Good morning, hmm, well mid afternoon at any rate.

1. Start with trivia? Or something like that.
2. Turkey teaches how not to compare crime.
3. An Indian pro-Pakistani blog … for a US audience.
4. The Ukraine and the H1N1 panic.
5. Regarding the historical Jesus.
6. Indie beating it.
7. Climbing robot winner.
8. Of socially and liberty conscious investing.
9. On monogamy.
10. It’s not Mr Obama’s fault, btw on that I concur.
11. This on the other hand …
12. Not Maxwell Smart’s shoes.
13. Not exactly news.
14. Grammar and the Bible … When grammar is mentioned, Mr Saffire’s long lost grammar column from my youth comes to mind … to whit “A prepositions is something you should never end a sentence with.”
15. Even if Mr Obama couldn’t be bothered, the East noticed.

I have an excellent excuse for not posting tonight … and a small request.

Tomorrow my (far) better half is going to have a small procedure at the Hospital. She will be there overnight for observation after the procedure. It’s not an emergency and not very risky but if you could remember her (Jill) in your prayers I’d appreciate it.

Thanks

1. Cities and global warming.
2. Global warming and the denier.
3. The UN and money … starve the beast?
4. Of social contract and criminal law. I guess as a recent un-subscriber to social contract, I need to consider criminal law myself.
5. Becker and Posner consider employment and the economy.
6. On the whole, “not a news channel” thing. Another view on that here.
7. Americans aren’t the only ones bad at history.
8. Considering loving God.
9. Well, that prediction went well.
10. Some logic.
11. Honduras.
12. Science fiction and a rock star.
13. Hmmm, perhaps because it was noticed?
14. You go girl!

A new ad will begin to run nationally today that makes the case that the government has no business getting any further into running healthcare given how they’ve handled the H1N1 flu vaccine shortage (as well as sending vaccine to Gitmo detainees before American citizens) (hat tip: Michael Goldfarb):

It’s a great ad and makes a very salient point. For all the talk about how widespread the H1N1 pandemic was supposed to be, the government sure seems to have been caught woefully unprepared in developing sufficient supplies of the vaccine. The ad reinforces what we already know: everything government does is going to be far less efficient and far more costly than they say it will be.

Ah, the benefits of socialism.

Residents of the Venezuelan capital face cuts in water service for as much as 48 hours per week, after the government imposed rationing to stem a 25 percent shortfall in the city’s supply, officials said Monday.

Officials said cuts in water service were to be staggered throughout Caracas through the duration of the current dry season, which is not expected to end until May 2010.

Heap this on top of all the other shortages that Venezuela is suffering under (including electricity, also noted in the article).  But "socialism" means never having to say, "My fault."

Weather forecasters blame the "El Nino" weather phenomenon, saying the periodic weather system has markedly reduced rainfall and created drought conditions.

Others blame the shortage on poor government management of the country’s water resources, while President Hugo Chavez faulted the excesses of capitalism.

"What will the rich fill their swimming pools with?" the country’s leftist leader asked recently.

"With the water that is denied inhabitants in the poor neighborhoods," he said, blaming the lack of sufficient water on "capitalism — a lack of feeling, a lack of humanity."

Don’t blame the weather for a resource shortage if blaming capitalism and demonizing rich people will do just as well, especially if you’re the one managing the resource.

Say what you will about the profit motive and market forces; they do a better job of distribution than any central authority.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insists that she is going to get a vote on healthcare reform over the weekend but one has to wonder what she thinks she is going to accomplish. According to the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, there are some Democrats who are questioning the wisdom in pushing ahead especially in light of Tuesday’s election results:

It’s one thing to be serene under fire, it’s another to be delusional.

More than a few Democrats in Congress are perplexed and worried that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insisting on ramming through a 1,900-page health care bill on Saturday, just days after her party took heavy losses in Tuesday’s elections. “It reminds me of Major Nicholson, the obsessed British major in the film ‘Bridge on the River Kwai,'” one Democrat told me. “She is fixated on finishing her health care bridge even as she’s lost sight of where it’s going and what damage it could cause to her own troops.”

Indeed, the Speaker’s take on Tuesday’s off-year elections struck some of her own members as delusive “happy talk.” “From our perspective, we won last night,” a cheerful Ms. Pelosi told reporters, citing her party’s pick-up of a single House seat in a New York special election and retention of another strongly Democratic seat in California.

That’s not how many of her own troops see it. Democratic Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama told Politico.com that members are “very, very sensitive” to the fact that the agenda being pushed by party leaders has “the potential to cost some of our front-line members their seats”

On health care, added New Jersey Democrat Bill Pascrell: “People who had weak knees before are going to have weaker knees now.”

Meanwhile, Republicans have outlined their own common sense and no-cost reform proposals that actually reform the health insurance system rather than turning the whole thing into another gigantic government bureaucracy.

Speaker Pelosi might just get her wish and see her bill pass the House. Chances are that even if she succeeds to keep enough Democrats together to pass it the bill will undergo vast changes in the Senate. More importantly, passage of a massively complex healthcare bill may fufill Democrats’ dreams of government healthcare but it will likely cause so many of their members to lose seats that they could be in the minority for many years to come. The key question will be how many Democrats are willing to risk political suicide for the sake of passing this bill. My guess is not many.

A few thoughts, stemming from the murderous rampage at Fort Hood.

***

While some are cautioning us to not immediately make a radical Muslim connection with the fact that the alleged killer is an Arab American, one has to wonder at how quickly the label “Right-Wing-Extremist” would have been applied had the mass murderer been white.

***

It appears that the alleged killer was stopped by shots fired from a civilian police officer. Per CNN,

A civilian police officer who shot the Fort Hood gunman four times during his bloody rampage stopped the attacker cold, a U.S. Army official said Friday.

Officer Kimberly Munley of the Fort Hood Police Department is a “trained, active first responder” who acted quickly after she “just happened to encounter the gunman,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, Fort Hood’s commanding general.

Cone said the officer and her partner responded “very quickly” to the scene of the shootings — reportedly in around three minutes.

One point of clarification, if Officer Munley was on duty, and responded quickly to the situation, she was a second responder (which in no way diminishes from her courageous actions). First responders would be those initially and directly under fire.

***

President Obama continues, unfortunately, to approach serious issues in amateur fashion. In the video below, consider the fact that Obama took nearly two minutes to actually get to the topic of the shooting at Fort Hood. Evidently, he thought that giving various “shout-outs” had a higher priority.

***

Update: More on courageous Officer Munley who, in addition to responding to the scene quickly, immediately engaged the situation, thereby stopping the killer.

Munley’s toughness and grace under pressure were on display Thursday when she and her partner responded within three minutes of reported gunfire, said Army Lt. Gen. Bob Cone.

Munley, who had been trained in active-response tactics, rushed into the building and confronted the shooter as he was turning a corner, Cone said.

“It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer,” Cone said.

"Big Hollywood" documents the latest in a long line of videos showing children singing Obama’s praises.  The videos get more and more fawning, and the kids get younger, as you move down.  Unfortunately, some of the videos have been removed, but the transcripts are still there.  Words like:

Michelle wants her daughters to think their own things. She doesn’t want their colors to do it instead. The 44th President of the USA because he beat Senator John McCain. Obama in charge of the oval office. He told Bush and his cabinet to get off this. A – a-a-a-aay. Obama is President of the USA-aaaay. Tomorrow’s a new day – ay – ay- ay- ay. And we’re living our life.

And these 11(!) videos are just the latest they’ve been made aware of.  You expect this sort of thing out of China and North Korea.  (But, thanks to George W. Bush, not from Iraq anymore.)

1. Well, granted learning (or knowing) how to learn is not a substitute for learning itself, but I don’t think you can actually do the former without accomplishing the latter.
2. More on education here.
3. Punishment and crime … a modern crucifixion … but is it appropriate?
4. Is he too busy … or does the left still diminish the nature and extent of those crimes?
5. Russia and AGW.
6. US, Russia and human rights.
7. Demonized by Mr Brown a film to set the record straight.
8. Well, there was the notion of “lies, damned lies, and statistics” but this admin takes the cake, that goes a bit beyond deceitful statistics.
9. The tale of the cars and German-US relations.
10. Polygamy and the Bible.
11. Iran mocks Mr Obama. And so does one ersatz comedian.
12. Metaphor noted.
13. Protesters attacked in Iran … but the world is no longer watching.
14. A left leaning tea party.

Mark Horne offers some arguments why “he can never be a Roman Catholic.” I’m not a Roman Catholic … but it seems like a number of these reasons are not valid criticisms. I’m going to concentrate on one (and mention one more). Mr Horne offers:

Necromancy is almost as huge a sin and praying to the departed saints is necromancy.  See #1 above.  People raised thinking bigamy is Christian may be true Christians, but people who know better are living in sin and without hope of eternal life unless they repent of such behavior.

Praying to Saints by Catholics is not because Catholics believe that “some other intercessory agency between themselves and God” is required. Examine their liturgy and the prayers they pray. They pray to directly to Father, Son, and Spirit. So they are not asking Saints (or Mary) to pray for them because they think it is required. Something else is going on here, they do it because they think it is efficacious. My understanding of the way prayer to Saints is seen not as a required intermediary but as being equivalent to your asking a friend, acquaintance, or even some Christian you don’t really know, to pray for you. That is it. Just in the same way that Protestants (and every Christian) thinks that the prayers of others on our behalf is beneficial, likewise Catholics (the East and the original Reformers for that matter) think that the dead can pray for us … after all they are not dead but are with God.  You are asking that this Saint, asleep in the Lord whom you believe is “now” outside of time participating in God’s presence (no longer seeing through a glass darkly), to pray for you. How is that akin to bigamy and living a life of sin?

There are two pieces to this that I think give the American evangelical cause to pause. The first is that the notion that a saint from a country far away and centuries removed will be aware of my request that he (or she) pray for me and that furthermore that he (or she) might do so. The second is that in our American notions of egalitarianism and equality Americans find the notion that we are not equal in the eyes of the Lord, a difficult one to master. To the latter, when the disciples were having a debate about who would be seated at Jesus right hand when he came into his glory, Jesus rebuke was not that “nobody would be sitting there” as we are equal in the afterlife, but that they were not the ones to be seated there.

Yet that isn’t really the question.

The real question is why is asking for the intercession by a deceased hero of the Church not adiaphora? And this has a counter question for the East and the Roman Catholic, why is not asking that the Saints intercede for us also not adiaphora?

A final remark Mr Horne objects:

Nowhere are Christians required to do a genealogical study to see if they are members of the true Church.

I for one, have no clue what is he talking about here. Any guesses?

(With apologies to George Lucas and Star Wars episode 4.)

The President’s numerous, and recent, trips to Virginia and New Jersey notwithstanding, Republicans were elected governors of those states.  The thrill (up the leg) is gone one year on, and when policies instead of history-making is more of a draw, two conservatives are elected.  (Christie is very pro-life, and is the first Republican governor in 16 years.  McDonnell is the first Republican for Virginia in 8 years.)  While Democrats are saying that the reasons are mostly due to local issues, the fact that they brought in the President so much for these races tends to discount their own analysis.  Bringing in a President that both these states voted for in 2008 was not enough to get the job done. 

Hope and change indeed.  Just not the kind the President represents.

In the small but closely-watched race in New York’s 23rd district, where the Republican dropped out, only to endorse the Democrat, the fact that Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman managed to garner 45% of the vote is astounding.  Coming in only 4.5 points behind Democrat Bill Owens is amazing for a 3rd party candidate.  While it’s likely that some of the absentee ballots cast early, before Dede Scozzafava essentially dropped out, may have gone to Hoffman, it probably wouldn’t have been enough to win it.  The main issue here is that, as Brit Hume on Fox News Channel put it, this is why you have primaries.  Scozzafava was chosen by the party machine.  Clearly, the base, even in New York, is farther to the right than the party realizes.  When you run a good, conservative campaign, you can both energize the base and bring in independents (ask Ronald Reagan … or John McCain).  This is a tough, if small, loss in a district that has been reliably Republican, but the party dropped the ball and misread its constituents.

Still, giving up NY-23 for New Jersey and Virginia is a trade I’d take.

Closer to (my) home, the city of Atlanta is poised to elect it’s first white mayor in 35 years.  Mary Norwood got 46% of the vote last night, which kicks in a runoff in a few weeks with 2nd place challenger Kasim Reed.  For a long time, it has been my opinion that Atlanta needed an African-American mayor to avoid spurious charges of racism.  Freaknik, an annual party generally attended by college students from historically black colleges, was heavily curtailed by 1998 and ultimately relocated to Daytona Beach under Mayor Bill Campbell.  If he had been white, he would have been labeled "racist" and that would have been an unfair distraction from the actual debate.  As it was, he was labeled an "Uncle Tom" for doing so, even though residents of all colors agreed that it was getting out of hand.  He did what had to be done, all for good reasons, but I think the racial overtones would have not allowed a mayor to do the job properly.  That Atlanta seems ready to elect a white mayor is a good sign that the race issue is diminishing, but time will tell if Norwood is elected.

One issue-related referendum I’d like to point out is that in Maine (as liberal as they come in New England) they overturned a law (that had not taken effect  yet) that would legalize same-sex marriage.  By a 53-47 margin, the people rejected what the legislature had passed.  Yes, the people elected those legislators, but apparently the peoples’ representatives stopped representing them at some point.  As I understand it, when it comes to referendums, same-sex marriage is 0 for 31.  I’m detecting a trend.

And finally, in a much smaller race, blogger Scott Ott, evangelical Christian and author of the wonderful, satirical blog ScrappleFace, lost to the incumbent for County Executive of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania by the small margin of 49-51.  The election was decided by 1,000 votes among the 40,000 case.  Scott put up a great campaign, and for a first-time political-office-seeker, this is fantastic, and shows that his conservative principles, especially with regards to fiscal policy, hit a nerve.  I hope this is not the end of Scott’s political aspirations.

1. The role of the fool.
2. Ethnic tensions in Russia.
3. AGW … not carbon related. Be a shame if that effect was larger than the carbon one, no? Another climate article here.
4. Scripture and the ELCA.
5. Ballet.
6. So, evil is it banal or not.
7. Liberatarians and immunization campaigns.
8. Mr Obama celebrates his election anniversary how? Hmmm. Another review of policy here.
9. The White House and reviewing their Asian policies.
10. Considering the deficits … the experts are worried.
11. Pointing connections and a certain Ms O’Toole.
12. Pointing out an elementary Krugman error.
13. On the Lives of Others.

In the past, I’ve ventured to consider the hypothesis (ansatze) that a noetic realm, a rough analogue of the Platonic realm of Ideals, has a real existence, in a parallel universe of sorts to our own. Part of this ansatze is that these two universes are not completely disconnected, and that the human intellectual machinery glimpses this realm and it is through this mechanism that our brain’s machinery accomplishes the semiotic scaffold and bridges gap between pattern and synapse to thought, meaning and intention.

What sorts of features might we imagine a noetic realm to have? Read the rest of this entry

1. Investigation report on killings in Afghanistan.
2. On enfranchisement of felons.
3. Considering a life well ended.
4. Africa and climate.
5. Vaccine lines, politics, and Gitmo.
6. Truth to power … for real.
7. Ditto.
8. One, one year review.
9. Who “owns” the Zeitgeist.
10. Signing petitions should not be a private act.
11. Corruption and the GM buyout.
12. Pensions and GM. It was a Soviet (Marxist?) conceit that manual labor was to be esteemed more highly than white collar labor. It seems that persists here too.
13. GM here too.
14. Heh.
15. Cash for clunkers … almost worse than you can imagine.
16. On marriage, east and west.
17. Holodomor.

In the In the First Circle: The First Uncensored Edition, there is a striking scene that I’d like to highlight. Most of the characters in the book inhabit one of the Moscow Sharaskas in the early 50s. A Sharaska was a special prison camp, unlike the work camps, the conditions of these camps were not so lethal. The conditions, while far far better than in the work camps, was liveable. These camps were primarily for those individuals who had skills, glass-blowing, engineering, electronics, mathematics, and so on that the regime decided to put them to forced work conditions in their speciality in order to further the regime. One of the major projects ongoing in the book was developing a working scrambler/descrambler system for their analog phones.

In the sharaska, the hours were long each day … and the work has very closely supervised by non-prison workers because the prisoners could not be trusted. Yet, apparently the guards and watchers could not be compelled to work the long hours every day and Sunday evening at 6pm until early in the morning Monday the prisoners were locked in and left to their own devices.

For the prisoners a day off meant that the heavy iron doors were locked from the outside, after which no one came in to summon a prisoner or haul him out. For those few short hours not a sound, not a word, not an image could filter through from the outside world to trouble a man’s mind. That was what their day of rest meant — the whole world outside, the universe with all its stars, the planet with its continents, capital cities with their blazing lights, the whole state with some at their banquets and others working voluntary extra shifts, sank into oblivion, turned into an ocean of darkness barely discernible through the barred windows by the dead yellow half-light from the lights on the prison grounds.
[…]
Those who sailed on in the ark were weightless and had only weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor full. They knew no happiness and so felt no anxiety about losing it. Their heads were not busy with trivial professional concerns, intrigues, the struggle for promotion; their shoulders were not burdened with worries about places to live, fuel, bread, and clothing for their children. Love, which has brought man delight and torment from the beginning of time, could neither thrill nor distress them. Their sentences were so long that not one of them as yet gave any thought to the years after his release. Men of remarkable intelligence, education, and experience of life, they had nonetheless been too devoted to their families to leave much of themselves for their friends, but here they belonged only to their friends.
[…]
During those Sunday evening hours, matter and body could be forgotten. The spirit of masculine friendship and philosophy hovvered beneath the canvas vault of the ceiling.
Perhaps this was the bliss all the philosophers of antiquity had striven in vain to identify.

It seems that the prison experience of Solzhenitsyn (not accidentally) reinforces that learned from early Christian experience that ascetic suffering has its own particular rewards.

One final thought to add, from another section. “You have but one life to live” spurred some of the characters (not in the prisons) to seek pleasures, riches, and to enjoy life to the fullest.

We are people who behave naturally,” Dotnara used to say. “We don’t pretend; we wear no disguise. Whatever we want we go all out for!” As they saw it, “We are given only one life” — and so must take from life all that it has to offer.

This is countered …

The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life.
Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law; that we are given only one conscience too.