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

After the experience of being descended upon by herds of free-thinking, pro-homosexual brownshirts, Stacy Trasancos reflects:

OK, I get it now. This is for anyone afraid to speak up about immorality because you don't want herds of "freethinkers" following each other to your website leaving hundreds of uncharitable messages. There's nothing to fear about evangelizing. There was a time not that long ago that the derision I received for saying I was offended by homosexual PDA's at the park would have had me in a corner crying like a baby, but I haven't shed a tear. Actually I learned something very important, peaceful, and joyful - and powerful. When you know who you are and who loves you, negative comments from complete strangers can't hurt you.


I remember reading the vile comments left for Jennifer Fulwiler when PZ Myers followers were sent to harass her. It made my blood boil because I hurt for her, and it instilled fear in me. But now I realize something: It probably didn't make her blood boil nearly as much. Someone wondered if I now know how the homosexuals feel who are harassed and persecuted. No, I don't think I know how they feel, but I wish they knew how I felt. When the message you have is about love and beauty, and real truth, your dignity and confidence is not dependent on other people's opinions. Being bullied doesn't make you angry and it doesn't make you want to seek revenge. You are sheltered and protected no matter where in the world you go.

True love is right there in front of all of us, ready to be grasped, and that love is found in Christ. It is a love that is always before you, lifting you higher, reminding you (as Lisa Graas reminded me) that you are in this world called to be a saint, but you are not of this world. Actually the overwhelming outpouring of love from fellow Catholics (and even many atheists) has been an unexpected and glorious gift. If I can give something back, let it be this: Evangelize without fear.

The only thing that I regret is that some people said I hurt them with my comments. For that I apologize, I did not mean harm to anyone. I also encourage those who are hurt to examine their own conscience and ask themselves why they are hurt and if it was really me, or really something else. Just like I'd be a horrible mother if all I did was tell my children they were wonderful when they were really doing something wrong, I'd be a horrible citizen to just pretend society wasn't experiencing a tremendous breakdown when in fact we live in a world where good is perceived as bad and evil is perceived as good. We are in serious decline.

And people wonder why they are so unhappy.

I suspect that you who are leaving angry comments on this blog were unhappy before I ever wrote a word about being offended by immoral behavior, and I suspect that were I to suddenly do what you are trying to intimidate me to do - as Mark Shea so well puts it, "Remember. Tolerance is not enough. You. MUST. Approve. And you MUST force your daughter to approve as well." - not a single one of you would be any happier for it. As Sister Lisa Marie puts it today, quoting St. John, "The one who fears is not yet perfect in love." As for me and my fears, it wasn't that I feared going to the park and seeing homosexual PDA's. It's that I felt resentment for knowing that if I spoke out about how much it disturbs me, that I would be persecuted for it and I feared that persecution. OK, I've conquered that fear now and I will strive to speak out in love.

Occam's razor suggests that the simple answer is often the right answer.

The average American is not prone to conspiracy theories.  We tend to think that governments and big corporations are dispassionately operated by people who know the rules and abide by the rules because we know that we would get caught if we were in their position and we don't want to get punished.

On the other hand, we also know that government and big corporations are inhabitated by people who are amazingly like people and that people are not above playing favorites, particularly where they have learned that they are immune from responsibility, as might be the case for someone in government or a large corporation.

Bryan Preston at the PJ Tattler looks at various data points that appear to show grotesque political use of the powers of government to punish political enemies and reward political friends and asks "is it that simple?"

Why did the Department of Justice raid Gibson Guitars twice in the span of two years, yet leave competitor C.F. Martin untouched? Both appear to use the same allegedly illegal woods. The allegation floating around is that it’s because Gibson’s CEO supports Republicans and Martin’s supports Democrats, and we have a Democratic administration hell-bent on punishing Republicans. Instinctively, I want to reject that theory. It’s too simple and too, I don’t know, obvious and even un-American. Gibson’s CEO may face jail time, and the company may end up failing under the weight of the federal boot. And over what?


Why does Warren Buffett, billionaire businessman, keep supporting President Obama despite the president’s obvious economic failures? Reading Tim Carney’s piece about Buffett and bank bailouts that appeared yesterday, it’s evident that at every turn over the past couple of years, Buffett has managed to cash in on huge government actions. Carney suggests that Buffett bought a major stake in Bank of America on the belief that the Obama administration will end up bailing that bank out, stuffing more money into Buffett’s pockets. One would expect a savvy and fair-minded businessman to oppose the rampant regulatory state that Obama has unleashed on the nation’s economy, but if the businessman stands to profit from it? If can use his influence to direct it to move in ways that help him? Does Buffett continue supporting Obama because he, Buffett, basically owns the president and knows he can make money off of his policies?

Why did the Obama administration shut down offshore oil drilling? Why did it take some car dealerships from their owners back in 2009? Do we really have an administration abusing its powers to punish its enemies? Is is really that simple?

Preston points to this data point:

3M Claims Democratic Lobbyist, Talking Head, and Former Clinton Staffer Lanny Davis Tried to Extort $30 Million From It


And I think this is standard operating practice. Do what we want, or we will make government trouble for you.

3M claims an investment company conspired with high-powered lobbyist Lanny Davis in a smear campaign to "coerce" it into paying "tens of millions of dollars ... to save them from the consequences of yet another unprofitable investment," a screening test for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus...

Davis, who worked as a special counsel for President Clinton from 1996 to 1998, has lobbied for a string of controversial clients since leaving the White House, including African dictators, military coup supporters in Honduras, and the government of Pakistan.

This report does not specify the interest of the parties here. It is my guess that 3M entered into some agreement with a company Davis lobbied for, to test and then distribute their drug; they decided it wasn't commercially viable, and terminated the agreement, and then Davis went to work to pressure them into reversing that decision.

I assume the termination of the contract wasn't a breach at all, because I don't see any mention of suing over a broken contract.

After attacking them in the press, it is alleged, they got more direct:

"Defendants' illicit campaign has included overt threats of reprisals by holders of large blocks of 3M stock; public demonstrations by paid individuals posing as victims of an altogether fabricated public health 'issue' allegedly created by 3M's decision to discontinue selling a product no one wanted...

And so forth. And then they kicked it up a notch.

3M adds: "When these tactics failed to yield the financial windfall defendants sought, they resorted to making extortionate demands upon 3M." It claims that Boulter and Davis then "acted together" to make a "crude extortion attempt" by "sending to 3M's counsel an unsolicited e-mail in which Boulter claimed that the British Minister of Defence had instructed Boulter to inform 3M that if it did not pay over $30 million, the Minister of Defence would interfere with 3M's ability to do business with the British government. He also threatened that the British government would reconsider the recently announced call to knighthood of Buckley. This crude extortion attempt threatened both to embarrass Buckley and to tarnish 3M's most valuable asset, its corporate brand."

Sounds a lot like a form of privateering. Well-connected individuals, acting with other pals in government, pirate money away from companies and people. And it's kinda-sorta legal, if you have enough friends in government.

Huh?

According to Christianity Today, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has held that government cannot furnish grant of money to fight AIDS on the condition that the money it provides will not be used to promote the legalization of prostitution:

The U.S. government cannot require organizations fighting AIDS with USAID grant money to oppose prostitution, according to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling may lead to a Supreme Court case about First Amendment rights.


Evangelical NGOs say the ruling is unlikely to affect their operations, although the case does touch on important principles.

The 2003 Leadership Act, which authorized PEPFAR in fighting HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, states that grantees cannot use government money to promote legalizing prostitution. It also requires "a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking." The second requirement has been the controversial one.

The Second Circuit split 2-1 in its July 6 ruling. It said the requirement amounted to discrimination against organizations that do not embrace the government's viewpoint. The dissenting judge defended the clause as constitutional. He said that it "allows the government to subsidize the transmittal of a message it has concluded is part of its preferred method of fighting HIV/AIDS."

That can't be right.  I can see a court striking down a rule that conditions the receipt of money on the recipient never taking a particular position, but the notion that the government can't condition that the money it grants will be used for the purpose of the grant can't be unconstitutional.  That would mean that anyone who gets government money for a particular purpose could pretty much use it any way they want, which is just fargin' nuts.

Either the Second Circuit is fargin' nuts, or Christianity Today misunderstood the holding of the case.

Sadly, either option is equally likely.

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there never is any bad news.

For example, if you weren't paying attention, you might miss this:

August has become the deadliest month for U.S. troops in the nearly 10-year-old war in Afghanistan, where international forces have started to go home and let Afghan forces take charge of securing their country.


A record 66 U.S. troops have died so far this month, eclipsing the 65 killed in July 2010, according to a tally by The Associated Press.

Of couse, Obama's opponents - unlike Bush's opponents - aren't in the habit of playing up American deaths for political advantage.

President Obama's literary mistakes.

We have been told repeatedly that President Obama is brillian - brilliant! - as often as we are told that various Republicans are dumb - dumb! - but no one in journalism has been interested in finding a transcript of Obama's grades, although George W. Bush's "gentleman 'C's" were the stuff of journalistic fodder for years.

This seems to gesture at the possibility that the President's college transcripts may not support the meme that he is brilliant.

The American Thinker has analyzed more pertinent evidence that underscores this possibility - a grammatically confused letter written by Obama when he was the editor of the Harvard Law Review:

Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick's biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.


Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review's affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.

The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.

"Since the merits of the Law Review's selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues," wrote Obama, "I'd like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works."

If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits ... have." Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone. He had vindicated Chen in his first ten words.

Although the letter is fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times. In one sentence, he seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries both: "Approximately half of this first batch is chosen ... the other half are selected ... "

Another distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space. Please note the unanchored phrase in italics at the end of this sentence:

"No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind." Huh?

Although it is as fashionable as belching in church to suggest the possibility that Obama may have been a lackluster student promoted into a position at Harvard through affirmative action, that possibility seems to have the ring of truth:

In the case of Michelle Obama, affirmative action did all three. The partners at Sidley Austin learned this the hard way. In 1988, they hired her out of Harvard Law under the impression that the degree meant something. It did not. By 1991, Michelle was working in the public sector as an assistant to the mayor. By 1993, she had given up her law license.


Had the partners investigated Michelle's background, they would have foreseen the disaster to come. Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."

She did not write well, either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis at Princeton as "dense and turgid." The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."

Michelle had to have been as anxious at Harvard Law as Bart Simpson was at Genius School. Almost assuredly, the gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative action admission, and the profs finessed her through.

In a similar vein, Barack Obama was named an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Although his description of the Law Review's selection process defies easy comprehension, apparently, after the best candidates are chosen, there remains "a pool of qualified candidates whose grades or writing competition scores do not significantly differ." These sound like the kids at Lake Woebegone, all above average. Out of this pool, Obama continues, "the Selection Committee may take race or physical handicap into account."

To his credit, Obama concedes that he "may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy." This did not strike him as unusual as he "undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career."

Obama has done well for himself.  He has exploited the opportunities given to him.  If he has ridden affirmative action to the presidency, such that, once again, he finds himself in over his head and has to rely on aids like teleprompters. (See, e.g. "President needs two teleprompters for three minute speech.")

Father Barron on St. Thomas Aquinas.

An experiment in playing "spot the idiot."

Stacy Trasancos has posted a mild rant on her blog about going into public places and having her children exposed to public displays of affection by homosexuals. It's a rant that has been expressed by many parents with children of a certain age who feel that society is conspiring to make their job as parents that much harder.  Until my daughters were of a certain age, I never noticed the constant commodification and sexualization of woment, well, at least I never noticed it as a "bad thing."  Likewise, I remember pulling up behind one "lady's" truck with a license frame holder that said "0 to c*nt in 60 seconds", but there was no star in the word.

As an adult, I don't care.  As the caretaker of children with minds like sponges, I felt that my job was made exponentially more difficult by narcissistic jerks.

Anyhow, Stacy Transancos' post was up for only a few minutes before it got its first visitor telling her that she was a bad person.  After comments started trending in the direction of judgmental and hateful people telling her that she was bad for being judgmental and hateful, she shut down the comments.  She opened them up again as almost an experiment in letting the non-judgmental forces of society have their say and the comments became a cesspool of hate directed against her.

As Mark Shea observes:

Gay Brownshirts on the March

Stacy Trasancos mentioned that she'd like to be able to take her little girl someplace without subjecting her to gays making out in public.

Huge mistake. The brownshirts have flooded her comboxes to scream about her urgent need to approve of homosexuality or face the consequences.

Stacy: Remember. Tolerance is not enough. You. MUST. Approve. And you MUST force your daughter to approve as well.

If you'd like to join in and suggest that the apostles of tolerance ain't so tolerant, click the link.

Update:

Here is a sampling of the comments:

Anonymous said...


And this is why I will never set foot in America. Still living in the past, I see. I wonder what people think of you having seven kids? Sounds like someone can't keep their legs shut.



August 30, 2011 4:33 AM

Jubal on Current said...

You seriously need to get a life or move out of Massachusetts. Larger secular agenda...you are not free your living in a religious mental prison.



August 30, 2011 5:05 AM

DD said...

Stacy, let them rant. They know not of what they speak. The Devil is in their words. We can only pray for them.

DD



August 30, 2011 6:27 AM

Anonymous said...

This blog post offends me in ways that are inexpressible.

This is our community. We are responsible citizens. We live by the rules, we pay our taxes, we take care of our things. I'm supposed to be able to influence what goes on in our community, and as a voter I do exercise that right. But I'm outnumbered. I can't even go to normal places without having to sit silently and pretend to be something I'm not out of fear of offending some uppity religious people on "moral" high-horses. We all know what would happen if I asked these people to stop displaying, right in front of me and my children, that they live in hate.

If someone doesn't share your religion, what gives you the right to demand that they act in accordance with it anyway?

@Christina Martin "My children aren't even aware of how babies are made. If they don't know about sexual intercourse, what on earth makes it a good idea to explain to them about sodomy?"

Exactly. If your kids know about hetero relationships without knowing a thing about what happens in the bedroom, why do you need to talk about sex when you explain same-sex relationships?



August 30, 2011 6:36 AM

Kris said...

I am sorry to hear that LGBT people "scare" you so much. I feel so sorry for your children especially if one of them ends up being part of the LGBT community because them knowing how you feel about it will cause them so much pain.

Better watch out for the scary atheists too because we are everywhere and just might teach your children the truth about science and all that stuff.



August 30, 2011 6:43 AM

Herb (12th Apostle) said...

I don't have to be tolerant of someone's hatred.



August 30, 2011 7:33 AM

Anonymous said...

Joe G. - I guess "NOH8" only applies if you AGREE with them.... otherwise it is open season.



August 30, 2011 7:40 AM

Anonymous said...

You're sad. dumb cunt.

So, the journalistic group-mind agrees that this year it is appropriate to ask questions about the interaction of faith and political conscience because several Evangelical Christians are in the mix....

...but four years ago asking a candidate about his faith - including the effect of his father's adherence to Islam on his views or about his pastor's adherence to a weird kind of anti-Americanism - was totally off base because it intruded into matters of personal privacy.

Weird, huh?

Bill Keller of the New York Times decides that now is the time to uncork "tough questions about faith to Republican candidates...uhm, errr...candidates who are not Democrat...which is to say...candidates who belong to the dominant American religious tradition and therefore who cannot be discriminated against by definition because clearly asking such questions of a candidate whose pastor crowed about the mass murder of Americans would only be for the purpose of a political smear." 

Whew... I'm glad we got that impartial rule defined.

You have to love how the impartial Bill Keller likens religious belief to a hallucinatory belief in space aliens:

If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him? Personally, I might not disqualify him out of hand; one out of three Americans believe we have had Visitors and, hey, who knows? But I would certainly want to ask a few questions. Like, where does he get his information? Does he talk to the aliens? Do they have an economic plan?

Quick, name the fallacy.

According to my copy of the "Big Book of Cheap Shots," that would be labeling.

Strange Herring disembowls Keller's "tough questions" as the ideological argument they are, and uncorks a few that might be nice to lob at Democrats:

Now for the Sacramone Questionnaire for Nontheists:


1. Do you think that anyone who believes in the supernatural is delusional? If so, do you believe they should be treated medically? Do you believe they should be allowed to adopt children?

2. Do you think anyone who believes in six-day special creation should ipso facto be barred from holding public office?

3. Do you believe the religious beliefs of historical figures should be eradicated when discussing them in schools? For example, that Louis Pasteur was a devout Catholic who prayed the Rosary daily?

4. Do you believe that the religious faith of those responsible for the birth of modern science—Galileo, Copernicus, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, George LeMaitre (father of the theory of the big bang), Jesuit priests too numerous to mention, et al.—should be eradicated when discussing them in schools?

5. Do you believe that it should be noted that the rise of modern science occurred in the context of a civilization that was still explicitly Christian when teaching either European history of the history of science?

6. Do you think homeschooling should be illegal, as it is in some European countries?

7. Do you believe vaccines are a factor in the rise of autism cases? Do you believe parents should be allowed to opt out of vaccine programs?

8. Do you believe that global warming/climate change demands we de-industrialize?

9. Do you believe churches and all religious institutions should be taxed?

10. Do you believe that there is such a thing as life unworthy of life? Explain.

11. Do you believe assisted suicide and euthanasia should be made legal either on a state-by-state basis or by federal fiat?

12. Do you believe infanticide should be made legal? If not, when is a baby a human being protected by the rights any other human being enjoys?

13. Is there any point when an adult human being loses the right to life? If so, under what circumstances?

14. Do you believe polygamous marriage should be legalized, either on a state-by-state basis or by federal fiat? Do you believe that “minor-attracted adults” should be protected by law as a perfectly valid expression of human sexuality that was much more common in ancient Europe and among non-Western cultures? Do you believe incest and/or bestiality should be protected by law as perfectly valid expressions of human sexuality?

15. Do you believe that individuals are ultimately responsible for their behavior, or do you believe they are subject to too many internal (biochemical, psychological) and external (social pressures, strange belief systems) factors to be held accountable, such that many of our criminal laws should be seriously reformed or eradicated?

Remember always that Progressives are smarter, nicer and more caring than you are.

Leftist protesters superglue doors of inner city Catholic school to prevent Wisconsin governor from making appearance.

It's a good thing that it wasn't conservatives who did this because we would be hearing about the atmosphere of fear and incivility in all the papers.

A pretty amazing statistic that, of course, means absolutely nothing and has no place in any policy discussion about any subject...

...and you are a homophobic racist if you even know this factoid.

CDC: Homosexual men account for 61% of new HIV infections but only 2% of population

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has estimated that practicing homosexual men account for 61% of the new HIV infections in the United States while they only amount to about 2% of the country’s population.


Earlier this month, the CDC released estimates for HIV infections from 2006-2009 showing that new infections remained stable at around 50,000 for each of the four years.

Homosexual men (men who have sex with men) accounted for 29,300 of the estimated 48,100 new infections in 2009, and homosexual men aged 13 to 29 accounted for 27% of the new cases.

The only group in which new HIV infections is increasing, they say, is young homosexual men – driven by an alarming increase in infections from African Americans. They estimated that the new infections among young black homosexual men increased 48 percent in the period of 2006-2009 (from 4,400 HIV infections in 2006 to 6,500 infections in 2009).

The study also revealed that almost 20% of homosexual men have HIV, while nearly half of those who do are unaware of it.

The population of the United States in 2011 was 311 million.  2% of that is 6,220,000.  20% of that is approximately 1.2 million people.

The infection rate appears to be 30,000 per year out of the remaining 5 million, which is roughly a .6 percent infection rate.

One of the eye-catching things about this factoid for those of us who grew with the constant barrage of propaganda about how HIV was "everyone's disease" and that it would rip through the heterosexual population is the fact that it remains a "gay disease."  Here are some statistics from the "Henry J. Kaiser Fact Sheet":

• The CDC estimates that almost one-third of new HIV infections (30 percent) occur among women. In addition, the proportion of all AIDS cases reported among adult and adolescent women has more than tripled, from 7% in 1985 to 26% in 2001.18 Most women are infected with HIV through heterosexual contact.18 Among women, the epidemic has had an increasingly disproportionate impact on women of color.


• By race/ethnicity, it is estimated that more than half of new HIV infections occur among African-Americans (54%), compared with 26 percent of new infections among whites, and 19 percent of new infections among Hispanics. The majority of new infections (42%) occur among men who have sex with men, 33 percent occur among those who are thought to contract HIV through heterosexual contact, and 25% occur among injection drug use.19

If around 60% of HIV infections are among homosexuals, that should leave 40% among heterosexuals.

But 30% of those heterosexuals are women according to the Kaiser fact sheet - which is admittedly a "hinky" number because the fact sheet puts homosexual infection at only 42% (which it calls a "majority."). If the 60% figure and the 30% figure are accurate, the majority of infections stem from men who have sex with men (and some women) with drug users making up the remaining amount, which would imply it is not a heterosexual disease (except for women who would be well advised not to sleep with bisexuals or drug users.)

Hey, I know!  Why don't we spend trillions of dollars attacking a non-existent problem, and we could draconian restrictions on the economy based on an incomplete science founded on false premises...

...because it feels good.

It turns out that the sun is really, really important with respect to global climate change, and there aint nothing we can do about it.

CERN: 'Climate models will need to be substantially revised':

CERN's 8,000 scientists may not be able to find the hypothetical Higgs boson, but they have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised.


The first results from the lab's CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets") experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth's clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it's a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a "heliocentric" rather than "anthropogenic" approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

CERN's director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer warned his scientists "to present the results clearly but not interpret them". Readers can judge whether CLOUD's lead physicist Jasper Kirkby has followed his boss's warning.

"Ion-induced nucleation will manifest itself as a steady production of new particles that is difficult to isolate in atmospheric observations because of other sources of variability but is nevertheless taking place and could be quite large when averaged globally over the troposphere."

Kirkby is quoted in the accompanying CERN press release:

"We've found that cosmic rays significantly enhance the formation of aerosol particles in the mid troposphere and above. These aerosols can eventually grow into the seeds for clouds. However, we've found that the vapours previously thought to account for all aerosol formation in the lower atmosphere can only account for a small fraction of the observations – even with the enhancement of cosmic rays."

The team used the Proton Synchotron accelerator (pictured here with Kirkby) to examine the nucleation using combinations of trace gasses at various temperatures, with precision. These first results confirm that cosmic rays increase the formation of cloud-nuclei by a factor of 10 in the troposphere, but additional trace gasses are needed nearer the surface.

Climate models will have to be revised, confirms CERN in supporting literature (pdf):


"[I]t is clear that the treatment of aerosol formation in climate models will need to be substantially revised, since all models assume that nucleation is caused by these vapours [sulphuric acid and ammonia] and water alone.

The work involves over 60 scientists in 17 countries.

Veteran science editor Nigel Calder, who brought the theory to wide public attention with the book The Chilling Stars, co-authored with the father of the theory Henrik Svensmark, has an explanation and background on his blog, here, and offers possible reasons on why the research, mooted in the late 1990s, has taken so long.

Svensmark, who is no longer involved with the CERN experiment, says he believes the solar-cosmic ray factor is just one of four factors in climate. The other three are: volcanoes, a "regime shift" that took place in 1977, and residual anthropogenic components.

When Dr Kirkby first described the theory in 1998, he suggested cosmic rays "will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth's temperature that we have seen in the last century."

Somewhere been a half and the whole increase in Earth's temperature over the last century had nothing to do with human activity.

Terrific.  Let's start a governmental program to fix that.

The best thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there never is any bad news....

...and when there is bad news, the bad news is always "unexpected."

Jim Geraghty documents and analyzes the media's use of the word "unexpected" in discussing the poor performance of the economy during the Obama years:

In the Obama years, bad news has always surprised the media.

It is the most common adverb of the Obama years: “unexpectedly.”

● “Sales of U.S. previously owned homes unexpectedly dropped in July,” reported Bloomberg.

● “Manufacturing in the Philadelphia region unexpectedly contracted in August by the most in more than two years as orders plunged and factories shed workers,”reported Bloomberg Businessweek.

● “Consumer spending unexpectedly fell in June,” reported Reuters.

● “Dismal economic data on Thursday pointed to an unexpectedly abrupt slowdown in manufacturing and a pickup in inflation,” reported the New York Times’ business page.
 
This is just in the past week; hundreds of articles each month note that some new bit of economic data is contrary to the expectations of experts. But the term is starting to become an object of ridicule within the conservative blogosphere as the country endures its third year of hard economic times under President Obama.


Three years after a financial crisis, unemployment has hit painful highs, GDP growth has been sluggish at best, and some predict a “double dip” recession. During this period, the Obama administration and its allies have repeatedly made bold promises about imminent prosperity — from an infamous chart that projected that the stimulus would keep unemployment rate below 8 percent, to the administration’s “Recovery Summer” tour of 2010, to Nancy Pelosi’s prediction that passing Obamacare would create 400,000 jobs “almost immediately,” to the president’s prediction that we would enjoy 3.1 percent growth this year and 4.1 percent growth in 2012 and beyond.

For about three years now, conservative bloggers have chuckled at how frequently the unveiling of bad economic news comes with the adverb “unexpectedly” in media reports. As Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, Michael Barone, and others have often asked, unexpected to whom?

“I think it’s a combination of cognitive dissonance, the terra nova nature of the post-bubble economy, and a healthy dose of partisanship,” suggests Ed Morrissey, who has blogged about the ubiquitous adverb regularly at HotAir.com.

Perhaps the perpetual surprise reflects a media desire to focus on pockets of growth or prosperity — at least with a Democrat in the White House. In a widely diversified $14 trillion economy, one can almost always find some areas of economic improvement.

Certainly, a media that wanted to paint a more dire portrait of the economy would have no shortage of material to work with. There’s considerable evidence that America’s problems in job creation are much worse than the most widely cited numbers would indicate.

If this bad news really is "unexpected", then we are truly screwed since we are in the hands of total incompentents.

On the other hand, we may be alright so long as the people in charge do not really believe this spin.

On yet another hand, the risk is that our leaders start believing their own spin and fall victim to the "Taranto Effect" by believing their own press clippings.  It's also a violation of the Jenkins' Dicta - named after a Fresno bankruptcy attorney whose sage advice was, "Never forget, the worse thing you can do is to believe your own bullshit."

Wow! Science -

Scientists witness star being shredded by black hole.

Prepare to have your mind blown.


Back in March, when NASA's Swift spacecraft first detected what scientists believed to be a black hole eating a star 3.8 billion light years from earth, many didn't quite know what it would mean. But now it seems the cosmic event not only sent a beam of X-rays shooting towards earth, but it also rejuvenated the black hole.

NASA has put together a short video imagining the event, which you can see for yourself, below.

"Incredibly, this source is still producing X-rays and may remain bright enough for Swift to observe into next year," said David Burrows, professor of astronomy at Penn State University and lead scientist for the mission's X-Ray Telescope instrument, told NASA. "It behaves unlike anything we've seen before."
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center explains why matter and X-rays are shooting out of the black hole:

As a star falls toward a black hole, it is ripped apart by intense tides. The gas is corralled into a disk that swirls around the black hole and becomes rapidly heated to temperatures of millions of degrees.

The black hole itself is enormous, potentially four times the size of the one at the center of the Milky Way, according to NASA. Even more incredibly, the massive hole seems to be shooting matter out of its center at 80 to 90 percent of the speed of light.

An event like this has never before been seen by scientists.

Earlier this year, NASA reported that the Swift telescope had detected dual black holes, that is, a supermassive blackhole at the center of a galaxy located extremely close to another galaxy with a blackhole at its center--a rarely observed occurrence.

At the 2011 Ted conference, Janna Levin, a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College, spoke to The Huffington Post about the "sound" of a black hole. Though black holes can't be seen directly, Levin likened their resonance to "someone knocking on the door, or mallets banging on a drum."

Space is huge.  What are the odds of a star "wandering by" a black hole with the orientation pointed in just the right direction when humanity has a data collection device pointed in that direction ?

Life's Small Mysteries.

Why do we keep reading that phrase that starts with "lorem ipsum" whenever we see "dummy text"?

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit” is probably the most popular sentence in the world that is not meant to be read. “Lorem Ipsum” (shorthand for the entire, seemingly endless body of Latin text) is the green screen of the publishing world — placeholder copy used by designers to replicate how a block of text will look and how many words it will fit before swapping in the fully written article. This apparent gibberish, however, has been used for this purpose since the 1500s, and its foundation goes back even further. According to lipsum.com:

It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 B.C., making it more than 2,000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the citations of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (“The Extremes of Good and Evil”) by Cicero, written in 45 B.C.

Although many variations of dummy text exist (a recent addition being “Hipster Ipsum,” which generates sentences like “Single-origin coffee four loko fap dreamcatcher hoodie, carles wayfarers vice bicycle rights synth keytar brooklyn”), “Lorem Ipsum” (which translates roughly as “suffering itself”) still remains the industry standard. As such, the image above, created by the artist Zoë McCloskey, serves as her commentary on “the futility of text and the written word.”

Holding Paper - Remember when Obama thought that running up $4 trillion in debt was "unpatriotic"?



That was so 2008.

Language, Culture and the Bible.

I have just learned that in Punjabi while there different words for "uncle" - depending on whether the man is your father's brother or your mother's brother or the man who married your mother's sister, etc. - there is no word for "cousin."  Hence, those male family relations that we would call "cousin," "brother", "step-brother" or "second cousin" are simply called "brother."  Ditto for female relations - whether an actual sister or a female cousin, the term used is "sister."

In Punjabi, if you want to distinguish between a true sister and a female cousin, a circumlocution like "the daughter of my father's sister's husband" would be used.

All of which looks a lot like Aramaic in passages like Matthew 13:55:

55Is not this the carpenter's son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas?


56And his sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things?

And Matthew 27:56:

Among which was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee's children.

So, were James and Joses the sons of Mary the mother of Jesus or sons of Mary the mother James and Joses?

And Jude 1:1:

Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, to them that are sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, ....

And Luke 6:

¹² One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. ¹³ When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles: ¹⁴ Simon (whom he named Peter), his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, ¹⁵ Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called the Zealot, ¹⁶ Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

So, was the apostle Jude, aka Judas, the son of James or the brother of James?

Obviously, the word "brother" did not mean in First Century Palestine what it means in 21st Century English.

10 Years after...

...and political correctness re-writes history.

Elizabeth Scalia on the 10 year memorial service of 9/11:

When two hijacked, terrorist-piloted passenger jets were deliberately flown into the Twin Towers, in an act of war against our nation, the first recorded casualty was a Roman Catholic priest and NYFD chaplain — Fr. Mychal Judge — who had ridden to the burning towers, and blessed doomed firefighters, hearing last confessions on the way.


And while Judge’s body was being carried away from the catastrophe by the firefighters who loved him, and whom he loved, First Responders from all ranks, all units, all departments were heading toward that disaster area, not running away, intent on saving as many human lives as possible, even as they weighed the terrible odds. They went up the stairs, while office workers went down. Some of them were kissed by a blind man’s guide-dog, as they passed.

Of the First Responders, 343 members of the FDNY lost their lives. The NYPD lost 23. The Port Authority Police lost 37. Of the 2998 killed at Ground Zero, 403 of them were First Responders, and one of them was a priest. That’s what, about 12% of the total?

But:

But now — understanding all of that — we read that New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is not inviting First Responders to observe the tenth anniversary of this day of death and sacrifice, at Ground Zero.


And we read, also that Mayor Bloomberg’s guest list is empty of any clergy, as well.

There will be no prayers at his little shindig. Heaven, forbid.

Apparently, there’s just not enough room for all the First Responders who want to be there, because there are so many important people who must be there! They cannot be denied their photo-op, and their speechifying, and their postures and poses, even though most of them were not even in office on that dreadful day.

No, Michael Bloomberg’s Super Colossal, Low-Salt 9/11 Memorial and Networking Event is a big-ticket item for the the ones who can be tapped, later, for their money or their influence — the most important sorts of people.

And of course, some of the families of the dead will be allowed in. One does need them for the pictures, after all.

First Responders and Clergyfolk are not very important to the powerful and the enlightened. They only protect us, rescue us, resuscitate us, console us, pray with us, bless us and bury us. And when they die doing it, well, one does feel terrible about it for a whole news cycle or two. And then one takes a private jet somewhere, and tries to forget…

I don’t know why I should be surprised. Priests and First Responders are, like our troops, front-line folk. They’re like heroes in the cowboy flicks; they ride in, shoulder the burden, help put things to rights, and then — while the elite get on with assuming their power and asserting their primacy –they recede into the background. Only the very few stick around to say ‘thank you’ and wave them off. Sometimes children ask them to come back, or to stay.

Bloomberg’s priorities are all wrong. He’s thinking like a Baron — or no, he’s not really thinking at all; he’s being pragmatic: mustn’t let the help get get too much recognition, get too full of themselves — they might start getting uppity and making demands on milords purse and time. Mustn’t let the damn clergy murmur their vulgar prayers, or next we’ll have tent-revivalists cluttering up the fairgrounds and making such spectacles of themselves.

The Fallacy of Publicity.

That which "fits the narrative" must be true.

From Dave Pierre at the Media Reports:

Shame on SNAP: Even After Priest Is Exonerated, Group Attacks Falsely Accused Cleric

Just awful.

- August 2011 -

Earlier this month (8/8/11), a Hawaii jury deliberated just minutes to declare that Fr. Bohdan Borowec, a Ukrainian Catholic priest visiting on vacation from Canada, was entirely innocent on charges of kidnapping and sexual assault.

Defense attorney Shawn A. Luiz, working pro bono on the case, effectively demonstrated that the claims against the priest were a complete fabrication from a woman of scant credibility. In addition to having an established mental health history, the unstable accuser had a record of making a false accusation against a priest before.

At the trial, the defense also produced e-mails following the alleged incident that demonstrated that the erratic woman was seeking money. These e-mails were exchanged even before she called the police, which she did not do until three days after the incident in question.

It should also be noted that Fr. Borowec has never had any other accusations of wrongdoing against him in decades in ministry.

Yet, despite the complete lack of credibility of the accuser and the fact that a jury acquitted the innocent priest so quickly, Joelle Casteix, the agitated "Southwest Director" of SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), released an awful press statement (8/10/11) following the case. It began (emphasis added):

Our hearts ache for this brave woman who had the wisdom to report a (sic) horrific crimes to law enforcement. Let's hope that every person who saw, suspected or suffered clergy sex crimes and cover ups in Hawaii – by Borowic or any cleric - will find the courage and strength to speak up, call police, expose wrongdoing, protect kids and start healing.

"Brave woman"? "Horrific crimes"? Of course, there were no "horrific crimes." And the woman is not "brave"; she is a proven fraud.

The fact that SNAP would run to the side of this woman who made a glaringly false accusation is troubling, if not flat-out sick.

SNAP's press statement reveals – again – that honesty and integrity mean very little to the group. It also again exposes the fact that SNAP will attempt to bludgeon the Catholic Church by any means necessary, even if it involves attacking innocent parties.

Shame on SNAP.

Finally … Bravo to attorney Luiz, not only for skillfully defending an innocent man, but also for making a very important point to the Hawaii Catholic Herald:

“In cases of being falsely accused, the priest’s reputation is effectively destroyed while the accuser, on the other hand, enjoys anonymity and suffers no loss of reputation or negative material consequences.”

Indeed, Fr. Borowec's rite placed the priest on administrative leave after his arrest, disallowing him from celebrating the liturgy. In addition, the priest was detained for six months in Hawaii, not allowed to return to Canada. Meanwhile, the identity of the accuser has always been anonymous. (By the way, Borowec also goes by Borowic, apparently.)

Luiz also noted to the Hawaii Catholic Herald that while Hawaiian and Canadian media went frenetic over Fr. Borowec's arrest back in February, the coverage of his exoneration has been "minimal."

Let us pray for Fr. Borowec and all our priests!

Justice and mercy are a two way street.
 
As Mark Shea notes, "It'd be nice if SNAP learned some mercy."

Basically, in the eyes of the State, we are all criminals and members of a prison population not yet incarcerated.

California legislature considers legislation to limit DUI roadblocks:

Confiscating automobiles has become a significant source of revenue for cash-strapped California cities. Last Tuesday, the state legislature gave preliminary approval to legislation to impose limits on the practice.


Under current law, municipalities run sobriety checkpoints funded almost entirely by $30 million in federal grant money. The drunk-driving (DUI) roadblocks catch comparatively few drunk drivers, so officers often focus on issuing as many tickets as possible for minor violations while cars are stopped. Assembly Bill 353 separates vehicle inspection checkpoints from DUI roadblocks and prohibits impounding of vehicles unless the alleged offense meets certain criteria.

Cars will be impounded from anyone suspected of driving while drunk or on a suspended license, unless the driver or a police officer can safely park the vehicle until a properly licensed driver can take it away. Some lawmakers see racial motivation behind current practice.

“Despite their original intent, sobriety checkpoints are increasingly being used to target drivers that are ineligible to obtain licenses in order to increase local revenue,” the bill’s sponsor, Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles), explained. “Frequently these checkpoints are set up in the areas that do not have a high correlation of DUI arrests or accidents; instead, they are placed in neighborhoods and, or locations where there are higher populations of low-income families and communities.”

Cedillo cited the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley which calculated that at 3200 roadblocks in the past two years, 61 percent took place in locations with a heavy Hispanic population.

“While impoundments for DUIs are usually overnight, impoundment for driving without a license typically last for a term of 30 days,” Cedillo said. “Often, this effectively results in the forfeiture of the vehicle because the towing and impoundment fees may well exceed the value of the vehicle, which is apart from the fines already paid to local governments.”

Municipalities collect $150 from license fines imposed at roadblocks plus receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees from towing companies. Out of 24,000 vehicle impounds at DUI roadblocks in 2009, a mere 13 percent were related to drunk driving.

Public Service Announcement - 30 Ways for Women over 50 to meet Men.

Lots of good advice here from Belladonna Rogers, although it doesn't say anything about "visiting bars and buying drinks for random redheaded gentlemen."

That one always works.

In other news...

....jury awards $1.2 million in damages for wrongful termination of Walgreen's pharmacist.

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

'Teacher of the Year' suspended for Facebook comment.

A Florida teacher has been suspended and removed from the classroom in Mount Dora, Florida, for comments made on his Facebook page against homosexual "marriage." Liberty Counsel will be representing the teacher in court.


The comments by Mount Dora High School teacher Jerry Buell were posted on his Facebook page on his personal time, using his home computer. Those comments reflected the mainstream view that marriage should be between one man and one woman. According to a Liberty Counsel press release, the history and government teacher expressed his view that homosexuality is a sin and that seeing two "grooms" kissing on a news story revolted him.

Here is the coverage of the story on MSNBC.

When Hell Came to Earth.

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder is a well-written, thoroughly-documented investigation into the Hell on Earth that was the "Bloodlands," basically Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine during the era of Stalin and Hitler. Snyder's attention to details - the individual deaths and the grotesque mass murder - focuses the reader's attentions onto the quite literal "enormity" - the extreme evil or moral offensiveness - of which totalitarian societies - whether fascist or communist are capable.


The fact that there were two monsters at work in the Bloodlands has come as something of a surprise to moderns who have tended to ignore the fact that the democratic West was allied with a psychopathic mass murderer of the first water. In his review of "Bloodlands" for Slate, Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler: the Search for the Origins of His Evil", commented that after reading the accounts of cannibalism during the Ukrainian Famine, which had been engineered by Stalin, he was "jolted me out of any illusion that meaningful distinctions could be made between Stalin and Hitler." The fact that it took this book to jolt someone who had written a book about the evils out of Hitler into thinking about the evils of Stalin, speaks volumes about why Snyder's book is a book that should be read by anyone with an interest in history, or, for that matter, by anyone who is interested in the mystery of human nature or of good and evil.

Snyder does at least five things in this book that make it well worth reading.

First, he breaks down the mostly artificial division that has been made between the experience of National Socialism and Communism for the people who were its chief victims. Most books consider one or the other - with the vast majority concerned only with the former, resulting in the naivety that Rosenbaum expressed in his review. As a consequence of the "fallacy of publicity" - i.e, that which gets the most publicity is most true - the victims of Stalinism, the hundreds of thousands of Poles who were shot for being Polish, have been reduced to non-existence.
 
Review continued here.

Pagan Parallels.

This is a good site for debunking the tired wheeze that the life of Christ is reconstructed pagan myths.

That's because "straw men" don't fight back.

British atheists seem to be afraid to debate William Lane Craig, aka "The Machine."

 American Evangelical theologian William Lane Craig is ready to debate the rationality of faith during his U.K tour this fall, but it appears that some atheist philosophers are running shy of the challenge.


This month president of the British Humanist Association, Polly Toynbee, pulled out of an agreed debate at London’s Westminster Central Hall in October, saying she “hadn’t realized the nature of Mr. Lane Craig’s debating style.”

Lane Craig, who is a professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, Calif., and author of 30 books and hundreds of scholarly articles, is no stranger to the art of debate and has taken on some of the great orators, such as famous atheists Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Harris once described Craig as “the one Christian apologist who has put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists”.


Responding to Toynbee’s cancellation, Lane Craig commented: "These folks (atheists) can be very brave when they are alone at the podium and there's no one there to challenge them. But one of the great things about these debates is that, it allows both sides to be heard on a level playing field, and for the students in the audience to make up their own minds about where they think the truth lies."

But David Silverman, president of the American Atheists, believes the reason behind the cancellation is much simpler.

"The fact is some people get tired of debating Christians because of the same arguments over and over again. And sometimes it’s a lot like arguing with a wall," he said.

Others have refused to challenge Lane Craig, too, including Richard Dawkins, one of the Four Horseman of the new Atheist movement, which include Hitchens, Harris and Daniel Dennett.

Dawkins, who has labeled the Roman Catholic Church “evil” and once called the Pope “a leering old villain in a frock,” refused four separate invitations, extended through religious and humanist organizations, to take part in debates with Lane Craig during his fall tour.

The controversy wafted into the British press after fellow atheist and philosophy lecturer, Daniel Came, accused Dawkins of simply being afraid, saying, "The absence of a debate with the foremost apologist for Christian theism is a glaring omission on your CV and is of course apt to be interpreted as cowardice on your part."

Dawkins responded by saying, "I have no intention of assisting Craig in his relentless drive for self-promotion."

"I've had a few conversations with Dawkins. He doesn't do debates,” said Silverman who defends Dawkins' decision not to challenge Lane Craig. “He doesn't like those staged debates, which is why he doesn't do much. ... And he gets rather frustrated with the quality of responses."

Craig argues that science and faith are connected. In his writings, he states: "I think we are living in a time in human history where physical science is more open to the existence of a creator and designer of the universe than at any time in recent memory."

In his debates he suggests that the question to ask is not whether science can prove God's existence but rather the philosophy that "science can establish a premise in an argument leading to the conclusion that God exists."

But there many in Britain who would not agree and want to debate that. And they're welcome to do it, because apparently the position is open.

The problem for the atheists is that Craig has been showing them the rationalism that underlies theology.

"Let's you and him fight."

Francis Beckwith responds to an essay in a January 2007 edition of the New Republic that tries to split orthodox Christians from Mormons over the issue of Natural Law.

Linker’s argument is flawed in several ways. It is, first, an uncharitable reading of Mormon thought. For it isolates the office of prophet and the exaltation and authority of God from the essential components of LDS metaphysics. Although the LDS prophet may offer new revelation, his authority is neither boundless nor under his absolute control. His pronouncements are limited by certain eternal principles – such as those articulated by Smith and other Mormon prophets – as well as the moral and religious requirements of the LDS canon of Scripture and the numerous teachings of the church’s General Authorities.


For, as we have seen, the LDS universe is shot through with teleology, moral and otherwise. The Mormon God is bound by an unchanging moral law outside himself that is part of the infrastructure of an eternally existing cosmos. This, of course, does not mean that one may not raise philosophical questions about the coherence of having a moral law without a moral lawgiver that is identical to the Good. Rather, it means that Linker locates the dispute between Mormons and traditional Christians in the wrong place. It is not a question of whether one can know a natural moral law that exists. It is over whether or not that natural moral law is merely part of the furniture of the universe or ultimately in the Being of God.

Mormons and traditional Christians differ in many ways; but the attempt to pick a fight between them over belief in a natural law is not one of them.

Here is the New Republic article that Beckwith is responding to.

It's adorable how liberals get interested in scholastic theology every four years.

The Death of the Intellect.

One of the disheartening thing about modernity, for anyone interested in such things, is just how simultaneously stupid and arrogant modern people are about anything more rareified than the instructions for playing an X-box.

Take Dan Brown, whose chief virtue is that he flatters his readers into thinking that they are smart.

Another example is the argument style of the New Atheist who believe that they can dismiss thousands of years of thought by people who spent their lives thinking about intricate and esoteric matters with a snort and few lines of text. Edward Feser disembowls this pretension in this essay:

Richard Dawkins is equally adept at refuting straw men. In his bestselling The God Delusion, he takes Aquinas to task for resting his case for God’s existence on the assumption that “There must have been a time when no physical things existed”—even though Aquinas rather famously avoids making that assumption in arguing for God. (Aquinas’s view was instead that God must be keeping the world in existence here and now and at any moment at which the world exists, and that this would remain true even if it turned out that the world had no beginning.) Dawkins assures us that Aquinas gives “absolutely no reason” to think that a First Cause of the universe would have to be all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing, etc.; in reality, Aquinas devoted hundreds of pages, across many works, to showing just this. Dawkins says that the fifth of Aquinas’s famous Five Ways is essentially the same as the “divine watchmaker” argument made famous by William Paley. In fact the arguments couldn’t be more different, and followers of Aquinas typically—and again, rather famously (at least for people who actually know something about these things)—reject Paley’s argument with as much scorn as evolutionists like Dawkins do.


And those are only (some of) the errors on pages 77–79.

You will find similar howlers throughout the works of the other New Atheists. Their grasp of the chief arguments for the existence of God and related matters is, in short, comparable to the scientific acumen of the college sophomore who thinks the lesson of Einstein’s revolution in physics is that “it’s all relative, man”—or that of the fundamentalist preacher of my opening example. It’s that bad.

For more Feser, see his post on the "argumentum ad Himmlerum."

The Good of Faith.

From Professor James R. Stoner, Jr.'s "Last Lecture."


 

IV. Faith


Constitutionalism, learning, beauty—next is faith. On nothing else is society so misled as on the question of what faith is and whether it is good—not just society at large, I think, but even many of us who take pride in being faithful. Faith is presented as the opposite of science: scientists know, others merely believe. This is not entirely wrong, but incomplete, for it takes for granted that modern science and faith speak about the same things, which is hardly obvious—indeed, is obviously mistaken, as anyone with faith can recognize. By opposing science and faith, faith is clumped together with all non-science and hence with a lot of nonsense, with every prejudice, fantasy, error, and falsehood. Even the faithful are misled into treating faith as a matter of the heart, not the mind—an opinion again not entirely false, but the cause of serious errors: distrust of learning on the one hand, and exaggerated trust of feelings on the other.

For me the breakthrough came when reading Thomas Aquinas on the virtue of faith. Faith, he says, is an intellectual virtue—the habit of mind that accepts true propositions on authority, sometimes because one hasn’t had the time yet or doesn’t have the capacity to know them scientifically (I’m not simply being elitist here; as Tocqueville wrote, even the philosopher must accept a thousand things on the authority of others), or because in this life, given the imperfection of our senses and our minds, we can at best know them “as through a glass darkly,” though we hope one day to know them clearly as we see God face to face.

Belief, says Aquinas, is between opinion and knowledge, far from ignorance, close to truth. The image I propose is of a staircase: the ascent to knowledge, every step higher, nevertheless requires planks to stand on along the way. Perhaps the greatest philosopher can climb a pole or rest sufficiently on the rungs of a ladder—but most of us ascend best by stairs, where merely stepping forward makes us step upward, little by little, and there are plenty of landings or places to rest. It is essential to this image, and to St. Thomas’s argument, that faith and science ultimately seek the same truth—and that, to most of us, is a matter of faith, for Christ said, I am the way, the truth, and the light. But if he told the truth—and how dare we doubt him on this point?—then we faithful have nothing to fear from science, nor scientists from faith, for we have the same end: knowledge of the truth about all things. I like to pray, “Lord, help us to see Christ in every truth we learn, and to look for truth in Christ.” If you notice that my argument supposes there is one true faith, I concede the point and invite you to consider which it is.

Now if I am right that we should see faith and reason as complementary, not conflicting, then we have within our hands an insight which can revolutionize the world of learning—within our faith tradition, we have resources that can restore the wholeness to learning, can give beauty back its luster, can even ennoble our political institutions by keeping the goods they secure in perspective. I don’t mean this will happen by suppressing science under faith, but by freeing the faithful from the fear that learning will cause them to lose their faith. Here is a task that will take a generation or more, that is not promised immediate reward or success, but which, against all appearance, makes the life of the Catholic in the university today the most exciting and demanding that I know.

The crickets continue to chirp about Pedophile Producer.

Dave Pierre at Media Reports observes:

Celeb’s Hollywood Pedophilia Stunner Met With Media Whimper


Not the Catholic Church?

- August 2011 -

Appearing in an interview on ABC's "Primetime Nightline" last week (Thu., 8/10/11), Hollywood actor Corey Feldman aired a truly brave and shocking claim:

"I can tell you that the No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia. That's the biggest problem for children in this industry ... It's the big secret."

It was not Feldman's only stomach-turning assertion. He also claimed that the "casting couch," the sick Hollywood legend by which roles are given in exchange for sex, even applies to children.

In addition to saying that he himself had been molested as a boy by "vultures" in show business, Feldman went on to claim that the demise of the late actor Corey Haim was precipitated by "a Hollywood mogul" abusing him as a boy. Feldman added:

"There was a circle of older men who surrounded themselves with this group of kids. And they all had either their own power or connections to great power in the entertainment industry …

"[T]here's a lot of good people in this industry, but there's also a lot of really, really sick, corrupt people. And there are people in this industry who have gotten away with it for so long that they feel they're above the law, and that's got to change. That's got to stop."

So here is a claim of massive abuse and cover-ups happening in Hollywood. Where is the major media on this?

Nearly a week after the episode aired, the response to Feldman's alarming claims has been almost non-existent in the major media. While the Boston Globe and the New York Times have hyperventilated over decades-old allegations of abuse by Catholic priests (many of which were all-too-true), neither paper dedicated even a drop of ink to Feldman's shocker.

Could it be that major media folks do not wish to dig too deep into this story and upset one of their largest sources of income?

The Catholic League uncovered exactly one newspaper in the entire United States that reported Feldman's claims: The International Business Times.

When it comes to the awful abuse of children, it sure seems like the media doesn't get too worked up unless the word Cardinal, bishop, or priest is in someone's job title.

Doubling Down.

C. Michael Patton goes "all in" after his post arguing his view that "Roman" Catholics cannot be "true scholars" by posting an essay on "Why I hate Roman Catholics."

The title of the essay is a kind of passive-aggressive rebuke to people who criticized his first essay.  Patton seems to be arguing that he has been unfairly attacked for hating Catholics, when, in truth, he has the most open mind imaginable and actually spent a year investigating Catholicism.

As they say, "whatever."  The responses to Patton's first essay didn't accuse him of "hating Catholics."  The responses were actually quite calm and intellectual critiques of Patton's cognitive dissonance in denying the beam in his eye, namly that he has first principles he cannot deny if he wishes to remain an evangelical and a true scholar - such as the Resurrection or the Incarnation. The comments are interesting and worth reading.

In response to this most recent post, Bryan Cox - who certainly qualifies as a "true scholar" - comments:

You might remember that scene in The Hunt for Red October where a Russian sub named the Konovalov fires a torpedo at another sub named the Red October, but the captain of the Konovalov was so confident that his torpedo would hit the Red October (because it was at such close range), he had deactivated the safety mechanisms on the torpedo, so that it became armed right at launch. But the torpedo misses the Red October, and subsequently locks on to the Konovalov instead, at which point, just before the torpedo impacts the Konovalov and destroys it, the Konovalov’s assistant officer turns to the Konovalov’s captain and says,


“You arrogant ass. You’ve killed us!”

I was reminded of that scene, when I read your comment above: “However, when it comes to theology and, most specifically, exegetical studies of the Bible, I don’t think he or she can be a scholar, since they lack the academic freedom to disagree with Rome.”

That’s because if you replace the word ‘Rome’ with the words ‘Jesus and the Apostles,’ you’ve just destroyed the possibility of Christian scholarship. And you have no non-arbitrary way of preventing that term-replacement.

Cox gets extra points for the pop culture reference.
 
Jeremy at Unsettled Christianity offers this interesting insight, namely after his baptism, he couldn't be a non-Catholic scholar even if he tried:
 

Upon returning to the Church, however, I was surprised to find out that my marriage was invalid … yes, that’s right invalid. The Church considered it invalid in the sense that it was not sacramental. I literally could have gotten divorced and gotten a quick annulment at that point (Thankfully my wife didn’t seize on her last opportunity for freedom as we had our marriage convalidated shortly after I returned to the Church and she started the RCIA process). And why was my marriage invalid? “Lack of Canonical Form.” In other words, I had not, as a Roman Catholic, obeyed the canonical requirement of being married in a Catholic Church witnessed by a priest or deacon (or with a dispensation from the bishop of my archdiocese outside of the Church).


But, wait a second … I was an ordained Southern Baptist minister not a Roman Catholic. Well, as it turns out, a person is Roman Catholic by virtue of their baptism. I discussed this with my instructor when trained to be an advocate for annulment cases. I knew this from the Catechism (paragraph 1280) at that point: “Baptism imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual sign, the character, which consecrates the baptized person for Christian worship. Because of the character Baptism cannot be repeated.” But, he put it a bit more eloquently; he said something to the effect: “you may have gotten wet, but you didn’t get baptized again.” Baptism is an indelible mark, and not even becoming an ordained Southern Baptist could remove it.

Now, at the same time I was a Southern Baptist minister, I was also getting my MA in Old Testament and Hebrew language and starting my doctoral program in Biblical Languages (which praise and glory to God I just finished). I get my years mixed up, but I believe I gave my first SBL presentation and wrote a peer-reviewed journal article before returning to the Church (though these did not deal with theology, I obviously dealt with theology in local church settings). It’s possible my papers and publication came a little after, but regardless of the time frame there is a sense in which I was a scholar before returning to the Catholic Church.

So, this presents an interesting situation. While I was a Southern Baptist, I was still, according to the Church, a Roman Catholic bound by canon law with with regard to my marriage, so much so that I could have had a short form annulment. And, I was also a scholar in the area of Biblical Studies and Biblical Languages. Ironically, I believe there is some real sense in which I could have been considered a Catholic biblical scholar when I was a Southern Baptist minister, at least in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Otherwise the Church holding me responsible for canon law wouldn’t make a great deal of sense. Again, baptism is indelible.

Now, would I have been a Catholic scholar faithful to the Magisterium of the Church? Of course not. Would I have been a scholar with a mandate from a bishop to teach Catholic theology? Of course not. But, a Catholic is Catholic by virtue of their baptism, not because of agreement to doctrinal formulations. Of course, the Church would hope that faithfulness to Magisterial teaching would follow upon baptism, otherwise there might not be that much point in remaining Catholic. And, there are ways of being excommunicated or even excommunicating oneself. I suppose even I could have pleaded for excommunication. But, I don’t imagine that this is where the majority of Catholics who disagree end up.

Wait for the outrage against "Pedophile Producers" in three, two, one....

....*crickets*

Mark Shea has a post on Corey Feldman's claim/revelation that he and his friend Corey Haim were molested by a coterie of Hollywood pedophiles - although "ebophiles" is probably more accurate - in their early teens.

If only people in Hollywood could marry...

...none of this would happen!

As the reaction of our elites to Roman Polanski made clear, sexual abuse of children is fine if you are the right sort of Roman.

Speaking of which:

If a small group of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have their way at a conference this week, pedophiles themselves could play a role in removing pedophilia from the American Psychiatric Association’s bible of mental illnesses — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), set to undergo a significant revision by 2013. Critics warn that their success could lead to the decriminalization of pedophilia.

I reiterate my prediction that the day will come when the Church is condemned, not for failing to prevent pedophilia, but for trying to prevent it.

Here is the Corey Feldman article:

Actor Corey Feldman has sensationally claimed that his Lost Boys co-star Corey Haim was the victim of a paedophile who was also a Hollywood mogul.


The Lost Boys actor said he was 'literally surrounded' by paedophiles at the age of 14, but didn't realise 'until I was much older what they were and what they wanted.'

In a special report, 'Underage And Famous' for ABC's Nightline show, Feldman blamed former co-star Corey Haim's death at the age 38 on the abuse he suffered at the hands of a 'Hollywood mogul' he refused to name.

And here is the article on the effort to normalize pedophilia:

Child advocate Dr. Judith Reisman, a visiting professor at Liberty University’s School of Law, said the conference is part of a strategy to condition people into accepting pedophiles.


“The first thing they do is to get the public to divest from thinking of what the offender does criminally, to thinking of the offender’s emotional state, to think of him as thinking of his emotional state, [and] to empathize and sympathize,” Reisman said. “You don’t change the nation in one fell swoop; you have to change it by conditioning. The aim is to get them [pedophiles] out of prison.”

According to Reisman, empirical data show that pedophiles typically molest many children before finally being caught.

Michael Coren points out that this has been a long term weltenschuaung among the formers of popular culture:

In 1977, the French newspaper Le Monde published an open letter signed by sixty-nine French intellectuals, including Jack Lang, a future minister for culture and minister for education, and Bernard Kouchner, a future minister for health and president of Médecins Sans Frontières, along with luminaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, and Roland Barthes. They were protesting the imprisonment of three men accused of having sex with thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. Ministers Lang and Kouchner have both been strong critics of the Roman Catholic Church and its handling of the abuse crisis.

The horror that our formers of popular culture and our intellectual betters express about "pedophile priests" is undoubtedly strategic. Its purpose is nihilistic - to remove the moral authority of religion, so that in the absence of such authority they can "immanentize" their perverse Gnostic eschaton.

"The pagans were saying after the atomic bomb: 'The Catholics must be bad people as the bomb has killed so many of them.'"


There is a trope among liberals that the atomic bomb was used against Japan for racist reasons.  As with most such tropes, the history is far more complicated, and the "argument ad racism" is undermined by the fact that the American military chose the Catholic cathedral in Nagasaki as its targeting point and that two-thirds of Japan's Catholic population was wiped out by the first use of an atomic weapon in human history.

This is a previously unpublished account from the memoirs of Mother Bernardine Goulter, a sacred Hearth nun who was present when the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. It's a fascinating and chilling account:

No matter what people say about the atomic bomb bringing the war to an end, of its preventing wars in the future, never can I be reconciled to the injustice inflicted on thousands of innocent people whose only part in the war was to suffer from it.


The pagans were saying after the atomic bomb: “The Catholics must be bad people as the bomb has killed so many of them.” The mayor of Nagasaki, who was himself a pagan, was very angry with this remark and silenced it, saying: “It is just the opposite. These good people have been chosen to give their lives for their country and their sacrifice will bring blessings upon Japan.” Certainly he spoke truly. Never has Japan opened its door so widely to the Faith as at the present.

During the days that passed from August 9 to August 15 there were constant raids. The police were very active hiding things in the monastery cellars. On August 2 all the Polish Fathers and Brothers had been taken away to the general camp for all foreigners: Italians, French, Poles, etc. The Father Superior, Rev Fr Mirahana, a naturalised Japanese, was permitted to remain at the monastery until August 15 for the profession ceremony, on that feast, of five Japanese Brothers in minor orders. We did not know what the guards were stowing in the monastery and the six gentleman of our camp were not allowed to go over there during these days. We thought it was an ammunition dump and one night an American plane came dashing, downflying over, just grazing the monastery building and our roof on a reconnaissance flight. Then we thought our hour had come to be a target.

To add to our misgivings, one of the young police guards began to sharpen his sword. It is a custom in Japan from the earliest centuries – one only has to read their history to verify it – that in times of enemy invasion it is thought merciful to put all prisoners to the sword. Our Manchurian fellow internees asked us what this guard was doing. We did not tell them this fact as it was useless to aggravate the already trying circumstances of this awful week. At last one of the British ladies could not stand it any longer. She went to the guard the next time he began to sharpen his sword and said: “What are you doing?” He desisted for a moment, looked up and smiled. Then he said: “I am cleaning off the rust.”

Throwing down the Gauntlet.

C. Michael Patton claims that "Roman Catholic Scholarship" is an "oxymoron."

Oxymoron means “sharp dullness.” It describes a figure of speech in which two words that are contradictory are put together. For example, “accurate rumors” is an oxymoron. Why? Because by definition, a rumor is not yet deemed to be accurate. Other examples could include: “insane logic,” “public secret,” “instant classic,” or my favorite, “government intelligence.” However, over the years I have come to believe that ”Roman Catholic scholarship” is an oxymoron. I don’t believe one can be a Roman Catholic and a scholar at the same time. Well, let me put it another way: I don’t believe one can be a true Roman Catholic and a scholar at the same time. Why? Because being a Roman Catholic militates against what makes someone a scholar in my opinion.


I know, I know. I don’t ever write this . . . this . . . well, this polemical. It seems as if I am discrediting Roman Catholic scholarship with a heavy hand by an ad hom fiat. Please know this is not what I mean to do. There are going to be plenty of people thrown under the bus with this one. In fact, let me start by saying there are many Roman Catholics whom I deeply respect. I am not anti-Catholic. As well, there are many Roman Catholics whom I believe qualify as scholars. However, once they become a scholar (and I am talking about theology here), as I will explain, they have to depart to some degree from Rome. I am not saying that they actually depart from their core Catholic beliefs. I am simply saying that they must suspend their commitment to Rome in order to meet what I believe to be an essential characteristic of scholarship.

And:

What does this have to do with Roman Catholicism? Well, as you can see, this post is about much more than just the viability of Roman Catholic scholarship. While what I have described above is very difficult for anyone with deep commitments, it is most difficult, in Christianity, for those who exist under authoritative human leadership. Christian traditions do not get much more authoritative than Roman Catholicism. To be fair, there are unspoken authoritative structures in many Christian traditions that, while not claiming infallibility, do share the same fundamental guidelines. Outside the Christian faith, it is not much different. I find atheists have the least ability to question their atheism, but this has more to do with personal emotional fundamentalistic commitments than any human authority. This is why atheism boasts of being the most objective, but this boast is, most of the time, very empty.


Roman Catholicism, however, exists under a official umbrella of authoritative – indeed infallible - dogmatic assertions. Again, while no one is completely objective in their studies, Roman Catholics, when it comes to their defined dogma, cannot really study objectively. Why? Because their conclusions are already laid out. For example, if a Roman Catholic is interpreting the Scriptures, he must come to conclusions that are in line with what Rome has already said about the subject. He doesn’t have the freedom to disagree. He doesn’t have the freedom to doubt, if the doubt implies an actual possibility that Rome is wrong.

This is why all true Roman Catholics “scholars” are necessarily apologists who follow the prejudice of Rome, not the the data. Were they to doubt and come to conflicting opinions on something the Church has dogmatized, they are no longer, by definition, Roman Catholic.

In truth, most Roman Catholics don’t function in this way. In fact, the Roman Catholics whose scholarship I trust the most are a bit rebellious. They are not truly Roman Catholic. Apologists on the inside of Rome would call them “cafeteria Catholics,” since they pick and choose which beliefs they like best.

This is not to say that the trust they put in Rome is ill-founded. I don’t happen to think the magisterial authority of Rome is worthy of such trust, but that is not the subject of this post. Another time, maybe. This simply means that when it comes to biblical and theological studies, the designation “Roman Catholic scholar” is an oxymoron. Their conclusions, no matter how unlikely, must sing in harmony with Rome. However, it must be said, that if they are right and the Magisterial authority is infallible (which is the key meta-issue before all others between Protestants and Roman Catholics), then their methodology is secure to the degree that they can demonstrate this claim.

While Protestantism is certainly not perfect, there is freedom for true biblical and theological scholarship to exist. Protestants don’t have to be lawyers defending a client of tradition, but can instead be investigators of truth. We can be critical scholars. Whether or not we always practice this is a different matter, but the issue is one of allowance. Yes, the greater the allowance, the more the diversity. But the greater the allowance for diversity, the greater the possibility of true conviction to exist. Evangelicals can let the evidence take them wherever it leads, not simply to a predetermined destination. Therefore, I believe Protestant Evangelicals can practice true scholarship to a degree that other traditions, especially Roman Catholicism, cannot.