Lex Communis

2012-02-16T23:09:00.000-08:00

More liberal totalitarianism, but this time it's found among conservatives.

James Taranto stops to actually think about some of the things that Rick Santorum has been saying about contraception - rather than reflexively engaging in knee-jerk condemnation - and finds that while Santorum may be wrong, the points he is making have substance. Taranto also considers why there is such a knee-jerk reaction against Santorum among the center-right and discovers the fact that they are "liberal totalitarians":

Rubin proclaims herself puzzled as to how Santorum can "square" his attitudes toward birth control, on which he would not impose his religious views through legislation, and abortion, on which he would. But Santorum explains that right off the bat: The latter but not the former, in his view, is "the taking of a human life." That's Romney's position too, and the position of every Republican presidential nominee since Reagan.

In the video Rubin scorns, Santorum actually makes an entirely reasonable and fairly sophisticated argument, and he says nothing cringe-worthy. He doesn't appeal to the authority of the church or "family values." He doesn't say that people who fornicate are going to hell or ought to be ashamed of themselves. Nor does he deny that it is prudent for them to use birth control.

What he says is that birth control has greatly expanded sexual freedom, and that sexual freedom has had consequences that are harmful to society and to women in particular. Again, one may disagree whether, on balance, these harms outweighed the benefits. But what is so upsetting about the idea that they might have? What in the world explains Friedersdorf's and Rubin's overwrought emotionalism?

Here's our attempt at an explanation: In liberal metropolises like Los Angeles, Washington and New York (homes of Friedersdorf, Rubin and this columnist, respectively), a high proportion of conservatives have internalized the assumptions of feminism. One of those assumptions is that female sexual freedom, an essential component of sexual equality, is an unadulterated good. Santorum's statements to the contrary challenge this deeply held view.

Furthermore, contemporary feminism is, as we recently argued, a totalitarian ideology, by which we mean one that tolerates no divergence between the personal and the political. If you are not a feminist, you can enjoy a lifestyle of sexual freedom and also take seriously the idea that sexual freedom is bad for society. If you are a feminist, that is a thoughtcrime. Thoughtcrimes are enforced through cognitive dissonance, which produces the departures from rationality that we have seen here from Friedersdorf and, to a lesser extent, from Rubin.

We say "to a lesser extent" because Rubin's bottom line, that Santorum's personal opinions about birth control make him unelectable, is not outlandish and could be true. But to the extent that Friedersdorf and Rubin support that hypothesis, it is by example rather than by logic. That is, if their emotions are typical of those of independent voters in swing states, then Rubin's conclusion is probably correct. But like this columnist, they are members of a rarefied class--media professionals living in highly Democratic areas--so the premise is counterintuitive to say the least.

Totalitarian ideologies sustain themselves in large part through fear, and feminism has been particularly fearsome of late, as the Susan G. Komen ladies and the Catholic bishops can attest. But our intuition is that this is a sign of weakness, not strength. The fearful reactions to Santorum's heresies against sexual freedom reinforce that sense.

This column has its differences with Rick Santorum, but we admire him for his fearlessness in challenging feminist pieties. "One man with courage makes a majority," Andrew Jackson is supposed to have observed. Is Rick Santorum such a man? If not, let's hear a reasoned argument to the contrary.

A "reasoned argument"...now there's an idea.

A "reasoned argument" was all I was looking for from Dude 1, and a "reasoned argument" was the one thing missing from his responses.

2012-02-16T15:48:00.001-08:00

Radio Free Aquinas.

2012-02-16T13:19:00.000-08:00

Ban Bacon????

Over my dead body!!!

I will defend to the death the right of bacon-eaters everywhere:

Glen Reynolds - who inhabits the fever swamp of "libertine libertarian" - makes an interesting point, which is worth quoting in full:

THE NON-PROCREATIVE FUNCTIONS OF SEX:“If you’re interested in the stability of families, then you should also be a fan of non-procreative sex (which, let’s face it, is going to be a majority of sex any couple engages in, even if they’re choosing to forgo birth control). Women who have more sex are happier in their relationships. Sexual satisfaction outstrips even good communication in ratings of a couple’s happiness. Whether you have an active sex life is a strong predictor of your mental health and a lesser, but still significant, predictor of physical health. None of that has anything to do with babies. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with mere pleasure, which is what Santorum said sex is reduced to once the potential for kids has been stricken from the equation. Sexual satisfaction increases relationship satisfaction and couples who are more satisfied in their relationships are less likely to divorce.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with mere pleasure, as far as I’m concerned. Related thoughts here.

But note how the narrative in the press has shifted. The Obama Administration says that churches who oppose contraception still have to pay for it. And then, when people object, suddenly the talk shifts from who pays for contraception to whether someone wants to ban it.

It’s as if we passed a law requiring mosques to sell bacon and then, when people objected, responded by saying “What’s wrong with bacon? You’re trying to ban bacon!!!!

I’m not much of a Santorum fan — to me, he seems like Mike Huckabee without the charm or political talent — but it’s hard not to notice the narrative jiu-jitsu here. Expect more effort to gin up social-issue hysteria in order to distract people from the real story, which is this:

Obama spent us into bankruptcy, most of the money went to cronies, and the job situation got worse. That’s the real story, not a question of who pays for birth control, which doesn’t cost that much anyway.

2012-02-16T10:58:00.000-08:00

From the "Great Life Decisions" File...

..."naked bondage sex game" mistaken for kidnapping:

They wanted bondage, and they wound up in handcuffs.

A Portland, Ore., couple was arrested on Valentine's Day after cops mistook a bound and naked woman in the back of a car for a crime in progress, The Los Angeles Times reported.

Nikolas Harbar, 31, was only "role-playing" when he allegedly tied up his naked girlfriend, 26-year-old Stephanie Pelzner and threw her in the back of his Subaru in the early afternoon, according to a police report. But the ball-and-chain action went awry when cops got a call from a concerned witness.

"Officers continued to check the area, concerned for the welfare of the bound and naked female," the report reads. "The vehicle was spotted ... an officer made contact with a male walking away from the car and noticed a bound and naked female in the back of the car."

Harbar told cops that the two "were just having some fun," and Pelzner confirmed that "she was voluntarily bound a nude." But officers weren't so quick to laugh it off -- After all, they had already sent at least nine patrol cars to look for the sex fiends, Fox News reported.

"The concern is their actions created a pretty substantial public alarm, to the point where you have a 911 caller saying she's concerned about this person tied up naked in the back of a car," Lt. Robert King, bureau spokesman, told the Los Angeles Times. "Why would the officers think it was a Valentine's Day thing ... it creates a lot of concern from the public."

Harbar and Pelzner were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, but released later that day.

What morons.

Good for the witnesses who got involved and didn't say, "Hey, maybe it's just a pair of morons engaged in "naked bondage sex games."

2012-02-16T10:33:00.000-08:00

Lying with Statistics.

So, what about that 98% of Catholic women use contraception statistic?

First, so what?

Even if it was 100%, that still wouldn't make it acceptable to force Catholic institutions to violate their conscience.

Second, it's a mischaracterization.

What's Wrong with the World explains:

Recently I received a phone call from my non-Christian (as far as I know) philosopher friend Neil Manson who, because he has an active and fair mind, had been exercised over what seemed to him the high FQ (Fishiness Quotient) of the statistical meme presently going around to the effect that "98% of Catholic women use birth control." Or something. Maybe "98% of Catholic women have used birth control." The former is obviously ludicrous, as it would seem to include elderly Catholic women, of whom it seems plausible that there are more than 2% among Catholics. Anyway, Neil wanted to know if I had read anything debunking the statistic.

Well, I had to admit that I hadn't. This is mostly because the relevance of the claim to the HHS's mandate is, to put it mildly, obscure. If a large percentage of Jainists are chowing down on hamburgers on the side, it hardly follows that an expressly Jainist charitable organization should be forced by the federal government to fund a plan that buys free hamburgers for its employees. If a bunch of Quakers turn out to have gun licenses, employees of an expressly Quaker organization are not therefore entitled to have their fees paid to a shooting range or their ammo. provided at no cost through an employer plan. There is this commonsense notion that organizations that are explicitly identified as religious are allowed to uphold the actual doctrinal and behavioral standards of their respective religious bodies. Whether the rank and file membership of that religious body follow those standards in daily life should be irrelevant.

Still, it has proven rather interesting to look into the statistical claim.

Here's how it works. The study is here. The relevant tables are Figure 3 on p. 6 and the second Supplementary Table on p. 8. The survey was limited to women between 15-44. Ah, well, that explains how we weren't including the elderly, but it also means that the silly "percent of all Catholic women" thing should be chucked out right from the beginning. More strikingly, as Neil pointed out to me after looking up the study, it excluded any women who were a) not sexually active, where that is defined as having had sexual intercourse in the past three months (there go all the nuns), b) postpartum, c) pregnant, or d) trying to get pregnant! In other words, the study was specifically designed (as the prose discussion on p. 8 makes explicit, in bold print) to include only women for whom a pregnancy would be unintended and who are "at risk" of becoming pregnant. Whether or not it included women who considered themselves neither trying nor not trying to get pregnant (there are some such women in the world) is unclear. It's also unclear whether it included women who have had their reproductive organs removed because of some medical problem. Presumably the study was intended to exclude women in both of these categories, as neither would count as a woman "at risk of an unintended pregnancy."

Now, consider what all of this means as far as the representativeness of the sample for Catholic women. Surely there are a fair number of Catholic women between 15-44 who are not "at risk of an unintended pregnancy" for various reasons. It is plausible that this number is higher among Catholics than among non-Catholics. For one thing, a faithful Catholic woman in this age category who is not married is supposed to be remaining celibate. Hence she won't fall into the "at-risk" category, and by the same token she won't have any use for the "services" that the Obama administration is mandating be provided. Similarly, married Catholic women are probably more likely not to be attempting to avoid pregnancy, even using Natural Family Planning, than non-Catholic women. One would think they are also more likely to be pregnant or postpartum. And so on and so forth. In short, the deliberate design of the study to cover only women who, at the time of the study, were having sexual intercourse while regarding a pregnancy as unintended would be likely to make it unrepresentative of Catholics and particularly unrepresentative of devout Catholics. Yet the study is now being cited to show the percentage of Catholic women generally who are not following the teaching of the Catholic Church in this area! What is wrong with this picture?

To make matters even weirder, this Politifact evaluation of the meme gets it wrong again and again, and in both directions.

First, the Politifact discussion insists that the claim is only about women in this category who have ever used contraception. When I first heard that and hadn't looked at the study, I immediately thought of the fact that such a statistic would presumably include women who were not at the time of the study using contraception and had used it only once in the past. It was even pointed out to me that it would include adult converts whose use might easily have been prior to their becoming Catholic. However, that isn't correct, anyway. The study expressly was of current contraceptive use. That's, in a sense, "better" for the side that wants the numbers to be high.

However, second, that is swamped by the point made above about all the groups (likely to be more highly represented among Catholics, especially faithful Catholics, and not in need of contraceptive "services") excluded from the study--celibate women, postpartum women, women not trying to avoid pregnancy. And on this point, too, the Politifact evaluation is completely wrong. Politifact implies that only the supplementary table on p. 8 excluded these groups and that Figure 3 on p. 6 included them! But this is wrong. The table on p. 8 is simply supplementary to Figure 3, and both are taken from the same survey using the same restrictions! This is made explicit again and again in the study.

Politifact seems to think that including these excluded groups, which it wrongly thinks are included in Figure 3, increases the total number of "contracepting" Catholic women found, apparently by including women who have used contraception at some earlier time in their lives. This completely ignores the ways in which such exclusions are likely to bias the study away from devout Catholics.

Of course, we don't actually know what the overall effect of including the excluded groups would be, because they weren't included. No doubt Guttmacher would say that such groups should be excluded from their survey because they wanted their survey to be about "current contraceptive use." It is obvious that, for example, pregnant women aren't going to be using contraception. Well, okay, then. But a statistic based on a study that explicitly excluded those who have no use for contraception is obviously irrelevant to a question about the percentage of Catholic women who have a use for contraception!

If a researcher wanted to design a study that included the excluded groups and then examine probable later contraceptive use among women currently post-partum, pregnant, trying to get pregnant, etc., he could include those groups in the original study and interview those sub-groups further about their later intentions: If they get pregnant, after that baby is born, do they intend to try to avoid pregnancy while continuing to be sexually active? If so, what method do they intend to use? If they get married, do they intend to use contraception? And so forth. It would, of course, be possible to question the objectivity of such future projections on the part of the women, but it would allow a sample in such a study to be more representative of Catholic women, including devout Catholic women, while gathering information relevant to the claim, sure to be made, "Yeah, but they'll want contraception later on."

The statistics in the Guttmacher study appear to be okay for the purpose for which the study was originally intended. The intention of the study was to answer something like the following question: "Among women of various religious groups who are now sexually active but do not wish to become pregnant, what percentage use different methods of avoiding pregnancy?" But the purpose for which the statistic for Catholic women from the study is now being used is to argue, "A very high percentage of Catholic women (or, perhaps, Catholic women of child-bearing age) are currently not following the Catholic Church's teachings on sex and contraception and have a use for contraception forbidden by the Catholic Church."

For that purpose, these statistics are bogus.

Update 1: Upon reflection, I have realized clearly an additional major problem with the 98% statistic. It is including all the Catholic women who expressly told researchers that they used "no method" to avoid pregnancy. In the table, that is 11%. The 98% statistic is apparently derived by subtracting only the 2% who said that they used NFP from 100%. So women who said they used no method of contraception are apparently being included in a statistic about how many Catholic women use contraception. How's that for crazy? And that's in addition to the problems discussed already in the original post.

[Via Brutally Honest.]

2012-02-16T08:49:00.000-08:00

According to Ben Franklin, "“Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security”...

...but what about trading liberty for a $5 co-pay on condoms?

According to Democrat Barbara Boxer the "right to be insured trumps religious liberty."

The Washington Examiner reports:

Senator Boxer warned yesterday that if the HHS contraception mandate was repealed it would set a dangerous precedence of religious rights trumping the right to be insured.

On MSNBC's Politics Nation with Al Sharpton last night, Boxer affirmed that under the proposed amendment proposed by Sen. Roy Blunt, an employer would not be forced by the government to pay for medical practices against his religion.

"I mean, are they serious? Sharpton exclaimed, "How do you make a law where an employer can decide his own religious beliefs violate your right to be insured?"

"Oh absolutely," Boxer said, "Let's use an example, let's say somebody believes that medicine doesn't cure anybody of a disease but prayer does and then they decide no medicine.

"No medicine!" she exclaimed, "Under the Blunt amendment, they could do just that."

Senator Harry Reid announced yesterday that he would allow a vote on the Blunt Amendment. The vote allows Senate Democrats such as Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia to register a protest vote against the HHS contraception mandate.

You have to love how the "Reverend" Al Sharpton goes "all in" with respect to his support of Caesar's requirement that Catholics throw a pinch of incense at the idol of contraception.

Likewise, you have to marvel at how stupid Boxer is with her analogy about a religious person believing that medicine doesn't work but prayer does. OK, does this person believe that it is a mortal sin to pay for medicine? Probably not, but this person really and truly has a religious objection to paying for someone else's medical treatment, then maybe that person oughtn't be coerced into paying for medical insurance in violation of their core religious beliefs.

I mean, Jeepers, Barbara, there is this thing called "the First Amendment."

And by the way, this "right to insurance"...we can find this where in the Constitution?

Via Wintery Knight who writes:

Fascism is the ideology that states that the worldview of the government, especially on questions of religion, morality and meaning, should be pushed down onto individuals by force. The Democrat elites, including Obama, are pro-abortion. And now, they want to force you to be pro-abortion, too – by forcing you to subsidize the abortions of others, even if you have a conscientious objection based on your religion. Your money isn’t your money – it’s Obama’s money. You just earn it. But Obama spends it. And if he spends in subsidizing abortion, and you don’t like it, then tough luck for you. That’s how secular leftist Democrats think.

Exactly, and the gobsmacking thing is that Liberals don't even recognize that they are fascists because (a) they think that if they are liberals, then, by definition, everything they do is about tolerance and respecting the rights of other people and (b) they have convinced themselves that the rights of people they don't much like don't much matter because those people are "superstitious" and ought to leave the country.

A-farging-mazing.

2012-02-16T08:08:00.000-08:00

Hipsters discover that they can't change the definition of "jealousy."

Tracy Quan at the Daily Beast ponders why Demi Moore might object to her "husband's" - and "husband" is in quote because it is not "marriage" when it doesn't involve fidelity - philandering in an "open 'marriage'":

You don’t know which kind of open relationship you have until you’re in the middle, testing your own limits, as may be the case with Ashton. But why would Demi care about a night spent with someone like Sara Leal?

“Everywhere in the world both sexes care,” says Fisher. “Both men and women do what academics call mate guarding. A woman in Demi’s position is pouring a lot of metabolic energy into a man who’s pouring his metabolic energy into somebody else. From a Darwinian perspective, that’s not terribly adaptive, so it can make you mad.”

Even if Demi had an open relationship with Ashton, “this is an individual who provides not only sex, intimacy, and companionship,” Fisher explains. “He’s now the social father to her children. From a financial perspective, she probably never needed him, but from an emotional perspective people want a partner to help them raise their DNA. If she stands to lose that, she feels undermined.”

Cheating on your partner in the context of “open” is often more exciting and transgressive than cheating on a traditional marriage. Any form of sex outside the home seems like cheating to a monogamous couple, but open relationships give birth to arcane and highly creative definitions of infidelity. Sex without a condom (alleged by Leal) might be seen as cheating, while sex with protection isn’t. (Some use a condom outside the marital bed and not at home, but the canniest philanderer makes sure to use condoms with everyone.) Sex with a friend of the family is betrayal, sex with a stranger a nonevent. Girl on girl is OK with some husbands; girl meets boy not so much. For many of us, involvement with a bimbo or a boytoy doesn’t really count—with your partner’s intellectual equal or professional peer, you enter treacherous terrain.

No matter how you manage the all-too-human need for variety, the bottom line—as Fisher points out—is how undermined your mate feels. At the end of the day, whether male or female, famous or anonymous, mono or open, you’ll pay a price for that.

I like that comment about "someone like Leal," and how it points to the elitism of the Left. It's almost as if Quan is casually remarking that Ashton's trifling with the scullery wench really couldn't matter.

But that kind of thing worked with the crowned heads of Europe during a time when social class really did debar people of the lower class from making a claim on the upper class.

So, it seems that even people as guarded from the iron rule of the "Gods the Copybook Headings" are re-discovering something as cliche as jealousy.

2012-02-15T13:13:00.000-08:00

The Incoherence of Totalitarian Liberalism.

This is a follow-up on Father Baron's video on how liberalism has split into two sects - one sect affirming the traditional liberal virtues, the other demanding complete adherence to its substantive predilections. I've scrubbed the names off of this Facebook discussion.

What I'm interested here is not in liberal-bashing. I'm more interested in the intellectual coherence of the two sides, and the strength of the claim that I was mischaracterizing Dude 1's arguments.

If anyone thinks that I was mischaracterizing Dude 1's arguments - mischaracterize, not frame them in a sharper, less self-congratulatory way - please tell me, and explain in what way I mischaracterized those positions.

Also, does it appear that Dude 1 - who calls himself a "libertarian" - is taking a position that Father Baron described as "totalitarian liberalism."

Thanks.

______

Dude 1 Posts:

‎"This idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do," Santorum complained to NPR in 2006, "that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn't get involved in cultural issues ... that is not how traditional conservatives view the world."
Santorum is severely wrong | Washington Examiner
washingtonexaminer.com
Republican presidential candidate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, is lit by utility lights as he speaks at an evening outdoor rally at the Washington State History Museum, Monday, Feb. 13, 2012, in Tacoma, Wash. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Yesterday at 7:31am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley Liberalism has a much better approach - it makes you pay for what other people do in the bedroom.

As a libertarian, I think the best approach is to let other people do what they want in the bedroom so long as they don't jurt anyone else, and that includes not paying for them to do it.
Yesterday at 8:13am ·

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Dude 2: No one has ever paid me for what I do in a bedroom. I'm a liberal. What are you talking about? Maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but no one has ever complained.
Yesterday at 8:29am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley Brian, then I take it you will stand with me in opposing President Obama's mandate requiring Catholic employers to violate their conscience by requiring them to pay for abortion, sterilization and contraception?

Is my point somewhat clearer now?
Yesterday at 8:45am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley You know, my "avatar" should have provided a clue as to what I meant.

I take it that Obama's order has scratched the surface of the liberal mindset as a problem to be concerned about? I notice, for example, that our host, who often posts about governmental oppression, hasn't posted anything on this clear violation of the First Amendment.
Yesterday at 8:48am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley There is also a practical problem with the liberal - make someone else pay - mindset. What other people pay for, they have an ownership interest in. If the government can penalize smoking through insurance co-pays, why can't it penalize risky sexual behavior?

That's a serious question.
Yesterday at 8:50am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Also, what is it with leftists and misquotes? Here is the full quotation:

Senator RICK SANTORUM ("It Takes a Family"): They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do. Government should keep ou...r taxes down and keep our regulation low and that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn't get involved in cultural issues, you know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world, and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can't go it alone, that there is no such society that I'm aware of where we've had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4784905

The problem is that Santorum is right and everyone knows it.

We don't live in a world of radical individualism.

If we did, Obamacare wouldn't exist, much less the issue about having certain religious minorities - not favored by the liberal elites - violate their conscience by subsidizing other people's sexual activities.

Liberals don't mind people being involved in the bedroom; they just want it on their terms.See More
Rick Santorum, 'It Takes a Family' : NPR
www.npr.org
Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) is one of the Republican Party's strongest and most c...onservative voices. He talks about his new book, It Takes a Family, where he discusses the politics of intelligent design, and what he'd like to hear from Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.See More
Yesterday at 9:08am · ·

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Peter Sean Bradley Perhaps we should live in a world of radical individualism.

Discuss.
Yesterday at 9:09am ·

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Dude 2

Dude, first off, on my phone, your avatar is way to small to read. The only truly visible part is an Iron Cross. You could be a Hell's Angel for all I can tell.

That said, I still don't see how anyone is getting paid for what they are doi...ng in the bedroom either under the original proposal, or the compromise.

I don't have the time, or the patience, right now to read, on my phone, everything you just posted, but I gather your in the "every sperm is sacred" and oral contraceptives can't be used for other legitimate medical reasons, camp. That's just silly. The compromise settles all reasonable objections and is supported by the cast majority of Catholics.

It is only the crazy right wing nuts who continue to oppose based on politics instead of morality, if they are intellectually honest with themselves. See More
Yesterday at 11:25am ·

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Dude 1:

The world won't really be a better place until the superstitious nature of man is no longer prevalent. So I guess we just have to settle for what we've got and fight when we can. ;) As for my posts regarding "oppression," I don't believe I'...ve ever posted about religion. If I did, I would be of the opinion that anyone who wants religion to be somehow babied by the government should find, or buy (the Catholic church has the money for this, right?), their own country and move there to set up their religious oligarchy. I am of the opinion that religion is largely evil and those who embrace it should be given as little ability to rule over others as possible.See More
Yesterday at 11:29am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley So, Dude 1, liberty for everyone, unless it involves religion or conscience?

As I've said, we're growing a strange crop of libertarians these days.

As for me, I will defend your freedom of conscience even if I disagree with it.
Yesterday at 11:34am ·

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Dude 1: I don't recall saying superstitious illogical people can't have their liberty. I think I said they shouldn't be allowed to rule over other people.
Yesterday at 11:35am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley: Dude 2, I knew that you'd go for the bait and unmask the fascism inherent in modern liberalism.

In other words, freedom for everyone, until someone disagrees with liberalism, and then ...They.Must.Submit.

Liberalism has taken quite a tumble in the last forty years, which is probably evidence that power corrupts.
Yesterday at 11:37am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley: Dude 1, and by "rule over," you mean not subsidize things that their conscience says is wrong.

You have a very convenient approach to libertarianism.
Yesterday at 11:38am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley You two are proving Santorum's point, by the way.
Yesterday at 11:38am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley Congratulations.
Yesterday at 11:38am ·

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Dude 1: They can refuse to participate in a democratic society if they want. As I said, let them go buy their own country.
Yesterday at 11:38am ·

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Dude 1: As long as all you want to do is harangue people on someone else's wall, I've other things to do. I made my point.
Yesterday at 11:40am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley So, Dude 1, I now take it that you are siding with me in opposing Same-Sex Marriage in California, which was struck down by a majority of Californians in a democratic process?

Or is there a different rule for that?
Yesterday at 11:40am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Dude 1 wrote "They can refuse to participate in a democratic society if they want. As I said, let them go buy their own country."

Perfect!

This is exactly what Santorum was saying!
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So, what was your problem with the entire Santorum quote?

Your problem isn't that you favor freedom; your problem is that you favor freedom for certain people.

Ha, I scoff at you when you call yourself a libertarian.See More
Yesterday at 11:42am ·

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Dude 1: Yes, different rule. People getting married have no impact on how you live YOUR life. That's the problem with superstition. It warps your brain so you see no difference between what you want and what other people should do. Refusing people health benefits because your stuperstition ordains that they should not live that way does impact how they live their lives.
Yesterday at 11:43am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley: Dude 1 wrote "As long as all you want to do is harangue people on someone else's wall...."

Nah, I just want to hold your feet to the fire as a principled libertarian.
Yesterday at 11:44am ·

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Dude 1: My problem with Santorum is that neither he, nor his brand of Christianity, ever owned this country.
Yesterday at 11:44am ·

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Dude 1: Frankly, I think Catholicism and Libertarianism are incompatible, which probably explains why you're so twisted. ;)
Yesterday at 11:45am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Santorum's a Catholic, He would be the first to agree that "his brand of Christianity" never owned the country.

To the contrary, there is a history of governmental oppresion of Catholicism that is more significant than any anti-semitism ...that has ever occurred in this country. One of the first of "privacy" cases was Pierce v. Society of Sister in which the Supreme Court in the 1920s knocked down Oregon's attempt to shut down the Catholic school system in favor of making everyone go to public schools.

So there is a long history of Catholicism anti-statism working to expand liberty in this country.

It's really sad how liberals have forgotten that freedom of conscience and freedom of religion are the sine qua non of freedom.See More
Yesterday at 11:48am ·

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Dude 1: Yes, the treatment of Jews in America has never been terrible. Most of the time, they've been allowed to live, so long as they are quiet about it. But thanks for verifying that Santorum's brand of Christianity never owned America and supporting my view that if they want a country where they can establish their own control over how others live, they can go somewhere else and buy one.
Yesterday at 11:52am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Insofar as Catholicism has caused its adherents to have a loyalty to something that is not the State, Catholicism is derogatory to the State's natural tendency to demand greater and greater obedience, authority and control. It is not surpr...ising that Catholicism was seen as a threat by the Nazis and the Communists and that it was workers rallying around their Catholicism that helped to end the Soviet Union.

If you were interested in reading one of the founders of modern libertarianism, you could check out G.K. Chesterton's idea of "subsidiarity."See More
Yesterday at 11:53am ·

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Dude 1: Yeah, right now the greatest threat I see is people like Santorum, and the right wing, who say it's okay to control the day-to-day personal behaviors of the rest of us. If you want to talk about dismantling government, go for it. And don't worry, I'm voting Republican in this election -- because I think it's the best way to ensure a civil war.
Yesterday at 11:55am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Dude 1, I know that you are making a conventional leftist point about "his brand of Christianity" not "owning" America, but, seriously, it sounds lame.

Obviously, Catholicism never "owned" America. No one has ever made that claim.... You are refuting a strawman. Catholics didn't come to this country in great numbers until the mid-19th Century. When this country was founded there were still a number of states that had laws against Catholics voting.

Yawn.

What you want me to answer is whether Protestantism "owned" this country at some point.

That is something I have never answered.

It may be simply an example of the lack of historical curiosity bred into the left by their contempt for religion, but you know that Protestantism and Catholicism are not the same thing?See More
Yesterday at 11:57am ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Dude 1, a libertarian would say that people control your day to day behaviors when they make you work to pay taxes.

Further, requiring me to pay for abortion, controls my day to day behavior. Every minute I spend working, I'm subsidizing murder.

Further, the left with its endless stream of nice fascist regulations - about where people can smoke, how they must be politically correct, how they must hire transexuals, how much they can pay for minimum wage, etc., etc. - control day to day behaviors.

You aren't in favor of freedom. You are in favor of freedom for people who agree with you. As for people like me, your attitude is that I can leave this country.

Santorum has never said that, but how is that different from what you think Santorum is saying?See More
Yesterday at 12:00pm ·

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Dude 1: I don't believe any branch of christianity ever owned America. That's what's made us great. The reason we're in decline now is all these idiot stuperstitious people trying to own it.
Yesterday at 12:00pm ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
I guess the question is what do you mean by "own"?

Have you ever read Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address?

Can you imagine a more richly religious text? Can you imagine that speech being given by anyone today?
...
Are we better now - when expressions of religion are held in contempt - than we were when Lincoln was free to give the Second Inaugural Address?

Seriously, these are things that any student of history should be thinking about.See More
Yesterday at 12:02pm ·

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Peter Sean Bradley Like a lot on the left, you have a knee-jerk attitude about religion. Have you ever considered it in its reality, rather than as the caricature that left paints?
Yesterday at 12:04pm ·

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Dude 1: So you point to a dictator to explain why it's okay for stuperstitious to take control of my life?
Yesterday at 12:04pm ·

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Dude 1:
See, Peter, this b.s. you spout about what my views are, without actually knowing me, is one reason I find it not useful to bother talking to you much. Descriptions of my views as "knee-jerk attitude[s]" and suggesting that I have never con...sidered religion in its reality, but rely upon caricature is evidence you have no idea who I am. And our views are so far different from one another that we will never be able to reconcile them. So even if you were more about that, than about attempting to convince yourself and others that your views are superior because you say so, we'd never get there. We differ on the foundational issues, so the higher-level ones, like whether stuperstitious people should be allowed to rule over others are just out of the realm of possible agreement, except by accident; i.e., even when we agree, it's just a happy coinkydink.See More
Yesterday at 12:25pm ·

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Peter Sean Bradley Huh? Lincoln was no dictator.
23 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley And how is someone who is "superstitious" taking over your life if we don't make them pay for contraception?

Are they "taking over your life" because they resist your efforts to make them do something?

I'm curious, what does libertarianism mean to you?
23 hours ago ·

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Dude 1: Yes, I would definitely take my comments about superstitious people taking control over my life as having to do with paying for contraception. You know quite well that's not what I was talking about. That's the way to stay slippery when arguing. And if you don't think Lincoln was a dictator, then you haven't read enough about Lincoln.
23 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley My basic point here is that there is a very interesting discussion about the limits of state intervention into the life of free men that ought to break out if we could just get past the left's need to accuse everyone else of being fascist while ignoring its own fascism.
23 hours ago ·

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Dude 1: I don't particularly care what the left does. They aren't part of this conversation, either.
23 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
Dude 1, unlike you, I treat my opponents as being rational and having something worth hearing.

But this is what you've said in this discussion.

1. Santorum is bad because he wants to get involved in the bedroom.
...
2. Making people who think that abortion and contraception is morally questionable pay for abortion and contraception is ok because they live in a democratic society (and as the buried minor premise, presumably, they must abide by the results of democracy.)

3. Besides people who oppose abortion and contraception are superstitious and ignorant.

4. The principle of living in a Democratic society doesn't count when it comes to the people of California voting against gay marriage because the people who voted against gay marriage are superstitious and have their minds twisted ( and the buried minor premise seems to be if they didn't, they would think like Dude 1 and/or liberals.)

5. Abraham Lincoln was a dictator because he insisted on making the Southern states live with the consequences of living in a democratic society, i.e., living with the consequences of an election.

6. Religious people are superstitious and can't think straight.

7. Religious people are taking over other people's lives when they ask to be let alone and not forced to fund programs that involve what other people do in the bedroom.

I think that you can assert some of these positions and make an interesting argument. I don't think you can assert them all and make any claim to intellectual coherence.

You are not in favor of a principle so much as you are against a group of people you really don't know.

But the funny thing is, is that you and Santorum are saying the same thing, except that Santorum is not inconsistent. He says that there is no radical individualism, and so we have to have discussions about these issues - that they are legitimate areas of inquiry. You feel the same way, except you think that your prejudices are off limits and my prejudices - because they are mere superstitions - don't count.See More
22 hours ago ·

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Dude 1: Look as long as you want to keep mischaracterizing and misquoting what I'm saying, such that you're actually arguing with someone who doesn't exist (whoever might make the arguments you're attributing to me), why do you want to waste our time? Is this just entertainment for you?
22 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley
I don't think that I have mischaracterized your statements. They are almost verbatim of what you have said. For example, didn't you say "People getting married have no impact on how you live YOUR life. That's the problem with superstition.... It warps your brain ..." How was my summary of your response inaccurate?.

If you think I have been inaccurate, tell me where I've done that.

What I'm really interested in is how you justify your "Lincoln was a dictator" claim.

Care to share?See More
20 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley As to why I'm doing this, I think you are a smart guy. I think you've got a lot of insights to share.

Sue me.
20 hours ago ·

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Dude 1: Then quit mischaracterizing my arguments.
20 hours ago ·

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Peter Sean Bradley I don't agree that I am. Tell me how I am, if I am.

Also, care to share your insights about why Lincoln is a dictator and why consideration of the Second Inaugural Address is therefore inappropriate vis a vis a comparison of theological influences in the past and now?
3 minutes ago ·

____

Reading through this exchange I am struck by how the name-calling goes one way. Dude 1 is offended by my description of his ideas as "knee-jerk" but launches multiple arguments that consist of nothing more than calling religious people "superstitious."

I'm also struck by the absence of real evidence. I pointed to Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the actual complete statement made by Santorum, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, etc., all of which was ignored, and no counter-evidence was offered.

From this exchange, would you conclude that liberals are running on intellectual vapors?

2012-02-15T08:30:00.000-08:00

Why we are so screwed as a nation, a continuing series.

Because Americans running out of unemployment insurance are opting to go on Social Security Disability:

The other article on the disability phenomenon was authored by Robert Samuelson and carried by Real Clear Politics. It quoted extensively from a paper by David Autor of MIT. They cite a similar relationship of rising unemployment to rising disability application.

Autor attributes disability's expansion mainly to liberalized, more subjective eligibility rules and to a deteriorating job market for less-educated workers. Through the 1970s, strokes, heart attacks and cancer were major causes. Now, mental problems (depression, personality disorder) and musculoskeletal ailments (back pain, joint stress) dominate (54 percent of awards in 2009, nearly double 1981's 28 percent). The paradox is plain. As physically grueling construction and factory jobs have shrunk, disability awards have gone up.

For many recipients, the disability program is a form of long-term unemployment insurance, argue Autor and his frequent collaborator Mark Duggan of the University of Pennsylvania. Benefit applications surge when joblessness rises. From 2001 to 2010, annual applications jumped 123 percent to 2.9 million. On average, recipients start receiving payments at age 49 and keep them until 66, when they switch to Social Security's retiree benefits.

Superficially, the case for overhaul seems overwhelming. Tougher eligibility standards would protect the genuinely disabled but limit benefits for others. Don't hold your breath. For starters, any crackdown could become a public-relations disaster. It might seem gratuitously cruel. Many recipients command sympathy. With low skills, their jobs prospects are poor. "People are driven into the program by desperation," says Autor. Nor are they rolling in money; the average payment is about $14,000 a year.

Another, rather familiar relationship showed up a bit later in the article:

Lawyers would also resist big changes. The Social Security Administration initially rejects about two-thirds of applications, but about half of these are appealed by lawyers and other professional advocates before administrative law judges, where the approval rate is between 60 percent and 75 percent. In a series of well-reported stories, The Wall Street Journal's Damian Paletta showed that the system is open to abuse. But it's also lucrative. Lawyers and other advocates are entitled to 25 percent of back benefits up to $6,000 per case. Their total payments approach $1.5 billion annually.

The larger budget quagmire now comes into focus. What the federal government does is so vast that it suffocates informed debate and political control. The built-in bias for the status quo reflects the reality that the various parts of government are understood, defended and changed mainly by those who benefit from their existence. However strong the case for revision (and it is powerful here), it is tempered by political inertia. What's sacrificed is the broader public good. The quagmire is of our own making.

So, when your unemployment benefits are running out and no potential jobs are visible, it’s almost natural to look in the mirror and wonder why you aren’t feeling good…..er…..make that well (sorry, Sister).

2012-02-15T08:19:00.000-08:00

First, it was the police, then it is the teachers...

...but to the government, you are the problem.

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason writes:

Yesterday my daughters brought home copies of a flyer containing the principal’s thoughts on the scandal. I guess this page of skylarking was intended to reassure us or something. I wouldn’t take note of it at all except that one paragraph illustrates the pathology of public employees with stunning clarity:

As I reflect on the disturbing occurrences at Miramonte, I am more confused over the fact that the children did not report. How is it that the children did not believe that what the teacher was doing to them was wrong? How could being blindfolded, placed in a closet, and having cockroaches placed on them not be wrong? I believe that the teachers involved in these heinous acts preyed on the most vulnerable of the children; children of poverty, children of abuse, children with uninvolved parents, and children of undocumented parents.

The principal’s insistence on repeating lurid details from the newspapers is between her and her god. This person is a martinet with a habit of logorrhea that expresses itself in nightly robocalls and long assemblies during which parents are upbraided for such crimes as parking on the street while delivering and picking up students, cutting into the school’s funding by keeping kids home from classes, not contributing during fundraisers, and so on.

But look again at that paragraph. There is no way around the logic: She is arguing that it was the kids’ fault for not reporting the incident. And since public school is a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims, the children are also described as victims who have suffered from the depredations of poverty and abuse, of “uninvolved” and undocumented parents. Her focus on the kids’ purported failure to speak up may be intended as an “if you see something say something” advisory, but the focus itself is what is revealing. The inadequacy of the students and their parents, not the negligence of the school or the district, is to blame.

As it happens, my kids’ principal is wrong on the facts: Mark Berndt, the more prominent of the two accused teachers at Miramonte, was the subject of complaints on at least two occasions: in 1994 and 2008. Administrators at the school and the district failed to take action either time.

Another thing that the principal fails to note: Berndt has been accused, not convicted. For criminal purposes he is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and that would be true even if he were not represented by a public-sector union. The difference between a schoolteacher and, for example, an employee of Disneyland or Burger King, is that Berndt couldn’t be fired when the suspicions first came up. That’s not an idle comparison.

2012-02-14T20:38:00.000-08:00

Secularist Totalitarianism.

Father Baron points to "two forms of Liberalism" - the traditional liberalism and the secularist totalitarian liberalism.

I've had some Facebook discussions which confirm the totalitarian temptation of modern leftists who think that all religious people are "superstitious" and not really entitled to either have democratic results in their favor honored or to protection from totalitarian democracy on the grounds of conscience. In fact, one of the most amazing things about modern liberalism is that it no longer seems to understand what "freedom of conscience" means, and, yet, not so long ago, these were the people inveighing against loyalty oaths on that very ground.

2012-02-14T20:26:00.000-08:00

We live in one strange reality.

Tiny insect-sized chameleons discovered in Northern Madagascar:

Meet Brookesia micra, the newly discovered world's smallest chameleon. This wee creature was discovered on an island off of Northern Madagascar, where a biological expedition found these tiny beasts snoozing in vegetation a mere four inches off the ground. Juvenile specimens of Brookesia micra are the size of a match head, whereas the adults can be eclipsed by a press-on nail. Explain the researchers of this miniature reptile:

The newly described Brookesia micra reaches a maximum snout-vent length in males of 16 mm, and its total length in both sexes is less than 30 mm, ranking it among the smallest amniote vertebrates in the world. With a distribution limited to a very small islet, this species may represent an extreme case of island dwarfism.

Brookesia micra was but one of four tiny chameleon species the team discovered. Now we will finally know the answer to the millennia-old riddle of how many Malagasy dwarf chameleons can dance on the head of a pin: "Maybe two."

2012-02-14T15:26:00.000-08:00

We may not listen to her like we should...

...but no one messes with Mom without our saying so!

6 Catholics in 10 disapprove of Obama.

There goes the Catholic vote. Nearly four years after President Obama won 54 percent of Catholic voters, their support has plummeted to just 40 percent in the first poll conducted after he imposed a new birth control mandate on employers, including Catholic agencies.

In a new Rasmussen poll, 59 percent of Catholics now disapprove of the president's job. Rasmussen reports that 44 percent strongly disapprove. About 40 percent at least somewhat approve of Obama's job.

"Catholics strongly disapprove of the job President Obama is doing as the debate continues over his administration's new policy forcing Catholic institutions to pay for contraception they morally oppose," the pollster said in releasing his new survey. He added that while Obama's approval rating in other groups has improved, among Catholics it has remained stagnant.

Washington Secrets reported earlier that the president's controversial insurance mandated, rejected by Catholic bishops, was uniting Catholics politically, something rarely done by a politician or his policies.

2012-02-14T08:22:00.000-08:00

Book Alert.

Amazon is indicating that Peter Kreeft will be releasing a new book entitled "Summa Philosophica."

2012-02-14T08:02:00.000-08:00

Better Book Titles Blog.

This is just a fun site.

2012-02-14T07:46:00.000-08:00

Reality is a very strange place.

Apparently, our sun was once much larger, according to Io9:

Sun-like stars become brighter over the course of their long lives, which means that the Sun once provided Earth with far less heat than it does now - so much less, in fact, that life should have been impossible.

This is known as the faint young Sun paradox, and it was first identified by astronomers Carl Sagan and George Mullen back in 1972. In the early days of the solar system, the Sun should only have been at only about 70% its current luminosity. Such a relatively paltry amount of heat would have made it impossible for the Earth to maintain a liquid ocean, and yet we know for a fact that it did — and now that we're pretty much certain Mars had a liquid ocean back then as well, we can add that as a second mystery to the list.

The most common way to account for this apparent paradox is that the Earth simply held onto a lot more heat back then, most likely due to a runaway greenhouse effect. The absence of bacteria would have meant there was nothing around to break down carbon dioxide into its constituent parts, which would have helped fuel this greenhouse effect.

The problem, as Astrobiology Magazine reports, is that the geological record doesn't really support the carbon dioxide hypothesis. If there really was a ton of this gas in the early atmosphere, then minerals like siderite — which forms in the presence of heavy concentrations of carbon dioxide — should be everywhere in the ancient geological record. But it's almost completely absent, which makes it hard to credit this particular hypothesis.

It gets worse. Even if we can sort out the Earth side of the equation, we now have Mars to worry about as well, which makes the problem more complicated now than it had been in previous decades. Since Mars is much further out, you would need a lot more carbon dioxide to create the greenhouse gas effect — so much, in fact, that the carbon dioxide would blot out the Sun and start reflecting the Sun's rays, not trapping them. It's like we've traded one paradox for another.

That's where an alternative hypothesis enters the picture. A Penn State research team led by Stein Sigurdsson has created a new computer model that can simulate the Sun's evolution under various different starting condition. What they're searching for is the right combination of starting elements and internal conditions that could support an old, largely disregarded explanation: that the Sun was once more massive than it is now, and a fierce solar wind shrunk it to its present size.

The exact estimates vary on how big the Sun must once have been — the range is somewhere between 2% and 10% larger — but the idea is that the additional mass made the ancient Sun compensated for its relatively inefficient release of sunlight. This means its luminosity was effectively the same then as it is now, only for different reasons. This removes the need for any greenhouse effect and explains why we can't find evidence of one in the geological record.

Of course, the paradox isn't going away that easily. The solar wind must once have been at least a thousand times more powerful than it is now. Evidence from meteorites suggests that there once was an increased solar wind, but it could only have lasted for about 100 million years. In cosmic terms, that's barely any time at all for the Sun to blow off a significant chunk of its mass and slim down to its current size.

The other concern is that we simply haven't observed any other Sun-like stars behaving like this. All other medium-sized stars start out their life far less luminous, then slowly warm up over billions of years - indeed, without that observational data to guide our modeling of stellar evolution, there wouldn't have been any paradox to worry about in the first place. This hypothesis comes perilously close to carving out a unique path for our Sun's evolution, and scientists are leery of relying on explanations that require extraordinary circumstances in order to work.

However this paradox is resolved, it seems it is not going away quietly. About the only thing we can be sure of is that, somehow, the Earth and its oceans did survive. I think we can take that much for granted... unless this is the mother of all Twilight Zone twists and we all suddenly realize Earth was frozen the whole time. I don't really think that can be considered a hypothesis though...

2012-02-13T19:18:00.000-08:00

There are no coincidences.

Legal Insurrection points out:

Remember when no one understood why ABC asked about contraception at the NH Republican debate?

Remember when George Stephanopoulos, at the New Hampshire Republican debate on January 7, brought up and harped on whether the candidates thought states could ban contraception?

Everyone, at least on our side of the aisle, shook their heads in disbelief as to why Stephanopoulos was bringing up the issue. There was no active controversy over contraception, it wasn’t in the news, and there were far more pressing political issues, yet what seemed like an eternity of debate time was devoted to the subject at the insistence of Stephanopoulos.

Well what do you know, about a month later the Obama administration proposes administrative rules under Obamacare which would require free contraception be provided even by religious institutions which oppose contraception on religious grounds.

It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first. Unless, of course, you believe in coincidences.

2012-02-13T13:22:00.000-08:00

You just wouldn't expect this kind of thing to remain undiscovered for so long.

German soldiers preserved in World War I shelter discovered after nearly 100 years: Twenty-one German soldiers entombed in a perfectly preserved World War One shelter have been discovered 94 years after they were killed:

The men were part of a larger group of 34 who were buried alive when an Allied shell exploded above the tunnel in 1918 causing it to cave in.

Thirteen bodies were recovered from the underground shelter but the remaining men had to be left under a mountain of mud as it was too dangerous to retrieve them.

Nearly a century later French archaeologists stumbled upon the mass grave on the former Western Front during excavation work for a road building project.

Many of the skeletal remains were found in the same positions the men had been in at the time of the collapse, prompting experts to liken the scene to Pompeii.

A number of the soldiers were discovered sitting upright on a bench, one was lying in his bed and another was in the foetal position having been thrown down a flight of stairs.

2012-02-13T13:08:00.000-08:00

In Obama's America...

...Everything is Everyone's Business.

Mark Shea's corollary - Conversely, if somebody is going to force me to pay for their supplies and consequences, don’t tell me it’s none of my business.

2012-02-12T22:46:00.000-08:00

Jeepers, the Government institutes price controls and holds pharmaceutical manufacturers up to class warfare...

...and suddenly we have shortages of vital cancer treatment drugs.

Next up, let's have trials of "wreckers" and "hoarders" like Stalin did it in 1929.

That always works.

Glenn Reynolds writes:

HEALTH CARE: Supply of a Cancer Drug May Run Out Within Weeks.“A crucial medicine to treat childhood leukemia is in such short supply that hospitals across the country may exhaust their stores within the next two weeks, leaving hundreds and perhaps thousands of children at risk of dying from a largely curable disease, federal officials and cancer doctors say.”

This seems kinda third-worldish to me. And these shortages keep happening.

UPDATE: Reader Don Jansen writes: “So price controls are imposed on injectable drugs and lo and behold a shortage arises. Who would have thunk it?”Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Physician-reader Eric Novack writes: “Glenn- these shortages are very real… one center I work at has trouble getting propofol for anesthesia and another cannot get zofran (ondansetron), one of the most effective anti-nausea drugs on the market…” Very upsetting.

MORE: More here:“Again, the reader is left with the impression that drug manufacturers are hugely incompetent, failing to produce the needed amount of drugs even in the face of rising prices. Thank goodness President Obama is on the case, issuing executive orders! But the existence of any kind of shortage in a market-driven economy should make one’s nose twinkle. One drug shortage might be some kind of freakish anomaly, but 180 crucial drug shortages? The usual suspect in these kind of situations is the dead hand of government, and according to bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, writing in last August’s New York Times, that’s exactly the case. . . . In other words, government has distorted the market and removed incentives for the production of life-saving drugs. And the New York Times’ readership, unless they somehow recall Emanuel’s opinion piece, are left none the wiser.”

2012-02-12T21:59:00.000-08:00

Radio Free Aquinas.

2012-02-12T21:48:00.000-08:00

I think it's awful how the Grammy's made fun of Muslims ...

... by using their religious rituals and religious images in a mocking stage show. I particularly think it was unacceptable for them to keep shouting out "Mecca."

Oh...that didn't happen???

It was a stage show making fun of Catholics and their religious rituals and images? And the refrain was "Roman"?

Well, never mind.

It's only Catholics, so who cares?

*Sheesh*

Here's the video:

21221223435 by YardieGoals

2012-02-12T20:34:00.000-08:00

Human Time Wormholes.

A nice article about meeting people who knew people - such as meeting a 73 year old man who knew Rasputin personally.

I spoke to a man about his experiences as a Polish artillery officer on the first day of World War II.

He also remembered Czarist officers galloping through the streets of Warsaw.

2012-02-12T15:53:00.000-08:00

There are two lessons in this: First, any time you interact with the police it could be a life or death situation - your life, your death - and ...

...second, cell phone cameras may be the best defense for our civil liberties.

Fresno's Channel 30 News reports:

Idalia Morgutia-Johnson was 15 years old and hanging out with friends after school when she says two officers manhandled her and arrested her for no reason in August 2010.

The showdown was caught on video and Thursday, a judge agreed she hadn't committed a crime. Cell phone video shows two Fresno Police officers grabbing Johnson and hauling her out to a patrol car.

The charge? Loitering at Big Mama's Grill after her school day was done at Hoover High School across the street.

Johnson told Action News she tried to explain to the first officer that she'd placed an order, but Sgt. Larry Hustedde wasn't listening.

"He responded though by grabbing my right arm and twisting my wrist into my back and slamming me on the table I was seated at," Johnson said, "and I kept asking him why he was doing this."

A friend started taking video a few minutes later, after Johnson says Hustedde had slammed her to the ground. At one point, you can see her flail and kick in the air, but she says she was only fighting to get breath as officer Jeffrey Kaiser choked her.

It's good to know that the Fresno PD has a handle on "loitering" by 15 year old girls.

2012-02-12T15:38:00.000-08:00

Flashback.

According to Kathryn Lopez at NRO:

Richard Land, from the Southern Baptist Convention says of the HHS mandate:

This ruling by the Obama administration is the most transparently anti-Catholic action by the federal government since the Blaine Amendment was proposed in 1875

2012-02-12T12:10:00.000-08:00

The Daily Mail can post this story...

...and Glen Reynolds can link to the story and post this observation:

“I THINK MY BREASTS SAVED MY LIFE:” Huge-breasted model, 32, walks away from horror crash after her 38KKK chest acts as AIRBAG. Is there anything they can’t do?

But as soon as I mention this newsworthy item and post a picture of the victim, then suddenly it's all, "you're such a male chauvinist pig."

Particularly if I quote the victim, a Ms. Sheyla Hershey:

"'I think my breasts saved my life,' she told Barcroft Media. 'The accident was bad and my boobs are sore, but they protected the rest of me.'

Her car spun around and hit a tree during the crash but she denied the drunk-driving charge in court on Monday, reported the Daily Mirror.

Amazing!

Nonetheless, despite the miraculous nature of Ms. Hershey's deliverance from serious injury, I submit that the story isn't about the story.

The story is about the story about the story.

2012-02-12T07:57:00.000-08:00

Radio Free Aquinas.

2012-02-11T11:17:00.000-08:00

Amazon Review - Why It Doesn't Matter What You Believe If It's Not True: Is There Absolute Truth? [Paperback]
Stephen McAndrew (Author)

The author sent this book to me to review. Here is my review. As always a "helpful" vote would be appreciated.

Stephen McAndrew's "Why it Doesn't Matter What You Believe if It's Not True" is a well-written, highly-informative, tightly-argued examination of the questions, "Are there good grounds to believe that there is an absolute moral truth?" and "Why do people think that moral truths are 'relative'?"

McAndrew structures his as a fairly slim (approximately 90 pages with end-notes) and highly accessible argument in favor of the proposition that moral truths are "real" and not simply things that exist by agreement, stipulation or fancy. McAndrew clearly states his propositions and, in a very lawyer-like manner, marshals the proofs for his thesis. Unlike a great many lawyers, however, he is gifted with a habit of graceful prose that made reading his book enjoyable.

McAndrew's basic argument is not going to be very surprising to those who are acquainted with the usual debates about the ontological status of moral truth. McAndrew's book, however, is worth reading for the perspective he brings on the argument, particularly his recounting of intellectual history. McAndrew locates the origin of the attitude that moral truths are only contingent in the Empiricist philosophical tradition. The Empiricists denied that anything could be known - or knowable - except that information that was derived from sense experience. This view led to a crisis in Empiricism, where Empiricist philosophers found themselves denying common sense knowledge such as the fact that things continue to exist even after we no longer see them. The Empiricist tendency led to Logical Positivism, whose practitioners stipulated out of human consideration anything that could not be measured, tested or falsified.

The culmination of what McAndrew views as a dysfunctional philosophy was Ludwig Wittgenstein. According to McAndrew, the later Wittgenstein sought to "solve" all philosophical problems by arguing for the proposition that the reality experienced by human beings was found in the language established by the community and communicated to the individual by modeling and reinforcement. It seems that Wittgenstein's view was pretty comprehensive; Wittgenstein argued that pain was only "painful" in that human beings had been taught by modeling and reinforcement of behavior that certain kinds of behavior would be rewarded if such behavior "appropriately" followed certain stimuli. So, children who stumbled and fell and cried would be comforted; hence, the children learned "pain."

Wittgenstein's argument stemmed from his "private language argument." To wit, the purpose of language is to communicate publicly, which means that no one has a reason for having a "private language," which means that everything we communicate publicly has to be a community activity. According to McAndrew this insight supported and resonated with the idea of moral relativity. Thus, if "pain" is "pain" because of a community definition, then morality - which is another public activity - would also be a product of community definition.

McAndrew succinctly and quickly establishes that this approach is self-defeating by appealing to the argument that even relativists make a truth claim that is not contingent on a community definition of what counts as "truth." Simply put, if there's no "there" there - if there is no truth in that truth claim - then it isn't worth even the time spent breathing out the nonsense syllables that make up "Wittgenstein's" claim.

McAndrew also follows another line of reasoning by appealing to the "human rights urge." McAndrew points out that human rights are widely accepted as a point of established fact in international law. Most people today accept the idea of human rights as something that cannot be questioned. But if such rights are only contingent and accidental, then they don't really exist in the way that even secular modernists - particularly secular modernists - claim they exist. This puts even secular modernists into the bind of giving up one the most cherished programs of their project, and lapsing into nihilism, or conceding what they know already, i.e. that there is a moral truth.

This is a very nice argument.

McAndrew also offers some insights into why the relativist project exists. His arguments here were thought provoking. After reading this part of his book, I came away wondering at the strange cognitive dissonance that pervades modern society. For example, we don't accept the claim that truth is relative to the community when it comes to science. No one will get much mileage claiming that "global warming" is true for Europeans but not true for China. But when it comes to moral truths, suddenly there is no truth.

Except, perhaps, for those truths enshrined by secular modernists in the U.N. Charter of Human Rights.

I found McAndrew's book to be well-worth reading. I recommend it without reservations.

2012-02-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

A book that should be required reading in any "women's studies" class...

...but obviously won't be.

Rich Lowry writes:

Mimi Alford’s account of life at the White House as a 19-year-old intern who caught the president’s eye is a vividly personal portrayal of the ugliness behind the alluring images. Alford’s belated tell-all, Once Upon a Secret, should be assigned in women’s-studies classes as an illustration of the power imbalances in employer-employee sexual liaisons, especially those involving commanders-in-chief and their interns.

And:

The reality wasn’t as magical. Within her first week as an intern, JFK’s friend and procurer Dave Powers invited her to a midday swim with the president and some of the gals from the secretarial pool. At the end of the day, the rising sophomore at Massachusetts’ Wheaton College was invited to a get-together in the family residence. She was plied with daiquiris, then the president peeled her away from the group with an invitation to a private tour of the residence.

Alford lost her virginity on the fashionably elegant Mrs. Kennedy’s bed. “I wouldn’t describe what happened that night as making love,” Alford writes. “But I wouldn’t call it nonconsensual, either.”

That double negative captures the entire relationship, if that’s not too glorified a word. Alford says she was thrilled by JFK’s attentions; it made her feel “special.” He was playful and gentle with her, supposedly called her at school, and opened up a world of power and glamour unimaginable to the average college senior, let alone a sophomore.

Ultimately, though, she was a plaything at the sultan’s court. He never kissed her. Once, as she was smuggled along on a trip with JFK, Dave Powers made her sit on the floor of his car to hide from the White House staff — unsuccessfully. During a White House swim, she says, JFK commanded her to perform oral sex on Powers, and, to her humiliation, she complied. Later, he prodded her to do the same for his “baby brother,” Teddy.

There was no chivalry at Camelot.

And, then, there is this conclusion:

No one can confirm what happened in JFK’s pool so many decades later. But as The New Republic’s Timothy Noah notes, “The likelihood that Alford is making this story up is extremely remote.” Alford didn’t write her book until she was outed by a JFK biographer and an enterprising journalist. If the broad outlines of her book accord with what we already knew about JFK, the details suggest he wasn’t just a standard-issue womanizer but a loathsome creep.

If there was a similar story about Eisenhower or Nixon acting this way it would be front page news, but there won't be any such stories.

On the other hand, is anyone really surprised that JFK, like the man to whom he was such a hero, Bill Clinton, turn out to be loathsome pimps?

2012-02-11T08:12:00.000-08:00

Author of Bonhoeffer - Eric Metaxas - speaks "truth to power" at National Prayer Breakfast.

Metaxas' speech is humorous and informative. Metaxas reminds us that there is a difference between a living faith and dead religion. Further, following in the footsteps of Bonhoeffer and Wilberforce, from whom he appears to have learned something, Metaxas dares to mention in front of President Obama that the unborn are the powerless who today have to be protected.

NRO's Mark Joseph has a terrific summary of Metaxas' speech:

But Metaxas’s most blistering attack, albeit sheathed carefully in good humor and rapier wit, was still to come, for next on his agenda was his careful but dogged determination to link previous attitudes among churchgoers toward slavery and Nazism with those of some present day churchgoers toward abortion. Surrounded by three of the most powerful supporters of the right to choose, Obama, Vice President Biden, and former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi — two Catholics and a Protestant — Metaxas said:

“Wilberfoce suddenly took the Bible seriously that all of us are created in the image of God, to care for the least of these.”

After carefully describing the inhumane treatment of both Jews and Africans by those claiming to be Christians, he asked then answered a question:

“You think you’re better than the Germans of that era? You’re not,” adding: “Whom do we say is not fully human today?”

Metaxas' speech starts at 35 minutes.

2012-02-10T16:47:00.000-08:00

As Obama uses the power of the State to make everyone conform to his vision of utopia...

...dare to be this guy.

Mark Shea lists what Obama's overreach has accomplished:

"Priests for Live Files suit against the administration.

Belmont Abbey also files suit.

Rick Warren says he will go to jail rather than knuckle under to the tyrant.

65 Orthodox bishops stand with the Catholic communion in opposing the tyrant.

Chris Mathews is frightened by the tyrant’s actions

The GOP suddenly feels it sails swell with a fresh breeze as the Obama Administration’s gratuitous act of spite against the Church hands them a fantastic, volatile issue. Is a lot of this political opportunism? Of course! But who cares? I don’t give a rip what somebody’s motivation is in opposing this act of tyranny. I care that they oppose this act of tyranny. Way to go, GOP! Welcome to the resistance!"

Bad Catholic writes:

That’s right folks. I woke up this morning and the Church was the shizz. This is first and foremost because we have been rudely placed in the position of rebellion, and of the advocation of civil disobedience. To those who understand the teachings of the Church, this rebellion is nothing new, it has just been suddenly and fantastically stuck in the public eye. (Thank you, Department of Health and Human Services.) The Church already rebels against the twin monsters Socialism and Capitalism in her teachings, and strives instead after the principles of subsidiarity, in which the human person is neither an economic tool nor a cog in the machine. The Church already calls us to rebel against the culture of death, against abortion — of course — but with equal fervor against euthanasia, unjust war, the unjust use of the death penalty, suicide, terrorism, and any attacks on life.

2012-02-10T15:44:00.000-08:00

"If only women could be teachers..."

Glen Reynolds notes:

BUT RELAX, IT’S ONLY A SYSTEMIC PROBLEM IF PRIESTS ARE INVOLVED: How Many Kids Are Sexually Abused by Their Teachers? Probably millions. When it’s public-school teachers, it’s just one of those things. Whaddyagonnado?

This is in response to an article by Slate asking "How Many Kids Are Sexually Abused by Their Teachers?" Slate answers:

Possibly. The best available study suggests that about 10 percent of students suffer some form of sexual abuse during their school careers. In the 2000 report, commissioned by the American Association of University Women, surveyors asked students between eighth and 11^th grades whether they had ever experienced inappropriate sexual conduct at school. The list of such conduct included lewd comments, exposure to pornography, peeping in the locker room, and sexual touching or grabbing. Around one in 10 students said they had been the victim of one or more such things from a teacher or other school employee, and two-thirds of those reported the incident involved physical contact. If these numbers are representative of the student population nationwide, 4.5 million students currently in grades K-12 have suffered some form of sexual abuse by an educator, and more than 3 million have experienced sexual touching or assault. This number would include both inappropriate romantic relationships between teachers and upperclassmen, and outright pedophilia.

The outrage about Catholic priests is "buying grace on the cheap." Most of the noise comes from people who are not Catholic and will never see any of their loved one's abused by a priest - particularly since the Catholic Church is now the safest place there is for children and virtually all such acts occurred more than twenty years ago.

Besides tarring all priests as pedophiles is easy and a popular thing to do because the Catholic Church is just so darned unsupportive of the things so beloved by the liberal elites.

But getting worried about teachers is dangerous. They're a core constituency of the Democrat Party. Essentially everyone is going to have some relative involved the public school system somewhere. And, besides, teaching is for the kids.

Best to just move along.

2012-02-10T12:08:00.000-08:00

Raiders of the Lost Textual Fragments!

Archeologists uncover First Century fragments of the Gospel of Mark.

And there are not earth-shaking revelations!!!

According to Dan Wallace:

On 1 February 2012, I debated Bart Ehrman at UNC Chapel Hill on whether we have the wording of the original New Testament today. This was our third such debate, and it was before a crowd of more than 1000 people. I mentioned that seven New Testament papyri had recently been discovered—six of them probably from the second century and one of them probably from the first. These fragments will be published in about a year.

These fragments now increase our holdings as follows: we have as many as eighteen New Testament manuscripts from the second century and one from the first. Altogether, more than 43% of all New Testament verses are found in these manuscripts. But the most interesting thing is the first-century fragment.

It was dated by one of the world’s leading paleographers. He said he was ‘certain’ that it was from the first century. If this is true, it would be the oldest fragment of the New Testament known to exist. Up until now, no one has discovered any first-century manuscripts of the New Testament. The oldest manuscript of the New Testament has been P52, a small fragment from John’s Gospel, dated to the first half of the second century. It was discovered in 1934.

Not only this, but the first-century fragment is from Mark’s Gospel. Before the discovery of this fragment, the oldest manuscript that had Mark in it was P45, from the early third century (c. AD 200–250). This new fragment would predate that by 100 to 150 years.

How do these manuscripts change what we believe the original New Testament to say? We will have to wait until they are published next year, but for now we can most likely say this: As with all the previously published New Testament papyri (127 of them, published in the last 116 years), not a single new reading has commended itself as authentic. Instead, the papyri function to confirm what New Testament scholars have already thought was the original wording or, in some cases, to confirm an alternate reading—but one that is already found in the manuscripts. As an illustration: Suppose a papyrus had the word “the Lord” in one verse while all other manuscripts had the word “Jesus.” New Testament scholars would not adopt, and have not adopted, such a reading as authentic, precisely because we have such abundant evidence for the original wording in other manuscripts. But if an early papyrus had in another place “Simon” instead of “Peter,” and “Simon” was also found in other early and reliable manuscripts, it might persuade scholars that “Simon” is the authentic reading. In other words, the papyri have confirmed various readings as authentic in the past 116 years, but have not introduced new authentic readings. The original New Testament text is found somewhere in the manuscripts that have been known for quite some time.

These new papyri will no doubt continue that trend. But, if this Mark fragment is confirmed as from the first century, what a thrill it will be to have a manuscript that is dated within the lifetime of many of the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection!

2012-02-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

Amazon Review...

...Memorize the Faith! (and Most Anything Else): Using the Methods of the Great Catholic Medieval Memory Masters
by Kevin Vost

My review is here. As always a helpful vote is appreciated since I'm trying to drive my ranking below 5,000.

I want to add my voice to the cavalcade of five star ratings.

I first heard Kevin Vost explain his memory system - developed, he says, from the insights of St. Thomas Aquinas - on Catholic Answers while I was working out in the gym. He ran through his memory picture for the Seven Deadly Sins while I was doing curls. By the time I got to the next machine, I had all seven deadly sins memorized, backwards, forwards, or in any other order.

I had never thought I could do that, and I have a first rate memory.

My daughter and I made a game out of memorizing the Seven Deadly Sins, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Virtues and the Beatitudes. We got to where we could call out "the seventh commandment" or "the eighth beatitude" and nail the answer with no effort.

Amazing.

We haven't worked our way through the rest of the book, but I intend to start up again.

Vost is also absolutely right about the importance of memory to knowing and then to living the faith. This lists exist for a reason, i.e., because it enables us to reflect intelligently on the life we live and to order our life to the truth.

I highly recommend this book.

2012-02-10T09:14:00.000-08:00

It seems that there have been a number of these stories about attacks on Republicans where the culprit is a Democrat intern.

So, I'm going to start "holding paper" on this topic to see if my sense is accurate.

Romney 'glitter bomber' fired from internship:

The college student accused of "glitter bombing" Mitt Romney after the Colorado caucuses has been fired from his unpaid internship with state Senate Democrats.

Police say 20-year-old Peter Smith threw glitter at Romney as the Republican presidential hopeful greeted supporters in Denver on Tuesday. Smith faces charges of causing a disturbance, throwing a missile and unlawful acts.

Colorado Senate majority chief of staff John Cevette says Smith was terminated Thursday. He was interning as part of a course at the University of Colorado Denver.

Some activists have used "glitter bombing" to protest politicians' opposition to same-sex marriage. Smith has said glittering Romney was worth it, but he worries he could be expelled from school.

A conservative-leaning blog, Colorado Peak Politics, first reported that Smith worked for Senate Democrats and had been fired.

2012-02-10T08:32:00.000-08:00

Quote of the Day.

From James Taranto at the WSJ's Best of the Web:

Conservatives who portray Obama as "kowtowing to women's groups" in mandating that Catholic institutions provide abortifacient drugs and sterilization procedures are making a very fine distinction (and perhaps also trying to imply that the president is unmanly). Actual women hold diverse views on this and other topics; the so-called women's groups reflect an ideological extreme.

Obama's anti-Catholic decree is plainly ideological rather than political. Like his decision to push ahead with ObamaCare despite overwhelming public resistance, it is an effort to impose a worldview rather than to win support. "The Catholic Church should deal with its own sexuality problem," Unitarian minister Debra Haffner told Fox News's Bill O'Reilly yesterday. By his actions, Obama has proved that he shares her contempt for the liberty of religions that believe in God.

2012-02-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

"Bonhoeffer" Author Compares Obama's HHS Mandate to Nazi Germany ...

...on MSNBC, which must have caused leftist brains to melt around the leftist universe.

Creative Minority Reports writes:

Whoa. MSNBC must have lost its mind today when author/guest compared President Obama's encroachment of religious liberty to the first steps taken by the Nazis in Germany.

Something tells me that this is the last time "Bonhoeffer" author Eric Metaxas gets on the air on MSNBC. Especially because the truth hurts.

Breitbart reports:

“I met the president. I gave him a copy of my book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which he said he’s going to read,” Metaxas said during the interview. “In that book, you read about what happened to an amazingly great country called Germany…”

“In the beginning, it always starts really, really small. We need to understand as Americans — if we do not see this as a bright line in the sand — if you’re not a Catholic, if you use contraception — doesn’t matter. Because eventually, this kind of government overreach will affect you.”

Check out the vid. Poor Chris Jansing was so shocked that I believe it melted her brain because she doesn't really react in shock.

But what does she ask about when she's told the Obama administration is following the example of Nazis? She asks how Democrats acting like Nazis may hand Republicans a political issue. Because that's the important question.

Here is the video:

Check it out.

Really, check it out.

2012-02-09T14:07:00.000-08:00

Great Moments in Conservation.

Rhino dies during anti-poaching demonstration:

A conservation group in South Africa accidentally killed a rhinoceros Thursday during an anti-poaching demonstration performed in front of a group of reporters.

The demo required that Spencer, a male rhino in his late 20s, be shot with a tranquilizer gun so that demonstrators could dye and insert a tracking device into his horn—a procedure that ideally deters poachers from slaying the animal to sell the horn. But the sedation process failed.

"The rhino had an unfortunate reaction to the anesthesia," Lorinda Hern, a spokeswoman for the Rhino & Lion Nature Reserve told Reuters. "Every time you dart a rhino, you take a risk that the rhino might not wake up and unfortunately today was one of those days."

The animal reportedly went into convulsions and could not be revived.

2012-02-09T12:58:00.000-08:00

A Beautiful Example of "Liberal Tolerance" - Liberal justifies oppression of religious beliefs by playing on derogatory myth of the "Inquisition."

Wendy Kaminer pens an essay on "In Birth Control Debate, Religious Beliefs Don't Trump Rights."

Because, obviously, religious beliefs are not a "right" and, as a Constitutional scholar, she knows that the Constitution is really all about "abortion" and has nothing at all to say about the free exercise of religion.

But she really tosses the red-meat out for anti-Catholic bigots with her first paragraph:

You might expect the Catholic Bishops to recognize an Inquisition when they see one. But listening to their laments about the administration's "unprecedented assaults" on religious liberty, you'd think Barack Obama was the second coming of Torquemada.

Because, you know, Catholics are evil, evil people who were always launching Inquisitions and what-not.

Except that the "Inquisition" that Kaminer is an anti-Catholic myth. The reality is that the actual Inquisition provided procedural protections unheard of in secular courts, and the reach of the Inquisition never extended as far as Kaminer suggests. Moreover, in terms of death tolls, the Inquisition was a "piker" compared to liberals and "liberals in a hurry." Over its 450 year history only around 3,000 individual were executed as a result of the Inquisition; the French Revolution and Russian and Chinese Communists would exceed that number in a busy afternoon.

2012-02-09T12:48:00.000-08:00

Young Adult Science Fiction Author John Christopher passes away.

He was the author of the "War against the Tripods" trilogy:

The author John Christopher died in England last Friday, and I'm guessing that most of you have no idea who he was or what he wrote. He wrote an awful lot, in a lot of different genres, under many different names, but I remember him today because of three creased and crinkled used paperbacks of science fiction I stumbled across as a child at the "for sale" carousel at the Reginald P. Dawson Library in Town of Mount Royal, Quebec. I still have the books--35 years later--and have dutifully tried to get my son to read them. Maybe I'll try again now.

The books are The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire and together they comprise what is called the "Tripod Series," named for the shape of the giant aliens who have captured Earth and enslaved the humans at the core of Christopher's narratives. I don't remember much of the details of the books except that a group of young boys were always on the run, part of a resistance to the alien conquerors, in a sort of 1984 meets Red Dawn meets the French Resistance fondue.

2012-02-09T10:27:00.001-08:00

Radio Free Aquinas.

2012-02-08T22:13:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of this going around.

First, a liberal Catholic says he's getting the sinking suspicion that the Church may be right, then the Business Insider says "Time To Admit It: The Church Has Always Been Right On Birth Control"

Here's the thing, though: the Catholic Church is the world's biggest and oldest organization. It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor. It's given us some of the world's greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually has a good reason. Everyone has a right to disagree, but it's not that they're a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages.

So, what's going on?

The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That's it. But it's pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it's probably never been as salient as today.

Today's injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1965 document by Pope Paul VI called Humane Vitae. He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:
1.General lowering of moral standards
2.A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
3.The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
4.Government coercion in reproductive matters.

Does that sound familiar?

Because it sure sounds like what's been happening for the past 40 years.

2012-02-08T21:50:00.000-08:00

Unterfuhrer Pelosi hails the Administration...

...she tells the press that she is going to "stick with" her "fellow Catholics" and "support the Administration."

I'm sure there were Catholics in the Reich who talked the same way.

2012-02-08T21:40:00.000-08:00

The Physics of Music.

Why Science Fiction Movie Music Composers love the "Perfect Fifth."

2012-02-08T11:45:00.000-08:00

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

Glen Reynolds observes:

FREE SPEECH: Government Employer Free to Fire Human Resources Officials Who Publicly Criticize the Propriety of Gay Rights Laws. See, once we stopped persecuting commies, the value of dissent quickly became unappreciated.

The Volokh Conspiracy writes:

So holds Dixon v. University of Toledo (N.D. Ohio Feb, 6, 2012). (I blogged about this case when it was filed.) A few thoughts:

(1) Some of the analysis seems limited to high-level “policymaking” employees, such as a university Associate Vice President.

(2) But some of the argument suggests that any time any government manager with hiring and firing authority — or even with substantial input into hiring and firing decisions — speaks out in opposition to civil rights laws protecting gays, the government may fire the manager on the grounds that the speech (a) “could disrupt the … [d]epartment by making homosexual employees uncomfortable or disgruntled,” (b) might lead “homosexual prospective employees [to] reconsider applications,” and (c) might “lead to challenges to her personnel decisions.”

(3) This in turn highlights the danger to government managerial employees who want to participate in, for instance, campaigns opposing same-sex marriage or proposed laws banning sexual orientation discrimination. If you’re such an employee, you’d be wise to keep your mouth shut on such matters, whether it comes to letters to the editor, to blog posts, to yard signs, to campaign donations, or to signatures on initiative or referendum petitions (in states that disclose such signatures). After all, any of these might be noticed by people who will publicize what you said or did, and who will directly or indirectly inform your supervisors about it.

Maybe that’s an acceptable price to pay for effective functioning of government workplaces — the Pickering test is generally not very speech-protective, on this subject or others — and maybe it’s not. But in any case that seems to be where things are headed, at least in many such workplaces.

So, basically, Catholics, Evangelicals and others who dissent from secular orthodoxy need not apply.

Of course, sauce for the goose, etc. Does this mean that HR employees who participate in pro-gay marriage campaigns might be suspected of invidious discriminatory attitudes against Catholics, Evangelicals and others who dissent from secular orthodoxy?

Probably not, under the legal principle of "heads I win, tails you lose."

Terrific.

2012-02-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

Oddities of the English Language.

Double Contractions.

The only one I will recognize as a real word is "bo's'n."

2012-02-08T11:19:00.000-08:00

All religions are the same, but Eastern religions are better because they are about "spirituality."

Indian girl, 7, murdered and sacrificed for better harvest.

A girl of seven in India was murdered and had her liver cut in a ritual sacrifice to ensure a better harvest.

Two men, both poor farmers, have now been arrested in central India for allegedly carrying out the killing, police said today.

Lalita Tati disappeared in October and her dismembered remains were found a week later, said Rajendra Narayan Das, a senior police officer in the Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh state.

The state is the tenth largest in the country and beliefs in traditional healers runs deep.

Police arrested the men last week and they told officers they killed the girl to appease their gods and get a better harvest.

Tati was walking home after watching TV at a neighbour's house when she was kidnapped, Das said.

The two men confessed to cutting her open and removing her liver as an offering.

Das said the police had gathered enough evidence, apart from the confessions, to charge the two with murder.

They would face life in prison or even the death sentence if convicted.
The men were described as 'tribals', a term referring to the region's indigenous people, most of whom remain mired in poverty and illiteracy.

And this:

In December of last year seven people were imprisoned in the state of Maharashtra for the human sacrifice of two children aged seven and three. While two years ago in West Bengal the head and torso of a man was found in a temple to the goddess Kali.

Yikes.

2012-02-07T11:29:00.000-08:00

The Death of Democracy.

Apparently a sovereign people does not have the right to determine something basic - something that has been non-controversial since time immemorial - like recognizing the fact that marriage is an institution that exists for the creation and rearing of children.

2012-02-06T22:20:00.001-08:00

Radio Free Aquinas.

2012-02-06T20:24:00.000-08:00

This Guy.

The photo was taken in Hamburg in 1936, during the celebrations for the launch of a ship. In the crowed, one person refuses to raise his arm to give the Nazi salute. The man was August Landmesser. He had already been in trouble with the authorities, having been sentenced to two years hard labour for marrying a Jewish woman.

We know little else about August Landmesser, except that he had two children. By pure chance, one of his children recognized her father in this photo when it was published in a German newspaper in 1991. How proud she must have been in that moment.

2012-02-06T20:01:00.000-08:00

Nun may be arrested for "desecrating" Hindu objects

According to Asia News:

Sr. Ajaya Mary, dean of the Nirmala Covent School institute, did not allow a student to perform a ritual dedicated to the goddess Saraswati. Hindu activists accuse the nun of "having wounded the religious sentiments of the community." The nun speaks of a "false and malicious campaign" against a school that "for 42 years has served society."

This morning Hindu activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABV) organized a sit-in in front of the Nirmala Covent School in Korba (Chattisgarh) to request the arrest of Sr. Mary Ajaya, dean of the institute. The protesters - mostly young men - accuse the religious of having "desecrated" Hindu sacred objects, belonging to a student. For Sr. Ajaya, of the Franciscans of the Immaculate Conception, it is "a gross violation of the rights of our Christian minority institution and of the dignity of a woman and intimidation and harassment of a woman religious and a threat to the very secular and democratic fabric of Indian society, creating communal disharmony and a law and order situation."

The ABV is a student organization affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu ultra-nationalist party that has lead the country since 2008. The BJP supports groups belonging to the extremist Hindu movement of the Sangh Parivar, like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or the Bajrang Dal, often responsible for violence against Dalits and Christians.

The protest arose out of an incident which occurred on 28 January. "During recess", Sr. Ajaya told AsiaNews, "a male student organized a 'Saraswati Pooja' [a Hindu ritual dedicated to Saraswati, goddess of knowledge, ed], in class, without any prior permission. He collected money from the students and arranged a framed image of Sarawati, along with plates containing flowers, fruit, incense, and prayer beads." After summoning the boy's father and telling him what had happened, the dean sent the boy home, giving him and his father all the ritual objects, which as customary, would be immersed in a nearby stream.

A few hours later, a crowd gathered outside the school, accusing the nun of having "desecrated" religious artifacts, injuring the sentiments of the Hindu community. With them, many local TV stations rushed to the spot, reporting the news that the principal had "offended" Hinduism "throwing objects in the trash."

And it didn't end there. On 30 January, an official of the district asked Sr. Ajaya to allow Hindu students to practice the ritual. The nun refused, at which point, AVP activists broke into the school, carrying a picture of Saraswati. "Given the pressures of the collector and the protesters", explained the dean, "I asked some Hindu teachers to celebrate the ritual".

"The accusations against me", explains Sr. Alaya, "are completely baseless. When I conducted an inquiry in my office, five teachers were present, along with the students, who held each and every item of the ritual. This fabricated, false and malicious campaign against our Christian Education has caused us deep anguish, because we have given the majority community our dedicated service, and made a significant contribution towards nation building through educational service. Thousands of students of all faiths, castes and classes have enjoyed our service."

2012-02-06T16:17:00.000-08:00

I guess on one level this is suprising.

Lesbian "marriages" more likely to end in divorce:

Lesbian Divorce Shocker: Same-sex marriages between women are considerably more likely to end in divorce than either same-sex male marriages or heterosexual marriages, according to a study of Norway and Sweden:

We found that divorce risks are higher in same-sex partnerships than in opposite-sex marriages, and that unions of lesbians are considerably less stable, or more dynamic, than unions of gay men. In Norway as well as in Sweden, the divorce risk in female partnerships is practically double that of the risk in partnerships of men.
Is the difference explained by a relative lack of children to encourage stability? Maybe not. The study found a similar pattern with childless couples (when other variables were accounted for).

So what’s the explanation? Here’s the murky PC theory offered by the study’s authors:

We find that partnerships of women to a much larger extent are demographically homogamous than are partnerships of men: Lesbian partners often have relatively similar characteristics while gay spouses more often differ in terms of characteristics such as age, nationality, education, and income. Such similarity in characteristics might also reflect a deeper feeling of sameness in lesbian couples. Such a sameness and a corresponding lack of clear power structures may be inducive to a high level of dynamism in the relationship, but perhaps not to the kind of inertia that is related to marital stability. [E.A.]
Um, ok. … You got a better explanation? …

Backfill: The study is not new–it appears to have been published in 2006. It’s new to me.

Or there is Glen Reynolds' explanation:

LESBIAN DIVORCE SHOCKER: Same-sex marriages between women are considerably more likely to end in divorce than either same-sex male marriages or heterosexual marriages, according to a study of Norway and Sweden. Well, women initiate divorce twice as often as men, so it stands to reason that a marriage composed of nothing but women would be more likely to split.

Makes sense: if women are twice as likely to initiate divorce in real marriages, then its stands to reason that the women in a lesbian marriage would be four times as likely to initiate divorce.

Yeah, I know it really doesn't work that way, but do you have a better explanation?

2012-02-06T15:45:00.000-08:00

Amazon Book Review - Jesus in the Talmud...

..by Peter Schafer.

The review is here. I'd appreciate a "helpful" vote.

Inflammatory material handled in a scholarly and interesting way.,

February 6, 2012

Peter Schafer does a terrific job of threading the needle on a subject that could be inflammatory in any of several directions. Professor Schafer handles the incindiary subject matter of slurs against Jesus and his mother by focusing on matters of scholarly interest, namely by examining what the Talmudic texts meant about the interaction between Jewish and Christian communities and Palestine and Babylon and about the knowledge of Jewish writers with the basic Christian narrative.

It shouldn't be surprising to find that there were some really vile slurs against Jesus, his mother and disciples floating around in Jewish communities during the period from the 2d to the 4th Century. Judaism and Christianity were engaged in a forceful debate about the meaning of Jewish and Christian identity, and as Oscar Skarsaune argues in In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity there was a heated competition between Christians and Jews for adherents.

We know about the Christian anti-Jewish side of the inter-religious slandering competition. "Jews" are described in the Gospel of John as being children of Satan; a fair number of early Christian fathers wrote embarrassingly anti-semitic tracks; and there was a tradition that equated Jews with being "God-killers."

It would be unimaginable to think that Jews wouldn't respond in kind.

As Professor Schafer points out they did by regularly inverting the Gospel narratives. So, in place of Jesus' birth from the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary, or Miriam, is a whore and an adulterer, and Jesus is a "mamzer" (bastard) whose real father was a Roman soldier names "Panthera." (Professor Schafer speculates that the theme of intentional inversion may be seen in the name "Pantera," which seems to invert "Parthenos" (virgin-birth) to "Panthera." (panther.)

If that isn't enough, Jesus was a bad son, a brick-worshipping idolater and a magician. Jesus' disciples recanted, pled for mercy and were killed. Jesus was never resurrected, rather he spends eternity boiling in excrement, in another inversion of the Gospel narrative that his followers should eat his flesh.

Schafer does a nice job of showing how these odd stories actually play a role in crafting a powerful "counter-narrative" in the Jewish community against Christian claims. Thus, rather than disclaiming responsibility for the death of Christ it seems that the Jewish community - particularly the Babylonian community - was proudly saying that "yes, the Jews did kill Jesus, which is what he deserved as a blasphemer and an idolater."

Schafer discounts the possibility that the odd stories found in the Talmud have any historical significance for understanding the life of Jesus. Rather, the stories have significance in showing what the Jewish community new later, and how it responded to the insurgent threat of Christianity.

Schafer concludes his short - approximately 130 page - text with discussion about the differences between the Palestinian and the Babylonian communities. My sense was that the scandalous stories about Jesus were few and far between in the Talmud's of both communities. Moreover, when the stories were told, the stories themselves were not so much the center of attention, but rather the stories were taken as a given and the information that the stories related were used to make some other point about Jewish law and customs. One of things that I take-away from this book is that even if the scandalous things said about Jesus were few and far between in the Talmud, I suspect that these stories circulated in a fairly unrestrained fashion in discourse between and among Jewish and Christian communities.

In any event, these stories were more often to be found in the Babylonian Talmud. Schafer points out that the reason for this may have been the fact that Babylon was under the control of Zoroastrian Persians, and, after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, Persia began to look at Christians as a potential "Fifth Column" and began a long period of persecuting Christians in the Persian Empire. The Jewish community of the Persian Empire may have been emboldened in that context to, as Professer Schafer argues, "take up, and continue, the discourse of their brethren in Asia Minor."(p. 129.)

From my standpoint, I find the mention of the Zoroastrian persecution of Christians to be something I don't think I had heard about before. Likewise, my next book will probably be Robert Louis Wilkens' John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century. After reading this book, I will probably have a better context to weigh the rhetorical excesses of Chrysostem because this book suggests that the "norm" of inter-religious discourse was not particularly edifying.

2012-02-06T08:34:00.000-08:00

Liberal Fascism.

So, the Obama administration bails out Big Business for billions of dollars, and then Big Business cuts a Superbowl ad telling Americans that it's "half-time in America."

Jeepers..."half-time"...as in four years out of eight?

Do you think that's what the not-so-hidden subtext was?

Gleischaltung worked for the Nazis; it's bound to work for Team Obama!

2012-02-04T15:03:00.000-08:00

From the "Truth is Stranger than Fiction...

...because Fiction has to be Plausible" Department.

Lawsuit: Defendant Breached a Duty Not to Shoot Bottle Rockets Out of His Anus.

College frat guys, naturally.

The pertinent allegations are:

8. [Defendant] was highly intoxicated on this date and time, and decided in his drunken stupor that it would be a good idea to shoot bottle rockets out of his anus on the [Alpha Tau Omega fraternity] deck, located on the back of the ATO house.

10. [Defendant] placed a bottle rocket in his anus [and] ignited the fuse, but instead of launching, the bottle rocket blew up in Defendant's rectum, and this startled plaintiff and caused him to jump back, at which time he fell off of the ATO deck, and he became lodged between the deck and an air conditioner unit adjacent to the deck.

13. Per the applicable codes ... the deck in question should have had a railing, which comported with said codes.

16. ATO owed plaintiff a duty to provide a safe deck, including a railing, and ... a duty to supervise its guests and its own fraternity members, such as Defendant, and other under age persons, from consuming alcohol on its premises, which leads to stupid and dangerous activities, such as shooting bottle rockets out of one's own anus.

18. [Defendant] also owed plaintiff ... a duty of care not to drink under age, or to file bottle rockets out of his anus.

19. [Defendant] breached this duty when he both drank under age ... and attempted to fire a bottle rocket out of his anus while under the influence. The act of firing a bottle rocket, within Huntington City Limits, was also a crime.

22. Plaintiff asserts that the activity of underaged drinking and firing bottle rockets out of one's own anus constitutes an "ultra-hazardous" activity which exposes both of these defendant to strict liability

Here is the pdf of the complaint if you need to put it into your form file.

Mom and Dad must be so proud.

2012-02-04T08:41:00.000-08:00

A candidate for the Paul Erhlich Award: Another disaster that didn't happen.

Back in the '80s the scare factor was that AIDS would explode through the heterosexual population. At the time there were those who argued against this scenario, but they were regularly denounced as anti-scientific or anti-gay or some-such.

It turns out that nearly 30 years later, the skeptics were right after all. According to the Center for Disease Control:

Gay, Bisexual, and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM)1of all races and ethnicities remain the population most severely affected by HIV.

CDC estimates that MSM account for just 2% of the US population, but accounted for 61% of all new HIV infections in 2009. MSM accounted for 49% of people living with HIV infection in 2008 (the most recent year prevalence data are available).

In 2009, white MSM accounted for the largest number of new HIV infections of any group in the US, followed closely by black MSM.

Young, black MSM were the only risk group in the US to experience statistically significant increases in new HIV infections from 2006–2009.

Another myth casually debunked by the CDC cite is the "10%" myth that was bruited about throughout the '70s and '80s, namely that one in ten Americans is homosexual. Apparently, the true figue is close to 2%.

Presumably, the interesting questions are: Why was the prediction of disaster so wrong? Who was responsible for making the wrong predictions? And, can we stop listening to these clowns in the future?

Here's a graph:

Another question - why are the infection rates so different between the white and black populations?

Strange.

2012-02-03T19:18:00.000-08:00

Another culture races for the exit.

One third of Japan's youth have no interest in sex or relationships:

A startling number of Japanese youths have turned their backs on sex and relationships, a new survey has found.

The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had "no interest" in or even "despised" sex. That's almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.

If that's not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.

The survey paints a bleak picture for Japan's aging population. The Associated Press reports that the national population of 128 million will have shrunk by one-third by 2060 and seniors will account for 40 percent of people, placing a greater burden on the work force population to support the country's social security and tax systems.

Many commentators in the Japanese and international media have laid the problem squarely at the feet of soshoku danshi -- "herbivore men" -- a term coined by pop culture columnist Maki Fukasawa in 2006. It refers to Japanese young men who have rejected their culture's traditional definition of masculinity, and seemingly eschew relationships with the opposite sex as part.

CNN spoke to a Midori Saida, a 24-year-old Japanese woman who described "herbivore men" as "flaky and weak."

And:

BBC News spoke to one such "herbivore" man (see video above). The man, Yusaki Yakahashi said: "Building a relationship seems like too much effort. To get her to like me and for me to like her... I'd have to give up everything I do at the weekend for her. I don't want to do that."

Another theory that seeks to explain Japan's shrinking population is that Japanese youth spend too much time engaged with technology, living in virtual worlds or settling for virtual girlfriends rather than real ones.

Britain's Daily Telegraph reports that Japan's government has undertaken a series of campaigns to encourage couples to have more children -- including making companies insist that their staff leave work at 6 pm to increase child allowances -- but according to Dr. Kunio Kitamura, head of the Japan Family Planning Association, "none of that is gong to have an impact if people are not going to have sex."

2012-02-03T14:43:00.000-08:00

Where reality is the enemy...

...neutrality is betrayal.

Susan G. Komen's explanation for walking-back its withdrawal from funding Planned Parenthood is strange. Komen explains:

"Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair."

It appears that Komen originally decided to defund Planned Parenthood because of the scandals (a) the counseling of pimps who want cheap health services for underaged prostitutes or (b) aiding and abetting middle-aged men in the statutory rape and impregnation of 13 year olds.

Komen's walk back is bizarre. Komen is not a government agency charged with making determinations beyond a reasonable doubt. It's a fiduciary charged with using common sense and making sure that the money that people donate doesn't get used to support (a) things other than breast cancer diagnosis, treatment and awareness or (b) idiots who counsel pimps and abused children on how to most effectively cover up crimes done by or to them.

That was my common sense, and I see that other great minds reached the same conclusion. Here is James Taranto from the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web:

In truth, Komen was under no obligation to fund Planned Parenthood. Its decision not to do so was not punitive and did not even appear to be. The episode is reminiscent of George Orwell far more than Joe McCarthy. Komen's actual aim was to extricate itself from the divisive national battle over abortion by severing its connection with a leading combatant.

The conservative Media Research Center notes that CNN "aired a pretty one-sided piece including statements from Planned Parenthood's president Cecile Richards, evidence supporting her claims of right-wing 'bullying,' and even vitriolic Facebook posts decrying the de-funding." No supporter of Komen's position or critic of Planned Parenthood was included. Even more appalling than that lack of balance, though, was CNN's echoing the charge of "right-wing 'bullying,' " while the network was participating in Planned Parenthood's effort to bully Komen.

The Ministry of Information--sorry, the New York Times--editorializes:

With its roster of corporate sponsors and the pink ribbons that lend a halo to almost any kind of product you can think of, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has a longstanding reputation as a staunch protector of women's health. That reputation suffered a grievous, perhaps mortal, wound this week from the news that Komen, the world's largest breast cancer organization, decided to betray that mission. It threw itself into the middle of one of America's nastiest political battles, on the side of hard-right forces working to demonize Planned Parenthood and undermine women's health and freedom.

The truth is that Komen blundered into a political battle by supporting Planned Parenthood in the first place and was attempting to back out of it quietly.

The Times's view exemplifies feminism's gradual transformation into a totalitarian ideology. Totalitarianism politicizes everything, so that neutrality is betrayal--in this case, neutrality on abortion is portrayed as opposition to "women's health." As we wrote last year, this is also why purportedly pro-choice feminists can hate Sarah Palin and her daughter for choosing not to abort their children.

Komen would have been better off approaching the matter straightforwardly, by announcing that it wished to opt out of the abortion debate and would not support groups that take a position on either side of the issue, including Planned Parenthood. This would not have averted the smear campaign that followed, for Planned Parenthood and its supporters have internalized the notion that abortion is health, and are determined that everyone else internalize it too. But an honest position would have been easier to defend. No one would have been able to dent Komen's integrity.

Exactly. Any sane charitable group would be running for the doors with their coat in hand if there had been videos of the group they were supporting using their money to advise pimps on how to get discount abortions for their underage hookers.

But the rules of common sense don't apply to liberal sacred cows.

2012-02-03T07:57:00.000-08:00

Global Warming: The Science is Settled...

...the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia concedes that there has been no warming for the last 15 years.

According to Armed and Dangerous:

First, the British Meteorological Service and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia are now admitting that global warming stopped in 1997 – there’s been no net rise in the Earth’s temperature in 15 years. And no, this isn’t an illusion produced by the 1997 El Nino peak – if you look at the chart accompanying the article you’ll see that GAT has dropped to pre-el-Nino levels.

The source makes this a particularly difficult pill for AGW alarmists to swallow – for of course, the CRU is the home of the infamous “team” whose work has been at the center of the panic. If they’re wrong now, what warrant do we have that they weren’t equally wrong then?

And, actually, it gets worse. Solar observations suggest we may be headed for an insolation minimum ever deeper than the one in 2008 that wiped out the entire 20th-century GAT rise – in fact, some NASA meteorologists are muttering darkly about a near-term recap of the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age!

This of course, is bad news for the political class because AGW panic was so useful for raising taxes and increasing central control of the economy. The general public has been increasingly skeptical of late, but popular reaction so far has been nothing compared to what will be unleashed if it turns out the real climate problem of the next two decades is how to keep our crops from freezing.

The CRU is one of the "hotspots" of Global Warmism.

Here is the Daily Mail source (which I've linked to previously):

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

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

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

Without fanfare?

No wonder we keep reading news reports which assume that global warming is still happening.

This is also inconvenient:

CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.

And:

She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water temperature cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

‘They have insufficiently been appreciated in terms of global climate,’ said Prof Curry. When both oceans were cold in the past, such as from 1940 to 1970, the climate cooled. The Pacific cycle ‘flipped’ back from warm to cold mode in 2008 and the Atlantic is also thought likely to flip in the next few years .

Pal Brekke, senior adviser at the Norwegian Space Centre, said some scientists found the importance of water cycles difficult to accept, because doing so means admitting that the oceans – not CO2 – caused much of the global warming between 1970 and 1997.

The same goes for the impact of the sun – which was highly active for much of the 20th Century.

‘Nature is about to carry out a very interesting experiment,’ he said. ‘Ten or 15 years from now, we will be able to determine much better whether the warming of the late 20th Century really was caused by man-made CO2, or by natural variability.’

Meanwhile, since the end of last year, world temperatures have fallen by more than half a degree, as the cold ‘La Nina’ effect has re-emerged in the South Pacific.

‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’

Very inconvenient.

2012-02-02T08:10:00.000-08:00

Global Warming: The Science is Settled...

...except when it's not.

Scientists allegedly discover a "new kind of molecule" that causes pollution to cool the planet:

In a breakthrough paper published in Science, researchers from The University of Manchester, The University of Bristol and Sandia National Laboratories report the potentially revolutionary effects of Criegee biradicals.

These invisible chemical intermediates are powerful oxidisers of pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, produced by combustion, and can naturally clean up the atmosphere.

Although these chemical intermediates were hypothesised in the 1950s, it is only now that they have been detected. Scientists now believe that, with further research, these species could play a major role in off-setting climate change.

The detection of the Criegee biradical and measurement of how fast it reacts was made possible by a unique apparatus, designed by Sandia researchers, that uses light from a third-generation synchrotron facility, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source.

The intense, tunable light from the synchrotron allowed researchers to discern the formation and removal of different isomeric species -- molecules that contain the same atoms but arranged in different combinations.

The researchers found that the Criegee biradicals react more rapidly than first thought and will accelerate the formation of sulphate and nitrate in the atmosphere. These compounds will lead to aerosol formation and ultimately to cloud formation with the potential to cool the planet.

The formation of Criegee biradicals was first postulated by Rudolf Criegee in the 1950s. However, despite their importance, it has not been possible to directly study these important species in the laboratory.

But, hey, the fact that scientists didn't know about this is no reason not to pour trillions into solving a problem that doesn't exist.

2012-02-02T07:28:00.000-08:00

Obama's last press conference was in July...

of 2009!

Don Surber writes:

The only president to ever need a teleprompter to handle a press conference — so his staff could feed him the answers — held his last prime-time press conference in July 2009, which ended in disaster when he said the police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “acted stupidly” in arresting his friend Henry Louis Gates.

The New York Times broke the unwritten code among journalists that you never, ever complain about mistreatment from Barack Obama.
In a blog post, Brian Stetler wrote:

Mr. Obama has been interviewed a total of 408 times in his first three years as president, according to Martha Kumar, a professor at Towson University who works alongside reporters at the White House. President George W. Bush had given 136 interviews at the same period in his presidency, and President Bill Clinton had given 166.

However, Mr. Obama has comparatively avoided Q.&A.s with scrums of reporters, according to Ms. Kumar, answering questions at 94 photo opportunities and other such sessions in his first three years. Mr. Bush had spoken at 307 such sessions after three years in office, and Mr. Clinton, 493.

Those 408 interviews include appearances on Jay Leno, You Tube and Twitter questions from sycophants, and the like.

President Obama has bubble-wrapped himself in the White House. His press staff reflects his attitude of disdain toward the press, as Brian Stetler noted:

Daniel Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, responded in an e-mail, “The idea that interacting with the public through social media is somehow going around the White House press corps is a prehistoric notion.”

“The media has become so diffuse that communicating ones’ message requires a lot more work than it used to,” he wrote. “You have to be willing to go where the viewers are, because they now have so much choice in where they get their information.”

Bizarre. The imperial presidency rises. No one in that “prehistoric notion” called the White House Press corps is willing to call Obama out on this. Not even Jake Tapper.

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

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

Moms can be deadbeat too:

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

Saves on stress all around.

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

How Americans sound to Brits.

Mark Shea intros this clip as follows:

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

The YouTube site explains:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why people?

More importantly, why "2"?

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

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

Here's the story:

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

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

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

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

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

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

She then added her own verses:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only Los Angeles school teachers could marry...

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

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

The details are disgusting.

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

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

Hope and Change as far as the eye can see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riots in American cities ...

...and it's not news?

Glen Reynolds writes:

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

Here is the linked Hot Air piece:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay classy, leftists.

Glen Reynolds notes:

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

More here.

From American Glob:

Occupy Providence Throws Condoms At Catholic School Girls

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

From LifeSiteNews…

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

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

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

OWS Riots in Oakland.

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

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

Here's some video:

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

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

Right idea; wrong remedy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Facebook post made the following observation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Academic Bubble.

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

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

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

...it may be getting colder.

According to the Daily Mail:

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

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

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

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

Amazon Review -

"The End of Eternity" by Isaac Asimov.

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

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

****Spoiler Warning****

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

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

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

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

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

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

***End Spoilers ***

Assessment:

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

But...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-Script:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uber-cool!

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

Via the King of Cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China may be heading for economic trouble.

The Telegraph observes:

A quick observation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beats me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the test.

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

Which is just about right.

Interesting.

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

Grace notes on the Titanic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Stewart on the State of the Union Address.

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

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

Advice after losing a job.

Susannah Breslin reflects:

TIP #3: Do something or die

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soylent Green is People...

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

Pepsi is using aborted fetuses in soda flavoring research:

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

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

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

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

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

We are in the best of hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Review ...

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

Please go here and give me a helpful vote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can the Secularists in the Democrat Party tolerate the Religious?

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

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

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

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

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

At the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's amazing is how cool Sullenberg was.

The man has the "right stuff."

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

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

The "religion" is Christianity.

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

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

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

The Dysfunction of the Academic Class.

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paradigm Shifts and Big Bang Deniers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting.

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

Priest Rap.

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

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

From the article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is better to be feared than loved.

Glen Reynolds points out:

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

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

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

Prejudice in America...

...can a Mormon be elected President?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the argument against Gingrich...

...by John Mark Reynolds:

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

Let us judge Newt Gingrich by his own professed beliefs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Newt Gingrich is unfit for public office.

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

Paranoid, yes, certainly...

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

Powerline points out the following:

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

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

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

Zachary Edwards was arrested Friday and charged with identity theft.

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The case for Gingrich...

...articulated by Dan Riehl:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon Review.

A Century of Progress by Fred Saberhagen.

Go here and give me a helpful vote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huh?

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

Ultimately, this book is a confusing mess.

*Sigh*

I had hoped for better.

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

Dear Mainstream Media...

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

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

So, I'm confused.

Please explain.

Very Truly Yours,

America

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Priest Rap ever...

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

Untitled from John Hollowell on Vimeo.

I love the "cue Gregorian chant" bit.

From the Unapologist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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