He wants said truth via commission.  I honestly think this is the best chance we got to figure out what Cheney and company did.  I don’t want criminal trials–I mean, I do, but they’re just not going to happen.  Better to just know.

Leahy said such a panel would not seek to build criminal cases against Bush officials but to “get to the bottom of what happened — and why — so we make sure it never happens again.” Some Democrats have called for criminal investigations of former Bush DOJ officials, but President Obama and now Attorney General Eric Holder have resisted such calls.

Leahy, though, suggested that doing nothing is not an acceptable option, and then offered what he called “A middle ground to find the truth.”

“People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts,” Leahy said “If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth.”

If you failed math, please see the below post on indulgences.  At any rate, this is a review of an interesting looking book about the nature of math–whether it simply exists or it is constructed.   I’d like to think it’s really real, that mathematical structures exist and that the universe has a logic and truth to it that we can discover and know.  I’m not sure that’s true, but I’d like for it to be.  Anyways, the question here:

On one side of the debate are all those remarkable constants that crop up, the makings of the ideal yet hidden world posited by Plato. In addition, there’s what the physicist Eugene Wigner, in a seminal 1960 essay, called the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematical theorems: the astounding ability of math to predict unimagined results. Wigner was picking up on ideas explored earlier by Einstein, and Einstein’s general theory of relativity remains one of the best examples: His predictions about how gravity can cause ripples in space-time was recently corroborated by measuring radio waves from a distant set of compact, high-energy stars called double pulsars, using technology unknown in Einstein’s day. Doesn’t all this indicate that the mathematical structure of the world is out there waiting to be discovered?

On the other hand, math cannot explain many situations, and chaos theory suggests that it may never be possible to predict the weather or the stock market with accuracy. Recent research has pointed to basic mathematical constructs in the human brain, suggesting that we impose numbers and forms on the world, not vice versa. In addition, mathematics is less stable than it appears to us in grade school. At the higher reaches of the field, there is constant ferment and debate. If the “truths” discovered through mathematics are always changing, doesn’t that indicate they are a product of human study and manipulation, rather than something fixed and eternal?

A few things here folks: The Holocaust-denying Bishop has been fired from the seminary he directs.    He is facing criminal charges in Germany.  And a Jewish group says that the Pope, in light of his tougher stance, is not so bad.  However, it’s still a rocky road.

Save your soul! So indulgences are back. Honestly, I’m a bit ambivalent about this. Maybe it’s just because I did not grow up with them, but it’s easier for me to see why the sacraments and the Church matters–indulgences seem to me a bit too much like pushing a button for cheese. But then, maybe I’m wrong, and if it gets people to the sacraments and to Mass, then I’m all for it. The story in the NYTimes:

“It’s not that easy to explain to people who have never heard of it,” said the Rev. Gilbert Martinez, pastor of St. Paul the Apostle Church in Manhattan, the designated site in the New York archdiocese for obtaining indulgences. “But it was interesting: I had a number of people come in and say, ‘Father, I haven’t been to confession in 20 years, but this’ ” — the availability of an indulgence — “ ‘made me think maybe it wasn’t too late.’ ”

Getting Catholics back into the confession booth, in fact, was one of the underlying motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope John Paul II described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for confession.

It’s quantum!  This really is incredibly exciting.  Basically, there are quantum processes that work in ways on a micro-level that could never work in the bigger world–something existing in two places at once, for example.  And what these scientists are finding is that some of life’s biggest mysteries might work because of quantum mechanics, including consciousness:

Hameroff speculates that anesthetics “interrupt a delicate quantum process” within the neurons of the brain. Each neuron contains hundreds of long, cylindrical protein structures, called microtubules, that serve as scaffolding. Anesthetics, Hameroff says, dissolve inside tiny oily regions of the microtubules, affecting how some electrons inside these regions behave.

He speculates that the action unfolds like this: When certain key electrons are in one “place,” call it to the “left,” part of the microtubule is squashed; when the electrons fall to the “right,” the section is elongated. But the laws of quantum mechanics allow for electrons to be both “left” and “right” at the same time, and thus for the micro­tubules to be both elongated and squashed at once. Each section of the constantly shifting system has an impact on other sections, potentially via quantum entanglement, leading to a dynamic quantum-mechanical dance.

It is in this faster-than-light subatomic communication, Hameroff says, that consciousness is born. Anesthetics get in the way of the dancing electrons and stop the gyration at its quantum-mechanical core; that is how they are able to switch consciousness off.

It is still a long way from Hameroff’s hypo­thetical (and experimentally unproven) quantum neurons to a sentient, conscious human brain. But many human experiences, Hameroff says, from dreams to subconscious emotions to fuzzy memory, seem closer to the Alice in Wonderland rules governing the quantum world than to the cut-and-dried reality that classical physics suggests. Discovering a quantum portal within every neuron in your head might be the ultimate trip through the looking glass.

Reflections about this from Salon and Slate.  So, Salon has a reflection that’s heartfelt and earnest and good, while Slate’s trying to figure out how it all works (if you know, e-mail them!).  Anyways, the Salon piece is nice and makes me less annoyed that people keep asking me to talk about myself in random ways, which up to now I had been told was what made me not keep these friends in the first place.  Here’s a bit:

And sure, there were the utterly ridiculous lists that wasted my time as well, and dozens that simply made me laugh. But even the most mundane entries tended to contain a few gems, minimalist narratives I could attach to the blur of faces I’d accumulated in this often paradoxically antisocial networking world we call Facebook.

That’s the thing about “25 Random Things About Me”: Once you stop being annoyed you realize that, at its best, it’s one of the more compelling — and, yes, even oddly inspiring — wastes of time to hit the Web in years. And let’s cut to the chase. Should we really be complaining about the inanity of this new trend? We’re a nation entertained by lolcats.

So, accuse me of oversharing. Say I’m adding to the problem. But I’ve decided to stop sneering at those who’ve taken the time to share something about their lives. In fact, I’ve decided to post a list of my own. I didn’t join Facebook, after all, to be anonymous, incurious or left alone.

We Americans, that is.  Why is that?  Because apparently we all think we can be wealthy.  This is not really a new observation, but this article is still a fun sort of reflection anyways.  It’s mostly cool because it references a list of The. Richest. People. Ever. on which are a bunch of Americans.  I’m not sure how they adjust for inflation and all of that stuff, but, apparently, it’s a list of who’s had the most loot in the whole history of the world.  It was apparently originally done by Forbes, but like all things, it’s wound up on Wikipedia.

This might be the future of Catholic education: charter scools where religion is allowed.  Paul Moses has a great bit of refleciton/reporting on this at Commonweal’s blog.  He’s ambivalent about this at best, pointing out that Catholic schools are often able to resist fads much better than their public counterparts.  He’s not sold on charter schools yet, and is worried that this latest incarnation will hurt Catholic schools even more, rather than save them.  For me, I’m sad to see Catholic schools go (I taught in a Brooklyn Catholic school for three years) but I’m pretty sure this is the only chance we’ve got; either this, or the Cristo Rey model or the NativityMiguel schools, both Jesuit and both pretty fantastic.  Anyways, here’s Paul:

I would add that there is much the mayor and other public officials can do if they really want to save Catholic schools. For example, during Bloomberg’s mayoralty, public schools have stopped Catholic high schools from recruiting applicants at high-school information nights held in middle schools.  On the state level, Governor David Paterson recently pulled back from a plan to cut a program that provided $55 million a year to nonpublic schools to compensate for complying with state mandates to record and report attendance. But although money was budgeted in previous years, it was often not paid out. The public education bureaucracy can be quite hostile to Catholic and other nonpublic schools.

Bishop DiMarzio noted that Catholic Charities provides extensive community service, and said that the charter schools would fall within that tradition of service.  Others, such as the authors of a study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, also have suggested  turning  some  inner-city Catholic schools into charter schools.

The problem is that this may hasten the demise of even more urban Catholic schools. And, contrary to what Mayor Bloomberg says, the charter schools are far from a proven success. One of the great strengths of the Catholic school system is that it has resisted the fads that sweep through public education. And if it should turn out a few years down the line that charter schools were just one more false hope, what  will the alternative be if the Catholic schools have closed?

This gets more and more surreal.  Read this article for more on the German bishops saying heck no to Williamson-as-bishops and Williamson claiming he needs more evidence to believe the Holocaust happened.  Unbelievable:

In statements to Spiegel Online, the Web site of the German news magazine, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch said the church should part ways with Bishop Williamson, a member of an ultra-conservative group that split off after Pope John Paul II excommunicated him and three other bishops in 1988.

“Mr. Williamson is impossible and irresponsible,” Zollitsch, chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, told the magazine in an article published Saturday. “I now see no room for him in the Catholic Church.”

The Vatican has faced criticism since Benedict lifted the excommunication of the four men January 21 and announced the move three days later. The announcement came days after a Swedish Public Television interview in which Williamson said Germany’s systematic murder of millions of Jews during World War II never happened.

With all due respect to Andrew, I think Ross is more correct here (but here’s Andrew’s take). It’s not as though previous corruption in the Catholic Church didn’t also prop up really crappy people. Which is not to say that we should not be very worried about the contemporary scence. It is to say that it is by no means historically unprecedented.