Lex Communis

2012-02-01T12:12:00.000-08:00

Deadbeat Moms and other real things that culture tells us don't exist.

Moms can be deadbeat too:

Single dads are sick and tired of being labeled "deadbeats" when it comes to paying child support. And data suggest they have good reason to be upset.

The percentage of "deadbeat" moms is actually higher than that of dads who won't pay, even though mothers are more consistently awarded custody of children by the courts.

Census figures show only 57 percent of moms required to pay child support -- 385,000 women out of a total of 674,000 -- give up some or all of the money they owe. That leaves some 289,000 "deadbeat" mothers out there, a fact that has barely been reported in the media.

That compares with 68 percent of dads who pay up, according to the figures.

And:

The statistics show 4.3 million moms out of 6.3 million who are supposed to receive child support actually get it. That leaves the alarming figure of about 2 million deadbeat dads, putting them more in the media spotlight than deadbeat moms.

But men also still pay much more in child support. The Census Bureau last month also released numbers showing fathers paid an average of $3,000 to custodial moms in 1997. Women paid little over half that. Moms also get about 60 percent of what they are owed, whereas dads only get 48 percent.

Not only are the dads paying up more when they don’t have custody, but when the court does hand the kids over to dads, they work more than moms who have custody.

While 7 percent of custodial moms work more than 44 hours a week, 24.5 percent of single custodial dads work more than 44 hours. And only about half as many custodial dads get government help than moms.

As a full-time custodial father, I have a simple solution to the problem; I don't ask for any child support and I don't get any.

Saves on stress all around.

2012-02-01T08:52:00.000-08:00

How Americans sound to Brits.

Mark Shea intros this clip as follows:

This is pretty clever (though a bit NSFW). The actor (apparently English) capture the rhythm and music of American English while speaking gibberish:

The YouTube site explains:

This is a short film in fake English. It's funny how the accent can replace the words, so that all you hear is the accent. BTW I like American and British accents of all kinds. It's great to have variety!

2012-02-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

Woman marries building, calls it a "gay union"...

...gay community declares that calling a marriage to a building a "gay marriage" is "irresponsible."

It's almost like words are supposed to have meaning or something, and that, like copyrights, words have to be protected or they become completely valueless.

Check out the "gay 'marriage'" supporters' sign with its assertion that "marriage is between 2 'people.'"

Why people?

More importantly, why "2"?

What is there in human experience that comes in two's and is relevant to marriage? Hands? Eyes? Feet? Lungs?

Don't know...it's a complete mystery.

Here's the story:

A Seattle woman recently exchanged one-sided wedding vows with an abandoned warehouse building that is set to be demolished to make way for a new apartment building.

In December, Babylonia Aivaz and 16 friends occupied the warehouse, located on 10th and Union streets, to protest the planned development of an apartment complex on the site.

"Gentrification is happening," Aivaz said. "It's a serious issue that affects poor people and especially people of color and this is just the beginning of the fight."

Calling it a "gay marriage," Aivaz was asked by the attending minister if she would "love and cherish and protect this warehouse."

Aivaz reportedly responded in verse, quoting the Cat Power song "Sea of Love."

"Come with me my love, to the sea, the sea of love. I want to tell you how much I love you."

She then added her own verses:

"Do you remember when we met? I cleaned your rooms and washed your floors, built community, opened some doors. You changed my life. I'll never forget the day we met. I'll cherish your community sprit until the day I die."

After the ceremony, a large banner reading, "I Do" was hung outside the building as the estimated 50 attendees sang, "Lean on Me." Nonetheless, demolition on the building began ahead of schedule, starting last Friday.

Aivaz caused some unintended controversy with her ceremony. A pair of protestors showed up to the event, objecting to her use of the term "gay marriage" because it weakens the fight to legal same-sex marriage in the state.

"With the delicate nature of Washington state and the attempt to legalize gay marriage, I find her saying it's a gay marriage disrespectful," Phoenix Lopez told KOMO.

"Her saying it's a gay marriage sets the community back with Christians and politicians and gives them a chance to say, 'See, we told you, they're going to want to marry everything if we give them the opportunity,'" added fellow protestor Johnny McCollum-Blair. "Having compassion against something you love, I understand, but to call it a gay union is irresponsible."

But, heck, who is to say that they don't love each other, and it's not hurting anyone, so what's the problem?

2012-02-01T07:59:00.000-08:00

If only Los Angeles school teachers could marry...

...if only women could be Los Angeles School teacher.

A veteran L.A. school teacher arrested on 23 counts of molesting children ages six through ten.

The details are disgusting.

The immediate question that comes to mind is, how could this have gone on for so long. One asnwer seems to that the children didn't complain because they thought they were playing a game. That seems possible for the six years old, but a stretch for the 10 year olds.

2012-01-31T15:53:00.000-08:00

Hope and Change as far as the eye can see.

White House Panic: Gruesome 2012 Economic Forecast Could Doom Obama:

The number crunchers at the Congressional Budget Office have been rather busy this week. As interesting as their examination of public vs. private sector compensation may be, today's dreadful report will cast a much darker and longer shadow over the 2012 presidential election landscape. Team Obama will likely put on a brave face and serve up rosier in-house economic figures in the media, but you'd better believe the CBO's latest economic projections are causing a lot of heartburn at the White House. Hideous:

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday predicted the budget deficit will rise to $1.08 trillion in 2012. CBO also projected the jobless rate would rise to 8.9 percent by the end of 2012, and to 9.2 percent in 2013. These are much dimmer forecasts than in CBO's last report in August, when the office projected a $973 billion deficit. The report reflects weaker corporate tax revenue and the extension for two months of the payroll tax holiday.

A rising deficit and unemployment rate would hamper President Obama's reelection effort, which in recent weeks has seemed to be on stronger footing. If the CBO estimate is correct, it would mean that the United States recorded a deficit of more than $1 trillion for every year of Obama’s first term. The deficit was $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010 and $1.3 trillion in 2011. The largest deficit recorded before that was $458 billion in 2008.

CBO had forecast an 8.5 percent unemployment rate for the end of 2012 in its August report. It now expects the jobless rate to be higher, and to still be at 7 percent in 2015. The higher unemployment numbers are due to lower economic growth than previously estimated. Gross domestic product for 2011 is now estimated to have grown 1.6 percent in 2011, down from the 2.3 percent forecast in August. CBO a year ago had predicted 3.1 percent growth for 2011. The outlook for 2012 has also worsened. GDP is forecast to grow only 2 percent this year, compared to a previous estimate of 2.7 percent.

That's one ugly stat piled atop the next. Trillion-plus-dollar deficits in every single year of Obama first (and possibly only) term. Unemployment creeping back north toward nine percent (remember, the White House projected that joblessness would have sunk below six percent by the end of this year, due to their $825 Billion "stimulus"). And worst of all, very sluggish growth -- the engine that has the capacity to make all of these numbers if it weren't gummed up with destructive regulatory and spending policies. The US economy grew at 1.7 percent in 2011, which is roughly half of the final 2010 number. In light of those entrenched struggles, CBO is pegging our growth target at a measly 2.0 percent for 2012. Keep in mind that any happier numbers you coming from the Obama people are likely premised on much more robust growth forecasts. That level of economic expansion has yet to materialize, and the president is only proposing more of the same: Higher spending and raising taxes on job creators. Great. Incidentally, these 2012 debt projections are actually lowball estimates:

The deficit will be much higher if Congress takes several actions that many expect. If the Bush tax rates are extended, for example, the deficit would rise. It will also rise if Congress patches the Alternative Minimum Tax, which lawmakers have routinely done to prevent higher taxes from being imposed on middle class taxpayers. It would also rise if Congress continues to pass the “doc fix” that prevents a cut to Medicare payments to doctors, something that Congress has done on a near annual basis.

Finally, if Congress does not follow through on cuts mandated by the failure of the debt supercommittee, the deficit will grow. Lawmakers are already talking about cancelling scheduled cuts to the Pentagon’s budget. In the “alternative fiscal scenario”where these things happen, the national debt rises to $23 trillion by 2022. Total ten-year deficits amount to $11 trillion compared to $3 trillion in the current law scenario.

Most, if not all, of the Bush tax cuts will be extended -- since all taxpayers benefitted from them (a fact that Democrats often forget to mention). The AMT patch and the increasingly costly "doc fix" will both go through, as they always do. Ironically, the Alternative Minimum Tax correction is an annual must-do for Congress in order to prevent a 1960s-era "Buffett Rule" -- which targeted a tiny handful of rich Americans -- from slamming tens of millions of households this year. In other words, Democrats in Congress are acting to reverse the disastrous, sloppy fallout from the last ill-conceived "fair share" tax while considering a new one.

2012-01-31T07:17:00.000-08:00

Riots in American cities ...

...and it's not news?

Glen Reynolds writes:

#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy support drops more than 20 points in … San Francisco? You can tell that the movement has lost popular support because the press suddenly stopped the breathless coverage. As I predicted, once it became clear the movement was hurting the Democrats, the coverage dried up.

Here is the linked Hot Air piece:

According to this poll, Occupy support in the Bay area would have been 58/34 at one point. Now it’s 35/57, which is a flip of 46 points in the gap. Combining support and opposition numbers, Democrat support for Occupy is now 40/56, and even among self-professed liberals, where 27% have switched to opposition, it’s only 52/35. Among San Francisco adults. Note too that the movement has not gained converts in anything like the numbers they are alienating, which means that the longer they go, the weaker they are getting politically.

In San Francisco. Nancy Pelosi’s home turf. The city that banned Happy Meals because parents were being held hostage by their children. The mind boggles.

The notion of “occupying” vacant buildings for their operations as some form of social justice also doesn’t go over as well as one might expect in the area. Only 21% support the idea, eleven points lower than the movement’s remaining support, while 71% oppose it. Even the youngest demographic, which still has a very narrow plurality supporting the movement (43/41) opposes this idea by a wide majority, 32/59.

But the best is yet to come. No one in this area is ever happy with the police. Eric Burdon once hailed the city in “San Francisco Nights,” praising the Hells Angels while warbling, “Cop’s face is filled with hate; heavens above, he’s on a street called Love.” (Needless to say, the entire song is dreck.) They’re not happy with the police in this instance, though, because the police haven’t been harsh enough with the occupiers. Twenty-eight percent say the police have been too harsh, while 35% say they’ve been “just about right” … and 33% say they need to get harsher.

When the Great Progressive Event has a third of adults in San Francisco looking for a police crackdown, I’d call that nuking the fridge.

If Occupy is alienating San Franciscans, imagine how normal America would feel...if the Occupy riots received actual press coverage?

2012-01-30T22:19:00.000-08:00

Stay classy, leftists.

Glen Reynolds notes:

IF YOU THREW BACON AT MUSLIMS YOU’D BE A RACIST: Occupy Providence Throws Condoms At Catholic School Girls.

More here.

From American Glob:

Occupy Providence Throws Condoms At Catholic School Girls

Because nothing says speaking truth to power like standing up to little girls. Right?

From LifeSiteNews…

PROVIDENCE, RI, January 30, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – Demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street movement threw condoms on Catholic schoolgirls, refused to allow a Catholic priest to give a closing prayer, and shouted down a pro-life speaker at a Rhode Island right to life rally on Thursday, according to its organizer. The event marked the third time protesters associated with the movement have disrupted a pro-life meeting in a week.

About two-dozen members of Occupy Providence hiked from Burnside Park to the 39th Annual Pro-Life State House Rally organized by the Rhode Island State Right to Life Committee on Thursday.

2012-01-30T17:41:00.000-08:00

OWS Riots in Oakland.

The Oakland Police is firing rubber bullets and using tear gas and arresting hundreds of OWS protesters in Oakland, but it isn't a news story.

It's almost as if some corporate power wants to suppress the news in order to protect those evil, plutocratic ~~Republicans~~ Democrats from embarrassment.

Here's some video:

You just know that if this had happened at a Tea Party event it would have been front page news.

2012-01-30T17:34:00.000-08:00

Right idea; wrong remedy.

Michael Coren points out that the French are about to make denial of the Armenian Genocide a criminal offense:

Oh, I just love this. The French intend to make public denial of the Armenian genocide a criminal offence. I don’t agree with this precise approach to the scandal, but I do applaud France for having long defended the Armenian people, and having not allowed the Turkish bullies to promote the vile lie that there was no genocide, and that the Armenians simply died under war conditions. There certainly was an attempted genocide, the Turks certainly did try to wipe out the Armenians, the event certainly did partly inspire Hitler, and for almost a century Turkey has been in organized denial, and various other nations have followed suit. What defies credulity now is that the Turks have accused the French of clamping down on free speech! This from a country that has more journalists in prison than any other on the face of the earth, and that has for generations assassinated writers, politicians, and activists who speak up for the Armenians. There are all sorts of reasons for Paris pursuing this latest project, and it has much to do with foreign policy as well as moral absolutes, but there cannot be a more hypocritical country than Turkey. While invading Kurdistan and killing thousands, they condemn Israel for defending its people. They occupy Cyprus, destroy Christian churches and holy places, kill male and female clergy, arrest military and political opponents on trumped up charges, and now lecture the civilized French on how to behave. Shame on them.

Yes, the Turks are jerks, but to criminalize the denial of a historical opinion is nothing less than Orwellian.

A better answer would be "more speech." If it's such a problem, the French government - or better still, a private foundation - should run commercials on public television educating the French about the Armenian Genocide.

2012-01-30T12:26:00.000-08:00

In Christianity, the opposite of "religion" is not "spirituality"; it is "superstition."

A Facebook post made the following observation:

This was posted today from one of my friends who is a very Emergent Christian. "The most boring and unproductive question a person can ask of a religion is whether or not it's true" - Alain de Botton

It may not be the case that Alain de Botton and the emergent guy are indifferent to the truth. What they may be saying is that "talking about religion" is the problem because simply talking about religion can in no way get us to the truth. Religion is one of those things, according to this view, which is not subject to discussion because it is motstly or entirely subjective - something proven or not proven in the interiority of the human.

Of course, the problem with that perspective is that it makes communication impossible because unless there is something objective about the thing we are discussing, then everyone's separate "interiority" is equally uncommunicable - perhaps even the statement that ""The most boring and unproductive question a person can ask of a religion is whether or not it's true" is itself an incommunicable thought.

Pope John Paul II in Fides et Ratio offered this on the problem of defining the religious as incommunicable:

"Deprived of reason, faith has stressed feeling and experience, and so run the risk of no longer being a universal proposition. It is an illusion to think that faith, tied to weak reasoning, might be more penetrating; on the contrary, faith then runs the grave risk of withering into myth or superstition."

Pope Benedict XVI follows up on the role of reason in Christianity and his tour de force at Regensburg, a part of which is the following:

"The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate."

We are either reasoning creatures or we are not. God has either made reason a touchpoint for everyone or He has not. If either of those two statements are true, then any belief that cannot be proven by contingent, empirical data is mere superstition.

And if that last bit is true, then who cares what Alain de Botton "thinks"?

2012-01-29T14:30:00.001-08:00

The Academic Bubble.

CSUF English Professor Craig Bernthal documents why the academic bubble is about to burst.

2012-01-29T14:17:00.000-08:00

An Inconvenient Truth - there has been no global warming for the last 15 years and...

...it may be getting colder.

According to the Daily Mail:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

2012-01-29T11:18:00.000-08:00

Amazon Review -

"The End of Eternity" by Isaac Asimov.

Please go here and give me a "helpful" vote.

This is my first re-read of Asimov's "End of Eternity" in nearly forty years. It was interesting to see what I misremembered and how my perception of the book may have changed since my first reading in my mid-teens.

****Spoiler Warning****

Andrew Harlan is a "Technician" in "Eternity." "Eternity" is an organization/environment that stands apart and outside of "Time" during all the centuries running from the 27th Century up to the 70,000th Century. Eternity is given to making changes in history in order to cause "reality changes" in a given century. These reality changes are designed to improve the human condition by editing wars, disasters and dysfunctional social customs out of history. Under Asimov's rules, "reality changes" tend to wash out after a few centuries so that a change in one century doesn't really have much effect on a century more than a few centuries "upwhen," i.e., in the future.

Technicians are the personnel in Eternity who actually implement the changes in Time that are determined by "Computers" and "Sociologists" and other "Specialists." Because of their "grim reaper"-like occupation - reality changes cause people to disappear or for personality changes or the elimination of great works of art and scientific progress - Technicians are the scape-goats of Eternity, and are ostracized but feared.

Harlan is, to put it simply, something of a "dick." He's arrogant and prickly and not-likeable. And, yet, he's taken as a protege by the head Computer, Twissel, who is one of the most powerful men in Eternity. One of Harlan's queer interests is his study of the Primitive, i.e., the period before time-travel was invented by a rare genius named Vikkor Mallanson in the 24th Century. Along with other tasks given to him by Harlan is given to him by Twissel, Harlan is told to tutor an odd young man named Cooper in the history and customs of the Primitive eras.

Harlan also meets a woman named Noyes Lambert, who, frankly, seduces him. Harlan flips from being a total misogynist - Eternals are generally celibate, and very few Eternals are women because extracting women from Time is much more disruptive of Reality than extracting men. So, Harlan has all the social graces and emotional maturity of a twelve year old. He falls hard, and starts committing crimes because of his infatuation for Noyes.

There is also the overriding mystery of the "hidden centuries" - an 80,000 century period into which the Eternals can traverse but not enter, but at the end of which, when the Eternals can re-enter time, humanity has gone extinct. There is also the overriding them of the futility of space travel. In fact, the only reality change we observe is when Harlan moves a cup by four feet in 5284th Century and eliminates space travel from the Reality of that era.

Who is Cooper? Why are there the "hidden centuries"? Why the heck does the lovely and uninhibited Noyes seduce the cold-fish and unlikable Harlan?

***End Spoilers ***

Assessment:

Asimov works all of the questions he sets for himself with near mathematical precision. The story moves along, and we do get a resolution of the questions. The story is entertaining.

But...

It may be the pespective change after forty years, but I found that Harlan was a jerk. A point that Asimov was making, of course, was that Harlan was, in fact, a jerk, but I found it harder to engage with the story in my fifties when I didn't like the insufferable Harlan, than in my teens when I was all about the *gosh, wow* storyline. That is certainly not accidental, since, in many ways, Asimov and science fiction of the '50s was about appealing to teenage males.

Another issue that kept recurring to me was "how does Eternity work?" Why don't Eternals run into themselves when they return from their missions? There are apparently many "generations" of Eternals working in their various sections of Eternity - Eternals age and die like Timers - but apparently one generation from a later "time" in "Eternity" does not meet the members of prior generation. How does that work? Asimov simply assumes that this is not a question and moves from there. Fine. He's the author, and there probably is not answer, so he's entitled to his legerdemain. I don't recall being concerned with this forty years ago, but today it kept recurring in my mind.

Another thing is that Harlan's flip from misogynist to infatuated teenager seemed unreal and unappetizing. Again, though, this is classic Asimov and the fact that his strength was ideas and not characters.

On the other hand, I always remembered that "The End of Eternity" was the true prequel to Asimov's Galactic Empire stories. I have always made a note in my mental schema of Asimov's writings that the fundamental choice offered by Asimov was Eternity or Galactic Empire.

That choice is the thought-provoking idea that we expect from Asimov, and it is the idea that give the book its motive power and entertainment value, as well as the fact that this quick read has remained in my memory for four decades.

"The End of Eternity" is a must-read for anyone interested in Asimov or "classic" science fiction. It is worth reading for anyone looking for a plot-driven science fiction book that delivers a single big idea in a quick, entertaining read.

Post-Script:

Something occurred to me after I put this review to bed, and it seemed too interesting not to note somewhere.

On reflection it occurred to me how much Eternity resembles the milieu of Asimov's primary occupation - academia in a university from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Consider, for example, the absence of women from Eternity. Certainly, that would approximate what Asimov saw when he attended department meetings. Likewise, Eternity is broken down into departments and specializations, such as "Sociologist" and "Computer" and "Life Plotter" and "Observer." The rigid limits of these specializations look like university departments.

Then there is Harlan's odd reflection on the role of "Maintenance." Harlan reflects that no one notices Maintenance workers, but without Maintenance workers - who are really not Eternals in some sense - Eternity couldn't last more than a few days. It sounds almost as if Asimov is reflecting on the nameless, forgotten university staff that changed the lighbulbs in his classroom.

And, then, there is the distinction between thinking and doing. Eternity exists to critique what others have done. Eternals review the reality produced by people really doing things in Time. When the Eternal's "criticism" of Reality find reality lacking with respect to the standards set by Eternity, then Eternity changes the reality of Timers without consulting the Timers for their desires. Timers are like students in a classroom who will accept the curriculum provided by their intellectual "professors" in Eternity.

There is also the disdain of the other professional classes for the "men of action" - the Technicians. The Technicians do things - they don't merely critique. They are the professors involved in applying science; they aren't engaged in pure abstract research. I wonder if Asimov exprienced a kind of similar ostracism at the hands of other professors on account of his involvement in writing science fiction.

Finally, Eternity is the antithesis of the Galactic Empire. One thing that a Galactic Empire is essentially is that it is a thing made by "doers" not "critiques." The ascendent elite of a Galactic Empire will be people who do things - make things - conquer - invent - rather than set back and critique others who do those things. Again, I wonder if Asimov's view of Eternity ruling out the Galactic Empire, and vice versa, does't in some way arise from the uneasy sense of academia that there was a world "out there" that viewed academic values with disdain.

I'm not saying that this interpretation is essential to an understanding of "The End of Eternity," but, on reflection, I'm now wondering how much of Asimov's personal experience went into shaping his view of Eternity.

2012-01-27T13:17:00.000-08:00

Uber-cool!

Scale of the universe - from Quantum Foam to the Cosmos.

Via the King of Cool.

2012-01-27T10:21:00.000-08:00

"The Economic Chart that may Doom the Obama Presidency."

According to James Pethoukis and the Wall Street Journal the "Obama 'recovery'" doesn't feature any economic growth.

In his State of the Union response the other night, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels neatly summed up Mitt Romney’s (who has a roughly 90 percent chance of being the GOP nominee according to Intrade) economic case against President Barack Obama: “The president did not cause the economic and fiscal crises that continue in America tonight, but he was elected on a promise to fix them, and he cannot claim that the last three years have made things anything but worse.”

In other words, the Obama Recovery stinks. Even if today’s GDP report—for the fourth quarter of 2011—shows 3 percent growth or better, it would be just the fourth time that has happened since the economy began turning up in June 2009: 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, 3.9 percent in the first quarter of 2010, and 3.8 percent in the second quarter of 2010. But no 3 percent-plus quarters since then.

The first nine quarters of the Reagan Recovery, by contrast, looked like this: 5.1 percent, 9.3 percent, 8.1 percent, 8.5 percent, 8.0 percent, 7.1 percent, 3.9 percent, 3.3 percent, 3.8, percent, 3.4 percent. In fact, the Reagan Boom went from the first quarter of 1983 until the second quarter of 1986 without notching a sub-3 percent GDP quarter.

So, while the Reagan Recovery quickly made up for lost years of growth, not so much for the Obama Recovery, as this chart in today’s Wall Street Journal makes clear:

2012-01-27T08:02:00.000-08:00

China may be heading for economic trouble.

The Telegraph observes:

A quick observation.

I could not help noticing that China’s imports from Japan fell 16.2pc in December. Imports from Taiwan fell 6.2pc.

The Shanghai Container Freight Index fell 1.4pc to a record low of 919.44 in November, after sliding relentlessly for several months. It has picked up slightly since.

The Baltic Dry Index measuring freight rates for ores, grains, and bulk goods, has fallen 44pc over the last year. Kasper Moller from Maersk in Beijing said weak Chinese demand for iron ore was the key culprit.

Cautionary warning. The BDI index also reflects the shipping glut, so it is not a pure indicator.

However, rail, road, river and air freight volume for the whole of China fell to 31780m tons in November (latest data), from 32340m tons in October. Not a big fall, but still negative. (National Bureau of Statistics of China.)

Chinese electricity use was flat in over the Autumn, with a sharp fall in the (year-on-year) growth rates from 8.9pc in September, to 8pc in October, and 7.7pc in December.

Residential investment has been contracting on a monthly basis, and of course property prices are now falling in all but two of China’s 70 largest cities.
So how did China pull off an economic growth rate of 8.9pc in the fourth quarter?

Beats me.

I strongly suspect that the trade and power data reveal the true state of China’s economy.

There clearly was a pick up in early January but I stick to my view that China has inflated its credit bubble beyond the limits of safety – an increase of 100pc of GDP in five years, or twice US credit growth from 2002-2007 – and that Beijing cannot continue to gain much traction with this sort of artificial stimulus.

Indeed, the extra boost to GDP from each extra yuan of credit has collapsed, according to Fitch Ratings.

A final point. There is a widespread misunderstanding that China’s households can easily come to the rescue by cranking up spending because they have the world’s highest savings rate, and consumption is just 36pc of GDP.

Prof Michael Pettis from Beijing University puts that one to rest. The Chinese do not have a much higher personal savings rate than other East Asians. The reason why consumption is so low is that wages are low, the worker share of GDP is low, and the whole economy is massively deformed and tilted towards excess investment.

This is deeply structural. It cannot be changed with a flick of the fingers, and contains the seeds of its own destruction.

2012-01-27T07:22:00.000-08:00

It's either an injustice that cries out to Heaven or the Daily Mail...

... was just looking for another reason to run some "skin pics."

"Mother-of-four, 28, banned from every nightclub in town for being 'too old to wear skimpy outfits'

"With a size six figure and 36DD chest, this petite blonde thought she would have no trouble getting into a nightclub.

But 28-year-old Lisa Woodman has been banned from every hotspot in her home town - after being told she is too old to wear skimpy outfits.

The furious mother-of-four was barred from three venues in Worcester, West Midlands, because of her low-cut tops, short skirts and knee-length boots."

And the ironic thing is that one of the clubs she was banned from is called "Tramps."

2012-01-26T22:23:00.000-08:00

Are you part of the elite or part of the masses?

The Volokh Conspiracy explains the thesis of Charles Murray's new book:

In his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, Charles Murray argues that a new elite class has emerged that is much more ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans than were the elites of earlier generations:

As the new upper class increasingly consists of people who were born into upper-middle-class families and have never lived outside the upper-middle-class bubble, the danger increases that the people who have so much inﬂuence on the course of the nation have little direct experience with the lives of ordinary Americans, and make their judgments about what’s good for other people based on their own highly atypical lives...

Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.

If Murray is right, this kind of elite ignorance is the flip side of the general public’s political ignorance. Public ignorance is dangerous because it reduces the quality of voting decisions; elite ignorance because it reduces the quality of the decisions made by elites once they get into positions of power.

To illustrate his point, Murray includes in the book a 25 question quiz that is intended to test readers’ knowledge and exposure to mainstream non-upper middle class culture (he assumes that most of the readers are members of the upper middle class elite). I managed a middling 37 on his 0–99 point scale.

As Murray recognizes, one can easily quibble about the details of many of the questions. For example, I not only have “attended” a Rotary Club meeting, but actually gave a speech at one when I was 17. Maybe I should get extra credit for the latter. I would also have achieved a higher score if there were more sports-related questions. Other readers will have different complaints. Even so, there is no reasonable version of this test on which I would have come out looking like a Man of the People. More generally, Murray is surely right that there is a culture gap between the new upper middle class and the rest of the public, and that the former is often ignorant about the lives of the latter.

Here is the test.

I scored a 51, which puts me somewhere between first generation middle-class with working class parents and first generation upper-middle-class with middle class parents.

Which is just about right.

Interesting.

2012-01-26T10:29:00.000-08:00

Grace notes on the Titanic.

I missed this story about the Hungarian violinist named Sandor Feher, who showed a rare sense of chivalry during the Costa Concordia fiasco/debacle/disaster:

Like much of the world, I have been riveted by the horrid fate of the Costa Concordia, which ran aground last Friday. It should never have happened, of course, and the investigation into the how and why is likely to be long and painful.

News reports about the first victim identified from the wreckage only adds to the darkness of this event. He was a 38-year-old Hungarian violinist named
Sandor Feher, who worked aboard the ship as a member of the the Bianco Trio.

Witnesses say that Mr. Feher first helped children with their life jackets before returning to his cabin for his violin. It is hard not to think of the Titanic and stories of its musicians.

Here's a nice post on the state of chivalry today.

2012-01-26T10:19:00.001-08:00

John Stewart on the State of the Union Address.

Hmmm...what does it mean when the biggest sycophant ever starts taking shots at Obama?

2012-01-26T10:09:00.000-08:00

Advice after losing a job.

Susannah Breslin reflects:

TIP #3: Do something or die

If you asked me what my biggest mistake was before I lost my job, I’d say it was not doing something when I saw what was coming. After the axe fell, I didn’t do enough quickly enough. This is the type of person I am. Never enough, never enough, never enough, is the refrain in my head.

If you asked me what my smartest decision was after I lost my job, I’d say it was moving. Moving in any way, shape or form. To a new city. Into new roles. Changing my life so what happened before wouldn’t happen again, not in the same way, anyway.

After you lose your job, these are your enemies: pity and paralysis, depression and anxiety, indecision and fear.

After you lose your job, these are your friends: perseverance and resilience, humility and self-examination, defiance and reinvention.

Here’s what I have to say after being downsized one year ago: Thank god.

It allowed me recreate myself, to free myself, to become something way more interesting than what I was.

2012-01-26T09:57:00.000-08:00

Soylent Green is People...

...from the "sins that cry out to Heaven" file.

Pepsi is using aborted fetuses in soda flavoring research:

Senomyx, a California-based biotechnology company that specializes in developing food flavorings, is one such company that uses aborted embryonic cells to create "isolated human taste receptors," which are used in the production of food chemicals. And this company has partnered with several major food manufacturers, including Kraft, PepsiCo, and Nestle

"There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors," Sen. Shortey is quoted as saying by KRMG News Talk Radio. "What I am saying is that if it does happen then we are not going to allow it to manufacture here."

According to Children of God for Life (CGL), a pro-life watchdog group, Senomyx uses HEK 293 to produce its artificial flavor enhancing chemicals. HEK 293 is code for human embryonic kidney cells that are manipulated to produce taste receptors that express a specific protein known as the G protein. But CGL says the company could also use animal, insect, or other more acceptably-derived cells instead, and still procure the same results.

While aborted fetal cells are not necessarily in the final products made by PepsiCo, Kraft, or Nestle, such cells appear to needlessly play a part in the production of artificial flavor chemicals used by these companies. And since there are viable alternatives to this questionable practice, Sen. Shortey, CGL, and many others are calling for its end.

2012-01-25T09:41:00.000-08:00

We are in the best of hands.

This is strange. As in, how does this kind of thing happen?

According to this article, a study that was done for the Department of Education into whether "for profit" universities provided a route to "gainful employment" for minority students "forgot" to include the employment rates of black students:

"The Department of Education has acknowledged using flawed data in a study on the impact of race on student loan repayment rates, having omitted black students from its calculation. The analysis was conducted during the debate over gainful employment regulations, in response to complaints that the rules would hurt colleges that enroll relatively high percentages of minority students.

Department officials disclosed the error in a December court filing, which is part of the ongoing legal challenge to gainful employment by the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the primary for-profit trade group. That lawsuit appears to have led to the mistake’s discovery.

The Obama administration designed the federal rules in an attempt to ensure that most programs at for-profit colleges and certificate and vocational programs at nonprofit institutions prepare students for "gainful employment." For programs to be eligible for federal financial aid, they must adhere to benchmarks related to student loan repayment and debt-to-income ratios.

The original analysis was included in the introduction section of the final rules, which were issued last June. It asserted that the “percentage of the students that are members of a minority group explains 1 percent of the total variance in repayment rates” at for-profit institutions. The low figure, the department concluded at the time, meant the racial composition of students was not a statistically significant contributor to how an institution stacks up on loan repayments. The percentage of lower-income students an institution enrolled was a better measure."

I can understand math errors and leaving out categories that were considered to be insignificant, but when the purpose is to measure the correlation of for profit universities and minority hiring rates, how could anyone leave out the thing that the study was supposed to measure?

At least, it probably didn't cost as much as Solyndra.

2012-01-25T07:02:00.000-08:00

Book Review ...

...The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard's 'Sentences' (Rethinking the Middle Ages) by Philipp W. Rosemann

Please go here and give me a helpful vote.

This is a wonderful book of history. The author Philipp W. Rosemann offers a fascinating examination of Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences and its treatment over four centuries. Rosemann provides a look at a rare slice of medieval life, specifically the role that the Book of Sentences played in the developing universities. Finally, he shares an insight into a feature of human thought, namely its tendency to unfold a text into insights, theories and speculations until it fractures, at which point there is a refolding of the diverse skeins of insights, theories and speculation back into the original text.

Rosemann organizes his book in a century by century form, devoting a chapter to each of the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, with the final chapter on the "Long Fifteenth Century" culminating in Martin Luther's involvement with the Book of Sentences.

The Book of Sentences was written by Peter Lombard, aka "The Master of Sentences" or "The Lombard," in the mid-12th Century as a "study aid" for his students. In the 12th Century, education was moving from the monasteries to the universities. Paris hosted a number of private theology teachers such as Peter Lombard. The Master based his book on the lectures he had been giving to his students for the previous thirty years. The book organized the opinions of religious authorities, such as Augustine and Gregory, on various subjects in a format that covered topics ranging from the Trinity to the sacraments. As the centuries went by this organizational format would persist as the way that systematic theology was structured during the ensuing centuries, even after theologians stopped interacting with the Lombard's actual text.

Lombard's book was an instant hit. Lombard became Bishop of Paris in 1159. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 consecrated the Sentences as supremely orthodox by approving Lombard's understanding of the Trinity. (p. 61.)

The Sentences were used by teachers of theology throughout Catholic Europe. Some universities had regulations requiring that the Sentences be taught. After Lombard, every theologian of note, including Aquinas, Ockham, Scotus and Luther, wrote a commentary on the Sentences.

Although it was a study aid, the early history of the Sentences involved developing study aids to assist in the use of the study aid. This resulted in the production of glosses and abbreviations. The glosses were the lecture notes that were added to the sides of the student's texts. Eventually, these glosses became books in their own right, although they required the text of the Sentences in order to follow the explanations in the glosses. Interestingly, one can see this format in Aquinas' commentaries on Aristotle and the various books of the Bible. Eventually, the gloss commentaries developed into stand-alone texts, beginning the tradition of writing commentaries.

Abbreviations were summaries of the texts. One interesting point made by Roseman is that at the time of the earliest abbreviations, in the 13th Century, the alphabetical order was still new, which resulted in a certain incompetence in creating alphabetical indexes. (p. 89.) Previously, and continuing throughout the 13th Century, the practice had been to arrange references in a "logical or indeed cosmological order," such as starting with God and working down through creation, as the Master had done in his book. (p. 89.) Rosemann makes the priceless observation that the move from the "cosmological" to the alphabetical order constituted a Copernican turn whereby men moved from being readers of signs, whose principle task was to understand the cosmos, to writers of signifiers, whose task was to impose an order on the universe. (p. 90.) Rosemann doesn't explore the issue, but one has to wonder how much of that "Copernican turn" eventually resulted in Nominalism and modernity. It's a topic worth contemplating.

Rosemann does a brilliant job of explaining the "crisis" provoked by the condemnation of various scholastic teachings by Bishop Etienne Tempier, the Bishop of Paris, in 1277. Tempier's condemnation was based less on the fact that anyone was actually teaching heresy, but on his concern that such a heresy might develop. The errors condemned in 1277 seem to be those teachings that sought to put philosophy on a higher plane than theology. The condemnation led directly to Nominalism, according to Rosemann, in that one of the earliest figures in the development of Nominalism - Duns Scotus - was deeply influenced by Henry of Ghent, who had been one of the members of the commission that drew up the list of errors that were condemned in 1277 by the Bishop of Paris. (p. 103.)

Rosemann's follows the development of Nominalism into its ever more abstract mode of thought. Nominalism was inspired by an effort to carve out an area of autonomy for theology by distinguishing between God's inscrutable absolute power - potentia absoluta - and God's power as exercised in a covenantal relationship with creation - potentia ordinate. (p. 137.) In contradistinction to Thomism, Nominalism taught that because all of creation was absolutely contingent on God's exercise of his absolute freedom, there was no "metaphysical structure" that could be traced back to the Creator and thus the created order was "best analyzed at the level of the existing individual." ( p. 138.) Over time, it appears that once God's freedom had been secured, theologians felt "authorized to unleash the tools of liberal arts without restraint." (p. 187.)

A theme that runs through Rosemann's book is the movement from "signs" to signifiers." Rosemann writes, "If there obtains no necessary, metaphysical connection between the Creator and the creation - if the connection is historical, covenantal, and hence contingent - then creation needs to be analyzed in itself, without recourse to a foundation in the meta-realities such as God or universal, abstract natures that sustain it. For this reasons the nominalist project is no longer aimed at understanding the cosmos through the analysis of signs, but rather at understanding the signifiers that we employ in speaking about the world." (p. 188.)

Another theme of Rosemann's book is that the move from signs to signifiers as the basis for thinking about the world was accompanied by a decoupling of theology from piety. As theology moved from sacra pagina - the study of scripture - to scienta divina - the divine science - theology became less and less concerned with lived spirituality, such as moral theology (p. 47; Cf. Servais Pinckaer, Morality: The Catholic View), scripture (p. 76), spirituality (p. 108), and salvation and the nourishing of faith. (p. 128.) By the "long Fifteenth Century," the project of theology was looking for a return to its roots as some theologicans, including the "Ecstatic Doctor" - Denys the Carthusian - sought to restore a concern for the nourishing of faith to theology. Eventually, the separation of theology from spirituality had reached the point where Martin Luther could condemn "Aristotle, the stinking philosopher" (p. 182) and, eventually, after Rosemann's book closes, advocate a wholesale return to sources in a return to the Bible alone.

Rosemann's book is an excellent read. He manages to move the story along by a narrow focus on the Book of Sentences, and, yet, offer a panoramic view of the major shifts in thought and ideology that were associated with the treatment of the Sentences. Rosemann also provides a nice glossary of the scholastic terms of art used in the book.

2012-01-24T13:24:00.000-08:00

Can the Secularists in the Democrat Party tolerate the Religious?

Catholic liberal Democrat Michael Sean Winters announces that the Obama administrations position on tolerating dissent on its health regulations has caused him to stop supporting Obama:

President Barack Obama lost my vote yesterday when he declined to expand the exceedingly narrow conscience exemptions proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again.

I do not come at this issue as a Catholic special pleader, who wants only to protect my own, although it was a little bracing to realize that the president’s decision yesterday essentially told us, as Catholics, that there is no room in this great country of ours for the institutions our Church has built over the years to be Catholic in ways that are important to us. Nor, frankly, do I come at the issue as an anti-contraception zealot: I understand that many people, and good Catholics too, reach different conclusions on the matter although I must say that Humanae Vitae in its entirety reads better, and more presciently, every year.

That last part is interesting. I suspect that there is an humbling moment that comes in the life of every thinking Catholic when he or she realizes "Oh, my word, the Catholic Church knows what it is talking about."

Carl Olson points out that Obama's position could easily have been predicted by anyone who objectively looked at his record.

At the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn notes:

Less predictable—and far more interesting—has been the heat from the Catholic left, including many who have in the past given the president vital cover. In a post for the left-leaning National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters minces few words. Under the headline "J'ACCUSE," he rightly takes the president to the woodshed for the politics of the decision, for the substance, and for how "shamefully" it treats "those Catholics who went out on a limb" for him.

The message Mr. Obama is sending, says Mr. Winters, is "that there is no room in this great country of ours for the institutions our Church has built over the years to be Catholic in ways that are important to us."

Mr. Winters is not alone. The liberal Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop emeritus of Los Angeles, blogged that he "cannot imagine a more direct and frontal attack on freedom of conscience"—and he urged people to fight it. Another liberal favorite, Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Fla., has raised the specter of "civil disobedience" and vowed that he will drop coverage for diocesan workers rather than comply. They are joined in their expressions of discontent by the leaders of Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities, which alone employs 70,000 people.

In the run-up to the ruling, the president of Notre Dame, the Rev. John Jenkins, suggested a modest compromise by which the president could have avoided most of this strife. That would have been by allowing the traditional exemption for religious organizations. That's the same understanding two of the president's own appointees to the Supreme Court just reaffirmed in a 9-0 ruling that recognized a faith-based school's First Amendment right to choose its own ministers without government interference, regardless of antidiscrimination law.

A few years ago Father Jenkins took enormous grief when he invited President Obama to speak at a Notre Dame commencement; now Father Jenkins finds himself publicly disapproving of an "unnecessary government intervention" that puts many organizations such as his in an "untenable position."

Here's just part of what he means by "untenable": Were Notre Dame to drop coverage for its 5,229 employees, the HHS penalty alone would amount to $10 million each year.

The irony, of course, is that the ruling is being imposed by a Catholic Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, working in an administration with a Catholic vice president, Joe Biden. A few years back the voluble Mr. Biden famously threatened to "shove my rosary beads" down the throat of those who dared suggest that his party's positions on social issues put it at odds with people of faith. Does he now mean to include Mr. Winters, Cardinal Mahony and Father Jenkins?

Catholic liberals appreciate that this HHS decision is more than a return to the hostility that sent so many Catholic Democrats fleeing to the Republican Party these past few decades. They understand that if left to stand, this ruling threatens the religious institutions closest to their hearts—those serving Americans in need, such as hospitals, soup kitchens and immigrant services.

Conservatives may enjoy the problems this creates for Mr. Obama this election year. Still, for those who care about issues such as life and marriage and religious liberty that so roil our body politic, we ought to wish Catholic progressives well in their intra-liberal fight. For we shall never arrive at the consensus we hope for if we allow our politics to be divided between a party of faith and a party of animosity to faith.

2012-01-24T13:10:00.001-08:00

Really Cool - Animation showing Capt. Sully's ditching in the Hudson.

What's amazing is how cool Sullenberg was.

The man has the "right stuff."

2012-01-24T12:51:00.000-08:00

Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus - Muslim Version.

The "religion" is Christianity.

This is a very serious presentation of the Muslim view of Christianity and Christ.

It's worth watching, not the least reason for which is that it reminds us why theology and philosophy still matter.

2012-01-24T10:17:00.000-08:00

The Dysfunction of the Academic Class.

This is an interesting reflection on how the narrowing ideological focus of academic specialization in the subject of History, and the concomitant narrowing of the ideological diversity of professional historians, has enervated the ability of history to inform public debate. Here are a some excerpts:

In a ruling likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Montana Supreme Court last month upheld the state constitution's prohibition on corporations directly spending on state campaigns. For those concerned with academic matters, the case is important for reasons quite unrelated to political debates about Citizens United. In a significant case involving history (the Montana court relied heavily upon the scholarship and words of historians to reach its conclusions), all the books cited were more than 35 years old. And that wasn't a coincidence: the kind of U.S. history relevant to influencing legal and public policy debates increasingly has been banished from an academy obsessed with scholarship organized around the race/class/gender trinity.

A quick summary of the decision: the Montana court ruled that "unlike Citizens United, this case concerns Montana law, Montana elections and it arises from Montana history," requiring the justices to examine "the context of the time and place it was enacted, during the early twentieth century." To provide this necessary historical background, the Court repeatedly cited books by historians Helen Fisk Sanders, K. Ross Toole, C. B. Glasscock, Michael Malone, and Richard Roeder. The Court also accepted an affidavit from Harry Fritz, a professor emeritus at the University of Montana and a specialist in Montana history, who affirmed, "What was true a century ago is as true today: distant corporate interests mean that corporate dominated campaigns will only work 'in the essential interest of outsiders with local interests a very secondary consideration.'"

An attorney analyzing the decision, however, probably would have been surprised to see that the works of history upon which the Montana court relied were all published before 1977. She might even have wondered whether the court's reliance on older works suggested that it had ignored newer, perhaps contradictory, publications. But for anyone familiar with how the contemporary academy approaches U.S. history, the court's inability to find recent relevant works could have come as no surprise at all.

And:

One-sided scholarly approaches tend to produce one-sided views on contemporary political and public policy issues. In recent years, controversies in the history departments at Duke and the University of Iowa revealed that neither department had even one registered Republican. Political registration figures are the crudest possible measurement of a faculty's pedagogical breadth, but a partisan ratio of dozens-to-zero raises some troubling questions about the open-mindedness of a department's hiring process. So too did the justifications offered for the imbalance. Iowa's Sarah Hanley rationalized, "I don't think there is a downside [to having a department that, according to a survey done by the local newspaper, had 22 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans]. If it is a downside, then it would be a downside to have states to be so-called blue or so-called red. It would be casting a pall on the democratic system where people are free to choose." The then-chairman of Duke's history department, John Thompson, dismissed findings that his department had 32 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans, on grounds that "the interesting thing about the United States is that the political spectrum is very narrow."

This type of comment is exactly what would be expected in an environment characterized by faculty groupthink--the common assumption that all thinking people chose to be Democrats (full disclosure: I'm a registered and partisan Democrat), the law of group polarization producing extreme arguments on the merits of affiliating with the Democrats.

The increasingly one-sided conception of the profession has appeared most distinctly when national historical organizations have placed their members' partisan interests ahead of a commitment to historical ideals. During the second Bush term, for instance, historians were pressing for increased access to government documents from an administration notoriously indifferent to open government. Any claim that the chief purpose of the request was academic rather than political, however, was undermined in 2007, when the American Historical Association approved a "Resolution on United States Government Practices Inimical to the Values of the Historical Profession." The resolution called on all AHA members "to do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion." That was a perfectly appropriate goal for partisan Democrats. But for historians? And why would any administration want to increase access to government documents for a profession whose major national organization demanded that its members seek to undermine a key foreign policy goal of the President?

Similarly, last year during the William Cronon controversy in Wisconsin, the American Historical Association issued an official statement demanding that the GOP withdraw its open-records request, offering the following reasoning. "The purpose of the state's Open Records Law is to promote informed public conversation. Historians vigorously support the freedom of information act traditions of the United States of which this law is a part. In this case, however, the law has been invoked to do the opposite: to find a pretext for discrediting a scholar who has taken a public position. This inquiry will damage, rather than promote, public conversation." Shutting down any inquiry into Cronon, even if it meant advocating a narrowing of the state's Open Records Law, was a perfectly appropriate goal for partisan Democrats opposed to the Walker administration. But for historians?

There are few areas in which the groupthink academy has had a more disastrous impact than the study of U.S. history. One-sidedness has its costs, however, in terms of influence outside the Ivory Tower. Courts or politicians who rely on the opinions of professors who now qualify as "mainstream" U.S. historians do so at their own peril.

2012-01-23T17:07:00.000-08:00

Paradigm Shifts and Big Bang Deniers.

This is a statement from various scientists seeking to have a re-allocation of resources into an investigation of the validity of the presuppositions of the Big Bang theory, rather than spending all money on research that assumes that theory. According the statement sponsors, all is not serene in science-land:

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory's explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.

What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.

Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do.

Interesting.

2012-01-23T07:20:00.000-08:00

Priest Rap.

I thought the production value and the rhyme scheme on this response to the "Love Jesus/Hate Religion" video.

The reason apparently is that the priest is, in fact, a rapper. Here's the backstory.

From the article:

Evansville's "Fr. Pontifex" Replies to YouTube Video

Before the Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus video went viral last week, an Evansville pastor saw it and knew he had to respond.

Known as "Fr. Pontifex" to his music fans, Fr. Claude "Dusty" Burns has a passion for hip-hop music and street poetry that are only matched by his passion for Christ and the Church. When the video, which soon racked up more than 15 million views, came out last Monday, Fr. Burns saw at once that its professional production quality and heart-felt emotions would make a strong impression.

"It only had about 70,000 views then," he says, "but right away I wanted to do a poetic response and I started writing. The next day I got the call from Rob."

"Rob" is Rob Kaczmark of Spirit Juice Studios (say it fast -- it sounds like "spiritus"), a Chicago design studio devoted to creating contemporary design for Catholic musicians, companies, and organizations.

Rob's response was slower. He saw the video mentioned on several web sites but didn't watch it until it became the number one video on GodTube, a website for Christian videos. "I knew GodTube has a pretty strong Catholic following, and it seemed to be promoting the video," he says. So during a break from a recording session with blogger Sr. Helen Burns, FSP, he turned it on.

"We watched it together, and we were so upset," he says. "There are a lot of anti-Catholic videos out there, but I felt more attacked in this one than I have in ages."

That's an interesting observation, since the original video doesn't mention Catholicism at all. And, yet, I saw more than a few comments - some by Evangelicals - that it was attacking the Catholic Church.

2012-01-21T18:03:00.000-08:00

It is better to be feared than loved.

Glen Reynolds points out:

BECAUSE IT’S ONLY SAFE TO PICK ON CHRISTIANS: University atheist society president forced to resign after cartoon of Muhammad having a drink with Jesus is posted on Facebook.

And the lesson to Christians (and other religions) is that if you want respect, make people physically afraid. But if that’s the incentive system you create — and it is absolutely the one that’s been created — don’t be surprised if people pick up on it. Because the lesson of this decade is that people respond to incentives, even perverse ones.

2012-01-21T18:00:00.000-08:00

Prejudice in America...

...can a Mormon be elected President?

In this day and age, I would like to think that religious prejudice is a long-dead issue, but there has been a lurking concern in my mind about the depth of anti-Mormon prejudice in America. Put aside the Evangelicals, there is a deep animosity against Mormons among secularists and liberals, and, perhaps, moderates. As evidence of that, keep in mind the infamous commercial during the Proposition 8 of a pair of Mormon missionaries busting into a lesbian household to rummage through their things. It was a reprehensible bit of prejudice.

Now, Roger Simon writes this about Romney's loss in South Carolina:

Believe it or not (and I didn’t think it possible), Mormonism was one reason Romney lost South Carolina. Exit polls show that most South Carolina voters wanted a candidate that shared similar religious views. Romney lost big among those voters. Note, I am not describing what ought to be, but rather what the data show is happening.

This does not bode well for Romney’s electability in the fall. Evangelicals are the base of the GOP. If they stay home, Republicans lose, like they did when they nominated the moderate John McCain. But more importantly, Catholics may decide this election in places like Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania. And the Catholic Church makes no secret of its view of Mormonism. An unexcited evangelical base combined with skeptical moderate Catholic voters undermines Romney’s chief campaign message of the last month — “most likely to beat Obama.” It could be a prescription for a November defeat.

Romney will spin that Florida is his firewall because he has an organization there. But he also had one in South Carolina. Tonight was a game changer.

One other thing. Romney annoyed people in South Carolina. His robo calls, from the vaunted “organization,” annoyed voters to no end. I watched someone get 5 calls in one night, many from Chris Christie. Another person is getting them in Germany in the middle of the night on her cell phone. Sometimes organization and money backfires.

Exit polls are exist polls, and if that's what they show, that's what they show.

As for Simon's point about "And the Catholic Church makes no secret of its view of Mormonism," I have to say "huh?"

Is he insinuating that there is some deep well-spring of prejudice against Mormons among Catholics. That seems to be an incredible statement. Among Catholics, there is the sense that Mormons are a kind of Protestant sect, more extreme than most, but no more extreme than many Protestant sects, including the Quakers, Christian Scientists, or any of the other strange little sects that make up Protestantism.

Certainly, the Catholic Church makes no secret of its totally accurate view that Mormon baptism doesn't qualify as baptism in the biblical sense in light of the different meaning that Mormonism attaches to the idea of the Trinity, but that level of theological nuance is sadly lost on most Catholics and other Christians.

Also, where does Simon get the data to extract this insight? Only 10% of South Carolinians are Catholic. Do we have any idea of how this scant minority of Catholics among South Carolina's Republican voters felt about Romney?

Perhaps the accurate point that we can take from Simon is that it may not take much to "poison the well" against
Romney.

2012-01-21T11:54:00.000-08:00

And the argument against Gingrich...

...by John Mark Reynolds:

Gingrich admits that for decades he was a roué and a hypocrite and demands the White House as his penance. That seems a bit much. He calls himself a man of “grandiose ideas” and such men are apt to stumble again near power. Those who love him should keep him from it, the way an alcoholic is kept from the bottle.

Let us judge Newt Gingrich by his own professed beliefs.

If he is telling the truth, Newt Gingrich is unfit for public office.

Gingrich might, of course, be lying. His performance last night was not comforting. After answering questions about his marriage calmly all day, he raged against them in the debate. Immediately after the debate, he was backslapping with the “disgusting” questioners at CNN.

Advocates of open marriage should be comforted, however. If his second wife is telling the truth, Gingrich was asking for polygamy, not open marriage. He was asking for consent to be a roué, not engaging in social experimentation.

In any case, Gingrich himself rightly said that lying to the public, even about sex, is disqualifying.

If he is lying, Newt Gingrich is unfit for public office.

Newt Gingrich was disciplined and removed from his high office by conservatives for his grandiose personality. He was a political roué, unable to control his political urges or ideas. He was sent packing to the political morgue, but now the roué returns from the morgue to murder marriage.

Only a grandiose man who believes words are more important than deeds could think he would get away with that in the long term. His party is left defending him when it should be examining better people: the political roué does not care.

Perhaps marriage should be redefined or perhaps, as Pope Benedict claims, this will end civilization. In any case, the grandiose man is the last man we need leading the discussion.

Newt Gingrich is unfit for public office.

2012-01-21T11:24:00.000-08:00

Paranoid, yes, certainly...

...but maybe paranoia is the only sane policy to adopt.

Powerline points out the following:

A few years ago, as part of its strategy of facilitating voter fraud as a means of winning close elections, the Democratic Party undertook a campaign to secure as many Secretary of State offices in swing states as possible. From those perches, the Democrats would be in a position to oversee elections and enforce (or decline to enforce) election laws. That strategy has been quite successful, but the Democrats suffered a setback in Iowa in 2010 when conservative Republican Matt Schultz won an upset victory in the Secretary of State race. Since then, Iowa Democrats have targeted Schultz.

That targeting has taken a sinister turn–a criminal one, in fact–as the Des Moines Register reports:

A Des Moines man has been arrested after police say he used, or tried to use, the identity of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz in a scheme to falsely implicate Schultz in perceived unethical behavior in office.

Zachary Edwards was arrested Friday and charged with identity theft.

The Iowa Department of Public Safety issued a news release saying Schultz’s office discovered the scheme on June 24, 2011 and notified authorities.

And:

Edwards is a former Obama staffer who directed “new media operations” for Obama in five states during the 2008 primaries. Thereafter, he was Obama’s Director of New Media for the State of Iowa. In the Democratic Party’s lexicon, “new media” apparently includes identity theft.

Edwards now works for LINK Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm with extraordinarily close ties to Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin. Its principal, Jeff Link, has served as Harkin’s campaign manager and chief of staff. Link, too, is a former Obama staffer. The LINK Strategies web site says that Jeff Link “served as a media consultant to the Obama for President Campaign, coordinating branding, all paid media and polling in 25 states, including seven battleground states (VA, NC, FL, CO, NM, NV, MT)….”

That Edwards allegedly tried to steal the Secretary of State’s identity in order to frame Schultz for “unethical behavior in office” is no coincidence. Iowa Democrats, as Kevin Hall of the Iowa Republican points out, have mounted a campaign of false accusations against Schultz:

Since his surprise victory over incumbent Michael Mauro in November 2010, Secretary of State Schultz has been a target of the Iowa Democratic Party. Interestingly, on June 24, the same day as Zach Edwards alleged crime, Under the Golden Dome, a blog connected to Iowa Democrats, launched a three-part series of articles critical of Matt Schultz. They were based on documents obtained through an open records request from “a tipster.” The blog alleged that a batch of emails from Schultz’s office “raise some serious questions about his ability to remain independent and ensure election integrity”.

Just 15 days earlier, on June 9, the Iowa Democratic Party filed an ethics complaint against Schultz, claiming the Secretary of State of used public resources to campaign against presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman. The Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board dismissed the complaint on July 19.

So on its face, Edwards’s identity theft appears to be part of a coordinated effort by the Iowa Democratic Party to bring down the Republican Secretary of State so he can be replaced with a Democrat. We hope that Edwards will get the long jail term that he deserves, but the more important question is, from whom was he taking instructions? Circumstantially, one would guess from his boss, Jeff Link. But if so, who was instructing (and paying?) Link’s firm? The White House? Tom Harkin? Iowa’s Democratic Party?

Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to be plausible.

2012-01-21T11:13:00.000-08:00

The case for Gingrich...

...articulated by Dan Riehl:

For conservatives, I'm a might tired of the weenies who prance around on the Internet as if they're spoiling for a fight, then when someone with a little fight in them comes along, they start sounding like pussified Republicans. Oh, God, no, we can't have that go on!!

One of the Left's big advantages is, they aren't afraid of a little passion in their politics. They're also more willing to take risks. Well, there's a rule of thumb that applies, higher risk is required for higher reward. Look it up in your capitalist manifesto, when you climb down off your high horse and stop defending it, when it wasn't under attack in the first place.

I didn't start out backing Newt Gingrich. Perry was my guy. He's gone and you go to war with the army you've got, or you can sit in your tent and pick your ass, while government continues to grow and we continue the long, slow slide into statism that's been going on for almost a century, now.

It is inconceivable that we will see any serious Right-leaning reform from a guy like Mitt Romney. He may work hard at some things when it suits him, but he has no history of fighting for anything other than perhaps parochial interests when the current is seriously against him. And the current in Washington and the media is most definitely against conservatism.

Romney will make Bush's Compassionate Conservatism look like the real thing. At this point in our nation's history, what in the hell is there worth fighting for in that? We may as well turn out the government approved light bulbs and hand over the keys to an establishment GOP every bit as invested in big government, as are the Democrats. They just like to tinker around the ever expanding edges of it on their own behalf.

Well, I'm not down for that. And most certainly not now. We do not have four or eight years to fritter away on Obama-lite, which is precisely what Romney is. So much so, in fact, he may not be able to win the general as his record indicates there isn't really enough difference to warrant throwing Obama out in the eyes of many voters.

Say what you want about Gingrich, one can look at his record and see someone who actually was once involved in some serious reform of the right kind in Washington. I watched the debate last night and all the others, sorry, but Santorum does not impress in this regard. I'm sure he's a fine man and I have resisted criticizing him, but that dog won't hunt, most especially in any general election. So, get over it.

Conservatives now have but one horse to ride; otherwise, you may as well saddle up with Mitt and head off into the sunset with whatever you think is a genuine form of conservatism. Romney is not going to expend one iota of political capital selling it, or fighting for it, because he doesn't believe in it. He is as elitist and out of touch with the working class that empowers Reagan conservatism as is Obama. And he's damn near as progressive in terms of government being the answer to everything, as long as he's the one who gets to make the decisions. That's not conservativism. It's bullshit.

We're in a fight to save what remains of the vision we have of America as conservatives. Whatever he's done, or not done, we can tell that Gingrich appreciates that particular vision. He is also showing himself to be an effective fighter. However he got there - the people that have voted decided it, not me - that's where he is. And he's demonstrating a willingness to fight for conservatism, but some of you bad-asses are afraid to fight for and with him?

The hell with you, punch your ticket and scurry to the back of the GOP's big government line like the losers that you actually are. I went into 2012 looking for a fight for the right reasons and the right cause - and as it stands today, there's only one guy left standing who looks anything like close to suitable to mix it up on our and conservativism's behalf. And, dammit, I'm going to fight with him, not run away like a coward because I want to look politically correct, or smart.

Yeah! Screw the Statists and their government approved light bulbs!

I'm still (probably) supporting Romney based on my principle that we need an executive with experience, but Riehl makes me wonder whether that isn't just choosing the slower road to serfdom.

2012-01-20T09:06:00.000-08:00

Amazon Review.

A Century of Progress by Fred Saberhagen.

Go here and give me a helpful vote.

As a Saberhagen fan, I wanted to like this novel,but the further I got in the novel, the less I liked it.

The story opens in 1983 with an old man named Alan Norlund contemplating the slow death by cancer of his granddaughter. He has a cryptic conversation with a mysterious woman who vaguely promises that the granddaughter will be cured if he agrees to sign on for a mysterious job with a mysterious organization. After some developments in the grandaughter's cure and relapse when he refuses the offer, he agrees and is - Hey! Presto! - sent back to the Chicago of his youth to post mysterious devices around the Chicago area. The reason for planting the devices is never explained, and it's never explained why he is the necessary man for the job, apart from the fact that he was pre-adolescent in 1933.

The story involves either time-travel or parallel time lines; Saberhagen never explains. Initially, it looks like the story is about time travel because the mysterious organization manages to snatch out of the air a character that Norlund had shoved out of a Flying Fortess back in 1943 in order to demonstrate that Norlund can and will be sent back to the past. On the other hand, there are vague references to timelines and to the emergence of a new timeline. Also, it turns out that the chief aim of the mysterious organization is to kill Adolph Hitler in 1934 during his visit to the Chicago's World Fair, an event that never happened in our history.

In fact, after a hundred pages of planting devices and hanging out in 1933 New York, the whole "mcguffin" of the story turn out to be that the chief aim of the mysterious organization is to kill Hitler in ever timeline it can find. It also turns out that there is a parallel organization headed by the "Lawgiver" which wants to protect Hitler for no explained reason; in fact, the characters in the good mysterious organization point out that they don't know why the other organization wants to save Hitler, except, maybe, to bring him to the "future" to take over their "future" society.

The chief frustration of the book is that nothing is explained. Apparently, Norlund gets briefed about "timelines" because he suddenly gets rejuvenated and starts operating a "time-traveling" or "parallel time traveling" armored personnel carrier, but we don't share in his briefing. Who the mysterious organization is, or what there relationship is to a future society - which looks to be around 2033 - or who is underwriting the, or, even, how many there members of the organization there are - it looks to be a couple of dozen or so - is never explained. Likewise, where the evil mysterious organization comes from or who the "Lawgiver" is - who actually makes a cameo appearance in 1934 - is never explained.

Another frustration is that things happen because they just have to happen for the book. Norlund's friend from 1943 is introduced, inducted into the good mysterious organization, does nothing in particular, and then is summarily dispatched by a stray death ray without ever having done anything. Norlund is rejuvenated by amazing and mysterious medical techniques from 2033. Why? Obviously, so he can be age appropriate for a female character introduced in the middle part of the book. The female character's estranged husband is killed in a plane crash just before the rejuvenated Norlund returns to her time. Why? Obviously, in order to resolve that plot complication, because the husband never plays a role in the book. The Lawgiver travels to 1934. Why? So he can shake Hitler's hand, not that the Hitler whose hand he shakes is his timeline's Hitler, or our timeline's Hitler, but, rather, is just one of many Hitlers in one of many parallel lines, all of who seem to be different people, if the fact our Hitler never traveled to Chicago in 1934 has any significance.

Ultimately, we learn that the mysterious organization was sucessful and that Norlund's granddaughter and her children grew up in a history that never knew Hitler.

Huh?

But weren't we told that this wasn't time travel? Weren't we told that there were parallel timelines? If that was the case, then how did they grow up in a changed history if the point of Norlund's adventure was to "split off" a "new timeline."

Ultimately, this book is a confusing mess.

*Sigh*

I had hoped for better.

2012-01-20T08:18:00.000-08:00

Dear Mainstream Media...

...So, it's ok once again to be concerned about the personal, private, in the bedroom, lives of politicans again?

Because you taught us that that being concerned about that kind of thing was bad, bad, bad when it involved John Edwards and Bill Clinton.

So, I'm confused.

Please explain.

Very Truly Yours,

America

They hypocrisy is so thick you can cut it with a butter knife. Ed Morrisey writes:

If Newt so lacked the "moral character" for the Presidency, why did it take Marianne eight months to tell us? Her relative silence in 2011 gave voters the impression that she had nothing to add to the debate over who should represent the GOP in the presidential race. It's also unfair to her former stepdaughters who have been working tirelessly for their father for the last several weeks to help broaden Newt's appeal, and for Newt's grandchildren who have to hear about this now. It's also a large dollop of hypocrisy from the national news media who ignored reports of an ongoing affair involving John Edwards during the 2008 presidential campaign itself, complete with love child, until the National Enquirer ended up scooping everyone else. Suddenly a 12-year-old affair is prime-time news? It's hard to come to any other conclusion that the party affiliation makes a big difference.

Professor Jacobsen points out the obvious "hackery" of the interview with Gingrich's second wife:

There were only two sensational aspects of Marianne’s statement, neither of which ABC News tried to put in context or challenge.

First, Marianne stated that Newt wanted an “open marriage.” Ross never attempted to clarify whether Newt used that term or whether that was Marianne’s interpretation. While Ross noted Newt’s denial at the debate, he made no mention of the context which would have raised questions as to Marianne’s story.

And:

Second, Marianne stated that Newt asked for a divorce after she had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Again, Ross did nothing to challenge the statement even though James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal reported earlier in the day that Marianne’s account was not consistent with an account she gave to the Associated Press in July 2000:

We would like to raise a note of caution about Marianne Gingrich’s credibility. According to both Esquire in 2010 and ABC in 2012, she, like Mrs. Romney, was diagnosed with MS in 1998. But according to a July 2000 Associated Press dispatch, she had not yet received the diagnosis even then.

On the two key inflammatory statements made against Newt, ABC News presented the statements without challenging his accuser based on readily available public information casting doubt on her version of events.

I'm not supporting Gingrich at this time - based on my belief that we need someone with proven executive experience - but I think Gingrich showed some real leadership ability in his response to the first question in last night's debate in South Carolina:

Also, wouldn't it be nice to have an articulate President.

2012-01-19T11:53:00.000-08:00

Best Priest Rap ever...

...in response to the "I love Jesus, but I hate religion" rap.

Untitled from John Hollowell on Vimeo.

I love the "cue Gregorian chant" bit.

From the Unapologist.

2012-01-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

Like Banquo's Ghost at the Feast, the issue that no one talks about in discussing "homosexual marriage"...

...is whether whether homosexuals really want what marriage means in anything but the title.

The ideal of marriage has traditionally been a life-long, companionate, monogamous relationship oriented toward the generation and rearing of children. Monogamy has always been a sine qua non of the "western way" of marriage, and that seems like a good thing. One reason is that human beings have this habit called "jealousy," where if more than two people are in a relationship, then the goods of the relationship may not be divided equally or equitably, which makes the loser resentful.

The traditional way of dealing with the jealousy problem has been to rule it out from the beginning - i.e., monogamy - or to give the power in the relationship to men and leave women powerless to make good on their resentment, e.g., polygamy.

One of the buried issues in homosexual marriages is whether the Western approach can work in such marriages. There is a long tradition of socio-biological research that asserts that men are not by nature monogamists because the male reproductive strategy enables a single man to father a lot of children and then move on. Women, it seems, are sociobiologically conditioned to monogamy - or at least some form of long-term relationship with someone to help rear the children - because women cannot drop their "eggs" and allow the offspring to fend for themselves. Women require support during pregnancy and for a substantial period of time thereafter.

In the gay subculture, this difference is seen in the large number of partners that homosexuals tend to have. Gays are the ultimate "love and leave them" swingers.

Homosexual marriage runs counter to that ethos. So, it's not surprising that an emerging issue in the gay culture is how to coordinate the idea of monogamy in marriage with the "swinging" ethos of the homosexual culture.

It's also not surprising to find that monogamy loses in this encounter. Read this thoughtful peace in The Advocate - The Gay Male Couples Guide to Non-monogamy. The purpose of the piece is to counsel gay couples to openly discuss the desire for "open marriages" and to be honest with the desire. As with any relationship, it seems that there are winners and losers, as the article acknowledges that one person in the relationship may be hurt by infidelity.

All in all, the article seems like a temperate, judicious discussion of how to do something really ridiculous, like sawing off one's foot. Can you imagine a "woman's magazine" giving this advice?

I can imagine a male-oriented magazine running this kind of article, but my reaction would be "unreal" and "what pigs."

So, here is the thing: if we are redefining marriage, then why can't we redefine what marriage means in terms of fidelity. If the culture accepts "open marriages" as one approach to marriage, then doesn't that require that everyone discuss open marriage as one of the options on the table? Does not discussing that subject open up the possibility for the claim that silence betokens consent? What happens if someone changes thier mind later in the marriage?

And is it worth opening up this can of worms in order to satisfy a couple of hundred men at the expense of the 99.99999999% of women who simply want to assume that marrage means monogamy?

That's not to say that heterosexual males are always sterling examples of monogamy. As the kerfuffle over Newt Gingrich's request to his second wife for an "open marriage" indicates, assuming the claim is true, then Newt is a pig, and probably shouldn't be trusted with such a major responsibility as the Presidency.

But that underscores the point about jealousy and the normative value of monogamy in a marriage. We all instinctively feel that Marianne Gingrich was well within her rights to say "no" and that - assuming that the allegation is true - Newt was a pig. We also feel that Marianne was somehow wronged and that she was justified in defending her marriage, which didn't include sharing Newt with Callista.

2012-01-19T08:14:00.000-08:00

Fun with words. Why do criminal get "sentenced" to prison?...

...why is there a "sentencing" phase in criminal procedures? Why do judges get to hand down lengthy "sentences"?

So, I'm reading "The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard's 'Sentences' (Rethinking the Middle Ages")by Philipp W. Rosemann. It is very interesting work on the effect that Peter Lombard's book, "The Sentences," had on the course of Western Civilization.

The Sentences was the seminal work of theology that started the development of systematic theology. From the time it was written in the mid-12th Century until sometime in the 16th Century, the Sentences was the required text for the study of theology.

The Sentences was a development of a genre called the "sentence compilations." In this genre, the author would reference particular sources from church fathers and other authorities and arrange these citations thematically for contemplation and study.

Why was "The Sentences" called "The Sentences"? My naive assumption was that Peter Lombard had clipped quotations from other sources and "pasted" them into his work. The quotations thus were the "sentences."

But the fact is that there seem to be very few direct quotations in The Sentences. Rather, Lombard's strategy seems to be to distill the essence of the authority and to provide a more accurate citation for the student to find the place in the cited work for himself.

This raises the point that a "sentence" is not simply a unit of grammar that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period. In fact, it may have been the case that when Lombard wrote "The Sentences" this definition of a "sentence" did not exist. Lombard lived during the period when the revolutionary idea of putting spaces between words was invented. Likewise, the convention of an alphabetical order running from "a" to "z" was only invented after Lombard's death; prior to that things were indexed pursuant to some "natural" relationship that existed in the subject.

But "sentences" are also units of meaning, which gives us a clue as to the answer to our original question. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the origin of sentence comes from sentientem, from which we get the idea of "sentient", i.e., thinking, such as when we refer to human beings as "sentient":

sentence late 13c., "doctrine, authoritative teaching," from O.Fr. sentence (12c.), from L. sententia "thought, meaning, judgment, opinion," from sentientem, prp. of sentire "be of opinion, feel, perceive" (see sense). Loss of first -i- in L. by dissimilation. Meaning "punishment imposed by a court" is from c.1300; that of "grammatically complete statement" is attested from mid-15c., from notion of "meaning," then "meaning expressed in words." The verb meaning "to pass judgment" is recorded from c.1400.

So, essentially, a sentence is a unit of expressed meaning or thought, and which includes opinions and judgments. "The Sentences" is a book that compiles not just the expression of the judgments of theological authorities, but distills those judgments into a readily digestible format. The "judgments" or "opinions" are the "sentences."

Likewise, when a judge hands down a "sentence," the judge is expressing his "judgment" as to the penalty the criminal should receive. The judgment - not the time served - is the "sentence." Over time, of course, the penalty was conflated with the idea of the "sentence" and the original meaning was lost.

So, the idea of a "sentence" seems to have gone from a unit of "expressed meaning" to that of being a grammatically complete unit of meaning during the time that Western Civilization became a generally literate culture.

2012-01-18T06:54:00.000-08:00

The great thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that ...

...there is no bad news.

Conor Friedersdorf compiles a list of Obama's accomplishments and asks a pertinent question:

After reading Andrew Sullivan's Newsweek essay about President Obama, his critics, and his re-election bid, I implore him to ponder just one question. How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (13) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

I submit that had Palin or Cheney or Rumsfeld or Rice or Jeb Bush or John Bolton or Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney proposed doing even half of those things in 2008, you'd have declared them unfit for the presidency and expressed alarm at the prospect of America doubling down on the excesses of the post-September 11 era. You'd have championed an alternative candidate who avowed that America doesn't have to choose between our values and our safety.

Yet President Obama has done all of the aforementioned things.

All those things were Very Bad under a Republican administration; under a Democrat administration the Crickets Chirp.

2012-01-17T15:25:00.000-08:00

A mildly heretical thought - America might be a better place if ...

...Ron Paul has influence at the Republican Convention.

According to ABC News:

Rep. Ron Paul says he’s in it to win it and the campaign boasts that it has a comprehensive strategy in place to ensure that happens.

But behind the scenes Campaign Manager Jesse Benton admits to ABC News that the team is plotting a back up strategy in case the congressman doesn’t pull in enough delegates to become the nominee.

If the campaign comes up short at the convention, Benton says the plan is to use all the delegates awarded to Paul as a bargaining chip to force the Republican Party to stick to its limited government platform.

Benton says this could include auditing the Federal Reserve and winding back several parts of the Patriot Act, including roving wire taps which he says were originally written with the intent of expiring.

2012-01-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

Props to the ADL.

Jimmy Akins lauds the Jewish Anti-Defamation League for taking a stance against spitting:

I don’t always see eye-to-eye with Abe Foxman of the Jewish Antidefamation League (ADL), but I want to give him his props on a recent statement issued by the ADL.

According to a press release, issued December 7th,

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has called on the Chief Rabbinate of Israel to publicly denounce the repulsive decades-old practice by ultra-Orthodox Jews of spitting at Christian clergymen they encounter in the street.

“This repulsive practice is a hateful act of persecution against another faith group and a desecration of God’s name according to Jewish law,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “This display of hate and bigotry has no place in Israel and is inimical to Jewish values of treating all people with respect and kindness.”

In a letter to Chief Rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger, ADL urged the rabbinical leaders to meet with Haredi leaders in an effort to end the practice and to join together to educate their community about having respect for coexistence with other faiths.

“The issue makes headlines every few years, and promises are made to combat it, but it continues every day,” said Rabbi Eric J. Greenberg, ADL Director of Interfaith Affairs. “We believe it is time for Israel’s religious leaders to stand up for the Jewish values of treating others with respect and kindness, and to put an end to this ugly phenomenon.”

Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court Judge Dov Pollock recently dismissed the indictment of a Greek Orthodox priest who punched a Haredi yeshiva student in the face after the student spat at him in Jerusalem’s Old City. Judge Pollock noted that this practice has been recurring for years, and that authorities have not been able to identify the perpetrators or to stop these acts.

What makes the ADL statement even more noteworthy is that there has been pushback (of a sort) and the ADL has remained firm. According to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Hebrew, “The Land”),

The Anti-Defamation League has refused to accept the explanation by the Israeli Chief Rabbinate about its efforts to combat the phenomenon of Ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting at Christian clergymen in Jerusalem’s Old City. While the Rabbinate asserts the ADL is “misguided’ in publicly lashing out at the government institution for not doing enough to fight the phenomenon, the ADL is sticking to its assertions.

“We do not believe our statement was ‘misguided’ in the least. On the contrary, we believe the Rabbinate needed a wake-up call on this issue. We believe they have not done enough,” ADL chairman Abraham Foxman told Anglo File this week. “They’ve condemned it before, they’ve issued all of these statements, but nothing has changed.”

Two thoughts:

"Yuck."

And,

"What a strange custom."

2012-01-17T11:25:00.000-08:00

Amazon Review -

Morality: The Catholic View by Servais Pinckaers

Please go here and give me a "helpful" vote.

This is a brief, clear and thoroughly accessible book. Pinckaers exposition of Catholic moral teaching is broken up by a number of tables and charts that expand, illuminate or summarize the points that his points.

Pinckaers divides the work between an historical exegesis and a meditation on the nature of Christian morality.

According to Pinckaers, Catholic moral teaching is not a mere code of prescriptions and prohibitions; Catholic morality is a response, he says, to the aspirations of the human heart for truth and goodness, and seeks to educate men for growth. (p. 1.) Morality today is considered the domain of moral obligations, whereas it was historically viewed as the area in which the question of happiness and perfection were answered. (Id.) Pinckaers points to the Sermon on the Mount as illustrating an exhortation to excellence, rather than a code of conduct. Likewise, Paul exhorted Christians in the second part of Romans to a way of life that would conform to their new life in Christ. Pinckaers calls this kind of moral exhortation "paraclesis" from the Greek work "parakaleo" ("I exhort") from which the term Paraclete, signifying the Holy Spirit, derives. Pinckaers points to the other exhortations as an invitation for Christians to live up to a model of perfect Christian behavior rather than simply following a set of rules.

The theme of exhortation toward virtuous living continued as a feature of Christian moral thinking. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, subordinated moral obligations to the virtues. (p. 32.) However, over time, particular during modernity, the focus of morality became the calculus of obligation. Aquinas' contributions, such as the treatise on happiness, were forgotten. According to Pinckaers: "Because of its focus on obligations, moral theology has detached itself from everything that goes beyond legal imperatives; from the search for perfection, which is henceforth reserved to an elite; from the interior mystical movement of the heart so closely linked to love; and from spirituality in general." (p. 40.) Fortunately, after the Second Vatican Council, the hope is to reclaim the original sense of moral theology as exhortative and to move away from treating morality as merely a set of obligations.

The second part of Pinckaers' book opens with the distinction between "moralities of excellence" and "moralities of obligation." This distinction grows out the difference between the "freedom for excellence" and the "freedom of indifference." "Freedom for excellence" takes the position that there is an objective good that can be discerned through reason and the will, the discernment of which motivates the will to make a choice. The movement of the will toward this objective good is "freedom for excellence" because the will seeks the good, which is its own perfection. The "freedom of indifference" posits that there is no objective good in the world, rather the will simply chooses between things that are indifferent as between themselves. The exercise of the capacity to choose is what is meant by "free choice." Pinckaers lays the divergence of views at the feet of William of Ockham and the Nominalists during the 14th Century, in that it was the Nominalists who made indifferent and arbitrary "choice" the sine qua non by which human actions were understood.

The freedom for excellence necessitates a morality of happiness. Insofar as choice is necessarily directed toward the good, or the perfection of oneself, such a view necessarily and directly takes up the issue of what is good. The freedom of indifference leads to a morality of obligation, says Pinckaers, because insofar as there is no good in nature to be discerned by reason, there is only arbitrary choice by the will, and that choice becomes paramount in the form of "obligation." Nature is thus drained by the proponents of the philosophy of the freedom of indifference of any intrinsic goodness.

Pinckaers also points out an interesting feature of the morality of happiness, namely that "joy" is a virtue in such a system. People who are seeking excellence may not feel particularly "happy" about their pursuit of excellence, but they can feel joy, e.g., an athlete seeking excellence may hurt in training, but there may be joy in being the best, or merely better.

Pinckaers also takes up the theology of the Holy Spirit and its relationship to morality. Aquinas concludes his analysis of law with consideration of the "Evangelical law." In Christian theology, the Holy Spirit lives in the hearts of believers and gives them the supernatural virtues of faith, hope and love. From the consideration of the morality of excellence, we know that love is that which motivates human choice. The Holy Spirit is therefore the Paraclete - the Exhorter - driving believers to become better. Pinckaers returns to a consideration of the Sermon on the Mount by pointing out that the Sermon is not a set of new obligations; rather it is an exhortation to become perfect, an exhortation that can only be accomplished by love and not by a sense of duty.

Pinckaers concludes with an analysis of "Natural Law and Freedom." Natural law, according to Pinckaers, "does not primarily function by constraint but by attraction." (p. 94.) The five inclinations that natural law provides are (1) the natural inclination toward the good; (2) the natural inclination to preserve one's being; (3) the natural inclination to marry; (4) the natural inclination to know the truth; and (5) the natural inclination to life in society.

Pinckaers has many interesting and worthwhile things to say in each area. For example, he points out that the first principle of morality - that good is to be done and evil avoided - is not primarily about obligation, rather it "expresses the attraction of the good, which it extends by enjoining us to search for the true good and avoid the really evil." In other words, the first principle of morality is not the first principle by edict, rather it is the first principle because it is the basis of our very nature, i.e., we love the good and we hate evil.

Love is directly caused by the presence of the good. Something is good insofar as it is loved. Because good things are particularly good when they are loved for themselves, love is a better love when the thing loved is loved for itself. This inclination leads to the love of friendship and benevolence. The object of such love, according to Pinckaers, is another's excellence, their virtue, which then leads directly to morality. Pinckaers writes:

"The inclination toward the good is expressed in the Ten Commandments through the two commandments to love God and neighbor that express the entire law. This inclination lays the foundation for the rights and duties that the other inclinations delineate. In short the inclination toward the good gives each person the right and instills in him the duty to search for the good and reject and combat what is evil. By activating in concrete actions the general desire for justice and friendship, the virtues develop our inclination toward the good. Love of the good, being simultaneously universal and specific, provides charity its natural foundation."

Ultimately, love and exhortation cause moral development.

Pinckaers view of morality makes sense. It is definitely not the moral view of modernity, which seems to think that people will be naturally good, while teaching them that the only good is in their choice itself and, perhaps, in restraining themselves from other people. Morality as it is conceived today certainly does not teach that one kind of life is more excellent, much less better, than another, lest the advocate of such a distinction be accused of engaging in discrimination. Then, when people don't act morally, society responds by attempting to pen up their choices with regulation after regulation.

The modern approach to morality seems to be an exercise in self-contradiction. It may be time to give this ancient moral approach another go.

2012-01-16T10:04:00.000-08:00

If this is true, the attorney responsible should be suspended from practice.

Law firm accused of firing legal secretary for serving on jury.

The California Labor Commissioner is suing a prominent workplace-discrimination law firm in Los Angeles, alleging that it fired an employee after she told the firm that she had been called to serve on a jury.

Filed on Tuesday, the lawsuit alleges that Martin & Martin fired receptionist Marla Osorio on the day that she told the firm that she had been impaneled to serve on a state court jury. The suit alleges that the law firm violated state labor laws prohibiting unlawful retaliation.

Martin & Martin managing partner Areva Martin is a labor and employment plaintiffs' attorney, who has made numerous televison appearances on such shows as Anderson Cooper 360 and The Dr. Phil Show to discuss employment and disability discrimination issues. According to its website, the firm has eight attorneys.

Reached by phone on Thursday, Ms. Martin said that she had not seen the lawsuit and was unable to comment.

According to the complaint, Osorio was summoned for jury duty in April 2006 but was directed by the law firm's human resources manager to try and postpone it. The court rescheduled her service for June, when Osorio was selected as part of a panel and told to return in July. When Osorio explained to the law firm manager that she had to go back in July, she was fired, the commissioner asserts.

Unfortunately, some attorneys - and plaintiffs employment attorneys - think they are exempt from the laws they enforce.

Unfortunately for them, their employees usually know the law from working for them.

2012-01-16T09:44:00.000-08:00

"The strong scent of intellectual dishonesty."

Bill Vallicella asks "Why do some physicists talk nonsense about nothing?"

The cause of the inquiry is Lawrence Krauss's claim to have refuted the metaphysical principle that "out of nothing nothing comes" (ex nihilo nihil fit) by claiming that a specific kind of "vacuum" - i.e., quantum vacuum - is a roiling, frothy nexus of energies out of which things "pop" into existence.

Vallicella writes:

There is no point in quoting any more of this stuff since it is obviously gibberish. What is not obvious, and indeed what is most puzzling, is why anyone who is supposedly intelligent would spout such patent nonsense. Or is he joking? Pulling our leg? Trying to sound 'far out' to sell books? It surely sounds like a weird joke to hear that nothing boils and bubbles and 'morphs' and is unstable with particles popping in and out of existence. If a virtual particle popped out of existence would it be even more nothing than the nothing that it was a part of?

If I tell you that I met nobody on my hike this morning, it would be a bad joke were you to inquire, "And how is Nobody doing these days?" 'Nobody' is not the name of a person or the name of anything else. If you are confused by 'I met nobody on my hike,' then I will translate it for you: 'It is not the case that I met somebody on my hike.' The same goes for 'nothing.' It is not a name for something.

The point, of course, is that nothing is precisely nothing and not a weird something or even a non-weird something. Krauss is not stupid, and he is presumably not joking. So he is using 'nothing' in some special way. He and his colleagues are free to do that. He and they are free to stipulate a new meaning for an old word. But then he is not using it in the sense in which it figures in the old principle, ex nihilo nihil fit, 'out of nothing nothing comes.' Whether true or false, the meaning of the principle is clear: if there were nothing at all, nothing could have come into being. This obviously cannot be refuted by shifting the sense of 'nothing' so that it refers to a bubbling, boiling soup of virtual particles.

The strong scent of intellectual dishonesty is wafting up to my nostrils from this bubbling, boiling cauldron of Unsinn.

If I make a tasty hamburger out of a lump of raw meat, have I made something out of nothing? Sure, in a sense: I have made something tasty out of nothing tasty. In a sense, I have made something out of nothing! But one would have to have hamburger for brains if one that ought that that refuted ex nihilo nihil fit.

"Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur." This is just nonsense. Whatever the laws of physics are, they are not nothing. So if the laws of physics require that something arise from nothing, then the laws of physics require that something arise without there being laws of physics.

Not only is the quoted sentence nonsense, it contradicts the rest of what Krauss says in quotation #2 above. For he says that there is a sense of 'nothing' which implies the absence of physical laws. So we are supposed to accept that physical laws require the emergence of something out of nothing even if there are no physical laws?

So you've got this situation in which nothing at all exists, and then something comes into existence because the physical laws (which don't exist) "require" it. Bullshit! Sophistry for the purpose of exploiting rubes to make a quick pop science buck.

2012-01-15T16:02:00.000-08:00

Prayer before connecting to the Internet.
Source.

OMNIPOTENS aeterne Deus, qui nos secundum imaginem Tuam plasmasti, et omnia bona, vera, pulchra, praesertim in divina persona Unigeniti Filii Tui Domini nostri Iesu Christi, quaerere iussisti, praesta quaesumus ut, per intercessionem Sancti Isidori, Episcopi et Doctoris, in peregrinationibus per interrete factis et manus oculosque ad quae Tibi sunt placita intendamus et omnes quos convenimus cum caritate ac patientia accipiamus.

ALMIGHTY and eternal God, who hast created us in Thy image and bade us to seek after all that is good, true and beautiful, especially in the divine person of Thy only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, grant we beseech Thee that, through the intercession of Saint Isidore, bishop and doctor, during our journeys through the internet, we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.

Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

2012-01-15T08:20:00.000-08:00

Amazon Review - "In the Shadow of the Temple" by Oskar Skarsaune.

Please go here and give me a "helpful" vote.

Oscar Skarsaune's "In the Shadow of the Temple" is an outstanding work that demonstrates how Christianity cannot be understood without understanding the Jewish soil from which Christianity emerged. For example, in Chapter 16 - "Christology in the Making (II): The Incarnate Word" - Skarsaune takes on the popular view that the notion of Jesus as divine was a pagan intrusion into the putatively monotheistic world of Judaism. Skarsaune points out the surprising truth which is that it was the pagans who found the idea of a god really becoming a human being to be disgusting, but, to the contrary, Judaism had a long-established "Wisdom tradition" which personified the divine attribute of God's "wisdom." Consequently, according to Skarsaune, the high Christology of the Incarnation had already been developed in an inchoate state by Jewish sources for the earliest Christians to use in describing the messiah.

Skarsaune intended his book as a text book that would be accessible to the general reader. He divides his work into four sections. The first develops the cultural world of Judaism beginning in the period of the Maccabees in the Second Century BC and continuing through to the Bar Kochba revolt circa 130 AD. The second develops the emergence of Christianity out of Judaism into its historic role as a gentile church. The third looks at the persistence of Jewish ideas, tropes and practices in Christianity during the first centuries. The fourth and shortest section examines the further development of Christianity as the favored religion of the Roman Empire.

The chief virtue of Skarsaune's book is the detail it provides on innumerable subjects. It doesn't advance a single coherent argument - nor is it intended to do so. Instead it makes many arguments and inferences from Skarsaune's assessment of the data. Consequently, this review will dip into a few of the topics that Skarsaune covers.

For example, I found Skausane's description of Jerusalem as a "Temple with a City," rather than being a city with a temple, to be a fascinating and paradigm-shifting way of looking at the culture in which Jesus lived. When that relationship is understood, then the significance of money-changing, temple politics, purity rules, the number of Jewish males engaged in Temple occupations and all those journeys that Jesus made to Jerusalem become more apparent when this relationship - so very different from the church-community relationships of our world is understood.

As a Catholic, I found many of the traditions of my own faith more explicable in light of the Jewish origins of Christianity. Things like a liturgy and a liturgical calendar would have been "common sense" to the earliest Christian-Jewish believers who introduced their faith to gentiles (See p. 125.). Likewise, as Skarsaune points out, Paul's deference to the High Priest, who had a charisma of authority because of his office notwithstanding his personal failings or how he was installed in office has a resonance with the office of the papacy (See p. 99.) Skarsaune also points out that early Christians, such as Justin Martyr, did not repudiate the concept of being under God's law; Justin Martyr in his dialogue with Trypho accepted the notion that there was a moral law written in the hearts of men which continued even when the ritual laws of the Old Covenant had been ended. Other Christians spiritualized the Old Law's ritual elements, but acknowledged their continuing force in a spiritualized form. This is a far cry from a clear dichotomy between "law" and "gospel" that informs the bible reading of many modern Christians.

Likewise, Skarsaune's discussion of the incorporation of Jewish baptismal practices into Christianity tends to show that baptism for Christians was very important. Conversion to Judaism involved a ritual cleaning and a liturgical catechesis whereby the convert rejected the devil in the worship of idols. The ritual cleansing - a baptism - defined the believer's entrance into a new life after having almost literally died with respect to his old life, e.g., in Jewish tradition, the convert no longer had family obligations to his gentile family. (According to Skarsaune, so complete was this new identity that a convert could theoretically marry a member of his former family. (p. 356.)

Interestingly, Skarsaune had previously pointed out the linkage, but also the distinction, between "belief" and "confession." For example, Paul in Romans 10:9 - 11 had written:

"If you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord,"
and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified,
and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved."

Skarsaune observes that "[t]he gospel message about Jesus the Messiah asks for the assent of the person addressed; this assent is made verbal in confessing with one's mouth the belief of one's heart. This may sound very "theological," but it all became very concrete when a person asks for admission to the people of the Messiah through baptism. Then it is necessary to ask the candidate the question do you (really) believe....? And the candidate has to affirm that belief." (p. 312 - 313.)

With that focus, we have to see a particular complimentarity of Romans 10:9 - 11 with I Peter 3:21 that "baptism now saves you." Were Paul and Peter referencing the importance of the ritual cleansing that they learned from Judaism in making a convert a new man? Were they tying the baptismal confession to the formal rejection of Satan and idol-worship that was found in the liturgy of conversion in Judaism? Hence, is Paul's reference to "confess and are saved" in Romans 10:9 - 11 just another way of saying "baptism now saves you," as formulated by 1 Peter 3:21? Based on Skarsaune's descriptions of Jewish practices, it seems that Paul and Peter were talking about the same thing.

In short, understanding the Jewish tradition that informed the first Christians' "concrete" understanding of baptism can make the theology of baptism much more "concrete" for modern Christians.

The resonance between Judaism, early Christianity and Catholicism may make the book challenging for modern Protestants. However, at times, it is also challenging for Catholics. For example, Skarsaune makes an argument that the Christian Church always recognized the distinction between the Jewish canon and the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament. (p. 291.) The deuterocanonical books were those book original written in Greek, canonized by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and rejected as canonical by the Protestant Reformation. Skarsaune argues that the determining factor for canonization of both the Old and New Testaments was timing, i.e., books written prior to the Hellenistic period were "canonical" for the Old Testament in the same way that books written during the Apostolic period were canonical for the New Testament. According to Skarsaune, the learned of the Church always recognized that the deuterocanonical books were problematic in some way, whereas "folk" Christianity accepted the fraudulent dating of the deuterocanonical works and therefore insisted on the inclusion of those works in the Christian canon (p.293.)

This argument seems strained. First, some of the works that were accepted in the canon were clearly not fraudulently dated. Maccabees, for example, never claimed to have been written during Skarsaune's Old Testament canonical period, but the books of Maccabees were accepted as canonical by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Second, Skarsaune points out how important books like Wisdom were to the early Christians in defining a "high Christology," which suggests that theology may have been as important a reason for canonizing the deuterocanonical books as timing. Skarsaune also points out that the chief purpose of canonization for Christians was the same as it had been for Jews - to define the scriptures that could be read during the weekly worship services (p. 294.), which suggests that the Church as a whole had accepted the canonicity of the deuterocanonical books for a long time before the Protestant Reformation.

Another area where I found Skarsaune problematic, but useful, was his description of the evolution of Christian views on the Eucharist. Skarsaune points out that the Eucharistic meal was always defined as a sacrifice, but he argues that it was intended only as a sacrifice of "first fruits," i.e., grain and wine as a sacrifice of thanksgiving (p. 420), but only later on was understood as an atoning sacrifice of Christ's body and blood. (Id.)

This is interesting, and Skarsaune's piecing together of Jewish Passover prayers, and the possible evolution of the Eucharistic prayers in the Didache and Ignatius with the Eucharistic Prayer of Hippolytus is a masterpiece of deduction, but the conclusion is problematic in its "either/or" reasoning. The Eucharist may be both a "sacrifice of thanksgiving" and a "sacrifice of atonement." Christ did say that "this is my body" and "do this in memory of me." In sharing in Christ's body, early believers undoubtedly understood that they were both expressing gratitude and sharing in Christ's atoning sacrifice at Cavalry. In a way, Skarsaune's argument seems to be based on a classic Protestant misconception of the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist, which recognizes the Eucharist as both "first fruits" and Christ's body, blood, soul and divinity.

In fact, Skarsaune's argument about the Eucharist being a thanksgiving sacrifice of "first fruits" made me see the liturgy I've been going to for 50 years in a new light, particularly in the earliest portion of the Liturgy of the Eucharist - the Preparation of the Altar and the Gifts - where the priest and congregation say:

"P: Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.

C: Blessed be God forever.

P: Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.

C: Blessed be God forever."

In other words, as a Catholic, I've been affirming the earliest Christians view of the Eucharist as a "sacrifice of thanksgiving" by offering the "first fruits" for my entire life.

I've probably said that over a thousand times but never understood how deeply this prayer goes into Christian tradition, and likewise into the Judaism out of which Christianity emerged.

2012-01-14T18:14:00.000-08:00

Hope and Change...

...Gas Prices under Obama.

from Directorblue.

"Under my plan of a cap and trade system, [energy prices] would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was... [t]hey will pass that money on to consumers." --Barack Obama, 1 November 2008

Mission accomplished.

H/T Wintery Knight.

2012-01-14T18:05:00.000-08:00

Further evidence suggesting that the high point of human civilization may have been reached in 1977...

...Tuberculosis may be making a come-back.

Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease. Although reports call this latest form a “new entity”, researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem.

The discovery makes India the third country in which a completely drug-resistant form of the disease has emerged, following cases documented in Italy in 2007.

However, data on the disease, dubbed totally drug-resistant tuberculosis (TDR-TB), are sparse, and official accounts may not provide an adequate indication of its prevalence. Giovanni Migliori, director of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases in Tradate, Italy, suggests that TDR-TB is a deadlier iteration of the highly resistant forms of TB that have been increasingly reported over the past decade. “Totally resistant TB is not new at all,” he says.

2012-01-14T17:53:00.000-08:00

Persecution of Christians.

John L. Allen takes on "Five Myths about Anti-Christian Persecution."

Anti-Christian persecution doesn't happen only where Christians are in the minority, it's not always about Islam, it is foreseeable when governments and societies begin ramping up traditional anti-Christian tropes, it stems from non-religious motives, and it is not just a "right-wing" issue.

Thus:

Of the 26 who lost their lives in 2011, only one died in a country where Christians are a minority: Polish Salesian Fr. Marek Rybinski, killed in Tunisia in February. All the rest died in countries where Christians are a majority, including several overwhelmingly Catholic nations such as Colombia, Mexico, Burundi, South Sudan and the Philippines.

Colombia, the sixth-largest Catholic country on the planet, was also the world's most dangerous place to be a Catholic pastoral worker in 2011. Six priests and one layman died, adding to a bloody count of 70 priests, two bishops, eight religious and three seminarians killed in Colombia since 1984.

One of the most harrowing new martyrologies of 2011 came out of Mexico, where 92 percent of the population is Catholic. Mary Elizabeth Macías Castro, a leader in the Scalabrinian Lay Movement and a blogger, was beheaded for exposing the activities of a drug cartel; according to the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists, she was the first journalist in the world killed for use of social media.

Anywhere Christians openly profess their faith, take stands against injustice or put themselves in harm's way on account of the Gospel, they are at risk -- whatever the religious demographics of the place happen to be.

And:

radical Islam is hardly the only source of anti-Christian animus. Christians suffer from a slew of other forces, including:
•Ultra-nationalism (as in Turkey, where extreme nationalists tend to be a greater threat than Islamists)
•Totalitarian states, especially of the Communist variety (China, North Korea)
•Hindu radicalism (Anti-Christian aggression has become routine in some regions of India. This week, Hindu radicals armed with sticks and iron bars attacked 20 Pentecostal Christians in a private home near Bangalore, an assault that left the pastor missing a finger on his left hand. When Christians reported similar assaults two weeks ago, a member of the state's official Commission for Minorities, which is under the control of a nationalist Hindu party, shrugged it off: "If you really knew the teachings of Jesus, Christians should not be complaining," he reportedly said.)
•Buddhist radicalism (as in Sri Lanka, where, contrary to stereotypes of Buddhist tolerance, mobs led by Buddhist monks attacked Christian churches and other targets across the country in 2009)
•Corporate interests (as in Brazil's Amazon region, where Christian activists have been killed for protesting injustices by agri-business conglomerates)
•Organized crime, narco-traffickers, and petty thugs (For instance, the 1993 murder of Mexican Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, shot 14 times at the Guadalajara airport by gunmen linked to a drug cartel, or the assassination in the same year of Italian Fr. Giuseppe Puglisi, a bitter critic of the Sicilian mafia.)

I am not sure that Allen's definition of "anti-Christian" doesn't suffer from "mission creep" where any act of violence is anti-Christian so long as the victim is in the country on a Christian activity, but the article is worth reading.

2012-01-14T17:44:00.000-08:00

The YouTube Rap Debate on ...

...whether religion poisons everything.

The late Christopher Hitchens' poorly written rant "God is not Great: How religion poisons everything" found fertile ground. There is something in the post-modern world that rejects all kinds of authority, except that of the government. Even post-modern, post-evangelical Christians seem to accept Hitchens' premise that "religion poisons everything." Here is a "spoken word" YouTube video that has nearly 10 million views on that subject:

This tendentious, post-modern, knee-jerk video has spun off some terrific responses.

And:

Update - apparently the original poet, Jeff Bethke, regrets his more "over the top' rhymes.

2012-01-14T13:31:00.001-08:00

Hope and Change.

Expect $5 per gallon gas by Memorial Day.

Of course, rising gas prices is part of the Obama plan for conservation.

2012-01-14T11:01:00.001-08:00

Movie Review - "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy."

I saw "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" last night. It was a faithful adaptation of Le Carre's book and a really well-done movie, particularly if you liked the book and its slow and subtle approach to unravelling the mystery.

If you haven't read the book or you don't like "spy procedurals," you probably should give it a miss. As the movie closed and I was basking in the brilliance of the movie, I heard the guy next to me say, "well, there's two hours of my life I'm never going to get back."

2012-01-14T10:32:00.000-08:00

Hope and Change - The Joy of Socialized Medicine.

British woman dies of cervical cancer because at 23 she was younger than the minimum age of 25 for the "smear test."

2012-01-13T16:18:00.000-08:00

An all-too common example of the neck-snapping cognitive dissonance of the liberal mind.

James Taranto observes:

Remember Froma Harrop, the civility scold and Baroness Catherine Ashton look-alike who called Tea Party congressmen "terrorists" and couldn't understand why anyone found this hypocritical? She provided us with lots of material last summer and now Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" has recycled it into comedy gold, somehow persuading her to sit for an interview in which she looks utterly ridiculous. You have to watch it to believe it.

Here it is:

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

2012-01-13T13:26:00.000-08:00

The Blood of Martyrs.

Conversions to Christianity follow Hindu attack on Christians.

2012-01-11T16:40:00.001-08:00

Good times...good times....

The Top 5 Obama "Let them eat cake" moments.

2012-01-11T16:22:00.000-08:00

Animal Rights Activists acknowledge they are not "delusional enough" in arson attack against Harris Ranch.

Animal rights activists commit arson attack against Harris Ranch:

Animal-rights activists are taking responsibility for an arson fire that destroyed 14 cattle trucks at the sprawling Harris Ranch in the San Joaquin Valley off Interstate 5.

The fire broke out at the feed lot truck-storage facility at the ranch about 3:45 a.m. Sunday, said Fresno County sheriff's Deputy Chris Curtice. Firefighters found 14 trucks fully engulfed and extinguished the blaze within 45 minutes, he said.

In an e-mail sent to the media Monday, the North American Animal Liberation Press Office said it had received an anonymous message from someone with specific details about the fire at the Coalinga ranch, one of the largest farming operations in the San Joaquin Valley.

"Containers of accelerant were placed beneath a row of 14 trucks with four digital timers used to light four of the containers and kerosene soaked rope carrying the fire to the other 10," the e-mail said.

"We were extremely pleased to see all 14 trucks 'were a total loss,' " the message said.

"We're not delusional enough to believe that this action will shut down the Harris feeding company, let alone have any effect on factory farming as a whole," the e-mail said. "But we maintain that this type of action still has worth, if not solely for the participant's peace of mind, then to show that despite guards, a constant worker presence and razor wire fence, the enemy is still vulnerable."

They need to keep working on being less delusional; if they thought about it, they would realize that Harris is probably insured.

2012-01-11T16:09:00.000-08:00

"Ha ha Warmist losers. For you the war is over"

Says James Delingpole at the Telegraph:

One of my resolutions this year is to write as little as possible about global warming. Not only will it make my wife much happier but it will also free me up to talk about more important things such as monetary collapse, hyperinflation and the imminent end of Western civilisation. Oh and also there's hardly much need for my input on climate change any more. That's because, basically, my side has won.

2012-01-11T10:12:00.000-08:00

Unanimous Supreme Court Rejects Obama's Argument that Government can Control Appointment of Priests.

From The Anchoress:

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled unanimously in favor of a church’s right to be itself, and its freedom to assign its ministries:

This is an enormous and timely victory for religious freedom:

In a groundbreaking case, the Supreme Court on Wednesday held for the first time that religious employees of a church cannot sue for employment discrimination.

But the court’s unanimous decision in a case from Michigan did not specify the distinction between a secular employee, who can take advantage of the government’s protection from discrimination and retaliation, and a religious employee, who can’t.

It was, nevertheless, the first time the high court has acknowledged the existence of a “ministerial exception” to anti-discrimination laws — a doctrine developed in lower court rulings. This doctrine says the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion shields churches and their operations from the reach of such protective laws when the issue involves employees of these institutions.

At the time the SCOTUS heard the case, it was noted that both Justices Scalia and Kagan had reacted with something like shock at the government’s constitution-shredding argument:

President Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claimed during oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court last week that it can order a church to restore a fired minister to a teaching position.

But that was a claim not even the president’s handpicked appointee, the very liberal Justice Elena Kagan, could accept as she and her colleagues considered Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. [...] The justices then rejected the argument of Leondra Kruger, Obama’s lawyer for the EEOC, who argued that there’s no ministerial exception in the Constitution, only the same rights that secular organizations possess to choose their own affiliations.

At this, Scalia exploded. “That’s extraordinary! There, black on white in the text of the Constitution, are special protections for religion. And you say it makes no difference?”

Kagan agreed with Scalia’s rejection of the argument that the First Amendment doesn’t protect churches from government ordering who they should hire as pastor or priest.

Given reports following the hearing, it’s not really shocking that the SCOTUS came down unanimously against the government’s case. But it’s reassuring, all the same.

Writing the court’s opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “Allowing anti-discrimination lawsuits against religious organizations could end up forcing churches to take religious leaders they no longer want.”

“Such action interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs,” Roberts said. “By imposing an unwanted minister, the state infringes the Free Exercise Clause, which protects a religious group’s right to shape its own faith and mission through its appointments.”

But, Roberts said, since this was the first time the high court has ever considered the “ministerial exception,” it would not set hard and fast rules on who can be considered a religious employee of a religious organization.

“We are reluctant … to adopt a rigid formula for deciding when an employee qualifies as a minister,” he said. “It is enough for us to conclude, in this, our first case involving the ministerial exception, that the exception covers (Cheryl) Perich, given all the circumstances of her employment.”

2012-01-11T09:34:00.000-08:00

Bloodlands.

I've just run across the story of the Eleven Nuns of Nowogrodek.

The Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth arrived in Nowogródek in 1929 at the behest of Bishop Zygmunt Lozinski.[1] The Sisters became an integral part of the life of the town. During the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland, the Sisters invested great effort in preparing for the religious services—for the residents of the town, liturgical prayer became a beacon of hope amid the hopelessness of the occupation.[1]

The Nazi terror in Nowogródek began with the 1942 extermination of the Jews. Of the 20,000 inhabitants of the town before the war, approximately half were Jews. The Germans murdered about 9,500 of the Jews in a series of "actions" and sent the remaining 550 Jews to slave labor camps. This was followed by a surge in Polish arrests, then the slaughter of 60 people, including two priests. This situation was repeated on 18 July 1943, when more than 120 people were arrested and slated for execution.[1]

The Sisters unanimously expressed their desire to offer their lives in sacrifice for the imprisoned.[1] Sister Maria Stella shared the Sisters' decision with their chaplain Father Zienkiewicz and rector, saying, "My God, if sacrifice of life is needed, accept it from us and spare those who have families. We are even praying for this intention."[1] Almost immediately, the plans for the prisoners were changed—they were deported to work camps in Germany, and some of them were even released.[1] When the life of Father Zienkiewicz was threatened, the Sisters renewed their offer, saying, "There is a greater need for a priest on this earth than for us. We pray that God will take us in his place, if sacrifice of life is needed."[1]

Martyrdom

Without warning or provocation, on 31 July 1943, eleven of the sisters were imprisoned, loaded into a van and driven beyond the town limits.[2] The eleven nuns were killed on 1 August 1943 in the woods 5 km (3.1 mi) beyond Nowogródek, and buried in a common grave.[1] After the execution, Sister M. Malgorzata Banas, the community's sole surviving member, located the place of the martyrdom, and remained the guardian of their common grave until her own death in 1966.[1] The Church of the Transfiguration, known as Biała Fara, or "White Church", now contains the relics of the eleven martyrs.[1]

In a barbaric time, murdering nuns is not a great stretch from murdering children, mothers and the elderly because of religion or ethnicity, but still one has to wonder what the people who carried out these atrocities were thinking.

See review of "Bloodlands."

2012-01-11T09:14:00.000-08:00

Sadly, I assume that America is not behind the latest string of succesful covert military actions against Iran.

Bomb in Tehran kills Iranian nuclear scientist.

A bomb blast in Tehran has killed a university professor who also worked as a scientist on Iran's nuclear program, Iranian media say.

The Fars news agency said someone on a motorcycle planted the bomb under the car of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan. Iranian officials blame Israel for the attack.

According to the report, two other people were wounded by the blast Wednesday in the northern part of the capital.

Fars said Roshan supervised a department at the Natanz nuclear facility. Iran has been enriching uranium to relatively low levels at the above-ground site.

Iranian officials confirmed Tuesday that a new underground complex has started refining uranium, and diplomats with ties to the U.N. nuclear agency say the work is being done at a much higher lever of purity.

Attackers have killed or wounded several Iranian nuclear scientists in recent years, including blasts in late 2010 that state media also attributed to bombs placed on cars by motorcyclists.

Iranian officials blamed the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Israel's Mossad intelligence agency for those attacks.

Someone is carrying out full-scale military operations in Iran and being very succesful at it.

2012-01-10T15:37:00.000-08:00

In 2012, it's not Wonderland any more.

Peter Wehner on William Daley's depature as Obama's Chief of Staff:

Rush Limbaugh has finally gone over the line.

In a hyperbolic, profanity-laced rant yesterday, during his opening monologue, Limbaugh twice referred to the (almost) three years of the Obama presidency as “ungodly.” He went on to say it’s been a “brutal” three years — a “very, very difficult three years.”

It’s one thing to be critical of the Obama presidency; it’s quite another to use such extreme, divisive rhetoric. Has Limbaugh no shame?

Oh my; I seem to have been mistaken. It turns out those words weren’t said by Rush Limbaugh; they were said by William Daley, President Obama’s chief of staff, in an interview with Roger Simon of Politico.

2012-01-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

For the record, I think this is ridiculous.

From the Guardian:

The US schools with their own policeMore and more US schools have police patrolling the corridors. Pupils are being arrested for throwing paper planes and failing to pick up crumbs from the canteen floor. Why is the state criminalising normal childhood behaviour?

After I was called on to defend this phenomenon, I wrote:

This is why Leftists shouldn't be allowed to carry sharp objects and chew gum at the same time. You people can't think without your stereotypes.

At what point have I ever given you the impression that I'm in favor of the militarization of the police or the corrupt tendency of every pimple on the butt of bureaucacy to gain social status by having a police force?

I'm the guy who thinks it is ridiculous that the Department of Education has a SWAT team.

This morning as I was driving past the Clovis Unified School District police car I was thinking that it was ridiculous that a school system has a police force.

More of my greatest hits on "Police and Democracy"
But then I am a pragmatic libertarian who wants society to work in a way that it generates people who have the habits that allow them to live in a maximally free society, i.e., I'm a conservative.

What you are seeing with all of this is G.K. Chesterton's maxim that when you take away the big laws, you don't end up with no law, rather you end up with lots of little laws.

Also from Chesterton -

"In short, we do not get good laws to restrain bad people. We get good people to restrain bad laws."

G.K. Chesterton, Thoughts around Koepenick (1915).

2012-01-10T08:13:00.000-08:00

Romney's looking better; Newt and Perry not so much.

Jim Geraghty's "Morning Jolt" observes:

If Mitt Romney's opponents embrace the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street crowd any further, they're going to start pooping on police cars.

So, here we are, on the day of the first primary, and the main objection to Mitt Romney from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry is that he fired a bunch of people? They object to this more than to his liberal-softie-sounding rhetoric from 1994 and 2002? More than to his crusade to liberate us from the individual mandate of Obamacare in order to leave the states free to enact their own individual mandates? More than to the fact that he's won exactly one general election in his life -- in a year when the left-of-center vote was divided?

We're hearing objections to private-sector layoffs from the party that wants to shrink government. How do we think all those employees of the federal bureaucracy will get off the payroll -- mass alien abductions?

2012-01-09T21:00:00.000-08:00

Why does the Left mock the disabled and people who have lost a very, very young child.

James Taranto offers the obvious thought -

Our surmise is that pro-abortion extremism is at the very root of the mockery. Under Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a woman 20 weeks pregnant has a pretty much unlimited legal right to abort her child. That it should be so is an almost unquestionable tenet of contemporary liberalism.

To remain comfortable while adhering to this position, it is necessary to dehumanize such children--even to devalue them totally, treating them as having less moral standing than a pet. The reason "some" mock the Santorums' mourning of their very young child is to conceal from themselves the monstrousness of their own convictions.

- Best of the Web.

2012-01-09T13:01:00.000-08:00

More on "Alice in Wonderland" and the Court Prophet Media.

John Nolte theorizes:

But the most important thing we now know is that the White House is claiming they hid nothing from the media and in response the media is… saying… nothing… in… their… defense…

For instance, nowhere in that Politico report does Politico clarify what they knew and when they knew it. If Politico did know about the party, why was there no reporting? If Politico didn’t know about the party, why not report that fact?

And so we are now left to ponder the following: did the MSM know about the party at the time and choose not to cover it in order to protect Obama? Or is the White House statement about the MSM knowing about the party untrue but in order to protect Obama the MSM isn’t reporting that it’s untrue?

I have a third theory, where both are true:

It is possible that in 2009, the White House told the their MSM friends about the lavish party but, for obvious reasons, asked them not to report on it, and in order to protect Obama, the complicit MSM agreed. It is also possible that the White House, in order to protect itself, is throwing the MSM under the bus by informing the public that the MSM did, in fact, know about the party and chose not to report it. And now, in order to protect Obama, the MSM is not going to tell us what they knew and when they knew it.

Anyone sense a theme here?

2012-01-09T12:29:00.000-08:00

It is good to be the King, errr, I mean, the President.

The fact that the economy is imploding and unemployment is rising doesn't mean that a hard-working guy can't play 90 rounds of golf, vacation in style, and eat crumpets at a White House "Alice in Wonderland" party.

With Pictures -

2012-01-08T11:53:00.000-08:00

The Obama administration can keep a secret when it is really important...

...such as keeping its "Alice in Wonderland" White House party secret from the public because of its fear of a backlash.

It was the tea party the Obamas just couldn’t resist.

A White House “Alice in Wonderland” costume ball — put on by Johnny Depp and Hollywood director Tim Burton — proved to be a Mad-as-a-Hatter idea that was never made public for fear of a political backlash during hard economic times, according to a new tell-all.

“The Obamas,” by New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor, tells of the first Halloween party the first couple feted at the White House in 2009. It was so over the top that “Star Wars” creator George Lucas sent the original Chewbacca to mingle with invited guests.

The book reveals how any official announcement of the glittering affair — coming at a time when Tea Party activists and voters furious over the lagging economy, 10-percent unemployment rate, bank bailouts and Obama’s health-care plan were staging protests — quickly vanished down the rabbit hole.

White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans — or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care — that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton’s and Depp’s contributions went unacknowledged,” the book says.

However, the White House made certain that more humble Halloween festivities earlier that day — for thousands of Washington-area schoolkids — were well reported by the press corps.

Then the Obamas went inside, where an invitation-only affair for children of military personnel and White House administrators unfolded in the East Room.

Unbeknownst to reporters, the State Dining Room had also been transformed into a secretive White House Wonderland.

Tim Burton decorated it “in his signature creepy-comic style. His film version was about to be released, and he had turned the room into the Mad Hatter’s tea party, with a long table set with antique-looking linens, enormous stuffed animals in chairs, and tiered serving plates with treats like bone-shaped meringue cookies,” reports the book, which The Post purchased at a Manhattan bookstore.

“Fruit punch was served in blood vials at the bar. Burton’s own Mad Hatter, the actor Johnny Depp, presided over the scene in full costume, standing up on a table to welcome everyone in character.”

2012-01-08T07:44:00.000-08:00

Gingrich denounces media bias of debate questions during the debate.

Via Wintery Knight.

2012-01-07T15:15:00.001-08:00

Fields of Gold.

2012-01-07T14:51:00.000-08:00

For all your Leftist ideological corruption of science needs.

250 Climategate emails.

For example:

Ed Cook: "It certainly looks pretty spooky to me with strong "Medieval Warm Period" and "Little Ice Age" signals in it"

ClimateGate email 3759

date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 14:07:38 -0400
from: Ed Cook
subject: Oroko Swamp
to: Keith Briffa
Hi Keith,
Here is the Oroko Swamp RCS chronology plot in an attached Word 98 file and actual data values below. It certainly looks pretty spooky to me with strong "Medieval Warm Period" and "Little Ice Age" signals in it. It's based on substantially more replication than the series in the paper you have to review (hint, hint!)...[Ed Cook]

And:

Email 4141, a glimpse into the climate science Mad Hatter Tea Party: "I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same creates a real public relations problem for us"

ClimateGate email 4141

date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004...
I think this is a real problem, and I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming...Therefore a central message probably has to be that humans are now interfering with extremely large and heavy global systems, of which we know relatively little: we are in a totally new situation for the human species, and our impact added to all the natural variations that exist risks to unsettle subtle balances and create tensions within the systems which might also lead to "flip-over" effects with short-term consequences that might be very dangerous.
And then, the good old precautionary principle must be guiding our effort. During the cold war, enormous resources were put into missiles, airplanes, and other military equipment to check Soviet expansion and make containment policy credible - in the firm hope that all this equipment would never have to be used. And it wasn't, and nobody complained about the costs. Now, in the face of a different, but clearly distinguishable global threat "more dangerous than terrorism" the cost issue surfaces all the time. Somehow we all need to help in creating an understanding that the threat of global change is real and that we need to develop a new paradigm of looking at the world and the future: this is not just a scientific or technological issue. It involves important philosophical and ethical considerations where some fundamental value systems have to be challenged.
Bo
-----Original Message----- From: Asher Minns...
FWD: Abrupt Climate Change
In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media, which can become public perception.---
---
I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same creates a real public relations problem for us....The message regarding the lesson of the THC should NOT be "global warming will cause an ice age." The message should be one about year to year or
decadal variability, and the way alternation of cold years/decades/centurys with very hot ones will exacerbate the problem of adaptation. Imagine a decade of torrid heat, thirty years of pretty good climate, fifty years of early frosts, a century of drought, twenty years of flood -- that's the kind of thing we need to worry about, not the simple "icebergs in the Thames" scenario. [Ray Pierrehumbert?]

2012-01-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

The Paul Ehlich Award for "Hysterical Predictions of Global Disaster that Got a Lot of Attention When They were Made, but were Forgotten When They Failed"...

...goes to the Progressive/Leftist rag The Canadian for its prediction of 4.5 billion deaths by 2012 due to Global Warming.

2012-01-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

There's an alternate history story in obscure bit of history.

Evidence emerges which may verify the claim that a future priest saved Hitler from drowning when he was four years old.

2012-01-06T18:54:00.000-08:00

Third World Muslims are not assimilating very well into Western Civilization...

...Muslim husband chops off wife's fingers for studying.

A jealous husband is facing life in prison after chopping off his wife's fingers because she began studying for a degree without his permission.

Rafiqul Islam, 30, blindfolded his wife Hawa Akhter, 21, and taped her mouth, telling her he was going to give her a surprise present.

Instead he made her hold out her hand and cut off all five fingers. One of his relatives then threw Ms Akhter's fingers in the dustbin to ensure doctors could not reattach them.

And then there is this:

The attack is the latest in a series of acts targeting educated women in the Muslim-majority company.
In June, an unemployed man gouged out the eyes of his wife, an assistant professor at Dhaka University, apparently because he could not stand her pursuing higher studies at a Canadian University.

2012-01-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

So, basically, in Blue State America you have to be "pro-porn" or you are a scary threat to Leftists.

This CNN Op-Ed piece is either a nice bit of parody or a scary reveal of the minds of our jaded bi-coastal elites:

So, what type of nation might the United States be under Rick Santorum's Sharia law?

1. Rape victims would be forced to give birth to the rapist's child. Santorum has stated that his religious beliefs dictate that life begins at conception, and as a result, rape victims would be sentenced to carrying the child of the rapist for nine months.

2. Gay marriages would be annulled. Santorum recently declared that not only does he oppose gay marriages, but he supports a federal constitutional amendment that would ban them, invalidating all previous gay marriages that have legally been sanctioned by states and thus callously destroying marriages and thrusting families into chaos.

3. Santorum would ban all federal funding for birth control and would not oppose any state that wanted to pass laws making birth control illegal.

4. No porn! I'm not kidding. Santorum signed "The Marriage Vow" pledge (PDF) authored by the Family Leader organization, under which he swears to oppose pornography. I think many would agree that alone should disqualify him from being president.

To me, "Santorum Two" truly poses an existential threat to the separation of church and state, one of the bedrock principles of our nation since its inception. Not only did Thomas Jefferson speak of the need to create "a wall of separation between church and state," so did Santorum's idol, Ronald Reagan, who succinctly stated, "church and state are, and must remain, separate."

While there may be millions of Americans who in their heart agree with the views of "Santorum Two," it is my hope they will reject any attempts to move America closer to a becoming the Afghanistan of the Western Hemisphere.

That's right, the great existential threat to American culture is the possibility that our porn supply might be restricted.

2012-01-06T12:28:00.000-08:00

Stephen Colbert on The Catholic Way of Suffering.

“I’m not bitter about what happened to me as a child, and my mother was instrumental in keeping me from being so. She taught me to be grateful for my life regardless of what that entailed, and that’s directly related to the image of Christ on the cross and the example of sacrifice that he gave us. What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain — it’s that the pain is actually a gift. What’s the option? God doesn’t really give you another choice.”

– Stephen Colbert, Catholic, discussing his father’s death.

Via The Deacon's Bench.

That puts me in mind of this:

Your sins are terrible. It is just that you suffer. Your life could be redeemed, but I know you don't believe that. You will not change.

[grants Michael the Rite of Absolution]

Cardinal Lamberto:The Godfather: Part III (1990)

Very counter-culture.

2012-01-06T12:16:00.001-08:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...

...gets a "good" review.

I liked the Swedish version. I'll probably check this one out and see how they've "Americanized" it.

2012-01-06T11:53:00.000-08:00

More Hope and Change: pro-life activists could be permanently detained without trial under law.

From Lifesite News:

Constitutional experts warn a new law that allows the president to permanently detain U.S. citizens without trial could be used against pro-life activists, who have already been defined as potential terrorists in documents by some government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute“This law can apply to pro-lifers, yes,” said John W. Whitehead, a constitutional attorney and founder of The Rutherford Institute. Whitehead told LifeSiteNews.com the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA) “would allow the military to show up at your door if you’re a ‘potential terrorist,’ and put you in military detention where seeing a lawyer is difficult.”

The NDAA, which President Barack Obama signed on December 31, allows the president to hold enemy combatants in military detention facilities without trial until the end of hostilities, if the person “substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” The law allows the president to determine which groups may be considered terrorists without judicial or congressional oversight, although Secretary of Defense is required to “regularly brief” Congress about “covered persons.”

Sen. Carl Levin, D-MI, said the Obama administration specifically asked senators for the power to permanently detain American citizens without trial and to “remove the language which says that U.S. citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section.”

2012-01-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

Pushing Back.

Cardinal defends comparing gay parade organizers to Ku Klux Klan.

Setting off a new round in his dispute with gay right activists, Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George has issued a statement defending his recent comparison of the gay rights movement to the Ku Klux Klan.

George’s initial comments came in connection with a controversy over whether next summer’s gay pride parade would interrupt morning services at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in the Lakeview neighborhood.

That dispute was resolved last week, but the cardinal’s KKK comparison – and his new explanation of those comments – have kept the controversy boiling.

“Organizers (of the pride parade) invited an obvious comparison to other groups who have historically attempted to stifle the religious freedom of the Catholic Church,” the cardinal said in a statement issued Tuesday. “One such organization is the Ku Klux Klan which, well into the 1940s, paraded through American cities not only to interfere with Catholic worship but also to demonstrate that Catholics stand outside of the American consensus. It is not a precedent anyone should want to emulate.”

It sounds like there was a scheduling conflict that was worked out, but the organizers of the parade need to keep in mind that they need to pay attention to the concerns of other groups.

2012-01-06T11:32:00.000-08:00

Good point - "In Mocking Santorum, Eugene Robinson Reveals A Sickness in Our Society."

Patterico observes:

But the problem is not just that some leftists can’t understand the love that some people feel for their unborn children — or for their children who (like Sarah Palin’s son Trig) were born with disabilities. What really infuriates is the contempt they show for parents who make different choices than they would . . . and the smug arrogance with which they pronounce judgment on the most intimate aspects of others’ private lives.

What Robinson has done, and what Colmes did the other day, is indecent. These men would never say such a thing to Santorum’s face. (Or maybe they would — which is possibly even worse.) What sickness has invaded our body politic that people feel free, not only to act the cretin, but to do so on national television while sporting insufferable, supercilious, self-satisfied smirks like those we have seen on the mugs of Colmes and Robinson in recent days?

In short: how dare they? How dare they?!

There is something wrong with a system that expects people to undergo such indignities to attain high office. I’m not a fan of Rick Santorum as a candidate, but the treatment he has received in recent days regarding an intensely personal decision is a disgrace.

This follows on the last round of mocking Sarah Palin for having a Down-syndrome baby -

It could be because, increasingly, it seems that those in public life — especially Republicans — are seen as fair game for criticism of their most intimate decisions. Sarah Palin has a Down’s Syndrome child and is mocked. Rick Santorum brings home his child that died hours after his birth, and is mocked.

It could be that this is how the logic of abortion plays out - babies are just clumps of tissues until their born, and until they are born, or if they "shouldn't have been born," then getting weepy over them is just overly-sentimental.

Glen Reynolds points out:

WELL, AFTER THE TRIG PALIN ASSAULTS, GOING AFTER A STILLBORN BABY ISN’T MUCH OF A STRETCH: The Casual Cruelty of Eugene Robinson. Remember this the next time they launch one of their bogus “new civility” campaigns.

File this under the category of "holding paper."

Update:

This is from the Commentary piece I linked above:

The second point is the casual cruelty of Robinson and those like him. Robinson seems completely comfortable lampooning a man and his wife who had experienced the worst possible nightmare for parents: the death of their child. It is one thing to say you would act differently if you were in the situation faced by Rick and Karen Santorum; it’s quite another to deride them as “crazy” and “very weird,” which is what commentators on the left are increasingly doing, and with particular delight and glee.

We are seeing how ideology and partisan politics can so disfigure people’s minds and hearts that they become vicious in their assaults on those with whom they have political disagreements. I would hope no one I know would, in a thousand years, ridicule parents who were grappling with unfathomable human pain. Even if those parents were liberal. Even if they were running for president and first lady.

The third point is it tells you something about the culture in which we live that in some quarters those who routinely champion abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are viewed as enlightened and morally sophisticated while those grieving the loss of their son, whom they took home for a night before burying, are mercilessly mocked.

2012-01-06T11:17:00.000-08:00

Three years later, it's still the "empty suit presidency."

Victor Davis Hanson on "Being There."

What got Obama to the presidency was being a man without a past or present, Chauncey Gardiner of Being There — without a college record, a medical record, a scholarly record, or much of a legislative record, the “smartest” president in history without having to say or do anything smart, who “busted hump” his entire life without any proof that he ever did any such thing, who proclaimed himself a greater president than all but three, but left nothing great in his wake, now or in the past. Obama had forgotten that winning non-persona for a time, and so after 2009 fooled himself into thinking out loud that at times he would play a real Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Kennedy, or Reagan.

But now Obama accepts what he was and always will be — Chauncey Gardiner.

And just being there is apparently the way to being president a bit longer.

2012-01-06T08:04:00.000-08:00

Rick Santorum is very effective in this clip.

I think he did an impressive job of directly challenging the fuzzy prejudices of a group of college students on homosexual marriage.

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

2012-01-05T17:04:00.000-08:00

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

James Taranto picks up on the New York Times "good-think":

Two Papers in One!

■"It is disturbing that President Bush has exhibited a grandiose vision of executive power that leaves little room for public debate, the concerns of the minority party or the supervisory powers of the courts. But it is just plain baffling to watch him take the same regal attitude toward a Congress in which his party holds solid majorities in both houses. Seizing the opportunity presented by the Congressional holiday break, Mr. Bush announced 17 recess appointments--a constitutional gimmick. . . . Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton made scores of recess appointments. But both of them faced a Congress controlled by the opposition party, while the Senate has been under Republican control for Mr. Bush's entire five years in office."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 9, 2006

■"Nearly six months after it opened its doors, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally has a director, after President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray. . . . Mr. Obama also appointed three new and qualified members to the National Labor Relations Board. . . . Announcing the appointments, Mr. Obama also asserted a welcome new credo: 'When Congress refuses to act, and as a result, hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.' Hear. Hear."--editorial, New York Times, Jan. 5, 2012

2012-01-05T08:15:00.000-08:00

But that's only because the Jesuits made the judge do it.

Court arrests and fines attorney for making anti-Catholic slurs in court papers:

Less than a month after a Minnesota attorney filed a court document laden with anti-Catholic slurs, the judge who bore the brunt of her comments has ordered her arrested.

Referring to Judge Nancy Dreher, who is not a Catholic, as a “popess” and “a secret Catholic Knight Witch Hunter,” attorney Nancy Isaacson’s filing had stated that “we may as well flush her papal bull order down the toilet.”

“The Catholic Church has millions of Jesuits working undercover around the country to fulfill the Church's agenda,” the memo continued. “They give orders, pull the strings, and their puppets like Nancy Dreher jump like zombies.”

Citing “unsupported and outrageous allegations of bigotry, deceit, conspiracy and scandalous statements against this court,” Judge Dreher ordered Isaacson arrested on contempt-of-court charges after she failed to appear on January 4 to explain her document.

Dreher fined Isaacson $5,000 and also fined Rebekah Nutt--Isaacson’s attorney--$5,000.

Describing the judge and other court employees as “dirty Catholics,” Nutt had said in an earlier court filing that “across the country the court systems and particularly the Bankruptcy Court in Minnesota are composed of a bunch of ignoramus, bigoted Catholic beasts that carry the sword of the church.”

“Catholic deeds throughout the history have been bloody and murderous,” added Nutt’s memorandum.

Those Jesuits, is there nothing they can't do?

2012-01-05T08:11:00.000-08:00

The Calvinist Chesterton.

Calvinist John Piper is a fan of G.K. Chesterton, which is odd because Chesterton disdained Calvinism as a force that stifled true humanity. Piper writes:

Here’s the reason Chesterton’s bowshots at Calvinism do not bring me down. The Calvinism I love is far closer to the “Elfland” he loves than the rationalism he hates.

He would no doubt be baffled by my experience. For me the biggest, strongest, most beautiful, and most fruitful tree that grows in the soil of “Elfland” is Calvinism. Here is a tree big enough, and strong enough, and high enough to let all the paradoxical branches of the Bible live — and wave with joy in the sunshine of God’s sovereignty.

In the shade of this tree, I was set free from the procrustean forces of unbiblical, free-will presuppositionalism — the unyielding, alien assumption that without the human right of ultimate self-determination human beings cannot be accountable for their choices. When I walked away from this narrow, rationalistic, sparse tree, into the shade of the massive tree of Calvinism, it was a happy day. Suddenly I saw that this is what all the poetry had been about. This is the tree where all the branches of all the truths that men have tried to separate thrive.

William Watson Birch - scourge of all things that start with a "c" and end in "alvnist" - observes:

Does no one find odd the fact that Adam and Eve could make free will, self-determined choices in the Garden of Eden and yet God remained "sovereign"?

For me, the most absolutely astounding supposition of Calvinists -- deterministic Calvinists like John Piper -- is how eager they are to discard "free will" and "self-determination" and affirm that God decrees our so-called "choices." Though, I think, these alleged "choices" are only apparently genuine, since, in Calvinism, God has already predetermined what we shall do/choose/say/think.1 John Calvin writes that "men do nothing save at the secret instigation of God, and do not discuss and deliberate on any thing but what he has previously decreed with himself and brings to pass by his secret direction" (emphases added).2 Where is the fear and honor of God present in such an admission? Why not just admit that God is the only real sinner in the universe?

Calvin further admits, "Therefore, whatever men or Satan himself devise, God holds the helm, and makes all their efforts contribute to the execution of his judgments."3 Such evil, in Calvinism, is committed according to God's predetermined plan, not by "bare permission": "If the binding and infatuation of Ahab is a judgment from God, the fiction of bare permission is at an end."4

Webster is right. Chesterton delighted in apparent paradoxes that demonstrated the cleverness of God. Thus, Chesterton took delight in the tension between God's apparent providential care for His creation and God's decision to give real freedom for His creation, for God's great cleverness in accomplishing His ends through the free actions of His creation. Chesterton had no time for those who would solve the tension by denying that it actually existed.

2012-01-04T22:35:00.000-08:00

Great moments in Constitutional Law - Obama Administration discovers that the "Living Constitution" allows it to make "recess appointments" even when there is no recess.

Ace of Spades writes:

Obama Administration Proudly Announces They Are Violating The Constitution

Yesterday news broke that Obama was going to recess appoint Richard Cordry to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There's just one slight problem, the Senate isn't actually in recess.

Today the Obama administration announced it's rationale for this extraordinary power grab.

Here are the facts: The Constitution gives the President the authority to make temporary recess appointments to fill vacant positions when the Senate is in recess, a power all recent Presidents have exercised. The Senate has effectively been in recess for weeks, and is expected to remain in recess for weeks. In an overt attempt to prevent the President from exercising his authority during this period, Republican Senators insisted on using a gimmick called “pro forma” sessions, which are sessions during which no Senate business is conducted and instead one or two Senators simply gavel in and out of session in a matter of seconds. But gimmicks do not override the President’s constitutional authority to make appointments to keep the government running. Legal experts agree. In fact, the lawyers who advised President Bush on recess appointments wrote that the Senate cannot use sham “pro forma” sessions to prevent the President from exercising a constitutional power.

Because of the President’s leadership and decisive action, the American people will have a consumer watchdog fighting tooth and nail on their behalf. The President knows this is a make or break moment for the middle class and he’ll continue to build an economy that’s based on the values of fairness and shared responsibility. Today’s announcement is a critical piece to strengthen the economy and restore the economic security for the middle class and those trying to reach it. Mr. Cordray is the right man for the job and we’re pleased he’s finally in place to continue his important work.

Emphasis mine.

Let's look at the relevant words of Article II, Section II of the Constitution.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Funny, I don't see anything about "effectively" being in recess.

2012-01-04T22:29:00.000-08:00

Great Moments in oratory by America's 4th Greatest President.

Jeez, has this guy gone grey or what?

And what a windbag.

Jim Treacher muses:

And he will travel back to 2012, and he will appear (did appear?) before the lucky Democrats of Iowa, and he will try to play off the sudden change in his appearance, and he will drone on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on...Did you watch the whole thing? Me neither. You’d think Future Obama would’ve learned something about public speaking in subsequent decades, but if anything he became (will become?) even more tedious and boring. Well, at least he managed to get away from Future Michelle. Let’s hope Skynet doesn’t send her back here.

2012-01-04T15:58:00.000-08:00

Things like this make me proud I live in Fresno.

Bizarre crash leaves car on N.W. Fresno roof.

And, of course, this:

Woman breaks gas line during Fresno driving test

A woman taking a driving test ended the exam with a flourish this morning, crashing her car into a large gas line and forcing the evacuation of the Department of Motor Vehicles office in northeast Fresno.

The adjoining Sierra Lanes bowling alley at Blackstone and Sierra avenue also was cleared.

The accident happened about 10 a.m. Firefighters shut down the gas line and both buildings were reopened.

Throw in a bomb scare at the Fresno Courthouse, and by the end of 2012, we may be looking at a full-blown Mayan apocalypse, complete with a 30 foot tall Stay-Puff Marshmallow man.

2012-01-03T10:21:00.000-08:00

The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvior is a surprisingly entertaining book...

... particularly if you despise Communists and Communism.

de Beauvoir stripped away the facade of nobility and concern for the poor that Communists like to put on and revealed that French leftists were - surprise! - spoiled, narcissistic fools. In my review of The Mandarins, I wrote:

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

Of course, there are American Mandarins. A case in point is found in two on-line articles by and concerning American writer Michael Thomas.

In this essay for Newsweek, Michael Thomas writes:

But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ’em go!

Hey, enough with that "New Civility" nonsense. Thomas means business!

But when you read this "inside baseball" puff-piece you find out that Thomas is the kind of wealthy, spoiled, self-indulgent narcissist that Simone de Beauvoir was writing about in the 1940s. A few excerpts will show this:

We were all out by the pool,” Michael’s son William—from his first marriage, to Brooke Hayward—was telling me over the phone from his home in Sag Harbor. It was one of those Southampton summers in the late ’60s/early ’70s; dad was with his second wife, Wendell Adams, then. Her attractive younger sister Jane was always around, looking for a wealthy husband.

“Jane was kind of uptight and a little bit prudish, but she had her bikini on and she was kind of showing off her bikini, and my father, right in front of me and my teenage friends and all these other people having the usual cocktail party out by the pool, got up and grabbed her and stripped her bikini off her and threw her in the pool, in front of his wife, too. I’m standing there and I’m holding the Polaroid land camera in my hand but I’m so stunned that I can’t take a picture.”

Ha! Ha! Dad sexually assaulted and humiliated a woman in front of his sons.

What a cut-up.

Then, there's this:

It’s a habit that, coupled with his abundant talent and ambition, might explain why he ended up “living my life backward.” By age 31, he was made general partner at Lehman Brothers, making $300,000 a year, which was a lot in those days. After the world of high finance had had enough of him, and he of it, he turned his hand to writing novels.

And -

Bobby Lehman helped him get a gig as the curatorial assistant in the department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, making $6,000 a year. He felt like his life was pretty much set. Two years later, he was locking horns with some asshole who was up to no good at the museum.

Mr. Lehman asked him if might like to try out finance. How much? Six thousand five hundred. Deal! Then, of course, he had to go tell his father the news that his brilliant son had decided to sell out and take a meaningless job in banking.

Because what kid isn't able to flush his first job and go to work for a top line banking business because he's dealing with "some asshole"?

And -

Distance prevailed even during his tenure at Lehman, when father and son worked in the same building. In those days, the Lehman brothers ate lunch at the round table: “Let’s say there were 35 partners, and some would be out of town, and some would be in the smaller rooms with clients, and there’d be maybe 15 or 25 of us. But, by ’71 or early—yeah, ’71, when Joe Thomas sat down for lunch, he would have two or three martinis. So I’m sitting there, and I don’t drink during the daytime, and so I’m sitting there, and, you know, your father’s at the end of the table, and everybody can see he’s half in the bag. And it’s tough.”

Ah, yes, three martini lunches...the common touch.

And -

And, much like his father, he found the work pretty uncompelling. He compensated for that by enjoying himself a little too much and boasting a little too loudly about the wonderful talents of Madame Claude.

“I mean, this was a wonderful time,” he recalled. (At this point in our conversation, he asked his son Francis, who recently graduated from college, to fetch him another Scotch.) “Madame Claude loomed very large; she was the biggest madam in the world, she had the best-looking girls. I remember once when I was at Lehman Brothers, our French partner, Jean Francois Malle, who is now dead, who was the brother of Louis Malle, we were in the bar and this fabulous-looking girl was there, and Jean Francois said to me, ‘She has to come with us now.’ So I called Madame Claude.”

Her name was Annabelle. Later he would host a dinner party, eight men and Annabelle. “And she was fabulous,” he said. “Fabulous.”

Because who among us isn't on a first name basis with a pimp or doesn't find enjoyable the idea of a "dinner party" with a hooker and eight men?

And -

“We used to say if a girl is in a room and she’s better-looking and has good manners and that her conversation is better than any of the other women in the room, the chances are she’s from Madame Claude.”

Not like modern day pimps who barely teach their hookers any refinement.

And -

Mr. Niven recalled a party thrown by Jan Cushing for Arthur Schlesinger to celebrate his book about the Kennedys. Needing to fill a last-minute chair, she called up Michael, who drank three Johnnie Walkers straight up before crashing in.

“When he got there, he saw this girl with enormous tits and immediately went over and started talking to her, and soon enough she was giggling a lot because, as I’m sure you know, Michael can be quite funny.”

The girl with the enormous tits was still giggling when Ms. Cushing tried to get everyone to focus up. She asked Michael to ask Mr. Schlesinger a question. “What’s the capital of South Dakota,” he said. The girl next to him giggled, as did George Plimpton and Mr. Niven.

Ah, the times we had back then... getting bombed, crashing swanky parties, hanging out with Jan Cushing, Arthur Schlessinger and the girl with the enormous tits....

So, the guy who wrote the manifesto calling for the beheading of corrupt Wall Streeters is himself an alcoholic, jaded, rake who made his money on Wall Street.

Sounds a lot like he's trying to buy grace on the cheap just like the narcissistic, wealthy French existenstial leftists of the 1940s.

2012-01-03T09:36:00.000-08:00

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

...which is why you should vote Republican if you care about civil liberties.

Glen Reynolds notes:

RUSSIAN TV mocks Obama over indefinite-detention bill. Even Chomsky misses Bush! Well, sort of: “Obama’s policy is just to kill them.” Yet Obama gets a pass from the left.

This just illustrates why if you favor civil liberties, you should always vote Republican for President — because a Republican President will be substantially more constrained than a Democrat.

Also, there's no homelessness or unemployment, and old people aren't having to eat dog food or take jobs to supplement their meager fixed incomes.

Oh, the wonderful things that happen when a Democrat is in the White House.

2012-01-03T08:21:00.000-08:00

Alan Colmes demonstrates his exceptionally high "DQ"...

...aka "Dick Quotient."

He must have been a very fit child with all the running and bobbing and weaving he must have done to avoid having his head stuck in toilet by everyone who thought he was a total dick.

Colmes thinks that Santorum is over the top for the way that he tried to deal with a horrible family loss and for equating homosexuality with bigamy, polygamy and incest because Colmes thinks its wrong to judge adults for their consensual sexual habits.

Huh?

Why is Colmes so harsh to consenting adults who happen to like bigamy, polygamy and incest?

What a dick.

Father Z has a post on the Colmes' clip.

Here is a video of Santorum's radical, "over the top views" on education and marriage.

Concerning the same, the PC crowd likes to throw brick-bats at people who extol companionate, heterosexual marriage as better than the alternatives. As a single, full-time father of three daughters, let me share this - Santorum is absolutely right.

Only an idiot, or someone who hasn't had to raise children alone, would argue against the idea that the best way to raise children is for a mother and a father to raise their raising their children together.

2012-01-02T19:33:00.000-08:00

Hey, maybe we should stop being so understanding now...

...before they can send us to their Gulags.

From Robert George's Mirror of Justice:

"What will happen to Catholics and others . . . ?"

One of my superstar former students, writing about his experience at one of our nation's premier law schools, sent me a note after reading my MOJ post on marriage, religious liberty, and the "grand bargain." Here is the text, with names removed to protect the innocent:

I had a first-hand experience with this reality in law school. One of my constitutional law professors taught the section of our course relating to same-sex marriage under the "inevitability" banner. I met with him in office hours later to talk to him about something else, but I brought up a question that I have been wrestling with: if the SSM advocates are right and opposition to SSM becomes analogous to racism in our society, what will happen to Catholics and others whose views on SSM cannot and will not change? Are they to be excluded from public office, political and judicial appointments, or places of trust and responsibility within private institutions (e.g., law firm partnerships)? I posed the question to him because I was curious to hear his response, since he is generally a kind and reasonable person who seemed open to other viewpoints.

His response was very disappointing, and it shook my confidence in him. He responded to me by saying something along the lines of: "Well, they [Catholics and others] will either have to change their views or be treated in the same way that white supremacists and the segregationist Senators were treated. They were excluded from the judiciary entirely for decades because of the South's views on race."

He evinced no sympathy for the traditional marriage position or those who hold it. They were to be relegated to the ash heap of history. He said all of this to me knowing full well (because I had foolishly just told him) that I was a Catholic who opposed SSM.

Is anyone prepared to say that the view expressed by the professor is merely a fringe opinion in the contemporary academy? Is anyone prepared to say that it is the view of only a small minority, or a minority at all, in what University of Virginia sociologist Jonathan Haidt calls the liberal tribal-moral community of contemporary academia? Would anyone deny that there is a significant element in the elite sector of the culture---an element with real power over the lives and careers of people like my former student---that wishes to penalize or discriminate against those who refuse in conscience to yield to the liberal orthodoxy on issues of sex and marriage? Consider the professors own words. He made no effort to hide his goals and intentions. On the contrary, he made it abundantly clear that Catholics and others who persist in their dissent are to be treated the way we treat white supremacists. They are to be stigmatized, subjected to discrimination, and denied the right to hold certain offices.

And this professor, as my student observed, is a "generally a kind and reasonable person who seems open to other viewpoints." What are we to expect, then, from those who are even less "open to other viewpoints"?

2012-01-02T11:39:00.000-08:00

All things Fresno - "Next stop, Milwaukee!"

From the hit move Monsters vs. Aliens:

Dr. Cockroach Ph.D.: They said I was crazy, but I'll show them. I'll show them all! Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Susan Murphy: Dr. Cockroach, I would really appreciate it if you didn't do your mad scientist laugh while I'm hooked up to this machine.
[Insectosaurus roars]
The Missing Link: You're right Insecto. You've been letting this quack experiment on you for over a month.
Dr. Cockroach Ph.D.: I'm not a quack! I'm a mad scientist. There is a difference.
Susan Murphy: Look, what choice do I have? If he can make me normal, or even six-foot-eight, I can get out of here and have the life I was meant to have. I mean, I should be with Derek in...
The Missing Link: Let me guess? Fresno?
Susan Murphy: Well, Fresno is just a stepping stone. Next stop, Milwaukee, then New York, and finally, some day...
The Missing Link: We know, we know, Paris.
Susan Murphy: Throw the switch, doctor. But-but don't do the laugh.
Dr. Cockroach Ph.D.: Now, you're going to feel a slight pinch in the brain. Mwa-ha-ha... Sorry.
[Turns on machine; Susan is shocked with electricity until she passes out; when she comes to, the others are standing over her]
Dr. Cockroach Ph.D.: Susan! Yoo-hoo!
Susan Murphy: Am I small again?
Dr. Cockroach Ph.D.: I'm afraid not, my dear.
[Susan sits up, her hair standing on end]
Dr. Cockroach Ph.D.: As a matter of fact, you may have actually grown a couple of feet.

2012-01-02T11:36:00.000-08:00

Martin and Lewis, Abbot and Costello, Astaire and Rogers, Science and ....

....booze!

According to this article:

On the face of it, there doesn't seem to be much a connection between a sleazy, smoky bar and a stuffy lecture on quantum physics or dark matter. But, at least in Tel Aviv, these two strange worlds are coming together.

The result: Some of the big city's best bars are hosting lectures led by those considered as these establishments' outsiders, drawn out of the labs and research institutes into nightlife stardom.

Even the organizers are taken aback every time by the popularity of these classes, and with the rate the phenomenon has been growing, those who don't seek an education on their night on the town will be soon considered a dying breed.

These events initiated by Weizmann Institute of Science lecturers, who were looking for ways to broaden their student base.

"We saw that the institute was teeming with listeners coming in to hear lectures, Weizmann Institute spokesman Yivsam Azgad told Haaretz, adding that those lectures "usually preached to the choir."

"We were thinking about how to get to the general public, who might find science lectures interesting but just doesn't know it. If we arrived at where they were, they might listen." Azgad added.

At first, the Weizmann Institute official offered the project to the city of Rehovot – where the world-renowned science research establishment is located – and after that initial attempt proved to be a success, he thought he'd try on the professional courts of Tel Aviv.

"They were very skeptical at first," he said, since "bar owners were reluctant to give away their establishment on Thursday nights. There were those who told me 'you don't know bars in Tel Aviv, they're loud, people drink and make out, how would the lecturer feel?'"

Only that it turned out that the skeptics were in the minority, with the project now taking place in 40 bars, including some of the biggest and most successful in the city, with another 50-venue project in the works.

"Now we're at a place where lecturers are offended for not being invited to teach," Azgad said.

And drink!

2012-01-02T10:28:00.000-08:00

As we roll in to another political season, we look forward to exploiting the hypocrisy of the mainstream media as it holds the Republican candidate to standards that it didn't apply to the Prom King President.

Victor Davis Hanson observes:

Ah—Those Damn Records Again

There were lots of incomplete stories on the domestic front. From time to time, the media caricatured Rick Perry’s Texas A & M’s aggie Cs as proof that he was “dumb.” Recently Chris Matthews (but, of course) derided Mitt Romney’s privilege by comparison to Barack Obama, “who busted hump” to get into prestigious schools and Harvard Law. (“Busted hump” is now to follow “tingle” from out of Matthews’ creepy Freudian recesses?) Remember in 2008 that John McCain’s lackluster US Naval Academy transcript was supposed to offer proof that he was always an unserious and irascible sort. But the media never finish this silly go-all-the-way-back-to-college narrative by producing Obama’s straight As— to remind us how brilliant academic achievement has now continued with inspired White House leadership. Why is this?

First, the minor, peripheral reasons. The media were burned with the George Bush “dunce” stories of cheerleading at Yale—when it was revealed that both his SAT scores and GPA were as good or better than John Kerry’s. The media also believe that the Ivy League is a certifier, not an institution, of higher disinterested learning. The point is to get in somehow and get out any way possible stamped with the brand—not what you did in between (unless you are a nucular Bush). Most accept that if one is not in chemistry, engineering, math, etc., then one can coast in the humanities or social sciences in the Ivy League without a lot of work. Flunking out as a sociology or political science major at Yale or Stanford is a lot harder to do than flunking out with the same major at Ohio State or Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

Or is it that Obama was a straight-A student and is holding back on the release of his transcript for the right moment to embarrass critics, in the way he did the sudden “birther” Donald Trump? Are the hidden straight As a complex political IED that will blow up in the face of any who jump upon it? Not likely, but to be fair I had to raise the possibility.

All of which gets us to the real story that was never reported on:

1) Barack Obama simply does not expect to follow normal political customs and traditions because he knows the media do not expect him to: he will not release the transcripts because he does not have to and it is his pleasure not to, in the way he did not worry about explaining his near worship of his racist pastor of twenty years, or being the first to renounce public financing of presidential campaigns in the general election, or the first nominee in recent memory not to have released his medical records, or the first to have raised $1 billion dollars in private cash, or the first to have played 90 rounds of golf in his first three years in office. All of these may or may not be real issues, but they have always been real issues to the press and suddenly are no longer such—and Obama not only knows it, but enjoys knowing how the media exempts rather than audits him. Does a Chris Matthews understand just how much contempt Obama has for someone so sycophantic as himself?

2) The second reason may well be that Barack Obama really did not “bust hump” to get into Occidental, Columbia, or Harvard, but in fact coasted the entire time. In other words, the record does not reflect an A-/B+ student whom affirmative action consideration can boost into the Ivy League, but perhaps a C+/B- (or worse?) student whom even “diversity” usually cannot. That would prove embarrassing in the sense that the myth of Michael Beschloss “smartest president ever” might be endangered (remember, PJ readers, the media, not us, iconize long ago college grades). A lackluster academic record might as well bring up the entire topic of affirmative action in a way not heretofore discussed. Finally, a dismal transcript might offer perspective on the Obama method of rhetoric over achievement.

At some point the Republican nominee will produce his entire medical and college records and matter-of-factly expect Obama at last to do the same. Watch the hysteria that follows—for 24 hours. (Or would it be better for a Romney or Gingrich to say, “Of course, my medical and college records remain off-limits as is now the custom, and by the way, I will not be taking any federal campaign financing funds with all their bothersome attached strings”?)

2012-01-02T09:29:00.000-08:00

The philosophy of writing in a nutshell.

I've been cranking out an opposition to a motion for summary judgment, which kept me up until 1:30 a.m. to finally grind out the statement of facts. The key is to lose yourself in the work so that your perception of time is episodic; you look up every now and again and realize that another hour has passed and that your legs may be experiencing some kind of deep vein thrombosis because you haven't moved them since the last time you moved from the aeviternal realm back into mundane time-space.

Apparently, I'm doing something right, however, as John Scalzi notes one of the basic rules of writing:

b) like most things on the planet, thinking about doing it is a lot
worse than simply sitting down and doing it. The writing wasn’t hard
to do, you just need to plant ass in seat and go from there.

It is true that thinking about writing a long piece is worse than writing the piece, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the reason thinking about writing a long piece is so difficult is because doing it can be so debilitating.

2012-01-01T09:37:00.000-08:00

The dog that didn't bark.

After we permit Obama to return to civilian status where he can play all the golf he wants, I expect that the media will make up for lost time in playing up sob stories about the Great Recession. Glen Reynolds notes:

HOPE AND CHANGE IN 2012: Aging and Broke, More Lean on Family. One thing not mentioned here is the devastating impact that low interest rates are having on retired people who live off the interest on CDs. I can’t help but think that if we had a Republican in the White House we’d be hearing wall-to-wall sob stories on that topic.

Remember the "homeless crisis" under George H.W. Bush? Or all those movies that made the Reagan years look like the Great Depression?

Until then, I will be filing this away under "Holding Paper - Media Bias."

2012-01-01T09:27:00.000-08:00

This explains quite a bit.

Court approves police policy barring individuals with high IQs from becoming police officers (because they might get bored):

A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Robert Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.

“This kind of puts an official face on discrimination in America against people of a certain class,” Jordan said today from his Waterford home. “I maintain you have no more control over your basic intelligence than your eye color or your gender or anything else.”

He said he does not plan to take any further legal action.

Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Most Cops Just Above Normal The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average.

Jordan alleged his rejection from the police force was discrimination. He sued the city, saying his civil rights were violated because he was denied equal protection under the law.

Another possible explanation is that those running the police department are afraid that they might be challenged by smarter subordinates.

I don't think that high IQ would qualify as a "disability" under California law insofar - it doesn't seem to be a physiological condition under the "physical disability" definition, and it is unlikely that it is recognized as a psychological condition for the "mental definition."

It's really stupid social policy, however.