Baseless Geopolitical Speculation

How long will it be before oil-producing states need to fear invasion and conquest by oil-importing states?

A confirmation of the Theology of the Body at the local library

My local library has a little room full of books for sale, various cheap paperbacks and no-longer-important political tracts. Sometimes one finds bargains--I just picked up _The Origins of Tolkien's Middle-earth for Dummies_, for example--but generally it is not too worthwhile. But, today, the book room itself was worthy of notice, because the cheap paperbacks were no longer arranged into romances, mysteries, and sci-fi, they were arranged into "Male Authors" and "Female Authors."

Why would one want to know the sex of the author (or authoress) of a book, unless there really was some sort of deep difference between man and woman?

I think I am doomed

I just had a vision of my life as a parent, given the recent California Supreme Court decision about marriage and who is eligible for entering into the matrimonial state:

For the rest of my life as a father, I am going to have to fight my nation's culture tooth and nail, for the good of my children, and I am likely going to lose. Everything that I say about things that really matter, about God, family, love, friendship, even about education and thinking well, will be contradicted daily by the bright, shiny, prosperous, but rotting Western world. My little girls will learn, slowly but surely, that Daddy is a crackpot, a crank, a dinosaur, and a religious fanatic.

Maybe if I read them Chesterton at bedtime. . . .

I really have no interest in politics anymore

having shifted my sights down to the level of the family and away from the international or national. I will vote for someone, somehow, but without any thought of good things resulting from it. But enough of that. I wanted you to notice something: almost every picture of Barack Obama is done in the style of a religious icon. A short web search reveals this one:



Notice the pleroma behind him, the glowing oval of light that reminds us of another image:



For more examples of this sort of thing, the most blatant deification of a candidate I can remember, check out ObamaMessiah.

A Distributist Summer?

With gas prices likely to hit 5$ a gallon, we in the Casa de Karl are going to be driving very little this summer. Once or twice a week to go to church, I think. I really want to try to see how little we can use the cars. Fortunately, we live in a community with some shops nearby, within walking or bicycle riding distance. There are even a few bike paths.

Which brings me to my next topic: a good use for GoogleEarth: finding bicycle routes. I don't like to ride on the street very much, since drivers of cars don't really expect bicycles to be there, and therefore don't look for them. Via Google Earth, I can plan out a route to the shopping areas. I could even tow a kid trailer to carry the parcels.

We'll see how it goes.

The hearts of many will be laid bare

if the current food crisis continues. It looks like famines are going to result from a commitment to "biofuels". The developed countries will assuage their consciences by putting their crops into their cars, while the developing countries will starve.

Someone should ask Gore how many people should die in Bangladesh for the sake of an ethanol mandate.

Concerning music and taste

Criticisms of some of the music at the papal liturgy have raised the cry of smallness against the critics. After all, isn't music a matter of taste?

I don't think it is. I think music is a matter of math and physics, and has a reality that we can't easily evade. I wrote up a handout for my students on this topic, and demonstrated musical concepts with a guitar and with the wonderful Scala microtonal program.

Perhaps you will find it interesting. I tried to post it here, but Blogger doesn't like math formulas. Here it is.

It's great that the Pope is here

but who picked out the awful responsorial psalm at the liturgy in Washington? Parellel whole tone scales? C-D-E-F#, repeated over and over, all for Psalm 104? If the Lord sends out his Spirit to renew the face of the earth, and it results in such cacophony, why would one want it?

An unfortunate choice, I think.

If you want to read Homer

but, like me, don’t know Greek very well, there are two resources for you:

1. The Perseus Project under Philologic at the University of Chicago, which has a lot of Greek and Latin texts linked to lexica and morphology analyzers. Just select a word and press “d”, and a definition window pops up. This is a wonderful resource, and is working much faster these days than the Perseus servers at Tufts.




2. The Chicago Homer, which gives you an interlinear Homer, with Greek on one line and the English on the next. It’s good for when one is puzzled, but it is also a great temptation to cheat.

If you don’t want to read Homer, then there’s no helping you.