Vox Popoli

All sports events in Italy this weekend were suspended in tribute to Pope John Paul II, who died Saturday night while thousands kept vigil in St. Peter’s Square and the faithful around the world reflected on his legacy.

“It was the only decision to be taken,” said Gianni Petrucci, president of Italy’s Olympic Committee….

The coaches of soccer powers AC Milan and Juventus on Friday had urged that no games be played in view of the pope’s worsening condition. “It’s fair that the sport is stopped … there are more important things than soccer,” Cagliari captain Gianfranco Zola said.

I very much admire the willingness of European athletes, especially soccer players, to demonstrate to their fans that there are more important things than sport. Keep in mind that Milan and Juve are tied for the Serie A lead at 66 points apiece with only a few games remaining in the season, and Milan was scheduled to play Brescia, the worst team in the league, yesterday. And earlier this year, when a player’s infant daughter unexpectedly died right before a La Liga match in Spain and it was too late to cancel the game, the two teams took the field as was required but refused to play, to demonstrate their sympathy for the bereaved player.

Not only were the fans not upset by watching ninety minutes of the two teams simply passing the ball back and forth, but instead, as the players walked off the field at the end of the game, they were saluted with applause.

Sports are great. I love NFL football, Serie A calcio, the English Premiership and FIFA soccer. But it is good when we are reminded, from time to time, that in the end, they are only games and money, nothing more.

Michael Ledeen writes on NRO:

It is utterly infuriating, almost maddening, to try to watch the Rosary at St Peter’s, because the accursed tv people just will not ever let us watch an event. They must tell us what to think about it, even as it is happening. And so we lose a sense of the real drama, we just cannot experience it for ourselves, they will always be there between us and real life.

Preach teacher! TV people, when something big is happening live, for the love of all that is good and holy, SHUT UP! If we wanted a non-stop description, we’d listen to the bloody radio. The absolute nadir of the TV news is not car chases or even the Jackson trial, it is watching some idiot talking head who probably scored under 1000 on his SATs trying to pontificate about the importance of whatever it is he’s “covering”.

No wonder the Internet is killing TV viewerships.

Some of you may recall Mr. John Scalzi from the recent Electrolite dustup. While Mr. Scalzi and I happen to hold diametrically opposed positions on the situation of women and the academy, we did have a friendly exchange of emails subsequent to the public flamethrowing.

I finished John’s first novel today, (his first CONVENTIONALLY-PUBLISHED novel, anyhow), and it was very entertaining. I’ll post a review of it here soon, but in the meantime I can state with some assurance that if you enjoy Heinlein or military SF, you will very likely get a kick out of OLD MAN’S WAR. I quite liked it myself.

Interestingly enough, he even managed to come up with a reasonable means of putting women in the military. In light of the way in which I first encountered the author, I found this more than a little amusing.

In case anyone happens to be interested, Elliott Wave International is going to be giving free access to its specialty services next week. These are the daily updates, ten or twelve per day, offering higher detail wave analysis while the markets are open. I’ve used one of their currency services to good effect over the last month, and if you’re into one of the markets they cover, I’d encourage you to have a look at it, especially if you’re skeptical.

It’s an art, not a science, but I believe it has a more rational basis than the conventional financial analysis and commentary, much of which is demonstrably absurd. It’s not magic nor does it work flawlessly, but I have found it to be a useful tool. I’ll post a link to the free access signup on the day it starts.

Full disclosure: I do not accept any money from EWI, but commissions from sales derived from this blog’s participation in their affiliate program have gone and will continue to go to charity and towards access to their various services.

Drudge is reporting that Pope John Paul II has died. Like many Protestants, I regarded the man with some degree of admiration and his office with some degree of skepticism. But all theological differences aside, he was a man of rare courage and forthright conviction who stood firmly for what he believed to be right. The Roman Catholic Church will be fortunate indeed if its cardinals are able to find a man of similar caliber to serve as his successor.

UPDATE – The Pope was reported as saying to Italian TV reporters: “I’m not dead yet!”

UPDATE II – Requiscat in pace….

From the Washington Post:

As many as 20 teenagers may have known ahead of time about plans for the shooting spree that resulted in the deaths of 10 people on the Indian reservation here March 21, tribal and federal officials said Friday.

Capt. Dewayne Dow of the tribal police told a group of parents, teachers and staff at a three-hour school board meeting that authorities believe as many as 20 students were involved.

I don’t see why this should be a problem for anyone. These kids have been learning that nothing is anyone’s fault and that there is no such thing as good or evil for at least nine years. Why should they do anything simply because one loser was planning to express himself and share his feelings in public? How can they be held responsible for doing something that they have been taught does not exist?

They know very well that they’re nothing but mammals and young Mr. Weise was simply doing what they do on the Hollywood channels. On what grounds would they possibly condemn him?

I just received a copy of the first anthology to which I contributed, which was surprisingly exciting for me. It will surprise no one here to know that the Original Cyberpunk contributed one of the best essays of the lot, which are about 75 percent interesting and occasionally insightful takes on THE HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY and 25 percent excuses for the writer to talk about her mother, herself, her interests and nearly everything but Douglas Adams or his work. Jacqueline Carey’s self-parodying piece on assuring the reader how she, an American, nevertheless “gets” British humor may be the most amusing essay for all that its comedy is inadvertant; it has to be read to be believed. Seriously, it’s entitled “Yes, I Got It.” Well, good for you, lady.

As for me, I contributed a number of run-on sentences, if you can believe that, as well as a take that is so entirely different from everyone else’s both in terms of substance and style as to cause the reader to conclude that I crashed the party. And yet, Don DeBrandt not only managed to top my a priori outrageous interpretation of the text, but did in a way that is surprisingly convincing until you put the book down and say to yourself: wait, that can’t possibly be right.

Anyhow, here’s the editor’s intro to my essay, THE SUBVERSIVE DISMAL SCIENTIST: DOUGLAS ADAMS AND THE RULE OF UNREASON
It’s a little known fact that Douglas Adams was close friends with Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, whom he met while obtaining his doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago. An advisor and confidant to Margaret Thatcher, he was responsible for much of Thatcher’s economic platform and was instrumental in her rise to power. Actually no. None of that was true. But it could have been….

THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
BenBella Books
240 pages
$14.95

Back in 1997, I read a very freaky masterpiece of paranoia and prophecy entitled APOCALYPSO. It was extremely entertaining, combining elements of the prophecies of Nostradamus, St. Malachy, the Bible and astrology. It would have made for a much better novel than the LEFT BEHIND books or THE DAVINCI CODE, and made me think of a religious Umberto Eco writing on acid.

One thing interesting was how it predicted that John Paul II would be followed by a Jewish Pope, namely, Jean-Marie Lustiger, the cardinal and former Archbishop of Paris. The writer viewed this as something intimately related to the end times; one interesting synchronicity that I discovered independently was that a new political leader in a country the writer had identified as being of particular interest, Azerbaijan, had a nickname noted as The Coming Man by the CIA World Fact Book.

Now, I regarded – and regard – this as nothing more than idle speculation. Back in the year 998, many Christians across Italy were terrified that Duke Romantius Crescentius was the Antichrist, and considering that he’d actually chased the Pope from Rome and installed his own creature on the Throne of Peter, they had very good reason to fear him, if not on Biblical grounds. The end is always nigh, and still it has not yet appeared.

But the value of a prophecy is in the accuracy of its predictions. If the conclave names Lustiger, that will be a rather interesting and unexpected turn of events.

Jay Nordlinger finally discovers that the EU isn’t so wonderful:

Begin with a quick word about the EU — about which I am awakening, at last. Years ago, I would hear my British friends — very bright, very balanced — talk about the EU in the most severe terms. They said it was a kind of Soviet Union in the making, and would lead to a host of ills. Frankly, I thought this talk was a little overblown. I thought it could be interpreted as hysterical. But my friends knew far more than I, and I was given pause.

Now I am something like a believer. As David Pryce-Jones tells us in our current issue — his piece is found here (subscription required) — Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov have put out a pamphlet on the EU. It bears the arresting title EUSSR. I wish to quote from the introduction (and bear in mind that Bukovsky was one of the leading Soviet dissidents, a great, clear-eyed man):

For anyone even remotely familiar with the Soviet system, its similarity with the developing structures of the European Union, with its governing philosophy and “democracy deficit,” its endemic corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude, is striking. For anyone who lived under the Soviet tyranny or its equivalents across the world, it is frightening. Once again we observe with growing horror the emergence of a Leviathan that we had hoped was dead and buried, a monster that destroyed scores of nations, impoverished millions, and devastated several generations before finally collapsing. Is it inevitable? Is the human race bent on self-destruction and doomed to repeat the same mistake time and again until it dies in misery? Or is the EU, indeed, simply a clone of the USSR imposed upon reluctant nations of Europe by the same political forces that created the first one?

Look, if Bukovsky talks this way, who am I to scoff? He may not be right — but anyone who ignored him would be a fool.

Hitler used tanks, the EU used banks. But the end result is the same, fascist rule across Europe. It is a mystery to me why it is considered more desirable that one’s totalitarian rulers be faceless bureaucrats instead of ranting lunatics. At least with the ranting lunatics, they’ll tell you what they’re going to do ahead of time.

RIP Terri Schiavo.

The Unborn: check
The Disabled: check

Next Up: The Elderly