Back of the Envelope

It's time to take a look at what's going on with our favorite online comics.

Sluggy Freelance -- It looks like Riff's business is going under, and he can't get back to save it. Meanwhile, Zoe's trying to get Torg and Gwynn to help out around the house.

Day by Day -- I'll admit, sometimes I don't quite get Day by Day, Wednesday's being Exhibit A. I enjoyed the rest of the week's commentary on Richard Clarke, however.

It's Walky! -- With SEMME shutting down, Joe has one last chance to find a meaningful relationship.

College Roomies from Hell! -- Roger finds help for Dave while Mike manages to stave off insanity.

General Protection Fault -- Trudy has second thoughts about using Yoshi. Trudy, sympathetic? I never expected to see that.

Schlock Mercenary -- The mercenaries have found a job. Much humor and violence are certain to ensue.

Doc Rampage has a post where he discusses Christian science fiction and fantasy writers as part of his discussion of conservative science fiction and fantasy. It's an interesting list. I've already read the books he mentioned by C.S. Lewis (with the exception that I've never gotten ahold of a copy of Out of the Silent Planet), but I haven't read Chistopher Stasheff or C. Dale Brittain. Based on the Doc's suggestion, I plan to check them out, just as soon as I get through my present stack of books, which is heavy on Stephen King and Dean Koontz. Doc also includes me in his list of Christian writers. Being included in the same list as C.S. Lewis is an honor I'm not certain I'm worthy of, but I appreciate Doc's endorsement. He was apparently too humble to include himself, but he should have.

I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction myself. While I haven't notice a lot of Christian writers, there are a few. Tolkien comes to mind, for example. One thing you will notice immediately is that there are a lot of Mormon writers of speculative fiction (a catch-all term that includes both fantasy and science fiction and everything in between). Along with Orson Scott Card, whom Doc Rampage has already mentioned, there's also Tracy Hickman, one of the principle authors of the Dragonlance series, as well as plenty of other series he's co-authored with Margaret Weis. From what I understand of Mormon doctrine, other worlds are quite consistent with their beliefs, which explains their overrepresentation in speculative fiction. Mormons are not Christians, precisely, but Mormonism does derive from Christianity and thus you'll find many Christian beliefs reflected in writings by Mormon authors.

Update: Based on Doc's update, I fixed the spelling of C. Dale Brittain. I also added a link to one of Doc's earlier posts.

Now that's it's clear that The Passion hasn't been causing widespread anti-Semitism among American Evangelicals, there's another group to be worried about. Middle Eastern Muslims have suddenly become very interested in this movie, most likely precisely because it's been accused of being anti-Semitic. Having Arafat declare that the movie is not anti-Semitic is about as convincing as Kim Jung Il's endorsement of Kerry. (Although I'd be curious how the anti-Passion Europeans respond to this endorsement from their patron saint of Mideast peace.) As I mentioned below, Doc Rampage has a great post on this:

I think there is enormous cause for hope here. And if the film has positive effects in the Muslim world, a great deal of the credit will have to go to the Jewish groups that protested its release. This would be a double irony: the film gains popularity because they opposed it, and they benefit from the increased popularity. I hope that in twenty years we will be having great arguments about what was the more powerful influence leading to the great modernization and pacification of the Middle East: the liberation of Iraq or the release of The Passion of the Christ.

Most Mideast Muslims have never heard the gospel story, only a highlights version heavily filtered through Islam. What an incredible opportunity this is! Their own hatred is leading them to seek out a telling of the gospel story.

While The Passion hasn't shown any tendency to stir up anti-Semitism among the generally philo-Semitic American Evangelicals, will it fire up already anti-Semitic people? Possibly. Generally you expect people to get out of a movie what they bring in with them, but I wouldn't be so quick to discount the power of God. I have been praying, without a whole lot hope, that the Middle East would be opened to the Gospel. (I haven't been praying for mass conversions so much as that the people will be given the chance to hear the Gospel and freely choose whether to believe without fear of reprisal.) Now I'm starting to hope. I would encourage all Christians to pray that the Holy Spirit will work in the Middle East, and that The Passion might be an instrument of this work. That, as in Genesis 50:20, what men mean for evil, God means for good.

Old Post: I told you I was working on a means to sell my short stories online below.

Doc Rampage kindly tested the system for me, and it looks like it works. Drop by the Doc's blog, by the way. He has an excellent post on The Passion and the Muslim world. As for Amazon, it's changed what it charges for the transactions, so I'll have to think about the pricing again. $1.25 was precisely calculated to give me $1 after Amazon took its cut; based on this, I had worked out a whole pricing scheme based on length. Of course, this is a moot point until I have some actual stories ready to sell, and then I should worry more about how much people might be willing to pay for them than how to round it to nice even amounts added to my banking account.

Tonight, I was writing Chapter 20 of The War of the Elementals (of which Fire was Part I, so think of it as Chapter 20 of Fire). This explains why I'm up at 3 AM. I like how it's turning out, but it's getting rather long for a single chapter, so I could end up splitting it. I've considered publishing the chapters serially (and selling them individually), but I tried that idea with Fire and eventually gave up. After I finished Chapter 5, I went over a year without putting anything up, then published 12 chapters, and a revised version of the first five, at once. I hadn't been writing any slower, I just felt that the section I was working on needed to be written as one piece to make it consistent and readable. Afterwards I was working on my thesis, and I didn't write much fiction during that academic year, but I wrote two short stories afterwards. One of them came out pretty well, and I may send it around a couple of print magazines to see if it can get published. The other one grew to be much longer than I intended, so I couldn't send it to any magazines without seriously gutting it. However, this very length might make it a good candidate to publish here. The problem is I'm still not sure of how well the story reads, and I won't be sure until it's been through a couple of revisions. If I'm happy with it then, I may make it the first story I officially sell over the Internet. If I'm not, I may post it for free. Then again, if I'm really unhappy with it, I'll bury it and you'll never hear from it again. Just as soon as I'm finished with Chapter 20 (or Chapters 20 and 21), I'll get to work on it.

Update: I really should know better than to post at 3 AM. There was nothing gramatically wrong with this post, but stylistically it was choppy and disjointed. Hopefully it reads better now.

I haven't said anything about the Fallujah attacks yet. (That's not surprising, when you consider that I very rarely express my thoughts on a news item right away. I'm not a fast enough blogger to get there first, and I prefer to let my thoughts percolate. Then, if I have something to add to the debate, I will post something.) If you don't know what it's all about, terrorists bombed vehicles carrying civilian contractors, then a mob dragged the contractors out of the vehicles and mutilated their bodies.

Plenty of people have posted on this already. Donald Sensing argues that it's important to act, while Steven den Beste argues that it's important not to overreact. I agree with both.

One thing I'm not too worried about is being able to find the members of the mob. The whole thing was caught on video, and the mob wasn't camera shy. This isn't another Mogadishu. We clearly aren't going to run; we will instead respond forcefully, but not inhumanely.

I'm experimenting with being able to sell some of my short stories online. As a test, I've created an Amazon Honor System Paypage which allows access to digital content. The story I've chosen for this experiment is "A Stranger in the Library," which is available online for free, so I wouldn't recommend using this option unless you are looking for an excuse to give me money. In any case, the link is below. I may start offering some stuff from the sequel to Fire for pay.



Update: Dang. I was going to test the payment system, but it won't accept payments from myself. Anyone else want to test the system and make sure it works?

New Post: Doc Rampage tests the system so you don't have to. More above.

Doc Rampage has had a lot of good posts recently, and I've been remiss in not pointing them out earlier. (Of course, I've been remiss about blogging in general recently. I've been busy at work, and I've been trying to do some writing recently. The combination is not conducive to a lot of blogging.) First off, he infiltrated a conference in San Francisco dedicated to uncovering the truth behind 9/11, "truth" here being defined as a conspiracy cooked up by Bush and his Saudi friends to turn the US into a police state, or something along those lines. Doc Rampage lets you know what the conspiracy theorists are up to with a series of posts, in chronological order, here, here, and here. He also has a very good post entitled "the myth of nuance" where he argues that not recognizing the difference between competitors and enemies does not indicate a fine sense of nuance so much as a lack of not only nuance, but of even the simplest level of discernment.

Update: There was an extraneous "theory" between "conspiracy" and "cooked up by Bush." It's gone now.

Blogrolling seems to be down today, which means 1) My blogroll isn't working, and 2) I'm getting less than half the traffic I usually get, since a lot of blogs that blogroll me are missing their blogrolls too, especially the Blogs for Bush sites. It's a reminder of how much my traffic is dependent on Blogs for Bush.

Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost has found an article on the website of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise which claims that the Gospel, and thus, Christianity as a whole, is inherently anti-Semitic:

The trouble with Mel Gibson's film "The Passion" is not the film itself, but the gospel story on which it's based. The gospel story, which has generated more anti-Semitism than the sum of all the other anti-Semitic writings ever written, created the climate in Christian Europe that led to the Holocaust. Long before the rise of Adolf Hitler, the gospel story about the life and death of Jesus had poisoned the bloodstream of European civilization.

Once again, no one's arguing that Jesus himself was anti-Semitic, and indeed if we had the narrative of the mythical historical Jesus, the Jesus who was a wise and good teacher who never performed any miracles or said anything that would cause him to be executed in the first place, everything would be okay. But we don't have that Jesus, and the only evidence we have for that Jesus is the wishful thinking of those who don't want to deal with the Jesus we do have, the one who said and did all sorts of outrageous things until the religious and political authorities of that day decided they had no choice but to execute him. If he had only stayed executed, we wouldn't have anything to worry about.

But when in doubt, it's easier to say that Jesus himself was really all right, if only it weren't for Paul who so distorted his message. Ignore for the moment that Paul himself never wrote a gospel. Charles Patterson, the author of the article, takes a strongly revisionist view of the gospels anyway, assuming that they were written outside of Judea in the late first century. This is probably wrong. Mark, at least, was most likely written in the middle of the first century in Judea, and is understood to be essentially Peter’s story. However, I’d be careful of taking either view as certain--there’s evidence, but no certainty, for where and when the gospels were written, or even whether they were originally written in Greek or Aramaic. As for by whom they were written, for that there’s much better evidence, but Patterson blithely ignores it, assuming they were written by anti-Semitic Gentile Christians. John and Matthew, in fact, were written by two of Jesus’s apostles, part of the group whom Patterson calls the Nazarenes, the early Jewish Christians from Judea. Mark was a younger witness to the events, although his family probably came from Alexandria. All of them were Jewish. Luke was the only non-Jew to write a gospel, and I think his comes across as less anti-Semitic than, say, John’s. Luke quotes Jesus as saying "Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.'" on the way to the cross. John's gospel looks the most anti-Semitic, largely because he often used "the Jews" to mean "the Jewish leaders," but also because he went to great lengths to demonstrate how the claims of Jesus were so unacceptable to Jewish thought.

I think it might be easier to argue that Judaism is anti-Gentile than that Christianity is anti-Semitic. After all, Judaism claims that the Jews are God's Chosen People. While they aren't inherently superior to others, they are better loved. Christianity doesn't dispute this claim, but rather it argues that Jesus's death on the cross made the Kingdom of God open to all. The supposed anti-Semitism of Christianity is really drawn from two internal debates, one among the Jews and one among the Christians. In this, I think Patterson does a much better job of explaining the history. I believe he's wrong about when, where, and by whom the gospels were written, but I will grant that most of the remaining history he gives is correct. Whereas the Jews were debating Jesus (which is the argument that we see in the Gospels themselves), the Christians were debating the role of the Gentiles. Many of the Jewish Christians regarded Gentile believers as second-class citizens in God's kingdom, and the most "anti-Semitic" of Paul's arguments center around his disputes with this attitude. This led to a certain amount of bad blood between Gentile and Jewish believers, and more bad blood between the Jewish Christians and non-Christians. That made for a whole lot of anger separating the Gentile Christians and the non-Christian Jews.

It is a shameful fact that the anger lasted for centuries in the Christian church, long after the exact causes were forgotten. I think to a large degree this was due to a lack of Biblical literacy, or any literacy, among the people of that era, so when they heard of those disputes they couldn't put them into context as the rough internal debates that they were. However, the strongly philo-Semitic evangelical church (see this article on Judeo-Christian values), in the US and elsewhere, gives the lie to the belief that Christianity is somehow inherently anti-Semitic. In fact, I rather suspect that Biblical literacy and anti-Semitism are inversely correlated. Not in all cases and for all people (Luther, sadly, became rabidly anti-Semitic in his later years, possibly due to disappointment with his overly-optimistic philo-Semitism when he first started studying scriptures), but as a general rule.

Sometimes, even John Derbyshire gets it wrong:

Andrew: The intersection set Writers x Engineers is not large. The only one that comes to mind is the fine & prolific British novelist Nevil Shute (ON THE BEACH, A TOWN CALLED ALICE, etc. etc.) He titled his autobiography SLIDE RULE.

This is, of course, incorrect. The problem is that Mr. Derbyshire hasn't taken the right genre into account, as I wrote him:

I fear you're looking in the wrong place. We engineers don't write boring old regular fiction, we write science fiction and fantasy. At least I do. (Of course, calling myself a writer since I put a couple of short stories and half a novel up on my webpage (http://www.ece.rochester.edu/~cranksha/writings/writings.html) may be a bit of a stretch.) I think it appeals to our creative instincts. We much prefer to create whole worlds with their own histories and cultures, not to mention their own rules for technology and/or magic, than to create just a few new characters and some boring real-life situation.

I haven't heard back from him. In case he's wondering, he has my permission to post my response on the Corner. If that link to my writings happens to be posted too, well, I suppose that's the price I must pay for freely offering my advice. Of course, some other readers responded before I did, prompting Derbyshire to post:

WRITER ENGINEERS [John Derbyshire]
Heinlein! Jerry Pournelle!! Arthur C. Clarke!!!

And best of all, from reader Peyton Cooke*, DOSTOYEVSKY!!!!!!!!

You'll notice that, aside from Dostoyevsky, all of those writers are known for their science fiction works, thus proving my point.

La Shawn Barber points the way to this excellent article by Dennis Prager on America's Judeo-Christian heritage, and just how unique that is in the Western world. It is true that the churches I grew up in put a great deal of emphasis on the Old Testament, but it hadn't occured to me that this was somehow distinctly American. For the record I disagree with the assessment that America is somehow uniquely heir to God's promises to Israel. I do believe we've benefited from the Judeo-Christian influence on our society, although I'm skeptical that this has somehow earned God's blessing. I won't deny that our country has been extraordinarily blessed, but this is less a cause for pride than for humility. Those to whom much has been given, much will be expected.

Out of curiosity, what is the point of a story like this one from CNN?

A look at Bush's reversals

President Bush's decision Tuesday to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify publicly before the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks reversed earlier White House insistence that she would only appear privately.

Some previous Bush reversals in the face of criticism:

[They then list five other times Bush "gave in" to public criticism, including his opposition to the Department of Homeland Security, and his opposition to various investigations.]

The obvious tone of this article, which is presented as straight news rather than opinion, is "Bush is a stubborn fool who resists doing the obviously right thing until shamed into it." That is, admittedly, one way of looking at it. Or you can believe that he's simply open to compromise and willing to have his mind changed. Or you can believe, like Michael Novak in the Corner, that these are brilliant political maneuvers:

Look. We have seen this move before. Everybody rages that Bush is doing the wrong thing, he has to do X. Senator Daschle says he has to do X.

Republicans say he has to do X. The whole press says he is stupid for not doing X. Still, Bush refuses. And refuses. And refuses. Then, after everybody else has spoken, Bush suddenly says, O.K., we'll do X. Then, with the attention of the whole world upon him, and with everybody committed to X, he steps forward and goes right through the hole the attackers opened up for him. He does X, and knocks them dead.

In football, this play is called the mousetrap. The guard pulls out and moves toward the end, and the opposing players rush in on the attack. Suddenly the ball is handed off to a runner heading right for the spot the attackers had just vacated.

It looks like CNN still hasn't caught on.

Old Post: I originally mentioned my laptop problems here.

Since Glenn Reynolds and Captain Ed are discussing their laptop troubles, I felt I'd be remiss if I failed to mention mine. If you recall, my problem was that the AC adapter jack was flaky, so I contacted Dell via e-mail on Saturday. This morning, a technician came to my office and replaced the motherboard. Watching someone replace the motherboard on a laptop is quite an experience. I've put motherboards in desktops before, changed the processor in my home PC, upgraded memory, etc. In general, I feel like I know my way around a computer. But when it came to taking my Latitude D600 apart, I was astounded. First the screen had to come off, then the keyboard, then the touchpad, the DVD, the hard drive, the memory, the mini-PCI wireless LAN, the DVD player, the back panel, what remained of the front panel. I realized something that hadn't occured to me. In a desktop, the motherboard and everything else is mounted to the case. In a laptop, the case and everything else is mounted to the motherboard.

In any case, it all works now. I don't think he left any screws out when he put it together, but frankly I couldn't keep count. Also, it may be my imagination, but the seam where the front and back of the computer join seems a little wider, and not quite as even... ah, I'm just being paranoid, I'm sure.

Anyway, I'm very happy with Dell's service, although I'm still annoyed that the darn thing developed problems after two weeks.

La Shawn Barber takes Kerry to task for misinterpreting scripture:

Speaking in a black church yesterday (time to rethink that tax-exempt status), John Kerry implied that "our present national leadership" is lacking in compassion because some people don't have jobs and teenagers are killed in drive-by shootings.

"The scriptures say, what does it profit, my brother, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? When we look at what is happening in America today, where are the works of compassion," preached Kerry.
...
James gives guidance on how individuals, not governments, can evaluate their faith to determine whether it's living or dead. It is the personal works of believers that James has in mind in this passage. It wasn't addressed to Caesar.

If Kerry were a Christian, he'd know that the biblical standard of the test of faith doesn't rest on whether poor people exist or teenagers are killed in the streets. Using taxpayers' money isn't a work of faith.

She rightly points out that Kerry's confusing personal responsibility with government responsibility. This is something I've pointed out before, in the post "Christianity and the Nanny State." Compassion on the part of the government is not only inefficient and rarely able to relieve the sense of being unwanted, it also lets us Christians off the hook, discouraging us from compassion. The more the government does, the more caring for the poor is left to professionals, the more Christians fail to live up to Christ's call to care for the poor and downtrodden. Considering Bush's many personal acts of compassion, which aren't well publicized but aren't really hidden either (see here and here (scroll to the March 25th 8:36 pm entry)), Kerry's charge shows such little understanding of what the Christian faith lived out looks like that it's depressing.

As I've said before, I think Bush should contact that church and ask if he can speak before it. I'm optimistic enough to believe the church members would recognize true Christian faith when they see it.

La Shawn got an Instalanche for her post, by the way. I've been trying for weeks to get one without success. If she has any advice she'd like to share, I'm listening.

The Democrats are now promising to block any future Bush appointments until he promises not to make any more recess appointments. Senator Schumer has said, "The president's use of recess appointments to circumvent the advise and consent process puts a finger in the eye of the Constitution ..." Apparently filibustering an appointment is exactly what the constitution intended when it specified "advice and consent." Senator Daschle said, "At no point has a president ever used a recess appointment to install a rejected nominee onto the federal bench." That's a bit deceptive given that Pryor was never rejected. In fact, if a vote had ever been allowed, he would have been confirmed, but the Democrats filibustered to prevent one. As recess appointments are hardly uncommon, and have been used by such Democratic presidents as Clinton to appoint judges, Truman appointed 39, JFK 25. Deceptive or not, what the Democrats are doing will motivate Bush's base than anything Bush has ever done.

Nothing, and I do mean nothing, scares us conservatives more than the very real possibility that in our near future our laws will be decided by appointed judges, not our elected legislatures. See Donald Sensing for example. It's already happening, with the Massachusetts Supreme Court ordering the legislature to rewrite its marriage laws. I'm willing to bet that most moderates and more than a few liberals are frightened by that idea as well. Now that the Democrats have made it very clear that ideology matters more in judicial appointment than competence, that any form of judicial restraint, or "intolerant" views which happen to agree with 2/3rds of the population, are not just reasons to oppose a nomination, but reason enough to filibuster it, we're becoming very nervous about what our judicial system will look like with President Kerry doing the appointing. If Bush can successfully frame the debate on judicial nominations in these terms, strenuously arguing for the importance of judicial restraint, his base's support will be as solid as a rock. I think it fits strongly with his theme of an ownership society.

There are practical steps that must be taken here. The first is the Federal Marriage Amendment. While there may be some reason to support the Musgrave amendment, Orrin Hatch's amendment, which I personally prefer, fits better with the overall theme of curbing judicial overreach, and is much more likely to pass. If Bush were to throw his support behind Hatch's amendment, I think the Republicans who want to stick with Musgrave's would go fot it.

Second, Bush could voice reluctant support for the Bill which gives Congress the authority to overturn a supreme court ruling with 2/3rds vote (blogged here). I think it would take an amendment to do this, and I am also uncertain whether this is really such a good solution, but Bush needs to argue for a permanent solution to the problem of judicial overreach, not just the ad hoc solutions of more conservative appointees and an amendment whose sole purpose is to put a stop to one particular instance of judicial overreach.

Update: Oops, I called the amendment Gallagher's, rather than Musgrave's. Maggie Gallagher is a vocal proponent of the amendment, but Musgrave is the Congresswoman who proposed it.

Do you believe in vampires? Believe it or not, there are places in the world where the belief in vampires is still strong:

On a recent afternoon, the village's single store, which also serves as its lone bar, was filled with men drinking hard as they explained the vampire facts to a stranger. Most had at least one vampire in their family histories, and many were related to vampire victims. Most had learned to kill a vampire while still children.

Theirs is not a Hollywood tale, and they laugh at Hollywood conventions -- that vampires can be warded off by crosses or cloves of garlic, or that they can't be seen in mirrors. Utter nonsense. Vampires were once Catholics, were they not? And if a vampire can be seen, the mirror can see him. And why would you wear garlic around your neck? Are you adding flavor?

No, vampires are humans who have died, commonly babies before baptism or people unfortunate enough to have black cats jump over their coffins. Vampires occur everywhere, but in busy cities no one notices, the men said.

Vampires are obvious when dug up because while they will have been laid to rest on their backs, arms folded neatly across their chests, they will be found on their sides, even their stomachs. They will not have decomposed. Beards will have continued to grow. Their arms will be at their sides, as if they are clawing out of their coffins. And they will have blood -- sometimes dried, sometimes fresh -- around their mouths.

We tend to scoff at these beliefs, but before you ridicule these superstitious people, ask yourself why you don't believe in vampires. I'll wait.




If you are a straightforward materialist who denies anything supernatural, you're on decent philosophical ground to be scoffing at vampires. Most of us have at least some belief in the supernatural, however, and that leaves our reasons somewhat shaky. Sure, it all sounds silly, but silliness isn't a factual argument. I am a Christian, and some of the things I believe sound silly to people who aren't. They don't seem the slightest bit foolish to me. The thing is, even those who think these beliefs ridiculous aren't arguing that they're illogical, at least not within my worldview, just that they're unseemly in theirs. For someone like myself who believes not only that God exists, but also that demons do, vampires seem unlikely--I'm not saying I believe in them--but I can't rule them out entirely.

Before you materialists scoff at my gullibility, consider this: Is regular alien visitation to Earth impossible? If you believe that life on other planets is possible, then regular alien visits may be unlikely, but you can't rule them out entirely.

Here's what I was talking about this past week.

We haven't forgotten -- Even after 2 and a half years, 9/11 still brings strong feelings.

Protesting the Imperial US Hegemon -- When wacky anti-war protestors go bad. It isn't pretty.

What is a Pharisee? -- Christians like to throw around the term Pharisee in a perjorative sense, to describe hypocrites in the church. While this isn't really fair from a historical perspective, the problems Jesus ran into with the Pharisees are common enough today. Of course, anyone who calls another a Pharisee is in danger of behaving like one in the worst way.

U of R survey on Religious belief -- I describe the results of a survey which Intervarsity took of the University of Rochester.

Ralph Nader's talk -- I blog a talk given by Ralph Nader at the University of Rochester on consumer advocacy. He sounded like a conspiracy theorist, talking about the evils of our corporate society.

Richard Clarke -- A quick summary of the Richard Clarke situation for those who are interested in my take.