When rational arguments fail, you can always denounce the opposition as sick. (Bloggers suffer from an "addiction" to the Internet, of course.)

Might as well invoke "Natural" Law. Staring into a computer screen for hours on end is almost as unnatural as using your peepee for unauthorized entertainment.

Me, I think getting up when it's still dark and having to scrub frost off the glass windshield of a metal box so you can go and sit in an agitated state in the middle of a crowd of other metal boxes is profoundly unnatural!

But then, no one put non-nocturnal me in charge of the Natural Law.

If they did, then by the gods, I'd declare blogging one of its profoundest violations!

And I'd still do it, because I think it's part of human nature to be unnatural.

(Another reason it's natural to hate all humans!)

I've been in New Jersey all day, and now I return and see that science has officially confirmed that Bush's Global Warming has ushered in an ICE AGE:

The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age.

The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream.

The slow-down, which has long been predicted as a possible consequence of global warming, will give renewed urgency to intergovernmental talks in Montreal, Canada, this week on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

Does the evil axis of the Bushitler McHalliburton Rechimplicans leave no spin unturned?

I have to say, it's very clever of them to disguise global warming as an Ice Age. (Intelligent design indeed.)

Fortunately, they can't fool science!

Via Wired News...

Recently, the Family Research Council, a powerful conservative Christian organization, was invited by Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, to submit suggestions for new IVF rules.

What a thoughtful thing to do. Anything to further the national dialogue, eh?

The Christian group demanded that "the practice of creating more embryos than can be safely implanted and brought to birth, the practice of freezing spare embryos and the practice of 'selective reduction' or selective abortion of 'defective' fetuses or of fetuses in excess of those that can be safely delivered, should all be condemned."

Did they really demand? Or did they ask nicely?

Further: "All biotechnologies which aid in the treatment of infertility should be restricted to use by married couples."

Huh. Maybe they did demand. I hope they didn't use up all their wish juice, wishing for this stuff. Cause frankly, I don't think they've got a snowball's chance.

In effect, the Family Research Council was advocating something like a law that took effect in Italy last year.

There, all embryos created during fertility treatments must be implanted, not stored (even when there's a good chance one of them carries a fatal genetic disease); IVF is limited to heterosexual couples in "stable relationships;" and donor eggs and sperm are outlawed. As a result, success rates have declined, women have had to undergo more procedures because they cannot skip steps and use their own stored embryos, and many patients have gone to other countries.

An attempt to overturn the Italian law failed this year after the Catholic Church mounted a campaign to urge people to avoid the polls and the vote failed to garner enough turnout.

The bioethics council didn't go quite so far. In December of last year, it issued a report calling for an entirely new federal agency to regulate assisted reproduction.

Because we desperately need one. Because if you don't watch those science guys like hawks, they'll try and clone somebody. Because the world...needs...order...

The council's model seems to have been the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority of the United Kingdom, which strictly regulates the industry, tracks embryos and issues research licenses.

American IVF practitioners and researchers are almost unanimous in their opposition to such laws, but they don't seem too worried that discussions about creating them in the United States will amount to much.

You can read the whole thing here.

I haven't been keeping up with San Francisco Bay area news as I should, but my attention was drawn to an interesting multicultural war story in Oakland, in which local Black Muslims vandalized a store owned by immigrants from the Mideast for selling alcohol to American blacks:

About a dozen men wearing dark suits and bow ties did tens of thousands of dollars' worth of damage to San Pablo Market and Liquor on San Pablo Avenue and New York Market on Market Street after demanding the stores stop selling liquor to African Americans. The stores are owned by people of Middle Eastern descent.

The violence was caught on videotape at the San Pablo Market, and investigators are using that tape in an attempt to identify suspects.

At this point, police suspect Muslims associated with Your Black Muslim Bakery were involved, although no arrests have been made.

In a telephone interview Friday with the Oakland Tribune, a man who identified himself as Yusef Bey IV, a bakery official, said the first time he learned about the incident was on television news and in the newspaper. "I was surprised to hear about what happened," he said. "I have no idea who could have done this because there are a whole lot of Muslims around here."

Bey said Your Black Muslim Bakery is conducting its own investigation into the matter.

Minister Keith Muhammad, a mosque leader and representative of Farrakhan, released a statement Friday about Wednesday's violence.

He said that "after careful review of recent news footage of individuals involved in actions against liquor stores and merchants in the city of Oakland, we have concluded that these individuals are not, nor have they ever been, members of the Nation of Islam, under the leadership of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan or any affiliated mosques or study groups."

The grocers (apparently Yemenis) have vowed to defend themselves, and I don't blame them:

OAKLAND — The president of the Yemini American Grocery Association said Saturday that grocers have the right to defend themselves if their stores are invaded like two West Oakland markets were hit Wednesday night.

The association, which represents about 300 store owners in Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond, is not telling grocers to buy guns and shoot, said Mohamad Saleh Mohamad. "But if they have a permit for a gun, they can legally defend themselves."

"The storekeepers are very devastated," Mohamad said. "You would be too if 12 men came into your house or business ... did damage like they did."

"This was a criminal act. It had nothing to do with religion, In this country we have the right to do business. We are selling legal products. The whole community is angry," Mohamad said.

The latest news is that Bey -- leader of the "investigation" for the Black Muslim Bakery -- has himself been arrested as one of the perps!

OAKLAND — Yusef Bey IV, 19, the self-proclaimed heir to the Your Black Muslim Bakery franchise founded by his late father, Yusef Bey, surrendered to Oakland police Tuesday in connection with the vandalism of two West Oakland liquor stores a week ago.

Also arrested was Donald Eugene Cunningham, 73, a longtime associate of the elder Bey. Both were arrested on suspicion of vandalism, conspiracy, robbery and making terrorist threats. They were booked at the North County jail in Oakland, where they are being held in lieu of $200,000 bail.

The younger Bey is Yusef Bey's biological son. He refused to talk to investigators Tuesday. In an interview withthe Oakland Tribune, a sister paper to The Argus, on Friday, he said members of the bakery were not involved in the incidents.

An employee at the bakery Tuesday would not comment on the arrest.

Police are seeking at least four other men — believed to be affiliated with the Bey organization — who they suspect were involved in the vandalism at the two stores. The vandals were caught on a surveillance camera at the San Pablo Market and Liquors. Last Wednesday, about a dozen African-American men wearing suits, white shirts and bow ties entered San Pablo Market at 2363 San Pablo Ave. about 11:30 p.m. and smashed liquor bottles and refrigerator cases. They asked if the owners were Muslim and told them to stop selling alcohol to the black community. It is against Islamic law to drink alcohol.

The group left and went to New York Market at 2446 Market St., where, about 10 minutes later, they did the same thing. They also disarmed a shotgun from the clerk and took the weapon with them.

"This is crazy. This is America," Hernen [the store manager] said. "They got hate in their heart."

Yes, but will any brave prosecutor dare charge it as a "hate crime"?

I doubt it. That's because multicultural hatred is not hatred.

Sigh.

What's being left out of the media reports is that the founder of the Black Muslim Bakery (and father of the accused), the late Dr. Yusef Bey (no idea what the doctorate was awarded for) was a major powerbroker in Oakland for many years.

This summary of the life of Yusef Bey just drips with Multi Culti possibilities:

As we regain African consciousness, it is inevitable that our lifestyle is going to revert to traditional customs and values, that will of course be at variance with American social values. So what? Gays and lesbians are out of the closet, why should the Afrocentric lifestyle of men like Dr. Bey and the women and children who love him, remain in the closet?

In openly living his life, Dr. Bey went beyond the man he loved and honored, but who secretly lived a similar polygamous life, the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Two of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad's sons by Tynetta Muhammad, attended the celebration of Dr. Bey. Indeed, Dr. Bey had given Tynetta and her children refuge when Wallace (Warith) Muhammad refused to recognize his siblings not from the womb of his mother, Clara Muhammad.

So in our natural trend to transcend America, as more and more African Americans adopt Islamic, Yoruba, Kemitic, and Ethiopian religion and mores, we must anticipate the revolutionary effect upon African American culture, especially Christian culture But Dr. Bey revealed that family organization is not a joke, a whim, a game children play, but a task of great responsibility, requiring discipline, intelligence, strength, and spirituality.

One of Dr. Bey's sons noted, "Our father made us soldiers, even our sisters are soldiers, and we are going to continue to soldier!" About ten of the sons performed a Fruit of Islam military drill for the audience to great applause.

Many of his supporters say the charges are nonsense, and others say it makes no difference even if they are true. “He was a born leader in the sense of an African chief or a Muslim caliph,” says 62-year-old supporter Maleek Al Maleek “What is prohibited here is not prohibited in East India, where there are child marriages. I can show you chiefs in Africa who have 30 wives . . . . The ways of the high priests are not shared by the commoner.”

UPDATE: In my haste to obtain biographical data on Yusef Bey, I linked to a site that I in no way endorse or agree with, which attributes that last quote to a piece by Lee Rommey called "Dignity, Diligence, Scandal, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 30, 2003." I have been unable to find the original anywhere, so I cannot vouch for the quote's accuracy. I well remember Yusef Bey, though, and the information in that piece appears to be true, and I think it probably did appear in the LA Times.

The problem is that the guy who runs the site appears to be an unreliable promoter of pseudoscientific racist nonsense, so I am not sure that I can rely on him even to quote the LA Times accurately.

(My intention, of course, was not to quote him; only the LA Times.)

Ian Schwartz has been linked on Drudge ("FINGERS FLY ON CNN..." -- with a picture, no less), and his server seems unable to handle what is obviously a huge spike in traffic.

I can't open it, so this post will serve as congratulations to Ian (and a reminder to me to try the link later).

UPDATE: I finally saw the video, which is another example of a small group of people (there were a hundred or so demonstrators) achieving enormous political leverage they do not deserve. They know that few people agree with them, so they concentrate their resources on carefully selected targets -- in this case a media bus -- in the hope that their hapless marks will confuse intimidation with "democracy."

It often works.

When the Philadelphia Inquirer is good, it is very, very good. And because I find myself criticizing the paper so often, I think I have a responsibility to speak up when I have something good to say about it.

So it is with "Packing heat - and political punch" -- the title of Beth Gillin's review of Tammy Bruce's The New American Revolution:

Tammy Bruce calls herself "a new radical individual," which conjures up a masked anarchist with a baseball bat running through the streets shouting "Death to the state!"

But no.

She actually fits neatly into a long American political tradition, says the prolific author, garrulous talk show host, and noted maverick - although "traditional" seems a stretch when applied to a gun-toting, pro-choice, 43-year-old lesbian who is both a Ronald Reagan admirer and the former head of a California chapter of NOW.

Bruce explains.

"The independent rebel, who is passionate about personal freedom, represents the instinctual core of America," she says, speaking at machine-gun speed, firing epigrams like bullets.

Which brings us to the .38 snub-nosed Smith & Wesson she calls Snuffy.

"When I take Snuffy out of her drawer in my nightstand and we go to the shooting range," Bruce says, "it reminds me that I am responsible for myself. Owning a gun is at the heart of what it means to be an American. The only reason this country is free from government tyranny is that people like me are armed."

Indeed, the thought of this self-described Irish Italian troublemaker packing heat should make criminals bent on evil-doing quake in their boots.

While I try not to brag much, I'm proud that I've linked Tammy Bruce's site from the very beginning of this blog, because I've always admired her, and I'm delighted to see that she's done as brilliant a job as a blogger as she has as an author and activist. I think it's a testament to her combination of irrefutable logic and irresistible charm that the Inquirer's treatment of her is so wonderfully fair.

Yes there's more, and it's almost all very refreshing stuff.

"I spent years compromising, and at times saying things I didn't totally agree with, in order to belong to the left," Bruce says, and she didn't become a true individual until she learned to reject group-think. "It was part of my growing up."

Tammy Bruce's answer to the charge that America is locked in a war between competing camps? Despite all the media hoopla, most Americans abhor idiotarianism:

But how can she presume to describe most Americans when everyone knows the country is polarized, split, and shouting insults across a red-blue divide?

"The mainstream media highlights the divide and reports on the extremes," Bruce replies, whereas "most Americans are as opposed to the liberal rantings of Howard Dean and George Soros as they are to the conservative ravings of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell."

While in Manhattan, Bruce helped launch Open Source Media at www.osm.org, a consortium of 70 diverse blogs on topics from politics and true crime to designer shoes and holistic pet care. She's on OSM's advisory board and blogs at http://tammybruce.com.

Despite the radicalism inherent in such talk of a libertarian middle, the Inquirer's conclusion is shockingly favorable to Tammy Bruce:

"The power no longer resides with the elites. The power belongs to whoever wants to take it," says Tammy Bruce with utmost confidence, sounding for all the world like a Sixties lefty at the barricades and signifying that in the fractured and shifting terrain of American political culture, labels have lost all meaning.

At this rate, the Inquirer itself will defy all attempts to label it.

I couldn't be more pleased.

As the last post reminded me, a number of people on the left (presumably including the Green Party) believe that there is no difference between Israelis defending themselves and the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians by Palestinian terrorists. And to some of these people, "peace activism" means opposing Israeli self defense while supporting Palestinian terrorism. While murderous leftists have long intrigued me (and I've known some), I think there's an antisocial aspect to this -- as several posts by Dr. Helen (aka the InstaWife) have reminded me (to the point where I'm feeling a bout of morbid nostalgia coming on).

The contradiction posed by such a species as "violent peace activists" is so self-apparent that most peace activists are forced to sublimate their natural hostility lest they look hypocritical -- or even ridiculous. Support for murderous radicalism therefore must be couched in terms of support for peace, opposition to war, advocacy of the downtrodden, belief in a better world based on "social justice," and above all an abiding belief that the violent people being championed are victims. (Usually, they are considered "victims" of the the activists' own country or close allies.)

Dr. Helen's touches on what I think is a similar mechanism in her post about vegetarianism:

I had a tremendous amount of free-floating hostility within me as well as downright aggression--I thought being a pacifist (which included being a vegetarian) could control my inner feelings of rage. But it only sublimated those feelings for a while. I sat quietly while peers at school made fun of me. But I learned the truth about what worked when one of my siblings brought down a boy who taunted me about my wild kinky hair on the school bus with threats of violence. My pacifism did not work.

I now look skeptically at people who preach vegetarianism to others as a type of religion--they are often the same ones who tout peace and brotherhood while trying to mask their feelings of aggression. My husband once said that he did not worry about violence from peace activists but frankly, I would rather hang out with a crowd of hard core gun addicts. I find them more capable of understanding and controlling their own aggression. People who preach peace in the face of appalling violence deny their aggression and target it at others who are not deserving of it or who are trying to protect them. I cannot justify that.

Frankly, it terrifies me that there exist people whom I have never threatened in any way who would use force to disarm me and leave me unable to defend myself against violent criminals. And make no mistake about it; that's precisely what gun control is all about. I believe that sublimated rage is a major factor, as is pure hatred of people who would defend themselves. Doubtless they would claim that I am hateful for owning a gun and that my being armed to defend myself is also a form of sublimated rage. Even if we grant them this argument, the fact is that I am not bothering anyone. I am not an aggressor in any way; I am only in a state of preparedness to defend myself. I am not making anyone do anything, nor am I asking anyone to do anything except leave me alone. It's plain to me that those who will not leave me alone, who would either invade my house as criminals, or cause the government to invade it to take away my guns, these are the aggressors. If anything, I am the true pacifist. Yet the people who'd use violence to disarm me and leave me without my defenses are the ones claiming to be pacifists. Such a contradiction is what results when deeply antisocial feelings are allowed to masquerade as precisely the opposite of what they are.

Dr. Helen also touches on this mindset in her discussion of leftist celebrities who rally behind violent criminals:

I have very strong feelings about celebrities who rally to get murderers sentences reduced or released. The legal system should deal with this, not a group of actors. It just makes me think of the Norman Mailer fiasco.

No such nonsense for Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn:

Dorhn incited the assembled radicals to join the war against "Amerikkka" and create chaos and destruction in the "belly of the beast." Her voice rising to a fevered pitch, Dohrn raised three fingers in a "fork salute" to mass murderer Charles Manson, whom she proposed as a symbol to her troops. Referring to the helpless victims of the Manson Family as the "Tate Eight" (the pregnant actress Sharon Tate had been stabbed in her womb with a fork), Dohrn shouted: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!"

Why? Because nominating murderers for the Nobel Prize is cool, that's why!

All this leaves me with only one question to ask.

What the hell is wrong with nominating Charles Manson for the Nobel Prize?

Charlie never killed anyone, plus he loves the earth. Read the Truth.

We need to support the earth and get past this violence thing, folks!

Or am I just being nostalgic?

MORE: On the serious side, Ben Johnson offers some very powerful arguments against clemency for Tookie Williams.

UPDATE (12/02/05): Baldilocks calls the celebrities on their B.S. by applying something I love -- basic logic:

If Misters Foxx and Dogg really believe everything that Mr. Williams says about his case, let them be brave enough to ask Arnold to pardon the “innocent man.”

But the entertainers won’t do that because they know just how far they can go with this anti-death penalty advocacy or with any possible racial solidarity that they might claim to have with with Mr. Williams.

Why else are they speaking out for someone as heinous as Mr. Williams? Because that's how most of our "betters" do things: without any regard to the consequences of their actions. Such gestures and posturing look good to the undiscerning.

If Tookie is innocent, his sentence shouldn't be commuted to life imprisonment; he should be FREED. He may or may not have reformed his life, but even if he has, that's still not innocence.

They can't have it both ways.

UPDATE (12/03/05): Hube, at La Shawn Barber's blog has a real shocker about Oakland, California students being "educated" about Tookie by scolding activists claiming Tookie was innocent because the jury was "all white." (A claim Joanne Jacobs debunks as a lie.)

Joining the likes of such groups as Aztlan.net, the Green Party is calling for a boycott of Israel:

1. The Green Party of the United States (GPUS) publicly calls for divestment from and boycott of the State of Israel until such time as the full individual and collective rights of the Palestinian people are realized.

To maximize the effect of the Green Party's support for divestment and boycott of Israel:

2. The party calls on all civil society institutions and organizations around the world to implement a comprehensive divestment and boycott program. Further, the party calls on all governments to support this program and to implement state level boycotts.

3. The party urges the Campus Greens network to work in cooperation with other campus organizations to achieve institutional participation in this effort.

4. The GPUS National Committee directs the Green Peace Action Committee (GPAX) to encourage the larger anti-war movement to promote the divestment/boycott effort.

5. The GPUS National Committee directs the International Committee to work with our sister Green parties around the world in implementing an international boycott.

The anti-Israel movement appears to have been spearheaded by the Wisconsin Green Party and by Madison activists affiliated with this University of Wisconsin site, which also champions Rachel Corrie and is organizing against Caterpillar (subject of an earlier post, and an example of bad art here.)

What is it that keeps the activists in Madison stoked with such endless moral fervor, anyway? I lived in Berkeley for years, and while Madison was always one of our chief competitors, I never quite understood the dynamics of the latter.

Why Madison?

Perhaps I should relax. According to Forbes Magazine, Madison's openness and tolerance for all things (including radical ideas) may have sewn the seeds of its own destruction -- by capitalist forces!

This hotbed of radicalism has grown into a seedbed of biocapitalism, propelling the region to the number one slot on our list of Best Places for Business and Careers. Scientists are developing artificial skin (at a company called Stratatech), vitamin D therapies for patients with chronic kidney disease (Bone Care International) and proteins that inhibit cancer-cell development (Quintessence Biosciences). Such biotech ventures cluster around the university and nearby Milwaukee, home of the Medical College of Wisconsin and a unit of GE Healthcare (2003 revenues: $10 billion), which acquired Lunar, a Madison maker of bone densitometers and ultrasound equipment, in 2000. Some 120 technology companies employing 8,000 people have sprung up in Madison during the past decade. Average annual salary: $60,000.

All things considered, I still think this Green Party is funnier.

This news report about the sicko accused of burying a puppy alive is horrifying:

ST. CLOUD, Fla. -- An anonymous tip led animal control officers to a shocking case of animal cruelty. A puppy was found buried alive in a yard near New York Avenue and 192 in St. Cloud. Osceola County Animal Control said they had never seen anything like this.

The dog's owner was arrested and before he was taken to jail said he buried the dog alive in a hole because he kept digging.

Animal Control officer Crissy Simmons had tears in her eyes when she found the 5-month-old puppy buried at his owner's home on New York Avenue in St. Cloud.

Unfortunately, the puppy appears to be a pit bull.

Sigh.

And, of course, no one would blame it for the conduct of its abusive master. Nor would they blame pit bulls and demand that they be banned.

Not this time!

But if that same tortured puppy had reached maturity and mauled a child as a result of the demented state which often results from such abuse, the outcry would have been very different.

Scum like the guy who buried his dog should be punished to the extent the law allows. Unfortunately, most of them aren't caught. While I can't help wishing that the guy's dog had survived to maturity and mauled his owner to death, the problem with that is that in the media story which would result, the thug would be the victim, and his dog the villain.

And all "pit bulls" -- like my dog Coco -- would be blamed as "the problem."

Which means that our communitarian society might pass laws making me into a criminal.

Because of someone else's crime!

Get comfortable. This is going to be a long one.

All of the variations in typeface were added after the fact by yours truly. Likewise, all of the links.

C.S. Lewis on Moral Education

by Gilbert Meilaender

When we think about C.S. Lewis’ understanding of morality, we have to distinguish three elements: (1) what moral truths we know, (2) how we know them, and (3) how we become able to know them.

What do we know when we know moral truth? Most fundamentally, we know the maxims of what Lewis—in his book on education, The Abolition of Man—calls the Tao. These “primeval moral platitudes” (as Screwtape, in Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, once terms them) constitute the human moral inheritance. We would not be wrong to call them the basic principles of natural law: the requirements of both general and special beneficence; duties both to parents/ancestors and to children/posterity; and requirements of justice, truthfulness, mercy and magnanimity. These are the starting points for all moral reasoning, deliberation and argument; they are to morality what axioms are to mathematics. Begin from them and we may get somewhere in thinking about what we ought to do. Try to stand outside the Tao on some kind of morally neutral or empty ground, and we will find it impossible to generate any moral reasoning at all.

I guess my first problem with the Tao according to Lewis is that it depends on an intentionally simplified view of human morality. When you look for ubiquitous moral constants you automatically weed out all the fascinating statistical outliers that make cultural anthropology so captivating.

By practicing such cavalier reductionism, a map of the human Tao is created that seems to me to be too compact and tidy, even if we opt for the deluxe 3D multi-axial projection. We might display it as a vaguely liver shaped mass (all those lobes, you know), with smoothly extending, yet still decorously restrained pseudopodia. Add back all the excised behaviors and it more closely resembles a sea urchin, the central mass of squishy consensus customs surrounded by unpredictably bizarre extreme behaviors. I just don't think it's fair to wish away the spines.

And yet, Lewis himself would find my objections irrelevant. In his own words...

The following illustrations of the Natural Law are collected from such sources as come readily to the hand of one who is not a professional historian. The list makes no pretence of completeness...But (1) I am not trying to prove its validity by the argument from common consent. Its validity cannot be deduced. For those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal consent could not prove it. (2) The idea of collecting independent testimonies presupposes that 'civilizations' have arisen in the world independently of one another...It is by no means certain that there has ever (in the sense required) been more than one civilization in all history...

Fair enough. Even though he's doing a nose count of different traditions, locating and tagging the moral commonalities, such samplings are ultimately a mere illustrative convenience, and not binding.

Back to Meilaender...

Lewis provides an illustration of the Tao in That Hideous Strength, the third and last volume in his space fantasy series. He himself subtitled the book “A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups,” and in the short preface he wrote for the book, he says: “This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.” We can follow his hint and illustrate the Tao by remembering the scene in That Hideous Strength in which the sinister Frost begins to give young professor Mark Studdock a systematic training in what Frost calls “objectivity.” This is a training designed to kill in Mark all natural human preferences.

Mark is placed into a room that is ill-proportioned; for example, the point of the arch above the door is not in the center. On the wall is a portrait of a young woman with her mouth open, and with her mouth full of hair. There is a picture of the Last Supper, distinguished especially by beetles under the table. There is a representation of a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being eaten by another mantis, and another of a man with corkscrews instead of arms. Mark himself is asked to perform various obscenities, culminating in the command to trample a crucifix.

Gradually, however, Mark finds that the room is having an effect on him, which Frost had scarcely predicted or desired. “There rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight.” This was for Mark all interwoven with images of his wife Jane, fried eggs, soap, sunlight and birds singing. Mark may not have been thinking in moral terms, but at least, as the story puts it, he was “having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal .”

He had never known before what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one’s head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him—something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to.

He is experiencing the Tao, which is neither his creation nor anyone else’s. He does not construct these moral truths; on the contrary, they claim him. The world around us is not neutral ground; it is from the start shot through with moral value.
We can, of course, criticize one or another of these moral truths, or, at least, particular formulations of them. But we will inevitably call on some other principle of the Tao when we do so. Thus, for example, we may think Aristotle’s magnanimous man insufficiently merciful and too concerned about his own nobility, using thereby one principle of the Tao (mercy) to refine another. In pursuit of our duties to posterity we may be willing to sacrifice the weak and vulnerable on the altar of medical research, but then we will have to ask whether we have transgressed the requirement of justice—every bit as much an element of the Tao as our duty to posterity. But to step—or try to step—outside the Tao entirely is to lose the very ground of moral reason itself.Thus the principles of the Tao do not solve moral problems for us; on the contrary, they create, frame and shape those problems. They teach us to think in full and rich ways about them, as we recognize the various claims the Tao makes upon us.

Hmmm. The moral inheritance of mankind is not susceptible to rational analysis. It merely is. Rather than opening a discussion on morality, Meilaender seems more intent on closing and locking it.

The Need for Moral Education

If this is what we know, how do we know it? If, as I put it a moment ago, the world around us is shot through with moral value, then to recognize a moral duty—as something other than our own choice or decision—is to see a truth. Lewis thinks we just “see” those primeval moral platitudes of the Tao. They cannot be proven, for it is only by them that we can prove or defend any other moral conclusions we reach. It is, as Lewis puts it at the end of The Abolition of Man, “no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. . . . To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” We might say, as Lewis says for instance in Miracles, that these first principles of moral reasoning are “self-evident.” One can argue from but not to the maxims of the Tao.
This is, however, one place where we need to gloss Lewis’ discussion just a bit, for he is not entirely consistent in his writing. If we look at what I take to be Lewis’ most mature expression of his view, in The Abolition of Man, we will immediately see—for reasons to which I will come in just a moment—that “self-evident” cannot mean “obvious.” It cannot mean that any rational person, giving the matter some thought, will see that the maxims of the Tao are the moral deliverances of reason itself. Yet, consider a passage such as the following from Mere Christianity:

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one.

This is a different formulation, and a less satisfactory one, than that of Abolition of Man. The precepts of the Tao constitute a kind of natural law not because everyone knows them without being taught, but because they express fundamental truths—which we may or may not learn—about human nature. Those of us who do learn them will, to be sure, just “see” them. There will be no process of reasoning by which they are proven, but Lewis’ more developed view offers us no reason to assume that we all will or can easily discern these first principles of natural law.

Which no doubt explains creatures like myself. Now, where did my trousers get to?

Why not? Because—although Lewis does not put it this way in Abolition of Man, a decidedly non-theological piece of writing—human reason and desire are disordered by sin. What Iris Murdoch once called the “fat relentless ego” constantly blinds us, so that the mere fact of opening our eyes does not guarantee that we will see truly. Indeed, if Lewis really held that the precepts of the Tao are “obvious,” the central theme of Abolition of Man could make little sense; for it is a book about our need for moral education.

Which brings us to the third element in Lewis’ understanding of morality. If we ask, what moral truths do we know? the answer is: the maxims of the Tao. If we ask, how do we know them? the answer is: we just “see” them as the first principles of all moral reasoning. And, now, if we ask, how do we become able to “just see” these maxims the answer is: only as our character is well formed by moral education. Without such education we will never come to know the human moral inheritance.

Who then were the first educators? How did they discover the truth?

We may be very bright and very rational, but we will be what Lewis calls “trousered apes.” Lacking proper moral education, our freedom to make moral choices will be a freedom to be inhuman in any number of ways. The paradox of moral education is that all genuine human freedom—a freedom that does not turn out to be destructive—requires that we be disciplined and shaped by the principles of the Tao. Our appetites and desires may readily tempt us to set aside what moral reason requires. Hence, from childhood our emotions must be trained and habituated, so that we learn to love the good (not just what seems good for us). And only as our character is thus shaped do we become men and women who are able to “see” the truths of moral reason.

Again, I'm puzzled. From where do the shapers derive their correct truths? How can our teachers discern good from evil on our behalf?

Moral insight, therefore, is not a matter for reason alone; it requires trained emotions. It requires moral habits of behavior inculcated even before we reach an age of reason. “The head rules the belly through the chest,” as Lewis puts it. Reason disciplines appetite only with the aid of trained emotions. Seeing this, we will understand that moral education does more than simply enable us to “see” what virtue requires. It also enables us, at least to some extent, to be virtuous. For the very training of the emotions that makes insight possible has also produced in us traits of character that will incline us to love the good and do it.

To call this a circular argument is to understate with extreme prejudice.

Moral education, then, can never be a private matter, and Lewis follows Aristotle in holding that “only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics.” Hence, the process of moral education, if it is to succeed, requires support from the larger society. Ethics is, in that sense, a branch of politics.

This argument is spherical. In particular, it reminds me of a Magdeburg sphere. Perhaps you've seen one. It consists of two metal hemispheres joined together to form a full sphere. As air is pumped out, the two parts are pushed together by atmospheric pressure. Hermetically sealed, the sphere contains absolutely nothing, yet that nothing ensures that the sphere cannot be opened, not even by two teams of horses pulling in opposite directions. The sphere becomes a sealed vacuous hollow, unbreachable.

Thus, for instance, to take an example that Lewis could not precisely have anticipated, consider the problem of protecting children from internet pornography (which the U.S. Congress attempted in what was known as the “Child Online Protection Act,” but which the Supreme Court ruled, in Ashcroft v. ACLU, was in probable violation of the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees). True as it may be that this protection should be the primary responsibility of parents, they face daunting obstacles and almost inevitable failure without a supportive moral ecology in the surrounding society. Moral education, if it is to be serious, requires commitment to moral principles that go well beyond the language of freedom—principles that are more than choice and consent alone.

Moral education should go well beyond choice and consent. I like it. It's catchy.

We should not think of this moral education as indoctrination, but as initiation.

Why not?

It is initiation into the human moral inheritance: “men transmitting manhood to men.” We initiate rather than indoctrinate precisely because it is not we but the Tao that binds those whom we teach. We have not decided what morality requires; we have discovered it. We transmit not our own views or desires but moral truth—by which we consider ourselves also to be bound.

It's kind of like watching a car crash, isn't it?

Let's recap. First, there is an objective morality in the universe. But it's really hard to figure out. You can't use logic or reason. Induction can't get the job done. The best thing you can do is just "see" it. Even that usually doesn't work. A firm guiding inflence is called for. Training, and lots of it. From an early age. Without it you're not even qualified to discuss these matters. Here, have a banana. Don't get any on your trousers.

So far, so good. But now it gets tricky. Who should train you? Wise elders. Tradition. Wholesome tradition, wholesomely imparted.

Call it initiation, not indoctrination. Because why? Because your teachers went through what you're going through, back in the day. Tradition has its own reasons, that reason knows nothing of. Everything is a big mystery.

Hence, moral education is not an exercise of power over future generations. To see what happens when it becomes an exercise of power by some over others, when we attempt to stand outside the Tao, we can look briefly at two ways in which Lewis’ discussion of morality in The Abolition of Man takes shape in That Hideous Strength, his “‘tall story’ of devilry.”

Man, Nature and Biotechnology

The driving force behind the plot in That Hideous Strength is the plan of the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments—whose acronym is NICE—to take the last step in the control and shaping of nature. (It is rather a nice irony that in today the National Health Service has established a National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence—whose acronym is also NICE—to formulate guidelines about the use of quality of life assessments in the clinical care of patients.) Having gradually conquered the world of nature external to human beings, the goal of NICE is now to view human beings also as natural objects—in particular, to take control of birth, breeding and death. The project that Lewis fancifully imagined in his “fairy-tale for grown-ups” has made considerable progress in the decades since he wrote. Let me illustrate.

Consider the following sentences from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea:

He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water. He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there.... I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish.... He urinated outside the shack and then went up the road to wake the boy. He was shivering with the morning cold.... Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him?... That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly.... The boy did not go down. He had been there before and one of the fishermen was looking after the skiff for him.

Hemingway’s prose is, of course, generally regarded as clear and straightforward. And every sentence in the passage above is simple and transparent. But taken as a whole, the passage makes almost no sense at all. There’s a reason for that: The sentences in the passage are drawn from pages 29, 104-5, 22, 74, 48, and 123—in that order.

But consider now the image of the human being in the following frequently quoted passage from Thomas Eisner, a biologist from Cornell University:

As a consequence of recent advances in genetic engineering, [a biological species] must be viewed as . . . a depository of genes that are potentially transferable. A species is not merely a hard-bound volume of the library of nature. It is also a loose-leaf book, whose individual pages, the genes, might be available for selective transfer and modification of other species.

I have tried to provide a humble illustration of this by splicing together sentences from different pages of just one book, producing thereby something unintelligible. But I might also have spliced in sentences from Anna Karenina and A Christmas Carol—producing thereby an artifact we could not name.

That's really nice. Artistic even. But if he'd put in just a little more effort, he could have selected lines that formed a coherent narrative of his own. That would conform more closely to the activities he's denigrating.

This train of thought was first suggested to me by one of the findings of the Human Genome Project, a finding that got quite a bit of attention in news articles announcing (in February, 2001) the completion of that project by two groups of researchers. We were told that the number of genes in the human genome had turned out to be surprisingly small—that human beings have, at most, perhaps twice as many genes as the humble roundworm (downsized even more with new findings in 2004, so that human beings and roundworms have about the same number of genes)—and that the degree of sequence divergence between human and chimpanzee genomes is quite small. Considering the complexity of human beings in relation to roundworms and even chimpanzees, it seemed surprising that, relatively speaking, much less complex organisms should not have far fewer genes than human beings.

Why, one might ask, should that seem surprising? It will be surprising if you assume that the complexity of a higher being is somehow built up and explained in terms of “lower” component parts (which serve as “resources”). If we explain the higher in terms of the lower, it makes a certain sense to suppose that a relatively complex being would need lots of component parts—at least by comparison with a less complex being. And, of course, one might argue that the Human Genome Project is the ultimate product of such an extreme reductionist vision of biology.
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis powerfully depicts the movement by which things came to be understood as simply parts of nature, objects that have no inherent purpose or telos—which objects can then become resources available for human use. Hence, the long, slow process of what we call conquering nature could more accurately be said to be reducing things to “mere nature” in that sense. “We do not,” Lewis writes,

look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety.... Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyze her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.

In that final step of this reductive process, the human being becomes an artifact, to be shaped and reshaped. One way to describe this is to say that we take control of our own destiny. But the other way to describe it is as the villainous Lord Feverstone puts it in That Hideous Strength: “Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest . . . .” That is what happens, Lewis thinks, when we step outside the Tao and regard even morality as a matter for our own choice and free creation.

I would hope that some of the links I've chosen demonstrate just how badly we can treat each other, with no recourse to science at all.

Indeed, we've been treating each other quite badly for several millenia now, with nary a test tube in sight. This is not to say that science can't be perverted and used for bad ends. But since we've already learned how to torture each other to death, wholesale and retail, it's not really all that enabling is it? A few Pathan women with nail clippers can do amazing things. The Abolition of Manhood?

Simple nomadic horse barbarians were technically capable of raising pyramids of severed heads, over and over again. And while they did it, they were observing the moral niceties of their own sacred traditions, imparted, no doubt, at their daddy's knees.

Where do we go when Taos collide?

From this angle, developments in biotechnology are likely to affect most our attitudes toward birth and breeding. But there remains still the fact of death, and once we take free responsibility for shaping our destiny, we can hardly be content to accept without challenge even that ultimate limit. When Mark Studdock is asked to trample on a crucifix as the final stage in his training in “objectivity,” he is—even though he is not a Christian—reluctant to obey. For it seems to him that the cross is a picture of what the Crooked does to the Straight when they meet and collide. Mark has chosen the side of what he calls simply the Normal . He has, that is, begun to take his stand within the Tao. But then he finds himself wondering, for the first time, about the possibility that the side he has chosen might turn out to be, in a sense, the “losing” side. “Why not,” he asks himself, “go down with the ship?”

For those who stand within the Tao, how we live counts for more than how long.

I bet you could see it coming.

There are things we might do to survive—or to help our species survive or advance or, even, just suffer less—which it would nonetheless be wrong or dishonorable to do.

Duh. Yet another reason to abolish professional bioethicists would be their propensity for stating the obvious while imagining that they're somehow enlightening us. They sweat, and strain, and eventually they pass a stony, gnarled fewmet which we're supposed to oooh and ahhh over. Look, he made some wisdom for us.

Indeed, we do not have to look very far around in our own world—no farther, for instance, than the controversies about embryonic stem cell research—to see how strongly we are tempted to regard as overriding the claims of posterity for a better and longer life. “We want,” Lewis’ Screwtape writes, “a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the Future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.”

Here comes my favorite line in the whole address.

Better to remember, as Roonwit the Centaur writes to King Tirian in The Last Battle—the seventh and final volume in Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia—that all worlds come to an end, and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy.

Nor should we neglect the instructive Doom that Came to Sarnath. Go, go and ask the Numenoreans. Then go tell it on the mountain.

This is at least something of what Lewis still has to teach us about the education we need to make and keep us human. In the modern world it is the task of moral education to set limits to what we will do in search of the rainbow’s end—to set limits, lest that desire should lead to the abolition of man. “For the wise men of old,” Lewis writes, “the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.” But when freedom becomes not initiation into our moral inheritance but the freedom to make and remake ourselves, the power of some men over others, it is imperative that we remind ourselves that moral education is not a matter of technique but, rather, of example, habituation and initiation. And, as Lewis says, quoting Plato, those who have been so educated from their earliest years, when they reach an age of reason, will hold out their hands in welcome of the good, recognizing the affinity they themselves bear to it.

As Butch and Sundance might have asked, who is this guy?

Gilbert Meilaender, the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Professor of Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University and a fellow of the Hastings Center , is a member of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and has also taught at the University of Virginia and at Oberlin College . He has served on the board of directors of the Society of Christian Ethics, as an associate editor of Religious Studies Review, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Religious Ethics, where he currently is an associate editor. Dr. Meilaender has published numerous articles and books, including Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics; Faith and Faithfulness: Basic Themes in Christian Ethics; and Body, Soul and Bioethics.

The above is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on September 12, 2005, at a Center for Constructive Alternatives seminar on the topic, “C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Inklings.” Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu. The opinions expressed in Imprimis are not necessarily the views of Hillsdale College.

In another story that wants to be an editorial, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Marcia Gelbart is having trouble understanding why Mayor Street got booed at a U2 concert last summer, and contrasts Street's "velcro" with Ronald Reagan's "teflon":

During a U2 concert here last month, lead singer Bono gave a shout-out to Mayor Street, thanking him for allowing the city to host Live 8 in July. The crowd booed.

"Am I missing something?" Bono asked.

Perhaps it's the mayor who's missing something: credit for the way the city has changed over the last six years.

Though the federal corruption probe of City Hall has drawn headlines, as has the city's growing homicide rate, Philadelphia has progressed under Street's tenure.

Since his 1999 election, Philadelphia's housing market has soared, while population loss has slowed to a trickle. Public school funding has gone up, as have student test scores. Two new sports stadiums have debuted. Two skyscrapers are on the way.

Last month's National Geographic Traveler magazine crowned Philadelphia "America's Next Great City."

And yet the public seems to make little connection between these strides and the man who occupies Philadelphia's top political office.

If Ronald Reagan was the Teflon president, Street seems to be the reverse, the Velcro mayor. "All the bad stuff sticks," said Phil Goldsmith, Street's former managing director, "and the good stuff doesn't."

In a recent interview, Street dismissed his critics, saying they "don't read."

On the inside pages, today's article mentions the pay-to-play scandal:

Equally as significant, the pay-to-play probe tied Street to an unappetizing crew of defendants. Street's former city treasurer is in jail. A Muslim cleric who is a longtime supporter of the mayor's is appealing a seven-year sentence. Nine other people have been convicted.

And although the administration has supported stronger ethics rules, Street hasn't used his bully pulpit to speak out forcefully and repeatedly against corruption in City Hall, say political observers.

"He's a mover and shaker for the people we don't want running this city," said West Philadelphia resident Kevin Williams, 43, a data-entry manager for a unit of Merck & Co.

As a political insider with the ear of the Mayor and officials throughout the Street administration, including City Auditor Corey Kemp, White is accused by the FBI of directing the distribution of these lucrative bond deals to various banks and lenders, notably Commerce Bank. In exchange for political contributions to his PACs, White provided inside information on other contractor’s competitive bids as well as, according to the FBI, directly ordering various members of the Street administration to deliver non-competitive contracts to those lenders and contractors that “played ball” with White and Kemp. Other financial rewards given to buy White’s influence include extraordinarily generous personal loans to among others Mayor Street, White himself, Kemp and White’s girlfriend, Renee Knight. Lavish meals, junkets to the Super Bowl, and lucrative “consulting” contracts were among the rewards White is accused of receiving in exchange for city contracts. White is also accused of landing exclusive airport food concessions, service contracts and government printing contracts for his wife, members of his family and Knight.

Lengthy detailed phone tap transcripts from the FBI investigation show White calling among others, Mayor Street, Street personal aide George Burrell, Airport Director Charles Isdell, and Sheriff John Green to remind them of recent political fundraisers and instruct them about who should be hired or contracted for various government deals.

According to the FBI, the number of ways which White manipulated and corrupted the way city of Philadelphia granted contracts are truly Byzantine. See the index of media articles to find more details on the various aspects of the ongoing corruption trials, as well as to read excerpts of the FBI phone taps that are both shocking and at times fairly salacious. White died of fast-moving pancreatic cancer before he himself could be put on trial, but Kemp, Knight and various others are currently on trial as result of the ongoing FBI investigation.

Ron White is dead, and people in the FBI probe are on trial currently. Why can't we just leave it the way it is now that the "bad guys" got busted?

Because Ron White and the accompanying "hoopla" is just one fish in a big pond. The events that led up to the current probe did not occur in a vacuum but instead in a pervasive political climate where both the Mayor’s office and city council are under constant pressure to deliver financial rewards to their largest campaign contributors instead of serving their constituents full-time every day. The Ron White FBI probe is symptomatic of a larger problem with pay-to-play. According to hallwatch.org, "Last year $2 billion of the City's $3.4 billion budget went to no-competition contracts--about 2 out of every 3 dollars."

Not only is the name of Ron White left out of today's puff piece Inquirer article, but the tone would have people forget that the whole idea of pay to play was to keep Street and his buddies in office. The following comes not from a partisan blog or web site, but from an FBI press release:

The indictment rests in part on conversations monitored by the government pursuant to judicial authorization for approximately nine months during 2003. During that time, according to the indictment, White and Kemp openly discussed their criminal scheme, in which Kemp permitted White to take over Kemp’s official decision-making in exchange for benefits from White and others. For example, on February 12, 2003, while discussing the selection of financial services firms favored by White, White stated, “well, we moving s---, ain't we Corey? . . . there ain’t nobody in it but me and you now.” Kemp replied, “That’s it, everybody else out the picture, huh?”

During 2003, White occasionally promised Kemp that, if Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street, whom White supported and who employed Kemp, were reelected in November 2003, White would continue to benefit Kemp and Kemp would become financially set. For example, on August 25, 2003, White stated to Kemp, “the key for us right now, man, is to concentrate on getting John elected, so it gives us four more years to do our thing. If we get four more years, Corey, we should be able to set up, you know, I mean and for you we maybe only talking about only two, you know what I mean?” Kemp said, “that’s good, that’s good, that’s cool.”

The indictment states further that in permitting White to direct his official actions, Kemp knew his actions not only benefitted White and White’s interests but also the political candidates White supported, including the Mayor. White and Kemp agreed that when White demanded political contributions from financial services firms to the Mayor’s campaign, the firms had to make them or face the loss of the ability to obtain City business. On August 26, 2003, discussing that matter, White said to Kemp, “either you down or you ain’t with it.” Kemp replied, “right, cause if they don’t, if they ain’t with us they ain’t gonna get nothing.” White said, “that’s right.” Kemp said, “you know, you just hate to say it but that’s the way it is, man, I mean, this is . . . election time, this is time to either get down or lay down, man, I mean, come on, to me, personally it’s not even a hard decision.”

And I'd be willing to bet that the nameless little people in the booing crowd had read about it too.

Of course, these days it's gotten more and more difficult to read about it much less find the details -- what with all the disappearing links. (Occasionally, however a cached piece like this will still turn up. . . But the days in the life of a Google cache are numbered, and sooner or later the critics Street says "don't read" won't be able to.)

I don't want to bore my readers, but here's just one example of a Street tidbit once available on on line at Philly.com, but which can now be found only at blogs like this:

A HIGH-RANKING Commerce Bank official told his boss in 2002 that Mayor Street had approached him after a City Hall meeting and asked about refinancing the mayor's home mortgage.

The mayor's personal-loan discussions with the Commerce aide - while the bank was winning millions of dollars in city business - are disclosed in a company memo, one of more than 1,000 bugging transcripts and documents released yesterday in the sweeping federal city corruption probe.

The discussion with Street, who ultimately got two loans from Commerce in 2003, was just one of several examples of public deals and personal loans overlapping.

(Even critics who "don't read" but still have a memory cache. . .)

MORE: While the "Duke" Cunningham scandal also involves a form of "pay-to-play," it can at least be argued that there seems to be a higher standard at work in Washington. (Occasionally.)

AND MORE: At the risk of being a bore, another example (in another disappeared news story saved here) shows how deep the corruption runs in this city:

In spite of contract language saying that airport-concession opportunities should be spread "to as many different subtenants as possible," the city allowed the same politically juiced bar-owner, Eric J. Blatstein, a $36,000 contributor to Street, to control eight bars in airport terminals. Blatstein's partners in the bars included White's physician-wife, Aruby Odom-White, the wife and daughters of former state Sen. Frank Salvatore, the wife of late South Philadelphia political potentate Henry J. "Buddy" Cianfrani, and a woman identified by federal authorities as Ron White's paramour, Janice Renee Knight. Isdell has refused to answer questions about the situation.

Even airport security is alleged to have been corrupted by the scandal:

Robinson contends that she was denied promotion, transferred to a meaningless job, and shunned by her fellow workers and supervisors because she raised questions about the grate at Blatstein's property - a restaurant known as Cibo in the new international terminal.

Robinson says the FBI told her that her job status was undermined by Blatstein and White, who were picked up on wiretaps discussing the situation.

Two agents who visited her in January, she said, told her of a phone conversation in which Blatstein allegedly called White and complained about her.

White replied, "Don't worry about it. I'll take care of it," the suit alleges.

Robinson said she believed the conversations were picked up on wiretaps that were part of the FBI's ongoing investigation into the awarding of contracts at the airport.

The FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office have declined to comment about ongoing investigations. White, a top fund-raiser for Mayor Street, was indicted in June with former City Treasurer Corey Kemp in an alleged scheme to steer city financial contracts and bond work to White's clients.

White's name has surfaced repeatedly in connection with a separate investigation into the awarding of concessions for stores, shops and restaurants along the various airport terminals.

Blatstein, according to city records, dominates the food and liquor concessions there. Of 16 liquor outlets, his companies run nine. White's wife, Aruby Odom-White, is a partner in five of those, records show.

Robinson has named White, Blatstein, the City of Philadelphia, and her bosses, airport officials Charles Isdell and James Tyrrell, as defendants in the suit, which she filed herself. (Emphasis added.)

What I really ought to be posting about is the role of bloggers in breaking the corruption scandal which just caused the Canadian government to fall.

If the Canadian government had had its way, few would have known about the scandal, and the no-confidence vote might not have occurred.

(Now, if they'd just been able to get the UN to silence Captain Ed..... )

MORE (12/03/05): There's some (partial) progress, it seems. The Philadelphia City Council just passed 5 out of 6 ethics reform measures:

Mayor Street said he would sign all of the bills that passed yesterday, which included legislation to ban big donors from receiving city financial assistance worth more than $50,000. Only Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell opposed that measure.

An effort to prohibit the awarding of competitively bid government contracts to big political donors failed. A tie vote of 8-8 means that bill will not become law.

"They penalize people who need a chance to participate," Blackwell said of the limits on political contributors, which would also require contract bidders and financial-aid recipients to disclose which consultants they hired. She said the paperwork requirements would be particularly hard for small and minority businesses.

Blackwell, however, voted in favor of the bills that would establish and empower the ethics board - a dramatic change for the Council member who has been the loudest foe of the two-year effort to enact new ethics rules after the City Hall corruption scandal. She was the only member of Council to oppose a charter change prohibiting the awarding of "no-bid" city contracts to big political donors, which voters approved by 87 percent in a referendum last month.

As to the provision that failed, Street and his allies were against it, and Councilman Michael Nutter illuminates:

Street had criticized the one measure that failed yesterday, an effort to restrict competitively bid contracts, arguing that bans on big donors could effectively eliminate low bidders from some projects and needlessly complicate the procurement process. Those doubts were shared in Council by the six members who traditionally vote with Street - Blackwell, Darrell L. Clarke, Blondell Reynolds Brown, Juan F. Ramos, Rick Mariano, and Donna Reed Miller - as well as two others, W. Wilson Goode Jr. and Marian Tasco.

"We haven't had any problems with the competitive-bidding process in this city," Tasco said when asked about her vote.

But Nutter said the federal corruption probe showed that even competitive contracts could be influenced by politics to the detriment of the city.

"It's clear on the tapes from the corruption investigation that Corey Kemp clearly gave a company certain information to assist them in a competitive-bid process," he said, referring to the former city treasurer, who received a 10-year sentence for selling his office. "It is also a company that also happened to, either directly or through others in the form of Ron White, make a lot of campaign contributions."

If you're as big a fan of Vernor Vinge as I am, this should interest you. His newest novel is only five and a half months away.

Rainbows End (Zones of Thought)

Thanks Amazon.com! Here's their bland summary...

Four time Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge has taken readers to the depths of space and into the far future in his bestselling novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Now, he has written a science-fiction thriller set in a place and time as exciting and strange as any far-future world: San Diego, California, 2025.

Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world-renowned poet. Now he is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he’s starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts . Living with his son’s family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum, layers of reality built on digital views seen by a single person or millions, depending on your choice. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen-year-old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access—through nodes designed into smart clothes—and to see the digital context—through smart contact lenses.

With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re-train at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination.

In a world where every computer chip has Homeland Security built-in, this conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert’s son and daughter-in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot.

As Robert becomes more deeply involved in conspiracy, he is shocked to learn of a radical change planned for the UCSD Geisel Library; all the books there, and worldwide, would cease to physically exist. He and his fellow re-trainees feel compelled to join protests against the change. With forces around the world converging on San Diego, both the conspiracy and the protest climax in a spectacular moment as unique and satisfying as it is unexpected. This is science fiction at its very best, by a master storyteller at his peak.

So he's explicitly labeling it as a "Zones of Thought" story. I wouldn't have expected that. Here's the cover art (Just so you'll know what to look for). Is that a bunny rabbit gazing pensively out over the City of the Future? He seems to be wearing clothing of some sort.

For your listening pleasure, here's a keynote presentation Professor Vinge delivered in September at Accelerating Change 2005. And here's a story set in the same milieu as the upcoming novel, available as an eBook. A brief sample follows...

Final exam week was always chaos at Fairmont Junior High. The school's motto was "Trying hard not to become obsolete"--and the kids figured that applied to the faculty more than anyone else. This semester they got through the first morning--Ms. Wilson's math exam--without a hitch, but already in the afternoon the staff was tweaking things around: Principal Alcalde scheduled a physical assembly during what should have been student prep time.

Almost all the eighth grade was piled into the creaky wooden meeting hall. Once this place had been used for horse shows. Juan thought he could still smell something of that. Tiny windows looked out on the hills surrounding the campus. Sunlight spiked down through vents and skylights. In some ways, the room was weird even without enhancement.

Principal Alcalde marched in, looking as dire and driven as ever. He gestured to his audience, requesting visual consensus. In Juan's eyes, the room lighting mellowed and the deepest shadows disappeared.

"Betcha the Alcalde is gonna call off the nakedness exam." Bertie Todd was grinning the way he did when someone else had a problem. "I hear there are parents with Big Objections."

"You got a bet," said Juan. "You know how Mr. Alcalde is about nakedness."

"Heh. True." Bertie's image slouched back in the chair next to Juan.

Principal Alcalde was into a long speech, about the fast-changing world and the need for Fairmont to revolutionize itself from semester to semester. At the same time they must never forget the central role of modern education which was to teach the kids how to learn, how to pose questions, how to be adaptable--all without losing their moral compass.

It was very old stuff. Juan listened with a small part of his attention; mostly, he was looking around the audience. This was a physical assembly, so almost everybody except Bertie Todd was really here. Bertie was remote from Chicago, one of the few commuter students. His parents paid a lot more for virtual enrollment, but Fairmont Schools did have a good reputation. Of the truly present--well, the fresh thirteen-year-old faces were mostly real. Mr. Alcalde's consensus imagery didn't allow cosmetics or faked clothes. And yet ... such rules could not be perfectly enforced. Juan widened his vision, allowed deviations and defacements in the view. There couldn't be too much of that or the Alcalde would have thrown a fit, but there were ghosts and graffiti floating around the room. The scaredy-cat ones flickered on-and-off in a fraction of a second, or were super-subtle perversions. But some of them--the two-headed phantom that danced behind the Principal's podium--lasted gloating seconds. Mr. Alcalde could probably see some of the japery, but his rule seemed to be that as long as the students didn't appear to see the disrespect, then he wouldn't either.

According to Drudge, Saddam Hussein says he's still president:

A defiant Saddam has refused to recognize the court and has declared himself president of Iraq.

He was similarly argumentative on Monday, complaining about the fact that he had to climb four floors to the courtroom because the lift was broken.

He also objected to being escorted up the stairs by "foreign guards".

In a series of heated exchanges with the judge he also complained about the fact that his guards had taken his pen away, rendering him unable to sign the necessary court papers.

"I will alert them to the problem," Judge Amin said in response.

Saddam Hussein fired back: "I don't want you to alert them! I want you to order them. They are in our country. You are an Iraqi, you are sovereign and they are foreigners, invaders, and occupiers."

Quite simply, if the war was wrong, and if the U.S. occupation is wrong, then it's wrong for Saddam Hussein to be on trial. By all logic his overthrow was illegitimate and he should still be president.

Why are his supporters so silent?

UPDATE: The forward thinking Lee Harris was thinking along similar lines way back in 2003:

Bush misled the American people, arguing that Saddam Hussein should be removed from power because he possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. But it turns out that this was all a pack of self-serving lies. From which it follows that we should never have fought the Iraq war, and, furthermore, that Saddam Hussein should never have been removed from his position at the head of the Iraqi government.

But if we did wrong in removing Saddam, then our duty is clear. We must undo the wrong we have done, and restore Saddam Hussein to the rightful place of authority at the head of the Iraqi government -- with reparations, of course, paid him for the damages done to his palaces.

UPDATE (11/29/05): In an article about his outbursts in court in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, Saddam's telling remarks about "foreigners, invaders, and occupiers" are nowhere to be found. Instead, Nancy A. Youssef (of the Inquirer Foreign Staff) reports only that Saddam "barked orders at the judge."

Sheesh!

(This makes Saddam look more like my dog Coco than Michael Moore. And poor Coco finds the word "bark" most offensive in this context!)

at·tri·tion n.

1. A rubbing away or wearing down by friction.

2. A gradual diminution in number or strength because of constant stress.

Bill Roggio says U.S. soldiers and Marines are frustrated with the media:

These guys are extremely frustrated with the media and make no bones about their distaste for those who are undermining the war effort by calling for withdrawal.

They must love the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I share the frustration of the soldiers and Marines. It is as if there's a professional, well-financed effort to reach into every American home with constant calls for withdrawal from Iraq. While I can ignore it, it's becoming clear to me that many people can't. They believe what they read in the papers, and much as I hate to say this, public opinion appears to be fickle and too easily influenced. I guess it should renew my faith that there is still support for the war.

People are certainly free to have the opinion that the war is wrong. But if those holding the antiwar mindset are charged with shaping public opinion, and they deliberately, constantly undermine support for the war effort, then it begs the question of whether the real war of attrition is in Iraq.

While she may have missed out on Black Friday's shopping extravaganza, Coco wants to her fans to know that it wasn't because of any lack of interest in glamor, but because her master didn't take her anywhere. Sleek and svelte, Coco is very glamorous -- and rapidly coming into her prime!

And that was taken this afternoon in front of an abandoned lot abutting a railroad track.

Imagine how she'd look in more sophisticated surroundings. . .

MORE: In the background behind Coco and to the right, a tree has grown around some old metal which appears to have once been part of a rail switching apparatus or something:

Sheesh.

The things a girl has to put up with to be fashionable these days.

In a (Sunday-after-Thanksgiving) front page headline, the Philadelphia Inquirer is claiming that Army Spec. John Kulick (who was killed last August) was "A war supporter disillusioned in Iraq."

Expecting to find some evidence that Kulick had in fact been disillusioned, I read through this huge piece, only to discover that while he had expressed vari