BEHIND THE SCENES.

But it's brilliant.

And hilarious.

And disturbing.

And ironic.

And it definitely awakened my inner TV plot-analyzer instincts.

And the author is right. The History Channel really should try to "add artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."

GET THE STORY.

(CHT: Instapundit.)

I also agree with what the author says about Babylon 5 and Doctor Who (mostly).

Remember how President Obama promised that his health care legislation wouldn't cover abortion?

Remember all that stuff with the Stupak amendment, which was later abandoned?

Remember how the deal in abandoning the Stupak amendment involved a presidential order that would keep federal dollars from going to abortion?

Remember how pro-life legal experts said the presidential order wasn't worth the paper it was written on?

Remember all that?

Well, now comes this news:

The Obama administration has officially approved the first instance of taxpayer funded abortions under the new national government-run health care program. This is the kind of abortion funding the pro-life movement warned about when Congress considered the bill.

KEEP READING.

A few months ago, during the height of the latest abuse scandal, the Holy See created a new page on its website offering resources documenting the Church's response to the problem over the last number of years.

HERE'S THE PAGE.

One of the things they put on it was a brief, layman's guide to the procedures the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith uses in evaluating cases of priestly sexual abusers.

HERE'S THAT DOCUMENT.

One of the things that document did was say that there is a revision underway of the current regulations, which are set forth in a motu proprio called Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela. Specifically, the document said:

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Hey, Tim Jones, here. I saw Toy Story 3 the other night, and found that - contrary to my fears a year or more ago - it is a very worthy successor to the previous Toy Story films. Lots of LOLs, and fun throughout.

I began to have a sense of persistent déjà vu as the story progressed, though. Here is the basic arc of the tale; WARNING! SPOILERS!!

A young man is growing up, going off to college, and has seemingly abandoned the __________ he loved as a child. He hasn't really abandoned them, though. It's all a big misunderstanding.

The __________ find themselves in a jam, separated from their master. They bravely decide to find their way back to him, but are thwarted in their quest by hostile __________ that plot and scheme, and finally manage to send the brave __________ to the city dump!

At the dump, the __________ are very nearly destroyed, but are pulled from a Conveyor of Death at the last possible moment.

Together, having learned to rely on one another, the _________ finally succeed, are reunited with their master, and are given a new lease on life.

Now, fill in the blank with the word "toys" and you have the synopsis for Toy Story 3. But change the word to "appliances" and you have the synopsis for The Brave Little Toaster! If you think I found this disappointing, you would be mistaken. Toaster has been a family favorite for a long time.

Toaster, a Disney film, like most of Pixar's stories, is a cautionary tale about Leaving Important Things Behind, a moral I very heartily endorse in our throw-it-away-and-don't-look-back culture. Not surprisingly, there are creative connections behind the scenes, Pixar's John Lasseter and Joe Ranft (recently deceased) having been involved in the project at various points. The final product was directed by Jerry Rees, a friend of Lasseter's.

So, I thought the nod to Toaster altogether appropriate. Why waste a good story? John Lasseter has been telling the same story in all his films for years now, and that's a good thing.

And don't even get me started on the religious symbolism of the two films...

(Cross posted at Tim Jones' blog, Old World Swine)

It's true!!!

Because they were programmed to!

Recently here on my personal blog I did an entry featuring a bit of computer animation I had discovered that offers a fascinating presentation of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (it's really cool).

But this was not the only animation in the series. 

There are a lot of them, and one that caught my eye was titled "Bach, Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, from Cantata 147 (sung by alien robots)."

Alien robots singing a favorite like Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"? 

That's worth checking out.

BTW, here is what the alien robots are singing in German:

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The odds of your right to keep and bear arms being infringed went down this week when, among other things, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision (.pdf) in which it held that the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms applies not only to the federal government but to state and local governments as well.

Because this isn't a legal blog, I'm going to pass over the legal intricacies and arguments that the case involved (though they are fascinating) and go to the moral issue in question: Is it a good idea for people to have the right to own guns?

Of course, we are not talking about all people without exception. As the decision in this Supreme Court case as well as the previous one noted, lawmakers can reasonably bar felons and the mentally ill from owning guns. (Personally, I would change "felons" to "violent criminals," due to the absurd extent to which federal law has started classifying things as felonies; I'd also shore up "mentally ill" to make sure that only those who pose a danger to themselves or others are intended, due to the tendencies to classify everything under the sun as a mental illness, but those are other issues.) The question is: Should ordinary, law-abiding, mentally stable individuals be allowed to own guns?

And by "guns" I mean "firearms that are in functional condition," not "pieces of disassembled metal that could be taken out of a locked container and/or assembled and/or unlocked and/or loaded and so be turned into functional firearms in a few minutes time." (Sorry for the verbal gymnastics, but that is the state of affairs to which opponents of gun rights have pushed things.)

So: Should ordinary people be allowed to own guns?

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Interesting visualization. Gives you a different perspective of what's going on in the piece--without the pain of sheet music!

Love the build over the course of the piece, and it's neat to see my favorite passages laid out graphically.

In our previous post on this subject, we looked at the claim that the Jewish people have a claim to the territory currently occupied by the modern state of Israel because they were promised it in the Bible.

We saw that reasonable people could take different views of this subject, especially concerning how such a promise might apply to the present age.

Now let's look at the question from an ethical rather than a revelatory perspective. That is to say, apart from the revelation claim that we have already examined, what grounds might be offered for the claim.

Before we do that, though, I'd like to clear something up that I think has resulted in some folks spinning their wheels: the term anti-Semite. This is a misnomer. It is used to refer to hatred of Jews, though the category "Semite" properly includes people who aren't Jews. Nevertheless, that is how the term is used. I suggest that we not fight about the word and just note that it is a misnomer that is in popular use and move on.

Now: What claims besides revelation might one appeal to in support of the claim that the Jewish people have a claim to the territory of Israel?

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It's true.

In fact, he said that when "two fathers" are raising a child together, we owe them "our unending appreciation and admiration" and that this Fathers' Day we should honor "all our fathers," including those in homosexual, two-daddy "families."

Admittedly, he didn't use the term "homosexual," but given all the other kinds of fathers he mentions, process of elimination makes it clear what he has in mind. (E.g., step fathers are given separate coverage.)

In an official presidential proclamation on the White House web site, he proclaimed:

Nurturing families come in many forms, and children may be raised by a father and mother, a single father, two fathers, a step father, a grandfather, or caring guardian. We owe a special debt of gratitude for those parents serving in the United States Armed Forces and their families, whose sacrifices protect the lives and liberties of all American children. For the character they build, the doors they open, and the love they provide over our lifetimes, all our fathers deserve our unending appreciation and admiration.

KEEP READING.

Recently we were discussing the recent Helen Thomas broujaja and the question of who "owns" the land of Israel/Palestine inevitably arose.

I'm not going to solve that long-standing and thorny question in this blog post, but I can offer some considerations that need to be taken into account when forming an opinion on the subject.

First let me note that there is room for different opinions, here. The issue is a complex one, and people of good will can take different positions--regarding the founding of the modern state of Israel, regarding its role in God's plan, and regarding what should happen with it in the future.

In previous comboxes, some readers asserted that support for Zionism is so important that opposition to Zionism makes ipso facto one an anti-Semite. This claim is etymologically ironic in that many of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine are, in fact, Semites, but even allowing for this irony, it is simply note true. Zionism has been and remains controversial within the Jewish community itself.

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In my previous post, I took on a silly video that has more than a million views of different versions of it. The video centered on Jesus' statement in Luke 10:18 that, after the disciples had come back from a preaching mission, Our Lord had seen "Satan fall like lightning from heaven" and claimed that if you back translated this statement from Greek to Aramaic and then to Hebrew that "lighting from heaven" would come out as "baraq o baw-maw" or "Barack Obama." This, the nameless creator of the video suggested, might mean that Jesus was telling us the Antichrist's name would be Barack Obama.

I greeted the logic of this video with a great big gift bag full of "Nope."

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The epitome of the Church’s teaching on immigration is found in No. 2241 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states: “The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.”

With the highest gross domestic product in the world, the United States qualifies as a prosperous nation, so on humanitarian grounds, it should welcome immigrants in search of work and security “to the extent [it is] able.”

How much it is able, particularly in a time of high unemployment and economic uncertainty, is ripe for debate. Some might argue that illegal aliens have become such a part of the American economy that they are now essential to it. Others might argue that illegal aliens are hurting the American job market by undercutting labor costs and taking jobs away from Americans.

KEEP READING.

IT'S TRUE!!! 

KEEP READING

A reader writes:

I searched your site to see if you had a list of suggested books.

I didn't find one though.

So, I was wondering if you would suggest some of your favorite books. I would be really interested in your top 10 fictions books, but also your top 10 books on apologetics/Catholic thought.

Thank you for working on your blog.

God bless

P.s. If you like, I can send you my lists as well.

I'd be happy to provide some book recommendations, only I don't know that I can provide a proper "top 10" list. So instead let me give "ten top" books (i.e., ten books that I like a lot, even if I can't rank them from 1 to 10 and even though there are others I'm not thinking of that I might put on the same level.

Let's do fiction in this post, and I'll follow up with theology/apologetics.

And I invite the correspondent, and other readers, to share ten of their top fiction picks in the combox!

Here we go (alpha by title) . . . 

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft.
Genre: Horror.

Although this is horror fiction, it isn't the blood-and-guts type of horror that was popularized by Lovecraft's younger friend Robert Bloch (author of Psycho).

Instead, it is weird horror, in which the horror is subtle and idea-based.

Lovecraft himself was an atheist, but he wrote fiction that including works that were highly supernatural (e.g., his dreamland series of stories) to ones that didn't involve the supernatural at all. This is one of the latter. There are no ghosts or witches or other supernatural creatures in this story.

Instead, the horror arrives when an Antarctic expedition makes an amazing scientific discovery, suffers a tragic fate, and a whole pre-human world is opened up to those who investigate.

(NOTE: I don't have this particular edition of the book, so I haven't read the introduction to this one. This edition also includes Lovecraft's essay on the nature of supernatural horror in literature, which is itself considered a classic.) Behind the Beyond: And Other Contributions to Human Knowledge by Stephen Leacock.
Genre: Comedy.

Leacock was a Canadian economics professor (or, as they called it then, a professor of "political economy") who wrote humor on the side.

But what humor he wrote! Leacock was a comedic genius!

Much humor is painfully time bound (try watching Saturday Night Live episodes from the 1970s. Ouch.). But though Leacock wrote a century ago, his work is still out-and-out hilarious!

This work involves a number of short pieces, including a send-ups of going to a stage play, going to the dentist, having your picture taken, what it's like to visit Paris, and others.

I think the ideal introduction to Leacock is Nonsense Novels (below), but this is a great book to read next. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H. P. Lovecraft.
Genre: Horror.

Here Lovecraft goes to the other extreme of his range, writing a novel that is entirely bound up with the supernatural. In fact, it has been considered by some to be the best supernatural detective story ever written.

None of the main characters are detectives per se, but the family doctor of young Charles Dexter Ward must solve the riddle of what has happened to his patient, who has become strangely fascinated with a particularly creepy early American ancestor of his.

In a way, the novel is like an episode of Columbo in that the reader has a clear idea of what is going on, while the characters are struggling to figure it out. It's not a "whodunit" but, like Columbo, it's a "howcatch'em."

(NOTE: I don't have this precise edition, so I haven't read the introduction to it.)

BTW, when you finish this, go back immediately and re-read the opening paragraphs. It's amazing to see how the whole story is foreshadowed so concisely in the first few sentences. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.
Genre: Science Fiction.

It's a couple hundred years in the future (exact date never established) and humanity is terrified of being invaded by an alien race known as the buggers (cause, y'know, they look like bugs; I imagine them looking like the Shadows from Babylon 5, only shorter).

To meet the bugger threat, Earth desperately needs a brilliant military commander who has the genius of a Napoleon or an Alexander the Great. To find one, they're testing all of Earth's children . . . and they think they've found their future leader in a boy named Andrew ("Ender") Wiggin.

A powerful story involving a great deal of psychological subtlety and insight as Ender struggles to prepare himself for the role of being humanity's last, best hope. Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card.
Genre: Science Fiction.

This is not a sequel but a "parallel novel" to Ender's Game. That is, it tells the same basic events from the viewpoint of another character.

The character in question is Bean, a young boy who grew up on the streets of Rotterdam--until he got tested and wound up in the same battle school program as Ender Wiggin. Bean is a supporting character in Ender's Game, but here he is the main character, and it's fascinating reading things from his point of view.

There is a lot more to Bean than met the eye in the first book. Not only is he smart, not only is he smarter than Ender, not only is he inhumanly smart, he's also brain damaged. He led such a rough early life that he may have lost half of the intelligence he would have had, and yet he's the smartest kid ever to train in battle school.

He also has a secret mission that Ender doesn't know about.

This is actually my favorite of all of the "Ender" books. I re-read it most often of those in the series, but be sure to read Ender's Game first to get the maximum enjoyment out of the two. Expiration Date by Tim Powers.
Genre: Modern Fantasy.

This is not epic fantasy (like Lord of the Rings) or sword and sorcery (like Conan the Barbarian). It's an intense form of magical realism. That is, it's set in today's world, but with extra supernatural elements.

In this novel those added elements are ghosts. They aren't the sinister, haunting-type ghosts that appear in most ghost stories. This is not in the horror genre. It is not about ghosts scaring people. In fact, in this book, the ghosts are the victims.

They're . . . well, it's hard to explain in a single sentence because Powers actually includes about seven different types of ghosts in the story.

I am agog at the sheer creativity he has packed into this book. Whereas most writers in possession of seven different ideas of how ghosts could work would carefully pace themselves and write one book about each idea, Powers has the audacity to throw them all in one work.

We get a fascinating story about a young boy (Koot Hoomie Parganas, who has been given the nickname "Kootie" by the kids at school) whose life becomes intertwined with the ghost of a famous person from history.

Both Kootie and the famous ghost are desperate to save themselves from the underground community of ghost-sensitives in Los Angeles.

Amid the suspense there is great deal of quirky Powers-esque humor--even more than in his other books--which makes this one probably my favorite Powers book so far (I'm still reading my way through them). Last Call by Tim Powers.
Genre: Modern Fantasy.

This Powers novel doesn't involve ghosts. Instead, it involves cards.

"What's supernatural about cards," you ask? C'mon. Every gambler knows that cards are magic--even if they're not Tarot cards. And so in this story we meet a group of characters who are card-sensitives, aware of the magical potential in an ordinary deck of 52.

The main character--Scott Crane--is the son of the mystical "king of the West," and as a boy he narrowly escaped the fate his father had in store for him. But now his father is after him again, and the only way to save himself is to take his father's job and become the new king of the West. The odds are against him, but every professional gambler is used to dealing with long odds--particularly when things are desperate.

Like Expiration Date, this one has an astonishing amount of creativity crammed into it (it won the World Fantasy Award), as well as Powers' trademark humor.

A favorite example of the latter: At one point in the novel Scott, as the true son of the king, must do an Arthurian sword-from-the-stone bit, which in this case takes the form of a knife embedded in a cement wall. His friend tries and fails to dislodge the knife. Then Scott steps up and yanks it out. The friend instantly quips: "*I* loosened it."  The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
Genre: Science Fiction.

It's a thousand years in the future. Mankind has moved out into space, colonized countless worlds, and we've never met another intelligent species.

Then we find one.

Only unlike most first contact stories, we are the star-faring race and they are confined to their own solar system.

The aliens are very nice, very friendly. They are innocents, when it comes down to it. They very much want to get along with us. And they very much do not want us to learn one particular fact about them. Because when the reader finds out this fact, the reader suddenly starts thinking, "Even though this isn't their fault, we can not live in the same universe as these aliens! We need to wipe them out immediately! While we still can!"

The novel becomes a race-to-the-finish page turner as the human characters struggle to come up with a way to avoid committing all out genocide.

It's also a fascinating study of the alien culture . . . and the imagined human culture of a thousand years hence.

BTW, I know readers will be curious about the title, so here goes: The vast majority of characters in the story are Catholics (Catholicism is, it seems, the official religion of the Second Empire of Man), but there are also some Jews and Muslims and . . . Himists.

Himists are a small group of heretics who worship the Coal Sack nebula as God. Seen from the other side in the novel (so that it is between Earth and where the story takes place), the Coal Sack looks like a giant, hooded man with a burning red eye (a red giant star) with a tiny yellow mote (a yellow dwarf sun) in front of it. The heretics refer to the giant hooded nebula man as "Him," and the mote (the yellow star) in "His" eye is the home of the aliens we meet.

So don't let the title put you off. Catholicism actually has a very fair and favorable treatment in the book. Nonsense Novels by Stephen Leacock.
Genre: Comedy.

How do I love this book! It was the first Leacock book I read, and wow is it great!

It's a concept book: Each chapter is a parody of a different genre of literature that was popular in Leacock's day (100 years ago).

The first story is a parody of Sherlock Holmes. Then we get parodies of the ghost story, the chivalric (Medieval) romance, tragic Russian literature, the old fashioned sea story, the young-man-seeks-his-fortune-in-the-big-city rags-to-riches story, the farm-has-been-mortgaged-and-is-about-to-be-foreclosed melodrama, and science fiction (which existed in Leacock's day, even though it didn't yet have that name).

And more!

This book is so funny that I won't even try describing it, because I couldn't do it justice. Just get it! Starswarm by Jerry Pournelle.
Genre: Science Fiction.

It's a few hundred years in the future (it seems), and mankind has colonized other worlds. 

One of them is Paradise--though the people who live there call it "Purgatory." It's a wild, frontier world, and it's also the home of Kip, the most important boy on the planet.

Only he doesn't know that. He doesn't know anything about his past. He's just being raised at the remote Starswarm nature research station by his Uncle Mike, a professional hunter.

Kip also has a voice in his head that only he can hear, and which has told him never to tell anybody else about the voice.

Over time, the secret of Kip's past--and the mysterious voice--begin to emerge, and in the end Kip must embrace his destiny to save the lives of all humans on Purgatory.

Now a few notes about these books in general:

• They're all in print. I picked ones like that so I wouldn't frustrate readers by recommending books they couldn't get. Some of them are a hundred years old (Leacock's) or almost a hundred (Lovecraft's), which is a tribute to their staying power and how much people like them.
• Some of them are suitable for children. Ender's Game and Starswarm, in particular, are written to be accessible to a young audience, though there are layers and layers in them that are there to make them enjoyable for adults, too (the way Bugs Bunny cartoons have simple jokes for the kids and sophisticated ones for the adults).
• None of these books presents a Hello Kitty view of the world where everything is cute and safe and happy. That is to say, they aren't written for preschoolers. There are frightening things in them (fear is the basis of drama; no dramatic tension, no story).
• Nor are they all about saints. There are characters who not only make mistakes but who do immoral things (though none of the protagonists is an anti-hero; the main characters in each are all on the side of good, no matter what mistakes they made or are in the process of making).
• They all have fundamental moral structure. That is, they all recognize that there are Things Humans Should Not Do, and the characters who ignore this fact do pay the price. 
• There are no sex scenes in any of these. I don't like sex scenes. There is, however, discussion of sex.
• There are some cuss words in some of them.
• There are a few gross things, but not much and always (so far as I can remember), always in service of the plot (i.e., not thrown in just to be gross but to advance the story).
• Many of them could be family reading, but parents should always read a book before deciding if it is right for their children.
• I may have forgotten some things I ought to mention, but this is a blog post and I couldn't re-read them all before composing it. :-) Please excuse me if that is the case.

Having said that, I hope you'll check out the ones that sound interesting to you, and I hope you enjoy them! (Though, as always, de gustibus non disputandum est.)

In the meantime, what are ten of your top fiction books?

Inquiring Muslims Want To Know!

Things I talked about: colloidal silver, argyria, Paul Karason (below) (video), Power Boy, trade dress.

 

So Helen Thomas has resigned.

Fine with me. I always found her obnoxious, abrasive, partisan, rude, and mean-spirited.

But don't count her out just yet. She previously resigned from UPI in 2000 but had a new gig at Hearst Newspapers within a few months, so we may see her again.

Though she is gone (at least for now), the question remains: Was what she said in the video clip anti-Semitic or merely anti-Zionist?

In the combox of my previous post, many commenters disagreed with me and said that the clip did provide proof of Thomas's anti-Semitism.

That's fine. I don't have a problem with disagreement.

Other commenters agreed that the video didn't provide proof of anti-Semitism and said that I was right to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism.

That's fine, too. I also don't have a problem with people agreeing.

Even though Thomas has resigned, the issues involved in the exchange are still with us--and will be in the future--and that makes them still worth talking about. So I'd like to explore them a little further.

Specifically, I'd like to evaluate the following claims by critics:

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This weekend I went to a local Middle Eastern food market and got some stuff.

I also made a couple of videos about the experience.

Links to the things I was talking about: Fava Beans; The Lord Chancellor's Nightmare Song [video] (from Iolanthe; with Mixed Pickles); and Peter Piper.

More links: hummus, tahini, baba ghanoush, imam bayeldi, paneer, dolma

On May 27, long-time White House correspondent Helen Thomas made remarks that have caused an uproar.

At the time, she was outside the White House, which was hosting a Jewish heritage event. An interviewer asked her if she had any comments on Israel.

Her reply was, "Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine."

She went on to say that "they" (meaning the Palestinian people) are an occupied people and that Palestine is "their land."

When asked where Israelis should go, Thomas said that they should "Go home" and went on to identify "home" as "Poland, Germany . . . and America . . . and everywhere else."

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