Andrius and I, tonight, by virtue of Vincas’s intervention, discovered that “nation” has far too flexible a definition to hold real meaning. It means both those born to a place and those existing in it. this flexible a definition obscures too much, allowing you to become of a nation, but never to leave it (with the exception of the immigrant, who if he immigrates again, will leave one of his two nationalities). “People” is much more usefully defined, being a body of people, be it community or tribe or whatever, who jointly compromise a whole. “Clan” is defined to be a group related by blood or marriage, under a chieftain. Excepting a requirement of chieftain then, “clan” is very nearly the way I have used the word “family.” “Kindred” would also be fairly close.

Vincas says I need to invent and define a word of my own, to allow for the specificity my ideas and ability to understand require. My imagination fails me.

There exists a relation between people who have chosen to be of a geographical location, either by birth, or immigration. While this can lead to the appearance having this relationship with multiple localities. However, the theoretical (sometimes actual) exercise of putting the two localities in opposition demonstrates that one’s tie must be to exactly one. This is necessarily a personal decision, the current reaction to that decision may affect it, but does not do the deciding. The future reaction may differ, but man not having awareness of that future change will not account for it in his thinking. This then means that man in his head feels that his bond to one locality is more significant, more meaningful, more real, that that to the other. This is not to be confused with the man who fights against an immoral government with those of another locality without ever being of them.

There exists a relationship between men because they are related. They are siblings (by birth or marriage), or their parents were, or their grandparents were, or so on. They know themselves to be related, they acknowledge that relationship to be significant. They have been raised with at least certain common traditions and cultural elements in common. In a lesser form of the same relation, perhaps the connection is lost in history, yet still, the commonality causes them to be aware they they are yet one.

Overlapping with the above, there is a relation between men simply because they do share certain values, certain traditions. This creates a bond of common cause and common struggle. This bond is not always distinguishable from the lesser form of the bond described above, and perhaps is even the same.

Sitting in “The Red Carpet Club” since our flight is not until nearly 10pm, and Vincas upgraded our tickets. It has real seats, which is nice. Vincas has me carrying a “growler” of beer for him, and my backpack ended up carrying the bottle of champagne that he’s giving to his soon to be in-laws. I find this rather amusing given how little I drink. We ended up leaving my present for Andrius and his fiance (their wedding present) with Vincas’s parents. It will probably reach them late, but I do not think Andrius will mind. Mom and Lauren kept expecting me to be excited. I am not really, I am going, I want to go for the wedding, but I persisting thinking that this is one of the crazier things I have ever done. Pranas has been speaking a higher percentage of Lithuanian than normal, it makes me aware that between the native Spanish of Uruguay, and the Lithuanian of the Ciziuni, I really will have jumped into the deep end of the pool with no ability to swim.

Oh, I forgot to mention, yesterday I was having no end of trouble with software serial numbers. So much so that I called apple twice (the second time, I did not reach them, it was after 6pm pdt). So today I call them as soon as they open, only to get told the serial numbers should work, and surprisingly, they do!! What in the world is up with that? I really have no clue. I did not even have to type them in again, just press save again.

So after staying up late last night, today some things just magically start working and others continue to frustrate. Netboot sucks. Badly. I managed to get it to work, but it doesn’t help, because I do not know how to make it install automatically, and I cannot ssh to the images that I have managed to create. I found a firewire cable and am now using the mac mini as a target disk. Hopefully this will work, if it does not, I do not know what I will do.

I take back all the nice things I said about MacOSX server. It may install easily enough, but the dhcp and netboot stuff both error out, there is no documentation on the error messages, nothing on google, and apple will not support it. That sucks. Oh, and to top it all off, you cannot use admin tools from a 10.3 machine to control a 10.4 server, you must have a 10.4 client. I hate forced upgrades.

Things are really busy right now, so just a quick run down.

• “Judge Narrows Pledge of Allegiance Lawsuit” by David Kravets of the Associated Press, from Monday, July 18, 2005. While the Judge is attempting to avoid the Pledge of Allegiance itself from being directly declared unconstitutional, I really fail to see how it matters if the Pledge cannot be used in schools and other government funded events.
• “Adoption agency rejects Catholic parents,” a Catholic News Agency(CNA) report from July 18, 2005. Just some documentation of protestants treating Catholics as non-Christians.
• “Moving ‘Ninth Day’, depicts often ignored Nazi abuse of Catholics,” another CNA report, this one from July 15, 2005. So often you will see a radically critical look at the Church during World War II, and just as often, you will hear statements that make it seem that Jews were the only significantly persecuted body. It is nice to hear that there is to be a movie with a more just account.
• “Anglican bishop suspends priest opposed to ordination of gays,” CNA is rapidly becoming one of my more significant news sources. This report is also from July 15, 2005. I have been watching the news articles talking about the entire Anglican mess dealing with the issue of homosexuality. I must say that I rather hope it causes fragmentation, because I strongly suspect that such fragmentation would lead to an increased number of Anglicans rejoining the Church. I also tend to think that the only way we will see the end of the Protestant heresy is that it is and will continue to slowly dissolve in the modernist heresy, and that the sooner this happens, the less confusion there will be as the Church attempts to face and defeat this more threatening heresy.
• “Public split over new hate laws,” from the BBC, July 18, 2005. Along the same lines as the last, this article looks at homosexual clergy, the influence of religion in the public life, and hate laws regarding religion. Focusing only on this last, which is, or seems to me a minority of the article, I tend to be really leery of such laws. It seems that it would be too easy to charge a Priest under them for teaching that all religions are not equal, or that the Muslim faith is wrong to allow multiple “marriages.”

I finished Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince tonight. It was a very good book. Much of it was happy and amusing, yet more-so than the previous books, it has ended on a sad note. Yet somehow that fits. I do hope that Ginny is smart and stubborn enough to stick with Harry. Once I rather wanted Harry and Hermione to end up together, yet this book managed to make me comfortable with her and Ron, and Harry and Ginny. I think the last book did its part in that as well.

Ms. Elizabeth Foss, writing in the Arlington Catholic Herald, reminds us how much of themselves, of who they are, children get from their parents.[1] This is not only true of her example, the way we talk to children and what we refer to them as, but also of the way they see us act in general. Do they see us going to Mass each week? Do they see us volunteering? Do we eat together as a family, do we clean up and stay organized?

Not that I think that every aspect of a child’s personality is derived from his or her parents, to think so would be to attempt to blame all my own faults on my parents. Which is far from being my attempt. Yet I hear time and time again from source after source that parents are their children’s first and most important teachers. And I know from my own life the impact my parents have had in shaping me, the way they are responsible for much of what good there is in me. So I cannot but think that Ms. Foss’s ideas must extend further than she has taken them.

[1] Foss, Elizabeth. “Let Me Call Her Sweetheart” Arlington Catholic Herald (On-line) 2005-07-14 http://www.catholicherald.com/foss/05ef/ef050714.htm

Some people might read Cardinal McCarrick’s statement yesterday[1] as backtracking from that of Cardinal Schönborn’s.[2] I do not think it is however. Those who support evolution like to keep the term very vague, they like to use it to refer to everything from a God-guided process to a fully random and unguided one. They keep it vague this way intentionally. In part because they simply do not know how it happened, but also in part (more so in the minds of some scientists than in others naturally) because they know that only by keeping it vague can they covertly push the atheistic vision they regard as the only acceptable version. Only if they claim there is no conflict will they continue to be allowed to push evolution, and only evolution, in our schools, and to use the schools to attempt to indoctrinate the next generation. They know we remain a country with very real Christian instincts even if our practice has fallen off and even if the theology of far too many is Protestant at best and utterly chaotic at worst. Still, most would, if the polls can be believed, reject a fully random fully unguided theory of evolution. And scientists know that.

But Cardinal McCarrick also knows that evolution can mean a range of things, and he, unlike the scientists who claim authority, specified that he was referring to those versions of the theory that allow for a Creator. In essence, Cardinal McCarrick responded to one side of evolution, while Cardinal Schönborn responded to the other. Their statements do not conflict because they do not address the same theory of evolution.

[1] Catholic News Agency. “Cardinal McCarrick says ‘evolution is fine–as long as there is room for a Creator’” 2005-07-13 http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=4373
[2] Schierer, Luke. “Appealing to Rome on evolution” Random Unfinished Thoughts 2005-07-13 http://www.schierer.org/~luke/log/20050713-0947/apealing-to-rome-on-evolution

Reading Mr. Chuck Colson’s “Europe’s demographic crisis,” it becomes easy to see why a marriage is intended to be a “fruitful” union. Children are intended to support their parents in their old age. This bit of Catholic morality is so self-evident that it is even built into the assumptions behind the welfare state. While these services may appear to be free, it is important to remember that the doctors and nurses are not working for free, and that medicines still cost money. You simply pay for them through your taxes. Thus as people retire and pay less in taxes, their needs are met by the taxes of their children. Thus they must have had sufficient children for their children’s taxes to pay for both their own needs and the needs of the retired generation.

The quick retort that I tend to hear is the example of a French or Spanish citizen who lives here and goes “home” only for medical reasons. Such a person pays little or no taxes there, and so gets “free” medicine. Cheating the system in this way is certainly possible. But its also certainly not an option available to everyone. What do you do if you get hurt to badly to fly home here? And what do you do when everyone at “home” is too young to work or too old to work, and thus is not paying much in taxes? Where is the government going to get the money to pay for this? Clearly such examples are simply exceptions, they cannot be the norm, and so do not disprove the generalization.

Colson, Chuck. “Europe’s demographic crisis” BreakPoint Online 2005-07-11 http://www.townhall.com/columnists/chuckcolson/cc20050711.shtml