North Western Winds

If I can find Him with great ease, perhaps He is not my God. If I cannot hope to find him at all, is He my God? If I find him whenever I wish, have I found him? If He can find me whenever He wishes, and tells me Who He is and who I am, and if I then know that He Whom I could not find has found me: then I know He is the Lord, my God: He has touched me with the finger that made me out of nothing. Thomas Merton, from No Man is and Island

Terri Scaivo, Dr. Cranford and the "indignity" of the feeding tube Terri Schaivo died today . Let's hope we can learn something from this terrible story. ***** One of my more outspokenly left leaning readers, Timmy the G , has taken the testimony of the doctor for Micheal Schaivo as the final word on Terri's condition and how she should be treated. It has to be noted that these are two issues, and not one. In philosophy this is the "is/ought" problem that goes back to David Hume at least. Terri might very well have been a PVS patient; I've never denied that. My concern in this case is for due process , or getting the facts right. What to do with them is trickier, but I have a few ideas about what might be reasonable in that regard too. Reading Timmy's post, one gets the impression that he and Dr. Ronald Cranford are perilously close to thinking that diagnosis dictates the treatment, which is absolutely false. Even if Cranford is right and it is ...

Edward Fesser, a frequent contributor at Right Reason , has a most interesting and important article at Tech Central Station entitled How to Mix Politics and Religion . Here is a taste: Suppose... that someone did defend a view about abortion, same-sex marriage, or some other contentious matter by appealing to religious considerations. Why should this be considered unacceptable? The problem, in the view of many liberals, is that religious considerations are matters of faith, where "faith" connotes in their minds a kind of groundless commitment, a will to believe that for which there is no objective evidence. Opinions on matters of public policy, they would say, can only appropriately be arrived at via methods of argument assessable by all members of the political community, not by reference to the idiosyncratic and subjective feelings of a minority. If religious arguments were in general really like this, then I would agree with the liberal that they ought to be kept out of...

This report indicates that religion was not covered very well in the MSM last year. I know, I know, what an earth shaking surprise. This particular tibit is worth quoting because the exact same phenomenon is happening in Canada, regarding Paul Martin's claims to be devout practitioner of the Catholic faith. Reporters approached religious issues from a very secular and political perspective, especially in stories on the presidential campaign. When some Roman Catholic bishops announced that they would deny Democratic candidate John Kerry the sacrament of the Eucharist over his decades of pro-abortion voting and advocacy, network reporters placed all their scrutiny on the church leaders, not on Kerry . Not only did they fail to explain the Eucharistic rules of the Church, they misquoted bishops as claiming Catholics shouldn’t “vote for sinners,” while they described Kerry as a “devout,” “observant,” and “practicing Catholic” despite his pro-abortion record. Kerry’s opponents were la...

Joe Ford, writing in The Harvard Crimson , shares his thoughts on what the Schaivo case is revealing, and it isn't pretty. The reason for this public support of removal from ordinary sustenance, I believe, is not that most people understand or care about Terri Schiavo. Like many others with disabilities, I believe that the American public, to one degree or another, holds that disabled people are better off dead. To put it in a simpler way, many Americans are bigots. A close examination of the facts of the Schiavo case reveals not a case of difficult decisions but a basic test of this country’s decency. Our country has learned that we cannot judge people on the basis of minority status, but for some reason we have not erased our prejudice against disability. One insidious form of this bias is to distinguish cognitively disabled persons from persons whose disabilities are “just” physical. Cognitively disabled people are shown a manifest lack of respect in daily life, a...

Steve Sailor has published an e-mail exchange he had with a Florida lawyer regarding the Schaivo case. Sailor's quite right about the fact that no one has been talking or thinking about the legal aspect in the media very much. It's probably because that aspect can't compete with the compelling and tragic nature of the events that have unfolded this past week. It is, however, both interesting and important. Here is an excerpt: I have been following the case for years. Something that interests me about the Terri Schiavo case, and that doesn't seem to have gotten much media attention: The whole case rests on the fact that the Schindlers (Terri's parents) were totally outlawyered by the husband (Michael Schiavo) at the trial court level. This happened because, in addition to getting a $750K judgment for Terri's medical care, Michael Schiavo individually got a $300K award of damages for loss of consortium, which gave him the money to hire a top-notch lawyer to re...

Let it Bleed slams one out of the park on the subject of the hypocrisy of the Federal Liberals. Pierre Pettigrew famously told the Catholic church to stay out of the SSM debate and is now faced with the fact the Canadian Sikh MPs have been told that they too should vote against the bill. What is poor Pierre to do? I don't want Pettigrew to tell the Sikhs to keep quiet. No, nothing like that. I think he ought to publically apologize for letting his anti-religious bigotry get the better of him, and admit that all groups, even Catholics, have the right to speak to public issues. Heck, if he does that I might even stop making fun of his hair.

"Obviously, Microsoft coming up with Reduced Media Edition was their very arrogant slap in the face of the EU ," said naming consultant Laurel Sutton. "They were specifically requested to come up with something that didn't sound inferior." The libertarian in me thinks that Microsoft should respond to the Euro weenie's name fetish by pulling all copies and all support for Microsoft products for six months. Of course the threat would have more force if MS made better software, but you get the point. For those interested, Reason magazine has a look at Ayn Rand on what would have been her 100th birthday, February second of this year.

Colby Cosh once again demonstrates that he holds the banner high for Canada's redneck blogging contingent. Writing about the Schaivo case, he says: Paul O’Donnell, a Roman Catholic Franciscan monk, said the family is urging Schiavo’s husband to allow his wife to receive the sacrament of communion at sundown Saturday, when Catholics begin celebrating their holiest feast of the year. Schiavo, who cannot swallow, would have a minuscule piece of bread and a drop of wine placed in her mouth. You could go blind trying to figure this one out. There are two problems for the Romish theologian here--Schiavo cannot ingest the Eucharist (which is sort of the whole idea), and she lacks the reasoning capacity to distinguish the sacred wafer from ordinary bread (assuming she would know she was being fed at all). As far as I can tell, the latter might conceivably be overlooked in deciding whether to administer viaticum. But in conjunction with the former it raises a danger of what was traditiona...

First up is Sidney Callahan, writing in the Washington Post : To many of us in the church's liberal wing, some of John Paul's rulings have been cause for real distress. As a card-carrying member of Feminists for Life, I find myself dissenting with a small but significant percentage of church teachings -- on women, sex, divorce and homosexuality. I also fault the pope for failing to enact more of the Vatican II reforms intended to change the way the church is run. The response is from Irish Law : Too many people, Westerners in particular, seem to believe today that the Church only teaches what she does because of the pernicious authoritarian influence of John Paul II, not because any writings and teachings he has made are drawn from and expound on about 2,000 years of Tradition, Scripture and natural law. The Church is not going to undergo radical theological changes as soon as a new pope is elected, not only because the office is larger than a single man, but also because as we...

The Weekly Standard has an excellent opinion piece on the Schaivo case and what we can learn from it. The author is Eric Cohen, who is the resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center . FOR ALL THE ATTENTION we have paid to the Schiavo case, we have asked many of the wrong questions, living as we do on the playing field of modern liberalism. We have asked whether she is really in a persistent vegetative state, instead of reflecting on what we owe people in a persistent vegetative state. We have asked what she would have wanted as a competent person imagining herself in such a condition, instead of asking what we owe the person who is now with us, a person who can no longer speak for herself, a person entrusted to the care of her family and the protection of her society. ... For some, it is an article of faith that individuals should decide for themselves how to be cared for in such cases. And no doubt one response to the Schiavo case will be a renewed call for living will...

Via Kathie Shaidle's Relapsed Catholic , I see that blogger Andrea Harris reads what is happening to Terri Schaivo just as I do . Harris writes: People are acting as if what happened to Terri is some awful, demonic, sci-fi thing that only happens in 1,000,000 years and only to people who have angered Cthulhu but I tell you it's in all our futures one way or another; we have no control on how we end, whether you believe in the God of Moses or the God of Chance, and people like Terri Schiavo are an in-your-face reminder of this and people hate and fear that, some enough so that they will do anything to destroy the reminder. Terri is the messenger. The message is: we are not in control. We 1 are, in fine, traditional fashion, killing the messenger because we don't like the message. 1 The "we" is humanity in general; the same humanity that that the Christians say killed God. I'm beginning to think that the Christians are right. Shaidle also links to Anoth...

This is from an interesting essay by William A. Rusher, published at the Heritage Institute, called " Conservatism's Third and Final Battle ." The contrast with the sonic whine coming from some so-called conservatives over the results of the recent Tory convention is quite stunning. Jay Currie's upset, to say the least, that he didn't get his way on the issue of SSM. You haven't heard me say much about the Tories' unwillingness to do anything about the utter lack of any abortion law in Canada, have you? They even tried to silence debate on the subject, and you heard nary a word (never mind a threat) from me about it. I trusted that silencing debate would not be allowed to stand, and ruefully admit that Canada may well not be ready yet to deal with the issue in a mature and civilized way. I'm still on board. If I can't have a mile, I'll take an inch. Seems to me that's how successful coalitions get built. Rusher writes: Public opinion po...

A while back I wrote contrary opinion to a famous pro choice essay by Judith Jarvis Thomson. At Right Reason, Francis Beckwith gives us a vivid counter example to Thompson's: The Baby on the Porch. An amazing French woman has successfully paddled across the Pacific Ocean . It seems she was looking for a challenge after doing the same on the Atlantic. Is there anyone in Canada who speaks for us specifically and not "world opinion" as clearly as Robert Bork does in this essay? What is really alarming about Roper and other cases citing foreign law (six justices now engage in that practice) is that the Court, in tacit coordination with foreign courts, is moving toward a global bill of rights. Neither our courts nor the foreign courts are bound by actual constitutions. Prof. Lino Graglia was quite right when he said that “the first and most important thing to know about American constitutional law is that it has virtually nothing to do with the Constitution.” That is cer...

"The protocols of the elders of science" With Terri Schaivo and an aged and ill Pontiff dominating the news this Easter, yours truly is feeling a mite humble. Here are some links to stories that I think are appropriate this weekend. From the pages of The New Yorker , an examination of the concept of "brain death": After the presentation ended, I spoke to Ronald Cranford, a professor of neurology and bioethics at the University of Minnesota, who is one of Shewmon's critics. He argued that Matthew's case was only an unusually prolonged example of the normal course brain death takes. "Any patient you keep alive, or dead, longer than a few days will develop spinal-cord reflexes," he said, recalling a case in which the doctor said, "Yes, she's been getting better ever since she died." In a question-and-answer session with Shewmon the next day, after an address in which he drew parallels between the brain dead and people who are consc...

This David Letterman Top Ten type list appears to have been done by someone in Germany in response to a rumour that there are more blogs in Iran than in Germany. I have no idea if that's true or not. I do, however, know Germans and German culture and this is funny! Top 10 Reasons Why Germany has Less Blogs than Iran 10. Humor? 9. Opinionated German bloggers risk being called Na.zis by the irate, deranged and mentally disturbed commenters who lurk in the Blogosphere. 8. People will find out how great Germany is and cause a mass migration of (gasp) foreigners! 7. On the internet, no one cares about someone's Dipl-X or Dr. 6. Blogging is not required. 5. No one famous has a blog yet. Olli Kahn, Boris Becker, Joschka... It all rides on you. 4. Hartv IV cut back on social benefits for DSL. 3. Der Blog, Die Blog, oder Das Blog? 2. Ein-Euro-Jobs don't have internet access. 1. No one can figure out the Neue Rechtschreibung . From David's Mediencritik via The Last A...

Good Friday, Suffering, and Terri Schaivo For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. St. Paul, Corinthians 1:18 It is Good Friday today, the day that Christians remember the crucifixion. In the Catholic Church today's mass is called "the way of the cross" and we are encouraged to think hard about suffering and sacrifice. It is a long, almost exhausting service, during which the everyone present touches or even kisses the cross. For someone looking on from the outside, it must be a strange spectacle. In fact, it is not easy for the faithful either. The "Problem of Pain" is said to be one of the most difficult challenges that a Christian faces. If God is good, then why is there suffering in the world? Or sin? Why do we die? Why did Christ, innocent and blameless, have to die? Teri Schaivo, does she deserve to be in the helpless state that she is in? Because of all my adversaries I have b...

This cartoon is from the blog Faithmouse . Note the vinnegar on the corner of the bed.

I made quite a few changes to the template today. I think the most useful thing was adding a script from Freedictionary.com to allow you to get a definition of any word just by doubleclicking on it. That'll help with jargon, and I'll try to keep handcoding links to the Wikkipedia for names and places that might be unfamiliar. I also: dropped most of my blogrolls. Well- I didn't drop them so much as hide them. You can click on their icons for the list of blogs. I found that they were becoming very long and cluttering up the page as a result. The Red Ensign group does not have a page to link to so I guess it stays until there is one. The Flea's does not have the blogroll for the group. placed code on the page showing referers. Like most bloggers, I find the referers very useful and a great way to find new blogs and interesting people tidied up some of my references by separating "wordsmithing" resources from Catholic resources added new links to almost all o...

I came across two good posts today on a subject that is dear my my heart, and that is Epistemology and it's subsection, the philosophy of science. At Right Thinking People , Trodwell writes: People who confuse a passing familiarity with a few of the elements of scientific terminology, with a fundamental understanding of science, tend to come a cropper when they attempt to apply scientific precepts to unscientific areas or methods of inquiry. The problem, as it always is with pseudoscientists, is that they approach science as a religion rather than as what it really is - a method. This is because, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, those who fail to understand science see it as magic. And to paraphrase Carl Sagan (since we're on a paraphraseological roll here), what the co-opters are hoping to do is to acquire the credibility accruing to science, without strict adherence to the method that is the source of that credibility. ... The utility of any hypothesis lies in the extent to ...

Mark Wills bring back a lot memories with this one... Saw Star Wars at least eight times Had the Pac-Man pattern memorized And I've seen the stuff they put inside... Stretch Armstrong (yeah) I was Roger Staubach in my backyard Had a shoebox full of baseball cards And a couple of Evil Knievel scars On my right arm. I was a kid when Elvis died And my momma cried... Chorus It was nineteen seventy somethin' And the world that I grew up in Farrah Fawcett hairdo days Bell bottoms and eight track tapes Lookin' back now I can see me Oh man, did I look cheesy But I wouldn't trade those days for nothin' Oh it was nineteen seventy-somethin'. It was the dawning of a new decade We got our first microwave Dad broke down and Finally shaved them old sideburns off I took the stickers off of my Rubik's Cube Watched M-TV all afternoon My first love was Daisy Duke And them cut-off jeans. Space Shuttle fell out of the sky And the whole world cried... It was nineteen eigh...

The highly divisive Terri Schaivo case is much in the media right now, as her parents and other pro life people try to get legal suport for her life beforre she succumbs to starvation and / or dehydration. In the WSJ, Peggy Noonan asks a good question about this case: I do not understand the emotionalism of the pull-the-tube people. What is driving their engagement? Is it because they are compassionate, and their hearts bleed at the thought that Mrs. Schiavo suffers? But throughout this case no one has testified that she is in persistent pain, as those with terminal cancer are. If they care so much about her pain, why are they unconcerned at the suffering caused her by the denial of food and water? ... What does Terri Schiavo's life symbolize to them? What does the idea that she might continue to live suggest to them? Why does this prospect so unnerve them? Again, if you think Terri Schiavo is a precious human gift of God, your passion is explicable. The passion of the pull-th...

A young protestor is arrested for trying to take water to Terri Schaivo. Tip: Southern Appeal The Ludwig Von Minses Institute reviews a new book, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America. Looks interesting: Allitt's thesis is that during the 1950s American Catholic conservatives generally held a cohesive position, based on natural law. In politics, Catholic rightists favored a strongly anti Communist foreign policy and defended capitalism, although not in the pure form professed by libertarians. This group succeeded during the 1950s and early 1960s in securing for themselves a distinct place in American politics. But then disaster struck. The Second Vatican Council, with its attendant upheavals, fragmented American Catholicism. Accordingly, in the 1960s and 1970s the united front among Catholic conservative broke apart. I'm too young and new to the faith to be able to comment much on Vatican II. I am curious about the subject, however. I suspect too ...