Month: November 2009

Kottke captions a 3QD find:

When you shoot video of water drops falling into a puddle in super slow motion, it turns out that they bounce in really interesting ways.

Mary Bates explains:

In essence, when blind people hear the actions of others, they use the same network of cortical brain areas that sighted people use when they observe such actions. This fits into what we already know about how some regions of the brain are recruited for different uses by blind people. For example, congenitally blind individuals rely on areas in the visual cortex to acquire information about an object’s shape and movement through other senses like touch and hearing. As Ricciardi, Pietrini and colleagues point out, the recruitment of visual brain areas for nonvisual recognition in congenitally blind individuals indicates that neither visual experience nor visual imagery is required to form an abstract representation of objects.

Slate marks the death of the DC Sniper by studying final food requests of prisoners about to be executed:

The last meals of death row inmates are often quite memorable. Karla Faye Tucker requested a fruit plate but didn't eat it. John Wayne Gacy asked for shrimp, fried chicken, French fries, and a pound of strawberries. Timothy McVeigh ate two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Instead of a last meal, Tennessee convict Philip Workman requested that pizza be distributed to the homeless in Nashville. (Prison officials denied his request, but local groups passed out pizza in his honor.) Before his execution in 2000, convicted rapist and murderer Odell Barnes requested a last meal of "Justice, Equality, World Peace." In 1992, Arkansas convict Ricky Ray Rector, who had brain damage from shooting himself in the head after killing a police officer, ate a final meal of steak, fried chicken, and cherry Kool-Aid, but famously said he wanted to save his pecan pie for later.

A reader writes:

This week I reread the Garry Wills book: Why I Am A Catholic.  Wills writes intelligently and candidly about his own disagreements with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.  As he explains, the church is not only the hierarchy. The Church – the mystical body of Christ – is all of the people and the priests and the hierarchy. To leave the church, he says, would be to abandon those who have been nothing but good to him simply because he objects to positions held by a few in the hierarchy. And of the hierarchy he says:

We do not leave a father whenever he proves wrong on something. That is when he needs us ….

The true lover of a country does not leave it in its time of peril. The patriot is not one who thinks a country must be perfect in order to deserve his allegiance. Patriots are often critics of their country, since they feel so deeply that it is worth protections.

It is for similar reasons that I remain in the

Catholic church.

If one truly believes that the church is all of the people, then to leave is rather like cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.  To leave would be to abandon those who have nurtured and cherished me.  To leave would be abandoning them to the powerful and misguided few who are themselves in need of my willingness to challenge.

A Protestant friend recently confided that she was thinking about leaving her church.  She was raised as an Episcopalian, but decided that the Episcopal church was too liberal, so she joined an Evangelical congregation.  Now she says she misses the more liturgical aspects of worship, so she is thinking about becoming a Catholic.  But she thinks the preaching in the Catholic church is of a poor quality (it often is) and she said that she would not long tolerate a parish if it had bad preaching. 

What I realized as I was listening to her is that she is giving no thought to the idea of a church being the people.  For her, it seems to be about the smells and bells, or the preaching, but not about the embodiment of Christ in the people.  As I listened to her, I realized that she sounded more like a fickle lover than a faithful spouse or a loving family member. 

Returning to Wills's argument, marriages and family relationships sometimes hit rocky ground, but when we are committed in love, we don't abandon the beloved.  

We stay, we fight, we challenge, we live with compromises and we try to work things out.

Tara McKelvey argues that the religiosity of Bush-era appointees had a detrimental effect on soldiers with PTSD:

[Paul] Sullivan was working as an analyst at the Veterans Benefits Administration in Washington in early 2005 when he was called to a meeting with a top political appointee at the VA, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Michael McLendon. McLendon, an intensely focused man in a neatly pressed suit, kept a Bible on his desk at the office. Sullivan explained to McLendon and the other attendees that the rise in benefits claims the VA was noticing was caused partly by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were suffering from PTSD. “That’s too many,” McLendon said, then hit his hand on the table. “They are too young” to be filing claims, and they are doing it “too soon.” He hit the table again. The claims, he said, are “costing us too much money,” and if the veterans “believed in God and country . . . they would not come home with PTSD.”

At that point, he slammed his palm against the table a final time, making a loud smack. Everyone in the room fell silent.

“I was a little bit surprised,” Sullivan said, recalling the incident. “In that one comment, he appeared to be a religious fundamentalist.” For Sullivan, McLendon’s remarks reflected the views of many political appointees in the VA and revealed what was behind their efforts to reduce costs by restricting claims. The backlog of claims was immense, and veterans, often suffering extreme psychological stress, had to wait an average of five months for decisions on their requests.

A reader writes:

If you listen to Archbishop Onaiyekan, he states that the Catholic Church does not discriminate when it comes to providing relief to those in need. Indeed, he's probably generally right about that–I've heard evangelical Protestants criticize the Church on exactly this issue, namely, the practice of performing corporal works of mercy without directly proselytizing the beneficiaries. I think this is the result of the Church's understanding that charity is the highest of theological virtues, and I think it's praiseworthy. Moreover, as St. Thomas would have noted, the goods of the earth belong to all, so it is a matter of justice that they be distributed accordingly (however problematic this is in practice). In this sense charity and justice do not conflict.

But this gets thrown into question with the Washington, DC, Archdiocese's recent actions. Let's put aside the legitimate outrage that many are feeling that the Church is holding the homeless and needy hostage in order to get its way on same-sex marriage, though this in itself is a huge issue. Instead, look at the glaring inconsistency of the Church's position with regard to gays and lesbians themselves: The Church claims that justice actually demands discrimination against gays and lesbians in certain matters: for example, the granting of civil and economic rights associated with marriage, housing (landlords shouldn't be forced to violate their consciences and rent to gay co-habitators, for example), employment in certain professions, etc.

So let's grant that justice is indeed served by discriminating against gays and lesbians on certain issues. The upshot is that gays and lesbians potentially are left without various primary goods: homes, jobs, food, medical care, health insurance, etc. What though does charity demand? If we follow the Church's traditional practice, as articulated by Onaiyekan, charity would demand that the Church provide for needy gays and lesbians–regardless of their life-choices/faith/orientation, etc.–all those aforementioned primary goods without condition.

In other words, we have a situation where charity and justice conflict, something that is supposed to be impossible according to JPII's Veritatis Splendor or Benedict's Caritas in Veritate.

The Dish is going to wait for the actual "book" "by" Sarah Palin before analyzing its factual accuracy. The excerpts are so far incomplete and context is missing. The odd lies compiled by the Dish were strictly limited to statements she has made that are directly contradicted by clear and available evidence that she simply refuses to acknowledge. But the first pushback from the McCain campaign does not, shall we say, surprise me. Check this out as an hors d'oeuvre.

As this blog persistently demonstrated in last year's campaign, Palin is a delusional fantasist, existing in a world of her own imagination, asserting fact after fact that are demonstrably untrue, and unable to adjust to the actual reality after it has been demonstrated beyond any empirical doubt. The campaign's media strategy of making sure she was never in a position to be asked anything in an uncontrolled setting, and of never holding an open press conference (unprecedented in the history of presidential campaigns) were a response to this. The only interview that dared stray even a little from this fawning celebrity-deference, Katie Couric's, revealed Palin to be an astonishingly inept know-nothing, camouflaged by incessant victimology.

She is a deeply disturbed individual whose grip on reality is very weak, and whose self-awareness is close to nil. This much is not a leap, let alone unfair. It is simply unavoidable if one examines her surreal invention of reality – even when she must surely know that the evidence exists out there to contradict her.

As I have long noted, this is not the usual political mendacity and spin. It is far weirder and more disturbing than that. She creates her own reality. And the fact-indifferent, editor-free marketing company, HarperCollins, is only too willing to make some money off it.