Bill's Notes

I'm heading out on the 6:45 a.m. flight to Orlando. See you all later. Pax.

I also publicize prayer requests. And that means now. I just got a call from my sister. My mother's back in the ICU, and the doctors aren't sure what's wrong. She had a fever on Friday, fell and lay on the floor for a couple of hours until my sister a few blocks away sent my niece to check on her.

It may be another stroke, may be a mild heart attack, may have something to do with the fever or a concussion from the fall. When the doctors say that's the range of possibilities, usually it means they don't know.

This would be a good time to pray for her. Her name is Margaret. I may have to make an emergency trip down to Florida tomorrow morning and I am going to check flights right now.

Harry gets up on his soapbox, saying:

I am not the sort to impetuously post in haste and then recant, redact, and delete later. I would much rather measure my words carefully, and only post things that I am willing to stand by in the future.

Hee hee. It really gets his goat when I remove, alter or change a post — or worse, change my mind. It really bugs him when I upfront made it an editorial policy that on this writer's public note pad "all entries are considered unfinished."

See the title at the top of the page? This is an online notebook, scrawled off and batted off notes, a collection of thoughts, ideas, observations, urges, one-liners, jokes, rants, and sometimes just stuff that I haven't quite thought through and would like some input on. Bill's Notes is not a collection of online, published, completed essays. Heck, half the time I stop in the middle and just abandon the post.

Harry's welcome to his editorial policy of writing online, thoughtfully considered, published essays. And I think I'm welcome to my policy of writing whatever the heck I feel like it, when I feel like it, and then taking another look at it later and doing whatever the heck I feel like it.

Pixels ain't ink and computer screens ain't paper. For one thing, no squids or trees have to die for pixel-on-screens.

I admit the gooey-good feeling I got when I first became Catholic, which lasted for six months, has ended. Just as the Church said it would.

One thing I've noticed, during Mass, is how much is happening, and I never quite know what's gonna get me — what's gonna pierce my heart and remind me of the great love of God. Sometimes it's a scripture reading. Sometimes it happens when I receive the Eucharist. Sometimes it's a gift of tears during prayer. Once, I felt dry the whole time and the very last song got me.

Tonight, at Good Friday Mass in the Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, it was veneration of the cross. Which was a little strange, because I wanted to get that part over with. I've still got some Protestant tendencies, but I've long since learned that when it comes to Catholicism, you suspend judgment and wait for it. Everything has a meaning, everything has a purpose, nothing is by accident. Not only that, Mass activates every aspect of you — the five senses, plus, the intellect, the will, the emotions. It's designed that way. There's a lot of chances for God to give you a sacramental blessing.

But today's Good Friday Mass was long, and I was starting to get a little antsy about an hour in. There were 60 priests at Mass (including candidates) and they all, one at a time, venerated the Cross. As they brought the cross down to the people, I was thinking, oh no, not all of us, too. This cathedral is packed and this is gonna take forever. Then I was thinking, well, if The Man can hang for a cross for three hours, I can handle two hours at Mass. You know, without any nails in me or anything.

So they brought the cross down to the altar, and all sorts of people, that mix of races and ethnicities and ages you get in the city, started to head over to it, milling about and disorganized at first. Really, a crowd. And the sight of them went right through me. I got it. The entire Mass was about the sacrifice of Christ, and here, 2,000 years later, were individuals still thanking Christ for His sacrifice. One at a time. Just as He calls us.

I haven't done justice to the experience with my words, but at the time, the sight of all these people grateful for the sacrifice, which meant the forgiveness of their sins, and there was also a piece about how at the time of the actual crucifixion, this didn't happen, Christ was abandoned and dead at that moment, so it was almost replaying history, or more like going back in history to thank Him for what He did on Good Friday, for His suffering and death ... just a beautiful moment, to see His love returned by so many different people. Thanks be to God.

So anyway, at Mass, wait for it. You never know what it'll be.

One day after his terrific speech, Obama says his grandmother is a "typical white person" because she mentioned she was sometimes afraid of young black men on the street. Well, yeah, Jesse Jackson said the same thing nearly 20 years ago. I guess Jesse Jackson is a typical white person, too. I'd say Obama's a typical black person for calling his mother a typical white person, but that wouldn't be right, would it?

Marxism predicted the collapse of capitalism, saying that competition would eventually cause profits to decline more and more until the whole thing just imploded. When that didn't happen, Marxists blamed one thing or the other, such as colonialism and imperialism, saying that the collapse had been moved from the First World to the Third World. And stuff like that.

Now, I'm saying saying global warming isn't happening (although now it's been called "climate change"). I've long argued that we could have man-made global warming, we could be in a warm earth cycle, and that we don't understand the corrective mechanisms of the system even if it's man-made. And oh yeah, I've mentioned that if the global warming alarmists are correct, we're absolutely fucked. There is no way to avoid burning carbon-based fuels (which includes, after all, wood) in time. It would require a worldwide agreement, essentially, to freeze and starve in the dark until we all go all electric, supplied by nuclear energy. Not gonna happen.

A lot of people are emotionally committed to the idea of global warming and especially all the stuff we'll need to stop it. Now, I happen to agree with some of the treatments, you know, such as getting off fossil fuels and the like. It's called technological progress and it's one thing Marx missed in his critique of capitalism.

Anyway, all that's to say, check out this story:

The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat

Morning Edition, March 19, 2008 · Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

*****

OK. A brief hiatus. Less-rapid warming that is in fact cooling. Them's the statements that constitute sleight-of-hand, and the presumption. If we don't know the causes, we sure-as-shit don't know it's brief. It could be. Or not. But we don't know. There was an assumption that the heating will continue, and here this data doesn't go with the theory, so it must be a "brief hiatus." Nothing to say about the theory. Or the problem is with the instruments. (There could be instrument problems; I'm not saying the theory was wrong; just that this story is written as if to defend dogma.)

*****

I got my issue out. A day early. Another victory over the forces of entropy and sloth. Heigh-ho.

Yesterday, I praised Obama. Today I come to pick nits. (Just kidding.) Somehow, it didn't seem right to start tearing his Philadelphia speech apart, bit by bit, yesterday. I can't exactly explain why, but in some cases, there's something to unseemly about immediately responding. It makes it a game more than a real discussion.

And Obama's speech yesterday was not a game, but a call to a real discussion. I still say it's brilliant in many of its evocations and it's sophisticated in its diagnosis of the current state of race relations. That amount of information, as well as the highest ideals that the speech evoked, required, at least to me, a respectful period of silence to consider the words.

That doesn't mean today I'm going to go after him today. Jonah Goldberg has done a good job of summing up where the speech was effective and where it was less so.

If I were to rank Obama's discussion yesterday on the continuum of Democratic candidate speeches, I'd rank it somewhere between Ted Kennedy's Cause Endures and William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold.

UPDATE: Others are saying it's more like Nixon's Checkers speech. Got to think about that for a while.

UPDATE2: Here's another helpful column from National Review. It appears that I'm in the minority (heh) among conservatives on this speech.

And by the way, that was a bit of a joke about the Cause Endures speech. Read it. Kennedy was wrong about everything. What makes the speech work is the quote from Tennyson. Obama's speech, on other hand, contained more truth that usual. Yes, as usual, Obama wedded his evocative rhetoric to a statist program, but much less so than usual. So I ignored that part. Others may find it harder to do so.

I'm with Charles Murray on this one: I read Barack Obama's speech on race, and it was brilliant. I'm not one to gush, or drink the Kool-Aid, and I don't agree with every little nit in the speech. But it was a great speech on the experience of race and racism in this country. Hats off to the man; Obama hit this one out of the park. Just a great American speech.

Text on Drudge here.

I've found myself provoked to anger on a blog or two this week. I used to go to all sorts of blogs and say all sorts of things, but I've slowed down a lot for the past three years. Still, I'm reminded of the following:

1. People will argue with you about anything. Seriously.

2. No matter what you say, some people will agree, some people will disagree, and some people will nitpick. You could say the sky is yellow at night and we all should wear Barney underwear outside our clothes, and someone will agree, someone will disagree, and someone will nitpick.

3. If you have a philosophical realist point of view, especially one rooted in an authentic, tested experience of God, people who don't have that experience will argue with you — without doing the hard work of actually opening themselves up to that experience.

4. Remember the wise counsel of Christ when he said this to bloggers: "Take care that you do not cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn and attack you." How many believers have testified about God, only to have someone walk right over what you say and attack you personally? I've had it happen when discussing natural law, on abortion, when mentioning Godel's Incompleteness Theorem (one dude actually quoted Sandy Day O'Connor after I mentioned Godel), and the few other topics I feel really strongly about.

5. I need to remember to watch my spiritual pride, which usually happens when I'm not feeling close to God, and when I'm angry or tired or frustrated. Spiritual pride manifests itself when I forget my gratitude at knowing God, and expect others to simply listen to me, instead of my remembering to lovingly point them toward God and let God take it from there. But I'm a bit of a control freak at heart.

6. And a lot of people don't seem to act like they understand the limits of learning in a blog comment thread. They want to score points and win arguments, but many do not, in fact, want to learn anything. And many of them succeed.

7. Worse, a lot of people get riled up by blogs and media and think about you only symbolically — it's almost a sociopathic element of this media. You know, it's really easy to forget there are people on the other side of names.

8. I need to remember to walk away when there's a pearls before swine thing happening. Especially if it costs nothing to walk away.

*****

One experience to illustrate my frustration. I won't mention names, but some of you will figure it out. About four years ago, a blogger noted publicly that he had a problem. Now, this was the very same problem that I myself overcame many years ago, and knew a lot about how to do it.

However, no matter what I said, this person just kept arguing back at me. No matter what. He pointed to clinical studies this, and this expert that. I pointed out that I'd actually been through the journey myself and knew the way quite well, thank you.

Well, four years later, he continued to have the problem and it actually got much worse. Exactly as predicted. His wife left him and took the kids. And he finally got what I and so many others were trying to tell him, and he finally did what I told him to do four years ago, before he lost his wife and kids. Now he's actually getting better.

Do you know how frustrating that was to me? How much heartache I could have saved him if he'd just listened? But he was too busy trying to prove me and a bunch of folks like me wrong than actually listening to what I was trying to tell him. I would tell him the truth (yes, mo-fo, the effing TRUTH), things I learned from hard experience, and he would just keep speaking back, kept saying things, kept talking pure shit back at me as if I were not the voice of experience speaking.

*****

This doesn't mean I think I'm always right. Far from it. But sometimes, I know what I'm talking about and don't like it when people just keep talking smack back at me. Aarggh!

Does this make sense?