The illness lingers, but I think it's mostly over. I'm actually going to try to exercise today. Nothing too rigorous. Maybe three miles on the stationary bike, or maybe some light weightlifting, or maybe just a couple of groans thinking about it. We'll see.
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It's a good day, though. Marie and The Seven left me. They're apparently coming back, but not until Sunday evening, thereby leaving me in a quiet house for 48 hours. It's too bad I had to work until after 7:00 last night. I would've liked to have enjoyed the Great Silence starting at noon yesterday.
When people hear my wife is gone, their reaction is normally, "Cool. You gonna get drunk?" The answer is, "No, I can get drunk when my family is home. I'm going to do things that I can't do when the family is here, like sit in silence, read, maybe do some research." Nobody gets it, but I couldn't imagine it any other way.
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Michael Moore banned in China: Movies involving "wronged spirits and violent ghosts, monsters, demons, and other inhuman portrayals, strange and supernatural storytelling for the sole purpose of seeking terror and horror" have been banned in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics.
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One of the worst parts about my illness: Only catching bits of the Canterbury Tales of Sharia last week, and being too sick to digest it or comment on it. Oh well, Anne Applebaum has done an excellent job, as indicated by the fact that her analysis was picked up by sources as disparate as WaPo and Catholic Education Resource Center. Excerpt:
Many explanations for the archbishop's statements have already been proffered: the weakness of the Church of England, the paganism of the British, the feebleness of Williams's intellect, the decline of the West. At base, though, his beliefs are merely an elaborate, intellectualized version of a commonly held, and deeply offensive, Western prejudice: Alone among all of the world's many religious groups, Muslims living in Western countries cannot be expected to conform to Western law – or perhaps do not deserve to be treated as legal equals of their non-Muslim neighbors.
When are we going to realize that Muslims are the flu of Western Civilization (spare me references to Averroes and Avicenna; their contributions to the West are a thousand years old)? They might not kill us, but they'd like to; they weaken healthy Western bodies; they spread; they're developing resistance to conventional antibiotics (like law).
We don't need to undertake measures to stamp out every possibility of the flu. The marginal costs of such measures would be prohibitive and have potential bad side effects. Likewise, we shouldn't remove Muslims from the West, but we shouldn't encourage their presence and we should always be ready to vaccinate and take other measures to prevent the strain from getting too strong.
