Thumos

Obama Reassures Despots - WSJ.com

2009-04-20T23:18:00.001-04:00

Opinion: Obama Tells Arabia's Despots They Safe: America's diplomacy of freedom is officially over. - WSJ.com

Nanny state nonsense from the Canadian government

2009-04-09T12:57:00.003-04:00

A Quebec father who was taken to court by his 12-year-old daughter after he grounded her in June 2008 has lost his appeal.

Next up: binding arbitration for your son's allowance.

Marriage and the Law

2009-04-09T10:10:00.004-04:00

This past week saw two major news events in the ongoing marriage wars. First, the Iowa Supreme Court found a right for same-sex marriage hidden in their Constitution (the relevant provisions of which, they note, are “identical in scope, import, and purpose” to those of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution). Second, the Vermont legislature voted to overturn their governor's veto on gay marriage, making Vermont the first state to enact a statute legitimizing these marriages. Interestingly, supporters of gay marriage are much more focused on exploiting the first victory rather than the second.

Voters all across the country find themselves increasingly removed from the political and legislative process that is by design theirs, removed by judges who believe they know better when it comes to making ethical judgments in public policy. One thing the decision doesn't contain is any reference to a history of British common law on marriage and family, which one would think would be appropriate in this context, referring only disparagingly to "strong and deep-seated traditional beliefs and popular opinion."

It does contain an empty gesture to the people of Iowa while removing their sovereignty:

Finally, it should be recognized that the constitution belongs to the
people, not the government or even the judicial branch of government. . . . While the constitution is the supreme law and cannot be altered by the enactment of an ordinary statute, the power of the constitution flows from the people, and the people of Iowa retain the ultimate power to shape it over time.

But elsewhere, they assert

Our responsibility, however, is to protect constitutional rights of individuals from legislative enactments that have denied those rights, even when the rights have not yet been broadly accepted, were at one time unimagined, or challenge a deeply ingrained practice or law viewed to be impervious to the passage of time.

However, the Constitution itself is a legislative enactment. It was ratified by those same Iowans who were too dim and retrograde to view rights as expansively as the current Iowa Supreme Court sees them. So the Constitution establishes rights that were unimagined to its drafters and are not broadly accepted by Iowans today. But of course, the Constitution "belongs" to those Iowans.

So long as they don't attempt to use its provisions to actually pass legislation.

These are dark days for American self-governance.

Visualize a trillion dollars

2009-03-05T23:37:00.002-05:00

The last graphic just makes me think of the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Now visualize a trillion dollars leaving. Bye!

It's official: no reason to read the Village Voice anymore

2009-01-01T01:30:00.002-05:00

Nat Hentoff has been laid off. Back to Boston Boy, Speaking Freely, and the liner notes to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

Who Are You, cowbelled and Walkened

2008-12-19T09:58:00.002-05:00


	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

This is better than the Band track -- The Who were made for this, it seems.

More cowbell for Levon Helm

2008-12-18T22:06:00.001-05:00


	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

morecowbell.dj allows you to add both cowbell and Christopher Walken to any MP3.

You're Welcome!

What'll it be, hmmm?

2008-11-15T20:20:00.001-05:00

Just saw The Nutty Professor, the Jerry Lewis original, for the first time since I was in grade school. What a weird movie. Maybe the French are on to something.

Jerry Lewis - The Nutty Professor Cocktail
Uploaded by bhgbjazz

It's ok to steal in Japan

2008-11-12T08:26:00.009-05:00

The Wall Street Journal has a good editorial about the recount in the Minnesota Senate race. Why do we see, over and over again (Florida Presidential race in 2000, Washington Senate race in 2004, and now in Minnesota), that in close elections where Democrats are in control, they are able to magically find votes just in the nick of time, appearing in the back seats of cars, or Democratic precincts? But, as they say in Casablanca, the establishment is as honest as the day is long. It's only conservatives who engage in fraud by demanding things like photo id.

A liberal acquaintance at work who is very proud of his Master's degree in political science informed me before the election that adding phony votes in an election is morally superior to blocking valid votes. My opinion is that they are both vote fraud. He claimed that when adding a spurious vote, the proportional count is changed by 1/(n+1) (where n is the number of legitimate votes) whereas the proportional count is changed by 1/n when deleting a legitimate vote. Hmmm. Well 1) there's no proportional count in this country, 2) if it's merely about the effect each incremental vote has, then by that logic, stealing Japanese money is not as evil as stealing American money, since the dollar trades at about 95 yen.

Printing's alive

2008-11-11T11:43:00.001-05:00

Rahm Emanuel: "Pit Bull," "Hemorrhoid," "Toothache"

2008-11-07T00:15:00.007-05:00

President-Elect Obama has made his selection for point man, Chief of Staff -- Rahm Emanuel, the man Fortune describes as a "pit bull." Clinton-era Democratic operative Paul Begala identifies Emanuel as having an aggressive style that is "a cross between a hemorrhoid and a toothache."

Regardless how much Senator Obama campaigned for changing politics and the nastiness of tone (and McCain tried to portray himself as above pettiness), politics ain't beanbag. Obama signals that he understands this with his first major staff pick.

This is brilliant

2008-11-04T12:02:00.002-05:00

Does anyone find it amusing that a church that was famous for stretching the traditional definition of marriage in advocating polygamy is now depicted as nefariously plotting to rigidly define marriage as between a man and a woman and thus control the world (or maybe just California)? Just checking.

Time to take this out of mothballs

2008-11-03T11:55:00.002-05:00

As the presidential election campaign draws to a conclusion, it's time to take this blog out and air it a bit. Those who occasionally peruse may find something of interest soon.

Definitive Catholic bathroom book

2007-07-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

John Zmirak and Denise Matychowiak's The Bad Catholic's Guide to Wine, Whiskey & Song is a hoot. If you look up "snarky" in the Catholic dictionary, you'll find a picture of this book. You'll find the answers to questions like:

Why do Kentucky whiskeys bear the name of the famous French royal house of Bourbon?
How did pisco become the national drink of Peru? (See answer below)
Is vodka Russian or Polish in origin?

It's a random walk through the history of Christendom, viewed from an epicure/enophile perspective. Thoroughly Catholic in its attitude and orthodoxy, chock full of recipes (Matychowiak is a chef), Guide to Wine takes the givenness and goodness of creation and physicality seriously. It's a funny celebration and will leave you chuckling and gabbing with friends. Highly recommended.

Oh, and about that pisco:

[Catholic clergy] march[ed] through the country on foot[,] learning a dozen languages to preach the Gospel without the benefit of gunpowder. . . . When the priests saw the conquistadors robbing the country of everything not nailed down, and enslaving the natives to work in silver mines, they started defending the Indians' rights and organizing them on farms. Jesuits taught the Indians to grow grapes and ferment them. . . . Enraged Iberian vintners — don't cross these people, trust us — rioted for their right to soak the colonials, and in 1614, the ever-meddling Spanish Crown outlawed the sale of Peruvian wine.

The ever-crafty Jesuits applied their scientific training to invent a new drink which fit neatly through a loophole in the law — a brandy that was soon named for the earthenware containers which held it, piskos. . . . "[P]isco" soon caught on throughout New Spain, and gave the long-suffering Indians an industry they could count on . . . .

Theresa Duncan, R.I.P.

2007-07-25T15:49:00.000-04:00

The New York Times reports that Theresa Duncan took her own life earlier this month, apparently followed in suicide by her boyfriend Jeremy Blake.

Theresa Duncan was my colleague at a New Media startup in DC in the mid-90's. She and Monica Gesue were the creators of Chop Suey, a CD-ROM entertainment that was brimming with wit and whimsy. Theresa was sui generis: smart as a whip, ambitious, with a biting wit and a commanding presence. She was an outsize personality in every way -- a constant edge and a twinge of sadness. I remember being startled to find that a wisecracking fashionista was also a devotee of Martin Heidegger. It saddens me to think I'll never bump into her in NYC and have another startling conversation. Requiescat in pace.

UPDATE: Theresa Duncan created this charming clip below. Enjoy:

Scenes from a Marriage

2007-06-26T15:06:00.000-04:00

Mike Aquilina's The Resilient Church is an effortless, respectful look at a number of episodes in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Not a comprehensive history (or even an attempt at a concise one), this book offers readers a number of vignettes from the life of the Church, through its encounters with heresy and holiness, scandal and salvation. Political events find their way in, but Aquilina's focus is on the Church as exemplifying one particular virtue: perseverance. Inasmuch as all Christian history is the story of a divine marriage, Christ and his Church, consider this book as an honest and sometimes humbling memoir of how that, as yet not fully consummated, marriage plays out in the lives of the faithful across millennia. It's an excellent read, and while not scholarly, the reader is bound to find something of interest. I particularly enjoyed the treatment of the Crusades. Inasmuch as the history of the West largely cannot be understood outside the history of the Church, this book is recommended for believers and non-believers alike.

Cheney attacks the Constitution?

2007-05-27T16:31:00.000-04:00

Such a headline would warrant an impeachment, no? But of course it's not true. Michael Roston has another shocking headline: Cheney criticizes the Geneva Conventions in Military Academy commencement address. The Raw Story ran it, and Andrew Sullivan repeated the allegation here. Of course, it's not true, as is easily verified by reading a transcript of the actual speech.

The Vice-President's speech mentioned the Conventions exactly once:

As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away. These are men who glorify murder and suicide. Their cruelty is not rebuked by human suffering, only fed by it. They have given themselves to an ideology that rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of society. The terrorists are defined entirely by their hatreds, and they hate nothing more than the country you have volunteered to defend.

One really must (forgive the term) torture a common sense reading of the speech to find a criticism of the Conventions. Cheney merely stated an undisputed fact, that terrorist killers demand Geneva and constitutional protections. It's in Al Qaeda training manuals, for pete's sake.

Cheney spoke of the Convention and the U.S. Constitution in the same sentence and in the same manner, because in both cases the question hinges not on the validity of the law, but on the applicability of some of its clauses to this group of people. If one posits that illegal immigrants should not be eligible for Social Security, that is an indictment of illegal immigrants, not the Social Security system. The link between the two bodies of law is revealing: neither Roston nor Sullivan tried to claim that Cheney was "criticizing" the Constitution of the United States, either because so obvious a lie would be more glaring, or because, in their minds, slagging an international treaty is a bigger travesty than trashing the Constitution (which the VP explicitly swore to uphold, twice), or both.

Those papists and their Romish ways

2007-04-23T11:56:00.000-04:00

Is this political cartoon from Tony Auth intended to make us long for the days when vigilant citizens sought to keep Catholics in their place and keep them out of power?

One thing is certain: no one could do this sort of propaganda as well as Thomas Nast. Auth's version is . . . toothless, by comparison.

The battle is far from over

2007-04-19T13:29:00.000-04:00

Ross Douthat, posting on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog at The Atlantic Monthly, says that claims of a sweeping pro-life victory in the Supreme Court's Gonzalez vs. Carhart decision yesterday are greatly exaggerated. Money quote, responding to Jacob Weisberg's claim on Slate that conservatives have consistently won on abortion and gun control:

In every state, it's illegal for minors to purchase any firearm. Does Weisberg really think pro-lifers are vastly closer to attaining their goal than gun control advocates?

Carhart is cause only for extremely guarded optimism. Pro-lifers still need at least one more Justice.

The Times on Benedict

2007-04-17T11:03:00.000-04:00

This must be a sign that we are in the End Times. The New York Times has a reasonable, intelligent piece on Pope Benedict and his place in modern Europe. Infinitely better that the recent New Yorker piece -- a real piece of reporting that didn't seem phoned in, that actually had some analysis that required more than an espresso with Marco Politi. Carl Olson has a good review of it on the Ignatius Insight blog.

Letter from Europe: The Pope and Islam: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

2007-04-16T17:13:00.000-04:00

Letter from Europe: The Pope and Islam: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker:

what divides the most vocal and rigidly orthodox interpreters of their two faiths, from the imams of Riyadh and the ayatollahs of Qom to the Pope himself, is precisely the things that Catholicism and Islam have always had in common: a purchase on truth; a contempt for the moral accommodations of liberal, secular states; a strong imperative to censure, convert, and multiply; and a belief that Heaven, and possibly earth, belongs exclusively to them.

The "sources" for this article are overwhelmingly Vatican correspondents. It's a little like the New York Times sending a reporter to cover Hugo Chávez and relying largely on the Venezuelan correspondents for the Washington Post and CNN for the story. This article is reliably hostile to religion and the Catholic hierarchy. But what makes it really reprehensible is just what a patchy job of reporting it represents. As Marty Peretz has noted at the New Republic, it resembles a term paper more than journalism.

The fallout of Lawrence

2007-04-11T15:19:00.000-04:00

Should Incest Be Legal? | TIME

Sullivan: O'Reilly is not our class, dear

2007-04-09T14:20:00.000-04:00

Andrew Sullivan is a bright guy, but he's not nearly as bright as he fancies himself. I have to defend the New York Times pace Sullivan, even if it's a pretty minor point.

Sullivan got his knickerbockers in a bunch because the Times cited some true Internet NOBODY who had the temerity to suggest that people on the Internet observe some rules of civility, some of which may not be obvious. Who is this Tim O'Reilly, anyway? Doesn't he know that Sullivan reigns in the blogosphere and, well, just really gets it?

Well, Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media, a tech publishing powerhouse which sees itself, with some justification, as transforming the tech and communication worlds. He's one of the biggest organizers and supporters of the Open Source movement, one facet of which is the blogosphere itself. He's a widely read blogger. In short, he's an important source for a journalist who wants an informed opinion about cultural issues on the Internet.

When his readers pointed out to him that O'Reilly's opinion actually was news, Sullivan just got juvenile and sarcastic. Sullivan doesn't even bother to address O'Reilly's comments; he just treats him as unworthy to address because he doesn't meet some weird Andrewland requirement for blogosphere society credentials. In nearly every public arena where there is free conversation, there are also traditions, customs, rules, and taboos that dictate appropriate courtesy and respect, and which, yes, actually do make speech in practice more free.

Which Church Father Are You?

2007-04-04T15:16:00.000-04:00

Fathers of the Church has a great quiz, "Which Church Father Are You?"

You’re St. Justin Martyr!

You have a positive and hopeful attitude toward the world. You think that nature, history, and even the pagan philosophers were often guided by God in preparation for the Advent of the Christ. You find “seeds of the Word” in unexpected places. You’re patient and willing to explain the faith to unbelievers.

Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

World Ends: Third World Hardest Hit

2007-04-01T08:52:00.000-04:00

New York Times:
Poor Nations to Bear Brunt as World Warms

Hmm. Let's see the assumptions you'd have to make to get here:

There is a sustained global trend to rising temperatures (recently in the twentieth century scientists warned about the opposite).
This global trend is in large part man-made (many climatologists the apparent warming may be a natural cyclical warming trend, swamping any anthogenic effects).
Anthropogenic effects will be large (most credible models do have some increase in temperature due to increased levels CO₂, but they vary widely on the net effect).
Global warming will be injurious, rather than beneficial to humans (if someone proposed to create a machine that would lower global temperatures by 5 degrees, it's doubtful many would rush to turn it on. So do assume that the planet is right now at an optimal temperature for human life?)

So now the Times has extrapolated for us what will happen in the third world if global warming continues. Never mind that freezing CO₂ production would doom developing economies which need rapid economic growth to lift them out of poverty. Something must be done to soothe the eco-pagan consciences of the editorialists who craft the front page of the Newspaper of Record.

The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence

2006-12-19T15:02:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite books this year, Grail Code is the thoughtful answer to a question that has been on my mind for years, well before Dan Brown unleashed the merchandising behemoth that The Da Vinci Code became: namely, what is the core of the Arthur/Grail stories, and how do we understand the relationship of these stories to Christian culture? Mike Aquilina and Chris Bailey have done a bang-up job with this book. It's fun, with mock arthurian stylings in its chapter heads and allusions to such popular treatments as the 1981 John Boorman film Excalibur and 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Aquilina and Bailey highlight the changing contours of the legends in the hands of men like Chretien de Troyes, Walter Map, Sir Thomas Malory, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. They've turned the history of these romances into an engaging intellectual romance. Christian theology, British history, romance and adultery, this is a wide-ranging, romping read.

The Blooming of the American Mind

2006-10-19T09:05:00.000-04:00

It's taken me about twenty years to get around to reading this. Despite that, there were still a few surprises:

Lots of Nietzsche -- Allan Bloom was a bit mad for that guy. He seems sympathetic, even if not generally in agreement with Nietzsche's conclusions.
Doesn't fit into right/left, conservative/liberal categories that easily. Bloom was preoccupied with the notion that one might find a rational ground for morality, as opposed to some non-rational commitment for decisive action.
Not a lot of prescription -- he describes a dilemma, but he talks only briefly about things such as the "good old great books," in a kind of dismissive fashion.
He harbors a big grudge against 1960's campus radicals for trashing the lofty ideals of the university.

There's some good stuff in it, and generally, in its own oddly personal and idiosyncratic way, it's worth reading. Sometimes it seems the best thing about the book are the section headings, which are wonderfully evocative of the times we live in: "Relationships." "Creativity." "The Self."
"Values."

Rockaway Beach

2006-09-27T11:48:00.001-04:00

This speaks (er, sings) for itself. Utterly faithful to the spirit of the original.

Pleased to meet Fulton J. Sheen

2006-08-24T05:34:00.000-04:00

Janel Rodriguez has done Catholics under the age of 50 a huge favor with her biography Meet Fulton Sheen. She relies on Sheen's autobiography Treasure in Clay as the source for most of her work. Very readable and enjoyable, Rodriguez's book follows Sheen's life and development as both a canny media personality and, more importantly, as an extremely devout bishop who in some ways is a precursor to Pope John Paul II's communicative and telegenic piety. Rodriguez's prose is unobtrusive; she never gets in the way of what proves to be a fascinating story filled with colorful incident. If you are unfamiliar with Bishop Sheen, do yourself a favor and get this book.

My Scrofulous French novel

2006-08-17T19:33:00.000-04:00

Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles is a French novel which features two burned out victims of sexual liberation in the 60's: Bruno, who suffers through a humilating youth mired in excrement and spends his life eternally pursuing his next orgasm through degrading sexual acts, and Michel, the detached scientist who has difficulty maintaining normal human contact or expressing any tenderness or love and who can only find some semblance of fulfillment in the elevated life of the mind. The main difficulty is that it's a bit repetitive and not as amusing as it would like to be. Although the vast bulk of the novel could be taken as a social conservative manifesto, the conclusion of the novel, involving a technological redemption of human nature, is difficult to know how to read. Is it a brief for transhumanism out of burned out Dionysian hippie excess, or is the resolution intended ironically? Most importantly, why should I care? If it's ironic, it's neither funny nor perceptive enough to retain my interest. The only motivation to read through to the end is to find out the promised resolution/breakthrough in both the plot and Michel's scientific endeavors. When it turns out to hinge on warmed over ideas from Ray Kurzweil, Julian Huxley, and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, I'm left cold.

Moby-Dick

2006-07-20T06:00:00.000-04:00

This is one tough novel: big, confusing. It leaves you wanting to re-read it

If you wanted to know the difference in structure (as opposed to scale) between a short story and a novel, Moby-Dick (or, The Whale) is probably the as good an exemplar one would find of the novel form. Where a short story focuses on a single event, action, or mood, a novel tends to take the air a bit more -- perambulate, follow its own muse, wander. And wander Moby Dick does. It goes and goes and goes. Melville wrote that he had written a wicked novel. I wonder if that is perceptible to a 21st century sensibility. He strolls through various modernisms: Calvinism, pantheism, Kantianism, indifferentism, relativism, pessimism. Ahab -- what to make of him: sacrilegious, demonic, monomaniac, striving. A shadow of Christian belief, no longer sufficiently vital to bring salvation, but more than adequate to reinforce notions of depravity and condemnation, hangs over the novel.

Also, Moby-Dick will give you a new appreciation for Star Trek. The episodic nature of the novel makes possible a bunch of self-contained mini-plots, each of which could be spun into its own little story. There's the encounter with a ship that has been taken over by a charismatic preacher and his converted followers. There's a ship in search of an abandoned crew, and one that is filled with bon vivants, appropriately named The Bachelor.

There's undoubtedly a lot I've missed. Like a whale, this novel's soul is submerged most of the time, only occasionally spouting or breeching to reveal awesome and fearful sights.

From the guys who brought you "McCourt's in Session"

2006-07-17T22:50:00.000-04:00

Not getting to De Botton of things

2006-07-02T06:18:00.000-04:00

Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy is a chatty collection of six essays on selected thinkers from Socrates to Nietsche. Unfortunately, de Botton favors cartoons over examinations of text. His Socrates is reduced to simply a man who bucks conventional wisdom -- a kind of Athenian whistleblower. We could picture him arguing in the city council about heavy metals in the local water supply, whereas in reality he was much more radical. The actual ideas that he championed (e.g., the Good) languish unexamined. Similarly, Nietzsche becomes a kind of drill instructor or personal trainer, doggedly barking motivational truisms like "No pain, no gain."

De Botton's choices of philosophers (the others are Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, and Schopenhauer) indicates a preference for pessimism and materialism, a kind of flinty cynicism that sees itself as practical. Don't read this expecting even modest rigor or reflection. There's no dialectic here. His breezy style and penchant for cute illustration (yes, the chapter on Nietzsche does include an illustration of DC Comics's Superman) keep things moving, but at the end there's not much meat on these bones. De Botton is an affable, diverting, but ultimately unsatisfying conversationalist.

Hey Ya, Charlie Brown!

2006-06-20T14:17:00.000-04:00

Connie Chung, chanteuse

2006-06-19T15:42:00.000-04:00

Unreal. I assume that this was supposed to go through a bit of post-production surgery, but this is precious.

VOA News - US Military Statement on Zarqawi's Death

2006-06-08T07:15:00.000-04:00

VOA News - US Military Statement on Zarqawi's Death: "'Coalition forces killed al-Qaida [in Iraq] terrorist leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and one of his key lieutenants, spiritual adviser Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman, yesterday, June 7th, at 6:15 p.m. in an air strike against an identified, isolated safe house,' said U.S. General George Casey."

Where's Penn?

2006-06-06T10:22:00.000-04:00

Reading Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. What a treat! Really. Discursive, rambling, and sprawling, yes, but still a treat. I'm only halfway through. Monomania, messianic fixations, philosophic ramblings, the thing-in-itself, despair, pedantic treatises and taxonomic catalogs of the natural and nautical worlds -- it's something to sink your teeth into.

Shatner, flying in his taxi, takin' tips, and gettin' stoned

2006-06-03T04:31:00.000-04:00

More Shatner on a Saturday morning:

The DiCaprio Code

2006-05-22T14:52:00.000-04:00

Sent to me by a friend, the first paragraph from Dan Brown's next novel:

Prologue

Planet Hollywood
Los Angeles, CA
11:49 PM

Award-winning restauranteur and entreprenurial franchise owner Franky Poisson stumbled over a cardboard cutout of Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger, posed under a title reading "Twins." He lunged for the nearest memoribilia-housing glass case he could find - a tall rectangular column showcasing the old woman's shawl from Titanic. Brandishing an elbow, the sixty-year old Frenchman shattered the glass and - being rather not un-sedentary - collapsed to the floor in gasping breaths.

I await the rest with bated breath.

Wrong Guy, just Being There at the Beeb

2006-05-20T17:07:00.001-04:00

Too many Guys:

Instead of interviewing Guy Kewney, pundit of Newswireless.net, on the legal battle between Apple Corp. (of Beatles fame) and Apple Computer (of iPod and Mac fame) over the latter's use of the "Apple" mark in selling music through iTunes, the BBC managed to interview Guy Goma, a Congolese gentleman looking for a job at the BBC. Goma, thinking the media interview was somehow part of the job selection process, managed to pass himself off reasonably well as a pundit. He's really on top of his game with this quote: "Exactly. You can go everywhere in a cybercafe. It's going to be very easy for everyone to get something on the Internet." You'd think this only happened in Jerzy Kosinski novels.

Everything old is new again?

2006-05-19T14:08:00.000-04:00

Where have we seen this before?

The Canadian and Australian prime ministers expressed concern at unconfirmed reports that said Iran may force non-Muslims to wear colored badges in public so they can be identified.

The National Post newspaper reported Friday, citing human rights groups, that Iran's parliament passed a law this week that sets a public dress code and requires non-Muslims to wear a special insignia.

"Don't be stupid, /
be a schmarty, /
come join the Islamist party!"

Update: Malkin asks, "Is this true?" Stay tuned.

Update 5/24/2006: National Post retracts the story.

Da Vinci, die Bombe

2006-05-18T12:21:00.000-04:00

Submitted for your approval: the startling truth about the Da Vinci Code, and Hanks's hair. Seek the Truth.
Minor quibble -- the book did NOT rock. The preview actually looks faithful to it.

The philosophy of every Tom, Jacques, and Ari

2006-05-11T00:11:00.000-04:00

Last November Sheed and Ward reprinted Jacques Maritain's An Introduction to Philosophy. This primer, which Maritain first published in 1931, is a bit different from standard introductions to philosophical thought such as Will Durant's Story of Philosophy, Bryan Magee's Story of Philosophy, or Frederick Coppleston's exhaustive multivolume History of Philosophy.

To start with, Maritain is a Thomist, following in the intellectual traditions of St. Thomas Aquinas, who in turn draws upon Aristotle. Maritain's approach in this book is to first trace this history of philosophy up to Aristotle. For this, he posits primitive traditions, discernable from both theology and a reasonable induction from historical evidence, which contain wisdom that is common to all mankind globally. He seeks remnants of these traditions in pre-Greek Indo-European civilizations: Persian, Indian, and Chinese. After surveying these, he proceeds to Greek thought: the pre-Socratics, the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and finally Aristotle. Maritain sees the ancient Persian, Indian, Chinese, and pre-Socratic Greeks as derived from healthy primitive traditions (although in corrupted form). The work of philosophy, in part, is to recover the ancient wisdom and ground it in a system of reason and dialectic.

Upon stating in brief form what he sees as Aristotle's achievements are, Maritain changes his method. He does not follow, as most historical texts would, with a discussion of late antiquity and modern philosophers. For example, do not get a sketch of Descartes in historical context. Rather, Maritain discusses the structure of philosophy as a body of knowledge. That structure is itself determined by Thomist philosophy. Maritain discusses the boundaries of philosophy -- how it is distinct from the empirical sciences, for example, and how it relates to them. He contrasts the Thomist view on philosophy with alternatives in modernity. He then gives an account of the fields of philosophy:

Logic (a sort of preamble to philosophy proper)
Theoretical philosophy (speculative, related to understanding of the world)

Philosophy of mathematics and nature
Epistemology
Ontology and metaphysics
Natural theology

Practical philosophy (related to human action)

Philosophy of art and technology
Ethics

Walking through these fields (philosophical categories which themselves follow from his Thomism), Maritain points out both the Thomist and Aristotelian positions, and the modernist positions, which are usually contradictory extremes which the Aristotelian mean reconciles.

It's a very rigorous and systematic book with a good deal of common sense. It explains a lot of Thomism in a very detailed way and makes an excellent reference for those looking to understand this point of view. Thomism can be a bit dry. Maritain goes a long way to guiding the reader to see motivations and connections. For example, one can struggle Aristotle for years and not find as clear an explication of metaphysical terms such as essence (being inasmuch as it can be understood), substance (being inasmuch as it primarily is), and act and potentiality (being inasmuch as it is the subject of change and motion). For anyone interested in Thomism, this book is a find.

Making Sense Out of Suffering

2006-05-04T22:09:00.000-04:00

Peter Kreeft wrote a book twenty years ago that I've just gotten around to reading. I wish I had read it twenty years ago.

Kreeft is a philosophy professor at Boston College, and his book Making Sense Out of Suffering is a look at the implications of suffering in philosophy and theology. His audience is the skeptic, the person of uncertain beliefs and convictions who is tossed about in this world of sorrow and pain and is struggling to find some way to understand existence in light of that raw fact.

One thing that I really enjoyed about his book was his attention to various traditions and schools of thought. He starts with this observation:

By the time you finish reading this book, ten thousand children will starve, four thousand will be brutally beaten by their parents, and one thousand will be raped.

If you took a poll asking who the profoundest thinker of all time was, the man who would probably come out second, after Jesus, is Buddha. Buddha's entire philosophy centers around his answer to the problem of suffering. How can we not hear him out?

Gotama Buddha's voice is only the first of many which we must hear out. If we follow Kant's suggestion that the great questions revolve around God, the world, and the soul, then the question of suffering becomes a question of the existence of a supreme being and its relationship to the human world. The difficulty of suffering, for belief is that we are asked to accept the following:

God exists.
God is all-powerful.
God is all-good.
Evil exists.

How can this be?

Kreeft summarizes the possible alternate theologies, which differ on these points, either bluntly or subtly. For examine, the atheist may deny that God exists. Or one may more subtly say that God exists, but only as a psychological concept, thereby draining Him of real force and existence. All of these alternate answers have implications for the meaning of human suffering.

Kreeft's goal on the other hand, is to affirm Christian belief and answer a resounding "yes" to all these questions. The task then becomes making Christian belief intellectually credible and defensible. His technique is interesting -- rather than argue from cohesive deductive principles, Kreeft takes successive passes at the problem and allows answers and ideas to emerge suggestively, tentatively, rather than authoritatively and dogmatically.

MySpace for Catholics

2006-05-03T08:03:00.000-04:00

BusinessWeek profiles a nun who is launching a second Web site for Vatican, in addition to http://www.vatican.va.

It will be interesting to see how this works. One concern is possible attacks and attempts to deface the site, but at this point a lot of the techniques for dealing with that seem to be in place to mitigate the possible damage (cf., Wikipedia).

History of Catholic Oppression, Headbanger Edition

2006-05-02T11:16:00.000-04:00

A friend sends along this article on the tritone, the flatted fifth or augmented fourth in musical intervals. Fun piece, but has the usual historical ignorance about things medieval in the summary:

A new film about the history of heavy metal highlights the so-called Devil's Interval, a musical phenomenon suppressed by the Church in the Middle Ages.

No reference is provided, so it's impossible to tell what is being referred to. Color me skeptical about this. It's unlikely that people were tortured for compositions that used tritones.

I recall studying rules for voicing four part harmonies, and parallel fifths and octaves were "against the rules." It would be disingenuous to write that "music theory teachers suppressed parallel fifths in the twentieth century." In fact, the article itself notes that this interval (which is quite dissonant) was used "in presenting the devil [o]r . . . to portray the crucifixion."

But, for the record, I dig tritones. "Purple Haze" may be the definitive rock tritone intro. King Crimson also made a career out of the tritone. And you have to dig the name "Professor John Deathridge." Makes you want to be in a metal band with him (he has to skip the first name).

Passion is no ordinary word

2006-04-17T07:55:00.000-04:00

David Scott is interested in Catholicism as made vividly manifest by artists, poets, and saints. In The Catholic Passion, he seeks to get to the romantic, dramatic, visionary, vibrant core of Catholicism, in all its cultural manifestations. It's a rewarding and rewarded effort.

This book takes as its starting point Chesterton's assertion that the most perilous and exciting path is not heresy but Christian orthodoxy. Scott is not interested in detailing doctrine and dogma, but in dramatizing and fleshing out the faith as it is embodied and lived out in the Church. Scott tells stories of people such as Blessed Charles de Foucauld, Dorothy Day, Francis Thompson, Eugene O'Neill, and St. Catherine of Genoa. Certainly not all are saints -- some are not even believers. But all stories lead the reader to an intimation of what it is that draws so many of us to the Church.

The "passion" of the title is a word that evokes romance, suffering, and engagement. Scott shows us how this passion is a part of life as lived, with a voice that is committed and honest. His words give us not a set of catechetical propositions, but a body, a corpus of Catholicism that is set before the eye of the reader. If you get a chance, pick it up -- it's an excellent, enjoyable, nourishing read.

Be afraid -- be very afraid

2006-04-14T14:15:00.000-04:00

New York Daily News caught my eye with this article on TomKat. I don't usually follow this story (shooting fish in a barrel). However near the end of the story, filled with creepy details of Tom Cruise's attempts to script Katie's birth according to Scientologist, uh, for lack of a better word, ideas, comes this disturbing line: "Cruise said the couple has a 'plan B' for the birth if things don't go their way, but he didn't reveal it."

Oh. Scripting "shifts" for your other children and drilling all involved in childbirth to maintain silence through great pain in order to thwart Xenu's evil is just the standard plan. Plan B -- what on earth can that be? I'm picturing Tom in a Devil mask, screaming "Don't you $#%*!@ look at me!" while a hostage situation unfolds in L. A. Heaven help us.

Judas manuscript came from sleazy dealer

2006-04-13T12:31:00.000-04:00

Judas Gospel Figure Has Tainted Past - Los Angeles Times:

In its unveiling of the Gospel of Judas last week, the National Geographic Society credited Swiss antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger Tchacos with 'rescuing' the ancient manuscript, described as one of the most important archeological finds of the last century.

But National Geographic made no mention of a suspended sentence Tchacos received in Italy four years ago for possession of looted antiquities, nor her alleged involvement for years in antiquities trafficking.

'In the past, she was at the center of the looting in Italy,' said Paolo Ferri, the Italian state prosecutor who has led an investigation of the illicit trade for 10 years.

Looks like National Geographic doesn't mind dealing with Belloq.

Tiny KISS on The Situation

2006-04-12T15:30:00.000-04:00

Ok, I've really missed out by not having a TV. Tucker Carlson on MSNBC has shown us Tiny KISS, a tribute band for the 70's band composed entirely of little people. What a country!

Warning: unfortunately, this link can only be viewed in Internet Explorer (because Mister Softie likes it that way). It's worth it.

New patristics blog: The Way of the Fathers

2006-04-02T21:10:00.000-04:00

Big welcome to Mike Aquilina, who has come out to the blogosphere with The Way of the Fathers, a blog on patristics. Mike's a writer who's both inspired and inspirational, and his book of the same name is a wonderful introduction to early Christian writing and thought. He also plays a mean piano.

The Schmittizing of leftist critique

2006-03-29T16:42:00.000-05:00

This New Republic piece seems to be a trashing of Richard Neuhaus from Damon Linker, who was his associate editor at First Things from 2001-05. One paragraph really stood out:

Carl Schmitt, the political theorist who devoted a great deal of thought to this dilemma, determined that such men have no choice but to make an arbitrary yet resolute decision to obey some authority, any authority. Taking account of the options in Germany in 1933, Schmitt swore obedience to Hitler. Neuhaus, of course, makes an infinitely more respectable decision in favor of the Vatican. He does so because, in his words, 'the promise of Jesus that he would send the Holy Spirit to guide his disciples' is a 'promise made to the Church.' But why does Neuhaus--and why should we--trust this promise? He claims that he can know that the Church's authority is worthy of his obedience in the same way that a bride can 'know' that her 'bridegroom will be faithful.' Though Neuhaus does not employ the term, what he is describing is merely another leap of faith, a melodramatic form of cosmic confidence that derives its psychological strength from its aversion to philosophical thinking.

It's not as though Neuhaus frequently cites Schmitt or that there is some other obvious connection. Carl-Schmitt-slander seems to have become a trend, hasn't it? I hadn't heard of the guy before last year, and now, he's the hip brush with which to tar conservatives. Maybe Tim Robbins will write an awkward play about him. At least with Leo Strauss, there was an actual, discernable influence that the man had, albeit not nearly as pervasive as critics claim. My take is that of prominent modern conservatives, few are Strassians; virtually none are Schmittsters (what would the word be?).

The private, the public, and Hawthorne

2006-03-22T17:04:00.000-05:00

A friend at Random House sent me virtually every 19th century novel in Modern Library imprint, and I'm re-reading The Scarlet Letter now. A passage today struck me:

One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill of the open window, that looked towards the grave-yard, he talked with Roger Chillingworth, while the old man was examining a bundle of unsightly plants.
"Where," asked he, with a look askance at them,—for it was the clergyman's peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked straightforth at any object, whether human or inanimate,—"where, my kind doctor, did you gather those herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?"
"Even in the grave-yard here at hand," answered the physician, continuing his employment. "They are new to me. I found them growing on a grave, which bore no tombstone, no other memorial of the dead man, save these ugly weeds that have taken upon themselves to keep him in remembrance. They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during his lifetime."
"Perchance," said Mr. Dimmesdale, "he earnestly desired it, but could not."
"And wherefore?" rejoined the physician. "Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart to make manifest, an outspoken crime?"
"That, good Sir, is but a fantasy of yours," replied the minister. "There can be, if I forbode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or interpreted Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as a part of the retribution. That, surely, were a shallow view of it. No; these revelations, unless I greatly err, are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain. A knowledge of men's hearts will be needful to the completest solution of that problem. And I conceive, moreover, that the hearts holding such miserable secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable."

It recalled a conversation I had last week with an old friend. We got to talking (writing, actually) about whether truly private experience is possible. My friend recounted many experiences in which he had intimations of things which we might term "private": intimations of the death of loved ones, clairvoyant or telepathic experiences, and that sort of thing. One of the things that Hawthorne keeps coming back to is the social and personal skirmishes across the public/private border. A woman has a private affair that bears public fruit in the birth of her child and results in her being very publicly humiliated. Her husband abandons his public claims and ties to her and assumes a new identity. He attaches himself to her lover, a minister, who holds the knowledge of his sinful affair deep within his own heart, where it nonetheless becomes known and visible to the husband. Throughout, the public and private have a way of bleeding into one another. Never really saw this before (of course, you don't see much the first time around).

The worst movies of all time == the best movies of the 80's?

2006-03-12T21:06:00.000-05:00

What was it about the 80's? My theory is that what pop music was to the 70's, pop films were to the 80's -- that is, all the money, headlines, raves, and Oscars were grabbed by films that were practically unwatchable. Just saw Cocoon and Good Morning, Vietnam this weekend. Wow. Awesomely bad. Supremely unwatchable.

And don't get me started on Oliver Stone! What a hellish decade in movies. What were we thinking?

Paranoid thoughts of mind control

2006-03-09T14:23:00.000-05:00

The Pope likes to unwind by listening to his iPod. . . . The Queen, President Bush and Tony Blair all own an iPod.

Can a one-world government be far behind?

Critique of Pure Reason

2006-03-04T14:35:00.000-05:00

What can you say about the Critique that hasn't already been said? I revisited this book as a result of a discussion with the Prince of Lit Kicks, this time around at a more leisurely pace.

This is a daunting work. It's also a necessary work, inasmuch as any understand of contemporary thought and intellectual history must encounter it. Kant has influenced nearly every major school of thought and cultural trend for the last 200 years. Below, I'll try to sketch his thought in this Critique.

This is the story of Immanuel Kant, who found philosophy a mess and sought to fix it. Specifically, he was a former Rationalist who was disconcerted by British Empiricism (specifically the skeptical philosophy of David Hume). He sought to provide a grounding for the truths of empirical science and mathematics, establish the possibility of religious faith and practice, while at the same time avoid dogmatism in metaphysical reasoning.

How did he seek to do this? By establishing a critique of reason whereby he understands the validity of all mental constructs. Kant distinguish between judgments which are a priori (prior to experience) and a posteriori (arising out of experience), and judgments which are "analytic" (trivial, tautological) and "synthetic" (where the predicate adds something that is not contained within the subject). Are synthetic a priori judgments possible? Kant answers yes, and much of this book deals with what follows from that.

First Kant deals with how we have sense experience. He claims that space and time are necessary a priori conditions for sense experience -- not physical things in the world. The content of our experience is sense-data: raw sensation that arises outside ourselves or inside ourselves and is "given" in experience. The forms in which we construct that experience are space and time. Sensations, organized within us spatially and temporally yield sense experience (perceptions).

Kant then proceeds to our abstract thought. What he terms "Understanding" has pure, a priori concepts according to logical form. He calls these "Categories." These do NOT arise as a mere empirical habit/convention -- they are prior to experience and are necessary forms that allow rational beings to experience the world intelligibly. Thus, we take the raw givens of our Understanding, which are perceptions (which we dealt with under "Transcendental Aesthetic"), and we impose the categories upon these perceptions -- we "schematize" our experience.
Perceptions, when given intelligible form according to schemata, yield intelligible concepts. We are justified in doing this because the perceptions are not things-in-themselves, but mere appearances (phenomena), and in order for these phenomena to exist in an experience that is coherent and consistent for us, they must have these forms. We are NOT justified in applying these categories to things-in-themselves (noumena).

This is where Reason eats itself. It tries to do the same thing the Understanding did, but now it does this with respect to the big metaphysical questions. It starts with concepts and attempts to unify all phenomenal experience according to concepts and yield the Ideas of Pure Reason. When it does this, it gets all confuzelled. It tries to deal with 3 Big Problems (Kant uses the term "dialectic"):

Soul - Reason wants to insist that the thinking soul exists, that it is subject (pure substance), that it is simple, and that it is unchangeable through all its activities. These are the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. We need these ideas -- their contraries are unthinkable for us(?), but these are not demonstrable.
The World - Reason wants to answer questions about the series of appearances that constitute the world: Is the World limited or unlimited in space and time? Is the world made up of simples or composites? Does freedom exist in the world? Is there a necessary being connected with the world? These are the Antinomies of Pure Reason. Unlike the Paralogisms, these questions admit of contradictory answers. They, too, cannot be adjudicated by pure reason.
God - Reason wants to demonstrate the existence of God. Kant refers to this as the Ideal of Pure Reason. He claims that all arguments demonstating God's existence in fact, despite outward appearances, depend upon one method, the "ontological" proof of God's existence, which Kant disallows as transempirical.

Kant tries to tell us how to employ reason. First, stop arguing speculatively about God and other ultimate metaphysical realities! But he does urge us to apply those metaphysical ideas in practical (moral) contexts -- we are obligated to do so. In this, he anticipates the Victorians, who were somewhat skeptical on matters of faith, but stressed the necessity of continuing to act according to traditional morality. The dialectic problems deals with ideas are not verifiable speculatively. They are not constitutive of experience. Rather, they serve a regulative function, specifically in the practical realm of morality.

Kant claims that reason is architectonic: it naturally wants to assume the greatest generality. Kant says this is fine for moral thinking, but bad for speculative thinking.

Kant says that philosophy answers these questions: "What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for?" The bulk of Critique of Pure Reason answers the first question. The Critique of Practical Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Metaphysic of Morals, etc., answer the second question. The third question ties the two together -- this is what Kant deals with at the end of the first Critique.

Kant sees the great transendental ideas as being God, Immortality, and Freedom. They are the starting points of theistic religion (e.g. Christianity and Judaism). These can neither be verified nor disproved by speculative reason (since speculative reason must by its nature deal with givens (Latin, data) either from sense-experience or pure intuition (as in mathematics). These ideas, however, are necessary "regulative" ideas for the guidance of practical (moral reason) and are valid in that connection. Thus, the second Critique answers the question "What ought I to do?" by recourse to the transcendal idea of Freedom. The question, "what may I hope for?", is given response through the transcendental ideas of God and immortality, for if God does not exist, nothing can grant us happiness for moral behavior and unhappiness for immoral behavior, and if we're not immortal, God won't have anyone to reward.

I probably have made errors and inaccuracies in the above, but I hope I give a flavor for his thought. Kant is sober, earnest, and disciplined. Again, he's not easy, but I think he's worth the effort.

Telegraph | News | Soviets 'had Pope shot for backing Solidarity'

2006-03-02T21:59:00.000-05:00

Was the Soviet Union behind the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II? An Italian commission says, yes, definitely. The man who was deputy chairman of the KGB at that time says no, as does the FSB, the re-named KGB.

Guns, germs and steel

2006-02-06T15:10:00.000-05:00

The Purist

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."

That bit of Ogden Nash whimsy came into my head as I thought about Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, a reflection on human history through the lens of evolutionary biology. Diamond, unlike Professor Twist, is seeking answers to real world problems. In this case, he seeks to understand the plight of indigenous peoples and their subordination to European and Asian cultures in light of evolutionary pressures. Even so, Diamond struggles awkwardly in his attempts to justify the ways of the Blind Watchmaker to men. One false note comes early in the book, when he departs from his evenhandedness to assure us that not only should we not hold New Guineans to be less intellectually endowed than Europeans (a reasonable enough assumption), but that they are probably intellectually superior. He admits that he can't demonstrate that superiority empirically, so that assertion strikes the reader as an attempt to curry favor by a politically correct reverse bias.

On the other hand, there's a lot of really stimulating and interesting stuff in this book. Diamond talks about: what kinds of foodstuffs are necessary to support civilization; why disease almost always flowed from native Europeans to native Americans (and not vice-versa), whereas Europeans encounter many new diseases when they attempted to enter Africa; why those previous two topics are related; how innovation happens; etc. It seems like there's an interesting fact or point of view whenever you turn the page.

The book seems to want to be a complete explanation for the course of human history -- it's got that sort of broad, sweeping intellectual appeal that a large work of philosophy or science has. For example, after someone learns Newtonian mechanics, he tends to see the entire universe as the interplay between physical forces that are expressed in terms of differential equations. A similar dynamic happens here.

As with most grand theories, it's important to see that there are some important limits to the analysis. While we can see why, in broad strokes, European and Asian peoples might have overwhelming advantages in human history in purely biological and geographical terms, Diamond's analysis is of no help in answering historical questions that still might strike us as large, but come within the realm of European or Asian culture, instead of at the border with other peoples. For example, it's hard to see how his analysis adds anything to our understand of conflicts such as the Greco-Persian wars, the rise and decline of Rome, the Napoleonic Wars, or the American Civil War. Certainly these questions are important, and we rightly inquire into agricultural, military, political, and culture causes for these events. In these cases Diamond's analysis is largely impossible, since we are dealing with peoples that share genetics, foodstuffs, climates, terrains, etc.

Perhaps I'm nit-picking. It's an excellent, thought-provoking book. I'd just like to temper the inevitable temptation to view all history through this lens.

Whores, and there's an end on it

2006-02-02T23:17:00.000-05:00

Jim Geraghty at TKS writes about a Turkish movie that shows

American soldiers crash[ing] a wedding and pump[ing] a little boy full of lead in front of his mother. They kill dozens of innocent people with random machine gun fire, shoot the groom in the head, and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.

The surprise is that it stars American actors Gary Busey and Billy Zane. It's been a while since these two have been in the money (Zane's terribly hammy performance in Titanic, e.g.), but to appear in propaganda that is both anti-American and anti-Semitic is a new low for both.

Google: Tiananmen? Never Happened!

2006-01-29T20:27:00.000-05:00

Evan Coyne Maloney has a good bit on brain terminal about Google's selective social conscience:

Google has been taking a lot of flak, rightfully so, for censoring search results to satisfy the Chinese communist dictatorship.

The search engine is placing notices on each page notifying users that items have been censored at the request of the Chinese government, so it isn't quite as bad as Microsoft's actions to placate the Chinese, which include taking down entire websites without notice, rendering them inaccessible to the entire world. Google's censorship applies only to the version of the search engine aimed at the Chinese market. Still, for a company whose motto is 'Don't Be Evil,' the action is at best hypocritical, and it shows the slogan to be nothing more than empty P.R. sermonizing. . . .

What makes Google's actions even more hypocritical is that, just a week before this Google flap erupted, the company was hailed by privacy advocates for refusing to turn over to the U.S. Justice Department aggregate data on searches for child pornography. What a brave stand!

So Google has the backbone to rebuff to the U.S. government's attempts to fight child porn, but the Don't Be Evil company is willing to help China continue to repress its people by erasing moments from history like the Tiananmen Square massacre

Nailed.

Encyclical Letter "Deus Caritas Est"

2006-01-26T11:38:00.000-05:00

Pope Benendict XVI's first encyclical letter "Deus Caritas Est" ("God is Love") has been published and is available in English on the Vatican's Web site. Haven't read it yet, hope to get to it this weekend.

Greg Gutfield on the Huffington Post

2006-01-23T17:29:00.000-05:00

Greg Gutfield has a good satire up at the Puffington Host: "Marking Sunday's anniversary of the 33-year-old Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, Planned Parenthood has launched a magazine targeting 'choicers' to be given out at clinics across the country.
'This new magazine will reflect the growing concerns and needs of women in the child-nonbearing age group,' says Melody Barron, a spokesperson.

Called 'Child-Free,' the premiere issue will feature articles and sections that target this prized demographic, as well as counter all those supermarket magazines that show actresses and models happy with their new babies and pregnancies."

It gets better. Check it out.

Z-Man #2 has a new tape, too

2006-01-20T14:59:00.000-05:00

Al-Qaeda's al-Zawahiri praises 'martyrs' in Afghanistan in audiotape - Forbes.com: "Al-Qaeda's number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, paid tribute to the Islamist 'martyrs' in Afghanistan, in an audiotape posted on an Islamic website purportedly from the target of an air strike last week.

The 18-minute tape, whose authenticity could not immediately be confirmed, gave no indication of when the recording was made. But the website said it was 'a new speech by Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri, may God protect him'. "

Pope's First Encyclical Due This Month - Forbes.com

2006-01-20T13:18:00.000-05:00

Pope's First Encyclical Due This Month - Forbes.com: "Pope Benedict XVI said Wednesday he will publish his first encyclical on the different aspects of God's love next week, adding it was 'providential' the text would be released after a period of prayer for unifying all Christians. "

Sad post in the midnight hour

2006-01-20T00:14:00.000-05:00

R.I.P. Wilson Pickett

Sen. Patrick Leahy will vote against Samuel Alito

2006-01-19T11:40:00.000-05:00

Leahy just announced this at a speech at Georgetown Law Center. Alito isn't a done deal yet. It'll be interesting to see how the Dems play it. Red state Democrat senators will support, blue staters oppose, with a total just over 60 nominating Alito? This would immunize the party leadership against the wrath of the Left. They can say they didn't call for it because the votes weren't there, leaving Daily Kossacks to fume at the Ben Nelson's of the world, but not the Leahy's and Kennedy's . . . .

Or they can have a narrower loss and antagonize their base. Or they can call for a filibuster and probably lose the filibuster in the future.

The pro-life "conspiracy"

2006-01-18T13:12:00.000-05:00

A good friend of mine on the other side of the abortion controversy writes to me that Alito looks assured of nomination because the pro-choice side was outmaneuvered by the pro-lifers, and the pro-choice activists did nothing. I have to wonder what planet he's on.
For example, here's the headline in huge, stop-the-presses font on NARAL's homepage:

The battle for the Supreme Court continues . . .
Stop Anti-Choice Alito
Help save the Supreme Court from President Bush:
Tell your Senators to oppose anti-choice Alito!

On the National Right to Life Committee page, we find . . . no call to action on Alito. The first and largest link is "PARTIAL-BIRTH ABORTION RETURNS TO THE U.S. SUPREME COURT." No invective, no call to action, just a warning that activists should pay attention. The Alito link? The writers at the New York Post ("Headless Body Found in Topless Bar") are undoubtedly impressed with this attention grabbing headline: "Heightened Interest in Alito's Views on Abortion as Hearings Approach." The date on the linked story is December 6, 2005. That's right, they didn't even bother to call for his passage, and they didn't bother to update it once the hearings came or went. NRLC's volunteer copy editors are worth every cent they're paid.

How did I choose these pages? I simply googled the most prominent pro and anti abortion organization that I knew off.

Of course, I don't expect my friend to see that his analysis was wrong. Like most pro-choicers, he's convinced that Alito is likely to succeed because the pro-lifers were more vocal and focused on confirming him than the pro-choicers were on shutting him down. Why acknowledge anything that's actually occurring or address contrary evidence?

For the time being, the reality denial of the pro-choice sympathizers works against them.

Poor Richard's Birthday

2006-01-18T13:05:00.000-05:00

The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary: "HAPPY 300th BIRTHDAY, BEN FRANKLIN!"

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin.

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves

2006-01-17T12:56:00.000-05:00

Cheerfully desperate, curmudgeonly in a breezy way, Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots, and Leaves is a delightful, quick read. Truss takes on the tendency of email and other rapid-response technologies to send our written communications into a world of Joycean incoherence. It's a chatty thing, with lots of diversions and asides, such as the contributions of Aldo Manuzio to the wonderful world of typesetting and punctuation. This book makes a great gift for people who love books qua books and reading qua reading.

Truss have a very pleasant sense of play. For example, in a section dealing with particular punctuation rules, she loves to display those rules she's writing about within the selfsame section. Truss is clever and lively and charming. Bookworms, give it a try. You'll like it.

Are you ready, CC?

2006-01-16T23:43:00.000-05:00

The Political Teen has a video of Ray Nagin advocating keeping New Orleans a "chocolate" city.

Isn't that charming.

I'm picturing David Duke campaigning to keep Louisiana "vanilla."

Apple Launches iMeat?

2006-01-10T23:38:00.000-05:00

News of the Weird:

A 14-year-old girl who received a new Apple iPod opened the sealed box and found raw mystery meat inside, according to a Local 6 News report.

Rachel Cambra purchased a new high-tech iPod for her daughter as a gift this week. When she opened the sealed box, the device was missing and in its place was a piece of raw meat, the report said.

Muslim Scholars Were Paid to Aid U.S. Propaganda - New York Times

2006-01-10T23:36:00.000-05:00

Muslim Scholars Were Paid to Aid U.S. Propaganda - New York Times:

A Pentagon contractor that paid Iraqi newspapers to print positive articles written by American soldiers has also been compensating Sunni religious scholars in Iraq in return for assistance with its propaganda work, according to current and former employees.

And this is a bad thing because . . . .? Isn't the Times always claiming that we're not winning Muslim "hearts and minds"? Shouldn't we be trying to win some?

Lazy Sunday (Chronic of Narnia)

2006-01-10T23:33:00.000-05:00

Port Authority at Found at Fault for 1993 WTC Bombing

2005-10-28T14:30:00.000-04:00

Ah, the joys of civil litigation. This detail in a civil case arising from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center is priceless:

In order to reach a verdict, at least five of the six jurors had to agree. The jury voted unanimously that the Port Authority was negligent. It found the authority 68 percent at fault for the bombing, while the terrorists who carried it out were 32 percent at fault.

In other news, a jury found Ford's Theatre to be 62 percent at fault for Lincoln's assassination, while John Wilkes Booth was 38 percent at fault.

Sweet smell of -- ?

2005-10-28T13:50:00.000-04:00

Yummy diversion or sign of the apocalypse? You make the call.

Don't cry for me, Mesopotamia

2005-10-17T10:54:00.000-04:00

Wyclef, Baathist, freestylin' into trouble: "Father Saddam cries in the prison"

Richard Clarke

2005-10-15T11:32:00.000-04:00

Recently read Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies. The prose style is atrocious, even for a hastily written "instant bestseller." The badly-written "remembered" dialogue strains credulity. He recreates detail that makes him into an omniscient narrator. For example, he reads Condi Rice's mind and strongly implies she was utterly ignorant about Al Qaeda. That's more than a tiny bit presumptuous.

It also would help if just once, in his memoir, he didn't claim that he had made every call correctly. If it had been written in Lincoln's time, there would have been a passage where he writes, "I strongly opposed the choice of Ford's Theater, as the strong sentiment of the southern actors was well known. Unfortunately, my warning fell on deaf ears."

His treatment of Clinton's Mogadishu omits key facts that he must be aware of. It's utterly dishonest to say that Clinton is criticized for the deaths of 18 American soldiers. Rather, the criticism is that Clinton's response was to say, "Absolutely no more casualties. Let's formally recognized the man we were trying to arrest -- pick him up in a limousine instead of chains." Whether or not that criticism is fair, the reader deserves to hear it stated correctly before it can be rejected or accepted.

His treatment of the Millennium plot ignores the fact that NONE of his preparedness exercises were responsible for catching the LAX bomber -- it was a complete fluke, a customs official at the border deciding to pull a nervous guy out of the line, a man who then panicked and fled. Had he played it cool, LAX would have been bombed. Interestingly, Clarke's hero Sandy Berger was just convicted of illegal removing and destroying the after-action reports on the Millennium plot. A wild guess is that they painted Berger and Clarke's efforts as insufficient.

Clarke is never bothers to meet his opponents objections. He mischaracterizes arguments about the Iraq terrorism connection (arguments that he himself is on record making in the late 90's, when he claimed that the al-Shifa plant in the Sudan was making chem weapons with much help from the Iraqis). He gratuitously slanders Laurie Mylroie by totally misstating her theory about an Iraq connection to the first WTC bombing.

You'd have to go back to the Nixon Administration and its aftermath to find someone so intent on covering his ass and denying the obvious fact about his legacy.

Clarke depicts himself consistently as the smartest guy in the room in any situation. A small ego he does not have. No mean feat, considering he failed in his main responsibility for 9 years.

On the positive side, you do get an occasionally interesting behind-the-scenes look at U.S. counter-terrorism policy.

Remember the Cole

2005-10-12T10:35:00.000-04:00

Today is the 5th anniversary of Al Qaeda's bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Seventeen sailors lost their lives in the terrorist attack.

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin.

Shining

2005-10-04T10:58:00.000-04:00

Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duvall in a heartwarming picture.

James Earl Carter, voyeur?

2005-09-30T17:30:00.000-04:00

In his 1976 Playboy interview, Jimmy Carter confessed to committing adultery in his heart. Times change. Nearly three decades later, he seems to have moved on to stronger stuff:

Carter recalled . . . a young Ethiopian girl’s eagerness to demonstrate that she, like her brother, could use the small latrine their father had made for them.

"She spread her skirt out very carefully and she squatted down to relieve herself." Carter said.

Carter added jokingly, "We took some pictures of it."

Hat Tip: Jim Taranto

Pervez Musharraf is in NYC today

2005-09-16T17:00:00.000-04:00

Heavy security presence around his appearance at the Time-Life building (CNN interview today?).

Hurricane Katrina

2005-09-16T13:02:00.000-04:00

Peggy Noonan has a good column on Katrina and its implications for Bush. As frequently happens, Ms. Noonan gives eloquent voice to things felt but difficult to phrase. The federal response to this natural disaster has been disastrous as well, and claims of local and state incompetence, however true, smack of an "everybody else is doing it" defense. The president has a lot of work to do to reassure the public that we are prepared for another disaster (or terrorist attack).

Louisiana 1927

2005-09-08T11:54:00.000-04:00

Randy Newman wrote a great song about the flood in Louisiana in the 20's. Aaron Neville did a beautiful cover. If you've got Rhapsody, you can listen to these songs here. Otherwise, it's worth getting from iTunes or on CD.

Hell is . . .

2005-09-08T11:18:00.000-04:00

Excellent piece on Hunter S. Thompson at Godspy.

Let 'em eat sex

2005-09-01T22:40:00.000-04:00

To a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Planned Parenthood of Houston confronts the most terrifying problem faced by survivors of the disaster in New Orleans. Starvation? Nope. Disease and unsanitary conditions? Nah. Homelessness? Guess again:

Did you escape the hurricane without your birth control? As a courtesy to women fleeing Hurricane Katrina, we will offer one free cycle (one month) of birth control or one free Emergency Contraception kit to women presenting to a PPHSET clinic with a valid Louisiana or Mississippi driver's license. We also are offering one depo injection at a total fee of $41.00 (we are waiving the office visit charge, and offering the depo at a 50% discount). This offer is good until September 10th.

Hat tip: The Corner.

Pray for the Big Easy

2005-08-31T18:10:00.000-04:00

Still on hiatus. In the meantime, our heart goes out to the residents of New Orleans, as the disaster worsens. Two places where readers can make contributions: Catholic Charities USA and Stormaid.com.

On Hiatus

2005-08-25T09:29:00.000-04:00

Mrs. T. (Monster Mom) is a monster mom again. Happy birthday to Augustine James, born Aug. 22, 2005. He weighed in at 7 lbs., 8 oz. We're on hiatus from blogging until things quiet down -- we'll post photos soon.

Pope Benedict, speaking in Cologne synagogue, warns of rising antisemitism

2005-08-19T15:02:00.000-04:00

Story here: "Speaking before Germany's oldest Jewish community in Cologne, Benedict said that 'today, sadly, we are witnessing the rise of new signs of anti-Semitism and various forms of a general hostility toward foreigners.'"

Saleh Mohammed al-Aoofi, Al Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia, killed

2005-08-18T13:38:00.000-04:00

AP reports:

Al Qaeda's leader in Saudi Arabia was killed Thursday during clashes with police in the western city of Medina, the Interior Ministry said.

Saleh Mohammed al-Aoofi was among six al Qaeda militants reported killed Thursday during police raids on numerous locations in the holy city of Medina and the capital, Riyadh, security officials told The Associated Press.

Hat tip: In the Bullpen.

Osama heading for Iraq?

2005-08-18T13:22:00.000-04:00

Indian press is reporting on intercepted Al Qaeda communications that indicate that Bin Laden is going to Iraq to direct the jihad. Can't find any confirmation of this story so far.

Woman with a knife kills leader of Taizé in front of worshippers

2005-08-17T22:04:00.000-04:00

Sad story. R.I.P., Brother Roger.

Iranian prosecutor now threatening family of Ganji

2005-08-17T16:09:00.000-04:00

The New York Sun reports:

WASHINGTON - The Iranian prosecutor responsible for jailing Akbar Ganji hinted that he would pursue prosecution of family members of the dissident journalist.

Ganji is in the 69th day of his hunger strike.

Are sacred texts "all-or-nothing" in public schools?

2005-08-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

Mike G. Gaither at libertyWatch has been asking some questions regarding Odessa and church-state relations.

As a matter of law, public schools may constitutionally teach Bible courses, as this opinion demonstrates:

[I]t might well be said that one's education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment. (Abington School Dist. v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963)).

Note that the study of the Bible (either on its own or as part of a general discussion of religion) is specifically approved here. The Abington precedent has been cited as allowing the Bible to be studied for literary and historic qualities in later Supreme Court decisions (e.g., Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968 and Stone v. Graham, 1980). Mike asserts: "The Supreme Court (the folks we hire to interpret the Constitution) has ruled fairly consistently the government (i.e. public schools) cannot endorse one religion over another. A class teaching the Koran (Quoran) with no other classes teaching the texts of other religions available, would be just as biased and unlawful." There is much in the existing jurisprudence that is not based in the text, legislative history, or intent of the Constitution, but even the Court has ruled in these cases that mere teaching of the Bible as literature or history does not in and of itself constitute an establishment of religion. Is there a SCOTUS precedent that requires schools to teach the Koran as literature if the Bible is taught as literature? If so, is there a mandate to the Bhagavad Gita be taught as literature/history? What about L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics -- must that be taught as literature/history?

Iraqi Chemical Stash Uncovered

2005-08-16T12:57:00.000-04:00

Iraqi Chemical Stash Uncovered:

U.S. troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a suspected chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals believed destined for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians, military officials said Saturday.

Monday's early morning raid found 11 precursor agents, "some of them quite dangerous by themselves," a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, said in Baghdad.

Combined, the chemicals would yield an agent capable of "lingering hazards" for those exposed to it, Boylan said. The likely targets would have been "coalition and Iraqi security forces, and Iraqi civilians," partly because the chemicals would be difficult to keep from spreading over a wide area, he said.

Boylan said the suspected lab was new, dating from some time after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. . . .

Too bad the murder weapon wasn't a "cyber-knife"

2005-08-16T12:34:00.000-04:00

File under Modern Weird: Chinese online gamer gets life for murder - Games - MSNBC.com:

BEIJING - A Shanghai online game player who stabbed a competitor to death for selling his cyber-sword has been given a suspended death sentence, which in effect means life imprisonment, state media said on Wednesday.
The case had created a dilemma in China where no law exists for the ownership of virtual weapons.
Qiu Chengwei, 41, stabbed competitor Zhu Caoyuan in the chest after he was told Zhu had sold his "dragon sabre", used in the popular online game, "Legend of Mir 3," the China Daily said.

Able Danger -- overrated?

2005-08-16T11:16:00.000-04:00

A lot of current news indicates that most of the "Able Danger" story was overstated and inaccurate. Will try to roundup info later.

Michael Ledeen on Able Danger

2005-08-12T13:18:00.000-04:00

Channeling James Jesus Angleton again, he finds it par for the course.

More "Able Danger"

2005-08-12T10:27:00.000-04:00

Turns out that the "Able Danger" team notified the 9/11 Commission that they had identified Atta as a terrorist more that a year before the attacks, but the Commission omitted it from their report. This story is getting interesting . . . .

Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith

2005-08-11T22:30:00.000-04:00

With his election as Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger's views, style, and thought have taken on a new relevance. Pilgrim Fellowship Of Faith: The Church As Communion is as good a place as any to start to gain insight into the man. Read more . . .

A collection of speeches, papers, and letters collected by his students for his 75th birthday, it examines the relationship between theology, faith, ecclesiology, and sacrament. It reveals a man who strives to be ecumenical in the most serious way -- who seeks real dialogue, which requires all participants to be as honest and searching about their beliefs and to accord dignity and respect to other interlocutors. This collection includes gracious letter exchanges with Orthodox Metropolitan Damaskinos of Switzerland and with Lutheran Provincial Bishop Johannes Hanselmann of Bavaria.

In the course of the works cited, Ratzinger deals in depth with these and other questions: What is theology, what is its relation to faith, and how can her methods lay claim to providing knowledge? What is the role of the Holy Spirit in ecclesiology, in our understanding of the Church? What is the relation between Communion as Eucharist and communion as Christian fellowship, and how does christology shape ecclesiology? What role to lay movements serve in the Church? How does the Church go about remembering and atoning for sins?

If there is a common theme, it is the primacy communion -- a vision of God as triune communion, a vision of the Universal Church with many local churches in communion, a vision of the ecumenical movement as a striving to realize Christian communion as a gift from God, a vision of sacraments as visible signs of communion. Also interesting is what he declares communion not to be. Specifically, it is not to be taken as a cover for blanket centralization of ecclesiastical authority in Rome.

It's a good read. A comparison with Wojtyla's style is perhaps inevitable. Ratzinger's writing is perhaps more pragmatic and concise, less grandiose. There's a quiet precision and grace here. Ratzinger seems like a quiet, patient teacher, a somewhat self-effacing man with a penetrating mind. It's an excellent way for Catholics to begin to learn their new pope's mind. It's a great book for other Christians who want an insight into how ecumenism fits into Pope Benedict's theological views. It's also a good book for non-Christians who wonder how the Church sees itself.

Even Chanceyer

2005-08-11T17:01:00.000-04:00

Here's a review that Dr. Mark Chancey wrote for The Passion of the Christ. He was somewhat disappointed. Capsule review: "problematic."