GOD IS A DJ? Via Dappled Things.

NUNC DIMITTIS: Must-read post from Waiter Rant:

Three priests walk into my bistro.

No, this isn't a setup for some awful joke--three padres sit in my section. They’re dressed in civilian clothes but I make them instantly. Former Catholic seminarians can spot priests a mile away.

more (via Amy Welborn)

AGAINST BABY AVERSION THERAPY:

This is the second in a series of Register articles in which author and syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher explains love and marriage to her grown son.

Dear Patrick,

Remember the last letter, wherein I asked you to consider deeply one simple fact: that sex makes babies? I showed it to a friend of mine, a brother who teaches at an excellent boys' Catholic high school.

"A good pragmatic argument," he wrote to me, approvingly.

My heart sank. Did you read it that way, too?

Of course, the fact that sexual desire powerfully draws men and women towards an act that can (and regularly does) create new life has practical consequences. Any sane person recognizes that this pragmatic side of life deserves certain consideration (Classically, that’s the virtue called "prudence.")

But I hate the way contemporary American culture confuses reasoned arguments with "pragmatic" arguments, especially about sex and babies, as if the only thing human beings care about are material deprivations and benefits to themselves. As if the way to respond to the intense mystery of sexual desire is to reduce it to calculus of health benefits. As if "if it feels good, do it" can be adequately replaced by "If it increases the risk of sexually transmitted diseases by 4.5%, don't do it!" ...

Every time you make love to a woman's body, you could be making your first-born child. Of course, I want you to be cognizant of the practical and moral implications of this truth. But don't forget, first to pause a moment in wonder at it.

You have within you the God-given power to co-create new life, and not just any sort of new life either. Your sexual desire is not a mere appetite, a mechanical prod for consuming an internal set of sensations called "pleasure." It is calling you out of the confines of your own body into the (literal) act of generation.

more

YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME AGAIN, OATMAN... BUT I GUESS YOU CAN SHOP THERE: A couple links on the Kelo eminent domain decision. (I should note that as a matter of constitutional interpretation I don't know enough about the case, and haven't yet figured out what I think of my father's position in e.g. this Legal Affairs Debate Club thing, to take a side. But as a policy matter--the government seized people's homes! For Pfizer! That's bad and wrong.)

Cacciaguida:

Another point made by Justice Thomas: if "economic development" is a "public use," then low-cost housing will always be a tempting target for city planners and state business promoters -- so, guess whose houses will usually be the first to face the combination of a check and a wrecking ball.

This decision ought to build cross-coalitions. Liberals who like urban planning, and conservatives who like whatever big business likes, should be pleased. Progressives who like the little guy, and conservatives who like (a) the original meaning of the Constitution and (b) property rights, should be together in mourning.

more

The Institute for Justice's Castle Coalition (as in, A man's home is his aforementioned). They litigate, but, as Eugene Volokh notes, "[T]he IJ people are masters at using their cases to marshal public opinion. That often helps them pressure the government to change its policy even without a final decision in litigation. And it also helps them use cases, whether they win them or lose them, to build pro-economic-liberty sentiment generally; they're especially good at showing how economic liberty helps the little guy." Why not help them?

Don't blog me 'cause I'm close to the edge--
I'm tryin' not to watch my head...

Hit & Run: Kelo decision:

...The straightforward implication is that any taking of a private residence to hand it over to a business, or just from a poor person to a wealthy person, will be a taking in service of a public purpose: As a general rule, the rich pay more taxes than the poor, and businesses pay more taxes than households.

(more)

The Corner: Ramesh Ponnuru:

Gov. Mitt Romney wants to require the purchase of health insurance by anyone who can afford it. I think that's a bad idea. ...

Finally, we should face the fact that health insurance is not an attractive deal for many young, healthy people. Getting rid of some mandates--for example, the state-level mandates that make it harder for people to buy a cheaper catastrophic policy--to make it a better deal for them would make more sense than forcing them to buy a product they don't want.

(whole post)

A Child's View of Music: Student bloopers. Some are old, some are probably fake, but almost all are hilarious. Via Mixolydian Mode.

And speaking of music, Songs that Make a Difference:

What liturgical song has really made a difference for you? It might be a song that has helped to form or strengthen your faith; has played a significant part in the life of your parish or community; is associated with a noteworthy event; or is simply your favorite liturgical song.

We are inviting NPM members and other American Catholics to tell us your selection for a liturgical song that makes a difference. We would like to know the texts and tunes that have done the most to help American Catholics to discover, explore, nourish, and deepen their faith.

here
You can only submit one; I put in for "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent," partly because I didn't think many others would. I could also have named "Amazing Grace," "Comfort, Comfort Ye My People," and "Pange Lingua" (...of course), as well as, probably, lots of others I'm forgetting at the moment.

On a somewhat different level of gravitas, I note that Amy Welborn's comment thread on the NPM project included a typo that absolutely made my day: "I cringe sometimes at Protestant hymns that go on and on about being washed in the blood of the Lame."

I GIVE UP: I just watched "An Echolls Family Christmas," and...okay... I'm into "Veronica Mars" now. Sigh. Oddly, it doesn't really hit up any of my obsessions (and still has several features that irritate me, though I'm less convinced about the pseudo-class-awareness thing now)--must be something about the taut pacing, sharp dialogue, and kicky acting. Also, I really like how these people bite at each other, meanly, and yet take the casual cruelty in stride rather than getting all sobby. It's refreshing. (ETA: And makes the frequent moments when the kids are kind to one another all the more affecting.)

HOW TO CHANGE UGLY REGIMES: Fareed Zakaria

...Don't get me wrong. I think the regimes in Tehran and Havana are ugly and deserve to pass into the night. But do our policies actually make that more likely? Washington has a simple solution to most governments it doesn't like: isolate them, slap sanctions on them and wait for their downfall. As Richard Haass argues intelligently in his new book, "The Opportunity," regime change has become a substitute for an actual policy toward countries like North Korea and Iran, with which we have serious security problems. Rather than tackling the issue of North Korean nukes, we're waiting for the country to collapse. We might be waiting awhile.

(more, via The Corner)

PRAY AND TELL: From the American Prospect:

...Last year, I increasingly wanted the insight of someone who had successfully interrogated terrorism suspects without resorting to violent or demeaning practices. Several people told me about a veteran FBI agent, recently retired from the New York ?eld of?ce, who was so opposed to the United States' burgeoning renditions-and-torture regime that his pointed questions on the subject to FBI Director Robert Mueller in a 2002 meeting had drawn Mueller's lasting ire. This, I thought, was the man to see.

more (via Unqualified Offerings)

"ENDLESS SUMMER": SENATE SIDE. Part two of the triptych. Washington, jerks, tempus fugit-ing like fugit is going out of style.... Yeah. Obsessive, overly obscure, and so on. Here. Write to me if you hate it, even a little bit.

LOVE SONGS OFTEN DO: Okay, since I linked to the Amy Welborn thread on sad songs, I thought maybe I should admit which songs actually make me cry. Forewarned is half an octopus. In solely alphabetical order.

Cat Power, "Good Woman," "Ice Water," "Rockets." Lots more, but these will do. Stark, and raw like a humid night filled with fireflies you can't capture.

Cyndi Lauper, "Time After Time."

Dolly Parton, "Bargain Store," "I Will Always Love You," "Used To." Don't even start with me, because I will mess you up. Dolly is the bomb.

Elvis Costello, "What Do I Do Now?"; "My Dark Life"; "Distorted Angel"; "Little Palaces"; "Our Little Angel"; too many others to count. And the doors swing back and forward from the past into the present....

Johnny Cash, "Hurt." Someday I will be wise enough to understand this song.

Moxy Fruvous, "Drinking Song." C'mon, I dare you to listen without choking up just a little.

Nina Simone, "My Man's Gone Now"; "Plain Gold Ring."

Patsy Cline, "Strange." Strange, how you stopped loving me/How you stopped needing me/Once she came along....


Pet Shop Boys, "Always on My Mind." Maybe I didn't love you.... Also, "Being Boring."

Yeah, it distresses me how easy it is to fail the people who need us. More on this when I write "The Zombie Guide to Life."

And yeah--I know it's not even an especially good song, but it digs right down into the place where you can't help it--I cannot ever hear "Cat's in the Cradle" without starting to cry a little. I really can't. "We'll get together then..."--the thing about fatherhood, I sometimes think, is that it is so thoroughly a metaphor for our relationship to God the Father that no real human father can suffice. That's part of why ordinary human fatherhood deserves so much honor. Because ordinary human fathers bear so much of the brunt of their children's aloneness. Mothers (sometimes) get the desperate confessions of fear and sickness; fathers often don't even get that solace, that trust. Every mother is Mary, Mother of God (Mother of Sorrows, Queen of Heaven, Mary at Cana and Mary at Calvary), but every father is (symbolically) Yahweh, not Joseph. And it's terribly hard. So I guess... there's nothing really to say except, Thank you.

Memo to myself: Do the dumb things I gotta do.
Watch the puppet blog.

Family Scholars: Elizabeth Marquardt growls at that Washington Post Magazine story about the sperm donor meeting his kids. "This industry has gone way beyond helping the occasional infertile couple reproduce –- and issues of masculinity, femininity, and heterosexual desire run through it all." (more)

Hit and Run: "In Sunday's Los Angeles Times, Ann Louise Bardach spells out just how these flagrantly illiberal (and I believe unconstitutional) regulations can be rained down on the head of one individual to score cheap and injurious political points. She writes of the case of Alberto Coll, 'a military expert of impeccable pedigree who is a dean at the U.S. Naval War College,' a 'former deputy assistant secretary of Defense during the George H.W. Bush administration,' and a lifelong Republican "anti-Castro hard-liner" who was persuaded after Pope John Paul II's 1998 visit to the island [= Cuba] that the embargo wasn't working. 'Hence,' Bardach writes, 'Coll had to be destroyed.'" (more)

Also H&R: "A new study by LeMoyne College economists Edward Shepard and Paul Blackley, based on New York state data, finds that drug law enforcement is associated with increases in predatory crime. Possible explanations include diversion of law enforcement resources, violence generated by disruption of drug operations, and increased attraction to property crimes among people deterred from dealing drugs." (more--I should note that I haven't read the posted draft of the study, b/c I don't have time, so... yeah.)

And due to the sad songs discussion at Amy Welborn's place, I have this stuck in my head. Cheery!

SO SUE ME: Have now watched the pilot and the final three episodes of the first season of "Veronica Mars." (Caved to peer pressure.) Some thoughts, worst first (and it's kind of hard to explain the show's premise quickly, so go here if you're interested):
1. VM herself is a Mary Sue: ubercompetent; "quirky" name (actually, all the names on this show are precious, which does irritate until you force yourself to ignore it); unpopular in the show's world in a way precisely calibrated to make her popular among self-pitying viewers; possessed of flaws and imperfections that somehow only make her cooler. The show also fetishizes her power over others, I think (see point #2), while absolving itself by showing her in jeopardy, and unpopular, etc etc. I spent the first ten minutes or so of the pilot with my face in this rictus of "must not show horror and disgust!" (I don't think the show's writers realize how disturbing her abilities to discover other people's hidden truths really is.)
2. The pilot, and the third-to-last episode of s1, both open with scenes of another character suffering public sexual humiliation from which Veronica Mars will Save them. I find it hard to express how much that disturbs me, and how much it makes me reflexively dislike VM and the show.
3. However... these are some great actors. Really liked the guys who play Logan and Weevil (see what I mean about the names?), and VM's father. (The Television Without Pity recapper seems to think the father is played too hammily, but I thought the point was to show a certain kind of father who intentionally hams it up, which I find endearing.) VM and her father interact really well. Logan is played as an immediately recognizable type of guy: attractive, in a mongoosey-snakey kind of way, and instinctively using his own vulnerability and aggression in order to manipulate girls' protective/patronizing emotions. I'm susceptible to that kind of guy, sadly, and it was neat to see the type so perfectly captured on TV. ...Even VM herself is likeable most of the time, and from points 1 and 2 you can see that this was a hard sell for me.
4. Whoever does the music is a stone genius. Adored it.
5. The mystery plots and subplots were really well-handled: attention to theme, interaction between "mystery of the week" and overarching season-long story arc. Fun and genuinely suspenseful.
6. I really liked the trick of having so much happen in backstory, before the pilot even begins. The show convinces you that VM was a totally different person last year. The first episode is corroded with voice-over, but after that the info-dumping settles down and you can just enjoy the past vs. present contrast the show sets up.
7. Oh, and I've seen people praising this show for dealing with class differences, and I just don't get it. The show refers to class differences, always superficially. I'm not seeing a lot of insight or even intelligence on that stuff.
8. The dialogue is actually smart and sharp, without (say) "Buffy"'s studied and overwritten coolth.

Upshot: I'll be watching this when it returns from summer hiatus, at least for a while, and I'll probably Netflix the first season when it's available. Hey, I'm easy.

BILL POSTERS IS INNOCENT--blogwatch postscript:
Camassia: "Ex-gay camp," institutionalization and the rule of experts, parental helplessness. The only thing I've been able to read about this without breaking things, so don't expect any comments from me, thanks ever so.

Colby Cosh: Pictures of starving children sell records.

Hit and Run on Egypt.

Is that enough?
My blog is absurd; I'm watching it upside-down...

Cacciaguida: Reflections on his son's scheduled deployment to Iraq. Depression-era apartments, rights and duties, and those who have seen the end of war.

Oxblog: Couple interesting exchanges on foreign-policy realism; start here and scroll down.

National Review editorial on Terri Schiavo.

TRADE, NOT AID:

...U.S. agriculture policy undermines U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty because it drives down global agricultural prices, which in turn cost developing countries hundreds of millions of dollars in lost export earnings. The losses associated with cotton subsidies alone exceed the value of U.S. aid programs to the countries concerned. The British aid organization Oxfam charges that U.S. subsidies directly led to losses of more than $300 million in potential revenue in sub-Saharan Africa during the 2001/02 season. More than 12 million people in this region depend directly on the crop, with a typical small-scale producer making less than $400 on an annual cotton harvest. By damaging the livelihoods of people already on the edge of subsistence, U.S. agricultural policies take away with the right hand what the left hand gives in aid and development assistance.

Some want to correct that problem by increasing foreign aid, but transfer payments have failed to stimulate economic growth in Africa where the average income per person is 11 percent lower today than it was in 1960. State-to-state aid is inefficient because it is often based on geopolitical considerations, not on economic criteria. As a consequence, the least deserving regimes often obtain aid. International organizations such as the World Bank are also largely ineffective. In 2000, for example, the bipartisan Meltzer Commission found that the World Bank's aid projects failed 55 to 60 percent of the time.

The aid is ineffective because of the appalling way in which Africa is governed. In recent decades, of each dollar given to Africa in aid, 80 cents were stolen by corrupt leaders and transferred back into Western bank accounts. In total, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo estimated, "corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion from their people in the [four] decades since independence." All that is left when these regimes eventually collapse is a massive public debt. ...

Development economists have stressed this message for years. U.S. subsidies and protectionism are particularly galling for those countries that have tried to make market reforms work, only to see their producers undercut by subsidized goods in the "free" world market. Even though the United States is hardly the worst offender in the developed world when it comes to unfair trading practices, the United States should lead by example and eliminate its market-distorting agricultural policies. They are damaging to the interests of most Americans, and they render useless U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty in the poorest corners of the globe.

more

ALL OF THE BUILDINGS AND ALL OF THE CARS/WERE ONCE JUST A DREAM IN SOMEBODY'S HEAD--NYTimes book review--

...Plato's dialogues, in which the very spirit of philosophical investigation emerges from the conversational counterpoint, are products of the contentious, disputatious ethos of the city. And in many classical and romantic concertos the solitary voice of the pianist or violinist, interacting with the crowded ranks of the orchestra, suggests a meditation on the experience of the individual who contends with the vastness of the city. It has often been observed that the collagist sensibility, whether in the visual or the literary arts, grows out of the cacophonous, ceaselessly composing and recomposing spectacle of the metropolis. But it can also be argued that the monumental form of many works of 19th-century fiction and philosophy and history -- with their densely interconnected passages and chapters and volumes -- mirrors the bulk and concentration of the 19th-century city, with its streets and neighborhoods and ever-expanding dimensions. ...

...The novelists Alter looks at were inclined to present the individual consciousness as having a fraught or elusive or dynamically expansive relationship with communal experience, and this provokes a reconsideration and even a shattering of realist conventions. He observes that in "A Sentimental Education," there is "a kind of complicity between the consciousness of the protagonist and the nature of the city itself." When Flaubert describes his diffident leading man, Frederic Moreau, moving along the Parisian streets, we do not see the streets so much as we see the hyperbolic images that gather in Frederic's mind. "Shadows slipped along the edge of the sidewalks, with umbrellas. The pavement was slick, the fog was falling, and it seemed to him that the moist shadows enveloping him were imperceptibly descending into his heart." Frederic's melancholy allows the city to overwhelm him, and yet his imagination, as Flaubert renders it, also suggests a sort of conquest of urban life: the city becomes his private realm.

more
possibly-related: me reviewing the City of Glass comic here

YEAH, life's kind of crazy here--I have stuff to say (figured out the other two parts of "Endless Summer," which will suck much less than the first part... I hope), but no time to say it. So... links. I'll be back when I can.

GroceryLists. Other people's grocery lists. Eerily compelling.

Missing Dalek found.

In case you can't tell, I'm having one of those days--not in a truly horrible way, more in a "one thing after another" way--and am kind of bemused/tired/punchy.

DANIEL PINKWATER!!!! a.k.a. children's book-ook-ook! Ultra-yay.

MEDICAL MARIJUANA:

...Chemotherapy, which I had in 1992, wasn't all bad. I looked very cool bald; it gave a nice grey perm when my hair came back (why couldn't it bring more hair back? can't they cut it with menoxydil?); and it did stop my unpleasant visitor.

But the nausea was not cool, and only the illegal drug worked once the legal ones had failed.

John Walters says there is no medical evidence for marijuana's effects. He is a liar or an ignoramus, probably both.

more from Rick Brookhiser, here (sorry I didn't get this up before the Congressional vote--I didn't see it until afternoon.)

WHAT HAPPENS AT GUANTANAMO (scroll).