Wittenberg Gate: On Dogs and Grace

Dory at Wittenberg Gate writes, in a April 12, 2005, post:

I am convinced that God made dogs to enable us to see grace from the grace-giver's perspective, rather than our usual position as a recipient of grace. At our house we have a new canine addition, a mixed-breed (mostly lab) nine week old pup named Bob. His older brother, Matthias, is a four year old dog with so many bloodlines that we figure he must be like the original dog "kind" that padded after Noah when he disembarked from the ark...

She goes on to mention some of the ways she thinks that living with dogs can teach someone about God's grace toward people. I especially like her first one: "He loves us even when we're yucky."

Commentary: Benedict XVI and Freedom

Alejandro A. Chafuen, a founding member of the Acton Institute and the president of Atlas Economic Research Foundation, writes:

John Paul II’s pontificate left an unparalleled legacy of papal teachings. One key aspect of his tenure is the space he created for the work of other great theologians. The new pope, Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is one of them. Given Ratzinger’s sharp focus on doctrine, many have seen only one side of this man: the protector of the faith, the leader of a new “inquisition.” Few have focused on his rich analyses of freedom...

The commentary was published April 20, 2005, on the Acton Institute's website. Use title link to see the rest of the article.

BookStation: New shipment of field guides

I hope my out-of-area readers will bear with me when, from time to time, for the benefit of my local readers I tout special deals and/or new arrivals at our little bookstore in John Day, Oregon. It's called the BookStation, and it's located inside the Leathers gas station, 603 West Main, between the Chester's Thriftway grocery store and the Les Schwab Tire Center. (Our motto: "Fueling both minds and machines.")

Today's notice: we've just put out another shipment of various types of field guides. Among the titles we've just stocked/restocked are Birds of Oregon (see my March 29, 2005 post), and these two:


Audubon Society Pocket Guide to Familiar Mushrooms of North America

Oregon Wildflowers: Beginner's Field Guide

Minor correction: the actual subtitle is, "A children's field guide to the state's most common flowers."

USGS Earthquake Hazards Program-FAQ - Seismographs

This site has information on seismometers, seismographs, and seismoscopes (the first of which, it says, "was invented by the Chinese philosopher Chang Heng in A.D. 132").

It claims that "It is relatively easy to acquire the necessary materials and build your own seismometer," and provides relevant links.

Since I know people who like to build their own scientific equipment, such as telescopes (including trying to grind their own lenses), I thought I'd throw this out there.

Have fun, guys. And let me know how it works out.

The Scotsman - Business - Shell to sell North Sea assets

At this point, Shell has only announced that it plans to put three mature (translation: largely drained) fields - Auk, Fulmar, and Dunlin, which includes the smaller Merlin and Osprey fields - up for grabs. The fields only account for about 2 percent of Shell's UK output. And, just with this, some people are jumping for joy that the little guys will finally have a chance to get their hands on some oil fields.

What a day and age we live in.

Shell has previously announced that it wants to raise billions and billions of dollars in the next couple of years by selling off assets - and with barrel prices as high as they are right now they're apparently finding no shortage of wannabe buyers. This small offering is therefore almost certainly only one of several oil field auctions to come.

An excerpt from the title-linked article by John Bowker, deputy city editor at The Scotsman:

Oil consultant Charles Westwood noted that the high oil price made it a "sensible time" to be hiving off assets and the $50-plus average is expected to tempt firms from across the globe. Of existing North Sea players, Paladin and Canadian firm Talisman are certain candidates, while the auction will also attract new independents.

Graham Tran, of union Amicus, welcomed the move, saying it was key that the North Sea was "in the hands of those prepared to invest".The big three oil majors (Shell, BP and Exxon) have been criticized in recent years for sitting on assets while they explored new markets while more eager firms have been left stuck on shore.

Shell echoed the words of its union, saying the decision to put the fields on sale was in order to "unlock their potential and extend their life". Currently, all three are expected to cease production by 2012.

Uh, huh.

Scotsman.com News - Storm damage set to create new Hebridean islands

Well, no, not exactly.

I have to disagree somewhat with reporter Murdo Macleod and his headline writer at The Scotsman. What's on the verge of happening is that existing islands might be gashed into smaller bits. While this would result in multiple islands where there was one, leaving each fragment in need of a name, I wouldn't want to call it creating new islands. It would be the same old islands, subdivided.

(If an underwater volcano gets really cooking and pumps out a whole lot of magma, that's creating a new island.)

Plus there's another worry for these particular islands, less visually dramatic perhaps, but serious - the islands could remain intact but with freshwater lochs flooded by salt water. Saltwater is generally a very bad substitute for fresh water.

And these are inhabited islands. Ouch.

In His Own Words

Hugh Hewitt, for the April 21, 2005, The Daily Standard online (www.weeklystandard.com), comments briefly on the homily that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger delivered just before the conclave began. And then he reprints the homily in full.

It was a powerful, blunt, no nonsense homily - and now the man who made himself so wonderfully clear during its presentation is Pope Benedict XVI.

The homily is worth a close read, I think.

The Death of Terri Schiavo: An Epilogue, by Daniel Eisenberg

Daniel Eisenberg, M.D., responds to another doctor who thinks Eisenberg's regard for severely disabled people is archaic and misguided:

Given a choice between the enlightened ethics of my correspondent and the "archaic" ethics of Jewish law, I really see no choice. He is not the first educated person to announce to the world that traditional ethics are passe. But throughout history, the cheapening of life has inevitably led to the deaths of innocent people. Whether it is a communist nation that devalues the intellectuals or ethnic groups that cheapen the lives of their rivals, in every instance the beginning of the end is the concerted attempt to convince the population that some lives just don't matter.

I can only hope that if you or I wind up in a medical facility, we draw a Dr. Eisenberg instead of someone like the other fellow. The other fellow, you see, thinks he can and should decide when to declare someone else a person. Once he culls you from the human race in his own mind, you're not to be fed any more.

It's scary stuff, but Eisenberg tackles it head on.

This article appears on www.aish.com, and was published April 10, 2005.

Michelle Malkin: THIS DAY IN HISTORY, PT. II

It is now 60 years since war correspondent Ernie Pyle died. Michelle Malkin has links to online archives and to a Stars & Stripes article.

I think it's fairly safe to say that Pyle made servicemembers real to the folks back home. Two of his books, Here Is Your War and Brave Men, are currently in print thanks to the University of Nebraska Press.


Here Is Your War: Story of G. I. Joe

Scouting Round-up

Murdoc Online has an update to his "Dear Pack 3311" story of the other day. See http://www.murdoconline.net/archives/002221.html.

The Colonel over at West Coast Pundits talks about what it's like for a father watching his son transition from a Cub Scout to a Boy Scout. As he points out, sometimes dads learn valuable lessons at campouts, too. See "Thoughts on this Weekend's Boy Scout Campout" at http://westcoastpundits.blogspot.com/2005/04/thoughts-on-this-weekends-boy-scout.html.

And, last but not least, I think one of the all-time great Scout stories is that of scouts in Iraq. See "Iraqi Scouts Thrive Despite Tyranny, War", from May 12, 2004, by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos at Fox News, at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,119658,00.html:

WASHINGTON — Often meeting furtively, with no communication with fellow councils throughout the country, Iraqi scouts (search) remained active despite oppression under Saddam Hussein's regime and subsequent war with Iraq — a miracle say Arab scouting representatives.

"The (scouting) movement never died in Iraq, and that is something no one knew," said Malek Gabr, deputy secretary of the World Organization of the Scout Movement (search), based in Geneva, Switzerland...

Greens Give Go-Ahead to Defense Project | Germany | Deutsche Welle |

This might get lost in the other news today, but there seems to have been a minor shift in international military cooperation, thanks to a surprising source. Nina Werkhäuser reports for Deutsche Welle:

The last hurdle to Germany’s participation in the "MEADS" transatlantic missile project has been overcome after the Green party, the junior partner in government, said it will vote in favor of the air defense system.

After weeks of opposition, Germany’s Green Party has decided to support the Medium Extended Air Defense System, or MEADS.

Funded by the US, Italy and Germany, MEADS aims to protect troops or sensitive locations from aerial assault by missile or plane. The system is intended to replace Patriot missiles in the United States and Germany, and Nike Hercules missiles in Italy...

This does not mean that they are signing on whole-heartedly (far from it), and they will undoubtedly expect something in return (politics is politics, and they've asked that other defense spending be cut in return for this), and there actually haven't been any final votes yet (so I'm not sure but there's still a chance that this might fall through), but, my golly, we have Green Party officials actually going on record to say that everything else taken into consideration, they can step aside and let a military project happen. My golly, the Greens in Europe looking at something in context, and being reasonable? Taking a big, broad view and looking ahead? Making compromises? In public, no less? There is hope, after all. (Knock wood.)

Or am I behind the times, here? I haven't been following what Greens have been up to in Europe lately, to be honest with you. But the last time I checked, they were latching on to bits and pieces of odd social engineering, and couldn't seem to connect dots for the life of them. They also seemed rather prone to losing their tempers, and having no patience with anybody who wasn't in lockstep. Heads in the clouds, boot tips on other people's shins sorts of people, if you'd like to put it that way. Have they been evolving/maturing while I wasn't looking?

The Surprising Undersea World at Pulley Ridge

This story is over at the U.S. Geological Survey website, with a last-modified date on it of April 12, 2005.

It seems that we don't know as much about where coral reefs can (and do) grow as we thought:

In the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, approximately 250 km west of Cape Sable, Florida, and 70 km west of the Dry Tortugas, are a series of drowned barrier islands known as Pulley Ridge. The ridge was found in 1950, but it wasn't until recent years that scientists discovered something extraordinary...

The Pulley Ridge coral reefs are much deeper than other known coral reefs, which means that they have much less light than usual to work with. They've adapted. Some of the colonies are flat instead of vertical, for instance. Use the title link for more info and a few photos.

Mertz - Peters - Michaels: Scam Alert

Barbara Mertz, who also writes under the pen names of Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels (and therefore has earned the nickname of MPM), has issued this warning:

MPM does NOT autograph photographs of herself either as "Elizabeth Peters" or "Barbara Michaels." Any offers of such for sale on the Web (or any place else) are FAKES. Caveat emptor!

I think that pretty well says it. The title link is to the author's official web page.

Oregon baseball coaching record now held by Art Thunell

The old record in Oregon for most wins by a high school baseball coach was 566. Art Thunell's Prospectors gave him his 567th win on March 30. They've added a couple since then.

The Prospectors are the Grant Union High School team. The high school is located between John Day and Canyon City, and serves several communities.

Canyon City was at the center of a gold rush starting in 1862, hence the school mascot.

UPDATE: Reporter Joe Freeman has written a feature story on Art Thunell for the Oregonian. See Pride of John Day

A key passage:

...Although the name Art Thunell is synonymous with success in Oregon baseball circles, it is measured by more than wins and losses in Grant County.

"I didn't realize how good a coach and mentor he was until I got out of high school and started facing tough decisions in life," says Ken Niles, a former Grant Union player and assistant coach who now coaches Sheldon. "I spent three hours a day on the baseball field learning more about life than baseball. You just don't realize it when you're a kid."

And this is by design.

"We only ask three things of our kids: We ask them to play hard, to be focused and to be a class act," Thunell says. "My goal is to develop some really nice kids who go out and have success in the world outside of baseball. We want them to understand that commitment is extremely important and dedication is important and they need to work hard." ...

United We Blog! for a Democratic Nepal: We The Congressmen Respectfully Ask Your Majesty

This Nepalese blog reprints the text of a letter to His Majesty King Gyanendra from eleven members of the U.S. Congress. They also print a picture of the signatures attached to the letter (I guess to say, 'Hah, here's proof we're not making this up.')

The names listed are James T. Walsh, Frank Wolf, Tom Allen, Mark Steven Kirk, Edolphus Towns, Christopher Smith, Mark Udall, Tom Udall, Bob Filner, Carolyn Kilpatrick, and Barney Frank.

I would have to say that many of the comments attached to the post are heated, to say the least. But varied. There are several points of view, certainly. (Use title link.)

I've been trying to find the date this letter was written, plus I wanted to attach a press release or follow-up or something from one or more of the above-named Congressmen. So far, I haven't found anything on Nepal, period, on any of the official websites I've visited, but it's early days yet. (Tom Allen, Edolphus Towns, James T. Walsh down, eight to go...)

I'm not saying I've searched in every corner of these websites, but you'd think there would have been something in the press releases or recent news sections or something that would pop up when you put "nepal" into a search box. But, as I said, I've only checked the three websites so far...

Notable Book: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carre

As a bookseller, I thank "Smiley" over at The Daily Demarche for his recent plug for this book. (See comments section on their 6 months/200,000 hits post.) I've been selling books since the tail end of 1995 and this is one of the better sellers over the whole decade - and we've sold it to an astonishing variety of people. That kind of staying power and broad appeal in fiction is rare.

(Me? It's still in my to-read-someday stack, I'm afraid. I'm still working my way through the Tommy Hambledon books by Manning Coles, thanks. Tommy's no George Smiley, and was never meant to be, but he's a hoot as a hero. I'm afraid I'm one of those lightweights who generally prefers her fictional spies to be humorous as well as daring and ingenious. But I do plan to read this book. Really. But I have a huge stack of books to get to. Really.)


Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Barnes & Noble has a lengthy, detailed review by one of their own over at their website (click on the book cover - it should take you there). The review starts:

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which first appeared in 1974, is arguably Le Carré’s masterpiece and is surely one of the great spy novels of the 20th century. Loosely inspired by the career of Kim Philby, a Russian double agent who worked his way into the upper reaches of the British Secret Service, Tinker, Tailor tells the story of donnish, unprepossessing master spy George Smiley and his quest to identify the "mole" -- the deep-penetration agent -- who has turned Britain's Intelligence Service (commonly known as the Circus) inside out....

A side note, to any author out there trying to think up a pseudonym for yourself: If you pick one with a prefix, you are apt to get misfiled both on bookstore shelves and in Internet databases. In the bricks-and-mortar world, Le Carre gets put in both "L" and "C", for instance. (And no matter where you put his books, some customers will be upset that they're not in the other place. Trust me on that.) In addition, in databases he gets listed both as LeCarre and Le Carre, which don't always show up together in some book searches. And in some databases the fact that the last 'e' in his name is really an é, well, that can cause minor havoc, too. Pick something that can't be broken apart quite so many ways, please. Pretty please. Thanks.

The Scotsman - Business - How a high-stakes poker game stoked a bitter banking rivalry

This is a companion piece to the Royal Bank story to which I linked yesterday. (That's another nice thing about The Scotsman's business section - it will run related articles, to provide more than one perspective or more than one focus. You know - background, depth, those old-fashioned things.)

This also is by Martin Flanagan and Bill Jamieson:

SIR George Mathewson does not recall the Battle for NatWest in the clipped tones of a stuffy businessman. Reminiscences are punctuated by scowls and an occasional fist in the air, as if the events happened only last week. This isn’t a banker’s tranquil recollection of balance sheets, it is Marshall Zhukov reliving the Battle for Berlin...

I tell you, if you don't read business news, you're missing out on a great deal of drama and action. I didn't know that until recently. But I have had quite an education reading business news like this.

Here's the history bit I want to keep in my files, though:

...The Battle for NatWest was brutal, a combination of a fist-fight and a high-stakes poker game played out by Scotland’s two banking leviathans. It was a civil war which had been coming for more than two and a half centuries, as Royal Bank faced old adversary Bank of Scotland.

The animosity runs deep. The Royal was founded to counter the Jacobite links of the Bank of Scotland and the very different traditions were well illustrated in September 1745. As Prince Charles’s Highland army crossed the Forth, John Campbell, the Royal’s chief cashier, moved the bank’s cash, securities and plate into Edinburgh Castle, only to find Bank of Scotland had moved in its assets the day before...

Darfur Diary

Check this out.

Daryn Kobata, editor of Caltech 336, is taking a leave of absence to serve as the communications officer for the World Relief Darfur Relief Collaboration, a group of six humanitarian agencies working in conflict-affected areas of West Darfur, Sudan. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Caltech...

(I wonder if the disclaimer has anything to do with the fact that Kobata is a person of faith? Nah, couldn't be. Right?)

Anyway, it's an interesting read, from somebody actually on the ground in Darfur.

The entries start February 14, 2005, and end March 23, 2005. Does anybody know what's happened to Kobata since then?

UPDATE: http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/336/articles/Volume%205/03-10-05/darfur.html is an article on the author and her project, and has a picture of her on a camel.

Alexander F.C. Webster: Death of a Patriarch

In this April 15, 2005, article for OpinionJournal, Alexander F. C. Webster looks at the life of a man who tried to unify America's Orthodox Church:

With the eyes of the world fixed on Rome--upon the death of Pope John Paul II and the gathering of cardinals to pick his successor--many Americans might have missed the quiet passing of another prominent bishop. Earlier this week, His Eminence Archbishop Iakovos died peacefully at the age of 93. Today he will be interred in Brookline, Mass.

Though not a pope in any familiar sense of the term, Archbishop Iakovos wielded an almost papal authority among the roughly two million Greek Orthodox in America, as well as among two million Orthodox Christians of other assorted ethnic origins. He was the senior Orthodox hierarch in the U.S. from 1959 to 1996--a reign half again as long as Pope John Paul II's celebrated pontificate in Rome...

Father Webster is a priest in the Orthodox Church in America and co-author of "The Virtue of War: Reclaiming the Classic Christian Traditions East & West." I'm not familiar with this author or this book, but it's an important topic, certainly.


The Virtue of War: Reclaiming the Classic Christian Traditions East and West

FROM THE PUBLISHER (via barnesandnoble.com):
The way of life in the West is currently under assault, and Western Civilization hangs in the balance. Christians need to reclaim the great moral teachings on war and peace from the contemporary revisionists who would have Christians believe it is necessary to choose a "lesser evil" for a good cause or as a way of being "responsible" citizens of a nation-state. Professors Webster and Cole explore in detail the great moral teachings found in Holy Scripture, the ancient and Byzantine Church Fathers, canon law, manuals of penance, lives of the saints, liturgical texts, visual icons, the medieval Scholastics, the great Reformers, and even among modern theologians and literary authors. They present a powerful, genuinely ecumenical, meticulously documented, incontrovertible case on behalf of the moral teachings known to Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christians as the just or justifiable war traditions...

Oh, this is interesting. I went looking to see if Alexander Webster had any other books. Here's an earlier (and pricier) title from another publisher. From 1999, we have:


Pacifist Option: The Moral Argument against War in Eastern Orthodox Theology

FROM THE PUBLISHER (via barnesandnoble.com)
In this path-breaking study, Fr. Alexander Webster convincingly demonstrates that a distinctive pacifist trajectory, characterized by the moral virtues of non-violence, nonresistance, voluntary kenotic suffering, and universal forgiveness, has endured through two millennia of Eastern Orthodox history in unbroken continuity with the ancient Church. Webster consults a vast array of primary texts including Holy Scripture, patristic writing through the Byzantine era that terminated in AD 1453, Orthodox canon law from the Seven Ecumenical Councils and other Byzantine Greek legal sources among others. Of interest to historians and to students of theology and religion.

The Daily Demarche: 6 months and 200,000 hits later...

Late last December, I got steered toward a wonderful, wise, witty, very grounded blog called The Diplomad. Within weeks, though, he signed off.

His farewell message is a classic, by the way. We should all be able to take new turns away from old paths with such grace. See: "Hello! Hello! I really must be going!" at http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/.

The Diplomad called himself a member of the State Department Republican Underground, and he put out some pointed truths, in a very civilized fashion.

But he stopped. Just when I thought I was starting to really learn something from someone wiser and more experienced than myself, he stopped.

Luckily, he left a few pointers on who to check out, and through those suggestions I found several nice blogs, among them The Daily Demarche, another blog of the Republican Underground.

I'm not the only one who found them, obviously. In only about six months, The Daily Demarche has busted through the 200,000 visitor mark:

Just over six months ago I launched this blog, inspired by the now defunct and sorely missed Diplomad- not long after that Smiley joined me in this adventure in blogging. I think if anyone had told us at the time that we would last this long and attract any readers, let alone average about 1,800 hits per day we would have asked them to pass the bottle. We are having a lot of fun doing this, and don't plan to stop anytime soon, so please don't take this as a swan song- just a stroll down memory lane...

And, by the way, anyone else who is on a China Watch these days should definitely check them out. They do regular China-related round-ups, with many folks putting their heads and expertise together, and they also provide lots of good links.

Congratulations, Dr. Demarche and Smiley. And thanks for being there.