The Prophet Speaks

Everyone's been dissecting Al Gore's first emergence since the IPCC debunking. But did you note this line?

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

...which would seem to be, besides an immanentization of the eschaton, an admission that this ain't never been about Science. 

Hockey Stick Graph Is True!

Shamelessly Instapinched.

Still In Danger of Healthcare

Andrew McCarthy gets it right (channeling Mark Steyn) --it's about transformation:

Today's Democrats are controlled by the radical Left, and it is more important to them to execute the permanent transformation of American society than it is to win the upcoming election cycles. They have already factored in losing in November — even losing big. For them, winning big now outweighs that. I think they're right.  I hear Republicans getting giddy over the fact that "reconciliation," if it comes to that, is a huge political loser. That's the wrong way to look at it. The Democratic leadership has already internalized the inevitablility of taking its political lumps. That makes reconciliation truly scary. Since the Dems know they will have to ram this monstrosity through, they figure it might as well be as monstrous as they can get wavering Democrats to go along with. 

The key point is this:

The only question is whether there are enough Democrats who are conventional politicians and who care about being reelected, such that they will deny the leadership the numbers it needs. 

I am not sanguine on this point, but as the Senate Bill is stripped of the Stupak amendment and greatly expands the abortion license, there are 15-20 supposedly pro-life Democrats who voted for the House bill who might not go for "reconciliation." Obama/Pelosi/Reid wouldn't let Stupak come to the summit even though his presence was requested. It just takes 3 Dems to peel away.... 

Pressure on the House Dems is going to be incredible and there's no telling how it will go. Mr. W. says:

In the days before our low, dishonest age, the GOP leaders would pick the 3 likeliest Dems to change their votes, and promise not to back a Republican against them in Nov.  That’s what an FDR or LBJ would have done.

Formerly Grey Lady Catches On

Curtsy to Ken Thomas for noticing the FGL has finally noticed the "black genocide" argument against abortion. Dr. Alveda King (MLK's niece) has been pounding this drum for 30 years, and the Black Genocide group was around when I was a pro-life lobbyist close to two decades ago. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenics supporter who wished to have "more children from the fit, less from the unfit" and thought birth control would weed out the lesser races. Thus was her infamous "Negro Project" created. Sanger's commitment to eugenics is amply documented in all kinds of scholarly literature, as well as popular histories such as 1991's Blessed Are The Barren. But a pale denial from a Planned Parenthood spokesman is sufficient refutation for our elites and the Formerly Gray Lady has had no interest in any of that for 30 years.

But let a white person in the South put up a billboard highlighting this, and suddenly the Times is on the case.

Yes, Dears.

Chile's Done It Again

8.8 Magnitude Earthquake in Chile sends tsunami 500mph barreling straight for Hawaii. The entire Pacific, including Oz and Japan, is under tsunami warning, although as I type they've already dialed the direst predictions about how big the wave will be down.

A tsunami after the magnitude-9.5 quake that struck Chile in 1960, the largest earthquake ever recorded, killed about 140 people in Japan, 61 in Hawaii and 32 in the Philippines. That tsunami was about 3.3 to 13 feet (one to four meters) in height, Japan's Meteorological Agency said.
The tsunami from Saturday's quake was likely to be much smaller because the quake itself was not as strong.
Japanese public broadcaster NHK quoted earthquake experts as saying the tsunami would likely be tens of centimeters (inches) high and reach Japan in about 22 hours. A tsunami of 28 centimeters (11 inches) was recorded after a magnitude-8.4 earthquake near Chile in 2001.

Stay safe, people.

Mo Mo'toons

From the archives of The Ryskind Sketchbook 

Cliff May reports we're fighting the Mo'toon battle again, hence the reprise cartoon from 2/06.

A Danish newspaper on Friday apologized for offending Muslims by reprinting a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban, rekindling heated debate about the limits of freedom of speech.

Why bother to fight shar'i'a if you're going to abide by it voluntarily? The claim against depicting the Prophet is bogus...or at least quite late anyway...late 16th/17th c. Here, for example, is a collection of medieval images of Mohammed created by Muslims...which, when you see some of them, may explain the prohibition. No Danish cartoonist could have come up with worse than what pious Muslims did!

Three From Ponzi

I was working for some kind of Ponzi scheme headline but decided, right, like no one's ever tried that before. Anyway, Julie Ponzi has two good posts today, which reminded me I intended to link another worthwhile entry from a week or two ago.

There's a riff on the WSJ's piece on the evolution of the Boy Scouts.

There's a great piece highlighting new research on the devastating effects of sex-ed --none of which are new or surprising. But she chides the abstinence-only folks in a way I agree they (we) deserve --for not taking the sex drive seriously enough.

The whole, "It is wrong; just say no" argument has much to be said for it, but it fails by itself (and on the whole, miserably, I'd suggest) to appeal when put up against the siren song of the opposite view--appealing as that alternative does to very natural--and, yes, legitimate--urges. 

Which is another reason sex-ed really can't be done as mere "health class" --it really has to be put in context, as for example, in the positive context of the the theology of the body. But what the abstinence movement really hasn't dealt with is

the extent to which the culture (including many abstinence advocates) has accepted delaying marriage until late in the 20s and even 30s.  Most people are not designed to have the fortitude of a nun or a monk . . . and there are good and natural reasons for this that ought to be addressed before an appeal to "abstinence-only" can be taken with as much seriousness as it deserves. 

The link in the quote above takes you to the third worthy post --this one on marrying young.

Losing Religious Liberty

Religion & Liberty interviews Nina Shea   (one of the true heroines of DC by the way --a tireless and mostly thankless champion of persecuted Christians and other believers for 30 years) the U.S. Commission in International Religious Freedom. From an interview preview:

Q: in what areas has the Obama Administration done commendable work? Are there areas where they could do more, especially in the Middle East?

A: I’m trying hard to think of any area where the Obama Administration has done commendable work on religious freedom or human rights. As I answer this over a year into the administration, it still has not appointed an Ambassador for International Religious Freedom, though it has appointed dozens of other envoys. This week it appointed one to an organization that advocates religious persecution — the Organization of Islamic Conference, a religious organization dedicated to opposing Israel and spreading a law to criminally punish apostasy from Islam. Regarding the Religious Freedom Commission, there’s been a seat vacant for a year now, too; it’s a presidential appointment. I see that there has been a tradeoff of human rights for other issues – security, trade or global warming. The Christian groups and Muslim liberals in the Middle East have been abandoned. Iranian dissidents have been abandoned by him. Egyptian, Iraqi and Sudanese Christians feel abandoned by him. 

All of which we sort of know, but I hadn't really focused on the degree to which we've abandoned decent Muslims by refusing to shine sunlight on their plight, lest their persecutors be offended.

There has especially been an abandonment of the Muslims of Darfur in western Sudan. Darfur was a major issue before President Obama came into office. There was a strong movement to save Darfur with bi-weekly, full-page ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post and with George Clooney and other Hollywood stars going to Darfur. Those voices have fallen silent and I really don’t understand it. I think that people like Samantha Power who went into the administration on a Sudan platform and who had a Harvard career built on stopping genocide, should see that policies are adopted that immediately end the genocide in Darfur and ensure free and fair elections take place throughout Sudan this spring, or resign. I recently met with her and she told me that the administration has sent its special envoy to Sudan many times, trying to negotiate with Khartoum and offer Gen. Omar-al Bashir incentives or “cookies and smiley faces,” as our envoy called them.
When he was a presidential candidate, Barak Obama wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post, stating: “[W]hen the history of this tragedy is written, nobody will remember how many times officials visited the region or how much humanitarian aid was delivered. They will only remember the death toll.” Well, hundreds of thousands of people of Darfur are still suffering in refugee camps where women are raped, where there’s terrible abuse and the spread of deadly diseases, where people can’t lead their lives and flourish.

This picture really did say it all.

Update: on the heels of this interview comes a report from Der Spiegel saying Christians are now the most persecuted group in the world.

Consensus Through The Decades

Tim Blair's eighth installment of "Things Scientists Say" . He digs into the Formerly Gray Lady's archives so you don't have to. RTWT, but note the decline of intellectual freedom.

1953: “A natural sciences group tonight called upon scientists everywhere ‘to strengthen the spirit of free inquiry by clear and courageous public expression.’ Scientists were urged to lose their fear of being ‘labeled’ for saying things they believed.”

1993: “With the cold war over, many scientists are converting both their professional skills and their activist convictions from national security and nuclear weapons to other issues, particularly the environment. This intellectual shift is driven variously by principle, by a growing interest in the environment among younger scientists, by the hunger for new challenges and – not least – by the search for new sources of financial support.”

Prime Minister Obama

Obligatory health care summit take: Leaving aside the content of the actual exchanges, which everyone else is already covering, my only observation is that the summit showed the White House does not know the difference between a President and a Prime Minister.

He is the Chief Executive, not a legislator, and he had no business being in that meeting. He should have summoned them to Blair House, given them a pep talk (with of course ample behind-the-scenes prep w/ his party leaders), and then locked them in to do their work. Agree completely with Yuval Levin. Reaction round-up here.

A Terrible & Beautiful Read

Sometimes with horrible things, you really feel there is nothing you can do. Nothing. You’re just useless. But over time, you start seeing that to do the right thing no matter what has tremendous power.

Matt Labash spends time with Fr. Rick Frechette in Haiti.

New Pro-Life Strategy

a smiling father holding his young son, next to the words "Celebrate Family. Celebrate Life."  Beneath the photo appears the message: "All I want for my son is for him to grow up knowing how to do the right thing."

That's the message that has the usual suspects in a tizzy. They got the NCAA to take it down. This on the heels of that "controversial" superbowl ad that showed Tim Tebow hugging his mom. Mary Katherine Hamm draws the only possible conclusion:

the strategy for Focus on the Family may be to create pro-life ads so utterly innocuous that they necessarily make critics thereof look like total loons.

Romans 8:28 In Action

One Fr. Hunwicke on the new British Equality Law. This is good:

When I was in teaching, there was already a de facto expectation that one bow to the zeitgeist in this sort of way. I came to feel that there were advantages in it. I used to tell the pupils: "Some people think ...", and then give them as passionate an advocacy as I could manage of the 'liberal' line - cliches, false logic, spurious rhetoric, factual misrepresntation, you name it, I threw myself into it all with relish. Then I said: "But other people think ...", and gave them the Christian view. When they said "But what do you think, Father?", I allowed them to pester me into revealing to them why the 'liberal' view I had so convincingly put forward was, in my own view, such rubbish. This had the advantage that when they later heard (as they were undoubtedly destined to) the 'liberal' orthodoxies, they were already to a degree innoculated; they found them rather less persuasive than than they were when Fr H had so convincingly expounded those same views ... "and he didn't even believe it!"

But this is positively delicious:

I also obeyed to the letter the fashion for teaching ethics in a "balanced and non-judgemental" way by giving the arguments both for and against Racial Discrimination, Gender Prejudice, etc.. Liberal colleagues used to find it incredibly difficult to explain to me why I was wrong to do this without conceding that they themselves were up to their ears in unbalanced and and judgemental teaching of moral and social matters. "But X is just wrong" they would naively bleat. I found the fun of it all really rather exhilarating.

Curtsy: Londiniensis

Hawaians Are Better Than You

Or so the House voted today by passing the Native Hawaian Reorganization Act. If it passes the Senate, President Obama has promised to sign it (then he won't have been born in the U.S. after all!)


I remember the old days when Liberals were opposed to Apartheid. And had a dream that people would not be judged by the color of their skin.

Character Counts

Did you know?

Character comes out in a sex scandal.

Newsweek, speaking of John Edwards' mistress as an example of good character. One doesn't know where to begin.

Paging Andrew Breitbart

Andrew Breitbart's young investigative journalists got ACORN dissolved (and yes, reorganized under new names, but still...) with just 3 or 4 videos showing local "community organizers" more than willing to help "organize" under-age brothels in their communities.

Lila Rose is now on her 10th video of Planned Parenthood clinics actively covering up statutory rape --not only disobeying the law, but actively protecting predatory males rather than young women-- all across the country. What a disgusting organization.

But who the hell cares? It's only women.

Curtsy: CMR

Medieval Warm Period Also Man-made!

Shamelessly pinched from Hanc Aquam
(click to enlarge)

Once Was Blind

Russell Turnbull once was blind:

[He] lost most of the vision in his right eye when he had ammonia sprayed into it as he tried to break up a fight on a late night bus journey home.
The attack, which badly burned and scarred his cornea, left him with permanent blurred sight and pain whenever he blinked. 

But now he sees:

his sight has been almost fully restored thanks to a new technique where doctors regrow the outside membrane of his cornea from stem cells taken from his healthy eye.

Chalk up another amazing cure to adult stem cells.

Curtsy: Brutally Honest

Two Good Stories

I like this post over at Mere Comments. Nothing to add to it really. It begins with a funny anecdote about C.S. Lewis and a bum, then adds an example of how our presuppositions color perceptions.

Right In The Fuhrer's Face

We couldn't have all those Hitler parodies without an eventual analysis of 'em, and WSJ comes through. The author seems to think they represent a degradation of culture.

Today's video pranksters are goofing around in a media world without censors, a fact that oddly gives their work more visibility and less bite. No one gets upset in the Internet era to see President Obama compared to the German mass murderer or the White House to the Berlin bunker.

I dunno: these parodies all mock Hitler rather than comparing anyone to him. The joke is having a huge, vein-popping conniption fit over whatever mock outrage suits your pleasure.

Stalin & Mao, it is pointed out, score very few parodies. But that is because they've scored very few movie treatments. When someone makes a movie showing Stalin or Mao pitching a hissy, parodists everywhere will be grateful for new material, I'm sure.

Meanwhile, the director who started it all, you'll be relieved to know, is not prissy about the parodies:

The German director of "Downfall," Oliver Hirschbiegel, is reportedly thrilled by the appropriations of his film. "I think I've seen about 145 of them," he told New York magazine. "You couldn't get a better compliment as a director."

Curtsy: Ken Thomas

Abdication of Duty

Mark Steyn w/ "a perfect snapshot of the west at twilight":

If you're minded to flip a pancake at speeds of more than four miles per hour, the state will step in and act decisively: It's for your own good. If you're a tourist from Moose Jaw, Washington will take pre-emptive action to shield you from the potential dangers of your patio in Arizona.

On the other hand, when it comes to "keeping you safe" from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing.

I'd like to hear Steyn's plan for what to do about Iran. We're not going to take out their facilities and what sanctions are there left to impose? Even if there were such, who besides Britain and ourselves would abide by them? Sanctions against rogue states in our current international moral culture are, as far as I can tell, like Prohibition --just an entrepreneurial opportunity for UN employees, the Russians, the Chinese and the French (although not so much under Sarkozy).

RTWT for summary of what a nuclear Iran means (it's not about the destruction of Israel so much as the cost of Russian "protection" against Iranian bombs).

Update: Russia objected (and we capitulated) to our selling missile defense to Poland, but it is selling missile defense to Iran. 

A Shot In The Arm

If you have 20 minutes, you owe it to yourself to watch George Will's C-PAC speech. It's a solid restatement of political philosophy, the state of our current politics, and hilarious to boot.

Promise Kept

It occurred to me this morning.... Obama's election does turn out to be the moment when the seas ceased their rising and the planet began to be healed.

No Longer In Charge

Poor Alexander Haig will always be remembered for his Constitutionally-mistaken effort to keep everyone calm when President Reagan was shot. Everyone acts as if he was usurping the line of succession, but even House Speaker Tip O'Neill said at the time that Haig meant no such thing and the issue was making a mountain out of a molehill.

When I think of him, what comes first to mind is his old soldier's use of Pentagonese instead of English, captured beautifully in a MacNelly cartoon when his "I'm in charge here at the White House" remark forced his resignation. (Not directly, but it set a chain of events in motion....)

I wish I could find that cartoon, but it had Haig announcing, "I decisioned the necessifaction of the resignatory action/option, due to the trendflowing of our foreign policy...."  Comedy gold at the time.

The formerly gray lady's obit makes no bones about disliking the man --mostly for his service in the Nixon White House-- but it can't hide his valor. Graduating from West Point, he went to Japan in 1947, serving under Gen. Fox, a MacArthur deputy.
In the Korean war, he took part in the Inchon landing, where his first battle experience was especially ugly:

General Almond sent thousands of American soldiers north toward the Chinese border in November 1950. They met a ferocious surprise counterattack from a far larger Chinese force. General Almond and First Lt. Haig flew to the forward outpost of an American task force on Nov. 28, where the general pinned a medal on a lieutenant colonel’s parka, told him the Chinese were only stragglers, and then flew off. Of that task force, once 2,500 strong, some 1,000 were killed, wounded, captured or left to die. In all, within a fortnight, American forces in Korea took 12,975 casualties. It was one of the worst routs in American military history.

Then came Vietnam, where he served as a battalion and brigade commander and earned the Distinguished Service Cross, Distinguished Flying Cross & Purple Heart. During one battle in which we were outnumbered 3-1, Haig took off in a helicopter to get a look at the terrain. Each time he took off and landed, it was of course into a barrage of bullets and eventually he was shot down and forced into two days of hand-to-hand combat.  The citation for the Distinguished Service Cross reads:

Heedless of the danger to himself, Col. Haig repeatedly braved hostile fire to survey the battlefield. His personal courage and determination, and his skillful employment of every defense and support tactic possible, inspired his men with previously unimagined power. Although outnumbered three-to-one, Col. Haig succeeded in inflicting 592 casualties on the Vietcong.

In 1969, he became Kissinger's deputy on the National Security Council and completely "consumed" by Vietnam, then by Watergate fallout. WaPo's obit credits him with persuading Nixon to resign, possibly brokering the pardon as a condition. (I know we are all surprised that WaPo is taking the occasion of the general's passing to run Watergate tie-in stories. At least three already, and the death was just announced.)

Kissinger liked the energetic Haig so well that he had him promoted from 2 to 4-star general, leapfrogging more than 200 officers. In 1974 Haig became the NATO commander as well as the head of all American forces in Europe. For his committed anti-Communism, he was a target, and a week before he retired (over disagreements with the "namby-pamby" Carter Administration) a Red Army IED narrowly missed him near his Belgium headquarters. The best obit so far is this from Arnaud de Borchgrave, which includes the anecdote that after Haig survived, Pres. Carter's Defense Secretary  called Haig and said, "Just want you to know we didn't do it!"

His service in the Reagan Administration ended bitterly. Lots of turf wars with Reagan's White House staff, with probably some blame all around. Haig said White House staffers manipulated the President's dislike of him, which must have some truth, but you could certainly tell in Haig's entire demeanor that he'd have had an old decorated soldier's chip on his shoulder about political operatives.

Haig always struck me as something of a conventional thinker, and therefore limited as a politician, but an admirable and tough old bird and committed anti-Communist --so he got the most important question of his time fundamentally right. Former Sec. of State George Shultz called him "a patriot's patriot."

de Borchgrave says one of Haig's best achievements is little known.

His least known accomplishment was a close working relationship with Irving Brown the AFL-CIO's roving ambassador abroad. Together, at SHAPE HQ, Brown and Haig got together to assist Poland's Lech Walesa as he led the Lenin shipyard workers in Gdansk against their Communist overlords. It was the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire.
Irving Brown received the Medal of Freedom for his efforts. Al Haig's contribution to the same endeavor that changed the world and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union was critical.

Haig, who was Catholic, is survived by his wife of 60 years, three kids, eight grandkids, and a brother, the Rev. Francis R. Haig.

Update: In comments, C. Blosser leaves this delightful remembrance of  the "best boss I ever had" from Michael Ledeen.

Yoo-hoo!

Friday night at the White House: time for an under-the-radar document dump. Bush lawyers cleared of misconduct. From Miguel Estrada's (Yoo's lawyer) statement:

Mr. Margolis, who conducted the review and rejected OPR’s conclusions, is one of the Department of Justice’s longest-serving, most distinguished and well-respected career civil servants.  His conclusion that Professor Yoo complied with the ethical rules accords with the opinions of leading legal ethics scholars such as Professors Geoffrey Hazard and Ronald Rotunda, each of whom has reviewed the memoranda at issue and concluded in expert reports that the memoranda exhibit no violation of the rules of professional responsibility or legal ethics.  As might be expected in the case of a lengthy legal document, we do not agree with every aspect of Mr. Margolis’ 69-page analysis.  But everyone knows that even the best lawyers disagree amongst themselves on matters of judgment.  What matters here is that Mr. Margolis agrees OPR was wrong.
Professor Yoo served our Nation well and honorably in times of great peril.  OPR’s work in this matter was shoddy and biased.  The only thing that warrants an ethical investigation out of this entire sorry business is the number of malicious allegations against Professor Yoo and Judge Bybee that leaked out of the Department during the last year.  It is high time for Attorney General Holder to show that these leaks not authorized or encouraged—for base partisan purposes—at the highest levels of his department.  Mr. Holder can do so by identifying the culprits and referring them for prosecution or bar discipline, as appropriate. 

 The CIA guys are still being investigated.
Update: The Justice Dept. neglected to release former AG Mukasey's letter on the topic, which shreds OPR's work, but here it is.

American Journalism Today

Curtsy to ninme for this, which the National Post headlined "Heads explode in NYT newsroom."

You Can't Handle The Edge!

Forget South Park, Family Guy, The Simpsons... Here's a truly edgy cartoon, curtsy to CMR.

Annals of Self-Awareness, 5

So a bunch of Corner-ites, beginning w/ Ramesh Ponnuru, think they have outed themselves as Brie-eaters. In "Brie at Last," one of them writes,

Ramesh, you wrote the post I didn't have the courage to.

Spare us. You're National Reviewbies, of course you eat Brie.

Mark Steyn goes off on an amusing tangent in Live Brie or Die!

You'd be surprised at how many Continental dinner parties the general tastelessness of American cheese comes up as evidence of the pointlessness of U.S. federalism: as one Frenchman put it to me, at least in Europe they have the federalisme du fromage, whereby every ten miles you'll come across a different unpasteurized cheese. Whereas USDA has successfully imposed ruthless centralized cheese homogeneity from Maine to Hawaii. 

On the Continent, it is better to have interesting cheese than liberty. It's an argument.

Waltzing Mackillop

Oi Oi Oi! Oz has its first official saint.

Sr. Mary Mackillop will be canonized October 17.  She co-founded the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart in 1866, dedicating her life to educating poor kids. She was once excommunicated for a time (hope for us all!)...but her bishop later regretted it and took it back.

Update: Canada getting a new saint, too: Andre Bessette. Stephen Harper appears pleased.

How I Know It's Lent

Hmmm. This is back.

Not Even In The White House...

can Obama create a job.

Jesus Was A Rocket Man

I was going to ignore this as it deserves, but co-religionists and even Mark Steyn (who at least gets a good one-liner in) are offended by Sir Elton John's latest pop-off. They are missing the true meaning of what he said.

I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems.

And possibly sang about them while wearing outre costumes? Sir John is telling us he's Jesus.

For which the only proper response is: Yes, Dear.

The Big Man Is A Big Man!

I read about Gov. Christie's budget cut speech, but am just getting around to reading it. Let him lay 9 minutes of righteous truth on you. Especially love his echo of SOTU with "is it any wonder the people don't trust the government?" intro. And adore him for saying, "I am not happy, but I am not afraid to make these decisions, either. "



Here's the text, which is a thing of beauty, plain though it is. It's a change that's truly hopeful.

Behold The US Policy On Human Rights

Message to Iranian students & Afghan tribesmen

Civilian Surveillance Program In Public Schools

Extraordinary. A PA school district has been caught spying on families using the embedded webcams in the government-distributed laptops each student has.

What students and parents did not know, however, was that the 24/7 access goes both ways. According to the complaint, nowhere in any of the documentation accompanying the laptops or otherwise disseminated to students and parents was any reference made to the ability of the school district to remotely activate the webcam embedded in each laptop at any time, according to the district’s discretion.
How the capability was discovered should be enough to put any who value civil liberties and privacy on the edge of their seat. From the complaint (emphasis mine):

On November 11, 2009, Plaintiffs were for the first time informed of the above-mentioned capability and practice by the School District when Lindy Matsko, an Assistant Principal at Harriton High School, informed minor Plaintiff that the School District was of the belief that minor Plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor Plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the School District.

That is outrageous, of course, and I can just bet that the geniuses who came up with this plan all had "Bush Scares Me" bumper stickers and fancied themselves outraged over the Patriot Act.

However, I'm actually more troubled by this line from the complainant's lawsuit, which accuses the school of:

“indiscriminant use of and ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students,” all without the knowledge or consent of any of the students or parents involved.

"Indiscriminant?" I see fake words in professional documents from the allegedly well-educated  more and more. It's disturbing.

Curtsy: Sidelines

A Skeptic's Desultory Philippic

"A Skeptic’s Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Not Al Gored Into Submission)" by Marlo Lewis Jr.
(with apologies to Rhymin' Simon)
Curtsy: The Corner

Sarah's Got Some Work To Do

Wish I didn't agree with this, since there is so much talent and genuine good there, but I do.
Update: More

She is what she is, and what she is merits no disdain. She is feisty and public-spirited, and millions of people vibrate like tuning forks to her rhetoric. When she was suddenly forced to take a walk on the highest wire in America's political circus, she showed grit. 

She also showed that grit is no substitute for seasoning.

Ash Wednesday for the Agnostic

A lovely essay from Gerard Vanderleun. I wasn't familiar with the spiritual he mentions. Here it is. (I s'pose it's the one.)

Potpourri of Popery, Ash Wednesday Edition

Guess I should take our Christmas wreath off the door, huh?

Popery
Here's the Pope's Message for Lent, all about justice and how to be restored to it.

Of course he intends it primarily for personal meditation as Christians journey through Lent and our annual period of repentance, but it's a pretty good summary of his mentor's City of God as well, in that he reiterates what Christians have to offer the political order (and what the political order can't, by its very nature, offer anybody).

The ultimate teaching is that Christ brings justice. How is a lovely meditation which can't be done...justice... in an excerpt, but here goes anyway:

Conversion to Christ, believing in the Gospel, ultimately means this: to exit the illusion of self-sufficiency in order to discover and accept one’s own need – the need of others and God, the need of His forgiveness and His friendship. So we understand how faith is altogether different from a natural, good-feeling, obvious fact: humility is required to accept that I need Another to free me from “what is mine,” to give me gratuitously “what is His.” This happens especially in the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist. Thanks to Christ’s action, we may enter into the “greatest” justice, which is that of love (cf. Rm 13, 8-10), the justice that recognises itself in every case more a debtor than a creditor, because it has received more than could ever have been expected. Strengthened by this very experience, the Christian is moved to contribute to creating just societies, where all receive what is necessary to live according to the dignity proper to the human person and where justice is enlivened by love.

Archbishop Chaput is doing a series of reflections on the Pope's letter. First installment here.
Someone apparently has given posting texts up for Lent, because neither his homily for this morning's Mass nor the full text of his audience are available yet. There's video, though (here and here, respectively). [Update: here's the Audience: "abandon superficiality," he counsels. Upperdate: Here's the homily]

•  Address on natural law to the Pontifical Academy for Life: 

History has shown us how dangerous and deleterious a state can be that proceeds to legislate on questions that touch the person and society while pretending itself to be the source and principle of ethics.

• Address at the Caritas shelter in Rome: 

Man does not only need to be fed materially or helped to overcome moments of difficulty, but also has the necessity of knowing who he is and knowing the truth about himself, about his dignity. As I recalled in the encyclical "Caritas in Veritate," "without truth, charity becomes sentimentalism.

• Hey, the Pope's going to visit Doug Kmiec in April! 

Potpourri:

• Lent: resource round-up here; Archb. Dolan says get thee to Confession; 24 hours of Confession in NYC; Wed. evening confessions, every parish in DC. Possible penances. Three weapons you need for Lent; Spiritual Exercises on-line for Lent; Sr. Mary Martha doesn't approve of your penances.
• Algeria: prelate calls for religious freedom, state not happy, Samil Khalil Samil elaborates.
• Australia: traditional Anglicans vote to "pope." (Yay!)
• China: three bishops imprisoned, two priests released.
• Great Britain: Catholic bishops not making it easy on poping Anglicans, urge faithful to go on Lenten "carbon fast"; retiring Card. Murphy O'C urges Catholics to be brave;Tony Blair: Catholic ban "ridiculous."
• Iraq: fourth Christian this week shot in Mosul today.
• Ireland: This week the Holy Father had a two-day confab w/ the Irish bishops about the terrible abuse scandals there. Here's the Vatican's official statement about that meeting. Register story.
• Italy: The Shroud's going on tour again.
• Lebanon: bishop of Tyre on life for Christians there.
• US: thank to bigoted City Council, Archdiocese of Washington out of the foster care biz; Bishop Vasa cuts Church's ties with hospital performing sterilizations; renegade Phoenix priest laicized. First Extraordinary Form mass in years to be celebrated at National Shrine, celebrated by Card. Hoyos. And we're fighting about it. CA's bishops also urging carbon fast; was going to mock them, but they got the idea from DC. Petition for Mother Teresa stamp. Olympian becomes a nun; Controversy: should Catholic supporters of waterboarding be denied communion?; George Weigel's eulogy for his son-in-law.

And finally: Catholic Downfall: Hitler rails against Pope Benedict

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The Great Chinese US Credit Dump Has Begun

Japan owns more of us than China does, thanks to a debt dump. It's a bad thing, but strangely, I feel a teensy weensy bit better.

Downfall of Global Warming

No, I have not changed to an all-video format. Things have just fallen out that way during the blizzard. Here's a video encapsulation of the past two weeks' worth of global warming consensus unraveling. Mr. W., please note the punchline! ninme, please note the creative translation of "mit Stalin". Everyone, beware the 2-3 f-bombs.

Curtsy: American Digest via Neptunus Lex 
Should you require actual link-laden round-ups of the latest, try here. And here. 

Mr. W. As Cliff Huxtable

Swoon! Happy Valentine's Day!

Just Because It's Jolly

Competitive Advantage

Looks like the ice-skating's going to be a bit more athletic at the Vancouver Olympics.

Andrew Klavan Is No Stubby Kaye

But watch anyway.

Life Gets More & More Like Star Trek

A laser beam mounted on a 747 shot down a missile in a test. Here's the video.
 

Too cool. Curtsy: the corner

Wherever You Go, Snow

Every place I've ever lived, there's snow on the ground.  I think we've established the snow in my home town adequately. It also snowed in Rome this week.

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This is Madrid in January, but snow's predicted today.

Neither the snow in DC nor the snow in Rome or Madrid is truly unusual. This is, though: 9 inches of snow in Dallas? I never knew it to do more than dust about a little.

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What about where the scattered relatives live or lived? New York/New Jersey? Snow. Montgomery and Atlanta? Snowing. It's even sort of snowing in Los Angeles. Freaky.

Imagine What Removing All Of It Could Do

Scientific American: Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace.

Curtsy: Sidelines

In Need Of A Scapegoat

Lileks, describing my mood this week (really need to beat up some people or at least rant at them, but mustn't.)

Pounded flat as a tin sheet tonight, and short with my daughter, which always gives me pangs of instant regret. Never, ever take out your mood on your family. It’s the easiest thing to do and the least forgivable; they’re the ones to whom you owe your best self. The fact that they’re closest obligates you to be extra careful. Of course, you can’t take out your bad mood on your co-workers; what did they do? (Unless they did something. Even then.) You can yell at the dog, but to him it’s just blah-blah dominance-racket from Mister Alpha. Talk to the paw. [and we don't even have a dog, we have mice-- highly unsatisfying as whipping boys] You can take it out on strangers, but then you’re abrogating your part in the social compact. You know where this is leading, don’t you? That’s right: the clocktower, with a rifle.

Or to Confession, infinitely preferable, but more difficult in a blizzard.

Office Courtship

I keep trying to take advantage of the snow days to read this month's book club selection, but find I can't keep it up for long. Swashbuckling and courtly love are not my thing, apparently. Pity: I enjoyed The Count of Monte Cristo thoroughly.

So I've been reflecting since coffee yesterday on whether this wsj article on office romance is depressing or heartening. For Office Romance, the Secret's Out details the new acceptability of office love. On the one hand, given that most of us do not have anything so elegant as a career, but only a job --ugh!-- this is depressing:

"People spend so much of their time working that it's unavoidable,"

On the other hand, especially following on the heels of Charlotte Allen's truly horrific "New Dating Game," in which the young women behave like Moll Flanders, only without the charming economic and status motives (you wish their behavior could rise to the level of whoring), the experience of this couple seems wholesome and refreshing.

After meeting—and mindful of the risks of office romance—they took several months to get acquainted before they started dating. "We had a true courting, where we had to sit on the front porch and just talk to each other" online and by phone, says Ms. Gudeman. Eventually she transferred to his office, where the pair worked side-by-side for another year.

And this appears to be a pattern:

many young office daters are taking things slowly—reverting to painstaking relationship-building because they know their livelihoods are at risk. "People have this notion that these relationships are scuzzy meetings in the supply closet, or Christmas-party affairs. In fact, it's just the opposite," the author Ms. Olen says. "The office has become the last bastion of old-fashioned courting." 

Hmm. So it appears that people need an institution which introduces persons with common interests and mores to one another while imposing certain standards of behavior that allow the relationship to develop fully or cool before much damage is done. Imagine!  As "the boss" is the last person whose right to make demands on and have expectations of us is still acknowledged, he turns out to be the stand-in for parents, the Church, and stern-eyed maiden aunts.

I can't decide whether to be grateful or extremely depressed.

Decline Is A Choice

VDH & Mark Steyn on possibly not inevitable American decline. VDH walks us through the fall of Rome, natch, arguing that what made it collapse is not what you think after reading all those other Rome/America comparisons. Big conclusion is that Rome chose to fall, and possibly so will we.

The strange thing is that these wild swings in civilization are at their bases psychological: decline is one of choice rather than necessity. Plague or lead poisoning or famine did not destroy Rome. We could balance our budget tomorrow without a great deal of sacrifice; we could eliminate 10% worth of government spending that is not essential; we could create our own energy with massive nuclear power investment, and more extraction of gas, oil, and coal. We could instill a tragic rather than therapeutic world view that would mean more responsibilities rather than endlessly more rights. We could do this all right—but too many feel such medicine is worse than the malady, and so we probably won’t and can’t. An enjoyable slow decline is apparently  preferable to a short, but painful rethinking and rebirth.

Then Mark Steyn weighs in on The Seductions of Decline, comparing our end with the decline of New Rome (Britains). Like VDH, he notes the decline of distinctive American virtues:

Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road To Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. 

But he strikes if possible an even gloomier note, because Britain (and all of Europe) had the luxury of palming its greatness off on us, which hardly has a downside beyond loss of bragging rights:

in the geopolitical sense it can be marvelously liberating. You still go to all the best parties and have a seat at the top table – Britain and France are members of the UN Security Council and the G7 and every other group that counts – and even better, when the check comes, you’re not the one stuck with the tab. You can preen and pose on the world stage secure in the knowledge that nobody expects you to do anything about it.

He compares the entire G-15 to Leonardo diCaprio, which is hilarious, but for it being so apt. If we were going to give way to another great Western power --let's let the Aussies have a go-- that would be one thing, but to whom are we likely to give way? 
The good news is, none of the usual suspects is up to the job. China, Russia, the Caliphate? All implausible. 
The bad news is, none of the usual suspects is up to the job.

The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order – in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their own borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, the United States will still remain the most inviting target – first, because it’s big, and secondly, because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur. 

So, either America makes the choice to man up, or it's back to the constant wars of tribe and religion America was founded to prevent. Peace through strength as Reagan used to say. But can comfortable people man up?

Stuff Snowbound People Like

Or, guess who downloaded her memory card?

 tunneling

 shoveling

 sledding

 braking before you hit this

good thing Mr. W's a leg man

Hyattsville Wild, Winter Edition

Next in an occasional series

 snow run-off

Canada geese on the Anacostia

cardinal

Icicle Tour

I am of the opinion that old Victorian homes should always drip with icicles if they can help it.

Digging Out

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Why, yes, the Weedlets do have a little cabin fever. Why do you ask?

The New Puritans

Here's salty language about...well, salty language, I guess. I didn't follow the link because I've never heard of the person involved and couldn't care less about his foul utterances. I only note the final observation.

Lenny Bruce lived in a much less puritanical era.

I don't think Lenny Bruce would raise any eyebrows today, and yet this does have the ring of truth.

Consensus At Last

Get this. First, an acknowledgment from the liberal Guardian:

The IPCC says its reports are policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive. Perhaps unknown to many people, the process is started and finished not by scientists but by political officials, who steer the way the information is presented in so-called summary for policymakers [SPM] chapters. Is that right, the Guardian asked?

Then the answer, from a lead author of the IPCC report on global warming:

The Nobel prize was for peace not science ... government employees will use it to negotiate changes and a redistribution of resources. It is not a scientific analysis of climate change," said Anton Imeson, a former IPCC lead author from the Netherlands. "For the media, the IPCC assessments have become an icon for something they are not. To make sure that it does not happen again, the IPCC should change its name and become part of something else. The IPCC should have never allowed itself to be branded as a scientific organisation.

So we are all on the same page now. The IPCC report has nothing to do with "Science" and everything to do with redistribution.
Curtsy: Brutally Honest

Anthem For Our Times

Here we are buried under three feet of global warming. Oh, but this made me laugh. It's all in the visuals. Especially the stove pipe exhaust coming from the camper.



Curtsy: American Digest

For Those Who Say The Bible Is Myth

Curtsy to ninme for this tale of love disappointed.

An Arab diplomat who lifted his bride's veil only to discover she was cross-eyed and had facial hair has sued her parents for emotional and moral damages.

Made me think of Jacob and Leah. In some parts of the world, it's still the Old Testament.

Top 10 Tweets From B-16

From Tom Hoopes:

1. April 19, 2005: OMG...habemus ME! lol
2. April 20, 2005: Great to be on *this* side of desk. Sec. is getting Assisi Franciscan file. Sayonara, Buddha boys!
3. Aug 18, 2005: Cologne. Never knew why they call it that till now. "Smells like teen spirit" indeed lol!
4. Jan 25, 2006: Check out new encyc @vat.va ="Deus Caritas Est" Taylor Swift fans know how to find the secret message (!!)
5. Sept 8, 2006:  Happy Birthday, M! Spent day reading great dialogues re: Islam. Great passage here4 Tues. speech.
6. Sept 13, 2006: oops
7. July 7, 2007: Find motu proprio @vat.va re: Tridentine. Hey Mr. Tamborine Man don't play no song for me! lol
8. April 17, 2008: White House= opposite of St. Peter's... Looks bigger outside than in.
9. July 19, 2009: Here at Sydney. Tie me kangaroo down sport! jk (lol). Really, though, can they call Foster's beer?!? Foster's = a joke
10. Feb 9, 2010:  great idol 2night...miss Paula but hate to say it Ellen = better.

I'm Impressed

Even usual Dem schill Mark Knoller has figured it out. Though some of us had his number in 2008.

Confusing Tolerance For Duty

On the mockery of rights:

The odd thing about liberals is that they believe they are being magnanimous and not absurd or malevolent in seeking to impose on everyone the non-existent duty of defending the non-existent right to falsehood, stupidity, vice, or whatever other depravities they cannot be bothered to oppose. [1] From their featherbrained credal belief that everyone has the right to believe whatever he wishes, it follows that everyone has the right to false and vicious beliefs, from which it follows in turn that everyone has the corresponding duty of defending the right of their maintenance and growth.

Naturally there is no such duty and therefore no right to impose it. Given that every man has the duty and the right to pursue and uphold the true, the good, and the beautiful, it follows that he cannot also have the duty and the right to the contrary. [2] Where morality by reason imposes a duty, liberalism by whim imposes a mockery of it. In seeking to impose the mock-duty of defending the mock-right to the false, the bad, and the ugly, such that they flourish thereunder, liberalism shows itself to be the enemy of the true, the good, and the beautiful, that is to say, of knowledge, culture, society, personhood, and mankind itself, and it is consequently the duty of every man to oppose it.

Let The Origins Wars Begin...Again

There was no primordial soup, Science has proven. David Warren compares this revolution in evolutionary thinking to an earlier revolution, when Darwinists had to re-group and listen to a priest they'd previously mocked:

Readers acquainted with the history will recall that followers of Darwin -- the crusading, anti-religious zealots who formed the "smart set" in later Victorian biology -- had no time for Gregor Mendel. When they mentioned him at all, they dismissed his meticulous cross-breeding experiments as trivial, and mocked the man himself as a Catholic priest. Mendel was working without so much as a microscope, in the obscurity of a monastic garden. What a laugh.

Indeed Mendel, who also made significant contributions to physics and meteorology, had to give up science, after his genetic breakthrough, to devote the rest of his life to fighting the Austro-Hungarian tax authorities who were threatening the very existence of monasteries such as his own in Brno. It was not till the dawn of the 20th century that his ideas were exhumed, tested, and found to be brilliantly true and game-changing. They put the older Darwinism into eclipse, since "natural selection" could predict nothing, nor give a single result that could be replicated.

It took the once-fashionable Darwinian atheists three decades to recover from this setback. They did so by announcing the formation of the "modern evolutionary synthesis" -- i.e. pure Mendelism, relabelled as "neo-Darwinism."

Well, yes, if "Darwinism" turns out to be "anything that eventually proves to be true-ism," count me in.

That is one leg upon which our contemporary Darwinism stands: appropriated genuine science.

The other leg has just been overthrown.

Few have ever disputed "common descent," but many have asked: What sort of "accident" hatched the first reproducing creature?

The sort of environmental flukes on which the Darwinian depends for his salvation are all very well if you have infinite time. But as we began to realize, about the time Primordial Soup was first served, the universe wasn't nearly old enough -- by a factor approaching infinity-- for any meandering and purposeless scheme to achieve the sort of results we see all around us.

(Curtsy: American Digest)

But wait, committed Darwinists! Intelligent Design is likewise on the block this morning. Stephen Barr says it's a failure. 

None of this is to say that the conclusions the ID movement draws about how life came to be and how it evolves are intrinsically unreasonable or necessarily wrong. Nor is it to deny that the ID movement has been treated atrociously and that it has been lied about by many scientists. The question I am raising is whether this quixotic attempt by a small and lightly armed band to overthrow “Darwinism” and bring about a new scientific revolution has accomplished anything good. It has had no effect on scientific thought. Its main consequence has been to strengthen the general perception that science and religion are at war.

I don't agree with him, actually. He's right that the ID movement is not "Science" as such; it is philosophy, and represents the intellectual rediscovery of formal and final causes after decades of philosophical materialism.

But anyway, everybody re-group, tend to your wounded and fight again tomorrow.

Potpourri of Popery, Blizzard of 2010 Edition

Nothing like a snowbound week to help a gal catch up on her popery, and we must catch up before Lent begins next week.

Popery
Since his January 17th visit to the synagogue of Rome (which was the last major address I covered), the Pope has given several major addresses and homilies.

For the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, which he celebrated at a vespers service at St. Paul's Outside the Walls, Benedict emphasized Christian unity, since the feast coincided with the conclusion of a week dedicated to that theme. It was an ecumenical service, and the Pope knit the two themes together by first recalling the source of Paul's missionary zeal --his personal encounter with Christ-- and linking it to renewed missionary activity:

In a world marked by religious indifference, and even by a growing aversion to the Christian faith, it is necessary to discover a new, intense method of evangelization, not only among the peoples who have never known the Gospel but also among those where Christianity has spread and is part of their history.....Each one of us is called to make his or her contribution towards the completion of those steps that lead to full communion among the disciples of Christ, without ever forgetting that this unity is above all a gift from God to be constantly invoked. In fact, the force that supports both unity and the mission flows from the fruitful encounter with the Risen One, just as was the case for St Paul on the road to Damascus....

Then there was another vespers service on the feast of the Presentation, which is also World Day of Consecrated Life. The Pope began with a reflection on what the Presentation is --God's presentation of his Son to us-- and finished with an eloquent bit of encouragement for the representatives of all the various orders in Rome gathered for the service.

Here's a lovely little address. It's nothing, really --just some spontaneous remarks made on the occasion of his being made an honorary citizen of the town where he went to seminary. But as it includes personal memories of what it was like right after the war, I like it best.

We knew that Christ was stronger than the tyranny, than the power of the Nazi ideology and its mechanisms of oppression. We knew that time and the future belong to Christ and we knew that he had called us and that he needed us, that there was a need for us.

Perhaps the most important address he's given so far this year was this to the Roman Rota, in which he essentially told them not to be an annulment mill. His argument rests on his refusal to allow charity and justice to be considered in opposition to one another. It's a mistake to allow "pastoral concerns" (or misguided charity) to twist the truth, he argues.  Moreover, it takes some guts to be a justice.

Over and above this dimension of justice that may be termed "objective", there is another inseparable dimension which concerns those who "implement the law", namely, those who make justice possible. I wish to underscore that they must be characterized by the high practice of human and Christian virtues, particularly prudence and justice, but also fortitude. This last virtue becomes more relevant the more injustice appears to be the easiest approach to take, insofar as it implies accommodating the desires and expectations of the parties or even the conditioning of the social context.

Which doesn't mean the judge is just a hard nose, either.

Love for God and for neighbour should inform every activity, even if it appears to be the most technical and bureaucratic. The perspective and the measure of charity will help focus attention on the fact that the judge is always dealing with people, beset by problems and difficulties. The principle that "charity goes beyond justice" applies equally to the specific sphere of those engaged in the administration of justice. Consequently, the approach towards people, while admittedly observing a specific modality linked to the process, must seek, with sensitivity and concern for the individuals involved, to facilitate contact with the competent tribunal by the parties to the case. At the same time, it is important to take definite steps, every time one glimpses hope for a favourable outcome, to induce the spouses if possible to convalidate their marriage and restore conjugal living (cf. CIC, can. 1676). Moreover, one should try to establish between the parties a climate of human and Christian openness that is based on the search for the truth .

I think that's interesting because, although the annulment process is possibly the most ridiculed and least understood aspect of Catholic teaching, I now know several people who report having found the process to be profoundly healing. But of course such healing can only take place where there is an honest search for truth and not a rubber stamp process.

He has some choice words for lawyers, too!

Here's his address to the Pontifical Academies from the close of last month. Not the greatest translation, I think, but we get the gist: let your work be worthy and let it truly engage culture.

If I can backtrack a little bit, I never covered the Holy Father's Christmas meeting with the Curia, and don't want to pass over it. I love what he has to say about his time in Africa, especially this about the ebullient liturgies:

there was a great shared joy which was also expressed bodily, but in a disciplined manner, directed to the presence of the living God. With this, the second element already became apparent: the sense of sacredness, of the mystery of the living God's presence, fashioned, as it were, each individual action. The Lord is present the Creator, the One to whom all things belong, from whom we come and towards whom we make our pilgrim way. I spontaneously thought of Saint Cyprian's words; in his commentary on the "Our Father" he wrote: "Let us remember we are in God's sight. We must be pleasing in God's eyes, both in the attitude of our bodies and in the use of our voices". Yes, we had this awareness that we were standing before God. The result was neither fear nor inhibition, nor external obedience to rubrics nor much less the need of some to show off to others or to shout out in an undisciplined manner. Rather, there was what the Fathers called "sobria ebrietas": a sense of joyfulness that in any case remains sober and orderly, uniting people from within, leading them to a communal praise of God, a praise which at the same time inspires love of neighbour and mutual responsibility. 

Unlike some liturgists, the Pope is not prissy!
In his comments on the African synod, the Pope draws on Caritatis in Veritate, and confirms me in my intuition that he had Africa largely in mind in the drafting of that encyclical. When he gets to his discussion of reconciliation on the continent, he has this absolutely marvelous passage on forgiveness, absolution and penance. A great preface for Lent:

God, knowing that we were unreconciled and seeing that we have something against him, rose up and came to meet us, even though he alone was in the right. He came to meet us even to the Cross, in order to reconcile us. This is what it means to give freely: a willingness to take the first step; to be the first to reach out to the other, to offer reconciliation, to accept the suffering entailed in giving up being in the right. To persevere in the desire for reconciliation: God gave us an example, and this is the way for us to become like him; it is an attitude constantly needed in our world. Today we must learn once more how to acknowledge guilt, we must shake off the illusion of being innocent. We must learn how to do penance, to let ourselves be transformed; to reach out to the other and to let God give us the courage and strength for this renewal. Today, in this world of ours, we need to rediscover the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. The fact that it has largely disappeared from the daily life and habits of Christians is a symptom of a loss of truthfulness with regard both to ourselves and to God; a loss that endangers our humanity and diminishes our capacity for peace.

That would be strong enough, but then he brings Bonaventure into it:

Saint Bonaventure was of the opinion that the Sacrament of Penance was a sacrament of humanity as such, a sacrament that God had instituted in its essence immediately after original sin through the penance he imposed on Adam, even though it could only take on its full shape in Christ, who is the reconciling power of God in person and who took our penance upon himself. In fact, the unity of sin, repentance and forgiveness is one of the fundamental conditions for being truly human: these conditions find complete expression in the sacrament, yet in their deepest roots they are part of the experience of being human persons as such. 

I think I'll be meditating on that for awhile. But his point was not primarily theological, it was that what he here calls reconciliation is pre-political --it must take place before politics is possible (or perhaps in our own case in order to prevent the fragmentation of the polity) because there is no notion of the common good without it.

Towards the end of his address, recalling his trip to the Czech Republic, he notes how well the Czechs treated him in spite of the country being largely agnostic:

we, as believers, must have at heart even those people who consider themselves agnostics or atheists. When we speak of a new evangelization these people are perhaps taken aback. They do not want to see themselves as an object of mission or to give up their freedom of thought and will. Yet the question of God remains present even for them, even if they cannot believe in the concrete nature of his concern for us.

I've been pondering recently Benedict's ability to say the hardest things in the gentlest manner. I think it is because he never speaks as the holy man who knows everything, but always takes the sinner's or the unbeliever's part. He makes his own their arguments, their point of view, and having identified with it, only then points the way forward. It's winsome. So here he is agreeing with agnostics about possibly obnoxious Christians, and then he makes an association with driving of the money lenders from the temple:

I think naturally of the words which Jesus quoted from the Prophet Isaiah, namely that the Temple must be a house of prayer for all the nations (cf. Is 56: 7; Mk 11: 17). Jesus was thinking of the so-called "Court of the Gentiles" which he cleared of extraneous affairs so that it could be a free space for the Gentiles who wished to pray there to the one God, even if they could not take part in the mystery for whose service the inner part of the Temple was reserved. A place of prayer for all the peoples by this he was thinking of people who know God, so to speak, only from afar; who are dissatisfied with their own gods, rites and myths; who desire the Pure and the Great, even if God remains for them the "unknown God" (cf. Acts 17: 23). They had to pray to the unknown God, yet in this way they were somehow in touch with the true God, albeit amid all kinds of obscurity. I think that today too the Church should open a sort of "Court of the Gentiles" in which people might in some way latch on to God, without knowing him and before gaining access to his mystery, at whose service the inner life of the Church stands. Today, in addition to interreligious dialogue, there should be a dialogue with those to whom religion is something foreign, to whom God is unknown and who nevertheless do not want to be left merely Godless, but rather to draw near to him, albeit as the Unknown.

See what I mean about the Pope not being prissy?

We've already covered the message to the bishops of England and Wales . He also spoke to the Scots,  a humdinger of an address for them too.

And all along he's been continuing his series of audiences on figures of the early Church: most recently Francis and Dominic. Oh, plus he encouraged priests to blog. (Sort of.) And advanced JP II and Pius XII along their canonization paths.

Potpourri:

• China:Underground bishop Raymond Wang Chonglin dies. Govt recognized him in '88, after 21 years in prison. 20,000 faithful attended his funeral.
• Great Britain: the Pope's going there in September, violating his own rule about not participating in beatifications on Card. Newman's behalf. 
• Haiti: church rebuilding; American docs on the scene.
• Ireland: Pope's about to enter a 2-day summit with bishops there and is expected to issue a pastoral letter just to the Irish; bishops meet w/ abuse survivors.
• Italy: Avvenire's editor resigns, Vatican denies it has anything to do w/ it. Mehmet Agca out of prison, now the Messiah. Newly released docs show Venerable JP II flagellated himself. Also, Jesus of Nazareth part two is complete.
• Spain: world's highest Catholic chapel consecrated. (Um... isn't there one a little higher?)
• UN: Holy See says the real solution to economic crisis is babies.
• U.S.:  Prop 8 trial wraps up; head of CHD accused of pro-gay ties, but this is a calumny; DC in a showdown w/ Church over same-sex marriage. Ralph McInerney passes.
• Vietnam:  Political prisoner Fr. Van Ly reported to be on point of death. Religious crackdown in Hanoi.

And finally: not esp. Catholic, but a superbowl joke. The Saints won, so let's pretend. And Frankincense cures cancer?

Image credit