God grant them freedom

This photo of an Iraqi woman sporting her vote-stained finger is a picture of courage. By the ink of a tattoo, she has marked herself a Christian in a country where Christianity is not always safe, and by the ink on her finger, she stands for a new Iraq in a time when the Rhinoceroses would kill her for that, too, if they could.

So may God grant them freedom and us the courage to stand with them in a way that honors their courage, and that of our military.

Carnival of the Clueless

After I entered Stephen Schwartz in the 25th Carnival of the Clueless, I got a letter proving him even more clueless than I had thought. It started "Hey stupid" and went downhill from there.

Last night I read a column about an e-mail exchange between Larry Elder and a reader who disputed his facts. If Mr. Schwartz ever comes back to my "pathetic blague," he might do well to follow the link and learn how a person with intelligence, class and discretion deals with a disagreeing, even disagreeable, correspondent.

A public apology

This is a public admission of arrogance to two bishops and a Protestant television celebrity. A couple of days ago, I posted a snarky comment about a Russian archbishop calling Krishna Satan, and then I drew a comparison to Pat Robertson and my bishop, Tikhon, and suggested that they all go to Antarctica together. To all three, I offer profound apologies. It's not that I think Archbishop Nikon was correct; it's that, first, who am I to sentence anyone to exile, and second why bring in Pat Robertson or Bishop Tikhon, neither of which had anything to do with it?

I thought about just deleting the post, but then I decided that this is more appropriate.

Let me do my disagreement with Archbishop Nikon more better.

I begin with the Kontakion of Pentecost:

When the Most High came down and confused the tongues,
He divided the nations;
But when He distributed the tongues of fire,
He called all to unity.
Therefore, with one voice, we glorify the all-holy Spirit!

The nations, as we know, are still divided, and the task of calling all to unity has fallen to the Church, empowered with the Holy Spirit. But the fact that we are divided doesn't mean that those on the outside are necessarily rebelling against the Cosmos, harmony with God -- they may be following to the best of their understanding -- more or less, and often more than, say, I am, who am supposedly blessed with the Holy Spirit.

So how can we give the Good News to people who have grown up not knowing it? If someone comes to me and says, "Everything you think is good is evil. Everyone you thought loved you has deceived you. Let me turn your world upside down and give you a life of dissension and chaos," I'm not going to be much inclined to listen.

Instead we can say, "Everything that you know that is true is True. Everything that you know that is good is Good. Everything that you know that is beautiful is Beautiful. Like everyone who learns and grows, you may have to throw away some fond beliefs on the way to a better understanding of what's True and Good and Beautiful, but you'll count them as dross in light of the greater Truth, Goodness and Beauty that you'll find." Then if we follow it up with deeds of mercy and compassion, we may find some who will listen. Others won't, but as St. Paul says, one plants, another waters, and God gets the harvest.

This is true whether we're talking to Hindus, Moslems, Native Alaskans or 21st-century agnostic skeptics. We owe a gentler touch to people outside the Church than to those within. After all, St. Nicholas punched out the archheretic Arius, not his pagan neighbors.

That's what I should have said about Archbishop Nikon's comments, and not what I did say.

Hey stupid

Begins the big comeback from my new acquaintance Stephen Schwartz, recently heard from waxing starry-eyed about prospects for an Albanian Kosovo. I had already planned to post his reply -- seems only fair, after all, to let him have his say -- when he kindly extended his permission.

So here it is, in its entirety, with breaks for comments:

Une flas shqip. Do you know that means? It means I speak Albanian.

Actually, no. Dare I ask? Have I just posted some flawlessly obscene idiomatic Albanian insult, or does it literally mean "I speak Albanian"? Being stupid, I've only studied French, Greek, Russian and Spanish, and though I'm not conversational in any of them -- not being a globetrotting journalist with many opportunities to polish my language skills -- I could figure out how to say, "I speak [language]," in all of them. I won't do it, though; it would be showing off.

I first went to the Albanian area of Yugoslavia in 1991. I worked in Kosovo in 1999-2000 and returned to the area in 2003 as well as this year.

My mistake. Being caught up in the dreary mundanities of Stateside life, I haven't read his entire opus.

You can't even read English. The guy who wants to publish the American founding fathers is an Albanian from Albania, not a Kosovar.

My error again. And actually, my impression of the Albanian Albanians is that they've been drug through the mill, first by Hoxha, and then, just as they were starting to get on their feet again, by a bunch of hucksters posing as capitalists, and yet there's remarkable harmony among the ethnic and religious groups there. Again, I'm not a globetrotting journalist who speaks Albanian, merely a stupid American who tries to sift the truth out of the news and who knows some people who have spent time there and loved the Albanian people. Is is safe to point out that these people were Orthodox Christians?

I have written on the Greater Albania issue since 1990. I have published more on Wahhabism in Kosovo and the Albanian lands than any other foreign writer.

See above about not catching the opus.

You should also go back and check out the fact that THE WEEKLY STANDARD supported the Kosovo intervention, regardless of your opinion of Clinton and Albright.

I'm aware that a lot of conservatives thought it was a pretty neat idea to "bomb Serbia into the Stone Age." I believe a lot of them were impatient with the bad behavior among the divorcing Yugoslavs, and the U.S. media, tired of trying to figure out who was right and what was really going on, finally just landed on a bad guy to villify (Let's see, Muslims are exotic; Catholics have the Vatican; that leaves the Serbs. OK, Serbs are wholly bad and the others are wholly innocent. See how easy that is? It totally works on TV.) Then with a good deal of selective reporting, some "revised" voice-over translation of Serbian "man in the street interviews," and some high-class public relations, it became easy to maintain a settled paradigm. But that excuse doesn't work for people who have been following the issue as globetrotting journalists since 1990.

Nevertheless, even from my sheltered stupidity, I remember when Richard Holbrooke stiff-armed the religious leaders of the former Yugoslavia -- Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim -- who had together authored a letter to all their people asking them to eschew violence. He visited Milosevic and the KLA (and don't miss the photo at the link of Holbrooke lounging with armed thugs), but didn't have an hour to spend with the bishops and the imam. It was a time when the diplomatic apparatus of the most powerful country in the world sent a message by its behavior -- the message that the people who mattered in Yugoslavia were the thugs in power. Beside that, Holbrooke calling Serbs "murderous assholes" on television in 1995 was just part of the Clinton approach to diplomacy.

The fact that the Weekly Standard has been so supportive of Clinton's abysmal foreign policy is part of why I don't read the publication much and therefore haven't followed Mr. Schwartz's opus more carefully.

Mr. Schwartz continues:

You write:

1. "why investigators couldn't find evidence of the Kosovo massacres that were the pretext for the assault on Serbia;"

A lie. There are 550 mass grave sites. Everyone knows about them.

Call me a liar if you want to. It's the same definition of "lie" that the Democratic Underground uses against Bush. But the link I gave in my earlier post has the World Court saying that the "mass graves" contain 5,000 bodies. This is, as Detective Sgt. Brian Honeybourn points out, a great evil, but not genocide. It's also not entirely clear that Serbs did all the killing. After-the-fact investigations have turned up evidence that some of the pivotal "massacres" never happened. Or maybe they did, but how many of the victims were killed by Serbs and how many by the KLA? "Everybody" apparently knows a lot of stuff, but when the reporters are so biased, we stupids in the hinterlands don't believe them at all.

2. "about the mass graves of Serbs discovered in Kosovo since the war;"

And where were these? There were a couple of gravesites I know of with fewer than two dozen Serbs altogether in them. They were fully investigated at the Hague. Place names? You don't know what you're taking about. I doubt you could find Kosovo on a map.

3. "and why Kosovo Albanians, set free to create a society in their own image, made it twice as much of a hell as the one Milosevic created for them."

How would you know? What do you know? Nothing. Kosovo is flourishing. But they have yet to be set free.

I honestly hope it's true. Here's a story of a courageous Serb family trying to return to their life in Kosovo. But here's an analysis that suggests that "flourishing" may not be exactly the adjective for it: "Why now? Kosovo has no economy to speak of, no one in authority able to push through privatization, and consequently high unemployment. Hideously abused in the past by the Serbs, the Kosovar Albanians are now on top and have been wreaking vengeance on the Serb minority in their midst, capped last year by the ransacking of churches and a monastery. This naturally stirs strong feelings in Serbia proper, even with Slobodan Milosevic away in custody. Without a functioning judicial system, organized crime in Kosovo is flourishing, so much so that it poses a threat to the entire region."

It's late, and I'll let Mr. Schwartz go on uninterrupted for a while:

4. "Oh, and while he's at it, he might have looked into human trafficking,"

Human trafficking largely involves activity by members of the international community, and Serbian gangsters, using Moldovan women and Ukrainian women to service said internationals. North Albanians, Kosovars, and Albanians from Macedonians do not get involved in this. If you think different, cite cases: indictments, names of the accused, dates of arrests, etc.

"drug dealers" Cite the names of the indicted, accused, dates of arrests, etc. They don't exist. The drug routes run from eastern Macedonia through south Serbia to Belgrade and from Greece through southern Albania to Italy. You can't cite any evidence otherwise. You are a victim of your own bigotry abetted by propagandists.

"and weapons markets." Albanians like guns. So what? You aren't for the second amendment? I am. They are. Deal with it. The gun market is in north Albania, not in Kosovo.

OK. I take it back. None of the links I provided had any information. I don't have dates and places, and the people who have access to dates and places have agendas that are preserved by not publishing them. So there are no drug dealers, no human traffickers and no Al-Qaeda-trained terrorists among the Kosovo Albanians.

The comparison with Kristallnacht is the usual kind of sloppy, morally despicable slobber one can expect from a comfortable American pseudo-intellectual sitting in a couch in pajamas.

I don't use these comparisons lightly, but I think the similarities are very strong between the Night of Broken Glass and the anti-Serb riots that ripped through Kosovo in March of last year. By the way, it was a UN administrator who made the comparison before I did.

As to the heart-breaking spectacle of vandalized Serb churches (sob!) -- the churches that were targeted were mainly recent foundations built to symbolize Serbian domination.

Hearing such hostility to a faith's religious structures makes me wonder if Mr. Schwartz is perhaps a Christian who hates the Orthodox, a Christian who hates Serbs, or a non-Christian who hates Christians. But I'm not asking for an answer to that question. Suffice to say that the hate is evident. On the other hand, he does ascribe considerable foresight to the Christians of the 14th through early 20th centuries, to know where to built churches to symbolize Serbian domination.

The old Orthodox monasteries, which were stolen by the Serbs from their Macedonian and Vlach builders, were largely left alone.

Is that why Decani has to be under constant guard, after its monks rescued Albanians during the war?

Do you know the story of the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw? It was a gigantic Orthodox structure built by the tsars to symbolize Russian power over Poland. When Poland became independent in the 1920s it was demolished and there is no trace of it today. Just as there will soon be no trace of the Japanese governor's palace in Seoul, Korea. Why should Albanians be held to a different standard than Poles or Koreans? To make foreign Serbophiles happy? Sorry, no thanks.

Even this "foreign Serbophile" was saddened by the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.

All comments on the record; I will post them to your pathetic blague if you don't.

Stephen Schwartz

P.S. [in follow-up e-mail]: The Serbian government now admits what happened in Kosovo: the Serbs attempted to expel the Albanians, killed many of them, including many children, destroyed many structures, etc. etc.

As a matter of fact, the Serbs are the only ones who admit that their side has done any wrong. It's part of their bad PR, and it's part of why I, as a stupid American who can't find Kosovo on a map (it's next to Ecuador, right?), think it's important to stand up for them every once in a while. I mean, Mr. Schwartz may call me names, but he's not likely to bomb my house.

UPDATE, DEC. 10: I edited out a reference to Michel Chossudovsky in the piece above, because his stand on other matters led me to doubt his credibility. For more information on the Kosovo Liberation Army, from a more authoritative and balanced source, here is a U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee report on the KLA filed one week after the war on Serbia began in 1999.

Kristallnacht? I didn't see any Kristallnacht

Stephen Schwartz, writing in the otherwise conservative Daily Standard, goes looking for white hats in the Balkans and finds them -- on the same heads blessed by Madeline Albright and Richard Holbrooke.

Schwartz manages to find a Kosovo Albanian who reads American founding fathers and a couple of others who assert that there's no plan for a Greater Albania and that Kosovo Albanians don't like Wahabbism.

Great. Life is simple if you only listen to one side of these messy situations.

In the meantime Schwartz, who seems to have arrived in Kosovo within the past couple of days, needs someone to explain to him about those piles of blasted rubble that used to be churches; why Serbs who have lived their whole lives in Kosovo -- including monks who gave shelter to Albanians running from Milosevic's troops -- aren't safe to leave their dwellings; why NATO troops need to spend more effort protecting Serbs from Kosovars than vice versa; why investigators couldn't find evidence of the Kosovo massacres that were the pretext for the assault on Serbia; about the mass graves of Serbs discovered in Kosovo since the war; and why Kosovo Albanians, set free to create a society in their own image, made it twice as much of a hell as the one Milosevic created for them. Oh, and while he's at it, he might have looked into human trafficking, drug dealers and weapons markets.

The answers to those questions might have made for at least a paragraph somewhere in his "It's a beautiful morning" story. The questions might have at least come up in his conversations with the "democracy-loving" Kosovars he talked with. Unfortunately, it's an opportunity lost and a whitewash perpetrated.

Is there a country where we can send Archbishop Nikon and Pat Robertson?

This headline from the Hindustan Times online edition tells the whole story: Russian Archbishop calls Lord Krishna 'Satan.'

Maybe Antarctica, where they can melt the ice pack by hurling burning epithets at each other. And let's add Bishop Tikhon while we're at it.

Note: It's not good evangelism to call other people's religious figures "Satan" (unless the people are actually Satanists). It should be obvious, but apparently isn't, that you build better relationships with people by honoring their highest impulses. It's something the members of the original Alaska mission, as well as Sts. Cyril and Methodius, understood.

UPDATE: I apologized for this post here.

Christ-hate

We'll be hearing a lot of Christ-hatred, apparently, with the release of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Up till now I've been mostly running across Philip Pullman, getting quoted all over the place in his efforts to become the anti-Lewis and to keep interest in his own books going 10 years after the movie release. I don't think it will work, but the aim -- even if duplicitous -- is at least rational.

Now Polly Toynbee, writing in the UK Guardian, reveals the depths to which hatred of Christianity can go.

Just to clear up one thing, I think she's got a point when she says some Christians have used guilt to manipulate children:

Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus's holy head every day that you don't eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told. So the resurrected Aslan gives Edmund a long, life-changing talking-to high up on the rocks out of our earshot. When the poor boy comes back down with the sacred lion's breath upon him he is transformed unrecognisably into a Stepford brother, well and truly purged.

I've read a book by a Catholic priest, containing various meditations on the stations of the cross. They were all awful (though the priest was a kind-hearted, well-meaning soul), but the meditation "for children" was hideous, containing just the sort of guilt-smack Toynbee says her mother got from the nuns. The result, as so often happens when guilt -- as it inevitably does -- goes sour, is a soaring rage full of fear, shame at having been duped, and a wall that keeps one from looking at the situation in any light but one's own defensive anger.

But however pitiably Toynbee came by her rage, her view is still warped by it.

At the core of her argument with Aslan -- and with Christ -- is that He's not just the Lamb but also the Lion.

Christ should surely be no lion (let alone with the orotund voice of Liam Neeson). He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight.

For Toynbee, Christ must always be "gentle Jesus, meek and mild," certainly not "a mighty fortress." She mocks the idea of a powerful Christ: "Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America -- that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right."

Lewis, a British citizen, was neither was neither Republican nor Democrat, certainly not as those parties align themselves in the dawning years of the 21st century. What Toynbee fails to understand -- or, understanding, hates -- is that in fairy stories good people are rewarded and bad people punished; heroes become kings and queens, and villains get their comeuppance. The Church is not a place for rolling over and letting the bad guy kick you; it's an army of martyrs who laughed at death and saints who killed dragons and cities protected from marauding armies by an icon of the Theotokos.

She says that in Great Britain 43 percent of people polled didn't know what event Easter celebrates. How much of that ignorance and disdain is due to the "sensitive," "mild" and "inoffensive" cup of weak tea that Christianity has become? Toynbee would like to keep it that way, but Toynbee, as she says herself, is no friend of the Church.

And Aslan, the Lion who plays like a being at once thunderstorm and kitten, may be a worthy opponent to such a view. The fact that Toynbee is so upset is a sign of hope.

Talkin' dog

I've been working to learn to speak dog most of my life. Most of my dogs have done better at learning my language than I have at learning theirs, but over time, I've gotten better at it.

For instance, if you want to tell a dog that you're friendly, start at a high pitch and work down to a low pitch. Words are optional. Babytalk is fine, such as "Oh, what a good puppy." For added emphasis, wave your arm behind your back as if it's a tail. Dogs don't see well, and they don't make distinctions between arms and tails. People, unfortunately, do see well, and they are likely to think the tail thing is a bit of overkill, if not utterly mad. Proceed at your own risk. Also, of course, if you've violated some other dog protocol, such as crossing into restricted territory or seeming to threaten its pack, making friendly noises may not help. It can't hurt either.

If you want to speak warning, on the other hand, a staccato, "Bark! Bark! Bark" is the standard doggie alarm. If your dog says that to you, it's something the dog considers worth noting. (It may be a cat moseying down the street, but the dog considers that noteworthy.)

Or if it's time for sleep, a long breath expelled through the nose is a signal that it's time to calm down.

Now ABC News gives us another one. Researchers are calling it a "laugh," which is probably as good a name as any. Just for an experiment, I did a loud, long pant, as described in the article, to Sadie and Mocha, my dog teachers, who were sleeping nearby. Sadie got up and brought me a tug toy. Mocha got up and corrected my pronunciation -- it should be done with a rounded mouth, as if you've taken a large bite of a too-hot roasted marshmallow and are trying to cool it off before it burns your mouth. She congratulated me on my efforts before lying back down and releasing a long breath through her nose.

This is just my first attempt at dog-laughing. Anybody else have results to report (those who aren't the sort of people to look askance at using a spare arm as a tail on occasion)?

I can't wait to see the movie

It's like Chinatown, the 1974 film noire with Jack Nicholson investigating a simple adultery case that ends up revealing crime and corruption up through the highest levels of Los Angeles city authority.

Only more so. The murder of a couple of gangsta rap musicians points to corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department, a coverup benefiting the then-police chief (who is now a city council member), aided and abetted by an apparently corrupt and complicit Pulitizer Prize-winning music reporter at the LA Times.

With the outcome that the Times bends its trial coverage so the repoter's buddy, a rap music producer, gets acquitted.

Chinatown is film noire in color; Jan Golab's piece is film noire in nonfiction.

H/T: Patterico.

Wait -- what have I been laughing at all this time?

Al Sharpton wants his own sitcom

OK, guys, fun's over -- who hid the passengers?

More random searches for passengers at US airports

Answers to Pullman

For some reason, a good many of the articles about C.S. Lewis coming out in advance of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe include interviews with Philip Pullman, British author of the revolting His Dark Materials trilogy and confirmed Lewis-hater. To judge by the constant quoting of this hostile witness, you'd think Lewis was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, instead of simply being a deceased author of a very popular series of children's books, one of which has been made into a movie. (Does anybody remember hearing from angry enemies of Roald Dahl around the time of the opening of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? I don't either.)

Nevertheless, Pullman is asked, and Pullman bilefully accuses, and Michael Nelson, writing in the Chronicle Review, answers Pullman's charges. Which is good, because Lewis doesn't seem to have as active a press secretary as Pullman does.

I just want to say thank you

to this Jewish group defending "Merry Christmas."

And Happy Hanukkah to you, too.

Non-scandal of the week

The LA Times revealed this week that the U.S. military has paid Iraqi newspapers to run pro-U.S. articles.

The task force also bought a newspaper and "took control" of a radio station (sounds like they sent in a SWAT team and held the announcers hostage, but that would be too juicy a detail to leave out, so it was probably just some unused bandwidth).

Anyway, does the LA Times remember Voice of America or Radio Free Europe? Radio Liberty broadcast Father Alexander Schmemann's sermons into the Soviet Union for 30 years.

So the task force writes and translates articles and pays the newspapers to run them. Sounds like a win-win to me. Unless the Times is presuming that the poor benighted Iraqis can't discern a pro-American article when they see one. Well, welcome to the age of the Internet, O newspaper of plummeting circulation that runs Democratic Party press releases for free. We all have other sources of news now, and newspapers are being held responsible for their bias. If the Iraqi readers don't like seeing pro-American articles in their pages, they won't read them or they won't buy those papers. On the other hand, it might be nice to see a pro-American article occasionally in the LA Times.

Next scandal up: The president wears socks. I kid you not. Black ones, too.

UPDATE: In an LA Times column, Walter Jajko goes into more detail about the need to join the propaganda war.

The Grammar Pledge

It always goes this way. Someone mentions a grammar problem -- in this case a novel, whose author is an English professor at a Seattle university, that is afflicted with dangling modifiers and even has an "it's" used as the possessive. These errors can be as distracting as a "factual" detail that isn't true or a character's action that doesn't follow or a tone shift from storytelling to preaching. It can pitch a reader utterly out of the story.

But unlike a catching a factual error or a tone shift, catching a stylistic problem (because dangling modifiers are not, strictly speaking, grammar but style) or a punctuation problem (see prior parenthesis) requires an advance apology. Mine is that I'm a grammatoholic, but I'm not trying to change.

That confession -- of interest in the finer points of language usage -- is always followed by someone who protests, "I don't know anything about grammar, and I'm a terrible speller, and I'm scared of all these people who think it's important." And then someone inevitably brings up Flannery O'Connor's saying that "Anyone who can only spell a word one way hasn't got much imagination."

There you have it. End of discussion. If you come back from that, you're not only insensitive, you're taking on Flannery O'Connor in an argument.

Well, I've got something else to say, and since it's my blog I'm going to say it. I'm talking to writers now mainly, secondarily to anyone who wants to communicate effectively, especially in writing. If you're a person of tender grammatical sensibilities and you don't fit those categories, best move along.

First, I don't care how Flannery O'Connor spelled in the drafts of her works; she was a master of the language and you don't get her dramatic effect with dangling modifiers and misused apostrophes.

Second, any writer has to care about the use of the language -- as a cook cares about food -- because that's all we have. And to say, "I don't know anything about it and I'm afraid to be told I need to learn" is a copout. It's no sin to say, "I don't know"; but "I don't know and I don't care" is an offense against oneself as a writer and against one's readers. The reader can glean our message only from what we lay out on the page. If we're not master of our message, we cannot communicate it.

And it's not that hard. I realize that the schools have been given over, by and large, to excusing "creative spelling" and "affirming" "natural" (read that, undisciplined) use of the language, so writers who graduated from such schools start at a disadvantage. But it's not quantum mechanics. Here are a few steps to start from nowhere and over time, fairly painlessly, develop a mastery of the language:

• Stop saying, "I'm bad at grammar and spelling"; it's just an excuse for not trying. Start saying, "I'm working on my grammar and spelling."


• Think about words -- where they came from, how they sound, what they mean. Get a good dictionary (also online) and, when looking something up -- as many unfamiliar words as possible -- look at all the definitions and the etymology, the history of the word. Ask what they have in common; ask why it's changed. The answer may not come right away, but if the question is burbling in one's brain, the answer that appears in a newspaper column or pops up in a conversation will bring the richeness of a found treasure.


• Subscribe to A Word A Day, or something similar.


• Buy a college grammar book -- The Complete Stylist is the best I've read, available from Amazon.com starting at 50 cents, but the Harbrace College Handbook is another, or check the shelves of the local used bookstore -- then read it cover to cover. It won't take that long, and it's not as boring as half the stuff in the daily paper (and a lot more relevant).


• Explore the excellent grammar resources on the web. The Dictionary.com page is a good place to start, but there are many. Google your question and see what happens.


• If you've got time, study an inflected language, such as Greek, Latin or Russian. It will expand your brain, give you a different perspective on time (literally -- every language's view of time is encapsulated in its verb tenses) and help understand the cases and genders in English. This is for extra credit.


• Beyond that, take an interest. It doesn't require correcting your grandma when she says "lay" instead of "lie," but thinking about the difference between "lay" and "lie," and transitive and intransitive verbs (though learning the terminology is not as important as learning the principles), and that gives you control over when to use what and why. If you choose to use a word against its conventional usage, that's a choice you get to make, and as master of the word, you know what effect it will have and how that furthers your communication with the reader you have in mind.

And if you already know this stuff -- or are in the process of getting better at it -- do you want to take the pledge with me? No more apologies. I'm not a grammatoholic; I'm just a writer who takes an interest in her tools. I'm not gifted from God to understand the difference between "lay" and "lie"; I just looked it up enough times that I got it. I didn't inherit my knowledge from my rich Uncle Edgar; I got a good chunk of it scowled into me from my eighth-English teacher, Miss Babers, and if you don't have a Miss Babers in your life, I'll be it for you.

Riots help alert French police to new technologies

French police have discovered the Internet, as well as cellphones, in one of the serendipitous outcomes of nearly two weeks of boys-will-be-boys rioting.

Police were shocked to find the exuberant immigrant youths not depending on banners and bullhorns, as the student activists did in the May 1968 riots that ended up overthrowing the French government.

French authorities are trying to find someone aged 14-16, who is not involved in the riots, to explain to them how to get online.

Canada takes the lead

Canada took the lead over Denmark last night in the newest round of International Capture the Flag, being played over Hans Island, a barren Arctic rock rumored to be somewhere between Greenland and Canada. Team Canada won two points for capturing two flags -- one flying on a flagpole and the other cleverly hidden in a barrel near the flagpole.

As required under current rules of the international competition, Canadian soldiers delivered the flags to Denmark to establish that they had gained their points.

Canada last scored in July when it erected a $2,000 flag pole and a sensitive multicultural pile of rocks on the island. The Canadian military had to fly in the 300-pound rocks by helicopter.

Using a classic stealth maneuver, Denmark later informed Canada that its flag hadn't survived. Canada disputed whether that deserved any points, but finding the two Danish flags on the island proved both the earlier Danish claim and their own.

The score seems to be 3-2 Canada, though it's hard to be sure.

The most recent round of International Capture the Flag was when England bested Argentina in the Falkland Islands match in 1982.

And that's all the news for today, sports fans.

This post is also available at Blogger News Network.

Chirac's Shakespearean crisis

The French drama has played through two acts, and we hardly noticed it.

Act I has been going on for decades. This 2002 article by Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal describes the ordinary world -- the growing discontent in the housing projects of France. Unemployment, discrimination, lack of opportunity, and bored youths who comfort themselves by affiliating with a foreign ideology that would give them power and status in a world that gives them every material necessity, but no dignity. In the growing conflict, French authorities have dealt haphazardly with rising anti-Semitic violence and have formed foreign policy around their own "Arab street."

Inciting incident: two boys think they're being chased by police, run into an electric substation and die.

In Act II, riots erupt and spread. A disabled woman is set on fire. Rioters respond to police, fire and ambulance crews with rocks and firebombs. At Day 12, a man dies.

The rest of Europe trembles, as cars are set on fire in Brussels, Belgium, and Berlin and Bremen, Germany.

The longer it goes, the more intense Chirac's crisis will be. If he had dealt with the issues years ago, with firm law enforcement and economic and social status for the peaceful immigrants, the riots would not be happening now. But instead, in typical post-modern fashion, the French authorities have treated the innocent and the guilty exactly equally -- with economic handouts on the one hand and discrimination and disrespect on the other -- which has the same effect as punishment for the innocent and reward for the guilty.

Soon we will arrive at Chirac's Shakespearean crisis: Will he do a Petain, following the 20th-century marshal who turned France over to the Nazis, or a Reno, following the U.S. attorney general who in 1993 stormed the compound of an offbeat religious sect, eventually causing a fire that killed all 76 members of the cult, including 27 children.

Either way, France is likely to be a very different place in Act III. The change will be more gradual if he goes Petain, but the radicalized Moslems will have increasing control over the government policies, as the authorities retreat and retreat to keep the same thing from happening again.

If he goes Reno -- and France has shown itself capable of brutality when French monuments are not at stake -- there will be blood in the streets and a period of active warfare with an uncertain end.

Europe will never be the same.

I'm seeing someone else

I've posted my first post on the Conciliar Press blog, The Orthodox Way, titled "'Closed Communion' or 'Communion as identity.'"

Catchy, don't you think?

That's my Monday blog.

I need to get a new title up here

Just to show that I haven't fallen into a time warp.

In a couple of days, people won't remember who Harriet Miers was or the various transmogrifications her public character went through during her 15 minutes of fame. When all is said and done, she may be glad it was only 15 minutes, and not 27. But I wonder if the borking from the right was any less distressing than the borking from the left.

But I have nothing informative or incisive to say, so I'll let you folks move on to the next blog.