Things of Sense

Poulos' criticism of the phrase 'a sense of' lacks full context for me, so I will have to work with the (few) examples he provides. Furthermore, wandering off as he does into a digression on his dissertation and other thoughts, might give the sense that he is right, but this does not convey objective rightness in and of itself.

"Give us a sense of what's going on out there in that hurricane, Bob." What is the difference between this formulation and the more traditional, "What are the conditions in the hurricane, Bob?" I suppose the former, offending statement is meant to invite the viewers to experience what a hurricane is like rather than quote wind speeds and rainfall rates that might otherwise convey little human meaning. So the question I would want to ask is, "What's wrong with making that experiential, sensate connection?" I don't see a problem with it myself. In fact, this seems to me a good example of a quite positive use for 'a sense of': we literally cannot experience the actual noun--the hurricane--ourselves. But for the sake of more immediate sympathy for those suffering from it, getting a 'sense' of it, having our senses engaged, is actually more of an 'incarnational' way of communicating the weather than the overly abstracted reporting of mere statistics.

The second example (and only other one I can find) is this:

"critics of contemporary life merely beg the question when they call for us to replace, say, our lost community with a new 'sense of community'. "

He may have a point here. I think this is a place where we tend to want to privilege our feelings over the objective experience of a thing. We probably don't have strong senses of real communities except at heightened moments, and ultimately I don't think that we seek out communities merely to get a sense of being a part of one. I don't often have a strong sense of being part of the Catholic Church in its full universality. When Pope John Paul II died, the beauty of the ceremonial for his funeral and the following conclave helped me to experience a stronger sense of communion with the universal Church. Even when I am not actively sensing this, however, the communion is still there. If one gets a sense of communion when there is not (as may be the case with 'cultural Catholics' who support abortion rights), this seems to me to be a good example of the disconnect betweent the objective thing and a sense of it.

Personally, I haven't noticed this explosion of poor usage. From what I imagine to be the common usage, I might actually support it. I am an advocate of a strongly Incarnational way of understanding this world; however, we must be discerning about what it is that we incarnate. Evil can just as easily incarnate itself as good, and so before we crown our own experience as unambiguously pointing to objective reality, we might exercise some restraint and merely admit that our experience is provisional: "I am getting a sense of your irritation about this phrase." Rather than, "You are angry about this phrase." This caution allows for our senses to be corrected by the objective reality.

I understand that there is impatience among conservatives with the lack of conviction that many postmoderns persons show toward the truth, but I think forbidding the use of this phrase will not help people arrive at truth. They will either find another way to express this reserve with regard to the truth, or will simply do what a lot of people do today and just assert their sense of things as true, whether or not this claim has any merit.

But it seems to me that even in the two examples he gives, the import of the phrase is slightly different, and this obviously badly vitiates his claim.

My Sense of Things

James Poulos is an eccentric sort of conservative. He contributes to and keeps good relations with The American Spectator, so he's not a lame too-cool-for-Hannity dissident of the sort we've been complaining about in this space. Nonetheless, sometimes it seems to be difficult for some of us dim bulbs to figure out his train of thought.

One of his recurring gripes is to complain about "a sense of" as an idiom in contemporary speech and writing. I think we can stipulate that it is simply meaningless linguistic filler much of the time, and at first glance this seems to be a case of usage hypersensitivity, like those people who know the correct meaning of "momentarily" and cringe slightly when hearing the word in its colloquial sense. But I think Poulos wants to go further than that somehow, as if there is something actually blameworthy or alienating in its common use.

I don't get it. Again allowing for overuse, "a sense of" can be used to emphasize something quite real, ie, the epistemological distance between our experience of the world and its underlying reality. We can (and often do) experience a sense of alienation with respect to some cultural phenomenon or another without actually being alienated from it in any meaningful way. It's hard, for me at least, to describe the difference without using the offending phrase.

I wouldn't bother with this ordinarily but now we have our very own philosophe on retainer here at FlyingSpit. I wonder if Boethius thinks there's any there there.

Aesthetics for Me, Taxes for Thee

Boethius inquires into the tension between the aethetics of conservatism and the capitalist, neoliberal economies we live in. He naturally touches on high art, because he's very interested in it. And because it is high art that is most directly a function of aesthetic judgment, that is where the rubber ought to meet the road.

But for the various dissident conservatives it's not, and that actually threw me for a loop for a while. Instead, the neo-Amish dissident conservatives are more interested in evaluating and (to the extent they can) guiding political-cultural affairs according to their aesthetic criteria. In short, they are usually motivated by the desire to repudiate the George W Bush Administration and the what they see as that part of America which supported him. This also has (for them) the benefit of asserting social superiority toward those they disdain. Ie, those Republican-voting yokels buy their food at Winn-Dixie (or God forbid McDonald's), but I buy my produce from a farmer's market every Sunday. Therefore I'm cooler than they are, hooray for me.

One problem with this is that they are inclined to overthrow capitalism in favor of some kind of communitarianism or distributism, ie, something they have hidden behind door #3 that has never existed before in a major industrial economy. Mainstream conservatives remember very well how hard it was to defeat Communism and socialism and are willing to live with the very real imperfections of capitalism for the sake of not having to win those battles again.

The other complaint that I have wrt dissident conservatism is that so much of it amounts to welfare for the intelligentsia. This is magnified of course by the fiscal priorities of the Obama Administration. We are at a time where the base of our economy is changing, toward things we don't understand and can't predict. Right now there is a profound call, IMO, for the right tail of the Bell Curve to assert leadership toward creating economically renumerative opportunities for the rest of the world to spend their time harvesting. Instead we have professors of this and environmental directors of that working to preserve their prerogatives.

What Aesthetics?

The tragic death of Michael Jackson seems as good an opportunity as any to reflect on the 'aesthetics of modern economies', as Koz put it in a recent email exchange which gave rise to my invitation to blog here. Michael, as talented as he undoubtedly was, owed his extreme popularity to the very capitalistic arrangement of the modern recording industry, which has proven itself less able to generate, say, a Mozart.

Koz observes that many on the cultural right get themselves in a jam because they support modern economic arrangement, but lament the poorer level of cultural quality that emerges from the patronage of the mass public as opposed to, say the Esterhazy's or King Ludwig, not to mention the Church. There are some on the right, namely the stricter libertarians and Objectivists, who are fine with the trade-off, but others in the current coalition, variously labelled as the neo-Amish, Cunchycons, paleocons, et al, experience 'aesthetic revulsion about the lifestyle and media of the mainstream Right', the 'Hannity-Palin axis'. This obviously is a larger field than what I would strictly call aesthetics, but there is a continuum here, so my point about royal patronage still relates. For example, Sean Hannity would have a harder time making a living getting his opinion listened to if he didn't have the very capitalistic Fox network and the mass following it generates in programming propping him up. Sarah Palin is more intelligent, I think, but all the same seems to have emerged less, in my opinion, because of her inspired pronouncements on policy, than because of her appeal with the cultural milieu of Fox broadcasting.

I'm of several minds in this, and hope that the opportunity to work on a conversation will clarify some points.

Would it be inaccurate to consider the Hannity-Palin axis to be allied with the neocons? In listing the groups in the conservative coalition (such as it is right now), it strikes me that those I usually consider neocons seem to exhibit quite little in the way of actual culture (with the notable exception of the Catholic variety, such as Weigel and the late Neuhaus, may he rest in peace). Let it be known that I harbor no great appreciation for the neocon ideas. It seems that part of the neocon difficulty is that they bring from the left ideas about 'human nature' in the abstract that don't translate well on the ground. The idea, for example, that Iraqis would naturally desire and embrace democracy is based in an ideology about the human person that is divorced from what we observe in actual cultures.

When I say that neocons lack culture, I don't mean that Cheney, the Kristols and Podheretz aren't well-read, don't enjoy fine wine, listen to Mahler or whatever; it just that their personas come off as tone deaf to the connection between culture and locality; they tend to view the globe as a monolithic thing, and where it isn't, it needs more sameness, as in American policy. Rod Dreher or Joe Sobran or Mark Shea will more often drop in references to things like food, music, literature (and not just to make facile military points in the fashion of VD Hanson), etc. I should add that I do not intend to write off the neocons, though I've been tempted to in recent years; their thought has so influenced thinking on the right that it makes no sense at this point to pretend that the right can make any headway without the neocons.

The other groups (excepting again the libertarians and Objectivists), are more closely connected with local traditions, or at least small-scale cultural phenomena, as the name 'neo-Amish' especially evokes. But certainly Paleos have always been extrememly suspicious about over-arching ideologies and reluctant to favor, say, federal policy over state and local policy.

I will break there for now, though my thoughts in the area are numerous. Back to you, Koz.

If this is the case, then it might be that

Hey Baby, What's Your Signal?

"Signaling" is relatively new, relatively obscure part of economics (hat tip to Bryan Caplan for this). The idea is, instead of some concrete objective some of our actions are done for the purpose of increasing our status in the perceptions of other people.

The literature on this typically deals with education as the canonical case. Ie, the utility of a Harvard doesn't necessarily depend on anybody learning anything there. Employers want to hire people who can get in to Harvard, applicants want to demonstrate they can get in, and they may want to associate with them too.

In the political world there's a couple of important things that are best understood in terms of signaling. First the bad news: the GOP has been bleeding highly-educated, wealthier coastal voters for two decades. Normally this shows up in public opinion surveys as referenda on social or environmental issues. They believe in gay marriage, the Republicans don't. They believe in global warming, the Republicans don't. But these are mostly signals. Most of the time, these issues don't affect those who claim to care about them. But, caring about them is an important signal of higher social status those who care about monster truck rallies. Suffice to say, it's not good for the GOP that there's a significant number of voters whose primary political motivation is to disassociate themselves from your political base.

On the other hand, the Republicans can also use signaling to their benefit. Most of the time the political actors try to promise various benefits to the voters, with the hope of getting political support in return. This is a difficult game for the GOP at the moment, among other reasons because they are so far out of power that they can't deliver on whatever they promise. But, their is a substantial tradition in America that people who want to earn their own living and mind their own business vote Republican. So, let's point that out and make it a signal. Joe Candidate (R, Podunk) can say "Hey, I don't know what can be accomplished if I am elected. Among other things, that will depend on how many of us there are. But, I want America to be a place where we get rewards for success instead of bailouts for failure. If that's what you want, vote for me."

Me to California: Drop Dead, pt III

Between democracy, immigration and big government, you can choose any two. You can't have all three. - Eddy Elfenbein

Me to California: Drop Dead, pt II

Hat tip to Steve Sailer for this one, not that it's any big secret by now. And let's also note that the money spigot still hasn't been turned off. Nobody's writing any new subprime loans, but public-sector pensions, entitlements, and various other forms of pork-barrelling are still going strong.

A Tale of Two (Sort-of) Cities

Or, why the situation for the Repulicans/conservatives is not as bad as it looks.

http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2009/05/a-week-in-the-american-heartland.html
http://www.leftlanenews.com/bankruptcy-could-cost-gm-chrysler-retirees-23b-in-benefits.html

Teabag Parties

As most of the world knows already, on April 15, there were "Tea Party" protests in hundreds of places across America. As might be expected, they were the occasion of some polemic back-and-forth. Doctrinaire Leftists and various other parties with an axe to grind against Middle America complained on various grounds: the protests had no grass roots support, the protesters were too quiet about government spending when Bush was President, and so on. Just another day at the office in our culture wars.

This particular episode has at least one interesting wrinkle though. A substantial number of the critics have insisted on calling the protests "Teabag Parties, " either implicitly or explicitly associating the protests with a kinky sex act. The whole thing is kind of a stupid distraction. The Boston Tea Party was a tax protest, the 2009 Tea Parties were tax protests. The sex act underlying the joke has nothing to do with either one. Nonetheless, there are a couple of things worth mentioning.

First of all, the whole thing was in bad taste. As a red-blooded male who's seen my share of Beavis and Butthead, I'll concede that responses like this are overdone. But repeatedly airing this particular gag on supposedly mainstream TV like CNN and MSNBC is cheap, not necessarily because the precious three-year-olds are watching, but because there are adults watching who might want to escape the forced sexualization of the culture, and current events cable ought to be one place to be able to do it.

The second point is a little more subtle. We're living in difficult economic times of course. And it's becoming more and more difficult, for people on various rungs of the social or economic ladder, to achieve financial security. What little security there is, is protected by the nuclear family, ie, the bonds created by getting married and having kids are strong enough to weather some bad times. It's the people who have those bonds who are protesting at the Tea Parties. They're not looking to the government for help, they want the government to get out of the way of earning a living.

The other side, the people who don't get married, don't have kids, are in palpable danger of being hung out to dry in this recession. Therefore they have to rely on political power to protect government transfer programs, which require high taxes. Unfortunately for them, the American tax base simply isn't big enough to support the government in the place where the Obama Administration is leaving us at any tax rate. They can make jokes about teabags if they want to but in the end the joke is on them.

The Reset, pt II

Let me fill in a couple gaps from my last post. Much of the economic commentary over the last couple of weeks at least has been focused on the banks. Are they solvent or not? In this context it's important to emphasize that even though we are obviously in difficult economic times, the nature of the problems is different than it was as recently as six months ago. At that time, it looked like there was a decent chance all lending and most other economic activity would come to a screeching halt. We should count ourselves fortunate that that didn't happen.

Numerous commentators have complained that in spite of all the government help the banks have gotten, they are still not lending in the volume we would like to see, instead they are ratholing the money away to shore up their balance sheets. This is true, but it's only half the picture at best. Because we are in a recesssion, the demand for credit from creditworthy borrowers is contracted as much as the supply. The quality borrowers that do want credit are able to get it on reasonable terms.

Therefore let's ignore the banks for a while. Frankly we don't know whether the banks are solvent or not. They are fine on a cash flow basis now. Whether or not they fail in the future depends on the extent to which there will be too many defaults in the their loan portfolio, on loans which have been performing up till now.

What we really need is a sector shift, a trend toward the production of goods and services which will be valuable in the future, and may not have been in the past.

Edit: in an important way, we can't help the banks anyway. More than most industries, in finance perception is reality. That is, whether or not the banks actually are insolvent, they are perceived to be insolvent at the moment at least. They are having serious problems borrowing from anyone else except the government. Therefore they have a strong incentive to hoard the capital they do have. If the government gives more financial support, that will help the perception as well as the reality, but only to an extent. Many of our bigger banks, especially Citi, have glommed together so many things and made so many deals, that it's very difficult to get a definitive handle on their financial status. And in this environment, what you don't know definitely can hurt you. Therefore the banks' financial conditions needs to be simpler as well as stronger, and that takes time.

The Other Reset Button

On macroeconomic things, I tend to be free market enthusiast of the George-Gilderite type. As far the web goes, this school of thought is probably best personified by Larry Kudlow, Rich Karlgaard, and James Pethokoukis. Unfortunately, my team has been taking it on the chin over the course of our current economic problems. The natural optimism of this school has fallen flat, as the gap between what is and what ought to be gets clearer and bigger.

I mention this because I like very much like a post Rich Karlgaard has up in Forbes. Frankly it's a great deal more credible than some other things he's written. Though Rich makes it seem boldly contrarian, there's actually a whispering consensus that the US economy will return to positive (though small) growth in 4Q 2009 and 1Q 2010. This is in itself an important development that will have, or at least ought to have, significant consequences for how we handle economic issues in public debate. Our problems are still severe, but no longer nearly as urgent. Therefore we should engineer economic policy with a strong determination to get it right, instead of getting something plausible in operation right away.

But the bigger issue is, let's say we're in a weak recovery by the end of the year, then what? Once people have adapted to the new economic reality and stabilized their financial situation, what will they buy? Nobody knows (and that's actually quite important). We have some idea of what things might look like financially but it's all a big cipher qualitatively and aesthetically. It's uncharted territory. In Rich's case, it means tooling around Northern California in a new a $4000 bicycle, which can be rationalized to be actually cheap compared to the jet plane he's forgoing.

This is the sort of thing we have to find out for ourselves, individually and collectively. And we will if we get the chance. But there is a powerful tendency among liberals and bobos to deploy capital towards market failing but politically favored ends. If this happens our economy will stay where it is at best, or deteriorate further. A substantial part of the political dogfighting in the next year or so will be about whether this happens or not. And if so, to what extent.

Long Way to Zero

Some people like to buy stocks after they've substantially gone down in value. Sometimes the thought is, that after the stock has already depreciated it's less risky. But that's a mistake. No matter where is now or where it came from, it can always depreciate by 10%. And another 10%. And again, and again, and again. As the Wall Street-cliche has it, it's a long way to zero.

I was thinking about this in reading a post by David Henderson at Econlog. It seems like the current Administration and to a substantial extent the voters have given themselves to try just about anything to "fix" the recession on the theory that things can't get any worse. One thing that has me particularly distressed about our current economic misfortunes is that Americans at large still in my opinion have very little perception of the tremendous economic value that we still have, and how close we are to losing it.

Libertarians

I’m trying to show how attractive classical liberalism can be once it is scoured of the conservative barnacles of the now irrelevant Cold War alliance and once it begins to take seriously (rather than just ignore) the powerful arguments of the best contemporary liberal thought. - Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson wants to believe that the association with the Right has corrupted American libertarianism. Unfortunately for him, he's exactly backwords on that point. The historical association with the Right is the only thing that keeps libertarianism even remotely legit. Without it, libertarianism in America amounts to, "Pleeeease let me smoke my dope in peace." It may be a decent argument even, but it impresses nobody.

And about engaging the best arguments contemporary liberal thought, that's like talking to the best cello player in Fresno.

American Islam

David Frum has a new post up about Mormonism, which strikes me as being essentially an American form of Islam, some of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the Islamic version of Islam. Theologically, both are founded on kooky precepts which nobody really believes. But both are sustained by as a means to support communities of their believers. Fortunately for Mormons, America has never been the site of Hobbsean war of all against all. Therefore the tribal violence of Mormons and against Mormons has gone away, leaving just good stuff, communitarianism, strong families, etc., to continue in its wake.

Btw, the apparent point of Frum's post is to rehabilitate the hypothetical Presidential candidacies of Mitt Romney and Jon Hunstman. I don't think that'll work. Eventually somebody has to take the theological kookiness of Mormonism seriously, and GOP base voters will if nobody else does.

Snobbery, pt II

What he said.

It may be obvious from the link but it's worth pointing about exactly why the Will Wilkinsons of the world will play second fiddle to the Sarah Palins if freedom in America has any future. Simply speaking there are by orders of magnitude more Palins that Wilkinsons so in any coalition containing them both, the Palins will be the lead dog.

It's a little less obvious (and counterintuitive to many) but the Palins are actually smarter for the same reasons. That is, because Will Wilkinson wants to impose top-down social control over their "reactionary" impulses, he is necessarily going to be on the wrong end of a Hayekian information gap, something that any libertarian ought to know.

The Message, pt II

A day of organizing is worth a week of blathering about "strategy," and an hour of fund-raising is worth far more than a month of navel-gazing op-ed columns pumped out by the punditocracy. - Robert Stacy McCain

I agree with (the other) McCain most of the time, and in fact with most of the post the quote is from. But as much as we might be disappointed with the conservative punditocracy over the last couple of months or years, we can't get by without them. Organizing, candidate recruitment and fundraising are all fairly substantial commitments in the lives of those who participate in them. What is it that we're shooting for that justifies all that energy? I don't think we can be successful in those areas until we get some decent answers.

Winning the Debate

Back in the day, conservatives used to console themselves that they were "winning the debate" over this issue or that. That is, even if we hadn't yet changed the laws to our liking, nobody with an intellectual credibility was willing to defend the liberal status quo with respect to rent control, Communism, or welfare. I remember being occasionally being frustrated upon hearing this, especially in the middle-to-late 90s, where I thought we'd done enough to be winning more than debates.

Now of course, conservative influence is at a low tide, so we should be grateful for small favors. So I guess we ought to be happy that even though in Realpolitik terms we've lost everything that matters, we are in fact winning the debate, for the first time in quite a while I might add.

Most of it has to do with the stimulus package. Recently Matthew Ygesias criticized Harvard economist Greg Mankiw for not being sufficiently condemnatory of Sen Jim DeMint's alternative to the Obama stimulus. From here, he conclude that Mankiw is not merely a reputable economist but also something of a Republican hack. In Jon Chait's mind, this is a "devastating critique."

At one level at least this is plainly ridiculous. Frankly I'd be interested to know what Mankiw thinks about DeMint's plan, but the zeroth order reason why Mankiw hasn't written anything about it is because the DeMint plan had no chance of becoming law and nobody took it that way. And Yglesias surely knows this because a couple of links earlier he criticizes Mankiw's own ideas as being politically implausible.

What's impressed me most about the recent debates is that the Right, largely but not completely represented by libertarian economists, has not only argued their corner well but also demonstrated much more emotional balance about the whole thing. Somehow liberals can't shake off their pissed-off malcontent personas even after they've won.

Cost of Snobbery

"Here I'm starting from the premise that American politics has been fitfully sorting itself into a meritocracy-versus-populism dynamic, with one party (the Democrats) dominated by the mass upper class and the other party (the GOP) representing the middle and working-class voters who resent this newish elite, for good reasons and for bad. The European model Reihan gestures at has succeeded - to date - by largely marginalizing the latter temper, with the result that the continent's right-populist types (your Le Pens and your Haiders) are simultaneously more extreme and more powerless than the equivalent figures in the United States. But conservative populism in the United States is way too potent to be marginalized in that fashion, I think...." - Ross Douthat

Ross writes an interesting post about how libertarians might fit in the big-picture American political dynamic as it evolves over the next decade or so. Leaving aside the libertarians for a moment, I disagree with Ross that right-populism in American cannot be marginalized. I for one think that's America's biggest political risk for the moment.

More than that though, we should wonder why the populism should currently be associated with the Right in America. Fifty years ago, it was associated with the Left (and politically speaking found its home with the Democrats). One one level, it makes more sense that way: modern economies, especially modern capitalist economies, are socially volatile to the point the people with the strong ties to the blood and soil might want help from the political establishment to protect them from being knocked around by incomprehensible forces bigger than they are. Nonetheless, it doesn't work that way, at least now. And the reason why is very illuminating.

Relatively speaking, the conservative base in America has strong families, which, besides being intrinsically valuable, are also protection during bad times. It's a very important but largely ignored reality that intrafamily economics are much more efficient than the general economy. The consequence of this is, with respect to being able to provide for themselves the conservative base has a broader imagination than typical liberals do. We get to slightly comic situation where the supposedly simple-minded Palins shoot their own food, whereas people with master's degrees in comparative literature are agitating for stimulus packages. It seems obvious to me, but the idea that not everybody can get a bailout is actually quite controversial.

Not Good News

We all know that the Obama stimulus package seems likely to pass at this point, and that's not good news. But what's at least as interesting is that how this reflects what the American people want, or will want. Check this out. A man in Elkhart Indiana asking a question to President Obama not only wants a bailout, he doesn't want to suffer the inconvenience of waiting in line to get it. It's quite an honor for the American taxpayer to be able to send his money to some guy he's never met, for nothing in return and at that person's convenience. It's nice work if you can get it.

This is an important transition point toward becoming a Euro-style social democracy. The political class wants to sever the the bounds of accountability imposed by people from flyover country. So it pushes out federal money so as to make everybody dependent on their largesse. From there, he who pays the piper calls the tune. But takes two to do this tango, and the power-happy pol has found his partner.

Life as We Know It

"The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good, and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same." - Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters

Hellish or not, this was essentially how life was lived for for most of humanity. I took a couple of courses in Roman history in college, and the professor was a big-deal scholar on the subject. On the first day of class he emphasized to us, that at the time of the Republic or the Empire, roughly 80% of the population worked as agricultural field labor, six days a week for at least ten hours a day. Therefore what conventional Roman history is taken to be "about" (Emporers, poets, generals, Senators, philosophers etc.) is our best guess of what we know or believe of the remaining 20%.

Anecdotes like this tend to evoke an aura like hearing about how Abe Lincoln walked x miles from his log cabin to school every morning, but I want to emphasize something else. Not so much how hard life was back in the day, but how it was defined in terms of things that have to be rationed, ie time and space.

What's different for us now is that is that life is much more capricious, and together with that that the "gooey" stuff matters so much more. Bill Gates is worth some number of billions, but his best friend when he was seven makes do with 90K/year. Michael Jordan won six NBA Championships but Karl Malone won none. And on and on. The reasons for this are never completely explicable, but we try. More importantly, we constantly evaluate the difference between success and failure, happiness and regret, in our own lives. But the essential factors, whatever we conclude they are, are not rationed.

If we spend an hour playing Tetris, the hour is gone. We can't use that hour again to write a letter. But a musician can express his passion or curiosity by writing a song. He doesn't have to give those things up once he's finished. In fact it's at least possible that he'll have more of it then. Therefore life itself is a miracle. We are spiritual beings who operate under important mechanical constraints, but those do not define us. For most people these are religious subjects and what we belive about them is defined largely by what religion we belong to. I don't mean to disparage that, or make any particular religious point at least in this post. But to truly express our selves goes way beyond moving rationable things in time and space, and we don't have to rely on any particular religious tradition to know it. Life as we know it is enough.