Blogito, Ergo Sum - 20 March 2008

...which marks the first day of spring for those up north who feel such changes, and also the anniversary of my mother's birth. A momentous day, this year falling very close to Easter, like it should. Holy Week in Costa Rica is a big deal, too. This year we'll attend the parade on Good Friday and I learned that there will be an Easter egg event in the park on Sunday for the kids, so we'll be taking Tony to that, too.

Adam Nagourney curiously says that the path to the nomination is growing narrower for Hillary:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton needs three breaks to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Senator Barack Obama in the view of her advisers.

She has to defeat Mr. Obama soundly in Pennsylvania next month to buttress her argument that she holds an advantage in big general election states.

She needs to lead in the total popular vote after the primaries end in June.

And Mrs. Clinton is looking for some development to shake confidence in Mr. Obama so that superdelegates, Democratic Party leaders and elected officials who are free to decide which candidate to support overturn his lead among the pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses.

Well, if I had to guess, and of course that's what I have to do because I cannot seem to reach my inside sources this morning, I'd say her chances are much, much improved over a week or so ago. I'm leaning towards the opinion that Obama was fatally wounded by Wright and that his hastily-applied tourniquet has staunched the bleeding...but not stopped it. She'll win big in Pennsylvania and Indiana and Puerto Rico and take the popular vote, leaving it all up to the superdelegates...

...who now have a NEW substance on their plate which they will have to digest. I haven't read anyone writing about this before, either, but I expect they will soon enough.

See, since Michigan and Florida look like they aren't going to get a re-vote, the superdelegates are going to be asked to take those two states into consideration when they make their decision, as well as the question of Obama's electability in the general. They can argue that it was their responsibility to consider those voters and what they would have done based on what they know now.

AND they can argue that the only way to do that, really, is by polling those delegates AFTER they get to the convention, which will give them the cover of confusion and back-room negotiations.

Now, in this scenario she has to win the popular vote, but in that case I think it's a sure thing for her. But even if she just comes close enough, on both scores, the electability factor will be enough to swing it, especially now.

And I'm being nice, now, not even taking into the fact that those superdelegates are almost all elected officials with their own campaigns to win, always desperate for money, and the Clintons have plenty of it available for those purposes.

The other thing to keep in mind about counting Michigan and Florida is that those votes have really already been counted, even if not officially, as well as other caucus states which did not even record a popular vote count.

RealClearPolitics.com will show you those votes calculated every which way from Sunday, so people have the numbers in their minds--the superdelegates, especially--even though they aren't official.

And by one count, Hillary is behind by only 80,642 votes today, with some big winners yet to come for her!

This means that you can rest assured that she will be ahead in the popular vote IN SOME ARGUABLE FASHION. No matter what, she is going to be able to huddle with the supers and point to numbers supporting her claim.

And you can absolutely COUNT on the fact that she will argue that everybody knows for absolutely certain that Algore got screwed by the electoral college when he won the popular vote, a hymn the Democrats have been singing lustily for so long now that it will be hard to argue against it.

If Bush 'stole' the election from Algore, then won't Obama have done the same thing to Hillary?

Ickes knows full well those same RCP numbers I linked you to, above, and that some people have already counted them in their own minds. He hopes that the superdelegates have done so, too, and I feel pretty certain that they have.

An untimely confluence of bad weather, flawed energy policies, low stockpiles and voracious growth in Asia's appetite has driven international spot prices of coal up by 50 percent or more in the past five months, surpassing the escalation in oil prices.

The signs of a coal crisis have been showing up from mine mouths to factory gates and living rooms: As many as 45 ships were stacked up in Australian ports waiting for coal deliveries slowed by torrential rains. China and Vietnam, which have thrived by sending goods abroad, abruptly banned coal exports, while India's import demands are up. Factory hours have been shortened in parts of China, and blackouts have rippled across South Africa and Indonesia's most populous island, Java.

World consumption of coal has grown 30 percent in the past six years, twice as much as any other energy source. About two-thirds of the fuel supplies electricity plants, and just under a third heads to industrial users, mostly steel and concrete makers.

Meeting rising demand will prove difficult. To maintain its role as the world's producer of last resort, the United States will need to make major investments in mines, railways and ports.

America, perhaps foolishly, is still exporting coal. We used to export oil, too, remember?

The al-Qaeda leader criticized European countries for joining in military campaigns in Muslim lands. Although he lamented those actions, he suggested that the Muhammad cartoons were even more immoral and that retaliation was coming.

"It paled when you went overboard in your unbelief . . . and went to the extent of publishing those insulting drawings," he said. "If there is no check on your freedom of words, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions."

It isn't good enough for you merely to stay at home, Europeans, but you must also not offend us with your freedoms. Oh, by the way...you know the place that you call Europe? Well, it isn't really yours; it's ours by right of long-ago conquest, and we're taking it back.

Here's an item that surprised me, referring to the release of Hillary's (redacted) public schedule, from Media Notes:

He had more than half a dozen encounters with Monica, counting only the days that Hillary was there? I had no idea there had been so many of them, had you?

BOTH Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton propose withdrawing U.S. troops at the most rapid pace the Pentagon says is possible -- one brigade a month. In the 16 months or so it would take to remove those forces, they envision the near-miraculous accomplishment of every political goal the Bush administration has aimed at for five years, from the establishment of a stable government to agreement by Iraq's neighbors to support it. They suppose that the knowledge that American forces were leaving would inspire these accords. In fact, it more likely would cause all sides to discount U.S. influence and prepare to violently seize the space left by the departing Americans.

With equal implausibility, the Democratic candidates say they would leave limited U.S. forces behind to prevent al-Qaeda from establishing bases. They assume that an Iraqi government that had just been abandoned by the United States would consent to the continued presence of American forces on its territory. In all, Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama speak as if they have no understanding of Iraqi leaders, whom they propose to treat as willing puppets.

To imagine that our leaving will force them to do something Obama and Clinton seem to think they obviously do not want to do now, is really an odd way of thinking. They're delaying only because they can? They're like children taking medicine, putting it off as long as possible? I'm sure they appreciate that attitude and will be happy to cooperate with American friends like those.

Back to the futility of hope, once again. I think Americans, in the end, will choose to vote for someone they don't have to hope so much will do the hard things that need to be done.

No one should forget that the invasion toppled a dictator who had already terrorized the region and would sooner or later have threatened American interests. This by itself was no small achievement. Saddam's trial was a teaching moment for that part of the Arab world that used to cheer him; his hanging, however crudely carried out, was a warning to dictators everywhere.

Iraq may not have had WMD, but Saddam admitted to American interrogators that he planned to reconstitute his WMD effort once U.N. sanctions collapsed. The capture of Saddam persuaded Libya's Moammar Gadhafi to abandon his nuclear program and seek a reconciliation with the U.S. This in turn led to the rolling up of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan's proliferation network, whose arms extended to Iran and North Korea.

Strategically, Iraq has gone from being one of America's two principal enemies (with Iran) in the region to one of its two principal allies (with Israel). Iraq's government, for all of its shortcomings, demonstrates that a Shiite-led government need not be a theocracy. The invasion did prompt thousands of jihadis to emerge from places like Saudi Arabia and Morocco to fight the "crusaders and infidels." Thousands of them are now dead or in prison, however, and the radical corners of the Arab world have learned that America cannot be defeated by a strategy of car bombs and assassination.

The strategic case for toppling Saddam also rested in part on the idea that a free Iraq would provide a strategic counterweight to Iran and Syria, as well as an ideological counterexample for a region where autocracy is the norm. The potency of that combination has been demonstrated by Sunni Arab hostility to the new Iraqi government; by Iran, Syria and al Qaeda efforts to destabilize it; and by those in the West who have sought to denigrate the effort as a way to diminish U.S. power.

Today, those efforts have largely failed. A new generation of European leaders has no interest in humiliating the U.S. and understands the danger of a chaotic Iraq. Al Qaeda has been nearly destroyed as a fighting force in Iraq and has lost support in the Arab Street with its brutality against Iraq's Sunni Arabs. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Sunni states are belatedly coming to terms with the new Iraq as they conclude that the U.S. won't leave in defeat.

That last, unfortunately, is not yet certain, since McCain is still only a hope of our own.

But not leaving in defeat is not enough, as the Vietnam war reminds us. American troops were drawn down quite rapidly over several years and finally left completely after a peace agreement had been signed.

Two years later...two years later...the North Vietnamese regular army broke the treaty and reinvaded.

America was then said to have lost the war in Vietnam, two years after having left completely.

McCain is right. We didn't lose in Korea, Japan and Europe...because we didn't leave. We're still there. And if we want to win in Iraq, we need to commit for a similar stay.

Ralph Peters spends three pages ripping the Bush administration on just about every level, before he gets to this:

It's a lesson that the left, as well as the right, needs to take to heart. While the Bush administration deserves every lash it gets, domestic opponents of the war have been hypocritical, dishonest and destructive. As this column long has maintained, had President Bill Clinton sent our troops to depose Saddam Hussein, Democrats would have celebrated him as the greatest liberator since Abraham Lincoln.

The problem for the left wasn't really what was done, but who did it. And hatred of Bush actually empowered him - the administration had no incentive to reach out to those who wouldn't reach back, so it just did as it pleased. Today's "antiwar" left also contains plenty of politicians who backed interventions in the Balkans and Somalia, who would be glad to send American troops to Darfur today and who voted for war in Iraq.

I seem to remember Clinton saying something wistfully about how it took a war to make a great presidential legacy and he was almost envious that Bush had gotten the opportunity that he had lacked. Of course, he always did have the opportunity...the anti-Iraq rhetoric under his administration was perhaps even greater than that after Bush took office...you can easily go back and look. Against what other nation has an administration passed a public law calling for regime change?

Given all our mistakes and partisan agendas, it's amazing Iraq is going as well as it is today. The improved conditions in Baghdad and most of the provinces verge on the miraculous, given the situation a year ago. But we've paid a needlessly high price.

As for President Bush, let's face it: He's been our most-inept wartime leader since James Madison fled the White House, leaving his wife behind to save what she could before the British troops arrived with torches.

That said, Bush has displayed one single worthy characteristic (one he shares, oddly enough, with Madison): He won't surrender.

Peters' criticism is based on his apparent belief that it would have been possible to fight the war in Iraq without making any errors, despite the fact that history shows us no previous examples of this having happened. Peters, a former high-ranking army officer himself, curiously enough fails to mention the inept generals upon whom Bush was forced to rely before finally Petraeus worked his way far up enough in the ranks to be given command.

You could say the same thing about Lincoln's conduct of the Civil War before he finally found his own winning general, so I think Peters' negative comments have to be put into context. Peters had his own favorite general at the first of the war, Shinseki, and thinks he was badly treated. Perhaps he was, but Shinseki's plan was only for more and more and still more troops, one just one hundred thousand, or two hundred thousand, but still more. But we could have had half a million troops there and still impotent until the general with the right strategy came along, and that wasn't Shinseki.

As horribly as Bush performed for our first four years in Iraq, it's still possible to do worse. Both of the Democratic Party's presidential aspirants believe that the answer is to flee, handing the terrorists we've defeated a strategic victory, inviting a genocidal civil war, further destabilizing the Middle East, and sending the message to the world that Americans lack the courage and staying power of our enemies.

Declaring failure isn't the correct re sponse to failure narrowly avoided. Both Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would kill a struggling convalescent. Bush's shambles would become the next administration's catastrophe. As president, Obama or Clinton would finish with far more blood on his or her hands than President Bush has on his.

Again, I wonder if Peters blames the several magnitudes of greater amounts of blood shed on President Lincoln's hands, or if he recognizes that a president can only work with the officer corps that he has, and that predicting a man's capabilities in advance is the hardest of all tasks a president is charged with accomplishing.

One thing is certain: you'll never get it done by surrendering. Lincoln persevered, and so did Bush.

Switching quickly to Arthur C. Clarke and religious beliefs, I touch on John Derbyshire:

I think we're stretching here, though. I can't really recall much in the way of Buddhist themes in Clarke's books. And I can spot a Buddhist theme at a hundred paces, I've read the classic Chinese novels and verse. True, Clarke sometimes spoke of himself as a "crypto-Buddhist" (see here, for instance), but that was just whimsical. Clarke didn't have a religious hair on his head. Like a lot of constitutionally irreligious types, he was slightly attracted to Buddhism because it's the least religious of religions. In its pure form (which, as it happens, the Sri Lankan style most closely approximates), its doctrines are atheist.

I started to say that you don't have to have or support any particular religious belief, yourself, in order to be interested in not only the what they say, and claim to believe, as well as why.

I mean, what constitutes a religious belief, anyhow? Later in this NRO post Derbyshire wrote:

The problem here is that the word "truth" ought to be plural. So ought "religious belief." There isn't just one, there are lots of them, and they disagree fundamentally among themselves about the transcendent stuff.

This one says that after you die you go to a different plane of existence; that one says, no, you are reborn on earth.

This one says there is an invisible Sky Father supervising our affairs, that one says, no, there are lots of Sky Fathers, each with a different portfolio; while yet another one says there are no Sky Fathers at all, only an ineffable void.

This one says you should love your enemies; that one says you should kill them.

This one says the Sky Father sent us a messenger 2000 years ago to show us the right path; that one says, yes, but he sent another messenger 600 years later, whose message was even more definitive; a third group tells us that, no, the second messenger didn't show up till 200 years ago; while down the street there's a religion that says the Sky Father will send a messenger in his own sweet time, but hasn't yet …

Doesn't look very dignifying to me, nor for that matter much like truth. Compared with this mess, those corny, laughable old non-transcendent truths — stuff like water is wet, fire burns, E = mc², and e^πi + 1 = 0 — look pretty good.

I think of a religious belief as man's attempt to find some explanation for things he observes which do not fit in with any rational system which he has found a way of quantifying and explaining to his own satisfaction. Once he thinks he "knows" the answers, such that they become fixed "beliefs", then in my opinion they are no longer religion, but dogma.

And if man thinks what he has discovered can be proved without doubt, it is called science...even, oddly enough, if it still falls into the realm of the otherwise unexplainable. Science prefers not to think about the unexplainable, when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, and prefers to merely accept some things as "simply being so" when that happens.

The Big Bang is my favorite, because science presently has accepted this theory as if it were scientific fact, on the basis that science believes it can find a logical and definitive explanation for everything which subsequently happened, but the same laughable old non-transcendent truth, stuff like water is wet, etc, suddenly doesn't work for questions like "what happened before the Big Bang?" or "what was around the minuscule pinhead which once contained, well, EVERYthing?" Suddenly saying water is wet and fire burns no longer fits any subsequent attempt at explanation, because now we go off into the specialized language field of scientific gobblety-gook which requires much more complicated words and ideas than 'wet' and 'burns'.

Science, in the end, is faced with the same situation: it doesn't know the answer to that question. In the final analysis, the Big Bang theory is simply an attempt to somehow quantify the actuality of what we know as our present-day existence, a creation-myth with numbers attached to give it status which earlier, purely verbal creation-myths seemingly lacked.

In the end...or, more properly, in the beginning, whether 'God' created the heaven and the earth or it somehow just happened due to, ah, natural causes, get back to something which cannot be completely explained. And that's what religion attempts to decipher.

Religious beliefs about various Sky Fathers and messengers, or even atheism itself, actually another variety of religious belief, are all attempts, much like science, to quantify the unknowable into the predictable...and quite losing sight of the fact that once they "know" then it is no longer religion.

Science and religion, including that branch known as atheism, are completely intertwined and always have been. The original shamans sequed into astronomers, and the earlier witch doctors into physicians (and even psychiatrists), and mathematics was invented in order to describe how things worked, but in the end we still have no explanation for why things are either alive or dead, or what happens the unique human consciousness at the exact moment of transition between life and death.

Why is every human being unique, for instance, if all are created by known and thoroughly understood chemical reactions among the same group of clearly-definable elements, when those same chemical reactions elsewhere produce absolutely predictable identical results?

What does life mean, anyhow? We say that "life begins at conception", sometimes, but of course that isn't true, because both the sperm and the egg were alive before they ever got together...you cannot take 'dead' sperm and fertilize an egg, after all, but what distinguishes the dead sperm from the live one? To be sure, we recognize behavioral differences, but what is the essential difference which we cannot quantify?

It is at that place where science and religion meet. Science takes us up to the place where we have the ability to answer the question 'why?' and religion proceeds from there. Both are the search for an answer.

Could Clark have created the stories and concepts that he did without having any own sense of religious questioning? Oddly enough, I always understood without asking that of course he had. Could you write a story like "The 9 Billion Names Of God" without being able to conceive of such a possibility? And if you can conceive of it, that's religion.

Getting back to the way religion proceeds to religious beliefs and practices, we come to this:

Wright v. Imus Cont'd [Jonah Goldberg]

From a longtime (black and conservative) reader:

Explanation: Imus made his ignorant comments on national radio, Wright made his in church to a private audience. Imus was just denigrating black women for fun there was no political or social motive or angle, just to slur black women or at least these black women. Wright was making a political comment, albeit a wrong and ugly one. Typically, religious and political speech are more protected than commercial speech. Try as you might but unless Wright went on the radio, TV or some other mass media medium and voiced racist white stereotypes, it isn't the same, other than in the broad general context that both were wrong. ...

Me: I certainly agree there are differences between Wright and Imus, but not all of them are nearly so beneficial to Wright. Wright sold DVDs spouting his bile. Imus said something idiotic on the spur of the moment. Wright's insults come from a thought-through worldview that comes from decades of reading, writing and speaking. Imus is a pompous shock-jock. Wright, to my knowledge, is completely unapologetic and unrepentant about his views. Imus went on a nationwide apology tour. These, too, are distinctions worth making.

I'm not an Imus fan, doubt if I've ever even heard him on the radio, but isn't it a fact that he merely repeated a common expression in regular and ordinary use by black rappers without anyone taking offense? The complaint is not about the words used, then, but the color of the skin of the person who said them. In Wright's case, though, the complaint is about the words he used, not his skin color. If Imus had been a black rapper than his words would not have been considered to be offensive. If Wright had been a white pastor, his still would have been.

The argument that Imus' singular offense received more media coverage than Wright's repeated offenses over a couple of decades is simply untenable. Wright, of course, did not speak to a private audience but a public one, since his words were designed from the first to be broadcast far and wide; they were intentionally recorded. Further, by putting them on CD for sale to the general public, clearly they were intended to reach more people than merely the private audience inside of his church.

Other essential differences, to me, are intent and apology. Wright clearly intended what he said over the decades and he intended for others to accept and believe them. He's a preacher and spiritual leader, after all, as well as an acknowledged scholar. In other words, he is a person whose words are intended and expected to carry a lot of weight, and people come specifically to his church to listen to him. He is addressing people who come to him for the express purpose of seeking enlightenment. Imus is a radio disk jockey whose intent is to amuse those with idle time to listen to him.

Nevertheless, Imus apologized for his single offense. Wright has multiple offenses, perhaps even still occurring, but as yet to apologize for any of them. It's quite obvious that Imus did not have any heart-felt beliefs behind what he carelessly repeated, whereas it is equally obvious that Wright did and still does.

But the other crucial difference is that Obama himself has described Wright as having a great influence upon his thinking.

Back to Iraq, where Clifford D. May tells us why Shinseki would not have succeeded and made Ralph Peters happy:

America’s forces were cooped up in heavily guarded Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) waiting for actionable intelligence that seldom arrived. When it did, they would drive their vehicles to battle down roads their enemies had lined with bombs.

Finally, after the 2006 election rebuke to President Bush, a new Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, was assigned to the Pentagon, and a new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, was deployed to the field of battle. American forces set out to liberate Iraq — for a second time.

The Petraeus strategy was nothing if not counterintuitive: He gave the enemy more targets and assigned them to more vulnerable positions — outside the well-guarded FOBs and in the shadowy streets.

Nothing against Shinseki, but there's absolutely no reason to expect that he would have not continued to fight a conventional war, one in which an overwhelming number of troops simply, well, overwhelmed the enemy. But this wasn't a conventional enemy, and there's no reason to believe any of our generals understood that prior to Petraeus. Shenseki wasn't thinking of an insurgency fought by irregulars, not unsurprisingly.

There is a time for all things, we have been told, and the army wasn't ready to drink the Petraeus wine before it's time. The question now was whether that time came too late, or not.

If the election had been held in 2007, the change in strategy would indeed have been too late for Iraq. Now, maybe not.

As much as I life Clifford May, this is a foolish statement. Did Roosevelt have any such understanding when we entered WWII? I was there at the time, and I lived through it, and I can tell you that on more than one occasion we were worried that we were going to LOSE the war.

What is the famous quote? All battle plans go out the window with the first engagement with the enemy?

But that's merely a quibble, because May clearly understands what I would argue a majority of Americans still do not:

Could they succeed? The longer it takes American to recognize the wider war for what it is, the more likely it is that the other side will win.

I don't expect it will be instantaneous, not any more, now that 9/11 failed and produced such disastrous repercussions for bin Laden. Say what you want about our failure to get him, but from his point of view he went from openly running a strong financial empire to running and hiding and struggling desperately to keep things together. A loss in Iraq would hurt him even worse.

I expect he will go back to recovering the Caliphate first, continuing to invade and intimidate Europe while distracting the U.S. as much as possible to keep us occupied with loud noises that produce no real harm.

Think about this possibility, if you will: the reason there has been no repeat of 9/11 in the United States is because bin Laden really, really did not like the response he provoked the first time.

He not only failed to cripple our financial system but he also destroyed his own. He not only did not force the US military to retreat from Saudi Arabia and return home, but in fact caused it to expand rapidly, unexpectedly invade two sovereign countries and defeat their conventional military forces in record time, while increasing American military financing and support to record levels. Today's Congress falls all over itself supporting and funding the military, and there are bipartisan calls for significant expansion of our military forces.

I could go on but the theme is simple: everything Osama did with 9/11 backfired for him, and badly.

Europa, on the other hand, is ripe for another rape, and the millions of Islamic sperm cells are already invading. Bombs in Europe don't produce violent reactions by European militaries, because there aren't really any to react.

As Victor Davis Hanson said: "Meanwhile, a shrinking Europe is disarmed in a dangerous world and can’t assimilate its growing minorities."

If the U.S. can be convinced not to pull Europe's chestnuts out of the fire yet another time, the Caliphate will be restored.

And Americans, it would appear, aren't all that eager to save those European nuts.

I happened upon a video of Reverend Wright appended to this article. In it, Reverend Wright says — or screams, as that seems his accustomed style — “Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country and who lived in a culture that was controlled by rich white people.”

Of course Jesus was a black man (in addition to being a poor one). Beethoven was, too — don’t you know? And all the Egyptians, who, by the way, flew airplanes, long before Orville and Wilbur.

Actually, it would be nice if people got their story straight about Jesus. When I was coming of age, in places like Ann Arbor, Mich., and Cambridge, Mass., there was a bumper sticker that said, “Jesus was an olive-skinned gay healer.” The only answer, or one of them: You wish.

Casting back, the first I can remember being personally involved with religion was after we moved to the Mojave Desert, east of Daggett (east of Barstow), in about 1940. We attended a small and extremely local version of the Missionary Baptist church, and our minister and his wife were, as I recall very well, a perfect example of the term "as poor as a church mouse". However, I had no doubt in my 6-year-old mind that they were honest and saintly and excellent people, and my subsequent 68 years have given me no cause to alter that memory.

But I was also an inherently honest young boy, and if there was one thing I knew for certain it was that I definitely did not possess the same sort of complete faith that they did. It wasn't that I wouldn't have liked to have been the way they were, or the way that I thought my parents also were, only...only I just wasn't. It was not there within me.

Well, anyhow, all I knew about Jesus was taught there in that church and Sunday school and in all the pictures he looked quite a lot like the rest of us, maybe the beard and mustache were unusual in those days among the people I knew, and I never gave it much thought. Living in a remote corner of the California desert, by the time I understood that Jesus was a Jew, I had no other idea of what a Jew was...it was simply another word, a sound, a name which carried no connotations for me.

Except for the mustache and beard and sort of holy look they always showed him having, I never considered that he looked any different from anybody else that I knew. Well, okay, maybe not the Mexican kids I went to school with...in my first school, I was the only child who was not a member of the Arajo family. But I cannot recall even thinking about that.

It was much longer than that before I had any inkling that there was some kind of difference between my family and Jews, and even longer before I knew what it was supposed to be, not that I'm exactly quite sure yet.

Maybe I was simply dumb and unquestioning, but I cannot tell you precisely when the first time was that I realized that nobody even knew for sure WHAT Jesus looked like. I guess I always thought the pictures were painted by somebody who knew, somehow.

I'm not enough of a Bible scholar to know if any passages therein actually spend any time elaborating his physical description, but I think not. Which would imply that the writers didn't take any particular notice that he was anything out of the ordinary, at least not in terms of looks.

As a kid, I hated church. A waste of a perfectly good Sunday morning, especially in summer. Over the course of my life I tried to go back, at various times and for various reasons, not all of them for the good of my soul, but it never stuck.

On the other hand, I think the Christian religion is generally a very good thing and I want Tony to have some grounding in it, which causes me no small amount of puzzlement right now. His biological parents were no doubt Catholic, but I'm not at all sure that he was baptized, and whatever it is that I may be it isn't a Catholic. I don't mind them, but they might mind me, so I don't know what I'm going to do, frankly. Tony has started talking about the Iglesia, since his school friends go, so I'm going to have to start thinking about that soon.