I have not actively followed the Obama Citizenship question. I saw references to a Certificate of Live Birth, and it looks legit as far as I can tell.

What I read the other day that perplexes me is this: The new governor of Hawaii says a physical Birth Certificate (apparently better than a Certificate of Live Birth, including things like doctors signatures, etc) is on file with the state, but that he cannot release it without President Obama's consent.

If I'm understanding this question correctly, then I cannot understand why Obama has not given consent to release this record. Obama's references to the issue are usually anecdotal and accompanied with a laugh. I would love to join him in that expression, and I'm inclined to say this whole argument is ridiculous. How could the political process ever allow anyone to run for President that could not absolutely, clear or doubt, be verified as a natural-born citizen?

What irks me is that a supposed record that would squash all doubt exists with the state of Hawaii, and Obama will not consent to have the record released? The idea that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. is a hard sell, and I'm not inclined to believe it. But, that Obama won't consent to release of the actual birth certificate gives those questions power. That he won't release it tells me that either he just likes the attention or playing games with doubters, mostly republicans -- or, that he actually has something to hide.

I want to believe this is the dumbest argument ever. Why won't he let Hawaii release the document?

Am I understanding this correct? This just doesn't seem like something to throw jokes and anecdotes at if Hawaii needs only his word to put this question to rest.

I feel like I'm a broken record, but I am revolving in the wierd logic of this issue, trying to figure out how he isn't either obstinate, immature, or lying. But if he isn't doing all he can (and apparently he isn't) to end the question, then either of those seem fair game.

Assuming, of course, that I'm understanding the question correctly.

Hey friends and readers,

Turns out the post this weekend was the big 100, making this 101. Insert dalmatian comment here.

Thanks for hanging in there, since it only took me 6 years to get here. I promise #200 will come a lot quicker.

Because I respect your eye-time, I won't cheap-up this blog and leave it at that. Let's pick a mini-topic for today: Facebook.

I saw the movie a few weeks back. Wonderful score, entertaining movie. Completely misrepresents a lot of people, from what I hear. Even so, it was entertaining, and again, wonderful score -- tastefully understated.

I had a little realization the other morning - I'm not giving it 'epiphany' status, but certainly a lightbulb moment. In terms of revenue streams, Facebook Google and Yahoo are really in uncharted waters. Never before have companies become so big on the backs of advertising revenue. My gut tells me this strategy isn't sustainable, and we will all look back and laugh that people ever thought companies could scale the way these three have on the backs of what seem so fickle and inauthentic forms of revenue. We can hardly argue that they are producing anything that wasn't already available, and therein lay my 'ah hah' moment.

I always assumed Google, Facebook, and Yahoo started something new. The truth is, they didn't start anything at all. We assume that an effect of the internet is that the proverbial 'middle man' is removed from our transactions - that anyone, anywhere, can buy from anyone, anywhere. That is true, but you also need to know where to look. That need hasn't changed. Google, Facebook, and Yahoo have no so much invented anything or blazed any trail. Rather, they have merely consolidated a litany of middle men into a towering three.

So what are these companies, uber-capitalists, heroes of American industry, or highly profitable information leeches? I'm playing ESPNU College Town and Carmen Sandiego on facebook. I have no idea what that means as far as the distribution of my information, but I probably wouldn't like it if I found out. Maybe I should shut it down. Ditto for gmail. No doubt every word I write, including this one, and this one, is somehow contributing to Google's bottom line. Am I being sensational? Might I be correct? Would Google create gmail without a plan to make a lot of money off of it? They have a lot to pay for - they feed all their employees very fancy, expensive food, free of charge.

Anyway, I won't ramble on. I'm just saying, as fun as these guys are, especially if you've been a stockholder for awhile, the question still remains: at this fundamental level, do these companies make sense? In a practical, nuts and bolts manner, does Google's capitalization of 190 billion dollars make sense? Would anyone be surprised if something, whatever it is, caused their value to collapse under its own weight?

Let me say up front that pop-articles must be taken with a dose of discernment, because articles are, among other things, a compressed and buffed angle on the subject at hand. Such as with news reports or other compressed forms of media which, in interest of their cash flows, must maintain your attention so as to plug advertisements. Ad revenue is not the sole purpose of New Media, but it is the way they make money, and such influences cannot be ignored.

I say that to disclaim that the article I reference below is certainly one take on the author, but it just-as-certainly not representative of the whole person. So, when I evaluate this person, her actions, and the trend in thinking she represents, I must distinguish my reaction as only that which is possible in the context of this compressed and buffed pop-article. The link is below, and I recommend you read it before continuing:

http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parenting/the-opposite-of-a-tiger-mother-leaving-your-children-behind-2460982/

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I recently completed the book, War and Peace. I hope you read it some day. Tolstoy is a master storyteller, and connects right into the gooey center of the human soul. His philosophy holds relevant 150 years after he wrote it down on paper. I've copied below a section of the book that I believe serves as an acute counterpoint to the article above.



"We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed in a subject however trivial it may be, and that there is no subject so trivial that it will not grow to infinite proportions if one's entire attention is devoted to it.

The subject which wholly engrossed Natasha's attention was her family: that is, her husband whom she had to keep so that he should belong entirely to her and to the home, and the children whom she had to bear, bring into the world, nurse, and bring up.

And the deeper she penetrated, not with her mind only but with her whole soul, her whole being, into the subject that absorbed her, the larger did that subject grow and the weaker and more inadequate did her powers appear, so that she concentrated them wholly on that one thing and yet was unable to accomplish all that she considered necessary.

There were then as now conversations and discussions about women's rights, the relations of husband and wife and their freedom and rights, though these themes were not yet termed questions as they are now; but these topics were not merely uninteresting to Natasha, she positively did not understand them.

These questions, then as now, existed only for those who see nothing in marriage but the pleasure married people get from one another, that is, only the beginnings of marriage and not its whole significance, which lies in the family.

Discussions and questions of that kind, which are like the question of how to get the greatest gratification from one's dinner, did not then and do not now exist for those for whom the purpose of a dinner is the nourishment it affords; and the purpose of marriage is
the family.

If the purpose of dinner is to nourish the body, a man who eats two dinners at once may perhaps get more enjoyment but will not attain his purpose, for his stomach will not digest the two dinners.

If the purpose of marriage is the family, the person who wishes to have many wives or husbands may perhaps obtain much pleasure, but in that case will not have a family.

If the purpose of food is nourishment and the purpose of marriage is the family, the whole question resolves itself into not eating more
than one can digest, and not having more wives or husbands than are needed for the family- that is, one wife or one husband. Natasha needed a husband. A husband was given her and he gave her a family. And she not only saw no need of any other or better husband, but as all the powers of her soul were intent on serving that husband and family, she could not imagine and saw no interest in imagining how it would be if things were different. "



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Now, what do you think of Leo Tolstoy? Having read the full book, and his philosophical confession at the end, I can assure the reader that the quotation above is, of his philosophy, an accurate reflection.

The reader's perception of Tostoy, or of Ms. Rizzuto, is a question of paradigm.

Each profile focuses on marriage. I do not mean to focus exclusively on the purpose of marriage, nor do I mean to diminish the importance of that question. The paradigm each has adopted guides their commentary on marriage, but also addresses the broader question: by what paradigm should men live? For the sake of the following comparison, I will label Rizzuto's paradigm as 'Independence', and Tolstoy's as 'Interdependence'.

Both paradigms are simple to digest in their basic forms, illustrated here in the topic of marriage:

Tolstoy:  In marriage, on forgoes independence, and binds themselves to the provision and nourishment of their spouse and the family they together produce.
Rizzuto: Marriage is a component of life, one of many engagements selected which, together, represent one's best effort to maximize life satisfaction.

Between the two, the primary distinction is this question of independence.

Rizzuto's philosophy is that independence is the governing virtue; the choice fruit of life. She has a lot of support. The word and concept of independence is ingrained in American culture. The modern liturgy are movies and music, and the common anthem is the virtue of blazing one's own trail and breaking free from oppression, adversity, or status-quo. My cabinet is lined with such movies. Out of this liturgy, independence is lionized. The natural logical progression, then, is that life activities must be balanced such as to preserve independence.

I can relate. I don't prefer having a mortgage payment and many of the things that fill up the house. They make me feel immobile, and something about that doesn't sit well with me; never has. Many people feel that way and few do anything about it, which is in part why the few that do are celebrated, such as the lady from 'Eat, Pray, Love'. Like Rizzuto, she left her dull, stuck life to embark on a grand adventure. She did so in order to more completely embrace her chief aim: independence.

And yet, we have in our liturgy stories of grand adventures that are not born out of an independent spirit. What of the reluctant heroes? What of the Baggins' or, as was just recently celebrated, King George VI? In both cases, the heroes are drawn into an adventure against their will, propelled forward by forces they did not choose or fully understand but could not deny. Each triumphed by embracing their role and abilities to function within the circumstances placed upon their heads or, in the former, fingers.

Just this morning I began reading '7 Habits of Highly Effective People'. Among Dr. Covey's introduction is his effort to distinguish 'dependence' from 'independence' from 'interdependence'. He says that progressing through these stages is the path of maturity and of leadership. A person should progress through depending on others for nourishment and identity, to becoming self-sufficient to nourish and identify ourselves, and finally, learning to move past self-identity as the chief aim, but to submit our independent desires to the interdependent reality set before us. I might prefer the flexibility to drift as I please, but to be an effective husband, father, worker, and leader, some sort of inflexibility is required. I can submit to that requirement or I can remove the people and circumstances that force that requirement upon me, but stability is required of me for where I am, and it is that way whether I like it or not.



Covey illuminates this point quite well:

"Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality. Independent people who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players. They're not coming from the paradigm of interdependence necessary to succeed in marriage, family, or organizational reality."


Now, compare this with Tolstoy's conclusion to 'War and Peace':

"As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth's fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one's own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: "It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws," so also in history the new view says: "It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws."

In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of
which we are not conscious."



As in the comparison of liturgical heroes, the guiding difference between the philosophies of Tolstoy and Rizzuto is acceptance of unconcious forces, apart from our experience and will, whose governance of our lives we cannot escape or circumvent. Once accepted, the remaining question is whether one will submit and productively behave within that contra-independent reality.

There still remains, then, the question of which paradigm leads to greater maturity in a man? Often, a good place to begin that journey is by examining the credibility of each paradigm's present and historical champions, and the credibility of each's liturgy. There may well be no new beliefs, but instead many liturgies, traditions, and well-trodden paths that we knowingly or unknowingly walk. Examining the histories and paths of those who have walked before us is akin to widening the scope of our viewpoint. In doing so, perhaps we can then discover if our path is clean, or if on the margins of the pavement lay the dead and the dying.

Today's topic is immigration. This won't be long.

I feel a great deal of sympathy, especially right now, for a Mexican national who enters the United States in hope of a better life. The violence in Mexico is heartbreaking. My thoughts are often directed to the children and staff of an orphanage I served at, located near one of the cities where Mexican citizens are inflicting unspeakable terrors upon their brethren. I pray for their safety.

These circumstances cast an important light upon the question of how to handle illegal immigrants. I cannot argue against due process of citizenship, and the legal channels by which a person can establish residence in the United States. What I also cannot argue against are the motives of any who, with just and good intent, take action to separate themselves and their families from poverty and violence. I cannot argue against a parent birthing an anchor baby in the United States so that, whatever may happen to them, the child's citizenship provides for a better opportunity to live a life of peace.

I can argue all day at the trafficking of drugs across the border, and can argue that American users are complicit in funding terrorists who exist below the realm of civilized man. They are beasts; dogs. Yet even dogs understand the basic rules of business. They provide a service to a willing customer.

We talk about immigration reform, and we talk about securing the border. The United States would do better to stop consuming drugs, or legalize and regulate the production of drugs, and remove the market from the border. I have always felt the latter is a base and self-centered argument made by people who seek to please themselves through addiction, and seek justification for their folly. Their position would be better served if preceded by the 'self-sacrifice' needed to dry the market for border drugs and pacify the need for Mexican nationals to flee their homes. The contra-position is more popular, that users would continue until our government's only option to curb drug trade is to legalize and regulate. I say that the former position is better because it is a position of peace. The latter, in it's displayed consequence, is a position of death.

So long as the latter is the reality, I cast no blame upon those who do whatever they can to enter the United States and burden further the same wallets that fund the terror they are trying to escape.