Christmas survives another bout

Idiocy comes in waves. More "War on Christmas" nonsense from a hyperactivist.

As has been her custom for as long as I can remember, my mom prepares her Christmas cards over the Thanksgiving weekend in order to have them ready to mail the first week of December. She enjoys purchasing beautiful cards, writing notes, addressing them by hand and affixing whatever Christmas stamp the USPS issues that year. So she stops by her local US Post Office a few days ago then asks the man behind the counter for this year's Christmas stamps. He pulls out a sheet of something called Holiday Cookies. To know my mom is to know that she has never indulged in cutesy stuff. Every year she always selects the Christmas stamp that features a classic painting of Madonna and Child. She asks if they have any classic Christmas stamps and the man pulls out a couple of sheets of last year's Madonna and Child. Mom notices he doesn't seem happy and he says to her, "These are all I have and they'll be the last you ever see." Mom asks, "What do you mean?" He explains the USPS will not be issuing any more "religious" stamps.

Ever.

Mom is momentarily stunned. She then raises her eyebrows a bit and asks, "Are you allowed to say 'Merry Christmas' to us?"

The man's face falls and he lowers his voice in answer, "No. We can only say 'Happy Holidays,'" he tries to smile at her, "But if you say 'Merry Christmas' to me directly I will respond in kind."

Word to the wise: never trust a low-level employee to give you the straight dope, okay? The salesman at the counter of your local post office does not run the company, repeat, does not run the company.

But that's not enough: our righteous warrior is "...annoyed at the tortuous language used in an effort to avoid the dreaded 'C' word."

Meanwhile, back in reality-land, the US Postal Service notes,

Cookies and other edible treats were used to decorate Christmas trees long before glass ornaments were used. Today, cookies are still used for that purpose. You may find cookies beautifully gift-wrapped under the tree - on a feast-laden table, as perennial favorites of holiday guests.... Five additional stamps from the Holiday Celebration series are currently available nationwide as well: Kwanzaa, the celebration of family, community and culture; Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights; EID, the Muslim Holiday; Madonna and Child, the Christmas stamp; as well as last year's Holiday Ornaments.

Two--count 'em--C-words! Heaven forfend!

Even when commentators point to credible links that wash away any hint of conspiracy to deny the Christ child his proper due, Darleen still can "neither confirm nor deny" that she's tilting at a windmill.

Check out the links offered: Virtual Stamp Club, Scott's Online Catalog. Only if you're frothing at the mouth will you miss the obvious implication: the stamps aren't going out of production.

(Blame PZ Myers.)

Happy Thanksgiving

A quick jaunt through the blogroll, and what do we find?

Ed Brayton's stuck at home due to nasty weather. (A rockslide achieved the same end in these parts.) PZ Myers is collecting weird and terrifying creatures that will liven up any after dinner conversation. Jason Kuznicki has found a particularly egregious member of a dying breed--the blinking website--that revels in poor logic. The TeacherRefPoet wants us to name bad holiday songs fit for destruction. (There are so many.) Tim Cavanaugh's hosting a quiet and peaceful open forum. Joe Carter is overrating and underrating movies, and needs your help. Jason Rosenhouse is out of town. Bora Zivkovic is "huddling with [his] histones."

Yours truly? I'm just trying to stay healthy and get in a little blogging before turkey dinners and English papers run off with my time.

is it hot in here, or is it just the deep fryer?

A construction workers' tradition of cooking a turkey for an early Thanksgiving celebration went awry when the oil in their deep fryer caught fire burning the house they had just finished building.

Whatever you do this Thanksgiving, be careful.

a question regarding the tragedy at the Tacoma Mall

Since I am no lawyer, and certainly no legal scholar, forgive my ignorant question. Everybody knows that the Tacoma Mall shooter, Dominick Maldonado, is guilty as all hell--including Dominick Maldonado. So what's the advantage of a not guilty plea?

twenty-second Skeptics' Circle: now available

A conversation with a yeti, tabloid-style. It's quality reading--after all, I'm included!

an obstacle by definition

I read this,

"...[T]hose who practice homosexuality, present deeply rooted homosexual tendencies or support so-called gay culture... find themselves, in fact, in a situation that presents a grave obstacle to a correct relationship with men and women."

and immediately think, isn't that what celibacy is all about?

fantastic opportunity for aspiring punditocrats

From the email:

In honor of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Felix Morley, the Institute for Humane Studies awards $5,000 in cash prizes to outstanding writers whose work reflects the principles of individual and economic freedoms including the First Amendment, voluntarism, the rule of law, and inalienable individual rights.

The competition is open to young writers (25 years of age or younger as of December 1, 2005) and all full-time students. Articles published July 1, 2004 through December 1, 2005 are eligible for consideration. For more information or to apply online, please visit the contest website at www.TheIHS.org/morley or apply directly at apply.theihs.org.

Deadline: December 1, 2005

Shucks. I'm ineligible. But maybe you're not.

spanking can lead to bad behavior

It certainly can.



[Forty-fifth in a series]

if I may offer an "Idiot of the Season" award

Ho-ho-ho, Santa's got a big bag of shhh for a bozo.

Here you go, Tim Wildmon:

That's not good enough for American Family Association President Tim Wildmon, who wants to see "Merry Christmas" signs displayed prominently "if they expect Christians to come in and buy products during this so-called season."

And he isn't worried if they offend people who aren't Christian.

"They can walk right by the sign," Wildmon said. "It's a federal holiday. If someone is upset by that, well, they should know that they are living in a predominantly Christian nation."

Where's Wildmon shopping next weekend? "Wal-Mart," he said.

That chain was briefly the target of a boycott called by the Catholic Rights League after an employee described Christmas in an unflattering way in a company e-mail. The employee has since left and the boycott is off, though the Catholic Rights League still criticizes Wal-Mart for tellings its employees to say, "Happy holidays."

Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman said the "Happy holidays" greeting is "more inclusive. With 130 million customers walking through the door and 1.3 million employees, it's safe to say there are a lot of different faiths out there."

That's right: the guy who's advocating a boycott of Target, which doesn't have an official "only 'Happy Holidays!'" policy, is going to shop at Wal-Mart, which does.


First Runner Up: Jerry Falwell, who advocates bullying tactics to counter "bullying tactics of the ACLU."

Second Runner Up: Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel. "'We'll try to educate... [b]ut if we can't, we'll litigate.'"



[Link thanks to Obscure Store. Apologies to Ed Brayton.]

necessary, justifiable, and entirely proper

Naomi has a recommendation for a verbose Canadian scholar:

... I move we put the following proposition to a vote: before your essays are published and distributed to bleary-eyed college seniors across the globe, you will be required to don a chicken suit and read your paper aloud before a panel of editors. Every time you use a word of more than five syllables, spontaneously generate a term entirely outside the parlance of political science when an established one will do just fine, or find you've turned blue in the face before you can finish reading a sentence, you must drink a single shot of tequila. If you are still ambulatory when the paper's finished, it goes to press. If not, we mass-produce the videotape and sell it in college bookstores nationwide.

But why limit punitive measures to Mr. Gill? Academics everywhere need strong medicine.

building democracy from the top down

James Gavrilis's account of establishing a workable government in an Iraqi town on a $3000 budget is worth reading.

Reflecting on it now, and on so much of what has happened in Iraq since we left, I can point to the reasons we succeeded so early on where many others have not. First, we lived modestly, and we did not occupy any private houses or regime buildings. We did not limit ourselves to certain functions or tasks, or fail to adjust to the realities on the ground such as stopping looting, providing electrical power, and other nation-building tasks. When nation-building became our mission, we performed without any hesitation. In addition, our immersion in the city fostered mutual understanding. Because we worked with and through Iraqis in all endeavors, they had a sense of ownership toward the new Ar Rutbah, and our success became their success. We behaved as if we were guests in their house. We treated them not as a defeated people, but as allies. Also, our forces ensured that political decisions were binding. Anyone that interfered with any part of government, public works, or a supply delivery was considered an enemy, just as if they had threatened security. In that environment, security and governance were intertwined at every level....

For the brief time I was mayor of Ar Rutbah, I knew we were the real revolutionaries there. Change had to come from the top down. Because we didn’t receive any guidance for governance or reconstruction, and certainly not for spreading democracy, I had to make up everything as I went, based on the situation on the ground and what I remembered from my Special Forces training and a handful of political science classes. I entered the city with only our strategic objective for Iraq in mind: to establish a free, democratic, and peaceful Iraq without weapons of mass destruction. And that is what I tried to achieve in my own microcosm of the war.

One wonders what could have been accomplished if Gavrilis's ad hoc method had been armed forces strategy before the invasion.

Tacoma Mall shooting: close to home

Apparently my sister-in-law and her friend were shopping in JCPenney around noon when a gunman entered at the other end of the store and opened fire, wounding six before taking five hostages into Sam Goody. The girls ducked behind a perfume counter as store employees barricaded the doors with shoe shelves, then hid out in an upstairs office until the shooter released the last three hostages after a four hour standoff with the police.

Only one of the victims is in critical condition, and the gunman, a twenty-year old with a criminal history, is in custody, bail set at $450,000. According to a hostage, he has "problems, issues." Indeed.

hagiography and iconoclasm

While I'm on a CS Lewis kick, I might as well point out that in "Prisoner of Narnia," Adam Gopnick examines Lewis's life, and offers all sorts of fodder for discussion. Choice quotes:

If in England he is subject to condescension, his admirers here have made him hostage to a cult. “The Narnian” (HarperSanFrancisco; $25.95), a new life of Lewis by his disciple Alan Jacobs, is an instance of that sectarian enthusiasm. Lewis is defended, analyzed, protected, but always in the end vindicated, while his detractors are mocked at length: a kind of admiration not so different in its effects from derision....

This loving and mother-deprived boy was sent to a series of nightmarish English boarding schools, where he was beaten and bullied and traumatized beyond even the normal expectations of English adolescence.... It seems to have had the usual result: Lewis developed and craved what even his Christian biographer, Jacobs, calls “mildly sadomasochistic fantasies”; in letters to a (homosexual) friend, he named the women he’d like to spank, and for a time signed his private letters “Philomastix”--“whip-lover....”

Lewis had a reputation as a tough but inspiring teacher, and, reading his letters, one can see why. His literary judgments are full of discovery; his allegiance to a dry, historical approach in the university didn’t keep him from having bracingly clear critical opinions about modern books, all of them independent and most of them right. He got the greatness of Wodehouse long before it was fashionable to do so, appreciated Trollope over Thackeray, and could admire even writers as seemingly unsympathetic to him as Woolf and Kafka. He was a partisan without being a bigot....

[T]hroughout his own imaginative writing, Lewis is always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the allegorical—his conscience as a writer lets him see that the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous sake, just as imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with belief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or, at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just what it’s supposed to say....

A startling thing in Lewis’s letters to other believers is how much energy and practical advice is dispensed about how to keep your belief going: they are constantly writing to each other about the state of their beliefs, as chronic sinus sufferers might write to each other about the state of their noses. Keep your belief going, no matter what it takes—the thought not occurring that a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn’t really a belief but a very strong desire to believe.

But you should read the whole thing.

word to the skeptical

Submissions to the next Skeptics' Circle are due Tuesday, November 22 at noon (time zone unknown). Send yours to blog1 (at) milezero.org.

useful sources for the torture debate

This is by no means finished. Please suggest other important articles, resources and postings in the comments.

Sen. John McCain, Newsweek, Torture's Terrible Toll
"To prevail in this war we need more than victories on the battlefield. This is a war of ideas, a struggle to advance freedom in the face of terror in places where oppressive rule has bred the malevolence that creates terrorists. Prisoner abuses exact a terrible toll on us in this war of ideas. They inevitably become public, and when they do they threaten our moral standing, and expose us to false but widely disseminated charges that democracies are no more inherently idealistic and moral than other regimes. This is an existential fight, to be sure. If they could, Islamic extremists who resort to terror would destroy us utterly. But to defeat them we must prevail in our defense of American political values as well. The mistreatment of prisoners greatly injures that effort."


Brian Ross and Richard Esposito, ABCNews, "CIA's Harsh Terror Techniques Described"
"Harsh interrogation techniques authorized by top officials of the CIA have led to questionable confessions and the death of a detainee since the techniques were first authorized in mid-March 2002, ABC News has been told by former and current intelligence officers and supervisors."


Jean Maria Arrigo, member of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, "A Consequentialist Argument against Torture Interrogation of Terrorists"
"Stated most starkly, the damaging social consequences of a program of torture interrogation evolve from institutional dynamics that are independent of the original moral rationale. Further, a legal, regulated program cannot eliminate use of rogue torture interrogation services, because they still serve to circumvent moral and procedural constraints on the official program."


John B. Roberts II, Washington Times, "School for scandal"
"Because the Guantanamo 'emerging strategic interrogation techniques' appear to have become the baseline for military intelligence interrogations worldwide, what is urgently needed is an independent evaluation of the value of the interrogation techniques being used at Guantanamo. They may be less valuable than was originally believed."


Julian Sanchez, Reason Magazine, Habeas Corpses
"Of course, in the absence of any judicial review, not only will we remain in the dark about how well interrogators are sticking to the rulebook; we also can't know how many of our detainees are hardened al-Qaeda killers and how many are Afghan farmers who'd been conscripted by the Taliban, or targeted at random by bounty hunters eager to reap a reward for catching terrorists, or singled out by informers who happened to be personal or political enemies, or simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time."


Editors, The Economist, How to lose friends and alienate people
"Mr Bush would rightly point out that anti-Americanism is to blame for some of the opprobrium heaped on his country. But why encourage it so cavalierly and in such an unAmerican way? Nearly two years after Abu Ghraib, the world is still waiting for a clear statement of America's principles on the treatment of detainees. Mr McCain says he will keep on adding his amendment to different bills until Mr Bush signs one of them. Every enemy of terrorism should hope he does so soon."


Mark Olson, Pseudo-Polymath, Torture and Cultural Norms
"IAs we deal with “torture” as defined with respect to our foreign affairs, one might wonder if “cruel and unusual” or “torture” should be defined relative to the cultural norms of the people we are dealing with and not the culture of the beltway. One does not have to be an advocate of moral relativism to admit that there are cultural norms regarding comfort and how one defines unusual treatment."
(See also A Final Comment on Interrogation, Is "Perfect" Interrogation Torture?, Clarification (yet again) on Torture, Zero Sum Assumption and a Note on Torture, and Clarifying Torture.)


Jim Anderson, decorabilia, the ends justify the mean
"This is moral calculus of the lowest common denominator, and a wholesale rejection of the purported moral role of this nation in its war on terror. Apparently "moral clarity" applies to all subjects except torture."
(see also the efficacy of torture)


Jason Kuznicki, Positive Liberty, Torture Yet Again
"I argue here that torturing detainees is not only morally wrong, but that it is far more likely to elicit false information than true, and that separating the one from the other is a task that few torturing regimes have ever performed successfully. Indeed, I will argue, the mere use of torture makes them ill-equipped to do so. It’s not so much that “forceful interrogations” will “never” produce correct information, as Mark Olson somewhat inaccurately distills my position, but rather that any true information is almost certain to be mixed in with and outweighed by a consistent narrative that matches the torturer’s own expectations."
{See also Truth Serum and Read This.)


Edward_, Obsidian Wings, The Bush Legacy: America's Human Rights Record is Now a Subject of Legitimate Debate
"If, as we're told again and again, this is a war of ideas and values, then there's no room for this sort of misstep. Forget whether Bush and Cheney's personal definitions allow them to baldly declare that we don't "torture"; through sheer stubbornness, one must assume, they're undoing hundreds of years' worth of human rights advances right before the entire world's collective eyes. The civilized world is dumbfounded. The terrorists' recruiters are delighted. And increasingly the citizens of the United States are being shamed by this incomprehensible, treacherous policy."


Matt Welch, Reason Magazine, Inside Outside U.S.A.
"It's easy to get distracted by the semantics and immorality of it all, but the ABC News story suggests a very pragmatic rebuttal to the administration: By whatever name or euphemism, water boarding seems like one of the worst methods possible of obtaining quality information. And treating water-boarded data either as a strong basis for policy, or as a prop to make a political argument, seems unwise at best."

I'll see you in my dreams

Normally I would reserve great skepticism for a woman claiming to have foreseen her watery motorcycle dive off a Highway 520 offramp.

No problem, because Reid says she saw the whole thing two weeks ago in a dream.

"The whole thing was that I'd already see it happen to me, and I don't know how to explain it, because I saw myself go over twice. I'd already lived it once. It's like I know I'm going to make it because there is a reason and a purpose," said Reid.

I'd be skeptical because, among other reasons, I have trouble remembering dreams from two weeks ago--and I've been keeping a dream journal.

But maybe there's something to the whole dream prophecy deal. So, I shall cast aside my skepticism and offer prognostication instead.

Here are the woes, both mine and yours, that you can expect in coming weeks, based on eighteen dreams recorded over thirty days. (As Dave Barry would say, I'm not making this up.)

1. I will attend a spaghetti dinner that will magically transform into a pancake breakfast, after which I will spectate a playoff game in Elma, in frigid weather. Later, I'll head to a warehouse, where a group of students filming a class project will be stalked by a knife-wielding maniac. In the ensuing class discussion, I will be confused for a student.

2. My uncle John will die in a bizarre accident, breaking his back while windsurfing off the coast near Westport. Remarkably, this will not upset my aunt Sherry. His coffin will be measured with a saxophone.

3. My wife will become pregnant, and I'll tell her she's cute.

4. Instead of reaching the summit of Mount Rainier by climbing, I'll tunnel up through winding caverns. Then I'll pick beans on a gigantic farm that transmogrifies into a school building, and get lost looking for a particular row of beans / desks. A nearby man's face will melt and bubble like a burning marshmallow. Somehow, mysteriously, this will be my fault.

5. My car will crash into a lake, and I will be mostly preoccupied by recovering sunglasses from the dashboard.

6. I will go to Disneyland with my older sister Cathy and brother-in-law Jon. After dining in a Thai restaurant where the owner feasts on Chinese food while ordering his employees to make more sourdough bread, we will finally reach the Magic Kingdom, only to be turned away when Jon's credit card is rejected. A trip to Ross (dress for less!) with my parents will devolve into an argument over whether I appear to be shoplifting.

7. I will give various speeches at school assemblies on sundry topics, and will sing songs of some kind.

8. While playing drums with fiber-optic brushes, one will break and slice through my fingernail, revealing a tongue-like appendage underneath. The nail will heal itself. Later, I will grow hair as long as my wife's, and will debate whether I should cut it or grow out my beard to match. (I'll look quite good with long hair.)

9. Behind my high school, I will discover a fellow English teacher raising nettles in the school's raspberry patch "to keep birds away."

10. Driving to White Sulphur Springs, Montana, in a pickup truck, I will be saddened to learn that the town is a shell of itself. Distressed by the ruination, I'll crash into a vehicle parked behind me, and cry when explaining the situation to the police. Later, a rainy-day trip to a mountain in northwest Washington will be interrupted by technical support crews who offer computer assistance to a room crowded with alpenfolks.

11. In a postapocalyptic future, I'll set up a rebel camp in an abandoned building or parking lot or something.

12. Back in that same rainy northern Washington locale, my wife and I will be busted for breaking and entering when we try to take a photo of a photo of Mount Rainier, because the real Rainier is obscured by clouds and we just want a photo. The police will not be sympathetic.

13. I will witness a couple breaking up as I walk through a suburban landscape. Then, playing touch football on a hospital lawn, I'll get in trouble for accidentally clocking a doctor with an errant pass.

14. When a great flood destroys most of Olympia, I'll help people rescue their pets and possessions by climbing ladders made of firewood.

15. James Bond will finally meet his match as I track him down and shoot him up pretty badly. He will need face transplant surgery, and will be forced to talk by making gurgly noises with his throat, which only his nurse will understand.

16. While Goodwill hunting for classic books and clothes, a little girl will pester me, after which I'll be dragged out into the desert and thrown off a cliff, ending up in a museum in Montana. My eternal fate: stuck in the cafeteria, drooling into a sink.

17. I will become a deejay at a local radio station, although a computer will mix most of the tracks. Running for president, or being president, will be stressful to the point that I'll have to take a shower. The drain will be blocked by my pocket watch.

18. I'll skip class after storming out of a "knowledge bowl" round where the judge makes a bad decision which costs our team victory. Why I will be back in high school, I'm not entirely sure.

Don't blame me, blame fate. The future is set.

history doesn't write itself

It takes diligence, time, research savvy. Kudos to The Mudville Gazette for a good start at providing perspective on the long-running saga of Saddam. As more bloggers notice and contribute, some of the gaps will be filled, and some of the spin corrected.

help from above

One of my favorite websites is The Christian Prophet, largely because it offers direct access to the Holy Spirit's wisdom in these times of trouble.

Our Holy Spirit answers:

Your spirit does not care if your government forces you to turn over some of your rightful assets to support programs you never would have supported voluntarily, true or false? Listen inside, true or false?

Taxation is a form of theft. Or since you probably have to work for a living, you are literally living under a system of slavery, working part of your day for your government masters.

In a spiritually-guided world everyone would be exempt from taxation, not just churches. But in your zany world of church-state separation, especially churches should be exempt.

Better yet, create a government that is entirely voluntarily funded and does only those things for which assets are voluntarily donated. Churches are asked to operate under these reasonable conditions. Why should governments be exempt?

Who knew God was such a big fan of The Emancipation Party?

po-mo Lewis

An earlier post by my brother got me thinking about the postmodern crack in C.S. Lewis's modern edifice.

Look at Lewis's famous formulation that a Tash-worshipper's love for Aslan is authentic despite lacking the proper referent.

"Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me... Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him, for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him..."

But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. "Beloved," said the Glorious One, "unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."

Similarly, consider Lewis's response to a mother who was concerned her son loved Aslan "too much," perhaps even more than he loved Jesus. Lewis consoled:

"Laurence can’t really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that’s what he is doing.... For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply things that Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus; and perhaps loving him more than he ever did before."

Lewis does a po-mo jig with the word really. Love for Aslan is really love for Jesus, for Aslan literarily did all the things Jesus really did.

To see the silliness of Lewis's position, imagine a reply to a spouse stricken by the revelation of her husband's infidelity:

"Your hubby can't really love his new flame more than you.... For the things he loves his mistress for doing or saying are simply things that you did and said. So that when your hubby thinks he is loving his girlfriend, he is really loving you; and perhaps loving you more than he ever did before."

torture versus the rule of law

Later I'm going to provide a list of links regarding the recent torture controversy, but I want to first point out a singularly forceful article by Julian Sanchez.