And We Are "The Great Satan"?

There are many moral evils weknow are happening right now, but because one cannot be indignent all day we try not to think about them too much. Things like the starvation camps of North Korea, or the "civil" war in Congo. However when this evils force themselvs onto us we are deeply affected. One of these great evils is Sex Selection of children, which is another name for aborting children after an amniocentesis or a sonogram that tells the parents that their offspring is a girl when they wanted a boy. In Beyond Therapy there are the global number of boys to girls, after ten to twenty years of Sex Selection. Here are those numbers and the commentary on them by the President's Council,

"Generally, any variation in the sex ratio exceeding 106 boys born per 100 girls born can be assumed to be evidence of the practice of sex selection. Here, from the most recent figures available (8/03), are just a few examples of skewed sex ratios around the world today. The sex ratio at birth of boys to 100 girls in Venezuela is 107.5; in Yugoslavia 108.6; in Egypt 108.7; in Hong Kong 109.7; in South Korea 110; in Pakistan 110.9; in Delhi, India, 117; in China 117; in Cuba 118; and in the Caucasus nations of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, the sex ratio has reached as high as 120. While the sex ratio in the United States has remained stable at 104.8."

So Moslem nations, Egypt & Pakistan, use abortion to have sons. Orthodox nations, Yugoslavia & Armenia (of all places Armenia!!!), and Catholic ones (Venezuela & Cuba). Where are the western nations? Well they arn't having any children.

Messiaen vs. Gustin

I was going to write about Dr. Gustin's musical theory and how it is refuted by Messiaen's opera Saint Francois d'Assise, but I saw my other recent posts and I think they are a little long and since there are no comments I think that no one is reading them. So I will ... What the hell, lets talk about the greatest composer of the twentieth century. Do I acctualy care if any one is reading this?

*I've Read lots of theologians, but I always come back to St Thomas Aquinas, who is the mostmodern and rewarding of them all.

*Here, too, we're dealing with a crucial moment (the Resurrection) in the history of the world, the most important moment since the Creation.

*Dodecaphony, serial music, atonal music, the result is the same: music without colour, grey and black. Except to express a terrible feeling of fear and anxiety, I see no emotion in this language, which sought to abolish resonance. I'am afraid that a love of music is missing from such a world.

These are all quotes from Olivier Messiaen, the composer who I consider the greatest of the last hundred years or so (at least since Stravinsky). These are words that could come from any one named Grimm. Yet they are the words of one of Classical Music's most anti-traditional and avant-garde composers. What is my point? Well I have alot to say but I'll try to make just one point. Tonality exists in more modes and ways than even Bach could imagine, and God (and also His image in man) could be expressed and glorified in more ways than St. Mathews Passion. If we want to create art the way the ancients did (Dante, Caravaggio, Bach) we should not look back and make a neo-classical art, but rather look foward, towards God and the Second Coming. We must always push forwards, and be a real avant-garde.

In an Age When Left is Right

Just when I thought that things where getting normal again. The lefties are over there, and the conservatives are over here. Yyou know? And every thing is as it should be. Than I see that Christopher ultra-leftie-bleeding-heart-liberal-greatest-living-man-of-letters-in-the-English-speaking-world Hitchens has an article in the Weekly Standard. I mean good God, F###ING HITCHENS & THE STANDARD; what is the world coming to? Don't get me wrong I love Hitchens (the only reason the read the Atlantic Monthly after Micheal Kelly was killed in Iraq) and I love the Standard, and I love that they are together at last, but its like eating sushi on pizza, it might taste good but it still feels weird going down.

I am In Way Over My Head

Yesterday I received my internship at the Independence Institute (link just to the left). I will spend all summer with David Kopel, a National Review Online columnist and gun nut. I will also get to have lunch with Governor Bill Owens, hopefully my senators Allard and Salazer, and just about every one in our state house and senate, as well as the publishers of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, and the head of the new Clarmont Institute branch in Denver. And a recruiter for the White House Internship Program will interview all of us. Oh, and I will even get my own cubicle. I am a little worried though, the other two interns go the Dartmoth, and Cornell. Will I get exposed as the fraud that I am?

That said, the place is the weirdest gun-loving, free-market, taxes-hating place I have ever seen. Not that I have seen many think-tanks before, even far-right ones. All the fellows who I meet, when they heard I would be working with David Kopel, said "You'll need a gun". I still don't know what they mean.

The lady I interviewed with was one of the most impressive people I have ever meet. She was born in 1940 in Holland, and both of here parents where in the resitance; she said something like "the nunns" where going to raise her if at any point her parents where killed. In the first five minutes of our conversation she called herself a Calvinist. Over the course of Two hours we talked about every thing. God, Christ, the Reserection, the Second Coming, The Unity of the Church, Abortion, Cloning, Stem-cell research, Euthanasia, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Free-Market, Highways, suburbain versus urban living, etc.

Its going to be a great summer!

Libertinism is not Libertarianism

In recent weeks I have heard from many different athorities that then Cardianl Ratzinger during his homily at The Mass for the Election of the Pope mentioned Marxism, and Libertarianism as false doctines of the modern age. He did nothing of the sort! Well yes he did say Marxism is a false doctine, but he never once mentioned Libertarianism. What he did say is this, "The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth."

Note that he said libertinism, and not Libertarianism. Why is this important? Well for one it is a a miss-translation that we have been hearing for the last three weeks. Second, with this miss-translation they, that is the old-gaurd "Spirit of Vatican II" catholics can say "sure the holy fahter says where wrong on the whole abortion thing, But what about you? He also says your wrong about the whole free-market thing. Therefore, if you shop at Wal-Mart and say your still a good Catholic, than I can tell people to have abortions and I am still a good Catholic." Further, this is one more example of what we all saw during the election. Kerry was going against Church teaching on abortion, but Busch was going against the Pope's wishes in invading Iraq.

Back to the miss-translation for a bit. I guess in the postmodern world where all we have is irony and relativity, than it makes perfect sense that what is for Cardinal Ratzinger a great evil, libertinism, is for us (the Oh So Enlightened Ironists) the great evil of Libertarianism, and its deformed love child, the free-market.

If that is the thinking behind the continual use of this miss-translation than we do live under the dictatorship of relativism.

The Land of the Not-So-Well Written

"I'm constantly surprised when I open novels by living American writers," Richard Pevear says via telephone from his home in Paris. "They're all written in very simple, first-person, declarative style. To my ear, they have no style at all. They just put down their words on paper."

Before all of you aspiring writers take too much offence at this statment, note who Richard Pevear is. With his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, he has produced the most definative, literary, and well written translations of the great Russian novels in English. For what it is worth I think he is right. Sure this American style was new in 1919 with In Our Time, & Big Two Hearted River could be one of the best American short stories, arguably better than Hills Like white Elephants. But come on boys! Its 2005! We are further from Hemingway, in time, than he was from Irving, we are further in time from Salinger than Salinger was from Adams, and Further from cummings than cummings was from Bryant. Yet they still haunt us in every thing we, as a people, write. This is not good. German literature did not exist before Werther because the Luther Bible was omni influential, Soviet literature was likwise non-existant because they all had to be like Gorky and write about "real" life. Well where to go? It is easy to complain about Vidal, DeLillo, and Dan Brown, but actualy doing something about? That takes a Goethe or a Pushkin. Where is America's national poet?

Doestoevsky on Holbein

But, strangely, when you look at the corpse of this tortured man, a particular and curious question arises: is all his disciples, his chief future apostles, is the women who followed him and stood by the cross, if all those who belived in him and worshipd him had seen his corpse like that (and it was bound to be exactly like that), how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect? Here the notion involuntarily occurs to you that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature are so powerful, how can they be overcome? How overcome them, if they were not even defeated now, by the one who defeated nature while he lived, whom nature obeyed, who exclaimed "Talitha cumi" and the girl arose, "Lazarus, come forth" and the dead man came out? Nature appears to the viewer of this paintinf in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctley, much more correctely, strange thout it is - in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which, which has senselessly siezed, crushed, and swoled up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being - seing such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, and the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems percisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly erternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily. The people who surrounded the dead man, none of whom is in the painting, must have felt horrible angush and confusion on that evening, which at once smashed all their hopes and almost their beliefs. They must have gone off in terrible fear, though each carried wihin himself a tremendous thought that could never be torn out of him. And if this same teacher could have seen his own image on the eve of the execution, would he have gone to the cross and died as he did? This question also comes to you involuntarily as you look at the painting.

The Idiot

BABY BABY BABY!!!

Dianna and Micheal Hurwitz are now the proud parents of Asher Samuel Hurwitz. He was nine Lbs. and born at 4:o5 5/4/05.