Screwtape goes to the movies?

I guess we'll keep squeezing them in: former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is in the running. (PjM) Giuliani is a pro-choice Republican with a somewhat shaky family background. He seems to be polling well within his party.

It seems this country hardly knows what it wants anymore.

More from Redlin (or rather, Mark Steyn) on global whining. It seems a bit ruffled, but there is some redeeming historical evidence sprinkled throughout.

Joel Belz of World Magazine on ethanol:

All the evidence says that—at least so far—ethanol really doesn't work. At least, not without a big boost from Uncle Sam. As I understand it, the argument for ethanol has three major flaws...

Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements for the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.

But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ's body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work.

The third sentence is clever, but does it hold up to Matthew 7:23?

Yesterday Garrett introduced me to a truly amazing guitarist he had recently stumbled upon. Andy McKee (wikipedia) is an incredibly talented pioneer finger-stylist with a gift and appreciation for emotion and energy in music. Top notch.

It's just as much fun to watch as it is to listen to.



Be sure to also catch Drifting, Into the Ocean, and Africa.

When you do something, you should burn yourself completely,
like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.
-Shunryu Suzuki

(from Andy's bio page)

The savings rate: getting the real story. (Instapundit)

LVMI has more.

The latest dispatch from Michael Yon, while somewhat graphic, skillfully documents some dramatic events. The human perspective Yon provides on the war is invaluable.

Keep praying.

Redlin seems to me a singularly sane voice in the climate change debate. Read it.

Error always contains the seeds of its own demise: the feminist movement is tripping over itself. (PjM)

LVMI on the economics of immigration.

MercatorNet reviews two historical works: one a young girl's private perspective on communist Russia, the other a chronicle of a Jew's search for his great-uncle's family, who were murdered during the Holocaust. The second seems a particularly poignant look into some of the deeper themes of existence:

Mendelsohn’s quest to recreate the lives of his six lost relatives, now no more than “minor characters in someone else’s tale”, takes him to the Ukraine, Australia, Prague, Vienna, Israel, Denmark and Sweden. One person leads to another, thousands of miles distant; one clue leads to another, which then illuminates an anecdotal fragment which has got blurred in the telling. So urgent is the author’s need to know, “to have facts and dates and details” and to impose order on this chaos of facts, by “assembling them into a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end”, that the reader, too, becomes absorbed in the search. Five years in the making and 500 pages long, Mendelsohn’s passionate tale makes his own family tragedy our tragedy too; indeed, the tragedy of mankind.

There is no half-way house and there is no parallel in other religions. If you had gone to Buddha and asked him 'Are you the son of Bramah?' he would have said, 'My son, you are still in the vale of illusion.' If you had gone to Socrates and asked, 'Are you Zeus?' he would have laughed at you. If you had gone to Mohammed and asked 'Are you Allah?' he would first have rent his clothes and then cut your head off. If you had asked Confucius, 'Are you Heaven?' I think he would have probably replied, 'Remarks which are not in accordance with nature are in bad taste.'

The idea of a great moral teacher saying what Christ said is out of the question. In my opinion, the only person who can say that sort of thing is either God or a complete lunatic suffering from that form of delusion which undermines the whole mind of man. If you think you are a poached egg, when you are looking for a piece of toast to suit you, you may be sane, but if you think you are God, there is no chance for you.

We may note in passing that He was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects - Hatred - Terror - Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.

Go Zoho!

You know, some of this is just a wee bit... silly. (PjM)

All right, this is really, really cool. Introducing pandora.com, personalized internet radio that assimilates your preferences and locates music that you don't know about but already like. The best part? No DJ's!

(Thanks Garrett!)

It's testimony to the widespread respect for the resource that Wikipedia is now being incorporated - cautiously - into judicial decisions. (PjM)

Go Wiki!

Interesting idea for a list: the top 10 books people lie about having read.

I'm 0 for 10, and mostly proud of it. (#1 and #2 are imminent reads and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World should cover for #5.)

The Northern Gleaner: good thoughts on prayer, positivism, and [looks sheepish] fellow bloggers.

LVMI: on the (non-)correlation between wealth and happiness.

Libertarianism definitely suffers from at least some degree of Ivory Tower syndrome. It seems the facts are that many people throughout the last century have been forced to choose between food and freedom. That's not an easy choice.

Daily Kos links to a video of the recreational violence that is plaguing Baghdad. (Older viewers only please.)

Wait a minute: isn't the ISF supposed to be a non-sectarian representation of a stable, democratic Iraq? What's with all the Sunni/Shiite animosity within the force? Someone help me out here.



And yes, keep praying.

Free speech? This seems to be taking things a bit too far. (PjM)

UPDATE: Another report on this sorry mess, via Instapundit.

MercatorNet with another report on the negative fallout of China's one-child policy. (Earlier article here.)

Well, Bloglines was looking like a go until it started missing new posts. Not good. I mean, that's sort of the point.

I've been throwing OPML's around like frisbees, trying to find a reader that would import my feed file because I was getting really tired of rounding them up every time. Gritwire flunked, along with Sage and NewsAlloy. Google Reader was having trouble recognizing and reading feeds. FeedLounge is a paid service: no thanks. Rojo was not too bad, but it seemed to me that the developers used so many toppings on the pizza that they forgot the dough.

There was only one left: NewsGator. Nervously, I loaded the home page, registered for the umpteenth time, and found the import tab. Presto! It loaded my opml from Bloglines seamlessly and won me over with its crisp, intuitive interface.

The only significant drawback is that it's a bit slow, but hey, it works, and that's all I'm asking right now.

(In case anyone is interested, here is the article that Garrett linked to in his comment below. It's a good summary of what's available. Also see Garrett's RSS post from October.)

Postscript: If you manage RSS content, be sure to add the feedbutton - a nifty little java widget - to your site to simplify the subscription process for your readers. I've had one on Sojourner's Song for awhile: Green Coffee gets one today.