Good intentions and fairy dust are like a glittering, yet invisible, and yet magical, shield against the evil of the world.

I know this is wrong, but deep down I really think that an angel gets his wings every time a left wing political activist gets hurt as a result of their activist activities.

Or to paraphase Vox Day, "the ability of the progressive white woman to stare objective reality in the face and insist it doesn't exist never ceases to amaze."

Amanda Kijera, "civic journalist and activist in Haiti," blogs the following at Alternet:

Two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, I started to write what I thought was a very clever editorial about violence against women in Haiti. The case, I believed, was being overstated by women’s organizations in need of additional resources. Ever committed to preserving the dignity of Black men in a world which constantly stereotypes them as violent savages, I viewed this writing as yet one more opportunity to fight “the man” on behalf of my brothers. That night, before I could finish the piece, I was held on a rooftop in Haiti and raped repeatedly by one of the very men who I had spent the bulk of my life advocating for.


It hurt. The experience was almost more than I could bear. I begged him to stop. Afraid he would kill me, I pleaded with him to honor my commitment to Haiti, to him as a brother in the mutual struggle for an end to our common oppression, but to no avail. He didn’t care that I was a Malcolm X scholar. He told me to shut up, and then slapped me in the face. Overpowered, I gave up fighting halfway through the night.

Accepting the helplessness of my situation, I chucked aside the Haiti bracelet I had worn so proudly for over a year, along with it, my dreams of human liberation. Someone, I told myself, would always be bigger and stronger than me. As a woman, my place in life had been ascribed from birth. A Chinese proverb says that “women are like the grass, meant to be stepped on.” The thought comforted me at the same time that it made me cringe.

A dangerous thought. Others like it have derailed movements, discouraged consciousness and retarded progress for centuries. To accept it as truth signals the beginning of the end of a person–or community’s–life and ability to self-love. Resignation means inertia, and for the past two weeks I have inhabited its innards. My neighbors here include women from all over the world, but it’s the women of African descent, and particularly Haitian women, who move me to write now.

Truly, I have witnessed as a journalist and human rights advocate the many injustices inflicted upon Black men in this world. The pain, trauma and rage born of exploitation are terrors that I have grappled with every day of my life. They make one want to strike back, to fight rabidly for what is left of their personal dignity in the wake of such things. Black men have every right to the anger they feel in response to their position in the global hierarchy, but their anger is misdirected.

Women are not the source of their oppression; oppressive policies and the as-yet unaddressed white patriarchy which still dominates the global stage are. Because women–and particularly women of color–are forced to bear the brunt of the Black male response to the Black male plight, the international community and those nations who have benefitted from the oppression of colonized peoples have a responsibility to provide women with the protection that they need.

The United Nations, western women’s organizations and the Haitian government must immediately provide women in Haiti with the funding that they need to build domestic violence and rape crisis centers. Stop dividing Black families by distributing solely to women, which only exaggerates male resentment and frustration in Haiti. Provide both women and men with job training programs that would allow for self-sufficiency as opposed to continued dependency on whites. Lastly, admit that the issue of racial integration might still need addressing on an international level, and then find a way to address it!

I went to Haiti after the earthquake to empower Haitians to self-sufficiency. I went to remind them of the many great contributions that Afro-descendants have made to this world, and of their amazing resilience and strength as a people. Not once did I envision myself becoming a receptacle for a Black man’s rage at the white world, but that is what I became. While I take issue with my brother’s behavior, I’m grateful for the experience. It woke me up, made me understand on a deeper level the terror that my sisters deal with daily. This in hand, I feel comfortable in speaking for Haitian women, and for myself, in saying that we will not be your pawns, racially, politically, economically or otherwise.

So, basically, Ms. Kijera discovered something that her mother probably taught her before she went off to become a "Malcolm X scholar", i.e., some of her "brothers" are, in fact, amoral criminals who don't if their intended victim is a "Malcom X" scholar.  Ms. Kijera demonstrates that she has failed to grasp this basic fact when she announces that she is grateful for the experience of being raped, albeit she "takes issue" with the rape, because it proved to her that the real problem is "her brother's resentment."

Huh???  She "takes issue" with being raped?  You "take issue" when someone parks in your parking space out of ignorance, not when they assault you.

Somebody should cancel this woman's passport and keep her in Beverly Hills where she will be safe.

Vox Day notes:

Yes, it's always a tragedy when a sex tour goes awry.... Compounding the humor here is the way in which the grateful rapee believes it is the fault of "the [white] man" that violent, savage black men rape silly white women who believe in the myth of equality. We can only conclude from this that she believes black men and white women alike are non-sapient animals incapable of making their own decisions or controlling their own behavior. It's probably just as well that this dimwitted woman happened to choose race relations over the environment as her cretinous crusade. She is clearly that special sort of environmental activist that ends up eaten by bears.


But, even though she avoided a career in ursine digestion, I should nevertheless like to congratulate Ms Kijera on her award-winning entry into the Peace Bride Club, for excellence in female naivete.

Day is referring to this story:

Italian 'peace bride' raped, murdered in Turkey


Naked body of artist hitchhiking in bridal gown on Israel peace mission found in forest; 33-year old Turkish man detained after confessing to crime

A 33-year old Italian artist, Giuseppina Pasqualino, also known as Pippa Bacca, was found dead in Turkey on Saturday, after having been raped and murdered. Paqualino was hitchhiking towards Israel dressed in a wedding dress in an appeal for peace.

The woman was last seen on March 31 in the mainly industrial city of Gebze, while hitchhiking to Israel in the wedding dress as part of her "Brides on Tour" project aiming to plead for peace in conflict areas. She disappeared after using her credit card around noon. Police found her naked body hidden in bushes in a forested area near Gebze, after questioning the man suspected of the murder late Friday, the governor's office said.

To repeat, a 33 year old woman was raped..and murder...in Turkey...while hitchhiking...wearing a wedding dress.

Who could have imagined a single woman being raped while hitchhiking in Turkey while wearing a wedding dress as a part of some street theater posturing that was supposed to sen a message about world peace? 

Don't these kind of women have mothers to warned them against things like hitchhiking or visiting crime infested parts of the world?  When they are alone?  And female? 

Hell, for that matter, I not sure that Lawrence of Arabia would have escaped the fate of being raped and murdered if he decided to hitchhike his way through Turkey while wearing a wedding dress.

Then, there is the bear story:

 Wildlife author killed, eaten by bears he loved


Many had warned Treadwell that his encounters with Katmai browns were too close

A California author and filmmaker who became famous for trekking to Alaska's remote Katmai coast to commune with brown bears has fallen victim to the teeth and claws of the wild animals he loved.

Because, basically, they are bears!!!  They are not poodles or homeless people or stray cats.
 
The basic lesson here is that being an enlightened liberal and/or progressive is not a magic shield against the evil of the world.

The Goebbels' Method of Journalism.

Kenneth Woodward at Commonweal writes:

The New York Times isn’t fair. In its all-hands-on-deck drive to implicate the pope in diocesan cover-ups of abusive priests, the Times has relied on a steady stream of documents unearthed or supplied by Jeff Anderson, the nation’s most aggressive litigator on behalf of clergy-abuse victims. Fairness dictates that the Times give Anderson at least a co-byline.


After all, it was really Anderson who “broke” the story on March 25 about Fr. Lawrence Murphy and his abuse of two hundred deaf children a half-century ago in Wisconsin. Reporter Laurie Goodstein says her article emerged from her own “inquiries,” but the piece was based on Anderson documents. Indeed, in its ongoing exercise in J’accuse journalism, the Times has adopted as its own Anderson’s construal of what took place. Anderson is a persuasive fellow: back in 2002 he claimed that he had already won more than $60 million in settlements from the church. But the really big money is in Rome, which is why Anderson is trying to haul the Vatican into U.S. federal court. The Times did not mention this in its story, of course, but if the paper can show malfeasance on the part of the pope, Anderson may get his biggest payday yet.

It’s hard for a newspaper to climb in bed with a man like Anderson without making his cause its own. Does this mean that the Times is anti-Catholic? New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan thinks it is—he said so last October in response to an earlier series of stories on clergy abuse. Whatever one thinks of Dolan’s accusation, clearly the Times considers sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests more newsworthy than abuse committed by other groups. An April 13 verdict against the Boy Scouts of America, which has struggled with the child-sexual-abuse issue for a century, did not merit page-1, above-the-fold treatment but rather a single paragraph deep inside the paper. A longer April 15 story about a Brown University student credibly accused of raping another student, an incident the university did not report to the police and arguably “covered up” at the request of powerful figures in the Brown community, appeared on page 18.

Basically, covering up child sexual abuse is no big deal if it is done by a university or the Boy Scouts.

There is nothing improper about reporting the news, but there is something very wrong about giving disproportionate coverage to stories in order to poison the minds of the public.  That kind of conduct is evidence of the "Goebbels' Method" in action.

There is also this:

I have to think a lot of people who write for the Times do too. Perhaps this is why some Catholic editorial columnists (names on request) cite the paper’s questionable reporting on the church as if it were revealed truth. It’s a nice example of how belief in the Times makes any other form of religious identification merely private and provisional when measured by the one true faith. Writing as a columnist, the affable Bill Keller once described himself as a “collapsed” Catholic. The adjective is new to me and I gather it describes how the weight of the Times as church collapsed his faith in the church of his earlier commitment.


As executive editor, Keller is now responsible for front-paging journalistically questionable stories that attempt but never quite manage to make the pope personally complicit in the clergy-abuse scandal. He apparently thinks that Jeff Anderson has handed over the ecclesiastical equivalent of the Pentagon Papers.

No, I am not suggesting that the scandal is merely media-driven, as some at the Vatican have argued. There would be no stories if there had been no history of abuses and cover-ups in the first place. But I am saying that the Times has created its own version of the scandal as if they had discovered something new. They haven’t. Until they do, I remain a dissenter in the pews of the Church of the New York Times.

If you surf the internet, you can pick out numerous examples of people who have left their childhood faith behind but remained obsessed with pointing out its flaws, as if they need the reassurance that they made the right choice. This same phenomenon - petty on the internet - may be playing itself out on a national stage with the New York Times.

[Via Mark Shea.]

Fun with words.

I've been reading several books on the early Nazi party.  "Nazi", of course, comes from the full name of the party which was "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" - the "National Socialist German Workers Party" or "NSDAP."

"Worker" in German is "Arbeiter", which sounds a lot like "arbiter", "arbitrate" and "arbitrary", which got me wondering how "arbitrate" became "arbitrary."

According to this online etymological dictionary, the "arbit" words have roots as follow:

arbiter


c.1500, from L. arbiter "one who goes somewhere (as witness or judge)," from ad- "to" + baetere "to come, go." The spec. sense of "one chosen by two disputing parties to decide the matter" is from 1540s. The earliest form of the word attested in English is the fem. noun arbitress (mid-14c.) "a woman who settles disputes."

arbitrate

1580s, from L. arbitratus, pp. of arbitrari "to give a decision," from arbiter (see arbiter). In modern usage, an arbiter makes decisions of his own accord and is accountable to no one but himself; an arbitrator (early 15c.) decides issues referred to him by the parties.

arbitrator

early 15c., from O.Fr. arbitratour (13c.), from L. arbitratorem "a spectator, hearer, witness, judge," agent noun from arbitratus, pp. of arbitrari, from arbiter (see arbiter). The legal form of popular arbiter.

arbitrary

early 15c., "deciding by one's own discretion," from L. arbitrarius "depending on the will, uncertain," from arbiter (see arbiter). The original meaning gradually descended to "capricious" and "despotic" (1640s).

arbitration

late 14c., "absolute decision," from O.Fr. arbitracion, from L. arbitrationem (nom. arbitratio) "judgment, will," noun of action from arbitratus, pp. of arbitrari, from arbiter (see arbiter). Meaning "settlement of a dispute by a third party" is from 1630s.

arbitrage

late 15c., from Fr. arbitrage, from arbitrer "to arbitrate, judge," from L.L. arbitrari, from L. arbiter (see arbiter).

So, it looks like an "arbiter" is someone who is selected "to go somewhere", particularly in the sense of a judge or witness, at which point they render a decision based on their reason or will as an "arbitrator", but people who render their decisions purely from their will, as opposed to settled principle or law, can be called "arbitrary."

It may also be the case that someone who is "sent" somewhere by another can be called an agent, which if the sense of acting at another's discretion is emphasized can come to mean someone who works for someone else.

That last bit is speculation since I'm not even sure that "arbeiter" in German has Latin roots.

Also, for those who just have to know, "arbeit" is the German cognate word for the Czek word for "worker", which is "robot", from which we get Robbie the Robot and other robots of science fiction.

Finally, the Russian word for worker is "rubot" with a long "o" and the accent on the second syllable.

I had to share that with someone and Penner is gone from the office.

Can a person be moral without God?

Mike Flynn's Thomistic approach is better than anything I've heard in a bunch of debates on the subject.

Mark Shea offers this gloss:

In the course of it, we discover a) that Fundamentalist Christians who imagine that morality is impossible for an atheist simple do not know what they are talking about. However, we also discover that atheist moralists (aka "New Atheists") have not thought deeply at all about the untenableness of their own position. Real atheists are actually the ones who argue the most strenuously that morality is a subjective illusion, that there is no answer to the question "Why not be cruel?" without smuggling in a transcendent code of ethics reflecting the Will of You Know Who, and so forth. So the problem is not that atheists are immoral. The problem is that atheists are theives who constantly borrow Greatest Hits from a transcendent worldview rooted in Theism, while lying to everybody (including themselves) that their favorite "self-evident" truths are just artifacts of evolution or "practical" or some other lame naturalist piece of bafflegab while ignoring the fact that they are privileging their own favorite moral precepts as Transcendent.

How was anyone supposed to know...

...that an entitlement which provided new benefits to an additional 30 million Americans would actually cost more than it would save? 

After all, we have so much more knowledge and experience now than we had last month when the bill was passed.

Only Communists would think that it makes sense to actually implement bad science fiction plot ideas.

It was Robert Heinlein, I believe, who wrote that the essence of science fiction is to take some idea or trend and play it out to its logical, if absurd, conclusion.  For Heinlein, the essence of science fiction was to ponder the question, "if this goes on..."

Normal people may wonder what would happen "if this goes on,"  but when they ponder the conclusion, they usually draw back in a human horror of the inhuman implications.

Not so with science fiction authors and Communists.

Only Communists would think that a "one child policy" implemented by forced sterilizations and abortions, inevitably leading to a massive selective abortion of females and thirty five million womenless men who have nothing better to do than revolt against the government that caused their predicament is a good idea.  Only Communists would think that it is even possible to create an alternate society of intergenerational slave labor/political concentration camps.

In the same vein, only Communists would think of this bit of science fiction outlined in this Wintery Knight post:

Doctors in southern China are working around the clock to fulfil a government goal to sterilise — by force if necessary — almost 10,000 men and women who have violated birth control policies. Family planning authorities are so determined to stop couples from producing more children than the regulations allow that they are detaining the relatives of those who resist. About 1,300 people are being held in cramped conditions in towns across Puning county, in Guangdong Province, as officials try to put pressure on couples who have illegal children to come forward for sterilisation.

And:

In a news conference on Capitol Hill, several speakers, including attorney David Matas of B’nai Brith Canada and Ethan Gutmann of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said their investigations have unearthed a grisly trade in which an estimated 9,000 members of Falun Gong have been executed for their corneas, lungs, livers, kidneys and skins.


They likened the practice to the Nazi treatment of Jewish prisoners in World War II concentration camps, which included using them for sadistic medical experiments and taking the gold fillings from the teeth of corpses. The newest wrinkle, they said, is that organs from other religious prisoners — specifically dissidents from China’s Christian, Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist communities — are also being harvested to satisfy an insatiable global demand.

The common thread might be the Communist belief that human beings are just sophisticated animals, and, therefore, there is no ontological barrier against using human beings like animals.

It is said that truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to be plausible, which seems accurate until some utopian humanist gets involved.

Joseph Goebbels couldn't have done it any better.

The American Spectator outlines the how the mutually reinforcing effect of bias flogs non-stories into scandals.  Specifically, the New York Times gets out of context snippets of information from a lawyer who has a specialty of suing Catholic Churches, which it then publishes as uncritical fact, which then helps the business development of the lawyer, who acquires more clients, and a more favorable litigation environment, from the publicity that the New York Times gins up against Catholicism.  The Spectator notes:

In other words, for Mr. Anderson, business is good. It is good because of a "wave" of accusations set off by his own efforts. The fact that goes without mention here is that the Times was the paper that published those accusations. Later in the article, the Times describes this reality a little more clearly:

The New York Times was working on a different article last month when a reporter contacted Mr. Anderson. He provided documents about the Murphy case describing how efforts by Wisconsin church officials to subject Father Murphy to a canonical trial and remove him from the priesthood were halted after he wrote a letter to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, asking for a cessation of the trial.

"It shows," Mr. Lena [a lawyer representing the Holy See] said, "how you can both create a media frenzy, and then capitalize on it. Jeff is very, very good at creating intense media interest, and then shaping a narrative for the press to write their stories around." He added later: "He serves these media events up like nice little meals for reporters to chow down on, and they do."

This is the best reporting the Times has done so far in its coverage of the pope's "scandal." They are revealing the fact that they uncritically passed along a report straight from the most interested party imaginable, Anderson. In doing so, they created the perfect political atmosphere for him to proceed with his case against the Vatican and his various other lawsuits against the Church.

But the Times did not have time to contact the canonical judge handling the same case.

This is the kind of coordination that counted as evidence of a "crime against Humanity" according to the OSS prosecution of the Nazis.

[Via Wintery Knight.]

Crunching the Numbers.

Joseph Bottums looks at some interesting statistical information on the Scandal:

The best sign of such hysterical moments may be the difficulty of anything sane or sensible being heard in them. As Newsweek noted on April 8, the surveys and studies over the past 30 years show “little reason to conclude that sexual abuse is mostly a Catholic issue.” Nonetheless, in 2002, after the last set of revelations, “a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that 64 percent” of Americans “thought Catholic priests ‘frequently’ abused children.”


A poll released on April 13 this year found that between 8 and 11 percent of Canadians say they know personally a victim of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest—which works out to well over 2 million people, out of a national population over 33 million. Given the number of Canadian claims over the last 50 years, that would require every abuse victim to know thousands and thousands of people—but the poll respondents aren’t lying, exactly. They’re responding, quite accurately, to an atmosphere, reinterpreting the past and reinventing the present to conform to the ambient understanding of the world.

This is the "argumentum ad publicity" - if it gets a lot of notoriety, then it must be a particularly big problem.

Newspapers understand the effect that such publicity has on discrete groups.  That was the reason that sometime in the early '70s the newspapers stopped identifying that African-Americans suspected of crime were "Negro" and a little bit later, the newspapers stopped habitually identifying Catholic pro-lifers as "Catholic.

Bottums also observes:

All this, while (as the papal biographer George Weigel points out) the most recent audit found six credible cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics in 2009, in an American church of 68 million members, with all the perpetrators reported to the police and stripped of priestly faculties by their bishops. “The only hard data that has been made public by any denomination comes from John Jay College’s study of Catholic priests,” an April 8 Newsweek story noted.

Limiting their study to plausible accusations made between 1950 and 1992, John Jay researchers reported that about 4 percent of the 110,000 priests active during those years had been accused of sexual misconduct involving children. Specifically, 4,392 complaints (ranging from “sexual talk” to rape) were made against priests by 10,667 victims.

“I don’t like it when Catholic leaders fall back on the ‘child abuse happens everywhere’ defense,” Ross Douthat observed on the New York Times website. “I do like it, however, when mainstream media outlets do their job and report that there’s no evidence that the rate of sex abuse is higher among the Catholic clergy than among any other group.” In fact, it’s lower. If the John Jay study is right, the rate of clerical abuse over the past 50 years, including the peak of the crimes around 1975, was considerably lower by Allen’s figures, and much lower by Smith’s figures, than the abuse rate of the general male population.

And:

Then there’s Ireland—ground zero for the European scandals raging now, just as Boston was for the American scandals back in 2002. Brendan O’Neill, editor of the Spiked-Online website and no particular friend of the Church, points out that the Irish government’s official commission spent 10 years, from 1999 to 2009, intensively inviting, from Irish-born people around the world, reports of abuse at Irish religious institutions. Out of the hundreds of thousands of students who passed through Catholic schools in the 85 years from 1914 to 1999, the commission managed to gather 381 claims—with 35 percent of those charges made against lay staff and fellow pupils rather than priests.


“It might be unfashionable to say the following but it is true nonetheless,” O’Neill concludes. “Very, very small numbers of children in the care or teaching of the Catholic Church in Europe in recent decades were sexually abused, but very, very many of them actually received a decent standard of education.”

Compare that with this:

The general figures of child abuse in the world today are shocking. One widely reported study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence suggested the United States has 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. It’s a little hard to believe. More than 12 percent of the population were abused at least once as children? But Charol Shakeshaft’s respected study insists that 6 to 10 percent of recent public-school students have been molested. Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, claims 10 percent is a conservative estimate. John Jay College’s Margaret Leland Smith says her numbers come closer to 20 percent.

But there is no hew and cry about American school children.

No Noah's Ark.

Paleobabble reports that the purported discovery of Noah's Ark on Mt. Ararat is a fraud.

The Discovery Channel - the National Enquirer of Cable - will probably still have a three hour special on this non-event, like it did for the "Gospel of Judas."

Dr. Helen asks the Question that needs to be asked...

"Does Society Encourage Genital Assault Against Men?"

Mmmm...well, I'm sure that it does, given all the depictions of the "groin shot" in movies and on television as a classic comedic trope.

But then I'm also sure that the attitude that assaults on uniquely male characteristics are funny and that similar physical assaults on uniquely female characteristics are misogynistic is probably evidence of the perduring patriarchy of Western civilization and the repression of women therein.

Either that or it's caused by global warming.

This is surprising....should this be surprising?

Arizona Hispanics support provision of law requiring proof of status.

According to Hot Air, there is ambiguity in the poll, but that is a fair inference from it:

I’ve got a question mark in the headline because, insanely, Rasmussen didn’t refine his sample to isolate the data from Latinos. The racial demographics polled are white, black, and “other,” which presumably encompasses Latinos (30.1 percent of the state’s population as of 2008), Native Americans (4.9 percent), and Asians (2.5 percent). Here’s what he got when he asked respondents if they favor or oppose legislation that would let cops stop suspected illegals to check their immigration status. Click the image to enlarge.


Fully 70 percent overall support this part of the law, and given the fact that Latinos compose most of the “other” category, a majority of their demographic must be in favor too. A few caveats, though. One: Rasmussen polls likely voters, so this is obviously a sample of citizens. Other polls that use “adults” as their sample are bound to show sharply lower numbers since they’ll include some illegals too. Two: Notwithstanding the support for letting cops inquire, 53 percent overall say they’re either very or somewhat concerned that the law will lead to civil-rights violations. Among the “other” group, it’s 54 percent — but of that number, 40 percent say they’re very concerned and just 14 percent say somewhat. (Among all likely voters, that split is 23/30.) So yeah, it’s an issue, and if it starts happening, expect support to start crumbling.

Exit question: Why didn’t Rasmussen emphasize this in his write-up of the data? Is he saving that for tomorrow?

Update: Another worthy caveat from the comments: The sub-sample of Latino likely voters must be relatively small, which would mean a large margin of error. That might explain why Rasmussen didn’t flag it. Just flag this result now for comparison purposes, as there’ll be plenty of more extensive polling in the days ahead.

This may be surprising only to those of us who grow up in they dynamic of victim-group identity politics. It may be the case that Hispanic-Americans are surprisingly like other Americans and want to see the law enforced. After all, nothing leads to a total contempt for the law than that it go unenforced. Also, Arizona is sitting right on the border where all kinds of violence is flowing into Arizona proper. They may feel that the best way to keep that stuff from happening in their homes is to enforce the law.

On the other hand, if law enforcement begins to act like thumb-fingered thugs that attitude will quickly change.

We shall see.

Service above Self.

My friend Carolyn Moebest has a wonderful essay reflecting on what it feels like - and what it means - to see her son enlist in the Marines. 

One of the timeless truths of life is that "they also serve who stand and wait."

Men and Women and the Issue of Separate Checks.

From Dr. Helen:

It seems the requests for separate checks tend to separate along gender lines. A reader e-mails:

I waited tables all through my twenties, when I started getting "real jobs." Much to my chagrin and disappontment, I am now, at 43, back to waiting tables. To be good at it requires a certain set of skills, mostly having to do with organization and social grace. All of these things came back to me practically overnight.

So did the memories/stereotypes of different kinds of customers. I am writing to see if you have insight or an educated guess on one of these oh-so-true stereotypes. If a group of men comes in to have lunch and maybe a beer, odds are pretty good that one of those men will pick up the tab. But, (ask any ten servers and this will be confirmed) if a group of women comes in, they will almost always ask for separate checks. It's always cause for comment among the waitstaff if a group of women doesn't ask for separate checks.

Seems to conform with my experience. 

Is it true, and, if so, why?

Check out the comments to Dr. Helen's post.

Britain Apologizes to Pope Benedict...

...for mocking memo drafted by 23 year old Foreign Ministry staffer.

All things considered, this looks like the kind of thing that you might expect from a 23 year old who hasn't quite gotten past that stage of life which thinks "wouldn't it be cool if we acted like they act on whatever the British version of South Park is."

On the other hand, diplomacy is largely about symbols and allowing the representative of a state or belief to be treated with contempt can easily be translated into real policies which treat the policies and interests of the state or belief contemptuously.  That seems to be the motivation behind the Vatican's refusal to accept the apology at face value:

One highly-placed source in the Vatican said: “This could have very severe repercussions and is embarrassing for the British government - one has to question whether the action taken is enough.


“It is disgusting. Britain’s ambassador to the Holy See has been in to see the Secretary of State and explain what happened and this will all be relayed to the Pope.

“It’s even possible the trip could be cancelled as this matter is hugely offensive.”

Cardinal Renato Martino, the former head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said: “The British government has invited the Pope as its guest and he should be treated with respect.

“To make a mockery of his beliefs and the beliefs of millions of Catholics not just in Britain but across the world is very offensive indeed.”

Further, it says a lot about British culture - and presumably Western culture generally - where this one particular leader of this one particular religion can reflexively, without any particular malice, with only a generalized malice that is deeply stained into the popular psyche can be made the butt of unfunny jokes.  One notes for example the current kerfuffle about South Park's threatened depiction of an image of the Prophet.

Presumably, the British Foreign Secretary staffer would have realized jokes about taking the Dalai Lama to a meat processing facility or serving a leading Muslim religious figure pork sausages were "beyond the pale."

If only Mormon Boy Scout leaders could marry.

A Portland jury awarded $18.5 million in punitive damages against the Boy Scouts of America for child abuse.

This is the same case where the Boy Scout troop was sponsored by a Mormon church and the Mormon bishop had information about the child abuse but didn't report it.  The LDS church has paid $350,000 in settlement.

There is no report yet on how clerical celibacy or Pope Benedict were responsible for this incident.

[Via Mark Shea.]

The Socially Autistic Richard Dawkins.

Other than a pathological lack of any ability to understand the social clues that most normal human beings possess, what else can explain Richard Dawkins comparing a rabbi to Adolph Hitler?

Mariano Grinbank writes:

Recently, Professor Richard Dawkins compared Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to Adolf Hitler. Although, Richard Dawkins was later careful to qualify his comparison of a Jewish Rabbi to Hitler it was surely a qualification that could only be justified in the mind of Richard Dawkins who has invested a large portion of his life directing his particular and peculiar prejudice towards those with whom he disagrees.


He wrote thusly in responding to Rabbi Boteach's shock at being compared to Hitler:

"I did not say you think like Hitler, or hold the same opinions as Hitler, or do terrible things to people like Hitler. Obviously and most emphatically you don't. I said you shriek like Hitler. That is the only point of resemblance, and it is true. You shriek and yell and rant like Hitler. Not all the time, of course. You also tell very good jokes, and tell them brilliantly. You deservedly get lots of laughs, as a good comedian should. But throughout your speeches you periodically rise to climaxes of shrieking rant, and that is just like Hitler."

That certainly clarified matters: Rabbi Boteach is only somewhat like Hitler yet, more like a clown. Makes one wonder: what is worse, a shrieking rant or very calmly comparing a Rabbi (or anyone) to Hitler?

In his awkward way, Dawkins comes across as a parody of the cliched character of the scientist who has been insulated from actual human experience and doesn't have a clue about human life is actually lived.

Dawkins would benefit much from a regular application of "swirlies" and "melvins" until he learned that people - unlike the rocks and fossils that make up his world - actually have feelings.

But never forget that he's smarter than you because he has a science degree.

From the Ministry of Truth files.

Pro-abortion groups pressure "The Lancet" not to publish report on decline of maternal death rates in pregnancy.

Pro-abortion groups applied pressure to the world’s leading medical journal to suppress a report into maternal death rates, it has been claimed.


Dr Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, told the New York Times he was pressured “by advocacy groups” to delay publication of the report until later this year. Dr Horton said the organisations – which he refused to name – wanted the information withheld until after the UN Commission on Population and Development (CPD), the Women Deliver Conference scheduled for June in Washington and the next UN General Assembly, which is also scheduled to address maternal mortality.

The Lancet study found that maternal mortality rates have been significantly inflated by UN agencies. The medical journal reported a 2008 worldwide maternal death rate of 342,900, rather than the more than 500,000 used by the World Bank, World Health Organisation and the UN Children’s Fund.

The Lancet found that progress had been made in preventing deaths in pregnancy and cited four main reasons: declining pregnancy rates in some countries, higher per capita income, higher education rates for women and increasing availability of basic medical care, including “skilled birth attendants”.

The report also found that HIV/Aids killed 60,000 pregnant women a year and that more antiretroviral drugs would have lowered this, contradicting the policy of both the UN and the US, which divert funding from HIV/Aids to family planning as a way to reduce maternal deaths.

They also found increases in maternal mortality in the US, Canada, Denmark and Norway, countries with the most liberal abortion laws in the world.

Because it is not good news if it doesn't let the Left depict their issues as a crisis that has to be addressed now.

Amazon Review

Glen Cook's "The Swordbearer"

Gathrid of Kacalief is ejected from his sheltered childhood by the Mindak Ahlert and, while fleeing from the Mindak's evil golem-like "Toal", stumbles across the Sword of Suchara and the Sword's protector, and the Swordbearer's esquire, Theis Rogala. Grasping the sword, Gathrid learns that he is bound to follow the compulsions of the Sword's mysterious fashioner. With the aid, advice and assistance of Rogala - who Gathrid knows from legend will eventually relieve him of the office of Swordbearer - Gathrid rockets from land to land, being accepted as a dangerous allies by the Western forces opposed to the Mindak's invasion and by the Mindak in turn, as alliances shift, politics become Byzantine, and the yesterday's friend is today's threat.

"The Swordbearer" is "minor" Cook. It doesn't rank with his better writings, such as the early Dark Company, the early Garrett and the Starfishers trilogy, and with stand-alone books like "The Dragon Never Sleeps" but it is worth reading for anyone who likes Cook, as well as for anyone who wants gritty, intelligent and deep stories. Cook excels at introducing politics into his fantasy as he shows how alliances can be fragile and based on the personality of leaders.

Cook also has an obvious love of history. Gathrid's world is one which is burdened by an unimaginable depth of history, where the big events of the distant past are no longer remembered but are still playing themselves out in his present.

On the other hand, I thought that The Swordbearer didn't show some of the things I typically expect from Cook. Cook normally has a felicity for naming things. This is absent from The Swordbearer where things received gutteral sounding names - Daubendiek, the Mindak, Ventimiglia, Wistma Povich of Spellenkothen - which hurt the flow of the story and simply sounded "made up." Also, while Gathrid becomes quite amazing by the end of the story when he lives up to the Swordbearer's potential, in the early parts of the story he comes across as a "punk" which doesn't make for an engaging focus character for the early part of the book.

Nonetheless, this is the second time I've read The Swordbearer. The first time was in the '80s, and I recall enjoying it. This time, I knocked it off over the course of a few days as bed time diversion during a trial, and it served its purpose of drawing me into Gathrid's world and making me forget mine for a little while. You can't ask for much more from a work of fantasy fiction.

Great Moments in the Carter Administration.

April 25, 1980 - The failed rescue of the Iranian-held hostages.

This was the cap on the long slide of Jimmy Carter into the anchor position of American presidents.  Before this there had been years of Carter - or his administration - playing the shrewish, elite, self-righteous liberal and lecturing Americans on their sins, including racism, wastefulness and malaise.  Americans were also being told that there were "limits to growth" and that we should resign ourselves to a limited future.  Carter's emphasis on human rights as the centerpiece of his foreign policy had resulted in the destabilization of American allies, like Iran and Nicaragua, which, as a result of Carter's belief that his essential "niceness" would result in everyone loving him, had been taken over by virulent anti-Americans.

It was a lot like the Obama administration.

In April of 1980, I was going into Finals of my last semester at U.C. Davis.  I recall the news, and it just seemed typical of American impotence, which was what Carter and his political allies had been preaching for years.  It was, after all, not that long after America's loss in Vietnam and the fall of South Vietnam to the Communist.  I don't recall any particular hostility being levelled at Carter - in fact, the feeling was the it was about time - but it seemed to capture the feeling that incompetence was the best we could expect.

We reached for Ronald Reagan like a drowning man grabbing for a lifeline.

Maybe I'll Take the Kids.

Probably not.

Some deep intuition in the recesses of my mind tells me that Child Protective Services might take a dim view of my parental skills if I did.

Big Hollywood likes "Kick-Ass" and finds the role of the foul-mouthed 11 year old vigilante to be an antidote to the "heroin-fuel of narcissism" which is the Disney channel.

"Don't Worry He'll Realize the Irony Soon." - Another Downfall Parody.

Watch it now or else!

President Narcissus

According to Mark Shea:

Americans, being Americans, tend to have Not One Clue about the significance of events in what The African Queen's Charlie Allnut called "all them little countries". So when the nation of Poland experienced perhaps its greatest trauma since World War II in the decapitation of it government by a plane crash (a tragedy made twice as bitter by the fact that the reason for the flight was to attend a memorial service for the victims of the Katyn Massacre, which likewise decapitated Poland in 1940), we got a couple of headlines and then returned to the burning issues that obsess American journalists of Generation Narcissus: namely, our money and our sex lives.


To get some perspective, we need to imagine, say, how we'd feel if the President and the Senate were all killed by some crashing airplane as they stood on the site of Ground Zero on September 11, 2011. That's the emotional impact this has had on the Poles.

So, while I can certainly understand that Obama couldn't fly to Poland for the services due to the Iceland volcano, I just have to cringe when I read that he chose to occupy his time that day with a trip to the golf course. It's a classic example of why this guy is *still* not ready for prime time and how he is rapidly pissing away the messianic good will afforded him by Euros who bought the hype on this empty suit. It's just a fantastically insensitive thing for the Leader of the Free World to do.

Jesus, the Jew, on Matthew 25.

Professor Ira at "Jesus and the Professor" is continuing his exploration of a Jewish understanding of Jesus' teachings. Ira looks at Matthew 25 - the separation of the goats from the sheep - and concludes:

In Jesus’ view, salvation depends solely on what one did, not on what one believed. Nothing in this monologue suggests that salvation is dependent on belief. That should not be surprising, however. Jesus was a Jew, and in Judaism, reward in the hereafter is dependent on righteousness. Hence, yet again, the dictum, “The righteous of all nations have a share in the World to Come.”

My comment:

Wow! It's like looking in a mirror. I've made the same argument - to wit, that ethical conduct in this life plays a non-trivial role in salvation - numerous times in discussion with Protestants based on Matthew 25.


Matthew 25 is acknowledged as being a "difficult passage" for sola fide Christians. I've heard one radio apologist suggest that teachers pass over it until the sola fide message is firmly established. I've also heard one Protestant pastor explain that the message has to do with the treatment of Christ's ministers, which necessarily ties into sola fide, i.e., rejecting Christ's ministers by not giving them water, food etc. is rejecting Christ.

Obviously, that understanding was not shared by St. Augustine, who accepts that Matthew means what it says when it talks about "the least of these."

In defense of the creed not deed position, I take it that Matthew might be read as pertaining to those who have confessed a belief in Jesus and then the determination of whether someone had true belief would be determined based on their conduct, e.g., "sure, you said that you believed, but we know in your heart you didn't because you didn't do as Christ said to do." At that point, the distinction between belief and action seems to collapse.

Here is the text from St. Augustine's "On Faith and Works" that I was referring to:

For it is evident that He rebukes them, not because they did not believe in Him but because they did not perform good works. In fact, this is why He said that He will separate all who were united together by the same faith, in order that no one might think that faith alone, or a dead faith, that is a faith without works, is sufficient for eternal life, and in order to make it clear that they who will say to Him: Lord, when did we see you suffering this and that and did not minister to you? will be those who had believed in Him but had neglected to do good works - as though it were possible to obtain eternal life by a faith that is dead.

Augustine also had this to say on faith and works:

When St. Paul says, therefore, that man is justified by faith and not by observance of the law, he does not mean that good works are not necessary or that it is enought to receive and profess the faith and no more. What he means rather and what he wants us to understand is that man can be justified by faith, even though he has not previously performed any works of the law. For the works of the law are meritorious not before but after justification.

And:

In the first place, we feel that we should advise the faithful that they would endanger the salvaiton of their souls if they acted on the false assurance that faith alone is sufficient for salvation or that they need not perform good works in order to be saved.

If any of my sola fide friends have anything to add, check out "Jesus and the Professor."

Remember when Liberals liked to say "Dissent is Patriotic"?

So long ago now.

It was 18 months ago.

A lifetime, actually.

Gateway Pundit has a clip of Chris Matthews and his liberal guests "wanking off" about their "deep and serious concern" that some conservative American figures might be engaging in sedition.

It turns out that the guest - John Heilemann - expressing his deep and serious concern about the use of the term "regime" by certain conservative Americans has written about the "Obama regime."

Morons.

How was anyone supposed to know that a guy who spent 20 years in a church that honored infamous anti-semite Louis Farrakhan would be anti-Israel/anti-Jewish?

What a perfectly wild coincidence.

Jewish support for Obama drops 36% since 2008.

In an unprecedented move, the Obama administration announced last week that support of Israel will be “balanced against other US interests.”


It looks like his contempt for Israel is finally shaking up the political landscape.

Barack Obama just lost his Jewish support. Only 42% of Jewish voters today say they would re-elect him.

McLaughlin Online reported:

According to the 2008 exit polls, Barack Obama won 78% to 21% among Jewish voters. Now, in the second year of Obama’s presidency, only 42% of voters would re-elect him, while the plurality (46%) would consider voting for someone else.

Sarah Palin - who is pro-Israel - may benefit from this trend.  Check out "Jews for Sarah."

Do you trust the Government?

In 1958, 73% of Americans said "yes."  Now, that number is down to 22%.

For a democracy - based on the consent of the governed - that is a very bad thing.

The Perennial Heresy.

Hre is an interesting essay on Jansenism.

In general, Jansenism was a Catholic splinter in the direction of Calvinism that developed about the same time that Arminianism splintered away from Calvinism in the direction of Catholic theology.

The author writes:

Some of Jansenism’s theological and spiritual roots are to be found in Calvin and Puritanism in general. The essential issue is the relationship between divine grace and human freedom in the process of salvation. The Jansenists found the precedent of St Augustine against the Pelagians a great inspiration for their polemics against the Jesuits. Pelagius supported the idea according to which man had the strength to want good and practice virtue, a position that would relativise the role of grace. St Augustine maintained that God alone chose to whom he would grant grace. Man’s freedom is destroyed and made perverse by Original Sin. By an act of God’s sovereign will, God acts on man by efficiacious grace, but human freedom is not destroyed.


Medieval theology was dominated by Augustinian thought, and little place was left to human freedom. St Thomas Aquinas worked hard to conciliate grace and human freedom. Man cooperates in the work of his salvation, which is the work of God. Luther and especially Calvin worked in the same direction, annihilating any idea of human freedom, and going much further than St Augustine would have remotely imagined. It is from this exaggeration of some streams of medieval theology that the famous solas would orginate (Bible alone, faith alone, etc.). The Reformers emphasised predestination. Man is saved by grace, but man cannot resist this grace that God freely chooses to confer, and the divine will is above all things. To combat the Reformers, the Council of Trent (6th Session, 1547) emphasised human freedom and left its relationship with grace open.

The Jesuit theologians reacted strongly, fearful that excessive Augustinianism would weaken the role of the Church in the salvation of Christians. Under Renaissance and humanist influence, they sought to convey a more optimist vision of man, and based their work of St Thomas Aquinas. This is how this Dominican theologian was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1567.

Theological conflicts grew from about that year. Baïus was condemned by St Pius V for denying the reality of free will. The work of the Jesuit Molina was a response to Baïus and claimed the existence of “sufficient” grace, which brings man the means of salvation, but requires a free act from the subject. In the seventeenth century, the controversy finds its centre in Louvain, Flanders (what is now Belgium). The Bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Jansen, also known as Jansenius, was a student and then a professor at Louvain. He began writing his magnum opus – Augustinus in 1628, and it was left unfinished when he died in 1638. For Jansen, since Original Sin, man’s will without divine help is capable only of evil. Only efficacious grace can enable man to prefer the things of heaven to the things of this world. This grace is irresistible and is not granted to all. Parallel with Calvin’s theory of predestination, most people are born to be damned, and God does not will their salvation.

Weeding out the Filth.

Knoxville Bishop Richard Stika takes prompt action after learning of sexual misconduct that occurred between 1975 and 1980.

Bishop Stika sounds like he's learned the lesson of the Long Lent.

Dawkins learns that the Pope won't be arrested.

Another "Downfall" parody.

And then they get together at the wine bar and wonder why men are such pigs....


CNN advises "nice guys" to become selfish, misogynistic jerks:

This nice guy backlash may sound unpleasant, but some men blame women who disregard the nice guy as an option. Some women interviewed say they equate a nice guy with being a boring guy. Others used words like "marshmallow," "doormat" and even "creeper."


Academic studies have reaffirmed that women prefer the bad boy archetype over the nice guy. A 2008 study at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces examined how college students perceived "dark" traits such as thrill-seeking behavior, deceitfulness and narcissism. The study found the female students preferred the males with these traits.

In her seven years of dating coach experience, Lisa Shield of Los Angeles, California, discovered that a majority of female clients prefer a man with edge who draws boundaries. Her clients reject nice guys as too malleable.

These different studies make you think that Nietzsche was right - that it is all about the "will to power."

Albeit you have to wonder why any human being blessed with the gift of reason would voluntarily opt to be intimate with someone who has a height/weight advantage and a propensity for deceitfulness and narcissism.

Eternal light.

Anthony Flew has passed away.

Now he knows the answer.

Australian Journalist asks, "Why not bomb the Vatican, and riddle the Pope with bullets as he staggers out of the flames?"



Bob Ellis, a political journalist writing on Australia's state-run media website - ABC - offers this thought experiment:

No-one has yet suggested bombing the Vatican and pursuing the Pope through the sewers of Europe till he is caught and riddled with bullets in order to stop priests buggering choirboys in Boston, Chicago, Dublin and Sydney. But a precise mirror image of this is how we behaved in Afghanistan.


If we bomb it flat, we were told, and pursue Bin Laden through the caves of Tora Bora and the mud huts of Waziristan until he is caught and riddled with bullets, al-Qaeda won't hijack planes and blow up trains any more. And the world will live at peace.

This can only make sense in the mind of someone who is consumed by an inner demon.  One would think that an obvious difference between Bin Laden and Benedict is that while Benedict does not want priests to commit child abuse, Bin Laden does want his followers to kill Westerners.  Likewise, while all followers of Bin Laden are presumptively committed to killing Westerners, Something like 99% of all Catholic priests have never committed any molestation.

What does it say when a journalist can use a mighty big brush to smear all Catholics as child molesters in an attempt to exonerate someone who actually constructed a plan to commit mass murder?

It is worthwhile, I think, to make these connections, of how forgivingly we treat the First World rich and the contrasting way we treat the Third World poor. How we treat the crimes of Christians and of heathens in very different ways. It shows how crazy we have lately come to be, and how justly we are despised by the Islamic world, and the Communist world, and many of our former colonies.


If we do this violence to the Taliban for the way they treat their women and children, why not the Catholics too?

Why not bomb the Vatican, and riddle the Pope with bullets as he staggers out of the flames?

Institutionalized mass murder or a small minority of homosexuals having sex with teenagers - there's really no difference there when you want to simultaneously accuse the West of racism for being too harsh on Bin Laden and too soft on the Catholic Church.

This is what passes for deep, critical thinking in certain quarters.

Mark Shea offers this on Ellis' demented screed:

This, among many other reasons, is why I find it so hard to credit the constant recommendation of MSM journalists that I get down on my knees in gratitude to them for their sterling and knightly high purpose of Reforming the Church. To quote Robert Bolt's St. Thomas More, "This is not Reformation. This is war on the Church." And it is using abused children as human shields. These people have not the slightest interest in knowing or caring what they are talking about. Point out that a slanderous misrepresentation of Pope Benedict has not a dram of truth to it, and the reply is: "So, once again, you fail to see the real issue here, and are more concerned about the problems of the Church and its survival, than of ridding the organization of pederasts and their enablers." Because, of course, the only way to Save The Children is to lie about the Pope. Conversely, any attempt to say, "But the Pope is not the Bad Guy here" is to ignore the victims. It's classic mob mentality.

And:

Every one of us has things we can look back on in our lives and regret. Benedict is no exception. He gives every indication of regretting his failure to appreciate the magnitude of the filth that has infected the Church and his sin of omission (a rather small one, in my judgement) when that filth occurred in his archdiocese. I, for one, am willing to forgive it, since I've had my own dealings with the Accuser when it has come to my own failings. But the Bomb the Vatican and Machine Gun the Pope crowd have no moral failings. They are fully of steely righteousness--like the authors of the French Revolution. They will, if they get their way, kill a lot of people to usher in the Perfect World. And they will assure us, every step of the way, that they did it For The Children.

Faith-based secularism.

The Times Online offers advice to the Catholic Church on how to solve its "crisis":

Best way forward


Bring in married priests and women priests. End ban on artificial contraception. Rescind doctrine of papal infallibility. Restore teaching licence to the dissident theologian Hans Kung. Issue papal letters of apology and cash compensation to all child abuse victims and banned liberation theologians. Make the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith a paperless office and speed up discipline by better use of modern technology. Put Opus Dei in charge of all Church communications. Apologise profusely

< sarc >Because denominations with women priests are so healthy and vibrant. < /sarc >  

In fact, every denomination that went in the direction that the Times is recommending by instituting the ordination of women and liberalizing doctrine - e.g., the Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and, most especially, the Episcopalians - have suffered a precipitious drop in membership - in excess of 50% - over the last 30 years. 

It's not like the data isn't there for anyone with some curiosity to see if these proposals actually, you know, work!

Secularist reasoning is so charmingly faith-based.  They have their ideology and they see what they want and ignore the results.

The Spendthrift living off of Christian moral capital begins to worry about bankruptcy.

Characteristically twenty years behind the times, Dawkins is quoted as being concerned about the possible elimination of Christian faith in Europe:

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”

You think?

Don't forget he's a scientist.  A scientist who has made a living out of arguing that Christians are as bad as people who do blow up buildings.

Vox Day remarks:

Translation: "I'm beginning to worry that Vox is correct after all and the replacement for European Christianity may not be that shiny, sexy, secular scientific society of for which I have labored." As I have been warning for some time now, atheism and scientific secular humanism are little more than speed bumps on the decline into paganism. And paganism, as the historically literate know, made for some horrific societal structures that took Christians literal centuries to stamp out. The legalization of abortion and euthanasia is only the beginning of the post-Christian Endarkenment on a silent continent that has rejected the Light of the World.

Suddenly, Dawkins is beginning to realize that one can only be comfortable in the role of free-thinking social rebel when everyone else is doing the heavy lifting of actually living by a set of codes that permit a small number of people to play the role of free-thinking social rebel.  If everyone tries to be a free-thinking social rebel, no one gets to star in that role.

Why women are less likely to be monogamous with "friends."

The post on "casual sex" got a lot of commenter attention, which was odd to me, since I posted it as a way of setting up the joke in the headline.  In any event this factoid struck me as counter-intuitive:

Being sexually involved with a friend increased the likelihood of not being monogamous by 44 percent for women and 25 percent for men. Involvement with an acquaintance or stranger increased the likelihood by 30 percent for women and 43 percent for men.

This may be an explanation:

Which is worse: sexual or emotional infidelity? Well, that might depend on whether you are a man or a woman.


Although feelings of jealousy, anger and hurt are common no matter what kind of affair a loved one has, a man is more upset when his wife has a sexual affair, while a woman is more bereft when her husband has an emotional affair and actually falls in love with the other woman.

Why? While most researchers point a finger at evolution, Penn State psychologist Kenneth Levy has a new idea. He suggests it has more to do with the types of attachments people form in relationships than their gender, reports LiveScience.com.

What is the evolutionary explanation?

• For a man, sexual infidelity is worse because he must be hyper-vigilant about sex to ensure another man doesn't impregnate his wife.

• For a woman, emotional infidelity is worse because she needs to keep her partner to help raise their children.

• Because of this, men tend to feel guiltier after a sexual indiscretion, while women feel guiltier after an emotional one.

But Levy, who is an expert on attachment in relationships, thinks there is more to it than evolution. In a study he conducted, he found a small subset of men who ranked emotional infidelity as the worst kind. He thinks individual differences in how people view relationships could affect our views on infidelity, reports LiveScience.com.

Specifically, there are two types of attachments in relationships:

1. Dismissive attachment: People who are very independent do not see the value in relationships. They place great importance on their independence--to the exclusion of an intimate relationship. People who feel this way may establish a defensive type of attachment in a relationship, but distance themselves so they don't feel so vulnerable.

2. Secure attachment: People who see the value of a relationship are comfortable with the interdependency that comes with it.

Levy thinks that those who have a secure attachment style are more likely to be bothered by emotional infidelity, while those with dismissive styles would see sexual infidelity as more of problem. In a study of more than 400 undergraduate students, about 75 percent of whom were female, Levy found that men with a dismissive style found sexual infidelity more troubling, while men with a secure style rated emotional infidelity as the most hurtful.

The big surprise: The same was found in females! "So it seems to be that this concern about sexual infidelity seems to be tied to dismissive attachment whether you're a male or a female," Levy told LiveScience.com.

Of course, it all may be pseudo-scientific psychological gibberish.

But I repeat myself.

Spiking another urban legend.

CNS observes about the recent kefuffle concerning the "Vatican's apology to the Beatles":

Many news headlines over the past week contained some variant of: “Vatican forgives/makes peace with/absolves the Beatles!”

It came after the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, published an article April 10 praising the pop group, saying their “beautiful melodies are like precious jewels.”


It’s certainly not the first time the Vatican newspaper has paid tribute to the band. Here and here are just the most recent examples of praise.

So obviously the paper’s editors seemed surprised that the press would think the Fab Four had been on some sort of hate-list of theirs.

In an effort to show that the L’Osservatore Romano had never been part of the wave of contempt and condemnation that swept across America and other parts of the world in 1966 when John Lennon remarked that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, the paper reprinted an article it ran Aug. 14, 1966 — the same month Lennon’s quip was taken out of context by an American teen magazine and sparked protests nationwide.

Today’s edition of the Vatican paper says that the Beatles never needed the paper’s absolution and that their 1966 story shows there was “already back then, an unexpected consonance between the Vatican newspaper and John Lennon.”

L’Osservatore Romano’s original 1966 story talked about the negative impact Lennon’s remark had on the public and how record sales had plummeted in just a few days. It said such an upheaval made Lennon publicly reflect on his comment, which the paper surmised, was not really a reflection of his being impious, but rather being flippant. He obviously hadn’t thought about the kind of impact a comment about Christ and religion would have on people, it said.

Here is a 2008 CNS story on a L'Osservatore Romano story on the Beatles that concludes:

As for John Lennon's famous quip in 1966 that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, the Vatican newspaper dismissed it as youthful bragging.


"The phrase that provoked profound indignation, especially in the United States, after so many years sounds merely like the boast of a working-class English youth faced with unexpected success," it said.

And yet AOL greeted me this morning with this bit of important, late-breaking news:

Ringo Starr Rejects Vatican Move to Forgive Beatles

Ringo Starr has rejected moves by the Vatican to 'forgive' the Beatles for John Lennon's notoriously controversial claim in 1966 that they were 'bigger than Jesus'....Starr, however, is unimpressed, stating this week, "Didn't the Vatican say we were Satanic or possibly Satanic? And they've still forgiven us?"


He added, in a reference to the current scandal over paedophile priests in the Catholic Church, "I think the Vatican, they've got more to talk about than the Beatles."

This latest coverage of the Beatles in L'Osservatore Romano comes two years after the Vatican initially expressed their forgiveness for the band's hedonistic ways in the '60s, the 2008 article celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of 'The Beatles',' a record that according to the Vatican is a "magical musical anthology."

So, why is this news now?

To be entirely candid, I couldn't care less about the Beatles or this story, except for having the impression that this was, you know, "news", but it isn't. So, again, why does non-story deserve the amount of attention being lavished on it, complete with sending a reporter to a has-been pop star in order to get some de rigeur hit and run calumny?

It couldn't have anything to do with this?


Via Mark Shea.

A Canticle for Liebowitz.

Returning last night from "guest-teaching" a class on early Christian history - thanks, Jim - I was reflecting on Walter Miller, Jr.'s "A Canticle for Liebowitz."  I was thinking that it was possibly the best book I have ever read in terms of historical scope, humor, suspense, characters and literary qualities.  I was thinking in particular of Miller's description of sharks feeding in the ocean as they enjoyed the bounty that resulted from the destruction of civilization and how it was a very good year for the sharks.

But I haven't read "Canticle" for years, and, so, I was wondering if it would hold up under my mature scrutiny and resolved to put in my "to be read" pile.

As providence would have it, Ignatius Insights has this essay "An Augustinian Wasteland: A Canticle for Leibowitz Fifty Years Later" by Dr. Bradley J. Birzer on its site today.  Birzer is as enthusiastic about Canticle as I am.

He offers this bit of Miller's writing:

"There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God's and not Man's, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection." —A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959; New York: Bantam/Spectra, 1997), pp. 145-146.

Birzer offers this explanation of Canticle's background and style:

Walter Miller served as a tail gunner on a bomber during the Italian campaign in World War II. His bombing group, in part, aided in the destruction of Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western world. The destruction of this Benedictine institution haunted Miller, and after the war he found himself drawn not only to the study of Western Civilization and its preservation, but, more importantly, to the endurance and significance of the Roman Catholic Church as a protective institution. Probably to the chagrin of many of those around him, Miller converted in 1947, shortly after his marriage. He explored many of the ideas of Roman Catholic theology in his many short stories written during the 1950s. As it turned out, this decade proved to be Miller's Golden Age, an age that he spent much of his remaining adult life trying to recapture but unsuccessfully so. In the mid-to-late 1990s, frustrated with God knows what and taunted by who knows what, Miller took his own life. Another author completed Miller's unfinished sequel, St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. This second book takes place during the second of the three eras featured in Canticle, roughly 1,200 years after the atomic war of 1960.


Numerous readings of Canticle for Leibowitz have left me with this: it is a complicated, nuanced, and perplexing novel, a mystery to be enjoyed, time and again, never to be solved. Set in the Intermountain Desert West in the futureless United States of America, A Canticle for Leibowitz offers a vibrant image of a desiccated human culture and a desiccated human politics, an irradiated landscape, and an inevitably dark and shameful future. As with some of its contemporaneous fiction—such as Ayn Rand's much less earnest Atlas Shrugged—Canticle for Leibowitz offers great insight into the nature and power of ideas, set in a dystopian world. While Rand, by far better known in popular culture and in book sales, possesses a stunning power to plot an intricate plot, she cannot match Miller in character development or writing style. As an example of one beautiful sentence: "The water was clouded and live with creeping uncertainties as was the Old Jew's stream of memory" (p. 167).

I did not know that Miller was a convert.  His writing - even that beyond Canticle - was quintessentially Catholic in spirit and orientation.  Along with Anthony Boucher, Miller seems to exemplify a Catholic ethos in the same way that Asimov exemplified a Jewish ethos, even when Asimov wasn't writing anything remotely Jewish (think of "A Pebble in the Sky" where Earth was a pariah Judea to the Galactic Empire's Rome.)

I did not know that Miller committed suicide, which, for a traditionalist Catholic, is about as damning an act as anything imaginable.  We can only pray that it was not Miller who committed suicide as a rational, deliberate turning away from God, but a distorted piece of Miller under the compulsion of depression who committed that act.
Birzer ends with this:
 

Depending on what day and, sometimes, on what hour, I agree and/or disagree with Miller. The novel means different things to me at different times, but I always recognize its profundity. As the last line of the novel reads, "the shark swam out to his deepest waters and brooded in the old clean currents. He was very hungry that season" (p. 338). The reader also broods and hungers at the end of the novel. Miller never lets us rest.


But, I do pray—may the author finally rest in He.

So, the image of the sharks stands the test of time for others.

Cool Graph.

Steve Sailer has this interesting chart that correlates political viewpoint and voter turnout with cable viewership.

Videotaping the Police

"So A Man In Plain Clothes And An Unmarked Car Cuts You Off And Pulls A Gun..."

If this traffic stop hadn't been recorded, no one would believe it, but it seems that the police have pushed back by serving a search warrant on the driver, confiscating all of his computers and charging him with unlawful audiotaping.



 
The stop seems to be an argument in favor of the propositions that many police officers have developed an attitude that everyone is part of the prison part and that videotapes may be the way that citizens protect themselves from such situations.

A recovery is coming...

...says Larry Kudlow, and conservatives shouldn't be in denial about it.

Fair enough.

I can accept and respect this observation from Catallaxy:

Athiests are people who say there is no god and so are non-religious. The anti-religious, however, are bullies who want to impose their views and lifestyles on the rest of the population – they should be treated with the same contempt as we do everyone else who know how to live our lives better than we do.

Richard Dawkins - supporter of pedophilia.

From Skeptic Lawyer:

That apart, Dawkins is also capable of nuance on this point. In The God Delusion, he makes a cogent case (based partly on his own experience of being molested by a school teacher) that we as a society are far too hung up about ‘improper sexualisation’, and that we are just going to have to accept that sometimes authority figures and their underlings will bonk each other and — generally — a good time will be had by all. What causes the problem for us is pretending that it won’t happen, or that we can always and everywhere stop it from happening:

Skeptic Lawyer cites Dawkins from the God Delusion:

Priestly abuse of children is nowadays taken to mean sexual abuse, and I feel obliged, at the outset, to get the whole matter of sexual abuse into proportion and out of the way. Others have noted that we live in a time of hysteria about pedophilia, a mob psychology that calls to mind the Salem witch-hunts of 1692 [...]. The mob hysteria over pedophiles has reached epidemic proportions and driven parents to panic. Today’s Just Williams, today’s Huck Finns, today’s Swallows & Amazons are deprived of the freedom to roam that was one of the delights of childhood in earlier times (when the actual, as opposed to perceived, risk of molestation was probably no less). (The God Delusion, p 315-6).

Dawkins goes on to point out that

All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affection for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless if, 50 years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defence, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience). (The God Delusion, p 316).

In a way, Dawkins seems to be a classic example of the process of the evolution of social opprobrium that Mary Eberstadt described in her essay "How Pedophilia Lost its Cool."  As Eberstad points out, in the '70s the idea of statutory rape - i.e., sex by a substantially older person with someone in their teens - was becoming passe.  Sex was viewed as something that people were going to do and age was an arbitrary way of defining who could do what with whom.  This may be one reason for the light sentences meted out to a noted pedophile like Roman Polanski, or, for that matter why Father Kiesle was convicted of only a misdemeanor for tying up and molesting two boys. Eberstad notes that as late as the '90s, a "pedophilia chic" existed among the shapers of culture:

After all, it wasn’t very long ago that some enlightened folk took a considerably more relaxed view of the question of sex with youngsters, and they weren’t afraid to say so. From the 1970s through the 1990s, a number of trial balloons were floated that almost no one in America would dare release now. Some people, including celebrated novelists, asked outright whether sex with minors might be worth a cheer or two. Other sophisticated voices wondered aloud whether “intergenerational sex” was really as bad as all that, at least where boys were concerned. Still others staked a claim to what might be called “anti-anti-pedophilia.”

Given the public record of those years, it seemed, if anything, overdue to talk of “pedophilia chic,” as I did in the Weekly Standard in two essays written several years apart (1996 and 2001). Those essays consisted mostly of quotations—sometimes long ones—from a variety of public sources. They demonstrated something that most people would have thought shocking then, as most people still do today—that the moral dumbing-down of both pedophilia (sexual attraction to children) and ephebophilia (sexual attraction to teenagers) was making slow but steady progress in sophisticated society. And while a few critics resisted having that record held to the light, their objections were beside the point. The facts themselves about who said what during those years to define down the phenomenon of sex with minors were beyond dispute. They still are.


The phenomenon of pedophilia chic revealed the intensely troubling possibility that society, especially literate and enlightened society, was in the process of sanctioning certain exceptions to the taboo against sex with minors—particularly sex between men and boys. As a matter of criminal law, of course, girls are often and tragically the victims of older men. But pedophilia chic concerned not the rate of criminal conviction but rather the open public questioning of the taboo itself. What the record through the 1990s showed was that in the case of girls the taboo remained solid, and in the case of boys it did not. In other words, to take the example before us now, had Roman Polanski been arrested for the same crime a decade ago, in all likelihood we would have witnessed the same outcry that we did this fall.

Eberstad reminds:

Plainly, the boundaries of public discussion, at least about the subject of sex with youngsters, are more restrictive today than they were in the 1990s. Back then, the toxic moral fallout of the 1960s and 1970s was fresher and lay more visibly in the public square. Fourteen years ago, for example, the New Republic published a short piece called “Chickenhawk” (pedophile slang for a young boy) that discussed a short film about the North American Man–Boy Love Association. The piece expressed sympathy for the pederasts and would-be pederasts depicted and echoed them in asking whether the boys weren’t sometimes the predators in man–boy sex. The piece is so damning of itself—so perfectly representative of a time when wondering aloud about “man–boy sex” exacted no penalty from the readers of a major magazine—that one could quote almost any sentence for the desired effect: “It might even be that a budding young stud had the upper hand over the aging, overweight loner,” for example.


When it came time this fall to speak about Polanski, however, bloggers for the same magazine seemed to compete over who could most thunderously denounce the confessed child rapist and his apologists. Most important, many were not just attacking the idea of sex with girl minors but with all minors, period.

Similarly, seventeen years ago another sophisticated magazine, Vanity Fair, published a whitewashing of a Phillips Exeter Academy teacher who had been caught surreptitiously filming boys in the showers and splicing those images into pornographic movies. The essay not only painted this former teacher as a victim of his accusers but also cast negatively one accuser who had come forward. Along the way, the article conflated pedophilia with homosexuality, blaming the teacher’s victimization on a school atmosphere that allegedly left him stuck “in the closet.”

And:

Example three: In 1998 the prestigious Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association, printed a subsequently notorious study called “A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples.” In it, three researchers took issue with “the common belief that child sexual abuse causes intense harm, regardless of gender.” The authors further criticized the use of conventional terms such as victim and perpetrator and recommended that “a willing encounter with positive reactions” be labeled “simply adult–child sex.” For good measure, they also compared consensual adult–child sex to “masturbation, homosexuality, fellatio, cunnilingus, and sexual promiscuity”—behaviors the APA once considered pathological but does no more. The clear implication was that “adult-child” sex would someday become as normalized in therapeutic circles as had these predecessors.

What happened to change this trend was that the Catholic Church got caught up in the pedophile scandal:

In a fascinating bit of moral jujitsu, the scandals helped in a second way to repair the preexisting public consensus against sex with minors. Naturally enough, throughout the scandals and beyond, the spectacle of priests committing crimes proved irresistible to the people who already hate the Catholic Church. Also attracted by the fray were other, more refined souls who simply wish the Church ill as a matter of habit because they want it to conform more to what they mean by Catholic. And so, throughout the scandals, both subsets of Church detractors—non-Catholic anti-Catholics and anti-Church-hierarchy Catholics—took every opportunity to excoriate the institution and claim the moral high ground for themselves.

Dawkins seems to have traversed this same territory - but as a tribute to his "social autism," he's behind the curve.  We see in his prior writings - as recent as 2006 - the libertine, realist apologia for sex between "master and student" as being essentially benign.  Apparently, since 2006, someone has clued Dawkins in that sex between student and teacher is somehow a "bad thing" which can conveniently be deployed against his great enemy, and now he sounds like, well, a Christian.