Readers of the Left Behind series and believers in the Rapture are going to eat this up!
NYT: COLLAPSE OF THE EARTH’S MAGNETIC FIELD ACCELERATES – link via Drudge
Author: Sal
Who is watching your kids?
What do you care as long as you don’t have to!
Japan: Schoolkids to be tagged with RFID chips
The rights and wrongs of RFID-chipping human beings have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school.
The tags will be read by readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the kids’ movements.
Do they have that many kids disappearing that they have to track them in and out of the school? Do the Japanese even have kids anymore? This sounds vaguely like a StarTrek episode in which members of the crew disappear some beiged-suited crewperson suggest they tag everyone with some chip so they can determine when and where the other crewpersons are disappearing. They then can rescue the missing crewpeople and maybe make first contact with some aliens from another dimension who want to do stem cell research on humans.
It’s important to use inclusive language when writing about vaguely-remembered StarTrek episodes as it is in the liturgy when you don’t want to offend anyone because we have such an easy-going, mellow God who made all us the exactly the same with trivial differences in biology and instinct that aren’t really products of nature at all but rather a result of the environment: sociological factors, gender power-dynamics, and discrepancies in income. He doesn’t have to tag us because He, I mean Mother Father Mighty Enabler of Humanity, knows where we are all the time but doesn’t judge us about all the stuff we do, like treating our kids like cattle if we actually allow them to be born or engaging in unethical stem cell research and suchlike.
What are ethics anyway except a projection of sociological factors, gender power-dynamics, and discrepancies in income? We ought to abolish the word “ought” from our language and from our memory, individual and collective. And why would I even want to watch my kids? Am I my children’s keeper? If the government wants to do that I’d be willing to pay more taxes and give up the freedom to raise my kids. A national nanny system can always watch the kids! I’m just one man, er – person – and I can’t be depended on to look after my own hatchlings what with all the sociological factors, gender power-dynamics, and discrepancies in income that I grew up with.
Victor David Hansen on the Terror War
This war — like all wars — is a terrible thing; but far, far worse are the mass murder of 3,000 innocents and the explosion of a city block in Manhattan, a ghoulish Islamic fascism and unfettered global terrorism, and 30 years of unchecked Baathist mass murder. So for myself, I prefer to be on the side of people like the Kurds, Elie Wiesel, Hamid Karzai, and Iyad Allawi rather than the idiotocrats like Jacques Chirac, Ralph (the Israelis are “puppeteers”) Nader, Michael Moore, and Billy Crystal.
Sometimes life’s choices really are that simple.
Read the whole thing!
More fun from Richmond
One of our astute readers in the Diocese of Richmond sent me a very amusing, very telling email today:
…thought you might get a kick out of it since you seem to be following our travails in the Richmond Diocese. TQ’s comments, which you linked, reminded me of the funniest thing I’ve seen this year. Some brief background:
TQ mentioned “a manual” that was discussed in Bp. DiLorenzo’s homily. The “manual” was a document prepared a couple years ago by Bp. Sullivan and his cronies that deals with the goals, strengths, weaknesses, etc., of the diocese. (They mostly get the strengths and weaknesses backwards, as you might expect). Supposedly, they got input from the parishes in preparing it, but at the parish level very few people seem to have heard of it.
They seem to have presented it to Bp. DiLorenzo with great fanfare — “this is the course the diocese wants/needs to follow” — so Bp. DiLorenzo talked a lot about it in his homily.
Then he went on the road, meeting lay leaders, and discovered that very few had heard of the document. The diocesan newspaper, reporting on the meeting, quoted him as asking “Is this document relevant, or is it a house job?”
I figured that by “house job” he meant, like, an “in-house” thing by the diocesan staff that wasn’t really relevant to the situation “on the ground” in the parishes — which is true enough.
But Tuesday, the new edition of the diocesan paper arrived with this correction, which gave me one of those wonderful diet-Coke-through-the-nose moments:
“Corrections: The term used by Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo … was “hose job,” and not “house job” as was printed in the June 21 issue…”
Hose job, of course, means snow job. As though blowing sunshine in the direction of the Bishop will distract him from the real work of the Church.
I’m really starting to like Bp. DiLorenzo. A lot.
Thank you, anonymous reader, for your email and a Diet-Coke-through-the-nose moment.
Bill Schilling, R.I.P.
Bill Schilling was a parishoner at St. John’s Parish in McLean, VA . He founded a scholarship in the name of his late wife for seminarians from the parish, giving them sorely needed money each semester to pay for essentials. He also funded a Catholic orphanage and school for victims of the AIDS virus in Kenya. He continued to support the seminarians and the orphanage in his will. He left a substantial amount of money to the Diocese of Arlington as well.
I visited him some weeks ago as his health began to fail. He told me about how he and his wife had saved their whole life to buy a house. As the years went on decided not to buy a home of their own. Rather, they stayed in the same modest apartment for decades. They never had children of their own, but their life’s work would go to support their spiritual children in Africa and the good work of the Arlington Diocese. He said missed his wife very much and was ready to see her again. She passed away in 1999. He sat wrapped in the blanket that kept her warm in her last days. As we spoke I thought of a story I once heard about Father Wilfrid Faber. Seemingly on his death bed, surrounded by family and friends, Father Faber got better. Bill passed away this morning from liver cancer. He didn’t get better, he got the best. “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” Psalm 115:15
May he rest in peace.