Congratulations, Shawn and Shawnee!

My old friend Shawn is a bachelor no more - as of 3:45 yesterday afternoon, Shawn and his new wife Shawnee had finally tied the knot. The service was beautiful (and I'm not just saying that because it was my honor to co-preside!), and the reception was more fun than I can remember having in ages. Most important of all, Shawn and Shawnee seemed truly happy, and the hundreds of family and friends there seemed delighted to celebrate such a special moment with them. I know I was!

So congratulations, Shawn and Shawnee. God's blessings on each of you, and on your new life together!

Please leave your congratulations and well-wishing in the comments section - I'll be sure Shawn and Shawnee see them... when they get back from the honeymoon. ;)

To Hutchinson, and beyond!

I'll be more or less blogless for the next ten days or so. I'm staying this weekend at my parents' house in Hutchinson so I can co-officiate at my friends Shawn and Shawnee's wedding. On Sunday or Monday I'll be leaving with my friend Michael for a week camping, probably on the north shore of Lake Superior. We're hoping to put our cameras to good use. I'll have my laptop with for storing and previewing the photos, of course, but I doubt that I'll have any Internet access from Monday through Friday.

If you're lost and lonely without me around blogging for you, (1) that's really sad, but I'm strangely flattered; and (2) try taking a look at the blogs and news feeds in my Blogroll in the right hand margin of this page. They're all interesting and worth a read. Hey, you can tell me what I miss! ;)

American Prospect: TBN's Paul Crouch - a homosexual fling?

Frankly, I couldn't care less whether Paul Crouch did or did not shag former Trinity Broadcasting Network employee and frequent jailbird Enoch Lonnie Ford back in 1996. If he did, all it reveals is another facet of the hypocrisy that clings to this behemoth "Christian" corporation like stink to a donkey. No big revelation there - TBN is corrupt, through and through.

It's facts like the following, and not some sex scandal, that really cheese me off:

Nor is it easy to ignore the Crouches' gaudy set, which fuses the kitschy style of a 1950s suburban living room with that of a royalty-themed Las Vegas motel. To watch the Crouches is an exercise in visual overstimulation.

For their devoted viewers, their appearance carries a deeper significance. Every aspect of the Crouches' look is carefully calculated as an aesthetic accompaniment to their Dominionist theology, which urges Christians to acquire as much wealth, power, and influence as possible in order to put the world's secular institutions under the control of biblical law.

To earn the blind loyalty of their viewers, who are often poor or working class and whom Jan Crouch routinely calls 'you little people,' the Crouches have cast themselves as spiritual aristocrats entrusted with handling God's riches. Seated on purple thrones like the king and queen of an alternate universe, the Crouches plead with viewers for their 'seed money,' reassuring them that their donations will be planted in heaven and blossom into anything they seek, from material wealth to eternal salvation.

Though it's hard to know how much of this money has actually made it to heaven (especially because the TBN keeps its financial records secret), a good chunk of it has made the Crouches wealthy; in 2001, they bought a $5 million home in Orange County, California, described by real-estate agents as 'a palatial estate with ocean and city views.'

"The Last Starfighter: The Musical"?

The best sci-fi flick you never saw, and a pioneer in computer graphics comes to the Broadway stage this fall. The Last Starfighter, an 80s sleeper, is one of those movies that I just had to get on DVD, because I had such fuzzy memories of it as a kid. That, and the starships were just about the coolest spaceship design I have ever seen, before or since. They make X-wing fighters look wussy.

You can visit the Storm Theatre's site for official information on this unlikely musical, coming in October to a galaxy near you.

Tip of the hat to Slashdot

NYT - "Deal in Congress to Keep Tax Cuts, Widening Deficit"

Why is it that all our politicians assume that the majority of Americans wants to send our nation disastrously into debt in order to preserve Bush's ridiculous tax cuts? Isn't there just an off chance that a very large number of Americans would find it a sane position to oppose extending these cuts when we have no plan to pay for them; that it would be a breath of fresh air in an administration gone awry?

Putting aside efforts to control the federal deficit before the elections, Republican and Democratic leaders agreed Wednesday to extend $145 billion worth of tax cuts sought by President Bush without trying to pay for them.

At a House-Senate conference committee, Democratic lawmakers abandoned efforts to pay for the measures by either imposing a surcharge on wealthy families or closing corporate tax shelters.

'I wish we could pay for them, but this is a political problem and we have people up for re-election,'' said Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, the senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee.

What cowards. I'm even more ashamed of the Democrats than I am outraged at the Republicans. That such an absurd tax cut could be a "bipartisan" effort is sickening.

NYT - "U.S. to Free 'Enemy Combatant,' Bowing to Supreme Court Ruling"

Remember Yasser Hamdi? He's the American citizen who was captured in Afghanistan and held incommunicado by the American military for more than two years, because the Bush administration deemed him a highly dangerous "enemy combatant."

The Supreme Court ruled in June that Hamdi and other enemy combatants must be given access to the legal system, so that they can challenge their status. Rather than allow Yasser Hamdi his day in court, however, it appears the Bush administration prefers to simply let him go! That's right - this man who was supposedly so dangerous to us that he couldn't see a lawyer or anyone else for years is now being allowed to leave the country a free man, because the Bushies know he's no danger at all... except in a courtroom, where he has the power to inflict the worst kind of political damage on them.

Writes the Times:

The agreement was driven by a Supreme Court decision in June. In the ruling, a major setback for the Bush administration, the court found that Mr. Hamdi and enemy combatants like him had to be given the chance to challenge their detention. The court declared that 'a state of war is not a blank check for the president.' The administration decided that rather than give Mr. Hamdi a hearing, it would simply negotiate his release.

Mr. Hamdi will probably be flown back to Saudi Arabia on an American military aircraft by early next week, said a government official who asked not to be identified.

You can bet Mr. Hamdi is not long for this world. Ten bucks says he's dead at the hands of special forces snipers before the year's out - or as soon as he opens his mouth to talk to the media about his experiences as an "enemy combatant." No way is Yasser Hamdi going to have the opportunity to try his case on Al Jazeera before a world of angry Muslims.

If the Bush administration can't lock Yasser Hamdi away for life without a trial, it will do the next best thing: release him into the dangerous world where "accidents" happen, where small, powerless people die all the time, and wait for Yasser Hamdi to "disappear."

20 Questions - Man vs. Machine

Think you can outsmart 20Q? It's a free online game of twenty questions, powered by a neural network. Neural nets are the same sort of interrelated structures that the neurons in your brain form, and are on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence.

Beliefnet - "Christianity Has Left the Public Square"

First we had a scathing indictment of the modern neoconservative; now comes this hard assessment of American civil religion:

America may be brimming with religion, but it is a kind that generally has little to do with the traditions and teachings that underlie it. It has become, for the most part, yet another servant of the economic and social order that sets the real priorities: success and material comfort. The prophets Jeremiah and Amos, who regularly scolded ancient Israel for crushing the poor, have been sent to the woodshed.

In the process, Christianity has become a private concern, a rescue squad to revive those crippled in free enterprise combat. It has taken on the functions of therapy and self-help, preaching its own version of self-centeredness that leaves political matters such as "justice" far behind. Religion hasn't been booted out of the public arena by mean-spirited secularists; it has largely quit going out in public to bring the full message of its heritage.

Rather than looking critically at social policy, in the manner of the prophets, Christians ignore or passively accept it at a time when prophets are so urgently needed.

Garrison Keillor: "We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore"

Garrison Keillor - Lutheran, liberal, Minnesotan - lets loose with both barrels in a remarkably angry piece:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Wow. Now I have some dear Republican friends, but I have to say that my Republican friends, whom I respect, tend to be the sort that Keillor also extolls, the "50s Republicans," a party of "good -hearted people" who "decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships."

The New Conservative movement - neocons, for those of you who know the lingo - is what Keillor's blasting away at, and I understand his anger. The neocons in control of our government are the farthest thing from upstanding 50s-style Republicanism this country has yet seen in power. They are not for fiscal responsibility. They are not for small government. They are not for a cautious foreign policy. Neocons like Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rummy, and their ilk give a very bad name to true conservatives - folks like my Republican friends.

NYT - "Banks and the College Loan Loophole"

And I thought faceless banks like Wells Fargo abused the student loan system through abominations like the single lender rule! Turns out they've also got a nice Congress-endorsed loophole that nets them billions of dollars in taxpayer money by charging the government rates three times the going one on student loans, in very particular circumstances.

How like our government to turn a system of financial aid designed to encourage and support education into just another way for megabanks to screw over their customers and the taxpayers.

Reuters: "Jesus loves you but not your cell phone"

Amen to this!

State-of-the-art technology developed by Israeli electronic-warfare experts is being used by some Mexican churches to silence cell phones that ring during mass, church officials said Tuesday.

Anne Lamott: "Loving Bush: Day 2"

One of the most honest liberal Christian reflections on Bush, and the hating thereof. Worth a read, even considering you need to look at an ad from Salon to see the whole thing. I'm impressed with Lamott's candor.

Everything was so sweet at church, the singing, the kindness, the plain old grief, and then the pastor had to go and ruin it all by giving the sermon -- on loving our enemies.

It was like being in the Twilight Zone. It was a nightmare. It was clear that the pastor, Veronica, was speaking directly to me. She said that Christians have a very bad reputation in the world, because we have earned it, with our hate and self-righteousness. We speak in reverent terms of grace, justice, equality, mercy, and then we despise people who were also created in God's image, who are Her children too. She said that if George Bush had been the only person on earth, Jesus would still have come down and died for him.

This drives me crazy. That God seems to have no taste, and no standards. Of course, by the same token, on most days, this is what gives some of us hope.

Shocking Stats - September 2004

Holy smoke! So far this month I've blogged up over 12,000 words! That's got to be some sort of record for me.

What's a Blogroll?

You may have noticed the expanding list of links on this page called the "Blogroll." Maybe you've even wondered what that's all about. ;)

A blogroll is simply a list of blogs or news feeds that a person reads regularly or subscribes to. You can usually learn a lot about that person's interests and passions by perusing the blogs linked in their blogroll.

Currently I've got nearly 50 blogs "rolled"... do I really read them all? Yep. I use a handy tool called Bloglines to aggregate them for me. Basically, every time a new post is made to one of my watched blogs, I get a little notification on my desktop. When I go to Bloglines, I can see all of the new posts to all of my blogs at the same time - all in one web page. It sucks them all in like a giant vacuum cleaner, and presents only the new stuff to me, so that I don't have to constantly surf from one blog to the next, looking for new stuff.

A lot of times I skim through the entries, only reading the stuff that looks the most interesting. But all of these blogs are interesting enough to me to make it on my "watch list." I would recommend them to you, too, if you're looking for some interesting reading.

CNN - "Slutwear goes out of fashion"

Thank God for small favors!

A full day of gabbing

I spent the whole day talking.

Really, I pretty much did. Lucinda hosted the text study at her house this morning, and it was only her and one other of our colleagues there. We talked a bit about the texts for next Sunday, and a lot about the ups and downs of financing a seminary education. Susan, our newest colleague, has a really wonderful story of God's providence, leading to her finishing sem with a credit rather than a balance of student loans. Many, if not most seminarians, have a sadly different experience, though.

After the text study, Cinda and I got caught up. We seem to do this every few weeks to few months - sit down, start talking about everything under the sun, and discover we need to eat because we've talked right through mealtime. Then we continue to talk for another few hours. =) It was very good and helpful visiting with her today. She's got a good sense for the way things work around here, and has been an excellent resource and source of encouragement when things in my own ministry have been difficult. Very good conversation... we just need to do this more often, so it doesn't have to take all day!

Then I visited the sewing ladies and had coffee. Afterwards I hunted for possible storage places with two of them (the church is filling up, and I firmly believe that with a little willpower and a weekend we could free up fully half of our cluttered storage spaces). I talked about my desire for a youth room at the church, and we wrestled a bit over why the "lounge" upstairs is sacrosanct - it's used only three or four times a year for anything "loungelike" (when we have funerals), and is essentially a wasted space the rest of the year. Yet it is emotionally beyond touch in our church. If there is anything about the church (the people or the building) that is not service Christ and his gospel, but could be, then we should be bold enough and faithful enough to put it to use. Protecting a room because "it's special" or "we've always had it" is silly if that room sits empty and doesn't serve the needs of the church.

Well, we went around in circles a little over that. ;) I want to understand why that room is so sacrosanct, but I also want to challenge people a little bit. In many churches, there are lots of things like that - gifts of God that are being wasted out of laziness, sentimentality, fear, and a host of other excuses. Our churches are no better or worse than most in this area. But just because we're no worse than most doesn't mean we should be content with that fact! We have no excuse not to try and use whatever we have here in Hastings and Litchville to serve Christ. We're called to do no less.

So now when I get home from a day full of gabbing, what do I do? I sit down at the computer, get caught up on the blogs and news I read, and then gab away on my own blog. =) Life is funny that way.

WatchBlog - "The First Meme War?"

This is a really fascinating way to look at the seemingly irrational behavior of the terrorists we are now at war with.

For those that haven't hear the term, 'memes' are contagious ideas that, like viruses, replicate by passing from mind to mind. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins. Memes can be harmless (like a catchy tune), valuable (like a new scientific technique) or harmful (like the 'smoking is cool' meme, which often kills off its host). One key to understanding memes is to view them as independent entities, not just as 'ideas'. Like viruses, memes can mutate, and like viruses, the memes that spread rapidly and persistently survive the best.

I believe that we are now fighting an extremely wily, dangerous and harmful meme: wily, because it has subverted the minds of its hosts so fully that it has some degree of intelligence; dangerous, because it is fighting for its life; and harmful, both to its hosts and to others. I'll call it RI, for radical Islam, but don't be confused into thinking that I'm talking about a set of countries, or individual people, or even a community of people. I'm talking about a different of creature: an more-or-less living entity that is encoded as set of ideas that propogates like a virus, and that subverts the minds and bodies of its hosts in order to spread and survive.

Just in the nick of time

Just as I was starting to get discouraged at all the bad news I've blogged on this evening, I come across this beautiful and sweet slice of life from Wil Wheaton's blog. I feel better about life in a world where little moments like this still happen. =)

NYT - How Tax Cuts Feed the Beast

The financial future of America looks pretty grim for me and for my kids.

Washington has historically engaged in immense wealth redistribution from younger to older generations, mainly through Social Security and Medicare. Those programs' benefits were essentially provided free to the first groups of eligible retirees (in the 1930's for Social Security and the 1960's for Medicare), and then expanded over the years without the government's demanding matching contributions from recipients. The younger generations keep having to pick up the tab for the older generations' expanding benefits.

The second major point is that, as even the president's 2005 budget admits, our current tax and spending policies are unsustainable. We face a long-term fiscal gap that is almost unimaginable: the total difference between the cost of all promised benefits and the revenues to pay for them is about $70 trillion.

The root causes of this gap are that Americans are living longer and that health care costs are growing far faster than inflation, making Social Security and Medicare more expensive. But the Bush administration has added immensely to the gap: the Medicare prescription drug benefit enacted last year amounts to a $16.6 trillion increase over the very long term, according to the Medicare trustees. That is a straight tax increase on future generations.

Against this background, how should we think about the huge Bush tax cuts? They greatly increase the already huge redistribution of wealth from younger to older generations, because the younger generations will have to pay off the bonds that are being floated to finance the current federal spending, as well as the Social Security and Medicare expenses of older generations. On top of this, the Bush tax cuts are likely over time to increase, not reduce, government's effect on the economy.

The growing federal debt is virtually certain to lead to offsetting tax increases down the road. Does anyone really believe that in 10 years, when Social Security and Medicare benefits are imminently threatened, Congress will not try to increase revenues to keep the benefits flowing a bit longer?

Slate - Why are protesters treated as threats?

A disturbing trend - protesters at presidential events are being singled out by law enforcement as "threats" against the president's safety and being forcibly removed, or even arrested:

On Friday, the antiwar-T-shirt-clad mother of a slain soldier was pulled out of a Laura Bush speech in New Jersey and threatened with arrest. A West Virginia couple was detained by the Secret Service for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts at a July 4 rally - they filed a lawsuit last week - and AIDS activists were removed and kept away from reporters at a Sept. 9 presidential event in Pennsylvania. Most notably, some 1,800 protesters, monitors, and passersby were jailed in indiscriminate raids during the Republican Convention in New York, while several hecklers were dragged off the Madison Square Garden convention floor. All were arrested or threatened with arrest, and hundreds expect to stand trial....

Because this is the 'age of suicide bombers,' the Secret Service should have latitude to get rid of anyone suspicious who is standing near the president's route, [Judge] Marchant said. Fair enough. But [this protester] could only have been singled out for suspicion by one thing - the slogan on his sign. Even allowing the strange notion that the Secret Service expects terrorists to begin their assassination plot by carrying a noticeable antiwar placard, it's enough to make anyone with a dissenting view think twice before deciding to stand out from a crowd.

Slate: Bush's U.N. speech offers platitudes instead of solutions

Fred Kaplan reflects on Bush's speech today at the UN.

It was a puzzling speech from start to finish. Near its beginning, when Bush said, 'We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace,' was there a delegate in the chamber who didn't wonder at the irony? It was Bush himself, after all, who was quick to choose war in Iraq - insiders' chronicles agree that he decided on that path in early 2002, over a year before the U.N. debates - while the vast majority of the body's members, free and unfree, were striving for a resolution short of conflict.

Slashdot: Will Google Launch A Browser?

Now this would be an interesting development...

Congrats, Twins!

The Minnesota Twins continue their string of championship seasons, caliming the AL Central pennant for the third straight year. Way to go! Now they can gear up for the postseason. Looking forward to fall baseball from the Metrodome. =)

HAL 9000 for sale on eBay

Engadget passes on a Slashdotted item - anyone with $150,000 or so to spare has a shot at owning HAL 9000, the homicidal computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Christmas present for your favorite pastor's study, perhaps?

Beliefnet - GOP Mailing Warns Liberals Will Ban Bibles

Not only is this sad, it's offensive to me as a liberal who cherishes the Word of God. The only thing sadder than the fact that the Republican Party sent this junk is that some people really believe it.

NYT Magazine - Who Was Abused?

This is a terribly important article. As we struggle with child abuse and accusations of abuse, it's so important that we know all sides of the story. This article is an honest attempt to ask, "Are we wrong to believe accusations out of hand?"

The article is long, registration is required - and yes, it's still more than worth the trouble. Please read it.

Windy sermon prep

No, not prepping for a windy sermon! Prepping for a sermon in the wind. =) It's warm and breezey out, the screen tent is swaying all around me, the candle is burning warmly in its lantern, and I've got Baroque streaming on the laptop... life is good.

Glorious day

What a fabulous day it's been here today. The thermometer's a bit high, into the 80s, but the wind has been roaring all afternoon, averaging 25mph, and gusting up to 40mph. That's kept it cool enough to be pleasant, and the sound of the wind whipping through the trees and the windows has been wonderful. Hard to ask for a better fall afternoon.

Scary stuff

What is the single most deadly infectious disease in the history of humanity? AIDS? Ebola? Smallpox? Bubonic plague? No. None of these comes close to...

The strain of influenza that devastated the world in 1918.

Over 40 million people died that year in the worst pandemic the world has ever seen. Experts agree that we are overdue for another influenza pandemic, and the changes in global culture that have occurred in the last 85 years could make the next superbug a plague of unimaginable proportions. With our ability to travel and conduct business anywhere in the world on a moment's notice comes the ability to spread a killer virus planetwide with speeds reminiscent of the worst Internet viruses.

Scientists are painfully aware of our vulnerability (remember the great lengths taken to contain "chicken flu"?), and are looking for ways to battle the next big pandemic. One group is looking to the past to protect the future.

A group of researchers is planning to resurrect the 1918 flu within the confines of the laboratory, in an effort to understand what made it so infectious and so lethal. The plan is to infect a particular species of monkey with a similar response to such diseases as humans have, in order to observe the virus at work. Since the influenza virus has only eight genes, the scientists hope to be able to use combinations of the 1918 bug's genes with modern strains to see which parts make it the killer it is.

Needless to say, there is some concern about the level of containment that will be applied to these experiments. If the 1918 bug were to get loose, the results could be devastating. Even worse, a new and more lethal strain might be created and accidentally released into the wild. The Biosafety Level chosen by the team for their laboratory could have worldwide consequences.

Research like this is essential. Let's hope that the scientists take every precaution in handling this killer. Their lives and ours may well depend on their caution. Scary stuff.

MSNBC: Film showing Hitler's soft side stirs controversy

It has long been understood in Germany the importance of speaking the truth about Adolph Hitler. As the nation has struggled to come to terms with the darker moments of its past, Germans have felt a strong need to speak the truth about Hitler, lest such a thing ever happen again on German soil.

Up until now, however, "speaking the truth about Hitler" has meant that any depictions of his charm, appeal, and positive attributes have been taboo in Germany. The nation fears that to present him as anything but a monster would be to encourage the miscreant neo-Nazis and Holocaust-deniers who perversely adulate Hitler to this very day. The recent film "The Downfall" has broken that taboo, stirring up a cloud of controversy in its wake.

The film certainly depicts Hitler as a madman, by all accounts. The creative talent behind "The Downfall," however, chose to also present Adolph Hitler as distinctly human - frail, suffering from illness, yet charismatic and even showing glimpses of kindness. The Hitler presented is far more complex than anything seen on German screens - or, I dare say, in theaters anywhere in the world.

Is it going too far to show Hitler in any kind of positive light at all? I think not. In fact, it's dangerous to present him merely as a beast, while ignoring the very appealing qualities that seduced a nation. While we must not ever forget the monstrosities Hitler committed, we must also be brave enough to cast a clear eye on this complex man, searching for what it was within him that could so appeal to an entire nation.

It's often observed that no one is tempted to something that is evil on the face of it; the devil's greatest trick is to wrap sin in the clothes of virtue, so that we are seduced by the grain of goodness in it even as our conscience protests that something is deeply wrong here. If we are to resist such sly efforts by the tempter, we need first to understand that this is his best method - to twist God's good gifts into something perverse yet appealing.

Adolph Hitler personifies this work of the tempter. If we are to fight the purveyors of genocide, we need to understand not only that they are monsters, but that they are tremendously appealing monsters. Their appeal is their great strength, their great deception. Perhaps "The Downfall" and the works that will certainly follow it can be a first small step toward understanding the monster within the human being Hitler - and slaying the one within our own selves.

LAPTOP UPDATE

Things are progressing well. I've got most of my main software installed, and I'm now copying my Bible study software over. Hard to believe, but I've got somewhere around a gig and a half of Bibles, commentaries, journals, dictionaries, and other theological resources! Fortunately for me, I was smart enough to back the files up to my external hard drive, so that I can just copy them back over. In the past i've needed to feed the computer aroud a dozen CDs, and wait while it slowly gets what it needs... today I was able to grab the old Bible resources, drag them to their new home, and amuse myself by blogging while I waited. =)

Oh! They're done. Time to move on to the next step in my list. I've got about 35 done, and have around 30 left to go before things will be the way I want them.

Bush's Star Wars fantasy

While the US economy languishes and schools get "left behind" in the Bush budget, our president has somehow managed to eke out almost $11 billion (that's billion with a B) this year alone to fund and deploy a missile defense system that's so full of glitches and problems that its technicians don't know what's wrong with it or how to make it work. No matter - it doesn't make a difference whether it works or is worth $11 billion... as long as it's in place before election day. From Slate:

Back in the early 1980s, after some scandals involving major weapons systems that were deployed before they'd been adequately tested, the Pentagon adopted a policy of 'fly before buy.' No system would graduate from research and development to procurement until it had passed a series of tests - not just 'development tests,' in which a weapon demonstrates certain technical milestones, but 'operational tests,' in which the weapon demonstrates it can do what it's supposed to do in an environment simulating combat.

The interceptors at Fort Greely haven't passed development tests, much less operational tests. Yet they're being hoisted into their silos as we speak - 10 in the coming weeks, 10 more scheduled for next year.

This is so boneheaded that it never ceases to amaze me. Whatever the merits of a missile defense system may be, you don't spend billions of dollars to manufacture and deploy it until you've got the technology worked out and know it will perform as advertised. Why do you do this? (1) So that you don't waste oodles of dollars on a project that won't actually get the job done, and (2) so that you don't have a false sense of security about a technology that may well fail, when other avenues might have been pursued that actually would provide you with some protection.

The Americans who believe Bush's sales pitch on Star Wars are the same types who really do believe that the Ginsu knife will never need sharpening, even if you cut through pop cans and footballs with it. Wishful thinking is what it is... only we're talking wishful thinking that will cost us our economic future, and not just a crappy $20 set of Ginsu knives.

Slate: Bush lets down his Guard

Bush has some answering to do to the National Guard. An insightful analysis:

Bush has pulled Guard troops away from their homeland security duties to fight and die in a war unrelated to the service for which they enlisted. A Guardsman who did less than he signed up for is coercing other Guardsmen to do more than they signed up for...

Those brave, loyal, hoodwinked Guardsmen. They think Bush is one of them. They don't understand that the only presidential candidate who's done the job they're doing now - risking life and shedding blood - is the guy on the other side.

Slate: "What Is an Assault Weapon?"

So, now the federal ban on assault weapons has been allowed by Congress to expire. What sort of goodies can Americans (excepting residents of California, Connecticut, Maryland, Hawaii, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New York, which have statewide bans) now add to their personal amories?

In addition to purchasing semiautomatic rifles with bayonet mounts and grenade launchers, consumers may also outfit their new firearms with newly affordable 100-round clips.

This was all for hunting, right, Mr. Heston? Nothing like bayonetting a dear to death. Once you've sprayed it with twenty or thirty rounds in rapid succession, that is.

Boston archdiocese seeks to close churches

Part of the fallout from the sickening failures of leadership in the Boston archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church? The archdiocese is attempting to close congregations in order to recover financially from the massive payouts stemming from the sexual abuse of parishioners by their clergy, and the wink-wink handling of the whole sordid affair by higher-ups. Reports MSNBC:

The parishes - St. Albert the Great in Weymouth, St. Anselm in Sudbury and St. Bernard in Newton - are among 82 that Bishop Sean P. O'Malley ordered shut by year's end in a restructuring prompted by falling attendance and economic woes caused partly by the clergy sex abuse scandal that began in Boston.

St. Albert parishioners, who have occupied that church since Aug. 29, went to court seeking an injunction to stop the archdiocese from selling church buildings and other assets, arguing that the church belongs to them, not the archdiocese. They also argue that St. Albert's, with 1,600 families, a paid-off mortgage and renovated buildings, fits none of the criteria O'Malley said would be used to decide which churches would be shuttered.

LAPTOP UPDATE

Windows is installed and running well. I've got the Compaq drivers for the laptop installed, and my laptop is once again on the wireless network. I'm now able to surf and post from the laptop, so updates will be easier (and therefore more frequent). I've still got over 40 items on my "Restore To-Do" list, so I'm far from done for the day. But just getting to the point where I'm in Windows and online is a good thing.

I want to emphasize that I haven't lost any data at all... I'm just giving my laptop a fresh start again. Once everything is set up, the next step will be to do a full image to my external hard drive.

On to Windows Update...

LAPTOP UPDATE

Laptop died. Using Pocket PC to post. Writing is tedious - this will be short. Will be spending all day tomorrow restoring laptop. Will update blog if possible with progress.

Another theory on the Killian memos

Blogger Steve Smith weighs in on the Killian memos regarding Bush's TANG service, with a rather persuasive argument: The White House has never denied the validity of the memos, even after they have been dissected by bloggers everywhere. Perhaps that's because they are recently-typed doppelgangers of original memos that the President knows to exist and be accurate? Worth taking a look at, and quite a bit less paranoid than my conspiracy theory. ;)

What are you looking for?

Wondering what people are searching for when they land on my web site? Here's a list of the latest search queries that have led people here. (I'm mortified to note that the large number of people looking for information on the assault weapons ban found my blog because both they and I happened to misspell "assault" as "assualt." The typo has since been corrected, but the typo search results continue to come in, since the search engines haven't reindexed that page yet. Doh!) Anyway, here are the results... *drumroll*

• >http://www.planetdan.net/junk/seniors/index.htm
  
• assualt weapons ban
  
• assualt weapons ban
  
• metaphor fall off the wagon
  
• assualt ban expire
  
• setting up birthday party for pa
  
• rick foss elca
  
• >http://www.planetdan.net/junk/seniors/index.htm
  
• pastor blog
  
• assualt weapons
  
• giuliani assualt weapons
  
• bush speech ob-gyn popular bluff
  
• assualt weapons ban expires
  
• assualt weapons ban
  
• changes by assualt weapon ban
  
• how do i describe a room

If Jesus were running against Dub...

What if Jesus were running for President as an independent? What would the Bush campaign's ads look like? A graphic that's making its rounds on the web takes a stab at that fascinating question.

Tip of the hat to Mary Hess at Tensegrities for the link.

Daily Mislead: "Report Shows Bush Neglecting Hunt for al Qaeda"

Today's "Daily Mislead" from www.Misleader.org:

In the months after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush promised America he would make the hunt for al Qaeda the number one objective of his administration. "[We] do everything we can to chase [al Qaeda] down and bring them to justice," Bush said. "That's a key priority, obviously, for me and my administration."[1] But according to a new report, the President has dangerously underfunded and understaffed the intelligence unit charged with tracking down al Qaeda's leader.

The New York Times reports "Three years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency has fewer experienced case officers assigned to its headquarters unit dealing with Osama bin Laden than it did at the time of the attacks." The bin Laden unit is "stretched so thin that it relies on inexperienced officers rotated in and out every 60 to 90 days, and they leave before they know enough to be able to perform any meaningful work."[2]

The revelation comes months after the Associated Press reported the Bush Treasury Department "has assigned five times as many agents to investigate Cuban embargo violations as it has to track Osama bin Laden's" financial infrastructure.[3] It also comes after USA Today reported that the President shifted "resources from the bin Laden hunt to the war in Iraq" in 2002.

Specifically, Bush moved special forces tracking al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and into Iraq war preparations. He also left the CIA "stretched badly in its capacity to collect, translate and analyze information coming from Afghanistan."[4] That has allowed these terrorists to regroup: according to the senior intelligence officials in July of this year, bin Laden and other top al Qaeda leaders are now directing a plot "to carry out a large-scale terror attack against the United States" and are overseeing the plan "from their remote hideouts somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border."[5]

Sources:

1. "President Calls for Ticket to Independence in Welfare Reform," WhiteHouse.gov, 5/10/02, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1350268&l=55681.
2. "C.I.A. Unit on bin Laden Is Understaffed, a Senior Official Tells Lawmakers," New York Times, 9/15/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1350268&l=55682.
3. "More Agents Track Castro Than Bin Laden," Common Dreams News Center, 4/29/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1350268&l=55683.
4. "Shifts from bin Laden hunt evoke questions," USA Today, 3/28/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1350268&l=55684.
5. "Officials: Bin Laden guiding plots against U.S.," CNN.com, 7/08/04, http://daily.misleader.org/ctt.asp?u=1350268&l=55685.

Christian Spam: Christian Mortgage USA

Several months back I posted a rant against "Christian" spammers in this blog. While the tide of spam from supposedly Christian organizations seems to have turned back for now, I received a particularly odious one this morning: It's spamvertizing a company called Christian Mortgage USA.

What is so noxious about this particular spam? It's that mortgage spam is one of your three or four main spam food groups. The previous "Christian" spam I was getting at least promoted Christian tools and services. This spam, on the other hand, has sunk to the new low of merely baptizing the shameless mortgage spam, turning it into a cynically capitalistic attempt to cash in on Christian recipients.

Of course, as with any spam, the proper thing to do is to delete it and never, ever purchase spamvertized goods or services, even if they do happen to mention Jesus. Spam is bad. Jesus is not. Do you really want to financially aid someone who is essentially making the name of Jesus into a sleazy marketing technique? I didn't think so.

Another morning, another headache

Yuck... two in a row. Right off the bat this morning I had a headache. I'm pretty sure this one's not a migraine - it's more the kind where you're kinda OK if you sit still, but it flares up when you move... it's not a searing pain, so much as the feeling that your head is being scrunched under something heavy enough that you should know better than to have your head under it in the first place.

Well, I scarfed two Aleves first thing after getting up, and am now drinking some kona blend coffee. Just because I don't think it's a migraine doesn't mean I'm not going to try the usual remedy... besides, it's really good coffee, and I'm out of milk.

It's a rainy, cold day here - a good one for laying low. I think I'll do some reading, and maybe put in "The Passion of the Christ" or the "Jesus: Fact or Fiction?" DVD I got free with it. As a pastor, I want to watch "Passion" again, to view it with fresh eyes. I also want to watch the other disc to see whether it might be useful for an adult forum or movie night at some point. And since watching DVDs doesn't require any real motion (unless you're watching "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"), I should be OK for that much at least.

We'll see how it goes. I'm not dying or anything, but it's sure not how I'd planned on these few days going!

Of aching brains and memory errors

Today has not been the productive day I had hoped for.

Almost immediately after waking up, I realized I had a migraine coming on strong. I'm one of the "fortunate" migraine sufferers who has the classic symptom: auras. Before a migraine sets in and the pain gets to me, my vision becomes shimmery. It starts in the periphery, so subtle at first that I wonder whether I'm just imagining it. But as it begins to creep toward the center, and more and more of my field of vision is dancing, there's no doubt left. I've got an hour at most before the pain begins.

I've learned that if I act quickly once the auras set in, I can usually head the headache off. The normal treatment of choice? Two Aleve tablets and a can of whatever's in the fridge that's got plenty of caffeine. If there's no caffeine handy, I've even ODed on Aleve (three tablets on the day of my graduation from Concordia) once or twice, when I absolutely couldn't be crippled by a headache.

Today I was able to dodge the bullet in my head, but I wasn't so lucky with the one on my laptop. Upon waking it up from hibernation, the hard drive whirred away while the screen remained blank, except for a blinking white cursor. Never a good sign.

After several reboots, I was able to get to the WinXP logon screen, but immediately an error would pop up, reporting that SVCHOST.EXE was attempting to write to an invalid memory address. After two of these errors, the computer became immobilized. Great. This happened repeatedly.

I was able to boot into Safe Mode, and ran a full virus scan and two full spyware scans. (SVCHOST errors often are related to worms or spyware, and although I'm pretty obsessive about computer security, I figured it was the obvious thing to investigate first.) Nothing, of course. No hardware issues reported by the Device Manager. Nothing to go on.

I Googled around looking for answers, but finally gave up and gave the system a reboot. It fired up just fine, and I've been able to use it all day.

I immediately went to work backing up all my files. (Ximeta's NetDisk external hard drive is a highly recommended tool for your kit, along with a copy of Acronis True Image.) I've now got everything backed up, and should be able to deal if the computer is screwy again the next time I reboot it.

Between headache and hardware-ache, I didn't get a lot accomplished that I'd intended. That's how it goes some days. I'm just happy not to have spent the day clutching my head, moaning, and restoring my laptop from scratch.

You see? There's always a silver lining.

Twin Cities Babelogue

Who knew? Back on March 3, my blog was featured on City Pages' "Twin Cities Babelogue" as the Minnesota Blog of the Day:

MINNESOTA BLOG OF THE DAY
Concordia graduate Bob Schaefer is a Lutheran pastor. Read his review of 'The Passion' at his blog.

I've had a few hits from TCB, but I hadn't realized that I was featured until this very afternoon. Thanks for the link!

Good God, do we really need this?

Behold the new Navistar CXT sport utility vehicle, and shudder:

At 258 inches, or 21-1/2 feet long, the CXT is about 4-1/2 feet longer than the new Hummer H2 pickup, and about 2 inches longer than the F-350 Crew Cab.

But the way it really towers over what's on the road now is in height. At 108 inches, or 9 feet, the CXT stands only a foot below a basketball rim and more than two feet above the Hummer or the F-350.

'It's not going to fit into the standard garage,' said Mark Oberle, a spokesman for Navistar, based in Warrenville, Ill., outside Chicago.

Slate: Does God endorse George Bush?

An interesting and timely question. I honestly wrestle with this. As a Lutheran, I believe strongly that everyone is called by God - that they have a "vocation" (from the Latin vocatio, or "call"). My vocation or calling at this moment is to be a minister of Word and Sacrament. But I believe that my calling is more specific than that, even - that I'm called to be the pastor here, in Litchville and Hastings, ND.

The Bible, and old Saint Martin himself, assert in numerous places that the rulers of this world have no power except what God gives them. God uses them to build up his people, or to punish them, but the rulers are always understood as under the control of the divine hand. Luther went so far as to argue that a Christian ought not rise up against his ruler, even if a tyrant, because God has many ways to handle a despot if he so chooses. The Christian's calling, Luther claims, is to pray for those above him, to obey insofar as faithfulness to the Gospel allows, and to correct insofar as is called for by the Gospel, in a spirit of humility.

Which brings us back to Bush.

Allowing that even despots might be guided by the hand of God, is it possible that Bush - who received no electoral mandate - has nevertheless been given some sort of divine mandate? (Slate quotes Gen William "Jerry" Boykin, in a marvelous example of spin control: "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of America did not vote for him. He's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.")

OK, so I could grudgingly accept the notion that Bush has been called to some sort of public service, that his vocation is to be a leader of some kind in this country.

But why do I resist the idea that he might have been called to the presidency (if not in 2004, then perhaps in 2000)? Because my own calling is not a general one, simply "t