Ben Stein on the "Arab Spring in the Middle East"

The always brilliant Ben Stein lays out his concerns and fears that the "Arab Spring" uprisings that are occurring throughout the Middle East is not a movement that is favorable to democracy, freedom, and the United States. 

He echoes what I have also feared, that Iran is a large and ever more influential player in this vital region of the world.  Their increased power and hegemony throughout the Middle East will only serve to further endanger our ally Israel and indeed our own world interests in the very near future if such "democratic uprisings" continue unabated when al Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood are often found at the root of such events. 

Our apparent ignorance regarding the significance of these events is to our own great peril.  As Mr. Stein says, our help of these uprisings will amount to the equivalent of when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeini, because that worked out well for the United States, not to mention the good people of Iran.

The Obama Paradox

This quotation was forwarded to me that was supposedly attributed to the brilliant Ben Stein.  I have been unable thus far to corroborate that he is the source of the statement, however.  Nevertheless, the point is most excellently made:


"Fathom the odd hypocrisy that Obama wants every citizen to prove they are insured, but people don't have to prove they are citizens."

Lessons in Love, by Way of Economics

For me there are few men out there that are more astute with their insights, more brilliant in their analysis of nearly any issue, and just down-right funny than Ben Stein. Needless to say, I am a fan of his. With that being said, I found an old article he had written that seemed like a good one with which to start out the new year.

By BEN STEIN
Published: July 13, 2008

AS my fine professor of economics at Columbia, C. Lowell Harriss (who just celebrated his 96th birthday) used to tell us, economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods and services. What could be scarcer or more precious than love? It is rare, hard to come by and often fragile.

My primary life study has been about love. Second comes economics, so here, in the form of a few rules, is a little amalgam of the two fields: the economics of love. (I last wrote about this subject 20 years or so ago, and it’s time to update it.)

In general, and with rare exceptions, the returns in love situations are roughly proportional to the amount of time and devotion invested. The amount of love you get from an investment in love is correlated, if only roughly, to the amount of yourself you invest in the relationship.

If you invest caring, patience and unselfishness, you get those things back. (This assumes, of course, that you are having a relationship with someone who loves you, and not a one-sided love affair with someone who isn’t interested.)

High-quality bonds consistently yield more return than junk, and so it is with high-quality love. As for the returns on bonds, I know that my comment will come as a surprise to people who have been brainwashed into thinking that junk bonds are free money. They aren’t. The data from the maven of bond research, W. Braddock Hickman, shows that junk debt outperforms high quality only in rare situations, because of the default risk.

In love, the data is even clearer. Stay with high-quality human beings. And once you find that you are in a junk relationship, sell immediately. Junk situations can look appealing and seductive, but junk is junk. Be wary of it unless you control the market.

(Or, as I like to tell college students, the absolutely surest way to ruin your life is to have a relationship with someone with many serious problems, and to think that you can change this person.)

Research pays off. The most appealing and seductive (that word again) exterior can hide the most danger and chance of loss. For most of us, diversification in love, at least beyond a very small number, is impossible, so it’s necessary to do a lot of research on the choice you make. It is a rare man or woman who can resist the outward and the surface. But exteriors can hide far too much.

In every long-term romantic situation, returns are greater when there is a monopoly. If you have to share your love with others, if you have to compete even after a brief while with others, forget the whole thing. You want to have monopoly bonds with your long-term lover. At least most situations work out better this way. ( I am too old to consider short-term romantic events. Those were my life when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were in the White House.)

The returns on your investment should at least equal the cost of the investment. If you are getting less back than you put in over a considerable period of time, back off.

Long-term investment pays off. The impatient day player will fare poorly without inside information or market-controlling power. He or she will have a few good days but years of agony in the world of love.

To coin a phrase: Fall in love in haste, repent at leisure.

Realistic expectations are everything. If you have unrealistic expectations, they will rarely be met. If you think that you can go from nowhere to having someone wonderful in love with you, you are probably wrong.

You need expectations that match reality before you can make some progress. There may be exceptions, but they are rare.

When you have a winner, stick with your winner. Whether in love or in the stock market, winners are to be prized.

Have a dog or many dogs or cats in your life. These are your anchors to windward and your unfailing source of love.

Ben Franklin summed it up well. In times of stress, the three best things to have are an old dog, an old wife and ready money. How right he was.

THERE is more that could be said about the economics of love, but these thoughts may divert you while you are thinking about your future.

And let me close with another thought. I am far from glib about the economy. It has a lot of pitfalls facing it. As workers and investors, we know that many dangers lurk in our paths.

But so far, these things have always worked themselves out and this one will, too. In the meantime, they say that falling in love is wonderful, and that the best is falling in love with what you have.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.

Intelligent Design Expelled

My baby brother, Timmy Paine, came to live with us temporarily as he moved to this state to begin a new job and set up his own home here. As I have not seen him in several years, it has been good to catch up on many things with him. Well last night he made some of his patented special popcorn and rented Ben Stein’s movie, Expelled. Then my sweet wife, baby daughter, Uncle Timmy, the dog, and I all sat down to watch it. Being a huge fan of Ben Stein anyway, I had great expectations, and I was not disappointed. Now this movie came out in 2008, but is very relevant and topical today.

Basically in this movie Ben Stein meets and interviews many scientists and professors that are both for and against intelligent design theory. He further goes on to report how many of these world class scientists that do espouse or even look at the possibility of intelligent design in their research or teaching have been excommunicated from academia and are made out as pariahs in the scientific world.

This, I found extremely interesting and yet sad, as I thought the purpose of science was to do research and experimentation and go to wherever the data took you in your conclusions. Instead, there are many people, particularly in academia, that have a preconceived notion and refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of any contrary evidence that goes against their seemingly political/anti-God agenda, despite the fact that there are HUGE holes in many of their theories that intelligent design does indeed help to explain.

For instance, most of the anti-intelligent designers are ardent subscribers to Darwinian theory. Never mind the fact that there are monumental holes in much of the macro-evolution theories that Darwin espoused in his work. To point out those flaws and suggest anything even tangentially associated with intelligent design is to become an apostate to science for these closed-minded “scientists”. Many of these “apostates” are then black-listed from teaching or getting research grants for any university after having come out of the “God-closet”.

With my exceptionally limited knowledge, even I can poke serious holes in Darwinism, let alone these world class scientists that offer up plausible explanations that debunk the more, shall we say, questionable parts of his work. Now I will buy evolution on a micro scale. That is to say, I see how a single species can change and improve via natural selection etcetera over time to become a more evolved and better version of the same species; however, you cannot convince me scientifically that all living species were propagated from one single species that in turn climbed out of the primordial soup when lightning struck it and gave a single cell its life.

For the amino acids and proteins necessary to form in the proper sequence so that one single living cell can come into being just by happenstance and chance, the odds approach near infinity. For this to happen repeatedly to form a complex organism that lives, breathes, and reproduces reaches the point of being completely inconceivable. Further, where is the transitional fossils between species if this actually happened? It takes a greater leap of faith, in my mind, to see how a trilobite, Tyrannosaur and tiger all evolved from a common ancestor.

This begs the question then; if sheer chance didn’t initially create life which flourished into all of its diversity and complexity, then who or what did? There certainly and, to my mind, undeniably is an absolute design to the complexity of our life forms, our ecosystem, our planet, our solar system, and our universe.

To those of us of faith, God and His intelligent design of all answers those questions in harmony with science. Those that deny intelligent design as even a possibility and stubbornly subscribe to the flawed theories of Darwinism are the ones that seemingly cling to something bordering on a false religion.

Were Charles Darwin alive today forming his theories, instead of a time around the civil war, and had modern knowledge of molecular biology, chemistry, and even the existence of something as fundamental to genetics as DNA, I suspect that even HE would no longer be a Darwinist. But perhaps I am just being stubborn in my beliefs….