April 2005 Archives

The election of Pope Benedict XVI has highlighted several things about the media. The news is presented as entertainment - simple stories, visuals, staged conflict, obsessed with celebrity. What passes for informed commentary is usually an ideological rant complaining that the Pope is conservative. Everyone knows that he wrote a lot of books, few seem to have read them. Everyone knows he wrote that homosexuality is "intrinsically disordered", few realize that this is a restatement of a traditional proposition of orthodox Catholic moral philosophy, not an anthropological or psychological claim. (Unfortunately the new Pope does want to limit the human rights claimed by homosexuals in Western societies).

A Russian astrologer is suing NASA because a space mission, Deep Impact, is going to fire an explosive impactor into the Tempel-1 Comet. It's against her religion. The story from SciAm Perspectives, the Web log of the editors of Scientific American, and from MosNews an English language Russian News service.

An odd find - I was looking for something different when I found this review of a book debunking the feminist/Wiccan/New Age myth that Christians burned 9 million innocent women as witches. In fact a lot of druidic and Wiccan folklore seems to have been invented or re-invented and then plugged into fluffy spirituality in the last decades of the 20th century by people with spiritual feelings and no particular feelings about logic and truth. The review is called "The Invention of Modern Witchcraft". The reviewer is Irving Hexham, who teaches religion at the University of Calgary, and has strong interest in cults and new religious movements. The book is "The Triumph of the Moon" by Ronald Hutton.

My upgrade to MT 3.16 was reasonably smooth, but there were a couple of annoyances, which relate back to the upgrade instructions and documentation. It has some nice improvements in the interface - for instance a more clear listing of categories and subcategories in the category selector field box in author post screens.

Last week and the week before I noticed that someone kept running searches for Sister Jane or Jane on this Web log. The IP addresses varied, but they all were within a range. The most recent searches were today, April 21, 2005 at 13:06 and 13:08. (The activity log shows the times in Greenwich Mean Time). The visitors haven't left comments or sent me an email so I don't know what they are looking for.

This is a book review of "One Nation, Two Cultures" by Gertrude Himmelfarb. She published this book in 1995, her next book after "The De-Moralization of Society" which was mainly a study in the history of ideas. "One Nation, Two Cultures" is more a work of social criticism than history. She looks at why and how the Victorian virtues, which were the foundation of a successful civic culture, became discredited. She looks directly at America, and frames her discussion in the context of what many call the culture wars. She isn't the first writer to identify the American cultural revolution and the continuing culture war, but her book is one of the most penetrating examinations of the origins and consequences of those events.

This is a book review of "The De-moralization of Society, From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values" (1994), by Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian and writer. I have read a couple of her books after reading this review of her latest book "The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments".

There is an essay by Jennifer Roback Morse called "Marriage and the Limits of Contract" at the Policy Review Online. The author and the journal have a libertarian perspective, a minimum-government perspective that is usually called conservative in the Canadian, American and British political traditions. I think her ideas are more based in natural law than in libertarian principles, which is why I like her analysis. I agree with her general perspective:

There is enormous room for debate, but there ultimately is no room for compromise. The legal institutions, social expectations and cultural norms will all reflect some view or other about the meaning of human sexuality. We will be happier if we try to discover the truth and accommodate ourselves to it, rather than try to recreate the world according to our wishes.

I found a couple of related articles which complain about the flaws in Microsoft Word's grammar checker. This one at the Chronicle of Higher Education points back to Sandeep Krishnamurthy's online article.

I find the grammar checker is useful at finding my common typographical mistakes like extra spaces and double words. It can get annoying because it tries to correct matters of taste and style - the passive voice error, and the use of which and that. I end up ignoring the suggestions most of the time. I should be able to change the settings but that means time with a manual and fiddling with the program. Configuring Word is not simple, and that is a drawback.

I was first forced to use Word to share documents with co-counsel on a case I did a few years ago. I hated it instantly. It does insane things to paragraph formats based on hidden commands. The last versions of Wordperfect for DOS and the Lotus versions of Wordperfect for Windows (6.1) gave the user much more control. However Word has become the standard and many clients and contacts require documents in Word format to open and print them. I tend to work in text and convert to Word only when it is required to print or send the content.

Arts and Letters Daily linked to Michael Valpy's long article in the Globe and Mail, Saturday April 2, 2005. It seems to be a good overview of the life of Karol Wojtyla and a balanced assessment of his papacy, touching the main issues as they appear to present-day observers. Brendan O'Neill's article at Spiked makes some ironic points about how the public reaction to the Pope's death has been predicably similiar to the death of other super-celebrities, which says a lot about how the Pope's teachings on truth and culture have not taken hold. The CBC Online service has a central microsite for John Paul II with links to much of their other material. The BBC has a microsite of the same kind, perhaps with better material. I don't know if these are going to be long-term or permanent links.

A week of temperatures near the 10 degree mark melted much of the snow cover last week. This week we have had daytime temperatures of 13.5 on Tuesday (April 5) and 16 on Wednesday, and the snow and the melt puddles are disappearing. The street are gritty with the winter's sand but some main streets have been swept.

A few weeks ago Jay Allan, the designer of MT Blacklist posted some suggestions for new plugins to fight spam. I followed up at the time and installed Trackback Moderation. I also went back later and installed MT-Keystrokes. The idea is that it blocks any comment that does not contain a bit of code that can only be created by a human user who has opened the comment window in a browser. The template that creates the comment field in the browser for the human user has javascript that inserts the special code if the user types something or pastes the comment into the comment window. Spiders can't comment, which should screen out a lot of comment spam.

Paul C. Vitz published Faith of the Fatherless, The Psychology of Atheism (1999) to question the projection theory of religion. He turns Freud's version of the theory back on Freud by questioning the relationships of many leading atheist thinkers with their fathers. His book is best viewed as an articulate deconstruction of some of the pretensions of modern philosophy and social theory, although it can be viewed as a fairly sophisticated religious counterattack against one of the common assumptions of modern culture about religion.

Last weekend, there was packed snow and ice on most roads. The ice between the ruts in my back lane was about 10 inches deep. In the past week, that kind of ice has melted on all the streets. There is still a lot of snow in yards and on boulevards, and most City streets have puddles and wet sections. The cross-country ski season did in fact end with my last ski trip to Bird's Hill two weeks ago.

The Wpg Folk Festival site security volunteer crew seems to be well organized. I received a letter in the mail inviting me back, with appropriate email contact addresses to confirm my plans. I replied, they replied and it's falling into place. I have been through it once and I have figured out the basics. It's a good way to see the festival, it's mostly fun, and there are good people to work with.

The 2005 line-up of performers isn't catching my fancy.

A review of a new sociological study about the religious beliefs of American teens- "Moral Therapeutic Deism" - published at The Revealer has a good comment that shows how culture dominates religion, and how religion relates to culture. The basic point is that self-described Christian American teenagers are as materialistic and self-absorbed as their peers.