Tennessee Ernie and a really young Johnny Cash.

Surprisingly Cool.

Who among us does not have an inner six year old who is not amused by the sight of seven men yanking ropes in unison to swing a five foot thurible over the head of a congregation?

Who among us doesn't wonder along with Patrick Coffin what would happen to the seventh guy if six of the thurible swingers decided to let go of their ropes?

Who doesn't wonder if there have ever been any thurible related casualties in the history of this activity?

Projection, Cognitive Dissonance and Banquo's Ghost.

Conservative Atheist commentator Theodore Dalrymple observes:

The quite extravagant expressions of antagonism towards him — such, for example, as that consideration be given to arresting him for crimes against humanity — seem to me to bespeak a very odd, almost paranoid, state of mind. And while I hesitate always to use Freudian concepts, surely the idea of projection, the attribution to others of discreditable inclinations, thoughts or behaviour that one has oneself had or indulged in, is appropriate here.


As everyone knows, the Catholic Church has been embroiled in a scandal about the sexual abuse of children by priests and the religious. It is the Pope’s supposed complaisance towards and responsibility for child abuse that has led people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to call for his arrest for crimes against humanity, under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction for such crimes. No one would say that the church has acted always with appropriate expedition in dealing with the problem.

But the problem is not only, or even mainly, that of the church, quite the contrary. It is universally accepted that step-fathers, for example, are many times more likely to commit both physical and sexual abuse against children than biological fathers; and since step-fatherhood has now become a very much more common relationship than it once was, thanks to the social reforms of the last fifty years or so, it is likely that the great majority of child abuse that occurs in this country is committed by them. Moreover, it is a matter of common knowledge that many mothers connive at such abuse because they wish to retain the favours of the step-fathers.

It follows from this that, if the Pope should be arrested for crimes against humanity, so should the following categories:

Divorcees with children

Step-fathers

Single mothers

Feminists and all other proponents of lax marriage and easy divorce, including journalists

All legislators who have eased divorce laws and all government ministers who have either failed to support marriage by fiscal means or have actually weakened it by those means

All judges and other lawyers who have administered easy divorce laws instead of having refused to do so

All social workers and social security officials who have sought advantages for or administered payments to non-widowed single parents and no doubt many others.

I hope I need not say that I am not in favour of the arrest and trial of perhaps forty per cent of the population between the ages of twenty-five and sixty, or that I expect secular social ‘liberals’ either to arrest themselves or each other, but that they should does seem to follow from the argument of at least a few of their representatives. Indeed, the very resort of some liberals to the language of arrest shows how, not very far beneath a veneer of libertarianism, lies an authoritarianism that makes Benedict XVI look very liberal indeed. They want arguments to be settled by arrest: in other words, who can arrest whom, assuming that they will always be the ones to wield the handcuffs.

As is well known, Professor Dawkins has suggested that a religious upbringing should in itself be considered a form of child abuse, because in his view it is a form of child abuse; but he then drew back from the obvious inference that such an upbringing should be illegal. Of course, there are degrees of child abuse as of every other crime; but if a religious upbringing is not so abusive as to merit legal sanction, is it properly to be called child abuse at all, given the current connotations of that expression?

Given that so intelligent a man as Professor Dawkins, and others like him, were so clearly illogical on the matter of the Pope’s visit, are we not entitled to suspect a deep emotional confusion within them: for example, one caused by a robust and unaccustomed challenge to a brittle Weltanschauung?

The Magic Darwin Fairies.

Another science fiction writer, John C. Wright, points to more scientific "just so" stories:

Likewise, believing in the Steady State Theory could be due to a genetic predisposition of being able to imagine an infinite amount of time, and being able to contemplate eternity is a survival characteristic because hunter gatherers would get bored counting passing hours during long night watches in the Ice Age; and believing in the Big Bang theory could be due to a genetic predisposition to fear loud noises, a survival characteristic because loud noises often signal danger.

In other words, thanks to what I call “Magic Darwin Fairies” any characteristic of mind, body or soul can be said to be (1) an inheritable characteristic and (2) aid in the survival and reproduction of the species.

The second basic criticism is that the theory neither fits nor explains the facts. A man fighting his genetic predisposition to mate with young and nubile females, whether he decides to be as chaste as Galahad or as unchaste as Lancelot, is still aware of the allure of the female of the species. An atheist is not always trying and failing to pull his eyes away from the allure of Buddhist prayer wheels and Catholic rosaries. He does not hide a copy of the Bible in his sock drawer, sneaking it out when he parents are out of the house, yearning toward what his reason tells him is wrong, and ripping up the Bible in fury and self-disgust afterward. The atheists I know despise the things of religion, and are repelled by the mere mention. The impulse that drives men toward theism, at least at first glance, does not seem to be like the sexual impulse, or aggressive impulses, or selfish impulses, or anything else that arguably comes from a genetic predisposition. (Indeed, the religions of the world by and large are dead set against the natural impulses which might otherwise lead men to adultery and murder and theft, lust and wrath and covetousness.)

The third basic characteristic is that religion in and of itself is not a trait leading to the survival of the fittest and the spread of one’s genes through many offspring. Titus Livy speaks of a time in ancient Rome when the son of an aristocrat, in order to placate the gods of the underworld, in full armor and on horseback leaped into a pit of sulfur; Vestal Virgins were stoned to death if they had sex; the Carthaginians sacrificed their own children to the burning and brazen idols of Moloch — the argument that suicide, sexual abstinence, and the slaughter of offspring are characteristics tending to spread the selfish gene involved are, to say the least, counter-intuitive. If we admit that arguments about “unselfish Uncles” are valid, then any characteristic or habit, including things that directly end life, prevent reproduction, and destroy offspring can be said by such arguments to tend (somehow, thanks to Magic Darwin Fairies) to allow the group to out perform and out-breed any rival group that eschews these practices. Any argument that can just as easily prove itself as prove its opposite is not a valid argument: it is an arbitrary assertion.

The only conclusion legitimately reached giving the just-so story given above is that reason is an inheritable characteristic, and that there are uses and abuses of reason that are endemic to human nature.

And:

The superstitious link between prayer and ritual and favorable outcomes is indeed one that is explicitly condemned in the Book of Job, which some scholars opine to be the first book written in the Old Testament, which places it among the very oldest of surviving written works of mankind.


No matter what one’s opinion of religion, the link between religion and superstition is not a simple equivalence–which means that even if there were a gene or a genetic predisposition toward superstition or toward this particular informal logical error of post hoc ergo propter hoc on this one topic, or a genetic predisposition toward anthropomorphism, this would not allow us to conclude that that predisposition is the cause of religion.

I can also speak from personal experience. My faith in God is very much against my inclinations and predispositions. No one eschewed religion as entirely as did I before my conversion; and I can hardly be called superstitious. I am not one of those atheists who secretly carried around a rabbits foot. Nor was my conversion for the sake of obtaining some promised good, like a good harvest or a good hunt, nor health nor well-being.

Thus, even if we become convinced that evolution prompts certain paleolithic hunter gatherers to make post hoc ergo propter hoc errors that incline them (and therefore the human race) toward anthropomorphism, some other explanation is needed to explain religious experiences.

Myself, I have never heard the “religion is a mental error that (thanks to Magic Darwin Fairies) is (1) inheritable and (2) creates an advantage in survival and reproductive strategies” theory advanced for any other purpose than to hold faith up to scorn: it is a theory too simplistic to account for the thing being described, albeit, of course, not too simplistic to mock the thing being described.

I am reminded of a line from a book on archeology by L. Sprague de Camp. Even though it had nothing to do with the topic of the book, he paused to give what i thought was a potent argument touching the Problem of Pain (if a perfect and benevolent God designed Man, and man is evil, either this is what God intended, in which case He is not benevolent, or His design is imperfect, in which case He is not perfect). He then went on to speculate that the original of all religion was from certain paleolithic men, unable to tell the difference between dreams and reality, had dreams of dead loved ones, and therefore falsely concluded that the dead are still alive in a spirit world. The contrast between the sharp logic in the first case, and the naivety in the second cannot be over-emphasized. L. Sprague de Camp is a perfectly intelligent and rational man, yet somehow he ascribes the entire religious life and tradition of all mankind to dream misinterpretation, and the assumption that primitive men are remarkably stupider than L. Sprague de Camp.

Great argument!

Smuggling Teleology in by the Back Door.

Michael Flynn applies his Thomistic senses to the explanation that some evolutionists use to explain the truly weird morphology of the Brazilian Tree-hopper:

But the site Why Evolution is True rather spoils things by resorting to the veriest "just so" stories rather than pursue the route of the Old Physicists: abstracting from sensory impressions (quiae) to a rational principle (propter hoc) and then deducing consequences from that principle and falsifying alternative principles to establish a physical cause. We live in the publish/perish age of Jumping To Conclusions. Gotta rack up them pubs!


The alternative is the modern Pythagorean approach of creating a mathematical model and forgetting about physical causes. But evolution is not math-friendly. There are no Darwin Equations.

In either case, hand-waving is not science.

A first guess is that it’s a sexually-selected trait, but those are often limited to males, and these creatures (and the ones below) show the ornaments in both sexes. Kemp hypothesizes—and this seems quite reasonable—that “the hollow globes, like the remarkable excrescences exhibited by other treehoppers, probably deter predators.” It would be hard to grab, much less chow down on, a beast with all those spines and excrescences.


Note, though, that the ornament sports many bristles. If these are sensory bristles, and not just deterrents to predation or irritating spines, then the ornament may have an unknown tactile function.

But notice how difficult it is to talk about evolution without talking in teleological terms. The structure is "for" something: sexual attraction (hubba hubba), or predatorial deterrence, or sensation, or something.

Of course, this was the very thing that led the atheist philosopher Jerry Fodor to rip natural selection apart as too theological.

It's not just evolution.  It is hard to talk about virtually anything in science without smuggling in some kind of teleogy.  The whole scientific project assumes a teleogy, where things are directed toward an end, even if scientists don't want to mention it.

When you let liberals talk about religion...


...you usually get wince-making statements that make you go "Whisky Tango Foxtrot?"

Feminist Mormon religious columnist Joanna Brooks offers an example of this principle in action:

Big confession: I generally feel a sense of relief when the Christmas season comes to a close.

Except for the fact that the divine feminine will now disappear for another eleven months.

That means something to a Mormon feminist. Protestantism in general is starved of female divinity and iconography. Mormonism is an especially poignant case: our doctrine actually teaches us that God is a couple—a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother—though Heavenly Mother is basically hidden in mainstream Mormon talk and practice.

Except during Christmas time. She comes out of our closets and cupboards and takes center stage in our creches. She gets long American Idol-style solos in our wardhouse nativity plays.

And sometimes, people even read the revolutionary 10-verse sermon Mary gives in Luke 1, celebrating a God that favors the poor and "puts down the mighty."

Our Catholic and High Church Protestant cousins call it the Magnificat. We Mormons (and lots of other folks) don't pay it much attention—the longest piece of recorded speech by a woman in our scriptures—except during Christmastime.

I have to wince when I read this kind of thing - and I'm not a Mormon.

Yes, the LDS does teach that there is a generally unmentioned Heavenly Mother responsible with the Heavenly Father for generating the "spirit children" that includes everyone who ever lived, or didn't quite make it to embodied existence, such you, I, Jesus and Satan.

But as far as I know the Blessed Virgin Mary has never been identified as that - or, a - Heavenly Mother.  Official Mormon theology tends to discourage much - actually all - speculation as to this Heavenly Mother, but it seems a stretch to think - even under Mormon theology - that the embodied Blessed Virgin Mary would herself be the Heavenly Mother who gave existence to the Blessed Virgin Mary as a "spirit child."

Yet, Ms. Brooks identifies Mary with the Heavenly Mother who comes out of the "cupboards and takes center stage in our creches."
Just goes to show what happens when burnishing your credential as an outsider critic of your faith tradition takes precedence over actually knowing what your tradition teaches.

Diversity as the tool of cultural imperialism - mentioning "ham" is hate speech.

This story may turn out to be apocryphal - it sounds apocryphal - but the fact that it seems plausible says a lot about how rules intended to promote diversity may be distorted to the opposite end:

An Islam critic and terrorism expert says a recent incident in Spain illustrates how Muslims will use absurd reasons to assert Islamic supremacism in order to squelch free speech.


José Reyes Fernández was recently teaching his geography class about the different climates in Spain when he mentioned that his region in Andalusia offers the perfect temperature for curing Spanish ham, a world-famous delicacy. But local newspapers account that a Muslim student interrupted the lecture to argue that any talk of pork products is offensive to his religion. Fernández responded by saying he was only giving an example, and he clarified that he does not take religion into consideration when teaching geography. But after the Muslim student informed his parents about the incident, they filed suit against the teacher, accusing him of abuse with xenophobic motivations.

"It's insane; it's a pretty flagrant attempt to intimidate Westerners and to put us on the defensive and make us feel as if our own culture and our own way of doing things is somehow wrong," he contends, adding that Muslims are attempting to make culture in the West "more open to the idea that we have to accommodate Muslims, no matter what -- that we have to placate them. It's really getting to absurd levels."

Are Fox News Viewers Misinformed?

This is a great example of how the internet undermines the biased academic class.



Via Roger Ho.

The Problem with Science.

The New Yorker has an interesting article on a fairly open secret, but one which would blow the faith of most people, invested as they are in a "scientistic faith."

The problem is that the fact that replicability of experimental results - one of the key principles of science - is a pretty hit or miss deal:

But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.


Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

The phenomenon can be chased to publication bias, "significance chasing," sheer randomness and the overwhelming influence of the accepted paradigm:

This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. Verbal overshadowing might exhibit the decline effect, but it remains extensively relied upon within the field. The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn’t changed. The law of gravity remains the same.


Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ♦

The problem with science is that it involves people.

Blowback to Vow-Breaking Lovebirds.

Apparently, the ex-husband of the spouse who found love at the wrong time was interviewed....by a different publication.  His comments were about as supportive as anyone outside of the bubble of self-indulgent narcissists at the New York Times would expect:

Bob Ennis, whose ex-wife, Carol Anne Ridell, left him to marry a family friend, ripped as "revisionist history" and a "choreographed puff piece" the new couple's version of their romantic history as recounted in a splashy Sunday New York Times wedding story.


In a phone interview with Politics Daily, Ennis also blasted the Times for "providing a megaphone" for Riddell and John Partilla III to "whitewash" the account of how they met and fell in love at Manhattan's private St. Hilda's and St. Hugh's Episcopal Day School attended by both couples' children. The Times piece chronicled the bride's detailed account of the duo's epic struggle against falling in love before they ultimately chose to break up two marriages involving five youngsters.

And:

Worse yet, he said, "I had no idea my 7-year-old daughter's picture would be in the paper. My lawyer thinks there should be a family court action." If there were no children involved, he added, "all of this would be 'Who cares?' It's evident that it's a story about two sad, narcissistic people who want to justify themselves to the world."

Public opinion was reassuringly outraged:

A firestorm of criticism and some expressions of support quickly ignited across the Internet, in print and broadcast media since Sunday. The Times took the unusual step of adding a comments section to the story, which provided an immediate venue for venting.

On Tuesday, the groom said if he had known how virulent the reaction would be -- some accused the couple and the Times of promoting "homewrecking"-- they would have not have offered themselves up as the featured nuptials of the week.


Indeed, on Tuesday Ridell also had taken down photos of herself and Partilla from her Facebook page.

 So, why did the Times run this lame exercise in self-aggrandizement on behalf of two, sad narcissistic people.

Because Partilla has spent years in the advertising business, and Ridell was a well-known Manhattan TV personality, Ennis said it was easy for them to pitch the idea for a Times story to yet another well-connected parent at their kids' school -- New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller: "You have a bunch of insiders doing one another a favor."

News you can use.

How not to ruin your nonstick pan:

“A lot of people buy pans and don’t read the directions,” said Reed Winter, director of research and development for Nordic Ware, a maker of household goods and the manufacturer of the griddle I bought my son.


Ahem. I confessed right away to Mr. Winter that that was true in my case. I barely read the manual when I buy a new car. Am I really going to pore over the directions for a pan?

So this is what I should have known. I should have “preseasoned” the pan by rinsing and drying it and rubbing it with a paper towel with a little oil on it. Pretty much any type of oil will do.

It’s a good idea to rub about a teaspoon of oil or butter on a cold pan each time you use it, Mr. Winter said, because despite the name nonstick, most of the cookware needs some kind of lubricant.

Just don’t pour oil or butter on the pan and then slosh it around (my method).

“Then the oil is not adhering to the pan but being absorbed by the food,” he said. Not only will you have butter-soaked pancakes, but after a while they’ll start sticking because there’s no grease.

But what about PAM or other cooking sprays? I often put a few squirts on my nonstick frying pans.

Not a great idea, I was told. After a time, the build-up in the areas where the heat doesn’t burn the spray off — like on the sides of a frying pan — becomes sticky and pasty. I found this to be true of my pans, but didn’t know why.

Mr. Winter said it’s the soy lecithin in the spray that causes that stickiness. Instead, he recommends just using oil or a spray called Baker’s Joy that also contains flour.

Directions?  Frying pans have directions?

Thoughts on Midnight Mass...

...Father Landry:

There is something beautifully symbolic about the tradition of Midnight Mass. It shows that Christians are so eager for Christmas to begin that they want to start celebrating on the first moment of Christmas day. People who ordinarily never go out late at night and are often at that hour dressed in pajamas and sleeping soundly adjust their sleep schedules to get up, put on their best clothes and head out alert to their parish churches.


The Christmas midnight Mass is the antithesis of the growing tendency to try to make the practice of the faith convenient and easy. It’s a bulwark against the propensity to fit the celebration of Christmas and the worship of God into our crowded life; it is, rather, an annual reminder that we are called to make our lives revolve around the mysteries of faith and that those mysterious realities are worth changing sleep patterns and inconveniencing ourselves.

For this reason, it’s highly fitting that the Gospel at Midnight Mass focuses on the shepherds awake in the fields to whom the angels appeared with the message of good news of great joy. As Pope Benedict reminded us in his Christmas Midnight Mass homily last year, the example of the shepherds emphasizes — as perennial lessons for the Christian life — the virtues that are on display and cultivated in the celebration of Midnight Mass.

Merry Christmas

A Very Zombie Christmas

Tips for surviving the Zombie Apocalypse during the Holidays.

So, why can't a father marry his daughter, I mean, if they really love each other?

John Zmirak enjoys a moment of schadenfreude:

The event that's tempting me to make like Tertullian and pop myself some popcorn while I watch the souls in hell is the very public scandal of Columbia professor (and Huffington Post blogger) David Epstein. First, let me lay out why I'm inclined to detest the man: He is the icon of leftist academic self-righteousness, the kind of Ivy League teacher who sneers at the Bible readers, homeschoolers, gun owners, and pro-lifers who keep this country livable. And he does so in the language of high moral dudgeon. Witness his response when Sarah Palin -- who's certainly flawed, and I've criticized her myself -- decided to resign as Alaska governor: "Palin has done what weak, self-centered people do when the going gets tough -- they quit and blame someone else." (Hat tip to Robert Stacy McCain.) Epstein elsewhere accused conservatives of "taking hypocrisy in their personal lives to new levels of self-indulgent weirdness."


This week, we have learned just a little of what Professor Epstein means by "self-indulgent weirdness," as news came out that Epstein has for three years been having an affair with his own daughter -- his biological daughter, whom he raised himself. The young woman's mother is also a professor at Columbia. I am relieved to report that she is not standing by her man.

Now facing a jail term for his actions, Epstein hired an attorney who made the kind of arguments we should by now realize are obvious: The young woman was over 18, she wasn't coerced, so what's the harm? What right does the state have to interfere? As Epstein's lawyer told the Huffington Post, "What goes on between consenting adults in private should not be legislated. That is not the proper domain of our law . . . . If we assume for a moment that both parties are consenting, then why are we prosecuting this?"

Swiss activists agree: There's a law under consideration in that once-sane country decriminalizing incestuous relations among adults: brothers and sisters, and parents and children. Such laws are already on the books in China, France, Israel, the Ivory Coast, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and Turkey, according to ABCNews.com.

This side of the ocean, secular news sources are actually connecting the dots between this case and the 2003 Supreme Court decision striking down Texas's (long unenforced) sodomy laws. Family law expert Joanna Grossman told ABCNews.com that the decision in Lawrence v. Texas meant that states cannot prohibit "private, consensual, sexual or intimate conduct that does not involve minors or coercion." I'm glad they're making the connection, because when conservatives say things like that, they're dismissed as alarmist cranks. Sen. Rick Santorum, whose defense of natural law I discussed last week, said ruefully during his talk at the Harvard Club that he was one of the few Republicans in Congress who warned where the Lawrence decision might lead: "I said that this ruling made gay marriage inevitable, and I caught a lot of heat for that. Sometimes you hate to find out that you were right."

Even Santorum wasn't alarmist enough to see legalized incest on the horizon, but Epstein's attorney is right: If our Constitution (as reshaped in the warm hands of activist judges) has morphed into a document that protects every form of private, consensual activities among adults, there is literally no basis for punishing a man like Epstein. Squirming frantically, psychologists consulted on this story are trying to find some way to assert that every form of incest, even among adults, is "inherently coercive" because of the lingering "power differential" between, say, a father and a daughter. Their arguments won't prevail. You can't infantilize an adult that way; grown children defy their parents all the time and in all sorts of ways. I distinctly remember fighting with my elderly mother over the remote control, trying my best to turn off The Jerry Springer Show, to which she was addicted. I'm confident I could have fought her off, if things had gotten even weirder . . .

Zmirak also added this observation about the "slippery slope" of natural law theory:

My old friend Br. Andre Marie was at the same event and heard Professor Hadley Arkes' brilliant discourse on natural law. He went up to Arkes -- a recent convert from Judaism -- and asked him about the connection between natural law and revelation: "'Do you know anyone who defends the natural law, who is not a Catholic?' His response was 'Yes . . . but they eventually become Catholics.'" That led Brother Andre to investigate what the Church teaches about this linkage, and he found in St. Thomas Aquinas a perceptive observation: While the general outlines of natural law are clear to the honest thinker, original sin tends to make us fuzzy about the details: "The natural law can be blotted out from the human heart, either by evil persuasions, just as in speculative matters errors occur in respect of necessary conclusions; or by vicious customs and corrupt habits, as among some men, theft, and even unnatural vices, as the Apostle states (Romans 1), were not esteemed sinful." Because of our weakness and sinfulness, we really do need the Church to clarify and sometimes to defend (almost alone) the contents of natural law. God gives us the Church's teaching authority as an act of mercy to help us in our weakness -- since not all men are philosophers, and not all philosophers are honest.

Is Jesus Christ a Myth?

Historian James Hannam deconstructs the myth that Jesus was a myth.

Hannam is an excellent historian and writer who takes the time to pick apart the pseudo-knowledge that all-too often passes for conventional wisdom.

I recommend Hannam's "God's Philosophers" to anyone interested in the intersection of religion and science.

"It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank."

Merry Christmas to everyone who has ever been there, or in a place - physical or spiritual - like that on this or any Christmas Eve.

Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist.

Pope Benedict covers a variety of topics in his Christmas address to the Roman Curia:

We were all the more dismayed, then, when in this year of all years and to a degree we could not have imagined, we came to know of abuse of minors committed by priests who twist the sacrament into its antithesis, and under the mantle of the sacred profoundly wound human persons in their childhood, damaging them for a whole lifetime.

And:

In the vision of Saint Hildegard, the face of the Church is stained with dust, and this is how we have seen it.
 
Her garment is torn – by the sins of priests. The way she saw and expressed it is the way we have experienced it this year. We must accept this humiliation as an exhortation to truth and a call to renewal. Only the truth saves. We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred. We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen. We must discover a new resoluteness in faith and in doing good. We must be capable of doing penance. We must be determined to make every possible effort in priestly formation to prevent anything of the kind from happening again. This is also the moment to offer heartfelt thanks to all those who work to help victims and to restore their trust in the Church, their capacity to believe her message. In my meetings with victims of this sin, I have also always found people who, with great dedication, stand alongside those who suffer and have been damaged. This is also the occasion to thank the many good priests who act as channels of the Lord’s goodness in humility and fidelity and, amid the devastations, bear witness to the unforfeited beauty of the priesthood.

And:

We are well aware of the particular gravity of this sin committed by priests and of our corresponding responsibility. But neither can we remain silent regarding the context of these times in which these events have come to light. There is a market in child pornography that seems in some way to be considered more and more normal by society. The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times. From Bishops of developing countries I hear again and again how sexual tourism threatens an entire generation and damages its freedom and its human dignity. The Book of Revelation includes among the great sins of Babylon – the symbol of the world’s great irreligious cities – the fact that it trades with bodies and souls and treats them as commodities (cf. Rev 18:13). In this context, the problem of drugs also rears its head, and with increasing force extends its octopus tentacles around the entire world – an eloquent expression of the tyranny of mammon which perverts mankind. No pleasure is ever enough, and the excess of deceiving intoxication becomes a violence that tears whole regions apart – and all this in the name of a fatal misunderstanding of freedom which actually undermines man’s freedom and ultimately destroys it.


In order to resist these forces, we must turn our attention to their ideological foundations. In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children. This, however, was part of a fundamental perversion of the concept of ethos. It was maintained – even within the realm of Catholic theology – that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a “better than” and a “worse than”. Nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything depends on the circumstances and on the end in view. Anything can be good or also bad, depending upon purposes and circumstances. Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist. The effects of such theories are evident today. Against them, Pope John Paul II, in his 1993 Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor, indicated with prophetic force in the great rational tradition of Christian ethos the essential and permanent foundations of moral action. Today, attention must be focussed anew on this text as a path in the formation of conscience. It is our responsibility to make these criteria audible and intelligible once more for people today as paths of true humanity, in the context of our paramount concern for mankind.

Well, really, who cares how badly you screw over the people who trusted you so long as it makes you happy?

That's not a recipe for the good life.  That's the motto of psychopaths.

But that doesn't stop the New York Times from celebrating a couple's destruction of their families in the "Marriage" section:

WHAT happens when love comes at the wrong time?


Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla met in 2006 in a pre-kindergarten classroom. They both had children attending the same Upper West Side school. They also both had spouses.

And:

In May 2008, Mr. Partilla invited her for a drink at O’Connell’s, a neighborhood bar. She said she knew something was up, because they had never met on their own before.


“I’ve fallen in love with you,” he recalled saying to her. She jumped up, knocking a glass of beer into his lap, and rushed out of the bar. Five minutes later, he said, she returned and told him, “I feel exactly the same way.” Then she left again.

As Mr. Partilla saw it, their options were either to act on their feelings and break up their marriages or to deny their feelings and live dishonestly. “Pain or more pain,” was how he summarized it.

And:

With that goal in mind, they told their spouses. “I did a terrible thing as honorably as I could,” said Mr. Partilla, who moved out of his home, reluctantly leaving his three children. But he returned only days later. Then he boomeranged back and forth for six months.

And:

“My kids are going to look at me and know that I am flawed and not perfect, but also deeply in love,” she said. “We’re going to have a big, noisy, rich life, with more love and more people in it.”

The former spouses of this couple could not be reached for comments.

"Christian" Authors.

First Thing's Evangel blog points to a Christian author who no one would ever think of as a "Christian author":

This has nothing to do with the Left Behind books by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye.


Nor am I referring to writers behind recent surprise hits like Facing the Giantsor Fireproof.

In fact, the individual I mean to talk about isn’t considered part of the Christian subculture at all.

He has sold over 400,000, 000 books. According to his website, the number is growing by about 17 million a year globally. He has made a reputation writing about evil, but his most popular character is one of the finest fictional human beings you can imagine.

Who am I talking about? Who has those kinds of sales figures and yet sets forth a philosophy which embraces the Christian faith, tradition, and a generally conservative philosophical viewpoint?

The answer is Dean Koontz and he’s been dominating the supermarkets, airports, and bookstores for a few decades now. His career has successfully spanned a book business that was once about names like Crown and B. Dalton and then moved to Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. He has little need to worry about the transition to ereaders. He’ll sell just as well there.

There are probably two reasons that Koontz has never been labelled as a "Christian writer."

First, unlike the other authors mentioned, Koontz isn't trying to write an evangelical tract.  He's writing entertaining stories about a character he likes.  A character that has been described by - in an interesting bit of the "Kevin Bacon Game" - First Thing's "Second Hand Smoke" blogger, Wesley Smith, as a "a life of a saint."

But according to Koontz, he was never aware of that until Smith pointed it out to him.

So, the lack of self-consciousness in the religious message distinguishes Koontz from the very self-conscious "Christian writers" who inhabit the shelves of Bereans Christian stores with their wooden characters and didactic plots.

Second, Koontz is Catholic.

I was listening to one of the Odd Thomas stories when it gradually dawned on me that Koontz had to be Catholic.  His description of Odd Thomas' very odd and non-catholic view of the afterlife seemed to be very Catholic:

I noticed some things in the book that seemed, well, familiar. For example, Odd mentions that his destiny after life is "between two fires." He ponders the dark place in Hell that those who would kill the disabled, either before or after birth, will inhabit. And he puts a G.K. Chesterton observation about those who believe in nothing will believe in anything into the mouth of a deputy sheriff.

Perhaps those two facts are sufficient to keep him out of the "Christian bookstore ghetto."

The Paul Erhlich Principle applied to Global Warming...

...it isn't science when you ignore the failed predictions.

Paul Ehrlich, of course, predicted that there would be worldwide famines that would reduce world population to an "acceptable level", something like 1.5 Billion.  The fact that India is now exporting food doesn't seem to have put Ehrlich's reputation on the remainder bin of science.

Powerline reminds us that proponents of Global Warming (TM) predicted that snow would be a thing of the past in England.

How did that prediction work out.  Pictures of modern English motorists stuck in the snow on the A3 speak volumes about the predictive capabilities of AGW theory. 

Powerline observes:

It's fun to ridicule the warmists because they are so often wrong, but their errors are in fact significant: a scientific theory that implies predictions that turn out to be wrong, is false. A principal feature of climate hysteria is its proponents' unwillingness to be judged by the standards that govern real science.

In other news, glaciers are retreating because of natural temperature cycles. 

"This doesn't question the actuality, and the seriousness, of man-made climate change in any way," says Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who led the study. "But what we do see is that current glacier retreat might be equally due to natural climate variations as it is to anthropogenic greenhouse warming."

"Equally due"???  So, they would be melting anyway?

You have to admire the opening sentence about the "seriousness of man-made climate change" in light of the equal effect of "natural climate variations." 

A Soviet geneticist in the 1930s trying to avoid being purged for refusing to get in line with Lysenko couldn't have said it any better.



The good news is that we are finding artifacts under retreating glaciers that were left by humans before civilization could ever have generated enough CO2 to cause "global warming."

Living History.

Interviews with highest ranking surviving SS officer.

Another argument to permit open homosexual into the military....

...because allowing mixed heterosexual crews has never been a problem.

Navy CO and XO of mine countermeasure ship fired for "fraternization."

The skipper and executive officer of a mine countermeasures ship crew were fired Dec. 8 after Navy officials determined the two were involved in an “unduly familiar relationship.”


Lt. Cmdr. James Rushton, commander of the MCM Crew Constant, along with Constant’s XO, Lt. Cmdr. Anne Laird, both received non-judicial punishment for misconduct, Navy spokesman Cmdr. Jason Salata said today. Rushton has been reassigned to administrative duties at Commander, Naval Surface Forces, U.S. Pacific Fleet. Salata said Laird also has been reassigned.

“She’s been taken off the ship, but her next assignment is still pending,” he said.

Because obviously no one would expect men and women on long cruises in foreign lands away from family and friends to have inappropriate relations.  Human nature doesn't work that way. 

Thank God, homosexuals are known for their iron-clad sexual discipline.

One of the comments points to a not very surprising subterranean reality:

majrod Dec 11, 2010 12:05:41 AM VAL - BTW, you have a point. Having served and commanded in primarily combat arms units I can tell you my four year stint as a tactical officer at West Point introduced me to situations I* didn't have to deal with in combat arms units.


I dealt with allegations of sexual harrassment between cadets that turned a love triangle with the girl telling a story to her fiancee vs being honest about her visiting a fell's room.

I dealt with an orgy between two couples (which were also fraternizing because of command influence) that escalated into allegations that the whistle blower was lying and violating the honor code. One of the cadets wrote a letter to his congressman complaining he was being punished without a shred of proof while admitting in the letter he did everything alleged. They all got separated and the guys went to Korea as E4's.

A friend of mine stumbled onto a same sex relationship (again because of a jilted lover) that ended up involving a lesbian Major, a Captain (aware of the relationship who commented through e-mail that all they needed was a good f---), the majority of one of the female varsity teams and the #1 ranking cadet (female). Officers were offered a courtmartial or article 15 with resignation.

I could go on.

In a candid conversation with an MP friend of mine he relayed its pretty much par for the course with mixed sex units.

Its a wonder they can get their mission done and a reason why we don't need that drama in unit's whose primary mission is to win our wars by killing the other guy.

This, on the other hand, is just funny:

USMC-FO Dec 13, 2010 1:24:24 PM Passing by the CO's cabin, seaman apprentice Wexler was surprised to see a tie hung on the door knob and to hear the low heavy breathing moans coming from inside the cabin; jeez, he thought, the captain must be passing a hard dump......

The coming depression among theoretical physicists.

String theory fails first major experimental test.

Buty they had such faith in string theory.

Francis Beckwith on Edward Feser on Thomas Aquinas.

Book review here.

6 Most Creative Abuses of Loopholes that Actually Worked...

...from Cracked.

This has got to be one of the best ever:

In the late 1960s, Leonard Casley grew way too much wheat, which could only ever be a serious problem if you live in Australia. You see, Australia had wheat quotas at the time and Hutt River (the province where Casley and other families grew) had inadvertently surpassed it, meaning they weren't allowed to sell any of it. When they petitioned for the quota to be raised, the governor responded by saying, "No," and filing a law to take their land away. THAT'S how serious Australians are about wheat.

In a desperate attempt to delay the legal process, the five families of Hutt River seceded from Australia under the Treason Act of 1495. This would have been as pointless as that time you were five and told your mom you were leaving home... if the government hadn't accidentally referred to Casley as "Administrator of Hutt River Province" in official correspondence, which actually gave him legal recognition as a ruler under Australian law. Yes, in Australia, calling someone something magically turns them into that.

Taking full of advantage of the mistake, Casley declared himself His Majesty Prince Leonard I of Hutt, meaning it was now treason, under Australian law, to charge him with any crime or interfere with how he ran his new country.

Could Australia have stopped him? Sure. But by the time they got around to it, the statute of limitations had run out. So as of 1972, The Principality of Hutt River had officially seceded from Australia and stopped paying income taxes.

As of the modern day, Hutt River is still separate, while Australia treats it as a private business that doesn't pay them taxes and just tries, really hard, to pretend it's not there.

For the Law-geek in all of us.

And Happy Hanukkah to you, Dennis.

Dennis Prager recounts his trip to Morocco when he was 20 and discovered that although he was a practicing orthodox Jew, he missed Christmas, and, therefore, America.

When I was 20, I spent my junior year in college in England. When classes let out for the last two weeks of December, I traveled to Morocco, where something life-changing occurred.


What happened was that I felt a longing, even an emptiness, I had never before experienced. Something was missing from my life, but I could not at first identify it. I knew it was not about being without friends or family — after all, I hadn’t been with family or friends in England for the previous three months. And it wasn’t about being alone — I had gotten used to traveling by myself.

This sense of missing something kept gnawing at me, until one day I realized what it was: I missed the Christmas season. I missed that time of year in America.

And:

I came to two life-changing realizations. First, though my yeshiva world did everything possible to deny the existence of Christmas — for example, we had school on Christmas Day, and “midwinter vacation,” as it was called, was at the end of January, not at the end of December — this yeshiva boy really liked the Christmas season.


And, second, this Jew, whose yeshiva upbringing taught him to think of himself only as a Jew, was in fact an American as well.

Though it took more than a few years to fully realize just how deeply American I was and how much I appreciated American Christianity, it was Christmas in Morocco in 1968 that first opened my eyes. And I was never the same.

Not fit to print.

Washington Post fails to mention its own poll showing Obamacare's lowest popularity rating ever.

A new ABC-Washington Post poll found ObamaCare sunk to its lowest popularity yet: 52 percent opposed, and only 43 percent in favor. ABC mentioned the poll without fanfare at the end of a Jake Tapper report on Monday’s World News, and Tapper added this was the health law's "lowest level of popularity ever." But Tuesday’s Washington Post reported not one sentence on the poll in the paper – even as they reported in the paper that the same survey found Obama’s tax-and-unemployment-compensation deal has “broad bipartisan support.”


This is the same Post that highlighted the news on Page One on October 20, 2009, when they found a “clear majority” in favor of a socialist “public option” -- amid charges they oversampled Democrats.

Incest - it's not just for Arkansas anymore.

Switzerland considers the elimination of incest laws.

Book Review - Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism

At Amazon:

This is a well-written, fair examination of a subject that is too easily turned into a point scoring exercise in polemics. Hastings looks at the earliest history of the National Socialist party and finds that it was expressly "Catholic" in its appeal, symbolism and orientation, but that the Catholic dimension of the National Socialist party was jettisoned after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.


More interestingly is Hastings depiction of the "Catholicism" that the National Socialists appealed to. All too often, anti-Catholic point scorers - such as Christopher Hitchens - try to score points against Catholicism and religion by asserting that Fascism was "right wing Catholicism." The problem with this approach, as Hastings points out, is that Catholicism is a broad category that encompassed in Bavaria in the early 20th Century a nationalist, "anti-ultramontane", anti-papal stream that was opposed to what we generally think of as "Catholicism", i.e., the international church headed by the Pope of Rome.

Hastings covers the little known time period between approximately 1918 and the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. According to Hastings, the National Socialist party during that time period was an essentially, and quintessentially, a movement that appealed to a particular strand of Catholicism found in Bavaria. That strand might be called "liberal Catholicism" or "reform Catholicism." The essence of this form of Catholicism was "nationalistic and non-ultramontane." In other words, it appealed to Catholics who wanted to minimize their allegiance to the Pope in Rome in favor of their German identity.

Bavaria had long had a tradition of anti-ultramontanism. German Catholic theologians such as Ignaz von Dollinger, who was excommunicated after Vatican I," had urged German Catholics to shed the "yoke of ultramontanism." (Catholicism and the Roots of the Nazis ("CRN"), p. 20 - 21.) Bavaria had a tradition of "political Catholicism" whereby various political parties sought to represent the interests of the Catholic Church. Countering such political Catholicism were anti-clerical, anti-ultra-montane parties. The founding members of the National Socialist party came out of the anti-clerical, anti-ultra-montane tradition.

After Hitler joined the National Socialist party, the membership expanded by appealing to this tradition and offering Catholics an opportunity to participate in a movement that seemed to combine patriotism with Catholic piety. The nascent National Socialist party wrapped itself up in the traditions of Catholicism, including having its members attend Mass in uniform and having Nazi standards blessed by Catholic priests. However, running through the early Catholic version of National Socialism was an opposition to "ultramontane internationalism" while maintaining "the purity of both their Catholic faith and their German nationality." (CRN, p. 95.) In 1922, as part of this movement, Hitler gave a speech describing his own religious convictions at the time. Hitler offered his view of Jesus Christ as the original anti-semite who was a warrior when he "seized the whip to drive out of the temple the brood of vipers and serpents." (CRN, p. 103.) Hitler's view was that Christ shed his blood on the cross as an act of anti-semitism. (Id.)

This phase of National Socialism ended with the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Prior to the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler had formed an alliance with the virulently anti-Catholic former German General Erich Ludendorff. After his imprisonment for the failed putsch, Hitler repositioned the National Socialist party away from its Catholic roots in favor of a broader Protestant orientation. After this repositioning, many of the original Catholic supporters, including various priests who had provided some respectability to the movement, found themselves excluded from the National Socialist party, and the Catholics who remained either became nominal Catholics or fell into open apostasy.

As a Catholic, I purchased Hastings' book with trepidation, expecting to find another version of "Hitler's Pope." My trepidation was encouraged by the title and the cover photo. Reading the book, however, was a stunning experience in that it revealed a world that we don't know or appreciate when we talk about "Catholicism", namely a world where some "Catholics" are "anti-clerical" and "anti-papal." Hastings' examination of that world and the consequences of that worldview is far more interesting than Christopher Hitchens' comic book version of history could ever be.

I also recommend The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 which covers the post-Catholic, pro-Protestant phase of the National Socialist party.

The Rise of the Ubermensch.

Incest and our self-defined moral superiors:

There is almost no way to construct a rational, legally based morality that forbids incest between adults. Most of us have a visceral reaction of disgust when we think about incest because the taboos are so deeply ingrained but the incest taboo can not be supported by rational argument alone. Since the Übermensch is defined by his ability to rise above conventional morality and create his own morality, there are no effective limits to the Übermensch; any purely rational morality designed by humans can be changed on a whim and fully rationalized as a new, emerging morality with minimal effort. The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger.


[For an interesting perspective on how Nietzsche's ideas were corrupted by the Nazis, see Professor Barry Rubin's post on The Strangest Antisemite of Them All: The Bizarre Case of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche did not mean to rationalize genocide but when G-d is dead all things can be rationalized by Homo rationalis.]

I have not even touched upon the psychology of incest, especially parent-child incest, which includes the refusal to accept limits and denial of differences. Incest is perverse in psychological terms because it destroys the meaning of words and differentiations. In parent-child incest the difference between generations is denied and the significance of the primal ties between parent and child are denied. Grown children remain the child of their parents no matter what their age which means that a chronologically adult child is still psychologically a child of the parent with whom he or she has incest. Perhaps some do rise above such conventional notions of morality; perhaps we are seeing the advent of the Übermensch, but we should be careful of accepting the continual and continued accrual of transgressions against our bourgeois (ie, Judeo-Christian) morality; at some point, just as termites can destroy a house by eroding its foundation in silence right until the moment, without warning, the house collapses, each small piece torn out of our moral fabric makes the collapse of our consensual culture more likely.

Of course, the doctrine of "do no harm to others" is a Judeo-Christian value judgment.  If one is to ground it rationally, then the argument is that the "do no harm to others" principle is enlightened self-interest since we don't know when we might be one of the "others."

On the other hand, if a person - an Ubermensch - can get away with doing harm, or thinks he can get away with doing harm, or doesn't care about having harm done to him, then the "do no harm to others" rationale is no more rational than the prohibition against incest.

Greasing that slippery slope all the way down to "heroin-induced necrophilia."

The Volokh Conspiracy asks the obvious questions about adult incest pace the Lawrence v. Texas decision:

(1) Should it be illegal, and, if so, exactly why? Is it just because it’s immoral? Because legalizing incest would, by making a future sexual relationship more speakable and legitimate, potentially affect the family relationship even while the child is underage (the view to which I tentatively incline)? Because it involves a heightened risk of birth defects (a view I’m skeptical about, given that we don’t criminalize sex by carriers of genes that make serious hereditary disease much more likely than incest does)?


(2) Given Lawrence v. Texas — and similar pre–Lawrence decisions in several states, applying their state constitutions — what exactly is the basis for outlawing incest? Is it that bans on gay sex are irrational but bans on adult incest are rational, and rationality is all that’s required for regulations of adult sex? Is it that bans on gay sex don’t pass strict scrutiny (or some such demanding test) but bans on adult incest do? Is it that Lawrence rested on the fact that bans on gay sex largely foreclose all personally meaningful sexual relationships for those who are purely homosexual in orientation, whereas incest bans only foreclose a few possible sexual partners? UPDATE: For court cases on this, see here (stepfather-stepdaughter) and here (brother-sister).

And if adult incest is hunky-dory, then why not incestuous marriages?

Or necrophiliac marriages?

Once again, let's thank liberalism for raising questions that don't deserve to be raised.

Are superpowers protected by the Second Amendment?

In case you were wondering, there's a blog covering the developing area of "Law and Superheroes."

Arkansans/West Virginians ousted from role of "preferred punchline for incest jokes."

Columbia Professor/Obama Supporter/Huffington Post contributor accused of having three year long sexual relationship with 24 year old daughter.

But it was consensual, so what's the big deal?

Kathy Shaidle observes, "Liberals, your intellectual and moral superiors."

I'm sure that Columbia teaches a three unit course on "Post-modern approach to the incest taboo."

Monopoly and Progress.

Gizmodo has an interesting article on AT&T and how it both advanced technological progress and retarded it.

Let's return to Hickman's magnetic tape and the answering machine. What's interesting is that Hickman's invention in the 1930s would not be " discovered" until the 1990s. For soon after Hickman had demonstrated his invention, AT&T ordered the Labs to cease all research into magnetic storage, and Hickman's research was suppressed and concealed for more than sixty years, coming to light only when the historian Mark Clark came across Hickman's laboratory notebook in the Bell archives.

"The impressive technical successes of Bell Labs' scientists and engineers," writes Clark, "were hidden by the upper management of both Bell Labs and AT&T." AT&T "refused to develop magnetic recording for consumer use and actively discouraged its development and use by others." Eventually magnetic tape would come to America via imports of foreign technology, mainly German.

But why would company management bury such an important and commercially valuable discovery? What were they afraid of? The answer, rather surreal, is evident in the corporate memoranda, also unearthed by Clark, imposing the research ban. AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone.

More precisely, in Bell's imagination, the very knowledge that it was possible to record a conversation would " greatly restrict the use of the telephone," with catastrophic consequences for its business. Businessmen, for instance, the theory supposed, might fear the potential use of a recorded conversation to undo a written contract. Tape recorders would also inhibit discussing obscene or ethically dubious matters. In sum, the very possibility of magnetic recording, it was feared, would " change the whole nature of telephone conversations" and " render the telephone much less satisfactory and useful in the vast majority of cases in which it is employed."

A Weirdness Score of "10."

Or what do you do when you really can't vote "present"?

President Obama turns over press conference to Former President Clinton.

This afternoon, President Barack Obama held a White House meeting with the last Democrat to hold that office, and the only Democrat to win re-election to that office LBJ, Bill Clinton. After the meeting, the two held a brief press conference in which Obama offered a quick introduction before turning the Q&A over to Clinton. The subject of all this is the deal that Obama and the Republicans reached concerning the Bush tax cuts. Clinton did a much better job of selling those cuts than Obama did during two press events earlier this week. He noted, in his wonkishly informed way, how the deal isn’t perfect but it’s better than what Obama can reasonably expect to get after the GOP takes over the House in January. He also noted that, overall, the tax cuts will help the economy. And he even went into a detailed discussion of how they payroll tax cuts that are part of the deal will help us become more competitive internationally. Clinton was in command of the facts, and did strong work selling the tax cut deal — the deal that Obama has so far failed to sell to his own party.

And then, an extraordinary thing happened.

Obama said he had kept the First Lady waiting for half an hour, and told the press they were in “good hands.” And he left the briefing. Clinton did not.

The former President continued the press conference, the logo of the White House behind him in what looked like a flashback to his pre-Monica days.

Clinton looks quite a bit older now, true, but he also looks like he’s in charge. He handled the press as well as he ever did, which is a stark contrast to the way the current President mishandled the press — twice — earlier this week.

After Clinton ended the press conference, MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan came on and asked about the “optics” of all this.

Here’s what I saw. I saw a current President who has never looked less interested in doing his job. I also saw a former President who never lost interest in doing that job. Obama’s demeanor and body language suggested that he’d rather be anywhere but where he was, and then he followed through and actually bolted for the door. Clinton’s demeanor was that of a passionate wonk trying to sell a policy he actually cared about, that he thought would be good for the country. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t even his own policy that he was selling.

I saw a President who, for a few minutes a least, ceded his job to his predecessor. He’d failed to sell his own policy, so he needed and got some rescue from Clinton.

Video here.

Dogs living with cats - Conservatives against the War.

Jonathon Aitken's recent column begins:

When a respected conservative magazine becomes an anti-war magazine its readers and writers should sit up, take notice, and examine their consciences.

That's for sure.

The column is a worthwhile examination of "just war" issues as applied to Afghanistan.  And to make it even more bizarre, Joe Biden comes off as the only person in Washington asking the right questions.

In the land of Richard Dawkins, where all religions are equally superior to Christianity....

....someone has decided to vandalize a thorn tree said to have been grown from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea.

Interesting story behind the thorn tree:

Christian legend dictates that Jesus's great uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, came to Britain after the crucifixion 2,000 years ago bearing the Holy Grail - the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper.


He visited Glastonbury and thrust his staff into Wearyall Hill, just below the Tor, planting a seed for the original thorn tree.

Roundheads felled the tree during the English Civil War, when forces led by Oliver Cromwell (pictured) waged a vicious battle against the Crown.

However, locals salvaged the roots of the original tree, hiding it in secret locations around Glastonbury.

It was then replanted on the hill in 1951. Other cuttings were also grown and placed around the town - including its famous Glastonbury Abbey.

Experts had verified that the tree - known as the Crategus Monogyna Bi Flora - originated from the Middle East.

A sprig of holy thorns was taken from the Thorn tree by Glastonbury's St Johns Church on Wednesday and sent to the Queen.

The 100-year-old tradition will see the thorns sit on Her Majesty's dinner table on Christmas Day

"The sacred tree is unique in that it blossoms twice a year - at Christmas and Easter."

Bishop of Green Bay Approves Marian Apparition.

"Catholic Diocese declares Wisconsin site a Marian Shrine: Shrine is only one in the U.S.; Virgin Mary appeared in area 3 times in 1859, diocese says."

I didn't know that in the modern era, a Bishop could do that, but apparently this kind of determination is left to the judgment of the local bishop, just like the declaration of saints in ancient times.

The Last Nazi.

American investigates and sues 97 year old former SS officer who signed the orders that began mass execution of Jews in 1941.  The Nazi, Bernhard Frank, had never been tried, had lived openly in Frankfurt and was involved in Neo-Nazi organizations.  The American, Mark Gould, went undercover in the Neo-Nazi movement and has written a book on his experience.

Gould, a professional information data broker of Jewish immersion, has long been interested in history, amassing a substantial collection of Holocaust photos and other memorabilia. In 1996, through a dealer at a gun show in Orange County, California, Gould purchased the gold-plated Walther PPK surrendered by Hermann Goering upon his arrest in May 1945. Gould’s investigation of the story behind the gun spurred his interest in uncovering untold stories of Nazi atrocities and American Jewish heroism during World War II. He filmed WWII veterans, both Allied and Axis, as well as Holocaust survivors, but wanted to know more.


Gould decided to go underground in Germany. Blond, blue-eyed and six feet, he had enough of the classic Aryan look and was willing to cut his hair into a neo-Nazi style in order to blend in. In 2002, under the guise of a “wealthy American neo-Nazi who wanted to own pieces of the Third Reich in order to preserve them and spread the message,” he began meeting with various leaders in the movement: buying documents and memorabilia, and attending neo-Nazi rallies.

This paved Gould’s way to higher-level SS gatherings and, in 2006, to Dr. Bernhard Frank, Himmler’s most trusted subordinate, who nevertheless was not prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials and has lived openly in Frankfurt for many years. Gould has shot hundreds of hours of high-definition footage capturing Frank’s stories, bolstered by research at the restrictive Ludwigsburg Archives for Nazi War Crimes.

The findings from Gould’s four-year undercover investigation of Frank will be painstakingly detailed in The Last Nazi (working title), a book to be published by Random House in Fall 2011, and he is also utilizing his expertise to help develop an authoritative database to further aid researchers and combat Holocaust deniers.

It's hard to believe that any of those guys are still alive.

That Olbermann rant deserves its own deconstruction for establishing the gold standard for "crazy."

Beyond enjoying the spectacle of pompous idiots dressing down the President in a tone that would have gotten Glenn Beck condemned for "hate speech," Olbermann's screed offers a glimpse into the weird upside down world of the devout leftist.

Take this bit for example [The Other McCain has the full transcript]:

In exchange for selling out a principle campaign pledge, and the people to whom and for whom it was made. In exchange for betraying the truth that the idle and corporate rich of this country have gotten unprecedented and wholly indefensible tax cuts for a decade. In exchange for giving the idle and corporate rich of this country two more years in which to accumulate still more, and more vast piles of personal wealth with which they can buy and sell everybody else.

The idle and corporate rich????  People become the "idle rich" simply because they happen to make more than $250,000 in a single year.  Who the hell does this super-rich, condescending asshole think he is? 

In exchange for injecting new vigor into the infantile, moronic, disproved-for-a-decade three-card monte game of an economic theory purveyed by these treacherous and ultimately traitorous Republicans, that tax cuts for the rich will somehow lead to job creation even though if that had ever been true in the slightest the economy would not be where it is today.

"these treacherous and ultimately traitorous Republicans"????

Again, I thought we weren't supposed to accuse other Americans of treason, particularly if they are Leftists who want to lick the boots of the Europeans.

This President negotiates down from a position of strength better than any politician in our recent history. It is too late now to go back and ask why the President, why the wobbly Democratic leadership, whiffed on its chance to force John Boehner to put his money where his mouth was. In September Boehner said if he had no other option, of course he would vote to extend tax breaks only for the middle class.

Absolutely!  Because no one would ever have predicted or expected that a guy who had never held a real job for more than 2 years, and who voted "present" when faced with real responsibility, wouldn't fold like an empty suit when forced to make a decision.

And Olbermann is only concerned when its the "treacherous Republicans."  What happens when its a real crisis involving the Communist Chinese or the Iranians or the North Koreans?

The unemployed — unlike the rich whom this President has just bowed to are, in fact, the job creators. They do not have investment portfolios to expand. They do not have vast savings into which to stuff the government checks. They have to spend the money. And the Council reported last week that when someone becomes a 99er his or her household loses at least a third of its income.

Because, obviously, when money is invested it just sits there in a mattress or a jar buried in the backyard, and not - you know - invested in some business that makes things.

Just as we shouldn’t have gotten you angry at your news conference today and made all the moderate Democrats wonder why in the hell you get publicly angry so often at the liberals who campaigned for you and whether you might save just a touch of that sarcasm and that self-martyrdom for the Republicans.

Here, however, I'm a tad sympathetic with Olbermann, except I would replace "Republicans" for "Third World Dictators."

That is what the base is saying to this President, about his Presidency. “Well, then, (we) must not have read the details.” The Churchill quotation — as opposed to the quotation from the very Senior member of your Administration, Mr. President — is from October 5th, 1938.


I don’t want to make any true comparison to the historical event to which it related; the viewer can go ahead and look it up if they wish; I will confess I won’t fight if anybody wants to draw a comparison between what you’ve done with our domestic politics of our day, to what Neville Chamberlain did with the international politics of his.

Hot Air explains the significance of this bit of unhinged hysterics:

“I will confess I won’t fight if anyone wants to draw a comparison between what you’ve done with our domestic policies of our day to what Neville Chamberlain did with the domestic policies of his,” says Olbermann. The reference is to Neville Chamberlain who, as Prime Minister of Great Britain, infamously cut a deal with Hitler (that Hitler subsequently broke to the surprise of nobody except Chamberlain) and proclaimed “peace in our time.”


Because, in Oblermann’s [sic] world, Republicans are Nazis and the Bush tax cuts are like Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Like LBJ, who realized after the Tet Offensive that losing Walter Cronkite's support meant he had lost the support of Middle-America....

...if Obama has lost Olbermann, it means he's lost Manhattan and most of Hollywood.

The Other McCain has Olbermann's excoriation of Obama's tax compromise, during which he calls Republicans "traitorous."

Remember when it was wrong to question someone else's patriotism?

"Someone else" meant "liberals."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The schadenfreude is delectable.

The shameful part is that John Stewart really is fake-reporting stories that our real news media won't really report.

Like whether Ben Bernanke is just printing money

The reason people say such ridiculous nonsense about history and Catholicism is ...

...that they are being taught that nonsense in High School European AP History.

The Curt Jester relays this discovery from an European AP history textbook:

A high-school textbook used for the AP (Advanced Placement) European History exam equates the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance with “high magic” and says that, to combat witchcraft in the 13th century, “the Church declared its magic to be the only true magic.”


The Western Heritage Since 1300 (10th Edition, AP Edition, is published by Pearson Education Inc., publishing as Prentice Hall) is written by Donald Kagan of Yale University, Stephen Ozment of Harvard University, and Frank M. Turner of Yale Unversity.

Attached as a PDF file are the relevant portions of the textbook, which were given to me by a teacher at a Catholic high school that uses the textbook. The teacher, who does not teach history, learned about it from a student who asked her if its account of “Church magic” was true.

An actual AP European History study sheet featuring material from the book. The study sheet is available as a download from http://teacherweb.com/ . The download link is http://teacherweb.com/CA/SantiagoHighSchool/Krueger/AP-Euro-Chapter-14-Student-Notes-Pages.doc .

Sample quote from the book’s Chapter 14, p. 438, under the section title “Influence of the Clergy”:

Had ordinary people not believed that “gifted persons” could help or harm by magical means, and had they not been willing to accuse them, the hunts would never have occured; however, the contribution of Christian theologians was equally great. When the church expanded into areas where its power and influence were small, it encountered semipagan cultures rich in folkloric beliefs that predated Christianity. There, it clashed with the cunning men and women, who were respected spiritual authorities in their local communities, the folk equivalents of Christian priests. The Christian clergy also practiced high magic. They could transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ (the sacrament of the Eucharist) and eternal penalties for sin into temporal ones (the sacrament of Penance or Confession). The also claimed the power to cast out demons who possessed the faithful.

In the late thirteenth century, the Church declared its magic to be the only true magic. Since such powers were not innate to humans, the theologians reasoned, they must come either from God or from the devil. Those from God were properly exercised within and by the church. Any who practiced magic outside and against the church did so on behalf of the devil.

And a sample quote from the attached study sheet:

1.

1. Influence of the Clergy

- When the church expanded into rural areas, it: ____________

- There the church clashed with the “cunning folk” who were respected in their communities

- The Christian clergy also performed “magic” by turning bread: __________________

- In the 13th century, the church declared its magic to be the only true magic

- The church argued that: ______________________________________________

- Therefore, magic either: ______________________________________________

- Those powers from God were good and were practiced w/in the church

- Those who practiced magic outside the church: ___________________________

- Attacking these so-called witches was a way for the church to extend its spiritual control

- The princes of the day who wanted: ____________________________________

- Witch trials became a way for the church and princes to realize their power goals

N.B. One of the book’s co-authors, Frank M. Turner, who died last month, also wrote a book on Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman that, according to its publisher, “portrays Newman as a disruptive and confused schismatic conducting a radical religious experiment” and “demonstrates that Newman’s passage to Rome largely resulted from family quarrels, thwarted university ambitions, the inability to control his followers, and his desire to live in a community of celibate males.”