Assorted linkage

Dean Esmay is blogging about Bouguereau again. (NB: Artistic depiction of busty substances.)

Dean's also blogging for Terri Schiavo:

Please click here and read this.

Come on. Are you all that certain you know all there is to know here that's important?

Are you really?

If you aren't all that certain, and if you have a weblog, do you think maybe you should tell your readers about this?

You guys know me. I'm no pro-lifer or religious extremist. I'm anything but. So, are you sure you know everything that's important to know here??

(This post stays at the top of Dean's World all day today. And by the way, click the links and read them before commenting, dammit!!!)

It's heartening to see that Terri's cause is just as compelling to those who are not suffering from the "unpleasant reek of fundy mindrot." Dean asks the question that cuts right to the heart of the problem. People hear bits and pieces on the news, they see that Randall Terry and the pro-life community is involved, they hear that the Schindlers are devout Catholics, they hear words like comatose and vegetative, and they reduce the whole situation to a template and invoke the appropriate knee-jerk reaction.

Meanwhile, Discoshaman is soliciting reader comments about whether marijuana should be decriminalized. He's also trying to figure out how best to label what kind of conservative he is. He coins the phrase "humane conservatism":

While Conservatism has gotten better at winning battles, it seems to have lost something of itself along the way. We've never agreed on our ultimate vision of things, but in decades past we had insightful, productive debates about it.

Conservatism is more than Grover Norquist's "Leave Us Alone" Coalition. It's more than the Chamber of Commerce. It's more than a handful of unconjoined reactionary sentiments. Unless we have some vision for the just, good society, how can we know what to conserve?

From my reading of Le Sabot Post-Moderne, I detect a certain crunchiness to Discoshaman's conservatism. (Thanks, Google -- here's evidence.)

The Penitent Blogger is back in America from her tsunami relief journey to southern India but finds herself on a second and emotionally more arduous leg of the same journey:

Once back home, I could barely look at the 400+ photographs without crying. I have not yet been able to sit down and edit the seven hours of video. Every single picture and image is a complete story that has to be written, and it is very overwhelming to me, a woman who until now had barely travelled up north, let alone visit a devastated third world nation.

However, I will begin this second leg of my journey now. We had the physical journey, now I must commit to the spiritual journey of not abandoning the tsunami victims in Tamilnadu, just because the press has now decided to report on something more titillating. Ten thousand people suffered horrible deaths in Tamilnadu, which means at least fifty thousand survivors have had their lives changed forever. We helped 100 orphans and families. How many more are out their needing assistance? Fr. Leo is right; ten dollars can feed an Indian child for a month, and I am going to feed as many of these children as I can.

You can help feed them, too, by clicking here.

Finally, if you're a homeschooler or (like me) sympathetic to the movement, this cartoon from the Arizona Daily Star will outrage you, but you'll appreciate the witty response by Jon Swerens of Kirkcentric. (HT: Dawn Eden, who says the abusive dad in the cartoon looks like "Richard M. Nixon reimagined as a vinyl-record store clerk.")