Since we’re talking about popes …

… a letter to the editor in the Plain Dealer yesterday complained about the disrespect shown to Catholics by the Non Sequitur cartoon strip by Wiley that had appeared the previous Wednesday. The letter began:

I thought the mass media were in agreement that insults based on race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation or creed have no place in civil discourse. Apparently, the creator of the comic strip “Non Sequitur” believes the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics don’t deserve such consideration.

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Justice – American style

Indefinite detention, torture and testimony obtained from torture, spying on attorney-client conversations, solitary confinement for months and years, no habeas corpus, military tribunals that suspend normal rules of due process, all these are now part of the brave new world that we live in as a result of the war on terror. Ah, for the days of the Cold War when the US used such charges to bludgeon the Soviet bloc nations as part of the propaganda blitz to show the world how evil they were and how superior the US system of justice was. [Read more…]

You mean deer can’t read?

Some time ago, I came across an amusing audio clip of a woman calling a radio talk show to complain about the fact that she had collided three times with deer within the past year near places where there were deer crossing signs. She said that she couldn’t understand why the state placed those signs in high traffic areas instead of places where there were fewer cars. It began to slowly dawn on the radio hosts that the woman thought that the deer chose their crossing points based on the signs. [Read more…]