Octopodial Chrome

I saw this at National Review Online:

To All My Liberal Friends

Please accept with no obligation, implied or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2010, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

To All My Conservative Friends

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I like:-)

I had a complete blast today snowshoeing up around Brainard Lake with the guys (and one gal) from work. It was well-worth the trek up to Boulder, and even not sleeping in until noon, as is my wont on Saturdays. We all had a great time.

Incidentally, wool rocks: I was wearing wool long-johns, wool socks, a wool sweater, wool wristers, wool mittens and a wool balaclava. I spent the trip–in freezing temperatures, with high-speed winds and blowing snow–hotter than was strictly necessary. And yes, I made all but the long-johns.

I’m pretty sure that this means in some cultures I rock.

The Pedant-General over at Devil’s Kitchen has a great explanation of why the CRU revelations can’t be ignored. Elsewhere, Charles Murray points out that it’s the disappearing data which is damning.

Given reasonably trustworthy premises, one can argue to a reasonably trustworthy conclusion. It appears from the evidence that the CRU’s premises aren’t reasonably trustworthy, and their conclusions aren’t to be trusted.

USS Consitution has been designated the Ship of State, which means a stepped-up ceremonial role for the 212-year old ship. She’s the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world, and one of the first six frigates in the US Navy.

When I was in Newport for DCO School we spent liberty on Saturday touring her. It was a great experience!

It has been twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty years since Eastern Europe broke its shackles, twenty years since our victory over socialist tyranny.

I grew up at the very tail end of the Cold War. As a small boy I remember leaving home before dawn to greet and say goodbye to my father as he sailed with the Navy. I grew up on movies like Top Gun. I was raised just outside of Norfolk, the headquarters of the Atlantic Fleet. Once I asked Dad what would happen to our family if there were a nuclear war; he replied that we’d be radioactive grit. It sounds harsh & heartless now, but it was true.

And then in the summer & fall of 1989 things started to change. The various states which formed the Soviet Empire started to lose their grip on their citizenry. The Hungarians opened their borders. The Poles rose up. Change was in the air.

But change was in the air in 1948, 1953 and in 1968—and nothing changed, except for the blood that was spilt & the lives which were lost, anyway. The Communists had crushed dissent then, and could have tried to do so again. But this time they didn’t. This time the people rose up, and they were allowed to stand. This time the people headed for freedom, and the border guards didn’t stop them. This time, the walls came tumbling down.

I was only eleven at the time, not much more than a boy, and I didn’t fully understand what was going one, but I knew enough to know that it wasn’t just historic—it defined historic. The radio the following year had Scorpions’ Wind of Change and Jesus Jones’ Right Here, Right Now on constant rotation. Event followed event: first the Wall, then Ceauşescu, then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics herself fell.

We. Had. Won.

After a world war, after a cold war, after numerous hot wars, after untold expenditures of blood and money, we had won. After the stalemate of Korea, after the losses of East Germany, Cuba & Vietnam, we had won. After the lies of the twenties and thirties, the necessity of the forties, the treasons of the fifties and sixties, the blindness of the seventies and the final struggle of the eighties, Truth and Freedom won the day. The appeasers, the dupes, the fellow-travellers, the traitors: they were shown for what they were; they lost.

But we—we had won!

The years since have been anything but simple or easy—or peaceful. Far from the end of history, what we have seen instead has been the resumption of history. The black-and-white of the Free World versus the Second World has been replaced with the grey of each nation’s self-interest. History continues, as it ever has.

But no matter what the future brings, one thing remains: we were right, and we won.

My uncle—Father Joseph to the rest of y’all—recently led members of his current and former parishes on the Hotter’N Hell Hundred , a set of cycling races down in Texas in August.

He was up here in Denver a few weeks back training and I had the opportunity to ride with him. He’s in great form, better than I am…

On Sunday, 23rd August I had the honour of administering the commissioning oath to my brother John, who is now an ensign in the United States Navy. He is a Chaplain Candidate, attending Holy Cross in Massachusetts.

With his accession, all four of us are now in the naval service: three naval officers and one Marine!

The San Francisco Chronicle has a great article about how food safety is wreaking havoc on the environment. Apparently food buyers are trying to make plants—grown in nature, under the sky—as sterile as possible, by mandating dead zones around vegetable beds, killing off of animals and so forth.

Wouldn’t it be more sensible to…wait for it…just wash off the produce?

On this anniversary of our independence, you might take a moment to consider how fortunate we were in our Founders. Unlike so many other revolutionaries, they didn’t trust in man’s good nature, but rather his baseness; they formed a government which was meant to control itself.

Smart guys.

I couldn’t put it any better myself.

A 10-year-old girl in Huntington Beach, Cali., was dying of cancer but wanted to stay alive long enough to see Up. By the time it came out, she was unable to leave her home—so Pixar sent a special DVD of the film to her, hand-carried by an employee with a bag of stuffed animals, a movie poster, a scrap book from the film and stories about the movie. She died a few hours after seeing it.

A manicurist from Washington, DC sold her car and her home in order to build a school in her native village in Ethiopia. Not only that, she reserved a third of her salary and all of her tips for the project. Part of her inspiration came from the fact that a girl there was eaten by a hyena on the three-hour walk home from the then-nearest school.

This is an excellent example of the power of private charity. Bravo for her!

I was reading an article about the digital television changeover and noticed something a bit disturbing: they set up a call centre for folks having problems; the average overall wait time at the call centre was 8.4 minutes but the average overall wait time for Spanish-speaking callers was 1.8 minutes. I’m having a little bit of difficulty figuring out why folks who speak our native tongue have to wait 4 2/3 times longer than those who don’t. Why didn’t the call centre more accurately predict the distribution of callers it would get and arrange so that all languages would get equal service? For that matter, wouldn’t it make sense to ensure better service for English-speakers, given that English is our language?

When I was in Germany, I expected to wait longer if I wanted English service; when I was in India, I expected the same. Why are we privileging people who can’t even speak our language?

Today is Oak Apple Day, marking the restoration of King Charles II to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and the elimination of the abominable Puritan tyranny in 1660. That was, for those not keeping count, 53 years after the founding of my home state—and thus it’s as Virginian a holiday as Jackson Lee Day.

I’m thirty-one years old now…oddly enough, I don’t feel the slightest bit different. Heh:-)

A birthday party was invaded by two men—fortunately one of the students at the party had a handgun in his backpack. He drove off the assailants, mortally wounding one of them.

In Britain 46% of families have only one child. This is a truly disturbing development, not just for demographics but for the moral and ethical development of future British subjects. I know from my own experience as an only child and as the oldest of four just how important it is to have siblings (and not just one: there’s a clear difference between those who only had a single brother or sister and those with several). You’re forced to learn how to tolerate others; you’re forced to learn that you’re not the centre of the universe; you’re forced to deal with your parents not always paying attention to you. These are all Good Things.

Plus, of course, there’s nothing better as an adult than spending time with one’s siblings.

I spent the past weekend in Telluride, staying at the nicest home I’ve ever been in ever. It’s owned by some real estate tycoon from Florida; my buddy Martin’s sister is friends with the woman who designed the interior of his mansion in Telluride Mountain Village, and he liked her work enough to let her use the house. To use it for free. A house which normally goes on the market for a max of $12,500 a night. This is the sort of place that some of the bigger celebrities stay at, and we were there.

It was nice, very nice. Really nice. Really incredibly nice.

To start off with, it’s huge (17,300 sq. foot interior, 3,000 sq. foot exterior, over an acre lot). It’s surprisingly cool to just have space for stuff. And all that space is definitely full of stuff: there’s a game room with pool and poker and backgammon tables; there’s a grotto with two pools and a waterfall; there’s a widescreen TV in every bedroom and most other rooms (complete with a library of thousands of DVDs); there’s even a stocked wine cellar. The kitchen is enormous, with four ovens. Oh, there’s also a private theatre in the basement with an excellent sound system (I watched Top Gun).

This place is so large that the kids could be in one end of the house playing in the grotto while the rest of us were lounging in the den listening to classic rock and no-one was bothered in one direction or another.

I have to say that the interior designer was brilliant: the house is extremely attractive and does a pretty good job of capturing the feel of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century park lodge, which was the owner’s intention.

All in all, it was one of the most fun, most luxurious weekends I’ve ever spent. I want to do it again this weekend!

Well, today is a black today in Colorado: the Rocky Mountain News is shutting down. Of Denver’s two daily newspapers, they were the oldest and best. When we moved here fifteen years ago, they were always the better, more intelligent, more thorough, more journalistic paper.

It’s a pity no-one could have bought them at a firesale. It’s a pity they couldn’t win the news war with the Denver Post. It’s a pity that they couldn’t have continued online. Farewell!

Switzerland’s socialists are trying to remove the right to store one’s military firearm at home. Two years ago they forbade the storage of military ammunition at home.

Seventy years ago the Swiss were able to keep Hitler’s war machine at bay (Fight to your last cartridge, then fight with your bayonets. No surrender. Fight to the death. —Gen. Henri Guisan); today they have turned into something far less fearsome.

One of the milestones in one’s path towards old age is this: hearing a grand old song from one’s youth turned into Muzak. Well, I just heard a smooth jazzy rendition of Boyz II Men’s End of the Road.

May I start belting my pants over my pecs now?

A week ago Father George Paulson passed away. He was the first parish priest I remember; he was the man who—teaching a Biblical Greek class—managed to convert my parents (and hence me & my brothers too) to Orthodox Christianity.

Fr. Paulson ran a very tight altar (he was the first Greek Orthodox chaplain in the military and retired as a captain): what with him, Dad (also former a naval officer) and Fr. Bartz (then and now a naval chaplain) we altar boys were squared away. One snap of the fingers from any of the three of them and all of us would settle down and snap to attention. There was a sequence of hand signals (invisible to the congregation) which indicated to us what we should be doing. He even set little plastic buttons (normally used for the bottoms of chair or table legs) into the solea (the floor in front of the icon screen) indicating where each altar boy should stand in order that we’d be lined up evenly. To this day, no-one who served on Father’s altar can abide sloppy acolyte-work—and I’m pretty sure any one of us could stand in and serve once more, so well-drilled were we.

Father was one of the first priests to celebrate the Liturgy in English, a practise which is now fairly well-accepted. That need to translate all the services into English is, I believe, what got Dad involved in building service books (a work which appears will be his own legacy). He also taught Dad how to sing & chant in the Byzantine style. Most importantly, Father Paulson encouraged and taught Dad in his path towards ordination, first as a deacon and later as a priest.

Here’s Father’s obituary:

Virginia Beach—The Rev. Father George I. Paulson, surrounded by his family and loved ones, fell asleep in the Lord in his home Jan. 5, 2009. He was born in Springfield, Mass., July 31, 1918, the son of Ignatius and Panorea Pavloglou. After his marriage to his beloved wife, Evangeline, June 11, 1944, Father Paulson was ordained into the Holy Priesthood Aug. 9, 1944.

After graduating from Bay Path Business College in 1935, Father Paulson attended Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, graduating in 1944. Always in pursuit of higher education, he also attended the University of Pennsylvania, George Williams College and Coastal Carolina Community College. In 1974, Father Paulson received a master’s degree in education from Boston University. In 1993, at the age of 75, he received a Doctorate in Ministry conferred upon him by Boston University.

Father Paulson’s ministry in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese began in 1944 at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Tacoma, Wash. He was transferred to the Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco in 1949. In 1952, Father Paulson was chosen by the Archbishop to become the first Greek Orthodox chaplain in the history of the U.S. military. During his 28 years of active service in the U.S. Navy, he attained the rank of captain and earned numerous awards and commendations.

Father Paulson’s naval career was highlighted by his organization and direction of the Leadership School. In response to the Navy and Marine Corps’ need to eradicate lingering racial tension among service personnel following the Vietnam War, Capt. Paulson developed the curriculum for the Leadership School. More than 15,000 Marines and sailors attended this school. A Navy Commendation Medal was awarded to him by the secretary of the Navy for this remarkable achievement. Father Paulson also earned the Navy Unit Commendation, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, a Combat Action Ribbon and decorations for National Defense Service, Armed Forces Expeditionary, Vietnam Service and the Republic of Vietnam Campaign. Father Paulson was commissioned by Saint Leo University to introduce the religious studies degree program in the Norfolk and Virginia Beach areas. He served as chairman of both the Psychology and Theology departments at Saint Leo and established a scholarship that is awarded annually to a deserving Saint Leo student. Father Paulson was a dynamic and illustrious educator whose teaching career culminated in a designation of full professor status at Saint Leo University.

Early in his career, as a direct result of his military service, Father Paulson developed a strong belief that “Jesus Christ belongs to all of us.” He felt that the most effective way for him to bring Christ to the people was to offer Greek Orthodox services in the United States in the language of the people, English. Utilizing this philosophy, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was established in Virginia Beach in 1980. Father Paulson served as pastor of St. Nicholas until his retirement in 2004 at the age of 85.

Father Paulson greatly valued the importance of family. His beloved Evangeline preceded his passing July 19, 2003, after 60 years of blissful marriage. He is survived by his sons, Ned and his wife Susan, Louis and his wife Jeannette, Bill and his wife Meg and George Jr. and his wife Gina. Father George and Evangeline were deeply devoted grandparents to their nine grandchildren, George, Carl, Elias, John, Matthew, Billy, Leah, Jon and Chris. They were also loving great-grandparents to their eight great-grandchildren, Madison, Alex, George, Max, Henry, Anastasia, Louis and Cathy. Father Paulson is survived by his brother, Vasilios Pavloglou and was predeceased by his brother, Peter Paulson. The family would like to extend a very special thank you to the warm-hearted ladies, Minnie Turner and Daisy Stephenson, who cared for Father Paulson for his last three years. Their love and devotion to Father George will forever be appreciated.

I was unable to attend his funeral on Saturday (I had to drill), but my parents were. Αιωνία η μνήμη—May his memory be eternal.

Today is Bill of Rights Day, the day in which we celebrate the guarantees of liberty in our federal Constitution. In Federalist 84, Alexander Hamilton argued that listing some rights and not others would lead to protection for only those listed and not the unlisted. He was, of course, correct: despite the the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, there is no right which is not safe when the legislature is in session.

Still, the Bill is a great document, listing a few of the fundamental rights of a free people: to practise one’s religion; to speak; to publish; to assemble peacefully (this one gets stomped on all the time nowadays); to petition the State; to own and carry arms (this one is practically a dead letter across the entire United States); to be secure in one’s property (yeah, quartering troops seems a pretty minor deal now, but the principle is important; moreover the protections of the Fifth Amendment with regard to property have been severely curtailed); to be safe from unwarranted and unreasonable searches and seizures (this one has been gone by the wayside since Prohibition); to indictment and trial by a jury of one’s peers (this one has been watered down quite a bit); to not bear witness against oneself (I’d go further and argue that no-one should be compelled to give testimony against anyone else either); to be confronted by the witnesses against one (this one too has been curtailed, to our great shame); to compel witnesses to testify in one’s favour; to be assisted by a lawyer in court and to non-excessive bails, fines and punishments (this one is all-too-often misinterpreted). This is not a bad list to start with, although I would add others. Tellingly, I wouldn’t eliminate any of them. It’s a pity that my fellow countrymen, our legislatures and our courts disagree and have removed or weakened one after another.

And then there are the Ninth and Tenth Amendments: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people and The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. Well, we see how well that worked out.

Here’s a thought: this year, why not work with the Bill of Rights, rather than against it?

Some time ago I predicted that forcing soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan to shave their beards would hinder our efforts to pacify that country (imagine, if you will, the trouble of ruling America with lisping legions in hotpants). Well, I was right: the Afghans do not respect men who look like boys.

Frankly, I think that the insistence on beardlessness is a bit strange. Hair on one’s face is no more a discipline issue than hair on one’s head: just slap some regulations on it, require neat military grooming and get on with life.