Tonight, I have nothing to do. After tonight? Social, service, or family obligations nine out of the next ten days. One is very pleasant (tree decorating with the family), but the rest are simple time consumers (committee meetings, take care of house and children while Marie is out, a perfectly painful Christmas party for children, etc.). But I will prevail! By the power of Norman Vincent Peale positive thinking, a few pale ales, and--in a pinch--a chemical lobotomy, I will make it through.
Al Qaeda has denounced Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Turkey, calling it part of a "crusader campaign" against Islam. Is anyone surprised? To someone who lives in jihad, everything is war. You couldn't offer to take these guys out for a beer (oh wait, they don't drink) without them thinking it's a crusade.
Were you a little young to remember the Polish Solidarity movement? The forthcoming issue of Touchstone has a good commemoration in it. Highly recommended. Excerpt:
In 1980, workers did not take to the streets carrying signs and banners of protest and images of the Black Madonna, the patroness of Poland. They stayed in their workplaces. With enormous courage and discipline, they passively dared the government's troops to attack them there, where all they were doing was issuing written demands, praying, singing patriotic songs, confessing to the priests who came to minister to them, and receiving Holy Communion.
And of course this tactic of massively organized Christian nonviolence had a radically different result. On August 31, 1980, two weeks after the general strike began, several of Solidarity's most important demands, including a forty-hour workweek and recognition of Solidarity as a legitimate union representing the interests of Polish workers, independent of the phony, communist trade unions set up by the government, were agreed to in formal accords signed by representatives of Solidarity and the government.
But if that type of thing is too sobering, you can rest in the lesbianism of Rosie O'Donnell: Today on "The View," Rosie invited Britney Spears to live with her, her wife Kelly, and their kids, and begged Britney to forsake what she called her new "idiot" BFFs -- Hilton and Lohan. Rosie says her offer is purely maternal. Okay.
Mel Gibson has said a few nice words for Michael Richards, much to the glee of secularists who think it's a bigot love-fest. You can't reason with such folks. You can scoff at their intellectual perfection, but you can't reason with their intellectual perfection.
Idea of the day: "Outbursts like Richards' are inevitable in a climate that on one hand is overrun with political correctness and on the other mocks the very idea that there is such a thing as bad taste." I like it. I'm not sure it's correct, but it's worth thinking about.
Interesting new study bodes well for me:
You'll live longer if you tie the knot rather than stay single, a new study suggests, and if you stay married rather than split up. Using 1989 and 1997 data from the National Health Interview Survey and the National Death Index respectively, and measuring across a variety of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, researchers found that being unmarried significantly increased one's chances of dying during the period studied . . .
