There are two parts to this piece with Dennis Prager: here and here.  Take a few minutes and listen to both.

Who wouldn’t want to be a Red Sox fan?

Terry Moran makes a great point that freedom and prosperity actually breeds terrorists:

“This is the condition of a free mind in a free world–liberated, but in a fundamental sense, alone as our forebears were not.”

“it is a truth of our time that as the world moves rapidly from the country to the city (more than half the human population now lives in cities–a staggering social change in our species), fewer and fewer people will live amid the old certainties, and more and more will experience the dizzying possibilities of life as an individual set adrift in the human sea of the great city.”

“And they will be insecure in who they are. Not all, perhaps–the poor are insulated, to an extent, by the sheer magnitude of their physical struggle to survive, by their continued reliance on each other and on an older faith that focuses its promises on the next world, and by their isolation. But take a few steps up the social ladder in an immigrant community, or in the sprawling new cities in the Muslim world, and it’s a different story. Doctors, engineers, architects and other professionals are in the vanguard of the movement into modernity. They are immersed in a world of transnational practices, standards, collegial networks and ethics that can be corrosive of their old allegiances. They can get lost, especially if they have migrated to the west, with all of our societies’ temptations, blasphemies, materialism and skepticism.”

 www.livescience.com

“That strong, egocentric communication of Westerners was nonexistent when we looked at Chinese,” Keysar said. “The Chinese were very much able to put themselves in the shoes of another when they were communicating.”

Hot Air

The comments are great.  Here are a few of my favorite:

“I see that Reid and the Dems pulled out of the all-nighter.”

“We must really be impressing all the bad guys around the world who are watching this! And they want this group to run my Health Care? Yea…whatever!”

“It wasn’t a total wash. My daughter was fussy last night and the C-SPAN coverage lulled her right to sleep.”

“No wonder they can’t commit to win a war. They can’t even commit to winning an all night DEBATE!!”

“Code Pink, Answer, Daily Kos, thats who this all- nighter was for. The nutroots.”

“This is the result of women in politics. Now they are organizing slumber parties.”

“How about congress’ approval rating is less than half of GW’S….????…What say you hairy and nanc…???”

“Personally, I think the GOP missed a golden opporuntity when they didn’t show up en masse in footie PJs to make the point that political stunts like this are only as good as the threats behind them. Harry Reid lost the minute he didn’t really make all the Senators stay there- particularly after making repeated statements about “working all night if necessary to bring the troops home now.””

FYI the congress approval rating is at 14% now according to Zogby.

Pope Benedict XVI recently came out with a statement that the only true church is the Roman Catholic Church. An initial tendency might be to be upset at a statement like that because it is declaring that Protestants Churches are invalid.

However Al Mohler makes a great point that a statement like this is a good thing because it makes more clear the lines that were blurred by Pope John Paul II. Pope Benedict’s statement is much more dogmatic then anything Pope John Paul would have said, since he was almost ready to embrace all religions as being equally valid.

In a world that is increasingly adopting post-modernism it is encouraging to see the RCC taking a step away from it, even if their absolutist position is erroneous.

Here is a good quote from Al Mohler:

… I am not offended because this new document actually brings attention to the crucial issues of ecclesiology, and thus it presents us with an opportunity.

…

Evangelicals should appreciate the candor reflected in this document. There is no effort here to confuse the issues. To the contrary, the document is an obvious attempt to set the record straight. The Roman Catholic Church does not deny that Christ is working redemptively through Protestant and evangelical churches, but it does deny that these churches which deny the authority of the papacy are true churches in the most important sense. The true church, in other words, is that church identified through the recognition of the papacy. Those churches that deny or fail to recognize the papacy are “ecclesial Communities,” not churches “in the proper sense.”

I appreciate the document’s clarity on this issue. It all comes down to this — the claim of the Roman Catholic Church to the primacy of the Bishop of Rome and the Pope as the universal monarch of the church is the defining issue. Roman Catholics and Evangelicals should together recognize the importance of that claim. We should together realize and admit that this is an issue worthy of division. The Roman Catholic Church is willing to go so far as to assert that any church that denies the papacy is no true church. Evangelicals should be equally candid in asserting that any church defined by the claims of the papacy is no true church. This is not a theological game for children, it is the honest recognition of the importance of the question.

So now that this crucial difference between the RCC and protestants is defined, this issue can be addressed theologically head on.

This is off iGoogle:

“You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.”

Sorry, I know this place has been more political since I started back, but I have always just written what is on my mind, and politics has been bouncing around up there lately.  Dont worry there will be plenty of other stuff floating by sooner or later (I still need to write up a trip report of our backpacking to cold mountain).

So here is a link to some Cuban hospitals not featured on Moore’s “Sicko”: http://freethoughts.wordpress.com  I would like to see a documentary come out as an answer to Sicko which looks at the way things actually are.

Also I just thought I would mention how facebook has been coming in handy lately.  A local group of people around Mebane called “Soccer Saturdays” has been useful for getting people together to do stuff.  If you are interested in knowing when soccer games are getting together in Mebane (and probably other stuff too) then message me on facebook and I’ll get you into the group.  From then on you will see notes in your facebook inbox when things are getting together.

So not very far below (since I haven’t written in so long) is what my fantasy baseball team looked like just after the draft. Since then it has changed a lot. Its amazing looking back and seeing how some who you thought were good turned out to be not so much, and others who weren’t even drafted ended up making a significant impact. Overall I think that in making trades I was able to increase the overall value of my team a little, and the new team looks much better then what I drafted when looking at it from a keeper league perspective. It got younger with much more potential upside.

So here is the team now:

• C: Victor Martinez
• 1B: David Ortiz
• 2B: Kaz Matsui
• SS: Khalil Green
• 3B: David Wright
• OF: Alfonso Soriano
• OF: Carl Crawford
• OF: Ty Wigginton
• Util: Chipper Jones
• Bench: Willy Taveras
• Bench: Freddy Sanchez
• Bench: Sammy Sosa
• Bench: Brendan Harris

• SP: Carlos Zambrano
• SP: John Lackey
• SP: Ian Snell
• SP: Jared Weaver
• SP: Randy Wolf
• RP: Mariano Rivera
• RP: Jeremy Accardo
• Bench: Homer Bailey
• Bench: Ryan Dempster
• Bench: Oliver Perez

So as you can see, the only guys left from the team that I drafted are Martinez, Ortiz, Wigginton, Snell, and Dempster. 5 out of 22. At the end of the year it will be interesting to see how different that team looks from this one.

This just in from newsbusters (you dont see this kind of news reported by the MSM):  The original ruling that “domestic spying” is unconstitutional was overturned.  I call it “domestic spying” because that is the label that was given it, though many disagree with that title.  Here is a quote:

A federal appeals court on Friday ordered the dismissal of a lawsuit challenging President Bush’s domestic spying program, saying the plaintiffs had no standing to sue.

The 2-1 ruling by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel vacated a 2006 order by a lower court in Detroit, which had found the post-Sept. 11 warrantless surveillance aimed at uncovering terrorist activity to be unconstitutional, violating rights to privacy and free speech and the separation of powers….

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, “We have always believed that the District Court’s decision declaring the terrorist surveillance program unconstitutional was wrongly decided.”

The ACLU is reviewing its options, including taking its challenge to the Supreme Court, Shapiro said.

I hope that it is taken to the supreme court, so that it can be shot down again by the steller group of people who now run the show.