Could be good.

Trailer for Coen Brother's "True Grit" remake.

Post-racial politics in the age of Obama.

Democrat Loretta Sanchez calls on Hispanics to oppose Van Tranh to protect "our seat."

Archduke Ferdinand found alive in Brazil; World War I fought by mistake.

Actually, the news is that Germany is making the final payment on its World War I debt this Sunday:

The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.

And:

Most of the money goes to private individuals, pension funds and corporations holding debenture bonds as agreed under the Treaty of Versailles, where Germany was made to sign the 'war guilt' clause, accepting blame for the war.

It's like federal bureaucracy.  Set up an emergency plan to fight falling prices in 1932 and you'll still have the bureaucracy around in 2010.

The Misogynistic Left, or Bob Beckel is a Human Tooth-ache.

In his various appearances on Foxnews, Beckel seems to have two modes - cheap shot against Conservatives and Republicans and complaining that legitimate concerns by Conservatives and Republicans are cheap shots.  The guy seems to incarnate the idea of "projection."  He also isn't very funny, and his modus operandi seems to be to drop into physical threats when all else fails. His appearance on "Money Rocks" shows him at his best.



The transcript shows:

Geller: I would like to address Mr. Beckel's point. I don't know why you're carrying water for the most radical, intolerant ideology in the world today. There have been 20,000 documented radical Islamic attacks since 9/11. Each one with the imprimatur of a Muslim cleric...


Beckel: You better be very careful. You're a woman, you better be very careful about who you say I carry water for, because you have no idea what you're talking about. And don't start putting me in the middle of your crap!

"You're a woman, you better be very careful about who you say I carry water for..."????

What is that even supposed to mean? Is he threatening her?  Is it some weird sexual connection that Beckel makes to "carrying water"?

What's odd is the willingness of people on the Left to drop into apparently habitual misogyny at the drop of a hat.  Michelle Malkin regularly gets villified by racist and misogynistic comments by leftists.  Sarah Palin was subjected to quasi-serious concern about campaigning with an infant.  Saturday Night Live runs with tropes about a conservative female candidate being a witch.  Needless to say, if rightwingers had dabbled in these kinds of tropes, the outrage would have been the issue for days.

The prospect of being hanged can concentrate the mind....

...and elections apparently have a similar effect.

West Virginia's Democrat Senator Manchin - facing a tough re-election campaign - calls for a "partial repeal" of Obamacare.

Because it's not like they could have worked out the problems with Socialized Medicine before they voted the bill into law or anything.

Shouldn't this admission of incompetence be a reason for voting against him?

Pope Benedict is an "Emmanuel Goldstein figure, who allows them to get their moralistic rocks off."

The Libertarian webzine Spike is disappointed with the recent crop of radicals:

Yet just because this campaign springs from neediness rather than political clarity, that doesn’t make it endearing or entertaining. On the contrary, there is a sharp authoritarian edge. Things turned ugly outside Downing Street when Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society branded the pope an ‘enemy of the state’, giving rise to the cacophonous chant: ‘GO HOME POPE, GO HOME POPE.’ It was like a scene from 1984. I have been on many a radical demo that has challenged the branding of some group or individual as ‘enemies of the state’; but this is the first radical demo I’ve been on where the protesters themselves demanded the silencing and even expulsion from Britain of someone they decreed to be an ‘enemy of the state’. Even one-time ‘enemies of the state’ - the so-called queers and the old left - were using that criminalising phrase, that piece of political demonology, to chastise the pope. It was the world turned utterly upside down. Being ‘an enemy of the state’, an ‘enemy of women, an enemy of gay people’, there is nothing for the pope to do but ‘go away and leave us alone’, said Sanderson.


It was extraordinary stuff. Consider what is being said: that because the pope’s views run counter to the British state’s views, he has to leave the country. Because he does not support gay rights or women’s equality, he must go home. Partly this is a creepy echo of the old prejudice about Catholics not being sufficiently loyal to the state - but more fundamentally, it speaks to a serious warping of the liberal humanist outlook. If you had to distil the profound, historic tradition of liberal humanism into one principle, it would surely be that no one should be persecuted for having views that are the opposite of the state’s or of mainstream political thought. Yet here was a gathering of so-called humanists clamouring for the expulsion of the pope on the basis that he does not accept ‘British values’, as the QC Geoffrey Robertson described them on Saturday.

And:

Beneath the radical garb, what the liberal fury over Benedict’s visit really represented was a demand that every individual - even the goddamn pope of Rome - should genuflect before the altar of ‘British values’ - that is, the state’s values, the liberal elite’s values - or else face the consequences. Demonisation, perhaps, or expulsion; certainly removal from polite society. No dissent from their creed can be tolerated. I’ve said it before and no doubt I’ll have to say it again in the future: I don’t agree with anything that the pope says. But I come from the kind of humanist tradition where, even when that is the case, you will still defend to the death his right to say it.

Tolerance is the space between the breathing out of one orthodoxy and the breathing in of another.

Another Chesterton moment.

Steve Sailer quotes Chesterton as follows:

Why do people think it intelligent to say, "I can see no difference!" It is nowadays quite a mark of culture to say that one can see no difference between a man and a woman, or a man and an angel, or a man and an animal. If a man cannot see the difference between a horse and a cow across a large field, we do not call him cultured; we call him short-sighted. Now, there are really interesting differences between angels and women; nay, even between men and beasts, and all such things. They are differences which most people know instinctively, as most people know a cow is not a horse without looking for its mane; or most people know a horse is not a cow without looking for horns. Whether the difference ought to count in this or that important question is a completely different matter, but it ought not really to be so difficult simply to see the difference.




... modern thought means modern thoughtlessness.

Sometimes life is an episode from Seinfeld...

...like the blind-date I was set up on with a woman who spoke no English. (The only way that one could have been any more ironic is if she had actually been blind - "oh, you meant a 'blind' date.")

Or a lady friend of mine whose first date involved taking the guy to a baseball game, where he disappeared when she went to get beer. (And you know who you are.)

The Frisky provides a list of "first date confessions" which, presumably, were "deal-breakers."  The list includes:

That he was a heroin addict and had spent three months on Rikers Island detoxing.


That he was a MURDERER. As in, he had killed someone with a broken wine bottle when he was 16.

That his last girlfriend was 16. He was 32.

That he was under federal investigation for insider trading.

That he was polyamorous. (He told me this in the first 30 seconds of date).

That he was unable to achieve orgasm and he and his last girlfriend saw a sex therapist.

That he had been stalking me online for over a year.

That he was a communist and writing a manifesto on drugs.

That he was married (!) but probably getting a divorce, didn’t have a job (although pretended he did because he was an “artist”—meaning he made just about the scariest theater masks you have ever seen in your life), and lived with his parents.

That he was a sex addict in an open relationship.

That he was a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who thought Bush/Cheney/Rove were behind the terrorist attacks.

You have to wonder why any guy would think that these things would help them "seal the deal," particularly the one about stalking the girl for a year.  Or the one in the comments where the guy confesses a predeliction for "necrophilia."

Americans doing the work that their Government won't do.

Citizens group in Houston unconvers rampant voter fraud.

We can't expect the Duopoly to ensure, you know, that the actual voters are actually represented.

The Prophet Gilbert.

There has been an eruption of interest in G.K. Chesterton on the interent - here,  here and here.

Chesterton remains singularly topical today; many of the things he opposed as fringe, crazy ideas are normative today, but still remain crazy.  This observation seems spot on:

Bramwell is looking for an exposition of Christian ideas over and against modern novelties. But Chesterton is rather a publicist and a polemicist on behalf of those ideals. He is not joining some great conversation with Don Scotus, Aristotle, and Nietszche. Rather he is in a constant scrum with Bertrand Russell, Benjamin Kidd, Cecil Rhodes, H.G. Wells, Sidney Webb, Edward Carpenter, W.T. Stead, etc... Notably, only half those names live on and most are dimmer than Chesterton's. Judged in that company he is sterling. When was the last time you saw an H.G. Wells insight applied to anything? If Chesterton were alive today a similar list would be something like, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Karen Armstrong ... Marty Peretz, Stephen Hawking, and Jonathan Chait. If I were going to produce a polemic against Karen Armstrong's book The History of God - and I dearly would like to - you might be satisfied with a clever review. You wouldn't chastise me for failing to produce the Summa Theologica. To criticize Chesterton in this regard seems unfair. Besides The Everlasting Man, his books are mostly recycled newspaper material. Next to a considered book of philosophy, Chesterton seems a little smug. Next to a cartoon and letters to the editor and in response to his actual opponents, he's not only a genius, but a delightful one.

100 years from now, people will be reading Chesterton when Dawkins is long forgotten.

The Evolution of Islam.

This article compares the extrinsic evidence of credibility for the Koran and the Bible. It notes some disturbing anomalies in the accepted Islamic tradition.

The best non-Muslim sources on this period which we have are those provided by the Arabic rock inscriptions scattered all over the Syro-Jordanian deserts and the Peninsula, and especially the Negev desert (Nevo 1994:109). The man who has done the greatest research on these rock inscriptions is the late Yehuda Nevo, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It is to his research, which is titled Towards a Prehistory of Islam, published in 1994, that I will refer.


Nevo has found in the Arab religious texts, dating from the first century and a half of Arab rule (seventh to eighth century A.D.), a monotheistic creed. However, he contends that this creed "is demonstrably not Islam, but [a creed] from which Islam could have developed." (Nevo 1994:109)

Nevo also found that "in all the Arab religious institutions during the Sufyani period [661-684 A.D.] there is a complete absence of any reference to Muhammad." (Nevo 1994:109) In fact neither the name Muhammad itself nor any Muhammadan formulae (that he is the prophet of God) appears in any inscription dated before the year 691 A.D.. This is true whether the main purpose of the inscription is religious, such as in supplications, or whether it was used as a commemorative inscription, though including a religious emphasis, such as the inscription at the dam near the town of Ta'if, built by the Caliph Mu'awiya in the 660s A.D. (Nevo 1994:109).

The fact that Muhammad's name is absent on all of the early inscriptions, especially the religious ones is significant. Many of the later traditions (i.e. the Sira and the Hadith, which are the earliest Muslim literature that we possess) are made up almost entirely of narratives on the prophet's life. He is the example which all Muslims are to follow. Why then do we not find this same emphasis in these much earlier Arabic inscriptions which are closer to the time he lived? Even more troubling, why is there no mention of him at all? His name is only found on the Arab inscriptions after 690 A.D. (Nevo 1994:109-110).

Hitchens v. Berlinski

"Does Atheism Poison Everything?"

The video of their debate is here.

Maybe it's because the Pope doesn't issue Fatwas.

Moments of lucidity like this are worth noting:

Bernard-Henri Lévy, a well-known atheist associated with what is considered to be the European left, said in an interview that Catholicism is by far the most attacked religion in Europe. The prominent intellectual also noted it was unfortunate that so many injustices are committed against Benedict XVI.


“The Pope’s voice is extremely important,” Levy told Spanish newspaper ABC this week. “And we are very unjust to this Pope. I am not Catholic, but I think there is prejudice and especially major anti-clericalism that is taking on enormous proportions in Europe.”

“In France there is much talk about the desecrations of Jewish and Muslim cemeteries, but nobody knows that the tombs of Catholics are continually desecrated,” he added. “There is a sort of anti-clericalism in France that is not healthy at all. We have the right to criticize religions, but the most attacked religion today is the Catholic religion.”

Levy said he supports the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero and is opposed to the use of burkas, but he said Catholicism suffers more attacks than Islam. “Muslims are defended in the intellectual world, but Catholics much less,” he underscored.

Hawking discovers the Logos.

Science Fiction author Mike Flynn explains:

Let's assume that he wasn't serious when he said, "from nothing," but that he meant only "from no matter." (This is "nothing" only in the sense of "absence.") So Hawking says that once upon a time the universe [space-time manifold] did not exist. There is a "beginning" or "finiteness" to time," and therefore an "outside" to time. And the laws of physics somehow exist outside of time. He is flirting with Platonism here. I wonder if he knows it.


So he equates the "creation of the universe" with the "becoming of matter." And logically prior to this "becoming" stands a principle, a set of laws described by quantum theory. (This is logically prior, not prior in time. Time commences with the becoming of matter.)

IOW: Law precedes Matter and is the cause of it.

This makes the Law the formal cause - i.e., "the form-specifying principle" - of that which would otherwise be formless. This is also Kool, since the Scientific Revolution deliberately rejected formal causes.


But since every thing that exists exists in some form, formless matter must be (in some way) non-existent. By bringing form to "formless matter" the Law brings matter as we know it into being. And we're back to Aristotle, again! There's no escaping that old Stagerite. Like American Express, he's everywhere you want to be.

Πρώτη ὕλη. If we abstract [in thought] all characters and determinations from body, we arrive at a concept of characterless, undetermined matter, aka "prime matter." Formless matter, the πρώτη ὕλη (prote hyle), is pure potency and not actually anything. In particular, while it potentially exists, it does not actually exist. (It "lacks the act of existence.") Thus it is incorporeal because it is no actual body -- though it is the necessary underlying condition for bodies. So the prime matter is formless or chaotic and because it has no physical existence we can call it a "void."

So according to Hawking, there was a beginning; and in the beginning was the Law and the Law was all there was; and without the Law nothing came to be. And the Law was an immaterial being that was pure λογοϛ. And this Law gave form to the void of pure potency, prime matter.

Wait a minute.....

Something about that sounds awfully familiar. Didn't someone say all that and say it more poetically a long time ago?

"In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was *with God,
and the Word *was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
And without him nothing came to be."

But I don't think Hawking realized he was paraphrasing that.

Metaphor gone wild.

President Obama loses it with a stump speech about a car, a ditch, a "Chinese surfer dude" and some damn Republican sipping a damn Slurpee.

Bombshell.

Chris Coates testifies before Congress that the DOJ's Civil Rights Division does discriminate against white voters.

Coates' testimony confirms the reports by former DOJ attorneys that the Civil Rights Division dismissed the New Black Panther case based on racial considerations.

J. Christian Adams provides the background for Coates' testimony:

It has been a very bad week for the dwindling number of people defending the dismissal of the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party by Eric Holder’s Justice Department. Today might have been the worst day of all. Former Voting Section Chief Christopher Coates testified to the United States Civil Rights Commission that Obama political appointees dismissed the case because they are opposed to enforcing civil rights laws in a racially neutral fashion.


And that was just the beginning.

In a dramatic hearing in Washington D.C., Coates simply destroyed the year-long spin from the Justice Department regarding the dismissal. Coates is the former Voting Section Chief, and served as lead attorney on the Black Panther case. He has practiced voting rights law longer than any other lawyer at the Justice Department. His testimony today was the worst possible nightmare for the Obama political officials responsible for the dismissal.

 testified before the Commission in July that Obama political appointee Julie Fernandes made it clear that the Voting Section at the Justice Department would not be bringing any more cases against traditional national racial minorities, like the members of the New Black Panthers. Under oath, Coates corroborated my testimony.

This is encouraging.

Canadian and American Muslims defend Free Speech.

Police and the "Us v. Them" Mentality.

This is an interesting description of the dynamics of dysfunctional law enforcement agencies:

It’s also important to keep in mind that in dysfunctional agencies, the worst traits of human nature, those formally and informally suppressed in competent agencies, tend to be manifested at every level. Among these are the tendencies to see life through an “us against them” lens, and to abuse power. The reality is that unless one is a police officer, it’s almost impossible to understand the pressures, professional and social, of the job. It’s not the kind of job that can be left at the office, ever. These pressures do tend to isolate cops from the general public. Good cops handle this rationally and calmly and don’t tend to view the public as the enemy while simultaneously understanding that there are inherent social issues. They also wield their authority, which is considerable, with restraint and humility. It may surprise many to learn that one of the hardest things for many new officers to learn is how to accept and properly use the inherent authority of their position. Most are not power hungry monsters dying to abuse the public and don’t yearn to misuse their authority.

And:

In dysfunctional agencies, it’s quite the opposite situation. Petty local politics can have an enormous effect on law enforcement. There are classes of local citizens who are essentially immune to arrest. Administrators tend to see officers as barely sentient troublemakers who must be tightly controlled to avoid mistakes. Officers resent the lack of trust and respect and are constantly, and wisely, looking over their shoulders. Weak people with few or no leadership skills and faulty knowledge and experience are appointed as supervisors because they are easy to control. Officers know that when someone complains about them—common no matter how good an officer is—they cannot know in advance if they’ll be fairly and professionally treated or thrown under the public relations bus. Does this sound like many dysfunctional workplaces? It should, but when you’re in a business that actually deals in life and death decisions on a daily basis, it’s rather more serious. Even in dysfunctional agencies, corrupt cops can never be entirely sure that their superiors won’t turn on them any second.

Interesting.

Chesterton on Progress.

From Ignatius Insight:

Progress, properly understood, has, indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning.  But as used in opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous.  So far from it being the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that of ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth. Nobody has any business to use the word "progress" unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible-- at any rate, without believing in some infallibility. For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress.

From Heretics.

The Titanic Secret.

Here is a hearsay report from the granddaughter of the only surviving officer of the Titanic about what happened that night:

What then did he know that he wasn’t telling? 'After the collision,’ Patten goes on, 'my grandfather went down with the Captain and Murdoch to Murdoch’s cabin to get the firearms in case there were riots when loading the lifeboats. That is when they told him what had happened. Instead of steering Titanic safely round to the left of the iceberg, once it had been spotted dead ahead, the steersman, Robert Hitchins, had panicked and turned it the wrong way.’


At first glance it sounds extraordinary that anyone – much less the man put in charge of the wheel on the maiden voyage of what was then the world’s most expensive ocean liner – could have made such a schoolboy error. But, Patten explains, requisitioning knives, napkins and even the breadbasket on the table of the London hotel where we meet for breakfast to give a practical demonstration of what she means, there was a very particular technical reason for this otherwise incredible error.

'Titanic was launched at a time when the world was moving from sailing ships to steam ships. My grandfather, like the other senior officers on Titanic, had started out on sailing ships. And on sailing ships, they steered by what is known as “Tiller Orders” which means that if you want to go one way, you push the tiller the other way. [So if you want to go left, you push right.] It sounds counter-intuitive now, but that is what Tiller Orders were. Whereas with “Rudder Orders’ which is what steam ships used, it is like driving a car. You steer the way you want to go. It gets more confusing because, even though Titanic was a steam ship, at that time on the North Atlantic they were still using Tiller Orders. Therefore Murdoch gave the command in Tiller Orders but Hitchins, in a panic, reverted to the Rudder Orders he had been trained in. They only had four minutes to change course and by the time Murdoch spotted Hitchins’ mistake and then tried to rectify it, it was too late.’

Patten’s grandfather – who later set up his own marine-repair business at Richmond-on-Thames and is commemorated to this day by a blue plaque where the boatyard used to stand – shared with his wife, Sylvia, a second and potentially even more damning secret. If the steersman Hitchins had made a human error, Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, owners of the Titanic, and another survivor of the sinking, gave a lethal order.

'Titanic had hit the iceberg at her most vulnerable point,’ explains Patten, 'but she could probably, my grandfather estimated, have gone on floating for a long time. But Ismay went up on the bridge and didn’t want his massive investment to sit in the middle of the Atlantic either sinking slowly, or being tugged in to port. Not great publicity! So he told the Captain to go Slow Ahead. Titanic was meant to be unsinkable.’

Cue more demonstrations with napkins and cutlery. 'Am I boring you?’ she asks, as she arranges them. On the contrary, I am gripped by the feeling of getting inside history and Patten has clearly checked her grandfather’s account lines up with all the other evidence gathered over the decades. 'If Titanic had stood still,’ she demonstrates, 'she would have survived at least until the rescue ship came and no one need have died, but when they drove her 'Slow Ahead’, the pressure of the sea coming through her damaged hull forced the water over the bulkheads and flooded sequentially one watertight compartment after another – and that was why she sank so fast.’

File this as an unconfirmable footnote to history.

Explaining Christine O'Donnell, "Kid Pundit."

John Podhoretz has an excellent article on the making and breaking of the candidate for the Delaware Senate seat:

Her standing as a kid pundit is crucial to understanding the reasons why she became a sacrificial-lamb candidate for the Delaware GOP for two cycles before 2010 -- because she had some kind of name and some kind of media experience. She was obscure but had a catchy resume. And as a result of that and other things, she was present to catch a wave against Mike Castle, the mainstream liberal Republican who was the perfect foe for an insurgent movement with passion and seriousness of purpose behind it.


Unfortunately, as O'Donnell's behavior 15 years ago and now attest, there is little evidence of seriousness of purpose (like her workplace lawsuit in particular against the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, in which she demanded damages because she had trouble sleeping) and a great deal of evidence of her fundamental silliness. Booking and canceling television interviews and bouncing around confusedly in the wake of her victory have not inspired confidence in the voters of Delaware. After the election, assuming the tsunami doesn't manage miraculously to carry her over, she will have a second career on the conservative circuit blaming the mainstream media for harming her candidacy.

But there would be no Christine O'Donnell without the mainstream media, and it will be to their precincts she will in all likelihood decamp in the wake of her sudden fame, turning the ideas she claims to embody into a dismissible caricature, just as she did in her youth. The same, by the way, will be true if she wins; she will be the first new senator liberal reporters turn to for a quote on something controversial, in hopes that she will step in it. The problem is not the ideas, or the Tea Party. The problem is O'Donnell and her path to the spotlight.

Lesson: Whenever you interact with the police, act as if your life is in danger because it probably is.

This is a horrifying story about a West Point grad whose lawful trip to Costco and lawful conduct cost him his life.

I hate it when this happens.

This is either a tribute to the slogan "Question Authority"....

...or it's a major entry into the "tin foil hat" contest.

Catholic apologist Robert Sungenis hosts a conference on the "Science of Geocentricism."

For some reason, geocentrism is an important part of Sungenis' apologetics ministry.

Like Young Earth Creationism, and Creationism in general, one has to wonder "WTF?"  How is it useful to make the truth of faith depend on a scientific theory formulated during the Bronze Age?

Here is Mark Shea's take on the conference, which contains some links to Sungenis' reasoning on geocentrism.

In Britain - Where all religions are equally superior to Christianity.

According to this Daily Mail article, British sporting venues and restaurants have been surreptitiously serving meat slaughtered pursuant to Islamic halal purity laws:

A Mail on Sunday investigation - which will alarm anyone concerned about animal cruelty - has revealed that schools, hospitals, pubs and famous sporting venues such as Ascot and Twickenham are controversially serving up meat slaughtered in accordance with strict Islamic law to unwitting members of the public.


All the beef, chicken and lamb sold to fans at Wembley has secretly been prepared in accordance with sharia law, while Cheltenham College, which boasts of its ‘strong Christian ethos’, is one of several top public schools which also serves halal chicken to pupils without informing them.

Even Britain’s biggest hotel and restaurant group Whitbread, which owns the Beefeater and Brewers Fayre chains, among many others, has admitted that more than three-quarters of its poultry is halal.

The Mail article points out this rich irony:

The extent of halal meat consumption, even in areas of Britain with a very small Muslim population, was revealed as the Pope, on his first visit to Britain, expressed fears that the country was not doing enough to preserve traditional Christian values and customs.


In a strongly worded speech to Parliament, he said: ‘There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none.’

Vox Day observes:

It will certainly be interesting to see if Britain's aggressive public atheists speak out about this, or if they do what one would expect and remain silent since so many of them are actually more anti-Christian than they are anti-religion. The amusing thing, of course, is that the story is being portrayed as one that concerns animal cruelty, not corporate submission to Islam.

It should be interesting to watch whether the secularists are going to go after the halal issue as they've gone after Christmas, and thereby forfeit their "street cred" for being "tolerant."

Cats and Dogs Living Together.

First, a Catholic Archbishop gives two cheers for early American Calvinism, and, now, a low-church Protestant at Evangel blog offers two cheers for Pope Benedict XVI for his poise in England:

And through all this, Benedict’s leading message has been a high-level critique of the aggressive secularism that has such a death-grip on the British mind. It’s a powerful argument, and he’s honed it very well over the years. I’ve been reading Benedict since he was Ratzinger; since he was just a theologian. Of course he’s said lots of other, capital-R capital-C Roman Catholic stuff, but the main point he’s been driving home has been his sustained, principled critique of the secular ideology of the contemporary world.


It seems to me that my interests are being represented by the Pope. What I mean is, the reproaches that fall on him are also directed at me and mine. When the tribes of village atheists come out to the streets with their postmodern versions of “écrasez l’infâme,” they are not upset about the things that divide my Protestant principles from his Catholic commitments. These semi-literate stepchildren of Voltaire simply hate religion, period, and want it all to go away. They lash out at the Pope because he’s famous, he’s said Christian things in public, and now has dared to come near enough to yell at. That’s mere Christian hate there.

So here’s what I learned from the public reaction to the Papal visit. I have a lot of objections to the distinctive elements of Roman Catholic theology. It occurs to me to blog them, or say them, or bring them up on this occasion. But that would be stupid. The Pope protesters are protesting me and my church as well. He’s using his platform to deliver my message to that hostile crowd, and I’m grateful for that.

Besides, when the last king is hung with the entrails of the last priest, I would rather be found among the blessed dead than in the howling crowd trying to shout “sola scriptura” over the deafening roar of “to hell with religion.”

Is the eschaton imminent?

That's embarrassing.

Tulare's 2009 "Woman of the Year" arrested for embezzling $700,000 from her bank.

Interesting Question.

Francis Beckwith observes:

Years ago when my sister was a senior in high school and I was on the philosophy faculty at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, her religion teacher, a feminist nun, began the semester with the instruction that because no one had the truth about morality or religion, we should be open-minded to everyone’s point of view. After consulting with her philosopher-brother, my sister raised this question the next day in class, “If no one has the truth about morality or religion, isn’t that a good reason not to listen to others? After all, if no one has the truth on such crucial questions, why should I waste my time listening to people who can’t teach me anything?”

It must be "George Orwell Monday."

Now for another George Orwell moment, go to this Big Government post and figure out what President Obama left out of his quotation from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

Here is the video of the speech.  Go to 22:30 and listen to President Obama's attempt at highflown rhetoric, the long pause, and the careful redaction of four words.



This video has only the relevant section of the speech.



Well, obviously, in our enlightened age which has no taboos, the only taboo is mentioning the, you know, Creator in public.

Irony Alert.

In which an "anti-hate" protest is shown to be filled with angry and hate-filled people.

It's like a scene from Orwell's "1984" coupled with a few slogans from the "Ministry of Truth."

Warning - Not Safe for the Irony-deprived.

America needs to preserve its classic Protestant heritage...

...according to Archbishop Chaput:

One of the key myths of the American Catholic imagination is this: After 200 years of fighting against public prejudice, Catholics finally broke through into America’s mainstream with the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president. It’s a happy thought, and not without grounding. Next to America’s broad collection of evangelical churches, baptized Catholics now make up the biggest religious community in the United States. They serve in large numbers in Congress. They have a majority on the Supreme Court. They play commanding roles in the professions and in business leadership. They’ve climbed, at long last, the Mt. Zion of social acceptance.

Chaput discusses the Protestant tradition that permitted - actually required - Christian religious principles to influence American public policy:

The roots of the American experience are deeply Protestant. They go back a very long way, to well before the nation’s founding. Whatever one thinks of the early Puritan colonists—and Catholics have few reasons to remember them fondly—no reader can study Gov. John Winthrop’s great 1630 homily before embarking for New England without being moved by the zeal and candor of the faith that produced it. In “A model of Christian charity,” he told his fellow colonists:

We are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ . . . That which the most in their churches maintain as truth in profession only, we must bring into familiar and constant practice; as in this duty of love, we must love brotherly without dissimulation, we must love one another with pure heart fervently. We must bear one another’s burdens. We must look not only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren . . . We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So we will keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

Not a bad summary of Christian discipleship, made urgent for Winthrop by the prospect of leading 700 souls on a hard, two-month voyage across the North Atlantic to an equally hard New World. What happened when they got there is a matter of historical record. And different agendas interpret the record differently.

The Puritan habits of hard work, industry and faith branded themselves on the American personality. While Puritan influence later diluted in waves of immigrants from other Protestant traditions, it clearly helped shape the political beliefs of John Adams and many of the other American Founders. Adams and his colleagues were men who, as Daniel Boorstin once suggested, had minds that were a “miscellany and a museum;” men who could blend the old and the new, an earnest Christian faith and Enlightenment ideas, without destroying either.

The positive assessment of Puritanism came to an end in the 19th Century when the Puritans were reconceived as ignorant and dour bigots, a reconception that served one side of a cultural war, the side that ended up winning the war by 1960, although at the time that victory seemed like a very good thing from the Catholic perspective.

The same Puritan worldview that informed John Winthrop’s homily so movingly, also reviled “Popery,” Catholic ritual and lingering “Romish” influences in England’s established Anglican Church. The Catholic Church was widely seen as Revelation’s Whore of Babylon. Time passed, and the American religious landscape became more diverse. But the nation’s many different Protestant sects shared a common, foreign ogre in their perceptions of the Holy See—perceptions made worse by Rome’s distrust of democracy and religious liberty. As a result, Catholics in America faced harsh Protestant discrimination throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This included occasional riots and even physical attacks on convents, churches and seminaries. Such is the history that made John F. Kennedy’s success seem so liberating.


The irony is that mainline American Protestantism had used up much of its moral and intellectual power by 1960. Secularizers had already crushed it in the war for the cultural high ground. In effect, after so many decades of struggle, Catholics arrived on America’s center stage just as management of the theater had changed hands -- with the new owners even less friendly, but far shrewder and much more ambitious in their social and political goals, than the old ones. Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox, despite their many differences, share far more than divides them, beginning with Jesus Christ himself. They also share with Jews a belief in the God of Israel and a reverence for God’s Word in the Old Testament. But the gulf between belief and unbelief, or belief and disinterest, is vastly wider.

According to Chaput, we are now seeing a surprising consequence of the decline of the mainstream Protestantism that informed so much of American history:

If government now pressures religious entities out of the public square, or promotes same-sex “marriage,” or acts in ways that undermine the integrity of the family, or compromises the sanctity of human life, or overrides the will of voters, or discourages certain forms of religious teaching as “hate speech,” or interferes with individual and communal rights of conscience—well, why not? In the name of tolerance and pluralism, we have forgotten why and how we began as nation; and we have undermined our ability to ground our arguments in anything higher than our own sectarian opinions.

Interesting.

The Combine.

Chicagoboyz -

I have seen a lot of people writing about Lisa Murkowski’s decision to wage a spoiler write-in campaign, to try to prevent a Tea Party-backed GOP candidate from winning the general election.


Most of the writers look at it, incorrectly, in terms of Sen. Murkowski’s personal psychology. For example, they say she feels miffed about losing a seat that is supposed to be hers by right of inheritance. This motive may exist, but it is trivial.

In Illinois, there has long been an expression which describes the relationship between the two political parties: The Combine. Chicago Tribune writer John Kass seems to have originated this expression. See, for example, this article: In Combine, cash is king, corruption is bipartisan. Kass quoted former Illinois Senator Peter Fitzgerald: “In the final analysis, The Combine’s allegiance is not to a party, but to their pocketbooks. They’re about making money off the taxpayers,” Fitzgerald said. Kass went on: “He should know. He fought The Combine and lost, and the empty suits running the Republican Party encourage their friendly scribes to blame the social conservatives for the disaster of the state GOP.”

Sound familiar?

America, welcome to Illinois.

The way it works is this. The Democrat party is the senior member of the Combine. The GOP is the junior member of the Combine. The game is exactly the same, and whoever is up, or whoever is down, based on the random behavior of those rubes, the voters, does not matter. The game is always exactly the same, and the people who are in on the game, from either party, have a shared stake in defending the game.

The Combine is a term that should be more widely used in Illinois. It is also a word that should be more widely used in the USA in general.

Lisa Murkowski’s family, and her career, exist because of the Combine. Her interest is in preserving the existing game. She is preserving her stake and her family’s stake in a game they have benefitted from. There is no mystery about this at all. There is no need for psychiatry to understand why she is trying to stop Joe Miller. He threatens the game. It has nothing to do with the label “Republican.”

Public Service Announcement.

A useful tip if you see one of these and you're - ah - "carrying" is not to do what you think you should do.

No one has ever been persuaded by being called an idiot.

"Bad Astronomer" Phil Plait gives a very sensible talk on what should be the aims and strategies of skepticism.  Plait calls out skeptical atheists for "hubris" and "ego" and abandoning logic, which he considers to be acrimonious and bitter.  Plait's advice ought to be considered by everyone, everywhere.  His summation amounts to the Four Way Test of Rotary.


Phil Plait - Don't Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.


Some atheists appear to be heavily invested in the satisfaction of their appetite for hate.  Atheist John Loftus argues in favor of the positive effects of ridicule. 

Ridicule in a social grouping does have it's effect because we are social human beings. There are some beliefs we can never argue people out of because they were never argued into them in the first place. Religion is one of them. So ridicule and social approbation do have their effects. It does indeed have a great impact on someone if all they ever hear is that a particular belief is stupid. Take a Flat Earther, for instance. Constantly have many different people tell him he's an idiot and this will cause him to doubt, even if we offer him no argument to the contrary. That's who we are as humans. We want to conform to the norm.

But Loftus actually proves Plait's point - although he reveals the "Us v. Them" foundation of the New Atheism:

Perhaps Phil was employing the strategy that "if the shoe fits the guilty should wear it." But such a strategy expects something that cannot be expected from emotional human beings. People almost always take things personally. Skeptics do not have a corner on rationality. I've said this umpteen numbers of times despite the fact that I wish it were not so.


Phil probably also offended the people who run in his circles if they are not persuaded by his case, and I don't see why they should as it's stated in the video.

That's why talks of this nature are not really smart to give if the goal is to make friends and influence people. Unless the speaker has the courage to name names, or unless he has more than mere anecdotal evidence that there is a problem needing addressed, he will always offend more people than he intends on addressing. In other words, "Don't be a Dick" Phil.

Another post on the talk accuses Plait of failing to show any evidence of atheist incivility demonstrates the extent of cognitive dissonance among internet atheists since a visit to the blogs of internet atheist personalities shows a high level of "dick to rational argument noise." This is an unintentionally funny series of post from that blog, which provides some evidence of what Plait was talking about:

grung0r


Posted August 22, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Permalink

Here is his comment on the post announcing his interview on POI: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/07/19/point-of-inquiry-interview-2/#comment-283813

The gist:

“Folks, when someone writing a blog mentions specifically that someone is their friend, even if you disagree with that person, perhaps insulting them is not the most polite thing to do. Disagreement is fine, and discussion of why is fine, but seriously, the insults? Take ‘em elsewhere.”

Followed by:

grung0r

Posted August 22, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Permalink

To be fair, I did actually call Mooney a cynical, unethical hack and a bridge burning expert in that thread. I just thought that this fell under disagreement and discussing why.

Richard Dawkins weighs in:

As Jerry said, Plait quoted no examples of skeptics who scream insults in people's face. I don't think I have ever met, seen or heard one. But I could quote plenty of skeptics who employ ridicule, who skewer pretentiousness, stupidity and ignorance using wit. Listening to such ridicule, and reading it, is one of the great joys life has to offer. And I suspect that it is very effective.

All of which helps to reinforce the trope that internet atheists seem to tolerate a level of "social autism."

Dawkins also shares his real goal in his anti-intellectual and irrational argument strategy:

Similarly, when I employ ridicule against the arguments of a young earth creationist, I am almost never trying to convert the YEC himself. That is probably a waste of time. I am trying to influence all the third parties listening in, or reading my books. I am amazed at Plait's naivety in overlooking that and treating it as obvious that our goal is to convert the target of our ridicule. Ridicule may indeed annoy the target and cause him to dig his toes in. But our goal might very well be (in my case usually is) to influence third parties, sitting on the fence, or just not very well-informed about the issues. And to achieve that goal, ridicule can be very effective indeed.

Which nicely rebuts the "atheism is not an evangelical faith" argument that atheists love.

Religion of Peace Update.

A Muslim cleric has targeted a Seattle cartoonist as a "prime target of assassination" for her spear-heading "everyone draw Mohammed day."

That's news, of course, but sadly not precedented.  And, unprecedently, no one in the official media or the government seems to work up much of a lather about Islam or Muslims for housing clerics who actually call for the murder of American citizens.  The attitude seems to be that if an American is so stupid as to exercise First Amendment rights, then what can she expect?

James Taranto interestingly asks:

Here's another question: Where is President Obama? Last month, speaking to a mostly Muslim audience at the White House, the president strongly defended the right of another imam held up as a moderate to build a mosque adjacent to Ground Zero. The next day, and again at a press conference last week, Obama said he was merely standing up for the First Amendment. As far as we recall, it's the only time Barack Obama has ever stood up for anybody's First Amendment rights.


Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

I guess it might be too much to expect the President to express some indignation at the notion of foreigners targeting Americans for murder in America.

Aristophanes in Hollywood.

This is a surprisingly literate deconstruction of the enjoyably screw-ball police comedy "The Good Guys."

Join the Counterculture - be orthodox.

Leo McKinstry explains why he is betraying his Ulster Protestant roots by joining the "Roman church":

More pertinent, however, is that my conversion also runs counter to the spirit of our times in modern Britain, for we now live in an aggressively secular, anti-Christian country, where the Catholic Church is seen as outmoded, reactionary, irrelevant and superstitious.


This anti-Catholic mood has been at its most palpable in the run-up to Pope Benedict's state visit this week, much of it led by militant atheists who, in the name of tolerance, have become utterly intolerant of manifestations of traditional Christian faith.

Indeed, I have been struck in recent months by the similarity between anti-Papal feeling in Britain today and the sectarianism that I saw all around me in Northern Ireland.

Yesterday the Reverend Ian Paisley, the Grand Old Man of Ulster Protestantism, announced he will lead a demonstration against Pope Benedict's visit to Glasgow, but his actions are no different from the noisy army of frenzied secularists.

One group, called 'Protest the Pope', is organising a major protest rally in London, under the slogan 'No! The Pope Is Not Welcome!', words that could have been drawn up by the Orange Order.

Richard Dawkins, the atheistic, best-selling author, has described the Pope as 'a leering old villain in a frock', heading 'an evil, corrupt organisation whose character he fits like a glove'.

And:

Yet the present antagonism towards the Catholic faith goes far deeper than merely a reaction to child abuse.


The fact is that Catholicism is completely out of tune with the progressive, politically correct spirit of our age, with its fashionable emphasis on moral relativism, multi-culturalism and self-gratification.

The leaders of our civic culture cannot bear the thought that there is an alternative to their state-dominated, anti-family, diversity-fixated vision of the world.

So they work themselves into a frenzy about the Catholic Church's opposition to indiscriminate condom distribution in Africa, one commentator even claiming the Pope is responsible for 'the deaths of millions of Africans from HIV/Aids'.

But this ignores not only the heroic work done in the third world by Catholic volunteers, but also the reality that those communities' primitive cultural mores are largely responsible for the spread of Aids. In fact, the Catholic ideal of restraint has often done more good than all the trendy sex awareness campaigns.

There is a tremendous hypocrisy about all this anti-Catholic feeling.

While raging against Christianity, too many civic leaders are only too happy to appease militant Islam - far more anti-gay and misogynistic than Catholicism - because of their notion that, in their Marxist hierarchy of victimhood, Muslims are an oppressed minority in need of support.

So they end up in the bizarre position of banning crucifixes and prayers from public institutions, while colluding with the spread of Sharia law.

But I am drawn to Catholicism precisely because it is a bulwark in defence of Christian civilisation against the destructive, secularist challenge.

We may long for the "good old days" when Global Warming was a Threat.

According to this Physorg.com article, the sun may be going into a "cooling period."

Sunspot formation is triggered by a magnetic field, which scientists say is steadily declining. They predict that by 2016 there may be no remaining sunspots, and the sun may stay spotless for several decades. The last time the sunspots disappeared altogether was in the 17th and 18th century, and coincided with a lengthy cool period on the planet known as the Little Ice Age.

The Sun affects the temperature of the Earth????

Nah, that can't be true.

"What are you the best in the Country at?"

What a great question when someone tries to put you down for doing something that you love.

Check out this Mark Shea post on the quiet heroism of small things, and in particular the short movie on the "best crossword puzzler" in the nation, who can complete the New York Times crossword puzzle in ten minutes, and has no understanding why it would take anyone all afternoon to do the same thing.

Shea writes:

The cult of celebrity is evil because it teaches ordinary people, possessed of a dignity given to them by God most High, that they are nothing and can only find happiness and fulfillment through identification with those people who typically represent the very worst the world has to offer: namely, people who are famous for being famous. Result: millions of people seriously modeling themselves on vacuities like What Paris Hilton is Wearing Today or striving to emulate the immense pride and narcissism of Madonna or battening on the pathologies of Brangelina or Britney Spears. The cult of celebrity robs everybody involved in it (including, especially, the Celebrity) of their humanity. It creates, not a relationship of love, but of sick co-dependence.


The cult of quiet heroism is different. It allows ordinary people to do something they excel at, to be a hero for somebody else, to admire and wish to imitate excellence in the hero, and then to resume normal lives as fallen sinners and struggling saints. In short, it is ordered toward human dignity.

The woman in Wordplay, for instance, is completely ordinary. That is to say, she is a human being created by God in his image and likeness and possessed of a value greater than that of the whole universe. Moving among her fellow creatures in a way that is not egocentric or full of the flash, dazzle, and glamor of the Kingdom of Noise that the devil presides over, she quietly does something she loves and, in the process, becomes the best in the world at it. The result: the highly Chestertonian phenomenon of a human being who is, in a very particular room, among a very particular group of people, revered as a hero and a role model to be imitated. What a beautiful thing!

Indeed.

Revising History.

The popular image of Adolf Hitler views him as something of a coward, a man who rants but when faced directly breaks down into abject fear.  This is probably due to the perception that Hitler was an archetypal bully, and bullies, according to the archetype, are cowards by nature.

The problem with the application of this archetype to Hitler is that he seems to have had a reputation for personal bravery.  He was awarded the Iron Cross and most historical sources report that he had the dangerous job of running messages between trenches.

According to this article, Hitler did not have a reputation for bravery among his World War I military comrades:

Letters and diaries revealed for the first time in a new book portray the future Nazi leader as a loner, a wimp, and an object of ridicule.


The documents published in, 'Hitler’s First War’, overturn the commonly held view that he was popular within the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment.

And:

“The commonly held view that Hitler had the dangerous job of running between trenches to deliver messages simply does not stand up,” Dr Weber said.


“His role was to deliver messages between regimental HQ and, for instance, battalions or the HQs of other units, and not companies as has been stated, so he would have been between three and five kilometres behind the front line.”

It was Hitler’s distance from the front line that led one soldier to describe him as “a rear area pig”, or Etappenschwein in German.

Dr Weber argues that the Iron Cross was awarded to Hitler because he was known by officers who could make recommendations and not because of any heroics in battle.

In some ways this reassessment seems to fit common sense.  We would expect a ranting monomaniac to be unpopular.  Most people just don't care about esoterica of the kind that attracted Hitler's attention.  Further, it just seems that Hitler's egomania - in fully developed form in his Mein Kampf - would just got on the nerves of normal people who have other things to focus on, such as not getting killed.

On the other hand, compared with other early 20th Century totalitarian dictators, Hitler did act like a bastion of personal courage.  Lenin was noted for cutting and running when protests turned violent.  In contrast, Hitler seems to have stood up to gun fire in the failed Munich Putsch, even injuring his shoulder during the gunfire volley, albeit not because of being shot.  On the other hand, Hitler didn't expect the Bavarian authorities to fight back and was probably quite surprised to find himself on the receiving end of governmental gun fire.

Mark this as a developing theory.

Don't want the American flag burned?  Don't just stand there...behead someone! - The New First Amendment.

Glen Reynolds observes:

HOW CAN YOU GET A NEW JERSEY TRANSIT WORKER FIRED? Charge that he burned a Koran. Hey, it’s not like an American flag — it’s serious.


Lesson to people who don’t want American flags burned — behead people or something. Then you get a hecklers’ veto! Nonviolent reasonable discourse is for losers.

Here's the New York Daily story:

Koran burner Derek Fenton booted from his job at NJ Transit


The protester who burned pages from the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero has been fired from NJTransit, sources and authorities said Tuesday.


Derek Fenton's 11-year career at the agency came to an abrupt halt Monday after photographs of him ripping pages from the Muslim holy book and setting them ablaze appeared in newspapers.

Fenton, 39, of Bloomingdale, N.J., burned the book during a protest on the ninth anniversary of Sept. 11 outside Park51, the controversial mosque slated to be built near Ground Zero.

He was apparently inspired by Pastor Terry Jones, the Florida clergyman who threatened to burn the Koran that day but later changed his mind.

NJ Transit said Fenton was fired but wouldn't give specifics.

"Mr. Fenton's public actions violated New Jersey Transit's code of ethics," an agency statement said.

"NJ Transit concluded that Mr. Fenton violated his trust as a state employee and therefore [he] was dismissed."

Fenton was ushered from the protests by police on Saturday and questioned, but he was released without charges.

"He said, 'This is America,' and he wanted to stand up for it, in a Tea Party kind of way," a police source said.

Another police source said Fenton described himself as a "loyal American" exercising his "right to protest."

For the record, I think that one shouldn't burn the Koran, but, then, I also think that one shouldn't burn the American flag or desecrate the Eucharist.  At least, I'm consistent, and I think that the law should be applied equally, regardless of content, and that we shouldn't give be giving foreigners a "heckler's veto" over American political discussion.

Insanity Squared.

My "outrage of the day" was this amazing observation from Justice Breyer [via NRO and this interview]:

Last week we saw a Florida Pastor – with 30 members in his church – threaten to burn Korans which lead to riots and killings in Afghanistan. We also saw Democrats and Republicans alike assume that Pastor Jones had a Constitutional right to burn those Korans. But Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told me on “GMA” that he’s not prepared to conclude that — in the internet age — the First Amendment condones Koran burning.


“Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” Breyer told me. “Well, what is it? Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”

So, the living Constitution is heading toward accepting the "heckler's veto" so long as the heckler's are not Americans?

For nearly one hundred years, the Supreme Court has taught that heckler's do no get to veto free speech.  If there is a chance of violence, the police are supposed to protect the speaker and maintain the peace by arresting the people who violate the law.

Moreover, every time this kind of issue has come up, the Left tells us that the offended parties - Catholics and Evangelicals in the case of putting a crucifix in urine, Catholics in the case of a state employee desecrating the Eucharist - are the ones trying to engage in "censorship."

But apparently that only applies to Americans.  If the problem is foreigners who issue fatwas, the Constitutional rules applicable to Americans no longer apply, and the foreigners are entitled to a "heckler's veto."

This seems to be yet another example of Oikophobia - the elitist fear of their neighbors.

Perhaps, therefore, it is understandable that this kind of Oikophobia generates a xenophobic reaction.  Mark Shea points to this post from What's Wrong With the World that contains these comments:

We need a new Crusade.


I don't know about that. We just need our country to be an Islam-free zone. The presence of Mohammedans and the threat of Muslim violence is paralyzing. There is simply no alternative. May I suggest a gentle five point plan?

1. Halt Muslim immigration.

2. Revoke the visas of Muslim students.

3. Offer Muslim families $100K to return to the Muslim country of their choice.

4. Halt the building of mosques.

5. Halt the printing and distribution of the Koran.

Yes, I know, first amendment and all that. But the the first amendment is dead, and Islam killed it. There is no "freedom of speech" or "freedom of religion" with the threat of Muslim violence hanging over your head. Once this "five point plan" does its work you can have your first amendment back.

Posted by Jeff Culbreath September 11, 2010 9:20 PM

And as far as I can tell, you could do points 1 and 2 without any actual First Amendment problems whatsoever, whatever the courts might say.

If you don't like 3-5, we could try adding--

3'. Pass jihad sedition laws and enforce them by seeding federal agents in mosques and arresting relevant imams.

4'. Local agencies refuse some mosque-building permits on plausible non-religious grounds. (E.g. "That coat factory has such wonderful architecture that we just can't destroy it.")

5'. Tear out all Muslim foot basins in public buildings.

6'. Federal and state enforcers of religious non-discrimination laws issue guidance statements to businesses indicating that a heck of a lot of things that have previously been required or thought to be required as "reasonable accommodation" of Muslim religion are actually _unreasonable_ accommodation and that they will get in _no trouble_ if they refuse these accommodations to Muslim employees.

7'. Revoke the passes of all Muslim prison chaplains.

8'. Begin extra screening of military personnel based on risk factors for Nidal Hassan-style violence, where these risk factors clearly include Islamic self-identification.

I believe that not a single one of these creates First Amendment problems. Remember re. #8 that military personnel do not as it is have all the constitutional freedoms, including rights to due process and freedom of speech (they can be punished for criticizing the President, for example), that civilians have. If any one would have to be cut on First Amendment grounds, it might be 7. But all the others should pass with flying colors.

They should cumulatively make Muslims in America feel uncomfortable. Which is fine with me.


Posted by Lydia September 11, 2010 9:43 PM

Mark Shea is right.  This is nutty, over-the-top stuff.  But when you have a sitting Supreme Court Justice suggesting that the liberties of Americans can be curtailed by the American government because of the sensibilities of foreigners, it is not entirely surprising when Americans start looking for a way out of that paradigm.

Cute skit.

DOJ Inspector General to investigate....

....Obama record on selective enforcement of voting rights law.

The Banality of Mediocrity.

Here is the transcript of Larry King's interview/carnival with Father Spitzer, Hawking's co-author Leonard Mlodinow and, for no obvious reason, Deepak Chopra.

It's a weird kaffee-klatch.  Father Spitzer - who clearly has the most to contribute - is kept to minimal air time. Chopra bloviates.  King tries to make it all about gossip.

Here's where you can find a video of the King show.

Hawkings offered this precis of the recent book:

KING: What, Stephen, do you most hope people take away from your new book "The Grand Design? ?" In your opinion, it's a great book with a lot of important points. What is the most important point in the book?


HAWKING: That science can explain the universe, and that we don't need God to explain why there is something rather than nothing or why the laws of nature are what they are.

 Good luck with that.

Father Robert Spitzer, S.J., on Hawkings Questionable Physics.

Oikophobia - "What makes them angry--what makes us angry--is the bigotry of the elites."

The clip where MSNBC lectured Pastor Jones like an 8 year old has sparked a nerve.  The typical response is something like "yes, he's a nutjob, but *jeez* what did MSNBC think it was doing?"

James Taranto is usually very good on this pop-sociology kind of thing.  A couple of weeks ago, he offered this diagnosis of the left as suffering from "oikophobia."  Taranto started with the keen observations of Charles Krauthammer, who observed that the Left's knee-jerk reaction of treating everyone who disagrees with them as uncultured boobs:

Krauthammer portrays this as a cynical game: "Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. . . . What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument."


But this has its limits as a political strategy. Krauthammer writes that "the Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November," and no one will credit him for boldness in that prediction. Some may disagree with his reckoning as to the reason for that likely loss: that "a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them."

But can anyone argue that a show of contempt is a winning political strategy? The question answers itself and implies that the contempt is genuine.

What is the nature of this contempt? In part it is the snobbery of the cognitive elite, exemplified by a recent New York Times Web column by Timothy Egan called "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings"--or by the viciousness directed at Sarah Palin, whose folksy demeanor and state-college background seem terribly déclassé not just to liberals but to a good number of conservatives in places like New York City.

Taranto then turns to former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich's pop psychological profile of New Yorkers who don't want a mosque built near "Ground Zero" as motivated by a childish fear of "the Other."

So if some Americans are afraid of people "who have what seem to be strange religions," it must be a totally irrational reaction to "economic insecurity." It couldn't possibly have anything to do with an act of mass murder committed in the name of the religion in question.


And Reich doesn't just fail to see the obvious. He dehumanizes his fellow Americans by treating their values, feelings and opinions as no more than reflexive reactions to material conditions. Americans in fact are a very tolerant people. Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was no serious backlash against Muslims. What makes them angry--what makes us angry--is the bigotry of the elites.

The Ground Zero mosque is an affront to the sensibilities of ordinary Americans. "The center's association with 9/11 is intentional and its location is no geographic coincidence," as the Associated Press has reported. That Americans would find this offensive is a matter of simple common sense. The liberal elites cannot comprehend common sense, and, incredibly, they think that's a virtue. After all, common sense is so common.

The British philosopher Roger Scruton has coined a term to describe this attitude: oikophobia. Xenophobia is fear of the alien; oikophobia is fear of the familiar: "the disposition, in any conflict, to side with 'them' against 'us', and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours.' " What a perfect description of the pro-mosque left.

Scruton was writing in 2004, and his focus was on Britain and Europe, not America. But his warning about the danger of oikophobes--whom he amusingly dubs "oiks"--is very pertinent on this side of the Atlantic today, and it illuminates how what are sometimes dismissed as mere matters of "culture" tie in with economic and social policy:

The oik repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed on us from on high by the EU or the UN, though without troubling to consider Terence's question, and defining his political vision in terms of universal values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community.

The oik is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of the oik that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. For we are seeing a massive expansion of the legislative burden on the people of Europe, and a relentless assault on the only loyalties that would enable them voluntarily to bear it. The explosive effect of this has already been felt in Holland and France. It will be felt soon everywhere, and the result may not be what the oiks expect.

There is one important difference between the American oik and his European counterpart. American patriotism is not a blood-and-soil nationalism but an allegiance to a country based in an idea of enlightened universalism. Thus our oiks masquerade as--and may even believe themselves to be--superpatriots, more loyal to American principles than the vast majority of Americans, whom they denounce as "un-American" for feeling an attachment to their actual country as opposed to a collection of abstractions.

Back in the 2004 election, I spoke to a liberal friend of mine.  She had moved to Florida. Thinking that I was one of the "elites," she shared with me her disgust for Floridians and Southerners who were uneducated, unwashed, racist rubes in her view.  I suggested to her that if she were in foreign country she would never speak about the unique cultural traditions and customs with the same lack of charity.  The cognitive dissonance didn't phase her - the ignorance and prejudices of foreign cultures were somehow better than the ignorance and prejudice of non-liberal Americans.

Great Moments in Journalism.

After making Pastor Terry Jones a star in order to depict Christian Americans as intolerant rubes, the media now wants to make him a martyr to free speech by exercising all the grace and style of Joseph Goebbels.

Newsbusters advises:

In what had to be the ultimate in condescension and elitism, MSNBC's "Morning Joe" brought Pastor Terry Jones on the show merely to lecture him on Christianity, cutting him off before he could even respond. Co-host Mika Brzezinski explained to him "we don't really need to hear anything else, so thanks." Newsbusters' Mark Finkelstein first briefly reported on this segment this morning.


Panel member Jon Meacham, the departing editor of Newsweek, briefly preached to Pastor Jones on Jesus' New Testament message of love and forgiveness and then appealed to him "as a fellow Christian" to not follow through with his threats to burn the Koran. Then, before Pastor Jones responded, his live feed was cut and co-host Mika Brzezinski continued with the show, saying that they did not need to listen to Pastor Jones.

The clip is weird beyond imaging. Check it out here.

It's either a miracle...

...or medicine isn't half as good as it thinks it is.

Boy declared brain dead and ready for organ harvesting  hears declaration of death and makes recovery.

Hollywood once again distorting the sacred to sell popcorn.

Yes, of course, I will undoubtedly go to this movie.  But as with Legion - also starring Paul Bettany - I will snort at every theological blunder I see, as in "why are angels vulnerable to bullets?"

Particularly the part where crucifixes get turned into Ninja-style throwing stars.

Just another pc urban legend.

The factoid that 1 in 4 college have been raped is a product of ideology, not science.

If government funded leftist elitists burn an American flag, desecrate a Eucharist, put a crucifix into a jar of urine, and it's all a healthy display of First Amendment protected speech....

...but if a chickenshit little church decides to burn a few Korans, its a grave threat to life as we know it.

President Obama pontificates:

"The other reason it's important for us to remember that is because we've got millions of Muslim Americans, our fellow citizens, in this country. They're going to school with our kids. They're our neighbors. They're our friends. They're our co-workers.

And, you know, when we start acting as if their religion is somehow offensive, what are we saying to them?"

Mmmm...maybe that they are adult enough to be treated like Catholics and Evangelicals by secular liberals with government funding to insult their beliefs?

Don't Burn the Koran - Burn the National Catholic Reporter...

...and some books by Hans Kung!

Acts of the Apostasy reports:

A little-known central Kansas Catholic blogger has announced that he will burn a copy of the National Catholic Reporter on his front lawn on Monday September 13, the Memorial of St John Chrysostom.


Renfrew Dachs, who blogs at 'Orthodachs Review', announced on Labor Day his intention to set fire to the most recent issue of the left-leaning paper. As he wrote on his blog:

"It is time to expose this publication for what it is. It is a heterodox publication that is trying to masquerade as a Catholic publication, seeking to deceive many within the Church."
 
Dachs' blog and Facebook page, which combined boasts all of 50 followers, has been inundated with hits and friend requests since his statement. He says that the split between supporters and detractors is fairly even.


"I've had people tell me they're coming to attend the burning. A bunch have mailed me copies of the National Catholic Reporter, along with some back issues of Commonweal and America, so I expect a pretty large fire Monday. I've also received a number of nasty emails, too. They're not death threats - pretty much just folks telling me to stop being judgmental, or that I'll harm the environment by increasing my carbon footprint, with all that smoke and stuff."

Dachs said he chose the memorial of St John Chrysostom for this event because the revered Doctor of the Church, whose name means 'Golden Mouth', defended Church teachings throughout his life. "The stuff the NCR publishes, on the total opposite spectrum of what he taught, of what the Church teaches," Dachs said. "Reiki, women priests, gay marriage? I think St John would get in their grill over those positions, so I thought it kinda appropriate."

To be ecumenical, perhaps he should toss in "Bondage of the Will" and "The Institutes."

And, yes, it's obviously a parody.


Dachs' intended action has drawn its fair share of criticism. The editorial staff at the NCR published a scathing column, which said in part: "It is regrettable that a blogger in central Kansas, with a blog with fewer than 50 followers, can make this outrageous and distrustful, disgraceful plan and get the world's attention, and yet we can't even get a link to the Huffington Post."

Jobs that Americans won't do.

There shouldn't be any. 

Here's a story about a new attorney who was laid off from a $160,000 litigation job and is hiring herself out to clean homes.

Good for her.  I bet that she has a housecleaning empire in a few years.

Great Moments in Public Speaking.

Via NRO.



Jonah Goldberg observes:

You love this guy’s enthusiasm? Mother of pearl. This dude is terrifying. If I read the speech, I’d be on board. But jeez, if there was a kitten on the platform, he’d kick it across the room just to hammer home his plan to reform the recycling procedures of the Stark County Treasurers’ office. Am I the only one reminded of this:

And this is from "The Office."