Down the Memory Hole

This Classical Values post, and the video below, raise some good points about the disparate treatment of men in post-modern Western culture.  Add to this disproportionate differences in homelessness and suicide, the disproportionately greater expenditures on women's medical issues, and you have a sense that if these factoids didn't favor women, they would be considered a national scandal.

Also, don't forget to factor in the gratuitous male bashing that goes on in movies and television and is considered kind of clever by certain kinds of women.

How perverse is Hollywood...

...when Patrick Warburton's mild criticism of the Family Guy episode that mocked Sarah Palin and people with Down Syndrome is newsworthy.  It seems that Warburton is the only person in Hollywood with enough class to say what every normal person in America already knows - the Family Guy episode was tasteless, classless and cruel, albeit even Warburton has to say it in the most congenial "it bothered me" format.

So, kudos to Warburton, and file this under "War of the Normal."

Civil Rights in the 21st Century

Court holds that Zombies have free speech rights.

I liked it better when our women didn't want to date sparkly vampires and we could put down Zombies without wondering if we were violating their Miranda rights.

Richard Dawkins discovers that his Fanboys are, in fact, socially autistic jerks

This is announcement by the "King of Socially Autistic Jerks" is ironic beyond all recognition.  After Dawkins announced that he was redesigning his website to reduce the amount of "frivolous gossip," the Great Man found himself the subject of villification at the hands of his fanbase. To wit, as he explains:

Imagine that you, as a greatly liked and respected person, found yourself overnight subjected to personal vilification on an unprecedented scale, from anonymous commenters on a website. Suppose you found yourself described as an “utter twat” a “suppurating rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum inside a dead skunk that’s been shoved up a week-old dead rhino’s twat.” Or suppose that somebody on the same website expressed a “sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails” down your throat. Also to “trip you up and kick you in the guts.” And imagine seeing your face described, again by an anonymous poster, as “a slack jawed turd in the mouth mug if ever I saw one.”

Mind you, describing someone who has breached True Atheist orthodoxy with this kind of language all the time at RichardDawkins.Net, but apparently the Great Man has never noticed.

The Greatly Liked and Respected Person responds:

You will notice that the forum has in fact been closed to comments (not taken down) sooner than the 30 days alluded to in the letter. This is purely and simply because of the over-the-top hostility of the comments that were immediately sent in. Note that there is no suggestion of abolishing the principle of a forum in which commenters can start their own threads. Just an editorial re-organization, which will include a change such that the choice of new threads will be subject to editorial control. Editorial control, mark you, by the person who, more than any other individual, has earned the right to the editor’s chair by founding the site in the first place, then maintaining its high standard by hard work and sheer talent. The aim of the letter is to describe an exciting new revamping of our site, one in which quality will take precedence over quantity, where original articles on reason and science, on atheism and scepticism, will be commissioned, where frivolous gossip will be reduced. The new plan may succeed or it may fail, but I think it is worth trying. And even if it fails, it most certainly will not deserve the splenetic hysteria that the mere suggestion of it has received.


Surely there has to be something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language, over-reacting so spectacularly to something so trivial. Even some of those with more temperate language are responding to the proposed changes in a way that is little short of hysterical. Was there ever such conservatism, such reactionary aversion to change, such vicious language in defence of a comfortable status quo? What is the underlying agenda of these people? How can anybody feel that strongly about something so small? Have we stumbled on some dark, territorial atavism? Have private fiefdoms been unwittingly trampled?

Be that as it may, what this remarkable bile suggests to me is that there is something rotten in the Internet culture that can vent it. If I ever had any doubts that RD.net needs to change, and rid itself of this particular aspect of Internet culture, they are dispelled by this episode.

It seems that the Greatly Liked and Respected Person has never noticed that his fans get hysterical all the time. 

Also, while he blames "internet culture" - which is fair to some extent - he also needs to look at the psychology of the fanbase he attracts.  These are people who are literally what Eric Hoffer describes as "True Believers."  They have escaped the burden of their frustrated lives by investing themselves in an ideology that gives their life meaning.  As fans they are fanatics, and, consequently, anything that frustrates their ability to escape into the thing that give them meaning is, to them, an evil that needs to be purged from existence.

Want to be an instant hero to the libertine Left?

Live-tweet your abortion.

Isn't it called the right of privacy for a reason?

And in case the message about the culture of death isn't enough, listen to her video:



Angie the Anti-theist says that "abortion is not that bad."  Unless, of course, you are the child being aborted by your mother, then it probably is that bad.

Also, Angie the Anti-theist assures us that abortion is medically necessary for her because of her health risks, but if pregnancy was such a risk for her, why is she risking her life on contraceptive technology that she says doesn't always work, much less on a pill that is associated with deaths and other health risks? Is this woman suicidal?  For her, sex apparently involves an irreducible risk of death, so shouldn't she just stop that risky behavior, which is the source of the threats to her life.

But, again, the most amazing reaction is the crowd of liberals at the Frisky site who declare that Angie the Anti-theist is their hero ... for murdering her unborn child.  Presumably, if Angie does away with her four year old son - who she arbitrarily chose to let live - then they will award her with Profile in Courage status.

There is something very sick in this.

Language can be so Cool.

As much of an American chauvinist as I am, I have to admit that Brit politicians are just so much better at dealing out clever put-downs than any American. Nigel Farage in this video levels the new EU president, while asking a very serious question. To wit, who are you and how did you become President?

Burning through Credibility

The President shows that if you are going to take a professorial tone, you'd better have your facts straight.

Let's get into that Curling action!

I did not know that women curlers - as in the Olympic Sport, not the appliance - were such, well, babes. This calendar makes me want to take an interest in this dynamic and nuanced sport, which will certainly approach the popularity of beach Volleyball in no time.


File under "Public Service Announcement."

File under "Give your criminal defense lawyer a hug."


Woman recants rape allegations that put man in jail for 3 years. The bad news is that she put this guy in jail for the most trivial of reason, which is pure evil. The good news is that she had enough of a conscience to finally do the right thing, which is good. The guy apparently had a long rap sheet, which did most of the work of convincing everyone that he had done what he hadn't done.

It's alarming how easy it can sometimes be to send someone to jail for a crime they didn't commit, which ties into the statistic that 40% of rape allegations are false.  Not unsubstantiated. False.

Canadian Content

From the Great White North, where it is controversial not to die in the name of socialized medicine like a commoner.

File under "Our Country is in the Best of Hands."


Harry Reid offers a pernicious sexual stereotype -

"I met with some people while I was home dealing with domestic abuse. It has gotten out of hand. Why? Men don't have jobs. Women don't have jobs either, but women aren’t abusive, most of the time. Men, when they're out of work, tend to become abusive. Our domestic crisis shelters in Nevada are jammed."

Secular Ideology trumps Conscience and Social Welfare

Catholic Charities is ending its foster care program and will soon be ending its adoption services in the District of Columbia because of DC's refusal to allow a conscience clause.

Does Richard Dawkins Exist?

The Pius Wars - Round II

The reviewer of "Did Pius XII Help the Jews" responded to my comment:

Again, I hesitate to spend too much time on this unfortunate time in Catholic life. Why don't people write more about the great Catholics, famous and unknown, the priests who spend time helping the homeless, church members who help the poor and handicapped, nuns toiling in obscurity helping the aged with the only thanks that they are doing something that is good and honorable. Write about Catholic opposition to slavery and its horrors. But no you chose to again discuss Pius and the murder of Jews and others, women, children, the medical experimentation, torture, and stacking of dead bodies.


Agreed that Pope Pius provided substantial help to the Jews in Rome, which negates the argument that he wished to help Nazis. Had his legacy with others been equal, we can agree that we would be remembering his courage. Instead, his followers and other Christians help imprison, torture, and murder so many, in so many cruel ways, mwomen and children included. How about Poland. What help did he provide.

You quoted a passage Mit Brennender Sorge, which said in part:

"Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value,...

Not much of a condemnation to me. "However necessary and honorable", the torture of defense persons, the murder of children, medical experiments, these are things that are "necessary and honorable." Why would the Nazis murderers honorable and why were the horrors necessary. Sadly Pius followers played a sad role in murder. This type of statements cannot be seen as a condemnation to deter.

Why not write. No German should murder children. No German should murder women. Do not kill civilians. Even if one accepts the German war machine, there are standards of morality that were freely violated.

My counter-response:

My point in writing what I did was to suggest to readers that there is a deeper historical context to understand Pius XII than was suggested by the two dimensional "if I had been there, I would have done it right" perspective of Bobby's review. For example, I questioned Bobby's claim that "Nazis and Christians saw no Inconsistency Between Christian Teachings, and Nazi teachings..." by quoting from Mit Brennender Sorge which showed taught the Catholic doctrine that "Whoever exalts race...and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds. "


Since the Nazis "exalted race" and "divinized race to an idolatrous" level, the fair conclusion is that the future Pius XII - the author of Mit Brennendor Sorge - was teaching that Nazism was inconsistent with Catholicism, notwithstanding whatever broad brush Bobby and a conventional wisdom sadly ignorant of the actual history might choose to publish.

Bobby's response is to take exception to the phrase "However necessary and honorable" as if it applied to the barbaric practices that the Nazi regime practiced, as opposed to what the relevant sentence is talking about, to wit "any other fundamental value of the human community." It is a sad - but apparently too deep for a lot of people to understand - fact that human nature has the ability to take any fundamental value - freedom, democracy, equality - and turn it into an idol that distorts it into something that can dehumanize those who idolize it.

I asked whether Bobby was aware of the facts that I pointed too, but did not get an answer to that question. I suspect that the answer is "no" in that he seems not to understand that Mit Brennender Sorge was written in 1937, when Nazi anti-semitic legislation was just beginning to ramp up, when a good number of American political and business leaders, including John F. Kennedy's father, were still enamored of Hitler, and a full 18 months before Kristalnacht. But, as is typical for this kind of writing instead of praising Pius XI and the future Pius XII for being the lone voice of dissent in 1937's long litany of rampant anti-semitism, Bobby criticizes Pius for not saying quite enough.

Of course, for some people, there would always be something else that needed to be said. Thus, Bobby asks "Why not write. No German should murder children. No German should murder women. Do not kill civilians. Even if one accepts the German war machine, there are standards of morality that were freely violated." But this is tendentious. These things were said, repeatedly. Certainly, Bobby is not really suggesting that the Germans who killed women and children and committed atrocities were unaware of the moral implications of their actions. It is a signal fact that the Nazis developed their "impersonal" methods of mass killing because of the high incidence of nervous breakdowns among those who served on the death squads. Morality is apparently a hard thing to totally wipe out. So, one is permitted to ask, what were Germans supposed to learn from a restatement of the 10 Commandments that they didn't already know? Although if Bobby were to be fair, he would acknowledge that Pius XII sent many private protests against Nazi atrocities.

Likewise, Bobby is probably unaware of the Nazi response to Mit Brennender Sorge: "The reaction to the encyclical's publication was immediate. The German regime sent a formal protest to Rome; it was swiftly rejected by Cardinal Pacelli. An enraged Hitler and Goebbels gave orders to bring to trial dozens of clerics on charges of immorality and "slanders against the State." Gestapo and SS squads were dispatched to find which presses had produced the encyclical: 12 were confiscated and editors rounded up. In one parish, Essen in the diocese of Oldenburg, seven girls were arrested inside a church as they handed out copies after the Palm Sunday service. "

This was part of a steady barrage of Anti-Catholic persecution on the part of the Nazis. Such policy was not persecution was not unique in German history - Bismark had started the Kulturkampf for the same reason that Hitler suppressed Catholics - both realized that Catholics were a substantial minority in a largely Protestant state which had separatist tendencies. This last fact made Catholics dangerous and distinctly unNazi. Accordingly, among other things, the Nazis - like the Communists had done for their movement - prohibited church attending Catholics from being members of the Nazi Party. Anyone surprised by this really ought to read Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" for the reasons why these totalitarian mass movements adopted such similar policies.

Bobby writes: "Agreed that Pope Pius provided substantial help to the Jews in Rome, which negates the argument that he wished to help Nazis. Had his legacy with others been equal, we can agree that we would be remembering his courage."

Note that Bobby seems to concede that Pius showed great personal courage in personally helping the Jewish community in Rome at his own risk. But he ignores the fact that it has long been conceded that the Catholic Church - at the orders of Pius XII - rescued and assisted more Jews during the Holocaust than any other organization, private or governmental, according to the study by Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide. It is therefore calumny to write "...you chose to again discuss Pius and the murder of Jews and others, women, children, the medical experimentation, torture, and stacking of dead bodies" as if Pius was proximately responsible for any of that.

Also notice that Bobby doesn't address any of the other historical points that I brought up.

If anyone is interested in getting a different perspective on Pius XII - something other than the Monday Morning Quarterbacking of those safely sitting in their living rooms long after the era of totalitarian nightmares have ended - I recommend Ronald Rychlak's "Hitler, the War and the Pope."

Alibis and Achievement

"There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life."

--- Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

Father Barron on John Paul II and Spiritual Discipline



After listening to that, check out the ignorant hooting that passes for "deep thought" among the Truly Reformed that Dave Armstrong is patiently correcting, in his own form of spiritual discipline.

If only Southern Baptists could marry.

Part of a continuing saga about how sin is an equal opportunity condition.

Aquinas

Summa Theologica - Question 113 - The Guardianship of the Good Angels.

ST 113
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Straws in the Wind

Here is Mike Flynn's Thomistic critique of Intelligent Design and an atheist's critique of Darwinism.

Flynn's post makes some wonderfully intersting points. For example:

Also Darwin tried to explain species while denying the real existence of species which is rather problematical:

"I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other..." -- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

This is raw nominalism, and as such philosophically incoherent. If a species is only a term, what exactly is 'evolving'?

Yes, it is, and who knew that Darwin was such a nominalist?

And this:

Much of the modern problem of understanding stems from the rejection of final causes. This was due to fear of Early Moderns that if final causes were recognized, then God would have to be admitted. That is, establishing finality is hard; but once you do, God pops out like Jack-in-the-Box which startles small children and modern sophisticates. But this gets it backward. Aquinas thought that finality in nature was obvious, but reasoning from there to God was very difficult. After all, Aristotle saw finality in nature too; but never concluded a God from it.


Hence, the modern sees everything in terms of a certain kind of efficient cause, and the old idea of God is pasteurized into an engineer sitting at a drafting table having a bit of fun with the platypus before getting down to the serious business of puff adders and praying mantises. God must be some sort of efficient cause, too; right?

Actually, evolution is very hard to get to using only efficient causality. Not even Dawkins can avoid teleology in his writings. (His famous example of deriving a sentence from a series of random letters is not only teleological -- he has the target sentence already in mind; but unDarwinian -- the intermediate sentences do not make sense and so are "unfit" for their niche as information-bearers. The real trick is to start with an intelligible sentence and, by accumulating random mutations and eliminating the results that become unintelligible, wind up with a different sentence. Better yet: start with the Don Quixote genome (biblionome?) and watch it mutate into Moby Dick!

It makes much more sense when viewed from the four Aristotelian causes, including finality.

Because, without finality, efficient causes make no sense. If there is not something in A that "points toward" B, then how can A cause B "always or for the most part and not cause C or D or nothing at all. Hume realized this and wound up denying causality, too. There is only correlation.

Pfui, sez I. Which is about what ibn Rushd said to al-Ghazali (who had said much the same as Hume).

The proof of finality is the existence of natural laws. Science thus denies finality while quietly relying upon it. Falling bodies move to the point of lowest gravitational potential. Complex systems move toward equilibrium in "attractor basins" with sometimes "strange attractors." Tiger cubs mature into adult tigers, and never into tiger lilies. The adult tiger is the final cause of the maturation of the tiger cub.

(If finality really does imply God, as Aquinas reasoned, then the existence of a natural law of evolution is an evidence for God's existence, rather than against.)

So far, it seems that St. Thomas is ahead on points.

Even crazy conservatives who fly their planes into IRS buildings....

...can be Anti-Catholic.

It's like you just can't get away from it.  This is from Joe Stack's Anti-Goverment suicide diatribe:

My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t steeling from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.

He also has unkind words for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Sad man.  Lord be merciful.

The Pius Wars

An Amazon review of Margherita Marcchione's "Did Pius Help the Jews?"  includes this farrago of historical urban legend masquerading as things that everyone knows:

The case against Pius though looks compelling. He signed an agreement with the Nazi party which he never repudiated, oversaw the German Catholic Church as attacks on Jews turned from vandalism, harassment, loss of jobs to mprisonment, starvation, medical experiment, and extermination of men, women, and children like Anne Frank. His comments were vague and ineffective, and his regime saw the involvement of German Catholics (along with Lutherans) in the most horrible acts known to man. German Catholics along with Lutherans and other Christians arranged the burning of temples, the destruction of Jewish business, and the arrest of women and children --- as a start. They want to arrange for the organization of extermination camps, and the developement of a modern, orderly system of death. As one German might have said- they talk about Ben Ladin and the 3,000 people killed on 9/11, we killed that number in one week. We pushed the Jews in, starved them, and then killed them, one week, I helped kill 3,431 and was chastized for being slow. For the average German Catholic, it was church on Sunday, during the week help capture Jewish children and women and others, put them in concentration camps, and arrange for their orderly extermination. So let's look at Pius's defense.

Unfortunately, this broad brush tar job is so well-ingrained that it takes root without ever hearing the facts.

So I dropped this into the comment section of that review:

How do you square your arguments with the unquestioned fact that Pius XII was personally responsible for hiding and supporting thousands of Jews on Papal properties in Rome? Also, how does Pius XII's authorship of Mit Brennender Sorge, which told loyal Catholics that the Nazi regime had violated its treaty with the Catholic Church, square with your claim that Pius never repudiated the treaty between the German State and the Catholic Church that was agreed to by his predecessor, Pius XI, which you describe as Pius XII's agreement with the "Nazi Party"? Also, what effect do you think Mit Brennender Sorge had on German Catholics when it said:

"8.Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds. "

And:

"11. None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket" (Isaiah xI, 15). "

Would you consider those statements as explicit condemenation of Nazi ideology?

Would you believe that an official Papal reminder in German to the German people at the height of Nazi popularity that "Human laws in flagrant contradiction with the natural law are vitiated with a taint which no force, no power can mend", to be something that the Nazi Party would have seen as a subversively, anti-Nazi statement.

What is the significance of Pius XII's first encyclical? What is it's name? When was it issued? What did it do? Would you agree that Piux XII's first official action in appointing native bishops from many different races was subversive of the Nazi ideology based on race?

Who wrote this?

"48. In accordance with these principles of equality, the Church devotes her care to forming cultured native clergy and gradually increasing the number of native Bishops. And in order to give external expression to these, Our intentions, We have chosen the forthcoming Feast of Christ the King to raise to the Episcopal dignity at the Tomb of the Apostles twelve representatives of widely different peoples and races. In the midst of the disruptive contrasts which divide the human family, may this solemn act proclaim to all Our sons, scattered over the world, that the spirit, the teaching and the work of the Church can never be other than that which the Apostle of the Gentiles preached."

How does that compare with Nazi racism?

Who wrote this:

"Convinced that the use of force on one side would be answered by recourse to arms on the other, We considered it a duty inseparable from Our Apostolic office and of Christian Charity to try every means to spare mankind and Christianity the horrors of a world conflagration, even at the risk of having Our intentions and Our aims misunderstood."

Does adopting the position of a mediator invite misunderstanding?

If Pius XII's conduct was so obviously inadequate, why did Albert Einstein write that Pius was the only European leader who had maintained a steadfastly anti-Nazi position? Why did the Rabbi of Rome convert and take the name Eugenio in honor of Pius XII?

Did you know any of this before you wrote your review?

Perhaps questions will spark some people to look into Pius' actual record.

An alternative Ash Wednesday Liturgy.


But I do think that the acclamation "And also with you and your camel" should be worked into more liturgical events.

File under "The irony is so thick you can cut it with a knife."

Elitist snobs Janeane Garafolo and Rosie O'Donnell dish on Elizabeth Hasselback for being stupid and "unsympathetic" while being unsympathetic to Hasselback and her views.

Funneeee!

Maybe they should teach sex education to Yale law students and see if that works, before they start in on impressionable teen-agers.

CNN legal news analyst, Harvard grad and married guy Jeffry Toobin is squaring off against Yale Law School graduate Casey Greenfield - the daughter of columnist Jeff Greenfield - over a paternity suit invovling their child.  Things are chilly.  She won't let him see the child. He's not paying legal support.  His wife is nowhere to be heard from.  Her father won't return calls.

Isn't sex education supposed to be the answer for our 14 year olds?

Didn't these people get sex education before they went to Ivy League law schools?

Also, it's interesting how poorly watched CNN must be inasumuch as this is the best kept scandal in media history.

 

Communio Thursday

We are doing Q. 113 - "The Guardianship of the Good Angels."

Newsflash: Journalist exploits Crazy Obama Supporter to Smear Conservatives.

Legal Insurrection points out that it was just a matter of time before the media would find a way to link the crazy socialist Darwinist professor Amy Bishop with Tea Parties, but one journalist has managed to create a link where there is none, and ignore the real story.

According to Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurreciton, "Keep repeating Amy Bishop and Tea Party in the headlines, and it will not be long before 35% of Democrats believe there is a connection."

Greece to be Reduced to a Satrapy of an Imperial Power, again.

Maybe this is a good idea, but is it what people thought they were signing up for in joining the European Union - namely, that they could lose their democracy to a bureaucracy in Belgian:

Greece loses EU voting power in blow to sovereignty

While the symbolic move to suspend Greece of its voting rights at one meeting makes no practical difference, it marks a constitutional watershed and represents a crushing loss of sovereignty.


"We certainly won't let them off the hook," said Austria's finance minister, Josef Proll, echoing views shared by colleagues in Northern Europe. Some German officials have called for Greece to be denied a vote in all EU matter until it emerges from "receivership".

Follower of Darwinian-Socialism had a History of Violence.

This Io-9 post on the Biology professor turned murderess is fascinating in a can't-look-away-from-the-car-wreck kind of way.  Io-9 is interested in clearing Amy Bishop of the charge that D&D unhinged her, but the woman had a history of violence going back to killing her brother and assaulting another woman in an IHOP who had taken the last booster seat:

In March, 2002, Bishop walked into an International House of Pancakes in Peabody with her family, asked for a booster seat for one of her children, and learned the last seat had gone to another mother.


Bishop, according to a police report, strode over to the other woman, demanded the seat and launched into a profanity-laced rant.

When the woman would not give the seat up, Bishop punched her in the head, all the while yelling "I am Dr. Amy Bishop."

Bishop received probation and prosecutors recommended that she be sent to anger management classes, though it is unclear from court documents whether a judge ever sent her there.

The woman, identified in court documents as Michelle Gjika, declined to comment, saying only "It's not something I want to relive."

She also had an advisor who received two pipe bombs after criticizing her work.

And she wanted to build a living computer.

McInerny on Aquinas

The Higher Sodomy

Ontario students will be required to undergo homosexual indoctrination. 

Public school children in Hamilton, Ontario will not be permitted to withdraw from classes that promote homosexuality, according to the Hamilton Mountain News. At the same time, according to a leaked document obtained by a local journalist, teachers are being instructed to tell parents who object to the curriculum that “this is not about parent rights.”


At the end of January, the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) hosted a professional development day dedicated to “equity” training, where they distributed a sheet to teachers with “quick responses” they can offer to parents who object to the school board's “anti-homophobia” curriculum.

And:

The sheet given to the HWDSB teachers specifies that teachers do not “condone” the removal of children from classes that deal with homosexuality. If told, “This is against our rights as parents to teach our own set of family values,” the board suggests teachers offer the following responses:

- “As teachers, we do not condone children being removed from our classes when we teach about Aboriginal People, people of color, people with disabilities or gays and lesbians.

- “You can teach your child your own values at home. Public schools teach everyone about respecting diversity and valuing everyone

- “This is not about parent rights. Children have the right to an inclusive education free from discrimination.”

Via Mark Shea

The Liberal/Libertarian Alliance is Over

Atheist/Socialist blogger P.Z. Myers has called out his roving bands of attack warthogs to wage jihad on atheist libertarians.  Much fun ensues.

Theist/Libertarian Vox Day comments from the sidelines.

What kicked off the internecine atheist blood-letting was this interview with Socialist Review by Science Fiction writer Iain Banks, which furnishes solid reasons for kicking in with the libertarians:

There's also the stuff about how power is distributed, but part of the guarantee is that there's a whole class of drones, or conscious machines, who are slightly more intelligent than humans, as a rule. When the Culture talks about "people" that means them as well, and they are inherently more rational, less exposed to emotionalism than people. And then of course there are the Minds - with a capital "M" in the finest tradition of fantasy - who are super-ultra-madly intelligent, well mainly, and way beyond either the human equivalent drones or humans themselves. They are a very, very advanced society with quite good morals really. They occasionally resort to dirty tricks, but they can always prove it was the right thing to do because they use statistics.

I like the part about using genetic engineering drone people and proving that they have done the right things through statistics.

Socialism - a system that treats people like things.

An Honest and Provocative Examination of a Belief System

Professor James Spiegel’s “The Making of an Atheist” will undoubtedly polarize the reviews that will be offered here and on other forums. Spiegel’s thesis is that atheists are atheists not because of their intellectual doubts about the evidence offered for the existence of God, but because they choose by an act of will to disbelieve the evidence that does exist. Moreover, and undoubtedly more controversial, Spiegel argues that the “will to disbelieve” is motivated in many cases by psychological factors, such as the atheist’s bad relationship with his father, or by an attachment to an immoral lifestyle.

Spiegel’s book is short – it can be read within the space of one evening – but Spiegel makes a strong case for his position in a short space of pages. Spiegel points out that there is evidence for the existence of God in a number of areas, which Spiegel argues is overwhelming. Spiegel’s assertion in that regard will undoubtedly cause a flurry of name-calling and nay-saying but his point about the odds of life being orders of magnitude beyond that which statisticians as a general rule consider to be impossible, and his point about atheists like Bertrand Russell accepting the existence of matter as “brute fact” that cannot be questioned, even by philosophers whose job is to question everything, goes a long way to establishing that there is evidence that requires a judgment.

Even more controversial will be Spiegel’s point that the reason that atheists in general do not see that there is evidence for God, whether overwhelming or not, is because they choose not to see such evidence. Speigel makes a solid case for the proposition that humans choose beliefs based as much on an act of the will as on an act of the mind by offering an analogy based on Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Obviously, this point should not be controversial: it has been a mainstay position of Western philosophy going back to Aquinas and Augustine. Further, atheists often attribute this position to theists. But it will come as a blow for those who still adhere to a juvenile view of science and logic to find that they are not, in fact, Mr. Spock, but are heirs to same cognitive foibles as the common run of humanity.

What should get atheists calling for Professor Spiegel’s blood, however, is his point that atheism is a product of psychological and/or cognitive malfunctioning. Spiegel offers data on the number of the historical “great atheists” who were lousy human beings with father issues, and extends from this data, and from Alvin Plantinga’s work on the self-defeating principle of naturalism, that denying the evidence of God’s existence is a kind of “epistemic malfunction.”

These points are going to wound the pride of many atheists, but I think that atheists should commend Spiegel for shining a light into the atheist world. Just as Professor Spiegel notes that Christians should be thankful for the atheist critique of religious hypocrisy when such criticism is true, atheists should welcome truthful criticism of their praxis.

In his courage to raise the politically incorrect topic of the connection between a practical commitment to immoral behavior and an intellectual commitment to atheism, Professor Spiegel deserves a vote of thanks by everyone interested in a truthful discussion about the role of belief and unbelief. It has become very unfashionable or socially gauche for theists to assert that atheists, as a group, have a disproportionate commitment to what has traditionally been called “depravity,” although it is manifest that a similar rule does not apply to atheist discussions about theist practices. Nonetheless, Spiegel’s anecdotal observations about those whom he observed entering atheism are not unique to him. I had a close friend - a critic of religion and all but a self-declared atheist - who turned out to be a closet meth smoker, porn addict who offered the same apologia for his lifestyle as that which Professor Spiegel attributes to Kinsey (p.77) at a time when his life was collapsing and he was losing his family. I’ve been on Philosophy forums where I’ve had hard core anonymous atheist posters confess to their problems with their families and/or their commitment to wife-swapping as part of their justification of their atheism or their reasons for hating one established church in particular. In one extended thread in a Philosophy forum, I watched dozens of atheist argue about why it was permissible to laugh at someone who had tripped and fell down a flight of stairs in their lecture hall, but not one offered the idea that it was probably wrong to laugh at the misfortunes of others.

Professor Spiegel doesn’t mention the idea of “cognitive dissonance” in his discussion of “paradigm shifts,” but the contrast between what other people see and how atheists perceive themselves should be some evidence of “epistemic malfunction.” Insofar as people truly see atheists behaving in these selfish and self-justifying ways, then atheists may want to look at their own lives to see if they really do live the lives of virtue that they often claim they live.

The backbone of Professor Spiegel’s argument is a Pauline explanation for the phenomenon of atheism, which might be summarized as “sin makes you stupid.” I’m not normally comfortable with biblical exegesis as a basis for philosophy, but that probably reflects a prejudice on my part. I found Professor Spiegel’s use of Calvin’s idea of the “sensus divinitatis” to be an interesting approach to reading Reformed concepts into a contemporary discussion.

My criticism of the book is that it is simply too short. It is an excellent quick read and summary argument, but I would have preferred to see more development of his empirical arguments for the connection of praxis and belief.

4 out of 5 stars.
 
Here is Professor Spiegel's blog.

Nuclear Fresno

From the Central Valley Business Times:

The person who might ultimately be the one to head the building of a nuclear power plant in Fresno is scheduled to be the featured speaker at a meeting there in March.


Anne Lauvergeon, a nuclear energy proponent and CEO of Areva SA, of Paris, France, will be the featured speaker at a luncheon hosted by Economic Development Corporation serving Fresno County on March 23.

Ms. Lauvergeon has been at the helm of Areva since 2001. Areva is one of the largest European nuclear power plant construction companies and has been picked to develop the proposed Fresno plant.

Ms. Lauvergeon will be on a trip to the Valley to meet with EDC stakeholder the Fresno Nuclear Energy Group about locating a power plant in Fresno County.

The event is open to the public. There is a charge: $35 tickets for EDC members, $45 tickets for general admission. The price includes lunch.

If the Iranians and the French can have nukes, then why not Fresno?

The Book of Eli

Father Barron has his typically insightful review of the movie.

Warning:  Spoilers!

Liberal Rules

Making fun of the handicapped is insensitive, unless it is done to ridicule Sarah Palin.

Scratch an Atheist, Find a Fundamentalist

This blog summarizes an observation from Cardinal Schonborn

3. Fundamentalism and Scientism are Twins.

Cardinal Schonborn said that the agnostic scientist and the fundamentalist believer essentially have the same understanding of God. Both, victims of nominalism, see God as entirely other, as inscrutable and unintelligible. Such a God is so “foreign” to our experience that we either shrug our shoulders and say, “Who knows?” and look to reason without faith to explain the universe or we accept a religion that is irrational, that we follow out of “blind obedience.”

Cardinal Schonborn said that we don’t follow God out of “blind obedience,” and neither do we follow him only after figuring everything out. We follow him in faith, and deepen our faith with reason.

He quoted a principle of Aquinas which I had never heard before: “Do not defend your faith with stupid arguments, because you make faith ridiculous to the unfaithful.”

Dinosaurs evolved from Birds

Wait long enough and even theories evolve:

"We're finally breaking out of the conventional wisdom of the last 20 years, which insisted that birds evolved from dinosaurs and that the debate is all over and done with," [zoologist John] Ruben said. "This issue isn't resolved at all. There are just too many inconsistencies with the idea that birds had dinosaur ancestors, and this newest study adds to that."


. . . Birds may have had an ancient common ancestor with dinosaurs, but they evolved separately on their own path, and after millions of years of separate evolution birds also gave rise to the raptors. Small animals such as velociraptor that have generally been thought to be dinosaurs are more likely flightless birds, he said.

"Raptors look quite a bit like dinosaurs but they have much more in common with birds than they do with other theropod dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus," Ruben said. "We think the evidence is finally showing that these animals which are usually considered dinosaurs were actually descended from birds, not the other way around."

From the original Science Daily article:

In their own research, including one study just last year in the Journal of Morphology, OSU scientists found that the position of the thigh bone and muscles in birds is critical to their ability to have adequate lung capacity for sustained long-distance flight, a fundamental aspect of bird biology. Theropod dinosaurs did not share this feature. Other morphological features have also been identified that are inconsistent with a bird-from-dinosaur theory. And perhaps most significant, birds were already found in the fossil record before the elaboration of the dinosaurs they supposedly descended from. That would be consistent with raptors descending from birds, Ruben said, but not the reverse.


OSU research on avian biology and physiology has been raising questions on this issue since the 1990s, often in isolation. More scientists and other studies are now challenging the same premise, Ruben said. The old theories were popular, had public appeal and "many people saw what they wanted to see" instead of carefully interpreting the data, he said.

"Pesky new fossils...sharply at odds with conventional wisdom never seem to cease popping up," Ruben wrote in his PNAS commentary. "Given the vagaries of the fossil record, current notions of near resolution of many of the most basic questions about long-extinct forms should probably be regarded with caution."

Well said

Ann Althouse nails the points that I've been fluttering around with the last series of posts on Global Warming scholarly malpractice - as well as prayer study post:

Everyone should perceive flaws! To talk about "sceptics" as the ones who will "seize" upon "evidence" of flaws is unwittingly to make global warming into a matter of religion and not science. It's not the skeptics who look bad. "Seize" sounds willful, but science should motivate us to grab at evidence. It's the nonskeptics who look bad. It's not science to be a true believer who wants to ignore new evidence. It's not science to support a man who has the job of being a scientist but doesn't adhere to the methods of science.

Exactly. 

Why Leftist Feminists are so Popular


Two movements are adamantly opposed to Valentine's Day - well, three if you include bitter, single, divorced men who go out and heckle Valentine's day daters - Muslim fundamentalists and feminazis.  About the latter, this article from Front Page observes:

In the West, meanwhile leftist feminists are not to be outdone by their jihadi allies in reviling — and trying to kill — Valentine’s Day. Throughout all Women’s Studies Programs on American campuses, for instance, you will find the demonization of Valentine’s Day, since, as the disciples of Andrea Dworkin angrily explain, the day is a manifestation of how capitalist and homophobic patriarchs brainwash and oppress women and push them into spheres of powerlessness. As a person who spent more than a decade in academia, I was privileged to witness this grotesque attack and “deconstruction” of Valentine’s Day at close range. Feminist icons like Jane Fonda, meanwhile, help lead the attack on Valentine’s Day in society at large. As David Horowitz has documented, Fonda has led the campaign to transform this special day into “V-Day” (“Violence against Women Day”) — which is, when it all comes down to it, a day of hate, featuring a mass indictment of men.

So, ladies, if you really want to throw off the chains of patriarchal oppression, tell that special man in your life where he can stick those diamonds, perfume and dinner out.

Yeah, I'm sure that is going to rally the sisters.

More Cracks in the AGW Wall

According to the Times of London, increased temperature readings may be the result of urbanization and other factors that do not reflect general temperature:

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.


In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.


These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.


The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.

Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.

His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.

Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

Also note this in relation to the post immediately below:

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30 years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data.


Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought.”

So, Dr. Pope warns that the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought - Panic! - but Dr. Johnson says that there has been no warming since 1995.








 

Scientist Acknowledges History, Maybe

The inventor of the infamous global warming "Hockey Stick" graph is acknowledging that his data was not "well organized" and that there is a "real issue" about whether the Middle Ages were warmer than today.

This was during the "Medieval Warm Period," when it was warm enough for Vikings to settle in Greenland.

As a history major, I learned all about the effects of the Medieval Warm Period in allowing European populations to increase and providing an environment that allowed the Vikings to erupt out of Scandinavia.  Then, all this Global Warming stuff and it was like people had just forgotten this bit of history.

Like I've always said, I will get nervous about "Global Warming" and the DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD when we can grow wheat in Greenland.

From the BBC article:

Phil Jones, the professor behind the "Climategate" affair, has admitted some of his decades-old weather data was not well enough organised.


He said this contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics - a decision he says he regretted.

But Professor Jones said he had not cheated over the data, or unfairly influenced the scientific process.

Fraud includes providing only a half-truth without the necessary qualifications that allow the receiver of the information to properly weigh the information.  In this case, the necessary qualification would have been that Jones data was not well organized and that he was withholding the raw data to spare himself the embarrassment of people learning that his data organization rendered his conclusions subject to criticism.

So, instead, he presented one view of the data, didn't reveal the weakness of his methodology and permitted supporters to declare that anyone who doubted his "hockey stick" graph was insane.

That's fraud.

He said he stood by the view that recent climate warming was most likely predominantly man-made.


But he agreed that two periods in recent times had experienced similar warming. And he agreed that the debate had not been settled over whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the current period

Well, no one previously said "predominantly" and no said that the debate hadn't been settled.  Rather, they sent the MWP down Orwell's "information hole."

Shouldn't the debate be "settled" before we cripple the economy?  Might it not be important to learn whether the Middle Ages were warmer and why that might be the case, in light of the fact that their were no carbon emitting industries way back then?

Just asking.

Interesting Update:

The BBC article didn't mention this bit from the BBC interview, which the Daily Mail supplies:

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.


And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made

So, no statistically significant warming since 1995, i.e., during the same period that we have been repeatedly told that Global Warming has been established as a fact.

Why did the BBC article not mention the "inconvenient truth" that the scientist it interviewed said that there was no statistically significant warming since 1995?

Perhaps, it has something to do with the fact that the BBC has its pension money invested in Global Warming:

STRIKING parallels between the BBC’s coverage of the global warming debate and the activities of its pension fund can be revealed today.


The corporation is under investigation after being inundated with complaints that its editorial coverage of climate change is biased in favour of those who say it is a man-made phenomenon.

The £8billion pension fund is likely to come under close scrutiny over its commitment to promote a low-carbon economy while struggling to reverse an estimated £2billion deficit.

Concerns are growing that BBC journalists and their bosses regard disputed scientific theory that climate change is caused by mankind as “mainstream” while huge sums of employees’ money is invested in companies whose success depends on the theory being widely accepted.

The fund, which has 58,744 members, accounts for about £8 of the £142.50 licence fee and the proportion looks likely to rise while programme budgets may have to be cut to help reduce the deficit.

The BBC is the only media organisation in Britain whose pension fund is a member of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, which has more than 50 members across Europe.

Its chairman is Peter Dunscombe, also the BBC’s Head of Pensions Investment.

Prominent among its recent campaigns was a call for a “strong and binding” global agreement on climate change – one that fell on deaf ears after the UN climate summit in Copenhagen failed to reach agreement on emissions targets and a cut in greenhouse gases.

Veteran journalist and former BBC newsreader Peter Sissons is unhappy with the corporation’s coverage.

Snobby Brit Atheist proves the Existence of God...

...while sticking his foot in his mouth.

Scientists are People - Corrupt and Prejudiced and Greedy - like Everyone Else.

Here is a typical Left-blog hooting at the success of a skeptic obstretician who defeated a defamation claim filed by a researcher whose study the skeptic had criticized.  The hooting comes from the fact that the study involved alleged scientific proof that prayer improved the chances of a couple's succesful in-vitro fertilization.

The thrust of the blog's post is that the evil forces of religious credulity have been vanquished once again by the gleaming righteousness of SCIENCE!

With all due respect, whoop-dee-doo.

In California, in this day and age, defending against defamation suits arising from public comments is about as risky as betting on the sun rising in the morning. California has an "Anti-SLAPP" ("Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) statute that puts the burden on the plaintiff to show up front that he has evidence supporting a prima facie case against the defendant.  Since an element of a case where there is the privilege of a common interest in a subject matter - as would be the case of a researcher criticizing another scientist's research - is malice, the plaintiff would have to show that the defendant personally had it out for the plaintiff as opposed to having some axe to grind with the plaintiff.

Good luck with showing that.

In fact, according to this source, Flamm prevailed under the Anti-SLAPP suit on the grounds that plaintiff could not prove that the allegedly defamatory statement could not be understood in a non-truthful way.

So, it was a short-putt to victory.

So, the results of the lawsuit show the law doing what it is supposed to do, namely, protecting people who participate in public discussions from lawsuits that are not really, really well-founded.

What is interesting, and what the blogger completely misses, is on how many different levels this episode shows the sordidness and corruption that that we are seeing in climate research and other areas.

Let's count the ways.

First, the paper that kicked off the trip to the Superior Court of the State of California was peer reviewed.  According to this interview with the defendant, Dr. Bruce Flamm, in 2001, the Journal of Reproductive Medicine published a paper titled, "Does prayer influence the success of in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer? Report of a masked, randomized trial." 

The Journal of Reproductive Medicine sounds like an official publication targeted to  professional in the field of reproductive medicine, the articles for which would be peer reviewed to make sure that they are consistent with the standards and the paradigmatic assumptions of the field.  Flamm confirms this:

Q: What was it about this study that got under your skin?


A: As soon as I got that issue of the Journal of Reproductive Medicine I was shocked. It was the lead story in the issue. And it showed a phenomenal change. It wasn't 10 percent or 4 percent of the women becoming more fertile. It was a 100 percent jump. If it were true, it would have changed the whole field of infertility. That's what got my attention. All the doctors I know of in my field were talking about this. They said, "If this is true, it is going to change everything." I have many different colleagues with different religious beliefs. Some were very hopeful that this was a big breakthrough not only in medicine but in spirituality - that prayers could make a difference. But most of my other colleagues were smiling in disbelief, saying this was very odd that this got into a peer-reviewed journal.

Flamm was suspicious, so as he says:

A: Just looking through the methodology, things jumped out. And I noticed right away that one of the authors. Daniel Wirth, wasn't a doctor or a PhD. He was a lawyer. I had never seen that before, a lawyer co-authoring a study in a major research journal. So I Google-searched his name and came up with all sorts of very bizarre things. Paranormal healing research. And therapeutic touch, which doesn't actually involve touch. It's about waving your hand above someone and altering their auras.

Hold the presses!  Flamm did what???

He google-searched and discovered that one of the contributors was a lawyer with connections to "paranormal healing research."  How difficult is that?  And these peer-reviewers are supposed to know who's who in their field and who can be trusted and who needs to really show that they have the goods.

So, why didn't the peer-review process pick this up?

That's a darn good question, and one that someone ought to be asking.

So, that's one buried point that this morality tale of science versus religion has to offer.

Second, there is the corrupt stem cell research angle.

Remember when the good people of California voted to indebt themselves to the tune of $3 Billion dollars now, and $6 billion when it was paid back, for stem cell research under Proposition 71?

Well, it appears that one of the researchers in this prayer study had his nose in that particular trough.

The plaintiff was Kwan-Yul Cha.  According to Flamm:

Q: And what about Dr. Cha? He started to have problems after he went after that stem cell grant in California, or was there something before that?


A: At the time the Cha-Lobo-Wirth paper was written, Cha was the head of the Cha Columbia Infertility Center in New York City. It catered to the Korean population and had his picture on the Columbia Web site right next to Lobo's. Soon after the NIH investigation, Lobo was no longer the chairman of the department and the Cha Columbia Infertility Center disappeared.

According to this article, Dr. Cha was in the trough for "seed grant" money under Prop. 71:

The check is not in the mail for La Jolla's Burnham Institute or the CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute of Los Angeles.


Burnham will not be receiving a $638,000 seed grant to fund research that could have led to the creation of new human embryonic stem cell lines, the state stem cell institute revealed yesterday.

And CHA will not be receiving a $2.6 million stem cell cloning grant, the institute said.

And:

The CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute of Los Angeles has withdrawn its application for grant money, said Arlene Chiu, chief scientific officer of the state stem cell institute.


The CHA researchers in Los Angeles wanted funding to make customized nerve cells from patients with Lou Gehrig's disease using human embryonic stem cell lines and a cloning method known as somatic cell nuclear transfer.

The initial approval of CHA's grant request was immediately questioned by taxpayer advocacy groups because of the facility's close ties with a for-profit Korean parent company, CHA Health Systems.

Proposition 71, the state law that created California's stem cell institute and the $3 billion taxpayer-funded research fund it will distribute, requires all grant recipients to be in California.

Meanwhile, CHA's CEO, Kwang Yul Cha, has come under fire as a co-author on a scientific paper that some critics say was identical to one published in a Korean journal. Cha denies any wrongdoing.

I assume that Cha was motivated to sue out of some notion that if he showed everyone that he was really peeved at Flamm's charges, then these other folks - investors, maybe - would believe him when he said they weren't true.  Given the fact that Cha apparently had already lost $2.6 million, this would seem to be a financially weighty matter for him.

Third, the wrong lesson has been learned from this experience.  Here is Flamm's press release on the California Supreme Court denying review - the possibility of the Supreme's granting review was the longest of long shots:

Today's ruling is a victory for science and evidence-based medicine. Scientists must be allowed to question bizarre claims. Cha's mysterious study was designed and allegedly conducted by a man who turned out to be a criminal with a 20-year history of fraud. A criminal who steals the identities of dead children to obtain bank loans and passports is not a trustworthy source of research data. Cha could have simply admitted this obvious fact but instead he hired a team of lawyers to punish me for voicing my opinions. Physicians should debate their opinions in medical journals, not in courts of law. Judges have better things to do with their time and taxpayers have better things to do with their money."

I agree with Flamm's point that scientists - heck, anyone - should be allowed to question bizarre claims. I'll even go so far as to say that anyone should have the right to question any damned claim they feel like without being sued.

But Flamm's qualifications of a victory of science and the right to question "bizarre claims" misses the point that this study passed peer review and was sponsored by someone who apparently had enough scientific street cred to get a $2.6 million grant from the State of California.  What if this study hadn't been "bizarre"? Would that have made Cha any more reliable or trustworthy?  What if he hadn't gone out on a limb with a prayer study and had stayed safely within "science" by cooking research results on more mundane subjects?  Would he ever have been found out?

The major motivating reason for Flamm's interest was that Cha's results were problematic in light of Flamm's materialistic presuppositions about reality.   This is perfectly fair, albeit shouldn't a scientist be open to experimental confirmation or disconfirmation of his presuppositions?

But what if it was an area that Flamm didn't have any bias against?  What if it was a presupposition that Flamm happened to share?  Would that research now be upheld as a model of the scientific method?  Would Cha be cooking results on $2.6 million of our money?

If Cha got as far as he did with as dodgy a study as he had, how much fraud is being succesfully passed off because it confirms the prejudices and expectations held by the individuals who make up the scientific community?

Who knows?  But it does make you think of the embarrassment that is climate research.

"He even has a freakin' Facebook page."

It may be time to re-read "The Name of the Rose."

Mike Potemra at National Review has this tantalizing deconstruction of Eco's novel:

I just finished rereading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, for the first time since the 1980s, and I recommend it strongly to anyone who’s never tried it. The recreation of mediaeval culture and atmosphere is as lovingly detailed as I remember it, but what comes through more strongly a quarter-century later is that the story is an account of the birth of modernity. The ideas at the heart of the book are in this regard more relevant today than they were in 1980, when the book was first published. Then, the world was entering the climactic phase of the extramural conflict known as the Cold War; now, the chief struggle is a domestic one within the bosom of the West, between power groups with different ideas about the proper ordering of society.


For most of Eco’s book, Pope John XXII’s court at Avignon is depicted in the harshest terms – it was rife with all kinds of evil, corruption, and scandal. The book’s hero is an aide to the Emperor, who represents the other side of this struggle – a side that wins major victories, only to show itself, too, full of violence, corruption, and infamy. The book’s historical account leaves the result undecided, but, on a parallel track, its philosophical discussions have made clear that there will be a much longer-term movement toward the recognition that the “simple” people have wisdom, and therefore deserve to rise to power, once all authorities have been justly overthrown. I can’t help seeing in this a reflection of our current political situation: Two years ago, public disgust with George W. Bush and the Republicans was so intense that virtually any Democrat could win. Then Obama and his Democrats took a firm grip on power, and proceeded to alienate everyone with a combination of ideological overreach and sheer blundering fecklessness. The result — not centuries later, as in the process Eco described, but within less than a year — was the rise of a massive populist movement even angrier at Obama than the American people had been at Bush.

At the time of Eco’s story, the early 14th century, the failure of the elites — of the potentates of Church on one side and State on the other — was occasioning intellectual ferment. Without this ferment, there would not have been, two centuries later, the Reformation; without the Reformation, it’s hard to envision the eventual rise of the broad-based franchise in the 19th century. From the discussions of the thinkers of Eco’s 1327, then, we can trace a more or less zigzagging line that takes us all the way to Palin, Beck, and the Tea Parties. Populism can, it is true, sometimes have a savage face, and great atrocities have been committed in its name, so it must be looked at skeptically (as, for that matter, must any other political movement). But Eco’s book reminds us that this sort of revolt against authority has deep roots in Western history, roots that we should honor for their role in making possible the positive achievements of the West.

Putting aside the modern political stuff, the medieval political stuff and the Nominalist v. Realist debate are interesting.

On the Hot Seat

The former head of the IPCC - who knows that there is Global Warming but never read the IPCC report - gets roasted in this interview.

And Entertaining Mystery, but not a Fantastic Fantasy

My review of Charles de Lint's "The Mystery of Grace."

Charles De Lint "The Mystery of Grace" kept me entertained all the way to the end, which is why I gave it 4 stars. It seems that I lose interest in a lot of urban fantasies at some point and then don't have enough interest to finish them, probably because they are cliches based on cliches.


The strength of "The Mystery of Grace" is that there is a bona fide mystery in the story that I wanted explained, namely why does Grace's after-life world only extend several blocks from the Alverson Arms apartment where she lived before her death. This mystery does get explained and resolved in a satisfactory way.

A further strength is de Lint's use of the Southwest as the setting for the development of the characters and their worldview, which includes abuelos and saints and Our Lady of Altagracia.

The opening was very effective, where de Lint set up the mystery of the disappearing tattooed girl.

Finally, de Lint is technically a good writer, and his prose is satisfying and pleasant to follow.

On the other hand, the story was disappointing in the mundaneness of life after death. When Grace returns for her twice a year jaunt, when the spirits haunt the living, it's not very haunting, and Grace is the same person she was before she died. I take it that the banality of the supernatural world followed from de Lint's decision to write the story from Grace's perspective. It is undoubtedly very hard (or impossible) to write a story where the first person narrator is mysterious and spooky to herself.

Likewise, de Lint's nods to multi-culturalism, where everyone is right in their understanding of the mystery of life, so long as they believe in their own faith, to me strenthened the shallowness of Grace's after-life world - it was as if we are finally given the answer to the great mystery of life after death and find out that the answer is the slogan "do your own thing." For example the scene where the residents of the Alverson Arms world confront the McGuffin of the story with their own objects of faith, which for one person - an atheist, I assume - was a copy of Darwin's Descent of Man for me pointed to the problem of a contentless supernatural world, i.e., for heaven's sake, this guy is dead, and he has empirical, experiential proof of a reality beyond the material world, and he is still an atheist?

De Lint was much better, in my opinion, when he was writing from the perspective of the Grace and Conchita's folk Catholicism, because at least, then, there seemed to be some rules for the supernatural world that might have provided a depth and texture to that world. At least when Grace was asking for Our Lady's protection, I had a sense of a mysterious supernatural world that beckoned to my imagination.

Nonetheless, it was a fun book and I felt that I got my money's worth of entertainment value from it.

Aquinas Goes to Hollywood

To return to The Book of Eli, as occasioned by my happenstance reading of p. 12 of Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on Hebrews.

According Aquinas, there are five things required for someone to be a true prophet:

1. That the revelation of things that exceed all human knowledge "otherwise he is not called a prophet but a wise man."

2. That the prophet understands the things revealed. Thomas offers the example of Nabochadneser who didn't understand what was revealed to him; Daniel did, which is why Daniel was the prophet and Nabochadneser was not.

3. That the prophet not be "detained" or carried away in the visible things as if they were things themselves, rather than "figures." We call people who get detained in the visible things, "madmen."

4. That he perceives the things with certitude, otherwise the revelation is a dream and not prophecy.

5. That "there be present the will to announce the things which have been revealed."

The Hughes' Brothers hit all five of Thomas' points in their movie:

1.   How did Eli know where to find this book?  How could he read it?  How did he know that he would have to keep walking until he was directed to a place where the book would be safe?

2.   Eli clearly understood the message to protect the book and deliver it to a place that would be safe, just as he understood the other messages he claimed to have received, such as by walking away from someone with a loaded gun pointed at his back.

3.   Eli isn't "detained" by the voices he hears, rather he understands that the voices are symbols - or figures - that communicate a message.  He also affirms that he isn't crazy, which seems borne out by the eucatastrophic ending.

4.   Eli isn't ever in doubt about his mission.

5.   The ending of the movie is all about announcing what he was ordered to reveal.

I don't think that the Hughes' brothers read Aquinas, but they have created one of the most obvious images of a prophet that has illuminated the silver screen.  Again, it's a surprisingly religious movie and equally surprisingly serious in its depiction of such a basic religious figure.

Gospel Hoax

A defense against the claim that the Secret Gospel of Mark was forged.

The proprietor of the blog site that links to the defense is the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and believes that James "the Brother of Christ" induced the belief in Jesus' resurrection because of his family resemblance to the Messiah.  This makes him a colleague of Bart Ehrman, professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.