The Daily Eudemon

May 13, 2008

Not on Youtube: Up to 15 people chased a man, then kicked and beat him to death on the street. Before police arrived, one attacker urinated on the victim’s head. It happened in Cleveland, “within a 10-minute drive of the city’s skyscrapers, sports venues and tourist attractions.”

Back in the 1990s, people started telling me how nice Cleveland had become. “They’ve really developed their lake front nicely. It’s a great place.” I was surprised, recalling the jokes about Cleveland in the 1980s: “How do you describe Cleveland? Answer: Detroit without the glitter.” I finally visited there in the summer of 2006. I wasn’t impressed. The lake front was nice. The Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame was nice. Jacoby Field looked nice. But go more than a couple of hundred yards from those places? The city started looking pretty grim, like a place you could get your head urinated on.

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Monday Moanin’

May 12, 2008

Mother’s Day went well. I started it by breaking my boycott of McDonald’s and bringing my wife a breakfast burrito early in the morning. We then went to church, after which I bought her seven roses (a right-to-life fundraiser). After church, we gave Marie her presents, exercised, then went to see Speed Racer. That was a road bump. Horrible movie, the worst movie I can remember. Characters came out of nowhere and weren’t developed, the movie chronology jumped mercilessly, the animation was neat but so wild that you couldn’t figure out what was going on, there were more cliches than pixels. I think Roger Ebert’s review did the best job of capturing my opinion:

As an elementary schooler, Speed is afflicted with foot-tapping hyperactivity and ADD, and so is the movie. A lot of fluorescent, 7-Eleven-tinted images flash by, any of which could easily be removed or re-arranged without significantly disrupting the film’s continuity, because it has none. If you can determine the spatial relationship between Speed’s Mach 5 (or Mach 6) and any other race car for more than a few consecutive seconds, then good for you. As on the TV series, the pictures don’t seem to move so much as repeat — movement with no momentum.

I’d give it a “3,” and the only reason I’m going that high is because the ending wasn’t bad and my five youngest children really enjoyed it. Then again, my younger children like any movie. At what age does the chair of film discretion go into a child’s mental furniture? I’m guessing 14. My oldest son (15) realized that the film was clearly garbage, but my oldest daughter (13) didn’t quite see it that way (she liked it, but she also discerned an element of lameness in it).
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I’m assuming my Ave Maria mutual fund shares won’t feel the impact: Adult entertainment publisher Playboy Enterprises Inc posted a quarterly loss on Tuesday because of weaker publishing and domestic television revenue and forecast more trouble during the year, pushing its shares down 8 percent.
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For American Idol fans: TMZ has learned David Archuleta’s dad, Jeff, has been officially banned from “American Idol.” Here’s how it went down. “Idol” sources tell TMZ Jeff has been a complete pain in the ass, interfering with the entire production. He has badgered producers, the band, vocal coaches and even other contestants. . . . BTW, he was banned on the set when David did “Star Search” a few years back. Why do I care? Because (i) I said during week one of the finalist competition that Archuleta’s “Gee, I’m shocked I’m doing this well” was a phony act, but my family thought he was a sincere kid, and (ii) I have David Cook in the family American Idol pool. I stand to win $5, if the rest of the America understands that the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.
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Sweet: Marvel has announced a slew of new productions, including Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America and one featuring all three characters, The Avengers. I’ve liked all the superhero movies except Iron Man, and I’m willing to give him another shot.

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Something for Sunday Morning

May 11, 2008

“Prayer refines the soul and makes us particularly apt to understand other people. Also, it increases our generosity, our optimism, our affability in social relations, and our gratitude–all being virtues that facilitate the way of friendship for the Christian.”

Francis Fernandez, In Conversation with God

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Something for No-Blogging Saturday

May 10, 2008

I only remembered 10. My brother who is three-and-a-half years older is “Older than Dirt.”

Older Than Dirt Quiz
Count all the ones that you remember, NOT the ones you were told about! Your ratings at the bottom.

1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
5. Coffee shops or diners with tableside juke boxes
6 Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OLive-6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15. S&H Green Stamps
16. Hi-fi’s
17. Metal ice trays with lever
18. Mimeograph paper
19 Blue flashbulb
20. Packards (Hudson, Willys, Kaiser, Nash)
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-5 = You’re still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don’t tell your age,
If you remembered 16-25 = You’re older than dirt!

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Brews You Can Use

May 9, 2008

I took off most of Wednesday to attend the Chamber of Commerce golf outing. Whatta mistake. I thought I had an easy day of work ahead of me on Thursday (a mop up day to get some old projects done), so I thoroughly enjoyed myself, still made it to my son’s little league game, then stayed up later than usual with the older kids. When I got to the office Thursday morning, I discovered that a new (longish) meeting had been put on my calendar, a new client was clamoring to get in to see me before he closed on a deal this coming Monday, and the phone rang off the hook. I ran for nine hours straight, putting out client fires, and I didn’t touch one of those old projects that have been hanging over my head. Finally, at 4:00, I told the staff, “If anyone calls, I died.” I zombied out of the office shortly before 5:00, four calls unreturned, vowing never to take a day off work again.

But I ain’t going in today. And my wife bought me three cases of good beer on a shopping trip yesterday. And my son doesn’t have a little league game. And I have nothing else on my calendar, except to return those calls from yesterday. I might just have to drink a few to help drown yesterday’s memory.

And in preparation, some beer news.
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I like a cold PBR as much as the next guy, but this is a bit much: Illinois man designs coffin to look like can of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
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What, no Olde Frothingslosh? A critic lists his ten worst beers of all time:

Milwaukee’s Best I understand this is a sentimental favorite of many, as it takes them back to the old days. Well, human sacrifice harkens to a simpler time, too. If you want to kill your taste buds, try battery acid — it probably tastes better.

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Fairy tale beer: The Baron Brewing Company in Seattle is introducing a line of six very rare big beers which will be available in limited edition 22oz bottles. Every special beer will represent a folk tale from the Grimm Brothers collection.
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Thursday Miscellany

May 8, 2008

You can’t hide your lying eyes: Uncontrollable Muscles in the Face Reveal Lying, New Research Shows. Via. Excerpts:

Those instances, less than a second long, are called micro-expressions, long believed to be incredibly brief expressions formed by muscles in the human face that are beyond control.

Porter, who has been studying deceptive behavior for 15 years, has a new study in the current issue of Psychological Science that indicates it is possible for persons involved in law enforcement and airport security, and the rest of us as well, presumably, to learn how to recognize those tell-tale expressions of deceit in someone else, even if we can’t control it in ourselves.

His research shows earlier studies that indicated those expressions lasted less than a fifth of a second were incorrect, because in many cases they last nearly a full second long. That should allow a trained eye enough time to detect them, he added.

I was hoping the article would discuss something I heard a few years ago: Our subconscious picks up on those imperceptible facial ticks and sets off alarms in us, even if we don’t know why the alarms are going off. You ever know any people who just don’t quite “click” when you talk with them, the type of person that makes you uncomfortable to be around but you can’t figure out why? A friend told me that the unease might result from facial ticks the person is throwing off: giving an indication that he’s lying or somehow being deceitful (like presenting a pleasant facade that is terribly inconsistent with his real personality). I found the concept fascinating, but I’ve never read anything about it.
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Alright, this is just gross. “Woman Aims For Breast Implant Record . . . with size 34 triple f.” And ignorant: “‘My doctor he says he don’t want to operate on me no more. Because in 5 years I’ve changed 8 times.’” And funny: “Sheyla feels better than ever about herself but others don’t see it her way. ‘I just don’t like people to look at me and laugh at me.’”

Pass the Doans.
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Public Service: How far can you go after your low-fuel light comes on? This site, using anecdotal evidence, tells you. My mini-van can apparently go about 32.5 miles.
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Kind of interesting, if you’ve ever been to Niagara Falls: The Decline and Fall of Niagara Falls. The book apparently addresses the ghetto-like New York side of the Falls. The Canadian side is still nice (often tacky, but nice).

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Shaw on Clericalism

May 7, 2008

I predicted that blogging would be light, and so it is. I took the older kids to Iron Man last night, and it was pretty long.

I didn’t care for it, incidentally. It moved too slow. I’d give it a 5 out of 10. While watching it, I was really surprised that I didn’t like it more. Yahoo users give it an A- and the critics a B+. Those are normally good indicators (especially the Yahoo users average) that I’ll like a movie, especially a superhero one (I’ve liked ‘em all: Batman, Superman, The Incredible Hulk, even the Fantastic Four . . . I’m sitting tight for Aquaman, Green Lantern, and The Flash). For some reason, this one didn’t entertain me much.

It’s the third straight time that an acclaimed movie has fallen short for me: No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and now Iron Man. Maybe I’m losing my pop culture tastes.
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Russell Shaw takes on the problem of clericalism. I’ve been a victim of it. I also strongly suspect the secrecy that clericalism instills contributed to the administrative incompetence that accelerated the demise of our parochial school. Very timely for my fresh wounds. Excerpts:

A pastor lords it over his people, consulting no one and habitually making unilateral decisions. His people are a passive, dispirited lot, quick to complain and slow to cooperate. . . .

Clericalism, however, is not an affirmation of these sacred realities but a caricature. It fosters an ecclesiastical caste system in which clerics comprise the dominant elite, with lay people serving as a passive, inert mass of spear-carriers tasked with receiving clerical tutelage and doing what they’re told. This upstairs-downstairs way of understanding relationships and roles in the Church extends even to the spiritual life: priests are called to be saints, lay people are called to satisfy the legalistic minimum of Christian life and scrape by into purgatory. . .

Disregard for the welfare of outsiders and excessive concern for insiders go far to explain the cover-up of clergy sex abuse by Church authorities.

Shaw’s article does a lot to confirm a suspicion. I don’t like the suspicion, but the evidence tells me it’s right: Priests tend to be duplicitous. I fear the duplicity is endemic to the profession. Clerics have one set of truths they provide to lay people, they have another set of truths that reflect reality. I’m sure there are many good and honest clerics out there who stay quiet when asked to divulge information that should not be provided to lay people. Too many clerics, though, simply spout off a different set of facts or otherwise mislead. It’s one reason I won’t volunteer for any “intellectual” roles in my church. I can’t provide effective advice if I’m not provided all information or if I’m given information that is inaccurate or misleading. I’ve lost all confidence that I’ll ever receive accurate and complete information when dealing with an important issue at church. Even if my priest is forthcoming, I’m not convinced the diocesan officials are.

My apologies to the good (and thoroughly honest) priests who read this blog. I don’t intend to paint with a broad brush. I know there are exceptions. Heck, the exceptions might be the majority. I do, however, think I’m caught in a bad regional situation, which I don’t fully understand (I’ve asked, but received inconsistent feedback), that sends waves of duplicity throughout the parishes.
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You’d think you’d be able to notice the difference before it got to your lips: A New Zealand café could be slapped with fines after two women were hospitalized when they were mistakenly served dish soap instead of mulled wine.

I thought maybe “mulled wine” was different than ordinary wine, but doesn’t seem much different: “Mulled wine, variations of which are popular around the world, is wine, usually red, combined with spices and typically served warm.”

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Tuesday Trifle

May 6, 2008

The good news: Son Jack (11) pitched three innings last night, striking out six and giving up only one run (thanks to some great fielding from his team). He also hit two doubles and a triple. The bad news: I stayed late to clean the field (had to stay a little late anyway because Michael’s (9) baseball practice hadn’t ended yet) and had household chores to finish when I got home, so there’s little time for blogging.

For these occasions, I keep a “bank” of material. The bank consists of humorous emails, witticisms, interesting passages from my reading. This morning, an interesting passage:

Historical marker on U.S. 11 in Mississippi:

John L. Sullivan defeated Jack Kilrain for heavyweight championship in a 75 round fight on July 8, 1889, at Richburg, 3 miles southwest of this spot. This was the last official bare-knuckle bout.

Jim Ruland in the March 2008 issue of The Oxford American writes: “Historical markers are notorious for being inaccurate, but this one is ridiculously vague. Three miles? . . . And since Sullivan mauled Kilrain with his bare hands, which made the fight illegal, how could the fight have also been ‘official.’”?

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Monday Moaning

May 5, 2008

The rise of the comic book, the Great Comic-Book Scare, comic-book censorship, and remembering a far more innocent age. Neat short piece. Excerpts:

[Following the censorship, b]etween 1954 and 1956, the number of comic-book titles plunged from about 650 to 250. One unemployed artist went looking for a job—any kind of job. “If you said you drew comic-books,” he recalled, “it was like saying you were a child molester.” . . .

Every honest consumer of 1940s and 1950s comic books can recall protagonists like Tarzan and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, who guided ignorant and obedient “natives.” Even Will Eisner’s brilliantly illustrated Spirit featured a dim-witted black henchman named Ebony White, who spoke like a walk-on in an Amos ’n’ Andy show. As for misogyny, helpless (and invariably large-busted) young women were the favorite target of innumerable criminals and extraterrestrials. Artists spared no pictorial detail in rendering their humiliation and terror. . . .

Yet in a coarsening culture, high values could not endure. Decades after the Code was imposed, underground films pushed vulgarity and celebrated violence. Standards gave way to the anything-goes atmosphere of the late sixties. All too soon, expensive underground comic books, with X-rated scenes undreamed of half a century ago, replaced the banished ten-cent periodicals.

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Big selection of bizarre “facts.” The citations give them an air of credibility, but heck if I know whether they’re accurate. Sample:

Zach Dunlap, a 21 year old Oklahoma City man, was declared brain dead. Doctors were preparing to remove his organs for transplant when he began to move his foot and hand. He slowly regained consciousness and was sent home to continue his recovery. - CNN.com, 3/24/08

A Sicilian court has ruled that an accused Mafioso can go home because he was too big (462 lbs.) to fit through prison doors and in an prison bed. - MSNBC, 3/12/08
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Put Barbie in a house that your kids should be playing with: Transforming that ugly plastic pink thing into a faerie tale house.

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That’s it for today. Blogging might be light for awhile. Lots of stuff going on.

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Something for Sunday Morning

May 4, 2008

“Jesus sought and encouraged the friendship of all he met on the roads of Palestine. He always made use of conversation in order to get to the bottom of their souls and fill them with love.”

Francis Fernandez, In Conversation with God

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The Saturday Eudemon

May 3, 2008

Not much today. The office calls, then Meg’s soccer game, then baseball field clean-up, then a First Communion party, then two more First Communion parties. Interspersed in there: ordinary large-family stuff and carting children to other events.

One quick thing, though:

A Romanian man has lodged an official complaint with the local trading standards agency after he got drunk on a single can of beer.

Iancu Boroi, 35, said he had bought the beer at a local supermarket in Arges in southern Romania but was so drunk after drinking just one can that he nearly passed out.

Sounds like liquid gold. Half a can is all it takes. Something tells me this brewery is about to hit the jackpot. Its beer could become a fad with the youth, who’ll mix it with Red Bull or some such confounded thing. And/or it could become big with the winos: a bottle of ripple in one hand, a can of this stuff in the other.

Enjoy your weekend.

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Brews You Can Use

May 2, 2008

Sign me up: Beer baths. Of course, you have to go the Czech Republic. “[W]hile a regular tap pipes in locally sourced Il-Sano mineral water, our tubs will also contain 8-10 litres of unpasteurised Chodovar 10, a dark brew that is pouring rapidly from a brass beer font fixed to the foot of each bath. Add some crushed herbs and dried yeast, mix it all together and you have a beer bath, excellent for “soothing muscles, warming joints and healing the complexion”, according to the brewery. . . . “It increases circulation, decreases blood pressure and purifies the skin because of the proteins, the high vitamin B content and also because of the minerals in the water.” Soaking in beer, he adds, is also very relaxing for the mind and good for wellbeing.”
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Kentucky prepared to declare war: Japanese whisky voted the best.
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The ambiguity of being vodka: “Given that it can be produced from anything containing starch or sugar, its very definition is subject to a range of legal challenges around the world.”
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Maybe there’s a beer god after all: Starbucks Sees Profits Drop 28% in Second Quarter.
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The Miller blogger seems mildly surprised to see smaller imports gaining significant market shares. He then lists the three that are doing well:

1. Modelo Especial
2. Tecate
3. Stella Artois

Let me provide the key to solving this puzzle: The first two are Mexican beers. If you’re still not sure what’s driving the increased sales, come to my small town for a tour. I’ll take you to eight Mexican stores and restaurants, seven of which didn’t exist 15 years ago.

(Aside: The link immediately above contains an email link where you can get a (free, I think) subscription to Brew Magazine.)
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Crap, it would appear the (fiscal) year is almost over. I should’ve stopped by months ago: Year of Beer: “I plan to drink a different beer every day for a year, it can be a homebrew, a craft brew, or a large commercially globally distributed beer.” I kinda did something like that once, except it was more like a twelve-pack a day for a year, I was in college, and I switched brands depending on what was cheapest.

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Thursday Miscellany

May 1, 2008

The Solemnity of the Ascension. The hardest mystery to understand. None of them can really be understood, of course, but this one is the hardest. I accept the immortality of the soul. It squares with the ontological facts we can discern. But the assumption of the body into heaven, with the concomitant idea that there is a geographical location for it, which telescopes haven’t discovered yet? That one is tough. We can pray, we can accept. But we’ll never–this side of existence–understand.
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Helping make lacrosse players synonymous with perverts: Thirteen members of a high school lacrosse team have been disciplined for baring their bottoms on which was written a prom invitation from one player to a girl.

If you weren’t aware, it has become cool to go through extensive (and stupid) gymnastics when asking a girl to prom. Here are my thoughts on it. Excerpt:

In our culture, we’ve largely lost the proper sense of the sacramental, and the loss is regurgitating back to the surface, in pseudo-rituals.

Consider other areas where elaborate rituals have taken over special events, like the wedding proposal. A man arranges for a plane to fly by with the proposition in the tail; a man sings the proposition in front of a hundred fellow restaurant diners; a man fakes his death and rises from casket at the funeral and pops the question (okay, I made up that last one, but it could happen).

The birth of a baby has likewise grown beyond all proportion. It’s talked about incessantly, plaster casts are made of the huge stomach, the birth is videotaped, family and friends are invited to the birthing.

Wedding proposals and the births are good things — neat things, wonderful things, stupendous things. The wedding proposal leads to a sacrament, and the babies are a normal result of that sacrament.

But they’re blown out of all proportion with all sense of their normal fitness replaced by an “event” mentality.

The Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper referred to modern culture’s “desacralization.” He said the desacralization leads to all sorts of heresies, and not just theological, but also “anthropological heresies.” He wrote of this:

[A]nyone who fails to realize that there is nothing in man’s nature which is “purely spiritual,” but that there is nothing that is “purely physical” either, will in all likelihood be incapable of appreciating or meaningfully enacting that “structure of forms visible and perceptible to the senses” which we call sacred action.

That’s a fairly difficult passage, but he’s basically saying that people who have lost the sacramental (a proper sense of the intertwined nature of matter and spirit) don’t appreciate and can’t properly enact the sacred.

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Logical, if nothing else: Sweden is about to introduce a new “Walk” icon at street lights, one in a feminine vein. And of course Chesterton famously observed that the madman is always logical. The madman has a botched set of premises, but his logical conclusions from the premises are normally good.
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New Jersey lawmakers consider sin tax on fast food. For a second, I thought maybe it was an attempt to punish McDonald’s for embracing the sin of homosexual activity. Delusional me.
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A story about prison rodeo. It’s not what I feared. It’s actually a pretty neat story: “Through rodeos and rehabilitation, Burl Cain has transformed America’s most violent maximum security prison into its safest.”

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The Wednesday Eudemon

April 30, 2008

“Sandwich days.” That’s what I call this time of year because my day is “sandwiched” by obligations. I have to get the kids to school at 7:30 a.m. then be some place in the late afternoon, leaving no time for anything except running. This week is an amazing whirl: Meg (7) soccer game at 5:30 last night; Jack (11) baseball at 5:30 tonight (I have the practice gear; gotta get there early); serving the Thursday 8:30 Communion service at church, Abbie (13) Exchange Club citizenship award at noon and soccer practice in evening, all children to church May Crowning ceremony; Jack baseball practice Friday. Relax on the weekend? Almost: Meg soccer game Saturday morning, Abbie away soccer game Saturday afternoon, two First Communion parties to attend, two kids have mandatory physicals. Sunday? Jack serves at 8:30 Mass, Godson getting confirmed at 10:30 Lutheran service, Godson confirmation party at 12:30.

Michael’s (9) baseball season starts next week.

Put a fork in me.

If I ever start to complain, my wife always (oh so gently) tells me to be grateful my kids are healthy and happy. If that doesn’t do it, she increases the rhetoric: You could be without work or one of our parents could die! If that doesn’t work, she plays hard ball: You could have testicular cancer and have three months to live! That one usually brings me around a bit.
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Hippies, like, moan the world over, dude: Albert Hofmann, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD has died. He was 102. Hoffman first tripped at age 37 and defended the drug the rest of his life. “He himself took the drug — purportedly on an occasional basis and out of scientific interest — for several decades.” That slays me: “out of scientific interest.” Strictly scientific research, like the way people experiment with alcohol on the weekends.
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Neat word I discovered yesterday: Gimcrack: A showy but useless or worthless object.

Maybe I should call this blog The Daily Gimcrack. Of course, some will think it callipygian. (Aside: That’s the second time this year I’ve used that word. In a culture fascinated with body parts, it’s nice to have relatively-urbane references for them. It allows one to relate without stooping tooooo far.)
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Hey, beats tatoos: Some students at Centennial High School have shaved vertical lines into their eyebrows in a trend recently made popular by hip-hop star Soulja Boy. School officials say the mark looks like a gang symbol.
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Crud, I don’t have time to read this one right now, but I’ve bookmarked it for later: But What About the Children? Lew Rockwell on a perennial excuse for the total state.

I detest the “What About the Children?” drumbeat. It’s used to justify anything and everything burdensome on the common man. But at the same time, we legalize abortions. I guess it makes sense. Because we take so much collective responsibility for children (instead of putting the onus on the parents), we don’t want yet more children, especially ones that will more likely fall within our collective responsibility (read: the poor and minorities, hence recent allegations that Planned Parenthood is engaged in a type of racial genocide against blacks . . . allegations that are consistent with PP’s roots).

Maybe if we said, “We won’t be responsible for your children. Do what you want,” we wouldn’t be so inclined to support abortion. Just a theory. I’m not really supposing we abandon children to the likes of the Incestuous Monster of Austria; as a society, we have an obligation to protect the most vulnerable. But something needs to give.
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A progressive couple. They just didn’t want to wait until the honeymoon was over:

A newly married Pennsylvania couple spent their wedding night in separate “honeymoon suites” at the Allegheny County jail after authorities said they got into a postnuptial brawl with each other and members of another wedding party. David Wielechowski, 32, allegedly karate-kicked his new bride, Christa Vattimo, 25, to the floor.

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Good Leno: “A man has staged a sit-in for prayer at a gas station asking God for lower gas prices. Doesn’t that seem a like a question for Allah?”

Good Conan:

Hillary Clinton says she’s willing to debate Barack Obama “anytime, anywhere” and would even meet him in the back of a truck. Which is surprising, because the “anytime, anywhere, even in the back of a truck” offer is usually made by Bill Clinton.

Today John McCain campaigned across the state of Florida. McCain likes campaigning in Florida because everyone there calls him “the kid.”

“American Idol’s” ratings have been slipping this year, so producers are thinking about making some changes to the show to make if more exciting. For example, from now on contestants will be eliminated by a sniper.

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Tuesdays with the Eudemon

April 29, 2008

Actually, I should call this post “Tuesdays with the Anti-Eudemon.” Not a lot of fun stuff out there today.

Great piece over at City Journal about “creeping sharia.” Excerpt:

[T]he Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Khomeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

He then offers a parade of evidence, some of it hard (or not so hard) to believe: “Back in 2001, Unni Wikan, a distinguished Norwegian cultural anthropologist and Islam expert, responded to the high rate of Muslim-on-infidel rape in Oslo by exhorting women to ‘realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.’”
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The most-detailed story on the web that I’ve seen so far about the Incestuous Monster of Austria. Not many stories jar me. This one has.

If that monster wasn’t heavily into porn at some point in his life, I’ll eat my shorts.

I’m still hoping it’s an elaborate hoax of some sort, though it’s hard to imagine how it could be.
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A seven-year-old boy was taken into foster care in the US - after his dad accidentally bought him an alcopop at a baseball game.

Dumb mistake: It was Mike’s Hard Lemonade. The stuff has been around for years. But does anyone think he really did it intentionally? They were sitting at a Detroit Tigers baseball game. Not exactly a clandestine location. But apparently the bureaucrats think he was trying to abuse his son there in public:

[I]t was another two days before Mr Ratte’s wife, architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, was allowed to take their son home, and nearly a week before Mr. Ratte was allowed to move back into his own house.

Moronic and overly-intrusive state. They latch onto something like this, but then they miss serious and real cases of child abuse. I could tell you a story of a botched child-protective service case in my county that would make your blood boil and your stomach curdle. But the child-protective folks in my state were all over the Mike’s Hard Lemonade case.
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The newest condemned “ism”: labelism. Teenagers label all the time: hippies, jocks, emos, preps, nerds. This young lady is trying to stop it.

Well, good for her. She’s a teeny-bopper and I give her credit for thinking about such things. Unfortunately, I suspect she’s not going to get past the pop palaver about tolerance, with the result that her thought remains permanently stunted. She’d need to understand concepts of abstracting, universals, proper prejudices, and generalizing–every day things, but things not understood by the vast bulk of Americans.

If you want to get your feet wet in this area, get Joseph Epstein’s essay, “But I Generalize.” You can find it in The Middle of My Tether. I couldn’t find it online, but I found a few good representative quotes:

“Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds… Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that “usually rather.” Safe generalizations are quite boring.”

“Always seek the general and never quite trust it.”

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Monday Miscellany

April 28, 2008

I’ve long been fascinated with the question, “How ought one to spend his time?” It used to be a fascination born of bitterness: volunteer organizations would ask me spend time helping with X or Y, not realizing my schedule was so full with writing projects and family obligations that I had nearly no time in an average week for those things other people indulge copiously: TV, golf, fishing, sitting in bars, hunting. I’m no longer bitter (primarily because I don’t get asked much anymore; I think the presence of seven children helped label me officially “busy”–hence my very real seven anchors did something for me that an idealistic life of letters couldn’t). Nonetheless, I’m still interested in how people ought to spend their time. I’ve concluded that they ought to spend it trying to become saints, but for those whose goals aren’t so lofty?

Hard to say, but in a loosely-related vein, some people have been thinking about “cognitive surplus.” It’s an interesting concept that says, “Modern gadgets have left you with a lot more mental energy and time than your ancestors.” I first heard of cognitive surplus yesterday, here. Excerpt:

[I]f you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. . . . And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. . . . People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

It’s a peculiar psychosis of our time that everyone feels busy. I felt busy at age 21 when I had oceans of free time, I felt busy at age 26 before my first child arrived, I feel busy now. I have no doubt that I’m far busier now than the average joe who says he’s busy, but I know I’d feel that way even if I weren’t busier than the average joe (”So how do you know you are busier, Scheske? Talk about psychosis!”). I don’t know where the psychosis comes from, but I have a handful of candidates: the modern tendency to abolish boundaries, both space and time, with the result that there’s always something else that could be pursued; scads of entertainment possibilities; a fear of quiet and calm (the places where existential reality is met in all its terror or beauty), which leads to a frenzied-type attitude that makes a person feel busy. I and the combox are open to other candidates.
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The next Brittney: Pop star and 15-year-old Disney sensation Miley Cyrus tells ET she’s “embarrassed” about an upcoming photograph of her appearing semi-topless in the new Vanity Fair issue.

Benedict Groeschel says modern teenagers are bitter because the culture sexualizes them, but they’re not developed enough psychologically for it (is anyone ever developed enough to enjoy being considered mere sexual fodder?). It rings true: If you feel like everyone is watching you in a way that makes you uncomfortable, that would be enough to give you a general feeling of angst and latent anger.
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Sure, why not. It’s an age of pluralism: A religious beekeeper in Serbia has started making beehives shaped like tiny monasteries and churches “because bees have a soul too”. Bees have souls, of course, but they’re natural souls. This gent simply didn’t get far enough in Aristotle’s De anima.