The Dawn Treader

"We have made him into a god, we have canonized him, but he's above all a man, and a man is fragile and breakable"

Michel Hidalgo, former soccer coach for France

I would not have believed this if you had told me.  But here it is.  Welcome to our culture, where personal autonomy privacy is the supreme ethic.  Sick.  Very sick.  Worldviews have consequences, folks.

Have you noticed how much the subject of snitching has been in the news recently?

There is the case of Carmelo Anthony's appearance in the Stop Snitching video.  Anthony appears in a video that promotes the ethic to stop snitching to law enforcement.  Melo argues that stop snitching really means stop the violence.

There is the case of rap diva Lil' Kim who is preparing to do time for lying to a grand jury about a 2001 shoot-out between members of her entourage and a rival rap crew in front of a New York radio station.  Apparently she was following the "no snitch" code of the hood .... she was taught from day one in her tough Brooklyn neighborhood that you do not snitch.

The founder of the Wilberforce Forum and the Centurions program, Chuck Colson, has a terrific Breakpoint article out today.

The question on the table is ... do the ends justify the means?

Colson justified his activities in Watergate because he felt the ends [getting Nixon re-elected] justified the means [Watergate break ins].

Mark Felt also used the same moral reasoning to justify leaking FBI files to the press.

Felt is being held up as a hero.  But is this right?   To be a moral hero, one needs to consider the means and the ends.  Felt had morally upright options available to him ... yes, it would have required moral courage.  Instead, he chose to do what he did.

Let's not forget about the means when it comes to moral reasoning ... otherwise, we could [in theory] rationalize just about anything.

UPDATE:  From Peggy Noonan's excellent piece in the WSJ.

"Were there heroes of Watergate? Surely many unknown ones, those who did their best to be constructive and not destructive, those who didn't think it was all about their beautiful careers. I'll give you a candidate for great man of the era: Chuck Colson. Colson functioned in the Nixon White House as a genuinely bad man, went to prison and emerged a genuinely good man. He told the truth about himself in "Born Again," a book not fully appreciated as the great Washington classic it is, and has devoted his life to helping prisoners and their families. He paid the price, told the truth, blamed no one but himself, and turned his shame into something helpful. Children aren't dead because of him. There are children who are alive because of him."

"The hope in neuromarketing is that there's some process in the brain that is a better predictor of whether people will actually buy things than what we already have," said Colin Camerer, professor of business economics at the California Institute of Technology.

But is that all there is to neuromarketing?

What is neuromarketing?  Neuromarketing is a marketing strategy which focuses on brain chemistry rather than product differentiation.  At this point,  researchers are using brain scans to determine brain activity during buying decisions ... to supposedly help them predict how one will act.  But it could easily go further ... beyond making predictions, to influencing decisions.