perfidy

In a perfectly ironic twist for an author whose works tested the limits of perception, paranoia, and self-identity, an animatronic robot in the form of reclusive and visionary sci-fi author Philip K. Dick has disappeared.

The Ministry is happy to report that Mr. Dick's simulacrum is currently resting comfortably and snacking periodically on engine oil and madelines. It recently requested a word processor; our clinicians suspect it intends to begin writing once again.

Three days afternoon being completely, utterly, totally accidentally shot by the Vice President after an innocent disagreement, Whittington dies from unrelated symptoms. White House doctors describe an untreatable case of "nervous stomach" as the primary cause of death. "That stomach just reached right up there into his throat, pulled his tongue down and choked him out", said White House Physician Ken Mehlman. "We don't know what Whit was thinking about, but something made that stomach nervous, and that's that."

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007666.php

The new Carnival of the Recipes is up at Physics Geek.

Next week, the Carnival will be hosted by yours truly, the Ministry of Minor Perfidy. Come and see what foods we will enjoy when the apocalypse befalls us.

Krauthammer on the cartoon rioting:

What passes for moderation in the Islamic community -- "I share your rage but don't torch that embassy" -- is nothing of the sort. It is simply a cynical way to endorse the goals of the mob without endorsing its means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.

Have any of these "moderates" ever protested the grotesque caricatures of Christians and, most especially, Jews that are broadcast throughout the Middle East on a daily basis?

... A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don't are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, merely using different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West.

I would have to agree, here. It is not the place of Muslims, anywhere, to determine through prior censorship (whether official or based on fears of violent retribution) what newspapers (or TV, or blogs, or magazines) publish. I remain amazed at the violence that convulses the Muslim "community" whenever something pisses it off. Which is frequent. Thirty five or more people dead, embassies burned, innocent Danish businesses harmed - all because, essentially, 1.6 billion people collectively can't take a joke.

This will go on, protests and riots, attacks on the west, people like Theo van Gogh stabbed to death, because the Islamic world has a hair trigger temper and is not merely easily offended but actively looking for things to be offended by. What will change these attitudes? It is not reassuring to consider that ending pervasive religious intolerance took several of the vilest and bloodiest wars in western history.

History tells us that Joan of Arc, known as "La Poucelle" was only two hours away from a degree in Forestry Management.

My sports fanatic mother emailed to inform me that former Ohio State football star Maurice Clarett was on indicted charges of robbing two people behind a bar and carrying a concealed weapon. The 22 year old who once led Ohio State to a National Title in 2002 has now irretrievably blown his chances of a Heisman trophy, a professional career and earning millions of dollars. If convicted of the two most serious armed robbery charges, he would face up to 26 years in prison.

He turned himself in two days after the incident, apparently after watching OSU beat Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl. Had Clarett stayed with the Buckeyes and kept out of trouble, he would have been a Senior and playing in that game. Or, considering that he rushed for 1,237 yards and scored 16 touchdowns as an Ohio State freshman in 2002, that game might have been a second or third national title game.

Just pathetic - from his lame attempts to sue his way into the NFL draft, to his run-ins with the law, to this. Clarett had the potential to be a superstar. But all he managed was second rate thuggery.

Nat Hentoff on abortion. The vast majority of those who oppose abortion are religious, and oppose abortion for religious reasons. Here is an exception.

Yesterday, I was perusing the DC Metro Blogmap for the first time in months if not years. I discovered there Dappled Things a local (to me) blog run by Jim Tucker, a Catholic Priest in the Diocese of Arlington. And on that blog, I found this link to a piece in the Post about some canny Swedes attempting to reverse engineer the genius of Stradivarius using computer modeling technology.

"The violin is easy to measure geometrically," said structural engineer Mats Tinnsten in a telephone interview from Mid Sweden University. "Then you can measure how it vibrates, look at the frequencies and other parameters. You excite it with a loudspeaker, knock on it with your knuckles. We can do this as well."

But after that it gets tricky. Violins are made of wood, and no two pieces of wood are exactly alike. Each violin, whether built by Stradivari or Tinnsten, is unique, and the challenge is to sculpt the wood -- delicately shaving the top and the back -- to "optimize" the acoustical qualities. Stradivari, working in a pre-industrial age, did this by ear and hand with unsurpassed consistency and artistry.

Tinnsten said his team can do it, too. "Violin-makers reduce the thickness of the wood with a knife, and do it in different places until they are satisfied," he said. "We use the same method, but in the computer. We take an electronic blank and carve it."

That's a bold claim. But if he pulls it off, he'll be in the long green making a new generation of Strad-level violins.

I also found this little bit of history interesting:

Stradivari, better known by the Latinized version of his name, Stradivarius, learned his trade from the Amati family of Cremona, near Milan. Beginning with the Amatis, continuing with Stradivari and finishing with Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu, the Cremonese instrument-makers dominated the violin trade from around 1560 to 1750.

Stradivari, who was born in 1644 and died in 1737, was perhaps the most fascinating of the maestri. The Amatis, Sparks said, "knew how to teach violin-making," while Guarneri was a tinkerer and a genius "who made a dozen violins that could outplay any Strad," but he couldn't manage it on a regular basis.

"Stradivari is the most consistent artist, with good sound, good looks and good coloration," Sparks said. "Stradivari could consciously alter an instrument to obtain a desired result. I believe if you knocked on his door today, he could tell you exactly how he did it."

I hadn't realized that there were violins better than a Stradivarius. Of course, my musical knowledge is cursory at best.

I also found a wicked cool video of an octopus killing a shark.

By this time, you are probably wondering, what sort of site is this priest running? Where's all the god stuff? Well, there's plenty, including his sermons. One item that I found interesting was his link to a lengthy (Clueless lengthy) essay on the prospects of reconciliation between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, "Catholic Ecumenism and the Elephant in the Room." As an orthodox type person myself, this is something I've pondered on occasion. The Orthodox and the descendents of the Monophysite churches (the Orthodox refer to them as non-Chalcedonian, because they did not accept the Council of Chalcedon) have decided that after a thousand and a half years, the original schism was really just over semantic issues, and that it was all a big mistake. The idea that the Catholics and the Orthodox could perform a similar miracle, and end a thousand years of separation seemed less likely, though Father Kirby's essay gives me a little more hope.

His idea that viewing the schism as imperfect - as are all human things is clever. Focus on how unity is preserved even in the face of stupidity, stubborness and vindictiveness. (Like the Crusaders sacking Constantinople instead of Muslim terrorists, or the mutual excommunications, etc. ad nauseum.) Nevertheless, despite the very real similarities between your average Catholic and Orthodox, and between the Liturgy and the Mass, there are also very real obstacles.

First, you've got the whole Pope thing. As most Protestants will likely understand, the Orthodox do not go along with the notion of either Papal infallibility or Papal primacy. In the east, there are fourteen "Popes," although there is something like the notion of infallibility - when the Church, speaking as a whole, pronounces on something, that is something like infallibility. An ecumenical council can make statements for the whole church, but there hasn't been one of those for a very, very long time. The idea that one guy can do that is a little odd to anyone who isn't Catholic.

Most of the doctrinal differences could probably be ironed out, or declared semantic issues and ignored. But the biggest problem would be in the human resistance to change. Here in the US, there are at least a dozen administratively independent Orthodox Churches. Washington DC has at least three Orthodox cathedrals - that is, seats of bishops. Which is patently ridiculous, when you consider that these are churches that haven't been riven by schism, and are at least theoretically part of the same church. This situation arose because when immigrants came to this country, they brought their churches with them. The Greeks set up Greek Orthodox churches, and likewise the Russians, Serbians, Macedonians, Syrians, Lebanese, Copts, Ethiopians and who knows who else. Each reported back to the home church in the mother country. So, throughout North America, you have multiple, parallel Orthodox hierarchies. The advent of Communism in Russia split the Russian Orthodox community, adding to the problem. Some areas might only have a couple orthodox churches - maybe a Greek and a Russian. But there are two Russian Orthodox Archbishops in DC, and at least one bishop from every major tentacle of the Orthodox Church as a whole. For an idea of the complexity of the lean and efficient Orthodox machine in the old world where things are simple, check out this brief primer on the Orthodox Hierarchy Orthodox Hierarchy.

If these churches cannot "unite" despite the fact that they are already united, what chance do two churches split for a thousand years have? You could start slow, I imagine, by just saying that the two churches are "in communion" which would mean that I could go to a Catholic church and not get beat up for asking for the Eucharist at the Latin Liturgy. But eventually, real union would stumble over things like, "Hey, there's too damn many bishops in this town. Which ones do we kick to the curb?" In DC, to we fire Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington, the Metropolitan Theodosius, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop Demetrios, or the Antiochian, or the Serbian, and so on.

It'd be nice, but I don't know how likely it would actually be.

[wik] Ran across this little jokelet: "I don’t believe in organized religion; I’m Orthodox."

Ministry Crony Phil has discovered a mysterious timewarp. Unlike the cool timewarps that lead to Imperial Rome, or the battle of Gettysburg or Matahari's boudoir, this one leads to...

A run down mall near your hometown in 1986.

I don't frequently post about politics, much to your collective relief. I don't usually have much to add to the bloviations and insights that whiz around the internet, and when I do I just can't really be bothered. I pay attention to politics, sure, but I don't have a deep grok of policy the way I do, say, the behavior of bread dough. And even if 99.99% of the people that happen past this website don't give a flying crap about how a certain recipe for bread behaves when refrigerated overnight prior to baking, I still feel that my sharing that information is more of a net good to the world than chiming in with a "me too!" when somebody posts a particularly insighftul nugget about energy policy.

But not today. I have been watching the flapdoodle over the NSA spying thingy with mounting alarm. It quickly became clear to me that Bush's people were doing their best to deflect attention from the full implications of their theories of law, and that investigators were becoming too wrapped up in the niceties of FISA law. When the Vice President can pull a jiu jitsu move on his questioners by merely stating, "we have an interest in knowing why an American citizen is talking to terrorists, said questioners have clearly not thought deeply enough about what they are doing. The salient questions are not really about FISA warrants, but about whether domestic spying, supra FISA, is happening, and under what legal authority.

Going all the way back to the detention of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, by a military tribunal without trial, charge, or habeas corpus, I have worried about the fragility of our way of life. This is especially so when defenses of the Padilla dentention, or Hamdi, or Abu Ghraib, etc., amount to "don't you know there's a war on??"

I am currently reading an absolutely fascinating book by Tom Reiss called The Orientalist. Ostensibly about a writer named Lev Nussimbaum who published bestsellers set in Persia in the middle part of the last century under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, the book is much more. Nussimbaum was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, the son of a Jewish oil magnate. He spent his teenaged years fleeing war and rebellion as World War I, the Russian Revolution, the flight of the White Russians, the counterflights of Azeris, Armenians, Gypsies, Turks, and Jews, pogroms, the collapse of Germany's "democracy," the descent of Berlin into chaos under the rule of the Freikorps, buffeted him and his family across Europe.

Along the way Reiss gives us a staggering array of capsule histories: of the last days of the Ottoman Empire; the rise of Baku as the first big oil boomtown in the world - there was (is?) so much petroleum there that the ground sometimes burst into flame spontaneously, not surprisingly making the city a major stronghold of Zoroastrianism (not to mention Islam and Judiasm); the assassinations that brought down the Czars; the spread of Bolshevism; vignettes about strange peoples like the warrior mountain Jews of Azerbaijan and an enclave of German speakers in the middle of southern Georgia; the fall of the Habsburgs; the rich multiculturalism of pre-20th century Persia, and more.

One recurring theme is that of fragility. The great empires of the 19th century fell quickly; once permanent, immutable and terrible, they turned practically overnight into scared collections of aristocrats stuffing priceless antiques into carpet bags as they fled revolution. The scrim between placid civilization and barbarism is tissue thin, it seems.

Which is why I worry that, in their zeal to prosecute the War on Terror, Bush & co. are doing something very harmful to the Republic we cherish. By now we've all been reminded that past Presidents suspended civil liberties for this reason or that. The difference is, those wars ended. This war, if it is a "war" in any recognizable sense, doesn't have an end-point. What... the last terrorist on earth waves the white flag and we're done? That is what makes any invocation by the President of "wartime necessity" as a defense for his actions very perilous. There will always be terrorism, and there will always be threats. So wartime necessity becomes mere "necessity."

All of this is to say: I have become increasingly convinced that the sum total of all the small gestures the Bush administration makes that signal a disregard for established procedure or finding wiggle room in Constitutional clauses come distressingly close to creeping authoritarianism. I am well aware that the notion that Congress runs the nation died the day John Adams signed the Sedition Act, but do we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater?

And now for the obligatory concilation. I am well aware we are at war, and even if I don't agree with Roger Scruton, Roger Kimball and Mark Steyn's alarmist and alarming essays in last month's New Criterion (short version: Islam terror fall of Rome; Bread and circus, decadent soft complacent. Liberals concilation, immigrants angry hatred xenophobia, Islam Islam Islam, demographic time bomb, our children will wear the chador, gays and Hollywood lead the way.), I acknowledge and agree that we have to be serious about confronting threats to our way of life.

But again, do we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater?

Much of what I hear from ardent hawks reeks to me of desparation, the cries of people who have looked to long into the abyss and gone mad. Sites like Little Green Footballs (no link from me) have as their stock in trade a shreiking denunciation of people who won't accept that sometimes hard times call for stern measures or whatever. Torture, spy, bomb, and nuke, if we must, and if you disagree you clearly hate our freedom.

But that's all crap. When the talk turns from "shall we, as a society, condone the waterboarding of prisoners as a policy" to "when is it appropriate to waterboard prisoners," from "shall we condone the dentention of American citizens without warrant" to "when is it appropriate to detain..., " from "should the government read our mail," to "when should the government be allowed to read our mail," we edge closer and closer to abandoning for expediency's sake the very principles we hope to export to countries we libervade. Any one of these sets off my alarm bells, but as long as any one of these occurs alone, I'm not going to man the barricades. But a whole bunch of similar stories all unfolding at once isn't a curiosity, it's a trend.

Hate our freedom? I love it! And unlike the torture-hawks, I'm not so afraid of a few splodeydopes that I think we need to abandon ship in orde to save it. I'm all for winning the War on Terrorism, whatever that means. But I'm dead against winning at all costs.

What brought all this on? Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has a long and rich discussion about what we don't know regarding what the President has done with the powers he says he now has, with long excerpts from the Gonzales hearing earlier this week, and it depressed me.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging on robots, food, beer, music, and fart jokes.