Nosing around the ‘net

Because I am now exactly 24 hours away from needing to be outta here and starting on our long-awaited vacation (it’s been three years since we went to Ireland, a trip chronicled here, by my 15 year old son, Buster) and I’ve never seen a man who needs a vacation more than my husband.

Buster is being difficult about it, btw. At 15, he feels he should not have to accompany his parents on a vacation, but since he is basically a sunny and bouyant sort of kid, he’s acquiescing. It helps that we’re traveling with several families, and there are other 15 year olds similarly trapped.

Anyway, time is short and there is a lot of good stuff out there, that needs linking to.

Lorie Byrd: She has a terrific, “oh-yeah?” sort of post up at Polipundit wherein she writes on Richard Clarke’s morning appearance on GMA. Her post is link-heavy and you’re going to want to go read the whole thing, but I’ll give you a li’l excerpt to whet the appetite:

The other thing that surprised me was that Richard Clarke told the story, at least part of it, of the chemicals that wer found in the possession of terrorists in Jordan last year. Clarke said that if they had not been caught that they would have killed thousands of people. I remember that story. I blogged about it. At the time, it was pretty much ignored by the American media. What Richard Clarke failed to mention today, and perhaps the reason the American media gave it scant attention last year, prior to the presidential election, was that the trucks carrying those chemical weapons were coming from Syria, where satellite evidence showed heavy truck caravan traffic travelling from Iraq just prior to the 2003 U.S. led invasion.

Frank Martin: One of my favorite writers. He is looking at Benedict XVI’s brother and imagining a bit of sibling tumult as the priest-brother of the new pope fumes:

Oh, Why should I visit him? Its not like everytime I sit down at Starbucks to enjoy a little caffe latte I wont get someone sitting across from me reading a newspaper with a headline about “Pope Benedict this and Pope Benedict that”. “Pope Benedict”, Feh. You know what we called him when he was a kid? We called him “Stinky”. Thats right “Pope Stinky”, that doesnt work so well does it! So you go ahead and call him Pope Benedict, He’ll always be “Pope Stinky” to me.

It’s very cute. You’ll like.

Tracey at Worship Naked has a very serious post based on a story from the BBC today about Burma’s use of chemical weapons on internally displaced tribal peoples. She is trying to get the story out there. She’s a good kid, that Tracey.

Keith Olberman: Back when I was live-blogging John Paul the Great’s last day, I actually complimented Keith Olberman because he seemed to me to be doing a pretty good job covering things. But this video from Jackson’s Junction contains one of the worst, most thoughtless seques, ever!

Julie, the Happy Catholic: Has a neat story about a little baby just confirmed as “Benedict” as he goes in to surgery for his kidneys. Don’t forget to offer a little prayer for Sam “Benedict.”

Jimmie, at Sundries Shack: is on one of those rolls bloggers sometimes get on, where they bang out one good thing after another; you may simply want to head over there and keep scrolling. He takes on Richard Cohen’s rather simplistic and intellectually dishonest, insert-standard-leftist-line- “this-pope-is-going-to-kill-people-because-he-won’t-hand-out-condoms” column here

Jeff, the Curt Jester. It’s visual. Just go look.

The cheapest and most effective way of preventing the spread of HIV is by having sex only inside of a monagamous marriage. The reasoning here is very simple. If you don’t have sex, you won’t get AIDS (absent the miniscule chance of getting it from a blood transfusion). Not having sex doesn’t cost anything. Abstinence is free. Cohen is wrong and, moreso, I suspect that he knows he’s wrong. But he does have a theology to push and he’s behind it as far as it’ll go.

The problem here, though, is that Cohen doesn’t actually understand what the Church is doing. They’re not advocating abstinence simply to slow the spread of AIDS or to control population. They’re in it for much larger stakes, the immortal souls of billions of people. Cohen doesn’t get that, which causes him to make statements like this:

well, now…you just go to Jimmie’s and read the rest. Also check out his posts here and here. Like I said, Jimmie’s rollin’.

Howie Kurtz: He’s taking a rather longish look at the blogs and their writings re Benedict XVI. If you scroll down you see he mocks the press for how badly they had allowed their personal desires to affect their “predictions” for papal frontrunners.

St. Blog’s Parish has been featured on the front page of the Delaware News Journal, and blogger Rae Stabosz (mother of 9!)
was quoted extensively. (She very kindly mentions your humble anchoress, too). Rae is a little miffed that the article mistakes some negative comments as coming from St. Blog’s when they came from Slate, but, you know…it’s the press. They lazy! :-)

Sr. Lorraine: She is wondering if the press see that while JPII was in essence “Reagan’s Pope,” Benedict XVI is possibly W’s Pope. They certainly to write about the two of them interchangably. Read anything some folks in the press write about W and you can change the name to Benedict and it reads the same, “stubborn, ruthless, relentless…” except, you know, the W meme includes the “moron” part while even Benedict’s most vehement detractors will rather grudgingly concede his brilliance.

Pope Benedict, Ye Mawo Akwaaba! Africa responds to his election.

Hugh Hewitt: Has a groovy piece in The Daily Standard wherein he looks at the new pope, “In His Own Words.” What an amazing idea.

Michael Prescott: Never heard of him? You will. Good writer who details here is journey from Atheist to Theist.

Peggy Noonan: I like this piece very much, and so I am linking to it again here, although I had excepted from it here. It bears the repetition, it’s that good and insightful.

We are living in a time of supernatural occurrences. The old pope gives us his suffering as a parting gift, says his final goodbye on Easter Sunday; dies on the vigil of Feast of the Divine Mercy, the day that marks the messages received by the Polish nun, now a saint, who had written that a spark out of Poland would light the world and lead the way to the coming of Christ. The mourning period for the old pope ends on the day that celebrates St. Stanislas, hero of Poland, whose name John Paul had thought about taking when he became pope. We learned this week from a former secretary that John Paul I, the good man who was pope just a month, had told everyone the day he was chosen that he wanted to be called John Paul I. You can’t be called “the first” until there is a second, he was told. There will be a second soon, he replied.

But of course, read it all.

Patrick, the Paragraph Farmer: spells out succinctly why he likes B16.

Christian Carnival is up. So is the Catholic Carnival. They’re both good!

Michelle Malkin and LaShawn Barber: both link to democrats moving to the right of George W. Bush on illegal immigration. A thought: is it possible Bush has been rope-a-doping the democrats all this time, taking a stand forces them to move to the RIGHT OF HIM on the issue, if they want to critique him…thus FORCING them to finally DO SOMETHING about illegal immigration? Just a thought.

Maxed Out Mama, who does not suffer fools gladly, and for this we bless God, highlightes George Will’s excellent column on just how darn special everyone is, or should be (longstanding gripe of mine) and if they don’t know they’re special, why, they must need therapy. Charlotte Hays at the IWF has thoughts along similar lines.

Betsy Newmark: wonders just why it is that snippety secularist society types like Tina Brown feel they should have so much to say about the new pope. I wonder, too.

My brother Thom: He has a nickname for me, or maybe not a nickname so much as a life-motto that he uses to describe my writing: MAUL OR TEACH. Thank you, Thom. Today he was amused to read an explanation of the new pope’s crest from Catholic Commentary.

Cardinals have crests for their flags. Apparently, the crest of then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger contains the odd if not striking image of a bear carrying a pack upon its back. Pope Benedict XVI was inspired to choose this iconograpy because it represents, as the story goes, a saint who was on his way to Rome on horseback to deliver important documents. Along the dangerous path, the saint was attacked by a bear, who mauled and slayed the saint’s horse. The saint whereupon chastised the bear for killing his horse, and then commanded the bear to carry the documents to Rome in the horse’s stead. As a brilliant and key theological advisor during Vatican II in the 1960s, and as the right hand man of Pope John Paul II, then Cardinal Ratzinger was known as the kind of guy who delivers the documents–the Truth. We can’t help but wonder how much our new Holy Father relates to the undaunted and resourceful saint in the story–and, perhaps, how much he relates to the at-first violent, then subsequently penitent and burden-carrying bear.

For Thom, this illustrates to him that perhaps Benedict XVI is also of the “maul or teach” persuasion, like me.

Dear Thom: Nobody likes a smart ass! ;-P

Okay, I am going to be on a plane flying toward a boat in precisely 23 hours! I have got to get going and deliver the pooch to the sitter, pick up suits from cleaners, all that good stuff you have to do before you can relax and unwind. Yes, we’re cruising. We are going with several other families, and they already know that I am not much of a tourist-y sort of person, that – like Bertie Wooster – I find having to go out and look at the Taj Mahal a bit of a nuisance. And yet they invited us to join them, anyway! :-)

I wish I could link to every good thing out there, but that’s not possible, so may I suggest that you check out my blog roll – they’re all good sites.