December 2004 Archives

Actually, I think in theory the UN is the right authority to coordinate the response to the recent natural disaster in South-East Asia, but practically speaking this presumes the UN is functioning reasonably close to how it is suppose to be functioning. It is not. And given how corrupt the UN has become -- it is now a coalition of banana republics, terrorist states, and tinpot dictatorships -- the reality is that the US has to take charge.

This way, the developed world knows: 1) the aid will get to where it is suppose to be going, and 2) the money doesn't end up lining the pockets of some corrupt official in a country that changes government through revolution more often that the French go on vacation. So while the UN should be coordinating the effort in theory, realpolitik necessitates the US taking the lead.

That being said, Canada continues to prove its inneptitude by charging a surviving victim $100 to replace her passport so that she can go home, while our Prime Minister continues to enjoy his holiday, and Liberal legislators complain they don't have the time or energy to get personally involved but then they slam America's response. Get me a green card quickly.

Believe it or not, this fellow won an award for "art" from our Governor General after sticking a vial of his own blood....well, read the entry at Canadian Republic. As the Governor General is the Queen's highest representative in Canada, this is just another reason why we so badly need a republic north of the border. (Thanks to Kathy Shaidle for the tip off.)

Regarding the response to the cataclysm in Asia...

The president has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world’s response.

But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN.

“I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up,” she said.

“Only really the UN can do that job,” she told BBC Radio Four’s PM programme.

“It is the only body that has the moral authority. But it can only do it well if it is backed up by the authority of the great powers.”

It can be argued that the UN has the operations in place to best respond and provide humanitarian relief, but moral authority is something the UN totally lacks.

Steve the Llama Butcher reminisces about "My Strongest Christmas Memory".

Over the past year, an ideological debate has slowly heated up among conservative Canadian bloggers. While constitutional monarchists continue to hold the status quo among conservative Canadians, the republican movement is growing. Yet rather than inflict this internal debate to conservative Canadian Catholics on our mostly American audience here at Catholic Light, I've decided to put together a new blog called Canadian Republic.

Good news for the Defense of Life:

3 abortuaries close in Massachusetts: $150,000 in reported Federal and Commonwealth tax liens might have something to do with it.

Pro-life laws making a difference in Mississippi: Informed consent laws and other provisions have helped half the abortion rate in this pro-life state.

(Via OR: Boston.)

Almost a year ago, I wrote a short post called "Killing poor people by keeping them poor," about poverty's role in massively lethal natural disasters. I expressed my contempt for the "activists" who campaign to keep Third World peasants in a Rousseau-like state of nature. For some reason, most people think these activists are selfless, but they are pursuing a prideful, secular vision of Paradise and causing human misery. As I said then,

...The anti-globalizers on the Left want to ensure that these disasters happen from now until the end of time. Who cares about mothers wailing for their children, or thousands of homes wiped out in a few minutes of screaming, suffocating chaos? All these things must be offered up to the god of environmental primitivism.

What do I mean by "environmental primitivism"? The anti-globalizers think that poor non-Western people are cute, so they don't want them to change their charmingly backward ways, which are (they imagine) the way people lived before the nasty Industrial Revolution with its so-called "abundant food," "long lifespans," and "housing codes." They love that poor people don't consume much energy or natural resources, and they use "organic" methods of agriculture -- which aren't very helpful for crop yields, but they don't use evil pesticides or fertilizers. And harvesting by hand -- so darn cute!

Having served and visited extensively in Central and South American countries with large "indigenous" populations, I can freely state that the region's "indigenous" cultures largely ceased to exist hundreds of years ago; "indigenous" culture today means rural poverty. As the saying goes, "I was born at night, but not last night," so even I understand, therefore, that calling to protect "indigenous culture" really means seeking to preserve rural poverty; to keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and isolated from the great and small wonders of our age. It means helping condemn them to half lives consumed with superstition, disease, and of watching their puny children struggle to live past the age of five. It's a call to keep certain people as either an ethnic curio on the shelf for the enjoyment of European and North American anthropologists or, equally vile, as exploitable pawns for the use of political activists.

Now with the tsunami-created disasters, we see this effect play out once again. I am certainly not blaming the victims for dying — they had nothing to do with it. And neither did anyone else, really. So instead of trying to explain that submarine tectonic movements are a result of global warming, why not try to figure out how these poor people can gain enough wealth to build more durable homes?

Police became suspicious when a derogatory word for homosexual was carved into the lad's forehead backward. In Canada, he likely would have received an award from the Governor General anyway.

Fortunately, this hospital web site announcing male pregnancy experiments and a "genetic choice" clinic is a spoof, and an elaborate one, by a New York artist. I wish it were funny, but since people have advocated doing just that sort of bizarrerie, the effect is a bit creepy.

Father Andrew Greeley never presents his credentials for commenting on the Iraq War, so I presume he has no special credibility in the matter. As he is not a bishop, we are obliged to listen respectfully, but his words do not spring from any charism of infallibility. His field of expertise is sociology, which might help him understand why societies make war, but is a rather inexact guide to practical statecraft.

Father Greeley's writing is not always devoid of charm or thoughtfulness, but it is here. You could spend days unpacking the ignorance:

One must support the troops, I am told. I certainly support the troops the best way possible: Bring them home, get them out of a war for which the planning was inadequate, the training nonexistent, the goal obscure, and the equipment and especially the armor for their vehicles inferior.

But once Father has worked himself up into a lather, there's no stopping him. He accuses American officials of being "criminals" but doesn't get around to specifying the crimes, though to a left-wing audience I'm sure those crimes need no enumeration, they merely need to be asserted. You could try pointing out that "reasonable chance of victory" wasn't part of just war theory at the beginning, and that the theory is just that — an ideathat describes the right use of force, but is not de fide or beyond modification. But it's best to just let Father vent his spleen, and hope he takes a nap.

Now, Father might be right about the Iraq War and I may be wrong. It may well be unjust and immoral, although to the depth of my very soul I do not think Jesus looks unkindly on the liberation of the oppressed. But his (Greeley's, not Jesus') public life consists in authoring books with smutty elements, and running interference for pro-abortion liberal Democrats.

Occasionally, Father Greeley takes a stand for something the culture opposes, such as clerical celebacy. On balance, however, a fair observer could conclude that he has harmed the Body of Christ with his writings. Perhaps someone who knows him ought to say: "My friend, my fellow brother in Christ, you are a fool, and have no idea what you are talking about." Someone like Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz:

No Catholics of any sense will take any pastoral advice from Father Andrew Greeley, a superficial writer who appears to spend his time promoting himself to various elements in the secular media....

In his self-important buffoonery, he has appointed himself as instructor to Bishops and to Catholics nationwide. In [writing an article defending pro-abortion Catholic politicians], he merely announces to every thoughtful Catholic that his views are totally self-serving and undeserving of any serious consideration....

My advice to any Catholics who would ask me about that Greeley article would be to give it the same view as you would the words and acts of a clown.

George Carlin, author of "banned" book When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, announced that he is entering a rehab clinic for alcohol and drug addiction. He says he's addicted to wine and Vicodin. (A good, earthy red burgundy would match well with Vicodin, I think.)

Carlin's latest book was "banned" by Wal-Mart because the title was offensive to many Christians, as well as the dustcover art that showed Carlin in the place of Jesus at the Last Supper. As modern blasphemy goes, that is pretty tame: it's smirking parody, as opposed to out-and-out maliciousness. Like night follows day, a bunch of "civil libertarians" rushed to defend Carlin's right to...well, nobody's really sure which of his constitutional rights were violated. He was free to write it, his publisher was free to publish it, Christians were free to protest it, and Wal-Mart was free to reject it. Wal-Mart can't "ban" books any more than they can make war, levy taxes, or coin money — only governments can do those things.

Although he is technically too old to be a baby boomer, Carlin has followed that generation's degradation, going from gadfly commentator to intellectually bankrupt performer to grumpy, nasty old man. My parents thought George Carlin was funny and raunchy back in the '60s. In the '80s, I saw one of his HBO concerts, and I agreed that he was raunchy. As for funny, he was sporadically amusing, but the audience must have been comprised of boomers who were thinking of his old routines, because the material wasn't particularly clever or pointed.

Today, he's apparently reduced to making fun of such things as "the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, dopey athletes and cutthroat businessmen." Here are some quotations from the book:

--Carlin on the media: The media comprises equal parts business, politics, advertising, public relations, and show business. Nice combination. Enough bull for Texas to open a chain of branch offices.
--Carlin on the battle of the sexes: Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid....
--Carlin on evasive language: Just to demonstrate how far using euphemisms in language has gone, some psychologists are now actually referring to ugly people as those with "severe appearance deficits." Hey, Doctor. How's that for "denial"?
--Carlin on politics: No self-respecting politician would ever admit to working in the government. They prefer to think of themselves "serving the nation." To help visualize the service they provide the country, you may wish to picture the things that take place on a stud farm.

Keep in mind that the quotations above are supposed to whet your appetite for buying the book. This reminds me of "The Simpsons," where Bart and Milhous pick up Mad Magazine and see an article called "The Lighter Side of Hippies." "They don't care whose toes they step on!" Bart laughs. It's part of a running joke, that Mad's humor tends to be obvious and about ten minutes too late. ("They're really sockin' it to that Spiro Agnew guy again!")

When he's not trodding the same ground as a thousand other second-rate comics, Carlin takes on groups that no one else has thought to challenge, mainly because there's nothing particularly funny about doing so. He dismisses peanut allergies as a fantasy, saying that people who think they have that condition are delusional.

As it happens, my brother is highly allergic to all nuts, among other things. Wherever he goes, he has to carry an adrenaline-filled syringe in case he accidently eats food with a slight trace of nuts. If he isn't treated, his throat swells up, he turns blue and will die soon after that. I'm not offended at Carlin for insulting people like my brother. I just think it's bizarre and sad that he would resort to mocking a serious, medically verifiable, genetic condition. Is he going to mock Down Syndrome kids next? Or has he already done that?

Predictably, the prefab "controversy" over the book has brought out the best on both sides of the cultural divide. On the right, you have the folks WHO HAVE A CAPS LOCK KEY AND THEY ARENT AFRAID TO USE IT BUT THEY DONT CONCENTRAT ON GOOD SPELLIN OR PUCNTUATION. On the left, you have people like this reviewer on Amazon, who titled his review "Hey Morons and Idiots":

First off let's get one thing straight, Jesus Christ, to me, is Lord and Savoir, everything else that followed after his resurection was man done. The Catholic Church, a bunch of morons and hipocritical idiots, the Protestants, ugly women that gather to protest abortion. Methodist, them I don't have a problem with, at least the one's I know, liberal to the bone, they have methods to their love.

Unlike Rush Limbaugh's detractors, who rushed to call him a hypocrite, liar, child-abuser, forger, cross-dresser, and whatever else they could think of, I wish Mr. Carlin well and I sincerely hope he emerges from the clinic having turned his bad habits into good ones. A relative of mine had similar problems, and met with an unhappy end. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

I do reserve the right to make jokes about it, however. He's a comedian, after all. He can take it.

Last week, I commented on the sad decline of the Washington Metrorail system, saying "the slack-jawed yokels who run it are slowly turning it into a costly mess with Third World-quality service." My friend and frequent Catholic Light contributor Victor Morton e-mailed me with the happy solution: former mayor Marion Barry is probably going to be on the Metro board.

You may remember Mayor Barry from a popular video he made in 1989. The production values were low, but his "How to Light a Crack Pipe" was an international hit. He also did many other noteworthy things, to wit:

He turned a solid local reputation as a civil rights leader into an international reputation as a crack addict and frequenter of loose women.

He went to jail for six months, and during a family visitation period, in a roomful of adults and children, he received a Lewinsky from a "friend" who was there visiting him.

He wasn't mayor the whole time, but in 30 years D.C. went from a city of 800,000 people in the mid-1960s to fewer than 500,000.

At one point, the Control Board appointed to straighten out the city's mess could not account for over $100,000,000 spent by the Barry administration.

That's just off the top of my head. But the people quoted in the article are probably right: he's one of the most qualified local officials to help run Metro. He's already bankrupted and despoiled the city: why not extend that success to the whole D.C. area, too?

Today is the feast day of John the Evangelist, the beloved Apostle.

...of the Washington Times.

Revival rescues Christmas, (Cardinal) McCarrick says

"I believe there is a real revival of religion in our country, not just of Christianity, not just of the traditional religions, but of people who really believe in God and may not be able to express it in the words of present-day religion," the Catholic cleric told "Fox News Sunday."

A study in contrasts - about Mel Gibson and Michael Moore approaches to winning an Academy Award. Moore didn't submit his film for in the documentary category so it can only be considered for best picture. Pride goeth before a fall!

Euthanasia . . . or a 'Dutch treat' Evil in the land of tulips, windmills and clogs.

Groningen's guidelines, however, involve the actual medical homicide of individuals who can't protest or defend themselves. I have no doubt that if the Groningen Protocol becomes official, parents who don't want to contend with raising a disabled child will have their baby or young child euthanized, even if the baby has a fighting chance at a meaningful life. Likewise, family members who fear the burden of coping with a disabled or comatose loved one will seek his or her involuntary euthanasia out of their own self-interest.

Bethlehem's inns, which had no vacancies for the birth of Jesus about 2,000 years ago, are largely empty this Christmas season, according to a United Nations report that found tourism to the West Bank town has fallen 92 percent in the past four years.

What this country needs is a grass-roots movement to take the "X" out of "Xmas."

Xmas With All of the Exes

"He said, 'Honey, will you please pass the potatoes?' -- and two women reached for the potatoes," recounted Blackstone-Ford, who recently co-wrote a book -- with her husband's ex-wife -- about her extended family experiences, "Ex-Etiquette for Parents: Good Behavior After a Divorce or Separation."

"You are born on this night, our divine Redeemer, and, in our journey along the paths of time, you become for us the food of eternal life," the Pope said.

The earth is glad, O Lord, and leaps with joy, for that the Word made flesh dwells in the womb of the holy Virgin. At His coming the whole earth is ransomed from captivity, after having been kept, by Adam's sin, in a dark prison. Now let the sea be moved, and all things that are therein; let the mountains leap with joy, and all the trees of the forest; because God, having become man, has deigned to come through the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, from heaven into this world. By this His coming, therefore, we beseech Thee, O almighty God, that thou loose the weakness of our flesh from the bonds of sin, and come in Thy overflowing mercy, to the assistance of this Thy family here present before Thee.

From the Mozarabic Missal quoted by Michael Davies in an article "Et Incarnatus Est"

I know people think Kathy Shaidle and I ought to be a little more patriotic--or at least cheerful--this time of year, but Canada really is like living in a Michael Moore dictatorship. Here's several reasons why I hope Santa brings me a Green Card this year:

1) In Canada you can get a longer jail sentence for torturing a dog than for raping a child.

2) President Bush puts Middle Eastern dictators out of business, whereas our Prime Minister hob-nobs and conducts photo-shoots with them.

3) Although SCOTUS is far from perfect, it has better things to do than rule over whether or not "The Lone Ranger" is racist.

4) The Sharia carries no legal weight under the US Constitution.

5) Illegal Mexican immigrants is much more tolerable than in Canada's policy of fastracking and special visa exemptions for strippers and prostitutes, as well as allowing Arabs to bribe citizenship judges.

Good grief, the corruption here is so bad up here that we would need to clean up our act before hiring Kofi Anan.

Ah, anti-Semitism: so old, yet forever new. In the Middle Ages, many ignorant people thought that rabbis stole Christian children to use as a blood-sacrifice. They neither demanded proof nor expected any — having decided that Jews were collectively evil, they felt free to invent any malicious stories they wished.

We're past that, because the Holocaust has awakened us out of our moral stupor and in this post-modern, relativistic, multicultural world, nobody would dare make up such crude falsehoods.

Yet in our enlightened world, a state-run Iranian television channel can broadcast a TV show about Israeli doctors stealing the eyes of Palestinian children. The news media won't give this 1% of the air time they spent on examining whether "The Passion of the Christ" was anti-Semitic. This bile is hardly atypical — browse MEMRI's site and you'll see what I mean. But the Middle Eastern hate-peddlers get a pass because, of course, they don't have white skin.

I never met a Middle Easterner who was entirely free of paranoia and conspiracy theories. One example: a former co-worker, an American citizen from Palestine with whom I enjoy a warm friendship, is convinced that every time Starbucks sells a cup of coffee, they send a nickel to the Israeli stettlements in the Palestinian territories. Bewildered, I asked him for proof, but he kept insisting it was true. (If you're reading this, R.A., send me proof and I'll post it right here!) This is one of the more sensible, admirable people I know, who isn't by any means irrational or filled with hatred toward anyone.

I keep hearing some people bleet that we should get out of Iraq and the region in general (including Israel). Do you really think that if we disengage from the Middle East, it will somehow become better? As if we are the primary contagion of all these pathologies? The world will continue to buy Middle Eastern oil, the oil-fattened sociopaths in these regimes will continue to oppress their own people and promote an anti-Western and anti-Semitic ideology that encourages external, aggressive death and destruction.

We weren't doing much of anything in the region throughout the 1990s besides protecting one Muslim country (Saudi Arabia) from invasion by another Muslim country (Iraq). That and telling Israel to make generous concessions to the Palestinians in exchange for paper promises of security. In return, Israel got hundreds of its citizens blown up and a suppressed economy. The U.S. got its servicemen blown up at Khobar Towers and in the U.S.S. Cole, two embassies bombed in Africa, and the coup de grace on September 11. If we disengage, why does anyone think these outrages would cease? As if terrorists and the despots who love them are suddenly going to change their ways when we turn tail and run.

I do not contend that the Bush administration's policies sprang fully formed from the brow of God, nor do I think the execution of their policies is beyond question or critique. But if you're going to say they're wrong, it's incumbent on you to say what you would do differently. And whatever solution you come up with needs to address the deep spiritual sickness that infects a good portion of the Muslim world. The conflict between the Islamists and the West starts with the soul, not with politics.

My pal Eric Ewanco has been on the internet since he started a Fidonet bulletin board in 1984, but it took until now to bring him into the world of weblogging. A Catholic apologist and über-word-geek, he has joined the "fine domain" with a site called Christifideles. Welcome, eje!

Here's a dietary supplement for men that promotes healthy sperm, called Proxeed. It's for use by couples who are looking to conceive. The manufacturer is one of my customers, so I'm linking up the information here.

Male fish bear eggs in Potomac

Sewage or factory effluent may be cause of 'intersex' abnormality

SHARPSBURG, Maryland (AP) -- Male fish that are growing eggs have been found in the Potomac River near Sharpsburg, a sign that a little-understood type of pollution is spreading downstream from West Virginia, a federal scientist says.

The so-called intersex abnormality may be caused by pollutants from sewage plants, feedlots and factories that can interfere with animals' hormone systems, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

This is strangely analogous to the cultural pollutants that have seeped into our lives over the past several decades and their effects all over. You get what I'm saying?

The New York Times continues its slanted coverage of detainees in the War on Terror. Reporting on such things isn't a bad idea: the subject is legitimate, and if a government official did something wrong, he should be punished for it, whether he is a PFC or a major general.

That being said, this article is shoddy and dishonest even by NYT standards. The article conflates prisoner abuse in Iraq with detainee treatment in Guantanamo. I'll save you the trouble of skimming the thing several times like I did. First, there is no doubt that enemy prisoners have been abused in Iraq. (Incidently, the word "enemy" doesn't show up in the entire article.) Second, there is no doubt that the Guantanamo detainees are made uncomfortable before they are interrogated, as a way to break their wills.

But pooping on yourself or being exposed to cold temperatures isn't like having a lit cigarette stuck in your ear. The former actions are uncomfortable and possibly humiliating, but the latter is potentially debilitating. Misleading the illegal combatants in Cuba (who are not, not, not prisoners of war!) by telling them you are an FBI agent isn't even a crime; I question whether it's a sin, unless you think al Qaeda members have a "right to know" who is questioning them.

The article says, "The documents are the most recent in a series of disclosures that have increasingly contradicted the military's statements that harsh treatment of prisoners happened only in limited, isolated cases." Not really — the Pentagon they're investigating the abuse claims. These new documents don't say much about the frequency or degree of abuse.

As I've said numerous times, the legal, just, and prudent thing to with unlawful combatants is to interrogate them, then execute them swiftly as an example to others. Bearing arms against a legitimate authority without wearing a uniform, not answering to a chain of command, and committing atrocities against civilians are each enough to place one outside Geneva protections. Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan and the insurgents in Iraq should have been punished for making private wars (a duellum, in classic Just War terminology) against legitimate authority.

I don't say that because I have lost my love for human life. Quite the opposite: I love life so much that I want to see it defended with the maximum amount of vigor. Nothing but death will deter those who have descended below the level of beasts, and even then the threat of death may not be enough to stop them.

Question: do liberals have to bow several times a day in the direction of New York Times headquarters? Is that a requirement, or just a practice they encourage?

Also: why does the NYT pedantically put periods in "F.B.I." and "D.O.D.," even when quoting written documents that almost certainly didn't have periods within the acronyms?

And finally: The New York Times offers a summation of its case against the Iraq War, including "the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the death of civilians in American attacks, the arrest of Sunni clerics, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the illegality of the U.S. invasion."

Whoops, sorry: that was a Iraqi Sunni preacher encouraging the terrorist thugs and murderers who bomb Muslim schoolkids and assassinate election workers. My bad — it's hard to tell the difference.

As you know, today in D.C. it was cold. As I was walking to get some coffee in the Nameless Entity's first floor, I saw a guy with a black fur-trimmed hat way down the corridor. I thought the hat looked Russian, and sure enough, it was — right down to the shiny medallion on the front of it with the hammer and sickle.

I doubt very seriously that the man was a Communist. He probably just liked the warmth, and the hat's provenance made it a good conversation piece. It was, you know, kitsch: if I were to take it seriously, and ask him why he was wearing a symbol of mass murder and oppression, he would have laughed.

Now, if the guy were wearing a cold-weather S.S. hat with a swastika, that would be another story. From his dress, I'd guess that either he worked for the Entity itself or an affiliated entity. Wearing Nazi paraphernalia would be a career-ending move, especially if he worked with any Jews (and there are more than a few at the Entity). However, if he worked with Ukrainians or Afghanis (again, not very far-fetched), their complaints would not be taken as seriously, even though the Soviets murdered millions of their countrymen.

As you know, I am a lackey of neoconservative Zionist cabal that controls American foreign policy, so I have no problem with people looking down on Naziism. But why doesn't Communism get the same treatment? I'm hardly the first person to ask this question, but I've never heard a satisfying answer. Some say that the Nazis are uniquely evil in a way that the Soviets were not; I have no idea how one evaluates such a statement, and I know of no crime (genocide, slavery, tyrrany, predatory war, forced deportation of populations) the Nazis committed that the Soviets rejected.

The best explanation is that since the Left controls the academy and the media, they are the only ones in the position to administer stigmas such as the Nazis have received, and they are unwilling to stigmatize their ideological cousins. After all, if people get turned off by collectivism, they might get squeamish about applying a statist solution to health care. And so Soviet kitsch is still safe in the halls of the U.S. Federal government.

When I visited the top of St. Peter's Basilica in '84, the Daughters of St. Paul had a gift shop up there, and it's an ideal spot to provide pilgrims with religious articles. But why stop there: the roof now also features a coffee bar. Now that's a nice idea: is it time for a pilgrimage to St. Biscotti's?

The journalists were convinced Bush would lose.

It is very, very cold today in the D.C. area. It's so cold, my thick Russian wool coat feels as protective as a wife-beater t-shirt when the wind blows. It's so cold, when I speak outside, my words freeze in mid-air and fall to the ground, where they smash into pieces.

Naturally, there were delays on the Metrorail this morning, so about 200 people and I were left standing on the freezing station platform until a train arrived, which took over 20 minutes. The Metro was formerly the sole glory of the Washington-area transportation system, but the slack-jawed yokels who run it are slowly turning it into a costly mess with Third World-quality service. Used to be that although the roads were terrible, you couldn't get an ambulance, the police were incompetent ("Ask Us About Our 200 Unsolved Murders This Year!" is their slogan), Washingtonians could at least point to the Metro as the one thing that worked in the city.

The Metro board, made up of obscure elected officials from Washington, Virginia, and Maryland, can pat themselves on the back for taking a public good and running it into the ground — and making it more expensive, too. In three years, my daily commute has gone from less than $6 to $8.55. That actually masks the true price rise, because if you added $10 or more to your farecard, they used to give you a 10% bonus credit. What they are doing with that money, I cannot say: there are broken escalators at lots of stations, and they've reduced the frequency of trains during the off-peak hours, to the point that walking is a better option if you're going less than a mile.

But the point is: it's cold today. Also, the St. Blogs comment function seems to be broken, and Richard needs to fix it because the rest of us have no idea how to do it.

Like I do every month, here's the unedited December installment of Canons and Culture -- the monthly column I write for the Wanderer:

Of Canons and Culture
President Bush’s Five-Fingered Canadians

Pete Vere

Had the President arrived a day later, it would have been–if I may borrow an expression from Ann Coulter – like Christmas in December Of course the five thousand anti-Bush hooligans who gathered on Parliament Hill would disagree. Strangely, I counted more New Yorkers than native Canadians among this collage of radical rejects from the 1960's, proponents of failed ideologies, and, I kid you not, Belly Dancers Against Bush.

Yet this last group deserves some credit for bearing (or perhaps baring is the more appropriate verb) a winter protest in the world’s coldest capital. Still, one could easily mistake the anti-Bush festivities as the illegitimate offspring of an All Hallow’s Eve party hosted by Ed Wood and a Soviet era May Day celebration. Or a typical day in the French legislature. And before I forget, this was mid-wived with the seriousness of Ground Hog Day.

But it revealed an important truism of modern Canadian politics–besides that we’re the only country taken less seriously in international politics than France. This hardly surprised most Canadian conservatives who pine for the days when our military projected a more fearsome reputation than the Vatican Swiss Guard. But returning to the topic at hand, this truism is that young conservatives make up Canada’s new anti-establishment.

For example, one particularly brave student sported the following on her placard: “Yo Hippy Shouldn’t you be working?” While I sympathize with this young lady, her question is more rhetorical than fair. Work, and not Bush, is the real four-letter vulgarity that this leftist coalition of political protesters, professional perverts, and pot-smoking poets finds offensive. After all, nothing frightens this Coalition of the Unemployable more than the real world. And there are only so many jobs within Canada’s activist judiciary, the ivory basement of Canadian academia, and the morally incoherent–not to mention culturally irrelevant–Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). For our American readers, the CBC is Canada’s closest equivalent to NPR, but with a liberal bias that even Dan Rather would find obvious and objectionable.

Using the right side of your brain, you can imagine this was not the welcome we Canadian conservatives wished to extend to the President. Given that this was Mr. Bush’s first official visit to our nation, and given the presence of the First Lady, Connie Wilkins and Mark Fournier set about organizing a pro-Bush rally in Canada’s capital region.

Connie and Mark are the co-founders of FreeDominion.ca. This makes them two of Canada’s most popular conservative activists as FreeDominion.ca is the official Canadian sister site to FreeRepublic. This couple is a rare breed among Canada’s political conservatives; one easily distinguishes them from Arlen Specter. In other words, FreeDominion.ca is among the few secular Canadian media outlets that welcomes social conservative and provides us with a voice within a larger conservative community.

“Given some of their negative past experiences,” Connie explained to me during an recent interview, “Canadian social conservatives tend to shy away from political activity. We need to change this. We must give social conservatives a fair voice in the process. Canada’s conservative movement cannot be making its tent smaller if we hope to make political inroads and take back our country.”

“The Internet is our free speech in Canada,” Connie subsequently added. “Liberals control much of the mainstream Canadian media, which is why FreeDominion.ca is a growing website. We’ve registered 4500 members in just under four years. I belong to the Salvation Army, and I see great potential for co-operation between social conservatives from various religious backgrounds. This includes Catholics. Protecting traditional marriage, the children in our womb, and the family – we all agree these issues are essential to a healthy, functioning, and moral society.”

Having received our marching orders from Connie, a group of us from FreeDominion.ca showed up at the airport to welcome President Bush. A handful of Americans from upstate New York and a trucker passing through from Nevada also braved the cold to join us. Since they were not rioting hooligans from New York City, and since this was politics and not hockey, we welcomed them with open arms.

About half an hour later, the presidential motorcade left the airport hangar. We stood within fifteen feet of the vehicles. Recognizing the presidential seal on Mr. Bush’s limo, we started chanting Bush The President seemed a little taken aback at first, but then a big Texas grin spread across his face. He slowed down the limo, stopped waving and gave us the big thumb's up. I cannot describe what we felt as beleaguered young conservatives in Canada. Some twenty-something mother pointed the president out to her toddler and said: That's what a real political leader looks like. He's pro-life. You won’t find these in Canada.

During the press conference that followed the President’s visit to the Canadian Parliament, some graceless reporter–probably from the CBC–confronted Mr. Bush about the number of protesters. I frankly felt like the reception we received on the way in from the airport was very warm and hospitable,” the President grinned, “and I want to thank the Canadian people who came out to wave — with all five fingers.”

Connie and Mark had joined my wife and me at the local pub for lunch. As the press conference flashed across the television, we heard President Bush’s aforementioned comment. A big smile crossed each of our faces. Thanks to FreeDominion.ca, Canadian political conservatism is on the rise.

A favorite past-times of Canadian lieberals is to find areas where Canadians supposedly exceded Americans. While I am not a liberal, I'm not sure America can produce an eco-feminist as stupid as those representing Canada at the United Nations. Not even Michael Moore has concocted anything this inane:

"Severe weather caused by global warming can pose greater physical danger to women than men," a Canadian attending a UN conference on climate change said Friday. "'For instance, often women don’t know how to swim, so in a flood situation that can lead to a higher instance of death or injury,' Angie Daze, a program manager with a Canadian group called Reducing Vulnerability to Climate Change, said.

(Thanks to Kathy Shaidle the Shotgun) This is what I face everyday in Canada. You can understand why I cannot wait to finish the residency for my doctorate and get back to the United States.

...and other pastimes of the Religion of (Rest in) Peace.

I get the impression that the Giant Turd, Michael Moore, really isn't very bright. I'm not saying that just because I despise him and everything he does in public. He's either kind of dumb, or being dumb is part of his schtick.

Granted, he is very manipulative, especially for the lemmings on the Left, and he is charismatic to the same folks. But I don't see much evidence that he has persuaded anyone except possibly the ignorant. He doesn't so much argue as throw facts around, many of them questionable, in an inflammatory manner, without regard to whether those facts contradict themselves.

For example, in his latest screed, the Turd says that "...America has never thrown a sitting president out during wartime. That’s the facts." But wait a sec, Mike...you said in your book "Dude, Where's My Country?" that there is no war on terror. I saw you on the "Today" show with my own eyes, and you said those exact words: "There is no war on terror." I wouldn't be surprised if you copyrighted the phrase, and sold t-shirts with it on your Web site.

So the war doesn't exist, but somehow that non-existent war managed to sink your candidate? Your candidate who, if you didn't notice, did think there was a war on terror, one that he could fight in a "more sensitive" manner?

How can those two statements possibly be reconciled? Does the Turd think that there isn't a war on terror, but Evil Karl Rove convinced 51% of the American population that there was, and therefore the faulty impression that George Bush was a wartime president was enough to defeat Kerry? Or maybe he doesn't remember his previous statement that there was no war?

It's all too much to contemplate on a Friday afternoon. Happy Christmas shopping this weekend.

I've been wondering when they'd make a movie about anything related to the War on Terror, and shockingly enough, Hollywood is on the verge of starting one. Even more shockingly, the story will be written by a former Marine who observed the battle for Fallujah, and the Marines will be the good guys. And it won't star some second-rate has-been, but Harrison Ford. Granted, Ford is about 137 years old now, but still. Read about it in the Guardian here and here.

It is impossible to make a movie about Marines that don't make them look like badasses. Even when the Marine is the bad guy, as in the colonel in "A Few Good Men" and the drill instructor in "Full Metal Jacket," he ends up being strangely compelling. Plus, the spectacle of Marines administering some rough justice to murderous thugs should be interesting to a lot of people. I mean, the insurgents actually do wear black, kill humanitarian aid workers, and beat women for not dressing properly. You can't make up bad guys like that.

Meanwhile, in other film news, Oliver Stone proved that anti-anti-terrorism is the new anti-anti-Communism. He has apologized for the 1979 movie "Midnight Express," which portrayed Turkish prisons as unpleasant places, and Turkish justice as, shall we say, unenlightened by liberal standards. By this schedule, that means in just seven years, Stone will apologize to the U.S. Army for "Platoon," and in 25 years he will apologize to Greeks for "Alexander." I would like a personal apology for the time I accidently watched 10 minutes of "Natural Born Killers" while flipping through channels in a hotel room.

Last entry of the night! Yes, I spent the evening browsing the Web instead of finishing my thesis project! No, this isn't the first time that's happened!

Growing up, my family lived in a modest townhouse, and often I found myself arguing with liberal kids whose parents' fancy German cars were worth more than my home. Most of them had all the money they wanted for designer clothes. Meanwhile, in order to pay for my share of the family car insurance, I was earning two bucks an hour after taxes to sling popcorn and clean out theaters at the local movie house.

As a Republican, I didn't care they they had it materially better than we did (and I still don't). However, it did gall me to be lectured about "the poor" by another teenager who never lifted a finger in her life. That reminded me of this post by Sarah of Trying to Grok:

When I sat down at our office Christmas lunch, I immediately remembered that I don't like any of the people I work with.

...The table conversation would've been funny, I suppose, if it didn't make me want to throw up. One woman was complaining about health care in the US and about how much better it is in Germany. She said that German doctors weren't motivated by money like American doctors and that they earn the same salary as schoolteachers. "Then what's the incentive to become a doctor?" I asked. She got all flustered and condescending. "But that's thinking like an American! You can't think like that!" "But I am an American," I responded. "I'm an American to the bone." "But life isn't about money!" she whined. So here's where the fun began. "OK," I said, "then since we all work equally hard in our education center to help soldiers, why don't we pool our money and all get paid the same salary?" "Oh, but that's different because we work under the American system..." she trailed off. Different, really, how? Oh, because she makes $61,000 a year and I make $12,000. It's her pocketbook now, so it's different. "Germans aren't motivated by greed like everyone is in the US," she continued. Her mental gynastics were simply stunning: this is the woman who gets an outrageous housing allowance from the American government, illegally rents part of her house out, and uses the profit to buy up property in Germany and re-sell it. I suppose she does all of that out of the goodness of her heart and not for profit or anything.

My second post about self-sacrifice is about a little Iraqi girl who risked her life to save others (don't worry, there's a very happy ending.)

On a didactic note: this story shows the folly of consequentialism, an error propounded by some liberal theologians and explicitly condemned by the Holy Father in Veritatis Splendor. Consequentialism is the idea that you can only know if an action is truly good or bad according to the outcome of the action. But that's foolish because, since no one can know the ultimate outcome of any given action, there's no way you can accurately gauge its effect beforehand. Therefore, you should do good and hope that good comes of it.

As if to illustrate this principle, a small act of almsgiving led to a huge act of bravery. Seriously, read the story. I personally guarantee you won't regret it.

...At the fourth house they encountered that morning the Marines kicked in the door and "cleared" the front rooms, but then noticed a locked door off to the side that required inspection. Sgt. Rafael Peralta threw open the closed door, but behind it were three terrorists with AK-47s. Peralta was hit in the head and chest with multiple shots at close range.

Peralta's fellow Marines had to step over his body to continue the shootout with the terrorists. As the firefight raged on, a "yellow, foreign-made, oval-shaped grenade," as Lance Corporal Travis Kaemmerer described it, rolled into the room where they were all standing and came to a stop near Peralta's body.

But Sgt. Rafael Peralta wasn't dead — yet. This young immigrant of 25 years, who enlisted in the Marines when he received his green card, who volunteered for the front line duty in Fallujah, had one last act of heroism in him.

...In his parent's home, on his bedroom walls hung only three items - a copy of the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and his boot camp graduation certificate. Before he set out for Fallujah, he wrote to his 14-year old brother, "be proud of me, bro...and be proud of being an American."

Not only can Rafael's family be proud of him, but his fellow Marines are alive because of him. As Sgt. Rafael Peralta lay near death on the floor of a Fallujah terrorist hideout, he spotted the yellow grenade that had rolled next to his near-lifeless body. Once detonated, it would take out the rest of Peralta's squad. To save his fellow Marines, Peralta reached out, grabbed the grenade, and tucked it under his abdomen where it exploded.

Many actions are Christ-like, such as feeding the poor or comforting the sick. To will your own death on behalf of others is to make yourself an alter Christus, another Christ, just as St. Paul wrote. As the article says, Sgt. Peralta may well receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. I pray that he is enjoying the greater honor of seeing the Holy One face to face.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)

“Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity?” Mr. Wills fears that conservative Christians are on a “jihad” — his word — to lock everything other than Christian beliefs out of the town square.

(Thanks to SacredCowBurgers.com)

The link is to a press release on the Diocese of Scranton's website. They have yet to post the letter in full.

“The church has always taught — and I teach here — that we need to find our happiness and holiness in a commitment to the chastity lived out in marital love or the chastity of celibacy lived out either in the consecrated life or the life of a single lay person in the world. These are the two paths to happiness and eternal life. There are no others.”

While some may believe that other subjects take priority, Bishop Martino stressed that

“chastity is a virtue for our times, and it does take priority. That should be clear, for instance, in the wake of the scandalous events in our own church as well as those in secular society.”

Scranton's diocesan newspaper is, incidentally, called "The Catholic Light."

She draws some funny stuff every now and then, some times it's a little raunchy, but today she is right on.

It had to happen! Here's a new Internet service: if you want to have a Mass said, but are too busy to run down to the parish or send a request in the mail, the Conventual Franciscans will help you out, accepting your Mass intentions over the net and the stipend by PayPal or credit card. Just click to get those graces moving!

When I was 15, I subscribed to Policy Review magazine, as part of my ongoing project to outwit my liberal teachers by knowing more facts than they did. (In many cases, that wasn't very hard.) Though I read a lot about politics, I wasn't an outcast — by my senior year, I was the president of our high school's student government, as the Schultz Boys can attest, and I ruled with an iron fist. "El Queso Grande," people called me, though never to my face.

Anyway: there are two excellent articles in the December issue that I commend for your attention. The first is by Jesuit Father James V. Schall, who puts the case for the just use of force as well as I wish I could:

A calm and reasonable case can and should be made for the possession and effective use of force in today’s world. It is irresponsible not to plan for the necessity of force in the face of real turmoils and enemies actually present in the world. No talk of peace, justice, truth, or virtue is complete without a clear understanding that certain individuals, movements, and nations must be met with measured force, however much we might prefer to deal with them peacefully or pleasantly. Without force, many will not talk seriously at all, and some not even then. Human, moral, and economic problems are greater today for the lack of adequate military force or, more often, for the failure to use it when necessary. [full article]

...If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music — the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before — is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers. Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Eminem — these and other singers and bands, all of them award-winning top-40 performers who either are or were among the most popular icons in America, have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. Surprising though it may be to some, that answer is: dysfunctional childhood. Moreover, and just as interesting, many bands and singers explicitly link the most deplored themes in music today — suicide, misogyny, and drugs — with that lack of a quasi-normal, intact-home personal past.

To put this perhaps unexpected point more broadly, during the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as an artifact of 1950s-style oppression, many millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared generational signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family has done to them. This is quite a fascinating puzzle of the times. The self-perceived emotional damage scrawled large across contemporary music may not be statistically quantifiable, but it is nonetheless among the most striking of all the unanticipated consequences of our home-alone world. [full article]

Why didn't Peterson's attorney call these experts? They're saying the secrets of the case are all in the New Age/King James/Prophetic/Astrological Bible Code! Laci's maiden name was "Rocha", which sounds like Rock, and of course "Peterson" reminds us of St. Peter, so, you get it, right? and it all has something to do with Chandra Levy, who was also from Modesto....

Well, there was. Only his name was spelled "John Carey." Unlike Senator John Kerry, Blessed John Carey was Irish.

And if this works out they are going to raise orphans to be Latinists and translate the 60% or so of philosophical works from the Medieval period that have not yet been translated. Yeah.

I thought that allowing non-whites to vote was a major priority of the Left. Yet what will their reaction be when murderous thugs try to prevent non-whites from voting in Iraq? If their reaction to prior injustices are any clue, the answer will be "not much."

What does the Left say about the thugs murdering innocent Iraqis on the street? Nothing.

What did they say when religious fanatics made women cover themselves completely in Fallujah, and beat them when they disobey? Nothing. What did they say when Marines and soldiers liberated the city, including its oppressed women? Nothing.

What did the Left say when four American contractors were murdered, burned to death, and hung from a bridge? Mostly nothing (although some leftists called the dead men "mercenaries," when they were really just security guards protecting a food shipment. That's right: THEY DIED WHILE TRYING TO GET FOOD TO POOR PEOPLE. And the Voices of Compassion and Goodness called them "mercenaries.")

The Left isn't completely silent: they blame all problems in the Middle East on President Bush, as if prior to January 20, 2001, it was the Garden of Eden. They have nothing bad to say about the people doing all the murdering and bombing and kidnapping, because they think Bushitler forced them to do it, and non-whites are never completely culpable for their own actions.

It began with their hysterical defense of Bill Clinton, and it continues with the excuse-making for Islamic terrorism. The Left's fire-sale of its principles continues apace.

I keep seeing the word "perks" to describe special privileges, such as: "A free parking space is one of the perks of the job." It should be perqs, as in "perquisites":

Etymology: Middle English, property acquired by means other than inheritance, from Medieval Latin perquisitum, from neuter of perquisitus, past participle of perquirere to purchase, acquire, from Latin, to search for thoroughly, from per- thoroughly + quaerere to seek
1 : a privilege, gain, or profit incidental to regular salary or wages; especially : one expected or promised
2 : GRATUITY, TIP
3 : something held or claimed as an exclusive right or possession

It's a December classic...

Twas the Night Before Kwanzaa by Kathy Shaidle.

I received the following email from "Johnny Canuck", a good friend of mine from my former university days. He was the ultra-liberal while I was the ultra-conservative in our circle. (We were all Canadian, so my conservatism at the time would be somewhat to the left of Casey Democratism).

Nevertheless, the so-called homosexual "marriage" issue turned him into a conservative during the last election. This was shocking enough among those who know John. But this past week's Supreme Court decision has forced him to admit our country sucks--especially when compared to America. In Canada, this is the political equivalent of an Anglican poping.

Anyway, here's the email I just received. For the record, I'm debating whether to resign from the 4th Degree of the KofC or whether to simply halt the transferal of 4th Degree membership to Ottawa, so that I remain a member of the Florida assembley to which I belonged.

----------------
Peter,

I'm just so disheartened with the [Supreme Court of Canada] news regarding same sex "marriage". I expected the High Priests of Canada to supply us with this fatwa, but nevertheless, reading it in the news is hard to take. I was browsing around Free Dominion and something struck me. Why are opponents referring to it as same sex marriage? To me, these "unions" will always and in every way be same sex unions. Opponents should adopt this phrase from now on to strengthen our resolve.

In redefining marriage, the power brokers of the country have finally crossed the line. Frankly, I was once proud of Canada, especially in regard to it's social programs and peace-keeping role around the world, but social programs are abused, mismanaged, and used as a political playing card from the ruling party, the military has been depleted which brings disgrace on my WWII grandfather, and on the matter of redefining marriage, any pride I had is now lost.

Though I would never say it, when I worked stateside I did have an attitude of superiority over my co-workers, the Americans and their country. I really thought that Canada was a better country. I thought that it adhered to Christian values more than the U.S., even though fewer Canadians worshipped on Sunday compared to Americans.

But regardless of the comparison, the point I want to make is simply that I am disgusted with Canada and though a friend recently said that the country is more than the government, by and large, the country is compromised of passive people with no vision for the future, being concerned only with what can pacify people's "individual" rights in the present. The population has become arrogant and secularism helped us think we are our own Gods.

Something is informing our collective value system and that something is no longer Christian sentiment. So today, a part of my citizenship was taken away. As a Christian, my pride in Canada was stripped to the bone. But there is Christ, and his Church, and with that I have a home. It is this citizenship that I will give to my children, my family will simply live in Canada.

Thanks for listening,
"Johnny Canuck"

Msgr. Michael Bransfield, the long-time rector of Washington, D.C.'s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception was named a few days ago to become the new bishop of the diocese of Wheeling and Charleston: that is to say, all of West Virginia.

A friend who grew up there warns that the place takes some getting used to: "Do you think he has an opinion on using moonshine for altar wine -- yet? I don't remember seeing that at the Shrine!"

Anyway, we here at Catholic Light wish the Bishop-elect all the best.

(BBC) — A Pakistani minister has revealed hundreds of cases of alleged child sex abuse at Islamic schools, or madrassas.

There were 500 complaints this year of abuse allegedly committed by clerics, Aamer Liaquat Hussain, a minister in the religious affairs department, said.

I guess original sin is in the Muslim world, too. Some of you have been telling me that we can't trust Catholic bishops. Next thing you know, we won't be able to trust Saudi-funded anti-Semitic suicide-bombing anti-Western imams, either!

Islam or the homosexual lobby?

A hot-headed Rad-trad acquaintance suggested that since our parish is closing, maybe the congregation should do what had been done in another part of the country: buy the property from the Archdiocese through a non-Catholic front man, and get our own priest. My reply was admittedly a little huffy:

Hi, D--

I understand you believe that it's OK to "go independent", but that is absolutely foreign to me.

I converted to the Catholic Faith and was baptized in 1980, and endured all the stupidities going on in the Church at the time -- in a particularly liberal place -- in order to do so, offering it up as an act of faith.

I stayed for those months and put up with their nonsense in order to provide a little witness of reverence and faith to other people who were entering the Church there at the same time -- people who didn't know any better, and otherwise might never see anyone kneel at the Consecration or (once I was baptized) receive the Sacrament on the tongue.

The goal always before my eyes was simple: to receive the Sacraments, have my sins remitted, and to enter into communion with the Church of St. Peter. In spite of all the faults and errors of the people running that RCIA program, I knew that the priest in charge there would indeed confer the sacraments validly -- if barely so -- and at his hands I would become a Catholic, a member of Christ's one true Church.

I have no interest in becoming a Congregationalist.

---

(So, yeah, the tone of that is not too nice, but sometimes it seems these angry types don't take you seriously unless you sound a little cranky. That's today apologetics tip, folks.)

Secretary Rumsfeld is getting some grief this week for not waving his magic wand and making all Humvees impervious to bad guys by adding armor to them. But I can think of two very good reasons that the up-armored Humvees wouldn't necessarily be desirable....

(The rest of this post was transferred to CommentaryPage.com)

Steve sent me this photo he took of the statue of Mary outside the Queen of All Saints chapel at Mary Immaculate Center in Northampton, PA. As he wrote in the comments a few days ago, he is on the Spirituality Year Program offered by St. Charles Seminary. He wrote that he'd sent this photo to RC hoping he would put it up before Dec. 8 but apparently RC doesn't love Mary as he ought! Tsk, tsk, RC !

Anyhow, Steve said he took the photo in the late afternoon when the sun was shining through a grate in the entrance of Mary Immaculate Center. The grate has the "M" associated with the Miraculous Medal devotion, a crown, and a fleur-de-lis in it. In this photo you can clearly see the shadow fo the fleur-de-lis and the M.

Steve also says pray for all seminarians, especially those most in need of God's mercy. I don't know what he meant by that but I am passing it along. It sounds like he's been reading about the visions of Hell from the children at Fatima - scary! So pray for seminarians, especially those most in need of God's mercy!

COOL! Just in time for Christ-Mass, Amazon has bundled my two new books, namely, More Catholic Than the Pope, which I co-authored with Patrick Madrid, and Surprised by Canon Law, which I co-authored with Michael Trueman. Purchased together from Amazon, you save over four bucks.

I know, this is another shameless plug for my books; but this being Christmas and I being a doctoral student with two little children...I need the royalties!

It's the 150th Anniversary of the Proclamation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Rejoice and thank God He gave us such a loving and perfect mother! Pray the Alma Redemptoris Mater, too!

Loving mother of the Redeemer,
gate of Heaven, star of the sea,
assist your people who have fallen yet strive to rise again.
To the wonderment of nature you bore your Creator,
yet remained a virgin after as before.
You who received Gabriel's joyful greeting,
have pity on us poor sinners.

Personally, I am fairly ambivalent about the death penalty. It would not bother me terribly if the death penalty were suspended in all the states, but I would not consider it a civilizational advance, nor do I think the culture-of-death-loving European governments are morally superior for having abolished it. On balance, I do believe it is a deterrent for dedicated criminals, as most criminals calibrate their actions based on very rational risk/reward criteria.

Nat Hentoff is a man of the Left for whom I have the utmost respect. An atheist, he is nonetheless pro-life, and outspokenly so. Being a civil-liberties fetishist, he is wrong about many things, yet his manner is never anything other than courtly and reasoned. When he speaks on an issue, I pay much greater attention to him than nasty-tongued liberals such as Michael Kinsley or Maureen Dowd.

Hentoff's article on Alberto Gonzalez, the incoming attorney general, made me stop and think about how the death penalty is applied. Gonzalez, as the legal counsel to President Bush when he was governor of Texas, wrote 57 briefings about death-row inmates facing the imposition of their sentences. Hentoff relies on an Atlantic Monthly article about Gonzalez, which criticizes him for relying on the Texas appeals courts' decisions:

As I and other journalists reported during Bush's governorship, the Texas appeals courts notoriously championed, as they still do, the death penalty....Gonzales, by his mechanical reliance on lethal decisions by those courts, ignored, as [Atlantic writer] Alan Berlow notes, "one of the most basic reasons for clemency: the fact that the justice system makes mistakes."

One of the cases in the article was that of "Terry Washington, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old." In his three-page report on Terry Washington, Gonzales never mentioned that Washington, as a child, along with his 10 siblings, was "regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts." And this was "never made known to the jury, although both the district attorney and Washington's trial lawyer knew of this potentially mitigating evidence." Just hours after Gonzales's brief report to Bush, Washington was executed.

You might conclude that — if you believe that all executions are wrong. That would be defensible, because then we're getting down to the real issue, which has nothing to do with whether Terry Washington was innocent or not.

This being the age of the Internet, I wondered if I could find more facts about this case. Google, when I searched for "Terry Washington" murder execution, returned results for articles that sounded very much like Hentoff's, with the implicit message that Washington was not responsible for his crimes because he was retarded. Then I found the actual ruling of the circuit court that denied his appeal, and you can read for yourself to see if he's guilty:

Beatrice Huling and Terry Washington worked at Julie's Place, a restaurant in College Station, Texas. Huling was the restaurant's night manager, and Washington worked as a dishwasher. As part of her duties, Huling would count the night's receipts at the close of business, place cash in the register for the next day, deposit the surplus cash in the office safe, wait for the dishwasher to finish cleaning, set the security alarm, and lock the restaurant....

At 2:30 a.m. that same morning, Michael Jennings was in the parking lot next to Julie's Place. He heard an object hit the ground and went to investigate. Jennings found a purse and immediately called the police. The police arrived shortly thereafter and found Beatrice Huling's name and address in the purse and her car in the parking lot. The restaurant was closed and locked. The police ultimately entered the restaurant and discovered Huling's dead body ten to fifteen feet from the back door, lying in a pool of blood, with her head next to the base of the office safe. She had multiple stab wounds.

The investigation of the crime scene and the autopsy showed that Huling's hands had been tied with apron strings and that she had suffered eighty-five stab wounds, seven of which were fatal. The medical examiner testified at trial that the murder weapon had a five-and-a-half inch blade and that he believed it took Huling ten to fifteen minutes to die. The investigation further found no signs of forced entry into the restaurant, and that $628.00 had been stolen.

The evidence at trial overwhelmingly implicated Washington as the murderer. The State produced evidence linking Washington's boots to an impression made in a pool of Huling's blood. Willie Hemphill, Washington's neighbor, testified that on January 15 he went with Washington to buy some beer and noticed Washington had a lot of money. Additionally, Hemphill saw Washington with a hunting knife which had a blade consistent with the type of wounds inflicted upon Huling. Maud Swanson also saw Washington on January 15 and testified that he had a lot of money in his billfold when he took it out, and that when she asked him about the murder at the restaurant, Washington said "to hell with Bea, or something like that." Scott Milton, the manager of the restaurant, testified that when Washington picked up his paycheck on the day of the murder he told Milton, "The police are hassling me about this, but I'm too smart for them." Billy and Mary Sandles testified that they heard Washington say, "I killed the b---." A teller at a local bank testified that sometime within a week of the murder, Washington changed $450.00 of small bills and coins for larger bills. An employee of J&J Bail Bond testified that shortly after the murder, Washington paid $468.00 in cash for a bond relating to traffic citations, paying with three hundred dollar bills and the rest in twenties and change.

If first-degree murderers deserve death, then Terry Washington deserved death, because there is little question that he plotted the intentional killing of his co-worker. Look, if you oppose the death penalty, just oppose it. Don't get into this stuff about bad defense lawyers and hard childhoods, etc. — that's an argument for reforming the death-penalty process, not abolishing it. I might be convinced, and so might other people. But you're not going to do it by insinuating that vile murderers aren't really vile murderers because their trials weren't absolutely perfect.

Does anyone know a retreat house with good vegetarian cooking? A friend of mine is looking for a weekend meeting place for a group she belongs to, and a fair number of the members are veg. She doesn't happen to be a Catholic, so feel free to suggest places run by other religious communities or even non-religious conference centers.

Please reply in the comments; thanks.

PS: I forgot to specify a geographical range. Anywhere in the Northeast should be OK: say, from Maine to Pennsylvania. Thanks to the reader who asked.

BANGKOK (AP) — A massive airdrop of paper birds intended to promote peace failed to halt violence in Thailand's restive south, with a spate of new attacks Monday that targeted soldiers and local officials.

The bombings, shootings and arson attacks came hours after Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said Sunday's airdrop of nearly 100 million Japanese-style origami cranes over the predominantly Muslim region had achieved an "enormous, positive psychological effect" toward peace.

Encouraged by the government, Thais across the country — Cabinet ministers, office workers, schoolchildren and even convicts — folded more than 130 million birds to promote peace in the south. Approximately 30 million will be delivered by land.

And here I thought California had all the whimsical peace nuts.

My older two kids and I were leaving our church today, on our way to the back parking lot to meet my wife, who was the cantor at the next Mass. Charlie and Anna scampered ahead of me to our pastor, as they always do, and started pulling on his vestments (as I've told them not to do). Father is a very patient man, with the young and the old. When my kids' enthusiasm has gotten the better of their manners, he is laughingly indulgent, and when adults argue against Church teachings, he is earnest but firm.

Both of those scenarios were happening simultaneously as I walked up to him. As my children begged for his attention, a chubby guy in jeans was haranguing Father, asking where in the Bible it said that homosexuality was a sin. Father seemed surprised that anyone would even question what Scripture has to say about the subject, pointing out that homosexual behavior is condemned several times in the Old and New Testaments.

"No, that was like in a war crime, you weren't supposed to do that during a war," the chubby heterodox guy said. His female companion started looking more embarrassed.

"Well, the Bible also says you're not supposed to engage in that behavior outside of war, too," Father replied.

I have to admit that was a new one for me. I've heard the canard that the men of Sodom and Gomorrah were "violating hospitality" by threatening to gang-rape the angels and men who were visiting them. That seems like a rather mild way of putting it.

The Bible doesn't explicitly condemn genocide, conducting dangerous medical experiments on people without their consent, or poking somebody in the eye with a sharp stick. Yet those are all sins. Homosexual conduct is condemned much more explicitly than any of those things (do I really need to list the passages?) Consensual sodomy is less sinful than male-on-male rape, I'm sure, yet just because a thing is less bad does not therefore make it good.

Even more than this specific issue — and there are few issues that bore me more than homosexuality — I am impressed with the gall the chubby guy had. The only time I've ever challenged a priest after Mass was when he said something that was explicitly unorthodox, and I think that's only happened twice, neither time at my parish. Visiting priests have occasionally said things that made me uncomfortable, but if I gave them the charity to which they are entitled, I could not say they were speaking against the faith.

If you have a problem or a question about something a priest said, you ought to take it up with him privately, either in person or in a letter. When you challenge him on a point of Christian teaching, you ought to make sure that you are supported by the ancient teaching of the Church, not by the secular anything-goes materialism that appeared on the world-historical scene the day before yesterday.

Let me widen my net, to complete my point: if you are an orthodox Catholic, believing all that Holy Mother Church teaches, and you have a cynical, bitter attitude toward the men who serve the Body of Christ as priests and bishops, you are little better than the heterodox. If you say you believe that the bishops are the successors of the Apostles, yet you condemn them en masse as unworthy of their offices, are you not insulting the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church? Can you not see that by acknowledging apostolic succession with one side of your mouth, and insulting the successors of the apostles out of the other, you give scandal to non-Catholics and gladden the hearts of the Church's enemies?

Have you never looked into your own souls, to see what darkness lies there? Have you no fear of judgment?

Hatred of priests is hatred of Christ. Hatred of Christ's commandments is hatred of Christ. Either one will kill your soul.

David Pryce-Jones, the insightful and often brilliant writer about the Middle East, Arabs, and Islam, has a typically trenchant article in Commentary magazine titled "The Islamization of Europe?" An excerpt:

Does this crisis amount to a “clash of civilizations”? Many people reject that notion as too sweeping or downright misleading. Yet whether or not it applies to, say, the situation in Iraq, or to the war on terror, the phrase has much to recommend it as a description of what is going on inside Europe today. As Yves Charles Zarka, a French philosopher and analyst, has written: “there is taking place in France a central phase of the more general and mutually conflicting encounter between the West and Islam, which only someone completely blind or of radical bad faith, or possibly of disconcerting naiveté, could fail to recognize.” In the opinion of Bassam Tibi, an academic of Syrian origins who lives in Germany, Europeans are facing a stark alternative: “Either Islam gets Europeanized, or Europe gets Islamized.” Going still farther, the eminent historian Bernard Lewis has speculated that the clash may well be over by the end of this century, at which time, if present demographic trends continue, Europe itself will be Muslim.

Origins
The First Saturday Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary was first mentioned by Our Lady of Fatima on July 13, 1917. After showing the three children a vision of hell she said, "You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace... I shall come to ask for... the Communion of reparation on the first Saturdays..."

Eight years later, on December 10, 1925, Mary and the Child Jesus appeared to Lucia, the sole surviving Fatima visionary, at a convent in Pontevedra, Spain. Our Lady rested her hand on Lucia's shoulder, revealing a heart encircled by thorns.

The Child Jesus said: "Have compassion on the heart of your most holy Mother, covered with thorns with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment, and there is no one to make an act of reparation..."

Conditions
Our Lady spoke next, saying: "Look, my daughter, at my heart, surrounded with thorns with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment by their blasphemies and ingratitude. You at least try to console me and say that I promise to assist at the hour of death, with the graces necessary for salvation, all those who, on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, shall confess, receive Holy Communion, recite five decades of the Rosary, and keep me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on fifteen mysteries of the Rosary, with the intention of making reparation to me."

Why Five Saturdays?
Christians have always honored the Blessed Virgin on Saturday because of her constant faith in Jesus on that first Holy Saturday before the Resurrection.

Five first Saturdays of reparation were requested to atone for the five ways in which people offend the Immaculate Heart of Mary:

1. Attacks upon Mary's Immaculate Conception
2. Attacks against her Perpetual Virginity
3. Attacks upon her Divine Maternity and the refusal to accept her as the Mother of all mankind
4. For those who try to publicly implant in children's hearts indifference, comtempt and even hatred of this Immaculate Mother
5. For those who insult her directly in her sacred images.

Well some Canadian legal Moore-on just charged President Bush with war crimes before a provincial court in British Columbia. What's even more ridiculous is that the BC provincial court accepted it. Here's the details:

A Vancouver lawyer has filed torture-related criminal charges against U.S. President George W. Bush in Vancouver Provincial Court. Gail Davidson, cochair of an international legal group called Lawyers Against the War, told the Straight that she charged Bush on November 30 with seven counts of counselling, aiding, and abetting the commission of torture in connection with the actions of U.S. armed forces at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at a U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. If the case goes to trial and Bush is found guilty, he would be liable to imprisonment for up to 14 years.

A justice of the peace accepted the charges, which means there will be a hearing to decide whether or not Bush will be required to appear. Davidson said that within eight days of her laying the charges, the Attorney General of Canada, Irwin Cotler, must give his consent for the case to continue.

Given how Canada's judiocracy has come to think of itself as the Robed Masters of the Universe, this is one of the few times where I wish the President was more ruthless and less classy. As it stands now, he will probably just ignore the charges and wait for our Attorney General to order the charges dropped. Nevertheless, it would have been nice to see President Bush represented, not by good lawyers but a cruise missle.

A critical point that is too often missed in the debate over stem cell therapies in the United States is that so-called adult stem cells (ASCs) have shown great success in doing the very things that advocates of embryonic stem cell (ESC) harvesting hope to achieve with ESCs.
....
Research has shown that stem cells from umbilical cord blood, when matched genetically to the patient, do not tend to trigger an attack from the patient's immune system. This is in distinct contrast to ESCs, which tests have shown to form tumors when injected into humans or laboratory animals.

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has the gloves off for Christmas.

Their latest newsletter details the many people and places they lobby against for trying to secularize Christmas.

I flipped to the last section where they list the interviews and publications in which CL staff are featured.

This caught my eye as the Mother of All Typos.

That's quite a promotion for Mr. Matthews. Or Chris Matthews has some stiff competition...

CWN had a link to this BBC piece with some interesting data bits. For a few seconds some reality was peeking out:

"The survey found that 42% of the gay men, 43% of lesbians and 49% of bisexual men and women had a clinically recognised mental health problem."

Which makes sense: one mental health problem may well be correlated with the presence of others.

However, the story and the researchers seem to cover this with spin and speculation, pretending that this level of mental illness is caused by "anti-gay prejudice". Considering how much mental illness is biological in nature, it seems awfully strained to claim that. Here's the sort of evidence the story presents:

"Eighty-three per cent of respondents said they had experienced either damage to property, personal attacks or verbal insults in the last five years, or insults and bullying at school, with many attributing these experiences to their sexuality."

I'm surprised: only 83%?

Did you notice how broad that list of offenses is? I'd expect virtually everybody, normal or not, gets a verbal insult at least once in a five-year period. But only 83% of gays do: what makes them so lucky?

Really. Anybody (other than a hermit) who hasn't been called names in the past five years just isn't trying hard enough. Even I got called a bleepin' bleepbleep by a dear friend a couple of weeks ago.

So I'm willing to read the study if it's published somewhere, but call me skeptical.

Link via Drudge early this morning.

I doubt Rep. Waxman gives a rip about biased history textbooks or disputed facts in the curriculum of other subjects. The abstinence-only program is being criticised because it is abstinence-only which is so..... 1950? Puritanitical? Dark Ages?

I think the "scared straight" approach with respect to extramarital sex is acceptable. But hey, that's just me.

Here's a pic someone posted to FreeDominion.ca ...

The sign being carried by the young ladies states, "Yo Hippy, shouldn't you be working?"

Good news: a corrupt religious order has been suppressed!
The bad news: a few years ago, the community's vision sounded rather promising, and a lot of us were rooting for it.

Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton announced last week that he was suppressing the Society of St. John, a community of traditionalist priests founded with the aim of fostering Catholic culture and the Tridentine Mass.

The Society, founded in 1998, had an ambitious plan to found Catholic villages and a liberal-arts college, but $5 million in donations for those purposes seems to have gone to lavish spending.

The Society even racked up over $2.6M in debts and got then-Bishop Timlin's agreement to have the diocese co-sign for it. That had to be a sign to anyone with an attention span that something was wrong. For that matter, any Catholic in the U.S. who got their elaborate and attractive fund-raising mailings could tell that money was not being spent wisely.

The game started to unravel when lay supporters noticed they weren't getting an accounting of where the money was going; it all hit the fan when the two top priests in the group were found to be taking home and sleeping with teenage students from a prep school. Since the members of the Society were all Scranton diocesan priests, the diocese itself is now the target of lawsuits.

Who knew? The story illustrates a bunch of problems we've all heard before: immature priests justifying their kinky conduct with a new self-invented philosophy about sex; arrogant clerics who think that they know better than experienced laymen how to run financial matters and practical affairs; a bishop who (although he did a lot of good in other areas) neglected his responsibility to protect the people of God from a few self-indulgent charmers.

But there is good news: the new bishop has done what he can to put an end to it. Thanks, Bp. Martino.

Rod Dreher wrote about the case in '02, and CWN reported the bishop's decree last week.

In the meantime, the Society's website is still soliciting funds.