Bossman asks “can you write a script that makes a tar.gz of each user in the /home dir please?”

After a couple false starts involving the bash for loop (which I still think could solve the problem), and a quick glance at the find man page, I produce the one line result.

find /home -type d -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -exec tar cvf {}.tar.gz {} ';'

I recall there being some debate over exactly when an unborn baby begins to feel pain, at what point the nervous system is sufficiently developed to transmit it, and the brain to make sense of the transmissions. So I expect that this debate^[1] will not go smoothly, and the measure to be hotly contested in congress, and, if it passes, in court. Still, it is good to see it on the table.

Several European politicians recently have talked about the problems burqas pose to civil interaction and society as we know it. The Dutch are the first that I have seen proposing so global a ban though.^[1] They want to ban them in all public places.

I do not like this idea at all. I sympathize with the lawmakers, the extreme level of anonymity provided to the wearer by a burqa must propose unique challenges to law enforcement among other things. This is not, cannot be, the right solution though. The state should not be defining what is an acceptable level of modesty for a person to attempt to maintain. For as I understand it, modesty is precisely what is at stake here from the Islamic point of view. They believe, I am told, that the woman must cover herself so completely because her beauty would cause men to look at her lustfully. In Catholic terms then, that unless so extremely covered, she would be viewed as an object and not as a person.

I think that chain of logic flawed. I think it puts far too little responsibility on the man, grants too little reality to free will. That is neither here nor there though, the critical data point is not whether I believe it or no, but whether they believe it or no. Nor is it sufficient to say that many or most Muslim women do not choose to wear the full burqa. I will take the logic behind the law to its extreme to make the cause of my disagreement clear.

Suppose you had a society in which shirts were not normally worn. A small percentage of the population, say 5%, is made up of immigrants from a “western” civilization where shirts are commonly worn. Most of these people, including most of the women, are willing to go along with the societal norm and go topless. A few dozen women though feel that it offends their modesty, which they are religiously obligated to protect. Should that society pass a law banning shirts in public? Clearly they could, but I think they should not.

Though the headdress is overkill in our eyes, we should respect the religiously motivated practices of others wherever possible. We should be extremely reluctant to interfere, doing so only when the religion in question is actively destructive to society. We should be extremely reluctant to so classify, always being mindful that our own rubric might somewhere/someday be used to classify us.

Naturally there exist cases were tolerance is not possible. The Mayan or Incan religions, with their human sacrifices, could not be allowed to exist. Yet it is this sort of extreme alone that I propose be the bar for interference. Thus I have stated that I do not want to see government preventing the use of hallucinogens in religious worship, though I believe the religion in question false, and the use of hallucinogens both wrong and harmful.

“The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.” —Mark Twain

Ms. Denyse O’Leary looks at the origin and flaws of the peer review process in some length.^[1] It is not just me you see.

Mr. George Monbiot publishes an article^[1] in rival paper “The Guardian,” addressing some of Mr. Christopher Monckton’s claims.^[2] His refutation is much less referenced. He also falls into the fallacy of assuming that anything that comes from a peer reviewed journal is necessarily more authoritative than anything that does not. Considering some of the utter garbage claiming to refute Intelligent Design that I have seen coming from peer reviewed journals, my own perspective is to take both the news paper article and the journal article at face value, and give neither greater credence.

Still, it may be that Mr. Monckton has overstated his claims and/or been misleading himself. I think the refutation insufficient, but then I am hardly objective.

It persists in being about five degrees colder up at my desk than down by the computer. It is 64 degrees up here, 69 downstairs. ☹

There is or is going to be an article in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science talking about a study in which adult stem cells, which pose no ethical problems, were used to cure type 2 diabetes in mice.^[1] This is the sort of thing that ought to be incredibly news worthy. It will be under-reported, however, because of the focus on embryonic stem cells.

One of the problems with cell phones is that it isn’t always convenient to be with in cell phone charger range of an electrical socket. The cell phone will without fail decide to run out of battery at just such a time in the middle of a conversation you would rather not end.

I can only suggest you read the whole. I cannot speak with the power that typifies much, though not all, of Mr. George Weigel’s work.

Europe, and especially western Europe, is suffering from a crisis of civilizational morale. … No, the most dramatic manifestation of Europe’s crisis of civilizational morale is the fact that Europe is depopulating itself.^[1]

…

Europeans and Americans alike typically think of “history” as the product of politics (the contest for power) or economics (the contest for wealth). Both “history as politics” and “history as economics” take a partial truth and try, unsuccessfully, to turn it into a comprehensive truth. Understanding Europe’s current situation, and what it means for America, requires us to look at history in a different way, through the prism of culture.^[2]

…

One of European civilization’s most distinctive cultural characteristics is the conviction that life isn’t just one damn thing after another, about which little or nothing can be done; Europe learned that from its faith in the God of the Bible.^[3]

…

Human freedom and human greatness required rejecting the biblical God, according to such influential thinkers as Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. … [From these ideas you get] the great mid-twentieth century tyrannies — communism, fascism, Nazism. … ultramundane humanism, in its quest for a worldly utopia, is inevitably inhuman humanism.^[4]

…

This crisis could only become fully visible after the end of the Cold War. Its effects were first masked by the illusory peace of the interwar period; then by the rise of totalitarianism and the Great Depression; then by the Second World War itself; then by the Cold War.^[5]

…

Europe today is profoundly shaped, however, by a kinder, gentler cousin, which the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has termed “exclusive humanism:” a set of ideas and political default positions according to which (and in the name of democracy, human rights, tolerance, and civility) all transcendent religious or moral reference points must be kept out of European public life — especially the life of the European Union.^[6]

Mr. Weigel continues, illustrating in brief the reality that this “exclusive humanism” is just yet another form of totalitarianism. Following the depopulation to its logical conclusion, he connects it with the rise of Muslim jihad-ism, and the potential for the future of Europe to be a Muslim one.^[7]

Western society is destroying itself. It is doing so by ceasing to believe in its very underpinnings. This deconstruction, this mutation into something unsustainable, has radical, extreme implications for the world that our children and grandchildren will live in. Pope Benedict XVI thinks we can turn this around, that just as Saint Benedict saved much of western civilization once by the spiritual renewal he triggered as Rome dissolved, we can save our contemporary society by a similar spiritual renewal.

Societies are built of families. To change the definition of the family is to critically undermine the very basis of society. For to turn the family into just yet another societally defined construct is to leave the society defining foundation-less. What is then left to provide stability, with both Church and family excluded? Who will work to establish (or re-establish) justice if those who would do were killed in the womb? For this reason marriage and life were the critical battles of the last election, and continue to be the critical battle fields as we look ahead.

We were hit hard in this last election. For while we stood firm in preserving the family, we failed badly to protect human life. It is in light of that failure that the turnover in congress takes on significance. For while the Republicans cannot be trusted, the Democrats have of late been the more threatening.

For Europe’s present could well be our future. Let us pray that we, with our separated (Protestant and Evangelical) brothers, can turn aside that grim possibility.