North Western Winds

Mark Steyn : I said a while back that China was a better bet for the future than Russia or the European Union. Which is damning with faint praise: trapped in a demographic death spiral, Russia and Europe have no future at all. But that doesn't mean China will bestride the scene as a geopolitical colossus. When European analysts coo about a "Chinese century", all they mean is "Oh, God, please, anything other than a second American century". But wishing won't make it so. [Smirk]

Francis de Sales 1567- 1622 I'm still reading my wife's unread books. This one is bigger and will take longer, if I decide to see it through: Saint Francis de Sales , Introduction to the Devout Life (the entire text is here ). It's interesting, reading books that you probably would not have picked up yourself. Here is a passage from the introduction to the Introduction . The very first step towards spiritual health is to be purged from our sinful humours. S. [saint] Paul received perfect purification instantaneously, and the like grace was conferred on S. Magdalene, S. Catherine of Genoa, S. Pelagia, and some others, but this kind of purgation is as miraculous and extraordinary in grace as the resurrection of the dead in nature, nor dare we venture to aspire to it. The ordinary purification, whether of body or soul, is only accomplished by slow degrees, step by step, gradually and painfully. The angels on Jacob's ladder had wings, yet nevertheless they did not fly,...

Your IQ Is 120 Your Logical Intelligence is Above Average Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Above Average A Quick and Dirty IQ Test That stuff about mathematical genius is hogwash.

Fractals are really cool. "The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists." Another gem from G.K. Chesterton, taken from Litweb.net. A while back I got an e-mail telling me about a new kit for teachers wanting to use CS Lewis' Narnia stories in the clasroom. Then I went on a short break. Here it is. Let's hope lots of them take advantage of it. Speaking of books, Human Events has published a list of the most harmful books of the modern age . It's a pretty good list; I'm glad to see Kinsey made the list, and pretty high t...

Electoral Reform Key: FPPTP = First Past the Post; AMS = Additional Member System; SYV = Single Transferable Vote; JAV+ = Jenkins Alternate Vote Plus; PLS = Party List System; CC = Cellular Constituencies. For explanations of these systems, please read the electoral reform FAQ . For more information about electoral reform in general, visit the Electoral Reform Society or Make My Vote Count . FPPTP 47 AMS -6 STV 3 JAV+ -6 PLS 3 CC -18 You should support: First Past the Post (FPTP) . This is the system currently in place in the UK by which a single MP is elected from each constituency by simply getting the most votes. This system is simple to understand, familiar to the electorate and maintains a direct link between MPs and their constituencies. It also tends to deliver an overall majority to a single party. It is very poorly representative in terms of how the number of MPs a party receives relates to their share of the vote. Take the test at Who Sh...

At Mirror of Justice , I came across links to these interesting maps of the US (I'm not aware of anything like this for Canada). Here is the map for Evangelicals . Here is the map for Catholics . Notice anything? Like the fact that the maps are almost inverted? Sometimes, in a country as resolutely secular as Canada, it's good to point out the obvious. In this case, the maps ought to explode the myth that Christians are a bland and monolithic bunch: "the religious right." There are doctrinal splits that are elusive to those on the outside, and then there's people like this : "Take Reagan," said Maddox. "He started talking about abortion and, all of a sudden, he was this great Christian candidate. ... Now we're in another election year and the right is still obsessed with sex. We have to tell the American people that this isn't about abortion and it's not about gay marriage. It's about the budget, health care and the war. At least, th...

Here are short entries on Michealangelo , whose legacy is doing just fine thank you, and GK Chesterton, who Dale Alquist is attemtpting to revive.

And other bits of bad induction Edward Fesser describes the anti conservative fallacy at TCS: Those inclined to commit the anti-conservative fallacy might try to defend themselves by claiming that the average conservative voter does not in fact have any good reasons for opposing the things he does. They may say that whether or not a Thomas Aquinas or Edmund Burke could come up with a fancy justification for being against abortion, same-sex marriage, or whatever, the typical redneck Bible thumper surely cannot. So, the critic of conservatism might infer, it must be the case that his view really is based on nothing more than irrational prejudice after all. We should keep in mind, however, that even if a person couldn't give a sophisticated defense of his belief that murder, theft, child molestation, and rape are wrong, we would not conclude from this that his disapproval of these things is therefore irrational. Rather, we would acknowledge that many perfectly defensible moral bel...

One my my favouite essayists, Joan Didion , has taken on the Terri Schaivo story. I've respected Didion ever since I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem for an essay course as an undergrad (no, it's not a religious book). She's no religiois nut, and she does well with the story. On PVS: No one who has had even a passing exposure to brain injury can think of neurology as a field in which all questions are answerable. The "prognosis" is arrived at only clinically, after the fact, by observation of what happens. Vegetative patients whose brain injury was traumatic (a fall, an accident, an external mechanical event) are more likely to recover response than those, like Theresa Schiavo, whose injury resulted from a lack of oxygen to the brain. No one knows why. Patients who emerge from coma and show some response can later drop into a less responsive state. Again, no one knows why. Neurologists can pinpoint the precise location of injured areas, know exactly what the f...

Ben at the Tiger in Winter and my wife Rebecca at Doxology have tagged me with the book meme, which is analysed ably by our newest Red Ensign blogger, Robot Guy, here . I knew there was a reason this meme became so prevalent on the net so quickly. # of books I own: Does this mean the number of books I own, right now? Do the ones at my parents' place count? I don't know, honestly. I have owned lots and lots of books over the years. Everything from peanuts paperbacks I used to beg my parents for, back when they cost about 75 cents, to the pulp sci fi and fantasy of my adolescence, to the literature books from my days as a university student - I still have lots of them. I now read mostly non fiction and I often give away books I have not looked at in too long (too long is when I can't get new books onto my bookshelves). last book I bought: I often buy books on line and in bunches these days. I'll list God and the Philosophers, the Reconciliation of Faith and Reason ...

Shake and Bake At Policy Review , Lee Harris writes about how to deal with Tradition in an age of Reason. It's a fascinating read, strongly recommended. He even manages, at the end, to bring his hypothesis around to the subject of marriage, and he defends it pretty well. Even more so when you consider that's he's gay. Is Tradition 1), a useful fiction? The idea of tradition as a “useful fiction” [that] has returned to the modern world in the thinking of Leo Strauss and his followers. Tradition is an essential prop for the masses — they cannot dispense with it without chaos and havoc ensuing. The common people need their myths and their illusions; but the elite can dispense with them, provided they scrupulously avoid saying or doing anything that would disturb the cognitive complacency of the masses. Is Tradition 2), the home of the radical skeptic? This defense of tradition goes to the other extreme. It argues that even the most intelligent among us cannot be trusted to ...

Colby Cosh , who can raise an interesting point if and when he chooses, philosophizes on The Revenge of the Sith : We live in a period in which churches are regarded as sinister in themselves, but "faith" of all kinds receives exaggerated deference and legal protection. So has anyone noticed that, er, the Jedi are a hierarchical militarist religious order that takes great pains to impose orthodoxy on its members from childhood onward? Or that the rhetoric used by Darth Sidious to befuddle and win over Anakin Skywalker is basically liberal-relativist? "Good is a point of view?" Helloooo? Obi-Wan Kenobi does make a remark at one point that "Only a Sith deals in absolutes"...but then he proceeds to mutilate the living bejeebers out of his heretical ex-acolyte. Which is a pretty "absolute" sort of thing to do, though nobody asked me. The Jedi, on the whole, seem like a funny sort of bunch for a generation of overeducated slackers with a distaste fo...

At some point, I want to write about sacramentalism, but I don't think I'm quite there yet. For now, here's a look at what B16 has said on the subject of the eucharist . Grasping this as true is a real mind blower: On Sunday, May 29, in his homily for the mass of Corpus Domini in Bari, Benedict XVI commented on the words of Jesus in Jn 6:53 : "Truly, truly I say to you: unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." They were words that had disturbed some of his disciples. The pope said: "In the face of the murmur of protest, Jesus might have fallen back on reassuring words: 'Friends,' he could have said, 'do not worry! I spoke of flesh but it is only a symbol . What I mean is only a deep communion of sentiments.' But no, Jesus did not have recourse to such soothing words. He stuck to his assertion, to all his realism, even when he saw many of his disciples breaking away (cf. Jn 6: 66). Indeed, he...

I am not surprised by the results of this very interesting quiz at the Guardian website (it would be interesting to me, wouldn't it?), but I am surprised by the range of the results. My Empathy Quotient is 31, just below the "average" level, which starts at 33. My Systemizing Quotien t is a rather high 53, the bottom end of the top range. On the plus side, I out emote Ben 2 to 1. (There I go again.)

Dorothy L. Sayers, 1893-1957 Wisdom on the subject of education, from Dorothy Sayers . One: A glib speaker in the Brains Trust once entertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helpless rage) by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to know how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, I hope, that it never was a "matter of faith"; it was simply a debating exercise, whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material, and if so, did they occupy space? The answer usually adjudged correct is, I believe, that angels are pure intelligences; not material, but limited, so that they may have location in space but not extension. An analogy might be drawn from human thought, which is similarly non-material and similarly limited. Thus, if your thought is concentrated upon one thing - say, the point of a needle - it is located there in the sense that it is not elsewhere; but although it is ...

This hiatus thing isn't going to plan. As I'm reading (books and blogs) I find things I think are interesting, or things I would like an opinion on, and bingo, my hiatus is in a shambles. So, *coughs*, until further notice, I'm blogging again. The main editorial difference that I can see coming from my few weeks away is that I do not expect to resume posting six out of seven days a week. There could be, at any time and without warning, a break of a week or two between posts. Really, I think that is the only way I can start to get some books behind me, and is also inevitable in the summer season when one wants to get out and enjoy it all. Here's a few things that got my attention this past week. Chris Taylor is blogging once again and has recruited an air force for the Red Ensign Brigade. Heh. Dennis Prager asks, Are you a liberal? Anglicans and Catholics are getting closer to reconciling -over the role of Mary in the Christian faith. Quote: A working group c...

Terri Schaivo Paul McHugh tells us of a patient in a similar state to Terri, reminding us that PVS is distinctly not the same thing as brain death. For the expansion of that term we have to thank the Cult of the Self: We young physicians felt honored to be caring for this man, who was of our fraternity. Prior to his injury, indeed, he had been quite simply the foremost clinical scientist in America. Among his many achievements, he had illuminated the functions of the parathyroid glands and so enlarged scientific knowledge of calcium metabolism, the dynamics of bone construction, and diseases of the bone like osteoporosis and osteomalacia. From his specific studies, he had discerned general principles (including organ resistance to hormonal action, a concept prefiguring the receptor revolution in endocrinology), and he made leaders of his students by teaching them how to employ biological science in investigating the pathogenesis of human diseases. In a relatively brief academic car...

Over at Boundless , J. P. Moreland has an interesting series of articles about the nature of knowledge. See here here here and here I don't intend to write about all of them, although they are good reading. Moreland has a number of degrees, including a PhD in Philosophy, and he keeps it all quite accessible as he provides a critique of Naturalism. I'm just using a small quote from the second article to get myself started: To briefly review: The three major components to naturalism are 1) scientism - the belief that scientific knowledge is either the only form of knowledge or a vastly superior form of knowledge; 2) the belief that the atomic theory of matter and the theory of evolution explain all events; and 3) the belief that non-physical things don't exist and that the world isn't here for any purpose. I used to subscribe to point one above. I still have great respect for the things science has given us. Number two I'm not addressing at the moment, and number th...

Oh, my. You are Pope John Paul II. You are a force to be reckoned with. Which Twentieth Century Pope Are You? brought to you by Quizilla

That new fangled religion The National Post ran a large part of this terrific UK Spectator article by atheist Andrew Kenny today. I was just going to link it and add some of my own witty and erudite commentary on it, but the Spectator web site made it almost impossible to get access to it (it is a freebie). To save you that hassle, I'm quoting most of the last page. After talking about the banning of DDT in 1972, Kenny argues that it is among the worst deeds that modern religion - ideology- was done. It has competition in the Soviet gulags and the Holocaust, but Kenny argues that malaria deaths are even higher and growing . He neglects to compare the figures to deaths caused by abortion and some types of embryonic research, but manages a very fair reading of history nevertheless. (If you're a keener, you may want to try going there yourself. Use IE if you do, because there's a hugely annoying macromedia ad smack in the middle of the page and I was unable to close it...