Maggie's Farm

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

Mark Twain

Grant Wood's American Gothic,
a portrait of his sister and his
dentist, is considered America's most famous painting, with perhaps Whistler's Mother a close runner-up.

Is this picture a satire? Is it a condescending portrayal of a stern and severe midwestern attitude? I doubt it. And why the pitchfork? Sandall has written a piece on the painting, with attention to Paris Hilton.

Rev. Brian at Real Meal has a good summary of the historiography of the Old Testament. A nice intro to a topic about which I know nothing.

Edward Oakes SJ takes on Gary Will's strange theological journey at First Things.

Rev. Tod on Repentance, at It Takes a Church:

Repentance is literally to “change your mind.”  In the famous words of Dallas Willard, “To reconsider your strategy for living based on the news of God’s Kingdom that is available in Jesus.” And that is what Lent is for, to reconsider your strategy for living.  To begin a new process of deep consideration and reflection about your life.  To reconsider what it means to follow Jesus, to plumb the mystery of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  To reconsider what your strategy for living should be, based on this good news.

Image: Botticelli's Mystic Crucifixion, with a nice view of the 14th C. walls of Florence. 

^{From Psalm 25}

¹To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
²O my God, in you I trust; do not let me be put to shame; do not let my enemies exult over me.
³Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame; let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.
⁴Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths.
⁵Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long.
⁶Be mindful of your mercy, O Lord, and of your steadfast love, for they have been from of old.
⁷Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness’ sake, O Lord!
⁸Good and upright is the Lord; therefore he instructs sinners in the way.
⁹He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way.

(To find out what this is about, click the Aliyah Diary category on upper left)

Feb. 17, 2006: Israeli DMV

Today is was a bully. I mean, Bully.  I entered the Holon Division of Motor Vehicles, after the hour or so bus ride, and was transformed some dozen minutes later.  Like the Hulk, bursting  fissures through his skin.

In Judy Garland's Wizard of Oz, when the film switches from Kansas to Oz , it changes from black-and-white to color,  the first use of color in a Hollywood film, I believe.  Here, I went reverse:  from color to black-and-white.  And as in the film, Roger Rabbit, three-dimensional creatures turned into two-dimensional cartoons (who then pop-out 3-D eyes), so too 3-D became 2-D.  I may have become two-dimensional also, I just couldn't see myself too well; I felt a bit, well, flat. But enough of this film-ishness. On to the tale of my transformation.

Here's the deal. The DMV (I will call it) is open sun through Thur., but will only change American licenses to Israeli permits on Mon. and Wed.  This, I am later told, was publicized last Nof, in newspapers (in Hebrew), Radio (ibid.) and even internet (op. cit.).

But, I left with robust intentions. I was forewarned by fellow student, Miriam, that the Holon place is a place of snakey lines, Hebrew only, and being told to go from the front of one line to the end of another, and then again.  I had girded my loins with a visit to the MEMSI office in Ra'anana: got an official-looking light green form
with my photo in one corner, filled out by an optometrist after an exam (40 shekels), then by a physician,  then I completed it with questions that I mostly understood.  Brought all my other documents: US license, US passport, Israeli I.D., Israeli Oleh card, and a blank check.  Hopped the bus to TA at 800 ( a bit on the late side, I was forewarned), into TA central bus station by 9, through security, only to learn that I had to exit the building to get the Holon bus. (Holon means something like "sand-edness", as does in Arabic, Ramleh).  The driver tells four of us to alight at a busy intersection, in an area that was in transition from rural to semi-industrial. I gather that the DMV is nearby, as I see students with a big "L" (for learner) magnetized to the top of their car, perched anxiously over the steering wheel, a bit praying-mantis-like, crawling in the right lanes of traffic, while their examiner sat next to them. Saw several examiners talking on their cell phones.

A blonde wanted to go ice fishing. She'd seen books on the subject, and finally, getting all the necessary tools together, she made for the ice.

After positioning her comfy footstool, she started to make a circular cut in the ice. Suddenly, from the sky, a voice boomed,

"THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE."

Startled, the blonde moved further down the ice, poured a thermos of cappuccino, and began to cut yet another hole. Again from the heavens the voice bellowed,"THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE."

The blonde, now worried, moved away, clear down to the opposite end of the ice. She set up her stool once more and tried again to cut her hole.

The voice came once more, "THERE ARE NO FISH UNDER THE ICE."

She stopped, looked skyward, and said, "IS THAT YOU LORD?"

The voice replied, "NO, THIS IS THE MANAGER OF THE HOCKEY RINK"

In 1950 Alan Turing, the famous WWll code-breaker and computer pioneer, proposed his test of whether computers can think: It you can't tell the difference between a computer responding to you and a person, the computer can think. The "Chinese Room" experiment is a variant of the Turing Test.

I've always thought that the question "Can people think?" is a more relevant one. And what is thinking anyway? Much of what passes for human thought is emotion, application of old mental templates, and intuition.

As if to prove this point, there are now Artificial Intelligence gurus who take positions on AI based on ideology. A quote from a piece by Halpern:

In discussing the “system” argument against his Chinese Room thought experiment, Searle once said, “It is not easy for me to imagine how someone who was not in the grip of an ideology would find the idea at all plausible.” The AI champions, in their desperate struggle to salvage the idea that computers can or will think, are indeed in the grip of an ideology: they are, as they see it, defending rationality itself. If it is denied that computers can, even in principle, think, then a claim is being tacitly made that humans have some special property that science will never understand—a “soul” or some similarly mystical entity. This is of course unacceptable to many scientists.

In the deepest sense, the AI champions see their critics as trying to reverse the triumph of the Enlightenment, with its promise that man’s mind can understand everything, and as retreating to an obscurantist, religious outlook on the world. They see humanity as having to choose, right now, between accepting the possibility, if not the actual existence, of thinking machines and sinking back into the Dark Ages.

Read the entire lengthy but solid update on AI, in The New Atlantis.

Russello reviews Rod Dreher's new book "Crunchy Cons" in the NY Sun:

"Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum, 259 pages, $24), even with its weaknesses, may be a clarion call for conservatives who have come to realize that the most important things in life cannot be found either in politics or the marketplace, and that what passes for political discourse is largely empty of meaning.

This is no academic treatise but rather a look at what America has become since the revolutions of the 1960s and the Reagan era. The ethos of "do your own thing," promoted by 1960s radicals and latter-day libertines, has been combined with a capitalist system all too happy to separate people from traditional commitments and to remake them instead into atomistic consumers tossed amid the "creative destruction" of the marketplace. The results have been broken families, destroyed neighborhoods, environmental degradation, and neglect of the duties one generation owes to another.

Read entire review.

Women speak two languages - one of which is verbal.

William Shakespeare

A must-read. Thanks to one of our ever-alert readers for noting this remarkable piece in the Brussels Journal: Anti-Jihad Manifesto Misses the Point.

A selection:

In our opinion, man is a religious being. Secularism destroyed the Christian roots of Europe and, in doing so, created the religious vacuum that is now being filled by Islam. The manifesto warns against

“battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. […] We must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.”

History in the past century, however, has clearly indicated that those fighting for an “egalitarian” world were the most “liberticidal” of all. Freedom is the right to live “unegalitarianly.” This is why The Brussels Journal defends the right of individuals – though not of the state – to “discriminate” (which, by the way, contrary to what the manifesto implies, is not the same as “oppress”). Indeed, it is no coincidence that the manifesto avoids referring to “Socialism” (and even “Communism”) among the scourges of the past century and prefers to speak of “Nazism” and Stalinism” instead. Half the manifesto’s signatories are probably Socialists, which explains why the manifesto obfuscates the secular, Socialist roots of these scourges.

While in America a cultural war is going on between “blue” (liberal) and “red” (conservative), the cultural war in Europe is a three-way war between the European equivalent of the American “blue” (socialist), the European equivalent of the American “red” (conservative, though Europeans often use the term “liberal”) and Muslims. I prefer to refer to the first group as “secularist” (although I realise this is a generalization and many Christians belong to these “secularists,” including – unfortunately – most of our bishops and priests) and to the second group as “Christian” (although many agnostics belong to it). The reason why I make this distinction is because the second group is prepared to acknowledge the importance of the cultural traditions of the West, rooted in the Judeo-Christian values without which classical-liberalism could never have evolved.

I trust those who have lived within Leftist totalitarian states to offer a clearer critique than dreamers who have never done so. As we have attempted to do in many essays here, Vasko Kohlmayer explores the cultural death wish implicit in what remains of Marxism. Always seemed strange to me that Western Civ. is the only civilization that welcomes self-critique: just try it in China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia or North Korea - I guess we are superior in that way. One quote:

Regardless of its rhetoric or avowed objective, the driving force behind the Left’s every movement is to strike against some aspect of Western society. Environmentalism, for instance, hits at the West’s economic foundation of free-market capitalism. Multiculturalism seeks to unravel its cultural coherence. The gay rights movement strikes at its moral underpinnings, and so on. The Left, of course, will deny the real reason for its actions. But to evaluate the true value of any act we need to look at its effect not the rhetoric behind it. And the effects of the Left’s actions are invariably – in one way or another – destructive to the West.

The Left’s gains have been greatly facilitated by its ingenious modus operandi, which is to cloak its destructive intent in the language of good causes. Civil rights, gender equality, ecological preservation are among some of its favorite ploys. The ostensible caring is not real, for these are not at all what the Left’s efforts are ultimately about.