Treacher believes there is a strong correlation between journalism and sociopathy, but he has his own theory.
"Actually, I think the effect is in the opposite direction," explains Treacher. "Journalism doesn't always cause stupid, but stupid sure causes journalism."
As many have heard, the former papal Master of Ceremonies (the man who organizes and runs the masses at which the pope presides) Archbishop Piero Marini has just published a book, in English, called A Challenging Reform: Realizing the Vision of the Liturgical Renewal, 1963-1975. The book recounts Marini’s time and service on the committees dealing with the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. While First Things hopes to review Marini’s book in a future issue, I found an interview he did with John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter on the occasion of the book’s publication worthy of comment. Allen asks the Archbishop about his book’s concern “about the current liturgical direction of the church, warning of a return to a ‘pre-conciliar mindset.’” Marini says that we should always be concerned about upholding the faith of the Bible and the Fathers in every age. Then the interview begins to address this “nostalgia:”That said, I have to add that today I’m a bit more concerned than in the past, because I see a certain nostalgia for the past. What concerns me in particular is that this nostalgia seems especially strong among some young priests. How is it possible to be nostalgic for an era they didn’t experience? I actually remember this period. From the age of six until I was 23, in other words for 18 years, I lived with the Mass of Pius V. I grew up in this rite, and I was formed by it. I saw the necessity of the changes of Vatican II, and personally I don’t have any nostalgia for this older rite, because it was the same rite that had to be adapted to changing times. I don’t see any step backward, any loss. I’m always surprised to see young people who feel this nostalgia for something they never lived with. ‘Nostalgia for what?’ I find myself asking.
John Allen: How do you explain this nostalgia?
In part, I suppose, because implementation of the liturgy of the council has been difficult. It’s true that many times there were exaggerations, which happened for the most part in a time when we could say there was disorder in the church. This was the period of great debates over new Eucharistic prayers, private adaptations, and so on. The danger today, on the other hand, is a ‘neo-ritualism,’ meaning a sort of exhaustion that one sees in many priests who celebrate the rite almost as if it’s a magical formula rather than a real participation of life. I see, therefore, a certain separation between celebration and life. Obviously, this separation can induce nostalgia for the past, for a time when everything was easier . . . when we used a language that no one understood, the rites were often incomprehensible, there were signs of the Cross everywhere, and so on. There wasn’t the same expectation that liturgy should speak to life. If one doesn’t insist on the link, it’s easy to see the liturgy more in terms of theatre. I believe this, to some extent, is the basis of the nostalgia we see today.
Archbishop Marini wonders why so many, especially so many young people, have nostalgia for an era that many of them never saw. I’ve heard his arguments before too. Young people today didn’t live in the fifties. We didn’t hear Masses mumbled by a priest in a language we never understood. We never saw how the church of that decade was driving people away from the faith and how the reforms of Vatican II brought the liturgy back to relevance for the changing times.
All this is true, of course. Those of us with more traditional liturgical tastes never did live in the fifties, and certainly there were reforms that needed to be made; I am grateful to have more Scripture read and to hear the Eucharistic prayer when it is said.
The problem, as many have noted, is that changes made in the name of reform have turned the beauty of the Church into spiritual drivel. The language of the Mass is debased. It’s as if the powers that be did not believe that the laity could handle the full beauty of the Roman Rite and the full power of its theological messages, and so brought the mass down to their level the way one condescends to a child. The architecture, the vestments, the rituals, the whole Mass became more banal and mundane. The plenitude of Scripture and Tradition was not truly passed down, and relevance replaced reverence with unfortunate consequences.
The Vatican has released the text of a speech the Pope was due to have given during a visit to Rome University, that was cancelled due to protests.
While some Rome students and faculty members have been crying victory, others have rallied around the pontiff. At Wednesday's general audience, students turned up with banners of support for the Pope.
A senior Vatican cardinal has urged Romans to turn out for next Sunday's Angelus blessing in St Peter's Square.
In the speech that Pope Benedict wrote himself for delivery at the start of the academic year in Rome, he acknowledges that some of the things said by theologians over the centuries have been proven false by history.
But he insists that the search for truth cannot be divorced from the traditional fields of study at universities since the Middle Ages, namely philosophy and Christian theology.
Jürgen Habermas esprime, a mio parere, un vasto consenso del pensiero attuale, quando dice che la legittimità di una carta costituzionale, quale presupposto della legalità, deriverebbe da due fonti: dalla partecipazione politica egualitaria di tutti i cittadini e dalla forma ragionevole in cui i contrasti politici vengono risolti. Riguardo a questa "forma ragionevole" egli annota che essa non può essere solo una lotta per maggioranze aritmetiche, ma che deve caratterizzarsi come un "processo di argomentazione sensibile alla verità" (wahrheitssensibles Argumentationsverfahren). È detto bene, ma è cosa molto difficile da trasformare in una prassi politica.
Jürgen Habermas represents, in my opinion, a vast consensus of current thinking when he says that the legitimacy of a constitutional charter, in its legality, derives from two sources: from the equal political participation of all the citizens and from the reasonable manner in which political disputes are resolved. Concerning this "reasonable manner" he notes it may not be only a matter of arithmetic majorities, but it should be characterized as a "process of argumentation sensitive to the truth." It is well said, but it is a difficult thing to transform into political practice.
The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone told the Rector of Rome University, after students threatened to disrupt the Pope's visit, that the Pontiff would no longer be "guaranteed a dignified and tranquil welcome".
What is interesting is that the anti-Pope protests seem, in some ways, to have backfired. One leading Italian newspaper the Corriere della Sera ran a front page editorial headlined "A defeat for the country", while President Napolitano and politicians of both the right and left have been condemning demonstrations of intolerance towards the Pope.
French carmaker Citroen has withdrawn an ad featuring a doctored portrait of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, after complaints it was an insult.
In the ad, carried in Spanish newspaper El Pais, Mao scowls at a hatchback.
"It's true, we are leaders, but at Citroen the revolution never stops," reads the text below the portrait.
Citroen apologised for the "inappropriate" ad, which Chinese chatroom users had complained "hurts our national pride".
"This is no small thing," said one visitor to a chatroom about the ad - based on the famous portrait of Mao which hangs in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
"It has an influence on the whole country. It damages the whole Chinese people."
Federal investigators have concluded that steel plates on the interstate bridge that collapsed last summer in Minneapolis were inadequate to hold the structure together and appear to have been what allowed it to fail, killing 13 people, two officials familiar with the investigation said Monday.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) plans to call Tuesday for states to perform safety assessments on the so-called gusset plates in steel girder bridges any time they add weight to a bridge, the sources said. Design changes in 1977 and 1998 added additional pavement and concrete barriers that increased the weight of the Interstate 35W bridge in downtown Minneapolis.
A city councilman and a local bar owner said today they'll ask Attorney General Jay Nixon whether state liquor regulations barring "indecent, profane or obscene" language or song in bars across Missouri violate constitutional free speech rights.
Councilman Richard Veit and Marc Rousseau, who runs R.T. Weiler's - a bar in St. Charles' North Main Street entertainment area - said they wanted Nixon to issue an advisory opinion detailing whether the provision bars performers at establishments serving liquor from using certain language and if so, what language. The state regulations also refer to entertainment, literature and advertising material.
The two spoke at a City Hall news conference after a public hearing on proposed changes in St. Charles' local liquor control rules.
Last month Rousseau had complained...
...to the council that the city proposal, sponsored by Veit, included such language. The council last week deleted the specific reference to bad words from its proposal, but the city bill still refers to it indirectly by saying that violations of state regulations could lead to city penalties.
Veit said he didn't intend to violate people's free speech rights and was trying to deal with situations such as bar patrons yelling obscenities at people walking outside an establishment.
Venezuelan Jews, long uneasy with the Chávez government's alliances with Iran and other Middle Eastern countries that espouse anti-Israel views, are concerned that the government is sponsoring anti-Semitism in this hemisphere, a prominent journalist said Tuesday.
''The situation we have now in Venezuela is that for the first time in modern history we have government-sponsored anti-Semitism in a Western country,'' said Sammy Eppel. ``That is why this is very dangerous, not just for the Jewish community in Venezuela but for the Jewish community as a whole.''
Among the examples offered by Eppel:
Venezuelan government intelligence services twice have raided the country's most important Jewish center in a vague, ultimately unsuccessful search for weapons. Publications of the government's cultural ministry run articles entitled ''the Jewish Question,'' along with a Jewish star superimposed over a swastika.
These examples, according to Eppel, an analyst and journalist who has written for El Universal and El Mundo, among other publications, are evidence of a pattern of official intimidation against the country's fast-dwindling Jewish population. Many of them have resettled in South Florida since President Hugo Chávez's rise.
About 30 people attended Eppel's presentation Tuesday, sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League at the Aventura Chabad. Many of the examples were excerpts from government-linked media.
One 2006 article in El Diario de Caracas debates whether it will be necessary to ''expel [the Jews] from the country.'' Another article in the Diario VEA accuses Jews of being involved in the murder of a government prosecutor.
Real Climate has been speaking with two voices on how to compare observations of climate with models. Last August they asserted that one-year's sea ice extent could be compared with models:A few people have already remarked on some pretty surprising numbers in Arctic sea ice extent this year (the New York Times has also noticed). The minimum extent is usually in early to mid September, but this year, conditions by Aug 9 had already beaten all previous record minima. Given that there is at least a few more weeks of melting to go, it looks like the record set in 2005 will be unequivocally surpassed. It could be interesting to follow especially in light of model predictions discussed previously.
Today, they say that looking at 8 years of temperature records is misguided:John Tierney and Roger Pielke Jr. have recently discussed attempts to validate (or falsify) IPCC projections of global temperature change over the period 2000-2007. Others have attempted to show that last year's numbers imply that 'Global Warming has stopped' or that it is 'taking a break' (Uli Kulke, Die Welt)). However, as most of our readers will realise, these comparisons are flawed since they basically compare long term climate change to short term weather variability.
So according to Real Climate one-year's ice extent data can be compared to climate models, but 8 years of temperature data cannot.
Right.
I can’t remember Ms. magazine receiving this much attention since about 1978, but the magazine is back in the news—this time for turning down an ad from the American Jewish Congress.
You can see the pro-woman ad here. It shows photographs of Tzipi Livni (Israel’s foreign minister), Dorit Beinish (Supreme Court), and Dalia Itzik (speaker of the Knesset). Underneath the photos, the ad declares: “This is Israel.”
According to the AJC, Ms. magazine explained that the ad was too controversial and “will set off a firestorm,” merely for daring to say anything positive about Israel. Not that it really needed any more proof, but here’s one more bit that shows the old-line feminist organizations aren’t really about women. They’re wholly owned subsidiaries of the left—and if the left rejects Israel, then Ms. magazine must reject Israel’s women.
A Ms. Magazine representative, Susie Gilligan, whom the Ms. Magazine masthead lists under the publisher's office, told Ms. Kurlander that the magazine "would love to have an ad from you on women's empowerment, or reproductive freedom, but not on this." Ms. Gilligan failed to elaborate what "this" is.
This "Special Issue on Racial Terrorism" was hardly the first time one of Paul's publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled "What To Expect for the 1990s," predicted that "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves.'" Two months later, a newsletter warned of "The Coming Race War," and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, "If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it." In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo." "This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s," the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter's author—presumably Paul—wrote, "I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming." That same year, a newsletter described the aftermath of a basketball game in which "blacks poured into the streets of Chicago in celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows of stores to loot." The newsletter inveighed against liberals who "want to keep white America from taking action against black crime and welfare," adding, "Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems."
Simply put, will America be willing to walk away from what some say is a sure thing of a Clinton in the White House and embrace a man who says we can do all things if we just believe enough in ourselves?
It all might sound like New Age mumbo jumbo.
Jun Xiao became so frustrated with his organic chemistry professor at St. Louis Community College at Meramec that he dropped the class — and sent e-mails inviting his classmates to do the same.
He never mentioned his current professor's name or directly criticized her in the e-mails, though several websites such as www.ratemyprofessors.com allow college students around the nation to comment on their professors by name.
So he was surprised when he received a letter from the college a couple of days later that said he had been placed on disciplinary probation for the 2007-08 academic year for violating the student handbook, including sections about hazing, obstruction or disruption of teaching, and disorderly conduct and defamation.
Now a national advocacy group that defends the legal, religious or free-speech rights of students is rallying behind Xiao's cause. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has written Paul Pai, president of the Meramec campus, saying that the college's actions ignore the constitutional guarantees of free speech and due process. The group has asked that the college rescind the probation and remove all mention of it from Xiao's record.
Pat Crowe, a college spokeswoman, said that there is another side to the story but that student privacy laws prevented her from commenting now. She said the school expects to review the case at a hearing next month.
Xiao, who has a doctorate from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has done post-doctoral research in neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University and Washington University.
He enrolled at the Meramec campus this fall to take pre-medical courses so he can apply to medical school.
He said he received A's in the four other science classes he took this semester. But he said he dropped his organic chemistry class because he did not like the professor, who could not be reached for comment.
Like him, that professor is a non-native English speaker and was sometimes difficult to understand in class, he said. He approached her a number of times to clarify the material, including during her office hours, but he said she was impatient.
On Oct. 10, he sent an e-mail to his classmates saying that he was dropping the class and hoped to get an "A" in the same class in the spring.
"P.S." he wrote, "Is there someone who wants to retake the class with me?"
In the second e-mail, sent Oct. 21, he told his classmates about other professors with good reputations who also teach organic chemistry.
He also pointed out that St. Charles Community College offers the same class for about the same price. He added that a friend of his said the professor there is nice, patient, a native English speaker, and has a good reputation. He noted the school's scholarship opportunities and suggested carpooling.
Dr. Xiao continues to be punished merely for speaking without any reasonable notice or opportunity to be heard. The harm to him is exacerbated as this matter drags on without final resolution. We reiterate the concerns expressed to you by FIRE regarding the serious civil liberties implications from your actions. We hope that you will give this matter the serious and immediate attention it deserves. On behalf of Dr. Xiao, we demand that you take immediate action to rescind the probation imposed upon him and expunge the disciplinary action from his records.
While it is our desire to resolve this matter in an amicable manner, we are willing to consider alternatives if you do not take immediate action to insure that Dr. Xiao’s constitutional rights are safeguarded and vindicated.
