Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador gets heart surgery...

In Miami, of course.

The Canadian doctors wanted to cut through his sternum (the old filet way), and the Miami doctor (a Canadian) had other options.

[I intend no insult, but I cannot write or say "Newfoundland" without thinking of one of the canine world's most heroic and humorous breeds.]

I thought the WSJ was smarter than the NYT...[Post No. 3000]

If you click on Peggy Noonan's latest column from the WSJ website, Peggy Noonan's Facebook page, or the Drudge Report, you are told you must subscribe to read the whole thing.

UPDATE:I found the latest column on Ms. Noonan's website.

"Balloon Mortgage"

W.A. Jacobson's take on the "new" healthcare plan.

Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.

Justice Dept. Report on Torture Memos

Links and commentary here.

Photos from Afghanistan

Linked by Michael Yon.

Mr. Yon posts regularly on Facebook.

Does anyone think that cutting federal spending is a good idea?

Peggy Noonan wonders.

One reason my father joined the U.S. Navy...

I cannot imagine the excitement of growing up in Panama during the 1930s and seeing this ship pass through the Canal.

This is the U.S.S. Lexington (CV-2) in her glory. Her keel was laid for a battle cruiser, but due to restrictions on such ships after the Great War she was redesigned as an aircraft carrier.

The website is in French, but the photos are fantastic, even if you cannot find the train station in Paris.

Kyle Cupp cited on Andrew Sullivan's blog

Andrew Sullivan writes the first blog I ever read daily, though I seldom visit any longer.

Nonetheless, he is still a leading blogger, so I congratulate Kyle for being cited and linked re his posts on torture.

G.K. Chesterton on the Eucharist

A post by the Anchoress.

Saint Pius X

He was truly a holy man and a great leader, catechist, liturgist, and bishop.

Here is a link to the book posted.

Startling unemployment

Jennifer Rubin quotes Don Peck regarding joblessness, and it is startling:

'The construction and finance industries, bloated by a decade-long housing bubble, are unlikely to regain their former share of the economy, and as a result many out-of-work finance professionals and construction workers won’t be able to simply pick up where they left off when growth returns—they’ll need to retrain and find new careers. (For different reasons, the same might be said of many media professionals and auto workers.) And even within industries that are likely to bounce back smartly, temporary layoffs have generally given way to the permanent elimination of jobs, the result of workplace restructuring. Manufacturing jobs have of course been moving overseas for decades, and still are; but recently, the outsourcing of much white-collar work has become possible. Companies that have cut domestic payrolls to the bone in this recession may choose to rebuild them in Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Bangalore, accelerating off-shoring decisions that otherwise might have occurred over many years.

'New jobs will come open in the U.S. But many will have different skill requirements than the old ones. “In a sense,” says Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution, “every time someone’s laid off now, they need to start all over. They don’t even know what industry they’ll be in next.”'


We will pull out of this. We always do. This recession, nonetheless, is far more painful than any one I recall. Historically in America, we get a major recession every two or threee generations that is both caused and lengthened by technology making entire industries and business plans obsolete. The Panics of 1837, 1893, 1929, and 2008 all led to the destruction of famous companies and methods of production. Innovation is the only thing that will save us. If we tax innovative people in order to subsidize waste and keep government payrolls stable, we will be stuck in this recession longer than need be.

Peck also says:

'In November, 19.4 percent of all men in their prime working years, 25 to 54, did not have jobs, the highest figure since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the statistic in 1948.'

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Sp. Adam Ray, Requiescat in pace

Michael Yon tells about one of our finest.

Obama and Carter

Jim Merriner sees more than a few parallels of both ambition and conceit.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

"Have the Bishops Missed a Teaching Opportunity With Regard to Torture?"

Jay Anderson has a nice post and some links here.

I have not written much about torture, though I occasionally comment about it when I see something about former Vanderbilt law professor John Yoo. I do not claim to be learned in moral theology. It is possible to argue, nonetheless, that non-lethal but brutal forms of interrogation might be necessary in some cases for self-defense.

The Catholic Catechism, Paragraph 2298, strongly condemns torture, as do all Catholic commentators who take the Catechism seriously. The Catholic Catechism considers war only just if it is for self-defense and requires that Catholics serve honorably and maintain the dignity of human life:

2310 Public authorities, in this case, have the right and duty to impose on citizens the obligations necessary for national defense. Those who are sworn to serve their country in the armed forces are servants of the security and freedom of nations. If they carry out their duty honorably, they truly contribute to the common good of the nation and the maintenance of peace.

2311 Public authorities should make equitable provision for those who for reasons of conscience refuse to bear arms; these are nonetheless obliged to serve the human community in some other way.

2312 The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict. "The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties."

2313 Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely. Actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles are crimes, as are the orders that command such actions. Blind obedience does not suffice to excuse those who carry them out. Thus the extermination of a people, nation, or ethnic minority must be condemned as a mortal sin. One is morally bound to resist orders that command genocide.

I have studied war my entire life. The treatment of non-combatants and captured soldiers has been discussed extensively in international treaties and among theologians, and for the most part, any officer in the U.S. Army should know how non-combatants and captured soldiers should be treated.

Soldiers at war, however, sometimes face moral ambiguities in which torture and self-defense might merge. In our current conflicts, these moral ambiguities arise from the treatment of armed combatants who hold no national allegiance and wear no uniforms but show willingness to kill or maim anyone who might oppose their tyranny.

Suppose you are a sworn officer in the U.S. Army and command a platoon, company, or battalion in Afghanistan, and you learn that one of your soldiers has been captured by armed guerrillas likely to kill him if you cannot secure his freedom very quickly. Let us suppose that one of the enemy captives in your custody (not in a uniform, but armed when captured, and for the sake of argument, certainly an avowed enemy who has killed soldiers in your command) is very likely to know the hideout of the guerrillas. What would you do?

(a) Read him his rights under the Geneva Conventions and back off further questioning when he gives you his jihadi nickname and his future rank in the coming Islamic Caliphate.
(b) Read him his rights under Miranda v. Arizona and question him as if you were an American police officer.
(c) Read him the story of Nathan Hale.
(d) Teach him about American freedoms.
(e) Preach to him the Gospel.
(f) Scare him into telling you where the captured soldier might be.

An officer in the Army takes an oath as follows:

"I, _____ (SSAN), having been appointed an officer in the Army of the United States, as indicated above in the grade of _____ do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God." (DA Form 71, 1 August 1959, for officers.)

You could well argue that the Constitution requires you to treat him with all the deference of the Geneva Conventions or the Bill of Rights. You could also argue that your duty to protect the Constitution from those seeking to destroy it requires you to protect the soldier under your command, even if you have to beat your captive severely and make him fear for his life.

You don't want to write one of those letters home to his mother to tell her that he died in the line of duty, especially if he is being slowly tortured and possibly dismembered. If you are an officer of any guts, you will do almost anything in your power to obtain information on the soldier's whereabouts and, if necessary, lead the raid to rescue him yourself.

That is my hypothetical. I have never been in such a situation, but I think an argument can be made that beating the captive to obtain the release of a soldier under your command before he is killed is an act of self-defense. If I am right, I will admit that writing a policy for U.S. Army officers on the matter is more than problematic. Likewise, as a matter of moral theology, the theory of self-defense should not swallow the fundamental principle of human dignity. Torture in the name of self-defense is the slipperiest of slopes.

"What I Saw at the Tea Party Convention"

I read Instapundit and the Wall Street Journal and found Glenn Reynolds' column at both. He observed:

'Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry—and they are—but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun.'

I proclaim thee an honorary Southerner...

For your post on collard greens (if you, Elena Maria Vidal, are not a Southerner already).

[Photo of Magnolia grandiflora. Click to enlarge.]

"A Saint For Those Who Are Prisoners of Their Past"

Hat tip to Pentimento and Tea at Trianon.

Saint Josephine Bakhita was kidnapped by slavetraders and suffered horribly, yet she learned to forgive and live in love for God.

"Feeding the Blue Beast"

Walter Russell Mead writes about the "blue model," that is, the government-services model in place in American society since the New Deal:

'The breakdown of the blue model is the core problem of American society today and the key to the troubles of the Democratic party. Blue states really are blue; the ‘progressive imagination’ remains staunchly blue, and blue model interest groups like public school teachers, government employees, the remnants of the private union movement and the much healthier labor movement among public employees shape and mostly fund what Howard Dean famously called ‘the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.’

'Most Americans would like the blue model to stick around and are nostalgic for the security it once provided, but they understand that the great task of our times isn’t to save the blue model but to move on. The Democratic wing of the Democratic Party believes exactly the opposite: that the blue social model is the only way to go. If our city and state governments are groaning under the dead weight of inflated labor and pension costs, the only solution is to pump federal money into them somehow. If public schools aren’t working, they need more money — but seriously restructuring the system is out of bounds. If college and university tuition is exploding as the costs of education rapidly and continuously outpaces the general level of inflation, the only solution is to pump more money into the system while leaving it to operate much as it does.

'Democratic policy is increasingly limited to one goal: feeding the blue beast.'

Unless we want to end up like Greece, we'd better figure a way to provide needed services more cheaply. In private industry, if a firm announces it is cutting its workforce by 5%, its stock price goes up. In government, any cut of workforce is considered a disaster. State governments, every decade or so, go through fiscal crises that result in major cuts in spending; most legislatures outside of Washington, D.C. have a constitutional duty to pass balanced budgets, even when it hurts. The federal government, however, probably has not cut total spending in any fiscal year since the end of World War II. Outside of circles of Democratic activists and government employees, citizens know that an ever-increasing government payroll is a social catastrophe in the making.

"The Off-Center President"

Peggy Noonan comments in the WSJ today.

President Barack Obama has plenty of time to recover from everything that hasn't gone his way since last summer if he learns to choose his battles prudently.

Americans will rally around a stubborn fighter in war or threat of war. We have less consistent a record of supporting a left-of-center president who persists in pushing a domestic agenda that lacks a popular consensus. In fact, for a president to spend time on issues that can only divide, e.g., cap and trade and healthcare reform (of the nanny government sans markets variety), can only invite opposition from both allies and foes.

The Guardian on the Tea Parties

I like the Guardian because its writers are not the faux leftists we have:

'What is it about tea parties that make them off-limits to Democrats? Well, for starters, everything. The Democrats control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, so at least until they get massacred in the November elections, they will have a hard time portraying themselves as a persecuted minority. Democrats neither hate nor distrust the federal government and do not automatically object to higher taxes, though, just like the Tea Party types, they do hate Wall Street.

'A more pertinent explanation, though, is demographics. The Democratic party, always a weird melange, is now truly the party of the rich and the poor, with millions of civil servants and intellectuals filling out the mix. Rich people don't attend tea parties, not only because they can find ways to hide income and avoid paying taxes, but because tea parties are corny. After all, Sarah Palin was there. Poor people don't go to tea parties because poor people don't go anywhere. Civil servants don't go to tea parties because they've got nice pensions – so who's complaining? And intellectuals don't go to tea ­parties because the whole iconography of populist insurgency repels them.'

Fareed Zakaria interviews John Yoo

John Yoo is treated by some as if he is the author and implementer of torture as state policy. He is not. He is a lawyer called to a national security position who was asked to research for his client, the executive branch, what the applicable treaties and case law might be regarding the interrogation of combatants without uniform or national allegiance in a war zone.

We lawyers are asked every day to explore the legal parameters of areas that have not been litigated or have conflicted statutes and case law, depending on the jurisdiction. I cannot tell you how many simple and supposedly obvious questions do not have fixed answers in American law. International law is worse because international law is essentially whatever the strongest countries are willing to enforce.

If President George W. Bush committed war crimes, there are several remedies: vote for the other party, impeach him and the officers that implemented unconstitutional policies, or pass laws over his veto which would severely constrict his prerogatives (not unlike the Radical Republicans against President Andrew Johnson during Reconstruction).

What do we get instead? Campus protests and editorial calls to hang a lawyer who happens to be one of the few Republicans at the University of California-Berkeley.

The interview is worth reading.

If lawyers cannot counsel their political clients in gray areas of the law without being threatened with indictments by those who disagree with the policies actually implemented, then we will have a witch hunt after every change of administration. I defend Mr. Yoo, not because I agree with his so-called "torture memos," but rather, because he advised the President of the United States during a major crisis. He did what lawyers do: he showed his client what options have been allowable under treaties, statutes, and precedents, what options might be allowable, and which way the law might turn.

Any honesty about immigration?

No.

Lest we forget...

The images here grab me and take me to a day when I realized that people I didn't know were willing to kill me- to sentence me to death by association.

It is a disturbing thought, and it has changed my life, even if I did not follow in Pat Tillman's path and sign up for the U.S. Army.

Why are banks not loaning money?

They can afford to hold on to their funds. Capital is still cheap, and they would rather invest cheap money in their portfolios than actually lend it to risk-takers.

Spengler writes a nice piece here. Too big to fail also means too big to take a risk once Uncle Sam has a stake in the firm.

One more time...

Gridlock is good. It is the voters' only means to keep special interests grinding against one another instead of stealing from the taxpayers through crony capitalism as practiced by both parties, which function too often as holding companies for competing groups with money and political drive.

Logistics in Afghanistan...

Make Vietnam look easy. You need about 1,000 logisticial personnel and a 10,000 gallons of fuel per day to keep one rifleman in a meaningful post.

Michael Yon photographs how it is done.

I am not conservative because I have reasoned anything out...

I am simply stupid.

Charles Krauthammer describes the condescending apoplexy on the American left as the Obama presidency and Democratic Congress fail to redeem us from tyranny with the collectivism and internationalism long promised to save the world:

'Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking "in the plain words of plain folks," because the people are "suspicious of complexity." Counseled Blow: "The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, 'Mr. President, we're down here.'"

'A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are "a nation of dodos" that is "too dumb to thrive."

'Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself "for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people." The subject, he noted, was "complex." The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.'


In case it is unknown at the faculty lounge or cocktail party, the British Labour Party's program has never caught on in America, not even among trade unionists.

Vanity and elected office

Before my third year of college I was elected to an office of student government. I worked very hard, did a good job overall, but learned to take myself too seriously.

Before my fourth year, I ran for student body president and was defeated. I was crushed.

Seeing what happens to people who believe they are special because they can win a political rat race, I realize it was a major blessing that my career as an elected anything lasted only year.

John Edwards is a wrecking ball for himself, his family, and everyone who believed in him.

Theology of the Body by Pope John Paul

His homilies before his audiences became the basis for some of the best catechesis for the modern world.

What is a "bioethicist" anyway?

Somebody who makes a judgment about somebody's else's life.

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

"J.R.R. Tolkien on the Eucharist"

Fr. Dwight Longenecker quotes the friend of Hobbits and Elves on a timeless subject:

"The only cure for sagging of fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals. Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children - from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn - open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. (It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand - after which [our] Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.)"

Dominican Sisters on Oprah!

Oprah has a large audience, and the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist are a great witness of heroic love through the consecrated life.

At the bottom of the Anchoress' post is a link to JPII's homilies on the Theology of the Body.

The old tyranny wasn't so bad...

I am not a fan of many presidents: George Washington tops the short list, and the list does not grow much, if at all. Yes, I recognize the historic greatness of several presidents, but all come with unintended consequences. Washington alone seems to have defied the law of unintended consequences. His men believed he would not fall, and when held up to scrutiny he has not, even if an illiterate generation cannot comprehend him (or the Constitution of the country he founded). He was simply the greatest man of his generation and perhaps the greatest American ever.

I have little rancor for ex-presidents. I cried during Ronald Reagan's funeral, grieved the death of Gerald Ford, said a prayer for Richard Nixon when he passed away, and will take my daughter to Atlanta to pay respects when Jimmy Carter leaves this vale of tears. Now that we have survived Bill Clinton, I wish him well and give him credit for balanced budgets and successful gridlock.

With this spirit I post the latest billboard on I-35 in Wyoming, Minnesota:

Lewis Millett, 1920-2009, Requiescat in pace

My father served in Korea with Colonel Lewis Millett, and I blogged about one of his exploits prior to his Medal of Honor. Besides his Medal of Honor, he was awarded a Silver Star. He was simply a great warrior who loved freedom and his country. I did not know of his death last year until I checked Blackfive tonight. Unlike most of us, he was willing to risk his life before we entered World War II, in World War II, in Korea, and in Vietnam.

The Washington Post has a nice obituary, of which this is an excerpt:

'His letters back home were unfiltered epithets aimed at the chain of command.

'"Letters were censored in World War II, and the next thing I knew I was standing before the battery commander," he told the journal Military History. "He told me that the War Department had ordered three times that I be court-martialed. They finally did it to prevent someone from really throwing the book at me later. Then a few weeks later they made me a second lieutenant! I must be the only Regular Army colonel who has ever been court-martialed and convicted of desertion."

'During the Korean War, he received the military's highest awards for valor, including the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross, for two bayonet charges he led as a company commander in February 1951.

'"We had acquired some Chinese documents stating that Americans were afraid of hand-to-hand fighting and cold steel," he told Military History. "When I read that, I thought, 'I'll show you, you sons of bitches!'"'

Millett led the last recorded bayonet charge of the U.S. Army.

Here is an interview with him. There is plenty to read. Thank you Colonel.

Yalta: The Price of Peace

An excerpt from Serhii Plokhy's book:

'Today, 65 years after Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at Yalta to decide the fate of the postwar world, the main lesson of the conference seems to be more obvious than ever before. There is always a price to be paid for making alliances with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes.'

Matthew Kaminski says in an earlier review of the book:

'The undereducated son of a Georgian cobbler, Stalin emerges early in this portrait as a savvier negotiator than either the patrician Churchill or Roosevelt. His charm wins FDR over, leading the American on numerous occasions to side with him against Churchill. Stalin was also the best informed of the three, thanks to British spy Kim Philby and the rest of the "Cambridge Five" who had for months provided the Soviets with Allied position papers, sometimes even before Churchill or Roosevelt saw them. Stalin masterfully exploited the divisions his intelligence told him about among Western leaders over what should happen to Germany or Poland after the war.'

A study showing that teaching on sexual abstinence...

Might actually work.

And it is discussed, amazingly, in an article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

(Promoting sexual responsibility by passing out contraceptives is a bit like promoting temperance by giving out fake IDs, but please forgive me for stating the obvious. It is a painful truth that doing whatever I want is not always socially beneficial.)

Inside the Beltway, the tenants (of elected offices) are still deaf...

They don't even know they are tenants.

We have had an unserious Republican Congress. We now have an unserious Democratic Congress. We had a serious Republican president, and almost everyone hated him. We now have a Democratic president who is rapidly being educated by people he thought he knew, e.g., voters in Massachusetts, people he did not know he needed to know, e.g., government bond traders, and people he did not know actually existed, e.g., the Christmas hot-pants bomber. Peggy Noonan writes:

'The biggest historic gain of this administration may turn out to be that Democrats in the White House experienced leadership in the age of terror, came to have responsibility in a struggle that needs and will need our focus. It wasn't good that half the country thought jihadism was some little Republican obsession.'

Cell phones and radiation

GQ, (the magazine that advertises jackets for "About $2,200") has an article about the dangers of radiation from cellular telephones. I use one, but prefer the speaker feature. Nonetheless, a cell phone shares many properties with your microwave oven. People who used cell phones often from their beginnings in the 1990s, such as investment bankers, seem to be getting some odd health problems.

I predict it will get worse, and in a few years, the cell phone companies will be subject to our puritanical retribution.

The writer, Christopher Ketcham, writes in his penultimate paragraph:

'I walked around Annapolis and took note of the number of cell towers poised atop the buildings, the number of people who talked on their cell phones. They were everywhere, and after a while I stopped counting. At one point, I watched two women pacing in a parking lot, heads bent against their microwave transmitters. They talked and talked and aimlessly circled. When I got home, I looked up a line from Orwell that I couldn't quite remember as I watched them, about the power that machine technology would exert over mankind. "The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug—that is, grudgingly and suspiciously," Orwell wrote. "Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes."'

Expanding the Panama Canal

Popular Mechanics has a piece with photos on the current expansion of the Panama Canal to accommodate modern merchant ships.

[Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.]

Because of the geology, it will not be easy to maintain the expanded structures. The land forms of the Isthmus consist of layers of volcanic rock spaced between layers of loose soils. The loose soils, especially during the rainy season, provide conveyance for rocky layers to slide downhill towards any excavation an engineer can design. The French were the world's best civil engineers when they began the canal project, but mudslides (and malaria and yellow fever) busted them. We completed the Panama Canal because we defeated the mosquito-borne diseases and built machines that beat nature, at least for a little while. Nonetheless, we have removed more rock and dirt since 1914 to keep the Canal open than we had to remove before 1914. Panama is a geological hydra.

Saint Mary Magdalene

I taught this morning a class for the parents of the kids preparing for First Communion. The lesson was on the Mysterium Fidei: "Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again." We read from John's Gospel about Mary Magdalene being the first witness to the Resurrection of Jesus. My intention was not to teach a lesson on Saint Mary Magdalene, but I talked about her for quite a while, and I have been thinking of her ever since.

No saint is the subject of more blasphemous speculation than Saint Mary Magdalene, and few saints of her importance have less historic information available. Let me cut to the chase: she loved Jesus greatly, so greatly that cynics instinctively presume she had a sinful relationship with the Son of God and Son of Man. There is no evidence of such, but some people do not need any. The alleged conspiracy that the evil patriarchal bishops crushed her cult, the female priesthood, and the entire matriarchal order of the early Church appears to suffice as historic certainty in many circles.

Her witness and leadership in the Church are much simpler than any of the speculative books written about her. She loved Jesus greatly. She was redeemed by Jesus of many sins. She saw the resurrected Christ first. She reported the Resurrection first. She believed the Resurrection first. Her simple message, if true, turns the logic of most human endeavor on its head: "Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again."

For this reason, outside of the Church and other ecclesial communities, few discuss what Saint Mary Magdalene saw and proclaimed; many merely speculate about a sinful relationship that did not happen. It is easier to speculate on her personal life and her role as a woman in the Church than to meditate on her role in the history of salvation as recorded in the Gospels.

Saint Mary Magdalene witnessed the Resurrection. We need her most when our own faith is week. She considered sitting at the feet of Jesus and looking at His Holy Face to be a great honor she did not deserve.

Saint Mary Magdalene, witness of the Resurrection, pray for us.

A new chapter of "Palin delenda est"

The condescension of the AP writer is palpable.

I saw Sarah Palin's first two speeches in August 2008: her introductory speech on the campaign trail and her convention speech. My take now is the same as then: she is a great political talent who will have to grow very fast to perform well in high office (rather than be what Sam Rayburn called a "show horse"). I am old school and wish our modern presidents all had the political and diplomatic experience of the first six, but we live in an age of celebrity, so we must pray that our anointed leaders are a quarter as wise as their fans and handlers proclaim.

As a student of American culture, I find her fascinating because she is polarizing. Barack Obama made vapid speeches for years, and his fans still say he is a genius and a savior. The same cheering section calls Gov. Palin every epithet. If you are looking for a "philosopher-king" for America, the good ole days died off with John Quincy Adams and briefly returned with Woodrow Wilson, yet not even the Democrats today want to reincarnate him.

The Daily Mail has a piece by a writer who does not get heart-burn followed by constipation after listening to a Palin speech.

As Yakov Smirnoff said, "What a country!"

UPDATE: Prior posts here on "Palin delenda est" and the presidential election as the search for a prophet, savior, and king, Moses, Joshua, and David, all in one.

"Unhappy Hipsters"

This is the funniest parody of modern architecture (and the attitudes which make it possible) I've ever seen.

If you look at all the photos and captions, you will know exactly what the boy is trying to escape.

Hat tip to Jordana Adams (Facebook).

Trial by Ordeal

You have heard of it, usually in the context of someone bashing Medieval practices and superstitions.

This blog, as a journal of culture clashes, is delighted to link a defense of trial by ordeal to The Boston Globe.

Mark in Spokane has the link and some comments.

Obituary for Holden Caulfield

Nice discussion of the late J.D. Salinger and his famous The Catcher in the Rye by Fr. Dwight Longenecker.

"Beauty Truth and Enchantment"

Fr. Dwight Longenecker says:

'Why should we take time and spend money to make our churches beautiful, our liturgy beautiful, our music beautiful, our art beautiful? Because it is through this beauty that we are taken into the heart of the divine order of all things. This is so difficult to communicate in a world of useful things. We have come to regard beautiful things as only so much luxurious ornamentation. We regard expenditure on beauty as wasteful--boors that we are--but this is not only boorish it is spiritually bereft.'


I must agree. Read the whole thing. He quotes Thomas Howard quoting C.S. Lewis. He cites G.K. Chesterton as well.

[Photo above of St. Joseph's Church, Macon, Georgia, one of the prettiest churches in the South.]

How bad is the economy?

The Economy is so Bad that...

1. I got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.

2. I ordered a burger at McDonald's and the kid behind the counter asked, "Can you afford fries with that?"

3. CEO's are now playing miniature golf.

4. If the bank returns your check marked "Insufficient Funds," you call them and ask if they meant you or them.

5. Hot Wheels and Matchbox stocks are trading higher than GM.

6. McDonald's is selling the 1/4 ouncer.

7. Parents in Beverly Hills fired their nannies and learned their children's names.

8. A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico .

9. Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.

10. Motel Six won't leave the light on anymore.

11. The Mafia is laying off judges.

12. Exxon-Mobile laid off 25 Congressmen.

And,finally...
13. I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc., I called the Suicide Lifeline. I got a call center in Pakistan , and when I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited, and asked if I could drive a truck.


Hat tip to Courtney at "Conservative Moms."