Staying the Course

Amidst the foolish braying over setting a public deadline to leave Iraq, I note this small interaction as described by the Washington Times. It speaks volumes about courage, character, common sense and constancy of purpose:

"Don't let my husband -- and 1,700-plus other deaths -- be in vain," she added during a private meeting with Mr. Bush at the North Carolina base. "They were over there, fighting for a democratic nation, and I hope you'll keep our service members over there until the mission can be accomplished." Mrs. Owen gave the president a stainless steel bracelet engraved with the names of her husband and another soldier, Cpl. John Santos, both of whom were killed on Oct. 15. The president slipped the bracelet on his left wrist and wore it throughout his 28-minute prime-time address to the nation, becoming visibly emotional at times.

Democrat Voter Fraud Convictions

Not that I'm terribly surprised, but despite its national implications, none of the coastal-liberal papers (New York Times, Boston Globe, LA Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, SFO Chronicle, etc.) give even a line-item mention of the conviction this week of all five Democratic defendents in East St. Louis on election fraud and conspiracy charges. Fortunately, we have Gateway Pundit doing saturation coverage complete with pictures and dozens of links to previous stories.

The Chicago Sun Times comes out with this (without naming the political party of the defendents in the headline!) That's probably only in response to its rival (The Chicago Tribune) coming out with this. Why is it that we heard so much from the MSM about Diebold voting machine conspiracies, Jeb Bush, nefarious plots in Ohio and other nutty-wacko theories that would seem ridiculous in a parody, yet actual convictions for actual fraud in a court of law as decided by a jury (in only five hours after a month of hearing evidence!) gets buried completely?

'Theocracy', Public Prayer and the Passage of Time

I watched a special last night on the gripping Apollo 13 disaster-recovery with my father. As an engineer once involved in such things, it was a near transcendent experience for him: dedicated geeks solving complex problems at a distance on the ragged edge of the possible, with lives on the line and the whole world watching. We'd both seen it before, which allowed me to take note of something else.

As the beleaguered astronauts emerged from six days of sleep deprivation, stress, dehydration, freezing temperatures, radiation exposure and what could have become the most public deaths by asphyxiation ever viewed in real time, they stepped onto the carrier deck in the midst of the Pacific ocean... and prayed. On mike. On international television. With an American flag flying overhead. With no apologies.

Such things were not unusual at the time. On the Apollo 8 mission, American astronauts circling the moon and sending back pictures of the earth from space for the first time read more than a few lines from Genesis. On mike. On international television. With no apologies. In both cases, it seemed like the right thing to do, and it was. Miracles, of the grand we-went-to-the-moon and survived variety as well as the more mundane meant giving thanks where it was due: to “the deity” (as O’Reilly likes to say.) Whatever one's "faith tradition" (I hate that mealy-mouthed term, but bear with me), there was respect for the idea that we were a nation "under God". Conceive of God any way you want - including not at all - but don't demand that as a nation we push Him aside in every aspect of public life.

Now at this point, some left-leaning readers may already be writing comments to the effect that “yeah, but they were also still lynching blacks in the South and women were locked in suburban kitchens having babies and people were starving in Appalachia and diversity was barely part of the English language and those scenes surely made some people uncomfortable and isn’t this all terribly anti-progressive and really what you and your ilk are all about is establishing a brutal theocracy that beats opponents into submission in horrendous Cuban prisons while capturing foreign oil from nice men like Saddam Hussein?” Well, some of that anyway… ;-)

What such an admittedly hypothetical critique misses however is the perspective of how much today's cries of "theocracy!" ring hollow against a backdrop of public faith that anyone emerging from a deep-sleep chamber after just 35 years would see as the precise opposite. We have become a highly secular nation, hyper-sensitive to the barest blush of public acknowledgement of a higher power (that one is free to conceive of as one wishes). That is a very recent development - counter to almost 400 years of history. Counter to barely 40 years of history. Counter to the values of not just our grandparents, but our parents... and even ourselves.

UPDATE: This editorial in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) does an even better job of summing up where we were as a nation on this just shortly before the Apollo missions cited above:

In 1952, Justice William O. Douglas, writing for the Court, stated in Zorach v. Clauson, "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being." And in 1961 in McGowan v. Maryland, Justice Douglas observed that the "institutions of our society are founded on a belief that there is an authority higher than the authority of the state, that there is a moral law which the state is powerless to alter, and that the state possesses rights conferred by the Creator which government must respect."

Assurance When We Need It

Welcome Anchoress readers! I'm honored that she would link to me. You'll find a little bit of everything here - spiritual musings, global warming, North Korea, Cuba, Canada, domestic politics and especially double standards. Have a look at the archives - it's a little eclectic (what blog isn't?), but there's plenty there to chew on - some of it with a decent half-life if I do say so.

Continuing on amazing personal experiences of God amidst misfortune is the story of the first few hours after I learned that my brother was sick. For those just tuning in, my only brother (late 30's; married; young child) was diagnosed with acute leukemia in March. After two months of chemo, he relapsed pretty badly. There's definitely still hope, but it's dicey. We're taking it day by day.
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I got the initial call from my sister-in-law at 12:15AM on a Sunday: "We're at the hospital. They've run some tests. They think he has leukemia. We're heading to the hospital in a few minutes by ambulance. They're concerned his heart might stop [because of the extra cells clogging his system.] They're pretty certain of the diagnosis. They'll confirm and probably start chemo this afternoon."

Me, wide awake in a way I hope never to be again: "OK. OK. I understand. Are they sure? OK. Got it. Should I come now? OK. I'll wait 'til morning. Tell him I love him."

Of course I couldn't sleep. I prayed a little, then got on the Internet and read. It was the only thing I could control. About 3AM, I finally dozed off. Around 7AM I drove in to see him.

I don't remember a lot about that first visit. He looked awful. I could tell he was in a lot of pain - his bones aching from the hyper-production of 'blast' cells trying to get out, clogging his system. The real possibility of cardiac arrest loomed large. Or stroke. Or kidney failure. His blood readings had maxed out the experience of the senior nurse on the unit. In 20+ years, she'd never seen anything that high. I didn't ask how many such patients survived.

Leukemia is fundamentally a disease of the bone marrow. With billions of evil, useless white cells cramming the inside of his bones and more coming along behind them, his bones were literally under pressure from the inside. They didn't fit together right. My brother told me it was like the worst case of arthritis imaginable, combined with a triple hangover - all over his body, all at once. When the docs did a bone marrow biopsy to confirm the diagnosis... Well, you get the idea. Enough clinical stuff.

Just the previous afternoon he'd had a headache and fever. Tired from a business trip he thought he had the flu, or at worst maybe meningitis. Leukemia? It never entered our minds. My brother is (was) a healthy guy. He went to the gym regularly. He ate organic, highly nutritious food to a fault. He wasn't overweight. He never smoked; seldom drank. "This just happens and we almost never know why", the doctors told us. Don't even try to find a reason. You won't. I held his hand and hugged him, but I don't know how much support I was right then. We were all reeling. In a sense, we still are.

Now here's where it gets interesting...

I left the hospital to drive to a church meeting. I told just those three people what was going on. I had my eyes on them the entire time until the service began. They talked to nobody else. We left the meeting in a hurry only a minute before worship. None of us saw or talked to our pastor. Nobody had called him. It had only been a few hours.

I really needed to be in church. There was little I could do for my brother that I hadn't already done. Now it was about gathering myself - gathering strength. It was going to be a long haul. How long, we were only beginning to guess, but it seemed grim.

As the scripture readings began, I was only half paying attention. Ezekiel, Chapter 37 seemed like an obscure choice. Then I sat bolt upright:

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, "Son of man, can these bones live?" I said, "O Sovereign Lord, you alone know."Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones and say to them, 'Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breathenter you, and you will come to life.

Bones? How often does the Bible talk about bones, much less ones that aren't working properly and will be "brought back to life"? When was the last time I heard anything from Ezekiel? Coincidence? Maybe...

Then the second reading was from John, Chapter 10:

Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair. So the sisters sent word to Jesus, "Lord, the one you love is sick." When he heard this, Jesus said, "This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God's glory so that God's Son may be glorified through it." ...When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. "Where have you laid him?" he asked. "Come and see, Lord," they replied.

Brother? Illness? Come quickly? Might die? By this point, I was shaking. I get goosebumps just retelling it. OK, John 10 is a relatively common passage, particularly for that time of year. But the sermon went on to emphasize exactly what I was going through: the faith-amidst-illness angle and how Mary, as the sibling of Lazarus, must have felt on watching him get sick and being able to do nothing to help him - her despair, her anger, her confusion, her helplessness, her sorrow... and her faith.

Coincidence? No. Just no.

Not "maybe". Not "possibly". No. Time and Newsweek can both print "God is Dead" on their covers every week until I'm in a nursing home and I will not believe that that morning's events were a 'coincidence', or of earthly origin. The improbability of the passages in juxtaposition is high enough based on simple statistics. The particular story line our pastor chose to take is even more improbable. That it all went down that morning... well, you decide.

And that's the beauty of it, isn't it? Our relationship with God, I mean. Even when He's so close and so direct that you can feel His breath on your face, we still have the choice to say, "coincidence"; to say "I don't believe it"; to say "go away"; to reject God. But why bother? He wants each of us. He is the ultimate provider of second and fiftieth chances. He makes it so easy if we're willing.

The assurance of that awful/beautiful Sunday morning is like a light that won't go out. As bad as it's been for my brother - and as bad as it may get - I know with utter certainty that it's all part of a much larger plan.

"Thy will be done..." "Thy will be done..."

NYT Page 19 - "Uh, Never Mind" on Gitmo Flap

In reading this story, buried deep in yesterday's New York Times, I'm reminded of the late Gilda Radner's character Roseanne Rosannadanna on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Edition" skit back in the late '70s. Loveable, hearing impaired and utterly clueless, she would reply, "Uh, never mind" after being informed by her fellow 'newspeople' (played by Chevy Chase and Jane Curtain), that her lengthy impassioned monologue (e.g., on 'Soviet Jewelry' vs. 'Jewry') was off-base and utterly irrelevant. So it is with Amnesty International's anti-American jihad vs. what Democratic Senators (as well as Republicans) found last week on their visit to Gitmo:

Senators from both sides of the aisle competed on Monday to extol the humane treatment of detainees whom they said they saw on a weekend trip to the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. All said they opposed closing the center. "I feel very good" about the detainees' treatment, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said. That feeling was also expressed by another Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska. On Monday, Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, said he learned while visiting Guantánamo that some detainees "even have air-conditioning and semiprivate showers." Another Republican, Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, said soldiers and sailors at the camp "get more abuse from the detainees than they give to the detainees."

Were it not for the fact that the "Close Gitmo Now" story was front page news for an entire week, page nineteen might be just where this story belongs. In light of that saturation coverage however, this is prima facia bias... as if we didn't know that already.

Hat tip: The Anchoress, who had this to say:

...nothing good about our troops or their CIC, or even this country, is allowed on the front page if the American President has the wrong letter after his name.

Just-In-Time Spiritual Preparation

As I noted yesterday, God seems to have quite the sense of timing: giving answers to heartfelt prayers for guidance precisely when we need them most. In the business world, this is referred to as "just in time" or 'JIT' training. E.g., the airplane mechanic instructed to see a video on installing an obscure part just when s/he needs to do so.

Thus it was last week, when I found myself bumping into someone with whom I had had a falling out months earlier. The particulars of that falling out are less important than the fact that harsh words had been exchanged and we had not spoken since. I had prayed about the situation often, feeling completely bereft of good ideas - in human terms - for healing it, but also knowing the importance of doing so. Others were and are involved. Walking away was not an option.

I had not expected to bump into this person when and where I did. Suffice it to say that I found myself in my car around 12:45PM, running errands and scanning radio stations as I did. What I found was this moving talk (Real Audio or Windows Media) by the late Corrie Ten Boom. A member of the Dutch resistance under Nazi occupation, she hid Jews in her house until being deported to a concentration camp. Miraculously, she survived, going on to write and speak extensively on what she'd learned about the power of faith.

Her deep Dutch accent was familiar enough to spark my curiosity and make me pause my scan. (My wife's family is from Holland.) What she related was a story of radical, absolute forgiveness - starting with the Nazi captors who killed her father and sister, and moving on to friends and others who had wronged her in various ways. Her tone of voice alone spoke volumes - confident without being arrogant, commanding without being fake. The story was personal, and sincere. She spoke with conviction. No, not the edgy "I must convince you" variety that often pervades religious broadcasting, but simply, "this is the way it is because I've lived it".

To tie this all back together, just as I was listening to her saying "we cannot forgive, but we can allow Christ to work through us to forgive" (or words to that effect), I pulled my car in to where I was going. Standing right there, to my complete surprise, was the object of my prayer for healing and reconciliation. A hand reached towards me... a hand I had not seen in months. "The past is the past", I heard, in the same accent I'd just been listening to on the radio. "Yes, it is", I said, too stunned to think of anything more profound.

And that was that. The specificity of my preparation for that encounter was beyond startling. It's common to call such coincidences eerie, but they're not. I prefer 'amazing'. The most unlikely of scenes had been perfectly choreographed - though not by human power - for the most important of reasons to accomplish the 'impossible'.

God does that a lot, I've noticed. He seems to be rather good at it. :)

Coincidences That Aren't

As I alluded yesterday, several seemingly small, contextualized 'coincidences' over the last few days have rocked my inner world - in a good way - showing me the palpable presence of God, even as I had already felt assured in that regard. I hesitate to share them not out of privacy concerns, but because each requires such a long story to make any sense to anyone but me. What follows is just one (and not the largest by any means.) I'll get to more in coming days.

Last week I drove my brother to a medical appointment. I welcomed the excuse to spend some time with him. Since his recent release from the hospital, I've missed our daily time together. On the way, we talked of his apprehension about upcoming treatment, and the myriad irritating side effects of his chemo. I was at a loss as to how to make them more bearable.

We arrived in the waiting room and sat down, noting a magazine rack across the room. The magazine names were discernible; the feature article titles were not. I asked my brother what he might like to read and with an unusual lack of hesitation, he replied: "I think Newsweek would be nice." (Note: this is not about their editorial integrity.) He had not seen this issue before. Without looking at the index, he let the magazine flop open at random. The article staring us both in the face was: "Making Chemo Easier to Take"... the exact answer to the question we'd just been discussing. Even more amazing was that the story dealt with another patient with a blood cancer at the same hospital as my brother.

A coincidence? Maybe...

On the way home, my brother and I talked more about his upcoming treatment. The long-term prognosis - and greater than 50% possibility that he might die - weighed heavily on both of us. I turned off the car, walked him to his front door, gave him a hug, then walked back out to my car. Turning the key in the ignition, the radio came on to the exact song and verse that answered the unspoken question that had been hanging in the air: i.e., would my brother survive this? The lyrics were so utterly perfect I almost leapt out of my seat:

Did you think I'd crumble?
Did you think I'd lay down and die?
Oh no not I, I will survive
For as long as I know how to love, I know I'll stay alive
I've got all my life to live
And I've got all my love to give
I'll survive
I will survive

Another coincidence? Maybe...

From conversations with friends, I realize that this is how God acts most of the time: not in grand public spectacles, but in quiet, highly specific signs that address our deepest fears and our honest requests for His guidance. They are easy to ignore if we aren't paying attention, yet they hold the key to our inner peace. The key. Just one. All the self-help books in the world cannot approach the pervasive assurance I feel with these two 'coincidences' piled atop so many others over the past few months.

I'll go a step further in surmising that these kinds of 'small' miracles - deeply personal and specific to particular situations - are 'small' only in our human unwillingness to pull back the veil of our own flawed perceptions to reveal more of the divine light that awaits us. It is our subliminal fear of its (His) brightness, our unworthiness to see it (Him), and our unwillingness to ask for the (His) forgiveness that holds us back from standing full in the window of His grace. God desperately wants us to bask in His pervasive eternal sunshine. It is we who resist.

The kinds of glimpses I describe above are amazing only for our having despaired in the darkness for so long. We act like spelunkers, standing at the edge of a subterranean precipice after dropping our lights and ropes. We are frozen. Petrified to take a step. Petrified to open our eyes. Living in abject terror that we will fall and disappear forever. Yet what if in reality, we are standing among the saints, in the middle of a sunny field of flowers... with our eyes wide shut?

Anti-Christianism - New Wine in Old Wineskins

It's been an amazing couple of days for me spiritually - something about which I plan to blog later this week when I have more time, and which (fair warning) is likely to shift my focus here going forward. In the meantime, I note this great (and funny) piece by Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost from last Thursday:

To believe that America is “heading in the direction of theocracy” requires either a complete lack of knowledge about Christianity or degree of willful ignorance and gullibility that is found only among Holocaust deniers and paranoids who believe the moon-landing was a hoax. I suspect, though, that the majority of those who make such calumniating statements do so out of a sense of political futility. Unable to convince the majority of their fellow Americans to agree with their radical politics, they resort to libel in order to vilify those with whom they disagree. What is truly shameful is that these anti-Christian bigots are so completely unoriginal. Their rhetoric is so thoroughly plagiarized from anti-Semitic propaganda... Fortunately, this radical contingent is too small a minority to be a physical threat. It’s also easier to turn the other cheek knowing that the menace comes not from buff Aryan SS agents but from spindly off-Broadway producers and teachers of post-colonial studies.

Sounds like the anti-Christianist crowd is right in there with the 9-11 deniers.

Acts 8:36-39

As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, "Look, here is water. Why shouldn't I be baptized?"^[a] And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing.

Light Blogging Weekend

I've got family in town this weekend and business is hopping. I may be able to grab an hour before Monday to catch up on key stories with a few posts. In the meantime, thanks for reading and check out the archives. There are some... how to say... interesting pieces in there. :)

Fat Chance - Dems on Rove

The pit bull barked. The neighbors want it put down.

Democrats said Thursday that White House adviser Karl Rove should either apologize or resign for accusing liberals of wanting "therapy and understanding" for the Sept. 11 attackers, escalating partisan rancor that threatens to consume Washington.

Threatens to consume? Washington is defined by this stuff. This is an obvious smokescreen attempt to create the left's own Dick Durbin... like bombing a third world country when the Monica Lewinsky story was breaking. Rove said nothing about a third party, e.g., the military. He derided his opponents. That's politics. It's a blood sport. And anyway, Rove is not an elected official like Durbin. He's a political operative - a pit bull. The left have their poodles. We chose a different breed. Get over it:

One has to wonder how rather lucid comments by Mr. Rove conjures up so much foaming at the mouth by the Democrats, yet, they couldn't be so much as bothered by Senator Durbin calling our troops "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others." What Rove has done with his comment, in rather political genius, if you will, is exposing the two-faced nature of the Democrats, while simultaneously telling it like it is. Rove has criticized merely their flawed knee-jerk response to most issues...

Politics - In the Genes?

It's been an incredibly busy day during which I desperately wanted to get out for a run in the near perfect weather we've been having here in Boston - but didn't. Business is finally breaking for me after a long dry spell. It feels good, but recreational blogging time has been scarce. This post and the last one have been simmering on the back burner all day - had to squeeze them in.

This article in yesterday's New York Times, (hat tip: anonymous reader and old friend), is genuinely fascinating, even though it doesn't explain a whole lot in my life: parents are both Democrats with views opposite to mine on quite a few subjects. Except for the death penalty, my views have changed significantly on economic subjects since my 20's and on other subjects since coming back to the church four years ago. So much for genetic destiny. Maybe I get it all straight from my late grandfather.

Political scientists have long held that people's upbringing and experience determine their political views. A child raised on peace protests and Bush-loathing generally tracks left as an adult, unless derailed by some powerful life experience. One reared on tax protests and a hatred of Kennedys usually lists to the right. But on the basis of a new study, a team of political scientists is arguing that people's gut-level reaction to issues like the death penalty, taxes and abortion is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. The new research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general approach to social issues - more conservative or more progressive - is influenced by genes. Environmental influences like upbringing, the study suggests, play a more central role in party affiliation as a Democrat or Republican, much as they do in affiliation with a sports team.

I'm wary of genetic explanations for such complex cognitive/emotional subjects but I'm also not willing to deny them. That's rooted in two things I hold dear: 1) free will and 2) the ability of God to genuinely change lives. I know Steven Pinker would disagree. He's entitled. Our animal nature is real. But then it's a pretty sad, dark place we inhabit if that's it and we're just complex bio-algorithms expressing our inner 'code'. As I wrote earlier this month:

...in Christ, character is anything but fixed and we, his followers, anything but doomed. With God we can be changed, if we let him do the work...

One thing that's interesting about the research from a political perspective is that it spells complete doom for liberal principles - and not just the Democratic party, (which is doing all it can to self-immolate recently.) If genes are destiny (or even a strong factor in it), then those that fail to breed as aggressively will lose out. This is not a new observation, but with scientific backing, the science-explains-everything liberal secularists may have just hoisted themselves on their own proverbial petard. There's divine resonance in there somewhere, ("go forth and multiply"), but I'm too tired to explore it further tonight.

Double Standard Alert - Mao vs. Hitler

Forty years after Hitler killed nine million plus, it would have been inconceivable to see a Time Magazine cover with his picture touting "Germany's New Revolution" - even though there was one, (both economic and political.) So why is it OK that Time sees fit this week to put Mao on its cover a little less than forty years after his devastating Cultural Revolution killed twenty million?

Blogroll Additions - Iraq, Economics & the Nature of Conservatism

Readers should note several new additions to the blogroll, some of which I've been reading for awhile but have been too lazy to include. In particular, Vodkapundit (Stephen Green) struck me as worth reading more regularly with this articulate rant concerning exit dates for Iraq: "Last week, there was some hubbub in Congress demanding President Bush announce a firm date for pulling out of Iraq. Announcing an exit date would be dumber than using a taffy puller to epilate your scrotum. Granted, an exit date would have one positive effect: There would be an immediate and sustained reduction in terror attacks. Right up until the day we left."

On a completely different note, I also liked this other post of his on economics and uncertainty, referencing a recent Robert Samuelson column. As hubris erodes certainty about great macroeconomic truths, so goes the rationale for doing sweeping things to 'fix' them.

As I've said about many other subjects too, (ranging from global warming to gay marriage to healthcare), the honest conservative position is not one of "no role for government, never ever no-way no-how, go away we're not listening!" (or as the esteemed Mr. Buckley once put it: "standing astride history yelling: 'stop'!"), but one of shifting the burden of proof to those who would seek to make change - starting with those changes that have the most far-reaching consequences if progressives turn out to be wrong... as they often are: oops, we screwed up society; sorry!

Proof is not the same as conjecture, nagging, UN consensus, computer models or a Howard Dean temper tantrum. Proof through history is a slow, deliberate process that deserves respect. Conservatives aren't against change per se, just the kind of change that lightly dismisses the value of what's been learned over time.

The Culture of 'Nice'

I just found this buried gem over at Catholicism, Culture, and Politics. Worth reading - especially for anyone who has been, (or by necessity must be), involved with a university:

...most teachers do not even believe in Truth... and the truths that they dish out to their students are little better than simplistic platitudes about tolerance... in other words, being nice... Allan Bloom called this 'openness'... but I never felt completely comfortable with that tag, because it does not really establish the mindnumbing silliness that our society demands that we embrace for the sake of social quietude. The 'niceness' that we are expected to embrace is much more akin to the destruction of any sort of judgment at all... any ability to discern good from bad, right from wrong, nobility from evil, God from Satan. And I am sitting directly in the middle of the entire mess.

Having recently attended a reunion at my alma mater, (an otherwise enlightened, elite and highly respected institution), I was reminded of just how sadly true CC&P's observations have become. With a child just a few years from college, I'm beyond concerned. She has good sense, but the academy has had a lot more practice at indoctrination. One small pinprick of light and hope in this dark pit of secular political correctness is F.I.R.E. - an organization worth supporting if you're so inclined, (no affiliation on my part.)

HRC = Nixon

Edward Klein takes off the gloves in an exclusive interview with National Review Online (NRO) regarding his new book "The Truth About Hillary Clinton":

NRO: Are you nervous putting out a product that seems to be based on a lot of anonymous sources?
Klein: Were Woodward and Bernstein?...
I interviewed nearly 100 people who know Hillary, including classmates from high school, college, and law school; Democratic activists and party officials; White House support staff, speechwriters, and military aides; Cabinet officers, senators and congressmen; and other intimates of the Clintons...
Like Nixon, Hillary is paranoid and has an enemies list.
Like Nixon, Hillary has used FBI files against her enemies.
Like Nixon, Hillary believes that the ends justify the means.
Like Nixon, Hillary has a penchant for doing illegal things.

Kyoto, Meet Ulrich Joerin

For all the yelling and screaming about global warming, (or as it's now termed, 'global climate change'), one seldom finds articles like this in the MSM.

Ulrich Joerin, a wiry Swiss scientist in his late twenties, is part of a small group of climatologists who are in the process of radically changing the image of the Swiss mountain world. He and a colleague are standing in front of the Tschierva Glacier in Engadin, Switzerland at 2,200 meters (7,217 feet). "A few thousand years ago, there were no glaciers here at all," he says. "Back then we would have been standing in the middle of a forest." He digs into the ground with his mountain boot until something dark appears: an old tree trunk, covered in ice, polished by water and almost black with humidity. "And here is the proof," says Joerin... The fact that the Alpine glaciers are melting right now appears to be part of regular cycle in which snow and ice have been coming and going for thousands of years. The glaciers, according to the new hypothesis, have shrunk down to almost nothing at least ten times since the last ice age 10,000 years ago... "If we can prove that there were ancient forests where the glaciers are today, it means one thing in particular: that the climate can change more suddenly than we thought." [emphasis added]

And, he might add, for reasons wholly unrelated to man. Articles like this don't disprove global climate change. What they do is to throw cold water on the hubris of the Kyoto set. Screaming about how we should radically alter the structure of the world economy and spend trillions to do something - anything! - about the changes being observed is a line of reasoning that starts with a political agenda and works back to a rallying cry and 'evidence'. Science works the other way.

When we don't fully understand the complex history of climate change, the mechanisms driving it, or how we could responsibly alter those mechanisms (and articles like this assure me that we do not), acting is arrogant and foolhardy at best. What Joerin's theory highlights, in the microcosm of the Swiss Alps, is that what is now barren, icy rock was once fertile and green. If you're Europe and your population is shrinking, you don't have to care, but with a burgeoning world population, is it not worth at least considering how that might be a net benefit to greater mankind?

UPDATE: Past KM writings on climate change are here, here and here.

Steyn on Durbin

Spot-on, as usual.

I am not questioning Dick Durbin's patriotism, at least not for the first couple of paragraphs. Instead, I'll begin by questioning his sanity... Had Durbin said, "Why, these atrocities are so terrible you would almost believe it was an account of the activities of my distinguished colleague Robert C. Byrd's fellow Klansmen," that would have been a little closer to the ballpark but still way out. One measure of a civilized society is that words mean something: "Soviet" and "Nazi" and "Pol Pot" cannot equate to Guantanamo unless you've become utterly unmoored from reality.

Required Reading for Gitmo Critics

This is real torture. The NY Times redeems itself slightly with some solid field reporting:

He was having a lunch of lettuce and cucumbers in the kitchen of his home in the small desert village of Rabot with his mother and brother. An Opel sedan pulled up. Two men in masks carrying machine guns got out, seized him, and, leaving his mother sobbing, put him in the trunk of their car. The drove to the house here. They taped his face, put cotton in his ears, and began to beat him. The only possible explanation for the seizure he could think of was his time in the new Iraqi Army. The men tended to talk in whispers, he said, telling him five times a day, in low voices in his ear, to pray, and offering him sand, instead of water, to wash himself... it was always dark inside. Mr. Fathil said he was fed once a day, and allowed to use a bathroom as necessary in the back of the house. When marines burst in, one of the captives was lying under a stairwell, badly beaten. At first, they thought he was dead. The others were emaciated and battered. Mr. Fathil had fared the best... But he still had been hurt badly. Marks from beatings criss-crossed his back, and deep pocks, apparently from electric shock burns, were gouged in his skin. The shocks, he said, felt "like my soul is being ripped out of my body." But when he would start to scream, and his body would pull up from the shock, they would begin to beat him, he said.

Powerline also references the story.

UPDATE: Great in-depth source with links on what the Geneva Conventions actually say:

Convention I, Article 13: Non-traditional combatants, such as militias or resistance movements, must, among other things, have "a fixed sign recognizable at a distance," they must "carry their army openly", and they must themselves follow the laws of war. Combatants who deliberately endanger or kill civilians violate the purpose of the conventions and are no longer entitled to their protections.

Moral License vs. Moral Panics

In this announcement of the 'Human Sexuality Summit' going on in San Francisco this week, I noted several choice bits, including the following from Saskia Wieringa, PhD, President of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society, Senior Research Affiliate at the Amsterdam School for Social Research at the University of Amsterdam and Director of the International Documentation Center and Archives of the Women’s Movement in Amsterdam. (Apparently, she doesn't lack for credentials... of a particular sort.):

[Wieringa] likens some strict Muslim traditions, such as forcing women to cover their faces in public, to many of President Bush's conservative policies. "They are both fighting against each other, but upholding the same kind of system," Wieringa said.

Yep, the same kind of system. Nuns habits will be mandatory at Wellesley next year; crucifixes will be required for women seeking to enter Manhattan via public transportation. I don't know how people can stand living in a theocracy as bad as this. Ain't it awful: Bush and the Taliban. Like twins separated at birth... except maybe for the mandatory beards, and the prohibitions on women driving, and the blowing up of ancient monuments, and the harsh legal restrictions on non-believers, and capital punishment for worshiping outside the state faith, and the public stonings, and the grossly lopsided rights of women. Except for those things they're exactly the same. Just like Gitmo and the Nazis and the Soviet Gulags and Pol Pot... yeah, that's the ticket!

Equally loony is that in Wieringa's world, moral equivalence flies under the guise of science, education and "literacy". Take this 'Sexual Literacy Quiz', for example. How neutral, you might think - a quiz! Won't it be interesting to see how many of the important facts I really know? For instance:

Question 5. What is the appropriate use of the morning-after pill?
A) If a woman forgot to take a birth control pill
B) After unprotected intercourse
C) If a woman misses her period and thinks she could be pregnant
D) Never

If you guessed 'D' (never - for any number of reasons: e.g., moral, philosophical, medical or otherwise) you would be wrong... according to the test-makers. The morally vacuous but technically 'right' answer: 'C'.

Question 11. If civil marriage rights were given to same-sex couples, the following would result:
A) Higher divorce rates
B) Decline in heterosexual marriage
C) Greater financial and emotional stability for families headed by same-sex couples.

No, there is no 'D' response (e.g., "nobody really knows"), much less an 'E' response such as ("long-term second-and third-order effects on the morals, economics, traditions, institutions and ultimate social trajectory of a culture that are difficult to measure but are best not to mess with lightly".) The only choices boil down to benefits for a limited group as the test-makers presume they will evolve in their imaginations, extrapolating perhaps from some early and limited experiments in Holland and Massachusetts, or the moronic rhetoric that the test-makers seek to pin on those that question their sweeping prescience about complex subjects.

There are a few factual questions on the quiz but they're tainted by ones like these. This is not science. It's not even good social science. It is pure politics, masquerading as enlightenment.

UPDATE: The conference agenda can be found here.

Sixties Social Legacy Bears Bitter Fruit

That this story is a surprise is indicative of how far from common sense our civic discourse has drifted.

Researchers at the University of Washington and Columbia University said Friday that child support laws' power to reduce single parenthood is an unintended consequence of a policy designed to help children and cut public welfare costs. [emphasis added]

Why an unintended consequence? Why not address single parenthood directly by re-creating the incentives (in tax, welfare, and divorce law) that used to exist to get and stay married - at least when children are involved? Why? Because that would not be PC. That would be overreaching. That might look like we were targeting certain racial or economic groups and we couldn't do that. That would be the great right wing conspiracy imposing its values on society. And we can't impose values, man. That would be too heavy.

No, it would be responsibly repairing one of the most egregious frauds and slow-moving social catastrophes foisted on a naive population by itself via its government.

Then this absolute shocker:

"Women living in states that do a better job of enforcing child support are less likely to become an unwed mother."

Say it ain't so! Really? Followed by this oh-so-logical link between a history lesson and a policy prescription:

The percentage of unmarried births in the United States has increased from 10 percent in the 1960s to about a third of all births today. Because children of single parents run a higher risk of poverty, academic failure and other problems, lawmakers are always seeking policies that will discourage unwed births - usually focusing on the mothers. [emphasis added]

But wait. If the rate of unmarried births has more than tripled in the last forty years, perhaps - just perhaps - we should look for leadership to the kinds of lawmakers who were NOT in charge of the government when radical 'progressive' changes were made to tax, welfare and divorce law, doing much to precipitate this tragedy. Perhaps the long rise in unwed births is the unintended consequence of all those obvious assumptions the Vietnam Generation made when it set out to change society. Obvious - and wrong. But we had good intentions, they will say. Yes, and absolutely horrific results. It's no wonder voters are saying: Your ideas didn't work. Thank you for your service. It's time to move aside.

Don't hassle me with your square values, the left used to say. Live and let live. Free love, man... Fair enough. We tried it your way. This is where that road leads. Now it's time to admit that we're lost. We can ask for directions - or turn back. Which is it going to be?

1st Timothy 6:6-8

...godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.

Speaking of Satan...

This kind of stuff gives religion a bad name.

Satan in San Jose

Unbelievable. While the world watched Michael Jackson... 1,360 pages; 30+ years; 36,000 molestations of young boys.

UPDATE: Nine arrests, twelve years in prison, an established reputation as "one of the most prolific child molesters in history", a known pedophile roommate... and a youth coaching job(!) This is not a matter of needing new laws but rather being serious about enforcing the ones we have. I'm tempted in this case to slink away from my ardent anti death-penalty stance, but I won't be swayed. If we had the collective guts as a society to lock him up for life, (or castrate him), that wouldn't even need to be up for discussion. Please pray for this guy's victims - and for him.

Hanged for a Lamb; Hanged for a Sheep

Wizbang! dives in headfirst on something that - at least hypothetically - had briefly crossed my mind yesterday in light of the Durbin flap:

I'm not going to bother arguing with the "close the Guantanamo death camp" morons. Instead, I have another idea. There's an old aphorism that says "as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb." Since we're already being punished for "torturing" these detainees, why don't we go ahead and do it already?

Who hasn't been in the position - usually but not always as a child - of being framed or wrongly accused with such force that one wishes one had had the benefit of committing and possibly enjoying the fruits of the crime for which one knows one is going to be punished?

When the verdict is "guilty! guilty! guilty!", as it is in totalitarian regimes, the result is a lack of respect for the law. Fear maybe, but a complete lack of respect, accompanied by a deeply justified feeling that one might as well try to get away with whatever one can. No, I'm not talking about Gitmo detainees being falsely accused. I'm talking about Durbin's patently false accusations against the U.S. military. Ironic, isn't it?

I'm not sure anyone has noted how in that sense, over-the-top rhetoric by figures in power like Dick Durbin is deeply corrosive to the rule of law and respect for civil institutions. These guys are scary enough out of power. Imagine having their no-holds-barred, intellectually bereft 'logic' actually applied to the governance of our nation. Scary.

The New Republic for the President...

... or at least an intellectually honest Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of TNR in the June 27th issue, admitting that it will lose him friends and dinner party invitations and cause friction at home. Having endured just one such dinner party recently, I can't imagine why one would would want to go to more.

While the rest of the left drifts - and doesn't know it's drifting - you've got to admire the guts of someone who can stand firm for enduring beliefs. There are obvious parallels with JPII or PBXVI, who have each unapologetically said to the world in their own way: it is you who have changed; the values we all once believed in have not; please come back!

[President Bush] seems to me to have completely transcended the biases of gender and race in his appointments... [whereas Bill Clinton] did not appoint one African American to a truly significant office in the executive branch.

Peretz goes on to level devastating sarcasm at Madelein Albright and the Rice in Clinton's adminstration: Susan. He then addresses John Bolton, holding him up against what the Democratic party used to stand for in the form of Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

Bolton's offense is to believe that American democracy has enemies; that words alone will not hinder their weapons; and that the United Nations is an alliance of those too weak-willed to stand up and fight for the good. Bolton believes in the sovereign power of democracies because they are responsive and responsible to their peoples... I believe the United Nations to be a false remedy for the world's ills. (Darfur just keeps happening, doesn't it?) So, since the expansion of the organization's headquarters in New York is in deep financial and political difficulties, I propose a test. Let the United Nations move, say, to Lagos, a major city of a paradigmatic member state, undemocratic and verging always on civil strife. Let all of the supposed economic advantages of hosting the United Nations flow to that poor country. Let us see what happens. What will happen is that no one would come. The supposed need for the organization would vanish, and with it would go "the theatre of the absurd," as Moynihan once put it.

Hat tip: The Anchoress - again. Yes, she's that good.

UPDATE: Another intellectually honest man-of-the-left, Christopher Hitchens recounts his time in the Middle East.

Cool Short Personality Type Test Thing

Hat tip: The Anchoress. This result seems uncannily accurate, especially for a 5-question test. No fair calling me a lunatic... :)

Try it: What Planet Are You From?

You Are From the Moon

You can vibe with the steady rhythms of the Moon. You're in touch with your emotions and intuition. You possess a great, unmatched imagination - and an infinite memory. Ultra-sensitive, you feel at home anywhere (or with anyone). A total healer, you light the way in the dark for many.

Happy Friday: House Slashes UN Budget Too

After hitting a strong single to right by taking on public broadcasting yesterday, I guess it makes political sense for Team Republican to go for a stand-up double by slashing U.S. funding of the UN today. After all, how hot can the MSM get before it simply melts down? It's sunny. I'm smiling. The political bases are almost loaded and I've got Red Sox tickets for tonight. Life is good.

Heavy-Duty Trinitarian Theology for (and by) Physicists

This book review at First Things is thick stuff, but it a) gets better as it goes, and b) is the kind of thing I can get into on a Friday afternoon. That's just me. YMMV.

I've always been one to believe firmly that cutting-edge science, (diligently understood), and religion, (humbly approached), are completely reconcilable. Such a public struggle to reconcile them therefore strikes me as almost unnecessary. But with the two perceived so often as being at odds with one another, I see the value in doing so. Small sample:

Polkinghorne does not wish to be in "unthinking thrall to the past" or to authority, whether in the form of a book or a Church. And yet, he also wishes to avoid the danger of "loose individualism" or "rampant relativism" that could lead to "willful or fantastic manipulation" of the Word of God. He acknowledges that some "degree of control" must be exercised by "the oversight of a truth-seeking community" and "the sifting and receiving role played by the whole Christian community."

...Einstein showed that spatio-temporal relationships are more subtle: there is no absolute meaning to the question of what is happening (or coming into being) “now” throughout the whole universe. And if it is a mistake to project the timeline of our mental states onto the entire universe, it is even less justified to project it onto God, who infinitely transcends the universe. It is equally ill-defined to speak of “the future” or “the past” in some global sense. Furthermore, to correlate God’s supposed past, present, and future mental states with what is going on in the world “simultaneously” with them imposes upon the world exactly the one-dimensional temporal structure that physics tells us it does not have.

Redefining the Word 'Torture'

The images that Jawa Report has collected are tough stuff - truly nightmarish. You have been warned. But then so are accusations of moral equivalence between the U.S. military and Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin leveled by Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL) and by others, vis Saddam Hussein.

Pictures have a power that words do not. On the advent of Abu Ghraib photos being released, it's worth keeping these in mind too.

Hat tip: Hugh Hewitt

UPDATE I: John Podhoretz is more than fair to Durbin but neither does he mince words in the New York Post today, (free registration required):

Dick Durbin has slandered the American military. He has slandered his country. He has defiled truth and he has spat on reason. He has given aid and comfort to all those who seek to use America's tough stance in the War on Terror as a recruiting tool for anti-Americanism. He is the Senate's Democratic whip: a leader of his party by any stretch of the imagination. If he remains a leader of his party, his party deserves to be judged by his words — by his anti-military, anti-American words. Judged, and held to account.

Isn't "aid and comfort to the enemy" the very definition of the capital offense of treason? Podhoretz is on the mark IMHO in coming a hairsbreadth away from that accusation.

UPDATE II: Real torture described here.

...a fat, well-thumbed Arabic paperback - listed itself as the 2005 First Edition of "The Principles of Jihadist Philosophy," by Abdel Rahman al-Ali. Its chapters included "How to Select the Best Hostage," and "The Legitimacy of Cutting the Infidels' Heads."

NPR Smackdown

National Public Radio touches a raw nerve in our household. My wife loves it. Most of my friends and neighbors love it. I used to be a huge fan too - taking their in-depth coverage as near gospel on my car radio while commuting. We always made annual donations to our local affiliate. It can be reasonably informative from time to time. We still have a few NPR coffee mugs kicking around somewhere.

I'm not sure what changed, but I now find it impossible to listen without cringing at the constant over-the-top liberal bias of Morning Edition and All Things Considered in particular: in story selection and sequencing, interviewers' questions, headlines, facts emphasized and facts and angles completely ignored. In short: everything.

I used to awake with my blood already boiling from some fawning, biased piece injected in my pre-dawn subconscious until, in the past year, we settled on classical music on the clock radio alarm. There are a few good NPR shows like Marketplace that try hard to be balanced (or like Car Talk, politically agnostic), but as other news outlets like CBS have discovered, that's an impossible task when one's entire staff is ideologically homogeneous. At one point I thought of devoting a blog to fisking NPR material. I soon realized it was a full time job, not a hobby.

Stop and think, for example, about the title of the main NPR evening news program: All Things Considered. Really? All things? Isn't that just a tiny bit... arrogant? (Granted, no worse than say, O'Reilly's 'No Spin Zone', but he's not asking for public funds.) Instead, how about 'Nothing Rejected'? Or maybe 'Anything Goes', or 'No Moral Compass'. 'Radio Whatever' would be equally appropriate, or perhaps they could roll up their sleeves and get competitive by calling it 'The Original Air America'.

Better yet, let's just call it LPR (Liberal Public Radio) and get on with it. They'd still get plenty of donations. George Soros is standing by, I'm sure.

All of this is context for explaining why I couldn't help but smile this morning upon hearing that a House panel has proposed cutting 25% from taxpayer monies lavished on 'public' broadcasting. I reject the notion of calling it a budget, implying broad approval and continuity of tradition. For more than half the electorate, it is about funding the political opposition. Try running that kind of accounting through McCain Feingold and see where it gets us. Better yet, try proposing that Laura Ingram have an hour long show on NPR - late night is just fine - and see if how far that idea gets. Biased? Naaah!

Now before anyone flames me about wanting to shoot Big Bird with a thirty-ought-six and fry him up on the backyard grill, while Tom and Ray Magliozzi roast on a spit nearby, I think there can in theory be a role for public media. It's just that in today's hyper-innovative, hyper-competitive world of Internet, cable and even over-the-air television and radio, that role is very small indeed. Why for example, are Frontline and Nova sacrosanct when I've got A&E and the History Channel? I have no problem with, (as NPR likes to call it): "listener-supported programming". It's just that I'm not a listener. Don't make me subsidize those who are.

Let's start with a 100% cut. Then we can build back up based on a de novo look at why particular shows are a) truly in the broad public interest and b) require government funding in order to survive. Public broadcasting might very well thrive after such an exercise, but it would certainly be different.

UPDATE: LaShawn Barber has more, including links to earlier material of hers on PBS.

Steve Jobs, Cancer and Following Your Muse

Found this link to Steve Jobs' commencement address last Sunday at Stanford via Michelle Malkin. Definitely worth five minutes:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Trying to Save Face in Europe

It's all there is left to do. 'EU Leaders Put Constitution Plans on Hold'. But why do they call them leaders? Arrogant cowards would seem to be more descriptive.

UPDATE: For the record, I do not have advance notice of WSJ op ed pieces (this excellent one free on OpinionJournal on Friday - very much worth reading):

What ought to depress partisans of European unity in the aftermath of the rejection of its proposed constitution by France and the Netherlands is not so much the foundering of this ridiculous document as the response of the leadership to the crisis, especially in France and Germany... What is notoriously evident among the EU elite is not just a lack of intellectual power but an obstinacy and blindness bordering on imbecility... Europe was essentially a creation of the marriage between Greco-Roman culture and Christianity. Brussels has, in effect, repudiated both...In short, the EU is not a living body, with a mind and spirit and animating soul. And unless it finds such nonmaterial but essential dimensions, it will soon be a dead body, the symbolic corpse of a dying continent. [emphasis added]

My Father's Democrats

I've referenced a lot of Wall Street Journal material this week. Partly that's laziness. I'm exhausted after three months of dealing with my brother's leukemia, with much more arduous stuff still ahead. In-depth blogging (and blog-reading) has taken a backseat. But it's also because the WSJ's editorial page often has good stuff - the kind of thoughtful, level-headed, take-on-anybody material that one used to be able to find in many national newspapers.

Today's feature editorial, ('Doughnut Democrats' - carried on the free OpinionJournal site), is especially good, on a topic I've grown to love, namely: What ever happened to moderate, enterprising, principled, freedom-loving, spiritually-reverent, rational-on-foreign-policy, stick-up-for-the-everyman Democrats that my parents voted for with gusto in the 1960's and that pretty much saved the world in the '30's and '40's? Who replaced them with foaming-at-the-mouth socialists bent on making America into Europe West? Apparently, they vanished with Bill Clinton. (Not that Clinton was exactly a rock of virtue, but he wasn't Teddy Kennedy... ya gotta love the sidelong doughnut reference on that one...)

With the notable exception of Joe Lieberman, there are virtually no Scoop Jackson defense hawks remaining in a party that has made Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo its main policy touchstones for the war on terror. The party that voted en masse for income and capital gains tax cuts under JFK now has but one message on taxes: Raise them. On trade, the Democrats who delivered 102 House votes for Nafta and Bill Clinton in 1994 will, at last count, provide all of five House votes for the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The Clinton Democrats helped enact the most momentous social policy legislation of the past generation: welfare reform. Now Democrats conspire every day to gut work-for-welfare requirements and prevent the renewal of welfare reform by Congress. Above all, there's the know-nothing-ism on Social Security. The Democrats in unison proclaim that Mr. Bush is advancing a risky right-wing scheme to destroy Social Security by creating private investment accounts for workers... And to what obstructionist end? Even if Democrats succeed in stopping Mr. Bush's plan, FDR's legacy that they say they are trying to protect is every day getting closer to $10 trillion of unpayable debts. As for political strategy, Democrats seem to believe that just saying no will help them gain House and Senate seats in 2006. Perhaps. But Tom Daschle's early retirement testifies that it is also a high-risk strategy that cost them seats in both 2002 and 2004..

The key quote in the whole article, and it is extremely wise and far-sighted, is this:

Many conservatives have watched the left's hostile takeover of the Democratic Party with great joy. We don't share that enthusiasm. The country would benefit from two vibrant parties competing on innovative freedom-enhancing initiatives. The problem is that the Democrats are running on empty when it comes to policy ideas other than big government, and this lack of competition has had deleterious effects on Republican behavior, as witnessed by their lack of any spending discipline.

UPDATE I: Case in point, Dick Durbin (D, IL) on the Senate floor Tuesday: "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control [at Gitmo], you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others - that had no concern for human beings..."

Yes Dick. Most certainly. Of course. Impeccible logic. Except that those folks were a) citizens of the countries that were oppressing them, b) prisoners of conscience, not armed combatants captured in battle, and c) purposely killed... by the millions. Nobody has died at Guantanamo. Nobody. More Korans have been flushed by detainees themselves than by U.S. personnel. Those being held get better food than U.S. soldiers. They are told which direction to pray each day and are scrupulously allowed time to do so. So come again?

Care to show us the stacks of skulls piled up in the killing fields Mr. Durbin? Care to show us the poets and writers and peaceful demonstrators who never took up arms against us? Care to show us the plans to invade Mexico and Canada? Care to show us the stacks of eyeglasses and shoes next to the ovens? How's that again Senator Durbin? Please... get a real job. You're not going to have one after Illinois gets done with you next election.

I'm just shaking my head, imagining in light of this that the reasoning at Kennedy-Pelosi-Democrat-central must be something along these lines: "Nobody took us seriously when we compared Bush to Hitler, so let's add in Soviet gulags and see if that works. Hmm [two weeks later]... that didn't work either. Let's try Pol Pot... then they'll have to listen to us!" Next up: Ghengis Khan, Ivan the Terrible and the Spanish Inquisition.

UPDATE II: Hugh Hewitt has some prescient and righteous prose on the expected MSM reaction (or rather, lack thereof) to Durbin's wild libel:

Which way do you think the editorial writers at the bigs [major media outlets] will go? My guess is a measured criticism for careless rhetoric, mixed with a Santorum reference, a call for more civility, a couple of nods to the bravery of the troops sent on a terribly difficult mission, and a demand to focus on the real issues, perhaps with a blast at right wing media. I can't see any of the bigs coming to the conclusion that the vast, vast majority of Americans have come to, which is that Durbin is a pathetic and repulsive political hack who should exit immediately after a lengthy and detailed apology.

UPDATE III: Michelle Malkin is all over this, (as usual), with many good links and thoughts. Does this woman ever sleep?

Cutting Through the Smoke on North Korea

One Free Korea gets to the heart of what's often portrayed in the MSM as an American administration too inflexible to deal with North Korea:

(1) North Korea isn't serious about disarming (2) because it has no fear that there will be consequences if it does not disarm, and because (3) its greatest fear is the openness and transparency that are essential to verifying any disarmament agreement. Ergo, there won't be an agreement in the near future, if ever... Once North Korea has its security guarantees, we presumably won't be free to do anything that would undermine the regime's security, and North Korea will have zero incentive to relax the grip of the iron fist... human rights and nuclear weapons become inextricable at an intersection called "transparency," ...[but that's all moot because] there isn't going to be any deal... Meanwhile, Biden and company are making a last-gasp effort to steer us in the opposite direction. The problem is that we have already tried what they propose, and there's no wriggling away from the fact that it failed even more miserably than the six-party talks have.

Diplomacy is often portrayed as a subtle black art with a solution somewhere to be found for those with enough patience to find it. Too often though, time is the factor not considered: time to build more weapons, time during which oppressed people continue to be oppressed, time, in short, that hurts someone - perhaps us. Time is on the side of Kim Jong-il. It is also on the side of the typical US Senator or a UN official or career diplomat with an expense account, a closet full of fine suits and a reputation for getting along with others to protect.

Avoiding firm lines in the sand - avoiding standing on principle and avoiding confrontation at all costs - nonetheless has a cost, (albeit one that is diffuse and without headline-grabbing power.) We saw that with Iraq where the left has been all too happy to count U.S. bodies, but reluctant to set them alongside the hundreds of thousands crushed under Saddam's regime - not to mention the hypothetical victims he might have threatened in the future.

Jimmy Carter would disagree, but endless diplomacy is not an end in itself. Too often it is a suckers' game with a dictator who knows exactly what he needs to survive another day.

The original post, plus more excellent analysis from OFK can be found here.

Previous KM posts on NoKo include: here, here and here.

What Terri is Still Teaching Us

I was trying very hard not to write again about Terri Schiavo. I'd like her to rest in peace. I'd like all of us - on all sides of the matter - to take a deep breath and consider what more can be gained now that we've proven beyond a reasonable doubt that we don't understand each other. But news has momentum. The discussion is back 'on'. The battle is joined. So here goes.

My initial reaction to the release of the autopsy report is "so what?" The media is describing her brain variously as Massively Damaged, Profoundly Damaged, Severely Deteriorated, or my favorite: Irreversibly Atrophied. Why is that my 'favorite' [heavy sarcasm]? Because it implies a level of foresight and medical omnipotence that I've learned - through my brother's illness, through consulting work in the medical industry, and through talking with doctors who are my neighbors and friends - that the medical profession simply does not possess. Christ was irreversibly dead... until he wasn't. YMMV, but believing that allows me to approach my time in this life with a longer perspective and far more joy than I possessed before.

The best docs are the ones most willing to admit that they know very little about how the human body in all its complexity (to say nothing of the human mind in its infinitely greater complexity) really works. Yes, they know a great deal more than they used to, and that is reason to celebrate. But even that is infinitessimally small compared to what they wish they knew, much less what could be knowable. Vanishingly, humblingly, frighteningly small.

Miracles occur all the time. I can't locate the reference at the moment, but I recently read that religious faith - while generally much lower than average among people with graduate degrees - is much higher than average among doctors (on the order of 75% as I recall.) It is even higher still among those serving patients directly in life-in-the-balance situations. I know this is true for the most part, of my brother's docs and nurses and that is comforting. Some actually gravitate to oncology precisely because they sense a divine, unexplainable presence there.

So what does this have to do with Terri? A great deal. All the autopsy told us was that she had a small brain - smaller, we assume, than before she became ill. What the autopsy cannot tell us though, is how Terri's life and death catalyzed the love of those around her - and due to the media circus surrounding her forced starvation, those well removed from her. Terri's suffering had a purpose instilling hope and faith among many. I will admit that that hope was small, but the God I know doesn't care about the size of such things. He will blow on the faintest ember if we will blow with him.

The fact that some chose (and still choose) to spit on that hope - retreating to a clinically reassuring view that we can all wash our hands, or move on and say "we may have gotten that one wrong, but look over here at another case instead" is frankly, demoralizing. Science and faith often reconcile - much more often than the media like to portray. It's unfortunate that they're still being driven apart in this case. Terri's parents may seem irrational. Her defenders may seem dogmatic. But that does not change the fact that hope is prettier to look at than a report that reduces Terri as a child of God to the size and weight of the non-inanimate brain that allowed her to 'be' in this physical realm.

I heard a sermon a week ago about death and life in the spiritual sense that I think is applicable here. The pastor's point was that without Christ, being dead in spirit, we are no better than an inanimate arm severed from its body (or more humbly, perhaps a fingernail clipping.) It is only in that body that we - individually and collectively - have hope of being something much much greater. Terri's brain is nothing. It is dead. Terri, I can only hope, is gloriously alive - free from the prison of the body that once confined her... and confused us.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has more after taking the time to read the 39-page autopsy report, as does The Anchoress here.

Microsoft, China and Socially Responsible Investing

As a consultant to financial organizations and as a member of a relatively liberal church, I've heard more than I want to over the years about "social justice" and "social responsibility", (e.g., in the context of socially responsible investing.) What I haven't heard - even from purveyors of so-called 'SR' (socially responsible) mutual funds and other SR investment vehicles - is a definition that goes beyond the facile liberal hit-list of armaments, alcohol, gaming, tobacco, union-busting and overseas 'exploitation', (by which they mean giving jobs to people in dirt-poor third-world countries at wage levels, and under conditions that are below those regarded as 'fair' in the U.S.) I once had a fascinating closed-door conversation with a major figure in the SR world to the effect that "yeah, we know it's fuzzy-headed and unfair and internally inconsistent, but people like to feel good about themselves and we provide a way for them to do that."

What's missed in conversations with fire-eyed SR do-gooders are the problems raised by more complex trade-offs. Especially problematic for SR investors to deal with are actions by "good" companies such as Microsoft (and Yahoo! and Google) that have insidiously corrosive second and third-order effects, even if they aren't directly 'evil'. Most recently, for all three, have been questions about Internet products in China. The Wall Street Journal today (subscription required) opines on how this facilitates the continuation of an oppressive political climate:

"Where do you want to go today?" That was Microsoft's slogan in the mid-1990s, one that evoked the unlimited possibilities inherent in the age of the Internet and the software revolution. The answer to that question today would be, "hopefully not where they discuss 'freedom,' 'democracy' and 'human rights,'" at least not if you expect to use Microsoft's new portal in China. The software giant has just bowed to the Chinese government by banning these words. If you type them on Microsoft's new portal, a message appears telling you to try different ones. If this weren't insulting enough, the message actually says, according to news reports, "this item should not contain forbidden speech such as profanity. Please enter a different word for this item." ...It is admittedly difficult for China's government to block Internet content from its estimated 87 million users, a number that is growing. But it is a lot easier if it has the cooperation of the industry.

9-11 Deniers, Part II (Morgan Reynolds)

As I wrote last month, there seems to be a perverse streak in human nature that wants to see a nefarious plot under every bed - feeling the irrational urge to oppose the party line no matter how well accepted or factually grounded it may be. The current administration seems to bring these folks out in droves. I imagine that for some, the alternative - looking around at their fellow citizens and realizing that they are outnumbered - is too painful and paranoia-inducing an idea to accept. So it is this week with Morgan Reynolds, a former chief economist for the Department of Labor who's insisting to anyone who'll listen that the collapse of the twin towers in NY on 9-11 was a premeditated controlled demolition perpetrated by government insiders. Okey dokey...

Reynolds is hardly the first to make such conjectures. He's merely the most prominent to shoot his career and reputation in the head by doing so - perhaps due to sour grapes over a less-than happy departure... we don't know. (On second thought, I'm sure he could get a job with George Soros at any time, or perhaps get Michael Moore to hire him as a production assistant.)

Unfortunately, neither political party seems to have a monopoly on this character flaw, as Blogcritics points out here. (E.g., think Joseph McCarthy - one of the early pioneers of the "fake but substantively true" CBS-Rather doctrine of political character assassination that ultimately destroys the accuser.) I suspect that this tendency is stoked by the all-too common plot device in movies, books and television shows these days of a dark, far-reaching conspiracy, (think 'Bourne Identity', '24' as just two recent examples.)

In most cases, this contrarian tendency is a net positive for an open, democratic society. Someone somewhere is always saying that the emperor has no clothes... even when he does. Sometimes he is right. What's easily lost in the noise are the credible, less-partisan voices of discernment that can say, "y'know, this time he really does look naked, doesn't he?"

Not being one of those non-partisan voices, I find it particularly ironic that the left is so quick to embrace an idea like 9-11 being staged against the preponderance of scientific evidence, forensic opinion and engineering expertise and yet when it comes to say, global warming, the argument turns to "well, most reputable scientists agree" and responsible voices of opposition like Michael Crichton get smeared or ignored.

The tricky thing about science is that sometimes the iconoclasts (Einstein, Galileo, Columbus, Newton, Hawking, Darwin) are absolutely correct against 99.999% of their peers... and sometimes they're just nut-jobs trying to score political points. In either case, there will always be a fringe saying the world is flat and that Neil Armstrong performed on a soundstage in the Arizona desert in 1969.

Perspective: 9-11, Gitmo and the Passage of Time

So much news seems trapped in a soap bubble of the moment with little historical reference. Thus, this line from James Taranto stands out:

We must admit, if you'd told us after Sept. 11 that less than four years later U.S. senators would be taking offense because would-be mass murderers were forced to listen to Christina Aguilera tunes, we'd have thought you were crazy.

Unfortunately, people have short attention spans - much shorter certainly than at the time of Pearl Harbor. Around here anyway, flags on cars largely disappeared by Christmas 2001. "Never Forget" bumper stickers can still be seen around New York City, but are much harder to spot anywhere else. It was said in the fall of 2001 that our adversaries were patient - very patient. Hello! They still are. Four years is not a lot of time.

It's easy for the Chuck Hagels of the world to make accusations against those trying to protect our way of life in the absence of an immediate newsmaking threat. It's a lot harder to stay the course and recognize that just because our enemies aren't attacking us this very minute doesn't mean we don't have any.

Single Payer Nonsense Goes Down Hard in Canada

Today's OpinionJournal carries this piece on a landmark decision by Canada's Supreme Court last week striking down a Quebec law that made private health insurance illegal. Even among socialist nations, the only ones with similar laws are Cuba and North Korea.

When George Zeliotis of Quebec was told in 1997 that he would have to wait a year for a replacement for his painful, arthritic hip, he did what every Canadian who's been put on a waiting list does: He got mad. He got even madder when he learned it was against the law to pay for a replacement privately. But instead of heading south to a hospital in Boston or Cleveland, as many Canadians already do, he teamed up to file a lawsuit with Jacques Chaoulli, a Montreal doctor. The duo lost in two provincial courts before their win last week... "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care," wrote Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin for the 4-3 Court last week. Canadians wait an average of 17.9 weeks for surgery and other therapeutic treatments, according the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute. The waits would be even longer if Canadians didn't have access to the U.S. as a medical-care safety valve. Or, in the case of fortunate elites such as Prime Minister Paul Martin, if they didn't have access to a small private market in some non-core medical services. Mr. Martin's use of a private clinic for his annual checkup set off a political firestorm last year... "The prohibition on obtaining private health insurance might be constitutional in circumstances where health-care services are reasonable as to both quality and timeliness," the ruling reads, but it "is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services." [emphasis added]

Mommas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Condi

What parent wouldn't be ecstatic for their child to grow up to be like the amazing Condi Rice? What novelist would dare create a character of such outsized talents and achievements - male or female, black or white? But most importantly, how can the left reconcile its absolute vilification of this woman, (including some who would rather see her accomplishments as 'slavery', going so far as to agree with nasty comments about her by that lover of peace, justice and democracy, Robert Mugabe), than to simply admit that she is living evidence that MLK's dream is being fulfilled. One wonders what kind of milestone would satisfy such critics.

UPDATE: Today's WSJ carries this editorial (subscription required), further outlining the despotism of Mr. Mugabe.

One of Africa's poorest countries, Zimbabwe, is suffering through a brutal forced relocation reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge's "ruralization." Hundreds of thousands of people in and around the capital, Harare, have been evicted from their homes, which are then bulldozed under the order of dictator Robert Mugabe, the poster child for Africa's governance problem... At the "detention camp" outside Harare where the residents were being taken, Ms. Stevenson saw people "crowded together in fenced compound. ... The people are staying in tents, and the tents are right next to each other, not a bit of space in between. ... The main shock was the small size of the place -- there is no way all the people from Hatcliffe Extension (there are still roughly 6,000-8,000 people staying there) will fit inside that compound, even if they all remain standing!" Mr. Mugabe is the same leader whose theft of land from white farmers nearly pushed his once-thriving nation into famine... The evictees' crime was living in areas that are increasingly opposed to Mr. Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party, an unacceptable challenge to the man who has misruled Zimbabwe for 25 years.

Amnesty Unhinged

Amnesty International Executive Director Dr. William F. Schulz (5/25/05):

If the US government continues to shirk its responsibility [to allow investigation to Amnesty's standards into Guantanmo allegations by terrorists], Amnesty International calls on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior US officials involved in the torture scandal. And if those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them. The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera because they may find themselves under arrest as Augusto Pinochet famously did in London in 1998.

Powerline has the story, including a strong argument why Amnesty is not only nuts but on shaky ground logically, legally and historically. John Hinderaker:

In a breathtakingly short time, Amnesty International has declined from being a respectable human rights organization to its current status as a joke and a disgrace.

Wisdom in Difficult Times

This short parable (and the larger site of which it is a part - sent by a reader and longtime friend), struck me as particularly profound in light of my brother's continued struggles, (including a 'bad' and potentially ominous day yesterday.) As I wrote Monday, it is through hardship that we grow. On this earth, the absence of discomfort is not heaven, but (often) spiritual stagnation.

Hypocrisy Watch - Noonan on Dean & Hillary

Peggy Noonan, writing for OpinionJournal gets right to the point: if a Republican leader spoke as Howard Dean did the other night, or as Hillary Clinton has on many occasions, he or she would be savaged by the press and shunned by the electorate - most of which is far more integrated and civil than red-blue maps would have us believe. Living in a red-blue household that does just fine in day-to-day living and loving, I can attest to that.

In America there is a lot of political integration. Democrats and Republicans are friends. Life forces them to be if they need to be forced, which most don't. They know each other from the office, Little League, school meetings, the neighborhood... There is a tradition of political generosity that prevails among the normal people of America, a certain live-and-let-live-ness. That is why Little League games don't break out in fistfights, at least over politics. You don't shun people in the neighborhood because they're Democrats, and you don't inform the Republican in the next cubicle that he is evil, lazy and racist. That just doesn't play in America. There are breaches, exceptions, incidents. We are not angels. But by and large even though we disagree with each other, and even if we come to dislike each other, we maintain, for reasons both moral and practical, decorum. Civility. We keep a lid on it. We don't lower it to the level of invective. We don't by nature seek to divide.

Elsewhere in the column, Noonan does a neat little left-right reference reversal, inserting color-coded Dean-Hillary quotes into a hypothetical future speech by President Bush to make her point. And it is an effective one - worth reading. (Noonan as a writer always is, even if one might disagree with her - though I don't. Her 1986 Challenger speech for President Reagan still sends shivers down my spine for its simplicity and emotion.) But I digress...

So why do Dean and Clinton receive respectful, even adoring treatment in the media when they say such things? I'm not going to take that bait. That would be divisive. :)

UPDATE I: I'm not sure what inspired the Anchoress to be up at 3AM, but I just read her take on Noonan's piece and it's a good one. Excerpt:

Had Noonan really wanted to push a hot button, (which clearly she doesn’t) she might have also switched Dean’s remarks about “Christians” to “Jews.” That would have caused a huge hullaballo, of course. Democrats would assume that Noonan was comparing Howard Dean’s extreme rhetoric (delivered to a defeated tribe that is desperate to feel powerful and looking for an enemy to hate and to vanquish so they may feel better about themselves) to the rhetoric of another shortish, stumpy-armed man with a gutteral yell.

UPDATE II: There's got to be a way to adapt this to Hillary and Dean. Any takers?

Accommodating Crime in Germany

Of course they could always simply arrest them. Isn't that what police do? Not in Europe. Not in Germany.

A German city is rushing to install a series of drive-in wooden "sex garages" in time for next year's Soccer World Cup and an expected boom in the local sex trade, a city official said Wednesday. Dortmund, one of 12 cities to host World Cup matches, is anxious to keep prostitutes and their clients off the streets by providing them with discreet places to do business. Experts estimate as many as 40,000 prostitutes may travel to Germany to offer their services to fans during the tournament.

US to Canadians: Chainsaw Murderers Welcome

The picture alone tells the story.

Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States.

The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres' hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton's kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom.

Despres, 22, immediately became a suspect because of a history of violence between him and his neighbors, and he was arrested April 27 after police in Massachusetts saw him wandering down a highway in a sweat shirt with red and brown stains. He is now in jail in Massachusetts on murder charges, awaiting an extradition hearing next month.

As a Massachusetts resident, why am I not 100% convinced that this guy is going to stay behind bars as long as he should?

Dedicated to Pizza Delivery

Maybe they're just tougher in Florida.

Thomas Stefanelli, 37, said dedication to his job at Hungry Howie's Pizza kept him on the job after a struggle with a robber Saturday night left him bleeding from a bullet wound in his left thigh... His cell phone wasn't working, so he drove to his next delivery address... [and] went on to make three more deliveries... He was treated and released from a hospital.

Growth of Religion II

In this post on Monday, I quoted an article that remarked that: "The more secure people become in the developed world, the more they loosen their hold on religion..."

Thus I note with interest this post on Real Meal Ministries Blog, (hat tip: Hugh Hewitt), and this excellent quote: "If we in North America were to rewrite 'poor in spirit' today, would we not be tempted to substitute confident, self-sufficient, well-adjusted, or middle-class?"

France Looks to NASA for Inspiration

It's hard not to marvel at how cluelessly France has allowed itself to be governed. The following sad economic statistic from Sunday's WaPo - and the patently silly solutions being proposed to solve it - make me even less confident than I already was, (which is to say, not at all), that France is even close to economic sanity, (voting down the EU Constitution notwithstanding.) In a country that produced Jacques Derrida and attracted Susan Sontag, I guess we should hardly be surprised.

...not a single enterprise founded here in the past 40 years has managed to break into the ranks of the 25 biggest French companies. By comparison, 19 of today's 25 largest U.S. companies didn't exist four decades ago... The [French] state plans to allocate nearly $1 billion over the next three years to about 20 regional projects, ranging from biotechnology to communication, from energy-related projects to nanotechnology ventures... Chirac's government has opened yet another front. The purpose: to enhance French competitiveness through large-scale industrial programs, like those used to promote Airbus, the French space program and the French nuclear industry. Even here, France is looking to the United States and agencies like NASA for inspiration.

Yes, you read that right: France is looking to NASA for inspiration, competitive verve, fast-forward innovation and a culture of entrepreneurialism.

Yes, this is the same NASA that tries very hard but fails not to look like the monopolistic government behemoth agency that lost two $nine-figure Martian space probes within a few months based on errors in elementary math, crashed two space shuttles and killed over a dozen astronauts due to a what post-mortem reports described as a calcified bureaucratic culture, and that promised to Congress in the 1970's to carry payloads into space at a rate of one per week at a cost of $100 per pound only to carry less than a dozen per year at a cost of $10,000 per pound... when the shuttle was flying, which it hasn't been. Yes, that NASA. Maybe France should take a look at, say, the Department of the Interior, or Homeland Security next. The words 'agile', 'efficient' and 'forward looking' immediately spring to mind. Not!

Forty years too late. Yeah, that's about right.

It's OK if a Doctor Does It...

This makes me very sad.

A 19-year-old East Texas man faces a life prison sentence for causing his teenage girlfriend to miscarry twins. Gerardo Flores was accused of causing the miscarriage by stepping on his girlfriend's stomach... [but she] can't be prosecuted because of her legal right to abortion.

If only he'd thought to go to medical school first...

Dumb and... Smeared - Kerry and Bush at Yale

This is rich:

"Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago."

Hmm... I wonder why Kerry waited so long to release this. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has more, as does Michelle Malkin on the fishy-nes of Kerry's non-release 'release' of his what may or may not be all of his Navy records to a friendly source, (the Boston Globe), which is not saying all that it knows, almost five months after Kerry promised to release those records and didn't (and well after he was challenged to do so.) All of this Kerry accompanied with Nixonian/Hillaryesque thrusts at a rabid right wing press out to get him. Yeah, right. Would someone - anyone electable - please run for his Senate seat? Soon?

Someone Who Should Know, on Gulags and Guantanamo

Natan Sharansky on Amnesty International, speaking on Fox News Sunday:

"...the comparison of Amnesty International is very typical, unfortunately, for this organization, which has no moral clarity... [or differentiation] between democracies where there are sometimes serious violations of human rights and dictatorships where no human rights exist at all. This comparison between gulag and Soviet Union and United States of America, erases all these differences... It makes moral equivalence between these two very different worlds and that's unfortunately very a typical, systematical, mistake of Amnesty International." [emphasis added]

Meanwhile, Amnesty back-pedals furiously on its previous libelous comments, as described in an Wall Street Journal editorial this morning (free on OpinionJournal.)

"Clearly, this is not an exact or a literal analogy," said William Schulz. "In size and in duration, there are not similarities between U.S. detention facilities and the gulag. . . . People are not being starved in those facilities. They're not being subjected to forced labor." Thanks for clearing that up. And what about Mr. Schulz's description of Donald Rumsfeld and others as "apparent high-level architects of torture" who ought to be arrested and prosecuted? He was asked by host Chris Wallace, "Do you have any evidence whatsoever that he ever approved beating of prisoners, ever approved starving of prisoners, the kinds of things we normally think of as torture?" Mr. Schulz's response: "It would be fascinating to find out. I have no idea . . ."

Biker Gang Politics

Mark Steyn could write for the back page of the Tierra Del Fuegan Community Notices section and I'd still read him. This piece in the Western Standard (quick, free registration required) may hold some American readers back with some 'inside baseball', but his biting comparisons between Liberal party political tactics, biker gangs and the Clinton administration are rich. Basic thesis: when the media is able to convince people that ethics are too boring and complicated to bother with, (while siding with the violators), the democratic institutions we take for granted are in trouble.

The Liberal party is certainly a machine and it’s proving harder to crack than most rocks, and it’s essentially engaged in the same activities as the other biker gangs: the Grits launder money; they enforce a ruthless code of omerta when fainthearted minions threaten to squeal; they threaten to whack their enemies; they keep enough cash on hand in small bills of non-sequential serial numbers to be able to deliver suitcases with a couple hundred grand hither and yon; and they sluice just enough of the folding stuff around law enforcement agencies to be assured of co-operation... During the Clinton era, there were disaffected types in Arkansas muttering that Slick Willie and his gang had had certain inconvenient persons removed from the scene... But, even at the height of the Starr investigation, there weren’t prominent political figures testifying under oath that they’d been threatened with a cement overcoat by Clinton aides... we cannot guarantee that a Conservative government will be perfect or squeaky-clean or super-competent. But we should all know that declining to punish the Liberal party for its serial abuses will guarantee more years of remorseless corrosion of our democracy.

Worshipping the World

I don't know how the Anchoress does it: day after day after day of prose so insightful and beautiful that one wonders if she has a staff - maybe identical triplets, each writing 2-3 days a week. (Or more likely, the Holy Spirit. One does not write that well without her.) Anchoress' latest - this afternoon - starts with reminders of some shameless gay-Catholic clashes and winds up to a heartbreakingly personal crescendo. Excerpt:

The whole world has paid a price for it, this rampant, thoughtless, ravenous pursuit of the Almighty Orgasm - deemed more delightful, more worthy, more necessary than God or Family or even Self. I have lost a beloved brother because of it... in the past 40 years, many more have died for the Orgasm than have died for the faith... They are not martyrs. They are not saints. But they are victims of a tinsel mentality that urged them on, every step of the way. And they leave behind countless, countless lives full of pain and sorrow.

Sitting by my brother's hospital bedside today, wishing more than anything that his faith be strengthened and his fear released - even more than that his leukemia disappear - her piece struck a deep chord. Worth reading in full.

UPDATE: On a lighter note... Hmm...

The Growth of Religion?

I just got back from what can only be described as an uplifting, (if sad and reverential) weekend celebrating my grandfather's life. As has been true during the most difficult parts of my brother's trials, I encountered a number of minor miracles and signs letting me know God was there for us. Most of them are too personal to easily describe without more context than any sane reader would have the patience for, but they were extraordinary nonetheless.

In catching up on reading, (I am hopelessly behind on world news!), I ran across this review in the Wilson Quarterly of the book "Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide". Big topic; scholarly treatment. I'm into that kind of thing from time to time. Two key excerpts:

Gore Vidal, in his Lowell Lecture at Harvard University in 1992, called [religion] the great unmentionable evil] at the heart of our culture... [but] contrary to the current scapegoating of religion, more people were slaughtered during the 20th century under secularist regimes, led by secularist intellectuals, and in the name of secularist ideologies, than in all the religious persecutions in Western history.

...[the book's authors] trace the growing irrelevance of religion in the modern world to the fact that people can take security for granted. The more secure people become in the developed world, the more they loosen their hold on religion; religion, meanwhile, retains its authority among the less secure but faster-growing populations of the less developed world. “The result of these combined trends,” the authors conclude, "is that rich societies are becoming more secular but the world as a whole is becoming more religious."

The first point needs no additional emphasis, except to say that I'm tired of secularists pointing out the Crusades as the big evil that stains the credibility of Christianity forever.

The second point makes complete sense at a superficial level. It begs the question of why plenty of people with fine incomes and nice houses choose faith. They/we must either be downwardly mobile idiots, or else blessed to see beyond those trappings.

Does faith allow some to better see the suffering and insecurity around them, including their own ultimate physical insecurity in the future, or do those things bring people to faith? Probably both. What's also likely, particularly in our culture, is that many in 'safe' well-off societies are inclined to focus on the moment and themselves (the entanglements of the world) and thus feel - as I once did - that faith is a crutch for old, sick, dumb and poor people. That couldn't be farther from my current view, even as God certainly serves those folks - which is all of us sooner or later.

At a church service I attended with family this morning near Atlanta, we were treated to an excellent sermon that took as its jumping off place a quote from Sylvia Plath to the effect that "character is destiny", making the point that in Christ, character is anything but fixed and we, his followers, anything but doomed. With God we can be changed, if we let him do the work.

Not to get too sweeping here, but I find that 'inside-out' view a lot easier to swallow than the 'outside-in' view I'm more accustomed to hearing at my home church near Boston. I.e., change society and fix the world and people will be better for it. That's precisely backwards.

Death and Insight

Just after my post last night, I got word that my grandfather had died. He was 97. It was expected, but still painful. We had grown close. He was sharp and vibrant 'til the end. I spent the day writing a eulogy for him.

I had jotted down some thoughts in the wee hours, jumbled in the dark - ideas swimming on the page. But as the dawn broke, after just three hours' sleep, I woke to utter clarity. Story and meaning came to me fully formed with the light, words easily flowing into images. I think I had some help.

I find the process of writing tremendously cathartic. It has been my prayer today. My brother was saddened by the news, but glad that he'd been able to see our grandfather back in April, in a brief break amidst bro's chemo.

It's been a tough year and it's only June. I don't know what I would have done without my faith. Rather than being challenged, I feel it on fast-forward.

I'll be largely off the grid 'til Monday, traveling to the funeral. Please have a look at the archives - even the way-back stuff! There's plenty there to ponder. Thanks for your prayers.

The Lovely Smell of Democracy in Bloom

Sixty two percent. SIXTY TWO PERCENT! That's the fraction of Dutch voters who rejected the EU Constition today. Who would have thought that a continent that - in aggregate - was so adamantly opposed to enabling democracy in Iraq would use it so forcefully themselves? I wish I had more faith in the ability of the EU bureaucrats to draw the proper lessons from the smack-down they've received in the past few days.

Newsweek on Marriage: Pillar of Salt?

I hadn't read Newsweek in a long time. After the unsubstantiated Koran-flushing incitement to riot (err, I mean 'story'), I was even less inclined to do so. So it was with some skepticism that - on my wife's recommendation - I read a Newsweek review of the book "Marriage, a History" by Stephanie Coontz last night. My skepticism was handsomely rewarded. Excerpt from the review:

For the true commitment-phobe, living among the Na people in southwestern China would be paradise. The Na are the only known society that completely shuns marriage. Instead, says Stephanie Coontz in her new book, "Marriage, a History," brothers help sisters raise the children they conceive through casual sex with nonfamily members (incest is strictly taboo). Will we all be like the Na in the future? With divorce and illegitimacy rates still high, the institution of marriage seems headed for obsolescence in much of the world. Coontz, a family historian at Evergreen State College in Washington, doesn't proclaim the extinction of marriage, but she does argue that dramatic changes in family life over the past 30 years represent an unprecedented social revolution—and there's no turning back. [emphasis added]

Has Newsweek really changed that much? Is it just me, or are others horrified by the breezy, offhand, Summer-of-Love assumptions and Margaret Mead-like sex-without-commitment South Pacific fictional loopiness behind that introduction? Hey, marriage didn't work and changes to it didn't work either, but there's no turning back! Let's plunge on ahead regardless because we can't stop progress, towards... whatever.

A common critique of conservatives is that we want to 'turn back the clock', as if the history of the world, (and particularly social experimentation) has been an inexorable march forward; the passage of time always begetting something better - more progressive. That begs the question: what is meant by 'progress'? Such critiques seem to carefully avoid the question of when - like the lost person who gets on the highway to feel like they're going somewhere - 'progress' has been in precisely the wrong direction. In such a situation, retracing one's steps, (yes, turning back the clock... there, I've said it), is precisely the right thing to do even if Ms. Coontz and her gushing reviewers at Newsweek disagree.

Whimsical side note: The 'Na' people? As in 'Na', the chemical symbol for salt? As in pillar of salt and Sodom and Gomorrah? Maybe God does have a sense of humor.

Louis XIV and the EU Constitution, Part II

The Wall Street Journal got it right yesterday re. the EU Constitution and the French vote in this editorial (free access):

The French vote is a victory of democracy against an opaque and elite process that few people really understood... The document itself is a monstrosity running to 485 pages... The convention process was supposed to involve Europe's citizenry in its drafting, but in reality it droned on for two years in nigh-perfect anonymity. The prevailing view among European elites was summed up by a senior EU bureaucrat we spoke to last month who said about the French and the constitution: "They haven't read it. If they had read it, they wouldn't understand it. If they understood it, they wouldn't like it." Nonetheless, he thought that the French should vote yes anyway.

Think of all the effective, enlightened and truly enduring constitutions and covenants throughout history (e.g., Ten Commandments, Magna Carta, U.S. Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution.) It's safe to say that none ran to 485 pages. Brevity certainly isn't a guarantee of efficacy, nor is an open process, but a lack of either certainly seems incompatible with democracy. (Think Moses on the mountain for the top-down exception that proves that rule.) I can't even recall the last 485-page novel I've read, much less liked.

UPDATE: Today the WSJ editorial page is even better on this subject in this piece (subscription required) by Jeffrey Cimbalo and David Frum of the American Enterprise Institute. [IMO, the WSJ is well worth the price of on-line subscription just for the editorials.]:

The French, the Dutch, and other Europeans have lost patience with political systems that seem increasingly remote and political elites that seem increasingly disdainful of the interests and values of the people they claim to represent. If the French voted "non," because they sensed that the EU Constitution would aggravate those problems, then they voted very shrewdly. Indeed, only a political system as seemingly remote and disdainful as the EU has become could have produced a document like the EU Constitution: interminably long, confusingly organized, obscure in its effects, and in many crucial spots almost deceptive in its purposes. It seems almost too heavy-handedly symbolic that while the U.S. Constitution opens with the resounding words, "We the People of the United States," the first words of the EU Constitution are: "His Majesty the King of the Belgians . . ."

French opponents of the EU Constitution charge that it is an "Anglo-Saxon" document that would impose a harsh "neo-liberal" free-market regime. In truth, the EU Constitution owes little or nothing to the constitutional traditions of the English-speaking world. It would establish a legislature that cannot write laws, a judiciary that can act even when no law has been broken, and an executive that is not elected by and is barely accountable to anyone or anything. As for accusations of "neo-liberalism," they miss the point. The Constitution vastly expands the powers of the unelected and largely unaccountable European Commission and the unelected and wholly unaccountable European Court of Justice (ECJ)... All can agree that a strong Europe -- a secure, prosperous, and self-confident Europe -- is in America's interest... Americans should fear European weakness -- and this constitution weakens Europe by diminishing democracy, alienating voters, and discrediting the legitimacy of necessary economic reforms.

That last sentence is important. Something tells me we've been here before... in 1919.