Month: February 2007

The Children of Uganda

Literally too terrified of being kidnapped to sleep in their beds, they walk through the night for safety. One militia in the foresaken country is known as the Lord’s Resistance Army. It has kidnapped thousands of children. Here’s how one teenage former soldier in the army described their preparation for battle:

"When you go to fight you make the sign of the cross first. If you fail to do this, you will be killed. You must also take oil and draw a cross on your chest, your forehead, and each shoulder, and you must make a cross in oil on your gun. They say that the oil is the power of the Holy Spirit. Some young children believe it – and those who have been there so long, five, seven, ten years, they believe in it very much."

The full story can be read here.

Casualties And Numbers

Have we been drastically under-estimating the number of casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Bob Woodruff believes so. Money quote:

While the U.S. Department of Defense says that there have been about 23,000 nonfatal battlefield casualties in Iraq, Woodruff discovers — through an internal VA report — that more than 200,000 veterans have sought medical care for various ailments, including more than 73,000 diagnoses for mental disorders.

I’m not sure what the significance of these numbers are, but they bear looking into.

Does The Welfare State Kill Religion?

It’s an interesting hypothesis. If welfare states make church social services unnecessary, do churches cease to have a deep role in people’s lives/ Do they appear increasingly irrelevant to the poor? Here’s a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of a recent study on the subject. Money quote:

There’s a statistically significant relationship between a Christian country’s welfare spending as a percentage of GDP and the percentage of people in it who report attending church weekly, even when controlling for such variables as education and whether the country is Catholic or not. The weakness of the study comes not from its lack of data, but from flaws in how the variables are defined, failure to look for alternative explanations, and problems with individual case studies.

Blogger “Scalping”

I hadn’t heard this term before. Neither had Ann Althouse. Right-wing bloggers allegedly

pick a target and harass that person and his or her employer until the person either jumps or is pushed out of the public eye.

Marcotte is the alleged victim in this case. But isn’t the left just as guilty in hounding campaigns? Or are they too disorganized? Personally, I’m all for making life difficult for bloggers who have whored themselves out as paid propagandists for campaigns. But it’s always best just to expose ugliness and dishonesty, not punish it.

The Romney-Dobson Summit

The former governor of Massachusetts went on bended knee to Colorado Springs last week to kiss the ring of the man who controls the GOP base. He’s working hard to win them over. But the Christianist movement is not happy right now:

"I don’t think any of the three are remotely acceptable, and I don’t think I’m an outlier," says Michael Farris, a top Christian activist who organized meetings between Bush and evangelical leaders for his first presidential run. "Giuliani holds the opposite view of the Republican platform on social issues, Romney has held both sides of those issues, and McCain picked fights with us the last time he ran for president."

An early February meeting of the Council for National Policy, a club of powerful social conservatives whose members include Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Left Behind author Tim LaHaye, was thick with fretting over ’08. "I’ve never seen more disillusionment at this point in the election in 30 years," says a source close to the Council for National Policy, which prohibits members from discussing meetings with the media. "There’s a revolt out there, a feeling these top three are being pushed on us by Republican leadership in D.C."