Laws against abortion with exceptions--an analogy

Caveat: What follows is not intended to mean that I endorse a democratic ideal of the family nor that I think that husbands have to defer to wives when it comes to forbidding their children to do things. It is meant for illustrative purposes only.

Suppose that you and your wife become alarmed by the fact that Junior is starting to do some bad things that you never had to have explicit rules about before. In particular, he's doing X and Y, which you quite reasonably regard as species of the same wrong act. In fact, if you prohibited someone from doing X, he'd probably assume he was also prohibited from doing Y unless you expressly stated otherwise. Your wife thinks that Junior should be stopped from doing X but should be allowed to do Y. You and she go back and forth for a while and can't come to any nearer agreement. Meanwhile, Junior is merrily going on doing both X and Y without the slightest fear of reprisal, fear of God not being Junior's strong suit, and fear of man (namely, his parents) not having been brought to bear on the situation. It seems to you rather important that he should be stopped, right away, from doing as much of this stuff as possible. So after one more conversation with your wife, you go to Junior and give him the following speech:

Son, we've not been stopping you from doing X and Y, but that situation is about to change. From now on, if you do X, you will receive such-and-such a punishment. You are hereby forbidden to do X. Unfortunately, your mother and I cannot agree about Y, so for the time being you are not threatened with any punishment from us for doing Y. This doesn't mean that Y is not wrong or that you shouldn't be punished for doing Y just as much as for doing X, and the situation with regard to Y may well change later on. Meanwhile, we're going to make good and sure you get in big trouble if you do X. Got that?

Now, I don't think anyone could say that you were authorizing or endorsing your son's doing Y. Nor does there seem to be any important distinction here to be made between the "author" of the prohibition thus stated and its other supporters. In this case, even though you are the one who wants to prohibit both acts, you are the "author" of the speech to Junior, and your wife is its supporter, rather than vice versa, but it seems to me obvious that that fact does not put you in the wrong. That is to say, you would not be in any morally better situation if your wife made a parallel speech to Junior and you "voted" for it or endorsed it in some other way. In fact, by putting yourself forward as the "author"--the one actually to speak to Junior--you can be especially careful that nothing that even looks like an endorsement of the moral licitness of Y gets into the speech, and you can warn Junior that his days of freedom to do Y may be numbered.

I think this is actually quite a good analogy for the situation of a pro-life legislator who gets an opportunity to write and propose a law outlawing abortion in some cases but allowing exceptions in others, where such a law will vastly improve the legal protection for the unborn in his jurisdiction, and who does so.

It might also be worth pointing out that the heinous and iniquitous court decision Roe v. Wade is not analogous to either of these things--to the pro-life legislator writing a law with exceptions or to the parent speaking to his child. For Roe really did attempt to lock the states into a situation where they could not protect unborn children, and it did so by saying (which was patently false) that abortion is a constitutional right. In so doing Roe's intention and effect was to strike down state laws that protected the unborn. Roe in that sense really did "authorize" abortion in a very specific way, and it is to Roe most of all that we should apply statements about the evil of "laws" (or in this case, the quasi-laws that are court precedents) that authorize abortion.

See here and here for the background to this post.

Q: What kind of celestial body...

...is niggardly with light?

A: A black hole.

Kudos to Lawrence Auster for a great new joke. (I find it very hard to invent jokes, myself.)

His was prompted by what he calls the latest "niggardly" incident in which a county commissioner for Dallas County (one John Wiley Price) interrupted and tried to correct a fellow commissioner (one Kenneth Mayfield) who likened a collections office in the county to a "black hole." To make matters worse, a judge who was present at the meeting (one Thomas Jones) chimed in and tried to make Mayfield apologize for his "racially insensitive analogy." Good for Mayfield, who refused and even attempted to, er, enlighten them on the meaning of the phrase. But apparently the light he was shedding was never reflected back. It just got lost...in the black hole of their ignorance. The report says that the other commissioners hurriedly got the meeting back on track. I suppose we should hope that we hear no more of it, because if we did, it would probably be the mayor offering to fire Mayfield and demanding an apology from him. Or perhaps race riots.

A judge. Can you imagine trying a case before someone that totally ignorant and with that kind of agenda and love of power?

Phonics material now available in PDF

I have now turned about two hundred and fifty pages worth of phonics material that I have written for teaching young children to read into a single PDF document. (I also have it on my own computer as a single Word Perfect document.) The single PDF is available here.

This material previously existed only in the form of over sixty separate Word Perfect files, because I have a separate file for each list or set of lists on a separate phonics concept, as well as separate files for the four short chapters of a book I had begun writing on how to teach your young child to read by phonics.

As I say repeatedly in the material itself, these lessons are for parents who want to teach their own children to read. If somebody takes them and republishes them under his own name, obviously, he's a louse. That's why I put the "copyright" symbol on the title page. (I've called the document, fairly unoriginally, A First Phonics Course for Young Children. Titles were never my strong point, as the name of this blog shows.) But I'm not out to make money on it, and I don't anticipate ever trying. For one thing, it has a very unfinished look about it. I broke off abruptly in Chapter 4 while describing how to teach your child to read blends, because at that point I got too involved in actually teaching my child to read blends. I try to make up for this sudden halt by including, as a separate item, several pages of notes on what it was like to teach Youngest Daughter to read the various phonics lists. These notes contain the same sorts of tips I was writing out at more length in the chapters before I stopped, and they also describe how my lessons are connected with the lists in the back of Rudolf Flesch's invaluable book Why Johnny Can't Read, and What You Can Do About It. But still, what I have written is more a bunch of materials than a book.

If you want to get the file as a zip file in Word Perfect for use with your children, you can e-mail me for it, and we should be able to do that. I have now successfully used the zip function at least once for sending a folder of these things when they were all in separate files. Perhaps this means I've joined the 21st century! The point of having a Word Perfect version is that you can make changes to it for use with your child. These might involve just adding more words at some point, but they also might involve changing the font size if it's too big or too small for your child, or putting the list into a different color.

One of the best things about having the materials in a single file is that I've included a Table of Contents. This allows you to see more or less at a glance what is there. I've also discussed what is there at greater length in a little introductory note at the very beginning. Some parents may want to pick and choose lists for types of words their children are having special trouble on, though the course is cumulative, so if your child hasn't had some of the earlier concepts, he may not be able to read the later lists if you simply jump forward. Still, feel free to browse and use what you find useful.

I would say that the course has a little bit of a "Christian" feel to it, but not strongly so. The words 'God', 'sin', and 'church' are all used, and several of the illustrative sentences when the student is learning the "ch" blend refer to going to church. All of these words are regular and phonetic, so they make excellent illustrations for phonics reading. But the majority of the materials have no special ideological "flavor" at all, that I can see, unless (in the later lessons) you consider "somewhat hard" to be an ideological flavor. :-)

I trust it will be of some value to parents.

Prayer to Allah comes to UK public schools

As you've probably seen elsewhere on the blogosphere, two boys in a public school in the UK were punished with detention for refusing to kneel down on prayer mats and pray to Allah as part of a "religious education" lesson.

But although you've no doubt seen it elsewhere, you haven't heard my two cents, so I might as well give you those two pennies, unasked, just because you were kind enough to drop by.

I think it's a big deal. And I don't think the teacher is going to get in trouble. I think the school officials are going to do precisely nothing to reprimand the teacher but are merely going to tell her that she has to make it clear to her students that this is "role-playing" and that therefore they are, you know, pretending when they kneel down on the prayer mats and pray to Allah. And that will make it all okay.

As you also probably know, there is already a similar curriculum in place in California, which our courts, always so very solicitous to avoid any appearance of an establishment of religion, have declared constitutional on the grounds of role-playing, a ludicrous defense that would never pass the laugh test were the religion in question Christianity. About the only thing that I can see that is missing in the California curriculum is the prayer mats, but I understand that the teachers have some leeway in how they teach it, so I'm sure some enterprising and creative teacher somewhere in the U.S. will stash some prayer mats in her cupboard and whip them out at the right moment to make the "role-playing" that much more real, just like the teacher in the UK. And woe betide the young Christian who refuses.

If you are a Christian parent, is this the sort of role-playing you would want your child to be doing?

Yet another reason to home school.

(Crossposted to What's Wrong with the World)

Moshe Plesser and the Jerusalem terror attack--Updated

In the recent terror attack with a front-loader in Israel, a young off-duty IDF soldier named Moshe Plesser shot the terrorist three times in the head, putting an end to his rampage. It appears that the terrorist may have previously been wounded by a police shot from the ground. Plesser says himself in the interview that at first, when he got onto the cab of the front loader, the terrorist appeared to have "fainted." But then he revived, shouting, "Allahu Akbar," and began driving forward again. At that point Moshe got a gun from another bystander, local security guard Oron Ben-Shimon, and managed to shoot the murderer repeatedly without harming the policeman who was also in the cab. Moshe gave a statement to the media of the "just doing my job" variety, and Ben-Shimon confirms his story here. Moshe thanks God ("G-d") for helping him. Coincidentally, Moshe is the brother-in-law of David Shapira, also in the IDF, who ran into a yeshiva earlier this year and killed a terrorist there, stopping his murderous rampage.

If you go to the very bottom of the entry here, you will find the LiveLeak video of the incident, which is the best one I've seen and gives a clear picture of Moshe shooting the terrorist in the cab. It is after Moshe shoots him several times that a SWAT officer comes up behind him. Reports indicate that the SWAT officer also shot him after Moshe did, but there is no particular reason to think that he was still alive by that time.

This information is all over the Internet, but one reason I am posting it here is because there has been a bizarre Israeli court gag-order banning the publication of Moshe's name. (The Israeli court appears never to have heard of the Internet!) His face has now been blurred out in various pictures of him from the videos (but is clear in the LiveLeak video). And a Jerusalem Post article that previously named him and published part of his statement has now had to redact its article to remove his name. See a quote from the unredacted JPost story here, along with a good still shot from the video. The redacted story is here.

Some have speculated that the ban on Plesser's name and picture may be a result of security concerns, since Plesser is in an elite IDF unit. But my own take is that a real security person would realize the pointlessness of such a ban from a security perspective, given the wide availability of the information and of Plesser's picture. A petty bureaucrat who begrudges the man credit in his own country, however, might have a slightly different perspective. This impression is borne out by the publication of an Orwellian foreign ministry article on the subject that leaves out any mention of Plesser at all, even under an initial, and states that "police shot and killed" the terrorist.

An irony in all of this is that Plesser was beaten senseless by Israeli police when he was photographing protests against the expulsion of Jews from their Gaza homes in '05. So far from holding a grudge against his country for this police brutality, he argued the IDF into letting him in and, yesterday, saved more of his countrymen from an Arab murderer. The Arab murderer, on the other hand, has apparently never been beaten senseless by Israeli police, but international media are falling over themselves, disgustingly, making excuses for him.

Finally, I wish to note that the point I made in this comment, and in the surrounding thread generally, about how it is healthy to have heroes who defend the innocent by fighting, applies in spades to Moshe Plesser, whom I mention in the comment.

Update: Haaretz reports that it was Plesser himself who put the request in for a gag order. His brother-in-law, David Shapira, had advised him to stay away from reporters, and apparently this was one part of his attempt to stay out of the limelight. Assuming this report is true, it still seems rather pointless, given the fact that his name was already widely known. Information can't be constrained in that way in the information age, especially given the heroic nature of the act.

Be a Vegan, Kill Bambi!

From Wesley J. Smith, Here's a perspective on veganism that had never occurred to me before, I being a city slicker and knowing next to nothing about farming. I think Foxfier's vivid account in the first comment of trying to chase fawns out of the field before the harvesting machine gets them--an effort that is sometimes sadly not successful--brings the point home very well.

Conservatives must decisively reject Buchanan's Holocaust revisionism

It just gets worse and worse. I am exceedingly disappointed in World Net Daily for publishing this article by Pat Buchanan. If WND has a long-running relationship with Buchanan such that it feels it has to publish such things by him, then this is the time to sever any such relationship.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that long ago--I can't even remember for sure how long ago, but I think it was in 1988--I once voted for Pat Buchanan in a Republican primary. Well, that was then; this is now. I'm certainly older and hopefully wiser now, not to mention better informed. And I don't think Buchanan was spewing this vicious nonsense then, though even then I had a vague feeling of disquiet about what I knew was his dislike of Israel. That, of course, was before the blogosphere and very nearly before the Internet, so information was not as widely available then as it is now.

What is the worst thing Buchanan says in the above linked article? This:

But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust. Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table....The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.

You get that? Buchanan says there was no Holocaust before the Wannsee Conference in midwinter of 1942. And if nasty old England and presumably America hadn't kept going with the war, if they had found some way to end the war before midwinter of 1942, there would have been no Holocaust at all. Hence the article's title: "Was the Holocaust Inevitable?"

Perhaps it is from reading Buchanan's sort of unblushing balderdash that some people have gotten the impression that there were no concentration camps in 1939. (See the discussion here and here.)

As the quotation shows, Buchanan claims that there was no Holocaust prior to midwinter of 1942 by defining "the Holocaust" as not beginning until the Wannsee Conference. This redefinition is so misleading that it is hard to refrain from calling Buchanan an outright liar. Indeed, he probably in one sense knows more than I do about the events of 1939-1942, yet he makes such a bald claim without so much as a qualifier or explanation. I make no claim to expertise, but I do know how to use Google and read a timeline. So let's look at a few facts.

(Note: The dates in what follows are all taken from the Yad Vashem timeline, which can be accessed by clicking through a couple of links starting here. For some strange reason, there are no separate URLs that appear for the different links, nor even for the separate timelines for groups of years--e.g., 1939-1941. I find this rather frustrating, as it prevents me from putting in links to each of the facts I cite separately. In the absence of such different links, I will give dates for each item. To check the timeline, go to the general link, click on "Chronology," then click on the group of years in question and scroll down to the particular date. The dates are also clickable, and I am getting my specifics from the brief paragraph that comes up when you click on the date.)

Jews in Poland were forced to begin wearing the Jewish badge on November 23, 1939.

The Lodz ghetto was sealed on April 30, 1940.

The Warsaw ghetto was sealed on November 15, 1940.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp began construction on March 1, 1941

German Jews were forced to wear the Jewish badge beginning on September 19, 1941.

The first experimental gassings took place at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941.

The Zhitomir ghetto in the Ukraine was liquidated on September 19, 1941.

In Kiev, the Germans liquidated over 30,000 Jews by gunfire after forcing them to march in ranks towards the guns, on September 29-30, 1941.

The Vitebsk ghetto in Belorussia was liquidated on October 8, 1941.

The Germans began deporting Jews from Austria and Germany to Eastern European ghettos on October 15, 1941.

Eichmann approved the use of mobile gas vans as killing machines on October 25, 1941.

The gas vans began to be used at Chelmno by December 8, 1941.

And all of this is only a sample. I could have given even more examples of massacres, mass deportations, and mass imprisonments of Jews in concentration camps, all before the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, where officials discussed how to make the systematic murder of European Jewry better organized and more efficient.

If you knew of someone who was killed in one of the liquidated ghettos before the Wannsee Conference, would you not say that he died in the Holocaust? What about the Jews systematically murdered in Kiev and elsewhere? If you heard of a child who escaped from one of the sealed ghettos and was taken in and passed as a Christian child by a Catholic family and survived, would you not say that he survived the Holocaust? Were not the building of extermination camps, the requirement for the Jewish badge, and the quarantining of Jews in ghettos in the first place obviously part and parcel of the Holocaust even before the actual murders of those specific Jews took place? The questions are hardly worth asking.

I can't help wondering not only how Buchanan can square his conscience with such blatant falsehoods as those he tells in his article but also how these falsehoods are intended to help his case. In what way is the ever-more-fervent murder of European Jews supposed to have been a response by Hitler to the fact that the war was going badly for him? It makes no sense to say, "Ah, Britain won't make peace with me. I know what I'll do. I'll start sending Jews to extermination camps by the trainloads. That will help." Yet this is, bizarrely, the thinking Buchanan apparently attributes to Hitler, while at the same time having the gall to refer dismissively to the "Hitler madman theory." Are we to think that, if England had made peace with Hitler and acquiesced in his rule over the places he had conquered prior to 1942, he would have stopped all massacres of Jews (like the ones already sealed in ghettos but not yet liquidated)? Or is the theory simply that the slaughter would have taken place more gradually? Hardly a comforting thought.

I hate to have to say this, but someone who can say what Buchanan says in this article is seriously out of touch with reality and, I believe, with the sheer evil of the Holocaust itself. I would not be overwhelmingly surprised if he sinks yet lower in the years to come in his revisionism of the events of World War II. He who hears will understand.

Modest Clothing moment--Lilies Apparel

I like to get out tips to people about modest clothes for girls. It's one of my things. Moms can waste a lot of time looking in the stores for modes girls' clothes. My advice is that for the most part you can write the stores off, except for buying boys' clothes. I buy lots of boys' shirts and shorts for my girls. But for dresses, fuhgetaboutit.

So it occurred to me that I should used blogdom to promote Lilies Apparel, a dress-making business from Kansas run by what appears to be a Mennonite family. The products are very nice. More details in the sister post (can posts be sisters?) at W4.

Oh, one nit-picky detail I didn't mention there: If you are trying to figure out what size to order, measure across the shoulders and chest of a dress that the person in question wears, and then be willing for the dress from Lilies to be a little bigger in those measurements, given that women's and girls' clothes these days tend to be rather too tight. But don't measure the girl herself. The inches given in their size charts are the inches for the relevant parts of the dress.

A very important paper bag

I just got back from the grocery store with a bag that says (Lydia is not making this up), "This is a recyclable bag that will reduce greenhouse gases and save our planet."

I'm not sure which is worse, the writer's naivete about environmentalism or the fact that he probably has no idea that what he wrote means that one paper bag will save the planet.

L.A. right on the money

There is an excellent thread about Buchanan's "unnecessary war" nonsense, about which I'm not sure I can speak without saying something flaming, at VFR here.

I've run into the "unnecessary war" thesis before, from (where else?) the paleo right. I first got an inkling of how far it might go from the highly uncomfortable discussion of WWII in Thomas Woods's otherwise very good libertarian-flavored Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. He more or less asks the question asked of Auster in the thread, "Just how many Jews did World War II save anyway?" Not in so many words, but by implication. Woods says something to the effect that, hey, most of the Jews of Europe were dead anyway by the time the allies liberated it so...(So what?)

And I've seen the whole spiel in other paleo contexts and in personal conversations. It makes me angry. It also, obviously, makes Auster angry, and he's better than I am at answering it, instead of just (as I'm tempted to do) spluttering in horrified fury and wanting to blast or ban somebody for even toying with the idea that we all should have appeased Hitler more, that what Hitler did was none of our business, and so forth.

But let's not kid ourselves. Of course this all has a contemporary edge to it, doesn't it? One of the best things Auster says in that thread is that we should not talk about Hitler as if he was rational. Yes. Precisely. But isn't this what one runs into the twisty-dovish paleo right with regard to our enemies now? And Israel's enemies, too. The "Palestinians" are to be thought of as rational, rather than (as every bit of evidence coming out of their mouths, official pronouncements, published maps, and TV programing indicates) insanely committed to the destruction of Israel. The Iranians, of course, are to be thought of as rational. Even Osama bin Laden is grist to their mill. (The leftists are in on that one, too.) Why, didn't you know? Saudi Arabia is holy ground to Osama, who is from a Saudi family, and America had (gasp!) troops stationed there. Why, if we would only understand ol' Osama, we could deal with him. He has his goals, and they are at least somewhat understandable. And so forth. So we get to the R.P. theory of 9/11--It was the fault of American foreign policy.

The paleos sometimes get angry when the neocons make 1939 analogies about the rantings of the man Auster calls "Johnnie," old "Israel must disappear," of Iran. Yet they themselves positively invite such comparisons by showing the rest of us that they are prepared to regard anyone, however evil, however committed to genocide and destruction, as merely another rational actor on the foreign policy scene, and to be negotiated with (aka appeased) as such. When they hail a revisionist history that says what a great thing it would have been if the West had treated even Hitler himself in this manner, why should they complain when we connect the dots?

It all makes me ill. I'll have none of it, and nothing to do with it. But I applaud Auster's and his readers' dissection of it.

To my comrades in the cause of the unborn child

Byhrtwold grasped his shield and spoke.
He was an old companion. He brandished his ash-spear
and most boldly urged on the warriors:
"Mind must be the firmer, heart the more fierce
courage the greater, as our strength diminishes...."

"The Battle of Maldon," Anglo-Saxon poem, translation by Kevin Crossley-Holland

When a cause is losing, that is the very time when it is most worth fighting for. In fact, it may well be that the only causes worth fighting for are those that are, or appear, to be lost in earthly terms. That your side has seen no results of the sort it hoped for, even for many years, is in no way an argument for endorsing the other side. If the Enemy can say that he has won the souls of the last defenders of the innocent, will that not be his greatest triumph of all?

Why missions matters

To the debate about Muslim takeovers of Western countries, that is.

I wrote to a correspondent recently in e-mail that the low-church Protestants are the canaries in the mine for Muslim oppression of Christians in erstwhile free Western nations. As an exhibit I offer the case discussed in my recent post on W4 concerning two Baptists (Americans long-resident in England) who were forbidden by a Muslim policeman from passing out Christian literature and trying to engage Muslims in religious conversation in a so-called "Muslim area." In the thread on that post, M.Z. Forrest, one of the commentators, actually said, "Why is it always American martyrs? Perhaps they deserve it." (He later said in the thread that this comment wasn't "completely serious.")

Now, I wonder if there is a hint there, too, of the idea that anybody who goes standing on street corners passing out Bible extracts and trying to witness to Muslims cold-turkey "deserves what he gets," because that's such a weird and crass thing to do. Of course, M.Z. didn't say that, and I won't put those words into his mouth.

But it is certainly true that Baptists and their like are a lot more likely than, say, Catholics, to engage in that sort of street evangelism. And it's also true that a lot of people, myself included, are not huge fans of that sort of evangelism, feeling vaguely that it's a little tacky, unlikely to be effective, a case of "bugging people," and so forth.

But the more I have thought about it the more I realize that the matter of evangelism is crucial for the whole question of dhimmitude. While Our Lord didn't say, "Go ye into all the world and pass out tracts on street corners," he did say, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel." While some people are called to missions more than others, and some people are called to engage in evangelism in different ways than others are, the Great Commission hasn't been rescinded.

And it's flatly incompatible with dhimmitude. I made that point in this exchange with Jim Kalb on the subject of whether Islam "has room for" Christianity. This is something I've never heard anyone else say: Christians are supposed to try to spread their faith. Islam makes converting from Islam to Christianity punishable by death. It is thus no accident that Christian missions are illegal in Muslim countries like, say, Iran. So in a sense, anti-dhimmitude is built into Christianity. We aren't allowed to ask nothing more of the world than to be let alone. We are called upon by the very nature of our religion to stand up, be men, and try to lead others to the light of Christ.

The trouble is unfortunately that some Christians don't realize all of this. Some Christians think that Islam "has a place for" Christianity so long as one is sophisticated and sensitive enough to keep quiet and to leave other people alone, not to do offensive, low, uncouth, things like standing on street corners passing out tracts and preaching to total strangers.

But this isn't true. Consider this story from Iran. An Iranian Christian woman gave sewing lessons. In the course of her sewing lessons, some of the women she was teaching came to know about her Christianity and were attracted to it. One of them, from a fanatical family, converted. The convert had to run away, and the seamstress was punished by the family for her role in the conversion. She had no legal recourse. The judge told her it was her fault and that she should be happy nothing worse had happened to her. So even quietly testifying to your faith in a natural manner to interested people is not permitted. And understandably enough. Remember, the penalty to one who converts is death, so there must be some penalty for being deliberately instrumental in conversions.

Worse, some Christians think that we are not called upon to try to witness to people, to try to get them to (as the negative phrase now is) "change their religion." And I am afraid that some "interfaith efforts" have contributed to this confusion. Once again, the fundamentalist types are the ones warning us about this. Maybe they have a point. Maybe we should listen.

So it's an interesting connection: The confused ideas about evangelism and the negative image of evangelism (now sometimes called "proselytizing," which indicates the shift) among some Christians have arisen independently of the rise of Islam in the West. But that negative image has left a weak spot, so that when low-Protestant missionaries get into trouble, I fear that there is a feeling of "that doesn't have that much to do with me" that goes around and that enables people to say that Islam "has a place" for Christianity. But actually, it doesn't, because it has no place for proselytizing, and we are called to proselytize.

Y.D. Blogs

Y.D. being Youngest Daughter.

Not really, of course. But she expressed herself rather forcefully about a matter of public policy today, so Eldest Daughter tells me that I should blog it to make sure that this young Michigander's voice is heard--she being a future voter.

We just learned today that effective July 1, all children under age 8 who are not yet 4' 9" tall will have to sit in a special car booster seat. Y.D. has been very happy to be a big girl and use a seatbelt, and I've been very happy not to lug about a special carseat, transfer it from car to car when necessary, and figure out the convoluted way it's supposed to be fastened. It's also been nice for her to be able to clip herself in and get herself out. But now it's back to the old grind for several more years.

Y.D., upon being told the news, informed us in loud tones, "That's darn-goned nonsense and balderdash!!!" Also, "I'll make them not have that law!"

Now you know that I use the same silly euphemisms at home that I use on the Web, though I don't recall ever actually using 'darngoned' before, but it's close to 'doggoned', which I do use frequently.

So the darngoned thing is ordered from Target. At least the reviewers tell me it's lightweight. We must be thankful for small blessings. The old carseat, long since sent to carseat heaven, weighed a ton. Sigh.

The FLDS fiasco and the lust for power

I've been following the FLDS fiasco at Jeff Culbreath's blog. His latest post on the subject is here.

I admit to being the kind of person who fantasizes about making the world right. From time to time I realize that this is not really a healthy habit of mind. But sometimes I get exceedingly upset about people who, for example, raise their children to hate Jews so much that they idolize suicide bombers and hope to grow up to be like them. Some of the things coming out of Palestinian media are beyond depressing. I've got a whole file of the links, including interviews with and Palestinian media depictions of the children of Rim, a woman suicide bomber. "How many Jews did Mommy kill?" and so forth. It's almost too much to bear, watching these children's minds be corrupted. LGF sometimes has stuff about Hamas children's television. It's just about beyond belief. And I have sometimes toyed with the idea that people who are going to teach their children these twisted ideas could, quite justly, have all their children taken away from them so that they couldn't poison their minds like this anymore. The children could be raised by, I don't know, Mother Teresa's nuns or something.

But even though I would stand by the idea that Hamas's Jew-eating bunny (they had a Mouse and a Bee, too, but in the TV show's imaginary world the Israelis killed them), the various horrific inciting commercials, and the school curricula and school programs that glorify murder to the children may and should justly be suppressed, the terrible mess caused by Child Protective Services' power trip in our own Texas, U.S.A., has caused me to realize that you have to let parents mess up kids' minds. That is to say, it is not just cause for removing children forcibly from their parents that the parents are teaching the children pernicious ideas, even if they really are pernicious ideas. Most of the time I'm sufficiently sane to realize this and am, indeed, something of a parental rights watchdog, but sometimes (after I've been reading too much about Muslims and Palestinians), it's good for me to be reminded.

I have no doubt that the CPS workers were sincere. That's part of the problem, isn't it? Lawrence Auster is always pointing out that conservatives should take liberals more seriously. What he means is that liberals aren't just doing what they do to aggrandize themselves. Many of them are true believers. I suppose I'd say that self-aggrandizement and sincerity are compatible. The CPS workers decided that this cult was just bad, bad, bad, that children shouldn't be raised in it, and they went in with no deference to the rule of law and grabbed over 400 children of all ages, every single child down to the infant born yesterday, in one fell swoop! By their own representation, what was supposed to be so bad was that underage girls were being married against their will. Even granting this, what the dickens does this have to do with newborn babies? Since when do the laws of the United States or the State of Texas permit the confiscation of infants on the grounds that they may be raised to sanction or participate in underage or even forced marriage? But all the indications are that the CPS just decided that this whole sub-society had to be brought to an end. Finis. Done.

Frankly, if I had breathed a word of the idea that Palestinian children should be taken from their death-cult-teaching parents so that they would not be raised in that fashion, the word "genocide" would not have been long in coming to the lips of readers. But oddly enough, the fact that CPS was trying, by the confiscation of the next generation, to wipe this weird polygamist sect from the face of the earth was not called this by anyone that I know of. Fortunately, though, there still is a rule of law in the state of Texas, and it looks as if CPS and Judge Barbara Walther may get a bit of a slap-down from the higher courts over their abuse of power.

Lord Acton was undoubtedly right: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." And the power to snatch children is somewhere pretty high up on the scale towards absolute power.

So I don't want it, and I'm glad I don't have it. And perhaps we should pray for the souls of the CPS workers who think they do have it, and who think they can wield it to wipe out bad ideas. For it is surely a corrupting thing.

What's a vote? New post at W4

I have a new post at W4 that has been the product of much thought, though I had for a while decided that it would never actually be written. It's on the nature of the vote. It has been prompted by the crazy news that some so-called pro-lifers are considering voting for Barak Obama. To my mind the best comment on this was by my co-blogger Zippy in a combox:

This may be our first genuinely postmodern election cycle. "Zionists for Hitler!"

I couldn't have said it better myself. But as I do have more to say on the meaning of voting, I've said it, here.

But feel free to comment here, if you like. :-)

Comments moderation removed

Dear readers,

I have removed comments moderation and the requirement for blogger ID for the time being. You will have to do one of those things where you type the word you see. I hope that this will work well.

A joke about penguins

I had been drafting a really depressing post about a book I'm re-reading (In the Beginning, one of his third-tier ones) by Jewish novelist Chaim Potok and about how Israel isn't defending herself and stuff, but it will have to wait. I got so depressed trying to write it that it's still in draft.

So to go along with the extremely profound post below about ziploc bags, herewith a joke I found on Dawn Eden's blog:

A policeman is out on patrol when he sees a man driving a convertible with a bunch of penguins in the back seat. The cop pulls him over and says, "Hey, you can't drive around with a bunch of penguins like that. I want you to take those penguins to the zoo right now!" The driver says, "Sure thing, officer. Right away. I don't want any trouble." And the policeman lets him drive off. The next day the policeman sees the same guy out with the same penguins, only this time they're wearing dark glasses and bathing suits. So he pulls him over. "Hey! I thought I told you to take those penguins to the zoo yesterday." The man looks a little puzzled. "Yes, sir, officer. I did just as you said. Today they want to go to the beach."

I really like that one.

Ziploc bags--Supply creates its own demand

I tried really hard to think of something profound to say about Pentecost, today being that feast. But nothing came to mind. So rather than bore you with my uninspired thoughts about the Holy Ghost, or even about the collect for Pentecost, I thought I would talk about something I know a lot more about. Ziploc bags.

Why in the world? (I hear you ask.) Well, because I was putting something into a ziploc bag the other evening, and it suddenly occurred to me that I understand now the good sense in which supply creates its own demand. (This, as all of you know, is a saying in economics.) Now, we all have heard people talk about how terrible it is for manufacturers to create by advertising a desire in people for something they never previously wanted. It's supposed to be a form of stimulating lust and so forth. It can be made to sound faintly indecent--making people think they need something that they manifestly don't need. It's easiest to make it sound bad if you get on a roll talking about bigger cars or about food that is probably going to make people fat and isn't good for them anyway. Whiny kids and breakfast cereal commercials are another good target.

But I would bet that I'm not that much over the average age of the people in my audience of, oh, two to five people who will ever read this post. And so I'll bet most of you can remember a world without ziploc bags. Remember? All my toys used to be tumbled into a big padded white toy box. It was like I was putting them away in a padded cell. A very messy padded cell, and one that got dirtier and dirtier as the years went by, so that eventually it was grey and the plastic torn, and I would find pieces of long-forgotten toys rattling around inside. Even if my parents had wanted to be good citizens and give away my toys to the poor(er) as I outgrew them (I having no younger siblings), they couldn't have, because every set and everything with parts was separated into its component parts, which were scattered to the four winds. Or piled into the toy box.

Leftover food had to be kept in tupperware. This was after tupperware. But if it got forgotten in the fridge, the tupperware had mold on it, which might or might not wash off. You couldn't just throw it away. You had to try to scrub it. And sometimes the tupperware lost its seal, or the plastic wrap didn't cling, or one was foolish enough to use tinfoil, which didn't really seal out air, and stuff got completely dried out. (I just recently got rid of a lot of old tupperware.)

And don't even get me started talking about what one did with the pieces from half-finished jigsaw puzzles, nuts and bolts that were no longer in their blister packs, or tiny little lego pieces.

The world needed ziploc bags. The world didn't know that it needed ziploc bags, but it did. Big ones, medium-sized ones, and small ones.

Is need relative? Sure it is. I would rather have the food (that gets dry if not well-sealed) and no ziploc bags to seal it in than have the bags and no food. Right. Check. I'm there.

But the minute whoever-he-was (I haven't googled to try to find out) invented ziploc bags, the world woke up and began to think about how, if it could afford this new product, it could solve a lot of niggly, annoying, practical problems in storage.

My kids have a building toy called Wedgits. I recommend it, with the proviso that if you have more than one child of any age from two to fifteen years old, they will probably squabble over these things. They are very cool. You can build all kinds of fascinating shapes with them. They come in an interesting box that has a plastic storage piece in the bottom. If you put the set of Wedgits together perfectly into the three-dimensional shape of a diamond, the diamond, containing all the Wedgits in that set, will fit back into the storage unit it came in. But who has the time to figure out how to do that every time? And I want the four-year-old to be able to pick up for herself. Ziploc bags.

In other words, and to put it prosaically, this was a case where people did not lust over something that was bad for them or that they should not want as a result of the desire-creation of the market. They looked at something, ingeniously designed, that would help make their lives more efficient, they discovered that it was cheap enough for them to afford, and they rationally decided to buy it. Supply created its own demand, and the rest is history.

I'm for it.

Blessed Feast of the Ascension

The feast of the Ascension has been one of my favorite church holy days for a long time. It celebrates all that great stuff from the Epistle to the Hebrews: Jesus is both man and God. Therefore, when Jesus goes back to heaven where he "sitteth on the right hand of the Father," man has actually been exalted to the heavens in Christ. This was the first time that a resurrected human body had gone to heaven. Even though Elijah had apparently been taken up living into heaven, he didn't have a glorified body. We aren't told what happened to his ordinary body, but presumably he has to wait for the resurrection of the dead along with the rest of us for his resurrection body. Jesus was, as Paul says in I Corinthians, "the firstfruits of them that sleep." He was the first one to be risen in a new body that will never die. So when he ascended into heaven, he took that glorified humanity back to the Father, where it had never been before. From there he intercedes for us, for as Hebrews says, he is a fitting high priest for us, having both offered himself for our sins and also being human as we are.

My impression is that Ascension did not always have an octave. Cranmer wrote his own collect for the Sunday after Ascension, basing it on a song that the Venerable Bede is supposed to have sung on his deathbed. Here are both collects for Ascension.

Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.


O God, the King of glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven; We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

P.S. On a mundane note, and in case anyone else has this problem, I figured out how to turn on "sent items" in Yahoo mail. George was no help. The relevant thing to click is hidden over in mail options.

New Post on W4 plus the Amazing Disappearing Sent Items

My blogging time this week went into a new post at What's Wrong with the World on a disturbing thing--disturbing to me anyway--I'm starting to learn about forced upward mobility in the corporate world. It's here.

Plus, my conservative soul is vexed to find that Yahoo has changed my e-mail format. Why do they do that? It was fine. Of course, they play it as a great improvement. Can't say I see it. One nifty new aspect is the disappearance of the "save sent items" feature. The "sent items" folder is still there. You just can't turn it on. I haven't found out yet if this is a judgement for my having had it turned off. I don't like to save everything I send, so I usually have it off. Now there's no way to turn it on anymore. I've written to Yahoo help about this three (count 'em, three) times. Each time I get a cute note from what is obviously a computer calling itself George (I hate computers with names) telling me that, because Yahoo likes to provide fast and efficient service, they aren't going to answer my question. It's a pretty simple question: "Has the save sent items feature really disappeared, or is the button just moved? If the former, could you please put the feature back again? I was using it sometimes." But no answer. Just a repeated link to a help page which, of course, doesn't mention this topic.

I definitely think they need to get some good, capitalist customer service going at Yahoo. And they should fire George. I don't think he has a wife computer and baby computers at home to support.

Easter IV

The collect for the fourth Sunday after Easter reads as follows:

O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men; Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Why is this such a great collect? I'm gilding the lilies even to talk about it, but I feel that not enough attention is paid to the great collects of the Prayer Book and that they deserve that we should stop and think about them and, of course, pray them.

Verbally, it is one of those works of liturgical genius which really cannot be improved upon--or at least can't be improved upon anymore. Cranmer translated it from the Latin, but in 1662 the Restoration Prayer Book revisers added the invocation "O God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men." As is so often the case with the Prayer Book, it is amazing that men spaced hundreds of years apart in history should have worked so well together to create the final product. Any sensible person nowadays should shudder at the words "liturgical revision." But the 1662 guys could put something in that really worked.

For the rest of the collect asks God to do something for us that we know from experience is very hard to do. Do we most of the time love and desire what we are commanded by God to love and desire? "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness..." Oh, bother the kingdom of God and righteousness! I want another cup of coffee! I want some potato chips and a fun book! I want some time to myself. I want lovely weather. I want a day off. I want, I want, I want. Not bad things. But not the kingdom of God, either. "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above....Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." (The epistle reading for Easter Day.) But how can I seek those things which are above, when I can't even picture them? I don't know what heaven will be like. I don't know what I'll be doing. I don't know what, exactly, it means to desire union with God or the Beatific Vision. So how do I set my affections on them and not on things on the earth?

And so forth. So the revisers were on to something when they put that bit in there about how God is the only one who can order our unruly wills and affections. And Cranmer describes, then, what we want God to do for us--make us love the things that God commands, and desire what God promises. To fix our hearts there where true joys are to be found.

What does God promise? That he will wipe away all tears from our eyes; that there will be no more death nor crying. That he will make us holy and like himself.

Sometimes we have to take it on faith that these are the true joys, because we don't naturally feel that way. Other times, it's easy. It doesn't matter. As Lewis said, our feelings are only things that happen to us. But our hearts are more than our feelings. Our hearts include our unruly wills. And that's why God sends so many sundry and manifold changes into the world. Or at least allows them. They make us long for the patria: "They confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. Wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he hath prepared for them a city."

What that means is that praying this collect may be inviting some unpleasantness in life, as unpleasantness does, unfortunately, seem sometimes to be required in order to make us love what God commands and desire what he promises. But part of the genius of the collect is that it works, like all great rhetoric, upon the emotions and will. Praying it quiets one's heart and makes one realize that, yes, indeed, true joys are to be found somewhere else, and we should desire to have them, whatever that takes.

So I offer you the collect for the fourth Sunday after Easter, which the editors of The Collects of Thomas Cranmer call "one of the high points of Anglican theology." And I hope it will be of value to you.

It's okay to push molecules around

I apologize to my long-suffering readers here at Extra Thoughts, if I retain any, for my silence in the last couple of weeks. Spring has finally come to this part of the world, very beautifully indeed. This does not make me any more busy, but it does lead me to drink my afternoon coffee outside and soak up a little sunshine instead of blogging. Which is probably all to the good.

You will see another post or two in the next couple of days, especially since tomorrow's collect is one of the very best in the whole Prayer Book, so I have to blog it. (There, I'm committed.)

But over at What's Wrong with the World I have a deliberately provocative post up about divine and even human intervention in nature. Not very profound. More in the nature of a rhetorical sock to the jaw for people who get all icky about the idea that anybody might push molecules around. Molecules, in my opinion, were meant to be pushed.

Hymn of the Week--Onward, Christian Soldiers

About five years ago a friend said to me, quite confidently, "Do you know what the subtitle of 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' is? 'Crusader's Hymn.'"

It's surprising that so short a statement can contain more than one egregious falsehood, but this one manages it, rather as if I were to point across the room and say, "My uncle over there is a dentist" when in fact I have no uncle and the man across the room is a hockey player.

To begin with, and as my readers probably know, hymns do not have subtitles, and the words under the title of the hymn actually are the name of the tune. Tune names make it easy for hymnodists to mix and match. The practice of naming tunes separately and writing words for them evidently goes back at least as far as the Psalms, where we sometimes find directions at the top of a Psalm along the lines of, "For my chief musician. To be sung to the tune 'Lilies'." The connection between tunes and hymn words is exceedingly varied, and most of the time the tune name has nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the words with which we most often sing the tune.

But it doesn't end there. The actual name of the tune to which we now sing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" is not "Crusader's Hymn" but rather the entirely unmilitary and humorous "St. Gertrude." The words were originally sung to a different tune, until the famous Arthur Sullivan wrote this tune to go with them in 1871 and facetiously named it after the wife of a friend of his. I don't know whether he told everyone that this was the origin of the name or whether he was trying to create a puzzle for posterity as everyone hunted for a fictitious connection to St. Gertrude, but if the latter, he has been foiled by, inter alia, the information age. (Search "Gertrude" on the page.)

As a matter of fact, "Crusader's Hymn" is really the name of the tune to "Fairest Lord Jesus," than which nothing less militaristic can be conceived, either musically or in terms of content. Just to make things thoroughly confusing, this tune is also sometimes called St. Elizabeth. I have no idea why the one tune has two different names.

As Darwin observed, false facts are an injurious thing. I never did find out where my friend got that particular factoid. I must assume that it circulates along with other unchecked statements in a sort of spoken version of Wikipedia among slightly leftish evangelical Christians who dislike military language.

By the way, I discovered my favorite verse of this hymn last evening when someone chose it at our hymn sing. Here's verse 2:

At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee;
On then, Christian soldiers, on to victory!
Hell’s foundations quiver at the shout of praise;
Brothers lift your voices, loud your anthems raise.

I like that image of hell's foundations quivering and Satan's host fleeing. May it be so.

Latimer supporters threaten Mark Pickup

...but he does not submit. See Mark's story about Robert Latimer, who murdered his disabled daughter and is proud of it, here. I've also blogged about the attempts to silence Mark at What's Wrong With the World, here.

Comments moderation enabled

Dear Readers,

I have reluctantly decided to enable comments moderation for a time, even on such a low-traffic blog as this one. This action is in response to continued traffic from one particular undesired reader whom I picked up quite by accident by writing a negative post about someone he evidently admires and who has ignored un-subtle hints to take himself off. This is not the first time that I have picked up oddball readers by putting the name of a fanatically admired kook into the heading of a post. Google alerts appears to be my bane, and I shall have to learn to give my posts less obvious titles. Since this is my personal blog, I do not feel obligated to interact with comments from people who give me the creeps (either by their handles or by their opinions) or who fanatically admire people who give me the creeps. So that's that.

To all the rest of you, please do not be discouraged by moderation from posting your comments. I am on my e-mail many times a day and will receive alerts and post your comments very quickly. And I hope that this change will not be permanent.

Just exactly like that

I was studying Colossians with Middle Daughter the other day. Got to the part where Paul warns his readers about people who will beguile them with enticing words. It's in the "vain philosophy" section. One conjecture is that the heresy in question was an early form of Gnosticism, so I was trying to explain a little about Gnosticism to her. I got to the part about how the Gnostics tried to create mysteries and then told people that they could be part of their secret "club" by going through an initiation ceremony. People thought this was pretty cool and that they would be profound thinkers like their teachers if they learned this hidden knowledge, but really it was all nonsense.

To which she replied, "That's sort of like postmodernism. Where they say that yes and no are the same thing."

Yes, sweetheart, very much so. Right on.

Some more Easter music

There is so much good Easter music. If I may venture to give advice, I would suggest that you sing to celebrate Easter. Even if you can't sing. Play some Handel and go around humming it. Sing something you sang in church this morning. It's worth it. He is risen!

Here is "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth." Here is "The Trumpet Shall Sound." Eldest Daughter at ages 2 and 3 (which is now getting uncomfortably long ago) used to refer to this bit of Handel as "Wumpable" from the oft-repeated line "And the dead shall be raised incorruptible." It was one of her faves.

I looked all over the Web for a sung version of "Because He Lives" that I liked. Except for the rather sappy verse about "our newborn baby," it's one of my favorite sing-along 70's Gospel songs and has been much in my mind today. We have had some wonderful times singing it with the family I blogged about here. But I just did not like any of the full-length Youtube versions. Some of them just started out with the "newborn baby" verse and entirely left out what is really verse 1, which begins, "God sent his Son. They called Him Jesus," and ends, "An empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives." And leaving that verse out would seem to be leaving out the whole point, right? (The newborn baby in verse 2, for those of you who don't know, is the Gaithers' baby in 1970, not Jesus.) One version by a black group that I rather liked at first lost my endorsement and link when it got to verse 3 and gave a crucial line as "I'll fight life's trials, no war with pain." Say what? The line is actually, "I'll fight life's final war with pain," which actually is rather moving and sobering. And some versions were just too self-indulgent. So here is a relatively tame sung version of just the chorus, repeated several times. And here is just the music, with the words displayed, a fun synth version on a site called, of all things, "Mama rocks."

If you have choral versions of great Easter hymns you want to recommend, or links to other Easter music you recommend, post them in the comments. I couldn't quite yet find a choir version of "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" that had all the normal words and sounded good.

Happy Easter

A joyous feast of Our Lord's glorious resurrection to my readers.

I've been thinking a lot about the resurrection lately, what with the paper and all. C.S. Lewis said that he never felt less convinced of a doctrine than when he had just successfully defended it. Thankfully (and I am thankful) that hasn't happened to me in this case.

Over at WWWtW I've posted Updike's poem.

Here are the words for one of the many of the very best of the Easter hymns. By Charles Wesley, of course:

1
Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!
Sons of man and angels say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply, Alleluia!

2
Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once he died our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where's thy victory, boasting grave? Alleluia!

3
Love's redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!

4
Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

I was trying to figure out why I was having so much trouble finding these words instead of links that had something strange I'd never seen before--"Earth and heaven in chorus say"--for the second line of verse 1. Then it hit me: That's the PC revision to avoid the word "Sons." Sheesh!

Here is the version of the words in our 1940 hymnal. I'm not quite sure I have this right, but I think from what it says here as well as at the previous link that there were some verses originally in Latin written in the 14th century and that Charles Wesley just wrote a whole bunch of others in the same vein. It looks as though all of the ones I quote above are by Wesley but only the fourth one in the 1940 hymnal is by Wesley.

Songs to Die for--Precious Lord, Take My Hand

A couple of weeks ago Youngest Daughter said, "I want you to sing to me." So I sat down with her and broke out the standard repertoire for such sessions--chiefly Negro spirituals and early American hymn tunes or folk tunes. "Brethren, We Have Met to Worship," "Sweet Little Jesus Boy," "I Wonder As I Wander," "Talk About a Soul," "Poor, Wayfarin' Stranger," "I Want Jesus to Walk With Me," and "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" are the ones I can remember. Eventually Middle Daughter came out and asked, "Are those all songs that were written by the slaves?" I told her that as far as I could tell, only a few of them were, but that the tunes to the rest of them were old American tunes. Except for one. The only one I thought fell into neither category was "Precious Lord."

So I looked it up and got quite a surprise. It turns out that "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" is written to a modified version of the very same tune as one of my other favorites, which I've blogged about already, "Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone." I've known both of those songs for years and never recognized the similarity once. But I was right that it isn't either a spiritual or early American. Thomas Dorsey, the black song writer who wrote the words and put them to the tune in 1932, did something pretty cool. Basically he took what is essentially a "white" American hymn tune (akin in chord pattern and style to "Amazing Grace"), written in the 1800's by a man named George N. Nelson, and he gave it a spiritual "swing," adding a number of extra notes to fill it out and make it slower. So my ear did detect correctly the fact that it isn't a true spiritual, but I also detected correctly its vague resemblance to a spiritual. Dorsey wrote the song after his wife died in childbirth; their child then also died. Here are the words:

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, let me stand,
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light:
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.

When my way grows drear,
Precious Lord, linger near,
When my life is almost gone,
Hear my cry, hear my call,
Hold my hand lest I fall:
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.

When the darkness appears
And the night draws near,
And the day is past and gone,
At the river I stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand:
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.

Now, if I could just find some confirmation of my gut feeling that all the sources are wrong, and that "Let us Break Bread Together on our Knees" is not a spiritual, I'd feel like a real instinctive music historian. The harmony seems wrong for the genre; the words seem wrong for the genre. But I have to admit that Google is solidly against my gut instinct on this one, so probably that one really is a spiritual.

Thy beauty, long-desired

This morning we sang "O Sacred Head." I always have a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around verse 2:

Thy beauty, long-desirèd,
hath vanished from our sight;
thy power is all expirèd,
and quenched the light of light.
Ah me! for whom thou diest,
hide not so far thy grace:
show me, O Love most highest,
the brightness of thy face.

The image is clear enough: Jesus on the cross had been so beaten by the soldiers that his face could hardly be seen clearly. But what about the "beauty" part? The trouble here is my over-literal mind. I immediately start thinking about what Jesus probably really looked like. We have absolutely no reason to believe that he was especially handsome. In fact, Isaiah 53 prophecies that he will not be particularly impressive in appearance. Considering the matter literally and historically, rather than devotionally, we should picture Our Lord at the time of his death as a Jewish man in his early 30's, toughened by outdoor living, bearded, probably dark-eyed. OMEA, as the new expression is. So what's the special "beauty" the hymn writer is talking about?

Well, the hymn writer isn't thinking literally and historically but rather devotionally. There are several different strands or traditions, both Protestant and Catholic, of the "beautiful Jeus" motif, including the "beautiful name" motif. And I have to admit that none of them speak to me very deeply. So I'd like to take this in a totally different direction from the one the author probably intended: Consider it, in the terms of E.D. Hirsch, a matter of the "significance" of the lyrics (to me and possibly to you) rather than of their "meaning."

I was suddenly struck while singing the song with the thought that babies do appear beautiful to their mothers, even if not to strangers. When you are bonding with your newborn, you do a lot of looking down and gazing. I've never had a son, only daughters, but as far as I know it's the same way with sons as with daughters. Now, Jesus was of course someone's Son. And Mary had doubtless seen him in many different situations before he grew up and became a bearded and perhaps somewhat scruffy, outdoor-living itinerant preacher. She had seen him laughing, running, studying Torah, intent over work with Joseph, asking the questions at the Passover meal, enjoying his food, seen him grow in strength and, yes, in beauty. So even from a purely literal, human, and historical perspective, there was one person at the foot of the cross who would have had a real meaning for the notion that his beauty had "vanished from our sight." That one person would have that contrast in mind--the face battered almost beyond recognition in contrast to the tiny infant face, the laughing boyish face, the young man with a twinkle in his eye, all those images of peace, joy, and relaxation. That human beauty that every mother's son, made in the image of God, has in the eyes of a woman who loves him.

And that thought finally gave me an entrance into the devotional possibilities of that verse of the song. For he "humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross"--and that was what it meant: That by cruel men, his human worth was set aside and his human flesh, that humanity in which he had been loved and had loved, had felt the sun and the wind, had eaten and played, had sung and learned, was tortured and killed. In that, he is like every young man cruelly slaughtered by his enemies, every young man mourned by his mother. But with a difference. Because this Victim was not just a victim, and this Victim finally conquered death. And this Victim died for all the sons of men, that by His death they might be redeemed.

Quick cross reference to new W4 post

I meant to write something here about hymns and songs but don't have time. But I have a new post on What's Wrong with the World that I'm rather pleased with. The writing could stand to be polished, but the structure is fairly tight, which is a pleasant thought.

A reader of W4 is a former reader of Right Reason. He is planning a paper on the subject of the role of religious beliefs in public policy, and he sent me the link to his posts on the subject on his new blog, "Being Appeared to Bloggishly." So instead of just telling him what I thought in his combox or in an e-mail, I wrote up a post of my own about it.

Announcing a new annotated bibliography on historical apologetics

I'll be posting briefly about this on What's Wrong with the World in the next couple of days, too. Meanwhile, I'm very pleased to announce here that Tim McGrew's annotated bibliography on historical apologetics is available on my personal web page, here.

It's taken a while for Tim to be satisfied that the biblio is ready for web posting, but it really is good to make this stuff widely available to people who will find it useful. If you have a history buff in your life or a Christian apologetics buff, and especially if you know someone who is both, get him the link. It's cool stuff.

Humor for mathematical folks

Attention all you readers with some mathematical flair or knowledge. Or even without. (I don't have a whole lot of that myself and enjoyed it.) Here is a video you'll want to watch for relaxation and laughs.

I had never heard of Tom Lehrer until the other day, but I'm told that he taught statistics at MIT for quite a number of years in the Political Science department (he mentions that on the video) and then apparently made a living as a musician. Here's the Wiki article. I gather he was/is a flaming liberal and was best known years ago for his political satire against the "conservative establishment" and on subjects like nuclear proliferation. I must say that he doesn't seem as sensitive on all that stuff as liberals are nowadays in the video (made in 1997); he makes a joke in one of the songs about having a more inclusive mathematics so as not to discriminate against numbers to the left of the origin. A sense of humor is a saving grace that too many liberals lack.

The archive.org video is thirteen minutes long. He begins to introduce my favorite song of the lot at about 7 minutes, 15 seconds. It's "Sociology" and is sung to the tune of "Choreography" from the movie White Christmas. I've always loved "Choreography," sung in the movie by Danny Kaye, which in its turn mocks pretentious, pseudo-intellectual dance forms. Lehrer's version makes fun of the attempt to disguise the fact that one is talking nonsense by putting it in mathematical terms to make it look scientific. You should be able to let the video load while watching the first few minutes, then push the slider to the right until the timer reads about 8 minutes, if you want to skip to the later song. I just tried it, and it worked, though that may be because I already watched the whole thing through once on this computer. But the whole video is funny if you have the time to enjoy it.

Comic and musical relief

Okay, now, just for fun. I was...rather young in 1971 when the Three Dog Night's rendition of "Joy to the World" topped the charts. And besides, I was a sweet little Baptist girl, and what would I know about rock music? It was a while more before we had a TV, and a while more after that before I saw a sappy and silly movie called something like Sunshine in the middle of which the song occurred. I don't remember a lot about the movie--a lot of motorcycle riding, a cute little girl--but the song stuck. It was cool.

In my teens, my taste in music had gone downhill temporarily. By then we were into the era of (ick) disco. But still, "Joy to the World" stuck somewhere in the back of my head. And for something like twenty years now I've been wondering how the lyrics go after "was a good friend of mine." Lyric searches are, surprisingly often, vain on the Internet because of copyright considerations, so I've only just now gotten around to trying to looking it up. And here it is.

Elsewhere on the fun front, from The Onion, here is a news flash on a new Iraqi law to require a five-day waiting period before purchasing suicide vests. Don't drink anything while watching it. It's hilarious. (HT for that one--TROP)

Norman Finkelstein--Kookball Extraordinaire

I had heard only faint rumblings about a professor denied tenure at DePaul last summer/fall. I paid little attention and hadn't wittingly ever heard of Norman Finkelstein until his name came up on Little Green Footballs a couple of months back. (I'm not going to do the search just now to find the link.) Couldn't quite figure the whole thing out. LGF and others call him a Holocaust denier, which could be true for all I know, but maybe he's a "minimizer" instead, given that apparently his mother was a Holocaust survivor. "Minimizers," I gather, come in various shapes and forms, though they are odious enough.

I couldn't quite figure out exactly why he was denied tenure from an academic point of view. I mean, consider all the people who do have tenure. How did they find a way to deny this guy? On the other hand, he's apparently a sort of sycophantic attack-dog for his dear friend Noam Chomsky, which is probably enough to lower the quality of anyone's academic work. And no, I don't mean in linguistics.

As it happens, I have a friend who is on staff at DePaul who tells me that the word on the staff side is that you were lucky if you never had to deal with Norm, because he's a jerk. I put a lot of weight on this, by the way. In my opinion, staff at a large university pretty much keep the place running, sometimes nearly single-handed, and they probably deserve to get paid a lot more than they do get paid. If the staff think a faculty member is a jerk, odds are high that he is a jerk.

I'm not planning to run out and read Finkelstein's infamous Holocaust book, so I basically just went on not knowing very much about the guy but assuming he was bad news in general terms. Until the other day.

Watch this video clip only if you have a strong stomach. Because now I know in more detail that Norman Finkelstein is a scary and completely, ideologically crazy person.

In case you don't want to put your stomach to the test, here's a brief version. The linked video is an interview Finkelstein gave to Lebanese TV on a recent visit. In it he lauds Hezbollah to the skies and pours scorn upon those Lebanese people, including the female interviewer talking to him, who don't support Hezbollah. He calls Lebanese Hezbollah opponents "slaves"--to Israel and the U.S., of course. He calls the raining of rockets upon northern Israel in the summer of 2006 a mere "pretext" for Israel to attack. Because they just want the Lebanese people to be their slaves, apparently out of sheer sadism. George W. Bush, he says, "destroyed your entire country" that summer. (Really? The whole country? And Bush did that?) Norm is infuriated that Bush was received in Lebanon recently on a visit at all. He says that the French resistance against the Nazis in WWII (all of them?) were Communists and were harsh and brutal, but that we admire them--and he clearly thinks we should admire them--because they resisted the enslavement of their country by the Nazis. Hezbollah, he says, is like that. He says that war against Israel is the only way for Lebanon not to be slaves. (Guess that means more rockets fired on northern Israel then. They'd better get cracking. This guy must just love Hamas in Gaza.) Oh, and perhaps the wildest line: He says he wishes there were some other way than war and that probably Hitler, too, would have preferred if "his goals" could have been accomplished in some way other than by war.

A nut. A complete and bizarro nut.

So now I know all I need to know about Norman Finkelstein.

HT Israel Matzav

Weird connectivity problems

(Gee, I almost found myself saying "issues" in the post header. Don't you hate the new use of "issue" to mean "problem"?)

The connectivity problems referred to in the title are not to this site. As you can see, here I am. Ta-da! I also have e-mail and can connect to nearly all of my usual Internet sites. However, I suddenly (as of yesterday morning) cannot connect to my beloved group blog, to which I am a contributor, What's Wrong With the World.

By asking all my friends to try it and see if they can connect, I have narrowed down the problem to, apparently, my own house. My neighbor across the street has the same ISP that I do, and he can get the site.

I found this nifty article that may diagnose the problem. If so, we'll have to call in an expert. (I hope our physically local expert is available; he isn't always.) It says "only experienced Windows-savvy users" should attempt the workaround described, so I think we'll probably not try it ourselves. If this should turn out to be the problem, the mystery is why it suddenly arose yesterday morning, when nothing had changed in our local configuration.

Anyway, to all my many fans, I will be able to blog only here for a while, not at WWWtW, until it's all back up and running. One always hopes, with a trace of superstition, that the problem will just "fix itself." Maybe I'll wake up again tomorrow and it will all be better. Evidently (according to the article) that could actually happen if various servers started sending smaller "packets" that could fit down the "tunnel" of my router. Or something.

Update: The problem appears to be our local wireless router. When we plug the cable modem directly into the computer I use, the problem goes away. All sites become available. Unfortunately this means that no one else can use the Internet from a laptop at the same time. So for the time being, the cludge is that when no one else needs to use the Internet, I can switch the cables, reboot the computer (it doesn't work otherwise), and then go wherever I want on the Internet. When the wireless router is needed, we switch the cables back. Then I can come here, do e-mail, go most places, but not go to a few sites, including What's Wrong with the World. That's until we get an expert out here to find a better workaround. All most odd. I have a feeling some Bright Lad changed a packet size setting somewhere out there in cyberspace overnight between Friday and Saturday.

Update #2: Problem solved. The connection problem was indeed, as the article I linked above suggests, fixed by changing the MTU setting on my Linksys router down to 1492. The mystery that remains is why this should suddenly be necessary now. As far as I know, the setting has always been the factory-standard 1500, and this has never been a problem before, for over a year and a half. I've certainly never touched it before. I keep my ignorant hands off that stuff as much as possible. Anyway, thanks to Zippy and to Todd McKimmey for patient help and advice over the weekend. And thanks especially to Todd for pointing out to me what the linked article is not clear about and what I in my ignorance would have overlooked: If the problem is with the router, then the MTU setting that needs to be changed is the one on the router, not the one in the registry of the desktop computer. Of course. But it wouldn't have occurred to me. So just remember, if this esoteric problem should plague your Internet connection, the magic number is...1492.

Introducing Mark Pickup

For those of you who don't know of him, Mark Pickup is a Canadian blogger with multiple sclerosis who has been writing about life issues for quite some years. I first read Mark's columns in National Right to Life News before anyone had ever heard of the blogosphere. (At least, that's how I recall it.) Wesley J. Smith has also mentioned Mark as a personal friend a number of times. I've just added Mark's blog to the links on the left, even though I'm not a very faithful reader, after seeing this post, "Sickness seen through a lens of Christian faith," from late January of this year.

Mark was diagnosed with MS when he was thirty years old and lives in a wheelchair. He recalls in this post how his wife found an old love letter he wrote to her when they were both young. In it, he wrote this:

What about our health? Health is like money in that it can be taken away. If either of us were to lose our health, we can be thankful for having known good health. There are thousands of people who have never had the gift of good health; they live with sick or twisted bodies that have never been whole. We have so much to be thankful for but most of all, we have each other.

Mark continues:

I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of thirty. Contrary to my earlier youthful words in a love-letter to my wife, I was not thankful I had known good health after it was gone. I was angry I lost it!

Fear overcame me about what lay in store for me. I knew multiple sclerosis is a serious disease that often has a catastrophic impact of the lives of people it strikes. I knew people with MS: often their lives were torn apart as their marriages crumbled, careers shattered, and they were abandoned to a living hell.

Multiple sclerosis devastated my life. It stripped away my health, layer by layer, like pealing an onion, and eventually left me triplegic and in an electric wheelchair.

Looking back over more than twenty years of increasingly profound and crippling disability I must say that I have become one of those people I wrote about who lives with a sick and twisted body. Yes, there were times when my heart broke – along with the hearts of those loved me. There were times throughout the years when it was me (not someone else) who was on the verge of despair. Protracted suffering seemed to isolate me in sorrow – just as my wife’s sorrow seemed to isolate her. At other times we lived two solitudes rooted in the same overwhelming and inexpressible sorrow.

The only way for our two broken hearts to unite was to kneel together before the cross and ask Jesus to console the inconsolable within us.

When people unite their suffering and sorrows with Christ’s Passion, a mysterious solidarity often occurs with other sufferers; solitudes of human anguish come together in mutual comfort at the foot of the cross. Christ’s outreached arms bid welcome to all heavy-hearted people, calling us beyond ourselves and our pain to find our consolation in Him.

Read the whole thing.

I wanna be like Zippy

My hordes of readers will notice the blog's new look. And just in case anyone doesn't get the allusion, it is to Zippy Catholic's blog, the look of which I have always liked better than my own. The content's pretty darned good, too!

The really good news is that now I can put up links to other people's blogs without fearing that warning that "all your changes will be lost if you change your format." I had to do a little html stuff to put up the three links that have always been there, and retaining as I do a bit of the technophobe, this was fiddly and annoying. I also believed that when it said that all my changes would be lost, it meant the links too, and I'd have to redo them, so I've kept it to just three against the day (today) when I would get that seagoing look I really wanted.

But the worry was for nothing. As it turns out, the links all survived the transition to the new lighthouse-y look, and now I don't have to think about it. So I can start adding a few more links. Now, if only they have some new user-friendly way to do that...

Update: Thanks entirely to Zippy for the recent comments feature. This should encourage y'all to comment frequently just to see yourself up there on top of the list!

Men ought always to pray, and not to faint

Luke 18:1 says, "And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint."

Thus begins the parable of the unjust judge. You all know it. A woman bugs and nags an unjust judge, until he finally gives in and defends her against her enemies. And Jesus, according to St. Luke, is telling us by this parable that we should nag God. Really. Jesus himself ends by saying that God will "avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him..."

I believe that it is not always coincidence but sometimes Providence that we hear particular things at particular times. This past Thursday at ladies' Bible study Phil. 4:6-7 was one of the verses we went over, in which we are told not to worry but rather to "make [our] requests known unto God." And this morning the hymn "Commit Thou All That Grieves Thee" was on the slate, chosen by the priest, not by me. Unfortunately, it appears that none of the cyber-hymnals have it, because for some reason the words are still copyright. It's #446 in the 1940 hymnal, and the first verse goes like this:

Commit thou all that grieves thee
And fills thy heart with care.
To Him whose faithful mercy
The skies above declare,
Who gives the winds their courses,
Who points the clouds their way
Tis He will guide thy footsteps
And be thy staff and stay.

And then while I was thinking about prayer, Jesus' parable of the unjust judge came to mind.

The point of all of this seems to me to be that we should get over ourselves. By that I mean that we should stop worrying about wasting God's time with our "little" worries or with things that "might not seem important to him." We have no dignity with God anyway, so let's get on with it: Jesus says we are to pray and not to faint. St. Paul says we are to bring our requests to God. These strike me as biblical injunctions simply to speak to God about our concerns and worries, to make our requests humbly, realizing that it might not be His will to grant them, but not to try to get an "inside line" on what God is already planning to do in the matter or what God wants us to say, the exact feelings He wants us to have. It really isn't about our feelings anyway (unless that happens to be what we are praying about). It's about whatever the subject of the request happens to be, which we should simply lay before Him as we are told to do.

So, since I think these things are sometimes not coincidences, I give you these thoughts for what they are worth, so that if God put them into my mind for a reason connected to one of my readers as well as to my own preoccupations, they are available.

I have nothing in common with this man

Nothing. Whatsoever. Here is an Australian professor who is such an environmentalist wacko freak (see, it's my personal blog, so I don't have to be restrained) that he praises China--China of the forced abortions, the political prisoners, the executed Falun Gong, y'know, China--because...wait for it...they outlawed plastic shopping bags. Yes, folks, this is how environmentalists think. The heck with all that nasty, personal, comfort-loving, individualistic nonsense that they have over there in America. In communist China they know how to do things right, effectively, with authority. Achtung! They just go right out there and ban those horrible, planet-destroying plastic bags that are killing all those beautiful polar bears and melting the ice caps. Or something. We don't need no stinkin' freedom.

He complains that when people suggest such things they are accused of being Marxists. Ya think? (Says Wesley J. Smith)

Next time I hear somebody complaining about all the unpleasant individualism we have in America, about how we need to get rid of our individualism and think instead in terms of "the community," and does so not while discussing murdering unborn people but rather in the context of, say, bemoaning the evils of corporations, I'm not going to be able to help it: I'm going to think of this Australian kookball, Comrade Citizen David Shearman--"Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens." Sweet and addictive, huh? Such people are creepy.

Thank God I live in a country that is an "extreme case" of liberal democracy. God bless America, and pass the plastic shopping bags.

HT Secondhand Smoke

Israel continues not to defend its civilians

And the rockets just go on falling on Sderot. The kassams fall there day after day. Today it looks like an eight-year-old boy may have lost his legs from shrapnel. Just imagine this on one of our border towns. Meanwhile, the "Palestinians" in Gaza celebrate this successful attack.

HT Israel Matzav

It's comments like this

...that make me unsure that I should be called a "traditionalist conservative." Just when I think I'm the traddest of the trads, what with believing women are designed by God to stay home with their children and other such oddball ideas, along comes somebody who lauds as "conforming to natural and divine law" arranged, unchosen marriages of the Medieval period and who cannot see what we would be missing in the U.S. if we didn't have a tradition of freedom of religion.

Hymn--Pass me not

We haven't had a hymn around here for a while. I happened to pick this one to play as part of my organ prelude on Sunday morning--"Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior."

Pass me not, O gentle Savior,
Hear my humble cry;
While on others Thou art calling,
Do not pass me by.

Refrain:
Savior, Savior,
Hear my humble cry,
While on others Thou are calling,
Do not pass me by.

Here is Fanny Crosby's trademark allusion to blindness. The words refer to the story of Bartimaeus, as he is called in one gospel (Mark 10:46), the beggar who cried out to Jesus. The evangelists tell of how the crowd tried to hush him, but he cried all the louder, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me." (Luke 18:35ff) Jesus heard him, asked that he be brought to Him, and asked what he wanted: "Lord, that I might receive my sight." And Jesus healed him.

Entirely unbeknownst to me (I hadn't happened to look and didn't remember), the version of this story from St. Luke was the gospel reading on Sunday. A happy coincidence, if a coincidence.

There is something poignant and urgent about the words. One can well believe the story told here about a young man who was moved to conversion by hearing them and by the thought, "What if he should pass me by?" C. S. Lewis said in a letter that anyone who has once known God at all will be awakened one day to the fear of losing him. We may hope so.

I was going to put a post up

...in the last couple of days, with content--specifically, a hymn post. Instead I have become embroiled in a probably futile on-line shopping hunt for waterproof winter boots (with a flat sole, for small feet), having just discovered that mine have holes in them. The sloppy February weather has revealed their hidden weaknesses. I hope that this does not count as descending into low-intellect, over-personal blogging, but take it as an apology for the lack of content.

This is funny

This video really is funny. This is for those of you who like stuff about male-female differences and the battle of the sexes. Watch it with your spouse, if possible. It's even funnier that way.

HT Dawn Eden