Mac 'n' Cheese Is Peeeeeeeople.

Well, not exactly. But still, Ewww.

White Men Can't Jump By Local Statute

I thought we were supposed to get the country moving to fight obesity and basketball in particular keeps kids out of trouble.

First Station

CMR is doing a series on a new set of Stations from artist Leonard Porter. Here's the first installment.

Christ stands serene and powerless before Pilate, who is raised up on a white marble throne which sits on a pedestal much like a statue base. Shown in perfect profile, Pilate appears frozen. His senatorial toga makes him nearly as white as the pedestal on which he sits, reinforcing his statue-like appearance and indicating that his power is merely external and worldly. Axe heads and fasciae stand behind Pilate's throne, symbols of earthly power and authority, while Christ is bound and passive, the true King humbly accepting the judgment of an earthly king. Pilate points at Christ, ordering his suffering and death, yet he also directs the view of the one praying the Stations: go and walk the via crucis.

In Which I Lock My Kids In The Basement Because I Love Them

Mark Steyn reports: 

If you've ever wished your Third Grade daughter had a better rack, good news!

ABC reports that A&F has a new line of bikinis for preadolescents that feature padded, “push-up” bikini tops for girls as young as eight years old. 

The hatred of humanity and of women in particular is palpable.

In a way, this is part of the same story as Libya, and I'm not so sure that in the long run it isn't the more important part. Islam will readily acknowledge our technological superiority: If you want to operate a no-fly zone over Benghazi or send an unmanned drone into Waziristan, we have the capability and they don't. The difference is that Islam thinks our technological superiority doesn't matter - because we're unmanned drones in a more basic sense: we believe in nothing except the most transitory and dreary self-gratification, an endless adolescence that begins with a push-up bra at eight and continues through free government condoms for 30-year olds. Not only do the surging Muslim populations in European cities have no wish to "assimilate" with such a culture, they do not believe they will have to - for they have bet that such a society cannot survive.

Are they right? A hyper-sexualized society becomes, paradoxically, sexless, and certainly joyless. Listening in recent weeks to young women in both New York and London complain that the men they meet would rather look at pictures of them naked on the Internet than actually see them naked in the same room reminded me of The Children Of Men, in which P D James' characters, liberated from human fertility, find sex too much trouble.

War Is Not Peace, Grey Lady Finds

This line on the unrest in Syria is so much like the old joke about how the NYT would cover the apocalypse I burst out laughing.

Deepening chaos in Syria, in particular, could dash any remaining hopes for a Middle East peace agreement, several analysts said.

Yes, dears.

Curtsy: HughHewitt

Passing Along Some Curmudgeon Joy

Fewtril no.277
It is no easy task to become virtuous, which is why in our age it is regarded as a vicious burden.

Fewtril no. 278
Whenever men of the West gather to ask why it has fallen, one is sure to get another glimpse of the answer.

And:
It is a shame that the “international community” is too scattered and shadowy a thing to fall to quick and easy air-strikes.

God Bless Her

This is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. Brave girl: may it not get her killed. Wait til the end when she speaks of Islam.

Nick Cohen at the Spectator writes:

If we are going to avoid a clash of civilisations, we are going to need many more like the Pakistani actress Veena Malik. Watch her take on a mullah, who is trying to accuse her of immoral behaviour. This is no small accusation in Pakistan where Islamist death squads and their collaborators in the state intelligence service, operate at will. The talk show setting of the attempt at trial by media is commonplace too. The murder of Salman Taseer followed days of hacks whipping up “Muslim rage” against him.
Instead of being frightened, Malik turns on her accuser and the journalist, who helped set her up, and lets them have it.
Brave, beautiful and utterly magnificent.

Curtsy: The Corner

Annals Of Self-Awareness, 6

Anecdote from an essay by Anthony Esolen

One of the young fellows told me that his professor in Introduction to Sociology -- a typical course assigned during orientation to unsuspecting freshmen -- expressed her disdain for our twenty-credit Development of Western Civilization Program, required of all students.  "You should be studying something that will be of use to you in the Real World," she said, "like feminist sociology."

Dictatorship of Celibacy

Allan Carlson has a nice piece showing how the atheist Margaret Sanger co-opted turn of the century anti-Catholicism. Her eugenics past I knew, but much of the specific history is new to me. Two things stuck out at me. The first is for my "not so good ol' days" file. It seems Charlie Curran and the Sacred Order of Dissenters may not be entirely to blame for Catholic non-compliance on matters of openness to life. One Fr. Ryan tangled with Sanger in 1915, and wrote an article trying to explain Church teaching on the matter, which Sanger was already caricaturing:

Ryan’s article declared that there “is no possibility of a legitimate difference of opinion among Catholics” regarding contraception, while acknowledging that many of the laity were “considerably tainted” by the practice.

To hear some people talk, no American Catholic ever sinned before Vatican II: so that's interesting.

The rest is kind Saul Alinsky pre-figured. Sanger started out what we now call a radical feminist, touting the goods of unwed motherhood and proclaiming woman's liberation from "gods and masters." That didn't fly, however, so she toned down the atheism and found a target: the Church, which was already feared because of Irish immigration.

Unsurprisingly, the seminal incident that gave momentum to her cause never happened. Or at least never happened the way it was reported. A debate she was supposed to be in was shut down and word spread that the Archbishop of New York had shut her down. He hadn't, but nothing could call that false story back, and she capitalized on it:

She sharpened the argument that she would employ for the next two decades:

There is no objection to the Catholic Church inculcating its doctrines to its own people, but when it attempts to make these ideas legislative acts and enforce its opinions and code of morals upon the Protestant members of this country, then I do consider its attempt an interference with the principles of this democracy, and I have a right to protest.

Elsewhere, she crowed about the incident: “The clumsy and illegal tactics of our opponents made the whole country aware of what we were doing. . . . Thus our first national conference was crowned with triumph.”

Margaret Sanger, atheist, the champion of Protestant Morality! That was rich in another way as well:

In vain did Catholic advocates note that as of 1921 not a single Protestant denomination or group had endorsed birth control; all remained formally opposed to the practice. In vain did they point out that existing laws against contraceptives were the uniform product of nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestant political influence.

I had a little taste of something similar recently while trying to debate a friend who was ranting against DADT and turned it into an anti-Catholic diatribe. It was utterly futile to point out the Church has no stance on DADT, nor did the Church have any influence whatever on the code of military conduct. Never mind, he was mad, and it had to be the Pope's fault somehow.

Instead, Sanger set the new terms of debate. As she wrote in her autobiography, “Ever since the outburst of religious intolerance at Town Hall, it [has] been apparent that in the United States the Catholic hierarchy and officialdom were going to be the principal enemies of birth control.” The Town Hall incident, she went on to explain in the Birth Control Review, “has shown up the sinister control of the Roman Catholic Church, which attempts—and to a great extent succeeds—to control all questions of public and private morality in these United States.”
She continued, “All who resent this sinister Church Control of life and conduct . . . must now choose between Church Control and Birth Control.” Neutrality was not a choice. “You must make a declaration of independence, of self-reliance, or submit to the dictatorship of the Roman Catholic hierarchy . . . a dictatorship of celibates.”

We all recall how much the Church was in favor here in 1918! 

 

Protestant ministers at the time spoke out against her, but she just ignored them and heaped abuse on the Church.

Another of Sanger’s brilliant strategies was simply to ignore Protestant writers, preachers, and churches that continued to denounce birth control. By demonizing the Catholic Church alone (although she also lashed out at Missouri Synod Lutherans) and by claiming to defend the Protestant conscience from Roman oppression, she left the impression that Protestants were on her side, in the apparent hope that this would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Internal debates about birth control touched off in various Protestant churches, with the Episcopalians being the first to cave....though not right away. Look at this! 

The church most vulnerable to doctrinal change proved to be the Episcopal Church. But that was not clear in 1908 when the Lambeth conference—an international gathering of Anglican bishops, normally held every ten years—adopted a statement labeling “self-restraint within marriage” a “man’s right,” and calling for the prohibition of all “neo-Malthusian appliances,” the prosecution of those who enabled “preventive methods,” a tighter regulation of midwives, and a national recognition of “the dignity of motherhood.” In 1920, the next (war-delayed) Lambeth conference delivered “an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception.” The bishops specifically condemned that teaching which “encouraged married people in the deliberate cultivation of sexual union as an end in itself.”
As early as 1916, the Moody Bible Institute’s Christian Workers Magazine began editorializing against birth control. Commenting on a sermon by A. C. Dixon, it denounced the Malthusian argument that the Great War had been caused by overpopulation, saying, “that theory is from the devil.” It also favorably described a speaker “of the Federated Catholic Societies” who traced the birth control issue back to the “detestable act” of Onan and who blamed “socialist leaders, aided by the anarchists and other neo-Malthusian ‘uplifters,’” for bringing on “the national agitation of this wickedness in the name of social betterment.” The journal positively quoted the unnamed Catholic: “If men would only read and believe the Bible, and obey God who revealed it they would find that they might in a holy and proper way multiply and replenish the earth.”

The Fundamentalists, too were all anti-birth control,  including Billy Sunday, who explicitly made common cause with Catholics (I knew nothing of the Fundamentalists ever having an interest in this question):

Billy Sunday, the greatest evangelist of the era, was a fierce foe of birth control. Perhaps influenced by his own precarious childhood, Sunday idealized the home and the place of the mother within: “It remains with womanhood today to lift our social life to a higher plane.” He scorned those “married women who shrink from maternity,” and referred to the “birth control faddists” as “the devil’s mouthpiece.” Women who used pessaries wore “the Mark of Cain.”
While anti-Catholicism grew among liberal Protestants, the fundamentalists tended to be remarkably praiseworthy of the Church of Rome. In denouncing divorce, Billy Sunday declared, “I am a Catholic” on this question. Moody Bible Institute publications regularly praised Catholic sexual ethics. And in 1929, John Roach Straton stood alongside Fr. William J. Duane, the president of Fordham University, at a rally protesting a proposed New York law to legalize the giving of birth control information to married couples. Straton congratulated the Catholic Church for its opposition to both divorce and “race suicide.”

Not until the 1930s and the eugenics movement did Sanger adopt eugenics and court eugenicists. Interestingly, many eugenicists resisted birth control because they thought the educated would use it and leave the unfit to breed like rabbits (which is exactly what is happening if by educated you mean atheist or new age and by unfit you mean religious). Sanger courted them, and they courted Christians, until among liberal Christians, birth control was just part of the Social Gospel. 

 

There follow a bunch of ministers who think like this:

Rev. MacArthur noted that a generation of church leaders, “open-minded idealists,” have dared “to dream of a new social order, a world made up of Christ-like men and women.” He continued: “This structure of the temple of God among men must be built of the best human material.” Brashly, he declared:

Now, eugenics offers a way, consistent with Christian principles, of freeing the race in a few generations of a large proportion of the feeble-minded, the criminal, the licentious, by seeing to it by means of surgery or segregation, that persons carrying these anti-social traits shall leave behind no tainted offspring.

Both poverty and ignorance were the consequence of “low-grade human beings.” Eugenics aimed at producing “a super race” marked by intelligence, health, and good will.

And  this: 

In his popular sermon, “The Refiner’s Fire,” the Rev. Phillips Endecott Osgood of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis cast Jesus as the ultimate eugenicist, the “Refiner” of men: “He was superlatively concerned to better the qualities of human living” and he saw children as “the near edge of the future, the beginning of the ultimate.” Marriage and childbearing should be reserved “for those who are wholesome and normal.” The unfortunate victim of a hereditary malady should deny himself parenthood and so “become a redemptive helper of the next generation.”
This meant that the Church would also “have to take its stand on the question of birth control.” He added: “In our cooperation with the Refiner’s work, we must accept heredity as our major factor.”
Another sermon published in Eugenics, this one by Edwin Bishop, pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in Lansing, Michigan, also wove together the themes of evolution, birth control, eugenics, and the Kingdom of God. Bishop insisted that men and women were summoned to assist God in the task of transformation: “Shall we humans not realize what God is trying to do for us and how He suggests that we participate with Him in conscious evolution?” He believed that Jesus had a program “for self-fulfillment for the individual and for the race,” which could only be accomplished with “more knowledge and practice of simple eugenic laws.”

And so forth...proving once again that Science & Religion must learn from one another, but not mix as such. More frightening than a preacher ignorant of science is one on the cutting edge of it!

 

RTWT.

Cutting Edge

David Bentley Hart says bring back the cut, which the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue describes:

To renounce acquaintance with any one is to cut him. There are several species of the cut. Such as the cut direct, the cut indirect, the cut sublime, the cut infernal, &c. The cut direct, is to start across the street, at the approach of the obnoxious person in order to avoid him. The cut indirect, is to look another way, and pass without appearing to observe him. The cut sublime, is to admire the top of King’s College Chapel, or the beauty of the passing clouds, till he is out of sight. The cut infernal, is to analyze the arrangement of your shoe-strings, for the same purpose.

As long-time advocate of applying the same policy to internet linking (so many people who Must Not Be Linked or paid any mind whatever, really), I applaud. RTWT for amusing literary references to "the cut."

Primal Screeeeeeeeeeaaaaaam

Forrest Gump has been voted the greatest film character of all time, followed by James Bond.

And you don't need three guesses to tell me what other little factoid here makes me scream and tear my hair out. Apparently people can't even recognize chemistry, for the love of peat moss.

Firth On Forman

Directors take note, Colin Firth makes a convincing Czech (or Pole), too.

Action On Libya

The President's remarks on the no-fly zone. This sounds vaguely familiar, can't quite place it though:

here is why this matters to us.  Left unchecked, we have every reason to believe that Qaddafi would commit atrocities against his people.  Many thousands could die.  A humanitarian crisis would ensue.  The entire region could be destabilized, endangering many of our allies and partners.  The calls of the Libyan people for help would go unanswered.  The democratic values that we stand for would be overrun.  Moreover, the words of the international community would be rendered hollow.  

He does sound resolute and specific here.

Now, once more, Moammar Qaddafi has a choice.  The resolution that passed lays out very clear conditions that must be met.  The United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Arab states agree that a cease-fire must be implemented immediately.  That means all attacks against civilians must stop.  Qaddafi must stop his troops from advancing on Benghazi, pull them back from Ajdabiya, Misrata, and Zawiya, and establish water, electricity and gas supplies to all areas.  Humanitarian assistance must be allowed to reach the people of Libya.
Let me be clear, these terms are not negotiable.  These terms are not subject to negotiation.  If Qaddafi does not comply with the resolution, the international community will impose consequences, and the resolution will be enforced through military action.

Max Boot says give the Prez a little credit for this.

JournoWall of Shame

We should do this for every major story. The site is a clearinghouse for people on the ground to correct what's being reported from Japan. Here's the scale of offenses:

1 - 2: Probably unintentional, and based on bad info that seemed legit
3 - 4: Not malicious, just misunderstanding of the situation
5 - 6: Reporting without checking easily-confirmed facts; lazy as opposed to malicious OR just dumb fluff piece using human tragedy as a background.
7 - 8: No fact checking; printing rumours as fact; sensational story more important than actual truth
9 : Fear mongering.
10 : Hysterical fear-mongering along with racial/cultural/political bias
11 : Satan

I only skimmed, but most infractions appear to be in the 8-10 range. I wish I could say the examples were extraordinary (like the Telegraph headline about the nuclear plume headed for California that their own story says doesn't exist, or FOX news highlighting as a nuclear plant what's actually a nightclub, but after Katrina, nothing surprises me.  Curtsy: Tim Blair

The creator of the Wall of Shame 'splains:
There are several major areas that journalists particularly suck at:

• Science reporting.  I have a degree in fine arts, and I could write better science articles than most science writers could.  Any journalist who suggested that Fukushima could be “another Chernobyl” should be made to retake his 9th grade science class and then have his journalist license revoked.   Oh wait…
• Reporting on Japan.  JAPAN IS SOOO WEIRD!  JAPANESE PEOPLE HAVE NO EMOTION!  If everything you think you know about Japan was learned from the movies Gung Ho and Mr. Baseball, then maybe you’re not qualified to write an article about Japan.  Also, spending a few days, hell, even a month in Japan (probably in a hotel or furnished apartment, or otherwise isolated location) does not make you an expert on the place.  Nor does interviewing someone who has lived here for a few months (or even year, if living in one of the many gaijin bubbles).
• Disaster reporting.  Two and a half words: Exaggeration and fear-mongering.

Helping Or Hurting Japan?

Are we doing anything to help the Japanese? I'm mentally comparing the Bush Administration's response to the Indonesian earthquake with the Obama Admin's response to Japan, one of our closest friends. VDH is too:

At some point, could the administration please release some sort of statement enlightening us about the help that the U.S. has offered the heroic Japanese — expertise, aircraft, personnel, clean-up materiel? Anything?

Thanks to our gauche, intrusive and hysterical reporters, the story seems to be all about us: a national high maintenance personality:

America is referenced in the media hype mostly in three contexts: One, we are terrified over a “plume” floating over the U.S.; two, we keep telling Americans to leave Japan ASAP; three, we speculate whether a crippled Japanese industrial base might, in fact, help the American economy.

ninme's been keeping running tabs on the nobility and dignity of the Japanese response: not for them anger at the government for something that was Mother Nature's doing or looting their neighbors. They are starting to get ticked, though, Tim Blair notes:

“Is fear stalking the streets of Tokyo?” asks RTE correspondent Paul Cunningham. “No. But there is a lot of anger being directed at the int media for scaring the public.”

President "Present"

John Stassel Kimberley Strassel nails it: 

If, however, you are curious about where the most powerful man in the universe stands on Libya, radiation, a possible government shutdown, the future of Social Security, or rising oil prices, don't look to the White House. Those issues are tough. Those issues risk mistakes. Those issues might mean unhappy voters. And right now, it's approval ratings the White House cares about. 

Reynolds' Law

Instapundit said this wise thing:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

And this fellow noticed it.

It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced.
This law is thus a relative to Murray’s third law in Losing Ground, the Law of Net Harm: “The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.” But Reynolds’ Law rests on a different and more secure foundation. It focuses on character as fundamental.

Hmmm. Curtsy: American Digest

Sometimes A Disaster Is Just A Disaster

When did we lose sight of the fact that hasty decisions are rarely wise? W/ respect to Japan's earthquake/tsunami/volcano/nuclear plant crisis, ninme puts it succintly:

Sometimes something horrible happens and it’s horrible because of the horrible things that have happened, and there really aren’t any lessons to be learned.

and in her twitter feed, humorously:

Due to threat of tidal wave? "Switzerland suspends approval process for 3 nuke power plants to review safety measures after Japan crisis"

Jonah Goldberg explores the theme.

In Europe, where nuclear power is vastly more common than it is here, the Japanese earthquake is being exploited to the hilt. "If the Japanese," editorializes the British newspaper the Independent, "with all their understandable inhibitions about anything nuclear and all their world-leading technology, cannot build reactors that are invulnerable to disaster, who can?"

Well, that's just it. Who said anything, anywhere is invulnerable to disaster? At magnitude 9.0, this was Japan's biggest earthquake and could be the fourth largest ever recorded (it was even detected in Pennsylvania). Perhaps the standard shouldn't be whether Japan's reactor was "invulnerable" but whether it succeeded by taking such a beating without threatening much human life?

I can't decide if the anti-nuke reaction is more stupid (you really thought you were invulnerable?) or obscene (is this really going to be our reaction to broad-scale tragedy from now on? Exploit the dead for our stupid causes? For what kind of person do causes not drop away for a few days at least while the dead are buried?)

Rather than worry about letting this crisis go to waste, this strikes me as a great moment to simply cope.

Oscar of Oscar's Cuba Released!

Cuban human rights advocate, subject of Oscar's Cuba, released. From the press release:

Óscar Elías Biscet González’srelease from prison in Cuba today is celebrated by the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights and Freedom Now, who are joined by supporters of human rights and democracy around the world. Dr. Biscet, a noted advocate for human rights and democratic freedoms in his native Cuba, had been arrested in late 2002 for merely exercising basic civil liberties, convicted on sham charges, and was serving a 25-year prison sentence. Dr. Biscet’s release follows the July 2010 announcement by the Cuban Catholic Church that a number of unjustly-imprisoned Cuban political prisoners would be freed.

Earthquake Preparedness

ninme's got a good conglomeration of Japan disaster links if you scroll around. In comments here, a Navy guy explains why all those ships were dragged inland rather than simply floating, and speculates about what would happen to our navy vessels if a quake struck our West Coast and we had --as the Japanese did-- only 5 minutes warning of an impending tsunami.

It's Not Chernobyl In Japan

William Tucker points out that focusing on Japan's nuclear plants at a time when there's a race against time to rescue missing people is close to obscene.

while thousands of people are reported dead or missing, whole neighborhoods lie in ruins, and gas and oil fires rage out of control, press coverage of the Japanese earthquake has quickly settled on the troubles at two nuclear reactors as the center of the catastrophe.

The problem at the Japanese reactors has been solved by the "generation III" nuke plants that some now propose to put on hold. Fearing a problem and therefore passing a law to refuse to let the problem be solved doesn't strike me as the right policy somehow....you?

The core of a nuclear reactor operates at about 550 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the temperature of a coal furnace and only slightly hotter than a kitchen oven. If anything unusual occurs, the control rods immediately drop, shutting off the nuclear reaction. You can't have a "runaway reactor," nor can a reactor explode like a nuclear bomb. A commercial reactor is to a bomb what Vaseline is to napalm. Although both are made from petroleum jelly, only one of them has potentially explosive material.
Once the reactor has shut down, there remains "decay heat" from traces of other radioactive isotopes. This can take more than a week to cool down, and the rods must be continually bathed in cooling waters to keep them from overheating.
On all Generation II reactors—the ones currently in operation—the cooling water is circulated by electric pumps. The new Generation III reactors such as the AP1000 have a simplified "passive" cooling system where the water circulates by natural convection with no pumping required.
If the pumps are knocked out in a Generation II reactor—as they were at Fukushima Daiichi by the tsunami—the water in the cooling system can overheat and evaporate. The resulting steam increases internal pressure that must be vented. There was a small release of radioactive steam at Three Mile Island in 1979, and there have also been a few releases at Fukushima Daiichi. These produce radiation at about the level of one dental X-ray in the immediate vicinity and quickly dissipate. 

Read on. "Melt-down" doesn't mean what you think it means, and the only disaster is to the power companies of Japan. We should focus our energies elsewhere.

Update: Shamelessly pinched from Kaching!

Gray Lady Reports 11-yr-old Was Asking For It

I thought one decent thing feminism assured us was we'd never have to read coverage of a rape story like this again. I guess I missed the part where the Muslim cleric guest-edits the NYT.

But what does the Gray Lady care? It's only a woman.

Woo To The Hoo

Same-sex marriage dead in Maryland for this year.

Prayers For Japan

Shamelessly pinched from some random twitter feed

However, just to nip certain apocalyptic rumors in the bud, no, there are not more earthquakes than usual.

Let The Undignified Happy Dance Begin

Ugh, what a miserable day today was....but it ends well because lookee what I have in my hot little hands this evening. Three weeks earlier than I expected, too / dances

 

You Say Qazzafi & I Say Khadthdthaffi

I asked who decides these things. AP explains.

His name’s first letter is the Qaf, representing a sound that does not exist in English. It’s sort of like a K but sounded from the back of the palate. (And no, it’s NOT the rough “kh” or German “ch” sound — that’s yet a different letter.)

Usually this letter is transliterated with a Q, as in Quran and Qatar and Iraq. An outdated but still seen transliteration is K, as in Koran.

However, the letter is pronounced differently in different Arabic dialects. In Libya, it’s often pronounced as a G, so that’s the letter the AP and some others use.

The next letter is the Dhal. Its sound exists in English, but not as one letter: In formal Arabic, the Dhal is pronounced like the soft “th” in “then” or “those.” It’s often transliterated as “dh,” to distinguish it from a separate letter that’s pronounced like the ”th” in “thick” or “thorn” or “throw.”

In dialect, the Dhal is often pronounced by Libyans and other Arabs as either a D or a Z — much like in English dialects where you might say “doze guys.” Thus some agencies spell Gadhafi’s name with a D or Z in the middle.

To complicate matters, the middle dhal in Gadhafi’s name is doubled – in other words, you draw it out some in pronunciation. That’s why you see Qazzafi, or Qaddafi, or the more bizarre looking Qadhdhafi or Qaththafi.

The third letter is a Fa, which is simply an F. In some spellings of Gadhafi’s name, you’ll see it doubled ‘ff’ but there’s no reason to do that, and it may just be a snarky way to slip ‘daffy’ into the eccentric Libyan leader’s name.

The last letter is a Yaa, which is simply an “ee” sound, as in “tree.” That’s why you see either a Y or an I.

Why do they rest on "Gadhafi"? Because that's how he spelled it in a letter to American school kids.

Arkes With Alito

Eight of the Supremes reluctantly decided that the cult that protests soldier funerals has the right to do so. Only Sam Alito thinks not. Hadley Arkes explains why he's right.

Far more telling for our jurisprudence is that the case marked the full drift of conservatives on the Court to settle in with the revolution begun nearly forty years ago, with Cohen v. California, to install moral relativism as the anchoring premise in the laws governing speech, and to overturn dramatically the ethic governing speech and civility in public places. It was in the Cohen case that Justice John Harlan wrote the line that would form the signature tune for the judges from that day forward: “One man’s vulgarity, another’s lyric.” Harlan would receive vast credit for a novel breakthrough in the law, for discovering the doctrines of “logical positivism” long after they had been discredited in the schools of philosophy: Moral words, casting praise and blame, pronouncing on the things that were right or wrong, just or unjust, had no cognitive content or objective meaning. They were essentially emotive; they expressed passions, which could not be judged true or false. 

RTWT. It's a nice piece of judicial history, and also makes the point that we keep moaning about civility at the same time we keep creating policies that make civility impossible.

To Help Your Fast

Marriage In Maryland

Same sex marriage is before the legislature in Maryland. It passed easily in the Senate and was expected to sweep through in the House of Delegates as well. Marriage defenders geared themselves up to undo the damage in a state-wide referendum next election.

But lo and behold, it is not sweeping easily through the House. Delegates are being hammered hard to vote against, to the point that a couple of key co-sponsors of the bill didn't show up for the vote and one has withdrawn and will now vote against. She wants a civil unions bill instead.

Here's a statement from the bishops of Maryland on the subject. And here's an update on the state of things from the Weekly Standard. As of yesterday, according to same sex marriage advocates, they were 4 votes short -- so keep pounding away at your delegates (find them here). 

The main opposition is coming from African-American pastors and their flocks. The Maryland Catholic Conference is doing yeoman's work as well -- but, alas, the Governor, President of the Senate, and Committee Chairman in the House are the three of them "Catholics" pushing for this. I went to school with the Senate president's daughters and with the committee chairman. I wouldn't call them ideologues, really. Just the most conventional possible thinkers imaginable; you can't imagine them ever opposing the zeitgeist. Yay, 1980s Catholic schools formation, you make us so proud.

Why I Wish Global Warming To Be True

Many thanks to Half Empty (& the ninme delivery system) for sending this along.

The carbon dioxide emissions allegedly responsible for Al Gore’s “planetary emergency” are helping tomatoes beef up. The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change maintains a database on field and laboratory experiments measuring plant growth response to CO2-enriched environments. Here’s the link for data on tomatoes.
A whopping 45 studies have examined the effects of CO2 enrichment on the garden tomato (lycopersicon eculentum). On average, garden tomatoes gain 32.6%, 40.9%, and 46.8% additional dry weight biomass, respectively, when grown in air containing an extra 300, 600, and 900 parts per million of CO2.

As I have been documenting, the tomatoes don't lie, and in my garden at least, there's been no warming in 5 years. Alas.