Random political thoughts

I haven't posted on here in a coon's age, but it is not for lack of material on which to pontificate. Unfortunately my infatuation with Ron Paul has waned now that he has crashed and burned like a person would expect would happen to anyone who expounded his "radical" views. At least his strong support among young people, and particularly college students, augurs well for the future of American political thought. The way that his agenda was enthusiastically embraced by certain groups suggests to me that there is a strong sentiment that the federal government has overstepped its bounds on many fronts. I feel that bloated federal government has fundamentally changed what the public expects from the federal government and in turn how this country goes about providing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to its subjects. One example is complex issues of morality and natural law. The common sentiment seems to place these decisions, as they relate to matters of law and justice, in the lap of the Supreme Court rather than within states and communities under whose purview these issues fall per their lack of enumeration in the Constitution. The catch is "globalization"; it is not always in the literal sense of the world, but also in the increasingly blurred boundaries between groups of people espousing similar views. Is it possible for a community or a state to ban homosexual unions but not a neighboring state because of different beliefs among the groups residing in each respective state? It hardly seems possible that this could be the case in a day and an age when people hop state boundaries on a sometimes daily basis. This is an issue that must be carefully scrutinized by those propounding the typical libertarian idea of defering to the next smallest unit of government.

What about Barack Obama? He's an interesting candidate: hardly as eloquent to my ear as he is touted to be to others' ears, yet charismatic and idealistic beyond any candidate in my admittedly short memory. Senator Obama reminds me of many college students that I'm around. He is visionary, intelligent, and somewhat anxious about the state of his country. I have no idea whether these qualities make for a good president or not. The primary duty of the chief executive is to represent his country in foreign affairs and issues of defense. I think these are the areas where Obama's credentials are most tenuous. I suppose that one could write a whole book glossing the candidates' credentials but the above are my Obama first-thoughts.

John McCain is petulant old man and truly a military hero, thus instantly endearing himself to enthusiastic admirers of Presidents of the early republic. I really think McCain is a statesman that is somewhat indifferent to social issues but feels forced to settle in to a Republican platform because he must court the base in order to win the election. In foreign affairs I'm willing to defer to his judgement because he's been dealing with the United States trying to find her place on the global stage for most of his career.

More to come.

Ron Paul

I have a very unfamiliar feeling this election season. I actually passionately support a presidential candidate! Although I thought that Geroge Bush was at least an equal or better option than John Kerry (and still do), my support for Mr. Bush was far from emphatic and was always tempered by my concerns about his intelligence on the global stage.

Up to this time I've been a very passive spectator in the the election campaigns, having watched none of the debates and expecting the usual uninspiring assemblage of Congressman and governors; however, now that I've learned something about all of the candidates I'm pleasantly surprised by Ron Paul.

Perhaps its my time at university or simply a natural maturation of my political ideology, but I'm as surprised as anyone that I've become a libertarian in many ways. But Dr. Paul is right when he opines that our federal government is not what the country's fathers envisioned and also codified in the constitution. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were horrified by the bureaucracy that sprung up under Alexander Hamilton in the Treasury department during George Washington's administration, and I think he had something like 30 employees. I am confident that even a high Federalist like Hamilton would be completely jarred if he saw how the federal government has ballooned over the centuries. With that said, the founding fathers would probably explain that it is only expected that a government will continue to grow as long as it is successful and governance becomes more complicated. This is why the powers allowed the federal government must be strictly enumerated and were in the Constitution. I'm no political theorist, but my personal experience makes Ron Paul's solution resonate. The more complex the problem, the more local the solution must be.

There's so much more to say but I guess I've already drained my overflowing exuberance. Maybe another day.

The Rape of Winter

The boy child of Ecuador has lessened his very tight grasp of air masses on the North American continent. The reprieve was incipient in a large cyclone that terrorized the midwest with snows, ice, and floods. The desecent of the arctic air mass in Wisconsin was expedited by the storms peregrination to New England.

Far from impressive, the cold has been average at best for a typical January. Minong in Douglas County recorded the states coldest temperature of -27 degrees Fahrenheit. The cold air's trip over the unfrozen waters of Lake Superior created a lake effect snow event. The propinquity of Giles, Hurley, Gurney, and Saxon Falls to the windward side of Lake Superior left those towns with upwards of one foot of snow.

Interestingly, not since the great El Nino year of 1998 has California suffered such a tremendous loss of fruit due to cold temperatures. This El Nino is indeed matching up formidably with 1998's event. No definite conclusions can be drawn, but El Nino's have been occuring ere the National Weather Service began to be, yet there are no data that stack up with these two most recent events in terms of departure from the expected winter weather. Perhaps our warmer earth has provoked the seemingly irascible little boy into a death grip on the cold air, no longer allowing even a brief furlough back to a normal winter.

Hope for the hippie earth lovers like me is entrusted to the winter sport enthusiasts and the people whom allow their indulgence. The pockets of the businesses and industies affected by the rape of winter might just be deep enough to gain the attention of some august congressman with a pecuniary interest in the matter. If he can rally his congressman friends around his plight perhaps the square legislative wheels can finally be kicked and beaten into motion and a few decades later the law can finally force the rabble into action and eventually the rabble will realize big business is the real problem and force congress to stop turining a blind-eye to big business, and after the paperwork settles and the glaciers are gone the United States will have finally addressed GW.

And soften'd sounds along the waters die: Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play.
-Alexander Pope

A natural swing of the climatic pendulum?

The preliminary climate statistics are here.

The ten warmest years globally since 1880 have all occured since 1995.

Farrago

Only 109 days until opening day of baseball season! I have every reason to believe that this will be the year the Brewers cast off the small-market shell that has been holding them captive to losing. Oh, how I could go for a 7:05 first pitch at Miller Park on a sunny June evening. Ben Sheets vs. Mark Prior. I'd even take a 9:05 game at Chavez Ravine or Pacific"Belle". At least if it must be winter it could actually be winter. I hate the cold as much as the next person, but this is Wisconsin, after all. We are right where you would expect for the last half-decade; it is the middle of December and there is no snow on the ground and it is 45 degrees. I miss those real winters we used to have where there was actually snow on the ground for weeks on end and it was cold and icy and wintry. If you want some proof of global warming just google the madison lakes ice-on and ice-off dates. You will notice the trend of later ice-ons and earlier ice-offs, especially over the last decade or so.

One ray of hope is the document which is expected soon that will liberalize the Traditional Latin Mass which was the norm for Catholics for 1500 years before the protestants infiltrated in the 1960s. The Tridentine Rite, as it is commonly known, was never forbidden, but it fell into dissuse by the 1970s. In contrast to the protestantized mass that is so common now, the latin mass is a carefully choreographed work of art that was refined over a thousand years. It is quiet, reverant, and mysterious. The priest and the people both face the same direction and the priest chants the prayers in latin. The latin mass is a mysterious encounter with God as opposed to the pedestrian gathering of soccer moms that typifies most masses these days.

H.L. Mencken, the famous literary critic and self-proclaimed atheist described the old mass:

...
The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its occasional astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to some extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous.

Rome indeed has not only preserved the original poetry of Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone.

Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope.

This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a dignified spectacle; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable police sergeant in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

Interesting Article

I couldn't let this article pass without linking to it.

Another round on me!!

Did Shakespeare die a papist?

I thought this article was interesting. Some people have made similar claims for famous protestants like Milton and Bach. Even if Shakespeare wasn't a Catholic himself, his works seem to show an appreciation for the Catholic ethos.

Meanwhile, it was quite warm around here today. October is going into the books as one of the top ten coldest since records have been kept. Either way, a warm winter is predicted once again this year. Perhpas it is only appropriate since the hole in the ozone layer over the south pole is as large as it's ever been since humans have measured it. Apparently this was a "record" year for greenhouse gas emissions.

Perhaps one of the reasons that I've distanced myself from politics over the past couple of years is that it's so self-serving. How can possible impending self-destruction not even be a campaign issue? I guess taking a strict stance against pollution and environmental destruction does not garner votes.