Eric Muller on the Pope's Auschwitz comments

Unlike Eric Muller at "Is That Legal?", I don't have really strong opinions on the Pope's comments at Auschwitz either way. Some of what the Pope said could be disagreed with, but it does not seem like he was trying to minimize or negate what happened to the Jews there.

There are some curious details: Being a Methodist, I don't understand the statement that "as a Christian and a Jew, [nun Edith Stein] accepted death with her people and for them" [emphasis mine], which seems to invoke some Catholic formulation.

The comments section is pretty active. Most readers seem to disagree with Muller's criticism, at least in tone or details. Here's one that caught my eye:

Note too that the Pope said that the Holocaust was an attack on God. This, too, sounded like calculated language to me. It is designed to turn the traditional "Murderers of God" argument on its head, to say no, it isn't the Jews who should be blamed for killing God, it is the anti-Semites who should be treated as deicides.

Interesting point! I'd never heard the "murderers of God" charge against Jews until just recently (and even then, just from TV show plots), but that might be from my background (rural conservative Methodist Southerner), but to the extent some people believed or believe it, this would seem to be a good way of turning that around.

Hillary-for-President rally in Nashville

A Nashville (population ~500,000) rally to show support for Hillary Clinton in the South drew twenty people. Posted without comment.

(Link via Instapundit)

Astronaut Tom Jones on NASA's Moon Plans

Tom Jones, a former NASA astronaut, writes about NASA's moon mission plans on Popular Mechanics' website. I haven't read his article yet, but I'd take seriously whatever he says. I met him at a talk he gave to the Washington, D.C. Phi Beta Kappa Association a year or two ago. Good speaker, and he's both an astronaut and a planetary astronomer.

I see from the bottom of that page that he has posted other articles on PM's blog. I'll have to start checking that regularly.

I'll comment more on this, once I've read the story...

The "Tar baby": More false cries of "Racism!"

Once again showing the cultural ignorance of some media elites, Tony Snow has been criticized for saying he didn't want to "hug the tar baby" on a particular issue. Jeff Goldstein has a good take-down of this inanity. Did these people not read the tales of Uncle Remus?! The tar-baby has got to be one of the two most memorable stories out of Uncle Remus, for me, second only to the briar patch. If any of Snow's critics had read this, they would have recognized the apt reference and not confused it with any supposedly racial terms. For those from a different culture, let me summarize the story. Br'er Fox has decided to catch Br'er Rabbit, and so he makes a figure of a baby out of a ball of tar. Puts clothes and a hat on it, and sets it by the road. Br'er Rabbit comes along and says a friendly "Good morning!" to the tar-baby, but, of course, "he don't say nothin'." Br'er Rabbit tries again, with the same result, and eventually gets so mad at the tar-baby's refusal to be friendly with him that he punches him. Of course, his paw gets stuck in the tar, and in trying to get himself free, he gets his other paws stuck, so that he's completely trapped.

Snow said he wanted to avoid discussing a particularly sticky issue, so as not to "hug the tar-baby." Now, read Snow's transcript again and recognize how good an analogy that is.

What kind of idiots see this and think, not of Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox, but of a supposed racial slur. One I've certainly never heard of in my life. Goldstein rightly says that "intentionalism" is the only way to interpret what people say. Groan.

Will Iranian clothing law single out Christians, Jews, & Zoroastrians?

The story I linked to below, regarding an upcoming Iranian law on clothing, might not be true. Or rather, the claim of identifying colors for Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians might not be true. Iran apparently is planning to require Moslems to wear a standard dress, though. Unlike other commentators, I don't regard that in itself as fascist, because I think there have been prohibitions on various kinds of clothing for religious reasons in otherwise free societies in the past. This sounds far mroe restrictive than those, however, so it will probably be a real annoyance to the Persians. Let's see how Jews and Christians are treated under this...

Outrageous rudeness and abuse of the law by a Baltimore policewoman

I thought this was ridiculous, just from the first paragraph quoted on the Best of the Web today, but the whole story makes me outright angry. How dare these Baltimore police officers mistreat somebody who simply wanted to ask them directions?! Yes, they ran a stop sign (apparently by accident, given the situation), but that's a simple traffic ticket, which the driver didn't argue with. But the snide response to a request for help! What a jerk that officer is. And then to arrest them when they pulled up to the curve (with hazard lights on) to try to phone for help. Was it a no-stopping zone? Well, that's another traffic ticket, and the article doesn't even say that. "Trespassing" on a public street? What nonsense.

Frederica Mathewes-Green on The DaVinci Code

She makes a good point, here--one which I've said to friends family and probably heard expressed by the same--that while there's all this excitement over Dan Brown's claim that Jesus was married, that's actually a really insignificant point to Christianity.

"The Bible, in fact, doesn’t say that Jesus never married, though if he had it probably would have popped up in the communal memory somewhere. If it turns out that that detail somehow slipped the first evangelists’ minds, it would make no difference to the Christian claims."

You wouldn't have known that if you listened to certain sources arguing over the book. In fact, before I read it myself, I had assumed that this was the only reason the book was controversial to Christians. I actually told a friend, in a "hey, take it easy," sort of voice, that it doesn't make any difference to our faith whether Jesus was married or not (although of course there's no good evidence for it), so why worry about the book?

I think that objection was really obscuring the important reasons the book is a problem. The problem comes from its claims that Christ was only human, there's a necessary male-female duality within the godhead (the pagan ashera of the Old Testament being examples), and that religious observance could involve ritual sex. Those are the problematic conclusions, but there are also many false supporting claims within the text that need to be refuted, too.

Anyway, I'm glad to see Mrs. Mathewes-Green bringing this out.

Wow--score one for the Archbishop!

This may be the first time that I've said an "amen" to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I normally regard him as a wobbly on religion, but he's certainly standing up for the faith here: "Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, used his Easter sermon to criticize Mr. Brown's book [the DaVinci Code] for making the true story of Christianity seem 'automatically suspect.'"

This ought not to be newsworthy, of course...

The return of Jewish clothing insignia

And not just for Jews, but for Christians and Zoroastrians, as well. Iran's parliament, the "Islamic Majlis," has passed a law requiring non-Moslems to wear distinctively-colored ribbons. Yellow for Jews (sound familiar?), red for Christians, and blue for Zoroastrians. "It would make religious minorities immediately identifiable and allow Muslims to avoid contact with non-Muslims," according to the article.

I wonder if this will finally push our erstwhile European allies to get tough with the Iranian government. What'll the next step be out of Iran?

Ray Bradbury's wonderful Ode to Immigrants...and America

This is a wonderful poem! I didn't realize that Bradbury was a poet at all, let alone a good one.

I'll quote the first and last stanzas:

We are the dream that other people dream.
The land where other people land
When late at night
They think on flight
And, flying, here arrive
Where we fools dumbly thrive ourselves.
.
.
.
Run warm those souls: America is bad?
Sit down, stare in their faces, see!
You be the hoped-for thing a hopeless world would be.
In tides of immigrants that this year flow
You still remain the beckoning hearth they'd know.
In midnight beds with blueprint, plan and scheme
You are the dream that other people dream.

Read the whole thing for yourself.

Tony Snow as White House press secretary

I haven't gotten to see all of Tony Snow's first full press conference, but from the clips on the web, it looks like he did a good job. The reviews are in, and the critics agree. Odd to have TV reviewers and the like getting into this, but hey--it's on TV.

I'm a long-time fan of Snow, from 'way back in the '90s when he occasionally substituted for Rush Limbaugh, up through his days hosting Fox News Sunday, and then FNC's Weekend Live and his radio show. That's over a decade, I reckon. And as Rush has put it well, radio is a very intimate medium. You can get the impression the host is having a conversation with you (admittedly rather one-sided, unless you yell at the radio...not that I do...). Of course, he's been on TV more than radio in recent years, but he's got that easy-going manner that still gives off a friendliness to the viewer.

And so it's been an odd feeling to see him up there in front of the assembled White House reporters, speaking to a crowd. It feels like this is someone I've known personally who has gotten to be the president's spokesman--it's exciting. Weird, too, because I have to remind myself I have not met him. But I'm enjoying watching him, and I think he did a good job yesterday. I look forward to the rest of his tenure there and wish him the best.

Atheist argues against religious toleration

A certain Sam Harris has a book out called "The End of Faith," whose topic is pretty self-evident from the title. In this excerpt, reprinted at Beliefnet, he argues against religious toleration. All religions ought to be smashed alike, rather than respected.

Now, I've complained before about the misunderstanding of the word "tolerance." At least in a legal sense, it started out as the government not compelling people to believe a certain way, even if you might publicly criticize what it is that they believe. These days, it seems to have morphed (an example of "semantic drift"?) into an idea that you shouldn't even criticize other beliefs. This misunderstanding has led to all kinds of logical nonsense, such as that too-cute phrase, "Intolerance will not be tolerated!", which seems like a truly profound statement, until you think about it and realize it really is self-contradictory.

I don't argue for going around criticizing others' beliefs, by the way. That can be quite rude, unless it's in an appropriate context--a political debate, letters to the editor, blogs, etc. You don't walk up to people, or start conversations with colleagues, lambasting their beliefs.

But when the topic comes up, there is no need to say that all beliefs are equally true. Many are contradictory, and those cannot all be true simultaneously. You can believe what you wish and have the right to do so, without being compelled to agree with anybody else. That is tolerance. Harris is against any kind of such restraint, from what I get out of this (admittedly, I haven't read the whole thing).

But let me get to the criticism I was about to start on. Harris has a crude understanding on the degrees of belief:

People of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. However, religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others.

Get that? If you are religious at all, you're either an "extremist" or a "moderate." Moderates advocate respecting the "unjustified beliefs of others" and are "fully committed to tolerance and diversity." Extremists "would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy." What a load of crap.

I am neither. I am a committed Christian and while I would never compel other men to believe as I do, I certainly advocate missionary work to change their minds. I am not committed to "diversity." I think it would be great if everybody agreed with me on matters of religion (although as a Methodist, I'm not too concerned with specific details that faith and salvation don't depend on). But I wouldn't force my beliefs on anyone.

So Harris starts off with a fallacious premise. Not a surprise.

The supposed "Ugly American" phenomenon

I'd heard of this pamphlet before, but it's starting to inspire some pretty good discussions now. Jim Geraghty over at National Review's Kerry Spot (Will that need a name change now? But then, I thought "20th Century Fox" might update to "21st Century Fox" back in 2001, and they didn't. No need, really. And Kerry is one of those gifts that keeps on...well, you know.) has a couple of good posts on it. Click here and scroll down for more.

I certainly agree with the ideas of being polite and respectful of the local culture. But I would not say that this is a particular failing of Americans. As several correspondents of Geraghty have pointed out, this is often a virtue of traveling Americans, especially in comparison to tourists of other countries. As far as dress, I do dislike the apparent tourist dress code of T-shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes, unless you're out hiking in hot weather or are on the beach. (Of course, those clothes are *really* comfortable in hot weather, and I'll wear them myself. I did it all the time when I was younger.) When touring around the ruins of Mayan cities or visiting cathedrals in Europe, though, I'd prefer to see people a little more conventionally dressed. But again, dressing-down isn't a particular thing with Americans. When my cousin spent a semester studying in Spain, she made a comment that you could really pick out American tourists--they were the ones wearing khaki slacks and denim shirts. "Really? What do the Spaniards wear?", I asked. "T-shirts and too-tight jeans."

So, at least in some situations, it's the Americans who are dressing more nicely even than the local population. Incidentally, I especially like the khaki-and-denim look, myself. It's both nice-looking and comfortable.

I won't comment too much right now on the document itself, aside from pointing out that its title, "World Citizen Guide," is mired in that cosmopolitan mindset I detest. Let me reprint here the bigger points made in it, according to this Reuters story:

*** Think as big as you like but talk and act smaller. In many countries, any form of boasting is considered rude. Talking about wealth, power or status -- corporate or personal -- can create resentment.

*** Speak lower and slower. In conversation, match your voice level and tonality to the environment and other people. A loud voice is often perceived as bragging. A fast talker can be seen as aggressive and threatening

*** Dress up. You can always dress down. In some countries, casual dress is a sign of disrespect. Check out what is expected and when in doubt, err on the side of the more formal and less casual attire. You can remove a jacket and tie if you are overdressed. But you can't make up for being too casual.

***Listen at least as much as you talk. By all means, talk about America and your life in the country. But also ask people you're visiting about themselves and their way of life. Listen, and show your interest in how they compare their experiences to yours.

"Speak lower and slower," followed by, "match your voice level and tonality to the environment and other people." You know, those two commands are often contradictory. Have you ever been among a bunch of Italians? Canadians? Australians? Have you ever been in a group of mixed nationalities when the subject of soccer came up? Lower and slower gets ignored in those situations.

From an American's perspective, I'd like to issue a polite request to foreigners visiting our country or working here, in the same spirit of the above. Some of these can also be applied to Yankees visiting (or moving to) the South.

(1) Please stop running your mouth on about how you think we're doing everything in our society wrong. Complain about us all you want to when you're by yourselves, but it is quite rude to go into somebody else's country and start poking your nose into their business. Would you visit someone's house and spend the night criticizing his family? It's like that.

(2) No, we Americans don't drink as much (beer, wine, distilled perfume...) as y'all do. Please don't complain when we don't feel the absolute need to get drunk whenever we're all eating out. And no, Taco Bell does not serve vodka at the drive-through. Or inside. I swear, a foreign classmate of mine in college was mystified when he discovered this fact. And when you do wind up being the one person from the lab who's drunk at the end of the night, please keep in mind Point (1), above.

(3) And lower your voice when you do. Really. People over at the other side of the dining room are starting to stare, now.

(4) No, we don't follow soccer. And there's no objective reason we need to. You like it; that's great for you. We have our own sports. Honestly--do Americans visiting Europe feel the need to go on like this about baseball, basketball, or football?

(5) Yes, we have local news on our TV. Lots of it. Far more than we cover the goings-on in Lower Slobovia. This doesn't mean we're ignorant. Things happening right around you are much more your business than what they're doing over there is, and so we pay more attention to it. Plus, I thought you wanted us to stay out of other countries' businesses, anyway.

(6) Listen as much as you talk. Wait--wasn't this one on the Ugly American list? Well, it applies to some foreign visitors. I've listened to you going on and on about how much you dislike everything about us and how we need to do it like you do it. How often have you actually asked my opinions about anything?

(7) Stop making fun of our religiousness. Sure, your countrymen have fallen into the atheist sinkhole since World War II, but that doesn't make you sophisticated or intelligent. It's part of a slow decay that we can only hope y'all will crawl out of before this generation is out. Do you actually think that you are showing any sophistication when you sneer so? Actually, maybe that is a trait of sophisticates. But it's not a good trait. It's supremely arrogant, condescending, and rude.

Furthermore, our religiousness is not a vice. It is a great virtue, and it is something which will carry this country through whatever will befall her.

As my wife said to a German friend recently, who was bragging(?) that only half of his country was religious, "Yes, half of your country is religious: they're the Turks, Arabs..." Good point, honey.

(8) To sum up: be polite, and mind your own business. Think of visiting another country (like mine...like anybody's) as being a guest in someone else's home. His country is like his family. Keep your criticisms to yourself, unless you're asked for them.

The right way to respond to the Da Vinci Code

Illustrated by the Greek Orthodox Church. Summary: don't go threatening to sue Dan Brown; don't prohibit parishoners from seeing or reading it; rather, pass out flyers in church that explain that it's fiction and pretty obviously false as far as history and theology. I even like how they conclude--saying that church members who go see it for themselves will realize how silly its claims are.

Dumber still...

They were even trying to get the mailing address of the city changed?!!? "The article quotes the resort’s trademark lawyer from Washington, D.C, Stephen Trattner, as saying of Pinehurst, 'It’s a resort, not a town.'"

What unadulterated arrogance! D--- Yankees.

More on Pinehurst

As a follow-up from that previous post on trademark cases, here's an old (1999?) article on the fight between Pinehurst, North Carolina, and the golf course there. I don't know what has happened more recently, and maybe the golf course has won, but I agree that it's a bad idea to let anybody trademark a geographical name. I hope it's not possible, and if it were, it's idiotic. Just as bad is the apparent reliance on common-law-like effects: it seems that if the public generally associates a phrase with a given business, they've got a better case for trademark protection. But if the town had the name first, what does it matter what other people think of when they hear the name? This aspect of trademark law seems to run roughshod over individual rights.

Digging for the real news

OK, last month, CNN's prime-time audience fell by 38%. Fox News' fell by 17%. MSNBC's rose by 16%. So what's the story to follow here? According to the L.A. Times, it's that Fox fell by 17%.

Let's see; if I were a reporter, I think I might write a story about how MSNBC is doing so well and avoiding the problems hitting the other two cable networks. Or if I were in a mood for blood, I'd write about how CNN's ratings were double-plus-bad over the past month. But who seriously looks at the numbers and decides to slam the guy in the middle?

The LA Times' Scott Collins needs to take some rudimentary lessons from reporter school and figure out what the subject of a story should be. If he were covering a plane crash in which a third of the passengers died, a third came out with broken arms, and a third said they'd "never felt better," he'd write a long article on those broken arms. Weird.

Smiley-face trademarking

This is why I hate trademark law. Patents? Great. Copyright? Absolutely. Trademarks? Ugh!

Pinehurst, North Carolina, has had trouble with the Pinehurst golf club there, which somehow trademarked the name "Pinehurst" and wanted to stop anybody else from using it ("Pinehurst Barber Shop"? The trademark-stealing crooks!). Donald Trump tried to trademark "you're fired." Etc.

I have a problem with claiming exclusive rights to anything you didn't create. Trump wasn't the first guy to tell somebody "you're fired," and Pinehurst, N. C., has been called that since before the golf course was built. Yes, the "village" was planned and developed by the same guy who built the golf course, but it's stupid to go name a town and then try to tell people they can't use the name of the town to describe their other businesses!

In Wal-Mart's defense, they've said they were only trying to trademark the smiley-face because the Frenchman who claims to have created it (there are earlier American claimants, but they haven't tried to trademark it) was saying he was now going to trademark it in the US. Still...

Lileks translates Ahmadenijad's letter to Bush

This is hilarious.

US tattling on the Minutemen to Mexico?

It seems the US government has been sending Mexico information about where the Minutemen and other citizen border patrols have been working. Andrew McCarthy in National Review has a detailed article and commentary on this today. My goodness, this is stupid! First, there were the reports that border patrol agents had been occasionally told not to arrest illegal aliens caught by the Minutemen, and later, that they'd been told not to let the number of arrests go up after the Minutemen left. Now, they're actually telling Mexico where the civilian patrols are!

Maybe--maybe--there are good reasons for this, but the consular notification treaty they're using as an excuse doesn't require it, and we're left with the strong impression that higher-ups in border patrol don't actually want the agency to do its job.

Outrageous.

*Another* "Da Vinci Code" suit?!

Ugh. This is unbelievably wrong-headed. A Roman Catholic cardinal (Francis Arizne, who was considered a contender for pope last year) has suggested Christians sue Dan Brown over the depiction of Christ and Christianity in The Da Vinci Code. Great--go ahead and turn us into some twisted combination of Scientologists and radical Moslems!

I read the book, and while the claims in it really annoyed me (I wrote a long page of notes on where Brown got his facts wrong) (although I thought it was a pretty exciting book to read, nonetheless), Brown's got every right to write what he has. He can write things as wrong as he wants. He can make fun of Christianity ("make fun" isn't quite the right phrase--it seems more like he's got a real chip on his shoulder about the religion) all day long.

The response should be exactly what we Christians have been doing for the last few years--writing books and holding lectures showing where Brown went wrong. It's wrong to use the law to try to silence critics--honest critics or dishonest ones. Now, Cardinal Arizne isn't an American, and maybe he doesn't have an appreciation for the freedom of the press. But in our political philosophy in this country, we believe that our fundamental rights aren't creations of the government, to be given or taken away by it, but are natural rights that a government has the obligation to protect. This freedom of the press isn't just something for us Americans, but it is a right of all men, whether it's protected elsewhere or not.

I've never gone for boycotts, either, even for causes I believed in. I don't like the bullying. Let's stick to writing and talking to get our objections across and leave the law out of this. Leave lawsuits to the cults.

Papal convention

Interesting little protocol detail I'd never heard before. Not that I care that Mrs. Blair didn't observe it.

More on churches

As an addendum to my previous post/screed on trying to find a decent church in this area, I'll note that maybe this silliness in church services here is a desperate attempt to attract members in a region that's leaking its population. Maybe pastors and the congregations are convinced that people will only come to church if it's a "contemporary service" and there's all kinds of awful modern music and clapping and silly football cheers and high technology. Well, if so, it's not working, and it's turning off not only me, but others who grew up in the traditional Methodist church.

And I have a great counter-example. In addition to my church at home, I'm a member of Lovely Lane Methodist in Baltimore. It was the first Methodist church in this country, the "Mother Church of American Methodism," and the place where the famous Christmas Conference was held in 1784 to organize the newly-established denomination. Well, today a bad part of town has spread across the neighborhood surrounding Lovely Lane. The church can hold hundreds of people, but when so many people moved away to escape the crime and decay of inner-city Baltimore, the congregation dwindled drastically. By the time I got there, there were maybe 40 people on a given Sunday. I was one of maybe two or three people under the age of fifty, and there were no small children. The Methodist Church rotates preachers fairly often, and when the new preacher got there, she encouraged a lot of work on reaching out to find new members. It is working. The congregation isn't huge today, but it's bigger, and there are several families with children now, so we have a regular Sunday school for the kids.

We had long had too few people to form a choir, so we relied on voice students from the Peabody Conservatory. As a result, we got beautiful, classical solos and anthems. The organist is from Oxford (you can tell he's Episcopalian--he plays the music a tad too slowly for us Methodists--but he's good). The service and music are completely traditional. Nobody applauds the anthems and solos, and the hymns (hymns!) are sung from the hymnal, loudly and enthusiastically. It has gotten, in fact, a bit more high-church during this expansion, adding Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday services and such, which were unknown to me growing up in the country. I don't need a high-church service, actually, but such things do interest me. And we've gotten people coming to them. Nobody needed to have things dumbed-down for him to get him into the sanctuary!

Attitudes are different in different parts of the country, admittedly, and up here in Yankeeland, a student told me I'd have to look far and wide to find a church not using these stupid Powerpoint presentations. But I'm not convinced these new trends will help attendance at churches where the population is dwindling, and they might be hurting.

Robert Novak on Romney and "unconstitutional" religious tests

Robert Novak has an article on Mitt Romney's chances for the Presidency and the issue of his Mormonism. Novak is worried that a lot of people would vote against Romney because of his religion. That will certainly be an issue, I'd agree. Although I disagree with Mormonism's theology, I admire the character of so many of its adherents. It seems to build men of solid morals. The theology will still make some people on the Right uncomfortable, of course, just as Mormons' moral stands will put off some on the Left.

But Novak is wrong to call a man's voting decision "unconstitutional," if he bases it on religion. Yes, the Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office. But that's a prohibition on making it a legal requirement. We're a democracy, and each citizen can vote his conscience, no matter what he bases the decision on. If one wants to vote against somebody solely on the basis of religion, he has that right. Novak knows better, and he makes a logically sloppy argument.

But I'd still advise people to consider Romney's politics first. It's not bad to consider someone's religious beliefs in deciding your vote. Hopefully, a candidate's religion will affect how he lives his life, and will inform some ideas on his political philosophy. But I doubt that the details of Mormon theology (especially its differences with standard Christian theology or Judaism) are going to put his politics outside the mainstream of the rest of us.

But back on the first hand, again: I can, by the way, think of an example of Mormon theology affecting a politician's political stances. Orrin Hatch's ideas on embryonic stem-cell research are different from most of ours on the Right, and I have read that it's because Mormonism has different ideas about the beginning of life from what we in standard Christianity assume.

Finding a good church

I've spent a good amount of time looking for a good church in this place where I'm temporarily exiled. Not in the sense of a denomination, but in the sense of a congregation. This place has been going through a long-term economic and (I think) population decline, and it shows. There are lots of abandoned buildings in town, and though the city still has a much larger population than my county seat back home, this city is limited in the kind of businesses it hosts, while my county seat is bursting at the seams and has all the kinds of stores I could need. Even though it's a small town.

Similarly, the churches around here are feeling the crunch. There are lots of church buildings, but not all of them are occupied. Those that are are pretty sparsely attended and are feeling the pressure to merge with similar congregations. Several have merged, in fact. I went to one Methodist church when I first got here that was the recent sum of three congregations. Beautiful old building. And then when the service started, they fired up a digital projector and ran Powerpoint throughout the entire service! It was so absolutely cheesy, you can hardly imagine. Little animated text running around to summarize the sermon points. The hymn lyrics splashed up on the screen. Don't we have hymnals? Although the rest of the qualities of this church seemed OK, I was too turned off by the concept of a projector to consider coming back. It was simply ridiculous.

As a follow-up note to this, that church (which didn't come close to filling the pews it had then) has now demolished the century-old, beautiful gothic brick building it had inhabited. A parking lot (I kid you not) will be put on the site, while they have built the new church across the street. It is a block-long, modernistic, steel-frame warehouse monstrosity. The narthex alone is the size of the church across the street from me. And if the congregation is still the size I witnessed, they don't occupy but a tiny fraction of the pews available. Who comes up with these brilliant ideas?!

Oh, and they applauded after the choir anthems. I hate that. People, you are not an audience at a concert. This is not a "performance," for you to applaud the performers. It is an act of worship, and you are a participant. This ugly trend came to my church at home, back around 1990, give or take. As a little kid, well before then, my parents had taught us that were, in fact, specifically not supposed to clap in church. For the theologically-thought-out reasons I mentioned above. So I was brought up in the tradition of the church. We used to have a Christmas Eve service in which members of the congregation who sang or played an instrument would do solos. Really beautiful music, nicely done. And still no clapping.
Then when I was in high school, I and some friends my age started getting asked to do solos, too. Great! And about that time, a handful of people in the congregation started clapping after we'd done our solos. I was actually insulted. I felt like it was a condescending compliment: "Aww, wook at de widdle kiddies! Dey can actually pway music wike de big people! Idn't dat cute?" Sheesh! I wanted to be taken as just a normal part of the service, like any other soloist. I thought about talking to the others my age and seeing if we could get a notice in the bulletin that we'd ask not to be applauded, but I never went through with it. The trouble with clapping, too, is that one person can infect the whole congregation. One clapper can be heard across the sanctuary, and you know how people will clap out of politeness if it sounds like everybody else is, even if they wouldn't start it themselves. Soon after that year, you started getting applause at all of the solos, all of the anthems, all of the special music... Thank goodness they haven't started applauding the hymns! Who knows, maybe they will start applauding themselves eventually.

After that church, I tried the little Methodist church across the street from me. Not bad, just a little small for me, and there was no choir. And it was odd to find a full-immersion baptismal pool (painted blue) up behind the altar. Full-immersion is fine with me, but the pool just stood out a bit much, and the place seemed a little sleepy.

So I tried a third church, in the next town over. This was the product of another recent merger of two Methodist churches, but the pews were well filled here. A good choir. The building was traditionally designed, and there were no projectors in sight. Only drawback was the music. They had hymnals but never (And I mean that literally. Never.) used them, instead bothering to print the lyrics to every hymn used that Sunday in the bulletin. Without the music. Ugh. That wouldn't be so much of a problem (rather than just an annoyance), except that these weren't regular hymns. I'd never heard these "songs" before and didn't know the music. How does anybody know how to sing it, if there's no music printed? Maybe all of them had heard them before, but I started going back regularly and don't think they were repeated each Sunday.

My biggest complaint, though, was that most of the music just wasn't traditional Methodist music. It was this new wave of "praise songs," I think. These can best be defined as tuneless, meaningless ditties that repeat the same four words over and over, endlessly. They strike me as having fake emotion. They try to stir up some emotion in you, but it's so obvious and sappy that they utterly fail, in me. I can tear up, singing "Amazing Grace," which has straight lyrics. But these? They just annoyed me. Jesus already knows his name is Jesus. And our repeating it a half-dozen times in a row drives home a pointless point that was already known to me before I could read.

And this was another church where everybody applauded the music. Ugh.

Still, I had spent so many weeks trying to find a decent church that I just gave up at this point and decided to stick with this one. Then this church built a new building. There was some small leak in the roof of the old one--not exactly a big reason to move, but half of the congregation had been in the next town over and wanted to get back there. OK, fine. And then I found out that the oversized, shallow-roofed warehouse I'd seen being built by the highway was no warehouse at all, but our new church. Grumble. Fine. Inside, it looked OK, though, until I discovered that they'd decided to have a digital projector system built in! Well, they didn't use it during the sermon, at least, unlike that one place. It was just used to flash up the lyrics to the "hymns." Which were also printed in the bulletin.

They also used this opportunity to rid themselves of those stuffy old Methodist hymnals. No need for those silly things: we've got Powerpoint! There are no hymnals anywhere in the sanctuary. At least where the congregation sits. I don't know if the choir has smuggled some of the contraband up there in the choir loft, but I couldn't find any. Still, I'd gotten to know the people there for a while and didn't feel like leaving, just over that. So I white-knuckled it through the meaningless, tuneless ditties (I can hardly dignify them with the word "songs," much less "hymns.") and simply refused to sing them or look at the Powerpoint, and enjoyed the Sunday school lesson afterwards and generally stuck it out.

Until the clowns showed up. A few weeks ago, right before the sermon, they had...clowns... And mimes. Actually, they were clown-mimes. They did some pantomime in clown costumes for what felt like five minutes or more, to an instrumental version of (get this) "Send In the Clowns"! That was the last straw, and my last Sunday there.

Since then, I've found a better Methodist church within walking distance. Tiny, but pretty nice. Beautiful building. Refused to merge, so they're pretty small, with an elderly membership. No choir. Not much clapping, which is a relief. They use the hymnals, but I've begun to notice that it's not that often, really. Most of the music is printed in the bulletin, and it's again these tuneless, meaningless ditties that nobody knows the music to. And almost nobody can be heard singing them! (A direct result of our ignorance of them?) I was ambivalent at that point, but then on Easter was another one of these "last straw" moments. We got to church a little late and missed the first part of the service. Looking at the bulletin, I found, near the lyrics of the unknown ditties we'd missed, that there had first been a football-game-style cheer: "J-E-S-U-S...Jesus!"

Aaaaaarrrrrrrggggggghhhhh!!!

That's almost as bad as the clowns, although it was over more quickly. I think that's my last straw for this one, too. Now what?! I think I've exhausted the churches in town, so maybe it's time to look farther afield. Thank goodness I'm a Methodist, and we're a large denomination. I have friends here who are Presbyterian (PCA), and they have to go to the next state just to find the nearest church of their denomination. If it were a congregation they didn't like, I don't know where they'd have to go to find another!

I'm baaaa-ack!

Sorry for the long absence. Been away from blogging for the last month because of all kinds of family activity to plan and execute. Now that we've gotten to enjoy that, I'm back to work and back to blogging. Stay tuned...

Bernard Lewis on Anti-semitism

An excellent article here.

House of Lords for sale?

Via Andrew Stuttaford on NRO's The Corner, here's a report from the London Times about a scandal erupting over the new method of naming peers to the House of Lords. Recall that the Labour party eliminated the hereditary lords from sitting in the body, in favor of non-hereditary lords named by the party in control of the House of Commons. Not exactly a check on the tyranny of the majority, is it? And, surprise, surprise: now it seems that one of those nominees made a million-pound loan to the Labour party.

Although I wouldn't want to live under a system of monarchy and nobility as England has and had, I can see that the hereditary lords at least were independent of the House of Commons and could act as a check on majoritarian power. (And, coming from one who doesn't have to live there, I can also see a romantic, historical attraction to the old system.) The new system abolishes some legal priviliges of lords, but it doesn't improve the government. Rather, it makes it worse.

England needs an elected Senate.

Good for him

A man in Puerto Rico for the World Baseball Classic held up a sign reading, "Abajo Fidel," or "Down with Fidel [Castro]," from the stands Friday. The top Cuban "official" (whatever that means, in this case) at the games came rushing over to confront the man, but Puerto Rican police, thankfully, came to the spectator's aid and took the Cuban off and explained to him the concept of free speech. Good for this man, and good for the Puerto Rican police!

Cuban TV was carrying a live feed from the games, so Cuban subjects watching would have been able to see the sign, briefly. Ahh, yes, we can't have the chance that the proles would be able to catch a glimpse of somebody in another country criticizing the great leader, now, can we?

Shelved Pentagon space plane

(via Drudge) Aviation Week & Space Technology is reporting that the Pentagon has shelved a space plane that has been operational since the 1990s. It is a two-stage to orbit system that could be outfitted with a number of different payloads, including satellites and anti-missile (or anti-satellite, I imagine) kill vehicles.

If they've cancelled the program, it suggests that it was either not successful (although this program was reportedly "operational"), was hit by changes in the budget, or was surpassed by something better. I'm hoping for the latter!

A leftist speaks honestly

I was listening to the BBC World Service on the way to church this morning, and they were discussing the situation in Iraq.
There was a caller whose nationality I didn't get, but who spoke with a pronounced accent, who said straight out that he hoped Iraq failed. He wanted the country to fail, so that it would be a defeat for Bush. A defeat that would prevent Bush from invading Syria or Iran.

I cannot call this man a "liberal," because despite the modern usage to mean "left-wing," I still like to pretend sometimes that it has a little of its old meaning left--a lover of freedom. This man is no lover of freedom. He wants the fledgeling democracy there to die. What a wish to extend to Iraq's 20 million citizens.

NASA programs squeezed in budget

The New York Times reports that some research programs are getting squeezed in NASA's budget, as the agency organizes around the manned space program goals of returning to the Moon and going on to Mars. I'm sympathetic to both sides, actually. Some of my fellow astrophysicists moan about their fields getting tight, but a lot of this is a matter of whose ox is getting gored. NASA isn't being slashed; rather, it's bringing in a big, new manned program, and the others are being shuffled around to make room for it.

I've never understood the attitude expressed by some astrophysicists like James Van Allen (discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth) that manned spaceflight is pointless, and we should concentrate only on robotic space probes (and telescopes, I imagine). I've heard similar thoughts expressed by some friends of mine over the years. Never that many people, mind you, but enought that I get the impression it's a more widely shared sentiment than I hear expressed. Generally, though, especially among us youngsters, there's an enthusiasm for manned space flight (I never say that horrible, clunky, and Politically Correct phrase, "human space flight," which NASA has imposed upon itself.). The shuttle program was lately a ho-hum affair, as it seemed our manned program was stalled in Near Earth Orbit. But the goal of reaching to the Moon and planets is an exciting one for lots of us.

Still, I'm a scientist and want NASA to keep the science programs up, too. I think the Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope ought to be the primary science priorities, so of course we have to make some compromises elsewhere. I just hope they're not too big or irreversible.

Astronomical telescopes obsolete in a half-century?

Well, the BBC starts off saying that, but then you scroll down and find that it's the claim of one scientist who's relying on if trends continue on more than one count and some other speculation and assumptions on others. And he's countered by other scientists. What this fellow claims is that airplane contrails and global warming will make unmanageable amounts of cloud cover over astronomical observatories by 2050 that will prohibit any ground-based astronomy from then on.

Of course, he didn't take into account that for airplane contrails to disperse into broader clouds takes specific atmospheric conditions that aren't always there. And even if one of these clouds blows over your observatory from elsewhere (he says that sometimes contrails blow for "hundreds of kilometers"), a lot of our best observatories are on the Pacific coast--Hawaii, Chile, and California. The prevailing winds are from the West, there. Yes, you have planes crossing the Pacific, but you don't have too many destinations to the immediate West of these observatories.

Italian commission finds USSR behind pope's assassination attempt

This article from the AP brings the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II back into the news. After Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turk, shot the Pope and was caught, he initially said the Bulgarian spy agency and ultimately the Soviets were at the top of the operation. He changed his story a number of times, but there was other evidence to implicate at least Bulgaria in the crime. Now an Italian parliamentary commission, originally set up to investigate KGB penetration of Italy during the Cold War, has concluded that the Soviets were, in fact, behind the operation.

What's surprised me throughout the years is finding that there are liberals here in America who have dismissed the possibility out of hand. As if a tyrannical regime that killed a quarter of the Ukrainian population, rounded up and murdered entire "classes" of Russian peasants, sent political dissidents to the Gulag in vast numbers, and so on, would never, NEVER have considered offing a problematic pope!

Of course, there are liberals who still claim Alger Hiss was innocent, when the Venona transcripts prove his guilt...

The ice has cracked

The cold Canadian model of socialized medicine might be thawing. I don't know that we can cheer just yet, but there's hope, anyway. Their Supreme Court ruled against certain restrictions against private medical insurance recently, and now private medical clinics are opening up at the rate of about one each week!

It doesn't sound like much from our perspective, but keep in mind that Canada had an absolute ban on private medine until now. People were actually dying in waiting lists for medical attention. And that's what prompted the lawsuit that broke this.

I remember a Canadian colleague once telling me that their absolute form of socialized medicine was necessary. That it was right to prohibit anybody from spending their own hard-earned money to get medical attention. Why? Because it would result in the rich being able to do better than the rest!

Well, heck! What about food? Sure, we and Canada both have welfare systems that assist the extremely poor to buy food, but we don't prohibit the rich from buying their own, do we? And this results in a system in which the rich can afford more and better food than the poor. Isn't food more inherently necessary for life than medical attention? I mean, on an every-day basis. Does the Canadian Left have a problem with this, or will they propose socialized food as a remedy to the horrors of inequality at the supper table?

I can hardly imagine somebody coming up with this line of logic, and, despite him being a smart man (an astrophysicist), I suspect he simply repeated some slogans he heard somewhere without thinking.

The evolutionary emergence of blondes

This is interesting. I hadn't thought about it, but have you ever noticed that around the world, dark hair and eyes are predominant in people? That's not as true among Caucasians, where there's quite a variety in hair and eye color. The research apparently shows that this was an evolutionary adaptation from about 11,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, near the beginning of civilization. In Northern Europe, near the retreating edges of the ice sheet, there were plenty of animals to eat, but not too many edible plants, unlike in regions farther south. So unlike other places, food-gathering was something more dangerous and performed mostly by men. Many were killed in the process, and you had a lot of women competing for the few survivors. Hair and eye color wound up being a genetic strategy to stand out and attract mates. It wasn't as necessary in other parts of the world, so the genes didn't wind up being as widespread.

Now I'm reminded of that line from Big Trouble in Little China, "Chinese girls do not come with green eyes."

I wonder, though, about the ancestors of the Eskimos and other far-northern tribes. Were they also up there at that time, and was their culture subject to the same effects? Eskimos today are dark-haired and brown-eyed. Just curious. Of course, you won't have the same random genetic quirks happening everywhere, so even two populations with the same environmental pressures might not have the same genetic mutations popping up.

Unexpectedly, the article ends by saying the WHO claims that the blonde-haired gene is dying out and should be completely extinct in 200 years. Right. No, I don't buy that. It's around for 11,000 years, and the instant our science matures to the point where we can study such things, we discover it's about to end Right! This! Minute! ?? This should violate some biological equivalent of the Cosmological Principle.

Dogs playing calculus

OK, so that title doesn't really evoke thoughts of the "dogs playing poker" painting too well. Nonetheless...

Here's an interesting article about dogs solving a problem in the calculus of variations. Throw a ball for your dog. If he's on the shore, and you throw it into the water at some angle to the shore, then the fastest path is a problem of "the calculus of variations." You can run faster along the shore, but that isn't aiming directly for the ball. If you went straight for it, you'd be moving slowly through the water. So what combination of shore and water gets you there most quickly? Dogs come up with solutions pretty close to the mathematically optimum answer! (Diagrams are on the page.)

A Catholic city by Domino's?

I haven't read this in detail, so I'm passing it along without too much comment. The owner of Domino's Pizza, who is a devout Catholic, is wanting to found a city in Florida to be run by Catholic principles. It's not clear from this English newspaper's report exactly how he means it to be Catholic, aside from simply encouraging Catholics to move there, and the details would be important. But as a devout Methodist, I wish him well. I wouldn't want to live there, myself, of course, but it's the kind of thing I'd imagine religious Catholics would enjoy. He's got a Catholic college he's already started on nearby, and they've got 5,000 acres of space (town and city both?).

I dislike deed restrictions of any kind, and I get the hint that that would be one way they might set up the town. The article says that owners of commercial property could impose restrictions on the businesses operating on them, for instance, restricting the sale of contraceptives. Fine enough. They don't say anything about deed restrictions, so I'm merely speculating on that point. I reckon that would be one way of making the town itself have a Catholic character, though not the only.

There's a retirement community a friend of mine has moved to. It's Methodist, although not run by the church itself. Mostly set up for retired ministers. And people have the complete freedom to decide whether they move there or not. Whether to enter into that kind of environment or not. So people should have no problem with a town being specifically set up to be characteristically Catholic. Now, if you already lived there and decided you wanted to live differently, that's another matter, but this seems it was vacant land, or not settled on, anyway.

Actually, I wonder how it would be if you voluntarily moved there, with the intention of being around Catholics and living in the way the town is intended for, and then changing your mind later. I'm tempted to say that's your own tough luck, but at that point it is your own property, and if you're prohibited from certain things (or required to do something) on your own property, I'd chafe at it, even if I had known it moving in.

Anyway, I wish him luck.

Wisdom from "The Tick"

Sign posted in paleontology lab:

DO NOT:
Eat in the lab
Burn down the lab
Innovate unnecessarily

Yep. Wisdom we should all live by.

Light blogging

Sorry for the light blogging lately. Lots to do. I'll try to post occasionally the next few days, but it'll be sporadic.

Excellent article by Victor Davis Hanson

Here on National Review Online. Absolutely fantastic article. Makes me laugh and gets me riled up at the same time.

The award for best astrophysics paper title I've seen...

...goes to Laszlo Gergely and Zoltan Keresztes, for "Irradiated asymmetric Friedmann branes". Click to read it. No, seriously!

Those cartoons of Islam

I've got different feelings about these Islamic parody cartoons out of Denmark. They are critical of Islam, of course, and if I were Moslem, I certainly wouldn't like them. I didn't like Andre Serrano's so-called "art" that made fun of Christianity, nor any of the other countless examples of anti-Christian expressions you'll find throughout the nominally Christian West. I criticize those. I understand and sometimes agree with calls for the publishers of such things to stop it. (I'll note that I never promote boycotts, though.)

So I have no problem in principle with Moslems around the world criticizing these cartoons. I have no problem with them asking the Danish newspaper not to run them, or to apologize for having done so. But there are some problems with how this is being done.

1) Some of the criticism, apparently, is that Islam does not allow depictions of Mohammed (technically, depictions of anything), so the cartoon depicting him is inherently blasphemous. Answer: You can't expect people not of your religion to follow the dictates of your religion. Should I be shocked that Buddists don't keep the Sabbath? That's a task for a long-term missionary project.

2) There are calls not only for the newspapers to apologize but for the Danish government to apologize or officially criticize the cartoons. Worse yet, to legally prohibit the newspaper from printing these. Answer: While the President of the United States, say, will often offer his opinion on cultural matters like this, and I wouldn't mind if he had criticized these, had they come out of the United States, I would object to the idea that the government at any level could apologize for the actions done by private citizens. I would also object to the idea that there could be an "official" criticism of any kind. The President could offer his privately-held opinion of this, critical or not, but it should not be delivered in any official context.

More importantly, there should not, and indeed cannot be any legal prohibitions against such publications in this country, and happily that still seems to be true in most of the European countries caught up in this issue. Britain might be changing, with a proposed law (passed, now?) that while toned down, still might prohibit certain religious criticism.

3) Is it irony or something far less subtle that some have responded with violence to these cartoons (one cartoon shows Mohammed with a bomb for a turban--and the fuse is lit)? There are hostage-taking attempts going on, although I don't know if any have been successful. How many Westerners are hanging around the Gaza Strip these days? Do you really want to make the cartoonist's point by reacting in the very stereotype of a violent Islamist radical?

It's with all of this in mind that I read this article in the Washington Post: "Men Angry at Drawings Surround Gaza Office" The AP writer is Ibrahim Barzak, with a dateline of Gaza City. After describing the aforesaid attempts at finding Western hostages and the surrounding of the EU offices by gunmen, Barzak writes this: "The furor over the drawings, which first ran in a Danish paper in September, cuts to the question of which is more sacred in the Western world - freedom of expression or respect for religious beliefs."

Well, now. The so-called "freedom of expression" (I say "so-called" because there are plenty of modes of expression that aren't permitted in a given society. The writer should have written "freedom of the press.") is a legal matter. Respect for religion is an aspect of the culture and is not a legal matter. (Britain may become a sad exception to this.) Within the legal freedom of the press to publish what it wishes, there is a separate question of whether these cartoons were really a good idea, respectful, or whatever.

Even if one considers them not to be, there is no logical dilemma posed. I believe the writer is trying to raise "respect for religious beliefs" to a legal status it does not have, and I suspect his personal leanings are that these should not be permitted. This is a bit of editorializing at the end of a news article.

Sorry to read that that French paper that reprinted the cartoons this week has now fired its managing editor. Barzak implies that it is in return for this act, but no connection is stated directly.

Hghmmmm...

"Alito Splits With Conservatives on Inmate" Up on Drudge right now. Bright red headline.

Hmph. I could see that there are death-row appeals (this is a stay of execution request) that could have some merit, in principle. But the defense "pursued two challenges - claiming that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment and that his constitutional rights were violated by a system tilted against black defendants."

Maybe there's something more substantive buried deep inside the request, but on the face, those are two of the most specious challenges to an execution you can come up with. I hope we haven't been hoodwinked by our new justice...

Final count

58-42

Harry Reid in Trouble with the DNC?

I saw a couple of minutes with Harry Reid last night on FNC's Special Report with Brit Hume. They brought up Howard Dean's statement on Fox News Sunday that any Democrat who'd done favors for an Indian tribe and received money directed by Jack Abramoff was in trouble.

That describes Harry Reid. Minority leader in the Senate. He admits to receiving the money and to writing a letter in support of a particular tribe for some issue, but he says those are unrelated. Could be, but it's worth checking into.

Also interesting was his reaction when asked whom the leader of the Democrats is. I figured that would technically be Dean, right? Reid refused to answer the question! My, that was an odd answer, no?

57 to 37; still counting

Alito confirmed

That's it. 11:09 AM, and Alito has just earned 51 votes. They're still calling the roll, but he's in, now.

Strange, again, about my earlier comment on the Democrats not (apparently) being present when their names were called. That includes Byrd, for instance, who had said he would be voting for Alito. Why's that?

UPDATE: Fox News just noted the same thing. They don't know why, either, but they suggested that some of them might have planned to vote in a second round.

Liveblogging the Alito vote

So they're voting on Alito right now. Something strange I'd never noticed on an earlier vote. The roll is being called, and all of the Republicans have been present and voting "aye." But until just a minute ago, most of the Democrats were not answering the clerk's call at all. Not present? Now they're up in the S's, and a larger fraction of the Democrats are present and voting "no."

I wish the clerk would call it "nay," though--it preserves a nice tradition.

Is emigration ethical?

Sure, ummm, unless you're a professional, says the UN. Actually, it's an "alternative proposal" that has come out of the United Nations Development Program and unveiled at the Davos meeting. To prevent the so-called "brain drain" of well-educated professionals from poor countries immigrating to richer, freer Western countries, one proposal is, as the Independent puts it:

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION: An international code of ethical guidelines overseen by bodies such as the World Health Organisation (for doctors and nurses) to monitor the harm that migration of professionals causes.

So. Let's say you're a Ph.D. astrophysicist from a poor, corrupt, and somewhat repressive country. (Pick any of those three, or in combination.) You see the United States as the beacon of freedom and opportunity, and you want to emigrate from your native land and immigrate to the United States. Good for you! We welcome you in with open arms. But be warned: you are being unethical, according to the UN. Your duty, as a national resource, owned by your country, is to stay put and make do with the rotten conditions you find in your own country. Conditions that Americans, rich or poor, wouldn't put up with. You are not a human being, free to make your own decisions on your future. You are merely an object, something to be added to the national statistics and compared by one country against another.

I propose we let the UN rewrite "The New Colossus," the great and famous poem inscribed beneath the Statue of Liberty. No longer should it read,

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Instead...well, I'll have to think about this. I'll come up with something good, later.