Preemie first 80 days

Rod Dreher explains why your faith should be as fragile and hollow as his

Let's review historically: first, cradle Methodist, college agnostic Dreher first becomes a Catholic because, from his own account, as a country mouse from Starhill, LA in Paris for the first time he was wowed by the architecture of Chartres Cathedral. One can only wonder what he might have become had he encountered a Parisian sex show first instead.

Then, having embraced Catholicism as the one true faith, all it took for him to renounce it formally and completely were the sinful and criminal acts of some human priests in its employ. Easy come, easy go.

Now we have the prime time pop cultural spectacle of Bruce Jenner talking to Diane Sawyer over Kleenex about his delusions of becoming a woman.

Naturally, Dreher is as fascinated as any 19th Century country boy at his first hoochie-coochie tent show, albeit a country boy who ultimately quotes Nietzsche to frame his reaction. Commenter Matthias offers Dreher a paper bag to breathe into:

Sure, the media like to dramatize things, but this article makes the same mistake; it is sensationalist and completely ignores available data. The handful of surgical sex changes every year will certainly not “cause this society to careen off the cliff”; on the contrary, statistically speaking it is completely insignificant. And as far as regret goes, this study finds a “regret rate” of about 2%. I guess this margin of error is acceptable (not to the individual, but on the whole).

Dreher rips the bag away:

[NFR: You completely miss the point. There is no question but that the number of transpeople among us will always be small. My point is that what we as a society have to do to go from seeing those people as suffering human beings who bear the image of Christ, however distorted by our common humanity, to celebrating them as avatars of courage and so forth, requires giving up so much philosophical ground that it amounts to removing the guardrails, especially given what technology is empowering us to do. -- RD]

Speak for yourself, Neville Chamberlain of philosophical ground.

First, as someone whose tabloid writing was not only forged in the fiery caverns of the New York Post but which has carried its stylistic imprimatur into everything you've touched since, let's not be disingenuous here.

Matthias is right, and anyone who has read you for any time knows you're only sorry you're sensationalistically behind on the story because you were tied up slurping oysters with Mollie. The only people I've seen remotely "celebrating" as opposed to gawking over the Jenner story have been his family tweeting - as if they could publicly do anything else.

Second, the only one promoting the notion of giving up philosophical ground is you. Most everyone else is responding along a range from pity to disgust. Is there a Bruce Jenner book gleaming in your eye in line behind the yet un-pitched Benedict Option book in line behind the yet unsold Dante book?

And guess what else technology empowers us to do. Beat a child to death with a cast iron skillet. Bugger scruffy little dogs named Roscoe when the wife and kids are off visiting Mam and Paw. Shoot up your local movie theater.That technology genie escaped its bottle when Eve started peddling apples and Cain found a suitable rock.

Maybe the problem isn't so much some aging former athlete turned celebrity reality star getting his lonely freak on by hitting himself up with estrogen as it is with your own congenitally fragile and fluid philosophical ground and its imminent potential to send you careening off your own personal and social guardrails.

That hardly argues for anyone else joining you in your fragilely principled state of mind.

If nothing more than your family being mean to you can send you into a narcoleptic depressive "dark wood", I'd tell old Roscoe to quit showing his belly and maybe head under the bed tout de suite. As for other social conservatives, surely there's a better prophet than Rod Dreher to be found.

Maybe even some 2,000-year-old Jew.

Great pictures of Cleveland

The guys at Cleveland Aerial Media really take awesome pictures of the Cleveland, Ohio area. Check them out on flickr.



These dudes are the Drone Cam Gods.

Mistaking Gigantism for Genius

Obama's comparison of his behemothic health care plan with something as brilliant and compact as the iPhone should evoke memories of this O'Rourke piece from a year ago. It's short, so I'll republish the entire thing here illegally without requesting any permission.

Let's Cool It With the Big Ideas
P. J. O'Rourke Jun 19 2012

I don’t have a big idea, and I don’t want one. I don’t like big ideas. And I’m not alone. Distaste for grandiose notions is embedded in our language: “What’s the big idea?” “You and your bright ideas.” “Whose idea was this?” “Me and my big ideas.” “Don’t get smart with me.”

When we say our children are “starting to get ideas,” we’re not bragging. It gives us pause to hear our spouse say “I have an idea!” If our boss says it, we panic unless we’re sufficiently quick-witted to spill coffee on the iPad the boss has just used to Google some portentous concept.

This is not anti-intellectualism. This is experience. The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas—fascism, communism, the atomic bomb. Liberty was also a powerful abstraction in the 20th century. But liberty isn’t a big idea. It’s a lot of little ideas about what individuals want to say and do.

I like little ideas. What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text. Thomas Edison’s moment of enlightenment could be sketched in a cartoon thought balloon. (Although once government started having deep thoughts about it, we got compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and now I need to don a hazmat suit if the dog knocks over the floor lamp.) There was Henry Ford’s Model T, of modest dimensions, and the bread box–size gizmo that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were fiddling with in the garage. But in 1875, 1879, 1908, or 1976, we wouldn’t have called any of these Big Ideas. We couldn’t foresee their consequences.

We still don’t know what ideas will have which results. But I fear the bigger, the worse. And we’re back in an era of big ideas. Our financiers have very big ideas. The rest of us are left looking for investment advisers clueless enough to be honest.

“Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come,” said Victor Hugo. In either case, run.

This stuff is so funny

It's understated. Well, the hair isn't, but everything else....



Reggie Watts, ladies and gentlemen.

No big deal if you don't know

Wait a second...

I didn't know about this new model, probably due to my deep-seated hatred of everything smelling of Sprint. From Jan. 8:

At a CES presentation today, Palm announced its next-generation smart phone platform, called WebOS. "It was built with developers in mind," said Palm CEO Ed Colligan in describing the new platform. Any web developer can use CSS, HTML, and JavaScript to develop applications for the OS; there are no new languages to learn. Palm would have appeared to have abstracted the hardware in some manner to allow for JavaScript developers access to nearly every feature of the phone, going in a direction that some had initially pushed for Apple to pursue before the Obj-C iPhone SDK was launched.

Palm also announced a new phone, the Palm pre, set for launch in the first half of 2009. It features a 3.1-inch multitouch screen with 320x480 resolution over a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, all squeezed into a small, 4.8-oz package.

But here's the part which piqued my interest.

As nice as the pré's hardware is, Palm's WebOS is where the real action is. As a dedicated iPhone user, I experienced something very strange and quite unexpected while watching Palm demo the new OS: my iPhone suddenly felt old and played out. It's like Palm started with the iPhone, copied all the best ideas, and then made the whole package better.

So I guess I have to wait for it to be available on AT&T or go to Sprint... yuck.

This looks pretty cool

Take it from a Skype junkie. I'm putting off buying an iPhone, but I'm starting to feel like resistance is truly futile.

Here's the slideshow and review of their iPhone app.

Skype continues to extend its smartphone mobile platform reach with the latest iteration for the Apple iPhone. Skype for iPhone users can conduct chats, control presence and edit profile information, as well as place Skype-to-Skype and SkypeOut calls. However, calls can be placed only when connected via Wi-Fi; EDGE or 3G users have to settle just for chat and presence.

Skype might be to phone companies what Google was to Microsoft. Who knows, but their app is simply too slick. The iPhone is slick, too.

Betcha this guy's descendants are all Apple customers

Microsoft / LOLCAT Hybrid Humor

I live for this kind of stuff.



Thanks for reading my blog. For current commentary and what-not, visit the Est Quod Est homepage

Television as Child Abuse

Michael Medved's Townhall.com commentary:

Parents who permit television sets in their children's bedrooms sharply increase risks for negative outcomes on a wide range of physiological, emotional, and academic measures. Collating stunning research from leading journals of pediatric and adolescent medicine, the Science Section of the New York Times concluded: "Children with bedroom TVs score lower on school tests and are more likely to have sleep problems. Having a television in the bedroom is strongly associated with being overweight and a higher risk for smoking."

One sobering study of kids between 4 and 7 showed that a TV in the bedroom increased weekly viewing by nearly nine hours--from 21 hours, to 30!

It's therefore alarming that a survey of third-graders at all income levels showed 70 percent of them with TV's in their rooms. As some of us have urged for 20 years, few policies will benefit your family more reliably than getting rid of television sets from every bedroom in the home.

Yes, please get rid of TVs in your kids' bedrooms so Michael Medved can quit talking about this subject. This habit is made all the more annoying by his being 100% correct.

Also sprach this, Mr. Z!

FeedBlitz Drive

I'm starting a "FeedBlitz Signup Drive" today. No, it doesn't have to do with trying to raise money for myself or a group I started at my house called Pauli's Kids. It's a service which is completely free and so far only one reader has taken advantage of it. Basically when you signup by entering your email and clicking on "Subscribe me" you begin getting an email each day I post something.

Believe me, this is useful; for example if I haven't blogged in awhile because I'm sleeping one off or just too lazy busy to blog you won't get an email.

And here's a bonus: I'm going to be starting an email newsletter which will be sent to all the members on the list. This will be chock full of reading material which you will not be able to find anywhere else. I'm thinking of calling the newsletter "The Staging Area". Or maybe "100% Organic Spam".



My modest goal is to sign up 15 readers. The drive will last 5 days, whether we reach the goal or not. Each day I will try to leverage your weaknesses and guilt feelings in order to coerce you into signing up. Since many of you are Catholics this should be easy.

So signup is over in the right sidebar, just above my profile picture. Just pop your email addy in there and click the button. FeedBlitz will then lead you down the Golden Road. Then you can "come join the party every day."

One Man's Bug Is Another Man's Feature

Rod Dreher has a semi-thoughtful piece about why many people have decided that newspapers are worthless. He provides several plausible explanations of what may be contributing factors to the demise of the Newsrag Industrial Complex.

But what struck me was this part:

What I'm thinking about this morning is what happened at my place yesterday. Julie decided she wanted to get rid of a particular piece of furniture we had. She put an ad on Craigslist Dallas. Within minutes, she'd sold the thing. When the purchaser who bought it showed up later to pick it up, we talked about the virtues of Craigslist. I told her that the problem with Craigslist was that it meant people didn't have to buy classified ads anymore -- which really hurt my industry.

"You work for the newspaper?" she said. "Um, we don't subscribe. Sorry! I miss the ritual of reading the morning paper with my coffee, but given that you can get the same information online, my husband and I figured that was one expense we just couldn't afford anymore."

She was clearly an educated woman, and was embarrassed to admit what she'd just admitted. But it is what it is.

So what was Craig Newmark supposed to do when he got the idea for Craigslist? I suppose he could have said to himself, "Gee, I could create a really efficient service that would help people buy and sell things and save them hard-earned dollars. But that would mean news execs would have to smoke cheaper cigars. So ix-nay on the ist-lay."

Presenting Craigslist as a "problem" which is "embarrassing to admit" that you use seems to indicate an extremely one-sided way to look at the world. The only reason the newspaper corporations have become enormously successful is by providing products and services to people which are in demand. In a sense, they created the model of selling subscribers to other corporations by way of advertising, the internet companies just perfected it. They had all these big "annuities" rolling in for years because they were the only game in town, not because their copy was so great.

This post is partially in response to people who often question why many of the readers here and I have "picked on" Rod Dreher so much. But this seems to be a reverse of the argument against Wal-mart, i.e., Wal-mart is seen coming in to the small village flexing is gigantic muscles and putting the little business owners out in the street or running hair salons and Kung Fu schools. Newmark describes his website as a "happy accident" and yet the insinuation here is that he is playing Wal-mart against the "little guys" represented by all these huge media corporations? It just doesn't make sense. Newmark says in that interview that he turned down venture funding many times; everything about Craigslist cries out "Small is beautiful". Can that be said of the big media corporations which consume forests to deliver a Sunday paper which is so full of advertising that an old granny can barely lift it?

I can see the point of the anti-Wal-mart fanatics and their ilk about how they "unfairly" leverage economies of scale. But if anything, getting beaten by Craigslist just highlights the stupidity of Old Media which should have jumped into the internet full force in the mid-nineties. It also maybe helps break the capitalism-only-helps-the-fat-cats narrative, and presents a "problem" for those who cling to that canard.

And the odds that Rod's wife will stop using Craiglist are about the same as the odds that my wife will stop using Craigslist. Extrapolating from her use of Craigslist they'll probably be putting Wal-mart out of business at some point.
Thanks for reading my blog. For current commentary and what-not, visit the Est Quod Est homepage