This should be a humdinger, SecDef Gates to the Notre Dame grads. (Kidding. I love bureaucrats, just hate to listen to them.)
What, no peerless leader?
Month: February 2011
Being reasonable about it
These three white guys walked into this 7-11 in Oak Park and . . .
. . . approached the clerk. One of the men pointed a black handgun at the clerk, another said give him the money or he will shoot you, according to police reports. The clerk triggered the silent alarm and fled to the back of the store.
There’s more:
While leaving the store, the three men saw a man servicing an ATM and demanded that he open it and retrieve money. When the service man said he could not open the machine, one of the robbers hit him in the back of the head with an unknown object, causing a laceration. The man was transported to the hospital.
But the whole thing worked out badly for them:
The three men left empty-handed and were not found when police arrived.
So they had to go by the clerk’s and ATM service man’s description, which was not bad as those things go. The gun was black, as above, where what one of them said is also narrated, and were “in their late-teens” and “wearing hats, black jackets and blue jeans.” Hmm, black gun and jackets, blue jeans.
But neither witness noticed if they were black, white, or other! Or they noticed but preferred not to say. Or they told the reporter and swore him to secrecy.
Anyhow, I assume they were white, because there are more white people in Oak Park than any other. It stands to reason.
Movie time: KC Confidential
1952 movie last night at the PC: Kansas City Confidential, with handsome John Payne and very pretty Coleen Gray, all in all a thing of joy. A gun is called a “heater,” to kill someone is to “burn” him, and the bad guys, including Lee Van Cleef and Jack Elam, are certifiable. more more more at Blithe Spirit original . . .
Practice makes perfect
This from about.com agnosticism/atheism about prayer and belief is very well put:
According to Catholic tradition, lex orandi, lex credendi [means] the law of prayer is the law of belief. What this means is that how a person worship[s] not only shows what the person really believes, but that how a person worships can ultimately decide what that person really believes.
Hence the importance of liturgical nuance:
As people’s patterns of actual worship change, so will their underlying beliefs – even without their realizing it. It is because of this that the Catholic Church can be so strict in maintaining what many might regard as superficial practices, causing them to be seen by many as old-fashioned and tyrannical.
The hierarchy realizes that allowing even minor changes in the practice of worship could lead to unforseen and unintended changes in beliefs, and the Church is one organization which understands how to think about how things will turn out over very long spans of time.
The author’s intent may be to show how we sheep are manipulated by our shepherds, but it’s an honest statement and quite accurate as taken to show how bishops fulfill their mandate and the deposit of faith is preserved.
I am reminded of one of the late Ralph McInerny’s novel about the Soviet mole who after years in a monastery was converted by the daily chanting of the divine office. (Anybody out there know the name of that book?) Prayerful repetition has its effect, as in J.D. Salinger’s Jesus prayer in Franny and Zooey.
I think today’s priests who insert subtle changes into the words of the mass have this in mind. They have their theology and want to promote it.
Red State magic
A little publicity is a dangerous thing, as Erick Erickson explains:
Late yesterday RedState broke a significant story, found in this morning’s Morning Briefing, which points to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nations premier public health organization, making a conscious decision to stop publishing the only federal report on abortion.
To briefly recap, for 40 years the CDC has published the Abortion Surveillance Report. For 40 years that report has appeared in the last November or first December issue of CDCs journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Report Weekly Report. This year it didnt. A RedState tradition has been to use this report for our annual retrospective on abortion. When it didnt appear in November or December or in January we decided to ask why.
That inquiry and its response led to our article yesterday.
The internet is an amazing thing. After weeks of checking and phone calls and emails no report. Then one blog post at RedState later, and suddenly the CDC is falling over themselves to produce something. Funny how that works. Two hours and six minutes after the post went live we had an official response from CDC.
What did Jefferson say, embedded in concrete at the entrance to the Chi Trib Tower on Boul Mich, about the relative importance of free government and a free press? (Help me here, someone.) Believe it, people.
Erickson:
According to the CDC we should move along because there is nothing to see here. Really? Were not so sure. It’s never the action, it’s the cover up.
They would prefer that, would they not?
says Erick E., who is editor at RedState.com
Danny Davis in Oak Park
Rep. Davis last April at Village Hall. Held off until he ran for county board president (he didn’t) and then until he ran for mayor (he’s not doing that), presented now to voters in the Illinois 7th as maybe something to keep in mind when redistricting comes around . . .
Presenting Danny Davis, once gearing up to be future mayor of Chicago but for several weeks now not, as he presented himself last spring, when he was running for Congress and in process of winning 80% of the vote on Chicago’s West Side and several western suburbs.
He is his regular folksy self, tossing off more or less relevant observations in answer to questions, leaving connections sometime to the listener’s imagination. . . . .
Read the rest of it here, at Blithe Spirit for longer items . . . (Scroll down a bit)
Tough guy will out
Crain’s Chicago Business likes Rahm, arguing persuasively. For openers:
What Chicago needs most from its first new mayor in 22 years is a clean break with the past.
While all the top contenders to succeed Richard M. Daley are political insiders of one sort or another, Rahm Emanuel is the most independent. He’s a product of Democratic politics but not of the City Hall machine.
Etc., including his being a mean s.o.b. (not quoting Crain’s) who will have to deal with others of his ilk. The public employees’ unions, for instance.
Meanwhile, Gery Chico unfortunately continues to pile up endorsements from those very unions, which is not a good sign.
BC or not BC, that seems to be the question
Parish Coordinator of Religious Ed writes in the bulletin that an Old Testament reading is “in” (?) 640-609 BCE (BC). What the heck? No more plain BC (Before Christ)? And insistence on BCE (Before the Common Era), which has appeared before in the same bulletin?
Some fussbudget there is who doesn’t like that BC and has gotten to the parish staff. Or it’s the latest idea at the Institute of Pastoral Studies. Same with AD (anno Domini, Latin for year of the Lord), as in the second reading, Paul to the Corinthians, in 54 CE (AD), CE being, you guessed it, the Common Era.
We are being educated to do away with the B.C. and A.D. designations, before and after Christ, maybe so as not to offend the non-Christians who have been putting up with them for a long time but have finally decided they can’t take it any more. Maybe some other reason, one that makes sense.
Fighting Irish give up
From the Sycamore Trust, “an alarming recent study”:
[M]any students become pro-choice at Notre Dame. By the time they graduate, there are as many pro-choice students (42%) as in the general population. Among the reasons may be mixed signals from the faculty.
Though the University declared itself pro-life in the wake of the Obama episode, there is reason to think that a large proportion of the faculty is pro-choice, and prominent members of the Theology faculty have been outspoken in their dissent from Church teaching on abortion.
Indeed, the nation’s leading “Catholic” pro-choice advocate has welcomed the recent public dissent from Church teaching by one of Notre Dame’s most widely known ethicists.
Give Notre Dame a pro-lifer, get back a pro-choicer. Read about it here.
Fourteen? No problem!
Newsalert has an undercover video of Planned Parenthood woman giving advice to a pimp with underage prostitutes.
For instance, in the two weeks of inactivity after an abortion, “waist up, waist up.” That way, she can earn her keep while recuperating.
It were better for the Planned Parenthood woman to go swimming with a millstone around her neck and be drowned in the depth of the sea.
Blithe Spirit 