Obama wants to take on "sacred cows" and "keep our sacred trust with our seniors."

We thought it was funny, at the press conference today, that Obama, in prepared remarks, used the word "sacred" in the sarcastic way right before using "sacred" in the serious way:

And it is possible for us to construct a package that would be balanced, would share sacrifice, would involve both parties taking on their sacred cows, would involved some meaningful changes to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid that would preserve the integrity of the programs and keep our sacred trust with our seniors...

He needs a better editor! That use of sacred cows primes the listener to disbelieve his seriousness about keeping the trust with seniors. We're prompted to think of "sacred" things as things that people are wrongly leaving untouched!

By the way, the word "sacrifice" also appears in that sentence, and "sacrifice" has the same root as "sacred."

sacrifice (n.)
mid-13c., from O.Fr. sacrifise (12c.), from L. sacrificium, from sacrificus "performing priestly functions or sacrifices," from sacra "sacred rites" (prop. neut. pl. of sacer "sacred," see sacred) + root of facere "to do, perform" (see factitious). L. sacrificium is glossed in O.E. by ansegdniss. Sense of "something given up for the sake of another" is first recorded 1590s. Baseball sense first attested 1880.

sacred
c.1300, from pp. of obsolete verb sacren "to make holy" (early 13c.), from O.Fr. sacrer (12c.), from L. sacrare "to make sacred, consecrate," from sacer (gen. sacri) "sacred, dedicated, holy, accursed," from O.L. saceres, which Tucker connects to base *saq- "bind, restrict, enclose, protect," explaining that "words for both 'oath' & 'curse' are regularly words of 'binding.' " But Buck merely groups it with Oscan sakrim, Umbrian sacra and calls it "a distinctive Italic group, without any clear outside connections." Nasalized form is sancire "make sacred, confirm, ratify, ordain." Sacred cow "object of Hindu veneration," is from 1891; figurative sense of "one who must not be criticized" is first recorded 1910, reflecting Western views of Hinduism.

Perhaps, out of respect for Hinduism, we should refrain from using the term "sacred cow." Perhaps respect for religion should lead us away from using the words "sacred" and "sacrifice" casually. But surely, if you want to demonstrate your somber, serious dedication by festooning your rhetoric with the words "sacred" and "sacrifice," you should nix the expression "sacred cow" — which is all about saying people are silly to regard something as holy.

Revenge, the Wikipedia article.

A report that the wife of Dominique Strass-Kahn is seeking "revenge" got me thinking about the specific meaning of the word. Surely, it doesn't include merely remembering who kicked you when you were down.

My curiosity about the concept was sufficient to get me to Wikipedia, where I was, first, interested that there was an article at all, and second, interested that it was as short as it was. It wasn't super-short, like a dictionary definition. If you're going to purport to cover the history of revenge and its function in society and religion plus that famous saying, how do you keep the length to 2 screens?

Presumably: editing! Wikipedia is all about editing. People load crap in. That's the easy part. The miracle of Wikipedia is in the editing.

Oh, come on, Althouse. It's not a miracle. I mean, check it out:  "A miracle is an event attributed to divine intervention."

No, no. I'm not going there. The Daily News used "revenge" to portray a specific individual in a negative light for the titillation of readers. I used hyperbole, in a complimentary sense, to refer to the behind-the-scenes work of thousands of editors who deserve some extra praise and thanks.

Both miracles and revenge play a part in human storytelling, but revenge is a much better story. "Deus ex machina" is not the most admirable plot device, as Aristotle explained:

It is obvious that the solutions of plots too should come about as a result of the plot itself, and not from a contrivance... There should be nothing improbable in the incidents; otherwise, it should be outside the tragedy....

Revenge makes a good tragedy. See "Hamlet."  If you haven't seen it already.

Of the psychological, moral, and cultural foundation for revenge, philosopher Martha Nussbaum has written: "The primitive sense of the just—remarkably constant from several ancient cultures to modern institutions ...—starts from the notion that a human life ... is a vulnerable thing, a thing that can be invaded, wounded, violated by another's act in many ways. For this penetration, the only remedy that seems appropriate is a counter invasion, equally deliberate, equally grave. 

For this penetration.... a good image, when we're talking about rape. But what of the false accusation of rape? That too is a penetration.

"And to right the balance truly, the retribution must be exactly, strictly proportional to the original encroachment."

I think revenge asks for more.  Nussbaum explains the moral aspect of revenge, not the passionate edge that wants more than justice. There is passion, but wait...

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

That is the saying about revenge. And it doesn't suggest becoming dispassionate. You're not using your measuring spoons and cups, preparing a dish "strictly proportional to the original encroachment." The cold dish that is the best revenge is not a calibrated diet dish.

Nussbaum's Heart-Healthy Justice Salad is not revenge.

"It is my high priority to find a new venue —and bring the Surfing Madonna and her important message of 'Save The Ocean' — back into public view in our community as soon as possible."

The unauthorized mosaic is "uniting the Latino community, surfers, ocean-lovers, environmentalists, and promoting ocean awareness in a way that's playful."

The world-did-not-end traffic.

From my Site Meter, just now, under "Referring Search Words Ranked by Visits":



It's not all about the world not ending — Google traffic going to this post of mine. Somebody came here looking for "music to read to" and got to a post that I'm proud of. And then there was "you know i work on my hair" — which went here, where the clip from the movie with that quote no longer plays.

The world did not end. That's not the big news.

The big news is that big news covered the nonnews. We were supposed to find it amusing. Amusing to snicker at marginal people who believe religious things. They're so dumb. We're so smart. No, you're not. You are part of the system of dumbness you purport to report.

Michelle Obama: "It means all the world to us to know that there are prayer circles out there and people who are keeping the spirits clean around us"

Keeping the spirits clean?

She's out doing politics. Fine. She drags in prayer. I don't like that, but I'm used to the political appropriation of religion in America. But what is this notion of "keeping the spirits clean"? The "spirits... around us"? Does she think we all have spirits around us, spirits that can be unclean?

What religion is that? Is she dabbling in... New Age? Is she a witch?

Now, she does pause and chuckle/scoff between the words "keeping" and "spirits," and that might suggest an ironic distance from the common folk who believe in such things. Or — listen and judge — it might mean that she's aware that it's a bit daring to let it slip that she believes we are surrounded by clean and unclean spirits that influence our fate.

Bemoaning the loss of blue laws in the NYT.

"Sunday Shopping Linked With Less Happiness."

Good lord.

Things you get to read about yourself in the newspaper after you survive a 39-story jump from a building in Manhattan.

From today's Daily News, the story of a failed suicide:

1. The headline says the man — Thomas Magill — "lives to tell tale," but the "tale" he's told so far is "My leg! My leg!"

2. A construction worker who witnessed the fall has opined that the man survived not because he landed on a red 2008 Dodge Charger, but because the car contained a set of rosary beads.

3. He landed feet first, "twisted like a pretzel," in the backseat of the car. The car seat! That, not God, accounts for the soft landing, as shown in this reenactment:



4. The man's Facebook page shows that he regarded his interests as "being mean" and "making fun of people." Does that make you less likely to scold me for being mean and making fun of him? I am making fun of him, but I deny that I'm being mean. This post is part of my ongoing effort to deter people from committing suicide. I believe stories about suicide are full of the kind of sympathy that creates a romantic aura around suicide. I want to give suicide the kind of awful image that will make less easy to embrace than facing up to your problems in the material world.

Let's watch Obama's big speech.

7:06: He's laying out a "battle plan" to fight the leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. He's "deploying" the military.

7:08: What to do during the "siege." A decision has been made to speak in military terms. Of course, he's not the first President to ask us to think about a nonmilitary problem in military terms. The War on X... the moral equivalent of war....

7:12: To make sure this won't happen again, Obama is establishing a commission.

7:15: We need to "jump start" the "clean energy" future. There's "the potential" to create "millions of jobs" but "only" if we "act together." We need to do something big at the national level to make this happen. Some people say we can't afford this, but he's saying we can't afford not to do it. He's vague about what this will be. The only thing he won't accept is doing nothing. He won't accept the "paltry limits of conventional wisdom." So even though we don't "precisely know" what we need to do, we will do it. Like we did in WWII and in going to the moon. We'll do something. And it will have to be big, but we don't know what it is. Then he drops from that scarily high level of abstraction and the unknown to... shrimpers. Something about shrimp people. We must think BIG and... shrimpy.

7:20: And suddenly, it's getting religious. I think he's bringing this speech in for a landing, because... it's a bit prayer-like. There's a "hand" that will "guide us." And — yes — it is the end: "May God bless America."

7:26: Well, that was a terrible speech! When it wasn't grim and dreary, it was grandiose. But the grandiosity was so vague... and half-hearted. Oh! The malaise!

AND: Here's the text of the speech. This is the part that interested me most:

As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs -– but only if we accelerate that transition.  Only if we seize the moment. And only if we rally together and act as one nation –- workers and entrepreneurs; scientists and citizens; the public and private sectors.  

This is the anti-capitalist move. There is all this opportunity, but free enterprise and capitalism can't take advantage of it. We need a top-down, government-imposed scheme, he announces. He doesn't explain why. It's an article of faith.

Now, there are costs associated with this transition [towards energy independence].  And there are some who believe that we can’t afford those costs right now.  I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy....

This is such embarrassing cliché rhetoric: Some say we can't do it. I say we can't not do it.


He cites a bunch of modest ideas that have been suggested and says we should think about them, then says that we have to do something, even though you could take all those things together, impose them, and still not break what he calls our "addiction" to fossil fuel. He blathers about WWII and the moon landing -- as noted above --  and talks about "what has defined us as a nation": "the capacity to shape our destiny....  Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like.  Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there.  We know we’ll get there." That is so hopelessly grandiose and vague, and to keep us from looking at it too long and despairing, he's all: Look! Shrimp!

Each year, at the beginning of shrimping season, the region’s fishermen take part in a tradition that was brought to America long ago by fishing immigrants from Europe.  It’s called “The Blessing of the Fleet,” and today it’s a celebration where clergy from different religions gather to say a prayer for the safety and success of the men and women who will soon head out to sea....

It's the shrimp and religion combo platter. Yummy!

"Watch J.J. Abrams Say 'Lost' Is Not About That Thing It Turned Out to Sort of Be About."

"We're sure in the weeks to come, there will be lots of discussion about the distinctions between 'purgatory' and 'heaven,' and 'the afterlife' and 'being dead,' and 'misleading information' and 'flash sideways is not the island,' and 'when did the Lost creators actually know how the show was going to end' and 'why didn't Darlton care at all about the show's mythology?!' — but in the instant aftermath of the finale, it seems that something sort of like purgatory, insofar as purgatory is a place full of dead people, did in fact have something to do with this here series called Lost."

Hey, you know what would really be funny? After we really die, if we find ourselves somewhere and we're talking about the distinctions between "purgatory" and "heaven," and "the afterlife" and "being dead," and somebody says "Deja vu! This is like exactly the same conversation I had after the last episode of Lost."

"Dear Lord: As You probably know, because I guess You sort of know everything, I’m thinking about having a mini brow lift..."

"... lipo on my neck, waist, hips, and thighs; a chin reduction; an ear job; fat injections in my cheeks, nasolabial folds, and lips; a revision of my previous rhinoplasty; a redo of my earlier breast implants; Botox injections in my forehead and frown area; and a buttocks augmentation, if that is Thy will. I won’t go ahead with any of this if You don’t approve, but I keep thinking, Why would God have made my plastic surgeon, Dr. Frank Ryan, so totally cute if He didn’t want me to use him? Although, of course, I also wondered, Why did God make my hips and thighs, both inner and outer, a teeny bit chunky, and why did He dig those grooves around my nose?"

Think Progress? Think humorlessness.

Want to laugh twice? A comic riff and a laughable failure to perceive that it's a comic riff.

Somehow Think Progress has no trouble seeing that Obama had to be joking when he said "There’s no Armageddon out there" but when Rush Limbaugh pointed to the Icelandic volcano that could only be crackpot religion.

Maybe it's not just humor-deafness. Maybe what Think Progress is letting slip is its own secure confidence that Obama is not a religious man (along with an assumption that Rush Limbaugh is). This gives me an idea for a little poll. This is a completely serious poll, not a joke or an attempt to record which of the 2 men you prefer.

Who's religious, Obama or Limbaugh?
	Both men are genuinely religious.
	Limbaugh is genuinely religious and Obama is not.
	Obama is genuinely religious and Limbaugh is not.
	Neither man is religious.
pollcode.com free polls

At the Earth Goddess Café...

... deliver.

"Earth Hour"... and other revealing "climate change" hypocrisies.

"Some of the lights the state Capitol were turned off Saturday night as part of Earth Hour a worldwide effort to get people, institutions and governments to shut off their lights for an hour to bring awareness to climate change."

Oh, I'm getting some awareness out of this, all right. This is heightening my awareness that the people who do stunts like this do not actually believe in the "climate change" emergency. Anyone who actually believed would oppose — among many, many other things — all the decorative illumination of the exteriors of public buildings. Just turning it off for an hour? Do you think we are idiots?

***

This reminds me of those churchgoers who pray for an hour a week — in public — and spend the rest of their time engaging in whatever nasty behavior they please. Why do they do this? Do they think they'll get absolution? Eh. You have to actually believe to think there's absolution. If they really believed, they wouldn't behave like that.  I think they, in their selfish interest, hope to gain favor and to prompt other people to believe and behave virtuously.

***

Some illumination of public buildings is required by the FAA, as noted in the linked article. But that reminds me: Why are people flying all over the place anyway? If we really believed in the touted emergency, we would limit flying to the truly essential. And what would be truly essential?

Business and government meetings can be done by video conference. Close down that that government building altogether! Think of all the carbon emissions that would save. (I will concede that in a representative democracy, officials really may need to mingle together in the flesh)

Recreational travel is a monument to disbelief in the seriousness of the climate change alarm. How can you go jaunting about to Europe or wherever and turn around and expect other people to buy tiny tin-can cars?

***

How about if everyone stays home and reads. Read until you figure out how to write English (or whatever language you think you know). The Wisconsin State Journal writes "to bring awareness to climate change." Like "climate change" is an entity that could be jolted into conscious thought.

Blasphemonomics.

Those Freakonomics guys have shocked the high priests of science.

Suppose... that the best solution [to global warming] involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.

That freaks out Al Gore, et al.

[S]ubversively, ["SuperFreakonomics" authors Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner] suggest that climatologists, like everyone else, respond to incentives in a way that shapes their conclusions. "The economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the [climate] models to approximately match one another."

Even assuming the global warming alarm is justified, the Stev(ph)ens still freak out the alarmists by pointing to easier, cheaper solutions:

[I]t may well be that global warming is best tackled with a variety of cheap fixes, if not by pumping SO2 into the stratosphere then perhaps by seeding more clouds over the ocean. Alternatively, as "SuperFreakonomics" suggests, we might be better off doing nothing until the state of technology can catch up to the scope of the problem.

All these suggestions are, of course, horrifying to global warmists, who'd much prefer to spend in excess of a trillion dollars annually for the sake of reconceiving civilization as we know it, including not just what we drive or eat but how many children we have. And little wonder: As Newsweek's Stefan Theil points out, "climate change is the greatest new public-spending project in decades." Who, being a professional climatologist or EPA regulator, wouldn't want a piece of that action?

Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence.

For some people, it needs to be a religion, and to the extent that it is a religion, we need the blasphemers.

A typo — in a year-old comments thread — amuses me.

"The real problem is that he became enamored of that Kabbalah horeshit that Madonna's into."

ADDED: And then there are the comments of my future husband, which I just noticed.

The brochure said you'd move beyond "self-imposed and conditioned borders" and "learn (and apply) the awesome power of 'integrity of action.'"

And was that really puffery? What was delivered was... death!

Shortly after 5 p.m. Thursday, a man and a woman, reportedly in their 50s, lapsed into unconsciousness during a simulated Native American sweat-lodge purification ceremony led by a self-help guru and inspirational speaker at a Sedona retreat. They were pronounced dead at Verde Valley Medical Center, and 19 others were hospitalized for as-yet-undetermined causes....

64 people were taking part in the sweat-lodge ceremony, which lasted about two hours and was being hosted by James Arthur Ray, an author and spiritual self-help entrepreneur....

The victims were attending the ceremony during the final day of a five-day program called "Spiritual Warrior," which Ray has conducted at the resort annually since 2003. Ray's Web site lists the cost for next year's program at $9,695 per person.

This all happened in Sedona, which the linked newspaper article calls "an international mecca for New Age beliefs and purportedly the site of numerous 'vortexes,' or natural energy confluences thought to enhance spirituality and well-being."

It seems to be a money vortex. $9,000+ to be packed into a very hot stuffy room with 63 other people who saw fit to pay $9,000 for such abuse — rendered subjectively beautiful via soppy thoughts about "Native Americans."

"We have to bow down to our President, Obama."

I say it:

"Jesus had 12 disciples, so there'd be a hot dog for each of them."

The great hot dog/bun disparity, solved at last.



"W00t, sir, we do agree with that."

"God bless you. And God bless America's wieners."

"For me, I hope that having the Christian vote doesn't help with anything."

Said "American Idol" finalist Kris Allen.

[Allen is] a 23-year-old college student who has worked as a worship leader at the New Life Church in his hometown of Conway, Ark. "I hope it has to do with your talent and the performance that you give and the package that you have. It's not about religion and all that kind of stuff."

So... some people think they are voting for religion and — what? — against some presumed immorality of Adam Lambert?

Lambert, a 27-year-old theater actor from San Diego who once worked in the Los Angeles cast of "Wicked," heartily agreed. He said he does not think the contest "has anything to do with your religious background, what color you are, your gender. It doesn't have anything to do with that. It's about music....."

Music and your package. That's what Kris said.