Privileging the Normal.

The Anal(ytical)philosopher has a post on the too-clever-by-half argument that heterosexuals should not be granted a legal preference with respect to the right to marry under the argument that marriage has a procreative purpose because not all heterosexual marriage result in children. Therefore, the argument goes, no principled distinction cannot be made between heterosexual couples and homosexual couples. The Analphilosopher's rejects this argument on the ground that law is inherently an inexact process for implementing social policy because law works through classes and not individuals.

Fair enough. But isn't there a philosophical doctrine called the "privilege of the normal case?" I can't find a cite through Google, but my course book for Natural Law and Human Nature defines the "privilege of the normal case" as:

"In realist philosophy, the willingness to consider the mature and healthy adult individual in any given species as the benchmark for knowing the basic features of the species and for measuring such characteristics as illness and defect."

In other words, we analyze the purposes and objects of marriage by considering the normal case. On that basis we can observe that heterosexual marriages normally have procreation as a normal feature, in part because of the nature of heterosexual sexual relationships to result in pregnancies, often despite of the participants' best efforts to prevent that result. In contrast, homosexual relations typically lack that concern. In short, we "privilege the normal case" by saying that our analysis of the basic features of marriage must start with the normal and typical marriage, and not by unusual and atypical marriages.

Not that I want to start practicing philosophy without a license.

The Culture of Death.

Hugh Hewitt links to an article reporting that the Groningen Academic Hospital in the Netherlands has been euthanizing "terminally ill" newborns. This policy was consistent with broader trends in Dutch culture:

In August, the main Dutch doctors' association KNMG urged the Health Ministry to create an independent board to review euthanasia cases for terminally ill people "with no free will," including children, the severely mentally retarded and people left in an irreversible coma after an accident

Hewitt observes:

There are three kinds of people in the world: Those who will react with horror and alarm to this story; those who will applaud it; and those who will shrug it off as of no interest to them. I am uncertain which of the latter two groups is in worse moral condition.

But the capacity for horror and alarm is ebbing. Twenty years ago the idea of pulling the feeding and hydration tubes frm incapacitated patients was considered entirely inconsistent with the Hippocratic Oath. The progressive solution at that time was to establish independent review boards would make the tough ethical decisions after considering all of the pertinent facts, including what the incapacitated person would have wanted if they could have made the decision.

In the space of approximately twenty years medical ethics went from the "do no harm" model of the Hippocratic Oath to a starkly utilitarian model. Today, even Catholic hospitals have transformed "independent review boards" into vehicles for routinely deciding to cut-off water to those whose life is they deem to be not worth continuing. It seems that "independent review boards" have the remarkable ability to look at the diverse experience of different people and come up with the conclusion that they would all prefer death to life. It's almost as if the "independent review boards" were projecting their beliefs onto the unknown value systems of their charges. In that regard I know of a situation which fits this description:

Doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff in hospitals and nursing homes often pressure family members to permit their seriously brain-damaged relatives (stroke victims, demented patients, and others with profound cognitive disabilities) to be dehydrated to death by the removal of tube-supplied food and water, a practice now occurring in all fifty states. Research animals enjoy greater legal protection of their welfare under federal law than do many human subjects who participate in medical experiments.

How did the culture change and why has the change gone largely unnoticed?

The answer may have something to do with our culture's tendency toward specialization and professionalization. The linked article on Wesley J. Smith's "The Culture of Death" argues that the institution of the "independent review boards" helped to create the profession of the bioethicists. Since professions protect their turf by developing shared values in order to distinguish what they do from what everyone else does it is not surprising that bioethecists developed a set fo common values which are not shared by their patients. The next logical step was for the hubris of professionalism, and the deference paid to professionals, to transform medicine.

The culture has changed slowly but definitely. We are now at the nightmare scenario posed as the extreme outcome if doctors were permitted to terminate artificial respiration: our doctors are potentially our executioners.

Ubermenschen Update: As if on cue to supplement the comments to this post, Pejmanesque drafts a post outlining the influence of Friedrich Nietsche on Richard Posner. And Andrew Sullivan also supports the point that "we're all Nietzschians now." (By the way, Nietzsche had some good points. For example, contrary to popular conception, he was not anti-semitic; he was, in fact, anti-anti-semitic. Also, his view of a person forcing his own meaning on life is attractive. On balance, though, the tendency of Nietzche to drain inherent meaning from things, actions and life has had a pernicious effects on his heirs.)

Game, Set and Match Update: Hugh Hewitt updates his "Groningen Protocol" post with an excerpt from a prior news article about Dutch policy on euthanizing children up to 12 years of age. From the standpoint of the question of how they got where they are, this is crucial:

"It is for very sad cases," said a hospital spokesman, who declined to be identified. "After years of discussions, we made our own protocol to cover the small number of infants born with such severe disabilities that doctors can see they have extreme pain and no hope for life. Our estimate is that it will not be used but 10 to 15 times a year."

You know a theory has some merit when it predicts data in advance: it appears that the culprit may well be the professionalization of bio-ethics which substitutes efficiency and rationality for sloppy sentiments like humanity, charity and parental love.

The Netherlands has taken the question of life and death out of the hands of parents and put it in the hands of professionals. As true heirs to the Enlightenment project of rationality, professionalization and specialization, individual Dutch parents are in no position to assert their own sentimentality about the value of their childrens' lives in the face of experts in the subject of life and death.

And so they submit to the professionals and thereby become less human.

Wow. Victor Davis Hanson really didn't like "Alexander the Great."

He observes:

There is also irony here. If we remember the embarrassing Troy, we are beginning to see, that all for all the protestations of artistic excellence and craftsmanship, Hollywood has become mostly a place of mediocrity, talentless actors and writers who spout off about politics in lieu of having any real accomplishment in their own field. I’ve heard so many inane things mouthed by Stone that I would like someone at last to address this question—why would supposedly smart insiders turn over $160 million to someone of such meager talent to make such an embarrassing film? Alexander the Great is third-rate Cecil B. Demille in drag.

Just try to tell him that "it's only a movie."

Another entry in the "there's no such thing as liberal media bias" file.

Aramvirique links to Bearflagger Patterico's post on how the New York Time simply recycles Democratic National Committee "talking points memos." Patterico picked up on a seemingly random, seemingly obscure 1993 quote from Christoperh Bond about how the Republicans had threatened to filibuster judicial nominees. The problem was that the Bond quote had nothing to do with judicial nominees, the threatened filibuster was against Clinton's economic stimulus package.

So how did the New York Times make that mistake, and with such an old, obscure quote?

A brief google search disclosed that the quote lived on in a DNC memo. As Aramvirique notes:

Thank God for Google. Mr. Patterico did a search and discovered that it turned up two results: the editorial in the Times and a Democratic Policy Committee page of talking points about judicial filibusters, titled "The Republican Flip-Flop on Filibusters." Yep, there it is, in black and white under the subhead "Senator Christopher Bond." You may have suspected that the Times took its cue from the DNC. You were right. They just lift whole sentences from their ideological masters.

You can just see the media monopoly crumbling under the combined effects of the pajamaheedin and google.

In his spare time Richard Posner will now be blogging.

Coming soon, a Gary Becker/Richard Posner blog.

Who in the history of the world has been as productive in combining the disciplines of public service and writing?

No, seriously. Who else? Disraeli? Winston Churchill?

Leibniz, Newton, Hook, Boyle - The true founders of what became the future.

Glenn Reynolds offers his review of Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle.

A "Da Vinci Code" Parody.

NRO has produced a parody "vision" of Dan Brown's "writing process." It hits all the right notes, including the pompously atrocious writing, such as:

The cobwebs in my head blow away, like candles in the wind. Oh, that's right, I am in my New England bedroom recovering from a trip to the world renowned city of Paris, where I attended a lecture given by world renowned Harvard religious symbologist Robert Langdon, who gave me an idea for a novel about religious symbology. On my bedside table I see Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum ... It's really difficult to read. How I wish someone would write a dumbed-down version!

And the falsely sophisticated allusions based on supposed research:

Good evening, old fruit!," he exclaimed as he shimmered in, his monocle popping out. "I say, how the devil are you, old bean? Lawks-a-mercy, had a spot of bother getting up the apples and pears, don't you know! Good lord, is that settee kosher or wot? Must 'ave a knees-up round the old Joanna, eh!" (Did I not already tell you my research skills are second to none?: I based this dialogue on The Code of the Woosters, a useful compendium of contemporary slang). His manservant, Rémy Legaludec, stood by, menacingly. I don't trust him. Rémy, I mean, not Sir Teabing, who is as straight as a piece of string.

Check it out.

Bloggers, we're not just a bunch of socially-awkward techno-nerds endlessly monologuing about our obsessions....

....occasionally we drink beer.

William Sulik, having apparently violated some of his employer's taboos, was sentenced to spend a week in Fresno on a business trip. Fortunately, he was in time to experience our Tule fog and the cold damp climate that never comes to mind when you think of "sunny California."

I had a wonderful time experiencing that contemporaneous set of coordinated time/place sensory interactions which prior to the emergence of the world wide web was called a "conversation." We ended up in my "go to" place - Body in the Bog - where everyone knows my name, although I swear to Heaven that I hardly ever go there.

At that point things got somewhat existential. It turns out that the owner/bartender/sole employee of the Body, John, claimed to have grown up in the same area/neighborhood that Bill lives in. That pushed my "Twilight Zone" meter to the limit, so I called him a "bloody fibber." He was, however, able to back up his claims with obscure references that I couldn't disprove, so it might be true.

Then over beer, Bill made a point concerning a difficult issue of Catholic theology. So, on the way out, I asked three slackers who were sitting on the patio wearing their dingy sweatshirts and watch caps while drinking beer and smoking cigars to give me four justifications for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

They came up with three. (In truth, I knew two; I was just trying to set the bar high enough to make them stretch.)

One of the guys had just returned from a try-out with the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and all three worked at Holy Child bookstore.

So, what an odd and eclectic city Fresno must seem to the casual visitor. The bar owners/bar tenders grew up in your city and it seems that everyone knows obscure Catholic theology.


Grammar Note: Heck, I don't know if "monologuing" is a word or if it's spelled "monologing" or "monologging." The web does provide a site known as Grammar Whores which has some comments on the subject. I am not, however, going to let pedantry get in the way of an humorously self-effacing set-up.

"'Springtime for Hitler' bad."

[Via Mark Shea.]

That is the verdict of John Podhoretz at National Review Online on the new Stone film, Alexander.

The critics agree with a 16% "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes. I particularly like the New York Times' assessment of the movie as demonstrating "... puerile writing, confused plotting, shockingly off-note performances and storytelling that lacks either of the two necessary ingredients for films of this type, pop or gravitas" because it uses the seldom seen word "puerile." And here is the Washington Post engaging review of the movie.

As "added value", here is a website about "Alexander on the Web" which includes a lot of movie-related/Alexander-related links.

As a person who was annoyed by the flagrant plot hole in National Treasure and started laughing at the end of Troy, I guess I should avoid Alexander, lest I suffer a fit of apoplexy which might require medical assistance (as opposed to the other kind which might be an enjoyable diversion from the movie).

A sad note about the movie is that Robin Lane Fox was the "historical advisor" for the movie. Fox is an excellent writer. In The Unauthorized Version", Fox confesses that he is an atheist but believes that the Bible is historically accurate. Fox's Alexander the Great is an easy, enjoyable read. (I much preferred, however, Peter Green's Alexander of Macedon. Green's account makes Alexander out to be a rude, barbarian conqueror who did not aim to extend the benefits of Greek civilization to the world; as the Post review observes:

The movie lacks any convincing ideas about Alexander. Stone advances but one, the notion that Alexander was an early multiculturalist, who wanted to "unify" the globe. He seems not to recognize this as a standard agitprop of the totalitarian mind-set, always repulsive, but more so here in a movie that glosses over the boy-king's frequent massacres. Conquerors always want "unity," Stalin a unity of Russia without kulaks, Hitler a Europe without Jews, Mao a China without deviationists and wreckers. All of these boys loved to wax lyrical about unity while they were breaking human eggs in the millions, and so it was with Alexander, who wanted world unity without Persians, Egyptians, Sumerians, Turks and Indians.

Along this line, Green demolishes the romantic view of Alexander as a youthful, sensitive, intellectual quasi-philosopher king. For Green Alexander is a very typical near-psychotic, murdering totalitarian who wants everything to bend to his will: a type we have seen from Alexander to Napoleon to Hitler. I tend to side with Green in this battle for control over the meaning of Alexander; sensitive, intellectual quasi-philosopher kings should not spear their advisors in a fit of drunken rage and then burn down palaces simply because the advisor sensibly argues in favor of consolidating gains, which is precisely what Alexander did to Cletus the Black.

I guess I will have to enjoy the self-immolation of Oliver Stone from a safe distance. Will "Alexander" join "Heaven's Gate", "Ishtar" and, my favorite, "Dune" as the gold standard for monumental bombs? Perhaps Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, is finally having her revenge against Stone for his many gross offenses against history.

Happy Thanksgiving.

I'm thankful for:

- The health and happiness of my family;

- The wisdom of our Founding Fathers (including Charles Carrol, who was not a Mason despite what the Masono-Hollywood complex tries to tell you) for the foresight of creating the Electoral College system;

- Winning the cosmic lottery and being allowed to live in a country that provides its citizens with the freedom to achieve great things;

- A national heritage that respects a broad range of philosophies and cultures, but which can resist those philosophies and cultures that deserve resisting;

- Brother and sister Americans who are willing to leave family and home and go to dangerous places so that my country will not lose its commitment to freedom and achievement and so that my daughters will not have to grow up in an America that looks like Beirut;

- Living during the reign of a Pontiff who history will describe as "the Great;"

- Sharing the country with nearly 52% of the population which could not be duped into voting for a man who believed that deceitful totalitarians could be trusted to act with honor, despite the fact that his opponent was subjected to the single longest smear campaign in political history.

That's enough for now. Maybe more later, after I get the stuffing stuffed and the turkey in the oven.

What happened in Santiago?

Dafydd ab Hugh at Powerline raises a disturbing possibility.

Atrocities during the Good War.

Mention Vietnam and you will inevitably hear that American soldiers really did commit atrocities in Vietnam. That rejoinder is always used as a kind of argument to indict the project of fighting Communism in South-East Asia.

My response is to suggest that similar atrocities undoubtedly happened during World War II, and to ask if that meant we should have left Hitler in power?

Belmont Club provides a lengthy piece on why we shouldn't get our history from Hollywood. The essay points to a forgotten American war crime - the spontaneous execution of surrendering German soldiers. The soldiers were the SS troops guarding Dachau and the American soldiers felt that these Germans were not soldiers entitled to the rules of war.

The site describing the event is fascinating. The event has essentially been forgotten. Moreover, there is a picture of a 27 year old Lieutenant Colonel firing his gun in the air to stop the execution. This last shows a distinctive aspect of the American military ethos: even under the most extreme circumstances, atrocities are not acceptable behavior. And the circumstances were extreme that day. It would have been like respecting the Geneva Convention rights of Satan after liberating Hell.

"Empty Maternity Wards Imperil a Dwindling Germany,"

When I was a kid, that was a headline I would never have dreamed that I would see in my lifetime. At that time we were pounded with images of the death of humanity by overpopulation The scenario of a humanity pressed in all sides by its own density was presented in a variety of vehicles. Soylent Green depicted people recycling human corpses for needed protein. In Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner made the "point of departure" the early 60's and had a eugenically controlled, narcotically enervated population represent the future. Even the TV series "Name of the Game" had an odd episode which projected Gene Barry into a future where pollution and overpopulation had laid waste to the LA environment. One website describes that episode, which has remained with me, as follows:

In "Los Angeles 2017" (15 January 1971) Glenn Howard falls into a nightmare of ecological disaster in which a vestigial American population survives beneath the polluted surface of the earth in USA, Inc., a regimented society run by a corporate elite. This notable episode was directed by Steven Spielberg from a thoughtful screenplay by Philip Wylie.

How about that? I can't remember the series, but I remember an episode directed by Steven Spielberg. Here is a link to a post on the episode.

In any event, the headline comes from this article about the dwindling birth rates in Germany. It describes the side-effects that result from the stark mathematics of a birth rate that is less than replacement. Those side effects range from a concern for maintaining an economy constructed on a larger population to maternity hospitals without patients and schools which are closed because of a lack of students. One expert has predicted that if current trends are maintained, German population could fall from 82 million to 24 million by the end of this century.

The article points to 1967 as the watershed year when artificial contraception became available. Further, it appears that immigration is not the answer since immigrants pretty rapidly adopt German cultural practices.

Most interesting is the description of the slow starvation of charity in this post-contraception culture. The article says:

A blunt-spoken woman who works as a hairdresser, Ms. Jovanovic, 32, said she also felt that children were neither particularly welcome nor prized in German society. Her neighbors, she said, complained more when her child cried at night than if she threw a party or played music.

"They want their houses, they want their cars, they want their peace," she said, apologizing to her German roommate, Simone Schönhoff, and her husband, Thorsten, who were preparing for the birth of twins.

"It is partly selfishness," Mr. Schönhoff agreed. "They want a Mercedes, and it costs so much that they can't afford a child."

This result is perfectly in keeping with the post-modernist critique of the modern idea that freedom is choice. Our modern culture defines freedom as the ability to choose between options. The lack of constraint is considered "freedom." This modern view is in contrast to the traditional view that defined freedom as the ability to choose the good. The difference, according to some philosophers, is that the modern view of freedom empties the object of choice of any intrinsic significance and if no thing has any inherent significance or value, then the chooser is put inot a state of indifference because everything has the same value, i.e., whatever value a person chooses to invest in the thing chosen.

Under that worldview, then, Mercedes are as intrinsically valuable as babies. For those of us who are not so far along as the Germans in this process, that idea seems monstrous.

National Treasure.

I saw the new Nicholas Cage move, National Treasure, today. The movie is based on the premise that the Freemasons moved a vast treasure from Europe to America prior to the American Revolution. During the American Revolution a virtual Masonic conspiracy was hatched to hide the treasure by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in historic documents (because, like, that made a lot more sense than, say, financing the Revolution.)

The movie is clearly an attempt to cash in on the Da Vinci Code craze before that book is turned into a film. The elements are all there - a lost treasure; a secret, ancient conspiracy; clues leading to more clues; "riddles" which require deep historical knowledge; historical settings; and a hero who gets the girl.

Also like the Da Vinci Code, the movie appears to simply make up claims about historical facts when convenient, notwithstanding the historical record or the truth. For example, the opening scenes frame the story line by explaining that the last surviving signer of the Declaration wanted to leave the secret with President Andrew Jackson in 1833, but when he was frustrated in that endeavor left it with Nicholas Cage's multi-great-grandfather. The purported last surviving signer was identified as Charles Carroll.

At that revelation I'm sure I was the only person in the theater who groaned at the idea of Charles Carroll being a Mason. Perhaps I was the only person in America who groaned at the idea. But I think my annoyance was fair with respect to a movie that trots out obscure historical "facts" in order to solve the riddles that advance the plot of the movie.

My discomfort stemmed from the fact that while Charles Carroll may have died in 1833, he is notable as the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration Since Pope Clement XII in 1738 issued a ban of excommunication on Catholics who joined Freemasonry, Carroll would have been the worst candidate to present as as the last holder of the Masonic secret.

A small point, but it does raise the interesting question of how filmmakers can spend tens of millions of dollars in making a movie and miss key background details which should have been obvious to anyone with an interest in the subject.

Cool Whip. A love story.

Mark Steyn has a long obituary on William Mitchell - the man who invented Cool Whip. I started reading it with a casually dismissive attitude and before I knew it I was entranced by Steyn's lyrical observations on "Kraft’s Classic Angel Flake Coconut Cake" and "hydroxy propyl distarch phosphate."

It was like one of those occasions when I've flipped on the Discovery Channel and become engrossed by a show about the history of the mitre box despite my best intentions.

And I don't even like hand tools.

Reasons to Counter-protest.

[Via Ith.]

Da Goddess has a great photo and a few moving thoughts.

Pragmatic Charity.

Every year my Rotary club rings the bell for Salvation Army. I always take the late shift on the weekend. It's always a sublimely existential experience: an empty parking lot, the fog enfolding us like a soft, chilly blanket which muffles the sound of the ringing bell. For two hours I get to connect with a spirit of Christmas by donating some time to helping the worthy cause that is the Salvation Army.

The Salvation Army's bell-ringing campaign is truly an activity which deserves support. The campaign raises a majority of the Salvation Army's funding for the year. The Salvation Army uses the money it raises to feed and clothe the needy and to provide a plethora of outreach activities. Also, you can't find a better place to make a donation; the Salvation Army channels a greater percentage of its receipts into actual charity than most charities, a reality suggested by the fact that its top executive makes $16,000 a year.

This year Target has decided that it doesn't want to support the Salvation Army's bell ringing campaign and that decision has offended supporters of the Salvation Army. It almost feels like a slap in the face and the suspicion is that the motive involves a taking of sides in the cultural wars.

Because of such latent suspicions, I found James Lilek's thoughts inspirational. Lileks says, basically, take a deep breath and keep some perspective. All corporations have similar issues somewhere. If you boycott Target, how will you feel about Wal-Mart's support of the United Way which has had its controversy over the Boy Scouts? Lilek's solution was to mail in a donation twice the amount of his normal donation to the Salvation Army's kettles.

That sounds like a nice solution which helps the Salvation Army, promotes social peace and preserves the Christmas spirit.

On the other hand, Hugh Hewitt raises a fair point about that since Target profits off of Christmas, it should show more of an understanding about the meaning of Christmas. We do have to fight the subtle erosion of our traditions and values. Give them and inch and the next thing you know we're all worshipping at the Temple of No Particular Deity.

But, you know, Christmas comes once a year. It is a season of charity. We can always return to the trenches of the culture ways after New Years. Until then add a little extra to the check you cut to the Salvation Army.

More business coming my way.

A synod of the Anglican Church of Canada's Niagara Diocesen has voted 213-106 to authorize blessings for same-sex couples. The Bishop has, however, withheld his endorsement to date.

Humans in the New World 50,000 Years Ago?

[Via Mark Byron]

Archaeologists say a site in South Carolina may rewrite the history of how the Americas were settled by pushing back the date of human settlement thousands of years. The finding is disputed by other scientists, particularly since the established consensus is that human beings first arrived in North America approximately 13,000 years ago (although I have a vague recollection of South American sites that are substantially older than that.)

We live in an age of wonder and adventure - 3 foot tall "hobbit" hominids in the South Pacific a mere 13,000 years ago; humanity potentially entering the "New World" nearly four times earlier than previously believed.

As Drudge would say....Developing.

Back to the plantation, says the Democratic Party.

There's some kind of rumor being circulated that a "racist, misogynistic" Republican president has nominated the first black woman to serve as Secretary of State. If true, this would somehow seem to be an historic event. The Secretary of State office is fairly important. For example, the Secretary of State is fourth in the line of succession to the Presidency and six of the first fifteen presidents had previously served as Secretary of State. So if this rumor were true, you would think that you would be hearing the sound of triumphalism as yet another enclave of "white male privilege" falls.

But instead of the sounds of triumphant Hurrahs!, we are treated to a series of racist political cartoons that trivialize this historic event by denigrating the credentials of Condoleeza Rice. When called on the carpet for degrading stereotypes that would have resulted in the summary loss of employment of any conservative cartoonist or pundit,
Democrat political operatives blather on about the mistreatment of Bill Clinton, obscure biblical references and being whacked on the head nearly a half century ago.

In general, Conservatives have been strengthened by the unremitting auditing of their attitudes by the mainstream media. In contrast, Liberals and Democrats have been given a pass by the media on their attitudes; Robert Byrd's Ku Klux Klan memberships and periodic burps of racism are edited from the media's conciousness. Moreover, so long as they can claim some connection to the heroic struggles of the Civil Rights Era - real or imagined - they have given themselves permission to ignore the fact that they have treated African-Americans as kind of a client class. This has been a scandal and an open secret. As La Shawn Barber, another rara avis, notes:

I, like Condoleezza Rice, am one of those “rare birds” you write about. Though not a member of the Republican Party, I am an Independent Conservative (I like the sound of it). I tend to vote for Republicans because between the two parties, the Republican Party is more representative of my views: anti-child killing, pro-family, anti-welfare state, anti-race discrimination, pro-business, belief in equal opportunity rather than equal outcome, just to name a few.

I heard that when Ms. Rice was asked why she became a Republican in the mid-80s, she said, ‘’I decided I’d rather be ignored [by Democrats] than patronized.'’ I echo her sentiment. She found the Democrats’ “you-can’t-do-it without-us” line distasteful, as do I. A product of the segregated south, she rose to the top like cream.

Check out her extraordinary biography. Wow!

Unlike most blacks (I loathe the term “African-American", so indulge me), I believe Ms. Rice is a woman to be admired and emulated. The black community doesn’t think so based on her political affiliation. I assure you it’s their loss, not hers.

If one was looking for a "profile in courage," and in conviction and competence, one would need to look no further than Condoleeza Rice.

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi.

"The law of prayer determines the law of faith".

In the same vein, Lex credendi legem statuat supplicandi which means "Let the rule of belief determine the rule of prayer" which some feel is more liturgically accurate than the more commonly seen "Lex orandi, Lex credendi." (As a well-formed Post-Vatican II Cradle-Catholic I obviously had to look up the meaning of these Latin terms; a phenomenon known as the "dumbing of the Catholic mind." Often times I rue the loss of the Latin liturgy when I think how cool it would be to be able to drop choice Latin expressions into casual conversation. On the other hand, I doubt that my 15 year self would have shared that same conviction.)

Two eclectic posts look at the issues of the loss and survivals of traditions and the continuity and survival of culture.

Camassia, writing from a Quaker perspective, laments the loss of Quaker traditions:

The Pentecostals, the Baptists, the Salvation Army, the Presbyterians, and now the Quakers all play the same white-bread Christian rock songs, all have long, folksy and apolitical sermons, and in some vague way feel very similar. And it particularly distressed me that the Quakers seem to be joining in. Reading the Quaker bloggers I've gotten the impression that liberal Quakers are losing touch with their past, and it was depressing to see the evangelical Quakers doing the same in a different way.

And why, why would the Quakers flee their past? Granted I don't know a lot about Quaker history, but it seems to me they have less to apologize for than any other Christian sect. They opposed slavery way before it was cool, they never fought in wars, they refused to swear fealty to any earthly authority. I mean, compare that to the Anglican church that started because a king wanted to dump his wife, or the Adventists who started from a belief that the world would end 150 years ago, or the Assemblies of God who started because white people wanted their own Pentecostal church. I can understand why those churches would ponder how much the past should inform their current practice, but the Quakers?

I suppose the seeds of the problem may have been there at the beginning. If you tell people to come in and let their "inner light" shine forth without any liturgical or doctrinal impediments, it shouldn't be that surprising that they drag a lot of their culture with them. But I suppose that's why the Quakers used to be cultural separatists. Now, not much seems to be shielding them from the massive cultural force determined to divide all Protestants into generic liberals or generic
evangelicals.

I suppose Mother Rome is having her revenge.

From a different perspective, Dave Armstrong quotes a discussion by Al Kresca who describes his relapse back into Catholicism when he was an Evangelical Pastor:

There's no way of escaping tradition, at two levels: sociologically and theologically. Sociologically, why does the church exist? Once you're inside a community of people, you begin doing things a certain way. You fall into certain traditions. They do develop. There's no avoiding them. And the traditions usually exist for fairly good reasons. Within the church, questions come up: how are you going to have communion? How are we gonna baptize? What are you gonna teach the new convert? Questions have to be answered. And so you begin a tradition. It's the social glue that brings cohesiveness to a clan or a tribe. In order for any group to
retain its identity for more than one generation, they have to articulate their reason for existence to the next generation. And no group can do that effectively by merely saying, "we're Christians. Mere Christians," because there are thousands upon thousands of such groups, and the questions always remains: "well, what's your group's reason for existing, and not joining up with another?" And so I kept asking that question at Shalom: "why don't we go down to the first church down the street?" And eventually about half of 'em did [laughter]. It was after I resigned that they
ended up doing it.

Tradition forms the backdrop of particular doctrines, and if you lose the tradition, you end up losing the doctrine. If you lose the tradition that led up to this statement that "Jesus was God in human flesh" (and part of the tradition was the battle which was fought), then you lose the meaningfulness of the doctrine. It ceases to be significant. You have to be self-confident about your roots, otherwise you'll be tossed to and fro by the winds of modernity. So as a pastor, then, I had to come to grips with this question of tradition, both sociologically and theologically.

There is a mystery at the heart of modernity. On the one hand, we want to privilege rationality. A lot of good things happen when we privilege rationality. We sweep away the useless and the inefficient. We get rid of irrelevant usages which accrete over the centuries. History can be a burden. Irrational and irrelevant usages can create dysfunctions in a community. It’s a good thing, therefore, to rationalize our usages in the light of evolving knowledge.

But, on the other hand, traditions can be important. Traditions can be the distillation of centuries of trial and error. Because of their origin in practical experience, traditions, as Richard Posner has argued with respect to common law rules, can incorporate efficiencies which are not self-evident.

Traditions also are vital to cultural continuity. One of the things that allows a community to continue in existence over time is cross-generational loyalty. Given the mortality of individuals, the only thing that permits such loyalty are traditions. So even though a given tradition may appear irrational, the tradition may be rational in a larger sense because it helps to preserve cultural identity.


But why be loyal to any tradition or community? Isn’t such loyalty irrational? After all, if society is ultimately reducible to individuals, and the wants and needs of individuals, then community and tradition is nothing more than a false consciousness by which some individuals privilege themselves at the expense of others, to lapse into a Marxist analysis.

I think this is where the Quakers and the Methodists and the Presbyterians find themselves today. They have invested in the coin of modernism. They have made rationality the raison d’etre of their metaphysics of community. Consequently, they have done their best to rationalize away old customs and traditions that do not reflect with modern society. Having done so, they find that - surprise - they are indistinguishable from everyone else. And since they are indistinguishable from modern society, any particularism they possess has become truly a burdensome historical relic, and so these traditions evaporate to the impoverishment of society.

It's a good thing that he had all those years of perfecting his craft while being subsidized by the taxpayer or people might think he was a boorish sore-loser.

The Volokh Conspiracy shares a Garrison Keillor anecdote, which subtly demonstrates the fine line between irony, satire and outright bigotry.

Keillor absolutely nails the landing on the last, which is a shame because he's been going off the rails lately and disappointing a lot of people who thought highly of him.

DoD moves to profile and isolate alien group plotting the subversion of American constitutional democracy.

Somebody had to curb the growing threat posed by the Boy Scouts.

Jeez Louise. What kind of world do you have to live in so that when you see children blowing themselves up in the name of Allah to murder other children, or the unchecked breakdown of the family with the social wreckage that that inevitably leaves behind, or the potential loss of many of our youngest generation to the nihilism that glorifying choice - and nothing but choice - as the summum bonum logically leads, you come to the conclusion that the Boy Scouts are the problem?

Just wondering.

Blue State Post-Modernist War Reporting.

Aramvirique reviews the war reporting of New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins whose dispatches recount the predestined failure of fearful and demoralized American troops in Fallujah - up to the point at which they win the battle.

Semper Fi Update:

[Via QandO.]

Here's a timeless Marine message from a "dispirited and frightened" Marine.

Freedom of Conscience - The American Experience/The European Experience.

As the Spectator notes, Rocco Buttiglione is an unlikely bell-weather of the cultural war. But after being nixed for a position on a European Commission for justice, Buttiglione is spearheading a movement for liberty of conscience.

Buttiglione was deemed unemployable as a Commissioner because of his membership in a discrete and insular minority group - he's a Catholic and believes that homosexuality is a sin. This belief was too much for Euro-sensibilities, notwithstanding his testimony that his religious beliefs did not detract from his social belief that discrimination against homosexuals is immoral; a position totally consistent with his Catholic faith.

In the Spectator article Buttiglione explains his view:

They say this because they have read that he ‘denounced homosexuality as a sin’ at his hearing before MEPs. Had he done so, he would indeed have been, to say the least, extremely rude. But it is worth looking at what he actually said. It was a left-wing MEP who introduced the s-word, asking Buttiglione how he could reconcile his role as the anti-discrimination Commissioner with his adherence to a doctrine which taught that homosexuality was sinful. Rocco replied by quoting Kant to the effect that there is a difference between morality and legality. Whatever his personal convictions, he said, he would uphold the equality of all citizens, adding, ‘The state has no right to stick its nose into these things. Nobody should be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation. That stands in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and in the [EU] constitution, and I am pledged to defend this constitution.’

Buttiglione has an essay on the Wall Street Journal Online where he discusses the difference between Europe and America with respect to the issue of religion. Buttiglione expresses the notion that America is the stronger society with its relatively stronger tradition of allowing some involvement of religion in society.

The Buttiglione story is disturbing. Essentially, he was given the Hobson's choice of apostasizing from his faith in return for social success, which ought to be disturbing to anyone who believes in freedom of conscience.

Fortunately, in America we don't tolerate test oaths. We believe in freedom of conscience.

Well, not necessarily. In Lumpkin v. Brown, the Ninth Circuit upheld the removal of Reverend Lumpkin from the San Francisco Human Rights Commission because he had been unwise enough to confess that he - apparently a believer in a literalist approach to biblical exegesis - believed in the literal truth of the Bible and "ha[d] to preach that homosexuality was a sin." No evidence was presented that Lumpkin had ever departed from a view or position of social tolerance or that he was unwilling to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

Perhaps Lumpkin deserved to be fired from the Commission. Confessing a literalist reading of Leviticus in San Francisco ought to give rise to questions about one's judgment. But no one provided any evidence that Reverend Lumpkin was leading a campaign to re-institute stoning in Babylon by the Bay. Perhaps Reverend Lumpkin would have been well advised to have followed the lead of St. Thomas More who did his best to say absolutely nothing on the "hot button" issue of his day - the primacy of the monarch over religious matters. But, then, even a studied ambiguity and a retirement from public life didn't save St. Thomas from a martyr's fate.

The decision in Lumpkin v. Brown suggests that Europe may not be as far in advance of America as we might wish.

And now you can play the "Six Degrees of Separation" Game as well.

Instapundit notes the interconnectivity between various bloggers and developers involved in SpaceShipOne, the Scaled Composites/Burt Rutan X-Prize winning spaceship. Add me as a minor node to the game.

I was co-counsel representing Burt Rutan and Scaled Composite in a federal jury trial involving the application of MilSpec 83691 - the protocol for testing the stall/spin characteristics of single engine aircraft - to a Rutan-designed, canard-style ultralight aircraft. (Rutan won the trial, incidentally.) I defended Mike Melville and Fitz Fulton in depositions. Both men are true heroes in the classically understated American style - think John Wayne with an airplane - except that Melville originally hails from South Africa. (As an aside, I remember referring to Mike's wife as "Ms. Melville." She told me not to "neuter" her and to call her "Mrs." Obviously, the comment made an impression on me.) (Fulton was tasked for the "first flight" of a prototype to the B-1 bomber and also flew the plane which "piggy-backed" the shuttle from coast to coast. By the way, Here's a nice article on Fulton and his career.)

The co-counsel representing Dick Rutan was George Hedges, an attorney who was involved in the discovery of the "Lost City of Ubar."

Over my shoulder as I type this is a photo of Rutan's canard-style jet and a poster of all of the Rutan designed aircraft as of 1991. Both are autographed by Burt Rutan. The Rutan brothers grew up in the Fresno area town of Dinuba and, if I recall correctly, their first exposure to flying was in Fresno. (I have the vaguest recollection of Burt saying something about a flying demonstration at Roeding Park, but that could be entirely wrong.)

As you can see, I'm damned proud of the connection.

Sense of Wonder Update: Thanks to Instapundit for the link.

You know, looking at my post and seeing the casual references to, inter alia, "the lost City of Ubar," a test pilot who was responsible for the "first flight" of several experimental aircraft and a man who piloted the first private craft into space, I'm struck by the fact each of these narratives could easily be found in any of a number of science fiction and adventure stories from the "golden age of science fiction."

We may not recognize it, but we live in an age of wonder and adventure.

Efficiency and Tradition.

[Via Lane Core]

This article from the Chronicles of Higher Education offers an intriguing explanation for the pervasiveness of liberal ideology in academia - sharing an ideologogy - any ideology - fosters a sense of community by efficiently dispensing with discussions about core values.

This makes sense in a broader sociological context. There are "single party states" - contemporary California, for example, - that have within them areas which are equally loyal to the other party - Fresno and Kern counties, for instance. Oddly, the division of Democrats and Republicans is not spread homogenously over the state; some areas are 90% Democrat and some areas are similarly dominated by Republican. Similarly, for over a hundred years, Tennessee ws historically solidly Democrat, except that Eastern Tennessee was, I understand, equally solid Republican.

How and why do such stable social arrangements endure? The answer has to be that it's somehow easier that way. Freedom does not inevitably yield diversity. I've heard libertarians argue that anarchy in traffic laws would evolve eventually into everyone always driving "on the right" or "on the left" because the alternative is not "efficient," which is to say that drivers would constantly be involved in car crashes and, even worse, a resulting "litigation explosion."

Obviously, there are also costs associated with such traditions, as the article illustrates.

Religious wars and desecration of the sacred aren't as much fun when they're instituted by secularists.

Ken Layne is keeping up the "Jesusland" schtick. He's increasing the volume of his obnoxiousness by warning Catholics and Mormons that they're the next ones to be put up against the wall when the "Christian Jihadistas" take control. (But, of course, his dire warning is spiced with the typical sneer of the tolerant secularist that Catholicism would have been heading for a similar destination but for the recent influx of Spanish-speaking Papists.) Layne also enlists Jack Chick as a trump card in his effort to split the faith community by pitting Papists against Anti-Papists. As a noisome broadside aimed at everyone who believe to the core of their being that a man named Jesus born in Palestine 2,000 years ago was actually the Incarnate Word and the Power behind the Creation of the Universe, Layne continues to use the divine name and image as a basis for a series of crude japes.

But so what? Religious believers learned years ago that expressing alarm at the desecration of their sacred images only encourages more such insensitivity by liberal, tolerant, open-minded agents of diversity like Layne. And the result is that today no one even notices when progressives like Layne are engaging in such desecration and blasphemy, thereby impoverishing the culture by depriving us of the power of images that can enflame passions.

Ironically, in his call to arms, Layne notices the "fading" of traditional "moderate" denominations like the Methodists and the Presbyterians. He notices that they're fading away, but lacks the curiosity to ask why they're fading. If he did, he would learn that these denominations are hemorrhaging members who don't think that a denomination that mirrors the current thinking of the DNC - shifting with political fads and fashions - is a faith grounded on a rock of truth.

So, it's all bare, ruined choirs on that front. The hordes of tolerant, open-minded Methodist beserkers won't be appearing when he stamps his feet and bids them join in a Manichaean battle to the death with the evil Baptists.

Better luck fomenting the next war of religion.

Peggy Noonan

This article on Peggy Noonan is worth reading.

Noonan presents herself as grounded and sensible. She's tremendously articulate. The fact that she is a conservative is a major asset for the movement. She's a conservative largely because she experienced the disconnect between the condescending attitudes expressed by her new friends at the elite media outlet where she was working about the Irish working class people - "her" people - who objected to the liquidation of their neighborhoods in the cause of busing.

There's a cautionary tale in there somewhere.

The Best Response to People Indulging in a Bizarre Fetish of Public Self-humiliation...

...is to grant them their heart's desire.

Jim Treacher provides hilarious running commentary to photos published on the world wide web as part of the "I'm Sorry" fad - as part of which earnest looking lefties "apologize" to the world for either (a) being Americans or (b) because a majority of their fellow-countrymen had the unmitigated gall to exercise their constitutional right to vote like adults.

Don't these passive-aggressive retards understand that an apology doesn't count if it's not for something you did that you regret. For example, if I apologize for the Germans murder of 8 million Jews, or for the sad history of French colonialism, or for the Democrats support of Jim Crow and slavery, or for the academic left's embrace of every mass murdering totalitarian promising agrarian reform, or for John Kerry's wet French kiss of treacherous Vietnamese thugs it's not an apology.

It's irony.

Speaking of the vital contribution that NPR and Public Television makes to public discourse and the Democrat party....

...such as by sharing contributor information with the DNC, NPR reveals after the election that one of its reporters has a spouse who was employed by the Kerry campaign.

Yea, that will go a long way to re-establishing trust with Middle-America.

Wouldn't it have ... I don't know... looked better if NPR shared this revelation before the election so that listeners would have been in better a position to weed out possible bias from news?

Remembrance Day.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Here's some background on the poet, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae.

Here's another site which contains this explanation of the employment of images of poppies in this famous poem:

The most asked question is: why poppies?

Wild poppies flower when other plants in their direct neighbourhood are dead. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, but only when there are no more competing flowers or shrubs in the vicinity (for instance when someone firmly roots up the ground), these seeds will sprout.

There was enough rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front; in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, around him bloodred poppies blossomed like no one had ever seen before.

But in this poem the poppy plays one more role. The poppy is known as a symbol of sleep. The last line We shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields might point to this fact. Some kinds of poppies are used to derive opium from, from which morphine is made. Morphine is one of the strongest painkillers and was often used to put a wounded soldier to sleep. Sometimes medical doctors used it in a higher dose to put the incurable wounded out of their misery.

In the United States today is Veterans Day; in Canada it is Remembrance Day. For Americans this holiday is an opportunity to shut down the government offices and schools. Canadians, in contrast, actually remember that today is the anniversary of the ending of the Great War at 11:11 A.M. on November 11, 1918.

From the Rough Beast Slouching file.

This is one to tuck away whenever you next see Lawrence O'Donnell.

Lawrence O'Donnell - last seen melting down in a pyrotechnic display of name calling - has calmly predicted the inevitability of the secession of Blue States from Red States because Red States are "welfare queens."

Tony Blankly notes that O'Donnell is a scion of a major Democrat dynasty, which makes this statement less of the peyote induced rantings of a bipolar off of lithium than it sounds.

Two points -

For Lincoln, secession was antithetical to democracy. If the losers of an election could vitiate the outcome of an election they didn't like by seceeding, then whither any democracy? Wouldn't, Lincoln wondered, this inevitably result in a series of secessions as the polity divided itself into ever smaller and smaller units of government? And didn't democracy mean something about making a decision and living with that decision?

For Plato, being a citizen meant a tacit agreement to accept the outcomes of the decisions of a polity. One wasn't entitled to the outcome one wanted because one was not entitled to pick and choose among the laws of the polity. (See Critias.)

Two great insights that deserve reflection even in this post-modernist age.

Tactical Update: Then there's the whole "Money talks, Bullshit walks" angle to O'Donnell's claim that sensitive liberals are going to secede from the Union. I can't imagine someone from New York City making the claim reported in this article that "Dude, give me the sniper rifle. I can take them out - I'm from Alabama."

I can't believe I'm betting on the South in a Civil War.

Really Cool 3-D Election Map.

[Via Left Coast Conservative.]

If the "Blues" secede it will be like a chapter out of Stand on Zanzibar.

Why blog at St. Blogs?

Steve Riddle explains.

I'll second his sentiments and confirm his observations.

News from Fallujah.

Belmont Club.

Ok, I've been real charitable about the Episcopalian's Trademark Infringement, but this is really beginning to steam me.

If you're keeping track of the Methodist Trust Clause case - aka the "Fall of the Mordor" - be advised that the UMC has filed its petition with the Supreme Court of California, we've replied, they've responded and now we're waiting for the decision of the SCC about whether it will take up the case.

On a related note, I've just been handed an amicus brief filed by the "Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America" in support of the United Methodist Church's position.

Two points -

First, what's with the "Protestant Episcopal Church" title? Is there an "Orthodox Episcopal Church?"

Second, stop kibbitzing and mind your own business. Our Lady of Guadalupe is a Catholic icon. The Methodist Trust Clause is a Methodist doctrine. Go back to arguing about the licitness of ordaining actively homosexual bishops who abandon their families or something.

Faith and Trademark Infringement

Bill Cork and his commenters discuss the Episcopalian use of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe as part of its "Hispanic Outreach."

Based on what some of the folks commenting there and in my post below have written, I understand that some Anglicans may have some level of devotion to Mary. But even given that, what is the connection between the apparition of Mary to a peasant in Spanish-controlled Mexico and the Anglican Church. If Henry hadn't jumped ship by the time of the apparition, he was very close to doing so. (Actually, according to the sources I've linked, Henry had begun the process of severing his connection with the Roman Catholic church at the time of the Marian apparition to Juan Diego.)

And what is the Anglican position on Marian apparitions, anyway? Does the Anglican communion acknowledge that they happen? Did Mary appear at Lourdes and Fatima? Why the singular interest in Guadalupe?

It would be fantastic if the Episcopalian communion is returning to its Marian roots. But if Our Lady of Guadalupe is simply being used as a kind of cultural icon - the way the Shamrock is used for the Irish - then that raises both a kind of "trademark infringement" issue and, more important, a literal desecration - an action depriving something of its sacred character.

Another Da Vinci Code Critique.

This one is by Professor Bart Ehrman, who is an engaging lecturer. I think that Ehrman is viewing this as an opportunity to spread the gospel of scholarship to the ignorant masses.

In fact, here are two free lectures from the Teaching Company by Professor Ehrman on this very topic.

This blog is nothing if it's not about value added service to its readers and to the trolls who like to stop by and correct spelling errors.

I'll probably get the Ehrman book because I gave away my Amy Welborn Da Vinci Code book to the summer intern.

Greetings from Fresno, the future capitol of the future state of West Oklahoma.

Apropos of the old joke about breaking California into three states - North California, South California and West Oklahoma - here's an online petition to have California secede from the Federal Government.

Certainly the "Third California" has a stronger precedent than these folks. While there has never been a succesful secession of a state from the Union, culturally distinct regions within a state have succesfully seceded from the state.

The link to the petition comes from Ken Layne, who has been doing a sour-grapes riff about "Jesusland, i.e., the states who voted Republican. Apparently, the "Jesusland" schtick comes from Der Speigel, which thoughtfully provides both a map of "The United States of Canada" and "Jesusland" and solid grounds for removing any remaining Americans from Germany, aka "the pimple on the butt of Russia when its fortunes revive."

FoxNews reports that Michael Moore - who has replaced the "Redskins Rule as the leading indicator of which candidate will lose - has linked to the map. So it appears that the great new idea that the left is currently trying out is to sneer at the religious beliefs of 59 million voters.

Yea, that will work.

All of which is an introduction to this post at Get Religion which describes Rod Dreher's attempt to talk his fellow journalists into taking religious beliefs seriously.

But the devil is in the details. The Get Religion post links to Dreher's prior article about the "Godless Party" which examined the sociological research of Bolce and De Maio. Bolce and De Maio's research supports the view that a core constituency of the Democrat party are "anti-fundamentalists," precisely the people who believe the "Jesusland" schtick is deeply insightful and original "satire." In other words, it is possible that the Democrat Party has put itself in a bind where it has to reach out to the very people that a core constituency has a deep investment in hating. The situation may be, Q and O writes, "Mission Impossible."

Under those circumstance, even silly proposals, like secession, might start to look attractive.

New Blog.

Catholics in the Public Square will put the focus on CINO politicians of both parties.

The "Third California.

A usually little noticed fact about California is that the real division is not really north/south; it's east/west. An article about how demographic changes will favor the Republican party takes note of that fact:

Even in California, which went for Kerry but not as overwhelmingly as might have been expected, the political fault-lines followed these same patterns. Kerry piled up huge majorities in the San Francisco Bay area, which has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and has experienced strong net out-migration since 2000. Bush won handily in Riverside-San Bernardino and the Central Valley, winning upward of three-fifths the vote in the emergent "Third California" that is experiencing the bulk of the Golden State's population and job growth.

Election Post-Mortem.

[Via Mark Shea.]

David Brooks says that despite all the attempts of pundits and politicians to spin the subject to their cause du jour, there probably is no single factor that gave Bush a majority of the vote.

Darn it, I want explanations.

Simple, reassuring explanations.

Einstein was Right (Again).

As The World Turns, It Drags Space And Time

I'm listening to Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos on CD - because there is no way I'm ever going to actually read a book on physics - and it is essentially a summary of review of the status of modern physics; a mind-warping summary of the absurd reality that modern physics has constructed. For example, there are more than 3 dimensions (plus time, maybe), but the rest are really, really tiny; you don't notice them unless you're at the level of Planck unit.

Time, on the other hand, doesn't exist; time is not an necessary assumption in the math of physics. What we think is time is nothing more than the subsequent working out of the initial state set by the Big Bang.

I recommend the Greene book, although it may be something of a distraction to listen to while driving.

Mark Steyn on the Future of Western Civilization.

Steyn seems to believe that in order to have a future, you have to defend the present.

2004 Red/Blue Counties.

[Via Get Religion.]

I think this link will get you to the red/blue county by county breakdown.

Fascinating. Kerry took only a few counties in California - admittedly the ones with greater population densities. For example, I had assumed that Southern California was largely Dem these day. According to the map, however, Los Angeles county is something of an anomaly, but obviously a very large anomaly.

Concerning the proper maintenance of clients and witnesses.

SoCal Lawblog links to an interesting LA Times article on why the prosecution's case against Kobe Bryant folded.

Guy Fawkes Day in San Francisco.

[Via Blog from the Core.]

Zombie Time has posted an assortment of photos from a November 3 "we lost" rally held in San Francisco.

The photos show various calls for action against the re-elected president, as well as people holding signs with variations on the "Bush=Satan" trope. It must have been a historically literate crowd with a keen interest in kicking Guy Fawkes Day festivities off early, inasmuch as there a several photos showing the President being burned in effigy.

I know that all of this can be dismissed as a kind of satire. But is this really a sign of political health? I honestly don’t believe that similar conduct would have occurred in, for example, Dallas if Kerry had won. Likewise, I don’t remember Republicans acting this way in 1992 or 1996, or, to be fair, Democrats acting this way in 1980, 1984 or 1988.

What rough beast slouches toward 2008?

[Hint: the answer is not "Hillary."]

Watching the Arteries Harden in Real Time.

Nykola has collected the best Ratherisms of election eve '04. They are all as "awkward as a retromingent turkey walking on a hot sidewalk in Tulsa" or something. This one struck me as particularly over the cliff:

"The election is closer than Lassie and Timmy"

I know that we're all supposed to be open-minded, and, hey, the Supreme Court may define that kind of thing as a "penumbral constitutional right", but that's just disgusting.

The Youth Vote.

Jonah Goldberg deconstructs the fantasy.

More Episcopalian Heresies.

I guess this is a good thing. It's got to be better than "divine feminine womb water Goddess-worshipping" rituals.

On the other hand, I was driving past St. James Episcopal church on the corner of Dakota and Cedar. As I went past it I saw a sign out front with the classic Catholic image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Did I mention that this was in front of an Episcopal church?

It appears that there is something called the "Guadalupe Chapel" operated by an Episcopalian pastor. It also appears that there is some kind of Hispanic outreach program that repackages Episcopalianism into Catholic symbols and sacramentality:

Calori offered a strategy of reaching out to disgruntled Catholics. “Sacraments are extremely important. There is an extended family through a system of godparents. They take it very seriously. The compadres and comadres are the second parents to a child. The entire dynamic changes in the spiritual and emotional relationship between the family and the godparents. And there are other celebrations. In the Anglican tradition, children receive communion from the day of their baptism. Spanish-Latinos need the solemnization of this sacrament, so we have preparation. We have special confirmation and marriage preparation and there are godparents for all of these sacraments.”

Calori described the traditional clothing and days used for first Holy Communion (she called it “Solemn Communion”) and handed out a flyer with other special days that are part of Hispanic Catholic culture. She then described each event in detail, including Quinceañera, El Día de los Muertos, Las Posadas, the feast of the Epiphany, La Fiesta de la Candelaria, and the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Calori explained that the Our Lady of Guadalupe was important to Hispanics because, “It is the biggest day, because it is the manifestation of the Divine to the oppressed, indigenous peoples of Mexico. The first time that the Divine expresses and shows Himself to an indigenous person. For the first time, after hundreds of years of persecution and oppression by the Spaniards. And if you look at a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, she LOOKS...LIKE...THEM.” (Calori seems to have forgotten that Cortez arrived in Mexico City in 1519 and Juan Diego received the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1531—a time span of 12 years).

Calori suggested blessing religious objects for Mexicans and adding saints’ statues and images, especially the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, to their churches. She said that another way to gain the trust of the Hispanic community is to join them in their struggle against oppression.

Because we know that Protestants are all about "images and statues."

And "Spanish-Latinos" need the "solemnization of the sacrament of communion?" Perhaps because they take the implications of the "real presence" very, very seriously? Like Roman Catholicism teaches, perhaps?

In 2003 former Lutheran pastor, and current Catholic priest, Richard John Neuhaus commented on a Chicago Sun Times article entitled "Are Lutherans Pretending to be Catholic in order to Lure Catholics. Lutherans were doing something similar. Neuhaus wrote:

But there are interesting questions raised. “Lure” may not be the right word, but there is something sly about trading in mistaken identities. Of course, Lutheran and Episcopal parishes could put their denominational identity front and center, offering themselves as a way of being catholic without really being what almost everybody means by being Catholic. But it is somewhat demeaning to present oneself as a substitute for the Real Thing. I am sympathetic to the Catholic priests who are critical of non-Catholics presenting themselves as Catholics. At the same time, it is good for priests to know how much some Protestants do share with Catholics. The question posed in Chicago and elsewhere is but one of many vexing ambiguities in being a lower-case catholic.

OK, fine, ecumenical hands across the water and all that. However, a question: what is the position of the ECUSA on the reality of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Juan Diego?

How about the Communion of Saints? Can Saints, like the BVM, intercede for us and can we pray for their intercession?

Because it seems that if you believe that Our Lady of Guadalupe really appeared to Juan Diego, that sure implies that they do and we can.

Is that a teaching of the Anglican Communion? (It might be; I just don't know.)

I think that we need a Catholic outreach to Episcopalians. Perhaps they have some symbols that would make them comfortable in transitioning to Rome, except we wouldn't mention that part about "Rome." Maybe we could decorate small chapels in and around country clubs with some Episcopalian-specific symbology to lure, er, attract them to Catholic Mass, though I am somewhat at a loss to think what those symbols might be.

Pictures of Queen Elizabeth? Of the Beetles? Images of salad forks? An absence of crab grass in the lawn?

This may be tougher than it looks.

Update: This site says that intercession of Mary is not sought by Episcopalians. This is consistent with the 39 Articles which provide:

XXII. Of Purgatory.
The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Relics, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.

The thinking behind that language is difficult to square with the Spanish-Latino outreach program's policy of using the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

I understand that the 39 Articles are something of a historical relic, certainly with respect to their phrasing. But I think that they do generally reflect current Anglican/Episcopalian doctrine.

OK, how do Episcopalians justify using "images" and "Invocations of Saints," such as the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe?

Lefty British Snobs for Bush.

Slate provides a post-mortem on the goofy scheme by British writers to target Clark County, Ohio for Kerry. The intellectuals, including Antonia Fraser, who I laud below, wrote letters to voters in Clark County, explaining how the voters would not be invited to posh British clubs if they voted for Bush.

Apparently, Clark County responded by going for Bush in a big way:

Katz also said he knew all along that the letter-writing project could backfire. So, did it? Almost certainly, yes. In 2000, Al Gore won Clark County by 324 votes. And since Ralph Nader received 1,347 votes, we can assume Gore's margin would have been larger without Nader on the ballot. On Tuesday George Bush won Clark County by 1,620 votes.

Way to go, Guardian!

Another Damned Holiday.

Bill Cork reminds everyone that tody is "Guy Fawkes Day."

I'm going to the store to get my effigy of the Pope to burn.

Actually, according to Antonia Fraser's excellent and balanced book "Faith and Treason", Guy Fawkes Day was a big celebration in Colonial America. George Washington and his confederates would celebrate the day burning the effigies of the Pope and any given unpopular politician who was handy. I assume the holiday los its luster through the 1820s to 1840's, at the same time that another holiday was being civilized and domesticated.

More Politics and Religion.

And if I can work in a reference to sex I hit the trifecta.

Bill Cork links to this map which shows (a) which religion - Protestant, Catholic or Mormon predominates a given county and (b)which states went to Bush in 2004.

Long story short, it appears that if you're in a Protestant or Mormon county, your state went to Bush. If it was Catholic (or Lutheran) it went to Kerry.

I don't know what this means, except that furnishes a different perspective on the election. Also, I had no idea that California was so lousy with Catholics. Ditto Idaho and Mormons.

For my college buddy John Springgate...

a post citing Keith Laumer.

That's the reason NPR is doomed.

Not enough references to B-list science fiction authors.

A Democrat engages in deeply reflective soul searching and tentatively concludes...

that 58 million of her fellow Americans are "ignorant", committed to "bloodlust" and "full of classic Republican feelings of superiority." (After all, you know, Democrats are peaceful sheep who never engage in personal attacks or name calling, unlike the evil, evil Republicans who never deal with the real issues.)

Yea, now that's the way to reach out to expand the base.

Also, if she can only work in a gibe about Bush not winning the 2000 election, that should just about seal the deal.

Political Post-Mortem

The Political Junkie e-mailed the following data from the 2004 election:

Bush 2000/Bush 2004

African-Americans: 8%/11%
Whites: 54%/58%
Hispanic: 41%/44%
Married: 53%/56%
Not Married: 38%/40%
Union Members: 37%/40%
Gays: 25%/23%
Gun Owners: 61%/67%
Protestants: 63%/59%
Jewish: 19%/25%
Catholics: 45%/52%
Republicans: 91%/93%
Democrats: 10%/11%
Men: 51%/55%
Women: 43%/48%
18-29 year olds: 46%/45%
30-44 year olds: 49%/53%
45-59 year olds: 49%/51%
60+ 47%/54%

A smaller percentage of Protestants, but more Jews and Catholics? Also, note that notwithstanding Andrew Sullivan and company, Bush still gets nearly the same 1/4 of the Gay vote in 2004 as he got in 2000, which is an interesting factoid.

Election Aftermath.

Media Bias - the good news of the election is that the horrible, systemmic bias of the media has been exposed beyond question. From the trivia of the AP's "fake boos" to the use of fabricated documents and the inanity of blaming the President for missing .01% of Iraq's arsenal, or maybe not, the media has clearly been shown to have been in the tank for the Dems. The hope and opportunity is for the media to take a long look at itself and engage in a meaningful process of reform by actually paying attention to its claim that it is the objective conduit of information to the American public.

Unfortunatly, it doesn't appear that the media is getting the message. My secretary pointed out that the entire crew of Good Morning America is wearing "mourning black." An office mate mentioned that she observed the sad and depressed tone of reporting last night.

And what's with CBS and its electoral map still showing New Mexico and Iowa as "too close to call?" Kerry has conceded and the spread in those two states is bigger than that in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, but those states are unquestioningly shaded "Kerry Blue." Could it be that some producer in the interests of "fairness" wants to emphasize the uncertainty of Bush's election, even after Kerry has conceded defeat.

Unity - There was on line in Bush's acceptance speech that struck me as summarizing my concern over what I have been reading at DU and the Daily Kos. The gist of what Bush said was that we have a "one election, one constitution and one future."

He's absolutely right. There is not a "Blue State future" or a "Red State future" where, as one Kos commentator fantasizes, the Blue States can leave the "freaks" behind. We're all in this together. If America has a future, it is our future and we should make the best of it.

Finality - Isn't it simply great that it's over? I am delighted that I can forget whatever I've had to learn about John Kerry. I never have to think about how he went to meet with Communists in Paris while other Americans were being barbarized in Hanoi prisons. Or how Kerry came back from such meetings with fresh new proposals to abandon our POWs and trust the Communists. I can hit the delete button because it doesn't matter anymore. I can also delete my bookmarks for the polling sites and electoral college sites with equal enthusiasm.

More important, Bush received more votes for his re-election than any other candidate in the history of the country. To reach that record, over 100 million votes were counted in the space of hours. Over 100 million people set aside their pleasures, diversions, tasks and work to make their individual ways to tens of thousands of polling places across this huge country to select a leader. The logistics of organizing that process and counting the votes and ensuring the fairness, openness and secrecy of the process are unfathomable.

But it was all done.

And now it's done.

May God bless America and our President.

The Election picks the President.

Or not. Daily Kos is demanding that the Kerry campaign "send out the lawyers" to "demand a fair count."

After all, if you're Kos and your guy loses, somebody must have cheated.

Remember my statement that "John Kerry would be my president if he won?" Other political conservatives and libertarians took that pledge as well.

Guess who didn't?

Check out this sentiment:

Screw that shit. I'm not a young man any more. I'm not going to piss in the wind.
If the blue states want to break off, I'm willing to fight for that. But fighting against the incestuous, teen-pregnancy-happy, divorce-happy "family values" hypocrite pigs for control of the same half-sane, half-freak piece of real estate? I'm done with that. Other developed countries don't even have these freaks. Why should I deal with them?

That's the progressive spirit - never forget that you're better than "incestuous, teen-pregnancy-happy, divorce-happy "family values" hypocrite pigs" who just participated in the great ritual of democracy.

This guy's sentiments are not unique on the Daily Kos site, but don't these people "get" that their pathologies can now be seen by the rest of normal folks, by which, of course, I mean us "incestuous, teen-pregnancy-happy, divorce-happy "family values" hypocrite pigs."

The "Oh, Hell, they're organized" update: A Democratic Underground poster pointed to this site which is pledged to "act against the stolen election," by which they mean this election. They apparently intend to "converge" on the sites where "the fraud occurred" to engage in acts of "non-violent civil disobedience." So, if you were in a community that voted against Kerry you can expect to see a whole bunch of unhinged loonies showing up in your town to make your life unpleasant.

On the other hand, give some credit to Andrew Sullivan, his final post shows class.

A First Glimpse at Key Demographics.

Young voters - the Democrat's will of the wisp - failed to show up in numbers greater than in 2000. What we've been hearing all night is that Republicans registered and turned-out for Bush because of social issues.

Needless to say, that angle will disappear or be explained away in the next weeks. But the dream of the "youth vote" will never disappear.

An example of the liberal youth vote fantasy is offered by Andrew Sullivan:

ANOTHER SURPRISE: The youth vote doesn't seem to have turned out. Fascinating. We were all suckered on that one.....

No, Andy, you weren't suckered. They're out there. Keep searching.

Democratic Underground is blowing a gasket.

"It's a conspiracy, there were all these new voters, where did they go...." Isn't it still early in the game for these people to need a shot of lithium?

But as I type this.....

Yeehaw!!! At 9:41 pm Fox is calling Ohio and the election for Bush!!!

Time to open the bubbly!!!

Kerry has to "run the table" including Alaska.

Not going to happen.

"On the other hand" update: I remember 4 years ago. Late in the evening Florida was finally called for Bush. Everybody celebrated and did the "dance of joy." Then, the next thing you knew, Bush's lead started to shrink, finally falling below the .05% threshold which triggered an automatic recount. At about 2 a.m. PST, some clown came on and explained precisely how the Dems were going to steal the election through ballot challenges.

Long story short, based on experience, it certainly isn't over yet.

Stem Cell Initiative Appears To Be Winning.

What's with that? We have a state full of secret embriologists/geneticists/biologists who know precisely what the appropriate level of funding for hi-tech science should be? And does it no longer matters that California is still trying to bail out from the Gray Davis deficits caused by the energy crisis of 2001?

Ah, well, it just goes to keep alive my streak of being on the losing side of initiatives.

How is Prop. 66 doing?

Spot link.

I should have done this sooner - here is the link to Hugh Hewitt's blog. Hewitt should be a reality check, particularly since the Corner is going through emotional fluxes like someone with bipolar disorder desperately in need of a lithium fix.

Like Hewitt says, go shoot some hoops until the bars open.

Update: OK, that's more like it. Hewitt says that Catholics are breaking for Bush, which will have an effect on the outcome in Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania, if true.

Extending the Franchise.

Tom Daschle filed suit to exclude Republican - and only Republican - poll watchers from Indian reservations, where last time there were enough rigged votes found to keep him in office.

No comment.

Snout Counting Tuesday.

The members of the Harry Turtledove e-mail discussion list are reminding eveyone to "have their snout counted." The phrase comes from Turtledove's World War series where the during the middle of World War II, Earth is invaded by an alien civilization known as the Race. Churchill, Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt have to set aside their parochial conflicts in the face of a greater enemy. Fortunately, the Race's inevitable conquest is upset by the fact that they had expected humanity to have medieval technology rather than V-2s and tanks.

The Race cannot fathom the absolutely bizarre governance system utilized by a particularly confusing region of Earth known as the United States. Apparently, the inhabitants of that area line up at odd intervals to decide important policy issues by engaging in "snout counting" rituals, which, when you think of it, is an extremely odd way to make policy.

But that's what we do. So, if you've got an opinion, don't forget to have your snout counted today.

On the other hand, if you're still undecided, then by all means stay home.

The Night Before - State by State.

Look, I think this thing is as accurate as hepatomancy - divination through the evisceration of livers - or myrmomancy - divination by watching ants eating. (Although that last one could have possibilities.)

Nonetheless, State by State shows Pennsylvania has gone pink, Ohio has gone powder blue, but Florida and Wisconsin have finally gone dark red!!!

Under this scenario, even without Ohio and Pennsylvania, Bush wins!!!

Let's hope

The Dems are really "rocking the vote."

I just discovered this voters' guide put out by some hip, happening Fresno youth magazine.

News flash. We really, really, really need to improve the quality of our educational system. Read the painfully self-absorbed pretensions expressed in the guide and you will discover that the precis of the guide is not principle or philosophy, but whether the voter's ballot is sufficiently stylish.

Also, note the advice to this supposed hotbed of Kerry-supporters - in California Kerry will win, so vote Green.

Hah!

Nonetheless, Kerry must be defeated.

Mudville Gazette counterpoises a startling, and startlingly unknown photo, with Kerry's incoherence on Saddam's continued suzerainty over Baghdad. I found the picture startling for what's behind the empty throne - a beautiful painting of launched missiles.

Chilling, no?

Lileks provided the link and this bit of farce that summarizes the inanity of Kerry's I've-got-a-plan-that-comes-with-this-magic-wand approach to "honestly" discussing the issues:

I am certain Bin Laden fears a Kerry presidency more than a Bush second term. He knows – and I think we all know this – that Kerry would summon in the military guys, and say “I want you to find bin Laden.”

Uh – sir, I don’t quite –

"I mean it. Find him. "

You mean, find him? Why – such a thing has never been considered, sir; we’ve just been waiting for him to wander into camp looking for directions, or perhaps to use the bathroom. That whole Abu Ghraib thing - well as you no doubt know, we were just trying to provoke him to set his ol' beard on fire and run screaming into camp waving a big-ass scimitar, and then we'd be like all Indy on him and pow! Pow! But it never worked out. We never even had a Plan B. Find him? You serious? This is so totally unexpected! You mean, actually go try and get him?

"That’s exactly what I mean. And I have a plan."

Sir?

"I want you to go here –"

Where, exactly? Your hand is covering all of Afghanistan and northern Pakistan on the map –

"That’s right. I want you to go here, and I want you to look for him. And when you see him, get him. "

Is that the plan, sir?

"No, there’s more. See this? I’ve drawn a blue line, making a wide new river to his exact position. Send the Navy."

Uh – yes. Yes of course sir. Anything else, sir?

But, you know, Kerry has a "plan" and we know he never makes mistakes.

How Come Nobody Understands Irony? Alert.

Jim Treacher's 10 Reasons I'm Not Voting for You, Mr. Bush" hits the Wall Street Journal Online.

I thought it was brilliant and funny - particularly Reason #2: "Two Words - You. Are. Stupid." - which is why I linked to it and was thinking about purloining it as one side of a Rotary Bulletin election gag (until I decided that that would be the end of my gig as Bulletin Editor. Hey, wait, there's an idea....)

But it seems that some folks think that Treacher was serious.

OK, class, let's discuss irony. It's a concept that involves playing on absurdist themes and tropes because, well, they're absurd and therefore funny. Irony often involves a logical self-contradiction, i.e., "Two words - You. Are. Dumb." (Hint: count the words.) Irony can often make powerful but subtle points because of the indirect nature of the gambit. Irony is the reverse of sarcasm. While sarcasm involves ridiculing someone else, irony involves a subtle self-lampoon, which is all the more effective because it invites other people to share a joke at our own expense and is, therefore, less threatening or offensive.

I'm sure that Aristotle had more profound things to say on the subect, but if we have learned from the deep historical research provided by the scholars responsible for movies like the "Name of the Rose" it's that Aristotle's great work on the principles of humor was lost when F. Murray Abraham burned down the abbey.

The Winner of the Election will be my President.

That really shouldn't have to be said, but sometimes it's important to state, and to restate, the obvious.

This is America. We are all Americans. If my guy wins, great, but there won't be gold-paved street, peace and justice in this world. If my guy loses, then the winner can expect me to join the loyal opposition.

What do I mean by loyal. It's simple. I will not side with any foreign country or foreign element against the president or the country. I will not offer gratuitious apologies to foreigners for the policies the president implements. I will not assume that my president is the moral or intellectual inferior of any foreign leader or institution.

Further, as a member of the loyal opposition, I will give John Kerry my support - in the sad and unlikely event that he wins - as he represents American interests to the world. I will not hope, pray or wish that he fails because such failures will cost our country and I will not seize upon momentary setbacks to provide ammunition to encourage the enemy or discourage our supporters.

As Americans, we are all pulling together and there are a lot of non-Americans in the world who would like to see us, all of us, fall.

I think my side of the political divide understands this. Please consider Let's Try Freedom and Vodka Pundit for starters. I will add to this list when I see other posts on this theme. I would particularly appreciate seeing such posts on the left. If you see them, let me know whre I can find them.