Basic Math Fail

If you happen to know any Lilliputians in the market for office space, this place in Glenview has exactly 11 feet available:

I Heart My Wife

Some All Too Often Ignored Points about Church History

...from Mark Shea:

What simple-minded believers in this simple minded “Evil Empire Clerics vs. Plucky Rebel Alliance Laity” myth never seem to understand is that it was just as often the laity who were eagerly tanking up on the Blood Libel and chucking Jews down wells for the supposed crime of drinking the blood of Christian children while it was the clerics who were telling everybody to cool off and stop believing urban legends.

So, for instance, the simple tale of slavery turns out to be fraught with complexity, not least because it was not all laypeople opposing it (lots of laity got stinking rich off it) and it was not all clerics supporting it.  Slavery, it turns out, was an immemorial institution throughout all of human civilization and the way in which the Church engaged it simply cannot be boiled down to laity good/cleric bad.  Lots and lots and lots of laity had as little patience for the Church’s nuanced arguments for the dignity of the slave as readers like the one above have for the Church’s nuanced arguments for the distinction between the dignity of the homosexual person and the sin of homosexual intercourse.

Indeed, one of the ironies of the Church’s history is that, for most of it, the main charge brought against the Church is not that it is too conservative, but that it is too liberal.  It is the laity that, again and again, rushes off all agog for some form of extremist rigorism.  Had the Church listened to the “opinions and wisdom of the rest of the body of Christ” during the Donatist enthusiasm, we would have excommunicated large portions of the Body of Christ because they did not measure up to the hyper-rigorism of the Donatists, who held that any priest who did not measure up under persecution could not validly consecrate the Eucharist and any bishop who did not measure up could not validly ordain.  We would have caved in to Lollards who insisted that anybody not in a state of grace could not function as an agent of the state and need not be obeyed by citizens of that state.  Asking whether the cop who is arresting a mugger is in a state of grace may seem spiritual to some of our more ethereal members of the Body of Christ, but for most of us it is, as Chesterton noted, “wanting in actuality.”  Most Catholic heresies down through the ages have been attempts to keep as many people away from the grace of God as possible, urging the faithful to stay away from the Eucharist, shut up, and give up the hope of salvation.  The “wisdom” of the first antipope in history was that the Pope was a wuss who welcomed people back to communion far too easily, when what they needed was merciless rejection by the pure.

Indeed, the reason for the Church’s creation of a system of Inquisitions was precisely that laypeople were, in their profound wisdom that needed no guidance from celibate old men, already running around doing it on their own as vigilantes and lynch mobs.  Turns out the Church thought that having a system whereby the facts were obtained and evaluated in an orderly way was better than something like this.

Of course, most people get their history from Monty Python and therefore could not tell you five intelligent words from a primary source about what actually took place in an Inquisition (and yeah, there were more than one and they weren’t all in Spain).  Similarly, most people don’t seem to know that though God does indeed sometimes raise up “ordinary pwople to challenge the istitutional church of the time”, He also raises up clergy to challenge the easy assumptions of fat, dumb, and happy ordinary people, who are quite certain that, whatever Gregory X says, Jews are drinking the blood of Christian children; or that whatever out-of-touch Dominicans may say, Indians are natural slaves; or that whatever pantywaists like the pope and bishops say, the nuclear murder of thousands of Japanese or the torture of prisoners in the War on Terror is the glorious work of God; or that whatever the Church says about the value of human life, abortion is a beautiful right and the sole core value of the Democratic party.  Looking around at our violent, selfish and sex-besotted culture, I’m not immediately persuaded that we glorious laity are a civilization of St. Catherines who are prevented from flourishing in sanctity by the evil machinations of Benedict XVI.  This optimistic self-assessment, while quite in keeping with the enormously high self-regard of the Baby Boomers, fails to premise itself on much resembling “reality”.  One forms, rather, the impression that Benedict is a thoughtful, gentle, and holy man who is doing his best to speak the Church’s beautiful teaching to a braying horde of crazies compact of talk radio lackeys, cokeheads, horndogs, warmongers, sex maniacs and addicts of therapeutic moralistic deism who let Oprah or FoxNews do all their thinking for them.  That he maintains his gentle and thoughtful composure in the midst of such a TV-addled culture with the attention span of fruit flies is astounding to me.

Read the whole thing.

Bishop Olmsted, Judge Walker, James Lileks, Gay Marriage, and Hang-Ups

In response to this editorial in the Arizona Republic applauding Judge Vaughan Walker's decision to declare Prop 8 unconstitutional, Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix has a smashingly good column entitled "Marriage: a 'Hang Up' or God's Plan"?

It's well worth a read.

Reading it also brought to mind James Lileks' spot-on discourse on the subject of hang-ups:

“Hang-ups,” for you younguns, was one of those pop-psych terms used to describe people whose vestigial molecules of morality keeps them from personally participating in a barnyard orgy, even though they may decline from judging those who do. “Hang-ups” were the watery Freudian version of “problems,” which were called “neuroses” by people too old to smoke pot. There was nothing worse than having a hang-up in those days. Squares had hang-ups. It didn’t matter what you had a hang-up about; the point was getting over your hang-up, because its very existence implied that you were not a free person open to experience.

I have no idea how this actually worked in the real world, but I suspect the term was used sarcastically as much as it was employed with conviction. Depended on your age. If Young Angry Hip directors made some cheapo groovy movie for American International, the heroine would accuse the hero of having a hang-up, and she’d mean it. If it was a big-studio movie meant to capitalize on the counterculture and explain it for the squares in a nonthreatening way, well, you’d find some middle-aged fellow at a Love-In stammering fractured hip-talk at some blessed-out blonde in a flower-printed miniskirt; she was usually too stoned to notice he was an old dude who was wearing this ruffled shirt entirely by accident, amusing chain of events don’t you know, honestly I’m a respectable married man with a career who has been drawn into your intoxicating demimonde, and she would run a finger down his sternum and coo something about her guru; he’d realize she was bonkers, and utter a riposte that told the audience he was too clever and decent to have sex with her, and then he’d leave. Some mutton-chopped guy with red sunglasses would sidle up and ask the blonde why the guy split the scene, and she’d say “he had hang-ups.” The audience would know what that meant: chick’s an idiot.

You Can Help the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration

Since today is the feast of St. Clare, it's a fitting day to announce that my beloved wife Jocelyn is currently seeking donations to raise money for the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration in Black Canyon City, Arizona.

To this end, she is asking for pledges for a half marathon she's running on September 6.

Jocelyn has been motivated to get herself running and exercising after hearing about a Nun Run the Poor Clares had earlier this year, in which she and several friends participated as shadow runners in support of these wonderful sisters' efforts to build a new chapel at their Our Lady of Solitude Monastery. Currently they are raising money to help construct new stained glass windows for the chapel.

The Poor Clares have left the world in order to spend all their time with Our Lord, adoring Him, and praying for us and the Church. I would very much appreciate your support as Jocelyn trains for and runs this half marathon on their behalf on September 6.

The easiest way to make a donation is by clicking the PayPal button at the bottom of the sisters' home page.

You can also send a check payable to Our Lady of Solitude, Inc. to:

Our Lady of Solitude Monastery
P.O. Box 92
Black Canyon City, AZ 85324

Either way you choose to give, please indicate that your donation is a "Pledge for Jocelyn Jansen's half marathon".

Please keep Jocelyn in your prayers as she prepares for this race, that her efforts may be fruitful and be done for the greater glory of Our Lord.

Experts, Shmexperts, Part II

In response to my post earlier this week ("Experts, Shmexperts"), The Dutchman commented thusly:

And the alternative to experts is what? Savants? Psychics? Amateurs?

Maybe doctors aren't AS expert as we would wish, but life expectancy has about doubled since 1800.

Back in the nineteen sixties there was a lot of talk about "pointy headed experts" and it was pretty obvious back then that this was just an appeal to prejudice. So now, when I hear broadsides against "experts" I am deeply suspicious of what the real agenda of such an attack is.

In response to The Dutchman's question — which, to my mind, is a straw man — I should clarify something I implied but apparently didn't convey clearly in my earlier post:

By all means, yes, we should value the advice of experts. But only if they really are experts, and not merely people walking around who think of themselves as experts.

IOW: let's trust experts, but not so-called experts.

Of course, that begs prompts the question:

What makes someone an expert?

Garsh, I don't have time to get into the technical requirements, but let me just illustrate my point this way:

Imagine you're a new parent and you're looking for some advice on raising your kids. You read the latest book on child rearing by some guy who doesn't have children of his own, but has a Ph.D. in Child Psychology.

Then you talk to a middle aged woman at your church who you've known for a few years. She's a college graduate who worked for a years before she got married and started having kids, and since then, she's been a stay-at-home mom. She and her husband now have six kids, all of whom are of exemplary character.

All other things being equal, which of the two is the real expert on parenting, and which is the poser expert? Whose advice are you more likely to take to heart? And therefore, whose advice are you more likely to take?

As Chesterton once said, "By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men."

Different field, but same idea.

I'll save my thoughts on expertise as it relates to the medical field for another post.

Spot-On

The extraordinary stupidity behind the University of Illinois' decision to fire Professor Kenneth Howell ought to make all of us sit up and take notice of the very real danger inherent in the "'Shut Up,' He Explained" ethos that so permeates the higher education establishment.

What happened to Professor Howell is grossly unjust, and not at all funny.

But this mockery of the whole situation sure is:

Experts, Shmexperts

If you've ever thought that the word "expert" is bandied about way too much, and that many of the people who are commonly regarded as experts are, uh, well, not experts, you're right:

To read the factoids David Freedman rattles off in his book Wrong is terrifying. He begins by writing that about two-thirds of the findings published in the top medical journals are refuted within a few years. It gets worse. As much as 90% of physicians' medical knowledge has been found to be substantially or completely wrong. In fact, there is a 1 in 12 chance that a doctor's diagnosis will be so wrong that it causes the patient significant harm. And it's not just medicine. Economists have found that all studies published in economics journals are likely to be wrong. Professionally prepared tax returns are more likely to contain significant errors than self-prepared returns. Half of all newspaper articles contain at least one factual error. So why, then, do we blindly follow experts?

Because that's what a Herd of Independent Thinkers does.

Heh

Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked

Patriotism Fail

I realize the intent is to show love of one's country and all, but doesn't it seem odd to put Old Glory on something that is (a) not a little prone to rust and (b) whose very purpose is to collect garbage?

Vacation, Part II

I mentioned earlier this week that I'd be including more about our recent vacation/3,000 mile road trip. Hence, this post.

We had originally planned only to go to Vail, Colorado (why there? Because we won a raffle), but then we found out about a 90th birthday to be celebrated in Dallas, Texas for my late grandmother's last surviving sibling.

Not wanting to miss that, we decided we wanted to go both places, although we weren't exactly keen on the idea of traveling with the seven of us in our minivan over that great of a distance.

Then my parents proposed a solution: they'd go with us, and we would rent a 12-passenger van.

That turned out to be a great idea, as the extra space made traveling easy and relatively comfortable.

For purposes of this entry on this here weblog, I couldn't possibly (and nor would I want to) include the sort of details I would include if I were writing a "What I did on my summer vacation" sort of account. But in lieu of these, here are some observations (in no particular order) of things I (we) saw/experienced/learned:

I enjoy nothing more than spending time with Jocelyn and our kids.

We spent a lot of most enjoyable time in Texas with many second and third cousins that I had never previously met. All of them are great people — warm, welcoming, generous, etc. — the kind of folks you're glad to be related to.

This is the third time I've been in Texas this year. The weather in Texas is hot. I mean, really, really hot.

Throughout the trip generally, and along U.S. highways particularly, we saw countless numbers of shuttered businesses — most notably gas stations. Some had "For Sale" signs, but many others that didn't looked as if they'd been abandoned for years. Kind of reminded me of Radiator Springs.

Although Metropolis Coffee is brewed only a few blocks from where I used to live, I first tried it 1,100 miles away in Vail. And, as Agent Cooper would say, it is indeed "damn good coffee."

The air in Colorado really did seem a lot cleaner.

Most of the people we encountered in Colorado seemed remarkably friendly.

We barely scratched the surface of the hiking trails in Vail, but what's there is phenomenal.

We saw dozens, maybe hundreds, of wind turbines during the course of the trip. I haven't decided what I think about wind energy (is it a boon? or a boondoggle?), but I will say this: wind turbines look really creepy.

In the corn uber-producing state of Iowa, we found that the 89 octane gas is actually cheaper than 87 octane, because the former has a higher ethanol content.

The cinnamon bread and pumpkin butter (made in the Amana Colonies) that we bought in Iowa are mighty tasty.

And now for a few pictures:

You Don't See That Every Day

On Thursday, June 17, the inhabitants of Haus Jansen set out on our vacation/3,000 mile road trip, which wrapped up this past Saturday. I'm hoping to post more details some time this week, but for now I wanted to post my favorite picture from the trip, which was taken at a rest stop in north Texas:

The Sui Generis Eve Tushnet

...is profiled in The New York Times.

My guess is that Eve is one of those people that a wide range of many other people try to pigeonhole, and, in so doing, fail miserably.

Her blog is here, and her blogger profile is here.

Just in Time for Summer

Step right up and get your baloney sammiches!

I still can't decide if Homestar Runner is more funny than it is bizarre or more bizarre than it is funny.

The Catholic Church Persecuted Copernicus, Doncha Know

Oh. Wait.

Now, a smart reporter would note that getting buried under a cathedral is not exactly regarded as a sign of heresy or dishonor in medieval Poland. But an MSM reporter just regurgitates a Dan Brownian meme without thinking about it too much.

And speaking of Church history fails [HT: Theology Fail Blog]:

Hawkeytown Indifference

So the Stanley Cup finals start tomorrow night, and I'm wondering if I may be the only person in Chicagoland who couldn't care less what happens to the Blackhawks.

Hailing, as I do, from Minnesota, and (1) remaining bitter that Norm Green moved the North Stars to Dallas in 1993, and (2) refusing, on principle, to root for any team whose name is a collective noun, for years, I've been a man without an NHL team.

All I'm hoping is that the series is a sweep (regardless of who sweeps who), because I'm growing tired of all the extra pre-emptings of Milt Rosenberg on WGN.

What "Comprehensive" Sex Ed Is Really All About

The Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health is at it again.

In 2006, ICAH held its annual fundraiser at Playboy's executive offices.

That event—view the invitation here [PDF]—included a VIP reception with Playboy CEO Christie Hefner, the daughter of Hugh Hefner, who founded the magazine in 1953. Several years ago, Christie decided that the company could make more money by producing increasingly harder-core pornography—something that even her father was reluctant to do for a long time.

The next year, their annual fundraiser featured a stripper.

At this year's event on June 15, ICAH will be honoring sex advice columnist Dan Savage with the group's "Sexuality Activist Award."

The fact that Savage is being honored tells us everything we need to know about ICAH's values and the advice they believe should be given to kids.

On his website, Savage recommends things like group sex and encourages his readers to enter amateur porn contests. For the sake of propriety, most of the advice he gives I won't even mention obliquely.

He also ridicules a support group for pornography addicts by claiming "porn addiction is bulls***."

This despite reams of evidence showing how devastatingly harmful and addictive porn really is. (For but one example, witness pop singer John Mayer's candid admission that he would rather watch porn than form a new relationship with a real woman.)

In its press statement [PDF] announcing this year's event, ICAH blames "harmful abstinence-only-until-marriage messages that have proven inaccurate and ineffective" for the alarmingly high rates of pregnancy and STDs among teens.

Yet the evidence for successful abstinence education programs continues to mount, and meanwhile, it's increasingly clearer that the message of Condoms, Condoms, More Condoms, And Even More Condoms doesn't, you know, work.

So let's review:

For 3 of the last 5 years, the honored guests at ICAH functions have included the CEO of Playboy, a stripper, and a lurid sex columnist.

And they expect the people of Illinois to believe they have our children's best interests at heart when they push for so-called "comprehensive" sex education.

How stupid do they think we are?

Related Coverage on the Generations for Life Blog

• What Really Goes On In "Comprehensive" Sex Ed Class


• When did Playboy Become Respectable?

[Cross-posted at Pro-Life Action League and Generations for Life]

"Clarity on Torture"

Sean Dailey has an editorial currently up on the website of Gilbert Magazine that's titled, appropriately enough, "Clarity on Torture".

Here's an excerpt:

Do we really need to get into the nuts and bolts of what constitutes torture?

Yes, we do. Most will agree that taking a power drill to a man’s shoulder or pulling out his fingernails with pliers for punishment or to extract information is torture. But when the subject is waterboarding, clarity vanishes again. Some consider waterboarding to be mere psychological torture — which, as we’ve already established, is morally indistinguishable from physical torture.

But waterboarding is not a harmless dunk in the tub, as former Vice President Dick Cheney once likened it, and it is not psychological torture. In waterboarding, a subject is strapped to a gurney. His feet are elevated slightly above his head. A cloth is draped over his face. And water is poured on his face so that it enters his nose and mouth and flows into his lungs. CIA interrogators are instructed to pour the water immediately after a detainee exhales, to ensure he inhales water, not air. They use their hands to “dam the flow” of excess water from a detainee’s mouth. And detainees who are scheduled for waterboarding are put on a liquid diet, to minimize the risk of death should they inhale their own vomit.

This procedure became official American policy in our so-called War on Terror, but it was not always so. Waterboarding has been condemned by the United States government since at least 1898, when American soldiers were court marshaled for waterboarding prisoners during our occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. In World War II, we hanged Japanese war criminals for waterboarding American and Allied troops. In the 1980s in Texas, a sheriff and three of his deputies were convicted by the Justice Department for waterboarding prisoners to extract confessions.

And yet, there are those exceptions: American security is at stake. If waterboarding saves even one life, isn’t it worth it?

If torturing a terrorist suspect saved a city from destruction, or if it saved even one life, it would still be a barbaric, savage act, unworthy of a civilized society. If expediency were enough to justify an immoral act, then abortion would be justifiable.

Read the whole thing.

You Don't See That Every Day

Like many schools, the grade school down the street from Haus Jansen has a sign in front on which are displayed various messages — most often, school announcements: "Spring Break: March 29 - April 2" or "Congratulations Mr. Brown on 32 years of teaching", or platitudes: "Knowledge is power", etc.

But notice the message that's there now:



Of course, our local school district isn't alone:



I wish every entity that the State of Illinois owes money to would likewise shout it from the rooftops. It might just help wake people up to how mind-bogglingly corrupt and financially mismanaged this place is.

Best. Spoof. Ever.

Not only that, it won the Papyrus Font Award!



Mark Shea comments thusly:

The layers of post-modern irony and metanarrative are thick as leaves in a Vermont forest in October, but dayum is this funny and spot on.

Cradle Catholics and Emergents have an almost impenetrably different understanding of what "worship" means. For Emergents (following their Evangelical parents) worship is profoundly bound up with music (the most disincarnational of the arts, unless you happen to be the one playing it). Evangelicalism, being leery of the Incarnation whenever you encounter it today tends to focus a lot on the verbal and auditory as distinct from the physical and tangible. So the Eucharist is "magic" but worship in which the believer moves himself into a "state of worship" is, well, worship.

Inevitably, it results in the sort of thing spoofed here.

I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with him about music's being disincarnational, but I can't argue with him about Evangelical Protestantism's inherent leeriness about the Incarnation as it is encountered today through various means, including, but by no means limited to, the Sacraments.