What's not to like?

Roger Kimball, from Small earthquake in la-la land, or, Why is Sarah Palin Smiling?:

....The hatred and contempt lavished upon Sarah Plain, from certain conservatives as well as from the Left, presents a dispiriting and, to me, hard-to-fathom spectacle. That is, I understand that the Left would regard her as a political threat and would therefore dislike her. But why the contempt? And why the contempt (and hatred) from the Right? I have several times explained why I admire Sarah Palin. Please note that I did not say I want her to run for the Presidency. But what (a locution that comes up often among her admirers) a breath of fresh air she is! Here you have a woman from a working-class background who, by dint of her own energy and ambition, becomes Governor of her state—a good Governor, too, by all accounts not tainted by The New York Times. She espouses good conservative principles: self-reliance, fiscal responsibility, a strong national defense. And, on top of all that, she is a courageous and loving mother to a passel of children.

What's not to like? That she chose to keep and love a Down Syndrome child? That sets the teeth of many on edge, I know, though they are loathe to come right out and admit it. Granted: She's not a lawyer. She's not from the Ivy League. She's not part of the Washington Establishment. Heavy liabilities, what? I acknowledge that her performance in front of Katie Couric and other barracuda-like interviewers was poor, embarrassing even. But put that and all the other charges in the scale on one side, then put her virtues on the other: which side wins out? Stefan Sirucek thinks he can simply indite the name "Sarah Palin" and all right-thinking (that is, left-leaning) people will scoff and hold their noses. Maybe they will. But the aroma of rancidness and decay you sense is not emanating from Sarah Palin's side of the aisle. The question is, when will the left-wing commentariat notice that the winds of opinion, to say nothing of the winds of political energy, have changed decisively against them? Scott Brown should have told them something. But Scott Brown was an impossibility. Or so they told themselves....

Even if she didn't have a hundred other virtues, the way Sarah makes a certain sort of people SUFFER would make me love her forever. It's sort of like, wherever she goes, pompous fat people slip on banana peels, and sour-pusses bite into lemons....

Flying saucer churches....

Fr Dwight Longenecker, Beautiful Church Beautiful Bride:

A comment on the post on beauty makes a good point. Churches should be beautiful because the Church is the bride of Christ and should be 'without spot and wrinkle, as a bride adorned for her husband.' The liturgy refers to Psalm 45 where the splendor of the king and his queen are praised and refer this to the church which is the bride of Christ and therefore the Queen of the King in the Kingdom of heaven.

If a church building is a symbol and sacramental of the Body of Christ, then each element in the building points to the organic Body of Christ. The imagery of the people of God being a temple or a building built up and dwelt in by the Holy Spirit pervades the New Testament, and we can build up a complex analogy with each believer being a living stone, the Lord being the corner stone, the apostles and prophets being the pillars and foundations...

If this is so, then a beautiful and glorious church building not only points us to the glory of the celestial city, but also to the supernatural beauty of the church, which is the result of grace perfecting the nature of each of the redeemed. I am just dipping my toe into this rich theology of sacred architecture, and musing while I wait for my plane, but the question then arises, what were they thinking when they built Catholic Churches that are carpeted arenas, flat flying saucer churches with amplification systems rather than acoustics and a meeting hall rather than a temple?

I think I know what they were thinking and it doesn't smell Catholic to me.

Too right. On a symbolic or unconscious level I have little doubt it was anti-Catholic.

I would add that the same things happen analogously in the secular realm. For instance the founding fathers of our country had a deep affinity for Republican Rome. The fact that many of our public buildings and symbols are Roman in style, or use Latin, is no accident. The authority that our system and its founding documents have over us is bound up in this symbolism, along with a collage of our history and culture.

To build American government buildings like this....

...Is to symbolically destroy a country you hate.

You don't have to be smart to get the best deal...

Save Money, Whether You Shop Here or Not - Stephen Spruiell - The Corner on National Review Online:

You benefit from Wal-Mart whether you shop there or not.

In most goods and services there are very few active consumers. What happens is, everybody selling a good is affected by Wal-Mart. You benefit from that wherever you are. So many of those who oppose consumer-driven health care use the perfect as the enemy of the good. You're not going to shop for health care if you're hit by a bus. That's not the point. The point is you're served in a health-care system that's been tightened up, both from a cost and quality point of view, by the fact that some consumers, for many procedures, are shopping around, and not just on price.

The reality is that if I'd known what I know about this hospital, it's not where I would have put my father. It's not that I would have been able to discover that when he got sick. It's that in the same way that I can find out about almost any business that I choose, their quality record and their pricing, I want the same thing for health care. It doesn't mean that if you're hit by a bus you pick up the phone and call ten hospitals.

And I think this misunderstanding of how consumer economies actually work is crucial to a mistake that's made a lot, which is that it's much better to have some big, financially interested institution make a decision on your behalf because you're not smart enough. You don't have to be smart enough to get the best deal on most things in our economy, because some people care enough to create the Wal-Marts of the world. And that's all that happens, is that once there's a Wal-Mart, you'd better be competitive with Wal-Mart, or you're out of business.

It's a simple point that somehow people have a hard time grasping. If only 10% of the people are careful shoppers, then all prices (or the price/service combo) will tend towards those of the most appealing outlet. When I shop at Target I don't worry about comparative prices, because I know that there are people at Target who do nothing but watch that prices are comparable with the competition. They make sure I'm not going to buy pork rinds for 4.99 and then later feel cheated and angry when I discover that everybody else sells them for 2.99! Therefore I don't have to think much about the issue.

Meaningful lives...

Jay Nordlinger has a good quote from a reader...

Way back in the '70s, Ralph Nader gave a speech to students at my university in which he urged us not to go to work in corporate America after graduation because doing so would serve only to "make AT&T a little bit bigger." Instead, he challenged us to do something "more meaningful" with our lives.

I was all ready to sign up for the Peace Corps when it occurred to me that AT&T employees were doing more than just making their company a bit bigger. They were enriching lives by enabling loved ones to talk to one another. They were creating wealth by providing a fast and inexpensive way to transmit information. They were saving lives by enabling people to call fire departments and hospitals.

It then occurred to me that if all of AT&T's employees were marooned on a desert island, people throughout the world would be hurt. On the other hand, if all of the world's consumer advocates were marooned...

Baiting traps...

YID With LID:

Michael Leiter the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the United States sometimes chooses to allow people into the country who are on the federal government's Terrorist Watchlist. We choose to allow them in, terrorists... on purpose.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.), the ranking minority member of the committee, said at the same Jan. 20 hearing that the government should suspend the U.S. visas of anyone whose name appears in its master database of all people with suspected connections to terrorism and then put the burden on them to prove "they do not intend to harm this nation or its citizens."

In that same hearing Leiter said he did not know exactly how many people on the Terrorist Watchlist entered the United States in 2009 but that it was probably a "very significant number." He than added that "when people come to the country, if they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another."

The government of the United States is using its citizens as a target to lure bad guys to our shores? There is something very wrong with that...

Wrong? Not necessarily. In this sort of covert warfare we might sometimes need to do stuff like that. BUT, it would be wrong if you were using US citizens as bait, and then not acting decisively to nullify the threat. Either by killing the terrorists or locking them up indefinitely at Gitmo.

It would be immoral to use us little people as bait and then fail to act with maximum force. As happened recently with the knicker bomber.

"Life is full of things which don't lend themselves to precise definition"

Macklin Horton has a very good piece on what conservatism is, Catholic and Conservative (1):

...My opponents in the disagreement documented above seem to believe that it [conservatism] is, or at least intends to be, a systematic philosophy, which makes it a rival to the Church, which in turn makes a Catholic who is also a conservative less than fully faithful to the Church because, as we all know, a man cannot serve two masters. They also insist that it fails as a system, because it is full of contradictions and inconsistencies; it is not only a rival to the Church, but an incoherent one.

I have to say that the attempt to respond to this complaint reminded me of arguing with objectivists, in that in both cases there is an insistence that certain terms must be defined with absolute precision or be dismissed as meaningless. The statement that the word "conservative" does not have a very precise meaning is taken as an admission that it has no meaning at all.

But life is full of things which don't lend themselves to precise definition, but yet exist, thereby making meaningful the words by which they are named. There are many such terms in the arts. Terms like "romantic" and "classical" cannot be defined in such a way that as to remove all doubt about whether or not any given work belongs to one of those categories, and there are others that are even more slippery—post-romantic, neo-classical, jazz. There are very few, if any, artists or individual works of art which fit perfectly into any of these categories, or which does not contain elements of both. Yet we continue to use these words because they serve a purpose in describing broad tendencies. If a critic describes one pianist's playing as more romantic than another's, everyone knows what he means; no one shouts Define your terms! And if he did, he would be laughed at, and deserve to be.

In answering the question "what sort of thing is conservatism?" these aesthetic terms provide the most useful analogy I've been able to come up with. Like them, the word "conservative" is more descriptive than prescriptive (as conservatives often note). Like them, it does not begin with a set of abstract principles. Like them, it is more understandable as a product of temperament and attitudes than as a book of rules. As Russell Kirk insisted, it is not an ideology, but rather the negation of ideology. It is a concrete human phenomenon, not an invented system. It has no necessary metaphysic, and one may be a conservative and an atheist, or a conservative and a Catholic. It is a loose alliance of people with broadly similar views about the management of worldly affairs....

Time for a witch-hunt...

The extent of the fraudulent politicized "science" of AGW is stupefying. This is clearly the biggest science fraud in history. (Unless perhaps you call Lysenkoism "science.")

And it is thrilling how fast the rotting log has been rolled over, and the number of horrid bugs that are scurrying for cover. Awesome! It reminds me of one of my first blog-posts right after 9/11, when I compared that time to... A rotting log being rolled over. And Oh the bugs we found! And "realists" back then were tut-tutting that there was a danger of the Middle East being "de-stabilized." And people like me were saying, "YES! That's what we want! Break some glass!"

The threads of deceit and mendacity run everywhere. The science establishment, the journals, the massive propaganda-and-bullying apparatus of education, politicians, bureaucrats, "journalists." And it is a pity that most of them will escape by a quick change of costume, and still infect the world with the spirit of the Father of Lies.

We need a new Tail-Gunner Joe, a new Nixon, to pursue the guilty with the ferocity of pigs rooting for truffles, hounding the guilty out of public life, and putting a few thousand behind bars. It won't happen of course. All will be tidied over.

James Delingpole has the right spirit. Climategate: time for the tumbrils :

...I first met Professor Stott a couple of years ago. He's emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London, and I tracked him down because in those days he was pretty much the ONLY senior scientific academic anywhere in Britain brave enough publicly to dispute the AGW 'consensus."

We had lunch. "There are many more scientists who think the way I do," he told me. "But they don't want to stick their heads above the parapet. They don't want to lose their jobs." We talked a bit about the loneliness of our position, how impossible it was to place dissenting articles anywhere in the media, how people who thought like us were treated like pariahs.

Now suddenly it has all changed utterly. And you know what? I'm in no mood for being magnanimous in victory. I want the lying, cheating, fraudulent scientists prosecuted and fined or imprisoned. I want warmist politicians like Brown and disgusting Milibands booted out and I want Conservative fellow-travellers who are still pushing this green con trick – that'll be you, David Cameron, you Greg Clark, you Tim Yeo, you John Gummer, to name but four – to be punished at the polls for their culpable idiocy.

For years I've been made to feel a pariah for my views on AGW. Chris Booker has had the same experience, as has Richard North, Benny Peiser, Lord Lawson, Philip Stott and those few others of us who recognised early on that the AGW thing stank. Now it's payback time and I take small satisfaction from seeing so many rats deserting their sinking ship. I don't want them on my side. I want to see them in hell, reliving scenes from Hieronymus Bosch.

Yeah, maybe it isn't the Christian way. But screw 'em. It's not as though they haven't all been screwing us for long enough....

And as a Christian I would wish to note that the AGW scam is un-Christian, despite all the liberal Christian sob-sisters who have signed on. Why? Because the desired end-result of the scamsters would result in massive economic contraction, the most grievous results of which would fall upon the world's poor. The warmists are all prosperous people who would be only mildly inconvenienced by economic shrinkage (And of course many of them could look forward to being in the Nomenklatura of the new "Global Governance" order) while, un-seen by them, millions of Third World people would die, or suffer horribly.

Refashioning God

From The Problem of a Designer God by Msgr. Charles Pope:

Some years ago on a certain Sunday the Gospel of the Narrow Road came up wherein Jesus warns that many are on a wide and easy road that leads to damnation and only a few are on the narrow road that leads to salvation. I went on to preach of this warning of Jesus and of the real possibility of hell taught by him in this and other passages. After Mass a woman came to me and said, "I didn't hear the Jesus I know in your words today." I said to her, "But ma'am I was quoting him!" Unfazed she simply waved her hands dismissively and said, "We know he never said that. The Jesus I know would never have spoken like that."

It is one of the more arrogant trends of our modern culture to refashion revealed religious truth and God himself according to our modern preferences. Many moderns want all the consolations of faith but none of its demands. God himself must be rendered harmless so many simply refashion him and what he has said. At times I'll run into someone at the store who has not been attending Mass faithfully and I will call it to their attention. It is not uncommon that they will respond, "God doesn't care if I go to Church or not." "Oh really?" says I, "Then why do you suppose he put it in the Ten Commandments that we should keep holy the Sabbath?'" No answer usually, sometimes a shrug. I usually add: "And why did Jesus warn that if we do not eat his flesh and drink his blood we have no life in us?" (Jn 6:53).

Many people have a designer God. A "God who doesn't care if _____ (fill in the blank)." A God who consoles but never commands. The real God who reveals himself in the Scriptures and doctrine of the Church has been set aside by many. In his place is an idol. A god that many people construct to suit themselves. There is an old saying, "God made man in his own image. Ever since we seem intent on returning the favor."...

Even your old grandma can do it...

Fraser Speirs on the iPad.

... I fear this January-26th thinking misses the point.

What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that's because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won't work on their local roads. (Sorry computer/car analogy. My bad.)

I'm often saddened by the infantilising effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they're thrust back to a childish, mediaeval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.

With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental....

Is the radical simplicity and ease-of-use of the iPad the real point? As a Mac user I've seen this aspect growing for a while now. Especially in the way all those apps that begin with an "i" work together. I don't actually like it very much; it always makes me feel cranky and rebellious. I never download pictures from my camera into iPhoto, I'd rather arrange my own folders.

But as soon as I get into some aspect of computing that I'm not familiar with, the same ease-of-use is liberating. I recently helped start a group in our parish that wanted to put podcasts of sermons on the web site. It seemed like an impossible mountain of technical juju to climb, and we assumed we would have to recruit "experts". I wanted to be my own expert, but I didn't have the time. I kind of jump-started things by making a sample podcast in Garageband. Then clicked one button to put that into a "blog" in iWeb. Then clicked another button and uploaded it to my iDisk.

I hated working in an Apple environment that assumed I was a "lifestyle" person (iWeb I mean, not Garageband, which I recommend.) But I loved being able to whip something up myself in a hour, and send a link to the group to see, and make them think, "Yes, we can do this.". (Here's a link to our website. The most recent podcast is on the right, and the podcast page is linked on the left. Not fancy, but a start.)

Detached from reality...

Charlene recommends this piece by Peter Wehner on the SOTU, A Self-Reverential State of the Union Address (Thanks to Alan):

...What made the speech a bit bizarre, and somewhat alarming, is how detached from reality the president is. After having spent much of his time blaming his predecessor for his own failures, he said he was "not interested in re-litigating the past." Barack Obama lamented waging a "perpetual campaign" – even though that is what the president, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs and others in his employ do on a daily basis. He said, "Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game" – yet his White House has played that very game with zest and delight.

Having gone on a spending spree that is unprecedented in American history, the president castigated the political class for "leaving a mountain of debt" to future generations. Having helped to create the worst fiscal situation in our lifetime, he says he will "refuse to pass the problems on to another generation of Americans." He says, "If we do not take meaningful steps to rein in our debt, it could damage our markets, increase the cost of borrowing, and jeopardize our recovery" – despite the fact that future generations will have to work to undo the deficit and debt he had done so much to increase.

It was as if we were being lectured on marital fidelity by John Edwards or Mark Sanford....

He blames Bush for everything... except this.

Bill Kristol: - What Obama can't bring himself to say -- we won in Iraq:

...President Obama says he is "not interested in re-litigating the past." Well, I am -- at least to this extent: Would it have been too much for the president of the United States to have acknowledged and paid tribute to a truly remarkable recent American achievement -- turning around the war in Iraq and putting that war on course to a successful outcome?

Here's what Obama did say about Iraq:

As we take the fight to al Qaeda, we are responsibly leaving Iraq to its people. As a candidate, I promised that I would end this war, and that is what I am doing as president. We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August. We will support the Iraqi government as they hold elections, and continue to partner with the Iraqi people to promote regional peace and prosperity. But make no mistake: this war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.

That's it: "This war is ending." But it's ending in a certain way -- with success. It could have ended with failure. Success rather than failure in Iraq has made a big difference elsewhere in the Middle East -- including in Iran....

What a moral pygmy. President Bush made the tough call, the right decision, when all the weak sisters wanted to cut and run from Iraq. and we won. Now, after endless sniveling about how all his problems are inherited from Bush, Obama isn't man enough to acknowledge this signal triumph. Democrats, I spit upon you with utmost contempt. You are low-class creeps to act in this way.

This is particularly galling because Bush could reasonably have blamed Clinton for a lot of problems he inherited, such as al-Qaeda and the Dot,com recession. But he was too much of a man to do such a thing.

Interesting word mistake...

Top Democrats at war - with each other - Glenn Thrush and John Bresnahan - POLITICO.com:

...In a display of contempt unfathomable in the feel-good days after Obama's Inauguration, freshman Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) stood up at a meeting with Pelosi last week to declare: "Reid is done; he's going to lose" in November, according to three people who were in the room....

I'll bet that authors started with "unthinkable" and decided to find something more jazzy in the Thesaurus. But unfathomable has meanings like mysterious, mystifying, deep, profound. Its origin in the nautical measurement of depth, "fathoms," calls to mind the mysterious depths of the sea. There is nothing "unfathomable" about mentioning the political troubles that Dems are in right now, it's an obvious point.

...O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
    -- Hopkins

A smidgeon of history...

Democrats' Bush-bashing strategy goes bust - Jonathan Martin - POLITICO.com:

...Running as much against the Bush White House as he was running against Sen. John McCain, Barack Obama easily carried Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts in 2008.

Yet when Democratic nominees for governor in Virginia and New Jersey and for Senate in Massachusetts sought to tie their GOP opponents to the still-unpopular former president, the strategy didn't resonate. Voters were more focused on the current administration or local political issues — and the onetime Democratic magic formula seemed yesterday's news.

"Voters are pretty tired of the blame game," said longtime Democratic strategist Steve Hildebrand, a top aide on Obama's presidential campaign. "What a stupid strategy that was."

Howard Wolfson, a senior official on Hillary Clinton's campaign and veteran Democratic communications guru, noted that his party was able to run against Republican Herbert Hoover's Depression-era presidency for 30 years....

SO, what happened 30 years after Hoover? Hmmm? Well, Conscience of a Conservative was published in 1960, and became a huge best-seller. The book was by Barry Goldwater, but actually ghostwritten by L. Brent Bozell Jr., brother-in-law of William F. Buckley. That was the moment that conservative thought began to nudge its way into the public consciosnous.

It's hard to imagine now how un-idea-ed the Republicans were in the first half of the 20th Century. I was raised by intelligent parents who read books and were conservative Republicans. They travelled, knew lots of interesting people, and ran a business that employed scores of people. We went to the library in a neighboring town because ours was not large enough. (Still odd to me was that my folks had little interest in owning books. It may have been a Depression Era thing, or because there were few bookstores around. None really; just the book sections of department stores.)

Yet the idea of reading conservative intellectuals was not something I even imagined until the 1970's.