Mission Trips & AmeriCorps

Last updated on: July 3, 2012 at 6:57 pm By Fred Clark

Matt Yglesias discusses Sen. Chris Dodd's national service plan, and in doing so touches on something that often arises in church regarding the practice of mission trips. Here's Matt: There's nothing wrong, generically, with such programs but they really need to be looked at one-by-one on the merits primarily through the lens of whether or not they're cost-effective methods of achieving the public purpose in question. Does appropriating more money to the Peace Corps make sense as a development strategy,... Read more

Milestones & miscellany

Last updated on: June 24, 2007 at 9:32 pm By Fred Clark

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.... Read more

Outsourcing torture here

Last updated on: July 3, 2012 at 6:56 pm By Fred Clark

If you'd opened our paper Wednesday to pages 2 and 3 of the local section, you'd have read the following headlines: "10 charged in alleged child porn network," "Man charged with rape of teen," and "Father of two pleads guilty in child porn case." All on the same day. Yeesh. Anyone who is proven guilty of the things these men are accused of needs to be taken off the streets. Incarceration is needed in such cases for all three of... Read more

L.B.: A Very Bad Reporter

Last updated on: July 3, 2012 at 6:54 pm By Fred Clark

Left Behind, pp. 292-298 (round 2) Buck Williams, our hero, is a terrible reporter. During the past two days he has conducted two blockbuster interviews packed with astonishing revelations. He will not write about either of them. Ever. First, back in London, he spoke with Inspector Alan Tompkins. Tompkins recounted scenes of brazen corruption, including his own eyewitness testimony of explicit death threats against police officers and their families. Those threats were made by a prominent public figure, Todd-Cothran, who... Read more

Jomeh

Last updated on: June 22, 2007 at 10:23 am By Fred Clark

Down at the stadium they're praying for the end of the age … "One Crowded Hour," Augie March "I Held Her in my Arms," Violent Femmes "Weightlifting," Trashcan Sinatras "Wicked Little Town," Hedwig & the Angry Inch "Care of Cell 44," Zombies "Hey Balloon," Mightyhead "Poughkeepsie," Over the Rhine "Calendar Girl," Stars "Autographs for the Sick," Daniel Amos "Stevie Nix," The Hold Steady Read more

Exhuming McCarthy

Last updated on: July 3, 2012 at 6:55 pm By Fred Clark

For all of the faults of Wikipedia, it's a marvelous demonstration of the power of the hive-mind of the Internet. It really is an impressive achievement. One way to step back and appreciate that is to compare it to its latest imitator, the Schlafly-spawn's "Conservapedia." Conservapedia is old news in the blogosphere, but it's back in the headlines thanks to this week's Los Angeles Times article. It's kind of fun to alternate between the two sites, comparing entries. For example,... Read more

Diocese disses Donohue

Last updated on: July 3, 2012 at 6:53 pm By Fred Clark

I don’t much care for Bill Donohue. He has a history of reckless dishonesty and his often-counterproductive demagoguery suggests that he cares more about his own success as a fearmongering direct-mail money-maker than about any of the real or imagined threats to religious liberty he claims to defend through his non-church-related Catholic League. I see from today’s paper that the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington doesn’t much care for Bill Donohue either. The background here is a piece of state legislation... Read more

Ashgabat airport

Last updated on: June 20, 2007 at 10:21 pm By Fred Clark

Paul Theroux's essay on Turkmenistan, "The Golden Man: Saparmurat Niyazov's reign of insanity," is no longer available on The New Yorker's site, but it's worth tracking down and reading in full. (Here's an abstract.) All dictators are megalomaniacs, but Niyazov took things to a whole new level — proclaiming that his memoirs should be read as scripture and renaming the months and days of the week after himself and his mother. On a tangential note, I liked this aside on... Read more

Deliberate ambiguity

Last updated on: July 3, 2012 at 6:52 pm By Fred Clark

"You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. … You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall." The above is from the famous speech by Jack Nicholson's character in Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men. Nicholson's Col. Jessep was a "tough" guy in the sense of "tough" conveyed by the current euphemism for torture: "tough interrogation techniques," which... Read more

L.B.: The Last Temptation of Buck

Last updated on: July 3, 2012 at 6:49 pm By Fred Clark

Left Behind, pp. 292-298 (round 1) "You are in deep trouble, my friend," Nicolae Carpathia says to Buck Williams. "And I want to help you if I can." So it seems we have come to the Big Temptation Scene. I'm a bit disappointed, then, that Rosenzweig's suite at the Plaza Hotel was not established as a "penthouse." It ought to be. The touchstone here is the temptation of Jesus, which we read about in Matthew's Gospel (Matt. 4:1-11). Jesus is... Read more