The Newest Catholic

Now I can't make my favorite infant joke (next to "Well, he wasn't born yesterday") about my little heathen baby.

"D'you know, if you weren't an agnostic, I should ask you for five shillings to buy a black god-daughter."

"Nothing will surprise me about your religion."

"It's a new thing a missionary priest started last term. You send five bob to some nuns in Africa and they christen a baby and name her after you. I've got six black Cordelias already. Isn't it lovely?"

--Bridehead Revisited

An Information Addiction

As the bailout package went down in congress yesterday, and the stock market starting dropping like a stone, I was trying to solve a problem in a database at work -- with a pair of web browser windows set to National Review's The Corner and the WSJ Financial Page that I would click over and refresh every five or ten minutes. In the "information age", it's easy for the information hungry to go on an information binge: Ah, the Dow is down 600 points. Oil is down. Now the Dow is only down 500. Representative Cantor criticizing Pelosi's politicization of the bailout -- Pelosi is a piece of work but that seems like a dumb reason to vote against it. Now the Dow is down 650. On, and on, and on.

Information is not the same as knowledge, however, and it is most certainly not doing anything. Not only does my instinctual desire to find out what's going on fail to achieve anything that I'm actually supposed to be getting done (professionally, personally or intellectually) but it does not actually achieve my goal of being informed, because from minute to minute there is not generally anything to know. We have, in this modern age, the ability to push images and text out to the world constantly, but that does not necessarily mean that there is anything worth reading among the stuff produced in the last five minutes at any given time.

In a sense, the old morning and evening newspaper editions cycle reflected the speed at which real information becomes available better than the age of blogging and 24-hour news channels does.

Some Thoughts on Homeschooling Young Children

In the week after young Jack's birth, I was doing the full time Daddy thing and had the opportunity to start the homeschooling year out with our two oldest (ages 5 and 6). Knowing that we had a baby due in early September, we hadn't really got going prior to this, and being tied up with baby things, we hadn't done a great deal of thinking about it either. So this represented a simultaneous launch of the new school year and planning session of what we're going to do differently from last year.

First off, here's the new schedule that we worked up:

Morning Read Alouds:

Religion - a short saint's life, story from the bible, or lesson from Faith & Life Book 1 (from Ignatius Press)

Written Work:

Math: Julie (5) is pretty good at math, while Eleanor (6) struggle a bit more, so they're effectively at the same point. Both spend 15-30min on a workbook page. After this week's experience I decided to ditch last year's Modern Curriculum Press workbooks and ordered the first book of Miquon Math from Key Curriculum Press. (Recommended by Opinionated Homeschooler, whose family knows a bit about math.)

Handwriting/Spelling/Grammar: The three are currently all rolled into one. Current format is each girl gets a sheet of lined paper. (We picked up some K and 1 size handwriting paper at a teachers' supply store.) I ask each girl for a topic and then write out a sentence to be copied. We discuss what makes the sentence a complete sentence, any any tricky spelling rules which the sentence illustrates. Then each one copies out her sentence carefully for handwriting practice, and illustrates it with a picture. Picture drawing goes on for a while, so this is a 30-60min block.

Reading Practice:
One or both girls take a turn at practicing reading while the other is still coloring and writing. (It's especially important to keep the elder away while the younger is reading, because otherwise miss first grade wants to butt in and do all the reading herself.)

Julia (K) is finishing Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons and Eleanor (1) is working through selected short stories and Beverly Cleary's The Mouse And The Motorcycle. (more on that in a minute)

Closing Read Alouds:
Selections from 2-3 different books so that each of History, Literature and Science are covered at least 3 times a week.

Last week we were covering the first couple chapters of E. H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World and stories from Tales From Near And Far for history.

We read from After The Dinosaurs (about pre-historic mammals -- it's a Golden Book from the early 90s, but I can't seem to find it online) for science.

And we read a few Grimms fairy tales and the first couple chapters of Stuart Little for literature.


One of the big issues I found myself bumping up against in both reading and real alouds is age. The two "in school" are 5 and 6.5, and we've got little miss 2.5 running around and wanting to be involved too. (She works on her alphabet coloring book during writing practice.) This gets tricky because while the eldest had hit an age where she really enjoys things like detailed science picture books and Gombrich's Little History, but the younger two are left pretty cold by these. Being energetic little girls, when the younger two are bored, crazy things tend to happen. And the eldest is still young enough that when crazy things happen, she wants to go join in. (Sending the younger two off to play doesn't work well either, as then the eldest wants to go going them.) So balancing the interests of all three girls without things exploding into chaos is very tricky -- and sometimes frustrating.

The other tricky thing about age is finding good stuff for Eleanor (age 6.5) to read. Over the last year her reading has become quite good -- probably something like a 4th grade level so far as I can tell from what she can read. However, her interests and experiences are still very much those of a six year old. So much of the things available to read at a level that stretches her simply aren't that interesting to her. After a couple of false starts, we're currently trying The Mouse And The Motorcycle, which has the benefit of being about an animal and a piece of machinery, two things generally dear to Eleanor's heart.

It does, however, underline for me that there's a limited virtue (other than bragging rights at gatherings with other parents) to a child that young reading far beyond his or her age level. By age eight or nine, there are a wide variety of books written for a general audience that will be interesting, but at age six there's a lot that just doesn't hold her attention (and that she wouldn't understand at all even if she did spent the time to read it) even if she could theoretically read it. So while we're trying to make sure that she keeps reading stuff that's at the outer edge of her abilities for practice, she's mostly reading much easier picture books which are more at her interest level. If you can't get your child to take off on reading level until a year or two later, it seems to me like it's nothing much to stress about. Sure, if you could somehow get your seven year old to read War and Peace you could annoy numerous other parents at social gatherings by talking endlessly about it, but the seven year old would get basically nothing from the experience.

How can a Conservative Support the Bailout?

Kyle asks, quoting Glenn Greenwald, how one can support government intervention into the US economy on the massive scale that the proposed $700B bailout would constitute.

Greenwald, politically tempestuous but ideologically difficult to place, asks in Salon.com:

Can anyone point to any discussion of what the implications are for having the Federal Government seize control of the largest and most powerful insurance company in the country, as well as virtually the entire mortgage industry and other key swaths of financial services? Haven't we heard all these years that national health care was an extremely risky and dangerous undertaking because of what happens when the Federal Government gets too involved in an industry? What happened in the last month dwarfs all of that by many magnitudes.

Greenwald's position is, it seems, basically that "Wall Street greed" is responsible for the problem, and that "Wall Street" thus deserves to take the hit without help:

What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism -- where they reap tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles are paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their schemes collapse? We've retroactively created a win-only system where the wealthiest corporations and their shareholders are free to gamble for as long as they win and then force others who have no upside to pay for their losses. Watching Wall St. erupt with an orgy of celebration on Friday after it became clear the Government (i.e., you) would pay for their disaster was literally nauseating, as the very people who wreaked this havoc are now being rewarded.

The "let the greedy ones take the fall" idea is widely popular throughout the left, so far as I can tell, reading around the last few days. On the conservative side, many are concerned about the precedent of the government stepping into the private sector in such a massive way. Mark Hemmingway of National Review Online writes:

Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke would have you believe that it’s perfectly natural that the solution to a large financial crisis is throwing a large amount of money at the problem. They seem to hope that no one will notice that the problem with the bailout isn’t ironing out some of the fiscal particulars: It’s philosophical.

When government seizes control of a critical industry, that’s, uh, what do you call it? Oh, yes, socialism. “The government is telling us that capital and credit markets cannot, for several reasons, solve the current crisis on their own — only the federal government and its massive taxpayer base have the authority and the resources to solve it,” noted financial columnist James Ledbetter. “That is state socialism: the philosophy preached by the founders of the Second International, by the radical wing of the American labor movement, through the formation of the Soviet Union and its satellites, and now by Henry Paulson.”

While readily open to the criticism that I am in no position to throw stones when it comes to lack of knowledge, it seems to me that both of these approaches fail to understand what it being proposed, and why it is probably a good idea under the circumstances.

What a lot of people seem to have convinced themselves is going on here is that either lots of major companies are being "nationalized" (that is: taken over and run by the government) or else that the government is planning to give away $700B to large Wall Street firms in order to keep them from going bankrupt. Neither one of these is really true.

In the case of AIG, it has effectively been partly seized by the government to the extent that the US government now owns 79.9% of the AIG's stock. As the majority stock holder, and as the provider of a $80B line of credit, the government also demanded some management turn-over at AIG. However, AIG is not being actively run as a government institution. Rather, it's being broken up and its segments and assets sold off until the remaining core of the company can pay of the US government and become fully independent again. That is indeed a very large intervention, and I wouldn't normally like to see that sort of thing being done under non-emergency circumstances, but it is not the sort of active government running of major industries that socialism (or fascism) involves.

In regards to the $700B bailout -- the government is not planning (under any of the plans under discussion) to simply give money to companies in order to keep them from going bankrupt, nor is it buying all the defaulted mortgages and thus investing in a total loss. Rather, the idea is to allow the treasury department to buy and hold, and then eventually resell, assets which are currently in trading free fall due to market fears. It goes basically like this: Because of all the fear in the market right now, and because companies known to hold a lot of mortgage-based securities are seeing their stocks go into freefall, and because no one knows exactly how many of the mortgages rolled into a given security will go bad -- no one wants to buy mortgage backed securities at all right now. Because no one wants to buy them at any price, their effective sale value is approaching zero in many cases. And yet, the majority of the mortgages behind many or most of these securities will indeed pay off in the long run. So there is a value to the security -- if you are willing to hold onto it until the market for them picks up again or until the mortgages are paid off.

What Paulson is proposing to do is give the US Treasury a very large pot of money, and allow it to invest in these securities.

I'd say that Megan McArdle has it right when she says:

Any bailout plan needs to walk a very, very fine line. It must let straightened financial institutions sell the debt that is dragging down their portfolios. But it must do so in a way that does not convince future bankers that excessive risk taking can be nearly painless. That means paying just enough for the securities to keep the banks from failing, not enough to let them avoid painful losses.

Investing legend Warren Buffet (whose political views I almost universally disagree with, but who is a very smart guy when it comes to business) has weighed in arguing that a bailout is seriously necessary, but also pointing out that due to the buy, hold, sell nature of the proposed bailout plan, the US government might actually end up making a good deal of money at it before all is said and done. (He's also shown some confidence in the underlying "fundamentals" of the economy by choosing this moment to invest $5B, about 1/10th of his fortune, in Goldman Sachs.)

So, if done right, the $700B isn't just gone, in fact it's possible that the government would actually turn a decent profit on it in the end. The devil is, however, in the details. As McArdle and Buffet both say, it's important that the government buy these securities at a market rate. On the one hand, they're propping up the market by keeping these assets from going to a value of zero, which would result in cascading bank failures. On the other hand, they need to buy them at rates that reflect (and indeed are discounted below) what the securities are likely to eventually pay off at.

Unfortunately, all this needs a little bit of calm thought, and not many people seem eager to give it that. CNN, which over the last few weeks has been solemnly opining on the importance of experience and elite credentials, is now going full-throated populist and running a raft of v-logs by people describing "What I would do with $700 billion."

In democracy, we generally get the government we deserve, and my fear (given that I'm fairly well convinced that failure to do anything in this situation could cause a pretty massive economic meltdown as a result of the freezing over of the credit markets) is that we may find ourselves deserving to engage in populist histrionics rather than pulling our collective rear end out of the fire. It is satisfying, in a sense, to say, "Why should we bail out these stupid rich people who took unsafe risks," but if telling things sort themselves out really did result in the credit market coming to a standstill, we could end up seeing a pretty massive contraction of the GDP, and a lot of us who work for companies that give credit or get credit or have their cash-on-hand invested in money market funds would find ourselves out of a job. We could assure ourselves that Wall Street had deserved all this, but in the end it's not the Wall Street barons who would end up in the bread lines -- it's the low level workers who found themselves out of work without savings who would be suffering a lot more than the millionaires who had to cancel their European vacations and yacht orders.

But even with all these: Why do I not as a small government conservative (who's argued we should avoid centralizing health care because it would be bad for society) also oppose such a massive government economic action?

Well, I'm not opposed to large government action in principle, I'm opposed to it in most circumstances because I think it's often worse for society than private action. However, government (indeed, government acting in a centralized and semi-dictatorial fashion rather than consulting the maximum number of voters at every step) is often the best approach to large emergency situations that require risky and decisive action.

For instance, the presidents during both our largest wars (the Civil War and WW2) assumed powers that bordered on the dictatorial, and controlled massive portions of the economy through government spending. (During the peak of WW2, government spending accounted for 50% of the GDP.) Similarly, after a truly massive natural disaster, the federal and state governments are often the best positioned to move in large amounts of manpower, material and money in order to get things back up and running quickly. Waiting for things to get fixed organically might conceivably be better in some sense, but I think most people would agree that it's appropriate for the government to step in during such disasters.

There is inevitably a lot of foolishness and waste perpetrated by governments even in such dire situations (the whole "greatest generation" idea came later -- read the novels written during the 40s for commentary on the complete absurdity of much that was done during the war, despite the overall good aims and results) but because they are large and capable of acting decisively to achieve specific aims, they seem to be best suited to deal with certain kinds of situations. So my support for the government stepping in to try to stabilize credit markets is based on this idea that it is sometimes in times of huge crisis appropriate for the government to step is as and take massive and purposeful action. And in keeping with that kind of theory, it seems to me that the number of decision makers should actually be quite small, as with generals in a war. In that sense, I would support Paulson's request for no oversight -- though I'd feel a lot more comfortable if the legislation put one person or a small board of people in charge for the duration of the exercise so that it couldn't become a political football.

Why not, by the same rationale, declare an "emergency" and nationalize healthcare? Because while I think that the government can at times succeed well in taking massive action to achieve very specific objectives in the short term, it seems to me that massive centralized organizations (whether governmental or private) are very bad at running operations on a day-to-day basis while keeping their priorities straight. Providing "universal health insurance" is thus something I think the government (or any other large single institution) is very badly suited to do. I would support a huge centralized government action to deal with a specific health problem, say a sudden and deadly epidemic. But I think that if put in charge of everyone's day-to-day healthcare, it would almost inevitably make things much worse for us in the long run.

Beach reading

We didn't take a vacation this year (except vicariously, through TS's travel posts), so I have to make my escape through reading. Yesterday I went to the beach, courtesy of Jeff Sawyer.

Outside on the small deck of the Isle de Veau, Jack squinted into the concrete gray sky as he cranked open a half-dozen blue Cinzano umbrellas, in case anyone actually showed up for lunch in this lousy weather. Three-foot waves gnawed at the beach in the distance, the wind occasionally carrying spray through angled palms all the way to his tan, tired face. It dampened the faded tee that hung loosely off his frame, and his cargo shorts, and his mood. Little electric Japanese lanterns strung around the deck arbor had twisted up tight, hanging themselves in their cords, the relentless wind shifting their vibe from island chic to bleak. The whole island felt like that to Jack these days, like paradise lost. Just a photo in a glossy brochure faded to light blue after sitting too long in the window of a travel agency in some snowy New England town.

Every morning he’d see crusty old retirees who’d responded to brochures like that, pensioned dinosaurs plodding along the beach on crunchy knees, bracing their backs with one hand to stoop and pick up shells with the other, artifacts they mailed to grandchildren back home. Under floppy cotton hats, their thin, hoary hair was whipped by the wind against cocoa wrinkles. Where did they get those ridiculous faux Hawaiian shirts, stretch pants and giant sunglasses, he wondered, what were they thinking? He devised a name for their geezer ensembles, and reminded himself to see if it’d get a laugh out of Car when she arrived at the Isle for dinner that night: Last Resort Wear.

Shipwrecked on the Isle de Veau, Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

Normality in Iraq

If it bleeds, it leads. If it doesn't, it's often forgotten. Still, it's interesting to read this NY Times reporter's account of returning to Iraq after a two year absence to find a country he barely recognizes.

...When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope. The questions are jarring, too. Is it really different now? Is this something like peace or victory? And, if so, for whom: the Americans or the Iraqis?...

What to Make of the Financial Meltdown

What are we to make of the recent financial crises and the proposed solution to it?

I work with economics of a sort all the time, but what I deal with is the economics of price, supply and demand for product -- not high financial markets, interest rates and money supply. If, like me, you're trying to understand what's really going on (and you've caught on by not that very little said by political candidates at the moment is likely to be at all illuminating) the following are pretty good posts:

The Freakonomics blog at the NY Times provides a guess post on the meltdown. (H/T: Razib)

Megan McArdle also has some very illuminating posts on the topic:
How close was the financial system to melting down?
Why we need a bailout, even if not this bailout.
Even the easy answers aren't easy.

From what I can make out, one of the key things to keep in mind is that the crisis is not simply a matter of "bailing out" institutions which hold securitized mortgages. The issue is that although very few mortgages are actually defaulting, the knowledge that a number of them have or will has cratered the market for such securities. The institutions that hold these securities thus have assets which currently have no or little saleable value, even though if they continue to hold these assets they will pay off fairly well. However, accounting rules require that financial institutions value their investment assets at their current market value. This is causing massive losses in asset value for financial institutions, which then find themselves looking like increasingly bad credit risks as they seek short term loans to finance their normal cashflow. And yet they're already so heavily leveraged that if their debt ceases to roll over it can wipe them out -- taking down in the process the heavily interconnected web of other companies, institutions and individuals with capital invested in money market accounts.

The idea behind the $700B fund that Treasury Secretary Paulson wants is for the US government to buy many of these distressed securities allowing the companies that hold them to recover some measure of stability. The Treasury fund would then eventually sell the securities off again as it became clear which ones were good and the market for them recovered. By making sure that there remains a market for these securities, it keeps the whole edifice from coming down. (On why that's a good idea, go read Megan McArdle's posts.)

So it sounds to me like something like this bailout is probably necessary, and to the extent that it is, I would tend to follow Secretary Paulson's reasoning that the legislation setting it up should be short and clear.

Many on the left (Senator Obama among them) want to take the opportunity to put in some good "stick it to the rich" criteria, like only letting the fund buy assets from companies that fit congressionally mandated standards of not having "excessive executive pay", and also want to see "help the little guy" features that would help individual homeowners avoid being foreclosed on.

Many on the right are concerned about providing so much money and power to a treasury secretary -- who may well be replaced by an Obama appointee in four months depending on how the electoral winds blow.

And many in congress, on both sides, would much rather be able to oversee things themselves rather than leaving the decision-making to an appointee.

It's a messy situation which one wishes one were not in in the first place. I don't claim to have any insight into what the right answer is -- though my instict is that perhaps this is one of those situations in which putting the power in the hands of a few people (who aren't elected) might be safer than putting it in the hands of many (who are).

In the Roman Republic, they had a legal provision for installing a tyrant in times of national emergancy, who weilded absolute power for one year, after which power reverted to the Senate. That's always struck me as a very interesting provision, and one which is appropriate in certain kinds of grave emergency. Perhaps this is something of the financial equivalent.

New Japanese Prime Minister

Mr. Taro Aso has just been elected the president of Japan's ruling party (the same party, the Liberal Democratic Party, has held power in Japan for the last 50 years) and is thus almost certain to be elected Prime Minister shortly.

Mr. Aso would be the first Catholic to be elected Prime Minister in Japan. He was also, it seems, a member of Japan's olympic shooting team (1976 Summer Olympics) and remains a big manga fan.

About a Boy

First, let's clear up this clairvoyant rumor and tell the not-so-exciting truth. The reason I could predict baby's birth date and time with such accuracy was not second sight, but insider trading. I had a midwife appointment on the 10th and I knew that she would strip my membranes (that's loosening the bag of waters from the wall of the uterus), a maneuver that has, in conjunction with other therapies, always brought on labor for me in less than 24 hours. (Confidential to TS: next time you play the lottery, try the numbers 09-11-08.)

And the birth. It was pretty uneventful for everyone but me and baby. I started with the contractions at 12:17, called the midwife at 1 am, spent the next few hours pacing and feeling increasingly miserable, and baby was born at 4:33 am. I did not need stitches, for which I'm still thanking the good Lord.

Sounds easy, no? No. I knew labor was coming the night before, and I was scared. I prepared for birth by reading the lives (or more accurately, the deaths) of the North American martyrs. Contractions, I reasoned, could hardly be as bad as having your thumb bitten off. And given that a week and a half later, I'm not in pain and still have my thumb, I think that assessment was correct.

I think it's a crying shame that hospitals will sterilize women right after they've given birth. No one wants to have a baby again right after she's just pushed a head through her pelvis or had major surgery. It's coercion of the worst kind.

But! To balance out all this toil, I present the sweetly cross-eyed reward:


Who wouldn't go through nine months of discomfort and four hours of agony for that precious boy?

Superstition and Unbelief

Friday's WSJ contained an interesting piece about a new study entitled What Americans Really Believe out from Baylor University and the Gallup organization. Some more information about the study is available from Baylor here. The full version is in book form from Baylor University Press and does not appear to be available online at this time.

From the WSJ piece:

"You can't be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you're drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god," comedian and atheist Bill Maher said earlier this year on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien."
...
"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener," skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.

Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn't. Two years ago two professors published another study in Skeptical Inquirer showing that, while less than one-quarter of college freshmen surveyed expressed a general belief in such superstitions as ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance and witches, the figure jumped to 31% of college seniors and 34% of graduate students.... [Darwin: Insert your favorite joke about long term grad students here.]

Must we now suspect that Richard Dawkins and the folks from the Skeptical Enquirer are slipping out for a quick palm reading before publishing their debunkings of religious belief? It's amusing to picture, but no.

What's actually going on is rather more interesting.

According to the information on the Baylor site, the survey found 11% of Americans said they had "no religion" but of those only 4% described themselves as atheists who believed that nothing exists other than the physical world. The remaining two thirds, reject existing religions, yet live to the full Chesterton's quip that those who believe in nothing soon find themselves believing in everything.

So it's not necessarily the hard core atheists who are believing in astrology and Big Foot.

However, it's also interesting to see that the more "modern" Protestant denominations show signficantly higher rates of superstition than the "fundamentalist" ones. In a sense, though, it shouldn't be surprising. Fundamentalist forms of Protestantism are built around the idea that the universe is fundamentally knowlable -- though what they think they know differs from that which is held by others. Many mainline Protestants these days, on the other hand, are in the habit of defining reality by preference. In that case, why not assume that the resurrection was metaphorical, but that palm reading is real?

And there is, of course, the gnostic-inspired mysticism that sometimes floats around the periphery of modern Christiantiy. An interesting snippet from the Baylor site:

Among other interesting findings on paranormal or occult beliefs: People who have read The Purpose-Driven Life or any book in the Left Behind series are less likely to believe in the occult and paranormal, while those who have read any book on dianetics or The Da Vinci Code are more likely to believe.

I do not see any information in the WSJ article or the Baylor release about Catholics, but I wouldn't be surprised to see much the same divergence between "liberal" theology and non-church-going Catholic on the one hand and orthodox Catholics on the other that is found between fundamentalist and liberal Protestants.

And while one shouldn't unduly tar seriously atheists with this brush, there are of course those annoying public personalities who leave themselves wide open. From the WSJ article:

But it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O'Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman -- a quintuple bypass survivor -- to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn't accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: "I don't believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory." He has told CNN's Larry King that he won't take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn't even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.

I Have Had It With "Catholics United"

Somehow, I've found myself on the email list of a group calling itself "Catholics United". It's a progressive 527 which is attempting to make the case for Barack Obama and against John McCain by using "common good" language out of Catholic Social Teaching.

They are running their own TV ad titled Actions Speak Louder Than Words, in which they remonstrate with Senator McCain, "You voted against one of the largest support programs for pregnant women. You voted against health care for our children. And you voted for a war that has killed thousands of Americans. Senator McCain, when will you start defending all human life, without exception?"

Now they have sent me an email entitled "Knights of Columbus Distracts Catholics from the Real Issues of this Election" in which they denounce the K of C for publishing (and paying to place in a number of newspapers) an open letter to vice presidential candidate Senator Joe Biden. The Open Letter from the Knights of Columbus to Senator Biden can be found here, and I strongly encourage you to read it. It is a thorough and thoughtful letter.

Catholics United executive director Chris Korzen is quoted as saying:

The Knights of Columbus' ad campaign is yet another unfortunate distraction from the serious and urgent issues Americans are facing in this campaign: lack of health care, a crumbling economy, a war that has gone on far too long, and solutions to the tragedy of abortion that offer results instead of rhetoric. By choosing to focus on Senator Biden's own unhelpful comments instead of offering a comprehensive vision of what it means to be pro-life, the Knights are doing a major disservice to the unborn, indeed to all Americans.

Let me reply, both as a fellow Catholic and as a Knight, to Chris Korzen and to James Salt, the "organizing director" who is the signatory to all the emails that go out from Catholics United:

Your attitude towards the open letter from Supreme Knight Carl Anderson is not only disappointing, it is deplorable. You and your organization should be ashamed of yourselves and of your politicization of Catholic teaching in order to support the most pro-abortion candidate ever to seek of the office of President of the United States.

Further, your attempts to attack McCain and uphold Obama on "pro-life" grounds are misguided to the point of being morally disgusting.

This is not because I think that every good Catholic must support McCain because of the abortion issue. Far from it. I know orthodox Catholics and other people who are genuinely pro-life who believe that a progressive approach to economics and social services (or a change in foreign policy) are so desperately needed in this country that they consider them more than proportionate reasons to support Senator Obama for president. I respect such people's position, though I by no means agree with it.

However, in your ad you elide some important moral and political distinctions. A desire to help the poor, expectant mothers and those in need of medical treatment is not the exclusive domain of social progressives. Nor are the particular pieces of legislation which you fault McCain for opposing necessitated by Catholic Social Teaching or a pro-life commitment. Catholics who hold conservative and progressive economic views are united in their desire to help those in need, but we disagree on the best way to do so. Principled conservatives do not believe that continuously expanding social welfare programs at the federal level is the best way to alleviate suffering in our communities. And a great many of us provide significant donations to crisis pregnancy centers and other charities designed to achieve these very goals via private means in our communities. (In stark contrast, it might be noted, to Senator Biden's virtually complete absence of charitable giving. And Obama's similar tendencies.)

So while being pro-life in a comprehensive sense most certainly requires "caring for people outside the womb as well as inside" (as the phrase goes) it does not necessarily require that one share the progressive politics of Messrs. Korzen and Salt.

Moreover, it is doubly hypocritical for you to first attack Republicans for not agreeing with your opinions as to what specific policies are actually most conducive to the common good, and then denounce the Knights for asserting basic Catholic teaching about the morality of abortion. The truth can never be a distraction from the "real issues".

I assume that you are in earnest in your belief that progressive policies are most conducive to the Common Good. If you called yourselves "Progressives United" that would be all well and good. But to call yourselves "Catholics United" and then denounce those who put forth basic Catholic teachings, while acting as if your personal policy preferences have the stamp of doctrinal necessity is the height of dishonesty.

My pirate name is:

Captain Charity Read

Even though there's no legal rank on a pirate ship, everyone recognizes you're the one in charge. Even through many pirates have a reputation for not being the brightest souls on earth, you defy the sterotypes. You've got taste and education. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

I'm a bit late for International Talk Like A Pirate Day, mateys, but here's me name in the local pARRRlance.

H/T Happy Catholic

Time and Achievement

According to Plutarch's "Life of Julius Caesar", there came a time when Caesar was thirty-seven years old and serving as a quaestor in Spain when he was seen bursting into tears after reading a biography of Alexander the Great. (Suetonius tells a version in which it is seeing a statue of Alexander that sets Caesar off.)

Of course, among the things which Alexander had achieved by age thirty-seven was dying, and in the end, I think one could say that Julius Caesar achieved more than Alexander ever had. Or at least, made a more lasting impression upon the world.

Yet Caesar's reaction strikes me as very natural and familiar. Every so often, I find myself looking back on the various ambitions that I had while in high school and college and asking myself: what have I done?

Well, not much, and a great deal, depending upon how you look at it. The dreams we have while young are usually of large and obvious achievements: publish a wildly popular novel, become a jet pilot, direct a movie, climb Mt. Everest, run for office, have a new species of slime mold named after you. Or, in Alexander and Caesar's case: conquer the known world.

But the very thing that makes and Alexander or a Mozart a "prodigy" is that few achievements come young. It is unusual for an artist to do his best work or a leader to attain the highest reaches of power at a young age.

Yet even in regard to our much more modest ambitions, it is often difficult to remember that life is long, and there are plenty of things which you are not working on right this very moment which you will nonetheless have the chance to achieve later on. As an inveterate planner (and a starter of many things -- though a finisher of fewer) this is particularly difficult for me.

At twenty-nine, I can like Caesar reflect on the amount of mayhem and recognition which Alexander had achieved by my age. And that I've thus far achieved few of the "great things" which I had while younger dreamed of. On the other hand, it has occurred to me in these last few days that when my father was my age his first child was not yet born. Some times, even those things one thinks of as "ordinary life" are, from a certain point of view, achievements.

A Little Thought, Please

It's hardly news that thought is generally a stranger to political advertising, no matter which party is responsible for it. However, one talking point which, for whatever reason, is starting to particularly grate upon my nerves is: "The economy is in crisis -- banks failing, plants closing, jobs lost. We can't afford four more years of Bush's tax cuts and policies that protect Wall Street while hurting Main Street."

What exactly is the logical relation between the first and second parts of this argument? If low taxes and pro-business policies are bad for the country, wouldn't it be equally wrong to support them whether the economy is doing well or doing poorly? If high taxes and more regulation is good for the country, then one's support for them should be independent of current economic conditions. And if one things, as I do, that high taxes and heavy regulation are generally bad for the economy, than telling me that the economy is already weak will do nothing to change my mind. (That turns the argument into: The economy is weak right now, lets kick it while it's down so we all feel better.)

I suppose it's wishful thinking to imagine that political advertising could rise above the level of "Four legs good, two legs bad!" but one still can't help being annoyed.

Particularly amusing in this case is that Senator Obama has said that he will hold off on raising taxes on "the rich" if the economy is in recession when he comes into office. This would seem to imply that he's aware that raising taxes has a slowing effect on the economy. (After all, one could hardly hold that "the rich" desperately need that the Bush tax cuts in order to buy food and make their mortgage payments -- because if that were the case they wouldn't be "rich".)

But then, I suppose even the increasingly cynical American public wouldn't go for an ad that said, "My opponent has the misfortune to be a member of the incumbent party at a time when our economic cycle is facing a downturn. Though this has little to do with his policies, and my policies would do nothing to alleviate it, I'd like you to vote against him just to show that bad luck will not be tolerated in our country."

Marriage -- Path to Prosperity

There's not a lot to make you feel great about finances this week, but for the longer term, this WSJ piece from yesterday struck he as very interesting. According to the latest Census data, the real median family income in the US hit $50,233 in 2007, up $600 from 2006. However, the real median income for intact families -- mother and father in the home -- rose to $78,000, an all-time high.

Among the factors that tends to throw off statistics about household income or family income over the last 50 years is the fact that families have become both smaller (as in fewer children) and more splintered (as in more divorces and single parents) over the last 50 years. So flat household income can often represent an increase in real family income when you control for family size and marital status.

In the other interesting stats the piece presents: women and minorities showed the greatest increases of median income in recent decades, while white men have shown the least.

Welcome to our life

It's like David Malki! went with us on our last Half-Price Books run.

Got yer fix

I find it impossible to write an objective post about giving birth less than a week away from the event (right now my summary would be: "pain sucks") but here's a few pix of baby for them as is interested.








Even the cat likes the baby.

Knowledge and Democracy

Myron of Working Towards Something That Makes Sense (a very interesting fellow) suggested to me the other day the idea that democracy is a superior form of government in that by allowing all members of the polis to vote, one incorporates the collective knowledge of many more people than are involved in an oligarchy or monarchy.

The idea is attractive to me in that it ties in with what I find attractive about a free economy and decentralized approach to charitable action: that people in a given situation are more likely to know the details of what is the best choice than is some distant, centralized authority. People often fail when they try to centralize or re-engineer important functions in society, because the centralizers seldom are able to know enough about all the different situations their actions will affect to correctly account for all of them. An open market (or a decentralized system of charity/safety net institutions) thus incorporates the knowledge and decision making capabilities of many more people and is able to achieve better solutions.

However, when it comes to democracy, I'm not sure that that argument works as well. (My own reason for preferring democracy is the more negative precept that democracy gives the people the government they deserve.) Here's the reason: In a democracy of any real size, the people as a whole are not deeply involved in drafting laws and policies. Rather, they either vote to elect leaders (in a republic) or in a more direct democracy vote on laws and policies which are crafted by a relatively small governing set or class.

The act of voting, in itself, does not do much to collect information from the populace as a whole. Nor can I think of any practical means (in a democracy of any size) whereby one could easily harness that information.

It seems to me that the only way to take advantage of this collective knowledge is to keep the number of things administered at the national level to a minimum, while allowing the most intrusive services (in which I would put education, health care and unemployment/poverty alleviation) to be administered at the most local level possible. (Preferably something rather smaller than most cities these days.)

Thoughts?

Do "Family Values" and "Pro-Life" Clash?

Ross Douthat has been examining the odd phenomenon of a number of left leaning commentators suddenly realizing in retrospect that they thought there was value to the old "family values" approach by conservatives, only to lament that it has now been destroyed from the inside by those villainous pro-lifers.

In a Jacob Weisberg piece in Slate entitled, "Whatever Happened to Family Values?" we hear:

In fact, these two conservative social goals—ending abortion and upholding the model of the nuclear family—were always in tension. The reason is that, like it or not, the availability of legal abortion supports the kind of family structure that conservatives once felt so strongly about: two parents raising children in a stable relationship, without government assistance. By 12th grade, 60 percent of high school girls are sexually active or, as Reagan put it, "promiscuous." Teen-pregnancy rates have been trending downward in recent years, but even so, 7 percent of high-school girls become pregnant every year. And the unfortunate reality is that teenagers who carry their pregnancies to term drastically diminish their chances of living out the conservative, or the American, dream....

Give the anti-abortion extremists credit for living their principles. If they weren't deadly serious, they wouldn't sabotage their party's political prospects or sacrifice so many other values they hold dear for the sake of denying exceptions in cases of rape and incest. But Sarah Palin's pro-life extremism is as ethically flawed as it is politically damaging to the GOP. By vaunting their pro-life agenda over everything else, conservatives are abandoning one of their most valuable insights: that intact, two-parent families are best for children and for the foundation of a healthy society....

Remember Murphy Brown? I always thought the former vice president was on solid ground when he called it morally irresponsible to encourage women without the TV character's resources to embark on child-rearing on their own. In today's GOP, Quayle wouldn't condemn Murphy Brown. He'd call her up to the stage and salute her for choosing life.

Yes, you just heard the Editor In Chief of Slate Magazine say that Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown. Nor is Weisberg alone in this tactic.

Leon Wieseltier writes at The New Republic:

...The world is aflame and we have been pondering the knocked-up daughter of a pert and uncannily confident Alaskan mediocrity who was elevated to a national ticket for the purpose of changing the conversation. The Republicans wanted a new conversation, and they got one. Juno in Juneau! The anthropological harvest has been rich: what a carnival of double standards Palin provoked. I was unaware of the tender feelings of conservatives for sex outside of marriage.... Some commentators have detected moral relativism in the untroubled, even edified conservative response to the obstetric developments in the McCain campaign; but I see something even more sinister. I see the teleological suspension of the ethical. You remember the teleological suspension of the ethical. It is the recognition that, whereas there is morality in religion, religion is not the same as morality, and may justify an exemption from morality. I know of no religion in which this handy power of extenuation is not used. The telos, in the case of Bristol Palin, is life; and a fine telos it is. The casuistry goes something like this: since there are no unwanted babies, there are no unwanted pregnancies. "It can sometimes result in the arrival of new life and a new family," Gerson cheered. For "evangelical Christianity (in most modern forms) is not about the achievement of perfection." If evangelicals are so exquisitely conscious of our creatureliness, why have they devoted so many decades to reviling the imperfections of others? If they are, as Gerson says, "about the acceptance of forgiveness," why do they diabolize difference? The fecundity of Bristol Palin is a windfall for Jesus, but the fecundity of black girls is the doom of the republic. Spiritually speaking, the forgiveness of oneself or of one's own is a smaller attainment than the forgiveness of the other or of all. My friends, the politics of virtue is a vice.

And yesterday the Editor in Chief of the National Enquirer had an editorial piece in the Wall Street Journal, attempting to defend the importance of the sort of muckraking that his venue is known for, fired a few passing shots of a similar variety:

Unlike during the Edwards affair, the mainstream media instantly joined the fray, questioning Mr. McCain's people about the report and triggering Mrs. Palin to announce that her teenage daughter was pregnant. After a collective right-wing gasp, the only sound that could be heard clearly was erasers furiously dragged over the "family values" section of the Republican Party platform....

In this fractious environment, politics has made for more than strange bedfellows. Witness Mr. McCain greeting Levi Johnston and quickly becoming buddies with the 18-year-old hockey player who impregnated the daughter of his running mate.

Mr. McCain presumably did not have a copy in his pocket of the recently adopted platform of the Republican Party, which contained within its instructive gospel of morality and values: "We renew our call for replacing 'family planning' programs for teens with increased funding for abstinence education, which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and expected standard of behavior. . . . We oppose school-based clinics that provide referrals, counseling, and related services for abortion and contraception."

Now, it's political season, so one must expect people to try to score their points, whether they make any sense or not. But given how proud all these authors seem of this talking point, I can't help wondering if they actually believe what they are saying. If so, they've long misunderstood what it is that the "family values" crowd is about. And badly.

All of these writers seem to believe that conservative Christians believe in some sort of outcome-base morality -- in which it is having a child while not being married that is wrong. In their imaginations, Christians then use these distinctions to divide the world into "good people" and "bad people". Good people white, married married and have three children and a dog. Bad people are dark, have children out of wedlock, and collect government assistance.

Perhaps there are a few people like that in existence, but it's certainly not what most conservative Christians are like. Rather, Christians belong that in any given situation, some choices are right, and some are wrong. Having sex before marriage is one of those things that we think is wrong -- but once it's been done, destroying the evidence (especially when that evidence comes in the form on an innocent human life -- is not what we believe is the right thing to do.

Nor is the predicament that the Palins find themselves in one which is unfamiliar to active Christians. Most of us have several friends in our local churches who have an oldest child whose birthday is separated from their anniversary by less than nine months. Truth, conversation and repentance are all central themes in Christianity. And so Christians will seldom have a problem with people who have made mistakes, so long as they acknowledge the truth and resolve to attempt to live in accordance with it.

And this is where the "culture war" differences come in. Christians do insist that having sex before marriage is wrong. And that intentionally choosing a "lifestyle" of single parenthood is not only wrong, but irresponsible. And that abortion is the taking of innocent life. All of these have to do with what action is the right or wrong thing to do in a particular situation. Christian morality is action-based, not outcome-based. Thus, while having pre-marital sex is wrong, the right thing to do next is not whatever it is that creates the appearance of not having had premarital sex, but rather whatever is actually right to do in the new circumstances.

Religious conservatives are not, thus, saying that it was right or good for Governor Palin's daughter to have premarital sex -- but having done so, getting married and raising the baby is definitely a choice that religious conservatives approve of. And in that it reflects an understanding that childbearing and family are the natural context for sex, it is in fact a "pro-family" approach.

That so many authors think otherwise simply serves to underscore how little they understood about religious conservatives in the first place.

He Wasn't Born Yesterday

He was born today.



Jonathan "Jack" Ambrose was born at 4:33 on 9-11-2008.

When asked for comment for this article, he waved and arm gently and went back to eating.