Good News

There are still some on the left who remain convince the George W. Bush is "stoopid" and they can't wait for the next election to prove it. I can't wait for Michael Moore to recycle his "payback Tuesday" essay.

Ecumenical Alert

A post in the Corner provides a reminder that the haggis eaters will be celebrating the "eternal memory" of Robert "don't call him Robbie" Burns on January 25. Incomprehensible poetry, but I have gone to about five of those Burns Dinners that the Scotts like to throw and they provide a wicked good time. And haggis is not bad when you drown it in wiskey, either.

[My home DSL seems to be working for the moment. Must be pixies at work or something.]

In case you needed another one.

Ignore the entry immediately below. Appropros of Penner's favorite subject, Molly has "yet another reason to hate France."

OK, I'm out of here. It's Saturday at 3pm. I just finished preparing a client for a deposition on Monday. My home DSL line is still on the fritz. [And, I may need to see about some kind of a 12 step program. I am having some real "issues" when I find that I can not go online and find out all the movies that Peter Weller starred in during the 1980's or when the Austro-Prussian War started. I may just need to get a life.]

Talk to you all on Monday.

The OmbudsGod has a multiple choice test on the number of MDSOs who are unaccounted for in California. The test is worth taking. [MDSO="mentally deranged sex offender." One of my time-killing projects is to run the name of my partner Penner within five words (/5) of mdso to see what comes up. Harmless, actually.]

Anyhow, my value added is this Megan's map site for Fresno. This link should take you to the map for my kid's school. Note that there is a single blue dot. The area is in the wealthy northern end of Fresno in new developments occupied by the usual professional class. And this should be the link for Lowell Elementary, which is where my Rotary club puts a good deal of its community service emphasis toward. Lowell is over 100 years old as a school - a rarity in California and check out this site for a the history of the neighborhood- in what is now a poor neighborhood housing a largely migrant population. The map looks like it has the measles.

I'm not sure what this means. Do professionals cover up abuse better? Probably. Are mandated reporters more likely to blow the whistle on the poor than on the wealthy? Maybe. Do poor migrants lack the language skills and legal connections to cop to a lower plea? Perhaps. Is there more abuse occuring in poorer neighborhoods just as there is more crime generally. Again, perhaps. I do remember, though, from my
time as Community Service Director for North Fresno Rotary that there was an incident where there was an attack in the Lowell neighborhood. The attacker fled to the school, where he was captured by five or six men from the neighborhood, who turned him over to the police. So, it may not be the best neighborhood to on Megan's list in. And the neighborhood is also the host to a phenomena where professionals have moved back into the neighborhood as a part of their religious calling, like Randy White:

In 1993 the White’s intentionally moved into the Lowell Neighborhood, Fresno’s highest poverty, highest crime community, where they have lived with college students and sponsor tutoring programs, kid’s clubs, and Christian Community Development activities on an ongoing basis.

So, I don't have anything profound here. I have no conclusions or theories. I just have some quanititative data that is interesting, and some counterpoint examples to that data, which would otherwise be used to show society's lack of concern for the poor.

There are no coincidences because everything is controlled by a very small group of people sitting in a room somewhere.

This is an interesting "coincidence." Earlier this week I made a passing reference to the service that I felt that William F. Buckley, Jr. performed for the conservative movement in ruling certain peoples and groups out of order. (See this post. ) David helpfully furnished this link to Buckley's book on the Sobran and Buchanan controversy. If that wasn't enough, as if arranged by a select group in the highest reaches of the media/military/government hiearchy, Book TV ran John McManus talk on his book "William F. Buckley, Jr.: Pied Piper for the Establishment."

Now, I am happy to report that I am young enough not to remember anything about the John Birch Society. But I had a dim recollection that Buckley sent the Birchers into the outer darkness back in pre-history. Well, it appears that the Birchers are still around and are looking for payback. According to this Book TV post, McManus is president of the John Birch Society. I caught part of the Q and A following his talk, which Book TV described as:

Mr. McManus addresses what he views as Buckley’s promotion of liberal causes, including abortion, drugs, and pornography, his connections to the CIA and Yale's Skull & Bones Society; and his criticism of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch.

The part I caught had McManus criticizing Buckley for (a) denying that there was a conspiracy (according to McManus, Moscow was a branch office of the conspiracy and (b) castigating Buckley for acting as the arbiter of conservativism and (c) implicating William Kristol, William Bennett and other neocons as enabling the liberal agenda.

There was enough wackiness to go around for everyone. [And who knew that the Birchers were still around and able to get broadcast time.]

And, by the way, in the tradition of Irving Kristol, who was a neo-con tending to the flickering flame of capitalism when everyone else was hopping on the socialist express, two cheers for Buckley.

Not for Sheep... is a blog by a "process philosopher." I guess that would make her blog a "philosophy blog," aka a "phlog," and the proprietor a "phlogger." [Give me a break here, I'm working.]

This is a really funny site.

Also from Mark Shea, check out this site which conclusively proves that Catholicism is paganism. Here's one link in the chain of the searing indictment of a Two thousand year old fraud:

Let us now examine the various Pagan groups that have utilized the Pine Cone in their ceremonies, their rituals, and their art. Once you study this list, you will be in for a great surprise in that the Roman Catholic Church utilizes the Pine Cone, just as any good Pagan religion would do! This fact is further firm evidence that Roman Catholicism is Pagan, not Christian. In fact, we would say that Roman Catholicism is counterfeit Christianity, with Paganism as its beating heart.

Amazing, I went to my local church - St. Anthony of Padua's - and for the first time I saw the Pine Cone motifs everywhere. St. Anthony holding a Pine Cone, the Pine Cone monstrance, the satanic images of Chip and Dale depicted as the Archangels Gabriel and Michael, respectively, elevating the false Pine Cone of Salvation. It was all there. How could I have missed it these last forty years.

The site contains other and equally conclusive evidence that Catholicism is a "counterfeit Christianity with paganism as its beating heart."

Enjoy.

A Modest Question

Mark Shea links to this article in the Standard.

Before you go there, though, are you eating anything? Ok, finish it up. I'll wait.

Done? OK, here's an excerpt from the article:

A few years ago, the London Daily Telegraph reported that "doctors at the state-run Shenzhen Health Centre for Women and Children hand out bottles of thumb-sized aborted babies to be made into meat cakes or soup with pork and ginger. Zou Qin, a doctor at the Luo Hu Clinic in Shenzhen, said the fetuses were 'nutritious' and that she had eaten one hundred herself in the last six months. 'We don't carry out abortions just to eat fetuses,' said Qin. '[But they would be] wasted if not eaten.'" And what--apart from vomiting--is the answer?

Here's my question. Apart from revealed or traditional morality, why would this be wrong? [I know it's wong within my moral tradition which recognizes dignity of human beings and the sanctity of the body, but why would an atheist find this practice to be wrong or immoral? Thanks, just wondering.]

Mark Shea to an article about a proposal in the Kentucky legislature about voiding the priest-penitent privilege in abuse cases.

Communio

After a two month hiatus, I went back to the Communio discussion group at the Holy Child bookstore. I've been busy, but if you find yourself divorced with children you had better make an effort to socialize or you can fall into non-social habits. The Communio group tackles obscure topics suggested by the Communio magazine. The articles are always dense and convoluted. Witness an article in the recent volume - The Concept of God after Theodicy.

The topic that we discussed tonight was mysticism in the Catholic understanding. Catholicism readily acknowledges mysteries. The Rosary calls Catholics to contemplate mysteries, such as the Incarnation, which are beyond human understanding. The Eucharist is both tangible and transcendent - bread and the Body of Christ. The mysteries involve events where the transcendent God becomes instantiated in his creation. Consider the Luminous mystery of the Baptism in the Jordan. Why did God need to be baptized? Don't answer. Stop there for a second. It doesn't need an answer. The answer will never be sufficient. Appreciate for a moment that God was baptized. What does that mean to us? Does it need to mean anything to us? Catholics are therefore called to be - in some sense - mystics. But what is mysticism?

The group's consensus was that mysticism is an attitude to God. Through a mystical approach to religion one attempts to "be" with God, to be with God and have some unity with God. A person contemplating a theological mystery can't unravel the mystery. God's becoming one of his creations cannot be parsed through logic, but it can be appreciated, accepted and contemplated.

How does the mystical experience differ from the Pentecostal experience? Both involve some kind of union with God. In the Pentecostal case, the union is with the Holy Spirit. But is there a difference? The mystical experience seems to involve the believer fitting himself to God. The mystic attempts through contemplation to seek God's presence. The Pentecostal experience seems to seek to have God fit the believer to Himself, to grab the believer into whatever that experience is. I am sure that that is a shallow formulation, but the interesting thing is the way that the difference highlights the different views that the two traditions have about the efficacy of human action. In general, for the Protestant tradition, humans have very little - or virtually no - capability to find God through their own effort. Catholicism, on the other hand, expects humans to use the powers that God has given man to seek and find God, of course, with God's assistance, sustenance and grace at all times. Consequently, because Pentecostalism emphasizes the Holy Spirit’s influence over believers may be very congenial to Protestants, whereas Catholicism may tend to mysticism inasmuch as that route nuances the believer’s pursuit of spiritual experience.

This is all speculation, of course. I don’t profess to be knowledgeable about either Pentecostalism or mysticism. Augustinian rationalism is more my forte. If you have a view, educate me.

Update Katherine at Not for Sheep... has her "rversion" story about her recent move from Budhism to Catholicism. I post this here because part of our Communio discussion was whether there was a difference between Budhist and Catholic mysticism. Naturally, thre are profound similirities in the attempt to find union with God, there are also differences. As a grounded rationalist, I submitted that one difference might be the divergent orientation of the two traditions to the physical world. Orthodox Christianity [i.e., non-gnostic] generally accepts that the real world is good since it was created by God. My understanding of Budhism is that it views the physical world as an illusion and seeks to get past the illusions of this world in a search for a loss of identity in Nirvana. Certainly, the Christian mystic is also trying to get past this world to the Real and the True in an attempt to find union with God, but I don't think it involves the same annihilation of personality as occurs in the Budhist tradition.

Katherine at Not for Sheep sketches the view that the real difference is love.

Well, she would know better than me.

The Raven fisks a watch.

This could start a whole new trend of fisking inanimate non-sentient objects, i.e., couches, automobiles, Alec Baldwin....

Moore-Watch

Verus Ratio links to this article concerning how Michael Moore is alienating yet another English-speaking country:

"Moore went into a rant about how the passengers were scaredy-cats because they were mostly white," Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote in the Jan. 6 Independent. "If the passengers had included black men, he claimed, those killers, with their puny bodies and unimpressive small knives, would have been crushed by the dudes."

Of course, if this had been said by a Republican, there would have been calls for resignations and reparations. And I thought that the thesis of Moore's Bowling for Columbine was that America was an overly violent culture prone to high number of gun deaths. Well, whatever. In any event, chalk this up as another example of Moore's-patent-lack-of-sensitivity-to-other-people's-tragedies.

In case you missed this.

I just received this in an e-mail, so I'm sure it's making the rounds.

Little Melissa comes home from first grade and tells her father that they learned about the history of Valentine's Day. "Since Valentine's Day is for a Christian saint and we're Jewish," she asks, "will God get mad at me for giving someone a valentine?"

Melissa's father thinks a bit, then says "No, I don't think God would get mad. Who do you want to give a valentine to?"

"Osama Bin Laden," she says.

"Why Osama Bin Laden," her father asks in shock.

"Well," she says, "I thought that if a little American Jewish girl could have enough love to give Osama a valentine, he might start to think that maybe we're not all bad, and maybe start loving people a little bit. And other kids saw what I did and sent valentines to Osama, he'd love everyone a lot. And then he'd start going all over the place to tell everyone how much he loved them and how he didn't hate anyone anymore."

Her father's heart swells and he looks at his daughter with newfound pride. "Melissa, that's the most wonderful thing I've ever heard."

"I know," Melissa says, "and once that gets him out in the open, the Marines could blow the shit out of him."

Man, I love this stufff

I grew up reading Analog. One of the favorite games of Analog readers was to write letters to the editor - originally, John W. Campbell, Jr., but in my day, Ben Bova - correcting errors in stories. The letters were usually chock-a-block full of math equations and other things I couldn't understand. [And still can't, which is why I went into law by way of a history major.] I couldn't understand the math but, of course, I envied the whole
existential coolness of the geek mystique.

Anyhow, Jay Manifold over at A Voyage to Arcturus is playing this game with his earlier post on the effects of a "burrowing nuclear bomb." Jay had originally posted that a shaped nuclear charge would have minimal effects on the surrounding environment. However, based on an abstract entitled "Low-Yield Earth-Penetrating Nuclear Weapons, " he's been forced to go back to the sliderule. It seems he hadn't considered seismic effects of a "shaped nuclear weapon:"

... expect complete destruction of buildings due to seismic waves at distances R [is greater or equal to ] 0.5 kT0.35 km, and considerable damage out to a distance R [is greater or equal to ] 2 kT0.35 km.

Now, I'm not sure what that means, but I get the sense it can't be good.

This seems like a good idea. Tech Law Advisor links to articles arguing for a statutory immunity for hyperlinks.

The Raven has an eclectic post on "cops." For example, there's the New York group that pays $200 to drug users to undergo sterilization procedures. [My Catholic instincts think that there is something quite wrong about this; my conservative instincts instilled by my conservative father think I should write a donation check. Particularly, after I read news reports like this one.

The Blog from the Core is pulling the Mullings-watch this week and points ot that Rich Galen makes some interesting observations about "Good news is no news." And, honestly, I hadn't heard how incoming Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist acted as a Good Samaritan on New Years Day or that the Florida State Democratic Party chairman was decrying the condition of his party, despite the desire for a payback of Mooreian (sp?) [Mooreovian, Moorish, whatever] proportions. Perhaps The OmbudsGod could shed some light on the "Dark Energy" that seems to dominate the Journosphere.

More Right-wing Historical Revisionism

Relative to yesterday's post on Bill Back, the California's Republican Party's Vice Chairman who circulated an article by William Lind which projects a rosy view of a world where the South won the Civil War, David provides this link to a Joe Conason article at Salon. Conason, who will never miss an opportunity to tar conservatives with vile innuendo, writes:

Is slavery compatible with compassionate conservatism? Can a patriotic Republican wish that the Confederates had won the Civil War? I ask because a White House spokesman has "declined to comment" on the revelation that Bill Back, a candidate for the chairmanship of the California Republican Party, distributed an article promoting those neo-Confederate views

Playing the guilt by association card, Conason follows up with:

It's likely that Rove and Bush don't want to annoy William Lind's patron, the powerful far-right figure Paul Weyrich, who often made life miserable for the White House during the first Bush regime. Lind operates the Center for Cultural Conservatism, a subsidiary of Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, where he fantasizes about burning feminists at the stake and concocts theories about the Marxist Jews who have infected American culture.

In case, anyone misses none too subtle smear, Conason points out:

Lind is the latest example of the moral sickness that pervades the far right of the Republican Party, where "morality" is sufficiently elastic to permit bigotry and thuggery, and "conservative" is defined to include the CCC and other openly racist organizations. Last summer, Lind appeared at a Washington conference of Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis, where he delivered a speech explaining how the "Frankfurt School" refugee academics who fled from Hitler's Germany to New York were the villainous creators of political correctness and much else that later went wrong in their adopted homeland. "These guys were all Jewish," he reportedly said, no doubt to considerable applause from the audience of anti-Semites.

Now, a few points are in order. First, Back's e-mail was circulated in 1999, so it appears that someone is doing a bit of historical hit-and-run smearing. Second, Back did publicly repudiate the Lind article when it resurfaced. Third, it appears - I hope - that Back has not circulated any e-mails speculating on a rosy what-if AH where Hitler won World War II.

On the other hand, this is all poison. As Jeff Jacoby points out Republicans are regularly slandered as "Nazis" and "Fascists." Those terms have more semantic weight than charges of being a "communist" or "red." [Which is a tribute to the fact that the Communists had a better public relations department since (a) communism was equally vicious and murderous and (b) remained a threat for most of the Twentieth Century, long after Fascism had been retired to a ridiculous project of knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing cretins.] A good example of this is Conason's ability to play a Connections-like game of linking Republicans to pro-confederate sympathy to an anti-semite to Nazi Germany. This kind of thing is particularly pernicious when you think about the honorable example of William F. Buckley, Jr., who has repeatedly disassociated conservativism from those elements - the John Birch Society, Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran - who would compromise conservatism's authenticate belief in individual moral equality.

Alternate History is interesting. It can illuminate the significant turning points of history by showing that history is not predetermined and that decisions have consequences. Holocaust revisionism and lamenting the Lost Cause, however, are not really inspired by an interest in AH. If one wanted to play the AH game of how to improve the Twentieth Century, there are more promising departure points than the Civil War. For example, what if the German Empire had won World War I. Fritz Lieber uses that assumption as the take-off point for his Hugo Award winning "Catch that Zeppelin." [It's probably more fantasy than Science Fiction, and here is the Fritz Leiber Homepage as value added.] Niall Fergusson's The Pity of War makes an extended argument that British intervention in the second Franco-Prussian war was a mistake. [And that book has just this minute gone on my 2003 reading list.] The fact that there is no equal fascination with this point of departure chillingly suggests that there is not a sufficiently large audience of irredentist Hohenzollern partisans to make it worth the while of the politician. And that alone is a reason not to tolerate pro-confederate or pro-fascist historical speculation.

cyberpunk author, William Gibson, has a blog. [Via Instapundit.]