Blogworthies LVIII

Because The Blog from the Core simply can't cover everything.

Noteworthy entries @ Irish Elk, Power Line, cut on the bias, Turnabout, The QandO Blog, ut unum sint, Rightwingsparkle, Lex Communis, Catholic Analysis, Wittingshire, BuzzMachine, Captain's Quarters, The American Scene, Anchor Rising, The Curt Jester, Hoystory.com, Instapundit.com, JunkYardBlog, PointofLaw.com, Off the Record, C-Log, Dust in the Light, Right Reason, Eutychus Fell: Becoming Catholic, Midwest Conservative Journal, and In Hoc Signo Vinces.

God Bless Harvard @ Irish Elk:

At PBS flagship WGBH, where the call letters are said to stand for God Bless Harvard, a motivational speaker prominently featured during the recent pledge drive urges women to get in touch with their inner blueprint, to discover their inborn ties with their mothers, and to glory in their womanly cycles linked to the phases of the moon....

Where Is Jeff Gannon When We Need Him? @ Power Line:

President Bush gave a press conference today [Wed. Mar. 16]. Which reminds us why he doesn't do it more often. Here are some of the questions he fielded: ....

The Case of the Missing Logic @ cut on the bias:

I'm willing to accept criticism of bloggers and blogging — like anything else, there are good and bad aspects, talented and untalented practitioners, overweening egos and odd humility. And like anything else, everyone sees it through their own prism. But, at the same time, there is an underlying logic and order to both the existence of blogs and the trajectory they have collectively taken. That's why I'm surprised at the bizarre ramblings of professional columnist John Dvorak, a self-proclaimed blogger, who takes on both bloggers and MAC users in this piece clearly written while he was on some type of medication....

The growth of liberalism into antiliberalism @ Turnabout:

Here's another way to state the problem with liberalism: Judith Sklar speaks of the "liberalism of fear," Leo Strauss says modern politics tries to build solidly by aiming low, and I say moderns try to come up with machines based on principles that can be fully grasped and give reliable results. Put those points together, and it seems that the basic liberal impulse is to base government on a few simple principles designed to prevent evils like slavery and religious persecution, and also to promote basic material goods like prosperity. Government, the thought is, should be rendered controllable and harmless by strictly limiting it. Goals other than the political goals of liberalism can then be treated as matters of luck or private choice and effort....

SS Reform is Dead; Long Live SS Reform @ The QandO Blog:

To the delight of the Opposition Party — and bloggers throughout the Left side of the sphere — the Washington Post reports that Bush's Social Security reform plan is quite unpopular....

J. I. Packer on Evangelicals & Catholics @ ut unum sint:

J. I. Packer reviews William Shea, The Lion and the Lamb in CT. Packer wants more conversations with Catholics, but he wants to lay out some ground rules first....

*Warning* *Warning* Extreme Religious Content* @ Rightwingsparkle:

I try not to get too much into my faith and religion here except where it pertains to the political debate. I wanted this to be a political blog. But the 2 abortion debates going on at Beautiful Atrocities and Wizbang have made me think about why I got into pro-life to begin with. It didn't have to do with my Church. I became pro-life before I became Catholic. I have posted on my experiences in pro-life from a political perspective before. Read that here....

The Waste Land. @ Lex Communis:

"April is the cruelest month," T.S. Eliot observed in the line most quoted from his celebrated poem, The Waste Land, and from there it's a quick descent into incoherence....

Restoring Habitats for Virtue @ Catholic Analysis:

A recent trip to the zoo — yes, some of us go to the zoo in winter — brought some wider issues into focus. You sit and watch a movie in which various scientists, presumably biologists and zoologists, take great pains to reintroduce species that are virtually extinct back into the wild. They also undertake great pains to restore the habitats that will be accommodating to the flourishing of these virtually extinct species. They even strap tiny radio transmitters on tiny frogs to learn what techniques are best for restoring a species to the wild. These efforts are good, noble, needed, and worthy of our support. They are also thought-provoking....

Here be Monsters @ Wittingshire:

My eight-year-old son has been ill the past few days, feverish and weary, so he and I stayed home one night while the rest of the family went to a Bible study. We sat at the kitchen table listening to Schubert. I knitted, and my son sipped tea to soothe his aching throat.

"When I think about dying I always think of one thing," he said suddenly, setting down his teacup and glancing at me sideways. "I always think 'Twenty-nine years.'" ....

Blogging white male @ BuzzMachine:

Steven Levy has a column about blogs in Newsweek — fallout from the last Harvard confab — that I think is, well, not to put too fine a point on it, a crock.

The head: "Blogging Beyond the Men's Club: Since anyone can write a Weblog, why is the blogosphere dominated by white males?" And he asks: "Does the blogosphere have a diversity problem?"

A few responses: ....

Lipscomb: No Trust For MSM Until They Police Themselves @ Captain's Quarters:

Thomas Lipscomb delivers a scolding to the mainstream media (or, as I've begun to think of them in the BCRA era, the Exempt Media) for its inability to hold each other accountable for the egregious failures, let alone the more minor errors. Editor and Publisher runs his latest column, which sounds the same themes as his debate this weekend with Alex Jones on James Goodale's PBS show, and it certainly belongs there where his colleagues will read it....

Should We Mourn the Pope? @ The American Scene:

Gregg Easterbrook says no: ....

The Deep Performance Problems With American Public Education @ Anchor Rising:

How bad is the public education performance problem in America? Consider this information from Robert J. Herbold of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and formerly the Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft: ....

Abbott and Costello go to Sunday School @ The Curt Jester:

Abbott: Well, Costello, I am going to be going through salvation history with you. The pastor gave me this job to prepare you for RCIA.

Costello. Well, Abbott, if you're my teacher, surely you know all of the players in Bible history....

Ready, fire, aim @ Hoystory.com:

Sunday's New York Times came out with an article blaring the big headline: "Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News." The headline and the article attempt to perpetuate one of the liberal left's new theories of the world — that the Bush administration is trying to destroy the media....

Steven Levy says... @ Instapundit.com:

... that the blogosphere needs more diversity: ....

What We Still Don't Know @ JunkYardBlog:

I wrote not long ago that blogging is merely a hobby. I was wrong. In one instance, blogging changed history for the better and put an end to a fraud intended to change the outcome of a presidential election.

I'm talking of course about the CBS memo scandal. I'm going to stop referring to it as Ra^thergate, because it's about more than Dan Rather. That scandal is about more even than CBS. It's about the entire news media and its failures, which are meny and important, and it may be about a political dirty trick that crossed the line into illegal activity....

Atlanta courthouse shootings @ PointofLaw.com:

The shootings of a judge and four others by an escaped rapist has raised calls for increased courthouse security, a move I applaud. But none of the press is directly talking about a contributing cause to the breach of security. When 33-year-old, 6'1" 210-pound former college football player Brian G. Nichols was unrestrained for purposes of changing out of his jailhouse jumpsuit into civilian clothes for trial, he was being guarded by 5'0" 51-year-old grandmother Deputy Cynthia Hall....

Endless Fixation @ Off the Record:

You thought progressive bishops were hard wired into gay lib? Wrong! It seems all along they've been trying to get us to focus on infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa....

Bush is wrong even when he's right @ C-Log:

Liberals just can't grasp the fact that President Bush might have actually been right. The Economist editorialized yesterday that Republicans are "back in their pomp," cleverly implying that the reverberations of democratic movements throughout portions of the Middle East will somehow embolden the administration to mount their stallions and run roughshod over even the most democratic of nations — perhaps France and Canada are next?...

Government as Incentive to Chat @ Dust in the Light (emphasis in original):

There's overlap within the cliques under the Republican Big Tent, of course, and there's theoretically broad footing for compromise and working together. Yet, disagreeing concepts of governance — disagreeing not only with each other, but also with the expression of them — make it difficult to carry on productive dialogue.

One must acknowledge that, in such large political groupings, there are examples of people to disprove any general statement. Nonetheless, it has seemed to me that, typical expectations notwithstanding, social conservatives stand a bit more firmly on that theoretical common ground than do libertarians or so-called moderates....

The Difference Principle in Action @ Right Reason:

I just came across a recent presentation on educational policy by Bill Gates (of Microsoft fame) to the National Governors Association. You can read it HERE.

Since I've spent the last few years teaching math to high-schoolers, first at my local public high school in rural Virginia and more recently at a private learning center serving the Korean-American community in the Washington D.C. suburbs, I take more interest in pre-college level education than most trained philosophers.

Briefly, I think that America's public high schools are an unmitigated disaster. And I am sorry to say that Gates' presentation epitomizes the sort of empirical and philosophical misconceptions that have made them a disaster....

The Raising of Lazarus @ Eutychus Fell: Becoming Catholic:

I look back over the last year and realize I've learned a lot. I never knew Catholics joined the church at Easter (although some do join whenever). I never knew Catholics held an Easter Vigil waiting for Easter morning and the rise of Christ from the grave and that new members joined at that vigil. I'd never heard of the scrutinies or heard the prayers for new members. I never knew Catholic altars held a relic of a saint within. I never enjoyed the depths of prayers and readings available to Catholics from 2000 years of saints. There's much I didn't know and much I thought I knew was wrong. I have much yet to learn....

Like a Rented Mule @ Midwest Conservative Journal:

When I recall the Episcopal sermons I’ve heard over the years, one pattern seemed to recur no matter who was in the pulpit. Preachers would get to their points, some of them quite profound, very early in their sermons and then repeat those points over and over until I could feel my irritation and annoyance building up like steam in a tea kettle. Countless were the number of sermons that I would have considered great if only they’d stopped two or three minutes in....

Lenten Reflection: The Power of Negative Thinking @ In Hoc Signo Vinces:

A reader sent me a link to a site about the Sedlec Ossuary, a chapel adorned with human bones in the Czech town of Sedlec, near Kutna Hora. Apparently the church's graveyard came to be considered a holy place after a Cistercian abbott, upon returning from the holy land, sprinkled its grounds with soil he had brought back from Golgotha. So many Christians wanted to be buried there that eventually the bones from the cemetary were moved to a crypt to make room for new graves. Later, a half-blind monk was commissioned to decorate the chapel, and he did so with some 40,000 sets of remains taken from the crypt. This medieval church still exists today....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 03/19/05 07:27:56 AM
Categorized as Blogworthies.