Blogworthies LXXIX

Because The Blog from the Core simply can't cover everything.

Noteworthy entries @ speculative catholic, Power Line, Dyspeptic Mutterings, Musings of a Pertinacious Papist, reveries magazine, Wizbang, Quenta Nârwenion, neo-neocon, JunkYardBlog, RedState, Mere Comments, NewsBusters, HerbEly, Off the Record, Catholic Analysis, Irish Elk, Insight Scoop, Evolution News & Views, Right Reason, and Wittingshire.

John C. Wright on becoming a Christian @ speculative catholic:

John C. Wright, author of the best science fiction series of the millennium (to date) — The Golden Age trilogy — as well as one of the most interesting fantasy series — Everness — has become a Christian....

An evening to remember @ Power Line:

Two or three months ago I received a call from a friend asking if I would like to attend the White House Hannukah reception. It sounded swell, but I forgot about it until I received an envelope with the White House as the return address. Thinking it was junk mail, I almost threw it out, until I noticed that my name and address on the envelope were handwritten. Inside was the invitation to the White House Hannukah reception held yesterday evening [Tue. Wed. 6]....

Fundamentalism is the theological equivalent of a fever. @ Dyspeptic Mutterings:

Think of it as the Body of Christ's attempt to fight off an infection. It's a sign that there's a deeper problem. You shouldn't celebrate the fever, but it's better than no temperature at all....

"White Flight" from intellectual rigor @ Musings of a Pertinacious Papist:

I knew something was up when a pattern began to emerge in the non-honors sections of some of my large introductory core classes. The top students were not the rich white Anglo kids, but the immigrants — in our neck of the woods, these were primariliy Romanians, Koreans, Vietnamese and Hmong. Why would the top 5% of students in these classes include immigrants struggling in a foreign language, while the majority of privileged upper-middle class American kids — who had no language obstacle to contend with — trolled the bottom of the mindless slough with the rest of the country's antediluvian knuckle-dragging mouth breathers? A momentous shift has occurred in our society over the last fourty years, and the chickens are coming home to roost....

Sparky Schulz @ reveries magazine:

“Sparky used to say there will always be a market for innocence,” says Jeannie Schulz, widow of Charles Schulz, creator of Charlie Brown and the Peanuts comic strip gang, reports Bill Nichols in USA Today. Yes, his friends called him Sparky. Everyone else called him crazy back in 1965 when he insisted that his first-ever television special, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” would have no laugh track, that non-Hollywood children would provide the voices and that the music would consist of “a swinging score by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.” The show’s producers really thought Sparky was off his nut when he insisted that the show end “with a reading of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke by a lisping little boy named Linus.”

Pulling out the big guns @ Wizbang:

Robert Novak, apparently taking a break from playing politics with the CIA, is reporting on a fight on Capitol Hill between the Marine Corps and the Navy. The Navy wants to donate the last two battleships it owns, the mothballed Iowa and Wisconsin, into museums. The Corps wants them kept around for possible use. And since the Corps is a part of the Navy, they don't have much chance of winning without garnering some serious political help.

This is a subject very near and dear to me. I am a huge battleship fan. I can discuss the evolution of the Dreadnaught from the USS South Carolina right through the Wisconsin, discussing how certain ships were evolutionary progressions (Utah, Pennsylvania), while others (Texas, Nevada, Washington) represented major revolutionary advances. I can do the same with the Royal Navy, which invented the modern battleship. Hell, I even have an essay mostly worked out that discusses the USS Alaska vessels, and whether they are large cruisers or battlecruisers, but I don't want to bore everyone to death.

That being said, I have to sadly come down on the side that the day of the battleship is over. They pretty much peaked shortly after World War I, but it wasn't until the end of World War II that it was obvious that their time was gone....

On December 3, 1875... @ Quenta Nârwenion:

Venerable John Henry Newman, C.O., wrote to one of his nephews, John Rickards Mozley. This was the final entry in a series of letters the Venerable wrote to try to answer his nephew's questions about the Church....

Amnesia: a love story @ neo-neocon:

A few years ago I saw the last few minutes of a TV documentary. Those moments made a deep impression on me, although I saw so little of it I didn't really even know who or what it was about, except that it concerned a man in England who'd lost his memory in a very profound way. Then the other day, just by chance, I came across another documentary on the same subject, and finally learned his story.

Clive Wearing was a British musician, conductor, and musicologist who came down with encephalitis about twenty years ago, a sudden attack that left him with only his short-term memory. Now short-term memory is a wonderful thing — it allows us to remember things briefly —but it's not everything. Ordinarily, after events or facts are put in our short-term memory for a few seconds, we can either delete them or store them for future reference. It's this long-term storage capacity that Clive Wearing utterly lacks....

A Date Which Will Live in Infamy @ JunkYardBlog:

Michelle Malkin rounds up reaction to the 64th anniversary of Imperial Japan’s attack on the United States.

December 7 always hits me from an odd angle. Serving in the US military, I lived in Japan for four years. I know people — am related to people — who were alive in both countries when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor triggered America’s entry into World War II. My father-in-law lived across the bay from Nagasaki when he was a boy. My mother-in-law remembers American soldiers in Occupied Japan handing out candy and — this would horrify the ACLU — teaching her to sing the hymn “What A Friend We Have In Jesus.” I know, ultimately, that personally the horrific attack on sleepy Pearl took me to the place where I met my wife decades later. When we found out we were going to have a son six years ago, the doctor solemly announced the due date: December 7. Isn’t that swell....

You Got Nothing @ RedState:

While the Nancy Pelosi/Howard Dean/John Murtha wing of the Democrat party is fixated on contriving a US defeat in Iraq, other voices in that party counsel caution.

Though I find Pelosi’s craven attempt to damage US geopolitical standing for some ephemeral electoral reason grotesque, more surprising is what those advocating caution have to offer.

Nothing.

Read on....

Tipping the Wheelbarrow @ Mere Comments (emphasis in original):

The big news today is not news. For years, young men have been outnumbered by young women at college. Apparently, all those many initiatives spearheaded by conservatives, including conservative women, have gone for naught. Well, there weren't any such initiatives, beyond the cries of a few brave souls — for instance our own contributing editor, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. So the situation has gotten much worse, and fast. Christine Sommers is wrong: there is no war on boys. There was a war on boys. It's over. The boys lost, badly — without any help from the Christian churches, and indeed with most of them, and even most "conservatives," pitching in to help their feminist opponents....

Washington Post Pattern: Good Economic News on D-1, Bad Economic News on A-1 @ NewsBusters:

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Stephen Pearlstein noticed in his "Sunday Briefing" (page F-2) that "The Economy Grabs the High Ground," as the headline said. He wrote: "Defying hurricanes and inflation, rising interest rates and political gridlock, the U.S. economy demonstrated its remarkable strength and stamina last week." Despite the drama implicit in that sentence, the Post’s editors buried the news inside the paper....

Wolf-Warning Weariness, Part IV @ HerbEly:

On November 23 I posted about a book suggesting that concerns about Avian flu were reminders of Aesop's fable about the boy who cried wolf. In this morning's WaPo writer Linton Weeks writes about the national tendency to panic in Fear Factory. Some extracts: ....

On Jordan's Bank @ Off the Record:

A Monday visit to Andrew Greeley's weekly homily site always helps me appreciate the sermon I heard the day earlier, much as dropping an engine block on your foot (in P.J. O'Rourke's image) helps you appreciate your toothache. Here's Greeley on yesterday's [Sun. Dec. 4] Gospel: ....

Jesus the Radical @ Catholic Analysis:

As I wrap up a course on the Synoptic Gospels, I have read and reread the three gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, along with assorted commentaries and background readings. But, in the end, it is the canonical text of these Gospels that counts. The picture I get is of how radical Jesus was and of how much we have domesticated and coopted him....

Go set the world aflame @ Irish Elk:

The feast of St. Francis Xavier on Dec. 3 marked the beginning of the Jesuit Jubilee 2006. The year-long observance commemorates the 500th birthdays of original Jesuit companions Francis Xavier and Blessed Peter Faber, and the 450th anniversary of the death of Society of Jesus founder St. Ignatius Loyola....

Letter Accompanying the Vatican Instruction on Homosexuality and the Seminary @ Insight Scoop:

I haven't had time to find and post this, until now. This is the much-discussed letter presenting the Vatican's Instruction to bishops. The sentence that has generated the most controversy is: "Because of the particular responsibility of those charged with the formation of future priests, they are not to be appointed as rectors or educators in seminaries".

The "they" referred to are those with homosexual tendencies. The Vatican cover letter says that those with homosexual tendencies should not be appointed as rectors or educators in the seminaries. That statement is not part of the Instruction itself, but it is interesting to observe that the Congregation for Catholic Education felt compelled to include it in the letter presenting the Instruction.

We'll see if that bit of "advice" gets ignored and something with more teeth on the point is eventually issued by Rome. That's the pattern — call attention to a problem, suggest a common sense solution to the problem, get ignored, then issue an instruction. It remains to be seen if the last item is followed, as it often has been in the past, by failure to comply with the instruction. And if it is what will happen.

In any event, here is the cover letter: ....

Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker? Ignorance on Display in the New York Times @ Evolution News & Views:

If you want another example of superficial analysis from the once-venerable New York Times, check out Laurie Goodstein's ill-informed effort to disparage intelligent design in today's [Sun. Dec. 4] edition. Among other things, Ms. Goodstein mangles the definition of intelligent design, misrepresents the content of the Kansas science standards, and displays her ignorance of evangelical Christian higher education and the academic supporters of ID.

Some background: Last Thursday Ms. Goodstein contacted Discovery Institute because she wanted to interview me for a story. Her deadline was later the same day, so she contacted Discovery right before she planned to file the story. When I called her, it was clear she already had written most of her story. All she was looking for was window-dressing....

Two Concepts of Obligation @ Right Reason (brackets in original):

At some point — clearly by the time of Franklin Roosevelt, but perhaps somewhat earlier — the traditional philosophical distinction between perfect and imperfect obligations began to break down. The breakdown had serious economic and political consequences. The obligation to help others in need was the paradigm of an imperfect obligation, an obligation that was general and granted no rights to anyone else. To fail to help a person in need might be wrong, but it was not unjust — or so Cicero, Aquinas, and Kant all thought. No one was entitled to help, and the use of force through government taxation, for example, for purposes of redistribution was thought to be illegitimate, a confusion of two rather different kinds of obligation. Charity was an individual virtue and a private matter, not something to be conducted with the coercive power of government. Utilitarianism, I think, was crucial to the development of the alternative that placed distributional questions in government hands.

Marx, of course, insisted that people have a right to have their needs met. That right would have to correspond to a perfect obligation on the part of others to contribute according to their abilities to meeting those needs. By the time of the New Deal, such a view was widespread. The traditionalist might well agree with Roosevelt that “[no one should go] unfed, unclothed, or unsheltered,” but resist his conclusion that "aid must be extended by governments, not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty." Marxism, socialism, and liberalism, however, were happy to draw the inference, and tended to think of imperfect obligations that did not correspond to any perfect obligations or entitlements as incoherent, toothless, or worse.

But is the inference legitimate?...

Scenes from Sunday @ Wittingshire:

Our congregation isn't huge — 250 or so —but it's a tight squeeze to fit everyone in for one service, so we have two. Our family goes to the earlier worship time, but this morning the kids and I stayed on for part of the later service because all the children's classes were to stand up in front of the congregation and recite the beatitudes and various other scriptures they've been memorizing....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 12/10/05 10:54:02 AM
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