Shaun Kenney

In fact, they’re offended by all the support, as one of the cartoonists explains:

“We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.”

Commenting on the global outpouring of support for the weekly, Willem scoffed: “They’ve never seen Charlie Hebdo.”

“A few years ago, thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan to demonstrate against Charlie Hebdo. They didn’t know what it was. Now it’s the opposite, but if people are protesting to defend freedom of speech, naturally that’s a good thing.”

At least they’re consistent in their vulgarity…

Some careful thoughts from The New Yorker today as they compare the cases of former Governor Bob McDonnell — who received 11 two-year sentences to be served concurrently for corruption — and the strange case of Davion Blount:

His two co-defendants (both eighteen years old) pleaded guilty. Prosecutors offered Blount a plea that would carry a mandated term of at least eighteen years; if he didn’t take it, they said, they would bring additional charges. To a seventeen-year-old, eighteen years in jail seemed interminable. According to the Virginian-Pilot’s Louis Hansen, “Blount was stubborn. He thought he was innocent of some charges. He was willing to fight.”

Blount lost. He had faced fifty-one felonies-including illegal use of a firearm, robbery, and abduction. The jury found him guilty on forty-nine of them. At the sentencing, in March 2008, the judge said the gun crimes, be it being arrested for owning a gun illegally or more serious charges, carried fixed punishments in Virginia, so his sentence for the weapons charge came to a hundred and eighteen years. On top of that, because the crime involved robbing three juveniles at gunpoint, the judge added six life sentences. The Virginian-Pilot wrote that the sentence “may be the harshest in America for a teen who didn’t commit murder.”

It is an odd fact that in Virginia, we spend more on corrections than we do on education. Perhaps it’s time to evaluate what an overhaul in our justice system might look like in a 21st century environment?

…and even then there’s some part of me that hesitates to post this.

Charlie Hebdo was not exactly a publication of the first rank.  Somewhere between MAD and Playboy is about where one might put it (and no, I am not an avid reader in the slightest).  The reaction in the wake of the French terrorist attack was vivid and real, without the appearance of either appeasement or overreaction.  Ross Douthat over at the New York Times perhaps encapsulated the feelings of America in his op-ed yesterday:

Must all deliberate offense-giving, in any context, be celebrated, honored, praised? I think not. But in the presence of the gun — or, as in the darker chapters of my own faith’s history, the rack or the stake — both liberalism and liberty require that it be welcomed and defended.

This is not something easily digested by many on the left.  Too often in my own experience, toleration is typically extended to those with whom liberals and progressive agree — or at worst, if only in an attempt to pillory what they are not.  It’s a tribalism of the worst sort, and sadly emblematic of what Jonah Goldberg has — in my view, accurately — defined among the American left the confusion of sneering for confidence.

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I’ve tried to like Crux, the latest experiment over at The Boston Globe to be relevant to its readers.  It bills itself as something of a public square, indeed “covering all things Catholic” is the byline.

Of course, when it strays into smug commentary…

Men “respond to vigor and precision and excellence,” says Burke.

“Manly discipline” is required to be an altar boy, says Burke.

“Men need to dress and act like men,” says Burke, who’s known for dressing himself in vestments of silk and … lace.

Oh my.

Altar girls have so overrun once manly man liturgies, says Burke, the manly men who would otherwise be priests are appalled and repelled.

I could go on here. But it’s now like shooting fish in a barrel.

Burke, clearly, has lost it.

I wouldn’t be so sure that it is Cardinal Burke who has “lost it” in this exchange, though I’m certain it would shock and surprise Ms. Eagan that there are indeed differing opinions that would treat the topic with a bit more of the intellectual rigor and reputation for newsworthiness The Boston Globe seems so willing to fritter away on efforts such as Crux.

…but far be it from me to make that critique.  Readers can vote with their mouse clicks.  In a 140 character world that seems to thrive on pithy wit than a complete thought to get attention, I’m sure the Crux will get along without more responsible and introspective readers just fine.

Good news, so it would seem:

The ORNL team, in collaboration with foundation researchers led by Drs. William Powell and Chuck Maynard of ESF, used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to analyze chestnuts from transgenic American chestnut trees-trees that were transformed with a wheat gene to increase resistance to blight. In chromatography, a range of equipment might be used to gather results on certain substances, such as an akta purifier or other FPLCs; labs looking to obtain such equipment can rest in the knowledge that they can be obtained online as well as in certified pre-owned and refurbished conditions. Results also showed that the transgenic chestnuts had similar metabolite concentrations to a panel of non-transgenic nuts, suggesting that they are edible.

“We found that the wheat gene kept oxalic acid (oxalate) concentration-a key fungal necrotic agent-from accumulating, and the only substantial difference from non-resistant trees was a slightly lower level of gamma-tocopherol, a form of vitamin E,” said Dr. Timothy Tschaplinski of ORNL’s Energy and Environmental Sciences Directorate. The level of gamma-tocopherol was the same as in non-transgenic Chinese chestnuts, which are commonly eaten around the world.

Of course, not everyone is entirely enthused about the idea, as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) don’t exactly have the best reputation in the world. My good friend Dwayne McIntyre — an ally in many a fight for small farmers — had the following observations:

Its total naivety to think that designer GMO Chestnuts aren’t going to be exploited for profit, especially after explaining in great detail in the article how exquisite chestnut timber is and how one mature tree produces a half a ton of nuts. That sounds like an exact recipe for exploitation. The timber and food markets will capitalize on its overabundant output levels which will launch demands for the trees way above the Johnny Appleseed levels of frolicking in the forests and repopulating the countryside so all the folks of the land can have their fill of free “healthy” food. So easy we buy the dream, cast all our convictions aside, and pretend this new American wheatnut tree won’t come with a patent.

Honestly, the more I think about this article the more I think the American chestnut is the mascot for the great American Tragedy.

It’s easy to forget that there’s a laboratory that’s replicating millions if not billions of American chestnut variants right now as we speak. That lab is Mother Nature… and I suspect that the natural crosspollinating tests will bear similar and superior fruit. Naturally, I’m naive enough to think that the winner will be someone who simply brings home a handful of chestnuts from hiking the Appalachian Trail and plants them in the backyard. Stranger things have happened.

I’ll be the first to admit.  I can’t stand marginalia, though I am the very first to feel that intensity of pride when I read through my grandfather’s books to read his notations in the margins.

So I’m having a hard time with this challenge, as issued by Tim parks over at the New York Review of Books:

Aside from simply insisting, as I already had for years, that they be more alert, I began to wonder what was the most practical way I could lead my students to a greater attentiveness, teach them to protect themselves from all those underlying messages that can shift one’s attitude without one’s being aware of it? I began to think about the way I read myself, about the activity of reading, what you put into it rather than what was simply on the page. Try this experiment, I eventually told them: from now on always read with a pen in your hands, not beside you on the table, but actually in your hand, ready, armed. And always make three or four comments on every page, at least one critical, even aggressive. Put a question mark by everything you find suspect. Underline anything you really appreciate. Feel free to write “splendid,” but also, “I don’t believe a word of it.” And even “bullshit.”

Those who have perused the Kenney Library know that I rarely if ever even crack the spine of a book.  I’m careful to read them at 90deg angles lest I actually do crack the spine and ruin it for future generations.

Marking them with a pen?  Even for a textbook for class?  Philistine… then again, how many thoughts have escaped for a moment and then fleeted away into the ether because I wouldn’t write it down?

Maybe I’ll start this for classes next semester.  Doubtful… but I may.

I shall admit it freely.  I am a huge fan of The New Republic.

Of course, we’re talking about a publication that at one time had it’s editor charged with being a spy for the KGB during the Red Scare — a charge that proved to be unassailable when the editor himself admitted as such.  Yet TNR has been a stanchion for American liberalism it its modern form: populist, intellectual, and confident enough to converse about the future of liberalism without resorting to orthodoxy.  TNR was in every respect reaching for what William F. Buckley created at National Review.

Much has been made of this week’s exodus of TNR’s editors in the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.  What has captured me in all of this is the focus on TNR owner Chris Hughes, a $700 million owner of Facebook who is an Obama booster from the word go.  From the NYT article:

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Over the past decade, the arguments against homosexuals’ desire to have their unions be sanctioned as marriage by the state have revolved principally around defining marriage based on Scriptural premises. And while some proponents of homosexuality have gone to extreme strains and exegeses to show that Scriptural condemnation of homosexuality is an illusion, the Biblical argument largely has become irrelevant. Many homesexuals are now getting married without negative societal pressure as a result of this. If you’re planning your wedding take a look at this stunning wedding venue Southwest Virginia to really help you celebrate this development.

We no longer live in a time in which accepting Sacred Scripture as an objective standard of morality is de rigueur. To assert as much has not only lost its quaintness — it has become rather offensive. Therefore, to argue theologically to defend a political or social position has in many ways lost its relevance. That does not mean revealed truths or Sacred Tradition or theology is any less right; however, it does mean that we as its defendants must take great pains to illustrate points of relevance and contact between the natural and supernatural, the secular and theological. This is a feat that too many have, unfortunately, since the late 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant considered impossible.

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…this time brought to you by Erik Satie’s Gnossiene No. 1, Lent.

October seems to be the month for classical music, and Satie has just recently been included within my repertoire of finer tastes.

Sometimes you just have to kick the tires on the ol’ website.  Of course, on days such as these when it’s been raining all day, songs such as these always stick out.

For one reason or another, it always reminds me of the 90’s — Peace and Love came out in 1989 along with that REM-inspired mandolin sound popular then —  and particularly of Fredericksburg in the rain or what it might have been to be in one of those old studio loft apartments along Caroline Street tapping away, consuming one cigarette after another, dodging the raindrops and grabbing coffee down the street.

Nothing particularly inspiring, political, philosophical, theological, or anything of the sort.  Just an opportunity to kick the tires.