David Michael Phelps

Posts by David Michael Phelps

August 21, 2006

A Google for Pork?

Did you know that there is legislation in the works that would set up a databse making it possible for you and me to track how the federal government is (mis)spending our money? Continue Reading...
August 16, 2006

I Want My Pope TV

Sadly, my lame attempt to teach myself German (“eins, zwei, drei, vier, funf…”) has thus far yielded little to allow me, unaided, to enjoy the Holy Father’s television interview for German broadcast. Continue Reading...
July 28, 2006

On Blogging

G. K. Chesterton on Journalists: “…there exists in the modern world, perhaps for the first time in history, a class of people whose interest is not in that things should happen well or happen badly, should happen successfully or happen unsuccessfully, should happen to the advantage of this party or the advantage of that party, but whose interest simply is that things should happen. Continue Reading...
July 28, 2006

Isn’t the Cold War Over?

I’ve got an idea for a new sitcom. Titled, Hugo and Vladi, it details the zany adventures of two world leaders, one of whom (played by David Hyde Pierce) struggles to upkeep his image of a friendly, modern European diplomat while his goofball brother-in-law (played by George Lopez) keeps screwing it up for him by spouting off vitriolic Soviet rhetoric and threatening all of Western civilization with his agressive (but loveable) arms sales and seizures of private oil companies. Continue Reading...
July 26, 2006

A Unitarian, the Pope, and Jeffrey Sachs Walk Into a Bar…

Hunger, disease, the waste of lives that is extreme poverty are an affront to all of us. To Jeff [economist Jeffrey Sachs] it’s a difficult but solvable equation. An equation that crosses human with financial capital, the strategic goals of the rich world with a new kind of planning in the poor world. Continue Reading...
July 19, 2006

Milosz

  “…can one build something lasting if the goal is not truth, but power? The few, most penetrating minds of that time understood that what constitutes the sickness of contemporary culture is the repudiation of truth for the sake of action…” Czeslaw Milosz, 1942 Continue Reading...
July 18, 2006

Businesspeople are Evil!

A very, very interesting piece in WSJ this week detailing a study by the Business and Media Institute that looks at how businesspeople are portrayed on television: The study, titled “Bad Company,” looked at the top 12 TV dramas during May and November in 2005, ranging from crime shows like “CSI” to the goofy “Desperate Housewives.” Continue Reading...
July 03, 2006

Because It’s Worth Rereading….

Happy Independence Day, everyone: IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776 The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. Continue Reading...
July 03, 2006

Obama, Where Art Thou?

From Barack Obama’s speech to Jim Wallis’s Call for Renewal (worth the read, if for nothing more than to gain an insight on how he sees his crowd. Study one’s rhetoric and style and you’ll know how they view their audience): Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. Continue Reading...