The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by bonniers:

It concerns me that so many experienced generals who knew what they were doing have left the military recently. I used to have a certain amount of faith that however incompetent the administration might be, most of the people running the army knew the score. But who's left to run the store?

And have these men all been pushed out for something they couldn't bring themselves to do?

I want some of that firefly glow stuff. For Halloween. I'm going to rub it on my cats and watch the neighborhood kids freak.

jrocheste -- Yes, it does say that, doesn't it? Scary.

Though I notice that while a great deal of the program's attitudes seem to have found a home with the administration, the parts about cutting certain kinds of inefficient weaponry didn't happen. Too much pork there for big contractors, I guess.

Interesting background reading: The Project for the New American Century's paper that provides the blueprint for a lot of what the administration has in mind. If you skip straight to the key points section, you'll find one of the items is fighting multifront wars.

...garnished with Parsley P. Pratt...

*spews breakfast coffee*

I'm an occasional commenter, but I'll be there. Looking forward to meeting some people.

That sucks big time. I hope it all gets straightened out soon.

If you take hugs from a stranger, then hugs.

I grew up on Frank Yerby, Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Louis L'Amour and Frank Shorter, Mary Roberts Reinhart, Mary Renault, plus a whole lot of other authors who probably don't deserve to be remembered. But they were fun.

I've emailed my thanks to Kennedy and Kerry.

I'm surprised I didn't get this email. I'm usually on Sen. Kerry's mailing list.

re: ear tags

I'm afraid you're not far off. How about this one? The administration wants a million random Google records and isn't even trying to hide it under the antiterrorism umbrella. Nope, it's the protect-the-children-from-porn umbrella:

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/13657386.htm

This, by the way, is to try to defend the statute the Supreme Court overturned a couple of years back.

Dave Luckert:

*applause* for both a well-written post and a fine action.

I've done things like that in the past -- never quite that generous, I'm afraid -- but still, you never know how it's going to turn out. Maybe the five bucks I gave the homeless dude in NYC ten years ago was the little thing that kept him from going out and killing himself. Or maybe he drank himself to sleep and froze that night. I don't know.

But I don't need to know. I did what I could at that time. That's all.

And so did you. The rest is out of our hands.

Officially I believe that's "close" communion, as in the circle of believers "close to you," not as in "closed circle." Though you do see both forms.

It's a rather weird doctrine. I was raised Missouri Synod Lutheran and was rather intense about it for a time, but never did quite get that one figured out.

re: the Episcopal/Lutheran thing and full communion

The issue with Lutherans and anybody else is that Lutherans practice "close communion." They believe that it is possible to partake of Holy Communion in a way that would cause you to be damned for your action (there's a verse in Paul that refers to "eating and drinking to your own damnation," or some such wording), so they don't allow just anybody to receive it. If you're a guest at a Lutheran church, you need to talk to the pastor or an elder ahead of time to establish that you know what you're doing.

Being in "full communion" with another church means that the synod that issues that declaration feels comfortable that the other church takes adequate precautions to guarantee nobody falls into accidental damnation. It sometimes involves other doctrinal issues as well. It would mean that the churches could share pastors, facilities, etc. though that wouldn't be the main point.

I'm not familiar with the particulars of the ECSA/Episcopalian agreement to know if there are further agreements between them. The close communion issue is almost always the big one.

"laced the page corners of each copy with heroin!"

I think you're trying to snow me...

The Lutheran cross is a cross with the middle part of the Luther Rose plonked on. I don't think it's an official church thing. (Note: I'm not Missouri Synod, but they have a better page on this than ELCA does.)

Oh, that thing! That's not a cross, it's a seal or a sigil or something. I mean, it's got a cross in it, but to call the whole thing a "Lutheran cross" is...geez.

One big difference between Catholic belief and Lutheran is the number of sacraments. Lutherans have only two: baptism and communion.

I'm a bit rusty on the other parts, having more or less parted company with organized religion several years ago, mainly over the issue of why if homosexuals aren't evil, they aren't allowed to have a life...

I had a hunch it was a pacing thing in movies vs. books. To extend my earlier thought, perhaps it was the fast pace* of Da Vinci Code that explains why so many people seemed to be immune to it's badness.

That was one of the infuriating things about the book. I was screaming to myself, "But this is so bad!" as I turned every page and stayed up until four in the morning to finish it.

One of these days, I'm going back to try to figure out how Brown does it. It's more than the cliffhanger chapters.

delurking -- hi.

Those symbols for the National Cemetery were interesting. I am stunned to learn that there is a Lutheran cross.

Imagine that. All those years and I thought we got to use the same crosses as everybody else in the Christian tribe.

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