Yay! A few seconds after Bush told China to allow more free speech, a protestor may be charged with an obscure federal offense for speaking up to interrupt the speech.

The drug war.

Remember, kids: even abstinence can fail.

It's so depressing when bin Laden says sensible things. Like "The war is a responsibility shared between the people and the governments." We're supposed to be the rational democracy. What does it say about us that our leaders can only spew Orwellian nonsense, the public believes it (or doesn't believe it but re-elects the leaders anyway), and the nutjob who started the whole firestorm is the only one speaking even a partial truth about the situation. (I'm not really convinced we're on a crusade against Islam, though it's an easy enough conclusion to reach.)

I found this bizarro mini-series on A&E last week, and I've been watching it intermittently. It follows four young men as they decide whether to become Catholic priests. They're all devout Catholics, as one would hope, so their decision-making process seems to lack certain things the rest of us might think about: doubts about the integrity of the Church given its incredible dishonest amorality about child rape, or doubts about the sanity of a life of celibacy. To them the priesthood represents a very real calling directly from God, so without exception or lapse, that frames their thought process. They never present it as a personal decision: it's always whether God is calling them to the priesthood or to married life, not what's right for them. And they each have various emotional currents happening throughout, which they are, at best, varyingly aware of. It's an alien process to me (and I suspect to most people, even Catholics), and fascinating to watch.