Depth dimension with your beverage

Five Oldest Pubs in the United Kingdom - Anglotopia.net: "The Old Ferry Boat is a great example of one of the pubs that started as an inn and still operates as such today. Though no documents apparently exist of when the Inn actually began, one record stated that liquor was served there as early as 560 A.D. and the foundations are reportedly another century older."

Mind-boggling witness to some of the continuities possible in the Old World.

Cloud, corporations, and trust falls

Mixed into an Andy Ihnatko article on FB's likely purchase of a traffic navigation app is this gem of an analogy that perfectly catches my anxieties about FB. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't run a social network and Google+ is unlikely to draw enough family & friends to be worthwhile. And so we remain serfs on the Zuckerberg plantation...

Chicago Grid | What if Facebook buys Waze?: 

   I hand over lots of my personal information to Apple, Google, and Facebook. I use a “trust fall” analogy when I talk about how much I trust each of these companies. You know the exercise: turn your back to this person, close your eyes, count to three aloud, and then fall backwards.
I’m certain that Apple would catch me. My sole worries are of the “accidents can happen” variety.
   I’m pretty sure that I’d be safe with Google. There’s a good chance I’ll fall. If that happened, though, it’d probably be because Google often doesn’t really think things through. Google thought I was going to say “1… 2… 3…” and then start falling instead of falling on “3.”
   I’m pretty sure that Facebook would watch me fall. I can see myself smacking into the ground, and then Facebook would update my status to “Concussed” without my asking it to. As I struggled to my feet, Facebook would update its own private profile about me and my habits, noting that I trust companies so blindly that I didn’t even try to stop myself from falling. That’s a very valuable demographic for ads about home-refinancing.

Brilliant geostrategic summary

How Geography Explains the United States - By Aaron David Miller | Foreign Policy: "Canadians, Mexicans, and fish. That trio of neighbors has given the United States an unprecedented degree of security, a huge margin for error in international affairs, and the luxury of largely unfettered development."

Reminds me of classes as an undergraduate at Georgetown.

Power of papal rhetoric

Sandro Magister: "This benevolence of the media toward Pope Francis is one of the features that characterize the beginning of this pontificate. The gentleness with which he is able to speak even the most uncomfortable truths facilitates this benevolence. But it is easy to predict that sooner or later it will cool down and give way to a reappearance of criticism."

A very nice examination of PF's rhetorical habits, illustrated in his morning homilies.

Universal call to holiness ≠ ministry

Pope Francis and the Reform of the Laity | NCRegister.com

"We priests tend to clericalize the laity. We do not realize it, but it is as if we infect them with our own disease. And the laity — not all, but many — ask us on their knees to clericalize them, because it is more comfortable to be an altar server than the protagonist of a lay path. We cannot fall into that trap — it is a sinful complicity."

Follow the link; it's worth reading as an example of what PF means when he talks about the necessity of going out and the downside of a "self-referential church."

How to commit Vatican journalism

RealClearReligion - John Allen: The RealClearReligion Interview

When the National Catholic Reporter’s senior correspondent John L. Allen, Jr. was called upon to put a question to Pope Benedict XVI in 2008, the Vatican press officer said: “Holy Father, this man needs no introduction.”

So very true, and the interview gives a model of what sober reporting should look like.

Beware people who revel in being "prophetic"

Bipartisan protip: if you want to be a prophet, or if you revel in it, you’re not. And if a President is in your audience, and you’re agreeing with him or telling him things that he doesn’t mind hearing, you’re definitely not.

Rev. Leon and Prophecy - Michael Sean Winters

“I am tired, very tired, of people, clerical or lay, who pat themselves on the back by articulating their positions on this issue or that and claim that they are taking a prophetic stance. All too often, it seems to me that this claiming the prophet’s mantle is designed to keep the person claiming it from the normal method we humans employ to face problems of a terrestrial nature: an argument. Claiming to be a prophet has become a way to avoid argument, not engage it, a way to claim the moral high ground for oneself and, just so, an evidence not of a genuine prophecy which comes from God, but a false prophecy that comes from the desires of the speaker.”

AGW panic ending with a whimper

I shall look forward to the future progress of this with considerable interest; many people from across the spectrum have taken notice of the Economist piece.

AGW panic ending with a whimper - Eric S. Raymond

The Economist, which (despite a recent decline) remains probably the best news magazine in the English language, now admits that (a) global average temperature has been flat for 15 years even as CO2 levels have been rising rapidly, (b) surface temperatures are at the lowest edge of the range predicted by IPCC climate models, (c) on current trends, they will soon fall clean outside and below the model predictions, (c) estimates of climate sensitivity need revising downwards, and (d) something, probably multiple things, is badly wrong with AGW climate models.

Moral Tastebuds and Culture War

Jonathan Haidt’s theory of moral foundations is one of the most interesting approaches to the ongoing social strife that I can remember. Here’s a basic explanation; read the whole article for an application as the battle space of the culture war shifts from the social to the economic. There’s even a fascinating WWII analogy!

To make sense of these cultural variations, I created a theory in 2003 called “moral-foundations theory.” My goal was to specify the “taste buds” of the moral sense. Every human being has the same five taste receptors – tiny structures on the tongue specialized for detecting five classes of molecules, which we experience as sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory. Yet our food preferences aren’t dictated just by our tongues. Rather, they depend heavily on our cultures, each of which has constructed its own cuisine.

In the same way, I aimed to identify the innate psychological systems that were given to us all by evolution, and that each culture uses to construct its unique moral systems. For example, you’ll never find a human culture that makes no use of reciprocity and has no conception of fairness and cheating. Fairness is a really good candidate for being a moral taste bud, yet cultures vary greatly in how they implement fairness. Consider this quote from the Code of Hammurabi, the ancient Babylonian legal text: “If a builder builds a house and does not construct it properly, and the building collapses and kills the owner, the builder shall be put to death. If it kills the owner’s son, the builder’s son shall be put to death.” You can see the psychology of fairness here, but this is not quite the way we’d implement it.

Drawing on the work of many anthropologists (particularly Richard Shweder at the University of Chicago) and many evolutionary biologists and psychologists, my colleagues and I came to the conclusion that there are six best candidates for being the taste buds of the moral mind: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Liberty/Oppression, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation.

An Ignatian papacy

John Thavis on the pope’s ‘reform’ project

Pope Francis came into the Vatican with a mandate to change the way its bureaucracy functions (or disfunctions), in the wake of scandals, leaks and power struggles that have embarrassed the church. It seems to me that he’s taking that task seriously, by laying the spiritual groundwork for change. He’s approaching the various Vatican environments not so much as the new boss, but as the new pastor. I think that’s one big reason why he’s decided to continue to live in the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the Vatican guest house, instead of moving into the formal papal apartment. In the Domus, he’s a few steps away from St. Peter’s, as well as the Vatican City governor’s office, and his morning liturgies are accessible to Vatican employees. In the Apostolic Palace, the pope would have been surrounded by Secretariat of State offices and the usual filters. In effect, the Domus provides a much better pastoral base for evangelizing the Vatican.

Raindrops Keep Falling

Blogging is light, now that we're rehearsing for As You Like It. On top of that, @viola_illyria had her computer blow up on her so there's serious geekery afoot redoing the household infrastructure. Hoping to get a few things lined up, though, and there's a serious academic workflow post hovering in the ether.