You just have to love Unix. Just when I am starting to get really frustrated with the fact that the only working command line tool to post to a WordPress web log that I can find does not seem to handle line breaks acceptably, I pause and switch tracks. Looking at the available command line tools from the coreutils package, it comes to mind that I have seen “tr” do some interesting things (when I am following the howto for burning audio cds). Sure enough, that lets me simply delete all the end line characters out of my file, which, since I tend to type in enough HTML to cause it to display correctly, is perfectly acceptable, I only have it formatted to 70 characters per line for Aspell purposes anyway. Yay for command line tools! ☺

Mentioned again today,[1] I wonder if Andrius has seen the pamphlet “Real Men Moisturize” that I know about primarily from having read the same column by Ms. Mona Charen that today’s article references.[2] Such a lovely image to be sending overseas. Why was it that Hitler thought the United States would not affect the outcome of World War II (I could be referring to whoever lead Germany in World War I here, not Hitler, my grasp of history is not what it should be)? Might it have been because he thought we were all spineless “playboys”? Might that have been because of the State Department then just as someone reading this current pamphlet might come to a similar conclusion? I wonder…

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Ham20050617.shtml [2] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/monacharen/mc20050603.shtml

I am not one who needs to be informed of the critical nature of a father in the lives of his children. My own father shaped me to an incredible extent, and is responsible for much of what good there is in my makeup. Our society has trouble understanding this. Most commercials show a clueless, spineless guy getting bossed around and corrected by his wife, without whom he would clearly be lost. There is only one part of such commercials that holds true, most men would be lost without their wives, but not because they need their wives to guide, direct and teach them everything about surviving and succeeding in society.

Mr. Mark Alexander has taken the opportunity Father’s Day presents to note some of the statistics that back up the critical nature of the father in a family.[1] Particularly noteworthy, especially to me who has so often tried to argue, white though I am, that racial discrimination is no longer all that significant, is the fact that when you control for the presence or lack of a father in a person’s life, the correlation between race and crime, and even between poverty and crime, utterly disappears.[2] It is the prevailing lack of a father in the inner city society, in which so many black families are trapped, that, in fact, traps the next generation there.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/markalexander/ma20050617.shtml [2] social researcher Ms. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, quoted in the above.

Mr. Thomas Sowell makes a number of utterly invalid, but unfortunately typical, arguments in favor of the USA PATRIOT act.[1] Most tellingly, and perhaps most compellingly, he compares the Patriot act to the polio vaccine, and to the Cold War. He is correct, people sheltered from polio by vaccination did, historically come to question the need for that vaccine. And that did cause a temporary return of the disease until the use of the vaccine picked back up. And Europe and the left here do typically fail to understand the role that The United State’s military might played in preventing the deployment of our armed forces.

However, it is utterly invalid to use these examples to justify the Patriot act. The logic here is p prevents q, r prevents s, therefor t prevents u. No proof is offered that the relationship between p and q, r and s, or t and u is the same. A “justification” such as this could, then, be used to assert that literally anything was necessary. You could just as easily say that the reason for no new terrorist activity was because people are flying less! Sadly, this failure of logic will escape many people.

Similarly, he tries to pull of a nice switch. The Patriot act is supposedly responsible for the fact that no second attack on the scale of the World Trade Center collapse has taken place. Thus its use to disrupt and crack down on domestic terrorists has been successful and responsible for that lack. Notice the switch there? The World Trade Center did not fall because of domestic terrorists. Rather, it fell because of international ones. So the use of the Patriot act against domestic terrorists has no necessary (it might have an incidental) causal relationship with the lack of a similar attack.

Someday perhaps I will see a valid argument for the USA PATRIOT Act. Until then I will persist in believing that its costs are far greater than its benefits.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050616.shtml

Mr. Marvin Olasky correctly identifies the line I try to walk between “a woman’s place is in the home” and the careerism of today’s culture.[1] While I strongly suspect that in trying to articulate the wrongness of today’s society I end up sounding like I’ve gone too far the other way, that is not my intent. Mr. Olasky correctly points out that today’s quota system is wrong, chances are good that most women are called to be a full time mother. But not all are, and those who are not should not be restricted any more than their own abilities restrict them. Thus I advocate true and fair strength requirements for jobs requiring physical labor. Yes, that would bar most women. But not the few who are truly able to do the work. And thus women have a place in the laboratory as well, some women are smarter than most men. But motherhood is not some lesser choice, and our culture is deeply disordered to treat it as such.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/marvinolasky/mo20050616.shtml

The National Catholic Register offers a different perspective on the new Batman movie.[1] Content wise there is nothing new here. They hit the nail on the head rather well, pointing out what fails about the previous Batman movies (dominated by the villain, or the side kick, not by Batman), as well as what does not fail in this one. Their explanation explains why Vincas couldn’t stand Robin’s portrayal in the second to last Batman, and why it more or less stopped after fighting the Iceman in the last one. Batman, as the older movies portray him, is too inconsistent, and gets lost in a mix of images.

Which makes this article’s take on the new movie even more significant. I had thought of it as a prequel, introducing some of the missing back story to the Batman of the previous movies. As such, the inconsistencies of two starting movies (for example, Batman the movie introduces the bat light that this new one does as well, and how can batman be unknown in the next if he appears in this?) somewhat concerned me. So much so that I rated an otherwise excellent movie as being hard to classify. Mr. Steven Greydanus says, however, that this is not a prequel. He says that it is rather starting from scratch (is that possible only 25 years since Batman the movie and only like 10 since the last?), an intriguing and exciting possibility, as I was already sure that had they started with this one, the latter movies would have been better.

I like the superhero movies, and I, unlike my mom, have enjoyed Batman. I hope that he is right, that this is just the first of a new series.

[1] http://www.ncregister.com/current/0619lead2.htm