A couple of milestones worth mentioning:
I started this blog on June 22, 2002, so today is the second day of my sixth year of this. (The archives from my old blogspot site seem to be bloggered. I'm going to try to get them back up, or transferred over to here, or something.)
Also the odometer at the bottom of this page tells me I've passed the 2 million visitor mark since August of 2004. Big Round Numbers are cool.
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Whenever I'm asked if there isn't anything I like about President Bush, I usually respond by commending him for signing the "No Call List" legislation. Maybe it wasn't his idea and he didn't fight to ensure its passage, but he signed it into law without botching it up, and for that I am grateful.
I'm tempted to add a second check in the plus column for Bush's violation of protocol in not addressing Pope Benedict as "your holiness." With all due respect, I think it exceeds all respect due to refer to anyone by that title. And if Benedict in any way felt slighted by not hearing this title from the lips of someone who is, A) not Catholic, and B) the American president, then it's pretty clear it's not a title he would deserve. Given A and B, Bush's respectful address of "Sir" seems appropriate.
And in any case, it's easy to imagine this scene playing out much worse (Goes into Jon Stewart Bush-crouch): "I'm gonna call you 'Benny' …" (and to the Cardinals present) "… and I'm gonna call you guys 'The Jets' …"
That would have been inappropriate.
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"The flesh is weak," I heard someone say the other day. And like many people who say this, what he really meant was "the flesh is strong."
The quote is from Matthew's Gospel, something Jesus said to his sleeping disciples in Gethsemane, "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak."
Jesus was talking about the way our weakness sometimes prevents us from doing the right thing. The strong-flesh usurpers of the phrase almost always use it in reference to our inability to prevent ourselves from doing the wrong thing. I guess that's how it looks if you think of faith as being mainly about Stuff You Shouldn't Do.
The Neoplatonists and Cartesians have had a field day with Jesus' choice of words. Makes me wish he'd put it differently, something like, "Your mouth said you'd stay awake but your eyes tell me you're sleeping," though I suppose even that would've gotten twisted into some abstraction about a mouth/eye dualism.
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A rough count shows I've seen only 22 of PopMatters' "50 DVDs Every Film Fan Should Own." The next best thing to watching the movies in a list like that is sitting around and arguing about what they left out and what you'd cut from the list to make room for it.
Seymour Hersh profiles and interviews Gen. Antonio Taguba. We seem to have created a system that has no room for good men.
The Daily Press (Newport News, Va.) revisits the story of Delmarva's deadly driveways as part of an impressive special report — "The Deadliness Below" — on the WMD off of our coasts. How much is out there? No one seems to know.
Fear-mongering, flag-waving, laager-mentality xenophobia, focus-grouped buzzword Newspeak … it's all there in one tidy package at Family Security Matters: The National Security Resource for American Families.
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