Stories below the fold

HERE is the article about drug companies pushing Plan B even though it doesn't work for women if you are over 167 pounds or have a BMI over 30...which is 20 to 30% of women...

Follow the money?

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The Pope has been blasted for condemning capitalism, yet as I mention many times he is talking from a third world perspective, where bribery, low salaries and corruption mean workers aren't paid a decent salary and the rich live high on the hog.

Father Z also notes this point might have been overlooked because of poor translation of the original text:

Over at the other post a commentator pointed out that the official English rendering of EG 54 makes Spanish “por si’ mismo” into “inevitably”, but that it really means “by itself”.
Let’s swap in the “by itself” and read it again.

In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories ["trickle down economics"] which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will by itself succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.

follow the activists trying to hijack the pope's nuances into fitting their agenda.

A similar kerfuffle in the last week was "wiminpriest" activists interpreting a catacomb picture of a woman with raised hands as showing a womanpriest raising her hands, thereby proving the early church had women as priests.

HELLO: Wikipedia is your friend: the "Orans" position of the hands to pray was common in classical times and still used by Pentecostals in parts of eastern Europe today.

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Research articles often are wrong.

Nature article on how to blow the whistle.

I always thought that letting folks discuss it on line (as we do in journal club meetings in our hospitals) might help.

Maybe they should ask Jim Robinson to set up a similar site for medical articles...that's how they and LGF caught the forged document that destroyed Dan Rather's career.

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Libertarian Instapundit often supports free sex, but today links to this article:

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Sexual Desire Forges Lasting Relationships. “People often think of love and lust as polar opposites—love exalted as the binder of two souls, lust the transient devil on our shoulders, disturbing and disruptive. Now neuroscientists are discovering that lust and love work together more closely than we think. Indeed, the strongest relationships have elements of both.”

 Catholics have often argued the same thing: that a sexual act forms a link between the people involved, because we are our bodies (i.e. not a "ghost in a machine", an idea that implies what we do with our bodies has nothing to do with our souls) therefore, what we do with our bodies affects the entire person.

and, as Andrew Greeley noted,

Catholic paraphernalia are merely hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility that inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. The world of the Catholic is haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of Grace.

Greeley has also written that god often sends sexual desire to mess up our narrowly scripted lives, and has written a bunch of R rated novels to show examples.

So CS Lewis' famous line: Pain is a megaphone to rouse a deaf world" could be better written as "lust is a megaphone that tells us of the glory and compassion of god" and is one way that God uses to change our lives in unexpected ways.

come to think of it, that's what happened to Lewis himself...who was indeed "surprised by Joy"...

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also from Instapundit:

Media feasting on Bush ‘fake’ turkey claim; false story still repeated 10 years on. The image of Bush serving Thanksgiving dinner to the troops was so unacceptably wholesome, the press was forced to hallucinate a flaw in order to maintain its own sanity.

Bush was joking around, as he often did, and the troops were all laughing.
It was a joke, twisted by the PC MSM to ridicule the president.

The real story is that it was very dangerous at that time to land in Baghdad, since several planes had been shot at....but Bush did it anyway, and the troops were very very happy to see him. And that story is not one that the MSM wanted to remember either.

actually, I first became aware of his trip when one freeper posted "guess who is eating in our mess" on FreeRepublic, whose monitor quickly pulled the thread because it might have alerted Iraqi insurgents lurking on the site to shoot down his plane when he left.

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for later reading: StrategyPage: Peace in our time or another ploy