I mean, what did you think they were going to say?  I believe ‘em though.

The personal physician to the late Pope, Dr. Renato Buzzonetti, angrily denied that he had withheld treatment in order to hasten the Pontiff’s death; “his treatment was never interrupted,” he told reporters.

Now Vatican officials have gone further, disclosing that the late Pope was in fact given a feeding tube well before his death. The officials said that while the insertion of the feeding tube was not announced to the public until March 30, 2005– two days before the death of John Paul II– in fact it had been in place for some time before that announcement.

Pavanelli had based her argument on the assumption that Pope John Paul was unable to swallow enough food to maintain his strength in his final illness. Dr. Buzzonetti– who, unlike his critic, was familiar with the medical issues involved in the Pope’s treatment– says that the tube was inserted as soon as the Pope became unable to eat for himself.

A really interesting, well-written series of three articles.  This is important stuff.

And he’s back, folks.

Niebuhr is widely regarded as one of the most significant Christian intellectuals of the 20th century. Born in 1892 in Missouri to German parents, Niebuhr was ordained in the German Evangelical Church (later part of the United Church of Christ) and taught for more than three decades at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He was a founder of the liberal anticommunist lobbying group Americans for Democratic Action, and in 1948, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Over the years, Niebuhr won the admiration of political figures on the left and the right, including the late historian and Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as Ronald Reagan’s U.N. ambassador.

Niebuhr’s unrelenting gaze inward — at a United States he refused to herald as the world’s unquestioned savior — runs counter to the renewed sense of American exceptionalism that followed the 9/11 attacks.

Niebuhr’s Christian realism — his recognition of the persistence of sin, self-interest, and self-righteousness in social conflicts — highlights the distinction between the acknowledgment of evil’s existence and America’s own involvement in that evil.

We’re talking about this over at Bustedhalo.com proper, but you really have to check this out.

The evil Mainstream Media just doesn’t understand what America really wants to see:

1. Main headline: TEEN’S KILLER ON THE LOOSE!

2. Other headlines: Badfellas

3. Other headlines: Protesting the Pledge

4. Other headlines: Brain-Eating Amoeba!

Poor kids don’t need insurance!  They need a bootstrap!

NEITHER fiscal restraint, nor the veto pen, has characterised President George Bush’s time in the White House. America continues to run a deficit, and Mr Bush has vetoed only three bills in his whole tenure. But now that he has a Democratic Congress to battle with, the president is promising to be tougher.

Mr Bush has said he will turn away a bill that would expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a scheme that insures children from low-income families, which passed the House of Representatives on September 25th. He has also threatened to veto nine of the 12 appropriations bills that make up the federal budget, because the Democrats’ budget plan exceeds his own by $22 billion.

But SCHIP is extremely popular, and so is the bill that seeks to widen it to 4m more uninsured children. Since 1997, SCHIP has covered children in families that do not qualify for benefits under Medicaid, a programme for the very poor, but who still cannot afford health insurance. Under the scheme, the federal government gives a block grant to the states, which design their own benefits and eligibility criteria. The programme expires on September 30th.

Don’t Hug Me!!!!

Actually, I don’t mind personally. Just don’t, you know, hug me in a way that would make my girlfriend angry. That woman has threatened to break a beer bottle over my head, and though I don’t think she’s ever had a beer in her life, I still believe her. Well, not really, but enough to be politely concerned. So lay off the hugs please.

Not that there was a huge line of people to hug me anyways, but at least now I can pretend there was.

My life is sort of pathetic.

Anyways, to hug or not to hug: that is the question.

And except for some very awkward product placement, it looks really great. 

And a kid from my high school, Nick D’Agosto, is one of the new heroes!  How cool is that?  He’s also a year older than me and playing a high school student, which, you know, is somewhat odd.

Nonetheless, pretty darn cool I say.  Sure, a lot of critics don’t like how many billions of new subplots there are, but that’s how comic books work folks.  Get used to it.

No complaining folks.

Researchers have long known that male bat bugs ignore females’ conventional parts and instead use their sharp penises to stab the females’ abdomens, injecting sperm directly into the bloodstream.

So the females evolved a defense: structures called paragenitals that guide a male’s needle-like member into a spongy reservoir of immune cells.

But the females aren’t the only ones in need of protection. Observers documented males performing the same injurious sexual acts on other males.

Now evolutionary biologist Klaus Reinhardt of the University of Sheffield in England has discovered that male bat bugs have developed their own versions of female paragenitals to avoid the assaults.

And some female bat bugs are mimicking the paragenitals of the more successful males to improve their defenses.

How cool is this?

Tolkien and Lewis formed the spine of the Inklings, regularly convening to read and discuss one another’s work in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College. There were nineteen members in all, and Glyer excels at depicting their world, with its petty rivalries, joshing honesty (“he is ugly as a chimpanzee”, wrote Lewis of fellow Inkling Charles Williams), its wit and learning and championship of scholarship for its own sake. The Inklings were often supportive and sympathetic (“the inexhaustible fertility of the man’s imagination amazes me”, wrote Lewis in 1949 on receipt of another instalment of The Lord of the Rings), but were capable of ferocious criticism if it was felt that a member had done anything less than his best (“You can do better than that. Better Tolkien, please!”). Tempers must surely have become frayed at times – as Tolkien became unyieldingly critical of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (“about as bad as can be”) or as the English don Hugo Dyson met the latest bulletin from Middle Earth by (according to Tolkien’s son Christopher) “lying on the couch, and lolling and shouting and saying, ‘Oh God, no more Elves’”.