It looks like we are about to see history being made. The Pope, leader of the Catholic Church, is gravely ill and the perception is that he is not long for this world. For those of you under 25-years-old or even 35-years-old this could be a once-in-a-lifetime event, the death of the Pope and the selection of his successor.
Like the death of a President or the coronation of a king, we are fascinated with the pomp and ceremony that is steeped in traditions of history. Whether you are a follower of the Pope or not, take notice of the activities that are about to take place over the next few days and weeks. You are about to see things that we usually only read about in history books.
No longer. There is a move to get Pope’s to retire at 75. It’s an agist policy, and an anti-disability policy, I think.
One cool thing this Pope did was to continue to show the world that having a disability doesn’t mean you’re useless. he was more visible than other Popes, and more visibly disabled, and made no bones about it, he just kept showing up for work and traveling.
He did a great thing to correct the widespread disability prejudice.
May his soul rest in peace, ive been watching the live news for about an hour now on the coverage of his life and death, May god take his soul peacfully, god bless.
he he, will some kids on a euro vacation ring the bell of san whoever and then burn a hat in the fireplace creating white smoke making seem like his succesor has already been selected;)
I don’t disagree that this is a fascinating process worthy of note. However, there have been 50 popes in the last 500 years. They’re averaging 10 year tenures, so it’s not quite as extraordinary or rare as suggested.
The only thing about the pope’s death (and schiavo’s) that I care about is it’s taking away from the coverage of the reviews of pre-gulf war II intelligence. If anything in the world is important right now, it’s not one guy’s urinaray tract infection and feeding tube, it’s the fact that US intelligence leading up to the war in iraq was “Dead wrong”.
It’s not as rare just once in a lifetime. It makes me feel old when the news mentions that for many people Pope John Paul II is the only Pope they ever knew. I was in grade school when the previous Pope died. It was a big event back then and something that I remember happening even though I’m not Catholic. Most of us will still be alive when the next Pope dies. They don’t tend to pick young people for Pope so they’re already approaching retirement age when they become Pope. Having a long reign as Pope is rare. But with average lifetimes getting longer it could happen that a future Pope goes on strong well in to his 90’s.
much as i despise the catholic church and everything they’ve ever inflicted on this world (can we have just ONE child-molestation trial of a catholic priest to rival the media-circus they have lined up against Jackson?!?), i’ve always ‘liked’ the fact that there’s a pope
it’s one of my (many) opinions that make no sense at all but the original post’s description of the pomp and circumstance probably come closest to making some sense of it
at this time of papal-chageover, a quick read of ‘In God’s Name’ is in order
this is also a cue for John Childs to post a link to an article debunking the charges levelled in that book
(u can say a lot of things about this forum, but u can’t claim that u don’t get to see/hear both sides of the story )
It has as much to do with the Pope as your comment I was responding to about the news of the intelligence failures. I just couldn’t let that little barb go unanswered.
as i understood the original comment, it centered on what’s happening in the world that the news services are ignoring in favour of covering the pope’s health and the feeding-tube story
the intelligence failures and the attempts to change the fillibuster rules in the senate seem to be the two most likely ‘swept-under’ stories
and possibly also the two most important ones
blaming the blatant misuse/unuse of intelligence for the purposes of advancing a well-known agenda on clinton’s underfunding of intelligence services is a bit of a stretch, even for u john
i don’t have a clue what u do for a living john, but u could do worse than get into politics
i may not like your politics, but i do have a certain admiration for the way u conduct them
Doing a job that’s politics related would not be well suited for me. I’m better off working with computers and software. Computers are easier to deal with and far more logical (that is until you get in to the Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac debates or the open source vs. closed source debates or spam or spyware or outsourcing or P2P or …).
I never made judgement on who was responsible for the intelligence failures, which was mostly an attempt to leave it open ended. Bush lovers would respond by blaming Clinton, and Bush haters would blame Bush or both. I didn’t attack Bush, and hance I don’t consider it a barb or something worthy of response. But, here, since you posted a nice barb about it being Clinton’s fault, I’ll simply use your logic and reposte with this barb: No, John, you’re absolutely wrong in all regards. I needn’t support my arguement because I have all the intelligence investigations to do that for me.
people are complaining about people making fun of tyler 
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