Pinging stuff I care about.
I make a foray into mashupland, aided by the magic of GarageBand — and bring you Steve It.
Released under a “I don’t have any legal right to sample this crap in the first place so I can hardly restrict other people from redistributing or modifying my work” license. :)
“When Vin Diesel recently underwent surgery to remove an obstructed liver, surgeons were suprised to find a smaller Vin Diesel inside him.”
The preferences window has been updated. It no longer looks like it was made by a drunk windows programmer, now it looks more like a drunk mac programmer designed it.
beatmixed: Joan Jett vs. Queen – We Will Rock and Roll You:
Now that’s some tasty mashup!
The trouble with mashups for someone as musically clueless as me is that half the time they’re mashing up things you’ve never heard of. Here’s a technically tight, catchy mashup, accessible to chumps like me. Ain’t nobody hasn’t listened to to Joan Jett and Queen, nobody my age anyway.
I had been afraid that Ratzinger would be continue all the bad things about JPII and none of the good things. I need not have feared that he would continue none of the good things — his anti-war stance has been, and is, at least as strong as JPII’s. Via James in IMs…
New Pope A Strong Critic of War:
The election of Benedict XVI as pope brings hope for the continuation of peacemaking as central to the papacy. Just as John Paul II cried out again and again to the world, “War never again!” the new pope has taken the name of the one who first made that cry, Benedict XV, commonly known as “the peace pope.”
The name is no coincidence. In fact, Cardinal Justin Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia said Tuesday that the new pope told the cardinals he was selecting Benedict because “he is desirous to continue the efforts of Benedict XV on behalf of peace … throughout the world.”
As a Cardinal, the new pope was a staunch critic of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. On one occasion before the war, he was asked whether it would be just. “Certainly not,” he said, and explained that the situation led him to conclude that “the damage would be greater than the values one hopes to save.”
“All I can do is invite you to read the Catechism, and the conclusion seems obvious to me…” The conclusion is one he gave many times: “the concept of preventive war does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.”
Even after the war, Ratzinger did not cease criticism of U.S. violence and imperialism: “it was right to resist the war and its threats of destruction…It should never be the responsibility of just one nation to make decisions for the world.”
Yet perhaps the most important insight of Ratzinger came during a press conference on May 2, 2003. After suggesting that perhaps it would be necessary to revise the Catechism section on just war (perhaps because it had been used by George Weigel and others to endorse a war the Church opposed), Ratzinger offered a deep insight that included but went beyond the issue of war Iraq:
“There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war’.”