rosetta stone: The Loveliness of Staying Connected

re: link to carnival of posts on everyday ways to stay connected with a husband...

Media Mythbusters Blog » Would You Please Invite Big Brother In?

re: "Via Instapundit, an attempt by the Washington, D.C. Police to convince residents to allow officers into their homes for voluntary gun searches..."...

Bookworm Room » Let’s just ignore the other problems

re: "I grew up spending a large part of my life at Lake Tahoe. At that time, Tahoe was a brilliant blue and crystal clear. More than a decade ago, after a long hiatus, I returned to Tahoe. I was overwhelmed by the crowds, by the wall to wall houses, by the big green lawns everywhere (it is, after all, a high desert), and by the fact that the lake was swampy. When I visited a favorite lakeside beach from my childhood, I was shocked that the water was brown and had massive amounts of algae floating through it. The general consensus amongst Lake residents was the the problem stemmed from the vastly increased population and the lawns — the nitrogen in peoples’ fertilizer was flowing into the lake and providing a perfect breeding ground for algae. /I was therefore quite surprised to read that my perceptions were and are all wrong. According to scientists and the news there is no problem now — the lake is crystal clear, according to the following article — but that there will be a future problem from (you can all say it with me here) global warming..."...

Planned Parenthood Abortion Business Makes $1 Billion Profit for First Time

re: "Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- A new annual report from Planned Parenthood shows the nation's largest abortion business has made over $1 billion in profit for the first time in its history. The non-profit pro-abortion group shows the historical gain in its new annual report covering 2006-2007./While Planned Parenthood made $972 milion in its 2005-2006 annual report, last fiscal year it brought in $1.017 billion. /On its web site posting of the annual document, Planned Parenthood says it "highlights our advancements in providing and protecting trusted health care services and medically accurate sexuality education." /Instead, the report finds Planned Parenthood doing more abortions than ever before. /The report shows an increase in the number of provided abortions from 264,943 in 2005 to 289,650 in 2006..."...

hat tip: Alliance Alert

The Great Beyond: Physicist-priest wins $1.7 million prize

re: "A Polish physicist and priest has won the annual million-dollar Templeton Prize for “progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities”. /Michael Heller walks away with $1.7 million for investigating questions including whether the Universe needs to have a cause (press release)..."...

hat tip: Frank Wilson

ZENIT - Thousands in U.S. to Join Church

re: "WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH 11, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Tens of thousands of Americans will join the Catholic Church this Holy Saturday through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. / Many of those in the RCIA program participated in the Rite of Election with their bishops at the beginning of Lent and will be baptized, confirmed and receive Communion for the first time this Saturday. More, who already have been baptized, will embrace full membership in the Catholic Church... [snip]... According to early figures from the 2007 Official Catholic Directory, last year almost 64,500 adults were baptized in the Catholic Church and nearly 93,000 came into full communion./ These numbers are supplemented by the baptisms of infants that occur in parishes throughout the year. It is estimated that more than a million infant baptisms will take place in the U.S. during 2008..."...

Credentials « Charlotte was Both

re: "Last week, new US ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon presented her credentials to Pope Benedict. Elizabeth Lev writes of the occasion for Zenit with her usual grace and insight - even more so this time, since her mother is, well, Mary Ann Glendon..."...

ADF Alliance Alert » Thomas More Law Center: Advocates State Personhood Amendment in Oregon

re: "Thomas More Law Center has issued this press release. It begins: //The Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will present oral arguments to an Oregon Circuit Court judge in defense of a proposed amendment to the Oregon Constitution crafted by the Law Center that would protect human life from the moment of fertilization. /In addition to this effort in Oregon, the Thomas More Law Center has been working with pro-life leaders in Georgia, Colorado, and Montana to pass similar state constitutional amendments . . . /Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Law Center . . . “For too long the national pro-life movement has been dominated by a strategy of “wait,” too fearful of losing to risk winning.” . . . "...

No Left Turns: Random Observations

re: Peter Lawler: "...5. The great dignity volume produced by the Bioethics Council is now available at bioethics.gov. You can either request a copy or download it..."...

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | South Korea swaps first astronaut

re: "Yi So-yeon, 29, is to replace Ko San, 31, on a Russian flight to the International Space Station in April. /Russia's Federal Space Agency requested the change because Mr Ko broke training centre rules, a senior official said. /South Korean officials played down the breaches, which involved removing reading material from the centre. /On one occasion, Mr Ko sent a training book back to South Korea - something he said was by mistake. /On another, he received a book from a Russian colleague that he was not meant to read, said Lee Sang-mok of South Korea's Ministry of Education, Science and Technology..."...

Vital Signs: For Weekend Web Reading

re: "Randy Alcorn has a couple of very thoughtful devotional essays on his blog dealing, respectively, with Blaise Pacal (illustration at left) and Augustine. ...[snip...] / * On this page at Christian Heritage, our old English L'Abri friends Ian Cooper and Ranald Macaulay weigh in on Richard Dawkins' much-ballyhooed atheism... [ snip]... /there's an incredible difference between hearing a mere sound bite and a bunch of blathering comments from journalists about what Bill Cosby said...and just hearing Bill Cosby make his case in full. Read it (or even listen to a portion it) right here..."...

Vital Signs: Why Oppose Personhood Legislation?

re: "Judie Brown, president of American Life League just sent out a provocative letter responding to the recent refusal of certain Catholic bishops in Georgia, Montana and Colorado to support legislation in their respective states that would recognize the legal personhood of preborn human beings. The letter is a little too lengthy to print in full here (and I'm guessing that it will soon be on the ALL web site, so look for it) but I wanted to print some of the most important points Judie makes..."...

Part of the problem | The San Diego Union-Tribune

re: "...Charity is a positive thing, and especially when it comes from private individuals as opposed to government. Otherwise, there is always the risk that the whole enterprise might become an exercise in fostering dependence. /And yet, thanks to the bizarre world of reality television, we are now confronted with something you don't see every day: a spectacle that actually manages to give “giving” a bad name. / Oprah Winfrey's latest brainchild is called “Oprah's Big Give.” And, based on first impressions, it looks more like a big mistake..."...

hat tip: Real Clear Politics

Gov. Schwarzenegger Issues Statement Regarding Court of Appeals Home Schooling Ruling - Press Release by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger

re: "Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today issued the following statement regarding the recent Second District Court of Appeals ruling on home schooling: / "Every California child deserves a quality education and parents should have the right to decide what's best for their children. Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children's education. This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts and if the courts don't protect parents' rights then, as elected officials, we will."

hat tip: Alliance Alert

Welcome To One80: Is Your Life Right Side Up?

re: "...I feel so strongly that this current generation of young people could rise up and reclaim our communities, our country, and our world for the cause of God's Kingdom. But we must have our hearts stirred and we must believe that another world is possible in order for that to happen..."...

Bookworm Room » Having meaning in ones life

re: "...As always with me, these ruminations about life take me to politics and the difference between Left and Right. Thus, when I started thinking about Harry’s plight, and the absence of meaning in his life before his Afghanistan deployment, that Clintonian statement “the politics of meaning” kept popping into my head. As you may recall, when the Clintons stormed the national political scene in the early 1990s, much was made of the “politics of meaning.” /The “politics of meaning” is a phrase that originated with Michael Lerner, the radical rabbi who was Hillary’s intellectual mentor in the early 1990s. Jonah Goldberg, relying on a 1993 piece Michael Kelly wrote for the New York Times Magazine, has a nice summary of what Hillary meant when she talked about her understanding of this concept and the way in which she hoped to make its abstractions real in American government..."...

Mark Steyn on William F. Buckley, Jr. on National Review Online

re: "...The 1950s are assumed, at least by children of the Sixties, to be a “conservative” era. But at home New Deal liberalism controlled all the levers of society and abroad the Communists had gobbled up half of Europe, neutered most of the rest, swiped China, were eyeing up other valuable real estate across the planet, and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment was inclined to accept this as a permanent feature of life to be “managed” rather than defeated. The Republican minority in Congress were isolationists or country-club liberals, and their presidential nominees were “moderates” like Dewey or non-partisans like Ike. There was virtually no serious intellectual energy in American conservatism. The notion that in the early 21st century more Americans would identify themselves as “conservatives” than as “liberals” would have struck the elites of 50 years ago as preposterous: a scenario unimaginable outside the more fanciful dystopian science fiction... [snip]... Then Bill Buckley showed up and was brilliantly effective. In the barren soil of the Fifties, he planted what became a mighty family tree that includes not just Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan but millions of other Americans. I’ve been amazed in recent days by the number of e-mails I’ve received from readers retelling essentially the same story across the decades: Buckley came to their college in the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, or Nineties, and the scales fell from their eyes. Or they were in the local library and found a stray copy of something called “National Review” that had somehow managed to penetrate the perimeter fence. Or they were flipping through the channels late at night and stumbled across this cool guy with a pencil effortlessly eviscerating some liberal panjandrum..."...

No Left Turns: Cleaner Louisiana

re: "Bobby Jindal, six weeks into his term as governor of Louisiana has started his reforms. The watchwords are ethics and transparency and almost no one thought he could do it, but he has. This fellow is worth keeping an eye on..."...

HolyCoast.com: Weather Channel Founder Wants to Sue Al Gore

re: "I've written before that Weather Channel found John Coleman is not a fan of human-caused global warming. The channel he founded, on the other hand, is hip deep in the stuff. Today Coleman had some things to say about that..."...

America, Europe and the management of danger | A hazardous comparison | Economist.com

re: "...Few Americans or west Europeans would trade their relatively risk-free existence for the tingling dice with death that can go with daily life in Russia. But many would endorse the insistence of the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, on the sanctity of the right to incur danger: “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.” Being reckless from time to time preserves what is “most precious and most important—that is, our personality, our individuality.”..."...

TV Film on Nazi Germany's "Titanic" Draws Millions of Viewers | Deutsche Welle | 03.03.2008

re: "Millions of Germans tuned in to a television film about the 1945 sinking of a Nazi ship full of refugees in the Baltic, which cost 9,000 lives and surpassed the Titanic as the worst maritime disaster in modern times..."...

The Death Culture Strikes Again

re: "A rise in suicide among the young seems to be tied to the emergence of on-line suicide sites that offer advice and encouragement to kill oneself..."...

Giovanni da Verrazzano - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

re: "Giovanni da Verrazzano [1] (c. 1485 – c. 1528) was an Italian explorer of North America, in the service of the French crown. He is renowned as the first European to explore the Atlantic coast of North America between South Carolina and Newfoundland in 1524, including New York Harbor where the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is named in his honor, and Narragansett Bay, where the Jamestown-Verrazano Bridge is located..."...