Tipsy Teetotaler’s Tasty Tidbits 7/2/11

Here’s today’s tasty tidbits:

1. Islam as Protestant or Jewish.
2. SSM was just a decoy for the real radical agenda.
3. Euphemism alert.
4. CAFOs for homo sapiens.
5. Local boy makes good, Purdue girl makes history.
6. Indiana Supreme Court (ouch!) in the news again.
7. Who owns the 21st Century?
8. I have no need of that hypothesis.
9. What’s Hell like, dear skull?

***

Islam, unlike Catholicism, lacks a religious hierarchy that can issue binding doctrinal statements. There is no central authority in Islam, in other words; there are just learned men (imams) whose views become popular by persuasion. In that sense, Islam is more “Protestant” than “Catholic” (and, ultimately, I would say it is actually more “Jewish” than “Christian”). So, a “development of doctrine” within Islam would be a much more decentralized and ad hoc job than the steps taken by the Catholic Church, such as Vatican II.

This quote, from an article I linked yesterday, seems notable. It is one of the reasons I have never accepted the simplistic idea that Islam is a monolith, and uniformly evil.

***

It all makes sense now. Same-sex marriage in New York was just a decoy so we wouldn’t notice the elimination of cursive writing from Indiana’s mandatory curriculum.

***

Jim Lehrer on The New Hour on PBS just asked about Republican intransigence on “revenue enhancement.” Mark Shields calls them “tax increases.” “Bad Mark! Bad, bad, Mark! It’s ‘revenue enhancement!'” (And Republicans are intransigent, suffering from the delusion that we’ll grow our way out of this with tax cuts and growth).

Oh, wait. This isn’t supposed to be liveblogging.

***

We’ve got shelter, and three square meals a day, cars and TV, which is almost as good as Soma. We’ve even go the right to enjoy lots of orgasms with any other consenting adult. What more could anyone ask for?

That boy should not have shed the hindrances. The ballerina shouldn’t have let him remove hers. There’s no reason to insist on dancing so insanely well when others can’t match them. It’s just not right – not equal. The Handicapper General was right to stop it.

Everything’s back more normal now. We’ve got shelter, and three square meals a day, cars and TV. And we don’t even have to work any more — except some of us sell burgers to the others, or bundle loans. What more could anyone ask for? This is as good as it gets.

Someone on the internet suggested that this can’t go on. There’s not enough gas for the cars forever, he said. The government that guarantees all this could go broke. That kind of contrariness is weird. I think Diana Moon Glampers should look into it.

***

Friday was the birthday of film director, producer, and actor Sydney Pollack, born in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1934. And today on this day in 1937, Amelia Earhart (Purdue girl) was last heard from, somewhere over the Pacific. HT Writers Almanac

***

Good news: The Indiana Supreme Court is in the news again. Bad news: It’s because of another weird, weird decision.

My firm was involved in an earlier appeal of a similar case. After repeatedly, over something like 20 minutes, asking permission to leave the car, enter his mobile home, and — ahem! — offload some beer, our client became a bit assertive, got out of the car, and was arrested for, I believe, public intoxication for being intoxicated in a private mobile home park and, I believe, on his own lot therein.

I strongly believe that this case could have been disposed of with something like “we decline to attribute to the legislature the absurd position that the cabin of a car, occupied by someone using a designated driver, is a public place for purposes of the offense of public intoxication.”

***

Walter Russel Mead of the American Interest, a magazine that challenges and stretches me, graces the weekend Wall Street Journal Opinion pages (in front of the pay wall, I believe) with his opinion that “The Future Still Belongs to America.” I can’t disagree, though I’d put some money on China if the odds were good.

My dystopian vision is not based on belief that we won’t be #1, but on the belief that the whole world will be a much grimmer place economically before long.

We have voted ourselves too many goodies, promising ourselves a future we will not be able to afford. We have developed a pathetically statist reflex, looking to the government to solve every problem. It is political death for an elected official to tell the truth about the limits of government and of petroleum, and we credulously suck up the lies they therefore tell us, mocking someone who pops up with a little truth with labels like “The Malaise Speech.”

I see no sign that we are in firm grasp of reality yet, despite the problems since 9/08. It seems to me, rather, that hoi polloi await the return of “nomalcy,” by which they seem to mean 20% housing price increases for average homeowners who put a little lipstick on their pig (a weak, but current example here —  from the New York Times, so it may count toward your freebies), as if $75,000 wage-earners really could be living in $900,000 homes with mortgages system-wide. Folks, this does not compute.

I’m also deeply disturbed at remnants of the dubious confidence in “the financial sector.” It’s not so much that they lie, cheat and steal — though they do — as that we are embodied souls who actually need stuff, not just loans and financial paper, and somebody‘s got to make that stuff. I lack the confidence that countries who trade with each other won’t war with each other, though it’s had a pretty good run for a while. No: normalcy is is “in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread.”

It is a perk of (relatively) financially secure bloggers, as of true monarchs, to call ’em as we see ’em without regard to the next election.

***

There are innumerable conspiracy theories in the world. I don’t need them, unless it’s about Rousseau and Locke meeting in a smoke-filled room to build a time bomb, or Lucifer and his minions calculating how best to delude us. We have met the enemy, and he is us.

***

Maybe Octavian Gabor and I listened to the same Ancient Faith Radio Podcast, but I was on my bike and didn’t write it down. He now posted it to Facebook:

From Desert Fathers: A skull to Father Macarius: “In Hades, we cannot see each other’s faces, but only the back. When you pray for us, we are able to see one another’s face for a moment.”

Bon appetit!