Things I’ve Seen

Public Christian is a site I might look at a bit more…

Jeanne, at Body and Soul, had been thinking of giving up blogging. I’m glad she hasn’t.

Body and Soul: Hunger

Although it isn’t back to its 1996 peak, when the sanctions were doing their greatest damage, the rate of acute malnutrition among children under 5 has doubled since we invaded Iraq. The main reason seems to be continuing lack of access to clean water, which can cause chronic diarrhea. Other things hurt as well: humanitarian organizations like CARE and Doctors Without Borders have had to leave as it became more and more dangerous to work there; Iraqi doctors are prime targets for criminals. But mostly children are malnourished because we’ve done a worse job than Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War in getting clean water to them.

Read.

Here are four alternatives

I don’t know when Google Scholar came out, or how widely it indexes, but it seems to have most of the major journals in my (previous) field…

As one small additional step in fighting comment spam, I’ve now automated the process by which new items from the master blacklist get included in my local blacklist.
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From Sojourners:

1. Jesus Christ, as attested in Holy Scripture, knows no national boundaries….
2. Christ commits Christians to a strong presumption against war….
3. Christ commands us to see not only the splinter in our adversary’s eye, but also the beam in our own….
4. Christ shows us that enemy-love is the heart of the gospel….
5. Christ teaches us that humility is the virtue befitting forgiven sinners….

Go and read it, I’ve edited out all sorts of good stuff for brevity.

New Testament Democrat is obviously very US-centric, but it’s another piece of the response to Christianism.

New Testament Democrats draw on the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John for their political philosophy. We believe that we must help the poor, sick, and hungry. We believe that we must lead peaceful lives, but at the same time not tolerate those who want to destroy our peace. We must work for peace in the world. We hunger and thirst for justice, and are willing to suffer persecution for justice’s sake. We reject the greed prevalent in today’s culture and understand that we cannot serve both God and money. We believe that we must love our brothers and sisters as we love ourselves.

…New Testament Democrats and Old Testament Republicans are different in many ways. On the issue of abortion, OTR’s want to make all abortions illegal and imprison doctors and mothers. NTD’s also believe that abortion is at odds with the teachings of Jesus Christ, but we also do not think that it is necessary to put doctors and mothers in jail for making a moral mistake. Instead we believe in truly [c]reating a culture of life through sex education, birth control and making adoptions more affordable and easier.

Now this is fantastic. You know those maps which show the US a sea of red, with beleaguered outposts of blue all but disappearing in the onslaught? Look again. And this time, look carefully…

A (relatively minor) result from the recent US elections has been overturned following an audit - a hand recount of the results from an electronic voting machine…

A recently found computer glitch in the voting machines in Franklin County, Indiana has given a democrat enough votes to bump a republican from victory in a County Commissioner’s race.

The glitch in the machines recorded straight Democratic Party votes for Libertarians.

The votes were re-counted last night, by hand.

The company who made the voting machine is also checking into programming of it’s equipment in nine other Indiana counties.

MSN Search is now out in Beta. brainsnorkel isn’t impressed…

Based on 15 minutes of play my verdict is that I might use it when it’s more reliable, ranks results better, indexes my local PC, performs better than Google, and my desktop freezes over… which I guess could be the next time I upgrade Windows.

But the real money quote is from Alastair in the comments:

“MSN Search” does not verb well. “Just MSN Search it” does not have the same ring to it as “Just Google it”.

But it’s not just the verb - or am I the only one to find myself saying “I’ll ask google, google will know”?