Monthly Archives: May 2009

Race to Digitize Ancient Manuscripts

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Wall St. Journal writes,

Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable — blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.

One of the most ambitious digital preservation projects is being led, fittingly, by a Benedictine monk. Father Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John’s Abbey and University in Minnesota, cites his monastic order’s long tradition of copying texts to ensure their survival as inspiration.

His mission: digitizing some 30,000 endangered manuscripts within the Eastern Christian traditions, a canon that includes liturgical texts, Biblical commentaries and historical accounts in half a dozen languages, including Arabic, Coptic and Syriac, the written form of Aramaic. Rev. Stewart has expanded the library’s work to 23 sites, including collections in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey, up from two in 2003. He has overseen the digital preservation of some 16,500 manuscripts, some of which date to the 10th and 11th centuries. Some works photographed by the monastery have since turned up on the black market or eBay, he says.

Read full story here.

Israel – Survival Against All Odds

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Israel is surviving against all odds, however the odds are increasing.  The threats go beyond enemies without to include homegrown dilemmas.

H/T Glenn Reynolds : Israel: Seven Existential Threats

Michael B. Oren, is a professor at the School of Foreign service at Georgetown University and a distingushed fellow at the Shalem Center, writes of Israel’s existential threats, at least seven:

The threats according to Oren are: the lose of Jerusalem, the Arab demographic threat, de-legitimization, terrorism,    the nuclear-armed Iran,     the hemorrhaging of sovereignty,    and corruption.

Oren, however, also notes:

Israel in 2009 has treaties with Jordan and Egypt, excellent relations with Eastern Europe, China, and India, and a historic alliance with the United States. By virtually all criteria, Israel in 2009 is in an inestimably better position than at any other time in its 61 years of independence.

Though the severity of the threats jeopardizing Israel’s existence must never be underestimated, neither should Israel’s resilience and national will. That persistence reflects, at least in part, the success of the Jewish people to surmount similar dangers for well over 3,000 years. Together with Diaspora Jewry and millions of Israel supporters abroad, Israel can not only survive these perils but, as in the past, it can thrive.




Face Transplant Update

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Update Successful Face Transplant

From AP, Cleveland, Yahoo News Canada reports

1st U.S. face transplant patient says she forgives man who shot her

In December 2008, Connie Culp had 80 % of her face replaced with facial skin, and bond, muscles and nerves from a woman who had dies. The operation, by a team of doctors, was carried out at Cleveland Clinic where Culp appeared for a news conference this week.

Culp came forward this week for a news conference at the Cleveland Clinic, where doctors in December replaced 80 per cent of her face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from a woman who had died.

“The woman who had the first face transplant in the United States says it was the smell of soap that made her realize her new face was working.”

Pizza Dilemma

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Hot Air supplies this audio). It should make you feel very superior.

Now that you’re in the pizza mood:

Gangster Government-The Strong Man Using Strong Arm

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Gangster government on the prowl?

Michelle Malkin writes of the abusive treatment the hedge fund industry is receiving at the strong arm tactics of  Barack Obama. “He keeps taking their money. They keep getting publicly tongue-lashed.”

This week, AQR Capital Management LLC hedge fund manager Cliff Asness — at considerable risk to himself and his business — issued a striking manifesto responding to the president’s self-serving demagoguery and flagrant disregard for the rule of law. You can find Cliff’s essay and his other invaluable work at Stumbling on Truth.

Asness writes in this manifesto:

Let’s be clear, it is the job and obligation of all investment managers, including hedge fund managers, to get their clients the most return they can.  They are allowed to be charitable with their own money, and many are spectacularly so, but if they give away their clients’ money to share in the “sacrifice”, they are stealing.  Clients of hedge funds include, among others, pension funds of all kinds of workers, unionized and not.  The managers have a fiduciary obligation to look after their clients’ money as best they can, not to support the President, nor to oppose him, nor otherwise advance their personal political views.  That’s how the system works.  If you hired an investment professional and he could preserve more of your money in a financial disaster, but instead he decided to spend it on the UAW so you could “share in the sacrifice”, you would not be happy.

….. This is America.  We have a free enterprise system that has worked spectacularly for us for two hundred plus years.  When it fails it fixes itself.  Most importantly, it is not an owned lackey of the oval office to be scolded for disobedience by the President.

I am ready for my “personalized” tax rate now.

Michelle further writes:

Asness minced no words: “The President’s attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it to a labor union that delivers money and votes for him…Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and abuse of power.”

Business as usual in the Era of Hope and Change. Perhaps demonized entrepreneurs will finally learn that when the dog you feed bites your hand, you don’t roll up your sleeve and give him your arm. You get a new dog.

Is the power grab over?  I hardly think so, nor does Examiner Editorial (Washington Examiner.) writing of another in your pocket action of the President giving UAW something they never earned nor could earn for themselves, effectively ownership of Chrysler:

True, the union doesn’t get an explicit controlling majority of the board of directors, but who needs that when you’ve got the White House guaranteeing your work and the U.S. Treasury Department making sure you never have to worry about the bottom line. UAW President Ron Gettelfinger’s place in Big Labor’s Hall of Fame is now secure. He found a sugar daddy with an endless supply of cash. So UAW members and retirees can keep right on drawing those pay and benefits so excessively generous they made it impossible for the old Chrysler to compete with Toyota and Honda.

Hans Bader of OpenMarket.org writes:

Obama effectively gave ownership of Chrysler to the United Auto Workers Union (which spent millions electing Obama), rather than taxpayers (who have spent billions to bail out Chrysler) or the institutions that lent money to Chrysler based on the legal right and expectation that they would receive its assets before the UAW union would. Veteran political commentator Michael Barone also calls it “gangster government.” The UAW will also retain “lucrative” pension and health benefits, courtesy of the taxpayer.

Fr. Corapi – Notre Dame Video Message

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Fr. John Corapi thanks signers to the petition at NotreDameScandal.com and urges Catholics to continue the fight for Catholic campuses. For more information on this scandal and to sign the petition visit http://www.notredamescandal.com/Signt…

“A picture is worth a thousand words.  Which thousand words will be articulated to an already morally relativistic culture by the  picture of Mr. Obama receiving such honors from a  Catholic university. Metaphorically and morally it like shooting yourself in the foot but Notre Dame lives on.” Fr. Corapi