Personal Blogs

Collecting my thoughts .... ...and

Posted on April 12, 2010
Collecting my thoughts .... ...and responding to the "Mormon troll" on Theology for Dummies. "Stealth" is once again playing his usual game of bigotry by pointing to the recent overheated stories involving Benedict XVI. This is my response, which I think is fair: Stealth wrote: So the Catholic backlash is on...

San Francisco - 4 Days before the

Posted on April 11, 2010
San Francisco - 4 Days before the 1906 Earthquake. Car Lust has some observations: Apart from the undeniable time-machine coolness of watching a 104-year old movie, there are a few things that strike me about this film. First is the sheer anarchy of traffic...

Is your life fated? In some ways,

Posted on April 11, 2010
Is your life fated? In some ways, yes.  In other ways, not so much. The trick is knowing where to look for the loopholes. Summa Theological, Question 116. Question 116 Fate brought to you by Livescribe

Another reason to regret the Reformation. Episcopal

Posted on April 10, 2010
Another reason to regret the Reformation. Episcopal Priest Barbie.

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A World Without Nuclear Weapons. Donald

Posted on April 10, 2010
A World Without Nuclear Weapons. Donald Sensing provides a pictorial reminder that it was not all unicorns and rainbows before 1945.

The Plan is Inflation, Inflation

Posted on April 10, 2010
The Plan is Inflation, Inflation is the Plan. I've been wondering how Obama intends to avoid hyper-inflation.  Stupid me - it seems that inflation is the feature not the bug in Obamanomics: Everyone thinks the Fed's job is to fight inflation, but right now the Fed is actually doing everything it can to cause inflation...

The Long Shadow of History. Turkish

Posted on April 10, 2010
The Long Shadow of History. Turkish Prime Minister threatens to expel remaining Armenians after Sweden and United States pass resolutions about the Armenian Genocide. Recent resolutions in the US and Sweden have called the killings "genocide". Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the BBC that of 170,000 Armenians living in Turkey "70,000 are Turkish citizens"...

Couldn't prove it by me. Casual

Posted on April 09, 2010
Couldn't prove it by me. Casual sex is increasing in the United States. Casual sex - does that involve wearing sneakers and jeans? He and his colleagues asked 783 heterosexual adults, ages 18 to 60, how many people they had been sexually involved with during their most recent nonromantic sexual relationship and found: 17 percent of the men and 5 percent of the women said they had been with

Media Malpractice. A journalist

Posted on April 09, 2010
Media Malpractice. A journalist is surprised to discover that much of journalism is incompetent because journalists go in with preconceived story ideas and ask questions only to fill in the "blanks."  But within those caveats, I've always maintained that the majority of professional print journalists, anyway, try very, very hard to get the story right...

Theology and Popular Culture. Father

Posted on April 09, 2010
Theology and Popular Culture. Father Barron points out that when authentic religious needs are repressed, they emerge somewhere else in a twisted and distorted form. So, while Americans are deeply into the "don't be judgmental" ethos, we also seem to like - really, really like - television entertainment that involves judging, being judged and learning what is true and authentic.

Will Obama maintain diversity and

Posted on April 09, 2010
Will Obama maintain diversity and support minority rights by appointing a Protestant to the Supreme Court. The last Protestant on the Supreme Court is retiring. Mark Shea makes the point about the NPR article that: If anybody wrote about Jews what this article says about Catholics we would hear holy hell about it--and rightly so...

Human Cupidity Trumps Liberal Optimism. A

Posted on April 09, 2010
Human Cupidity Trumps Liberal Optimism. A Lancet study makes the "surprising" finding that when foreign money is provided to developing countries to compbat AIDS, the aid recipients find other ways to use their own money: After getting millions of dollars to fight AIDS, some African countries responded by slashing their health budgets, new research says...

Congressman Stupak Retiring. Information

Posted on April 09, 2010
Congressman Stupak Retiring. Information here. What was the point in going from hero to goat if he was simply committing political suicide?  I think I respected him more when I thought he thought that he was actually representing the people of his district...

Mainstream Media versus the Blogs. It

Posted on April 08, 2010
Mainstream Media versus the Blogs. It now appears that the New York Times mistranslated what it described as a smoking gun document in the Murphy case.  Once the document had been properly translated it turns out that not only was Cardinal Ratzinger not present, but that the CDF official was concerned - quite properly - with the problem of proof: Point 1 is Bertone?s real concern here: ?the

Eclipse of Epsilon Aurigae Io-9

Posted on April 08, 2010
Eclipse of Epsilon Aurigae Io-9 reports that scientists have been able to solve the mystery of why Epsilon Aurigae dims every 27 years.  The answer is that it is occluded by a dust dragged behind a massive but still unseen object.

Armenians. In his inimitable way,

Posted on April 08, 2010
Armenians. In his inimitable way, Steven Sailer offers some fact-based stereotypes about Armenians: - Armenian-Americans are unusual for a small immigrant group at doing well in both farming (especially orchards around Fresno) and in the kind of businesses at the polar opposite of farming, such as being a Hollywood agent...

World Traffic

Posted on April 08, 2010
World Traffic

Nancy Pelosi: Explains Health Care

Posted on April 08, 2010
Nancy Pelosi: Explains Health Care Reform. "Pelosi Celebrates Healthcare in SF." ?It?s like the back of the refrigerator. You see all these wires and the rest,? said Pelosi. ?All you need to know is, you open the door. The light goes on. You open this door, you go through a whole different path, in terms of access to quality, affordable healthcare for all Americans...

Census 2010 Your tax money at

Posted on April 07, 2010
Census 2010 Your tax money at loaf.

Eternal Light. Michael Spencer

Posted on April 06, 2010
Eternal Light. Michael Spencer - the Internet Monk - has passed away from the brain cancer that he was diagnosed with only a few months ago. Spencer was one of those talented people that the internet allowed to share their gifts with a far broader audience than was the case in an earlier time...

Roger Simon says .... "President

Posted on April 06, 2010
Roger Simon says .... "President Weirdo goes Anti-nuke." Over Easter, I wrote a post at this space entitled ?President Weirdo,? which got a fair amount of attention pro and con. In essence, I proposed that President Barack Obama was psychologically unfit to govern...

Signs of the Apocalypse. Canadian

Posted on April 06, 2010
Signs of the Apocalypse. Canadian Loonie hits parity with American Greenback. Canadian currency isn't even real money, for heaven's sake. It's Monopoly money with pictures of furry and feathered woodland critters.

"Posters on police station walls

Posted on April 05, 2010
"Posters on police station walls show a sinister stranger luring two young girls into a car below bold letters that call on parents to 'Prevent Child Sacrifice.'" It's like a weird alternate history story, but it's really Uganda. Child sacrifice on the rise: Caroline Aya was playing in front of her house in January when a neighbor put a cloth over her mouth and fled with her...

Memory. Father Brundage - the

Posted on April 05, 2010
Memory. Father Brundage - the judge in the Murphy canonical case - does not dispute that he received a memo from his bishop ordering that the trial be abated.  However, since the memo was dated 2 days before Murphy's death, the issue was moot. As a practical matter, Brundage may have seen the memo after Murphy's death - or he may have been contemplating an appeal which was mooted by Murphy's

Strategies: How the New York Times

Posted on April 05, 2010
Strategies: How the New York Times recent reporting against the Pope resembles the Nazi strategy for destroying Christianity. In researching Hitler's religious views, I ran across the 1945 report - "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches" - prepared by the OSS as part of the preparation for the Nazi War Crimes Trial at Nuremberg...

The New York Times Journalistic

Posted on April 05, 2010
The New York Times Journalistic Mistakes. Patrick O'Hannigan provides a scorecard of the journalistic rules violated by the New York Times in its campaign against Pope Benedict.

Boycott. Francis Beckwith is following

Posted on April 05, 2010
Boycott. Francis Beckwith is following Father Dwight Longenecker's lead in calling for a boycott of the New York Times and an e-mail campaign against it. Beckwith cites Longenecker as follows: Let's get a campaign going. Let's blitz the New York Times with emails complaining about Maureen Dowd's sleazy and false attack on the Holy Father...

Can the Washington Post be tried

Posted on April 05, 2010
Can the Washington Post be tried for Religious Persecution? Sensationalistic?  Check. Devoid of factual support? Check. Defamatory? Check. Motivated by ideology?  Check. This Washington Post article meets the criteria necessary to constitute evidence of an intent to persecute under the OSS Report...

Faking the Narrative. Mark Steyn

Posted on April 04, 2010
Faking the Narrative. Mark Steyn pointed out something that was news to me, but seems obvious in retrospect - namely, that the Black Congressmen who claimed to have been victims of racial epithets and spitting chose to walk through the protesters in the hope of eliciting such a response...

He is Risen!

Posted on April 04, 2010
He is Risen!

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