oldbob44

The things you see on Facebook!

2012-01-18T23:10:00.002-06:00

TEXT ON THE PICTURE:

You are an altar where my lover worships

Center of the heated wildness of me

yoni, sacred

gateway to and

of life and

pleasure, i

sing an image

of your textures

and colors.

this and i

are a temple

and a playground

a blossoming

mandala of

soft, folded

flesh

[Note: "yoni" is a Sanskrit word meaning vagina.]

COMMENTS on the picture:

DeliciouslyDeviant

December 8, 2011

2 people like this.

Jason A------

Has the told irony that the pic looks like a vajay-jay been lost lol

Monday [Jan 16?] at 11:20pm

DeliciouslyDeviant

Yoni = vajay-jay

Yesterday [Tuesday Jan 17] at 11:28am

Sarah P---

Oh Jason...

22 hours ago [11:52 pm Tue 17 Jan]

Bob W---- [me]

Looks like an illustration from a textbook on gynecology.

But I suppose it was meant to, hm?

22 hours ago [11:52 pm Tue 17 Jan]

Jaime S---- It's most likely the point. Woman. Strength. Artistic. Beautiful.

21 hours ago [12:52 am Wed 18 Jan]

Sarah P---

Oh yes Jaime girl. You got the point for sure!

21 hours ago [12:52 am Wed 18 Jan]

Bob W----

Well, I guess I didn't. Oh, well, mox nix.

20 hours ago [1:52 am Wed 18 Jan]

MY POST on the picture

4:46pm Wed 18 Jan me

Somebody posted a picture yesterday, a piece of artwork resembling female genitalia, with words like "gateway to joy," "secret of woman's power," "woman's strength," and so on (I don't remember exactly). I made a snarky comment to the effect that it looks like a page from a gynecology textbook.

After thinking about it, though, I have to say it's a damn piss-poor philosophy that defines a woman in terms of her genitalia and makes her an object.

There is far FAR more to a woman than that!

Stephen M-----, Andrew Y----, and Rachel M---- like this.

5:46 pm Wed 18 Jan Shane G----

More to everyone than the sum of their parts but modern man in his idiocy believes giving in to primitive desires and thinking is the right and acceptable way of thinking and progression....sure if ya want mankind to become animals but mankind is more than an animal.

5:46 pm Wed 18 Jan me

That's right, Shane.

6:45pm Wed 18 Jan Sarah P---

I would be that "somebody" you are refering to Bob and I feel that I need to set a few things strait here. First of all, to be honest you have misrepresented what was writen on this peice of art. No where in the picture did it say anything about women's power or strength. I believe the intention was to express pride in that which is most femine, I am not the artist so I can only guess, but that is what I took from it. I think it's unfair to say a philosophy that makes being a woman into some thing small was reprsented at all. Secondly, I did not post the photo although I would. I commented on it which linked it to my page. facebook often shows what you comment on as well. I keep a strict policy about not sharing my opinions about things like that unless asked. Especially when it is a differing view point from my own. I certainly have never sent out a status update to my entire friend list regarding another person's activities. If I am offended or unsure of what is intended by a picture or post I go direct to the source. And I would not refer to that person as "somebody". Lastly you have not mentioned at all that this piece of art work ( and that is what it is weither or not we agree or like it) mentions in very knid terms the ability of a woman to carry and bring life into the world. Obviuosly that fact was meant to be celebrated in the picture and there is nothing piss poor about that. To anyone reading this who may wonder who I am or how I feel about what defines me as a woman, I am Sarah P---. I am strong, smart and very proud to be who and what I am. I am not just woman, I am certianly more than that and please don't think for one second I would waist my time on anything that would reduce me to just genitals! But if that is what you would think based on my prefernce in art work so be it. But that truly would be having a piss poor philosphy. I will make sure in the future that my FB settings offer more privacy.

8:15pm Wed 18 Jan me

Sarah, you speak well, and I agree with you 90%!

In my own defense, I tried today to find the picture I saw last night, and I couldn't find it anywhere. (I started with your page because I recall seeing your name associated with the picture somehow.)

So I was quoting from memory, and obviously did a clumsy job of it.

"...you have not mentioned at all that this piece of art work ... mentions in very kind terms the ability of a woman to carry and bring life into the world. Obviously that fact was meant to be celebrated in the picture and there is nothing piss poor about that."

As they say, "My Bad"!! You're right!

It wasn't obvious to me at the time that that was in the picture, and of course relying on a day-old memory was a bad idea.

That said, I have to say in my own defense that I was taught very forcefully when I was young that a woman's body is almost sacred - because of her ability to carry new life - and that for a guy to defile or degrade that is a horrible thing.

(In this connection, I hold a grudge of sorts against Hefner, Flynt, and Guccione, who did their best to teach a generation of young men that women are objects, to be used for pleasure and then discarded. So when I see a piece of art that seems to objectify women, my temper rises.)

I think I know you fairly well, and what I know of you I like. Yes, you're strong and smart, and deserve to take pride in who and what you are (of most concern to me is that you're a fine neighbor and I'm glad you live nearby).

I had better quit; I keep hitting the wrong buttons here.

Anyway, in sum, thanks for calling me out and speaking your mind, Sarah. I respect that in you!

10:12 pm Wed 18 Jan Me – private message to Sarah

Hi, Sarah. I found the picture (finally, after another 1/2 hour of digging) and read the words on it and the comments. The words are:

You are an altar where my lover worships

Center of the heated wildness of me

yoni, sacred / gateway to and / of life and / pleasure, i /

sing an image / of your textures / and colors. / this and i /

are a temple / and a playground / a blossoming / mandala of soft, / folded / flesh

The whole thing seems to equate (or at least bring together) sexuality, sensuality, and sacredness. I suppose that's so, I don't know of myself; only what married people tell me.

Facebook Satire

2012-01-01T00:37:00.003-06:00

I am happy to report that FAILS,
the Facebook Apathy Indecision and Lethargy Society,
got off to a great start in 2011!
There must be tens of thousands of users of Facebook,
and all but two either didn't care, couldn't decide, or just didn't get around to joining!
... This shows that they truly belong to FAILS, and we are very glad to have them!
(Or not have them. Or something.)
Happy New Year to the apathetic, indecisive, and lethargic!
And everybody else, of course!

May God bless us, every one!

Christmas Fun (well, fun for math types)

2011-12-26T08:48:00.003-06:00

After exhaustive and exhausting investigation of the many variables involved (and hoo ha, are they variable!) it can be shown that on the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love will have given me:
12 drummers drumming,
22 pipers piping,
30 lords a-leaping,
36 ladies dancing,
40 maids a-milking,
42 swans a-swimming,
42 geese a-laying,
40 golden rings,
36 calling (or colly) birds,
30 French hens,
22 turtle doves, and
12 partridges in a pear tree (or pear trees; this last has not yet been ascertained).

For those who really really care, the graph resembles a parabola.

A merry, joyous, happy, holy and blessed Christmas to all!

Christianity is Universal

2011-12-24T14:12:00.007-06:00

To see a clear image, click on it.
The texts are:
And Mary said, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done to me according to the word."
and
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
--in ancient Greek, Vulgate Latin, Spanish, French, German, Danish, Breton, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Finnish, Polish, Czech, and Ukrainian.

I have collected and saved Bibles in different languages for decades, and this is my chance to use lots of them.

Merry CHRIST-mass!
OldBob

Veni, veni Emmanuel!

2011-12-21T14:01:00.003-06:00

Sacred Mathematics

2011-12-14T16:52:00.003-06:00

As I was receiving last Sunday, the thought popped into my mind, "How can the Infinite fit into the infinitesimal?"

And it was followed by: "It just did."

My September and December rant a day early

2011-12-06T22:56:00.004-06:00

The events of December 7, 1941, and of September 11, 2001, have many similarities; of which the strongest is that the events were acts of war perpetrated against the United States by foreigners who wanted to maim, kill, and destroy us.

The major difference between the two events is that --
in 1941, the American government and people rose up and kicked our enemies' ass;
in 2001 and since, the government has been kissing our enemies ass.

And the worst ass-kisser of them all is the present occupant of the White House,
who was obviously lying through his teeth when he took the oath of office,
who is a Judas and a traitor and obviously has no interest in preserving America.
The sooner he is impeached and removed from office, the better.

After reading The Hitchhiker's Guide

2011-12-05T00:48:00.001-06:00

My response at this moment to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Forty-two!

There is an infinite number of numbers.
There is an infinite number of even numbers.
There is an infinite number of odd numbers.
The infinite number of all numbers is equal to the infinite number of even numbers and to the infinite number of odd numbers.
Do not think about this too much.

The universe is mind-bogglingly large.
The amount of information coded into the single 46-chromosome cell we all once were
is also mind-boggingly large.

Facebook Satire

2011-12-03T22:59:00.001-06:00

I posted this on Facebook half an hour ago or so. I wonder if anyone will rise to the bait.

I'm going to start a group, and I think I'll call it
Filthy Unwashed Crusader Kaffirs . . . .
OOOOOPS!! I don't think that will go over too well.
How about . . . um . . . Filthy Unbelieving Crusader Kaffirs?
Uh . . . NOPE! Same problem!
... Hmmmmm . . . .
Filthy Infidel Satanic Crusader Kaffirs?
That'll do for a start, I guess.

Math, Carpentry, and Culture: a Facebook Rant

2011-11-16T11:28:00.004-06:00

It's a mathematical axiom that through a point an infinite number of lines can be drawn. It's also an axiom that two points determine a line. But statistically speaking, the closer together those two points are, the less reliable are any predictions made from them.

In the real world, it's easy to lay a 10-foot 2x4 across two sawhorses six feet apart. Now try balancing the 2x4 across one sawhorse. Then try balancing it on a 1/2" rebar stuck into the ground. The smaller the base, the harder the balancing act.

The real-life analogy to this is that (all other things equal) we old folks have a longer, and therefore better, view of life and especially American culture than you young folks do. Culture is like the air you breathe: you don't notice it unless it changes or you have something to compare it to.

I grew up in the late 40s and through the 50s, and I can say that American culture has largely degenerated since then. I can smell the stink of it, but you young folks can't, because you grew up in it and don't know any better. You think it's fine and normal, I know it's rotten and abnormal.

Laugh -- and slap my head

2011-11-09T00:18:00.002-06:00

What makes me want to laugh and slap my forehead at the same time, is that big fat lie "We are the 99%."This is the same lie told in Petrograd in 1917 by the people who called themselves the Bolsheviki, roughly "the majority."

In fact, the Bolsheviks were never a landslide majority in any mass of socialist or anti-Tsarist political groups.

But on December 2, 1917, the Duma (governing body) of Petrograd was dissolved by threat of armed force. And on December 12, a new Duma was elected, almost entirely Bolshevik.

(Source: John Reed, "Ten Days that Shook the World," Mentor Books, 1967, p. 250)

Homosexuality

2011-09-29T00:03:00.003-05:00

It seems to me there are a number of interlinked but separate aspects here:

1, the condition;

2, the person;

3, the behavior;

4, the social aspects;

5, the political aspects; and

6, the moral and religious aspects.

I do not intend to discuss any of these right now. I only want to point out as strongly as I can that these are separate aspects.

The only other opinion I'll put out now is that I firmly believe that almost any sexual behavior can be an acquired taste. And since human sexual drive is so strong, and sexual activity is so highly pleasurable, that acquired taste can become an addiction.

On a lighter note --

2011-09-18T20:19:00.002-05:00

One of my sisters and I regularly tackle the New York Times crossword puzzles. I was about to say that we're fond of doing them, but that's not accurate, because it's really a love-hate relationship.

One of the questions recently was: "Chilean cape"; answer, four letters.

The answer was HORN.

This is why my sister and I call the puzzle-makers "demented gonifs."

Stereoscopic Vision

2011-09-18T00:24:00.001-05:00

Recently I was having lunch with a dear friend Kathy (who I first met in 1962) at a restaurant we both like, when two kids of the owner walked by -- Nick and Kate. They said hi and it was nice to see me, and I introcuced Kathy and said it was very nice to see them both, especially Kate, because she was cuter than Nick. Kathy laughed and said, "That's a matter of point of view." To which I replied, "That's why you and I make a good team, Kathy: together we have stereoscopic vision."

Now I want to try to explain the intuition that came to me from Kathy's remark. Stereo vision is a physical analogy for lots of things; for instance:

The two most different creatures on this planet are human male and human female.
The two sexes look at things differently and perceive things differently.
If the two perceptions are combined, a better picture of reality emerges.
So the two sexes complement each other in all ways, generally speaking.

I have no wife or children, so I have to rely on what parents tell me about kids.
Even in pre-kindergarten years, maybe even as toddlers, boys are different from girls.
In general, a father will look at a son differently than at a daughter, because the kids are different, and because he is a man.
Ditto for a mother, because she's a woman.
So no matter the sex of the kid, it takes two parents of opposite sexes to raise a kid well.
This is one of the reasons same-sex couples can't (I bet) raise a well-rounded kid, boy or girl --
in general, that is; there are always exceptions.

I imagine men and women have different approaches to spirituality, though I bet that if you put an old husband and his old wife together, the sharp differences between their sexes has become softened with age and experience. Maybe even more so for an old priest or brother and an old nun, because they've both been trying all their lives to be good children of God, and as they approach eternity, sex (in the sense of gender) becomes less relevant because it's "absorbed" by God, the creator of both.

Delayed gratification is sweeter

2011-08-20T23:32:00.003-05:00

Maybe you can tell from the yellowing of the paper on the cover of Tome II that it's older than Tome I. I bought Tome II at a book sale in 1975 or 1976, when I had just finished a year-long U of Minn night school course in basic French, and only a few years after I had finished a really fine course in medieval history at the U. I knew it was an important piece of French literature, and I wanted to see if I could read it in an edition published for French speakers (Nouveaux Classiques Larousse).

I put it on the shelves and waited.

In 2002, I found a copy of Dorothy Sayers' translation of the epic, leafed through it a bit, put it on the shelves, and waited.

On August 5, 2011, I finally found a copy of Tome I, and now I can settle down with the whole thing and enjoy.

"The poem itself as we know it," writes Sayers, "would appear to have achieved its final shape towards the end of the eleventh century." She translated from a manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which she says is "the oldest and best of all the versions." It contains 291 laisses, or divisions. In the Larousse books, the laisses are all in modern French, but with laisses 146-185 in the original Old French, which for me is a double treat.

Here's a sample, laisse 150. First the original, then in modern French, then in Sayers' English (she attempts to emulate the syllabication and assonance of the original):

Oliver sent que la mort mult l'angoisset.
Ansdous les oilz en la teste li turnent.
L'oïe pert et la veüe tute;
Descent a piet, a la tere se culchet,
Durement en halt si recleimet sa culpe,
Cuntre le ciel ambesdous ses mains juintes,
Si priet Deu que pareïs li dunget
E beneïst Karlun e France dulce,
Sun cumpaignun Rollant sur tuz humes.
Falt li le coer, le helme li embrunchet,
Trestut le cors a la tere li justet.
Morz est li quens, que plus ne se demuret.
Rollant li ber le pluret, sil duluset;
Jamais en tere n'orrez plus dolent hume.

Olivier sent que la mort l'angoisse beaucoup.
Les deux yeux lui tournent dans la tête,
Il perd l'ouïe et la vue entièrement;
Il quitte sa monture, s'étend à terre.
Fermement, à haute voix, il dit sa coulpe.
Vers le ciel, il a élevé ses deux mains jointes,
Et il prie Dieu de lui donner le paradis,
De bénir Charles et la douce France
Et par-dessous tous les hommes, son compagnon Roland.
Le coeur lui manque, le heaume retombe,
Tout son corps s'affaisse contre terre.
Le comte est mort, il n'a pu prolonger son séjour.
Roland le preux le pleure et s'afflige;
Jamais sur terre vous n'entendrez homme plus douloureux.

Oliver feels the coming pangs of death;
Both of his eyes are turning in his head,
Now he is blind totally, and totally deaf.
He lights from horse and to his knees he gets
And makes confession aloud, and beats his breast,
And clasps his hands, and lifts them up to Heav'n;
In Paradise he prays God give him rest,
And France the fair and Carlon prays Him bless,
And his companion Roland above all men.
His heart-strings crack, he stoops his knightly helm,
And sinks to earth, and lies there all his length.
Dead is the count, his days have reached their end.
The valiant Roland weeps for him and laments,
No man on earth felt ever such distress.

Sayers also has some insightful comments on the Middle Ages, and on the war between Saracen and Christian (timely today, which is another reason waiting until 2011 to read this was a good thing).

"And now, embattled alongside the French, for the first time we see "the Franks", and hear the voice of all Christendom. In the final encounter of the last great battle Charles and Baligant meet face to face:
Quoth the Emir: 'Bethink thee, Charles, and see
That thou repent what thou hast done to me.
My son is slain; I know it was by thee;
And on my lands thou wrongfully hast seized.
Become my man, and I will be thy liege;
Then come and serve me, from here unto the East.'
Quoth Carlon: 'Nay, I'd hold it treachery;
Never to Paynims may I show love or peace.
Do thou confess the Faith by God revealed,
Take Christendom, and thy first friend I'll be.
The King Almighty then serve thou and believe.'
Quoth Baligant: 'Thy sermon's but ill preached.'
Once more with swords they battle, each to each.

"At last the word is spoken that should have been spoken long ago: 'Never to Paynims may I show love or peace.' It should have been spoken at that first disastrous council; but Charlemagne, though his mind and conscience misgive him, takes counsel of the French, and the French, swayed by Naimon and Ganelon, choose to have peace for peace's sake.

"So the grand outline of the poem defines itself: a private war is set within a national war, and the national war again within the world-war of Cross and Crescent. The small struggle at the centre shakes the whole web."

I could never have appreciated any of this in 1975 or 1976, nor before 2001 especially, the conflict.

Letter to a girl who might run away again

2011-07-26T00:36:00.007-05:00

Sunday, July 24, 2011, about 11 pm

Dear _______,

I would like you to think about _____ and about our Lord Jesus. You and I have been taught since we were small that Jesus came into this world and suffered and died for the good of our souls, and did it all out of love for us. I would like to remind you what He suffered and how much He suffered.

After His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was arrested, taken before Caiaphas and in the morning, brought before Pilate, who had Him scourged by Roman soldiers, who showed no mercy at all. A Roman scourging could lay the flesh open to the bone.

Would ______ endure as much for you?

Then he was led under heavy guard to the hill of Calvary, where they crucified him. He took three hours to die, in unbelievable agony.

You might never have seen a Crucifix, a cross with Jesus on it. Here are some for you to look at and think about.

Would ______ endure as much for you?

Best wishes, blessings, and prayers from Bob

I just had an idea

2011-07-16T01:46:00.002-05:00

In some parts of this country, there are enclaves of certain groups, where non-members of that group are discouraged from entering - discouraged by persuasion, intimidation, or violence.
They choose to withdraw from the mainstream, give them what they want. Fair is fair.

Build walls.

If non-members can't get in, then members can't get out. They can behave as they like inside the walls, and will not be interfered with or harmed, but they can't get out.

At all.
For any reason.
Don't even think about it.

An Act of Humility

2011-07-12T00:57:00.003-05:00

(I found this in an old, well-thumbed prayer book, Imprimatur 1914, published about 1923.)

O GOD of sanctity ! who am I, that Thou shouldst come to me ? " The heavens are not pure in Thy sight, " and wilt thou dwell in my heart ? " Lord! I am not worthy that Thou shouldst come under my roof. " The consciousness of my unworthiness would prompt me to exclaim : "Depart from me, O Lord ! for I am a sinner. " But oh, the wonderful condescension of Thy love ! Thy pressing invitation encourages me, and dispels my fears. " Here I am, for Thou didst call me. " Come, then, O Jesus ! take possession of a heart that wishes to belong to Thee. " Behold ! They that go far from Thee shall perish. " But, O my God ! this house of my heart is too narrow for Thee : do Thou enlarge it ; it is falling to ruin : do thou repair it ; it has been defiled my sin : do Thou cleanse and purify it. " Look Thou upon me and have mercy on me. Oh, heal my soul, for I have sinned against Thee ! Let Thy tender mercies come unto me, and I shall live ! Lord ! I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof ; say but the word, and my soul shall be healed. "

The Center of All Things

2011-07-09T01:30:00.003-05:00

This is the center, the peak, the turning point of human history,

the place where all roads meet.

Do some math and find the answer!

2011-06-07T13:37:00.001-05:00

OBAMA OSAMA
OBAM OSAM
OBA OSA
BA SA
B S

D-DAY

2011-06-06T01:09:00.004-05:00

by OldBob on Monday, June 6, 2011 at 1:08am

0108 hours 6 June 1944. The greatest amphibious force in history sails slowly across a treacherous Channel to begin, in Normandy, the final assault on Hitler's "Fortress Europe." Paratroopers of the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne, and British glider troops, have already landed well behind the enemy lines on the coast. Years of planning and preparation, including a massive and detailed campaign of deception, have led up to this hour. Many brave men will die or be shattered so that we, sixty-seven years later, can live free. Salute them!

Personal side note: my Pop might have been there but for a fluke. Here is the way he told the story. He was at the docks with his rifle company, who were embarking on the ships that would carry them to Europe. He was called aside by his company commander, Captain Cohen (for whom Pop could do no wrong since the time Pop, called to lead grace in mess hall, said Catholic grace and then called for silence, put his cap back on, and recited the Shema Yisrael.)

Captain Cohen said to Pop, "Sergeant, we need men to stay behind as weapons instructors, and since you shot expert with almost every weapon you touched, we need you. You may wish to go overseas with your company. You have twenty minutes to make up your mind." Pop said, "Sir, I don't need twenty minutes, I have a wife and two little boys at home." (Guess who the four-month-old baby was.)

Pop said it came out later that his company was attached to the 4th Division, which was in the center of the front line in the Ardennes Forest in December 1944, and took 30% casualties. So Pop might never have come home -- and there would have been no Cecilia, no Mary, no Joe, no Ray, no Margaret.

God writes straight with crooked lines.

E = m * c^2 and all that

2011-06-01T00:41:00.003-05:00

I was thinking lately (a thing that some of my friends say I should not do too much) and it occurred to me that if God possesses infinite energy -- and I can't see any reason why not -- then creating a universe, even a very large one, out of nothing is no big deal.

Now since E = m * c^2, where c is the speed of light (about 186400), then m = E / c^2. This means that to create one kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) of matter, God used up 9 * 10^16 joules of energy, or about 90,000,000,000,000,000 joules.

So what's a joule? One joule is the amount of work done when a mass of one kilogram is moved against a force of one newton. And one newton is that force which will give a mass of one kilogram an acceleration of 1 meter per second per second (or 1 m / s^2). In "English" units, 1 m / s^2 is about 1/10 the normal acceleration of gravity on Earth.

Matter and energy are interchangeable. Force, mass, work, acceleration -- all these terms, and the phenomena they name, are interrelated. (God is pretty smart.)

So some smart-aleck may ask: even if God possesses infinite energy, if God created an infinite universe, would that use up all His energy? The answer is no, because there are orders of infinities, some are bigger than others, and you can take away infinity from infinity and still have infinity. For instance, from the infinitely large set of ordinary counting numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) you can take away the infinite large set of even numbers, and still have an infinitely large set of odd numbers. And since every number has a double, which is an even number, there are as many even numbers as there are numbers.

(Don't blame me, I didn't make this up!)

Anyway, God said "Let there be light!" And there was light. And I can't see why that wasn't the same as the Big Bang.

That was the first Big Bang.

When I was at Adoration the other night, a line from a French Christmas carol ("He is Born, the Holy Child") ran through my head: "Depuis plus de quatre mille ans, nous le promettait les prophètes." -- "For more than four thousand years, the prophets promised us Him."

It doesn't make any difference to me if there were four thousand or unpteen bazillion years between creation and the birth of Christ. Let's just say it was a very long time. Dinosaurs came and went, continents shifted, seas rose and fell, glaciers advanced and retreated, and then at some imprecise time, God breathed life into the clay of the earth and made Man. (This does not seem to me to be necessarily inconsistent with the physical evolution of the human body.)

Then sometime about 1900 years before Christ, there was Abraham. After 1900 years, Christ was born and lived about 30 years, before He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. It was about four or five days between that and the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood at the Last Supper. It was about 12 hours after that, that Christ was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane and put on trial. It was about three hours He hung in horrible torment on the Cross. It took maybe one minute for Him to utter His very last words -- and then time sort of stops.

And tradition tells us that forty hours after that was the second Big Bang -- Christ's resurrection!

And just as the universe expanded and formed itself after the first Big Bang, the Church has expanded and formed Herself after the second Big Bang.

The first was physical, the second spiritual; the second depended on the first (without a universe, no Earth, no people, no need for redemption). But the second is infinitely more important.

Take care and God bless!

Gettysburg Address

2011-05-30T12:36:00.001-05:00

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- this this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Christopher Dawson and Western History

2011-05-21T19:44:00.005-05:00

I don't remember when I first read any of Christopher Dawson's work, but I have read six of his works --

The Dynamics of World History

The Making of Europe

Medieval Essays

Religion and the Rise of Western Culture

Progress and Religion

The Dividing of Christendom --

and now I have a seventh -- The Formation of Christendom (fascinating so far).

I would recommend him to anyone seriously interested in the history of Western civilization and culture.

As far as I know, Dawson is far from being the only historian who argued that Roman Catholic Christianity was one of the indispensable elements in the formation of Western Civilization.

My professor of Medieval History, at the University of Minnesota 1968-69, Robert S. Hoyt, the author of Europe in the Middle Ages, says in that book: "The Christian contribution to the transformation from late antique to early medieval culture was the controlling force that dominated the assimilation of the Germanic, classical, and distinctively Christian elements." (p. 74)

And long before him, G. K. Chesterton quipped that the Church is accused of trying to drag us back to the Dark Ages, when in fact it was the Church that got us out of them. (Sorry I don't have the exact quote or the book title.)

The point of course is that which so many good bloggers have said over and over -- in so far as the West repudiates its Judeo-Christian heritage, it will die. We in the United States are seeing religion being "marginalized," shoved out of the public square where, in my opinion, it has every right to be. And we're seeing our beloved nation going under.

Coincidence? I don't think so.

God bless you all!

Philip Trower's Books

2011-05-14T15:44:00.005-05:00

I consider myself learned, not necessarily wise, because most, very likely all, of my good ideas came from somewhere or someone else, or from thinking about things that I learned from somewhere or someone else. (Wasn't it our favorite fat friar who said that anything in the intellect is first in the senses?)

A couple of years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Philip Trower's book The Catholic Church and the Counter-Faith, and I found it really good, and I like it a lot, because Trower manages to pull together lots of scattered scraps I picked up over the years, make a coherent whole out of them, and point me toward a need for more study and better understanding of the scraps.

For instance, one of my favorite sentences from that book is this:
"After Descartes had philosophically shut men up inside their minds, the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) redecorated the prison's interior, the Scot David Hume (1711-1776) locked the door and the Prussian Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) threw away the key." (p.73)

I read a little Descartes in college (philosophy, not math; how could such a great mathematician be such a lousy philosopher?) and I think I've dabbled a bit in Locke, Hume, and Kant (getting old, can't really remember); but the thing is that if I want to really understand Trower's statement, all I have to do is pick up these men's books and read them.

So the other day in the mail I finally got my hands on a copy of Trower's book Turmoil and Truth, and just a few minutes ago stumbled across another of his gems which exactly describes my experience with the world of learning (whether it's higher mathematics or growing flowers):

"One of the chief hazards for scholars of every kind is 'not being able to see the forest for the trees.'
"When we look at any of the things God has created, perhaps the most striking thing about them is the contrast between their simplicity and intelligibility when taken as a whole, and their complexity and obscurity when examined in detail. That is why there are biologists who cannot see any essential difference between men and animals, and ordinary folk who can. Peering at the details produces a kind of myopia about the whole." (p.54)

Regina Caeli

2011-04-24T22:11:00.003-05:00

Regina Caeli laetare, alleluia

Quia quem meruisti portare, alleluia

Resurrexit sicut dixit, alleluia

Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia

Gaude et laetare Virgo Maria alleluia

Quia surrexit Dominus vere alleluia!

Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia,

For He Whom thou wast made worthy to bear, alleluia

Has risen as He said, alleluia

Pray for us to God, alleluia

Rejoice and be glad O Virgin Mary, alleluia

For the Lord is truly risen alleluia!

HAPPY EASTER!

2011-04-24T14:51:00.001-05:00

I wish a most blessed, happy, and holy Easter to all my blog friends! Also Pesach Shalom!

Good Friday

2011-04-22T14:31:00.007-05:00

Here are some thoughts by Jim Bishop (from The Day Christ Died) and G. K. Chesterton (from The Everlasting Man).

"A greater contrast could not be imagined than the lax, indulgent, highly civilized life of Rome, and the strict life of Palestine where every last detail of daily living was regulated by the law of a stern religion. Yet these two worlds must have figured with equal importance in the mind of Jesus as he spoke parables to teach the people, and these two worlds joined to pronounce the most important death dentence in the history of man."

-- Bishop p.244

"For the central history of civilisation, as I see it, consists of two further stages before the final stage of Christendom. The first was the struggle between this [Latin] paganism and something less worthy than itself, and the second the process by which it grew in itself less worthy."

-- Chesterton Ch.VI: The Demons and the Philosophers

"There is a very real sense in which the Christian is worse than the heathen . . . or even the Roman potentially worse then the Carthaginian. But there is only one sense in which he is worse; and that is not in being positively worse. The Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better."

-- same

". . . certain anti-human antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic. There may be suspected as running through it everywhere, for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. People would understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth of children."

-- same

"Very various and incompatible were the things that could be loved by the consuls of Rome and the prophets of Israel; but they were one in what they hated."

-- same

"The civilisation that was centered in Tyre and Sidon was above all things practical. . . . They believed, in the appropriate modern phrase, in people who delivered the goods. In their dealings with their god Moloch, they themselves were always careful to deliver the goods."
-- same

"There is a religious war when two worlds meet; that is, when two visions of the world meet; or in more modern language when two moral atmpospheres meet. What is the one man's breath is the other man's poison; and it is vain to talk of giving pestilence a place in the sun. And this is what we must understand, even at the expense of digression, if we would really see what happened in the Mediterranean; when right athwart the rising of the Republic on the Tiber, a thing overtopping and disdaining it, dark with all the riddles of Asia and trailing all the tribes and dependencies on imperialism, came Carthage riding on the sea."

-- VII: The War of the Gods and Demons

"What strikes us in the Italian cults is their local and especially their domestic character. . . . We have a vision of a god of roofs and a god of gate-posts, of a god of doors and even a god of drains. It has been suggested that all mythology was a sort of fairy-tale; but this was a sort of fairy-tale which may be truly cfalled a fireside tale, or a nursery-tale; because it was a tale of the interior of the home . . . "

-- same

"But the worshipers of Moloch were not gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished civilisation, abounding in refinements and luxuries; they were probably far more civilised than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth; or at any rate his meal was not a myth. These highly civilised people really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace."
-- same

"Before the gates of the golden city Hannibal fought his last fight for it and lost; and Carthage fell as nothing has fallen since Satan. The name of the New City remains only as a name. There is no stone of it left upon the sand. Another war was indeed waged before the final destruction: but the destruction was final. Only men digging in its deep foundations centuries after found a heap of hundreds of little skeletons, the holy relics of that religion. For Carthage fell because she was faithful to her own philosophy and had followed out to its logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten his children."

--same

"Nobody understands the romance of Rome, and why she rose afterward to a representative leadership that seemed almost fated and fundamentally natural. Who does not keep in mind the agony of horror and humiliation through which she had continued to testify to the sanity that is the soul of Europe? . . . It is not for us to guess in what manner or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome. We have to thank the patience of the Punic wars if, in after ages, divine things descended at least upon human things and not inhuman."

-- same

"Europe evolved into its own vices . . . but theworse into which it evolved was not like what it had escaped. Can any man in his senses compare the great wooden doll, whom the children expected to eat a bit of the dinner, with the great idol who would have been expected to eat the children? That is the measure of how far the world went astray, compared with how far it might have gone astray. If the Romans were ruthless, it was in a true sense to an enemy, and certainly not merely a rival.

-- same

"Many moderns have insisted on the smallness of that Mediterranean world; and the wider horizons that might have awaited it with the discovery of the other continents. But this is an illusion; one of the many illusions of materialism. The limits that paganism had reached in Europe were the limits of human existence; at its best it had only reached the same limits everywhere else. The Roman stoics did not need Chinamen to teach them stoicism. The Pythagoreans did not need any Hindus to teach them about recurrence or the simple life or the beauty of being a vegetarian. In so far as they could get these things from the East, they had already got rather too much of them from the East. . . . It is essential to recognize that the Roman Empire was recognized as the highest achievement of the human race; and also as the broadest. A dreadful secret seemed to be written as in obscure hieroglyphics across those mighty works of marble and stone, those colossal ampitheatres and aqueducts. Man could do no more"

-- VIII: The End of the World

"There was nothing left that could conquer Rome; but there was also nothing left that could improve it. It was the strongest thing that was growing weak. It was the best thing that was going to the bad."

--same

"Jesus was crucified. He faced the Holy City for the last time."

-- Bishop, p. 297

"Mary of Alphaeus said she did not want to leave. . . . Mary Magdalen sat down beside her. Both leaned against the stone.

"It had been a long day. A very long day. There was much to remember; and some would remember it this way and some would remember it that way. Much of it had been done in secret, in spite of the public execution, and it would be weeks before the news reached the small towns of Galilee and the settlements east of Jericho.

"The grief among the followers of Jesus would be poignant, a volatile fuel which, in its own fierce flame, burns itself out quickly. They did not understand. (For a moment in time at least, they could not understand.) To their way of thinking, this was now a tragic defeat. It was not.

"It was victory beyond their most exalted imaginings. He had come her to die. And he had died. He had come to preach a new covenant with his Father, and he had preached it. He had come to tell man that the way to everlasting life was love -- each for the other, each for him, and his love for all -- and he had proved this by laying down his life in a torrent of torment -- for them.

"He did not die particularly for the Jews, or for the Gentiles. He died for man. All mankind. He came to Palestine to lay the foundations of his new covenant because he and his Father were dissatisfied with the old. The Father had never made a covenant with the Romans, or the Greeks or the Egyptians. He had made it, through Moses, with the Jews. . . . If a new covenant was to replace the old, it would be negotiated with the same people.

"That is why he had to die in Palestine; that is why, of all the cities in Palestine, he had to die in the Holy City -- the city of his Father. The high priests rejected him and plotted against him and killed him. The people didn't. The people were looking for the Messiah, waiting eagerly. And, although Jesus did not fit their conception of a resplendent Messiah clothed in clouds of glory, they were willing to listen. They did listen. The people were of good heart."

-- pp. 317-318

"The two Marys sat with their backs to the stone. They loved him and, in their love, they missed the enormous triumph; the new promise; the good news.

"They did not even notice that the sun was shining."
-- p. 319

Breaking news! Picture of Judas!

2011-04-20T13:26:00.003-05:00

One of my esteemed colleagues here posted a very interesting short video about Judas. The spiritual message I got from it was that it's very dangerous for my soul to think that I'll stick with Our Lord Jesus Christ only as long as things are going my way; otherwise I bail out and save my own skin.

Looking around dusty old archives, I found what I believe is a genuine picture of a Judas.

Here it is.

Let us go to Jerusalem

2011-04-17T01:00:00.002-05:00

Lord Jesus, Crucified, have mercy on us!

What went wrong ? - 2

2011-04-02T21:54:00.006-05:00

In the spring of 1964 I left a job at the FBI, had a small part in a play at St. Anthony of Padua High School in Minneapolis (that's me there), and went to work in a tiny print shop.

Go back thirty years.

My mom went to work for the FBI in Milwaukee in 1934, and my dad went to work for the FBI in Philadelphia in 1938. They met in Washington DC in 1940, had their first date in January 1941, and were married on September 6, 1941, just before Pearl Harbor. Mom left the work force sometime in the spring of 1942 to be delivered of my older brother John, and Dad stayed with the FBI until 1970. I worked as a summer helper in the Minneapolis office in 1961 and 1962, then signed up as a full-time worker in the late winter of 1962-63. I swore an oath which (if I recall rightly is the same administered to all military personnel) to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, against all enemies foreign and domestic, and so on.

In 1964, St. Anthony of Padua was still an all-girls school, run by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet; most of the faculty were Sisters. How I got the job of designing the sets and supervising their construction, as well as having a small part, is a saga in itself, so I'll skip that. I will mention, though, that even as late as 1964, the girls tried to look older, demure, and "ladylike" for their graduation pictures.

(I have all the senior yearbooks for St. Anthony from 1960 through 1967, and to see the styles of photography, typography, and girls' fashion change over those eight years is an education in itself. I have to add that even as late as 1964, girls were wearing undergarments confining enough that they didn't jiggle when they walked, wiggling hips was not encouraged, and going braless wasn't even thought of yet.)

In the late summer of 1964 I went to work in a tiny print shop in downtown Minneapolis. There was the boss and me, and he hired me on the spot when he saw that I knew how to run and clean his small offset press. The pay was low, the benefits nil, the schedule erratic, and there were only two work rules: the printing had to be perfect, and it had to done on time. I could relate to that, because my maternal grandfather was a printer his whole working life, from about 1900 to 1955.

(He got cheated out of his union pension when he retired in 1955; they claimed he had missed a payment on it back about 1939 or so. My dad threatened legal action, and the financial secretary of the union laughed in his face. Grandpop and Grandmom lived in abject poverty on Social Security until they died young [72, young for their families) in 1959.)

I stayed at the print shop until the spring of 1968, and I learned a lot about offset and letterpress printing. They're probably dying arts now; I know letterpress printing is almost extinct, and it's a shame. You don't have to have a university degree to set type and pull proofs.

Between 1964 and 1968, I got some more schooling at the University. The first technical calculators, by TI, showed up in the University Engineering Bookstore in the fall of 1964; my recollection is that they cost $100; before that we used slide rules. We added, subtracted, did short multiplication and division by memory -- we had been expected to learn all that in fourth grade.

In 1965, I took a course in advanced composition, and I remember the teacher telling us that all papers had to be typewritten, and that we were expected to be able to handle the English language intelligently, so any error in spelling (aside from obvious typographical errors like t for r), punctuation, grammar, or syntax, would get a paper an automatic F. I took a course in modern poetry and drama from the English department, hoping we would declaim and perform the works, but no. We analyzed and picked them to death. It nearly bored me to death.

The year 1965 was the year I finally took -- and flunked -- the Army physical. People tell me now it undoubtedly saved my life. I lost six buddies to Vietnam.

I think I took only one quarter at the U during 1966: no money. From Christmas 1966 to Easter 1967 I grew a full beard, and finally my dad told me to shave it or move out. A beard on a young man was a political statement back then.

In the spring of 1967, after about six or seven years of dithering, doubting, questioning and wondering about the Faith -- i.e., was what I was taught as a child able to fit the complexities of the adult world? -- I walked up to St. Bridget's and had a long talk with the assistant pastor, Fr. Bill Ward (God rest his soul) and decided that it was and I would stay. Lewis and Chesterton had a lot to do with it too.

In the summer of 1967, a scuffle between some white kids and some black kids, after the Minneapolis Aquatennial torchlight parade, escalated into a full-scale race riot. A lot of people who thought "it would never happen here" were pretty surprised. Late that summer I went back to school full time for good and stayed till graduation.

And of course 1968 was the year Dr. King was assassinated, the riot happened at the Democratic convention in Chicago, I went to work at a little hotel in downtown Minneapolis and met a young woman I came to call "Princess."

And that was the fall that the two priests at the Newman Center at the U "came to work" in business suits and insisted on being called "George and Harry."

Saint Me

2011-04-01T10:40:00.001-05:00

I have written to Pope Benedict (in a mixture of German and Latin, of course) asking him to canonize me while still alive.

What went wrong with the American Experiment?

2011-03-29T21:45:00.007-05:00

Adrienne at Adrienne's Corner asked other bloggers to comment on the question, and link to her blog. She provided two links, and I read the posts, and they're both good, so I'm not going to try to duplicate them. I'll just add some of my own memories of the 1960s, with background.

I graduated from St. Bridget's Grade School in north Minneapolis in 1958 (when Pius XII had "always" been Pope, and Eisenhower had "always" been president). I went to De La Salle High School (one of the De La Salle yearbooks was themed "The Soaring Sixties"), and graduated in 1962, when John XXIII was Pope, Kennedy was president, Vatican II had not yet begun, and no one I knew had ever heard of the Beatles.

I began school at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in the fall of 1962, in civil engineering, and I remember one prof telling us that they intended to be tough on us and wash out as many of us as they could, because they wanted only the very best getting degrees from the U. It was tough; I lasted four quarters, and had to change colleges.

All this took two years, because I occasionally dropped out of school to work enough to make enough money to afford another quarter. It was risky to drop out of school, because there was a draft then, and (as I recall it) as long as a guy was in school he would have a 2-S student deferment; otherwise he was 1-A and liable to be drafted. So it wasn't until the fall of 1964 that I found myself back on campus, and I noticed things had changed.

The most noticeable change was that the kids born in 1946 were at the U as freshmen. One other thing I noticed, which didn't affect me then bout would some later, was the beginning of the "Weekly Silent Vigil to Protest the Vietnam War." The protestors stood on the sidewalk in front of the University Armory, just across University Avenue from the Newman Center, where I hung out a lot.

The most annoying change was the time I went to noon Mass at Newman Center sometime that fall. During the Mass they sang the "Gelineau Psalms," which I took an immediate dislike to, because they sang the word "YHVH" in full, out loud. I was twenty at the time, and had been interested in Judaism and Yiddishkeit for four or five years. I knew that a pious Jew will never utter that most holy name of God; in the "prayer of prayers," the Shema Yisrael, whenever the text has the four Hebrew letters, the word Adonai, "Lord" is substituted.

This was the beginning of the era of ecumenism, interfaith dailogue and sharing, and I figured it was entirely possible that some Jewish kids from the Hillel Foundation down the street might come in and see what the goyim were up to. So after Mass, I went to one of the singers, a guy I knew from De La Salle, and explained to him why I thought we should not say the name of God out loud. And he said to me, "This is the way it's going to be around here. If you don't like it, you can get the hell out."

This was my first brush with "progressive" thinking; it wouldn't be the last.

And this was after the assassination of John Kennedy and the coming of the Beatles to the States.

Sex Education and Physics

2011-03-12T20:31:00.003-06:00

And I bet you're saying "Whaaat?!"

When I was in Physics 1 as a freshman engineering student at the University of Minnesota, one of the topics of study was falling-body problems. (No pun intended.) An object dropped from a height will cover distance downward according to the formula

s = (1/2 * g * t^2) where g is the acceleration due to gravity (and * means times, and t^2 means t-squared)

and the velocity of the object will be

v = g*t

To make things more interesting (read: complicated), the downward acceleration is independent of any forward motion the object might have, such as if the object were dropped from a moving airplane. Thus both downward and forward motions need to be analyzed. The math will show that a falling body in motion when dropped will follow a curve called a parabola, and its point of impact can be easily calculated.

But it's not as easy as that. There is air resistance, which increases proportionally to the mass and shape of the falling body, and (to make things even more interesting) changes the path of the falling body from a parabola to a cycloid.

So I asked the professor, "When do we get to figure air resistance?" and he replied, "Come back when you've had about five quarters of calculus."

Translated, this means: "You don't have the need or ability to understand that yet."

So with sex education. Little kids don't need to know about the "mechanics" of sex, because they don't have the need or ability to understand it (and though I'm not a parent, I would bet all my blog dollars they don't care either.)

I would venture to say that almost all little kids, when asking why Mommy's belly is getting big, being told that their little brother or sister is growing in there, will ask "Well, how'd he or she get there?" Parents correct me on this one, but I bet it will be quite enough to tell a small child, "God put him / her there."

Parents can tell their kids the equivalent of what the physics prof told me.

And I cannot state strongly enough that it's nobody's business but the parents' to give the child any more information, because the parents know their child better than any teacher possibly could, and they know when the child is able to absorb and assimilate the information.

(This applies only to ordinary kids in ordinary families, of course. The "special cases" are something else entirely.)

Great video from Michael Voris

2011-03-12T14:38:00.005-06:00

I just saw a video posted up by the Facebook group "Traditional/Conservative Catholics" and commented to its main contributor as follows.

I noticed the emphasis Michael Voris gave in that excellent video to the point that the Mass is not about us, or the priest; it's about Jesus Christ, Who is the real celebrant, and in Whose place the priest acts. In the Ukrainian Byzantine liturgy (from St. John Chrysostom) there is the following prayer by the priest of which this is a short excerpt:

"Bending my neck, I approach and I petition You: turn not Your face from me nor reject me from among Your children, but allow these gifts to be offered to You by me, Your sinful and unworthy servant. For it is You Who offer and You Who are offered; it is You Who receive and You Who are given, O Christ our God, and we give glory to You, together with Your eternal Father and Your most holy, good, and life-giving Spirit, now and for ever and ever. Amen."

I might add that Ukrainian preserves the formal / intimate usage in pronouns and verbs, and that in all the liturgy, God the Father, Son, and Spirit are addressed as intimates. Which Latin used to do. The fault, of course, is with the English language for having lost the distinction.

Best wishes to you, and keep the commentaries coming!

Mainstream Media Memory Manipulation

2011-03-03T15:34:00.003-06:00

My local paper ran a story on Jane Russell today; it said in part:

"She wrote in her 1985 autobiography, 'My Paths and Detours,' that during high school she had a back-alley abortion, which may have rendered her unable to bear children."

The experience, which she says nearly killed her, led her to become outspoken about abortion, denying that any circumstance - rape or incest included - justified taking the life of an unborn child.

No mention in my paper of what she did about it. She became a passionate pro-lifer and adoption advocate -- which a couple of honest blogs (Fr Longemecker andf Life Site News) mentioned.

I wrote a comment to the paper and pointed this out, along with a statement attributed to her: “People should never, ever have an abortion. Don’t talk to me about it being a woman’s right to choose what she does with her own body. The choice is between life and death.”

The paper printed my letter. I'm very surprised they did.

The Oath of Office

2011-02-28T23:44:00.001-06:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_office_of_the_President_of_the_United_States

The oath of office of the President of the United States is an oath or affirmation required by the United States Constitution before the President begins the execution of the office. The wording is specified in Article Two, Section One, Clause Eight:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Let's face it, folks. He LIED.

Wisconsin and me

2011-02-22T17:49:00.000-06:00

By George, I have thought of something.

According to the sources on both sides I have read, the one side says there is not enough money and cuts have to be made. The other side says the cuts are too drastic and will hurt people.

My situation (I think exactly analogous) is this:

There are two eat joints here I positively love, and if I could, I'd eat at one of them almost every day. My business would help them, both owners have said or hinted as much.

But right now today my savings account is $0.00, checking ditto, credit card maxed, and debts all over the place not counting the mortgage, plus about $350/mo in unreimbursed medical expenses.

So what's just? To keep the money in my own pocket so I can survive, or risk being in worse financial condition to help out good local businesses I like very much?

What's just? What's fair? What's moral?

More sweet honey for Granddaughter

2011-02-21T15:46:00.003-06:00

Last night I wrote a short note to my granddaughter, first one ever completely in Ukrainian. Fifteen words took me half an hour, and I consulted five reference books. I used to be an ESL tutor, and I can tell you Ukrainian is a piece of cake compared to American English. So I sympathize more and more with her struggles with this language. Here it is:

золото і самоцвіти

Найдорошка ♥ Внучкo ♥ Марійка,

Моє серце ставало золото колй ти усиновляла мене як дідусь, і ти -- дорогоцінни камінь його.

любов ♥ завжди,

твий ♥ люблачий ♥ Дідусь

Gold and jewels

Dearest ♥ Granddaughter ♥ Mariyka,

My heart turned to gold when you adopted me as Grandpapa, and you are its precious jewel.

Love ♥ always,

THY ♥ loving ♥ Grandpapa

And when typing in Ukrainian I have to do it one character at a time. Allied problem is that I'm still thinking in English. But for her it's worth the work. She's trying hard to be at home in an English-speaking environment; the least I can do is try to enter her world, so to speak.

Letter to my Granddaughter Maria

2011-02-12T14:59:00.003-06:00

Найдорошка ♥ Внучкo ♥ Марійка,

[Very dearest ♥ granddaughter ♥ Mariyka]

I was watching a speech by a guy named Herman Cain, a black man from Georgia (USA, not Caucasus), who is considering running for president in 2012. He said a lot of great things about America, and he said them very well indeed. Watching him brought you to my mind.

Now you may well ask: Why?

You said once that I'm the grandfather you never had. I noticed too that in your photos from Ukraine I didn't see any old people - my age or older. I really don't know at all -- "Не знаю ничого" ["I know nothing"] is one of my favorite Ukrainian sentences -- but please allow me to guess that a lot of Ukrainian people about my age might have been patriotic dissidents against the Soviet regime, and were either executed or exiled to the Gulag for it.

(I have read "The Gulag Archipelago," all three volumes, three times. Also Orest Subtelny's book "Ukraine" twice.)

The point, dearest Granddaughter, is that back in your family history there undoubtedly were people who knew what slavery under the Tsarist or Soviet government was, just as Herman Cain's ancestors were slaves on plantations in the American South before the Civil War.

I know that some of the very old Ukrainians at St. Constantine lived under the slavery of the Soviets and the Nazis, and when they came to America sixty or fifty years ago, they cherished the liberty that this country gave them -- and an unfree Soviet Ukraine never gave them.

I remember Maria Iwaskewycz showing pictures of a new little village church, and saying with tears in her eyes that they will have Divine Liturgy again -- after seventy years. Seventy years without God! It was she, or perhaps Katherine Zastawny, or Julia Maksimkiw, who said, "Never trust anyone who wants to do away with God, Marriage, or the Family!"

So, Dearest Granddaughter, at the same time I ask you to never forget you're a daughter of God and a daughter of Ukraine, I ask you to remember that you live in America now, and likely will your whole life. Please remember that you, who have in your Ukrainian blood a longing for liberty, can put that longing to work as a voting citizen of the United States.

Be a good student, be a good doctor, and be a good American too.

твий ♥ люблачий ♥ Дідусь

[thy ♥ loving ♥ Grandpapa]

PS – Today is Abraham Lincoln's Birthday (it used to be a national holiday). I ask you to look up his Gettysburg Address and read it very carefully so that – as he said – "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

God bless you richly, Dearest Granddaughter Mariyka!

PPS for Americans - "Mariyka" is an endearment-diminutive of "Maria."

Rome, Sodom, Gomorrah . . . that stuff, you know.

2011-02-11T23:09:00.006-06:00

Today I accidentally stumbled across a Facebook application called something like "being really really ridiculously good-looking." The pix are not really that bad, but the young people's language would make a whore blush. This is America's future, folks.

Boy or girl? Look closely.

Random Idle Thoughts

2011-02-02T13:14:00.002-06:00

If we lived in an unfallen world, Murphy's Law wouldn't exist, because it wouldn't have to.

I'm a prude because I know what a libertine I could be.

Being ill is aggravating, but it makes me realize my dependence on God, and that's very good.

How much ground would a ground hog hog, if a ground hog could hog ground?

Thank God for Purgatory! I don't care if I have to stay there till the end of the world, if I may just get in the door.

2010 Christmas Card

2011-01-31T22:24:00.003-06:00

Isaiah 11:1-3

I hope you're sitting down.

2011-01-30T14:21:00.005-06:00

Hi, blog friends! This is not bad news! It's good news, in fact very good news (though of course not as good as the Good News).

I have a granddaughter.

And you may ask: "How can this be?! Old Bob has never been married and has never had a child!"

Here's the story.

About 1995, thoroughly disgusted with the way the liturgy was being mangled in a certain Latin-rite parish here in Minneapolis, I started going to the Ukrainian Catholic parish here, which uses the Byzantine rite of St. John Chrysostom.

(To the best of my knowledge, this rite has survived unchanged since about AD 400, except for the translation from Greek to modern Ukrainian. In the Orthodox Slavic world, the liturgy has always been in the vernacular. What is now the Ukrainian Catholic Church worldwide was split from Rome in 1054, but in 1596 some of the bishops asked to be reunited to Rome, and were, and are now a church sui juris.)

The first few times I went to Divine Liturgy there (at 8:00 am, yuk, but I was much younger and stronger then) I heard the liturgy recited in English, and then, after I got the hang of how it is structured (same as Roman but a little different), I started going at 10:00 to hear the liturgy chanted (a cappella, mind you) in Ukrainian. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

I sang in the choir for part of one liturgical year, and discovered that during Divine Liturgy time is irrelevant. It's exactly as if we are lifted out of time to brush with eternity, and nothing earthly matters at all.

During those many years at this parish, I made many friends, learned to hold a (very halting) conversation in Ukrainian, and did a bit of a stint as an ESL tutor to Ukrainian refugees, mostly Soviet Ukraine.

One very odd sidelight is that one of the best friends I made is a man almost exactly my age, an engineer, a family man, who - get this! - served (not by choice!) in the Soviet Army when he was young, exactly at the time I would have been serving in the U.S. Army if I hadn't flunked the physical exam. It's not impossible that he and I, now friends, could once have been enemy soldiers staring at each other across the Berlin Wall.

During all this time, and before, my favorite eating place was a Ukrainian deli-bakery-butcher shop where I could get heavenly delicious meals and practice my Ukrainian at the same time. This is where I met Maria. Her immediate family came here from Ukraine about 2004 or 2005 (when she was about 13 or 14), and she went to De La Salle High School, my old alma mater, knowing very little English, if any.

In 2010 she graduated from high school and went to college in Duluth. A month or so in her first term we happened to meet and she mentioned that she was still having trouble with English, especially formal written English such as college papers demand (I had a prof once . . . but no.)

So I gathered together a pile of English language reference books: dictionary, thesaurus, grammar, style guide, and so on (packrats have two of everything), and gave them to her. She was so happy that she gave me a huge Ukrainian bear hug (much more enthusiastic than an American one) and told me that she was adopting me as her grandfather.

Since then, we have corresponded regularly. I write her more oftem than she writes me, because she's up to her eyeballs in difficult course work in a pre-med curriculum. But she is happy to have me in her life and has said so:

Me, Nov. 2010:
Hi, Maria, I hope you don't mind that I call you "doroha vnuchka" [Dear Granddaughter]-- if you do, just say so and I won't do it any more. I hope you have a very good month in school before Christmas. Anything I can do to help, just let me know. I'm praying for you all the time.

Maria:
Hi Didusyu [Grandfather], of course not, i really like when you call me vnuchka :) I hope it will be a good month too, but it's going to be very busy one. I hope everything is well with you. Thank you for caring, it's good to have you "didusyu". Thank you so much!! :) God bless you!

Me January 12 2011:
Grandfathers do worry about their granddaughters.

Maria:
because that what they feel like doing.

Me:
Oh, yes! I want to know that you are okay, well, and happy!

Maria:
thank you, it's good to know that someone like you care about me.

Me:
I'm very happy in my soul (v dushu?) that I can give you some happiness.

Maria:
im happy for you too

Maria January 18:
Dorogyi Didusu', [Dear(est?) Grandfather (Grandpapa?)
Thank you for telling me what you just did. Your words make me think about life, faith and people who really understand the meaning of God's love. I'm glad to felt better. I promise to write as often as i can and Im glad to have you in my life Didus'. To have you as a techer, friend and person that i can tell everything to means a lot to me. You have my full permission to do so. [tell people about me]
God Bless you! Love always
Vnuchka ♥

* * *

First came the pure joy, the kind of happiness I have never felt in my life, the kind that comes from giving without expectation. I have to explain that while I think I have a hard head (one friend calls me "the Bell-Curve mind") I have a very soft heart, full of sentiment, shmaltz, and romance. When I was young my favorite play was Cyrano de Bergerac, and still is way up there, with that heartbreaking fifth act and its last scenes.

Then the joy became alloyed with worry -- something every parent and grandparent knows, I'm sure, but I never did. Worry by day, worry by night. I asked some middle aged moms and grandmas if this was normal or I was crazy, and they all said it was perfectly normal, and one grandma I know told me that I would be crazy if I didn't worry. These smart women also told me that kids at "that age" also do the fly-away-come-back dance, and it's normal for them to be sometimes uncommunicative.

Of course I'd like to hear from Maria more than I do, but the nature of the situation is that it's just not possible. All I can do is be patient and understanding, and love, love, love without thought of reward. I think St. Ignatius said that was what we should do to imitate Christ. One day a couple of weeks ago when I hadn't heard from Maria for what seemed an eternity, the verse "Oh, Jerusalem!" (I think Matthew, Palm Sunday) popped into my head.

Oh, am I learning so many many new things! My heart is growing and stretching, and even with the down side, I love it. One close friend remarked to me recently that perhaps God kept romance, wife, and children from me so that in old age He could give me this. Blessed be God!

Two multiple murderers

2011-01-24T10:38:00.002-06:00

It occurred to me this morning that two mass murderers, Major Hasan and Doctor Gosnell, were known for what they were -- but the evidence was ignored.

My cynical self says: because one is a Moslem and the other an abortionist, in today's politically correct America, neither can do any wrong.

And I have this creeping little nasty suspicion that in the end, both of them are going to get off with slaps on the wrist.

I am sickened but not surprised. God have mercy on us!

Something new and joyous

2011-01-22T11:38:00.003-06:00

A bit over a year ago, I gave a pile of English-language reference books to a young Ukrainian immigrant friend who was just beginning college. She was so happy to get them that she told me she was adopting me as her grandfather! Well, well! and Oh, my goodness!

We have been corresponding regularly, and of course she is so busy that she doesn't have time to answer all my letters; but she is very happy to have me in her life and has said so.

I wrote to her a few days ago:
To give you a grandfather's love means to smile with you, rejoice with you, weep (плакати) with you. It means to help you, to teach you, to learn from you (like how to write good Ukrainian). I'm not a parent, nor a teacher, nor one of your peers, I'm an old man who has lived long and learned much (and the best things I have learned are about God and our holy faith). This puts me in a position different from the others.

She responded:
Dorogyi Didusu', [Dear Grandpapa]
Thank you for telling me what you just did. Your words make me think about life, faith and people who really understand the meaning of God's love. I'm glad to felt better. I promise to write as often as i can and Im glad to have you in my life Didus'. To have you as a techer, friend and person that i can tell everything to means a lot to me.
God Bless you! Love always
Vnuchka ♥ [Granddaughter]

A close friend, and grandmother herself, told me that she thought God gave me no girlfriend, no wife, and no children, because He was preparing me for this.

Anyway, it's lovely, and makes my heart warm and light. Please pray for her and for me. Thanks very very much!

Today

2011-01-22T11:32:00.002-06:00

On Jan. 22nd, 1973, the US Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, legalized abortion, essentially for any reason, through all nine months of pregnancy. Since then about 52 million American who should be here are not.

Now it is very wrong to treat a person as merely an economic unit, but the loss of 52 million people between ages 1 to 38, has to have had a devastating effect on the economy of this nation.

More about my brother

2011-01-12T21:39:00.002-06:00

My brother John fell away from the Faith sometime in his middle teens. I was shocked by that at the time. I've learned since that it happens to almost every kid raised in a religious environment: they "kick against the goad" in their teenage years, or they "outgrow" what they were raised with. It happened to me too, but that's another story.

When John went to college, his undergraduate major was philosophy, which I suppose pounded the nails in the coffin of his agnosticism or atheism. All I know for sure (because he hardly ever discussed personal matters with me) is that one of his favorite philosophers was Ludwig Wittgenstein. In fact, he named his cat Ludwig.

It would take a mind more educated and sharper than mine to explain what Wittgenstein believed. From looking at articles on the net, the most I can figure out is that his philosophy is incompatible with religion in general and Christianity in particular; because in his philosophy one has to be able to prove whether a statement is true or not. This of course isn't the case with our Faith because the core is Revelation, specifically the self-revelation of God in the person of Jesus.

Late in the evening of December 29, when John collapsed at home and had to go to the hospital, I prayed to Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas to "whack John upside the head and show him the light he's been missing." I'm certain John read these three greatest of Catholic philosophers; and even if he disagreed with them I suspect he respected them all the same.

Anyway, John died in the hospital early the next morning. Early the following week, I had a dream that John and I were in a confession line in a church together. I think that's a good sign. At least it comforts me.

R.I.P. John Wirth 9 Jun 1942 - 30 Dec 2010

2011-01-10T22:06:00.006-06:00

I could write one sentence or I could write a book. All I know right now is that I have very little idea what or how much I'm going to write.

I was conceived on or about John's first birthday, June 1943 (Pop told me that I was supposed to have been born March 10, 1944 but came early).

The picture at right is of course the two of us, living in Minneapolis sometime during the war. I can't judge kids' ages. I estimate it was the fall of 1945. The piles of leaves say fall, and I look like I was about 19 or 20 months; John would have been 3 and a few months.

He was Big Brother, I was Little Brother, and that's how it was all the way. There were modifications, refinements, and amendments as the decades went on -- the biggest being when he came home from the USAF in 1963 when he was 21 and I was 19 -- but there never was any real change.

A star inside a crescent

2011-01-06T18:25:00.003-06:00

When I was a kid, back in the fifties, we had a superstition that if there ever appeared a star within the horns of the crescent of the new moon, the Mohammedans of the world would rise up in holy war against the West. We knew what the word jihad meant (despite modern lies to the contrary).

The more learned of us knew that that was not possible, because what appeared to be empty space was actually the unlit surface of the moon, and the stars were farther away than that. However, after Sputnik, there seemed to be a reason to worry.

Well, I've never seen that phenomenon, but I have seen jihad, even though I never thought, fifty-some years ago, that I would live long enough to see it.

The O Antiphons 6 - Third and Fourth Sundays

2010-12-22T14:29:00.004-06:00

EMMANUEL,

Rex et legifer noster,

exspectatio Gentium,

et Salvator earum:

veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.

O Emmanuel,

our King and our Lawgiver,

Longing of the Peoples ;

yea ; and salvation thereof :

Come to save us, O Lord our God !

The O Antiphons 5 - Third and Fourth Sundays

2010-12-22T13:32:00.003-06:00

REX GENTIUM,

et desideratus earum,

lapisque angularis,

qui facis utraque unum:

veni, et salva hominum,

quem le limo formasti.

O King of the peoples,

and desire thereof;

O Cornerstone,

that makest one of two:

come to save man

whom Thou hast made of the dust of the earth.

The O Antiphons 4 - Third and Fourth Sundays

2010-12-22T13:16:00.006-06:00

CLAVIS DAVID

et sceptrum domus Israel;

qui aperis, et nemo claudit;

claudis, et nemo aperit;

veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris,

sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Key of David, and Scepter of the house of Israel;

that openest and no man shutteth;

shuttest and no man openeth :

come to bring out the prisoner from the prison,

and them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death.

ORIENS,

splendor lucis aeternae,

et sol justitiae :

veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris,

et umbra mortis.

O Dayspring,

Brighness of the everlasting light,

Sun of Justice,

come to give light to them

that sit in darkness and the shadow of death!

The O Antiphons - where?

2010-12-17T23:34:00.003-06:00

I am really embarrassed, because the old prayerbook, from which I've been copying the Antiphons, has gone missing. And I missed last weekend too. Big time bummer.

Reminds me of some little thing I wrote down in December 1984 about the anguish of waiting.

The night is empty, dark, and cold.
I trudge along the road
Rememb'ring dimly being told
So long ago when I was young
From dark like this new hope has sprung.
The memory's old and faint and pale
Has little power to lift my load
And free me from my inner jail.

Second Sunday of Advent - O Come, Divine Messiah!

2010-12-05T16:48:00.004-06:00

This has long been one of my favorite Advent carols, and last night at Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes, the old French-Canadian parish on the east bank of the Mississippi River, near Sault Saint-Antoine de Padue (the Saint Anthony Falls), the choir (and I) sang two verses in French (my Grand-Père Gosselin was a French-Canadian-Ojibwe mix) . . . and here they are. Note the urgency of Venez, venez, venez ! -- "Come, come, come!"

Refrain:

Venez divin Messe,

Sauvez nos jours infortunés ;

Vous êtes notre vie,

Venez, venez. venez !

Ah! Descendez, hâtez vos pas,

Sauvez les hommes du trépas ;

Secourez-nous, ne tardez pas !

Voyez couler nos larmes ;

Grand Dieu, si Vous nous pardonnez,

Nous n'aurons plus d'alarmes :

Venez, venez, venez !

(Refrain)

Si Vous venez, Roi glorieux,

Nous Vous verrons, victorieux,

Fermer l'enfer, ouvrir les cieux.

Soyez-nous secourable ;

Les cieux nous furent destinés ;

Venez Sauveur aimable,

Venez, venez, venez!

(Refrain)

The O Antiphons 3 - Second Sunday of Advent

2010-12-05T16:11:00.003-06:00

RADIX JESSE,

qui stas in signum populorum,

super quem continebunt reges os suum,

quem Gentes deprecabuntur :

veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse,
who standest as an ensign for the people,
at whom the kings shall shut their mouths,
whom the peoples shall seek :
come to deliver us, do not delay.

The O Antiphons 2

2010-11-28T14:30:00.004-06:00

ADONAI et Dux domus Israel,

qui Moysi in igne flammae apparuisti,

et in Sina legem dedisti:

veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O Adonai and Ruler of the house of Israel,

who didst appear unto Moses in the burning bush,

and gavest him the law at Sinai:

come to redeem us with outstretched arm!

The O Antiphons 1

2010-11-27T11:44:00.007-06:00

SAPIENTIA, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem,
fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O WISDOM that comest out of the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to another,
mightily and smoothly ordering all things,
come to teach us the way of prudence!

Today's Gospel Reading --

2010-11-07T22:28:00.002-06:00

was about the Sadducees trying to trick Jesus with the question about the women who married seven brothers and died childless, and in heaven whose wife would she be. Now this was a trick question, because (as it says at the beginning of the reading) the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. And, as one priest quipped many years ago, "that's why they were sad, you see." Ba-da-bom!

The Bell Curve 17 - TBC and the 2010 Elections

2010-11-04T21:52:00.011-05:00

Here's a quote I posted in TBC 16:

"What if the cognitive elite were to become not only richer than everyone else, increasingly segregated, and more genetically distinct as time goes on but were also to acquire common political interests? What might those interest be, and how congruent might they be with a free society? How decisively could the cognitive elite affect policy if it were to acquire such a common political interest? (p. 115; emphasis mine)

They give us this gloomy picture: "As of the end of the twentieth century, the United States is run by rules that are congenial to people with high IQs and that make life more difficult for everyone else." (p. 541)

* * *

Well, Herrnstein and Murray were right. We have now had several years of government by the cognitive elite (who in my opinion are a bunch of overeducated pinheads, i.e., they know more and more about less and less), and a few days ago the ordinary people of this country showed at the polls how sick and tired they are of the cognitive elite. See for instance ---

http://michellemalkin.com/2010/11/03/take-your-olive-branch-and-shove-it-democrats/

If you read it, be sure to read the eighteen references in it.

And I say hooray for the common people!

It's NOT the econony, people!

2010-11-01T15:01:00.003-05:00

I have listened to a lot of people say the most important issue this year is the economy. Okay, it's important, but the economy is made by people: going to school, working, and doing business.

Consider:

there are about 18.3 million schoolkids (18 and under) who are not here;

about 6 million possible college students (ages 19 to 22) not here;

about 31 million part- or full-time workers (16 and over) not here;

about 23.4 million voters not here.

If a baby aborted in 1973 were alive today, she or he would have had 37 birthdays; if the 738,800 aborted were alive, they would have had 27,335,600 birthdays: cards, cakes, parties. Not to mention diapers, baby clothes, school clothes, shoes, food: all the things needed to be made and sold for a living person -- of which the dead have no need.

The economy is faltering and Social Security going broke because we are missing about 50 million people. It's NOT the economy, people!

The Bell Curve 16 - The End

2010-10-21T21:32:00.008-05:00

(This has been a long series of posts. I never dreamed it would be this long, and I bet nobody else did either.)

This book has covered far more territory than I have explored, but I've chosen to limit my comments to the phenomenon of cognitive stratification, which Herrnstein and Murray suggest has changed American society so much (perhaps more than any other phenomenon).

You'll recall the authors argued that in past ages, social position was governed far more by social position or wealth ("lineage and money") than by intelligence. Also that a large majority of the smart people in past ages were engaged in ordinary pursuits, living, working, and mixing with everyone else. "Social and economic stratification were extreme, but cognitive stratification was minor." (p. 27)

It's a commonplace in circles anthropological that technological changes produce social changes (at least that's what I was taught in Cultural Anthropology in 1970). Technology has grown by leaps and bounds in the last century or so; one excellent example is the progression from the first powered heavier-than-air flight in 1903, to the placing of astronauts on the moon in 1969. (I had relatives whose lifetimes included both dates.)

My last two posts demonstrated the phenomenon.

Early in the book, Herrnstein and Murray say: "Cognitive partitioning through education and occupations will continue, and there is not much that the government or anyone else can do about it."
and
"Another force for cognitive partitioning is the increasing physical segregation of the cognitive elite from the rest of society."
and
"The isolation of the cognitive elite is compounded by its choices of where to live, shop, play, worship, and send its children to school."
and
"Add to this the phenomenon known as assortative mating. Likes attract when it comes to marriage, and intelligence is one of the most important of those likes. When this propensity to mate by IQ is combined with increasingly efficient educational and occupational stratification, assortative mating has more powerful effects on the next generation than it did on the previous one. This process too seems to be getting stronger, part of the brew creating an American class system." (pp. 91-92)

Later, they reiterate:
". . . the funneling system is already [1994] functioning at a highy level of efficiency, thereby promoting three interlocking phenomena:
1. The cognitive elite is getting richer, in an era where everyone else is having to struggle to stay even.
2. The cognitive elite is increasingly separated physically from everyone else, in both the workplace and the neighborhood.
3. The cognitive elite is increasingly likely to intermarry." (p. 114)

It is my opinion that these three phenomena were occurring then and are still occurring now, and there are obvious consequences, most of which, in my opinion, are highly undesirable, related to the authors' observation at the end of Part I of the book:

"What if the cognitive elite were to become not only richer than everyone else, increasingly segregated, and more genetically distinct as time goes on but were also to acquire common political interests? What might those interest be, and how congruent might they be with a free society? How decisively could the cognitive elite affect policy if it were to acquire such a common political interest? (p. 115; emphasis mine)

They give us this gloomy picture: "As of the end of the twentieth century, the United States is run by rules that are congenial to people with high IQs and that make life more difficult for everyone else." (p. 541)

Now, if I had my way, I would make the last two chapters required reading. They are:
21, "The Way We Are Headed," (which includes a discussion "The Coming of the Custodial State")[1]
and
22, "A Place for Everyone," in which the authors discuss political philosophy, including that of the Founders. "The Founders saw that making a stable and just government was difficult precisely because men were unequal in every respect except their right to advance their own interests." (p. 531, emphasis in original)

Those who have read my blog see that I am a firm believer in the founding principles of this our country, as laid down in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and an ardent opponent of anything and anyone who tries to subvert or pervert those principles because, as the authors say near the end of the book, "Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality. Trying to pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to disaster." (p. 551)

What can we do? Pray, pray, and pray some more! -- especially for the youngsters who are going to inherit this someday. Pray for them and educate them.

My sincere thanks to all who read this, and to people and sites like The Old Jarhead, The Catholic Caveman, Pajamas Media, The American Thinker, Jihad Watch, TH2, Anita Moore, Mary Ann Kreitzer, Thomas Sowell, Michelle Malkin, Alan Keyes, Tom Roeser, and all the others whose names slip my mind right now. God bless you all.

* * *

[1] Being an intellectual as well as a physical packrat, I have saved several hundred blog and website posts just in the last few years. One of my folders is labeled "Culture War" and has 1880 files in 67 subfolders; one of which is labeled "Nanny-Servile State and Thought Police" with 63 files collected in the last 5-1/2 years. I have, in my national public affairs folder, 1842 files in 42 subfolders, one of which is called "Obamagrad" and has 464 files collected since January 2009. You get the idea: I think Herrnstein and Murray were on the right track because I have found out for myself that what they said has come to pass.

Quick Education about Islam

2010-10-15T11:20:00.000-05:00

This was posted today on The Old Jarhead's blog, and I recommend it highly:

http://tartanmarine.blogspot.com/2010/10/political-digest-for-october-15-2010.html

and he cites:

http://www.amilimani.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=189&Itemid=2

(I hope the links work.)

The Bell Curve 15 - Closer to the End

2010-10-11T18:41:00.017-05:00

"The story of higher education in the United States during the twentieth century is generally taken to be one of the great American success stories, and with good reason. The record was not without blemishes, but the United States led the rest of the world in opening college to a mass population of young people of ability, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, and financial resources.

"But this success story has a paradoxically shadowy side, for education is a powerful divider and classifier. Education affects income, and income divides. Education affects occupation, and occupations divide. Education affects tastes and interests, grammar and accents, all of which divide. When access to higher education is restricted by class, race, or religion, these divisions cut across cognitive levels. But school is in itself, more immediately and directly than any other institution, the place where people of high cognitive ability excel and people of low cognitive ability fail. As America opened access to higher education, it opened up as well a revolution in the way that the American population sorted itself and divided itself. Three successively more efficient sorting processes were at work: the college population grew, it was recruited by cognitive ability more efficiently, and then it was further sorted among the colleges." (pp. 30-31)

These two bell curves illustrate in more detail the trendline shown in the last post: as time has passed, the number and percentage of Americans with a college degree has risen dramatically.

And as the graph at left shows, "For white youths, being smart is more important than being privileged in getting a college degree." As IQ goes from -2SD to +2SD, (Standard Deviations) the probability of getting a degree rises from about 2% to about 80%, but as parental SES (Socio-Economic Status) goes from -2SD to +2SD, the probability of getting a degree goes from about 2% to only about 40%.

(I hope it's now obvious why I threw in so much statistical information into these posts: you can see the data at a glance and interpret them faster than you could a table of figures.)

Herrnstein and Murray assert further that about 1950, America became more efficient at getting bright students into college; that between the 1920's and the 1960's, college attendance became even more closely associated with IQ, and that "cognitive sorting" continues from the time students enter college to the time they get a degree. These are shown in the next three graphs.

I think what this all means is that college sorts out and isolates the smartest kids from the rest, and buries their noses in books for four years; unless the kids have a "grunt" job that gets their hands dirty and shows them how "the other half" lives, they're going to live more and more in a basically unreal world.

Part of that unreal world, as many of us have seen in following the news from colleges, even Catholic colleges (or should I say CINO colleges?) is the absurd notion that either God does not exist or doesn't matter. There are plenty of data out there that show the "elite" in a number of professions are non-religious or irreligious people.

Another part of that unreal world is the indoctrination the kids get in leftist ideas. (Personal note: I think "from each . . . to each. . ." would work just fine if people were perfect, but we aren't. (As G. K. C. said somewhere, the Antichrist can fool people not because he is unlike Christ, but because he is so like Christ.) I suspect that it takes some experience of the world to read Rousseau's The Social Contract and come to the conclusion that he was a dewy-eyed optimist.

Also -- while in school or just out of it, kids are going to have so much debt piled up that they will go for the jobs that pay the best, and likely choose a curriculum that can lead to a high-paying "career" after graduation. This hints very strongly to me that the smartest people will be clustered in a relatively small number of jobs or professions.

Political Snarkies

2010-10-06T00:16:00.007-05:00

Q: What is a Communist?
A: Someone who reads Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
Q: What is an anti-Communist?
A: Someone who understands Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Q: What is the difference between a Capitalist and a Communist?
A: A Capitalist takes from the poor, keeps it, and makes slaves of them. A Communist takes from the rich, gives to the poor, and makes slaves of them.

Q: What is the difference between a Democrat and a Tea-Partier?
A: A Democrat listens to what Obama says. A Tea-Partier observes what Obama does.

The Bell Curve 14 - getting close to the end

2010-10-02T13:18:00.007-05:00

Intelligence, education, and more sorting

I would suggest that as America has become more technologically advanced in the last century, higher levels of education became the new basic minimum. In a (comparatively) low-tech society, say a Minnesota farm 100 years ago, a grade-school education was enough, and maybe more than enough, for a youngster to be a successful farmer or farmwife. Almost all the skills needed could be learned on the farm, at Dad's or Mom's knee -- or Grandpa's or Grandma's, for that matter. I would be willing to bet that family and community ties were in general closer than they are now, and that rural people were generally more conservative and more religious than today. This for the simple reason that people had to cooperate to survive, and had to depend on God to keep sane. There were no other alternatives.

The graph here shows that "in the first half of the century, the high-school diploma became the norm," but also shows that in 1910, for instance, less than 10% of Americans had a high-school diploma.

Here is a bit of my family's history that illustrates this very well. My Grandpop Gosslin (born 1887) never finished high school; Grandmom did, in 1905, but she was the only one of her siblings to do so. My parents both graduated from high school in 1931, and they were both college material, but for them college was out of the question because of the Great Depression.

All six of their children (born 1942, 1944, 1947, 1948, 1951, and 1964) finished high school and went to college. Five of us have BA's, four have master's degrees. My three sisters all have master's degrees, and made professional use of them. My older brother's two daughters (born 1969 and 1977) both have doctorates, are successful professional women, and likely will go far, because they're still young and have a lot of time in front of them.

I think this family history illustrates another point too, shown in the top diagram. There are four steps on the ladder. Being on one rung is necessary to get to the next one (and some professions like medicine, law, and engineering have "glass ceilings"), but no guarantee that a person will. A person also needs perseverance, lots of hard work (or cheating), and lots of luck. (In the spring of 1970, Frank "Doc" Whiting, practically the founder of the University of Minnesota Theatre, told us new BA's and MA's that very likely only about 5% of us would ever make a full-time living in the professional or academic theater.)

Last note for this post: to get to "the top," a person sometimes has to step on the faces of others. Doing that -- or even being willing to do that -- requires a lack of conscience, a lack of sense of responsibility to or for others, and a talent for shmoozing, lying, cheating, and being an outright phony. And, I suggest, that's what can (in general) be expected of a generation that hit the college campuses in 1964 and were taught "if it feels good do it," "you can do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt anyone else" (the second part easily forgotten), and "this generation has nothing to learn from the past" (attributed to Margaret Mead).

The Bell Curve 13 - @ # $ % ^ & * !

2010-10-01T22:37:00.003-05:00

I had a lovely article written (and rewritten) in Microsoft Word, with the hope that I could copy and paste it to here . . . and it won't. In the meantime,
@#$%^&*
and @#$%^&*
and @#$%^&*!!!

The Bell Curve 12 - More Regression Analysis

2010-09-23T22:22:00.004-05:00

(It's been a while, so I had to go back through a few older posts, find my place in the books, and then get caught up.)

In the beginning of Part II of the book, "Cognitive Classes and Social Behavior," the authors spend a lot of ink talking about regression analysis[1], in order to explain the conclusions they reach about the effects of intelligence[2] on:

poverty,

unemployment,

single-parent families and illegitimacy,

welfare dependency,

parenting,

crime, and

civic behavior.

It has to be emphasized very strongly from the beginning that:

A, the authors are talking only about non-Latino whites[3],

B, they had a very large data base from which to draw, the NLSY[4], and

C, they divide it into two subpopulations:

1, a high-school diploma, no more and no less, and

2, a college degree, no more and no less.

[1] Regression analysis is a mathematical way of describing the effect of one thing on another thing, in general. If you look at the post from February 6 ("The Bell Curve 4"), with the example of the high-school senior boys lined up by height and weight, you will see again that there is a rough relationship between height and weight -- for boys only, about the same age. It is highly necessary when making correlations, to be very specific about the size of the data set, the constraints imposed upon it, and the conditions under which any conclusions can be accepted as valid.

Another, more technical, way of saying it is:

What is the numerical value of the correlation between the independent variable x and the dependent variable y, if

-1 means a "perfect negative" correlation (every increase in x means a predictable and measurable decrease in y),

0 means no correlation at all, and

+1 means a "perfect positive" correlation (every increase in x means a predictable and measurable increase in y).

[2] That is, the effects of intelligence on various social behaviors, after all other reasonable influences have been accounted for. Other influences could be age, education level, socioeconomic status, parents' socioeconomic status, and so on.

[3] Herrnstein and Murray don't begin to talk about race or ethnicity until part III.

[4] As mentioned before, the NLSY (National Longitudinal Survey of Youth) was begun in 1979 as a nationally representative sample of persons aged 14 to 22 at that time, and who have been "followed ever since." (p. 36, written 1994) It appears it is still going on. See: http://www.bls.gov/nls/

Good day to announce - - -

2010-09-11T23:31:00.002-05:00

Runaway Christian Convert From Ohio Gains Legal U.S. Residency
Published September 07, 2010 Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A lawyer for a runaway Christian convert from Ohio who was also an illegal immigrant says the 18-year-old woman has gained permanent residency in the United States.

Kort Gatterdam, a lawyer for Rifqa Bary, said Tuesday the news means Bary can now start applying for a driver's license, Medicaid coverage and college scholarships.

Gatterdam says Bary, a native of Sri Lanka, received her permanent residency card last week and can apply for citizenship in five years.

Bary had sought the green card as she argued in court she could not reunite with her Muslim parents, whom she alleged threatened her with harm for converting.

Bary also sought legal residency to achieve health coverage as she battles uterine cancer.

From: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/09/07/runaway-christian-convert-ohio-gains-legal-residency/

I wonder . . . .

2010-09-10T14:08:00.005-05:00

. . . . what they're going to do this year.

R.I.P. George P. Gosslin

2010-08-25T01:22:00.006-05:00

Monday evening August 23 I posted on facebook:

"In loving memory of my uncle, George P. Gosslin, born Feb. 25, 1917; departed this life Aug. 23, 2010. Seaman First Class, USS Windham Bay CVE-92, served at Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. 'Home is the sailor, home from the sea.'

"Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen."

Uncle George was either a Seaman First Class "striking" for Gunner's Mate Third Class, or he was a Gunner's Mate; that part isn't clear anymore.

What we do know is that he was a gunner in a forward sponson under the flight deck of his "baby flattop" and fired water-cooled 20mm cannon at Japanese aircraft who were trying to kill him. I read that at these three battles the Japanese began using kamikaze pilots, and their primary targets were the aircraft carriers.

A history of his ship I found online says: "On 4 to 5 June, [1945] while steaming with the logistics group in support of TF 58 and the strikes on Okinawa, the carrier steamed right through the famous typhoon of 1945, suffering lost and damaged planes as well as damage to her flight and hangar decks." George once showed me a picture of the bow of his ship; the flight deck was bent over like a crushed pop can.

One sailor friend of mine on facebook said that is is because of George and men and women like him that we don't speak German and Japanese here today.

The picture is of George and his wife of 56 years, my Aunt Rita (a Canadienne), and their daughers Linda and Barbara.

Just to be snotty --

2010-08-25T01:16:00.003-05:00

I put a post on facebook Tuesday:

"A conflict between Islamism and Bushido, between suicide bombers and Kamikaze pilots, might possibly be of more than passing interest."

I posted it because it occurred to me that I couldn't tell the difference between the two.

More on Astrology

2010-08-25T01:04:00.004-05:00

In July 2009 I wrote an essay titled "Astrology is Baloney." This week I have decided to carry my peeve against astrology into a more public realm, and have posted a couple of things on facebook to make fun of it.

Monday I posted:
"Generic one-size-fits-all horoscope for today: something bad will happen to you. ;-)"

Tuesday I posted:
"Murphy's generic one-size-fits-all pyramidally-channeled enneagraphic labyrinthine horoscope for today: Something really nice might happen to you today, but don't bet on it."

I wonder if anyone will be offended. I hope so.

Ricardus III Anglorum Rex Requiescat in Pace

2010-08-22T12:35:00.003-05:00

Repeat from last year:

". . . King Richard left Nottingham and marched to Leicester, arriving there on the 19th of August. Here he gathered his army. Two days later he marched out to meet Henry Tudor at Bosworth Field on the 22nd of August. Here he fought his last battle, supported by the Duke of Norfolk, who was killed, but betrayed by Thomas Lord Stanley and his brother Sir William Stanley, whose sudden switch to Tudor's side at a crucial moment lost Richard the battle and his life." (Richard III; The Road to Bosworth Field, P. W. Hammond and Anne F. Sutton. London: Constable, 1985; p. 214)

"The York City Council had (slightly inaccurate) reports of the battle on the day after it was fought. In their own Minutes they provided Richard III with a lasting epitaph.

"On the 22nd day of August Anno Domini 1485 at Redemore near Leicester there was fought a battle between our Lord King Richard III and others of his nobles on the one part, and Harry Earl of Richmond and others of his followers on the other part. In this battle the foresaid King Richard in the third year of his reign, John Duke of Northfolc . . . .

"Tuesday the vigil of St. Batholomew,
that is 23rd August in the year etc., the throne being vacant
We assembled in the counsaill chamber, where and when it was shewed by diverse persones and especially by John Sponer send unto the feld of Redemore to bring tidinges from the same to the citie that king Richard late mercifully reigning upon us was thrugh grete treason . . . piteously slane and murdred to the grete hevynesse of this citie . . . ." (op cit., p.223)

One interesting thing about this 525-year-old story is that Lord Stanley was married to Margaret Beaufort, who was -- Henry Tudor's mother.

Another is that Shakespeare's "Richard Crookback" was written during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who happened to be -- Henry Tudor's granddaughter.

A third is that had Richard won the battle, there very probably would have been no Henry VII or Henry VIII, thus no split of the Church in England from Rome.

And a fourth, which ought to surprise no one, is that this kind of lying and character-blackening goes on even today.

Revealing Picture of Me in a Swimsuit

2010-08-19T13:32:00.002-05:00

Atlantic City, New Jersey, September 7, 1946

My Debt to Canada

2010-08-17T13:05:00.004-05:00

Recently chatting with TH2, I realized that I owe Canada a big debt, and I know far less about Canada than I think I should. I have been aware for most of my life that Canada was originally New France, that the British took it over about 1763, and there have been tensions ever since.

In 1955 I went for two weeks or so to the Catholic Youth Center camp on Big Sandy Lake in northern Minnesota, where I first learned of the seven Jesuit martyrs, Jogues, Brébeuf, Goupil, Lallemant, and the others (and Kateri Tekakwitha who ended her short life in a settlement on the banks of the St. Lawrence). I have to add that the combination of woods and water (as opposed to prairie) seized my heart and imagination.

Probably the biggest debt I owe Canada is that one of my great-grandfathers, Jules Etienne Napoleon Gosselin, was born in Montmagny, Quebec, in 1852. I have no idea how he got to Osseo, Minnesota - founded by Pierre Bottineau - by 1885 to marry my great-grandmother Julia Chenevert, granddaughter of Pierre.

The next biggest debt is to my Uncle George's wife, my Aunt Rita, born in St.-Jean-Baptiste near Winnipeg, who has not only been very kind to me, but has been tart in her criticism of my schoolbook French ("You don't growl enough!")

Next comes a friend of some years' standing whom I met on Ave Maria Singles; she is a Winnipeg lady, bilingual (naturally), and who has been a wonderful chatting companion these year, and who is the inventor of Huey the Humourous Humerus and the co-inventor of Newfie Brewfie.

Then, in no particular order: Red Green, Geneviève Bujold (whose performance as Jeanne d'Arc I would love to see again), Céline Dion, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Robert Service, Thomas Costain, Louis Hémon, John Buchan (yes I know he wasn't really a Canadian), W. P. Kinsella; and so many actors and musicians I've liked but I had no idea were Canadians.

And, of course, TH2.

PS - the Maple leaf is from the tree in my back yard.

The Sad but Instructive Tale of Seymour the Femur

2010-08-16T20:28:00.003-05:00

Seymour the Femur was a dreamer,
Did not like his place.
Said to the pelvis, "You're not Elvis,
Get out of my face!"

Moaned to the body, "This is shoddy!
I bear half your weight,
Bent am I, it's hard on a guy!
I don't like my fate!"

Tillie Tibia said, "Shut up!
You're nuts like that cat Felix!
I go jogging or Irish clogging,
Get bent into a helix!"

Patty Patella spoke up then.
"You know your jobs, at least!
Look at me, just capping the knee,
And for the eyes, no feast!"

Joe the Toe, Tammy Tarsus,
Cal the Cuboid joined the fight,
All the bones were throwing stones,
And this went on all night.

"Hey, what of US?" said Moe the Muscle.
"We're the ones for your motility!
Pects and Biceps, Glutes and Triceps,
No us? – impossibility!"

"Who's the one who makes you move?
Me and my nerves!" said Brian the Brain.
"I'm the globe that's got the lobes,
I'm the one who drives the train!"

"So what?" cried Ellie Epidermis,
"I protect you all from harm,
Puncture me and you'll sure see
You have sold the farm!"

"I'm a nothing?" said Steve the Stomach.
"How do you think you all stay well?!"
Then Louie Liver, Katie Kidney,
Pammy Pancreas raised –a yell.

"Quit the fighting!" said Seymour Femur.
"I only wanted a change of place --
Get out of this socket, go up in a rocket,
And see some outer space!"

Huey the humorous Humerus said,
"Seymour, you tweaked on meth?
There'll be no sky, you're in the thigh,
And there you'll stay till death!"

"All you others, you shut up too!
"This noise is astronomical!
Read One Cor Twelve, the fighting shelve!"

-------

(So ends verse anatomical.)

Old Bob the Bookie

2010-08-11T16:52:00.004-05:00

I will bet 100 blog dollars that the administration will try to deport Rifqa Bary and Bibi Aisha. Any takers?

Also, on a different subject, Murphy's Law proves Catholic theology about the fall of Man and the world.

This is necessary to know!

2010-08-10T15:22:00.007-05:00

This is what used to be the nose of Aisha, an 18-year-old Pakistani woman who was put into an (I presume) arranged and forced marriage when she was 16. Her husband beat her, so she fled. When the Taliban caught her, her husband and brother-in-law cut off her ears and nose. At last report, she has been flown to California for reconstructive surgery. (Picture from the August 9 issue of TIME.)

Also let's not forget Rifqa Bary, who turns 18 today and is finally legally free of her father, who she says threatened to kill her because she became a Christian.

People who treat women -- or anyone else -- like that are not to be appeased! When will people wake up?!

Sign I saw today

2010-08-01T23:49:00.004-05:00

This is a 48" wide and 36" high metal sign bolted to the iron-grating fence in back of Our Lady of Lourdes Church, which is just on the east bank of the Mississippi River and just upstream from the St. Anthony Falls in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The sign faces Second Street, which has townhomes and an underground parking ramp, so it is likely that many drivers and passengers will see it; the message is readable from the street.

When I saw it I thought, "See, we Catholics do walk the talk" and "Three cheers for Archbishop John Nienstedt!"

The Bell Curve 11 - Effects of Cognitive Stratification

2010-07-29T11:15:00.002-05:00

Thomas Sowell demonstrates that what is happening here and now has happened before; Herrnstain and Murray predicted it would happen.

Here's the link: http://patriotpost.us/opinion/thomas-sowell/2010/07/27/how-smart-are-we

More coming; stay tuned . . . . .

I finally cracked the secret code!

2010-07-26T09:49:00.002-05:00

Ordained

Allah to

Mangle

America

The Bell Curve 10 - An Example of the Result of Cognitive Stratification

2010-07-20T11:14:00.002-05:00

I recommend this link.

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/pity-the-postmodern-cultural-elite/

Here are some quick cuts from Hanson:

"There is no racial, regional, religious, or tribal commonality. One shared allegiance perhaps is to higher education that certifies the cultural elite by diplomas of all sorts from a “good school,” as well as a respectable salary and a nice home with appurtenances. The good life of the elite is defined by both the absence of worry about necessities, and a certain status that accrues from properly recognized advanced education and sensitivity.

"How would we characterize the new aristocracy? In a number of ways. 1) Untruth; 2) Nature; 3) Muscularity; 4) Gender; 5) Logic."

Basically Hanson is explaining and describing the results of cognitive stratification -- what happens when the people I call "overeducated pinheads" talk only to each other.

It is posted in excerpt by
http://tartanmarine.blogspot.com/2010/07/political-digest-july-20-2010.html

Billboards

2010-07-19T22:36:00.002-05:00

I have recently seen two billboards around the Twin Cities that give me the cold shudders.

One says:
my pop culture
my gossip
my radio station
my talk

The other one says:
The station for the Obama generation.

A comforting night prayer

2010-07-18T01:18:00.003-05:00

This is the Anima Christi, as freely translated in verse by John Henry Cardinal Newman. I find it very comforting to say as my last prayer while lying in bed waiting for sleep.

(My usual bedtime is 2:00 am, old student habit, I think; and usually by 2:00 I'm in such a trance of fatigue I can scarcely get up from my knees from my usual night prayers. But when I get fatigued my mind wanders all over the place; many times it wanders to wondering how wonderful it would be to have a warm soft cuddly wife in bed with me. And since this is a thought I must not think, for obvious reasons, I say the Anima Christi. If I'm not asleep by then, I start saying the Stations of the Cross, and rarely get to the end.)

So here it is:

Soul of Christ, be my sanctification.
Body of Christ, be my salvation.
Blood of Christ, fill all my veins.
Water of Christ's side, wash out my stains.
Passion of Christ, my comfort be.
O good Jesus, listen to me.
In Thy wounds I fain would hide,
Ne'er to be parted from Thy side.
Guard me should the Foe assail me,
Call me when my life shall fail me,
Bid me come to Thee above,
With Thy saints to sing Thy love
Forever and ever. Amen.

The Latin is elegantly sparse and compact; a literal translation equally so; I like this best.

New Title

2010-07-16T14:11:00.003-05:00

How about if we start calling him the Presidentissimo? (Note the similarity to the musical term prestissimo, which I believe means "loudest," and to the kleptocratic term "generalissimo.") I think it fits.

Woodworking and Catholic thought

2010-07-16T13:43:00.003-05:00

While scraping and sanding two window sashes that will be re-stained and re-varnished, I noticed that it's nearly impossible to get all the old stain out of the wood. Scraping is like going to confession: the surface junk comes off, but the stain remains. Purgatory (that merciful doctrine) tells us that all the deep-seated stains, come from years and decades of sin, can be and are removed; probably very slowly and painfully, but with the promise of heaven when we're purified enough to go there. I suspect that for most humans (me especially) the deepest stain is an attachment - sort of a deformed affection - for our favorite sins. That is what needs removal the most.

Understanding the Revised Mass Texts

2010-07-15T22:48:00.003-05:00

I found this book at a religious book store last week. It's very good. I bought one for myself, and one for a dear friend who is a convert from Judaism, so did not get the benefit of hearing Mass in Latin, as I did when I was in grade school (graduated 1958) and high school (graduated 1962). I recommend it to everyone.

To my unknown Chinese (?) commentator

2010-07-15T16:46:00.003-05:00

Dear Sir, Madam, or Miss -

When you write comments that are:

1, In English,

2, relevant to what I'm saying, and

3, civil and respectful -

I will publish them. Until then, no.

le 14 Juillet 1789, July 14 2010

2010-07-14T17:57:00.009-05:00

A bas la Bastille!
A bas les Aristos!
(And I think you know which ones I mean).

Later addition: a paragraph from a book called The Secret of D-Day, by Gilles Perrault. He wrote it about 1964, gleaning material from Allied and German intelligence files. It was first published in 1964 by Librairie Arthème Fayard, and earned its author the Prix de la Resistance.

"A Führer is always more or less convinced that he is always right; it is one of the peculiarities of the breed. He has his own personal star to guide him toward his destiny. He has revelations, he knows the secrets of the gods. Fortune is one his side, ready to tip the scales if necessary. He is surprised if the Red Sea does not part to let his army cross. Hitler, for example, could not admit that it was bad weather which had forced him to postpone his offensive four times between November, 1939, and May, 1940. It was abnormal. He was the man of sunlight."

(Sound like anyone else we know of?)

The Bell Curve 9 - The NLSY and Defining Cognitive Classes

2010-07-05T23:14:00.010-05:00

The introduction to Part II of the book says: "Part II presents our best estimate of how much intelligence has to do with America's most pressing social problems. The short answer is 'quite a lot,' and the reason is that different levels of cognitive ability are associated with different patterns of social behavior. High cognitive ability is generally associated with socially desirable behaviors, low cognitive ability with socially undesirable ones."

But Herrnstein and Murray add what looks like a disclaimer, that associated with does not mean coincident with. (As statisticians are fond of saying, correlation does not mean causation.) "What this means in English is that you cannot predict what a given person [my emphasis] will do from his IQ score -- a point that we have made in part I and will make again, for it needs repeating. On the other hand, despite the low association at the individual level, large differences in social behavior separate groups of people when the groups differ intellectually on the average."

If you go back to my example given in the second essay (Feb. 1, 2010), "What looks random maybe isn't," you'll see that I tried to emphasize that no single flip of the little sink strainer can be predicted (seat or not seat itself), but after 187 trials of ten flips each, a pattern emerges. What is unpredictable singly can be accurately estimated en masse.

Now here comes what looks like a side-step. Where can one get anough data to do decent analysis on, let alone draw valid conclusions from?

The authors point to a long-term study called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, begun in 1979 with 12,686 persons aged 14 to 22 at the time. (Check out http://www.bls.gov/nls/ for more info. The page is maintained by the US Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.) Herrnstein and Murray call the study "the mother lode" and add that it is unique because it combines in one study all the elements that had to be studied piecemeal beforehand -- and presumably the elements had to be gathered from many different studies.

(I had somewhat the same problem when dealing with estimated traffic demand at a proposed new interchange. The highway volume data came from the state; the cross-street volume data came from a county or city. The data had to be integrated into one data set before any analysis was even possible.)

The next thing Herrnstein and Murray do, after explaining where they get their best data, is to define cognitive classes. They divide the population into five classes, as seen here, and what isn't in the picture is in the text: classes I and V are each only 5% of the population; classes II and IV are each 20%, and class III is 50% of the population.

Then comes an important note to the reader: "You -- meaning the self-selected person who has read this far into the book [p. 121] -- live in a world that probably looks nothing like the figure. In all likelihood, almost all of your friends and professional associates belong in that top Class I slice. Your friends and associates whom you consider to be unusually slow are probably somewhere in Class II. Those whom you consider to be unusally bright are probably somewhere in the upper fraction of the 99th centile, a very thin slice of the overall distribution. In defining Class I, which we will use as an operational definition of the more amorphous group called the "cognitive elite," as being the top 5 percent, we are being quite inclusive. It does, after all, embrace some 12 1/2 million people." [Note this was 14 years ago.]

Very important endnote: In the light of eternity, how smart we are matters little compared to what we do with what we've got. "The greatest of these is love." Remember the parable of the Talents. "Much is required from him to whom much is given." It's the same as a great quip I saw on a blog, maybe one of yours: the most glorious monstrance in the world is nothing compared to Who is in it.

Apologies to Hilaire Belloc!

2010-06-24T12:03:00.002-05:00

When I am dead, I hope it may be said,
"His sins were black, but his blog was read."

Can you imagine the great stuff that Belloc and Chesterton would be writing, with the tools we have available now?

The Bell Curve 8 - Another Side Note

2010-06-24T11:08:00.002-05:00

"The widening of income in equality is caused mainly by technological changes leading to closer ties between education and employment. The crash happened because the attempt to turn America into an ownership society failed. Americans will own a house and in turn use the house as collateral to borrow money to invest."
[Emphasis mine]

This is from
http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2010/06/21/its-not-just-debt-its-consumption/

which I saw just a few minutes ago. To my mind it ties in perfectly with what Herrnstein and Murray said about the emergence of a cognitive elite. In a low-tech society, one didn't need a lot of education (except perhaps as an apprentice in a medieval guild) to get and hold a job. It's very different here and now.

The Bell Curve 7 - side note

2010-06-22T02:18:00.002-05:00

I mentioned in the last post about having recently read a piece that asserts what Herrnstein and Murray predicted has come true. You can find it at:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/americas_death_by_professor.html

Its title is:
America's Death by Professor By Stuart Schwartz, and it was published May 20. The article also mentions Allan Bloom's Book The Closing of the American Mind, which I read when it first came out, and liked very much.

The Bell Curve 6 - More on cognitive stratification

2010-06-22T00:24:00.007-05:00

The authors talked (in my last post) about cognitive stratification. They provided a couple of graphs to show the differences between, say, my parents' coming-of-age era, and that of their grandchildren. Here is one from 1930. Note that the mean IQ of the non-college persons is about 0.1 standard deviation (SD) less than the overall mean; the mean IQ of college graduates is about 0.7 SD above the overall mean; and the mean IQ of the grads from the prestigious colleges is about 1.3 SD above the overall mean.

Since the areas under the three curves are proportional to the relative size of the populations, it means if the three populations are combined, and taking their sizes into account, the combined mean will be the same as the mean of the whole population. It's the same as if you had a teeter-totter with a very large kid sitting one foot to the left of the pivot point, a small kid sitting about seven feet to the right, and a baby sitting about thirteen feet to the right.

Now here is a graph from 1990. Note that the mean IQs of the three populations have shifted: the non-college mean has dropped to about -0.25 SD below the overall mean IQ; the college grad mean has gone up to about +0.85 SD above the overall mean IQ, and the mean IQ of the grads of the prestigious colleges has taken a big jump to about +2.8 SD above the overall mean IQ. Quite a change in sixty years. As the authors predicted when they wrote the book in the mid-90s, this shift has profound social consequences.

At least one other author I read recently has confirmed, in a way, that what Herrnstein and Murray predicted has happened.

The Bell Curve 5 - What they're talking about

2010-06-12T20:01:00.005-05:00

(It has been quite a while, so you might want to go back and read my first four essays - Jan.9, Feb. 1, Feb. 2, and Feb. 6)

To quote the authors' preface: "This book is about differences in intellectual capacity among people and groups and what those differences mean for America's future."

In Part I, "The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite," the authors argue that in past ages and cultures, most notably western Europe, social class was determined largely by lineage and money rather than by intelligence. Therefore one would probably find a pretty normal distribution of intelligence at all class levels: that is, one could find smart peasants and stupid aristocrats.

". . . a large majority of the smart people in Cheop's (sic) Egypt, dynastic China, Elizabethan England, and Teddy Roosevelt's America were engaged in ordinary pursuits, mingling, working, and living with everyone else. Many were housewives. Most of the rest were farmers, smiths, millers, bakers, carpenters, and shopkeepers. Social and economic stratification was extreme, but cognitive stratification was minor." (p. 27)

One of the major premises of the book is that what they call cognitive stratification is a product of a high-tech society. Before the 20th century, ". . . the number of very bright people was so much greater than the number of specialized jobs for which high intelligence was indispensable." (ibid.) But during that century, assert the authors, a class structure based on intelligence emerged.

Chapter 1, "Cognitive Class and Education, 1900-1990," gives some information that I find highly interesting. The authors point out that from 1900-1990 there was a fifteen-fold increase in the proportion of people getting college degrees, and that students wishing to enter college were being more effectively selected for high IQ. They also mention that "Starting in the 1950s, a handful of institutions became magnets for the very brightest of each year's new class. In these schools, the cognitive level of the students rose far above the rest of the college population." (p. 29) They show with graphs (which one needs the smattering of statistics to interpret for oneself) that:

1, during the 20th century, the "prevalence" of the college degree went from about 2% to about 33% of the population;
2, starting about 1950, more of the top (high-school) students went to college;
3, between the 1920s and the 1960s, college attendance became more closely correlated to IQ, and
4, the cognitive sorting continued throughout one's college career.

"By the early 1960s," say the authors, "the entire top echelon of American universities had been transformed. The screens filtering their students from the masses had not been lowered but transformed. Instead of the old screen -- woven of class, religion, region, and old school ties -- the new screen was cognitive ability, and its mesh was already exceeding fine." (p. 42)

(I recall mentioning elsewhere that both my parents graduated from high school in 1931, and though they were both very bright people, for them college was out of the question. They went immediately to work, and mentioned many times they were lucky to find it. They pushed education at us six kids, with the result that all six went to college, we have five BA's and an AA, and four Master's degrees; more than that, two of my nieces have doctorates. I find it interesting that I would consider the girls part of the "cognitive elite"; my siblings and I, for the most part, definitely are not.)

Ghosts, Shades, Shadows

2010-06-07T01:23:00.005-05:00

This day is call'd the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say, 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, 'These wounds I had on Crispin's Day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's Day.

King Henry V, Act IV, Scene iii

I was fourteen weeks old that day --

2010-06-06T14:01:00.003-05:00

-- and my dad missed, by a hair, being in the assault force. So he stayed stateside, came home to Mom and my older brother a year after the war was over, and then the rest of us came along. It's something to think my other five siblings might not have existed.

My most heartfelt thanks to Pop, my uncle George (gunner on a "baby flattop" in the south Pacific), their friends, and all who served, and who serve now. Those men and women then were all that stood between us and two aggressive enemies, and the women and men now are all that stand between us and another of the same.

God bless them all!

It's hot

2010-05-29T14:59:00.003-05:00

At my house in Minneapolis, it's 104 in the sun and 90 in the shade.
There is a place hotter than this.
Let's stay out of it!

Father Kelly needs education

2010-05-28T02:23:00.004-05:00

I got this from The Catholic Caveman --

Stating that “Catholics can become fanatical about one form of the Body of Christ in the bread of the Eucharist as the REAL presence of Christ,” Father Michael Kelly, the Jesuit CEO of the Asian Catholic news agency UCA News, criticized the doctrine of transubstantiation in a May 24 column.In his column-- a critique of the new, more accurate liturgical translations that reflect the content and dignity of the original Latin-- Father Kelly writes:

"Regrettably, all too frequently, the only Presence focused on is Christ’s presence in the elements of bread and wine. Inadequately described as the change of the 'substance' (not the 'accidents') of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, the mystery of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist carries the intellectual baggage of a physics no one accepts. Aristotelian physics makes such nice, however implausible and now unintelligible, distinctions. They are meaningless in the post-Newtonian world of quantum physics, which is the scientific context we live in today."

I left the following comment, which Caveman was kind enough to print (I have amended it a little bit for here):

I have just finished reading The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, in which he talks about relativity, quantum theory, the uncertainty principle, subatomic physics, the big bang, and other such topics.The conclusions I reached are:

1, it could validly be said that the universe is the result of one infinite and eternal thought;

2, these topics do not affect everyday objects and actions at the human scale[1]. Aristotelian and Newtonian physics are still valid for ordinary use;

3, the transcendent truths revealed by God in Scripture, and by our Lord Jesus Christ, are outside the physical realm;

4, so what physics we use is totally irrelevant to Christian truth, in the sense that physics cannot disprove revelation or theology;

5, God has infinite energy, so by "e=mc^2" we can see that m=e/c^2, and it doesn't matter how big the universe is, because e is infinite;

6, Christ's Passion, Death, and Resurrection are most certainly events at the human scale, in every sense of the word!

The good father should read more physics, and of course his catechism.

[1] Relativity does in fact have some effect on things at the human scale, but the effects are (almost?) always too small to be perceptible, and seldom even capable of being measured.

I have to add that there's no essential difference that I could ever see between the "Big Bang" theory and the first verse of Genesis: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."