Trainwrecks, Trappist Monks, and Mossad

Aw jeez, it's Tuesday already. Somebody managed to sleep through the entire weekend. Link-dump follows. First a eulogy for George Weiss.

• R.I.P. George David Weiss: “the lion sleeps tonight” (1961), based on a south African Zulu song first recorded in the 1930s, was given a reworked melody and new lyrics (“in the jungle, the mighty jungle/the lion sleeps tonight”) by Mr. Weiss, Mr. Peretti and Mr. Creatore.

Next a rather unusual look at the administration of the Catholic Church. As a side note, it seems that the Belgium government's raid netted a Bishop,but he's been sent to a Trappist monastary, so it's OK - nothing to see here.

• The Pope is not Gay: So far, tragically, fear has won. But Toibin also sees the potential for a reborn Christianity in the papacy of John Paul II - wrecked by the white-knuckled reactionary politics that grew under him and now defines the Vatican. Here is what I too found so mesmerizing about Wojtila - as Toibin describes an event in John Paul II's native Poland in the spring of his papacy.

And as long as we're on a computer, a bit of meta about them.

• The Web is Dead: Long Live the Web: ...which argues that the web is an antienlightenment phenomenon, a destroyer of wisdom and culture and an infantile, Rousseau-esque fantasy. “It’s the cult of the child,” he says. “The more you know, the less you know. It’s all about digital narcissism, shameless self-promotion. I find it offensive.”
• Virtual Horizon: Computers today barely connect with people. The human body evolved as a whole to sense and interact with the world, but computers sense us only at our fingertips. Even the fingertips aren’t allowed to do all they can; a computer that was designed to interact with us holistically would feel different from moment to moment in order to convey information. For more than two decades, I’ve been working on the grand project of virtual reality (VR) to bring the whole body into computing.

A bit of business. I mean really, if we didn't have a banker veto in congress, the hoi polloi might vote for jobs or worse.

• The Business of Business: As with the banks and other financial institutions that played clever, manipulative games, producing little of real value other than moving vast amounts of capital from A to B in a giant shell game and racking up massive salaries and bonuses as their games plunged the country into recession and drove "the little people" out of jobs and homes. These "giants" provide ample proof that not all products that can be produced should be produced and that not all services that can be provided should be provided.

And last, the trainwreck section. (politics)

• Since when is it rational to bet on history being made by rational men? But then, a few days back, with the sanctions regime fresh out of the Suzy Homemaker oven that produced the oddly small confection, the Chinese let it be known that sanctions or no they would be working to deepen their trade ties with Iran. Which more than trumps the even more recent announcement that the Brazilians will, reluctantly, go along with the sanctions program.
• Mossad in America: It also dominates two commercial sectors that enable it to extend its reach inside America’s domestic infrastructure: airline and telecommunications security. Israel is believed to have the ability to monitor nearly all phone records originating in the United States, while numerous Israeli air-travel security companies are known to act as the local Mossad stations.
• Anti-Fascist Superheros: The comfort of the child’s vision of right and wrong is that he or she lives in a mental world where only monsters perpetrate crimes. Here on planet Earth, people who are certain they are doing right murder and terrorize. It’s a cruel world.
• America Is Exporting Terrorism: Think about what the U.S. reaction would be if, say, France claimed jurisdiction over a terrorist crime that a U.S. citizen committed on American soil, in which a visiting Frenchman happened to be one of the casualties.
• The Undemocracy: Let us consider how it is that Benjamin Quayle, son of the former vice president, opposed by a majority of Arizona's Republican voters, will soon be a member of Congress, their opposition notwithstanding.