A Closer Look

The Feds Want to Censor the Internet

The list below is taken from a website called TheoriesofConspiracy.com about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill going through Congress that would put America behind its own Chinese firewall. While the bill is being sponsored by a particularly odious Republican, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, it has the enthuasiastic backing of liberal Democrats who love the idea of the government taking control of the Internet at last — including many from California who have been paid off by the entertainment conglomerates pushing for this bill. Among the Democrats trying to ram SOPA and its companion bill in the Senate,the PROTECT IP Act down the throat of the American public are  Howard Berman (D-CA), Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA). The most troubling aspect of the legislation, revealed in a live video posted on YouTube.com, is the wholesale technical ignorance of the hack politicians presuming to reinvent the Internet.  In the hearing on SOPA, the politicians revealed themselves to have a computer knowledge of three-year-olds — yet they don’t hesitate to pass legislation that would shut down entire sections of the Internet without due process.  AMong the proposed laws most odious features: Website Blocking With this bill, government can order Internet service providers to block websites for infringing links posted by any users. Websites like Reddit, Tumblr, and even Youtube, are fair targets to be shutdown. Risk of Jail for Ordinary Users It... [Read more of this post]

Fred Reed on Chickenhawks…

One of my favorite expat columnists, Fred Reed who lives down Mexico way, spent some time as a military affairs reporter and police reporter. Unlike many anti-war conservatives and liberals, therefore, Fred has a healthy respect for the military — at least, as much respect as someone who has actually spent a lot of time with soldiers can have. In other words, he’s a realist. His problem with the Republican chickenhawks like Newt Gingrich is that their ignorance and arrogance can get a lot of good people (mostly teenagers) killed. Here’s what he says we need to ask all the candidates urging quick military action against Iran… To begin, I will ask the following questions of the candidates, and for that matter of Mr. Obama, and of the Secretary of Defense, a generic bureaucrat. Can you explain: Convergence zones, base bleed, Kursk, range-gate pull-off, artillery at Dien Bien Phu, IR cross-over, Tet and queen sacrifice, Brahmos 2, CIWIS, supercruise, side-lobe penetration, seven-eighty-twice gear, super-cavitating torpedoes, phased arrays, pulse Doppler, the width of Hormuz versus the range of Iranian cruise missiles, DU, discarding sabot, frequency agility, Chobham armor, and pseudo-random PRF? These, gentlemen, are the small talk of serious students of the military. Here I mean men like David Isby, author of such books as Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army for Jane’s, which you likely have never heard of, or William S. Lind, probably the best... [Read more of this post]

How to Be Happy in Life

There are many different ways of life, of course, and each person has to choose the way that fits his or her personality and intuitions about what life is all about and how to be happy. There is the way of the adventurer. The way of the businessman. The way of the scholar or priest. There is the way of the artist or mystic. There is even Gurdjieff’s Way of the Sly Man, the secret mystic who lives like an ordinary business man. But because I studied Aristotle at a young age, I’ve always been persuaded that, when considering how to “structure” your life, you should consider how best to use whatever God-given talents you’ve been given. In his Nicomachian Ethics (1095a15–22), Aristotle said that happiness (eudaimonia) comes from the full exercise of your powers… from using your gifts… and I’ve always thought that is true. And that is why, for me personally, one of the dominant themes of my life has always been what I call balance – the attempt to arrange your life, in so far as its possible, so that you have some balance in life and are able to use as many abilities as possible. Perhaps this is actually the Way of the Dilettante but I prefer to think of it as the Way of the Renaissance. In other words, I wanted a life in which I could marry, raise a family, think, create, study, make money, travel, play sports, stay in shape, play music, read books, and, in general pursue my interests and passions. I tried to make choices, as life went on in its haphazard... [Read more of this post]

None of the Above

The word “politics” is derived from the word “poly,” meaning “many,” and the word “ticks,” meaning “blood sucking parasites.” – Larry Hardiman The world needs a political and economic alternative. The obsolete ideas and ideals of Big Government collectivism … and the equally bankrupt ideas and ideals of Big Business collectivism… have run their course. Now all that is left, in most developed countries, is a political stalemate that is increasingly acrimonious, even dangerous. The only sane alternative for fair-minded humanists everywhere is to abandon the siren song of politics altogether… to flee the plantation of government rules and regulations… and channel their energies into social and economic projects that lie outside the realm of politics. What sorts of projects? Anything that is based on voluntary cooperation, not force. Any individual initiative or social effort that invites participation, not demands it. That would include new businesses, voluntary organizations, neighborhood groups, food and medical co-ops, charities, churches and temples, social outreach enterprises. For thousands of years, this was how people served the common good: voluntarily. Someone saw a need that wasn’t being met, thought of a way that need could be met, and then either created a solution that could be sold, or, alternatively, persuaded neighbors and friends to join in a collective effort to provide a solution. Thus, Benjamin Franklin and... [Read more of this post]

Why Newt Gingrich is a False Messiah

Like most people who enjoy frank and intelligent conversation, I like Newt Gingrich. He is smart, knowledgeable, intelligent to a fault, every bit the history professor he once was. I first saw him, more than 18 years ago, at a gathering of conservative activists in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. He mesmerized the audience then just as he mesmerizes growing numbers of Republicans today. Republicans are so grateful to have someone in their party who can string together more than two coherent sentences at a time — let alone someone who knows the specific details of policy and history — quite a few are falling all over themselves in support of Newt. But Newt is a false messiah. Like the greatest disaster to befall the Republican Party in a century, the faux cowboy George W. Bush, Newt is a “big government conservative.” He believes, like most of the Republican candidates with the exception of Ron Paul, in expanding government power, not limiting it. He wants to start new wars, not end the ones we’re already in. Indeed, as the historian Thomas J. DiLorenzo has chronicled in painful detail, Newt’s proposed foreign policy is downright frightening — even granting that a lot of what he says is merely posturing for the Republican base. According to Gingrich, the U.S. military should invade Lebanon with the purpose of “disarming Hezbollah.” This would effectively commence another war with Syria, says Gingrich, as it... [Read more of this post]

Carl Levin and John McCain Repeal the Fifth Amendment

A bipartisan coalition of increasingly rabid U.S. senators, led by Carl “Jabba the Hut” Levin (a Democrat) and John McCain (a Republican), have quietly laid the legal groundwork for martial law in the United States. That sounds alarmist but it may be quite literally true. Their amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) repeals the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (“no person [not citizen] shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) and centuries of legal precedent regarding the doctrine of habeas corpus. At issue in the NDAA amendment is whether the U.S. military should have the power to arrest U.S. citizens, here on U.S. soil, and detain those citizens indefinitely in military prisons (here or overseas) without access to legal counsel or due process and without trial in civilian court. Sections 1031 and 1032 of the NDAA, cooked up in secret by the corrupt lizard Levin and McCain and recently passed by the U.S. Senate after heated debate, say that the military can arrest and detain anybody “who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.” Obviously anyone who is actively supporting terrorists or engaged in terrorism should be arrested.... [Read more of this post]

New Mass Translations A Bit Awkward and Therefore Beneficial

The entire English-speaking Catholic world today began the painful process of adjusting to new translations of the Mass. And the verdict is in: Many people, particularly clergy and professional church folk, dislike them. Some dislike them intensely. The Jesuits have been carrying on their usual rear-guard assault for weeks now, in the pages of America. Commonweal naturally despises the new translations. Even The Tablet, the English Catholic journal that tends to be slightly more temperate in its expressions of dissent, has run article after article bemoaning the new translations. The idea behind the new translations, of course, was to be a “reform of the reform,” to correct the overly-sloppy and needlessly dumbed-down translations that were rushed into print in the heady days of folk masses after Vatican II. Conservatives have long pointed out how the translations produced by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) seemed to have a deliberate theological agenda beyond merely smooth diction. It wasn’t merely a question of “dynamic equivalence” (looser) versus “formal equivalence” (more literal) translations but of actual distortion, the conservatives asserted. Nevertheless, many people find the new, more literal translations from the Latin to be awkward in the extreme, wordy, laden with theological jargon (incarnate, consubstantial) that doesn’t exactly pour off your tongue smoothly. The priest... [Read more of this post]

Rob Bell Asks the Big Questions Ignored by Many Churches

What I love most about Rob Bell’s controversial book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (HarperOne, 2011), is the way it has triggered a new debate about what is really at stake in Christianity. The odd thing about Christianity, at least in the United States, is that tens, even hundreds of millions of its adherents can’t really articulate its core beliefs beyond the most superficial, kindergarten level. That is not a snobbish slam on Americans but simply a fact of life. Like most religions (with the possible exception of Buddhism), Christianity is not so much a philosophical system as it is a subliminal, pre-conscious worldview that is passed on from generation to generation through rituals, symbols, readings from canonical texts, stories, proverbs, finger painting and occasional catechetical classes. This cultural inheritance carries, of course, philosophical ideas and historical claims, but it is the rare adult Christian these days who has taken the time to examine systematically any of that inheritance. It is the rare Christian indeed who gets a systematic presentation of the key ideas and philosophical presuppositions of his or her religion – perhaps in a parochial school religion class or in a Christian high school senior seminar. Some Christian denominations do a better or worse job at this than others, but even those denominations that try to give a systematic overview of what Christianity is all about rarely... [Read more of this post]

How I Saw the Loch Ness Monster

I never really expected to actually see the Loch Ness Monster. As a result, when I looked through the tour boat window out at the frigid waters of the loch and happened to spot “Nessie” cruising alongside with a little monster in tow, it was a startling moment. What made it more amazing was that I was gazing at the time at the radar scanner that the boat has in its main cabin. As it moves up and down the loch, this boat, and the other boats as well, are constantly scanning every nook and cranny of this 23-mile-long inland lake in the Highlands of Scotland. Loch Ness is the second largest lake in Scotland (after Loch Lomand, where the popular BBC series, Monarch of the Glen, was filmed). But there she was, right before my eyes, right out the starboard window (see nearby photo). I was in the UK on personal business and decided, after visiting St. Andrews and its famous golf course and university, to take a trip up north and see Nessie for myself. I’ve always been willing to believe in most legendary creatures now derided by science, including the yeti of the Himalayas, the Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest, fire-breathing dragons, at least some elves, trolls for sure (I’ve met some myself!), and giants. I haven’t made up my mind about vampires and werewolves, though, and am an unreconstructed skeptic when it comes to space aliens. But Nessie? A race of prehistoric plesiosaurs that somehow survived in the isolated lochs of northern Scotland and falsely believed,... [Read more of this post]

Can a Faithful Catholic be a Democrat, Republican or Green?

What’s a peaceful, freedom-loving, family-oriented, hard-working Catholic guy to do with the current state of U.S. politics? For decades, now, it’s been obvious that even a moderately faithful Catholic cannot feel at home in any of the major, or even the minor, U.S. political parties. We are given the choice between an increasingly militaristic, even bellicose Republican Party that goes out of its way to sneer at civil liberties and enthusiastically endorses torture, illegal surveillance of ordinary citizens and the death penalty… and the morally tone-deaf party of slavery (both literally and figuratively), the Democrats, who have never seen an authoritarian Big Government program they didn’t like and whose only economic policy prescription is to “Tax the Rich” (the “rich” being defined as anyone who holds a job) and whose embrace of “abortion rights” is so extreme that it even includes outright infanticide. Not a very appealing choice. The Party of Death versus, well, the Party of More Death. The truth is, Catholics are odd ducks in American politics. The ones who actually go to church and believe the central tenets of their Faith (as opposed to the “I was raised” Catholic variety who skew polling data) are, by and large, fairly conservative on social issues (abortion, marriage and embryo research), moderate on economic issues and occasionally downright liberal on environmental, peace and justice issues. (Most church-going Catholics, for example,... [Read more of this post]

The Return of the Republican Chickenhawks

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Republican debate on foreign policy, held November 12, was that it presaged the return of the Republican chickenhawks. The term “chickenhawk,” of course, refers to someone who is an extreme “hawk” on military matters without ever having served himself or herself in the military. It was a frequent taunt of Democrats aimed at the Bush Administration because so many dovish Democrats had, in fact, served in the military, while some of the most hawkish members of the Bush Administration — most notoriously Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the most staunchest advocates of using torture, assassination and other extreme measures — never saw a day of military service, much less combat. As someone who also is not a veteran, I can honestly say that non-veterans owe two debts when speaking about anything involving the military. The first is respect. One of the biggest mistakes of liberals during the 1960s and ’70s, one which, I think, they have now corrected, was to blame rank-and-file soldiers for the decisions made by politicians. Most anti-war liberals now acknowledge that Americans owe a profound debt of gratitude and respect to the men and women who have served in the U.S. armed forces… whether or not you agree with the military policies of whatever administration happens to be in power. Freedom truly isn’t free. The second debt non-veterans owe is a frank humility when it comes to... [Read more of this post]

Democrats Love Death Squads… When They’re Obama’s!

The same Democrats who screamed the loudest over the illegal and immoral use of torture against captured terrorists, when it was done by the Bush Administration, have become enthusiastic supporters of the CIA’s new death squads. Nothing like having principles, eh? Both Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and fierce opponent of civil liberties, have announced that they publicly support the Obama Administration’s use of “death squads” to assassinate American citizens if the government decides they’re threats. However, in Feinstein’s case, she has politely requested that the White House release the legal memorandum, produced by the Office of Legal Counsel, that attempts to show how such “targeted killings” do not violate the U.S. Constitution and federal bans on assassination. Feinstein said that the release of the OLC memo is necessary “to maintain public support of secret operations” in the facing of growing public opposition. “While U.S. counterterrorism operations are, by necessity, classified, I do believe the administration should make public its legal analysis on its counterterrorism authorities, whether in the form of a legal opinion or a white paper,” Feinstein said. “For both transparency and to maintain public support of secret operations, it is important... [Read more of this post]

Ron Paul on the CIA’s New Death Squads…

Thanks to the New York Times’s Charlie Savage, we now know that the creation of the CIA’s new death squads (authorized to assassinate any American citizens the president decides are “threats”) was the work, naturally, of two government lawyers — David Barron (who now teaches at Harvard Law School) and Martin Lederman (who teaches at Georgetown) of the hilariously misnamed Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). This was the same government office that produced the official legal memoranda (here, here, here and here) that authorized the use of torture and illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens condemned around the world. Ironically enough, Marty Lederman, back when he pretended to have principles, rightly railed against the Bush White House for its torture policies. But once he was ensconced in the same office as the now-infamous torture memo authors — Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury — Lederman indulged in the same legal casuistry they did and went even further than they did in shredding the U.S. Constitution. All this has been amply documented, as usual, by Glenn Greenwald, stepping into Nat Hentoff’s shoes as one of America’s very few independent, principled journalists. Predictably, there has been nary a peep out of Congressional Democrats about this. Two years ago, Rep. Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called for the impeachment of federal judge Jay Bybee for his role in justifying and excusing... [Read more of this post]

Video: Avon Descent

One of my favorite gurus, Tom Hodgkinson of The Idler, demonstrates what you can do with your spare time if you don’t waste so much energy on work, paying taxes and doing what everyone tells you. An awesome achievement pulled off at the last minute! This was the 2011 Avon Descent, the only white water race of its kind in the world. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Video: Avon Descent", url: "http://roberthutchinson.com/blogging/video-avon-descent/" }); Read More →

Video: Contemplative Nuns Doing Aikido

A sick, twisted member of my Aikido dojo sent me this video: Nuns practicing karate and, at the end, a little judo and Aikido. (One of the nuns does a pretty good sumi-otoshi there, albeit with a judo flair.) Some people really do have too much time on their hands. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Video: Contemplative Nuns Doing Aikido", url: "http://roberthutchinson.com/health/video-contemplative-nuns-doing-aikido/" }); Read More →

Do We Really Want the U.S. Government Assassinating Its Citizens?

The assassination of a U.S. citizen by the Central Intelligence Agency has rekindled the legal debate on whether the U.S. government can kill its own citizens without them being found guilty of or even charged with any crime but merely because the government considers them “threats.” It is a chilling, terrifying day when we assert that Barack Obama can now order the execution of anyone he chooses without judicial oversight of any kind. And make no mistake: That is precisely what the “targeted killing” of the American-born al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki now means. The U.S. government has not produced a shred of evidence that al-Awlaki had “gone operational,” as U.S. officials lamely put it. It’s all “top secret.” When you read the details of the 12 or so plots al-Awlaki was supposedly “involved” in, it turns out that most of the would-be perpetrators had read al-Awlaki’s writings, or were “inspired” by his sermons. I have no doubt that al-Awlaki was a bloody-minded Islamic fanatic. But this case means that the U.S. government is now asserting, as a matter of policy, that it may assassinate its own citizens for writing or saying things it disagrees with, so long as the government claims (but doesn’t even bother to prove) they are “threats.” Of course, the government’s legal apologists — such as Kenneth Anderson, an international law scholar at American University’s... [Read more of this post]

The Conservative Case Against the Death Penalty

I’ve always been opposed to capital punishment, and for the most conservative of reasons:  I don’t believe government should have the authority to take human life, at least not in a society, such as ours, that has the resources to build prisons. This is a fundamentally conservative position because it rests upon the assumption that government is, by definition, incompetent and often malicious. Do we really want the same type of semi-literate, unionized sludges who run, say, the U.S. Postal Service or the Department of Motor Vehicles, having the power to execute people?  I don’t think so. It’s not surprising that many liberals and Democrats support capital punishment (although many also oppose it).  (Yes, Virginia, Obama and Clinton are both supporters of capital punishment:  Obama led an effort in Illinois to restore the death penalty when numerous exonerations persuaded the Republican governor, George Ryan, to halt all executions and commute the sentences of everyone awaiting execution, giving most of them life in prison.) Liberals and Democrats believe in government.  The more government, the better.  They teach the opposite of what Thomas Jefferson and Thoreau taught:  That government is best which governs most! But what does surprise me is that so many alleged conservatives also support capital punishment, although that is changing.  Ann Coulter, for example, who I often find hilarious and agree with at least 50 percent of the time, recently... [Read more of this post]

The Death of a True Teacher

I just found out that an old college professor of mine, George, died in his sleep recently. He was 84. I’m sad because he was one of those people I wanted to get in contact with to say thank you, and I never did. A few years ago, I emailed his son – a former Jesuit – and he gave me George’s address. I was thinking about sending him a copy of my recent book, to show him that something of what he had taught me had stuck with me, that his lessons mattered. But I never did. I felt it would be showing off. Now I wish I had. George taught theology at a Jesuit university but he was an inspiration for a small circle of Catholic would-be intellectuals in the city. He was a layman, father of seven, not a priest or religious, and he delighted in shocking his students with frank (often obscene) comments about sex, race relations, war and peace, and so on. In that, he was a child of his time (I studied with him in the late 1970s). But George was a lot more. He introduced his students to a whole different world, a world in which Christianity and Catholicism were vital and urgent and had important things to say to the world. He introduced us to heavy-weight thinkers like Bernard J.F. Lonergan (his hero) and Karl Rahner, to Bernard Cook and Rollo May and Erich Neumann. When I was only 18, I was being initiated into the arcane world of transcendental Thomism. More of it stuck with me that George ever realized. Just two days ago, someone asked me in a business meeting what... [Read more of this post]

Why Evolution Can’t Explain Evolutionists

John Haught, a Catholic theologian, had yet another interesting but perplexing article in the December 6 issue of America, the Jesuit weekly.  It was entitled “Do We Need God to Be Good?” Haught is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University and he has spent the last decade, at least, wading in shallow tide pools of evolutionary biology, pointing out the odd creatures who live there to people like me who happen to be walking down the beach. There are two types of evolutionary scientists scurrying about in the tide pool mud, Haught explains.  There are the regular scientists, their slide rules poking out of their pocket protectors, who accept the reality of evolution implicitly and just go about their job of figuring out the mechanisms of the natural world.  These are the real, working scientists who make actual discoveries.  Then there are the self-important writers of books, like Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins, who think evolution explains pretty much everything in the universe — from worm holes to Mozart.  They are wannabe philosophers who don’t want to bother actually studying philosophy — since, after all, evolution explains everything so why read philosophy books?  (Or history books or novels or economics or sociology or anything at all.)  Anyone who finds their simplistic reductionism a bit hard to take — a little too much like the old “Omni” Magazine — is still... [Read more of this post]

A Routine Near-Death Experience… and a Rumor of Angels

Two days ago, I was almost killed in an instant. I had one of those experiences that shake you to your very core – and which, to me, constitute some sort of proof of divine providence. It was a very ordinary day. I drove my son to the beach train for his daily trip up the coast to high school. My wife had given me some money and asked me to stop at the store to pick up some sour cream. We were having chicken fajitas for dinner, and one of my kids like sour cream on them. I pulled into the grocery store parking lot around 7:30 a.m. As I walked into the store, I noticed three very young children right outside the door. They caught my attention because they were pretty young to leave alone. There was a baby in a stroller and a boy and a girl of about four or five years of age, watching the baby. I assumed the mother left them outside and ran into the store to buy something. “That’s a bit odd,” I thought. “I hope the mom hurries up. They’re a little young to leave alone.” I went into the store, found my sour cream, and left. I then got into my car, buckled up, and headed to the exit of the parking lot. Now, the parking lot of this grocery store is slightly raised from main street of town that runs in front of it. The store itself, on the right, extends right out to the sidewalk. On the left, there is a brick wall that runs parallel to the sidewalk. Because the exit is a kind of ramp, the brick wall blocks your view of the street to the left. The parking... [Read more of this post]

Organization “Inside Google” Runs Ads About Google CEO’s Big Brother-Like Attitude

Most parents understand that the Internet is NOT their friend. Companies like Google are making billions by tracking everything you do online… and then selling that information to the highest bidder. Worse, they are tracking everything your children are doing as well… up to and including using the GPS in their cell phones to track their movements. Fortunately, the public is FINALLY waking up — and fighting back. The organization “Inside Google” is now running ads on the Times Square Jumbotron lampooning Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s famous comment that, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Schmidt could have worked for the East German Stasi with that attitude. Between corporate sleazebags like Schmidt and Big Brother totalitarians in the U.S. government, Americans will soon have their every movement watched, online and off. On a more practical level, Inside Google offers a number of privacy tools on its website that can help you get started taking back your life from corporate totalitarians like Schmidt. Go to… http://insidegoogle.com/takeaction/privacy-toolbox/ It’s not just a matter of disabling “cookies.” Hundreds, even thousands of websites –especially those that use Flash Video — place tracking programs on your computer that monitor everything you do. These tracking programs — known as LSOs... [Read more of this post]

Why I Don’t Trust Doctors (or Most “Experts” for That Matter…)

In bioethics, politics and law, oftentimes we must rely upon the opinions of so-called “experts,” particularly those in the medical professions.  But as anyone who has ever dealt with doctors knows, they are frequently wrong — but almost NEVER admit it. The problem is, their arrogance can get people killed or cause serious harm. That’s one of the reasons why you should never trust doctors or any other expert. Or rather, you should follow Reagan’s Dictum: Trust… But Verify. Take this recent case from Australia. A woman, Kate Ogg, delivered twins and was told that, after 20 minutes of resuscitation efforts, that the male child wasn’t going to make it. The hospital staff lay the lifeless body of the premature infant on the mother’s chest so she could say goodbye. The problem is, the baby began to stir. “Just reflexive movements,” the doctor sniffed dismissively. The parents trusted the doctor knew what he was talking about — always a problematic assumption — and continued to nuzzle the baby as it squiggled around. They assumed he was dying. They kept asking the doctor to re-examine the baby, but he refused. Repeatedly refused. He had decided. He had made up his (arrogant) mind. Too busy filling out his forms to bother taking another look. This attitude is rampant in medicine. Here’s what happened next as reported on MSNBC.com: Jamie [the baby] continued to come around as he lay across Kate’s... [Read more of this post]

Evolution, Creation and Adam & Eve, Part 1

The debate over Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve is one of my least favorite topics.  That’s because I’ve accepted the theory of evolution ever since fourth grade, when it was first explained to me in science class by a Dominican nun. As a result, debating evolution feels a lot like debating the Pythagorean theorem: It’s something I studied 40 years ago… long ago accepted… but makes my head hurt even thinking about. This is one of the many differences between Catholics and Protestants, I’ve found.  Catholics rarely if ever think about evolution.  For Protestants, it’s one of their favorite subjects, a principal “litmus test” for theological orthodoxy in many churches. It took the agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrmann nearly 20 years of rigorous graduate education before he could finally come to accept what I learned in fourth grade:  that human beings have existed on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years… and their physical bodies likely developed out of more primitive animal forms. When I was in high school, one of my Jesuit teachers showed me a copy of Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis in which the pope explained that “the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter” is not incompatible with Christian faith as revealed in the Biblical texts.  Here is the key section (36): For these... [Read more of this post]

Benedict XVI’s Visit to Great Britain Will Bring Out the Lunatics

The Vatican announced today that Pope Benedict XVI will visit Great Britain on September 16-19. “Accepting the invitation of Her Majesty Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, and of the bishops’ conferences of England and Wales, and of Scotland, His Holiness Benedict XVI will make an apostolic trip to the United Kingdom from 16 to 19 September,” the Pope’s spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, said. The theme chosen for the papal visit to England is “Heart Speaks Unto Heart,” Cardinal Newman’s motto. According to Inside the Vatican magazine, following the pope’s arrival at Edinburgh airport on September 16, he will be driven to Holyrood Palace where he will be welcomed by Her Majesty the Queen. “He will then travel through the center of Edinburgh in the Popemobile, and the Scottish bishops are encouraging ‘as many people as possible’ to attend and line the Pope’s route and to attend the public Mass in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park.” Given the official welcome by the Queen, it is doubtful that the British government will permit the threatened legal action against the pope planned by the UK’s infamous village atheists, the Oxford biologist and town crank Richard Dawkins and U.S.-based journalist Christopher Hitchens. The two men have allegedly been scheming for months — with the help of two British lawyers, Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens — to have the Crown... [Read more of this post]

NCR Blogger Rebuts Biased New York Times Attack on Pope

It’s not often you read someone in the National Catholic Reporter defending the pope.  After all, with the exception of its excellent Vatican correspondent John Allen, Jr., the NCR is to Catholicism what The Nation is to the Republican Party:  the official organ of opposition. For decades, it’s been the primary forum for angry ex-priests, angry ex-nuns and even, in the case of uber-liberal Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, angry ex-archbishops.  It regularly features columns by the usual collection of geriatric Sixties liberals, such as Richard McBrien of Notre Dame, ex-priest Eugene Kennedy, Joan Chittister, Charles Curran, and so on. For a “NCR Catholic,” the papacy is not a “charism of unity” that has held an international community of believers together for well nigh 2,000 years but merely an archaic medieval institution that should have long ago been jetisonned by a “progressive” church (small C). Thus, it was something of a surprise to read new NCR blogger Michael Sean Winters actually step up and defend Pope Benedict XVI (the arch-villain for the NCR for literally decades!) against the assorted imbecilities and logical incoherence of the New York Times. “This morning’s New York Times “expose” regarding then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s role in the Vatican’s response to the clergy sex abuse crisis exposes more than it intended,” Winters writes. “It exposes the fact that the authors, Laurie Goodstein... [Read more of this post]

Frank Fenner: Another Crackpot Prediction of Doom

NOTE:  The photo above is an illustration of what the earth would look like if ALL of the ice on earth melted and the worst fears of the climate change doomsayers came true:  About 4% more of the earth’s surface would be covered by water than is true today. I would take the aged scientist Frank Fenner’s predictions of imminent doom more seriously if his fellow scientists hadn’t been making the same predictions for 400 years — and have a near perfect record of being wrong. Apparently Fenner, a 90-year-old microbiologist, calmly told The Australian newspaper recently that the human race faces extinction within 100 years due to… wait for it!… overpopulation, famine and, yes, climate change. “We’re going to become extinct,” Fenner told the newspaper jovially. “Whatever we do now is too late.” At least Hollywood is more original: In the film 2012, which I found entertaining if a bit tedious, the extinction comes from a new kind of Flood: all the land masses are covered by a massive melting of the earth’s ice. The problem is, such a scenario is scientifically impossible. If all the ice on earth did, in fact, melt, it wouldn’t come close to covering all of the land masses. According to William Johnston, melting the 29.3 million cubic kilometers of grounded ice would produce 26.1 million cubic kilometers of water and raise the levels of the oceans about 66 feet — enough to swamp small low-lying islands... [Read more of this post]

Catholic Lesbian Blogger Eve Tushnet

The New York Times had an interesting article on the lesbian Catholic blogger Eve Tushnet.  She’s not interesting because she’s lesbian and Catholic (lots of those) but because she is lesbian, Catholic and opposes same-sex marriage. Raised in a liberal household (her father a non-observant Jew, her mom a Unitarian), Tushnet went to Yale a conventional student liberal and left a committed Catholic intellectual with a decidedly conservative bent.  She went to a meeting of the Yale underground club, The Party of the Right — to, as she puts it, “laugh at the zoo animals” — and was astonished to find the conservative kids to be intellectual, quite tolerant of her open lesbianism and very funny.  Tushnet herself defies the stereotypes of faithful Catholics by embracing the ideology of joy: She may befuddle others, but for her, life is joyful. She takes obvious pleasure in being an eccentric in a tradition with no shortage of odd heroes, visionaries and saints. “You can be really quite strange, and the Catholic church will canonize you eventually,” she says. She loves eating the flesh and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, which she believes is a carnivorous meal, not a metaphor. She loves gay synth-pop bands. “I really think the most important thing is, I really like being gay and I really like being Catholic,” she says. “If nobody ever calls me self-hating again, it will be too soon. “Nothing is quite as great as getting up... [Read more of this post]

Catholic Church in Tibet

I’ve been fascinated by Tibet my entire life — ever since I read, as an 11-year-old, Alexandra David-Neel’s classic Magic and Mystery in Tibet (a book I still own and reread). As a child, I scooped up every book on Tibet I could find in my local public library: Lowell Thomas, Jr.’s Out of This World to Forbidden Tibet… Heinrich Harrer’s classic Seven Years in Tibet... Thubten Norbu’s Tibet is My Country... and Lama Anagarika Govinda’s The Way of the White Clouds. Of course, I am hardly unique in this fascination. The whole Lost Horizon’s fantasy obviously appeals to millions of westerners… that of a peaceful kingdom of meditating monks living in an isolated plateau in the faraway mountains. But I’ve maintained my interest in Tibet for more than 40 years… eventually discovering the works of Chogyam Trungpa and other westernized lamas. The peaceful Tibetans struck me as very similar to people in my own Catholic background. Both the Catholic Church and Tibetan Buddhism share many similar external traits — a central authority figure who serves for life (the pope, Dalai Lama)… large monasteries and converts… different religious “orders” (in the case of the Tibetans, the four principal “sects” such as the Kagyu, Sakya, etc.)… elaborate liturgical ceremonies involving vestments, incense and the like… a highly developed iconography… different mystical... [Read more of this post]

BP Oil Spill Shows Need for Natural Gas Conversion

The British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico only underscores the need to develop the most plausible, practical, real world source of alternative fuel we have: natural gas. Anyone who spends as much time as I do on the beach is a natural environmentalist. I’ve been itching for years to get my hands on an all-electric car (like fellow right-winger, Mel Gibson, I was eager to get the first electric car built by GM)… and I’ve priced out solar and wind systems for my ocean-facing, sun-drenched house. Yet I’ve learned the hard way that most alternative fuels, at this stage, are a pipe dream. Both wind and solar cost a fortune. The last time I priced out a solar array for my roof, the Return on Investment over the outrageous prices charged by our electrical utility was more than 20 years. By that time, the PV panels will be shot. But there is one technology that exists right now… for a fuel we have in astonishing abundance… that is 100% clean… and cheaper than oil… and that’s natural gas. What’s more, the conversion kit for your car is as low as $300… and any decent mechanic can do the work. Or you can buy a brand-new all-natural gas vehicle, such as the Honda Civic, for the same price as a regular gasoline car. The problem: There are still not that many natural gas refueling stations around. You can get a natural gas refueling set-up put in at your house, but if you travel the ordeal of finding... [Read more of this post]

Thriving Long-Term Marriages

The break-up of Al and Tipper Gore’s 40-year marriage is sparking a soul-searching among many long-time married couples. The Wall Street Journal today had an interesting article about the shifting marriage patterns among couples who have been married 30, 40 years or more. It turns out the Gores are typical of the baby boom generation: Whatever the Gores’ issues—he’s 62, she’s 61—they are part of a new normal that began with their generation, according to Census statistics. Of the 8.1 million women who were married between 1970 and 1974, just over half made it to their 30th wedding anniversary, compared with about 60% for women married between 1960 and 1964. That is likely the biggest generational jump in divorce rates ever seen, says Pamela Smock, a research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. From more women in the work force to the gradual acceptance of unmarried couples living together, the Gores’ generation “saw a sea change in how people thought about what they were supposed to do with their lives, including their family lives,” she says. My wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary last year. I don’t think we were too smug about it, though. More like combat veterans sitting around after a battle, happy to be alive but a bit dazed and exhausted. With five wild kids and our own business, we’re just glad to be in one piece. Plus, we’ve... [Read more of this post]

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