Here it comes

- heading right for Small Town, Illinois. While I was outside to check the removable downspout that the mowers sometimes don't put back properly, I enjoyed a continuous lightning show to the north and west.  My unbelievably handy booklight is clipped to my shirt for use as a flashlight in case the power goes out.

Put not your trust in princes

As Fr Mark Kirby notes, Juan Carlos de Borbón, the one-time Catholic King of Spain, incurred excommunication latae sententiae by signing a law that legalizes the murder of Spanish children up to 14 weeks of age. It's tough to find a good King nowadays.

He'd walk a mile for a merit badge

Did you know that Google Maps has a super-handy measuring tool? You have to enable it by clicking on the lab beaker icon, then click to enable "Distance Measuring Tool". Using this amazing little thing, I found that a walk around our yard, avoiding the poison ivy behind the shed in the top left of the picture, will take you almost exactly one-tenth of a mile. Our oldest son has to walk a mile as a prerequisite for a Boy Scout merit badge, so he's out there now walking around our yard 10 times.

Update: I was wrong about the merit badge.  His pediatrician recommended more exercise & this is what the boy chose to do.

Law and virtue

Ann Althouse recently said, "A love of autocracy often lurks beneath the liberal veneer." The inimitable Andrew Cusack gives us further light in a single simple sentence: "...the government is attempting to solve a problem with a law, when really the only solution is a virtue."

The new issue of The Christendom Review...

... edited by William Luse, is out and available for your enjoyment at http://www.christendomreview.com/. Tired old eyes may enjoy it even more when it's read through Readability.

Dignitas personae in real life

You can always rely on the writer at mirabilis.ca to bring you the very best of the web. Today we have Duncan McNicholl's Perspectives of Poverty, a planned series of photos illustrating typical dishonest NGO-style photos of poor, raggedly-dressed rural Africans in the usual clouds of flies. Mr McNicholl wonders, "Do many organizations ask people how they want to be represented before the photographs start being taken?"