The Dish

This essay struck home:

Nathan Zeldes, a principal engineer at Intel (employees there read or send three million e-mail messages daily), is running a couple of experiments, one in which people spend a morning a week at work but offline, another in which people consciously reduce their e-mail output. Though he’s not reporting results, he’s encouraged and he says people are participating.

“Even many corporate leaders now believe you need time to hear the voice of the new inside,” said Anne Dilenschneider, a spirituality consultant in Montara, Calif., a coastal town 17 miles south of San Francisco. “And this time need not be a day, or even a specific period, activity or lack of one. It doesn’t necessarily mean a Zen sit, just some time of solitude.”

I’m finding that this is a real challenge for bloggers especially. Especially during this campaign, I’m all but surgically attached to the web. I’m working 24/7, and increasingly isolated from social interaction. Going to the Atlantic offices helps, but getting a grip on this thing is hard. The blogging mind does not easily adjust to reading a book or allowing an unformed thought stay unformed. Even when you carve out time for more offline reading or living, it’s hard to switch gears. And the danger of burnout is serious.

Any thoughts on how to counter this? I know you’re often as bad as I am – in reverse (I blog; you read; how many times have you hit refresh today?). My fear is not getting the time and space to think and rethink. I now force myself to work out every day; I have tried transcendental meditation; the dogs and husband help enormously. But still the addiction grows.

Not a single poll has given Obama a lead. But Clinton’s lead has gone from almost 30 percent to around 3.

The district attorney whio represented Texas in Lawrence vs Texas said this in the case:

Even if you infer that various States acting through their legislative process have repealed sodomy laws, there is no protected right to engage in extrasexual — extramarital sexual relations, again, that can trace their roots to history or the traditions of this nation.

My italics. You know what happened next. The Christianists are nothing if not consistent.

Did he change his mind over the years? Yes, he did – a stance that is now verboten among "conservatives" and denigrated as "flip-flopping":

Buckley said that he now wished that the United States had never become involved in Vietnam to begin with, and added that he would still oppose the passage of the Civil Rights Act but not in the same terms or for the same reasons as he had then.

So the most influential conservative of his generation endorsed both the Vietnam and the 2003 Iraq wars, and came to regret doing both.

One of the great divides within conservatism today is between those conservatives who think war can solve problems and that government needs to be "heroic" and those who are skeptical of both arguments. These past few years have persuaded me that war, while sometimes necessary, even essential, is in fact the natural, long-term enemy of conservatism – because it enlarges government and destroys freedom and fans those emotions that most cloud skeptical reasoned judgment. Pre-emptive war, without any plans for the aftermath, may perhaps be the antithesis of every conservative impulse known to history. Pre-emptive war to seize non-existent WMDs is almost a text-book example of conservatism repealing itself.

I plead guilty in retrospect, but am reassured that changing one’s mind in the wake of new facts is not a crime or a sin. It is a conservative virtue – and one that Buckley, alas, didn’t share with most of his successors. Can you imagine Hugh Hewitt ever conceding that he was once mistaken?

An ex-Catholic writes:

Gary Wills is a smart guy and Chicago, fortunately for him, is a big city.  in 2002, I was serving on the parish council of my neighborhood Catholic Church, and despite the sex scandal, I would have agreed with everything he says in the Atlantic interview. Six years later, the new generation of reactionary bishops is using their power to appoint priests without consulting parishes, to impose rigid liturgical and sacramental standards, and to lock out people who cherish other spiritual values besides obedience and conformity.  See, for example, today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune.

In the past six months, the diocese of Minneapolis Saint Paul has also eliminated a lay preaching program that brought trained, diverse voices to supplement the preaching of priests — particularly in under served rural areas. In addition, they’ve banned communal services of reconciliation.  We expect more of the same when the new, even more conservative bishop-in-waiting takes over in May.

The conclave that Wills had such high hopes for elected Benedict XVI, a gifted teacher who doesn’t appear to have any friends among ideas that emerged after the Counter Reformation.  At least for the next few decades, the group of bishops appointed by John Paul II will maintain the outmoded system of seminary education and will allow reactionary leadership to be self-perpetuating.  I wonder what Wills would say today about the prospects for change?  I suspect the hierarchy will be content to continue losing non-conservative Catholics in the U.S. if they’re replaced by Hispanics; see this week’s Pew survey.  Conservative positions on liturgy, faith and morals will make it easier for Benedict to reunify with the Orthodox and the Society of St. Pius X and to compete with Islam in Africa; I don’t think he cares overly much about ecumenism with the Protestant denominations represented by the World Council of Churches or with the Jews, and he appears to see Islam as an adversary.

I’ve been worshipping in an Episcopal parish for the last two years.  When my Catholic friends ask me what I would need to see to come back, I usually answer: women at the altars; gays and lesbians worshipping openly with their children in the pews; and everyone gets invited to Communion.  Vatican II theology and ecclesiology are alive and well among the Episcopalians, but I don’t expect to see it emerge again in the Catholic Church in my lifetime (I’m 51).

Even celebrities don’t get the last word any more.

"Who would have ever imagined that the next Ronald Reagan would be a black Democrat?" – Royal Masset, long-time Republican analyst in Austin, Texas.

Clinton is pressed to say that Obama is not a Muslim. She does – but then she pulls it back. Video here.

Relatives of slain Israeli soldier Staff Sergeant Eran Dan Gur comfort each other during his funeral procession at the Mt. Herzel military cemetery in Jerusalem on March 02, 2008. Staff Sergeant Eran Dan Gur was killed with another soldier during a fire exchange with Palestinian gunmen in the northern Gaza Strip yesterday, the army said. By Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty.

Hilzoy:

About once a month, I read something that makes me think: this just might be the dumbest thing ever written.

Matt concurs:

I’m having trouble believing this was actually published.

Ackerman:

When the Feministing crew gets ahold of this it’s going to be like a multiple EFP incident garnished with an SVBIED.

Ahem.