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Indeed, the Post article is really a critique of Hillary Clinton for not doing enough to supply fellow Democrats with thoughts not their own to parrot on national TV. She’s shirking some of the basics of public deception! Is she really ready to run? Had Team Clinton acted to supply political allies with typical talking points, the article wouldn’t have been written. No one would’ve thought it newsworthy.
This post by Conor Friedersdorf is especially interesting because of the way it points out, brings to consciousness, a nearly-universal betrayal of responsibility that almost everyone knows about but — and this is Conor’s point — rarely considers.
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[gallery] I don’t yet know what I think about hypothes.is, but this drawing of Vannevar Bush’s Memex in their video is great.
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Religion Comes
Religion comes from our pity for humans They are too weak to live without divine protection. Too weak to listen to the screeching noise of the turning of infernal wheels. Who among us would accept a universe in which there was not one voice Of compassion, pity, understanding? To be human is to be completely alien amid the galaxies. Which is sufficient reason for erecting, together with others, the temples of an unimaginable mercy.
— Czeslaw Milosz
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What we learned from USA's friendlies with Brazil and Peru
What we learned from USA’s friendlies with Brazil and Peru
Not sure how much we learned, but we received further confirmation that the USMNT has made zero progress in the Klinsmann era and had probably regressed a bit. Has U.S. men’s soccer, as a much larger and more complex endeavor, improved? I see no reason to think that it has. I think we may well be looking at a significant period in which the USMNT sinks deeper into mediocrity.
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[gallery] Images from a newly illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
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But this is not an argument for Trump as a serious presidential candidate. It is really no argument at all. It is catharsis masquerading as principle, venting and resentment pretending to be some kind of higher argument. Every principle used to defend Trump is subjective, graded on a curve. Trump is like a cat trained to piss in a human toilet. It’s amazing! It’s remarkable! Yes, yes, it is: for a cat. But we don’t judge humans by the same standard.
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I defer to no one in my love for America and for Christianity. I have devoted my life to the study of both of them. I have tried to live up to my association with them. And I take very seriously Jesus’s teachings, in this case his saying that those who live by the sword will also die by the sword. Something called Christianity has become entangled in exactly the strain of nationalism that is militaristic, ready to spend away the lives of our young, and that can only understand dissent from its views as a threat or a defection, a heresy in the most alienating and stigmatizing sense of the word. We are not the first country where this has happened. The fact that it was the usual thing in Europe, and had been for many centuries, was one great reason for attempting to separate church and state here.
Jesus’s aphorism may be taken to mean simply that those who deal in violence are especially liable to suffer violence. True enough. But death is no simple thing when Jesus speaks of it. His thoughts are not our thoughts, the limits of our perceptions are not limits he shares. We must imagine him seeing the whole of our existence, our being beyond mortality, beyond time. There is that other death he can foresee, the one that really matters. When Christians abandon Christian standards of behavior in the defense of Christianity, when Americans abandon American standards of conduct in the name of America, they inflict harm that would not be in the power of any enemy. As Christians they risk the kind of harm to themselves to which the Bible applies adjectives like “everlasting.”
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[gallery] The Hotel Okura in Tokyo is closing
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GOP voters who are passionate supporters of Kim Davis may well find that photo [with Ted Cruz] inspiring, and appreciate that a Republican presidential candidate stood by her in her hour of need. But I can easily imagine that — fair or not — in terms of its visual symbolism, that shot reminds suburban Republican voters, even some Christians, what they don’t like about the party and its direction.
Ted Cruz Jailbreaks Kim Davis. Verily, Ted, thou hast thy reward.
