"When you get rid of the fear of the Lord, you don't get fearlessness..."

Mark Shea, The Gift of Fear:

...On the other hand, in confirmation, God does give gifts, first among them a gift our culture despises. Sirach 1:12 sums it up: "To fear the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; she is created with the faithful in the womb."

We don't much care for the fear of God these days. We prefer to hear about self-empowerment, self-esteem, self-affirmation and just plain self. We have whole magazines devoted to the notion that the first shall be first, that you must find your life in order to find it, and that the way to happiness is to seek first the things of this world. Fear of God doesn't fit into programs like that. It's "disempowering," don't cha know, an affront to our dignity and a relic of that nasty Old Testament God who wants everybody to cower before him like the Great and Terrible Oz. We've outgrown all that.

But, of course, there's fear and there's fear. And the funny thing is, as our civilization is discovering, when you get rid of the fear of the Lord, you don't get fearlessness. You get servile fear: fear of What People Will Think, fear of environmental disaster, plague, terrorism, political incorrectness, death, STDs, war, divorce, economic meltdown, the future, headlines and things that go bump in the night.

It is often only belatedly that we realize that the Gospel comes, in part, to cast out such cringing, crawling servile fear. When we do finally take a hard look at the fear of the Lord, we discover that Jesus feared God, but he never cowered before his Father. On the contrary, his courage has been the model of the courage of all the saints.

There is a confidence, a free and easy step, in the stride of the saints that is in sharp contrast to the craven cowardice of the bureaucrats of atheistic totalitarian regimes who began with bold promises to liberate us from the fear of God and ended in lickspittle prostration before the terrors of Mao, Hitler and Stalin. For the fear of God is the awe and reverence due what is truly good, not a mere cowering in the face of Power. If you want to get a glimmer of it, look not to the Cowardly Lion, trembling before the terrors of Oz, but to the sense of awe any sane person should feel under the immensity of a summer night — and before its Maker....

It seems paradoxical to say that fear of the Lord casts out fear. But really it's like the old legal maxim, that "The man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client."

Something practical we can do...

We just sent a little something... to try to keep us outside the barbed wire for another generation...

Hugh Hewitt:

Stopping Obamacare: Contribute To Tim Burns This Weekend

Tim Burns has been nominated to run in the special election to fill the Congressional seat vacated by the death of John Murtha.

Burns' homepage is here, but we need to raise him a lot of money this weekend.

If lots of contributions roll into Burns' coffers this weekend from voters trying to send a message to fence-sitting Democrats about the national support for replacing Democrats with Republicans because of Obamacare, there's a good chance that those Democrats will think twice about throwing in with Nancy Pelosi next week. Please dig deep and send Burns some money and many Democrats that message....

"The analogy is clever, but wholly inaccurate"

The "al-Qaeda seven" aren't like John Adams:

Defenders of the habeas lawyers representing al-Qaeda terrorists have invoked the iconic name of John Adams to justify their actions, claiming these lawyers are only doing the same thing Adams did when he defended British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. The analogy is clever, but wholly inaccurate.

For starters, Adams was a British subject at the time he took up their representation. The Declaration of Independence had not yet been signed, and there was no United States of America. The British soldiers were Adams' fellow countrymen -- not foreign enemies of the state at war with his country.

Second, the British soldiers were accused of a crime. The constitution was not yet in place, but as I pointed out in my column this week, former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy explains that the great American tradition later enshrined in the Sixth Amendment "guarantees the accused -- that means somebody who has been indicted or otherwise charged with a crime -- a right to counsel. But that right only exists if you are accused, which means you are someone the government has brought into the civilian criminal justice system and lodged charges against." Unless they have been charged before military commissions or civilian courts, the al-Qaeda terrorists held at Guantanamo do not have a right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment. They are not accused criminals. They are enemy combatants held in a war authorized by Congress....

You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.
-- John Adams

Quote for Thursday...

Tide is turning on global warming by Robert Gentle, BusinessDay.com | Climate Realists:

...The smart money is on global warming going the same way as bird flu, swine flu, Y2K, the ozone layer, the population explosion, the food crisis, the energy crisis, global cooling and the litany of Armageddon-type predictions of the past 30 years that never came to pass. ...

Don't forget acid rain. Our forests were going to be dead by now. Scientists told us so....

In a nutshell...

Dafydd sums up warmist "climate science" with enviable concision: "Bride Mistress Tawdry One-Night Stand of Climategate":

...The hacked documents stunned the world, as they appear to demonstrate that the "consensus opinion" of climate research was not driven by strong and uncontroverted science -- as we'd been told ad nauseam since the 1990s -- but by political calculation and activism, sloppy research techniques, malfunctioning or mis-sited measuring equipment, predetermined outcomes and the "desk drawer" fallacy, bullying of peer-reviewed literature to exclude dissent, hounding and character assassination of "deniers" (skeptics), and above all, driven by the lure of hundreds of billions of dollars in "carbon credits," with all the anti-scientific pressures such massive monetary manipulation inevitably entails.

And it all began with such promise... the promise of a world cleansed of the contagion of religion, technology, Capitalism, and conservatives!...

"The needed wall of separation between race and state"

This census advice sounds sound to me...

Sending a Message with the Census - Mark Krikorian - The Corner on National Review Online:

...Fully one-quarter of the space on this year's form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government's business (despite the New York Times' assurances to the contrary on today's editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks "What is Person 1's race?" (and so on, for other members of the household). My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don't do it.

Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — "Some other race" — and writing in "American." It's a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, "American" was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.

So remember: Question 9 — "Some other race" — "American". Pass it on.

St Augustine, Tea Partier...

From a good talk by Archbishop Chaput:

...Robert Dodaro, the Augustinian priest and scholar, wrote a wonderful book a few years ago called Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine. In his book and elsewhere, Dodaro makes four key points about Augustine's view of Christianity and politics.

First, Augustine never really offers a political theory, and there's a reason. He doesn't believe human beings can know or create perfect justice in this world. Our judgment is always flawed by our sinfulness. Therefore, the right starting point for any Christian politics is humility, modesty and a very sober realism.

Second, no political order, no matter how seemingly good, can ever constitute a just society. Errors in moral judgment can't be avoided. These errors also grow exponentially in their complexity as they move from lower to higher levels of society and governance. Therefore the Christian needs to be loyal to her nation and obedient to its legitimate rulers. But she also needs to cultivate a critical vigilance about both.

Third, despite these concerns, Christians still have a duty to take part in public life according to their God-given abilities, even when their faith brings them into conflict with public authority.  We can't simply ignore or withdraw from civic affairs. The reason is simple. The classic civic virtues named by Cicero – prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance – can be renewed and elevated, to the benefit of all citizens, by the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity. Therefore, political engagement is a worthy Christian task, and public office is an honorable Christian vocation.

Fourth, in governing as best they can, while conforming their lives and their judgment to the content of the Gospel, Christian leaders in public life can accomplish real good, and they can make a difference. Their success will always be limited and mixed. It will never be ideal. But with the help of God they can improve the moral quality of society, which makes the effort invaluable....

So, what happens when the bio-tech equivalent of Moore's Law kicks in?

This is very interesting tech, but my guess is that it is even more interesting that portrayed, because the technology sounds like stuff that can get cheaper and cheaper, and simpler and simpler. Like, you know, computers do. Or digital cameras, or flat-screen TV's, or smart phones. And could head in the direction of home machines that can take a drop of your blood and report on your blood sugar or cholesterol levels. And send the results to your physician, who will see graphs of her patient's conditions, wit warning flags if something needs attention, or prescription dosages need tweaking.

What's missing? You and me buying our medical diagnoses like we buy other consumer goods.

Technology Review: Personalized Medicine on the Spot:

A new device can rapidly test biological samples for genetic variations that could cause dangerous reactions to some drugs. By Erica Naone

Different people can react to drugs in different ways, and in some cases the response can be predicted from their genes. For example, the drug warfarin, often used to prevent blood clots, can cause dangerous bleeding in some patients. Researchers have identified two genetic variations that can increase this risk.

Tests for this type of individual genetic variation have been available for a long time, but in many cases they cost too much and take too long. Nanosphere, a startup out of Northwestern University that's based in Northbrook, IL, hopes to change that. Its Verigene system, which takes just a few hours to analyze DNA from blood or other material, allows doctors to test for genetic variations without having to send samples out to a lab.

A. DISPOSABLE CARTRIDGE
A single-use cartridge uses a combination of chemical reactions to isolate fragments of DNA from a patient sample and test them for specific genetic characteristics. The top half of the cartridge is discarded after this process is complete, leaving a prepared glass slide behind.

B. BAR CODE
To help keep track of samples, a bar code is printed on the test cartridge and the underlying slide.

C. REAGENT WELLS
The necessary ingredients for the chemical reactions used to process the DNA are stored in wells located around the edges of the test cartridge. After the DNA is extracted from a sample, the machine uses air pressure and mechanical valves to release the ingredients from the wells as needed. Strands of DNA that are complementary to the target sequences are used to bind those sequences to the glass slide below the cartridge, as well as to gold nanoparticles that will allow the DNA to be detected when exposed to light. The cartridge washes away any excess DNA or nanoparticles and then sets off a reaction that coats the remaining nanoparticles with silver, which makes it easier to scan for them.

D. DNA LOADING CHAMBER
A DNA sample is loaded into the port shown here. Sonic energy, applied when the cartridge is inserted into the machine that processes the samples, breaks the DNA into small fragments and separates it into its two complementary strands so that it can be captured on the surface of the glass slide.

E. GLASS SLIDE (MICROARRAY)
After the chemical reactions have finished, the target DNA remains on the surface of the prepared glass slide, tagged by silver-coated gold nanoparticles. The Verigene's reader can read the slide by shining light into it and measuring how that light is scattered by the tagged DNA. The system can be used to look for single or multiple genetic targets....