Stromata Blog

What We Learned from Terri Schiavo

Now that Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo is dead, I hope that an autopsy will establish that she truly was without the capacity to sense what was happening as she starved to death. It would add an intolerable fillip to this tragedy were we to learn that, like Our Lord on the Cross, she thirsted – and got not even vinegar and gall for relief.

There will now be a rush of post mortems on the political implications of Mrs. Schiavo’s death watch. I’ve never had much talent for predicting the future, so I won’t join in. Instead, I’d like to ponder what this controversy tells us about the present, in particular, about the attitudes and emotions of large segments of America’s political culture.

Everyone has noticed that intense emotion generated by the conflict over what to do with Mrs. Schiavo. Once her fate has dwindled from the headlines to mere history, a moiety of the emotionalism will, I think, be difficult to comprehend. The bare facts, not seriously disputed by anyone, are that 15 years ago she suffered brain damage that greatly reduced her faculties, that medical experts disagreed on her diagnosis and prognosis, that she required nourishment, but no other artificial support, to sustain life, that evidence about her own wishes is scanty (how many 26-year-olds give serious thought to the possibility of severe disability?), that her parents and siblings were willing to assume the responsibility of caring for her, and that her husband, now living with another woman, exerted his authority to deny them the right to do so. One can argue that, under those circumstances, the natal family and its supporters were unreasonable to advocate continued provision of food and water, that their hopes were illusory and that the husband’s hard-headed approach was the right one. But, can one rationally assert that only a religious fanatic could object to hastening death? In the spectrum of “right to die” cases, Terri Schiavo’s was far from the most compelling. I’ve never heard a secularist, discussing such matters in the abstract, call for the killing of human beings whom someone wanted and would care for, and whose existence was no inconvenience to anybody. Yet objections to killing Terri Schiavo were treated as expressions of irrational religiosity or, alternatively, as opportunistic pandering to fundamentalist nuts.

Similarly, Congressional action on behalf of Mrs. Schiavo drew outrage vastly disproportionate to what the lawmakers actually did. They enacted a statute granting federal courts jurisdiction to hear the Schindlers’ claims that the State of Florida was depriving their daughter of life without due process of law. Perhaps this intervention was unwise; it certainly turned out to be pointless, since federal judges, after cursory inquiry, refused to do anything. Still, unless one pines for the repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment and the reversal of Hunter v. Martin’s Lessee, anguished cries about how Congress was shredding federalism and adopting “Stalinist” tactics (the actual epithet hurled by the Los Angeles Times) are tantrums rather than arguments.

Not only have the Schindlers and their sympathizers been portrayed in many quarters as bullying zealots, but they are presumed to have worse in mind. Former economist Paul Krugman was only slightly more demented than the left-wing mainstream when he publicized his fear that “dangerous extremists [who] belong to the majority religion and the majority ethnic group, and wield great political influence”, may soon begin assassinating “liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren’t sufficiently hard-line”.

Ranting like that, wholly detached from the causes that ostensibly prompt it, is a sign that influential elements of the Left no longer think rationally about what their opponents say and do. When Professor Krugman writes, “[U]nless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here,” his words have manichaean undertones that might be suitable for Zimbabwe or Lebanon but not for any United States except one conjured by paranoid fantasy. If Congress and the Presidency are in the hands (or under the thumb) of “domestic extremists”, what are the “moderates” to do? Is electoral politics of any use against “those whose beliefs include contempt for democracy itself”? If not, what is? In their loathing for “extremists”, many left-wingers are moving, at least rhetorically, toward rather extreme positions themselves.

Will any significant number go beyond rhetoric? A Southern belle opined that the root cause of the Civil War was not any specific dispute between North and South but that “we hated the Yankees so much”. In the Schiavo case, we have hints that a similar hatred is percolating in the 21st Century. Let us hope that it leads to no similar catastrophe.

Less ominous, but likely to be the subject of considerably more chit-chat (especially among liberals who hope for fissures on the Right that will enable a minority Left to regain the power that it believes it deserves), are the disagreements that erupted, often heatedly, between conservatives and libertarians (two blurrily defined terms but convenient for the nonce). Very few libertarians expressed the opinion that the desire to keep Mrs. Schiavo alive was monstrous; many averred that such would have been their own decision, had the question been theirs to decide. They did not, however, approve of Congressional action to overturn a verdict reached by state courts after years of litigation, and for many of them that legislative overreaching was a matter of tremendous moment – “contempt for the Constitution and the different branches of government”, in the words of Glenn Reynolds. Isn’t that just a trifle hyperbolic? Congress did not presume to alter the substantive law of Florida in any respect, nor did it tell the courts how to decide the case; it gave the Schindlers a federal forum in which to assert whatever rights they had under the United States Constitution and federal law. That is far from an aberrant use of the federal judiciary.

On the other side of the Right there has been hyperbole, too. Professor Reynolds has good reason to be annoyed at being tarred with the poisonous anti-Christian ravings of certain other bloggers. His stance is not that Terri Schiavo ought to have been starved but that the good end of saving her life didn’t justify the bad means of violating the Constitutional order. I disagree with his opinion that the Constitution was maltreated in this instance, but I trust that almost all conservatives would see his point if the means had been less scrupulous about legal niceties, for instance, if President Bush had sent federal marshals to Pinellas Park to arrest Michael Schiavo and reinsert his wife’s feeding tube. As James Taranto points out, “[T]he ‘religious right’, for better or worse, has supplanted the liberal left as the political faction that most strongly and consistently advocates compassion in social policy.” Compassion is a worthy quality, but it is not the only worthy quality. A government of laws makes mistakes; experience shows that a government of compassionate men makes worse ones.

The preceding observations do not, of course, apply to every liberal, every libertarian or every conservative. Some very leftish liberals readily aligned themselves with the Christian Right in Mrs. Schiavo’s behalf, as did a fairly large number of libertarians. Meanwhile, a few impeccable conservatives of religious bent glumly concluded that intervention would be futile. On all sides, there were civil disputants, and the troubling patterns of thought and rhetoric noted above were far from universal. Nonetheless, a dram of eale is at work in the body politic, and we must be sedulous that it not make “all the noble substance of a doubt”.

Related Posts: Strange Spirits
Civil Obedience
Fake-But-Accurate and the Schiavo Case
Schiavo Quotes of the Day
Terri Schiavo’s Golgotha
You Don’t Have to Be Pro-Life to Love Terri Schiavo
“Vegetables” Who Think

Behind the Pope’s Assassin

Pope John Paul II has enjoyed one of the longer Papal reigns, and his canonization is a near certainty. He might, however, have died only three years into his Papacy, on May 13, 1981, when Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish citizen with a long criminal record, shot him twice in St. Peter’s Square. There was much speculation at the time about whether Agca was in the pay of others, but he has never talked. (He is currently imprisoned in Turkey after being convicted of murdering a journalist.) Now records from the Soviet era are talking for him. The OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription-only, $3.95/month cheap) reports:

One of the most intriguing mysteries of the Cold War has finally been laid to rest. Ever since he was shot by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca in 1981, Pope John Paul II has refused to discuss the incident. But last month, the ailing Pope included this passage in his just released book Memory and Identity: “Ali Agca is a professional killer. This means the attempt was not his initiative, that it was someone else who planned it, that someone else had commissioned it.”

We now know the Pope's statement was backed up by documents from the East German secret police that have finally been unearthed. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reports that the files show that the Soviet KGB ordered the Bulgarian secret police to kill the Pope, whose Polish heritage led the Soviets to conclude he would foment trouble in their empire. The newspaper said the documents include letters from Stasi agents to their Bulgarian counterparts seeking help in covering up traces of the crime and creating a disinformation campaign denying Bulgaria's involvement.

I well remember when suggesting the communists had anything to do with this incident was regarded in bien pensant circles as incontrovertible proof of right-wing kookery. It’s pleasant to learn, though it took a quarter of a century, who was right about Soviet behavior.

Lenten Weblog, Day 18: Lighter Fare and a Warning

As a refrigerium from the discipline of Great Lent, let us turn to last Sunday’s Easter sermon of an eminent Canadian prelate, Michael Ingham, Anglican Bishop of New Westminster (via Midwest Conservative Journal, which keeps track of the comedy of modernist theology for the benefit of the rest of us).

Bishop Michael is much impressed by “new science”, that is, by science that was new several decades ago, though he doesn’t actually seem to know a lot about science old or new. He thinks, for instance, that traveling for 2,000 years at the speed of light would not take one out of the Solar System and that the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that our universe may someday “meet up with an anti-matter universe . . . [and] go up in a cloud of smoke”. He is distressed that “These ideas somehow never make it into the church.”

Not that His Grace is more at home in theology. At least, he seems to be under the impression that Christians have historically conceived of Heaven as a place that one can reach by traveling a very long distance from Earth. Happily, “A few brave Christians have taken up the challenge of these new ideas” and arrived at what sounds exactly like the old idea of pantheism.

Diarmuid O’Murchu in Quantum Theology: the Spiritual Implications of the New Physics says we should stop thinking of God as a supernatural Being located outside the universe. Instead, he says, we should think of the universe itself as a pulsating, vibrant dance of energy alive with benign and creative potential in which God calls to us from within, not without.

He says we should stop thinking of ourselves as created beings, and see ourselves instead as woven into the fabric of a dynamic, evolving and self-renewing universe in which we must play our part or become extinct. The damage we are doing to the planet and to other life forms may leave the universe no choice but to spit us out, as it has done to countless species before us.

Well, well, a new theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs: They didn’t play their part in the “dynamic, evolving and self-renewing universe”, so it spat them out. Is that a recent finding of evolutionary biology that I somehow missed?

The central theme of the homily is a cloudy connection between Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which “brings a new understanding of the non-predictability of events” (that’s why scientists conduct experiments, to marvel at how the results are different every time), and whatever it was that happened on the first Easter.

Easter is a kind of uncertainty principle thrust into the heart of our tidy, ordered universe, undermining all our theories about how things ought to be. It’s an event that makes everything unstable.

As Scripture says, “The people who dwelt in darkness have seen a great something that leaves them totally confused.” Certainly that is the case with the Bishop of New Westminster.

The unsettling side of this excursion into post-Christian nonsense is that Bishop Ingham imagines himself to be a serious, enlightened thinker, whereas he is in fact as ignorant and obscurantist as the most retrograde, Bob Jones-style fundamentalist. His abandonment of the good of intellect is a warning to us all.

Lenten Weblog, Day 17: St. John of the Ladder

Today is the feast day of St. John “of the Ladder” (“Climacus” in Latinized Greek), whose surname comes from the title of his principal work, Klimax tou Paradeisou (Englished in a recent edition as The Ladder of Divine Ascent). In 30 chapters the book traces the ascent from attachment to the world to union with God, beginning with the defeat of commonplace vices and continuing through the acquisition of the virtues of stillness, prayer, dispassion and love. It has long been central to Orthodox spirituality and is appointed for reading aloud in monasteries during Lent. The Fourth Sunday of Lent is dedicated to the author.

About St. John’s life, our knowledge is scanty. He is now believed to have been born before 579 and to have died about 649. At age 16, after excelling as a student, he abandoned the world to live as an anchorite near Mount Sinai. At age 60, he was chosen as abbot of the mountain’s great religious house (now known as St. Catherine’s Monastery). He passed into life eternal at about age 75.

The Ladder quickly became one of the most popular spiritual tracts ever written. In ascetic circles, it is one of the fundamental expositions of hesychasm, the approach to God through continual prayer of the heart. Among laymen it is read for its striking aphorisms and insight into the spiritual struggles that afflict all Christians. Indeed, St. John has wise counsel today. For instance, in view of the emotions aroused by the court-sanctioned starvation of Terri Schiavo, we should ponder what he had to say about the remembrance of wrongs:

Remembrance of wrongs is the consummation of anger, the keeper of sin, hatred of righteousness, ruin of virtues, poison of the soul, worm of the mind, shame of prayer, cessation of supplication, estrangement of love, a nail stuck in the soul, pleasure-less feeling cherished in the sweetness of bitterness, continuous sin, unsleeping transgression, hourly malice. . . . You will know that you have completely freed yourself of this rot, not when you pray for the person who has offended you, not when you exchange presents with him, not when you invite him to your table, but only when, on hearing that he has fallen into bodily or spiritual misfortune, you suffer and weep for him as for yourself. . . .

The forgetting of wrongs is a sign of true repentance. But he who dwells on them and thinks that he is repenting is like a man who thinks he is running while he is really asleep.

Troparion - Tone 8

By a flood of tears you made the desert fertile
And by your longing for God you brought forth fruits in abundance.
By the radiance of miracles you illuminated the whole universe.
O our holy Father John Climacus, pray to Christ our God to save our souls.

Kontakion - Tone 1

You offered us your teachings as fruits of everlasting freshness,
To sweeten the hearts of those who receive them with attention.
O blessed and wise John, they are the rungs of a ladder,
Leading the souls of those who honor you from earth to Eternal glory in Heaven!

Lenten Weblog, Day 16: A Citizen of Christendom

Today is the fifth anniversary of the canonization of St. Raphael Hawaweeny (1860-1915), the first Orthodox Bishop of Brooklyn (consecrated 101 years ago, on the Third Sunday of Lent, 1904) and a pioneer of Orthodoxy in this country. He was born in Beirut, to which his parents had fled from Damascus during an outbreak of violence that took the lives of their parish priest, St. Joseph of Damascus (martyred on July 10, 1860), and many other Christians. The family later returned to Damascus, where Raphael excelled in school and won a scholarship to study for the priesthood. In 1886 he graduated from the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s School of Theology at Halki in Constantinople. After serving for a time on the staff of Patriarch Gerasimos of Antioch, he enrolled in the Kiev Theological Academy, then was ordained to the priesthood in 1889 and became the Patriarch’s representative in Moscow. Unfortunately, he fell out of favor with Gerasimos’ successor and by 1895 had been relegated to teaching Arabic at a seminary in Kazan.

Showing that God rarely closes one door except to open another, this underutilized priest came to the notice of the Syrian Orthodox Benevolent Society of New York, which was searching for a clergyman to attend to the needs of America’s small, scattered Christian Arab population. Fr. Raphael was invited to take the post and arrived in this country on November 2, 1895. Within two weeks he had established a chapel. The following year he traveled across the continent from New York to San Francisco in the first of his several transcontinental pastoral journeys, visiting Orthodox communities – Greek and Russian as well as Arab – in 30 cities.

After declining offers of ecclesiastical preferment in the old country, Fr. Raphael was chosen as Bishop of Brooklyn under the Moscow Patriarchate (then the only active Orthodox jurisdiction in the United States). He was the first Orthodox bishop whose consecration took place in the New World and the first to serve there throughout his entire episcopal career. In addition to continuing his extensive travels, Bishop Raphael founded a periodical for his Arab-speaking flock, al-Kalimat (The Word, still published (in English) by the Antiochian Archdiocese), translated liturgical texts into Arabic, while at the same time encouraging the use of English in church services, wrote extensively, and took part in ecumenical endeavors, particularly the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox Churches Union, of which he was vice president from 1910 through 1912.

In 1911 he began to suffer heart problems, though ill health reduced his activity only slightly. He passed into life eternal on February 27, 1915.

Orthodox Photos has a short biography, with photographs illustrating St. Raphael’s career.

Troparion - Tone 1

Your proclamation has gone forth throughout North America,
calling the scattered sheep into the unity of the church.
hearing your voice, they responded to your teaching,
and through your writings you instructed them in piety.
now guided by your example, O Father Raphael,
we sing hymns of praise unto Christ our God.
Glory to Him Who gave you strength!
Glory to Him Who granted you a crown!
Glory to Him Who, through you, grants healing to all!

Kontakion - Tone 8

You were a guardian and a defender of the Church¹s teaching;
you protected your flock from false doctrines and confirmed them in the true faith.
O holy father Raphael, son of Syria and glory of North America,
always intercede before the Lord that our souls may be saved.

Briefly Noted: Charlock, Simonsen, Social Security

■ The way that blogs come and go, I feared the worst when The Charlock’s Shade, a delightful blend of book notes and curmudgeonly observations on the state of culture, came to an abrupt halt last December 6th, while “Enoch Soames” was “out as well as about in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.” An ominous place to disappear! Happily, Enoch has reappeared just as abruptly. I take his harrowing account of his hiatus cum grano salis.

■ Redmond Simonsen, whose maps, counters and cover art for SPI have influenced wargame graphics ever since, died of heart failure on March 8, 2005, at the sadly young age of 62. He hadn’t worked in the wargaming industry for 20 years, but we old-timers remember him well. Operational Studies Group has posted reminiscences (page 1, page 2) from inter aliis Greg Costykian, David Isby, Jim Dunnigan, Jack Greene, Rodger MacGowan, Brad Hessel, John Prados, Eric Lee Smith and Kevin Zucker.

Update (4/24/05): The Charles S. Roberts Awards site has posted a detailed appreciation, Alan Emrich & Rodger B. MacGowan, “Our View is Better Because We Stood on the Shoulders of a Giant: Redmond A. Simonsen”.

■ Brendan Miniter’s description of the Democrats’ inchoate Social Security pseudo-reforms, which I noted when it appeared in the subscription-only OpinionJournal Political Diary, is now publicly available, with additional commentary, under the fitting heading, “Worse Than No Reform”. At least a few clever Dems have come up with ways to “save” Social Security that ignore its demographic imbalances while “improving” it in ways that would expand both the scope of the welfare state and the power of the federal government to influence the private economy. Not surprisingly, their ideas are Bill Clinton retreads.

Lenten Weblog, Day 15: Strange Spirits

A standard media line is that those who object to starving Terri Schiavo to death are motivated by fanatical Christianity. That surprises me a bit, for I had charitably thought that hardened secularists also disliked the idea of depriving people of food and water. At issue in Mrs. Schiavo’s case is whether she is aware of what is happening to her, a question of fact that cannot be decided on religious grounds. I assume that morally sane nonbelievers do not advocate cruelty and have sincerely convinced themselves that there is no rational possibility that Terri Schiavo feels anything as her body dies. Were that my conviction, too, her circumstances would not distress me. (This morning I happened to see a snippet of CNN Headline News reporting that her doctors were administering morphine, which suggests a certain lack of confidence in the diagnosis of total unconsciousness.)

If the role of Christian zeal in this dispute is overstated, a different religious impulse has been overlooked. Michael Schiavo’s lawyer, Gregory Felos, also adheres to a supernatural creed, the tenets of which he has espoused in a book entitled Litigation as Spiritual Practice. He believes, to summarize baldly, that death is a stage in a divine procession. Hastening it for the disabled is to help them on their journey and doesn’t actually deprive them of life, as they are drops in the ocean of God and will be reincarnated in due course. A few quotations (from sources ([1] and [2]) that, while hostile to Mr. Felos, do not appear to be plucking his words out of context; cf. his publisher’s Web page):

[Mr. Felos’ reaction to reading a book on “conscious dying”:] Scripture says neither hands, nor feet, nor emotion, nor mind, nor body are we. Our death—the permanent separation of our spirit, our consciousness, from the body—if experienced with awareness, can provide the opportunity to dispel the greatest of illusions: that we are this body. The author [of the book] goes on to describe how meditation and spiritual practice is the process of dying—the means by which we extinguish our ego and body identification and realize we are the expression and manifestation of the Divine. Pretty heady stuff, especially for one who had just died and been reborn, so to speak. I deeply connected with the message of this book, and as I gazed out the window upon the clouds and surface below, I felt death move a bit closer.

[On a different occasion, by his own account, his thought “I wonder what it would be like to die right now” caused an airplane to go into a sudden dive.] At that instant a clear, distinctly independent and slightly stern voice said to me, “Be careful what you think. You are more powerful than you realize.” In quick succession I was startled, humbled and blessed by God’s admonishment.

This autonomy from mental control is characteristic of how events and emotions are encountered during Grace. . . . Nothing holds permanent and immutable except the ocean of God’s consciousness from which and upon which the forms of Divine consciousness play. Life in Grace is a succession of these unfolding moments. Whether the next moment brings death or a fortune is irrelevant because nothing that can happen can ever harm or hurt you, or improve or make you better. In reality you have never been born and never can die. You are the expression of the Divine.

If we are infinitely large, if the Divine within us, which is us, contains all of creation, what can be taken from us and who is there to take it? [emphasis in original]

[An experience that he claims to have had while he and his wife were debating whether to have children:] I heard the soul of my yet-to-be-conceived child emphatically shout: “I’m ready to be born . . . will you stop this fooling around!” . . . The voice I heard was distinctly male, and I beamed with the idea I had a son—or was going to have a son—or sorta had a son out there—or something like that. [James Taranto: “Of course, if Felos (or a talking gleam in his eye) thinks the way to conceive a child is to stop fooling around, some medical expert ought to sit him down and explain the facts of life.”]

Gregory Felos, then, embraces the “right to die” (or, to be more precise, the right to have others liberate your God-spirit by ending your life), because he has received what he regards as spiritual enlightenment. I take it for granted that he is sincere and regards his mystical experiences as authoritative. But how does he know that they derive from God rather than from his imagination or a malign spirit?

Christian mystics not infrequently report diabolic visions that are every bit as vivid as those sent by God. They can distinguish the one from the other by drawing on the teachings of the Church. If a saint is urged by an angel of light to kill an innocent woman, he knows that the “angel” is a demon in disguise, because it calls him to do what the law of Christ forbids.

Mr. Felos, by contrast, has no theology but that inferred from his visions. No independent authority can test the validity of the visions, and he has never thought to raise skeptical questions. Thus he has been led to a self-righteous zeal for what can only be characterized, by those who do not share his faith, as a cult of death. In our era of “New Age” spiritual experimentation, he is far from alone in following unexamined impulses into terrain that is dangerous to soul and body.

Lenten Weblog, Day 14: Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas

On the second Sunday in Lent, the Orthodox Church honors St. Gregory Palamas (c. 1296-1359). To Orthodox theologians St. Gregory is a tremendously exciting and seminal thinker, whose ideas swept through the 14th Century Church like a divine fire. Before Gregory, it is not unfair to say, Orthodox thought, as exemplified by such figures as Barlaam of Calabria, was drifting toward Renaissance Roman Catholicism, just as the Byzantine Empire was drifting toward political subordination to the Western powers. Gregory decisively rejected the intrusion of humanism and rationalism into theology. His great contribution was to arrest the tendency to push the implications of God’s transcendence to their logical end point. His great opponents Barlaam, Gregory Akindynos and Demetrios Kydones, placed God so far beyond human comprehension that He became an impersonal, unknowable, Neoplatonic deity, almost the sort of God that Antony Flew, the recent defector from atheism, hypothesizes.

St. Gregory’s God, by contrast, is personal and knowable, not in His divine essence but in the “energies” with which He touches the world. To a non-specialist like me, the details of the reasoning of Gregory and his later interpreters are obscure, but the conclusion, vindicating the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Who became incarnate in Jesus Christ, against the God of the philosophers, is clear.

To the saint’s contemporaries, God’s accessibility was not a matter of abstract speculation but immediate practical import. Palamatism became a key issue in secular politics, in which Gregory himself strove to play the role of peacemaker. Contrary to what one might cynically suspect, the Palamite cause did not triumph through being on the winning political side. While it was certainly helpful that the emperor who presided over the first council to consider the controversy (the Council of St. Sophia, June 10, 1341) was Gregory’s boyhood friend Andronicus III, that prop vanished when Andronicus died less than a week later. Within a few years, the Emperor John V Palaeologos had accepted union with Rome in return for promises (never fulfilled) of a great anti-Turkish crusade. Had Palamatism not already been decisively established within the Church, it is likely that this political development would have led to its condemnation. Instead, Gregory was canonized in 1368, only nine years after his death. His role as a Father of the Church was further emphasized when he began to be commemorated during Lent, on the Sunday formerly reserved for the highly esteemed St. Polycarp of Smyrna (d. 166).

Further reading: Monachos, “Gregory Palamas – An Historical Study”, “St. Gregory Palamas – Knowledge, Prayer and Vision”, “Gregory Palamas – Historical Appendices”
Fr. George Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers”
Panayiotis Christou, “The Teaching of Gregory Palamas on Man”

Lenten Weblog, Day 13: First Commandment and First Amendment

It’s remarkable how frequently non-Christians or Christian modernists undertake to expound what traditional Christians “really” believe, generally along the lines of, Those guys may pretend to be reasonable and harmless, but if you dig deeper. . . .

Today’s exhibit is a column distributed by the University of Wyoming Religious Studies Program under the title, “The First Commandment vs. the First Amendment”. Its news hook is the forthcoming Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments in public buildings, but its central argument is less transient: that the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion is directly opposed to the First Commandment’s “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”

The Puritans were perhaps the pivotal religious group in America’s founding. They championed religious freedom, by which they meant that they themselves should be a community that was free to worship according to their beliefs. They believed that they were a new “Israel” and that therefore Scripture and the Ten Commandments applied to them. As a community, they enforced its legal requirements.

The First Commandment took on special meaning. “You shall have no other gods before me” meant: You shall not follow beliefs or practices about God different from those of the community. Freedom of worship was thus freedom to do as the community of believers determined, with scriptural and divine guidance, but not as individuals believed, whatever scriptural or divine guidance they received. The Puritans thus created a restrictive society, like the one they had fled.

People who went against the dictates of the Puritan community were expelled, as were fervent Christians such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Both fled to Rhode Island, where Williams founded America’s first Baptist congregation. Rhode Island became a center for religious difference. Not only did several different types of Christianity flourish there, but so did the Touro Synagogue, one of America’s first Jewish congregations.

Williams’ ideas later became fixed in the Bill of Rights’ First Amendment, which provides the foundation for the exclusion of government from involvement in religious matters. . . . This religious freedom comes from the First Amendment's denial of the First Commandment.

The message is clear: Belief in the First Commandment leads to religious persecution. The United States would have evolved into an oppressive Puritan theocracy, with only “freedom to do as the community of believers determined,” had not the founders of Rhode Island boldly denied the validity of the First Commandment, a denial that “became fixed in the Bill of Rights’ First Amendment”. To readers unacquainted with Christian history and doctrine, the exegesis of the commandment as “You shall not follow beliefs or practices about God different from those of the community” may sound plausible enough, but it has been invented by the columnist out of thin air.

That princes could and should establish a particular faith as the official religion, supported by the state and granted privileges of varying degree, was taken for granted well before any large part of the world was influenced by the words of Yahweh. The Athenian Assembly that condemned Socrates and the Roman Emperors who persecuted the early Church did not need a Mosaic injunction to inspire them. When Christian-ruled states emerged, they, too, regarded religion as a proper object of legal regulation. If any Church Father invoked the First Commandment in support of that practice, he merely added a superfluous buttress to an uncontroversial practice; all of the debate was over which creed should be established.

While Puritan Massachusetts was no exemplar of what we would today call religious freedom, attributing its intolerance of heterodoxy to intense devotion to the First Commandment is far-fetched. The colony’s founders had gone to a great deal of trouble to find an out-of-the-way location for what was intended to be a homogenous community of the Elect. The limitation of full citizenship to members of the official church was intended to prevent that goal from being thwarted. It did not rest on a doctrine that God commanded state-enforced uniformity.

And what of Roger Williams, who supposedly pioneered the anti-First Commandment views? The folk of Massachusetts Bay with whom he quarreled did not accuse him of repudiating the Ten Commandments. Indeed, at the time of his expulsion he was pastor of one of the settlement’s leading churches, and his adherence to Puritan theology was unblemished. His troubles with the authorities stemmed from political rather than religious disagreement, particularly over relations with the Indians and the validity of royal land grants.

That Christian governments have engaged in persecution is not a source of pride, nor is it a corollary of the fundamentals of the faith. Rather, it is a consequence of the adaptation of the faith to the world, a process in which worldliness too often infects faith. Those who constantly urge the Church to “keep up with the times” and “get rid of outmoded dogmas” may wish to reflect on whether being in step with the zeitgeist and downplaying dogmas that the age finds unattractive have served Christianity well in the past.

Hugo Award Nominees Revealed

A few hours ago, InterAction announced the 2005 Hugo Award nominees. Ballots will be distributed with Progress Report 4. The voting deadline is July 8, 2005. Here are a few observations:

• The novel nominees include no great surprises, except that every single author is British. Either American writers slipped badly last year, or a lot of Brits broke precedent and cast nominating ballots.

• For what I believe is the first time, two stories that first appeared on-line rather than in print gained nominations: “The Voluntary State” by Christopher Rowe (novelette) and “The Best Christmas Ever” by James Patrick Kelly (short story). Both were published by SciFiction, which is also a Best Web Site Hugo nominee.

• The short fiction nominees were more scattered than usual: four from anthologies, four from Analog, three from Asimov’s, and two each from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and SciFiction. That represents the best showing by Analog and the poorest by Asimov’s in many years, as well as a definite dip in the dominance of the big three print mags.

• Two of Noreascon Four’s Guest of Honor books, With Stars in My Eyes by Peter Weston and Dancing Naked by William Tenn, gained Best Related Book nominations.

• As some people (modest cough) predicted, Short-Form Best Dramatic Presentation has become a weak sister among the categories. Only 161 nominating ballots were cast, the least of any category and less than half of Long-Form’s 340. Meanwhile, we literary types can be pleased that Best Novel was first by a wide margin this year (424).

• Best Web Site, which InterAction placed into contention by exercising its right to create a special Hugo, had the third largest number of nominating ballots (318). Three of the nominees also appeared on the ballot in 2002, when ConJosé introduced the category.

Congratulations to all of the nominees.

Addendum: Another astonishing fact about the Best Novel nominees: Two of them, River of Gods by Ian McDonald and The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks, have not yet been published in the United States! When was the last time that anything like that happened?

A Warning to Anti-Globalists

A University of Wyoming press release summarizes, under the perplexing headline “Did Use of Free Trade Cause Neanderthal Extinction?”, a paper arguing that Homo neanderthalensis died out because it refused to embrace the free trade and globalization policies of competing Homo sapiens.

“After at least 200,000 years of eking out an existence in glacial Eurasia, the Neanderthal suddenly went extinct,” writes University of Wyoming economist Jason Shogren, along with colleagues Richard Horan of Michigan State University and Erwin Bulte from Tilburg University in the Netherlands. “Early modern humans arriving on the scene shortly before are suspected to have been the perpetrator, but exactly how they caused Neanderthal extinction is unknown.”

Creating a new kind of caveman economics in their published paper [in the Journal of Economic Organization and Behavior], they argue early modern humans were first to exploit the competitive edge gained from specialization and free trade. With more reliance on free trade, humans increased their activities in culture and technology, while simultaneously out-competing Neanderthals on their joint hunting grounds, the economists say.

Archaeological evidence exists to suggest traveling bands of early humans interacted with each other and that inter-group trading emerged, says Shogren. Early humans, the Aurignacians and the Gravettians, imported many raw materials over long ranges and their innovations were widely dispersed. Such exchanges of goods and ideas helped early humans to develop “supergroup social mechanisms.” The long-range interchange among different groups kept both cultures going and generated new cultural explosions, Shogren says. . . .

He says the evidence does not support the concept of division of labor and trade among Neanderthals. While Neanderthals probably cooperated with one another to some extent, the evidence does not support the view that specialization arose from any formal division of labor or that inter- or intra-group trade existed.

So, when people call Pat Buchanan a “Neanderthal”, they speak more truly than they realize.

Lenten Weblog, Day 12: A Reason for the Orthodox Calendar

Today is Good Friday, the most severe and solemn of fast days, for Christians who follow the Western calendar. It is also the Feast of the Annunciation, a day of celebration and joy. Doesn’t that coincidence suggest that the Orthodox calendar, which everyone agrees is less “scientific”, has its virtues for marking the life of the Church?

For the Orthodox, Holy Friday and the Annunciation cannot fall on the same day, and Easter always falls after the Jewish Passover (though that was not invariably the case during the 1st Millennium). Those are excellent results if the purpose of the calendar is to produce a meaningful Christian year. They are less excellent, I concede, if the highest priority is applying exact astronomical methods to the decisions of the First Council of Nicaea. Readers may decide for themselves which is more important.

It should be noted that, even using the Orthodox calendar, Holy Friday could fall on March 25th so long as we observed the Julian civil calendar. It is the surface inconsistency of adopting the Gregorian calendar for most purposes but keeping the old method of determining the date of Easter that eliminates the risk of a spiritual anomaly. That is, I think, an example of how Tradition can outperform Reason in arriving at rational and satisfactory outcomes.

Further reading: Lewis Patsavos, “The Calendar of the Orthodox Church” is a good overview of the calendrical controversies.

Discussions of the dating of Easter seem invariably to center on astronomy rather than faith. Very thorough and useful for the former is Marcos J. Montes, “Calculation of the Ecclesiastical Calendar”, which includes “Notes on the Orthodox Easter”. William H. Jeffreys, “Easter, Rosh Hashanah and Passover” provides an algorithm for calculating the Jewish holy days.

There was a strong effort a few years ago in ecumenical circles to persuade all Christian denominations to adopt a new, astronomically more precise Easter calculation. Proponents saw an opportunity for “unification” in the coincidence of Orthodox and Western Easters in 2001 and 2004, after which everyone could march along under the new New Calendar. For an account, vide “Efforts to Find a Common Date for Easter”. The campaign went nowhere and didn’t deserve to. Not only would it spread the spiritual defects of the Western calculation to the Orthodox world, but any attempt by Orthodox jurisdictions to revise the church calendar at this moment in history would generate schisms whose detriment would outweigh the benefits of celebrating the Resurrection of Christ on the same day as our Western brethren.

Lenten Weblog, Day 11: Civil Obedience

You must all obey the governing authorities. Since all government comes from God, the civil authorities were appointed by God, and so anyone who resists authority is rebelling against God’s decision, and such an act is bound to be punished. Good behavior is not afraid of magistrates; only criminals have anything to fear. If you want to live without being afraid of authority, you must live honestly and authority may even honor you. The state is there to serve God for your benefit. If you break the law, however, you may well have fear: The bearing of the sword has its significance. The authorities are there to serve God: They carry out God’s revenge by punishing wrongdoers. You must obey, therefore, not only because you are afraid of being punished, but also for conscience’s sake. [Romans 13:1-5 (Jerusalem Bible)]

As Terri Schiavo wastes away, many Christians will be righteously indignant (or, as the media will label them, angry), and in some hearts indignation at a cruel decision will metastasize into fury at the United States and Florida governments. One commentator has already called for “storming the Bastille”, that is, rescuing the victim by executive fiat despite the absence of legal authorization. Others, less vocal or excitable, will merely harbor dark thoughts about the virtues of civil disobedience.

Before giving way to such sentiments, we should reflect on the words of St. Paul. Is it an evil that the governing authorities have approved the death by starvation of a middle-aged woman and frustrated all attempts to save her? Suppose that they allowed parents to kill any infant who was judged “sickly”, or that fathers had unfettered power of life and death over most of those in their households, or that judges routinely ordered torture, flogging and cruel executions? Is it dismaying that Christianity is widely denounced as an improper basis for public policy? Suppose that merely naming oneself as a servant of Christ were a punishable offense?

Those suppositions were, of course, facts in the 1st Century Roman Empire. According to St. Paul, the officials who routinely perpetrated horrors greater than those inflicted on Terri Schiavo, “were appointed by God”, and resistance to their decrees was tantamount to “rebelling against God’s decision”. They were to be obeyed, not merely because defiance would lead to penalties but because conscience demanded it.

If the Apostle could write that about Caesar’s minions, a fortiori, it is true of duly elected or appointed officials of the United States and Florida. If conscience demanded acquiescence in the decisions promulgated by an absolute monarchy that excluded Christian opinion entirely, the force of that demand is magnified when the state is subject to popular control and allows Christians full freedom of speech. It is hard to accept an outcome that one believes to be drastically wrong, but conscience (as we too often forget these days, when “follow your conscience” and “do what feels good” are generally treated as synonymous) is the faculty that instructs us to do what we do not like.

Bowing to the wisdom of St. Paul does not mean spinelessly accepting tyranny. The duty to obey the constituted authorities is not man’s only duty. A “just rebellion” is no more unthinkable than a “just war”, but neither is the norm. Indeed, one need only contrast America, Florida judges and all, with Lebanon or Kyrgyzstan to see how frivolous it is to grumble that our government is undeserving of patriotic allegiance.

So let us respond to the Schiavo tragedy not with railing but with prayer, not with anger but with fasting, not with disobedience but with repentance. The evil done already is enough.

Passing Breezes, With Music

■ Harvard profs can’t get into Rock’n’Roll heaven, so where do they go instead?

■ Power Line has continued to cover the so-called “GOP talking points” on Terri Schiavo. The likelihood that they had any official standing is now in the range of nil, that they were a plant by Democrats or the media very high. The latest updates are here (signs of forgery to substantiate forgery) and here (further evidence that the document was not circulated among Republicans and originated with someone not completely at home with Senate procedures).

■ Let me direct your attention to a comment posted this morning in response to my “Social Security Reform: Patrience, Please”. The substance is feeble: an argument that the present system is better for poor workers than individual accounts, because it includes disability benefits and skews its formula toward beneficiaries with low lifetime earnings. Those are unimportant advantages, because (a) President Bush doesn’t propose to alter the disability program; (b) individual accounts would provide an additional source of income for those who suffer disability; (c) low income is a predictor for shorter-than-average life expectancy at retirement, which offsets the advantage of the progressive benefit formula; and (d) it doesn’t take spectacular investment returns for an individual account to surpass the most favorable Social Security formula (and whatever is left in the account can be passed on to one’s heirs).

What’s significant about the comment, however, is not its unimpressive reasoning but its racist rhetoric. It has the appearance of a mass mailing, probably spammed to other sites that have written about Social Security reform. The racism is black, rather than white, and can’t be imputed to all reform opponents. On the other hand, if white racists were spewing this kind of stuff in favor of the President’s proposals, it would be trumpeted by the media as loudly as the dubious Schiavo memorandum.

■ The latest book on “Who Really Wrote Shakespeare?” is a rare entry on the side of sanity: The Case for Shakespeare : The End of the Authorship Question by Scott McCrea, a playwright who teaches at SUNY’s Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film. It will take a while for Amazon to deliver my copy. Meanwhile, here are comments posted on an anti-Stratfordian newsgroup by vocal Oxenfordian Richard F. Whalen:

McCrea’s book needs to be addressed because it’s a book-length, direct attack on the Oxfordian proposition by someone at a university. (Maybe that’s a compliment?) He probably spent 3-5 years researching and writing it, and he got a major academic-oriented publisher for it. . . . He accuses Oxfordians in detail of poor scholarship and selective use of evidence, and relying on totally implausible conspiracy theories. He raises some interesting challenges, eg. the WS works refer solely and many times to grammar school education but never to universities – challenges that will appeal to the unwary .

Having read Mr. Whalen’s magnum opus, I doubt his ability to evaluate the cogency of opposing arguments, so I’ll wait and see before hailing Mr. McCrea as the vanquisher of the infidels.

If, by the way, the book argues that the absence of university scenes in the plays is evidence against Oxenford’s authorship, it is straining too far. Despite the fantasies of folks like Richard Whalen, the earl attended a university for only a few months, as a Cambridge boarder at age eight. He left after his father grew tired of paying charges for broken windows. So he knew quite as little about Oxbridge as the man from Stratford.

■ Tomorrow I’m off to Minicon 40 (or “Fortean”), which I can do because my Easter weekend is still five weeks away. Posting will be either interrupted or incessant, depending.

First Whispers: The Democratic Social Security Plan

Yesterday the editors of the Wall Street Journal had a session with Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), minority whip and leading Democratic spokesman on Social Security. An account in the OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription-only, but cheap at $3.95 a month) foreshadows what the Dems will say about the program once they stop insisting that absolutely nothing is wrong:

Mr. Hoyer said Democrats will offer their own plan when the time is right, and that the model for compromise will be the deal Ronald Reagan struck in 1983 to raise the retirement age. He further hinted at benefit cuts by noting that the government isn’t obligated to keep paying what it currently pays out. Dropping the Democratic talking points for a few minutes, he also suggested that Social Security should have the “ability to invest” in the stock market. And he declared: “I am for private accounts,” though “as an add-on” to Social Security.

So, after months of denouncing President Bush for proposing future benefit reductions, sweetened by being able to keep all of the gains from one’s own investment account, Democrats are prepared to offer future benefit reductions, sweetened by nothing at all. No wonder they’ve been reluctant to go public with that brainstorm!

Investing the Social Security trust fund in stocks and “adding on” taxpayer-funded private accounts are two of the Clinton Administration’s bad ideas, whose flaws I discussed long ago. In brief, the former would make the U.S. government the country’s largest stockholder, potentially owning $7 trillion in securities at the trust fund’s peak. That sort of government intrusion into the private sector would be unhealthy. Moreover, it would not address Social Security’s long-term demographic dilemma in any meaningful way.

The other element, add-on accounts paid for by other taxpayers, is no more than an income transfer scheme. Its appeal to crypto-socialists is obvious, but one hopes that they won’t fool the rest of us.

I expect to hear many invocations of 1983 as the debate continues, with the aim of convincing the public that higher taxes (only on “the wealthy”, of course) and lower benefits are the “Reaganesque” approach to reform. That isn’t the real history. In 1983 Social Security faced near-term cash flow shortfalls because of imprudent revisions to the benefit formula a few years earlier. All of the changes adopted then were directed toward resolving that problem. Private accounts weren’t on the table, because everyone still regarded Social Security as Washington’s highest-voltage third rail, one that not even Ronald Reagan dared to touch. It’s a pity that our leaders weren’t bolder back then. If they had been, the transition of the system from public liabilities to private assets could have been nearly complete by now. That an opportunity was missed once is not, however, a good reason to spurn it when it comes again.

Lenten Weblog, Day 10: Opportunity in Unraveling

The news that one of our most invaluable quarterlies, The Public Interest, will cease publication has spurred me to browse through back issues. Last night I reread “The Unraveling of Christianity in America” by Clifford Orwin, which appeared in the Spring 2004 issue. As his title suggests, the author has little optimism about either of the two great camps, “mainline” and “evangelical” into which he divides American Christians. On the Christian Left,

Since the late nineteenth century and the emergence of the Social Gospel, the typical response of the mainline churches to the challenge of secularism has been to capitulate to it. Every one of these churches has been advancing (or retreating) from Christian orthodoxy down the road of secular progressivism. They have not done so without hesitation and confusion, which have sometimes brought them to the brink of schism. Nonetheless, within each of these churches, certainly at the national level, progressivism has eventually prevailed across the board. . . .

Similarly, within the pastoral realm, the discourse of psychotherapy and personal fulfillment appears to have established itself as thoroughly in the mainline churches as in the lay world. Those who are looking for something different in church than is on offer outside it are increasingly less likely to find it there.

The evangelicals have avoided surrender to the dominant secular culture, forming a sort of counterculture. Unfortunately, they lack many of the qualities needed to prevail in the “culture wars”:

Perhaps most confusingly, neither are evangelicals themselves immune to the inroads of the mainline from which they seek to distinguish themselves. James Davison Hunter’s studies of evangelical divinity students show a marked tendency toward regression to the mean of Protestant religious opinion in America. And then there is the vogue for “Christian counseling,” a growth industry if ever there was one. Himmelfarb reports that “evangelicals are divided between those practicing a ‘classical’ spirituality derived from earlier Protestant and Puritan traditions, and those partial to a ‘postmodern’ or ‘existential’ spirituality, which is therapeutic and individualist.” . . .

No counterculture fully realizes its aspiration to separate itself from the broader culture. I will note, however, one respect in which the evangelicals have failed not just themselves but the rest of us. This is the barrenness of their intellectual life. In many months spent over many years visiting in a pious household, I‘ve not come upon a single evangelical book that rose above mediocrity. On a recent lecturing trip to the South, I met a young evangelical intellectual who had just defected to Catholicism. First among his reasons was the intellectual wealth of his new, much older faith in contrast with the poverty of his former, much younger one. He disclosed that others of his circle were contemplating the same move for the same reason. It would be unfair to demand of evangelicalism that it produce a St. Thomas Aquinas or Pascal any time soon. Still, it had better develop some avenue of intellectual response to its own most thoughtful young people.

There is a great deal of truth to these indictments, though generalizing from the library of a single “pious household” and the dissatisfaction of one intellectual may be rash. Christianity is not, however, the only faith that is unraveling. Secular liberalism has, in Dr. Orwin’s view, lost its intellectual bearings in a more fundamental way:

In posing the question between humanism and theism as one of reason versus revelation, one risks being branded as passé in the most advanced secularist circles. This is not because the reigning theorists there will crow that reason has triumphed, but because they take it for granted that its pretensions have been decisively refuted. The earlier John Rawls, he of the Theory of Justice (1972), might have seemed to argue that secularist liberalism was the dictate of universal reason. This invested his enterprise with weight, as if he really was participating in the grand style of political philosophy. Later, however, he crumbled on this point, conceding that such liberalism was merely “our” perspective, no more grounded in the truth about things than any previous moral horizon. He thus made his peace with postmodernism.

Richard Rorty, the leading postmodernist liberal theorist, candidly admits that at the end of the day liberalism is a matter of faith, not reason. Indeed, he goes further than this: He concedes that liberalism, once so jealous of its autonomy from Biblical faith, is in fact parasitic upon it. In his essay “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,” he describes secularist liberals like himself as “freeloading atheists.” They continue to rely on the Judaeo-Christian legacy of concern with human dignity despite their rejection of the revealed truth that alone could support this concern.

Rationalism that rejects reason is nothing but a refined superstition, as its adherents more or less acknowledge:

This twofold admission—that liberalism is merely a faith that remains dependent on an earlier faith, the authority of which it has rejected—should not, claims Rorty, dismay liberals in the least. No rational or coherent alternative to liberalism exists; all “foundational narratives,” upon inspection, will prove equally arbitrary and groundless. Thus our allegiance to liberalism progresses from the naive to the “ironic,” but the allegiance itself survives this transition unscathed. Through his supposed practice of unprecedented candor, Rorty achieves unheard of feats of having his cake and eating it too. Liberalism of this postmodernist sort pillages the Biblical tradition for everything up to and including its own moral core, while still priding itself on remaining a faith of the atheistic variety.

The other element in the American spiritual mix that Dr. Orwin describes is the “bourgeois bohemians” (David Brooks’ famous Bobos), who –

yearn for Something Higher, Shared, and Meaningful. Unfortunately, this vague impulse is attended by neither commitment nor belief. A Bobo never limits his options, so while he may dabble in a range of sacred practices (taking “helpings from the spiritual buffet table,” as Brooks puts it), he can never dedicate himself to any. Brooks cites the real life example of a “26-year-old disabilities counselor, the daughter of a Methodist minister, who describes herself as a ‘Methodist Taoist Native American Quaker Russian Orthodox Buddhist Jew.’”

The conclusion that I draw from this taxonomy of American spiritual culture is that Christian pessimism is unwarranted. The enemies of the Faith have effectively yielded the intellectual background and fallen back on the fortress of emotion and impulse, where “moral laxity is a way of life, having mysteriously emerged as the fundamental principle of morality itself. Not only do they treat the sinner with charity, but they’ve become curiously indifferent to the sin.”

Bringing a message of repentance to those who say they have no sin can be frustrating, and developing ways to pierce the armor of indifference is a daunting challenge. Nonetheless, though anti-Christian sentiment may sometimes grow fierce, Christianity has, for the first time since the Middle Ages, an overwhelming advantage in the struggle for men’s minds.

Addendum: The last part of the essay has the air of having been tacked on in order to incorporate recent events. It takes a peculiar turn, arguing that President Bush’s support of democracy to the Islamic world puts him on the secular side of the cultural divide, because it accepts the premise that Christianity is not essential to democracy.

The American project . . . . both implies and demands the abandonment of the link on which [Abraham Lincoln] so relied between liberal Christianity and liberal democracy. For it is crucial to our victory in the forum of world opinion (including, crucially, Muslim opinion) that we not couch our global project as akin to Christianity in any way. . . .

By its deeds, not merely its words, this administration has exceeded all previous ones in rejecting the dependence of democracy on Christianity. It has adopted the premise that just as Confucianism, historically anything but liberal or democratic, has posed no insuperable obstacle to the democratization of East Asia, so Islam will pose none to that of the Middle East.

Dr. Orwin’s reasoning puzzles me. Is he saying that the proper Christian position is that non-Christian peoples ought to be left under the sway of tyrants until and unless they come to Jesus? Christians are aware the democratic idea got its start in ancient Greece, five centuries before Our Lord’s Incarnation. We may contend that belief in Christ has consequences that make democracy and liberty more likely to flourish, but political felicity is not a parochial blessing that we refuse to share with infidels.

Reasoned Discourse From the AFL-CIO

A little over 25 years ago, two loony leftists, Jeremy Rifkin and Randy Barber, published a book called The North Will Rise Again: Pensions, Politics and Power in the 1980’s. It reads quaintly today. The first chapter hymns the inevitable demise of capitalism; within a generation, it will vanish from the earth. The rest of the volume stridently urges labor unions to help the inevitable along by wielding their power over pension plan assets for left-wing political ends. The authors are aware that federal law prohibits investing those assets other than for the “exclusive benefit of participants and beneficiaries”, but they scorn the law, in a couple of instances commending conduct that landed union officials in jail. It’s clear that they think of the fiduciary standards of ERISA as just another reactionary plot – doomed, of course – to thwart the march of Progress.

The strategy advanced by Rifkin and Barber did not lead to socialism in the 1980’s. Not only were the labor leaders of that era insufficiently radical, but union influence over pension investments is less formidable than often imagined. It can be exerted only over collectively bargained, multiemployer plans, which account for a small minority of total plan assets. Moreover, the Taft-Hartley Act requires that employer appointees comprise at least half of every multiemployer plan’s board of trustees, providing a check, though often not an especially vigorous one, on union appointees’ schemes. Nonetheless, as organized labor has lost much of their demographic strength (only about one in 12 private sector workers is now represented by a union), its chieftains turn to the weapons that remain in their arsenal. Thus we see a Rifkin-Barber-style campaign to stifle support for Social Security reform by threatening investment managers with the loss of multiemployer clients.

Today’s Wall Street Journal reports on union financial intimidation in “Social Security Change Faces Labor Muscle” [link for on-line subscribers only]. The focus of the story is William Patterson, head of the AFL-CIO Office of Investment, who, at age 55, belongs to the generation of then-young radicals who swallowed books like The North Will Rise Again. Echoing Rifkin and Barber, he has contempt for legal technicalities that interfere with the progressive (that is, reactionary) agenda. He “has been warning financial firms that embracing President Bush’s top domestic priority could become an issue when pension trustees review fund managers”, blandly asserting that giving politics priority in portfolio management is “not illegal for us. We have a responsibility to support Social Security against efforts to weaken it.”

Mr. Patterson probes for ways to push financial firms away from supporting the White House plan to overhaul Social Security through private investment accounts. . . . [His] tactics begin quietly with an exchange of letters, but can escalate quickly into old-fashioned, noisy street demonstrations.

Next week, the AFL-CIO plans more protests in California, Pennsylvania and elsewhere outside the offices of Charles Schwab Corp. and Wachovia Corp., which both belong to lobbying coalitions backing Mr. Bush's Social Security approach. . . .

The pressure isn’t subtle. Three New York City Employees’ Retirement System trustees warned J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and five other investment houses that their positions on revising Social Security may be considered in reviews of fund managers.

The article reports that pressure of this kind has achieved a degree of success in muting its targets.

The effort has had an impact. At the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, an umbrella group of Bush backers, Director Derrick Max says his original pool of investment firms now contributes about 8% of his budget, roughly half of the percentage before labor went on the offensive. Mr. Max says, however, that he has more than made up the lost revenue with bigger checks from other coalition members and new recruits from the investment industry.

“This campaign is ill-conceived but it’s to our benefit,” Mr. Max says. He and other Bush supporters call Mr. Patterson’s effort tantamount to blackmail.

Of course, Mr. Patterson and his buddies deserve no credit for being ineffective. They want to stifle their opponents, just as their more grandiose predecessors wanted to establish socialism. When AFL-CIO officials prate about democracy (which they still profess to support outside of Iraq), we should keep in mind what they think of free and open debate on issues of public interest.

Addendum: An amusing sidelight on labor-backed demonstration, from National Review’s Beltway Buzz, attributed to an “Administration source”:

While the president was traveling through the Southwest a few weeks ago promoting Social Security reform, the White House team encountered a group of about a dozen protestors outside an event in Albuquerque.

“There were twelve to fifteen of them outside. They were holding signs and heckling us as we went into the event. I didn’t think much of it, because you see this sort of thing happens almost anytime you are traveling for town hall type events.”

But what happened next is what caught our source’s attention:

“I was walking through the Dallas airport with some colleagues and one of them recognized two of the same protestors we had seen outside the event in Albuquerque. We had some extra time, so we decided to talk to them. They were very polite and explained to us they had just come from protesting an event nearby. One of them very quickly identified themselves as professional protestors.”

“Not that they just liked to protest, but that they actually got paid by liberal interest groups to travel the country protesting. Here they were, sitting in the airport TGI Friday’s having a burger and getting ready to travel to New Orleans for another protest. They were good kids and wanted to talk. We tried discussing some of the benefits of Social Security reform. They listened, but weren’t too interested. Not because they had opposing views, they just said they weren’t too educated on the details. They even admitted they didn’t know who it was they were going to protest in New Orleans.”

Fake-But-Accurate and the Schiavo Case

Rathergate may have embarrassed CBS, but it won’t be the last fabrication of “fake-but-accurate” documents that we’ll ever see. There are signs that the impulse to “improve” the dull facts is at work in the Schiavo controversy, too.

One instance is almost commonplace. ABC News took a poll of public reaction to Congressional intervention and reported overwhelmingly negative sentiment. A large majority of respondents, we are told, approve the Florida decision to starve Terri Schiavo to death. The author of the story accompanying the poll clearly regards its findings as proof that pro-Terri sentiment is confined to a small group of zealots.

The problem with that analysis is that the poll’s questions were patently designed to influence the answers. Orin Kerr – not a proponent of federal intervention – reprints and analyzes what was asked. The case was framed in these terms:

Schiavo suffered brain damage and has been on life support for 15 years. Doctors say she has no consciousness and her condition is irreversible. Her husband and her parents disagree about whether she would have wanted to be kept alive. Florida courts have sided with the husband and her feeding tube was removed on Friday.

What’s your opinion on this case – do you support or oppose the decision to remove Schiavo’s feeding tube?

This question insinuates as “facts” assertions that are, to say the least, controverted. Mrs. Schiavo’s heart, lungs and other organs function normally; she is not on “life support” as that term is normally understood. The extent to which she is conscious and her prospects for improvement are hotly disputed. She has never had an MRI examination to determine the physical severity of her brain damage. It’s no surprise that respondents, by a 63% to 28% margin, favored removal of the feeding tube, given the situation presented to them, but the presentation travesties reality. ABC News, whose raison d’être is assembling facts, can scarcely have been unaware that it was distorting the issues. Apparently, it, like CBS News reporting on George W. Bush’s National Guard service, didn’t care.

Less routine is possible skullduggery uncovered by Power Line. Left-wing commentators have made quite a bit out of a memorandum, allegedly circulated to all Republican Senators, touting Terri Schiavo as “a great political issue”. The unsigned document, apparently not on anyone’s letterhead and not in standard format, consists of brief bullet points, mostly describing one version of then-pending legislation. Two bullets, however, opine about the politics of the situation, to wit,

• This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue.

• This is a great political issue, because Senator Nelson of Florida has already refused to become a cosponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats.

Power Line’s observation makes sense: “It does not sound like something written by a conservative; it sounds like a liberal fantasy of how conservatives talk.” Very definitely, it is not how members of the Senate leadership and their staffs talk. If this “memo” is not a fabrication, it is the unsupervised production of some low-level staffer, not an insight into what motivates Republicans. The attention that it has received, with no corresponding stress on its unknown origins and the absence of indicia of reliability, show that the spirit of Dan Rather lives on.

Update: Power Line, after further investigation, presents strong arguments for fakery. The clincher comes from a reader, who observes that the so-called memo is headed “S. 529, The Incapacitated Person’s Legal Protection Act”.

The Real S.529 is a bill introduced by Grassley on 3-3-05 to establish a US anti-doping agency. No competent staffer would create a talking points memo with the wrong S. number on it.

As Power Line says, “Maybe there is an explanation. But the burden now is clearly on ABC and the Washington Post to explain why they are not the victims of a hoax.” Given that the reporter who broke this story claims to have received it from an unimpeachable source that he is not at liberty to reveal, “victims” may be too generous a term.

Update II (3/23/05): More from Power Line: Most of the purported memo’s text was copied from a post at the Traditional Values Coalition Web site. The two points quoted above were added. This fish smells worse and worse.

Update III (3/23/05): A Power Line reader offers this argument: “The reason the authenticity of the Schiavo memo is not in dispute, is because those in a position to know haven’t disputed it.” That is exactly the same as one of CBS’s arguments for airing the forged Killian memos: The White House hadn’t declared them fake, so they must be real.

The fallacy is that, if the memo is forged, Senate Republican leaders are not “in a position to know” where it originated and can’t do anything more than say, “Not me” (as Senator Santorum, for one, already has). There isn’t much use to such denials, which the Left won’t believe in any case.

So far as I am concerned, the erroneous bill number and the absence of any indication of origin are clear signs that no one associated with the GOP leadership wrote this document. Maybe the author was a particularly tone-deaf right-wing free lancer, but the theory that it was deliberately crafted to blacken Terry Schiavo’s advocates is more plausible.

Update (4/7/05): It turns out that a Republican did write the “talking points”, though not one who could be accurately described as a “party leader”. For my latest thoughts, vide The Schiavo “Talking Points”: Only Sort of Fake.

Lenten Weblog, Day 9: Will Christians Miss Atheism?

A recent UPI article-essay by Uwe Siemon-Netto appears under the headline “God Not So Dead: Atheism in Decline Worldwide” and opens with what sounds like excellent news for Christendom:

There seems to be a growing consensus around the globe that godlessness is in trouble.

“Atheism as a theoretical position is in decline worldwide,” Munich theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg told United Press International Tuesday.

His Oxford colleague Alister McGrath agrees. Atheism’s “future seems increasingly to lie in the private beliefs of individuals rather than in the great public domain it once regarded as its habitat,” he wrote in the U.S. magazine, Christianity Today.

Professor McGrath’s essay, “The Twilight of Atheism”, a precis of his book of the same name, looks back at the factors that made atheism attractive and those that caused that attraction to wane:

Atheism was once new, exciting, and liberating, and for those reasons held to be devoid of the vices of the faiths it displaced. With time, it turned out to have just as many frauds, psychopaths, and careerists as religion does. Many have now concluded that these personality types are endemic to all human groups, rather than being the peculiar preserve of religious folks. With Stalin and Madalyn Murray O’Hair, atheism seems to have ended up mimicking the vices of the Spanish Inquisition and the worst televangelists, respectively. . . .

With the breakdown of social cohesion in recent decades, creating a sense of community has become an increasingly important political issue in many Western cultures. The question of how community can be recovered invites a comparison of religious and atheistic approaches.

One of the most obvious indicators of the ongoing importance of religion is the well-documented tendency of immigrant communities to define themselves in religious terms—Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim communities in Great Britain, and in France, Muslims from Algeria and other North African nations.

Christian churches have long been the centers of community life in the West. People want to belong, not just believe.

This sociological analysis has its place, but it is, to my mind, less interesting and important than atheism’s intellectual retreat, dramatically signaled by the defection to theism – albeit the theism of an unlovable, impersonal God – of Antony Flew, formerly a thoroughgoing skeptic. Professor Flew’s convictions were overthrown by the absurdity at the root of all atheist systems: the idea of a self-created universe. At a fundamental level, disbelief in a Creator requires a larger “leap of faith” than belief.

Developments like these are heartening to contemplate. Nonetheless, before we rejoice too unreservedly at atheism’s loss, we need to ponder to what extent it represents Christianity’s gain. On that point, Uwe Siemon-Netto offers sobering words:

The Rev. Paul M. Zulehner, dean of Vienna University’s divinity school and one of the world’s most distinguished sociologists of religion, told UPI Tuesday: “True atheists in Europe have become an infinitesimally small group. There are not enough of them to be used for sociological research.” . . .

Zulehner cautions, however, that in the rest of Europe re-Christianization is by no means occurring. “What we are observing instead is a re-paganization,” he went on, and this worries Christian theologians such as Munich’s Pannenberg and the Rev. Gerald McDermott, an Episcopal priest and professor of religion and philosophy at Roanoke College in Salem, Va.

For although in every major European city except Paris spirituality is booming, according to Zulehner, this only proves the emergence of a diffuse belief system, Pannenberg said, but not the revitalization of traditional Christian religious faith.

Observing a similar phenomenon in the United States, McDermott stated that the “rise of all sorts of paganism is creating a false spirituality that proves to be a more dangerous rival to the Christian faith than atheism.”

Atheism has the virtue of its vice: It aspires (leaving aside charlatans like the late Mrs. O’Hair) to be purely rational. Christianity, the most rationalistic of faiths, can debate it on common ground. The neo-pagan “spiritualities”, by contrast, have no use for reason. They begin with the same self-contradiction as atheism, the uncreated universe, but are not interested in thinking through the implications of that position. “Feelings” reign supreme, meaning that the followers of these invented faiths ultimately abase themselves before their own irrational impulses. The quality of their actions depends on the soundness of their constitutions and amiability of their characters. If they start to go wrong, reason is not there to arrest the decline.

For this reason, we Christians may eventually pine for a recrudescence of atheism. It is a worthier opponent than many of those that we must now confront.

Belated Spring Greetings

I had thought that I could post “Happy Vernal Equinox” today. If nothing else, the sentiment might preemptively calm any neo-pagans about to be outraged by tomorrow’s “Lenten Weblog”. Unfortunately, I learned too late, through not having kept up with Space.com, that the popular belief that Spring starts on March 21st is a myth and has been for a long time.

While it’s true that we’ve traditionally celebrated the beginning of spring on March 21, astronomers and calendar manufacturers alike now say that the spring season starts one day earlier, March 20, in all time zones in North America. Unheard of? Not if you look at the statistics. In fact, did you know that during the 20th Century, March 21 was actually the exception rather than the rule?

The vernal equinox landed on March 21, only 36 out of 100 years. And from 1981 to 2102, Americans will celebrate the first day of spring no later than March 20.

In the years 2008 and 2012, those living in Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific, Mountain and Central time zones will see spring begin even earlier: on March 19. And in 2016, it will start on March 19 for the entire United States.

The article goes on to explain why the date of the vernal equinox varies and, likewise repellent to our accustomed beliefs, why daylight does not last for exactly 12 hours on the equinoctial day.

There is also good news, at least for those of us who are unfazed by the prospect of a warmer planet.

[S]pring is currently being reduced by approximately one minute per year and winter by about one-half minute per year. Summer is gaining the minute lost from spring, and autumn is gaining the half-minute lost from winter. Winter is the shortest astronomical season, and with its seasonal duration continuing to decrease, it is expected to attain its minimum value – 88.71 days – by about the year 3500.

Something to look forward to. In the meantime, Season’s Greetings to All!

Lenten Weblog, Day 8: Another St. Thomas

Recognized saints named Thomas aren’t all that common, and many of them, being post-1054 Latins (e. g., Thomas Becket), are unsuitable for Orthodox devotion. I was pleased, then, to see that March 21st is the feast day of a Byzantine St. Thomas, viz., Thomas I, Patriarch of Constantinople, and I decided that I would make him the subject of today’s entry. Gathering facts about his life would, I supposed, be a simple matter. Not only do I have plenty of books on Byzantium, but there is always the infinitely knowledgeable World Wide Web.

Alas! This saint is lost in obscurity. On his own feast day, he is overshadowed by James the Confessor, who suffered under the iconoclast emperor Constantine V (741-775). The most extensive biography that I can find shows no sign that the compiler knew much about Thomas’ own deeds:

Saint Thomas, Patriarch of Constantinople, was at first a deacon, and later under the holy Patriarch John IV the Faster (582-595) he was made “sakellarios” (sacristan [“chief financial officer” would be a more apt translation]) in the Great Church (Hagia Sophia). After the death of holy Patriarch Cyriacus (595-606), St. Thomas was elevated to the Patriarchal throne in 607. The saint concerned himself in every possible way about the spiritual needs of his flock.

During the patriarchate of St. Thomas, an ominous portent appeared in the land of Galatia (Asia Minor). The heavy crosses which were carried during church processions began to shake and to strike against each other. The clairvoyant Elder, St. Theodore Sykeotes (April 22), explained the meaning of this portent. He said that discords and disasters awaited the Church, and the state was in danger of barbarian invasion. Hearing this, the saint became terrified and asked St. Theodore to pray that God would take his soul before these predictions were fulfilled.

After the death of the holy Patriarch Thomas in 610, disorders started in the Church. St. Thomas’ successor, Patriarch Sergius (610-638), fell into the Monothelite heresy. Through God’s dispensation, war broke out with Persia, which proved grievous for Byzantium. The Greek regions of Asia Minor were completely devastated, Jerusalem fell, and the Life-Creating Cross of the Lord was captured and taken to Persia. Thus, all the misfortunes portended by the miracle during the church procession came to pass.

If one may add historical detail, gleaned from the Chronicle of Theophanes and various reference books, St. Thomas became Patriarch on October 11, 607, under the Emperor Phocas (602-610). Phocas, a mere centurion who was elevated to the throne by mutineers against his capable predecessor Maurice (582-602), has left a reputation for tyranny, which revisionist historians have lately argued was due to a policy of agrarian reform that outraged the aristocracy (though there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the putative reforms actually took place). Be that as it may, no contemporary needed clairvoyance to sense disorder ahead. In 608 the Exarch of Carthage, one of the most powerful imperial officials, launched a revolt. Most of St. Thomas’ tenure in the Patriarchate had civil war as its backdrop.

In religious policy, Phocas was strictly orthodox, making no effort to mollify the Empire’s large Monophysite and Nestorian communities. A revolt by the former led to the murder of the Patriarch of Antioch (which, in a foreshadowing of the contemporary Middle East, was blamed on the Jews), while the Persian Great King invaded as protector of the latter. On the other hand, the Emperor made strenuous efforts to mend relations with the See of Rome, which resented the assumption of the title “Ecumenical Patriarch” by John the Faster. The Romans later claimed that Phocas had declared Rome to be caput omnium ecclesiarum, which, given his posthumous ill fame, made no impression in the East.

St. Thomas doubtless supported, and may have guided, his Emperor in these controversies, but, save for the tale of his meeting with St. Theodore, he seems to have done nothing that later generations recalled. He died on March 21, 610. Six months later, the rebels seized Constantinople and crowned Heraclius, son of the rebel exarch and one of the most spectacular figures in the entire history of Byzantium, Emperor.

Hence, I cannot relate the miracles or pious sayings of my namesake. Still, there is a lesson in the veil that lies over his life: To be a saint is not a matter of conspicuous deeds but of thoughts and actions known only to God. There are many in the heavenly company whose very names are forgotten, yet they are greater than the earthly emperors.

Addendum: The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America’s Web site reproduces a splendid icon of St. Thomas, showing him teaching from the Gospel, surrounded by a multitude of blessed figures.

Schiavo Quotes of the Day

Matthew Hoy, while watching the debate on the private bill to give Terri Schiavo’s parents access to the federal courts in their effort to save their daughter’s life:

But I thought about what form this debate would take in a parallel universe, one where the Democrats held majorities in both Houses and the White House. A parallel universe where it wasn’t a brain-damaged woman who was being starved to death, but instead a pregnant woman who was being forced to carry a child to term under some bizarre court order (remember, this is an alternate universe). Would Democrats flinch at a special session to pass a law that would allow an abortion to take place?

Jerry Pournelle:

If we decided to kill a dog by starving it to death and giving it no water, the police would come and rescue the dog and jail the perpetrators.

I am not sure I understand the almighty urge to kill Terri Schiavo, or torture the husk. Many experts have concluded that she is already dead. So what? If she is already dead, then keeping her alive does no harm beyond financial. Why the insistence on killing her? If she is not already dead, then this is murder. . . .

Wouldn’t it be more humane to auction off the right to shoot her? That would get it over quick, provide someone with the satisfaction of committing legal murder, save a physician the trouble of removing the feeding tube, and raise enough money to bury her. But as it is, we will get to watch her die of thirst on television. I hope that she is properly instrumented. We should not lose this opportunity to gather new data on starvation and thirst. Perhaps some other experiments could be performed in the two weeks it will take her to die.

Of course the Grand Jury in the district where this is taking place has the right to indict those responsible for willful murder by torture. I wonder if anyone has told the Foreman? Or does the new found regard for local rights extend that far, or only far enough to kill this woman in the name of freedom?

Lenten Weblog, Day 7: The Sunday of Orthodoxy

The first Sunday of Lent is known as the Sunday of Orthodoxy. It commemorates the end of the iconoclastic controversy, the bitterest period of internal dissension in the history of the Orthodox Church, comparable in some ways to the Reformation in the West, though the outcome was not, happily, a permanent schism.

An proto-iconoclastic undertone, contending that the custom of venerating images of Christ, the Theotokos and the saints contravened the Second Commandment, had long existed in fastidious religious circles. It may have been reinforced by the rise of Islam, with its severe prohibition of any kind of representation of the human form. In 726, Emperor Leo III initiated the strife by ordering the removal of a much revered icon of Christ from one of the gates of his palace in Constantinople. Four years later he officially condemned icon veneration and installed a Patriarch who shared his views. For more than a century thereafter, the clash between iconoclasts (“image breakers”) and iconophiles (“image lovers”) was the major ideological breach within the Byzantine Empire.

The Seventh Ecumenical Council, convened at Nicaea in 787, settled the controversy theologically with a dogmatic decision that is accepted by the Universal Church:

We define that the holy icons, whether in color, mosaic, or some other material, should be exhibited in the holy churches of God, on the sacred vessels and liturgical vestments, on the walls, furnishings, and in houses and along the roads, namely the icons of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ, that of our Lady the Theotokos, those of the venerable angels and those of all saintly people. Whenever these representations are contemplated, they will cause those who look at them to commemorate and love their prototype. We define also that they should be kissed and that they are an object of veneration and honor (timitiki proskynisis), but not of real worship (latreia), which is reserved for Him Who is the subject of our faith and is proper for the divine nature. . . . For the honor rendered to the icon is in effect transmitted to the prototype; he who venerates the icon, venerates in it the reality for which it stands.

The Council’s decree did not settle the issue in the secular world. Emperor Leo V (813-820) revived official iconoclasm, which remained ascendant for thirty years. Then, following the death of Emperor Theophilos, who had been one of the fiercest persecutors of iconophiles, his widow Theodora, acting as regent for their son Michael III, renounced iconoclasm and returned a magnificent array of icons to the Church of St. Sophia in a great procession held on March 11, 843. That event, called the “Triumph of Orthodoxy”, is recalled in today’s divine liturgy.

The classic exposition of the theology of icons is On the Holy Images, written by St. John of Damascus in response to Emperor Leo’s actions. Ironically, this great Father of the Church lived in a region under Moslem control and came from a family that provided government officials to the Caliphate. He would probably have been martyred had he written within the reach of Imperial justice.

St. John’s central argument is that the Incarnation of Christ demonstrates that the divine can properly be represented materially. If not, how could the eternal Second Person of the Trinity have been embodied in a human being?

Of old, God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was never depicted. Now, however, when God is seen clothed in flesh, and conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honoring that matter which works my salvation. I venerate it, though not as God. How could God be born out of lifeless things? And if God's body is God by union, it is immutable. The nature of God remains the same as before, the flesh created in time is quickened by, a logical and reasoning soul.

I honor all matter besides, and venerate it. Through it, filled, as it were, me. Was not the with a divine power and grace, my salvation has come to thrice happy and thrice blessed wood of the Cross matter? Was not the sacred and holy mountain of Calvary matter? What of the life-giving rock, the Holy Sepulcher, the source of our resurrection: was it not matter? Is not the most holy book of the Gospels matter? Is not the blessed table matter which gives us the Bread of Life' Are not the gold and silver matter, out of which crosses and altar-plate and chalices are made? And before all these things, is not the body and blood of our Lord matter? Either do away with the veneration and worship due to all these things, or submit to the tradition of the Church in the worship of images, honoring God and His friends, and following in this the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Icons and iconography are more conspicuous in the Orthodox Church than anywhere else in Christendom and play a leading role in every Orthodox Christian’s devotion. Hence, it is meet and right that they should be singled out for special attention at the beginning of Lent.

Sidelight: The debate over icons forms the central theme of what is perhaps the only science fiction story ever based on a genuine, accurately portrayed theological question, “Images” by Harry Turtledove (Asimov’s, March 1987; Agent of Byzantium (1988)). The hero, Basil Argyros, is a Byzantine official living in the early 14th Century. In his alternative timeline, Mohammed converted to Christianity and was ultimately canonized, Islam never existed, and the Late Roman Empire flourishes throughout the Mediterranean world. In “Images” Argyros confronts a nascent iconoclastic movement and devises against it the same arguments as St. John of Damascus, with more immediate success.

Lenten Weblog, Day 6: Terri Schiavo’s Golgotha

Early yesterday afternoon, Terri Schiavo started on her road to Golgotha. If nature now runs its course, she will die, at some time during the next week or two, of hunger and thirst, like a traveler stranded unprepared in the desert.

In the Orwellian language to which we have become so accustomed, the process that is killing her is called “euthanasia”, “good death”, though it is not, I think, the way of dying that anyone chooses as a swift, painless dispatch. It is less agonizing than crucifixion, less merciful than the quick-acting poisons that terminate the lives of men judged guilty of murder.

To feel comfortable with such an act, those who approve it and carry it out must hold two contrary thoughts without ever noticing their contradiction. On the one hand, starvation and dehydration are not torture, because Mrs. Schiavo is “vegetative”, unaware of stimuli, unconscious of afflictions to her body and therefore not suffering.

At the same time, we are told that death will be a mercy to her, that it will end the misery of her bedridden existence. But if she will be unaware of her aching belly and dry throat, how can she despair over not being able to walk and talk? The administrators of her good death want us to view her simultaneously as a vegetable and as a sensitive, fastidious human being. If she is not both, their consciences are not so blunt that they can justify treating her in a manner that would be cruel to a dog or cat.

In many cases like these, there is a third consideration: The incapacitated person’s family undergoes financial hardship and emotional trauma. One can debate whether their desire to put a tragic incident behind them justifies physician-assisted homicide, and there are rational arguments (not, in my opinion, strong, but rational) in favor of that action. In Terri Schiavo’s case, though, part of her family – her husband – has already “moved on”. He has a new female companion, with whom he has children, whom he could marry were he willing to obtain a divorce. The other part of the family – Terri’s parents – desperately wants to keep her alive and has offered to bear the cost of caring for her. Michael Schiavo can walk away without responsibility or expense but chooses not to do so.

This is not, then, a genuine “right to life” case, where keeping one person alive will arguably harm another, where we must decide between the competing claims of life and other goods. It turns, rather, on personal autonomy. Mr. Schiavo holds, by decree of the Florida judiciary, the right to speak on behalf of his wife. Does he have the right to say whatever he wills in her voice, without interference from “outsiders”? Is he mutatis mutandis the sovereign of the Schiavo domain with the final authority over what goes on within its borders? Is Terri Schiavo on the same level with his other property, to be disposed of when no longer wanted?

That question is, odd as it may seem, a microcosm of one of the great issues in foreign policy today: Are rulers absolutely sovereign within their realms, licensed to do good or ill as they please? Are their subjects their property?

The answers to the two questions don’t have to be the same; there is a great deal of difference between a family and a country, between a husband and a supremo-for-life. Yet many people tend these days to answer both the same way. Conservatives, through a strange reversal of historical roles, are those who speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. Liberals invoke legality (of a limited and blinkered sort) on behalf of power.

So far, legality and power have triumphed, just as they triumphed for a time at that other Golgotha, nearly 2,000 years ago. It is quite possible that Terri Schiavo will breathe her last while Western Christians are mourning on Good Friday. That prospective coincidence should remind us of the truth: The powerful of this world have no true power. One Who suffered is the Lord and Savior. In Him Terri Schiavo will live.

Related posts: You Don’t Have to be Pro-Life to Love Terri Schiavo
“Vegetables” Who Think

Further reading: Blogs for Terri
Wesley J. Smith, “A ‘Painless’ Death?”
Fr. Robert Johansen, “Killing Terri Schiavo”
Fr. Robert Johanson, “Terri’s ‘Exit Protocol’ Begins”
Andrew C. McCarthy, “The Court-Ordered Death of Terri Schiavo”
Megan Dillon, “Terri Schindler-Schiavo: Myths vs. Reality”

Lenten Weblog, Day 5: Toward Christian Africa

Yesterday was the feast day of St. Patrick. When he began in mission in the wild realm of Ireland, his enterprise probably seemed futile. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography observes,

From the tone of much of the Confession, it can be inferred that one important reason for its composition was that Patrick felt that his mission was misrepresented in Britain. Christians in the late Roman empire did not think in terms of having a missionary duty to take Christianity beyond its frontiers to the ‘barbarians’. Some in Britain (perhaps the educated and aristocratic ecclesiastical hierarchy) were therefore highly dubious about Patrick’s conviction that God had called him to go and preach to their Irish enemies.

Certainly no one anticipated that, within a few generations, pagan Ireland would be a solidly Christian land that would send famous missionaries and teachers to the European continent!

That history sheds light on one of the most remarkable and overlooked religious developments of our time: the tremendous expansion of Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa. As reported in the Daily Telegraph.

If a clergyman’s success is measured by the size of his flock, then Africa’s priests stand to inherit the earth. Their congregations are growing faster than any since the earliest years of Christianity.

The pews of Africa’s churches now hold 390 million worshippers – more than three times the total of 35 years ago. Over the next two decades, Africa’s congregation is likely to grow by another 200 million, causing a huge shift in the character of the Christian faith.

The direction of the shift is indicated by the fact that the Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria, the leader of what is now the largest member of the Anglican communion, is a staunch traditionalist. That stance makes him persona non grata to modernist clerics. To me it calls to mind how St. Columbanus brought a purified faith from Ireland to Merovingian Gaul.

Though we tend to think of Africa as predominantly Moslem and pagan, Christians in fact are about 53 percent of the Sub-Saharan population (currently estimated at about 730 million). This growth certainly seems providential. The past half century has been a period of catastrophe for the continent, culminating in the AIDS pandemic. On a merely secular level, the propagation of Christian ideals of monogamy and sexual restraint is the best hope for the next generation of Africans. Christian ideals are also potentially, if not always and everywhere actually, a powerful engine for political freedom and economic development. Those secular benefits are not, to be sure, the reasons why Africans turn to Christ, but they will be welcome side effects.

And who knows? Perhaps one day a Columbanus from Africa will spark a spiritual revival in the desiccated, “enlightened” parts of the white Western world.

Too Cynical, Taranto

I wouldn’t be a true blogger if I didn’t seize the opportunity to lambaste a writer with whom I ordinarily agree. In today’s Best of the Web, James Taranto spurns an editorial in the leftish Seattle Times supporting estate tax repeal and offering reasons (albeit cynical and snarky) that might appeal to Washington State’s two know-nothing Democratic Senators. Rather than welcome this surprising endorsement of a sensible policy, Mr. Taranto is cynical and snarky right back:

. . . one suspects that this position was forced on the editorial board by the Blethens, the famliy that controls the Times, which presumably would like to keep Uncle Sam away from its assets. The editorial doesn’t actually mention the paper's owners’ interest in the matter, only making this allusion: “In our industry, dozens of newspapers have done it” – i. e., sold the business to pay the tax.

Having no spies in the Times boardroom, I can’t disprove that speculation, but isn’t there another that is at least equally credible? The editors of the Times are probably quite happy with their present, family-owned setup. I suspect that they do not envy their counterparts at papers owned by media conglomerates. Indeed, as trendy liberals, they doubtless view “media concentration” with alarm. It makes sense, then, that they would need no dictation from the Blethen family to see that expropriating the rich at the time of death has negative side effects.

The Times’ situation is just one example of the way in which the detriment of death taxes trickles down to the not-very-rich. It’s to the credit of the paper’s editors that they have figured out that they, too, are in danger of being sliced by the backhand blow of the tax man’s scythe.

Andre Norton Dies

Strange to get this news first via Instapundit (presumably the result of his Tennessee locale), but Andre Norton has died at age 93. Trufen reported last month that she was receiving hospice care at home and was not expected to survive much longer. I meant then to get to work on an obituary but put off the unpleasant task. Many will appear almost immediately all around the SF blogosphere.

For the benefit of those who would like to read the Norton whom I savored as a lad, the Baen Free Library has two of her novels from that period, Star Soldiers and Time Traders, available for download. The latter (actually a combination of two short novels) was among my youthful favorites.

Update: SFWA has posted an obituary. It notes that Miss Norton was recently honored by the establishment of the Andre Norton Award for young adult science fiction novels.

Reliving Noreascon Four

Wow! This is just like living in the 21st Century! Almost ten hours of video from last year’s World Science Fiction Convention are now available in a boxed DVD set. Included are all of the “big tent” events: Opening Ceremonies, Hugo and Retro-Hugo Awards, Masquerade and Closing Ceremonies. One special feature is a time-lapse motion picture of the entire convention, from the beginning of setup through the last vestiges of teardown in about 15 minutes. The price is $59.95, less than you would pay for many a mediocre television series.

Marc Gordon, Noreascon’s Events Director, and his crew deserve mega-kudos for this production, which is not only a first for Worldcons but was accomplished without subcontracting to professionals.

Noreascon is still refining its press release and Trufen has nothing yet, so this post may be the very first public announcement. It’s fun to be a news source once in a while.

Lenten Weblog, Day 4: Patrick, Orthodox Saint

Patrick, the evangelist of Ireland, is an Orthodox saint, whose feast day troparion is, “O holy hierarch, Patrick, wonderworker, equal to the Apostles and illuminator of the Irish people, pray to the merciful God that He will pardon our transgressions.” Another version of the troparion and kontakion is –

Troparion
Holy Bishop Patrick,
Faithful shepherd of Christ's royal flock,
You filled Ireland with the radiance of the Gospel:
The mighty strength of the Trinity!
Now that you stand before the Savior,
Pray that He may preserve us in faith and love!

Kontakion
From slavery you escaped to freedom in Christ's service:
He sent you to deliver Ireland from the devil's bondage.
You planted the Word of the Gospel in pagan hearts.
In your journeys and hardships you rivaled the Apostle Paul!
Having received the reward for your labors in heaven,
Never cease to pray for the flock you have gathered on earth,
Holy bishop Patrick!

St. Patrick’s icon, painted by Nicholas Papas, adorns St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church in Oakland, Pennsylvania.

Unfortunately, St. Patrick is one of those figures to whom nonsense attaches by the bushel. The best way that I know to winnow fact from legend is to read E. A. Thompson’s Who Was St. Patrick? (Boydell Press, 1985), a sober account based primarily on Patrick’s own surviving writings, the Confession and the Epistle to the Soldiers of Coroticus.

Fake-But-Accurate in Norway

Bjørn Stærk presents a pair of anecdotes that illustrate the virulence and pro-terrorist bias of certain segments of the European Left.

The first is “fake but accurate” raised to a more brazen level than even Mary Mapes dared. Several months ago a left-wing blogger posted what looked like a reprint of a real news story quoting an American “senior administration official’s” supposed statement that the U.S. government funds the European Security Advocacy Group, which runs anti-terrorism newspaper and television ads in Europe. Leftists had been claiming as much from the beginning. Bjørn immediately suspected that this convenient confirmation was untrue and confronted the blogger, who admitted that he had made the item up. He refused, however, to withdraw or disavow it, declaring, “If people are mislead [sic] by this it’s fine with me. Maybe they will ask their government who pays for these aids [sic]. That should be helpful to find out who has the moral responsibility for the disinformation terror campaign.”

There the matter rested for a while, but –

. . . the story’s been sitting there ever since, waiting for someone to fall for it. That happened early this month, when it began showing up in Norwegian left-wing circles. . . .

On March 2, the story was reprinted by Hans Olav Fekjær on a Norwegian anti-NATO mailing list. From there, it made it to indymedia.no, and was then repeated by the Norwegian blogger Norvegia, who went on to spread it in the comment section on Dagbladet’s blog. [N.B.: Dagbladet is a leading Norwegian newspaper.]

I quickly replied on Indymedia and Dagbladet, pointing out that this was a deliberate fake story. I also sent a mail about it to Norvegia (who curiously doesn’t allow open comments in his blog). That was a week ago. Norvegia never replied to my mail, and never corrected his story, where he still claims that ESAG is financed by the US government. He did, however, reply to me on indymedia:

“Bjørn Stærk is of course entirely right; it is probably no more than 99.9% likely that the DoD (the Pentagon) is behind the financing of ESAG.”

So again: fake but accurate. Like Bernhard at Moon of Alabama, Norvegia believes that his own unproven suspicions justify making up an entire news story.

What is significant here is not merely that leftists feel no compunction about inventing and spreading “news” but that their target is an innocuous advertising campaign whose messages are “What Europe needs is a counter-terrorist response that’s thoughtful, balanced but appropriate,” and “Europe - all of Europe - must cooperate in deliberate, thoughtful but forceful measures against terrorism”, with the tag line, “There’s no future in terrorism”. It says a lot that, in some circles on the Left, such sentiments are not merely controversial but so outrageous that fighting them with lies is acceptable conduct.

The second incident involves not mere bloggers but a mainstream newspaper. Before the invasion of Iraq, Norway lent several laser-guidance systems to American forces in Kuwait. Last October, Norwegian media reported this assistance, and opposition politicians raised an outcry. An article in Dagsavisen reinforced the critics with quotes from “leading experts on terrorism” purportedly indicating that “The threat of terrorism against Norwegian targets has increased because of the weapons lending to the American forces”.

Bjørn talked to the persons quoted in the article and discovered that the reporters had (a) engaged in blatant shopping for statements that supported their preconceived opinion and (b) when that wasn’t sufficient, distorted what they were told. For example,

The most disturbing quote in the article is attributed to Jan Oskar Engene at the University of Bergen, another researcher with genuine expertise on terrorism:

“It could be enough to strike against something with a symbolic or real connection with Norway. An attack against the Norwegian Church Abroad would for instance be a heavy blow against the crusaders.”

In the context of the article, Engene seems to be talking about what form a revenge attack for the weapons lending may take, but he tells me that he does not at all agree with the thesis of the article, and that he said this only in reply to a direct question which he saw as unrelated to the weapons lending. He remembers his own surprise at reading the article, and discovering what he had supposedly agreed with.

In all, of the five sources Dagsavisen quotes in the article, only one – Marcus Buck – actually says what the headline affirms, that the “weapons lending” has placed Norway in greater danger of a terrorist attack. He's the only source explicitly referred to as a “terrorism expert”, and also the only source not in any way qualified for that label.

So what about the “leading terrorism experts” who have “concluded” that the terror danger against Norway has increased? They don’t exist. Jon Martin Larsen and Nilas Johnsen made them up. Norway’s actual leading experts on terrorism don’t believe this lending matters much at all. But casual readers have no way of knowing that. The article is deliberately designed to fool them. I have only one name for this: corrupt journalism.

Quite unexpectedly, Dagbladet ran an article about these criticisms. In it, the reporters were given a chance to defend their work; their effort was remarkably feeble, essentially a repetition of the out-of-context quotations that their sources had repudiated.

As with the blogging fabrication, we see unapologetic willingness to resort to falsehoods to attack even modest anti-terrorist actions, in this case one ally’s routine, small-scale aid to another. One can’t, of course, generalize from two incidents to Europe, or the European Left, as a whole, but it is important to be aware that people like these, who can legitimately be labeled fifth columnists, exist and influence opinion in the rest of the world.

Lenten Weblog, Day 3: A Mustard Seed in China

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the biggest shrub of all and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and shelter in its branches.” [Matthew 13:31-32 (Jerusalem Bible)]

Few mustard seeds are as tiny as the Orthodox Church in mainland China. Except in Hong Kong, Orthodoxy has no legal existence in the communist domain. The faithful have been reduced by half a century of persecution to a few thousand. The last Chinese Orthodox priest known to be living inside the country died last year at age 80 without having ever obtained permission to minister to a church.

In a recent interview with Religioscope, Mitrophan Chin, whose Orthodoxy in China Web site contains extensive information about the past and present of Chinese Orthodoxy, discussed the Church’s history and plight:

New Light on Edward de Vere

Edward de Vere (1550-1604), 17th Earl of Oxford (or “Oxenford”, as he himself invariably spelled it), has suffered the posthumous misfortune of becoming the object of a cult that credits him with writing the works of Shakespeare. In reaction to the cultists, serious historians tend to neglect him, which is unfortunate. It’s true that he accomplished little in his life except to dissipate a substantial fortune, but he had a remarkable start: heir to England’s oldest earldom, son-in-law of the powerful minister William Cecil and for a while the recipient of favorable attention from Queen Elizabeth. His failure to advance is an interesting study in itself, colorfully punctuated by murder, feuds (including a famous quarrel with fellow underachiever Sir Philip Sidney), flight abroad, sexual adventures, a brief conversion to Catholicism, treasonable intrigues and other excitement. He even has a small place in genuine literary history, as one of the first Tudor courtiers to write secular poetry.

Two years ago, Alan H. Nelson, a Berkeley English professor, published Monstrous Adversary, a detailed documentary biography of Oxenford. As the first extensive life of the wayward peer written by someone who didn’t see him as the true “Shakespeare”, it does much to give a clear picture of a talented, feckless, discontented nobleman. In one important area, though, it falters somewhat. Professor Nelson had no desire to sift through his subject’s tangled financial affairs, so that side of the story is lightly handled, depending less on Oxenford’s accounts than on his contemporary reputation for extravagance.

Now Nelson’s work has been supplemented by a book concentrating on what he omitted. Edward de Vere (1550-1604): The Crisis and Consequences of Wardship (Ashgate Publishing Co., March 2005) is written by Daphne Pearson, a young scholar who, in her still younger years, was an Oxenford-was-Shakespeare believer. Her apostasy has led to a number of testy exchanges with her former comrades-in-arms, a couple of whom made peculiar efforts to suppress her book or, failing that, to “refute” it in advance. [Update: I am now informed that, although Dr. Pearson was once editor of an Oxenfordian newsletter, she stated at the time that she did not agree with its premise. That fact suggests that her Oxenfordian pursuer sees her as a renegade dhimmi rather than an apostate. Also, my reference to Dr. Pearson as “a young scholar” was inapposite, except in the sense that she received her Ph.D. recently. She embarked on her doctoral program as a mature student and is in what Isaac Asimov used to call “late youth”.] From the publisher’s description, the book sounds like a useful addition to Tudor studies:

Socrates and Summers

It would be hard to improve on Power Line’s title for its post about the latest round in Harvard radicalism’s jihad against Larry Summers: “Athens on the Charles” [now changed, for unfathomable reasons – did the mayor of Athens threaten a lawsuit? – to “The Clouds”, which also fits].

The Harvard faculty has narrowly voted (218-185) to express “no confidence” in the leadership of Harvard President Lawrence Summers. Socrates was convicted of impiety by a roughly comparable vote of 280-220. The vote essentially represents the conviction of President Summers for not believing in the gods of the city.

There are two principal differences: First, Dr. Summers will not have to drink hemlock. Second, unlike Socrates, he has not been bold enough to declare that his questioning of popular prejudices is “a gift from God” to his fellow citizens. To the contrary, he has insisted, with increasingly desperate vehemence, that he worships exactly the same gods as they. It is as if Socrates had come around to praising Aristophanes’ Clouds and promising never to raise uncomfortable questions again.

This incident is the latest to cause me to wonder whether contemporary universities do more good than harm to the intellectual state of society. We have more campuses, professors and students than ever before, but is the net effect a more vigorous life of the mind? Bundling general education for near-adults, professional education and scholarly research into a single type of institution seemed to make sense as recently as my own youth, because each element furnished something that the others lacked. I won’t say dogmatically that all has changed for the worst, but I can’t help but wonder.

A college education is vastly more expensive today than it was then. When I entered Yale 40 years ago, annual tuition, room and board totaled $2,800. Now the figure is $38,950. Adjusted for inflation, that is a 130 percent increase. The trend is the same everywhere else. For these higher prices, students more and more appear to be getting a curriculum of academic fads pushed by know-nothing extremists.

Universities aren’t the only places where youngsters can become familiar with the traditions of Western civilization while acquiring useful skills, nor do they have a natural monopoly on scholarship. The smug professorate that sits in judgement beside the Charles River may discover in a few years that no one is any longer willing to pay for its dubious services. The Muses are departing for more welcoming slopes.

Further reading: A Harvard professor (one of the minority) has a roundup of links to reactions to the vote.

Update (3/16/05): Also worth pondering is Eric Rasmusen’s reminder –

that the department chairmen are drawn from the faculty, and the senior faculty all vote on tenure cases. What are we to think of a university faculty of Arts and Sciences which has voted a desire to get rid of a powerful president because he dared be mildly politically incorrect at a scholarly meeting? How can any non-liberal assistant professor hope for fairness in a tenure vote? Summers can shrug this off – but the junior faculty can’t.

One can’t help but fear that, in the minds of some of those who voted for censure, that was the real objective: to warn less well-known dissidents that they are unwelcome in Harvard’s Athens.

Lenten Weblog, Day 2: Hope in Impossible Straits

Great Lent is a season not only of fasting and repentance but, also and more vitally, of hope. Viewed from a purely secular perspective, the world is a doomed arena of meaningless activity by organisms doomed to strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then be heard no more: “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Yet with God all things are possible. He brings hope to us mortals, however hopeless our situations may seem. For example,

Kate Adamson is the mother of two who suffered a double brain stem stroke and was in a coma for 70 days. She was completely unresponsive to stimuli and was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. Doctors finally pulled her feeding tube and, for eight days, she lay dying. Instead of being unconscious as the doctors believed she was aware of everything. . . .

When the feeding tube was turned off for eight days, I thought I was going insane. I was screaming out in my mind, “Don’t you know I need to eat?” And even up until that point, I had been having a bagful of Ensure as my nourishment that was going through the feeding tube. At that point, it sounded pretty good. I just wanted something. The fact that I had nothing, the hunger pains overrode every thought I had. . . .

Doctors had given up hope that Kate would ever recover, but she is now fully functional except for some paralysis on the left side of her body.

Mrs. Adamson has been speaking out about her experience for the sake of another seemingly hopeless patient, Terri Schiavo. Unless Congress, a court or a miracle intervenes, the process of starving Mrs. Schiavo to death will begin this Friday. When we pray, we should think of her.

Professor Tribe Slips and Slides

Anybody can make a trivial mistake. It takes a real fool to defend one until it starts to look important. Until today I would never have called Laurence Tribe, eminent Harvard professor and constitutional scholar a “fool”. Nor, I’m sure, is he foolish in most things. But Ramesh Ponnuru’s “How To Be a Hero of Liberty” has stung him into folly. As I have noted before, Ramesh discovered distortions in a memoir Professor Tribe penned about the experience of arguing his first Supreme Court case shortly after his father’s death. What he uncovered was not much of a scandal; the errors were of the kind to be expected when a man recalls in an informal venue events that occurred more than 20 years in the past. The “exposé” created no buzz; those few right-of-center bloggers who noticed it at all pooh-poohed the significance of Professor Tribe’s mild exaggerations.

The professor did find one intemperate defender, whose contribution to reasoned discourse was to engage in google bombing and the purchase of half a dozen variants on the domain name “rameshponnuru.com”. He suffered retaliation in the form of a mock site called Rock-Dumb.

At this juncture, a wise, or ordinarily prudent, man would have let the non-controversy sink into Lethe. Eminent scholars, alas, can be strangers to ordinary prudence. Professor Tribe has now sent NR a letter to the editor denying that he made any mistake at all. There are a couple of flaws in his defense.

First, he ignores the actual charge against him. In his memoir he claimed that, as he prepared his reply brief and oral argument in the 1980 Richmond Newspapers case, he was under tremendous pressure to deemphasize the Ninth Amendment argument that he had advanced in his initial brief. By his account it was the memory of his father that steeled him to resist “the Pooh-Bahs of the establishment”.

That’s who I was. And am. So the Ninth Amendment argument stayed in. And, I’m happy to report, in the end it hit its target.

Ramesh showed that a few facts had been omitted: Other advocates on the same side of the case had made similar Ninth Amendment arguments. Professor Tribe barely mentioned the Amendment after making his purported resolution that it was going to “stay in”. And there’s no sign in the Court’s opinion that “it hit its target” in any meaningful sense.

Professor Tribe’s letter doesn’t defend, or even reiterate, his previous narrative. Indeed, the Ninth Amendment is now merely “among the reminders” that the right of the public to attend trials is one of the “tacit postulates” of our judicial system. He contradicts Ramesh only on a subsidiary issue, contending that his critic understated the extent to which the Ninth Amendment was discussed in the initial brief. He is right in a narrow sense: Contrary to Ramesh, the Amendment was not just a “rhetorical flourish”. Yet he is also slippery. “In fact, it occupied fully seven pages,” he avers, failing to add that the brief was 72 pages long and that those seven pages start at page 52.

Then comes a paragraph for which both “misrepresentation” and “folly” are apt characterizations:

Responding tit-for-tat to each of Ponnuru's distortions is rendered unnecessary by http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/Ponnuru.pdf [by the intemperate defender whom I mentioned], a devastating, line-by-line demonstration that his entire piece, published online weeks before the printed version, was a pastiche of misstatements. It remains only to ask readers of this once discerning if ideological magazine to reflect on its remarkable decision to reprint so misinformed an attack on my character despite that intervening demonstration. [emphasis added]

“How To Be a Hero of Liberty” was posted on-line on February 25, 2005. It was printed in National Review’s March 14, 2005, issue, which appeared on newsstands two weeks before the cover date, i. e., on February 28, 2005. Professor Tribe’s defender posted his first statement about the dispute on March 1, 2005, and his “line-by-line” attack a day or two later. I’m not sure what is dumber on Professor Tribe’s part: to misstate the chronology so absurdly or to imagine that he can get away with a falsehood about a fact that is so easily checked.

For those who would like to read more about this matter, the Volokh Conspiracy has collected pertinent links, and Eric Rasmusen has tried to decipher what the Supreme Court and Professor Tribe actually said (and did not say) about the Ninth Amendment in the course of the Richmond Newspapers case.

Happy Pi Day!

In addition to beginning Orthodox Lent (see previous post), today is, as John Derbyshire reminds us, Pi Day (3-14, you know). Pi Instant was shortly after 3:49 a.m. (3:49:20.527015 a.m., to be less approximate).

Aside from its arithmetical significance, pi has played a key role in history. Without it, circles would not exist. Without circles, wheels would function poorly. Without efficient wheels, civilization could not have risen above the level of the Aztecs and the Maya. So, if you are grateful for not being a human sacrifice and prefer that the world not end seven years from now, pause a moment and say thank you to the generations of mathematicians who have delved tens of thousands of digits deep into this foundation of our culture.

Let me conclude with my high school math club’s rousing cheer:

Y to the X, dY, dX!
Y to the X, dY!
Cosine, secant, tangent, sine!
3.14159!
Yay, team!

Further reading: Hilbert Schenck, Jr., “Wockyjabber”

Lenten Weblog, Day 1: Clean Monday

Orthodox and Western Easters are at their maximum separation this year: five weeks. Therefore, while the Westerners approach Holy Week, today is the beginning of Great Lent in the Eastern calendar. Orthodox Easter will fall on May 1st.

For Orthodox Christians Lent is associated with a rigorous regimen of fasting. According to the canons, we are to abstain from meat, fish, dairy products, wine and olive oil, as well as reducing our overall consumption of food. Fasting is not, however, the whole of our Lenten duties.

Thus, the Mother Church, exercising wise care, established the period of the Fast so that we may all remember our duties emanating from our holy Baptism, and may understand that we are by definition contenders and athletes taking part with the grace of honor in the various sacred exercises: forgiveness of one another, fasting, prayer, charity, patience in sorrow and hardships of life, perseverance in pain, and the offering of brotherly love to one another.

Fasting relieves the body from unneeded weight; it empowers prayer, humbles the sense of one’s worth, and opens up the gates of repentance. Physical “repentance” strains and exercises the body, but it also constitutes a clear demonstration of our self-knowledge that we are sinners and fallen people, and that in repentance we ask God humbly to bring us back to life. It is a confession and prayer in which the body partakes as well.

Charity sanctifies fasting and makes our prayer more agreeable to our Merciful God. Our patience in illness, pain and sorrow leads us to the footprints of the holy Martyrs and secures for us tremendous gifts and wreaths from our Lord. Our act of forgiving all who have harmed and hurt us in any way, and our love for all, seal our genuineness as Christians and render us emulators of Christ. The frequent study of the Holy Scriptures, the teaching of the Fathers and the lives of Saints give our spirit necessary food, which we need so that we fight well and until the end. [Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, “Catechetical Homily on the Occasion of Great and Holy Lent, 2005”]

Further reading: Demetrios, Archbishop of America, “Encyclical for Great and Holy Lent, 2005”
Fr. Patrick Reardon, “Orthodox Christian Lent, Prayer, Fasting, and Baptism”
blogs4God, “Clean Monday Ortho-Blog Cache”

Bankruptcy in the Blogosphere

[A hearty welcome to arrivals from the NRO Corner. Ponnuru fans may also be interested in my opinions regarding his scrap with Professor Tribe or, to turn to a more intellectual topic, Social Security reform.]

Like Gail Heriot at the Right Coast, I haven’t read the bankruptcy bill that just passed the Senate, nor do I pretend to expertise in that field. When I took a bankruptcy course in law school, the 1898 Act was still the law of the land, and my professional involvement has been limited to an occasional matter involving the status of PBGC claims against sponsors of terminated pension plans. About consumer bankruptcy I (thankfully) know little and have never had any motive to learn.

Therefore, I was quite content to regard revising the rules for personal bankruptcy as a task to be left to my elected representatives. One reason why we have a republic rather than a democracy is to spare citizens the burden of acquainting themselves with every nook and cranny of public policy. My attention to bankruptcy reform was limited to noting that almost every Republican in Congress supported it and almost every opponent was a far-left Democrat. That lineup doesn’t always prove that a proposed measure would be good law, but it’s definitely the way to bet.

Now I see that a number of right-of-center bloggers are raising last minute objections, e. g., Instapundit, JustOneMinute (somewhat ambivalently) and Asymmetrical Information. Should I reconsider? Have corporate lobbyists pulled a fast one and foisted a dreadful bill on naive conservatives?

That isn’t an impossibility, but, before I consider agreeing, I’d like to see a reason to oppose the bill. The attacks on it reduce to four arguments, three of which are variations on a single theme:

1. Companies that issue credit cards are evil.

2. The reform bill’s success is due to corporate lobbying (by those evil credit card issuers).

3. The pending reforms will allow the evil credit card issuers to squeeze more money out of the low income people whom they entice into accepting easy credit – and, by the way, those people’s inability to pay their plastic debts is caused by illness or similar misfortune, not by irresponsibility.

4. Making it harder to wipe out debts in bankruptcy will discourage entrepreneurs.

I’m not impressed. Here, briefly, is why not:

1. No one is compelled to accept credit cards or to run up debts that he can’t repay. If it is “evil” to provide credit to essentially the entire wage-earning population, that is a consensual evil to which self-styled libertarians shouldn’t object. Moreover, it’s doubtful that Mastercard and Visa issuers are comparable in social undesirability to the juice racketeers who used to be the main source of credit for the lower class. Those guys’ interest rates ran to 50 percent a week, and collateral was the borrower’s kneecaps.

The alternative to the present system is not one in which kindly philanthropists make loans never expecting to be paid back. It is the restriction of legitimate credit to a small segment of the population, while the rest are forced to live on a cash-and-carry basis or turn to shady lenders.

2. As Todd Zywicki, who really is an expert on bankruptcy law, points out, lobbyists don’t speak with a single voice.

There are interest groups on all sides, most notably bankruptcy lawyers and other professionals, who have lobbied hard against the bill. Why? Because fewer bankruptcy filings means less money in lawyers’ pockets. Unsurprisingly, the most vocal opponents of reform in the Senate are also among the largest recipients of contributions by lawyers. . . .

Another problem with the argument is that the relevant committee with jurisdiction over bankruptcy reform is the Judiciary Committee in the House and Senate. Why does this matter? First, because the Judiciary Committee is the traditional playground for lawyers, not bankers, which as David Skeel has noted, provides lawyers with a substantial leg up in lobbying efforts surrounding bankruptcy reform, and which is one reason why enactment of bipartisan bankruptcy reform legislation has taken 8 years. Second, although the consumer credit industry certainly is a major player when it comes to lobbying, most of their contributions – unsurprisingly – are made to members of the Banking Committees, not the Judiciary Committees.

In fact, a study by Princeton’s Stephen Nunez and Howard Rosenthal using votes on the bill in 2001 concluded that perhaps 15 of the 306 members’ votes in the House in favor of the legislation at that time may have been swayed by campaign contributions from the consumer credit industry – or about five percent of the House’s 74% majority. 15 out of 306 “yes” votes. Hardly enough to account for the consistent overwhelming support for the bill.

3. As I understand it – and I have seen no account disputing this point – the bill will have little impact on debtors whose income is below their state’s median level. They will continue to be eligible for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, in which all dischargeable debts are eliminated. Only the more affluent will be forced into Chapter 13, which requires a post-bankruptcy debt repayment plan (analogous to Chapter 11 for corporations). That doesn’t impress me as outrageously onerous. My confidence that it isn’t is reinforced when I see a prominent bankruptcy lawyer for the upper classes pushing a blatantly phony study asserting the medical debts are responsible for half of all personal bankruptcies. That the bill’s opponents can’t find better evidence for their position leads me to doubt that better evidence is available.

4. Easy access to bankruptcy may indeed encourage entrepreneurship by reducing the cost of failure. On the other hand, it may also encourage malinvestment by reducing the penalties for deploying capital in unproductive ways. If data exist showing that the former effect is more potent than the latter, I’ll consider it. So far, however, the assertion simply hangs in the air without empirical or persuasive theoretical support.

In conclusion, then, those who decry bankruptcy reform haven’t won me over by shrieking. Let them offer a rational basis for their opinion, and perhaps I’ll change my mind. Meanwhile, I’m inclined to concur with Professor Zywicki:

As I noted in an essay published last year in the Michigan Law Review, the driving force in the bankruptcy reform debate is the influence of ideology, and especially the ideology of personal responsibility, that has animated many reforms in Washington in recent years. To the extent that special interests have played much of a role, it appears that the lobbying efforts by the consumer credit industry on one side and the lobby efforts of the bankruptcy bar on the other have largely canceled out each other around the fringes of the debate, leaving the ideology of personal responsibility as the predominant factor in the debate.

For the moment, that old-time libertarian religion is good enough for me.

Further reading: Todd Zywicki, “Bankrupt Criticisms”
Todd Zywicki, “Credit Worthy”
BlameBush!, “Bush’s Morally Bankrupt Bankruptcy Reform Bill”

A Worthy Successor to the Harvard Lampoon

It’s good to see that the tensions created by nonstop attacks on President Summers haven’t dulled the Harvard student body’s sense of humor. The campus that gave birth to the Lampoon now features a new satirical zine going by the name of the Harvard Crimson. Via Right Wing News I learned of this comic gem [all punctuation sic]:

After recent approval by Associate Dean of the College Thomas A. Dingman ’67, other members of the Dean’s office, and all 12 House Masters, a new student service is sweeping onto campus. Dormaid, founded by Michael E. Kopko ’07, is a cleaning service that allows students to avoid the perennial problem of dingy, smutty, questionably-habitable rooms. But as appealing as the thought of a perpetually tidy room may be, (independent of family visits), Dormaid could potentially mess up as many rooms as it cleans. By creating yet another differential between the haves and have-nots on campus, Dormaid threatens our student unity. . . .

Dorm life is one of the few common experiences left that all students, regardless of class or background, have to endure with a measure of equality. The egalitarian nature of dorm life helps to foster a sense of collegiate camaraderie, an unadulterated respect for peers; it generates a level playing field that encourages learning between people of all upbringings. A service like Dormaid can bring many levels of awkwardness into this picture. For example, do two people sharing a double split the cost? What if one wants the service and the other does not? What if one cannot afford it? Hiring someone to clean dorm rooms is a convenience, but it is also an obvious display of wealth that would establish a perceived, if unspoken, barrier between students of different economic means.

Harvard administrators and House Masters should have known better than to approve Dormaid. While it provides a useful service, Dormaid’s cost to campus life outweighs its positive aspects. Harvard makes strong efforts to open this school to students of all backgrounds. These efforts must not end with a number in a financial aid packet. This openness must be imbued in the atmosphere of this school, which means that unneeded distinctions between the rich and the poor are the last things that Harvard needs to foster. Although Harvard has given its approval, students don’t have to. We urge the student body to boycott Dormaid. Everyone’s certainly busy, but Harvard students shouldn’t choose convenience over healthy relationships with their blockmates. It’s up to each one of us to ensure that our peers feel comfortable on campus, and if that means plugging in a vacuum every two weeks, then so be it.

There’s no healthier relationship than that formed by watching mold grow on half-eaten sandwiches, smelling the socks piled on the couch and trying to squash the roaches who come to enjoy a salubrious environment. Wasn’t it the Puritans who said that cleanliness is next to Godliness? And isn’t George W. Bushitler a Puritan? So isn’t hiring Dormaid the moral equivalent of invading Iraq? You can be sure that there wouldn’t be travesties like this if the Ba’ath (not Bath) Party ran Harvard! Dormaid’s alignment with the Religious Right is clearly demonstrated by its commitment to solving “the perennial problem of dingy, smutty [emphasis added], questionably-habitable rooms”.

Now that I think of it, the distinguished statesman and novelist Saddam Hussein, criminally assaulted by the Bushite neoconservative Zionist fanatics, needs a job. Maybe the next issue of the Crimson will demand that Harvard hire him to replace the fascist elitist Thomas A. Dingman ’67.

Hey, hey, ho, ho,
Soap and water’s got to go!

Ho, ho, hey, hey,
Chase those Bushite maids away!

Bribing Inspectors to Tell the Truth?

Saddam Hussein’s bribery campaign is old news, but a Daily Telegraph report gives an interesting insight to a controversy that Conventional Wisdom has laid to rest:

Saddam Hussein’s regime offered a $2 million (£1.4 million) bribe to the United Nations’ chief weapons inspector to doctor his reports on the search for weapons of mass destruction.

Rolf Ekeus, the Swede who led the UN’s efforts to track down the weapons from 1991 to 1997, said that the offer came from Tariq Aziz, Saddam's foreign minister and deputy.

Mr Ekeus told Reuters news agency that he had passed the information to the Volcker Commission. “I told the Volcker people that Tariq [Aziz] said a couple of million was there if we report right. My answer was, ‘That is not the way we do business in Sweden’.”

Applying his beer-sharpened little gray cells, Tim Blair wonders why Saddam undertook a Bribery Bid to Conceal Weapons That Didn’t Exist. Last year a similar mystery surfaced, when the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that Saddam had authorized field commanders to use chemical and biological weapons against a prospective Coalition invasion.

As I’ve discussed before, the now generally accepted “fact” that the Ba’athist regime secretly destroyed its weapons of mass destruction rests on little foundation except the anti-war Left’s eagerness to condemn Saddam’s overthrow. It never approached the plausibility of the alternative explanation for the absence of easily discovered stockpiles: that the Ba’athists hid their unconventional arsenal well or placed it in the hands of a friendly neighbor. Rolf Ekeus’ disclosure is further circumstantial evidence. Will the Leftists try to explain it away, or do they count on their media allies to refrain from drawing inconvenient inferences?

Free Markets = Corporate Welfare?

It goes without saying that anti-immigration shrillmonger Mark Krikorian would dislike today’s Wall Street Journal article [link for on-line subscribers only] on the dependence of Arizona lettuce growers on Mexican labor. In the Journal’s words,

The fieldworkers – virtually all of them Mexican – are the backbone of the region’s largest industry. It pumps $1.5 billion annually into the Yuma County economy and accounts for a third of Arizona’s agricultural revenue, according to state agriculture department statistics. Between November and March, 90% of the leafy vegetables produced in the U.S., including broccoli and cauliflower, originate here, giving Yuma the nickname of the nation’s “winter salad bowl.”

Most of the production is packed at local salad-processing plants and shipped to major supermarket and fast-food chains, like Safeway and McDonald’s Corp. Each year, Yuma throws a weekend celebration called “Lettuce Days” to mark its agricultural prowess and showcase its products.

This year, Antonio Oseguera isn’t celebrating. He needs about 350 workers, 40 tractors and a fleet of trucks to harvest lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower from 3,000 acres of land he controls around the area. He says he’s had to scrounge for workers like never before in his two decades in the business. “The lettuce has to be picked; that’s the cry of the land,” he says. “But there aren’t enough workers.” He has lost $1 million in potential sales this season alone, he says. His business is operating $250,000 in the red.

Mr. Oseguera used to be able to find plenty of green-card holders to do the work. But these legal immigrants are aging – their bodies injured or too worn out by the backbreaking work to keep it up. The old timers’ offspring, born and raised in America, are educated enough to seek better opportunities. Those willing to do physical labor prefer construction or factory work, which offer higher pay and year-round income.

“So, who’s going to do the work?” asks Mr. Oseguera, though he knows the answer all too well. Ahead of the harvest, he took out ads in the local papers for fieldworkers. The grower got one reply, he says – from a mechanic. He didn’t get the job.

Arizona officials also concede that growers have trouble filling field jobs with legal employees. Janine Duron, a senior official at the employment agency meant to match workers with jobs, says she gets requests all the time for fieldworkers, but she rarely fills them. She estimates seven out of 10 farm workers in Yuma are illegal.

The moral of the story is not that illegal immigration is a good thing but that a system for employing Mexicans legally, such as President Bush’s proposed guest worker program, is needed to provide a reliable supply of lechugeros. Mr. Krikorian, however, is a bitter opponent of the Bush proposal, which he has frequently equated with allowing unlimited illegal immigration. Today he adds a revealing twist: “Illegal immigration is simply another form of corporate welfare for agribusiness.”

This formulation more than hints at Mr. Krikorian’s fundamental economic beliefs. Restrictions on cross-border movement, whatever their noneconomic merits or faults, overtly interfere with the free play of market forces. To call it “corporate welfare” when a willing employer hires a willing worker at a mutually agreeable wage is to turn the concept of “welfare” on its head. By that light, lowering tariffs, abolishing wage-price controls, cutting taxes and deregulating industries are all “corporate welfare” measures. Why do they deserve that name? Presumably because they can lead to more profitable businesses (along with the weeding out of the inefficient resource wasters). Those who regard that prospect as undesirable and prefer that the government regulate markets are not usually thought of as conservatives.

Having read many, many Krikorian posts in the NRO Corner, I doubt that he is in fact a conservative in any meaningful sense. He seems, rather, to be a single-issue zealot with a basically left-wing economic outlook who tries to “pass” as a rightist for tactical reasons. I don’t, mind you, think that there is anything dishonest or dishonorable about that tactic. It displays a certain cleverness on the anti-immigrationists’ part. Some of them write for labor union and old-line liberal publications, others for National Review. Advocates of other causes tend to cluster on one side of the political spectrum, making the opposite half leery of listening to them. It’s far more adroit to infiltrate both.

It would be more adroit yet for the infiltrators to adopt the principles of the camp that have nominally joined. That is, however, a challenge when, like Mark Krikorian, one is trying to sell a Big Government cause to the party of Liberty. Now and then one’s bedrock opinions peek out from beneath the ideological astroturf.

Fresh Face, Stale Mind

Barack “Lucky” Obama is routinely portrayed by the media as a fresh new face in the Senate. Well, the face may be fresh, but the mind isn’t, as he demonstrated yesterday by rotely accusing President Bush of presenting racially “offensive” arguments for Social Security reform.

The President has been pointing out regularly that private accounts would be a boon to retirees who die prematurely. Under the present system, they receive less than they have paid in FICA taxes. Basing Social Security on capital accumulation would make it possible for them to leave an estate. The greatest beneficiaries of this change would be black males. Not only do they have significantly shorter life expectancies at retirement age than other groups, but they inherit less from their parents, who typically have had little opportunity to accumulate savings during their own lifetimes.

The present state of affairs is thus disadvantageous to both the current generation of blacks and their children. That is not the only, or the principal, argument for reforming Social Security, but it is certainly a consideration that policymakers ought not to overlook.

Well, Senator Obama does want to overlook it. In fact, he doesn’t think that it should be mentioned in polite society.

Instead, people should be talking “about how are we going to close the health disparities gap that exists, and make sure that African-American life expectancy is as long as the rest of this nation.”

Er, why can’t we talk about that in addition to working toward a more equitable Social Security program? The problem of poor health among black Americans isn’t going to be solved in a couple of years with a couple of government initiatives. It is a long-term effort that needs to be pursued on many fronts. Senator Obama, eager to keep the race card in play, insinuates that improving Social Security implies abandonment of all other efforts to ameliorate the problems of the black community:

“The notion that we would not be talking about lack of health insurance, and reducing diabetes, and reducing incidents [sic] of AIDS, and making sure that African Americans have the wealth and the income to save into retirement and supplement Social Security is stunning to me.

Not only is that a non sequitur, but it ignores the fact that private Social Security accounts, by making blacks richer in the future through savings and inheritances, will contribute to making them healthier.

It’s glaringly obvious that Senator Obama’s primary concern is not improving the health of black Americans but maintaining their allegiance to the Democratic Party by slandering beneficial Republican initiatives. That is the stale politics of the “liberal black plantation”, and denouncing arguments as “offensive” while refusing to engage them intellectually is the symptom of a stale mind.

Keep Congress Off Steroids

While professional athletes’ use of steroids to strengthen their muscles may have been important enough to merit inclusion in the last State of the Union omnium gatherum, it’s a sign of the scatterbrained state of the government that this issue is to be the subject of Congressional hearings. For the sake of maximum publicity, subpoenas have been issued to a number of baseball stars, such as Frank Thomas and Curt Schilling, whose only connection with steroids has been to lend support to Major League Baseball’s efforts to eliminate them from the game.

The subpoena recipients are understandably nervous at the prospect of being quizzed about what they know about teammates’ activities, but it’s hard to see what other testimony they could provide that would increase the lawmakers’ stock of knowledge. Mr. Schilling is an expert on fast balls and wargames, not drug policy. Nor is it clear what the Congresscritters will or can do with whatever information they do chance to gather. I doubt that their objective is to devise more effective laws governing prescriptions. Are they going to tell organized baseball how to cope with the bad publicity emanating from news stories about Barry Bonds et al.? Management consulting is an interesting sideline, but don’t legislators have other work to do? (A libertarian might reply, of course, that attention-grabbing investigations beneficially leave them less time to pass laws.)

It’s almost inevitable that the “investigators” will do more talking than listening and that their talk will consist mostly of complaints that baseball and other sports aren’t monitoring players closely enough, levy overly lenient penalties for infractions, don’t proclaim their abhorrence of illegal drugs with sufficient vehemence, etc., etc. After which the Legislature will move on to other matters, having done no good and possibly a bit of harm.

At the risk of sounding like a simplistic fan of laissez faire, I’d like to suggest that steroids today are like gambling in the early 20th Century, a problem that baseball will have to either solve or ignore on its own. Whether the attempt to solve it should be made is a business decision, though I doubt that, given the views of the game’s customers, it is a difficult one to make. If, then, baseball wishes to become steroid-free, the gambling parallel offers a couple of lessons.

First, while it’s true that some ballplayers have real trouble grasping the consequences of their actions, serious threats coupled with conspicuous examples of follow-through can alter the behavior of even the most recalcitrant. Players in the ’20s were, to put it mildly, no brighter than the current crop, but the expulsion of the Black Sox from baseball cut their propensity to bet on games immediately and sharply.

Second, it is vital to look forward, not back. Judge Landis, draconian as he was to the eight Chicago malefactors, did not scour the big leagues for other gambling men. If he had, as is now well known, many of the all-time greats would have been cashiered in disgrace, and it’s doubtful that the game would have survived. Instead, the absolute ban on future misconduct was accompanied by a de facto amnesty for misdeeds in the past. That policy proved effective, and baseball emerged within a few years with a fresh, wholesome image.

Bud Selig is no Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Luckily for him, his problem is less severe. Artificially beefy batters trying to hit 70 homers a season are less deleterious than great natural hitters tying to avoid knocking in the winning run. On the other hand, if the first man to fail a steroids test this season is a multi-millionaire superstar, it will be harder for the feeble Mr. Selig to discipline him than it was for his predecessor to kick out clueless Joe Jackson. It is not at all certain that the present day baseball establishment will rise to the challenges that it faces. But there’s no question that “help” from Congress will make their performance worse.

It Really Is a War on Terror

A popular cliché, not just among Bush haters, is that the formulation “War on Terror” doesn’t make sense. “It’s like calling World War II a ‘war on tanks’,” as I read the other day in a military history magazine.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between military hardware, which all armies necessarily employ, and the tactic of terrorism, which most do not. Making war on civilians is not merely uncivilized; it is corrupting. Any cause that makes it a central, systematic element in its strategy will inevitably shuffle off whatever worthy ideals it initially fought for and descend to the level of a common enemy of mankind. We have seen that regression take place rapidly in Chechnya, where what began as a valiant struggle for freedom from Russian oppression ended in the Beslan massacre.

That the Bush Administration realizes that terrorism, like piracy, is an enemy in and of itself has now been demonstrated strikingly by its demand, so unexpected in light of past American policy that it has barely been noticed, that the Irish Republican Army, one of the world’s oldest and most degenerated terrorist groups, disband. Furthermore, the diplomatic courtesies previously extended to IRA thugs have been abruptly curtailed. As the Associated Press reports,

Wednesday’s call [for disbanding the IRA] from the U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland, Mitchell Reiss, came a week ahead of St. Patrick’s Day when, for the first time in a decade, leaders of the IRA’s Sinn Fein party won’t be guests of the White House.

This year, the invitations are going to the five sisters of the IRA’s victim, Robert McCartney, a 33-year-old forklift operator and nightclub bouncer [and, I also note, a Roman Catholic].

“It’s time for the IRA to go out of business. And it’s time for Sinn Fein to be able to say that explicitly, without ambiguity, without ambivalence, that criminality will not be tolerated,” Reiss said.

McCartney was killed Jan. 30 after an IRA-led gang slashed one of his friends inside a Belfast pub, then attacked both men outside, clubbing McCartney and knifing him.

In the words of an e-mail from a friend (who works for the State Department, where there is probably much gnashing of teeth over this “provocative” Bush-Rice decision), “It’s about time. Let’s consign these two-bit hoodlums to history forever. If we expect there to be freedom in Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt, we have got to insist there be freedom in Ulster.”

Exactly. Just as there aren’t good and bad pirates, there are no terrorists who merit American toleration, much less solicitude.

Vote Now; Repent Later

Among the vices of widespread voting by mail, in addition to its vulnerability to fraud and inconsistency with the principle of secret balloting, is that it encourages voters to make their choices before all the facts are in. John Fund, writing in the OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription only, but a good use for $3.95 a month), calls attention to a contest yesterday in which giving both sides time to present their arguments made a difference:

Governor Jeb Bush scored a partial victory yesterday as voters in Miami-Dade County (population 2.3 million) voted down a proposal to install Vegas-style slot machines at racetracks and jai alai establishments. His insistent argument that gambling money wouldn’t ultimately help public education resonated finally resonated with voters. . . .

There was a clear split in the voting patterns depending on when people voted. The racetrack owners spent $7 million to sell the plan under the slogan “Yes to Better Schools and Jobs.” As a result, pro-gambling forces swept the absentee and early voters in both counties. By the time walk-up voters participated on Election Day, the gap narrowed considerably, such that the gambling forces in Miami-Dade drew only 48%.

These results send a strong message about the dangers of encouraging large numbers of voters to cast ballots before Election Day. Absentee and early voters often don’t receive useful information or telling insights into candidates. Ross Perot suffered his famous meltdown on 60 Minutes, in which he accused Republicans of disrupting his daughter’s wedding, only nine days before Election Day in 1992. The John Huang fundraising scandals involving President Clinton’s campaign accelerated just prior to the 1996 election. Having a large chunk of the electorate vote early is akin to having a judge announce that any juror may vote and go home when the juror decides he or she has heard enough evidence.

This consequence of premature voting probably hurts Democrats overall. The domination of the media by their ideological comrades makes roorbacks more dangerous for Republicans, as witness Lawrence Walsh’s election eve Iran-Contra indictments in 1992, George W. Bush’s DUI kerfuffle in 2000 and the al-Qaqaa fabrication on the weekend before the last election. (Isn’t it odd how the last – supposedly such a major story as of November 1st – vanished from the media after November 2nd?) Republicans should not, however, imitate the other party by finding excuses for flaws that happen to work in our favor. Much of what is currently wrong with American elections stems from the immense expansion of mail-in voting. If we want to remain a real democracy, it’s time to get rid of this pernicious practice.

Business Lawyers Rate the Courts

Each year the Institute for Legal Reform conducts a State Liability Systems Ranking Study, which surveys the opinions of corporate lawyers on the fairness of state courts. “Fairness” is viewed from a business perspective, of course, so anyone who thinks that corporations deserve whatever they get should feel free to invert the rankings and cheer on the states whose judges and juries finished lowest.

The top and bottom tens don’t contain any surprises:

1. Delaware
2. Nebraska
3. North Dakota
4. Virginia
5. Iowa
6. Indiana
7. Minnesota
8. South Dakota
9. Wyoming
10. Iowa
* * * * *
41. Hawaii
42. Florida
43. Arkansas
44. Texas
45. California
46. Illinois
47. Louisiana
48. Alabama
49. West Virginia
50. Mississippi

At a time when Red State vs. Blue State comparisons are all the rage, it’s noteworthy that political leanings have no obvious correlation to the quality of judicial systems. President Bush carried eight of the ten states that the survey respondents liked best – and seven of those that they most abominated.

Illinois, my own home state, was impressively consistent in each of the areas covered by the study: Overall Treatment of Contract Litigation (45th), Treatment of Class Action Suits (45th), Punitive Damages (41st), Timeliness of Summary Judgment/Dismissal (45th), Discovery (45th), Scientific and Technical Evidence (45th), Judges’ Impartiality (46th), Judges’ Competence (46th), Juries’ Predictability (45th), Juries’ Fairness (46th). And three Illinois counties (Cook, St. Clair and, of course, Madison) gained places on the list of the 15 worst local jurisdictions.

Remarkably, Illinois has managed to drop 12 places since the 2002 study. Unfortunately, that isn’t because other states have been improving at a fast clip but because its own evaluations have been plummeting. Its aggregate score (on a 100 point scale) fell during that period from 55.1 to 44.1. No other state had anywhere near so large a change, for better or for worse.

If only the Illinois Republican Party hadn’t self-destructed during the long period of Thompson-Ryan-Kjellander-Topinka dominance, there might be a campaign issue lurking here.

If You Worry About Asteroids, Don’t Read This

LiveScience informs us that civilization is, to be candid, doomed:

Several volcanoes around the world are capable of gigantic eruptions unlike anything witnessed in recorded history, based on geologic evidence of past events, the scientists said. Such eruptions would dwarf those of Mount St. Helens, Krakatoa, Pinatubo and anything else going back dozens of millennia.

“Super-eruptions are up to hundreds of times larger than these,” said Stephen Self of the United Kingdom’s (U.K.) Open University.

“An area the size of North America can be devastated, and pronounced deterioration of global climate would be expected for a few years following the eruption,” Self said. “They could result in the devastation of world agriculture, severe disruption of food supplies, and mass starvation. These effects could be sufficiently severe to threaten the fabric of civilization.”

And, unlike giant asteroid strikes, mega-eruptions are not once-in-a-geological-era events:

Explosions of this magnitude “happen about every 600,000 years at Yellowstone,” says Chuck Wicks of the U.S. Geological Survey, who has studied the possibilities in separate work. “And it’s been about 620,000 years since the last super explosive eruption there.”

Okay, so these catastrophes have happened before, but we lived through them, right? Just barely, it seems:

About 74,000 years ago, in what is now Sumatra, a volcano called Toba blew with a force estimated at 10,000 times that of Mount St. Helens. Ash darkened the sky all around the planet. Temperatures plummeted by up to 21 degrees at higher latitudes, according to research by Michael Rampino, a biologist and geologist at New York University. . . .

Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, suggested in 1998 that Rampino's work might explain a curious bottleneck in human evolution: The blueprints of life for all humans – DNA – are remarkably similar given that our species branched off from the rest of the primate family tree a few million years ago.

Ambrose has said early humans were perhaps pushed to the edge of extinction after the Toba eruption – around the same time folks got serious about art and tool making. Perhaps only a few thousand survived. Humans today would all be descended from these few, and in terms of the genetic code, not a whole lot would change in 74,000 years.

This is an end-of-the-world scenario that science fiction has, so far as I know, overlooked. Mankind has been devastated by disease, drought, ice, heat, famine, radiation, asteroids, alien invasions and dozens of other varieties of death and destruction, but an erupting Yellowstone has yet to engulf North America in magma and ash.

If nothing else, this scenario is another reason not to keep all of our species’ eggs in the same fragile and not overly accommodating basket.

Update (3/13/05): As I did not know when I wrote the preceding post, BBC will present “Supervolcano”, a drama hypothesizing a mega-eruption in Yellowstone Park, this month, accompanied by two documentaries on the history of Yellowstone volcanic activity, both past and possibly future.

Democrats Against the U.N.

If the United Nations hopes to survive as a meaningful organization, it urgently needs thoroughgoing reform. If U.N. scandals continue unabated and unaddressed, civilized nations, beginning with the United States, will inevitably dissociate themselves from –

That great glass palace
Of mendacity and mendicancy and malice.

Within the U.N. hierarchy itself, some intelligent beings grasp the reality of the situation, as is shown by this press release from the U.N. News Centre:

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today warmly congratulated John Bolton on his nomination to be the next United States Permanent Representative to the world body and looks forward to working with him on UN reform, among other issues.

Mr. Annan was called this morning by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who informed him of the appointment and assured him that Mr. Bolton would work with the UN on reform and a full range of other issues, spokesman Stephane Dujarric told the daily news briefing in New York.

Asked about Mr. Bolton’s past record of demanding accountability from the UN, Mr. Dujarric said the UN has “nothing against people who hold us accountable.” On the contrary, the UN has been dealing with accountability and would continue to do so in the months ahead, he added.

But there are others who do have something against U.N. accountability, namely, the Democratic Senators who have lined up to denounce Mr. Bolton’s appointment, such as Jon Corzine and John Kerry. The Administration is confident that the nomination will proceed “proceed with some fireworks but little controversy”. Less optimistically, I anticipate at least the threat of a filibuster. Even if it doesn’t come to that, there will certainly be a furious smear campaign by the Left.

From the point of view of those of us who would just as soon see the U.N. sink slowly into the East River, Democratic obstruction is just fine. Mr. Bolton is remarkably energetic, determined and competent, just the kind of man who may be able to drag the Secretary-General and his staff, kicking and screaming, out of their present abyss. The more resistance his appointment encounters from American politicians, the more confident the corrupt elements in the U.N. bureaucracy will be that they can ride out demands to root out incompetence, mismanagement and corruption. President Bush has offered the organization a Martin Luther, while Senators Kerry and Corzine and their allies shill for the sellers of indulgences.

Addendum: Since one is supposed to disclose such connections these days, let me note that I knew John Bolton when we were both active in the Yale Political Union mumblety-mumble years ago. He was pretty energetic, determined and competent back then, too.

Further reading: Anne Applebaum, “Defending Bolton”

A Prediction Edges Toward Fulfillment

Me, 3/6/05:

Confident that their media allies will outshout the Right, leftists are giving hostages to fortune in the form of arguments whose absurdity will become more and more evident as the public becomes more keenly aware of how Social Security operates. As the Left’s fictions are debunked, its spokesmen will lose credibility.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.), House Minority Leader, 3/6/05 (quotations courtesy of Matthew Hoy):

The plan for solvency is to stop robbing Social Security of its money for other purposes. The plan is to return the money back to the trust fund as President Clinton did when he was president. In the Clinton years, in the closing years of the Clinton administration, there were three years of no deficit. Zero deficit. And with the surpluses that were created, President Clinton was able to put nearly $400 billion back into Social Security. . . . We must stop robbing Social Security’s trust fund of its money.

The New York Times, 3/8/05:

Under the current structure, payroll taxes will begin falling short of what will be needed to pay benefits in 2018, according to the latest estimates by the Social Security Administration. . . .

Once benefits exceed annual tax revenues, the government will have to increase taxes, cut spending elsewhere or issue more bonds if it decides to pay full Social Security benefits.

But trust fund or no trust fund, bonds or no bonds, Social Security is only one program with a claim on the federal budget.

There will be highways to build and, perhaps, wars to fight. There will be expenses for education and health care and many other government activities. And there will be citizens – voters – who do not want their taxes to be raised.

Maybe because of the trust fund, the politicians will decide that Social Security has the strongest claim.

But if so, that will be a political decision, not a legal one.

Some people have been saying exactly that for years. The Nancy Pelosis of the world either haven’t heard or don’t regard them as important. Perhaps hearing an accurate account of how Social Security operates from an ideological ally will lead them to stop talking nonsense about the “trust fund” and start addressing the program’s financial problems realistically. I would not, however, bet large sums on that outcome. More likely, the reactionary progressives will continue to wend their way into the fever swamps. It’s a sign of how far they’ve gone in that direction that they can no longer count on the Times to give them cover.

Not Quite Schwarzenegger

It looks like the Terminator isn’t in our imminent future. Reassuringly for mere humans, New Scientist reports that three robots couldn’t hold their own in arm-wrestling matches with a 17-year-old girl, self-described as a “wimp”.

It took Panna Felsen 24 seconds to defeat her first opponent. “Following this, and a pep talk from an arm wrestling expert, it took her just four seconds to beat the second arm and three seconds for her to win the last match.”

There was a serious purpose to this contest, which is part of an effort to develop strong, lightweight artificial muscles for use in machinery and prosthetic devices. “The actuators in the three competing robotic arms belong to a class of materials known as electroactive polymers (EAP). These are plastics that can change shape when activated either electrically or with chemicals.” They are potentially superior to alternatives like electric motors (too weak) and hydraulic-pneumatic devices (too heavy). As their defeat at Miss Felsen’s hands shows, however, much work remains to be done.

The most futile effort came from a Virginia Tech team, whose robotic arm “had three sets of chemically activated muscles acting on the shoulder joint, triggered by hydrochloric acid which caused the EAP strands to contract. Unfortunately, as it turned out, it only started to work a few minutes after its match had ended.”