I had no idea of the dangers of blogging. I’ll have to start blogging carefully. Original video found here.

For this week’s TITMT, Janet used a modified version of a question I sent to her. This week’s question is about your memory.

“What is your earliest memory(ies)? and adding my own personal touch, why do you think this memory has managed to hold such significance over the years?”

My earliest memory is very brief. I remember being in the backyard of my house with my mother. She was sitting in some kind of lawn chair reading a book. I looked up, probably because I heard a noise, and saw one of those small airplanes. This one was dragging one of those advertisement banners behind it. Being less than two years of age and having never seen one before, I was quite excited by the site. That’s pretty much it.

Why is this memory significance? It’s not, really. It’s next to void of emotional content. I think the reason is because I identified it as the earliest while I was still young. What’s strange is that I don’t remember when I first tried to identify my first memory. But the result of that first attempt yielded the answer I gave above which helped reinforce it in my mind. Since then, it still returns to me now and then.

My blog keeps track of search engine terms and phrases that have been used to find my site. Usually, I’m on page 5 or more of the results. For the first time ever, I was the top Google result! The googled phrase was “stimulate rebate program, 2007″ (without the quotes). Here’s a screen shot. The result linked directly to Santini’s recent post. Later in the day a second phrase, “spending habits economical stimulate” (without the quotes) yielded the same top result. He really struck gold with that post. I have no idea how long it will remain the top result, but in the meantime, congratulations to both Santini and myself!

I am sure all of you have heard the news recently concerning the worries about the economy heading towards or being in a recession. The pundents are preaching doom and gloom and the news is scaring everyone, which is what news stations love to do. Not to say that I disagree about the recession part; it is my personal and humble opinion that we are in a recession. Also, two years from now when all the data is in the National Bureau of Economic Research, it will show that maybe from middle 2007 to about year end 2008 we are in fact in a recession. But that is not my topic of choice today, I would like to touch on the news of President Bush’s proposed tax rebate to help stimulate the economy.

The proposal is a $600 rebate for an individual and $1200 for a family. The hope is that the consumers will turn around and spend this money in the economy, thus stimulating growth. Yeah I know, there are more business cuts and such, but the big news is the rebate for the consumer. I would like to point out a major and fatal flaw of the rebate program as a stimulus package: it is a one time rebate! Providing a person with $600 or $1200, depending on the situation, in the beginning of the year will not create a change in the consumers individual long-term spending. In order for the stimulus package to work, you need to provide the consumer with a long-term change in there income in order for the consumer to feel comfortable changing their spending habits.

Think about this as you finish reading the post, what would you do with the $600 or $1200 dollars that the government plans on giving to you for 2008? Are you going to increase your spending for the year? Maybe buy a new car or some fancy new electronics? Or will you spend it on some bills or simply just save the money? Me personally, I know we will save it if we get it. I may go out and spend a small portion of it but the money is not long-term nor is it substantial enough for me to change my spending habits.

Sorry Mr. President but you need to do a little something more to stimulate an economy. Or perhaps this is just a political stance to help give your fellow Republicans a little positive press going into a crucial election year.

As with most Wednesdays, I repost a weekly question that appears on Tuesdays on The Art of Getting By. This weeks question is one of those that is difficult to answer for those of us that consume very little general media.

What do you think were the worst performances of the year? In the name of expansion this could be the worst movie or acting in a movie, worst TV show or even worst album or song. Feel free to write as little or as much that comes to mind.

I watch very few movies in the theaters (two in ’07), no commercial radio, and other than a very occasional Daily Show and Colbert Report, no first-run television shows. My consumption of such entertainment is highly specialized. If I find a show or movie I like, I’ll purchase them on DVD. My new music comes at me through the internet. I’ve selected ‘stations’ and shows that play mostly good music. While occasionally a bad song slips through, there were none that I’d describe as terrible. Thus I can’t really answer this question. What about you?

After I got less then half way through C.S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity, I was fairly certain that the rest of the book would have little to offer me. Parts II and III where predicated on accepting both the existence of God and of Christians doctrine in particular. Since Lewis’s argument for the existence of God is poor and his argument for the divinity of Jesus is even worse, it made sense that the rest of the book wouldn’t be applicable.

I was partially wrong. The rest of the book was an interesting mixture of deeply interesting moral insights and disparate attempts at justifying Christianities less savory ‘moral’ rules. Part III of Mere Christianity, “Christian Behavior”, is basically Lewis’s interpretation of Christian Ethics. Trying to summarize all his thoughts on this subject is futile. I will only hit the hight and low points in this post. Suffice it to say that Part III is a great read for Christians and non-Christians alike and a would recommend it to anyone.

One very refreshing thing about Lewis is that he acknowledges that many virtues are not unique to nor invented by Christianity. There are four virtues he identifies as ‘Cardinal’ virtues. These are virtues “which all civilized people recognize”. These ‘Cardinal’ virtues are Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude. He also recognized that the Golden Rule is intuitive in origin, “…Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule… is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right.” Indeed, this is a necessary conclusion for Lewis based on Part I, which states that humans have always been aware of moral truths, even before Christianity. Still, it’s nice to read a Christian who recognizes that non-Christians can be very moral people.

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I was catching up on my podcasts that I had missed while traveling. The last one I listened to before I left work on Friday was one of my favorites: World Cafe: Next. This podcast features two full songs and short bio of an up-and-coming artist or group. It’s usually good music… this time it was amazing.

The featured artist this week was Yeasayer, a Brooklyn group that released their first album All Hour Cymbals this past October. David Dye, host of World Cafe, described them as “… inspired by the multi-ethnic layering of people like David Byrne and Peter Gabriel and they are not adverse to the odd ecstatic experience as well.” What he doesn’t mention is that they also have strong electronica influences, which makes all the difference for me.

The two songs from the podcast were “Sunrise” and “2080″, both of which are available on their website as free downloads. The later blew me away. The song is dripping with beauty and talent. It’s become quite rare when a song can elicit such a strong emotional reaction from me. I don’t expect the song to have the same impact on anyone else as music is an intensely personal experience . Also, there are some aspects of the song that suite my peculiar tastes (3/4 time, melodic bass, and clean, picked guitar), but I must share regardless. Songs like “2080″ are precisely why I constantly seek out new music. Give both a listen (they are free, after all).  Enjoy!

I’m late with this week’s TITMT, partially because I wasn’t sure if I was going to use it this week. This is because the question is about the author’s blog, The Art of Getting By. I’ve decided to both answer the question and then adapt it for my readers to answer about my blog.

I want to know what links you think need to be added to my sidebar that aren’t there already. This could be a brand new blog that you recently found or one that has sadly remained missing from the cavalcade of AOGB links. Oh, and if you are one of those links, speak up and let me know! Incidentally this also applies to My Space and I suppose Facebook and Friendster, though I really don’t use either of those.

Why, you should link my blog, of course, Janet. I’ll even create a link icon that you can use. You should also check out the links on my sidebar.

What I want to know from my readers is the answer to a similar question. Are there any links that you’d like to see on my sidebars? Any that you wish I didn’t have?

I’m back from my trip and finally found the time to create my second post about C.S. Lewis’s classic apologetics book, Mere Christianity. In the first post, I talked about enjoying the book quite a bit. I then deconstructed Lewis’s argument for the existence of God, which boils down to the normative moral argument.

I found Lewis’s proof of God’s existence unconvincing. This isn’t that much of a problem for me since I find another argument for God’s existence compelling (though that argument gives little to no insight into God’s nature). But let’s assume that Lewis had succeeded. Let’s suppose that there is a God who created moral laws and gave us the ability to know these laws (conscience). Great, that means we can trust our consciences to guide us to do what is right. But this still falls short of proving that God cares about us, has provided us with an afterlife, sent a son (who was also himself in some mysterious way) to earth to die for our moral failures, ‘inspired’ a book, has a favored people, felled the walls of Jericho, created the world in seven days, told Abraham to kill his son, made Job’s life a living hell, etc. It doesn’t even tell us if God is all powerful, only that It is powerful enough to create moral laws. In short, the normative moral argument fails to prove that the Moral Provider is the God of the Bible.

Thankfully, Lewis addresses this issue. Sadly, I recognized the argument from another book that I partially read, The Case for Christ. At the heart of that book, Lee Strobel argued that Jesus must be who he claimed to be, God, because for anyone making that claim, there are only three possibilities: ether Jesus was telling the truth, crazy, or a liar. Since there is no evidence that he was crazy or a liar, Strobel argued (or, more accurately, Strobel set up ‘experts’ to argue for him), he must have been telling the truth. Imagine my surprise when I read the following from Mere Christianity:

We are faced, then, with a frightening alternative. [Jesus] was (and is) just what He said or else a lunatic, or something worse. Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

As I discovered about the ‘new’ atheist movement while discussing Bertrand Russel with Scott, there is very little new in Christian apologetics either.

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It’s TITMT time. The Art of Getting By is this series’s home and I often repost it here. This week is a movie-related one.

What are the most disturbing films you have ever seen and what, in your opinion, made them so disturbing?

That is so tough to answer. I don’t watch many movies and tend to forget them quickly. When I do watch them, I tend towards comedies which aren’t all that disturbing. I do, however, remember catching some horror movies as a young kid. They were only disturbing because I was so young. Horror films just seem silly now. Other than that, I really can’t think of any that I found overly disturbing. So I think I’ll just punt this question to my readers and see if their responses trigger any repressed memories.