Good News from Cancun

Fiesta Americana Condesa

A useful summary of the situation regarding climate change.

Russian Version of Catch and Release

Perhaps our Russian friends should peruse a few of our Montana fishing brochures and videos in order to brush up on their catch and release programs. Or maybe not. Is there an international version of the ACLU? Do pirates have 4th and 8th Amendment rights?

This is a story from the UK Telegraph about some Somali pirates that captured a Russian oil tanker in the Gulf of Aden. Some commandos from the Russian Navy took the tanker back and "unexpectedly" set the pirates free, but they apparently failed to reach shore. The Washington Post's Anne Applebaum tells the story this way. I have no idea how reliable she is.

Political Guru Peggy Noonan Says:

The President needs a Special Assistant for Reality.

Sounds a little cryptic, doesn't it? Well, check out Saturday's Wall Street Journal for her short essay/instruction for the president and his non-real bubble assistants. Ms Noonan pretends to overhear a conversation between President Obama and the Special Assistant for Reality (SAR) regarding the TSA and its pathetic attempts to steal the show, i.e. over-acting in the theater of the absurd that anti-terrorism has become, without showing that its earlier entries produced anything useful. Evidence-based. Right!

In general, the President comes off as a combination of the smartest man in America and King Solomon, except that he has trouble getting out of the bubble of Washington and the Presidency itself. Even if he goes to Indiana, he takes the bubble along with him.

The dialogue is funny at times, but then only a humorous essay will escape the sharp editorial scissor of the Bubble-Wizard. It becomes even more ironic when Ms Noonan fails to recognize that her SAR talks and reasons like folks on Fox News. Or maybe she does this on purpose, but why she thinks this sort of person would be listened to by the President or his assistants is not clear. "Hey, it's a difficult if not impossible job so one has to take shortcuts in order to have time for basketball workouts. Right? OK then, Fox News is out, not to be looked at or listened to by anyone in my Administration." Now you know.

Billings MT on the Weekend before Thanksgiving

Outside it was very cold, down near zero Fahrenheit, and a lot of snow fell too. This is what my outdoor table with warmed bird-bath looked like.

Inside it was more pleasant, about 69 deg Fahrenheit and very little snow, usually quickly melting after you stamped it off your shoes. This Christmas cactus is just starting to bloom in our sun room.

And at the Expo Center there was a lot of vendors trying to sell us stuff. A lot of useful and nice stuff and some good food too. This was a drooling bear who was collecting the drool from his mug to his other mug.

Global Warming Kudos

As the lawyers say, Global Warming is exaggerated and perhaps doesn't exist; but if it does, it results in longer lives. I love that form of argument. It is so reasonable.

Yes, that is what is reported in the peer-reviewed literature recently.

To the left is a frozen stop sign in South Dakota according to the article cited above.

Reference
Christidis, N., Donaldson, G.C. and Stott, P.A. 2010. Causes for the recent changes in cold- and heat-related mortality in England and Wales. Climatic Change 102: 539-553.

The front cover of the December 2010 issue of one of my favorite magazines. Life, now, alas, defunct, and National Geographic were significant sources of my early education. The latter is still being received and avidly read, or at least the pictures are carefully examined. In the 40s and 50s the editors were always very gentle and careful when they visited Communist countries. Even a child would call this biased but they published great pictures and maps.

Nowadays their particular bias is environmental and they are not careful or gentle with the "warmist" conspirators; rather they are arrogant bed-wetters and proselytizers for this pseudo-religious cult. I think it was G K Chesterton who reckoned that those who lose their Christian faith do not opt for none but rather they are susceptible to anything.

But they still have great pictures and maps, and at least in this issue some pretty good articles on archaeology in Israel, though they seem to have overlooked the excavations near to the Golan Heights, the town of Bethsaida, the elusive and long-lost home town of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew, when they were still completely unknown fishermen, and perhaps other future apostles. Even so, it is a nice summary of some of the interesting characters, some older and others more recent, some who laugh at the Bible and others who treat it with more respect, who have been trying to unearth the truth for some decades now, though perhaps it is still hiding in the Israeli desert, or who knows, maybe some "rough beast, . . . slouching towards Bethlehem, to be born."

There are other good articles too: David Quammen writes on the problem of bats with fungal infections in this country and the almost incredible Gaudi basilica in Barcelona. They have been working on it for about 120 years. To the right National Geographic contributes one of their iconic and incredibly detailed foldouts. After reading this article I had to move Barcelona up on the priorities of my bucket list.

There is an interesting story about some uppity Afghan women. I hope they survive.

And another on the trade-offs between a gold mine and a salmon run in Alaska. Fascinating story and reasonably balanced though the possibility of both phenomena happening at the same time and in the same place was apparently never seriously considered.

And there is a great story on the Black Hole at the Center of our Galaxy.

A Little More Settled Science

One of my favorite websites:

By the way, what was the settled science of the age of the universe before the Big Bang Theory came along? You know, "In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded."

Brahms' German Requiem in English

Last Saturday evening the Billings Symphony and Chorale celebrated with the community their year-long 60th anniversary by performing a splendid Brahms' German Requiem. German rather than the traditional Latin and I suppose a little touch of anti-Catholicism too. Maestra Harrigan showed her usual good sense in scheduling this marvelous piece of music several years in advance. Baritone Christopher Johnson and soprano Christine Steyer were excellent soloists and the Chorale was its usual beautiful full-voiced choir. I thought the tenors were exquisite. Besides the woodwinds and horns which are always superb whatever they do, I thought the trombones and tuba acquitted themselves well too, especially with their choir-like masculine sound in the last movement.

By the way, that is Brahms' final resting place in Vienna to the left.

The only jarring note was in the introduction by the usually very articulate Ms Harrigan: she said, according to the review in the Gazette by Jaci Webb, appearing on Monday, "the reason this piece is so ground-breaking is that all of the other requiems [and there have been in the region of 2000 of them over the centuries] focused on death and the fear of going to hell . . . Brahms didn't want them to feel afraid, he wanted them to feel comforted." Ms Webb then goes on to add in her review that "Brahms' Requiem is no funeral dirge but an uplifting call to the living to stay hopeful." I'm not sure exactly what these two thoughtful ladies had in mind when they explained things in this odd way. Perhaps they are unfamiliar with the mass, especially a funeral mass, or perhaps they are unfamiliar with all the requiems that have been written. Not to worry, the final word was that Brahms' German Requiem "was the perfect choice."

I can't resist telling the story of hearing a performance of this piece in Amsterdam back in the mid-70s. We were visiting that lovely city and managed to get some last minute tickets. We were seated on the stage just behind the back row of violins and about 10 ft away from the alto section of the choir. So whenever the director looked our way we immediately came to attention. The concert was part of the Dutch celebration of the Nazis leaving the Netherlands near the end of WWII. There was a little awkwardness as the Crown Princess Beatrice, I suppose she is Queen by now, was actually married to some German with a claim to royalty, but this was all resolved by the Dutch choir singing the German Requiem in English—take that you Nazis. So anyway, the end of the story has to do with me walking over to the choir after the performance and telling them in English how excellent they were. After all, I had heard them singing in English, but of course, they did not feel comfortable talking in English, so we all had a good laugh.

Is There An Exorcist In The House?

I read in the Billings Gazette this morning that the Associated Press (AP) reported on a two-day conference on exorcism, just finishing up, sponsored by US Roman Catholic bishops, just before their fall meeting which starts in Baltimore this coming Monday. Somewhat surprisingly, the AP keeps a straight face as it reports the decline of those priests with "enough training and knowledge to perform an exorcism . . . (and) to avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition." Because there are so few priests capable or willing to do exorcisms the few that do are kept very busy.

Perhaps thinking that their readers may not be all that familiar with the New Testament, the AP mentions several examples of Jesus casting out evil spirits from people, and that each member of the Church at baptism undergoes a minor exorcism. They also mention that Pope John Paul II performed an exorcism at the Vatican on a woman brought in "because she was writhing and screaming, in what Cardinal Dziwisz, the Pope's private secretary, was a case of possession by the devil." This last quote was as close to skepticism as the article got, a minor miracle in itself.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston, was one of the speakers at the conference and said this: "For the longest time, we in the United States may not have been as much attuned to some of the spiritual aspects of evil because we have become so much attached to what would be either physical or psychological explanation for certain phenomena. We may have forgotten that there is a spiritual dimension to people."

According to our friends at Wikipedia, "demonic possession is not a valid psychiatric or medical diagnosis," at least according to the bible of psychiatry, the DSM-IV, or the ICD-10. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled and People of the Lie, "in an effort to disprove demonic possession, claimed to have conducted two exorcisms himself. He attempted but failed to persuade the psychiatric community to add the definition of Evil to the DSM-IV. And then in his later years he really got into trouble with the High Poobahs of Psychiatry "when he was accused of attempting to persuade his patients to accept Christianity."

These later adventures are chronicled in his last book, published in 2005 by Free Press, Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption.

Veteran's Day

A long and thin line on both sides. Protected by fairly lightweight shirts.