Stones Cry Out

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.

I’ve mentioned Lila Rose before. She’s the adult that poses as an underage girl at Planned Parenthood clinics and finds out how they deal with a statutory rape victim.  She’s got another video showing that PP just follows the money.

HotAir has the video.

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.

You’ve may have heard by now some of the fallout from Miss California’s answer to a same-sex marriage question from one of the Miss USA judges, Perez Hilton.  If not, it’s probably because, like me, you didn’t watch the Miss USA pageant (or because, also like me, didn’t even know it was on).  What happened there has put on display for all to see what happens when you stand up for beliefs which are contrary to the liberal line.

Perez Hilton asked Carrie Prejean, "Vermont recently became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage," he said. "Do you think every state should follow suit, why or why not."  Prejean answered:

I think it’s great Americans are able to choose one or the other.  We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what in my country, in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody there, but that’s how I was raised and that’s how I think it should be, between a man and a woman.

While starting out with a little fumbling for words, she ultimately comes to her honest answer.  And that, in what is now a pageant fully engulfed in liberal dogma, was her downfall. 

According to this ABC News article, the initial boos were ultimately overcome by applause.  However, Hilton was taken by surprise.

"I was floored," Hilton told ABCNews.com Monday. "I haven’t said this before, but to her credit, I applaud her for her honesty. However, she is not a politician, she’s a hopeful Miss USA. Miss USA should represent everyone. Her answer alienated millions of gay and lesbian Americans, their families and their supporters."

Instead, I suppose, he wanted an answer that alienated tens of millions of those who do not support same-sex marriage.  If it’s about the numbers, Hilton is currently on the down-side of that.  If it’s about not alienating people, Prejean’s answer, no matter what it was, would alienate some, so she actually did well on that front, if that’s what you’re going to judge her by.

So what answer would Hilton have preferred; one that would be less political and represented everyone?

Hilton said Prejean could have chosen an answer that he believed would have been less political. When he asked Miley Cyrus the same question on Twitter after the show, he was surprised by her response: "I believe that EVERYONE deserves to be happy. That’s all I’m saying."

Comparing Cyrus and Prejean, Hilton said, "A 16-year-old gave a better answer. If she [Prejean] had said those two sentences, that would have been a better answer."

On his video blog, he offered another alternate answer. "I would have said, ‘Hmm, Perez, that’s a great question, that’s a very hot topic in our country right now. And I think that’s a question that each state should decide for themselves."

He was looking for politically correct (i.e. liberal) and / or one that is, in fact, more political.  Not to mention, what if you don’t actually believe that answer?  The truth, to these left-wing elites, means little.

It wasn’t just this gossip columnist that was irked by her answer.  This aversion to a truthful answer extends to the Miss California organization itself.

Keith Lewis, who runs the Miss California competition, released a statement to the media in response to Prejean’s answer last night.

"As co-director of the Miss California USA, I am personally saddened and hurt that Miss California believes marriage rights belong only to a man and a woman," said Lewis in a statement. "I believe all religions should be able to ordain what unions they see fit. I do not believe our government should be able to discriminate against anyone and religious beliefs have no politics in the Miss California family."

Co-director Shanna Moakler, the 1995 Miss USA, told the media that she fully supported Lewis’ statement.

Apparently, the Miss California organization can’t handle an honest answer that diverges from the liberal line without issuing a statement and denigrating their own representative.  At least Hilton had the guts to give Prejean credit for honesty before he tore her up.

And that honest also cost her more than just national scorn from the Left.

"She lost it because of that question. She was definitely the front-runner before that," Hilton said, adding that he’s "very happy with whom the judges chose," Miss North Carolina’s Kristen Dalton.

He’s a judge.  He would know.  He didn’t want her to politicize her answer, but he politicized the who event. 

From the Nobel Prize committee, who made past Peace Prize choices to tweak George W. Bush, to the Miss USA Pageant, the Left is showing just how much they tolerate dissent.  They don’t.  Oh the irony.

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.

No, this isn’t a comparison of the Earth to the Sun.  Take a close look.  (Click on it for the source.)

In 90 days, Obama’s Cabinet has to come up with what amounts to a gnat’s worth of saving.  At this rate, by the time Obama’s first term is up, we might have saved a fly. 

In the meantime, they gleefully swallow the camel.

Another step in the wrong direction.

In a significant shift, White House and Treasury Department officials now say they can stretch what is left of the $700 billion financial bailout fund further than they had expected a few months ago, simply by converting the government’s existing loans to the nation’s 19 biggest banks into common stock.

Converting those loans to common shares would turn the federal aid into available capital for a bank — and give the government a large ownership stake in return.

While the option appears to be a quick and easy way to avoid a confrontation with Congressional leaders wary of putting more money into the banks, some critics would consider it a back door to nationalization, since the government could become the largest shareholder in several banks.

Another writer, whom I read last week and can’t find the link to, noted that you don’t have to have full-blown government ownership of businesses to have what amounts to socialism; you just have to own the financial system that all those businesses get their financing from.  Like I said before, if you don’t want to call it "socialism", fair enough, but please don’t call it "capitalism".

Rick Brady was the original brains and writing behind the Stones Cry Out blog (or what we sometimes refer to as the Foundation Stone).  He’s no longer in the blogging arena these days, unfortunately.  One of the subjects he touched on here a number of times before he left (see here, here, here, here and here) was the subject of exit polling.  He, along with colleagues, wrote a paper on the subject entitled, "Behind the Controversy: A Primer on U.S. Presidential Exit Polls".  It’s a good explanation of problems inherent in exit polling.

You’d think it shouldn’t be that difficult; finding out what people had just finished doing.  However, it’s not so simple.  It’s a good read and, for a non-statistics guy like me, was still understandable.  Worth a read.

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.

Lost in the midst of the weekend news coverage of President Barack Obama hamming it up with his new best friend Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is this little promise tucked into this weekend’s Presidential Radio/Internet Address:

“In the coming weeks, I will be announcing the elimination of dozens of government programs shown to be wasteful or ineffective,” he said. “In this effort, there will be no sacred cows and no pet projects. All across America, families are making hard choices, and it’s time their government did the same.”

For those of you keeping score at home, this is the same President Obama who pushed through a $787 billion pork-filled spending bill and a proposed $3.6 trillion budget. He also promised during the campaign to go through the budget line-by-line and eliminate waste. Yet such scrutiny seems to have been absent during these initial spending initiatives.

Anyone really think he’s going to follow through on this one?

I wouldn’t count on it.

Michael Graham, writing in the Boston Herald, lays it out for Homeland Security.

Janet Napolitano was right. There were hatemongers at the Tea Party rallies on Tax Day. They called themselves “reporters.”

The Department of Homeland Security released a pre-emptive “assessment report” on the dangers of “right-wing extremists” just a week before the tax protest rallies. According to DHS, these potentially include pro-lifers, supporters of border security and that notoriously unstable group – U.S. military veterans.

And I can report that there were, in fact, quite a few vets at our Tea Party at Long Wharf. But other than their crazy notion that spending our kids into an $11 trillion hole is wrong, they didn’t appear to be unhinged.

The same cannot be said for the reporters.

He hits the same highlights as many bloggers about CNN reporter Susan Roesgen who bad-mouthed and argued with protesters.  Unlike in this video, when a Bush mask with a Hitler mustache and devil horns was simply termed a "likeness" of the President.  No outrage then, but today she specifically calls them out.  Fair and balanced?

And in a case closer to (his) home, an example of willful blindness.

As hard as it is to believe, until yesterday The Boston Globe-Democrat had not run a story about the national Tea Party movement. As Howard Kurtz noted in The Washington Post, a newspaper in “the city famed for the original Tea Party” had ignored the story entirely.

Like President Barack Obama, who claimed on the morning of April 15 that he knew nothing about the Tea Party protests, the Globe-Democrat played dumb.

But once 1,500 local citizens and I re-enacted the original Tea Party at Boston Harbor, the Globies couldn’t avoid it any longer. They had to cover this breaking, local story, and so they did:

From Kentucky.

Yep. The Globe-Democrat’s only story about the national Boston Tea Party movement was an AP story datelined Frankfort, Ky.

That’s like covering the Kentucky Derby from Suffolk Downs. Yet the Globe-Democrat did cover a story on anti-bottled-water activists recently dumping bottled water into the harbor.

But as one Tea Partier quipped: “If Obama had been the king of England, the Globe wouldn’t have covered the American Revolution.”

In.  The.  Tank.  And drowning.

While there have been recent scattered protests (dubbed "Tea Parties" after a rather famous one in Boston one 235 years ago) against huge government expansion, economic control, bailouts, borrowing and spending, the day of the individual tax deadline, April 15th, was a day of concerted protests.  The "Tax Day Tea Party" was an event held at over 500 locations all across the United States.

In case you’re still wondering what all the fuss was about, a budget deficit graph may help.  (Click on the image for the source.)

Yes, we’ve had budget deficits in the past.  These and the ones to come are in a class all by themselves.  Hence the outrage from all over the country.

From Michigan to South Carolina to California (where the state GOP chair got boos) to Ohio to Kentucky to Atlanta (the largest crowd in the nation, as far as I know, at over 15,000).  This was no localized phenomenon.  This was a national movement.

More below the fold…

Read the rest of this entry

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.