patterns & practices summit pays off right away

p&p seemed pretty advanced, and I was worried that it would be too far over my head. I even tried to back out at the last minute.

I must say it was well worth it, in terms of entertainment value, to step out of the conference room at our midmorning break, breeze by a long line for the men's room, and stroll right into a vast and completely empty women's room.

Guess I'm not the only devgrrrl who wasn't sure she belonged here.

Politics vs. Lodge: a losing battle?

Those of us who find conservative politics to be repugnant take comfort in the notion that our Chapters and Lodges are meant to be neutral territory, where we can choose to experience what's good in people whether we agree with them on such issues or not.

This could be self-delusion, in many ways.

Perhaps our Orders aren't neutral ground at all, but rather have been overtaken and are dominated by backward thinking, which in turn shapes and governs our institutions and their priorities and directions. (That would explain quite a few things.)

Perhaps it is folly to try to compartmentalize away aspects of ourselves that are part of our passion or our intellect (well, some of us choose to involve our intellects) or our daily lives outside of our Orders, and thus it is no surprise that we do such a poor job at it.

Perhaps a Sister or Brother's conservative views are so repugnant that we shouldn't fraternize with them.

Perhaps in our silence, we are not only naïve, but complicit.

Perhaps our Orders don't do anything worthwhile enough to justify the effort.

In our Lodge-as-neutral-territory worldview, the true and proper fraternal response to a conservative email-bomb is generous use of the Delete key. The problem is, by doing so we never uncover the issues and can never learn the answers to any of the above questions.

Feline Chronic Renal Failure

Back in January, I went looking for an older kitty to adopt and found this sweet 15-year-old feline offered by loving owners who felt she would appreciate a quieter retirement home than they could offer.

The whole quiet retirement home thing went a bit awry when I got hit by a car three days later. My bewildered girl adjusted as well as could be expected to the parade of caregivers and piles of orthopedic supplies in her new home. She even warmed up to me once I got rid of the scary crutches three months later.

Nowadays my stately old girl, rechristened Jiji, follows me around and wants to cuddle more than I expected, but still tolerates my busy work and activity schedules fairly well.

We visited her longtime veterinary clinic this week and confirmed that she has chronic renal failure (CRF), which is very common in cats her age. Her previous owners had described the classic symptoms—drinking lots of water and urinating frequently—but I'm not sure how much they knew about her disease. It is progressive and will eventually be terminal.

The good news is, her bloodwork this week isn't any worse than it was last November. Kidney function is diminished, but the damage isn't progressing. We have no way of knowing how long she's already been on this "plateau", but her life expectancy might still reasonably be measured in years, and that's encouraging. I've found websites dedicated to cats who have survived six to eight years on extremely aggressive treatments that I already know we won't try.

I've switched her to k/d (low protein, low phosphorus), which she seems to love, and I'll start her on Pepcid (for stomach upset) and probably subcutaneous fluids (for dehydration). Howevermany years of retirement she may have left in front of her, I'll make sure they are peaceful, cozy and pampered.

Stealth evangelism on the History Channel International

I sent a "shame on you" to History Channel International, owned by A&E, for the misleading marketing blitz surrounding their debut of "Drive Thru History". Apparently I'm not the only one who got taken in by the ads, which seemed to suggest that they would be using CGI overlays to show what historical sites and buildings would have looked like in their day. It's not that that didn't happen, though it didn't. It turns out the bait and switch was of a much different sort.

I have to say, I didn't hate the 2.5 episodes I watched on DVR. The host was a little much, but I didn't hate him either, just wanted him to dial it back a bit. I guess I'm not sharp enough on my ancient history to catch all the small inaccuracies that the folks on the reader boards are cranky about.

At first, I thought it was pretty cool that the show took a side trip to a (they said) lesser-known monument in Rome, the Arch of Titus, which commemorates the sack of Jerusalem. Then the show got awfully rhapsodic about the history of the Jews and the glories of their temple. OK, I kind of enjoyed getting such a colorful picture of the importance of the temple and how emotionally devastating its loss must have been for the Jews. But it seemed like we were pretty far afield from Rome at that point. And, hmm. Here's what the show had to say about the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites in Islam:

Today, a Muslim mosque, along with another Muslim holy site called the Dome of the Rock, sits on top of the old temple ruins, resulting in Jerusalem becoming a constant hotbed of religious turmoil, warring factions and struggle.

Bwah? Resulting in? Did they just say that all Middle East violence is a building's fault? A Muslim building's fault? But wait, there's more.

In this highly charged climate, some Palestinians and other Muslims have suggested that the Jewish temple was a myth, a political fabrication to give Jews a legitimate claim to the Holy Land. It would appear, however, that the temple and its treasures were as real as the carvings on the Arch of Titus back in Rome. And while there are no easy answers to the seemingly endless conflict, one thing is certain: there can be no just outcome by rewriting history.

Huh? Isn't this a show about Rome? Did we just do a 20-minute segment on an obscure Roman arch just to prove that the Jewish temple really existed and to put the Palestinians on notice?

Well, I figured maybe I was overreacting. And the rest of the show was quite entertaining and not particularly weird. So I watched the next one, which was mostly about Nero and particularly the great fire, which the show pretty strongly indicates (complete with a stay-tuned cliffhanger) was set intentionally by Nero so that he could blame it on Christians. Then, after a rather detailed digression about the persecution of Christians, including Saints Peter and Paul, we get this:

Christian tradition holds that, except for John, all of Jesus' apostles were executed for their faith. For many Christians, this is a strong argument for the truth of their claims. The apostles, because they were eyewitnesses, knew for certain whether Jesus' resurrection was true or false. This set them apart. History is full of people willing to die for what they believed, but it's difficult to find any sane person who will give their life for a cause they know to be fraudulent. Those who defend the Christian faith ask this question: how likely was it that a man would choose torture and death if all he had to do was simply deny a myth?

Um.

The second half of the show visits the Pantheon, and gives lots of illustration and detail about its architecture and engineering, which is way cool, and also a perfectly reasonable overview of the Roman and Greek, well, pantheon. In comparing the Pantheon's dome to other domed structures, we get another mention of the Dome of the Rock, with a conspicuous reminder that it "sits over the site of the former Jewish temple in Jerusalem". They digress again about the persecution of Christians for refusing to worship Cæsar. And then, the big finish: a celebration of how the Pantheon was later consecrated as a Christian church.

And, in the course of a few centuries, Christianity had overtaken the Roman Empire, establishing itself as a fundamental foundation of Western civilization. This upheaval has done nothing less than shape our world as we know it today. The architectural marvel that once stood for the glory of the Roman gods now stands as a monument to their insignificance, and the triumph of a Galilean carpenter who professed himself to be God.

Dude.

I guess I'm a slow learner, though, because I coasted through the digression into the Acts of the Apostles from the Oracle at Delphi in the third episode. It wasn't until halfway through, after they used the Olympic Games as a hook to show a lengthy quotation (with dramatic reading and graphics) from I Corinthians about the Christian "crown that will last forever" that it occurred to me to Google this show and try to figure out WTF was going on.

Well, well, well.

Turns out Drive Thru History was produced by ColdWater Media, an evangelical studio. DTH's editor and host, Dave Stotts, is described as a seminary student with twelve years' experience in "Christian media production". Christian bookstores stock the DVD sets, and it originally ran on the Trinity Broadcasting Network in June before being picked up and run as-is on History International.

Wow. Let me emphasize again that this show was marketed as if it were neutral, secular, scientific and fact-based programming. Some critics on the HCI message boards are also pretty upset about what they say are historical inaccuracies. The small debatable stuff doesn't bother me nearly as much as the Trojan Horse (pun intended): a deliberate framing and interpretation of history to emphasize Christian supremacy, Christianity as Truth, the inevitability of the rise of Christian dominance. Dismissing and denigrating Muslims bothered me, and they haven't even gotten to Turkey yet. And then, identifying Christianity as "a fundamental foundation of Western civilization" (I'm not sure why they bothered to say "a", but they did, I checked) can really only have one purpose: the fundamentalists' favorite, the claim that America is a "Christian nation" founded on "Christian principles". That's provably false, but provable falsehoods never stopped these people before.

Oh, look. Here's what Focus on the Family has to say about an upcoming episode: "Then it's on to Washington, D.C. to see how Greek, Roman and Christian influences shaped the foundation of America."

I don't dispute the History Channel's "right" to evangelize if that's what they really want to do, but stealth evangelism is creepy and uncool.

If you should happen to also be disturbed by this, you could send feedback to HCI/A&E via their contact page and let them know that you'd like their TBN evangelism content to be properly identified as such in their ad campaigns. Alternately, if you love this show and want to see lots more like it, it'd be swell if you'd contact them and ask them to identify it prominently in their ads so you'll know when to watch it....

In the meantime, History Channel International, which I added to my satellite "favorites" just because I thought this show looked cool, is back off of the list. I'll be viewing the other A&E networks warily as well. Back to Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs" and "Mythbusters", which haven't let me down yet.

Fat in Paradise

Several weeks ago now, I saw a special on TLC set at the Freedom Paradise "size-friendly" resort. It seemed to be some sort of "fat acceptance" workshop or retreat, not just vacations. Interesting, because I thought the FA movement was kinda over in the 1990s, but there it was on everybody's favorite cable lifestyle channel.

The insight that I had while watching the show was that there are (potentially) two totally different levels of FA.

One is more like a fat-pride movement. Fat is fabulous. Fat people shouldn't ever change. This leads to some predictable stuff that I think is lame (fat isn't my fault, weight loss is impossible), delusional (lots of fat people eat right and exercise vigorously and are still fat), and/or dangerous (fat is a safe and healthy lifestyle choice). It can get downright weird (everyone should find fat attractive and sexy). Emphasis on discrimination. Everything would be OK if only the MSM would show fat in a positive light. Fat celebrities who lose weight viewed as turncoats. Not much left of this one these days. I think it pretty much lost the war with science.

Someone on the TLC show said something about how nice it was, as a fat person at a fat resort, to be able to go back to the buffet again and again without anyone being judgmental. That's old-school FA for me in a nutshell. Delusions and coverups notwithstanding, it's pretty much Gluttony Acceptance, and that's just sad.

On the other hand, I don't think it's helpful to vilify fat people, to moo at them out of passing cars, or for department stores to cram the fat women's clothing section in a dark corner of the basement and fill it with polyester and muumuus. Fat is so locked up with self-esteem and self-worth that ironically, it's necessary to think well of yourself in order to sustain the motivation and discipline needed to lose the weight!

It's a dilemma and I don't really know whether it's possible to balance meeting fat people's basic needs against trying not to enable fat and make it so comfortable that it really does become yet another alternative lifestyle. I like the idea that fat people can have a normal and relaxed vacation on a beautiful beach with respectful staff and sturdy beds and chairs. On the other hand, being pinched in an airline seat serves as a helpful reminder that my size is not normal and what I'm doing is not OK in the long term. It encourages me to straighten up and fly right, as it were.

I figure regardless of what should or should not be, the marketing niche will win out and fat will be accommodated because fat money is worth just as much as the skinny kind (and there's increasingly more of it). And yet, since the TLC show was filmed, Freedom Paradise has abandoned their size-friendly theme and don't market themselves as such any more. I don't know if that means there isn't support for the niche, or they need to partner with a size-friendly airline to make it work. Maybe it means that all resorts catering to Americans are becoming size-friendly anyway and it isn't a niche any more!

Testing Blogger tags

Here we are testing whether I can really get categories working in Blogger.

Tags:

• blogtech
• test

Yet another reason to love the mainline

If I believed in a God, I'd wonder this week if s/he were trying to tell me something.

CNN: Woman elected to lead American Episcopalians

NY Times: Woman Is Named Episcopal Leader (very cool photo)

(Take that, Diocese of Fort Worth.)

Mainline Protestantism... or....

Rabbi Shmuley takes the dVC as a starting point and takes it to another, more interesting place.

A More Human Jesus?

He summarizes, practically verbatim, stuff I've said about why the dVC (and Last Temptation) theology is so appealing to me.

I don't think there's any power in God becoming human if God does not actually become human. I found it frustrating that Christians don't seem to understand or care about that point, but Rabbi Shmuley offers a really great explanation as to why that may be. I think mainliners are less likely to fall victim to the super-hero mentality, which I find pretty childish; thus, I find yet another reason to feel satisfied with being mainline.

But, it's worthy of note that many of the things I find appealing about urban Episcopalianism can also be found in certain branches of Judaism. It doesn't really matter which one(s), if any, I choose to follow as a personal path. That's too much like shopping anyway. What's more broadly important is the social benefits a positive, progressive faith community can bring. There's lots of room in that definition for lots of different personal paths to exist, co-exist and co-operate.

ObDaVinciCode

I really like this take on it (though not the headline).

Seattle Times: Debunking "The Code"

I'm not normally a fan of SPU's theology and politics, but their president writes this in his article:

Here's the problem. We have trouble in our time distinguishing between fact and fiction. Christians, informed by good scholarship, consider the "facts" of the novel to be ludicrous, dangerous if taken seriously, and pure fiction. On the other hand, Brown and those outside the Christian tradition may consider our whole story nothing but fiction. And so how do we have meaningful discussion between fiction and fiction? If that is really what we are talking about, who would care?

Wow, cool. A Christian apologetic that acknowledges postmodernism instead of assaulting it, and invites non-Christians into the debate instead of shunning them.

Yes, I actually do believe it's a fight between fiction and fiction. So why care? Because which fiction our mainstream readers prefer tells us something about where our society is headed, and who's defending which fiction and why tells us something about how they're trying to influence that direction.

It's suspicious that Dan Brown so vigorously denies having an agenda and that the book's defenders try so hard to pass it off as innocent entertainment.

I think Dan Brown believes, like many idealistic philosophers before him, that stripping power from authoritarian structures and returning it to the people will make theology and society better. The problem is, he's only half right. If he succeeds in undermining respect for traditional institutions, populism isn't going to restore freedom of thought, gender equity or the sacred feminine (nor eradicate corruption and greed!). It's just going to drive mainstream pulp fiction readers into the feel-good rock-band megachurches or out of church entirely.

And it's working. See also Bowling Alone. Expect more of the same when he secularizes (sort of) this process in The Solomon Key...?

I guess that's why I favor mainline Protestantism... it's the right mix of an organized, but not oppressive, institutional structure to get things done, and a progressive theology to pick the right things to try to get done.

Fishy about Zarqawi

I'm sure I'm not the first or only person to notice this, but at least I don't think I'm late to the party this time.

On June 9, the day after the airstrike, Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said this on CNN:

The first people on the scene were the Iraqi police. They had found him and put him into some kind of gurney/stretcher kind of thing, and then American coalition forces arrived immediately thereafter on-site. They immediately went to the person in the stretcher, were able to start identifying by some distinguishing marks on his body. They had some kind of visual facial recognition.

According to the person on the ground, Zarqawi attempted to, sort of, turn away off the stretcher. Everybody resecured him back onto the stretcher, but he died almost immediately thereafter from the wounds he'd received from this airstrike.

[CNN transcript, emphasis added]

You can't tell by reading a transcript, but I heard the excerpt several times on the radio, and the way he says that last bit is really strange. It sounds to me like he initially meant to end the sentence ("died almost immediately thereafter") and then there's a slight pause and he tacks on the end bit ("from the wounds...") as an afterthought.

The very first time I heard it I thought the whole thing sounded fishy. Not acknowledging until Day 2 that Zarqawi was found alive, and then doing so in an odd and strained manner, by someone who felt the need to disclaim specifically that Zarqawi died of airstrike injuries. As opposed to what, and why make the disclaimer so awkwardly and so early?

Or, to look at it another way, why sound so certain about his cause of death before the autopsy is performed? We don't know that the villagers of Hibhib didn't come in and finish the job before Americans arrived; we don't know that he didn't have a cyanide tooth.

Now there are claims bubbling up about whether Zarqawi was beaten by the Americans when they arrived (specifically, struck with a rifle butt) and the unsurprising counterclaims by Gen. Caldwell and others that such accusations are "baloney" and "propaganda". I almost think those are a noisy distraction from what still seems unusual about the case.

The autopsy report today describes Zarqawi's cause of death as crushing internal injuries, which is perfectly reasonable and makes sense given that two 500-ton bombs were dropped on him. And yet, one of the Army spokesmen (I'm not sure if it was Gen. Caldwell or medical officer Steve Jones or someone else) said something in the report about how therefore, it is understandable that Zarqawi would have no outward signs of serious injury even while his lungs and other organs were fatally damaged. Medically, I suppose that's plausible, but once again I hadn't heard anybody questioning Zarqawi's outward appearance until the Army brought it up. So why bring it up? What do they think they're pre-empting? What other causes of a pristine outward appearance are there that the Army really doesn't want us to think of or ask about?

There are quite a few possibilities, not just ominous conspiratorial ones. I think the most likely would be:

• Perhaps the Iraqi police did something to Zarqawi before the Americans arrived on-scene, which would be a political disaster regardless of whether Iraqis or Americans end up being blamed for it.
• Perhaps the Army is so paranoid about media coverage that they will tend to make this worse for themselves by trying to pre-emptively CYA against fanciful things no one else had even thought of yet, leading everyone to wonder why they thought of them.
  

I figure the MSM will be distracted by the pedestrian "beating" arguments or else will ignore the whole thing, while the blogosphere will run off on a hundred different loony conspiracy theories, so perhaps we'll never really know.

Blogwagon report: Stole both elections?

I assume I'm jumping on a pretty big blogwagon here, but I just don't see how I could not do it.

Rolling Stone: Was the 2004 election stolen?

I was just listening this morning to NPR's "To the Point" on which progressives were arguing about what's wrong with the Democratic Party, why the people don't seem to be on board with their candidates or their messages, and what they need to do to change.

But what if there isn't anything wrong with the Democratic Party from an electability standpoint and never was?

What if there was never anything wrong with Al Gore or John Kerry? What if the American people liked both of them perfectly well enough?

Seriously, what if we really never elected W., only inaugurated him twice?

Is "To the Point" missing the point?

On the one hand I'd have a lot more hope and optimism about Americans as a people.

On the other hand, unless this Rolling Stone article sparks a massive investigation, the MSM dogpile on the story, and Congress is forced to enact a flood of real new reforms, I don't see a fix in sight. When you don't like the way an elected elections official criminally rigs elections, how exactly do you go about electing someone else?

It doesn't bode well for the November 2006 elections, that's for sure.

Das Gläserngürteltier

They've built a spectacular new Hauptbahnhof in Berlin. As a non-local, I'm not required to care if the cost and inconvenience of construction approached Big Dig proportions, or if Berliners think of its architecture the way Seattleites think of our EMP*+. I just love it.

But, I realized, I'm extremely lucky to have experienced both Berlin Zoo and Ostbahnhof stations when they were still in use. Starting this week, visitors to Berlin won't have any idea what those vestiges of West and East were like.

It was quite amazing that even in 2005, Deutsche Bahn schedules showed our train from Hamburg arriving at Berlin Zoo and our train to Prague departing from the Ostbahnhof. Even though they're only a few stations apart on the same tracks, we weren't totally confident that the train to or from one station would stop at the other one, and even if it did, the schedules were loath to tell us at what time such an event might occur. (I was travelling with a West German, though not a Berliner, and it wasn't clear to her, either.) Since we weren't making that connection on the same day, we never did find out whether a single transfer could have been done at one station or the other. We just got on and off at the DB-prescribed stations.

Definitely not an Iron Curtain, but you do get a feeling of separation from it. Kind of an Iron Sheer. Now replaced by glass. It's a great moment, really.

* I don't know whether Berliners actually feel this way, I'm just saying I don't have to care if they do.
+ I actually like Seattle's EMP.

Edit: Ostbahnhof != Alexanderplatz.

Glad I'm not a thoroughbred

Horses cannot convalesce; their internal organs shut down if they're kept off their feet for any significant length of time. Veterinary surgical techniques may produce state-of-the-art repairs, but the horse is so unlikely to survive the non-weight-bearing period of recovery that euthanasia is still the most humane option.

I, on the other hand, hit golf balls and bowled this weekend on my bionic knee. Life is good.

Accomplishment

I'm now the only person I know to have gotten through all of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.

Actually, I'm the only person I know to have gotten past the first 100 pages of Quicksilver.

It was worth it.

There are two ways to keep politics and religion out of Lodge

One is to insist that every Brother completely neutralize himself and erase all hints as to his personal beliefs, lest the rest of us learn what those beliefs are and think less of him for having them. Along the lines of, I don't want to know what church you attend or who you voted for, and I'm not convinced it's appropriate for you to park your car outside the Temple with those bumper stickers on it.

Another would be for a Brother's beliefs and opinions to be held discreetly, but acknowledged when appropriate, and for the rest of us to challenge ourselves to extend Brotherly Love and even respect to him whether we agree with him or not.

One of those approaches would seem to be more in line with the character-building goals of Freemasonry than the other....

Where it's at

Huffington Post: Jane Smiley: Notes for Converts

A quibble: "Anti-Bush from Day 1" very most certainly is not the day after the 2000 election. Let's talk about sometime in 1993, when W. announced his candidacy for Governor of Texas and it was painfully obvious to everyone, including his supporters, that the mansion in Austin held no appeal other than as a stair-step to the one in Washington. There are probably people smarter than me for whom Day 1 was even earlier than that.

Thanks to a smart guy for the pointer. He thinks point #6 is worth special notice, but I favor point #4.

The greatest thing about democracy is that the people always get exactly the government they deserve. Unfortunately, he and I also get exactly the government they deserve.

This is a conservative?!

Quote from CNN, 'Let the prisoners pick the fruits':

King analyzed the issue in class terms.

"The elite class in America is becoming a ruling class and they've made enough money by hiring cheap illegal labor that they think they also have some kind of a right to cheap servants to manicure their nails and their lawn, for example.

"So this ruling class, this new ruling class of America, is expanding a servant class in America at the expense of the middle class of America, the blue collar of America that used to be able to punch a time clock, buy a modest house and raise their families.... Those young people are cut out of this process."

Had not really thought of this particular issue in those particular terms. This is a conservative?!

So the question is, when we say "these are jobs native-born Americans won't do", do we mean at all or just for pissant wages?

If the latter, then is the problem who's willing to do the work for peanuts or is the problem that we refuse to pay more than peanuts? Like, why shouldn't a manicure or a housecleaning or restaurant service be worth 4-5 times the wage they are now, and why shouldn't we wealthiest people on earth pay luxury prices for luxury services?

I've previously criticized Americans' fanatical desire for Wal-Mart prices on everything and how that strengthens the whole downward spiral: wage depression, outsourcing and offshoring, etc. Bottom line, we can either demand the lower prices or we can demonize the illegals (and offshorers) who make those prices possible but not both?

I've heard it said that any job is intrinsically "worth" whatever people are willing to accept for doing it. But that only works if the entire globe is a level playing field and wage workers have real choices. It isn't, and they don't. So wages are already unnatural, and the richest corporate executives stockpile the benefits of that. I wonder why we wouldn't want a democratic government to set unnatural wages to benefit the rest of us, instead. Seems to me that's the only way it'd make any sense to crack down on illegal immigration.

New linguistic peeve

The use of "so" to end a sentence, as if it were punctuation.

Another reason to give women's colleges a look?

NYT: To All the Girls I've Rejected

(Women find higher hurdles at college is identical; NYT doesn't always expire their op-eds, but just in case.)

To sum up: at many competitive co-ed colleges, female applicants outnumber male ones, but the colleges want to maintain gender parity in the classes they admit. The result is pretty simple math: well-qualified girls will be rejected to make room for less-qualified boys.

This is a challenge. I'm an alumna of a women's college and I have been working to encourage high school students in my area to consider not only my alma mater, but highly competitive colleges in general and women's colleges in particular. On the one hand, if female applicants are at a demographic disadvantage at co-ed colleges, that's a rock-solid argument for them to look at women's colleges instead. On the other hand, it's hard to brag about a college being easier to get into, at least among the caliber of students I'm trying to attract.

"Be surrounded by all the girls who were almost good enough to get into Kenyon"?

But, wait. That's only half the story. What about going to Kenyon and being surrounded by all those even less qualified boys?

Now which campus is looking more competitive?

It's interesting, because Smith takes a big hit in the U.S. News rankings for having too high an acceptance rate. (I don't think that's the only reason Smith has been slipping for the last many years, but that's the most glaring difference between itself and its peers.) Smith loses that one on two fronts, because its applicant pool is half the size of its co-ed counterparts', but its incoming class is twice the size of its single-sex competitors! I'd love to see us back in the top five again, but I think I'd rather brag about the wealth of opportunities we offer to a truly diverse pool of amazingly talented women and girls.

In any case, I shall be curious to see what effect the demographic shift has on Smith and women's and co-ed colleges alike, in the coming years. Maybe female-dominated campuses will be the wave of the future for all of us. ;)

Again, not sure what went wrong with whom.

Yes, it's alarming to find myself agreeing with Charles Krauthammer.