"Conservative Democracy"

I found this argument at First Things fairly persuasive. It may be slightly too strong on the Biblical aspects -- Jefferson would have thought so, certainly -- but it's not too strong in most respects.

I find it difficult not to see the Western nations disintegrating ­before our eyes. The most significant institutions that have characterized America and Britain for the last five centuries, giving these countries their internal ­coherence and stability—the Bible, public religion, the independent national state, and the traditional family—are not merely under assault. They have been, at least since World War II, in precipitous ­decline.

In the United States, for example, some 40 percent of children are today born outside of marriage. The overall fertility rate has fallen to 1.76 children per woman. American children for the most part receive twelve years of public schooling that is scrubbed clean of God and Scripture. And it is now possible to lose one’s livelihood or even to be prosecuted for maintaining traditional Christian or Jewish views on various subjects.

Add to this the fact that the principal project of European and American political elites for decades now has been the establishment of a “liberal international order” whose aim is to export American norms and values to other nations, and you have a stunning picture of what the United States has become—a picture that in certain respects resembles that of Napoleonic France: an ideologically anti-religious, anti-traditionalist universalist power seeking to bring its version of the Enlightenment to the nations of the world, if necessary by force.

As strongly worded as that is on first face, I think it's appropriate. When I reflect on the 'bake the cake' court cases, or the lawsuits brought against groups like The Little Sisters of the Poor, or the Senate confirmation hearings in which membership in the Knights of Columbus is treated as a problem -- well, "anti-religious, anti-traditionalist, universalist" sounds more or less correct.

Given the strenuous objections I feel myself, too, how much stronger must those objections be among those against whom force has been used to effect this agenda. These people are completely convinced of the rightness of their cause, and that their opponents are motivated by simple racism or xenophobia or hatred of some similar sort. They do not see, and do not understand, how their project is experienced by those who are experiencing this project as finding their faith, traditions, and nations under assault.

Hogmanay and the End of Yule

Happy New Year!

The Torch parade in Edinburgh.

An Exception to AVI's Title Rule

AVI has stated a general principle that the titles of satirical articles generally are much funnier than the actual articles. Not so this time: the title is simply, "Opinion: We were winning when we left."

Pope To Tear Down Vatican City Wall

Well, no. Not really. Just everyone else's, if he can.

Pope Francis urged political leaders on Monday to defend migrants, saying their safety should take precedence over national security concerns and that they should not be subjected to collective deportations....

Calling for “broader options for migrants and refugees to enter destination countries safely and legally,” he said the human rights and dignity of all migrants had to be respected regardless of their legal status.

“The principle of the centrality of the human person ... obliges us to always prioritize personal safety over national security,” he said.

That's a principled argument against armies, too: nobody should put themselves in a position of being personally harmed to protect an unfeeling thing like 'a nation.' Right?

Well, no. It turns out that national security implies a greater degree of personal security than otherwise. The reason to have a nation is that it protects -- it protects citizens and their rights. If the nation fails, the rights are endangered and the citizens are in danger. They might be oppressed by anyone who comes over the horizon with a strong force and/or bigger guns.

The nation provides this security, and in it a kind of human flourishing becomes possible that is not possible without that security. That's why, Aristotle argues, the state has a kind of priority even over the family (let alone the individual). It is why nations were long thought, and in many places are still thought, to have a right to draft citizens to serve or even die in defense of the whole if necessary.

A more sophisticated solution is needed here. The principle of the centrality of the human person isn't a bad principle; it really is individuals who suffer, not collectives. But the other problems don't go away just because we recognize that fact; and a lot more individuals may end up suffering, for that matter, if their nations are allowed to fail.

Government Somewhat Less Unconstitutional Than Previously

Thanks, against everything you'd expect from the normal news sources, to the Trump administration.

Perspective

As the year draws to a close, and with the new year looming before us, it's a time to try to gain a little perspective on ourselves and our place in the world.  I've always been interested in issues of scale and how to better understand (and communicate) these ideas.  Things like the classic Charles and Ray Eames movie "Powers of Ten" which portrayed the sense of scale from human to the universe and then back down to the microscopic in jumps of powers of ten (at 10 to the 24th meters- 100 million light years across- "this emptiness is normal, the richness of our own neighborhood is the exception"), and "The Paper Clips Project" which was a middle school project which sought to collect six million paper clips to give a sense of the scale of what it meant when one said the abstract words "six million Jews died in the Holocaust", have fascinated me.  Of course, I was one of those kids who believed that when you rode "Adventure Through Inner Space" in Tomorrowland at Disneyland, you really shrank! - well, at least until my brother reached out and touched the giant "snowflake" and said "It's not even cold!".

I found a couple of things more recently that give some interesting bases for scale that might offer some slightly different perspectives than we usually consider around this time.

"If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel" is a fascinating webpage that has the solar system to a "tediously accurate scale" with the Moon being = 1 pixel.  Worth remembering that our solar system is actually a fairly dense space relative to interstellar space (which is the majority of the universe).  Don't cheat and use the planet shortcut at the top of the page- scroll manually or you'll miss some amusing commentary and more importantly, the fuller experience of scrolling your way through the vast spaces between the brief encounters with something in our solar system.

"10,000 Year Clock" is the website for an interesting Earth art project that has set out to reframe time a bit to something outside the normal human scale.  I think this project is fascinating, and not least because I think if we had a better feel for the length of time it really takes for things to change, we'd learn to not worry so much about radical change in the short term, and focus on the smaller changes we can more effectively do ourselves in the time and space local to our lives.

So here's to a year past, hopefully one of growth- and to a year ahead- one of promise and opportunity.  May we see our place and make the most of it while we are there.

Songs for New Year's Eve

May God keep you for the next year to come. Not that there are any guarantees on this night, or any night.

But if you're a good drinking man, well, it's a fine night. Let's have some music from when I was... well, very young indeed.



It was 1973 when Waylon Jennings grew his beard; he'd been clean-shaven before that. Everyone was, who was of any account. 1973 was when it started to shift from the consensus. There still hasn't been a President with a beard, not since Benjamin Harrison.

From the same year, Johnny Cash sang a piece about the family coming together after death is transgressed:



AVI's recent post on a song of a similar age reminded me of how much better -- demonstrably, positively better -- the old music used to be. Even the stuff I don't especially like is head and shoulders above what is popular today. Not as a matter of opinion, but one of fact: for the people who did things I don't like in the 1970s nevertheless knew how to do them. They didn't just show up at a studio without talent or skill, trusting the computers and the engineers to clean up their ignorance.

Old Willie Nelson, for example:



The recently deceased Roy Clark:



But a completely different song, on the same thing, from the noble Clancy Brothers:



Drinc Hael. Waes Hael. Happy New Year, brothers and sisters.

BBC Pidgin

Did you know that the BBC has a pidgin-language website? It turns out that this year's Miss Africa pageant was quite exciting.

Miss Africa 2018: Miss Congo hair catch fire plus oda tins wey happun for dis year event

...Di event almost turn sometin else wen di new queen her hair catch fire as she bin dey do her celebration waka but some organizers behind di scene don come out say na wig she bin dey wear.

Di fire start afta fire works wey dem no do well fall for her hair.

I always love it when I realize I can read another language. They are of course close variants of languages I know: I can read English, so with some practice at sounding it out I realized I could read Middle English with very little work. I can read French, so it wasn't too hard to learn to get the sense of Spanish -- but I was really pleased to realize that I could kind of work out some Romanian, which is a Romance language in spite of the relatively large distance. (Portuguese was harder than Spanish, easier than Romanian. Of course idiomatic expressions will catch you in all of these cases.)

So add Pidgin to the list. It's fun.

Chess art

I was supposed to be looking for something else, but these chessmen caught my eye, along with dozens of other insanely beautiful sets featured in the lengthy article.

Shutdown day 3

Don't get in their way

These dogs seem into it.

From a site called "Design You Trust."  Lots of interesting things there.

Hogmanay Rising

The fire festival is close at hand. Someday I hope to go to Scotland for it, but thus far it has not worked out.

In Shetland, where the Viking influence remains strongest, New Year is still called Yules, deriving from the Scandinavian word for the midwinter festival of Yule.

It may surprise many people to note that Christmas was not celebrated as a festival and virtually banned in Scotland for around 400 years, from the end of the 17th century to the 1950s. The reason for this dates back to the years of Protestant Reformation, when the straight-laced Kirk proclaimed Christmas as a Popish or Catholic feast, and as such needed banning.

And so it was, right up until the 1950s that many Scots worked over Christmas and celebrated their winter solstice holiday at New Year when family and friends would gather for a party and to exchange presents which came to be known as hogmanays.

There are several traditions and superstitions that should be taken care of before midnight on the 31st December: these include cleaning the house and taking out the ashes from the fire, there is also the requirement to clear all your debts before “the bells” sound midnight, the underlying message being to clear out the remains of the old year, have a clean break and welcome in a young, New Year on a happy note.

I wonder if the lack of Christmas is less compatible with America, or the idea of annually clearing all one's debts. The latter, I suppose.

Holiday Travels

I have just returned from the ancestral homeland in east Tennessee, where I visited with both my father's and mother's people. The Newfound Gap was open on the way over, and we stopped to have a snowball fight. However, the park service decided to close it before my return trip, which added a very substantial detour in the pouring rain. I was grateful to finally return home late last night.

Visiting family more-or-less annually over decades, you begin to think you notice patterns in lives that begin in the same place but show marked divergence. I think religious observance must be quite important to holding one's life together, as even the more annoyingly evangelical of my relatives have flourished markedly over the less-religious ones. The most intellectually sophisticated have not flourished, not even relatively speaking; but the ones who go to church do, for whatever reason or set of reasons. Education correlates with success only somewhat. Hard work does not; laziness is often rewarded by luck, or simply by the virtue of being happy with less. Although I should add that those who have pursued higher education and self-disciplined hard work to the greatest degree of success are also religiously observant, so perhaps I don't have a large enough set to tease out the details.

Perhaps you have similar observations, or divergent ones.

White papers with teeth

Why do right-wing intellectuals hate Trump, and by extension capitalism?

In the case of the anti-Trump right-wing intellectual, however, the genealogy of their disgust is slightly different. Rather than being possessed of the silly notion that the world will be just like school, they are possessed of a different, but no less silly, notion: that politics is just their insular conferences played out in public and backed by law, or their white papers given teeth—but that, in the final analysis, there’s no substantive difference between statesmanship and academia.

On the Feast of Stephen

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas!

The Wren Song: With Liza Minnelli

Poor lass, she's hardly mentioned. But she's there, featured a moment among minor deities of the Celtic pantheon.

There's some bad songs woven in there, for those who know the history.

"As I was goin' to kill, and all..."

Happy St. Steven's Day.

UPDATE: If you're wanting a start on the bad songs, you can begin here.

Scenes of Christmas

Pastries, Croissant and Danish.

Closeup of the Danish pastries.

The hound of the hall sleeping near the fire.

The Feast of Christmas

Old comrade Joseph W. once said this was the carol he most associated with the Hall. It's a fine one.



But I like this song too, though it is perhaps more festive than observant.



And a couple more, one by Bach:



And another by the Baltimore Consort, this last done a few years ago at Trinity Church, London.



The peace of the Hall to all people of good will. Merry Christmas to you all.

Holiday mania tightens its steely grip

If I'd been getting some of this clickbait email a few weeks ago, I might be in even more crafty trouble than I already am.  This morning I am completely lost in ideas for dyeing plain paper in tea baths and producing cunning paper bows with sprigs of this and that from the back yard. (Also, fringe scissors.  But I already have some of those.)  Luckily, I have no more presents to wrap and only two days remain before Christmas.  But oh, my goodness, who could resist trying to make these woven stars?  Especially, who could resist who actually has vast great quantities of long paper strips in stock just at the moment?

Last night neighbors joined us for a holiday dinner of oysters Rockefeller, standing rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, pureed peas with mint and cilantro, and a salad with grapefruit, pomegranate seeds, and Stilton cheese.  Our guests arrived with a fresh loaf of sourdough bread, a grapefruit pie, and killer wines.  I was particularly taken with my husband's Yorkshire pudding, which is something like a croissant and dangerously easy to make, judging as a spectator:

I see this as a future breakfast food, a worthy competitor to biscuits.

We're bang on trend this year with "foraged" holiday decor.  (To be truly on-trend, we'd have to work "bespoke" in there.)  I found last week that greenbriar makes a good wreath or garland late in the season after its leaves have turned red, but its stems are still flexible:

The Extremist Knights of Columbus

Two of our least respectable Senators, Harris and Hirono, ask a Federal judicial candidate if his membership in the Knights of Columbus isn’t disqualifying.

Given that the Knights’ positions are mere Catholicism, that sounds suspiciously like a religious test for office. Such tests are forbidden by the Constitution that these Senators have taken an oath to defend and protect. I wonder if either of them know what it means to take an oath?

The Knights of Columbus do.