timeimmortal

Howard Rotberg is the author of a novel about suicide bombing in Israel called The Second Catastrophe. He filed a lawsuit, recently, against Chapters, after Islamic hecklers broke up what I believe was a book signing or book launch at a Chapters store in Ontario. Subsequently, Rotberg was condemned as “racist” in a press release from Chapters proper, and his book was banned from the chain of stores…after a hijab-wearing part-time clerk falsely claimed that Rotberg asserted that “all Middle Easterners are terrorists.”

At any rate, Rotberg has started a blog to chronicle the ongoing legal matters pertaining to his suit against Chapters. Lend him your support if you are able, O Reader!

But it’s not exactly a victory, is it? Nine hundred days, 15 government bureaucrats, and over $600,000 spent — $500,000 by the taxpayer-funded AHRC and another $100,000 by Ezra Levant in the course of his defence — brought things to a most unsatisfying result:

Is this a victory? I suppose, in a narrow technical sense, it is. I’m off the hook now for both of the HRC complaints. That’s two legal battles done –- though I’m still up to my eyeballs fighting defamation suits and other legal actions that the human rights industry piled on top of these complaints.

But I’ve read the dismissal letter three times now, and each time it makes me more angry. Because I haven’t been given my freedom of the press. I’ve simply had the government censor approve what I said. That’s a completely different thing.

Pardeep Gundara –- a second-rate bureaucrat, a nobody –- had to give me his approval for me to be allowed to go back to my business. For 900 days I was in the dock, waiting for this literary giant to pronounce his judgment on me. And I found favour in his eyes -– but barely.

Sorry. I don’t give a damn what Gundara or the HRC says. Getting his approval is not a success. I won’t legitimize his arrogant “authority” by saying “thank you, master”. I’ll say: “who the hell are you? Besides a busy-body bureaucrat?”

Look at his rationale for acquitting me: because the Western Standard met Gundara’s home-made tests of reasonableness. We published the cartoons in “context”; we published letters that “criticized” them; and my favourite, the cartoons weren’t “simply stuck in the middle” of the magazine. Gundara must have thought for ten whole minutes to come up with that list of journalistic do’s and don’t’s. And –- phew! -– he likes me. He really likes me!

Sorry again, I don’t give a damn if he likes me. In fact, it rather creeps me out that a whole squad of teat-sucking bureaucrats spent 900 days inspecting me and the Western Standard. I positively want to offend them. In fact, that’s pretty much the only test of my freedom: can I do exactly what Gundara says I shouldn’t? I’m not interested in publishing recipes or sports scores. I’m interested in bothering the hell out of government.

The debate is far from over, and this victory is — as Ezra notes — only a technical one. The HRC has, in its rejection of the second complaint, nevertheless shored up its power as an office of Censorship at work in the province of Alberta.

That is as unacceptable now as it was when this all came to light.

An interesting question is posed over at The Deeps of Time (a Catholic science blog): is atheism a science-stopper?

Steve Fuller explains:

While evolutionists have been busily trying to explain our propensity for Religion, they have neglected science itself. From an evolutionary standpoint, why have we done science at all –- and why are we still doing it?

The ease with which we accept banal non-answers to this question is breathtaking. The most popular non-answers usually involve some vague appeal to “innate animal curio­sity”. But this hardly distinguishes science from, say, gossip or sheer nosiness –- let alone religion. It also doesn’t explain why we persist in doing science even when trails grow cold or, worse, dangerous. Most evolutionary explanations account for a trait’s persistence in one of two ways: it either increases our chances for survival or it is the by-product of something that increases our chances for survival. But does science fit either description?

…

Clearly we have hit upon a paradox. Hardcore Darwinists are right that their version of biological evolution requires no belief in the kind of deity endorsed by the Abrahamic religions. However, it is unlikely that human societies would have devoted the time, effort and material resources needed to make that point in all its empirical detail, had they not also believed in the capacity of science to transcend species boundaries and acquire a comprehensive grasp of nature. Yet from a strict Darwinian standpoint, such a belief is unsustainable and perhaps ultimately lethal.

More generally, atheism has not figured as a force in the history of science not because it has been suppressed but because whenever it has been expressed, it has not encouraged the pursuit of science.

At its core, there is something very oddly Christian about the scientific method and its belief that the universe is rationally ordered such that a line of directed inquiry will be, in due season, rewarded in some fashion, either with a confirmation or a refutation of an initial hypothesis. In plainer terms, science is predicated in the belief that we shall find if we seek, that we shall see opened that upon which we knock.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that science has flourished in places where Christianity once flourished, and has stagnated in places that either never saw the Christian message become widespread, or that strove to remove it from the picture.

Why did we evolve the various academic pursuits generically termed “science”? What benefit does it serve? Arguably, scientific studies have resulted in the development of medical procedures, cures for diseases, and a better understanding of e.g. hygeine — all of which do confer some survival benefit on the human species. But primitive “science” gave us the spear, and then the bow. More modern science gave us gunpowder and TNT. Modern science gave us the nuclear bomb, and may one day give us something like a negative energy density strangelet — all of which, it could be argued, have a detrimental effect on the survival of the human species.

Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred have a short post up with the actual comparison, and while I’m sure there’s probably room for variance, I have to say that overall the results don’t surprise: wait times in Ottawa average about 20 hours, whereas wait times in Boston average about 1 hour.

I never understood what Michael Moore was getting at in Sicko. Not that I expect the man to turn in anything other than a distorted, misleading account of the subject he is covering, of course…but still. Dude totally glossed over several real problems that exist and persist in Canada’s system today.

Health care would have worked so much better in this country had it been able to stick to its original mandate: providing care for the chronically ill and accidentally injured. But as society got more and more lazy, and as Canadians took less and less interest in being active participants in their own health (see: obesity), it was inevitable that the system would become overloaded.

David Warren provides a most appropriate reflection, which I have chosen to use to re-open blogging after pausing a while to mark my wife’s birthday.

Some young aspiring journalist — obviously fishing for secrets of the trade — asked me the other day in email: “Do you purposely say things that are outrageous?”

“No,” I replied, “people are not so easy to shock, and these days everyone is used to the outrageous. Outrageous statements, and especially, outrageous half-truths and outright lies, will never ‘bring the ceiling down’. For if they did, politicians would never say them, let alone endlessly repeat them. Politicians, journalists, lawyers, university professors, and the other lower orders, constantly say the most outrageously untrue things, for the simple reason that they are so common, so uncontroversial. Nobody bats an eye.

“No,” I continued, “if you really want to bring the house down, say something that is obviously true. But it has to be something everyone knows, at least in his heart; something that everyone is thinking — subconsciously perhaps, but fairly near the surface. Be the first person to say aloud what everyone in the room is thinking, and then you may watch the ceiling come down.”

Amen. This is as good an answer to the question of why your good blogger, O Reader, does what he does as could be hoped for.

This is a HDR image composed from a single exposure to restore some background detail around the wedding party. Lightroom was used to produce an overexposed and an underexposed copy, and then Photomatix was used to compose the HDR image proper.

The original image can be seen below the fold.

Continue reading ‘Pic of the Day #687′

Who is this woman fair? She is wife, mother, lover, friend.
About her could all manner of songs be written and sung
Yet none would do justice to the beauty of God at her core

Sijo is a form of Korean poetry, usually written as three lines of 14 to 16 syllables each, with provision for a pause in the middle of each line.

It is said
that you cannot be told the beauty of the prairies.
You have to see.

In the same way
I cannot tell of the aspect of her that draws me in
It must be felt.

Like a divine gift
She is that which inspires a transformation
She pours out love.

She never asks
But I cannot help but desire to be better
Made pure for her.

I prefer her to scepters and thrones,
and I account wealth as nothing in comparison with her.

This poem has been in the works for a while now, but it wasn’t until last weekend that I thought of the phrasing that I wanted to use in the opening metaphor. The last two lines are a favourite verse from the Book of Wisdom, one that always makes me think of Grace.

What’s a wedding without wedding cake? Grace was instrumental in the making of the wedding cakes, helped by the maid of honour. The icing is her mother’s recipe.

My lovely wife Grace
has a kind, pretty face
And a silly manner
Which makes me more a fan of her

This is the first of a series of three poems which I intend to write for Grace’s birthday. The particular poetic form in use here is called a Clerihew, which was a short poetic form favoured by, among others, Chesterton.

This is a Lensbaby shot of a typical table setting and centrepiece at Kate & John’s wedding. The white balance is a bit “off”, mostly due (I suspect) to the fact that the room was lit by flourescent lights, while the windows letting in the natural light all had yellow glass panes on them.

He was 89 years old.

Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin’s prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, has died near Moscow at the age of 89.

The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure.

Solzhenitsyn was a tireless critic of the Soviet system, and one who saw with clarity the dangers and evils of atheism effected as state policy. The problems of both the Eastern and Western worlds were, in his view, inextricably linked with a philosophy of aggressive atheism and agnosticism.

It has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

A tireless champion of human rights — genuine human rights — he will be missed. Rest in peace, Mr. Solzhenitsyn — God grant you peace, and may you rejoice forever in His unending Kingdom.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

This is one of the more random shots I took at the wedding reception. It’s the maid of honour’s camera — a Panasonic TZ3, if memory serves — and her fiancé’s scribbled notes. He was the MC, you see. Some artificial vignetting was added in Lightroom, and the end result was, I think, a fairly dramatic shot indeed.

Here comes the bride!

This shot has obviously been rather heavily edited in Lightroom, the result of a couple of new presets I’ve been playing with. I’m really beginning to like the effect of partially de-saturating an image. Here, it creates a kind of “olde tyme” effect.