St. Benedict's Feast Day. I took a medieval history class at the University of Michigan back in the 1980s. Rule for Monasteries was required reading. I don't remember anything about the professor (Catholic? Secularist that wanted to freak out college kids?), don't remember what kind of impact the book made on me, and maddeningly don't remember much about the course itself. But I remember the professor saying (rough quote), "You can't understand the Middle Ages if you don't understand this little book." Indeed.
Later addendum: It's St. Bernard's Feast Day, not St. Benedict's. See explanation below.
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Nifty fact to have on hand today: In this day in 1940, Leon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico City by Frank Jackson wielding an ice-pick. I knew Trotsky was murdered over here (for some reason, I thought it was South America), but I never knew any details. How many ice pick stabs did it take?
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Late night humor from Craig Ferguson: "Police in Denver are getting ready for the Democratic Convention in Denver. They're ordering the stun guns, the barbed wire, the plastic handcuffs . . . and that's just for Bill Clinton's room."
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I found these words of wisdom yesterday at Taki's Magazine. It's a quote by Bill Kauffman:
The last three major-party presidential candidates standing have this in common: the state abbreviations after their names--John McCain (AZ), Hillary Clinton (NY), and Barack Obama (IL)--are no more meaningful than the random pairings of letters in a spoonful of alphabet soup. These are the candidates from nowhere. Or in Obama's case, from everywhere. And this rootlessness has policy consequences.
[...]
Obama's limitless internationalism is encapsulated in his statement that “When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern.” This is, quite possibly, the most expansive definition ever essayed of the American national interest. It is a license for endless interventions in the affairs of other nations. It is a recipe for blundering into numberless wars-which will be fought, disproportionately, by those God & Guns small-town Americans evidently despised or pitied by Mr. Obama. It is redolent of the biblical assurance that not even a sparrow can fall to the earth unnoticed by God. The congruence of the roles of the deity and U.S. foreign policy in Obama's mind is not reassuring to those of us who desire peace and a modest role for the U.S. military.
Kauffman's entire piece can be found here.
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Another interesting piece at Taki: Yellow Peril!–How the Beijing Olympics Became the Most Politicized Show on Earth. Excerpt:
In America and Europe, the Great and the Good, offended by China's rise and its apparently bad habits, no longer talk about “the Olympics”–they talk about the “Genocide Olympics,” the “Smog Olympics,” or the “Human Rights Olympics.”
