HerbEly

David Makes a Good Observation

The last time I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) I met a former colleague whom I had not seen in several years. When we both left an hour and a half later, he said "You definitely look older than the last time I saw you."

My son David's posting on DMV Demographics reminded me of a few other aspects of that experience.

Another Take on the name “Benedict

I think that Roger Kimball gets it right. As I read Cardinal Ratzinger’s homily on relativism, I remembered how philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre saw modern ethical discourse as hopeless babble. There can be no real discussion unless there terms have agreed meaning. Macintyre was looking for another Benedict to preserve tradition and civilization. Give Kimball a read.

Irish Women are Changing the Church

A quick add-on to Sunday's posting on the determined action of Judge Anne Burke on the National Review Board. The judge in Cardinal Law's trial was Constance Sweeney. These Irish women are changing the Church.

Go, "Ethnics"?

Several years a go the College of William and Mary changed its team nickname from “Indians” to the more politically correct “Tribe.” Now the NCAA is concerned and has ordered it to examine its current nickname. Presumably the name “Tribe” might offend some Native Americans. Before the College administration gets into a major debate – no doubt at taxpayer expense – it might consider these two alternatives:

• Change the name to the William and Mary “Ethnics”, thereby offending no one – or everyone
• Keep the name and adopt a new “fight” song:

I went to a Garden Party
To reminisce with my old friends
A chance to share old memories
and play our songs again.

When I got to the Garden Party
They all knew my name
But no one recognized me
I didn't look the same.

But it's all right now.
I learned my lesson well.
You see you can't please everyone
So you got to please yourself.

— Rick Nelson, "Garden Party" (1971)

News Flash: American Catholics Support the Pope!

After weeks of MSM reporting about a divided church and American skepticism about Cardinal Ratzinger, the WaPo reports a poll. (registration required) Surprise! the poll found that:

"...more than eight in 10 Roman Catholics broadly supported the selection of German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to replace Pope John Paul II. Nearly as many, 73 percent, said they were "enthusiastic" about the new pontiff, though only one in four said they were strongly enthusiastic about the choice."

As you read here last Thursday, journalists who make predictions should meditate on Fiedler's 2nd rule of forecasting: “He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass.”

Darren Rowse writing on Workplace Sprituality for Spero News

Spero News for this week includes an article on Spirited entrepreneurship. Here is an extract:
"More and more I'm noticing that businesses are taking on the role of providing avenues for social concern and welfare that previously would have fallen back upon the church and government. I suspect this will happen increasingly in future.

The power business wields on our society is sometimes labeled an evil and often rightly so. But rather than protesting from the fringes could another way forward be for Christians to influence from within?
Maybe a twin approach is needed.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but most business people that I've met don't want to be manipulative, they actually do care for the society they live in, they do want to make a difference. They often just need to be encouraged to do so and see ways of ethical, life giving business to be modeled for them."

Please give Darren a visit - and add your comments. Traditional spirituality has a much to say to us about our inner lives - but not much about what happens when we go into the world amongst Christ's sisters and brothers

Augustine’s 26th Law & Irish Grandmothers

Maybe the Conference of Catholic Bishops knew what it was doing when it put Justice Anne Burke on the pedophilia case. Once she was on the National Review Board investigating child abuse she overcame Norman Augustine’s Law XXVI*. This law states that once enough management layers are imposed on top of one another, disaster is not left to chance.

The laity and some Bishops in the American church were trying to get the Vatican to understand the scope and seriousness of child abuse and pedophilia. The Vatican, understandably suspecting that the mainstream media was using the scandal to make the church look bad, was not getting the message through channels. Correct information was being stopped by intervening layers.

Justice Anne Burke, an Irish grandmother, went to work.

Did Bolton Politicize Intelligence?

According to David Ignatius, in this morning's WaPo (registration required), he did: The problem with Bolton, in fact , is that he epitomizes the politicization of intelligence that helped produce the fiasco over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration has so far managed to evade any real accounting for its role in the Iraqi WMD blunder, letting the intelligence community take the hit. But the Bolton saga is a microcosm of that larger failure: It's the story of a policymaker who tried to pressure intelligence analysts into supporting WMD views that turned out to be wrong.

Here is the key sentence in Ignatius story: According to the 1999 NIE "Cuba had a "limited, developmental, offensive biological warfare research and development effort." A limited R&D effort may become a threat - but it was apparently less of a threat than Bolton wanted.

Miles’s Law, Fiedler's Rules and Benedict XVI

As I look at the flood of commentary on Cardinal Ratzinger becoming Pope Benedict XVI, I’m reminded of two proverbs from my favorite collection of Murphy’s Laws.

Miles’s Law of position states: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”

Fiedler’s 2nd rule of forecasting states: “He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass.”

Consider how unreliable the pundits were in their forecasts of the recent popes. Every one expected John XXIII to be just a caretaker. John Paul I died before anyone expected. John Paul II stood against communism as everyone anticipated – but was far more and fare different than either the journalists or Cardinals thought.

Another Sentance that I wish I had written

David Brooks said it best:

”Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.

When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.

Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.”

This is a new application of a point that I made April, 2004 and that James Hunter made in 1994