Books: The Well of Ascension

The Well of Ascension is the sequel to Mistborn: The Final Empire, picking up a year after Vin and her friends overthrew the tyranny of the Final Empire. A young nobleman, Elend, has helped the people set up an Assembly to govern themselves, its membership split evenly between noblemen, peasants, and merchants. Elend is King, but he wants the Assembly to have the real authority in the land.

Unfortunately, in surrounding regions, autocratic rulers have stepped in to fill the power vacuum left by the demise of the Lord Ruler. Seeing Elend and his Assembly-led government as weak, an army led by Elend’s father has marched on the city, prepared to defeat them and restore the former way of government and life. Another army soon arrives from another direction, and before long a third army, made up primarily of monsters called koloss, also threatens the city.

Much of the book deals with what it means to be a good leader, and what kind of leadership is good for the people. There is also the issue of whether Elend and Vin are really right for each other, and the meaning of the ancient prophecies about the Hero of Ages and the Well of Ascension, but the book revolves primarily around the political power struggle.

As with Mistborn, I found it surprisingly hard to really “get into” the book. I enjoyed it, but it just wasn’t compelling until pretty near the end. There are all sorts of subplots, but action on the main plotline seems to move very slowly. Vin can’t decide what kind of life she really wants, and Elend is frustrated with people’s unwillingness to accept his leadership, even as he affirms his desire for them to make their own decisions.

In steps Tindwyl, a woman from Terris whose special area of study is biographies of great men of the past. She sets about teaching Elend how to act kinglike so that people will respect his authority. From the way he dresses and wears his hair to his manner of speaking and of reacting to opposition, she teaches him to have confidence in himself and to project confidence in what he says and does.

Whether and how to change the flag

Even since I first heard of Puerto Rico when I was a child, I’ve heard arguments about whether or not it should become our 51st state. As with other complex and controversial topics, the arguments I hear or read often sound convincing – until someone else presents a contrary view.

On the whole, I tend to lean toward agreeing with the proponents of statehood, both for reasons of principle and pragmatism. As to principle, why should citizens of this country not have the same kind of voting rights and elected representatives at the federal level? The practical reasons have to do with the economic boost that statehood proponents believe would occur, as it has with other states that entered the Union.

Trying to predict economic outcomes, of course, is difficult at best. But I do think that statehood proponents have a point when they point out the flaws in the economic arguments of opponents to statehood. The latter group claim that since rates of poverty are so high in Puerto Rico, having Puerto Ricans pay federal income tax would generate little revenue, while more tax dollars from the existing fifty states would flow into Puerto Rico.

The question is whether the current state of the economy in Puerto Rico would persist. The opponents of statehood seem to assume that it would. The proponent of statehood point to studies that purport to show that the island’s economy would experience a significant boost. People who know far more about economics than I do can’t agree on the matter, so I’m not going to try to render an opinion. But I do know that the economy is so complex, influenced by so many interdependent factors, that you can’t change a few factors and expect the others not to change also.

The purpose of this post isn’t to argue for or against statehood, however. If the subject interests you, there are a variety of website that discuss the matter. The U.S. Council for Puerto Rico Statehood is – as the name says - for statehood. No Statehood for Puerto Rico and ProEnglish oppose it. This one gives a fairly balanced view, I think, of the issues from both perspectives.

What I found interesting this evening was a far easier question: How could we rearrange the stars on our flag to add in one more? Fifty-one is three times seventeen, but it would hardly work to have three rows of seventeen stars. You could split seventeen into eight and nine, and have six rows of eight and six row of nine, but then you wouldn’t have the nice symmetry of today’s flag, with longer rows of stars at both top and bottom.

Of course, if Puerto Rico became a state, might there be other territories desiring the same status? How would you make a flag with fifty-two stars, or fifty-three? Fortunately, a mathematician and a computer can offer practical solutions to these questions far more easily than economists and politicians can answer the thornier questions regarding statehood.

Check here for an interactive flag calculator that lets you see possible configurations for anywhere from one to one hundred stars – with three exceptions for which there are no valid patterns (at least not using the six most common star configurations). Many numbers offer two or more possible patterns (try clicking on the long, short, alternate, equal, wyoming, and oregon buttons when they are not grayed out).

Money and politics

I’m sure I’ve read only a tiny fraction of what has been written in the blogosphere since last Friday regarding the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Much of the argument over the decision deal with the nature of corporations and whether they are persons deserving protections guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Other arguments speculate as to the possible outcome of allowing corporations to spend billions of dollars to influence elections.

The two questions are separate issues, I think, and should not be conflated. One can believe that corporations have the right to free speech but worry about the possible outcome of letting them exercise that right. One can believe that corporations are mere legal fictions with no inherent rights, yet believe that letting them get involved in political campaigns will not corrupt the democratic process (more than it already is, anyway).

At least on WorldMagBlog, the opponents of the SCOTUS decision seem to view corporations in a very negative light. They worry about how safety regulations will be dismantled, workers will be maltreated, and only the wealthy stockholders will profit. I find myself arguing on the side of corporations, because both from my experience (I have worked for seven different corporations, mostly large ones) and my studies for my MBA, I see corporations playing a positive role in society.

We probably all have read about the horrible working conditions before worker safety laws were enacted, and how bitterly companies opposed reforms. I remember reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair in eighth grade, and I was appalled at the awful conditions people lived and worked in. There is a need for some level of regulation. But that doesn’t mean that if we allow corporations greater latitude, that they will push to return to those “bad old days.”

In business school (at Rider University), we learned that, in the long run, businesses benefit from working for the interests of all their stakeholders, not just their stockholders. They may gain short term profits from actions that hurt workers, the environment, the community, or even their trading partners (suppliers and customers), but in the long run they profit more by maintaining the good will of all those stakeholders.

Books: Liberty and Tyranny (part 3)

[continued from previous two posts]

Levin covers a number of different areas of conservative thought, but important to all of them is the idea of limited government. There is a need for government to perform certain essential tasks – but no more. And as much as possible, the best level of government to handle these responsibilities is the one closest to the situation. That is why education is best handled at the local level. Very little was originally intended to be handled at the federal level.

Growing up in Connecticut, I was puzzled by the slight differences in laws between different states. When I went shopping in or near my hometown, I knew how to calculate the sales tax and thus the total I would need to pay the cashier. But when we did any shopping during camping trips elsewhere in New England, my calculutions were always off, because I had forgotten that other states had higher or lower sales tax, or includes/excluded different items.

There were also different traffic laws. Most other states allowed right turn on red, before Connecticut adopted the practice (it was the next to last state to do so). Speed limits were different (until President Nixon imposed the nationwide 55 mph speed limit in 1973). I think I was also vaguely aware of different state laws as to the sale of such things as alcohol, firecrackers, and lottery tickets.

None of the differences seemed huge. As far as I could tell, from visiting relatives in different states, there was not a lot of difference between living in one state or another, except those that had to do with by physical laws (climate, topography) rather than manmade law. As I studied history in school, I learned how and when different states had been added to the Union. But the reason why they each had a state constitution and their own set of laws remained a mystery to me.

Books: Liberty and Tyranny (continued)

[continued from yesterday's post]

One thing I liked about this book was that it discussed conservatism primarily in the abstract, citing examples more from history than current events. That way you can focus on the concepts themselves, without the emotional baggage the accompanies current manifestations of conservatism, either in personalities or programs. Discussions on worldmagblog so often become mired in specific details of what some well-known conservative or liberal did, or anecdotal evidence of the success or failure of some particular program.

Since no one is perfect and no one’s program is perfect, there will always be places to find fault, and somehow the faults of one’s political opponents always seem somewhat worse than those of people on the same side. Even when this is admitted, however, such fault still end up being used as evidence of the perversity of the opponents’ political views. This tendency is less pronounced when it comes to discussing history – though it’s hardly absent.

On the other hand, discussing conservatism in the abstract makes it hard to envision how it can be put into practice in the real world. And it paints a picture of the conservative as the paragon of moral clarity, while his opponent is a tyrant, the source of unmitigated evil. There may be people in the world who fit those two extremes, but most people are much more a mix of noble and ignoble thoughts and motives.

Who is this Statist, anyway? Levin explains right at the beginning that he will use the term Statist rather than Liberal, since Liberal should rightly mean broad-minded, and Levin considers today’s “liberals” to be the very opposite. They want to control people’s lives by government regulation that reaches into just about every aspect of people’s lives. What products you are able to buy, how you can use your money, how you can use your own property – these are just a few of the ways that your liberty is abridged by those who call themselves liberals. Therefore, Levin calls them Statists, to emphasize their use of government power.

While it is true that liberals generally favor regulation far more than do conservatives, I have trouble with the idea of assuming to know their motives. Levin says, “But it is the Statist’s purpose to make as many individuals as possible dependent on the government.” I have known quite a few liberals, and they are variously motivated by concern for the poor and oppressed, protection of the environment, or reaction against what they perceive as the moral code that conservatives seem to be attempting to impose on society. The result of their efforts may well be dependence on the government, but that does not mean it is their purpose. If Levin thinks that all or even most liberals are Statists in the full sense he describes, he is blinded by his own ideology.

Books: Liberty and Tyranny

My husband is enjoying being able to discuss politics with our older son, now that he is old enough to understand and take an interest in current issues and events. At his request, I checked this book (along with Ann Coulter’s latest book) out from the public library, for them to read and discuss. When they were done, he offered them to me to read. I wasn’t interested in Coulter’s book, from what I had heard about her and the excerpts our son had read aloud.

But I took a look at Mark Levine’s book and decided it was worth reading. I even kept it two days past the due date, when I discovered I couldn’t renew it because someone else put a hold on it, so I could finish the book. (Fortunately our library only charges a dime a day per book.) I’ve considered myself a conservative for a long time, but it’s a long time since I had seen someone articulate the conservative views clearly and succinctly without indulging in sarcasm and invective.

I do have some criticisms of the book, but for the most part I thought that Levin presented the main principles of conservatism well. At first I thought some statements were made without offering examples or corroboration, but once I got into the meat of the book, he provided examples and lots of footnotes. If I were to purchase the book, I would be able to do further research into some of the areas he discusses, using the sources noted in the notes at the end of the book.

I first came to hold a conservative position in college. I happened to turn 18 in 1980, right at the start of the presidential campaign (although that first semester I was studying at Word of Life Bible Institute, where no TV or radios were allowed and I paid little attention to the outside world (they kept us much too busy anyway). By the time Reagan emerged as the Republican candidate, I had decided to transfer from WOLBI to Cedarville College (now Cedarville University), and that fall I took a required course that included an introduction to both economics and political science.

I wasn’t certain just how the Bible supported free markets as clearly as our professor said, but everything he said about free markets and limited government made sense to me. When a straw poll taken that fall at the college showed over 90% support for Reagan among the student body, I was actually surprised it wasn’t higher. How could anyone listen to what they taught us about what the Republicans stood for and what the Democrats stood for, and not choose to vote for Reagan?

National treasure

“National treasure” was the theme of our Cub Scout day camp this summer. As I am a member of the planning committee, I spent a good deal of time thinking about what kinds of national treasures to try to work into the camp program. National parks? Natural resources? Our flag? Our history? Our people?

Mostly we focused on nature and the national parks. I spent evenings coming up with clues, then ideas where to hide the clues, and more clues to point to those hiding places. Since I didn’t work with the Scouts directly during camp, and my own son was at College for Kids instead of camp, I never did hear how well some of my clues worked out.

I figured a yellow crayon and a stone should be a fairly easy reference to Yellowstone. That one was for the youngest group; the older boys had to figure out that a picture of a bald man’s head, a feather, and a quarter were clues to “bald eagle” (the only answer that wasn’t a national park). For Mount Rushmore, they got a picture of a mountain, and three coins: a penny, a nickel, and a quarter. I was going to include a dime, then someone pointed out that it had the head of the wrong Roosevelt.

The theme for today’s July 4 parade was “Stars and Stripes Forever.” At the last Cub Scout pack meeting, some of us expressed an interest in making a float for the parade, and I was wondering if there was a way to somehow show the history of the American flag. But I was too busy with day camp to work on it. So were other parents, I guess. The boys just walked next to a trailer pulled by an old (1945) tractor, handing out ice pops to the children along the route. (Another float in the parade did display the history of the flag.)

Today we celebrate one of our nation’s greatest treasures – the commitment to liberty embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was at once an eloquent statement of values around which the new country would form, and a bold political action that set in motion the battle for America’s self-government. Googling for more information on this historic document, I was happy to find this website at the National Archives: The Declaration of Independence: Our National Treasure.

Books: Memorial Day

Arguments regarding the morality of “enhanced interrogation techniques” often focus on the “ticking-bomb” scenario, a hypothetical situation where a terrorist (in custody) has information regarding a plan to use WMD, possibly a nuclear bomb that will wipe out an entire city. Conservatives tend to point to the number of American lives that would be saved by using whatever means necessary to get the terrorist to talk, and that he deserves some pretty severe punishment anyway for his part in a mass murder conspiracy.

Liberals tend to point out how extremely unlikely such a scenario is, and that there is no way of knowing whether a captured suspect actually does have knowledge of the details of what is planned, or that he will tell the truth if he does speak. Using a highly unlikely scenario to justify torture of actual human beings, who may not even be complicit in the acts of terror they are being questioned about, gives too much power to government agency officials who may abuse that power. And the victims of that wrongly wielded power could someday be us.

Conservatives – who on other issues are often far more suspicious about government having too much power – prefer to err on the side of security rather than personal freedoms when it comes to the fight against terrorism. I find my sympathies more with the liberals on this one, but I also think that most people on both sides have far too little knowledge of real as opposed to hypothetical scenarios to be good judges of the matter. Personally I am glad not to have to be making those life-and-death decisions.

In the book I just finished listening to, Vince Flynn puts flesh on the hypothetical nuclear bomb scenario. Al Qaeda has managed to obtain the material needed to make the bomb, has apparently managed to smuggle it into the U.S., and plans to use it to destroy a major city. Mitch Rapp, a CIA operative, is charged with finding out the where, when, and how soon enough to avert the disaster.

Rapp’s methods are whatever it takes to get the job done, not necessarily within the parameters of what is officially allowed. Unofficially, he is granted a fair degree of latitude, because he is known to get results. And he is trusted to do what is best for the country, not for his own personal gain or satisfaction. That is, he is trusted by his boss and some others high up in the nation’s security apparatus. There are others who are adamantly opposed to him, whether for philosophical or personal reasons.

Thinking about our flag

I realized at bedtime last night that today would be Flag Day. Too late, I realized, to go out and buy a flagpole. We have a flag, one I purchased several years ago when we lived in Michigan, but the flagpole I purchased with it stayed behind on the house when we sold it. (It was a two-piece pole and the upper piece didn’t line up quite right with the lower piece, producing an effect of the flag sagging on its pole.) Sometime between now and July 4 I need to find a good flagpole (preferably one that doesn’t require drilling holes in our aluminum siding).

My father always displayed our flag on holidays. It was an old flag, from before the entry of Alaska and Hawaii into the Union. I always felt vaguely uncomfortable about our house flying a flag with only 48 stars, and wondered if that was proper. It finally occurred to me today to look that up, and I found this answer at The Betsy Ross Homepage:

Is it appropriate to fly a flag that has fewer than 50 stars?

Yes. Official United States flags are always considered living, active flags. From the Betsy Ross flag to the present 50-star flag, any flag that at some time was the currently active flag is still considered a living flag to be accorded all due respect.

We children had our own handheld flags (not the tiny ones with about a six-inch pole but a pole well over a foot long and the flag larger than letter-size paper though I don’t remember the size exactly), and we planted them in the ground in the front yard on days such as July 4. Other than that, however, I don’t remember any particular teaching about holding the flag in special respect. It was a symbol, and as such it was not the symbol that mattered so much as what it was a symbol for.

Books: Shadow of the Giant

While this book is certainly science fiction, science plays a relatively small role. There are light-speed colony ships heading out to establish the human race on new worlds. Unspecified new technology has ended the strategic importance of petroleum. And one of the main characters is the product of genetic manipulation, removing the normal signal to the body to stop growing and vastly increasing his intelligence – but dooming him to death in early adulthood as his heart cannot continue to support his gigantic body.

Yet that is all largely peripheral to the geopolitical currents that move through the chapters of this novel. On the futuristic Earth, the U.S. has retired from active involvement in world politics, and is content to sit quietly apart, its power in its strong economy (that is secretly financing planetary colonization in the hopes of future wealth from new trade routes). The new world powers are China and the Muslim League, with India and Russia also scheming for greater power. And then there is Peter Wiggin, the Hegemon, trying to leverage his largely ceremonial office to establish a worldwide democracy.

If there is any overarching theme in the novel, it is that humans need to stop wasting their resources (human and otherwise) fighting among themselves. The nations of the world briefly united (in Ender’s Game, the first novel of the series) against a common enemy (the space-faring “Buggers”). But now they are back to jockeying for power, using the young graduates of Battle School (the elite training program in that first book, that trained children rather than young adults in the ways of war, hoping that their very youth would make them flexible and imaginative enough to counter the alien forces arrayed against them) to plan their military operations.

Peter has a different vision for humanity. He is ruthless in his use of the tools at his disposal to accomplish his ends, but he also knows that he cannot achieve lasting peace through violent conquest. Force is used only to respond to attacks – but then it is used to overwhelm so quickly that relatively few lives will be lost, and so that enemies will recognize the futility of opposing his forces.

He knows that a government based on a particular leader cannot last, so he must establish one based on the strength of the democratic process. Starting with just a handful of fairly minor countries, he establishes the Free People of Earth, bound only by commitment to a Constitution, and the will of the people (who must choose through a plebiscite to join the FPE). If successful, it will be a one-world government, replacing the old division into warring nations. But the rule will not be dictatorial – it will resemble more the union of states that formed as the U.S.A.