Spot the Idiot.

Some flyspeck named Jim Naylor at some online site called Splice seems to believe that if he thinks you ought to condemn Norwegian terrorists in the form that he thinks is proper, then you have failed his test for not being complicit with the terrorist:

Where's the Condemnation?

Jim Naylor

The eerie official silence in the wake of the Norway massacre.

In the event you have no opinions on Anders Breivik, you’re a moron. This is why I’m surprised that I haven’t seen or heard from Christianity's leaders on the matter. I’ve gone from the Vatican to the Saddleback Ministries, and then some, and I’ve got to say I’ve been getting nothing back in response from all but one (and to add an insult, that one made a precursory statement of no comment). The only thing I could gather from my attempted correspondence with Christian leadership is that Rick Warren doesn’t want to say anything unless he and his people know my angle. It’s like they’re all too afraid of their own shady scriptures to condemn them, or perhaps they condone it and they just don’t want the non-Christian parts of the world to know their true colors. Why are a majority of Christians silent and unable to publicly condemn (or at least disown) a fundamentalist Christian that committed an act of terror?

I mentioned the Vatican already, but their silence has reminded me of their semi-silent acceptances of larger, more organized, mass killings. The lack of response from the Vatican shows the world just how Ratzinger feels about Breivik. I may as well lump the Vatican in with Westboro Baptist Church. At this point, only the WBC has anything to say about it; nothing nice, but at least they have the balls to come out and say what they really think instead of being silent to avoid lying. Pat Roberts and his ministry: nothing. Trinity United, ditto. I thought maybe Rick Warren would offer an opinion. After all, around 2006, he was saying that Fundamentalism in religion would be a danger to society. Why not hold Warren to his words, call him on BS, and see if he’s willing to lead by example? Instead I got a reply via email stating that neither he nor his ministry has made, or is willing to make a statement. But the next day via Twitter he asks people to pray away the pain. I guess a deleted tweet says more about what Warren really finds important at times like these. Perhaps my focus should be on Rick Warren; after all he probably doesn’t want to believe Anders Breivik is a Christian.

It's not apparent that Breivik is a Christian from any perspective other than that he may have said he was.  From the standpoint of living a life according to the tenets of Christian doctrine, he ain't. 

Unlike Islam, there is no text in Christianity's Holy Book imposing a duty on Christians to kill unbelievers.  The text is noteworthy for counseling loving one's neighbors.  Breivik didn't love his neighbors; he killed his neighbors because he was a psycho.  Ergo he was not a Christian. QED.

Does this flyspeck named Jim Naylor really believe that Pope Benedict - or any of the pastors he identifies - endorses the murder of children?  If he does, he needs psychotherapy, not a reasoned response.
In fact, of course, to be expected, Pope Benedict did condemn the acts of Breivik -

Pope Benedict XVI has called on people to renounce hatred in the face of the “deep sorrow” felt over the terror attacks in Norway.


The pope urged people to pray for the dead, the wounded and their loved ones as he spoke to pilgrims and tourists from the balcony of his summer palace in Castel Gandolfo near Rome.

Benedict says he is issuing a heartfelt appeal for people to “abandon hatred once and for all” and renounce what he calls “the logic of evil”.

The pope yesterday sent a condolence message to Norway’s king, denouncing the “senseless violence”.

His envoy in Norway called the terror attacks “madness” and said the victims would be remembered at Sunday Mass.

"Unfortunately, yet again comes news of death and violence,'' Benedict said at the start of his greetings to the faithful.

"We all feel deep sorrow for the grave terrorist acts.''

“I want to again repeat my grief-stricken appeal to all to abandon forever the way of hatred and to run away from the logic of evil,” Benedict said in his remarks, speaking in Italian.

Apparently, "grave terrorist acts" is not clear enough for Naylor and his intellectual pygmies at Splice.

By the way, has Splice or Naylor condemned any of the dozens of Muslim attacks on Christians that were committed during the last year?  If not, by his logic, he apparently is complicit in those attacks.

"Smurfs" is an extremely clever and sophisticated movie...

...if you are homosexual.

Although Smurfs is bombing everywhere, it seems to be appealing to one demographic, and, weirdly, one that is not likely to have children to see this children's movie:

Is The Smurfs the gayest movie since The Birdcage? As someone who considers himself a friend-of-a-friend of Dorothy (check my DVD shelf for copies of Grey Gardens and Mommie Dearest) I sure think so. As we’re about to conclude the first full week of legal gay marriages in New York, there’s no better way to celebrate than to see this extremely clever and sophisticated movie.


Let’s take a look at the cast. The out and proud Neil Patrick Harris, who opened this year’s Tony Awards with one of the funniest numbers in recent history, plays our empathetic lead. His pregnant wife is played by Jayma Mays, star of the very pro-LGBT show Glee.

Well, alrighty then...but how about the movie?

But it isn’t just this cast of characters that makes this film the closest thing we’ll see to a 3D CGI version of Hush. . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte. There is a wry, worldly tone in the script. NPH is the perfect straight man, endlessly annoyed by the jolly singing, the illogic of randomly replacing words with “smurf” and the fact that everyone just happens to be named for how they act. When it comes time to defeat the baddies by “believing in yourself,” there is enough sincerity to sell as a kiddie picture, but you can almost hear the martini-soaked voice of a screenwriter spitballing “oh, hell, then Mickey and Judy put on a show in the barn.”

Because parents want their children exposed to "martini-soaked" screenwriters as much as they want subtle homosexual references laced through a kids' movie.

But, then, there is the obligatory ignore-the-fact-that-we-mocking-you-because-we-want-your-money wheeze of film-makers who are smelling a bomb:

I was lucky enough to speak to Smurfs director Raja Gosnell this morning who, while happy to riff with me on just how gross is too gross for one of Azrael’s hairballs, didn’t want to extrapolate too much on my theory that this film was crafted to have special appeal to a gay and gay friendly audience in a way that so many “kids pictures” do not.

“That absolutely is not something we tried to do. We cast Neil Patrick Harris because he’s an amazingly gifted actor. There’s not a lot of actors that can act opposite a Smurf and make it absolutely believable and absolutely charming. That is the sole reason we cast him. There was no effort to sneakily attract the gay crowd. We strictly cast on ability and talent. Tim Gunn exists because the movie takes place in a fashion world and who better to be the face of that world than Tim Gunn? He’s fantastic on his show, everyone knows him, everyone loves him, he’s a complete gentleman in real life and, by the way, he’s a good actor and hysterically funny!”

Oh, the fashion-world.  Yup, no hidden gay references are likely to crop up there.

And then there is this:

Okay, so they don’t want to lose the South, I can understand that. But for people who aren’t close minded, crack open your popcorn, your St. Germain and Soda and laugh when Hank Azaria makes his Brokeback Mountain reference.

Because parents want to have a talk about homosexual sheepherders with their six year olds.

*Sheesh*

Surreal.

This "What's My Line" clip featuring Salvador Dali is literally surreal.



Among the things that strikes me is how civilized this game show is, and how smart Arlene Francis was.

More Liberal Fascism.

Jonah Goldberg points the spotlight on this Canadian commentary calling for control on the media by "multicultural commissions with the power to punish and shame."

Jeepers - what does that sound like?

Oh, I don't know...Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, perhaps.

Liberal Fascism.

Anne Althouse takes on Jeff Rosen's argument that a majority of the Supreme Court would support the authority of the President to borrow money, even though the text of the Constitution says that only the Congress has that authority:

[Quoting Rosen]Of these five justices, Thomas is the only one whose judicial philosophy might lead him to side with Congress over Obama. As someone who believes that Congressional power over the purse should be construed strictly, Thomas might conclude that Article I gives Congress, and not the president, the power “to borrow money on the credit of the United States”—a power that it has exercised by establishing a debt ceiling. The debt ceiling doesn’t repudiate the debt or question its validity, Thomas might hold; it simply threatens default by prohibiting the president from assuming extra debt beyond what Congress has authorized. According to this argument, Obama’s unilateral decision to take on additional debt to avoid a government default would not represent debt “authorized by law,” as the Fourteenth Amendment requires, and therefore wouldn’t be justified by the Amendment.

Isn't it funny how this "tea party" philosophy just sounds like a fair reading of the text? But only Clarence Thomas is crackpot enough to do that! I added the boldface to highlight what to me seems like the obvious interpretation: No one is talking about questioning the validity of the debt! When you fail to pay debts, you're not claiming they aren't valid. Why wouldn't all the Justices say that? Why would that inapt clause take precedence over the specific and clear clause in Article I, listing among Congress's powers the power "To borrow Money on the credit of the United States"?

Forget for a moment the plain text of the Constitution, how about separation of powers?  The Congress has the power of the purse.  That's all it has to control the President.  It can't arrest the President since the executive powers are located in the Executive branch, but it can vote to withhold money from the executive.

Unless Rosen is right and the President can just borrow money without Congressional approval.

How does Rosen not recognize his argument as an argument for fascism?

The principles of the Constitution grew out of the conflict between Parliament and the Monarchy out of this very issue.  King Charles thought that he could govern without the Parliament, so he dissolved Parliament and he found all kinds of unusual ways to raise money for himself (See "Ship Money Controversy," 1634 - 1639), until he learned that he really needed Parliament.  Parliament decided not to allow itself to be dissolved again, particulalry after Charles attempted to prorogue it (See "The Long Parliament," 1640 - 1666).  From there it was off to the races as the legislature fought the English Civil War against the King, and eventually executed King Charles.

That's the history our founders were working against, and why they devised a separation of powers.

Is Rosen entirely ignorant?  If not, why would he want to recreate that bit of history?

Marco Rubio on the Debt Crisis...

...with interaction with John Kerry.

Rubio looks good - "Compromise that is not a solution is a waste of time."

Court tosses San Francisco circumcision ban...

...as an illegal attempt by a city to regulate medicine.

Father Barron on Biblical Family Values.

Clue - it isn't very sentimental.

The Secret of Yogic Levitation.

Where's the President's plan?

Even the White House Press Corps can't suppress its vestigial self-respect any longer:

And so, at long last, we reach the bitterly logical conclusion of O’s debt-ceiling-as-reelection-strategy gambit: Six agonizing minutes of his paid flack playing dumb while reporters ask why, at the eleventh hour and after months of negotiations, the “adult in the room” still hasn’t produced his own formal, score-able proposal. The answer, of course, is that the more he publicly commits to a plan, the easier it is for the GOP to use it against him next year. So he’s doing what any “adult” supervising a group of unruly children would do. He’s sitting back and staying quiet to protect his own precious ass while they fight it out.

Note the jeers from the press flacks in this video:

A revealing, continuing verbal tic.

It has been noted before that Obama thinks that everyone else is stupid - particularly out in the part of the country where people cling bitterly to their guns and religion - which has made for his most spectacular gaffes.  Bill Kristol noted this trope being slid into the President's speech on raising the debt ceiling:

I was struck by these sentences in President Obama’s speech:

Now, what makes today’s stalemate so dangerous is that it has been tied to something known as the debt ceiling – a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of before.

Understand – raising the debt ceiling does not allow Congress to spend more money. It simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress has already racked up.

Consider the condescension implicit in the president’s statement—“a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of before.” These “people outside of Washington” are not little children being lectured on an obscure subject by a worldly adult. These people outside Washington are ... citizens. Judging by the polls, most of us have opinions about whether, and under what conditions, the debt ceiling should be raised. We don’t seem to be as ignorant as Obama thinks we are of the term or concept of a debt ceiling. But the president assumes we’ve never bothered our pretty little heads about such a thing.

The Mandarins - Book Review.


From my Amazon review on Simone de Beauvior's The Mandarins:

As someone with an antipathy to existentialism, feminism, the French and soap operas, I came to Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins expecting to find myself loathing the experience. My attitude turned around quite rapidly because of the writing, the plotting and the fascination of watching the internal debates of French leftists who were coming to terms with the recent impotence of their nation and, consequently, their own irrelevance in the face of the upstart, gauche Americans. (See p. 516 ["Admitting that you belong to a fifth rate nation and an outmoded era is not something that you can do overnight."].)


I thought that De Beauvior's writing - or at least this translation - was excellent. The sentences were fairly simple and direct, and there were frequent instances where de Beauvior's observations were charming. For example, after Nadine, the daughter of Anne Dubrieulh - the first person narrator/de Beauvior figure - joins the Communist Party, Anne observes that "[Nadine] soon began examining all my acts and words in the light of historical materialism." (p. 197.)

Kids will do that.

The plotting is first-rate. De Beauvior uses a technique where she employs two perspectival characters -Henri Perron and Anne Dubrieulh. When Henri Perron - the Albert Camus figure - is the central character, the story is narrated in the third person; when Anne Dubrieulh is the central character, the story moves to a first person narrative. The change in writing perspective is interesting because de Beauvior will sometimes "loop back" to cover scenes and times that Henri had previously narrated, and we see the same scene told from Anne's perspective.

The soap opera of the book focuses on Henri and Anne's interactions with other people. Henri is the editor/publisher/co-owner of a newspaper started under the Resistance named L'Espoir (the "Hope.") Henri is married to Paula, who he seems to be fond of but finds her cloying love for him to be stifling him. Henri has to work through the question of whether he will keep L'Espoir an independent Leftist newspaper or be sucked into the plans of Robert Dubrieulh ("Dubrieulh") - the Jean Paul Sartre analog - to turn L'Espoir into the house propaganda organ of Dubrieulh's political party/movement, the S.R.L, which Dubrieulh conceives as a broad leftist front aligned with the Communist Party, but not Communist. Henri succumbs to the force of Dubrieulh's personality and his apparent submissiveness to Dubrielh, and then regrets that decision when the issue of whether to print an expose about the Soviet death camps splits Dubrieulh and Henri, with Dubrieulh judging that it would be far worse to give aid and comfort to Anti-Communists than to allow the death camps to continue, and Henri having some residual adherence to an idea of a commitment to truth that transcends politics.


Through the long political ratiocinations, we see Henri philander. First, he has an affair with the Dubrieulh's eighteen year old daughter, Nadine, then he takes up with a Quisling wanna-be actress - which results in him perjuring himself for a Nazi collaborator - and then he returns to Nadine, who connives at trapping Henri in a marriage by getting pregnant. Nadine goes from Henri to Henri's younger friend Lambert. Lambert goes from a leftist journalist to a right wing newspaperman. Paula, Henri's wife, goes from being a woman in the grips of obsessive compulsion about her husband, to out and out insanity on the same subject, but, fortunately, she is saved by psycho-analysis before the book ends.

And:

A large part of the book is taken up by the problem of the Communist Party. The problem is that Henri's coterie of intellectuals wanted to be Communists but they didn't want to make a full commitment to Communism, much less anything else. They want to have their cake and eat it, too, but the Communists won't permit a left that is not under their control or which refuses to permit itself to be used as patsies. The big issue for non-Communist intellectuals seems to have been whether they should support the United States or the Soviet Union. It seems that for most, there never was a question about supporting the Soviet Union over the United States - of course, they were going to support the Soviet Union (p. 584) - but this allegiance seems to have been more a matter of conformity to class expectation. What we get from reading The Mandarins seems to be that the French Left made most of its decisions based on projecting their attitudes on their enemies. Thus, on a number of different occasions, Henri and his friend describe their fear and loathing about becoming a colony of the United States. This fear and loathing is never expressed in terms of what the Americans will do - except that Americans are somehow uncivilized and uncultured (they will never be able to control themselves with their Atom bomb (p. 241) - but there are descriptions about what it means to be a colonized power, specifically a colony of the French during the Malagasy Uprising. Being a colony of France is not an attractive option. I got the sense that the French intellectuals were basically saying something like, "gosh, we know how we act when we are the colonizers, so why should those Americans act any better?"


Similarly, the only explanation given for the pro-Communist/pro-Soviet attitude is a salve on a guilty conscience, specifically guilt because Henri and his class of intellectuals are rather well-off. We know that they are well-off because they are drinking champagne, going out on the town, living in houses, and not going hungry. When Henri contemplates supporting the Soviet Union - or when he feels guilt or doubt about pointing out that the Soviets have death camps - he explains to himself that only the Soviet Union is likely to feed millions of starving Chinese. According to Henri, "American domination meant the perpetual oppression and undernourishment of all Oriental countries." (p. 242.) Of course, the Communists did have a pesky habit of treating people as things. (p. 241 - 242), Henri ratiocinates his way to supporting Communism by asking "but what does that mean compared to feeding the hungry?" (p. 242.) Nadine, likewise, explains her brief foray into the Communist Party by explaining that if she had been a member of the Communist Party she would not have had to feel guilty about the hungry kids she saw in Portugal during her trip there with Henri. (p. 171.) Likewise, there is a revealing scene where Anne is talking to some Americans about American support for Henry Wallace - FDR's former vice president until he was dumped in favor Harry S Truman because of Wallace's Leftist/Communist sympathies. Anne receives the explanation that "[t]hat man will never create a real leftist party. He's just an alibi for people who want to buy themselves a clear conscience cheaply." (p. 553.) A few pages later, Anne is shocked at finding Americans who don't agree that America will become fascist, and she drops the conversation because she realized that they "wanted to continue leading their comfortable, carefree, esthetes' life; no argument would dent their genteel egotism" (p. 563), which seems like a strange critique coming from a woman flits over to America at whim to have an affair and seems to want nothing more than to continue her comfortable, carefree, esthete's life.

Go here for the rest of my Amazon review.

And don't forget to give me a helpful vote to offset the votes of the Commie-symps.

Totally a marketing gimmick....

...."Cult Of Putin: Russia Leader Now Literally Worshipped As Second Coming of St. Paul."

From Le Monde:

The cult of personality spawning around Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has taken a biblical turn. In the region of Nijni Novgorod, 400 kilometers east of Moscow, the still powerful former president is now being worshipped by a sect that sees him as the reincarnation of the apostle Saint Paul.


In the Bible, Paul was a military chief who persecuted Christians before preaching the gospel. Putin, who worked for the KGB before becoming the righteous Russian president, has had a similar career trajectory, the supporters say. Even inside the Kremlin, Putin is considered a holy figure “sent by God to Russia in these difficult times,” according to Vladislav Surkov, first deputy chief of staff of the president of the Russian Federation. This supposed saint-like status comes as speculation swirls that he will run for a new term as president.

This cult dedicated to Putin has no limits, high or low: food and vodka are branded with his name. In the most attention-grabbling twist of all, a group of female students have created an army of supporters named “Armia Putina,” which now features a video clip of one of the students tearing off her shirt in front of the camera. She calls on every “beautiful and clever” girl to do the same in support of the prime minister.

Some Russian political analysts take a dim view of this female army. To Constantin Kojevnikov, the video clip is “vulgar." He says: "The viewers are encouraged to develop a political opinion but all the clip does is to show them a pair of boobs.” For others, this operation is mainly a public relations exercise launched by Putin youth organizations, and secretly financed by the Kremlin.

This may be the video - and it's surprisingly safe for work, unless the language isn't, in which case it is in Russian, so who knows:


Those crazy Russians.

On the other hand, it is not hard to imagine a college journalism department in the United States doing this for Obama:

I've had the experience and now I have a word to describe it....

...particularly over near my daughter's ice skating rink over near Highway 99 and the motel district, where crystal meth using 20 year old women appear to be a not insignificant part of the demographics.

13. Bakku-shan (Japanese)


The experience of seeing a woman who appears pretty from behind but not from the front.

*Shudder*

From Mental Floss's "15 Wonderful Words with no English Equivalent."

Gumusservi, the Turkish word for "moonlight shining on water" is nice.

Let's play "spot the religion."

It has become a commonplace observation that when there is a terror related crime, the media will go out of its way to obscure the religion of the suspect is a Muslim. 

On the other hand, such circumspection disappears entirely when the suspect is or might be Christian, kind of, even if he is the only Protestant, Rome-leaning Freemason in recorded history (and for those who don't know - probably an overwhelming majority of the population, those categories are essentially mutually exclusive....*sigh*.) For example,  The Atlantic Magazine tells its readers about the "Christian" suspect.

However, according to Mollie Hemingway at Get Religion;

We learn that he’s a member of a political party that advocates for stricter immigration and lower taxes. He apparently argued that socialism was breaking down traditions, culture, national identity and other societal structure and that this made society weak and confused. We learn that he was a fan of anti-Nazi World War II hero Max Manus. He liked Dexter, the TV show about the serial killer. He was into partying, gaming and fitness. We learn about his like of John Stuart Mill.


And we learn that he ran an organic fruit and vegetable farm. Hmm, so I guess we’re still waiting to find out about why The Atlantic is so dramatically pushing this idea that Breivik was motivated by Christian fundamentalism.

Now it’s certainly true that the New York Times printed that a jihad group had claimed responsibility for the attack. An attack that, based on the evidence we have thus far, they didn’t actually commit. And certainly some parts of the blogosphere were either too trusting of this report or too eager to believe that this attack fit into the mold of Muslim terrorism as opposed to anti-government terrorism.

But now the media are committing an equal and opposite rush to judgment. It is certainly true that a police chief said that this man was a “Christian fundamentalist.” But at this point, I’ve seen precisely zero evidence that he was one, much less that he has in any way claimed it as a motivation for what he did. Maybe that will happen. Maybe he is right now telling police that his interpretation of a particular book of the Bible means that you shoot up 80-plus kids on an island. I don’t know.

Until such time as we learn that, though, this seems more like an attempt to force the shooter’s motivation into something equivalent to Islamist terror. Again, maybe it is. Maybe we will discover a trove of writings about how Jesus commands his followers to kill a bunch of kids. I don’t know. But we certainly don’t have that now.

I think we can safely say, as Mother Jones does, that the shooter was “obsessed with the impact of Islam on Norwegian society.” That’s precisely what I picked up when I read the many dozens of pages of internet comments.

The media have an unfortunate history of taking people who claim political motivations, be they anti-government Timothy McVeigh or anti-abortion Eric Rudolph, and call them “Christian” terrorists. Even if these same people vehemently deny that their acts had anything to do with their (lack of) religious views. And I’m sure that happens with terrorists of other stripes whose violence isn’t related or strongly related to their religious views.

I’ve read a bit more since I started writing this. Norwegian media have linked to the terrorist’s explanation for his actions. He spent years on his plans. There is quite a bit to chew on in terms of his obsession with Muslims, multiculturalism, nationalism, etc. And it seems, if I’m reading this correctly, that he was part of a Masonic group called Knights Templar.

And here’s an English translation of a Norwegian blog that has been tracking conservative extremists. He says that it’s wrong to call the terrorist either a “Christian conservative” or a “neo-Nazi”:

Breivik was inspired by an internet community who brands itself “counter jihadist”, a community espousing an ideology that may be considered as extreme right-wing, which also has connections to European neo-fascism. It’s a community I have been following fairly closely for a number of years. I am not surprised that the spirit of this community has now resulted in an act of terror in Norway. What is surprising is the scale, the scope of the terrorist attacks. The number of casualties exceeds the Al Qa’ida attack in London a few years ago. Although there are examples of terrorist attacks perpetrated by similarly motivated people in the past, they have not approached the scale of this incident.

If you read the terrorist’s own manifesto, it seems like this is a more fruitful avenue for journalists to pursue. And I guess many of us will need some refresher courses on Freemasonry, too.

It's hard to imagine a media source linking Islam to an act of terror on such similarly weak evidence.

Are Nuns "God's Punchline"?

In one of those periodic "two minute hate" passing as "humor," the New Yorker has published an article depicting Pope Benedict's recent use of 'twitter."  It contains such gems as:

• Sometimes, when I’m all alone, I like to put on my cassock and spin around really fast and pretend I’m a tepee.
• During a papal audience, I put folks at ease by asking, “Are you gay?” Then I say, “Kidding!” Then I go, “No, seriously, are you gay?”
• It’s hard to tell all the cardinals apart, so sometimes I put different dinosaur stickers on their backs.This is so embarrassing, but whenever I see Orthodox Jews I always think they’re waiters.
• If people ask, “Why does God allow war and evil?,” I ask, “Why do the high-school students on ‘Glee’ look forty?”
• When I stand on my balcony and wave to the faithful and millions more via satellite, I think, Kate Middleton must hate me!
• If someone questions papal infallibility, I reply, “I know one thing for sure: you shouldn’t be wearing horizontal stripes.”
• When I ponder why I was elected Pope over so many others, I wonder if it’s just a popularity contest. Then I think, Gosh, I hope so.
• Proof of God’s existence: St. Patrick’s is right next to Saks.
• Certain Christians think that they have to attend church only on Christmas and Easter, and I have a word for those people: lucky.
• Whenever people doubt that angels are real, I ask them, “Excuse me, but have you seen the Jonas Brothers in concert?”
• I hate to say it, but nuns are God’s punch lines.
• Michele Bachmann is not Satan. Satan doesn’t have split ends.

And:

• I loved that best-seller about the boy who momentarily died and went to Heaven, but all I wanted to ask was, “Did He say anything about me?”
• I counsel couples who are about to marry, “If it feels good, stop.”
• Nancy Grace: perfect name for a gay Pope?

Funny stuff.  I'm waiting for the New Yorker piece that shows Obama twittering about his secret love for watermelons and how he really likes to sing minstrel songs.

Oh, wait, that wouldn't be funny would it?  It might seem to be a racist attack masquerading as humor, perhaps?

But the New Yorker has no problem depicting the Pope as being fashioned-obsessed, gay-obsessed, celebrity-obsessed and doesn't like conservative women and likes shopping and thinks that women religious are total jokes.

Hmmm... does he sound, I don't know, maybe, totally gay?

Is there, perhaps, an agenda here besides good humor?  Might the New Yorker be catering to a kind of bigotry prevalent in upper-class, elite, Eastern enclaves?  Would anyone be surprised to find out that the author of this piece is a jewish, homosexual playwright?

Ethnic humor is difficult. When it comes from inside, it can be a celebration of our uniqueness. From the outside, it can be used to put a group into a box and invite everyone to laugh at that group. The entirety of Rudnick's humorous take on Benedict's twitter had the cumulative effect of the latter on me.

It's not that I put jokes at the expense of Catholicism automatically off-limits. Despite my better judgment, I found "Dogma" funny because it was so over the top and seemed innocent of any real agenda. On the other hand, after listening to a ten minute series of drunk Irish jokes at one Rotary meeting on a St. Patrick's day, I found myself actually feeling insulted for being Irishman for the first time in my life.

Rudnick's schtick remind me of this ugly bit of bigotry by anti-catholic bigot Matt Taibbi.

Nuns are not God's punchline. They are, for the most part, a model of devotion. It is part of Catholic tradition that we do not distinguish between the Church and ourselves. An insult to the Church is an insult to the body of Christ which is an insult to Catholics.  It was not for nothing that Christ's initial reproach to Paul on the road to Damascus was "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"
Catholics should not permit hit and run, passive aggressive attacks on their faith to pass by without challenge out of fear that they will be accused of not having a sense of humor.  That's the tactic of bullies - pick on someone, define them as the Other, and then protest that it was all a joke when they get called on their behavior.
 

Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science...

...explained by Hillel Orfek at The New Atlantis.

The Secret Life of French Marxist Intellectuals - Existentialist Division.

These pretenders think they can tell us anything about how to live?

The relationship between Simone de Beauvior and Jean Paul Sartre was simply perverse, and it was a perversity that hurt other people.  According to the Daily Mail:

Left behind in Paris, Simone continued to seduce both men and women, writing titillating descriptions of her activities to Sartre behind the Maginot Line, which reveal her heartlessness and the vulnerability of her conquests.


Today, she would be behind bars for her sexual activities with her young pupils, but in those days she got away with it.

Tragically, the lives of these girls, who were pathologically jealous of each other over their teacher's attentions, were permanently blighted.

One took to self-harming, another committed suicide. Most remained pathetically unfulfilled and dependent on the childless Simone, who perversely referred to them as her 'family'.

Yet Simone had no maternal feelings for them at all. She showed no empathy even when one of them, a Jewish girl whom she seduced when she was 16, nearly lost her life at the hands of the Nazis who were advancing on Paris.

Simone's lack of scruples extended to her war record.

She took no part in the Resistance, like other writers of the time, concentrating on her sex life.

Indeed, the only thing that aroused her to action was the pregnancy of one of her entourage.

She found the condition of pregnancy 'insulting' because it was an impediment to woman's self-fulfilment in the wider world, and Simone arranged an illegal backstreet abortion which nearly ended the girl's life.

Sartre's war record was equally dubious. Captured by the Germans, he got on so well with his guards that he managed to engineer his release in 1941.

But he did not rush straight into Simone's arms. He had been in Paris with another woman for two weeks before he told her he was free.

In 1940, when the Germans occupied Paris, Sartre's first reaction was to preach resistance, yet he soon lost interest and, instead, accepted the teaching post a Jewish professor had been forced to leave by the Nazis.

Sartre even fraternised with the German censor when he wanted his work published.

Since the couple were free to come and go as they pleased, the war proved one of the most exciting periods of their lives and the one which has gone down in history.

Writing in the pavement cafes of St Germain, with Picasso and his mistress at the next table, and going to nightclubs with the black-clad singer Juliette Greco, they enjoyed themselves to the hilt, fully expecting the Germans would remain in Paris for at least 20 years.

They now had at least five lovers between them - men and girls - all sleeping with each other.

It was too much for the mother of one pupil who brought an official complaint in 1943 against de Beauvoir, accusing her of corrupting a minor and acting as procurer in handing her daughter over to Sartre.

The charges failed to stick because de Beauvoir's little 'family' closed ranks and lied.

And though Simone lost her teaching job, she compensated for it by publishing her first novel.

Born from her real life experiences, it was about a menage a trois. Sartre's weighty philosophical tome Being And Nothingness was also published that year.

This was the rallying cry of existentialism, the creed that preaches there is no God and that man and woman are, therefore, free to do as they will.

It would become the bible of our licentious times, taken up by liberals everywhere in the West, and yet it was practically ignored at first.

Sartre drowned his sorrows at its lack of success with rampant womanising, this time in the company of the writer of the moment - the handsome, tall, dark Algerian Albert Camus, who joined in most of the couple's sex games.

Camus slept with all their impressionable young girls, but he could not bring himself to sleep with Simone herself whom he found 'a chatterbox, a blue stocking, unbearable'.


As an Allied victory became inevitable, Sartre began to paint himself once again as a Resistance fighter and, as such, was lionised when he visited America in 1945.

I've just finished reading de Beauvior's "The Mandarins" - my review should be up momentarily - and I found it to describe the empty, posturing, comfortable, buying cheap grace lifestyle described in this article to a "T."  It's a well-written book, but it has left me confused as to whether de Beauvior intended to write a book memorializing the fact that she and her fellow intellectuals were worthless human beings.

Of course, there's this:

The Americans did not take to Simone as they had to Sartre. They disliked her drinking, they mocked her clothes and they noticed her faint whiff of body odour.

And:

For many years he had kept himself going with amphetamines, black coffee and cigarettes, followed by sleeping pills and red wine. Now he was incontinent, lame and blind.


On the brink of his death in 1980, Sartre was also flirting with Judaism and Simone was appalled - to embrace God would have been to reverse their entire lives' work.

After he died, Simone was left alone with his body in the hospital, and she crawled under the sheet to spend one last night with him. Now that his restless mind was stilled she at last had him where she wanted him.

And so she wrote her nihilistic epitaph for the tomb they would ultimately share, ensuring their bleak and Godless creed would go down in history. 'His death separates us, my death will not reunite us,' it read.

Finally, she'd had her own way - but in her heart she must have known it was only because she had managed to outlive him.

Hitler responds to the Evangelical counter-attack against "Love Wins."



Funny stuff. 

I'm glad that this one is a total non-starter in my tradition, so I don't have to feel personally involved.

Panic as a political strategy.

"Never let a good crisis go to waste" was the advice of Obama's advisor Rahm Emmanuel, and it seems that Obama has taken that advice to heart by working to create a panic, according to Legal Insurrection:

If nothing else, Obama does “panic” well


John Podhoretz notes that Obama is trying to talk the markets into a panic as part of Obama’s political strategy (emphasis mine):

An enraged Barack Obama just took to the nation’s airwaves to announce his effort to strike a deal with Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner has fallen apart. Perhaps for the first time in American history, this president is literally using this press conference to create a financial panic over the weekend about the opening of the markets on Monday. He is warning of disaster on Monday. Clearly, he wants to use this as leverage to frighten the GOP into passing the plan proposed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, which will push the debt ceiling problem into 2013, but it’s still an entirely new and astonishingly reckless gambit.

I agree with the analysis with one big exception, the use of the terms “first time” and “entirely new.”

In fact, talking down the markets and creating a sense of panic is one of the few things Obama has done well.

Recall February 2009, when Obama wanted to push through the Stimulus Plan and created a near panic in the markets which caused even the last bull to capitulate...

Wow! Science.

Human civilization may have emerged 11,000 years ago - or approximately six thousand years before Egypt and Sumeria.

There is a site in southeastern Turkey called Gobekli Tepe that has many intricately carved stone pillars which have been dated, according to Smithsonian magazine, to 11,000 years ago:

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.

Guten Morgen," he says at 5:20 a.m. when his van picks me up at my hotel in Urfa. Thirty minutes later, the van reaches the foot of a grassy hill and parks next to strands of barbed wire. We follow a knot of workmen up the hill to rectangular pits shaded by a corrugated steel roof—the main excavation site. In the pits, standing stones, or pillars, are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside, are four other rings of partially excavated pillars. Each ring has a roughly similar layout: in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars tower 16 feet and, Schmidt says, weigh between seven and ten tons. As we walk among them, I see that some are blank, while others are elaborately carved: foxes, lions, scorpions and vultures abound, twisting and crawling on the pillars' broad sides.


Schmidt points to the great stone rings, one of them 65 feet across. "This is the first human-built holy place," he says.

Interesting.  I'm not sure about the dating methodology, though:

Schmidt returned a year later with five colleagues and they uncovered the first megaliths, a few buried so close to the surface they were scarred by plows. As the archaeologists dug deeper, they unearthed pillars arranged in circles. Schmidt's team, however, found none of the telltale signs of a settlement: no cooking hearths, houses or trash pits, and none of the clay fertility figurines that litter nearby sites of about the same age. The archaeologists did find evidence of tool use, including stone hammers and blades. And because those artifacts closely resemble others from nearby sites previously carbon-dated to about 9000 B.C., Schmidt and co-workers estimate that Gobekli Tepe's stone structures are the same age. Limited carbon dating undertaken by Schmidt at the site confirms this assessment.

Gobekli Tepe may require a re-thinking of the origins of civilization:

To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.


The immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe reinforces that view. Schmidt says the monuments could not have been built by ragged bands of hunter-gatherers. To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. "This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later," says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe. "You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies."

I thought that the Gobekli Tepe story might be a nonsense story fabricated by loons, but it seems authentic enough to interest some fairly legitimate mainstream media sources, such as the National Geographic magazine.

Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first. Sometimes, later, they installed a third. Then the whole assemblage would be filled in with debris, and an entirely new circle created nearby. The site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.


Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building. The earliest rings are the biggest and most sophisticated, technically and artistically. As time went by, the pillars became smaller, simpler, and were mounted with less and less care. Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise

The National Geographic article also has an interesting observation about why we should be careful when a scientific theory that just fits so nicely into the politically correct theory of the scientists' own culture:

The idea that the Neolithic Revolution was driven by climate change resonated during the 1990s, a time when people were increasingly worried about the effects of modern global warming. It was promoted in countless articles and books and ultimately enshrined in Wikipedia. Yet critics charged that the evidence was weak, not least because Abu Hureyra, Mureybet, and many other sites in northern Syria had been flooded by dams before they could be fully excavated. "You had an entire theory on the origins of human culture essentially based on a half a dozen unusually plump seeds," ancient-grain specialist George Willcox of the National Center for Scientific Research, in France, says. "Isn't it more likely that these grains were puffed during charring or that somebody at Abu Hureyra found some unusual-looking wild rye?"


As the dispute over the Natufians sharpened, Schmidt was carefully working at Göbekli Tepe. And what he was finding would, once again, force many researchers to reassess their ideas.

Anthropologists have assumed that organized religion began as a way of salving the tensions that inevitably arose when hunter-gatherers settled down, became farmers, and developed large societies. Compared to a nomadic band, the society of a village had longer term, more complex aims—storing grain and maintaining permanent homes. Villages would be more likely to accomplish those aims if their members were committed to the collective enterprise. Though primitive religious practices—burying the dead, creating cave art and figurines—had emerged tens of thousands of years earlier, organized religion arose, in this view, only when a common vision of a celestial order was needed to bind together these big, new, fragile groups of humankind. It could also have helped justify the social hierarchy that emerged in a more complex society: Those who rose to power were seen as having a special connection with the gods. Communities of the faithful, united in a common view of the world and their place in it, were more cohesive than ordinary clumps of quarreling people.

Göbekli Tepe, to Schmidt's way of thinking, suggests a reversal of that scenario: The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization. It suggests that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it. When foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm—a fixed huddle of homes with hundreds of inhabitants—and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts.

Interesting.

8 Reasons Jesus was being literal in John 6

At Bible Tidbits.

India Pakistan Wagah Attari Border Closing Ceremony



Sponsored by the Department of Silly Walks.

How could any Marine refuse Sarah Connor?

Actress Linda Hamilton begs Marine to ask her to the Marine Corps ball:

Is that "Hope and Change" thing working for you yet?

According to the Central Valley Business Times:

California’s unemployment rate increased to 11.8 percent in June, although nonfarm payroll jobs increased by 28,800 during the month, according to data released Friday by the California Employment Development Department from two separate surveys.


The U.S. unemployment rate also increased in June, to 9.2 percent.

Hey, what say we don't vote for the guy with the most vapid slogan next time?

Wow! Science - with all these theories explaining all the mass extinction event, it is hard to conclude anything other than that the Universe is trying to kill us.

A new theory for the Permian extinction - massive release of methane from the oceans may have killed half of all life on earth:

Researchers at the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the University of Copenhagen claim to have discovered the cause of the extinction of over half the Earth's marine life 200 million years ago, reports Fox News. The cause, it seems, was a giant "Earth burp."


That is, a huge quantity of methane being released into the atmosphere.

The methane release likely originated from the sea floor, according to the study, and added a huge amount of carbon to the atmosphere, killing many species. LiveScience reports that the find suggests this event killed a number of species, paving the way for the rise of the dinosaurs.

The gas was releases over a period of 600,000 years, according to the report.

Scientists came to this conclusion by analyzing the chemical content of plant leaves preserved in the sediment at the bottom of the Tethys Ocean. By studying the different carbon isotopes in the sediment, scientists were able to draw these conclusions, reports LiveScience.

The researchers found a peak in favor of the lighter isotope, carbon 12, for a stint lasting about 20,000 to 40,000 years.

A strong shift in the ratio indicated that methane, not carbon dioxide, was responsible, Ruhl said.

Here is the Wiki article on the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event.

On "gay bullying" and that thing called "projection."

Kathy Shaidle catches an interesting insight into homosexual ethicist Dan Savage's recent public pronouncement on Michelle Bachman, or, more specifically, Michelle Bachman's husband, from Slate Magazine:

This week, though, the [Dan Savage] podcast started with an attack on Marcus Bachmann’s masculinity. After a short preamble about the accuracy of gaydar (with a scientific citation, no less), Savage—whom I respect tremendously—played a tape of Michelle’s husband’s speaking voice. Bachmann has a tiny bit of a lisp—though it’s barely perceptible—and he slurs his words slightly. To Savage’s ears, it was a gay accent. Savage played the tape over and over, and reprised it several times throughout the podcast. He even did his own Bachmann impression, exaggerating the lisp and camping it up.

In other words, the man who launched the “It Gets Better Project,” an effort to stop the bullying of gay teens, was acting like a big bully.

As Savage always notes, the kind of smear-the-queer taunts that can cause so much pain to young people aren’t aimed only at kids who are gay, they’re often aimed at boys who don’t live up to some mythical standard of masculinity and girls who just aren’t girly enough.

I can only imagine how listeners who happen to have the kind of lisping, effeminate speech and affect that Savage was ridiculing felt upon hearing the attack.

Mark Shea adds this insight about Dan Savage's recent "joke" about raping a male conservative politician:

Don't believe it? Here is Savage, fresh from bullying Bachmann's husband about his lisp, fantasizing about inflicting rape (pardon me: "hate sex" which is totally different) on his political enemies to the applause of the sort of apes who populate the audience of "Real Time".


This is a militant crusading intolerant and deeply hypocritical faith that does not hesitate for a second to deploy against its perceived enemies everything it pretends to decry. Hate sex Rape is openly bruited and applauded. The most miserable schoolyard bullying is just part of the toolkit for these phony apostles of compassion. These guys are going to wear out their welcome damn fast once they use the force of law to try to hammer people into Goodthink. You can't beat people into loving your perversion.

Of course, Maher's audience laughed at the idea of raping someone they hated for having the wrong opinions.

I've been reading Timothy Snyder recite in his excellent book on the tragic situation of people living between Stalin and Hitler, Bloodlands, stories about how Nazis einsatzgruppen in Nazi-occupied Ukraine would drink and laugh and make Jewish women recite "I am a Jew and I don't deserve to live" before forcing them to strip and shooting them in the back of the head and tossing their bodies into a pit that their husbands and brothers had been forced to dig the day before with the taunts that they should dig carefully because their wives and mothers and sisters would be filling up the pit the next day. 

You read those stories and you wonder how any human being could possibly be that way.

There's more than a little bit of that old fashioned Nazi spirit in Maher's audience.

Feser on the Cosmological Argument.

Philosopher Ed Feser analyzes the many responses to his post on the Cosmological Argument by pointing out that the smug, self-assured but totally ignorant combox atheists who think that they can dismiss the argument with a waive of the hand do not know what they are talking about.

Speaking of smug, self-assured but totally ignorant, check out this "argument" from a combox atheist Ben Goren:

First, recognize that any such thing must be understood only by analogy.

Bullshit. Though analogies are often a helpful pedagogical tool, everything proven real to date is best understood by direct examination and reasoning. Analogies inevitably break down.

Hah! Take that Rene Descartes!

For those who don't know the history and philosophy of science - such as those like Ben Goren who worship science but don't understand it - Rene Descartes proposed a method for approaching the natural world that involved modeling it through mathematics.

You know, Cartesian graphing and all that, which we all did - or should have done - when we were in 8th grade science.

But what is "graphing" and math other than a model?

And what is a model but an analogy?

After all, when we graph the distance of a falling object to time, we aren't drawing the actual falling object (in which case the picture would be an analogy), but we are analyzing certain isolated characteristics of the object extracted from the actual object.  And when we do a plot the distance that a lot of falling objects travel over time, and average those speeds, we aren't even analzying any particular real object.

In other words, we are analogizing from an object to a mathematical analysis and vice versa.

Insofar as modern science is based mathematical analysis, it is based using the method of analogies.

How oligarchy is supposed to work, and how it sometimes doesn't.

Pundit and Pundette reports:

It's in this must-read post from Jim Geraghty. He quotes Gov. Chris Christie's comments to a gathering of big election donors on why he will not be running for president, which is a worthwhile read in itself.


But even more interesting is what Geraghty quotes from Politico's Mike Allen's newsletter (apparently not available online). Allen relays what he heard from the "moderate Republican" millionaire-billionaire donors at the meeting:

Several of them said: I’m Republican but I voted for President Obama, because I couldn’t live with Sarah Palin. Many said they were severely disappointed in the president. The biggest complaint was what several called “class warfare.” They said they didn’t understand what they had done to deserve that: If you want to have a conversation about taxation, have a conversation. But a president shouldn’t attack his constituents – he’s not the president of some people, he’s president of all the people. Someone mentioned Huey Long populism.

Cry me a river. They looked at Obama's Harvard law degree and that sharp pant crease and thought he was one of them, or at least more so than that uncredentialed piece of Wasilla trash, with all her vulgar "you betchas" and excessive children, including that embarrassing baby she doted on. And these snobs, instead of apologizing for contributing to the downfall of America, have the nerve to complain about "class warfare."

Beyond the snobbery issue, the elite probably understood that they would have less of a hold over a complete outsider than they would over someone who was part of their culture.

A brief summary of ...

...the Council of Jamnia.

"Bloodshed, Monsters, Honor, Savagery, True Love, Dying Cities, Flying Machines and Naked Folk Armed to the Teeth. What is not to like?"

Science Fiction author John C. Wright reflects on the eternal romance of life under the hurtling moons of Barsoom.

Nooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!

Borders is liquidating.

Bankrupt Borders Group Inc. has written its final chapter: liquidation.


The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based bookstore chain says it has been unable to find anyone to rescue it from bankruptcy so it will dissolve.

Before it filed for bankruptcy last February, Borders had stores in Stockton, Modesto, Elk Grove, Sacramento, Davis, Turlock, Folsom, Roseville, Fresno, Hanford, Visalia, and Bakersfield in the Central Valley.

After the initial Chapter 11 filing, it shuttered stores in Bakersfield, Stockton and Modesto. With the liquidation, all of its remaining 399 stores nationwide will be closed.

Hilco and Gordon Brothers will purchase the store assets of the business and administer the liquidation process, if approved, as expected, by the Bankruptcy Court.

"Following the best efforts of all parties, we are saddened by this development," says Borders Group President Mike Edwards. "We were all working hard towards a different outcome, but the headwinds we have been facing for quite some time, including the rapidly changing book industry, eReader revolution, and turbulent economy, have brought us to where we are now."

Borders currently employs approximately 10,700 employees. Subject to the court's approval, under the proposal, liquidation is expected to commence for some stores and facilities as soon as this Friday, July 22, with a phased rollout of the program which is expected to conclude by the end of September.

Of course, I haven't bought a book at Borders in years.  The vast majority of my purchases are now through Kindle, with orders at Amazon running a distant second, and purchases at Barnes and Nobles, where they have a 10% discount program running a distant third.  In fact, it was because Barnes and Nobles gave the 10% discount and Borders didn't that made me move my "brick and mortar" business to Barnes and Nobles.

Still, I wanted it around so I could browse.

Death Panels - the real solution for Medicare....

...according to Pual Krugman.



This is a video from last year, according to The Anchoress.

Oops.

Author who debunked Obama's story about his mother having to fight with her insurance company doesn't want to talk.  According to Byron York:

Many authors of newly-published books are eager to discuss their work, especially if the book has made news. But Janny Scott, author of A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother, doesn't want to talk about what has become the most newsworthy part of her generally well-received new biography.


Scott, a former New York Times reporter, deserves praise for discovering that President Obama repeatedly misled voters during the 2008 campaign, and also during the 2009 health care debate, when he said that his mother, Ann Dunham, spent her final days fighting an insurance company that sought to deny payment for cancer treatment. Scott, who had access to many of Dunham's personal papers, discovered that Dunham, an anthropologist who spent most of her career in Indonesia, had health coverage that paid for her treatment for uterine and ovarian cancer, from which she died in 1995. "Ann's compensation for her job in Jakarta had included health insurance, which covered most of the costs of her medical treatment," Scott wrote. "Once she was back in Hawaii, the hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month."

And:

Nevertheless, after the Times story appeared, I got back in touch with the Penguin publicist. Since Scott had overcome her reluctance to talk, at least to the Times, perhaps she would be willing to talk now. "Thank you for contacting us again regarding Janny Scott," the publicist replied. "The author does not have any new information to add to the story."


Authors often know more than they include in books. They've done a lot of research, and the process of writing a book, even a long one, usually means leaving some things out. A Singular Woman is about Ann Dunham's entire life, and Dunham's dealings with insurance companies is just one small episode. Since Scott had correspondence outlining "the whole history of her medical crisis in the last year of her life," it seems likely there is more information about the insurance matter than the brief version that appears in the book. It might even be newsworthy, given that the president has talked about the issue in personal terms many, many times. But don't look to Janny Scott for any insights. She's not talking.

Scott seems to be afraid of saying anything critical of Obama.  When she was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly, after recounting how the president's father had been unfaithful and abandoned his American family, O'Reilly observed that Obama, Sr. seemed to have been an awful father.  Scott refused to be concede this point, saying that it was not her job to judge, although she made a number of pro-Obama judgment in the course of the interview.

Shoot,  ever since one of our first bishops sold out Christ for 30 pieces of silver, it's been all uphill from there.

There's another book out on the sins and vices found in the historical record of the papacy that has the anti-catholic faction slavering for a fix. The New York Times gave "Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy” by John Julius Norwich the cover and assigned its top editor to give it a rave review, which was an odd choice according to Mollie Ziegler Hemingway:

We don’t typically spend too much time looking at mainstream movie or book reviews, but I thought the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review was worth looking at. For one, it’s written by Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times. For another, the Review has this curious note from “the editors”:

Through the years, The New York Times’s coverage of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican has received sharp criticism from practicing Catholics — including the past eight years that Bill Keller has been the paper’s executive editor. Yet Keller, who wrote this week’s cover review of “Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy,” by John Julius Norwich, was raised within the fold.

“My parents took their faith very seriously — especially my mother, who had the fervor of a convert (from Episcopalian),” Keller recalled in an e-mail. “My brothers and I had nuns and priests as our teachers through high school, and I look back on that education with real gratitude. I’m now what my friend Dan Barry calls a ‘collapsed Catholic’ — beyond lapsed — but you never really extricate yourself from your upbringing.”

I love that “Yet” in the first paragraph. Why “yet”? I mean, the next paragraph explains that he’s “beyond lapsed” to “collapsed.” If being raised in the faith is supposed to mean something about how the coverage can’t be unfair, what is collapsing from it supposed to mean?

And then we read the first paragraph of the review:

John Julius Norwich makes a point of saying in the introduction to his history of the popes that he is “no scholar” and that he is “an agnostic Protestant.” The first point means that while he will be scrupulous with his copious research, he feels no obligation to unearth new revelations or concoct revisionist theories. The second means that he has “no ax to grind.” In short, his only agenda is to tell us the story.

Since when does being “an agnostic Protestant” mean that ipso facto one wouldn’t have an ax to grind against the Roman Catholic Church or the papacy? But also, how does this relate to the editors note? Are we to presume that Keller does have an ax to grind since he’s a “collapsed” Catholic? I know he’s acted contrary to the faith in which he was raised (he and his wife aborted a son, for instance). Is that playing a role in The Times’ coverage of the Catholic Church? And then, there’s this famous Keller column — “Is the Pope Catholic?”

Here's a paragraph from the "famous Keller column":

Probably no institution run by a fraternity of aging celibates was going to reconcile easily with a movement that embraced the equality of women, abortion on demand and gay rights. It is possible, though, to imagine a leadership that would have given it a try. In fact, Pope Paul VI indicated some interest in adopting a more lenient view of birth control, and he handpicked a committee of prominent Catholics who endorsed the idea almost by acclamation. The pope agonized, and then astonished Catholics by reaffirming the old ban.

Ah, Keller is one of those "collapsed Catholics" - a person who puts his allegiance to the totems of his tribe, upper-class liberalism, above that of his faith.

And - lo and behold - Mollie finds that the nonscholarly book by a nonscholar "Protestant agnostic" that retails myths and slanders as scholarship is congenial to the prejudices of said "collapsed Catholic":

Here’s the thing: This review is not up to snuff. Many folks across the Catholic spectrum are talking about problems with the review and its uncritical look at the book in question. For instance, the book author gives quite a bit of time to a fictional incident of a female pope — a full chapter. Keller gives another couple hundred words in his short review over to discussion of this fictional character.


The review is stunningly uncritical. I actually laughed out loud at Keller’s kicker — simply a quote from the book:

“It is now well over half a century since progressive Catholics have longed to see their church bring itself into the modern age,” he writes. “With the accession of every succeeding pontiff they have raised their hopes that some progress might be made on the leading issues of the day — on homosexuality, on contraception, on the ordination of women priests. And each time they have been disappointed.”

Wow. It’s almost like the author has the same lack of an ax to grind as The Times, doesn’t it? Brilliant reviewer choice there, editors.

But it's in God's plan to turn every bit of evil to good, or an opportunity for snarky humor, which in this case is supplied by Diary of a Wimpy Catholic, who points out that when Catholics sin they sin on an epic scale:

What a prince Bill Keller is. In reviewing John Julius Norwich’s Absolute Monarchs, he warns that this “rollicking narrative” featuring “265 popes (plus various usurpers and anti­popes), feral hordes of Vandals, Huns and Visigoths, expansionist emperors, Byzantine intriguers, Borgias and Medicis, heretic zealots, conspiring clerics, bestial inquisitors and more” might not appeal to “devout Catholics.”



It’s a nice little warning label: The following history contains scenes that might shock or upset readers. Not recommended for expectant mothers or members of the Mystical Body of Christ.

I have one question for Keller: son, just who the hell do you think you’re talking to?

Tony Montana told the INS goons that they could do nothing to him that Castro hadn’t done already. Well, John Julius Norwich can’t tell us anything that Garry Wills hasn’t told us already — in Papal Sin, Return of Papal Sin and Bride of Papal Sin. (I myself have been on tenterhooks, waiting for Papal Sin: The Gay Blade.) And then there’s James Carroll. I used to mix him up with Jim Carroll, the Basketball Diaries guy. It’s not an unreasonable mistake: the Jim Carroll Band’s greatest hit was “People Who Died”; James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword might as well be subtitled: Six Million People Who Died, And All Because of Us. Have you ever seen the thing? It’s 750 pages of pure j’accuse. I’d as lief be spitted on an actual Roman gladius as suffer a copy to fall on my foot.

And:

There’s real pride to be taken in knowing that even our screw-ups are epic and spectacular.


What’s the worst thing a fundie pastor’s ever done? Kiss another guy? Smoke some glass? Rip off the faithful? Junior varsity. Nickel and dime. Amateur hour. When one of our popes feels like living in infamy, he sells an entire hemisphere into slavery. That goes for their kids, too. You say Franklin Graham was a real hell-raiser? Cesare Borgia could have stolen his Harley and his girl, gotten his blue-tick hound in the family way, and carved “AUT CAESAR AUT NULLUS” in his forehead with a stiletto before Lucrezia finished pouring arsenic in his grits

And:

Even recently have Catholics been going bad in style. Having decided that Charles de Gaulle was a traitor and a tyrant, French military officers — all being well-bred graduates of St.-Cyr and l’École Polytechnique — didn’t lower themselves by floating any rumors about his birth certificate. (Since de Gaulle was born in Lille, an excellent case could have been made that his nose was a Belgian citizen.) No, asking themselves, “What would Thomas Aquinas do?”, they came up with the answer: take him out. An air force colonel named Bastien-Thiry engaged five gunmen to ambush the presidential car on the Rue des Petits-Clamarts. De Gaulle survived; most of the conspirators escaped to Argentina, where they found jobs teaching naval midshipmen to deliver electric shocks to dissidents’ testicles in a properly Thomistic fashion.


Bastien-Thiry himself was arrested, tried by court-martial, and sentenced to death. He went to the firing squad clutching his rosary.

He had been a Boy Scout. His specialty was designing air-to-surface missiles. His given name was “Jean-Marie.”

Even our sissypants wonk patsies are hardcore.

Oo-rah!

Wow! Science - Haboob over Phoenix.

Video of 50 mile wide dust storm that engulfed Phoenix on July 5, 2011.



Driving through the Haboob:



Haboob in perspective:

In the alternate universe where Spock has a goatee....

...Obama has "rolled" the GOP, according to Mickey Kaus.

It’s as if Obama has avoided emasculation by becoming a star in a fake little drama of his own creation, in which the audience (so far) consists mainly of MSNBC viewers, source-greasing reporters and Bloomberg editorialists. No wonder he has “reality tv” on his mind. …

And:

Scientists Discover Alternate Universe in Which Obama has “Rolled” GOPS: Headline in Politico–”How Obama rolled the other side.” Really! Let’s count the ways: 1) He didn’t get the deal he wanted–a $4 trillion “grand bargain” involving new revenues; 2) His White House command performance negotations–”Obama’s smart play” that gave him “home field advantage” (whatever that means)–seem to be increasingly not where the decisions are being made, the action having shifted to Congress; 3) He may well have to sign a law with substantial cuts and no revenues; 4) He’s been ”defining the opposition” as immature extremists who want to protect millionaires. There’s been just one problem with this always-appealing “disgusted headmaster” act, however–he has, as Politico puts it, ”struggled to move public opinion his way.”

Polls showed Americans still largely opposed to raising the debt limit, despite months of pushing by the White House. Much like it was with health care reform, Obama is not making a popular sale on a policy he feels strongly about. For all the effort, he also hasn’t move the needle yet on his own job approval rating.

Oh, well, that. “Public opinion” is always a challenge! But he impressed Politico. [Correction: Obama actually has "moved the needle." His Gallup job approval dropped 11 points in the last 10 days--from +3 to -8]. …

Jimmy Carter is looking like a "best case scenario."

From Ed Driscoll:

Mister, we’ve got a man like Jimmy Carter again! It’s been obvious since, oh, about the middle of 2008, but Laura Ingraham makes it official, as even center-left Mediaite is forced to note:

Today on The Laura Ingraham Show, host Laura Ingraham presented a remix, of sorts, juxtaposing portions of former President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Malaise Speech” (also known as his “Crisis of Confidence Speech” or, perhaps, his “Generally Terrible Stuff Speech”) with recent comments made by President Barack Obama.

The emphasis of both speeches used in the clip is on convincing Americans to scrimp, save and sacrifice during tough economic times. It’s like they say: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Depressing. I was really looking forward to blowing a lot of cash on Vegas.

Ode to Billy Joe



So, what did she throw off the Tallahatchee bridge?

The Wiki entry for Bobbie Gentry describes this 1967 hit as "Southern Gothic."

Concerning the lyrics, Wikie says:

Gentry herself has commented on the song, saying that its real theme was indifference:


“ Those questions are of secondary importance in my mind. The story of Billie Joe has two more interesting underlying themes. First, the illustration of a group of people's reactions to the life and death of Billie Joe, and its subsequent effect on their lives, is made. Second, the obvious gap between the girl and her mother is shown when both women experience a common loss (first, Billie Joe and, later, Papa), and yet Mama and the girl are unable to recognize their mutual loss or share their grief

6 Ways to Cultivate Civility on the Net.

Because gentlemen should be civil, according to the Art of Manliness.

One way is really simple - use your real name.

Andrew Klavan waits for Michelle Bachman to make a gaffe.

"Are you now or have you ever been a Lutheran?"

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway at Get Religion, who is a Lutheran, analyzes the silly hit piece on Michelle Bachman's former membership in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS):

I don’t know what it is about conservative women that makes some reporters lose their everliving minds, but Bachmann’s candidacy is this year’s Sarah Palin media meltdown, apparently.


In any case, Joshua Green is one of the more partisan folks at The Atlantic, and that harms his piece when it comes to stuff like facts, nuance and context.

For one thing, the headline is not true. It’s about the church body to which Bachmann once belonged, but not her current church. And let’s actually start there. I’m a confessional Lutheran. Ostensibly, Michele Bachmann was a member of a more conservative but also confessional Lutheran church body. And for years, whenever I heard her speak, she never sounded even mildly Lutheran to me. The “the Lord put it on my heart” type language. The “the Lord anointed me” stuff. This is not how Lutherans speak, although I won’t bore you with all of the why. Her other affiliations have always been more evangelical than Lutheran, going back decades.

You might keep that in mind when you’re thinking about what news value a hit-piece on the doctrinal views of a church that a presidential candidate no longer belongs to has.

And:

The justification for the hyperbolic story about 500-year-old history is that, we’re to believe, Michele Bachmann will have trouble getting the Catholic vote in light of the fact that she was once a member of a Protestant church that had Protestant views on Catholicism.


Yeah, right.

There is no political significance to what the article reports. Instead it serves only to alarm the casual observer over a non-issue. I mean, seriously, go to Minnesota and you can see for yourself that there is no 30 Years War breaking out among the large Catholic and Lutheran populations. That state has had tons of Catholic and Lutheran governors — many of whom held opposing views on the papacy. They somehow managed to get through it.

Exactly.  As Rodney Stark points out, religious cooperation in America is a unique phenomenon.  Despite their oppositions, members of different religions - led by their clergy - have cooperated in emergency relief and prayer services - in ways that have no imitation throughout the way.

This cooperation is what true tolerance looks like.  Rather than a watering-down of difference, in American religious pluralism we see a respect for other human beings because we recognize their humanity and their likeness to God and their common membership in a community united in mutual respect.

So, why in the face of that singular success, does the leftist media want to stir up religious discord by focusing on Mitt Romney's Mormonism and Michelle Bachman's former church's roots in the 16th Century?

The hurtling moons of Barsoom...the incomparable Dejah Thoris....

...John Carter of Mars.

The Problem with Bibliocism.

This post by Scott McKnight at Jesus Creed comes on the heels of a discussion at the CAA I've been having on the problem of "unchanging biblical truths."  I've been trying to get a few of the people there to explain how, if there are unchaging biblical truths, Protestatn doctrines can change over time.  My point has been that having an unchanging text doesn't mean unchanging doctrines in the absence of an unchanging interpretative tradition.

It's amazing to me how such an obvious point is apparently incomprehensible. 

McKnight's post discusses a forthcoming book by Christian Smith, "Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is not a truly Evangelical reading of Scripture." McKnight writes:

His argument will look a bit like this: the problem is called biblicism (defined below).


1. He sees biblicism in evangelicalism (not all of it) and in most charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity.

2. Biblicism involves belief in the Bible’s exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability.

3. Liberalism is the corrosion of historic orthodoxy and is intellectually naive and susceptible to some reprehensible social and political expressions, but opposing liberalism — which Smith does — does not lead to or require biblicism. There are other alternatives.

4. What ultimately defeats biblicism is “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” The Bible says and teaches different things — if you listen to biblicists carefully — about most significant topics. It is, he argues, meaningless to talk about the inerrancy of the text if the interpretation of that text is up for grabs.

5. His goal is to become more evangelical, not less, in approach to Scripture.

6. Christian Smith, a notable Christian sociologist, has become a Roman Catholic, but he wrote this book before that move took place. He had these problems with evangelicalism before he became Catholic, but these problems are part of the reason he became Catholic.

The Thin Veil explains:

Scot's post and the upcoming book hit right at the heart of two major flaws in Protestantism:


In order to trust the Bible you need to trust the Bible's origin. If you say the Catholic Church wasn't given the authority to define doctrines, then neither did she have the authority to define the books of the Bible back in the fourth century. How can Protestants be sure that the books that make up their Bible--and only those books--are the inspired Word of God? They can't accept them unless they take for granted the authority of Church.

Any appeal to Scripture is an appeal to an interpretation of Scripture. Biblical interpretation is really not a question of "what does the Bible say?" but "what do I or my community think the Bible says?" But what happens when two people think the same Bible verse means two different things? Why should someone believe the interpretation of this teacher, or that writer, or that church instead of others? It really boils down to the question of authority--who has the authority to ultimately explain the meaning of the text? The Catholic Church holds that her interpretation is the true one since she alone was given the authority of Christ (Matthew 16:19), an authority which has been passed down through the centuries. She alone was promised the protection of the Holy Spirit.