Ortho Opinions

Steven Paul Jobs Memory Eternal!

2011-10-05T21:07:00.002-05:00

Memory eternal! Memory eternal! Memory eternal!

The Debt Ceiling and the Renunciatory Quest

2011-07-29T19:20:00.002-05:00

Let's forgive Senator McCain for confounding Middle Earth with The Shire.

The Senator's sudden insertion of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings into the debate over the U.S. national debt immediately evoked in me the reaction "Senator McCain is, evidently, casting himself as Saruman." Saruman and his minions are the only characters in the entire trilogy to sneer at hobbits, and Senator McCain's brand of bipartisanship so often seems to echo the fallen wizard:

"But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see."

"And listen, Gandalf, my old friend and helper!" he said, coming near and speaking now in a softer voice. "I said we, for we it may be, if you will join with me. A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all."

"This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it."

Now, President Obama hardly rises (or descends) to the level of the Dark Lord Sauron, the "new Power" Saruman advocates joining, but Gandalf's description of Sauron "weighing everything to a nicety in the scales of his malice" and not being able to imagine that anyone would not want the power he seeks to wield seems to fit the Democrats collectively: they can't really believe that people are motivated to limit government, to destroy the very "ring of power" they want to wield. Tea Partiers can't really be after limited government, they must be racists or be trying to seize the reigns of government for some nefarious purpose.

And McCain, like Saruman, wants to play their game in hopes of the GOP wielding the same power of bloated government in place of the Democrats. Of course, this is a fool's errand, just as Saruman's attempt to set up on his own in competition with Mordor was. America has no need of two parties of big government, and when the GOP try to be a party of big government, making an Isengard as a slave's flattery of Barad-dur, they always lose.

For those steeped in Tolkien's mythos, branding the Tea Party as "hobbits" actually seems oddly appropriate. Tolkien's "little people" lived in the "fly over country" of Middle Earth, the Shire, ignored by the Wise (Gandalf the Grey, excepted) and the Enemy, ignored by the elves who traveled across the Shire on their way to the sea. They were farmers and shopkeepers and artisans, whose government was limited to a postal service, a few "Shirrifs" who mostly served as haywards, the "Bounders", a sort of border patrol, and one elected and one hereditary office. They had fixed laws "ancient and just", and thus no need for a legislature. Mostly they just wanted to be left alone to live peaceful, prosperous lives, very much as the Tea Party really just wants to be left alone.

But there is also a similarity between the Tea Party caucus in Congress and the hobbits who became notable among the Wise: like the Ring-Bearer, Frodo, they are engaged in a renunciatory quest. They did not go to Washington to wield the "ring of power" of deficit spending and powers accreted to the Federal government, if not in violation of the Constitution as interpreted by the courts, at least in violation of its plain meaning, but to destroy it.

Those of us sufficiently hobbit-like to just want to the Federal government to leave us alone, those of us who hope our children can live free, prosperous lives unburdened by the monstrous debt that now drags our country down like the Ring weighing on Frodo as he plodded to Mount Doom, must hope that they do not lose their nerve at the last moment as Frodo did, or if they do, that unaccountably someone from the other side of the aisle will step in to play the role of Gollum, and destroy their "Precious".

Emmanuel Goldstein Sarah Palin Two-Minutes Hate

2011-01-15T19:41:00.005-06:00

It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the ~~RECORDS DEPARTMENT~~
newsroom at MSNBC, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate.

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of ~~Emmanuel Goldstein~~ Sarah Palin, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. ~~Goldstein~~ Palin was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago nobody quite remembered), had been ~~one of the leading figures of the Party~~ a governor, almost on a level with ~~BIG BROTHER~~ OBAMA himself, and then had ~~engaged in counter-revolutionary activities~~ run for Vice President and lost, had been condemned to ~~death~~ political oblivion and had mysteriously escaped and ~~disappeared~~ reappeared as a major media figure.

The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which ~~Goldstein~~ Palin was not the principal figure. He She was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the ~~Party's purity~~ Hope and Change. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of ~~his~~ her teaching. ~~Somewhere or other he was still alive~~ She was off in the wilds of Alaska and hatching ~~his~~ her conspiracies: ~~perhaps somewhere beyond the sea,~~ under the protection of ~~his foreign paymasters,~~ FOX News perhaps even - so it was occasionally rumoured - ~~in some hiding-place in Oceania itself~~
on Facebook.

Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of ~~Goldstein~~ Palin without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a ~~lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard - a clever face~~ genial, WASPy face with whispy bangs--a pleasant face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the ~~end~~ top of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. ~~Goldstein~~ Palin was delivering ~~his~~ her usual venemous attack upon the doctrines of the Party - an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He She was abusing ~~BIG BROTHER~~ OBAMA, he she was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he she was demanding the immediate ~~conclusion of peace with Eurasia~~ end of quantitative easing, he she was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, the right to keep and bear arms, he she was crying hysterically that the American Revolution has been betrayed - and all this in ~~rapid polysyllabic speech~~ a soothing, folksy tone which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which ~~Goldstein's~~ Palin's specious clap trap covered, behind ~~his~~ her head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of ~~the Eurasian army~~ TEA Partiers - row after row of ~~solid~~ ordinary-looking men and women with ~~expressionless Asiatic faces~~, American flags and home-made signs who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull ~~rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots~~ plodding of the protesters' shoes formed the background to ~~Goldstein's~~ Palin's bleating voice.

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides the sight or even the thought of ~~Goldstein~~
Palin produced fear and anger automatically. He She
was an object of hatred more constant than either ~~Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other~~ John McCain or Ron Paul, since from time to time either would take positions supporting the Party. But what was strange was that although ~~Goldstein~~ Palin was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, ~~his~~ her theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were - in spite of all this, ~~his~~ her influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by ~~him~~ her. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under ~~his~~ her directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He She was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the ~~overthrow of the State~~ restoration of Constitutional government.

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck ~~Goldstein's~~ Palin's nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably.

In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of ~~Goldstein~~ Palin had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of ~~a Eurasian soldier~~ an evangelical Protestant who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, ~~his sub-machine gun roaring~~ waving a leather-bound Bible, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of ~~BIG BROTHER~~ OBAMA.

Winston had heard the whispered story of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which ~~Goldstein~~ Palin was the author and which ~~circulated clandestinely here and there~~ was a best-seller on Amazon. It was ~~a book without title~~ reputedly entitled "America by Heart". People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the ~~Brotherhood~~ TEA Party nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.

St. Ignatius of Antioch weeps

2010-08-25T20:04:00.001-05:00

On writing on spiritual matters

2010-06-14T22:09:00.002-05:00

The occasional visitors to this very intermittent blog may find it odd that despite its name, the posts seldom address spiritual matters. I think perhaps the more prolific "Ortho-bloggers" might do well to consider two passages from The Philokalia:

According to St. Maximos the Confessor there are three motives for writing which are above reproach and censure: to assist one's memory, to help others or as an act of obedience. It is for the last reason that most spiritual writings have been composed, at the humble request of those who have need of them. If you write about spiritual matters simply for pleasure, fame or self-display, you will get your deserts, as Scripture says, and will not profit from it in this life or gain any reward in the life to come. On the contrary, you will be condemned for courting popularity and for fraudulently trafficking in God's wisdom.

--St. Gregory of Sinai, On Commandments and Doctrines

. . .through your writings you converse also with those who are not present, and often what you write falls into the hands of others, sometimes of those whom you would not wish to read it, since writings usually survive the death of their author.

For this reason many of the fathers who practiced extreme stillness could not bear to write anything at all, although they were in a position to set forth great and profitable things. It is true that I myself, who totally lack the strict observance of the fathers, have a habit of writing, although only when some great need compels me to do so. Now, however, those who look upon certain of my writings with malicious eyes and seek to find in them grounds to do me wrong have made me more reluctant to write.

--St. Gregory Palama, To the Most Reverend Nun Xenia

An Oblique Reply to the Editors of the New York Times

2010-02-19T10:31:00.002-06:00

All of the discussion of policy and scientific issues related to the earth's climate since "Climategate" broke has, quite reasonably, focused on the corruption of data by the "homogenization" techniques used by various and sundry research agencies throughout the English speaking world and on the bogus claims found in IPCC publications based on use of advocacy sources in place of actual scientific papers, or on just plain, stupid errors (always favoring the preconceived idea that AGW is taking place and getting worse--one supposes the plain stupid errors in the other direction were caught in the editing).

All of this calls into question whether there has really been any global warming going on at all (at least if one takes a much shorter time scale than from the end of the Little Ice Age, c. 1850, to the present)--Prof. Phil Jones of "Climategate" notoriety has admitted there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995.

What I find maddening is that critics do not put front and center a thoroughgoing critique of the method by which the supposed causal link between CO2 emissions and changes in mean global temperature was supposedly established: computer modeling.

The last big enthusiasm in science journalism before most science pages turned into AGW propaganda rags was "chaos theory", a sexed-up version of an observation Poincaré had made around the turn of the 20th century, that solutions to non-linear differential equations with nearby initial conditions could diverge radically over the long-run, meaning that physical systems governed by them were predictable only in the very short-run without perfect knowledge of the initial state of the system, supplemented by the discovery that the same sort of unpredictability could arise in other sorts of dynamical systems, including symbolic dynamics and the dynamics of iterated polynomials that leads to all those lovely pictures of (approximations to) fractals.

One of the popularized phrases thrown around in that era was "the butterfly effect", describing the sensitivity of the non-linear equations governing the dynamics of the earth's atmosphere to initial conditions in the terms "If a butterfly flies across a field in China, the weather in New York will be different three days later."

The mantra "weather is not climate" shows a fundamental misunderstanding, not in what it denotes, which is true enough, but because it papers over the fact that climate is weather, averaged and aggregated over time and place. Certainly in the popular mind, and I strongly suspect in the minds of a great many of the climate modelers who have contributed to this debacle, there is the idea, supported by the "weather is not climate" mantra, that the unpredictable short-term variations in weather are simply "statistical noise" overlaid on a predictable system. This is not the case. The variations in weather are the short-term dynamics of the system climate modeling seeks to predict long term. Creating time-averaged variables (turning weather into climate) and discretized space-averaged variables (gridding) out of the actual continuous moment-to-moment measurements that describe the earth's atmosphere do not magically turn a non-linear system into a linear system, even if done honestly.

The only proof offered for the causal hypothesis that CO2 emission from human activities cause whatever warming trend, whether really existing in the world or conjured by dark means out of "homogenizing" data, have been discretized computer models of a chaotic dynamical system, that perforce leave out both the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns among influences on the earth's climate, but also have, by and large, left out known influences (for instance, the causal mechanism, proposed and verified in experiments by Svensmark, linking solar magnetism to cloud formation that accounts for the long-noted correlation between sunspot number and mean global temperature).

To the extent that the AGW hypothesis leads to testable predictions: a hot-spot in the troposphere over the tropics, and a decrease in out-bound infrared radiation correlating with rising CO2 concentrations, or, for that matter, the most elemental prediction that rising CO2 levels would correspond to rising temperatures, which they have not over the past decade and a half, the hypothesis has been falsified by observation.

The "proof" of AGW was never science, it was a pack of grant-funded nerds playing an apotheosis of SimEarth on supercomputers. And we now know they were cheating.

It is the AGW-believers who are at war with science, with their notion of "settled science". Computer modeling is not a "new way to do science" whatever Steven Wolfram may think or want so he can sell more software. The "skeptics" or "deniers" are, in fact, the defenders of science, defending it by making war on "settled". Real science is never settled, it is always provisional. As I have observed before, Newtonian physics seemed "settled" for two-hundred years, but came apart when it couldn't explain the precession of Mercury, the photoelectric effect and the constancy of the speed of light in a vacuum--observations that falsified its predictions.

I wonder whether the authors of the New York Times' recent lead editorial which still hawks the "need" to hobble the world economy and impoverish the world's people to "cut greenhouse emissions" consulted with James Gleick, their old science correspondent who wrote the popular "Chaos" back in 1987. I suspect not.

(A disclaimer: I do not know Gleick's views on AGW, and do not mean to attribute any view to him. But were he true to the science and mathematics he described in his 1987 book, he could have warned the editors of the folly of their position.)

We have seen the results of over-reliance on models that make false assumptions about short-term variability in the financial sector. What is needed from policy makers is not ploughing ahead with greenhouse gas emission regulations, but a recognition that they have been sold a bill of goods. As I have opined before, the correct, useful, response to climate change (which is real and has been going on for 4.5 billion years without human agency) is to make contingency plans against droughts, floods, rising sea levels, advancing glaciers, and the like and to throw a lot of money at making sure our agricultural infrastructure can grow food in hotter dryer, colder wetter, hotter wetter, and colder dryer climates than we now use.

At least seed money for the agricultural research might easily be found without raising budget deficits by defunding supercomputer climate modeling.

Memory eternal! Archbishop +Job

2009-12-18T20:59:00.000-06:00

I was saddened to learn today of the passing of Archbishop +Job of Chicago.

He was the only bishop of the OCA I have had occasion to meet, and that only briefly when my family and I celebrated Pascha at Holy Trinity, Chicago in 2007.

Others will reminisce about his stalwartness as a force for good in the late troubles in the OCA.

I remember him for the joy in his face and voice as he celebrated the Paschal Liturgy.

Memory eternal! Memory eternal! Memory eternal!

Data Deniers update

2009-12-01T20:51:00.003-06:00

Well we now have word that Hadley CRU "lost" the original data and only has the "value added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data".

Notice again the use of words which are themselves lies: "value added". No value is added to raw data by homogenizing it. While discarding outliers may be necessary to the construction of reasonable statistical models, value is not thereby added to the data. Sometimes outliers are hints at unguessed at phenomena, things that should be measured to be included in a better statistical model. The other homogenization process that comes to mind, averaging, simply loses information. Again it is useful, but it does not add value to the data from which the averages were constructed.

Given what has been revealed about the code used in the CRU's analyses, complete with "fudge factors", one wonders what "quality control" means in this case, one wonders and suspects nothing good.

And, from down under, we learn that not only New Zealand but Australia is afflicted with the tendency for its data deniers (a.k.a "climate researchers") to publish climbing temperature graphs that have little resemblance to the relatively flat raw data on which they are "based".

On calling things by their right names, or Data Deniers

2009-11-27T23:38:00.004-06:00

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.

--Chinese proverb

While my own tradition holds that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, as regards worldly affairs there is something to be said for the Chinese view.

We have of late been treated to headlines about rallies protesting “against health care”. As I have noted in other forums, with the exception of devotees of faith healing and in certain narrow circumstances involving incurable terminal illness, no one is against health care, at least if the words are used as we speakers of English use them.

The most egregious abuse of language, of late, however, is the use of the word “denier” as a universal pejorative. To deny the truth, be it the reality of the Shoah or something unpleasant about oneself that a therapist or confessor is telling you, is either folly or a species of lying. However to deny a falsehood, to deny the folly of others misnaming things, to deny the deceits of purported authorities is a form of honesty.

The phrase “climate change denier” (It seems it can’t be “global warming denier” anymore, since mean global temperatures stopped going up.) is, of course, like “opposing health care” an absurd accusation: no one denies that the Earth’s climate changes, while a great many of us do not credit claims that recent changes in the Earth’s climate have been cause by human activity (be it burning fossil fuels or raising farting livestock). And those of us skeptical of such claims have also noticed the complete absurdity of continuing to blame “greenhouse gas emissions” for climate changes of other sorts (be they droughts or changes in frequency of storms in some region) in the absence of increasing temperatures.

Even during the 1990’s when the mean global temperature seems to have been increasing, the only support for the theory of anthropogenic causation were computer models—a pack of nerds playing an apotheosis of SimEarth on supercomputers. The entire enterprise has always been prima facia absurd: a discrete model of a continuous chaotic dynamical system with, what is worse, unmodeled and even unknown inputs, cannot possibly be useful for long-term prediction. Compound the problem by not using realistic boundary conditions for the PDE governing the greenhouse effect, and “GIGO” is the only rational response, though not one heard from self-proclaimed “climate rationalists”.

But now, thanks to some hackers whose names, when we learn them, should be enrolled with Pasteur, Edison and Turing among the great benefactors of mankind, we find out that they weren’t even playing an honest game of SimEarth, but were using the mathematical modeler’s equivalents of downloaded game cheats to get their desired anti-capitalist, anti-development, and in the final analysis, anti-human outcome.

Much has been written about the e-mails in the Hadley CRU file dump. These could be seen as merely revealing the sort of cattiness that the “big science” model of research funding has made endemic in some fields—only our theory should get funded, only our theory is worth publishing—because grant-funding is indeed a zero-sum game. Read this way, they would reveal only that some of the leading proponents of the anthropogenic theory are unpleasant people, perhaps beset by self-doubt that even tenure and a few fat grants have not assuaged.

But it was not just e-mails that have come to light. Code for “analyses” on which published papers and the IPCC report were based turn out to include explicitly identified “fudge factors” which create output showing warming when the raw data showed none.

Honest scientists, finding that a run of recent dendrochronological data did not correspond to temperatures measured in the same period and location would have rushed to publish a paper calling into question the conventional wisdom about how to model temperatures based on dendrochronology. Instead, the climate modelers at the University of East Anglia, applied a SimEarth cheat, and replaced the measured data with bogus numbers made to look like their desired outcome.

Nor is the crew in East Anglia the only ones using cheats in their SimEarth game: the New Zealand NIWA was finally obliged to provide its raw data to someone outside the cozy world of capitalism-slaying climate crusaders, and mirable dictu, the “increase” in mean temperatures in New Zealand over the past 160 years turns out to have been the result of another SimEarth cheat: the raw data shows no such increase.

Until last week I had assumed that being an “anthropogenic climate change denier” was rather like being a “phlogiston denier” or an “spontaneous generation denier”: someone who upheld scientific truth by denying a specious theory. It seems that it is more like being a “Piltdown Man denier”.

Let us start being wise, according to the Chinese proverb, and start calling things by their right names: those of us skeptical about the anthropogenic global warming theory are the climate realists and climate rationalists, and those who use fudge factors, baseless corrections, or even merely fancy that computer modeling is a substitute for empirical science are pseudoscientists, and (dare we say it?) data deniers. Any diplomat, legislator or bureaucrat who thinks he or she is benefitting mankind by hobbling the world economy to “cut carbon emissions” is a fool, and any who knows better and goes along with such schemes is a rogue and an incipient tyrant.

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

--George Orwell

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

2009-03-03T18:47:00.003-06:00

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

--Rudyard Kipling, October 1919

While Kipling's Freemasonry earns hims a good deal of contempt in these quarters, his incisive observation of history and human nature make his well-nigh 90-year old verses a prophetic commentary and warning on the financial crisis and the Obama administration's misguided attempts to repair it, or Machiavellian attempts to exploit it. (Pick your own cynicism level there).

Openness in Government

2009-01-28T12:20:00.004-06:00

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

--quoted from
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment/

It seems clear that either we really have reached the point where Orwell's Newspeak has become the language of government, or that the Obama admininstration has hired Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty, for whom words meant exactly what he chose them to mean, neither more nor less, as the Presidential lexicographer.

Evidently, President Obama means by "openness", "secrecy".

No President of the United States in living memory has not released to the press a detailed medical history--until Obama.

No President of the United States in living memory has kept his college and graduate or professional school transcripts cloaked behind privacy laws--until Obama.

No President of the United States, ever, has engaged in litigation to prevent public access to his original birth certificate--until Obama.

No President of the United States, at least since Nixon, has attempted to substitute White House staff photographers for photographers engaged by news organizations--until Obama.

This is certainly change, but with equal certainty it is not openness, at least not as those of us who still speak English unfettered by the whims of Humpty Dumpty or The Party use the word. And, truth be told, I think it gives the American people little cause for hope.

President Obama, put some weight behind your nostrums about openness, and lead by example. Give the American people a true, complete medical history, access to your transcripts, and order half a dozen official copies of your Certificate of Live Birth (the long form that actually counts for all legal purposes in Hawaii) and send them to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, and Radio Pacifica.

The Content of His Character

2008-11-05T17:35:00.001-06:00

Well, the American people decided to elect an empty suit.

One might try to take some comfort from the thought that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of a day when Americans were judge by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin has been realized.

But that is not what happened on Election Day.

For those who got their news from the 'elite' print media or the alphabet networks, the content of Barack Obama's character remained a complete unknown. He was elected not for the content of his character, but for the contentlessness of his rhetoric: soothing nostrums about "change" and "hope" mingled with earnestly delivered, vacuously platitudinous appeals to vanity: "We are the ones we've been waiting for." For the contentlessness of his rhetoric, a sort of political Rorschach test onto which the inattentive voter projected his or her own hopes and dreams or imaginings of 'not Bush', and for the color of his skin.

To the extent that race had a role, the election of Barack Obama represents not the triumph of the Christian humanism of Dr. King, but of a transvaluation of values applied to the old template of white racism. Instead of 'white good, non-white bad', it was simply 'white bad, non-white good', an embrace by a portion of the electorate of the sort of pap sold by multiculturalist academicians with their twisted redefinition of racism under which all whites and only whites are 'racists'.

At least I hope that is how we can read the election. For if not, then a significant part of the electorate has judged that it is a sign of good character to vote "present" on contentious issues rather than taking a stand on one side or the other; that it is a sign of good character to win elections by litigation and leaks that disqualify one's opponents; that it is a sign of good character to collude with a shady political-machine fund-raiser and slum-lord to acquire one's home at below market cost; that it is a sign of good character to support infanticide then lie about it afterward; that it is a sign of good character to hide one's educational records behind the shield of privacy law; that it is a sign of good character to be the first major party candidate for the Presidency or Vice Presidency in the past quarter century not to release detailed medical records; that it is a sign of good character to twist words in a lawyerly way to deny that one "worked for" an organization that one represented as legal council, provided training seminars for, and for a subsidiary of which one actually worked for pay, simply because one didn't get a paycheck drawn directly on the organization's payroll account; that it is a sign of good character to first declare that one could not disown one's pastor of 20 years, then within the month to disown him; that it is a sign of good character, to characterize a man one worked with on a multi-million dollar project as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," when asked about one's association with him. If Barack Obama was elected for the content of his character, then America is lost, and with it Western Civilization.

Fortunately for the future of our country and our civilization, I do not believe that Obama voters by and large were even aware of the signs that suggest the suave, well-spoken junior Senator from Illinois, now our President-Elect, was of less-than-stirling character. Unfortunately for that future, the reason was the death of American journalism: every story that might have revealed Obama's character was spiked; attempts by the McCain campaign or 527 organizations to reveal it by the application of Euripides' dictum, "Every man is like the company he is wont to keep," evoked no journalistic zeal to uncover the true story or depth of Obama's contact with unsavory persons--Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, Rezko, Giannoulias, Davis, . . . but was instead briefly sneered at as 'guilt by association'.

As a result, America has a President-Elect who advocates economic policies that combine Herbert Hoover's folly of raising taxes and imposing protectionist measures in an economic downturn with calls for New-Deal-style 'civilian [fill-in-the-blank] corps' of the sort that arguably delayed the real recovery from the Great Depression by diverting labor from the private sector into 'make work' projects; a President-Elect whose foreign policy naivite combines a denial of the threat posed by radical Islam, with a complete incomprehension of Frederick the Great's dictum that "Diplomacy without arms is like a musical score without instruments"; a President-Elect whose contempt for our Constitution can be heard in his 2001 lament that the Warren Court did not find a way to subvert it in the cause of redistribution of wealth; a President-Elect who seems intent on hobbling the American economy by treating carbon dioxide as a 'pollutant' even as it becomes obvious that anthropogenic global warming is a specious theory, even at the cost of bankrupting the coal industry that provides the U.S. with half of its electricity and most of its energy not derived from imported oil.

The conservative humorist P.J. O'Rourke said that "Liberalism is Communism sold by the drink."

By the end of the next four years, America may have quite a hangover.

"Palling around with terrorists"

2008-10-08T15:39:00.004-05:00

Gov. Sarah Palin has correctly characterized Barack Obama as "palling around with terrorists." The Obama campaign and "mainstream" media are spinning like tops, trying to turn Obama's having been hired by Weathermen founder William Ayers to head the Board of Directors for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, appointed to the Board of the Woods Fund of Chicago by Ayers, Ayers' hosting of the 'meet-and-greet' that launched Obama's political career, and their appearing together on two academic panels into something enough less than a close working relationship to make Obama's characterization of Ayers as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" seem like something less than the outrageous lie of omission it actually was.

But the old bomb-maker Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dorhn, of the Weathermen's "Declaration of a State of War" infamy are not the only terrorists with whom Sen. Obama pals around.

Sean Hannity set forth Obama's connections with another radical member of the Woods Fund Board, PLO operatative, sometime University of Chicago professor, now at Columbia, Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi was a member of the PLO at a time when the State Department still designated it a terrorist organization. In 2000, Khalidi held a fund-raiser for Obama's unsuccessful run for the U.S. House of Representatives, and as Hannity documented, Obama threw a farewell party for Khalidi when he left U. Chicago.

And then there is Obama's relative Raila Odinga. Obama campaigned for Odinga while on a trip to Kenya at U.S. taxpayer expense:

When Odinga lost the Kenyan presidency, his followers, Islamists and Communists among them, launched near-genocidal violence against the mostly Christian tribes that had supported the winner, Mwai Kibaki.

If we believe Obama's protestations of the innocence of his associations with thugs and terrorist, we must judge him to be possibly the worst judge of character in the history of American politics, not someone who should be making cabinet, Supreme Court, or even ambassadorial appointments. If his protestations are lies, the import is sinister.

"A guy who lives in my neighborhood"

2008-10-05T11:03:00.001-05:00

Here is a bit of documentation on the ties between Barack Obama and Weatherman terrorist William Ayers. Even the most tenuous of the ties, even taken in isolation from the others, show that Ayers had a closer relationship to Obama than Obama admitted when he characterized Ayers as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood".

I've not found any contemporaneous online confirmation of the coffee-klatch at Ayers' home that launched Obama's political career, or of the donations Ayers gave to Obama's early campaigns, but no one seems to be denying them. "A guy who lives in my neighborhood"? That and a political supporter.

Despite open editing, wikipedia's entry on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge tells the tale of their connection there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Annenberg_Challenge

Below is the bulk of the text of that entry as of 5 October 2008. Salient facts: Ayers wrote the grant proposal and co-chaired the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, which hired Barack Obama to chair the Board of Directors for the project. "A guy who lives in my neighborhood"?

The CAC's successful grant application was written in 1993 by William Ayers, co-founder of the militant organization Weatherman and professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.[2][3] After extensive community-based discussions also involving Anne Hallett of the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, and Warren Chapman of the Joyce Foundation.

At its founding, the Annenberg Challenge was made up of three constituent parts:

▪ The Chicago School Reform Collaborative, co-chaired by William C. Ayers;

▪ a Board of Directors initially recruited by the Collaborative, which was chaired from 1995 to 2000 by Barack Obama[4], at the time a practicing attorney.

▪ The Chicago Schools Research Consortium, a research arm of the Challenge.

The Collaborative was the operative on the ground body of the Challenge. It was made up of representatives of various constituencies in the Chicago school reform movement. That reform movement had begun in 1987 in the wake of an unpopular strike by Chicago teachers. Bill Ayers was active in that reform effort through a group called the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, or ABCs. ABCs was an alliance of various activists and reform groups that included the Developing Communities Project which Barack Obama headed up at the time as well as Chicago United, a business sector group, that was headed up by Thomas Ayers, father of Bill Ayers.
A key accomplishment of the reform movement was the passage in 1988 of a new state law that established local school councils in every school in Chicago as a competing center of power relative to the teachers union and the Chicago school administration.

The Collaborative's responsibility was to help identify potential grant recipients, prepare requests for proposals and develop other means for the Challenge to intervene in supporting the local school council-led reform process in Chicago. In 1995 the mayor of Chicago succeeded in the first of several efforts to undermine the power of these councils. But the Challenge fought back by funneling millions of dollars into the councils and associated reform groups, including $175,000 to the Small Schools Workshop. The Workshop had been established in the early 1990s by William Ayers who hired Mike Klonsky, a Chicago cab driver who had earned a Ph.D. in education from the University of South Florida, and former activist with Ayers in Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS. Klonsky had achieved limited notoriety in 1977 when he traveled to Beijing to seek the endorsement of Communist China for a political party he had helped establish in the United States, the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist).

At times the attempt by the Challenge was controversial. An effort to funnel $2 million to the Local Schools Councils was criticized by one Challenge board member, Arnold Weber, a business sector representative and former President of Northwestern University, who saw the Councils as a potential "political threat" to school principals. Of course, the councils were formed precisely to provide parent and political activists with the power to influence schools.

The Board would engage in fundraising and approval of grants. The Board also hired a Executive Director, Ken Rolling, from Woods Fund of Chicago.
The Research Consortium was responsible for assessing the impact of the expenditure of the Challenge's grant money. Ironically, they concluded that the $110 million spent in Chicago over six years had little or no impact on outcomes for students.

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge received a grant of $49.2 million from the national Annenberg Challenge based at Brown University. The grant was to be matched 2:1 by private donors. By 1999 the Chicago Challenge succeeded in raising an additional $60 million.

Other CAC board members were prominent Chicagoans from both the private and non profit sectors.

Following the link in the above quoted wikipedia entry relating to the Woods Fund of Chicago shows that both men serve on the board of that foundation in 2001. "A guy who lives in my neighborhood?"

Obama also, twice that can be easily documented from online sources, appeared as part of panel discussions featuring Ayers. Once in 1997 and once in 2002. Unlike being hired by Ayers, or having his political career launched at Ayers home, this does not indicate a close relationship. It, in itself, is, however, enough to put the lie to Obama's description of "a guy who lives in my neighborhood."

However, given the close ties between the two at the CAC and the launch of Obama's political career at his home, two years earlier, it appears that Ayers as main speaker invited Obama to serve on the panel at the 1997 symposium.

In the case of the 2002 conference, it seems likely that they were invited to serve on the same panel by the conference organizers. Given the rest of what we know about their relationship, and the intellectual homogeneity of American academe, this was probably not coincidental, but deliberate--because they would put forward the same point of view.

In each case, besides a link to the relevant announcement, a copy of the interesting paragraphs is provided

http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/97/971104.juvenile.justice.shtml

Ayers will be joined by Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama, Senior Lecturer in the University of Chicago Law School, who is working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system; Randolph Stone, Director of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic at the University of Chicago; Alex Correa, a reformed juvenile offender who spent 7 years in Cook County Temporary Detention Center; Frank Tobin, a former priest and teacher in the Detention Center who helped Correa; and Willy Baldwin, who grew up in public housing and is currently a teacher in the Detention Center.

http://www.uic.edu/classes/las/las400/conferencealt.htm

2:15-3:45 p.m.
IV. Intellectuals in Times of Crisis
Experiences and applications of intellectual work in urgent situations.

William Ayers, UIC, College of Education; author of Fugitive Days
Douglass Cassel, Northwestern University, Center for International Human Rights
Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago, Political Science
Salim Muwakkil, Chicago Tribune; In These Times
Barack Obama, Illinois State Senator
Barbara Ransby, UIC, African-American Studies (moderator)

One wonders if lecture notes for either event can be found, or if that potential proof of a likeness of thought between the two "neighbors" has vanished down the memory hole.

And here are the financial arsonists: Congressional Democrats

2008-09-29T17:54:00.002-05:00

The excerpts from Congressional committee hearings from 2004 that Rush Limbaugh played today, without El Rushbo's commentary, but with explanatory titles:

Burning Down the House

2008-09-27T13:36:00.004-05:00

A rapid little video from YouTube which lays out with documention the connection between Democrat social policies and the current financial crisis. (You can pause it and Google items to verify all of the claims.)

It ends with a little home-made McCain/Palin ad, and has a nice rock sound-track, including a bit of the Talking Heads track from which its evocative title comes.

For anyone angry about the current financial crisis, or about the potential baleout, understand that electing Obama is like putting the fox in charge of the hen-house. The subprime mortgage crisis is the natural consequence of 'community organizing' run rampant.

Different activities, different virtues

2008-09-17T12:22:00.001-05:00

The recent remarks of former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, asserting that none of the major party candidates for President or Vice President could run a major corporation, prompt me to set forth some thoughts I regard as fundamental to a true conservative understanding of the world.

One of the hallmarks of conservatism according to Russell Kirk is its respect for the particular. Sadly too many so-called conservatives at the turn of the 21st century fail to embrace the respect of the particular. Just as those on the left seem to think that all human activities can and should be reduced to a collection of social service programs, too many on the right seem to think that all human activity can be reduced to commerce. Hence, the offense taken by many erstwhile conservatives not only at the Obama campaign's out-of-context use of Fiorina's remarks as applied to McCain and Palin, but at the remarks themselves.

Among the particularities for which conservatives should have a visceral respect, and should lead our society to respect, are the different virtues necessary for different realms of human activities.

The virtues needed in a head of state, what Aristotle called 'the ruling virtues', are not the same as the virtues needed to run a profit-making commercial enterprise, and both are in turn different from the virtues needed to be a holy priest, and all these are distinct from the virtues needed to be a successful academician (which in turn, to some degree vary from field to field), and these differ from those needed in a general, a physician, an actor, and on and on.

Ronald Reagan was a B-movie actor, and quite frankly had only a minimally adequate share of the virtues needed in an actor (as he, in one of his charming self-deprecating jokes, put it "I was never an actor, and I've got 38 movies to prove it."). I do not think that Reagan would have made a good priest, a good professor, or a good corporate CEO. He did, however, have a lion's share of the ruling virtues, which, directed rightly, allowed him to lead the West to victory in the Cold War and remove enough of the government impediments to commerce through taxation and regulation to allow the market to launch the longest economic expansion of the 20th century.

This is one reason why not merely generic executive experience, but executive experience in government, ideally in a position where 'the buck stops', is an important consideration in selecting a President. Curiously, among the major party candidates, only the GOP Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, has this kind of experience. For all the sneers directed her way, her brief tenure as Governor of Alaska has shown that she, like Reagan, has a fair share of the ruling virtues: she could not have accomplished a major clean-up of government largely against interests within her own party, moved measures through a legislature with bipartisan support, and negotiated against entrenched commercial interests without a good dose of the same virtues Reagan exhibited.

A President with the virtues needed to be a corporate CEO, but lacking the ruling virtues, will either be a miserable failure, or will try to remake government in the image of commerce, a project which would prove as baleful as did the remaking of the mortgage industry in the image of a social project under the stewardship of erstwhile Clinton administration figures now clustered in Obama's economic team.

A Fundamental Absence of Empathy

2008-09-11T17:14:00.003-05:00

We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

--Sen. Barack Hussein Obama (19 Sept. 2001)

It is doubtless clear that Ortho Opinions opposes the election of Sen. Obama to the Presidency (while unwilling to endorse Sen. McCain on account of his evident Slavophobia). Readers may wonder then why this year's anniversary meditation on the occasion of the 9/11 attacks begins with a moderately extended quotation form the most leftward member of the U.S. Senate.

The Senator's remarks have been much derided on the political right. In truth, except for his remarks misattributing this lack of empathy to 'poverty and ignorance', the comments show a psychological perceptiveness that might well guide American policy in dealing with Islamofascism. The Senator ought not be derided for his insight, but for his failure to understand its policy consequences.

Absence of empathy, issuing forth in antisocial behavior--violence, lying and the like--is the chief characteristic of the sociopath. Consider the diagnostic criteria for the Dissocial Personality Disorder (one of the attempts by psychologists and psychiatrists to operationalize sociopathy) as set forth in ICD-10:

Callous unconcern for the feelings of others and lack of the capacity for empathy.
Gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules, and obligations.
Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships.
Very low tolerance to frustration and a low threshold for discharge of aggression, including violence.
Incapacity to experience guilt and to profit from experience, particularly punishment.
Marked proneness to blame others or to offer plausible rationalizations for the behavior bringing the subject into conflict.
Persistent irritability.

A person who behaved as modern politicized Islam has behaved as a movement would readily be diagnosed as suffering from this disorder: Jews and Christians are equated with pigs and moneys; non-Muslims are not to be befriended; the norms of the Geneva convention--carrying weapons openly, not targetting civilians and the like--are wantonly ignored; there are no peace treaties, only hudnas, and even Muslims who sided with them are declared to be infidels the moment they step out of line; cartoons or criticism are sufficient cause for violence; the wretched state of Muslim countries is the West's fault; and everything conceivable is seen as a slight to Islam.

Persons suffering from sociopathy are notoriously difficult to dissuade from criminal behavior. Indeed generally only life-long incarceration or (if they have committed a capital crime) execution offers the public protection from the actions that flow from their "fundamental absence of empathy".

Fortuantely the case of sociopathic mass politico-religious movements seems to be more hopeful. The Imperial cult of Imperial Japan showed the same symptoms of sociopathy as the post-Qutb politicization of Islam, right down to the use of suicide attacks. In that case a cure proved possible, though it involved a prolonged war, two atomic bombs, and the imposition of a pacifist constitution.

The world really must hope and pray that the milder treatment, that of planting parliamentary democracies in the heart of the Muslim world, attempted by the Bush Administration proves successful in the case of Islamofascism, and that a cure on the Japanese model will not needed hereafter.

Every man is like the company he is wont to keep.

2008-08-27T13:25:00.011-05:00

Euripides' dictum has prompted many to look at the company Senator Barack Hussein Obama is wont to keep:

Frank Marshall Davis

K-State dropout, poet, labor organizer, Communist Party member, journalist for a newspaper published by a Communist front labor union, 'Frank' is described by Senator Obama in his autobiography as a mentoring figure for whom he had great affection: "It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created."

'. . .his faith. . .' in what? certainly not God, in the dialectic of history? in revolution? in the proletariate? Senator Obama coyly sanitizes his Marxist associates.

Willima Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn

Others have highlighted Senator Barack Obama's connections with Weather Underground leader William Ayers in slickly produced TV spots:

Here are a few more samples of what passes for thought in Obama's circle of friends and acquaintances:

Here is a clip of Ayers reminding us why the last Democratic nominee deserved to be 'Swiftboated'. Of course, Ayers thinks Kerry's scurilous behavior after his return from Vietnam was a fine thing:

Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn supported and defended academic charletan Ward Churchill:

But Senator Obama's questionable associations are not limited to a childhood mentor and the 'neighbors' in whose house his political career was launched, and with whom he served on governing boards of left-wing non-profit organizations that wasted millions of dollars in grant money in failed attempts to improve education in Chicago.

Antonin "Tony" Rezko

Another 'neighbor', fast-food restauranteur, real-estate developer, political fund-raiser for Chicago machine politicians, recently convicted of six counts of wire fraud, six counts of mail fraud, two counts of corrupt solicitation, and two counts of money laundering, Rezko was among the very first contributors to Obama's state and U.S. senatorial campaigns. In 2005, on the same day when Obama and his wife bought their Hyde Park home for $1.65 million ($300,000 million below the asking price), Rezko's wife bought an adjoining vacant lot for the full asking price. The Rezkos subsequently sold part of that land to the Obamas at a bargain price.

Dorothy Tillman

Long-time Chicago Alderman, leading adocate of the payment of slavery reparations to African-Americans, Tillman was an early backer of Obama's political career, a fact he used to excuse his continue endorsement of her reelection at a time when the Harold Washington Cultural Center, the cost-overrun ridden construction of which she championed, and whose management board was staffed by her family and close associates, was under investigation for corruption.

No video of Ms. Tillman, but a tour of the ward whose interests she purported to represent spouting radical ideas was posted to YouTube with the caption, "A quiet New Year's Day morning trip down Calumet, Prairie, Indiana and 47th Streets in Bronzeville. All of this is in Chicago's 3rd Ward, as is most of the rest of Bronzeville. The 3rd Ward, which was ruled for 24 agonizing years by Alderman Dorothy Tillman, has 5,000 vacant lots, half the number in the entire city. And who endorsed her for re-election in 2007 (she lost, fortunately)? Hyde Park resident Senator Barack Obama! Has he ever driven through Bronzeville? If so, he might have had second thoughts about his support. All politics is local, Barack. Remember that. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. She and her 49 City Council colleagues have gotten $1.2 million APIECE every year since 1994 to improve streets, sidewalks and lights. Even if you don't live in Chicago, it's your tax money, too.":

Alexi Giannoulias

Obama endorsed Giannoulias' successful campaign for state treasurer in 2006, despite reports that Giannoulias' family-owned Broadway Bank, where Obama's campaign accounts were held, had made loans to known organized crime figures. Records show Giannoulias and his family gave more than $10,000 to Obama's senatorial campaign.

Jeremiah Wright

Now thrown under the proverbial bus, Senator Obama and his family's spritual life for twenty years consisted of singing hymns and listening to the sermons of this America-hating fire-brand who dressed Marxism and black nationalism up in vestments and passed them off as Christianity:

Khalid Al Mansour

Here is a little speech from a fellow who solicited letters of recommendation for Barack Obama so he could get into Harvard:

Is it any wonder Obama's staff have to periodically cleanse the open-posting sections of his campaign website of anti-Semitic claptrap?

Mazen Asbahi

Another one under the bus: somehow Senator Obama managed to pick a member of the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group dedicated to establishing a world-wide Caliphate under Sharia law, as his campaigns's Muslim liason.
Asbahi resigned this month when his radical ties were revealed.

Whether he picks them, or just attracts them, can America afford to have a man with these kind of associates in the Oval Office?

As Euripides wrote: "Every man is like the company he is wont to keep."

A Quiz on World Affairs

2008-08-14T12:17:00.000-05:00

With the end of the Cold War, a Communist country, which had been organized along federal lines into constituent republics, dissolves into those republics, with each becoming a sovereign nation. In one of those republics, there is a province in which (partly due to population shifts during and just before the Communist era) the majority of the population is ethnically distinct from the now-independent republic. In that province there is a strong separatist movement engaged in an armed insurrection that has taken effective control of much of the province. As a result, the province has not participated in the parliamentary elections that elected the national government of the republic.

The premier of the republic orders military action to retake control of the province, which is, under international law, a part of the now-sovereign republic. In the press of a great military power (which, incidentally, has unfriendly relations with the democratically elected government of the republic due to its close ties to another great military power), there are breathless (false) reports of genocide being carried out as part of the attempt to reassert sovereignty over the province. The great power, without U.N. sanction and without taking care to avoid targetting civilian targets, launches a military campaign which strikes target throughout the republic, and is which it describes as a ‘humanitarian intervention’. The other great power, which was friendly to the government of the republic, protests and sends logistical support to the futile resistance by the republic’s government.

1. The great power launching the military strike on behalf of the separatists is

A. The United States
B. Russia
C. not enough information is provided

2. The republic fighting the separatists is

A. Georgia
B. Serbia
C. not enough information is provided

3. The separatists are

A. mostly Christian Ossetians
B. mostly Muslim Albanians
C. not enough information is provided

4. The year when this takes place is

A. 1999
B. 2008
C. not enough information is provided

The correct answer in each case is, of course, C.

Vechnaya Pamyat!

2008-08-07T22:23:00.003-05:00

The passing of Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitzen is surely a time of reflection both for Orthodox Christians who share his love of the Russian culture that was shaped from its birth by Holy Orthodoxy only to be marred by the Bolsheviks' imposition of inhuman ideas born in the rationalistic West, and for all who learned of the true scope of that inhumanity through his writings.

I would urge all readers of this blog to find and read the last interview Alexander Isayevich granted to the Western media
in Der Spiegel, and to take to heart his criticisms of the West, and the saying of his I once quoted at a candlelight vigil for the victims of the KAL 007 shootdown: "The dividing line between good and evil does not run between social systems, but right down the middle of the human heart."

O God of spirits and all flesh, who has trample down Death and made powerless the Devil, and given life to the world, do Thou, the same Lord give rest to the soul of Thy departed servant, Alexander, in a place of brightness, a place of verdure, a place of repose, whence all sickness, sorrow and sighing have fled away. Pardon every sin which he hath committed, whether by word, or deed, or thought, for Thou art good and lovest mankind: for there is no man that liveth and sinneth not, for Thou only art without sin, and Thy righeousness is unto eternity, and Thy Law is truth.

Vechnaya Pamyat! Vechnaya Pamyat! Vechnaya Pamyat!

Memory Eternal! Memory Eternal! Memory Eternal!

William F. Buckley, Jr. Memory eternal!

2008-02-27T17:44:00.003-06:00

I never had the good fortune to meet the man, but from my college days when I began to develop grave doubts about the 'New Left', through my embracing American conservatism, Buckley's influence on my own thought has been strong.

National Review was the singular voice of conservatism in those days, and even after it had been joined by Human Events and the less sober American Spectator, remained a beacon to the movement.

The formality of Buckley's style sometimes lapsed into pomposity, but on the whole was more positive than detrimental, lending a gravitas to his speech that befit the seriousness of his thought.

He will be missed.

As we say in the Christian East: Memory eternal! Memory eternal! Memory eternal!

An Open Letter to Fred Thompson

2008-01-18T10:58:00.000-06:00

Dear Senator Thompson:

I've been a 'FredHead' ever since your elegant 38 second dismissal of Michael Moore.

For today, and tomorrow, if South Carolina law allows it, I'm hoping you will continue to regard SC as a must-win, and campaign accordingly.

But come Saturday night, when the polls close, should things not go the way we both hope, I'm appealing to you to ignore the pundits, and your own 'must win' statements, and stay in the race, for the long run.

In view of the fact that you are seeking the Presidency of the United States not from personal ambition, but a desire to serve our nation, your presence in the race as the 'anti-soundbite' candidate will itself be a service to the country. Keeping your ideas before the American people, and your rivals, may well help those down-to-earth ideas--which even more than your eloquence and equally down-to-earth style are what has attracted us to you--become realities, regardless of who wins our party's nomination.

Much though those of us who support you are hoping, working, and donating with the goal of your nomination on the first ballot, we would be happy with your nomination on the fifth.

Though it may not sit well citing Lincoln to a southerner, remember that our party's first President came in third on the first ballot, and was nominated on the third.

You are the only candidate in the race whose nomination would not alienate at least a quarter of the Reagan coalition. As such, if the delegations to the convention are fractured, with no candidate having more than 1/3 of the delegates, the party may, indeed, should, turn to you.

Besides, I want the chance to caucus for you here in Kansas on the Saturday after 'Super Tuesday'.

Best Wishes for a big win on Saturday,
DNY

Fred Thompson--A principled American Conservative

2007-10-02T21:18:00.000-05:00

What is American Conservatives want to conserve? The adjective American is very important here, as the American Founding was in some sense the quintessentially liberal event in human history--when the word liberal is given it classical meaning, not used as a sheep-skin for the wolf of American socialism.

I like to describe what we want to conserve as the patrimony of Western Civilization up to, and including, the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment. (And noting that our conservation consists chiefly in resisting the Continental 'Enlightenment'.) But I'm an academician and should probably more often quote the line put in the mouth of Thomas More by the screenwriter of A Man for All Seasons: I trust I make myself obscure.

Fred Thompson, however, does not make himself obscure, but sums up American Conservatism in the statement of principles he wrote for his campaign website www.fred08.com:

Individual Liberty As Jefferson spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, our basic rights come from God, not from government, and that among these inalienable rights is the right to liberty. We must allow individuals to lead their lives with minimal government interference.

Personal Responsibility The corollary to liberty is responsibility. No society can succeed and thrive for any duration unless free people act in a responsible way. All of us must take responsibility for our actions and strive to improve our own lives and to contribute to building a better society.

Free Markets Free people are best equipped to order their own affairs, and the common interest benefits from and is improved by the aggregate success of all. We must reform our tax system, encourage investment, support entrepreneurial spirit, open markets abroad to American goods, and minimize burdensome government regulations to continue to expand the economy and bring increased wealth to all Americans.

Limited Government Government must be strong enough to protect us, competent enough to provide basic government services, but limited by the delineated powers in the Constitution.

Federalism Our Constitution innovatively guarantees our liberties by spreading power among the three branches of the federal government, and between the federal government and the states. In considering any action by the government, we must always ask two questions: is the government better equipped than the private sector to perform the task and, if so, what level of government (federal or state) ought to do it. Washington is not the seat of all wisdom. (More on Federalism)--link to Fred's video exposition of the first of his principles to be set forth on his website

Protecting our Country The first responsibility of the federal government is to protect the nation and the American people. There is no more important task. We must have a strong and effective military, capable intelligence services, and a vigorous law enforcement and homeland security capacity.

Traditional American Values A healthy society is predicated on belief in God; respect for all life; strong families centered on the institution of marriage—the union of a man and a woman; and self-respect and tolerance of others. While we are all free to live our lives in the pursuit of our own happiness, the government has a responsibility to respect the right of parents to raise their children and to promote the values that produce the strongest society.

The Rule of Law We protect our liberty, secure our rights, and promote a just and stable society through the rule of law. We owe to ourselves and our fellow citizens our own adherence to the rules, but tough law enforcement and punishment for those who do not. A free and independent judiciary that interprets the law by adhering strictly to legal text and respects its limited role in our system of government is essential to our security and freedom, and we need judges who understand that role if we are to preserve our republic and freedom.

Conserving Our Nation’s Resources Each of us is put on Earth for a limited period of time. We must always strive to ensure that the resources we use to lead our lives are here for future generations to enjoy and use as well.

Note the order in which Thompson states his principles. First individual liberty. It is only because of the American people's steadfast resistance to socialism, in name at least, that the name 'liberal' was hijacked by the left. One European once explained to another that "in America 'liberal' means socialist." In European terms, we Republicans are mostly liberals with some of what Europeans call conservatives thrown in, while the Democrats are socialist. Liberty first.

After liberty Thompson lists personal responsibility. The Founders would have recognized this as a corollary: liberty is not license. Liberty has bounds necessary to its own continued existence, and each person must take responsibility for the use of their own freedom, not expect the state or their fellow citizens to save them from the consequences of their own actions.

Free markets. Here we are back to classical liberalism--freedom includes the freedom to engage in commerce. There is something ironic about the way our so-called liberals want to regulate and tax commerce while wearing the name 'liberal', when the original bearers of the name cleared out state-granted monopolies and established the free market system which has allowed Americans today, yes, even by and large those we call the poor, to enjoy wealth unimagninable to the vast majority of mankind down through the ages.

Limited government, federalism, protecting our country. Here Thompson comes to the means of guaranteeing the ordered liberty our Founding Fathers sought to establish. Probably because no one else in the political foray was talking about it, Thompson's website at first had only Federalism listed under his Principles. His eloquent exposition and defense of our Founders' idea is given in a video clip at the link provided.

Traditional American values. I know some of my fellow conservatives--the ones who would be conservatives in Europe--would like a candidate who put this first. I think it is about at the right place in the list (though it bothers me that 'values' has become a substitute for 'virtues' in our political discourse). Thompson is running for President of the United States, not Patriarch of Constantinople or Pope of Rome. A government can only do so much in instill virtue in its citizens. Conservatives of both the American and European varieties know that other institutions, natural, societal, and divinely instituted: the family, voluntary associations, schools (even when government run, not traditionally a Federal domain), the Church, all have much more to do with inculcating virtue than anything over which the Federal Executive Branch has control.

The Rule of Law. Again back to means, but even as personal responsibility sets a limit on individual responsibility, so the rule of law--that laws mean what they say, not what a judge intent on imposing his own values can twist them to say, that the functionaries of the government are bound by the laws as much as private citizens--imposes limits on the government's support of virtue and attempts to suppress vice. The fictionalized Thomas More come to mind again, defending giving even the devil the benefit of law.

Conserving our nation's resources. The 'Earth First, we'll strip-mine the other planets later' bumper-sticker is amusing as a way of tweaking the nature-worshipping romantics on the left, but conservatism is about conserving. . .

Ahmadinejad at Columbia

2007-09-24T20:07:00.000-05:00

As Ortho Opinions has formally endorsed Fred Thompson, I might as well begin my comments on the sad event by quoting in its entirety Thompson's press release on it:

Columbia University gave a public forum today to a tyrant to spread his lies and deceit. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a mockery of free speech by standing in front of an auditorium of academicians and students and denying the existence of the Holocaust and his deadly intentions toward Israel.

I find it ironic that Iran's president accepted an invitation to speak at Columbia University, since students who dissent on Iranian campuses are not met with debate, they are met by a gun and imprisonment. A few months ago, eight college students were imprisoned in Iran's notorious Evin Prison for publishing articles and cartoons critical of Iran's government in a student-run newspaper. The Evin facility has been described as Iran's 'most feared prison' and is known to stone women to death. We need to do our best to empower freedom-loving people throughout Iran.

After giving a one word answer to a question after his speech to the NRA, Thompson waggishly observed that having rejoined the ranks of the politicians he was expected to say more. Well bloggers are even more longwinded than politicians, so I'd like to continue in the vein of Thompson's remarks:

One wonders what other luminaries Columbia plans to give a public forum to:

Since Holocaust denial seemingly is not beyond the pale when it comes to invitations from Columbia, will David Irving be invited to give a lecture? Perhaps he could even be offered a post in the Department of History.

Since killing homosexuals seemingly is not beyond the pale when it comes to invitations from Columbia, will Jimmy Swaggart get an invitation? Perhaps he and Imam Arshad Misbahi of Manchester, England could be invited to lead a symposium on the subject. (Or is the mere theoretical advocacy of killing homosexuals somehow less tolerable than actually putting the policy into practice?)

I mention these two only because they are positions Ahmadinejad has endorsed, which were it discovered that some other invited speaker, hailing from the U.S. or some white Commonwealth country, say, endorsed, would lead to the cancellation of the speech, abject apologies to offended student groups, and perhaps the resignation of a token administrator or two, or at least would on most American campuses.

In the fever-swamps of the academic left, many of Ahmadinejad's other positions--that Israel is evil and should be destroyed, that American soldiers are tools of imperialism and should be killed, that President Bush is to blame for terrorism, or himself should be considered a terrorist, and the like--are commonly shared and thought a sign of enlightened opinion. One wonders whether these positions are thought so very enlightened that if one holds them, denying the Shoah and (at least tacitly) acceeding to the judicial murder of homosexuals can be overlooked as meer quirks.

More likely, Ahmadinejad was invited in spite of his odious positions because he is a Muslim--one of the barbarians du jour in the long tradition in the West of denigrating of the benefits of civilization in favor of the 'authenticity' of barbarism that stretches from Tacitus to Rousseau to the Romantics to today's multiculturalists. In which case, hold the invitations to Irving and Swaggart: their Holocaust denial and 'homophobia'* are inauthentic, products of Western culture, proof of it's evil, oppressive nature. Not like Ahmadinejad's vibrant, authentic, non-Western Holocaust denial and homophobia, these, one supposes are expressions of the true, peaceful nature of Islam we keep hearing so much about lately.

*A stupid word: 'Homophobia' from the Greek, meaning fear of sameness. Shouldn't it really be 'homoerotophobia'? I mean folks with homoerotic attractions dislike being called 'homos' almost as much as being called 'poofters' or 'faggots'. Why do they want the word for irrational fear or hatred of them to only mean what they want it to if they are called 'homos'?

The Cross, the Crescent, and the Glories of This World, II

2007-09-11T06:42:00.000-05:00

In considering what to write on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I found I was unable to improve on what I had written last year, save by updating it and making it more concise:

"To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to whomever I please."

Last year in an online political discussion forum, another Orthodox Christian poster raised the question of why Islam is the fastest growing religion on earth. The answer I proposed makes the words of the Evil One to Our Lord as reported in St. Luke's Gospel, a fitting starting point for a meditation on this, the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001:

. . .at a material level, birthrate; at a noetic level, Islam is a nearly perfect demonic lie consonant with the interests of the prince of this world--it mingles appeals to all of the eight grievous vices catalogued by St. John Cassian (lust and gluttony in Mohammed's picture of 'paradise'; lust, wrath, and avarice in its promise of war-spoils; sloth in its fatalism; and pride, self-esteem, and (since they started losing to the West) envy in their haughty concern for every imagined slight to Islam or their 'prophet') with little fragments of true piety copied from our Orthodox traditions (prayer five times a day is the hours and compline, prostrations in prayer, women covering their heads).

The present conflict, begun in earnest with America's sudden awakening on that September morning six years ago, to the fact that terrorism is not a mere crime, but an act of war, has its origins not in the truths of Islam--that there is but one transcendent God, that we ought fall down before the One God, that we ought pray daily--but in the vices woven into its fabric asserting themselves once again. Envy and pride drive the leaders of the terrorists, who hide, cowering in caves from the new-wakened might of the West, even as lust for virginal 'houris' is dangled as a prize for the self-immolating cannon-fodder of the jihad.

But the devil's words should give us pause. That we have the material glories of economic power and military might, which is the envy of our enemies, outward symbols of which were the targets of that attack, should not be the ground of our hope for victory. ". . .I give it to whomever I please," the Evil One declared. While he is a liar from the beginning, the lie in the tempations of Our Lord was buried deep in, the surface meaning of the words spoken by the Evil One in each case was true. Material glory belongs to this world, which is passing away, and to the prince of this world. The seeds of cowardice sewn by the Evil One in the minds of our countrymen may yet blossom in a victory for Islam, or we ourselves being victorious, we may become even more convinced to our own ruin of the American fallacy that we, rather than God's providence, are responsible for our lives.

It is well for those of us on the New Calendar that a mere three days after this anniversary is the Feast of the Universal Exaltation of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross.

"O God, save Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance, granting to Thy people victory over all their enemies, and by Thy Cross preserve Thine estate,"

the democratized version of the troparion runs. Singing it now, with barbarian enemies assailing Christendom once again, surely feels much as it did when the words ran, ". . .granting to our believing Kings victory over all their enemies. . ."

Let us remember that the True Victory by which death and the demons and this world were overcome was wrought on the Cross, "[the] weapon of peace, [the] trophy invincible" as another hymn terms it; that victories over the barbarians who beset us now must partake of that Victory in some way, lest they prove to be gifts of the Evil One and worse than defeat; that true victories may look like the Cross, or the Field of Kosovo, or the field near Shanksville, PA.

Fred Thompson for President

2007-09-06T23:27:00.000-05:00

Ortho Opinions is pleased to announce its endorsement of Senator Frederick Dalton Thompson for the Republican nomination for President of the United States.

Senator Thompson's public statements show a clear understanding both of conservative principles, 'grounded in human nature and the experience of the ages' to use his own phrase, and their importance to the continued liberty and well-being of America. While not satisfying those self-professed conservatives who have forgotten the experience of the ages that human beings are imperfect, Senator Thompson's record in the public service evinces confidence that he has the intent and ability to enunciate those principles clearly on the campaign trail and to put them into practice once elected.

He brings to the campaign a savvy sense of 'the new media' and its potential, speaking to the American people directly, and at length about his convictions using YouTube and other video sites, from his witty repost to the odious Michael Moore, to his formal announcement of his candidacy released earlier today. His delayed entry into the campaign shows a sense of strategy straight from Sun Tzu, a sense of strategy which will be more even more important for a Commander-in-Chief than for a political candidate. His willingness to address entitlement reform, a 'third-rail' issue for most politicians, in the opening statement of his campaign is itself proof that he is willing to face tough challenges and make tough decisions for the good of the country.

From time to time, more statements of support for Senator Thompson's candidacy can be expected here.

In the meantime, readers who agree that Frederick Dalton Thompson should be the GOP nominee for President can donate to his campaign via the button at the top of the links section to the right.

Of Pork and Pavement

2007-09-06T22:31:00.000-05:00

Encountering an editorial by Jesse Jackson absurdly attributing the failure of the I-35 W bridge in Minneapolis to the prosecution of the Iraq campaign in the 1400 Years War on the same day that, quite unaccountably, a street near my house, laid in concrete last year, was being torn-up to retop with asphalt, prompted some thoughts on the state of America's infrastructure.

The Reverend Jackson might be reminded that the 'peace dividend' in the days between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 wasn't used to fix obsolete 1960's era bridges, despite the fondness members of Congress of both parties evince for 'bringing home the bacon' in the form of proverbial Washington pork. The fatuousness of attributing the decades-old neglect of maintenance on bridges to military operations less than five years in progress should be evident to anyone not suffering a terminal case of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Every member of Congress should promise that at least half of the 'earmarks' and other spending on behalf of the specific interests of their own constituents (or however they euphemistically describe porkbarrel spending to mask the vote-buying aspect of the practice and make it sound like a noble part of the governance of a democratic republic) will devoted to repair and updating of transportation and telecommunications infrastructure. If (as we can expect) there is no reining in of earmarks and other porkbarrel spending, and mirable dictu they all kept that promise, the problem of aging infrastructure would vanish within the decade.

What a really comprehensive immigration reform would look like

2007-06-13T11:47:00.000-05:00

The defenders of the once dead immigration 'reform' bill, now rising vampire-like from the no-cloture grave in the Senate, keep insisting that it is 'not an anmesty'. Somewhat perversely, this claim is right, but for the wrong reason: it is worse than an amnesty.

An amnesty would simply let illegals off the hook, not deport them, not throw them in jail, say, but grandfathering them into guest worker status, not reward them with a track to citizenship. There is something truly perverse about the 21% of Republicans in a recent survey who support a conditional grant of citizenship to current illegals, but oppose an anmesty. It is precisely the grant of citizenship that is the most objectionable feature of the current bill. A mere amnesty could well be part of a sound and sensible fix to the presently broken system of immigration law and border security.

Contrary to some argumentation, amnesties are not always an erosion of the rule of law: continued attempts to enforce bad law, or unenforcable laws, can harm the rule of law more than forgiving some offenses.

Herewith, I propose what a really comprehensive immigration reform would look like:

• Increased border security (mostly aimed at keeping out terrorists, but secondarily to stop illegal immigration generally)
• A guest worker program
• A three month period for current illegals to register as guest workers (a mere amnesty)
• Really tough sanctions against any employer who knowingly or without due diligence employs anyone in the country illegally after the three month registration period is up
• Increased law enforcement resources devoted to enforcing those sanctions
• Physical barriers along the border
• After the three month registration period is up, short prison terms--three months should suffice--followed by deportation for any foreign national in the US without a visa or political assylum claim, or with a visa expired by more than three months (for visas expired by less than three months, just deport them), or in the case of foreign nationals from countries where visas are not required to visit the US, having overstayed the time of their announced visit to the US, or having been found to have illegally taken employment in the US in any event. (The point of this is to interrupt the flow of remittances back to their home country.)
• Statutory limits on social benefits to non-permanent resident non-citizens (for some types of visas, the limits might be more generous--for instance those in the US under a visa program for hi-tech workers might be allowed unemployment benefits, workmans comp, social security, . . . on terms equal to permanent residents).
• Increased quotas for legal immigration from countries from which the US has traditionally gotten lots of economic migrants, and whose citizens do not generally pose a security threat (meaning Latin America, mostly).
• A less burdensome program for employers who can show inadequate supply of highly skilled workers to get long-term visas and permanent residency for immigrants to fill job openings.

Such a reform would simultaneously address all the legitimate desiderata of both the pro-immigrant and restrictionist camps.

Too bad our President and a good chunk of the Congress love illegal immigration so much that they want to reward it with citizenship here, and by giving the spiritual heartland of Serbia to illegal immigrants from Albania in the Balkans.

On the Probity of Reading Other Peoples' Messages

2006-10-03T08:32:00.000-05:00

At the outset, let me say I am gratified by the resignation of Mark Foley from his seat in Congress. The Clinton-Lewinsky matter had made me suspect that the ethical standards of government are really so much below those that prevail in academe that the abuse of power present in a sexual liaison with a subordinate over whose career the superior has tremendous leverage is of no consequence in Washington.

It is not the primary purpose of this article to consider the moral and legal issues of ex-Congressman Foley’s behavior. On the one hand, I hold strongly to the moral teachings of the Orthodox Church, for which the sins punishable by death under the Old Covenant (including male-male anal sodomy) are penanced as murder and the deliberate excitation of the passions is understood to be sinful. On the other, I am a strong advocate of sensible age-of-consent laws such a prevail in Kansas and the District of Columbia. There is some irony, that if any law was broken by Foley, it is only a Federal law he, himself, sponsored, which criminalized use of the internet to solicit sex from a minor. (As an aside, one wonders if a 19-year old e-mails his 16-year old bride in one of the several states with sensible age-of-consent laws and signs the message NORWICH*, can he be thrown in Federal prison?)

Rather, I want to consider the light the Foley affair sheds on the controversies surrounding the war measure of intercepting telecommunications between persons in the U.S. and suspected al Qaeda abroad.

The ‘overly friendly’ e-mails and lewd instant messages were not released to the press by the ‘victim’, the page or former page who received them, but seem to have surfaced on a hitherto unknown left-wing blog. Where are the privacy advocates? Where is the outrage and offense that American citizens are having their private communications intercepted?

The outrage is, of course, nowhere to be heard. The reply, that, well these communications were at worst illegal, and at best tawdry and proof of Foley’s hypocrisy as an advocate for children, really says nothing about the privacy issue. A corresponding reply about content intercepted by the NSA carried no weight with the now-silent privacy advocates.

Except for industrial espionage and stealing insider information to beat the stock market, there is no point in intercepting communications unless there is something ‘wrong’ in them. The blackmailer, the police officer running a wiretap on a crime boss, the private investigator hired to confirm or dispel suspicions of infidelity, the intelligence officer intercepting and analyzing enemy communications, none of them care a whit about innocent, innocuous content. Like freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable search only works when it protects the bad as well as the good.

It is telling that the same voices that object to surveillance of al Qaeda communications in and out of the U.S. are not raising questions about the provenance of the IM’s, about how the Soros-backed group C.R.E.W. came to be in possession of them, about how logs of them were obtained from some server or from one of the correspondents own computers.

Perhaps we should give the Democrats a little more credit for their stand on terrorist surveillance. Plainly they have no scruples about intercepting private communications between Americans and using them to destroy their political opponents. Perhaps they are protecting us from themselves: warrantless intelligence gathering in the hands of people with the level of character shown by C.R.E.W. and the Democrat leadership in Congress in the Foley affair might very well be a grave threat to civil liberties, and they do think they'll win the White House in '08.

*For those of you who don’t remember the old Monty Python sketch, that acronym for “Nickers off, ready, when I come home,” lead to a discussion of how Lord Norwich, who signs his name Norwich, would communicate the same sentiment to his wife.

Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new. . .

2006-09-28T01:14:00.000-05:00

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

--Basileus and Autokrator Manuel II Paleologos

Reason and Observation

It is with an odd mixture of grim delight, sorrow and wistfulness that we Orthodox Christians hear the words of the antepenultimate Orthodox Emperor of New Rome, spoken by the Pope of Old Rome, and behold them used as an excuse for the persecution of Christians, Latin, Orthodox, and protestant throughout the Muslim world.

In his reign thus far, Benedict XVI has become by far my favorite post-schism Pope of Rome, a sentiment shared, I think, by many of my fellow Orthodox. It seems to me that only one point keeps the Pope’s speech at the University of Regensberg from being thoroughly Orthodox, and it is a point of similarity, not just between Ibn Hazn and the ‘dehellenizing’ Reformers, but between both and the Medieval scholastics of whose synthesis Pope Benedict seems to approve: all of them treat theology as a synthetic science, rather than a positive science.

It is true that the scholastics were not afflicted as was Ibn Hazn and are the most thoroughly dehellenized Christians, the self-named fundamentalists, with a dead literal approach to the exegesis of their scriptures. Nonetheless, for all of them, theology is an exercise in human reason, in the sense of deduction and logic, albeit applied to different data--the Scriptures, the writings of the Fathers and Aristotle’s philosophy for the scholastics; the Koran and hadiths for Ibn Hazn; the Christian canon as abridged by Luther for the protestant fundamentalists. Evagarius of Pontus’ dictum, “He who prays is a true theologian and the true theologian is one who prays,” beloved in the Christian East is nowhere in evidence.

At some level, Ibn Hazn’s insistence that God is not bound by human categories, rationality included, is entirely correct. It echoes Dionysius the Areopagite’s “The Divine Names”,and the odd dictum of the Cappadocian Fathers, “I believe in God; God does not exist.”

Ibn Hazn, of course, promptly failed to understand the real implications of being beyond human categories and imprisons Allah in the image of an arbitrary oriental despot, who need not keep his word, nor act reasonably, nor pursue the good.

Human categories are invariably dichotomous and exclusive: ‘either-or’.
Transcending them, thus involves . . .both “either ‘both-and’ or ‘neither-nor’”, and” both ‘both-and’ and ‘neither-nor’” or. . . (well I leave you to complete the iteration--and feel free to apply transfinite induction if you’re up to it).

It is neither to a denial of God’s freedom, nor the the applicability of human reason to Him that the Emperor’s ultimate argument appeals, but to the Scriptural pointer to the way in which God transcends human categories:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . .”

In this passage, the Evangelist not only coopts and corrects the intuitions of Greek philosophy, but points to God’s transcendence of the dichotomies between identity and distinction, unity and multiplicity, even as “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” points to His transcendence of the dichotomy between transcendence and immanence.

“God does not act without Logos.”

“Without Him was nothing made that was made.”

These are not deductions from some necessity binding God, but observations about Him. The God who made reason is not unreasonable--He does not act without Logos. Yet neither is he apprehended by human reason, but empirically, provided first one opens the court of the senses to readmit their long-exiled ruler, the noetic sense, by which, when it is cleansed through repentance and prayer, Man apprehends God.

Benedict came very close to this point in his discussion of love transcending knowledge, and again in his lament that the ‘reduction of the scope of science and reason’. It is not the extension of reason to again embrace theology in the manner of Aquinas or of Barlaam of Calabria, which provides a basis for the reuniting of faith and reason, but the noetic empiricism of the hesychasts--misunderstood by Westerners as 'anti-rational mysticism'--and with it the Orthodox position that theology is indeed a science, not a branch of logic or mathematics. And when a man of great humility, who in his writing as a Cardinal had embraced the Orthodox position on the Holy Icons, and is given to quoting 14th century Orthodox Roman Emperors sits on the papal throne, it may even provide the basis for the reunion of the Church, East and West.

The Emperor, the Pope, the Sheik and Islamic Science

"About your stupid question about our contribution to civilization, did not you read about who were the pioneers in medicine, in mathematics, in astronomy? Did not you hear about Averroes and others?”

--Sheik Abu Saqer

The ‘stupid’ question was a reiteration by an interviewer of the Emperor’s implied question to the ‘learned Persian’. The incendiary Gaza-based sheik, who has called for a jihad to conqueror Rome and place the green flag of Islam on the Vatican, did no credit to the rationality of his creed with his response.

The Emperor’s remark, taken as a question, did not ask about Muslims collectively, but about Mohammed, and was framed, moreover in the context of a discussion of religious doctrine.

Unable to point to any teaching of Mohammed which was on the one hand, new (not copied from either Judaism or Christianity) and, on the other, neither evil nor inhuman, the sheik fell back on one of the favored talking points of Islamic apologists: the period when, having absorbed the learning of both classical Greece and Rome (from translations prepared by bilingual Christians) and of ancient India, the Muslim world enjoyed a brief preeminence in technical disciplines.

In truth, one wonders how much the sheik, whose response to the Pope’s speech is straight from al-Ghazali, knows of Averroes, other than the usefulness of his name in discussions with Westerners. Ghazali’s rejection of the ‘pagan’ reason and philosophy embraced by Avicenna and Averroes is de rigeur in Islamic epistemology, and undergirds the Muslim response to the Pope’s call for rational dialog.

But let us for the moment be charitable to the sheik: his answer may not be a non sequitur as it first appears. Since the question from 1391 was asked about the teachings of Mohammed, the sheik, perhaps believes that this brief period of technical prowess somehow flowed from Mohammed's teachings.

The history of science makes this position insupportable, unless, of course, the teaching in question was the one specifically labeled as ‘evil and inhuman’ by the Emperor, which impelled the votaries of Mohammed to overrun two peaceful and technically competent civilizations--that of the East Romans and that of India--providing the basis for the more stay-at-home types in the ummah to coalate and synthesize and somewhat extend with their own empirical observations the knowledge of ancient Greece, Rome and India.

If, as some Muslim apologist claim, the flowering of the sciences in the Islamic world was somehow endemic to Islam, why did it whither so quickly? Surely the triumph of Ghazali’s ideas over Averroes’ was the death-knell of Islamic science. Without an import of ideas from the ‘kuffir’, the insistence on Allah’s absolute freedom, and the occasionalist epistemology this bred, destroyed any impetus for empirical observation or reasoning about natural phenomena, or even effort in commerce. For a culture with such an epistemology, the only alternative to perpetual war seems to be the fatalism of the shrug and a muttered “Inshallah”.

Copernicus had revolutionized astronomy and Vesalius set the West on the road to suprassing Islamic medicine before the Battle of Lepanto ended Muslim attempts to dominate the Mediterranean in the same year Johannes Kepler was born. The last Siege of Vienna was turned back a mere three years before Newton published his Principia. By the time the Ottoman Empire was nicknamed ‘the sick man of Europe’, dwindling through its own indolence, not Western pressure or oppression, not only Western Christendom, with its (perhaps over-)warm embrace of Greek philosophy, but Orthodox Russia and Meiji Japan, had passed the Muslim world in mathematics, science and medicine. By the time the New Turks overthrew the last Caliph--do today's Muslims remember that the Turks, not the West destroyed the Caliphate?--the entire Muslim world had become a cultural backwater.

So, Sheik Abu Saqer, the challenge to refute Emperor Manuel II Paleologos still stands unanswered, and unlike the Pope or the reporter who interviewed you, I repeat his words as my own: Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached. No counterexamples have been forthcoming, and the violence which greeted the papal call for dialog is as close to a proof as may be had in human affairs that the Emperor's assessment was correct.

The Cross, the Crescent and the Glories of This World

2006-09-11T08:18:00.000-05:00

"To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to whomever I please."

Not that long ago in an online political discussion forum, another Orthodox Christian poster raised the question of why Islam is the fastest growing religion on earth. The answer I proposed makes the words of the Evil One to Our Lord as reported in St. Luke's Gospel, a fitting starting point for a meditation on this, the fifth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001:

. . .at a material level, birthrate; at a noetic level, Islam is a nearly perfect demonic lie consonant with the interests of the prince of this world--it mingles appeals to all of the eight grievous vices catalogued by St. John Cassian (lust and gluttony in Mohammed's picture of 'paradise'; lust, wrath, and avarice in its promise of war-spoils; sloth in its fatalism; and pride, self-esteem, and (since they started losing to the West) envy in their haughty concern for every imagined slight to Islam or their 'prophet') with little fragments of true piety copied from our Orthodox traditions (prayer five times a day is the hours and compline, prostrations in prayer, women covering their heads).

This observation will doubtless offend many readers. Muslims surely because I have asserted that theirs is a doctrine of demons, but could they really, in all honesty, expect an Orthodox Christian who sings weekly, "we have found the True Faith, worshipping the Undivided Trinity, who has saved us" to hold otherwise? It surely also offends those who fancy that "all religions are ways to God."

I make no apologies to Muslims offended by my observation. A call to repentance is an expression of love. Even if you do not fully repent and embrace the Gospel of Christ, but remain adherents of Mohammed's teachings (after all, prayer five times daily is the equal of our monks, and falling prostrate before Our Creator is certainly fitting), at least repent of the fatalistic sloth that made the ummah slide further and further behind the West in scientific and economic development over the past five centuries, and of envy--the West's lead began while a Caliph still sat on the Sultan's throne in Constantinople--the downtrodden state of Muslims is of your own making, not an imposition from afar.

To others offended, I do make some apology. As an Orthodox Christian, I am simultaneously able to firmly hold that Christ is the Way, the Life and the Truth, that no man comes to the Father, but through Him, and to believe that all religions have some truth.

Indeed I have pointed to true aspects of Islam--aspects borrowed from Holy Orthodoxy.

Save those granted in revelation to the people of Israel, truths in pre-Christian religions are intuitions, human insights of truth, perhaps at hinted by the guardian angels granted to the nations before the coming of Christ, that fall short of what God has revealed in Christ, but point to Him, be it the myth of Baldur the Beautiful, which is a type of Christ somehow whispered into the midst of the demonic beliefs held by my Norse forebearers, or the imperfect intuition of the Triunity of God among the Hindus, or the Buddha's correct embrace of ascetic discipline and rejection of what the Hindus called 'gods', or Lao Tzu's understanding of the selflessness of the Way.

The truths in post-Christian religions, be it Islam or Wicca or Julian the Apostate's neo-paganism, are borrowed from the Gospel. Truths in pre-Christian religions, if signposts were ways, would be ways to God, but signposts only point to the Way, in this case to Christ. Truths in post-Christian religions are warning signs that the way has been lost.

The present conflict, begun in earnest with America's sudden awakening on that September morning five years ago, to the fact that terrorism is not a mere crime, but an act of war, has its origins not in the truths of Islam--that there is but one transcendent God, that we ought fall down before the One God, that we ought pray daily--but in the vices woven into its fabric asserting themselves once again. Envy and pride drive the leaders of the terrorists, who hide, cowering in caves from the new-wakened might of the West, even as lust for virginal 'houris' is dangled as a prize for the self-immolating cannon-fodder of the jihad.

But the devil's words should give us pause. That we have the material glories of economic power and military might, which is the envy of our enemies, outward symbols of which were the targets of that attack, should not be the ground of our hope for victory. ". . .I give it to whomever I please," the Evil One declared. While he is a liar from the beginning, the lie in the tempations of Our Lord was buried deep in, the surface meaning of the words spoken by the Evil One in each case was true. Material glory belongs to this world, which is passing away, and to the prince of this world. The seeds of cowardice sewn by the Evil One in the minds of our countrymen may yet blossom in a victory for Islam, or ourselves being victorious, we may become even more convinced of the American fallacy that we ourselves are responsible for our own fate, rather than God's providence.

It is well for those of us on the New Calendar, that a mere three days after this anniversary is the Feast of the Universal Exaltation of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross.

"O God, save Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance, granting to Thy people victory over all their enemies, and by Thy Cross preserve Thine estate,"

the democratized version of the troparion runs. Singing it now, surely feels much as it did when the words ran, ". . .granting to our believing Kings victory over all their enemies. . ."

Let us remember that the True Victory by which death and the demons and this world were overcome was wrought on the Cross; that victories over the barbarians who beset us now must partake of that Victory in some way, or they may be gifts of the Evil One, and worse than defeat; that true victories may look like the Cross, or the Field of Kosovo, or the field near Shanksville, PA.

2500

2006-06-16T23:40:00.000-05:00

A number of events suggest the consideration of death, particularly death in battle: Memorial Day was followed in quick succession by the anniversary of D-Day, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an American air strike, the Soul Saturday on which Orthodox Christians pray for all the departed on the day before Pentecost, and the announcement of the 2500th US battle death in the current campaign in Iraq.

A great deal has been made of the last by the American left. They would have us believe that this event--2500 deaths--has some great significance to American policy, a significance borne of the notion that death in battle, or indeed any death, save perhaps of old-age, is a ‘tragedy’.

Warriors and Orthodox Christians alike know that the equation of death with tragedy is shallow, facile pap. There is a tragedy--the tragedy of the Fall, that death is at all. A death may be tragic, but a death may also be heroic. The death of a soldier who saves his squad from death by throwing himself on a grenade is heroic. The death of the martyrs, from St. Stephen the Deacon, and St. Thekla, the first woman martyr, down to St. Peter the Aleut and St. Lidia, murdered in a Chekist basement torture chamber, to the latest Christian, whose name is now unknown, and may never be known, to spit in the face of some jihadi or North Korean prison guard and refuse to renounce the faith, is not tragic, and raises personal heroism to a cosmic level-- ‘how long?’ cry the martyrs under the throne of God, St. John tells us in his Apocalypse.

While enlistment involves an eight-year commitment, including the individual ready reserve commitment, the active duty part of that commitment lasts at most five years, usually two to four. At very least, the last 500 or so of those battle deaths were the deaths of young men (and the occasional young woman) who knew that they were joining the military in time of war, who enlisted or reenlisted for active-duty status since the Afghan campaign began, and believed in a cause--our county, the (admittedly ill-named) ‘war on terror’, or perhaps even the campaign of that war being waged in Iraq--believe in it enough to risk the death which found them.

Sorrow at their death must be tempered with the honor due their sacrifice, the knowledge that they died in a cause to which they were devoted, and a bit of historical perspective.

2500, the politicians intone without even a name to attach to the number. But the 2500th soldier slain is no more nor less worthy of grief, no more nor less worthy of honor than Michael Estrella, number 2498 (the last name published by the DoD at this writing) or Kyle Thomas, whose place in the numbered toll I do not know, but whom I knew in life.

If we used octal numbers, would we get somber faces every 256 deaths? If we used hexadecimal would the sanctimonious hand-wringing of our defeatists have only surfaced once when 2048 was reached? The absurdity of faux grief at neat packages of 500 dead is all the more seen to be a sham when put in historical perspective:

On Omaha Beach on D-Day the U.S. lost 2374 men--not much shy of the three year total in the current campaign in Iraq. 2374 out of the 292,131 killed in World War II. In the three years of the Korean campaign of the Cold War, we lost 33,686 men. In our War of Independence, 4,435.

I can hear the indignation now: but World War II was serious! Nazism and Japanese Imperialism were real threats!

Pearl Harbor killed fewer Americans than 9/11. Pearl Harbor, while a ‘sneak attack’ in contravention to the norms of declarations of war, was an attack on a military target.

But Iraq is a distraction! Saddam Hussein didn’t attack us!

Nor did Hitler. The first American action in World War II was the invasion of Nazi-held North Africa. There were no cries that it was a distraction from the ‘real enemy’ in the Pacific to fight the Nazis. There was no constant drumbeat of casualty statistics from the North African and European theater, no constant complaint that we should withdraw from Europe because our casualties were too high. No hand-wringing in Congress over the toll on the beaches of Normandy. D-Day was hailed as a triumph.

Al Qaeda’s boast that they will win because they love death, while we love life, may ring true if one stands in the halls of Congress, when the Democrats have the floor, or visits the press room of the New York Times, but al-Zarqawi’s death replies echoing the words of George Patton: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

Documents found in al-Zarqawi’s not-so-safe house suggest his organization was coming to the same conclusion a bit late.

When we think of our dead, be it American battle dead, or the Holy Martyrs, whether now, or the next time politicians are excited by a number divisible by 500, or next Memorial Day, or this Sunday, which for the Orthodox is All Saints Day, let us remember another thing Patton said, “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.”

Wars and Campaigns.

Clear strategic thinking is a must for free people when liberty is under threat.

“The Vietnam War,” the phrase itself, leave aside the misconceptions it conjures up in many minds, betrays muddied strategic thinking. The American engagement in Vietnam was a campaign in a larger war, the Cold War, just as the ‘Korean police action’, the ‘Cuban missile crisis’, the Berlin blockade, the ‘Contra War’, and a variety of other events were campaigns in that larger war.

The conceptual separation of a campaign from the larger war of which it is a part serves only the interests of one’s enemies.

Whether the Iraq campaign was the optimal second campaign in the present war, after our victory in the Afghan campaign may be debated. But, portraying the Iraq campaign as a separate war is at best strategically naive, and at worst a deliberate lie in support of the enemies of America. liberty and the people of Iraq.

Christ is Risen!

2006-05-23T11:25:00.000-05:00

Christ is Risen! Christos Anesti! Christos Voskrese!

Hristos a Inviat! Al-Masih-Qam! Kristus aq ungwektaq!

Xris-tusaq Ung-uixtuq! Kriste aghsdga! Harisutosu fukkatsu!

Christus resurrexit! Atgyfododd Crist! Kristus Ar uppstanden!

Travel at Pascha, the end of the semester, and a sudden uptick in my mathematical productivity as ideas from my sabbatical have gelled in my head have kept me away from the blogosphere. Still it isn't too late to cry "Christ is Risen!" without being reproached for not our failure to acquire the Holy Spirit in sufficient measure that emulating St. Seraphim of Sarov would not be presumptuous.

Travel

I mentioned traveling at Pascha. I've been traveling a lot this semester, and unedifying though it may be, wanted to share an insight about airlines. Some of them like to boast about 'percentage of on-time departures'. This is one of those statistics which provides support for the denigration of statistics in the popular "lies, damned lies, and statistics".

Does anyone really care if their plane leaves the gate at the appointed time (or within the, I think, 20 minute window considered 'on time')? Not really. All a traveler cares about is whether he or she gets to the destination on time and how much one is delayed if not. Who wouldn't rather stay in the airport lounge an extra hour, rather than sitting on tarmac, strapped into a coach seat for an hour?

And speaking of sitting in an airport lounge. 'Percentage of on time departures' actually encourages a practice which should
be banned by statute: stranding a flight while other, later flights on exactly the same route with the same size planes are permitted to depart on time. I spent 8.5 hours in the Philadelphia International Airport thanks to this corrupt practice, but hey, USAirway kept their on-time departure percentage up.

One might hope that a forward-looking airline executive would realize the detriment to traveling public posed by the perverse incentives created by using on-time departure as the measure of efficiency, rather than on-time arrival or minimizing delay from scheduled arrival time, but corporate management being what it is these days, that's about as likely as being on a flight whose oxygen masks deploy.

However, someone in the travel journalism business could do the flying public a great service by compiling average on-time arrival statistics, and average delay from scheduled arrival statistics for major carriers, both system-wide and on popular routes.

Lent, 2006

2006-03-05T08:28:00.000-06:00

It seems appropriate, our separated Latin bretheren having begun their Lent, with Great Lent about to begin for Orthodox Christians worldwide to pause from comment on politics and other matters and consider spiritual matters.

This blog will seldom do this, as writing on spiritual matters is actually a peril to the soul. As St. Gregory Palamas says in his “On Commandments and Doctrines”:

According to St. Maximus the Confessor there are three motives for writing which are above reproach and censure: to assist one’s memory, to help others, or as an act of obedience. It is for the last reason that most spiritual writings are composed, at the humble request of those who have need of them. If you writ about spiritual matters simply for pleasure, fame or self-display, you will get your deserts as Scripture says, and will not profit and will not profit from it in this life or gain any reward in the life to come. On the contrary, you will be condemned for courting popularity and fraudulently trafficking in God’s wisdom.

I suppose bloggers who are trying to be faithful Christians must hope and pray that our words are a help to others, say in clarifying their own thoughts on contentious issues of the day.

The Fathers also exhort us to only teach what we have ourselves put into practice. So in hope of aiding other beginners. (Yes, after 12 years of keeping Great Lent, I am still a beginner. Holy Week still comes and I feel, “No! I need another week, another two weeks, to repent, to say the Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian.”)

Lenten advice from a beginner

Confess your sins.
Keep the basics of the fast. Abstain from all meat, fish, dairy and eggs, from olive oil, from wine and strong drink (except on days when a katalysis is provided), and lighten the amount you eat from your norm. Learn the lenten cuisines of traditionally Orthodox countries, the cuisines of cultures in which many are vegetarians, and if need be, avail yourself of the many soy-based vegan ‘substitutes’ now available.
Beyond this, adopt only those additional rigors provided by tradition which you can easily keep, be it curtailing the number of meals, abstaining from all food or all food and drink from the beginning of Pure Monday until after 3:00 PM Wednesday or after a Wednesday Pre-Sanctified Liturgy, or taking a stricter interpetation of the oil rule as is common among the Slavs. If you can’t do these easily, don’t: it is better to adopt a rule you can keep.
Avail yourself of such midweek Lenten services as are offered by your parish.
Add the Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian to your rule of prayer.

A good and holy lent to all, struggle well. May we come through the tempest of fasting to Our Lord’s Glorious Pascha.

Ports in a Storm

2006-02-24T08:54:00.000-06:00

There has been a lot of bluster in the world of American politics since the bureaucratic approval of the sale of British-owned Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation to Dubai Ports World, which suddenly became the only bidder for the British port management firm when a Singapore based firm dropped out of contention.

Suddenly, the Democrats, the party of multicultural tolerance, have discovered the value of racial profiling, the party of the 9/10/2001 balance between civil liberties and national security, have discovered an issue on which to get tough with the Islamic world.

And, not so suddenly, President Bush has again exhibited the political tin ear that gave us both his nomination of Harriet Myers, and his defense of that nomination. He may indeed have good reason to threaten a veto of legislation to block the sale, but given the prima facia cogency of arguments against the deal to the mind of the American public, a veto threat on this issue, without first laying out the facts in support of the deal, was perhaps the most politically inept move of his administration thus far. More so when issued with President’s staggeringly maladroit assertion that he saw no reason why a Middle Eastern country should be held to a different standard than a European country. Ann Coulter observed that she could think of 3000.

Nor is anyone holding Middle Eastern countries qua Middle Eastern countries to a different standard. Nobody except CAIR would be upset if an Israeli firm had won the bidding war and gotten regulatory approval for the deal, and at least a fair selection of those opposed would feel the same way if it were a state-owned firm from Pakistan, Brunei, or Indonesia that were involved.
The fact that our enemies in the current war are all Muslim, are infiltrated into Muslim states and minority Muslim subcultures world-wide, and that Islam provides blessing to the deception of non-Muslims are adequate reasons to hold Muslim countries and Muslim-owned corporations to a different standard.

The arguments against the deal have been rehearsed at length: two 9/11 hijackers were UAE nationals, the UAE was not helpful in tracking down al Qaeda finances in the days following 9/11, Freedom House lists the UAE as ‘not free,”. . . . And while the hysterical notion that the sale of a port operations company would put the corporate owners ‘in charge of security at our ports’ is silly (British bobbies aren’t currently in charge of security, American police and customs officials are), the fact is that the deal would produce a lot more travel to the US from the UAE, and with it more potential for al Qaeda infiltration.

On the other side, one has Gen. Tommy Franks, who praised not just Dubai’s permission to use their port facilities in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, but their running of those facilities, and the fact that Dubai in particular, whatever Freedom House’s assessment of the UAE may be, is, on the religious front, a bastion of relative freedom among the Gulf States.

The last time Dubai came into a news item I attended to, was the announcement last fall that the government of Dubai was footing the bill for the construction of a church for us Rum (as Eastern Orthodox Christians are called in the Middle East), which is expected to be completed by Holy Pascha. The UAE already had over a dozen churches, a few Latin, a few protestant of various stripes (including Baptist(!)), and about half a dozen monophysite of various sorts (Syrian Jacobite or Malabar), as well as a Hindu yogic meditation center.

The singularly good treatment received by Christians in Dubai (which even hosted a conference of evangelical protestants recently) stands in sharp contrast to both the neighboring Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where even transit passengers have their Bibles shredded and non-Islamic religious establishments are illegal, and to conditions for Christians in newly democratized Muslim areas, be it Iraq, where Ba’athism, for all its vile human rights violations and social repression, afforded Rum, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians alike more freedom of worship than the current situation, or the areas under control of the Palestinian Authority, where Bethlehem is under continued pressure to Islamize.

Get the facts on this one before you form an opinion--something our President didn’t do when he shot from the hip with a veto threat, something the the ‘putting Arabs in charge of security’ hysterics didn’t do. If Congress could be trusted to hold actual fact-finding hearings without the Democrat half of the committee turning into a lynch-Bush-mob, I’d suggest hearings. As it is, I hope our legislators individually study the matter carefully before forming their own opinions one way or the other.

Of course, one compromise would be to approve the sale, and then screen any Muslim employees of Dubai Ports World applying for admission to the US so rigorously that the company will decide either to hire only Americans for its U.S. operations, or to send us only Christians and Hindus from the UAE. But that won’t happen. It would require policymakers and politicians on both sides of the aisle to admit that the present conflict is what it is, and what our enemies know it to be: a war of religion.

Mohammed Smileys

It seems that some Sunni imam or other has issued a fatwa declaring that even emoticons violate the Islamic prohibition on images.

So here, for the amusement of my fellow infidels are some ways to tweak the Mohammedans, mostly courtesy of billorites at FreeRepublic.com:

Mohammed

(((:~{>

Mohammed playing Little Orphan Annie

(((8~{>

Mohammed as a pirate

(((P~{>

Mohammed on a bad turban day

))):~{>

Mohammed with sand in his eye

(((;~{>

Mohammed wearing sunglasses

(((B~{>

Mohammed giving the raspberry.

(((:~{P>

A clean-cut American giving Mohammed the raspberry.

;-P

An Orthodox monk in giving Mohammed the raspberry.

[[:-{P=====

Mohammed with a bomb in his turban

*-O(:~{>

Muslims are hypocrites! NOT!

2006-02-16T14:15:00.000-06:00

It seems fitting to start a blog that will most likely deal a lot with religion and politics with a topic that spans both.

One comment one reads and hears a lot in right-wing commentary on 'the Cartoon Wars' are 'Muslims are such hypocrites!'

I'd like to take exception.

Devout Muslims, like devout Jews or devout Christians of any confession, take seriously their belief that their religion is true, a reflection of the one, existing God and grounded in His decisive self-revelation, the Qu'ran. I, too, believe that my religion--Orthodox Christianity--is true and grounded in God's decisive self-revelation, His Incarnation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, even as Jews believe their religion is true and grounded in God's decisive self-revelation, the Torah.

The alleged hypocrisy of Muslims: that they happily produce and print really vile cartoons mocking Jews, visual presentations of the blood-libel and the like, while they explode into violence when Danish cartoonists, whose work is mild by the standards of American political charicature, hint at an arguable connection between their prophet and violence, is not hypocrisy. Rather, it is a colossal arrogance which stems from their self-assurance in their faith, and their religion's lack of regard for persons.

Muslims still believe that "error has no rights." Any other religion, being 'in error' according to their lights, is a proper target for mockery and vilification, while their faith, being 'true', must be defended against blasphemy at all costs--even, apparently, death and destruction of property of those whose only connection with the alleged blasphemers is being citizens of the same country, or even merely being other non-Muslims.

Westerners, of whatever religious tradition, secularists included, are inheritors of the anthropology of the Greeks, "Man is the measure of all things," of the Hebrews, "Come let Us make Man in Our image and likeness," and of Christ, "In as much as ye do it to the least of these, ye do it unto Me." The exalted status of the human person, whether conceived in pagan, Jewish or Christian terms, has no analog in Islam: submission to the will of Allah, the text of the Qu'ran is all. There is no symmetry between persons, no status worthy of regard, simply on the basis of their humanity: the Muslim is superior to the non-Muslim, period.

This is no hypocrisy: it is inhuman arrogance.

Alas, even guided by the commandment of Christ, "Love your enemies, and pray for those that persecute you," and His example of self-sacrifice, it took the horrible 'Wars of Religion' in the wake of the Western reformation before Christians generally came to agree with the words of the Surah Al-Baqara: “Let there be no compulsion in religion."

We must pray that a yet more horrible war will not be needed to overturn the centuries of triumphalist Qu'ranic interpretation by which the warlike Medinan surahs with verses like "When you meet the infidels, smite their necks," are used as the basis for creating compulsion in religion: compulsion which gave the Hindu Kush its name, compulsion which created the Jannisary corps, compulsion now being applied in hope of obliging Christians and secularists alike to abide by Muslim pieties regarding depictions of Mohammed.