yielded so many solid findings that no mainstream biologist today doubts its basic tenets, though they may argue about particulars.

The theory has unlocked many of the mysteries of the natural world. For example, by studying the skeletons of whales, evolutionary scientists have been able to trace the history of their descent from small-hoofed land mammals. They made predictions about what the earliest water-dwelling whales might look like. And, in 1994, paleontologists reported discovering two such species, with many of the anatomical features that scientists had predicted.

Darwin's Finches

Nowhere has evolution been more powerful than in its prediction that there must be a means to pass on information from one generation to another. Darwin did not know the biological mechanism of inheritance, but the theory of evolution required one.

The discovery of DNA, the sequencing of the human genome, the pinpointing of genetic diseases and the discovery that a continuum of life from a single cell to a human brain can be detected in DNA are all a result of evolutionary theory.

Darwin may have been the classic scientific observer. He observed that individuals in a given species varied considerably, variations now known to be caused by mutations in their genetic code. He also realized that constraints of food and habitat sharply limited population growth; not every individual could survive and reproduce.

This competition, he hypothesized, meant that those individuals with helpful traits multiplied, passing on those traits to their numerous offspring. Negative or useless traits did not help individuals reproduce, and those traits faded away, a process that Darwin called natural selection.

The finches that Darwin observed in the Galápagos Islands provide the most famous example of this process. The species of finch that originally found its way to the Galápagos from South America had a beak shaped in a way that was ideal for eating seeds. But once arrived on the islands, that finch eventually diversified into 13 species. The various Galápagos finches have differently shaped beaks, each fine-tuned to take advantage of a particular food, like fruit, grubs, buds or seeds.

Such small adaptations can arise within a few generations. Darwin surmised that over millions of years, these small changes would accumulate, giving rise to the myriad of species seen today.

The number of organisms that, in those long periods, ended up being preserved as fossils is infinitesimal. As a result, the evolutionary record - the fossils of long-extinct organisms found preserved in rock - is necessarily incomplete, and some species appear to burst out of nowhere.

Some supporters of intelligent design have argued that such gaps undermine the evidence for evolution.

For instance, during the Cambrian explosion a half a billion years ago, life diversified to shapes with limbs and shells from jellyfish-like blobs, over a geologically brief span of 30 million years.

Dr. Meyer sees design at work in these large leaps, which signified the appearance of most modern forms of life. He argues that genetic mutations do not have the power to create new shapes of animals.

But molecular biologists have found genes that control the function of other genes, switching them on and off. Small mutations in these controller genes could produce new species. In addition, new fossils are being found and scientists now know that many changes occurred in the era before the Cambrian - a period that may have lasted 100 million years - providing more time for change.

The Cambrian explosion, said David J. Bottjer, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California and president of the Paleontological Society, is "a wonderful mystery in that we don't know everything yet."

"I think it will be just a matter of time before smart people will be able to figure a lot more of this out," Dr. Bottjer said. "Like any good scientific problem."

Purposeful Patterns

Intelligent design proponents have been stung by claims that, in contrast to mainstream scientists, they do not form their own theories or conduct original research. They say they are doing the mathematical work and biological experiments needed to put their ideas on firm scientific ground.

For example, William A. Dembski, a mathematician who drew attention when he headed a short-lived intelligent design institute at Baylor University, has worked on mathematical algorithms that purport to tell the difference between objects that were designed and those that occurred naturally.

Dr. Dembski says designed objects, like Mount Rushmore, show complex, purposeful patterns that evince the existence of intelligence. Mathematical calculations like those he has developed, he argues, could detect those patterns, for example, distinguishing Mount Rushmore from Mount St. Helens.

But other mathematicians have said that Dr. Dembski's calculations do not work and cannot be applied in the real world.

Other studies that intelligent design theorists cite in support of their views have been done by Dr. Axe of the Biologic Institute.

In one such study, Dr. Axe looked at a protein, called penicillinase, that gives bacteria the ability to survive treatment with the antibiotic penicillin. Dr. Meyer, of the Discovery Institute, has referred to Dr. Axe's work in arguing that working proteins are so rare that evolution cannot by chance discover them.

What was the probability, Dr. Axe asked in his study, of a protein with this ability existing in the universe of all possible proteins?

Penicillinase is made up of a strand of chemicals called amino acids folded into a shape that binds to penicillin and thus disables it. Whether the protein folds up in the right way determines whether it works or not.

Dr. Axe calculated that of the plausible amino acid sequences, only one in 100,000 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion - a number written as 1 followed by 77 zeroes - would provide resistance to penicillin.

In other words, the probability was essentially zero.

Dr. Axe's research appeared last year in The Journal of Molecular Biology, a peer-reviewed scientific publication.

Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and a frequent sparring partner of design proponents, said that in his study, Dr. Axe did not look at penicillinase "the way evolution looks at the protein."

Natural selection, he said, is not random. A small number of mutations, sometimes just one, can change the function of a protein, allowing it to diverge along new evolutionary paths and eventually form a new shape or fold.

One Shot or a Continual Act

Intelligent design proponents are careful to say that they cannot identify the designer at work in the world, although most readily concede that God is the most likely possibility. And they offer varied opinions on when and how often a designer intervened.

Dr. Behe, for example, said he could imagine that, like an elaborate billiards shot, the design was set up when the Big Bang occurred 13.6 billion years ago. "It could have all been programmed into the universe as far as I'm concerned," he said.

But it was also possible, Dr. Behe added, that a designer acted continually throughout the history of life.

Mainstream scientists say this fuzziness about when and how design supposedly occurred makes the claims impossible to disprove. It is unreasonable, they say, for design advocates to demand that every detail of evolution be filled in.

Dr. Behe, however, said he might find it compelling if scientists were to observe evolutionary leaps in the laboratory. He pointed to an experiment by Richard E. Lenski, a professor of microbial ecology at Michigan State University, who has been observing the evolution of E. coli bacteria for more than 15 years. "If anything cool came out of that," Dr. Behe said, "that would be one way to convince me."

Dr. Behe said that if he was correct, then the E. coli in Dr. Lenski's lab would evolve in small ways but never change in such a way that the bacteria would develop entirely new abilities.

In fact, such an ability seems to have developed. Dr. Lenski said his experiment was not intended to explore this aspect of evolution, but nonetheless, "We have recently discovered a pretty dramatic exception, one where a new and surprising function has evolved," he said.

Dr. Lenski declined to give any details until the research is published. But, he said, "If anyone is resting his or her faith in God on the outcome that our experiment will not produce some major biological innovation, then I humbly suggest they should rethink the distinction between science and religion."

Dr. Behe said, "I'll wait and see."

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Glossary for Philosophy of Religion

2005-06-01T16:40:00.000-04:00

One of the better sources seems to be www.about.com
see: http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/indexes/blglossary.htm
where you can look up about any word in philosophy or religion,
under a number of sub-categories.
I will keep looking around for good sites.
Dr. B.
June 1.
Note: the previous post was intended to supply some background for the Philosophy 280 course at Midway. You might want to read it.

Key concepts for Philosophy 280, Midway College

2005-05-25T11:26:00.000-04:00

Posts for Philosophy 280 Midway College, from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
Basically a Philosophy of Religion deals with the reasonableness, or rationality of belief and belief concepts. It can also be called a justification or warranting by which thinkers, past and present have attempted to understand faith and belief systems.

Key Concepts covered here: Appeal to authority; Citing an “expert,” Conditions for legitimate Argument from Authority; Deductive reasoning; Inductive reasoning; Questions asked; What is "God?"

An appeal to authority is a type of argument in logic also known as argument from authority, argumentum ad verecundiam (Latin: argument to respect) or ipse dixit (Latin: he himself said it, where an unsupported assertion depends on the asserter's credibility). It is one method of obtaining propositional knowledge and is often a logical fallacy. Some examples of appeals to authority:

* Referring to the philosophical beliefs of Aristotle. "If Aristotle said it was so, it is so".
* Quotes from religious books such as the Bible. "The Bible says X, therefore X is the right thing".
* Claiming that some crime is morally wrong because it is illegal. "It's against the law for stores to be open on weekends, therefore it's wrong for them to do so".
* Referencing scientific research published in a peer reviewed journal. "Science (in the form of an article in a prestigious journal) says X, therefore X is so".
* Believing what one is told by one's teacher, preacher or priest. "My teacher (or other authority figure) said so, therefore it must be right."

Sometimes, an appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. This is the case when a person presenting a position on a subject mentions some authority who also holds that position, but who is not an authority in that area. For instance, the statement "Arthur C. Clarke recently released a report showing it is necessary to floss three times daily" should not convince many people of anything about flossing, as Arthur C. Clarke is not an expert on dental hygiene. Much advertising relies on this logical fallacy; for example when Michael Winner promotes car insurance, despite having no expertise in the field of car insurance.

Citing a person who is an authority in the relevant field should carry more weight, but given the possibility of mistake, should not be compelling. In the Middle Ages, roughly from the 12th century to the 15th century, the philosophy of Aristotle became firmly established dogma, and using the beliefs of Aristotle was an important part of many debates. Aristotle's thought became so central to the philosophy of the late Middle Ages that he became known in Latin as Ille Philosophus, "the philosopher," and quotations from Aristotle became known as ipse dixits ("He, himself, has spoken."). In this case, Aristotle is an example of someone who is an authority in philosophy, but philosophy is an area where direct evidence is less readily available, and therefore, Aristotle's ideas carry weight, but are not the final word. On the other hand, arguing that all astronomers believe that the planet Neptune exists - and therefore, that serves as evidence of the planet's existence - is a more compelling argument because astronomers are knowledgable in the relevant field and are in a position to readily prove or disprove the existence of the planet (direct experience). However, it is still better to argue from evidence than from what astronomers believe.Induction (philosophy)

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Conditions for a legitimate argument from authority

1. The authority must have competence in an area, not just glamour, prestige, rank or popularity.
2. The judgement must be within the authority's field of competence.
3. The authority must be interpreted correctly.
4. Direct evidence must be available, at least in principle.
5. The expert should be reasonably unbiased (not unduly influenced by other factors, such as money, political considerations, or religious beliefs).
6. The judgement must be representative of expert opinions on the issue (as opposed to an unrepresentative sample).
7. A technique is needed to adjudicate disagreements among equally qualified authorities.
8. The argument must be valid in its own right i.e. without needing to appeal to authority at all - except of course to its own authority as entirely valid. (This last point ought to dissuade any who might consider an argument legitimate from authority alone - even if that argument is about the legitimacy of itself as an argument from authority. And, has serious implications for the relevancy of the argument from authority portion - even if valid in its own right - of a greater argument in the first place.

Deductive reasoning
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Deductive reasoning is the process of reaching a conclusion that is guaranteed to follow, if the evidence provided is true and the reasoning used to reach the conclusion is correct. The conclusion also must be based only on the evidence previously provided; it cannot contain new information about the subject matter. Deductive reasoning was first described by the ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle.

Deductive is a descriptor for one type of logical reasoning. In logic, there are two broad methods of reaching a conclusion. The alternative to deductive reasoning is inductive reasoning.

Both types of reasoning are routinely employed. One difference between them is that in deductive reasoning, the evidence provided must be a set about which everything is known before the conclusion can be drawn. Since it is difficult to know everything before drawing a conclusion, deductive reasoning has limited use in the real world. This is where inductive reasoning steps in. Given a set of evidence, however incomplete the knowledge is, the conclusion is likely to follow, but one gives up the guarantee that the conclusion follows. However it does provide the ability to learn new things that are not obvious from the evidence.

Many incorrectly teach that deductive reasoning goes from the general to the specific and that inductive reasoning travels in the opposite direction. Deductive reasoning is fundamentally in the form of an assertion of idea to materialisation, while inductive reasoning is from empirical evidence to formulate the generalised knowledge of the observation thereof. It is not unusual therefore for science, in its beginning form to be induction based. However, since the discovery of quantum physics, it is realised that higher science via deduction post greater possibilty in resolving higher theoretical scientific problems.

Deductive reasoning is supported by deductive logic, for example:
Syllogisms

All apples are fruit.
All fruits grow on trees.
Therefore all apples grow on trees.

Or

All apples are fruit.
Some apples are red.
Therefore some fruit is red.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Inductive reasoning)

This article is about induction in philosophy and logic. Inductive reasoning is the counter to deductive reasoning. For other article subjects named induction see induction.

Induction or inductive reasoning, sometimes called inductive logic, is the process of reasoning in which the conclusion of an argument is very likely to be true, but not certain, given the premises. It is to ascribe properties or relations to types based on limited observations of particular tokens; or to formulate laws based on limited observations of recurring phenomenal patterns. Induction is used, for example, in using specific propositions such as:

* The ice is cold.
* A billiard ball moves when struck with a cue.

to infer general propositions such as:

* All ice is cold.
* For every action, there is an equal and opposite re-action
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The questions asked in the philosophy of religion

There are a lot of philosophical questions that can be asked about religious beliefs. Two of the significant questions in this field are:

1. What is God? That is, what is the meaning of the word 'God'?
2. Do we have any good reason to think that God exists, or to think that God does not exist?

Still, there are other questions studied in the philosophy of religion. What, if anything, would give us good reason to believe that a miracle has occurred? What is the relationship between faith and reason? What is the relationship between morality and religion? What is the status of religious language? Does petitionary prayer make sense? That is, Is it rational to believe that prayer works?

What is God?

The question "What is God?" is sometimes also phrased as "What is the meaning of the word 'God'?" Most philosophers expect some sort of definition as an answer to this question, but they are not content simply to describe the way the word is used: they want to know the essence of what it means to be God. Western philosophers typically concern themselves with the God of monotheistic religions (see the nature of God in Western theology), but discussions also concern themselves with other conceptions of the divine.

Indeed, before attempting a definition of a term it is essential to know what sense of the term is to be defined. In this case, this is particularly important because there are a number of widely different senses of the word 'God'. The term is ambiguous: it is used in different ways by different people. So before we try to answer the question "What is God?" by giving a definition, first we have to get clear on which conception of God we are trying to define. Among those people who believe in supernatural beings, some believe there is just one God (monotheism; see also monotheistic religion), while others, in the greatest numbers Hindus, believe in many different gods (polytheism; see also polytheistic religion). Buddhists generally do not believe in a personal God similar to that of the Abrahamic religions but direct attention to a more undefined state of being called Nirvana.

Within these two broad categories there is a huge variety of possible beliefs, although there are relatively few popular ways of believing. For example, among the monotheists there have been those who believe that the one God is like a watchmaker who wound up the universe and now does not intervene in the universe at all; this view is deism. By contrast, the view that God continues to be active in the universe is called theism. (Note that 'theism' is here used as a narrow and rather technical term, not as a broader term as it is below. For full discussion of these distinct meanings, refer to the article Theism.)
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Rationality of belief

The second question, "Do we have any good reason to think that God exists, or to think that God does not exist?", is equally important in the philosophy of religion. Since Plato and Aristotle, philosophers and theologians have offered arguments and counterarguments for the existence of God.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all developed religious world views based on, or incorporating, philosophical speculation. There are separate entries (Wikipedia) on Jewish philosophy, Christian philosophy, and Islamic philosophy.
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Now that you have read the above, it is all perfectly clear, right? Reviewing these remarks should make your reading and your discussion easier for us all. Your comments here also allow us to have a virtual classroom discussion and listen and learn from others comments.

The Ultimate Temptation of the Religious Person

2005-04-29T04:25:00.000-04:00

THE ULTIMATE TEMPTATION
c. Paschal Baute, 1985

Once, out of time, the devil went for a walk with a friend. They saw a man ahead of them stoop down and pick up something from the ground.

"What did that man find?" asked the friend.

"A Piece of truth,” said the devil.

"Doesn't that disturb you?" asked the friend.

"No," said the devil, "I shall help him make a belief out of it. Before long, out of the vanity of his own discovery, he will end up worshiping his belief. Then he will become blind to all other truth!" And the devil laughed.

The temptation to use one's vision of God (or one’s reading of Scripture) to judge others is the ultimate temptation of the religious person down through the ages.

Once we decide we have some hold on some truth, then bolster this by some appeal to faith, bible or orthodox teaching, we put ourselves on the side-of-the-angels, and assume that God supports OUR view. Then we believe that anyone who opposes this view is either "blind," further removed from God, or perhaps even on the side-of-the-devil.

Our blindness in this is that we are more interested in proving the rightness of our point of view, than in discovering others views, finding out what else God may have said, or in appreciating that other sincere people, devout people of any Wisdom traditon, can come to very different points of view.

To the extent that we do this with faith, we have made an idol of our belief, and judged others by this belief. What concerns us is not God's truth, which in its depths is unknowable and incomprehensible, but such a passionate attachment to our idea of God that we find it impossible to believe that God does not share our vision.

Every convinced crusader, vigilante, book-burner, Klan-er, Nazi, Communist, Inquisitor, Censor, or terrorist has the burning conviction that They Alone are right with Ultimate Reality, that "God" is on “our side,” and that WE alone stand against the forces of evil. Because our own conviction is so sincere and noble, ours conviction must be the only right one.

Anytime we use our vision of God, our faith, or our reading of Scripture to judge others as further from God than we are, we are guilty of a form of idolatry, a true perversion of belief. We have put wax in our ears to not hear that faith is a undeserved gift from God. We reassure our own demons, and add to the forces of intolerance and prejudice. Thereby we add our speck to the power of evil in the world, all the while believing we are doing something good and holy.

Furthermore, unconsciously and symbolically we also re-enact the violent founding murder of Jesus by judging brother and sister using the gift of faith to do so.

Can we begin to understand that our need to be right has nothing whatever to do with any love of truth or God. Jesus didn't tell us to look for ways to be sure, but rather to take care: "Be careful lest the light in you be darkness." (Luke 11:35) Gregory of Nyssa in the third century said: "Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything." Religious people still kill people "in God's name" still today.

Consider that we have often distorted the way of Being Christian into a "salvation" exclusively for us, for our group of believers, and further, been ready to judge others as further from God because they do not hold the same beliefs. Rather than a dualistic acceptable/non-acceptable division of people, perhaps the unique way of being Christian has more to do with total equality of discipleship, and that each of us can learn from another, no matter how divergent the path, history, experience, or sinfulness we confront. Maybe this mystery we call God is already present; around, within and between us, and our summons is to recognize “that of God” in each and every human being.

We are being asked today to realize that we live in a global community, that each's welfare is dependent upon all others. We are called to accept the we are truly brothers and sisters of one another. If we dare to call God "Father," then every human being is brother and sister.

So we should be ready to give witness, but not to pass judgment on those whose convictions conflict with our own. This means that we must struggle to walk very humbly before God, to seek the truth and stand for it with passion but never act as if we have exclusive claim upon it. When we consider the terrible harm done to millions in the history of religion, we must conclude that no moral crisis can ever dispense people of conscience from full respect for the freedom and responsibility of every other conscience.

"You are confused about what has gone wrong, and how to set it right?" the prophet asks. "Then listen. This is what Yahweh asks of you, only this: to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God." (Micah 6:8)

Discussion and comment?

Remember to "Bookmark" this page

2005-02-02T04:31:00.000-05:00

Remember to "bookmark" this page (find the button on top bar, usually which reads Bookmark, click there when you have the blog page opened, and this click will save the blog web address to you list of Bookmarks, so you need only to go to your Bookmarks section) so you can go to the Class Blog page anytime you have available to see what the latest quotes, posts and comments are.
Dr. B.

THE PRINCIPLE OF FRUGALITY, "Ockam's Razor."

2005-01-15T12:40:00.000-05:00

"Ockham’s razor" is
the law of economy, or
parsimony, or frugality, meaning
"entities are not to be multiplied
beyond necessity."
Ref. Ency. Brit. 475, Micropedia.

. . .Principle of William of Ockham
who altho he did not invent it,
mentioned it so often that it became
known as "Ockham’s razor."

It is a a fine and perceptive principle
used in medieval Scholasticism
and science, as did Galileo in
defending the simplest hypothesis of the heavens

(Oposed at the time by all of organized religion
and suppositions of revelation based on a
literal interpretation of the bible, and there
fore he was condemned and restricted to his
home for the rest of his life by Roman Catholic authorities.)

It is applied both in biology and philosophy,
e.g., "no action should be interpreted in terms
of a higher psychical faculty when a lower
faculty suffices."

The principle can be widely applied:
Keep it simple, Stupid, KISS
Good writing is to the point, concise and clear.
Likewise good speaking, i.e., "Don't beat around the bush."
and you the reader will find other applications.

One conclusion: If quantum physics finds that the very basis of all reality, as far as one can push science to discover is "particles constantly in motion, which appear and disappear without explanation,"
therefore, the most fundamental FACT of nature is "relational aliveness,"
then why should we need further name for Ultimate Reality, than
"Relational Aliveness."

Ockham's razor!

LEARNING THEORY how we learn?

2005-01-14T23:00:00.000-05:00

Today's challenge is to incorporate technology into the learning process while retaining the best of the Wisdom teachers of the past. The great teachers used story and metaphor, interactive dialogue and the Socratic method of questioning.

The aim was to empower the individual from the inside out. "E-ducare: (Latin) to lead out from within." The best educators have also stressed that we learn by doing, by acting.

The world has changed from Descartes' proposition, "I think, therefore I am," to our current axiom "We participate, therefore we are." Meaning "When we participate, we discover who we are and that we belong."

For the non-traditional student who already brings much life experience and some wisdom to the classroom, this is a fitting guideline for both teacher and student, to put as much emphasis on participation as the transfer of knowledge from a textbook.

How is knowledge being applied in the business world? The world is now changing so fast that no one can keep up with it. What works today will probably not work tomorrow. Therefore Knowledge Management (KM) is a new focus for organizations and business. "The blend of KM and e-learning initiatives is on every CLO (Chief Learning Officer) agenda these days."

The challenge for organizational effectiveness is "instant sharing and flow of strategic information, or knowledge, seamlessly through all channels of the organization, ensuring a well-informed workforce that can react to the vagaries of the new economy." Website www.learningpost.com

It is not coincidental that one new definition of Ultimate Reality emerging from Quantum Physics and Quantum Theology is "Relational Aliveness." This suggests that when we are inside a personal "zone" or an attitude of "Relational Aliveness," we are already inside Ultimate Reality.

A theory or a philosophy of education then becomes a theology of education and even a spirituality for living. Interesting "razor's edge" thinking today.