Pinging stuff I care about.
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’.”
Calvin to Welcome President Bush
Alma mater, you’re dead to me.
So says papyrology student Hannibal at Ars Technica.
So as of right now, the rest of the papyrological community is waiting to hear Dirk Obbink at Oxford either back up for disavow the claims made in the article. At the very best, the Independent’s reporters are covering some kind of new imaging breakthrough in an extremely hyperbolic fashion. And at the worst, they’re trying to make a major story out of 20-year-old news.
Huh. Guess I fell for the hype. Good thing I’m not a Classicist anymore.
UPDATE: New York Sun has a more sober followup.
Tho Fan, via James. Cool article, giving the whole history of the language and its creator.
I used to dabble in conlanging for roleplaying game cultures. What killed me as a conlanger was getting stuck in the idea that I needed to know everything about how real languages work to do it “right.” I ended up endlessly studying real-world linguistics, and never actually creating anything.
I would advise anyone starting a creative project to learn as little as possible about the field before diving into it. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing — too much knowledge is lethal.