//Mosings//

Man Against World

2010-07-23T01:27:00.003-05:00

Check out my incubating new project, Man Against World, about the fight that we, especially young Christian men, have to wage in this world.

More France posts may be in order, but I won't promise anything. I'm, *sniff*, not the most reliable blogger.

France, Part II

2010-06-21T22:58:00.002-05:00

VII.

An easygoing day of shopping and sightseeing, still somewhat marred by the airline snafu. We ate egg crepes provided by the hotel's kitchen, with orange juice, baguette, preserves, and hot chocolate--the perfect breakfast. We then walked to the center of Honfleur, a square harbor with some impressive sailboats surrounded by tall, narrow houses. We toured the Church of St. Catherine, begun in 1464. It was dark inside, huge and barn-like. It creeped me out a little--images of Mary were everywhere, including hanging over the altar. We then spent time at a book shop where I bought Tintin au Congo, a book racist enough that it was never translated into English--but hey, it's a Tintin book. Though Herge was a Belgian Imperialist, all his books are works of art.

We returned to the hotel and prepared to go to a larger town to find some clothes for John. This took us a long time. Finally, we were able to find a good discount store. I bought sneakers and a shirt in the traditional Normandy fisherman pattern (slightly updated). We are little cheese pastries for lunch in Trouville-sur-Mer, and finally returned to Honfleur. We took a leisurely walk to the center of Honfleur, enjoying traditional cider and appetizers at a quaside restaurant before continuing our leisurely walk. We stopped so that John could get gyros, then walked a steep twenty minutes to Cote de Grace, the highest point around, with stunning views of Honfleur, and a massive bridge across the little finger of the Atlantic that separated quaint, medieval Honfleur from massive, industrial Le Havre. There was a chapel, Our Lady of Grace, which unlike St. Catherine's, had its altar centered on Christ. It was a beautiful chapel, set in acres of quiet, ancient forests on the top of Cote de Grace. The bells began, calling believers to Mass. The pale ocean on one side, the forest on the other, the idyllic chapel--one of the oldest in the region--and the tintinnabulation of the bells--all combined in a sweet sensory harmony. For me, it felt like long-awaited peace after a long couple days of travel. We returned to the hotel, watched part of the John Grisham film "A Time to Kill," and went exhaustedly to bed. We will be heading to Brittany tomorrow, taking in the D-Day beaches on the way. What I will take away from Honfleur: the quiet. On the quiet streets during the day, in this hotel, and everywhere at night, Honfleur is a quiet and peaceful city. I can hear nothing right now but the faint buzz of the lights and John's even, quiet breathing. Time to turn in.

VIII.

Honfleur to Dinan, Brittany, via a never-ending procession of roundabouts and wee little towns. We were sad to leave the B&B in Honfleur--it was a truly wonderful place. Today we toured some of Normandy's beaches, including Omaha Beach and Pointe du Hoc, where Grandpa Gray's Ranger Battalion fought on D-Day. We then set our sights on Brittany, our next destination.

The town of Dinan is rather touristy, with circuitously medieval streets. The hotelwas ancient on the outside, but indoors resembled an American motel--in a bad way. The petite British manager was very helpful, if scatter-brained. We wandered through the narrow streets and alleys. Mrs. H. and John bought a handmade leather belt for Mr. Hokanson. Then, at Creperie Ahn, we had the best meal of the trip so far--crepe salad with hot chevre for me, with rose wine for the table and a butter-caramel crepe for dessert. Then, proudly utilizing my French skills, I told the waiter to "bring you the bill, please." I then corrected myself and the smiling waiter shook his head. We then took a dusky walk around medieval Dinan.

France, Part I

2010-06-16T16:06:00.002-05:00

We went to France. Here's the story, in short installments.

Numb airport gate agents, almost robotic in their countenance. Unlike robots, these terminal denizens are not emotionless. Instead, they are sunk deep into melancholia. However, there was a curious glimmer—almost joy—in this specimen's eyes as she told us we had missed our flight to Paris.

Charlotte, North Carolina, is no doubt an excellent place. Its leaden skies on this occasion, however, did not invite further exploration. We wanted to be in Paris, immediately. I won't spend time describing the horrible experience of cajoling an airline into getting you on another plane. Somehow, we managed to get tickets to London. There, hopefully, we will transfer to another airport and thusly to Paris—most of a day latter than planned.

John, our erstwhile companion, was booked on a different flight, from Philadelphia. Ironically, he missed his flight as well—the plane was delayed. We will see if tomorrow brings a safe reunion of the four of us at Paris—Charles De Gaulle.

The loudspeakers on planes hardly merit the term. They failed altogether as the stewardess on this flight tried to talk. When they did work, they were hardly more effective. The pilot, however, was finally able to advise us to avoid “conjugating in the aisles.” I could barely resist jumping into the aisle and yelling “Amo! Amas! Amat!” at the top of my lungs.

The head stewardess was also able to tell us about the “flirtation devices,” handily placed under our seats. Seated between two pairs of grandparents, I didn't find this particularly useful. Besides, I have one built in that works perfectly well.

This is an Airbus A330. I only fly Boeing, so I asked the stewardess for a parachute with which to exit the plane, hoping for a soft landing on the pillowy Atlantic. She wouldn't supply me with one! I tell you, airplane travel is going to the dogs.

II.

Eventually, we will get there. Will our baggage be waiting to meet us, however. THAT is the question.

What journey goes smoothly? Few. Life itself is a journey, if you'll pardon the cliched sentimentalism. We cannot avoid its obstacles—and nor can we make every plane. Obstacles are part of the journey of life. But how do we surmount them when encountered? Without sounding like a televangelist, we should rely on God. He is map, compass, and tour guide. When we are saved, the journey of life still has its ups and downs, but the destination has radically changed. I'm going to heaven, via Paris, France. How about you?

I don't really feel like getting my iPod out right now. So I plugged my 'phones into the in-flight entertainment console. Hey, they have Alejandro by, erm, well, you-know-who. Ah, even better, they have a whole station devoted to Radiohead. Bliss.

The whole tragedy of errors that has thus far characterized our journey brings all too readily to mind the excellent comedic sketches of Brian Regan: the arrogance of first-class passengers, the food which adjectives fail to capture, the message of harassed gate agents: “Okay, if I could have passengers in Zones A and B being to approach the gate, please,” which, to many people, sounds like, “Okay, Everybody rush the gate RIGHT now.”

III.

It is indeed strange that during a single seven-hour flight through Earth's atmosphere, we can see the light of two days. We have shortened the night—I will pay for it with tiredness. Dawn begins sooner above the clouds. It is 5:45 AM and bright as day.

IV.

After three different estimates, we now find that weather has lost us 12 hours of France. John was, for some reason, sent to Oslo, Norway. He won't be in Paris till 7.

I have been sitting near the spotless McDonald's in Charles De Gaulle airport for hours now. My designated task seems to be muse, scratching post, internet enabler, and baggage watcher, while my betters troop about this massive airport. Tiresome crises, too tiring to go into, come and pass as we try to get our fractured party together and leave this teeming rabbit warren and strike out into France in our “Renault Espace or similar.”

Charles De Gaulle is massive and convoluted, but astonishingly clean and new, albeit with frequently non-functional escalators. The McDonald's and Pizza Hut are located back to back, as if set defensively against the waves of “foreign food” that threaten to overrun them.

We ate, this morning, at a delicious place called “Costa” at Heathrow Airport. It was like an upmarket, deli-style Panera Bread.

A short plane ride later, Air France delivered us to CDG, where we sit, waiting for John's flight from Oslo.

125 kilometers an hour through the dusky French countryside. It is past 9:30, but the leaden skies still bear enough light to write by. No one really knows where John's luggage is. No one knows when we will get it back. But we do count our blessing that John packed an extra change of clothes into his carry-on. None of us did.

Nor our black Mercedes, aided by a GPS, oozes quietly across the countryside.

VI.

Honfleur is a miniature town—parking even the tiny B-Class was a chore. The houses are ancient—half-timbered and brightly painted. It is dead silent right now in our hotel room with the windows thrown wide open. No downshifting trucks, no 24-7 gas stations—this town at night is much as it has been for centuries. La Cour Saint Catherine is a little jewel of a hotel right from Rick Steve's guidebook. The landlady promised us good weather tomorrow, and having lost a rainy day to the airline, we resolve to start early.

Let us suppose...

2010-03-28T23:37:00.004-05:00

Never mind. Why did I delete this post? I suggest you watch the House episode "Private Lives." It's unhealthy to share everything about you with the internet.

Tim Tebow Forever

2010-02-03T16:30:00.004-06:00

You have probably heard of Tim Tebow. Tebow, 22, is the quarterback for the Florida Gators, the University of Florida's football team, and he is the greatest college athlete ever.

As a freshman, Tebow was a reserve quarterback. Nevertheless, he helped the team win a national championship. He almost single-handedly made the Gators a factor in college ball again. He won the Heisman Trophy as a sophomore--the only underclassman ever to do so. He surprised many by returning to college for his senior year when many athletes with skills like Tebow's would have jumped into the pro arena.

There are a few more things you should know about Tim Tebow.

He's a Christian.

His parents are missionaries in the Philippines.

He was homeschooled.

The doctors told his mother that he should be aborted to save her life.

She refused.

He is a virgin.

He is appearing in a pro-life Super Bowl ad on Sunday.

So, now you know a little something more about the enigma that is Tim Tebow. At 6'3", 240 lbs., Tebow is no half-weight, stringy home-schooled kid who would spell "denouement" for you but can do no more than one push-up without getting distracting sweat under his preppie collar. He is not, in other words, someone like me.

A minor uproar arose last week, when it was revealed that Tim Tebow would appear in a Focus on the Family Super Bowl ad advocating the pro-life cause. This, in the 21st century, is apparently controversial. However, pro-choice sports writer Sally Jenkins makes the case for him.

Here's what we do need a lot more of: Tebows. Collegians who are selfless enough to choose not to spend summers poolside, but travel to impoverished countries to dispense medical care to children, as Tebow has every summer of his career. Athletes who believe in something other than themselves, and are willing to put their backbone where their mouth is. Celebrities who are self-possessed and self-controlled enough to use their wattage to advertise commitment over decadence.
You know what we really need more of? Famous guys who aren't embarrassed to practice sexual restraint, and to say it out loud. If we had more of those, women might have fewer abortions. See, the best way to deal with unwanted pregnancy is to not get the sperm in the egg and the egg implanted to begin with, and that is an issue for men, too -- and they should step up to that.
"Are you saving yourself for marriage?" Tebow was asked last summer during an SEC media day.
"Yes, I am," he replied.
The room fell into a hush, followed by tittering: The best college football player in the country had just announced he was a virgin. As Tebow gauged the reaction from the reporters in the room, he burst out laughing. They were a lot more embarrassed than he was.
"I think y'all are stunned right now!" he said. "You can't even ask a question!"
That's how far we've come from any kind of sane viewpoint about star athletes and sex. Promiscuity is so the norm that if a stud isn't shagging everything in sight, we feel faintly ashamed for him.

Keep on keepin' on, Tim! Good luck with the NFL draft! If Aaron Rodgers weren't so good, I would covet you...just please don't go to the Vikings.

Haiti and the Bible

2010-01-16T10:03:00.003-06:00

It happens after every natural disaster: "Why does God let these things happen?" some people say. And some reply, "These people are cursed by God and deserve to die." Cue hatred.

It happened in Haiti. As you know, a recent earthquake there killed upwards of 100,000 Haitians. The true number killed will never be known. Earthquakes bury their own dead. Evangelist and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network Pat Robertson responded by saying that the Haitians had made a "pact with the devil," and thus, implicitly, deserved whatever they got.

Voodoo is, unfortunately, fairly prevalent in Haiti. However, by percentage, Haiti is overwhelmingly Christian. I'm not saying that the bare statistics prove that Haiti is a righteous country, but I don't believe, as Robertson does, that Haiti did something especially bad to warrant this act of God. Were Satan-worshippers prevalent in pre-Katrina New Orleans? Of course not! Were they in pre-Earthquake 'Frisco? Again, no. Thus, Robertson's theory that only extreme, devil-worshipping sin merits this sort of catastrophe is disproved.

As a Calvinist, I believe that every unredeemed person deserves death. I'm not going to apologize for that. The fact that many people, including Christians, believe that they are entitled to 80 years of comfort is rather discomfiting. As Job would say, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away."

But Haiti is no worse than New Orleans or Indonesia when it comes to sin. The fact that many people fail to realize is that every second of life is a blessing from God. What's more, this is not an obligation for God. He chooses to bless his creations, and he chooses not to. The Christians who died in Haiti will rise up with the saints on the Last Day and be rewarded. The unbelievers who died in Haiti will likewise meet their just punishment, the same as we. True, life is bleak for those left behind on this island, but that's where affluent Western Christians come in: HELP HAITI! Christ did not command us to help the Christian poor, or the white poor. He commanded us to help the poor.

But don't believe me. Believe the Bible.

"Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. ²Jesus answered, "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? ³I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. ⁴Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? ⁵I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish."

--Luke 13:1-5

Book Review: Going Rogue by Sarah Palin

2010-01-02T20:22:00.002-06:00

Sarah Palin. Many people like her immensely. Many people can't stand her. Many people think she would make a better president than any other major-party candidate in 2012. Many people think Curious George would do better.

If you delineate the border between Palin-lovers and Palin-haters, you understand much about American politics. They love her here in Middle America. To blue-collar Republicans, she talks sense in a way they don't often hear from politicians. But to educated east-coast Democrats, she is the anti-christ. She is everything wrong with populist politics. They look at Sarah Palin and see a menace to society.

Why is she so polarizing? Much of it, I believe, is due to the media. The media has done much to tarnish Sarah Palin's reputation. This could be good and it could be bad. If Palin were Rod Blagojevich, we certainly would want her tarnished so that she would never show her face in the public square again. If, however, she were Ronald Reagan, we would not want her tarnished.

So which is she? Sarah Palin's 2.5 year stint as Governor of Alaska was, in the beginning, wildly successful. As Alaskan Dewey Whetsell explains, everything she did worked and she did everything with high approval ratings and bipartisan support. (This is included at the end of Palin's book.)

But then, at the Alaska State Fair, in August 2008, Palin got a call from a man named John McCain, who was running for president. Would Sarah like to be a vice-presidential candidate? Yes, Sarah would. Depending on Palin's political future, she may one day rue that decision.

Suddenly, this cute, folksy mother of five catapulted onto the national stage. The Media, who had already crowned King Barack, were stunned. How dare this bumpkin stick her nose in? "Concerns" and "questions" arose. When frivolous ethics charges surfaced against Palin (like wearing an Arctic Cat jacket and talking to reporters in a hallway--apparently taboo on the Loony Left), these were trumpeted for all to hear.

Fast forward almost a year. The campaign is over, McCain-Palin soundly defeated. Palin calls a press conference and resigns the governorship. Once again, the country is stunned. Was it an admission of guilt? Was there another shoe about to drop? Had the pressure gotten to her? Was she dropping out to plan her presidential run? Or was she, as she said, unable to afford the legal bill for those ethics charges and left the public sector to make some money? No other shoe dropped and she appears sane, so it must have been the latter two.

I'm not talking about the book, am I? Well, that's because to understand Sarah Palin's book, one must understand Sarah Palin. And that's something that many people fail to do.

The writing is average. Palin charms sometimes, but at other times I wish she would stick with grammatical and verbal convention. Every cutesy word she makes up detracts from the seriousness of the work. Her life certainly has been busy, and fulfilling.

It's interesting that, until she reached the national stage, everyone liked her. Sarah could do no wrong on the Wasilla City Council, as mayor, on the various commissions she served on, and finally as governor. So she was a good pick for John McCain.

Her political beliefs are very, very right-wing. She is hardcore, man. But she makes it work. Without animosity, and without bias, she perfectly rode the line between big business and big government as governor.

God is on every page of Going Rogue. She invokes Him and His plan constantly. This could be real or it could be artificial--who am I to judge? But it's nice to see it in a book written by a popular politician.

Her family life is concerning. She has five kids and a largely absentee husband (work). But she still found time to govern the largest state of the union. That raises questions about her priorities. Would a truly devoted mother take on this more-than-full-time job? Part of me wonders how well her kids have been brought up. Bristol Palin's teenage pregnancy makes me wonder as well. Palin does not, in the book, chastise Bristol at all, nor does she admit any failings as a parent, or any failings at all.

Her TV appearances during the campaign were awful. Frankly, just terrible. This only increased the Media's dislike, and Tina Fey's SNL parody skewed many people's views still further. It was so accurate and so devastating.

After the campaign, though, she cleaned up her act. In Going Rogue she raises serious questions about her handling by the McCain camp, and indeed, as she tells it, it was wildly mismanaged. But the campaign itself was basically imploding before the election, and aides were fighting over the pieces.

Now, Sarah Palin lost to Hilary Clinton by one percentage point in a poll of Most Admired Women, beating such notables as the Queen and Oprah. For a politician whom I had never heard of in June 2008, that's quite an accomplishment.

Sarah Palin remains an enigma. My own view of her has skewed wildly, from love to serious distaste and back to cautious optimism. Go for it, Sarah, but just prove that you are who you say you are. Whatever else Sarah Palin does, she is not going to die quietly. Her book has already past up Barack Obama's and Bill Clinton's bestsellers. Maybe she will do the same for the American electorate.

Mosing's Best of the Decade: Movies

2010-01-02T11:44:00.003-06:00

Best Movies of the 2000s

Hollywood is such a mixed bag. In fact, the movies made by Hollywood in a single year span from massive-budget megafilms with jaw-dropping special effects to little indie movies with a tenth of the budget but more heart. Hollywood is a misnomer, really. No single entity can be credited or blamed for all the films produced by the American movie industry. People will lament the decadence and sloppiness of Hollywood with one side of their mouth, and wholeheartedly praise its ingenuity and heart with the other. They're talking about different films that they like and dislike, not the film industry as a whole. All in all, the 2000s were a good decade for film. In the digital age, the signature of approval of a major studio is not as necessary as it once was. "Indie" movies like Slumdog Millionaire and Juno win critical acclaim and audience adoration, without the approval of corporate Hollywood. But here, in my opinion, are the best of the lot.

10. Amazing Grace, 2006

Ioan Gruffud's performance raises this above a normal historical movie. His impassioned portrayal of abolitionist hero William Wilberforce shows a man of true faith who lived it out well and earned the name "God's Politician."

9. Serenity, 2005

This movie adaptation of the short-lived Firefly TV series features a great, eclectic cast, a dark and moral plot, sudden bursts of humor, a great villain and ultimately, a story about responsibility and what happens when the government tries to make the people good.

8. The Lord of the Rings, 2001-2003

Peter Jackson's three films ought really to be considered one massive paean to Tolkien's mythic world. A beautiful, wonderful epic.

7. The Queen, 2006

A soft and subtle piece about the Queen and her troubles. Helen Mirren's performance is outstanding, and Michael Sheen as Tony Blair is one of the best portrayals of a politician ever.

6. Slumdog Millionaire, 2008

A fast-moving love story set in the beauties and horrors of modern India.

5. The Incredibles, 2005

The superhero movie saw a massive resurgence in the 2000s, and Pixar's offering was immensely good. For the first time, the studio portrayed real humans who, despite their powers, struggle with real human dilemmas.

4. The Dark Knight, 2008

Almost frighteningly dark, this movie is ultimately a tale of human failings. Heath Ledger's Joker is scary and unique. Hard to watch, but so, so good.

3. WALL-E, 2008

A Pixar movie for the robotic age, WALL-E is about the perils of dependence on technology. It's really very scary when you think about it. The love story between WALL-E and EVE is adorable. It takes immense skill to make half an hour of movie with no dialogue compelling and watchable. Pixar does just that.

2. The Pursuit of Happyness, 2006

Down and out in America--it's a common premise for films. But few are as big-hearted and touching as this Will Smith movie. A father's love proves true, hard work pays off, and soon a homeless single father becomes a Wall Street financier. Oh, and it's a true story.

1. Napoleon Dynamite, 2004

How can I begin? Napoleon Dynamite is one of the best films ever made. I and most people I know quote it constantly. It's a high-school movie. It's an American movie. Most importantly, it's a movie about people who exist outside of Hollywood films. Sure, Napoleon and Kip and Uncle Rico are exaggerated. But really, people like them are all around us. They're my friends and your friends, too idiosyncratic or not photogenic enough for a normal Hollywood movie. Thank God for Napoleon Dymanite. "Tina! Come get some ham!"

Mosing's Best of the Decade: Music and books that define the '00s for me.

2009-12-23T12:24:00.005-06:00

I was nine when this decade began, and eighteen now. I am twice as old now as I was then. Obviously, then, this decade has influenced and changed my life in incalculable ways. So, for your enjoyment, for posterity, and for my biographers, I now list my favorite music and books of the '00s. Coming soon: Best movies and cars.

Best Music of the 2000s.

Arctic Monkeys, Favourite Worst Nightmare, 2007

The Monkeys' brash scouser funk at its best, with lyricism and catchy beats.

9. U2, All That You Can't Leave Behind, 2000

The world's greatest band reapplying for its title and unanimously holding on to it.

Norah Jones, Feels Like Home, 2004

Jones is the best-selling female jazz artist of all time and her second album remains, so far, her masterwork.

Radiohead, Hail to the Thief, 2003

Radiohead has been hailed as one of the greatest bands of the 21st century. Opinions vary, but I believe this album is more coherent than their more popular offerings Kid A and Amnesiac.

Red Hot Chili Peppers, By the Way, 2005

Funk with heart. Kiedis's polarizing vocals, plus Chad Smith's superb drumming, Flea's driving bass lines and John Frusciante's godlike guitar skills make this the best Pepperss album.

The White Stripes, Icky Thump, 2008

The White Stripes' last and best is probably one of the most American albums I have ever heard.

Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, 2002

Wilco was dropped by their record label after this album was completed, and picked up by a new one. It became a mega-hit and established Wilco's country-influenced hard rock sound.

Switchfoot, The Beautiful Letdown, 2003

Sue me, but I think Switchfoot has had a huge influence on modern pop rock, and it started with this album's earnest lyricism.

The Killers, Hot Fuss, 2004

The Killers' best album to date, Hot Fuss combines many elements to become an eclectic, interesting whole.

1. Audio Adrenaline, Lift, 2001

Lift is one of the most worshipful albums I've ever heard. From Ocean Floor to You Still Amaze Me, the Christian rockers keep the message coming in serious, otherworldly melodies. Also, I have all these albums on iTunes and this is the only one that writing a blurb about made me want to listen to it again. "You, you still amaze me. Bigger than the sky, brighter than the sun, you're the one."

Best Books of the 2000s.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, 2007

Rowling's powerful finale to the best-selling fiction series ever written was a fitting end to the series and proved, once and for all, that Rowling was no mere children's writer. The Messianic allegories, the intricately crafted plot, and the unforgettable characters make this one of my favorite books ever.

Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons, 2006

Dreher's impassioned call for a Republican party grounded more in environmentally responsible, doctrinally sound, and intellectually honest philosophy is the political book with the most influence on me, ever.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Shadow of the Wind, 2001

Zafon's book is magical. Simple as that.

Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace, 2007

William Wilberforce, “God's politician,” has long been one of my heroes. This biography of him, then, naturally attracted me. It was the best biography I have ever read, and slim as it is, it provides a rather complete assessment not only of Wilberforce but of his allies and conditions in early Victorian England.

Stephen Marche, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, 2007

This exquisite collection of short fiction from the fictional island of “Sanjania” is as beautiful as it is inventive.

Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in the Age of Skepticism, 2008

Pastor Keller, leader of New York's most vibrant evangelical church which he himself founded in the 80s, gives an impassioned, orthodox defense of traditional belief.

Timothy Zahn, Allegiance, 2007.

I know, I know, a Star Wars novel. Truth be told, though, Zahn is ten times more talented than the other hacks Lucas hired to write his sequels, and is an accomplished sci-fi author in his own right. Allegiance is not his best, but the others were published in the last millennium and he needs to be on this list.

Adam Nicolson, Seize the Fire: Heroism and Duty at the Battle of the Trafalgar, 2006

As an anglophile, I've always idolized Nelson. This book is less about him as it is about the greatest naval battle in history, but how can one define Trafalgar without Nelson, or Nelson without Trafalgar? A great read. It also introduced me to one of the best poems ever written.

Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, 2009.

This rousing mystery features a ridiculously young protagonist, but is nevertheless a great book.

M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, 2007.

A reasoned defense of one of my heroes. McCarthy's methods were way over the top, but his evidence of communist infiltration, Evans points out, was unassailable. This has been proven by declassified Soviet records. The fact that he remains a favorite target of liberals should remind us which side it is that has reason on its side.

FIlm Review: Avatar

2009-12-20T13:06:00.003-06:00

Avatar is the most expensive movie ever made. Sources vary, but the New York Times pegged it at just under half a billion dollars. It's unfortunate, then, that the movie was fatally flawed.

We saw the film in 2D because we're skinflints, and because some of us thought 3D would make us nauseous. Many of the positive reviews Avatar has received were from critics who saw the film's 3D premiere. Thus, their minds were blown by the majestic special effects and no mental energy was spent on the movie's plot.

If critics had paid more attention to the movie's plot, I fancy they wouldn't be quite so quick to proclaim Avatar one of the best movies of the decade, as some have. To be succinct, the plot is about a corporation in the future which has sucked Earth dry and found the world of Pandora to consume with their evil technology. The mineral "Unobtainium," found only on Pandora, sells for $25 million a kilo, and is well worth killing for. This corporation hires scientists led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) to create an "avatar" program: essentially a human mind controlling a body that resembles Pandora's indigenous intelligent species: the Na'vi. The avatar program is meant to relate to the Na'vi, teach them English and basically appease them for having their world stolen.

The Na'vi are tall, impossibly thin, and blue. They are a tribal race with shamanic customs and cliched religious beliefs about a world-tree and a life-force that binds everything together. They are like a group of pretty, warlike, Jedi Smurfs with a lower body-mass index and giantism.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is an ex-Marine whose brother was in the Avatar program. When said brother dies suddenly, Sully is sent into space to take his place. Sully is paralyzed below the waist. He is implausibly given an Avatar after one day on base, and soon wins the trust of the Na'vi. He falls in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and begins to question his role in the relations between humans and the Na'vi.

Dark clouds loom in the horizon, though, as a rich vein of Unobtainium is discovered--right beneath the Na'vi village! What do our heroes do? After meager attempts at diplomacy fail, scarily gung-ho ex-Marine villain Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a xenophobic Bush-parody figure, is sent in to destroy indigent blue-skins.

This doesn't work.

Long movie short, the aliens win and lots of humans die.

About halfway through the movie, I realized I was watching a movie about aliens killing humans by the hundreds and I was supposed to cheer. The effects were stunning. Stunning. The acting was really pretty credible, especially Worthington, Lang, and Weaver.

The humans, we hear in the movie, come from a world where there is no green left. "They killed their mother," Jake Sully's avatar tells the Na'vi. So the future of humanity, according to director James Cameron, is to destroy Earth and go searching for another world to rape.

This is the James Cameron of Titanic fame, who tied his name to a spurious documentary which claimed to have found "the lost tomb of Jesus." In Avatar we see his ideal world: where quasi-Buddhist, Mother-Pandora-worshipping blue-skinned savages kill a bunch of Marines.

The movie is so well done that I seriously enjoyed it. The effects are truly beautiful and amazing. I would be glad to spend years exploring the exotic biosphere of Pandora. But the plot prevents Avatar from being a great movie, or even a good one.

Why can't our sci-fi epics be about humans finding common ground with aliens and working towards the future? Why do the humans have to lose? What kind of person makes a movie like that?

Ender's Game: Literary Analysis

2009-12-09T10:40:00.000-06:00

Ender's Game is a science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card and is one of the very few books to win both Hugo and Nebula awards, science fiction's highest honors, for Best Novel. It is the story of child prodigy Ender Wiggin in 22^nd century North Carolina, who lives with his distant parents, his dear sister Valentine, and his sadistic brother Peter. The novel opens movingly: “I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.” Humanity faces the threat of a technologically advanced alien civilization that has already attacked twice, and the Earth leadership desperately seeks a person with the skill and innate ability to lead Earth's forces to victory. In Ender Wiggin, they see that person. Colonel Graff, who says that unique first line, is the book's most mercurial character. A fat, slovenly bureaucrat in some respects, he possesses a keen military mind and a ruthless sense of what must be done to win final and ultimate victory in the war that humanity faces. It is his manipulation that turns Ender Wiggin into a precisely-tuned instrument of destruction, who in the end, is able to save humanity. The question Card leaves us with is: was it the right thing to do?

Early in the book, Peter Wiggin terrorizes his younger siblings, inflicting physical violence and even threatening to kill them. Peter is cruel and manipulative by nature, and this naturally led to his oppression of Ender and Valentine. He especially hates Ender because Peter was tested and rejected for Battle School while, at the outset of the book, Ender still wears his “monitor,” and is apparently destined for Battle School. After Ender leaves Earth to go to Battle School, the conflict continues to a lesser extent between Peter and Valentine. Peter draws Valentine into his scheme to gain power in the world. He and she pretend to be the ideologues Lock and Demosthenes. Locke's persona is reasoned and wise, while Demosthenes is inflammatory and indulges in demagoguery. They are meant to be perfect opposites. Peter takes Loke, Valentine writes Demosthenes. Essentially, they each are taking positions that conflict with their real beliefs. Through their close partnership, they begin to understand more about each other and Peter's animosity is curbed somewhat. However, Valentine knows that if Ender returns to Earth after his victory over the Buggers, Peter will use him to his own ends. She uses Demosthenes to assure that Ender can never return to Earth, and she leaves Earth on a colony ship to join him. So the conflict is resolved only when the aggressors are separated by lightyears.

The Human war with the Buggers is the overarching conflict in the story. The Buggers are a powerful alien race that attacked Earth twice sometime before the story began. They were repulsed by the space-fleets of Earth, but only because of the dumb luck of Mazer Rackham. Since the “second invasion,” humanity has concentrated its energies on preparing for a possible third invasion. Humanity is under a Hegemony and the IF (International Fleet) builds spaceships with ever-increasing speed and firepower. However, humans on earth believe that the fleet is massing in the solar system, when in fact each ship is sent to attack the Bugger home-worlds as soon as it is built and crewed. The IF has instituted the Battle School, an orbital base devoted to training prodigious children to be the leaders and commanders of the fleet en route to destroy the Buggers. Ender Wiggin is selected to attend Battle School. He overcomes the trials of battle school and is sent to Command School. There he is trained by Mazer Rackham himself, and begins to practice using the “Simulator,” a virtual command interface. He is aided by his “jeesh,” his friends and allies from Battle School. Unbeknownst to him, the battle “simulations” are actually the real battles against the Buggers. He wins most of them handily. On the final trial, however, he decides to use his weapons against the Bugger planet itself, employing a suicidal strategy. He is succesful, and the planet is destroyed, along with nearly all his forces. Rackham reveals to him that he just fought the real battle and has defeated and destroyed the Buggers.

Before Ender enters battle school, Stilson, a boy at school, terrorizes him for being a “Third”--a third child born to his parents under a special dispensation, at a time when there are strict population controls placed on the population. One day Ender's “monitor,” a device the IF uses to observe him and decide his fitness for Battle School, is removed. Stilson, seeing that Ender is now unmonitored by watchful adults, approaches him with a group of cohorts planning to cause pain. Ender determines that he must take the gloves off. He thinks that only a complete victory would dissuade the bullies from further attacks. When Stilson attacks him, Ender's response is swift and very painful. Stilson is vanquished and, the author implies, actually dies. Later, at battle school, Ender makes an enemy of Bonzo Madrid, a much older boy who commands Ender's army. Bonzo treats Ender nastily, and Ender embarrasses him by defying his orders to never fire his weapon, and firing critical shots that win a battle with another army. Ender is later transferred to another army and has further scuffles with Bonzo. Their conflict culminates when Bonzo confronts Ender in the showers. Ender decides that, as before, a direct confrontation is necessary. He destroys Bonzo, later finding out that he killed him as well.

All the conflicts in the book are set against the backdrop of humanity's protracted war with the Buggers, which forms the overarching story line. The first lesser conflict is Peter Wiggin's infliction of pain on his younger siblings. Ending this conflict becomes a major motivation for Ender and Valentine. Ender's fight with Stilson is his final test, and the moment in the book when he is most defenseless. It is his response here that finally tells Colonel Graff, the commander of Battle School, that Ender is strong enough to lead. As Ender goes through Battle School and proves his stellar abilities, it is his seeming indispensability in the Bugger Wars that provokes Bonzo's hatred and jealousy. Before their last encounter, Ender's older friend Dink shouts, “Don't hurt him, Bonzo! We need him!” This only inflames Bonzo further, reminding him, as Card points out, that he is largely a nonentity to other people, while Ender is the perceived savior of humanity from the Buggers. In a sense, the antagonists Peter and Stilson and Bonzo were hindrances that prevented Ender from addressing the major conflict: the war with the Buggers.

Ender's time in the “simulator” at Command School is the climax of the story, specifically the final “test” set by his teacher Mazer Rackham: he must lead the human forces, outnumbered 1000 to 1, to victory against a massive Bugger fleet around their home planet. Prior to the battle, Mazer tells Ender that the upcoming battle will be the final simulation; if he wins, he will graduate from Command School. Ender is dismayed when he sees the enormity of the fleet he is tasked to destroy. He thinks it is an impossible cheat by Rackham, and decides that he will use all his forces in a near-suicidal attack on the Bugger planet itself. This mirrors an incident earlier in the book, Ender's last battle at Battle School, where Ender and Dragon Army beat not one but two armies in the battle room by using similar techniques. Ender's spiraling, unpredictable attack leads to grievous losses, but it also brings the awesome destructive power of Ender's weapons to bear on the Bugger planet. He destroys the planet. Ender thinks he has won by cheating, but the celebration of the observers sent to watch his final battle tells him otherwise. Finally, in the book's revelatory moment, Rackham reveals to him that he has just destroyed the Buggers—the “simulator” was no simulator at all. In fact, it was a tactical command center of the entire Earth space armada. He tells Ender that Earth needed a commander with the compassion to fully understand his enemy, but with the ruthlessness to destroy him. Ender had the compassion, but not the ruthlessness, and thus his true purpose was hidden from him. Ender concludes that a complete understanding of one's enemy will lead irrevocably to loving them. Ender's victory, then, is the climax of the story, though he did not know it at the time.

The questions Card leaves unanswered are uniformly intentional. Ender's Game is not a thrilling science fiction story, but rather a novel about the human condition and the consequences of thoughts and actions. Was Graff's manipulation of Ender justifiable? Was Ender's eventual act of destruction the right thing to do? Did the Buggers deserve to die? These are the questions Card leaves us with, and they are questions with answers that may make us rethink our preconceptions about human actions, the military mind, and the prospect of nonhuman intelligent life in the universe. Ender's Game, however, does not succeed because it is a great philosophical work. It succeeds because it is a novel that describes otherworldly events with a human heart. Like the best experiences in life, the events in Ender's Game do not just happen. They break down and change and build up the characters who experience them. In a world where fiction is so often idealized and unrealistic, Ender's Game is, conversely, a harshly realistic novel set in one possible future.

In Which I Am Seduced by the Specter of a Corporate Image

2009-09-27T16:38:00.006-05:00

To relate this tale, I must begin almost a year ago, when I decided that my 1 GB Creative Zen Nano was a completely inadequate MP3 player and should be replaced. (To be honest, this thought had been percolating for some time.) However, I was prejudiced against the best-selling MP3 player: the iPod. I thought its functions could be duplicated for much less money, though with much less panache, by a cheaper model. I leaned toward another Creative: my sticking point was WiFi access, and their wireless-enabled Zen X-Fi seemed attractive.

I was still weighing the pros and cons of the X-Fi when I learned from a friend that an acquaintance of his had a refurbished 8 GB Apple iPod Touch which he wanted to get rid of. I learned that said acquaintance found himself in deep debt only a week after purchasing the iPod (this upstanding citizen had to pay compensation for vandalism.) I impetuously traded one hundred and eighty of my moneys for this iPod, sight unseen. We exchanged check and iPod in front of my friend's house, while my friend's (wry) mother made some comment about drug deals.

I noted with dismay the heavily-scratched metal rear surface of the iPod. However, once I brought it home and plugged it in, it worked well and continues to do so today. There were a few small niggles: the WiFi works everywhere but here at home, the storage capacity now seems prohibitive, and the software hasn't been completely bug-free. Overall, however, I am very satisfied with my purchase, even though I paid sixty dollars more for this refurbished iPod than I would have for a new Zen X-Fi of the same storage capacity.

So you could call it accidental, my inculcation into the Cult of Apple. It was probably a few months afterward that I started lusting after a MacBook. (Clear your mind of any negative associations with the words "cult" and "lust." Most human technology is so heart-breakingly unreliable and pitifully mediocre that any adoration for and lust after these items is painfully short-lived, laughable, and undeserving of any association with the Seven Deadly Sins.) For the uninitiated, the MacBook is Apple's cheapest laptop. I wanted the aluminum one, which was two and a half pounds lighter than my beastly Acer, and approximately a third as thick. It was also more than twice as expensive.

I am not a fanatic. I will concede that looking at the MacBook next to its humbler HP step-cousins, I saw the discrepancies: for about 2/3 of the money, an HP laptop would have a much larger hard drive and more memory to work with. But (and it is a very large, even obese but) it would also come with Windows Vista, the worst iteration of the most maddening operating system from the most annoying company on the planet.

The twin-pronged question that filled my head was: Do the advantages of the Mac (no viruses, infinitely better operating system, instant good karma) outweigh the disadvantages (high price, mediocre raw stats, and being labeled as an artsy snob?)

Since I'm now blogging on my aluminum Macbook, you can see that I answered that question with a resounding "Yes!" and backed up that assertion with my pocketbook.

The answer to the question is, as I see it, simple. When one buys a Mac, one is buying a lifestyle. Apple must have the best corporate images and the most devotees of any company in the world. Their stock, I should mention, has more than doubled since the recession began. And the Mac lifestyle is not like the PC lifestyle. We can see this clearly from, if nothing else, Apple's completely insufferable "I'm a Mac" ads which feature young, hip, Mac-user Justin Long in tight jeans and Converse and bespectacled, doughy, PC-user John Hodgman in a brown suit.

Apple is a luxury brand, and any price-comparisons between Macs and PCs should reflect this. Even though an everyman's laptop might have more RAM and hard drive space than my MacBook for less money, a "luxury" PC like a Sony Vaio costs just as much as a Mac--and it still has Windows Vista.

An interesting note: since I bought my iPod and began to seriously consider purchasing an MacBook, this dilemma has been mere rationalization for me. I had already made up my mind, I was just trying to convince myself that it was more rational than emotional. It worked, I bought a MacBook. This would suggest that Apple lust grows with time, like the common or garden variety of lust. Once I saw the clean curves and mouthwatering functionality of an iPod, I was not satisfied until I laid my hands on the much larger graceful aluminum lines of the MacBook.

I am happy with my MacBook so far. In fact, I can't think of a single fault at the moment, although certainly a few will occur to me as I grow used to it. I have transferred my computing life to it almost seamlessly and I'm glad I did.

I was seduced by clean metal lines, Steve Jobs, aluminum, Snow Leopard, and the Myriad font.

I was seduced by the carefully projected image of a vast company, the holographic cover girl wrapped around the gigantic, ugly furnace of corporatism.

I am truly an American.

Two tidbits

2009-08-07T12:20:00.002-05:00

My new favorite source for worldwide news is Foreign Policy magazine; especially two of its recent articles which challenge the conventional wisdom and strike me as wise--all too rare a quality. See what you make of them.

Myth #1: "Conditions in Africa are Medieval."

FP's response: read the whole, enlightening article here.

Myth #2: "Power is shifting from West to East." (America and Europe are losing power to Asia.)

FP's response: read the article here.

E-books, the Kindle, and the future of the library

2009-08-05T12:27:00.006-05:00

The modern lending library is a co-op of sorts. In my town, a group of literate people got together and decided that the town needed a library. They each contributed a few books, and these sparse tomes were housed in somebody's basement. New people joined, contributed their own books, and read others. The library grew. A hundred years hence, it is a collection of thousands of books in a sterile, white-walled, green-carpeted building with a staff of ten. What will it be in another century?

The printing press appears to be on its way out. Amazon's Kindle was introduced a few years ago, and quickly embraced by the literary elite. The Kindle, however, has massive flaws. Even after a price cut, the cheapest model is still $300. It uses E-ink technology which is expensive but, unlike an LED screen, is not backlit. The Kindle can only be stocked with ebooks from Amazon's Kindle store, which has about 300,000 titles--78,000 less than the amount of books published in the US and the UK in 2006. In other words, this is a tiny drop in the bucket of books that have been published even in the last decade, a tiny mote in the dust bunny the size of Hoover Dam that is the amount of books published since the invention of the printing press in approximately 1436.

Furthermore, a cursory glance of the "Kindle store" will reveal that, although most NYT bestsellers and many significant books are available, many of the bestselling books in history are not. The Harry Potter series, for example, which has sold half as many copies in 12 years as the Holy Qur'an has in its entire history, is absent.

The Kindle is undeniably groundbreaking, despite its flaws. Two competitors, Sony and Barnes & Noble (competing for the first time in their respective histories) have produced or shortly will produce e-readers, with larger libraries, lower prices, and less restrictions than Amazon's Kindle. The fact is, the printed book is no the way out, but I'm not willing to jump on board yet. I'm an admitted technophile, but every now and again staring at glowing rectangles gets old and I have to escape into what solace a printed book can offer. I do not look forward to the day when, to read the books I love, convenience will mandate that I leave my printed books behind.

I will miss going to Borders and browsing for hours. I will miss my job at the library, which will be made ineffably obsolete in the next half-century. I will miss the fresh, foresty, virginal smell of a new book, the crispness of its pages, and the salacious pleasure of reading it for the first time, and many times hereafter. I will miss the joy--yes, joy--of recommending a book to someone, lending them a ratty copy, and then basking in satisfaction when he or she loves it. With Card's Ender's Game, I did something very perilous. I recommended to someone a book I had not read myself. He read and loved it, I read and loved it. My brother read and loved it. By the end of it, I had read eight more books (the sequels) and no less than everyone in our school had read Ender's Game. With books made up of bytes instead of paper, this sort of sharing is not possible. No sensible publisher will relax DRM (Digital Rights Management) rules to allow customers to lend books to each other. Brick-and-mortar publishers can't dictate what customers do with their books after they buy them, but cyberspace-based ones can reach into your computer and delete anything and everything it wants to if you don't toe the line.

Don't take my word for it, though. Recently, Amazon remotely deleted copies of the Harry Potter series and Orwell's 1984 from customers' Kindles, and refunded them. The books had been placed on Amazon's Kindle store illegally, but even so: if they can do it for legitimate reasons, they can do it whenever they want. Barnes & Noble, however much it wants to, can't send ninjas to break into your house and take your copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting that you lent to a friend "in the family way."

There is a inherent difference between the version of the latest bestseller on Barnes & Noble's burgeoning shelves and the electronic one on Amazon's Kindle store. There are a finite number of copies of the paper version, and they cost a certain amount of money to make. There are an infinite number of copies of the Kindle version, as many as there is demand for and no more, and they cost an infitesimal amount to produce. This means that consumers pay less, that bookstores will never be overstocked, but it also undermines the entire thesis--and here I return, five paragraphs hence, to the subject of my first paragraph--of the modern lending library.

A public library is not a building or a collection of books, but a social contract between people saying, in effect: "We will each contribue x% of our income to fund this library, which will buy books and other materials, hire staff, and provide premises where we can all enjoy these items for free." That, at least, is how libraries started out. Now, they are publically funded and so taxpayers pay for their library whether they use it or not. A book that a library buys is put on the shelf, and patron after patron after patron can read it. Electronic books cannot be put on a shelf, and with DRM only one person can own them, not a consortium. A library could buy one e-book, someone could download and read it...and it would be "used up" and disappear into cyberspatial oblivion.

So, whither the library--or rather, will the library whither?

Not to act like an action film director, but to find out you'll have to wait till the sequel: "The Future of Libraries Redux," "The Future of Libraries is Back," "The Future of Libraries Reloaded," or "The Future of Libraries II." The title is still under consideration.

Till next time,

Sola Gratia

Israel, Iran's Nukes, and Lots of Help from the Obama Administration

2009-07-07T10:17:00.004-05:00

So, VP Joe Biden says it's okay for Israel to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. "We cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do when they make a determination, if they make a determination, that they're existentially threatened," Biden said in an interview on ABC's "The Week" on Monday the 6th.

Joe might want to check back with his boss. Here's Obama, when asked one day later if his administration had given a "green light" for such an attack: "Absolutely not." The problem of Iranian nukes would be resolved, he said, through diplomatic channels.

Joe Biden is in the right of it. Israel is a sovereign nation and old enough to make its own decisions. Biden didn't really give them the "green light;" he acknowledged that they could do what they darn well pleased. Obama, on the other hand, says that the problem must be resolved through diplomatic channels. Iran, even under Ahmadinejad, isn't stupid enough to challenge the U.S. directly by bombing U.S. interests in Iraq or Afghanistan. If, God forbid, they do get the bomb--which Mossad chief Meir Dagan said might happen by 2014--then they may well attempt to wipe Israel off the map.

In other words, this doesn't affect the U.S. directly except insofar as it changes the political balance in the Middle East. I hope Israel won't do anything rash that might lead to a larger Middle-Eastern war, but here's the clincher: Iran stands virtually alone. The rest of the Muslim East is separated from them by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural barriers. Even ultra-conservative, ultra-Muslim Saudi Arabia has, after negotiations, reportedly allowed Israeli jets to fly over Saudi airspace in an attack on Iran. Even the Saudis don't want a nuclear Iran, and see what needs to be done. Why doesn't Obama?

This is all assuming that Khamenei's theocracy in Iran triumphs in Iran, and that his puppet Ahmadinejad isn't forced to give in. This may or may not happen. The shooting death of protester Neda Salehi Agha Soltan, caught on video and apparently perpetrated by Iranian security forces, has become iconic in the same way as the grainy footage of the lone protester in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square. A prominent group of Iranian Shi'ite clerics in the city of Qom have called the election invalid. We don't know what the future holds, but if Mousavi triumphs the whole question of attacking Iran might become moot. We can only hope.

Rain on the 4th

2009-07-04T17:31:00.000-05:00

It's raining on the 4th of July.
Heavy clouds cover the leaden sky.
The ponds fill, the trees weep,
And water from my eaves does seep.

I cannot remember an instance or a time
When on the anniversary of that day sublime
-When the brave Founders threw off the yoke of a tyrant-
That the heavens saw fit to release such a torrent.

But I am still young, and can only remember a few
Fourths of July, out of two hundred thirty-three that have made their adieux.
Perhaps wind and rain have dampened the festivities
At many anniversaries of this, our nation's nativity.

The mood of the sky should not dull our celebration
Or, God forbid, turn it into sober lamentation.
Because even if the fireworks are sodden and the barbecue won't start
Those things are not what this Day is about, at its heart.

"Independence!" was the cry that on this day rang
When America had tasted enough of oppression's tang.
You will agree, I'm sure, that it wouldn't have made much sense
Had they cried instead, "Fireworks! Buy one and get one for 99 cents!"

The rain now ceases, the drops have stopped.
And in the east, blue sky the leaden cloud has cropped.
In fact, a ray of sun now sets ablaze
The crystalline drops that on the grass were glazed.

The fireworks now will soon commence.
Adding to the smoke of Dad's grill their heady incense.
But let us not forget, amidst the festive conflagration,
The fire that drove, impelled, and fueled this nation.

Friendship: An Incomplete Diagnosis

2009-06-30T18:43:00.008-05:00

I spent last week at Patrick Henry College in Virginia, attending a journalism camp. I'll try not to be prolix. Suffice to say that it was amazing. In fact, I wish it lasted another week. I definitely learned a lot about journalism, but that, I think, was secondary.

For years, believe it or not, I tried to convince myself that I was an introvert. It's just not true. I am content alone, surely, but I could not stand extended periods without contact with my fellow man. This is reflected in the two times I took the Meyers-Briggs personality test. I took it first in the spring of 2008, and found that was an ISTJ. Frankly, I cheated. It's fairly easy to engineer tests like that, if they're straightforward, to show what you want them to show.

The second time I took it, I wasn't even aware that it was a personality test, per se. It was on some kind of job site, so I figured it was some sort of job suitability test. Not really knowing where the questions were leading, I didn't second-guess them. And so I got a different, probably more accurate result. I am now, apparently, an ESTJ. If you're familiar with the Meyers-Briggs test, you will know that the only difference between those two results is that in the first I stood for Introverted, and in the second E stood for Extroverted. So I either became an extrovert in the course of not more than a year, or I have been one all along.

People used to laugh when I insisted that I was an introvert. My teacher (an ESTJ) just shook her head mutely, smiling. Apparently it was obvious to everyone but me that I was an extrovert. Someone, put simply, who loves being around people, but more importantly just loves people.

Why bother analyzing my personality? Partly because this is my blog and I can do whatever I want, but mostly because I believe it explains why I enjoyed camp so much. The learning was great, the counselors were wise beyond their years, and fun. But the people--the people! Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think that few things are worth more than friends. Of course I can't say much in that regard after knowing someone for only a week or two, but I think that some of the people I met at Patrick Henry might fall under that category.

Part of the Facebook-ization of our generation is that the term "friend" is devalued to mean people you met once and didn't hate. As it happens, I'm already "friends" on Facebook with most of the cool people I met at camp. Time will tell if those interesting, appealing people will become real friends of mine. I suspect that some will and some won't, because that's the way the life is: rarely as amazing as our wildest dreams, or as awful as our worst nightmares.

Since returning from camp, two people have told me that they enjoyed camp at first but now dislike it in varying degrees. The primary reason? It doesn't build lasting friendships. "I hate camp," said one. "Why is it fun to be placed in a strange environment where you don't know anyone? And how are you supposed to make 'lasting' friendships with people in 1 week!?"

My friend has a point. Friendship is built in person. Facebook can connect people, as it has connected a large majority of the people I knew at camp. But it is not a magic potion. It cannot nurture the conditions in which lasting friendship arises. That is up to the people themselves. If a friendship was not rooted and growing before it was "Facebooked," chances are it just won't last. So the question remains: Did the people I met at camp never pass beyond the level of acquaintance, or did they, by virtue of time and work and laughter shared, become true friends?

To use a journalistic simile, was my relationship with each of these people like a hard news story, with a great lede and nut graf that then fades into "details in descending order of importance?" Or was it a feature story, where the facts are laid out in a story with a coherent structure and a firm conclusion, that can last for pages in a newspaper--or even a lifetime? If the former, I suspect whatever connection we had will simply...fade away. If the latter, perhaps God has a plan with more scope for our friendships.

Several times during the process of writing this post, I've considered just deleting it and starting over. I was originally just going to write a dry summary of what happened at camp. This isn't it. I suspect that if you care about what I did at camp, I've already bored you with the details. And I've put too much time into this to delete it now, so here it is. I'll be honest: I don't know why I chose to write about friendship. It's just been on my mind lately. When it all comes down to it, there are more important things than politics and journalism and computers, my usual topics, and friendship is one of them.

I'll leave you with two quotes about the nature of friendship. You may decide which you agree with, and if you're feeling Freudian, which one you think I believe is true.

"Friends, in my experience, are like ladies' fashions. They come and go with the seasons, and are rarely of such stout stuff as bears repeated wearing." --Stephanie Barron

"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods." --Aristotle

~Moses

It is more important to serve God and to save your soul than to see your political party take power.

2009-06-15T11:50:00.004-05:00

I have talked before about the fundamental disconnect between Christianity and the United States, and the failure of some Christians and some conservatives to see the difference between the two. There are people, including some of my friends and relatives, who believe that being a conservative Republican is just as important as being a Christian, that tax hikes are as detestable as gay clergymen. Rod Dreher has a phenomenal post about this, stating in much better language than I could ever manage, why this is a blatantly wrong, and indeed dangerous, belief.

I urge you all to read the entire piece, but I'll excerpt the choicest bits below. Rod Dreher, as most of you know, is my favorite blogger and political philosopher or all time. He usually makes good sense and unlike most pundits, he writes from a purely Christian perspective rather than a conservative-Christian one. Here, he shines.

If you read my book, you may recall my telling the story of sitting in a wine bar in Dallas one fine afternoon, engaging in conversation with some older liberals. They were nice enough, but at one point, started talking about how much good would be done in the world if a terrorist drove a truck bomb into Prestonwood Baptist Church. They were joking, in a way, but they also weren't. It was clear from the context of the conversation that they didn't really want to see a truck bomb driven into the church (just as conservative magazine editors don't really think Obama is a left-wing Nazi), but deep down, they derive a certain primitive emotional satisfaction in thinking of their opponents as being unredeemably bad. Worse, even, than it is reasonable to think that they are. Where does that lead? Among other places, it leads to the loss of our own souls.
Now, I don't mean to be read as saying that we cannot say the truth because the truth could hurt someone. I don't know how else to describe late-term abortion except in maximalist terms. If the dismemberment of an unborn child inside her mother's womb --as the abortionist LeRoy Carhart describes his own his own work here -- is not evil, then what is? Farther up the spectrum, the refusal of some media outlets to report on Islamic extremism, or to mention the color of an at-large crime suspect's skin, on the theory that releasing that important and relevant information might lead some people to illogical and anti-social conclusions, is plainly rubbish. The trick is to work hard to think through our own biases and emotions, and always to keep watch on our own minds, tongues and consciences, so that we speak the truth that is, not the truth that suits us emotionally, or that suits the people who buy what we're selling.

This is not a phenomenon exclusively of the right, or the left. It's the way it is with us human beings, especially when we live in an emotivist culture driven by a news media that profits from reducing every issue to a clash of irreconcilable opposites. It seems that if you are the sort of person who looks for wisdom, enlightenment and guidance in public affairs, there are fewer and fewer places and people to which you can turn. It is useful to get that learned, so that you can more ardently seek out those worth listening to amid the meaningless partisan din.
It is more important to serve God and to save your soul than to see your political party take power.

Again, I urge you to read the whole article and watch the video clip (Eric Liddell's sermon from Chariots of Fire, quoting Isaiah 40).

This might be the last Mosings post for a week or two. I will be at a journalism camp at Patrick Henry College in Virginia from the 21st to the 27th of this month, and I don't know if I'll get any blogging done before or during. However, when I get back I'll be sure to blog about the experience, and if I'm motivated here are some posts you can expect from Mosings during the rest of the summer.

1. Urbanism vs. Agrarianism: which, if either, is more conducive to a productive, Christ-centered society.

2. Book Review: Patrick O'Brian's 20-volume Aubrey/Maturin series. I'm almost done!!

3. Small houses vs. big ones: Which make more harmonious, beautiful and useful homes?

Until the next post, Sola Gratia

Why are European Right-wing parties cleaning up?

2009-06-09T11:44:00.003-05:00

Anne Applebaum at Slate has an interesting article about Europe, and the stunning triumph of right-wing parties and defeat of left-wing parties in the recent elections for the European parliament. These are not national elections, but instead elections for the European Parliament, situated in Brussels, Belgium under the umbrella of the European Union. Applebaum says that the power that this parliament has quietly attained contrasts with the falling vote turn-out. The average turnout in the whole EU reached 43%, a substantial fall from the last European election. In Britain, which had a 35% turnout, the ruling Labour party had its worst electoral performance since 1910--when it was a dissolute fringe party. The anti-EU UKIP and BNP (UK Independence and British Nationalist parties, respectively) won victories, but overall it was a Tory landslide, and a reminder to the increasingly-feeble PM Gordon Brown that his turn is coming up. No less than five Cabinet ministers have quit in the last week.

Silvio Berlusconi's, Angela Merkel's, and Nicolas Sarkozy's right-wing governments in Italy, Germany, and France both receieved positive reinforcement from the election, while the socialists in Spain, Britain, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and elsewhere were hammered.

Putting Labour on the Left and Berlusconi on the Right aside (Labour is embattled almost beyond belief, and Berlusconi controls much of the media in Italy...which helps in elections) the Right still won staggering victories. Why?

Applebaum doesn't say this explicitly, but it's clear that the right-wingers in Europe are different from those here. Fighting two wars, American conservatives have spent the last decade focused on national security, with trade-offs being made with personal liberty (the Patriot Act) and small government (Bush's deficits were almost as staggering as Obama's) while right-wingers in Europe have been free to concentrate on fighting socialist spending excesses. In short, Bush was quite liberal fiscally--Rush Limbaugh would agree with me on that--but unlike in Europe, the profligate spenders were replaced in November by new profligate spenders. As Daniel Hannan, MEP (Member of European Parliament) for South-east England, would say: "You can't borrow your way out of debt or spend your way out of a recession." The recent EU election results show that the Europeans, at any rate, have rejected the profligate spending of the Left-wing parties in favor of something more responsible. Hopefully America can follow their example before our country is as bankrupt as Brown's Britain.

Lazy Days of Summer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Am I Still a Red-Meat Conservative?

2009-05-27T13:22:00.010-05:00

It's been oddly gray and cloudy the last two days, but I doubt it has much to do with Obama's pick to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Sonia Sotomayor (So-toe-my-YORE) is probably headed for easy confirmation, despite a rather average record on the bench and some troubling comments she has made. Apparently, 60% of her rulings on the Court of Appeals bench have been overturned by higher courts, which seems very high. However, I have no idea what the average is, so I can't tell you if that's a real minus. However, does it denote someone who should be on the nation's highest court, from which there is no appeal? I read an interesting piece with interviews with fellow judges, clerks, and lawyers who had argued cases in front of Sotomayor, and their verdict was not as positive as one would expect. She sometimes argues with lawyers, gives hasty opinions, and is nasty in general on the court. She does not seem to like hearing arguments she disagrees with. On the other hand, she has carefully-written, comprehensible, and precedent-based opinions, and by all accounts absolutely pwns the oral arguments.

Sotomayor has never heard an abortion-related case, and her views on abortion can only be assumed, which might cause the pro-choice partisans some anxiety. However, I ask you: a liberal (if not leftist) female judge of Puerto-Rican ancestry who grew up in a single-parent household after her father died in a Bronx public-housing project. What would you expect her view on abortion to be? I dare you to count the stereotypes in that last sentence, but as far as I know most of them are true. However, I guess the question that might make Planned Parenthood is: how much DOES she support abortion? Hillary Clinton has been moving distinctly rightwards on the issue, to the point of saying that the ideal number of abortions was zero, and that it was imperative that Americans unite to move toward that number. Sotomayor's religion is, to me, unknown, but I'd guess Catholic. Catholicism strictly forbids abortion, so who knows?

The main bones that commentators have to pick with Sotomayor are several troubling comments she has made, in speeches and in print. For example, she wrote in an essay that she "would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Rush Limbaugh called this "reverse racism." Rush, there's no such thing as "reverse" racism. Racism is racism, and this is rather bald-faced. Politico has an interesting discussion about this. Slate Magazine, however, says that in the context of the rest of the speech, Sotomayor was merely musing on how one's ethnic and family background affects your decision-making process. Still, it sounds like the remarks Larry Summers, the Dean of Harvard, made when he suggested that maybe, just maybe, there was a natural gap between men and women in scientific and mathematical achievement. He was fired in disgrace, but Sotomayor is a Hispanic woman so obviously she's entitled to say things like that. Uh-huh.

Her other, more telling boo-boo:

This is more distressing. You may say: Well, what's wrong with that? That's because the courts have moved very far away from their original Constitutional mandate of interpreting the law, and truly more liberal courts have been doing so for years: that's how abortion and gay marriage became legal. Clearly, Sotomayor is of this school. Frankly, I have great contempt for them, just as I hate historical and Biblical revisionists who try to fog the truth to further their own agenda.

Most commentators think Sotomayor is headed for a fairly easy confirmation, because the Republicans are a minority huddling behind the last stockade with their tails between their legs and because she didn't shoot anyone and is a woman.

It's summer! And this day, the second day of work on this post and the third of summer vacation, has been absolutely gorgeous; balmy and warm and delightful. I love it. I'm really not bored: I've been playing computer games, reading, and mindlessly web-surfing. It's the reading part I get the most pleasure out of, however. I'm on Book 15 of a 20 book series, as most of you know: the Master and Commander series ( also known as the Aubreyad), which is simply delightful.

I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh, and frankly, I still think he makes sense. However, during the waning years of the Bush administration and especially since I read Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher, I've moved away from the part of conservatism that he represents. I know longer find "Liberal hunting permits" and jokes about Barack Obama's middle name (Hussein) all that funny. This is slightly awkward since my dad (and, it must be confessed, most of the people with whom I discuss politics) are rabid Republicans. Have I moved to "the Left?" Absolutely not! It would still take a huge amount of soul-searching to get me to vote for a Democratic candidate even if he/she mirrored my views more closely than a Republican one. I think, instead, that I've moved from a booyah, America-worshipping, give-'em-both-barrels self-congratulatory unthinking set of beliefs to something deeper. I now believe that the modern Republican party is not the voice of true conservatism, and that capitalism has been mistaken for conservatism for many voters. Some Republican policies now seem absurd to me, like corporation-cozy government regulations that hurt small businesses, resistance to tax not because the government should be smaller and less thirsty but because we should have more money, and opposition to birth control (don't get me started on this: frankly, my view is that if a condom prevents an abortion, then go for it. Sexual immorality only wounds. Abortion is murder.)

I think this move away from Rush Limbaugh (I still enjoy listening to him) has parallelled my move toward a deeper faith: at some point, one realizes that some Republican policies are as greedy and worshipful of Mammon as some Democratic policies are depraved and worshipful of the body. Both extremes distract from Christ, and so both are hindrances on our journeys toward Him. To many Americans, country and Christ go hand in hand. They need to remember that America is not the world's panacea, and that in the end it will pass away and anyone who was deluded into thinking that America-worship and Christ-worship are the same thing will be, to use a singularly American crudity, caught with their pants down.

I don't know why I hid that confession (not, indeed a confession of wrong. More along the lines of St. Augustine's Confession: a confession of truth) at the end of this post, but I did. I hope everyone is having a great summer.

Revelling in Revelations

2009-05-20T19:19:00.002-05:00

The Dokime Academy class New Testament Survey, in which we read, discussed, and were tested on every book in the latter part of the Bible, is finished as of today. Today, the students took the final test on the book of Revelations.

I am ashamed to say that our discussion of Revelations was the first time I had studied it carefully, and what an amazing book I found it to be! The fantastic imagery, the science-fiction plot, and the dripping symbolism were zapped into sharp relief by the fact that everything in that book is going to happen.

So, as a science-fiction fan, I admit that Revelations is the best science-fiction work of all time, and the only true one. I had to fight, while I was reading the book, the urge to conceive of every development as a plot twist in some Passion of the Christ-like epic--which I planned, in my arrogance, on developing. However, the story is a scriptwriter's nightmare and, well, there's a rather large and devoted fan base out there who might take issue with me if I made a sub-par movie out of it. And any movie, made by fallen human hands, would be sub-par, even based on such literally divine material. I can imagine the headlines "MASSIVE BUDGET OVERRUNS AS BRATRUD TRIES TO ADAPT REVELATIONS." It sounds almost as probable as "MAN SUFFERS REPETITIVE STRESS INJURY WHILE DRAINING OCEAN WITH THIMBLE."

All in all, I think I'll leave the book alone. I'd never get studio backing, and it just wouldn't work as an Indie flick. Plus, what would be the point? We will all experience this story. We will all live it out. Because it is the conclusion, the massive summer blockbuster conclusion, to a sixty-six book series with billions of ardent fans through the centuries. A series that tells a story that defines everything about who we are, where we live, and where we're going.

The Five Most Interesting Sites on teh Interwebz

2009-04-25T17:18:00.009-05:00

I spend a ridiculous time trolling around the Internet. Most of it, however, is spent in a fairly small pool of sites. My most visited sites, according to my web browser, are: Facebook, CNN, YouTube, Slate Magazine, Yahoo Mail, icanhascheezburger.com, the Drudge Report, Project Playlist, and the web-comic XKCD, which lately replaced TIME Magazine. This reveals some interesting things about me: I read Slate more than I check my email. I think some of this is due to the fact that I really don't get that many emails, and another part is due to the fact that Yahoo Mail refuses to remain logged in for me; every time I close the tab, it logs out. Not to mention that Slate is almost infinitely interesting despite the obtuse leftward slant. I am, apparently, a news junkie.

But the sites I visit most are not necessarily the most interesting. So, without further ado, Sola Gratia's Five Most Interesting Websites. Disclaimer: these all have little or no user-generated content. Thus, YouTube and Facebook are ruled out.

5. The Gawker family of sites.

Gawker itself is actually rather dull: a collection of wacky and sometimes idiotic artists and their workings. Jezebel is a mere celeb-gossip site, Kotaku is a geeky, quirky, video game site, and Deadspin is a lame sports site. So, half of these eight related sites are boring. However, the other four make up for them with interest. i09 is a science-fiction blog, more devoted to movies than books, but still interesting and probably the best place to check out endless galleries of promo pics from the upcoming, awesome-looking Star Trek movie. Jalopnik is a unique site in my experience: a red-blooded car enthusiast site, but written from a techie, 21st century, Gen X perspective that I find quite refreshing. Most car mags are written by middle-aged people who love high-buck performance cars and minivans and SUVs and crossovers. Jalopnik is written by impoverished twenty-somethings who like sporty subcompacts and smaller, more efficient cars. Nothing against Motor Trend, but I sympathize with the latter group. Gizmodo is a gadget website, full of the latest computers and hardware. The best place on the web to explore the netbook craze, or a huge new windmill being put up outside Hanover. Lifehacker, however, is the best. Everything from Windows 7 screenshots to reviews of the latest Ubuntu distro to Star Trek desktop icons. I love it.

Lifehacker.

4. The Drudge Report.

Matt Drudge's one-man-show is very bare and nineties, but conversely very slick. It has, I must admit, more news than CNN--and often scoops the larger organizations. This is the ultimate news junkie site, and the best place on the web to learn disturbing things like the rise of Conficker, the world's most sophisticated botnet (Windows users: check your Windows automatic update settings. If it's turned off and you didn't turn it off, you have this virus) or the disturbing story of a man who greeted President Obama in Mexico City and died a week later of swine flu. Icky, yeah, but also interesting and not on CNN yet. Thanks, Matt Drudge.

The Drudge Report.

3. Wikipedia

I'm fudging a little bit. Wikipedia is, in fact, somewhat user-generated. However, a vast majority of the content is written by dedicated Wikipedians and not ordinary joes like you or I. Sure, I have contributed a few small articles and removed some glaring faults, but I am largely an observer. An observer to what? Web history 1.0, Lesson 1. Along with profit-based giants like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, eBay, and etc., there are people on the web who have a more idealistic approach. The "open-source" phenomenon--freely accessible code, editable content, and few or no fees, began almost as soon as the web did, with Linus Torvalds' Linux program--which now has almost infinite varieties (like the rather cool but flawed Ubuntu linux OS I tried to install a few weeks ago.) Wikipedia is part of this phenomenon. Some people have serious fears about Wikipedia and its mob-rule approach to the encyclopedia, but I have found it to be staggeringly informative on subjects that people aren't very divided about. There is an absolute wealth of information on Wikipedia, and when taken with a grain of salt it can be infinitely interesting and--dare I say it--educational. It is so wickedly interesting and multifarious that I find myself drawn by those innocent little blue links from Hurricane Ismael to the Zimmerwald Conference in seven clicks of the mouse. Each article in between was vast, informative, and probably hotly contested in the backstage "talk" page where members fight it out about what should be included in a page about shipping containers, Vladimir Lenin, or a socialist conference in 1915.

Wikipedia.

2. Free Rice

Donate rice to charity by testing your vocabulary: only in the web 2.0 world would such a thing be possible. Find the right definition of impecunious from four choices, and ten grains of rice will be donated to feed impoverished people around the world, supported by ad revenue. And not just vocabulary: FreeRice has English grammar, foreign language, famous art, chemistry, and mathematics sections. It's an infinite time-waster. Why? Because it's interesting.

FreeRice

1. Slate Magazine.

Less liberal than the odious Daily Kos and Hufington Post, Slate is also much more interesting, fair-minded, and idealistic. Think of it as the New York Times, except with real journalism, big-name writers, and honest coverage. Sure, many of the articles are way too quirky for it to be a 100% serious web journal like Credenda/Agenda, but it is quite informative and relevant. For example, right now I could learn why Glenn Beck is the "hot new mob leader of 2009" in a shockingly biased but surprisingly affectionate article, or read an article about the widespread indignation after agents of a British tabloid offered $400,000 to buy the 8-year-old star of Slumdog Millionaire--and then made it into a huge news story when her parents didn't immediately say no, or read about the liberal hand-wringing item du jour--the Bush torture memos that Obama released. All in all, my favorite source for web editorials--and quite interesting too.

Slate Magazine.

Honorable mention: XKCD for being the best webcomic--and narrative on web culture--in existence.

"This Means War"

2009-04-22T16:18:00.002-05:00

With Taliban forces only 87 miles fom Islamabad and Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, I thought I'd discuss something happier...like the fact that China has 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls. Why? Some horrific disease that strikes girls in childhood?

Well, yes, in a way. In fact, these missing girls were never given a chance of life outside the womb. Ultrasound technology revealed to their parents that they were of the "undesirable" sex, and because of China's One Child Policy, they are not given the chance of life outside the womb. They are aborted. More than 30 million lives snuffed out in 20 years, because their parents cannot abide a girl child and their government mandates only one child per family.

This is a disgrace. This is sexicide.

And worse, according to Rod Dreher, it means war.

What will the Chinese governmnent do with these surplus young men? Just take a guess.

"For the sake of stability, the Chinese government in the future will have to find some way to channel all that masculine aggression and frustration outward. Not good for the rest of us. Just another fruit of abortion. How is it, exactly, that feminists here maintain their unqualified support for abortion rights when abortion is used to carry out a holocaust of baby girls abroad?"

He is not here, He has risen.

2009-04-09T14:09:00.003-05:00

It's Easter once again. I've always wondered why Easter is not celebrated like Christmas is in the U.S. You'd think a holiday at the advent of spring would be more natural than one in the dead of winter. On deeper reflection, I've decided that Easter is simply too "Christian" to be widely celebrated outside of religious circles. Let me explain.

There are many people who believe that, if Jesus actually existed, he was merely a Gandhi-like figure who founded a Jewish sect in the first century A.D. They have no problem with this "historical Jesus" being born in Bethlehem. They have no problem with His birth in a stable, or the shepherds and the wise men. The angel choir? Well, that can be smoothed over. But Easter is a different story. Within three days, we go from Good Friday on which Christ was crucified, to Ressurection Sunday upon which he did what no man has ever done: He raised from the dead. He took our sins with him to the grave, and left them there. This is deeply uncomfortable to secular people. Man can't rise from the dead, they say. They are technically correct. Man can't rise from the dead. But when a man is God and Man in one, it is no problem at all. Easter, not Christmas, is the crux of the Christian story, and it is Easter that has been shunned by secular America. Even the efforts to make Easter another commercial holiday have been sporadic and pitiful. The Easter Bunny really has nothing on good ol' Saint Nick.

But the world is free to celebrate when they wish. Christians, however, will celebrate the anniversary of the ultimate sacrifice, the climax of Dei Incarnatione, that washed our sins away. Happy Easter!

The little stream sings

in the crease of the hill.

It is the water of life. It knows

nothing of death, nothing.

And this is the morning

of Christ's ressurection.

The tomb is empty. There is

no death. Death is our illusion,

our wish to belong only

to ourselves, which is our freedom

to kill one another.

From this sleep may we too

rise, as out of the dark grave.

--Wendell Berry

Music Review: No Line on the Horizon--U2

2009-04-04T21:29:00.014-05:00

U2 and its bastard offspring Coldplay are now rivals to the the Biggest Band in the World. This is not the actual biggest band title being contended—Earth, Wind, & Fire would have something to say about a quartet winning that award. Nor is it about record sales. It is about some mathematical median between “biggest” and “best.” So, Rihana and Fall Out Boy might make more money than Norah Jones and the Fleet Foxes, but the latter are simply classier, longer-lasting, and...well, better

The untrained listener hearing U2 and Coldplay back to back would be justly confused. Coldplay is quite simply a U2 cover band. Even my brother and I, seasoned U2 fans, were confused when first we heard Coldplay's smash hit single "Viva La Vida." "Is that Bono?" I remember asking hopefully. But no. In fact, Coldplay is a British band and Viva La Vida was produced by Brian Eno and scored a 72/100 on Metacritic. Contrast that with U2, which is a British band, and No Line on the Horizon, which was produced by Brian Eno and scored 72/100 on Metacritic...

Listen to Viva La Vida and No Line on the Horizon, U2's future megasmash back to back, and you'll know what I mean. The majestic palace-rock motifs, the drawn-out musicality, the soaring tenors (smooth, laid-back, and modern for Chris Martin, aka Mr. Gwyneth Paltrow; rough, passionate, and almost funky for Bono).

You can't blame Martin and Coldplay for aping their heroic forebears. After all, U2 has won more Grammys than any other band in history, and sold more albums too--145 million of them. Some critics (mostly young Turks at Slate and the ilk) dismissed U2's latest offering, making snide plays on the title. "For this band, the line on the horizon is growing ever clearer." Nothing makes me madder than yuppie condescension, especially of demonstrable greatness, so I'll just go break a few 2 by 4s and be right back.....

...There, that's better. Anyway, I bought No Line with fingers crossed. I had heard the first single, the precocious, funky "Get On Your Boots" and I was a little apprehensive. I was a little underwhelmed at first listen. "No Line" itself was a great song, but "Moment of Surrender" dragged onnn and onnn and none of the other songs held my attention. Since then, I've listened to it quite a few times, and I love it. The lyricism, the melody, the practiced excellence of a band that was formed in...oh, wow, 1977. The year Star Wars came out. And here they are with a big, bold, sure-hit of an album. So, what exactly is on it?

(01): No Line on the Horizon. The title track is beautiful. Classic U2, possibly my favorite overall. Lyrics: "I know a girl, she's like the sea...one day she's still the next she swells."

(02): Magnificent. A classic power-ballad. The beginning is a little electronic, until The Edge's familiar guitar kicks in. The descending electro-thing after the first line and repeated throughout the song gives it focus. Lyrics: the kind U2 gets panned for--too Christian to ignore. EVERY secular review of U2's music has as a con Bono's "lyrical preachiness." Well, they can complain, but I think it's really refreshing. "Only love can leave such a mark...From the womb my first cry, it was a joyful noise....Justify till we die, you and I will magnify/ The Magnificent."

(03): Moment of Surrender. Earnest piano and organ in the background just make this song last longer. Calm musically, rigorous vocally--a ballad with all that that entails. Not my favorite, but undeniably good. Lyrics: "It's not if I believe in love/ If love believes in me....At the moment of surrender/of vision over visibility."

(04): Unknown Caller. It gets off to a slow start, but comes surging in with Bono's plaintive cry of "Sunshine, sunshine." The tintinnabulation of The Edge's guitar is particularly poignant, the rough Celtic harmony particularly sweet and fleeting. Lyrics: "Oh, oh, escape yourself and gravity/Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak/Shush now." It ends, once again, with plaintive organ.

(05): I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight. My favorite beginning. An echoing guitar solo. Then Bono starts and goes into a jarring falsetto immediately. The beginning jars; it's tentative before it coalesces fully. But when it does, with Bono's "Baby, baby, baby," . But even here, Bono's "preachiness" comes through. There's a tantalizing hint of deep cello that I wish would have been more fully expanded. Lyrics: "How can you stand next to the truth and not see it?/ A change of heart comes slow/It's not a hill, it's a mountain/As you start the climb/Do you believe me, or are you doubting/ We're gonna make it all the way to the light.....The right to appear ridiculous is something I hold dear."

(06): Get On Your Boots. I didn't like this song at first, then I liked it, and now I'm edging back to not liking it again. It's undeniably funky and pretty cool, but it doesn't fit in with the rest of what must be called a fairly introspective album. The brazen beat and muddled electronic effects of Boots ruin a decent song that would have been more at home on their earlier, more electronic (and widely panned) album "Pop." Lyrics: "The future needs a big kiss...Satan loves a bomb scare...Laughter is eternity if Joy is real...Get on your boots/ sexy boots."

(07): Stand Up Comedy. A great song, again with Edge's solemn guitar and rough Celtic harmony. Lyrics: "I can stand up for hope, faith, love...stop helping God across the road like a little old lady....Josephine be careful of small men with big ideas." Josephine refers to Napoleon's empress.

(08): FEZ - Being Born. This album really does have alot of electronic garnishments, but they rarely seem overdone. This song has few lyrics, but those that are there are powerful. Lyrics: "Head first, then foot, then heart sets sail."

(09): White as Snow. Begins with solo piano and a little electronic zip. Then the Edge cuts in with an acoustic as Bono talks about the lamb being as white as snow. Beautiful and ghostly. Lyrics: "Once I knew there was a love divine/Then came a time when I thought it knew me not/Who can forgive where forgiveness is not/Only the lamb is white as snow."

(10): Breathe. A brash, beautiful song. It starts out flawed, but gets better as Bono's overdubbed voices reaches high as he sings "These days are better than that." Lyrics: "Breathe now/yeah, yeah/ We are people borne of sound/The songs are in our eyes/Gonna wear them like a crown."

(11): Cedars of Lebanon. A sad, slow, ballad. Plaintive and spare. Lyrics: "Choose your enemies carefully, 'cause they will definite you. Make them interesting 'cause in some ways they will mind you. They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends. Gonna last with you longer than your friend.

In conclusion, a beautiful album from the masters of great rock music. Expect more music reviews in the future.

"The Devalued Prime Minister of a Devalued Government"

2009-03-27T21:19:00.002-05:00

MEP David Hannan shows some serious backbone against PM Gordon Brown. I wish an American politician would have the backbone to take Obama to task for his fiscal policies, which are just the same as Brown's.

Detroit Reliquary

2009-03-10T18:59:00.002-05:00

Goodbye, Motown. You've given America fast cars, happy memories, and some great music. Rest in peace.

Detroit Reliquary (TIME Magazine Slideshow).

Truly Beautiful or Beautifully True?

2009-03-07T20:57:00.007-06:00

Francis Schaeffer said that art must have Truth and Beauty. Touring the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis with my relatives today led me to wonder: is there truth and beauty in modern art?

I used to believe that modern art was rubbish, no exceptions. The piece that began to change my mind was Frank, by Chuck Close, at the MIA. When I first saw it at the end of a long gallery, I thought for sure that this monstrous (108 in. by 84) black-and-white picture was a photograph. As I walked slowly through the gallery, the picture loomed above me. When I finally reached it, I was shocked to see that it was a regular painting on canvas. Looking closely, I could see the minute brushstrokes. The other pieces in the room were Andy Warhol and Roy Liechtenstein--empty pop art with no deeper meaning and certainly no truth or beauty. This piece was different. The hyper-realistic style was quintessentially modern, like the other artworks in the room. What was different?

This painting had truth. This religiously accurate reproduction of an 8 by 6 photograph writ large was undeniably truthful. It did not embellish, beautify, or change the original photograph. Yet it was not a copy. While the photograph was an emotionless, perfect reproduction of a scene, the painting is flawed. I could find no flaws in the painting, but I'm sure if I looked hard enough I could. These flaws are the cracks on the Mona Lisa, the missing body parts of the great Greek and Roman statuary. Without them, the artwork would somehow be inhumane. One of the definitions of art is that it must be an object created by human endeavor. Another definition could be that it must be flawed. There is nothing like perfect art. Art created by imperfect humans has no perfection; its glory is in the fact that it reaches towards perfection. Frank is a unique painting; a unique project of human endeavor. It has no heavy handed symbolism; no references to something familiar, no pleas to be acknowledged, no obvious meaning. We measure the meaning of something against other objects or ideas. Frank should not be judged meaningful against another piece of modern art, or a Rembrandt. Instead, these things should be judged against Frank. It is a touchstone, it is a fulcrum, it is a lever. It has truth. Francis Schaeffer would be proud.

Truth, however, is only one half of Schaeffer's bicameral definition. To be true art, Frank must be more than true. It must be beautiful. But beauty is subjective and truth is not, right? Or is it? Beauty, in a way, is truth. In the postmodern world, truth is being made "open to variant interpretation" to use pop psychobabble. In other words, meaningless. The prospect of truth with no meaning is, on a deep level, incredibly frightening. The prospect of a sinful mankind living with this philosophy is far worse. This degradation of meaning has already began, and will continue. Beauty, however, has always been "subjective." I may think a piece of music or an artwork is beautiful, and anyone else may disagree. I think this is because there is no self-evident beauty as there is self-evident truth. Perhaps beauty exists on a deeper level, and humans contemplating the beauty value of something are only judging one part of a whole too great for them to comprehend It is undeniable that there is a "layering" of meaning in this universe. The human race is, after all, six and a half billion variations on a single theme; like Monet's water lilies or the a musical scale in a Bach fugue. Each of Monet's water lily paintings, each part of a fugue offers a slightly different interpretation of its theme. So it is with humans. We who are slightly different variations on God's eternal theme see things in slightly different ways from one another. So, confronted with something that is beautiful at its core, one of us might feel that it is ugly whereas someone else sees it as beautiful, but not for the reasons it is truly beautiful.

I see Frank as a beautiful work of art. And it is, in fact, a real work. I can only imagine how many long hours and painstaking attention to detail it took to produce this painting. You may disagree with me. As variants on a theme, this is our curse and blessing. Spiritually, this means that we are not called into mindless uniformity of faith. God is the ideal of beauty and truth, which humans cannot fully perceive. In creating us, the Artist made us unique and different in one another. We do not sacrifice that when we throw away the sinful nature and run to Christ. In fact, the sinful nature is conformity and alien to our uniqueness. We do not strive to surrender our identity to God. Instead, like every great work of art, we are destined to become one with the Artist. How can one define Monet's paintings without Monet? How can one define Man without God? It is the latter fallacy, which underpins the idea of denial of God, which has led to the slow, frightening abandonment of truth I mentioned earlier. I can hardly imagine anything more frightening. Perhaps the endpoint of this horrifying downward spiral will be the cue for the sounding of the last trumpet. "Come, Lord Jesus, come!"

Until I saw Frank, I believed unconsciously that artists had forsaken true art right about the time of the death of Monet. I saw no beauty or truth even in the pre-modernist works of Picasso. Looking through the Walker, I believe that truth and beauty are rare in art. The scarceness of modern pieces in the Walker that I felt had both truth and beauty is not necessarily part of an abandonment of the qualities of true art, but rather a continuation of the status quo: there is art, and then there is beautiful and true Art. This has been going on, I believe, since at least the beginning of western civilization and will continue. Then again, I believe the rotting of truth has led to a much higher ratio of art that is not Art in the modern era. I have some horror stories about meaningless pieces in the Walker. One painting was an rectangle of canvas covered entirely in black paint. That was it. It took ten minutes. No beauty, no truth. Another piece was a mishmash of geometric shapes in green, blue, and yellow. The title? "A View of Cape Cod." Please, a 6-year-old could have done it.

No piece stuck out at me like Frank did at the Institute, but I had to acknowledge that truth and beauty were present at the Walker, rather like a tantalizing zephyr of spring. Which, coincidentally, is just around the corner. Stuffy human artists have tried for thousands of years, but they haven't come up with anything yet as tantalizing, truthful, and beautiful as spring. They never will. That's why the Master Artist deserves our love and devotion; more than the salvation he has offered us, the beauty and truth he has blessed us with.

Best Burn of the Week & The Future of Mosings & More Car Lust

2009-03-01T15:39:00.007-06:00

From Shafeen Charania's entertaining, ensightful ~synthesis~ blog comes this great description of poor Congresswoman Chipmunk, our perpetually-surprised House Majority Leader.

"Maybe Nancy needs to lower her Crystal Meth intake or go to Walter Reed to have them reattach the cerebrum that she accidentally threw into the recycle bin during National Be a Moron Week."

Charania's optimism is, sadly, misplaced. It would take a powerful electron microscope to locate something of that size in a recycling bin. In writing that blistering sentence, Charania was referring to the auto bailout. He was writing from a "live and let die" perspective about companies; if GM and Chrysler can't stay relevant and alive, why should they survive? However, as I've mentioned before--it was on Glenn Beck's program--the auto companies almost deserve that money: it probably amounts to the profits they've lost over the years due to harebrained federal regulations and such. That does not make it alright, however. A thing can be just without being the right thing to do...An idea which, I believe, underpins such important stories like The Incarnation. If we were treated justly, we would have been exposed to God's boundless wrath towards our sin. However, it was not the right thing to do. (God did not do it. God does what is right. Therefore, it was not the right thing to do. Q.E.D.) God chose to exercise his mercy instead.

It occurs to me that I've just covered many of the things most dear to me in one paragraph: talk radio, cars, logic, intelligent and free-thinking blogs, and of course God's Incarnation. I wish it was as easy to write 50,000 words of fiction (the length of an average novel) as it is to blog 50,000 words.

Moving on. Blogger is kind of like blog preschool. Once children can say the alphabet and go through the day without mentioning "butt" or "fart," they move on to grade school. Thus it is with blogs; when a blogger finds blogging fulfilling and enjoyable, and has some sort of readership, he moves on to the next step. This means registering a real domain name, paying for web-hosting, and rolling up your sleeves for HTML coding (or Java if you're insane.) Alternatively, since Blogger obligingly allows you the code to your own blog if you ask for it nicely, you could just use that. I've fiddled with this in the past; I added the small white widget at the end of each post for bookmarking it--I doubt it's been used since I don't have a tech-savvy user base, but it's nice to know that it's there. I am contemplating taking this step with Mosings. Hosting one's own website is only one step short of Web 1.0 Nirvana (Cloud Nine itself would be starting an internet business.)

Even as I talk about "moving on" I know I won't do it. Some people are go-getters who take ideas and run with them. I'm not like that. Plus, I hate spending money. There's nothing wrong with Blogger, and realistically I can't see devoting much more time to it than I already do--which I would have to if I set it up myself. So, that idea is now filed in the "Possible Future Concepts for When Sola Gratia Has Unlimited Time On His Hands." I wonder if they have blogs in heaven. We will be "glorifying God and enjoying Him forever;" there might be a place in there for blogging.

Moving on, yet again; surfing the synapses in the frothy abyss of my cerebrum. I love cars. And lately, I've been reading more car mags and watching more videos from what is simply the best tv show on the air today. I speak, of course, of Top Gear. There are no words to describe the utter joy of this show. The three hosts: Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May; are engaging, interesting, informative, and they work well together. They test amazing, beautiful, wondrous cars that cost more than some people make in their lifetimes, like a Bugatti or a Pagani or an Ascari or a Ariel Atom or a Lamborghini. But they also test regular cars once in a while. That's how I justify my love of this show: sometimes (infrequently) they give advice about cars that might help me in the buying and driving processes. Oh, one more thing. It's a British show, made by the BBC. So many of the cars aren't available here. And it's still the best. And I'm not alone in saying that. Slate Magazine even acknowledges it.

Aided by Top Gear, Motor Trend, and Road & Track, then, may I present my top 5 (Semi-Affordable) New Cars I want.

5. Ford Mustang GT. ($26,995) If I wanted to be slightly irrespnsible and buy a car with no real family utility (fast-forward to sometime in the misty future when I have a family of my own...and money to buy a car), this is the one I would buy. It's fast, it's cheap, and it's a Mustang. What else must be said?

4. Mazdaspeed 3. (Unbelievably, $22,740) Small, but fast. The performance version of the best compact on the market. The American phobia towards small cars is completely irrational. Although, I admit, if everyone else is driving a big car, you want one too. I'd rather not be caught in a crash between two Escalades in a 3. But then, it's fast and nimble enough that I probably wouldn't have to.

3.....I can't think of any. Next time!

So, what has this post accomplished?

....

Nothing. Oh, well. It was fun. *sigh*

Briefly...

2009-02-25T22:18:00.002-06:00

While I'm waiting for my brother to be done with the Robin Hood and Omnibus books so I can finish my homework, I thought I should mention something I saw yesterday that surprised and gratified me. For at least two weeks now I've been telling everyone who will listen that the Obama bailout is completely unrealistic and irresponsible because it has $2 trillion in new spending with no real rise in taxes and a large deficit already--I assumed the government was spending money it didn't have.

However, according to the invaluable CNN Political Ticker, Obama has "identified" $2 trillion in government budget cuts.

"In this budget, we will end education programs that don't work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them," Obama said. "We'll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we're not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don't use."

For a politician, this is incredibly specific, and I applaud Obama for even trying.

Conclusion? Barack Obama isn't a complete idiot. Even he recognizes that we won't get out of this economic crisis by pledging $2 trillion we don't have to fight a crisis--without taking that $2 trillion from somewhere else...like the massive, bloated federal budget!

As a commenter on CNN noticed: "1 month into his administration and he's already found $2 trillion to cut...I think this illustrates how pathetic the Bush administration really was." He has a point.

Since all government budget cuts are good, and this is a government budget cut, therefore this $2 trillion budget cut is good!

Just some simple logic there.

In other news, there was a rather absurd article on CNN entitled "Galaxy May be Full of 'Earth-like Planets'". Some of the evolutionist bilge out there defies belief. People throw around huge figures as if they pulled them from the air and expect total agreement. The Milky Way is 13 billion years old, really? How'd they figure that out, by carbon-dating cosmically-enabled mouse turds? 38,000 intelligent civilizations may have formed in the Milky Way! Wow! You'd think one of them might have moseyed on over to little ol' Earth in those 13 billion years.

Extra-terrestrial life is, I admit, quite appealing to me as a science-fiction buff. I don't know what the Bible says about it, but I think it would be a HUGE affirmation of God's power is there were "aliens." The chances that something will be created out of nothing...which is what the Big Bang was, are already so infinitesimal that they defy logical belief. However, add to that it happening more than once and the odds are approximately ten times infinity to none. Perhaps if it did happen, some of those chronically cynic scientists would acknowledge a Supreme Being.

But Abe's done with the recitation...now I can try and wade through it. I swear our homework level has been through the roof for the whole of February. It's crazy!

Take the Pledge

2009-02-21T16:40:00.002-06:00

The Concerned Americans for Hope have a new, very enlightening video. Enjoy.

Letter from the Boss

2009-02-21T00:46:00.002-06:00

Via Rod Dreher's Crunch Con blog, this little gem which strikes at, if not the base of the problem, then something very close to it. The philosophy behind this appears to be that the government's main failing is that it penalizes the productive and rewards the sluggards. True, but I think the real problem, which this anonymous author touches on briefly, is that many people believe the government can actually fix the economic crisis--how ludicrous! There are problems government can solve. They involve land disputes and criminals and wars. They do not involve finance and business. Certainly, business got us into this mess with sub-prime mortgages and the like (the flaw in libertarianism: unrestrained capitalism has no forethought.) However, government can't bail us out. Unless the government actually controls the economy, which it does not, its reforms can have little effect. As always, supply and demand will rule the day and we will have to whether this recession and hopefully come out ahead.

To All My Valued Employees,
There have been some rumblings around the office about the future of this company, and more specifically, your job. As you know, the economy has changed for the worse and presents many challenges. However, the good news is this: The economy doesn't pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is the changing political landscape in this country.
However, let me tell you some little tidbits of fact which might help you decide what is in your best interests.
First, while it is easy to spew rhetoric that casts employers against employees, you have to understand that for every business owner there is a Back Story. This back story is often neglected and overshadowed by what you see and hear. Sure, you see me park my Mercedes outside. You've seen my big home at last years Christmas party. I'm sure; all these flashy icons of luxury conjure up some idealized thoughts about my life.

However, what you don't see is the BACK STORY :

I started this company 28 years ago. At that time, I lived in a 300 square foot studio apartment for 3 years. My entire living apartment was converted into an office so I could put forth 100% effort into building a company, which by the way, would eventually employ you.
My diet consisted of Ramen Pride noodles because every dollar I spent went back into this company. I drove a rusty Toyota Corolla with a defective transmission. I didn't have time to date. Often times, I stayed home on weekends, while my friends went out drinking and partying. In fact, I was married to my business -- hard work, discipline, and sacrifice.
Meanwhile, my friends got jobs. They worked 40 hours a week and made a modest $50K a year and spent every dime they earned. They drove flashy cars and lived in expensive homes and wore fancy designer clothes. Instead of hitting the Nordstrom's for the latest hot fashion item, I was trolling through the discount store extracting any clothing item that didn't look like it was birthed in the 70's. My friends refinanced their mortgages and lived a life of luxury. I, however, did not. I put my time, my money, and my life into a business with a vision that eventually, someday, I too, will be able to afford these luxuries my friends supposedly had.
So, while you physically arrive at the office at 9am, mentally check in at about noon, and then leave at 5pm, I don't. There is no "off" button for me. When you leave the office, you are done and you have a weekend all to yourself. I unfortunately do not have the freedom. I eat, and breathe this company every minute of the day. There is no rest. There is no weekend. There is no happy hour. Every day this business is attached to my hip like a 1 year old special-needs child. You, of course, only see the fruits of that garden -- the nice house, the Mercedes, the vacations... you never realize the Back Story and the sacrifices I've made.
Now, the economy is falling apart and I, the guy that made all the right decisions and saved his money, have to bailout all the people who didn't. The people that overspent their paychecks suddenly feel entitled to the same luxuries that I earned and sacrificed a decade of my life for.
Yes, business ownership has is benefits but the price I've paid is steep and not without wounds.
Unfortunately, the cost of running this business, and employing you, is starting to eclipse the threshold of marginal benefit and let me tell you why:
I am being taxed to death and the government thinks I don't pay enough. I have state taxes. Federal taxes. Property taxes. Sales and use taxes. Payroll taxes. Workers compensation taxes. Unemployment taxes. Taxes on taxes. I have to hire a tax man to manage all these taxes and then guess what? I have to pay taxes for employing him. Government mandates and regulations and all the accounting that goes with it, now occupy most of my time. On Oct 15th, I wrote a check to the US Treasury for $288,000 for quarterly taxes. You know what my "stimulus" check was? Zero. Nada. Zilch.
The question I have is this: Who is stimulating the economy? Me, the guy who has provided 14 people good paying jobs and serves over 2,200,000 people per year with a flourishing business? Or, the single mother sitting at home pregnant with her fourth child waiting for her next welfare check? Obviously, government feels the latter is the economic stimulus of this country.
The fact is, if I deducted (Read: Stole) 50% of your paycheck you'd quit and you wouldn't work here. I mean, why should you? That's nuts. Who wants to get rewarded only 50% of their hard work? Well, I agree which is why your job is in jeopardy.
Here is what many of you don't understand ... to stimulate the economy you need to stimulate what runs the economy. Had suddenly government mandated to me that I didn't need to pay taxes, guess what? Instead of depositing that $288,000 into the Washington black-hole, I would have spent it, hired more employees, and generated substantial economic growth. My employees would have enjoyed the wealth of that tax cut in the form of promotions and better salaries. But you can forget it now.
When you have a comatose man on the verge of death, you don't defibrillate and shock his thumb thinking that will bring him back to life, do you? Or, do you defibrillate his heart? Business is at the heart of America and always has been. To restart it, you must stimulate it, not kill it. Suddenly, the power brokers in Washington believe the poor of America are the essential drivers of the American economic engine. Nothing could be further from the truth and this is the type of change you can keep.
So where am I going with all this?
It's quite simple.
If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, my reaction will be swift and simple. I'll fire you and your coworkers. You can then plead with the government to pay for your mortgage, your SUV, and your child's future. Frankly, it isn't my problem any more.
Then, I will close this company down, move to another country, and retire. You see, I'm done. I'm done with a country that penalizes the productive and gives to the unproductive. My motivation to work and to provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it, will be my citizenship.
So, if you lose your job, it won't be at the hands of the economy; it will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this country, steamrolled the constitution, and will have changed its landscape forever. If that happens, you can find me sitting on a beach, retired, and with no employees to worry about....
Signed, THE BOSS

"I bear in my body the marks of our Lord Jesus"

2009-02-15T18:31:00.002-06:00

Paul was stoned and shipwrecked. At a time when forty lashes were considered a death sentence, Paul received thirty-nine lashes not once, but five times. "Let no one cause me trouble," he says in Galatians, "for I bear in my body the marks of our Lord Jesus." Paul was a juggernaut. His body and spirit were enabled by the Holy Spirit to withstand the inhuman trials he faced during his ministry. In prison, in constant threat of death, Paul glorified God at all times.

But that was two thousand years ago. Are there still Christians with this self-sacrificial zeal for the Kingdom?

Indeed there are. Ten-year-old Namrata Nayak stares out of the above photo horrifically scarred by a bomb planted in her home by Hindu extremists last August. She is permanently disfigured.

Nayak's face was severely mutilated after Hindu extremists bombed the home where she was staying on Aug. 26. They broke into the house and burned it while Nayak and her siblings hid in a small bathroom. Before exiting the home, they left a bomb in a dresser, according to the report.

While the little girl surveyed the destruction, the bomb detonated and burned her face.

The explosion also lodged shrapnel into her face, hands and back.

And what was this girl's response to the devestation inflicted upon her and her family? She forgave her attackers.

"The world has seen my face destroyed by the fire, now it must come to know my smile full of love and peace…I want to dedicate my life to spreading the Gospel.”

“[W]e forgive the Hindu radicals who attacked us, who burned our homes…They were out of their minds, they do not know the love of Jesus. For this reason, I now want to study so that when I am older I can tell everyone how much Jesus loves us. This is my future."

The Anchoress says: "Her eyes are fearless. She is unintimidated. She looks directly at you, with a collectedness and assurance that only comes from deep interior knowledge. Namrata Nayak knows who she is. At 10 years of age, she understands the world in ways many of us never will, no matter how long we tread the stony paths."

American Christians have grown fat and complacent, perfectly willing to serve both God and money. But when they find out that serving both is impossible, many of them would choose the comfort and affluence of their lives over the suffering and hardship that they might go through in God's service. How many people I know could forgive anyone who did this to them? Could I do it?

Most American Christians probably have very little idea about how much persecution there actually is in the world. In Arab countries, Christians can easily be murdered for their faith. In China they can be imprisoned and beaten. And in India, they can be horrifically burned and treated as outcasts. When becoming a Christian means going to church once a week, serving in "praise band" and going to Bible study once in a while, there is by default little of the vitality that comes from a faith forged in the fires of persecution.

Christians need to suffer for Christ. They may not be burned or martyred, but they will have to give up elements of their lives that are unfit for one living in Christ. They may have to give up their time and money to aid those less fortunate. For Christians, this world is merely a test track, the results of which determine whether we will be spending eternity in heaven or hell. When Paul says he has run the race and kept the faith, it means he has completed his laps around the test track, and been found worthy of God's grace. Namrata Nayak may have a long life of ministry ahead of her, or she may not. But she, like Paul, has been tested and been indwelled by the Spirit to such an extent that she has come out of the experience stronger than ever. God Bless, Namrata.

Macs, Cars, and other things I love (like stimulus checks)

2009-01-30T21:38:00.010-06:00

In car news, Porsche, Lamborghini, and Aston Martin are all releasing four-door sedans.

Lamborghini has previously released a Hummer-like behemoth of an SUV during the cheap-fuel days of the 1980s. Porsche, during the cheap-fuel days of the early-2000s, realeased a gargantuan sports car of an SUV known as the Cayenne. The Reventon and the Panamera, however, are the first real sedans for the companies. Aston, on the other hand, has a long--if mixed history with four-door vehicles. In 1944, they released a striking concept called the Atom, which failed to make production. They continued making sedans, stopping only after the love-it/hate-it Lagonda, styled by William Towns, which ended production in 1989. Personally, I think it's aesthetically pleasing with a few exceptions. However, I will now post pictures of the three new sedans from each company and you can tell me in the comments which one you favor.

The Lamborghini Estoque. This car is a concept, which means that (1) it is not cleared for production, and (2) it takes design liberties that will not be present in the production model if there is one. In other words, it looks cooler.

The Aston Martin Rapide. This is the production version, so this is what it will look like driving down your street. Stunning, eh?
And finally, the Porsche Panamera. Which one's your favorite? Vote in the comments.

Sorry about the video. Pirates of the Carribean does not equal Porsche Panamera...honestly.

In other car news, many kudos to Ford for refusing the "free money" offered to the Big Three by Congress. This proves what I've said all along: Ford is the best car company in existence.

Several more things I'd like to cover. First of all, why do I always get the urge to post when no one has commented on my previous post? I am, by bumping it down a notch, consigning my last post to perpetually unread status. Anyone visiting this blog while this post is the first in the line-up will, by some quirk of the human mind, believe that every time they visit there is one--and only one--new post, and thus will not scroll down. At least, that's how it works for me. Ah, well. Scroll down, guys!

I've decided my next computer will be a Mac, probably a MacBook. I hope my OS isn't laced with insidious Microsoft warez ready to take over my system at any sign of switching to McKintosh...or whatever it's called. However, I'm trying to convince myself that it would be completely selfish and irrational to buy a new computer--especially an $850 (refurbished) Mac. I know I'll be getting a refund from the government if I file my taxes--probably about $100. Mom also thinks I might get a "stimulus check" as part of the government's response to the economic crisis--a response that makes my foolish selfishness look like gospel wisdom. If I did get a stimulus check for, say, $200, then my net contribution to the government since I first got a job in mid-June would be approximately -$150.

I was a conservative republican and against a minimum wage hike until I became a minimum-wage worker. It is frighteningly easy to thoughtlessly dismiss something you've never experienced. It's basically impossible to live on minimum wage--no one should have to. It's very easy to be selfish about "government regulation of the economy," which does sap jobs. But now that I'm in the position of a low-wage worker, I...still don't support a raised minimum wage. Nor universal health care. Nor high taxes if and when I ever become wealthy. Nor government-funded social-engineering programs--like "abstinence-only" and "no-abstinence" sex education programs--basically any publicly funded sex-ed programs. I'm still a conservative, even though I have a low wage job. That's one hurdle I've crossed. The bottom line is that I'd rather be poor and free than poor and dependent on the government to spoon the protein mash and anti-fertility drugs into my mouth.

I'd rather do it for myself, thanks much.

Macintosh is a rabidly corporate company. Behind that silver-plated, trendy New-Left visage, however, it is a competent company that makes computers so far above the Microsoft standards that the mind simply can't take it in. My grandma has had an old iMac, circa 1998, that runs better eleven years on than my fourteen-months-old laptop. Mom is on her fifth computer since then: (three desktops and two laptops--all of which, it should be said, are still running. But only after extensive repairs and modifications.) Apple trumpets the fact that it makes the OS and the computer itself to fit each other, so that there is no conflict between the two.

Apple Computer is an odd, clannish company. There is so much mythology surrounding the company it could be cut with a knife. Apple itself has done nothing to discourage this: Steve Jobs' introduction of the original Macintosh should prove that to you. It's a cross between exultant over-competence and shameless egotism. Very dated, yet interesting.

And Mac's famous 1984 ad parodying--you guessed it--1984 by Orwell, urging consumers to fight the system (Microsoft.)

I really, really want a MacBook. But they have discounts for college students,

so I will definitely wait till then. And maybe I'll just wait until this poor Acer conks out (or I get a good offer for it.)

I got this laptop for $450, and I've definitely had my money's worth. I don't intend to stop now.

Fictional Moldovan Soccer Phenom Tells All

2009-01-24T22:01:00.004-06:00

The demise of the cobwebby Olde Media is taking much too long. Sure, sites as humble as Yahoo! News and as serious as CNN.com have done their part; and I genuinely hope that the bankruptcy of the odious Star Tribune is but the first of many. However, I will not be assured of the ultimate success of this phenomenon until the Newspaper of Record; the Gray Lady; the uppity liberal litterbox-liner; is consigned to the history books. I speak, of course, of the New York Times.

The rise of the New Media has given us such hysterically leftist sites as the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos. It has also given us, thankfully, Slate.com. Slate, while left-leaning, is largely objective, well-written, serious and enjoyable. They have a knack for digging up interesting, obscure issues--and making some where there aren't any. For example, two recent articles mused diversely about ridiculously convoluted congressional districts and their impact on the electoral vote and other things, and a man's musings about why his enormous steer was spiritually at peace. It is just the eclectic but topical and interesting assortment of articles a quirky new-media website needs.

This article was so funny that I read it to the whole household, where it received much acclaim. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

An Irish sports journalist from Galway began a clever hoax in a sports forum regarding a fictional Moldovan soccer player with alleged godlike skills. From there it only went up: At one point before he came out of the closet as fictional, Masal Bugduv was rated by no less a newspaper than the Times of London (talking about arthritic and snobby olde-media anachronisms) to be the 30th most promising soccer player in the world. Incidently, "Masel Bugduv" is a whatchamacallit to the Irish Gaelic "M'Asal Beag Dubh," which means "my little black donkey." Which, coincidentally, is the title of a short story by early-20th-Century Irish writer Pádraic Ó Conaire--"about a man tricked into overpaying for a lazy donkey based on some vivid village gossip, can be read anachronistically as a parody of the culture of soccer transfers, in which the flaming rings of hype around a player—about how good he is, where he might go, how much a club might pay for him—often seem to overwhelm the minor matter of what he does on the pitch."

Intrigued? Read the article. It's hilarious.

Mosings on Bush

2009-01-16T09:44:00.002-06:00

My last post was devestatingly critical of our 43rd president. While much of that was accurate, I believe I failed to illustrate the positive aspects of our much-maligned leader. Perhaps I was just angry that night, perhaps I bought into virtual lynching he has received from the liberal media. Either way, W's good deeds as well as the not-so-good ones deserve to be told.

1. He cut taxes. All tax cuts are good tax cuts, so the Bush tax cuts must be too.

2. His response to the 9/11 attacks was spot-on. If for no other reason, Bush's response to 9/11 will be his reconciling factor in the history books. He was prompt, he was honest, he got things done. Afghanistan and Iraq were pulled of (initially) without a hitch. Post-invasion, he stumbled. Rumsfeld was the wrong man for the job; Gates is much better. But the Surge worked in Iraq, there's no reason to think that dealing thusly with the Taliban in Afghanistan won't. Bush led on 9/11. He led the American people through a time of great sorrow, but also great unity. However, under his watch that unity also crumbled into petty squabbling.

3. He has been consistently pro-life. As Dad remarked to me today, "Eight years of a pro-life president, even if he is a big-government pro-life president, is worth it." And so it was.

4. He wasn't Al Gore. All criticism of Bush should be qualified with, "Well, it would have been ten times worse under Gore." Or Kerry.

All in all, I think that Bush will be another Hoover of history. Only, however, because historians are almost entirely liberal revisionists with no real interest in facts, only spin. In any just portrait of the Bush era, he would be a largely sympathetic figure. He tried, and sometimes succeeded. But that can't fix the fact that he never had Reagan's, or even Clinton's tie with the American people--and that is what it takes to be a great president.

In other news, R.I.P. Andrew Wyeth. A great painter.

Mosings44

2009-01-09T19:05:00.003-06:00

Thoughts on President Obama and the aftermath of Election 2008.

The Republicans suffered a searing electoral defeat in November; Barack Obama was swept into office by a substantial margin, and Republicans lost ground in both the House and the Senate. Though a bleak picture overall for conservatives, the election did yield some rather unexpected bright spots.

1. The people of American's most populous (and most liberal) state affirmed, by a surprisingly broad margin, the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. The people of California passed Proposition 8, which provoked the fury of diseased sybarites throughout the state. The sweet and fluffy LGBT community yelled racial epithets at African-American people because...you guessed it...they don't support gay marriage. In Colorado, they burned a Mormon Bible outside of a Mormon church because many Mormons also do not support gay marriage. So life is back to normal out west; but the sanctity of marriage has won a small victory.

2. McCain-Palin didn't win. Frankly, the ticket was a bit of a disaster. I respect Senator McCain greatly, but his campaign was a shambles and his team's handling of Sarah Palin; the whole vapid "Drill, Baby, Drill" and "bulldog with lipstick" routines were probably more shocking than anything to sane Americans. I don't blame this on Palin; I read a recent article written by an Alaskan who said that, back home in the Yukon, Palin wasn't a hard-charging, mindless partisan, but a sincere, canny leader, unafraid to stand up to the Republican machine and compromise with her erstwhile opponents. Much as I respect her, however, she does not inspire confidence. I am sure she does a capable job as Alaska's governor. However, as Alaska goes so the lower 49 do not. Alaska has always danced to its own tune, and this case is no different. Sarah Palin is and will remain an oddity out of the north; maligned through no fault of her own. McCain simply is not a man I would trust to lead this country through the troubled waters it now faces. Where Obama exudes assurance and icy calm, McCain is inflammatory and, in a gravelly way, shrill.

3. I have always believed that the Republican party is more effective as a minority party. Fighting a heroic rear-guard defense against the forces of big-government liberalism. The Democratic party is, after all the party of government; it's their natural habitat. The Republicans are the minority party, then, going into an administration that seems so far determined to run an accountable and, at least on the surface, bipartisan White House. Whether that will be the case in the long run remains to be seen, but perhaps given competent Republican leadership, the party can regain control of itself and perhaps make gains in, if not 2010, then 2012.

Notice that I was positive about McCain's loss, not Obama's win. There is a strong distaste for Obama among conservatives, which I can certainly understand. His power over the electorate is unbelievably strong, almost unnerving. I am not, however, greatly dismayed about the course of this country as we move into the 44th presidency. Barack Obama has picked Republicans for his cabinet; he chose conservative mega-pastor Rick Warren to deliver his inaugural dedication; he supports the sanctity of marriage; and last but not least, he plans to cut taxes by $310 billion.

Barack Obama's cabinet picks so far have been startlingly reminiscent of Clinton's. In fact, I have not seen any yet that didn't serve in some capacity in the Clinton administration. This is both a good and a bad thing. It is good because these people presumably have experience, and Clinton's Third Way policies are certainly not the worst Democratic tradition Obama could choose to emulate. It's bad because the Clinton administration was corrupt; it's biggest achievement the perjurous defense of Clinton from legitimate impeachment charges.

Barack Obama exudes leadership, like Master Yoda's aura in the force. He is icy calm at all times. His voice is deep and soothing. I'm trying not to make him sound like a Hindu god here, but you've all seen his unbreakable composure. Most of my political life has been during the Bush administration, watching a man who is either viciously cunning or a complete dolt make mercurial decisions in which men have died. Bush's famous actions on 9/11 notwithstanding, his presidency has been insular; he has been almost as distant and removed from the people, and they from him and the real process of governing this country, as an ancient, implacable Chinese dynastic emperor. Obama promises to involve the people in the legislative process once again. If Obama is the man he promised this country, then this country is in good hands--regardless of his policies. If Obama is the reasonable man of sense I expect him to be, he will see the stupidity of withdrawing our troops from the Middle East as so many Democrats have called for; and hopefully find a better course.

I have not joined the Obama bandwagon. He could be dangerous if he uses his unshakeable charisma to guide the American people down the wrong road; like a master leading a trusting horse to the knacker's yard. If he leads this country astray, America will break him. But I hope that God will bless his presidency, and that he will be the true leader that Bush was not.

Finding Jesus in London

2008-12-21T15:02:00.002-06:00

London's impressive bid to become the world's most secular city looked promising only a decade ago. But no longer. Britain's capital has quickly become the second most devout area in the country. Trinity Brompton Church, located between the famed department store Herrod's and that monument to secular humanism, the Natural History Museum, has 15,000 members, a figure which has tripled in the last twenty years, with an average age of 27.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1866094,00.html Read, it's a great article.

In addition, I love this video because any rock song is better with the addition of harmony and a mandolin.

My Poor, Neglected Bloglet...I Have Not Posted In 20 Days...I Had To Fly To Thee

2008-12-19T19:42:00.004-06:00

If I believed in self-flagellation, my neglect of this blog for the past month would certainly induce me to do it. However, I don't, and in my defense it's been a more-than-usually busy Christmas season. In the time since my last post, President-Elect Obama has come many steps closer to his inauguration as leader of the free world, one of his political mentors has been caught blatantly trying to sell his Senate seat; the gritty, moral tale of good and evil in the city known as the Dark Knight has been released on DVD, I have watched a few good movies and quite a few bad ones, and most importantly Dokime has completed its phenomenal Christmas concert. And those are just the headlines.

All of you, I'm sure, have heard that the Illinois political machine has stretched to the breaking point. Governor Rod Blagejovich, who has always struck me as a bit of a thug, has proved it by trying to blatantly sell Obama's Senate seat. He is reported as saying, referring to the recently-vacated Senate seat, "I've got this thing and it's #$%&ing golden; I'm not giving it up for #$%&ing anything." He was planning on selling it in exchange for a position in Obama's administration or cash. And if his press conference today is any indicator, he does not intend to accept the consequences of his actions and resign. Striking an absurdly self-righteous tone, he vowed, "I will fight. I will fight. I will fight until I take my last breath. I have done nothing wrong." Smug idiot. He went on further to villify his opponents, saying that they were keeping him from doing the people's work; "I will not just quit the job the people hired me for." Well, bub, it's a rare thing for a politician to recognize that his job exists only at the behest of the people, but you've missed the most crucial part--they hired you, they can also fire you, and if there's justice in this world they will. What we're seeing here is someone placed on virtual indefinite leave because of his own actions, ignorantly and absurdly trying to do his job. You failed, Rod. Give up.

The hysteria over the people of California's bold move to uphold traditional marriage borders; nay, exceeds ludicrous. Gay activists have shouted racial epithets at African-Americans, they have burned a Mormon Bible outside a Mormon church; they have blockaded churches. Are these the acts of rational human beings? As Paul might say, "May it never be!" Without sounding insensitive or judgmental--the Lord knows I have my own problems--the diseased, warped feelings that gays and lesbians feel are perversions of the natural order; their cry for equality with normal people is almost a plea for help: "Accept me. Tell me that I'm normal." You're not normal--they don't call you queers for nothing. There is no justification for your actions. They are the twisted and warped versions of God's original plan for the procreation of man. Homoseuxals to Heterosexuals are, if you will, like orcs to elves. The fact that liberals are so eager to turn over the history of civilization so that Rosie O'Donnell can sleep soundly at night knowing that she is "married" to a woman, is disturbing but also heartening: it reveals the utter intellectual desert of the Democratic party today. "We have no ideas for improving this country...We're just going to make sure queers can get hitched."

I've been thinking about colleges lately. The UW-RF is the modest choice, and my other ideas so far are Calvin College, Wheaton College, and New St. Andrews College. The latter is a tiny private school with some big Reformed names in Idaho, with very appealing and Biblical ideals.

Speaking of religion, I found out today that Christopher Hitchens did a religious debate with Doug Wilson, and looked up some footage on YouTube. Hitchens seems willing and able to debate any religious person, and his experience shows. It was a definite contrast. Hitchens is round-shouldered and bulky, with a receding hairline, and a baggy, owlish disposition. He looks like a statue of Ricky Gervais that has melted slightly. Doug Wilson, on the other hand, is a characteristically restrained Calvinist. He has broad, square shoulders, a wide, straight brow, thick eyebrows, a big beard and a grizzled, open disposition to Hitchens' acerbic, refined style. The whole debate hasn't been released yet, but I will watch it eagerly when it is; and compare it with the three other debates I have seen Hitchens in: with Dinesh D'Souza, with Marvin Olasky, and with Al Sharpton. The four of them together represent the great diversity of Christianity, but Hitchens has debated them all.

My brain grows impaired with the fogginess. I will, unfortunately, be gone for most of Christmas break, but I hope that in the slow month of January I will be able to devote more time to blogging. Until such time as I return, farewell.

Soli Deo Causa!

The Auto Industry: Will it Survive? + Car Lust

2008-11-30T19:32:00.002-06:00

The news from Detroit has been grim, Willie Nelson is playing On the Road Again, Russia is being bellicose, and Elvis is still dead. Sound like 1977? Well, it's not. It's 2008. The auto industry, like Willie Nelson, has been on a downward spiral for the last thirty years; and the Wall Street turmoil has recently accelerated the decline of the three monolithic, neolithic companies known as the Big Three. This decline has led to forty-percent of Detroit being vacant, and to the great state of Michigan being reduced to an old, rusting hulk, resembling nothing more than an Edsel slowly decomposing in some hot, wasp-filled junkyard.

What are the roots of this decline? First of all, corporate monopolizing. The Big Three didn't have to make cars safe, or even very much better than the last models, because they had no competition except each other. That led to Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed and many other books. The Volkswagen Beetle notwithstanding, American cars had pretty much uncontested domination of the US market from World War II to about 1977. The gas crunch and embargo in the early parts of that decade made cheap, small imports chic. Detroit tried to adapt; and the consumer got some truly awful cars: the AMC Gremlin, the Chevette, and the later Novas come to mind. Then came Toyota, Honda, Nissan. Luxury buyers had BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes in their garage instead of Cadillacs. People still bought American cars, but sales were sliding.

Then came corporate regulation and CAFE standards for emissions and fuel-economy. But with cheap fuel, SUVs became big. Then gas went up, so did fuel standards, the companies spent years and billions retooling, trying to overcome the idiotic union rules and...here we stand. There are so many underpinning reasons to this decline, it would take a book to list them all. And no one can agree who to blame. My grandpa, an old auto worker who quit because, after a short period, he decided that he didn't want to do that for the rest of his life, blames the unions for driving up costs. I blame the government, for setting unreasonable (and inherently wrongheaded) emissions and economy goals. Many other people blame the companies themselves for their greed and response to the factors listed above. As usual, I'm sure the truth lies in the middle. But whatever the cause, the fact is that Detroit is in a mess.

Rick Wagoner, the CEO of GM, and someone I've always regarded as sensible, says that GM needs money from the gummint within the next two weeks; Chrysler needs it at the latest during 2009. Ford can make it till 2010--when sales are expected to pick back up. The three heads of these companies were unashamedly begging for money from congress as part of the bailout bill, which was originally supposed to be used to buy loans from banks. In desperation to qualify, GM has even turned its accounting arm, GMAC, into more of a conventional bank--laughable.

Should Congress give the Big Three this money? It's a tough question. Frankly, I LIKE American cars a lot. Ford and GM, at least, have been coming out with many apealling models in the last two years, with more expected. The sad thing about this financial crisis happening when it has is that, just when Ford and GM and Chrysler were making some advances to being 21st century car companies, the credit crisis comes in: they can't borrow money to innovate, and their cars don't sell because their customers can't get loans either. As Glenn Beck aptly pointed out, the government is part of the reason the B3 are in this mess--shouldn't they get them out of it? Ford may survive without a bailout or even outside investment. But GM and Chrysler, with less prudent business practices, will not. Either the government bails them out, they are bought by outside interests--who could merely liquidate them for profit--or they go bankrupt.

I support the second option: GM, Chrysler, put yourselves up for sale--I'm sure someone would be interested. Congress, after deliberations that looked like seabirds squabbling over fish scraps on some godforsaken, crap-festooned rock in the middle of the ocean, have decided for now to deny the B3's request. We'll see what this year holds. Will the economy come back up? Will Cerberus Capital Management, the owner of Chrysler, bail out of the sinking ship and put it for sale? Will self-owned GM and Ford be bought? Will Toyota and the other foreign brands profit at Detroit's expense, or go down with the economy? (The latter looks true right now.) These are the questions to ask throughout 2009, and hopefully the answers to them will lead to a 2010 with all three companies still intact, some way or another. But if that doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. I hope it does, because I love good old American iron, but we will see what the future holds.

I know more about cars and the car industry than I know about just about anything else. It comes from reading car magazines religiously since I was about five. To this, my Grandpa Gray is much to blame for passing on to me at that impressionable age his Motor Trend back issues. I was simply crazy about all kinds of cars. I say "was" because since I've started driving the enthusiasm has, oddly, deadened somewhat. I attribute some of this to the fact that I can't as yet drive a stick-shift, which car magazines generally swear is the only right way. Another factor might be our (American) car, which is a 4000-pound, prune-colored enigma. I'm grudgingly fond of it, but I'm the first to point out it's many faults, and it has perhaps taken some of the fun out of driving. The final deciding factor, however, is what a serious and dangerous business driving really is. There's a downside to the sporty roadsters I've lusted over in the past: they're death traps in an accident. There's a downside to the big muscle cars I looked at for hours years ago: they use way too much of an expensive and stinky fossil fuel. People drive around in steel missiles at high speeds; and when these missiles hit each other bad things happen. Put a drunk man behind the wheel of a 5000-pound SUV, and it can become a 65-mph missile, more deadly than a bullet. These serious facts of life have dimmed my childish enthusiasm...but not so much that I don't love cars. They can be fantastic works of designing art, and when they work right they can be immensely satisfying.

Case in point, the new Nissan 370Z. I am in lust with this beautiful hunk of metal. 330 horsepower, $30,000. And it's drop-dead beautiful to boot. I remember when the 350Z came out, I thought it was competent but ugly. The designers had the Porsche Boxster squarely in their sights when designing it, for 20k less, and by all accounts they made a good attempt. The new Z looks to supersede that. Here's a video...isn't it amazing? Listen to that engine note. Gorgeous.

Weekly Editorial Cartoons

2008-11-26T00:38:00.002-06:00

I missed this last Saturday, but I have an excuse--I had, almost literally, no time to blog. So, here they are.

Best Editorial Cartoons of the Week

2008-11-15T15:40:00.002-06:00

A new weekly feature on Mosings (hold me to it) will be the Top Four editorial cartoons of the seven-day period. Here is the first installment.

Predictions: The Obama Presidency + 2012

2008-11-13T17:08:00.002-06:00

Obama Presidency Predictions

Obama's staff picks so far have been astonishingly Clinton-era; nary a new face. Clinton-ite, and pusher behind the NAFTA Free Trade Agreement that most people point to when they talk about Clinton's "centrist" policies, Rahm Emanuel, as previously mentioned, will be chief-of-staff. John Podesta, another rabid liberal partisan will be head of Obama's so called "Transition Project," which appears to be a way that Obama can lead before he's actually sworn in.

For the Cabinet, the odiously liberal HuffPo has a Dem-insider post about likely Cabinet picks.

Attorney General: The HuffPo says that former Bush AG Alberto Gonzales brought "controversy" to this post, but seems to have forgotten Janet Reno's bloody attack on religious nuts in the early nineties...ever heard of Waco? Arizona governor Janet Napolitano is reportedly in line for this post. Young, Black governor Deval Patrick is also being considered for this post in young, Black president Obama's cabinet.

Treasury Secretary: Tim Geithner, Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve, and a protege of Clinton-era TS Robert Rubin, is being considered, as well as another Clinton-era TS, the former president of Harvard, Larry Summers. Summers was fired from his (tenured) post at Harvard when he suggested that there may be inherent differences between men and women in the fields of science and engineering....Amazing. Both of these men are Clinton "centrists."

Secretary of Defense: Robert Gates, the current secretary, is probably going to stay for a while. After that, Colin Powell's name is being bandied around, but he's already served in the post under two presidents and has shown no interest. Richard Danzig, former Navy Secretary, is also being considered.

Secretary of State: The laughable John Kerry is reportedly angling hard for this job; other candidates are, surprisingly, a Republican; RINO Chuck Hagel of Nebraska; and three boring Obama policy advisors. Although, if Robert Gates is kept on as Defense Secretary, another high-ranking Republican cabinet secretary is unlikely. (Although, as Glenn Beck noted on Monday, Gates is not a registered Republican.)

Other posts:

Sec. of Agriculture: Former governor Tom Vilsack, of (you guessed it) Iowa--although he was a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton (where is she in these discussions, by the way? Obama seems to have totally ignored her.) We Wisconsinites are much better at agriculture than the poor sappy Iowans, so may I humbly suggest to President Obama that you rid us of...err, I mean, appoint WI governor Jim Doyle to the job? Word around here is that Doyle would accept a post if it were offered to him, but it might lose the Wisconsin governorship to the Democrats.

Energy: Many people, from PA governor Ed Rendell to CA governor and Republican Ah-nold Schwarzanegger are being considered.

Education: Joel Klein or Caroline Kennedy.

Policy-wise, Obama seems to be following in Clinton's footsteps, with many old Clinton names and policies. He seems committed to ending the war in Iraq, and possibly Afghanistan as well, although he may renege on that promise if as president, he is made aware of the blow to US image it would be and the other reasons against pulling out. He would have to weigh whether upsetting the anti-war wing of the party with a phased withdrawal (like Bush's plan) would lose him more votes than the possible awful consequences to our image abroad, not to mention middle-eastern policy and politics and the possibility that emboldened terrorists would

Predictions for the 2012 Election

This all depends on Obama's presidency. Will he be Carter or Clinton? He is certainly angling to be the next Clinton, but if the economy heads even farther south, that would reflect badly on him as it did on Carter, and if he withdraws from Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a serious possibility of war in the Middle-East, possibly between Pakistan and Afghanistan, or Iran and Iraq (2.0). If Obama is a weak brand for re-election in 2012, the challenger is all the more important. If Obama seems strong or moderate, as Clinton was in '96, the LAST thing we want to do is nominate another Dole (like McCain would be then.)

Mitt Romney (who would be the first Mormon president) is already gearing up for 2012, and barring anything unexpected, he is the frontrunner: his strong economic experience would be a huge asset. Conservatives are likely to support Louisiana Republican success story Bobby Jindal, who would be the first Indian-American president, who has governed post-Katrina LA with grace and aplomb, or Sarah Palin. We will see in 2012 if Palin's image has been permanently dented by the McCain camp's mishandling of her: the whole "bulldog in lipstick" thing, I've heard, is very different than the image she cultivated as Alaska governor, and probably boiled up by the McCain people. If she put that behind her, she would be strong in 2012. If not, she would be a goof on the Dan Quayle scale. Mike Huckabee is not to be ruled out. All of these candidates seem good for 2012, just as none of them seemed particularly good for 2008. Ideally, I would pick Jindal-Huckabee, but they are so publically Christian that it might be hard. Romney-Palin could be worse, as could Romney-Huckabee or Huckabee-Romney. Romney-Jindal would be a strong ticket, but anything with Palin on the top might not fly.

Enjoy four years of the Obamaniac!

Four Years of Obama-Biden...Saints Preserve US

2008-11-07T20:18:00.004-06:00

Well, Obama won convincingly. I'm glad, in a way. His victory brings closure. McCain can take his rightful place as respected elder statesman of the Republican Party, and Palin can return to Alaska and continue her good works there, and get excited for 2012. The Republican party is struck down but not destroyed, and will rise again; hopefully better and stronger.

I remember reading a TIME article after Obama's watershed speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, and having a positive impression of Barack Obama. Four years later, I still don't hate him. That's a little scary, considering that I loathe both John Kerry and Al Gore, the previous Democratic candidates. Frankly, the guy is just likable. As I've said before, it's unfortunate that he's a liberal Democrat.

His appointment of partisan Democrat Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff throws his campaign promises of country-before-party out the window. Emanuel, an Orthodox Jew, does underline Obama's support of Isreal however. In the four days since his election, Obama has made more gaffes than in the entire previous campaign combined: he made a insensitive, factually wrong remark about Nancy Reagan, and got into a bit of unpleasantness over a European missile shield. That makes two in four days. His previous record? 1, in the year since his campaign started: the so-called "Bittergate" comments about Pennsylvanians clinging to God and guns; which cost him Pennsylvania and delayed his win in the Democratic primary.

What kind of president will Barack Obama be? There are two options: he doesn't have the guts or the charisma to be the next JFK, but he could very well be the next Jimmy Carter. Republicans, obviously would hope for this, since Carter was so inept that he managed to lose a landslide election to the formerly-disgraced, only four years post-Watergate Republicans and a former actor named Ronald Reagan. He could also be the next FDR. I shudder at this, because the more I find out about FDR, the less I like him. Obama would, thank God, be banned from running for more than two terms, but he could have the same socializing influence; a second New Deal, perhaps--and after six and a half decades of Republicans trying to undo the first one.

I am not exceedingly sorry that the Republicans lost. Why not? The fact is, Democrats are the party of government and Republicans are not; they're preternaturally comfortable there, Republicans squirm. And then when Republicans get into power and office, they don't have the guts to do what they got in there for: reduce, cut, prune government.

And it's also true, conversely, that Republicans are a better minority party than the Democrats. How effective has the Democratic congress been since the 2006 midterms? The answer is, not at all. Reid and Pelosi have a lower approval rating than President Bush. When Republicans have a strong, focused minority, they can effectively block some of the more egregious Democratic policies, and yet still enjoy the inclusiveness of not having to appeal to voters outside the base, making for a stronger, more orthodoz party.

We shall see what the next four years hold. Safe to say, though, they will be nothing like the Bush years. What remains to be seen is whether that's a good or a bad thing.

In God's Hands

2008-10-26T22:53:00.002-05:00

It does not now look like McCain-Palin can turn the tide against the Obama juggernaut. Ah, well. There hasn't been much hope since it became clear that Obama would win the nomination. McCain and especially Palin simply do not have the...anything that Barack Obama possesses. I DEARLY wish he was a conservative Republican, because he is--for better or worse--going to change the world, and conservativism may well be left behind. Mark Levin has a great article at The Corner:

There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff.

It's truly scary. But there is one bright spot: everything is in God's Hands. If He has ordained that America should fall swooning into the clutches of this man, then it is for His purposes and those of us whose aim is to glorify Him should give all praise for it. God bless Senators Obama, McCain, and Biden; and Governor Palin as well. Lord, lead them all in your ways.

Red Hot Chili Peppers

2008-10-23T20:14:00.002-05:00

Have I mentioned to you people how deeply dippy I am about the Red Hot Chili Peppers? They are hands-down the best modern band, and their music is nothing short of incredible.

Two of my favorite songs: Not only is the music great, but these music videos, especially the one for Dani California, are stylistically pleasing and make a statement.

Dani California:

Can't Stop:

The truly amazing thing about this band is that I like their stuff. I mean, all of it. There are quite a few artists who have only made a good song. Without even thinking hard, I can name fifteen amazing Peppers songs. What can I say? I'm addicted.

The Angel's Hand

2008-10-17T20:36:00.000-05:00

The Angel's Hand

M. M. Bratrud

It is a common exercise among art students; exhibited most famously in the works of MC Escher. The idea of the infinite and the incalculable reduced to the finite medium of a canvas. A hand drawing a hand, which in turn is drawing the first hand, or a third hand, which may also draw a fourth hand. The concept is the infinite and the incalculable reduced to the finite medium of a canvas. Escher, in the most famous iteration of this theme, concluded it with two hands. However, the exercise could go on forever, limited only by space. This idea had always intrigued Augusto Palacio Da Silva; and as he stood perusing through the shelves of Castillo & Sons Books, one midsummer evening, while horrendous decade-old German techno assaulted his eardrums from the demonic new ceiling speakers, he wondered why this mind-bending concept had never been applied to writing. The concept would have to be adjusted a little, but Augusto did not see any reason why it could not work.

Da Silva replaced a shiny new anthology of Flaubert, an author he detested, on the shelf. Da Silva shook his head, annoyed. One bad book, like a bad apple, could could quickly ruin Da Silva's appetite for good ones, and with an effort he willed himself to stop thinking about his distaste. Three books to the left of the Flaubert, a tattered green paperback caught his eye. It looked a few decades old; published during the heyday of attention-drawing, bright pastel covers and zany fonts: 1977. In an unfamiliar black or dark green font on the front and side, the book told Da Silva that it was Hand! Write! By a certain James B. Trevelyan. Augusto opened it. The dedication read, To the books that write their author's stories, and to the stories that write their author's books, and above all to the authors that write stories of books; this book humbly dedicates its author.

Da Silva read the sentence again. And again. It made little sense. Part of Da Silva's brain scoffed. English Rigmarole, it thought. But another part of his mind was intrigued. Book in hand, he sat down in a squat leather armchair, the kind which bookstores sprout like bread sprouts mold, and began to read. All the chapters, he noticed without noticing, were labeled “Chapter 1,” although they sported different titles.

Chapter 1: In Which

Ordway Books in Bangor, Maine, wasn't quite the establishment Henry Wallace Bergen II had envisioned owning when he had first become interested in the book business. Bangor wasn't glamorous, but he couldn't pretend that his business was struggling. It as a literary town. Bangor Public Library, after all, regularly had one of the highest circulation rates in the country. Nevertheless, Ordway wasn't perfect. Bergen often dwelled on the idea of a perfect bookstore whenever the bookshop was not busy, which was nearly all the time. Aside from various rules he would enact about smoking while reading (You burn it, you buy it!) , a revolutionary Algebraic filing system, and the elimination of price tags, his most fervent wish was for a Great Discovery. (He always capitalized its in his mind.) A first edition of some classic; or perhaps even something more exotic: an illuminated vellum manuscript confirming the truth of the Arthur legend, a forgotten Norse saga, or, more modestly, just a book he had never heard of written by an unknown or anonymous author, which upon reading proved enchanting. This last had happened several times, even in Bangor, but Bergen had little hope that any of the others would come true. His ideal bookstore would need to be in the old world. Not Britain, and the farther east the better, because of the closer proximity to the Euphrates and Tigris, the cradle of civilization. An abandoned church in Old Krakow, perhaps.

There was a half-hearted ding from the strong of bells Bergen had tied to the door, signaling that the last furtive patron had left the shop. It was around four-thirty in the afternoon on February 23^rd, a time and month which, as most people know, nothing exciting every happens. Tiredly, Bergen sat back on the stool and reached for one of the three hundred books that were within easy arm reach (Ordway was a bookshop of the best kind; crowded with books and not people.) The volume his hands found was a small, unassuming hardcover, with a simple leather cover, typeset in Garamond, “The Bookshop Three Blocks from La Sagrada Familia,” by Adrian Fournier. The date on the inside cover was 1897, and this book was a First Edition from Cabestany House, Barcelona. Bergen opened the book without much interest, and began to read.

“The book of infinity never existed, nor did an infinity of books. Infinities within or concerning books, and books within or concerning infinities, yes, but never THE book of THE infinity. This has not deterred some among the intelligentsia from looking for such a book. This was always unconsciously in Don Augusto Palacio Da Silva's mind as he entered a bookstore. It was no different as he entered Castillo Books that blustery morning in early October. He was ill-dressed for the cool weather, and seemed perpetually surprised by it as most Spaniards are. His thin, fashionably cut jacket was more for style than for wind protection, and he had been buffeted around thoroughly on the short walk from his apartment in Calle Almuradiel to the bookshop. This discomfort left his mind and body as he entered the warm bookshop. To him, it was an obstacle to be conquered. He was a relieving army, the books and patrons of the store were an enemy force besieging a friendly fortress. The fortress was his perfect book; the book of infinity. With the temperature rose his spirits, and soon he was surveying the shelves with a practiced eye. A few times a book would stick out at him, but always he shook his head and returned it to its place. Then, he saw a large book, ornately bound in wine-colored leather. It was entitled 'An Angelus Quod a Libri;' 'An Angel and a Book.' Da Silva opened the book. The book was older than Da Silva had first thought; It was in archaic English, typeset in a way that suggested antiquity. The title page read thus: 'This volume was written by Franz Michael Bastogne of Copenhagen Town and published by Wladislaw & Sons, Berlin, on the Lord's Day of December 15^th, 1771.' Da Silva was mildly interested, for no apparent reason, and brought the heavy book over to a hard stool and guttering candle which were the spartan bookstore's only concessions to customer comfort. He began to read. 'Henry Wallace Bergen was not heeding the fierce rain that beat down from the heavens, but merely pulled his oilskin tighter as he made his way across Rue Antony to the Guiglielmo Library.'”

Bergen stopped reading, deeply puzzled. He read the paragraph again; he had not been mistaken; the book had named Bergen himself. It was incredible that this Bastogne would have conceived of a character with the same name as that of the man who read his book more than a century and a half after it was written. It was mind-bending. Mind-bending and impossible.

Augusto Palacio Da Silva stopped reading, wide-eyed. He looked at the book in his hands warily. What was he holding? The man Bergen had discovered himself in the pages of the book he was reading. Da Silva had too. Da Silva mentally voiced agreement with Bergen; it was mind-bending and impossible. But then he remembered that Bergen was a fictional character. Or was he? Da Silva made an effort in his mind to separate the reality of the bookshop from the almost frightening yet unavoidable unreality of the book in his hands. The techno music that he had detested earlier served as his anchor in the warm, musty reality of the bookshop. But he could not do it. His mind was hopelessly muddled. With a deep breath, he blew out the guttering candle and climbed off the hard wooden stool. No, said Da Silva. There were no candles, no hard stool; that was the other Da Silva. But there is only one, a snide voice in his mind whispered.

Da Silva closed his eyes and shook his head hard, like a man trying to clear the bleariness away after being hit on the head. He removed himself from the clutches of the fat leather chair with some difficulty. His muscles felt unwilling, as if they had not been used for a long time. His left foot, he noticed, had fallen asleep. He gratefully latched on to the painful pins-and-needles as he had done with the techno. Combined, these two influences held him firm, and he was able to limp to the check-out and pay quickly for the book. For some not entirely natural reason, he did not even consider leaving the book behind. Luckily the girl at the check-out was a mute, mousy sort of creature with multiple tattoos and the look of a heroin addict who did not deign to say anything; Da Silva doubted he could have managed to speak. He took the book, in a plastic bag, inclined his head distractedly at the checkout girl, and hobbled out. Without the techno, he again began to lose to lose control of his muscles, half his mind was within the book. The pins and needles, however, were particularly painful, and by concentrating on them he managed to stagger onto a trolley where he closed his eyes and gripped the pole tightly, concentrating on the foul odor of a fat man's Gauloise. This saw him to his stop, but when he paid the trolleyman and exited, the odor quickly dissipated. Da Silva had never longed for the noxious odor more. He found that he no longer had coordinated muscle movement. No one was about, thank goodness, to laugh at the absurd stagger with which he made it to his own front door. Luckily his was a ground floor apartment; stairs would have defeated him entirely. He collapsed into a chair. His fingers could not open the flimsy plastic bag emblazoned with the name of the bookstore. He ended up tearing it to pieces. He opened the book, entirely against his will, found his spot, and began to read. It was not a thick book, he was done by midnight. By that time his mind was gone. Augusto Palacio Da Silva was dead.

But Augusto Palacio Da Silva rose to take his place in full headship of the body of the deceased. He was only too happy to make room for Henry Wallace Bergen II, and for James B. Trevelyan, Franz Michael Bastogne, and, though he fought with Bergen constantly, Da Silva also admitted Henry Wallace Bergen II. And, in the end, he made amends with Augusto Palacio Da Silva, and gave him joint headship of their shared body.

These men, who had always not existed, shared only one thing in common: they had found a book that sired book and was sired in turn by book; the book of infinity and the original Great Discovery; the book by an anonymous author which, upon reading, proved enchanting; it was also the inspiration to every book that has ever held any of these qualities to anyone. This book's origins remained shrouded in mystery, but the bond of its different guises proved strong enough to bend time—and mind—and bring it's discoverers together in one consciousness.

The body of Augusto Palacio Da Silva and all its mental tenants were appointed to the Chairmanship of the Universidad de Barcelona Literary Department in 2017. They were very successful, though their lectures were sometimes confusing and there were dark rumors among the student body of papers which were given two differing grades, and comments and corrections that seemed to disagree with each other, though they were written with the same hand. Da Silva and his tenants wrote a novel, entitled “The Angel's Hand Which Wrote the Sagrada Familia,” but it has been rejected by all the publishers they have sent it to. In 2041 Da Silva's body died, which did not impair them greatly although no one was satisfied with his funeral arrangements. Their next host was Portia De Luca, a young green-eyed University student who had always greatly admired Professor Da Silva, and wandered, one day, into his private library, where a tattered green paperback caught her eye...

I Honestly Seriously Totally Can't Think of Anything to Post About

2008-10-16T16:29:00.003-05:00

There's always politics, but frankly the political scene is so acrid and malicious and depressing that I'd rather not pay attention to it. Or more accurately, since I'm glued to political websites, I don't want to draw YOUR attention to it. As Obama pulls ahead, McCain babbles apoplectically. Whatever happens, it's going to big losses for Republicans this November. All is Vanity. What's the point?

*Sigh*

My life is falling into the school-year routine. Five days of Dokime is nice, actually. I've been more on top of my homework this year than I have been at Dokime ever. I'm working at the library which is so soothing and intellectual and awesome and such a blessing. I'm engulfed in a John Grisham book right now, after trying to read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose...I like to say my literary tastes are wide, but I believe the operative term here would be "fickle."

Mom is in Vegas for a conference, and I miss her. Of all the people to send to Vegas...probably the city on earth most alien to her personality. But she'll be back Saturday.

My new blog motto; I liked St. Athanasius' epitaph, "Athanasius contra mundum," which means "Athanasius against the world," so I adoped it. I hope it meets with your satisfaction.

I'll think of...SOMETHING! to post...EVENTUALLY! Until then, I love you all.

--Sola Gratia

The Abomination of the Obama Nation

2008-10-03T22:08:00.002-05:00

They tell us the movement is like a tidal wave; inexorable, gargantuan, strong but pure and cleansing. Our country is merely the green land this wave will flood, its people the debris the wave will pick up along the way. They are the mainstream media. The wave is Barack Obama.

The level of outright worship accorded to him is past frightening. It's terrifying. It staggers me that America has become so intoxicated with this man.

I have neither the energy nor the inclination for a full-length post, I leave you to meditate upon this frightening specter that has cast it's fell shadow over American politics. Perhaps tomorrow I will edit the Circle Theory, taking into account the editorial comment I have received.

In the meantime, watch this (originally a Metallica song, if you can believe it):

The Circle Theory

2008-09-27T16:46:00.001-05:00

This is something I've been kicking around for awhile, and which I decided to put down on paper.

The idea is...well, I'll let my chart explain. Tell me what you think. I found myself being universally negative, even about things I agree with, so don't take it to heart.

Click to view full-size.

United States of France: Thoughts on the "Bailout"

2008-09-23T22:50:00.004-05:00

Frankly, I've never been particularly interested in economics. In fact, this might be the first post devoted to it in the history of this august blog. The federal government has unveiled a massive plan to nanny the financial sector of our economy, something the decaying remnants of civilization left in the Old Continent have mastered the art of, but which is relatively new on these shores (forgetting, of course, the FDR aberrant, more on that later.)

America has joined our cheese-eating, socialist, surrender monkey "friends" across the Atlantic. I speak, of course, of the French. More in a minute, but this perfect quote from--whodathunkit?--TIME, is the perfect introduction.

"Admit it, mes amis, the rugged individualism and cutthroat capitalism that made America the land of unlimited opportunity has been shrink-wrapped by half a dozen short sellers in Greenwich, Conn., and FedExed to Washington, D.C., to be spoon-fed back to life by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. We're now no different from any of those Western European semi-socialist welfare states that we love to deride. Italy? Sure, it's had four governments since last Thursday, but none of them would have allowed this to go on; the Italians know how to rig an economy."

From: "How we became the United States of France" by Bill Saporito. TIME Magazine, September 21, 2008.

The economic situation, which is in a mild recession, is slightly disturbing. The proposed government bailout, however, is more than slightly terrifying. The federal government, is descending back into the New Deal chaos of government entitlement which only the combined efforts of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41--and grudgingly Clinton--were able to undo the first time around. Ladies and gentlemen, entitlement is back.

The Treasury Department, with Bush appointees Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke at the head, has steamrollered over the legislative process and is buying, according to CNNmoney.com, "from firms up to $700 billion in troubled assets - mainly mortgage-backed securities - whose values have declined as the housing market imploded. The goal is to stabilize the companies and prompt them to lend again."

This is big-government interventionism at its worst. It took the FEMA bureaucrats to get three days to get water to the Louisiana Superdome after Katrina, but in barely that time, more bureaucrats have come up with a bullet-proof, enormous, multi-tiered leviathan of a proposal to essentially bail out their Wall Street masters while simultaneously consolidating their control over the free market.

Thomas Sowell estimates that this vast handout to the Wolves on Wall Street might cost taxpayers, not merely $700 billion, but more than one trillion dollars. Yes, that's $1,000,000,000,000.

$1,000,000,000,000

Let's put this incredibly vast figure in perspective.

Sowell explains what that means: "A trillion seconds ago, no one on this planet could read and write. Neither the Roman Empire nor the ancient Chinese dynasties had yet come into existence. None of the founders of the world’s great religions today had yet been born." And now the government is putting a dollar sign in front of that figure and sucking it out of our pockets.

Even in terms of government spending, this is unprecedented. According to a 2005 MSNBC article, the government put about $200 billion into rebuilding the Gulf Coast after Katrina. One-fifth of what it now plans to spend to ease the worries of a few thousand, high-and-dry white males in one tiny part of the country--Wall Street.

The joint cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to present? $6.4 billion. Add those two numbers together and you have $8.4 billion. That's still much less than this gargantuan figure. Fighting two wars for almost six years, plus recovery from the biggest hurricane in two decades? Laughable beside this.

Heck, this is THREE BILLION DOLLARS MORE than the entire projected Federal budget for 2009 (pre-"bailout"). $997 billion, according to globalissues.org. This is staggering. Incredible. Unthinkable. Impossible. The federal government, has doubled itself and split into two: the government and the government-backed and controlled financial sector. We're supposed to be evolving, but the government is taking it all back to a cellular level. This isn't government growth, it's mitosis.

The Down Syndrome Holocaust

2008-09-19T22:01:00.005-05:00

I have never been comfortable with people who have Down Syndrome. I've had limited exposure to them, but they have always disturbed me. They are humans constrained by a chromosomal accident; a defect that has left them impaired but in no way sub-human. They are largely dependent on others throughout their lives. Even in adulthood, they remain much like children.

I am not comfortable around them because I, like many other people, sense that they are defective. If humanity was an assembly line, they would be miscast rejects.

But humanity is not an assembly line. It is, or should be, a compassionate race.

The human race's conduct towards Down Syndrome children has been a shameful travesty in recent years. 91-93%, yes, that's 91-93% of unborn children who may have Down Syndrome are aborted. Out of one hundred Down Syndrome babies, only seven or nine survive the womb. Abortion is always a terrible thing, but when victims of a certain genetic disorder are singled out like this, it reeks of holocaust. The Left's worse crime in recent years has been the resurrection of the culture of Eugenics: perfection of the human race through selective breeding and, implicitly, the destruction of "unfit" individuals. It is this motive that underpins much Leftist thinking on Abortion, assisted suicide, and the recent move in the United Kingdom to deny healthcare to old and obese people in the hope that they will die and cease being a burden on the system. When healthy, strong men and women of the world look at the old, the obese, the disabled, and those with Down Syndrome, they say or think, "You freaks! You impede our evolutionary progress. It is not economical to care for you. You will now be slaughtered for the good of the tribe."

This post-"Enlightenment" age claims to be the most civilized and advanced yet. But beneath the shiny veneer of technological progress, our barbarism is just as blatant and poisonous as anyone before us. We shake our heads at bloodthirsty soldiers from the past, but are our abortion providers, our Dr. Kevorkians more civilized? The answer is, not at all. The same mindset of purging the world of those you see as unfit to live is the very essence of Nazism and fascism. Thus, the Left in supporting the Eugenecist abortion doctors and the Michael Schiavos of the world comes full circle; in the end there is no difference between communism and fascism.

There is open revulsion in the affluent leftist classes for anyone who chooses to keep a Down Syndrome baby. In Ramesh Ponnurru's excellent "Party of Death," one woman who told another woman that she had a child with Down Syndrome met shock and something along the lines of, "But why didn't you dispose of it?" This sentiment also underpins much of the unflinching animosity towards Sarah Palin in leftish circles. She dared to keep an imperfect child, instead of letting its brains be suctioned out, where the Left insists that all women must abort their defective children, to keep their lives uncluttered. In dark corners, you will find people dissing Palin for the most idiotic reasons, but it all circles back to the fact that she's Pro-Life. Feminazis are scandalized. But we did this for you, dearie. They insisted on choice, but it is unthinkable to make the right choice to them.

CNS News has an interesting article, about a British study that found that for every six hundred Down Syndrome babies (almost all aborted), four hundred more babies without the defect are miscarried due to the invasive testing. In their zeal to protect civilization from the malformed, the Eugenecists have caused the death of thousands of normal babies. The first and last enemy of civilization is the persecution of the weak by the strong. The Jews by the Nazis. The Armenians by the Turks, the Kurds by Hussein, the Chechnyans and Georgians by the post-USSR Russia. And the innocent Down Sundrome babies by the abortionists. A tragedy, but beyond that. A lasting bloody stain on the tapestry of civilization.

If I sound angry, it's because I am. The blood of these children is on the hands of the abortionists, and beyond that on us as a culture; we let it happen. These crimes will be answered for.

I'm not uncomfortable with Down Syndrome people because of them, it's because of me. It's entirely my attitude, and my fault. I viewed them with sympathetic distaste, only one step away from the mindset of so many, who view them as pitiable, brain-dead things.

Hitler had deformed babies burned alive. The abortionists of today just suck out their brains.

The Anti-Palin Conspiracy

2008-09-14T22:20:00.003-05:00

Since Senator McCain's nomination of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his Vice-president, a move that many on the Right viewed with jubilant celebration and the Left viewed with unanimous despairing horror, the news media has quite frankly gone beyond belief in attacking her. Even Barack Obama made a questionable reference to her--he may have called her a pig--but more on that later.

Briefly, they claimed that her Downs-Syndrome son Trig, born in April, was actually a sham, and that the baby was really her grandson by her 17-year-old daughter (who did, as it happens, become pregnant--and decided to keep the baby and marry the father). How incredibly absurd. Unless she resorted to a fake pregnancy belly and kept the First Daughter of an American state out of photographich surveillance for months and months, it would be utterly impossible. What am I talking about, it IS utterly impossible. What a disgusting lie.

Then, they said, she fired her cop ex-brother-in-law, and his immediate supervisor who refused to fire him. (Innapropriately.) She did fire both of them, but in fact the cop in question was a known idiot, who shot animals illegally and used a taser on his stepson without legitimate reason; and his supervisor was obviously fired for standing in Palin's way over it. Frankly, I can see where the controversy comes from. However, she did the right thing. She knew the man was a moron, and she didn't want him as a cop in her state. So she fired him and his kvetching supervisor.

And there are far more:

Palin did not cut funding for special needs education in Alaska by 62 percent. She didn’t cut it at all. In fact, she increased funding and signed a bill that will triple per-pupil funding over three years for special needs students with high-cost requirements.

She did not demand that books be banned from the Wasilla library. Some of the books on a widely circulated list were not even in print at the time. The librarian has said Palin asked a "What if?" question, but the librarian continued in her job through most of Palin's first term.

She was never a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, a group that wants Alaskans to vote on whether they wish to secede from the United States. She’s been registered as a Republican since May 1982.
Palin never endorsed or supported Pat Buchanan for president. She once wore a Buchanan button as a "courtesy" when he visited Wasilla, but shortly afterward she was appointed to co-chair of the campaign of Steve Forbes in the state.
Palin has not pushed for teaching creationism in Alaska's schools. She has said that students should be allowed to "debate both sides" of the evolution question, but she also said creationism "doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."

This from factcheck.org.

Even The Obambi himself has made veiled insults, and some of the idiotic media sniffing around is certainly at his campaign's behest.

The story behind this video: In her acceptance speech at the convention, Palin told a joke about the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull. The answer was lipstick. Here Barack Obama makes a completely un-subtle attack on Palin, referring her to a pig. He insisted he wasn't talking about her personally, but watch the crowd's reaction: THEY thought he was talking about her.

And Obama's step down of late hasn't been limited to Palin. Oh, no. In a recent ad, Obama accuses McCain of being out of touch and incapable of leading the nation because he can't use a computer. That would certainly be bad under normal circumstances. But John McCain was a prisoner of war for years, and in the course of that sustained lasting injuries, one of which prevents him from being accomplishing complicated hand-motor skills, like typing on a computer. So McCain can't use a computer, but only because he suffered bravely under Vietnamese torture for years while Obama was in Muslim school in Jakarta. Quite a contrast, eh?

In conclusion, this media blitz like never before has highlighted the truly breathtaking bias in the news media. They hate Republicans, and Palin registers like a bogie on their radars. Attack her with everything we've got, they say, playing fast and loose with the truth along the way. An incredibly low and scary attack on a strong, principled woman, who deserves to be the next Vice President of the United States of America.

Good Heavens

2008-09-13T18:24:00.002-05:00

Not a single post since August 30th. O, the shame! Since that time the school year has started and my leisure time (and thus blogging time) has evaporated faster than a puddle on hot pavement. I have concluded my ten-week employment at McDonald's, and moved on to the next stage: the Baldwin Public Library. I now hold one of three Student Aide Librarian positions at that august establishment. The job is certainly an answer to my fervent prayer over the two years I've volunteered there. Thus far, it has been a no-nonsense but productive and tranquil work environment, especially compared to the slippery, hot, sweaty, loud, stinking, opprobrious chaos of McDonald's.

I leave McDonald's with few, if any, regrets. All in all, it was utterly unsuited to me, or perhaps I was utterly unsuited to it. I won't dwell on it, but suffice to say that I thank the Lord I'm out of there. Incidentally, I picked up my last paycheck there today, and handed in my uniforms with a light heart.

If you have been keeping up with the news, you know that not one but two hurricanes have landed since I last blogged: Gustav and Ike. I have contemplated buying two small, white, ineffectual dogs with loud, persistent barks and naming them Gustav and Ike, to show the frenzied alarum of the news media in the days leading up to both of these hurricanes which have turned out to be substantially duds as the farce it really is. Although, it is better to be over- than under-prepared, at least where hurricanes are concerned.

Governor Sarah Palin, the newly-hatched GOP nominee for Vice President, has been undergoing the media equivalent of a mob hit-job because she is a beautiful, principled, intelligent, Conservative woman--all qualities alien to the news media and their masters the Demofiendish Party.

But the public has seen through this transparent media hatchet-job, and McCain has risen above Obama in the polls, making the race close. As you may recall, Bush trailed Kerry heavily for much of the campaign in 2004, and then won. Hopefully we've seen the turning point in the race. A McCain-Palin ticket is not perfect, but anything this better than the village-idiot, content-free, shameless, media-endorsed circus of moronic repetitious vapid rhetoric about Hope (the Lord God) and Change (Mother God) of the Obama-Biden ticket.

School has brought back all the old fun memories of last year and the year before--as well as the not so fun. Like having a running commentary on my lunch and how I'm eating it. Have you ever had a table full of girls giggle whenever you took a bite out of a banana? Quite an experience, I can assure you. And not one that I was especially happy with.

Academically, however, I am staying on top of homework (so far) and I intend to continue to do so. I am beginning to slowly research colleges, as it is already my junior year (yikes!). New St. Andrew's College (www.nsa.edu) in Moscow, ID was reccomended to me by my pastor, and looks very good. I will be praying about it.

I watched Amazing Grace with Ioan Gruffudd, Michael Gambon, Romola Garai, and Albert Finney again today. What an incredibly excellent movie about a modern-day saint (well, sort of); William Wilberforce; who ended the British slave trade almost single-handedly after a long struggle without firing a shot. How I desperately wish that America could have ended the atrocity of slavery with similar tactics, without the long, ruinous War Between the States, which I regard as a pointless war on the scale of World War I.

Cheers, pip-pip and Adieu until next time!

MCCAIN-PALIN 2008!!

2008-08-30T10:28:00.002-05:00

I know, I know. Politics. I am briefly breaking my "no-politics" promise for Mosings. But I hope you will forgive me when you read this post. John McCain, who I regarded with something less than serious enthusiasm as a candidate, has chosen as his Vice president, GOVERNOR SARAH PALIN OF ALASKA!

A bold, in fact shocking move. This mother of five, including her youngest son who has Down's Syndrome, born in April of this year, has been governor of Alaska for only two years. Before that, she was mayor of a small town in Alaska, Wasilla. Her oldest son, Track, is in the U.S. Army, and is scheduled for deployment in Iraq on September 11, 2008. She is strongly Pro-Life, and dared to give birth to a "flawed" baby. She fought the sadly corruption-tinged Alaska Republican Party and enjoyed a pretty hefty 76% approval rating in her home state two years after her election. She homeschools. She was a elementary school teacher. She's strongly Christian. Her husband is one-eighth Inuit. She's gorgeous. She's a great speaker. She has everything in a woman candidate that Hillary didn't. I'm so happy. McCain could have gone establishment and picked Romney, or gone safe and picked Pawlenty, or he could have picked well-known rising star Bobby Jindal. But he didn't. He picked a virtually unknown governor from Alaska. And it makes for a great ticket. Already, she specifically targeted Hillary supporters, and some of them are bound to follow her. The eighteen million people who voted for Hillary in the primaries; that's a huge segment of the population, and if enough go for McCain-Palin, it will swing the election.

Book Review: Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

2008-08-28T20:29:00.002-05:00

This book is a collection. First of short stories, second of essays, and finally of parables. I started with one of the stories which reside within this older, but still sound paperback. The story is called "The Library of Babel." It is, I confess, this decidedly dystopian thesis that gave me the impetus of my earlier post on a universal web-library encompassing all published works of past, present, or future.

The title of this story is self-explanatory. The library in this story is infinite. It contains all conceivable works of human and perhaps of divine endeavor. The first sentence begins thus: "The universe (which others call the Library)--." The narrator is a librarian of this library. He and the other librarians are unaware of this vast library's origin or purpose; and attempt to find it. Some see it as meaningless and commit suicide. Much of the story is devoted to the narrator hypothesizing about the library; its builders, its purpose, its extent. My favorite phrase in this story is perhaps the most commonplace; something that other writers would have used: "Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps."

I concentrate on this story because it is the first I read; and because it characterizes (if anything can) the underlying thesis of this work. Though few of these works could coexist in some vast fictional universe, the narrator is usually Borges himself, when he is named at all, and channeling him when he is not. Man is battling against, and yet in synthesis with, God in these stories. The profound ones reach entirely beyond the usual scope of human endeavor. They are little gems, set in the stone crown of a tall and noble statue neglected by the ages. There, a Borges touch for you.

I highly recommend the whole book. With your permission, I will now excerpt in its entirety a short, Platonic parable included at the end of Labyrinths, entitled The Witness.

The Witness

In a stable which is almost in the shadow of a new stone church, a man with gray eyes and gray beard, lying amidst the odor of the animals, humbly seeks death as one would seek sleep. The day, faithful to vast and secret laws, is shifting and confusing the shadows inside the poor shelter; outside are the plowed fields and a ditch clogged with dead leaves and the tracks of a wolf in the black mud where the forests begin. The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten. He is awakened by the bells tolling the Angelus. In the kingdoms of England the ringing of the bells is now one of the customs of the evening, but this man, as a child, had seen the face of Woden, the divine horror and exultation, the crude wooden idol hung with Roman coins and heavy clothing, the sacrificing of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he will die and with him will die, and never return, the last immediate images of these pagan rites; the world will be a little poorer when this Saxon has died.

Deeds which populate the dimensions of space and which read their end when someone dies may cause us wonderment, but one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies in every final agony, unless there is a universal memory as the theosophists have conjectured. In time there was a day that extinguished the last eyes to see Christ; the battle of Junin and the love of Helen died with the death of a man. What will die with me when I die, what pathetic of fragile form will the world lose? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a red horse in the vacant lot at Serano and Charcas, a bar of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?

This story asks, as I have myself more than once, what we will lose when we will die. I have no answer yet; perhaps like Borges that story for me will end with a question mark. But perhaps everything will be lost, and then when the Son of Man descends to take his throne, and in the new Heaven and Earth, all memories of all people will be purified, solidified. Like a broken glass melted and blown into an infinite series of connected glasses, each reflecting, prism-like, the thoughts and memories of the others.

There are few connecting themes in Borges' book, but here they are: first, the labyrinth itself. Second, eternity and the eternal. Third, God. Fourth, Man. Fifth, Christ--one of his parables muses on the appearance of Christ; how "a Jew's profile in the subway is perhaps that of Christ; the hands giving us our change at the ticket window perhaps repeat those that were one day nailed to the cross by some soldiers." Sixth, things not as they seem. Seventh, the Rousseau's Noble Savage. Eighth, time as an illusion, ninth and finally, the traitor--one story is devoted to Judas Iscariot. One is devoted to Droctulft, a barbarian who in the end died defending a Roman city.

My favorite story in this collection is Theme of the Traitor and Hero. I will not attempt to summarize it; there are some things one must experience for oneself. I only encourage you to read it. As multi-layered and satisfying and breath-taking a story I have scarcely read; and keep in mind that it is not a Tolkien epic, but a four-page story.

Borges' stories are always concluded; if not satisfactorily. Mentally or physically, the story is completed; as opposed to, for example, Dickens' Great Expectations. In one story, for example, a Jew set to be executed by the Nazis is granted time by God to mentally complete his last play. For example, the narrator of The Library of Babel is overwhelmed and depressed by the seeming pointless chaos of the library, until:

Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species--the unique species--is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.

I have just written the word "infinite." I have not interpolated the adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end--which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.

Read it.

Why I hate big, corporate bookstores--And Introducing Bookstore v. 2.0

2008-08-26T11:00:00.002-05:00

Almost every week, while my brother is having his guitar lesson, Dad and I will waft over to the Barnes & Noble in the mall across the way. I rarely buy anything. Dad never does. The place is almost consciously hostile to readers. As I told Dad when we left yesterday: Bookstores shouldn't cater to people, they should cater to readers. Forgive me, but when Joe Blow and Sarah Sap walk into Maplewood Mall, they probably aren't looking for Hemingway, Shakespeare, or anything with the vague appearance of a book. They're looking for Hot Topic, or Abercrombie, or Aeropastale, or American Eagle, or Hollister, or Tommy Hilfiger, or some other kitschy, incredibly expensive chic clothing purveyor. Why do people go into Barnes & Noble at all? They want to giggle in the big puffy chairs, playing with their Ipods in loud voices, while people quietly browsing the shelves pull their hair out.

There was an age when everybody read, because books were the only form of entertainment. These days that is not the case. Not that bookstores are irrelevant, far from it. Those few who read regularly find themselves indoctrinated by the bookstore's political view: Twenty copies of Dawkins' The God Delusion, in a big, shiny stack, but none of Berlinsky's The Devil's Delusion, refuting it. A zillion copies each of Audacity of Hope, Bill Clinton's relative bomb Giving, Al Gore's laughably pretentious The Assault on Reason. Yeah, Al, because global warming is so reasonable. The "Media & Journalism" Section is full of left-wing screeds by hot-air-spewing idiots like Keith Olbermann, John Stewart, Bill Maher, etc, while conservative books, outnumbered 10-1, circle the wagons beneath the gleaming stacks of Dawkins, vainly hoping someone will sift through and find them.

No wonder B&T and Borders are finding themselves in dire financial straits. Who is going to pay $27.95 for a book? DVDs, CDs, and basically all other forms of media cost much less than that.

My solution? Two, actually. First of all, bookstores should not be in malls. People who shop in malls, except those specifically looking for books, do not want books. They want Abercrbombie. Spending $44.95 on some pastel oddity at a brand-name clothing outlet is, apparently, what gets them going. Bookstores should be on shady boulevards, not in suburbs. The staff should all have degrees in English literature, but be solid political centrists. Very diverse racially and religiously, to fit their clientele, but politically non-biased. Then, stylish "coffee shops" inside them should be banned. At what point did we forget that books and food don't mix very well? The shelves should start at the floor, but not reach high enough to need "Staff Only" ladders. The staff are so unhelpful and, usually, scarce in bookstores that this is basically just a prohibition on reaching what are usually the most interesting books. A computer algorythm would largely determine what books would be stocked. Bestsellers, obviously, and books with a certain review from literary and popular journals; but also older books, and more obscure ones. Ideally, it would have an enormous used section, twice the size of the new section. New books should be confined to new books, books published in the last five years; whether first editions or reissues of classics. After this period, books should be consigned to the Used section, and discounted, even though they may not be, in fact, used. They should also have black, old-fashioned name plates, with gold-leaf inscription, "Obscura Books" or "Bratrud & co. Books bought and sold since 3 AD." They should, in fact, have as many old books and fat, worn leather armchairs packed into a space with as much stained and lacquered wood as possible, with lamps the color of heavy cream giving it a literary glow.

This first scenario has as a prerequisite the undiminished power of the book as cultural medium. The printed book. Soon, however, printed books will be consigned to the past, which leads to my second idea: Google has already sworn to put every book online, in a searchable, readable format. I applaud them, but I will take it to the next level. In the future, books should not be a commodity, not even a sick and wounded one like they are today. The power of the mega-publishers should be diminished. Books would become bestsellers on merit, instead of how many advertising dollars are spent on them. So, my idea. A virtual bookstore: looking like an old, wooden bookstore of the kind I described in the last paragraph. It would be vast; eternal in fact. And you could walk or run through it to your heart's content, with your own realistic avatar. You could interact with other readers, and either living staff with access to a digital catalog would help you find books, or there would be a simple search bar with a map function. Type, click, click, and your character walks to the shelf where the book is located. You would then be able to pull the virtual book off the shelf and browse for a set period of time, say fifteen minutes. If you didn't like it, you could put it back on the shelf and move on. If you did, you could take it to the front desk and check it out/ buy it (I'll cover this later.) Immediately upon the book being taken off the shelf, another identical one would take its place.

Who says it has to look like a bookstore? You could choose anything from "British Library" setting to "Mars Planetary Bookstore." Your library could have floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on a space battle or the block where you live. And why does your avatar have to be realistic? Anything without too many fangs and tentacles for the (infinite) bandwidth is fine, as long as its not profane or indecent. Now let's talk money. Books should not be taxed. Ideally, this would be a library and not a bookstore at all. However, authors are unlikely to write for nothing. So, authors would set the price. Too expensive, and no one will buy it, unless it is in high demand. Too cheap, and you wouldn't make a profit. There would be a small charge to put your book the library, and fairly strict guidelines. It would have to meet a certain level of grammatical correctness, literacy, and length. Unfinished books would not be allowed. One copy of each book would exist, but they would be infinitely replacable. Book critics would still have jobs. Each new book would be reviewed by either a critic or reader, althoguh this would not be strictly compulsory. If a new book remained on the shelf too long without being read, it would be put into a fast-track system, and placed in a high-traffic shelf, and bumped on "Also Read" lists and etc. until it was read and reviewed. Only if you are the first reader would you have to review the book (meeting certainl grammatical and literary requirements.) Patrons would log in and be sent to a random part of the library. No one gate would exist, you would appear and disappear in your section. There would be landmarks--the New York Times book review, if it still existed, would have a virtual booth and hawk its picks there, etc. Books would be shelved alphabetically by author's last name, because subject can be subjective, except in special cases. Different parts of the library would be color-coded on the maps and carpeting (or something). So, numbers, letters, and combinations. Ex: "Your search: "Amaranth" by Moses Bratrud" is in the B-Section of minilib section F-960. Color code: Magenta." You could also choose to sort books by subject. When you picked a book off the shelf and clicked on a button, the shelf around you would morph into books on similar subjects, and revert after ten minutes or when you left the section or logged out. This would be a special shelf for you only. If someone were to look for a book three titles down from the one you just selected, it would be there. People browsing by subject would have a revolving "S" over their head.

When you liked a book, there would be a computerized algorythm to compute "Also Read" items. People who read and liked this book also liked etc." This could also include recently-added, never-read books which match yours in certain fields, filled in by the author upon admission to the library.

This library would be administered by computers, except for a small advisory board which would enact small policy changes, barred in the library's (notice how we've moved away from the very term "bookstore") Charter from having too much power or influence. Glitches would be fixed as quickly as possible. Upon every fifth logout you would fill out a virtual survey asking you if you had any problems. These would be categorized by keywords, and sent to computerized glitch-fixers. The computers would also be able to write new code for the new sections of the library, which as you can imagine would be continuously growing. The library makes no decisions. It is impartial. It is perfect. There would also be a translator function, and the biggest man-powered part of the library would ensure that this was carried out correctly. A book would be left in its original language until requested in a different one. Then a computer robot would translate it, it would be double-checked by another computer, and then finalized by a human employee, all within six hours or less.

Also, for a small charge over whatever charge there happens to be, you could get the book bound and printed to your specifications. Hopefully 3d-imaging technology will have developed to the point that nothing so crude as actually printing would be required.

In short, this library is infinite. I must admit, I got the idea from Borges' dystopian story "The Library at Babel," which also deals with an enormous library, but no one knows how to use it. However, this would be the perfect library. Perfectly infinite, infinitely perfect. Is that sacrilegious? Maybe I should never have brought up Babel...

I'm going to go talk to Bill Gates about this--yeah, we're pals from way back. Please, your input. What is good? What needs improvement?

The Celtic Diaspora

2008-08-19T17:28:00.005-05:00

As most of you know, I am of partially Celtic extraction. Specifically, I am 1/4 Cornish. My Grandma Jean, nee Rowe, is purely Cornish, and her mother and father emigrated to the United States. Her family comes from Cornwall, one of the six Celtic nations; In the linked map, Scotland is blue, Ireland is green, Wales is red, Cornwall is yellow, Brittany is black, and the Isle of Man is tan. The Celts were and are an ethnic and linguistic group of unclear origin, which settled in Middle Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, and the British Isles in the late centuries B.C.

The rise of Rome and later of the barbarians drove the Celts westward, to Britain. Britain is the most heavily Celtic region of Europe, partially because the Romans arrived there comparatively late in their golden age, and didn't stay very long compared to other regions in Britain. After the Roman retreat across the Channel, the Celts flowered in the Isles, and remained the dominant force there until the Angles and Saxons invaded from Continental Europe. Some Celtic nations made the mistake of allying themselves with the Danes and Vikings against the Anglo-Saxons, and when the Norsemen were defeated, the invaders were even more anti-Celt.

Sub-Roman Britain is a confusing picture. In many ways we know more about the time of Christ than we do about this era. We do know that the British Isles were split into small, frequently warring kingdoms. Cornwall was one, and there were several each in Brittany, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In many ways, it was a very mythic age. It is startling how little we know. Unlike, say, Easter Island, the archaeological evidence the Sub-Roman Celts left has not been left untouched by human activity since the deaths of its builders. Britain was, for at least five hundred years, the crux of civilization, and the descendants of the Anglo-Saxons still felt a genetic distaste for all things Celtic. The greatest medieval myth, and the greatest fruitless quest both came from Celtica: the sagas of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and the Quest for the Holy Grail. Legend has it that Arthur himself was born in Tintagel Castle, Cornwall. In time the Kings of Wessex and the other Anglo kingdoms conquered the Celts, and were in turn conquered by the Normans. But the Celts remained apart, seperated from their continental usurpers by language and a proud heritage.

Perhaps the Celts had something that the straitlaced, conservative Anglo-Saxons, and even more so the later invading, French-speaking Normans, did not. Certainly much modern day fantasy and yearning for the past dwells on the Celtic era. All modesty aside, I am quite well-read in modern fantasy, and I have yet to come across a fantasy with no Celtic aspirations. Tolkien's mythos was drawn from Welsh and Finnish languages and legends, and everyone else has built upon him. The Narnia stories are a sole exception, seeming oddly very Anglo-Saxon. Series' like Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain are explicitly Celtic, and it is perhaps in reading them that I developed my fascination with the Celtic aspect, although some of it can be attributed to my ancestry and my wider love of everything to do with Britain.

Enter Marcus Tanner's Last of the Celts. This thick book devotes a long chapter to each of the Celtic nations, concentrating primarily on their modern state. In brief, I will summarize him. Scotland, although granted some token measures of independence, is still subservient to England in every way. Since the Battle of Culloden and the defeat of the Scottish Stuart claim to the English throne in 1746, the Scottish have been firmly under the British boot, and unlike their neighbors across the Irish Sea, have shown little interest until recently in doing anything about it. The Lowlands of Scotland were settled by Non-Celts very, very early, and lost Scottish Gaelic early on. In the Highland and island regions of Scotland, however, it survived and survives to this day, although there is little support for it and the number of speakers is decreasing dramatically.

Ireland, on the other hand, was in a bloody constant state of rebellion for years, and was finally granted independence from the United Kingdom in the 2os. Since then, it has become the "Celtic Tiger," a powerhouse Capitalist economy, now with a higher GDP than its British neighbor. The language, however, is not in as great shape. There is huge government support for it, but Irish speakers are in a minority, and possibly shrinking. Still, the Irish have much to be hopeful for. Northern Ireland, the part that remains under the Crown, is in some parts like inner-city Belfast, are mini-Irish-language areas, called "Gaeltachts." However, under even less supportive Great Britain, it is unclear, in the years after "The Troubles" between the Protestant Unionists and the Catholic Nationalists, how Irish in the North can move forward.

Wales is almost as divided as Ireland. In earlier centuries, the South and North were both deeply Welsh. Anglicization was almost unthinkable. However, the Industrial Revolution turned the tables. Tiny medieval villages were transformed into hellish industrial landscapes by coal and copper and iron. This led to a huge influx of workers, Anglophone workers, and South Wales soon became in some ways a part of England. North Wales, however, where I've been, looks better. Everyone we met and spoke to in the extreme northwest, near Bangor, had a strong Welsh accent. For some, Welsh was obviously their first language. Wales has a space-age Assembly building and some token gestures of devolution granted by London, but still remains subservient to England.

Breton is barely spoken in Brittany any longer. The rampant Francophone centralization of every French government since the Bourbon monarchs, and especially since the Revolution. French was the language of the Revolution, Paris was the city of the revolution. Far worse than in the UK, Breton is actively persecuted in France. This medieval attitude is a further example, as if anyone needed it, of the wine-sodden depravity of the dirty, unshaven vinos across the Channel...sorry.

Cornwall is perhaps the most melancholy story at all. The Cornish language is fully extinct. The last speakers were not recorded in any way. Dolly Pentreath, the improbably famous fishwife from St. Ives who was the last full Cornish speaker, died in the eighteenth century. Revival efforts are doomed to failure. The inflection, the pronunciation are all gone--all that is left is stilted, melancholy phrases. Cornwall itself may eventually achieve its own Assembly, just as Wales and Scotland have, but it is of all of the Celtic Nations, besides the Isle of Man, the only one to have lost its language. A sad state of affairs.

Marcus Tanner's book is pessimistic until the last few sentences, where he quotes an Irish poem talking about putting the Irish language in the river, hoping that it might be picked up by "some Pharaoh's daughter." A somewhat fatalistic and lackadaisical attitude towards the whole future of the Celtic identity.

Why is Celtic identity so important? What do the Celts have that makes them unique. On my Facebook profile, I divide myself this way: "I am from British-Norwegian-Celtic extraction, and my I think I am equal parts British (my worldliness, love of literature and the Bard,) Norwegian, (the Blue-Collar part of me; humor) and Celtic, (the mystical, supernatural side.)" Being Celtic could be summarized as irrational escapism from the emotionless panorama of Anglo-Saxon rationality, but it is something more. The Universe is not rational. God is not rational. God is above both rationality and its opposite, emotion, and his perfect creation is as well. We humans cannot achieve that; we give in too much to one or the other. We need to integrate both into our belief. The Celts, as prime exemplars of the emotional worldview, are worthy of close scrutiny.

A New Blogging Venture; And other tidbits

2008-08-13T10:58:00.004-05:00

I am proud to announce that fellow blogger Renzzy and I have started a new blog. Entitled "Here the Faithful Gather," it is going to be a commentary/dialogue on Calvinism and what it means for Christians. The first post was last night. You can view the blog HERE. My first joint blogging effort, which I hope will be a success.

And now for that trip summary I promised.

The Boundary Waters is not, let's face it, my natural environment. It was mildly unnerving to be forty miles from the nearest computer, not to mention library or freeway overpass. I'm a man of civilization, for better and for worse. That doesn't prevent me from enjoying the occasional excursion into the untamed wild, but I am more content with a laptop, my bookshelves, and some tea. That is in some ways a painful admission. Certainly my imagination has not followed this truth; but when has imagination ever done anything but supersede the conscious mind's rules?

Part of the Boundary Waters is hardship, at least to affluent Westerners like us--latrines, sleeping on the ground, etc. That is part of the appeal, but it also made me glad to get back to civilization.

While there, I wrote four poems and a complete trip journal--a writing project on a greater scale than anything I have ever completed. The solitude and beauty of the place is a muse; and an effective one. I wrote better there than I ever have. Why? My computer, which is as always a blessing and a curse, was not there to distract me, not there to take my time. I did not have to work or attend school, or do anything at all, really. To fill in the void of responsibility, my mind latched on to my idea of writing a trip journal with a poem for each day, which I completed successfully. I'm very proud of myself, but dismayed that such inspiration seems unlikely to come again, back in civilization as I am.

All in all, a philosophical, beautiful trip. As different from our vacations to Florida as if we had gone to another planet of still, peaceful, vibrant, vital solitude.

--

In a rapid change of subject, I had an RGSF (Random Google Search Find) this morning. On a website called Urbana.org there is THIS blog entry about CNN.com, my preeminent news source, becoming increasingly a milquetoast web tabloid amalgam. In other words, it has forsaken serious world news and current affairs and turned to vapid web-culture, celeb-worshipping, scandal-drooling sludge. I confess I didn't really notice this, but now that I've read the article I agree. Even since I began reading CNN.com about a year ago, it has changed. Remember when the exotic Cold-War-throwback assassination of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was huge news? CNN.com was full of it for weeks. Now, the Russo-Georgian War is in a minority of the news coverage. It's not even need-to-know fluff like the Edwards affair in many cases.

I love the phrase this blogger uses: "CNN has become an 800 pound tabloid in the room." So, I encourage you to read this post and give me suggestions: unbiased, non-fluff-full news sources? NOT Fox, it crashes my browser.

Adieu!

Boundary Waters, Part V

2008-08-08T14:22:00.003-05:00

Day 5 - July 31

This day passed much the same as that immediately preceding it; in lazy, relaxing recreation. It was our last full say in the Boundary Waters, and we celebrated by doing as little as possible. Perhaps it is now time to discuss wider aspects of the trip, that did not fall on any particular day. One of the most striking and beautiful aspects of the Boundary Waters is the rock. There's just SO MUCH of it.

The Boundary Waters is on the "Canadian Shield," an enormous piece of rock, stretching from northern Wisconsin and Minnesota to Greenland in the north and New York in the east. Although it covers only a fraction of the United States, it covers almost half of Canada. It is covered by only a relatively thin layer of topsoil in most places; thus it is not a center of agriculture; its only serious resources are minerals, and it is sparsely populated. So, long story short, there are truly massive rocks in the Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness, most splinters of the gigantic Shield, but some part of it themselves. By massive, I mean thousand-ton, lichen-covered behemoths.

Something we puzzled on throughout our trip was a strange plant we found in our second campsite, on Baskatong Lake. It was composed of about fifteen greyish-white stalks with blackish flowers on top, set very close together. We at first thought it might was a Fungus, not a plant at all, for several reasons: (1) it was near some mushrooms--Fungi stick together because sometimes they are all connected underground, and because their spores, wind-spread, usually stay close; (2) It wasn't green--as most of you know, chlorophyll makes plants green--so it couldn't have chlorophyll or perform photosynthesis, 99.9% of plants' way of obtaining energy; and (3) it didn't LOOK like a plant. This odd speciment became even more zany when we saw that it was covered with bumblebees--at least two at ALL TIMES. Bees wouldn't be on a fungus, we though--would they?

Another long story short, when we were in Ely, MN on the way home, we bought two excellently-illustrated and informative books, one about the plants of the North Shore/BW area, and one about the Fungi in the same area. It didn't take us long to find what we wanted: It was, in fact, a plant called Indian Pipe. We learned that it was in a parasitic relationship with a certain Fungus (explaining the mushrooms around it); and the fungus itself is parasitic on the roots of the fir and pine trees! I recall saying, "That is SO COOL!" at least five times in the car after learning that ;).

Falling Asleep

As the silent weight of darkness falls,
And the birds of night their sweet haunting calls
And the leaves laugh sleepily in the nocturnal breeze,
We shut our eyes and lie with ease.

After a long day spent under the sun,
My being calls for sleep with every ion.
Whether little or much I've done in a day
The press to attain unconsciousness happens in much the same way.

Head centered on pillow, body prostrate on bed
My mind down the long tunnel of sleep is led
But before I follow, I think and muse
About the day's thoughts, fears, conversations, news.

Finally sleep carries me gently down
And thoughts leave my head as if I'm abdicating a crown.
I journey through the long dark hall
'Til I hear sweet morning's loud clarion call.

Boundary Waters, Part IV

2008-08-06T20:10:00.003-05:00

[Sorry this one didn't follow the one-a-day theme. Thirty-hour workweeks are no fun. Enjoy!]

Day 4 - July 30

The most exciting thing that happened on this fourth day of our sojourn deep into enemy territory in the way between Man and Nature was the weather. We awoke to soporofic, pillowy clouds, which saw fit to dump some fairly mild, scattered rain on us throughout the day. Later, the clouds fractured and by dusk were confined to the edges of the horizon, so we were treated to a fiery last rally of the sun, unencumbered by cloud for virtually the first time that day before it sunk behind the tall, beautiful firs on the far shore.

Out here, we all took particular note of the weather. In our modern lives, the weather has a lessened effect on us. But when you're out in it, it's a different story. The above description of a day in weather isn't even all that exciting, but it's what we all noticed. You can see alot more sky in the BWCA than you can with a roof over your head, and so it's inevitable that you pay more attention to it and its subtle moods and changes.

As for us, we oozed around the campsite and our lake, blissfully wiling away the lazy hours, conscious of the beauty of this wilderness lake. We voyaged to see the beaver dam, so permanent a fixture of the landscape that it had quite a sizable pine growing out of it, that held this lake at its present water level. A solitary camper took the other campsite on this lake, but he made no noise at all and we only saw him flitting about the lake in his one-man canoe. It is funny that all of us seem to lower our voices naturally here. At night it is quieter than my bedroom at home; no wind, no train whistles, only the otherworldly, beautiful song of the loons and the soft slop of the water against the rocks. We are provisioned like kinds in the wilderness. After a majority of our trip has been taken, our food supply seems quite undented. The freeze-dried food exceeded expectations, but was inconvenient because one package was not enough, while two packages was much too much. We didn't even eat supper on the 30th, because of a very late lunch and the urge to get the food out of the camp, so that nighttime marauders wouldn't bother us. We made up for it the next morning with an enormous breakfast that lasted till 11. In conclusion, an immensely lazy but immensely fulfilling day.

The Book

Many's the time I've beheld a book
Just begging to be taken and read in some nook.
A book is a suitcase for story;
Of mirth, of magic, of glory.

It transports me to some far distant shore,
Where I'll watch Frodo and Sam making their way to Mordor.
Or I'll feel the salt spray on H.M.S. Surprise's bow,
And I'll see Beanstalk Jack being traded a few beans for a cow.

The best books are portals into another dimension;
To the perils of Leonidas, to D'arcy's condescencion.
The list goes far on, for there are many more,
the legends, the sagas, the myths and the lore.

As I open the book, my troubles meet relief.
From Saul's defeat to David's humble belief.
Like the Road to Damascus, and the one to perdition,
The best books are stories without termination.

Boundary Waters, Section III

2008-08-05T10:25:00.002-05:00

We saw fit to sleep in luxuriantly, and dined less extravagantly on lukewarm instant oatmeal. The people in the campsite next to us left at some ungodly early hour, so we saw fit to bring up the average a bit by dawdling around. The rain had left our tents in an advanced state of soppiness, which made them almost TOO MUCH fun to take down--not. In the end, however, we managed it, and canoes safely loaded we set out.

The first checkpoint was a river at the end of our lake--Kawishiwi--Gesundheit!, which we found with no trouble even though the lake was shaped like an especially gnarled, island-dotted lower intestine. Paddling into the river was like entering a dream--a dream of sun and water and mud; trees and plants and above all, acres of verdant water lilies. Perhaps not exerting our imagination to the fullest, we dubbed this passage "Waterlily Alley."

There was a narrow passage through the lilies, so we didn't have to run over them, although I doubt they would have suffered much damage. That, anyway, was the theory. Yours Truly's navigational skills were not quite up to the task, and our canoe frequently strayed out of the lily-free avenue. The excursions onto the shoulder probably did nothing to increase Mom's confidence in my driving skills. But I was not entirely to blame. Whoever heard of a canoe with a keel? Isn't that what separates canoes from other boats? But our venerable plastic--yes, plastic--canoe was equipped with one, and it made the simplest turn into a hard effort. The canoe Dan and Abe had, by contrast, was as I could tell, graceful and supple in the water. It was Kevlar and cost $3000, which may have something to do with it.

Waterlily Alley ended quite abruptly in an excellently situated beaver dam.. We portaged it with a little less effort than it took to build Mt. Rushmore, and found ourselves in a narrow, angry bay filled with rocks and mud which led to a narrow, angry lake dotted with zit-like rocks. It was called Square Lake. Mom and I set off along the shore, in search of the lake's two campsites, while Dan and Abe, by prior agreement, set off across the lake to a portage, to see if the preferable sites in the next lake over were open. Without a map, finding the campsites wasn't that easy, especially since we were fighting sixty-mph winds and a ten-foot swell. I may be understating it just a bit. Mom and I did find an empty campsite, and settled down on a rather hospitable little island with view across the lake to the portage where Dan and Abe had disappeared through, waiting for the yay or nay signal. Dan and Abe returned and waved us over. At another time, perhaps, I will tell you how much fun it is to carry three Cuisinarts over a rocky, 1/4 mile portage. We found a palatial woodland bower of a campsite, where Dan had stayed before, and found ourselves at ease. The bugs stayed well clear for a while, because of some gusty, lusty winds, but soon returned in swarming vengeance. Some more rain fell as we drifted off into satisfied sleep in our tents, bastions against the heathen mosquito hordes.

Water

The vast, glistening expanse
Locked in eternal, rhythmic dance.
Sky's beautiful, fickle daughter
Not gas, not solid, but water.

The life-giving liquid of sorrow and joy;
Its changing mood and caprices play with us like a toy.
An unfirm foundation to our insignificant lives,
From St. Ives all the way to Maldives.

Titanic, Fitzgerald, how many thousands more
Driven and riven by sea on the shoals of death's door?
Yes how many battles, heights of human endeavor
Have been lost and won on the sea, in the past and forever?

Great Atlantic cries.
Sweet Gitchi-Gumi sighs.
Trackless Pacific shakes and moans.
Mediterranean makes kings, Baikal moans.
Water.

Boundary Waters, Section II

2008-08-03T18:24:00.005-05:00

Day 2 - July 28

We arose from our collective beauty sleep quite early...and after a typical inoffensive hotel breakfast, we set out for the ranger station. We were unfortunately unable to enter our choice lake on that day, because they only give out so many permits, but were able to secure a next-day pass. In the meantime, we were allowed to stay in an "overflow" campsite which was in fact situated on the lake itself--Kawishiwi Lake--bless you!

Permit secured, we drove for about half an hour until we reached Kawishiwi, on roads that made washboards feel like silk. We set up camp on the site of our choice. It was rather steep, and going from the tent to the water's edge involved some acrobatics, after you rappelled down an easy 100-ft glacier. We were ensconced in camp by about 10:30 and began to veg out, just as if we were back home in front of the TV--not. The remote was stuck on one channel--pure, undistilled, scenic beauty. We picnicked on a rather unwelcoming little island, where Abe and I waded through some shoulder-length blueberry swamp for no reason at all.

Our lunch meal consisted of "GORP"--Good Old Raisins + Peanuts, but which also included granola, M&Ms, and a few almonds; as well as that cheese that comes in an spray-can thing on tortillas, with salami optional. We carried little water in, partly because it's very heavy but mostly because, with a filter, you can take it right out of the lakes! I think that in this modern, post-industrial, polluted age, that's pretty incredible. Later on in the trip, in fact, our filter clogged and we just dipped buckets into the middle of the lake. It was slightly greenish because of all the chlorophyll from dead leaves, but tasted just fine. There was a water-Lilly settlement kitty-corner to our campsite, which we explored at length and took pictures of, unaware that they would put on an innumerably more vigorous appearance later on in our journey. We spent the afternoon lazily fiddling around in the lake, the mini-ecosystem surrounding our granite jetty proving fascinating to Abe and I--why do the bugs go into the water? They know it will kill 'em--and reading. Elevation issues aside, it was a beautiful campsite, and ant sunset the sun outdid itself in fiery splendor against the thickening clouds, providing inspiration for what may be my first complete poem in rhyming couplets [yesterday's poem, people]. Haiku is all well and good, but rhymes have more poetic power.

Dinner was heavily freeze-dried, with "Sweet and Sour Pork and Rice" for the carnivores and organic mac & cheese for me, and "peaches and cream" for dessert. The pork was generally accepted as better than expected, but it was so filling that the four of us were hard-pressed to eat two packages. The same went for the peaches and cream. The peaches were reluctant to reconstitute, and so we were basically eating peach yogurt with dried peaches in it!

We lounged outside till it was too dark to read and then read some more in the tent with the help of a wind-up LED flashlight, and then turned in. The tent like the rest of the campsite was on a tiny bit of a slope, so that it was suspended vertically from the aforementioned glacier. As we slept, a light rain began to fall, making slightly less noise as it hit our tent than a hailstorm on a tin roof.

[My second poem I exhibit here. Definitely my strongest effort, I'm particularly proud of it.]

Partly Cloudy

When Cloud and Sun fight
And Battlefield Sky is filled with their might
Vying for domination of horizons great;
We ask -- What shall be our fate?

Great long battalions, majestic and white
Trying to extinguish Castle Sun's light.
Volley after volley, they go back and forth,
Their battles resounding from the South to the North.

Full sun or full cloud, their ceasefires deem.
When victorious one or the other might seem.
But the battle goes on, for always they rally,
And with hit after hit rises the tally.

Locked forever in massive heavenly conflict,
As if mandated by some higher edict.
Sun and Cloud become good and evil in this, the inverse,
And the battle for Sky flares into a fight for the universe.

Boundary Waters Voyage Log, Section I

2008-08-02T22:03:00.008-05:00

As promised, I am posting a trip log kept by Yours Truly on our family's Boundary Waters trip of last week. I astonished myself by not only keeping a faithful journey of our doings along the five principle days of our trip--two pages penned in my underused, pointy, scrawling cursive for each day--but writing a poem for each day! Some of you may be familiar with my past attempts at poetry. Some of them may have had serious prosaic value, but in their entirety they had a serious problem: they didn't rhyme. Of course, not all poetry rhymes, but for someone like me--far more prosaic than poetic--non-rhyming poems become especially melodramatic prose. These five poems are all in rhyming couplets, in the AABB format. One is three stanzas, three are four stanzas, and one, which I regard as my greatest achievement, is five. These poems were not, as my previous ones were, entirely imagination. For every one of these poems, I made sure that I had a solid inspiration. Uninspired poetry is not poetry at all; although with previous attempts I had tried to deny it.

Because of the length of each entry plus poem, I will post one now and the rest in later posts. Enjoy!

July 27-August 1

BOUNDARY WATERS TRIP

Taken by Dan and Sue Hanson, Moses Bratrud and Abraham Bratrud.

Day 1-July 27

We took our time leaving--which was just as well because some indigent members of the expedition had done no packing at all. However, we were on the road by no later than 2:20 PM with a full church service under our belts. We took in a less substantial repast at Wendy's in Hudson. Dad called as we supped on fats and carbohydrates in colorful packages. He was slightly underwhelmed by our progress thus far. But we pushed onward.

I can't stress enough how enjoyable the trip up was--would have been, that is, if we had left our legs behind. Dan's truck, which could otherwise be compared favorable to a faithful Yorkshire draft horse, is not as faithful inside. In fact, it's nothing short of adulterous. But I should not have been surprised--after all, Dan pointed out on the original window sticker of his Dodge Dakota that it had seating for "two adults and three legless midgets OR two Rhode Island Red laying hens." By switching positions between the three passenger seats (dubbed: Cramped, Even More Cramped, and The Crusher) Mom and Abe and I managed to disembark with our lower appendages intact. We intended to push on to Grand Marais, MN, for some bonus sightseeing, but while still miles distant, Dan pointed out the Ranger Station where we would have to go in the morning anyway to get our permit, and instead of backtracking like that we decided to find somewhere closer. An utterly forgettable Americinn appeared wraith-like out of the dusk, the lights of its pool wing filtered through condensation-covered windows that danced with reflection off the water beckoned us in like moths. Our room is already a dim fog in my memory. It was one of those newfangled ones which they pour directly into the mold, bedsheets and all, at a faceless factory in Xjinhujaxian Province in the People's Republic.

It was 7:49 PM by the time we wafted out of the motel in search of some half-mythical purveyor of foodstuffs. It was cleverly hidden, but our brave questor heroes did not falter and found themselves ensconced on the deck of the strangely multinational Cafe Coho, where "skeeters" outnumbered patrons by a substantial ratio. Staff with un-Italian accents (no, not American either) served Italianesque food that was nothing less than manna to the weary travellers, topped off by a massive slice each of a chocolate concoction that bore a resemblance to a DQ ice cream cake. Bellies distended and appetites sated, we returned to the--what was it again?--and fell into exhausted sleep.

[And now, the poem. My first and shortest effort. Also perhaps my weakest, but at least I improved instead of the alternative!]

Sunbeam

When a shaft of light,
Strong and bright,
Shines through the pallor of cloud
It is the smile of a maiden unbowed.

When water it hits
It bursts into bits
In the facets of water's expanse
And re-forms, into a watery dance.

But when cloud, like a fist, closes once more
The dance is infected, it becomes like a sore.
Then light without sun, shadow without shade.
The sun won't return, even if it is bade.

Many, Many Musings to Mention

2008-07-26T19:36:00.007-05:00

It's been a slow blog week--partly because of work and numerous friend activities, and partly because we're leaving for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area tomorrow! Yes, the Hanson/Bratrud conflagration corporation is heading to the Great Watery North.

I've had a revelation of sorts; as you know, I've gone a month and a half without discussing the political stage on this blog. Shocking, really, when you think that up until that point this blog had been politics first and everything else secondary. But anyway, the revelation is that I rather enjoy not discussing politics. Politics is down-and-dirty, spontaneous, easy. If I'm under mental pressure to post about something, anything, politics immediately floats to the top because it's so easy. Everything in politics is either outrageous or pitiful or hateful or laughable--or all of the above. I don't hate politics, as the people who simply don't understand it say they do, but I have no illusions about what it is. I can't deny that it's necessary, either, but this blog attains a higher intellectual level by discussing politics, but discussing the cultural, religious, and societal trends that forge the political scene. Take, for example, the issue of the Anglican split, and deeper than that the confrontation between religious liberalism and religious conservatism. The Liberals are the Pacific plate, the Conservatives are the North American plate, and politics forms the San Andreas fault between them.

So, in the future, politics will be kept at a minimum at Mosings. This kills two birds with one stone, in fact. Many of my faithful readers profess to "hate" politics and to be bored out of their skulls when I write about it on this august pixelated faux-intellectual late-capitalist ex-literary collection of random coding known as a blog. So, I no longer have to ford the muddy river of politics to achieve the nirvana of blogging success, and I no longer have to bore and disappoint my audience!

Important Reader's Note: By "politics" I generally and non-bindingly mean the 2008 elections, and the lowest battleground of politics. Campaigns, political speeches, and that sort of thing. I will still be discussing important issues that have been unfortunate enough to have been deemed "political" but are, in fact, part of the plates rather than part of the fault.

Speaking of religious conservatism and religious liberalism, Abe and I have been watching episodes of the strangely addictive eighties British sitcom (I can think of no words more repellent to your average Simpson's fan than "eighties British sitcom") "Yes, Minister," and its sequel "Yes, Prime Minister" on YouTube. It's incredibly interesting and humorous to see Jim Hacker, MP (Paul Eddington) being held at the mercy of his Civil-Service advisor, Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne), while his rather hapless Private Secretary Bernard Woolley (Derek Fowlds--how's that for a Welsh name?) is caught in the middle. It's mixture of G-rated tongue-in-cheek humor, political satire and intrigue, with fairly veiled political commentary is, to me and Abe, addicting. I can't explain it.

But anyway. One of the episodes we watched today was called "The Bishop's Gambit." In this episode, the Church of England forwards the customary two names to the Prime Minister so that he can pick one to reccomend to Her Majesty for a new Bishop of something or other. It's quintessentially British to leave the choosing of Bishop's names to forward to secular politicians. It leads to some frank conversation about the degenerate state of the Anglican Church. The Church official who briefs Prime Minister Hacker has already made up his mind, and tells him that so-and-so is a "Modernist." Sir Humphrey later tells Hacker that "Modernist" is key for "athiest," which indeed it is. The episode later descends into political shenanigans, but I winced at the smiling-on-the-surface-but-quite-barbed-underneath critique of the Church. Eddington (a devout Quaker) played Hacker's blindly altruistic secular caution about religious matters perfectly, and the great lines build up: (I paraphrase) Hacker: "Surely it's alright for a Bishop in the Church of England to believe in God?" Sir Humphrey: "Oh, you'd be surprised Prime Minister."

The whole "seperation of church and state" idea is carried much too far. But some people (David Limbaugh and his book "Persecution" come to mind) think that all our problems would be solved if all our leaders were at least outwardly Christian. Say hello to religious fascism. When sinful man and religion and the church (as opposed to Christ's Religion and Christ's Church) and government get mixed up, the result is either puritanism or resolute indifference for both parties. In Britain in the centuries following Henry VIII's self-serving break from Rome, the church has become steadily more indifferent to real Religion, so that it is now acceptable, as Hacker finds out, for a complete unbeliever to become a Bishop--as long as everyone knows but nobody tells the churchgoers (less and less every year in England--wonder why?). It is so pervasive, in fact, that true Christians are "extremists." But I'm walking on treaded ground--I've already covered the sad state of the Anglican church.

In other news, I've found plucky Kiwi blogger Poneke's post about one of the original Global Warming toadies renouncing it completely.

In still other news, I'm reading Marcus Tanner's Last of the Celts. Expect a post or series of posts about the state of the Celtic nations--as well as a trip log of our BWCA trip!--when we return.

Location, Location, Location

2008-07-20T14:00:00.000-05:00

Vinegar and Baking Soda.

In reading, as in real estate, location is everything. Certainly a good book has power anywhere, but every book has a place where reading it is more intellectually or emotionally charged. These nodes hook your brain and your heart to the book in a more vital way. Reading ceases to be a merely intellectual pursuit--not that it should be in the normal way, but it too often is--and becomes an emotional one as well. Thus, it becomes a true experience, because it incorporates emotion and rational thought, the vinegar and baking soda that make our lives fizz.

It is all well and good to read, say, Tom Clancy's Hunt for the Red October (which currently languishes on my shelf, unread) on a bus or subway, or curled up in bed, but it is another thing entirely, I should imagine, to read it in the blue light of an actual submarine cabin. That's not an experience many people are likely to have, but do you see what I'm getting at? When you read a book somewhere that figures in the story itself somehow, is evocative of the book in some way, or was important to the author; or alternatively in non-fiction, reading a book about a certain battle on the battlefield; reading a book about American democracy while sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial; it becomes, in a real or imaginary way, closer to you.

Anne Fadiman, writing in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, tells of how she read the journals of a western explorer in the Lewis and Clarke mold while sitting on the shore of the very river being described in the book. She also tells of an author who read a book about Hannibal and the Punic Wars while in a misty Italian battlefield. Reading A. A. Milne on a country bench somewhere in the forest that became, in his stories, the Hundred Acre Wood, reading Shakespeare while being punted down the Avon, reading Gilgamesh in Iraq, Exodus in Egypt and Israel, or Acts of the Apostles in Athens or Philippi or Corinth or Rome; you can imagine the significance of achieving that.

A problem comes, however, regarding two areas of my literary canon: religious books, and science-fiction/fantasy. These three categories in fact probably make up most of my reading itinerary. Christian books such as the Screwtape Letters, The Reason for God, and in fact the Bible itself are by their nature otherworldly. Christianity does not dwell on this world; it does not dwell in this world. God is not of the world, and Christians are called not to be either. But the world in the Bible is more often the enemies of God, or the sinful nature, which can be described as the necrotic crusty nacre of unspeakable, filthy evil and sin; the antithesis of everything God created the world to be. Since we, and the world, are totally but not utterly depraved--there is no sinless aspect of our lives and world, but nothing is completely sinful. So, there remains in this world a part; a 2-d image of a 3-d event, a black-and-white photograph; of the glory and majesty God created in Man and in this world. But that doesn't answer the question: are there places where the Bible, to take one example, can be read so that it has the power of location?

The Bible is, of course, a special case. The only perfect book in the world; the only one inspired by God. It is always equally powerful to read the Bible, and because it is such a diverse, world-spanning narrative, no place can really be defined by it. However, I think it would have great meaning to read the story of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, of his crucifixion in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and etc. The question must arise, though: Where do you read a perfect book? There are two possible answers: everywhere and heaven.

The Screwtape Letters? The theme of anxiety about World War II is something frequently mentioned in the book. It's such a perfectly crafted work that, although it does not have an explicit plot, the tension still builds towards the end as the War looms. A bench at a WWII memorial perhaps? An Anglican confessional? I guess that's one we'll have to discover.

Science-fiction and fantasy may be the only exceptions to the rule. It's not possible to read Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire in Admiral Thrawn's low-lit art-filled command sanctum--although I swear it's out there somewhere. It's not possible to read William Shatner's Star Trek Academy Collision Course in 23rd Century San Francisco, and so on. Perhaps because so much of reading this kind of book is intertwined with pure imagination in that it makes use of far less real-life material--that rests, if you will, already in image files in our brains--than, say, a John Grisham book. Compare the following tidbits: "He was wide awake when the engine was throttled down and the boat moved close to the bank. There were voices, then a gentle bump as they docked at the trading post. Nate slowly removed himself from the hammock and returned to the bench, where he sat" This is form John Grisham's excellent book, The Testament. Engines, boats, banks, trading posts, hammocks, voices, bumps, and benches are all things we are at leasy vaguely familiar with. Nate is a familiar name. I would say this book's "node" would be drifting slowly down the Amazon in a river boat. Compare it to this: "Atuarre watched anxiously as she and a few chosen helpers in the big tier-level cargo lock almost threw milling prisoners into the tunnel tube, where they thrashes like swimmers, moving and helping one another move towards the junction station." That example may be too effective; it seems incomprehensible. To clarify, I should say that Atuarre is helping wrongly-held prisoners escape through a no-gravity tube, thus the throwing and thrashing like swimmers. But still, many of these words are no doubt unfamiliar to you. I, who have read a chunk of science fiction in my day, understand it better, but part of the charm of science fiction is that in many ways it leaves more to the reader and author both, rather than, say, the laws of physics or reality which usually set unflicnhing guidelines. In that sense, sci-fi is both harder and easier to write and read than a Nora Roberts or John Grisham book. But you can see my point: there aren't many science fiction books with "nodes"; most of them don't even happen in this universe.

The book and place don't even necessarily have to be related to get the electric connection Anne Fadiman writes about. One of my favorite reading memories took place on the shores of a glassy northern lake, sitting on a hugely gnarled tree root indian-style. Dusk was falling, and I had to bend close to the book to see what I was reading. The book? It was a P.G. Wodehouse book featuring Jeeves and Wooster. How seemingly alien to the quiet dusky stillness of that lake reflecting the last rays of the sun into the tree-lined campsite. And yet somehow, it was a great reading moment. It was a vinegar and baking soda moment.

Life Update

2008-07-19T16:45:00.000-05:00

No idea how I've gone this long without blogging. However, my one month no-politics period is over and done with, so expect at least a few political posts in the next week.

I've been undergoing a slight paradox this summer: computer or books? The very fact that I'm posting about this on the computer must make it seem like the books capitulated, but they've been waging quite a fight. I love books more than computer, yet I seem to spend more time on the computer. Perhaps because I can only talk to people I care about through the computer at some points, or maybe because of the low mental energy level computer use requires compared to reading a book, especially the books I read, which are rarely of the "Dick and Jane" variety.

That said, I've managed to get through a few good ones this summer. See my GoodReads widget on the lefthand side of of this blog for details on that.

We went to Chicago over the weekend, for my cousin's baptism and another cousin's baby shower. I mean, a baby shower for the as-yet unborn offspring of my cousin. I also had a Rachael-Ray-recommended dish called "French Toast Fantasy"--and it certainly was fantastic--at an incredibly expensive Swedish-influenced breakfast place in Chicago, and saw the Blue Man Group; a group of men, painted blue in case the title wasn't self-explanatory enough for you. That was mind-blowing. I urge you to see it. I drove most of the way to and from Chicago, except for between Madison and Chicago en route and from Chicago to Harvard, IL, on the way back. It was really my first long-distance driving experience, and I think it really increased my on-road confidence.

We also stopped at the International Crane Foundation (http://www.savingcranes.org/), where all fifteen species of crane in the world are exhibited. That was a blast. They're incredible birds, and we got to see them up close. We also got a cool window sticker for the Spudmobile, which by the way returned its best mileage since it came into our possession--23 mpg, over the long soporific monotony of the interstate.

Most of you know I have a job at McDonald's. It has all the intellectual stimulation of a coma, but it pays fairly well. I'm debating if I would quit it if another, better offer (say, from the library) came my way. I guess it would depend how flexible they would be to my hours at such a job.

Well, it's raining hard outside. I'm rather glad we decided not to go to the county fair again this afternoon; I expect it's raining there too.

Well, I'll be back later this week--before we leave for the Boundary Waters!-- with a political post at least, and perhaps a cultural post.