I can understand slanting the news about politics, but slanting news stories about the recent changes in the Catholic Mass suggests that the New York Times is just habitually perverse in slamming all things it thinks are "conservative."

TMATT at Get Religion did a word count on a recent NYT story about liturgical changes in the Mass. Here are his results:

Note that this debate is between Vatican leaders and a vague camp of critics, including ordinary priests. In reality, this is a debate INSIDE the American Catholic hierarchy and, especially, among conservative and progressive Catholic liturgists and academics. The essential question? Is a translation “simple” and “clear” if it omits many words, phrases and images that are found in the source document?

That’s the debate journalists need to cover. Thus, one would expect that this Times story must accurately and fairly cover this debate, with articulate leaders — local and national — being heard on both sides. That’s the journalistic challenge. Correct?

With that in mind, I went through the story with a highlighter pen and marked the voices on both sides, then I counted the words. I did everything I could to leave many words as neutral, including the following quote that allowed one Catholic to cover both bases at the same time:

Rebecca Brown, a parishioner at St. James Cathedral in Seattle, said she felt well prepared for the new translation. “I’m not fond of the linguistic choices, how it rolls off the tongue,” Ms. Brown said. “But on the other hand, the Catholic Church is always about renewal and reforming itself. This is just one of those changes.”

I am sure that others attempting this task and end up with numbers that are slightly different than mine. I erred on the side of neutrality, as I mentioned.

Nevertheless, I ended up with 128 words of positive commentary about the new translation and 403 words of negative commentary. The story includes one scholar on the left, but none on the right. When it comes to direct quotes, all of the strong voices are among those who oppose the new translation.

It’s not a fair fight. Then again, that does not appear to have been the journalistic goal — simply looking at the raw materials of the report. This is a story about good guys and bad guys, defenders of Vatican II and opponents of Vatican II.

In terms of balance and tone, here is a typical exchange:

“It was interesting,” said Danielle McGinley, 31, a parishioner at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles. “It feels more like a Spanish Mass to me. The Spanish Mass is a more literal translation. I like it.”

But George Lind, 73, in New York, had a more visceral reaction. He tried to say the new language at the Church of the Holy Cross in Times Square during the Saturday night Mass, he said, but he became so angry that he had to stop speaking.

“I am so tired of being told exactly what I have to say, exactly what I have to pray,” he said. “I believe in God, and to me that is the important thing. This is some attempt on the part of the church hierarchy to look important.”

Yes, yes, there are conservative Catholics who would respond that they have, for four decades, been told exactly what they have to say, exactly what they have to pray. That’s the other side of the story, the other side of this emotional debate.

Do the journalistic math.

Decanonization in the Mormon Scriptures.

From the Doug Gibson at the Salt Lake City Standard-Examiner:

(To see Cal Grondahl’s cartoon that goes with this post, click here) Remember the Lectures on Faith sections in the Mormon scripture, “Doctrine and Covenants?” No? But they were there for 86 years? I’m reading an 1918 “Doctrine and Covenants” and sure enough, there’s Lectures on Faith.” What about “Section 101″ in early D&C editions, the “Article on Marriage” that says men and women should only have one spouse? No, haven’t heard of that one either? It was eventually deleted by church leaders and replaced by Section 132, which details celestial marriage and having multiple wives. Decanonization of scripture is not talked about much in the LDS church, and it’s certainly far less frequent than examples of added scripture in Mormon canon, but it does happen.

In the fall 1987 issue of “Dialogue,” historians Richard S. Van Wagoner, Steven C. Walker and Allen D. Roberts explore “The ‘Lectures on Faith’: A Case Study in Decanonization.” (Read) The lectures, comprised of seven chapters and totaling 70-plus pages, were part of the “School of the Elders” that Joseph Smith had in Kirtland, Ohio. Most scholars believe church leader Sidney Rigdon wrote most of them, with Smith and another leader, W.W. Phelps, writing one each.

According to the Dialogue article, Smith “accepted responsibility for ‘every principle advanced.’” However, in 1921, via a committee of church leaders, the Lectures on Faith were deleted from the D&C. The explanation given, the Dialogue authors explain, underscores the LDS Church’s muddled explanations for why canon is deleted. The committee wrote, “… Those lessons were prepared for use in the School of Elders … but they were never presented nor accepted by the Church as being otherwise than theological lectures or lessons.“

Related to this issue is confusion from LDS authorities over what constitutes revelations. In testimony before a court and later before Congress, church presidents Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith stated that church members have the right to reject revelation and that true revelation needs to be accepted by the church. It’s likely those statements were part of efforts to avoid secular pressure on the LDS faith, which was dealing with the unpopularity of polygamy.

Most other church leaders, including George Q. Cannon and Bruce R. McConkie, strongly reject the idea that a prophet’s revelations from God need to be approved by members. Even the D&C has conflicting advice on revelations. As the Dialogue article points out, Section 68:4 seems to indicate that once a prophet declares revelation, it is revelation. However, Section: 28:13 says that common consent is needed for church doctrine. (On a personal note, I’ve always been taught that when the LDS prophet claims revelation, debate ends.)

One reason the Lectures on Faith may have been decanonized, the Dialogue authors posit, is that its teaching as to the character of Heavenly Father — as taught by Smith in the 1830s — differ from later teachings. As the Dialogue authors explain, the Lectures on Faith read, “There are two personages who constitute the great matchless, governing and supreme power over all things, by whom all things were created, and made. … They are the Father and the Son — the Father being a personage of spirit, glory, and power … the son … a personage of tabernacle, made or fashioned like unto man.”

What the Lectures on Faith and its subsequent decanonization teach observers is that Mormon doctrine was in a constant evolution in the 1830s. It was not until 1841, more than a score of years after the First Vision, that Smith taught that God had a body of flesh and bone. This doctrine would later be expanded in Smith’s 1844 King Follett sermon, where, the authors point out, Smith taught: “God, who sits enthroned in yonder heavens is a man like unto one of yourselves,” and “You have got to learn how to be Gods yourself.”

Perhaps the most important thing to learn from the Lectures on Faith’s history, as well as the deletion of “Section 101″ of the early D&C, is that Joseph Smith’s understanding of the doctrine of the church he started grew over time. Yet, the majority of Latter-day Saints today, as the Dialogue authors concede, are quite unaware of these evolutionary changes.

Lecture Series available on-line...

...by Lawrence Feingold at the Association of Hebrew Catholics.

Professor Feingold's most recent book has just been published and is available through Amazon - "The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters (Faith and Reason: Studies in Catholic Theology and Philosophy)."

The Lectures include:

1	Sept. 21, 2011	The Natural Desire to See God and Man's Supernatural End	Q&A
2	Sept. 28, 2011	Original Justice and Original Sin	Q&A
3	Oct. 5, 2011	Original Sin and its Consequences	Q&A
4	Oct. 12, 2011	The Question of Evolution	Q&A
5	Oct. 19, 2011	The Mystery of Grace	Q&A
6	Oct. 26, 2011	Actual Grace and Our Cooperation	Q&A
7	Nov. 2, 2011	Merit and Perseverance	Q&A
8	Nov. 9, 2011	God's Universal Salvific Will	Q&A
9	Nov. 16, 2011	Predestination

We are all part of the potential criminal class - draconian DUI laws are a racket and have both intuitive and counter-intuitive results...

...the counter-intuitive result is that lowering the BAC to .08 has led to more fatalities as cops have moved their enforcement from a behavior - impaired driving - to a symbol - a threshhold blood alcohol content.

The intuitive result is that by making law-abiding people into criminals the State has found a new source of revenue and power.

Drunk driving enforcement in this country has become a racket. It’s not about safety, it’s about money. Actually, the drive over the past two decades to lower the legal limit of alcohol for drivers has likely made traffic less safe. It has undoubtedly, though, put millions of dollars into the coffers of various jurisdictions via fines and vehicle confiscation. Additional millions have lined the pockets of police officers via overtime pay to appear in court and to man sobriety checkpoints.


The cynic in me says that as long as police officers and municipalities see drinking drivers as cash cows and hide behind the fig leaf of “traffic safety”, arbitrary standards based on BAC will continue even though they may be counterproductive. In fact, after there was a national push by Mothers Against Drunk Driving to lower the legal BAC limits nationally from 0.10% to 0.08%, backed up by federal pressure on states, alcohol-related traffic fatalities went up in 2000, after 20 straight years of going down. That increase shouldn’t have been surprising. The push for a de facto national limit of 0.08% came after a 1995 NHTSA study already showed that some states that lowered the BAC limits were less safe than before. Those lower limits may have meant a windfall of revenue to jurisdictions and individual police officers, but they didn’t necessarily make us any safer. They may have led to more booze related driving injuries and deaths.

How do lower BAC limits mean more alcohol related accidents? Because those lower BAC limits in most cases led to the institution of sobriety check lanes, legal in all but 9 states. Assuming that the purpose of those checkpoints is genuinely to catch drinking drivers and not just put money into municipal coffers and cops’ pockets, I think it stands to reason that the rationale is to catch those drinking drivers that conventional on the road enforcement wasn’t catching. The idea, I suppose, was that if you check every driver, you’ll find the ones who have been drinking but aren’t impaired enough to catch attention from police or other drivers. In other words, the purpose of the check lanes is to catch drivers who aren’t driving dangerously, except for the fact that they have a particular amount of alcohol in their system.

Most drivers that have a BAC of between 0.08 and 0.10 percent are not driving badly enough to catch attention from police. They may be buzzed but they aren’t swerving, speeding badly, or failing to keeping up with traffic. When police are busy at a sobriety roadblock or setting up surveillance near restaurants and bars, they are not out on the roads trying to find more dangerously impaired drivers. Yes, they get some folks on the cusp of legal intoxication, generating lots of revenue in the process, but they don’t make the roads safer. A nighttime sobriety checkpoint might take more than 20 police officers away from tasks that actually make our roads safer. Only nine states don’t allow suspicionless sobriety checkpoints.

Using 2009 data collected by the University of California at Berkeley, California Watch showed that 1,600 sobriety checkpoints yielded 3,200 DWI arrests. An typical checkpoint would yield only two or three drunk driving arrests. Most of the checkpoint DWI arrests involved people close to the legal limit, rather than at high levels of intoxication. When you consider how many hundreds of drivers get stopped at each of those checkpoints, it hardly seems productive to catch a tiny number of drivers that are over the legal limit but may or may not be dangerously impaired, while at the same time seriously impaired drivers go unstopped because so much police manpower is devoted to sobriety checkpoints. Of course there are other serious crimes besides seriously impaired driving that go unchecked while the local PD or state police are busy pulling people over at checkpoints.

Well, that is, it hardly seems “productive” until you see the bottom line for the municipalities and the cops personally. Drunk driving and sobriety checkpoints are big business. To begin with, a single DUI conviction can mean thousands of dollars of revenue for the jurisdiction that issued the citation. That’s only the tip of the iceberg, though. While sobriety checkpoints don’t catch many seriously drunk drivers, they do nab folks for equipment infractions or other sorts of minor crimes and they end up generating a huge amount of revenue for those municipalities and police officers that do use checkpoints. That same California Watch story revealed that those 1,600 police checkpoints may have yielded just 3,200 arrests for DWI, but they resulted in $40 million in fines, plus $30 million in overtime pay for cops and a staggering 24,000 vehicle confiscations. Assuming that there are towing and storage fees involved in those confiscations, add on even more millions that are extracted from drivers, not to mention those vehicles that end up being part of a “civil” or criminal forfeiture case.

Thirty million dollars in the pockets of cops, $40 million in revenue for their employers, over twenty thousand cars confiscated, all without much proof that seriously impaired driver have been gotten off of the roads.

In the real world we call that a racket.

Well, that makes arguing about the economy more difficult...

...American economic data are wildly inflated above the average consensus estimates:

It appears that central bank intervention was not the only thing in full force today: The US version of the Chinese Ministry of Truth in economic reporting has now officially joined the fray. Anyone wondering just how much of a joke the US high frequency economic data updates have become should look no further than these three charts showing Wall Street forecasts (consensus and distribution) and actual prints for the ADP Payroll, the Chicago PMI and Pending Home Sales. Not one indicator has come below 4 standard deviations above the average forecast, and every single one has printed above the highest forecast. It is now safe to say without any doubt that US data is equal if not more equal in credibility terms with that of China.

Who is issuing this report?  And why make it so obvious to those who know?

The Dating Life.

No IVF, No contraception, no non-marital sex - it's a package deal:

Pressil said he hadn't considered having a family, and his religious beliefs would never allow him to visit a fertility clinic or participate in any form of artificial insemination. Yet three months after he broke up with his girlfriend, she became pregnant with his sperm at the Advanced Fertility Center of Texas on the Katy Freeway near Beltway 8.


In his lawsuit, Pressil said he found out about the plot when a receipt arrived in the mail, listing him as the patient.

"Pressil was listed as the 'patient' on the receipt even though he had never been to (the clinic) nor ever sought treatment for male infertility," according to his lawsuit.

His ex-girlfriend gave birth to twin boys and then sued him for child support. She was granted that child support after blood tests confirmed Pressil was the father.

"That's a violation of myself, to what I believe in, to my religion, and just to my manhood," Pressil said.

Pressil said his ex-girlfriend always claimed she was unable to have children due to a medical condition involving fibroids. He also said she claimed that her condition required a certain sort of condom be used during sex. Now, in hindsight, he said that seems suspicious.

"I did notice a little bit because she would take the condom and ask me to discard it. And usually, a male would discard their own property, but she would always take the condom and she would run off out of the room and I just didn't think anything of it. And I didn't think that anyone could use a condom and bring it to a clinic to get an in vitro," he said.

Pressil's attorney, Jason Gibson says this is particularly terrifying for a man, especially if he's not planning to have a family.

"It's not what you're thinking when you're in a relationship. That's not what most people are thinking, that their partner is going to get a special condom, use that condom as soon as you're done having sex, run off to the fertility clinic to go have an IVF procedure. That's certainly not what my client was thinking," Gibson said.

An attorney representing the Advanced Fertility Center and Omni-Med Laboratories, Danny Sheena, called the lawsuit "suspect" and "disingenuous."

Human Nature, Class, Segregation, Utopia and Occupy Wall Street.

Every time someone attempts to build a horizontal, leaderless, classless society they face-plant into the fact that the desire of people to associate with those who seem to be like themselves is hard-wired into human nature.  Dealing with that fact is one reason why pragmatic Marxists in the 20th Century had to rack up such a high body count as they tried to make their utopian omelette by mass murdering a few tens of millions of eggs.  As evidence of this truth, watch, this unintentionally hilarious video from the Daily Show.

[The video code seems to be "eating" my text.]

"Prepare for riots in euro collapse, Foreign Office warns."

British embassies in the eurozone have been told to draw up plans to help British expats through the collapse of the single currency, amid new fears for Italy and Spain.

Recent Foreign and Commonwealth Office instructions to embassies and consulates request contingency planning for extreme scenarios including rioting and social unrest.

Greece has seen several outbreaks of civil disorder as its government struggles with its huge debts. British officials think similar scenes cannot be ruled out in other nations if the euro collapses.

Diplomats have also been told to prepare to help tens of thousands of British citizens in eurozone countries with the consequences of a financial collapse that would leave them unable to access bank accounts or even withdraw cash.

Unexpected Science News!!!

Climate may not be as sensitive to CO2 as "expected":

The climate may be less sensitive to carbon dioxide than we thought – and temperature rises this century could be smaller than expected. That's the surprise result of a new analysis of the last ice age. However, the finding comes from considering just one climate model, and unless it can be replicated using other models, researchers are dubious that it is genuine.

As more greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere, more heat is trapped and temperatures go up – but by how much? The best estimates say that if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles, temperatures will rise by 3 °C. This is the "climate sensitivity".

But the 3 °C figure is only an estimate. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the climate sensitivity could be anywhere between 2 and 4.5 °C. That means the temperature rise from a given release of carbon dioxide is still uncertain.

The true believers are still holding on, but all the anomalies in climate data, such as the fact that there has been a decade long cooling trend, are piling up.

In addition, there has been strong scientific evidence that CO2 does not drive the global weather for longer than the last decade.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Goldman Sachs predicts that U.S. will be top oil producer by 2017:

Goldman Sachs made a prediction on Sunday, September 11, that the United States will become the world's largest oil producing country by 2017. This significant production boost will occur as a result of utilizing a new definition of oil and generous estimates for the amount of liquids-rich shale production that can occur, The Oil Drum reports.

The investment bank has claimed that the country's daily production of oil will grow from 8.3 million to 10.9 million barrels of oil per day (Mbopd) by the year 2017, according to the media outlet. This level of production would exceed both Saudi Arabia and Russia, which is currently the top oil producer. The European and Asian country should only increase its oil production by 100,000 barrels during this period, which would result in a total output of 10.7 Mbopd, according to Dow Jones Newswires.

How Goldman Sachs arrived at its current production estimate of 8.3 Mbopd is ambiguous, The Oil Drum reports. The Energy Information Agency states that daily production averaged 5.6 Mbopd in June. The media outlet speculates that the investment bank erroneously included natural gas liquids and liquefied refinery gases in oil, but even then the numbers only total 7.8 Mbopd.

Well, okay, but it's not like Goldman Sachs has had a great track record of late, and it's not like our President and his Democrat congressional allies aren't doing their best to prevent America from producing more oil.

Private Interpretation - Michael Licona v. Norm Geisler

Parchment and Pen hosts this video of Paul Copan's thoughts on the dispute on how literal Evangelicals must take Matthew 27:

“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?”

Climategate 2 - another release of Climate Researchers' emails contains more embarrassing revelations and admissions:

Analysis There was always an element of tragedy in the first “Climategate” emails, as scientists were under pressure to tell a story that the physical evidence couldn’t support – and that the scientists were reluctant to acknowledge in public. The new email archive, already dubbed “Climategate 2.0”, is much larger than the first, and provides an abundance of context for those earlier changes.

“I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story,” a civil servant wrote to Phil Jones in 2009. “They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.”

Having elevated global warming to the most dramatic, urgent and over-riding issue of the day, bureaucrats, NGOs, politicians and funding agencies demanded that the scientists must keep the whole bandwagon rolling. It had become too big to stop.

“The science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” laments one scientist, Peter Thorne. While Professor Jagadish Shukla, a lead IPCC author, IGES founder, and one of the most senior climate experts writes that, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.”

With the release of FOIA2011.zip, the cat’s now well and truly out of the bag.

To their credit, some of the climate scientists realised the dangers of the selective approach politicians demanded, which meant cherry-picking evidence to make it suitably dramatic, and quietly hiding caveats. “We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest,” pleads Thorne, in another email from 2005. Thorne noted that a telltale "signature" of greenhouse gas warming was absent. “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous.”

Elsewhere, discussing the homogeneity of temperature readings from different sources, Thorne mulls the need to “balance the text so this is not the message”, and expresses his discomfort with making claims that conceal the uncertainty. But such were the demands of activists, agencies and the political class, uncertainty was not on the menu.

This was why the first Climategate caused such repercussions. The revelations came as little surprise to those few who follow state of temperature reconstructions, but they rocked supporters who had put their trust in climate scientists. Clive Crook, a believer in the manmade global warming hypothesis and supporter of carbon reduction measures, expressed it like this:

“The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

Victor Davis Hanson on Higher Education.

Things that can't go on, don't go on.

By 2011 we all know that faculties are overwhelmingly liberal. That in and of itself would not be so alarming if they were not activist as well. By that I mean academics are not just interested in identifying supposed past American sins, but also in turning disinterested instruction into political advocacy, especially along race, class, and gender lines. Rosie the Riveter, the Japanese internment, and Hiroshima all deserve study, but they are not the sum total of World War II. Today’s average undergraduate may know that African-Americans were not integrated into American units during World War II, but they have no clue what the Battle of the Bulge, a B-29, or Iwo Jima were. They may insist that global warming is real and man-caused, but would have trouble explaining what exactly carbon is.

And:

As the economy cooled, cash-strapped parents increasingly had little money to ease the mounting burdens. What was once a rare $10,000 student loan became a commonplace $50,000 and more in debt. Living at home until one’s late twenties is in part explicable to the mounting cost of college and the accompanying dismal job market — and the admission that many college degrees are no proof of reading, writing, or thinking skills. (Note as well that the themes and ethos of the university were not “life is short, get on with it”, but rather population control, abortion, careerism, metrosexism, etc. that contributed to the notion that one’s 20s and even 30s were for fun and exploring alternatives, but most certainly not to marry, have children, get a job, buy a house, and run the rat race.)


I noticed about 1990 that some students in my classes at CSU were both clearly illiterate and yet beneficiaries of lots of federal cash, loans, and university support to ensure their graduation. And when one had to flunk them, an entire apparatus was in place at the university to see that they in fact did not flunk. Just as coaches steered jocks to the right courses, so too counselors did the same with those poorly prepared but on fat federal grants and loans. By the millennium, faculty were conscious that the university was a sort of farm and the students the paying crop that had to be cultivated if it were to make it all the way to harvest and sale — and thus pay for the farmers’ livelihood.

How could a Ponzi scheme of such magnitude go on this long?

Lots of reasons. The university was deeply embedded with a faux-morality and a supposed disdain for lucre. “College” or “university” was sort of like “green” — an ethical veneer for almost anything imaginable without audit or examination (Whether a Joe Paterno-like exemption or something akin to Climategate or the local CSU campus where the student body president recently boasted that he was an illegal alien and dared authorities to act — to near unanimous support from the university.) Since World War II, a college degree was rightly seen as the key to middle class upward mobility. That belief was enshrined, and so we forgot to ask whether everyone was suited for college, or whether the college educated per se were always more important to the economy than the self-, union-, or trade-schooled welder, concrete finisher, or electrician.

10 Untranslatable Relationship Words.

We should add these to the English language:

Saudade (Portuguese): The feeling of longing for someone that you love and is lost. Another linguist describes it as a "vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist."

It’s interesting that saudade accommodates in one word the haunting desire for a lost love, or for an imaginary, impossible, never-to-be-experienced love. Whether the object has been lost or will never exist, it feels the same to the seeker, and leaves her in the same place: She has a desire with no future. Saudade doesn’t distinguish between a ghost, and a fantasy. Nor do our broken hearts, much of the time.

Ilunga (Bantu): A person who is willing to forgive abuse the first time; tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.

Apparently, in 2004, this word won the award as the world’s most difficult to translate. Although at first, I thought it did have a clear phrase equivalent in English: It’s the “three strikes and you’re out” policy. But ilunga conveys a subtler concept, because the feelings are different with each “strike.” The word elegantly conveys the progression toward intolerance, and the different shades of emotion that we feel at each stop along the way.

Ilunga captures what I’ve described as the shade of gray complexity in marriages—Not abusive marriages, but marriages that involve infidelity, for example. We’ve got tolerance, within reason, and we’ve got gradations of tolerance, and for different reasons. And then, we have our limit. The English language to describe this state of limits and tolerance flattens out the complexity into black and white, or binary code. You put up with it, or you don’t. You “stick it out,” or not.

Retrouvailles (French): The happiness of meeting again after a long time.

This is such a basic concept, and so familiar to the growing ranks of commuter relationships, or to a relationship of lovers, who see each other only periodically for intense bursts of pleasure. I’m surprised we don’t have any equivalent word for this subset of relationship bliss. It’s a handy one for modern life.

Amazon Review...

So, you're saying that everything in the Emerald City of Oz is green because of these glasses?

A review of Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

This is the second volume in my personal search to get some purchase on the idea of "private interpretation." After a surprising experience on an internet Christian apologist forum where I was roundly condemned for asserting that reading St. Augustine's "On the Trinity" might be useful for thinking about Christian doctrines - because, after all, as my modern interlocutors explained, they had more information than was available to St. Augustine and had at least as much access to the Holy Spirit - I decided to look at this idea of "private interpretation" in order to learn and understand what led these people with an obvious commitment to the intellect to ridicule the idea that they might be wrong and St. Augustine might be right with respect to the interpretation of the Bible.

I started with Alister McGrath's Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution--A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First. McGrath promised that his thesis would be that "private interpretation" was the dangerous idea behind Christianity. I was therefore expecting a discussion of private interpretation and some analysis about how it worked in practice. While I read a lot of heart-warming slogans about the "right of every Christian to read scripture for himself," I also so a lot of instances where various Protestant denominations did everything they could to channel their adherents' reading of scripture into what the denomination considered proper and orthodox. What was strange to me was that McGrath did not discuss, or even seem to notice, the disconnect between his slogans and the actual practice demonstrated in history.

Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture offers an explanation for that disconnect, and, it seems, the explanation is sociological and not intellectual, which is why McGrath and others don't seem to see disconnect. They get up close to the point where theory starts to transition into practice, and, then, the explanation slides off to more theory.

Smith's target is limited to what he calls "biblicism." "Biblicism" is defined by Smith as "biblicism" I mean a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability." This is the view that informs most, or much, of modern American evangelicalism, and explains how Christian bookstores like Bereans can have stacks of books promising the "Biblical approach" to weight-loss, dating, business management, raising children, etc. It is also the reason that many Evangelicals talk about connecting a verse of the Bible to a problem they are facing as if the Bible were a guidebook to modern life written in language accessible to everyone.

Smith points out that this approach misconstrues the Bible. The bible was never intended to be a guidebook to living life. Rather it is a collection of books about God, and for Christians, about Christ. Treating the Bible as a guidebook to life deforms the Bible, according to Smith, by shifting the perspective of readers who employ that approach away from Christ to work-a-day trivia of life. Likewise, treating the Bible as if it were always written in plain and accessible language causes further deformations in that the Bible is not always written in plain and accessible language, which results in "biblicists" having to delude themselves through a variety of tools, approaches and tropes into denying something that is plainly true. Smith writes:

"In order not to let these problematic texts endanger their formal theory of the Bible, biblicists tend to respond in three ways. The first is simply to ignore the problematic texts, essentially pretending that they do not exist. The second is to "interpret" the problematic texts as if they say things that they do not in fact say. The third is to develop elaborate contortions of highly unlikely scenarios and explanations--of the sort to which nobody would ever resort in any other part of life--which seem to rescue the texts from the problems."

A result of this approach is a kind of cognitive dissonance where "biblicists" on one level know that there is a problem with what Smith calls "pervasive interpretive pluralism" as part of which "biblicists" know that there are divisions on major issues in practice, but deny that such divisions exist in theory, except, of course, when they don't, as suggested by the recent ejection of Michael Licona from the North American Mission Board because of his "private interpretation" that the apparent resurrection of the dead mentioned in Matthew 27 was a symbolic "illocution" or "perlocution."

Smith offers a solid analysis of the flaws in the "biblicist" project. Smith argues that the Bible was not intended to speak to our mundane lives. Rather it points to the transcendent God. By ignoring that the Bible is about Christ, Evangelicals have moved away from their christocentric commitment. Further, by insisting that the Bible is clear, plain guidebook, Evangelicals have minimized the reality that God is mysterious.

Smith's solution is tentatively sketched, at best. His solution constitutes a call for Evangelicals to return to their christocentric commitment, and to read the Bible as if it were about Christ, rather than about finding the best way to play the stock market or find happiness or have a good dating relationship. In doing this, Evangelicals will have to re-learn how to live with uncertainty. We may not know, now, soon or ever, whether the saints of Matthew 27 really were raised from the dead, or if that event was meant as a symbolic prefiguring of Christ's role as the "first fruit" before the general resurrection. Or in the case of my experience with the Christian apologists, we may not learn definitely whether the epiphanies described in Genesis were Christophanies, or, as St. Augustine tentatively suggested in "On the Trinity," they were, in fact, angelic visitations.

Smith also advocates a willingness on the part of Evangelicals to distinguish between dogma, doctrine and opinions. One effect of the "biblicist" project, according to Smith has been a tendency to make all theological issues carry the same weight. In my interney discussion on the Augustine's opinion that the theophanies of Genesis were actually "opinions," I soon discovered that no one seemed to understand the concept that I was presenting Augustine's opinion as an opinion, notwithstanding the fact that I made that point repeatedly. I see now from Smith's book that this is simply a feature of the "biblicist" mindset.

As a non-evangelical, the most important thing I picked up from Smith seems to be that I shouldn't expect discusions with most Evangelicals with a "biblicist" state of mind about "private interpretation," or whether a given opinion might be held but may be wrong, to bear much fruit. It seems that what separates Evangelicals (with a "biblicist" state of mind) from non-Evangelicals is not intellectual. That which separates us is more an act of the will by which the two groups adhere to what they see as "the good." It also explains why my quest for an explanation of how the theory of private interpretation works in practice may never bear fruit. There is quite simply "no there there."

Amazon Review...

... The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities.

 

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating and fun look at the "Heart of Darkness.", November 20, 2011

I have long kept in my memory statistics such as the fact that the the Thirty Years War (1618 - 1648) managed to kill off 25% of the German population. Or there is my personal favorite - during the War of the Triple Alliance, the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano Lopez improbably and imprudently led Paraguay in to a war against Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, which resulted in the deaths of something like 90% of the mature Paraguayan male population.

These statistics are simply imponderable. What was it like to live after the cataclysm of the Thirty Years War? How did Paraguay manage to continue as a nation after the debacle of the War of the Triple Alliance? How did these "democides" happen?

The Great Big Book of Horrible Things collects and ranks the Thirty Years War (Rank: 17) and the War of the Triple Alliance (Rank: 79) with ninety-eight other mind-boggling instances of man's inhumanity to man, and provides a brief synopsis of their causes, course and results, all done in a breezy and humorous approach to the all-too serious subject matter. This approach is not a flaw of the book. All but five or six of the wars are long-forgotten, and the fact that so many can die for what appear to be transient and ephemeral causes is a cautionary instruction for the modern age. Moreover, the effect that these statistics and the stories behind them have - particularly the ones removed from modernity - have on me is "Gosh!Wow!" as in "Gosh! Wow!" can you believe that Genghis Khan (Rank: 2) managed to kill 40 million human beings with nothing more than muscle powered weapons?!?!?

Each of the entries gets a fairly short write up that provides background, players, setting, course and effects of the particular piece of human tragedy being reviewed. The book covers a period from the Second Persian War (Rank: 96), circa 480 - 479, to the Second Congo War (Rank: 27) that ran from 1998 to 2002. The author Matthew White surveys the entire world, which results in entries from the Goguryeo-Sui Wars (Rank: 67) between Korea and China, crica 598 to 612 A.D., to the Bahmani-Vijayanagara Wather (Rank;70) between Muslims and Hindus, circa 1366, in Indian, to the "Heart of Darkness" which was King Leopold I of Belgium's Congo Free State (Rank:14), circa 1865 - 1908. The result is a book that is easy to dip into to read whatever the reader is interested in, but then pulls the reader into reading "just another" selection, then another selection, as the reader is confronted by well-known and unknown mind-boggling, "Gosh! Wow!" histories of events whose passions have either died completely or are in the process of dying out.

The author has a couple of nice appendices where he crunches some numbers for determining who and what are the greatest killers. Although my senses was that he had a secularist bias, he was encouragingly even-handed in analyzing both the cliche that religion causes war and the contribution that Communism has made to mass-killing in the 20th Century. For my part, I was surprised by the number of Chinese rebellions that were inspired by a form of "Christianity," to wit, two: the Fang La Rebellion (Rank: 37) of 1120 - 1122 was led by "Vegetarian Demon Worshippers," i.e., Manichaeans, and the Taiping Rebellion (Rank: 6) of 1850 - 1864 was led by a person who fancied himself to be the "younger brother of Jesus Christ." Granted that there are a lot of Chinese rebellions that did not need to be ignited by a a Christianity heresy, one has to marvel - Gosh! Wow! - about the fact that any of them - let alone two - were ignited by such an alien influence, and ponder what effect that may have had on the antipathy of Communist China in the 20th Century to Christian missionaries. (Admittedly there are other reasons for Communists to suppress Christianity, but the virtue of a book like this one is that it allows such patters to become apparent because of the breadth of its coverage.)

This is a great book to leave on the night stand or coffee table for those occasions when the reader has a few minutes to get lost in the the great ethnic cleansing of the Sino-Dzungar War (Rank: 67), circa 1755-1757, when China eliminated the Dzungar nation by eliminating something on the order of 600,000 Dzungars in an atrocity that has essentially been forgotten.

Chris "My Legs are Tingling" Matthews reveals his unhappiness with the Prom King President.

Watch this video and note that Matthews is surprised that a person whose career has involved voting present isn't doing anything - including calling Congressmen - as President.

Financial Apocalypse Now - Corzine, Obama, Crony Capitalism and the End of the Markets.

This was posted on Zerohedgefund:

BCM Has Ceased Operations (source)

Posted by Ann Barnhardt - November 17, AD 2011 10:27 AM MST

Dear Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management,

It is with regret and unflinching moral certainty that I announce that Barnhardt Capital Management has ceased operations. After six years of operating as an independent introducing brokerage, and eight years of employment as a broker before that, I found myself, this morning, for the first time since I was 20 years old, watching the futures and options markets open not as a participant, but as a mere spectator.

The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not. And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. Given this sad reality, I could not in good conscience take one more step as a commodity broker, soliciting trades that I knew were unsafe or holding funds that I knew to be in jeopardy.

The futures markets are very highly-leveraged and thus require an exceptionally firm base upon which to function. That base was the sacrosanct segregation of customer funds from clearing firm capital, with additional emergency financial backing provided by the exchanges themselves. Up until a few weeks ago, that base existed, and had worked flawlessly. Firms came and went, with some imploding in spectacular fashion. Whenever a firm failure happened, the customer funds were intact and the exchanges would step in to backstop everything and keep customers 100% liquid – even as their clearing firm collapsed and was quickly replaced by another firm within the system.

Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate. This is unfathomable. The risk exposure precedent that has been set is completely intolerable and has destroyed the entire industry paradigm. No informed person can continue to engage these markets, and no moral person can continue to broker or facilitate customer engagement in what is now a massive game of Russian Roulette.

I have learned over the last week that MF Global is almost certainly the mere tip of the iceberg. There is massive industry-wide exposure to European sovereign junk debt. While other firms may not be as heavily leveraged as Corzine had MFG leveraged, and it is now thought that MFG’s leverage may have been in excess of 100:1, they are still suicidally leveraged and will likely stand massive, unmeetable collateral calls in the coming days and weeks as Europe inevitably collapses. I now suspect that the reason the Chicago Mercantile Exchange did not immediately step in to backstop the MFG implosion was because they knew and know that if they backstopped MFG, they would then be expected to backstop all of the other firms in the system when the failures began to cascade – and there simply isn’t that much money in the entire system. In short, the problem is a SYSTEMIC problem, not merely isolated to one firm.

Perhaps the most ominous dynamic that I have yet heard of in regards to this mess is that of the risk of potential CLAWBACK actions. For those who do not know, “clawback” is the process by which a bankruptcy trustee is legally permitted to re-seize assets that left a bankrupt entity in the time period immediately preceding the entity’s collapse. So, using the MF Global customers as an example, any funds that were withdrawn from MFG accounts in the run-up to the collapse, either because of suspicions the customer may have had about MFG from, say, watching the company’s bond yields rise sharply, or from purely organic day-to-day withdrawls, the bankruptcy trustee COULD initiate action to “clawback” those funds. As a hedge broker, this makes my blood run cold. Generally, as the markets move in favor of a hedge position and equity builds in a client’s account, that excess equity is sent back to the customer who then uses that equity to offset cash market transactions OR to pay down a revolving line of credit. Even the possibility that a customer could be penalized and additionally raped AGAIN via a clawback action after already having their customer funds stolen is simply villainous. While there has been no open indication of clawback actions being initiated by the MF Global trustee, I have been told that it is a possibility.

And so, to the very unpleasant crux of the matter. The futures and options markets are no longer viable. It is my recommendation that ALL customers withdraw from all of the markets as soon as possible so that they have the best chance of protecting themselves and their equity. The system is no longer functioning with integrity and is suicidally risk-laden. The rule of law is non-existent, instead replaced with godless, criminal political cronyism.

Remember, derivatives contracts are NOT NECESSARY in the commodities markets. The cash commodity itself is the underlying reality and is not dependent on the futures or options markets. Many people seem to have gotten that backwards over the past decades. From Abel the animal husbandman up until the year 1964, there were no cattle futures contracts at all, and no options contracts until 1984, and yet the cash cattle markets got along just fine.

Finally, I will not, under any circumstance, consider reforming and re-opening Barnhardt Capital Management, or any other iteration of a brokerage business, until Barack Obama has been removed from office AND the government of the United States has been sufficiently reformed and repopulated so as to engender my total and complete confidence in the government, its adherence to and enforcement of the rule of law, and in its competent and just regulatory oversight of any commodities markets that may reform. So long as the government remains criminal, it would serve no purpose whatsoever to attempt to rebuild the futures industry or my firm, because in a lawless environment, the same thievery and fraud would simply happen again, and the criminals would go unpunished, sheltered by the criminal oligarchy.

To my clients, who literally TO THE MAN agreed with my assessment of the situation, and were relieved to be exiting the markets, and many whom I now suspect stayed in the markets as long as they did only out of personal loyalty to me, I can only say thank you for the honor and pleasure of serving you over these last years, with some of my clients having been with me for over twelve years. I will continue to blog at Barnhardt.biz, which will be subtly re-skinned soon, and will continue my cattle marketing consultation business. I will still be here in the office, answering my phones, with the same phone numbers. Alas, my retirement came a few years earlier than I had anticipated, but there was no possible way to continue given the inevitability of the collapse of the global financial markets, the overthrow of our government, and the resulting collapse in the rule of law.

Doctrine Matters...

...because love is a theological virtue.

Father Barron explains -

A nice summary of the "Four Causes."

At Brutally Honest:

Imagine four sheets of paper. One has been folded into an airplane. One has been shaped into an origami frog. One has been crumpled into a ball, a paper wad. And one sheet is left alone.


All four objects are made of the same stuff but they are different things. Philosophers call that stuff the Material Cause. The last sheet represents that cause; the stuff of each object. It is important how the sheets were made, by whom and why. But for now consider just sheets of paper taking different forms.

Their form makes the objects different. Philosophers call that the Formal Cause. The paper wad represents that cause; a different form than the sheet. I read recently that crumpled paper has deep mystery to science. It cannot be accurately modeled! But for now, it is enough to see that a paper wad is different from a sheet. It has a different form.

An origami frog might be folded by an eight year old, but I couldn't do it. Philosophers call the eight year old the Efficient Cause. Almost anyone can make a paper wad. But it takes skill to make a frog. If you'd never seen a real frog, you might have trouble distinguishing the frog from the wad. But for now, it is important to note that an Efficient Cause must be up to the task. I couldn't do it. I am not an efficient cause of origami though you might be.

The paper airplane was made to fly. Philosophers call that purpose, the Final Cause. If the paper plane doesn't fly or doesn't fly well, we say it isn't well made because it doesn't fulfill its purpose.

My friend says that the universe is merely "atoms and void". We agree on this material cause. We agree on the formal causes, the different forms atoms can take. But I continue to be amazed that anyone, especially Randy, can think that natural laws are an efficient cause for those forms of matter that are alive. Nothing in nature, not even natural selection, has demonstrated the creativity necessary for a DNA molecule, let alone a human brain. Nature by itself is simply not up to the task. Believing life happened naturally seems to take an enormous leap of faith.

But the most troubling aspect of my friend's atheism is the loss of purpose. For Randy, there is no final cause for the universe, no purpose to life except what he gives it. When he is gone, so is the purpose.

How stable is China?

According to this, not very:

China’s economy has a reputation for being strong and prosperous, but according to a well-known Chinese television personality the country’s Gross Domestic Product is going in reverse.


Larry Lang, chair professor of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in a lecture that he didn’t think was being recorded that the Chinese regime is in a serious economic crisis—on the brink of bankruptcy. In his memorable formulation: every province in China is Greece.

The restrictions Lang placed on the Oct. 22 speech in Shenyang City, in northern China’s Liaoning Province, included no audio or video recording, and no media. He can be heard saying that people should not post his speech online, or “everyone will look bad,” in the audio that is now on Youtube.

In the unusual, closed-door lecture, Lang gave a frank analysis of the Chinese economy and the censorship that is placed on intellectuals and public figures. “What I’m about to say is all true. But under this system, we are not allowed to speak the truth,” he said.


Despite Lang’s polished appearance on his high-profile TV shows, he said: “Don’t think that we are living in a peaceful time now. Actually the media cannot report anything at all. Those of us who do TV shows are so miserable and frustrated, because we cannot do any programs. As long as something is related to the government, we cannot report about it.”

He said that the regime doesn’t listen to experts, and that Party officials are insufferably arrogant. “If you don’t agree with him, he thinks you are against him,” he said.

Lang’s assessment that the regime is bankrupt was based on five conjectures.

Firstly, that the regime’s debt sits at about 36 trillion yuan (US$5.68 trillion). This calculation is arrived at by adding up Chinese local government debt (between 16 trillion and 19.5 trillion yuan, or US$2.5 trillion and US$3 trillion), and the debt owed by state-owned enterprises (another 16 trillion, he said). But with interest of two trillion per year, he thinks things will unravel quickly.

Secondly, that the regime’s officially published inflation rate of 6.2 percent is fabricated. The real inflation rate is 16 percent, according to Lang.

Thirdly, that there is serious excess capacity in the economy, and that private consumption is only 30 percent of economic activity. Lang said that beginning this July, the Purchasing Managers Index, a measure of the manufacturing industry, plunged to a new low of 50.7. This is an indication, in his view, that China’s economy is in recession.

Fourthly, that the regime’s officially published GDP of 9 percent is also fabricated. According to Lang’s data, China’s GDP has decreased 10 percent. He said that the bloated figures come from the dramatic increase in infrastructure construction, including real estate development, railways, and highways each year (accounting for up to 70 percent of GDP in 2010).

Fifthly, that taxes are too high. Last year, the taxes on Chinese businesses (including direct and indirect taxes) were at 70 percent of earnings. The individual tax rate sits at 81.6 percent, Lang said.

Once the “economic tsunami” starts, the regime will lose credibility and China will become the poorest country in the world, Lang said.

Get a job, you damn hippy...

...and no you can't maim the "1%" with your home-made fragmentation grenades.


Glenn Reynolds advises:

#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy Portland domestic terrorists arrested with hand grenades. All the media myths about the Tea Party seem to have come true with regard to the Occupy movement, but the press doesn’t seem to care all that much.

Here is the story:

The deputy also found two gas masks, protective eye goggles and a safety helmet. All three men told the deputy that they had spent the night at the Occupy Portland demonstration, and they brought the mortars and safety equipment to the demonstration in preparation of the expected confrontation between police and protesters Sunday morning.


The three had been at the demonstration during the confrontation Sunday morning and had left about an hour before the vehicle was stopped. During that confrontation, a police officer was injured by a firework, but the three men denied being involved in the incident.

When asked about the explosives, the three men told authorities that they knew the canning jar would explode, causing glass shrapnel to fly and possibly cause injury.

So, the "grenades" are home-made, but let's give full credit to the Occupiers desire to maim.

Then if that isn't disturbing enough, there's this from James Taranto:

In covering the Tea Party, of course, the Times emphasized its supposed extremism and violence. Brisbane doesn't even mention these themes in his column on Obamaville, even though there has been a good bit of violence there, whereas Tea Party violence was a figment of left-wing imaginations. That tells you something about the agenda of the Times and other like-minded news outlets.


The media helped create and now helps sustain the Obamaville monster, but that doesn't mean they can control it. In recent days videos have surfaced from Oakland, Calif., and Portland, Ore., showing Obamavillians attacking local news crews attempting to report on the goings-on.

The Portland video is especially creepy. It shows an angry white man--his face obscured part of the time by a pink scarf--shouting obscenities at a newsman, and declaring: "We are the 99%, you're the 1%. . . . We don't want you in our society." The distinction between demonization and dehumanization is a very fine one, and media figures who have encouraged this foul and dangerous movement will have a lot to answer for if it continues to escalate.

President America-is-lazy did go golfing in Hawaii...

...with his long-time friend who was arrested in a prostitution sting.

Answering my question from yesterday.

According to The Hill:

President Obama golfed on Monday with his long-time friend Robert Titcomb, who in May plead no contest to soliciting a prostitute, according to the White House pool report.

The president’s fourball at the Mamala Bay Golf Course includes his long-time friend Robert “Bobby” Titcomb who was arrested and plead no contest in May to soliciting a prostitute, Marvin Nicholson, and White House advance man Pete Selfridge,” the report read.


In April, Titcomb was arrested in Honolulu and charged with a misdemeanor for soliciting a prostitute after he approached an undercover police officer. Titcomb's attorney, William Harrison, said at the time that Titcomb did not fully agree with the facts of the case, but plead no contest because he wanted to take responsibility.

He was fined $500 and the conviction was expunged from his record in October, following six months without further incident.

Obama and Titcomb have been friends since attending the Punahou School together in Honolulu, according to Hawaii News Now. The two are long-time golf partners as well.

If only we worked as hard as our President.

Don't forget - religion poisons everything...

...except when it saves the world from nuclear annihilation.

Ronald Rychlak on how Pope John XXIII prevented World War III:

Three days later, American spy planes discovered that the Cuban and Soviet governments had begun to build bases in Cuba for a number of medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missiles. They would have the ability to strike most of the continental United States. President Kennedy was furious. On October 22, he went on television to explain the situation, and he moved the defense readiness condition to Defcon 2 for only the second time in history.


Kennedy insisted that the missiles had to be removed. When Khrushchev refused, the American president set a blockade around Cuba. Khrushchev, in turn, authorized his Soviet field commanders to launch tactical nuclear weapons if Cuba were invaded by the U.S. As the Russian ships approached, the blockade stood firm and ready, and the world came closer than ever to Armageddon. Millions watched the showdown on television.

Kennedy, the first (and still so far the only) Catholic president, then sent a message to Pope John XXIII. After reading the president’s note, the pope drafted a message, copies of which were delivered to both the American and Soviet embassies. The following day, John read his message on Vatican Radio. It said:

We beg all governments not to remain deaf to this cry of humanity. That they do all that is in their power to save peace. They will thus spare the world from the horrors of a war whose terrifying consequences no one can predict. That they continue discussions, as this loyal and open behaviour has great value as a witness of everyone’s conscience and before history. Promoting, favouring, accepting conversations, at all levels and in any time, is a rule of wisdom and prudence which attracts the blessings of heaven and earth.

The next day, the Pope’s message appeared in newspapers all around the world, including Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist party. The headline in that paper said: “We beg all governments not to remain deaf to this cry of humanity.”

With his plea, Pope John XXIII had given Khrushchev a way out. By withdrawing now, he would be seen as a man of peace, not a coward. Two days later, Khrushchev, an atheist who was in the middle of a propaganda war with the Vatican, agreed to withdraw the missiles. (Kennedy also secretly agreed to withdraw American missiles from Turkey.)

Pope John’s role in the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis is often overlooked, but it was very important. It also helped move the world in a positive direction, consistent with the Second Vatican Council that was then taking place. Soviet and American leaders signed a nuclear test ban on July 25, 1963. President Kennedy called that “the first step down the path of peace.” The two nations also set up a “hot line” for emergency messages between Washington and Moscow.

It was not known by the public at the time, but on September 23, 1962, just a month before he helped pull the world back from the brink of war, an X-ray revealed that Pope John XXIII was suffering from an advanced case of stomach cancer. He knew he was dying. He passed away on June 3, 1963. He was proclaimed blessed on September 3, 2002. The cause of his sainthood is still underway.

How humanity survived the Cold War is mysterious, perhaps even miraculous.

Does he really want to go there?

President Obama reiterates his "Americans have gotten lazy" theme:

President Obama said that the United States has gotten a "little bit lazy" when it comes to bringing in new businesses in to the states. He made the comments at a CEO summit as part of the APEC conference Saturday, when asked by Boeing CEO James McNerney about looking at the world from a Chinese perspective and what they might consider as impediments to investing.


Obama said it's important to remember that the U.S. is still the largest receiver of foreign investment in the world and things like stability, openness and innovative free market culture are attractive. He also said there are a lot of things that make foreign investors see the U.S. as a great opportunity - like stability, openness, our innovative free market culture.

"But we've been a little bit lazy, I think, over the last couple of decades. We've kind of taken for granted -- well, people will want to come here and we aren't out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new business into America, Obama said.

That was in Hawaii.  I wonder if the President went golfing.

And to think that this idiot was third in line from the Presidency...

...of course, look at the bozo who is second in line.

The Washington Examiner observes:

Former House Speaker and current Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., attacked Republicans for their opposition to debt ceiling increases, but defended President Obama for voting against a debt-ceiling increase when he was in the Senate, during an interview with Jon Stewart. Her effort to reconcile the two positions drove The Daily Show host to distraction. You can see the transcript and video below.


Pelosi: "We didn't say, '[Bush] amassed this debt, we're not lifting the debt ceiling,' because we have to honor the full faith and credit of our country. Republicans with this president, and this president only, exacted upon him that $1.2 trillion [spending cut].

JS: "Well, there were -- you know, President Obama himself voted against lifting the debt ceiling [as a Senator]."

Pelosi: "That's okay, you can lift it, but you can't obstruct it."

JS: "No, he voted against lifting it."

Pelosi: "You can vote against it. You can vote against lifting it."

JS: "But he said he voted against lifting it because he knew the other people would lift it."

Pelosi: "That's right. That's right. And I say to my members, 'you can vote anyway you want, but we're not going to obstruct [the debt-ceiling increase].' It's about if you're going to obstruct."

JS: "So its okay to do it for political reasons, but not for principle."

Pelosi: "No, you have to vote what you believe."

JS: "As long as it doesn't actually obstruct it."

Pelosi: "Well, other people who may believe differently can take care of that."

[Editor's note: at this point, Jon Stewart put his hand over his face]

She also points to the crushing need for public financing of campaigns.

Hey... wait a second...didn't her guy Obama reject public financing after pledging to accept public financing?  But it was not a problem then?


The Daily Show provides this clip.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

On Pelosi's claim that Obama created more private sector jobs in his second year than Bush did in his eight years check out this.

Dawkins v Craig.

Andrew Brown from The Guardian:

William Lane Craig was last month's story, but I am still puzzled by one of the attacks on him. Let's suppose for a moment that Richard Dawkins was telling the truth when he said that it was Craig's attitude to genocide which meant he would not debate with him. Let's further move the debate away from the revenge fantasies of the book of Joshua – because I don't believe the stories there and can't see why I should. The world is full of real acts of genocide or ethnic cleansing without worrying about the probably fictional bits of the Old Testament. The question is whether it is morally outrageous to suppose that the innocent victims of such crimes go to heaven.

The attack on Lane Craig does not just maintain that he is wrong to believe in heaven, but that his belief renders him so morally repulsive that no decent person should share a platform or shake hands with him. And I don't see why.

In all the fuss about Craig there are two things mixed up. The first is whether God commands genocide. The second is whether he is able to take innocents to heaven. It is possible, and perhaps necessary, to get morally outraged about the first question. That's the Euthyphro problem. But I think there is a transference of outrage to the second question, too.

The first thing to say is that there is genocide in our world. More generally, innocents suffer, and injustice is rewarded. If God does not exist, he is not to blame for this. If he does exist, he is in some sense responsible, and there is some mechanism, clearly not of this world, by which he can be forgiven. I don't accept that our present state of comfort somehow justifies the sufferings of people who were sacrificed for it. We can't, I think, forgive God or the universe for the horrors of the world that other people suffer. That would be precisely the sin of the Pharisees, or, as Swift put it, "When we are lashed, they kiss the rod, obedient to the will of God."

There are two possibilities. Either the suffering of the innocent is meaningless, and goes unredeemed. Or it is eventually understood – and accepted – by them as meaningful, and so redeemed. It seems obvious that the second of these two possibilities would be better. That, on its own, is not grounds for believing it is true. But it is clearly more desirable.

This is what I've been telling women for years...

...always date nerds.

And yet they still insist on dating men who are good dancers and don't suffer from fits of hysterical blindness in the presence of a "hot" woman.

Being Awkward Makes You Better At Relationships, Says Science:

Happy Opposite Day, everyone. A new study has found that people with no game are actually better at relationships.


The study, which was conducted by the University of California-Berkeley, revealed that people who are more easily embarrassed are more likely to stay in monogamous relationships and are considered to be generally more trustworthy, loyal, relatable and cooperative.

The study makes no claim as to whether or not the Liz Lemons of the world are more likely to find love -- only that once they have it, they're good at hanging on to it.

But wait! Before you go handing out your number to every guy with a trail of toilet paper stuck to his shoe -- there's more. The researchers found that only people with "moderate" embarrassment levels exhibit the favorable qualities. So that girl who can't talk to you without throwing up, isn't necessarily the girl of your dreams.

At least not scientifically speaking.

One sees the stock of Star Trek fans rising once this scientific finding gets better known.

Science news you can use.

Glen Reynolds reports:

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Women Aren’t Having Enough Sex, Says Science. “According to psychiatrist Dr. Naomi Greenblatt with the HealthyWomen organization, ‘hitting the skins’ may be as important as hitting the gym when it comes to preserving one’s youthful looks—and women aren’t doing enough of it.”


You can’t argue with science.

Tribalism poisons everything...

...but the problem is that we are hardwired for tribalism.

Todd Kelley ponders the recurring fact that we have a tendency to take sides even when taking sides means that we line up with those who hurt what we love:

Clearly, this kind of tribalism is destructive. It keeps us from getting to the best solutions for our children, our country and ourselves. Worse, it forces us to become champions of the very things we most despise, things such as child abuse, sexual harassment and crony capitalism. So what, then, is the answer?


There is no easy answer, of course – or if there is I have no idea what it might be. The best I can manage is two very small pieces of advice to people of all political, religious and alma mater stripes.

The first is to always be willing to take a step back and audit your beliefs. When someone you are supporting is being “unfairly crucified” by FOX or the lame stream media, take a step back and ask yourself: If this was happening to the other tribe’s team, how would I be reacting right now? If the honest answer is anything other than “the same,” it might be wise to go back through all of the facts you had previously dismissed to see if perhaps you’ve let yourself miss something. More important, though, is this:

Be an advocate for what your tribe stands for, not an advocate for your tribe.

I simply don’t believe that there aren’t a ton of Republicans out there that are very disturbed by what has transpired with Herman Cain this week. Similarly, I am sure there are more than a few (maybe a large majority?) of Penn State students and alum that know that people have to be held accountable for their school’s horrible scandal. And since it is my understanding that a lot of Rick Perry’s own GOP brethren actually can’t stand the guy, I am very certain that there are a lot of Republicans that pay close attention to his cronyism.

These people need to speak up; not to the world at large, but to the members of their tribe. I’m not a Republican, so I can point to the myriad of things that don’t add up about Cain’s denials all day long and it’s going to fall on deaf ears. The same way, not incidentally, that Democrats shrugged off all evidence of Clinton’s pattern of sexual harassment fifteen years ago. People don’t listen to those outside their tribe when their self-identity is on the line. But they might be open to peeking at reality when it’s being presented by one of their own.

These two bits of advice aren’t much, I’ll be the first to admit. But they’re a start.

It's a good essay.  Read the whole thing.

Fascinating.

Score one for evolutionary theory as scientists discover "fossil genes."

In a sense they really are ghosts, because they contain the remnants of function they once had, and more interestingly, they retain the relative location they still occupy in our contemporary living relatives on the Tree of Life.


Trinity Western University biologist Dennis Venema highlighted this in a paper published last year which, for other reasons, I have been re-reading. As he reviews some key pieces of evidence for common ancestry, he writes:

“Common ancestry also predicts that, beyond human-chimpanzee common ancestry, the common primate ancestor also shares ancestry with other vertebrates in the more distant past. For example, evolutionary theory predicts that humans, like all vertebrates, are descended from egg-laying ancestors. As with all placental mammals, humans do not use egg yolk as a source of nutrition for their embryos. Other vertebrates such as fish and birds do employ egg yolk, as do a small number of extant mammals such as the platypus.

But it turns out, humans still retain the remnants of these yolk-producing genes. A particular protein used as a component in egg-development in egg-laying vertebrates, Venema points out, is produced by a gene called vitellogenin. And recently some researchers decided to find out if humans carry the pseudogene for vitellogenin.

They did this by first locating the functional vitellogenin gene in the chicken genome. They examined all the genes flanking the vitellogenin sequence–and then tracked these same genes in the human genome. According to Venema:

“They found that these genes were present side-by-side and functional in the human genome; then they performed an examination of human sequence between them. As expected, the heavily mutated, pseudogenized sequence of the vitellogenin gene was present in the human genome at this precise location. The human genome thus contains the mutated remains of a gene devoted to egg yolk formation in egg-laying vertebrates at the precise location predicted by shared synteny derived from common ancestry.

This is certainly one of the more extraordinary pieces of evidence for common ancestry as Darwin first proposed it.

It’s one thing to tell your kids or students that we share some obvious gene sequences with animals (like primates) that look a lot like us. They think that’s cool.

It’s another to watch their expressions when you tell them we still carry the remains of genes … for making egg yolk.

Return of the Mega-croc."

Crocodilians may have been top predator in dinsosaur ecology.

To investigate that question, Martin Lockley at the University of Colorado, Denver, and Spencer Lucas of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, turned to one of the most famous fossil phenomena on the planet—the dinosaur freeway that runs through Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas and Oklahoma. This collection of tracks, scattered over several sites of the same age along the coast of an inland sea, is thought to mark an ancient migration route. The traces of more than 1,380 individual animals can be distinguished. Most, but not all, were ornithopods. Some were small carnivorous dinosaurs—the sort that might pick off young stragglers in the way that the crocodilians identified by Ms Drumheller and Mr Boyd did. But there is, Dr Lockley and Dr Lucas realised, something missing from the picture. When they looked for traces of big predatory dinosaurs, they found none.


That is ecologically absurd. Unless, of course, the top predator of the system—the one that could hunt down adult ornithopods—was not a dinosaur at all. And, when Dr Lockley and Dr Lucas re-examined the tracks they found that that was exactly what was going on. Instead of theropod footmarks, they found those of crocodilians. More than a quarter of the places where the dinosaur freeway surfaces have yielded signs of crocs. And they were big: sometimes more than four metres long. That is certainly large enough to take on an adult ornithopod.

Such megacrocs, then, could easily have acted as top predators in this ecosystem. But that does not completely explain the absence of theropod tracks. Modern migrating herbivores fall victim to many sorts of carnivore: big cats, wolves and hyenas, to name but three. The marshy conditions of the dinosaur freeway (the reason its footprints formed, and have survived) may, though, have favoured crocodilians over predators that had evolved on drier land. In that sort of environment even a big theropod would constantly have been looking over its shoulder. Perhaps the real reason why they did not plant their footprints on the dinosaur freeway is that they might have ended up as prey, as well.

Father Barron on McGrath's "Christianity's Dangerous Idea."

And admirable man, but not to be admired for the wrong reason.

William Oddie writes about the passing of a British disk jockey, who apparently epitomized charity:

Until I read it in the Catholic Herald, I have to admit that I didn’t realise that Jimmy Savile was a practising Catholic, who attended Mass several times a week. Neither, or so it seemed, did most of those who wrote his obituaries. Some 0f them mentioned that he had a papal knighthood, possibly a clue (though since Rupert Murdoch also has one, it doesn’t necessarily signify). But they must have known it. I’ve written obituaries for the Times and the Telegraph: you can’t do it without quite a bit of research into a man’s life: his attending daily Mass must at some point have come on to the obituarists’ radar.


They all mentioned his generosity with both money (he gave 90 per cent of his earnings away) and his persistent and energetic doing of good. (It was interesting that no-one ever described him as a do-gooder; his sheer effectiveness made that impossible, somehow.)

And:

As I say, the English quality papers say nothing about Jimmy Savile’s faith either. But they must have known about it. Is it too much to call this a “conspiracy of silence”? It must, at the very least, be a sign of the underlying almost instinctive hostility in England to the notion that anything good could come from a life whose foundation is the Catholic religion. I fear we still have a long way to go. Ah well; A Luta Continua.

Sounds like a person who should be honored and imitated.