Crusade Tirade

Apparently there are those in Spain who believe that their government should apologize to the Moors for the Reconquista. Yes, you read that right, the Spaniards should apologize to their colonizers for having liberated themselves. This is via Gerald Warner, who thinks it's a load of hooey, along with the great fashion for national historical apologies in general. No points for guessing that I agree.

There's an insidious interplay of forces at work here. In the West, there are those (mostly academics) who desperately want the opportunity to apologize for Western Civilization. Many of them have absorbed to various degrees the ideology of a generation of Arab Nationalist intellectuals who painted the history of Europe's relations with the Arab world as an unending litany of oppression and malfeasance. Despite the waning relevance of Arab Nationalism, this narrative of victimology has lingered on, even blossomed, as a foundational precept of Islamist geopolitics. This brings us to the present day, when Western intellectuals and the majority of the Muslim world can slowly shake their heads together in sorrow over all the injustices perpetrated on Muslims by Europeans in ages past, the greatest of which is, of course, the Crusades. "Oh! The Crusades!" they wail, "how horrible, how barbaric! What monsters we were!".

I'm just going to throw this out there: the medieval Arabs didn't seem to take the Crusades very seriously. The Crusaders were never anything close to an existential threat to the Caliphate-- unlike the Mongols or the Turks -- and prior to the 20th century, they were little more than an interesting historical anecdote and a backdrop for the heroism of Salah-al-Din. It wasn't until the Arab Nationalists realized they could use the narrative as a club to beat at the West that the Crusades were recast as the pivotal tragedy of Arab history, on which everything else turns. And with few exceptions, we swallowed the narrative hook, line, and sinker.

Despite the fact, of course, that it doesn't make any damn sense. The Crusades occurred very shortly (historically speaking) after the Muslim Arabs had conquered and subjugated fully half of the Christian world by area, and all the greatest Christian centers of population and prestige except for Rome and Byzantium. From a broader historical perspective, the various attempts to recapture the Holy Land were nothing more than a rather pathetic and shortlived pushback against the Muslim expansion, after which positions were consolidated for a few centuries. But before, during, and for centuries after the Crusades, the Arabs and then their Ottoman successors never stopped trying to conquer Europe, right up until the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate after World War I. Yet we're supposed to beat ourselves up that some European nobles conquered a few measly bits of Palestine and held Jerusalem for a few years, nearly a thousand years ago? Spare me.

I don't mean to suggest that the Arab world never suffered at the hands of Europe. But this is history, everybody did terrible things to everybody else. Apologizing for it accomplishes nothing.

Your Government Cares... How Much You're Costing Them

Whilst commenting on what Nancy Pelosi thinks of you, Fearsome Comrade uses an excellent example to ask why many people trust the government to solve the nation's problems:

Remember: To the government, you are a number in a computer. You think your insurance company doesn't care about you? How about if your insurance company had guns and the means to enforce its will on the population? How much would they care then?

For serious! People gripe about how corporations like banks, HMOs, and particularly insurance companies are so uncaring, impersonal, and exploitative. And it can certainly be true, but at the end of the day that company is still making money off you. You may be nothing more to them than the pasture on which they grow fat, but at least you're that. You're still on the black side of the ledger. To the government, you are a liability, an expense. You're still just a number, but to them that number's in red.

Happy Dismallest Day of the Year

Ye gods above, I'm tired of hearing people say that it's now "officially" winter, the solstice having passed. Sorry, I know I'm a pedant to get this annoyed at each and every solstice and equinox, but the seasons are not defined astronomically! In fact, they're not officially defined at all, at least, not in the United States. Listen to wise Uncle Cecil of the Straight Dope:

There is a widespread misconception in this country — which extends, I might note, to the makers of most calendars, dictionaries, and encyclopedias — that summer "officially" starts on the day of the summer solstice, June 21 or 22, which is the longest day of the year. Americans also believe (1) that there is some valid scientific reason for doing it that way, and (2) that everybody in the Northern Hemisphere does it that way, and always has. None of these things is true. So far as I have been able to discover, no scientific or governmental body has ever formally declared that summer starts on the solstice.

Hear that, people, Washington has left you to your own devices to decide what season it is on any given day! Madness! Chaos!

Things were much simpler in the mid-20th century, when it was generally accepted that winter comprised December, January, and February; spring March, April, and May; summer June, July, and August, and fall was September, October, and November. It's nice and simple, and lines up pretty well with the weather. As far as I'm concerned, spring starts with the first flowers, summer on the first day I break a sweat (without exerting myself), fall when it smells like fall, and winter with the first snow that sticks. But that's just me. Incidentally, nobody seems to know where the rather strange idea originated that the equinoxes and solstices mark the beginnings of the seasons. It's one of those things that everyone just started telling each other with the assumption that it was backed by some sort of authority, but now it's gotten so ingrained in the American consciousness that I'm surely guaranteed an absolute minimum of four days of frustration per year for the rest of my life. You could argue, I suppose, that I should just lighten up. You clearly don't know me very well.

"Your Poverty Makes Me Uncomfortable"

Alarming News quotes a disturbing question posed to the "Ethicist" column of the New York Times (registration required). I have to quote this in full:

A woman I hired to do simple gardening comes weekly and, when school is out, brings her kids. While her twin preschoolers play in the shade, her approximately 9-year-old daughter works alongside her. I am uncomfortable watching my 8- and 11-year-old boys kicking a soccer ball as the girl walks past pushing a wheelbarrow. Should I ask the mother to keep her daughter from working? Should I not employ this woman? — JANE E., ALBUQUERQUE

You are rightly dismayed by this situation, but you’ve phrased the question curiously, emphasizing your discomfort rather than a child’s well-being. If you are concerned about the daughter, as you admirably seem to be, you ought not make her life harder, which firing her mother would certainly do. And rather than insist that the mother make the daughter drop that wheelbarrow, you might encourage your sons to invite the daughter to play soccer with them. Her mother will likely be relieved: having a 9-year-old “help out” all but guarantees the task will take longer.
It would be commendable if you could proffer some practical advice. Presumably this woman brings along her children because she has no alternative. Does your town offer inexpensive day-care programs? Are there other social services that might benefit her three kids? A bit of time on the phone or online might lead you to something that helps this family and eases your own mind.
UPDATE: The gardener failed to show up a few times, and Jane “used that as an excuse” to find someone else for the job.

I think this interchange probably provides a pretty strong test case between two very different fundamental orientations on child-rearing, education, and the relation of those things to work. I suspect a great many people will find the so-called ethicist's position reasonable and wise. For others whose orientation is more like my own, it will turn their stomachs. "You are rightly dismayed by the situation."? Really? The assumption that a pair of preschoolers would be better off in government-subsidized daycare rather than playing outdoors under the supervision of their mother and big sister is revolting. The implication that a 9-year-old can be nothing more than a burden to be parked in a kiddie-kennel likewise bothers me. Even assuming the healthiest of day-care options, a private baby-sitter, which better prepares that 9-year-old to be a healthy and productive member of society: watching TV while a bored college student does her homework at the kitchen table, or working alongside her mother to help support her younger siblings?

Nukes, Baby, Nukes!

Bruce over at Pagans and Lutherans beat me to the punch, but I definitely wanted to blog this piece from William Tucker on nuclear power. He provides a great background as to the differences between the fuel used for power generation versus that used for nuclear weapons, the safety and efficiency of nuclear power, and the canard of nuclear "waste". Unless you're already a nuclear scientist, chances are you'll learn some things you didn't know before. Here are a few new-to-me facts:

• Nuclear "waste" reprocessing is already well-understood in other countries, even if Carter banned it here: "All of France’s nuclear waste from 25 years of producing 75 percent of its electricity is stored beneath the floor of one room at Le Hague. The lifetime output for each French citizen would fit in a soda can."

• 10% of American electricity is produced by nuclear fission of uranium reprocessed from Soviet warheads.

• Coal contains more nuclear energy in its uranium traces than the chemical energy produced by burning it. [Which is one of the reasons coal plants expose their neighbors to more radiation than nuclear reactors do!]

Yucca Mountain, along with the whole "waste" issue, is a red herring thrown out by those who don't want to admit that they'll never actually support building actual nuclear reactors. Nuclear plants don't produce waste; most everything that comes out of a traditional reactor can still be burned in other types of reactors or reprocessed into new fuel, and many of the elements that can't are valuable in radiology and nuclear medicine. The tiny amount of nuclear fission byproduct that we truly don't have any use for needs only be stored for the generation or so it will take until we find one.

What exactly are we waiting for?

In Defense of the Grinch

A friend kindly sent me a link to this article from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, regarding a bit of a kerfuffle my alma mater's been involved in. See, four years ago St. Olaf College sold WCAL, an independent classical music station owned by and located on the campus of the college. For a tidy sum, mind you, and to Minnesota Public Radio, which speedily replaced the classical music programming with The Current, an indie/eclectic station. Some students were iffy about the sale at the time, but when we realized the college had gained both several million dollars and a radio station students actually listen to, most considered it a win-win situation. I say "most" very pointedly, however, as several alumni (some of whom were student at the time of the sale) have refused to let the issue die. SaveWCAL, which made lots of noise around the time of the initial sale, is apparently still alive and kicking, and (of course) suing to get the whole thing reversed. Now, there's a stereotype of Olaf alums (and this is probably common at small private schools) that the alumni all want Olaf to stay exactly how it was when they were students. I have to admit, I've felt the twinge myself upon seeing significant changes to the school and the campus. But this is the first case that I know of where alumni have attempted to use the courts to force the college to change things back the way they were.

As to President Anderson being a "Grinch" for refusing to give free (and scarce!) ChristmasFest tickets to ungrateful alumni who've now cost the school hundreds of thousands in legal fees? Good for him! The nerve of some people.

On Pronunciation: A Prelude

Some day I am going to write a thesis on a certain sort of Americans' strange fixation with over-pronouncing foreign words. Today, someone took offense to Ramesh Ponnuru's Pakistan-pronunciation drinking game from the debate:

The only thing worse than being a moron is celebrating your moron-ness. I can't believe you would actually attack Obama for pronouncing words correctly.

I love the layers of assumptions packed into this statement: that the hifalutin' international media pronunciation is correct; that of course Obama would be the one pronouncing it correctly; and finally that this guy would know better than someone named Ramesh Ponnuru how to pronounce words of South Asian origin. Also: "moron-ness"? Huh?

I can say this with the authority of someone who's spent several years now studying Near Eastern languages: you're not going to get it right, so stop trying. Of course, the stress patterns of Arabic being rather counter-intuitive to a native English speaker, the hifalutin' international media pronunciation is as often as not further from the original language than the way us ign'int yokels say them. Not that they really care, since it's more about differentiating themselves from the ign'int yokels than it is about fidelity to the original language.

In the meantime, I'm going to demand that European newspeople pronounce the name of my country correctly: the word is 'Murreka. Just like Toby Keith says it.

Customer Disservice

I just missed my appointment to take the GRE exam because the information provided to me by Educational Testing Services was insufficient to get me to the testing facility. The address they gave me turns out to have been for the entire university campus, not for a specific building, and nobody answered the phone at the number they gave me. The voice mail recording at that number was kind enough to tell me their testing hours, but not so kind as to tell me their location. Needless to say, I set out to send them a very tersely-worded email, but their complaints department only has a snail-mail address and a fax number. Riiiighht. So I used the only email form I could find, in the hopes they'll forward it along. I'd better be getting my $140 back, or at the very least a reschedule without a fee. I don't generally stay in Fayettenam on weekends, and since they can't give me my weekend back, they'd dern well give me my money back.

Shamelessly Cribbed Quote of the Day

Cheryl at A Round Unvarnish'd Tale shares this quote from C.S. Lewis, a good reminder of the dangers of spiraling do-gooderism:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment".

Now I'm no Objectivist, and Lewis certainly wasn't either. I wholeheartedly believe in personal charity, not least because Christ was sort of big on it. But Ayn Rand does hold a sliver of truth in the potential of charity to become tyrannical, particularly charity institutionalized or nationalized. There's a strong streak of Prohibitionism in America these days, and it seems to be getting stronger; Elephant's Child is right to reference Liberal Fascism.

Language Peeve

I'm currently reading Three Cups of Tea, a book which has been recommended to me again and again, and which is pretty much living up to its reviews. The spirit of Midwestern do-gooderism struggling to build schools in the cold shadow of K2 is pure Olaf, really, and it warms my heart a bit to read. What doesn't warm my heart, however, is shoddy transliteration of Muslim (originally Arabic) names, which brings me to today's peeve. Fairly early in the story, we meet a character named Abdul. Popular conception would seem to suggest that the Muslim world is full of men named Abdul; indeed, I'm guessing if you started asking Americans to list five tradition Muslim names, Abdul would be on many if not most of those lists. One problem: no such name is possible in the Arabic language, whence traditional Muslim names around the world derive. The word abd means "servant" or "slave", and while it can be a name in and of itself, it is generally part of a compound name, as in the familiar name Abdullah, abd-Allah, "servant of God". This construction is the source of innumerable Muslim names such as Abdulrahman "servant of the Merciful", Abdulrahim "servant of the Beneficent", Abdulqadir "servant of the All-Capable", Abdulzahrah "servant of the Flower", Abdulrazzaq "servant of the Provider", Abdulaziz "servant of the Powerful". Indeed, any of the ninety-nine names of God could be made into names by this construction. While these phrasal names are separate words in Arabic, the traditional transliterations divide them in the wrong place (i.e. Abdul Rahman), leading to the misconception that there exists such a name as Abdul. This is rather like an Arab noting the vast number of northern Europeans bearing the last name of Son. Correct yourselves, friends, and please correct others. If a space is necessary, it should go before the article al- (i.e. Abd al-Rahman), but since the space just tempts us to read one name as two, let's just agree to leave it out entirely.

Someday I'll dive into my rant on pronunciation of Arabic names and place names. My opinion may surprise you. But today is not that day.

Preterition

In follow-up to my piece on Hillary's gripe with OPEC and in reference to Necessary Roughness, I was going to throw in my own two cents on the subject of peak oil. But after reading numerous websites declaring that civilization will collapse as a result of, well, commodity speculation, I just lost interest. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've long held that while I don't expect to see civilization collapse in my lifetime, I wouldn't be all that surprised. So I'm sympathetic to the homesteader's mindset of living self-sufficiently, just in case. But there's a big difference in mindset between living a simple country lifestyle and filling your basement with astronaut food. And of all the things I can imagine bringing down civilization, a shock in the petroleum market isn't one of them. So there, Peak Oilers, I think you're wrong, but I just don't care enough to bother explaining why in any detail. More vacuum-packed survival rations for you, I guess.

My Grandfather's Church

I've refrained from commenting until now on this topic, when so many better-informed commenters are writing on it, but I couldn't keep from adding my own thoughts. Those of my readers who aren't confessional Lutherans are probably (blissfully) unaware of the current sturm und drang within the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, the church I was raised in and have embraced as an adult. The current round of controversy was set off by the summary cancellation by the Synod -- during Holy Week -- of a popular and theologically-conservative radio show which had at times been critical of the sort of "seeker-sensitive", "purpose-driven", and quite frankly Oprah-fied programs and congregations that are so beloved of the Synod's aggressively modernizing current leadership. The Synodical leadership's responses to the grassroots outcry have only solidified the impression among many that there is a concerted effort among the top leadership to change the face of the LC-MS forever. Indeed, the current president is quite fond of saying, "this is not your grandfather's church."

Why are you so intent on taking my grandfather's church from me, President Kieschnick? I like my grandfather's church, for a host of reasons, but one of which is that it is my grandfather's church. If I didn't like it, after all, there are a great many churches out there that aren't my grandfather's church; namely, every other church in the country. Where will I go, when my grandfather's church has been "improved" into something he wouldn't even recognize?

Wal-Mart

I really like Wal-Mart. I can't stand the way they lay out the grocery section in Super Wal-Marts, but beyond that, I can generally find whatever I need pretty quickly and cheaply. I appreciate that the "Wal-Mart effect" has lowered retail prices of consumer goods across the economy, saving the average US family around $2,300 annually (.pdf warning), whether they shop there or not. I find it remarkable that despite building their empire on tight supply chains and centralized logistic they have managed to become the nation's #1 retailer of locally-grown produce. At the same time, I can appreciate that some people prefer not to shop there. Everyone has preferences, and it's really not my concern. I do get a bit tired of hearing how Wal-Mart is destroying America, however, particularly in light of significant evidence to the contrary. (HT: Round Unvarnish'd Tale).

Open Mike Night

My only internet access these days is at coffeeshops. Sadly, unlike in more civilized parts where free Wifi floats on the breeze thick as dandelion seeds on a summer's day, coffeeshops here in Fayettenam all charge for their internet access. Barnes and Noble has by far the nicest atmosphere, but their AT&T Wireless access is pretty slow, and costs $4 for two hours. The price really isn't unreasonable, but I hate having a time limit. I makes me feel rushed to get stuff done, and obligated to "get my money's worth" even if I've only really got 20 minutes of internetting to get done. Recently I've found a local coffeeshop with a more reasonable price for nightly access, so that's where I am right now. Unfortunately, said coffeeshop hosts Open Mike Nights on variously unpredictable nights of the week. So now I'm getting sung at by random talentless amateurs. And I do mean talentless. If your best gig is singing Tears for Fears covers at a characterless strip-mall coffeeshop in Fayetteville, NC, you are most assuredly talentless. And then they berate me for not "responding" to the performer. Shut up. Please. I paid decent money for this internet access. Sorry I didn't realize I was contractually obligated to assuage the egos of Fayetteville's amateur music community. Rant concluded.