Well, that makes sense. If you cut the carbs you don’t have blood sugar spikes and lows that will sap your strength during competition. After going on the diet I noticed how much energy I had in the hour following lunch now that I wasn’t trying to shrug off a blood sugar low like those who ate carbs during lunch.
Further, you’ll need the protein to build the muscle to compete.’
A while back I started getting a whole wash of spam with subject lines like “Lonely wifes looking for action” and “Cheating wifes” and things like that. (What is it with the misspelling of “wives”? Is that an attempt to get around spam filters? No matter, mine is catching them now anyway.)
When I started getting these, I figured that they were advertisements for ostensible online matchmaking clubs for people who were already married–in other words, adultery clubs. I say “figured” because I simply deleted the e-mails without opening them and I say “ostensible” because I didn’t really suppose that such clubs existed or, if they did, that they would be conducting massive spam campaigns.
I couldn’t imagine that people would really be interested in such clubs. Why would women want to sign up to be one of the “cheating wifes”? And what kind of total loser men would want to be patrons of such places? What would it say about such a person to be attracted to such a place? Notice that the appeal the advertisement is based on is not that you find the other person attractive. The idea is that cheating with somebody else’s wife is itself supposed to be an inducement. What kind of sick desires are wrapped up in that?
I couldn’t imagine that very many people would be interested in such clubs and that the e-mails were more likely a credit card scam designed to prey on the few lonely, gullible men who might actually respond.
Well it seems I am a little naive.
Turns out that there are such clubs. A reader sent me a link to this story about such clubs.
Now I’m thinking: How do we make these illegal or at least unprofitable? Alienation of affection class action lawsuits?
SDG here with yet more proof of the inability of mainstream media reporters ever accurately to report on a story involving religious doctrine.
“Wheat-allergic girl denied Communion”, blares the headline at CNN.com.
Actually, technically, that’s true.
An unnamed Catholic priest who attempted to celebrate Mass with a rice wafer containing no wheat did indeed deny communion to 8-year-old Haley Waldman, who suffers from celiac disease.
He did so by attempting to celebrate Mass with invalid matter. Because non-wheat grains are invalid matter for the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, what the girl received was not the Body and Blood of Christ, but an untransformed wafer.
So, yes, the girl was denied communion, by a priest who doesn’t know his sacramental theology.
That’s not what the headline means, though.
It means that the mean old bishop of Trenton has (correctly) declared the girl’s communion invalid and has (also correctly) refused to authorize the use of rice wafers for her consumption in subsequent communions.
Yet the article itself admits, a few grafs down, that the diocese has not “denied” the girl communion at all. It admits that the diocese has told Haley’s mother that her daughter may receive Christ’s body and blood under the species of wine alone, as well as offering her low-gluten hosts.
The article adds that Haley’s mother “rejected the offer” of low-gluten bread, “saying her child could be harmed by even a small amount” of gluten. Apparently she has also rejected the offer of receiving under the species of wine alone, though the article doesn’t say why.
The misleading headline (flat-out wrong headline, in the sense intended by the author) isn’t the only error in the story. CNN.com also reports that “For alcoholics, the church allows a substitute for wine under some circumstances, however the drink must still be fermented from grapes and contain some alcohol. Grape juice is not a valid substitute.”
Wrong. Unfermented grape juice (or “mustum”) is a valid substitute, and permission can be obtained from competent church authority for its use in specific circumstances (cf. the “Norms For Use Of Low-Gluten Bread And Mustum”). It’s not ordinarily a licit substitute, that is, it isn’t normally allowed by church law, and cannot be licitly used without episcopal permission.
But liceity and validity are two different things. Liceity has to do with disciplinary rules established by the Church, which the Church is at liberty to rescind or suspend. Validity has to do with absolute sacramental rules established by divine authority, which the Church has no authority or power to alter or suspend, ever, under any circumstances.
That communion hosts must be unleavened is a matter of discipline, just as that a candidate for Holy Orders must be unmarried is a matter of discipline. The Church can make exceptions to either rule, and indeed in the Catholic Churches of the East those rules don’t apply at all. However, that communion hosts must be made of wheat rather than other grains is a matter of sacramental necessity, just as that a candidate for Holy Orders must be a man and not a woman is a matter of sacramental necessity.
Obviously, Haley’s mother is as unclear on this point as the reporter. “How does it corrupt the tradition of the Last Supper? It’s just rice versus wheat,” she complains. Yes, and Jesus used wheat and not rice at the Last Supper, just as he taught his disciples to baptize in water and not milk, and as he ordained men and not women. These are precedents the church has no authority to break. The Church has no more power to change a rice wafer into the Body and Blood of Christ than to turn a Dorito into a Wookiee; by the same token, she has no more power to ordain a woman than to pronounce the Archangel Gabriel and Mother Theresa man and wife. (And there, once again, is one of those sentences that has never before been constructed in the history of the universe.)
Haley’s mother has actually gone so far as to write a letter to the Pope and to Cardinal Ratzinger requesting a change in the rules. “This is a church rule, not God’s will,” she wrote in the letter, “and it can easily be adjusted to meet the needs of the people, while staying true to the traditions of our faith.” Hopefully at some point, someone will carefully and clearly explain the truth to her.
Of course, it may be that someone already has, and she’s just being stubborn. The article reports that the pastor of St. Denis Catholic Church in Manasquan correctly refused to allow a substitute when the family first approached him, at which point they went to the other pastor who, presumably out of misguided compassion, agreed to use a rice wafer. I hope the first pastor carefully and compassionately explained the reasons for his refusal and immediately offered to allow Haley to receive communion under the species of wine, and that diocesan officials she’s been dealing with have been as clear and as sympathetic as they possibly could be. Perhaps Haley’s mother is simply stubborn, but inadequate catechesis and/or pastoral insensitivity can also sometimes be a factor in such situations.
The story adds that “Haley’s Communion controversy isn’t the first. In 2001, the family of a 5-year-old Massachusetts girl with the disease left the Catholic church after being denied permission to use a rice wafer.” That anyone would leave the Church over such a thing (or over anything else for that matter) is a terrible tragedy. Pastors and other church leaders need to do all they can to be sure that if and when it does happen, it’s not because of a failure to respond sensitively and compassionately to people’s needs.
SDG here with an interesting commentary challenging the Democrats to “do better” on abortion.
I wish they would. My blood is not Republican red. I would vote for a pro-life Democrat in a heartbeat, if for no other reason than to make the point.
Lefties often say that the pro-life movement has a stranglehold on the Republican party. The truth is closer to the other way around. Between the two major parties, the Democratic Party has allowed the Republicans to have a monopoly on pro-life candidates — and voters.
And, for reasons rather well laid out in Catholic Answers’ “Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics, I find it necessary to give black-and-white issues like abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage priority over other issues about which men of good will, including Catholics, may in good faith legitimately dispute.
But the Republicans didn’t always have a monopoly on concern over protecting the weakest of the weak. To be a pro-life Democrat wasn’t always a virtual contradiction in terms. In fact, there’s still a pro-life movement within the Democratic Party, though party bosses won’t give them a voice. According to this article, a recent gathering of Democrats for Life included:
However, according to an article in the paper I write for, the National Catholic Register, Democrats For Life were not allowed to have a visible presence at the Democratic National Convention — no banners, no signs, etc. Planned Parenthood, OTOH, was a highly visible presence at the convention.
And while party chairman Terry McAuliffe made noises that there would be no ban on pro-life speakers at the convention, and touted the appearance of pro-life Rep. James Langevin from Rhode Island, Langevin’s topic was one on which, unlike abortion, he is not pro-life, embryonic stem cell research.
So, for all intents and purposes, the Democratic establishment brooks no dissent, at least so far. But perhaps Democrats for Life will be effective in bringing about some change in the Democratic party. Perhaps the Democrats will do better in the future, and again extend their traditional concern for the weak and powerless to the weakest of all. If they gave us a choice, I think they’d be surprised how many default Republicans there are who would vote for a pro-life Democrat.
SDG here with an article representing a recent salvo in the debate on free will.
In this article, the issue is framed in terms of criminal and penal law, and the up-front emphasis is the claim of leading neuroscientist Wolf Singer that all criminal activity can in principle always be traced back to brain abnormality, even if no brain abnormality can be found.
However, the underlying issue is Singer’s explicit arguing point that all human actions and choices are deterministic results of electro-chemical processes in the brain, which obey deterministic laws, and that our own ideas about our motives and decision-making processes are essentially rationalizations that we create to make our lives seem rational and meaningful.
Such deterministic materialism is at least as old as Spinoza, of course, and has been advocated by a number of philosphers and schools of thought (Marxism is one example). This view is contrary to Christian anthropology, which insists on what in philosophical discourse is sometimes called libertarianism, meaning belief in a human faculty to make non-deterministic choices. On this view, presumably, non-deterministic choices have effects in the electro-chemical processes of the brain, with physical results in the brain that are different from the result that would obtain in a purely deterministic system.
The difficulty with either proving or refuting either point of view on empirical grounds, of course, is that the brain as a system is so staggeringly complex, and the difficulties in observing and measuring its processes so formidable, that the probability of meaningful analysis of the processes involved in making a choice, and of confirming a result consistent with or contrary to deterministic principles, approaches zero.
Even if a neuroscientist happened to be looking at the exact spot in the brain where cerebral bioelectric processes were being impacted by a free choice, he could never definitively say that this was not the result of deterministic processes. There are too many factors and the system is too complex to ever fully be understood. (As the saying goes, if our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we’d be so simple that we couldn’t.)
So neither libertarianism nor determinism can ever be proved or disproved on purely empirical grounds. That doesn’t stop Wolf Singer from claiming to have done so, though. For example, consider this passage from the article:
Neurobiology tells us that there is no centre in the brain where actions are planned and decisions made. Decisions emerge from a collection of dynamic systems that run in parallel and are underpinned by nerve cells that talk to each other – the brain. If you look back in evolution to say, the sea slug Aplysia, you see that the building blocks of this brain have not changed. The amino acids, the nerve cells, the signalling pathways and largely the genes, are the same. “It’s the same material [in humans], just more complex,” says Singer. “So the same rules must govern what humans do. Unavoidable conclusion.”
Ridiculous. That’s like saying “The mineral components of the rock formations in Monument Valley are identical to those of Mount Rushmore, so therefore the configuration of both must represent the same processes.” A thing’s makeup has nothing to do with the question whether some force may be operating upon it. If free will in the fully libertarian and Christian sense exists at all, it is not a function of cerebral biochemistry, but a force acting upon it. Singer’s observation that human brains and sea slug brains are built out of the same components simply has no bearing on the question whether human brains are joined to rational souls.
The article then goes on to cite the phenomenon of hypnosis, which Singer claims to have practiced on an RAF pilot at a party at Cambridge University, as an example of the brain’s ability to respond to a complex of influences and factors with specific action in a way that has nothing to do with conscious thought or decision making. But even if one grants the phenomenon of hypnosis, which I’m not prepared to do, it only shows that it’s possible to bypass or short-circuit full human freedom, not that it doesn’t exist.
Some of the other conclusions in the article (it’s not always clear which are really Singer’s and which are merely the reporters) are equally dubious. “He does not argue that a criminal should not be held responsible for their crime,” writes the reporter. “After all, if a person is not responsible for their own brain, who is?”
Framed that way, the question is meaningless. It’s like saying “He does not argue that a tree should not be held responsible for the way it grows. After all, if a tree is not responsible for its own shape, who is?” The answer is that Singer’s worldview negates the very concept of “responsibility” in any true moral sense.
One may of course argue that it still makes sense to prosecute and punish criminals, in the same way that we discipline a puppy when he exhibits unwanted behavior, or restrain or destroy a dog given to biting. It still makes sense to want to influence human behavior in ways that make us safer and better able to get along, and to protect society from those whose nature is to resist our attempts to influence their behavior and continue to behave in antisocial ways.
Of course, as soon as we say that we want to do this in order to bring about that result, we assume that we have some actual insight into our reasons for doing things. But on Singer’s view we may not. Singer wants to show that jurisprudence and penal law still make sense within his worldview — but does the concept of “making sense” make sense? If we don’t really know why we do things, if our ideas about why we do things are merely rationalizations of brains looking to make patterns, why doesn’t that apply to our ideas about why we should make laws and punish criminals as well as to any other ideas?
Even Singer’s central thesis (if it really is his thesis, and not the reporter’s interpretation) that criminal activity must always indicate brain abnormality seems not to make sense. How does Singer know that a “normal” brain will always behave in a way consistent with whatever laws happen to hold sway in a particular time and place? Does this conclusion apply to unjust laws as well as just? Were European Gentile civilians who illegally hid Jews in their houses during WW2 suffering from brain abnormalities?
To most folks, rice is something that you eat in Asian restaurants.
To me, rice is something that I’m not allowed to eat on my diet. But it’s also something else.
Being from Texas, Rice to me is also a university located in Houston (one of my four hometowns). I’d known about Rice for years, but what I hadn’t know was how it got started.
It’s AMAZING.
I doubt that any other university in the world has been founded in quite this way.
Read The Frightful Tale Of The Founding Of Rice University!
(They should make a movie about this or something.)
SDG here with an ego check for critics… like me.
Tom Payne, a literary critic, turns in a wickedly funny… er, make that a pointedly satiric exposé on the special jargon critics use, partly as a matter of trade necessity and precision, partly by carelessness and imitation, and partly to sound as if they know what they’re talking about and better than you.
The article is about literary critics, but I must confess that as a film critic I winced more than once at a well-skewered foible found in my own reviews. Not that all the listed clichés are necessarily bad. Phrases like “darkly comic” or “emotional rollercoaster” may be clichés, but they’re also useful — we know what they mean, and what would be the point of digging through the thesaurus for some less familiar way of describing a quality we already have a good term for?
That said, I hereby vow to be very careful in the future about phrases like “vast, sprawling epic,” and never, ever again to write “But these are minor quibbles.” (Aren’t quibbles minor by definition?) And I must confess that even before discovering this article I was already uncomfortably aware of my reliance on phrases like “at its core” and “at its center” (though not combined with Payne’s phrase about “a deeply moral work”).
Take that, fellow critics!
SDG here with an ego check for critics… like me.
Tom Payne, a literary critic, turns in a wickedly funny… er, make that a pointedly satiric exposé on the special jargon critics use, partly as a matter of trade necessity and precision, partly by carelessness and imitation, and partly to sound as if they know what they’re talking about and better than you.
The article is about literary critics, but I must confess that as a film critic I winced more than once at a well-skewered foible found in my own reviews. Not that all the listed clichés are necessarily bad. Phrases like “darkly comic” or “emotional rollercoaster” may be clichés, but they’re also useful — we know what they mean, and what would be the point of digging through the thesaurus for some less familiar way of describing a quality we already have a good term for?
That said, I hereby vow to be very careful in the future about phrases like “vast, sprawling epic,” and never, ever again to write “But these are minor quibbles.” (Aren’t quibbles minor by definition?) And I must confess that even before discovering this article I was already uncomfortably aware of my reliance on phrases like “at its core” and “at its center” (though not combined with Payne’s phrase about “a deeply moral work”).
Take that, fellow critics!
The following exchange took place on August 5 on Fox News between host Stewart Varney and Disney president Robert Iger. The conversation concerned Disney’s new Dream Desk computer for children:
IGER: It’s easy to set up, easy to use, compact, it doesn’t take much room, and most importantly it has what’s called ContentWatch built in.
VARNEY: Well, you know, I — exactly. I mean, in June you have “Gay Days” at your theme parks. You got any ‘Gay Days’ on the Mickey computer?
IGER: Well, this has built into it all kinds of protective devices that protects the kid, or the child from internet sites that a parent wouldn’t deem appropriate. Also, the fact —
VARNEY: Well, you don’t protect the kids from “Gay Days” at the theme parks, do you? Why do you have to protect them in the computer?
Fight the Power, Stu!
Batman has his Batcave and Batmobile. The Pope has his popemobile. What did John the Baptist have? Maybe the Baptistcave.
Maybe.
According to a new story, someone is claiming to have identified a cave purported to be used by John the Baptist in the first century to perform baptism.
Maybe.
Not probably. Just maybe.