Look what popped up on my screen while reading Drudge.

Yes, I had to click the link, but it looks like Drudge has readers (how many, I wonder) who care about COMPANY MAN: MY JESUIT LIFE, 1950-1968.

Needless to say, I applaud the placement. Go Amazon!

Oh my. Our friends at NY Times do have their way with news, do they not?

The counter?

New for 2013: The hypnotic effect of YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Podcasts, and any other similar site where you upload your presentation, is one thing: The Counter. Without the counter, these sites would have no more use to you than your phone number listing in the phone book. Why does the counter matter so much?

Read this to find out. But I am taken by that “hypnotic effect” part, as also I am by this reference to the man who gave us the “hot” and “cold” media and “The medium is the message”:

Psychologically, it has to do with the “media effect”, which is explained in mass media studies (especially Marshall McLuhan’s book called “Understanding Media”). But you don’t have to understand psychology to understand how the “counter” is misleading you and other authors. Imagine for a second, that all counters were removed forever. No more counters, ever again. Never again will you be able to tell how many people “heard” your presentation. Wow.

This fellow writes for writers and filmmakers, I gather.

It allows former Anglicans to keep “aspects of their spiritual and liturgical traditions.”

History will be made in the Catholic Church on Thursday 10 October when a new text for the Mass which includes traditional Anglican words is officially introduced in London.

Me, I welcome this. The Book of Common Prayer, for instance, is English up with which I gladly put. As opposed to some of (all of?) the group-written U.S. text for us pew-sitters. If we are to go vernacular, which we are, why not in English that rings?

Stanley Kurtz discussing Islam’s presumed long slog to embracing a democratic society:

Catholicism’s centuries-long war against kin-based social structures helped create the conditions for Luther’s individualist Protestantism.

What’s that?

From the 4th century through the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church fought to protect personal choice in marriage, while prohibiting marriage between cousins and other relatives. This policy undercut social forms based on kinship and collective identity, laying the basis of democratic individualism in the West. [italics added]

How often have we heard of the church’s cutting through customs that undercut individualism, that is, human dignity, during the Middle Ages, for God’s sake?!

Point is, we see nothing like this concern for the individual in fundamentalist Islam, which rules the Middle Eastern weltanschauung.

Hence, the long-slog, not-in-our-lifetime-realized democratization of Muslim Brotherhood, Kurtz argues, vs. Reuel Marc Gerecht, whose books he discusses — The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracyand The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East — in Claremont Review of Books for summer, 2013.

Sun-Times’ David Roeder about capping the Kennedy:

City planners have for years seen as sensible the idea of building a landscaped cap over the Kennedy, shielding the cars from neighbors and creating a park. [italics added]

Whoa. As if the neighbors were lobbing grenades at rush hour. He wants shielding the neighbors, I’d say.

Incidentally, he says it’s his last column before joining state gummint’s (“Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration in his”) Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

What’s that? He’s leaving a business with so much growth possibility? He must be very patriotic fellow.

Something different: a Chicago safari

Note, however, this comment from “Bootsie”:

    You motherfuckers got the nerves to put two White Bitches on the photo….Prejudice Bitches where will you get your drugs from now. I don’t believe this Blog, white people own this only because when an African American make certain comments you white Bitches delete them. Its so sad that you would even make fun of something like this.
July 7, 2013 at 6:34 AM

The site runs Bootsie and others who object. Bootsie, apart from his angry and prejudicial language, makes a point about making fun of this. As for the site’s featuring crime in the ‘hood, it’s what the Sun-Times does routinely, with different emphasis — on victims and the generalized horror at it all.

Anonymous thanks Bootsie for his comment, says he should start his own site, to which Bootsie:

I don’t have to start my own site , you know its wrong and its sad. If i had my own site Do you think it’ll be all about white folks shooting up schools or killing their entire family no…..i totally disagree with this safari shit

All in all, honest reportage, honest exchange. You do not get this in the dying newspapers.

Advice for the writer (of fiction but applicable to non-fiction, I’d say), from Enemy Salvoes, 264-265:

Do not be intimidated . . . into never uttering a Yes or a No by the propaganda of the nuance the prevarication the half-light the pseudo-statement and the pseudo-truth those barren lands of fashionable literary criticism. . . . . enter fully into the spirit of the side-taking and it will become a game for you . . . a game in which there is only one rule: namely, that you must place yourself on the side to which you belong . . . . You will find you will achieve more true detachment that way than by playing at Mr. Fair-Play, and doing as much harm as you can to the people to whom you do belong as the Anglo-Saxon has been doing for so long, in his cold frenzies of suicidal liberalism . . .

. . . . You play at being yourself and so you are yourself; it is quite unnecessary to play at being anybody else to be completely the artist. If you cannot be detached” with yourself, there is nothing you can be detached with! . . . . you will not find that playing Number One, or the First Person Singular, has cramped your style . . .

And believe me, you could still be wrong! Behold the problem.

In his recently widely cited interview, he urged “proclamation in a missionary style,” with focus “on the essentials, the necessary things . . . what fascinates and attracts . . . makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus,” offering “urgency and radiance and freshness [that] is new and welcome,” comments Robert Royal.

But if he were to call me he does such things, but Im not holding my breath I would point to the misleading phrase [“The dogmatic and moral
teachings of the church are not all equivalent”] that starts [the] passage [in
question]. Its true: not everything in Catholicism is on the same plane. Benedict and the American bishops, for example, tried for years to explain that life takes precedence over secondary policy questions. Francis no doubt agrees, but before making his strong evangelical point, hes given an unnecessary opening to those who would twist his words.
Those of us who publicly fight these battles already know what were going to be hearing from the other guys: “Will you Catholics stop yapping all the time about abortion [or contraception or gay marriage]. Even the pope has told you to give it a rest.” And they wont be entirely wrong.

The world is only too happy for the Church to leave the battlefield and allow the secular world to kill babies in unimaginable numbers, destroy marriage, and along the way reduce religious freedom none of which will be good in the long run for the evangelical efforts Francis favors.

Francis is seeking to bring a new Catholic spirit to the world and thats all to the good. Lets hope the spirit that arises is the one he seeks, not a wayward one that others foist on him and the Church. [italics
added]

Here’s a bit of fraternal correction — as to phrasing, not substance. Quite legitimate, it seems to me.

Pat Hickey is not impressed with the new Chi Trib project:

For better than forty years the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board worked to make sure that everyone takes this person very seriously, and questions the values, aspirations and intentions of these people

And now they want help in recommending a fix-it.

Hickey is hands-down the most fertile mind on the Chicago blog scene. Fascinating.