Welcome to...The Twilight Zone

Pat: Mr. Chambers...Mr. Chambers, the first page is just a collection of English words with their own translation. But the rest of the book...the rest of the book—It's a cookbook!

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Can't help it

Sometimes stupidity just burns me. Especially coming from people who claim to be smart.

I wandered onto the sites of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests. Yeah, one word: womenpriests.
Kinda tells you what they're all about.

These are girls who got themselves "ordained" by some stray bishop and now are playing at being womenbishops and womenpriests, "ordaining" each other. Have at it girls, but the thing which burns me is calling it all "Roman Catholic." It's just, well, wrong and stupid. Call yourselves Old Catholics, New Catholics, American Catholics, Reformed Catholics, etc. But if you call yourselves Roman Catholics and then break with the primary mode of transmission of Roman Catholicism, the priesthood....you're stupid, at the very least. It hasn't been 1968 for a long time.

Rome says you can't ordain a woman, says it consistently and says it solemnly. So there it is. You can't baptize with gravy. You can't confirm by laying on of feet and anointing with Noxema. You can't marry five people at the same time. You can't consecrate the Eucharist with beer and rice cakes. You can't make a priest out of a female.

Hate it. Deny it. Defy it. But don't pretend to be a priest or bishop and then say it's "Roman Catholic." That's just...stupid.

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The Androphile strikes again

Jack Donovan wrote Androphilia (as Jack Malebranche), the feisty 2007 farewell of an unrepentantly man-loving man to the pre-packaged identity of gayness. For better or worse, that little book has had a big impact on how I see myself and how I see the gay world, which I increasingly see myself as "in" but not "of". (Cf John 17:13-16!).

As I was walking down Castro Street today, I was thinking again that pretty well the only thing I have in common with the denizens of the gay ghetto is a common interest in same-sex eros. I do not agree with the victim-based LGBT grievance-group identity, nor with the captivity of these folks to progressive Left thinking and statist politics, nor with the feminist-led ambivalence (at best) about being a man.

Part of the conservative temper is a hesitancy to fiddle with what has been long established and seems to work pretty well. In conservative parlance, "work pretty well" is practically an ecstatic outburst, since so much does not. Marriage, for all its limitations, works pretty well. Has anyone found an empirically superior long-term societal alternative? The law of unintended consequences takes up a lot of space in conservative minds. And although I have a lot of personal sympathy with gay and lesbian people whom I know (and love) who want same-sex marriage, on a wider cultural scale I am skeptical.

It would please me more to have the military decide, on its own, to ignore sexual orientation than to have same-sex marriage enshrined in law.

Well, Mr. Donovan has taken a stand on both these issues in his usual forceful, clear, kinda take-no-prisoners way.

Gay marriage. No. Homosexual soldiers. Yes.

Here's his piece. Enjoy.

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St Patrick

Small island, Eire. Saint Patrick made the Irish Christians in the 5th century. He was a Roman Briton, kidnapped and enslaved by the Irish as a boy. He escaped but returned later, with a big impact. A big chunk of my ancestry came from there. My middle name, chosen at confirmation, is Patrick.

When I was thirteen, the night I graduated from eighth grade to be exact, my Dad sat me down and explained that he was not my only Dad, that my mother had been married before and that her first husband, who had died in a car accident, was my birth father.

I was only ten weeks old when he'd died happened, so I had no memory. And my Dad had entered the picture fast, marrying my mom when I was just two. So as far as I was concerned, he was my father.

My first response to all this information? Wanting to know the deceased man's name, to make sure I was still Irish!

For better or worse, he was 100% Hibernian and so my gene pool remained unchanged.

In the interim, I have sometimes had reason to wish otherwise. Specifically, I told my mom that if she were going to marry a short-lived father, instead of marrying a tall, skinny, pale Irishman to mirror the tall, skinny, pale Scandinavians of her family, she could have found a 5'9" Italian football player. For example....

That would have been a happier genetic mix: skin less likely to burn, possibly even able to tan, a more mesomorphic frame to work with and perhaps a less sensitive conscience!

But instead of pasta, wine, veal and garlic, I got potatoes, whisky, corned beef and soda bread. And  Irish Catholic guilt.

I am very adept at language. In my heydey, I spoke Spanish fluently, and did well in French, Italian, could read German, along with Latin, Greek, some Hebrew. Even did basic Esperanto.
But when I tried Irish I was stumped. The spelling-pronunciation dynamic makes English look like simple math. In the Sign of the Cross, for example, the phrase, "and of the Son" is "agus an Mhac". But it is pronounced "agus a vik." You get the point. I gave up.

Erin go bragh. Lotsa good craic to you.

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Not from The Onion

With a HT to The Boyo, this heartrending piece from the San Francisco Chronicle.

And it's not from The Onion.

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Am I smarter than I think?

I have always remembered my IQ score as 130. My nephew recently scored 156, and as I was telling my mom that he was then 26 points smarter, she said, no, your IQ when we had it done in grade school was 142.

Now I feel like even more of an underachiever!

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PS. IQ is important, but I know, as a smartypants of either 130 or 142 with five university degrees, that there are lots of other qualities that make even more significant differences in life. My brain can hold lots of information (of certain types) and it processes very very fast. Language stuff especially. When it comes to math, though, no smarty I.

High IQ also does not, for instance, mean that you are good with money. Trust me.

More Mohammedan pranks in SF

Turns out the three East Bay Muslim* men videotaped eleven other attacks they did. Bail was revoked and they are back in jail.

I am waiting for this to be front page news on the BAR.

*Well, no one in our very PC press has named them as followers of Mohammed, but their names are Mohammad Habibzada, Shafiq Hashemi and Sayed Bassam. Think I'm rushing to judgment?

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Non-rational animals

One of the most useful insights I have gleaned from reading philosopher John Kekes is that conservatism is, or should be, anti-ideological. This is partly because ideology is a form of rationalism, that taking of an idea (almost always untested by practice) and imposing it on society as the solution to a problem. A kind of unhinged intellectual obsession. Enforced
equality is now the ideology of choice in the liberal West...a strange obsession for the victors of the Cold War against Marxism, the ideology of enforced equality.

Kekes helped me articulate why my libertarian sympathies never developed into a Libertarian affiliation. Libertarianism is an ideology, the consistent and comprehensive application of the principle of non-coercion. Something, by the way, that has never been tried.

Advocates of gay marriage often have a similar rationalist argument. Ignoring what works and what doesn't in this most complex and crucial area of gender and reproduction, they announce a theorem of equality. Poof. A solution.

It strikes me that we never make decisions in this way about our own lives, or the lives of our families --a non-rational institution if ever there was one. We calculate all kinds of factors, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously or even lazily ("Sorry, that just doesn't work for me"). But we are hardly ever ideological about our most personal interests. Does that bode well for using rationalist and ideological arguments for the larger world?

For example, how many of the white enlightened class in San Francisco, who hold only the most advanced racial views, move heaven and earth to get their kids into a good school, often private?


A lot of the cumulative decisions of many humans over many ages sometimes goes by the name of tradition. In some cultures, that word has positive and even determinative value. But in ours, it is practically pejorative. Because tradition, supposedly, is not rational.

And rationality is better than "blind" or "mere" tradition, which, after all, was made up by all kinds of inferior (and dead) people who were not...us.

It may have been Chesterton who called tradition "the democracy of the dead", since it continued to give a voice to lives that had been live through to the end. I find it ironic that people I know who sigh enviously at how "spiritual" brown and yellow and red people revere their ancestors will, at the slightest inconvenience, dismiss or pathologize their own, often in the forms of life that they have handed down to us, like marriage, for instance.

Since I am a believer in The Fall, I do not grant sinlessness or infallibility to human tradition. But I do, especially as I get older, give it the benefit of the doubt for starters and then try to understand why it turned out as it did. Some things become obvious only with time.

A trivial example. When I was a monk, there was a long tradition of eating meals together but in silence, with one monk reading aloud during the dinner. This inhibited "community connection" and so, during the era of The Church Efervescent, it was largely abolished, along with the long tables, etc. We sat together at smaller tables and talked. All the time. Morning, noon and evening. Do you know how wearisome it is to try to make conversation with people you live with for years and don't even like? God, how I wanted the old way back. It was kind, not cruel.

For all its benefits, one of the things the Enlightenment did, I suspect, was sow the seeds for the de-racination from reality of the Western mind. It helped us believe the Star-Trek-silly notion of "universal human rights" transcending human attachments to soil and tribe and self-interest.

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Hot dogs and Burghers

Part of the Boyo's birthday event for me was that, after lunching on hot dogs near the Rodin Gates of Hell, we would play catch with his Burghers of Calais, located just outside the main chapel at Stanford U.

Here we are, the Burghers and me.


On the one hand, it's kinda unintentionally disrespectful. The story of the Burghers is noble and sad. But on the other hand, it appeals to my sense of the absurd. By his own description, the Boyo found the action "high concept fun."

Plus, my Dad, who taught me, laboriously, to throw and catch, would probably sorta approve.

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Racy

Someone else who finds the word "racism" now a mere rhetorical weapon opines that

"the term means little more than believing in the scientific method and rejecting the double standard which says Asian countries for Asians, African countries for Africans, Middle Eastern countries for Middle Easterners and white nations for everybody.

If you'd like to empty a room, start a discussion about race and IQ.

Or suggest that the head of the Detroit Board of Education should be able to write a complete and proper English sentence...after spending 15 years in college. Role modelling and all...


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