Howard Dean: thoughtless ranter

Last Friday, Howard Dean told the College Democrats of America, "The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is 'okay' to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is."

The writer of the story, Carolyn Bolls, notes, Dean ignores the fact that the president hasn't appointed a single member of the current Court.

And more importantly, the "right-wing" members of the court were the dissenters in the decision in question!

How can an intelligent man say something so obviously false and erroneous in good faith?

Update: A Dean supporter (azizhp) takes Dean to task over the remark. And at the same guy's dKos diary on the subject (for those who don't know, Daily Kos is the biggest blog out there, and it's the haven for online leftists) one commenter states, "I'm 100% behind it. Why? Because it resonates, and I'm perfectly willing to go for a false statement that illustrates a truth."

Did you get that?

I'm perfectly willing to go for a false statement that illustrates a truth.

To his credit, azizhp spanked the commenter: "you are willing to disseminate a false statement just because it suits your goals? have you no sense of decency?"

Kudos to aziz.

Interesting article

lf the ultimate purpose of human existence is the at­tainment of the Beatific Vision, and if we have a culture which prohibits all official and many cultural acknowledgements of that purpose, we have a culture which denies that purpose. And in its place the culture puts—for nowhere does nature so bitterly abhor a vacuum as in this question of the meaning of life—the atheistic pursuit of happiness in this world.

That was my first point. My second is that this atheistic culture is also dead.

That from Maclin Horton's article "Nothing at the Center".

Check it out.

The Plame leaker: Joseph Wilson, her husband?

Read this. And the relevant stories at Redstate, especially those by Leon H, Nick Danger, and Erick... make sure you go back to early July as well.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, it's not worth your time :-)

"How FDR Made the Depression Worse"

That's the intriguing title of this article by Robert Higgs.

Debunking 8 Anti-War Myths about the Conflict in Iraq

That's the title of this article which takes on the following myths:

1) George Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
2) A study released in March of 2003 by a British medical journal, the Lancet, showed that 100,000 civilians had been killed as a result of the US invasion.
3) The Bush Administration claimed Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
4) The war in Iraq was actually planned by people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz back in 1998 at a think tank called the Project for the New American Century.
5) The war on terror has nothing to do with Iraq.
6) Saddam Hussein had no ties to terrorism.
7) Saddam Hussein had no ties to Al-Qaeda.
8) The Downing Street Memo proves Bush lied to the American people about the war.

HT: Joe Katzman @ Winds of Change.

New Traditionalist Group: Society of St. Pius I (SSPI)

Their motto: “To be any more Trad, you’d have to be Jewish”

Here's their intro:

Welcome to the fledgling website of the Society of St. Pius I (SSPI). Unlike other so-called “traditionalist” Roman Catholic groups, we adhere to the ORIGINAL Roman Catholic Mass of A.D. 40-200, and described by St. Justin Martyr and the Apostolic Constitutions, and used by Pope St. Pius I of happy memory.

Don’t be fooled by PHONY “Vulgate” neotraditionalists, who claim to protect tradition, and yet still defend the RADICAL and totally UNCATHOLIC reforms of the 4th century A.D.

So-called “trads” pretend to be against the modernism of the last hundred years, but where were they when the original Rite of Rome, the Greek rite USED BY ST. PETER AND THE APOSTLES was being totally gutted and revised by unknown scholars and translated into the vernacular language of Latin?

Unlike other wimpy neotraditionalist groups who attach themselves to various other Piuses, we at the SSPI make absolutely ZERO compromises with modernism. We reject not just one, but BOTH “Novus Ordos”—the Novus Ordo of 1970 promulgated by Paul VI, and the Latin Vulgate Mass of 400 A.D. promulgated by Innocent I and Pope Gregory I, which we call the “Vulgar Mass.”

Thanks to the miracle of the internet, we can now spread the TRUTH about the REAL Roman liturgical tradition which is being kept alive only by a brave remnant of faithful Catholics: myself and whoever else wants to join.

:-)

Check the site out... it's pretty funny.

HT: David Mills.

Big surprise

You scored as Roman Catholic. You are Roman Catholic. Church tradition and ecclesial authority are hugely important, and the most important part of worship for you is mass. As the Mother of God, Mary is important in your theology, and as the communion of saints includes the living and the dead, you can also ask the saints to intercede for you. Roman Catholic 100% Neo orthodox 86% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 71% Emergent/Postmodern 39% Fundamentalist 36% Reformed Evangelical 29% Classical Liberal 21% Charismatic/Pentecostal 18% Modern Liberal 4% What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

Some songs I really, really like today

"Higher" Creed
"My Immortal" Evanescence
"Meant to Live" Switchfoot
"Someday" Nickelback
"In the End" Linkin Park

and most especially...

"My Father Sings to Me" Richard Veras & Riro Maniscalco

Nice quote

"To travel hopefully is better than to arrive" is, in fact, a cynic's maxim, a way of saying that all destinations fall short of our hopes. [Richard Purtill, C.S. Lewis' Case for the Christian Faith, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 39]

Well said.

Next Meeting of the Minds Carnival (on Intelligent Design)...

is coming up. If you've got a submission, go here.

The New Catholic Carnival is up!

Here.

Who would have thought?

The following is from this article on a recent meeting of rabbis with Pope Benedict:

Several participants commented on Pope Benedict’s demeanor at the meeting.

“At the beginning he seemed as taciturn and as sharp in his bearing as I would have expected,” said one. “But as soon as we were finished with the formalities and he stepped down to greet each of us individually, the warmth and kindness were unmistakable.”

[...]

“John Paul was a philosopher,” Rabbi Bretton-Granatoor said. “This pope, when he talks to you, you think you’re the only person in the universe. This will be a thoughtful, circumspect and very focused papacy, and that bodes very well for the dialogue.”

“Certainly John Paul took Jewish-Catholic relations to new heights, but in all my meetings with him — some 15, including eight or nine private audiences — I never saw such a degree of relaxed intimacy and friendship,” said Rabbi David Rosen, international director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee.

That personal connection, Rabbi Rosen said, will alter Jewish-Catholic dialogue.

Who would have thought that rabbis would find the Panzerpope warmer than JPII, who's efforts at dialogue with the Jewish community were virtually unparalleled? Wow!

Book Meme

So a while back (a couple weeks ago, I think) I was tagged (by both Sharon and Melanie) in the "book meme" that's making its rounds in blogdom. In it, you answer some questions and then tag five people yourself. So here goes...

1. How many books do you own?

Oh, several hundred, maybe 1000-1500.

2. What was the last book you bought?

Hmm... I guess it was one of the following: Looking for God in Harry Potter, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, or Building a Healthy Culture: Strategies for an American Renaissance.

3. What was the last book you read?

Cover-to-cover? Boy... I'm not sure. I've got so many that I'm reading at any particular moment, and which I don't necessarily read entirely, that this is a tough one to answer. It may have been Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, but I think I've read something else cover-to-cover since then...

4. What are some books that have meant a lot to you?

Wow... um... let's see... Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity, de Lubac's Splendor of the Church, von Balthasar's Short Primer for Unsettled Laymen, and more recently Tracey Rowland's Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II and Giussani's The Religious Sense. Yeah, they're all theological :-)

5. Tag! You're it:

Bill Cork, Carl Olson, Mo, Kevin Miller, and Thomas. (I've any of you have already been tagged, just let me know!)

The Morality of Ovarian Transplants

Query for readers of this blog: what are your thoughts on the morality of ovarian transplants, a technology which is has already had some success between indentical twins, and could very well become even more common, if the technology allows.

There are a number of significant moral issues which may be relevant. For instance, would the act of having an ovary removed for a non-life threatening reason be contraceptive? (Typically, ovaries discharge ova in alternating cycles; so it might be that a woman would only be fertile every other month; on the other hand, perhaps the remaining ovary would release an ovum monthly instead of bi-monthly. I'm sure there is an answer to this, considering that women have ovaries removed.) Or perhaps not, considering that the intent need not be to avoid conception.

What about a child conceived after receiving another woman's ovary? Is there anything problematic about the fact that the ova were another woman's? Or is it little different (morally speaking) than adoption, the difference being that the father is literally the father, and that the child is conceived by the (adoptive?) mother?

Thoughts?

NB: based on the limited reading I've done on this so far, it isn't clear to me that an actual ovary is transplanted; in what I've read, reference is made only to "ovarian tissue," and not to "ovary" or "ovaries". But IIRC, it isn't possible for a woman's body to grow new eggs (she only has those with which she was born). So what exactly is the referent of "ovarian tissue"?

HT to G.

"Hope Does Not Disappoint."

Shannon has posted some reflections based on this year's CL (spiritual) Exercises. I hope to be able to attend one of these years! But for you, dear reader, read away!

Talk about cool under pressure...

Imagine that you are 13 years old again. You have advanced to the pinnacle of spelling glory: the National Spelling Bee. You have advanced, furthermore, into the fifth round, and your word is posed to you.

How many of you would take this opportunity to do an outstanding Napoleon Dynamite impression before calmly and correctly spelling your word to advance to the next round?

Impressive. Most impressive.

HT: Warren Bell.

Strange conversation

I'm in the midst of a protracted argument about the moral status of the human embryo with someone who supports abortion rights (in the comments of this post). The discussion has been all across the board, but of late I'm trying to get him to acknowledge that human beings begin to exist at conception. He has advanced the most curious argument that this is not the case, because the matter that I consist(ed) of existed prior to conception, in the sperm and ovum that united. The logical conclusion of such an argument is that every individual entity (including all human beings) are of the same age, and that age is the age of the universe. Here's what he said:

Life is a cycle. It doesn't have a tidy "beginning" the way you want it to have.

And then:

You didn't "start to exist" materially. You didn't "start to exist" intellectually. You didn't "start to exist" biologically (you didn't spring from non-living material).

This is probably the strangest argument I've ever seen advanced in the course of trying to deny that human beings have value from the moment of conception. I've heard the argument that "life is a cycle," but I've never seen someone actually continue to defend it in the face of a pretty straight-forward and effective rebuttal (i.e. that the issue is not about life as such, but about the life of an individual human being). Nor have I seen someone maintain that human beings don't begin to exist because the material that formed them was previously present.

At this point in the conversation, I'm just hoping he'll answer the question, "when did you come to exist?" I have some doubts that he'll do so.

Nonetheless, an extended argument with someone like this is useful for making sure I'm able to articulate my position. The question "when did you come to exist?" will prove useful in the future.

Question:

Do you know who initially developed the theory of the Big Bang?

A belgian named Georges Lemaitre. Father Georges Lemaitre. He argued -- against the atheists of his day -- that the universe was infinite in age and in a constant state.

Hmm... remind me again, please, how the Catholic Church is opposed to science?

More info here.

HT: Mary Daly (no immediate relation to the golfer).

Please explain this one to me...

"A 19-year-old East Texas man faces a life prison sentence for causing his teenage girlfriend to miscarry twins, even though she wanted to end the pregnancy. [...] Erica Basoria acknowledged asking Flores [her boyfriend, the 19th year old] to help end her pregnancy. But the 17-year-old can't be prosecuted because of her legal right to abortion."

HT: streiff.

And some people feel bad for him.

New Carnival!

There are all sorts of carnivals out there... Catholic, Christian, Capitalist, Recipes, Jokes, etc. etc.

We now have a carnival of posts about intelligent design, called Meetings of Minds.

You can find the first installment here.