The good news just keeps rolling in on the health front. First it was that booze is good for the old ticker, then we found out that dark chocolate helps lower blood pressure, now it turns out coffee may help prevent cancer!
Some truffles, an espresso, and a glass of bourbon – now that’s my idea of a heart healthy meal!
Reason has an interesting article on the history of coffee’s negative image.
Here’s a list of organizations providing relief to victims of Hurricane Katrina.
ELCA online donations here.
Interesting piece from “paleocon” Thomas Fleming in the London Spectator (registration req’d):
America has always been a strange place, even to Americans. While most countries are content merely to exist, America is supposed to have a project, a destiny, a divine mission. New England Puritans suffered from the delusion that their little settlement was a ‘city on a hill’, and Cotton Mather, who played a key role in the Salem witch trials, thought New England was plagued by witches because, before the arrival of white European Calvinists, the continent had been a playground for devil-worshipping Indians and idolatrous Catholics. President Lincoln went so far as to describe the United States as ‘dedicated’ to a proposition, and secular Americans speak glibly of America as ‘an experiment’ — a grisly idea, if ever there was one. Even today patriotic conservatives believe that ‘God’ has blessed our nation as a reward for our virtue and our piety.
[…]
Small wonder that so many Europeans are afraid of the United States and its messianic approach to foreign policy. The good news is that all our exceptional virtue and piety is so much buncombe, as Mencken would have said. Despite the many myths of American ‘exceptionalism’, most Americans have always been just as content to muddle through as if they had been born among the unredeemed heathens of London and Paris.
[…]
I have lived 60 years in the United States, the first 25 of them as an atheist, the last 35 as an increasingly reactionary Christian. I have never witnessed the great piety and deep spirituality which I have heard described in 4 July addresses and in semi-scholarly tomes on American religion. We are a practical people, above all else, and, as I have heard repeatedly from business and political leaders, religion makes good sense: the man who goes to church also goes to work, takes care of his family, pays his taxes. This is religiosity, not Christianity.
[…]
European leftists can breathe a sigh of relief. A typical American may go to church too often to be respectable, but when he walks out on the street he is either a little liberal or else a little conservative. If there really were a ‘Christian America’, Hollywood would be broke, and the ashes of both political parties would be reposing quietly in the dustbin of history.
Pietism gets a bad rap, especially in Lutheran circles it seems. The pietists are reviled by conservatives and liberals alike – the former accuse them of ignoring doctrine, wallowing in subjectivism and emotionalism, and fostering legalism, while the latter deride them as embracing a privatized, individualistic faith that is oblivious to the larger issues of social justice.
Ever the contrarian, I figure that when everyone agrees that something is so wicked and pernicious, maybe there’s something to it after all (a rather perverse logic, granted). So, I’m off to the library this afternoon to pick up Dale Brown’s Understanding Pietism and an anthology of their writings edited by Peter Erb. I hope to report back on my findings.
Remember when we went to war in Kosovo to protect the heroic freedom-loving Kosovar Albanians from the depredations of the evil Serbs? Right. So, anyway, in the course of reading this story on the UN’s failure to protect the Roma (a.k.a. Gypsies) residing in their refugee camps from lead poisoning, I came across this little nugget:
Many aid agencies are calling for the immediate relocation of the Gypsies, or Roma, as they prefer to be called, who were first settled into camps at the end of 1999 after Kosovo Albanians razed their homes during a bout of ethnic cleansing.
I’m just sayin’.
A sinister conspiracy by the beauty-fashion industrial complex, no doubt. Qui bono? indeed.
Alan Bock makes the case for immediate withdrawal from Iraq (without thinking that it’s actually going to happen).
Caleb McDaniel has a good post on the reaction to Pat Robertson’s now-infamous remarks.
Camassia and I have been going round a bit on infant baptism.
Pr. Frontz writes on “the domestication of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
One common criticism of President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq is that the UN-imposed sanctions were “working” – i.e. containing Saddam Hussein’s expansionist ambitions and his drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction. That fact that the U.S. has indeed not found the dreaded WMD seems to confirm this.
While the efficacy of the sanctions certainly needed to be taken into account in assessing any possible threat posed by Saddam’s Iraq, it is eminently debatable whether sanctions are morally preferable to going to war, or even morally permissible at all.
Accounts differ, but most people agree that the toll of the sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq from the end of the first Gulf War until the re-commencement of hostilities in 2003 was anywhere between 500,000 to over a million deaths, largely due to lack of access to clean water, food, and medical supplies (excacerbated by the probably unnecessary destruction of Iraqi infrastructure during Gulf War I).
So, in sheer quantitative terms, sanctions rival or exceed war as a tool of policy. Moreover, sanctions are among the least discriminating ways of punishing another country for failing to comply with one’s demands. The political elite are usually the last to feel the punishing effect of sanctions, and ordinary people suffer the most. Sanctions intrinsically violate the principles of just warfare.
In fact, sanctions are essentially a form of siege warfare, so “let the sanctions work” was not exactly an “anti-war” stance. It may instead have been a policy for a silent, but more deadly, form of war.
Brandon at Siris posted his list of twenty “must read” science fiction novels. Very interesting. Readers chimed in with their suggestions. I’ve only read about five of the titles on Brandon’s list – looks like I’ve got some catching up to do! Currently I’m in the middle of Gene Wolfe’s novella trilogy The Fifth Head of Cerberus.
A Thinking Reed 