Entries from April 2008 ↓

One of the environmental solutions hailed by past Earth Days is now seen to be creating huge environmental problems. Using ethanol, made from corn and other agricultural products, has been found to use more energy than it produces, adds to pollution, and now is contributing to a global food crisis.

See Lester Brown and Jonathan Lewis - Ethanol’s Failed Promise - washingtonpost.com.

Robert D. Novak finds the source of Barack Obama’s “bitterness” comment:

Obama’s new resemblance is less to Kennedy or Reagan than to leftist author Thomas Frank, whose 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” answered the liberal conundrum: Why do ordinary Americans vote against their own economic interests to support Republicans? Frank explained that “deranged” and “lunatic” Kansans were led away by Republicans from material concerns to social issues. Obama similarly described small-town Americans turning to guns and the Bible in frustration over government’s failure to take care of them — a more genteel version of Frank’s thesis. That raises the question, “What’s the matter with Obama?”

Almost everybody I encounter in politics is familiar with Frank’s bestseller. Democrats are united in embracing his theory but are divided about its rhetoric. While sophisticated Democratic politicians regard the book as condescending toward lower-income Americans who voted for Reagan, grass-roots party activists consider it gospel. They tell me that Obama should not back away from what got him in trouble: his declaration at a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco that “bitter” small-towners in Pennsylvania and elsewhere “cling to guns or religion.”

Obama fans, attention to that comment he made in San Francisco is not a matter of jumping on a statement or refusing to accept his explanation or not putting the best construction on everything. This is an issue of Obama’s ideology. It is important to know his political philosophy. Does he believe that economics and economic oppression account for people’s social and religious beliefs? That is, in fact, the common assumption among many people on the left. He is campaigning on the promise to transcend liberal/conservative ideologies. It is surely legitimate to inquire what he believes. Isn’t it?

Some Muslim scientists and scholars are calling for Greenwich Mean Time as the longitude by which the world’s clocks are set to be replaced by the time at the Muslim holy city of Mecca.

That the world uses the Greenwich observatory as 0 longitude and the starting point for the world’s clocks is condemned as a remnant of British colonialism (though it actually had to do with the pioneering navigation of the British navy). Mecca, according to Muslims, is said to be the true center of the world.

The linked story also says that a Muslim watch has been invented, which runs counter-clockwise and which helps Muslims at prayer find the direction of Mecca so that they can bow down in the right direction.

Your “first place” is your home. Your “second place” is your work. Sociologists are noting the resurgence of what they are calling “third places” where people can hang out, socialize, where everybody knows your name, etc. These are neighborhood diners, bars, and (increasingly) coffee houses. This is a healthy development, say in the sociologists, in our society of alienation, rootlessness, and so on. See Satisfying a Craving For Someplace Familiar - washingtonpost.com.

This is indeed good to return to, working against that opposite trend of bowling alone. In the past, though, people tended to belong to lots of groups, but this is a start. (Small town Americans might be amused that this is a new trend, since we have been hanging out at such places all our lives. It must be due to our bitterness.)

So, do you have a “third place”? What lifts it above the merely functional, the place to get something to eat or to grab a cup of coffee?

Does the church function as a “third place”? Could it? Should it?

The front page, top of the fold story in the Washington Post: McCain: A Question of Temperament . The story is about John McCain’s notorious temper, insinuating that he might not have the “temperament” to be president. We await a story on Hillary Clinton’s notorious temper.

Still, what do you think about this issue, which is bound to get hit hard in the general election? According to the story, the main target of McCain’s wrath has been fellow Republicans who renege on Senate deals or who indulge in pork barrel earmarks, which McCain consistently opposes. The story also cites other presidents who had incendiary tempers, including Harry Truman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, and (yes) Bill Clinton.

Is there a danger that McCain might get angry at some foreign leader and get us into war? If we go by the niceness, even-tempered standard, I guess Barack Obama is our man. Is there a danger there too?

As I learned in Australia and as I have blogged about before, cricket is a great game, with many of the virtues of baseball. The teams from India are notable practitioners of the sport. A new league there is trying to modernize the sport, not just by a new three hour version (Twenty20), as opposed to a match normally taking nearly a WEEK, that perhaps might be a version suited to the American attention span. . . .but also by commercializing it and sexualizing the game.

One team has brought over the Washington Redskin cheerleaders into that famously modest nation to gyrate before delighted male cricket fans who, it is said, will have never seen so much female skin before their marriage. See Redskins Cheerleaders Shake Up Cricket In Modest India - washingtonpost.com.

The bringing of the aptly-termed Skins cheerleaders into cricket, with the rest of the accompanying spectacle, including rock bands and laser shows, is being associated with India’s newfound wealth and the over-arching goal of being like the Americans. Killer quote:
“Sexuality and cricket is the way forward. And it’s time India wakes up to the fact that it’s a different society. It’s a modern society. There’s no use keeping it all under wraps.”

The way forward for India is sexuality and cricket!

How my mind works: Ideas, memories, and experiences float around in my head until they crystallize into a question:

Thinking about our popular “Spy Camp,” contemplating our college’s Strategic Intelligence Program, having recently read a book and watched a movie about the origins of the CIA, having taken my son to D.C.’s Spy Museum, having just read a student paper relating the lessons from Shakespeare to the field of Strategic Intelligence, and having just done some research on Graham Greene (one of many author/spies going all the way back to Christopher Marlowe and Daniel DeFoe), I came across a quotation from super-spy and counter-intelligence czar James Jesus Angleton who said that literature majors make the best spies.

Indeed, during World War II and in the eariy days of the CIA, the recruiters for the new intelligence agencies tapped mostly Ivy League English majors.

What connection do you see between the study of literature and the VOCATION of espionage?

If Bill Clinton could be termed the first Black president, George W. Bush could be termed the first Catholic president. No, Kennedy can’t claim that title since he made a point of not letting his membership in the Catholic church influence what he did as president. But Bush, surrounding himself with Catholic advisors, has been actually implementing many points of Catholic social teaching. So says this article: A Catholic Wind in the White House - washingtonpost.com.

Is this journalist confusing “Catholic” principles for just “Christian” principles, such as the pro-life cause? Are the Catholics influential just because they have worked out the rationale for these issues, whereas Protestants have not? Is the influence of Catholicism in the White House something for non-Catholics to be concerned about?

The raid of that compound in Texas with the Fundamentalist Mormons has to make us squirm. Taking over 400 children away from their mothers? Surely they weren’t guilty of anything. And even if there were abuse, their mothers surely weren’t to blame. Here is the latest.

Don’t the investigators need to be more respecting of parental rights, even in a case like this?

Thanks to whatever reader it was who urged me to watchRamsay’s Kitchen Nightmares . I had praised Gordon Ramsey’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” which had probably been pitched as an American Idol for cooks combined with a Marine bootcamp. In “Kitchen Nightmares,” on the other hand, Gordon slaps dysfunctional restaurants into shape.

In a recent episode, the problem was the obnoxious husband in the kitchen and wife who handled the front. They constantly sniped and yelled at each other, and even threw out customers! Gordon had to play marriage counselor, as well as getting rid of the pretension and revamping the menu–getting the owner to cook what he was really good at rather than all of these fancy recipes. Gordon is harsh and brutally honest, but he does have a heart. And there are lots of lessons here, even for non-restauranteurs, about customer service, quality, and VOCATION, VOCATION, VOCATION.

I’ve been critical of Barack Obama the last few days, but this time I can understand his exasperation with the debate run by ABC the other night. See this TV critic’s evisceration of the way ABC handled it:In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC.

Many conservatives, though, are crowing at how badly Obama did and how liberals are being so indignant about ABC.

But on one issue, surely all can agree that ABC blew it: The main questioner was George Stephanopoulos , a former Clinton staffer!

How is it possible that a major network with an actual newsroom would be so blind to such an obvious conflict of interest? The lowliest intern should have been able to catch that howler.

The Pope is here, and Washington, D.C., that secularist haven, is all excited. The Washington Post is full of favorable coverage. We even have a discussion of his vestments from the fashion editor.

Why do you think so many secularists are making such a big deal about the Pope’s visit?