"Fine for Muslims to pray, not for Christians."
Yep, this Telegraph piece about sums up the anti-American, ignorant prejudice that pervades the Isles and the continent today.

by Donald Sensing, 5/29/2004 04:59:00 PM. Permalink |

Pat Tillman dead from friendly fire
One of Murphy's Laws of Combat is, "Friendly fire isn't friendly." Another is, "The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire."

Tragically, these laws seemed to have held true for Army Sgt. Pat Tillman, late of the Arizona Cardinals NFL team. Tillman died from gunfire fired by other US soldiers during a sharp firefight in Afghanistan, the Army said Friday.

The Army reported last month that Tillman, 27, was killed April 22 while leading his team of Army Rangers up a remote southeastern Afghanistan hill to knock out enemy fire that had pinned down other U.S. soldiers.

As Tillman and other soldiers neared the hill's crest, the Army reported, Tillman directed his team into firing positions and was shot and killed as he sprayed enemy positions with fire from his automatic weapon.

The Army did not specify who fired the shot or shots that killed Tillman.

The fact that friendly fire killed him does not change his status as Killed in Action, or affect his award of the Silver Star, America's third-highest decoration for valor.

by Donald Sensing, 5/29/2004 11:46:00 AM. Permalink |

Still vacating
A reminder that posting will be light and irregular through the middle of next week.

by Donald Sensing, 5/28/2004 11:00:00 PM. Permalink |

Torture
James Joyner has some comments about Harvard law Professor Alan Dershowitz's latest article about using torture on certain kinds of terrorist prisoners, and the professor's comments about how the Geneva Conventions are now working against their writers' countries (the West) rather than protecting them. Thought-provoking stuff.

I wrote a long time ago (too lazy to look it up) that what we all think are the normative rules of war and associated issues are in fact fairly recent, Western inventions. Moreover, they are Christianity-based.

I think that explains why so many countries that signed the various conventions turn out not to honor them while Western nations mostly do. The signatures were simply pro forma, not substantive, a way for the country to gain legitimacy in Western eyes. But there is little or no cultural or religious grounding to make the Conventions seem natural to the people - hence the militaries and the governments - of the nations concerned. (Never mind for now that many "nations" in the world are just legal fictions.)

by Donald Sensing, 5/28/2004 10:42:00 PM. Permalink |

Best movie review I've read lately
With the release of The Return of the King on DVD, Kim du Toit has written a magnificent review. RTWT!

by Donald Sensing, 5/28/2004 10:36:00 PM. Permalink |

Gratitude
Whilst on vacation I am reading The Simple Sounds of Freedom, by Thomas H. Taylor, son of Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division in WW2.

The book tells the story of the 101st's Joseph Beyrle (BYE-er-lee), the only American soldier to fight in both the US Army and the Soviet Army in World War II. Taken prisoner after parachuting into Normandy on D-Day, Byerle was imprisoned in eastern Europe. He eventually escaped and was liberated by the Soviets, who accepted him as a good soldier after he showed them how to rig battlefield demolitions.

Byerle was also the first American paratrooper to jump into France during the war. Well before the invasion, he made two "paymaster" jumps into France to deliver gold to the French underground (hence the jumps' nickname).

This is an astonishing true story. The torture and physical abuse Byerle and his fellow prisoners endured is shocking to read. He has to this day a depression in his skull, caused by a beating with a rifle butt during interrogation. He lost many memories as from the resultant concussion, many of which he never recovered.

At any rate, one section of the book deals with the 101st's experience in Operation Market Garden, the airborne invasion of The Netherlands in September 1944. In Eindhoven, the first Dutch city to be liberated, the people swarmed into the streets in jubilation when the paratroopers entered the city.

One trooper named Ed Albers migled with admirers when German mortar shells began dropping nearby. Instantly, Albers was thrown to the ground by Dutchmen, who

... tackled him and covered him with their bodies. When the shelling stopped they let him up. He asked what the [h] they were doing. In broken English one of them said Albers was a soldier fighting the Germans. Protecting him was the best way to help get rid of them.

It's hard to imagine.

by Donald Sensing, 5/27/2004 08:46:00 PM. Permalink |

100-plus thousand and climbing
Despite the fact that I've basically taken the last several days of for family events and vacation (taking off again tomorrow and Saturday, too), SiteMeter reports that this site's hit count has topped 100,000 for the first time since April 2003, when it topped 110,000. The page view count is more than 130,000 this month.

I am, as always, grateful for your readership!

Lazy night tonight - watching the Braves on TV with the Other Hand Clapping. I have in mind one more post for tonight I'm mulling over. In the meantime, I think Bill Hobbs has a lot of good stuf today.

by Donald Sensing, 5/27/2004 06:52:00 PM. Permalink |

Military running out of ammo
Kim du Toit has a typically, uh, pithy synopsis of the armed forces' shortage of small-arms ammunition, especially the 5.56mm rifle cartridge used in the standard- issue M16 series rifle.

One of the things the Army seems to have to learn every war - and then seems to forget - is the astounding number of bullets that get fired in combat. In the Civil War a Union general computed that it took his troops 30,000 fired shots to drop one Confederate. And that was before the machine gun came along.

After Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama, in 1989, the operation's ground forces commander, Lt. Gen. Carl Stiner, said that the firefights in Panama were much more intense than in Vietnam. Stiner said that the reason was that automatic weapons were much more numerous now. "Machine guns are everywhere," he said. (Stiner had spent several tours in Vietnam as an infantryman and Special Forces officer. He later earned his fourth star and commanded US Special Operations Command.)

The Army today uses a light machine gun called the SAW - Squad Automatic Weapon. It uses the same ammo as the M16 rifle, a good idea for interoperability and simplifying the supply chain. But soldiers love the SAW and would much rather use it, with its 1,000 meter effective range and far heavier weight of fire, than the shorter-ranged rifle. This has been the case with all rifles versus MGs for almost a century. In fact, typical engagement ranges with the infantry rifle are practically unchanged since World War I: 20-30 meters. Even US Marines, who pride themselves on long-range rifle fire, rarely fired at targets more than 100 meters distant.

So combat ops today are eating ammo wholesale, and the military's sole ammo plant in Independence, Missouri, can produce only 1,200,000 rounds per year, far under the Army's new estimated requirement of three to five times as much for the next several years.

Which makes me wonder what on earth the Army expected to do if the really big balloon dropped, say in central Europe or the Korean peninsula. The European battlefield against the Soviets envisioned General War, when the military would be entirely committed to combat operations, all the Reserves and Guard units mobilized and deployed, and intensive, round-the-clock combat taking place for weeks on end.

That sort of combat would have sucked the ammo-reserve well dry in short order. Could civilian manufacturers of such popular hunting and target loads such as Winchester, Remington and Browning have been redirected for military ammo in a short enough time to make a difference? I don't know.

In World War II, the Olin Corp. (which makes Winchester-brand ammo) built and operated the then-largest ammo plant in America in St. Louis, Mo.

Total production of .30 and .50 caliber rifle and machine gun ammunition at the St. Louis Ordnance Plant during the war, 6,738,009,746 loaded rounds, exceeded the output of all of the nation's small arms ammunition plants in World War I. In addition, the Western Cartridge Company plant at East Alton produced 4,022,621,734 loaded rounds of ammunition, and the Winchester plant in New Haven another 4,499,493,774 rounds. Thus a total of 15,260,125,254 rounds of ammunition were produced by the various Olin companies during World War II. [link

Note that each of the three plants mentioned manufactured far more than a billion rounds per year during the war.

To solve the present shortage, the Army will contract with civilian manufaturers to make up the difference.

by Donald Sensing, 5/27/2004 01:06:00 PM. Permalink |

Bloggers are mentally ill
At least, that's the impression one is left with after reading the NYT's hatchet job about bloggers, "For Some, the Blogging Never Stops."

The whole piece is about bloggers who are so obsessed with blogging that it dominates their lives to the exclusion of everything else. Such as the lead profile of a couple on an anniversary getaway:

... Early on the morning of their anniversary, Ms. Matthews heard her husband get up and go into the bathroom. He stayed there for a long time.

"I didn't hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on," Ms. Matthews said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with his laptop balanced on his knees, typing into his Web log ... .

Later we learn that he has missed deadlines for his paying job - writing articles - in order to write posts for his non-paying blog. Overall, the piece strongly implies that not only are bloggers "slight teched in the head," as we used to say down South, but that blogging is simply futile anyway: "... never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs."

I will be the first to admit that blogging has a certain allure that many other activities don't have. As bloggers go, I think I am pretty senior. I've been blogging without a break, except for vacations, since March 2002. Many blogs predate mine (and mine has been through three evolutions so far) but overall, One Hand Clapping is a graybeard of the blog world. (I remember when an Instalanche yielded about 1,500 hits rather that the several thousand it yields today.)

What seems objectionable about the Times piece to me is that it has no balance, it does not show there is a highly productive side of blogging, both financially and in information dissemniation. There is a brief quote from Jeff Jarvis, who is sort of the media's go-to guy for blogging matters, but no sense of proportion. There is only the drumbeat, from beginning to end, that bloggers are out of touch with the real world and are slightly, well, off.

There is also a profile piece in today's Times of Brian Stelter, an 18-year-old college student who blogs solely about cable news.

BTW, searching the NYT's site for "blog" yields only 11 articles. "Blogging" yields three, all duplicates of the other search. As others have said, the m=oldline media just don't understand this medium, and it shows in what limited coverage they give it. (hat tip: Bill Hobbs)

by Donald Sensing, 5/27/2004 01:05:00 PM. Permalink |

Break
Still on vacation, of sorts, anyway, so posting will be light and irregular for the nonce.

by Donald Sensing, 5/26/2004 04:43:00 PM. Permalink |

Stuff I found looking for something else
I forget what I Googled for, but in the results, this page turned up that purports to be an objective look at more than 300 diet plans and products. And so it seems to be. Maybe you will find it useful.

by Donald Sensing, 5/26/2004 01:45:00 PM. Permalink |

The other media bias
Story about "lifestyle changes" due to gas prices reveals media coverage slanted toward monied class

With all the attention we've been focusing recently about media bias toward the left side of American politics, perhaps some attention should be paid to another bias: coverage biased toward the middle and upper economic classes.

In today's Tenessean (Nashville) the front-page feature article is entitled, "Gas prices driving change in lifestyles," wherein we read this nugget in the fourth graf:

"It's really thrown our budget off," said Troy Farmer, who began looking at hybrid cars last week to get better gas mileage than his 1992 Ford Thunderbird. "We can't buy as much extra food. We can't go as many places. I'm buying more Kroger brands, going to Wal-Mart more. We don't rent as many movies on the weekend."

Another unfortunate person drastically affected:

Christina Brown, 18, of Lebanon has cut back on her social calendar and is relying on carpooling to hang out with friends.

Oh, the horror! Please, somebody take up a collection so the poor woman can get her social life back on track.

The whole article is nothing but lazy journalism, a puff piece for the middle class to read and moan about how bad it has it. Poor Troy Farmer can't rent as many DVDs as he used to - aren't you about to cry? Can't you feel his pain? Aren't high gas prices the awfulest thing you've ever heard about?

What about the people of the lower economic classes, who are hit much higher for higher prices of any consumer commodity than everyone else? Troy Farmer can cut down on Blockbuster to pay for his gas, but what about the cabbie who has nothing much to cut down on to pay for his higher fuel costs?

In a post about what journalism really is in February 2003, I quoted Matt Welch, who wrote that America's newspapers are catering almost exclusively to the well-to-do in search of advertising dollars, skewing their news coverage in order to achieve reader demographics that attract high-dollar advertisers. As the result,

"Daily newspapers have effectively dropped [coverage of] the bottom quintile or perhaps a third of the population," wrote communications professor Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a chapter of the 2002 book Into the Buzzsaw .

I note that McChesney is pretty left-leaning himself, and casts an eye of deep suspicion on the media from a socialism-influenced perspective (at least, I conclude from reading stuff on his own web site). Even so, this November 2000 article rings true to me:

It is the class bias that is the biggest obstacle. In the 1940s, most medium- and large-circulation daily newspapers had fulltime labor-beat reporters, sometimes several of them. The coverage was not necessarily favorable to the labor movement, but it existed. Today there are less than ten fulltime labor reporters in the media; coverage of working-class economic issues has all but ceased to exist in the news. Conversely, mainstream news and "business news" have effectively morphed over the past two decades as the news is increasingly pitched to the richest one-half or one-third of the population. The affairs of Wall Street, the pursuit of profitable investments, and the joys of capitalism are now presented as the interests of the general population. Journalists rely on business or "free market"-loving, business-oriented think tanks as sources when covering economics stories. ...

In recent years, this increased focus by the commercial news media on the more affluent part of the population has reinforced and extended the class bias in the selection and tenor of material. Stories of great importance to tens of millions of Americans will fall through the cracks because those are not the "right" Americans, according to the standards of the corporate news media.

The story in today's Tennessean does seem to bear this claim out. Now, I know that "one robin doth not a springtime make," so I don't want to over-generalize using only one newspaper story. But McChesney's point is valid. Journalism has become an elitist career (curious, since it does not qualify as a real profession), populated by college-degree holders. Bernard Goldberg, Emmy-award winner who retired from CBS with 30 years experience, documented his book Bias, A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News , how the newsrooms of CBS (like other newsrooms across America) are staffed by people whose world views and prejudices are almost all alike.

But not just political views. Because members of the lower economic strata rarely become reporters, that bottom fifth to a third of the population Professor McChesney mentioned is ignored in the reportage - unless there is a shooting or drug bust.

The bottom third, you see, doesn't have a "lifestyle." That's for you and me to have, and to read about.

by Donald Sensing, 5/26/2004 11:38:00 AM. Permalink |

Ramada blogging
Okay, we're out of town and staying in a Ramada Inn, where I discover that broadband access is available in all the room for no extra charge. Problem is, I don't have a laptop. Ah, but there is an always-on PC in the lobby; just sit down and type. So while the teenagers are going back to bed after breakfast and the daughter is swimming, I am knocking off a post or two.

Bush's Speech:

I didn't see the president's speech last night because I am on vacation, dadgummit. But from what I have seen and read this morning, it was pretty much a "stay the course" speech rather than a revelation of anything new. Bush has said we wants more international involvement in the transfer of sovereignty before, as well as UN legitimization of the new Iraqi government. No one could ever have realistically expected that the US would start to withdraw troops anytime soon.

My fault-finding with the speech - again, only having read about it - is that is was too mechanistic oriented: it dealt with nuts and bolts rather than forward visions. We still have not had the White House explain to us why we invaded Iraq beyond the WMD threat Iraq was said to pose and long list of UN resolutions it broke.

All well and good, but right now we're like the proverbial dog who finally caught the car: now that we have it, what are we going to do with it? As I wrote several months ago, the real benefits of taking down Saddam relate to the outyears (also here).

Now, it may well be that what I outlined as the strategic rationale for the invasion - the reformation and democratization of Arab societies themselves - is not what the administration ever thought. That's fine, but I sure would like to know what their long-term strategy is. Not the details, of course, but at least a philosophy of overcoming the terrorist threat that has a longer timeline than this summer. And I don't hear Bush and company doing that.

**********************

Vanderleun posts more problems with UN troops - in Iraq the corruption was oil for food. In the Congo it is sex for food.

Also, he makes a good case that liberal media bias - which the media trade journal Editor and Publisher exposes (and E&P; is a liberal publication) - is the result of a sort of "social Darwinism," rather than simple party affiliation.

by Donald Sensing, 5/25/2004 08:01:00 AM. Permalink |

See you Wednesday!
I'm taking a couple of days off from everything. Had an exhausting weekend - Saturday was younger son's Eagle Court of Honor and yesterday was eldest son's high school graduation. We're whipped and going to relax until midweek.

Thanks for reading!

by Donald Sensing, 5/24/2004 06:51:00 AM. Permalink |

Ascension Sunday
Today is an elephant in the living room of North American Christianity

Acts 1:1-11
1 In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning 2 until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.
3 After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. 4 While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. "This," he said, "is what you have heard from me; 5 for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now."
6 So when they had come together, they asked him, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?"
7 He replied, "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."
9 When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10 While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.
11 They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."

You have probably heard the expression, "an elephant in the living room." The source of this saying apparently was a substance-abuse counselor, who said that families in which there is a drug user are living with an elephant in the living room: It moves around, takes up an enormous amount of space, makes loud noises, bumps into them, knocks things over, smells bad - yet the family members are usually in denial and pretend it isn't there.

The story of Jesus' ascension is sort of an elephant in the living room of North American Christianity. Clergy of mainline churches like the UMC know what dominates this story but we usually pretend it isn't there. In previous years on Ascension Sunday, I ignored the elephant, too, but today I'm coming clean. What dominates this story is Jesus' bodily ascension into Heaven.

A miracle, in other words. That's the elephant.

The 21st-century Western mind pretends the miracle isn't there. We search for the moral of the story or its implied meaning for our day and ignore the miracle. Lay people are taught, by implication, to do that in our secular school systems and colleges. Clergy are taught to do that in mainline seminaries and divinity schools. Every mention of biblical miracles in my classes at Vanderbilt Divinity School was to show how the event itself wasn't really important and wasn't the real point of the story, anyway. Don't dwell on the miracle - with the unspoken implication being that the miracle didn't really happen or that the event was really an ordinary event that occurred in unordinary circumstances and was mistaken for a miracle. Besides, the people who wrote the Bible were educated for their day, but not for ours, and did not enjoy the benefit of the scientific method as a way of understanding reality.

I certainly do not attack science and some of you may even remember that I have defended science and the scientific method against religious fundamentalism and have exposed the holes in what is inaccurately called "scientific" creationism.

But we have to face the elephant in the living room of 21st-century, North American Christian faith, the fact that the entire Christian religion inescapably rests on miracles. And whatever other points the Ascension stories may have for us in our day, the central part of the story is that Jesus ascended bodily into Heaven.

In defense of modern scholarship, though, I readily agree that in miracle stories, including those of Jesus' healing, the miracle is not the only point of the stories, and sometimes not even the main point. For example, Jesus healed the servant of a Roman centurion whose faith in Jesus was so profound that Jesus exclaimed, "I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith" (Matt 8:10). That's the real kicker of the story, not the healing, which takes place entirely offstage. An officer of the oppressive, occupying Roman army, not a Jew, has the greatest faith.

But there are three miraculous events of Jesus' life in which the miracle is so central to defining who Jesus was - and who he is today - that explaining them away somehow cuts the heart from our faith.
The first is Jesus' miraculous Incarnation as the unique Son of God. I do not refer to the virgin birth. I mean that, as Paul wrote, "In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form," (Col 2:9), which cannot be said about any other person past or present. That Jesus was fully God and fully human is an essential miracle of his very existence that cannot be intellectualized away without surrendering the essence of who Christ is, what he means and what he does.

Second is that Jesus was dead, buried, and on the third day rose from the dead. The resurrection is the hinge of Christianity, the thing about which everything else rotates. Everything about our faith depends on it. Once its affirmation is abandoned, Christian faith becomes pointless, another fact that Paul recognized. He wrote the Corinthians that if there is no resurrection, "'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (I Cor. 15.32).

The third miracle is the Ascension.

The Reverend Robert Hansel described most classical art of the Ascension.

We see Jesus dressed in gauzy, flowing robes and he appears to be floating weightlessly on a couple of insubstantial-looking white clouds. The clouds are being lifted up by some smiling, chubby cherubs. It seems like some kind of pre-technology elevator or a circus levitation act. Even though we understand that what we're seeing is artistic and poetic, we just have to smile at the apparent silliness of the whole thing. Jesus lifting off like a rocket? Peter Pan with pixie dust? Come on! Isn't this whole idea of Ascension dated and embarrassing - something we'd be better off simply leaving out of contemporary Christian theology?

The modern mind replies, "Yes."

Yes, we all know that people do not fly unassisted through the air and that precious few of us have seen angels, although we can all imagine circumstances that would be greatly improved if one showed up now and then. And we know that wherever Heaven is, it isn't directly over our heads, as hundreds of spaceships have proven.

And having affirmed all that, we are left with the cold, hard fact that Jesus isn't here any more, and neither is his body.

The suffering, death, resurrection, appearances and ascension of Jesus Christ form a single narrative. In religious terms, they use poetic imagery and mythical literary language to describe the central events of the most important person in all history. Religious language is used best for religious experience. But there is also a very practical matter addressed, an important one for a faith that claims to be grounded in real events of actual history, as our faith claims. That is, What happened to Jesus' body?

Matthew records that this question was of foremost concern to Jesus' opponents after he was buried and the tomb turned up empty. Disbelieving that Jesus was raised from the dead, the question of what happened to Jesus' body was both obvious and urgent.

The story of Christ's ascension leaves us with much the same question, too. Namely, if Jesus didn't ascend into heaven, where is his grave? For he is no longer walking around, continuing his ministry. A crucial historical fact of Christianity is that Jesus' body is missing. Peter preached to the people of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, "Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. ... I may say to you confidently of our ancestor David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day." Jesus' tomb is still here, too, but unlike David's tomb, there's no body there. So for people who dismiss the Ascension story from a scientific-technical point of view as I once did, I have to ask:

Accepting for the sake of argument that Christ was raised from the tomb but denying that Christ ascended into heaven, then what happened to his body? In a religion with two thousand years of building innumerable monuments to even the most obscure saint or martyr, where is the church or reliquary or plain granite obelisk claiming to stand on Jesus' final resting place?

If Jesus is not here, and he is not ascended, what happened to him? And more importantly, what will happen to us?

For Christ's resurrection to be decisive, it had to be permanent. After all, Lazarus was also raised by God's power, through Jesus. Note that we call ourselves "Christians," not "Lazarites." Lazarus' resurrection was a temporary reprieve from the grave and therefore of no value to our salvation.

The Ascension of Christ is a critical element of Jesus's story, and therefore of our salvation. But we are a scientifically minded, technically trained people, and unlike the uneducated, superstitious masses of earlier centuries, we know better than to believe in fairy tales like the Ascension story. At least, that's how I used to think, including for quite a while after I became committed to Christ. But I think now that we cannot gut the story of Jesus of its miraculous content, leaving holes in the narrative, and expect something sensible to remain. If Jesus didn't heal the sick in inexplicable ways, then what did he do? Just preach? There have been countless thousands of extraordinary preachers since Jesus' day. Quick, name two, not including Billy Graham ... or Donald Sensing. So preaching itself gets no monuments dedicated to you.

Thomas Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment and the age of Rationalism, a deist rather than a traditional Christian. He took scissors to the New Testament, cutting out the verses that mentioned miracles. What was left was perhaps morally inspiring, but not much more. As you may recall me saying before, any religion founded only on Jesus' teachings would be simply an admirable form of Judaism. That's no bad thing, but that is not what brings us here each Sunday. The disciples knew this, even said so explicitly. Paul wrote the Corinthians that if Christ is not raised than we are still in our
sins and have no hope.

I quote the Reverend Hansel again:

Whatever we may think of the poetic imagery, the Ascension tells us finally and completely who Jesus really is. The picture of Jesus returning to God the Father enables us to let go of previous and incomplete pictures of Jesus. Certainly Jesus is the baby in the manger at Bethlehem, but that's not who he is now. Yes, he is the great teacher of the Sermon on the Mount, but we know much more than just a record of his words. We know that he hung and died on the cross, but that's not where he is today. We believe that he rose victorious from the empty tomb, but he's not just hanging around like some sort of wandering ghost.

Ascension adds a final and critical photograph to the album of who Christ is and what he does. He is ascended - once more with the Father, enthroned forever as the ruler and judge of all human history. This is the final picture and a very important one indeed because it puts all the other pictures in perspective.

There is a lot more to the Ascension story than the Ascension itself, but without the Ascension itself, there isn't much else about the story that matters.

by Donald Sensing, 5/23/2004 07:44:00 AM. Permalink |

Do you complain about coach seating?
Try flying 19 hours like these guys. I have done it more than once. It ain't fun.

by Donald Sensing, 5/22/2004 09:46:00 PM. Permalink |

Makes you want to yell at the radio
When Jeff Jarvis, a generally gentle man, gets so angry listening to his car's radio that he spittles all over the windshield yelling at the moron holding forth on the air, then you know things have gotten really bad.

by Donald Sensing, 5/22/2004 09:40:00 PM. Permalink |

The sarin-gas shell, revisited
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter says the nerve-gas shell exploded against US troops was most likely a leftover test shell, but I doubt it

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, former US Marine officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter argues that the artillery shell, filled with sarin nerve gas, that was used as an IED against US troops was "high likely" a dud round fired long ago in a test program (link ). His main points and my reply are:

Modern artillery shells have a high dud rate, usually 10 percent or higher..

This is an incredibly great exaggeration. As a career US Army artillery officer ( retired 1995) I have observed thousands of artillery rounds impacting. The sarin shell is question is described by the CPA and Ritter as being of 155mm in caliber. The standard 155mm US model M107 high-explosive round, used since 1959, has a vanishingly small dud rate, in the tenths of a percent and probably lower.

The US has not ever used chemical artillery rounds in battle but did develop and test them extensively. The detonation mechanism of these rounds was simple and extremely reliable. (None remain in service stockpile.)

Submunition, or "bomblet" rounds have a much higher dud rate, but for the bomblets, not the carrying projectile or its activation. The bomblets often fail to explode if, after ejection from the projectile, they hit the ground or target at an oblique angle. The dud rate varies according to the type of bomblet and ground or target conditions (snow on the ground, for example, increases the dud rate). Unexploded bomblets are a real concern among relief agencies in former combat areas and military commanders who move into places such rounds were used.

Saddam's regime declared to the UN that it test fired 150 sarin-filled shells, meaning that with a 10 percent dud rate, 15 of these shells are lying on the test range, "waiting to be picked up by any unsuspecting insurgent looking for raw material from which to construct an IED."

Again, a dud rate that high is simply a Ritter invention, but his thesis depends on it. Iraqi military technicians were by no means incompetent, especially having had training by Canadian artillery genius Gerald Bull. Furthermore, Iraqi 155mm artillery was very advanced, being also of Canadian design, based on the highly regarded GC-45 gun.

I would estimate that of 150 fired shells, even prototype ones, the dud rate should realistically approach zero. The detonation mechanism is just too simple and of decades-proven reliability to be more.

Ritter says that the shell's fragments can be examined to determine whether it had been fired, and the US government should announce the results of this test.

This contention is true, but not quite to the extent Ritter seems to think. I, along with every other new artillery lieutenant, was taught the basics of shell-fragment analysis. For a shell used as a roadside bomb, there is only one type of fragment that can reveal whether it has been fired. That is a fragment from the rotating band.

Artillery cannons are rifled, so as the shell travels down the tube it rotates. The shell has a rotating band, a ring of relatively soft metal such as brass, that grips the grooves of the tube's rifling to impart the spin. No other part of the shell contacts the cannon barrel's interior, and hence no other part of the shell would reveal whether it has been fired.

Ritter says that the sarin shells declared by the former regime were "base-bleed" shells. A BB shell is one in which the base (trailing end) of the shell is mildly concave, in which sits a gas emitter like a rocket motor. The gas emitter imparts no thrust. The gas simply fills the vacuum caused by aerodynamic effects as the projectile travels. Because the vacuum causes drag, removing the vacuum with the base-bleed method can greatly increase the shell's range.

A base-bleed projectile in flight

Ritter is correct that if the gas emitter was recovered, it would show whether the shell was fired. A discharged emitter would strongly indicate the shell had been fired. But it is also necessary to note that the proper function of the fuze and detonation mechanism has nothing to do with the gas emitter. Even if the gas emitter failed to ignite upon firing, the fuzing would still function.

Here is a qualifier, though. Chemical rounds are used with either countdown-timer fuzes or radar-activated fuzes (called variable-time fuzes, the radar being inside the fuze). In either case the point is to detonate the round above the ground to aid in dispersal of the chemical contents. Ground detonation tends to drive the chemical solution into the soil, where it is ineffective.

Time or VT fuzes have a backup mechanism that explodes the shell on the ground if the air-burst fails to occur. After all, some sort of detonation is better than none at all. It is possible (how likely I don't know) that the Iraqis used air-burst fuzes with no impact backup. I think this is very unlikely, but it is possible. If so, than it is more possible than otherwise that the round, if fired, was a dud as Ritter postulates.

Ritter wrote,

Given what's known about sarin shells, the US could be expected to offer a careful recital of the data with news of the shell. But facts that should have accompanied the story - the type of shell, its condition, whether it had been fired previously, and the age and viability of the sarin and precursor chemicals - were absent. And that's opened the door to irresponsible speculation that the shell was part of a live WMD stockpile.

I don't think the speculation Ritter refers to is irresponsible. But I agree that a lot more about the shell and its legacy would be helpful. The jury is still out. I also note that the US government has been pretty mum about it. I don't really fault them for it - the tests Ritter outlines have surely been done - but I would like to know. (The question is begged, though, whether I have a need to know, and I must admit I don't, and neither does Ritter.)

BTW, I know that Ritter's reputation is pretty much down the tank for many reasons, not least of which is that he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by an Iraqi agent for his support of Saddam's regime, was honored by the rubberstamp Iraqi parliament and was investigated here in the US for matters relating to child sexual offenses. But those things don't seem relevant to the technical questions at hand.

Aht tip: Joe Carter

by Donald Sensing, 5/22/2004 01:32:00 PM. Permalink |

Dueling biases
The media are biased. So am I. But which bias shall we choose and why?

One of the memes of the blogosphere since Nick Berg's brutal beheading on May 11 has been the enormous tilt of the traditional news media away from Berg's murder in favor of piling up ink and broadcast minutes about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal by American soldiers.

I summarized this phenomenon a week ago, and many other writers have, too, including some traditional media outlets.

The web is biased, too.

As of the date-time of this posting, a Google search for the exact phrase, "Abu Ghraib" yields "about 527,000" results.

A Google search for the exact phrase, "Nick Berg" yields "about 777,000" results.

Google searches non-media sources on the the web as well as media sources. So the searches show that Berg has received more coverage on the WWW than the prison scandal to the tune of a quarter-million more pages.

Does this mean that the web is biased toward the Berg story by 250,000 entries? I'm not trying to sound like Reuters, but could it be that "one man's bias is another man's fairness"?

Commentary overkill

In the Cold War, it was said that we had so many nukes pointed at Moscow that all most of them would do would be to "make the rubble bounce." And with the prison and Berg stories, instead of talking about what happened, we are talking about how we are talking about what happened.

There just isn't any "new news" coming from either case. All we are doing is recycling the same pictures and analysis over and over. Not even the courts-martials for prison offenders qualifies for the amount of "news" coverage Abu Ghraib still gets: there just isn't that much to report. And nothing new has happened in the Berg story except the Iraqi authorities captured four suspects, let two go and still hold the other two. (Wonder what their treatment is like?)

Hence, what is going on now is dueling biases. Have the mainline media shoved Berg down the memory hole while they relentlessly hammer the prison abuse story? Unquestionably.

Are web commentati, including me, pretty much off the Abu Ghraib story and still pounding the keyboards about Berg's murder and what it portends? Absolutely.

Both sides proceed from pre-existing biases. But are all biases equally objectionable or comparable? I don't think so. Discriminating among choices with moral import and deciding which to choose is the fundamental problem of ethics.

Ethics and commentary

There are a fair number of ethical matrices that can be used to approach the question. Aristotelian ethics would ask about the objective sought, whether it is just and excellent. Kantian ethicists might try to determine what is the rule to be followed. Utilitarian ethics leads one to ask what course would most likely result in the greatest good for the greatest number.

All these approaches have their merits and their deficiencies. I tend to approach tough ethical issues using the method of H. Richard Niebuhr. The first question in his ethics system is not, "What to do?" but, "What is really going on?" In other words, what is the setting of the ethical dilemma as best as can be known and described?

I believe it is impossible to discuss the present issue apart from the fact that large numbers of violent Islamic extremists have declared total war upon the United States. There are potentially millions of human lives at stake, and not just American lives. Should the Islamofascists detonate a nuclear weapon inside an American city, as they have said they want to do, there is no way to say in advance that the American government certainly would not respond in kind against a city inside the Axis of Evil.

And that leads us bump into the goal of Niebuhr's ethics: the promotion of human flourishing. This is not really the same as Utilitarianism's goal of the greatest good for the greatest number, a system which founders for the lack of a utilitarian calculus. HRN said that ethics is the problem of determing the "fitting response" to a situation. A fitting response is that which advances human flourishing (in HRN-speak, "advances the potentiality of beings.") Hence, HRN's ethics are consequentialist to some degree.

As ethics should be, for while consequences of a chosen course are rarely wholly determinative of what the course should be, they can hardly ever be disregarded (as Kant wanted to do, holding that only the rule mattered).

Consequences matter

It can hardly be argued that human flourishing is better to be achieved by Islamists. The Taliban, for instance, beat and even shot women who went outside their homes without company of theiur husbands or a close male relative. They flogged or hanged men whose beards were too short. In Saudi Arabia last year, a girls' school caught fire one night and the decency police (yes, they have them in Saudi Arabia) refused to unlock the exits because the girls were not properly veiled. At least 15 girls died. And surely human flourishing will not be brought about by the routine practice of beheading enemies, as Islamists have been doing for a very long time.

I quite agree to the other side of the argument, that human flourishing will not be brought about by the kinds of tortures that were done to Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But there are two crucial, indeed central, differences, to which the news media are almost entirely oblivious and the blogosphere is not:

The abuses were anomalous, not normative.

We are doing something about it.

In the world view of our enemies, the brutality and cruelty they commit are not exceptional, but routine. In fact, such acts are held to be a positive good, admired by Allah (who is not the God of Jesus) and commanded by him. The men who commit them are heroes, not villains.

The potential of human flourishing in this war's outcomes and the selection of biases:

There are only four basic outcomes of this war:

1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in the Islamic lands, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the societies become principally democratic as we conceive democracy (at least not for a very long time), but we can (and must) work to help them remit radical Islamofascism from their cultures so that terrorism does not threaten.

2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamicization of the entire Middle East (at the minimum), the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans.

3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and total war erupts between the US and several Islamic countries.

4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.

Perhaps you can think of another, different outcome, but I think these pretty much cover them.

So the question for us commentati, whether based on the web or in traditional media, is simply: which of these outcomes is best? Which will be most favorable to human flourishing?

As for me, I choose the first, and have no qualms admitting I am heavily biased in favor thereof. And that bias certainly shapes my blogging!

The basic issue for news media :

For the news media, I ask you: which outcome do you want? It is not possible to pretend neutrality here, for the power of the media to frame the public's debate is too great to claim you are merely being "fair and balanced." There literally is no neutral ground here, no "God's eye view" of events, and hence no possibility of not taking sides. One way or another, what you print or broadcast, what stories you cover and how you cover them, what attention you pay to what issues and how you describe them - all these things mean that you will support one outcome over another. Which will you choose? How will you support it? These are the most important questions of your vocation today. But you are not facing them at all.

Roger Simon is right: this war is war at its most basic: "It's about civilization versus a death cult. Make a choice!"

Now.

by Donald Sensing, 5/21/2004 06:00:00 PM. Permalink |

Marine moms
Nashville Tennessean columnist Tim Chavez profiles local mothers of US Marines serving overseas and writes a real winner of a column.

The Marine moms had had it up to here with news media coverage:

Their opinion hasn't been formed by news media coverage, Bob Woodward's latest book, the loudest talking head on television or a presidential candidate. These local moms get their perspective from the telephone and from pictures sent home or over the Internet. They've quit watching and reading the news. They say the coverage doesn't provide the full story.

Endless days of big headlines and lead stories on prisoner abuse make one believe Iraq is just one big holding pen instead of a place where people can now protest openly and hold religious observances once banned. If any one of the 200,000 members of our armed forces is doing something right in Iraq, the average viewer and reader would be hard pressed to find out. Yet if there is even speculation of something wrong, it leads the newscasts and makes the front page.

Which is what bloggers have been saying for a long time.

While the rest of us have seen the picture of the Army reservist holding the Iraqi prisoner on a leash a thousand times, these mothers talk about all the pictures showing Marines holding children, laughing with children and even an old man kissing the hand of a Marine.

''My son calls at 3 or 4 in the morning, and he once told me, 'I don't care who you vote for, but vote for someone who is going to let us finish the job,''' says Nancy Hayden of Nashville about her son, Justin. He is a Marine private. ...

These moms will surprise you if you depend on the media for your opinions. Of the 15 mothers in attendance Saturday, not one criticized President Bush. Laurie Undis, whose son Lance Cpl. Mark Underdahl is ready for deployment, said: ''I didn't vote for George Bush. I've never voted Republican before. But John Kerry scares me. George Bush has the leadership.''

Don't tell these mothers that war protests are designed to save their sons lives.

''When they call, we tell them we're doing fine, that we're strong, that we're doing great and that we're thrilled to hear from them and that America is behind them 100% and we're praying for them,'' said Martha Morris of Franklin. ''The reason for that is if they are brave enough to go over there for us and to fight for us, then by God they will not spend one second worrying about whether their mothers are strong enough to handle what they're doing.

''We'll talk about that when they get home.''

Some calls are harder than others. Trish Autery of LaVergne was talking on the phone with her son, Lance Cpl. Ryan Autery, when she heard an explosion. Ryan told his mom he had to go. Autery says she was hysterical for 10 minutes. Then her son called back and said it was a mortar attack. But he was fine.

Make no mistake. These mothers love their sons dearly and would prefer them safe at home. But the greatest love a parent can have for a child is in supporting him or her in pursuit of happiness and a meaningful life. So these Marine moms are always searching for ways to cope.

Clemons recently was getting into her car at Wal-Mart when a Marine in dress blues got out of his vehicle. Seeing him, she did an about face and ran his way. Later, she felt bad. He was African American, and she is white. And she felt the Marine must have thought she was intending something ill toward him. But she simply asked: ''My son is in Iraq, but I can't hug him. So can I hug you?''

He said, ''Yes.''

What these mothers have to say about the war in Iraq is more than mere opinion. They are invested — in every phone call and every slamming car door that could be the casualty officer paying that fateful visit. Don't question them. Thank them. Then listen and learn the rest of the story.

God bless all the mothers of our men and women serving in the armed forces.

by Donald Sensing, 5/21/2004 08:53:00 AM. Permalink |

Deal at Six Flags
In case anyone is interested, you can buy discounted tickets online at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom at what seemed to me to be a pretty deep discount of $11 off ($25.99 vice $36.99). And you can get a next-day ticket at the park for $5.

SFKK is already one of the least expensive around. Dollywood, near Gatlinburg, Tenn., charges $42.40 regular admission with no online discount. The only discount it presently offers is $5 off with specially marked Coke cans.

There are other ways to get discounted tickets, of course. The military's Morale, Welfare and Recreation agencies sells discounted tickets, too. But the SFKK online deal seemed pretty good to me. If not, I don't want to know.

by Donald Sensing, 5/21/2004 08:44:00 AM. Permalink |

Ambushed!
If you ever wondered what it was like to be in a fuel convoy in Iraq and get ambushed on the journey, then read this first-person account by Army Pfc. Jarob Walsh. It will curl your hair and leave you wondering, "Where do we get such men?" HT: Right Side Redux.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 09:30:00 PM. Permalink |

Saudis kill four terrorists in gun battle
One Saudi policeman was also killed in the gunfight "during a raid on a militant hideout in Khudaira, a southern district of Buraidah." Link.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 06:48:00 PM. Permalink |

Report: German army in Afghanistan told, Take no prisoners!
Incredible as it may seem, German military lawyers

... have advised German elite soldiers in Afghanistan not to take prisoners to avoid having to turn them over to US forces, Der Spiegel magazine reported.

There are millions of people in eastern and western Europe who remember all too grimly what it means for "elite" German army units to be told not to take prisoners.

The lawyers' concern was that the prisoners might wind up in American hands, where they would be abused. Alas, the new directive says that German soldiers are to release prisoners rather than turn them over to Americans.

"Well, Mullah Omar, we hope stay with the German army has been pleasant and comfortable. Please give our regards to Osama."

The thing is, I would be willing to bet my air fare to this year's Oktoberfest that the German units themselves think this order is idiotic. (More info.)

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 06:33:00 PM. Permalink |

The secret life of Kirk and Spock
And where is Star Fleet headquartered? San Fran-flippin'-cisco! Coincidence? Yeah sure, and so is Kirk's lavender shirt! I mean, really! (Caution, profanity at linked site, but it's funny and thought-provoking.)

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 04:16:00 PM. Permalink |

Linkagery
Some stuff I wanted to write about but know I'll never get around to, so just the links thereto:

The Saddam-9/11 Link Confirmed - by Laurie Mylroie, who advised Bill Clinton on Iraq.

"Why are the architects of Kosovo so down on Gulf War II?" by Matt Welch.

A former Marine NCO says that officers ordered him and other Marines to

"Throw candies in the school courtyard, and open fire on children rushing to snatch them. Crush them."

He's a liar.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 01:37:00 PM. Permalink |

There will always be an England
Okay, the men who did this amazing feat were really Scots (I think, maybe Welsh?), not English, but still, it's a jaw-dropper for those of us who know what it entailed.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 01:28:00 PM. Permalink |

My prophecy comes true
I wrote in the last graf of this post,

I am convinced that if a Baathist dead-ender showed up one day in front of CPA headquarters, driving a truck containing a one kiloton, use-ready atomic weapon, and announced he was defecting and making a gift of the nuke to the coalition, that the Left would argue, somehow, that it doesn't fit the definition of WMD that Bush (and Clinton and Kerry, btw) claimed Saddam had.

Well, I was right.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 01:20:00 PM. Permalink |

Your move, Kofi
At the end of his bleat which starts by talking about home roasting coffee, James Lileks moves on to weightier matters and remarks about Seymour Hersh's latest piece about Iraq, which focuses exclusively on Abu Ghraib:

Anything on the Berg slaughter? Alas, no. That was a one-off, it seems, an aberration. Move along, nothing to see. Hersh’s article ends: "'We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Convention. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.'" Ah. Hereafter the terrorists will be emboldened to saw people’s heads off with dull blades. I’m not going to get into any of that, except to say: 1. the UN Food-for-Oil scandal continues apace. And 2. The first sentence has been handed down in the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. A downgrade, a bad-conduct discharge, a year in the pokey.

Questions: is the Oil-for-Food scandal characteristic of the UN, or not? Is the Abu Ghraib scandal characteristic of the US Armed Forces, or not?

Which body acted swiftly to investigate? Which body opened itself to public hearings and condemnations? Which body put the bad guy in the dock, held a trial, and pronounced sentence? Says AP:

Within hours of Sivits’ court-martial, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington that abuse of prisoners in Iraq will be investigated thoroughly up the chain of command, "and that includes me." ...

Kofi? Your move.

Yeah, Kofi will move, all right, about as fast as the Sphinx, and about as forthcoming.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 01:13:00 PM. Permalink |

James Lileks, coffee man?
Brian Jones emailed to tell me that James Lileks evidently doesn't read One Hand Clapping (and why not?) Because he posted today,

Had a guest for lunch today: Mike J. Nelson, bearing a small jar of home-roasted coffee. I know what you’re thinking: he roasts his own coffee? Apparently. I had no idea such a thing was possible, but the world is full of such surprises. No doubt there’s a thriving industry to support this hobby.

Well, James, all you have to do is read this essay of mine, which will tell you all about it.

I think I’ll start roasting my own and selling it here.

Two tips: ignore all the coffee from South America and go straight either to African coffee or, better yet, southwest Pacific coffee. I refer to the absolute best I have roasted, Papua New Guinea, and Sumatra Mandheling (also spelled Manhelding). In fact, Mandheling blended 50-50 with Tanzania Peaberry is outstanding.

Roasting and selling it on your site? Believe me, if it was economically feasible I'd be doing it already.

Home roasting machines only roast a few ounces at a time and except for only a couple of machines, none are "start and forget." You must closely monitor the roasting process the entire time. The two machines I know of that will roast pretty much automatically are also slow roasters and therefore you can't roast much coffee per day.

I don't know of any roasters that are in between home and commercial capacity. Commercial-capacity roasters cost thousands of dollars and require extensive duct work for venting and electrical capacity.

Since the whole point of home roasting is freshness, you'd also be hieing off to the FedEx station every day to send out that day's roast. All this means that you'd have to charge a very large amount per pound to make the effort worth your time - but since fresh-roasted coffee is already available online from commercial roasters, why would someone buy from you (or me) and not them?

Nope, there is only one reason to roast your own coffee: It's the best coffee you will ever have!

Update: A little Googling of -coffee blog- reveals a number of sites dedicated to the subject, including a new blog dealing just with fair-trade coffee issues. But CoffeeBlog isn't about coffee at all.

Here is Don's coffee consumption by kilogram and origin, Mar 2002 - May 2004. Sorry, it's another Don.

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 01:05:00 PM. Permalink |

Government licensing of pastors?
As i have mentioned a couple of times before, I serve as a volunteer chaplain for the Williamson County (Tenn.) Sheriff's Department. This is a ministry to the deputies and through the department to the county's residents, not to the county jail, which the WCSD runs.

Hence, I was a little dismayed to learn that beginning next month, the department's policies for pastor visitation with inmates will require pastors to complete the department's certification program. Only two certifying sessions per year, apparently will be held, both in May.

Only pastors with a photo identification badge issued through the identification program will be allowed to visit inmates.

I do not know yet just what it is that is being certified. I suspect, but do not know, that the certification deals with rule for inmate contact, off-limits areas, jail procedures and the like.

I have no objection to such training . . . but I wonder whether all visitors must complete such certification, or only pastors. On the face of it, this new policy seems ripe for legal challenge on the basis of especially burdening clergy. We'll see.


by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 10:44:00 AM. Permalink |

Reminder
For reasons I posted here, blogging will be irregular for the next several days. Sorry, but thanks for reading!

by Donald Sensing, 5/20/2004 09:15:00 AM. Permalink | <img class="icon-action" alt="" src="http://www.blogger.com:8