Really, really bad news for health care reform

From Jim Geraghty:

Campaign Spot on National Review Online

And some prayer music

From the Blind Boys of Alabama.

Extraordinary

Apparently, Open Source Audio has recently archived and published a January 1, 1939, wire recording of Peter Maurin reading one of his Easy Essays. An amazing, thrilling and inspirational bit of Catholic history.

Huckabee in the lead

A new Rasmussen poll of likely Republican candidates shows Mike in the lead among several candidates. It doesn't mean a lot at this point, but it is interesting. Actually, it bears out the truism that the likely winner in a political race will be the person with the most "likeable" bearing and personality--the "warmest". I'm certain that this has been a factor in many of the elections in the "media age"--since 1960. Still pictures and words favor the appearance of maturity and wisdom. Voice and video favor an image of sympathy, personal warmth, sincerity and a degree of charisma.

We'll see....

On the Doctrine of the Soul

A friend related a story about when she and her sister were much younger. As their mother was taking a rare nap, her sister, a toddler at the time, went up to mom, carefully pulled up the lid of one of mom's eyes, and asked, "Mommy, are you in there?"

Who could explain it better?

A Fragment on Michael Jackson

In spite of millions of words, one small thought I haven't seen yet: How unhappy must a person be, who spent his last hours, days, months, and perhaps even years, begging for more pain-killers.

It's obvious that it wasn't for the thrills....

Universal or Parochial? An interesting study on the roots of moral reasoning.

There's a lot of talk today about how moral reasoning is a product either of genetics (sociobiology, etc.) or of cultural/social forces. The point is that we don't like the idea that people actually reason to universals or are capable of reasoning away or apart from the group's consensus. It appears from this Science News article that the debate may still remain open.

Why to read, and how to do it.

Richard Weaver is one of those Dangerous Writers. It's important to be careful and discerning as we make our way through his work. Plato, Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss are among those authors who are perceptive and profound in their observations of human thought and culture. Here is a lengthy passage from the concluding chapter of Visions of Order, where he discusses human learning. (His idiom is mid-20th century, so please overlook the non-PC terminology, like "man".)

Now while man has many times claimed goodness arising from a divine connection and while he is given to erecting codes of ethics, he has committed the most abominable crimes and has visited every kind of suffering upon his fellows for an infinite variety of alleged reasons. He is passionate and unstable, sot that very little is required to set him on the warpath, even against his kith and kin. Most fearful of all to contemplate is his great power of self-deception. He often does things for reasons that are obscure to him, and undoubtedly many a person has led an entire life in ignorance of the mainspring of his own actions.

These things being so, nothing could be more proper to man than the study of himself, and it is important that this should be the deepest, freest and most imaginative that the most gifted individuals are capable of making. It should be a continuing, earnest examination of human life, with all its moods, impulses, choices of means, failures and successes, miseries and happinesses shown in concrete representation. The indispensable requirement, both for the creation and enjoyment of literature thus conceived, is a receptivity to the real image of man. The practical problem is how to restore that receptivity in the face of a barbarism nourished by the scientistic fallacies discussed earlier.

A simple illustration may make this clearer. Every teacher of experience knows that there is a type of student who resents the very idea of studying literature. This student hangs back or is even defiant because he senses that the study of literature demands a certain kind of intellectual and emotional response. We might say that it demands a sign of consent, almost like some religious sacraments. It requires of every man that he suppress at least part of his native barbarism and enter into rapport with the realm of value. The easier and more natural thing for him to do is to regard the work of literature with mingled contempt and truculence. For literature, at the same time it pleases those who accept it, imposes obligations; one does not enter into it and leave scot-free. In that important respect literature is further comparable with religion; it is not supposed to make us merely comfortable. This the wary barbarian (even in the form of the reluctant student) senses, and he may decide to persist in an obdurate barbarism. It is part of the barbarian's self-protection to reject cultivation. He may repel all influences that would mollify the attitude that keeps him narrow and destructive. Putting this in a figurative way, one might assert that men are not ready for literature until they have been "Christianized." By this I refer to the establishment of that "prejudice" Blackmur speaks of in Language as Gesture. They must give initial assent to certain propositions about man and the world. In no age are all men equally ready to give this assent, and in our age there are new active forces to persuade them against giving it. The barbarian's picture of the world is founded upon the simple adulation of force, direct ways of satisfying appetite, and generally the absence of any idea about human destiny. (Of course not all peoples who have been called barbarians fit this description.) When the barbarian is asked to respect things which rebuke, refine, and control these ideas, he is being asked to change his way of life. Hence the problem of conversion arises, which in the modern setting will have to be away from the idealization of physical comfort, from the view of life as the mere play of physical matter, and from the shortcutting of those processes around which cultured man weaves patterns of significance. It must be to a conversion to an awareness of the ethical and religious drama of every moment.

What's really scary?

The radio news said this morning that the President feels that opponents of the health plan are using scare tactics to persuade people that this is not good legislation. If the bill is scary in itself, then the opponents are merely discussing facts. If the facts are scary, then the bill should not be considered for passage by the Congress. I hear facts in the arguments of the opponents. I hear a lot of avoidance and double-talk, and more than enough scare tactic, from the President.

The '09 Astros

To all outward appearances, this would seem to be a team heading nowhere, and doing that in the most discouraging possible fashion. However, if they could get healthy in the next 10 days to two weeks and not suffer too much slippage in their inept division's standings in the meanwhile, there is always the hope that a good winning stretch in their last 30 games or so will slide them very close to the division lead.

I know, it's a dream.