This is where I am now ...

The Humble Whinery

The "true" meaning of Christmas?

I've copied a column below by Harold Myerson that just appeared in the Washington Post. It prompts a few thoughts from me:
1) A few months ago the Barna Group (Christian research company) came out survey results that indicated that most people, and very especiallly young people, had very negative images of Christianity. The reasons should be obvious to anyone who can see lightning and hear thunder -- if your image of Jesus comes from the activities of America's most vocal Christians, whether they are famous or simply the ones who send the most email, then it's likely that you think that Jesus' main things are hatred of abortion, homosexuals, and Democrats. Not only is this just not a very attractive image, but when these folks also happen pile on words like "grace" and "love", there is, understandably, a very serious disconnect.

2) More than once I've received communication that Democrats, or "liberals", or "progressives" are unChristian. Here is a secular person (see below) -- or at least I believe he is a secular person -- pointing to the perversion that has been made of Christianity both by the secular operators in the Republican Party who have manipulated "the faith" to their own ends, and by people within Christianity who have unwittingly bought into that perversion -- whether it is by buying into single-issue abortion politics, homosexual persecution, or the Terri Schiavo idiocy. For the objective observer it is obvious that religion has been politicized, trivialized, and made into something that, in the absence of a serious makeover, we would be better off without.

3) Yes Virginia, there is a war on Christmas, but it is not, as Bill O'Reilly and his own cohort of ditto-heads would have you believe, waged by atheists and secularists, most of whom could give a rip. It is being waged by a fifth-column, in fact; it is those mentioned in #2 above, who make Jesus into something he almost certainly was not. A saying of the Master comes to mind ... one involving millstones.

-- Merry Christmas, rls

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Hard-liners for Jesus

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, December 19, 2007; Page A19

As Christians across the world prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, it's a fitting moment to contemplate the mountain of moral, and mortal, hypocrisy that is our Christianized Republican Party.

There's nothing new, of course, about the Christianization of the GOP. Seven years ago, when debating Al Gore, then-candidate George W. Bush was asked to identify his favorite philosopher and answered "Jesus." This year, however, the Christianization of the party reached new heights with Mitt Romney's declaration that he believed in Jesus as his savior, in an effort to stanch the flow of "values voters" to Mike Huckabee.

My concern isn't the rift that has opened between Republican political practice and the vision of the nation's Founders, who made very clear in the Constitution that there would be no religious test for officeholders in their enlightened new republic. Rather, it's the gap between the teachings of the Gospels and the preachings of the Gospel's Own Party that has widened past the point of absurdity, even as the ostensible Christianization of the party proceeds apace.

The policies of the president, for instance, can be defended in greater or (more frequently) lesser degree within a framework of worldly standards. But if Bush can conform his advocacy of preemptive war with Jesus's Sermon on the Mount admonition to turn the other cheek, he's a more creative theologian than we have given him credit for. Likewise his support of torture, which he highlighted again this month when he threatened to veto House-passed legislation that would explicitly ban waterboarding.

It's not just Bush whose catechism is a merry mix of torture and piety. Virtually the entire Republican House delegation opposed the ban on waterboarding. Among the Republican presidential candidates, only Huckabee and the not-very-religious John McCain have come out against torture, while only libertarian Ron Paul has questioned the doctrine of preemptive war.

But it's on their policies concerning immigrants where Republicans -- candidates and voters alike -- really run afoul of biblical writ. Not on immigration as such but on the treatment of immigrants who are already here. Consider: Christmas, after all, celebrates not just Jesus's birth but his family's flight from Herod's wrath into Egypt, a journey obviously undertaken without benefit of legal documentation. The Bible isn't big on immigrant documentation. "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him," Exodus says the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai, "for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."

Yet the distinctive cry coming from the Republican base this year isn't simply to control the flow of immigrants across our borders but to punish the undocumented immigrants already here, children and parents alike.

So Romney attacks Huckabee for holding immigrant children blameless when their parents brought them here without papers, and Huckabee defends himself by parading the endorsement of the Minuteman Project's Jim Gilchrist, whose group harasses day laborers far from the border. The demand for a more regulated immigration policy comes from virtually all points on our political spectrum, but the push to persecute the immigrants already among us comes distinctly, though by no means entirely, from the same Republican right that protests its Christian faith at every turn.

We've seen this kind of Christianity before in America. It's more tribal than religious, and it surges at those times when our country is growing more diverse and economic opportunity is not abounding. At its height in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was chiefly the political expression of nativist Protestants upset by the growing ranks of Catholics in their midst.

It's difficult today to imagine KKKers thinking of their mission as Christian, but millions of them did.

Today's Republican values voters don't really conflate their rage with their faith. Lou Dobbs is a purely secular figure. But nativist bigotry is strongest in the Old Time Religion precincts of the Republican Party, and woe betide the Republican candidate who doesn't embrace it, as John McCain, to his credit and his political misfortune, can attest.

The most depressing thing about the Republican presidential race is that the party's rank and file require their candidates to grow meaner with each passing week. And now, inconveniently, inconsiderately, comes Christmas, a holiday that couldn't be better calibrated to expose the Republicans' rank, fetid hypocrisy.

meyersonh@prospect.org

Methodists are backing off (maybe) on G W Bush Library @ SMU

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/10/15/124329/27

"The placement of the George W. Bush Library and the establishment of an Institute to promote the policies of this president at Southern Methodist University would be a tragedy," said Bishop William Boyd Grove of Charlestown, West Virginia. "The policies of the Bush administration are in direct conflict with the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church on issues of war and peace, civil liberties and human rights, care for the environment, and health care. SMU is a university of the church and is home to one of our outstanding theological seminaries. Its United Methodist identity and its moral authority would be seriously compromised were it to be identified with the policies of George W. Bush in this way."

Opponents are "question[ing] the educational value of the Bush complex" given that earlier in his administration Bush issued Executive Order 13233, "which," the press release notes, "provides former Presidents with virtually unlimited powers to deny or grant access to documents generated under their administrations." The Executive Order extends these powers to a president's heirs.

"Professors within the history department at Southern Methodist University, the future home of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, may not all agree on the benefits or legitimacy of the library, museum and institute. However, they unanimously agree about SB 866 and the need to rescind the presidential order," Laray Polkfor recently wrote in the Dallas Morning News.

Bishop C. Joseph Sprague of London, Ohio, observed that "last spring the Faculty Senate and the history faculty at SMU issued statements criticizing the Executive Order as incompatible with the goals of providing public and scholarly access to federal documents. It is a great concern when a large number of the faculty at a United Methodist university question the educational value of a project."

Bishop Susan M. Morrison of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, pointed out that while she "respect[s] the office of the presidency, presidential libraries are created, partly, to celebrate the legacies of particular presidents [and] ... Bush's leadership has been so problematic and contrary to much of our Social Principles, it does not seem appropriate to place this library in the midst of one of our celebrated educational institutions."

"It's not a matter of censorship, but there's a lot of resentment that this institute will be run without any oversight by the university," the Rev. Weaver, who is spearheading the drive, told the Dallas Morning News.

In an e-mail, the Rev. Weaver pointed out that "The fact that the press is reporting that Rove will lead the effort to design and plan the freedom institute has increased the concern about and sentiment against the project among many in the church. Three additional bishops signed the petition this week. I believe we have the stronger arguments on our side and can win the debate in the church. And, if Bush bombs Iran, I doubt he will ever get an inch of church land to put anything on."

Maybe my alma mater (BaylorU in wheyko) will yet have a chance to pull George W's fat out of the fire. Texas A&M may be kind of miffed right now, since they settled on preserving the presidential effluvia of the relatively liberal George H. W. Bush. Had they not been so eager, they could've had George W. -- HBF

Bush aide says warming man-made ... BBC

While his daddy Cheney was having him fire the generals who sassed him, did George W overlook this guy?

Professor John Marburger, who advises President Bush, said it was more than 90% certain that greenhouse gas emissions from mankind are to blame.

...

Professor Marburger said humanity would be in trouble if we did not stop increasing carbon emissions.

"The CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and there's no end point, it just gets hotter and hotter, and so at some point it becomes unliveable," he said.

Professor Marburger said he wished he could stop US emissions right away, but that was obviously not possible.

US backing for the scientific consensus was confirmed by President Bush's top climate advisor, James Connaughton.

The chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality told BBC News that advancing technology was the best way to curb the warming trend.

"You only have two choices; you either have advanced technologies and get them into the marketplace, or you shut down your economies and put people out of work," he said.

"I don't know of any politician that favours shutting down economies."

....

"I think 2C is rather arbitrary, and it's not clear to me that the answer shouldn't be 3C or more or less. It's a hunch, a guess."

The truth, he said, was that we just do not know what the 'safe' limit is.

Invest 93 on Thursday 9/20/2007

This was on the east side of Florida, now it's in the Gulf. Hurricane in a few hours?? The models are systematically biased; the green one has it going north consistently, the others further west. Interestingly, no one has it turning "left". It must have something to do with how the model uses input rather than a bias inherent in the model; the green model (assuming Masters' plotting maintains a consistent mapping of colors to models, but I haven't verified that) had Ingrid (earlier) remaining further south that some of the models.

Weather modeling

This was in Jeff Master's wunderground blog yesterday [vote tabulations are mine]:

Gulf of Mexico storm possible this week
The four reliable computer models for forecasting genesis of tropical cyclones have been very busy the past few runs cooking up some nasty storms in the Western Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico for the coming week. Neither the timing nor the location of these hypothetical storms has been consistent. However, the models are insistent enough that something might happen, that I believe there is about a 40% chance we'll see a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico by week's end. A few possibilities, from this morning's model runs:

NOGAPS: A tropical storm forms in the Western Caribbean Tuesday, and moves north, hitting South Florida Friday. [one vote]

UKMET, ECMWF, and GFS: A tropical storm forms in the central Gulf of Mexico Thursday and moves west, hitting Texas on Saturday. [three votes]

The seed for formation of a tropical storm in the Western Caribbean would be one of the tropical waves from Africa that are parading across the Atlantic. A Gulf of Mexico storm could get spawned from a tropical wave, or from an old frontal zone stretching from the Carolinas southwards along the U.S. East Coast then across northern Florida.

Now, a day later, here is what we've got just east of Florida:




















I think this qualifies as the Western Caribbean.

Ingrid models a little later