1. Mr Obama the bigot? Well, yes but he’s a hopey-changey bigot and that makes all the difference, just like Mr Clinton the sexist was a sexist of the right sort so it didn’t matter.
2. That little universe.
3. Debates and changes of perception.
4. The big race Sunday. Three background stories, one, two, and three. I find that of my purchased recordings of classics, the L-B-L tops the list which means by some measure it is my favorite of the classics to watch.
5. A interesting new website noted.
6. A film noted. Another one here.
7. Considering public education.
8. A new Philokalia translation? And a note “reading is not practice.” … Rats. 😉
9. Pakistan and the Taliban.
10. A Orthodox response to a Lutheran question.
11. Ms Pelosi and the waterboarding issue.
12. Dya think?
13. That “stupid book” as an opportunity.
14. The real villain behind WWII … and he got away with it.
15. More innumeracy in the White House.
16. Low-brow? Well, I guess I’ll have to blog about my symphony experiences more often.
17. UPS and modeling faith.
18. It’s not the thought that counts.
19. God and the quantum universe.

One point here I’d like to make clear. I am firmly against institutional support for torture. I have no qualms stating that and think that torture at best should have institutional guards against its use. It is not clear that it is ever necessary to use it and there are reasons not to. However, I don’t think the utilitarian case can be effectively made against it, that is, that I think the historical record clearly shows that torture can be used to extract information. Blog neighbor Mr Kuznicki accuses me of not carefully reading his point of view on torture when I describe it as “ineffective”. His actual words (from a later post):

Along the way, Dr. Arrigo also supports the independent argument that I’ve been making, namely that torture tends to reveal a great deal more false but convincing information in addition to whatever truth happens to come out, and that, for this reason, it’s a bad informational bargain. [note: emphasis mine]

That’s a bit more nuanced objection than one normally finds, my characterization as “ineffective” is wrong where “a bad informational bargain”, oh no that’s just way way different. A complete misreading … or not. For to me that reads a lot like “ineffective”, doesn’t it? Alas, I’m a little unclear on the difference.

There are remain two problems here. One is that resistance movements in general have always reacted to capture of one of their members in a regime in which torture is utilized by quickly moving safehouses and scrubbing all contact with the captured member. Why? The most likely reason they do that is experience in the organization shows that if they don’t move quickly the captured person will “break” under “enhanced interrogation” and they and those to whom he/she was in contact are now at extreme risk. As a odd side note, I’d add that a book The Quiller Memorandum from my childhood, err, mispent youth of cold-war spy vs spy genre (except agent was deemed “reliable under torture” instead of “licensed to kill”) was quite interesting and psychological was quite good even if the later books in the series suffered for moving to the action side and away from the thoughtful end of the storyline arc. The point is if it was true that torture was so bad at giving information then such organizations, which do learn from experience, would stop moving after capture. They didn’t so it seems highly probable that torture from an experimental viewpoint on the victims side … works. So, to put it bluntly: If you think torture is ineffective, why do organizations when facing an opponent who uses torture in an assymmetric struggle always have to quickly move to cut ties and move safehouses when someone is being tortured and interrogated if the claim (of its bad information content) is true?

Why is that? Well, here is my guess. The problem located likely at the the phrase supplied by Mr Kuznicki, that is “bad information.” Almost all information from intelligence sources in a conflict are “bad” in the same way that confessions under duress are. The signal to noise ratio is horrible in all but ideal situations … and ideal situations are very very rare. The best information in a semi-static situation is obtained by a good cultivated relationship with a snitch, just as was found to be the case in Iraq. But from an intelligence gathering point of view, most of the intelligence gained is bad. This, in the crime fighting genre, leads to the “chasing down leads” side of the equation. Snitches, double agents, satellites, drones, phone taps, cell phone monitoring, radio spectrum analysis, internet/switch monitoring, bribed, interrogation, and “enhanced interrogation” are all bad sources of intelligence when you get down to it. The signal to noise ratio of all of these methods is horrible. Correlation between intelligence leads to higher probability of fact. In the absence of good leads, agents and people chase down every available lead, again from the crime drama world … leads have to be chased down with footwork. The point being while torture is indeed “bad information.” The problem real problem arises that so are all the other sources of information. When all information is bad, more bad information which can lead to correlation with other information is in itself entirely useless. When the gestapo or whatever agency got 75 names from torture. They chased down all those leads. Perhaps many were bad. But they had resources and the time and if 5 of the 75 led to a little evidence then they have 5 more people with which to have an enhanced chat. And that led to more names that lead to further connections. That was worth the payoff (for them).

There is another issue regarding torture I’d raised years ago which is the culturally relative problem in defining torture. The colonial era trans-Atlantic voyage, not to speak of the Darwin/Cook trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic voyages, today would be regard as cruel and inhumane punishment. The quantity of pain regularly indured by NFL, professional cyclists, and many other professional atheletes is astounding to the uninitiated and likely exceeds that delivered to those under many forms of “enhanced interrogation.” The sleep deprivation noted in some of the accounts compare that to the Shackleton’s amazing journey or those who race sailboats around the world and around the horn. Read the beginning of this book (The Soul Of A New Machine) for the geek variant on sleep deprivation. There is an old joke which goes something like this.

Joe Frazier is in a bar drinking and one surly drunk stumbles up to him and starts swearing about the money he lost betting on him. The drunk is ignored by Joe which just bugs the drunk and spurs him to exclaim how he’s going to haul off and wing Joe but good. Joe finally ever so slowly turns to him and says, “If you hit me, and I happen to find out about it ….. “

The point is what is torture to one person in one time and era is making an ordinary living to another.

1. Linking to links.
2. Some thoughts on torture.
3. Beauty and nature.
4. Profit in the business world (re)considered.
5. Technology?
6. Boris?
7. Dork?
8. On the Caprica pilot.
9. Scent.
10. Estimating neuron counts in the beltway.
11. Upheaval?
12. Or is it time to close the schools?
13. Changes at First Things.
14. The Ikon screen or Iconostasis considered.
15. Hope and change apparently does not include more honesty in government, less?
16. Being in the right place at the right time.
17. An amateur rides the Huy.
18. Pals.

Torture seems to the be the hot topic of discussion today.

• Ms McArdle offers an interesting alternative way to object to the notion torture even granting its effectiveness.
• Mr Kuznicki continues to hold on the notion, which seems more and more likely to be incorrect, that torture is actually ineffective.
• And … Mr Fernandez points out a big reason why it is likely that torture works and that those who think it isn’t actually effective live in ivory towers wearing rose tinted glasses. It has to effects, it can extract information and it can terrorize a population. Both work, i.e., torture can get information and can terrorize a population.

Torture is almost certainly effective. To isolate the one of the points Mr Fernandez raises:

But I didn’t need Mr. Cheney to tell me that. When I ran safehouses in the anti-Marcos days the first order of business whenever a cell member was captured by the police was to alert the surviving members, move the safehouse and destroy all links to the captured person. That’s because everyone knew that there was a great probability that the captive would talk under duress, however great his bravery and resistance. Nobody I know, or have heard of who has had experience in real-life situations has ever said, “our cell should continue as usual and the safehouse should remain open, despite the fact that one of our own is being tortured by the secret police, because I read in the New York Times that coercion never works.” The probability is that torture works and for that reason its use constitutes a moral dilemma; and the reason why Jacoby believes he is expressing a noble sentiment when he forswears it even as “a last and desperate option” in the War on Terror.

This is not a isolated reaction of a resistance movement in the Philippines … resistance in France in WWII and elsewhere in modern and ancient eras had to react quickly after one of their companions was captured. Why? Because under torture, the threat that the person held would talk was more likely than not. Mr Kuznicki would have it that the notion that the gestapo and/or the Marcos regime might extract under duress valuable information is not likely. He would not (apparently) “alert the surviving members, move the safehouse and destroy all links to the captured person”. Doing those things takes effort and entails risk. According to the “torture doesn’t work” theory that would be counter-productive, expensive, and risky. According, alas, to the real world … it may be expensive and risky … but it is also necessary. And the reason why it is necessary is the erroneous assumption that torture doesn’t work. Torture it seems in the real world, doesn’t always work … but very often does.

However that being said, Ms McArdle’s proposed argument has merit. We are not and have not been a people that condones torture. My contention is that torture and methods of torture should be known and understood by our state agents. But that when and if they use it, they should understand that it is illegal. We ask our soldiers to lay their lives down for the benefit of their country. The existence of effective torture techniques means that we may also ask our operatives and agents to lay down their career and possibly their freedom and good name for the benefit of the country. To put in in the parlance of popular theater, Mr Baur may use torture (effectively even) to save (many?) American lives … but in the aftermath he should go to jail for it … absent a (rare) Presidential pardon. We should remain a people and an nation that never systematically employs torture as a method. It may be that making it illegal is a way to do that. It may also be that there are other, just as effective ways of doing that.

I am no lawyer and I have no idea how the law stood and the law stands now. Apparently waterboarding and similar techniques as were used recently has been used on occaission as a method of extracting information in times of need for over 50 years by our country. If Mr Bush and Mr Cheney and their administration is to be now tried for the methods they employed should not the previous 6-8 administrations be vetted and tried too?

Live (blogged sort of) coverage of the 73rd La Flèche Wallonne can be found here. A preview here.

1. A death of a CFO.
2. Blood and a gift.
3. A film for fun.
4. For Earth day, a modest proposal.
5. Stimulus (HT: Carl Olson)
6. A sixth century icon from Mount Athos.
7. A carnival asks for submissions.
8. On the rhetorical phrase, “Of Course”.
9. The first tremors of the current economic downturn was the collapse of the housing bubble … how’s that housing situation look now?
10. Hate? Hate is not the first thought comes to my mind. Actually it’s not even on the list.
11. Fasting, end of the fast, and the convert.
12. Dickens re-imagined and the POTUS.
13. The other side of waterboarding prosecutions.
14. Archaeology and Aegypt.
15. Espionage.
16. On prayer and footprints.
17. Verse.
18. On hope.
19. From the left on waterboarding and interrogation.
20. Taking acting seriously.

Today’s links started a short discussion on healthcare. The Liberal/Progressive left see universal health insurance (one insurance provider) as a way to ensure the “right” that they believe every American has to good healthcare. Now, I don’t think healthcare is a “right” but then again I’m admittedly quite shaky when it comes what the word “right” (with or without scare quotes) might mean and think that by and large think that we don’t have what is meant commonly by that word, especially for healthcare. But I digress, for the point of this essay is to establish a few “talking points” regarding healthcare from a policy standpoint.

I’ll begin with noting a few flaws with universal coverage.

• One of the primary problems with universal coverage/one provider for insurance is structural. Representational government, involving elected officials, is particularly poorly suited to handle actuarial matters. Politicians like to promise, and very often promise short term gains ignoring long term costs, e.g., flood insurance rates set by the State is traditionally far below what reasonable actuarial calculations will provide. The representitive banks on the “payback” or disaster which is being insured against will not occur in his/her lifetime.
• Good actuarial calculations demand an eye to the cost, to the bottom line. That future cost is the future of the company and cannot be overlooked, unlike it can in a politician’s rhetoric.
• Insurance-as-business has a short term interest in cutting costs, but a long term interest in them going up. That is to say, in the short term a medical insurance provider benefits from cutting health care costs. If a medical procedure costs less, it costs them less and they don’t have to pay as much to provide a given benefit. On the other hand in the long term, their rates and profit are based on a percentage of average costs … which if they go up, then aggregate profits go up as well. One might suspect that the cost/benefit analysis works differently for a government run agency, but this is not likely the case as power as well as profit goes into the government’s payback.

Now some thoughts on healthcare in general.

• Why is healthcare expensive today? The reason shirts, food, shoes, and toasters are cheap today is because of two factors. Mechanization allows for multiplication of human labor involved in their production and the availability of cheap power. If a skilled or unskilled laborer can produce 10,000 widgets a day with a machine where he can only make one per day by hand, then the price of the widget being sold can drop by orders of magnitude. Unless we increase greatly the number of health care workers and pay them slave wages the price of healthcare is going to stay prohibitively high. Humans, especially skilled humans, cost money (they need to get paid). Ultimately the only way to make healthcare available and cheap for everyone is to get the humans efforts multiplied by technological means. If a doctor today sees 40 patients a day, the only way to reduce health care costs by orders of magnitude is to increase the number of patients he can minister to in a day the same orders of magnitude. This is not as impossible as it sounds. The average village pediatrician sees childhood diseases in waves. When a flu sweeps through the town, he gets hit with hundreds of kids with identical symptoms. Does he need to give the same diagnostic care to all? Couldn’t some intelligent automation and cheap intelligent diagnostic tools multiply his effectiveness?
• Another reason is regulation. FDA regulation is very expensive, and largely useless from the point of view of the manufacturer. FDA approval does not indemnify a manufacturer from fault. After going through extensive and expensive tests a drug is approved. If later it is found harmful, the manufacturer is still liable even though they got certification. FDA approval is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has cost. That cost should be an option not a requirement and should indemnify the manufacturer from fault. If the FDA approves thalidomide for pre-natal maternal care then there should be no way to bring suit in case harmful effects are discovered later unless the manufacturer fudged or falsified the certification procedure. Requiring FDA approval is likely the single biggest roadblock to innovation in the healthcare industry in the US today. I’m not suggesting it be eliminated, in fact by indemnifying a manufacturer upon gaining FDA certification it is instead strengthened. The other side of that coin is that FDA approval for drugs and health care products should be optional.
• Univeral/single payer plans miss out on the goal. The goal for government policy should not be to bring equal health care to everyone but to provide a path to better, cheaper, and more effective future health care for all of us. Government driven policy and insurance is not the way to innovate.

Look at an example noted in Monday’s highlight’s comments:

A down to earth example might be the law student whose letter Andrew Sullivan published recently. He has asthma but no coverage since he is in school. He has to basically get his friends mom to swipe samples of the drug he needs. He was jogging on a treadmill and got a sudden pain in his foot. He stayed off of it for several months. In the meantime someone with good coverage will get regular checkups for a $20 co-pay and maybe spend $100 for an emergancy x-ray if they got that mysterious pain in their foot. This type of ‘rationing’ does not seem very efficient or fair.

How might this end up in a “mechanized” health care environment? Today we have many categories of “prescription” drugs and over the counter drug and as well we have protected and generic drugs. My suggestions would severely limit the first category opening up the number of drugs available over the counter, which would almost certainly include asthma inhalants. And as well to the “protected” and “generic” classifications of drugs, other approval schemes would be available besides FDA approved medications. Other independent certifications (or no certification at all) would be available to drug manufacturers. That would leave a larger array of price points for the albuterol this young student needs. In the second case, the student could go to a semi-automated (think Kinko’s) medical diagnostic clinic, rent some scan time with a automated scanner (x-ray or ultra-sound likely) and have the pain in his foot examined. He could have an automated result from an expert system tell him what therapeutic options would be best in his case and the an estimate of accuracy of diagnoses which he could use to decide if he needed his pictures to be examined by a human expert. The clinic would be making money by providing this machine for likely less than that $20 co-pay. Note that in my “plan” anti-plan no insurance is needed. In fact, the existence of insurance would mean that the things needed to give control back to the patient and provide for more health care “product” to be consumed by the population would not be occuring. Single payer or universal health care is exactly the wrong way to get to where we need to go. It is moving to a more covered, more controlled and less effective health care industry, which gets it exactly backwards.

Consider 400 years ago, I’d bet that over 60% of the population farmed. Consider food as analogous to health care. Single payer is a plan to provide “fairer distribution” (an arguable point) and redistribute and control what food is produced. That sounds like a move to the collective farming of peasants who stay with non-mechanized labor for production. But history has shown, a more effective way to provide inexpensive food is to bring in harvesters, trucks, fertilizer, refrigeration, super-markets, and other (farmers, ethnic, health) markets into the equation. Single payer supporters are the ones fighting for staying with the horse drawn solutions on collectivized farms at the same time as a better solution. Today a small fraction of the population farms … and obesity because, in part, of cheap available food is the problem.

So essentially the single-payer supporter is campaigning for the five-year plans of the Soviet era and the failed farm collectivization projects of Lenin and Stalin which caused mass starvation and shortages. So when looked at from a practical standpoint, single-payer healthcare might have pretty poetic stories and market jingles to push its agenda forward. But to put it bluntly, one might ask the supporters single payer, “So which is it are you stupid or evil?” ‘Cause it seems like those are only the two alternatives that remain.

1. Our (apparently innumerate) President’s budget cuts.
2. Genesis. Genealogy and charts.
3. St. Cyril on Isaiah.
4. Intrinsically Anti-Semitic theology noted.
5. Kids and fire.
6. Market (not gov’mint fiat).
7. A doorknob.
8. A return to the fold and the faith.
9. Not liking The Shack so much.
10. HRM for swimmers.
11. Not liking Mr Obama … but still of the mind that Mr McCain would have been worse (and perhaps forgetting the benefits of gridlock regarding economic response).
12. A quote on carbon.
13. A thousand words on the prosperity gospel.
14. Training and life.
15. Faith and thought.
16. Faith and divorce … three myths.
17. Of God and Caesar.
18. An impressive bedroom floor booklist.
19. In my youth, B-school literary fancies ran to the Book of Five Rings today a more regrettable choice is apparently popular.
20. Planned Parenthood covering more crime.
21. Dance.

1. Some Paschal Links from the East: A Dachau icon, four prison camp liturgies recalled, Liturgy pictures from the seminary, from Esteban, a song, the homily preached in every Orthodox parish on Pascha, and symbolism at the table (in which I wonder how our annual inclusion of White Castle sliders figures in that idea),
2. Live and word and a Darwinian fable.
3. Evolution and snake oil.
4. Information and habit in Baghdad.
5. On high speed passenger rail.
6. Heh.
7. Mr Wilders.
8. Universal health care in which “and a pony” is not the best remark … but honestly speaking I’ve yet to hear a reasoned answer to my rejoinder that health care requires rationing … and why is “ability to pay” not the fairest method of doing the rationing?
9. The left’s Ms Coulter.
10. Verse.
11. One big factor “keeping the Black man down” and likely one which will not help the “white man” in the future.
12. Eight years.
13. A tale (and an amazing book) from the gulag.
14. Patristics resources.

In a recent extended discussion of a Christian apologetic nature, the claim was made that Jesus dual nature of being God and man is logically impossible. I think the argument that this is in fact logically possible is independent of the actual Scriptural/doctrinal basis for the claims that He does in fact posses such dual nature. I suggested at the time that the situation found in nature regarding the dual nature of matter as wave and particle has an incomplete logical resolution but which suggests a similar solution might be found for one person being both God and man.

The essential logical problem is categorical or ontological in nature. A wave is an extended effect, a point-like particle is is not extended. The notion that something can be extensive and localized at the same time is a inconsistent or illogical. It’s akin to suggesting a number can be composite, prime, and/or a unit at the same time. However, the notion that this illogical turns out to be the error, that is to say the error is not that a thing cannot be a extended and point-like at the same time … for the universe is demonstrates that the error is not that this is impossible but that it is observed. Whether it is illogical or not is irrelevant, it is in fact the case that particles are wave-like and point-like at the same time. The error is in the ontological notion of “what is matter”. Matter exists in a different way altogether. Matter is best given a description which actually does posses these qualities simultaneously. The technical details of that particular construction (and its own peculiar limitations are not salient at this point, but for some non-technical descriptions lay-level I’d recommend Gamow’s Mr Tompkins in Paperback or the more recent release of that for an introduction).

My suggestion is that the God/man duality problem is similarly solved. That is the suggestion is that a being cannot be man and God at the same time. The error is perhaps in what you mean by “a being” and not that the notion of having that particular dual nature is impossible. In the matter example it was the notion of what constituted matter that was in error. Perhaps what is in error here the conception of personhood or being, that is what it means to be man or God. Metropolitan John Zizioulas in Being as Communion discusses the development of the idea of person though antiquity into the developments required by theological developments that unfolded in describing precisely the issue of the dual nature of Christ and an understanding of Trinity. In Classical Greece, person was had a dramatic understanding, that is one’s person related to one’s role in family and society. In Rome, a juridical understanding prevailed, that is that a person primarily meant one’s legal standing within society was how personhood was identified. In the fourth century theologians in Alexandria and the Cappodocian Fathers arrived at an idea of hypostasis as person. This notion of hypostasis in fact aligns quite well with some modern notions of personhood, Vladimir Lossky goes so far as to suggest that the modern notion of person derives from the developments by the Cappadocian fathers, but for myself I wonder if that can be established. That is to say, that the notions of person are in fact very similar and from that evidence the hypothesis that they are related is suggestive but the development might be independent but arriving at the same conclusion.

Within the modern notions of person, consider the science fiction/fantasy notions involving transfer of person from one body to another (or to a machine). The hypostasis or person is not directly tied to body. In stories, such as Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels persons can be “uploaded” or transferred from one person to another. This idea makes narrative sense in the context of our modern notion of personhood. A friend or mine (and as well my experience with my children) noted that infants from the very first moment, to his surprise demonstrate and evidence distinct personality. One might suspect that personality develops later in life, but from the first moments an infant expresses a distinct personality.

Hypostasis is separate from memory. If I lose or gain memories, I remain myself. The kernel of what constitutes the unique hypostasis or self may not be identifiably definable in a propositional manner but if one turns that around and defines the unique person as the kernel of person which is distance from particulars of memory, ability, and body. So the, what is occurring in the notion that Christ has dual nature as God and man. Simply that God (or one of the three hypostasis within the triune Christian conception of the Godhead) condescended to allow his hypostasis to be expressed in a particular man, Jesus. That is, Jesus developed into a grown man from infancy whose kernel of self was God translated to a (fully) human person just in the same manner as from a narrative perspective one might find a person “uploaded” to a machine in a sci-fi story.

The point is, while the factual details might be disputed, i.e., non-Christians in particular might dispute that this true and a accurate account of what happened from a logical standpoint what is being claimed makes logical sense. The hypostasis or kernel or personhood from one being was translated from one body to another body. If it makes sense in the context of narrative it makes sense in the context of Christ.

1. Of light and customs in the East.
2. Praise of hypocrisy?
3. A book reviewed (and a short interview with the author).
4. I’m in the seventh week of the Lenten fast, like bacon, and that doesn’t look remotely appetizing.
5. Size … and history.
6. Polical philosophy, economics, and turf wars.
7. Wheden and FOX.
8. In order to marry my little girl ….
9. Why … did He rise?
10. Speaking of hypocrisy.
11. Well perhaps hypocrisy isn’t the right word here … but “I’ve participated in such protests before” but your reasons don’t meet my standards so you’re protest is clearly motivated by greed alone is really ill considered.
12. “Stress tests”
13. More on Tuesday Matins service on the Harlot and the Disciple.
14. Why tea parties? One explanation.
15. Well, I don’t think it’s clear that their response is religiously motivated so perhaps Jihad is the wrong term.

Tonight’s service continued the Matins in the evening theme. The service ended with the Sacrament of Unction, a anointing with oil for the remission of sins and healing of body (following the epistle of James). Tonight I thought I’d offer some remarks on the canon, which accompanies matins (or the Vigil service which varies with different tradition) in ordinary times.

The Nine “Canticles” of the early church were taken from Scripture directly. These Canticles were originally read as part of services but through the years additional prayers (the canons) were written as meditations on the Canticles. More and more canons were written and some assigned to “ordinary” times in the year and others to accompany feasts and fasts that follow in the church liturgical cycle. Eventually the canons often replaced the canticles for brevity (although I’m guessing monastic practice does both). What are the nine canticles:

1. Canticle One: The Song of Moses. Exodus 15:1-18. This would be read verse by verse with a refrain. In this case for example, refrain is taken from the first verse “for He has triumphed gloriously” (the whole verse reads “I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider He has thrown into the sea”.
2. Canticle Two: The Song of Moses. Deuteronomy 32:1-42. This is quite long and I’ve come to understand canticle (and therefore canon two) are read only on Tuesdays in Great Lent as it is a lamentation.
3. Canticle Three: The Song of Hannah 1 Samuel (or 1 Reigns in the Septuagint): 1-10.
4. Canticle Four: The Song of Habakkuk (Habakkuk 3:2-19)
5. Canticle Five: The Song of Isaiah (Isaiah 26:8-21)
6. Canticle Six: The Song of Jonah (Jonah 2:1-9) The Canons written about the next three invariably connect these events as types of the Resurrection.
7. Canticle Seven: The Prayer of the Three Holy Children(Daniel 3:26-56)
8. Canticle Eight: The Song of the Three Holy Children (Daniel 3:57-88)
9. Canticle Nine: The Song of the Theotokos (In the West this is the Magnificat) and the Song of Zacharias (the Benedictus) Luke 1:46-55 and 68-79 respectively.

The canons themselves I find a treasure. They contain caches and pieces of wonderful liturgical theological and biblical poetry. And good example of that was the canons read last night weaving the harlot and her repentance, my sinful state, and Judas’ scheming blended all together artfully.

1. Tea Party and maps … how will the MSM cover this? Compare to, say, Ms Sheehan and consider if bias perhaps a relevant question?
2. Sober thoughts on piracy.
3. Some Easter reflections.
4. Charismatic vs Cessastionism … some thoughts.
5. On Mr Obama’s “yet another plan”, this time to rid the world of nuclear weaponry, and no mention (in the plan) of providing everyone with ponies either.
6. A book and a movie. And … for my two cents, always always read Ms Penman’s writing.
7. A chatty Fed?
8. A bad analogy from our President.
9. To a good man.
10. Technology and a great ride.
11. Hmmmm (Ouch).
12. Contra Twitter.
13. Beauty and action.
14. From one unimpressed by the Byzantine rites.
15. A link roundup for an excellent and very detailed series/summary of Zizioulas fascinating Being as Communion.
16. When you read that Arctic ice diminished somewhat this winter … that should be put in context with the Antarctic advance.
17. A health care question.
18. The Bridegroom (icon).

As an introduction for those of Western traditions or are unfamiliar with the Eastern Christian traditions, during our Holy Week this week I thought it might be useful to summarize what we do at our Church during this week and some of my thoughts and impressions during the week.

Tonight we celebrated the last of the three Bridegroom Matins services. Wiki informs us in the post on Holy Week (and the East) that tonight in Greece a significant (majority?) of the sex trade industry workers attend this service. Why? Well, while the service has other things which it touches on two major themes play back and forth throughout the service. The first of these keys on the event from Luke 7 with the Pharisee and the harlot, the second is Judas starting to unfold his particular role in the Passion narrative (and in a later parallel devotion in which Mary sister of Lazarus anointing Jesus feet with expensive perfume).

One of the striking things is the repetition and insistence of two points. The harlot’s sins where egregious (and she was repentant and was forgiven) but mine are worse … and while she has begged forgiveness … why have I not done the same. Specifically in one of the refrains sung, “Though I have transgressed more than the harlot, O Good One, I have not offered You a flood of tears ….” Toward the end, we sang a poignant and beautiful hymn which I will relay here (at least the text). Cassia is apparently the name appointed to the harlot (by the whom or what tradition I do not know).

The Hymn of Cassia

The woman had fallen into many sins, O Lord,
yet when she perceived your divinity,
she joined the ranks of the myrrh-bearing women.
In tears she brought You myrrh before Your burial.
She cried: “Woe is Me!
For I live in the night of licentiousness,
shrouded in the dark and moonless love of sin.
But accept the fountain of my tears,
as you gathered the waters o the sea into clouds,
Bow down Your ear to the sighing of my heart,
as You bowed the heavens in your ineffable condescension.
Once Eve heard your footstep in paradise in the cool of the day,
and in fear she ran and hid herself.
But now I will tenderly embrace those pure feet
and wipe them with the hair of my head.
Who can measure the multitude of my sins,
or the depth of Your judgments, O Savior of my soul?
Do not despise Your servant in your immeasurable mercy.”

It should be noted in the Matins services and in scattered throughout Orthodox liturgical prayer, canon, and hymnody great praise and honor is granted to those women called the Myrrh bearing Women who first came to the tomb and discovered it to be empty and met the angel therein. This harlot, this prostitute is granted the same honor and praise for far before his passion she too bore myrrh and tears as a precursor to those other women as well.

The Gospel reading was far shorter tonight, only John 12:17-50.

1. “Truth” to power, from the wacky left.
2. Fantasies of one in a position of power.
3. Of prophecy and tradition.
4. Truth, err, teeth and consequence.
5. So, about that whole loving God thing.
6. Re, climate change.
7. Ethics question from TV.
8. Considering Rawls.

As an introduction for those of Western traditions or are unfamiliar with the Eastern Christian traditions, during our Holy Week this week I thought it might be useful to summarize what we do at our Church during this week and some of my thoughts and impressions during the week.

Tonight is the second of three “Bridegroom Matins” services, held in anticipation not in the morning but in the previous evening. Matins is normally a morning service but during Holy week in anticipation this is moved forward to the prior evening. Jewish tradition held that the day begins at sundown. Liturgical tradition follows that, but as noted above “in anticipation” moves the Matins service at time at which in more ordinary times Vespers services would be held.
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