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I have no idea who this is or if he is a relation. I am summarily claiming him anyway. This is from the same graveyard where Sam Adams and Paul Revere are buried.
Below is one of the three basic models of gravestone design in 17th/18th century America: the winged skull. These things are all over Boston's historical graveyards.
Below is a second, more cheery model, the winged cherub.
I leave Jon and Todd alone for two days, and look what happens. Don't make me come back there! I'll just have to sort it out when I get back. Meanwhile, here is the balcony from which the Declaration of Independence was first read to the public.
The number of Americans who die each year on the roads dwarfs the number who have died in all terrorist violence and in the wars in Iraq and elsewhere. But we pay almost no attention to the former. Greg Easterbrook, who is a master at clear thinking, has this in the LATimes:
Suppose 245,000 americans had died in terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001. The United States would be beside itself, utterly gripped by a sense of national emergency. Political leaders would speak of nothing else, the United States military would stand at maximum readiness, and the White House would vow not to rest until the danger to Americans had been utterly eradicated.
Yet 245,000 Americans have died because of one specific threat since 9/11, and no one seems to care. While the tragedy of 3,000 lives lost on 9/11 has justified two wars, in which thousands of U.S. soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice, the tragedy of 245,000 lives lost in traffic accidents on the nation's roads during the same period has justified . . . pretty much no response at all. Terrorism is on the front page day in and day out, but the media rarely even mention road deaths. A few days ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that 42,642 Americans died in traffic in 2006. Did you hear this reported anywhere?
Today's automobiles are far safer than they have ever been before, and the injury rate has been dropping for a while. But it is not dropping as fast as Easterbrook thinks it should.
Relative to passenger-miles traveled, traffic fatalities have declined in the United States owing to anti-lock brakes, air bags, impact engineering (a hidden safety feature of most new vehicles) and the big rise in shoulder-harness use (your seat belt is much more important to safety than air bags). Tougher laws and social awareness have reduced drunk driving. Yet fatalities per mile traveled have not fallen as much as might be expected given improved technology and less alcohol-impaired driving. There appear to be two key reasons: cellphones and horsepower.
I am with him on the first. I remember walking in Chicago and hearing a policeman talking to someone on his radio. He said: "yeah, a cell phone in a skirt collided with a bread truck. The bread truck won." Talking on a cell phone while driving is a bad idea. Easterbrook has some proposals for legislation.
On the second I have to be agnostic. I just bought a Toyota RAV4, and I insisted on getting the Six Cylinder engine. I like the idea of being able to pass when I want to. But here is the bad news:
Cars with high horsepower and rapid acceleration are easy to lose control of, especially for young drivers. Tap the accelerator in a tight curve for just an instant in that Camry -- to say nothing of socially irresponsible monstrosities such as the 520-horsepower Porsche Cayenne SUV -- and you can lose control. High-horsepower cars enable cutting off and other forms of aggressive driving; cutting off and sudden lane changes are leading causes of highway collisions. A generation ago, a small percentage of American drivers had high-horsepower vehicles. Now the majority do! Is it a coincidence that road rage and high horsepower have occurred simultaneously? High horsepower makes road rage possible, which in turn adds to the death count.
Well, he has left me an out. Horsepower is dangerous only for "young drivers" and people with bad character. Yeah, that's the ticket. I'll just be a better a person.
Anyway Easterbrook is very good at showing that we are very bad when it comes to recognizing risk.
I spent the weekend at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Unit, with a couple of my inestimable colleagues, Ric Dias and Steve Rasmussen. This might be my favorite place in the region. It is wild, off the beaten track, and marvelously sculptured. Every night the coyotes howl in unison, tugging one's soul back to a time before the world became what it is. Below are the aforementioned persons, bringing all their well-earned qualities to bear on a basket full of beef strips.
Here is a view of the Little Missouri (or little Misery, as the locals call it), from the lookout post on the north rim of the canyon.
If you click on the image it will enlarge a bit. You can see a group of seven or eight buffalo enjoying the soft evening at the edge of the river.
This trio of adventures has visited many high, alpine regions like the Wind River Range and the Big Horns. Those places are full of solid bluffs and "everlasting" rock. It is easy to sing "On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand, All Other Ground is Sinking Sand . . ." when you are looking at the three thousand foot walls around the cirque at Lost Twin Lakes.
Teddy Roosevelt's North Unit is rather a Buddhist kind of place. Everything is constantly eroding and changing form. Impermanence is what the place is trying to tell you. Here is a good example.
What you are looking at is a caprock. The rock shields the sandy soil below it from rain and water flow, and as the soil around it erodes, it leaves a tower. We have seen such towers six or seven feet high. If you want to know what Buddhists think that existing things (ourselves included) really are, take a good look at that caprock.
Here is another caprock composition. 
And here is yours truly next to a ranger who gave us a talk about the history of the lookout structure where the above shot of the river was taken. The three of us had spent the day hiking in the area, and after four or five miles of meandering, we just happened to hit the lookout point when it was time for a short program. The hat I am wearing is its own sort of caprock. It shields the short stand of soil below from the rain of sunlight.
I am testing out a new blog editor called Qumana, so forgive any formal anomalies here. Anna served and I returned on a University of Texas study concerning reasons college students choose to have sexual intercourse. Here is Anna's volley.
It is extremely difficult to respond to your most recent post because of the fact that you totally misrepresented (purposely or otherwise) the meaning of the quote you cited. When Meston referred to "huge differences" among older people, she did not mean that there would be huge gender differences among older people's reasons for having sex. She meant that there would be huge differences between college students' reasons and older peoples' reasons (i.e., people in their 30's might cite 'reproduction' as a reason to have sex at higher rates than college-aged men and women). If you don't believe me, read the study.
I am not quite sure what we are arguing about here, as my point was directed to the college students in the study, and not to older persons with whom the study is not concerned. I did suggest that the differences between the sexes would be greater among older persons, but that will have to wait for another study.
The UTex study shows less difference among the two genders than one would expect from previous scholarship. This is not to say that it showed no gender differences. Consider this passage from the UTex report:
The current research provided the most comprehensive examination to date of gender differences in expressed reasons for engaging in sexual intercourse. When examining the most frequently cited reasons for having sex, men and women were remarkably similar in that 20 of the top 25 reasons given were identical for men and women. This broad-based similarity provides an important background context for interpreting gender differences. When examining endorsement frequency of reasons for having sex, however, substantial gender differences emerged such that men reported substantially higher frequencies than did women for the majority of individual items and subfactors. Men, significantly more than women, endorsed reasons centering on the physical appearance and physical desirability of a partner, such as ‘‘The person had a desirable body,’’ ‘‘The person’s physical appearance turned me on,’’ and ‘‘The person had an attractive face.’’ These findings support the evolution-based hypothesis that men tend to be more sexual aroused by visual sexual cues than are women, since physical appearance provides a wealth of cues to a woman’s fertility and reproductive capacity (Buss, 1989b, 2003; Symons, 1979). [My italics]
I also note this passage:
Men, significantly more than women, also endorsed reasons indicating experience seeking and mere opportunity. Examples include ‘‘The person was ‘‘available,’’ ‘‘The opportunity presented itself,’’ and ‘‘I wanted to increase the number of partners I had experienced.’’ These findings support the theory that a major historical constraint on a man’s reproductive success has been the number of different women he can successfully inseminate, and this selection pressure has led men to have evolved a greater desire for a variety sexual partners (Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Schmitt et al., 2003; Schmitt, Shackelford, Duntley, Tooke, & Buss, 2001; Symons, 1979). [my italics]
So, far from challenging established views of sex differences, this study largely confirms them. Maybe the differences in sexual inclination between men and women are less than previous scholarship has suggested. But differences present, and they are robust. That was my point. If you don't believe me, Anna, read the study.
I am not sure why Anna invests so much passion in this matter. Feminists have long argued that women think differently than men about a lot of things (war for example), and that feminine inclinations are sometimes more civilized than those of men. I think that this is plausible, given the evidence, though to be sure we don't know a lot about this yet. It is possible, of course, that as the discipline of sociobiology develops, we will find that these supposed gender differences disappear. I rather hope this is not the case, for a number of reasons. One is that we all benefit from having two basic perspectives rather than one. I hardly see why that should offend Anna's sensibilities.
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My pal Anna at Dakota Women has elevated me to the status of Jungian Archetype. Commenting on a recent study of sexual motivation among college students, she says:
The Ken Blanchards of the world, no doubt, will be surprised to hear that women aren't necessarily having sex because they're deeply in love, and men aren't having sex because of an innate biological impulse to exert dominion over women. Men and women both report having sex because they're attracted to their partner, they like the physical pleasure of sex, and "it feels good".
There are more of us? I feel a bit like the man who has just been tarred and feathered and carried out of town on a rail: "if it weren't for the honor of the thing," he said, "I'd just as soon have walked."
At the risk of forfeiting the honor, nothing in the above paragraph corresponds to anything I have written or happen to believe. Contrary to all expectations, I am not, apparently, one of the Ken Blanchards of the world.
One of the co-authors of the study, David Buss, has produced a mountain of evidence regarding the difference in sexual behavior and inclination between men and women across the globe. And I note this bit, from the article Anna cites.
"None of the gender differences are all that great," Meston said. "Men were more likely to be opportunistic towards having sex, so if sex were there and available they would jump on it, somewhat more so than women. Women were more likely to have sex because they felt they needed to please their partner." But this is among college students, when Meston conceded "hormones run rampant." She predicted huge differences when older groups of people are studied.
So men and women are rather different after all. The differences are minimal only among twenty-first century American college students, and even there they are visible. I am not exactly shocked.
Bob Ellis at Dakota Voice has responded to my post on the question whether the United States is, or has ever been, a Christian Nation. I say no. Bob says yes. Bob, as always, is gracious.
Though I disagree with Blanchard, I have to give him hearty praise for providing the first reasoned and based-in-reality thesis I've ever seen that contends America is not and never has been a Christian nation.
I think perhaps that the difference between us concerns definitions more than facts.
However, he makes the same mistaken assumption that all the incoherent God-haters do: in simple terms, that America must look like and operate like a church in order to be "Christian."
When we say that America is a Christian nation or was founded a Christian nation, we mean that it was founded predominately by Christians based on the values and principles these Christians gleaned from the Judeo-Christian faith (i.e. the Bible).
The United States was founded by a people who were very nearly all of them Christians. But just because a person was a Christian does not mean that everything he does is a Christian act. The same is true for a people. Likewise, an act that has religious motives (the abolition of slavery, for example) is not thereby a religious act. The founding was an explicitly political act based on principles which, even if they were to a large degree religiously motivated, were nonetheless secular in character.
Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, recognizes that the truths realized by the founders came from their Creator, and stated a "firm reliance" on God in order to bring about our independence.
I suspect that Bob has in mind the phrase "the laws of nature and of Nature's God" when he mentions truths that came from the Creator. Again I point out that laws of nature do not rest on any religious belief. They are either known a priori, if they are indeed self-evident as the Continental Congress claimed, or they are evident from an examination of human nature, or both. Either way, they should be evident to anyone who would but employ his intelligence, regardless of his religious beliefs.
There is a long tradition, going back at least to the 13th Century, that holds that some of God's laws depend solely on revelation (remember the Sabbath Day), and others were evident to unassisted human reason (thou shalt not steal). The founding principles of the American Republic fall entirely into the latter category.
On the other hand, one cannot help but notice that genuine republics are scarce outside Christian Europe and America. There is no doubt a connection between Christian culture and the idea of liberal democracy.
This story from Fox:
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency says he will investigate a threatening letter sent to a global warming skeptic by the head of a group advocating the use of renewable energy.
The Washington Times reports American Council on Renewable Energy President Michael Eckhart wrote to Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis — "It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity."
The EPA is a member of ACORE — and so are several other government agencies. Eckhart told the Times he apologizes to all who were offended by his choice of words, and says the letter was a private communication in the context of what he called "personal combat and jousting."
Disclosure: Marlo Lewis is a good friend of House Blanchard. We were close when I was in graduate school. In fact, I watched the second or third Star Wars movie, in advance of its release, at the house of one of his Uncles in Hollywood. Cool times.
There is more than a bit of fanaticism among some of the global warming activists. That doesn't mean that they are wrong about global warming. It does mean that they (the fanatics) are unreasonable and not to be trusted. Kudos to Marlo for drawing this fanatic out.
Sibby joins Bob Ellis (Dakota Voice) in reaction to a Barack Obama comment. Here is Obama:
Whatever we once were, we're no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers. We should acknowledge this and realize that when we're formulating policies from the state house to the Senate floor to the White House, we've got to work to translate our reasoning into values that are accessible to every one of our citizens, not just members of our own faith community.
Obama was half right. The United States is not now, nor has it ever been a Christian nation. This is so for two reasons. First, there can never be any such thing as a Christian nation. I think I have the authority of St. Augustine to back me up here. All nations are political communities, and all political communities involve unequal relations with regard to power and status. This is just is true of democracies as it is of any other form of government. The majority has privileges and honors denied to any minority; some people are more fit for office, or are more loved by the electorate, than others. A Christian community, by contrast, is based on agape, the love that recognizes the absolute worth of every human soul, without regard for any distinction. The wino in the gutter is no less worthy than the tireless and brilliant philanthropist. Perhaps a church can aspire to be such a community. No political community can have such aspirations without risking the gravest impiety. Augustine thought that most human beings would have to try to live with one foot in each city: the City of God and the City of Man. It is irresponsible to run off into the desert, but unChristian to attribute holiness to any political institution.
The second reason the United States was never a Christian nation is that it was founded on self-evident principles, equally accessible to any human being who would but use his or her reason. I think "all men are created equal" means all human beings, male or female, Black or White, Baptist or Buddhist. It doesn't matter whether Christians constitute a minority, a plurality, a majority, or everyone but Barack Obama; the Republic is the body made up of all those who accept the self-evident principles.
This is not to deny that Christianity is one of the strongest forces in the development of American political culture. As we inherited our ideas of constitutionalism from English Liberals and Ancient Greeks, so we got our idea of the dignity of all human beings from the Bible. The idea that every person was created in God's image provides powerful support for the idea of human rights. Whether the latter can be sustained as the former erodes (and it has been steadily eroding for a long time), is a very good question. But for the reasons set forth above, the strength of Christianity in American society is irrelevant to the question of whether we can be or ever were a Christian nation.
Women having options = good
Women having no options = bad