1. Ms McArdle, a former(?) fan, on Geithner.
2. One idea for Lent, stop breathing?
3. The Pope to Vietnam?
4. Two approaches to economic stress compared.
5. As Mr Obama keeps stressing the “crises” we’re in … one wonders if Mr Emanuel’s remark of using a crises to seize power is part of this play.
6. Demons replaced in metaphor.
7. St. Polycarp? I think the significance of his martyrdom was he was the last alive at one degree.
8. A book list.
9. An oil deal.
10. If it’s really a Ponzi or bubble, buyout/buy-in is not the solution, I think.
11. The importance of being Earnest, err, stupid.
12. His purpose.
13. Fisking Krugman.
14. Our irresponsible AG?
15. Uncertainty.
16. Emulating Mr Soprano.
17. A quote.

One book, which is treasured today by the modern Orthodox community derives from the experiences of an extraordinary man who survived the gulag experience in Russia. This book, Father Arseny, 1893-1973: Priest, Prisoner, Spiritual Father : Being the Narratives Compiled by the Servant of God Alexander Concerning His Spiritual Father, I recently acquired. I’ve read about half of it, and I’d like to share a little from what I’ve read. The first part of the book are stories and fragments collected from prisoners who remembered Fr Arseny during their imprisonment. From a fragment entitled, O Mother of God! Do not Abandon Them! we find a recounting of a time in which Fr Arseny became very very ill. He was expected by all around him to die. During this time he recalled having out of body experience. At the first part of this, he recalled viewing the following:

As he prayed, he cried, begging God, the Mother of God, and all the Saints to have mercy on them all. But his prayer was wordless. And now the barracks and the entire camp appeared before his spiritual eyes in a very different way. He saw the whole camp with all its prisoners and its prison guards as if from inside. Each person carried within himself a soul which was now directly visible to Father Arseny. The souls of some were afire with faith which kindled the people around them; the souls of others, like Szikov and Avsenkov, burned with a smaller yet ever growing flame; others had only small sparks of faith and only needed the arrival of a shepherd to fan these sparks into a real flame. There were also people whose souls were dark and sad, without even a spark of Light. Now, looking into the souls of the people which God had allowed him to see, Father Arseny was extremely moved. “O, Lord! I lived among these people and did not even notice them. How much beauty they carry within them. So many are true ascetics in the faith. Although they are surrounded by such spiritual darkness and unbearable human suffering, they not only save themselves, but give their life and their love to the people around them, helping others by word and by dead.

“Lord! Where was I? I was blinded by pride and mistook my own small deeds for something grand.”

Father Arseny saw that the Light burned not only in the prisoners, but also in some of the guards and administrators, who, within the limits of what they could do, performed good deeds. For them this was extremely difficult, because it was very dangerous.

This image, of those around us, burning with varied lights some stronger some weaker and the need for us to encourage the sparks and growing or lessening flames of faith in those around us. This is a powerful metaphor, one which could spur us to find a way to put our faith in action. To listen, to love and to encourage that spark in our neighbor, in our family, and in all those with whom we come in contact. Even, or perhaps especially, those to whom, like the guards in Fr Arseny’s camp, we would normally see as those who are working against us.

1. N.D. offers a bill that will get discussed.
2. Death penalty for Downs?
3. Anti-semitism in Europe has been noted in various quarters. It’s odd how none of those making that observation connected that to either the fall of Christianity in Europe or the rise of Islam.
4. Denominations and brand loyalty.
5. Drood? I do like Simmons writing a lot.
6. Conspiracies and pitchforks.
7. How will the left react to the new surge?
8. I don’t get the lede.
9. Fairness with another name, still stinks. Noted here too.
10. A sign of foreign relations? or what?
11. Of reason and judgement.
12. Pascal being lyrical.
13. Some remarks on the meeting of secular and Orthodoxy in psychotherapy.
14. Schools being stupid.
15. Zooom.
16. Mr Obama contradicting himself, when the shoe is on the other foot.
17. A book on apologetics recommended.
18. The economic story of the Depression and world war … bottom line -> not simple.

1. Narrative shock and Ms Pevensie.
2. Mr Geithner’s sooper seekret plan.
3. On that “no true scotsman global warming dissenters” in science narratives thing.
4. On Vaclav Klaus.
5. Bus captions.
6. On Lent.
7. Geek chic.
8. Of names and some not so good.
9. It’s interesting how modern progressive ideas mesh with Mussolini’s list.
10. Ethics and guidance.
11. Unemployment figures.
12. Really laying the hammer down.
13. On the Twist narrative.
14. Well, I answered “no” to both questions.
15. Well, I bought the book … looks good.
16. Suggestions of consequences re Mr Obama’s inexperience (or naivete).
17. Mr Wilder’s and the UK continues.
18. And a book and a list.

1. Two symbols examined, one a very important lady with a torch.
2. A feast day, the presentation.
3. The press and Islam.
4. The tour of California, a graphical view of what have your day job be in a saddle.
5. Lamarckian descent/inheritance revisited.
6. Chant.
7. “Move over to the side of the road” alligator version.
8. Of Apple and Microsoft.
9. So … now Mr Obama has taken up the “religion of peace” slogan. What is it with these Presidents?
10. Also, how about the religion of desecration?
11. Mr Ping and the stimulus.
12. I’m willing to bet that few, especially of his detractors, think of the Pope as cheerful (but I’ll wager he actually is such).
13. UK and “Fairness”.
14. Christ and Christianity without his death.
15. Obama and the birth certificate weirdness.
16. A lecture on an early heresy.
17. Why is that the left cannot argue for the stimulus without resorting to logical fallacies (poisoning the well and ad hominem attacks in this case)?
18. So … dollhouse, whaddya think, here’s an interview.
19. Five films.

1. The new openness in the Administration, “cannot comment on specific instances” … or not. More on the census as well.
2. Mr Reid notes a problem with the SBC.
3. Which was basically the same as the problem that St. John Chrysostom had 1500 years earlier.
4. Taking the WSJ to task.
5. If I was on the left, observations like this, “During the 2008 election, Obama co-opted huge portions of the Left and its infrastructure so that their allegiance became devoted to him and not to any ideas” would be quite troubling.
6. Ecclesia.
7. Endurance sports and camaraderie … perhaps a Romans 5:3 thing?
8. Banach-alia.
9. One model reviewed … the sort of thing detail and discussion lacking in the beltway to support their policies.
10. Whether or not there is a right to privacy … the government certainly has reserved the right to extreme stupidity.
11. Aha! (from the left).
12. Supply, Afghanistan and the necessity for relations with Pakistan.
13. Coptic resource for the coffee table.
14. Yikes.
15. CBO and stimulus.
16. Big number found.
17. The state, morality and legislation.
18. Pippin and Obama.
19. Considering the Cylons.
20. It was remarked in a comment here that “no debate has been stifled” regarding the stimulus bill … evidence to the contrary is here.
21. A suggestion regarding the housing market problem I’ve mentioned (in conversation if not on the blog) made elsewhere.
22. So … if you think carbon offsets are an issue … how much do you use a bike for daily travel? If not, perhaps you’re just a hypocrite like Mr Gore.

This is an attempt to examine the question:

Vigilantism is justified when the government has failed to enforce the law.

In the following, two aspects of this question will be examined. One is to examine a famous example of the social custom of vigilantism in a very libertarian society in our American historical past. The second will attempt to touch on some of the foundational political aspects of this question, i.e., to look at authority and society and where force fits into that picture. Please find bulk of the essay “below the fold”. Read the rest of this entry

1. A book recommended.
2. Transparency or not, perhaps Mr Twain’s little saying might be amended to “lies, damned lies, statistics, and anything said by a politician”.
3. Just a trip to the UK.
4. Some kids living where winter doesn’t come.
5. Well, you’ll have to pay for that … and the other.
6. The Pope on the ladder.
7. A heroic lady noted, Stanislawa Leszczynksa.
8. A hill … and a bike … and another rider noted here.
9. The difference between Mr Obama and the Dems stimulus bill and Tenaha … the size of their theft.
10. They are.
11. Who. Are. You.
12. A question.
13. Another.
14. Mr Obama standing firm against the economy and recover and its effects. Ah. It’s all part of a super duper secret plan.
15. Why Wednesday and Friday (and Monday for the monastics I think) for fasting?
16. Salary caps and a comparison.
17. Religion and nation.
18. Some economic hypothesis tested.
19. Yet another Democratic tax cheat close to the President.

The legal defense of abortion rests on a claim of a right to privacy. Alas, following the argument below, it seems this right is used as a legal proxy and is not consistently applied. By legal proxy, I mean that it is the legal argument/excuse used to justify the legalization of abortion (for other reasons unstated) and is not a right which is given in other comparable or parallel circumstances. Consider the following three somewhat related cases involving immunization. Immunization is fundamentally a private thing involving the manipulation of your immune system, which is clearly a private part of your person. If the state feels it can adjust and order your immune system programming for its purposes, logically it can also do so in the case of pregnancy.

1. Pubic schools demand immunization of children attending. While it might be said that public education is not a right, education is a requirement placed by the state on parents. You cannot legally raise your child and deny him or her an education. However that is not relevant to the question. The point is, immunization being private should not be a question asked or required to be answered by the state regarding education or any other purpose.
2. When you travel abroad certain immunizations and proof of the same are required for exit and re-entry into the country. One cannot claim a right to privacy to waive this requirement. Again, if this is private how can the state justify this in the face of their stated alliance to a right of privacy. Should one not logically be able, akin to “claiming a fourth Amendment right” be able to stake a claim to one’s right to privacy and refuse to provide information regarding your immunization status?
3. Consider the case of a modern carrier, a Typhoid Mary, if you will. That is to say, ,she/he is a person, symptom free, who is an active vector for a disease. I claim that this person if identified, would be given treatment and by court order if she refused. When this was suggested earlier in a comment, Boonton suggested she might be exiled. However this suggestion clearly fails under examination as the public/foreign relations problem of knowingly sending an active disease vector to another state is, well, just a little problematic. Perhaps we might also, in those states where there is no capital punishment, exile serial killers as well. The only realistic solution, once discovered, is that this person would be treated, willingly or not.

How is that from a legal standpoint are immunizations required? The logical reason is of course the health and safety of the people. Yet over a million are killed per year by abortion. That is clearly a health and safety issue for quite a number of human lives, in fact a quite terminal question for those. And, if you argue the non-personhood of a early term fetus, one still faces the 45 late term abortions performed per day … and after that a small number of executions of infants for whom that late term abortion was intended but botched (botched in that the infant was failed to be murdered at the appropriate moment in the delivery process). It is in this latter case that our current President (in)famously argued that those failed executions should be carried out at any rate.

So there is a logical inconsistency here. Abortion is claimed as a privacy right. Yet analogous privacy rights are waived every day in circumstance not related to abortion and the reason that right is waived is exactly the same claim made by the abortion opponents why abortion should be regulated if not prevented. So perhaps dropping the rights talk regarding privacy in the legal and ethical discussions might be helpful, for that’s really just a smoke screen for something else.

1. A question of politics, “should the liberal state permit the existence of non-liberal communities?” I think so, but my argument will not fit in the margin of this page.
2. Well, those Keynesians in government voted themselves more power and got their panacea. Some more remarks here.
3. One more thing for schools to waste money on.
4. Time and church.
5. Napoleon, err, the Anglicans in Egypt.
6. Mr Wilders and “freedom” in the UK.
7. Verse.
8. Healthcare rationing and the stimulus bill is a cowardly way to avoid debate.
9. The Hindu Melkite.
10. An odd film noted and reviewed.
11. So Mr tax-fraud Geithner offers bank bailout version 2, or the fix for bad debt for the credit industry is to accumulate as much more bad debt as possible. Hair of the dog as very very expensive policy?
12. What if I am weak?
13. That “economic consensus” for the stimulus, alas exists only amongst politicians.
14. Two recent films compared.
15. In which yet another lefty discovers the bigotry is hers.
16. No, I have not.
17. A discussion of guilt, innocence and punishments and another (from the left) who just bought the argument hook line and sinker.
18. Epistemology and climate “science.”
19. The cross survives.
20. On fasting.
21. A cool video.
22. So, its been what, two weeks? After four years … one wonders how disillusioned the left will be?
23. If I had more money than I knew what do do with.

Many early Christians enjoyed number coincidences and used them in their prayers and writings. In that vein I offer some coincidences between our understanding of nature and Christian theology.

God in the Christian understanding is Three and One in Trinity. As Christ as well is both Man and God expressing two natures in one person.

Matter displaying wave and particle behavior having two natures in one. Furthermore, fundamental particles are deployed in three lepton and quark families respectively. With SU(3) of color (strong forces) and Gell-Mann’s eightfold way also the eight cardinal virtues and sins. Examine the forces in nature and we find there are three massless (gluon/strong, photon/electric, and graviton/gravity) and one with massive (weak/W&Z) … again the three and the one.

St. Augustine in his Confessions wrote that Nature worships God via our deepening understanding of it. Little did he know how well nature recapitulates theological ontology as the Standard Model post-dated St. Augustine by just a few years.

Then again, why does space have 10 dimensions? 😀

1. Zap.
2. COIN and Afghanistan.
3. Snuck in the pork bill. Anti-stimulus stuff in there too.
4. Just a little permutation?
5. Philosophy boners.
6. Mr Polamalu and Orthodoxy, and she didn’t remark that it looks like he’s intoning “Lord have mercy” when he’s crossing himself.
7. The pork bill again, a serious question unanswered alas it seems thus far.
8. Heh.
9. In which I concur completely with the NYTimes.
10. Rugged individualism … or not.
11. Yah, nope. It is misleading, duh. I’d be getting over 110 mpg if I drove 40 mph with minimal stopping in my Insight.
12. For yer office or home.
13. Art and bike … and a ultra low carbon emissions SUV.
14. Shakespeare as crypto-catholic, a review.

Economists are by no means exclusively Keynesian (or more properly append a “neo” to be hip to that term), however our beltway denizens are almost to a man Keynesian. Climate scientists are not “settled” by any means on anthropomorphic causes for global warming but, again, politicians are. Why is this? It think the answer boils down to a logical fallacy hinging on simple psychology.

When your child has the flu the desire is to actively do something to combat the illness. After all, your kid is (gasp) sick and hurting. Some, but certainly not all, pediatricians will cater to this desire of the parent and prescribe antibiotics. Antibiotics have no effect on viral infections. But it gives the appearance of action. After all antibiotics fight diseases and your child has a disease. So, therefore there is some notion that the pill or potion is helpful. The real active palliative measures that should be taken in the case of flu is to provide rest and fluids, i.e., basically do nothing. That is a moral equivalent to “do nothing” for rest and fluids are the response taken in the case of any illness, be it bacterial (in which case antibiotics will help), or cancer, or other.

Similarly Keynesian economics offers to the government the notion that specific actions in the times of economic change are helpful. Do “X” in inflationary times, during recession provide “stimulus”. During economic expansion, act to curb growth (that one I really really don’t get). The point is these actions have two effects. They cater to two strong impulses that governments are vulnerable. The first is the above, it gives justification for action in the face of crises. It provides an explanation for why antibiotics might help the virus infected patient. The second is more pernicious. All governments for a variety of reasons find growth necessary and good. All of these actions provide reasons for larger and a more active central government. Keynesian economics thereby provides an excuse for central/federal expansion in the face of economic crises of any flavor. Read the rest of this entry

1. Looking at Keynes.
2. UK demographics.
3. To avoid 3 common fees.
4. Getting ready for Lent 3 weeks to go and it’s not just about eating the meat out of fridge and freezer.
5. Filled with extraordinary, uhm, wouldn’t that mean just ordinary?
6. I concur 100%, and I certainly am a fan of that genre.
7. Translate: asian?
8. Cool animation.
9. Where build bridges means, bring on the concessions … we’ll give not an inch.
10. Testing and failure, epic variety.
11. Predator.
12. On Mrs Palin.
13. Crises and profit, how the “gouger” outperforms government disaster relief.
14. Biden’s remarks on competence.
15. Evaluating Presidential performance.
16. Theology and ecumenical movement.
17. Is unconditional pacifism immoral, an interesting look.
18. Looking for love in 2009.
19. I spotted 2 problems … how about you?
20. Toward the up and coming collapse of environmental policy.
21. What rugged Yankee individualism looks like in 2009. Don’t tread on me indeed.
22. Becker/Posner usually debated unite against pay caps (here and here).
23. Not socialism, participatory fascism.
24. Christian blogger held in Egypt, where is the (muted) joy in Christian communities. We used to celebrate martyrdom, why do we whine today?

1. Heh.
2. Ayers returns … but Rick (?) more than Bill.
3. Heh … LOL Saints.
4. Some items in the Pork package … which has no earmarks because you can’t tell. More on “clean coal”.
5. Real … or satire, hard to tell sometimes.
6. Great blessing of water … where cold means cold.
7. Signs.
8. One consequence of Obama in the WH, Chicago dirt is getting some light.
9. A true statement about economics … which is one more reason to doubt the wisdom of the stimulus bill.
10. How can you tell if a politician is lying … Obama no different. Surprise! or not.
11. Mr Carter and legacy.
12. A book about a book reviewed.
13. Does the government create jobs? Technically yes, practically no.
14. Duality in math is often beautiful. In politics not so much.
15. Remarks on Obama from a speech writers blog.
16. Obama looking at Islam with the same pair of tinted glasses as Mr Bush.
17. Zoooom. Reprised.
18. Big snake boogie … which begs a question. One reason I’ve heard on my kids dinosaur type planet Earth dvds is that in the ages in which larger critters (dinosaurs and the like) dominated one reasons they were so big was that the earth was warmer and had higher levels of CO2 which enabled more plant growth and provided more energy for the biosphere. So then why is this a bad thing for Mr Gore and company?
19. Disposable income, where is the crises?