Michael Flynn's Blog, page 63
November 2, 2010
m_francis @ 2010-11-02T15:50:00
Solvet sæclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla !
which means
Day of wrath! that day
Dissolves the world in ashes:
As foretold by David and the sibyl!
The wrath in question is that of the voters, the sibyls are the pollsters, and the ashes are the sorrow of the losers. Supposedly, these will be made manifest most everywhere save New York, Connecticut, and possibly California, as the voters in their wisdom replace one band of nitwits by another. The winners will fall to their knees to pray that our short attention spans will make them safe in two years. Our liberties are secured by inducing fear in the hearts of legislators. No more safe seats!
Well, maybe. Every time Those Who Are Born to Rule are told, well, no, actually you're not, they imagine the world dissolving into ashes. How one longs for the champions and opponents of yesteryear, when Lincoln could go against the Little Giant, or Teddy Roosevelt mud rassle with Taft and Wilson in a cage fight. The current prexy is sometimes compared to FDR (who went against people the likes of Wilkie and Dewey), but it is not so: Why Obama is No Roosevelt.
Roosevelt: 'Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst without flinching and losing heart.'
Obama: We don't 'always think clearly when we're scared.'
The description of FDR's "Map Speech" is instructive.
+ + +
Vote Early and Often
Quando iudex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurus !
(How much tremor there will be,
When the judge is come,
Investigating everything strictly!)
Watch the close races, for they are likely to be Frankened. This is the practice of re-counting and re-re-counting per omnia saecula saeculorum until the results come out right. Sometimes entire missing ballot boxes are fortuitously discovered.
+ + +
The Memsahib and I went to vote early on this morning, ca. 10:00 hrs. At that point, the election judges told us, about 159 people had already voted. "It's like a general election."
The morning was cold, due to global warming, and the frost would have been on the pumpkin, saving only that most of the pumpkins had achieved their apotheosis a few days before. We entered the polling place and the first judge (a young man. I am immediately on my guard) says, "Still hot out there?" And I say, "Sure is. I think I'll work on my tan today." This passes for High Humor, as anyone who has heard me can attest. The next judge says, "Hi, Mike," and it is the lady who used to schedule the lectors at the parish. I ask if my dad has been in, for you must get up early in them morning to beat my dad to the polls. Surprisingly, he has not yet voted. The third election judge looks up and says, "Is this Joe and Rita's boy?"
Now, it has been a while since I was referred to simply as my parents' child. But my cousin Mariellen once commented that when her mother used to introduce her to someone back in childhood days, she always assumed she was related to that person somehow. It is not a very large city, as such things go; though more diverse than when the Heights were called German Hill and this part of it was called Schwar-town. I am no longer related to everyone. On the block where I live, only two other houses belong to cousins of mine, and one is what we used to call a cellar-door cousin. But I digress.
+ + +
Inter oves locum præsta,
Et ab hædis me sequestra,
Statuens in parte dextra.
(Grant me a place among the sheep,
and take me out from among the goats,
setting me in the right-hand parts.)
Margie and I then do our civic duty, which consists of closing our eyes, lying back, and thinking of America. Wait, no. We pressed buttons on a big computer-sort of screen. Deep within the hardware, special software then converted those finger presses into.... who knows what? Whatever some pimply-faced hacker in Seattle wanted them to translate into. For all I know the voting machine was programmed by Joe Biden. This would be good news, since he would be bound to screw it up. (Oh yeah? And what about Glenn Beck, hunh? It is a measure of where we have come to that we automatically compare our elected officials to clowns and comics. And that the comics look good in the comparison. Minnesota almost elected a comic. I count Al Franken as almost a comic.)
One thing to keep in mind is that American liberals and conservatives are both liberal by the Auld Definitions. In Europe, anyone espousing laissez faire capitalism is a "neo-liberal." Sometimes differences appear very large when you are very close. Reflexively, liberal liberals grow uneasy with socialist tendencies. Being bossed around by the lord of the manor is not what they had in mind. And conservative liberals scowl a bit over rampant populism. We ought not confuse the public will with the public whim any more than we ought confuse will and whim in general. I have always wanted to register and proudly vote as... a Whig. But they won't let me. The Whigs were the only major party since party-formation not to give themselves a self-flattering name.
+ + +
Mors stupebit, et natura,
Cum resurget creatura,
Iudicanti responsura.
(Death will marvel, and will nature,
With the creature resurges,
Responding to the Judgement.)
In any case. The buttons pressed, the curtain parts, and I step forth to find it is... Morning in America. And has been locally for about ten hours, but what the heck. The line of eager voters is now reached the door. Banging and pounding. Impatient voters demanding entry? No, just slaters working on the roof. "All year long," grouses one man about the community center, "you can't get them to show up; but today, they're all over the roof."
+ + +
As I exit, an incoming voter is attired in pinstripe suit with an American flag tie. Now there is someone who knows how to dude up for the occasion. Then I think, perhaps he is a politician, and I make a sign against evil and take care lest his shadow fall upon me.
On the way in to vote, an exiting voter had spoken to the vacant air. "Only one way to vote today," she said. "Straight Democrat!" I had forestalled myself from leaping upon her and pinning her to the ground in a citizen's arrest for politicking within the limits of the polling place. But this would be a) unseemly b) unlikely to achieve any meaningful objective and c) almost impossible physically to effect, there being few creatures in the world who could not outrun me easily. Still....
Politicking. There were yard signs all along the path into the polling place. The poll watchers, who were not watching the polls but handing out Literature, just in case we had shown up to vote without having decided for whom we were showing up to vote. There is a jolly game they play when they are of more than one species. When the other species leaves for a potty break, the first dutifully yanks all their signs out and lay them flat on the ground. At least, I have seen this in the past, but not today.
There are three of these poll watchers. One points her finger at me. "You're a Flynn!"
Busted.
I think... Do I owe this person money? But no, it is a classmate of my middle brother and she has in some manner discerned the essential Flynnishness of my countenance. It's nice to know nobody can pull identity them on me around here. So we chat for a few moments while folks enter the polling place unmolested by her. Then I hear a disturbance.
The first poll watcher had been wearing a cap with some military fooferaw on it. Now I heard a voice say, "...not wear that when you're doing political work! Your grandfather would be ashamed." I glance over my shoulder. An older man, also wearing a military style cap with the designation of (I think) a naval vessel is addressing the poll worker. The older man walks with a cane and begins to hobble away. The poll worker is not young by any means, and he says defensively, "I'm a vet, too, you know."
I don't know for sure what the response is; but I know what it sounded like. Without turning, the old man said almost as if to himself, "Wrong war."
I do not know for which Party the younger vet was politicking or whether the old vet was objecting to the Party or to the politicking while wearing military identifiers. I was not actively listening but talking to my brother's friend. I offer it as a simple, and in its way, sad vignette.
+ + +
I rejoined the wife in the car and we drove off into the chill autumn morn, the Republic once more safe, more or less.
Lacrimosa dies illa,
qua resurget ex favilla
iudicandus homo reus.
Huic ergo parce, Deus.
November 1, 2010
Sometimes, the Mask Slips a Little
50 women injured, and one hospitalized
Stranger Things
Friends, you can't make this stuff up. The Wall Street Journal informs us
Colorado Flying-Saucer Believers Have Ghost Hunters in Their Sights.
DENVER—There has been plenty of partisan rancor across Colorado as Election Day approaches. Here in the capital, it's out of this world.
Ballot Initiative 300 would require the city to set up an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission, stocked with Ph.D. scientists, to “ensure the health, safety and cultural awareness of Denver residents” when it comes to future contact “with extraterrestrial intelligent beings or their vehicles.” . . .
Promoting the initiative: Jeff Peckman, a silver-haired entrepreneur who lives with his parents. "Low overhead," he explains. Mr. Peckman is a firm believer in intergalactic life, though he has never been personally contacted by an alien. That gives him more credibility, he says; it's harder to dismiss him as biased. ....“We need to get this out of the realm of the Tooth Fairy and into the realm of diplomatic protocol,” says Ricky Butterfass, who works on the campaign.
But wait. It gets better. The major opponent is... a ghost-hunter. Bryan Bonner "dismisses the unidentified-flying-object buffs as delusional if not outright frauds."
One thing about Mr. Bonner: He spends his spare time crawling through spooky spaces, deploying remote digital thermometers, seismographs, infrared cameras, electromagnetic field detectors and Nerf balls in pursuit of evidence of the paranormal. He is, in short, a ghost hunter.
And he has rallied his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society to fight Initiative 300 as an embarrassment to science—and to Denver.
Replies Clifford Clift, a Colorado UFO researcher: "The paranormal group is saying we're outlandish?"
So apparently the paranormal folks are accusing the UFO folks of being an embarrassment to science; and a ghost hunter is calling UFO hunters "delusional." Friends, if the irony were any thicker, we could coke it up and smelt steel.
October 29, 2010
Music, Sweet Music
A few days back I treated you to some musical entertainment. Thanks to Mark Shea, we can bring to you now the stunning virtuosity of the St. Luke Bottle Band playing Scott Joplin's Peacherine Rag.
Followed by Auld Lang Syne and the Quickstep from the 1812 overture, complete with cannons.
October 28, 2010
The Madness Continues
Remember, the objectum sexuals? Neither do we, but to refresh your memory, here is the story of the woman who married the Eiffel Tower.
For three years, the professional archer from San Francisco would visit the object of her affection, going for weeks at a time, spending all day touching the tower. And then on April 8, 2007, Erika LaBrie became Erika Eiffel in a commitment ceremony before 10 of her closest friends.
Now, from China, comes the next phase:
Chen Wei-yih has posed for a set of photos in a flowing white dress, enlisted a wedding planner and rented a banquet hall for a marriage celebration with 30 friends. But there is no groom. Chen will marry herself.
A good man is hard to find, the song runs. Apparently very hard, in some cases.
One wonders if when she dies, the French government now has dibs on Mrs. Eiffel's property. And who gets what if Mrs. Chen divorces?
October 26, 2010
Goosey, Goosey Gander
Kirk Myers, Seminole County Environmental News Examiner has compiled a fascinating list of quotes, many of which are below:
"The climate of New-York and the contiguous Atlantic seaboard has long been a study of great interest. We have just experienced a remarkable instance of its peculiarity. The Hudson River, by a singular freak of temperature, has thrown off its icy mantle and opened its waters to navigation.”
“Is our climate changing? The succession of temperate summers and open winters through several years, culminating last winter in the almost total failure of the ice crop throughout the valley of the Hudson, makes the question pertinent. The older inhabitants tell us that the winters are not as cold now as when they were young, and we have all observed a marked diminution of the average cold even in this last decade.”
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“The question is again being discussed whether recent and long-continued observations do not point to the advent of a second glacial period, when the countries now basking in the fostering warmth of a tropical sun will ultimately give way to the perennial frost and snow of the polar regions.”
“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot,” [according to a Commerce Department report].
“Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers. . . all point to a radical change in climate conditions and . . . unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone . . . Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones . . . while at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared.” --Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1922
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Professor Gregory of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out.”
“The discoveries of changes in the sun's heat and southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to the conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age
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Headline: “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise”
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“America is believed by Weather Bureau scientists to be on the verge of a change of climate, with a return to increasing rains and deeper snows and the colder winters of grandfather's day.”
======================
Warming Arctic Climate Melting Glaciers Faster, Raising Ocean Level, Scientist Says – “A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, engendering a "serious international problem," Dr. Hans Ahlmann, noted Swedish geophysicist, said today.
“Greenland's polar climate has moderated so consistently that communities of hunters have evolved into fishing villages. Sea mammals, vanishing from the west coast, have been replaced by codfish and other fish species in the area's southern waters.”
“An analysis of weather records from Little America shows a steady warming of climate over the last half century. The rise in average temperature at the Antarctic outpost has been about five degrees Fahrenheit.”
“Several thousand scientists of many nations have recently been climbing mountains, digging tunnels in glaciers, journeying to the Antarctic, camping on floating Arctic ice. Their object has been to solve a fascinating riddle: what is happening to the world's ice?
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“After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.”
“Like an outrigger canoe riding before a huge comber, the earth with its inhabitants is caught on the downslope of an immense climatic wave that is plunging us toward another Ice Age.”
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“Col. Bernt Balchen, polar explorer and flier, is circulating a paper among polar specialists proposing that the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two."
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Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor, "the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.”
“The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages.”
“In the next 50 years, fine dust that humans discharge into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel will screen out so much of the sun's rays that the Earth's average temperature could fall by six degrees. Sustained emissions over five to 10 years, could be sufficient to trigger an ice age."
“It's already getting colder. Some midsummer day, perhaps not too far in the future, a hard, killing frost will sweep down on the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, the Dakotas and the Russian steppes...”
“An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.”
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“A poll of climate specialists in seven countries has found a consensus that there will be no catastrophic changes in the climate by the end of the century. But the specialists were almost equally divided on whether there would be a warming, a cooling or no change at all.”
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“A global warming trend could bring heat waves, dust-dry farmland and disease, the experts said... Under this scenario, the resort town of Ocean City, Md., will lose 39 feet of shoreline by 2000 and a total of 85 feet within the next 25 years.”
“Global warming could force Americans to build 86 more power plants -- at a cost of $110 billion -- to keep all their air conditioners running 20 years from now, a new study says...Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010, and the drain on power would require the building of 86 new midsize power plants
“New York will probably be like Florida 15 years from now.”
"[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers . . . The Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.”
"It appears that we have a very good case for suggesting that the El Ninos are going to become more frequent, and they're going to become more intense and in a few years, or a decade or so, we'll go into a permanent El Nino. So instead of having cool water periods for a year or two, we'll have El Nino upon El Nino, and that will become the norm. And you'll have an El Nino, that instead of lasting 18 months, lasts 18 years,” according to Dr. Russ Schnell, a scientist doing atmospheric research at Mauna Loa Observatory.
"Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. A build-up of greenhouse gases is blamed for the meltdown, which could lead to drought and flooding in the region affecting millions of people."
“This year (2007) is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998.”
Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer (2008), report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field. "We're actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history]," David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker.
"So the climate will continue to change, even if we make maximum effort to slow the growth of carbon dioxide. Arctic sea ice will melt away in the summer season within the next few decades. Mountain glaciers, providing fresh water for rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people, will disappear - practically all of the glaciers could be gone within 50 years. . . Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know . . . We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with sea level 75 metres higher. Climatic disasters would occur continually."
-- Dr. James Hansen (NASA GISS), The Observer, Feb. 15, 2009.
October 25, 2010
A Long Night's Journey into Day
[image error]
h/t Mark Shea
October 24, 2010
Suffer the Little Children
From a medical study at Mediscape, excerpted at First Things
Neonatal survival after withdrawal of artificial hydration and nutrition can last up to 26 days, according to a case series presented here at the 18th International Congress on Palliative Care. Although physical distress is not apparent in the infants, the psychological distress of parents and clinicians builds with the length of survival, said Hal Siden, MD, from Canuck Place Children’s Hospice in Vancouver, British Columbia.
“These babies live much, much longer than anybody expects. I think that neonatologists and nurses and palliative care clinicians need to be alerted to this,” he said. “The time between withdrawal of feeding and end of life is something that is not predictable, and you need to be cautioned very strongly about that if you are going to do this work.” He presented a series of 5 cases that clinicians at his hospice had overseen over a 5-year period. Two infants had severe neurologic impairment, 2 had severe hypoxic ischemia, and 1 had severe bowel atresia.
...
Despite this, there is one factor that medication cannot alleviate, and that is the visual signs of emaciation, said Ms. Keats. “The longer a child lives, the more emaciated he or she becomes. This is something that we as clinicians need to anticipate. You can alleviate some of the physical symptoms, but this is one symptom, or result of our action, that we can’t relieve. A critical factor for counseling is to anticipate the kind of suffering that comes with witnessing the emaciation. It isn’t something people can prepare themselves for.” Autopsies are often encouraged in such neonatal palliative care cases to help both parents and medical staff gain a better understanding of the reasons for the death, said Dr. Siden. Parents should be warned that the report will document the technical cause of death as “starvation” — a loaded word for all concerned. It is important that parents separate this word from any notion of suffering, he said.
...
“All of the children we’ve cared for have been in a very quiet, low metabolic state — not an agitated state — with no overt signs of hunger behavior. Whether they are neurologically capable of hunger behavior is another question, and I don’t know the answer. That’s why I am trying to understand better what they are going through, because I don’t want them to suffer,” Dr. Siden explained.
He emphasized the importance of more research into the physiologic processes that occur after withdrawal of fluids and nutrition so that clinicians can both inform and reassure parents. “There’s an ethical component to doing research. If you don’t do research yourself, you need to support those who do, because we desperately need to know more,” Dr. Siden asserted. “There’s a technical aspect to what we do, and we need to become really good at that because we need to be able to say to people, without a doubt, that we are going to do this and there is not going to be any kind of suffering. You’ve got to be very on top of your game.”
* * *
By all means, let us distance ourselves from the implications of that loaded term "death by starvation." After all, these are infants who are severely defective. They have what the Germans used to call lebensunwertes Leben, or "life unworthy of life." What comment is necessary beyond the mere posting of this mengelestic research?
October 23, 2010
Final Causes
(Photo from Conversion Diary)
when even plants strive toward something beyond themselves?
Without this "towardness" there would be no laws of nature, since there would be no reason why A→B "always or for the most part." Efficient causes thus depend on finality for their coherence. This is why final causes have been called "the cause of causes."
In particular, evolution (transformism) would make no sense without this intentionality of living things, since the efficient cause (natural selection) would at best simply weed out the unfit. It is precisely the striving of living things to go on living that leads them to exploit new mutations and new environments. To seek out new life and new civilizations; to go where no.... Wait a minute. <Reset> OK. Natural selection, as an efficient cause would not necessarily select for better fitness unless there were an intentionality in living things, a towardness in nature for better fitness.
Thomas Aquinas touched on the issue tangentially during a discussion of other matters.
Objection 3. Further, nothing is said to be complete to which many things are added, unless they are merely superfluous, for a thing is called perfect to which nothing is wanting that it ought to possess. But many things were made after the seventh day, as the production of many individual beings, and even of certain new species that are frequently appearing, especially in the case of animals generated from putrefaction.
Reply to Objection 3. Nothing entirely new was afterwards made by God, but all things subsequently made had in a sense been made before in the work of the six days. .... Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning. ....
-- Thomas Aquinas, Summ.Theol. I, 73, 1, ad. 3 et resp. 3
Now, Thomas was relying on science that we now know was wrong. Pasteur and others showed much later that living things do not in fact arise from non-living things. But the example is purely illustrative. Thomas clearly states that new species (implicit or potential in the old) are brought forth by purely natural powers; and this would be the case whether it really was the stars and the elements causing putrefaction or cosmic rays from the stars causing a mutation in an element of a genome. He did not suggest that new species arose because of a violation of natural law.
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